Happy birthday to me. As a Canadian, one of the joys of living in San Francisco during the few months around my 21st birthday has been getting to turn legal twice. Not that I really care. Relevant thoughts:
I don’t really feel any age. Before telling people my age, I usually get them to guess, and the typical answer is about 25. Since many of my peers/friends are 25 or older I don’t mind this, and projecting as older probably helps me gain some respect. I know some people who feel like they’re a certain age, whether older, younger, or equal to their actual age, but age just feels really arbitrary to me.
I no longer think that. Probably since I’ve had some friends who are much older than me (in one case half a century) and I’ve started interacting a lot more with mixed-age groups. Also flirting.
The other half of this is that I’ve realized that I sometimes have difficulty relating to some people who are my age.
I periodically feel impressed with myself when I’m able to do things like navigate airports between countries, or have a job, or maintain a schedule that involves meeting people for coffee. I’m not sure why these things make me feel like this, since they aren’t actually that complicated compared to e.g. multivariable calculus. Or empathy.
I find myself often thinking “Wow, this will change my life!” or thinking that an idea has profoundly affected the way I think. This causes me to look back at musings of past-me and be astonished with how much I knew so long ago… since I assume that I’ve learned so many important things this past year, clearly I was an ignorant fool a year ago. Except apparently not.
Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through motions and chasing ideas and emptying my email inbox, but then I’ll be talking to someone who hasn’t had the same experiences I’ve had and they’ll practically start taking notes. At this point, I realize that I’ve actually synthesized a lot of interesting stuff during this time.
This point is essentially the net point of the previous two. This realization emerged from my spreadsheet of all the books I’ve read since summer ’11. I looked back at my notes on some of Seth Godin’s books and the notes suggested my life had been profoundly changed by reading them. Months later, I barely remember what Poke the Box is about. These books inspired me, but didn’t actually change my behaviour or even my thought patterns.
Sort of. It’s related, but they’re not the same. I seem to feel mostly the same about myself regardless of the facts in my head. Even when I learn new models or frameworks, or ways of approaching things, they rarely have a substantial effect on my self-conception. The main things that do are ones that actually relate to relating. Any time I feel like I’ve learned to connect with people better I expand my comfort zone in certain situations and this is a really good feeling.
I’ve recently been realizing that awkwardness often arises from the feeling that something is supposed to be awkward. If you give up the assumption that an experience or interaction will be awkward, often it simply isn’t. Often it’s just fun, or pleasant, or profound instead.
There are a lot of factors that affect the sensation of the passage of time. The main one for me is tiredness. Time passes much faster late at night. I’d like to figure out ways to hack this so that I can experience more.
Something similar happens on a days-months scale too: the experience of yesterday feeling like last week but months ago feeling like yesterday. My current theory is that doing lots of interesting (and varied) things makes time feel like it’s passing quickly because there’s always something going on, but when you look back things are stretched out forever because there are so many details.
People all age at a rate of 60 seconds per minute, but the variance in amount and type of experiences is so broad that age makes a very poor proxy for what someone is like. I mean, guess it’s the best one we have, but like, some people could be safely drinking at age 16 (not too much, of course) whereas others can’t even in adulthood. But anyway…
Now, when I’m drinking, I tend to think alcohol is underrated, but I trust sober!me’s opinion more. People make a really big deal about it but for me these months of being 20 in the USA have been more annoying for lack-of-ability-to-go-dancing than lack-of-ethanol-in-my-bloodstream. In fact, I’d consider going off alcohol entirely if that wouldn’t seriously restrict my drink options. I like to try new things, and most drinks appear to be booze.
One night, when I was 15, I made a vow to myself that I would never do “drugs”. I clarified at the time that this didn’t include alcohol or caffeine, but implicitly included pretty much everything else except prescription drugs or the odd painkiller. My main reasoning was that I, at the time, felt infinitely happy. That is, I didn’t feel like I could possibly feel happier, and therefore there was no need to pursue artificial highs.
For years, this has given me an easy way to refuse an offered smoke of any kind, but I’ve lately come to realize that the original argument doesn’t apply to some places where I’m applying the rule. Nootropics are the main thing in this category. I have other reasons to be wary of them, but nonetheless, I’m realizing that my cached response (“no drugs!”) is not quite sufficient. That’s a much bigger topic… I just wanted to note how it’s both hard and easy to justify breaking a promise to yourself.
