You have 5 different interests, make zero progress in any of them, and have no idea how to manage them all.
What if there was a way to become obsessed while balancing everything?
This was me for a long time; drowning while trying to juggle everything and moving nowhere.
My Dad used to tell me this when I was younger; and it always seemed counterintuitive to me.
He said I used to obsess over one interest at a time, and it was a great strength I had.
But deep down I wanted to do everything at once.
Fundamentally, this problem comes down to strategically constraining your attention.
And I eventually learned how to leverage this in my own life.
Because managing multiple interests is a skill, and like all skills, anyone can learn to do this.
It just takes knowing how to do it correctly.
Let’s discuss some profound ideas about managing multiple interests the right way.
1) Audit your interests right now
An audit is a type of investigation; and we're going to investigate your interests as they are right now.
Why?
You don't want four of your interests dying for the sake of exceeding in one.
"Specialization is for insects." - Naval Ravikant
We're not living in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. You're not Gregor Samsa, and you haven't woken up one morning to find yourself turned into a bug.
I fucking hope not in anyway. That would be pretty shit.
When people say they want to balance multiple interests, what they're really saying is they want to be progressing across multiple interests simultaneously.
Thus, consistent progress becomes more important than making massive strides of progress at any given time.
Imagine reading 200 pages of a book one week, and reading 0 pages in the 6 months that followed?
You'd make more progress reading 20 pages every week for 6 months. And this seems like a lot less work. Because it is.
But it’s 200 pages against 520 pages.
Small, tiny actions done consistently and purposefully.
I want you thinking like this when it comes to managing your interests.
We’re playing the long game here. Consistency, consistency, consistency. For every domain.
Because incremental improvements are deadly in the final analysis.
Write this down right now:
How much time must you give to each interest every week to improve them by 1% compared to the previous week? How much time can you spend progressing each interest without regressing in any one of your other interests?
This is going to be your baseline standard. Your minimum weekly targets.
An example of weekly minimum targets (remember, you have 7 days to hit these):
Lifting for two 60-min sessions
BJJ for 2-3 sessions
Reading for 5 hours
Write 5000-7000 words
See friends for 90 minutes
You need to hit these targets.
Minimum.
This is just an example list. Your targets can be much lower than this. But if you fail to hit every baseline target, you need to reaudit and readjust your targets. We’ll discuss a profound idea to help with this in Step 5.
Your goal here is to aim low enough so you can make progress across all your interests, every week, without fail.
Now onto creating the tasks for progressing your interests.
2) Define your problem anchors
What is a problem anchor?
It’s the biggest, most immediate problem you need to change or improve within a set interest.
It's your highest priority task.
Your heavy movers.
The small actions that move mountains because they're purposeful.
First, we must know how to find your problem anchors based on the types of interests you have.
The next section, Step 3, will go over how to go about crafting your problem anchors more precisely for progressing each interest, and saving time and effort while increasing your chances of staying consistent.