SCHEDULING FAILURE

December 11th, 2018

Progress on any front in life feels great.  It’s clearly one of the best feelings we can have, and it seems to stay aloft, or rather keep our spirits aloft quite a bit longer than the quick pitfall pleasures we encounter everyday, like donuts, T.V. and social feeds.

Pairing our hard-won progress against quick pleasures, we can see that they are actually inverses of one another.

The hard-won progress begins with difficulty, frustration, and even pain, but results in an elation with a decently spread half-life.

The quick pleasure on the other hand, starts with the pleasure, that is generally quick, fleeting and followed by a long and somewhat painful payment.  Anyone who has had a bad hangover can remember pondering the previous night and wondering if it was all worth it.

This inversion is not a difficult one to realize, but figuring out how to choose the more rewarding of the two is not so apparent.  Many brain processes paradoxically seem geared to lead us astray from forging paths to a sense of fulfillment. 

If we look at that hard-won progress, we might breakdown what our thoughts are like just before attempting to do this hard work.

Is there an expectation that we will achieve what we’re setting out to do?  What happens when the day comes to an end and we have toiled for hours on a problem that just doesn’t yield it’s solution?  We might think that expectation is our driver, our motivation, but it is a ripe recipe for disappointment.

While such self-expectation, perhaps passed down from some tiger parents, work for some people, it’s clearly a stressful sort of pressure-cooker.  We would do well to wonder if there are easier and potentially more efficient ways of achieving similar progress.

One curious way might be to find a way to deflate the concept of ‘failure’.  This is a big one, the fear of which keeps so many people from every attempting anything outside of a fixed routine.

If we play the thought experiment on ourselves, by asking: what would happen if I was completely, utterly and totally comfortable with failure, would I be more likely to try more things, or less likely?

Often the phrase “what would you do if you were guaranteed not to fail?” is tossed around as an ineffective way of motivating people to find better paths.    But this question is an absolute farce.  It’s akin to asking “where would you fly if you were superman?”.  It’s a nice question to contemplate, but it has no basis in reality.  The question requires a dangerous suspension of disbelief.  We are never guaranteed to undertake anything without the prospect of failure.  This is why that question is a purely unproductive joke, it only initiates day dreaming, not action.

But, what is within the realm of possibility is changing our relationship to failure.  We can, by exposing ourselves to it little by little, over and over, become comfortable with it.  Just as mountain climbers slowly acclimate to altitude by pushing higher slowly and steadily, or how weightlifters slowly inch their way towards feats of strength that would have been impossible in the beginning, so to can we push ourselves into small curious endeavors and begin to develop an acclimation to failure.

One might ask at this point, if we become so comfortable with failure, would that become a kind of self-defeating default that we seek?

No.  The reason is because sometimes we will surprise ourselves with progress.  And the elation from that tiny victory is far more powerful than anything we might achieve with a desire to become comfortable with failure.

The exercise is simply to release a sort of mental pressure that keeps one from engaging more fully with what life has on offer to do.

It’s a tricky balance to simultaneously seek progress while being comfortable with failure, but for some, actually scheduling work on projects by scheduling failure, might be a counter-intuitive help.

SLIPPERY MENTAL TERRITORY

December 10th, 2018

If we think of our internal mental world as a kind of landscape, there are certainly obvious highs and lows that we can point out. It’s interesting that our verbiage about how things are going in life actually references a sort of landscape.

The ups and downs of life,

Going through a rough patch,

Flying high,

But however we are doing in the real world boils down to some information that we have the option of taking seriously and embedding in our mind in order to effect our mental state, or not.  Our ability to feel a sense of wellbeing is really determined by our ability to navigate and manipulate an internal landscape as opposed to trying to live some story out in the real world.  It may be dangerous to explore too much of a disconnect from reality, as this is the hallmark of psychosis in many cases,

but paradoxically,

it is also the hallmark of the stoic and the buddhist, who relegates the state of one’s mind to a purely internal engine.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb once wrote: “For those..who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, I have a simple answer.  A stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says  ‘f*** you’ to fate.”

This is the epitome of balance between incorporating reality into our mental models and keeping a certain internal distance from it all in order to covet a self-generating sense of mental well-being. 

But such a sort of mental super power does not happen overnight.

Such a perspective might seem like a fairy tale paradox to someone who lives under a barrage of uncontrolled emotions. 

Human psychology is generally slow to change, but it does clearly change over the years, and given this fact, we can slowly direct that change until a fairy tale paradox is a little more at home in a mind equipped with greater clarity and calmness.

The first step might be to identify whatever slippery mental territory seems already well entrenched in our mind.

Each piece of this landscape can be edited.  This requires contemplating those dark mental processes while in a neutral state.

We might retroactively observe our anger in some sort of situation and ask what we could have done differently.  The first step to changing that landscape may be as simple as resolving to walk away from any situation that incites anger.  A walk around the block and some slow breathing can do wonders.

