Tag Archives: self-improvement

How to Accumulate (Non-Coercive) Power, Part I

Posted on January 25 | 13 Comments

As it turns out, the door to power isn't even locked.

This post is a follow up to The Four Types of Power, in which I described different types of power, as follows:

  1. Tyrannical (Coercive, Zero-Sum)
    Ex. monopolies, unregulated financial markets
  2. Diabolical (Coercive, Non-Zero-Sum)
    Ex. slavery, colonialism, human trafficking, illegal tax havens, cons
  3. Competitive (Non-Coercive, Zero-Sum)
    Ex. sports, reasonably regulated economies, marketing/advertising
  4. Progressive (Non-Coercive, Non-Zero-Sum)
    Ex. invention, innovation, infrastructure, education, exploration, creating new markets, connectivity, information sharing

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Posted in Metaprogramming, Utopian Speculations

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Why We Should Seek to be Uncomfortable

Posted on December 26 | 3 Comments

Bed of nails, state fair style.

It’s intuitive and natural to seek comfort.  We want to be warm, well-fed, among friends and family, doing things we enjoy, with money in the bank.  But those moments when we are uncomfortable give our lives meaning, force us to grow, keep us healthy, and make us think.  It’s not something we consider or celebrate very often, in our culture that values ease and feeling good.

What’s separates being uncomfortable from suffering?  Duration and choice.  Being uncomfortable for too long, or being uncomfortable against our will, can translate into suffering.  There’s a huge difference between being poor for a year and poor for a lifetime, or taking a vow of poverty vs. involuntary poverty.  There’s nothing glorious or redeeming about suffering.  But choosing to be uncomfortable for brief periods of time can make us stronger, more aware, and more alive.

There are plenty of shortcuts to health, wealth, and happiness, many of which I’ve discussed on this blog.  Eat foie gras for heart health.  Make the easy choices that vastly improve your quality of life.  There’s no reason we shouldn’t do the easy things that make our lives better.  But there’s a risk of elevating ease and comfort, as values, above all else.

Cold dip.

Why should we celebrate being uncomfortable, and seek it out in our own lives?  Intense physical exertion is the most obvious answer; there are a multitude of benefits to short bursts of extreme physical activity (stronger muscles, denser bones, etc.).  Cold water is another physical example; a 5 minute cold shower can stimulate circulation, encourage fat loss, strengthen our immunity, and wake us up.  But there are less obvious examples as well.  Learning something difficult is uncomfortable.  The steeper the learning curve, the less comfortable we feel.  Prolonged intense concentration can feel uncomfortable.  So can unfamiliar social situations.  Emotional introspection can be intensely uncomfortable, as can some honest, heart-to-heart conversations.  Writing a big check to a charity can hurt a little.  But often, when we choose the more difficult path, it pays off.  We get stronger, we gain new skills, we meet new people, we deepen relationships, we complete difficult tasks, and we feel better about ourselves.

This is obvious, right?  So why don’t we ever hear the message that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable? It seems to be a kind of blind spot in U.S. culture.  Our country wasn’t founded on feeling good and living an easy life, so where did the culture of ease come from?  Maybe it’s an outgrowth of post-war consumerism, the culture-shift engineered to keep the booming, hyperactive wartime economy going.

The most insidious aspect of the culture of ease (remote controls, fast food, cup-holders, minivans, instant gratification, nonstop entertainment) is that it leads to chronic understimulation.  When we’re under-challenged, we get bored and seek distraction.  If we’re constantly drawn to addictive, unproductive behaviors (drinking, over-eating, TV watching, videogames, partying, etc.), then it’s usually a sign of too much comfort (and therefore boredom) in the rest of our lives.

Climbers on Mt. Fuji, either dead or napping.

The flip side of the same coin is the subculture of extreme discomfort.  Amateurs run marathons and climb mountains, injuring (or even killing) themselves in the process.  People drink only lemonade and salt water for a week, despite the lack of evidence that such a regimen benefits health in any way.  This kind of discomfort bingeing doesn’t do anyone any good.

