Grinding Instead of Consuming Brainrot

Pablo Sanderman

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August 7, 2024

I strive to become someone who invests their time into becoming better at their craftmanship, rather than wasting it on brainrot content. But holy moly, I am wasting so much time on this brainrot.

I am not saying I want to spend ALL my free time on it, I still want to do the healthy stuff, like investing my time in socializing, eating healthy, and exercising. I just want to spend this time I am wasting, on something meaningful, like my career.

But it’s not fun to grind in your free time. Learning complicated programming frameworks, languages, concepts – it requires so much effort.

I thought the way to become better is to treat your craftsmanship as a hobby. Like for example in gaming I find it enjoyable to grind to become better at the game. But the truth is, games are easy, or I mean... most people play games the easy way, while the pro’s do it the hard way. When I was into League of Legends, I watched a documentary on the pros, and their day consisted of doing boring and intensive drills, and watching a lot of replays... So, if I look at my “grinding”, it actually wasn’t grinding, it is just part of the game... If I wanted to become a top 1% player, I had to be grinding the grinding... If you know what I mean.

Anyways, so, maybe working on becoming better at your craftsmanship isn’t possible by making it a hobby?

I just find it so hard, that on the days with a deadline I can work 10 hours straight, and on free days I work 0 hours. But am I really working 10 hours straight on those days?

Something I learned from the book Deep Work, is that people can only work intensely for between 2 to 4 hours maximum per day. So, there must be something wrong with the working 10 hours straight.

I think, that in those 10 hours 80% is spend on consuming information related to the problems we are solving. Like by reading documentation, googling, discussing, meetings, watching a tutorial. And 20% is using your powerful brain energy on solving the problem.

So, maybe I should alter my perspective to spending most of my time setting up for the grinding by consuming information on the problem I want to solve. And then using the little super brain power that can do the complex puzzling when I have everything set up. Like 80% setting up and 20% actually grinding.

I have no idea if this will result in a burnout, but I am willing to try.

Thank you for reading. And thank you Storm for giving me the motivation to continue blogging!