I had originally intended to write 21 thoughts, but this prompt only produced 12. Oh well, it’s the same digits. I won’t be able to cheat next year 😉
This is the first time in a few years that I’ve set my birthday to public on Facebook. I might decide to have another one in a few months, just for fun.
The song isn’t actually about hot air balloons… right?
A month ago, a friend and I decided that we’d write a song each month with a preset title. This is kind of like Songfight, but I find that a month actually gives me time to flesh out a full idea rather than just scraping something together in a couple hours. This is my song for month one, “On Fire”.
My reflection above about hours versus months is interesting, because it reflects a recent (past year) shift in the way I write songs.
I’ve since… changed. Now it’s more like this:
The first song I wrote this way was General Disregard
, which is on my album. If you’re familiar with the rest of the album you might notice that General Disregard feels more casual and less structured than the other tunes.
I’ve been a poet for at least as long as I’ve been a songwriter, and I’ve long considered myself a poet first and musician second (this is related to the fact that I invariably do the words before the instrumentation). The poems I used to write were very structured: limericks, sonnets, or even just rhyming couplets with a strict meter. I haven’t totally ditched these but I’ve gotten more involved with slam poetry, which uses a lot more internal rhyme and stretching of beats, and I’ve also started casually freestyle rapping. Both of these have contributed to my new strategy for songwriting.
In fact, when I first started doing slam, I would create my poems like I used to write my songs. This is just simply the wrong medium. It’s like designing a painting using your sense of smell. Murmuring and writing are a really poor way of creating something that’s ultimately going to be performed. Similarly, I find I can work a lot faster and with way more nuance when I’m creating songs aloud and in my head versus on paper. It takes energy and intent to erase something from paper, while it takes effort to keep something in my head. This means that if a part is cumbersome or boring, it gets forgotten, and I have to replace it with something catchier.
I’ve learned a bit about the memory recently from reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (read my summary at actionablebooks.com) and one key point that emerged was that the memory regularly drops details and adds others every time the memory is accessed. For my songwriting, this means that every time I want to work on a song in-progress, I get to massage it on the way out, rather than just turning text into sound.
I’ve also realized that writing the songs in my head is a real mental exercise! In another song I’ve been working on I found I had to stop because my brain was getting worn out. This saturation is a good sign, because it means both that my unconscious brain will continue working on it even once I move on, and that my mental capacity for this will expand. Neuroplasticity!
After my album launch last fall, I unintentionally took an almost complete hiatus from songwriting for nearly 3 months. Then I decided in February I wanted to write more songs. Now I have 1¾ songs since then, and I’m really excited to start sharing them again. Much of this will probably be posted here, but if you want my really musical news you can also subscribe to the Maleidoscope newsletter at maleidoscope.com.
A short reflection on two even shorter words.
The other day, I was reading the details of various phone services while logged into my carrier’s website. I came across a section that read:
Long distance charges apply if you don’t have an unlimited nationwide feature.
…so I’m like “Wait? Do I have an unlimited nationwide feature?” and it occurs to me that there was no reason for them to use the word “if” there. I’m logged in! Their system knows the answer to the if question and should simply provide the result instead of forcing me to figure out if I qualify.
In some cases, of course, it might be valuable to let the user know that the result hinges on the state of things, but there’s an alternative to “if”. It’s called “since”. So that page, instead of what it said, should have been something more like:
Long distance charges would apply, but they don’t since you have an unlimited nationwide feature.
or
Long distance charges apply since you don’t have an unlimited nationwide feature. Upgrade now
I was initially going to just talk about software, but this actually applies to any kind of service, including one made of flesh and smiles. The keystone of service is anticipation. A good system will anticipate what the user needs/wants and will provide it as available. This means not saying “if” when the if statement in question can be evaluated by the server (machine or human) instead.
Framing is important. There are many other examples of this (in fact, I’m in the process of compiling a list of helpful ways to reframe things) but here’s a simple one. It relates to the word “but”. Specifically, to the order of the two clauses attached to the “but”. The example that prompted me to jot this idea down was deciding which of the following to write in my journal:
As is readily apparent, the second part becomes the dominant or conclusive statement as it gets the final word against the first statement. In this case, I opted in the end to use the former option, because it affirms the value of reading the book rather than suggesting it’s not worth it in the long run. The book in question is a now-finished serial ebook called The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin, and the sentences above should give you an adequate warning/recommendation not to read it.
This bit about the buts is obvious in hindsight, but I found that laying it out explicitly like this helped me start noticing it a lot more and therefore reframing both my thoughts and my communication.
