Archives for category: Personal Development

Winning at Arguments by Enlarging your PNS

February 10, 2013 //

Here’s a video of me. It might be helpful to read the text below before watching the video. Actually, on second thought, this post was adapted from an email to a friend who said “I am grinning ear to ear from watching the video on your wall. I’d love to hear more about it!” so maybe watch it first. Your call.

The Autonomic Brain & Againstness

So, in late January I was at a 4 day Applied Rationality workshop, which was absolutely amazing. The first 3 days were classes, and the 4th was to practise what we’d learned already. That’s when this video happened. The relevant class is called Againstness, and the practice session is fondly referred to as “Torture Court.” The againstness class is about the two halves of the Autonomic Nervous System (the part of your brain you don’t consciously control directly) which are the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems.

SNS = fight + flight + freeze (stress/againstness)
PNS = rest & digestion + (empathy)

The idea is that while againstness (or SNS domanance) was effective back when stress = wild animal or armed opponent, it isn’t when stress = fight-with-your-partner or performance anxiety. As mentioned, you don’t have a sense of empathy when you’re in that state, so it’s basically impossible to consider that the other person might be right, or to even think of how the situation might be resolved peacefully. We were taught several techniques to release from againstness and shift to PNS dominance… basically:

Be grateful for the chance to practise this skill (gratitude is incompatible with SNS)
Relax your body and open it up to expose your organs (body gestures like crossed arms are both symptomatic of againstness and reinforce SNS-dominance)
Actively try to feel the situation from the other perspective, or feel a sense of connection to the other person.
(repeat as necessary. if gratitude for the chance doesn’t work, be grateful that the chance is so tough that it’s beyond your ability to be grateful for it!)

Astrology & Arguments

Then. We come to the question of how exactly I came to be standing up there freaking out about astrology. I’ve historically not really liked astrology, but I was mostly indifferent. Sometime (I’m not sure where) in the past few years I developed a deep frustration with it. It really hit a peak this past summer when I had a very heated argument about it with my partner at the time. This had come up with past partners as well, although not so intense. Anyway, in another class at the workshop, called Winning at Arguments, we were asked to think of a heated argument, so I thought of that one. We looked into the word “winning” and how it can mean a variety of things, but that the most useful definition is that both (all) people involved achieve their goals. The next step there was to pause and think “what is my goal? what is their goal?” and I realized that ultimately she was trying to understand me and I was trying to be understood. Pretty compatible, eh? And yet it was one of the most intense arguments I’ve ever had.

However, despite having that understanding on Sunday, there was still a lot of pent-up negativity surrounding the subject of astrology. Very silly. Like, no matter how much I ultimately dislike it, there is nothing to be gained by being angry or stressed about it. Hence, the torture court exercise. I was one of the last people to go from our group, and a lot of the other people had been doing pretty tame things like singing I’m a Little Teapot—the main source of stress there was uncertainty surrounding the lyrics, not fear of performing. Another participant had to sidestep a punch from Val (the male instructor you can hear) but do so without flinching—just moving relaxedly. A lot of this is actually related to Aikido, but that’s another topic.

Torture and Laughter

The other instructor running the Torture Court was Cat, who was also the one who did the arguments class, so when I finally went up I had this anticipation (a scary but hopeful one) that it would be astrology-related. If it had come up as something else that was boring, actually, I would have suggested it be revised as such. Anyway, I had given my phone to a friend to film me, and so then Cat proposed what she did and man it was overwhelming! One of the profound realizations I had was that I use laughter as a stress response. Like, I sort of knew this, but I didn’t realize how obvious and dramatic it was. Where others became frozen or defensive, I became, well, as you see in the video.

Immediately following the session I was walking around in a very intense physical, emotional, and mental state. My body felt… kind of tingly. I was feeling totally drained but simultaneously full of life. It was kind of like being dizzy but I wasn’t off-balance. This lasted maybe 10-15 minutes. It has, however, substantially reduced my aversion to astrology. Again, I still don’t care for it, but it doesn’t get me worked up anymore. At least, it hasn’t yet.

