Just got on the train, damn it’s crowded. Wonder if I can complete a full word vomit before I get home. If I do, I’ll make it a point to do vomits exclusively on my commutes to and from work. That would be awesome. These lines are so… cheat-code, but screw it just do it.
The thing on my mind is from reading a few lines of a book about influence. Somebody once said that civilization progresses at the rate of operations that we can perform without thinking, or something to that effect. What I got out of that is the power of automation, of structure, of routine.
Here’s something I’m rather unenlightened about. It has to do with intellectual arrogance and a waste of cognitive resources. I waste valuable time and energy making decisions that could be automated. Routines are incredibly powerful and enabling.
I’ve been relearning html and css, and the cool thing about css is how you can put a bunch of tags on stuff, and then modify your entire website by editing the css stylesheet instead of editing the text bit by bit. That’s powerful stuff! It takes out the tedium of manually having to edit things- and once you learn to do this, the idea of editing html manually seems awfully primitive and wasteful. It takes longer, you’re more likely to make errors, and recalibration requires renewed effort. Tedious!!!
So the challenge is to apply ‘CSS’ to daily life. By planning a schedule and sticking to it I save myself the trouble of having to redecide, everyday, what to do with my time.
Also, local solutions are typically globally sub-optimal- by that I mean to say that I will make lousier decisions when tired, frustrated, bored. I become a victim to my baser instincts instead of my nobler aspirations. It takes less cognitive effort to ‘follow instructions’ or to decide to do what you had set out to do earlier than it does to try and come up with something awesome every step of the way. Has anybody written about this? I’m sure they have.
What routines should I set? Sleep on time. Drink water. Exercise regularly. Schedule coffee with friends and loved ones and stick to it. There’s almost no excuse now that I’ve got a smartphone with google calendar on it. Practicr guitar (not a big deal). Code. Read. Write. Have conversations with my best friend everyday. Why is this taking so long? My old ways are trying to cling on to me. I need to drag them out into the open and beat them to death with a stick or whatever weapon I have at my disposal.
I like to use a ‘big red button’ as a philosophical exercise to figure out what I want for myself and the world. It involves oversimplifying things so that I can figure out what I ought to work on.
Consider the following. If there’s a big red button that’s labelled “press to quit smoking completely”, would smokers press it? I’m guessing that many would, despite the rationalizations that follow (oh they’re quite pleasurable, etc). Quittong smoking is pretty much always a globally optimal solution. It’s just locally hard to enforce, because it’s always so easy to start again, and the short term pleasure outweighs the long-term cost to the short-sighted human brain.
So I wonder, what are the red buttons worth pressing? I know this can seem like an exercise in wishful and unrealistic thinking but I think it’s interesting as a tool to figure out what’s important.
Learn to swim? Yes. Learn emergency skills? Yes. Become a responsible, trustworthy person? Yes. Get addicted to learning? Yes. Get off social media? Erm, maybe not- there has to be a middle ground. Develop a fitness habit? Yes.
Okay at this stage it becomes clear that the good stuff is fairly easy to come up with. I think I’ve thought enough about this and I know what I need to achieve to make me happy. The next challenge is to figure out the most effective way of implementing it. What should I schedule? How should I schedule it? What are the most important priorities?
I think the most important thing I’m not doing is meditation. 2nd most might be writing. Both involved a certain mindfulness and they lead me towards thinking bigger, longer, more globally. The two combined will keep me from acting in my short-term interests at the expense of my long term ones.
I needa clearer roadmap of my life. I got a couple of cool emails- one inviting me to speak at an event in september, another inviting me to write for something pretty substantial (relative to what I’ve been writing for so far).
What do I want, what makes me happy, what would I like to achieve? These are recurring questions I shouldn’t have to keep re-answering- they should be easily accessible to me, at my fingertips. I need a clear picture of my best work- to refactor my blog and my quora answers, and my favourite quotes and stuff. This cannot be done in one fell swoop as I like to fool myself into believing. I am not that capable. Few people are, if any. So things need to be broken down into smaller bite-size chunks that can be tacked a bit at a time.
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Just opened this up- argh, so close! Just 100 words from completion. I guess I’m skim through the article and do a summary of my thoughts on it. Erm… the big-red-button thing seemed useful at some point but now it just feels tacky and redundant. It does help I guess to have a clear sense of what one’s priorities are, what makes you happy, what gives you joy… jesus I’m so obviously just going through the motions here to make up words.
I might as well talk about what I’m up to at work- I’ve been working on something involving putting together a job description for my future teammates. It’s an interesting experience because it kind of helps me clarify my own role… ah I’m done (so silly but ;_;)