Journals

This is an archive of all posts published under a paid journal subscription that ran between 2011 and 2014. When I ended the paid journal, all entries were consolidated into an existing category. This ‘Journal’ tag provides access to that prior list of entries.

There are 144 posts tagged Journals (this is page 6 of 8).

Notes: Is this noteworthy?

In a response to The Dangerous Effects of Reading (an essay I highlighted in a previous note), nlawalker wrote the following comment on Hacker News.

His last point about noteworthiness is an incredibly useful way to avoid wasting time. I started curating and sharing notes on things that I read because I feel that doing so will not only help me retain and determine the usefulness of what I'm consuming, but also help others spend less time filtering through stuff.

I definitely agree about the "filtering crap from gold" bit. Once you reach a certain level of skill it can become a hindrance: you develop an extremely low tolerance for anything that doesn't catch you as interesting within a few seconds, and you start speed-reading absolutely everything. This is good in that you aren't wasting time consuming something that's not really useful, but it's bad in that you end up continuously subjecting yourself to input in this way. You can spend a whole day processing a million inputs, throwing them all away and learning nothing, when the alternatives are to spend your time doing something more fun or productive, or slowing down a bit and maybe actually getting a tidbit or two out of the first few hundred inputs and leaving the rest for another time.

A while ago, when I was reading for the purpose of focused learning (technical books, scouring blogs for information about some framework/API, etc.), I began the habit of taking copious notes. My notes are very wordy; it's almost like I'm having a conversation with myself and rephrasing ideas so I can understand them better. OneNote is my weapon of choice - for me it reduces the "barrier to entry" of starting notetaking because it's easy write now and organize later.

Over time, I realized that when I took notes this way, I had a much higher retention rate and a much greater understanding of what I was reading. So much so that when I find myself sitting at my desk or on the couch and "infosnacking," I try to stop and ask myself, "is what I am reading right now worth taking notes on?" If it is, then I start writing. If it's not, I make the effort to tear myself away and either do something that's more productive or something that I really enjoy.

Notes: The middle-man to your happiness

David Tate writes about the dangerous effects of reading, but more than that he explains why it's so vital that we stop being filters, that we stop developing a habit of judging what we're consuming in attempt to consume things that make us happier and instead focus on creating the things that actually make us happy.

I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter. You stagnate at work for fear of everything you do being judged like every news article or viral video that you view.

So how do you break the power of consumption? By creating your own things. All the things you consume - somewhere somebody is making all this stuff, right?

Adding anything (not just your opinion) to the world is creating – writing, drawing, dancing (not line-dancing which is not art but instead some sort of long-term psychological annoyance stress test). Normally when people think of 'creating' or 'innovation' they think of a naked hippie standing in the woods painting a tree, an alcoholic writer slaving away at a sad tale of a small town, or some tech geek coming up with some new way to annoy everyone by sharing every detail of their pointless life.

If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like and cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?

Notes: Book Highlights from The Flinch

The Flinch by Julien Smith is a short, but great read (it's available as free download; you'll need a Kindle reader, which you can also download for free).

"The idea is simple: our flinch mechanism can save our life. Our flinch instinct short circuits the conscious mind and allows us to pull back and avoid danger faster than we can even imagine it's there. But what if danger is exactly what we need?"

It's a fascinating concept, one that I can definitely identify with. As I note in one of the highlights below, overcoming the instinctive desire to finch is what allowed me to create and publish my first ebook. The flinch is something I'm consciously learning to lean into more often.

(As always, the numbers at the end of each highlight indicate the location in the Kindle book.)

If you got injured, you were done. No modern medicine, so each encounter meant blood loss, infection, or death. You can't relate to this. Your lifespan is double that. Science and technology mean you can survive almost anything. It may be expensive to do so, but that's still a significant improvement over death from an infected cut. (112)

Let's make a list of the fears you were born with: falling; abandonment; loud noises.... Yeah, that's about it. You were born with these fears because you need them to survive. These fears kept you safe. The rest are just ghost stories that the flinch has taken over. They're signposts. Look for them. They point the way toward barriers you need to pass, to doors you need to open. (134)

the lessons you learn best are those you get burned by. Without the scar, there's no evidence or strong memory. (155)

Maybe, when you were a kid, your parents didn't want you to get dirty, or you didn't like heights. Avoiding dirt or heights built a pattern of pain avoidance, which added to the habit of flinching. Your parents' fears became your fears, their lives became your life. They flinched for some things, so you began to do the same. But behind every undiscovered flinch is a lesson. If you do everything your parents' way, you'll never discover the truth. You'll never discover the edge. You'll never get the lessons you need. (159)

Forget secondhand learning. It leaves no scars. It doesn't provide the basic understanding that sits in the body as well as in the brain. There's no trace of its passing. It might as well have been a dream. (166)

Firsthand knowledge, however, is visceral, painful, and necessary. It uses the conscious and the unconscious to process the lesson, and it uses all your senses. When you fall down, your whole motor system is involved. You can't learn this from books. It just doesn't work, because you didn't really fall. You need to feel it in your gut—and on your scraped hands and shins—for the lesson to take effect. But if you're surrounded by padding, scar-free learning is all you have left. It defines who you are. It limits you, but those limits aren't actually yours—they're the limits of the men and women who came before you. But other people's limits will no longer do. (168)

You can't settle for reaching other people's limits. You have to reach yours. If you don't test yourself, you don't actually grow to your own limits. For you to map out this new world, you need to test it, and test what you're capable of inside it. You need to make mistakes, resist the flinch, and feel the lessons that come with this process. Kids naturally begin this way. It's why their world is always growing. They find hurdles, jump them, and get stronger. When they see they made it, they move on to bigger hurdles. If they fall down, they try again later. It's a basic cycle. It's how kids figure out they can eventually change the world, found a startup, or build a house—by experimenting, learning, suffering, and growing. It's a process. But for that growth to continue, they need to avoid listening too closely to what they're told. They need to stay open-minded. (175)

The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself. You've forgotten that. You need to learn it again. You need more scars. You need to live. (190)

Ask yourself this: would your childhood self be proud of you, or embarrassed? (197)

no one has a problem with the first mile of a journey. Even an infant could do fine for a while. But it isn't the start that matters. It's the finish line. (213)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." (247)

getting lost is not fatal. Almost every time, it will make your world bigger. You can look at the edges of your map, the places you were unsure about. Old explorers even had a phrase for it: "Here be dragons." (258)

You need find your dragons, look them in the eye, and destroy them. (263)

Samurai and their modern counterpart, kendo practitioners, say that fights are won internally, even before the killing blow is landed. They face an internal struggle before they ever face the enemy. So will you. Stop shying away from it. (273)

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT, PART 2 You need more training. Let's take this further. Ready? Go to the kitchen and grab a mug you don't like. Mug in hand, go to a place in your house with a hard floor. Hold the mug in front of you, in your outstretched hand. Say goodbye to it. Now, drop the cup. Whatever rationalization you're using right now is a weak spot for you. Flag it. You'll see it again and again. Drop the damn cup. Did you do it? If so, you'll notice one thing: breaking your programming requires a single moment of strength. Now, clean up the mess. That wasn't so bad, was it? If this was too easy, because a cup is simple to replace, try something harder, like your Blackberry. The strength you gain by letting go is more important than any object you own. (310)

