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Sustain
May 26th, 2021
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I recently received a copy of a running book called "I H♥te Running and You
Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational
Passion" by Brendan Leonard[0].
It's a short, partly illustrated book that one could easily finish over a long
lunch break where Leonard explains the mental side of doing an activity that is
partially irrational and incredibly difficult.
What really struck me was that this wasn't really a book about running at all,
but instead a book on understanding how to take an approach of a sustained pace
in the face of obstacles like pain, sleep, energy, willpower, and more.
As I've mentioned before, my true passion beyond computers is music. I
practice almost any day that I can. I've played on stages for thousands of
people. And this book was fundamentally describing my process of learning a
skill through pain, sleep issues, lack of enery, low willpower, &c.
The central premise of the book is twofold: you build big things out of very
small blocks of work and that the pace of your work should be /sustainable/
over a long period of time.
If you want to learn to play a guitar like Jimi Hendrix, you start by taking
little steps like understanding the notes of a guitar, learing to fret
properly, learning to tune your guitar. These are little blocks that you build
upon to understand scales, modes, harmony, counterpoint and more. Eventually,
over a period of sustainably working on many little things, you build up enough
skill to start to do things like play a Hendrix-inspired solo.
I see the same thing with software development: you start with tiny little
"hello world" programs, understanding compilers or interpreters, text editors,
Makefiles, libraries, packaging, and more to build complex software.
The biggest impact after reading this book has been the impact on my own
running regimen by slowing down to a sustainable pace. I enjoy my runs even
more because I am more in tune with my surroundings and because the easier pace
allows me to run more frequently compared to a challenging run. This is all
because I strive to make each effort /easy/ and that each effort is just a
small building block into something bigger.
I encourage you to contemplate your own pace for long-term goals. Maybe you
have attempted a skill only to find that you don't stick with it for a long
period of time. It could be that you need to consider a sustainable pace and
understand how your effort fits into a larger picture the next time you attempt
such an undertaking.
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[0]
https://bookshop.org/books/i-hate-running-and-you-can-too-how-to-get-started-keep-going-and-make-sense-of-an-irrational-passion/9781579659882
