The process of identifying where you are in relation to your goals (something we might call point A) and mastering new material to maneuver yourself to where you want to be (something we might call Point B) is essentially what successful adults almost exclusively spend their time doing. I challenge you to name one hero or role model who did not go through this process. What Point B becomes does change as you move through your life and become more successful, but why not start now and get good at the process while you’re still young?
Previously, how to approach a hunting-type project.
More previously,
Gardening-type projects are going to apply to most of your relationships, networking, and sales where you’re motivated to get something from other people: you’re paying a lot of attention to the qualitative state of someone/something else, trying to cultivate it responsively but also efficiently, and depending a lot on your memory of what it liked and didn’t like in the past. Some of your efforts bloom, and some don’t, and it never really ends. Much of it depends on which people happen by chance to be drawn to your personality type, just like how the local climate and conditions affect what grows and how easily. There’s no definition of “done,” just easily judged states of better and worse. Some non-obvious examples of gardening-type projects are social media marketing, dating from the male perspective, intelligence work, and searching for a job. The time horizon is actually pretty short, because you’re trying to maintain daily short contacts with each plant to water it, monitor it, and respond quickly (reasonably quickly) to small opportunities and crises. You want to reflect on the progress of each little project every week or two, so it pays to have snapshots that make the differences more concrete and obvious in retrospect. (Do gardeners take pictures of their plants over time? I would, especially if it were automated.) That means maintaining a CRM is crucial. In this type of project, it’s hard to set traditional goals because it doesn’t just depend on you and you’re never really done spinning plates, you just take long breaks sometimes and let the garden fall apart for a while.
https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2024/01/03/types-of-project/
Gardening-type projects are probably the most important for material success in modern life, because personal finance and wealth-building is a lot like gardening. This has become more salient to me in recent years, as I’ve been striving to become good at money despite my natural anti-materialistic streak. I’ve also had a recent epiphany about how to do stuff like this.
But first, let’s talk about video games!
Subset Games has a couple of very different games called Into the Breach and Faster Than Light. The former plays like chess, and I loved it. It’s pretty close to deterministic (if you pick the right moves, you’ll win) and rewards the tendency to slow down and overanalyze your next move for very simple outcomes. It’s very appealing to the sort of mind that enjoys a rigorous syllogism, and I beat the campaign on hard on my second try. If you can restate modus tollens in your own words off the top of your head*, you’d probably love it. My friend Zeke bounced off it, but he loves Faster Than Light. This is more of a resources management game, where you balance concerns, grow your crew and ship’s capabilities in parallel, acquire money, spend money, spread your attention broadly and shallowly across everything at once, and make tons of little decisions as you prepare for some final challenge (on a time limit). Early successes can compound into big successes and big mistakes often spiral into catastrophe, just like in the game of life (or XCOM, which I think is more popular in this genre). If you have an overabundance of executive function, you’d probably love it. I have a deficit of executive function as part of my inattentive ADHD, so this game is stressful for me.
Skipping to the end, most of adult life is like the one I’m bad at, and not coincidentally I’m quite poor relative to my IQ. Also not coincidentally, Zeke is happily married with five kids and has amassed a moderate net worth, despite getting his bachelor’s degree in a major less marketable than creative writing. Being naturally like me is only useful for specializing in something technical where the job market doesn’t crash the month before you graduate (but c’est la vie). Zeke is also quite the gardener, again not coincidentally.
Enough preamble, how does he do it? It’s simple! The success of all gardening-type projects can be broken down into values, targets for optimization, strategy, rules of thumb, daily metrics, and knowledge. Let’s tackle these in reverse order.
Knowledge is the context you need to make good decisions at every level. It’s the variable that will make or break you, and should be your #1 focus and priority for succeeding at gardening-type projects. Because gardening-type projects necessarily involve a lot of waiting around, you should spend about 80% of your time learning what to do and why–as a rule of thumb–and only about 20% of your time actually doing anything. If you’re the phlegmatic type, or just inclined to armchair philosophy, this should come as great news! There is no knowledge that isn’t valuable for gardening-type projects, but some knowledge is much more valuable. What you don’t know will always hurt you, and if it’s fundamental ignorance it will probably kill you. Refer to my post on foundational books for a highly useful taxonomy of knowledge. For most gardening-type projects in life, you’ll never run out of useful stuff to learn, so front-load your studying with foundational books, but don’t make the mistake of never starting (active learning is the best kind), and only stop studying if you’re tired of the compound growth that is its result.
Daily metrics are the choice of where you spend your time, money, and effort. They represent the independent, causal variable that breeds success. In gardening, it’s the watering, weeding, and other tasks that constitute the necessary work. In sales, it may be the number of contacts you have with leads and customers, or maybe the number of minutes you spend talking to them. In competitive running, it’s the duration of time per week you spend running and the quality and quantity of your recovery time. In a more complex endeavor, like your health broadly speaking, you may have to balance work time, which you use to pay for everything else, family time, exercise time, cooking time, organizing time (so you don’t miss doctor appointments), and so on. It’s harder to pick targets for optimization, but there are guidelines like “work out 4x/week for 30 minutes or more” that will get you 80% of the way there (a respectable passing grade!). These aren’t the things you want, per se, but they’re the daily and weekly minutiae that get you what you want in time.
