A
month or two ago, I was becoming very frustrated with myself because I
couldn't seem to make any progress on the books that I was trying to
read. Since I have many books on my want-to-read list and I consider
reading to be an important, productive, and enjoyable activity, this was
bothering me a lot.
Fortunately the reason for my problem was staring me in the face every day. Or perhaps I should say, I was staring at it. The reason I was making little-to-no progress on my books was that I was listening to too many podcasts and watching too many videos on youtube. These three activities--watching youtube, listening to podcasts, and reading books--are three of my favorite activities, so this shouldn't be too surprising.
But why were podcasts and youtube completely blocking out my reading time? Once again, the answer was clear. In my head I might have said, "I don't have time to read because there are so many videos that I want to watch on youtube and there are so many podcasts that I want to watch." Actually, this was only a superficial answer. The real answer was, youtube and podcasts were blocking out my reading time because they are endless. So I learned an important lesson:
Beware of activities that are endless.
Such activities will suck up all of your free time--if you let them.
So I set myself some new rules.
These
two rules have greatly accelerated my reading pace. I've been making
good progress on three books that I'm reading: The Happiness Advantage
(audiobook), Designing Your Life, and a physics textbook that I want to
finish before teaching physics again. This is really satisfying, because
each of these books has an end that I see myself gradually closing in
on, unlike youtube videos and podcasts, which are, as I said
before...endless.
Lake Wobegon Method
So, what is the mysterious "Lake Wobegon Method." Actually, what I described above was an example of it. Note: I didn't invent the Lake Wobegon Method. It's an adaptation of the Lake Wobegon Strategy invented by Google (maybe). More on that below.
Lake Wobegon is a fictional town in Minnesota that you can often hear about in the Prairie Home Companion radio show. You can also read a lot about it on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon
but the part that really sticks out to me is this: "The closing words of the monologue are 'Well, that's the news from Lake
Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking,
and all the children are above average.' " (Wikipedia)
This
"all above average" idea is the name-sake of the "Lake Wobegon effect":
"a natural human tendency to overestimate one's capabilities"
(Wikipedia). It's a psychological phenomenon (and kind of a problem).
But the Lake Wobegon Method is where you turn this idea on it's head a
little bit. Instead of an idea, the method is a tool:
Replace below average activities with above average activities.
What happens when you do this should be clear: the average value of your activities increases. This is a way to optimize your life. Thus, your whole life can be "above average."
Now for the Google part. In the back of my head while I was writing this, I new that this was similar to what Google uses for hiring. I did a quick search (on Google) and found this article:
https://research.googleblog.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-strategy.html
which describes their strategy of "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees." What's the purpose of this? To raise the average skill of the employees working there. Now this article is from eleven years ago, so probably their hiring strategies have changed, but still, it seems like it's a good strategy if you can successfully accomplish is. So my Lake Wobegon Method is an adaptation of the Google hiring strategy (which I definitely read about a while ago).
In closing, thanks for reading to the end of this long article. Go forth and raise your average.
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