Incremental Improvements

Innovation and Maintenance are two somewhat competing aspects of development. Investment in one requires compromise in the other. What then is the correct investment of time/resources in each?

Maintenance is about recognizing what you already have and maintaining it at a desirable level. But optimizing this requires at first recognizing what things are worth maintaining. Otherwise a lot of resources will be wasted. For example, if you have cultivated some relationships, are all of them worth maintaining? If not, then the unnecessary ones must be amortized.

Innovation, similarly is about recognizing the minimal set of the desirable qualities and behaviors one must have and then creating plans to achieve them.

There are many competing ideas in decisions we make for these aspects. On the one hand, as you grow, so do the things you need to maintain. Considering we usually have a fixed amount of time resource at hand, it would seem that the amount of investment in innovation would go down. And that is usually what happens too. Big old people are rarely the ones who come up with radical innovation. However, this doesn't eliminate incremental innovation.

There are two tools that can be used for help in this case:
--Subconscious automation: As you build more and more experience, it should take you less and less resources to do the same job as you did before. Especially for maintenance. This is similar to how we develop subconscious behaviors to handle some basic functions as humans (walking, driving, etc), or how athletes need to think less and less about the actions they've practiced for a long time.
--Delegation: As we develop more experience, we need to get better at thinking on an abstract scale. If we're able to do that, we're more suited to delegating (managing) things better. We can find the right people to take care of some things we would have had to personally take care of before.

Why are incremental gains important? Stagnation produces a loss of desire to become better. It's a vicious cycle. So escaping from stagnation even before we get into it is crucial. On the second hand, a crucial part of my philosophy is that as an atheistic individual, the worth of my life is equal to what I make of it. It is proportional to how much of what I do will have long lasting impressions. This ties in with the fact that I am a social animal, where community is an important player. Community built and produced resources, ideas etc are what have shaped me, helped define me and provided me basis for not just survival, but to thrive. Hence, people's happiness and respect is of importance in defining achievements.

Forming personal goals, then is a balance in finding the things we like within the subset of acceptable social achievements, behaviors and ideals. This set, generally is large. We're usually at the stage of having achieved some subset. Incremental gains is the most achievable algorithm to keep achieving more.