Say you want to express to a cook both your enjoyment of a meal and your surprise at its spiciness, there are several options:
…but, maybe the extra spiciness didn’t detract from the enjoyment. In that case, a better conjunction would be “and”. Again, like before, this sounds obvious, but once consciously aware of it I started catching myself saying “but” in places that didn’t adequately capture what I wanted to say or in some cases were rude. The chef remark above has the potential to be rude, for example.
If you want to add to the reframing list, comment below or shoot me an email at malcolm@[thisdomain].
Here’s a video of me. It might be helpful to read the text below before watching the video. Actually, on second thought, this post was adapted from an email to a friend who said “I am grinning ear to ear from watching the video on your wall. I’d love to hear more about it!” so maybe watch it first. Your call.
So, in late January I was at a 4 day Applied Rationality workshop, which was absolutely amazing. The first 3 days were classes, and the 4th was to practise what we’d learned already. That’s when this video happened. The relevant class is called Againstness, and the practice session is fondly referred to as “Torture Court.” The againstness class is about the two halves of the Autonomic Nervous System (the part of your brain you don’t consciously control directly) which are the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems.
The idea is that while againstness (or SNS dominance) was effective back when stress = wild animal or armed opponent, it isn’t when stress = fight-with-your-partner or performance anxiety. As mentioned, you don’t have a sense of empathy when you’re in that state, so it’s basically impossible to consider that the other person might be right, or to even think of how the situation might be resolved peacefully. We were taught several techniques to release from againstness and shift to PNS dominance… basically:
Then. We come to the question of how exactly I came to be standing up there freaking out about astrology. I’ve historically not really liked astrology, but I was mostly indifferent. Sometime (I’m not sure where) in the past few years I developed a deep frustration with it. It really hit a peak this past summer when I had a very heated argument about it with my partner at the time. This had come up with past partners as well, although not so intense. Anyway, in another class at the workshop, called Winning at Arguments, we were asked to think of a heated argument, so I thought of that one. We looked into the word “winning” and how it can mean a variety of things, but that the most useful definition is that both (all) people involved achieve their goals. The next step there was to pause and think “what is my goal? what is their goal?” and I realized that ultimately she was trying to understand me and I was trying to be understood. Pretty compatible, eh? And yet it was one of the most intense arguments I’ve ever had.
However, despite having that understanding on Sunday, there was still a lot of pent-up negativity surrounding the subject of astrology. Very silly. Like, no matter how much I ultimately dislike it, there is nothing to be gained by being angry or stressed about it. Hence, the torture court exercise. I was one of the last people to go from our group, and a lot of the other people had been doing pretty tame things like singing I’m a Little Teapot—the main source of stress there was uncertainty surrounding the lyrics, not fear of performing. Another participant had to sidestep a punch from Val (the male instructor you can hear) but do so without flinching—just moving relaxedly. A lot of this is actually related to Aikido, but that’s another topic.
The other instructor running the Torture Court was Cat, who was also the one who did the arguments class, so when I finally went up I had this anticipation (a scary but hopeful one) that it would be astrology-related. If it had come up as something else that was boring, actually, I would have suggested it be revised as such. Anyway, I had given my phone to a friend to film me, and so then Cat proposed what she did and man it was overwhelming! One of the profound realizations I had was that I use laughter as a stress response. Like, I sort of knew this, but I didn’t realize how obvious and dramatic it was. Where others became frozen or defensive, I became, well, as you see in the video.
Immediately following the session I was walking around in a very intense physical, emotional, and mental state. My body felt… kind of tingly. I was feeling totally drained but simultaneously full of life. It was kind of like being dizzy but I wasn’t off-balance. This lasted maybe 10-15 minutes. It has, however, substantially reduced my aversion to astrology. Again, I still don’t care for it, but it doesn’t get me worked up anymore. At least, it hasn’t yet.
Malcolm, the Aries
Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of being able to attend an Applied Rationality workshop held in Berkeley, CA. I can say without a doubt that it has had a serious effect on the trajectory of my life. I want to talk briefly about this more specifically. I do have much more to say about the workshop when I get a chance, and I’d love to talk about it either privately or in the comments.