You're only as strong as your weakest moments. Learn to reinforce those weak spots before they cut you down. (337)

Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it's really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. (340)

Krishnamurti, a great Indian sage, once said: "You can take a piece of wood that you brought back from your garden, and each day present it with a flower. At the end of a month you will adore it, and the idea of not giving it an offering will be a sin." In other words, everything that you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be. (343)

The flinch doesn't want you to change. Its agenda is to keep you in status quo. It believes your identity is what's kept you alive and stable, and that settling is better than dead. But it's a trap, because almost none of the risks modern man takes are fatal at all. (346)

You can change what you want about yourself at any time. (350)

If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it's the only way. (353)

The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can't will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you've been punched in the face, you won't worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don't worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you'll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. (384)

Law enforcement officers, professional fighters, and members of the military—all of them learn systems that leverage the flinch. They use it to react faster than their opponents even realize. Instead of flinching back, they flinch forward—toward their opponent, and toward the threat. When you flinch forward, you're using the speed of your instincts, but you don't back off. Instead, you move forward so fast—without thinking—that your opponent can't react. You use your upraised hands as weapons instead of shields. You use your fear to gain an advantage. (395)

Raam's Note: This is exactly what happened when I wrote my first ebook, Small Ways to Make a Big Difference. Creating that book felt so important that I leaned into the doubt and procrastination that I knew was awaiting me. I worked obsessively for three weeks until it was done.

Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world changes radically. You respond to challenges by pushing ahead instead of shrinking back. You become bigger instead of smaller; you're more stable and more confident. Your world becomes a series of obstacles to overcome, instead of attacks you have to defend yourself from. (401)

Don't wait until you can talk yourself out of it—you're already too good at that. Instead, act before your self-talk overpowers you. Get yourself into a position where you can no longer back out. Your old self would back away here—instead, burn your bridge so you can no longer retreat. Flinch-breaking is all about eliminating the pointless, cowardly, and habitual, and choosing the useful instead. Useful cannot be discovered in the abstract. It has to actually happen. (474)

From the outside looking in, everyone looks like a conformist. But really, no one is; they're just waiting for another person to speak up. The question is, why isn't it you? Do you feel like you'll be judged, or ostracized? Do you think you'll be ignored and humiliated? Do you feel impotent? The truth is likely quite different. Everyone wants progress but very few want to lead. So a whole group waits for the first hand to go up before their hands go up, too. Suddenly, a vote goes from a unanimous NO to a unanimous YES. All it took was one voice of dissent—and suddenly, everything changed. The secret to overcoming the flinch is that everyone wants you to succeed. People are looking for proof that you can be amazing so that they can be amazing, too. The Web is so great because you can see others being truly themselves, and succeeding at it. This diminishes the power of the consensus. The pressure diminishes. You can be who you like. Getting in the ring becomes easier because you have supporters. So if you see no one like you, no one who agrees, don't worry. There are actually hundreds of people like you, and they're waiting for a leader. That person is you. Stop flinching. Speak up. (505)

Turn your mobile phone off for a few hours each day. Having nothing to do while you're waiting for a bus can be boring, but it's only when you're bored that the scary thoughts come to the surface. Use a dumb phone on the weekends to prevent yourself from checking your messages. (555)

Imagine that you have to leave a legacy, and everyone in the world will see the work you've done. Volunteer. Create something that lasts and that can exist outside of you, something that makes people wonder and gasp. Build a support structure for others. Devote some of your time or money to it. (563)

A Three Step Plan

I see it everywhere, often in marketing and things that are demanding my attention. "Three steps. It's simple!" But does it have value? Is it worth it? You could have a three-step-plan for life too: be born, age a little, and then die.

Sometimes things aren't so simple and easy. Sometimes, the things really worth doing are a lot more complicated. You can tackle them in a simple way, sure, but life isn't a three-step-process and neither are most things worth doing.

I admire and even advocate simplicity, but not at the expense of doing things that matter.

Pushing Through 'The Dip'

I believe that I'm at the point in this experiment that Seth Godin would refer to as 'The Dip'. It's the point at which one feels no upward progress is being made and where one feels momentum has stalled. It's where continuing further doesn't feel worth the effort.

Seth says it's where most people quit. It's the reason great ideas and businesses often fail. They don't fail because the idea or business was no good, but rather because the person keeping the venture alive decided to give up. They weren't patient and persistent enough. They didn't push through the dip.

As I experience the dip in this experiment, I find myself questioning more and more the purpose of it. I find myself looking for an out, trying to convince myself that nothing of value is being produced and that I'm wasting my time. But I know none of that is true and it's almost comical to watch myself go through this phase.

I'm able to look at these feelings objectively because I made my decision not to quit before I started. 

I accepted that no matter what, there would be value in this experiment. Even if all I wrote was narcissistic gibberish -- something I knew my perfectionist, value-based side wouldn't allow for anyway -- I knew there would be value in finishing.

Knowing I would come up against this resistance, I gave myself just two rules: One paragraph, ten days. These rules were optimized to get me through the dip. I knew that even my perfectionist self should be able to share that much.

And as it turns out, I need only look to the previous seven days for proof: More than three thousand words shared and lots of resistance overcome.

Losing Focus Through Association

Where is my focus? Am I focusing on the right thing? Am I putting too much effort in the wrong direction? Am I inadvertently stunting my growth?

These are questions I ask myself quite frequently. I'm not sure when I started asking these questions or even why, but I do know that asking them often leads to recognizing areas of my life where I'm stagnating or where I'm otherwise unconsciously holding myself back or underutilizing my potential (or simply walking in the wrong direction).

The world is full of people who want to tell us how to do things. And I don't think that's bad. I don't think they're doing it with malicious intent: sharing what we know is an innate human quality. I also don't think it's bad to listen to what others have to say: I've grown so much in my life thanks to the advice and experiences shared by others.

But I think there's a danger in following too closely, in listening too intently, in modeling our life too closely around the lives of others. We lose a bit of ourselves through association. If we permanently associate with anything but our true selves, we will easily forget why we're doing things we're doing. We will lose sight of what feels innately important to us.

To really get at the core of what matters, to really focus our energy on growing in the right directions, we need to strip away everything, all the labels, the assumptions, the role models, and the beliefs. 

Who am I? 

When I strip away everything, I just am. And when I approach life from that state, I become a paint brush and everything else becomes the paint. There are no labels, no genres, no niches, no must-haves and have-nots. There are no limitations, no restrictions, no "this is who I am" or "this is who I am not". There just is, and pure potential.

The Superior Guest

If you were a guest in someone's home, would you criticize your host behind their back? If you were invited in and you accepted that invitation, would you be rude or judgmental or act superior?

Now let's say your host prepared a nice meal and then and gave you a nice comfortable room in which to sleep. 

Let's also say that you were aware ahead of time that money was tight for your host. You knew they incurred extra expenses hosting you, buying the ingredients for dinner and cleaning and preparing your room to make you comfortable.

