In my 2013 review, I wrote:
What broke me out of [my despondent unmotivated funk mid-summer-2013] was when I realized that sometimes even things I really enjoyed doing, like blogging, I wouldn’t bother to do if I didn’t kind of force myself to do it. Turns out motivation is complex.
I have once again found myself blogging right now because if I don’t, I owe beeminder money. I feel frustrated—I have only an hour or so left at this point and while I have many posts in progress and many others that I want to write, none of them will be ready in an hour. So instead here’s a brief rant on accountability.
I’m listening to a fantastic audiobook right now called The E-Myth, E being short for Entrepreneurial. It’s all about how to do a small business as an entrepreneur, rather than a technician. There are some other insights from this book that I’m excited to blog about, but those are on the longer-than-an-hour list.
One of the chapters I was listening to today was talking about the importance of accountability when setting up a business. The author describes two brothers who start a business together. In one version of the story, they take turns doing everything and it’s great for awhile but then it breaks down because nobody is responsible for anything. In the other version, the two of them sit down at the beginning of their business development process and lay out a basic yet fairly extensive organizational structure, including a COO, VP of Marketing, salespeople and accountants. They write a description for each position.
Then, they assign an employee to each of those roles and have that employee sign off on their position contract. Of course, the only options available are themselves. So they each have multiple roles, and report to each other and themselves. But the key is that now they’re accountable for several distinct outcomes. Then, the process from there is to systematize the lower-level roles and hire someone into them, promoting themselves as they go along.
I think this is really cool and makes a lot of sense.
One bit I thought was strange though was a remark the author made, which was “all organizations are hierarchical”. I actually blurted out “pfft, what?” when he said that.
I just re-read my 2013 review. What a year. It was by far the best year of my life… until 2014. I think 2015 can be even better. Who needs regression to the mean, anyway?
I like the object-level + process-level + meta-level structure I used last year, and I don’t have an obviously better structure to use this year. So here it goes again.
(FYI: I am both the maker of and a power-user of a productivity app called Complice. To help make things clearer, I’m going to use “Complice” to refer to the business or the app-with-me-as-maker and “complice” (lowercase c) to refer to the system-with-me-as-user. In most cases it’s obvious from context, but it’ll be helpful to know that I use it two ways.)
Object level is just like… stuff. Stuff I did. Accomplishments, or events I attended. It’s the “what”.
The first big thing that I was focused on was redesigning my site. This is a great example of a tangible goal that complice helped me achieve. A year ago, my site looked like the left/first image, below. shudders As of last February, it looks like the one of the right! So much more me! And with a new logo 🙂 I have new business cards too, that I get lots of compliments on.
Nate Soares just published the first article to The Mind’s UI, a group blog that I’ve set up with him and Brienne Yudkowsky. It’s called Enjoying the feeling of agency, and in it Nate said that one thing that helps with that enjoyment is
Context and framing: it’s much easier to draw satisfaction from a clean room if your mother didn’t make you clean it.
I wanted to elaborate on that, drawing on very recent (even ongoing) experiences of being home for the holidays.
I’ve spent the last year living in an intentional learning community (let’s call it LRC) that has a number of interesting features. One of these, as I’ve described before, is that nobody ever has to do the dishes. We have some agreements about how we want to keep the kitchen space and the cooking utensils available for use; even here, nobody ever yells or guilt trips people for not following them. At our best, we approach the act of giving that kind of feedback with openness and curiosity. Sometimes it produces experiences of frustration which are processed in a different way.
But the point is, for the most part, we all get to navigate the kitchen based on our own desires and needs, and our abilities to discern what makes sense. This is really relaxing. But that’s not the only reason we do it.
When I got back to Nova Scotia to see my family a couple weeks ago, I was amused to experience surprise when I saw a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink. I had become very accustomed to the fact that part of our dishing system in the LRC house where I live is that we stack dirty dishes next to the sink rather than in them, which makes for much better flow in various ways. I looked at the pile of dishes in the sink and figured that it would look a lot nicer if they were washed or put in the dishwasher. So I did that.
On Thursday evening, while I was packing for my flight home for christmas, my girlfriend announced “I took advantage of your trust and posted something to your facebook.” Based on what usually shows up in that kind of circumstance I was like “ack, better go delete it.” Instead, when I finally saw it, I was like “Damn. Why didn’t I think of this?” Fortunately, I could pretend I had thought of it.
