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Actually doing things | benkuhn.net

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I’ve written about exploration and exploitation before, but I realized recently that this may be more important than I thought. Talking to a friend about what different people thought about what role effort vs. innate ability played in success, I went down my list of successes and ended up realizing that the only “difficult” part (in the sense of “part I was closest to not doing”) was actually getting up and doing things outside my normal routine. For example, here’s a list of the things that have led to my biggest wins so far: I’d say these were about 25% effort, 25% ability, and 50% “luck” from doing lots of things outside my normal experience. At a guess, the reason doing lots of different things is so important is that it simply exposes you to more potential random “strokes of luck”. When you do a thing, often lots of the exposure to luck comes from the first relatively small bit of effort you put in. For instance, if I turned out not to like contra dancing, I could have stopped go

I've written about exploration and exploitation before, but I realized recently that this may be more important than I thought. Talking to a friend about what different people thought about what role effort vs. innate ability played in success, I went down my list of successes and ended up realizing that the only "difficult" part (in the sense of "part I was closest to not doing") was actually getting up and doing things outside my normal routine. For example, here's a list of the things that have led to my biggest wins so far: trying out contra dancing in middle school joining Harvard High-Im

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