Zoravur's Blog

Thoughts on Improvement

2026-05-22

The precursors to being in shape and making money are healthy habits and learning skills.

Why is this useful to know? Besides the obvious fact that one actulaly has to know how to get in shape and make money, it’s also useful because it turns an adjective (“rich”, “hot”) into verbs (“exercise”, “diet”, “learn”). As such, it turns an identity you desire into a routine that you can execute.

The next thing to know is that as you get older, you need more and more inputs to get reliable results. This is because you are less mutable, which means change is harder, but you are also less mutable, meaning positive habits are more likely to endure. It also makes the consequences of negative habits more severe, and more worth avoiding.

Commensurately, it’s useful to increase the unit of time over which you measure change. Not just because change is slower, but because subjectively, time passes more quickly. What feels like a long time when you’re young feels shorter when you’re older, meaning not only is patience for outcomes required, but it’s also an input that you get more of as you age.

Also, as you get older, seasons of your life become longer. The amount of time you have to benefit from a habit increases as you age. (Really, this is a mental trick; you don’t literally get more time, but the period of time across which a habit is effective gets longer automatically because you are less mutable). Therefore it makes sense to increase the amount of time required to execute that change in behaviour. A habit that takes 2 years to build is a long warmup period, but taken over a 50-60 year period, the net effect of that habit on your life is massive. So:

Another common refrain: “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. People often think “slow” means passive or hesitant. In reality, slow really means “not rushed” when taken objectively (subjectively, “slow” is what “not rushing” feels like when there’s a strong sense of urgency). Rushing is how you make mistakes, backtrack, duplicate work, and take shortcuts that don’t hold up over time. Urgency is still there – every action must still be taken, and stalling prevents growth, but by going at a tolerable cadence you eliminate errors, which are the real cause of delays. The tortoise and the hare embody this as well.

The same pattern shows up everywhere:

Slowness leading to speed is also a feedback loop that works both ways. The more you rush, the more mistakes you make. The more mistakes you make, the more you stall. The more you stall, the more you feel behind, and the more you try to compensate by going faster. Conversely, the more you take your time, the fewer mistakes you make. The fewer mistakes, the less you need to backtrack. The less you backtrack, the faster things get done. The faster they get done, the more time you have. The more time you have, the more you can take your time.

Improvement is hard. Building habits is hard. The other thing that helps, besides increasing the duration of each season, is increasing the skill of obsrvation. By noticing the 0.1% improvements, the tiny records always being broken, whether it’s consistency, PRs, technique, diet, weight, trajectory, streaks, or something else, you gain a more accurate baromeetr of your progress.

Making drastic change, being consistent, and increasing powers of obseraviton all feel like contradictory strategies, but they actually complement each other.

If you stack increased patience with noticing imperceptible changes and humility, suddenly the pace of change is fast enough that it feels like feedback.

2025-09-08

I’ve noticed a counterintuitive fact about improvement most obviously from two activities: exercise and singing. And that fact is this:

The thing that you’re thinking is the obstacle to your improvement, that you need to deal with before you can start getting better: dealing with that obstacle is the improvement itself.

When I started running, I used to have a blocked / inflamed nose that made it impossible to breathe efficiently. So I’d have to breathe through my mouth, drying out my throat. Eventually, though, my nose cleared, and not only was I able to breathe more easily while running, I could breathe more easily in general.

Even many years into singing, I would consistently sing notes 30+ cents sharp, perhaps because early on it was difficult for me to project over my harmonium. I had to go back and retrain every single note, singing into a tuner as my voice wavered wildly.

When I got back into the gym with some level of consistency with the gym after COVID, I initially only went a couple of times per week. Eventually I developed pain in both shoulders. Thanks to my trainer, I learned some exercises that helped, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that I resolved to dedicate every session to hammering this weak point, until they got better. After about a month, the pain was gone.

When singing (or at the gurudwara), you’re supposed to sit cross-legged on the floor. I would force myself to sit cross-legged, let my feet fall asleep, wake them up, repeatedly. After about six months to a year of this, I’m now able to sit cross-legged, pain free. I was convinced I’d never perform for long periods again, and now an hour passes, with the pain lessened to the point where I barely notice it, and I’m able to stand and walk after, where before I would have to sit and massage my feet. The body adjusts.

It took so long for me to nail the basics, but once I finally did, my rate of improvement skyrocketed. Dealing with the obstacle to improvement is improving.