This post was co-written with my friend Duncan Sabien, a very prolific doer of things. He had the idea of writing the article in a sort of panel-style, so we could each share our personal experiences on the subject.
Malcolm: At the CFAR alumni reunion this August, my friend Alton remarked: “You’re really self-directed and goal-oriented. How do we make more people like you?”
It didn’t take me long to come up with an answer:
“I think we need to get people to go and do things that nobody’s expecting them to do.”
Duncan: When I was maybe nine years old, I had a pretty respectable LEGO collection dropped into my lap all at once. I remember that there was one small spaceship (about 75 or 80 pieces) that I brought along to summer camp, with predictable results.
I found myself trying to piece the thing back together again, and succeeded after a long and frustrating hour. Then, to be absolutely sure, I took it completely apart and reassembled it from scratch. I did this maybe forty or fifty times over the next few weeks, for reasons which I can’t quite put my finger on, and got to where I could practically put the thing together in the dark.
These days, I have an enormous LEGO collection, made up entirely of my own designs. My advice to pretty much everyone:
At burning man this year, I spent a day exploring that question, from the inside and from the outside.
“What’s it like to be you?” I asked someone sitting at the Tea House at my camp. They said something like, “It’s awesome. My life is really great. I have all of these really good friends…” and I said “Sure, sure, but what’s it like?”
I was trying to understand, I guess, what the texture of his qualia was like. (Qualia = “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us”(wikipedia)) I was having this feeling that other people were just figures in my dream, or just characters in my story, and I think this was in part an attempt to break out of that.
I spent a few hours at the Tea House, talking with friends and strangers, trying to get glimpses into what the plots of their stories looked like, and sampling my own experiences as well. I ran into Brayden, one of my campmates, around the start of this, who told me that he was heading out. I ran into him again, hours later, just before I was heading out, and he said he was going to go sleep.
I spent a moment being present to the reality that he had had his own story happen in the space between those two tiny interactions, and that our plots had just intersected momentarily.
After I left camp, I found myself reflecting that the “What is it like to be you?” question, while pointed and interesting, wasn’t the only way to get clues about the texture of others’ experience. “How are you doing?” when asked with the right kind of tone, could actually generate some windows into the other person as well. Also, of course, off-hand remarks that people make, if you’re paying attention.
Part of my mission for that day was » read the rest of this entry »
When you think of “ultimatums”, what comes to mind?
Manipulativeness, maybe? Ultimatums are typically considered a negotiation tactic, and not a very pleasant one.
But there’s a different thing that can happen, where an ultimatum is made, but where articulating it isn’t a speech act but rather an observation. As in, the ultimatum wasn’t created by the act of stating it, but rather, it already existed in some sense.
I had a tense relationship conversation a few years ago. We’d planned to spend the day together in the park, and I was clearly angsty, so my partner asked me what was going on. I didn’t have a good handle on it, but I tried to explain what was uncomfortable for me about the relationship, and how I was confused about what I wanted. After maybe 10 minutes of this, she said, “Look, we’ve had this conversation before. I don’t want to have it again. If we’re going to do this relationship, I need you to promise we won’t have this conversation again.”
I thought about it. I spent a few moments simulating the next months of our relationship. I realized that I totally expected this to come up again, and again. Earlier on, when we’d had the conversation the first time, I hadn’t been sure. But it was now pretty clear that I’d have to suppress important parts of myself if I was to keep from having this conversation.
“…yeah, I can’t promise that,” I said.
“I guess that’s it then.”
“I guess so.”
I think a more self-aware version of me could have recognized, without her prompting, that my discomfort represented an unreconcilable part of the relationship, and that I basically already wanted to break up.
The rest of the day was a bit weird, but it was at least nice that we had resolved this. We’d realized that it was a fact about the world that there wasn’t a serious relationship that we could have that we both wanted.
I sensed that when she posed the ultimatum, she wasn’t doing it to manipulate me. She was just » read the rest of this entry »
Some things you don’t learn by being told (or telling yourself), you learn by organizing your experiences.
A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend, Ruby, over skype. Our conversation drifted to letters one might send to one’s past self, from say 1-2 years ago. Aside from the obvious tip-off’s about stock prices or romantic inclinations or lacks thereof, what would be useful to say? Ruby proposed sending his past self a list of books to read sooner. I though that was probably better than lots of other approaches (in part because it lets you send more information than you could possibly fit into a letter) but it seemed to me like there was a non-obvious challenge to doing that effectively, related to experience. There are some books that are broadly pretty mindblowing, but I’ve found that often when books really rock my world it’s because I’m particularly ripe for them at that moment. I think that trying to send a revelation to your past self, if you weren’t ready for it, might have a bit of an Archimedes’s Chronophone effect, where everything comes out sounding kind of obvious rather than insightful.
