For Happiness Sake, Measure by Months

Want to make yourself miserable and then lose money because of a bad decision? Own a diversified mutual fund, and check the returns every day.

Want to make yourself happy and able to make the right decision?  Own a diversified mutual fund, and check the returns once a month, or once a year.

This at least has been true over the course of the history of mutual funds, and the last hundred years of diversified holdings of stock.  It might not hold true over the course of the next 100 years, or even 40, but the principal behind this is very instructive and amusing.

So how do we understand the difference between checking daily and monthly?

The first thing to understand is that loss hurts more than an equal gain feels good.  This is something biologically hardwired into humans, and demonstrated in experiments.  After that, simply realize that, the longer the time frame you are looking at the "smoother" the pattern, with less fluctuations.   Let's say every day there is a 50/50 chance the stock will go up or down.  If you check daily, then the losses are going to hurt more, stick with you more, and probably lead you to bad decisions.  On, the other hand, lets say there is a 70% chance the market goes up month-over-month.  In this case, the success rate will be high enough that you can overcome your loss-aversion bias.

I believe that most goals are like this as well.  I cannot guarantee that each and every time I do a lift I will improve, but if I stick with a system, I have a really good shot of seeing improvement after a month.

The reality isn't any different, just I am just changing where I stop and compare results.  The difference in terms of happiness is tremendous.

Go into Nature

Last week I wrote about going into the silence.  It truly is the best place to invest your time, whether in quiet thought, meditation, or writing.  Today I want to write about my favorite kind of silence: going into nature.

This doesn't have to be elaborate, like going to some nature preserve.  Instead, you can go to a park, or even slowly walk through your neighborhood, stopping ever so often to just focus on some detail of landscaping and to just  . . . listen.  Or, you can do my favorite method, garden in a way that lets nature in.

The benefits of going into nature as your means of going into the silence have been demonstrated by research.  (As a side note, this leads to one of the great paradoxes our age has not yet grappled with entirely: what to do when science and data vindicate a practice that doesn't seem to follow the rigid or analytic patterns of science.  But that's the thing: analysis the is the tool the human uses to improve life.  When there is a conflict between the system and the human, just go ahead and value the human).

Check out the webMD article on Eco-therapy or this website that clearly enthusiastic on the subject.  If you share my intuition that a connection to nature is the right thing for humans, you might skip the articles.

The real trick, however, is spending the time in nature.  To do that you have to giving yourself permission to spend the time in this way.  To give yourself that permission, in the short run, you might need to get more done in less time.  If you're in that situation, look into my time management tricks.

Deliver At Least Twice

I thought the following as I was lying in bed:  Deliver at least twice and then let someone know what your "brand" is.  By brand, I mean here what adjectives you want them to apply to you.

I don't want to get into a debate with anyone, but the world the seems to need more of any kind of virtue I can name, ranging from cunning and intelligence to compassion and honesty.

The problem is there is no shortage of people who claim to have virtues.  And many people in the world at large seems to know this, and thus has filters up against people saying they have X virtue. Paradoxically, this can be seen big win for those who merely want to claim they have a virtue.  First, they get all the low-hanging fruit of the gullible people (how can such people still exist in times like this? Oh, the conditioning of consumer culture . . .)  Secondly, it would seem this kind of inflation of virtue-claiming makes the currency of saying you have a virtue so debased that no one can seem to have a virtue in the eyes of the discerning.

My experience as a teacher (and continued, passionate, life-long learner) tells me this: words are labels we use make concepts easier to "pull up" and organize.  Abstractions without connections to a underlying memory/image/other concept are worthless until correctly attached to something else.

That's not to say these labels aren't remarkably important.   Look at any multi-dollar brand, Coke being the most successful brand-as-brand-alone I can think of.

It's a delicate act, but you want to get the full power out of the good things you do.  So, I am saying to self-promote.  But the crucial difference is to self-promote only after you have delivered at least twice.

Your Work Can Become Your Mediation

This answers my musing that you can become your own machine.

