CUSTOMIZING AUTOPILOT

October 20th, 2018

Set it and forget it is the protocol with any kind of autopilot system.  Such systems, we try to design so that they will take care of themselves throughout the duration of whatever important task we entrust.

Autopilot as a concept in human cognition can be helpful when we apply It to our habitual behaviors, both good and bad.  Much of the time we are running on autopilot.  All bullshit jobs are catered to by people who are mostly running on autopilot.  Few in such undemanding jobs require much more than being present and going through the daily motions required. 

In diametrical opposition to the bullshit job is the innovator, who is constantly trying to push into new territory where new and useful things might exist.

Such innovators seem to have made a habit out of this difficult work, and to someone striving to do something more interesting with their life, it might appear not only difficult but strangely paradoxical to make a habit of such agile and construct dismantling behavior.  The difference is not as contradictory as it may first appear.  A habit of innovation arises from a person who has customized their autopilot with a different set of rules.  Like a random number generator that is designed to spit out anything but a pattern, building a habit of innovation is more like building a springboard instead of a train track.  While the later leads to a set and predictable outcome, the former is an amplifier that can magnify whatever occurs in the moment.

A more practical example rooted in better habits helps clarify the springboard.  Let’s say physical exercise is a habit that we would like customized into our autopilot.  In a fantastical situation, we might imagine a bedroom that has in it’s center a deep recess with walls fashioned like climbing walls and the bed far down at the bottom.  Such a strange set up would force one’s self to climb up the walls every morning when starting the day. This would in essence be a way of taking the autopilot out of the person and designing it into the structures we inhabit.  Given enough time in such a circumstance, the urge to do physical activity will probably still remain if the structural situation changed.

Most of us, however, do not have the luxury of designing such fantastical structures into our lives.  Customizing the autopilot requires a subtler restructuring depending on what sort of behaviors we’d like to make an automatic part of our lives.

Some kind of innovative habit might be as simple as: write something everyday, period.

A physical habit might be: take the stairs, always, and then take them 2 at a time.

We might even try to design traps for ourselves.  Let’s say we’ve started a slow-carb diet that has one cheat day a week.  We might decide to go shopping for food at the end of such a cheat day when we have gorged on foods we have been craving and now feel quite gross.  Throwing the healthier option into the shopping cart is far easier with this state of mind.

While life is short and spending a single moment on autopilot might seem like a bit of a waste, it’s also unrealistic, and in the grand scheme of things, the tendency to go on autopilot appears to be a fact of human behavior, but one that we need not begrudge, but one that we can use to our benefit.  If we can mindfully customize it and endure those difficult periods of change and rewiring, we might find we progressively enjoy a better and better life because so much of the things that contribute to better life are now just a part of the autopilot.

The episode piggybacks off of Episode 44: Autopilot.  If you’d like to explore the prequel to this episode, please check out that one next.

ALL OR NOTHING, OR NOTHING TO ALL?

October 19th, 2018

The idea of an ‘instant conversion’ captivates many people, and regardless of it’s origins in religious traditions, many still hope for some kind of moment when things start to fall into place.  Many cultural memes play on this concept of “finally getting one’s shit together.”

This all-or-nothing attitude may work for a tiny majority of people who wake up one day and suddenly act and perform in the way they have always dreamed.  But it’s unlikely, and unrealistic. 

The all-or-nothing attitude might seem like a reality because of the stark difference between people who seem to operate with high levels of achievement and those who seem perpetually stuck in a RUT.

But in such a case, we only ever see the result, never the process, because we do not tag along with people during every moment of their development to see how they went from nothing to all they are at the moment.  This is another case of the Montage being False.  If such a person were interviewed, we might get a few quaint anecdotes from their past, but it’s potentially a huge mistake to attribute any success to such anecdotal moments.  Just as the False Montage leaves out all the boring parts, so do such interviews.  Even if the boring parts are somehow packaged into a quaint anecdote about hard work, such an anecdote is still just a tiny narrative, and in terms of a medium, the story of hard work should not be seen as the same thing as hard work.  Like a humorous experience that does not translate well into a story, such boring growth on the part of a person may fall into the same category of “you had to be there.”

