📚 Notes on Weichen Liu

Die with Zero - by Bill Perkins

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Main takeaways: It’s like applying Your Money or Your Life on spending: just like you earn money by spending your finite life energy, you spend money to increase it, or a better word used in this book: life experience.

At first I was skeptical about accumulating more life experiences. It could be misunderstood as trying as many things as possible (e.g. I want to go to every place), which is unrealistic because of the finitude of life. And it can seem selfish to increase your own experience. But it doesn’t have to be this way. An example from the book: if you enjoy watching ted talks on YouTube and you have the means, you can pay to go (and invite others) to the ted global conference. I don’t agree that it’s about optimizing for memory, for we can only live in each present moment, but thinking about how to spend money on having a better experience in each moment (especially with others) can be worthwhile.

Another interesting point is about planning activities according to your age. While I don’t agree that “there are certain things you should do at your age,” it does ring true that “30 is not new 20” (a TED talk). I think the difference is you should decide what to do according to your own needs, rather than from what others or society expect of you. It’s often not easy to tell the difference though.

Another key point from the book may help: avoid auto-piloting. Saving every penny is just as bad as spending all of them — you’re not deciding based on specific cases, but just resort to a blanket rule. This aligns with Karl Popper’s idea that theories are to solve specific problems, and we should make clear of the boundary of our solutions.

Notes #

Optimize Your Life

Death wakes people up. The closer, the more awake and aware. Until then we live as if we had all the time in the world. [As people I met in Istanbul said, people live as if they’ll never die.]

The author treats this as an optimization problem: how to maximize fulfillment while minimizing waste. [I don’t agree with this completely, as this approach created stress and tunnel vision for me, but this could be useful as one of the tools in the toolbox.]

Several guiding principles to solve the optimization problem:

Maximize your positive life experiences
Start investing in experiences early
Aim to die with zero
Use all available tools to help you die with zero (e.g. life expectancy estates, annuities…)
Give money to your children or to charity when it has the most impact
Don’t live your life on autopilot
Think of your life as distinct seasons
Know when to stop growing your wealth
Take your biggest risks when you have little to lose

What should worry us is not the fear of squandering our money, but squandering our lives by letting opportunities pass us. [Interestingly if you’re worried about spending too much, you don’t need to worry lol — it’s a self-balancing act]

To maximize your overall fulfillment, it’s important to have each experience at the right age.

We shouldn’t let what we have determine what experience we have. An idea is consumption smoothing: our spending shouldn’t reflect the variations of our incomes. Example: by saving a lot when you start your career, you’re starving your younger self to give to your future wealthier self. While you can’t predict the magnitude of your future earnings, you can be confident in the direction of it. Example: you don’t know if you could earn millions, but you’ll know you’ll make more than 18k a year.

Our perception of work-life balance is shaped by where we’re. The author says the island of St. Barts is one of his favorite places on earth and every shop closes for two hours so everyone can hang out with friends and enjoy a nice long lunch.

The author is a big believer in the value of experiences. While experiences don’t have to cost a lot, some are free, but worthwhile experiences do usually cost some money — the unforgettable trip, the concert tickets, the pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream or a new hobby — sometimes they cost a lot of money. “To me, that is money well worth spending.”

“Your life is the sum of your experiences.” [To me it’s more than that. And also the experience of others, but maybe included as part of my experience in reciprocal sense.]

Start actively thinking about what meaningful and memorable experiences you want to have.

Invest in Experiences

Jason knows he timed that European trip exactly right. “I wouldn’t enjoy sleeping in a youth hostel with 20 guys on a shitty bunk bed now, and I wouldn’t enjoy carrying a 60-pound backpack around on trains and through the streets.” … Despite the high-interest loan, he has the opposite of regret about the expense. “Whatever I paid, I feel it was a bargain because of the life experiences I gained,” he tells me. “You can’t take those away, and I would never have them erased for any amount of money.” What he gained from that trip, in other words, is priceless. [Hmm… I see the point, but I also wonder how much of those experiences are necessary? Maybe it’s not about looking back and regretting, but about designing the experience you enjoy now.]

you retire on your memories. When you’re too frail to do much of anything else, you can still look back on the life you’ve lived and experience immense pride, joy, and the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia. [Kind of against mindfulness but it’s natural to be like this]

Peak experiences will bring you many experience points. Small pleasures will get only a few points. … Experiences yield dividends because we humans have memory. [I’d hesitate to compare in this way. I think it’s more about being in the moment, that you’re more energized in the moment. But again maybe it’s more forward-looking.]

Once you start thinking about the memory dividend, you’ll realize it pays to invest early. [If not for memory but like for relationships the earlier you start, the more compounding you get.]

When thinking about real estate, it’s more than return on money, but also return on experience. “The whole point in earning money is to be able to spend it on the experiences that make your life what it is.” [One criteria to think about being reasonable vs rational (Morgan Housel)]

Why Die with Zero?

Even for people who enjoy work as play would be better off if they spend at least some of their time on experiences that don’t involve working for money. [Balance, or don’t be too extreme ([[Being less extreme to avoid future regrets]])]

If you’re still concerned and resisting the idea of dying with zero, identify where this psychological resistance comes from. (e.g. even if you love your job, you can consider spending money on activities that fit your work schedule.)

How to Spend Your Money (Without Actually Hitting Zero Before You Die)

Consider annuities — it’s more like insurance than investments, guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.

Economists generally think that annuities are such a rational way to deal with longevity risk that many experts have long wondered why more people don’t buy annuities—a question economists call “the annuity puzzle.”

What About the Kids

The enemies of rational thinking: autopilot and fear.

It’s better to give your children money sooner than later (although not before they mature), because a person’s ability to extract enjoyment out of the gift declines with age.

Balance Your Life

Autopilot-save is just as bad as autopilot-spend. The key insight is to strike the balance between spending on the present (and only on what you value) and saving smartly for the future.

A point about aging: while it’s admirable to be “young at heart,” be mindful and aware of your physical limits, and how they are steadily encroaching upon you as you get older, whether you like it or not.

Your saving and spending rate should be specific to your situation, not blanket rule like 20 percent. It might be better to saving almost nothing in early twenties and ramp up saving rate as income rises. [Made me realize the things I’ve tried was not useless or waste of money. But also made me think if there’s anything I need to spend money on to increase my enjoyment of life at the moment.]

This is not to say you have to spend money to increase your enjoyment, as people’s favorite activities differ. Walking costs nothing if that’s what you like.

Consider the basic needs: health, free time, and money. The amount of each changes as you grow older. [I’m lucky enough to have reasonable amount of each now. It’s important to think about how to use them.]

The author suggests people at all ages should be spending more time and money on their health. One way is to do more of the physical activities that you already enjoy.

Start of Time-Bucket Your Life

We die many deaths in the course of our lives: The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that’s a parent of an infant dies, and so on.

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” — the number one regret of dying.

Research shows that being aware of finitude motivates you to make the most of the time you do have.

Time-bucket approach: assign activities you want to do in life to the age buckets (e.g. 25-30, 40-50, 46-50, 51-55, 75+ years old). This helps you realize some experiences are better done at certain ages.

Know Your Peak

Crack open your nest egg earlier to make the most of your hard-earned money.

Be Bold—Not Foolish

Spot asymmetric risk, where the upside is very high while the downside is low or nonexistent.

Conclusion

While it seems an impossible task of dying with zero, it’s a worthy goal in the sense that it will change your autopilot focus of earning and saving, and push you in the direction of living the best life you possibly can.

Impromptu - by Reid Hoffman

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A nice quick read to gain deeper understanding of the current state of AI and how to best use it.

Notes #

GPT-4 is not a conscious being at the front of your own wondrously human mind. In my opinion, this awareness is key to understanding how, when, and where to use GPT-4 most productively and most responsibly. At its essence, GPT-4 predicts flows of language. Trained on massive amounts of text taken from publicly available internet sources to recognize the relationships that most commonly exist between individual units of meaning (including full or partial words, phrases, and sentences), LLMs can, with great frequency, generate replies to users’ prompts that are contextually appropriate, linguistically facile, and factually correct.

in your overall quest for authoritative information, GPT-4 helps you start somewhere much closer to the finish line than if you didn’t have it as a resource.

GPT-4 arranges vast, unstructured arrays of human knowledge and expression into a more connected and interoperable network, thus amplifying humanity’s ability to compound its collective ideas and impact.

Human beings should view a powerful large language model (LLM) as a tool, not as a source of truth, authority, or intelligence.

