Conversation

6:29 PM · Apr 28, 2021TweetDeck

A typical daily video has 150k+ views! There is *fan art*! There’s an encouraging chat full of other students. Other students’ video streams are picture-in-picture on the wall. There’s something very powerful about watching someone exhibit intensely focused behavior.

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That is: it’s one thing to read a self-help book on Deep Work or Atomic Habits, full of deeply-considered models and techniques; it’s another thing—maybe an emotionally more powerful thing!—to internalize those practices implicitly by watching them in action.

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In a typical session, he’s: * reviewing Anki cards for a couple hours (!!!) * doing written exercises (from textbooks?) * writing notes / Anki cards about class materials he’s reading * doing programming projects (for classes, I think) It’s interesting to see all this modeled.

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I’m hesitant about this kind of media. It can shade into willpower / motivation porn, particularly when centered on externally-provided curricula. James disavows this ("I don’t believe in motivation. It’s volatile.”), but it’s still there, in part at least.

This makes me wonder what it might look like to create a similar stream for curiosity-driven knowledge work.

There’s a funny tension: part of the point of such streams is to help remind you (and the streamer!) to stay “on task.” Don’t check Twitter! This is usually good. But… Twitter is an essential part of curiosity-driven knowledge work! (Sometimes, when used in a careful way…)

To put it another way: it would be very bad to insist on “not getting distracted” by ideas and conversations which seem unrelated to my “main research focus.” But most of my surfing really is just displacement activity; there’s a fine line, and I often can’t see it in the moment.