Or we might pause for a work out.  Even if we find our self in a work setting we can always take 5 and go find a place to bust out a few dozen push-ups. 

There are countless strategies to mitigate and restructure the parts of our mind that presents a threat to our mental wellbeing.

The first step is simply giving the whole thing some thought, with calm thoughtfulness.  Everything builds from there.`

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE BOUNCE

December 9th, 2018

Lucilius was sitting on a park bench in the city in a purely dismal state.  A large company he had slowly built over a number of years had come to a disastrous end when everything seemed to crumble from beneath.  ‘Unforeseen market forces’ was the pithy and official statement, until further notice.  Dark thoughts were filling his mind as huge portions of his brain’s neural network that had been built and devoted to the project were suddenly experiencing severe down regulation due to sudden irrelevance and the retroactive imaginative planning required to try and make sense of large mistakes in the face of a need to feel certainty.  Lucilius’ mediation habits were on a long hiatus – a further cost of the now failed endeavor, and so he was not acutely aware of this whole reality.  He could only see and feel the consuming and gnawing feeling of utter failure.

It was a beautiful spring day, but Lucilius was unable to notice any of it’s splendor.  He merely sat watching the lay of his undone shoelace draped across his fine and shiny shoe.

His dismal reverie was cleaved by a sudden thud and clack of metal.  He looked up to see a young boy on the brick walkway, a small bicycle strewn next to him.  The boy was silent, looking at his situation.  He peeled his hands from the walkway and looked at his scuffed palms, inspecting them.  He tentatively rubbed them together to clear the dirt as his mother came up to him.

“honey, you ok?”

“Yep, I try again.”

The kid got up, lifted his bicycle and mounted it.  He looked forward and pushed the bicycle, trying to catch the peddles.  He fell again, checked himself and giggled some.

“You wanna be done for today sweetie?”  The boy’s mother asked.

“No, a little more.  Then we’ll come back and do more tomorrow.”

Lucilius watched the young boy continue off with his mother walking along and watching.  He’d forgotten about his own situation during the whole interlude and now it was all soaking back into his mind.  The dread and dark worry, the sheer open ended feeling that arose from a blank tomorrow.  The young boy’s words echoed in his mind, and slowly something began to rise through all that Lucilius was feeling.  After a moment, while staring at his untied shoe, he giggled.  He looked up at the trees coming into blossom, the bright sky spilling between the branches and the fresh air moving across his skin.  He hiked up his foot to the bench and tied his shoe.  Got up and walked back into the concrete jungle, slowly shaking his head with a smile.

FRACTAL MISTAKE

December 8th, 2018

It’s a common habit to give yourself grief over mistakes, poor performance, laziness and all manner of other flaws that we can find.  If we can remember that we only have the present and that the past actually does not exist, then what exactly are we doing with the present moment when we engage in such indulgent self-castigation?

We are inevitably wasting more time making a similar mistake that can likewise be the object of ridicule by a future version of our self. 

This crops up in meditation for many people.  While meditating, the mind drifts, and eventually the meditating person realizes that the mind has drifted off on a river of thought and suddenly gets frustrated and angry with the mind for not being able to do the simple task of focusing on the breath or repeating a mantra, or whatever the instruction of the meditation is during that session.    But this frustration is yet another thought that is taking focus away from the task.

We can zoom-out from this context and see the same behavioral structure occurring at a larger scale:

When failure occurs.

What is the response?  How many people become obsessed with the failure, overwhelmed by the concurrent feelings?  Nearly no one is unfamiliar with experiencing this.  We might justify our dwelling on this failure as an attempt to figure out what went wrong with our efforts, but such analysis should be relegated into two categories, both of them quick:  Either there were obvious mistakes that can easily be remedied when we try again, or, the reasons for ‘failure’ have too many factors and variables and is therefore too difficult to figure out with a high degree of certainty, at which point it’s just best to move on and take actions that will glean more information from reality, filling in these unknown variables and giving rise to more obvious mistakes that can further more be remedied on the next attempt.

The remedy to all of this is simple but difficult:

We need only to refocus.  Whether this be with our meditative focus on breathing, or refocusing on the goal that we’ve failed to achieve with previous failed attempts.  This remedy is the opposite of ‘dwelling’ on a subject, or as it’s termed in psychology, ‘rumination.’

As a side note, the word rumination originally refers to a cow chewing.  Such herbivores chew their green food over and over and over in order to make it more digestible and this repetitive action is likened to the repetitive nature of thought when someone is dwelling on a subject.  This is essentially one way of being in a RUT or at the very least a good way of carving out an unproductive RUT to get stuck in.

This dwelling or ruminating produces nothing, it is a holding pattern.  And the only thing that can be gleaned from such an activity is the fact that it’s happening – it’s a sign that more information is needed from reality, which requires interacting with reality, i.e. just plain ol’ taking action.  This holding pattern, if occurring at the initial experience of reality – that is our thoughts – will then ramify up through all versions of reality that we can experience.

