As our motivations change, and especially in doing new things, finding how you can make them slightly easier for yourself can be helpful in accomplishing them. Of course, some things are regardless just hard to do, but between Kahran and Divya there are some diverse approaches and stories abound of how the approaches work in certain situations.
I've become very rigid in how I learn. I am the best teacher that can teach myself. I get irritated when I get homework from other people, but I'll happily do homework I've assigned myself.
If you do something really well at the base level, the chances that you will need to do tweaks on the final layers are much lower. First capture the big areas of value, then add detail.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week, Divya and I talk about what makes things hard, talk about how can your models make things easier, but then also how some things really are just hard to do. And at some point, you've got to put in the time and the effort to make them happen. There's some amazing examples we talk about, and we hope you enjoy the episode.
I was thinking about it, though. Like, I think in lenses, it's called chromatic aberration, something like that. Yeah, chromatic aberration. Yeah, it is something that there'll be profiles for the lenses in a lot of softwares that they'll assign.
The metadata will carry what the lens was that shot. I will say that now that I've started shooting with Leica lenses and Leica's just storied in their ability to make glass, that is what they've been known for for a hundred years, there is just something really nice about it. There's just a certain beauty to the photos.
It doesn't need anything, really. The ability for you to frame the photo and really just minimize how much time you spend in post-processing is huge. I almost never touch the pictures I take other than maybe changing the crop. Yeah, it's one of those things.
If you do something really well at, like if you're painting something, and if you do something really well at the base level, like when you're sketching and doing the base glazes, the chances that you will need to do tweaks on the final layers are much lower. I guess that's the way when you learn to paint, they always teach you, right? You paint, like first capture the big areas of value, right?
And then from there, you keep adding the layers of detail. I wouldn't know. I have never learned how to paint. I still think, yeah, you could do a class here or there, but I guess you don't really have that much interest.
I think that in a very weird way, I've become very rigid in how I learn. And so I am the best teacher that can teach myself. Like I get irritated when I get homework from other people. I'm happily going to do homework that I have assigned myself, but you know my quest to try and learn Japanese and Korean, right?
And I know it would be so much easier if I just got a tutor. And I told them that take two hours a week and I'm not going to do anything beyond it. Or instead of six months, maybe it's going to take us like one and a half year to get to the same level, but I'm okay with just spending those two hours. I'm sure that that's possible, but somehow my mind is just like, nah, I don't know.
And whereas I feel like I love structured learning, right? Like it makes it so much more manageable for me to have someone having chunked it for me and being like, yes, do this chunk in this creative time. And then you can feel like you're overachieving if you do more than that chunk in that period of time.
I guess this is the best. Yeah. Yeah, I generally find that like, you know, in a very weird way, guided training, I have very like high internal resistance too, especially because I don't think that any of the skills I've developed in the last 16 years, I want to say have had anything to do with like a
specific teacher teaching me something. I feel like the closest thing would be my therapist teaching me emotional coping skills. I also feel like it's hard to talk about things when they are like somewhere around the 10 to 15% mark, because you also don't know where this is going to go, what is going to happen here.
Make sure you can quickly get to 30 to 40% and then I feel like one can converse about it. Interesting. What gives you, what are the markers of these percents in your mind? Like, are there, do you feel like there's a 20% benchmark?
I don't know. I think that like part of it is how I would feel about an idea. Like if this was an idea, how would I feel about it? Right. So when would an idea feel?
Yeah. So like I would start making something when an idea feels around like 30% ish in my head. So there's like a point when action gets taken potentially. No, in the sense that like I would have a sense of like, okay, now it's somewhere where if I sit down, I can put enough roots in, you know, those plants where you sort of germinate
the seed outside and then you plant it. Yeah. Right. And like if you directly put it in soil, like if you put the seed in soil, the chance of a plant growing would be much lower.
It feels a little bit like that, except with ideas. If I tried to make something out of it, I also don't understand it enough right now to make something here. Of course, brain can convince you that, oh, but I still don't have enough. I still don't have enough even when you have enough.
