Saturation

I quite enjoy talking with my mentor – I learn a lot, or at least I get food for thought. He’s a busy man, though, so we can’t talk every day.

But if we could, we’d have nothing to talk about. Part of how the conversation starts is reflecting on progress. With no progress, there’s nothing to reflect on. A thoughtful conversation with someone more experienced is bound by saturation, as is all growth.

Every day we wake up, we have a finite amount of energy, and we can choose what to do with that energy. But only a certain amount of it can be allocated to each type of growth until the saturation point is reached, and you will grow no further by investing more of your energy into the problem.

Most complex skills are subject to this, and optimal practice is informed by the limitation. Practicing guitar for 30 minutes every day yields much greater improvements than practicing for 3.5 hours every Sunday. If one day, old, you wake up and decide you want to know how to play, you’re inspired, and explode with energy – you won’t be able to transmute that energy to skill.

Perhaps a major cause of the limitation with something like guitar is the limited pace at which neurons can grow. It’s similar to the constraints on muscle growth. Work out, eat, muscles grow, repeat. Attempt a pattern of movement, eat, neural tissue grows, repeat.

This understanding places a limit on incremental growth, which is a crucial part of development. I think one way around this sort of limitation is to focus on breadth in a skill: practice a different aspect, that a different set of neurons would be responsible for. For truly complex skills, there are enough different aspects to occupy a full day, so all the time you have in a day can be dedicated to improvement.

There is a different sort of limitation – a bottleneck of understanding. Often work is done in the wrong direction, or not fully correctly. Or the right question is not asked for optimal growth; the framework of thinking about the problem is missing something. This is a sort of thing that mentorship and guidance is good for. It can help find the right questions.

Until you arrive at a question, though, hearing the answer may not even be helpful. Questions only come in struggling with the tools you have at your disposal. But once you have earned the question, you are truly ready to hear the answer, understand it, and instantly incorporate it into your worldview. This is the limitation of conceptual jumps, epiphanies.

These sorts of limitations – incremental and fundamental – apply in the realm of thinking as well. It’s possible to get very good at thinking, but it’s a journey of stumbling in darkness, making mistakes, reflecting deeply. You need to incorporate a style of thinking – which is a life-engulfing discipline – apply it, course-correct, and try again.

Human life is fraught with moderation. The most beautiful moments in life are moments where the rules are broken, or when a transcendental truth is spoken. But if a rule is broken every moment, they don’t truly exist, and there is no beauty in breaking them. If all truths are transcendental, there is too much noise, and nothing is worth listening to. Transformational conversations only have something to transform if there is something between them.