Before going on your way, you gave them some money as reimbursement for their help. You included a bit extra as a way of saying thank you for their service, their kindness, and their willingness to host you.

Now how much different is what I just described from any restaurant or hotel you may visit? How is it different from any service-oriented business?

There are few things that irk me as much as observing guests in a restaurant, hotel, or any business for that matter, criticizing their hosts, talking behind their backs, and acting like they, despite being a guest, are somehow superior. 

Adding money to the equation does not make you superior. It does not give you the right to act rude or judgmental. Adding negative energy to the situation by acting superior only enhances the coarseness of all the interactions; it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you're invited and you accept, leave money out of the equation. If you don't like the service you're offered, leave. But if you do accept the invitation, remember that you're a guest. Show your respect. You may be surprised by how much a change in your attitude affects the service.

Setting the Right Intention

If you set the wrong intention, you'll feel like you're going somewhere without actually going very far. Setting the wrong intention leads to unsustainable effort.

Without the right intention we won't be able to set the right priorities, and without the right priorities effort will be made in all the wrong places.

It's the reason why so many people set the intention to get in shape every year only to return to their old lifestyles within a few weeks or months.

It wasn't a lack of effort or inability to commit that eventually turned them away from getting in shape. It was that getting in shape was the wrong intention and as a result they set the wrong priorities. The thing they felt was so important quickly became not important enough.

Often something that we consider important becomes not important enough because we set the wrong intention. (It's not "get in shape" that we should be focusing on, but rather "change my lifestyle".) 

Changing your lifestyle takes a bit more work than signing up for a gym membership, but that's why the former often results in transformation while the latter results in wasted time and money.

If we set the right intention, we'll set the right priorities and our time and effort will propel us towards our goals. But how do we set the right intention? I believe it starts with taking a look at the bigger picture and understanding the why. Why is this important to us?

Leaning into the Flinch

What's the difference between the people who are remembered by history and those who make up the silent majority who simply live and die? 

I don't believe history remembers people by chance. I don't believe some people are born with better ideas or more capable skills or that it requires a unique set of circumstances to do great things.

Many of us -- perhaps most of us -- have incredible ideas, world-changing visions for how things could be better. We think many of the same thoughts that memorable people throughout history have thought. 

So why aren't we doing anything? Why are we just living out our lives, caught up in the daily grind?

I think the answer lies in our reluctance to believe in ourselves and face our self-doubt. We see the possibility in our idea and we get scared that it just might work. As Julien Smith calls it, we flinch. We see the possibility and then pull back from going any further.

I read Julien's new ebook today (it's short and free [edit: it's not free anymore, but you can easily find it for free by Googling 'the flinch']; a great read) and there were lots of things about his idea that rang true for me. For example, in one part of the book he talks about leaning into the flinch and allowing that instinctive desire to retract to point us in the direction we should push forward.

The last time I clearly remember leaning into what I would've normally pulled back from was when I wrote my first ebook, Small Ways to Make a Big Difference. 

The idea for the project came suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. I was sitting at my laptop in the kitchen of my hosts house, only a few days after arriving in Kathmandu, Nepal. 

It certainly wasn't the first time I'd had a spontaneous idea for an ebook, but what followed the idea this time was much different. Instead of over-thinking and considering all the reasons I shouldn't do it, I immediately sent an email to 60 people inviting them to participate in the project.

That one action, that leaning into what I normally would've pulled back from, essentially opened the door to the completion of that project. It took three weeks of obsessively working on it every single day, but there wasn't a single moment in that entire three weeks where I thought of quitting. I kept leaning into the flinch until I was done.

I think the people who are remembered by history are the ones who don't stop pushing. They see something, or have an idea, and instead of doubting themselves or the possibilities, they lean into them. 

Despite the entire world pushing the status quo onto them and doubting the usefulness of their rebellious nature, these few people push back. And they don't stop pushing. Ever.

Failure doesn't make them flinch because they're leaning into failure. They're walking in the direction they expect to fail while holding onto a belief that what lies ahead is something worth it. And they're usually right. What lies on the other side of failure is usually what helps them change the world.

Notes: Entrepreneurs: Picking Something vs Being Someone

I've read a lot of stuff over the past few years about building a business online. Most of it talks about the need to identify "our niche" so that we can focus on talking and selling to our "right people". The problem was, settling on a niche meant giving up my multi-faceted self and I wasn't prepared to do that.

So when I came across Abby Kerr, I loved the way that she broke that status quo. She still talks about 'right people' -- which is a concept I agree with, to a point -- but she also takes things a step further and embraces expansiveness in nichification.

Her newsletter comes with a fantastic free e-Course called Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. All of the emails in the series had something fantastic and her style of writing is one of the few styles that I find really engaging and fun. The highlighted piece below from the email series really hit home:

I don't think wannabe entrepreneurs should just pick something.

I think that wannabe entrepreneurs should be someone.

And the best part about being? Being is an evolutionary process. It's never stagnant. It's continually changing by nature. All beings are born from a process of change and are destined to change, forever.

And really powerful, sentient beings {like you and me} don't just evolve, they create revolutions, and they have revelations. And they help their Right People to have them, too.

I like to look at my entrepreneurial niche, and yours, as an ongoing evolution and revolution {of self, ideas, and ways of doing business}, full of revelations.

This isn't just playful phraseologie.

This is a complete approach to claiming your entrepreneurial niche in this moment, living what you believe to its fullest, being a great friend to those you help and serve and create for, while embracing the reality that because you are not a stagnant being, neither will be your business.

Claiming a niche, the Niche of You, allows you to continue your own growth process. You can explore your niche, be expansive within it, play with it, turn it on its head just for kicks, break it down into its many facets and go deeply into each one.

Remember, even the smallest bits of earthly matter are a universe unto themselves.

And so are you.

And so is your niche.

How important is it?

Why do we set out to do something only to dismiss it entirely? We forge ahead at the beginning (mentally and perhaps verbally) but then something happens just before the point where we take action. 

The intention is there, but something is missing. We know exactly what needs to be done and we know how to do it, but something prevents it from ever becoming reality. 

I believe everything we intend to do that doesn't get done is a direct result of this one thing: it wasn't important enough.

Or at least we didn't decide it was important enough. We had the motivation and the know-how, but we didn't put enough thought into the "why". At first glance the "why" seems obvious, a no-brainer that shouldn't need much explanation, to others or to ourselves. But it's actually crucial to maintaining momentum.

In analyzing why certain recurring intentions never become reality -- waking up early, doing daily yoga and meditation, writing in this journal, running regularly -- I've discovered one missing component that is common to all of them: I had not decided how important they were and why they were important.

It's easy to say to myself, "it's important, now let's do it", but that's not enough. I need to understand the why inside out. I need to come to terms with what will happen if I don't take care of these things. 

I told you, and myself, that I'd do an experiment for the last 10 days of this year. I would write and publish at least one paragraph a day in this Journal. Well, here I am with 8 days to go and I haven't written in this Journal.

Why not? I have the time. I haven't run out of thoughts or words. I do still want to do it. So why haven't I done anything with it?

It's simple: I hadn't decided how important it was to me. If the intention was there and I had all the resources necessary to get it done, but I still didn't do it, then it must not have been important enough.