It already had a dozen likes.
By the time she dropped me off at the Billy Bishop Airport in downtown Toronto, it had over a hundred. In fact, it had exactly 101. The Bishop Airport was the perfect place to do this, as it has a great lounge that feels really friendly, along with free food I could make small-talk about.
These are things I relearned. I basically already knew them, but the message got drilled in a lot deeper by the actual act of offering a hundred hugs.
CoZE, short for Comfort Zone Expansion, is the main lens that I used to understand what I was doing. I was expanding my comfort zone by offering a lot of hugs. Now, to some people, this would have been so far out of their comfort zones that it would have seemed way too daunting. For me, I knew it would be a challenge, but I figured I could do it if I really hustled.
So CoZE is great. I already knew that. One reason it’s great is because you deepen your experiential understanding of things. I’m sharing what I learned not because I think it’s things that you totally don’t know, but to try to tell the story of how this CoZE challenge taught me stuff. And because the stories herein are pretty great.
This was also a lot of fun. It’s fun to challenge yourself. Or can be, anyway.
It’s worth noting that while I definitely recommend that people try CoZE exercises, it’s important to make the world a better place in the process. When you’re offering or requesting something, do the best you can to make it easy for them to say no if they don’t want it, especially, especially something related to physical contact. Maybe even start just by holding up a free hugs sign as people walk by.
Now, without further ado, the other 8 things I relearned.
With the first few people I asked, I tried showing them the facebook post on my phone, then saying “would you like a hug?” and they refused, kind of awkwardly. Then I tried to give a more meaningful reason:
“I’m going home for the holidays, and to get warmed up for the season I’m giving hugs to strangers on the way. Would you like one?”
This worked a fair bit better, but I was able to improve it even more to the following:
“I’m travelling home for Christmas, and I have this thing I like to do where I hug as many strangers as I can on the way… Do you want a hug?”
I would often preface that with “so this is kinda random, but…”
I think the Christmas thing really helped. I might be able to come up with an almost-as-good framing some other time of year, but it would be hard. Holiday season is easy mode for friendly stranger CoZE.
I can’t say for sure, but I think that smiling warmly and holding out my arms was also pretty key.
A bunch of people asked me, at various times yesterday, if I noticed whether any demographics seemed more or less likely to go for the hug. I can confirm that nope, it was everyone. I think I had a slightly higher acceptance rate among women with grey or white hair (80-90% compared to the overall 70%) but there was no other obvious group that was for or against.
In particular, I recall striking up a conversation with a group of 4 dudes who were eating the cookies in the kitchenette area. They were heading to Montréal to party. As they were about to walk, I said “wait!” and proposed hugs. They were like “totally, man!” Maybe 10 minutes later, I walked by them, and they were with like 5 other friends, and the guys I’d originally met were like:
“Yo, Jake, you need to hug this guy!”
They got all but one of their friends to hug me. Which brings us to…
I hugged one woman who I thought was alone, and just moments later, she called out to her friend who was behind me, “Tanya, he’s giving Christmas hugs!” So Tanya got one. And then their other friend, who was initially reluctant, also got one.
I had a few people say, “if I’m doing it, you can do it,” or something along those lines. One person took a picture of me. Not of the hug, just “this was the guy who hugged me.” I posed for it.
At one point, I walked past a woman I’d just hugged, as she sat back down with a ~7-year-old boy (presumably her son), and I overheard her say “…Christmas hugs…”, and I said to him, “do you want one?” and he said sure!
I offered some hugs to a couple people in an area, some sitting, some standing. Another guy on the far side of that cluster of people (not friends as far as I could tell) whom I hadn’t explicitly addressed, stood up and said “I’m getting in on those hugs!”
Some people were really struck by delight at the prospect of a Christmas hug from a stranger in an airport, including quotes like, “Wow, that really brightened my day!”
The most touching moment of my hugs adventure happened in the Halifax Airport, after I landed. I was on my way from the plane to the baggage claim, offering hugs to people who looked huggable as I went. A woman with short white hair looked me in the eye and said:
“I’m a cancer survivor, so I always say yes to hugs…”
Ultimately I feel pretty confident that this effort had a net positive effect on the people I interacted with.
“Give ME a hug?! I’m gonna give YOU a hug!”
“I’m not gonna hug you. But you can hug me.”
(she was fine with being embraced, just didn’t want to put her arms around me herself)
“I can’t, I have a sore shoulder.”
