Book-Notes on Janusworx

Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:21:57 +0530

Ben Orlin, the modern Maths apologist, brings to us what I’d call his Magnum Opus, the modern Mathematician’s Lament.
Everytime, I read an Orlin book, I always wish, I had teachers like him when I was young, so that I would not have had such crippling math-phobia for so much of my life.
It should actually be called, Maths for the Rest of Us.
It’s great! So great!

My highlights, from the book
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A mathematician is hardly a reasonable person. More like a feral philosopher or a logician gone rogue.

It’s a bit peculiar to say that I add 4 and 3 to create 7; 4 and 3 simply are 7, irrespective of my efforts. When I multiply or divide or take a logarithm, the result equals whatever it equals, regardless of my labors. I do not, in a strict sense, change the numbers, but merely discover or reveal them. Operations act not upon the quantities themselves, but only upon our understandings of them.

In my childhood, back when money was made of metal and paper instead of software and lies, I learned that two quarters add up to 50 cents: 25 + 25 = 50. I loved knowing this

… the beauty of mathematical language lies in its unreality. Math lets us escape this world of crumbs and mud for a realm of rigorous abstractions. The purer the logic—that is, the further from physical reality—the deeper the truth. “As far as laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,” said Einstein, “and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

I sometimes envision mathematics as a tower. It leads from the earthy crust of everyday experience (piles of cookies; buckets of water; half-dollar coins) up to the thin atmosphere of abstract concepts (Lie groups, whatever those are). There’s pleasure and power in climbing to the upper floors. But there’s an equal pleasure—and a different kind of power—in descending to the bottom. Down there, you can touch the foundations, poke at the joints where math attaches to the world, and fill your half-gallon bucket with a new kind of insight

Consider 2 + 3. If + is a verb, then who is the subject carrying out the addition? Neither 2 nor 3 performs any action; those nouns just sit there being nouns. You’re the one who adds, but you’re not a part of mathematical speech

Such confusion is not limited to the youth. Adult textbook authors have been known to include gratuitous fighter jets and non sequitur cheetahs, as if the secret to math is picturing something, anything. But the hard part of math isn’t remembering what cats look like. It’s making sense of abstract ideas.

The challenge of algebra is to visualize the invisible

“The point of doing algebra,” writes math teacher Paul Lockhart, “is… to move back and forth between several equivalent representations,depending on the situation at hand and depending on our taste. In this sense, all algebraic manipulation is psychological.”

Old information, new formation

I like this rule because it’s rarely even taught. Mathematicians apply it automatically, the way fluent English speakers always say “a big ugly bath toy” and not “a bath ugly big toy.” In fact, as Mark Forsyth points out in The Elements of Eloquence, English adjectives are typically placed in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. Hence, “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

Likewise, in math, numbers are typically multiplied in a certain order: numeral, radical, constant, variable. Hence, we write 3πxy²z, and never (unless we’re trying to provoke someone) zy²πx3

Toward the end of a sixth-grade lesson, a chipper young fellow named Kieran raised his hand. “I don’t really understand anything you’re saying,” he informed me. “But I can still get the right answer.” He beamed a patient smile.

I stifled a sigh. “Which part can I help you with?”

“Oh, I don’t need help,” he said. “It’s just that you were talking about this extra stuff. Like, the ideas behind it. I don’t, you know, do that.”

I blinked. He blinked. A great silence passed between us.

“Is that okay?” he concluded. “I mean, as long as I can get the right answer?”

There it was, out in the open: the subtext of almost every lesson I had taught that year. Day after day, I tried to illuminate the logic behind the symbols. Day after day, my students politely ignored my prattle to focus on the symbols themselves. What made that afternoon stand out was that Kieran broke the fourth wall. He uttered the title of the film we were acting in.

To do math, must you think about the ideas, or can you just focus on the symbols?

As David Hilbert quipped, “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.” That’s symbol pushing in a nutshell. Language divorced from meaning

But a few weeks after Kieran’s query, I learned that not all mathematicians share my dim view of symbol pushing. I mentioned to my dad (a mathematician himself) that I had started writing an essay titled ”How to Avoid Thinking in Math Class.” Before I could say any more, he gave the project his stamp of approval. “Great,” he said. “I’ve always said that the point of math education is to help you not to think.”

I was taken aback. No, I explained, the title was ironic. On the question of “Should we think?” I was firmly in favor.

“Oh, yes, thinking is good,” he generously conceded. “But it’s too hard to do all the time.”

He (and, indeed, Kieran) had a point. For example, it is an algebraic truth that (x + 1)(x − 1) is the same as x2 − 1. This fact boils down to a repeated application of the distributive property; as such, you can explain it entirely in terms of pile rearrangement. But trying to do so is like ascending a sheer cliff face.

Quite a climb! Invigorating as an occasional workout, but unthinkable as a morning commute. This was exactly my dad’s point: Thinking is good. But it’s too hard to do all the time.

“Operations of thought,” wrote the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, “are like cavalry charges in battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made in decisive moments.”

In this case, there is no need to send in the cavalry. The symbol pusher, thinking only about letters and parentheses, reaches the same summit in a few effortless strides

Can you imagine if English worked this way? An object’s name would indicate its physical size, so that a chihuahua (nine letters) would be three times the size of a cow (three letters). A food’s name would encode its recipe, so that a pizza would be a “DoughSauceCheeseBake.” Chemistry would be a tediously safe area of study, because we could run experiments simply by smushing together the names of various chemicals and seeing which ones spell “explosion.”

Symbol pushing boils the laws of logic down to laws of grammar. The language becomes a scale model of reality. We can wrangle ideas simply by wrangling ink.

So who was right, me or Kieran? The answer, of course, is both. To speak mathematics is to slip back and forth between two worlds, to inhabit two distinct frames of mind: the hard joy of thinking and the mindless trance of symbol pushing. Without the ink, the ideas are befuddling; but without the ideas, the ink means nothing. Learn the logic, learn it well, and then turn off your brain and let the symbols on the page dance to the silent music of the mind.