Yesterday I put in a lot of work re-digging in a stone border for my two annual vegetable beds.  I can't say every second of it was tranquil work, but a good deal of it was.  The most important thing, I think, is breathing.  If you can stay oxygenated, you are far less of a fool.    If you can still your mind a bit, your mind opens to your surroundings.  After all, I was working on a great day with bird song around me.  I was working in a beautiful garden that I was only trying to make beautiful (okay, trying to make one of the ugly spots significantly less ugly)

To get the deep breathing, and a stillness of mind, I found it helpful to be more deliberate in my motions and focus on a flowing shifting of weight, like in Tai Chi.   And this is how, from time to time, I mediated in action.

I understand this thought is not original.  We know all about zen in the art of ____,  but sometimes everyone needs reminding from time to time.  This is my reminder.

You Become Your Own Machine

It has been said that "you must not lie to yourself . . . and you are the easier person to lie to".

Likewise, it is very easy to take a project and push yourself too far in its pursuit.  And this becomes especially dangerous when the project is self-selected.

I am taking a day off from physical work today because I felt I had to pull up all the perennial grass in a vegetable bed.  Secondly, I have been working toward my million word challenge in Spanish.  I wrote yesterday about finding an addictive way to go by reading lots of bits and pieces from Spanish wikipedia.  And that is how I became my own machine, spending a large chunk of my break serving my own made-up goal.

My biggest problem with me becoming my own machine isn't really the risk of pain or injury, however.  It is the way I become locked in and unsatisfied.  Let's look at both in turn.

Locked in.

I narrow in what I am doing in such a way that I am not receptive to the world.  A person can come in and try to talk to me, and I am not present for them.  Even my wife.  And while I see everyone around me prone to this same problem, that doesn't make it right, especially if I have the means to do better.  If instead of working on something "addictive," I spend that time on a pleasant stroll about the garden or gently reading a book, then I am not locked in, but instead open to others.  I am a better person in those moments I am not locked in.

Unsatisfied.

Having over 50,000 words toward a million word challenge doesn't make me feel more satisfied -- at least not until I consciously reflect on that.  Instead, it leads to head games where I somehow try to figure out how to do get the rest now.  And of course that is impossible, so my addict brain tries to make myself believe 100,000 will be fine, just get that. . .

Making the content super-interesting only increases the sense of feeling incomplete.  All the sudden, I have 20 tabs open.  When I was not reading, I feel like I should be.  Being a machine makes you feel jittery.

The Dao to the Rescue.

Instead of getting back on the treadmill today, I drank a cup of coffee and started walking through my garden.  It felt some pleasant, so aimless, so complete, that I came inside and felt cured of all my longings.  So instead I reread a bit of the Tao Te Ching I had hand copied.

I followed my own advise about going into the silence, and as usual, I did not regret it.

1/20 of the Spanish Challenge Done

It's so much worse to write that as 5% done . . .

I probably want to mix it up more with other types of writing in the future, but I am currently just reading away at whatever I want in Spanish Wikipedia.  It's really enjoyable to the point of addictive. I also keep a much more accurate count by copying what I read over into a open office document, and just run a word-count.  When I read physical books, I am just estimating.

Go into the Silence

To manage time well, you have to move to quality, instead of a myopic focus on efficiency.   If you're efficient at doing the wrong things at least two problems can crop up: first, you can create more work for yourself (ie you did it wrong the first time), and secondly, if you work within an organization, you can typecast yourself as a workhorse or "savior", and then get more work assigned to you.  Thus, in a dynamic sense, it is very inefficient to be efficient.  Efficiency alone is static thinking that tries to make human beings fit a system.  It's not good for the human being. (It's actually not good for the system either, but systems are too driven by static calculations to see that).

The only ways I know of to get out of this trap are 1) frugality and 2) high-quality work.  First, frugality gives you the leverage to carve out freedom, and especially time wealth.  And the other great path is to do quality work.  Cal Newport has a book entitled So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is a title based on Steve Martin's advice to young comedians -- be so good they can't ignore you.

How do you become so good that they can't ignore you?  It's not really through hard work alone, as I have shown that efficiency alone is a trap.  To have the greatest breakthroughs in you life, whether in career, creative pursuit, or relationship, you need to go into the silence.

