Incremental progress thoughts part 2

Incremental progress thoughts part 2

As I mentioned in my introductory post, the time challenges of those who travel are what originally prompted me to investigate the concept of incremental progress.

At its simplest level, if you neglect a skill or hobby, over time that skill will decrease. Even memory falls to the same prey. A German psychologist named Ebbinhaus conducted studies that show that given time, the power of a memory decreases. However his studies also show that with repetition at intervals of increasing length, a person may continue to learn and improve their memory of facts. He created a forgetting curve that was fairly interesting and will be the subject of another post.

However deliberate practice of a skill is important. Repetition of the same fact is good for purposes of trivia, but progress requires new information or challenges. The work of Anders Ericsson in his latest book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise covers this in great and fascinating detail.

As I write this before work, one of the skills I want to work on is writing. I enjoy reading, however I've never felt my writing skills were great. It's understandable since I rarely practice long form writing.

There are so many areas of life to work on, I'll try to discuss some of the areas i'm most interested in within the next several posts.

------Dave