What do people think of you? What affects what people think of you? I’m realizing that if you focus on what people think of you this moment, you usually lose track of what they’re going to think of you next month.
I’m interning at a large tech company for the first time (previous max was a 22-person startup) and I’ve been having some trouble navigating how to ask questions and get things done in the rather complicated system. Today, in my 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, we were talking about asking others for help, which he pointed out is really important in a large organization with relatively little documentation. I commented that I was worried that people would feel like I was asking them to solve all of my problems—that they might judge me for doing so. I described one part of this problem using this analogy:
Say I’m trying to make myself a sandwich, and I don’t even know where the bread is kept. So I ask you, “where’s the bread?” You indicate the appropriate cupboard. Then I get distracted for half an hour, initially trying to choose a kind of bread but then reading the ingredients… after which I find the knife and realize it’s totally dull and won’t slice the bread (the next step).
At this point I feel really apprehensive about asking you for help again, because I feel like you’ll notice how I haven’t really accomplished anything for awhile (with software development, this can be more on the order of hours and days) and that I’m now asking you for help with something that’s basically a next step to the last thing I asked about. Or that could be expected to follow within 2 minutes.
“Don’t worry about what people think of you,” my manager responded, to this story and to other concerns about pestering people, “think about the results.” In other words, if you’re hungry, do what it takes to get that sandwich made. Then it dawned on me that by trying to avoid having people think negatively toward me in the short term by asking too many questions, I was ultimately sacrificing their long-term opinion of me by reducing what I was able to accomplish.
When I’m finishing my internship, I’d much rather have a couple of people think, “Oh yeah, Malcolm was great, though he asked a lot of questions,” than have everyone think, “Malcolm just kind of went off on his own and barely accomplished anything”. Which is sillifying to realize, because I haven’t been behaving with that in mind. Well, it’s hard to change what you don’t even notice, so this is a start.
I wrote the bulk of the above this afternoon in an email to myself (something I do with surprising regularity) and then thought I’d share it on my blog, for a few reasons, notably that it’s a great example of conflicting wants. There’s a deeper shift happening here too, which is the realization of how my concern over my own image is itself getting in the way of both image and goals, therein being quite unproductive. But for now it seems easier to shift on the level of behaviour->values, achieving them in the short term rather than trying to change my values overnight.
I write a lot about goals. Sometimes big meaty well-defined goals like the album I recorded last year or the polyphasic experiences I had this summer. Other times the goal is just a 30-day challenge to do something daily or give something up. Sometimes it’s more abstract, like my aspirations to become more aware of my own mental processes. In the past few weeks, I’ve started taking things to the next level in a few ways. First, I’ve started doing not just evening reviews but also morning solo-standups where I plan my day. Second…
I’ve started a business to help other people with their goals.
I’m running this business incredibly lean:
I don't think I understood the concept of "lean" until I had three paying customers for a business that doesn't have a name yet.
— Malcolm Ocean (@Malcolm_Ocean) October 1, 2013
About 2 weeks ago, I was reflecting to my friend Dan from Beeminder about how I thought I might be able to create something to play a kind of complementary role to his product. While Beeminder helps you keep track of numeric goals, I found I needed another system to help me keep track of my progress on more abstract and nuanced goals. As I noted during my end-of-2012 reflection, last year I started using the Pick Four system by Seth Godin and Zig Ziglar. Naturally, of course, as a tinkerer, I was constantly tweaking it, and developed a more robust system. I also found myself wishing I had better software to help me keep track of everything.
This summer I tried doing sketchnote style goal planning. Really pretty but didn’t actually help much.
However, I figured, it probably wouldn’t be worth it to build that kind of software just for myself. Would it be valuable to others too? Dan recommended starting just the way he started Beeminder: by helping one friend, manually. By chance, later that day I found such a friend, and so after talking with him briefly about his goals, we started going through the steps of the system. I would email him questions and prompts inspired by Pick Four, and he would respond. Meanwhile, I was also pitching the idea to other friends and getting them to sign on for my beta, which I’m hoping to start with about a dozen people in November.
…about a dozen people, who have some goals they seriously want to achieve, and are feeling frustrated because they feel like they aren’t making as much progress towards them as they’d like. If this sounds like you, let me know! If you’re not sure if it’d be a good fit, get in touch and we’ll have a quick Skype chat. [EDIT 2013-11-05: the beta cohort is now closed, but feel free to email me and I’ll keep you posted]
So far the November beta cohort is about half-filled. At that point, things will be a bit more streamlined, although people will still be interfacing with me regularly—once this really gets running, in 2014, it’s going to be mostly automated, so if you want the chance to have a really cheap personal goals coach (me!) then now’s the time. The beta is going to be $10/month; after that the service is probably going to be at least twice as much. While I charge separately for full-on consulting, it’s super important to me that my system is helping you, so if you’re stuck then I’ll gladly help troubleshoot things with you. My business doesn’t have a name yet, but I think it will be valuable for people. Full refund offered if it isn’t—I want my customers to be satisfied.
