On Mental Barriers

WARNING: long and unorganized post ahead.

sometimes i forgot what i wanted to write about, or what i was thinking about, as i write.

patience and attention span

As a smart person (according to people around me and some dumb IQ test from many years ago), I don't have much patience for seemingly simple things.

I have a fairly short attention span, I don't consider my working memory very good, and if I want to do something well, I really have to internalize required knowledge, or restructure / visualize the data, making them easier to lookup and understand.

When I stuck on a problem, I'll switch context to do something¹ that's more relaxing, something that doesn't matter, something to take your time off the thing you're trying to do.

By not having much patience, I mean getting stuck on seemingly simple things, like learning the R sounds from Danish and Spanish, which I didn't anticipate the difficulty and expect to learn them like I learned the English R, and I think I allocated just an hour of time, max, to tackle this problem. I really want to be able to pronounce them, but if I'm not properly motivated, I WILL give up after many failed attempts.

I know people who can work on a single algorithm problem for hours, and I have great respect for them. I can't do that, I'll probably check the solution after some failed attempts.

grad app essays

When I was applying for grad school, I had to write these essays. Writing essays is not exactly I consider myself to be good at, and I knew I had to write perfect essays to boost the chance I'd ever had to get into some fancy schools, I did a lot of research. YouTube, Reddit, ebooks on writing essays and grad apps, you name it. My strength didn't show in numbers, and it stressed me out thinking about how to tell a good story (of how I got into the tech stuff and became a geek) It took me a long while to actually start writing, and a few weeks IIRC to finish the 1st paragraph².

Then I fiddled with the layout of the essay, and did quite some research. How the header should look like, what font I should use etc. Since I was writing in Google Docs, which isn't what I normally would do, knowing that not having version control also put some weight on my brain. Everything I need to worry about wears me out, even if I'm not consciously thinking about them. There were lots of trivial but important things I worried about, like how long I should write them, the grammar and typos, use of duplicated words and phrases. The list went on and on.

So as you can imagine, what actually pushed me to produce the first passable version of the essay was the deadlines.

I sometimes do a lot of context switching, and something that works in reducing the things I have to worry about, is 1) journaling, just write down your (unfiltered) thoughts without judgement, and 2) put things I want to do that I don't want to forget doing, in a very very long, ever-growing list³.

giving up on learning spanish

So how did I give up learning Spanish?

First, I need to talk about my motivations for learning the language:

• I like the exotic sound
• Seems simple, every vowel only has one sound. You don't find many languages simpler than that in phonetics, I guess.
• Very widely spoken, in the US it's the most learned 2nd language, and most of the English-language movies and tvs you love feature some Spanish. Also lots of native speakers in the US. Services often available in both languages.

Anyway, I like the simple sound but didn't expect the R to be so hard, and I wasn't motivated enough to push through, and I gave up.

some of my patterns

I tend to avoid doing unnecessary hard work and prefer easier and faster routes.

Only after I almost exhaust every alternative route I could think of but didn't seem to work, do I start doing things the hard way.

They say the best way to learn is to teach. It's the scientifically best way to retain you knowledge after learning it. Reading is almost the worst way, and re-reading is the worst thing you could do when you're preparing for tests. So basically, the less mental effort you have to spend, the worst the learning outcome.

For the courses I wasn't interested in, I try to find the most efficient medium to learn them besides textbooks and slides, and do a little bit of restructuring inside my head, just enough for me to understand and / or memorize enough of them to get me past the exams.

For things I care about, I would spend much more effort on them. Sometimes I was just spending more time on them, not necessarily learning them using the most efficient way I know, because I'm intimidated by the uncertainty and the energy required. For example, I was learning Go and React, I've read docs and books, tried out other people's fancy libraries or projects or apps, but had almost written no code in them. My plan was to either 1) build something I need with these tech, or 2) contribute some PRs to the open source libraries I use. But I haven't actually done them because for 1), sometimes I just want to try something fast and Python did the job for me, perfectly, and 2) I looked at the issues list of some libraries, some open issues just gone ignored for a long time, despite people asking if they could contribute. That's frustrating. Some projects, like rclone, is very active, and the maintainer is very responsive to contributions and my past issues, and it was on my list - I planned to look at the codebase when I got time, hopefully within this week, but I honestly don't know when.

the imaginative task queue

My task queue is like a black box distributed system, some tasks will eventually get to the front of the queue when you need to do them (either you feel enough pressure, or got a deadline). Yes, eventually. You don't actually lost any tasks, they're just buried deep and not easily accessible.

Here's how I tried to work against my nature and actually be more productive