Such a process that only pathetically translates through story, like an analogy should not be thought of as some overnight sensational change, as mythical stories like comic books like to portray. 

This is potentially good news to the person who is stuck in some sort of all-or-nothing attitude who does not even try because to try would require firing on all cylinders all the time after the car has been rusting in the backyard for god-knows-how-long.

Instead of the all-or-nothing attitude, we would be better served by wondering how we start at nothing and go to all.  With any endeavor, merely starting is the most important part, because progress can compound, especially once we start to get a handle on what we’re doing and where we’d like to go.  We need not know our last step to take our next step.  And in that spirit it’s best to try and just pick one thing that can improve.   Such an improvement in one single area might free up some kind of resource to be reallocated into a second area of improvement, like starting a small business to build the capital for a larger business, or getting good sleep in order to have enough energy to hit the gym which in turn builds more resolve with regards to food choices.

What separates all and nothing is not some kind of mystical quantum leap, but a process that we can break down by looking thoughtfully at our own lives, establishing priorities and making small changes that can compound into radical shifts.  We might discover tricks and tips from others that help us leap in good directions, but it’s most likely a mistake to think that we can go to sleep disappointed in ourselves and wake up with a totally different life as a new person.

The all-or-nothing mindset might be useful when it comes to these tiny changes that we start with.  A commitment of all of one’s self to making one small change is far more likely to be successful than some fantasy of committing to changing everything that we’d like to see change.

Perhaps the all-or-nothing mindset should be treated like a tool, one of many that we have and that can be implemented sometimes when it fits the situation just right?

STUPIDITY WISDOM

October 18th, 2018

Wisdom is simply the act of making a better decision based on past experience.

Somehow, this is an incredibly difficult feat, and often requires not doing things that we have done in the past.  It begins to sound like a sort of stupidity when we examine the simple things that would make life much better.

Don’t eat that donut.

Don’t go to bed so late.

Don’t see that toxic person again.

Don’t go to that website.

Don’t dwell on this negative thought.

A large part of what keeps us from levelling-up our own lives has to do with shooting ourselves in the foot over and over and over with habitual behaviors that continually drag us down.  Nutrition is an obvious one.  The body is constantly trying to achieve a healthier state, but we drag down it’s ability to achieve such with that donut or that cupcake or that candy bar or that beer.  Watching just one of the endless documentaries about food shows just how eager our bodies are for regaining and maintaining a healthier state.

It might be possible to build an igloo with Lego shaped sugar cubes, but building a complex fighter jet with Lego sugar cubes is bound to look like a wreck.  So too is the case with our bodies. We’d be best to think of food as a kind of tool and building block as opposed to the colloquial analogy of ‘fuel’.  Considering how much high-energy food is available in this day and age, our bodies need ridiculously little ‘fuel’ and mostly crave better tools and better building materials for the job at hand.

But such is the trap of stupidity wisdom.  Our dopamine pathway keeps those bad choices well-oiled.  While such a shortcut-searching mechanism of our biology served us well before the agricultural revolution, it certainly functions far more like a gun aimed at our own foot in today’s world.

Wisdom is the act of mindfully making a somewhat painful choice for a better outcome.  Our dopamine mechanism ensures that making a different, wiser choice is going to be more painful.  Such is the cause of cravings.  The better choice is often so obnoxiously obvious it’s rather stupid, but the design of our biology makes this stupidly simple choice rather difficult.  Nothing is more powerful in this case than a mindful, thoughtful pause.  Cravings pass.  They spike like difficult emotions, but if we can experience and then remember the fact that they do not last, they do not endure, then we can remind ourselves when they occur: This too shall pass.  And every time we succeed in doing so, it will be easier the next time, and the craving – the downright stupidity – will pass faster.