I’m spending this upcoming weekend mentoring at the October CFAR workshop, where I hope to pick up some new ideas for what kinds of questions will help people most with staying on track, and to have more chances to pitch my business to smart, ambitious people.
I’m giving up gluten for a month. Maybe longer.
Many of my earliest posts on this blog are about my 30-day challenges: behaviour changes I undertake for a month. I’ve been on a hiatus for awhile, which initially was for the purposes of installing some new habits but then later was just because I forgot to restart.
Last week at work, I realized that I’d nearly stopped eating gluten. The cafeteria at Twitter (where I’m interning for my penultimate co-op placement) has a lot of very healthy food, including grass-fed beef and many gluten-free options. Since I try to eat a kind of “relaxed paleo”, I gradually started eating fewer and fewer of the dishes containing gluten. I haven’t been a huge fan of bread for years, so this was a fairly easy transition to make.
I hear, however, that for many people the biggest changes result not from severe reduction of gluten intake but from complete elimination. This is obviously true for those with coeliac disease or a wheat allergy, but various bits of evidence (google for this if you care) suggests that there’s a decent probability of having some effect occur for me anyway. New models suggest that there’s a spectrum of gluten sensitivity.
At any rate, since this is an relatively very easy experiment for me to perform right now, with potentially very valuable results, it seems like something worth doing. I’ll decide later in the month if I want to continue being gluten-free or not. It strikes me that most gluten-sensitive people notice a pretty sudden and dramatic effect when they start consuming it again, so maybe I’ll do that just as a further experiment.
The official box for my Gluten-free Challenge:
Small text: I will try very hard to avoid products that say “may contain traces”. I’m going to disprefer products made in the same factory as gluten, but not avoid them outright. I reserve the right to drop this challenge in life-or-death / starving situations.
I have decided that things are going to change. Obviously I can’t entirely drop my present habits, but I’m done with fooling around.
Several things have contributed to this:
So. What does that yield? Watching this body move and wanting my own body to look like that (~again) made me reflect on the nature of wanting. As it turns out, you can’t get everything you want. This is obvious in cases like “I want to be in Canada right now” and “I want to be in San Francisco right now”. However, I had been allowing myself to believe that somehow “I want to be able to eat whatever I feel like (where ‘whatever I feel like’ includes tons of junk food)” is compatible with “I want to lose a bit of weight, put on some muscle, and generally be healthy”. Upon reflection, this appears not to be the case. I think this is a breakthrough of sorts.
Much more generally than diet and physique, I think I’ve been (not quite this explicitly) thinking that “I want to do what feels fun/appealing in the moment, including following various dopamine surges” and “I want to achieve my medium-term and long-term goals” are compatible. Hell, that first one isn’t even compatible with “I want to get to bed at a predetermined time, ever”. Upon reflection, it’s very clear that the want of impulses is not the one I care about, yeah
What am I going to do about it?
[ Brief interruption while I take a pomodoro break
and go for a beeminded 600m barefoot run. ]
One thought that came to mind right now is to have a morning reflection period where I review my long term goals and affirm to myself how my actions today will advance them. This could be a decent time for the alternate-paths part of goal factoring too. Although I think I want to keep it super short, at least to start. My experiences around designing new habits and getting bogged down in wanting to get the details perfect suggests it could be valuable to create a little procedure for myself for designing and implementing new habits.
I wrote most of the above text on Sunday (edited a bit for this post) and since then I’ve indeed done this reflection each morning. It seems to have been an awesome action to choose as it has had substantial ripple effects on my other habits as well. For the past few weeks, I’d been gradually slipping behind at my Bees (Beeminder, mentioned in the run block above, is a service that lets you track your progress on your goals, and stings you (with a credit card charge) if you don’t make sufficient progress). Earlier this week, I had about 6 or 7 goals that were going to derail that evening if I didn’t do them. Not only did I do them, but I’m now ahead on most of my Beeminder goals, with 1-5 days of buffer!
As of writing this post. Click through for live data!
I’m sleeping better, waking up feeling more motivated, and my days have more interesting things in them. I haven’t quite shifted all of my impulses and habits while at my computer, meaning I’ve not actually completed everything I set out to do every morning. I have, however, done substantially better than if I hadn’t noted it (on my phone) or thought explicitly about it at all. I keep my goals numbered so that it’s immediately evident in any review if one has been missed. Now I’m checking twice a day. In reality, with 5 goals, it probably makes sense to give 1 mostly-a-break on any given day. So maybe to do some tiny little action toward it, but nothing huge. With my work-goal, I get weekends off.