… notations often gain popularity precisely because they lend themselves to simple mechanical rules. You could say we choose the symbols for the express purpose of pushing them around. We can then generate right answers with no insight, no inspiration, no input other than elbow grease. Just turn the crank, and new knowledge pops out

When someone is too focused on details, we say they’re missing the forest for the trees. Mathematicians, if anything, are guilty of the opposite: missing the trees for the forest. Their habit is to inspect not objects themselves, but the objects’ properties. (Not the trees, but the number of them.) Then, having distilled these properties, they look at the properties’ properties. (Not the number, but its evenness or oddness.) And so on: the properties of the properties of the properties of the things. “Matter does not engage their attention,” Henri Poincaré once said of mathematicians. “They are interested in form alone.”

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Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
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Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

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On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:27:18 +0530

courtesy, R.F. Kuang & Carlton Gibson

I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching Carlton Gibson’s talk on surviving open source¹ a few days ago.
They both touch upon ingrained privilege in their book/talk.
The popular proverb urges us to engage with the world as it is, not as we would have it be.²
But sometimes, we are so caught up that we need other, wiser eyes to see. That’s what Rebecca & Carlton have done for me :)

Here’s Carlton. I paraphrased the relevant bits from his talk. It begins at around the 10m, 10s mark. (all emphases mine.)

We’re not getting paid. But we don’t always act like we know that.
We give far more than is reasonable given the fact that it’s a volunteer thing that we are doing

It has a consequence.
Open Source skews overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
The bottom line is that contributing to open source is a privilege that only a few can afford.
We like to think it’s meritocracy. Well, you do the time, you do the hard yards, you work on your project, you get the rewards, but well Sorry! Meritocracy, my arse!

What’s really going on is that pre-existing economic relations are being reinforced by contributors leveraging the inequality of opportunity that those economic relations provide.
Sorry!
In English.
If you let it, Open Source extracts such a cost; physical, financial, and emotional, that the only folks who can do it are the global rich and of those, only the ones that are either directly supported by, or can make their way around the patriarchy. English speaking, white, men.

And these series of quotes from Babel.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Watch the talk.
Read Babel.
You’ll be better off, having done both.

not at the same time. I know I’m cuckoo, just not that cuckoo. ↩︎
I love this one from Saul Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals:
“I start from where the world is, as it as, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.” ↩︎

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:56:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Here I was, trying to laze away my day by getting lost in a book, when the book kicks my behind and tells me to go work 😂

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week.
‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”.
Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

— R.F. Kuang, Babel

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 08:47:30 +0530

Short Booklet.
Very Taleb–esque writing. Very entertaining.
Tells us there are lots of stupid people, with a really precise definition of stupid; those folks that would cut their nose to spite their face, or like the book would say, stupid folks are they who would cause losses to other folks, even when they stand to gain nothing or possibly, ever incur losses!

It reads like an erudite rant. But unlike Taleb, ends with no advice or suggestion.

Let me offer one then, in the form of one of those old folksy grandma quotes,

“What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig?
You both get all over muddy … and the pig likes it.”

Zettelkasten

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 28 Jun 2022 09:07:51 +0530

Just a little note to mark the beginning of my Zettelkasten journey.
While I’ve always had a commonplace book of sorts, all my life, and I’ve always taken tons of notes on books I pay attention to, I’ve never really been able to come up with a way of writing what I think syntopically.
Or I can, but its like pulling teeth.
Writing what I learnt in Antifragile, took months, and a lot of cursing through gritted teeth.
But I want to. I really do.
I so want to write about what I learn and read and then intermingle them all together and put my bundle of thoughts down.

And then this perfect storm of stuff happened recently.
I have a lot to learn this year.
I am taking a lot of notes, but just full text search, does not cut it for me.
So I’ve been casting about for a way to take notes and thoughts and relate all of this together.
And I ran across the Zettelkasten method across a lot of people I pay attention to.
Despite all the new fangled tags of “personal knowledge management” and “knowledge graph” and who knows what else, the Zettelkasten method’s old and it’s Lindy.
So definitely worth my time to learn and invest in, if it helps me write and share more.

At its heart, all it is, is a system to take and refer to your notes and your thoughts.
Folks have recommendations about how to take notes, the types of notes, the way to store the notes, and various ways and means to link and refer to them notes.¹
I found David Kadavy’s long post as well his book and Sascha Fast and Christian Tietze’s posts over at the zettelkasten.de website really helpful with me getting started.

I decide to use Org-roam as my tool of choice.
It’s very loosey-goosey² and flexible.
It’s Lindy.
It’s plain text.
And it is built on Org mode and Emacs.
Wouldn’t recommend you use this, unless you want to put in the time to learn about Emacs. There are plenty of user friendly options out there.

I spent about a week putting in lots of stray notes, I had.
And some time building up links between them.
And some more time, reading a couple of books and then taking notes and linking them as I went.

This is how my notes currently look.

And I realised two things, both good for me.

This is turning out to be a sustainable, lifelong habit. One that I enjoy
Building up links and doing highlights and jotting thoughts, all lead to me having a coherent view of what I just read and learnt as well as having something, a lot of raw yet fertile somethings, that I can use to build something derivative out of, create a larger work from, expand on much more easily.

I’ll revisit this in a year and tell you how it went :)

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It’s notes (and footnotes) all the way down! :) ↩︎
Yes, that is the exact, technical term to describe it. ↩︎

List of Books to Read Before You Die

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 12:20:51 +0530

Read and Be Merry, over on Tumblr, has this perfect list of books to read, before you die.
It’s pretty short, so I’m cribbing it here in its entirety.

Any book you want
Don’t read books you don’t want to read
That’s it
Congratulations you did it!

This shall be my advice to all folk interested in there next book, henceforth!

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This is Water

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:45:00 +0530

My idols have feet of clay, as usual. The book is one of those, do as I say, not as I do books. I learnt about his abusive behaviour about a month after reading the book. While I absolutely loved reading it, I cannot in good conscience suggest you buy it anymore. Hopefully the clip I linked to, should be enough, because what he did share in the talk, is worth emulating, even if he himself, didn’t.

At some point in my mid twenties, before I found Stoicism, I somehow managed to start looking at things in my life, from other points of view.
And I was wondering how I got to be so “adult”, at least in that sense, when I did the rest of my growing up and adulting in my mid thirties. It was not the Catholic faith that I was brought up in, nor had I found the Stoic sensibilities that I’d stumble across much later in life.
I found the answer today as I was cleaning out my book shelves.

It was David Foster Wallace’s talk, This is Water.
I remembered the message and forgot the source! Talk about internalising a book.
I listened to it over and over and over in the mid 2000s, and when the book was published in 2009, soon after his tragic death, I went and bought a copy and then read that to tatters too.
This little volume, was the bridge that took me, as I struggled from being laid off through five years of craziness until my mind and heart settled down.

