The Generic Mechanisms Of Nearly Everything
The neuroscientist Andrew Huberman often talks about how many systems and processes in the brain and body are “generic,” meaning they are multi-purpose: the same underlying machinery is involved in many different contexts and situations. Reading a book engages the same attention-narrowing and sensory-filtering circuitry used when watching a movie, practicing an instrument, learning a language, or drawing. Or, overriding the resistance and taking a cold shower taps the same generic motivation and self-control mechanisms involved in going for a run when you don’t feel like it, starting a task you’ve been putting off, or getting out of bed despite wanting to hit snooze. Because these mechanisms are generic, Huberman explains, exercising them in one context “actually carries over to many others.” Resisting the urge to reach for your phone in a moment of boredom while in the middle of a task, for example, makes you better at resisting distractions in general (and vice versa: each time you give in to one impulse, you reinforce the circuitry that makes you more likely to give in to other impulses). “That’s the thing to understand about these generic mechanisms,” Huberman said. “They carry over to most every pursuit and activity of any kind.”
Generic mechanisms that carry over from one area into others—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Art Of Becoming More Aggressive
After a dinner with a group that included Josh Waitzkin, Mackenzie Burnett got to talking with Josh about some of the ideas in his book, The Art of Learning. At one point, he asked Mackenzie if there was anything she was trying to get better at in her professional life. The cofounder and CEO of Ambrook, Mackenzie said she was “trying to experiment with being more aggressive in how I make decisions, rather than primarily staying in my default of being observant and methodical.” The best and fastest way to cultivate aggressiveness in your professional life, Waitzkin told her, is to “try being more aggressive in all areas of your life, not just at work.” Mackenzie is an amateur boxer, and at the time of the conversation with Waitzkin, she was studying poker. “If you practice being more aggressive when boxing and playing poker,” Waitzkin said, “it will transfer over to your work.” Just as her non-aggressive approach at work had been transferring over to the rest of her life—“in boxing, my sparring style tended to be more technical and defensive,” Mackenzie said. “And in poker I tended to like to try to read people first before making aggressive moves. So my default style at work was carrying over into all these different mediums.” Then when she started experimenting with being more aggressive in the ring and at the poker table, “I slowly started noticing myself being a little more aggressive at work too. And some of the best decisions I made last year at work” came from that carryover.
Training The Idea Muscle
On sticky notes stuck to walls all over his apartment, Riley Walz writes down ideas. Some immediately seem like good ideas, and some seem like bad ideas. Some are relevant to what he’s currently working on, and some seem to have no connection to anything he’s ever done or been interested in. Some are ambitious, and some are sort of silly and trivial. The ideas themselves, though, are less important than the practice of writing down whatever comes to him. In a profile titled Training the Idea Muscle, Walz talked about his belief that good, bad, big, small, serious, and stupid ideas—they all come from the same part of the brain. The mechanism is generic. So if you get in the habit of rejecting your ideas because they seem bad or silly or trivial, “then the part of your brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop” generating them altogether.
It’s The Same Person Throughout
At a New York City party full of artists in the 1960s, the poet Diane di Prima was getting ready to leave. She’d asked a friend to babysit her young daughter, promising she’d be back no later than 11:30 that night. As 11:30 rolled around, she said her goodbyes and headed for the door, the first to leave. “The other writers in the room found this laughable,” Ryan Holiday writes in a chapter on the importance of keeping your word in Right Thing, Right Now, “believing that the literary life must take precedence over such pedestrian matters. ‘Unless you forget about your babysitter,’ Jack Kerouac said to her in front of everyone, ‘you’re never going to be a writer.’” Still, di Prima left, believing that Kerouac had it exactly backwards. “That is,” di Prima writes, “the person who would have left a friend hanging who had done her a favor, also wouldn’t have stuck through thick and thin to the business of making poems. It is the same discipline throughout.” The discipline (or lack thereof) in one area carries over to the other. Whether it’s telling yourself you’re going to get up early, eat better, walk more, scroll less, pick up a hobby, drop a habit, or hit a self-imposed deadline—it’s the same generic machinery. To be disciplined, reliable, productive, or prolific, Ryan continues, requires the same thing throughout: “being the kind of person who keeps their word.”
Becoming A Creative Person
The screenwriter Brian Koppelman (Billions, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen, and more) credits a generic writing habit with carrying over and giving rise to his screenwriting career: morning pages—three handwritten pages of stream of consciousness journaling. It’s a practice that comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. “The reason I did morning pages originally,” Koppelman said, “was to become a creative person.” He analogizes it to wiping down the gym equipment after you use it—a small thing that reinforces the identity of being the kind of person who leaves things better than they found them, which carries over into bigger things. Koppelman wanted to write screenplays, but he first had to become the kind of person who writes every day.
You’re Always Practicing Something
The poet David Whyte likes to say that we’re always practicing. We’re always reinforcing some habit, training some mechanism, strengthening some version of ourselves. “You are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day,” Whyte says. “It’s not a passive process…You’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day…So [Ask yourself], by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?” Because that will be the person you carry over to most every pursuit and activity of any kind.