Small, daily doses of self-imposed discomfort do more good.  Examples?  Choosing to bike instead of drive.  Eating less.  Listening to and considering thoughtful criticism (of our work and/or behavior).  Learning a new skill, even if it hurts your brain.  Working out.  Meditating.  Giving to charity.  Sometimes (though not always) the application of moderate self-discipline feels uncomfortable.

I’m not advocating stoicism or asceticism — I appreciate my creature comforts as much as anyone else.  But the insidious glorification of ease is a real cultural phenomenon, and it’s damaging.  I think it’s one reason the United States is falling behind in terms of education (though lack of school funding is another).  It’s one reason that, as a nation, we’re fat (though government subsidies of corn, sugar, and wheat are another).  For some reason there’s a prevailing idea that Americans can’t tolerate being uncomfortable (after 9/11, when citizens were ready to make sacrifices on behalf of our nation, George W. Bush told us to shop).

We don’t need to kill ourselves to be happy, but we can benefit from resisting the corporate and cultural messages of ease being the highest value.  It’s okay to feel uncomfortable.

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Posted in Metaprogramming

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The Joys of Throwing Out Long-term Plans and Lowering Quotas

Posted on January 22 | 3 Comments

This year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions or making a list of goals for the year (something I’d done since 2006, with mixed success), I decided to take on one big goal for Q1, and leave the rest of 2010 unplanned.

My planning/goal-setting horizon has been getting shorter and shorter over the years.  I remember having grand life-arc type plans in college, and even as a child.  Once I entered the working world and decided I that I basically liked what I was doing (having my own music business and doing freelance database consulting), the “future-vision” shrunk to two or three years, and finally to one year.

Why shorten my planning horizon to a mere 3 months?

A big part of it has to do with reading Tim Ferriss’s blog and, more recently, reading his book The Four Hour Workweek.  Ferriss makes the point that long-term plans often function as dream deferrals.  Why start something now if it’s on the agenda for 2015?  The problem is, it’s too easy to defer those large, difficult, potentially life-changing actions indefinitely, perhaps so long that we die before we try.  This is true even if the deferred plan of action is a central part of our identity.  I’ve been thinking of myself as novelist since approximately age six, but it took me another thirty-four years to actually write my first novel.  Talk about procrastination.  Anything you’ve been putting off for thirty-four years?

Already a novelist in his own mind.

There’s a natural tension between identity and intention; some parts of our identity evolve out of performing the related actions (if you play soccer enough, you might start to feel like a soccer player), while in other areas the identity and intention come into being first (a high-school student decides to become a doctor and starts planning their academic path).  The distinction has less to do with the profession than it does with the character of the agent.  You could just as easily decide at a young age to become a professional soccer player, or, in your adult life, fall into practicing medicine (perhaps a weak example — of course you can’t just start practicing medicine without a medical degree — but many people do learn a great deal about human physiology as a hobby and end up giving informal health advice to their friends and family).

It’s the intention-related parts of our identity that are vulnerable to deferral, as opposed to the professions that sneak up on us.  For myself, writing is in the former category; computer programming and music production are in the latter.  Who knows why.  What about you?

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I decided to take on one big, potentially life-changing goal in Q1 of 2010, and that was to write a first draft of my second novel.  It’s a big enough goal to get me excited and motivated, and simple enough to keep in my head every day without constant review (if you have fifteen goals for the year, it’s hard to remember them all — not to mention that by August half of them are irrelevant).

At the same time, I threw out any preconceptions about what the latter three-quarters of 2010 might look like.  Maybe Kia and I and our daughter will spend a few months working remotely from somewhere on the Mediterranean coast (I recently ran the numbers, this option could potentially be less expensive than our current lifestyle, especially if we can get in on some of that free European pre-school — you parents of young children living in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about).  Or, depending on the availability of Spesh or Mark Musselman, maybe there will be a new Jondi & Spesh or Momu album in the works.  In any case it’s exhilarating not knowing.