Malcolm, the Aries

Categories Conversation, Mindfulness, Neuroplasticity, Personal Development, Rationality, Video

The Meta-Application of Rationality

February 1, 2013 //

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of being able to attend an Applied Rationality workshop held in Berkeley, CA. I can say without a doubt that it has had a serious effect on the trajectory of my life. I want to talk briefly about this more specifically. I do have much more to say about the workshop when I get a chance, and I’d love to talk about it either privately or in the comments.

So, my life’s trajectory: those familiar with calculus will understand the following in terms of derivatives, but I’m going to use the analogy of a moving vehicle. If you want to describe the vehicle, you can talk about several things. The most obvious (and most immediately useful) is “where is it?” which often called displacement. The next most obvious/useful is “how fast is it going and in which direction?” also known as the car’s velocity. But, unless a wall or gas shortage stops the car before the relevant moment, the most useful thing to know about a car is how far down the gas pedal or brake is. This is the acceleration and ultimately it will tell you a lot more about how far the car will have gone by tomorrow than the velocity or displacement. You need to know roughly where the car was and how fast it started, but smaller changes in acceleration are much more important.

At the rationality workshop, I learned some things that definitely took me beyond where I’d been before (displacement / location). While at the workshop, I was definitely growing faster than usual, but right now I might be slower than usual as I focus on consolidating everything. Here’s why I’m not worried: what I definitely increased was my ability and propensity to assess how fast I’m going and to go faster still. Have a look at the chart to the right:

A chart demonstrating how much faster an exponential function increases than either a linear or polynomial function

Ideally, you want to be the yellow line on top.

Accelerating returns

It should be clear that the yellow line on the top is increasing much faster than the others. It begins just as slow, but because it’s not only getting faster but getting faster faster, it quickly takes the lead. This is the model I’m adopting. Short-term, it’s fine if my displacement and velocity are taking a hit. In the long run, by getting better at getting better (by applying my rationality skills to becoming even more rational) I can easily overtake my hypothetical other-self and never look back.

However, I’d like to think that I haven’t just increased my acceleration but that I’m increasing the rate at which I’m increasing my acceleration, and increasing that rate as well, and so on indefinitely. This resembles an exponential function, which is shown by the yellow line above. If I were just accelerating at a constant rate, I’d be the red line in the middle, and if I were just holding steady at a certain speed I’d be the shallow blue line. One fascinating principal is that no matter how many layers you do this acceleration like xbigNumber, the exponential curve always has more. That means that if I were to ask “who will win the race?” between x1234567890 and ex, then ex will always win as time goes on. I plan to do the same.

How?

How am I going to do this? I have some general thoughts on this which involve developing personal scaffolds that will make it easier to install what I learned at the workshop as habits, but I’ve modified my environment as well. Or rather, I’ve decided to put myself into a different environment. I’m working at a software startup in San Francisco right now, but rather than live in SF I’ve decided to spend the next 3 months living in Berkeley. This will make me much more likely to attend various free training events held by CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality, who ran this workshop) and will also make it easier for me to hang out with some of the people I met at the workshop, encouraging me to focus on these various aspects of my life. By investing the time and effort now to make my next 3 months more fruitful, I hope to ultimately set up self-reflection habits that are exponentially powerful. I’m not sure how I’d tell success from a close approximation, but honestly I think that if I get the first 5 or so layers than there really isn’t much to be gained at that stage.

I was surprised by the variety of rational techniques that were relevant to my decision to live in Berkeley rather than SF. They included not only a substantial consideration of my preferences and goals, but also a recognition of how I’m not as rational as I’d hypothetically like to be, and therefore I can predict that if I’m living in SF I won’t go to as much CFAR stuff. Similarly, while I might generally enjoy not having a 1h-each-way bus commute, I expect to be able to devote a lot of that time to this work, where previously I felt like there was a bit of imbalance such that most of my waking hours were directed towards working on things for the company I’m at. Then, when deciding if I wanted to accept a certain sublet option, I also weighed factors like, “how much more valuable of a place do I expect to get by waiting / more effort, and is it worth it?” I decided it wasn’t, so I accepted. Personal happiness is hard to judge, but we do our best.