“How about if I just put my arm around you?”
“Sure!”
“Here, just squeeze my hand.” *smile* “That’s a hug.”
“What, do I have to get up?”
(he was down for a hug but refused to get up for a hug.)
The strongest negative reaction I got was when I offered hugs to a couple of women waiting to depart in Halifax, and they looked at me incredulously and said, “You’ve got the wrong crowd, man…”
I chatted up one of the pilots in the cockpit while the plane was refueling in Ottawa, and he said “so you’re going home for Christmas?” which I used to segue into my offer. He said no, which was probably for the best since he was all strapped in. But yeah, this challenge definitely made me a lot more social.
There were a few encounters that were a little bit awkward, but other than that almost all of over one hundred hug offers was totally friendly and pleasant.
…including when I tried my line on people I’d already hugged. (I’d been super freaked out about that one happening, and it was totally fine.)
Throughout the whole thing, I was posting my hug count (as a fraction of hugs/offers) to the facebook thread that started it all. It was really motivating to know that my friends around the world could see my progress live. And I mean, I needed to keep track somewhere. But it really helped to have the accountability.
I made sure to make the official count (what needed to get to 101) be something under my control—hug offers—rather than something someone else would need to consent to. That way I wasn’t trying to manipulate them into hugging me so I could get points. I got all of the important points just from trying.
But I wanted to get actual hugs too. In the end, I had 71 hugs out of 101 offers. Not bad! That ~70% was pretty consistent throughout the day, including exactly 7/10 and 35/50, as well as 50/70, which was how many I had before the plane took off.
I wish I’d made a prediction for how many I’d get, but I didn’t so I’m not going to pretend that “that’s how many I thought I’d get” or whatever. Retrodictions don’t count. I will say that at one point it was around 50% and I was thinking “I really hope I can get at least half,” which indicates I definitely wasn’t confident that I would.
One of the coolest parts was that one guy started watching me and then when I would come back to the table he was at, he would ask me how it was going, what my success rate was like, and so on. At one point he said,
“I got some pictures of those hugs!”
“What?”
“Lemme show you…”
He emailed me one of them, which is… here!
“What’s the catch?” asked someone. I also got some looks and remarks to the effect of “and then what?” or “so now what?” which I usually would just respond to with a happy shrug, “That’s it! Just a hug.”
I think my favourite remark, the whole day, was made by this guy at the baggage claim in Halifax. He would have been like person 93 or so. I said
“So I’m going home for christmas, and I’m trying to hug as many—”
and he just interrupted me and said
“Shuttup with your social experiment and get over here!”
This post was written collaboratively with my friend Kai Rathmann. The reason for this will become apparent very shortly.
The thesis of this post is essentially: make things with people. We want to introduce a new-ish framing for how to relate to people, called “project partners”. A project partner is someone that you are doing (or have done) a project with. The project can be large, but doesn’t have to be. The key is that you have the experience of working together towards a specific, external, common goal.
Doing a small project with someone is great for a number of reasons:
There’s an obscure concept (from an obscure field called semantics) that I find really fun to think with: Dot Objects. This post is an attempt to pull it out of that technical field and into, well, the community of people who read my blog. I think that semantics tools are fundamental for rationality and quality thinking in general—Alfred Korzybski, coiner of the phrase “the map is not the territory” and founder of the field general semantics, would probably agree with me. Note that I extrapolate a ton here, so (disclaimer!) don’t take anything I say as being true to the technical study of the subject.
So. Consider the sentence: “The university needed renovations, so it emailed its alumni to raise funds.” The university that has the alumni isn’t the one that needs the repairs. One is an organization, the other is a physical structure.
Dot objects are
entities that subsist simultaneously in multiple semantic domains.[1]
The name “dot objects” (also sometimes “dot types”) comes from the notation used in academic papers on the subject, which is X • Y where X and Y are the two domains. So the above example might be Org • Phy.
Context: this was a very stream-of-consciousness post, tapping into something I had just learned when I wrote it, yesterday. I don’t necessarily think that what I suggest here makes sense for everyone. But it spoke something really valuable to me, and I suspect there will be others who deeply appreciate it as well.
Today, my friend Matt and I found ourselves in a particular head-space as well as an intense and exciting conversation where we were speeding up, and were continually needing to remind ourselves to take a breath. I found each breath so powerfully pleasant that it made for a really interesting feedback loop. Note that all uses of “breath(e)” here refer to the act of consciously, mindfully, taking a breath.