Luckily, making something important enough is easy: you simply decide it's important enough, understand why it's important, and then follow up with action. Repeat those three steps frequently enough and eventually a habit will form. 

I decided today that writing here is important enough to put aside other things. I understood why it's important: I need to share, to grow. The last part, action, is taking place right now, as I write this entry. This is me repeating those three steps. This is important.

Breaking Barriers to Self-Expression

It's easy to write about what should be done. It's easy to see a problem, a deficiency, and then describe an action or series of actions to change it.

When change is viewed externally, it seems easy. Our brain has no problem dissecting what's wrong and coming up with possible solutions. What's a bit more challenging is taking those thoughts and actually turning them into actions.

Action takes something special. It takes commitment. Action requires accepting that something is important enough to expend energy doing it.

Much of my writing is a reflection of what's on my mind. The words I'm typing right now are literally recording bits of what's going on in my head. Sometimes what's going on is clear and articulation comes easy. Right now I'm "in the flow", typing these words with only the effort required to maintain grammar and spelling.

I started this Journal entry spontaneously. It started as a thought, "I want to write", and then, being that I had nothing else pressing to do, I began to write. But when I started thinking about what I was doing (as I did towards the end of the previous paragraph), I found myself pausing. I immediately had trouble articulating my thoughts.

It seems that's a problem with most "things we want to get done but don't". They come to our mind as clear as day but then we start thinking about them. We end up destroying our original thought with buckets of analysis and self-doubt.

"Is someone going to think this is stupid? Should I step back and think about this a bit? What if I'm making a huge mistake?"

Instead of following our intuition, we follow our self-ridicule. Instead of allowing the result of action to determine whether we should continue, we suffocate the motivation to act before it's even born.

I do this all the time.

A few days ago I wrote a follow up essay, Say More, to the essay I published the week before, Say Less. I found it interesting that after writing Say Less, I was using that essay as an excuse for not writing more. 

That's when I realized how important it is to say more. I can hide behind being succinct forever, but then I'll be sharing very little. If I feel that I have so much to share (and I do feel that way), then I should make every effort to share more.

It's in my nature to say less. As a child, I was taught the value of listening. I would stay quiet for hours at a time, doing nothing but listening. As I grew older, I continued listening. My dad often repeated a quote that stayed with me: "A wise man thinks first and then speaks. A foolish man speaks first and then thinks."

That quote really resonated with me even at an early age. It made a lot of sense. If you speak first and then think, it's too late to decide not to say anything. But if you think first, then you'll always have the option of choosing whether to speak.

Ando Perez recently shared a quote with me by Jean Jacques Rousseau that reminded me of my dad's quote and inspired me to see it from a different angle: "People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."

I certainly wouldn't claim that I "know much", but I do feel that I don't say enough. I hold inside too much of what I feel is important. I need to learn to say more. To speak up. To share what's inside.

When I reflected on why I don't say more, I discovered self-imposed barriers to my expression, barriers that I had created, perhaps long ago, to ensure that I wasn't too wordy or needlessly verbose.

Those barriers served an important purpose and I wasn't ready to rip them down. 

My public writing is usually the result of careful consideration. For the past two years I've maintained a relentless desire to abandon "the way blogging should be done" and replace it with something that felt more true to my heart.

Readers connected with this form of writing and my work felt more real than ever. It felt more like something that I would actually want to read.

But something was beginning to feel stale. More and more things felt trapped inside. I felt caged by my own quality barriers and unable to express and share things that I felt would be really useful to others.

So the idea for this Journal was born. I would create a place to express myself, a Journal in which I could write without barriers (or at least very few barriers) and share what was happening inside.

But, just as it's easy to write about what should be done, it was easy to create this space to write. The actual action of writing here, of taking down those internal barriers and allowing my thoughts to materialize, to become tangible pieces of writing, has been incredibly challenging.

I did not realize just how difficult this process would be until I started writing. It has required an entire rewrite in the way that I think about what I'm sharing. 

Before the Journal, I let everything percolate in my mind. I gave myself as much time as I needed to flesh out an idea to the point where it felt, in my head, polished and easily sharable.

Now, I needed to share that percolation process. I needed to find a way to express my thoughts and ideas before they felt polished.

Perhaps if I had already been keeping a personal Journal, this transition would've been easier. 

There were a few years during my early teens in which I kept a Journal on my computer. I wrote thousands and thousand of pages in a simple text file, sharing my deepest thoughts and observations, and my most private ruminations.

Then someone close to me, someone I trusted, violated that trust and read my Journal without permission. They took things that I wrote out of context and accused me of thinking thoughts that I had not really thought.

It was traumatizing, perhaps more so than I realized.

I deleted the entire journal, several years worth, and promised myself that I would never record such deep thoughts on any medium that a person could access. My mind was the only safe harbor now.

And so my mind became the storehouse for what would've gone in a journal. What I did share verbally and through writing became more refined and more carefully considered.

When I began attempting to write for this Journal, those barriers became apparent. The difficulty of expressing my deepest thoughts without judging myself or holding back felt incredibly difficult and challenging.

This Journal entry is probably the closest I've come in the past 10 years to actually recording my thoughts unedited. I haven't stopped writing since I started the beginning of this Journal and I haven't gone back to edit or reread anything as I normally would.

When I wrote the 'Say More' essay, I was talking to myself. I was telling myself that it's time to stop holding back. 

For more than ten years now I've learned how to hold back. For more than ten years the voice inside has been silenced and moderated by fear. It's time for me to leap past that plateau and move forward.

I'm going to do an experiment for the next 10 days in attempt to cultivate this unedited side of myself.

Every day until January 1st, 2012, I'm going to write at least one paragraph in this Journal. Perhaps some of those paragraphs will turn into longer entries, but no matter what I'm going to commit to writing and sharing at least one paragraph each day. (To minimize the number of emails you receive, I will combine the entries into one email sent out on the 24th, 28th, and 31st.)

Do you hold back? Do you unnecessarily censor yourself? Is there something inside that would benefit others if you shared it? Do you ever feel like you should speak up, but don't?

Notes: Anti-Sabbatical

For most of my career (or rather, careers) prior to my becoming nomadic in 2010, I had always been taking jobs and working with the quiet, retained knowledge that I would not be working that job for long. The job was always a stepping stone, always designed to get me somewhere else. The term for this, as Matt writes about, is the 'anti-sabbatical':

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland:

"Anti-sabbatical: a job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions. (p.35)"

What job isn’t an anti-sabbatical, I ask you?

Well, that’s my problem, at least. Every job I take slowly turns into an anti-sabbatical even if I start with seemingly bottomless excitement and enthusiasm. Friends bet on the number of months before I say I’m ready for a new job.

The other problem I have is that I always tell my employer that I’m thinking of watercolor sketching in Crete, or moving to a Zen Monastery, or walking the Appalachian Trail or whatever. That, as you are surely saying at this moment, makes people worry about your career longevity.

Ironically, I'll be hiking the Appalachian Trail next year (more on that later).

