PAIN & PASSION

May 3rd, 2019

It’s recommended that if you haven’t read or listened to Episode 6 of Tinkered Thinking that you do so before listening to this one.

“Follow your Passion” is a piece of advice that has a good intent but almost no thoughtfulness behind the shape of it’s language.  Episode 6 of Tinkered Thinking thoroughly rips this obnoxiously over-used phrase to pieces, and leaves any reader or listener with a far more practical piece of advice.

That being said, and with the full context of that Episode, there may be some good use that can be resurrected from the troublesome word Passion.

As Episode 6 explores, Passion has roots that indicate pain and suffering, and such things can be a great source of insight with regards to where and what we should focus on.

Life can accurately be defined through the lens of solving problems.  Every little annoyance and trial that emerges during the course of the day can be seen as a puzzle or problem that we can solve.

The worst of these puzzles and problems create real pain, real suffering, and they are ultimately the first problems that we should seek to solve.

These are problems that in essence,  we are already passionate about.

There’s no need to go looking for some task or career that is going to unrealistically light up our life with joy and fulfillment.  There are already things that we can actively work on.

Lack of income causing stress and making the stress of debt compound in unhealthy ways?  Boom, a problem with passion already built into it.

Annoyed with some process that could be solved with some sort of product or new process that’s easily seen in the imagination?  Boom, the experience of dealing with the absence of such a solution is a form of suffering, a kind of pain, which inherently defines our passion for any given thing.

Those high and generous sounding words follow your passion might be more appropriately reworded as

solve the annoying and painful problems in your life and you’ll feel better about your situation.

The greatest boon of following the nauseatingly overused directive in the way here outlined is that with more problems in our life effectively solved, it opens up resources both emotional and cognitive to follow the advice Episode 6 seeks to give in absence of passions followed:

with less pain and suffering in the day to day, we can then follow that fainter voice of curiosity and discover real treasures hitherto unimagined.

ONE DAY. . .

May 2nd, 2019

Hopes. Goals. Dreams. 

Big, small, complicated, simple.  Realistic or just plain fantasy.

What we imagine we’d like to do and accomplish can fall into all sorts of categories.  Some might not actually be achievable, and this would be a painful lesson worth learning as it would require a set of actions to reality-test that possibility.

Regardless of failure and lack of possibility, such efforts are ultimately an exercise in information gathering.  By proving something is not possible by giving it our best effort we understand something about the world in the tightest way possible. 

This calibrates our imagination even more finely, allowing the next thing we might imagine to be more within the realm of the possible.

One day…. we say, we’ll do this or that.  Live in this place, hold some certificate, start some company, be a meditator, write that book and so on and so forth.

Our ability to project into the future, or rather our inability to reliably project into the future ultimately causes a variety of fantasy that is counter-productive.

What we do today shapes the most immediate future we will have access to, namely tomorrow.  This simple and obvious fact has hidden within it a compounding mechanism that we often fail to connect with the hopes, goals and dreams that we fantasize about.

By saying one day we effectively remove ourselves from any responsibility to do something about it today.

Certainly there is an order of operations in that some things are definitively limited by the completion of other things, however if this is the case then our current efforts on limiting factors count in the direction of any succeeding goals, like levels in a videogame.

Many of the dreamy goals that we hold in reserve, however, do not have any part of our daily energy devoted to such aspirations, and such is the trap of language like One day.

The shape of language has an enormous impact on our thinking, and downstream from there, our thinking has an enormous impact on our behavior.  The language that we use, especially with ourselves ultimately has a large influence on our behavior. 

The phrase One day as a prefix to the actions and situations we can sort of imagine ourselves inhabiting convinces us that it will happen in a very insidious and potentially deceptive way.  Such phrasing comforts us and enables the lazier parts of our mind to say that its not necessary to act today.  There’s always tomorrow.

The problem is that this lack of action compounds in exactly the same way that small actions compound, however the difference is that one leads us towards goals and the other leads us to a place where there is increasingly little time to take advantage of positive compounding results – and potentially a place and time when goals are no longer feasible, because time has run out.