Unfortunately it’s not overly simplistic to say that wisdom can be achieved by simply not making the stupid choice.

However, if the bad choice and the bad outcome is the only thing we know, we must also create room in this psychological equation for the fact that the brain is simply incapable of thinking of a true absence.  Thinking about not giving into the craving of eating a donut, is still a thought that has a donut as it’s subject.  We might develop a strategy of thinking about some other particular thing every time such a craving arises, such as doing ten pushups every time the craving arises.  This is far more effective than merely thinking about resisting a craving. 

But what is also available is an undistracted presence of mind.  This can be developed through meditation and can enable a person to mindfully disengage from a thought like a craving for some shoot-me-in-the-foot-food.  The craving itself can become an object of meditation in such a way that diffuses it of it’s power.  This might seem paradoxical and contradicting of the precept that the mind cannot think of an absence, but just as the sun heats up the surface of water and draws the water up into the air closer to the sun to form a cloud in the sky, such concentration on the part of the sun inevitably blocks out a view of the original water with the cloud.  The cloud is a different form of the water that has been brought closer through the directed power of the sun, and this altered state seems to relinquish whatever power the original thought had over the minds.  Such mindful concentration on any object seems to increase the mind’s power, like the sun’s rays being reflected back by the white albedo of the clouds it creates.

It might seem stupidly obvious to state, but our success with regards to anything is merely a process of choosing the right thing to concentrate on, but training our ability to make the correct choice is what builds wisdom out of the pieces of stupidity we carry around.

This episode references Episode 35: You Are Not All of You.

IATROGENIC GASLIGHTING: ARE YOU OK?

October 17th, 2018

When misfortune befalls a friend or loved one, we all ask the same thing:

Are you ok?

The intentional origin of this question is a good one:  We are trying to show we care and trying to suss out anyway that we can help.  Often the response to such a question is simple and ambiguously short, like ‘yes’ or ‘I don’t know’, and rarely might we get the surprisingly honest ‘no’.  This is an unsatisfying ending for the urge to help, and so such an urge can often prompt the exact same attempt.  After a few moments, we see a flash of dismal thought or memory across the face of a friend or loved one, and we ask again:

Are you ok?

We generally fail to think about what the effect of such a repeated question is in the mind of our listener.  From our own perspective, we are simply acting once again on an urge to be helpful, but from the perspective of such a friend or loved one, we must wonder: what’s it like to be asked if you’re ok repeatedly?

Instead of sparking a productive conversation, it’s more likely that such a repeated question will land and spur the thought: Am I ok?  Maybe not?  Especially if they keep asking.  Maybe they see something that I don’t.  Maybe I’m really not ok.  Wow, what’s wrong?

Such a short internal dialogue is deceptively insidious because at face value it seems to fit the situation perfectly.  Some misfortune has occurred, there is reason to feel below normal.  But unless the misfortune is of the nature that can be worked on, like a problem that can be solved, asking ‘what’s wrong?’ can result in looking for a problem that isn’t solvable.  It can become a psychological fool’s errand that leads someone off on a totally unproductive and potentially damaging set of thinking. 

The most effective argument is often the one that is simply repeated more often than any other argument.  We might imagine, for example the nightmarish situation of trying to go about our day as normal and having every single person we try to talk to or work with look us straight in the face and say ‘you’re crazy’.  Who wouldn’t eventually go nuts in this situation?  We have a bad tendency to believe what most other people believe at face value, potentially even when it comes to the state of our own minds.

The well intentioned person merely asking if someone is ok has hit a far different target.  A mindful pause is often all that’s needed to realize that perhaps just the company of a caring person is far more effective than asking “are you ok?” for the zillionth time.

Likewise, we might do well to remember for times when misfortune befalls ourselves and we are peppered with such a gaslighting question: are you ok?

Perhaps we can respond.  “No, I’m not, but I will be.  Thank you so much for asking.”