Notes: Finding Your Writing Voice

Finding my writing voice is something I've been taking seriously since the beginning of 2010 and since then I've come across a few excellent sources of inspiration and guidance. I'm sharing three of those below:

It all began when I started searching for my blogging focus after reading Charlie Gilkey's excellent post, Becoming Yourself and Growing Your Blog. (I was considering splitting my blog at that time, but Charlie's comment on that post convinced me to focus my attention in one place.)

My two favorite paragraphs from Charlie's post follow:

You don't grow a blog by thinking about growing a blog or trying to figure out what you should be writing about – you grow a blog by writing, posting, receiving feedback, integrating feedback.. and writing, publishing, posting, integrating feedback... and writing, publishing, and integrating feedback.

...

To connect with your readers, you'll have to develop the voice and style that is unmistakably you. And you probably won't know who that person is unless you start writing; living is not about being – it's about becoming. Between where you are now and where you want to go stands a lot of writing. Not thinking about writing. Not worrying about writing. Not figuring out what you're going to write. But writing.

Next comes a post by Jeff Goins where he describes an exercise for finding your writing voice. Three of his points that have been incredibly helpful in my own journey follow:

7. Free-write. Just go nuts. Write in a way that’s most comfortable to you, without editing. Then go back and read it, asking yourself, "Do I publish stuff that sounds like this?"

8. Read something you’ve recently written, and honestly ask yourself, "Is this something I would read?" If not, you must change your voice.

9. Ask yourself: "Do I enjoy what I'm writing as I'm writing it?" If it feels like work, you may not be writing like yourself. (Caveat: Not every writer loves the act of writing, but it's at least worth asking.)

And last but certainly not least, this article by Holly Lisle, titled Ten Steps to Finding Your Writing Voice, contains a wealth of things to try, including several games and suggestions for writing in the voice of your favorite authors. Here are my two favorite points from her article:

9. Remember that complacency is your worst enemy.

If you’re comfortable, if you’re rolling along without having to really think, if you haven’t had to challenge yourself, if you know that everyone is going to approve of what you’ve done — you’re wasting your time. Writing done from a position of comfort will never say anything worthwhile.

10. Remember that fear is your best friend.

If your heart is beating fast and your palms are sweating and your mouth is dry, you’re writing from the part of yourself that has something to say that will be worth hearing. Persevere. I’ve never written anything that I’ve really loved that didn’t have me, during many portions of the manuscript, on the edge of my seat from nerves, certain that I couldn’t carry off what I was trying to do, certain that if I did I would so embarrass myself that I’d never be able to show my face in public again — and I kept writing anyway.

At the heart of everything that you’ve ever read that moved you, touched you, changed your life, there was a writer’s fear. And a writer’s determination to say what he had to say in spite of that fear.

So be afraid. Be very afraid. And then thank your fear for telling you that what you’re doing, you’re doing right.

Voice is born from a lot of words and a lot of work — but not just any words or any work will do. You have to bleed a little. You have to shiver a little. You have to love a lot — love your writing, love your failures, love your courage in going on in spite of them, love every small triumph that points toward eventual success. You already have a voice. It’s beautiful, it’s unique, it’s the voice of a best-seller. Your job is to lead it from the darkest of the dark places and the deepest of the deep waters into the light of day.

Notes: The Next 50 Years

In The Next 50 Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible, science fiction writer John Shirley talks about where we are now and where we're headed.

It's worth remembering that he is a science fiction writer, so there's a lot he talks about in this article that I feel is a bit "out there" (or at least several hundred years off), but the highlighted points below stood out as particularly thought-provoking.

I believe in the power of human good and in natures ability to find natural ways of correcting imbalances, but I also feel that our growing mastery over the elements and our growing usage of technology is tampering with those natural checks and balances; we're putting more responsibility in our hands without actually accepting the responsibility.

Addiction to social media, videogames, cell phones and the internet is now a recognized phenomena and that has implications for our relationship to future tech. Because its addictive capacity will only increase as its experiential quality improves.

It's strange—most of our technology is about extending our reach... but paradoxically, we're in danger of a relationship to technology that actually cuts us off from one another. Cartoonists already caricature families who sit together talking to everyone but each other on their plethora of devices...

...

The real singularity will be simply an unprecedented cybernetic intelligence explosion to many orders of magnitude, combined with astronomically improved interactivity—but the Kurzweilian singularity that allows us to interface with machines until, in his words, "there will be no distinction between human and machine" , will not come about sustainably because the psychological and social consequences would be so dire.

People who are quadroplegic have noted that they feel less emotion than they did, when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into electronics reduces our relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.

And empathy may be a precious commodity in the future. Most people unconsciously cut off their empathy when they're feeling endangered — when the population increases to 8 and 9 and 10 billion, we may instinctively become, as a race, proportionately less empathetic — unless, with self-observation and cognitive therapy, we actively struggle against that kind of degeneracy.

...

Mastery of technology must include acknowledgement of its dark side. Mastery of technology means accepting of limitations. Limitations have value, eg limiting electricity to what will work for a particular power line means electrical flow isn't wasted. Water is good; a flood usually isn't. Technology too needs limits.

An invention which pollutes is only partly invented. And a lot of the time we rush into technology so quickly we don't realize it's going to pollute... It was recently discovered that every time a garment made from synthetic fabric goes through the wash, it lets go of thousands of tiny plastic fibers which end up fouling coastal environments throughout the globe. No one expected that. No one thought that form of manufacture through.

...

It's time for a new philosophy of technology—one that acknowledges its dark side and thinks pro actively about the consequences of new technology so that technology can be tweaked and negative consequences prepared for. Technology needs to evolve a conscience.

...

Only world government — not an autocratic one, but a world governance committed to human rights, the rights of women (which are integral to population control), and environmental justice — can deal with the kinds of international crises that will arise in an environmentally stricken and overpopulated world. World government will not mean anyone gives up their culture, except the bits that reject human rights; it will not be a great gray conformity; there will still be at least as much national sovereignty, for most issues, as states in Europe have in the EU — and remember that the EU, a fuzzy foreshadowing of world government, is in a very early stage. It's having problems, and that was inevitable as it's still evolving. But it does have the right idea. Toward the end of the 21st century the world will move toward a framework of consensus, on some basic rules regarding population growth, the environment, and access to technology. Empowering third world people with education and technology will give them a step toward the resources and coping ability they'll need to survive.

I believe we'll achieve a collective progressive consciousness as a result of the revelatory shocks we'll endure in the next fifty years. We'll learn... we'll come to understand that we can't treat Spaceship Earth as a party cruise ship.

Notes: David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

This article in the Wall Street Journal was adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.

Although the concepts are a bit difficult to follow at times, they're incredibly insightful, especially the whole point about how much our perspective influences the way we see the world around us.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

...

If you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

Dreaming big or just big enough?

If you always felt you were born to do something big, something really, really big -- something so big that your existence would end up shifting human history and leaving a dent in the fabric of time -- what would you do? 

Would you think about what your best career options were, what things you were good at, and go from there?

Would you stress out over money or financial concerns or hunker down and save your money?

Would you focus on doing things that made you comfortable or ensured that people would like you?

Would you limit your focus to things that you could achieve this lifetime?

Would you be realistic?

