Accountability

This evening, I briefly struggled to start my productive habits. I really wanted to procrastinate by watching Youtube or jumping into a game of LoL with friends–I ended up just burning time while mustering up the motivation to write this post. The initial wave of motivation and excitement from starting this blog has slightly begun to fade, and with it, the desire to procrastinate has grown stronger. Hopefully, I will be able to maintain my habits through the future.

Productive Thinking

Today, in the park, I watched a young girl cautiously examine the hill before her, consider her options, and then proceed to throw her head backwards onto a sloped hill. Needless to say, the combination of uncompromising gravity and compact dirt triumphed over her tiny head. Shocked by the sudden turn of events, the girl sat stunned for a second, before deciding it was prudent to start crying and run, pouting, at her mother.

Not to be heartless, but the whole situation, as it transpired, was somewhat amusing. It reminds me of the TV series that would always seem to playing, “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” If you don’t know the show, it was essentially a commentated compilation of humorous homemade videos, typically composed of physical slapstick humor or pranks (internet humor nowadays is quite a deal more sophisticated)

What’s interesting to me is that videos of young children falling off short chairs or bumping lightly into walls are quite endearing, yet similar videos of adults slipping and falling into pools or tumbling down ski sloppes are amusing for different reasons–the audience is laughing at their stupidity. This contrast is exemplified in the show itself–the vast majority of the humorous videos of are children. While part of this disparity can be attributed to other factors (people tend to record toddlers more than adult peers), these reasons by themselves cannot explain this difference. Rather, videos of children are deemed more humorous/acceptable because children are not expected to understand the consequences of their actions. When adults make the same mistakes as children, it is kind of sad.

Children are often encountering situations for the first time–they do not really know the consequences of touching the stove, throwing a fragile object onto the ground, or, as exemplified, throwing themselves at the ground. The biggest fundamental contrast from adults is a level of experience. Foresight is something that can be only obtained from almost exclusively experience.

Suppose, theoretically, we can model a person’s life as a series of moves. At any given moment, a person can perform a series of actions, the situation the person is in has been determined by one’s previous actions, and future situations will be partially determined by the actions one takes right now.

Children can typically only see zero or one steps into the future depending on their level of experience. And, as people gain more experience, they start to be capable of seeing multiple steps into the future. For example, a student may know that if they get drawn into a night of video games, they will not make it back soon enough to finish their assignment, which would then compromise their sleep/future work, and ultimately negatively affect their academic performance. Alternatively, the student may not have experienced this yet and go through this series of moves to then learn the lesson. Ideally, this student would learn from the experience and have the foresight to avoid it next time they find themselves in such a situation. (This weirdly specific and strangely personal-sounding situation is purely theoretical, of course).

What’s interesting about this to me is that people tend to plateau on the number of steps they can foresee. Most people are aware of the consequences of everyday actions, but no matter how many times we miss a bus, we may begin to guess how late we’ll be for work, but we will never be able to predict how much later we’ll sleep at night. At a certain point, no matter how much more experience we gain, we cannot foresee any further.

This concept is interesting when applied to specific, personal, skilled aspects of life. For example, a professional chess player with thousands of hours of experience is able to foresee a much larger number moves into the future. As with many “skilled” activities, the question then becomes, is skill due to innate talent or hardwork/experience?

I often hear people say, “oh, I wish I was talented (artistically)” or “man, I wish I was good with numbers like some people.” Others will counter by defensively claiming that these individuals are failing to consider the countless hours of work that goes into developing such skills.

My quick take on this is that there may be a few select individuals with some god-given talent that means they have a higher ceiling on the number of steps they can foresee. This is not relegated to just chess–an elite programmer can map out multiple stages of a coding project, an excellent artist can generally gauge how brushstrokes will meld together, and a good NFL quarterback can sense how the opposing defense will assemble after the ball is snapped.

However, without the vast amount of experience to back it up, this almost supernatural foresight is never realized, regardless of how much “innate” talent. A child who is born destined to become an expert glassblower would still have no chance of knowing how fragile glass is without some initial experience. And, an individual who pours in as much work/gains the same amount of corresponding experience will be just as skilled.

Ultimately, “talent” is not the deciding factor in “skill.” Remember, Richard Feynman, arguably one of the greatest physicists of his generation, had an IQ of only 125. I don’t think anyone disputes that he was good at what he did.