Such a response puts a pin in it far more effectively than the usual one-word answer.  Remembering such is definitely more difficult in times of trial, and certainly a strong moment of mindfulness is required for this sort of wherewithal. 

WILL POWER

October 16th, 2018

If we crack these words open a little, it results in a deceptively simple formula for how to generate more will power.

The word will comes from high German and simply means ‘wish’.  This makes a lot of sense if you think about it in the sense of a person’s last will, or their legal will.  Such a document is a record of their wishes about what should happen.

Power is simply work divided by time, or rather, power is defined by how much work we can do in a given amount of time.  If we can do a lot of work in a small amount of time, then we might be described as having ‘power’. 

At first glance, such a definition of power does not seem to be in accord with our cultural definition of power which seems to indicate something about someone’s ability to yield their will over other people.  But, someone who is willing to work a lot and efficiently, can with time gather the resources that enable them to hire and direct people to do their will, say, in a growing business.  Such an occurrence without the initial luck of some kind of capital inevitably requires some hard work on any individual’s part.

Power on a local, individual level as defined by doing more work per unit of time can eventually lead to the sort of power that is more colloquially used.  (though this need not be the only way to obtain such power, nor does it guarantee the acquisition of such colloquial power.)

However, on the level of the individual, we can use this definition of power and combine it with our understanding of the word ‘will’ and see that will power is a formula that indicates: if we can do more work in shorter time with regards to the things we wish, then we have more willpower.  In this little equation, which parts do we have the most agency over?

Our wishes need not be of huge concern with regards to effort.  It’s not terribly difficult to sit down and thoughtfully look at one’s life and decide how it could be better, or any other wishes we might have that can be written down.  That is perhaps the easy part.  Time is also a fairly fixed variable, unless we start thinking about how we are forced to allocated it, say with a time-consuming job, or bad habits that consume lots of time.  Regardless this has to do more with how we spend that time and not so much about how much time is ultimately available, such a quantity is relatively fixed day to day no matter how we spend it.

Work is the big variable in this equation that we can substantially change, but in order to do so, it may be useful to answer the question: what is work?  Work can further be cleaved in to the amount of force that can be exerted in a given unit of time.  What this ultimately breaks down to is how much energy we can spend in a given amount of time.

At the root of the will power equation is the one lever that we can mindfully toggle with different strategies: how much energy we have available every day that we can expend in the direction of our wishes.

Will power is not really a matter of being able to call up loads of endless energy on some sleep deprived morning and throwing one’s self with herculean strength into the next activity.  Everyone has had the experience of being exhausted upon waking up and clawing their way out of bed with huge difficulty.  In such a situation, answering the question of what would give such a person more energy is probably fairly easy:  such a person probably just needs more sleep.  It’ll take more time, but if such a person’s ability to work is amplified with enough energy, such a person might get more work, and higher quality work done in a far shorter amount of time when compared to sleep deprived performance. 

Nutrition and exercise also come into the picture as the other primary ingredients for power performance.  Sacrificing an hour of work to work-out can go a long way to making working hours far more productive and efficient.  Good nutrition simply adds to this combo.

Breaking apart the words and the concepts they represent reveal that will power is not some mysterious trick of mental life that we seek like some kind of holy grail.  If some people seem to muster huge amounts of drive from seemingly nothing, we would not be best served to try and emulate such a model.  Most of us would be better served by thinking more practically about our days as a sort of energy model, one that we can properly aid and feed to allocate more energy for the day.  Levelling-up need not be some divine wish that we beg for, but rather a conscious and methodical set of strategies that we research, discover, implement and compare in order to see what works best. 

Looking at the body as a kind of machine that requires certain inputs, like sleep, good food, and exercise is a good start for hacking the mental part of life and opening new spaces of will power.

The owner of a Ferrari for example wouldn’t pour coca-cola into the gas tank and expect it to perform at it’s peak… or perform at all really, so why do we expect ourselves to perform at our peak without the exact right kind of fuel, rest and activity that most benefits our body?