[If ChatGPT] can do a job as well as a person, then humans shouldn’t duplicate those abilities; they must surpass them.

humans could thrive alongside AI by: (1) specializing in asking the best questions, (2) learning insights or skills that are not available in the “training data” used by the deep learning networks, and (3) turning insights into actions.

large language models are also different from these technologies in that they can produce outputs that are not based on existing sources or inputs, but on their own learned patterns and probabilities. Students may need to verify, interpret, or modify the outputs of large language models, as well as understand the limitations, biases, or errors. Moreover, large language models can also learn from the feedback or interaction of students and teachers, which can create a dynamic and collaborative learning environment.

in early March, MIT researchers reported that two studies2 on generative AI’s effects on knowledge work found that writers and programmers both saw 50 percent gains in productivity with AI, and higher satisfaction to boot. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick called the results “completely unprecedented in modern history

But I do know enough about tech to be confident that GPT will be the next technology platform—on a scale like the internet, and very possibly bigger—on which the world will build applications, tools, and services of these sorts and literally a million others. And it’s going to happen fast, not least because GPT tools will themselves accelerate the development of all the rest of it.

When I graduated from college in 1990, jobs like “web designer,” “SEO strategist,” and “data scientist” didn’t exist.

In my opinion, ignoring AI is like ignoring blogging in the late 1990s, or social media circa 2004, or mobile in 2007. … Developing skills and competencies in it now will yield benefits for years to come.

Write a story of around 400 words about a manager and employee in the year 2035 using AI to work together to define a tour of duty for that employee, and leveraging AI to help that employee achieve greater productivity and accelerated career development. Illustrate the benefits to the company, the manager, and the employee of this approach.

When transformational technologies appear, most people are tempted to plug them in as a substitute for an existing technology or technique. … but this approach is actually a trap: seldom is the new technology an exact analogue for what came before.

Principle 1: Treat GPT-4 like an undergrad research assistant, not an omniscient oracle.

It also has many of the other drawbacks of a human research assistant: it’s not an expert, its grasp of any particular subject is fairly shallow, and it gets things wrong. In fact, when it’s wrong, it’s worse than a human research assistant, since a human will often have the good sense to warn you when he or she isn’t certain about the quality of their output.

Principle 2: Think of yourself as a director, not a carpenter.

You have to coax out your desired result, and you may need to try many variations on a prompt in the same way a director might need to film multiple takes of the same scene. It’s ultimately a collaborative process.

Principle 3: Just try it!

GPT-4 provides, with unprecedented speed and scale, each of us with probabilistic syntheses of the world’s existing words to consider as inputs, challenges, and inspirations for our own work.

Human beings are natural problem-solvers, and technology often becomes the vehicle through which we address challenges and make improvements to our lives.

Big Magic - by Elizabeth Gilbert

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Highly recommend the audiobook version read by the author!

Seeking Wisdom - by Peter Bevelin

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This book is more like a catalog that gives you pointers to ideas that are worth understanding and internalizing, to go beyond simple knowing. I enjoyed reading it and do like the simple and clear writing. But it’s distilled information. We have to do the work outside the book. I might come back to it in the future, as it provides a scaffolding for ideas to connect.

Anything You Want - by Derek Sivers

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Enjoyed reading the book. The main ideas are centered around:

Helping others is the priority. Serve your customers well. Make them happy.
It’s your business, your utopia, so do anything you want.
Make yourself happy, don’t worry about money, or growth, or other stuff. The reason you started your business, even if it was to make money, is to make yourself happy ultimately.

Check out the book on Derek’s website

Highlights/Notes #

We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence. But I had misunderstood. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

Any time you think you know what your new business will be doing, remember: No plan survives first contact with the customer. [But how do you know you’re making better decisions, rather than listening to someone saying and it feels right?]

My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something that I made myself for $1000. They did it saying “we need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for the customers. [Focus on what provides values to your customers]

Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers.

If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.

It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone. [This is the north star for how you make decisions]

People often ask me if I have any suggestions for what kind of business they should get into. I tell them the only thing I know how to recommend: Start by sharing whatever you’ve got.

They’ll play on your fears, saying that you need this stuff to protect yourself against lawsuits. They’ll scare you with horrible worst-case scenarios. But those are just sales tactics. You don’t need any of it.

You hear hundreds of people’s opinions, and stay in touch with what the majority of people want.

It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99% of it. Have the confidence to know that when your target 1% hears you excluding the other 99%, the people in that 1% will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them. [Back to the idea of serving the existing customers well.]

I’m just trying to help musicians. CD Baby has to charge money to sustain itself, but the money’s not the point. I don’t do anything for the money. [Each sentence is gold. Remember why you’re doing it. Charging money is not a sin. Money is not the goal.]

Years later, I took an entrepreneurship class. [What did he take? Was that helpful? Why don’t I just try one myself?]

So please don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today. [Long-term thinking is doing the needs that don’t change.]

For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites, or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input. How do you grade yourself? [Thinking almost the same?]

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough? [Powerful words. Highlighting again.]

If you really feel secure and abundant — that you have plenty to share — then this feeling of generosity will flow down into all of your interactions with customers. Give refunds. Give them attention. Take a little loss. You can afford it.

Anyone who’s in business to sell you a cure is not motivated to focus on prevention. [So much content are like this.]

Banks love to lend money to those who don’t need it. Record labels love to sign musicians who don’t need their help. People fall in love with people who won’t give them the time of day. It’s a strange law of human behavior. It’s pretty universal. [Wow, so true.]

It’s much harder to get a new customer than it is to get more business from an existing customer. Companies focus so much on getting new customers, but keeping existing customers thrilled is a better investment. [Echoes the 100/1000 true fans theory — they will appreciate and help you eventually]

Musicians find it very hard to get anyone to listen to their music. So when someone takes even a couple minutes to listen to it, it’s so touching that they remember it for life. [Same for other writers! Spend some time to help them. Pay it forward for the help I ]was given.

Imagine what you’d do if your favorite rock star called. You’d drop everything, and give them all the time in the world. So that’s how you should treat everyone that contacts your company. Why not? You don’t have time? Make time. It’s how everyone deserves to be treated. It makes life better. It makes work more fun. And it’s the right thing to do.

When one customer wrongs you, remember the thousands that did not. [Paying attention is important]

It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and is personally affected by what you say. Even if you remember it right now, will you remember it next time you’re overwhelmed, or perhaps never forget it again? [Empathy.]

One unclear sentence? Immediate $5000 penalty. Ouch. Unfortunately, people writing websites don’t get this kind of feedback. Instead, if they’re not clear, they just get silence. [Hidden costs]

If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.

Instead, if your internal processes are always designed to handle twice your existing load, it sends an attractive “come on in, we’ve got plenty of room” message to everyone. [I’m kind of afraid that people would just unsubscribe some day… This is a self-limiting ]idea.

You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsourced everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right? In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. [This is so unintuitive yet in the plain sight]

Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both.

I live simply. I don’t own a house, a car, or even a TV. The less I own, the happier I am. The lack of stuff gives me the priceless freedom to live anywhere anytime.

It’s not that I’m altruistic. I’m sacrificing nothing. I’ve just learned what makes me happy. And doing it this way made me the happiest. I get the deeper happiness of knowing the lucky streak I’ve had in my life will benefit tons of people — not just me. I get the pride of knowing I did something irreversibly smart before I could change my mind. I get the safety of knowing I won’t be the target of a frivolous lawsuit, since I have very little net worth. I get the unburdened freedom of having it out of my hands so I can’t do something stupid. But most of all, I get the constant priceless reminder that I have enough. [I love this.]

That’s the best reason to have a company. It’s your playground, your instrument, your laboratory. It’s your place to play! [Changing the mindset is important!]

Working Identity - by Herminia Ibarra

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A few surprises and learnings

What seems like a small shift in actions can reveal a deep change within the mind.
- The change of action may be quick and easy, but it takes time for our internal identity to transition.
We are social animals and can never do this alone. Relationships are important during the transition.
- On the flip side, overly attached to old relationships can hinder our transition.
“Making sense” or telling the story is an important part of the process. It’s about surfacing what we feel in emotions to the rational brain that we can clearly articulate our stories.

Notes #

Introduction #

Two key ideas: 1) We don’t discover our true self, but rather there are many possibilities. Some are defined by the things we do, the company we keep, and the stories we tell about our work and lives. Others exist in future potential and private dreams. 2) We are many selves, so we don’t swap one identity for another but transition as we reconfigure the full set of possibilities. We achieve this through action rather than reflection, doing rather than planning.

Two main themes from the book

“Identities in transition” — how our identities change
1. Exploring possible selves: instead of asking “Who do I really become”, ask smaller, more testable questions like “Which of the possible selves should I start exploring and how?”
2. In between: “long, chaotic period of transition” after we start testing. We’re still not sure about the new possibilities and not yet ready to give up old ones.
3. Deep change: how we move from in between to a deep change
“Identity in practice” — actions we can take to improve the odds of success for the transition
1. Doing experiments
2. Making new connections (and getting away from old ones)
3. Telling stories of ourselves

Making important career moves and life changes requires us to live through long periods of uncertainty and doubt. We can learn much from the experiences of others to make these difficult passages easier to navigate.