So that's like the 30% marker to me is like, it feels like I could do something if I put the pen to paper, but also I don't know everything. When I start giving myself, but I don't know everything kind of reasons, then I'm like, okay, you know, enough. If you're worrying about knowing everything, that means you have an idea of what the outline
looks like. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. I'm now trying to think about which ideas I have that I feel like I don't know everything. It feels like a lot of them. No, because there is some amount of learning that just happens when you get to it and when
you start like doing the thing. Right. I think that there's a amount of energy or amount of learning that you have to get you to know how to do something. And then I feel like there's a separate thing around like how you would like to do it, maybe,
or maybe if you flip that around, that could also be right. So what you would like to do in it. And I feel like learning those things takes more knowledge. And that really only comes once you've been doing it. But there's a certain amount of knowledge required to just understand how to do something
initially. And I feel like that's how I would frame, I think, what you're talking about. Yeah, I agree. There is the skill component of it and there is like whatever is the spark of this specific idea, that component.
Right. And I was like a couple of days back when I was telling you that, oh, I haven't written even though I have had so many ideas and like you helped me sort of walk through it. And I think what helped was you made this statement that instead of thinking about it as articles that you have to write, think about it as if these are thoughts that you
have and ideas that you have. And like I am reasonably good at articulating my thoughts and ideas. Right. And then somehow it sort of transposed from, oh, I don't know how to write to a skill that I already have, which is like communicating things that I am thinking about.
I mean, not somehow, but yes. I mean, like, yeah, you directly phrased it, but the problem is sometimes even when people directly say something, you don't get it. Yeah, for sure. And in that moment, I got it, got it.
Right. And like that's why I'm saying like it somehow just worked. Because again, that is one magic piece. That if I could just learn how to make myself get it, get it. I'm sure I can like 10x everything that I'm learning.
I mean, what one would always need to do is just transpose something that feels difficult into something that feels easy or something that you have really understood past. Not always. Sometimes things just are hard. Sometimes you don't have prerequisite knowledge.
This is a lesson we're learning on. We're working on learning. Excuse me. But like, for example, you didn't have dance as a skill when you started learning Katak, right?
And I'm sure a lot of like, you can say, oh, some of the stuff I've learned in yoga or like, you know, somewhere else I can transpose here. But let's be honest, that must have been less than 2% dances at some skill. No, definitely there was a whole, I think, initial amount of learning even after I started where I was just learning how to do what I was doing.
Right. And now I feel like much more. Like, oh my God, there's like a whole universe of things to learn. Yeah. You know, so I do feel like that transition has occurred.
Yeah. While sometimes you can transpose like one piece of skill to somewhere else by just changing the frame around it, I don't think always you can do that. I recently heard it in a podcast. Renessa personality, like the more you have that, the more random new skills you will
have to learn. But see, to me, it's just another structured learning environment, especially a group structured learning environment. What is learning dance? Right.
No, but I bet you were saying, how did you acquire the skill? So I've transposed something that I feel successful in. Right. So I've had a lot of success in different group structured learning environments. And so I've transposed that to be a place where I'm going to learn this new thing, because
I'm not trying to learn it in a way that I would feel really hard, right? Like trying to learn it from like videos or trying to learn it in a self learning process would feel really difficult to me. I'm taking something that feels like a relatively easy way for me to acquire skills. And I'm using that to acquire this thing that otherwise would feel really difficult.
But I'm saying like there's still a large component, like the skill is new. Like it's a completely new mental node for sure. Right. Like just because you have made the context slightly convenient for yourself does not make it easy.
Like I would say something similar is true for like, you know, when one learns to cook or somebody who hasn't been active their whole life, if they try to get into physical activity, I would also say it's like people who haven't trained at all in the humanities, doing any sort of like subjective critical analysis comes very difficult to them.
And people who have been heavily trained in STEM, doing any sort of analogical thinking comes very difficultly to them. Like these are separate skills. You will have to train yourself separately. It's like knowing how to use your hands does not teach you how to walk.
Right. Like when you're a baby, learning to grab doesn't teach you how to walk. You have to learn separately how to walk. Sure, it is limb movement, but it is separate skill. I hear you on all of those things, right?
And I think even if you just think about those last ones, you were saying, right, like you there's a process by which you learn something. And so for some children, it may be that they realize that, oh, they watch someone and then they tried in this context and then they were able to do something. So maybe at first it's like, oh, they were able to like pick up a ball.