Given that I’m biting off more than I can chew at this point, I think this would be an effective way to scale back and focus. I expect it to also slightly renew my vigour when I return to the goal then next day. At any rate, my sense of purpose has already improved so dramatically this week that I think this can be considered a success. The paradox of sorts is that working towards my goals is so much more enriching and rewarding than dopamine hits from skimming Facebook*. So I’m experiencing pleasure while I do things, which is mutually reinforcing with the alignment between my urges and goals. So in a way, I am getting everything I want. But it required being open to the reality that that doesn’t happen automatically.
*or any dopamine hits, for that matter. Dopamine is the lust neurotransmitter, not the pleasure one, and it mostly makes you want stuff.
A mentioned in previous posts, I spent this summer living at a very interesting household—one dedicated to communication. One topic that came up at several points was that of the ideal position for the toilet seat. I’m male-bodied and grew up in a house where nobody cared, so my default was naturally to not move the seat after using it. However, one of my housemates found this extremely frustrating.
I was unable to quite grasp the nature of her feelings therein until another friend who was visiting described a raised seat as “triggering”. Oh. I had been modelling it as a preference or inconvenience, not as something that was acting on that level. There were a few possibilities here, feedback-wise. Initially I had no feedback. The first bit of feedback I got was my housemate asking if I was aware that I left the seat up. I replied something to the effect of “No, I’m well-aware” and the conversation became quite tense. I felt very defensive. What I was not aware of was the impact of leaving the seat up. This is the real channel for powerful feedback.
The most valuable feedback, naturally, is that which we cannot know on our own. I knew I was leaving the seat up. I know that my vocal chords tend to produce higher amplitude vibrations in the air than most people’s. What I can’t know, without feedback, is how it affects you. I could guess, and I do guess when necessary. But that’s not nearly as powerful. Besides, I want to know how you feel.
Feedback in relationships is essentially the opposite of bottled feelings. Bottled feelings, for the person they’re bottled inside, foments resent and frustration. But it’s not only the person who’s bottled that gets frustrated: to be interacting regularly with someone who’s not expressing themselves to you is confusing and unpleasant.
I was reading the first few chapters of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) earlier today, and was quite naturally struck by the profound transformations people undergo when they feel that they’ve spoken and been heard. This is the power of feedback.
One of my friends, Sandy, has written about how he used a form taken from software development to improve communication within his relationship.
The advantages he points out of using agile in any context:
- Potential problems are mentioned before they turn into actual problems, and the entire team can brainstorm on ways of fixing them.
- The entire team gets a better understanding of the project scope, not just those domains they’re directly involved with.
- Furthermore, everyone gets an idea of what their coworkers’ day-to-day job is like.
- Feedback becomes frequent, reliable and near-instant.
The point about feedback becoming frequent is key, as without a clear picture of when you’ll get to be heard by your partner it can be easy to become anxious trying to decide if, when, and how to speak your mind.
Sandy recommends Crocker’s Rules as a way to facilitate frankness. While that’s certainly an option, I’d encourage people to be gentle, both with themselves and their partners. There’s nothing “wrong” with you if you get offended when someone calls you an idiot. Furthermore, that particular word is unlikely to be the actual most efficient way of communicating what you’re trying to communicate (which is what Crocker’s rules are about).
On the contrary, it is mostly a judgement and is not very addressable. How does one simply reduce one’s idiocy? My understanding of communication (from LRC and NVC) is that it would be much more effective to talk about what you’re experiencing, how that’s making you feel, and what you need in order to deal with that.
It’s of paramount importance, regardless of how you say it, that people don’t feel like things have been left unsaid. This is easiest when both people are giving each other the benefit of the doubt on what they’re saying. If you need to institute Crocker’s Rules for that to happen, then do it. (EDIT: I’ve since written an article on trust and Crocker’s Rules)
I have a tendency to avoid classes whose professors or styles of teaching I dislike, and it looked at first like my 3A Math course would be the opposite of this. Turns out that there was a substitute prof for the first week. He was entertaining, engaging, and pedagogically sound. The instructor for the rest of the term was basically reading out of the textbook and getting confused whenever we’d get confused.
The worst part, however, was that our homework assignments (which were not for marks!) had no solutions given. Following the thread on feedback, this is clearly ridiculous as the best way to learn is to to try and fail—provided that you immediately realize that you have in fact not performed in the desired manner, and you proceed to practice something slightly simpler until you’re ready for the exercise you messed up on.
The reason he avoided giving us solutions is that he wanted to assign us the exact same questions on the tests and didn’t want us to have solutions for them. I don’t really have any words to describe how I feel about that. None fit to publish, anyway.
What I would like to do is lay out a spectrum of feedback loops and show that tighter loops are better.
Option 1: Homework with no solutions given (as above).