Possible or not, the price to find out is action.

Any time we catch ourselves saying One day….

We must remember that there is actually only ever one day, and that day is

Today.

This episode references Episode 352: Order of Operations

SCALING EFFORTS

May 1st, 2019

Things take time. 

It’s certainly one of the wisest statements we have floating around.  Our perception of time and our understanding of how things grow and evolve through time is grossly under developed.  Two weeks of working out appear to have no results.  Meanwhile the individual who has been tinkering with weightlifting, cardio, diet, fasting and sleep  for years is far more likely to know what works, and what doesn’t, and more importantly, just how much time things can take.

So many endeavors fail to really get going because of this aspect of our perception of time:  we take action, and there don’t seem to be any results, so why keep doing the same thing expecting a different result?  This is a casual definition of insanity that has little thoughtfulness behind it.  And yet it persists and guides many people in ways that are ultimately less interesting, less productive and potentially even deleterious.

A way to think about these beginning moments is with dominos of varying sizes.  A domino can hit another domino that is 1.5 times it’s size and it will fall.  It can’t however takedown a domino that is twice it’s size.  If we abide by the first case, a tiny domino can take down a gargantuan domino if there is an appropriately sized and ordered set of dominos between the two.  And this distance between the tiny domino and the huge monolith can be seen as time expressed in a visual sense.

So often, our attempts to begin things are like a tiny domino trying to knock down a brick wall.  We fail to remember that our efforts need to compound and scale and that this process most often takes time.  Time where nothing seems to be happening.  Our skills scale and compound as we practice, and if we are smart, the results of our practice can also compound symmetrically in accordance to our practice.

Just to put this in perspective, if we line up dominos starting with a normal sized domino that fits in the palm of a hand, and then increase the size of each succeeding domino by 1.5, the twelfth domino will be 125 times the size of the first.  (Check out this videos here)

But there can be a gross mismatch between the scaling improvement of our skills and the scaling expression of that skill in the real world.

For example, an author can toil away in obscurity for years, scaling their skills at the craft, and yet the results of such effort might lack all expression in the real world because such an author eschews  petty concepts like marketing, network effect and exposure. 

The problematic concept of Passion for a given profession or endeavor often carries along with it martyr-like implications that most likely have bad effects on the ways we think about what we like to pursue.

A painter who paints every day and posts their art everyday on Instagram, however, might be fortunate enough to see a concurrent scaling of their skill and the effect that their paintings have with the public exposed to such art.

This can be the virtuous effect of followers on any given platform, however if twitter or Instagram were to suddenly shut off tomorrow, the artist or writer who has worked hard to improve their skill is still going to have the most important aspect of their scaled efforts, unlike some people who have harvested the network effect of such platforms without scaling their own abilities in accordance with whatever following they happen to garner.

The digital world simply speeds up the network effect  that also happens organically outside of the digital world, but practice still carries as much weight as is put into it, unlike the digital platforms which none of us own nor control and may be taken away at any moment for any number of unforeseeable reasons.

In light of such possibilities, its best to invest in our own selves and scale our abilities as much as possible.

This episode references Tinkered Thinking’s all-time most popular Episode 6: What’s Your Passion?

LIKE A CHILD

April 30th, 2019

Society, school, family, jobs – all of them place more and more restrictions on the forms of behavior that are deemed acceptable.  Anyone who ventures outside of these norms is greeted with eye rolls, nervous looks, and worse yet, exile to be filed away in some institution.

Childhood is a time when many of these restrictions are at their most relaxed, though much of childhood seems to be about installing such restrictions.

Don’t do this.

Don’t do that.

But children have yet to import the full brunt of society, school and jobs.  And it’s this lack of restriction, this freedom from inhibition that allows children to often see ingenuous little solutions when adults do not.

Professor Alison Gopnik has outlined a framework that characterizes the difference between a child’s consciousness and an average adult:

She describes a child as having ‘Lantern’ consciousness

and adults as having ‘Spotlight’ consciousness.

The difference she seeks to illuminate here is that adults focus on smaller areas of reality, whereas children are focusing on everything that comes their way.