Or would you think about the biggest, most crazy thing you could imagine? Something that seemed so unlikely for a single human being to achieve but that, when you thought about it or talked about it, filled you with spine-tingling, eye-watering, goosebump-making surges of energy that seemed to emanate from some unknown source deep inside?

That thing that despite being so unrealistic and crazy lingered on your mind, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

If you ever asked me in person to share my biggest dream, I'd probably tell you that I would like to reach the end of my life and see humanity more connected and forward-looking, to have an end to poverty, hunger, and inequality at least somewhere in sight, and to know that my actions played at least a small role in making that movement happen.

But if you asked me again, what's my biggest, craziest, most wild dream, I'd likely change my answer.

I'd tell you that I'd like to see humanity not only more connected and in tune with nature, but also exploring and stretching off planet Earth. I'd want to stand on planet Mars before I die and feel that humanity as a whole finally recognizes its precious potential. 

I'd like to witness the beginnings of humanity-level cooperation taking place, pushing the human species forward together to eliminate silly things like poverty, hunger, and inequality so that we, as a species, can move on to bigger and more important things like exploring the universe, not just the universe around us, but also within us.

This is Star Trek type stuff, yes, but if you really asked me what my biggest, craziest dream was, that's what I'd honestly tell you. I'd like to know that I played a part in moving the human race forward, towards something that my intuition tells me we'll eventually arrive at anyway.

But you'd never guess any of that reading my writing or even communicating with me online. In fact, very few of my actions in life really reflect that level of thinking.

Why? 

Because I gave up on that dream long ago. It was too unrealistic, too "out there". If I was going to use my potential for something great, why would I throw it at something so preposterous?

Following that thinking was always a series of justifications, a train of logical reasoning to back up the impossibility of that thinking:

"I'd need to become heavily involved in entrepreneurship and business and investing and money... I just don't like any of those enough to do something big with them."

"I'd probably need an engineering degree and that would be too much of a time commitment... I'm too old and my time is running out fast."

"If I failed to achieve my dream, I will have wasted my time and energy."

"If I fail, all my potential, my whole life, will have been for nothing."

"Nobody else is doing this kind of stuff -- or even attempting it -- so it must be unachievable and silly to even consider."

I've gone through this process more times than I can count -- throughout my whole life -- often justifying the process itself by telling myself that some dreams really are just too big, but that it's healthy to think about them anyway. 

However something changed in the past year. Before I returned home from India last year, I won a chance to see one of the last Space Shuttle launches in Florida. 

That experience led me to connect with a whole new circle of friends who were passionate about space and who lived with those futuristic dreams on their minds every single day. 

Those events led to my learning about Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal who, with a real passion not focused on being entrepreneurial and making money but for making humanity a multi-planetary species, went on to found SpaceX, now the leading private space company in the world.

Yes! That's exactly what I should be doing! But (and here's where the fear and self-doubt steps in)...

"That's just not me..."

"Space exploration is so disconnected from the immediate humanitarian needs here on Earth that I really care about..."

"I can't possibly focus on addressing world poverty if I'm focused on getting people into space..."

"Elon Musk was rich and had tons of money to start with... I'd be starting with nothing and that would make it impossible..."

But Elon is moving the human race forward.

He's chasing his seemingly impossible dream because that's what he believes he should be doing. He's running his business the way he believes it should be run, telling employees and investors face-to-face that he and his business are not in it for the money but for the legacy of humanity.

In the past year I've connected with so many people who are fascinated with space and I've learned about people like Elon who are taking their dreams and pushing them forward. 

All of this has rekindled within me the "impossible" dreams that I've held inside for so long. It's made me reconsider them and start asking myself questions about what I'm doing and why I'm here on Earth.

Why can't I become someone who builds businesses that determine their success not based on monetary profit but rather on the welfare of the human species as a whole? 

A space company that addresses humanitarian needs? Why not? So what if nobody else has done it or if nobody thinks it would work.

Steve Jobs said, "stay hungry, stay foolish". Perhaps to really stay hungry we need to chase dreams that are unrealistic and seemingly impossible; perhaps to stay foolish we need to believe in dreams that seem a little crazy but that call to us, like a whisper from the future, asking us to do the impossible.

Notes: Book Highlights from The Pursuit of Elegance

"What made the Sopranos finale one of the most-talked-about events in television history? Why is sudoku so addictive and the iPhone so irresistible? What do Jackson Pollock and Lance Armstrong have in common with theoretical physicists and Buddhist monks? Elegance."

I recently finished reading The Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing by Matthew May, a book that gave me so much insight into what elegance really is. I'm sharing my highlights from the book below.

I read books almost exclusively on my Kindle and I love that I can highlight passages in the books as I'm reading and have those highlights synced to my Kindle profile.

(The location numbers below let you find the highlight when reading the book on the Kindle.)

the full power of elegance is achieved when the maximum impact is exacted with the minimum input. (Read more at location 91)

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit—to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life. (Read more at location 132)

as Henry David Thoreau once observed, if you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications. (Read more at location 157)

Because by nature we tend to add when we should subtract, and act when we should stop and think. Because we need some way to consistently replace value-destroying complexity with value-creating simplicity. Because we need to know how to make room for more of what matters by eliminating what doesn't. (Read more at location 179)

What is Donald Knuth's definition of elegance? "Symmetrical, pleasingly memorable, spare—with the ease and immortal ring of an E=mc2."Read more at location 258)

Symmetry. Seduction. Subtraction. Sustainability. These are the key elements of elegance—the laws that can help us harness the power of the missing piece. (Read more at location 297)

Symmetry helps us solve problems of structure, order, and aesthetics. We are natural-born symmetry seekers. Most of nature, with its infinitely repeating patterns, is symmetrical. It is present in nearly every living thing, and we generally equate symmetry with beauty and balance. In fact, a number of studies have found that most people find symmetrical faces more attractive. But symmetry isn't limited to biology. Symmetry is where mathematics, nature, science, and art come together. We are adept at noticing a lack of symmetry, which is why we can exploit it to our advantage—when someone experiences a degree of asymmetry, they naturally want to "fill in" the obviously missing piece. It's the nature of symmetry that enables us to find solutions given only partial information. When symmetry comes into play, what appears to be missing isn't. It's at once absent, and yet present. (Read more at location 298)

When, for example, Sopranos viewers were robbed of a standard story structure—a beginning, middle, and end—they were initially distraught. But when reassured by the story creator himself that the missing piece was "all there," they went in search of an ending—the "truth"—to restore their perceived loss of symmetry. Symmetry allowed you to complete the letter E earlier, and the role of symmetry in Sudoku is clear. (Read more at location 305)

Seduction addresses the problem of creative engagement. It captivates any attention and activates any imagination. The power of suggestion is often stronger than that of full disclosure. Leaving something to the imagination, open to interpretation, creates an irresistible aura of mystery, and we are compelled to find answers. The seduction is in what we don't know. What we don't know far outweighs what we do, and we are naturally curious; we are easily drawn to the unknown, precisely because it is unknown. What isn't there drives us to resolve our curiosity. (Read more at location 309)

