Setting a Lower Bound

Variance is a natural part of life, and it’s not a battle that can ever be won. Some days you’ll perform amazingly, and others you’ll be a lot worse. We’d all like to have as many amazing days as possible, but focusing on those days too much can end up doing more harm than good.

In a sense, though, the good days will take care of themselves. On my worst days it seems like I need everything to be just right, but on good days almost everything can be wrong and I’ll still produce good work. Good days are going to be good days, no matter what.

A common pattern you see people in is to have a few good days followed by abysmal days. Tons of work followed by almost nothing for days or weeks. This is particularly frustrating because they know they’re capable of good work– they’re just not able to extract it from themselves.

On the other hand, some people are able to set a lower bound on how bad days can get. They have just as many bad days, but those days still move them forward a couple squares. That adds up to a lot over long spans of times.

What’s your minimum day? What gets done no matter what? For me, I at least “touch” Sett. I fix one little bug, even if that’s all I can do. Most of the time I do a lot more, but on a travel day where I’m exhausted, that might be it. So on a bad day I push Sett forward by some amount. Then I do my one blog post and I do my language tape. So in addition to creating something with Sett, I’m learning something and I’m sharing something. And if I’m in San Francisco, I work out if it’s a workout day and I eat healthy food. So I also make myself a little bit healthier.

Sometimes I’ll look back at a week and think that it was a pretty crummy week. Maybe five days were “bad”. But then I look at what actually got done in that week. I wrote seven posts, probably two or three of which that were good. I learned more of a new language. Usually the progress in Sett is the most surprising. My memory is of just fixing a bug or two, but I forget about the one or two days I got sucked in and built some big stuff, and only in retrospect do I remember how annoying that one bug was, and how glad I am to have it fixed.

Glory is for the movies. In real life, gains are achieved through slow and steady progress. Sure, you’ll have your days of glory and rapid progress. But if you set a manageable but substantial lower bound for yourself, and always hit it no matter what, that’s where most of your progress will come from.

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Photo is from Zurich. Should have lots of new photos soon!

Hoping to have a really cool Sett update ready next week!


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