Getting Better vs Getting Smarter
On recognizing different types of growth
I like to think I know who I am.
I contain multitudes, but I like to know what those multitudes are. For the last five years, I’ve broken my life down into eight different categories: Health, Wealth, Career, Relationships, Operations, Spaces, Experiences, and Intellectual. Viewing myself as an eight dimensional creature has felt like the most elegant answer to the question of who I am.
But for the first time, that answer feels incomplete.
When I check in with myself at a quarterly review, I analyze the health of each of my life areas. I use Experiences to measure all of the “fun” I’m having (travel, video games, etc.) and Intellectual to collect my generative side projects. This year, I’ve aligned my life around two major hobbies: pickleball and hosting.
I like to think I approach both of them with intellectual rigor. When I’m on the court, I’m not just hitting balls mindlessly. I study technique, analyze strategy, and think about positioning and shot selection. Similarly when I host a party, I always take a few minutes at the end of the night to analyze what went well, from the theme and invitation down to the ordering of the food in the buffet.
I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had before, but something feels like it’s missing from my life.
I’ve realized that I lost my connection to the world of ideas.
Learning vs Thinking
In my twenties, I used to be an Intellectual, but somewhere along the way, my life shifted. Maybe I played one too many mind numbing video games but more likely, I got turned around by my first experience spending more time living outside my head than inside it.
Where I once devoured 20+ books a year and could discourse on everything from narrative structure to economic theory, I’m now sitting closer to 5-10 books per year and feel the well of new ideas drying up. Even for this newsletter, the flow of new issue concepts has slowed to a drip.
What I've realized is that I was doing a lot of thinking — analyzing court positioning, optimizing party logistics, refining my technique — but I wasn't engaging with ideas that expanded how I saw the world. Whether it was perfecting my third shot drive or orchestrating the perfect dinner party flow, I was solving tactical problems, not wrestling with concepts that challenged my understanding.
All that analysis was incredibly satisfying and helped me grow, but it didn't satisfy the same itch in my brain as grappling with what makes an Ansel Adams landscape great or generating my own original ideas. Take pickleball. I'm a lower intermediate player who's over 30 and not going pro. I love competing and using my body, but I don't have anything unique to say with my game, and I never will. I’m climbing a well-defined skill ladder and learning to get better at specific things, but it doesn’t cause me to think about bigger questions.
These pursuits don’t fit neatly into my existing categories either. They aren't Health or Relationships, the benefits are incidental. They aren't just Experiences, there was too much intentional skill development. Instead, they were something new.
A New Life Area
This long-winded preamble is all to say, I’m adding a ninth life area: Mastery. A Dungeons and Dragons character sheet has a whopping 18 stats to track, so maybe nine isn't too bad.
For the most part, I see it as splitting my Intellectual life into two categories.
Intellectual is about engaging with ideas, concepts, and meaning. Reading philosophy, understanding narrative structure, wrestling with complex problems that don't have clear answers. It's the part of me that needs to think about thinking.
Mastery is about developing skills and capabilities. Getting better at pickleball, improving my cooking technique, learning to play an instrument. It's the part of me that needs to see tangible progress and competence.
I experience great joy when I tangibly get better at something. It’s my 1% better growth mindset. It allows me to feel like my life has trajectory. Once I was bad, now I am good, one day I will be better.
At the same time, this Mastery is not a replacement for my Intellectual life. Developing better motor skills and instinctual reactions doesn't create a thriving intellectual life. At least, not for me. The distinction matters because when I conflated the two, I tricked myself into thinking I was still growing intellectually when I was really just getting better at a sport.
My First Small Wins
As I write this newsletter, I'm not on day one of the journey. Over the last few weeks, I've started to make a few changes, and I feel myself gradually taking back control over my intellectual life.
My saving grace has been my notebook. I have a small every day carry Field Notes I've wrapped in a leather cover. It fits snugly in my pocket along with a pen. For months, it sat dormant on my shelf, but I've picked it up and started carrying it with me everywhere. Any day that I write a note is a day I have an idea. Not necessarily an original idea, maybe an idea I've noticed or stolen from others. But funnily enough, one idea often begets another. And a stolen idea often begets an original one.
I've also started making time for reading again. Instead of defaulting to my phone during downtime, I'm picking up books. I'm doing my weekly reviews more consistently to check in on this new balance. Most importantly, I'm no longer trying to force every hobby to be intellectual. Some things can just be about getting better, and that's enough.
The goal isn't to choose intellectual growth over skill development. It's to understand what each gives you and make sure you're getting enough of both. Now when I do my reviews, I ask myself two different questions: Am I developing new capabilities and skills? And am I engaging with ideas that challenge and expand my thinking?
Both matter. Both deserve attention. But they're not the same thing.
Thanks for joining for another week. As I mentioned in my last issue, my publishing cadence will be a bit irregular for the rest of the year. I’m juggling a few new forced and unforced projects in my life at the moment, and writing time has been a little hard to come by. I’m also experimenting with a few different styles of posts and new topics. I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.
Your friend,
Connor