Subtraction helps us solve the problem of economy. Doing less, conserving, doesn't come naturally. Humans are natural-born adders, hard-wired to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. Perhaps that's why Costco is so successful—something about taking home thirty-six rolls of toilet tissue makes us feel especially secure. And therein lies the conundrum. The same penchant we have to "fill in," to add, is exactly why elegance, being subtractive, is so elusive. Whether we're talking about a product, a performance, a market, or an organization, our addiction to addition results in inconsistency, overload, or waste, and sometimes all three. We all face these types of problems. It is how we handle them that enables or prevents elegance. Do we really gain through loss? Can we actually add value by subtracting?Read more at location 321)

When we use the word elegant, we're describing a solution that is as surprisingly powerful as it is uncommonly simple: it goes to the heart of a wickedly complex problem with such laser-like clarity that it leaves no doubt that the solution is the right one, or at the very least a long way down the right road. Elegant solutions solve intractable problems once and for all without causing further ones. Put another way, not everything simple is elegant, but everything elegant is simple. (Read more at location 357)

Most people are also at least somewhat familiar with another kind of symmetry, the rotational kind of symmetry exhibited by, say, a snowflake, sphere, or starfish. In addition to its mirror-reflection symmetry qualities, if you rotate a sphere around any axis going through its center, it appears to be the same sphere. (Read more at location 408)

mathematician Hermann Weyl defined it in his seminal 1952 book, Symmetry: "A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before."Read more at location 415)

Scientists and artists agree that symmetry bridges any gap between the two seemingly disparate fields and holds the power to reconcile that which we normally think of as personal, emotional, and subjective—aesthetic beauty (proverbially being in the eye of the beholder)—with what we normally think of as impersonal, rational, and objective: the truth. Symmetry is such a fundamental characteristic of the natural world—of the universe as we believe it to be—and plays such a big role in whatever we think or do, that we often overlook its importance. Until it's absent. (Read more at location 422)

Thus, the final questions Taylor confronted were these: given the overwhelming appeal of Pollock's paintings—one of his last drip paintings, Blue Poles, is valued at well over $40 million—do people prefer fractal patterns over nonfractal ones? If so, does the fractal dimension range Pollock painted within, and that nature exhibits, represent some sort of ideal? If so, the implications might be enormous. The short answer to Taylor's questions is yes. Since 2000, Richard Taylor has conducted dozens of visual perception experiments, with rather fascinating results. In a survey of 120 people to see whether fractal patterns are preferred over nonfractals, 113 people chose the fractals. In several tests involving 220 participants, subjects were shown more than forty different fractal patterns from a number of different sources. Universal preference was given to images with fractal dimensions between 1.3 and 1.5, irrespective of how the fractals were generated—computer, Pollock paintings, nature photographs, or Pollockizer. Today, all of those mesmerizing screensavers on your computer are dynamic fractals roughly in that range. (Read more at location 653)

Hans Monderman believed that traffic controls do not, and cannot, create that kind of behavior, but rather that you have to build it into the design of the road. As he told the Times in the August 22, 2004, Sunday edition: "Treat people like zombies and they'll behave like zombies. But treat them as intelligent, and they'll respond intelligently." What Monderman is saying is exactly what Jackson Pollock was saying, only in different words: when you are fully involved in a process governed by very simple relationship rules, a natural inclination takes over, and a self-organized pattern emerges that is far more orderly than anything legislation could produce. Under those circumstances, you're connected and interacting with what's around you. Lose that connection, and a mess ensues. Hans Monderman thought that traffic controls sever us entirely from the very connections we need to travel safely and they amount to admitting defeat in achieving good road design. That raises the most important question of all: What are the dynamics under which these natural symmetries can develop?Read more at location 793)

travel controls give a false sense of security, an illusion of safety, which is "the biggest mistake we can make. Traffic rules strip us of our capacity for socially responsible behavior, our ability to be considerate. The greater the number of prescriptions, the more the sense of personal responsibility dwindles."Read more at location 811)

What he means is that how we behave is ultimately governed by our surroundings and the cultural signals that go along with them. So by removing clear boundaries and blending street with sidewalk, you create a social context for behavior based on the environment itself. In a space shared equally by drivers, bikers, and walkers, the right-of-way priority disappears, replaced by good judgment and common sense in interpreting the simplest of governing core values required of any working relationship: respect for others. (Read more at location 816)

"What's wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations," Hamilton-Baillie says. "If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn't need most of the things we build." To his point, in spite of the billions spent each year around the world on installing and maintaining traffic controls, there is absolutely no comprehensive research anywhere to demonstrate the benefits of traffic signals—in either the context of traffic flow or safety—but there are a number of studies showing their detrimental effect. (Read more at location 823)

"We have a sophisticated ability to handle complex situations far beyond what traditional engineering assumes," states Ben. "Signs and lines only inhibit the way we work as social creatures. They reduce our extraordinary ability to read and respond to situations appropriately, because the more evidence there is of legislated control, the less we think we have to be involved, to use our own senses."Read more at location 841)

The famous poet Fujiwara Teika developed the equivalent of non finito in his verse, believing that "the poet who has begun a thought must be able to end it so masterfully that a rich space of suggestions unfolds in the imagination of his audience."Read more at location 990)

Jobs revealed that a stop-doing strategy figured centrally into Apple's approach: "We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done."Read more at location 1066)

Curiosity—aka the need to know—is part of what's behind the impact of not just the iPhone strategy, but also of elegance and the missing piece in general. (Read more at location 1082)

Berlyne determined four primary external stimuli that arouse curiosity: complexity, novelty, uncertainty, and conflict (defined as the violation of expectations). He also discovered that there's a specific trigger point for curiosity: if the level of stimulation is too low, there's no real motivation to explore; if it's too high, the result is anxiety and avoidance. In other words, in order for something to motivate us to act on our curiosity, it needs to hit a kind of "sweet spot" for one or more of the four stimuli. (Read more at location 1095)

gap—when we perceive there to be a gap in our knowledge, we feel deprived, a feeling we label as curiosity. And it's our desire to alleviate that feeling that motivates us to obtain the missing information. How deeply deprived we feel is relative to how we perceive the gap. It all depends on how much we know and how much we want to know. (Read more at location 1111)

The first is to arouse curiosity by demonstrating a moderate gap in the observer's knowledge. Second, provide just enough information to make them want to resolve their curiosity. Third, give them time to try to resolve their curiosity on their own. (Read more at location 1179)

focusing only on what we already know can limit our ability to think more expansively. (Read more at location 2135)

"What's wrong with how we engineer things is that most of what we accept as the proper order of things is based on assumptions, not observations. If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn't need most of the things we build."Read more at location 2139)

Just before he became mayor of New York City in 1994, Rudy Giuliani attended an all-day seminar on "Broken Windows" policing methods at a think tank called the Manhattan Institute, where George Kelling was a fellow. As mayor, Giuliani hired Bratton as chief of police, and a more far-reaching effort to shut down small crimes in New York City began. Manhattan's infamous "squeegee men"—petty perpetrators of forced vehicle windshield cleaning, followed by demands for money—were tossed in jail. Drug dealers were frisked and arrested for carrying guns. Graffiti was cleaned up, broken windows fixed, litter removed, and the petty criminals dwindled in ranks as they became the center of police attention. Day by day, month by month, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, the number of arrests for smaller crimes rose. As they did, the rates of the more serious crimes dropped, quickly and sharply. A new vitality took hold. Before the Giuliani/Bratton campaign, 125th Street in Harlem didn't have a supermarket or a movie theater. Today you'll find Magic Johnson Theaters, Pathmark, The Gap, Barnes & Noble, Disney Store, and the office of former U.S. president William J. Clinton. (Read more at location 2161)