One could also consider a function of personal utility. Again, I expect to slow down briefly but ultimately go so much faster/further. This is fairly easy to measure but very hard to judge cross-domain.

What’s a moment that not just changed your life, but changed how you approach it?

Categories Habits, Life, Personal Development, Rationality, Reflections, Uncategorized

Delicious Cognitive Dissonance

July 11, 2012 //

This is it. This moment will decide the future.

Wikipedia defines cognitive dissonance as being “a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions simultaneously”. It lists several possible kinds of cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions. I would like to add “intents”.

There’s a Cadbury Creme egg sitting on my desk. It looks positively delicious.

I had told myself when I bought it that I wouldn’t eat it until I did something substantial. I’m being rather loose with substantial: essentially, I just need to have done something for I can say “I did that.” This is my latest strategy for keeping myself a) focused and b) from eating all chocolate within my grasp.

And yet I sit here, staring at this egg.

I believe I’m experiencing acute cognitive dissonance.

Oddly, the intense sensation I’m feeling—the experience of my urges waging war against my self-control—is not in my brain, where the actual cognition is taking place. It’s actually located somewhere in my chest.

I find myself surprised that it’s such a tantalizingly rich experience. I’m not acting, to accomplish something substantial or to eat the egg, but just sitting. Being present to my conflicted intentions. I find myself taken in by the sensation in my chest. Enduring. Like a cold shower.

Delicious.

I wonder: how long I would have to sit with this urge before it would lose the battle? Could I break the urge by refusing it for long enough? I feel like I can.

Time to experiment.

Categories Food, Mindfulness, Personal Development, Reflections

I want to have reflection time.

April 10, 2012 //

I want to have reflection time. How am I going to do that?

I’ve been intending a while bunch, lately, to “take some time and reflect,” referring to a whole host of topics I’d like to reflect on, from romance to school to my blog to my habits to my goals (individually and as a whole) to setting up a system to easily track failures and improve on them. I have done brief goal reflections, but otherwise that’s pretty much it.

Ultimately I’d like to reflect on a very regular basis. If I could find a way to do it, twice daily would be optimal. It wouldn’t have to be for long. The morning could just consist of looking at my agenda for the day, planning the main things I want to accomplish, and reading an inspirational quotation or something. The night would consist of (ideally) an assessment of my day, reviewing how it met, exceeded, and fell short of my expectations, and then noting if there are any patterns of failure that I notice. Then, I’ll figure out what’s causing the failure and come up with potential ways to address it.

In a multilayered cake of irony, it was the lack of reflection that was causing itself. My not reflecting led me to not address my failure to reflect. (rinse, repeat). I have recognized for over a week (I distinctly recall wanting to reflect last sunday) that I wanted to do something about this, but haven’t done anything because it’s never felt like the right time to do anything about it. The idea with the reflections is that they’d give me regular chances to tune into those thoughts that have been hopping around anxiously on my back-burner, before they get burnt.

One fortunate thing is that this particular revelation comes to me at a moment when I have got myself into a reasonably regular (and early) sleep-waking situation. This is not habitual, but merely a necessity given 9am exams every other day. Even still, I think I’m going to start this with an MEA (term courtesy of Nir Eyal, though ZenHabits has written about the principle extensively as well). MEA = Minimum Enjoyable Action, and is basically the smallest form of the habit possible. It must be so small that: a) you can’t fail & b) you can’t complain.

For my reflection habit, that will be writing a sentence, morning & night.