I first saw the phrase expressed this way in the book Energizing the 12 Powers of Your Mind by Howard E. Hill.  I mention this to give credit where it is due, rather than make a recommendation of the book.  It gets a little too new-agey, rah-rah, and self confident for my tastes.  But hey, if you ever find a copy, it make be worth a read for you.  It actually was for me.  I'm just also a skeptical jerk and an intellectual snob.

You can look through the biography of almost any great innovator, or even great leader (ie positively transformative -- not necessarily "popular") and there is almost always a strong streak of finding quiet time away from others, and this time is often consciously protected and seen as a key to creativity. Heck, even I had that with my "Walden Years."

Susan Cain in her powerful TED talk states, ". . . no wilderness, no revelations."  Herman Melville is even more direct, saying "God's one and only voice is silence."  Cal Newport, the author of the aforementioned book, has a blog that has shifted away from efficiency to a focus on deep thinking and deep work habits. Here is a representative post along that theme.

To think deeply, you have to remove distractions.  You have to cut yourself off, at least temporarily, from the day-to-day.  This is not an optional feature, based on preference.  This is a best practice, and probably the only way to get to quality work.

Another way to look at it: your subconscious is demonstrably better at epiphanies than your weak, headache prone, hold 7 items -- plus or minus 2-- consciousness.  When you go into the silence, your mind works things over at its true rhythm, and not doused in stress hormones.  The breakthroughs just bubble up to the surface when they are ready.  Trying to get the same result by consciously straining is the using the wrong tool for the job.

So I here is my updated plan for improving someone's time management:

1. Use efficiency tricks to get more done in the same time, so you can have time to invest.  Once you have finished your normal amount of work, stop, and DO NOT use that time to do more of the same crap (how will you even know if the additional work is crap? Well, go to step #2)
2. Go into the silence.  Only then can you reorient your thinking enough to know what the next, best moves are.  Even more importantly, you can stop being reactive and instead start figuring out what the next worst moves are, and avoiding those. Then . . .
3. Invest in other types of personal development, such as  exercise, reading, journaling, work skills, etc.

How to Have a Perfect Day (For Me)

Breaks, like the current Spring Break, allow me to see what a perfect day would be like. 

First, go outside when it is nice, stay outside as long as it is nice, with brief breaks going inside.

Once it stops feeling nice, finally go inside.  When inside, don't allow myself to sit so long that my body goes into a lethargic zombie mode.  I used to solve this with the pomodoro method, but my problem now with the pomodoro is that it relies on focused work during that 25 minute block.  Forcing yourself to do focused work on something that you aren't interested in enough to do anyway is really lame.  Sure, the pomodoro method, with its frequent breaks, is a more humane method of personal slave-driving, but that just makes me wonder why you can't work on what you want to when you want to and make sure you take breaks for health, mental sharpness, and to prevent your body from stiffening?  So that's now what I want to do with my indoor time.  (With outdoor time I find am so inclined to move and rest in the right balance, that I don't need to give myself any external help).

So, after I am pushed indoors, it is all about doing whatever I want in a natural blob of work-as-play and play-as-work.  I do this in 25 minute bits, and in that way basically organize my day by hours.  This isn't really the pomodoro method because I am not making myself focus on one thing; I allow my attention to drift as much or as little as I want during those 25 minutes.  On the first break of an hour, I make sure to get up and walk around the house at least a few steps.  If I have something physical to do -- such as soak dishes, or do the litter box -- then I'll do it on the first break.  Then I do 25 minutes more of worky-play.  After that, an hour has passed, so I work on whatever physical challenge I am on.  Right now, I am training to do a set of 100 push-ups using grease the groove.  During the summer I think I might go for 25 pull ups.

I keep this cycle going day and day and then year and after year, enjoying the process all along, and then every now and then I get to look back and seeing I have achieved cool things.

My Walden Years

Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13, I remember imaging myself living in the house I grew up in (my parents rented it out for a year or two and it reasonable to talk of one day me owning it).  In that vision of a life I would inherit my father's landscaping business and own almost nothing.  I didn't picture owning furniture, just a rug where I would meditate.  I would work, come home and meditate.  I would not own a t.v.

This is my earliest memory of thinking I would not own a television, though I am sure reading Fahrenheit 451 and the profound impact it had on me played a big part.  Nonetheless, after years of telling them what I would do, my parents were shocked when I moved out of their house and I didn't take a television with me.  They hadn't listened to me, so my actions got to speak more loudly than my words.  I had begun my Walden years.

