Category: Life Design

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Life Design

The disrupted and the deliberate

I used to think that disruptions in habits were temporary. One things got back to normal, I’d automatically go back to my regular schedule. I’ve discovered quite powerfully that that isn’t necessarily the case.

I fell ill in April 2018 for a couple of weeks and never really got back to my workout routine that I had built up over years, a routine I persisted with even through mental illness.

Earlier this year, some major disruptions caused changes to my sleep schedule. The disruption has passed but my sleep schedule has remained shifted by a few hours. This was a schedule I’d developed as a child and stuck through adulthood to middle age.

And also in 2018, I finished no books, an extraordinary feat for me – I’d read at least a couple of dozen books a year since my teens. But I’ve found it hard since to get absorbed in a book from start to finish – and I had, until now, known no other way.

Just like it had been with sleeping early, quickly and well, just like with being in shape had.

I’m reconstructing each of those habits once again. There are several frameworks to help, such as Atomic Habits. More than anything else, though, is the hard realisation that each of these is going to be a journey, one that requires me to be deliberate at and with each step. Habits that are knocked out of orbit by disruptions don’t just wobble back into their old trajectories, they need to be trained to revolve around our selves once again.

Categories
Life Design Wellness when Always-On

Social connections and “a lifelong journey together”

This New York Times article from three years ago describes the degree to which strong social bonds with people who share similar interests improve one’s longevity.

One example is Okinawa, Japan, far south of the country’s main islands:

… a place where the average life expectancy for women is around 90, the oldest in the world, people form a kind of social network called a moai — a group of five friends who offer social, logistic, emotional and even financial support for a lifetime.

In a moai, the group benefits when things go well, such as by sharing a bountiful crop, and the group’s families support one another when a child gets sick or someone dies. They also appear to influence one another’s lifelong health behaviors.

“Traditionally, their parents put them into moais when they are born, and they take a lifelong journey together.”

That’s not the only reason Okinawans live longer than even the average Japanese – diet and genetics seem to play their part too – but social practices seem to be the third pillar of their longevity.

This National Geographic article from last year, which touches briefly on each of these three factors, also mentions moais.

Takashi Inafuku, head of one of Ogimi’s districts, belongs to two moai—one with a group of school friends and another with former co-workers. “They are places where you can exchange information and communicate with others,” he says. “I think that participating in moai, having a common hobby and releasing stress, can help promote longevity.”

And that

“loneliness is as bad for you as smoking.”

Image: National Geographic

While the forced isolation of the last nearly two years has had a devastating effect on people’s mental health, I have observed clearly that those with such strong social connections have fared better during this period. Often, such connections had been built and nurtured electronically even before the pandemic, and so weren’t buffeted as much by it.

(ends)

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Life Design

Own-goals

When we obsess over our goals, we can easily sacrifice what makes those goals meaningful in the first place. 

– The Surprising Science of Goal Setting (And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong)

It’s a good article, like a lot of Mark Manson’s work. Particularly whether our goals are aligned with our values.

That, of course, presupposes that we’re aware of our values in the first place. That’s a whole other exercise, and uses a different part of the brain than goal-setting does.

We don’t usually think about or acknowledge our values to ourselves. I think that’s because by the time we establish our own independent lives, we’ve already made several commitments: a degree, a city, a job, a house (often relative to the job), loans, maybe a spouse. Each of those comes with its constraints – in the case of the spouse, their own (often tacit) values.

I think we implicitly grok that our values, even if unacknowledged to our own selves, are already in conflict with many, most, of these commitments. That’s why our goals are, from day one, typically misaligned with our values.

Most of our twenties and some of our thirties are about realising this. The rest of our thirties and forties are us fashioning an ersatz compromise between who we are and who we really are. And that’s probably why people really only begin to chill after that.

Spending over half our lives in this muddle is both uniquely human and inhuman. Those of us lucky enough to have youth before us than behind should have an honest conversation with ourselves. Having subsequent conversations with those close to us won’t be easy, but it’ll be inevitable.

The payoff, then, is having a set of goals that we viscerally believe in. It is indescribably freeing – a feeling too many of us haven’t yet felt.

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Discovery and Curation Life Design The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Life pre-internet

This question on Reddit had a bunch of answers that I think are worth reflecting on.

”People old enough to remember life pre-Internet, what are some less obvious things you miss about that time?”

Work-life balance

“Leaving home and just being gone for the day. No cell phones.”

Mind-wandering

“I miss spacing out. Like, you could legit just sit on a bench or ride a bus and space out completely, letting your mind wander into those creative zones. Now phones/tech makes it much harder to get there.”

