Improvement Takes Resistance

11:59 PM

It's really hard to improve. It might be harder to improve as we get older, as everything feels less novel the more we experience and learn. Light bulbs used to be impressive, at one point in time they were the newest and hippest invention in the world, and only a few people had them. How cool it would have been to be the only house in the entire neighborhood to have a light bulb, and you would invite some friends over at night, and they'd see the rooms and everything was illuminated? At some point everyone in the neighborhood eventually got a light bulb, and the excitement and novelty for them wore off.

We get less enthusiastic about things if we've already experienced them, so it might be harder to learn and improve because we've already learned and improved so many times. We've gone through school and learned about all the topics they taught us. We have to do that again on our own in adulthood for different topics, and this can be harder just because we've already experienced it before. It just starts to feel repetitive at some point, which is why it might be easier for youth to learn and improve when learning and improving is still novel to them.

I have every ability the younger high school version of myself has and more. I have all the video editing skills still, all the website development skills, whatever passions I had in my youth. I used those skills when I was young to get millions of views on YouTube, millions of views per month on my websites. I still have those same abilities today, I remember how I did them, I have access to better technology today, and I improved on my abilities since then, so I can actually do even more than my past self. Yet I don't. I could be making videos or wallpapers in my spare time, or writing articles, or working on website design, or something, just like I used to do back in the day, but I don't.

With all the free time in the world, I sure use it to watch a lot of cartoons and anime, and browse social media. How come I'm not creating like I used to? How come a lot of musicians when they hit their 30s, they stop writing any new songs? How come the most innovative websites and apps were made by people in their 20s? I'm talking about Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even this site and more, were made by people in their 20s? Why haven't they made anything new since? Well actually, the creators of Twitter moved on to creating Medium, but the creators of YouTube haven't made anything new since they sold it back in 2007, the creators of the other sites are still maintaining the sites/companies they made in their 20s.

There is a lot of research and science done by people 40+. All the business leaders and executives are 40+. Another exception to this "young people" make all innovations rule is John Von Neumann, probably the smartest person who's ever lived, in my opinion, even compared to the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, Tesla, Feynman, and other geniuses. There's actually a lot of geniuses who are not famous, like Claude Shannon and Charles Babbage, and many more. Actually, those guys are pretty famous. The unknown geniuses are like, and I'm only using tech field examples since that's the field I'm in, the people who worked on Watson at IBM, the people who worked on AlphaGo by Google, the people who worked on ChatGPT, and I'm sure these were done with just a handful of key players (maybe like 5 at the most) and a bunch of less-contributing people because they work at a company.

Even the people who made the "Deep Blue" chess supercomputer are geniuses and IBM the company gets all the credit, but only three people really worked on it, they started off in college and their project later evolved to Deep Blue. Claude Shannon was involved in it in some way too, as he wrote theoretical technical papers in the 1930s on chess AI decades before a computer that could run a program like that even exist. The insane thing is, Claude Shannon was correct. I think he wrote about certain laws that chess AI cannot break, I don't remember them so I'm making up an example, that they can only look ahead a theoretical maximum of 100 moves for example. Again I don't remember the laws he wrote about, but yeah the chess programs written decades in the future follow it due to being unable to pass those theoretical limits and laws he wrote about. It's insane how he was able to predict limits on computer programs, prior to technology existing that could even support it, prior to even computer screens, prior to even programming languages I think.

Anyway, I went hugely off topic here. I'm just trying to make the argument that younger people are more innovative, inventive, but I counter-argue with myself by providing examples of people 40+ who are just as innovative, in more complicated ways. Scientific and other technical field contributions are no joke, they are difficult and rigorous. Even more-so than creating a website like Facebook. Even I have the ability to make a Facebook-like website from scratch, it is complicated but not exceedingly so, I have built up years of knowledge and experience to be able to do it too. The reason why I don't make a website like that though, is probably because it takes a lot of time and effort to do so, and then it would be hard to get people to use it. I don't know.

Anyway, today was just another good day. I did my exercises, I did my brain training. I did some cleaning, I didn't sweep though. I did some working. I messaged Wahl again today. I think as long as I get stuff on my checklist done, then it was a good day.

Geez I went on a huge tangent. I titled this entry as "Improvement takes resistance" and it does, but I didn't write about that at all. I was going to, that's what I planned on doing, but I didn't.

Anyway, it's hard to improve, for a large variety of reasons. Studying something technical, practicing something technical, is difficult. There is failure and messing up involved. It's why I can do a bunch of penspinning tricks that I learned while going through school, but I haven't learned any new tricks since then. I did learn to write in Dvorak though, with perfection. That's something I learned in 2017 from scratch. I did learn some other things, mainly as improvement to my already existing knowledge in philosophy, psychology, programming, health, fitness, learning a new game, but learning Dvorak was basically something from scratch with almost nothing similar to it, at least it felt that way (because Qwerty is similar to it).

Oh, surfing. I learned that this year. That's entirely novel too. Actually, maybe it could be added to a "sports" category, and that it isn't novel? Anyway, doesn't even matter. I think everything can be categorized, and the older we get and the more we experience, the less likely there will be that we encounter a new category of skill or knowledge we've never encountered before. I read the Tao Te Ching recently, the knowledge I learned can be categorized as either philosophy or religion, a category I already have knowledge in. Yeah, I can't think of any skill or ability in a category I haven't experienced yet. Maybe motorcycling, but that's sort of a mix between car driving and riding a bike, both activities I've already done before.

Yeah, the older we get, the less likelihood we'll encounter an entirely new category of skills we've never experienced before. Since we encounter so many new skills too, I think we're less likely to stick to one to improve upon. I know so many programming languages. It feels hard to learn a new language to stick to, because I'm already proficient with all the other ones. And why would I learn another language, when I already know these other ones? Why would I make a new program, when I've already made these other ones?

Anyway, yeah, improvement in all forms, and not just learning, takes going through resistance.