And it was that they were in the context of this carpet and they were with these people and they were able to, you know, pick up their ball. Right. And so then when you're going to be trying to stand up, you may try and transpose that context, right?
And so you're saying, OK, this was a successful learning context for me before. Even adults don't have that kind of understanding. First of all, what I'm saying is that I feel like that's what I was hoping you do in that moment. And I think that that can be a really successful way of just solving things.
You feel like are hard and I admit, of course, yes, some things are hard. And that is a thing that we are working on, particularly me. Most things are hard. Very honestly, most things are hard. Sometimes you can make them easier by transposing something that feels easier
and saying, can I use this little thing, this thing I mastered and use it, pick it up and put it here. You know, maybe it's a whole environment and you're picking that up and here. And now you're trying to learn that thing or do that thing in a different kind of way. Let's say that you're trying to get better at racket sports and you also don't
like the notion of balls flying at you, right? Well, maybe it's starting with like table tennis before you go to like actual tennis or like squash, you know, would be like a great way to like get some amount of racket sports and then you can move on to, I don't know, racket ball. There's a joke among squash players that racket ball is for failed squash players.
That's just squash players being made. You know what is interesting? I read that article that you shared earlier about most people thinking that table tennis is super easy and they can challenge an Olympian level person. And I feel like slightly that's also what's happening here in the sense
that like different people have different degrees of ability to grasp new skills, not exactly transposing what is happening would basically like somebody who has never trained like an Olympian or has no concept of what an Olympian level skill would mean, would think, OK, I could also do it because I also play table tennis sometimes, right?
But now in the reverse direction, as somebody who has acquired multiple skills, you probably understand how you learn a lot better than most people who would be in their late thirties, right? Like a reverse like it is easier for you, probably. And it is for a lot of other people.
Like I learned really at a very accelerated pace when I was in culinary school, right? And that was a really interesting environment for me because it's very much like a carrot and stick environment where like, you know, favor is given to the ones who are performing the best. And if you are like fucking things up, you're going to get yelled at,
I made fun of all the time. And it's interesting because the dance is taught in a very classical sense, which is how I'm learning dance is kind of similar, right? And the Vesnaji, our teacher, she will not be mean to like new students. And she's told us that, right?
Like that's something that Guruji kind of used to do, but she doesn't really agree with. But once you're like really into the program, you know, there's some students who have been dancing for like eight, 10 years. If you like fuck shit up, she's going to call you out on it, right? And be like, you know, you can't be standing in the front and like leading
people who are watching you if you're going to make mistakes. So there's this one person who she was really scolding yesterday, which is like, you know, if everyone is going to be singing like you, right? And you drop the note, what are people going to learn? And then she was telling people, like, don't listen to that one.
Yeah, it's a really high note. I really was struggling to hit it. It's like, is there a pa in the Indian? Like I thought only that was sorry. Gamma.
Oh, there's three more. I never knew about. Gee. Oh, so people are really struggling when hitting the pa. I think in Indian classical, the spacing between one scale and the next to scale, it's asymmetric.
I don't know much, but I think it is something like that. Well, I know that sometimes they speak in normal things, right? Where they're like, oh, like make it C and then they'll set the tampera, tampera, tampera, tampera. Yeah.
To come back to the point I was driving at after our brief little sidewalk, bird lock there. So this is a very similar learning environment. It's a learning environment that I knew I find very successful. And I am finding very successful, right?
I feel like very excited when I feel like I'm learning things at a speed that I like. So I think there's some truth to that. I don't know. I mean, I feel like for me, the example I was using was learning environments, but I feel like if you are someone who's listening to our podcast and therefore likely to be somewhat caring about like self improvement or kind
of thinking about just how you grow as a person, there's going to be things that you have mastered. There's going to be certain models that you're applying in certain parts of your life. And I just feel like wherever you can looking to say, like, can I make this thing that feels like a hard problem easier with this thing that I've
mastered in some other place? Let me do that. Like if I took the example of my sister, I feel like she's so good at this point at just being able to break tasks down into relatively consumable like modules, right? Like this needs to be done.
