Sometimes I have a spare beeminder and I wonder what to fill it with. Here’s a list of simple daily habits that add up to massive results over a year:
- Reading 30 pages per day → 10,950 pages a year
- Making 0.2 close friends per week → 10 close friends a year
- Meaning only 20% of attempts to make a new friend are successful
- (side note) A nice poem from Muhammad Ali on friends
- Growing something 5% a week → 12x return in one year
- This is unrealistic for, e.g. a financial portfolio, but it’s a useful thing to put on top of other continuous goals. If you can become 5% more efficient at something you do every day per week, you’ll be doing 12 times as much per day in a year. (An example: writing a really good introduction email will require you to test a few approaches, but once you have system that gives you a response rate you’re happy with, it can easily be done 12 times as fast)
- 1 serious attempt at getting a dream job per week at a 2% success rate → 1 dream job per year
- Some people remain unemployed for multiple years. Finding places that have 2% acceptance edges is not hard.
- By serious attempt I mean sending cold emails to people at the company, trying to befriend them through other means, or even trying to reach out to their colleagues – both of which are much harder than throwing an resume in a pile but do work.
I find I quit out on beeminders that track hours rather quickly. It’s good if I have a deadline but rarely works for long-term projects. Nothing is really made up of ‘hours’. I think this framing of beeminder is a good solution to a problem I had a while back.
Here is a system I’ve come up with for better fitting beeminders to my goals:
- If your intention is clearly described in a goal where an attempt only has to succeed once to change your life, then a beeminder that focuses on consistent “shots on target” is way more fun to fill out.
- If your overall goal is a roughly finite and well-known number of ideas to learn or things to master, than a beeminder that focuses on mastering some% of those per day, or per week is more exciting.
- There are about 10 textbooks, cumulatively maybe 10,000 pages, of undergraduate knowledge in a field like, say, biology. They probably get easier to read as you master the language of the field and its grammar, so starting at 10 pages a day while increasing at 2% per week leaves you reading 50 pages per day without much effort in a year’s time. The whole corpus can be consumed in well under two years, with no massive push to master the subject required.
- This maybe applies better to a subject like history, which will have a lot of overlap in the events books cover
- The key meta-approach for goals or self-improvement is to be clear about what you want, and break that down into something that feels like meaningful continuous progress every day. Sometimes, that involves just learning how something works for a long time, especially by asking people who might know (which is a step that often decides your outcome), before taking any concrete actions.