The first 6 months I didn't even have the internet.  I don't remember that as particularly productive time, but it was worth noting how peaceful it was.  I'm a fairly private person, so I didn't have as many "are you crazy" conversations as you might have thought, but I do remember one time explaining to a particularly dubious person that  I would listen to the radio to "create enough noise," but really never happened. I learned to work in silence.  I caught up on my sleep, and I listened myself think.

I also took up wine tasting to see if there was anything to all the fuss, and found that really wasn't.  But I still have a lovely memory of a beautiful spring day, laying on my couch, listening to the breeze, sipping a Merlot, and reading Nietzsche.  I read incredibly slowly, stopping to think often, and the birds sand their lovely songs.  It's hard to improve on a moment like that, even with a meditation mat (something which I didn't and do not own).

Though being unplugged from the world of instant information was an interesting and worthwhile experience, I got the internet and while I spent the last four and a half years which I lived on my own without a television, I had to find other ways to be unconventional. For example, I started watching a bunch of videos on YouTube, but they happened to mostly fall into three categories: 1)  gardening (useful and good idea)  2) YouTube polyglots (much more of an addiction -- one I find myself pulled into far too often). 3)  Videos on computer programming.  I learned how to program again (or really learn how to program the right way for the first time).

Thoreau's own time at Walden Pond ended after 2 years, and my time had to end as well.  Now that I am married, we have a television, but I'd like to believe that the gravitational pull of my unconventional ways is responsible for the fact that my wife and I only watch it around 2 hours a week, though my wife does watch movies on it in addition to that.

From Walden and some of Thoreau's other writings, I have completely lost my earlier notion, more of a prejudice, that Thoreau was a "phony."  Instead, I see his time at Walden as a stand he had to take, one that put him on a firm footing for the rest of his life.

I see my time when I lived alone the same way.

A Million Words in Spanish

I broke a million points on Memrise, getting through the last leg by doing a no-typing Spanish conjugation course.

While I would not recommend this at all as the most efficient way to learn a language from scratch, it is a really fun way to go and 97%+ of the conjugations were really easy for me.  The course taught me some ones I didn't know, but more than that worked to make a lot of them "click" for me in a deeper, more internalized way.  It also motivated me to pick back up some Spanish books and start reading again.

The reading went just that little bit smoother.  So, in an example of success breeding success I am embarking on a project to read 1,000,000 more words in Spanish (so somewhere around 20 books, though wikipedia, veomemes and other interesting content certainly counts.

Also, I want to watch 100 hours of television/video content in Spanish and *gulp* clock at least 20 hours of conversation practice (that last part I will certainly procrastinate and then blog about beating that procrastination).

Let the project commence.

Easiest Software to Write

One of my most difficult goals on the bucket list to achieve, at least as I first conceived it, is to have 10,000 people use software I have written.  It's not that I doubt I can learn the skills, but rather I don't have the motivation to work in any programming language.  It drives me nuts that programming is an endless treadmill of the-next-best-thing-to-make-work-so-much-easier(!!!).  You keep pursuing enough things to make your work easier, and your work ends up a lot more difficult.  And no one seems to get this.  It is very un-dao.  

Here's my planned hack: I will write the software for a new home page, which will also be a collection of 1.) my longer works and 2.) my aphorisms.  Then, I just need to get 10,000 to go there in my separate quest to go viral so I can help others with time management and environmental issues.   

A blog is something easy to write, and by coding it myself, I can avoid all the add ons, privacy violations, and general b.s. (like facebook) that make the internet an ever-worsening experience.  

I will write it myself to start it simple, keep it simple, and avoid it ever getting complicated.

Time for more philosophy: for a while, my thoughts have had a central theme of decluttering.  This blog really started going into high gear last summer when I had decluttered so much that the void was too big.  So it is possible to be too declutered.  But society is far, far too unbalanced in the other direction.

My software, even though it is just a humble webpage, will thus have a purpose: to combine the fact that we are interconnected, so that the ideas I want to share can reach as large of an audience possible, but to do so in a way that is only an improvement in their life, and not an extension of dominate force of our time: consumerism.