Toeing the valley
In The problem with big innovations I shared many happy examples of innovators making breakthroughs with the help of the "adjacent possible" — the introduction of new technological or informational building blocks into the environment.
But what happens when a brilliant innovator never encounters the adjacent possible? I found many such examples in researching that essay, and the following one really stuck with me. From Arthur C. Brooks' From Strength to Strength:
[Charles] Darwin died considering his career to be a disappointment.
In 1859, at age fifty, he published his magnum opus and crowning achievement, On the Origin of Species, a bestseller explaining his theory of evolution that made him into a household name and changed science forever.
At this point, however, Darwin's work stagnated creatively: he hit a wall in his research and could not make new breakthroughs. Around that same time, a Czech monk by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered what Darwin needed to continue his work: the theory of genetics. Unfortunately, Mendel's work was published in an obscure German academic journal and Darwin never saw it. … Despite his writing numerous books later in life, his work after that broke little ground.
This kind of thing haunts me because it poses a dilemma.
On the one hand, I want to spend time in the exploratory valley discovering the kinds of building blocks that will help me reach the tallest mountain of potential for my projects (i.e. a lot of reading, learning, networking, and experimenting). But on the other hand, executing on my projects requires focused devotion, and it's hard to justify taking time away from the work that I know I need to do to engage in fishing expeditions for creative inspiration.
My solution is to do what I call "toeing the valley." I block out ~15–20% of my daily work time for book reading. Usually 45–90 minutes in the afternoon. With a requirement to get to the end of a book by the end of the week. In other words, I keep my feet on the project mountain while keeping my toes in the learning valley.
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Diverge-converge is essential. Every project has a natural rhythm.
But there's a tension: Focus and obsession vs. openness and wide-ranging curiosity.
You hit on a key temporal element, too: It's not just about looking right and left. There's also value in looking "front and back" (towards the past, learning from history etc).
I love imagining the alternative universe where Darwin and Mendel were both on Twitter.
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I was thinking about this the other day. I find myself going through cycles of going deep into learning and exploring, then scaling it down to focus more on executing. But I think your suggestion is the right balance to keep learning every day consistently over small increments vs. larger cyclical increments.
The cyclical approach could be helpful in the early stages if you need to spend a lot of time getting up the curve on an industry, but it's not sustainable.
A hidden benefit of doing something daily is you quickly turn it into an effortless habit.
I know a lot of people who want to do more reading/building/writing/etc. but just can't generate the activation energy required because they haven't outsourced the process to their muscle memory.
Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, so you have to be judicious.
Agreed. I like how you phrased it by saying "outsourced."
I started listening to podcasts while working out at the gym or running. It has helped me integrate learning into a daily routine without taking away time from executing.
It's a good idea to ask yourself to read a book every week, for example, you can also ask yourself to write and share a reading every week, after setting such a goal you can force yourself to keep learning.
I also have the habit of continuous learning, my experience is that input and output should be balanced, around the current things to do to start learning is the most rewarding, when things need to make breakthroughs and progress when fast learning will bring great help.
I totally agree with the idea of dedicating a set amount of time daily or weekly to book reading and learning in interesting fields, even if not directly related to what you are building.
Building knowledge in adjacent fields and different areas almost always pays off in the long run.
What I don't necessarily agree with, is the idea of timeboxing the book completion time, eg. 1 book per week...
It might work for certain types of incremental learning but there are surely other, perhaps more technical books that do take more time to reasonably complete while being able to digest and truly internalize the knowledge.
Also, many books suggest you learn by doing, be it software dev, marketing, or sales.
Taking the time to complete the exercises or taking the recommended steps in real life is often very important to make notions stick
Makes perfect sense. If I read one book at a time, I wouldn't have this one-book-a-week quota for the reasons you mentioned.
But my reading process is a little more complex: I read multiple books at a time (usually 3–6), which means that at the beginning of a given week there's always at least one book that's within striking distance of completion. So I'll designate that part book as the one I want to finish at the end of the week. But I'll continue to take my time with all the others.
(I didn't include these details because this post was already getting a bit long. I'll write more about my reading approach in a separate post.)