This is not even a feedback loop. It’s not a loop at all. You’ll quite probably never find out how you did on any of the practice problems.
Option 2: Teachers assigning homework and then solutions/answers show up within a week or two.
Slightly better but not really. A two-week feedback loop is still way too long. By that time, you’ve either already done it right and didn’t need the feedback
Option 3: Do a question, check your answer.
This is great. If you can do this, you’ll probably be just fine. It’s better to have solutions than just answers, but at least answers will tell you if you (probably) got it or if you messed something up.
Option 4: The first time(s) working through a problem, check your progress at each step.
This is optimal. See if your textbook has worked examples, and try guessing at each stage what the next step will be before you read it. You might need to read through at least one of the examples first.
The shift here is essentially from wild stabbing in the dark to deliberate practice.
If you find yourself as a student with a teacher assigning question with no answers, try finding similar (often adjacent) questions in your textbook, to ensure that you’re practising the relevant skills. EDIT: or check out Wolfram Problem Generator. I purchased it and tried it out, and while I think the technology is great, unfortunately they don’t cover any of the material I’m actually learning at this point. Would be great for highschool or early university though.
The day after I decided to write this post, a friend sent me a copy of some fanfiction she’d written about her favourite band. I really have nothing to do with them, so I thought I’d read the first few chapters to indulge her, because she was my friend, and also because I was curious what the story would be like, as it’s not something I normally read.
She went offline shortly after I started, and when she signed on the next day she was greeted with a deluge of feedback on various lines I’d found hilarious or bits that confused me or felt “off”. When introducing the story, she’d remarked “yeah I haven’t written in months…I need to do itttt I want to but I’ve been working so much” …after reading my feedback, she exclaimed: “Okay now I am 100freaking% writing the next chapter so you can read it haha I like your feedback… it’s going to be amazing.”
This is the power of feedback.
Have a project you’re working on? Something creative? A startup / app? I love giving feedback. Get in touch! malcolm@malcolmocean.com
In January, while doing an internship in San Francisco, I found myself in the hospital. Fortunately, I needed to have insurance to even step foot in the states, so the hospital stay passed without a hitch. After my first night there, someone came by from the company I was working for and brought me food. However, the hospital was already feeding me, and they’d brought me, among other things, a whole fruit basket! I can’t eat so many apples and oranges by myself even when healthy.
I therefore decided, when I was discharged, that instead of just throwing out the remaining food, I would try to give it to the people on the street near Union Square who were begging. What followed was a remarkable experience.
The first observation I made was that the street people weren’t nearly as omnipresent as I’d thought—I lived near Union Square and I had the sense that I’d be able to give away the food in about 15 minutes easily. The first bit, indeed, went quickly, but then I had to spread out.
More significantly, I found it to be a profoundly unique feeling to be looking for beggars. So often the impulse is to try to avoid eye contact or to look away, in an attempt at denial or at least an attempt to avoid feeling obliged to help. This was a 180° shift for me, and was quite a surprise.
A similar experience showed up for me this week, when I was at a friend’s house and he had a device that looked like a squash racket with metal strings, that would literally zap fruit flies out of the air. I grabbed it and obliterated a few, and then found myself looking for fruit flies… opening cupboard doors in hopes of finding some. What?! If you’d told me last week that I’d spend some of this week excitedly looking for fruit flies (and disappointed not to find any) I would have been quite skeptical.
But it was fun! And so was interacting with the people on the street, once I was feeling truly and deeply generous. I also learned that many homeless people will refuse apples—because they don’t have sufficient teeth with which to eat them. That was totally something I took for granted.
I think there’s a broader lesson here, which is that a tiny shift in intention can transform situations from being unpleasant or tiring into being exciting and enjoyable. This can be applied to one’s life (making a game out of a chore) or could be used to create a product like that bug zapper. Any product that takes a necessary part of life and makes it fun instead of unpleasant offers a clear value to the users.
Over the past few years (and mostly this summer) I’ve amassed a myriad of experience surrounding the enigmatic topic of polyphasic sleep. I’ve yet to write a comprehensive polyphasic adaptation advice post, so here goes. (This post was adapted from an email to a friend who is just starting his adaptation.)
I recommend reading puredoxyk’s book Ubersleep as well and following most of her advice: after all, she’s one of the first of not-very-many people to sleep on the uberman schedule, and has also spent years on various other polyphasic schedules. I would recommend reading that before adapting, as it really helps you create a good mindset for this kind of behavioural shift. Since at this stage you may not have time to read it before starting your adaptation, I’m going to pull out the key pieces of advice for you:
This isn’t ±1h, and ideally isn’t even ±5mins. Aim for ±1min. In order to do this, you’ll probably want to have an “alarm” on your phone that goes off shortly before your nap. I have one 10mins before with a snooze time of 6mins, set to a nice pleasant sound. 10mins is like “you’d better know where you’re napping and any details” and 4mins is like “you’d better excuse yourself from whoever you’re with or whatever you’re doing and go sleep.”
