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LM: #379: Using your mind effectively is like jogging
I have done just enough jogging to say that pacing yourself is a lot like mind management.
If you’re a beginner and just keep jogging, your lungs soon start to burn and it sucks and you never want to jog again.
By contrast, if you keep yourself within a comfortable heart-rate range – by walking when it’s high and jogging when it’s low again – jogging actually becomes kind of enjoyable. String together enough days of that and you adapt to where you can just cruise along in that range.
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In the days before I learned mind management, I would frequently peg myself out mentally in the same way. I’d end up saying, “I never want to edit a video again. That was too mentally exhausting,” not recognizing that of course it was exhausting because I tried to learn a new thing while also powering through getting the thing done.
If you keep monitoring your heart rate, you stop needing to check what it is. You can just feel in your body whether it’s high or low.
Mind management becomes the same, where you can sense that you’ve just been presented with a task and face a choice. You can power through and probably burn yourself out. You can switch mental states and get off the track you were on. Or, you can set that task aside for a better suited pool of energy and stay in the state you were in.
The challenge is, there’s no quantifiable metric you can monitor. The four stages and the seven mental states give you a vocabulary to guide you. From there, you learn through practice.
Aphorism: “What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.” —Nassim Taleb
Book: Works of Cicero (Amazon) is that.
Best,
David