The tiny book I have, is this small talk I’ve linked below, spread across a hundred easy breathing pages.

brainpicker · David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 1)

*[Part 1][scdfwtiw1]*

brainpicker · David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 2)

*[Part 2][scdfwtiw2]*

This is the part, that has always stuck with me,

“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 exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
This, like many clichés, so lame and banal on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

And this is just one lesson.
Maria Popova lists a ton on her post about the talk.
Shane Parrish lists it in his books that have the most page–for–page wisdom.
And then goes further and transcribes it completely.

So listen and read ~~and go buy the book and destroy~~ it too.
The lessons are worth it.

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The Science of Interstellar

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 14:16:28 +0530

This was so much fun!
If I had teachers or mentors like Kip Thorne in my youth, I’d have never had such a crippling fear of mathematics or the hard sciences.
I’d have never plagued by doubt and fear, that I was not smart enough or good enough.
I have just one note to share. This is Kip as he closes the book …

Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain. And the richness and beauty of that science.
More than anything, I’m moved by Interstellar’s underlying, optimistic message: We live in a universe governed by physical laws. By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes.
But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important.
I hope this book contributes to that understanding.

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Draft No. 4

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 09:06:41 +0530

Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4.

I could pithily summarise it as …

Practice a lot of things.

Work at finding your thing.
Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.)
Work within established rules.
Bend the rules to fit your thing.
Break the rules once you know your thing deeply!

McPhee writes about the craft of writing.
But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour.

This series of essays and lessons and backstory was also hugely confirming to me.
Because, while I may not have McPhee’s grace and economy, most of his advice is something I have always understood and done intuitively.
Like he’d say something and then illustrate it.
Like he struggles, even now, the way I do, every time I sit down to write.
That these things take time. (and that we can be ok with it)
That my prose is grasping at the way he writes. Sturdy, workman-like, no muss, no fuss.
The journey is hard work for most people, the gifted are few.

I’d would have called it the definitive book, the first book to read, on the craft of writing, if I had not already read, Caro’s, Working.

This is what I’d written about Working …

if you haven’t read the Power Broker, you should
if you haven’t read the Lyndon volumes, you should
this book is Caro’s account of the work, that went into those works.
the ceaseless toil, the thankless years, the people and their stories
Caro is Caro, master of the craft.
There are only a few explicit lessons here.
but plenty if you care enough to read between the lines
plenty if you make this an annual read, like i will

McPhee treads the same ideas on a different path, and I loved both journeys (I love Caro, only a little more).
So now, I have two books that I’d recommend as books to read on the craft.

Highlights from the book follow (all emphases, mine),

After putting the two cards together, and then constructing around them the rest of the book, all I had to do was write it, and that took more than a year.

It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones. And I hope this structure illustrates what I take to be a basic criterion for all structures: they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it. That perfect circle was a help to me, but it could be a liability for anyone trying to impose such a thing on just any set of facts. A structure is not a cookie cutter.

Certain Baroque poets, among others, wrote shaped verse, in which lines were composed so that the typography resembled the topic—blossoms, birds, butterflies. That also is not what I mean by structure. A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there. You do that by building what you hope is an unarguable structure. Beginning, middle, end. Aristotle, Page 1.

Each of those structures, from the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, was worked out after copying with a typewriter all notes from notebooks and transcribing the contents of microcassettes. I used an Underwood 5, which had once been a state-of-the-art office typewriter but by 1970 had been outclassed by the I.B.M. Selectric. With the cassettes, I used a Sanyo TRC5200 Memo-Scriber, which was activated with foot pedals, like a sewing machine or a pump organ.

The note-typing could take many weeks, but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind.

The notes from one to the next frequently had little in common. They jumped from topic to topic, and only in places were sequentially narrative. So I always rolled the platen and left blank space after each item to accommodate the scissors that were fundamental to my advanced methodology.¹

After reading and rereading the typed notes and then developing the structure and then coding the notes accordingly in the margins and then photocopying the whole of it, I would go at the copied set with the scissors, cutting each sheet into slivers of varying size. If the structure had, say, thirty parts, the slivers would end up in thirty piles that would be put into thirty manila folders. One after another, in the course of writing, I would spill out the sets of slivers, arrange them ladderlike on a card table, and refer to them as I manipulated the Underwood.
If this sounds mechanical, its effect was absolutely the reverse. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write

People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.

Ben Jonson summarized the process when he said,

“Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.”

Gender aside, I take that to be a message to young writers. Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it.

After all those one-on-one sessions discussing back-door plays and the role of the left-handed comma in the architectonics of basketball—while The New Yorker magazine hurtled toward its deadlines—I finally said in wonderment, “How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?”
*He said, *“It takes as long as it takes.”
As a writing teacher, I have repeated that statement to two generations of students. If they are writers, they will never forget it.

Shawn also recognized that no two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

Students have always asked what I do to prepare for interviews. Candidly, not much. At minimum, though, I think you should do enough preparation to be polite. You would not have wanted to ask Stephen Harper what he did for a living. Before, during, and after an interview, or a series of interviews, do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. In the course of writing, you really find out what you don’t know, and you read in an attempt to get it right. Nonetheless, you get it wrong, especially if you are an innumerate English major and you are writing about science.

But science, for me, is the exception that probes the rule. I have never published anything on a science that has not been vetted by the scientists involved.

Once captured, words have to be dealt with. You have to trim them and straighten them to make them transliterate from the fuzziness of speech to the clarity of print. Speech and print are not the same, and a slavish presentation of recorded speech may not be as representative of a speaker as dialogue that has been trimmed and straightened.
*Please understand: *You trim and straighten—take the “um”s, “uh”s, and “uh but um”s out, the false starts—but you do not make it up.

It isn’t all like that—only the first draft. First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether.
That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.

“Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once.
For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus.
Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see.
And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time.
You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”

Martha calls me up nine times a day to tell me that writing is impossible, that she’s not cut out to do it, that she’ll never finish what she is working on, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth and so on, and I, who am probably disintegrating a third of the way through an impossible first draft, am supposed to turn into the Rock of Gibraltar. The talking rock: “Just stay at it; perseverance will change things.” “You’re so unhappy you sound authentic to me.” “You can’t make a fix unless you know what is broken.”