I’m going to invite you to do that now, as you read this.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The “take a breath” piece of feedback is part of a much larger energy-awareness thing I’ve been working with for a long time—it’s connected with againstness and so on as well. Essentially, I’ve been working to overcome an experience I’ve sometimes had of myself where I’ve gotten slightly caught up in my own thoughts and slightly worked up, while interacting with people, in ways that have felt disconnecting and unpleasant for them. And in general, when people have given me feedback about this, I’ve had largely positive reactions in response.
What I realized today though, was that it could be even more positive. Or perhaps we might say positive “sooner”.
This is a topic for another post, but I want to briefly present a model I’ve been using for awhile to capture the process of human interaction with the world.
(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.
What makes the difference in what someone says in response to criticism? Or even what they think in response to imagined criticism?
Talking about personal growth is easier when you have better language for it. One component of this is using words and phrases that are more conducive to growth mindset. Another aspect is having more nuanced terminology to refer to concepts, to allow us to talk about (and think about!) growth more effectively.
This post is also designed to serve as a standalone introduction to the subject-object distinction which is central to Constructive Developmental Theory, developed by Robert Kegan and others. I’m going to elaborate on that model in future posts and connect it to other models, but this sub-component is helpful on its own. I’ll start with the in-depth example, and then talk about the more abstract model behind it.
First: what do I mean by defensiveness? I mean a reactive quality that creates a feeling of unsafety or instability and responds out of a place of feeling threatened. It’s often associated with a sympathetic nervous system (stress) response, or a feeling of againstness. This is not a response that’s useful for much of anything. Maybe survival 50,000 years ago. It interferes with learning, because it makes you irrationally averse to integrating others’ perspectives, both casual and in the form of directed feedback, instead preferring to assert personal rightness. It can wreck relationships by causing disagreements to escalate into conflicts then into fights.
Under this definition, we might ask what kind of quality of response you might prefer? What’s the opposite of defensiveness? Hint: it’s not offensiveness. That’s… I’m not even going to go there. Instead, I propose it’s curiosity. Unlike defensiveness, where your mind is closed to new information and insists on proving itself right, in a state of curiosity your mind is open to updating itself and is ready to reexamine its own assumptions. Curiosity also has another specific property we’re looking for here, which is that it’s a broader outlook than defensiveness. This is necessary for what we’re about to do.
Okay. With this distinction highlighted, let’s talk about the qualitatively different experiences between the two ends of the spectrum. The story we’re going to use as an example:
Jamie is on a bus, travelling home for Thanksgiving, when she realizes that she left a bunch of stuff out in the kitchen. Her roommates are likely going to be annoyed.
Defensive. When you hear feedback or even imagine someone else being critical of you, you immediately start thinking (and perhaps speaking) reasons why that’s invalid and you’re still essentially right. It doesn’t even occur to you that this might not actually get you what you want in the long or short term. Or get you anywhere.
Jamie, thinking to herself: “I mean, I was in a huge rush today… it’s not like I could take the later bus… these tickets are only good for a specific one, not all day… and anyway, Cristina called me when I was about to head out… so it’s not my fault. Besides, she always leaves stuff out.”
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It didn’t occur to me to take the picture until after I cleaned up the broken glass.
This post isn’t about gardens or bodums. It’s about thinking and mindset.
Last July (~15 months ago) I had an interaction in my house’s laundry room, where I moved something on a shelf, which knocked off a bodum (aka french coffee press) which fell to the ground and shattered. I mentioned this to Jean (the likely purchaser/user of the bodum) that it had broken. But… the shelf was in a corner, with a chest freezer making it even more secluded, so the broken glass wasn’t a threat to anyone. So I decided I’d clean it up later.
Of course, as we know, later never comes.
So when it came time in August to leave for a four-month internship at Twitter in San Francisco, it still wasn’t done. I swore to Jean “I need to finish packing, but I’ll do it tomorrow morning before I go.” Not too surprisingly, I was packing basically all night. So morning came and I was running around and she said to me in my stress and frenzy, “Don’t worry; I’ll clean it up.” I was hugely relieved because I had felt an obligation to clean it.
Interlude: Malcolm in San Francisco / Berkeley, then home for Christmas
When I returned to the house in January of this year, I went downstairs to do laundry, and glanced in the corner. Lo and behold, a broken bodum remained. “Huh,” I thought.
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