the real work takes time - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix

A bit of a different essay this week coming to you in the form of a few unedited notes and snippets: meditations on putting in the work & watching Past Lives Part of the frustration with life in your 20s is that it is highly unstructured. Feedback loops are really long and sometimes non-existent. You’re the only one accountable for yourself. How much effort you pour into everything, how measured you are, how moderate, how extreme. Effort is hard to measure. It’s become obvious to me that real, meaningful, effort takes a really long time to bear fruit. This can refer to all sorts of work: e.g., internal: confidence-building, developing taste, skill-based: coding, writing, researching. When you’re in the thick haze of hacking away at a goal with no clear reward, incremental improvement is extremely opaque and tedious. For me this materializes in a couple of ways. Writing, for one. It’s really hard to tell if I’m getting better. Some pieces feel better than others. Sometimes nothing sings

A bit of a different essay this week coming to you in the form of a few unedited notes and snippets: meditations on putting in the work & watching Past Lives Part of the frustration with life in your 20s is that it is highly unstructured. Feedback loops are really long and sometimes non-existent. You’re the only one accountable for yourself. How much effort you pour into everything, how measured you are, how moderate, how extreme. Effort is hard to measure. It’s become obvious to me that real, meaningful, effort takes a really long time to bear fruit. This can refer to all sorts of work: e.g.,