She said, “My style is always that of what I am reading at the time—or overwhelmingly self-conscious and strained.”
I said, “How unfortunate that would be if you were fifty-four. At twenty-three, it is not only natural; it is important. The developing writer reacts to excellence as it is discovered—wherever and whenever—and of course does some imitating (unavoidably) in the process of drawing from the admired fabric things to make one’s own. Rapidly, the components of imitation fade. What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time. A style that lacks strain and self-consciousness is what you seem to aspire to, or you wouldn’t be bringing the matter up. Therefore, your goal is in the right place.
So practice taking shots at it. A relaxed, unself-conscious style is not something that one person is born with and another not. Writers do not spring full-blown from the ear of Zeus.”

Jenny said, “I can’t seem to finish anything.”
I said, “Neither can I.” Then I went back to my own writing, my own inability to get going until five in the afternoon, my animal sense of being hunted, my resemblance to the sand of Gibraltar.

It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away.

After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4.

If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them. You could call this the copy-editing phase if real copy editors were not out there in the future prepared to examine the piece.

You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word?
If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. If there’s a box around “sensitive” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.”
With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one. The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus. If you use the dictionary after the thesaurus, the thesaurus will not hurt you.
So draw a box around “wad.” Webster: “The cotton or silk obtained from the Syrian swallowwort, formerly cultivated in Egypt and imported to Europe.” Oh. But read on: “A little mass, tuft, or bundle … a small, compact heap.” Stet that one.
I call this “the search for the mot juste,” because when I was in the eighth grade Miss Bartholomew told us that Gustave Flaubert walked around in his garden for days on end searching in his head for le mot juste. Who could forget that? Flaubert seemed heroic. Certain kids considered him weird.

In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better.
*The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the *mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.

Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line—how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green. Look up “vertical.” It tells you—believe it or not—that “vertical,” “perpendicular,” and “plumb” differ each from the two others. Ditto “plastic, pliable, pliant, ductile, malleable, adaptable.” Ditto “fidelity, allegiance, fealty, loyalty, devotion, piety.”

I grew up in canoes on northern lakes and forest rivers. Thirty years later, I was trying to choose a word or words that would explain why anyone in a modern nation would choose to go a long distance by canoe. I was damned if I was going to call it a sport, but nothing else occurred. I looked up “sport.” There were seventeen lines of definition: “1. That which diverts, and makes mirth; pastime; diversion. 2. A diversion of the field.” I stopped there.

His professed criteria were to take it easy, see some wildlife, and travel light with his bark canoes—nothing more—and one could not help but lean his way. I had known of people who took collapsible cots, down pillows, chain saws, outboard motors, cases of beer, and battery-powered portable refrigerators on canoe trips—even into deep wilderness. You set your own standards. Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another—anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion of the field, an act performed not because it is necessary but because there is value in the act itself.…

Writing is selection.

Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out.
At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more.

Green 4 does not mean lop off four lines at the bottom, I tell them. The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed.

Just like I do here! ↩︎

On the Difference Between Coding, Programming, Engineering, and Computer Science

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:41:05 +0530

My homepage lists my new career shift as

“This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)”

I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different.

Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programshtml though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly.
Here’s his take …

A number of different terms are used to describe working with software. These terms have no exact definitions, although they have acquired some rough meanings.

Coding, a fairly recent term popularized as part of “learning to code,” can be viewed as the somewhat mechanical work of translation. Let’s compare it to the job of medical coding. When you visit a doctor, getting a diagnosis is the easy part. The hard part is translating that diagnosis into one of the over 100,000 codes in the ICD standards, ICD-10 at the time of writing. A Certified Professional Coder who has learned these codes knows that, when a doctor comes up with a diagnosis of “struck by cow,” it should be assigned code W55.2XA. This is actually harder than many coding jobs in the programming space due to the sheer number of codes. But the process is similar to what a coder would do if directed to “make that text bold” on a web page; a coder knows which code to use to make that happen.

The ICD-10 standard is so complicated that few coders know it all. Instead, medical coders get certified in specialty areas such as “Diseases of the nervous system” or “Mental and behavioral disorders.” This is analogous to a coder being proficient in a language such as HTML or JavaScript.

But programming*—that is, being a programmer—means knowing more than a specialty area or two. The doctor in this scenario is analogous to a programmer. The doctor determines a diagnosis by evaluating the patient. This can be pretty complex. For example, if a patient has burns and is soaking wet, is it a “bizarre personal appearance” (R46.1) or a “burn due to water skis on fire, initial encounter” (V91.07XA)? Once the doctor has diagnosis, a treatment plan can be devised. The treatment plan must be effective; the doctor probably doesn’t want to see the same patient suffering from a bad case of “parental overprotection” (Z62.1).*

Just like the doctor, a programmer evaluates a problem and determines a solution. For example, maybe there’s a need for a website that allows people to rank ICD-10 codes in terms of silliness. A programmer would determine the best algorithms for storing and manipulating the data, the structure of the communication between the web client and server, the user interface, and so on. It’s not a simple “plug in the code” sort of thing.

Engineering is the next step up in complexity. In general, engineering is the art of taking knowledge and using it to accomplish something. You could consider the creation of the ICD standards to be engineering; it took the large field of medical diagnoses and reduced them to a set of codes that could be more easily tracked and analyzed than doctor’s notes. It’s a matter of opinion as to whether or not such a complex system represents good engineering. As an example of computer engineering, many years ago I worked on a project to build a low-cost medical monitor such as those that you see in hospitals. The charge I was given was to make a system that a doctor or nurse could figure out how to use in less than 5 minutes without any documentation. As you might imagine, this required much more than just knowledge of programming. And I beat the goal—my solution ended up taking about 30 seconds to learn to use.

Programming is often confused with computer science. While many computer scientists program, most programmers aren’t computer scientists. Computer science is the study of computing. Computer science discoveries are used by engineers and programmers.

Coding, programming, engineering, and computer science are independent but related disciplines that differ in the type and amount of knowledge required. Being a computer scientist, engineer, or coder doesn’t automatically make someone a good programmer. … Engineering and programming are similar to music or painting—they’re part skill and part art.

So I could also state my goal as

“This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a programmer. (aiming at becoming an engineer)”

I think I’ll stick with my line though. I love the inclusion of the arts in there. Programmer and engineer are too dry without them :)
But this little screed helps me explain my intentions better to other people :)
And for that, a hat tip and lots of gratitude to you, Mr. Steinhart!