Identities in Transition #

To reinvent ourselves means we live through a period of transition.

Change always takes much longer than we expect because to make room for the new, we have to get rid of some of the old selves we are still dragging around and, unconsciously, still invested in becoming.

Possible Selves #

Why do we have many selves? How do we discover those selves?

We learn in iterative, multilayered ways. This is why the plan-and-implement model often failed. It’s better to adopt the test-and-learn approach.

The kind of knowledge we need to make change in our lives is tacit, not textbook clear; it is implicit, not explicit; it consists of knowing-in-doing, not just knowing.
-> Schoen-1983 Reflective Practitioner

Management guru Henry Mintzberg contrasted “planning” and “crafting” strategies.

Planning - a person who “sits in an office formulating orderly courses of action derived from a systematic analysis that precedes implementation.”
Crafting - “not so much thinking and reason as involvement, a feeling of intimacy and harmony with the materials at hand, developed through long experience and commitment. Formulation and implementation merge into a fluid process of learning through which creative strategies evolve.” https://hbr.org/1987/07/crafting-strategy

Instead of asking “Who am I?”, ask in more open-ended alternatives “Among the many possible selves that I might become, which is more intriguing to me now? Which is easiest to test?”

True-self model vs adult-development theory: some of the latter theories claim that maturity—and progress—increases with each developmental stage; others suggest that as we age, we shift priorities, eventually attending to values and interests we had previously ignored. One argument goes that in early adulthood, we are all too often victims of other people’s expectations… If we examine which family or other pressures might have led us down the wrong track, we can transcend pressures for social and organizational conformity in order to become “our own person.” (p. 36)

Far more often than not, the true-self approach—there is a “right” career out there, and looking inward will give us the insight necessary to find it—often paralyzes us. If we don’t know what “it” is, then we’re reluctant to make any choices.
Implementation consumes the bulk of our time and patience in career transition. What really happens in effective change is a necessarily “open-ended, tentative, exploratory, hypothetical, problematic, devious, changeable, and only partially unified” process. The allocation of attention, time, and energy suggested by the true-self model is exactly backwards.

Possible-selves model is based on the work of Stanford cognitive psychologist Hazel Markus: we all carry around, in our hearts and minds, a whole cast of characters, the selves we hope to become, think we should become, or even fear becoming in the future.

During a career transition, our possible selves spur us to find role models whom we’d like to become (and whom to avoid becoming) and help us to benchmark our progress toward those ideals.

Finding a new identity was not simply a matter of dropping one self in favor of another but a process of tinkering with a whole set of possibilities: imagining new ones, trying them on for size, elaborating on some, dropping others, getting rid of outdated images, coming to grips with the fact that some might languish. Only by testing do we learn what is really appealing and feasible—and, in the process, create our own opportunities. (p. 39)

Between identities #

There’s no avoiding this agonizing period between old and new careers: A transition can begin years before a concrete alternative materializes, as we start creating and testing possible selves. (p. 46)

It’s more of a psychological zone “in which we are truly between selves, with one foot still firmly planted in the old world and the other making tentative steps toward an as-yet undefined new world.”

To be in transit is to be in the process of leaving one thing, without having fully left it, and at the same time entering something else, without being fully a part of it. (p. 54)

No matter how unhappy we may be in a job, most of us continue to revisit the possibility of making it work because the present role is necessarily tied to a possible self—an image, outdated though it may be, of whom we once wanted to become.

Rarely does “becoming an ex” happen as a result of one sudden decision. Instead, it happens over a period of time, one that often begins before we are fully aware of what is happening.

Long before we start exploring alternatives, we also begin to disconnect socially and psychologically. (p. 56)

Don’t think this as unproductive middle period — “We need not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out at turning points in our lives,” writes Bridges, “for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of our everyday existence. In the apparently aimless activity of our time alone, we are doing important inner business.” Part of that inner business is the task of ending one thing; the other part of it—which takes longer—is creating substitutes.

What’s happening during this period:

Trial activities — learning what kind of jobs and companies exists, also a feel for yourself in the concrete contexts and situations
Trial relationships — “Do I want to be like him?” And “Can I be like her?”
Trial narratives — A working identity also lies in the unfolding story of our lives. Throughout a career transition, the narratives we craft to describe why we are changing (and what remains the same) also help us try on possibilities. (p. 60)

Making the selection from the possibilities

We use information from two sources: our gut (our emotional reactions) and the people around us (their responses to our trials and efforts)
- Internal gauge: Can I see myself in this? Does this feel right?
  - Discarding possibilities means progress: “Once she sat down to do a trial case, it became obvious that consulting was not for her. Working identity is not just who we are. It is also who we are not.”
- External gauge: based on the feedback we get from those around us.
This variation and selection process is not in the least an intellectual exercise or an introspective procedure. It is a physical activity in which we try on, in real time, any number of provisional identities. With feedback and validation, we might discard any one of these—or we might select one for a closer look. (p. 63)

Change takes time — Living with uncertain identity can feel like “living inside a hurricane.” But premature closure is not the answer. People who can tolerate the painful discrepancies of the between-identities period, which reflect underlying ambivalence about letting go of the old or embracing the new, end up in a better position to make informed choices. (p. 65)

Deep change #

In the reinventing process, we make two kinds of changes: small adjustments in course and deep shifts in perspective.

Trying to make a big shift in one fell swoop can bring us back to square one all too quickly.
If we interrupt the reinventing process prematurely, we jeopardize our ability to fully internalize this new self-definition.
- Note: Internal state changes take time

Change one project at a time

Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems. Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response.
One small win in itself may not seem like much; a series of them increases the likelihood of serious change by setting in motion a dynamic that favors a next step and makes the next solvable problem more visible. (p. 74)

Not just what you do matters, but also how you do it

In some cases, the issue is less the substance of the work than the lack of flexibility of the institutional structure in which the work gets done.

Unlearning / Drop your familiar tool

It often happens that we often stubbornly hold ourselves back — “What we see as feasible and appealing is always constrained by the limitations of our experience.” (p. 76)
It’s not just about finding a true passion, but also about “unlearning the assumptions that lead to the ‘next logical’ and absolutely wrong move.”
- As we explore possibilities, we start to recognize, question, and eventually dismantle some of the basic operating principles that are at the foundation of our working identities.

Exposing the hidden foundations

“Seeing he was still drawn to high-prestige institutions and to projects that fueled his achievement overdrive brought him to the next question: ‘Why am I so driven?’”
-> I went down a similar path.

Levels of career decision criteria (pyramid shape, p. 83)
- Level 1: job, industry, and sector
- Level 2: competencies, motives, and values
- Level 3: basic but implicit assumptions about what is desirable and possible in our lives and in the world
Many people in transition stumble onto the fact that they derive much of their sense of identity from their title and employer and that such over-identification with any institution can lead to stunted growth in other arenas. Far into our careers, we can remain the victims of other people’s values and expectations.
- Becoming our own person, breaking free from our “ought selves”—the identity molded by important people in our lives—is at the heart of the transition process.
- Even when we can honestly admit that the external trappings of success—titles, perks, and other markers of prestige—don’t matter much, we can hide from the need for change by telling ourselves how much the company needs us.
Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization. Note: Like habits, deep change come from identity change -> Atomic Habits

“Work-life balance” has become a preoccupation precisely because it is so hard to achieve. Correcting the encroachment of work on personal life is a pressing concern for most professionals seeking change, whether or not they are conscious of it at the start. But Dan McIvy and Susan Fontaine found that correcting the imbalance is not such a simple matter because it is part of a larger system of basic assumptions that reinforce each other. (p. 87)
Note: this was my idea that when you don’t have time to do what you want, it’s rarely a time management problem, but a rather deep one.

Practice makes improvements

Learning happens in cycles. Early cycles focus on the most immediate (or surface) problems. Later cycles provoke the bigger questions: How do I put it all together? What other facets of my life do I need to adjust? -> The learning loop
We are simply not equipped to make those deeper changes until we come to understand what they really mean, not as concepts but as realities that define our daily lives.
Transformation, then, happens less by grand design or careful strategy than by the small wins that result from ongoing practices that enhance our capacity to change.
- Note: Transformation feels like fast, but they’re just part of bigger and true transformation. It’s an ongoing process. We don’t remember those small things paved the road for bigger ones.

Identity in practice #

Reflection best comes later, when we have some momentum and when there is something new to reflect on.

During times of identity in transition—when our possible selves are shifting wildly—the only way to create change is to put our possible identities into practice, working and crafting them until they are sufficiently grounded in experience to guide more decisive steps.

Crafting experiments #

We don’t, as a rule, leap into the unknown. Instead, most of us build a new working identity by developing the girders and spans as “side projects”—extracurricular ventures that allow us to test possible selves without compromising our current jobs.

