(2011-10-26) Rao Personal Passion Thrust Engine

Venkatesh Rao thinks that having a "ThrustEngine" (Passion?) makes your whole life better. If you don’t have a thrust engine in your life, drag reduction will also become nearly impossible, because there is no source of energy. Everything from getting organized to losing weight becomes easier if you have a thrust engine humming. Not only do you have a reason to reduce drag (free up more resources for thrust), you have the means to do so.

The good news is that if you have a thrust engine, drag reduction is as simple as a scheduling prioritization rule: Clear your calendar as much as possible (empty out the “hard landscape” to use GTD terminology), create as many longer windows as possible, and start filling them with thrust work.

This is why you can get to 10x type returns: such exponential gains always involve positive FeedBack loops, and thrust tasks contain two of them: the autotelic loop (Flow State) within a session, and the longer-term Deliberate Practice benefits that carry over between sessions. These two positive-feedback loops together basically create an addiction.

Can you discover your engines? This is an open question that I am currently thinking about. My tentative conclusion is that a thrust engine has two parts: a natural Talent, and a capacity for MetaCognition with respect to that talent. A thrust engine is a developed strength (though not all strengths are thrust engines). Strengths psychologists seem to think that anyone with a talent can develop it into a strength simply by investing time. I don’t think that is true. I think a separate capacity for meta-cognition is a necessary ingredient that many hard-working and talented people lack. So they make no progress despite putting in the time. Without the meta-cognition, you don’t get either the autotelic positive feedback loop within work session, or the deliberate-practice improvements between sessions.