Cognitive Fitness
I think seeing whatever pursuit one cares most about as a sport sets the right incentives. Everything you do outside of work is preparation for improving your work performance. Internal speech patterns become environments to practice predictive reharsals.
This primes the system to act more efficiently when in motion. Rigorous internal reharsal is training. This prevents misapplied intelligence.
The thing to be careful about is to become aware of mental environments you don’t want to be in. Energy that leaks from things you don’t want to think about cause stress. The kind of stress that burns you out rather than making you excited.
In fact it is useful to keep the systems very lean. Which means taking a lot of steps. One of the biggest blocks to me was thinking that intelligence means oneshotting. Which then becomes basing it on innate capability. Which is equivalent to basing outputs on luck.
In sport it is recognized that talent has its part, but it is more like a multiplier. Which means that anybody with enough effort, time and practice can become extremely good. Maybe to become the world champion in something you need a little luck and talent too. But seeing becoming one of the best is already very useful and motivating.
Because it implies constant intense practice. Being at the edges of your knowledge and capability means you are wrong and bad most of the time. Which makes practice humbling and hard. This kind of training also implies being strategic about intense focus bouts alternated by deliberate rest.
This incentivizes one to take smaller steps and seeing errors as normal and momentary opportunities to improve, rather than setbacks. Errors become opportunities to see what was ignored or not practiced with enough attention and try again.
This bases identity on effort rather than talent. Effort is infinitely renewable and intensifiable.
A good incentive that sports have is that of competition. Competition shifts from beating the other to outdoing the other. The predatory impulse of course is that of beating. But outdoing implies a continuous raising of the bar. And it is generalizeable to outdoing yourself.
Beating sets war incentives, leading to unethical and unfair actions. Because winning is incentivized rather than being the best.
The fundamental key to outdo yourself is about tolerance and coping. Tolerance has to do with sensitivity and triggers. To learn one has to be intolerant to prediction errors. And also have a strong frustration and pain tolerance.
New environments, errors and bad performance are painful. One must have chaos and confusion tolerance, being able to move through it. One must also have risk and error tolerance.
This is the important point. Outdoing yourself is about putting in authentic effort and enduring the journey.
What I try to achieve in my practices is a state of deep focus. I would describe it as a kind of meditative practice. Because I try to kill the ego and become the thing. Giving it all my dedication and devotion. All of my attention.
Which implies contionuously saying no to all external stimuli. Redirecting attention to the performance. Cutting out distraction.
Allowing it to consume all my mental faculties. I think this is how you get really good at something.
It gets easier overtime. The one thing which prevented me to enter that zen state is expecting to enter deep focus the minute i start working. It unfortunately takes a few painful minutes to enter the meditative focus state.