And then all these things are underneath it, you know, and then the thing that she loves to do is really take some of them and do them at like an outrageous level. Right? Like she got all these like little like takeaway bags with like a neum's face on them. Like they just got like stickers, right?
That they faced it. It was really, really cute though. And so she loves to kind of like go above and beyond on some of them or really should love for all of them. Right? So she can apply that to things that she finds more difficult, right?
Like right now I know she's trying to plan her birthday party next year because she's turning 40 and she's really excited about it. So like can she somehow take that planning process and apply what she does so well in like the execution process and apply it to that planning process? And then maybe that would feel a little bit easier for her.
So like that's what I'm trying to say is like, can you take those things, those models that you really understand how to do well and then apply them to things that feel less, less easy to do. I hear you. I think like, I think we're talking about slightly orthogonal things in the sense that like I'm saying some things are hard and you're like, correct.
And you can make them easier if you think about what is something that is like the closest analog to this that I can find. Which is what I was helping you do when you were writing your articles. So you got it all the way back. Yeah.
At least our listeners get worried we go on too long of bird walks sometimes. I think some of it is just like it's hard to do that transposition. You know that. Have you heard that statement? Outsiders see better insiders know better. I have. It's one of those business maxims that I don't know if I agree with the
100% but tell me about why it resonates with you if that's where you are going. In the sense that like when you are stuck somewhere, you know very clearly your points of stuckness. And sometimes like that information is so much that it's very hard to figure out what is the signal and what is the noise.
Like just taking the article example, you just told me, okay, don't worry about the final product while I was worrying about the final product. I was like, why am I not getting these done? Why can't I finish this? When they'll like, you know, I'll start publishing them, etc. etc.
But you was just like, okay, here are some ideas that you have. Just think about how you would expand them. Right. And so you could almost like take a bird's eye view of the whole situation and like pull one level up and then pull me one level up as well. Right. I guess it must have been like the bold and the beautiful is what I'm really thinking of.
So this is a long time ago. This is like I was like maybe eight or nine years old because I used to watch this in India with my grandmother. And I was just thinking like it was so clear when this person was saying one thing that it meant a different thing. Right.
And I was just like, why do people ever do that? Like, because I was like, oh, people just sometimes like it's so clear when they're saying, you know, they're like, oh, I don't love you anymore. Like you must leave me. It's like, no one ever actually means they don't love you anymore.
Right. Like they're saying it because they're trying to like protect you from something. And it was just so odd to me that no one ever seemed to ever think like, I don't know, just like think about what is the context we're in right now. No, but I feel like in that story, there is very obviously why it happens. Because how will you have?
Oh, yeah, why you needed melodramas. Absolutely. Yes, it's. Why did this girl go in the basement without light on in a horror movie? Well, because she doesn't know she's in a horror movie and the writers know you are watching a horror movie. So I don't know.
I mean, I think you may be right. Like it may be a skill that I particularly have is being able to kind of like, like zoom up and then try and and kind of help people around me see that kind of like bigger view. Oh, that I would say a lot of smart people have. It's easier to do it for other people is what I'm saying. It's hard to do it for yourself.
And that's what I meant by like, you know, inside is no matter and outside is better. It's just like really, how should I say, as long as you have like a sufficient corpus of strong first prince, principle thinking, you can look at a situation and you can be like, OK, these are probably the three different fault lines. If you cover these, you should be OK. But when you're inside, you see all the cracks and you don't know which is the major fault line to like, you know, patch up something.
My therapist and I were talking about in a lot of situations, you know, you have different parts of you that have different, maybe even conflicting desires, right? And so sometimes what I think about is like, maybe you're giving validation to that part of you that otherwise is not able to convince the rest of you. So when you're talking to someone who is also sharing the kind of notions that maybe you're having, because almost you're presenting the story in a certain way, especially when you're telling one of your friends, right? So you're presenting it in a way that the big picture is available to be seen.
So you have some sense of it even as you're presenting it because usually people are going to tell back to you what you want them to tell you. Anyway, so I wonder if there's a little bit of that, right? Because you're giving validation to that part of you that is more thinking about the picture in the way that you would think that that friend would give you that validation. So I wonder if like, you know, the parts of a person's personality that don't want them to ask for help are actually denying validation to the ones that could solve the problem. Interesting hypothesis from your axiom.
