Generalist v.s Specialist

The two so-called polar opposites. Generalists and specialists. One is called as the jack of all trades while another is considered as master of an art.

This is shown throughout mediums we consume that show off an inherent trade-off.

They say that specialists become so at the cost of ignoring everything else including different careers in parallel worlds or their family, friends and such.

While the generalist is the average person who is mediocre at everything and isn’t noticeable since the narrow focused people are rewarded far more disproportionately.

Specialists and generalists only make sense in a cartoon-ish world where only white and black characters exist.

There is no specialist and generalist exclusively. A Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry is, of course, well-versed in chemistry far more than the majority of people.

Saying 1 in 100,000 would still be an understatement but also, this person might also have a hobby of cooking or a sport of their own liking which they are not specialists in.

And in other aspects of simply living life which they learn along the way such as changing the tire of their car and such.

Just because they are a specialist doesn’t mean they are grossly incompetent.

My glib wording of this is: “A generalist when starting out becomes a specialist by the end of it.”

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Superpower of Giving Up

We are often told that we shouldn’t give up no matter the circumstances. This sounds good on paper and what society regularly preaches.

The problem however is when you don’t know when to give up. The advice to not give up is indeed a good one. After all, how can you make progress if you constantly give up along the way?

But there’s a hidden condition we usually don’t mention in this discussion and thus, everyone assumes it doesn’t exist and gives the wrong version of the advice.

Not giving up only makes sense if the process of your goal is the one that’s giving results or if the goal itself is a valuable goal.

To still not give up when results don’t appear or when you find out that the goal is not relevant to your life is considered poor decision making.

It’s simply not beneficial to you nor others.

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The importance of an information diet

We all have been told from time immemorial that everything comes at a cost and even better, what is free is often the costliest.

Certainly, these phrases are, for no doubt, absolutely true. Things might have changed but human biology hasn’t so these sorts of wisdom are of timeless nature.

But today, we aren’t going to be talking about it specifically and I prefer not to preach and talk about things which are already mainstream or can be thought of in a span of a few seconds or minutes since I pride myself as a first principle thinker.

Instead, let me introduce you to a rather, practical yet often glanced through topic. It’s called the information diet and let me tell you it's important.

In Stage One Diet, most of us.. Wait, that’s a bad word. Let me readdress, the average person is likely living an unexamined life.

This kind of life is the most obvious and recognized lifestyle which we all have seen and can easily, at this exact moment, point out someone who’s living it.

Simply living life based on our circumstances and doing almost nothing about it.

Let’s get more specific and introspective on this, okay? The problem with the unexamined life is that it's a life that has no structure, planning, systems or even dreams.

Okay, so why is this a problem you might ask? Well, the problem with such a lifestyle is that whatever life throws at you, you catch based on your mood swings and aren’t willing to be rational and thoughtful to spend your one chance and one opportunity (your life).

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Effectiveness v.s Efficiency

These terms are often misplaced and used interchangeably considering to most people it means the same but it doesn’t and has completely different purposes to them.

Effectiveness is about how well you do your work. It’s about doing your work as the input and producing an output.

It doesn’t matter how long that it takes, as long as an output is produced and works, it’s considered effective.

For example, if someone does a task within a few hours while another in a day, both are considered effective as long as the output is produced.

Whether the former or latter has more quality or quantity is another topic though.

That being said, if we were to measure a person’s ability to deliver within a time constraint then it’s considered tracking their efficiency.

A usual example of efficiency we are familiar with is vehicles having less or more efficiency regarding fuel. If it’s more efficient, you get more miles rather than the former.

So if a person completes a task faster and produces a solution that solves the problem then he’s considered to be both efficient and effective.

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Insights from Ashton Hall's Morning Routine

For people who don’t know, Ashton Hall is an influencer that got famous quickly due to his comical morning routine and his other memes lately.

When I say famous, I mean really famous. A video on his morning routine got 765.4M views on Twitter so far.

This is purely because of how exaggerated his morning routine is and a backlash that has been waiting on self-help gurus who promote their unrealistic morning routines.

