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May 2018

Post image for How to Slow Down Time

As I moved from my twenties to thirties I noticed a certain psychological miscalculation happening more often: a day that feels like it was three or four months ago was actually a year ago.

Or I would think back to what I was doing this time last year, then realize that what I’m remembering happened two years ago.

Almost everyone says this effect only gets stronger—time seems to speed up as you age, right until you die. Apparently, by the time you’re ninety, you make breakfast, and once you’ve tidied up the dishes it’s mid-afternoon. Then you read a book for a bit, and when you look up it’s dark.

Supposedly, this speeding-up sensation is unavoidable, because it’s linked inextricably to how increasingly small a year is in comparison to your age. To a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, but to a fifty-year-old, it’s only 2% of a lifetime. This growing disparity makes it feel like time is slipping away ever more quickly.

That’s the popular explanation anyway—the one I heard, and repeated, for years.

But it’s pure bunk. It doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. How long an hour, a week, or a year feels is something that changes all the time. Five days spent traveling in a foreign country tends to feel much longer than a regular workweek. An hour spent coping with tragic news can feel deadeningly slow, while an hour of frantic cleaning before guests arrive slips away like draining bathwater.  Read More

Post image for The Hole Where All The Success Leaks Out

Each of us has a few professional-level skills—usually ones relating to our jobs, or hobbies we’ve been trained in formally. But when it comes to everything else we do, we’re amateurs.

Being an amateur just means below pro level—you may do some aspects quite well, but you still muck things up that a professional never would. For example, there are dishes I can cook pretty well, but I’m no chef. I chronically overcook vegetables, serve things I haven’t tasted, and who knows what else that would make a proper chef cringe.

There’s a huge upside to being an amateur, however. On the excellent Farnam Street Blog, Shane Parrish dusted off a brilliant insight about effectiveness and expertise, which he found in an old “get better at tennis” book from the 1970s.

Shane isn’t particularly interested in tennis. Neither am I, and chances are you aren’t either. But this insight is so powerful and universally applicable that anyone could use it to drastically improve their performance at virtually anything—any job, any art, any sport, any skill at all.  Read More

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