Or to put it another way, if we dwell on a subject, we take no further action.  Not only is the time for thought wasted, but the time for action is wasted, the opportunity for feedback is squandered, the chance to gain more information is lost, the universe where we would have seen a new and better way to progress in life ceases to have any possibility of existing, and then our precious gift of life is spent unfulfilled.

But to think about this is to literally invoke this tragedy,

so let’s move on.

Move on to what?  Might be the next obvious question.  A question that is potentially so large as to probably invoke fear.    Our default reaction to fear is to turn away from it, and go back to doing what we know.  On a mental level, this is akin to that holding pattern.  On a day-to-day level it might be going to the same unchallenging job day in and day out, draining our energy to the point where we feel justified binging on unhealthy food and mind-numbing T.V. shows.

What’s needed is a better question.  One that does not necessarily have an answer but pushes us in a more productive direction.

We might ask:

are my priorities as thoughtfully constructed as they could be?

am I being as useful to humanity as I could be?

do I have a capacity for innovation that I am not expressing?

am I asking myself the best questions on a regular basis?

Questions are the most powerful tool we have, and we can use them to break the fractal mistake of unproductive dwelling.  And there is a simple test to know if we are asking a good question, it’s this:

If an interesting question does not spur a change in behavior and create subsequent action, then the most productive form of this question has not yet been found.

Finding those productive questions is key to shattering the fractal mistake we make by dwelling.  Asking the right question is an art and that skill is at the core of what it means to problem solve.

Our greatest mistake can simply be to forget to ask ourselves any productive questions at all.

What questions are you asking?

This episode references Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom, Episode 128: Question, Episode 125: Rut, and Episode 92: Focus

BUILDING BEGINNER'S LUCK

December 7th, 2018

It’s a delicious farce to think that we can take on a new project and dive into it so fast, so immersively and completely that we nearly instantly start harvesting the fruits of our progress.

Such a hopeful concept is derived from the excitement we have thinking about the end result - the shiny treasure at the end of the cave of wonders, the anticipatory joy that happens with turning the first page of the next chapter.

But what if that next chapter is written in a different language?  What if it requires muscles we have never really used?  What if it’s best read with a totally different kind of logic and sense-making?

Such an immediate stagnation in progress can be demoralizing, and the juxtaposition to that initial excitement can often completely cancel out the emotional desire to continue on with the project.

How many people spend 5 minutes trying something new and then throw their hands up and say “I suck at this” ?

Almost everyone is guilty of this with something.  And it can benefit us immensely if we take the time to think of such defeat and fit it into our understanding of other endeavors where we ended up investing a lot of time to gain proficiency. By comparing the two, we can ask what the difference was, and where was the similarity?

We find ourselves in the territory of beginner’s luck here.  Few have not had the experience of trying something for the first time and achieving some immediate small success.  Such an event is delightfully surprising, almost instantly intoxicating and there is no one who can resist trying to build on that success.

Beginner’s luck, however, is probably an illusion.  Even if the immediate success is real.  The illusion comes from the idea that someone can be good at something with absolutely no preparation.  This is impossible, otherwise there would be some tiny percentage of newborns who immediately demonstrate skills that only come later in life.  All skill or ability is aggregated and compounded from previous experience.  In order for an infant to demonstrate language at an impressively early age, it is still necessary for that infant to actually hear the language.  So when beginner’s luck seems to suddenly manifest, we can be suspicious of it and ask what previously well-oiled tasks and abilities might combine to create sudden fluency in a seemingly new endeavor?   The most obvious example here is how athletes who specialize in one sport can perform better than the average population in other sports.  They have already gained great proficiency in tasks that require similar abilities.

Turning back to the event when after five minutes of effort we experience no success and no beginner’s luck and we are tempted to throw up our hands and give up.

Such an experience is actually quite an opportunity.  It represents an area where a lot of potential growth may occur because it is so different from what we are already good at.  Such a stretch is perhaps the best thing that we can do for the brain because it requires resources that seem to benefit the brain as a whole.  Research seems to indicate that continual learning throughout life shields the brain from cognitive decline to a degree.  There is also another opportunity in this situation.  One relating to our emotions and how we interpret and manage them.  While the emotion associated with wanting to give up is really unpleasant, knowing how to work through that emotion, by putting it to the side and remaining focused is in incredibly important skill, one that very few people have beginner’s luck with.

Something Babe Ruth once said gets to the heart of this matter “You cannot beat a person who will not give up.” 

If we have the ability to forge beyond our initial emotional reaction with any task, we will accomplish that task, because beyond that emotional reaction is a more intense focus, a greater purity of attention, and it is there in that place where the missing connection between parts that we study become luminous.

Building beginner’s luck is not so much a task of gaining some ability as it is changing our relationship to emotions that form roadblocks to our progress and motivation.

The entry fee to progress in any endeavor is really an emotional test, after that, success is a function of time, consistent effort, and attention.