So — back to my grand plan.  I came up with what I thought was a fail-safe strategy to bang out novel #2.  I whipped out (or rather, clicked on) my digital calculator and figured out approximately how many words I would need to type every day in order to have a more-or-less novel length manuscript on my hard drive by March 31st.  I gave myself weekends off, as we don’t generally have childcare on the weekends (you try writing a novel while a two-year-old is clambering onto your lap demanding to look at pictures of choo-choo trains on your computer) and also planned on taking several “creative sabbatical” weeks where all I would do was write.

1150 words per day, on the regular working days.  That’s what the calculator said.  Okay, no problem.  My work was cut out for me.  Here’s what the first few writing days in January looked like, in terms of actual output:

Day 1: 297 words
Day 2: 402 words
Day 3: 351 words

Ouch.

I wasn’t spending eight hours each day in front of the laptop — nor was this ever the plan.  I still needed to eat, after all, and running Loöq Records takes some time.  I was hoping to hit my quota after two or three hours of focused work, first thing in the morning.

I liked the material I was coming up with, but at this rate it would take me all year to get a draft.  I kept thinking of Stephen King’s observation that after three months, “the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave radio during a period of severe sunspot activity.” Nope, don’t want that to happen.

It was my favorite goofy-hat-wearing vloggers, Tim Ferriss (again) and Kevin Rose, that came to the rescue, with this video post.  It’s long and (as the title warns) random, but somewhere towards the end Tim makes a reference to a story of how IBM achieved the highest sales by setting the lowest quotas.  The idea was to boost productivity by removing pressure, and in IBM’s case it worked.  Tim Ferriss is currently applying the low quota idea to his own writing project, with the goal of writing “two crappy pages a day.”

That sounded good to me.  I needed less pressure.  The 1150 word quota was looming over me every morning like a flying Nazgûl.  I reduced my quota to 750 words a day.  The next two days my word counts were as follows:

Day 1: 1147 words
Day 2: 1120 words

Go figure.  This was just two days ago, so we’ll see if the trend continues, but at the moment I’m feeling the lower quota.  I think the point of a quota is to get one’s ass in gear, and to have a minimum standard of productivity.  Quality is more important than quantity, but you can’t get to quality unless you produce something. Ideally, you get started and catch a wave, you achieve flow … then you hit your goal before you know it.  But for me having a quota is useful; it’s a guardian against sloth and inertia.

Did Rodin have a sculpting quota?

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Posted in Creative Work/Career, Metaprogramming, Writing

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Willpower as a Commodity, Part II (counterintuitive sleep tips)

Posted on January 17 | 5 Comments

It’s strange starting a new blog.  On jondiandspesh.com I mostly wrote about dance music, clubbing, and the like.  I don’t think this blog will have any sort of focus.  Some of my favorite blogs are similarly unfocused.  Art de Vany‘s blog became popular because he posted pictures of his grain-free paleolithic lunches and his muscle-bound 70 year-old body, but he also wrote about statistics, Hollywood films, and economics.  Now he’s made his blog private (his bandwidth fees were getting out of control and he didn’t want to deal with advertising) but I enjoyed the eclectic nature of his writings for a long time.

I think the main reason I like to blog is to make sure I can express myself without boring my friends to death with info-dumps that they may or may not be in the mood to hear.  I assume nobody is making you read this — you’re here voluntarily.  You can stop reading at any time.  It’s a perfect arrangement.  I can “talk” uninterrupted for pages on end about whatever is on my mind, and you can leave at any time without any fear of an awkward social moment.

