I recently wrote about how frustrated I get when studying or learning something new. It is an emotional response that is a bit embarrassing at this stage of life. It has affected me since grade school and has caused me to “check out” in many scenarios during my academic career. Luckily, my day to day life no longer is riding on academics, but I believe in the long term, if I ever want to even even close to doing great work, I still have a lot to learn.
When I initially wrote about getting frustrated I was surprised to find other people asking the exact same question as me, and the general response online being to basically white knuckle it, take a break, or learn some breathing exercises. I was really disappointed to not find something more substantial.
Coincidentally, a strength and condition Q&A video by Sika Strength (link to question and answer) discussed resilience and wether or not its trainable. The answer given was interesting and makes me think there is room to run here (no pun intended).
If you don’t care to watch the video I think the key pieces are:
Often times we will think of resilience as a trait, not a state. We will say “Eoin is a resilient person”.
This quote resonated. In my previous article I even called out the fact that I can sit through grueling workouts and not lose my head, but one small setback while studying and I can’t even think straight anymore.
Most recent research of the last twenty years will agree that resilience is not a trait somebody has, but more so a state and they can be both very resilient in certain states and unresilient in other states.
The wording here of the direct quote is a little bit funny but I think the point is that we can be resilient in one domain, and unresilient in another.
This is particularly interesting. I couldn’t ever wrap my head around why I am able to think in terms of sessions, days, weeks, months, and years when it comes to fitness, but learning is this anomaly that exists and I just struggle. I think its safe to say that it completely reflects how I feel. I have become extremely resilient to training setbacks, while very unresilient to learning setbacks. So what do I do?
Doing difficult things repeatedly will give you better resilience.
Just off the bat, it sounds like I am already on the right track. I am doing the exact thing every day that I have poor resilience in. The interesting part is I have something else to look into. Is there an academic resilience training methodology?
Unfortunately googling resilience training results in a lot of general advice like have low stress and build a support network. Its a lot of what I found before about being kind to yourself and journaling.
I don’t want ways to cope with adversity I want to build a tolerance to it. Marathon runners don’t run marathons by journaling, they create a stimulus and adapt to it. The peripherals might help in some way but they aren’t the key.
It doesn’t seem like I am going to find what I am looking for on this subject very easily, and maybe it doesn’t exist. Maybe what I am saying doesn’t actually make much sense at all and I am improperly applying concepts to areas they really don’t apply, but lets try anyways.
I think there are two factors at play here: Pure exposure and overreaching.
The idea here is how much time I spend doing the thing that frustrated me. How often am I putting myself in a state of discomfort so that I can get used to it. The way to increase this is simple, just do more. The key here will be to not do too much too soon but gradually upping the exposure.
Overreaching is the necessity to continue to go just beyond your abilities so that you continually make progress. At the moment I am learning Kotlin. This means that literally just expressing my thoughts in Kotlin’s syntax is a bit challenging even if the problems I am working on are conceptually easy. One day this wont be true. I will need to find another subject that challenges me so I don’t stagnate. This is much harder to do well unless the path is already predefined. I’ll have to dedicate time to finding this solution and I’ll do that another time.
Its about to be the holidays and I’ll be visiting home. I think sticking with what I am doing now makes sense. Its a habit, and persisting through the change of environment and routine will be an accomplishment by itself. What comes next though?
Right now, I have 45 minutes of dedicated time to learning. To keep things simple to start, I am going to use a single lever, time domain, to increase my exposure. I know right now 45 minutes is not a big deal. Im not dreading it and even if I am late and I’m tired, I can get it in. How would I up the volume over time then?
Here is a weekly breakdown by day of time spent:
| | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | | Min | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | Total Volume: 45min * 7 = 315min
I think the best way to keep things feeling good, would be to add a second 30 minute session in twice a week. I like the 45 minute time block and 30 minutes might be enough to get some decent practice in. Thinking about other aspects of my life, I think this would work best Mondays and Fridays.
| Session | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | | ——: | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | | A | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | 45 | | B | 30 | | | 30 | | | | | Min | 75 | 45 | 45 | 75 | 45 | 45 | 45 | Session A: 45min * 7 = 315 Session B: 30min * 2 = 60 Total Volume: 375 % Change: 19% increase
While the percentage difference seems like a lot, the numbers are relatively low right now. If I was around 700min per week, a 19% increase would probably feel awful. Right now though, I think this will definitely be ok.
What would upping the volume look like down the line? I tried to model this in a spreadsheet.
Something important here is the concept of overtraining. You can easily burn out by doing too much volume that you cant adequately recover from before the next session. People in the tech industry know this as burnout. While I think the time domains laid out is totally achievable, its important to bring up when discussing doing more of anything.
The goal here is every day, not N volume every day. If later down the line I find myself with a new baseline and doing some absurd amount of volume each week and no longer enjoy it, the volume should be reduced to a number that is easily sustainable. The ball has to keep moving forward.
Finally, I know all this is a bit ridiculous and way over done. Like, dude, “if you want to learn something just start learning it”. Maybe I am really overcomplicating it to the point it might be satire.
All I know is over the years I have tried and failed so many times to better myself and further my career prospects only to burn out after a week or so. I’ve talked big games and told myself I would do this or that only to end up months or a year later realizing all I did was workout and play video games for an entire year.
Taking the process oriented approach, where the goal is the process itself rather than some endpoint, has helped me build a routine and a practice that I hope can materially affect my future. If it doesn’t, at least I’ll have the evidence this time to say that I tried.