And maybe that's a better way to think about it, right? Instead of fighting the part of you that doesn't want to ask for help, you're saying like, oh, I just really want to support this part of me that wants to solve the problem. And then that would push you to do what feels easier. Like, for example, I love to stay in touch with some of the older generation of my family, but I feel very weird about calling them because I just don't really call anyone anymore. But if I just focus on the fact that I feel like I really want to stay in touch and I don't really like, even though I feel like I'm supposed to call them because like it's just, but then I can just find some other way to do it.
You know, I could, I could set the voice down. I don't have to fight myself on the call. True. Go on. It's reminding me of that thing in product design, like when you're doing user research, the user is always right about the problem.
They are seldom right about the solution. How Henry Ford said that, like, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. But like as a person who makes things, it's your job to realize that when people say they want faster courses, what they want is something that moves faster than a horse. What they want is they want to be able to get to their destination. I don't know, because that's the thing we'd want to break down, right?
Do they want to feel the feeling of being on a faster horse or do they want to get to their destination faster? Right? Or is it that they want to have the ability to carry more things with them that like a larger horse would provide, you know, like there's, if you can push them on what characteristic of it is the most exciting, I feel like that's when you really can start to figure out where to take that. And an interesting thought I had the other day, but I feel like sometimes if you think about people on the ends of the spectrum and sometimes that can mean people who are, you know, have disabilities or different abilities or neurodivergent, right? They're maybe going to reveal to you the places that your product could grow in a way that would actually be nice for everyone, but not everyone felt it as strongly enough to help you articulate it as a need.
So it can be just kind of an interesting way to think about how you're going to continue to push forward on adding value when you start to feel like it's not clear where places are still there to optimize. That is very true. It's a little bit like how subtitles were initially for people who were hard of hearing. Nowadays, because of subtitles, people are used to watching shows in other languages because of subtitles, like almost everybody who wants to see things can like, you know, see with subtitles, which just enables people who have like, oh, I didn't hear that one word correctly. Oh, the volume in this movie theater is not correctly balanced or whatever.
But like everybody can benefit from that. You know, this conversation just made me think of that statement, like the things we make make us because we were starting from a very personal space, but then like, and we ended up in a very, oh, this is how things around us are designed kind of space. I actually just want more with that. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 with three of my friends in Seattle, and one of them is colorblind. And it's been so interesting to see her experience because we all saw in the menu that in the accessibility, there's like colorblind and they give four options or like just turn it on like, what's wrong with you, Tab?
Tab is her player name. Player's name, excuse me. And it's very funny how you end up calling each other by the names of your characters after some point. But it was just also interesting to see, first of all, that there's not great coverage for just great differentiation for her, right? To try all the different options.
It did help in some ways, but she wasn't that clear about how it would help. And then also surprising to me that it seems like they're only relying on one modality, right? There's a lot dependent on these like circles that indicate for you whether someone is an ally and an enemy, especially in a battle. And they don't really give you much other indicators to make it clear that like, this is the person you're attacking. And especially sometimes, you know, you may have summoned an ally that looks a lot like an enemy.
And it can be very confusing. And if it so happens, your ally is a rogue and like has executioner and they're going to do like a hundred damage in their next shot. It can also be very frustrating at times. But it's a place where it definitely would add value, right? Even for other people, like just giving more modalities of indicators and that would just solve for that use case as well.
But it's not something you maybe would have thought about unless you considered people being colorblind, right? Yeah, actually colorblindness is still one of the more common accessibility features that a lot of games have. But like I remember there was some video or something that I saw about like either Dota or Leagues accessibility features. And how amazing it was that how much depth they had gone into. Like, oh, even if you can't hear, you can see this.
Like even if you could see no color, you could understand everything. It's like these are very high intensity fast, like, you know, fast based high stakes feeling type games, right? Like five people are going to, four people are going to shout at you if you did something wrong. Yeah. Well, and I don't know if I heard you right, but it kind of sounded like they're almost thinking about how they bake them into the game versus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keeping them as accessibility. Yeah. And I wonder if that's also a great way to think about. What you just said, right? Like singular modality, that's what they have not done in the whichever, I don't remember which one it was, but like it was one of these two. And like they're just like, okay, if something is like, you know, if something is going wrong, like, you know, you have this indicator and this indicator and this indicator and this indicator.
