Eli Qian

Read a banger blog post today and realized that I’ve fallen into the midwit trap. For the uninitiated, the midwit trap comes from the midwit meme which is broadly used to make fun of people that have strong opinions and think they are really smart, but are actually pretty average. The midwit trap is:

The tendency for intelligent people to be smart enough to approximate the identity they want without actually working for it, but not smart enough to realise that actually getting there requires real work.

In my life, I’ve developed a habit of consuming information learn about things, rather than actually doing things. I think this is pretty common because it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you are making progress by reading blogs and listening to podcasts. They are intellectually stimulating and contain valuable insights—but they aren’t substitutes for experience and practice.

More recently, I’ve tried to counter this by biasing towards action. If I find myself interested in something, instead of daydreaming or “researching,” I want to find a way to make it happen, even if only on a small scale. For example, I’ve thought about podcasting for a long time. My freshman year of college, I applied to intern at a bunch of podcast studios and listened to a ton of shows. I read about podcasting and basically did everything except start my own podcast. This year, I actually did start my own podcast and the experience is completely different from listening to or reading about podcasts.

Less thinking, more action.