The longer the routine, the more effective, but the harder to maintain. Good idea to have the first steps include rapid movement like arm-and-head-flailing, and possibly rendering your mattress temporarily un-sleep-on-able. Easy mode: put various cumbersome objects on it. Hard mode: put a large bowl full-to-the-brim of water on it.
Write that at the top of a piece of paper, answer it below, and put that paper somewhere where you can remind yourself of your long-term goals and how awesome they are, when you’re at the depths of tiredness.
Try to minimize external obligations during this time, and be aware that there will probably be times when you are too tired to do a seated computer task. At those times you have to admit it and do something energetic instead. Realize that even if you sit there and try to work, you won’t get anything done anyway. But you do have a lot of time to get other random fiddly things done. Puredoxyk apparently had like 80 things on her initial list and she finished all of them within a few days.
PD recommends:
This one mostly wasn’t necessary for me, as I don’t think I’ve had a single instance where I didn’t at least wake to the end of Matt’s sleep tracks. However, waking and actually rising are totally different. Puredoxyk recommends things as weird as putting various appliances on timer switches so that they’ll start blending, or toasting, or whatever, when you’re supposed to get up. Another option is to take something that needs to stay frozen out of the freezer before your nap. Then if you oversleep, it goes bad. Anything to increase the pressure on the “get up” side of your body’s internal fight. I like Sleep as Android, which forces me to scan a QR code (which I keep in the bathroom) in order to turn it off.
Have a dozen (err, don’t have so many that you have bystander effect). Preferably in person, and preferably someone who can be with you during your darkest hours (which may not necessarily be the literally darkest hours; for me it was often 5am-11am). If someone else is adapting with you, that can be really effective, as your downswings in energy may not be simultaneous
Don’t let this be you. Not worth it.
I haven’t actually tried this, but you might consider putting a really high financial (or experiential; could be eating a cockroach) penalty on being asleep for more than 30 consecutive mins ever during your adaptation (with an appropriate caveat for schedules with cores). This could add extra gravitas to the need to stay awake constantly, and because the penalty applies every time, it would ruin any ability to say “just this once”. Obviously you want to be careful with this because sometimes you might be totally blindsided and feel like it wasn’t your fault. Still though, like Beeminder, this would allow you to be hyper-vigilant about the moment-to-moment decisions so as to achieve your ultimate goal. This could be combined with tip #7
Something further from my own experience: I would sometimes doze off, and then half-wake-up but not actually get up. I think part of this comes from not wanting to consciously face the shittiness of just having overslept. But it So you might consider a separate motivational hack in that case. That would be almost impossible to actually enforce though, which means it might not make sense. At the very least, be aware that this might happen.
Something for the Big Fat List: learn to juggle, or (even better) spin poi or devil sticks. I’ve found this to be a very wakefulness-inducing activity. Juggling is okay but I think poi and devil sticks are better as they allow you to build up a lot of rotational momentum in objects, which is really engaging and exciting. Juggling balls doesn’t have that. Juggling pins, maybe? This sort of thing only costs $20-$40 to start, so it’s worth going and buying some objects like this for the sake of adaptation, unless you’re extremely broke.
Unfortunately, not much is known about the mechanism by which polyphasic adaptation works, and there are actually several models of this. The model that polyphasicsociety.com uses is that napping is mostly a skill to be learned, so they make suggestions like the Nap Exaptation (often “naptations”) which involves taking a lot of practice naps. Puredoxyk’s model is that your body needs to be taught to get its sleep at different times of day than it did before. At first, deprived of sleep during the normal hours, the body will respond violently with a survival response designed to get you to fall asleep immediately at all costs. Then, once you refuse to yield, the body tries a different tactic, which is to get sleep during the polyphasic periods allotted. If you give in, you tell your body that the sleep deprivation works, and thus it doesn’t try adapting.
Based on that, you want your immediate response to “I’m dozing off” to be “OMFG I better run around the block right now! It’s life or death!!!” Maybe not that dramatic, but that’s better than your response being “well, I’ll just get up in a few moments”. If you have the ability to install dramatic imagery, you might try something like a bear chasing you and forcing you to hibernate with it. More realistically, you could simply suddenly point your fist to the sky and say “No! I must not sleep! Sleep is the time-killer! Sleep is the little death that brings total hibernation!”
One thing that is embarrassingly common to see among wannabe polyphasers (including a younger Malcolm) is to remark, mid-adaptation, something to the effect of “clearly my body isn’t meant for this”. This, I think, is the counterpart to the legitimately mindblowing reality that even with no experience, you’re still way more rested with 20min naps every 4h than not. This can lead to a sense of “wow, my body is doing this cool thing.” Which it is. Just know that until your body is doing that consistently and you feel totally rested almost all of the time, rather than rested-enough some of the time, you are not fully adapted. Being not fully adapted means that you’re still experiencing sleep deprivation, which yes, your body is not meant for.
