Reasonable goals for learning and progress

I like paradigms or helpful simple guidelines that can be applied to many things in life. The more things a simple guideline can be applicable to, the closer it is to being a unifying theory. Simple guidelines and advice are easier to remember and way easier to teach the next generation. Here is probably my most meaningful and simple advice that I could ever give to my future generations.

"Make a meaningful advancement in your self development every week" - Hank Lin

There are so many things in life that a person can work on. Some people would like to conquer their fears, others want to learn a new skill, however way a person can define his/her goal I highly recommend trying to make progress on that self improvement goal every week.

Why do I say every week? Why not say every day, or month, or year? I say every week because that's what has been universally applicable to me personally in so many endeavors in life. I noticed that trying to rush to improve literally everyday gets boring and repetitive, and making progress once a month is just not satisfying. I utilized this principle for many different categories of skills that I acquired. Body weight training, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, cooking, using vim, and software engineering.

Here is a way to learn that I and many people find to be very natural in terms of expanding your skillset or broadening your horizon. I call this the flashcard method. You create a bunch of flashcards for something new you want to try in a particular skillset, and you focus on that new thing for a week. You apply that new skill, technique, or concept whenever you get the chance. The body and mind takes time to improve and adapt/adjust and similar to how most people will not see improvement from their workout until the week after recovery, you might find yourself taking a week to improve on that flashcard you were focusing on. After you spend that week working on that flashcard you shuffle that flashcard into the pile of flashcards you've already worked on and you take another from the new deck. Periodically you should revisit the old pile of previously worked on flashcards and maybe focus on one of the old ones for a week or just quickly review each in rapid fire depending on how comfortable you are with what's in the old pile.

Take something that is not an abstract skillset, maybe something involving emotional maturity such as communication skills or relationship health. This flashcard method, once a week progress goal worked tremendously well for me in that regard too and I see myself doing the same for when I have a kid in the future.

To some people, improving once a week doesn't sound impressive but I want to help you think through how impressive it actually is. Imagine if a person learning Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, going 2X a week, and making significant improvement after each week no matter what the topic of the week was, that person would be a monster after a year. If a person focused a week using 'hjkl' keys in vim instead of the arrow keys, and then next week focused on utilizing q macros, they would be already ahead of 90% of the population in terms of effective use. If you have a parent who has anger issues and that parent spent a week focused on not being bothered by 1 particular thing, then another week on taming the anger on another thing, etc. After a year that parent will have 52 anger pain points that they made progress on, or 1 primary anger issue reduced by a small amount 52 times.

Consistency will always win over monumental effort in the long run