So, my life’s trajectory: those familiar with calculus will understand the following in terms of derivatives, but I’m going to use the analogy of a moving vehicle. If you want to describe the vehicle, you can talk about several things. The most obvious (and most immediately useful) is “where is it?” which often called displacement. The next most obvious/useful is “how fast is it going and in which direction?” also known as the car’s velocity. But, unless a wall or gas shortage stops the car before the relevant moment, the most useful thing to know about a car is how far down the gas pedal or brake is. This is the acceleration and ultimately it will tell you a lot more about how far the car will have gone by tomorrow than the velocity or displacement. You need to know roughly where the car was and how fast it started, but smaller changes in acceleration are much more important.
At the rationality workshop, I learned some things that definitely took me beyond where I’d been before (displacement / location). While at the workshop, I was definitely growing faster than usual, but right now I might be slower than usual as I focus on consolidating everything. Here’s why I’m not worried: what I definitely increased was my ability and propensity to assess how fast I’m going and to go faster still. Have a look at the chart to the right:
Ideally, you want to be the yellow line on top.
It should be clear that the yellow line on the top is increasing much faster than the others. It begins just as slow, but because it’s not only getting faster but getting faster faster, it quickly takes the lead. This is the model I’m adopting. Short-term, it’s fine if my displacement and velocity are taking a hit. In the long run, by getting better at getting better (by applying my rationality skills to becoming even more rational) I can easily overtake my hypothetical other-self and never look back.
However, I’d like to think that I haven’t just increased my acceleration but that I’m increasing the rate at which I’m increasing my acceleration, and increasing that rate as well, and so on indefinitely. This resembles an exponential function, which is shown by the yellow line above. If I were just accelerating at a constant rate, I’d be the red line in the middle, and if I were just holding steady at a certain speed I’d be the shallow blue line. One fascinating principal is that no matter how many layers you do this acceleration like xbigNumber, the exponential curve always has more. That means that if I were to ask “who will win the race?” between x1234567890 and ex, then ex will always win as time goes on. I plan to do the same.
How am I going to do this? I have some general thoughts on this which involve developing personal scaffolds that will make it easier to install what I learned at the workshop as habits, but I’ve modified my environment as well. Or rather, I’ve decided to put myself into a different environment. I’m working at a software startup in San Francisco right now, but rather than live in SF I’ve decided to spend the next 3 months living in Berkeley. This will make me much more likely to attend various free training events held by CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality, who ran this workshop) and will also make it easier for me to hang out with some of the people I met at the workshop, encouraging me to focus on these various aspects of my life. By investing the time and effort now to make my next 3 months more fruitful, I hope to ultimately set up self-reflection habits that are exponentially powerful. I’m not sure how I’d tell success from a close approximation, but honestly I think that if I get the first 5 or so layers than there really isn’t much to be gained at that stage.
I was surprised by the variety of rational techniques that were relevant to my decision to live in Berkeley rather than SF. They included not only a substantial consideration of my preferences and goals, but also a recognition of how I’m not as rational as I’d hypothetically like to be, and therefore I can predict that if I’m living in SF I won’t go to as much CFAR stuff. Similarly, while I might generally enjoy not having a 1h-each-way bus commute, I expect to be able to devote a lot of that time to this work, where previously I felt like there was a bit of imbalance such that most of my waking hours were directed towards working on things for the company I’m at. Then, when deciding if I wanted to accept a certain sublet option, I also weighed factors like, “how much more valuable of a place do I expect to get by waiting / more effort, and is it worth it?” I decided it wasn’t, so I accepted. Personal happiness is hard to judge, but we do our best.
One could also consider a function of personal utility. Again, I expect to slow down briefly but ultimately go so much faster/further. This is fairly easy to measure but very hard to judge cross-domain.
What’s a moment that not just changed your life, but changed how you approach it?
EDIT: As of September 2014, the Kik Messenger app no longer supports the old API, which means it no longer supports FileKicker. Thanks for using it—I wish it were still working but there’s not really anything I can do at this point! You can check out my current project at complice.co.
I have a super-exciting announcement to make today. It’s likely exciting to some of my users who will be able to send files over Kik Messenger faster than ever, but the reason it’s so exciting for me is that it’s my first major passive income project. Over the past year, FileKicker has grown from a few hundred downloads and a dozen daily users to over 350,000 downloads and 14,000 events per day (!).
As such, I’ve spent the last few months overhauling it, adding advertisements and new features. I can’t really know until after I’ve launched it, but I’m expecting this to provide a decent amount of money to help support my tuition. Frustratingly, this has taken a lot longer than anticipated (five months instead of one) and it’s not even as much as I wanted to release.