I can’t possibly get up late enough that I don’t have time to write a sentence, and I can’t possibly be so tired that I can’t write a sentence. Long term, I’d potentially like to have a form I fill out with fields expressing certain things about my day, but I’ll get there eventually. This is a start.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll scale back the MEA to “pick up a pencil”. That I can definitely do every day.

~~~

(While selecting a category for this post, it occurs to me that despite years of reading ZenHabits, I still had not really been focusing my personal development around habits. That changes today.)

Categories Habits, Personal Development, Reflections

Frontal lobe or midbrain? How to take control.

February 12, 2012 //

One of the popular pseudo-scientific questions people like to ask is “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or if they have a slightly better understanding of nuance, then maybe “Do you favour the left or right side of brain?”.

An image of the brain, with the left half depicted as a chessboard and city, in black and white, and the right half in vibrant red with swirls of paint and symbols of emotion like a bull and a couple embracing. The image is an ad for Mercedes Benz.

The difference is really not this vast.

While this question can be seen as just a figurative way of asking someone if they consider themselves more analytical or creative, it perpetuates the myth that our brain is rigidly divided into two halves that only do certain things. This is not quite accurate. While the left-half of the brain is indeed more active while reasoning and the right-half while creating, both sides of the brain engage in most activities, just in different ways. This TED Talk explores how musical improvisation (which would probably be called right-brain) relates to communication (usually thought of as left-brain).

A better dichotomy

Instead of thinking about left-vs-right, a more pertinent question that we should ask of ourselves on a regular basis, is “Am I thinking more with my frontal lobe or midbrain?”. I’ve been working my way through a book called Evolve your Brain by Joe Dispenza and some of the later chapters are so cool I just had to talk about them.

The cover of Evolve Your Brain by Joe Dispenza. Depicts a brain and the head of Da Vinci's painting Vitruvian man.

This book will blow your mind.

A quick refresher on parts of the brain: the midbrain, located of course roughly in the center of the brain, is in charge of processes like sensory perception and motor coordination; the frontal lobe, just behind our forehead, is what processes higher thought and engages in complex reasoning. The relative size of our frontal lobe is also one of the clearest distinctions between us and other creatures, representing 30-40% of our brain mass versus 11-17% in primates and about 7% in dogs^{[Dispenza, p346-347]}.

Chapters 10 and 11 talk about the frontal lobe and how to use it to take control of our lives and become who we want to be. Essentially, the frontal lobe is the seat of our consciousness. When we live life habitually, going through the same motions, we are not taking full advantage of our frontal lobe and instead are being controlled by the midbrain and the other more primitive parts of our mind. Evolve your Brain proposes that in order to achieve our goals we must focus on using our frontal cortex. How do we do this? By focusing. Just as athletes or musicians can improve their performance by mentally rehearsing exactly what they want to do and how to respond to certain stimuli, we can do that with our day-to-day activities and interactions as well.

Focusing on Focus

I’m going to work on practising the techniques outlined in the book over the next few months, and I’ll report back with my progress and suggestions on how to use it in your own life. My primary focus is actually going to be focus itself. I’m going to mentally rehearse being focused on the work I do and single-tasking, and my hope is that while the rehearsing may take time, my increased level of discipline will give me more time. It seems like a worthy investment. A very introspective friend of mine once said “Discipline is actually the path to freedom. Otherwise, you’re a slave to your urges and impulses.” He spoke the first part of that, and I paused, internalized it, and figured out the second part. Nobody wants to be a slave, hence the argument for discipline. It’s really empowering, ultimately, to put it like that, because it separates the person from the urges. It is easy to justify acting out the impulses by saying “they’re part of me that I have to honour.” While the first half is true, the second is most certainly not. For more on intercepting urges, see this post on The Pause at ZenHabits.