Brave Enough

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 05:45:00 +0530

If I could distill everything that I have learnt about love and attraction and lust and life and persistence and bravery and marriage and children and facing your fears and growing up?

If I could do that, it would be this slim book.

I stumbled across Cheryl Strayed, in (as usual) a Farnam Street post.
And then promptly bought all her books and forgot about reading them.
Better late than never though.

Like I said, if I could distill everything I know, it’d be this book.
But I could never do it as beautifully, as eloquently as Cheryl does.

Riffing off a popular meme,

So did you highlight the book?
The book, yes!

Cheryl says in the introduction, “This aims to be a book of yes.” It definitely is!

I’ve put some here, but honestly, the whole darned book is quotable!

On books and quotes and reading …

The best quotes don’t speak to one particular truth, but rather to universal truths that resonate—across time, culture, gender, generation, and situation—in our own hearts and minds.
They guide, motivate, validate, challenge, and comfort us in our own lives. They reiterate what we’ve figured out and remind us how much there is yet to learn.
Pithily and succinctly, they lift us momentarily out of the confused and conflicted human muddle. Most of all, they tell us we’re not alone. Their existence is proof that others have questioned, grappled with, and come to know the same truths we question and grapple with, too.
I hope this book serves that purpose for you. Read it like a motherfucker.

Be brave enough to
break your own heart.

We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop.

We start at the bottom and climb up.

Blood is involved.

YOU* don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.*
But that’s all.

Don’t surrender all your joy
for an idea you used
to have about yourself that
isn’t true anymore.

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing.

Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you’ll look back in twenty years and howl.

I considered my options.
There was only one, I knew.
There was always only one.

To keep walking.

You go on by doing the best you can.
You go on by being generous.
You go on by being true.
You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on.
You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and by allowing the pleasure in other days.
You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

On taking risks while still young …

Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth.
People who didn’t do those things risk becoming mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be.
Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose.
Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go.

Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I’d done some things I shouldn’t have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different from what I’d done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn’t have done were what got me here?
What if I was never redeemed?

What if I already was?

Hello, fear.
Thank you for being here.
You’re my indication
that I’m doing what I
need to do.

On Parenting …

When it comes to our children, we do not have the luxury of despair.
If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we’ve fallen.
Remembering that is the most important work we can possibly do as parents.

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

An ethical and evolved life entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth. Leaving a relationship because you want to doesn’t exempt you from your obligation to be a decent human being. You can leave and still be a compassionate friend to your partner. Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty. It means that if you yearn to be free of a particular relationship and you feel that yearning lodged within you more firmly than any of the other competing and contrary yearnings are lodged, your desire to leave is not only valid, but probably the right thing to do. Even if someone you love is hurt by that.

These little snippets on grief, ring specially true for me. Having been on both sides. I try to be better at this all the time …

If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely on the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t—if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live—well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of death. Allowing this into your consciousness will not keep you from your suffering, but …
it will help you survive the next day.

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want or keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long, meandering walks. The days reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not.
These things are your becoming.

Walk without a stick
into the darkest
woods.

The unifying theme is resilience and faith.
The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker.
It is not fragility. It’s strength.
It’s nerve.
And “if your Nerve, deny you—,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Go above your Nerve.”

Honor is inconvenient and absolute. Honor is looking it square in the face and taking it on the chin. It’s having the guts to break someone’s heart so as to avoid fucking with his or her head.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.

Ask yourself:
What is the best I can do?
And then do that.

FEAR, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.
I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. That nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid.
Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.

Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals.
They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself.

On getting over pain and heartbreak.
This.
Abso–fucking–lutely this.

You let time pass. That’s the cure.
You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months.
And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you’re okay.

Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar.
Forgiveness is the old fat guy you have to haul up the hill.

On doing the work …

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.
Do the work.
Keep the faith.
Be true blue.
You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.

Can I convince the person
about whom I’m crazy
to be crazy about me?

The short answer is no.
The long answer is no.

There are so many things
to be tortured about.
So many torturous things
in this life.
Don’t let someone
who doesn’t love you
be one of them.

Travel by foot.
There is so much you can’t identify at top speed.

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It’s about the person who’s being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say:
Don’t own other people’s crap.
The world would be a better place if we all did that.

We do not have the right to feel helpless.
We must help ourselves.
After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.

Accept that their actions hurt you deeply.
Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know.
Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life.
Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest.
Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

This isn’t a spotless life. There is
much ahead, my immaculate peach.

Let fall your notions about “perfect couples.” It’s such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they’re in one. Its only defining quality is that it’s composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

The story of human
intimacy is one of
constantly allowing ourselves to see those
we love most deeply in a
new, more fractured light.

Look hard.

Risk that.

It isn’t too late.

Time is not running out.

Your life is here and now.

And the moment has arrived
at which you’re finally ready
to change.

Go because you want to
go. Because wanting to
leave is enough.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

If it is impossible for
you to go on as you
were before, so you
must go on as you
never have.

Bravery is acknowledging your
fear and doing it anyway.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing.
And it’s one thing and one thing only:
it’s doing what you have to do.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real-deal, down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

This is not the moment to wilt into
the underbrush of your insecurities.

You’ve earned the right to grow.

Humility is about refusing to get all tangled up with yourself. It’s about surrender, receptivity, awareness, simplicity. Breathing in. Breathing out.

Trusting yourself means
living out what you
already know to be true.

How to Pronounce Knife

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 10:59:15 +0530

This was the best collection of short stories, I’ve read since O’Henry.
No O’Henriesque twists, but fate and life and love deal the characters and us readers, enough drama that none are needed.

A couple of lines, that struck me …

Raymond didn’t like to talk back to his sister, but this time he thought she was wrong to say what she did.

“Well,” he said, “you know, maybe Miss Emily ain’t ever gonna be with a man like me, but I want to dream it anyway. It’s a nice feeling and I ain’t had one of those things to myself in a long time.
I know I don’t got a chance in hell, but it’s something to get me through. It’s to get through the next hour, the next day.
Don’t you go reminding me what dreams a man like me ought to have. That I can dream at all means something to me.”

My father did not grieve. He had done all of this life’s grieving when he became a refugee.
To lose your love, to be abandoned by your wife was a thing of luxury even—it meant you were alive.

