Circling in on the diamond

A skill I have been pursuing recently (my ‘diamond’) is attaining mastery at noticing.

In some ways, noticing is a fairly well distinguished (mental) action. The most obvious way to learn noticing is to do it. And that’s probably not a bad way to learn it.

I suspect thought that, if your goal is to attain mastery at it, going straight for what we perceive to be noticing might not be enough. While this would likely make me better at noticin, it is plausible that this approach would have me miss out on some things - sub-skills, nuances, understanding - and eventually prevent me from actually attaining mastery.

This is why I chose a different approach the endeavor. I came to call it: circling in on the diamond.

Essentially, this means taking a number of different approaches to learning to thing. There or two reasons why to use this approach. Possibly, none of the approaches, on their own, would be enough to learn it, but the complex they form when applied together is exactly what you need to attain your learning goal. Secondly, there might be no clear, direct route (at least from where you are standing at the time) to attain the skill. Therefore, you adopt a portfolio-approach to learning of which you can be fairly certain it will lead you to the diamond. You might not be certain that any of the approaches on their own will allow you to learn the thing, but you can be fairly certain that you will make progress thanks to one or some of the approaches.

Based on my own experimentation, I have come up with a few categories for the types of approaches you might want to make part of your learning portfolio.

1. Train the same muscles

Here, you are looking for other skills that share some of their processes with your diamond. Maybe this process (the muscle) is easier to train when engaging in a skill or activity that is not the one you are interested directly. Another way to frame this is to think about sub-skills to your diamond and what the different ways are to practice this subskill independently.

Example: According to me, doing focusing and noticing both use the ‘same muscles’. It appears as if one is the inverse process of the other. When doing focusing, you reach down into your unconscious (via felt senses) in order to bring it to your conscious mind. In noticing, the goal is for certain phenomena to be propagated into your conscious experience automatically.
My hypothesis is that by training focusing, I engage some of the same processes as the ones I’m using in noticing, which could plausibly be useful to my goal of attaining mastery in noticing.

2. Go astray

This is the more ventured asset in your portfolio. We are looking for skills you somehow came across in the process of thinking about your diamond. The causal links between that skill and your diamond however can be vague, on mostly be based on an intuition. Of course, you don’t want to make this part of your portfolio too heavy - just like in real-world investing - but you probably also don’t want to neglect it entirely as there might be some drop of secret sauce in this asset.

Example:I was inspired for this by reading “How emotions are made” - which made me think that it is plausible that I can get better at noticing when I have more reified concepts of what I there could be to notice. The ‘ventured’ approach was to start explicitly working on expanding my active vocabulary on emotions and emotional states - meaning, learning one new word (from my emotional vocab list) a day.
I am very unsure that this is actually useful for my endeavour. But it didn’t seem like a huge cost to me (, and has some other positive externalities,) so I found it good enough of a bet to take.

3. Tackle it heads-on

This is the ‘common way’ we usually try to learn something. In most of the cases, this just means ‘actually do the thing’.

Example: In my case, I set up some TAPs to overtrain my noticing skills. I identified some mental moves I was interested in noticing more and, well, did that. (There are some specific ingredients to how noticing works, which is important to executing this part, but since this post is not about noticing as such, I will restrain from writing this up.)

4. Move in parallel

This is what I also call working on ‘auxiliary skills’. Unlike with subskills, they don’t necessarily share the same processes (or same ‘muscles’), but they are skills that are generally helpful to your goal of reaching your diamond. Sometimes I think of it as being part of your ‘internal learning environment’.

Example: Regular meditation practice contributes to my mental cliamt and makes me generally (on expectation) more focusI and clear minded. It seems to be easier to do noticing with a clear (as opposed to a stormy mind), thus part of my learning regime was to maintain my daily meditaiton practice.

5. Declarative and procedural knowledge

Declarative knowledge is conceptual understanding about how something works. Procedural knowledge is practical understanding of how something works.

I think that for most skills, it is valuable to build both declarative and procedural knowledge. The ratio of the two depends a lot of the type of skill, but I would argue that there is no skill where you should neglect the declarative or the procedural part of it completely. This is important to keep in mind explicitly, as we often tend to put an overproportional attention on one of the two.

Example: In order to increase my declarative knowledge of noticing, I did a lot of reading and mapping of my own thoughts. For the procedural knowledge, I did different types of practice (see above) but also deliberate exploration of what ‘doing noticing’ consists of from a practical point of view.

Note: Exploring the declarative as well as procedural aspects to my diamond informed a lot my choices for what learning approaches I engaged in thereafter. For instance, it was crucial in helping me to generate hypotheses about the processes and sub-skills involved in noticing and how to learn them.

6. Apply and test

I think that this category is particularly important and often is forgotten. Whenever you are trying to learn something, it is probably a good idea to track your learning progress and operationalize your success criteria. ‘Apply and test’ approaches also work as a sort of ‘stress test’ for what you believe to have learnt. They are indicators for your progress as well as the real world application of the skill you set out to learn. This is probably not an approach you want to engage in from the very beginning of your learning process, but I would also claim that it shouldn’t be something you only do at the very end. Instead, it is valuable to make it part of your learning process, once you have made some headway in your quest.

Example: In order to apply and test my noticing skills, I started to install a lot of TAPs. For some context, I have always been a ‘theoretical fan’ of TAPs, but haven’t used them much as they never really worked that well for me - I never really got the hang of them. Finding the right triggers for your TAPs is crucial for their success, and that’s where noticing becomes relevant. The success criteria was thus to be able to successfully install a bunch of TAPs, which was something that I wasn’t able to do prior to my noticing training.