> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.
There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.
Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:
> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."
I'm not a huge fan of the book Atomic Habits, but James Clear does talk about something similar around goals. Effectively, one of the problems he brings up with goals is that if your goal is to run a 5k and then you achieve that goal, you're sort of "done." Instead he talks about building systems, and changing what you see yourself as. I.e. in the case of a 5k, instead of running a 5k, change who you are such that you are a runner. Then the 5k "goal" doesn't put you in the position of "okay, now what? Guess I'm done." type of mentality.
I've always kind of liked this. I doubt it's unique to James Clear but it was the book I read that made it sort of click so I always go back to that part.
The post resonates with me as an OSS user and a contributor. Many a brave souls have taken to forking the project to fix the bugs but those forked projects almost always suffer from a discoverability problem. I have tried making fixes and tried forking projects only to discover that someone else has done it better elsewhere.
I've been burned by this problem often enough that I wrote a Chrome extension which would _tell_ me if there are any notable forks of the project I'm currently looking at on GitHub: https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks </self-plug>.
The program requires notes (written in Markdown, with one section for each slide) along with the pdf slides and it produces a deck which can be practised in Anki. It may prove to be useful for someone here.
Hmm, I agree with you on that. This was my thinking behind appreciate [1], that starring would be a personal token of appreciation rather than an endorsement by the employer.
I wrote a Chrome/Firefox extension to address the problem of finding "notable" forks of original repos. These often are community supported version of the original which would have been hard to find otherwise: Lovely Forks ~ https://github.com/musically-ut/github-forks-addon
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.
There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.
Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:
> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."