But don’t confuse this temporary pain for an incompatibility with the system long-term. This is like visiting Brazil for a week and saying, “I could never live there! I couldn’t understand anybody!” Your brain is much more malleable than you think.
(As far as I can tell, neither Puredoxyk’s model nor Forevernade’s model on PolySoc really explain all of the data I’ve experienced. So there’s clearly more to it. They both have their merits though.)
The Living Room Context holds that the subjective is all we have. This is true in the sense that we only have our own perceptions of things and our own models. However, barring solipsism, it appears to be valuable to talk about things as having a sense of objectivity.
I had long thought of objectivity as “reality” or “the way things are”. This sort of definition makes sense with the phrase “objective truth”. In learning about subjective truth—the known truth of our own experience—I’ve come to understand that while it can make sense to model the existence of some kind of external reality, everything we know about that objective reality is itself… a subjective model, contained in each of us, the subjects.
I tried to understand the objective by simply modelling it as inhuman, except no, nonhumans experience subjective perception as well, though they may not have thoughts about it. Or what about aliens? This works on the level of “if a tree falls in a forest, it makes air vibrations but sound only happens when a creature with ears experiences those vibrations”.
Then I thought about it from a scientific perspective: objective truth, I thought, is when you’re saying some model is presently as close as possible (given available data and modes of thinking) to the model you would anticipate having given infinite investigation. At the very least, even if not as close as possible, you’re asserting that it’s better than the prevailing model. Importantly, that it’s better than the prevailing model for everyone, not just you.
Your perspective and mine. Visually, at least. I also have a strong emotional experience, since that CD is my first album.
So maybe the objective is describing something independent of perspective? As in, devoid of subjectivity? Sort of, but that’s not quite it either. If I hold up a CD, facing you, then your subjective description is the cover art, and mine is just a shiny disc, but what is the objective description? In what sense can such a description exist?
I propose that the objective can be best modelled not as being independent of perspective but rather dependent on it. Like a function. The objective description is a way of answering the question, “if I perform some known kind of measurement on this object/phenomenon, what do I expect the result to be, given the perspective from which I perform the measurement?” Note that there remains the subjective component of there being a certain subject who holds the expectation that the results of said measurements would be well-mapped by said function.
I think that a common source of conflict is when we attempt to make objective descriptions without accounting for certain dimensions by which the subjective perspectives can vary. It’s easy to ask “what photons would enter my eyes if I were standing in a different location?” but much harder to ask “how would I perceive this interaction if I had been born and raised a in X circumstances?” where X could be a different period of history, or a different country, or even a different social class. This is what makes objective descriptions dangerous—we usually don’t know how to define the function across the full breadth of human perspectives, and so what we say is likely to be misinterpreted.
From the LRC list of commitments and assumptions:
I commit to speaking only out of and about my own personal experience and understanding. When I speak of others experience or ideas, it is my experience of them I speak of.
I’ve had a chocolate addiction for a few years now, but I’ve only recently started looking closely at it rather than just joking about it. Part of what has facilitated this is a framework called the Living Room Context which I relate to in several ways. One way is the house I’m living at, which is full of other people familiar with the ideas and is designed to be a microcosm within which to develop a new culture. The other is a group called CoCoA, which meets Monday evenings to talk about the LRC, and our own personal and collective growth.
In relating to a member of our community with a serious addiction, I reflected that my only personal experience I had to empathize with was this chocolate addiction. As we spoke, it became more and more apparent how similar our addictions were. We both…
This connection, along with some recent events, caused me to acknowledge my addiction more meaningfully than before.
One interesting property that a chocolate addiction has is that there’s no particular cultural stigma around it. This is true of several chemical addictions, notably caffeine, but less true of most psychological addictions, such as alcohol, smoking, self-harm, and pornography. The chemical/psychological distinction I’m making hinges on stress-based cravings: like many alcoholics and others who are psychologically addicted, I have experienced severe cravings when stressed, and have often used chocolate as a coping mechanism. This cultural stigma can make it hard for addicts to speak up, so since I have relative space in that regard, I’m going to take advantage of it.
When, last week, I mention my addiction to my parents, my dad said something like “well, you know, sometimes I have a bit of chocolate to take the edge off” and I felt misunderstood, so I asked if he would say the same about wine if talking to an alcoholic. Then my parents got really serious (which I could have anticipated but hadn’t really thought through). I do believe that the extent of my cravings is serious, but I’m fortunate enough to have a relatively harmless addiction. That is, while I have eaten myself literally sick on a couple of occasions, no reasonable amount of indulging in this vice is going to cause serious short-term harm to myself or to others, unlike alcoholism. I suppose it’s a bit more like a nicotine addiction—long term damage to my health in exchange for temporary relaxation—except far more socially acceptable indoors, not to mention delicious. The freedom to experiment without doing serious harm is perhaps a second property to take advantage of, in trying to understand and transcend addiction.