It’s not just a means of exploring known possibilities, but a way of creating unforeseen ones. (p. 92)

In his nonprofit work, he found a hungry audience for his expertise—designing effective organizational structures and facilitating decisions about how to change.

“Manworks had an inexperienced management team. That was going to limit what I could learn from them. Since I did not have a track record in managing, the absence of role models felt like a real drawback.”

Not all experiments have to be rigorously designed

Experiments come in many forms: Some are unintentional, others are conducted by design, some are exploratory, others, confirmatory.
An exploratory experiment is a probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things. Exploratory experiments succeed when we are able to formulate more specific questions, or when they lead us to a hypothesis or educated guess.
- vs. a more rigorous confirmatory experiment, in which the objective is to learn whether the hypothesis is supported or refuted by the evidence.
In the exploratory phase of any investigation, looking into not one but a broad range of options is essential. Variety allows comparison and, therefore, discrimination: “This resonates and that doesn’t”; “I like X better than Y”; “Even in the best of possible worlds, I really don’t want to do Z.”
- This include projects, part-time ventures, limited partnerships that “set up as low-risk ways to diversity a portfolio rather than ‘big bang’ investments.”
- Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that they move in the same general direction—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.
- Note: It’s much easier to compare (having options battle) than choosing directly
“Road-not-taken test”: when the situation forces upon you, the path you did not take gives you insight into a set of drivers you had been vaguely aware of.
One of the biggest advantages of going back to school, or taking any form of sabbatical, is that it makes room for play, allowing people “to experiment with doing things for which they have no good reason, to be playful with their conception of themselves.”
- Note: It feels more of a mental security—“I can do whatever I want since I have a job” or “I’m a student so I can learn whatever interests me”—whether I’m actually in a school or not does not matter that much. But the benefits of school include a network of like-minded people.

Narrowing down after exploration

Avoiding the blind spots — Counterbalancing our natural biases requires a partnership of emotion and intellect—working with our subjective and emotional responses (our gut) as part of the analysis, yet submitting those responses to thoughtful challenge and criticism. (p. 107)
Only being rational is not enough — Natural subjectivity can lead to what researchers call the “negotiating with yourself and losing” phenomenon. This is the all-too-familiar experience of having two versions of ourselves, one “emotional” and one “rational”; one that knows what we “want,” the other that knows what we “should” do.
- The lesson is not to throw reason to the wind. It is to trust emotional information, even when we can’t articulate what our gut is telling us.
  - Note: because motivation comes from emotion
- In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio showed just how rational it is to treat our emotional reactions as information… Damasio’s studies show that emotional biases, the compass of the gut, guide behavior long before conscious knowledge sets in.
  - Note: Probably the most important thing this book taught me is to look after the emotions – sometimes it knows very fast, other times you have to allow time for it to grow (identity)
How to stay calm during the in-beween period

Experiments are inherently dangerous, though necessary. Like Mark, when we follow our passions, we also risk escalating our emotional commitment to a new course of action before we have evidence that it will be doable. On the other hand, the perpetual dilettante dabbles in a great variety of possibilities, like our would-be history professor, never committing to any and never crossing any off the list.

In between lies a stance of “committed flirtation,” in which we hold ourselves to a rigorous search while withholding allegiance to any given alternative until the evidence that it will work is in.

Shifting connections #

Mind your old good friends —

When it comes to reinventing ourselves, the people who know us best are also the ones most likely to hinder rather than help. They may wish to be supportive but they tend to reinforce—or even desperately try to preserve—the old identities we are seeking to shed.

Shifting connections refers to the practice of finding people who can help us see and grow into our new selves, people we admire, would like to emulate, and with whom we want to spend time. All reinventions require social support.

The value of weak ties

In the mid-1970s, a Harvard sociologist named Mark Granovetter published what became the landmark study of how people get jobs. What he found and others have confirmed, is still true today: Most people find their jobs through personal connections.
What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. (p. 121)

Changes happen easier when you’re in a different environment

In brainwashing studies—obviously one of the ultimate forms of identity change—standard operating practice is to separate subjects from all those who knew them previously, so as to deprive them of grounding in the old identity. Brainwashing tends to fail when subjects are allowed to return at night to their fellow prisoners (who knew them before) after a day of indoctrination. We are all more malleable when separated from people who know us well. The same dynamic explains why young adults seem to change when they go away to college and interaction with family members and prior friends is necessarily reduced.

In the difficult days of the in-between period, a desire to move on must be coupled with a drive to find strength, wisdom, and emotional support, if only on the outer boundaries of our social world. (p. 123)

Not just support, but reinforces the transition —

As our points of comparison shift from inside to outside our organization, and as we encounter more and more people who have changed careers, a “tipping point” occurs. Our actions become self-reinforcing: We start to feel more determined to make a change and seek out others who have already done so.

Find your guiding figures —

Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson, whose book The Seasons of a Man’s Life explained the midlife crisis, emphasized the importance of guiding figures: people from whom the person in transition gets encouragement and learns new ways to live and work.

How do you find it? “In many cases, it is a simple matter of serendipity.”

Look for a community —

Since apprenticeships and internships typically exist in institutional form for only the young, at mid-career we are left to our own devices when it comes to picking up the tacit knowledge of the new work we wish to do. It is up to us to create or find our own community.

Get a secure base —

In the 1950s, psychologists showed that baby animals could become so highly attached to mother substitutes like brooms and wire figures that they would ignore their actual mothers. Such studies formed the foundation of a more general theory about the sort of human attachment that is critical for any risk taking. These “imprinting” studies pointed to the paradoxical nature of self-reliance and paved the way for the notion that people, like baby monkeys, are only capable of being fully self-reliant when they feel supported by and attached to trusted others.

Note: meditation can serve as (one of) the secure base

What kind of adult relationship provides such psychological safety?
- In developmental theory, a “good-enough mother” neither stifles nor ignores the child, neither intrudes nor abandons, but rather gives the child enough rope for discovery, all the while conveying that she is nearby if needed. Likewise, a guiding figure is neither unresponsive when we need help while in transition nor overprotective when we need to operate and explore on our own.

Making sense #

Making sense refers to the practice of putting a frame around experience: interpreting what is happening today, reinterpreting past events, and creating compelling stories that link the two. A life story defines us.
- Consider how we come to feel that we really know someone: We might know them well enough to predict their behavior; but we only really know them when we know their stories—the underlying narratives that lend meaning, unity, and purpose to their lives. (p. 134)
- Note: also related to how to cultivate a deep relationship. Just talking about things feels too shallow. I feel like I really understand someone when I know their motivations.

What seems like a revelation is actually a long running under current

In an essay about how we change our opinions, novelist Nicholson Baker argues that most of the time, we are in some inconclusive phase of changing our minds about many things, without being consciously aware that we are doing so. Events intrude and interrupt, occasioning what he calls alert intermissions.
- All of us hope for those moments and mistake them for coincidences or rare occurrences. In fact, we create alert intermissions.
- It had a big impact not because she revealed something he did not know (if that were the case, she could not have catalyzed a change) but because all the experiences he had been having suddenly made sense in this new light. That encounter lent coherence to all the bits of knowledge, information, and feelings he had yet to put together.
Facts and intuitions, reason and emotion come together, and we feel ready to seize the moment. These moments of crystallization tend to occur much later in the transition; most often they are an effect, rather than a cause of, change. (p. 147)

Moments of insight—the culmination of meaning in a brief time span—tend to occur when we change contexts, when we are relaxed, when we put aside our problem for a while, or when we are doing something out of character. -> Why it’s important to Have free time * More: “The full emotional and cognitive complexity of the change process can only be digested with moments of detachment and time for reflective observation. In the same way, time away from the everyday grind creates the “break frame” that allows people in transition to articulate intellectually what they already knew emotionally.” (p. 149)

Such insights on their own cannot drive a career transition to its culmination. They have to be worked into a compelling story. Why? Because we define who we are by our life stories. And stories about change, by definition, require a “before” and “after.” Events are merely occasions for retelling, reworking, and reassembling our experiences. We are literally reinventing the past so that it flows into a future we desire. -> As The Second Mountain argues, calling only makes sense when looking back.

Stories are shaped by the end —

One of the most interesting things about reinvention stories is how much they change along the way. Since a good story is defined by a narrative structure—a beginning, a low point, a climax, and an ending—the end point helps determine the beginning and the low point. (p. 140)

“We must not overlook sudden conversions and wrenching insights, but usually we fasten onto these only in hindsight, and exaggerate them for the sake of the narrative.” As Nicholson Baker writes in The Size of Thoughts

The practice of making sense consists of three parts:

taking advantage of the events of our lives to reconsider our selves
stepping back periodically to allow insight to jell
and using both the events and our interpretations of them to work and rework our story.