A Mathematician’s Lament

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 09:16:00 +0530

This little book, had me yelling, “YEA! HELL, YEA!” at every page.
The book’s evolved from this really beautiful lament, which is available online and has a newer section titled Exultation.
The article has the main thrust of the book and is worth your time. (as is the book, specially if you have kids, or you teach kids, or if you want to shape someone’s thinking about Mathematics)

Highlights from the book follow …

On the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare …

I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint. “Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”

After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked. “Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”

“Um, these high school classes you mentioned …”

“You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.”

“Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?”

“Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.”

“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”

“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”

Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

SIMPLICIO: I don’t think that’s very fair. Surely teaching methods have improved since then.

SALVIATI: You mean training methods. Teaching is a messy human relationship; it does not require a method. Or rather I should say, if you need a method you’re probably not a very good teacher. If you don’t have enough of a feeling for your subject to be able to talk about it in your own voice, in a natural and spontaneous way, how well could you understand it? And speaking of being stuck in the nineteenth century, isn’t it shocking how the curriculum itself is stuck in the seventeenth? To think of all the amazing discoveries and profound revolutions in mathematical thought that have occurred in the last three centuries! There is no more mention of these than if they had never happened.

SIMPLICIO: But surely we want all of our students to learn a basic set of facts and skills. That’s what a curriculum is for, and that’s why it is so uniform—there are certain timeless, cold, hard facts we need our students to know: one plus one is two, and the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. These are not opinions, or mushy artistic feelings.

SALVIATI: On the contrary. Mathematical structures, useful or not, are invented and developed within a problem context and derive their meaning from that context. Sometimes we want one plus one to equal zero (as in so-called ‘mod 2’ arithmetic) and on the surface of a sphere the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180 degrees. There are no facts per se; everything is relative and relational. It is the story that matters, not just the ending.

What is happening is the systematic undermining of the student’s intuition.
A proof, that is, a mathematical argument, is a work of fiction, a poem. Its goal is to satisfy. A beautiful proof should explain, and it should explain clearly, deeply, and elegantly. A well-written, well-crafted argument should feel like a splash of cool water, and be a beacon of light—it should refresh the spirit and illuminate the mind. And it should be charming.
There is nothing charming about what passes for proof in geometry class. Students are presented a rigid and dogmatic format in which their so-called “proofs” are to be conducted—a format as unnecessary and inappropriate as insisting that children who wish to plant a garden refer to their flowers by genus and species.

Calling into question the obvious, by insisting that it be “rigorously proved” (as if the above even constitutes a legitimate formal proof), is to say to a student, “Your feelings and ideas are suspect. You need to think and speak our way.”
Now there is a place for formal proof in mathematics, no question. But that place is not a student’s first introduction to mathematical argument.

if multiplication is something you are interested in (that is, making repeated copies of piles of rocks), you might also notice an unpleasant lack of symmetry. What number triples to make six? Why, two of course. But what triples to make seven? There isn’t any pile of rocks like that. How annoying!
Of course we’re not really talking about piles of rocks (or anti-rocks). We’re talking about an abstract imaginary structure inspired by rocks. So if we want there to be a number which when tripled makes seven, then we can simply build one. We don’t even have to go out to the garage and get tools—we just “bring it into being” linguistically. We can even give it a name like ‘7/3’ (a modified Egyptian shorthand for “that which when multiplied by three makes seven.”) And so on. All of the usual “rules” of arithmetic are simply the consequences of these aesthetic choices.

The point is that there is no reality to any of this, so there are no rules or restrictions other than the ones we care to impose. And the aesthetic here is very clear, both historically and philosophically: if a pattern is interesting and attractive, then it’s good. (And if it means having to work hard to bend your mind around a new idea, so much the better.)
Make up anything you want, so long as it isn’t boring. Of course this is a matter of taste, and tastes change and evolve. Welcome to art history! Being a mathematician is not so much about being clever (although lord knows that helps); it’s about being aesthetically sensitive and having refined and exquisite taste.

the mathematical landscape is filled with these interesting and delightful structures that we have built (or accidentally discovered) for our own amusement. We observe them, notice interesting patterns, and try to craft elegant and compelling narratives to explain their behavior.

It seems to keep happening! And it’s utterly beyond our control. Either this is a true (and surprising and beautiful) feature of odd numbers or it isn’t, and we simply have no say in the matter. We may have brought these creatures into existence (and that is a serious philosophical question in itself) but now they are running amok and doing things we never intended. This is the Frankenstein aspect of mathematics—we have the authority to define our creations, to instill in them whatever features or properties we choose, but we have no say in what behaviors may then ensue as a consequence of our choices.

These aren’t hairy, smelly hamsters with bloodstreams and intestines; they’re happy, free, lighter-than-air constructs of my imagination. And they are absolutely terrifying. Do you get what I mean here? So simple they’re scary? These aren’t science-fiction aliens, these are aliens. And they’re up to something, apparently. They seem to always add up to squares. But why? At this point what we have is a conjecture about odd numbers. We have discovered a pattern, and we think it continues. We could even verify that it works for the first trillion cases if we wanted. We could then say that it’s true for all practical purposes, and be done with it.
But that’s not what mathematics is about. Math is not about a collection of “truths” (however useful or interesting they may be).
Math is about reason and understanding.
We want to know why.
And not for any practical purpose.

Here’s where the art has to happen. Observation and discovery are one thing, but explanation is quite another. What we need is a proof, a narrative of some kind that helps us to understand why this pattern is occurring. And the standards for proof in mathematics are pretty damn high. A mathematical proof should be an absolutely clear logical deduction, which, as I said before, needs not only to satisfy, but to satisfy beautifully. That is the goal of the mathematician: to explain in the simplest, most elegant and logically satisfying way possible. To make the mystery melt away and to reveal a simple, crystalline truth.

Finally, I want to stress again that it’s not the fact that consecutive odd numbers add up to squares that really matters here; it’s the discovery, the explanation, the analysis. Mathematical truths are merely the incidental by-products of these activities.
Painting is not about what hangs in the museum, it’s about what you do—the experience you have with brushes and paint.

So where do math problems like these come from? Well, I’ll tell you: they come from playing. Just playing around in Mathematical Reality, often with no particular goal in mind. It’s not hard to find good problems—just go to the jungle yourself. You can’t take three steps without tripping over something interesting.