A second story: I was talking with some friends about Robert Kegan’s Constructive Developmental Theory. The structure of CDT is about shifting parts of your experience from being [thoughts you are subject to] to being [thoughts you can take as object, i.e. think about]. I’ve blogged about this here. Its content is a set of five specific subject-object stages in how people view themselves, ideas, and other people. Anyway, one of the people I was talking to has a 10-year-old daughter, and he was wondering if I had advice on how to help her go through the shifts faster. After noting that that wasn’t necessarily a good idea (I mean, it could be, but it might make her feel more distanced from her peers), I remarked that the process is complex and it’s not enough to just teach her certain things or to get her to do certain other things.
Because each subsequent shift in Kegan’s system represents not just new knowledge or understanding, but an entirely new kind of order applied to the level below. » read the rest of this entry »
Last Thursday—after my last day of classes ever—one of my classmates, Sung Cheul Hong and I found ourselves in an interesting conversation at a local craftbeer bar. At one point I asked him, “What was the most surprising thing you learned during your degree? Not necessarily from school, though it could be.”
He thought for a moment, then answered: (this is from memory, a beer and 3 days later)
I think it was… that you can just kind of decide to make things happen. I wanted to make a positive impact on campus, and I had this idea for a Product Vision Club to educate students about product management, with companies giving talks and students building and executing on their visions.
I didn’t have anyone on board, I just wrote a one pager, like what this club is about and what we are going to do this term, and made a facebook group and a public announcement… and people rolled in! An exec team, guest speakers, and of course members.
I just had an idea and a high-level plan, then I publicly announced the plan as if it were happening regardless, and… Bam!
What Sung said probably wouldn’t’ve been my answer if someone had asked me the question, but this is a thing I’ve been learning. I wrote last year in my post about self-authorship, about how I realized I had no birthday plans, and just decided that I would have a cuddle party, announced it, and it happened. This year, I one-upped my past self and » read the rest of this entry »
(This post starts with a technical example, but it’s not about the technical stuff so don’t worry about trying to understand the details.)
A friend of mine reached out to me earlier today, with a question about trouble she was having while coding something. She’s working in NodeJS, which I’m really familiar with since it’s what my productivity app, Complice is built on. “I’m having this problem with doing GET-requests… I can’t get them showing different things based on the url…”
A few sentences later, when I still didn’t really understand her problem, I said, “Hang on. Let’s back up—what is the user trying to do here? Like what’s the point of this page?”
She said something like, “so it’s like, they’re trying to load the data, but when they bring up the page, I can’t specify exactly what data they want.”
“Nonono, back up. I still don’t know what problem you’re solving for the user of this system. What’s the user trying to do?”
When you’re stuck on (or in) a problem, it can be easy to end up with a really narrow view of what you need to do to solve it, becoming overfixated on a given intended solution and focusing all of your questions around that solution, rather than around the original problem. This can happen on the scale of a day’s debugging, or on the scale of an entire startup.
It took me several more times of asking before I finally got my friend to back up far enough to talk about the situation from the user’s perspective, and once she did, she was suddenly like WAIT! and then came back a few minutes later with the solution.
As I had predicted, the biggest hurdle to her figuring out this problem was an assumption that she was making. I actually still don’t know what that assumption was. It would have also been possible for this story to end with her stating one of these assumptions, which I would have then overturned. But she ended up realizing it all on her own.
Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers, calls this whole thing the XY Problem: when the asker asks about their attempted solution, rather than about the original problem they didn’t know how to solve.
And this isn’t unique to programming.
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of part of the recording of the Monday evening gathering of culture-nudgers. I’m sharing it because a lot of people are curious about the workings of the intentional community that I’m involved with, and I think this exploration of my own thought patterns provides an excellent window into our context. I also think that it can stand on its own as a powerful example of mental control… being able to step back and look at my thoughts as they arise. In some ways, this is Mindfulness Field Training 3. Read one and two.
Things you may need/want to know, for context:
Malcolm, with a grin: I’m noticing a lot of shit come up around this.
Jean: Cool! As you would say—cool!
Heather: I like…that you can smile about that.
Jean: Ohhh, he’s been practicing! » read the rest of this entry »
Two experiences in the last 48h have caused me to redesign some of my language and communication patterns in a pretty serious way. I suspect that these are generally applicable and very useful, so I’m sharing!
Before I get into it, take a moment and see what comes to mind when you read the phrases “that made me feel uncomfortable” or “I noticed some discomfort while reading that.”
…
Done?
