There’s a lot I’d like to learn from other people, but it’s difficult for me to find a time to ask people meaningful personal questions. This happens for several reasons, but instead of addressing all of those, I’ve decided to just directly make a new setting for myself that bypasses them.

If I’ve sent you a question with a link to this description, that means that I deeply admire a personal quality of yours and I’m actively thinking about trying to learn from it. I would greatly appreciate your response to my question, but do not feel any undue pressure to respond from me. If it works better, just take it as a nice compliment!

Potential responder questions

What if I don’t have time to respond thoughtfully?

That’s ok! I already get a significant amount of value by finding the quality I’d like to understand in someone else and articulating it clearly enough to ask the question. You can either respond letting me know that you’re too busy, with whatever rough thoughts you can quickly muster, or just not respond at all. Just keep doing what works for you.

What if I don’t know why I’m great in this way?

That’s also ok! A brief response saying that “I don’t know. I’ve just always been this way” is also useful. Maybe this initial thought will generate useful conversation later, but it doesn’t need to.

What should a response look like?

I’ve written a modest example below. Hopefully this gives an idea of what kind of information I’m looking for, but again, an answer doesn’t need to be as long or as descriptive.

Q: How did you build a strong morning routine?

I haven’t always been good about this! Instead, I’m someone who cares a lot about being able to bring focus to the things that I care about and at a certain point I found that I’d feel guilty or embarrassed when I let this tendency allow chores and boring tasks to pile up. This ruined the focus.

While highlighting the things that matter is good, neglecting things that actually matter can obviously be a huge problem. Setting up a routine is my negotiation with myself for when I do things without the laser focus and when I can turn the laser on. I guess you could also think of this as tuning the laser to what obstacles I need to remove before getting to what I want, but it’s a bit less structured than that; the things I often do after the routine aren’t my favorite, and I don’t always hit every item on the list. I also include some “laser focus” tasks in the routine when there’s a task that’s only amenable to being done in small pieces. Still, I think the major motivation of doing this at all is trying to achieve focus outside of the routine.

This is probably also a situation where I’ve unconsciously picked up queues from my parents. My dad has always had a strong morning routine. When we’re on vacation he’ll often get up hours before everyone else and myseriously move mountains without saying a word. I get up much later, but I can sometimes roughly mimick this effect with extremely late risers now.