The aforementioned deliciousness has vexed me, as it means that I don’t want to go cold-turkey on chocolate (although I have done that sort of thing temporarily as a challenge). What I want to do is reduce my chocolate consumption to healthy levels, while not setting any explicit restrictions on it. I have tried explicit restrictions, cutting down my sugar intake from around 80-200g/day to 40g/day, but then, well, midterms. And stress. And then I ate 200g of chocolate during one midterm. Then another. And besides, I found myself frustrated by the restrictions, because some days I just want some ice cream, cravings largely aside. I tried 4HB Slow-Carb-Diet-style “Cheat” Days, but some days I don’t know in advance that I’ll have the chance to try someone’s homemade torte. Opportunism is important to me!
I found this after I made the post, but had to add it because it’s just so relevant.
Some of my recent introspection supported by the Living Room Context is related to motivation, and it prompted me to think of a new approach. Perhaps, rather than balancing my “I want” with an “I can’t”, I might try relaxing the “I can’t” to see if my “I don’t want” would strengthen itself. I think I did this too quickly, because days later I ate about 300g of chocolate during about 20 minutes. Turns out the “I don’t want” wasn’t ready to handle such extreme stress. I relayed this to Jean (one of the people who started the LRC) and she pointed out the retrospectively obvious point that psychological addiction is driving by patterns of thought—typically shame and anticipation. Anticipation is normally quite a valuable thing (research has demonstrated that people would pay much more for an awesome experience in 3 days than 3 hours) but this becomes toxic when the anticipation is tainted with dread and shame because the anticipated activity feels akratic (against one’s better judgement).
About a third of my attention was in this bag, in my cupboard.
I didn’t really know what to do with the anticipation point for awhile, but during the most recent CoCoA meeting I had an idea. I had been sitting there finding myself spending about 30% of my cognitive energy on dealing with the urge to eat a two-bite brownie. I ultimately revealed this to the group when we were talking about sharing our own experiences, and after that the intensity relaxed somewhat, but it was still there.
My train of thought went something like this: the anticipation becomes intense when thoughts spiral and become obsessive. What do I know about obsessive thought spirals? They are also a key part of depression. What else do I know about this? Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction – Wikipedia, a simple meditation practice I’ve taken workshops on at University of Waterloo, has been shown to seriously help people with depression escape their downward spirals.
Then I recalled my earliest experiences with mindfulness, which were reading Eckhart Tolle, and I recalled one potent principle from one of his books. He spoke of stimulus and response. Stimulus: a dog barking, or a car alarm outside your window. Response: anger? frustration? As an alternative, he proposed using this potentially annoying cognitive interruption as an invitation to enter the present moment. I tried this at the time and found it a profound shift in perspective. I still do it today sometimes and it remains very powerful.
(I showed a draft of this post to some people, and one of them asked what “entering the present” means. It refers to not being caught up in thought patterns. To be experiencing and noticing, rather than thinking mindlessly. Directed thought, such as problem-solving, is very valuable, and meandering thought can be valuable and enjoyable as well. Persistent negative loops, on the other hand, are not, and so by returning to what’s happening in the here and now (in this case, the urge itself, and my friend speaking) I can break free from them. Meandering thoughts can be undesirable in situations like this too. Presence also implies a kind of acceptance: that reality is as it is, right now. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. This is what the title alludes to.)
I realized during the meeting that I could do the same thing with my intrusive urges to go eat another piece of chocolate: treat the urge as a cue to relax into the present moment. This appears to be way more powerful than just thinking happy thoughts, because the entirety of the urge is a “wanting something else” which is by its nature nonpresence. So becoming present here does several things:
Quoth I during the closing round of the meeting:
I have this thing that reminds me every few moments to be present? AWESOME!
This is a profound shift. I’ve wanted for awhile something that might remind me periodically to become present to what’s happening. Turns out I already have one, I just wasn’t using it. This is part of a larger pattern in the community I’m presently in, which is recognizing our patterns (both in thought and behaviour) as resources in the work we’re doing, rather than resenting them.
An analogy: imagine standing on a slippery cliff with an endless train of lemmings walking toward you. You can try to stop them by pushing back, but you’re unlikely to be able to hold them off forever, especially since the ones you repel will double-back with increasing pressure. Consider that you also have the option of simply stepping aside and watching them pass. Now, in most actual cases, the lemmings/urges are slightly more responsive and will change their route to again try to push you off. Step aside again. Not only is this more effective than fighting them, it’s a lot more enjoyable. Maybe you can even push off them as they pass, to gain momentum to get off the cliff altogether.
