Singing while playing the piano is something I’d like to learn at some point. But my boy seems to have beaten me to it.
Archive for June, 2023
Peaches: Super Mario (Piano & Vocal by Sky)
Posted in Hobbies, Music, piano, tagged Peaches, piano, Super Mario on June 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Be a Better Dad
Posted in Daily Life, Happiness, Relationship, Uncategorized, tagged parenting on June 28, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Most of us would like to have great relationships with our kids. We are familiar with the basic advice: love our kids unconditionally, put relationship first, spend time with them, empathize and be kind, believe in them and help them fulfill their potential. But putting this advice into practice can be challenging.
One reason is that some of these principles may conflict with each other. For example, balancing unconditional love with helping them reach their potential, or finding a balance between having fun and maintaining order. Should parents allow their kids to experiment with different projects, even if they create a mess at home (or just create a mess for fun)? This could foster creativity and provide an opportunity for everyone to have fun. But for parents who prefer order and cleanliness in their daily routine, and have limited time to supervise or assist with cleanup, this can affect their well-being.
Loving someone unconditionally is hard. Sometime it feels like we are having the same conversations a thousand times, and they continue with the same bad habits. Or what if they refuse to listen to feedback, even when deliver in a well-intentioned, calm manner? Can we love unconditionally when someone consistently behaves in ways we don’t like? For adults, we can choose to spend more time with people we like and avoid others. But with our kids, we don’t have that option. We want our kids to be people we like. Hence even if we know it’s often futile to try to change someone, we still try to shape our kids’ behavior.
Parents can get annoyed or angry by different triggers, such as slamming doors, poor hygiene, mistreating belongings, rudeness, complaining, lying, or engaging in bullying or physical aggression. Some of these character issues require serious attention. But often what we really care about is obedience and respect from our kids.
If having a good relationship is most important, the ideal approach seems to remind them calmly and kindly each time. Punishment usually doesn’t work. Sometime we punish our kids for trivial things, regret it later (as punishments usually benefit no one), but feel obligated to carry them out to maintain consistency and credibility. If our aim really is to help them improve, we should come up with punishments that aid their development.
An ideal parent can strike a balance, to be both loving and accepting, while guiding their kids to become their best selves. Fortunately, being a good enough parent is often good enough. Despite my weaknesses, my kids still seem to enjoy spending time with me. And I like the ideas that there’s room for me to improve and become a better dad.
Sketches II
Posted in Art, Hobbies, tagged Drawing, Fusui, sketches on June 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Effort, Deep Work, and Time
Posted in Hobbies, Resolutions, tagged Deep Work, Effort, Mastery on June 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Bryan Caplan recommends spending ten times the usual effort to be competent.
People who attain fluency practice about ten times as much as the typical person who is officially “learning a foreign language.” Sure, the quality of practice matters, too; immersion is the best method of foreign language acquisition. But unless you’re willing to give ten times the normal level of effort, fluency is basically a daydream.
When I see the contrast between people who succeed and fail, I generally witness a similar gap in effort…
If you want to learn a foreign language, you need to budget about two thousand hours. If you want to master a technical subject, you need to budget about five thousand hours…
Either that, or admit that you’ve got higher priorities. No one succeeds at everything. If you’re not willing to do ten times as much, just level with yourself: “I’ve got better things to do than learn a foreign language.” “I’ve got better things to do than become a great economist.” “I’ve rather raise my kids in the modern world than be a family of earnest Orthodox Jews.” If you take all of the time you dabble away in a hundred quixotic ways and concentrate it on two or three goals you truly prize, you’ll probably succeed at what you value the most. Pick your battles, friends. And wherever do you choose to fight, do ten times as much.
Like what he noted, spending 10,000 hours on something doesn’t guarantee mastery, but without the sustained efforts, it’s generally difficult to become proficient. Depending on the goals and desired level of excellence, one could achieve decent results with good quality focus for a few months.
The problem with this plan, of course, is that it required Keanu Reeves to become sufficiently good at judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting so as not to look clumsy for Stahelski’s stable camera. Reeves was game. According to the featurette I watched, to prepare for production, he trained eight hours a day, four months in a row. The effort paid off. The action set pieces in the movie were show-stopping, and after initially struggling to find a distributor, the film, made on a modest budget, went on to earn $86 million, kicking off a franchise that has since brought in hundreds of millions more.
For Keanu Reeves, it was obvious that the most productive path was to focus all of his attention on a single goal: becoming really good at Stahelski’s innovative brand of gun fu. Doing this, and basically only this, month after month, materialized hundreds of millions of dollar of profit out of the entertainment ether.
Cal on the slow productivity of John Wick
Deep work + time = competence. Pick your battles.
Tolerance for Discomfort and Attributes of Greatness
Posted in Health and wellness, Hobbies, Resolutions, tagged greatness, tolerance for discomfort on June 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Brett summarizes Hemery’s book Sporting Excellence. The attributes mentioned seem reasonable, but it’s hard to know how applicable they are to the general public.
Athletic excellence has thus been linked to the capacity to tolerate discomfort — to feel the pinch and the pain and keep going anyway…Another gold medal winner, Herb Elliott, who’s considered the greatest middle-distance runner of his era, put it this way, “In retrospect, my training wasn’t to improve my physical strength or stamina; those came along as a secondary result, but the primary purpose of every training session was to toughen up mentally. A training session was totally useless until it started to hurt. That was the point when it started to be worthwhile.”
I like the concept of having a high tolerance for discomfort. While we want to avoid overtraining and getting injured, I think in today’s society many people tend to shy away from discomfort. Consistent efforts contribute to progress, which makes the chosen pursuits more enjoyable and sustainable.
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