Windows of opportunity effect

MIT researches discovered that managers have only a discrete time period in which to effect a real change after introducing a new technology.
- Research on leaders newly taking charge of organizations shows the same effect: New leaders have a fixed time period in which to make changes; after that, it gets harder.
Windows of opportunity open and close back up again. Take advantage of it.
- What we do in the period immediately following a time-out determines whether we will be able to use that experience to effect real change or whether, instead, old routines will reassert themselves, leaving basic problems unresolved until urgency builds the next time around.

Self-report is usually unreliable —

People devote considerable energy to developing their stories—what key experiences marked their path; what meanings they attribute to those experiences; and, more importantly, what common thread links old and new. Precisely for that reason, some academics argue that interviewing people about why and how they are changing is a flawed approach. Interviews, the argument goes, just yield a self-presentation: the cleaned-up identity a person puts on for the outside world. They can never unearth the “truth” because, as any good social psychologist will tell us, people can’t resist embellishing their stories, making themselves look braver and smarter than they really are and coming up with logical explanations for events that are really random. So our stories never reflect objective reality.
That is why revising our stories is a fundamental tool for reinventing ourselves.

-> Use it to our own advantage. But I wonder if this can be consciously invoked though. Maybe it’s about gathering evidence?

To be compelling, the story must explain why we must reinvent ourselves, who we are becoming, and how we will get there. Early versions are always rough drafts.

Stories gather support from others —

Until we have a story, others view us as unfocused… Equally important is having a good story to tell others, putting it into the public sphere even before it is fully formed. By making public declarations about what we seek and what common thread binds our old and new selves, we clarify our intentions and improve our ability to enlist others’ support. (p. 186)

Practice deliberately: Sometimes it takes many rehearsals before it comes out just right. What happens in the retelling is not just a more polished story; we finally settle on a narrative that can inform the next step.

Set the stage for change to happen —

Insight is an effect, not a cause… There is not much we can do to manufacture the turning points that lend dramatic form to our stories. But when events happen that serve our purposes, we can weave them into the fabric of our reinvention narratives to use them to explain—to ourselves as much as to others—why we are changing.

Becoming yourself #

The oft-cited key to a better working life, “knowing yourself,” turns out to be the prize at the end of the journey rather than the light at its beginning… We learn by doing, and each new experience is part answer and part question.

Taking actions —

I heard great regret only from those who failed to act, who were unable or unwilling to put their dreams to the test and to find out for themselves if there were better alternatives. The only wrong move consisted of no move.

Summary of strategies

Act, then reflect
Flirt with your selves
Live the contradictions
Make big change in small steps
Experiment with new roles
Find people who are what you want to be
Don’t wait for a catalyst
Step back periodically but not for too long
Seize windows of opportunity

Coders - by Clive Thompson

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A book depicting what it’s like to be a coder, and how they (and their programs) affect the society. I think it’s a good read even for coders themselves, especially the second half, to understand how good intentions can lead to societal problems. I find the first half interesting too – after years of corporate life, it reminded me coding can (and should) be fun. Can’t believe how many of my perspectives toward coding have been skewed by my job.

Highlights #

Coding #

If you spend enough time around complex old systems, “you realize that the fastest, shortest way to a deep, solid, elegant integration is just by putting another layer of dirt on top.”
- In the world of coding, this sort of fix is what’s known as an “encasement strategy”—fixing a hairy, complex system by boxing it in.
Coding vs. writing
- In contrast, I have no such simple affirmations of the efficacy of my journalism. You cannot really ask whether any particular Wired column I write is “working”; writing does not possess similarly binary pass-fail parameters.
- Most coding is about breaking a big, hard task down into small pieces.
- The upshot is that this can produce a remarkably soothing sense of progress.
  - Research by the Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile and researcher Steven J. Kramer has found that employees are happiest at jobs where they experience “the power of small wins”—regular, daily, visible progress.
- Coding gave me precisely that sense of linear, regular achievement. Writing rarely did. Producing a book always feels more like piloting a boat across a foggy lake. I know I’ll eventually arrive at my destination, but the voyage will be filled with nail-biting doubt about my bearings.
- “Refactoring” is, in a way, like editing.
- “You don’t have ‘coder’s block’ the way you have ‘writer’s block,’” she told me. “Of course some writers really love writing. But you hear so much about the agony of writing, the procrastination. Whereas I find with programmers, you don’t find the same agony. If anything, it’s, like, ‘Yeah, I want to get back to coding!’”

Coders #

What type of personality, what type of psychology, makes someone good at programming?
- Some traits are the obvious ones. Coders tend to be good at thinking logically, systematically… (Philosophy students, it seems, make excellent coders: I met philosophy majors employed at Kickstarter, start-ups, and oodles of other firms.) Coders are curious, relentlessly so, about how things work.
But if you had to pick the central plank of coder psychology, the one common thread in nearly everyone who gravitates to this weird craft? It’s a boundless, nigh masochistic ability to endure brutal, grinding frustration.
- What are they actually doing, most of the time? Finding bugs.
- Coding is, in a profound way, less about making things than about fixing them. The pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert had a koan: No program works right the first time.
Why can coders be so snippy? Atwood asks, rhetorically. He thinks it’s because working with computers all day long is like being forced to share an office with a toxic, abusive colleague. “If you go to work and everyone around you is an asshole, you’re going to become like that,”
“The programmer personality is someone who has the ability to derive a tremendous sense of joy from an incredibly small moment of success.”
The phrase “user-friendly” is itself hilariously revealing: It implies that most software is “user-hostile,” until someone can wrest the design from the coders’ hands and get it in the mitts of someone who actually understands how real humans function.
For many programmers, a profound allure of coding is that it’s a refuge from the unpredictability of humans, from their grayscale emotions and needs.
- This love of objective, tangible results underpins most forms of engineering.

Obsessed with automation

The upshot is that most coders arrive at the same logic, which we could summarize thusly: (a) Doing things repeatedly or at the same time every day is boring, and I’m terrible at it. By contrast, (b) slavishly and meticulously doing the same task again and again is easy for the deathless machine sitting on my desk. Thus, (c) I am going to automate every single thing I possibly can.
As it turns out, this experience of mine is a common syndrome among programmers. The more I asked around, the more stories I heard of people spending more time writing a program to automate an action than it would take to simply do the damn thing itself.

Obsessed with efficiency

Programmers are obsessed with efficiency. It is the one thing I’ve encountered in essentially every coder I’ve met. Coders might be wildly diverse in other ways—politically, socially, culturally, what have you. But nearly every one found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient and ratcheting it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; their eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster, or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process.
In part, this lust for efficiency isn’t unique to software developers. Engineers and inventors of all stripes have long been obsessed with it. Ho’s chart seemed amiably nuts, but it reminded me of the original American hacker and engineer, Benjamin Franklin.
- Franklin wasn’t just interested in optimizing the physical world, though. He also thought his moral and ethical qualities should be tracked and tweaked for maximum improvement, too. So he wrote down thirteen “virtues,” including “Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions,” and “Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.” Then he printed them on a chart, with the virtues in rows and the days of the week in columns, so he could track daily how often he practiced good behavior, with a satisfying Puritan tick of the pencil.
In a very data-scientist fashion, she rebels at the idea that a single archetype can hold true across an ever-larger cohort of coders worldwide. The population has grown so huge that you can’t generalize across the entire field anymore when it comes to personality.
The elder coders all used Vim; “real coders use Vim,” they more or less told her. So she forced herself. At first it was ungainly and awkward; she kept on wanting to use her usual mouse-or-arrow-key movements to navigate. But after three weeks of painstakingly reprogramming her habits, it clicked—and suddenly she felt a cyborgic level of oneness with the machine, a sort of “I know kung fu” moment reminiscent of The Matrix. “You’re one with the keyboard,” she marvels. “There’s no moment when I have to break away from my train of thought.”
Paul Graham refers to it as the collision between the “maker’s schedule” and the “manager’s schedule.” The work of managers, he points out, is composed almost entirely of meetings. Managers’ jobs are to make sure things are going well, so they block out their day in one-hour increments, meeting with a different employee every hour. So they think nothing of asking a coder to come in at 1:00 p.m. and have a check-in meeting. But for the coders, that meeting destroys any chance of getting into a long flow state. “I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day,” Graham wrote. “A meeting commonly blows at least half a day by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case.

