SUCCESSION STAGES

April 26th, 2019

Ecological succession is defined as the changes in species structure over time in a given place.  Deserts can turn into grasslands given the right circumstances and grasslands can eventually lead to an even richer complex of species as we see in forests.  The key to this process is that consequences of something living in a given place inevitably changes that place.  For example when grasses are trimmed, as per the lunch of some herbivore, the grass also abandons some of it’s root structure in order to balance things out.  Without the little green solar panel above, there’s not enough energy to run the systems of such a large root system, and so the parts of the root system that are left behind contribute to a richer soil upon which all the grass grows, and this soil, with time can grow rich enough to support larger species, like trees.

However, the desert is the fastest growing landscape on the planet.  The succession process just described is occurring in reverse.  That succession process is a good example of a virtuous cycle, and the process of desertification that we now have is an example of a vicious cycle.  Both are very similar but one leads to a better place and one leads to a worse place.

Such a successional process may pose an apt analogy for the mind.  We might think of the ideal state of a mind as one where it’s at rest with the body and primed without distraction for creating and exploring interesting ideas.  Or as is often said, being in the zone.  What conditions can we have an effect on in order to remove friction from our mind’s ability to slide into this zone?

Sometimes, it can feel like planting a tree in the middle of the desert and wondering why it doesn’t flourish.

What successional stages does the mind benefit from in order to flourish with the ideas that will make tomorrow better?

Could any question be more pertinent when reports of depression and anxiety are at record highs?  The desertification that is occurring to our environment seems to have a twin process in the minds of the population that is suffering more and more.  What first step is required to help slow the process and eventually turn the tide?

For an individual these questions are far easier to answer.  While diet and exercise are jabbered about ad nauseam, both require a monolithic foundation in order to function properly:  namely sleep.

To highlight the ecological allegory, sleep might be  akin to the rain that nurtures the landscape.  Perhaps no image is more evocative of this than the colorful super blooms that have occurred in California with the end of the drought and the return of the rains.

For the individual, everything becomes easier if sleep is dialed in, especially all the other things that a person can do in order to Level-Up their mental state:

For example just think about how much easier it would be to try and meditate after a good night’s rest, as opposed to just a few restless hours?

How much stronger does the body feel, and when results of exercise and good food and meditation are released back onto the brain, how much cleaner and smoother is our thinking?

Just as the species who live in some microenvironment change that environment, so to do our activities and our thoughts change the landscape of our brain.  Lavishing that internal environment with everything it needs only makes it a better place to inhabit, and since there’s really no other choice about where and what to inhabit, it’s clear we need to nurture this space as much as possible.

This episode references Episode 370: Zen and the Goldilocks Fallacy and Episode 42: Level-Up.

TWO-DO

April 25th, 2019

An oft remarked aspect of productivity regarding to-do lists is how effective they can be when they are actually used.  Of course, a to-do list that is made only in order to feel productive and not to guide next steps is simply a waste of time. 

For every to-do list that has been written and eventually discarded without any of it’s listed items coming to fruition, we might ask: why do some to-do lists get done and others don’t?

The assumption might be that it’s all about the person who was supposed to do all the items on the list.  Perhaps they were lazy, got distracted, or some other excuse.

But what if these discarded to-do lists have more to do with the nature of the list rather than the doer?

We might ask: is there a to-do list that is more likely to be done than another to-do list?

Approaching this question from some extremes, we can ponder the likelihood of to-do list with some god-awful number of items, say 230 against a to-do list with 5 items on it.

It’s obvious the to-do list with 5 items is more likely to get done.  But if this seems perfectly acceptable with extreme juxtapositions it’s reasonable to think that similar likelihoods hold true with much lower and closer numbers.

Is a to-do list with 10 items more likely to get done than a list with 20?

The logic of the prior assumption would seem to indicate yes.  But how far can this kind of trend really be pushed?