Toyota employees know that fact-based problem solving and visual management is at the heart of every decision and that true knowledge comes from clear, accurate, firsthand observation—of customers, of operations, of products. Both Toyota and William Bratton would agree with the wisdom of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective, Sherlock Holmes, who, when asked by sidekick Dr. Watson whether he had formed a theory shortly after arriving at the scene of the crime, said: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has the facts. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts." Similarly, at Toyota, marketing reports and focus groups are all well and good, but those are just data, and while data may indicate the facts, there is no substitute for being in the field to gain true insight into problems facing customers and employees. Likewise, if you're a copper in Bratton's rank-and-file, you know that you need to be on top of what's going on no matter what your beat, and the only way to do that is to be out there not just looking, but seeing. (Read more at location 2205)

In the factory, a new associate in a Toyota plant is sometimes asked to observe a particular operation while standing within a circle drawn on the floor, known as an "Ohno circle," named for the engineering pioneer Taiichi Ohno. Ohno often would draw a circle on the floor in the middle of a bottleneck area and make a line employee stand in that circle all day to watch the process, directing them to observe and ask Why? over and over. Ohno believed that new thoughts and better ideas do not come out of the blue, they come from a true understanding of the process. Typically what happens during this exercise is that you quickly become familiar with the process, and start to see problems, gaps. Because you can't move or take action, you start to ask Why is this occurring? Finally, you come to understand the root cause. Then, and only then, can you offer a solution. When the person would report to Ohno any observations made, problems discovered, and solutions recommended—as well as the rationale for them—Ohno would just look at the person and say, "Is that so?" By requiring keen observation before action, by demanding that one look beyond the obvious surface symptoms to better see the deeper causes, by never giving answers and only asking questions, Ohno taught people to stop and think. (Read more at location 2260)

A sustainable idea is the visible outcome of viewing finite resources as scarce and precious—an opportunity to think anew—and exploiting the one eternal source of creativity and innovation: observation. (Read more at location 2294)

It seems that if we can stop, look, and think long enough to ask the right questions and fight our natural tendency to arrive at an immediate answer, we will find ourselves in a better position to see the elegant solution. For many of us, though, it is answers that have consumed our thoughts since we were first-graders. Perhaps it's worth revisiting Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Elephant's Child": I keep six honest serving-men; (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest. (Read more at location 2299)

Most people recognize the eureka! moments of legendary insight—Archimedes' discovery of volume displacement occurring during a bath, Einstein's theory of special relativity coming to him in a daydream, and Friedrich von Stradonitz's discovering the round shape of the benzene ring after dreaming of a snake biting its tail. The more you look into how groundbreaking solutions came about, the more you realize how much they share a common element. Philo Farnsworth was plowing a field as a teenager in 1921 when the idea for projecting moving images line by line came to him as he gazed out over the even rows, prompting him to use his knowledge of electrons and vacuum tubes and invent the first electronic television. Richard Feynman was watching someone throw a plate in the air in Cornell University's cafeteria in 1946 when the wobbling plate with its red school medallion spinning around sparked the Nobel Prize–winning idea for quantum electrodynamics. Kary Mullis, another Nobel winner, was driving along a California highway in 1983 when the chemistry behind the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) came to him, stopping him in the middle of the road. In 1995, car designer Irwin Liu sketched the innovative new lines of what became the shape of the first Toyota Prius after helping his child with an elementary school science project involving the manipulation of hard-boiled eggs. Author J. K. Rowling was traveling on a train between Manchester and London in 1990, thinking about the plot of a novel, when the character of Harry Potter flashed in her mind—she was able to work out all the details of a children's story without so much as a pen and paper. Shell Oil engineer Jaap Van Ballegooijen's idea for a snake oil drill came in 2005 as he was watching his son Max turn his bendy straw upside down to better sip around the sides and bottom of his malt glass. The common element in all of these eureka moments is a quiet mind, severed for a time from the problem at hand. Most artists, musicians, writers, and other creatives instinctively know that the incubation of great ideas involves seemingly unproductive times, but that those downtimes and timeouts are important ingredients of immensely productive, creative periods. Until fairly recently, the how, when, and why of being kissed by the muse was something of a myth and mystery. But now researchers examining how the human brain solves problems can confirm that experiencing a creative insight—that sudden aha! flash—hinges on the ability to synthesize connections between seemingly disparate things. And a key factor in achieving that is physical or mental time away from the problem. New studies show that creative revelations tend to come when the mind is engaged in an activity unrelated to the issue at hand. Pressure is not conducive to recombining knowledge in new and different ways, the defining mark of creativity. (Read more at location 2332)

While no one yet knows what exactly that process is, what is important to know is that putting pressure on ourselves to speed up or artificially influence our brains to work harder, or more intensely, or more quickly, only slows down our ability to arrive at new insights. Ironically, when we let go, when we escape, either physically or mentally, we actually speed up the transformational processes. (Read more at location 2363)

Notes: Haiku Economics

Will our successors, perhaps hundreds of years from now, better understand the link between art, life, emotion, and economics? This article on money, metaphor, and the invisible hand offers a hint at that possibility.

"If you were to trace the separation of art from life historically," says the poet Etheridge Knight in an interview, "you would trace it back to the Greeks when Plato and others made the 'head thing' the ideal... There was a separation between reason and emotion."

[...]

"Generally speaking, a people’s metaphors and figures of speech will come out of their basic economy," Knight continues:

"If somebody lives near the ocean and they fish, their language will be full of those metaphors. If people are farmers, they will use that kind of figure of speech. Metaphors are alive. When they come into being, they are informed by the politics and the sociology and the economy of now. That’s how language is."

That's how economic language is, too, but with a surprising difference. And this is where poets can help to fix the economy. It turns out that economic theory is overly dependent on fictional devices, whereas poetry, as Knight shows, trucks in the real.

Notes: End up at the right destination

I've long resisted using social media in a way that didn't match how I socialized offline (which is to say, not very much). Despite all the online advice telling me I needed to be heavily involved in social media to grow online, I've refrained from this because it didn't feel true to my core.

This bit from a recent letter by Thom Chambers, How to be Antisocial and Become a Better Writer (subscription required), explains succinctly what I felt intuitively:

Your business is your chance to create your very own utopia, your ideal lifestyle. When it comes to your writing, it’s far more honest to have a setup that you want to maintain indefinitely. If you were a best-selling author, would you tweet?

The answer to that may be "yes", in which case great. But if you’re just putting on a facade of sociability in order to build an audience, then two things will happen. One, you’ll build the wrong sort of readership who come to expect you to be someone you don’t enjoy being. And two, you’ll probably get found out.

Being antisocial might very well mean it takes longer to get where you want to go. But at least you’ll end up at the right destination.