Societal impact #

Once advertising and growth become the two pillars of a big-tech firm, then it’s nearly inevitable that they’ll seduce their users into endless, compulsive use—or “engagement,” as it’s euphemistically called.
While still at Google, Williams began to do doctoral research into our attention and how modern tech was affecting it. “Nobody goes into tech thinking, I want to spy on people and make the world a worse place,” he said. “They’re well intentioned.” But the business models have a propulsive force of their own. Eventually, after ten years at Google, Williams left; he wound up at the University of Oxford, where he wrote Stand Out of Our Light, a penetrating meditation on the civic and existential dangers of big tech. “I’ve gone from one of the newest institutions on the planet to one of the oldest,” he says wryly.
As scholars have found, social algorithms around the internet all seem to reward material that triggers strong emotions.
- My friend Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who has long studied tech’s effect on society, argued in early 2018 that YouTube’s recommendations tend to overdistill the preferences of users—pushing them toward the extreme edges of virtually any subject. After watching jogging videos, she found the recommendation algorithm suggested increasingly intense workouts, such as ultramarathons. Vegetarian videos led to ones on hard-core veganism. And in politics, the extremification was unsettling. When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.”
Engineers who build huge systems, like economists with their models, see the world in the aggregate, not in the particular. “One of the dangers of the tech community is that their fixation on data models means that they don’t see the humanity based in them,” says boyd, who today runs the Data & Society think tank.
The first generation of social networks were built and funded by techies who regarded “connecting people” as the only goal, as danah boyd points out. They naively hoped that all the hard stuff—getting humans to actually understand each other, to bridge their big political differences—would happen automatically. It didn’t. It can’t.
Indeed, one problem with assuming coding is crucial to navigating the world’s future problems is that this drifts dangerously toward Silicon Valley–style solutionism—assuming that, hey, every problem in the world should be solved with some software! “It puts the method before the problem,” Atwood noted. “Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?” The whole reason the humanities are still a crucial field of study is that they help us understand the grayscale, maddening complexities of human behavior. They help us define our vision for society and the human spirit, which is the crucial first step before grappling with which tools—coding? plumbing? urban planning?—can help us achieve it.

Anti venture capital

Glitch’s Anil Dash thinks coders with start-up ideas should consider avoiding venture capital—or take as little of it as they can. That’s because investors will insist on hockey-stick growth, and that pushes the firm down the slippery slope to terrible design.
David Heinemeier Hansson. He’s a coder who watched ad-based businesses fall apart in the dot-com crash of the ’90s and thus decided to write only software that people would be willing to pay money for. So he started making an organizational tool called Basecamp,
- “There’s a magical relationship you have with people who are paying you money,” he tells me.
On the other side —
- if they’d charged for their services, they’d have pushed away millions of lower-income people—and billions in the developing world. Many of those people have enjoyed enormous personal and economic benefits from social media, but they’d never have had the chance if required to pay even one dollar a month.

More than just coding

And if they’ve studied very little of the humanities—history, sociology, literature—they often have what Northrop Frye might have called an “uneducated imagination”: They have little ability to envision what motivates the users of their software.
“People with liberal arts degrees, they’re critical thinkers,”
Amazon’s success is predicated on rendering life into a carousel of instant gratification, as the computer engineer and director Ruhi Sarikaya notes: “Friction is any variable that impedes your progress toward a goal, whether it’s purchasing a product or navigating traffic to make your nine a.m. meeting on time. Amazon is obsessively focused on reducing or eliminating friction—think one-click ordering, Amazon Prime, or Amazon Go.”
“It’s our generation’s crack cocaine,” as the tech entrepreneur Rameet Chawla wrote. “People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions.” Psychologists probably could have predicted this behavior: Back in the ’70s, the social psychologist Donald Campbell pointed out that if you use a single measurement to reward people, they’ll do everything they can to goose that number higher. (It’s now known as “Campbell’s Law.”)

Range - by David Epstein

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I love this book! So much to unpack. Resonated so much with chapter 7.

Key takeaways #

Having a head start is overrated. It’s only an advantage when you start on the right thing.
Match quality is more important. Have a sampling period before you start. Pivot when there are better matches available (not when it’s hard).
How to improve match quality? Test-and-learn, not plan-and-implement. We discover what we love by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks and finding new role models.
[[Prefer work that employs creativity]]. Repetitive work is easily replaceable by computers.
Relying on past experience in an unkind domain, or a changing world, is dangerous. Know when to drop your experience or even knowledge, so you see things as they are.
Struggle is good for learning. Tactics like “spacing” and “interleaving” makes it more difficult to learn but are more effective.

Notes #

Introduction #

“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice… Instead they undergo what researches call a ‘sampling period.’” (p. 7)
What’s the value of early sampling?
- Finding better fit — “One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.” (p. 9)
Studies have shown that “highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident — a dangerous combination…” and that “learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on the tests of immediate progress.” (p. 11)
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasing incentivizes, even demands, hyper-specialization.” (p. 13)

Chapter 1 - The Cult of the Head Start #

“In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule… these are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.” (p. 21)
- “In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”
“There is a saying that ‘chess is 99 percent tactics.’ Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all those patters, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess — how to manage the little battles to win the war — is called strategy.” … when facilitated by computers, people realize “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less.” (p. 23)
“Chunking — rather than struggling to remember the location of every individual pawn, bishop, and rook, the brains of elite players grouped pieces into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on familiar patters… this helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain-specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to… Chunking can seem like magic, but it comes from extensive, repetitive practice.” (p. 26)
“Even when they did beat humans in individual games, human players adjusted with ‘long-term adaptive strategy’ and started winning. ‘There are so many layers of thinking,’ Julian Togelius, an NYU professor who studies gaming AI said. ‘We humans sort of suck at all of them individually, but we have some kind of very approximate idea about each of them and can combine them and be somewhat adaptive. That seems to be what the trick is.’… ‘Not just games, in open ended real-world problems we’re still crushing the machines,’ Gary Marcus, a psychology and neural science professor said. (p. 29)
“When narrow specialization is combined with an unkind domain, the human tendency to rely on experience of familiar patterns can backfire horribly.” (p. 30)
- This is what Chris Argyris called “single-loop learning”
- A paper titled “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules” — that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions. (p. 31)
- Suggestion: vary challenges within a domain drastically, and insist on “having one foot outside your world.” (p. 32)
- Connolly’s primary finding: “early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple ‘career streams’ open even as they pursued a primary specialty.” They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. (p. 34)

Chapter 2 - How the Wicked World was Made #

Thoughts/Summary: What modern human learned from education is to use concepts — to make abstractions out of concrete things. This allows us to apply knowledge from one domain to another. On the flip side, with many concepts in the mind, it’s harder to jump out of the existing framework to see things as they are.

A lot of examples from this chapter to show [[How you think is more important than what you know]]

Chapter 3 - When Less of the Same is More #

“The students who would go on to be most successful only started practicing much more once they identified an instrument they wanted to focus on.” (p. 66)
- Inner drive is more important.
“The strict deliberate practice school describes useful training as focused consciously on error correction.” (p. 74)
- “While improving, musicians do pretty much the opposite of consciously identifying errors and stopping to correct them.” (p. 75)
“The more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.” (p. 77)
“Creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart, ” noted by Adam Grant (p. 77)
- Note: the idea of “coach after”, not before.

Chapter 4 - Learning, Fast and Slow #

Playing multiple choice — “what they’re doing is seeking rules”. They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute… The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire. (p. 83)
- “Students do not view mathematics as a system. They view it as just a set of procedures.”
- But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.
One of those “desirable difficulties” is known as “generation effect.” Struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning… It requires the learner to intentionally sacrifice current performance for future benefit. (p. 85)
- Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful. (p. 88)
It can even help to be wildly wrong — “hypercorrection effect” — the more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. (p. 86)
- Note: hold strong but loose opinions.
- Footnote mentions that this is for motor-skill learning, as bad habits are hard to undo.
Another desirable difficulty: “spacing”, or distributed practice.
- Repetition was less important than struggle… If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again. (p. 89)
“Interleaving” is also a desirable difficulty, which holds true for both physical and mental skills. (p. 95)
“The most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.” (p. 96)
- “Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose.”
The research team recommended that if programs want to impart lasting academic benefits they should focus instead on “open” skills that scaffold later knowledge. (p. 97)

Chapter 5 - Thinking Outside Experience #

“Kepler was so far outside the bounds of previous thought that there was no evidence in existence for him to work from. He had to use analogies.” (p. 100)
- Note: one of the tools for creativity
“Most problem solvers are not like Kepler. They will stay inside of the problem at hand, focused on the internal details, and perhaps summon other medical knowledge, since it is on the surface a medical problem. They will not intuitively turn to distance analogies to probe solutions. They should, though, and they should make sure some of those analogies are, on the surface, far removed from the current problem.” (p. 107)
- Note: how to practice doing this?
“Our natural inclination to take the inside view can be defeated by following analogies to the ‘outside view.’ The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the experts, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies. It requires a mindset switch from narrow to broad.” (p. 109)
“Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.” (p. 110)
“Evaluating an array of options before letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world.” (p. 112)
Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it… As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.” (p. 115)
“Those labs were Keplers by committee. They included members with a wide variety of experiences and interests. When the moment came to either dismiss or embrace and grapple with information that puzzled them, they drew on their range to make analogies. Lots of them.” (p. 118)
- Note: seems interesting environment to work in. I think there are more than simply “analogy”.