This man’s morning routine was so ridiculous that it started from 3:53 a.m till 9:26 a.m. That’s roughly 5.5 hours of a morning routine.

What does it include? Well, it’s a mega self-help guru’s crash course where he does push-ups, treadmill and swimming to name a few.

The reason why Ashton Hall’s morning routine is so absurd for all of us is because it doesn’t make sense. Why would someone who’s a so-called businessman be related to doing swimming or basic push-ups?

Sure, exercising your body helps but nowhere near as important as actually doing the business if your goal is to be a successful entrepreneur. There is no solid correlation between exercising and business.

Not to mention, while his business is related to exercising itself, the way he does it is obviously not the optimal way to do it.

If you want to get jacked as much as he is, swimming or basic push ups or the funny cold plunges for his face does not have any reasonable benefits nor does doing them every morning help either.

Once you realize this, you understand that it is absurd because this isn’t about effectiveness, it’s about virtue signaling.

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Why We Procrastinate & its Strategies

We all have been here. Procrastination before an assignment or a task we know we ought to do yet we drag it till the evening of the deadline and finally end up submitting it.

Of course, this is considered ironically ideal for us and there are many days where we don’t even submit and miss the deadline completely.

It’s even worse when you think about the fact that we do this knowingly sometimes as well. We know there’s a deadline yet we simply don’t do it despite it having negative consequences for us.

In the end, we find ourselves with a pang of guilt brought by ourselves, no one else.

But you are not alone, 20-25% of adults are chronic procrastinators and this isn’t even considering the share of adults who procrastinate occasionally as well.

Procrastination is a very human-condition, unlike any other creature, so why do we have this problem?

Procrastination is a feature, not a bug. Things aren’t this way because you’re bad but things are rather, meant to be this way.

We procrastinate because of the contradiction between short-term pleasures in our daily lives such as watching TV or playing video games over our long-term goals we assigned to ourselves such as our career.

This fundamental mismatch though, occurs because we can’t really cover the distance between short-term self and long-term self. The clear answer is to make a fair compromise.

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The Problem With Lying

We are told that lying is wrong ever since we could barely form memories as kids by our parents, relatives or respectable adults in our lives.

But ironically enough, we have occasionally caught these preachers on telling lies from small things such as lying about the origin of the gift they brought or about bigger things.

Regardless, it’s a silent question that we all had in our minds or at least when we were kids. If lying was so morally wrong then why do we see adults doing them time and time again?

If we compare this to other forms of moral wrongdoings we were taught as children, whether that’s getting into fights, arguing or blaming others for our mistakes, we suddenly were judged harshly for it. We also never saw adults doing these wrongdoings as often as lying either.

So why does lying get preferential treatment in the hierarchy of wrongdoings and a pass for doing it in most circumstances.

Is it morally acceptable to many because everyone does it so no one wants to call it since it’s considered “beneficial” or there’s a deeper reasoning behind it?

The common sense answer we all know and society tells us secretly is that, the consequences of lying are negligible and it barely affects others. This is not true.

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Boredom's Role in Our Daily Lives

Everything that we want is in reach of our hands. Whether that may be the optimized pleasures of either sense of hearing or taste, we have it all. Things weren’t always like this. Such a wide range of accessibility to pleasures was not common even fifty years ago.

But especially when profits-driven corporations realize that we can hack the human mind through spending millions of dollars making refined trial-and-error products to scratch those exact itches we crave, whether that’s junk food or a video game, things start to make perfect sense.

The sudden spike in the variety of pleasures and its decimal optimization sounds good to many since it’s all but a transactional exchange between a product and our money.

This way of thinking isn’t wrong in theory but with how invasive things are and with how common they are, even with the smallest toolkit, things start getting messier.

Naval Ravikant said, “In an age of abundance, pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction.”

It’s just true because the world we live in today is different. Everything is in abundance so we have a mismatch of natural and artificial desires causing us addictions which we clearly don’t want nor need to any meaningful degree.

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