Regardless, a list of 10 or 20 items takes a few minutes to think through and write down.  Minutes during which anxiety can rise as we realize just how much we have to do.  Suddenly the mind is clouded with many items and intoxicated with stress. 

Is this the best way to go about it?  Or should we be chunking our to-do’s into even smaller pieces.

What about just two items?  Literally a two- as in the number – do list.

The first item is our most pressing next action,

and the second is merely what we currently think would be a good next step after our current action.

Who knows, the world might look quite different after we’ve taken that first step.

What we plan 7 and 8 steps ahead might turn out to be totally irrelevant, and if we holdfast to this order we’ve planned out into the future, it might even keep us from exploring more productive avenues that open up as we make progress.

This may even be a reason why many to-do lists are discarded before they’re ever even completed: things change as we do things, which lead to different needs and other things that need to be done.

A two-step list is also faster to think of and write down.  There’s no time, nor scope for anxiety or worry to bloom and we can feel the comfort of actually getting to work on our tasks much sooner.

The obviously homophonic implications of the to-do list might actually hide a more incisive description about what needs to be done. 

Simply put, don’t plan every step to the end.

Just plan two, to do,

and then,

write another to-do list.

But keep it short.

This episode references Episode 285: Plan on no Plans

INFINITE DEAD-END

April 24th, 2019

An infinite dead-end is a particularly insidious conceptual pothole that we often hit.  Hours, if not days and years can be wasted trying to find something in an infinite dead-end.  Perhaps the most ubiquitous example of this particular hazard is the question:

What is the meaning of life? 

Possible answers to this question can ricochet in all sorts of directions and hugely elaborate frameworks have been constructed in an effort to gain some ground on this question, but to do so is somewhat like trying to stand on a black hole.  Though a black hole is incredibly massive… in the same way a planet is massive, one cannot in essence stand on a black hole or build anything on it.

So to with the above question.  There are infinite ways to answer this question, and yet none of these answers really make any concrete headway in the direction of solving this paradoxical question.

The best way to deal with such a question is to simply stop wasting time with such a question and concern one’s self with better questions. 

Like chasing the horizon, such Infinite Dead-Ends seem to have some sort of endpoint, some sort of observable closure in the distance.  As with the question: what is the meaning of life?  The nefarious aspect of it’s nature is embedded in the assumption that questions have answers.  However, some do not.  And questions as a concept do not come complete with a good manual regarding their nature.

Infinite Dead-Ends exist in all sorts of forms.  For example, we may be fiddling with some gadget that we are trying to use.  Though it might appear to work for our purposes, at the end of the day it may simply just not work.  We can think of a physical puzzle, like those that are fashioned from bent steel and links where the object is to separate parts - imagine for a moment a gag version of such a puzzle that intentionally has no solution, but the purpose is to prey on our desire to try and solve something.

Social Media feeds are a type of Infinite Dead-End, as are the toxic games that such inventions are based off of, namely,

slot machines. 

These gambling games are tailored to play with human emotion in a way that keeps a person playing.  The pattern of winning and losing is calibrated so that a person always feels as though they are on the verge of winning big, and this verge is pushed forward in time infinitely, all the while a person is steadily losing their money for the feeling of ‘almost’.

Curiosity by default points us down all sorts of paths without much of a clue about where such paths lead.

Sometimes, these paths are productive rabbit holes where a slight obsessiveness can be a good thing, allowing a mind to explore the ins and outs of a topic and gain a strong understanding.

Other times, what looks like an interesting rabbit hole is actually an Infinite Dead-End that will cost us precious time, along with any other resources we might be spending while chasing the next step in the experience, as is the case with the slot machine player who loses both time and money.

The best way to test whether or not a current object of concentration is a productive rabbit hole or if it’s an Infinite Dead-End is to pause and observe the size of progress that is being made.  If the steps of progress are haphazardly sized… for example we have a breakthroughs that feels like big leaps forward along with small baby steps of progress and all manner of in between all mixed together, than this is a good thing.