The unfortunate victims of frontal lobotomies (destruction/removal of the frontal lobe) in mid-20th-century became lazy and obsessively driven to experience sameness constantly. To a lesser degree, this is what anyone can experience when we constantly reenact the same behaviours. Since the brain is plastic, neural networks that are unused will gradually wither and die, replaced by the features that are active. I’m going to make a point of asking myself on a day to day basis:

Am I thinking more with my frontal lobe or midbrain?

Categories Mindfulness, Neuroplasticity, Personal Development

What Steve Jobs means to me

October 6, 2011 //

Portrait of a young Steve Jobs, wearing a suit and tie, and holding a red apple in one hand.

This isn't the Steve Jobs that I'm familiar, but he's definitely closer to me in age and hair length than 2011 Jobs.

I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Steve Jobs is dead. I found out while at work. I work at Kik•, on the cross-platform messaging app that is Kik Messenger. The entire company would be wholly impossible without Jobs and the iPhone. This, however, is an understatement. Computers themselves, and thus the internet, and thus much of today’s culture, have all been massively influenced by this man.

If the me that I was a few years ago could see me blogging about how Steve Jobs is an inspiration, he’d be very confused. For years, I’ve been a Windows/Linux guy, and ragged on Apple as much as I possibly can. I just bought a smartphone this summer; it’s an Android. The only piece of Apple I own is a 2gen iPod Shuffle, which I proudly sync using Windows Explorer and python script. I don’t have iTunes installed. While my personal preference for computing has not changed over the past few years, I have grown an appreciation and respect for Apple and Steve Jobs.

I still like having two+ mouse buttons, and I still like having both a Backspace and a Delete key, and I really don’t know how well I’d be able to handle having my main modifier key (Ctrl/Apple) not in the corner of the keyboard. I also can’t stand the colourlessness that pervades the typical Apple interface. Yet, I can’t deny the vast influence that the mouse as introduced by Apple and the window manager have improved my life. I am not an ungrateful person.

I’d rather focus on Jobs though. Tonight, I read his speech at Stanford and then later watched/listened to it. This speech is 6 years old, and yet fits the occasion of his death very well, as his final point is about death. While Steve Jobs may only have had 56 years, most would agree that he made more of them than most people make of their 80. This was not an accident.

In his speech, Jobs describes how for all of his adult life, he has looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself:

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

I’ve recently been developing several new daily habits. I’ve been meaning to blog about them for awhile, and tonight seem like as good of an occasion as any. I recently listened to Jim Rohn’s The Art of Exceptional Living Audiobook, and it inspired me to make a number of changes in my life. So far I’ve integrated three daily habits:

I go for a walk.
I read for at least half an hour.
I journal.

Most books on the subject advise against making significant changes all at once, as they can be harder to keep. I wanted to dive right in. Besides, I think these habits are consistent and mutually reinforcing. The walking makes the other two easier, because by the time I get to the end of the day, I’ve already done one of my three new habits, so I’m already part-way toward my goal. Also, since my journalling is about personal development, it makes sense to read something inspiring first. I like reading anyway. I also like walking. I’ve been enjoying journalling as well. I’ve logged nearly 20000 words in 22 days.

Where does Steve Jobs fit into this? Well, I’m nailing my nights, but my mornings have been less than fantastic. My main excuse for this is that it’s really cold in my apartment (my room anyway) and so I’ve been lazing in bed because my newly-awoken-brain thinks that that will keep my feet warmest. Come on Malcolm: you can do better than that. Steve Jobs describes how he makes each day meaningful from the beginning, and I’m going to find ways to do the same.

I haven’t decided yet what this is going to consist of, but I now have a clear vision that my mornings need much more clarity and purpose than they have at present. Will I ask myself a question? Several? Recite a mission statement? Chant a mantra? Plan my day in my head? Do something specific?

…I don’t know yet. But I’m excited to find out.

Categories Design, Life, Personal Development

Priorities: It’s not what you do, but what you don’t do. (Music and Thoughts)

August 7, 2011 //

I mentioned that one song was missing from my 30-Day Poem/Song Challenge. Well, here it is:

While you watch & listen, here are some of my thoughts from the past few days. I’ve had some interesting conversations and listened to more of Steve Pavlina’s podcasts (such as this one on achieving goals) and I’ve started thinking about my goals. I’m notorious for not setting any, so this list is not very long, but if you’ve been following my blog you’ll have seen that I have at least one:

