Bad moods as a fragility test
04-20-2024 • Ryan Prendergast
Let's say you want to read more, to go to the gym, to study scientific papers in your free time, to make music. There's a style of advice that many people give. It's especially pronounced with hustlers and hustle culture. The advice goes something like this:
Just wake up at 4 AM. Just force yourself to go to the gym. Just write a song. Just make yourself do extra math homework.
This technique fails on most people, because it is too hard. Musicians don't start randomly one day and write a song. They iterate over years-- starting with lessons their parents force them into, and then they perform oversimplified covers of easy rock songs, and then noodle on their guitar, and etc. The Beatles showed up to perform covers thousands of times before writing their famous works.
"Iterate on an oversimplified version of the thing" is strong advice for how to improve at something. Playing covers is the simpler version of writing your own songs. Learning a language is hard, "listen and repeat a 30 minute Pimsleur recording every day on your walk home from work" is specific. You can force yourself through it when you are tired or hungover or just don't feel like it.
Paul Graham wrote about small lies you tell yourself to get over the small cognitive hump of starting to work each day. He lies to himself by saying "we'll just read an abstract for a couple minutes", and invariably he gets invested and reads the whole a 30 page document. Had he been upfront to himself about his intentions, he wouldn't have started.
A simplified process is simple enough you can force yourself to do it in a bad mood. The complexity of your oversimplification increases with skill level. Really, the complexity of your oversimplification defines your skill level. For a professional jazz guitarist, "noodling" means playing the notes from a specific scale in a specific voicing off the cuff; for an amateur, noodling means playing an open C chord followed by an open G and an open D.
People become experts by raising the baseline of their oversimplifications, NOT by forcing themselves to do the complicated thing.
Bad moods act as a simplicity test. If it gets thrown away in a bad mood, if it is impossible in a bad mood, then it is too complicated. It is beyond my skill level.