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“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Alice Walker
I tried to learn Spanish for years and never consistently found the time. Any hour I gave it came straight out of something else I needed to do.
So I started studying Spanish while I run.
The course is Language Transfer, an audio method where a teacher asks you to build the sentence yourself before he gives it to you.
A 2013 paper in PLOS ONE found that young women who exercised while learning vocabulary recalled more of it than those who sat still through the lesson.
Breakout is an arcade game where a paddle keeps a ball alive against a wall of bricks. Track the ball better and you break more bricks. One miss costs a life.
An AI learning the game refused that trade. It opened a gap up one side, sent the ball above the bricks and let it ricochet until the wall was gone. The paddle barely moved.
Tunneling is finding out that a trade-off you thought was mandatory was optional all along.
For years the novelist Kevin J. Anderson had to pick between a day of writing and a day of hiking.
Then he started carrying a voice recorder up the trail and dictating chapters as he walked, one chapter out and one back, since he had to walk back anyway.
In 2010 he counted nearly 50 novels dictated into a recorder.
One week he hiked 50 miles and wrote 168 pages.
For the management thinker Nilofer Merchant, taking care of her body and being productive were in conflict. Then she started taking her one-on-ones as walks.
By 2013 she was walking 20 to 30 miles a week inside meetings she was going to have anyway. Then she got on the TED stage and told everyone else to try it.
Stacking a second activity onto one you already do is one route through.
Test trade-offs before you accept them.
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Which trade-off could you try to tunnel through?