If, however, the size of our steps in progress seem to be getting smaller and smaller, and the results of our effort seems to have diminishing returns, chances are good we are chasing an Infinite Dead-End.

FRESH EYES

April 23rd, 2019

Digging into a problem can often result in an endless rut of unproductive stabs.  Hours are seemingly wasted banging a forehead against some issue that is unyielding.  This is one of the ways that work expands in pernicious ways.  Suddenly our time is up and we have to leave without a sense of accomplishment and productivity, attempting to comfort ourselves with the idea we’ll return with fresh eyes for the subject.

The next day we return and perhaps the answer is suddenly staring us in the face, or we have a mind to work on some other aspect of the project or problem.

How might we cultivate a perspective that is constantly trying to be on the lookout for such ruts and when identified, our perspective comes equipped with a mind to refresh itself.

This is a smaller example of an age old concern:  should I pivot in some way, or should I persevere?

But to persevere is like climbing a mountain – it is not done in one epic step, but hundreds or thousands of smaller steps.  Even if we are going in the wrong direction, the wrongness of the direction will not illuminate itself until we’ve gone far enough in that direction, which requires steps in that direction. 

We must make a distinction between actual activity and mere staring at a problem or perseverating over a problem.  A writer who stares at a screen for two hours is really no closer to putting a word on the page than during those first few seconds.  This is quite unlike someone who has been hiking in the wrong direction, who eventually when their destination is proving to be less and less likely in such a direction will consider a new direction of action. 

Having fresh eyes with regards to a problem is more about taking a new action, any action really, as opposed to wondering why past actions did not have the desired effect.  Fresh eyes is not really about new insight, it’s about a relaxed willingness to poke at some other aspect of the issue.  

It’s about exploration more than anything else.

We waste less time when we look out for times when we’ve been lulled into inaction, and find ourselves aimlessly pondering over some issue.  Best to get out of one’s own head and take some new action that will give our eyes something fresh to see.

This episode references Episode 372: The Expansion of Work, Episode 125: Rut, and Episode 72: Persevere vs. Pivot

THE EXPANSION OF WORK

April 22nd, 2019

Few are unfamiliar with the inconvenient phenomenon that occurs when we have a large interval of time to get something done.  Given just a few minutes, we may rush, and hurry, but ultimately we don’t feel too bad when we look at how little or how much we were able to accomplish.

“I only had a few minutes to do it, I don’t think it’s too bad considering.”

But give a few months for the project, or worse, a few years, and how much does our activity and thinking and attack of such a problem change?  Not only do we feel that there’s plenty of time to get it done, but our abilities from moment to moment are of a far different tenor than when we feel the crunch of time during some unexpected last-minute deadline, or even an emergency.

Few are unfamiliar with pulling an all-nighter – compressing the work of an assignment that was allotted several weeks of work into several tired frenzied hours.  What’s even more curious about the all-nighter is that we ultimately become far more productive with less energy, being increasingly sleep-deprived throughout the process.

We can even view the establishment of institutions as a way for certain work to expand.  For example there are institutions dedicated to solutions for different diseases.  We might wonder how such institutions would react if such bodies of investigation were given only a final year of action in order to accomplish the goal of eradicating such a disease?  Would business continue as usual or would the final time compression change anything about how all the people associated and supported by such an institution go about their goals?

We need not wonder about such a hypothetical cage on such a large institution.  We can play this game with ourselves. 

For example, we can all think of instances when a few minutes dangle useless before something happens. 

Oh I only have 10 minutes before work.  That’s not enough time to start something new.  As though the ‘starting’ of some new problem or goal requires a butter knife applied to a chunk of time, to spread out and settle into.  We can perhaps wonder instead: how much can I get done in just ten minutes?  What if I challenge myself? 

It’s interesting to watch how one’s thinking changes when pushed into a sprint.

Just as this mind was,

having been given just 10 minutes to write this episode.

What might you accomplish if you sprint during those odd patches of time that pepper the day, the week and the year?