A brief refresher, and then some new points on power-leveling your life.
** How do we define life levels?
0 is too sick/dysfunctional to work or do anything much even personally productive
1 is some personal productivity, but not enough for any but the least intensive paid work
2 is ok ability for paid part time work
3 is good ability for part time work, ok-ish for full time.
4 is good ability for full time work
Levels 0-4 are pre-defined. Why? Because people below level 4 tend to be locked in a bipolar hope-despair cycle. They will thus make mountains of molehills, and award themselves undeserved levels constantly, if permitted to do so. Then they will despair because their life has not materially changed, despite “gaining levels”.
Furthermore, the spacing of these first four levels helps calibrate how far apart future levels should be. This also combats level inflation.
The purpose of a level is not to celebrate every epiphanic euphoric rush. Many of those simply fade away with no objective impact on long term performance. Therefore, a level can have subjective components, but it must also have objective components that are strong enough to stand alone.
Past level 4, people’s level markers will begin to diverge. At this point, we start measuring levels by “imaginative break”, which is inherently subjective.
What do I mean by “imaginative break”? Consider levels 0-4. If you have spent a year at level 0, you can no longer imagine life at level 1. Your neurology, your expectations, your habits, have all adjusted to level 0. When you achieve level 1, it is literally a whole new world. Much of what you were doing at level 0 no longer applies.
That is what I mean by an “imaginative break”. If the gap between future levels is not comparable to the gaps between levels 0-4, you are probably engaging in level inflation.
I don’t know exactly how these levels will play out. But I can say pretty confidently that if you are not earning $100k/yr by level 20, you are inflating your level.
** Deconstruct and chunkxecuteback your critical path to the next level
As a deepsock MT, I am ambitious and obsessively analytical. Thus at level 3, one of my primary sticking points is overanalysis. To combat these tendencies, I have been developing koan paradigms. Here is the latest iteration.
First, let’s review:
The concept of levels itself is intended to combat overanalysis. Focus is limited to just the critical path to just the next level. This massively reduces the scope of the information required.
Next, I tried to apply massive deconstruction to this narrow scope. But it turns out that my capacity for deconstruction is so extreme that, even with a narrowed scope, I can still burn all available time deconstructing. I mean this literally – two nights ago I pulled an all-nighter deconstructing a training video by transcribing it word for word.
Now, while I do eventually want to get that word for word level of deconstruction done on that particular category of training videos, it was not the highest priority for my immediate prep needs, and thus the all-nighter was an error.
Therefore I needed a new paradigm, to limit the magnitude of deconstruction within the narrow scope of focus permitted.
This forced me to consider the nature of skill acquisition, and whether it was materially different than execution. I decided that it was not.
This is my new model for leveling:
“Deconstruct and chunkxecuteback lvl 4 critical path.”
Expanded, that is:
“Deconstruct and chunked execute feedback the critical path to level 4.”
Expanded further, that is:
“Deconstruct ONLY enough to begin chunked execute feedback on the critical path to level 4.”
There are significant hidden implications to this:
1. Minimal, just-in-time information
2. Learning is primarily doing
3. Chunk scope for 80/20 improvement & resource limitations
4. Remove all barriers to immediate, lossless feedback and feedback integration
Essentially, this is an application of the leveling model to skills. In an RPG, your character has an overall level, and levels for various skills. Skill levels are gained by doing the skill.
When you are at life level 3, you can only work on gaining level 4.
Likewise, when you are at x subskill level 1, you can only work on gaining x subskill level 2.
Thus, limit your deconstruction to the scope necessary to kickstart the chunkxecuteback loop to the next subskill level.
As always, I recommend Tim Ferriss’ book, “The 4-Hour Chef,” which is about learning. I will be reading the full text shortly; I’ve already seen talks and outline notes from it.
Naturally, there is a hand koan for this. My right hand now reads “DC4″, with hashmarks underneath for the day’s strategic advances towards lvl 4. The model contained in this post represents one hash mark.