Occasionally, I get asked for feedback on someone’s resume. I’m not really a resume-editing coach, but I can ask them what they accomplished in that roll where they’re just listing their duties. Over time, I’ve found I’m completely replaceable with this rock. 

You did X for Y company? Great! Why is it impressive? Did it accomplish impressive outcomes? Was it at an impressive scale? Did it involve impressive other people or companies? 

You wrote an application using Z software? Great! Why is it impressive? Did the code speed up run time by an impressive amount? Did it save an impressive amount of money? Did it enable an impressive research finding? Does it display an impressive amount of technical expertise? 

You published a thing? Great! Why is it impressive? Was it published somewhere impressive? Was it cited an impressive number of times? Did impressive people say good things about it?

Fabricated goals

I’m really good at taking an abstract goal and breaking it down into concrete tasks. Most of the time, this is super useful.

But if I’m not sure what would accomplish the high level goal, sometimes the concrete goals turn out to be wrong. They don’t actually accomplish the high-level more vague goal. If I don’t notice that, I’ll at best be confused. At worse, I’ll accomplish the concrete goals, fail at the high-level goal, and then not notice that all my effort isn’t accomplishing the outcome I actually care about.

I’m calling the misguided concrete goals as “fabricated goals”.  Because I’m falsely believing this goal is an option to get me to my high-level goal. 

The alternative feels pretty bad though. If I can’t break the vague goal into concrete steps that I know how to do, I need to be constantly feeling my way through uncertainty. In that situation, sometimes it’s good to pick a small, time-bound concrete goal and do it to see if it helps. But I need to be constantly checking in on whether it’s actually helping.

I’ve been practicing a lot this year with improving feedback loops, and it’s come a long way. Sitting with uncertainty for days and checking in on whether I’m making progress on the scale of minutes, though, that’s hard. I’ve heard early stages of research being called “wandering in the desert” and this feels similar. 

It’s so much easier to substitute a fabricated goal – I know what I need to do, I can measure my progress. It’s harder to sit with the uncertainty and hopefully, slowly feel my way toward some insight. 

Hmm, it would probably work well to write a longer daily FB post, like if I set a goal to publish at least 500 words each day. 

Part of the goal is ‘become comfortable submitting things I'm not fully happy with’ and part is 'actually produce words faster'. The second part feels like it needs the length requirement. I've done daily short FB posts before and found it useful, but I noticed that I tended to write mostly short posts that didn't require me to hammer out words. 

Hmm, I'm not certain where you're getting that. I interpreted this as the amount of deliberate practice contributed to success in some fields much more than it did in other fields. (Which could be explained by some fields not having developed techniques and training methods that enable good DP, or could be explained by everyone maxing out practice, or by practice not mattering in those fields.) DP still makes a difference among top performers in music and chess, indicating that not all top performers are maxing out deliberate practice in those areas.  

I considered that early on during my exploration, but didn't go deep into it after seeing Scott's comment on his post saying:

These comparisons held positions (specialist vs. generalist) constant. Aside from whether someone is a specialist or not, I don't think there's any tendency for older doctors to get harder cases.

Now, after seeing that the other fields also match the same pattern of decline, I'd be somewhat surprised by evidence that taking on harder cases explained the majority of skill plateaus in middle age for doctors. 

Note: I was treating the 2009 study as a psudo-replication. It's not a replication, but it's a later study on the same topic that found the same conclusion, which had allayed some of my concerns about old psychology research. However, I since looked deeper into Dan Ariely's work, and the number of accusations of fraud or academic misconduct makes me less confident in the study. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Accusations_of_data_fraud_and_academic_misconduct

I agree with the line of reasoning, but I'd probably err on the side of adding a deadline even for designing  your office -  if you want to make sure the task gets done at some point, setting the deadline a month away seems better than not having one at all. 

I agree that adopting high variance strategies makes sense if you think you're going to fail, but I'm not sure the candle task has high variance strategies to adopt? It's a pretty simple task.