WILLPOWER AS A COMMODITY, PART II

In my last post I stated my opinion that willpower is more like an expendable resource than a muscle you can build, and that the two aspects of willpower management are:

1) Stopping the Leaks

and

2) Doing What’s Important

By “Stopping the Leaks” I mean finding the areas of our lives where we’re expending effort and tweaking our behavior and rituals so that those areas no longer drain our daily reserves of willpower.  I think most of us can “trim” willpower expenditures in at least a couple of the following areas:

  • Fighting sleep deprivation
  • Fighting carbohydrate cravings
  • Enduring annoying behavior
  • Doing unnecessary tasks
  • Excessive exercising
  • Ignoring inclination and mood
  • Having excessively high standards

SLEEP DEPRIVATION

Fighting sleep deprivation can be exhausting.  Being anywhere but in bed when you’re tired is a fast-track to misery.  When you’re tired, the simplest to-do items feel like Herculean (or Promethean?) tasks.

I’m going to try to avoid saying mind-numbingly obvious things in this blog.  I’m not going to say anything about the effect drinking ten cups of Peet’s coffee every day, or eating an entire bar of 85% dark chocolate right before bed might have on your sleep cycle.  I’m not going to suggest that you wear earplugs if your spouse snores like a wheelbarrow being dragged down a gravel driveway.  I’m just going to mention a few things that have had a drastic positive effect on my own sleep cycle.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT 30-DAY EXPERIMENT

Last June Kia and I tried a 30-day experiment; no artificial light in the evening.  I first became interested in the effects of artificial light on sleep after reading this book and this article in the New York Times.  We wanted to experience what sleep might have been like in the pre-electrical era, so after when the sun went down (around 8:30 or 9pm), we turned off (or didn’t turn on) all lights, computers, TV’s — we even taped the fridge-light lever down.

A typical evening at home that month involved reading by candlelight from 9 to 9:30 (yawning the entire time), and finally succumbing to sleep around 10pm.  We *were* co-sleeping with our one-year-old daughter at the time (so we were more tired than usual) but nonetheless we found ourselves going to bed significantly earlier than we had the previous month.  It was a bit like going camping every night, except we were living indoors.

For the first few days we both slept longer than usual; I think about ten hours a night (paying off sleep debt).  After that, we probably both slept eight or nine hours a night.  Some nights I would get up around 2am and read for an hour or so (the NYT article discusses how the eight hour block might be a recent norm or expectation; pre-electrical people may have often slept in four hour blocks).

We both felt good that month.  We didn’t get sleepy during the day (which is unusual, considering we had an infant child).  The most unexpected thing was that we felt much happier that month.  We both had the experience of feeling spontaneous joy/excitement at random times during the day, for no particular reason.  This was probably incredibly annoying to our friends and family members.

With these results you might wonder why we didn’t continue the experiment indefinitely.  I can tell you — reading by candlelight every night is BORING.  However we do make a point to turn the lights down fairly early in the evening on nights that we’re just chilling at home.

So that’s one point — if you have trouble getting sleepy at night then turn down the lights.

VITAMIN D

The second factor that improved my sleep quality was taking prescription level doses of Vitamin D.  It was after having two colds in a row that I saw this video and immediately started taking 5K IU of Vitamin D3 daily (I’ve since reduced my dose to 2000-4000 a day).  No colds since, and I’ve been experiencing deeper and more restorative sleep than I have since I was in my twenties (I’m forty now).  The clinical research of this science dude supports my personal experience — adequate Vitamin D levels are important for deep sleep (not to mention reducing risk of nearly every type of cancer, improving mood, improving bone health, and positively affecting 36 organs in total).  Get your blood levels checked and if they’re suboptimal (like two-thirds of U.S. residents) then start taking supplemental Vitamin D (at least 2K a day), or get 10 or so minutes of summer sun on large areas of bare skin, with no sunscreen.  Ten minutes a day shouldn’t burn your skin or raise your chance of skin cancer, and adequate Vitamin D levels may be protective against melanoma (the most dangerous form of skin cancer).

