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Math – Word Problem #1: The Division of Mind
You work 40 hours a week selling software. You’re extremely productive, and you’re able to produce 100 productivity units per week.
However, you begin to get a little discontent and decide to pickup another activity. You choose to spend 20 hours a week selling software and 20 hours a week composing music.
How many productivity units per week do you produce by selling software?
Your Answer: “50 productivity units of course! You were spending 40 hours selling software and were able to produce 100 units. Now you’re working half the amount of time selling software so you only produce 50 units. ”
Your Teacher:“………………………..WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WROOONG! why don’t you ever learn????!!!!”
~
An Irrefutable Law
A LOT of people are students to this problem, and a lot of people get it wrong time and time again. I’ve only recently really internalized this.
Most people think of an individual’s total mental output, the number of productivity units you’re able to produce from your mental efforts, as water in a pitcher. You have a certain amount of water in the pitcher, and you can divide it into as many cups as you please. And the amount you distribute to the cups equals the original amount of water in the pitcher.
This would be true if it were a nice clean math problem. ”If you evenly divide a pitcher of 4 cups of water into 8 glasses, how much water is in each glass?” ”There are 8 glasses with 1/2 a cup each!”
In 2nd grade math class this is the correct answer. But it’s wrong. The truth is that with every extra pour you have to make of that pitcher of water, you lose usable water. Some of it runs down the side of the pitcher away from the cup, some is spilled when moving the pitcher around, and sometimes you accidentally knock over one of the glasses because you’re in a hurry to get all those cups filled. This water falls on the floor, evaporates, and is lost forever.
Why is this?
This is due to a very basic law, the Irrefutable Law of the Division of Mind.
Mental output decays according to the number of places it’s used; the more things you try to do the more you waste. The pieces separated from the whole erode, and you end up with less than what you started with.
So what’s the cause of this Irrefutable Law?
Here’s a couple of reasons:
1) Greater complexity. When you have more things to work on, you introduce new layers of complexity. When you’re doing one thing, you don’t have to answer questions like “what should I be working on today? for how long? do I need to do this before that?”
2) Loss of subconscious advantage. A lot more is happening in your brain under the hood of your consciousness. You’re subconscious does a lot of work for you and will often bring you key insights from no where. If you’ve experienced such epiphanies and inspirations you understand. These come from somewhere, you just aren’t aware of it. These key insights can have huge impact. However, when doing many things, I’ve found that this doesn’t happen as much. It’s almost like the subconscious just starts waffling around or gets bored or goes MIA.
3) Dullness of skills. Skills deteriorate if you aren’t using them. So if you’re spending time re-sharpening skills, you’ve lost time that could’ve been spent doing top notch work and improving skills. And remember mental improvement tends to have compounding effects. The most productive knowledge workers at a given skill tend to be magnitudes more productive than those that are just mediocre. (This isn’t true of manual labor.)
Why does it take us so long to learn the Irrefutable Law of the Division of Mind?
I know a lot of people that are great starters, and horrible finishers. There’s a couple of reasons for this.
For one, some people just get super excited about a new inspiration. I’ve found myself in this boat many times. ”There are so many great things to do! We must do them all right now!”
Here’s another reason: Starting a new journey is great fun. There’s a whole new world out there to explore and the potential for the endeavor is huge. But, as you move along, it gets harder to confabulate what the outcome could be. You also encounter hardship and things that scare you. People have the tendency to then shy away from these things if they can, and then start out on a new journey. In my mediocre book “10 Powerful Personas” (need to actually finish it some day….), this is what I refer to as the Dreamer’s Trap—a land of impotent dreams, producing nothing, stuck in the limbo of starting things.
The Mental Singularity
I don’t like many of the supposed rules in the world. But some rules, some laws, are very real, and until we reach some sort of technological utopia, they cannot be bent or broken. The Irrefutable Law is one of them.
The few people that follow this rule seem to have powers well beyond ours. When you find something that consumes you, something that completely engulfs your entire mind, this is when you can do something phenomenal. But how often do we focus on just one thing? How often do we get the chance?
Not too often. And when we do get the chance to focus on one mental engagement, what do we tend to do? Generally, people seem to destroy the opportunity, one way or another…..laziness, filling life with garbage, adding all the more things to do…….
I know I blew a lot of chances to just focus on one thing and dominate it.
This post started with a math problem
I wish I would’ve had that math problem in school and at least been exposed to the concept. It would’ve saved me a lot of trouble and loss. Now multiply that loss over millions of people, we’re talking about a huge loss in potential.
Maybe we can work it into the curriculum? Who should I call?
-Kevin
7.7.2011