…
Okay, turns out that I’d been using phrases like that, and they were totally backfiring, because they communicated something totally different than what I was intending to communicate.
On a mailing list I frequent, someone offhandedly made a remark that was intended to be humorous. I felt uncomfortable reading it, which I shared with the group, along with an explanation for why I consciously endorsed that feeling of discomfort. Fortunately, I edited the subject before replying, because it prompted a massive email thread about (among other things) whether or not it makes sense to be offended by things and whether or not it makes sense to avoid saying things that will make people uncomfortable. And a bit about the content-level topic itself.
Someone else shared that their perception of this conversation was that I was trying to shame the OP for what he had said, to which I responded:
Thanks for the feedback that that was how it looked. I will maintain, as one of the main this-made-me-uncomfortable-sayers, that I was not intending to send any guilt or shame.
However, I’ll drink my own medicine, noting that this whole conversation happened because of person A saying something that was interpreted by person B in an unexpectedly negative way.
So I just did the same thing!
*sheepish look*
On a facebook comment thread about cuddle parties, I gave a few tips on hosting one, and said “if you have any other questions, feel free to message me.” Well, one of my friends took me up on that offer and sent me an email asking me a bunch of questions. So I answered them!
(For those unfamiliar, the term “CoZE” in the title refers to Comfort Zone Expansion, the practice of deliberately becoming comfortable with a wider range of experiences and behaviors.)
Q: When I visited the Bay Area for the first time in 2013, I was introduced to hugs as a form of greeting. The nature of these hugs is nonsexual. What is the nature of a cuddle party?
The nature of cuddle parties vary. Typically the term is used to refer to events that are explicitly nonsexual, though contexts do exist that involve cuddling and allow or encourage sexuality.
Q: If the answer is a definite “nonsexual”, then it would help me to get more explanation on how to keep it that way, what with your examples of kissing someone’s neck or spooning. I mean, sure, such things can stay nonsexual. And there are cultures where males kiss each other on the cheek in greeting. But across hundreds of cuddle parties, surely the issue of keeping it nonsexual must have come up before.
My first cuddle party was in January of 2013, and was fairly formal. » read the rest of this entry »
This is a followup to my two previous posts on what I’ve been calling mindfulness field training. Essentially, the underlying idea is to practice noticing your thoughts and not getting caught up in them. This post is also, in some ways, a followup to my post from last summer on a technique from CFAR called Propagating Urges.
When talking about behaviour change, we find ourselves asking: what kinds of feedback loops are most effective? One strong possibility is operant conditioning, which researcher B. F. Skinner developed to the extent that he could teach pigeons how to perform very complex tasks (like playing a tune on the piano) in a matter of minutes. Where Pavlovian “classical conditioning” would just associate one preexisting behaviour to a new trigger by creating an association with a natural trigger (eg dogs trained to salivate when bells ring because they’re taught the bells signify food) operant condition allows the trainer to create totally new behaviours. The way it works is that when any behaviour that at all resembles the target behaviour is exhibited, a reward is given, and that reward causes the subject to seek more reward by taking the behaviour further.
CFAR’s Propagating Urges class, last time I saw it, was based around this principle, with the additional aspect of it being a human influencing their own behaviour, which allows for the reward to be a lot more nuanced. The general approach of P.U. was to think of your long term goal and why you want to achieve it, and to connect that feeling to a kind of gesture that you can do (eg pumping your fist and saying “yesss!”) at the moment you notice a thought that’s related to your goal. Depending on how aversive the goal is, that could even include thoughts about how much you don’t want to work on it. So if your goal is filing your taxes on time, then even the thought “Gah, I still haven’t printed out the tax forms!” is still a really helpful thought because you’re at least thinking about your taxes, and you definitely aren’t going to be able to do them without thinking about them.
In my YES! I noticed! post from last summer, I tried exploring using this on myself to get rid of a number of personal habits like going to get a snack when I’m already full, or in general fleeing from aversive thoughts. It had limited effect, for a few reasons, the main two being:
1. I was trying to do a lot all at once and this lack of focus made it hard to stay motivated (I addressed that with this habit-a-week project)
2. I didn’t have very good feedback loops connecting my noticing with any reward
In theory, the focus and reward can be created, but it’s hard.
It’s especially hard because a lot of the highest leverage change comes from shifting mental patterns around fear, shame, judgment, and so on, where it’s hard to get yourself excited about them and where the long-term reward for overcoming them isn’t very tangible, making it hard to try to connect a “yes! I noticed!” with your sense of long-term goal.
So typically it’s pretty hard to get excited about noticing frustrating mental loops. What has changed that for me is continued interaction with someone who wants to hear about them (my friend/mentor/project-partner, Jean). » read the rest of this entry »