Finally, at the advice of my friend Yev Chertov (check out his app re:me if you’ve ever forgotten to respond to an important text) I decided to polish off and launch what I have. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to finish the upgrade—that is, launch a paid version of the app with more features—this winter, but it’s hard to say.
Shoutout also to Scott Greenlay, who made a whole set of shiny file-type icons for this update. Click on his APK icon below to check out FileKicker 3.0.
If you’re a FileKicker user, let me know in the comments what you think of it. Have any suggestions or feature requests? They may not be possible, but I’m more than game to listen.
The year ends. 366 days. 527,040 minutes. (Leap-years always have the worst RENT.) As I thought about how I might measure this year, the word that came to mind was “projects”. My year entailed a large quantity and wide variety of projects, that I’d like to reflect on.
I’ve wanted to record an album for years. In fact, I even vowed in 2010 that I would, but it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons—mainly lack of commitment. Fall of 2011, I bought Seth Godin & Zig Ziglar’s Pick Four, a workbook for completing goals. When I bought it, I knew one of my goals would be to create an album. I didn’t know what the other three would be, but in mid-February I finally committed to them (album, mindfulness, startup, fitness) and starting working every day to reach them.
Nine months after I originally committed to record and release an album this year, I’m excited and proud to say that I have!
The album art, by me with help from my friend Tess.
It’s been a long journey, and honestly if I had known in advance how much work it would be, I might not have done it. Naivety can be so useful! That said, having now done it, I am definitely going to do it again. I enjoyed the recording process immensely, and found it really rewarding to practice intently: guitar, piano, and even some saxophone for the first time.
Without further ado, the album:
I’ll be writing a post later this month about my experiences in creating this album, but until then I hope you enjoy the music. Thanks for taking the time to listen.
Photo by Fred Hunsberger
Anyway, 8 months later that album, titled The Mind I’m Lost Inside, is almost finished! It’s been a huge journey and I’m going to post more reflections on what I learned while working on this project all year, but for now I just want to share some demos with you.
My stage name (after more deliberation than you want to hear about) is Maleidoscope, so I’ve set myself up a pre-release page at maleidoscope.com
Sample music below. If you like it, you can sign up at my launch site to be notified when the album’s ready..
Update 18/11/2012: The album is finished now! Listen and download at maleidoscope.bandcamp.com
I was talking with a friend about his project, and he commented that he hadn’t launched yet because first he’s “gotta be perfect”.
My initial response to this was the maxim I know from the Facebook posters:
“Done is better than perfect” – The Hacker Way
Then, I thought about this idea a bit more, and realized that there’s something much more profound at work that has to do with failure. I’ve recently been realizing that a lot of popular business and personal advice can be summarized as “learn from your failures”—the natural conclusion being that the more failures you have the more you can learn. (There’s an issue here in that you can’t just try to fail, but that’s a topic for a future post.)
The first obvious problem with waiting for perfection before launch is that perfection never comes. Ultimately there’s always one last revision that could be made.
The second, more subtle issue, is that if you wait until you feel you’ve reached perfection before you give your project a chance to fail, then failure is so much worse, because:
I recently read The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore, and one of the useful concepts I took away from it was that procrastination is often caused by two fears: that your failure at an endeavour indicates your failure as a person, and that if you succeed you’ll just be given harder tasks.
“With procrastination, though, you’ve covered yourself both ways: there’s always an excuse, in case you don’t perform as well as you’d hoped; and there’s also some reserve left, if you still do succeed.” – Dr. Derald Sue, as quoted in The Now Habit, p34.
The cool part is, there’s another solution that is much less stressful than procrastination:
To counter perfectionism, try iteration: instead of trying to be perfect from the beginning, you try to do as little as possible to still be acceptable. From there, you improve. I was once chatting with another friend, Alec, while recording a video of a song for YouTube. I returned to the chat after a take, and said “This one wasn’t perfect, but it’s acceptable.” He remarked “Don’t strive for ‘acceptable'” but then after a moment’s reflection, reconsidered:
“On second thought, acceptable is… acceptable”
Acceptable is faster than perfect, but also in many cases you have a chance to improve on it anyway. In the case of the video, I didn’t have hours to practice at the time. In the case of my first friend’s project, he would be much better off getting something out than just sitting at the drawing board all day. The world can’t give you feedback if it can’t see what you’ve done.
Also, if you did everything perfectly in the first place, how could you possibly listen to any feedback?