So like, you know, they're just like fail safe after fail safe after fail safe. Expensive, but nice. Yeah. And that's where everything boils down to it, right? Like it's expensive to do this. Inclusivity is expensive. I don't know if that's one of those maxims that like we have taken as a given.
It's not a maxim. I like just from my experience of making things, this is expensive to do that. More design overhead, right? You just have to think about it more. Yeah. And the more complex these systems become, the harder it is. I just wonder if you could, and I know you're not a big fan of Elon Musk, but if you could take the, at least what his strategy was, we're thinking about like, how do we get to Mars? So he was like, okay, you know, what are the most expensive components?
But he didn't get to Mars. I know, I know, I know. Forget whose idea it was. We'll pretend just to look at it on there, right? It was like, how do we break down the components of what is expensive to get there and then challenge each one on the fact, on the notion that they had to be expensive. And so I don't know, I wonder if we took that mindset towards something like this and said, you know, what is makes it expensive? So part of it is just like, you have to think more broadly, right?
Like to be able to think about all the different use cases, the different types of users, then executing on that feels expensive. So then it's like, can you take each one of those and start to say, how do we make that cheaper? So it's not just that, right? One of the things that I have like recently been interested in and like just trying to get into studying is like emergent systems. Yeah.
I really don't know much about emergent systems. So emergent system thinking is basically like when the components of the system, you can even then you can predict the behavior of the individual components. The moment they come together, you can't predict what is going to happen afterwards. So like if you think about traffic is an emergent system problem. In some ways, it's a linear one because like traffic goes on big types.
Ecosystems are emergent systems, right? Like, and let's not even go into biological systems because they are so bloody complicated. Like the way your genes express also and like which ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all of that too complicated. All of that would be, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Like even at a very simple level, we don't have a very good understanding of like emergence as a property. All the research is also very nascent and a part of like complicated game design. I can only speak for game design because like that is something that I have some experience with. So like, you know, everything from chaos theory to more mathematical side of emergent system design and like, you know, how would that work with procedural design in game design and at a certain level.
Like those are the things that I'm trying to think about. What ends up happening is that like, let's say you thought about accessibility at a certain level, but every time you add a new variable, you suddenly have fractalized the problem space. Like the error spaces have now just exploded every time you add something new. So it's not even accessibility, right? So accessibility for a simplistic game might be easier, but accessibility like, let's say for a game that supports four people playing together, where they are in different environments, everybody can do multiple different things.
How do they all look different is such a nightmare of a problem to solve. Sometimes it's also like what you would call like a wicked problem where there is basically no solution and you just have to make do with a compromise on all friends. No, I hear you on that. And I think that there's obviously a complexity when just you have more goals to achieve, right? Like if you just think about it straight from like how many user objectives are you trying to support in this release and how many business objectives are you trying to support? Well, if you have more objectives, I bet you're gonna have to write more stories than write more code, whether it's by people or by machine or whatever.
So I hear you on that, right? Adding more objectives is a very real thing. I guess I just I wonder if like we've we've also just taken it as a given for a long time. So we haven't built the standardizations that could make it a little bit easier, you know, I think that it's just interesting to me that since Satya came to run Microsoft, like there's been so much more focus on accessibility. And there's been so many things that like seem like they could have been no brainers like even a decade ago. And I'm thinking specifically about like, right, there's like this interchangeable gamepad thing that they rolled out.
It's a controller which has interchangeable components to make it more accessible, depending on what your like abilities are and then also what thing you're trying to play. So I just wonder about that, right? Like can focus make some of these things more easier? I think it's also like somebody needs to be thinking about the fact that oh, but maybe this is possible, regardless of how complicated it is. Somebody has to think that no, but probably it is possible if we just thought of something, right? Like faster horses were not possible, but cars are.
That's a great line right there. The music is by Akshay Ramu Halli of BTRPT Music. Editing is by Beatnik.