Rules of thumb are, in my opinion, the most important kind of worldly wisdom there is. These are quantitative guidelines that take the load off your executive function by eliminating the bulk of your decisions, which become obvious, and providing perspective for the ones that need more scrutiny. For example, as a rule of thumb your rent or mortgage payment shouldn’t exceed 30% of your income. If you’re buying a house to flip, the purchase price should not exceed 70% of the property’s After Repair Value minus the estimated repair costs. As a rule of thumb, your meals should be 1/3 protein, 1/3 carb, and 1/3 vegetable. As a rule of thumb, you should run in Zone 2 or less 80% of the time. As a rule of thumb, you should do heavy compound barbell lifts in sets of 5 (or “fahve”). Usually you can find these rules of thumb in the foundational books, during your initial immersion phase, but nowadays all the advice on the internet is 90% disclaimers and 10% useless sentimentalism (“have fun!”), so they’re getting harder to find. You may have to invent your own as you go.
Strategy refers to the fact that people and starting contexts are different enough that you may have to modify the normal advice to fit your situation. Think of it as different ways of getting victory points: everybody wants the same points, but if military conquest is overvalued by the other players you might want to go for a science victory. Please don’t mistake this for the common (and retarded) sentiment that “there are as many ways to squat as there are people who squat.” There are only a couple really good ways to do anything, there’s definitely a best one for your situation, and you’re gonna get hurt if you aren’t at least in the same ballpark as the right strategy. And if you’re wondering whether you’re special, you’re not. A guy in a wheelchair knows whether he’s in a wheelchair. So do the normal strategy or get an expert to design your special strategy.
Targets for optimization are the variables you track that will tell you whether you’re succeeding in the long term. It’s the scoreboard you choose for your big annual goals. In sales, it’s your sales numbers. In fitness, it’s your performance numbers. In chess, it’s your Elo rating. In gardening, it’s the weight of your harvest. This is probably the easiest one to understand, but also has the most common pitfalls. The one to watch for the most is premature specificity. This is a fancy way of saying you don’t start your education by studying for the SATs, you build up a foundation of skills and knowledge and then do your test prep. Please notice I’m not completely opposed to teaching to the test…quite the contrary. (See the devil’s advocate argument in favor of standardized testing in “Bring Home the Score” by W. Walter Tinsley.) But getting specific too early is how you “get out over your skis.” When your training for a triathlon, you don’t practice by running triathlons at race pace, you spend a few months building up your aerobic base and then linearly ramp up specificity over a few months in the “build” phase.
The other danger is paperclips maximizing, which is prevented by keeping in mind the difference between your quantitative targets and qualitative values.
Values are the ethereal, unapproachable, unmeasurable things we’re trying to get at by gardening (or whatever) but can never quite reach. In psychometrics, it’s the elusive idea of g that we imperfectly approach by measuring IQ. For example, we aren’t actually gardening because we want to convert the earth’s mass into produce, it’s a murky mix of the desires to eat good produce, give some produce away, save some money, connect with the earth, scratch the itch to nurture something, feel a sense of accomplishment, learn about nature, and lots of other things that defy comprehensive definition. Keeping Goodhart’s Law in mind, that the targets we optimize for will cease to be good proxies for our values as we get better at optimizing, will prevent the paperclip maximizing problem. Values are by necessity subconscious and nonverbal (ref. Rory Miller), you will have to use visualization techniques to build your intuition for them. You will then have to use your judgment to decide whether your values and targets have become decoupled to the point that you have to pick new targets. No one can do this for you, and if you try to lawyer your way out of it you’ll only be hurting yourself and the people for whom you’re responsible.
Now that you have all the mental tools you need, let’s bring it all together.
We’ve all seen the video of the superspy dusting off some bullet wounds to take down the bad guy after he remembers some emotional moment, or the soldier who defeats impossible odds after watching his comrade die in battle. Unfortunately, this is mostly the stuff of movieland. Unless you’re a fictional character, the truth about emotions and motivation is that they really don’t get you very far on their own. Granted, heightened emotion and soaring motivation are great tools for clarifying what you want and what you need to do, but in real life there is almost no situation where someone achieves something difficult by being particularly emotional or motivated. In fact, quite the opposite is true, as almost all great achievements are composed of countless small decisions made toward that goal.
-W. Walter Tinsley again
The way to win at gardening-type projects is going to vary by discipline, but they’ll always require you to connect all these concepts together like an assembly line. Ideally, your knowledge will inform your daily decisions, which will allow you to hit your daily metrics, which your rules of thumb predict will optimize your targets, that will then satisfy the subconscious values that motivated you to garden in the first place. But you have to do this in the opposite order, starting with why like that Simon Sinek guy said: meditate on your values, pick a target that’ll move you toward them, strategize how you’ll get there, develop guiding rules of thumb for what daily metrics to hit and why, and make good daily decisions based on your knowledge. And because gardening-type projects are 80% knowledge based, your typical decision should be to spend time learning how to do it properly, with only 20% of your time spent actually doing it.
If you want to get really good at this, go through Brian Tracy’s Maximum Achievement training kit.
*Absence of the symptom implies absence of the condition.
Aeoli Pera 
