Peak Performance Newsletter #6 | On FOMO in the Learning Process, Heroic Individualism, and Context-Driven Learning Strategies
Hey all,
I keep telling myself I'll make these less conceptual, and it never seems to happen. Allow me to shift my future guidance to: "these are likely to continue to be highly conceptual. That will likely be a core feature of the newsletter! I hope you like it."
Onto the newsletter
FOMO & Focus in the Learning Process
No, I'm not talking about when you decide to party it up with your friends in lieu of studying for your test. FOMO, or "Fear of Missing Out", happens in the learning process when you've identified an area ripe for development yet resist diving in as deeply as you could for fear that you may "miss out" on learning elsewhere.
It's pretty intuitive. If you've been there you probably just chuckled to yourself and remarked "oh yes, I know exactly what you're talking about." If you're still unclear, here are a few examples of FOMO-driven behavior:
Compulsively reviewing old information to ensure you've extracted every bit from it
Forcing yourself to learn something that a prior version of yourself committed to, even if it's not the most important thing for where you're at now
Always looking for the "next big thing", even when you have a rich learning opportunity in front of you
There's certainly room for exploration in the learning process. But when you're in the thick of it in an area ripe for growth, looking for learning elsewhere is a form of avoidance. Learning at your growth edge is uncomfortable. It involves high levels of effort, risk-taking, and putting yourself on the line. FOMO is a convenient way to avoid that discomfort.
The cost of a FOMO-driven process is huge. FOMO puts a governor on your learning potential. It prevents (protects) you from building up the momentum required for explosive, paradigm-shifting growth.
An alternative to FOMO is Focus: whenever you're on a growth edge, ride the explosive wave of energy and growth. When the energy starts to waver, then and only then do you look for the next edge.
Less assessment. More absorption. More growth.
Sure, this may lead you to be overdeveloped in some areas and underdeveloped in others. But over the long haul, this style of learning allows you to become everything you're capable of.
Heroic Individualism
Brad Stulberg is one of my favorite thinkers in the coaching and human development space. He has a new book out on sustainable performance titled "The Practice of Groundedness". The book is marketed as a counter to our present epidemic of Heroic Individualism, defined as: "An ongoing game of one-upmanship, against both self and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success."
I love everything that's packed into that definition. One-upmanship with others but also with self. The limiting belief that seems to be epidemic in western thinking that only that which is measurable matters. I suspect that, for some, that line of thinking extends as far as an unconscious belief that only that which is measurable is real.
I'm currently taking a course on Applied Complexity Science. One of the more mind-blowing things we've discussed is that measurability and understandability are properties that phenomena may or may not have. For all we know, measurability and understandability may be very unique properties.
This notion of understandability as a property leads to profound consequences. Because we as humans are looking to understand, we study those things which are quantifiable and understandable. In our study of those things, we abstract what we learn as universal principles and believe that we are coming to understand the whole of reality.
Yet if measurability and understandability are rare properties, our "universal understanding" may only apply to a very small subset of phenomena. Namely much of what is real, and matters, may not be measurable (or understandable) at all. And yet our entire mode of thinking is biased toward discounting those things—those things possibly being most things—altogether.
All of this is an argument for valuing that which is not quantifiable. The non-quantifiable, albeit more difficult to understand, very likely dwarfs that which exists in the realm of the quantitative. We ought to give it more credence.
This appears to be a common shift for highly analytical thinkers. At some point you start to see the limits of quantified thinking and develop a supreme appreciation for the qualitative. Hence the long list of brilliant scientists who end up finding god through science.
I'm personally apt to think the most profound thinking comes from a marriage of strong quantitative and qualitative thinking with a respect for the pros and cons of each.
Anywho. If you like what I said about Brad, he's got a short summary article here.
If you like what I said about applied complexity, email me and we'll find a time to talk about it while we walk through the woods after eating some mushrooms.
1 Tweet
An idea I've become fascinated with this year: different arenas require drastically different approaches to learning.
In well-bounded environments, learning is best facilitated by deep practice. Things like learning an instrument, singing, acting, cooking, or the foundations of any sport. The way to learn these things is to show up and practice the skills with an intense focus on improving execution.
As complexity increases, learning shifts away from being best facilitated by deep practice of specific skills and toward being best facilitated via feedback-driven simulation and tacit knowledge transfer from an expert. This is because higher levels of complexity exponentially increases the variability of scenarios you can encounter and the amount of information available to. Because of this, learning in these domains is more about developing an intuition for:
What information is relevant
How best to use that information.
Things like military scenarios, firefighting, entrepreneurship, and high-level competition in athletics.
In the domain of entrepreneurship, this explains the wisdom of the philosophy of small bets. Small bets allow you to run simulations with skin in the game in order to build an intuition, all while mitigating the risk of ruin. This is especially important in entrepreneurship, as you may be operating in a space where there are no experts or relevant simulations. Small bets are the closest approximation to simulating while in the intense heat of market competition.
In complex and highly uncertain domains, think in bets.
Hope all is well! in your world,
Justin