Welcome to BTA! With this intro post I’ll explain a little bit more about what BTA is, and what you can expect here.

First off, hi, I’m John Mosesman. I write this stuff. This all comes from a particular quality of mine: about every six months to a year, I find something new that I get totally enthralled by. Sometimes it’s a new skill, sometimes it’s a community of people around a particular subject that I didn’t know existed, or sometimes it’s something that I was already aware of but I didn’t realize was full of depth and richness.

Basically, I find a new thing, and I get addicted to it. For however long it lasts, I will read every book, watch every video, listen to every podcast, and read every article I can find. Consume as much as I can as fast as I can. I love these moments. Many times it feels like I find an entirely new world that I didn’t know existed—yet it was right there all along.

However the thing I find with every one of these subjects is there’s a point where it becomes increasingly hard to make progress. It makes sense though—when you’re first starting out you can make so much progress because it’s all so new. You’re so unadapted to this new thing and your body and brain are challenged so uniquely that they form quick adaptations. In the exercise world they call it “beginner gains.” Eventually you adapt to this, and it becomes increasingly harder to make gains. The increasing effort required to make increasingly smaller and smaller pieces of progress goes up. This is the route to becoming an expert, and eventually mastery. There are some areas in life where it is probably worth becoming an expert—maybe your career or in your relationships. The reward for eeking out those small advances is worth it. It’s a life-long pursuit. In many of the cases here I would love to be an expert in them, but I know that I can’t or I am not willing to give up the time and effort to achieve mastery—I have other priorities. So, I am ok with just being better than average. Staying in the sweet spot where the effort-to-reward ratio remains very high.

So that’s what Better Than Average is. It is my recollection of the these things presented in a way where you can take all of the beginner gains with only the minimum-required effort. I hope you will enjoy learning about these things as much as I have.

Due to the nature of the material, there may be large gaps between when content is available here. It may only take me a few days to write about it, but that’s only because I’ve spent the past six months diving in and teasing it apart.

So anyways, that’s the jist here. I tend to gravitate towards learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge, and getting really good at games of all sorts, so that’s mostly the topics you’ll see here. I also tend to write essays—it’s just my personal style.

One final word: I’m obviously doing my best to understand and generalize topics that can be deep, complicated, and varying. I make no means at presenting myself as an expert on these things—by the very nature of this I’m stopping right as the grind towards expertise starts to come in! So keep that in mind. If you are an expert in these areas feel free to contact me and offer corrections. And regardless, keep a critical eye and mind to anything you read on this site or the internet at large. :)

Thanks for reading.

- John