This is how math problems arise—just from sincere and serendipitous exploration. And isn’t that how every great thing in life works? Children understand this. They know that learning and playing are the same thing. How sad that the grownups have forgotten. They think of learning as a chore, so they make it into one. Their problem is intentionality. So let me leave you with the only practical advice I have to offer: just play! You don’t need a license to do math. You don’t need to take a class or read a book. Mathematical Reality is yours to enjoy for the rest of your life. It exists in your imagination and you can do whatever you want with it. Including nothing, of course.

The Comfort Crisis

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 09:27:42 +0530

I kept reading books and articles about solitude and discomfort and boredom.
This Michael Easter book covers all of it, succinctly in the frame of a journey to the Alaskan wilderness.
Worth a read.
Highlights from the book follow …

“When our ancestors weren’t searching for food or getting pummeled by mastodons, they had long moments of downtime, lounging around for hours a day. They had to make something out of their boredom.

These people allowed their minds to wander and had to get creative and rely on one another for entertainment. As my beautifully blunt then-girlfriend, now-wife put it when we went camping early in our relationship: “We ran out of things to talk about in three hours and had a whole day left.” It wasn’t until the 1920s, when radio was broadcast to the masses, that there was a full-time, brainless escape from boredom. Then came Big TV in the 1950s. Finally, on June 29, 2007, boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone. And so our imaginations and deep social connections went with it”

“how he determines if something is hard enough.

“We’re generally guided by the idea that you should have a fifty percent chance of success—if you do everything right,” he said. “So if you decided you wanted to run a twenty-five-mile trail, and you’re preparing by working up to a twenty-mile training run and doing thirty-five or forty miles a week of running…that’s not a misogi. Your chance of failure is too low. But if you’ve never run more than ten miles, think you could probably run fifteen, but are iffy on whether you could run twenty…then that twenty-five miles is probably a misogi.”

This rule also renders misogi a moving target. One person’s 50 percent is often not the same as another’s. “If someone has never run more than a couple miles, then a 10K could be a misogi,” said Elliott. Modern humans may have an unmet need to do what’s truly difficult for us. New research shows that depression, anxiety, and feeling like you don’t belong can be linked to being untested.

“So you must fail about half the time?” I asked.

“I’ve actually failed my last couple misogis, …”

“there are only two rules,” said Elliott. “Rule number one is that it has to be really fucking hard. Rule number two is that you can’t die.”

“the human brain hates this construct. The brain wants nothing to do with failure. Especially if you execute perfectly on your side.”

“Failure even a hundred years ago could mean that you die,” said Elliott. “But people vastly overestimate the consequences of failure today. Failure now is that you fuck up a PowerPoint presentation and your boss gives you a bad look.”

“two: Don’t advertise misogi. It’s OK to talk about misogi with friends and family.
But you don’t Tweet, Instagram, Facebook, or boast about misogi.”

“In a perfectly designed misogi, you give it everything you have and you just finish it. Or maybe you just barely fail,” Elliott told me. “To finish it with a lot left is not really doing it right. You want to explore what your potential is out on the edges.”

“Unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

The 11 hours and 6 minutes of attention we’re handing over to digital media isn’t free. It’s all spent in focused mode. Think of this focused state like lifting a weight, and the unfocused state like resting. When we kill boredom by burying our minds in a phone, TV, or computer, our brain is putting forth a shocking amount of effort. Like trying to do rep after rep after rep of an exercise, our attention eventually tires when we overwork it. Modern life overworks the hell out of our brains.”

“Tolstoy had this great quote in Anna Karenina that says boredom is a ‘desire for desires,’ ” said Danckert. “So boredom is a motivational state.”

“now people want to say that boredom makes you more creative,” said Danckert. “I call bullshit on that. Boredom doesn’t make you more creative. It just tells you ‘do something!’ ” And when that “something” is letting our mind revive unfocused mode—or sitting down to write a screenplay—rather than blanketing it with the exact same media that everyone else is consuming, we begin to think, quite literally, on a different wavelength. That’s what creativity requires.”

“So I found myself bored again. Again the game is waiting; waiting for caribou to move into view. Donnie once spent 42 ten-hour days waiting in the North Dakota woods for a single white-tailed deer”

“John Muir in 1901 put it this way: “Nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”

Three or more days in the wild is like a meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and the experience is free of costs and gurus.”

“Famed biologist E. O. Wilson developed a theory, called the biophilia hypothesis, which says we have an ingrained call to be in nature that’s in competition with our evolutionary desire to control our environment.
The thinking goes like this: We evolved in nature, and therefore have programmed within our genes a need to be in and connect with nature and living things. If we don’t, we go a little haywire, as if we’re missing a necessary nutrient for our body, mind, and sense of self.”

“We were walking past 100-foot-tall maple and spruce trees planted in the late 1800s, and she was telling me about her research. In 2016, she led a study that found something as painless as a 20-minute stroll through a city park, like the one we’re in right now, can cause profound changes in the neurological structure of our brains. This leaves us feeling calmer and with sharper and more productive, creative minds. “But,” she said, “we found that people who used their cellphone on the walk saw none of those benefits.”

“There’s a little magic in 20 minutes. That was confirmed by Hopman’s colleagues at the University of Michigan. They discovered that 20 minutes outside, three times a week, is the dose of nature that most efficiently dropped people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The catch to that study, of course, was that the participants couldn’t take their phones outside with them.”

“People are busy,” said Hopman. “I get it.” Some days you’ll have a pile of work. A walk through a park seems unfeasible. Any time away from the grind feels like too much time away from the grind. “I tell busy people about the productivity and creativity benefits of nature,” she said. Think of that short walk outside like a high-return investment in yourself. Those 20 minutes in the park may cause you to pump out, say, 20 widgets instead of the 18 you would have done had you tried to power through the day in burnout mode. And perhaps those widgets would be more creatively designed”

“Any time in nature is beneficial,” said Hopman as we reached the crest of the trail. “But spending more time in wilder spaces does seem to give you more benefits.” Time in this semiwild stuff comprises level two of the nature pyramid. Research, in part thanks to Finland, says we should spend a total of about five hours in it a month.”

“There could be a lot of reasons why nature—wilder spaces in particular—has these effects on the mind and body. It could be that in nature you are engulfed in fractals, complex patterns that repeat over and over in different sizes and scales and make up the design of the universe. Think trees (big branch to smaller branch to smaller branch and so on), river systems (little river to bigger river to bigger river and so on), mountain ranges, clouds, seashells. “Cities don’t have fractals,” said Hopman. “Think of a typical building. It’s usually flat, with right angles. It’s painted some dull color.” Fractals are organized chaos, which our brains apparently dig.”