I will develop awesome time-management skills and habits. -Me, several weeks ago.

Well, I started thinking about ways in which I could try to accomplish that goal. One of Steve’s strategies is to become the person who has already achieved it. As I thought more about what sort of person has amazing time-management skills, I realized that the person I was imagining was not very spontaneous or adventuresome, two traits I hold in high esteem. With that realization came questions: Then who do I want to be? What skills and habits do I want to have?

I began to redefine the problem, from “not managing my time well enough” to “not managing my activities well enough”. What I realized is that my main problem isn’t with missing deadlines but with wasting time. It’s not that I feel like I need to procrastinate less. On the contrary, Parkinson’s Law (Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.) makes a fairly strong argument for procrastination. If I do things earlier than they need to be done, I’ll likely spend more time doing them then they really need.

A New Approach

Today I decided I would try a different tactic: I made a list of all of the things that I wanted to potentially spend my time doing today, and tried to do only things on that list. I added some things as the day progressed, but the point of the exercise was to be doing only things that I consciously wanted to do. I have a strong tendency to get sidetracked by activities that in retrospect I judge to be wasteful. These include reading shallow blog articles, wandering around on Facebook, and having long circular arguments with my friends. These activities are entrancing but not engaging — tempting but not really worthwhile. Instead, I want to do more reading, writing, exercising, and having deep and meaningful conversations with people.

The today-plan worked out alright. I had two items on my list that I had marked as high priority (see below) and I got both of them done. The flexible schedule I gave myself worked particularly well today because the two high-priority tasks were ones I wanted to do anyway and knew I would enjoy (recording the video above was one). I’m not sure how well this would work in a circumstance where I have a large unpleasant task with a faraway deadline. We’ll see, though. I’ve managed to get those things done before though.

This is how I've been making my todo lists for several years. The bottom item type · is new, but necessary for my new paradigm as it allows for items I'm allowed to do that are infinite, eg. read.

In working through this new strategy, I’ve come to realize:

It’s not what you do, but what you don’t do.

That is, as long as I’m not doing anything wasteful, then I’m either doing something valuable or doing nothing. If I define the latter to be meditation, then it’s still worthwhile. Exactly what I do isn’t really that important – as deadlines approach, enough pressure will build that the things that need to get done will get done.

I’ve yet to determine exactly how this will affect my spontaneity, but for now my rules will be as follows:

Rules

I will keep a daily list of activities I may engage in.
I may modify the list at any time during the day.
There is no limit to how long the list can be.
I will not spend a significant amount of time engaging in other activities.

Rule 2 lets me be spontaneous, because if I discover an interesting activity I feel is worthwhile, I can take part in it… as soon as I add it to the list. This forces me to make a conscious decision “Yes, this activity/event will add value to my life” before I undertake it. Otherwise, it’s all to easy to just do it without truly considering if I really want to.

For rule 4, I haven’t decided exactly what the threshold for significance is, but I think probably about 10 minutes on any one activity per 3 hours, and 30 minutes total on any extra activities within the 3 hours. I should probably use some sort of timer that I set every time I start one of these activities, that will sound after 5-10 minutes to force me to either decide that what I’m doing is meaningful or stop. The former case would apply to finding a really captivating article or something on the internet.

I’ve created a new page titled “My Life“, that will keep a current record of exactly what rules I’m following as I live my life. The link ought to stay at the top, so if you find myself on my blog in the future you can see what challenges and so on I’m currently engaged in.

One final remark: I’m observing with some interest that while I seemed to be taking a blacklist approach, what I’ll actually be creating daily is a whitelist. I suppose because otherwise, if I wanted to permit myself to have half an hour of Facebooking, I’d have to take it off a list, which seems strange. Would I then put it back on the list when I decided I’d had enough? I’m going to try it like this for now, and see how it goes!

Categories 30 Day Poem/Song, Music, Personal Development, Video