We can further evince the utility here with regards to finding creative solutions by making Gopnik’s image even more extreme.

Take this thought experiment for example:

Let’s say you are camping out in the woods and the sun has gone down and there is no moon, it’s pitch dark but you’ve lost something somewhere around your campsite and you have to find it.  Which would allow you to find it faster: a bonfire or a laser pointer?

Clearly a laser pointer is absolutely useless in such a situation as it only illuminates the tiniest pinprick of reality, whereas a bonfire, while lacking the singular bright intensity of a laser pointer, casts enough light in all directions that we can quickly scan all possible places where our missing item might be.

Creativity certainly benefits and flourishes from having certain restrictions in place, but it’s often  likely that we have the wrong restrictions in place.  Many of the norms that we are conditioned to behave within most likely have little actual utility and function only to hinder what might flourish.

Apple’s incredibly successful marketing campaign highlights this unabashedly by commanding that we ‘think different’

The older generations of our species would probably do very well to learn from the very generations we are so resolute to teach the ways of the world. 

MENTAL SKILLS

April 29th, 2019

What’s a person generally going to imagine when they think about what a mental skill might be?

Playing a game of chess without the board nor the pieces?

Meditation?

Multiplying long numbers without paper and pencil?

Remembering long strings of names or numbers on the spot?

Perhaps something fanciful like telekinesis?

Would something like drawing be considered a mental skill?

This seems to have more of a basis in the real world, as in, we can see this skill in action as it produces some interesting and potentially amazing result.  In contrast, the others happen all within the brain, so perhaps they are more in the realm of what we might define as a mental skill?  Maybe.

In fact any and all skills that we might effectively use and perform are really just mental skills.  No matter how physical or active, our ability in any context boils down to a matter of brain cells: how they are organized, what sorts of patterns they’ve developed and how they translate those patterns through the body.

The individual who can produce the amazing drawing has to translate what’s going on in the brain through the arm and hand and subsequently with the pencil in order to demonstrate this skill.

The person who can remember names and numbers inevitably expresses this by manipulation of vocal chords, by speaking the result.

Any ability that we undertake to learn and acquire, whether it be free throws at a basketball hoop or coding in the Python language is at base a mental skill that our brain has to figure out and fine tune.

While mastery in any area might be acquired, there are a few mental skills that have a cross-over effect.

For example: meditation and autodidacticism.

The simplest and most approachable cross-over effect of meditation, at least in the mindfulness variety, can enable a person a certain level of meta-cognition while trying to acquire and improve other skills.  Such practice allows a person to Pause and assess their progress and internal mental environment far more effectively than a person who is quite unaware of such aspects of their reality.

This bleeds somewhat into the other here mentioned:

Autodidacticism.  This is the art of teaching one’s self without the guidance or help of instructors or masters.  Acquiring the skill of autodidacticism is in essence learning how to learn.  This can become a superpower because once trends in the process of learning are identified, they can be anticipated, recognized and then optimized while pursuing learning in other fields. 

The autodidact might understand that 10 hours of hard solid effort on a topic can yield a huge amount of progress, whereas the person who lacks such drive and curiosity generally doesn’t have access to the sort of learning environment that would create this dense 10 hour research block and give such a person the simple realization of what is possible in half a day’s rigorous investigation.

The autodidact may also realize the emotional component with regards to motivation.  Expressing our own personal agency is extremely important for maintaining a healthy outlook in almost all circumstances in life and it’s particularly true when it comes to new and unknown ventures in learning.  This is the principle reason why people can seem so nervous and self-deprecating while learning something totally new in front of peers – their personal agency is severely diminished due to their ignorance about the subject and in turn such a person grows self-conscious.

The autodidact on the other hand realizes the drain such emotions have on actual progress regarding any new subject and focuses rather on observing and poking around with the new subject as opposed to perseverating over a self-conscious ignorance.

There is inevitably a mental skill to acquiring mental skills.

Nailing that one ultimately eases the barriers to entry for any and all other skills and projects that we might set our eye on.

This episode references Episode 23: Pause.