“Having an idea, finding a new hobby or skillset or project to work on, going to the library or bookstore to educate yourself about it, start learning and growing and excited about a new passion. Now… you look it up online, realize there’s a bunch of people who are wayyy better at it than you will ever be, and so you immediately give up out of discouragement. :\”

Presence

“If there were cameras, it was really different. You used them to take pictures of things or had people take pictures of you. But there was no social media to preoccupy your mind. It was just doing something. And whoever you were with, was who you were with.“

“My former housemate – who is twenty years younger than me – and I both left our phones at home by accident one day. So we kept on keeping on doing the days activities. Some errands and some wandering around. At one point, she turned to me and said “So this is what the 80s were like?”

“We weren’t getting texts all the time. No constant robocalls and spam e-mails. No expectation of instant reply 24/7. No constant stress or pressure. We were just there enjoying the moment and the simple stuff.”

The news cycle

“News only being on at 6pm. That was it. Now we have 6 hours of local news and 24 hours of cable news. Not being bombarded all day with “news.” And when you saw “Breaking News” on the screen you knew some serious shit went down.”

A curious one for me was one about identity:

“The ability to start over. I moved a lot, every move I could reinvent myself, bookworm, punk, preppie, I got to try out lots of aspects of my personality and my past wasn’t a factor.”

and its reply “I think especially when young it’s genuinely damaging to be locked into an identity by the stuff you have said / done years ago. How are we supposed to grow? Also being judged by the norms of a previous era which are not cool now.”

Categories
Life Design Wellness when Always-On

“Feel awesome in the morning”

A question asked on Twitter about what one could to do “to feel awesome in the morning” had interesting and commonsense replies. Here are some of both:

https://twitter.com/edwardsorado/status/1391512730654314496?s=21
In my experience, waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle ruins a whole day. A major downside of alarms, and why apps like Sleep Cycle are helpful.
Yep. A good eye mask and ear plugs are among the most valuable cheap things I have bought.
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Investing Life Design

“Money has no utility to me. Time has utility to me.”

This doesn’t just apply to someone who is ninety years old. Warren can use money to free up his time so he can do what he likes – which in his case happens to be making money.

What we do with our time will be different for you and me [1], but as Morgan Housel said in his book The Psychology of Money, Time is the highest dividend money pays. The sooner we internalise that, the sooner we will understand why we trudge to work to make money.

[1] Discovering what you’d do if you could do anything with your time is a journey in itself.

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Investing Life Design Personal Finance

Building a good relationship with money

I recommend reading the book Psychology of Money. It’s an easy, straightforward way to build a good relationship with money. I have many Kindle highlights from when I read the book recently; here are a couple.

What money does:

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.” People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time. To obtain, bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from unspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it. A small amount of wealth means the ability to take a few days off work when you’re sick without breaking the bank. Gaining that ability is huge if you don’t have it. A bit more means waiting for a good job to come around after you get laid off, rather than having to take the first one you find. That can be life changing. Six months’ emergency expenses means not being terrified of your boss

What you should know about saving and using your money:

Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. That’s different from saying you should aim to earn the highest returns or save a specific percentage of your income. Some people won’t sleep well unless they’re earning the highest returns; others will only get a good rest if they’re conservatively invested. To each their own.

There are basic principles that must be adhered to—this is true in finance and in medicine—but important financial decisions are not made in spreadsheets or in textbooks. They are made at the dinner table. They often aren’t made with the intention of maximizing returns, but minimizing the chance of disappointing a spouse or child.

Wealth is what you don’t see… Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.

Also on this subject: the excellently written Money is the Megaphone of Identity.

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Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Life Design Making Money Online Wellness when Always-On

When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else

A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.

The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.

It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:

Understanding attention scarcity

He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.

This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

Understanding attention hijacking

“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”

[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”

“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

Politics and Attention

Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…

Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.

he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,

“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”

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Life Design Product Management Startups

Authenticity

Mundane as it sounds, that’s the most powerful motivator of all, not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be genuinely interested in what you’re building. This is what really drives billionaires, or at least the ones who become billionaires from starting companies. The company is their project.

One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do.

That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies. So that’s what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. 

– Paul Graham, “Billionaires Build”

This is actually harder than it sounds. Authenticity is rare. If we could assume that everyone we met was authentic, navigating personal, professional and other spheres would be a lot less stressful for most of us.

But it is also because authenticity is so rare that it is such a powerful signalling mechanism with go-to-market, customer engagement, and especially hiring. I have seen each of these first-hand.

Categories
Life Design

Extreme negative incentives

If I did drink any alcohol between the beginning of October and October 28th, which was my wife’s birthday, I would have to donate $100 to the Trump campaign for every drink, and post a screenshot of the donation on Twitter. Since I didn’t really want to do that, and I knew it would not be particularly popular socially, it became a good motivator for the whole month and I was able to stick to my goal.

– The Health Stack – with Nat Eliason