8 milli-blog - maybe my approach to the New Year was wrong

#update
parents:: milli-blog
daily note:: 2025-01-07

Back in Boston today, and feeling a little tired/demoralized. Tired because red eye flights are always a much better idea in foresight than in hindsight.
Demoralized because it's again that annoying thing that happens where, before I'm back, I get really excited about all the possibilities that await. And once I'm here, the possibilities end up as rocks on my shoulder that way me down unless I'm willing to toss a few down to pave the road ahead. Only saving the gold. But the thing is, I can't see the rocks very well, to tell which ones are gems. The only glimpse I have is via a murky lake to my left. At best I can discern that that rock looks a little green-ish (but maybe that's just the seaweed in the pond), that other rock looks a little more jagged.

Maybe it's easier to think about this at a more local scale again. I listened to this podcast today, How To Live Musical Life In 2025, thinking it'd be about tips for what to listen to, what exercises to do to get better musically, etc. Instead, it was a grab bag of gems of advice, supposedly music oriented but really much more general.

1. Sometimes you need to leash yourself to a pole

Putting up guardrails

When we talk about guardrails, that's where those are important. That can come in the form of saying, I'm only gonna listen to maybe one album for this entire week because I wanna really go deep on it. And I'm gonna avoid going to a gig or a concert that maybe is really appealing to me. But I just sort of feel like I've had enough musical input.
Note: This! This is what I’ve been asking about. Balance between creating and consumption.

When left to its own devices, my brain will be biased towards more. If I'm about to make a research breakthrough or making great progress on learning something new, the best thing I can do is to not be distracted and follow through on this. I can't do this with the deluge of thoughts on "well, aren't you missing out on X Y or Z?"

2. Make the journey enjoyable

Aint no mountain high enough

the. If the hike and the journey isn't enjoyable enough and you can't find joy in that journey, you're never going to make it to that mountaintop. You know, the hike has to be really the main thing, because once you get to the top of the mountain, once you get to next December with your, you know, if you achieve these goals, it's going to be great, but you're going to be thinking about the next year, right? So it's going to be a very quick enjoyment and then sort of moving on. So we want to have a plan, and a lot

I often get on myself for not wanting to do what I want to want to do. I want to want to practice scales for 3 hours or take diligent notes on lecture videos on complex analysis. But somehow, I never want to.

But what I do want to practice scales for 30 minutes and see myself work out an issue I've been struggling with or gain a new skill. And I do want to learn that specific fact from complex analysis that was relevant for research/some other thing I'm trying to understand.

3. Maybe my approach to the new year was all wrong

it's easier to prune than to replant

inspiring. As we move into the new year, I find to not just get caught up in, like, what are the new habits I want to develop? What are the new things I want to listen to? What do I really want to practice and learn this year? What do I want to do? A lot of that can become really exciting, but it can also become. It can turn to being a little demoralizing as we start the new year and we start to realize, wait, I'm not going to be able to do all this, or I'm already falling short of what my goals were.
Note: Yes!

The advice is to, rather than spending all that time trying to think of all the new shiny habits you want to develop, spend more time looking back at the habits you exhibited; reinforce the ones that were good, prune the ones that were bad.

Because you're gonna have a much better time trying to grow an apple tree if you're not cutting it down and replanting it every year...