I know I said in my recent post on noticing that I’d write a report my progress in noticing my urges and thoughts. Well, what I’m realizing is that I didn’t focus on actually installing the habit of practising noticing. I also didn’t take my own advice about starting with one. I think the act of writing the post brought the noticing itself close to my attention, but then shortly thereafter I forgot. For the immediate future, I’m going to hone in on just using my chocolate urges as a cue to become present. I may delight in noticing other urges, but I think for now I need the clarity of focus. We’ll see how well it holds up under extreme stress. I expect it to work really well for the other half of the addiction, which is when I’ve had a small amount of chocolate and then I go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, etc…
Depending on how it’s defined, it can be estimated that over 90% of Americans have at least one “soft addiction” or “behavioural addiction” that they indulge in to unwind, to ultimate negative effect. We live in a culture of addiction, as Jean pointed out. So if you’re willing to admit it, chances are this article is personally relevant (and hopefully valuable) to you whether you identify as an addict or not. Be it chocolate or reddit, the first step is to be present to whatever your reality is.
I want to share something I’ve gradually learned about myself with respect to sticktoitiveness, using my experience with polyphasic sleep as a case study.
Almost exactly two years ago, I embarked on a quest to adapt to the uberman sleep schedule: sleeping only six 20min naps per 24h. I made it about 6 days.
Almost three months ago, I started an adaptation to the everyman sleep schedule: 3.5h core sleep at night plus three 20min naps. I’m still going. The obvious difference between the two cases is that uberman is insanely hard and everyman is only very hard. I think that’s a big part, but there’s another pattern I want to delve into.
One day in my high school cafeteria, a friend of mine got a few of us to see how long we could hold some sort of downward dog plank exercise. One friend collapsed, and it was just two of us. Someone said something that made me laugh, and I toppled, lamenting that that had caused me to fall. One of my friends immediately laughed and said, “That is so like Malcolm!” and the others agreed emphatically. I wasn’t sure what they meant, or… if I did, I wasn’t then brave enough to admit it, even to myself.
Years later, I quit my uberman adaptation with a similar attitude, although it took me longer still to realize the parallel. A quotation from my final uberman post:
The Supermemo article I linked to above describes how many bloggers try this, and some of their blogs just end abruptly with no conclusion. While I was ultimately unsuccessful at transitioning, I’m very proud to say that I did not crash or burn out.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that my blog is not dead. Immensely glad. But there’s an aspect in my tone of voice that suggests that I didn’t give the adaptation my best, or fullest shot.
Growing up, my parents would often use “sticktoitiveness” to refer to a certain kind of determination. I’m going to suggest a subtle distinction between them based on their etymologies.
So, determination is what pushes you through the last mile of a marathon, and sticktoitiveness is what maintains your habits.
In preparing to write this post, I re-read my old uberman archives, and I was somewhat surprised at how many references I made to my life as a future ubersleeper. I had been thinking that one of the reasons I gave up before was that I didn’t have a long-term commitment to it—that I lacked determination. Rather, I had determination, or at least some of it: I was committed to successfully adapting. What I didn’t have was sticktoitiveness: I didn’t have commitment to the process of adapting.
With everyman over the last three months, I’ve at times felt discouraged, and at other times felt very frustrated with myself. “It’s like I’ve got an addiction to my bed!” I lamented to my roommates after another episode of getting up and crawling right back in. Ultimately though, I’ve made progress, and while I’m still not fully stable in my sleep schedule, I feel like I nonetheless have a firmly polyphasic lifestyle and I’m not worried about slipping off of it. (I’m tempted to use the word <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability” title=””Metastability describes the behaviour of certain physical systems that can exist in long lived states that are less stable than the system’s most stable state.” – Wikipedia” target=”_blank”>metastable, which sort of applies insomuch as this current situation is stable enough to endure for the medium-long-term but I’m ultimately expecting to end up in a more stable state.)
I’ve matured since that day in the cafeteria. I’ve learned to tough things out more. More powerfully, perhaps, I’ve learned—and created—new ways to understand my own behaviour. This is one of them.
Sticktoitiveness, as I’m defining it, isn’t a blind persistence that persists even when it no longer makes sense. But it’s a commitment to the process of learning, growing, or establishing a new habit, that goes beyond just a commitment to have finished doing so. And sometimes that does mean refusing to be overcome by opposing evidence: at least, refusing to be easily convinced, when the evidence seems to favour what’s convenient or comfortable.
I'm Malcolm Ocean.
I'm developing scalable solutions to fractal coordination challenges (between parts of people as well as between people) based on non-naive trust and intentionality. More about me.