Chapter 6 - The Trouble with Too Much Grit #

Malamud’s conclusion: “The benefits to increased match quality… outweigh the greater loss in skills.” Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit. (p. 130)
- “You lose a good fraction of your skills, so there’s a hit,” Malamud said, “but you do actually have higher growth rates after switching.” Regardless of when specialization occurred, switchers capitalized on experience to identify better matches.
(Career) matching process — An individual starts with no knowledge, tests various possible paths in a manner that provides information as quickly as possible, and increasingly refines decisions about where to allocate energy. The expression “young and foolish”, he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. (p. 136)
- The important trick, Seth Godin said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.
“I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them.” (p. 142)
- Note: I’m exactly such type of person too.

Chapter 7 - Flirting with Your Possible Selves #

As Steven Naifeh said regarding Van Gogh’s life, some “undefinable process of digestion” occurred as diverse experiences accumulated. Hesselbein: “I was unaware that I was being prepared, I did not intend to become a leader, I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.” (p. 152)
Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘ Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.’ ” (p. 154)
- Note: 1) start here, 2) motivation, 3) learn, 4) do.
“The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery.” (p. 155)
- Note: I think this is a better strategy than [[So Good They Can’t Ignore You]], which treats human somewhat like a machine (“just get good at it, don’t ask why”). But this strategy only works if you have financial support (e.g. for rich kids), for most people I agree it’s better to improve your skills first.
In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress calming to be finished… some personality traits change over time in fairly predictable way… plus, while personality change slows, it does not stop at any age. Sometimes it can actually happens instantly. (p. 157)
Shoda maintained that the most exciting aspect of the studies was demonstrating how easily children could learn to change a specific behavior with simple mental strategies, like thinking about the marshmallow as a cloud rather than food. (p. 159)
At a given point in life, an individual’s nature influences how they respond to a particular situation, but their nature can appear surprisingly different in some other situation. (p. 159)
- This can be framed as “if-then signature”, or “context principle” as Ogas and Rose call it.
- “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.”
- “It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.” Alice captured a grain of truth, one that has profound consequences for the best way to maximize match quality.
Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat… come up with some experiments and see what happens… “First act and then think.”… “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. (p. 161)
- “Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?”… “Test-and-learn, not plan-and-implement.” (p. 163)
Paul Graham: “Instead of working back from a goal, work froward from promising situations.”

Chapter 8 - The Outsider Advantage #

InnoCentive: post “challenges” and rewards for outside “solvers”.
- “The trick: to frame the challenge so that it attracted a diverse array of solvers. The more likely a challenge was to appeal not just to scientists but also to attorneys and dentists and mechanics, the more likely it was to be solved.” (p. 173)
- Note: How does outside thinking work exactly? Can we reframe it in a way so it resembles problems from other fields?
The Einstellung effect: the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
- Pegau said “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.” (p. 177)
“As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. If those fail, they’re stuck.”
“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.” (p. 179)
- Note: [[How you think is more important than what you know]]

Chapter 9 - Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology #

“The generalists tended to get bored working in one area for too long. They added value by integrating domains, taking technology from one area and applying it in others.” (p. 204)
“T-people like myself can happily go to the I-people with questions to create the trunk for the T,” she (Jayshree Seth) told me. “My inclination is to attack a problem by building a narrative. I figure out the fundamental questions to ask, and if you ask those questions of the people who actually do know their stuff, you are still exactly where you would be if you had all this other knowledge inherently…” (p., 207)
“Melero and Palmer’s measured uncertainty in each technological domain: a high-uncertainty area had a lot of patents that proved totally useless, and some blockbusters; low-uncertainty domains were charactered by linear progression with more obvious next steps and more patents that were moderately useful… The higher the domain uncertainty, the more important it was to have a high-breadth team member.” (p. 208)
- Note: more upside in uncertain environments.
Darwin only personal carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. (p. 212)
- Note: how to choose what to do? Be a connector of smart people.
Griffin’s research team noticed that serial innovators repeatedly claimed that they themselves would be screened out under their company’s current hiring practices. (p. 213)

Chapter 10 - Fooled by Expertise #

“The average expert was a horrific forecaster… They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain… The Danish proverb that warns ‘It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,’ was right.” (p. 219)
- “Experts remained undefeated while losing constantly.” — fail at “hard to vary” is described in [[The Beginning of Infinity]].
- “The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview.” (p. 221)
“Tetlock is clearly a fox… ‘But if your assumptions about human nature and how a good society needs to be structured are different, you would see this completely differently.’… ‘Let’s say for the sake of argument.’… He tried on ideas like Instagram filters until it was hard to tell which he actually believed.” (p. 222)
“foxiest forecasters — just bright people with wide-ranging interests and reading habits but no particular relevant background.”
- Note: I want to be one of them.
“A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed ‘active open-mindedness.’ The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.” (p. 227)
- When more information is dangerous (without realizing we are most likely wrong) — “Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahn has shown that more scientifically literate adults are actually more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. Khan thinks it could be because they are better at finding evidence to confirm their feelings: the more time they spend on the topic, the more hedgehog-like they become.”
“[Charles Darwin] made a point of copying into his notes any fact or observation he encountered that ran contrary to a theory he was working on.” (p. 228)
- He also “needed a push from an actively open-minded teammate — or mentor, really.”
“None of this is to say that hedgehog experts are unnecessary… Beneath complexity, hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely.” (p. 229)
“Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events with structural commonalities rather than replying on intuition based on personal experience or a single area of expertise.” (p. 230)
- Note: what is “structural commonalities” and how to practice finding them?
“Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.”
- Note: learning not from experience (contra [[The learning loop]])

Chapter 11 - Learning to Drop Your Familiar Tools #

When making decisions based on data, we usually didn’t do a good job of asking “Is this the data that we want to make the decision we need to make?” (p. 240)
In The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan suggested that using quantitative approach is so ingrained in NASA’s DNA, that reason without numbers was not accepted. (p. 245)
When you drop your familiar too, you feel you’re doing something unnatural. “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility.”
- It’s difficult for experienced professionals who have done the same thing over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool — Wick called “overlearned behavior” (p. 248)
View your leadership not as decision making, but as sense making.
- “If I make a decision, it is a possession, I take pride in it, I tend to defend it and not listen to those who question it,” Gleason explained. “If I make sense, then this is more dynamic and I listen and I can change it.”
- There are no tools that cannot be dropped, reimagined, or repurposed in order to navigate an unfamiliar challenge.
  - Note: Culture is a tool too. Emotions, prior experience, skills are tools too. They should serve the purpose to getting you to where you want (with moral values of course).
One organizational strategy is to send a mixed message.
- The researcher found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful.
- Philip Fetlock also showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts.
- The trick is to identify the dominant culture and then diversify it by pushing in the opposite direction.
Balance formal process culture with a dose of informal individualism.
- “The chain of communication has to be informal, completely different from the chain of command.”
- “I told them I will not intercept your decisions that belong in your chain of command, but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.” (p. 264)
A stunning study: patients with heart failure were less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology conference, when thousands of top cardiologists were away.
“No tool is omnicompetent. There is no such thing as a master-key that will unlock all doors.”

Chapter 12 - Deliberate Amateurs #

One needs to let the brain think about something different from its daily work, Oliver Smithies would say. “On Saturday, you don’t have to be completely rational.”
- What sounds like hyper specialization today was actually a bold hybrid at the time.
- “Take you skills and apply them to a new problem, or take your problem and try completely different skills.” (p. 271)
“A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun.”
“I do not dig deep—I graze shallow… I go into a different subject every five years or so…” Deviating from what Gein calls the “straight railway line” of life is “not secure… psychologically,” but comes with advantages, for motivation and for “questioning things people who work in that area never bother to ask.”

The Beginning of Infinity - by David Deutsch

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is not an easy book to read. I like that it uses plain language, but the concepts take time to digest. I’m most interested in the theory of knowledge aspect, but the book goes much more than this. To be honest I only briefly skim through it. Maybe I got 5% of it. Definitely worth coming back.

Notes #

These are a combination of highlights from the book and my own notes.

“Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves. Where do these theories come from? For most of the history of science, it was mistakenly believed that we ‘derive’ them from the evidence of our senses — a philosophical doctrine known as empiricism.” (p. 4)
- [Sensory experiences] through [‘Derivation’ such as ‘Extrapolation’, ‘Generalization’ or ‘Induction’] to [Theories / knowledge of reality]
“Experience is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guesses.”
- “Nor is nature a book: one could try to ‘read’ the dots in the sky for a lifetime — many lifetime — without learning anything about what they really are.”
Justificationism: justify ideas as true by reference to some authoritative sources; Fallibilism: no reliable means of justifying ideas as true — they are predisposed to try to change them for better. (p. 9)
- Seek objective knowledge — hard but attainable. Justified belief — sought by many people — is not worth seeking.
- Beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to other beliefs, and even then only fallibly. (p. 226)
- For justified belief seeker, revelation does not happen when they can explain something. But rather, when a god reassures them that is true.
Why is science so successfully at explaining things?
- Rebellion — “take no one’s word for it”
- Tradition of criticism
- Testable
- But the board criteria does not necessarily lead to closer to the truth. Myths can meet those criteria, but can be easily adjusted. Good explanations is the key. It implies the above criteria. (p. 22)
  - “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” — Richard Feynman
Occam’s razor — simplicity is not enough. They should also be less variable (give accurate explanations.)
“The best explanations are the ones that are most constrained by existing knowledge.”
Science is not reductive. That if you understand low-level details, you’ll be able to understand high-level ones. (p. 109)
“All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement.” (p. 146)
Optimism views depend on the creation of knowledge, but we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered. (p. 206)
Misunderstanding are ubiquitous. Neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against them. (p. 255)
The way to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth. (p. 257)
“Rational thinking does not consist of weighing the justification of rival theories, but of using conjecture and criticism to seek the best explanation.” (p. 352)
It can be only rarely, if ever, that two people hold precisely the same cultural idea in their minds. (p. 355)
Arguments by analogy are fallacies. Almost any analogy between any two things contains some grain of truth, but one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what, and why. (p. 371)
We do not know how creativity works. We do know it evolves within individual brains. It depends on conjecture and criticism. (p. 373)

Several Short Sentences About Writing - by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I love this book. It gives me new perspectives on writing. See my thoughts here.

Notes #

Not just know what you want to say, but also what you’ve actually said.
Pay attention to the rules you have learned as you go about writing. Write them down. “You can’t revise or discard what you don’t consciously recognize.” (p. 6)
There are the ways we know nearly everything about the world around us — keep them in mind when you begin to think about what to write and how to write about it.
- What you’ve been taught.
- What you assume is true because you’ve heard it repeated by others.
- What you feel, no matter how subtle.
- What you don’t know. (“What you don’t know and why you don’t know it are information too.”)
- What you learn from your own experience.
“Many people assume there’s a correlation between the reader’s experience while reading and the writer’s experience while writing — her state of mind, her ease or difficulty in putting words together. There is not.” (p. 8)
“Long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.” (p. 9)
Remove every unnecessary words.
- You idea of necessary will change as your experience changes.
- “Every word is optional until it proves to be essential. Something you can only determine by removing words one by one.”
Writing by implication should be one of your goals — the ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, the ability to speak to the reader in silence.
- Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there will be room for implication.
“Most of the sentences you make will be killed. The rest will need to be fixed.” (p. 13)
“For our purposes, genre is meaningless. It’s a method of shelving books and awarding prizes.”
What if meaning isn’t the sole purpose of the sentence? What if you wrote as though sentences can’t be summarized? (p. 20)
“No sentence can afford to be merely transitional. If you’ve written clearly—and you know what you’ve said and implied as surely as you know what you haven’t said—the reader will need get lost reading your prose.”
The basic truth about writing: you can get anywhere from anywhere.
“Good writing is significant everywhere, Delightful everywhere.” (p. 27)
How we need to read, as writers: paying attention to the decisions embedded in each sentence.
- Imagine reading Jane Austen or James Baldwin, Why is this sentence this way and not another way? Imagine revising the sentence.
Notice: “If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.” (p. 37)
- Don’t put words to it.
- The goal is to get your words, your phrases as close as you can to the solidity, the materiality of the world you’re noticing.
- Rushing to notice never works.
- Let yourself wonder.
- You’ll never run out of noticings.
“What you get in return for this gathering and releasing is habit, ease, trust, and a sense of abundance that sustains your writing. And your mind never relinquishes what really matters.” (p. 42)
Beware of volunteer sentences — they’re nearly always unacceptable.
- “They occur because you’re not considering the actual sentence you’re making. You’re looking past it toward your meaning somewhere down the road, or toward the intent of the whole piece.”
- “You’re distracted from the only thing of any value to the reader.”
- Volunteer sentences are “the relics of your education and the desire to emulate”. They are “banal and structurally thoughtless”.
- “Only revision will tell you whether a stance that offers itself is worth keeping. The writer’s job isn’t accepting sentences. The job is making them, word by word.” (p. 47)
When the work is really complete, the write knows how each sentence got that way, what choices were made.
“The fundamental act of revision is literally becoming conscious of the sentence, seeing it for what it is, word for word, as a shape, and in relation to all the other sentences in the piece.”
- “This is surprisingly hard to do at first because our reading habits are impatient and extractive.”
One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what yo’ve written.
- Try reading your work aloud.
  - Mechanically, without listening.
Another way to make it look less familiar: turn every sentence into its own paragraph.
“Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.” (p. 67)
- “Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat. It’s a sign of engagement.”
“There is nothing natural about writing except the tendency to assume that it’s natural.”
How to make a sentence sounds spoken
- Ask yourself if you can imagine saying a sentence, and adjusting it until you can.
- Ask yourself “What exactly am I trying to say?” The answer to that question is often the sentence you need to write down.
- Imagine writing a letter or a long e-mail to a friend — the change in the reader is important: there is “a sense of connection and kinship, and intuitive grasp of what you say and don’t say.”
“Anything you think you need in order to write—or be ‘inspired’ to write or ‘get in the mood’ to write—becomes a prohibition when it’s lacking. Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, with anything, starting from nowhere. All you really need is your head, the one indispensable requirement.” (p. 80)
“In the pursuit of clarity, style revels itself.”
“Writers at every level of skill experience the tyranny of what exists.”… So try this: Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision.
- Bring the sentence you’re working on as close to its final state as you can, before you write it down and after. (p. 88)
“Language writhes with urgency to be saying something.”
- Learn to understand and control that urgency.
- It takes time to practice, but you’ll “find yourself making discoveries you never could have predicted, finding thoughts you never knew existed because they didn’t exist, until you were exploring sentences for their implicit possibilities.”
- With practice, it will be more efficient and creative, and more interesting.
“We assume that thought shapes the sentence. But thought and sentence are always a collaboration, the sum of what can be said and what you’re trying to say.” (p. 92)
Writing comes from writing.
Try this: no outline. Take notes. Reread your notes and take notes on them. Be certain to mark out what interests you. Think. And think again. Be patient. (p. 96)
- How do you know what interests you? You’ll stop and rethink the thought.
- Let the thoughts that interest you distract you. Ask yourself about them. What do they interest you?
- Don’t try to distinguish between thinking and making sentences. Pretend they’re the same thing.
Practice. Teach yourself to be patient.
- “You’ll learn to trust the agility and capacity of your thinking. You’ll learn that you don’t have to set aside inviolate chunks of time to think.”
- Resist the temptation to start organizing and structuring your thoughts too soon… Postpone the search for order.
How do you begin to write? Look for a sentence that interests you.
“The reader doesn’t need grabbing. She needs to feel your interest in the sentence you’ve chosen to make.” (p. 101)
What makes the first sentence interesting? Its exact shape and what it says, And the possibility it creates for another sentence.
“See if you can write the sentence that arises from the first sentence. Not the sentence that follows from it, even if that means the second sentence lies at some distance from the first.”
“Thought isn’t as fleeting as you think, nor does it come completely unbidden. If the thought was worth having, you’ll rediscover it or find a better one.”
- Write them down, just in case. And then go back to thinking — “imagining sentences and their possibilities, feeling your way into each new opportunity.”
“The writer’s world is full of parallel universe.”
“Rejoicing and despair aren’t very good tools for revising. Curiosity, patience, and the ability to improvise are.” (p. 116)
“Writing doesn’t prove anything, and it only rarely persuades. It does something much better… It shares your interest in what you’ve noticed.”
“Your job isn’t to arrange chunks of evidence, chunks of the world in the order you gather them. Your job is to atomize everything you touch… Pay attention only to what interests you in it. Break the complexity of what you’ve learned into the very small pieces of mosaic shaped not by the clumping of evidence but by your conscious decision as a writer.” (p. 122)
All writer’s authority is granted by the reader. “Yet the reader grants by her sense of the writer’s authority.”
“Rhythm is a vital source of the writer’s authority.” It comes as a precursor. How you write, rather than what you write about, creates your authority.
The only sure test of your ideas is whether they interest you, and whether they surprise you as you work. (p. 133)
Feeling a sense of obligation to write a sentence or paragraph in some way is always a sign of trouble. Question that obligation.
Try writing for the reader in yourself… impersonating the literal-minded reader and the trusting reader at the same time… A faith in the kinship between you and the reader who isn’t you, the assurance that what interests you will interest the reader… At the same time show a tender care.
There is no objective measure of “done”… It’s as much feeling as judgment, “derived from your rich experience of the completeness of all the books you’ve read in your life.”
Revise toward brevity, directness, simplicity, clarity, rhythm, literalness, implication, variation, silence, the name of the world, presence… when things are really working, that’s when it’s time to break what already works.