Some reminders to focus on

Most of this evening, I spent researching Parisian and Portuguese hotels. I'll be going on holiday in less than two weeks and it needed to get done, so time ran out to write something good.

So here's just a few good reminders that attention is required for ideas to grow:

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
 

 
Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
— David Foster Wallace

The surprising science of happiness

I've been trying to meditate again. And it's funny how easy it is to drop into new habits, but the idea of sitting still for five whole minutes, training your mind not to do the thing it's done just about all of your waking life is still so rough.

In thinking about the mind as a trainable muscle, I found myself back on Dan Gilbert's 2004 TED talk, The surprising science of happiness. It's one of my favorites. And even though I've seen it a dozen times, something about the lessons really hit me today. I think I finally understood more about the power of subjective, synthetic happiness.

Gilbert put it in perspective with the scale of the world:

What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.

Why do we have that belief? Well, it’s very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don’t want stuff enough.

Being happy without the desires of our consumer culture seems to clash with the wonderful progress our society has done doing our work. Without the need to buy things, we'd definitely have less of a need to work on things. It's a weird balance that no one can put their finger on.

While reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, I know I'll get to the idea of the collective brain. Something about our progress and idea sex with one another is making the world a better place by tons of markers, but to what end? 

I like to think we don't know and we might not ever. The idea could be just to be. And it makes me think of Ferriss' 4-Hour Work Week, and a quote that always calms me down when I think I need to figure out some grand purpose:

The truth is this: those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia that you protect could hold the cure for cancer. 

Malthusian comedy

One of my best friends, Rob, told me to look into Malthusianism after reading my last post. I know I've heard the concept thrown around before. The term has been rattling around in my head all day and I couldn't place it until I did some research.

Wikipedia told me Malthusianism was born out of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus' 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population. It is the idea that certain "checks" need to occur to keep the population stabilized and sustainable. Some "checks" make sense for a number of reasons, like access to contraception, while others border on or dive right into the darkness.

A Malthusian catastrophe is, according to Wikipedia, "a prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production – that there will be too many people and not enough food." It could be a condom or it could be war, starvation, or a plague. 

Later I realized Malthusianism is the best way to describe one of my favorite stand-up comedian's recurring bits of population control. Enter Bill Burr:

Not all idea sex is good

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In his most recent book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier presents his case as a Silicon Valley veteran with a dream for a better technologically connected future.

I think it's easy to make the leap that if the exchange of ideas, the idea sex, is the vehicle for human progress than social media might be the best thing yet. But Lanier would argue that the incentives are not in the right place. Remember, social media companies are some of the largest corporations in the world. When there are stakeholders in a boardroom somewhere, time has told us that people are going to get fucked.

The magnitude of social media corporations means no one knows who is driving this thing.

Not Zuckerberg. Not Larry Page. Not even Trump. 

Lanier writes:

The algorithms are rarely interrogated, least of all by external or independent scientists, in part because it’s hard to understand why they work. They improve automatically, through feedback.

But if no one is driving, the least we can understand is the road we're on. The algorithms are "improving" to sell us ads and our attention. It might be time to find something new, and just maybe delete our social media accounts.

Adore the technologies of our time

In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, media critic Neil Postman proposes that while the world worriedly anticipated Big Brother of Orwell's 1984, we should have been better prepared to fight Huxley's Brave New World.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell wants that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It's hard to argue that modern technology is without flaws. I wonder, probably too much, how I'll feel on my death bed (or some futuristic equivalent), cursing how much of the years where my knees still worked I binged away on Netflix.

But it might just be unreasonable to suggest we need everyone to think in the same ways their parents or grandparents might have.

It could be the dawn of a new weird time. It could be idea sex has the capacity to give birth to an endless amount of innovation if we're able to keep rubbing up against one another.

What is idea sex?

It's been a week and this daily blog is consistent and all over the place. It's easy to blab about things that move me, but it makes more sense for both of us if I pick something and stick with it. Consistency and commitment.

In searching for direction, I returned, as I often do, to Sarah Peck's article Why Starting a “Blog” is a Terrible Idea. Instead of a blog, Peck recommends committing to a project of small steps, declaring to yourself and others: “I’d like to talk about x topic in 4 posts, within the next two months.

The timeframe doesn't matter, the focus does. You need to start somewhere and it's better to have a direction than an explosion.

I'd like to talk about idea sex in 3 posts within the next two months. 

What is idea sex? That's probably a good place to start on post numero uno. But I started to learn about it through Matt Ridley's TED talk When ideas have sex.

It's worth the watch and if you like it, be sure to come back for more.

Four day work week

Tim Ferriss wrote the Four Hour Work Week more than a decade ago.

Today the New York Times wrote about a successful experiment of the four day work week.  New Zealand firm Perpetual Guardian shrunk the week to 32 hours and found that " 'Supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks.' "

And " 'Their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.' "

We're getting somewhere. But Ferriss made a point about this too:

For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.

The main metric is energy

Weekends without plans are often weirdly difficult for me. I'll wake up on a Saturday and grab a habitual bacon and egg sandwich and an iced coffee, but facing the rest of an empty day or two sends me into a downward spiral of decision paralysis. "What's the best way to spend a weekend, right now?" I wonder as the clock ticks time away. 

Luckily, this weekend had one plan - my sister planned to take a drive over to Hoboken with my mom, my niece, and my nephew. Even better was that Hoboken was hosting the St. Ann Italian Festival so we walked around chowing down on sausages and meatballs and Italian ice. Plus, Sabrina, my niece, got her wiggles out, spastically dancing to the classics: 

Kids can be exhausting but as an uncle they give my energy. And as Dilbert creator and blogger, Scott Adams, explains that's the idea when you're presented with the choice of everything else.

We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career, and so on. The problem with all of this wanting is that the time you spend chasing one of those desires is time you can’t spend chasing any of the others. So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result?

The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.

Bad days happen but they don't count

Firas Zahabi is no stranger to toughness. He cofounded Tristar Gym and has trained multiple MMA champions, including, arguably one of the best ever, George St-Pierre.

Zahabi on toughness and the pressure of fight night performance:

I always tell my fighters, you’re not scared of fighting. That’s not true. We fight all the time. What you’re scared of is the camera and the lights and the people watching and the judgments, thats what you’re scared of. You're worried about the judgments. Because bad days happen.
Sometimes guys come in the gym and they kill everybody. And one day they have a bad day. What if that one bad day is on fight night? And that’s the one they’re recording. That’s the one people will remember. That’s the one that counts.
But I always tell my guys, look we know, if it does happen and it’s a possibility it could happen, we know that’s not true. That’s what matters.