Of course, I’m not a doctor and you should consult your doctor before doing anything.  I’m just sayin’ …

BONE-BENDING EXERCISE

Perhaps you’ve experienced sleeping deeply after exercising hard.  But who really has the time or inclination to consistently exercise the recommended thirty minutes (make that at least an hour with the commute to and from the gym) every day?  Only those freakishly disciplined types … and this isn’t directed at them.  The question in my mind was as follows: could I improve the quality of my sleep by exercising approximately 1 minute a day?  The answer, for me, was a definitive yes.

Try this following right now.  Get up, find the nearest open stretch of street, path, or whatever, and sprint at full speed for about one minute.  Unless you’re sitting there reading this in a Puma tracksuit, you can simultaneously exercise your nonconformity muscles at the same time.

So, how do your legs feel?  (No, of course you didn’t do it).  But try it some time, without doing any other exercise that day, and see how it affects the quality of your sleep.  I’ve found that vigorously jumping up and down for one minute also does the trick.  Undignified, yes, but it helps build bone density and release growth hormone.

One thing that happens when you get enough deep sleep is that your sugar and carbohydrate cravings go way down (and the converse is also true; as little as three nights sleep deprivation can reduce insulin sensitivity to a degree that is similar to Type 2 diabetes).  This post is getting way too long so I’ll discuss my experience with drastically reducing my sugar and grain intake in Part III.

EDIT: The Willpower Part III post is going to cover another topic, but I did end up writing about reducing grain products and sugar here.

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Posted in Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming

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Willpower as a Commodity, Part I

Posted on January 15 | 11 Comments

Willpower in action

I’m considering two metaphors for the concept of willpower; willpower as a commodity and willpower as a muscle.  I think the second metaphor is closer to the way that most people think about willpower.  Willpower is something that can be exercised and strengthened.  A person can toughen themselves up.  Try hard, and you get better at trying hard.

I think this view is mostly false.  Hard things get easier because you get better at them when you do them.  Skills that have a steep learning curve, that feel difficult when you’re acquiring them, aren’t going to feel hard for that long.  Why not?  You can’t have a steep learning curve without having a short duration.  If you keep at it, the hard feeling part will pass relatively quickly.

So is willpower a commodity?  Is it a raw resource, valuable, scarce, and non-renewable, with multiple potential applications?  I think this metaphor is much closer.  You can renew your willpower by sleeping, and to a lesser extent with breaks, pep-talks, and sugary snacks, but in a given day willpower is basically non-renewable.  Willpower can be drained by any number of innocuous-seeming tasks, anything that requires mental concentration, enduring the unpleasant, complex decision-making, or resisting temptation.  Answering complicated email, having to interact with people you don’t like, searching for the best airline ticket deal, trying to NOT eat that doughnut, making lunch for your kid when there’s no food in the house — all these things can drain your willpower quicker a bullet hole in a gas tank.

Some people seem blessed with an abundance of willpower.  They have incredible powers of concentration, they can stoically endure the most unpleasant conditions, easily stick to the most spartan of diets, effortlessly delay gratification, and regularly complete grueling exercise programs.

Other less fortunate souls struggle with attention-deficit-disorder and are defenseless against all forms of indulgence.  They have to gear themselves up to get the littlest thing done.  If there is cake, they will eat it.  If there is Scotch they will drink it.  If there is the internet, they will waste time on it.

People less naturally endowed with willpower might in fact be the luckier group.  If they want to achieve anything, they will quickly learn that they have to guard their willpower against theft and to conserve against waste.

Those born into the first group might stoically labor their entire lives, getting much done but achieving nothing, because they are never forced to develop good willpower management skills.

Personally I think I started somewhere in the middle (by nature and/or nurture) and I’m trying to better use my available willpower with smart willpower management.  So what do I mean by that?

IMO willpower management has two sides:

  • Stopping the Leaks
  • Doing What’s Important

I’ll cover both in my next post.

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Posted in Metaprogramming

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