“it turns out that what’s enchanted my brain there is a certifiable scientific phenomenon. It even has a catchy name, “the three-day effect.” To experience this level requires “backcountry nature.” A trip into the wild places that begin where dirt roads end. Places characterized by spotty cell reception, wild animals, and a lack of bathrooms and other humans.”

“the message is clear: Time in nature is a hell of a way to calm the turbulent sea inside our minds.”

“programming two “hungry days” per week where we eat around 500 calories delivers benefits”

“Another option is to string together five “hungry days” in a row, once a month, eating just 700 total calories”

“In misogi you’ll reach this edge where you are convinced you have nothing left,” he said. “But you’ll keep going anyway. And then you’ll look back and you’ll be way out beyond what you were certain was your edge. You won’t forget that.” The human brain may hate failure, but it hates exercise equally so.

Humans over millennia developed a complex network of physical discomforts and psychological “governors” to dissuade us from effort, because effort requires energy, or calories, which in the past was precious. This is why we seemingly have an ingrained call to laziness.”

“exercise-induced fatigue is predominantly a protective emotion. It’s a psychological state that has little to do with a person’s physical limits.”

“Doing physically hard things is an enormous life hack. Do hard things and the rest of life gets easier and you appreciate it all the more,”

“This idea was echoed to me recently by one of my best friends, William Allen, a former major in the US Marines and co-founder of Harpoon Ventures, a fast-rising defense-focused venture capital firm. “If you can consciously put yourself through physical discomfort and understand the higher purpose of it, the ‘why,’ the mental calluses that come along with that create what is called the Well of Fortitude,” he said. “My business partner, who happens to be a prior service US Navy SEAL, and I were able to successfully build a legitimate venture capital fund from the ground up. Not because we were special, supersmart, or had access to family money. But rather, we knew our higher purpose and were able to draw on the Well of Fortitude we built on challenging missions in the military to buffer stress, work harder, and simply endure.”

“Research suggests that smoking takes 10 years off a person’s life, while the combined effects of being unfit may take as many as 23.”

The Overstory

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 31 May 2021 07:59:47 +0530

When a book keeps popping up in your radar, from a wide variety of sources, over months, then you just have to go read it.

via the amazing Ricardo Siri. click the image to see full size.

The Overstory was it for me.
Two friends, three random youtube videos and a couple of podcasts made be buckle down and read it.
I wanted to go slow and savour it and finish it slowly. But I got greedy and gobbled it down yesterday.
This one is for the Lindy List.

The book’s about a set of characters and trees and about the intersections and interleaving of their lives with each other and with trees.
It’s a love letter to trees.
Or maybe it’s a love letter from Aberewaa, from Atira, from Bhoomi, from Gaia to us.

My highlights from the book follow …

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.

—James Lovelock

Tree . . . he watching you. You look at tree, he listen to you. He got no finger, he can’t speak. But that leaf . . . he pumping, growing, growing in the night. While you sleeping you dream something. Tree and grass same thing.

—Bill Neidjie

Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks:
How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?

United, the trio sit together one last time. They have no explanation. There never will be one. The least likely person in the world has gone on an impossible tour without them. In place of explanation, memory. They put their hands on each other’s shoulders and tell each other stories of how things were.

The judges award him no medal—not even a bronze. They say it’s because he has no bibliography. A bibliography is a required part of the formal report. Adam knows the real reason. They think he stole. They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

“Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.”

If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.

Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.

… each night, Ray has almost forever to think: Something is happening to me. Something heavy, huge, and slow, coming from far outside, that I do not understand. He has no idea. The thing that comes for him is a genus more than six hundred species strong. Familiar, protean, setting up camp from the tropics all the way up through the temperate north: the generalist emblem of all trees. Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.”

In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.

With them, Dad may throw softballs and tell bubble-gum wrapper jokes and play tag. But he reserves his best gifts for his little plant-girl, Patty.
Their closeness bothers her mother. “I ask you. Has there ever been such a little nation of two?”

They drive through a land once covered in dark beech forest. “Best tree you could ever want to see.” Strong and wide but full of grace, flaring out nobly at the base, into its own plinth. Generous with nuts that feed all comers. Its smooth, white-gray trunk more like stone than wood. The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter—marcescent, he tells her—shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods. Elegant with sturdy boughs so much like human arms, lifting upward at the tips like hands proffering. Hazy and pale in spring, but in autumn its flat, wide sprays bathe the air in gold.
“What happened to them?” The girl’s words thicken when sadness weighs them down.
“We did.”

“If you see a trunk carved full of letters, it’s a beech. People can’t help writing all over that smooth gray surface. God love ’em. They want to watch their lettered hearts growing bigger, year after year.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!”

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters. Patty pictures their tiny seed growing up to be covered with words.

On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Patricia opens the book to the first sentence and reads:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

At the funeral, Patty reads from Ovid. The promotion of Baucis and Philemon to trees. Her brothers think she has lost her mind with grief.
She won’t let her mother throw anything out. She keeps his walking stick and porkpie hat in a kind of shrine. She preserves his precious library—Aldo Leopold, John Muir, his botany texts, the Ag Extension pamphlets he helped to write. She finds his copy of adult Ovid, marked all over, as people mark beeches. The underscores start, triple, on the very first line:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

She replants their experiment in a spot behind the house where she and her father liked to sit on summer nights and listen to what other people called silence. She remembers what he told her about the species. People, God love ’em, must write all over beeches. But some people—some fathers—are written all over by trees.

Late at night, too tired from teaching and research to work more, she reads her beloved Muir. … She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antennae arrays form up into thylakoid discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious ginkgo.
Too many zeros: their eyes glaze over. She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe. “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear, and love became possible.” They think she’s nuts, and that’s fine with her. She’s content to post a memory forward to their distant futures, futures that will depend on the inscrutable generosity of green things.

Years from now, she’ll write a book of her own, The Secret Forest. Its opening page will read:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .

She addresses the cedar, using words of the forest’s first humans. “Long Life Maker. I’m here. Down here.” She feels foolish, at first. But each word is a little easier than the next.
“Thank you for the baskets and the boxes. Thank you for the capes and hats and skirts. Thank you for the cradles. The beds. The diapers. Canoes. Paddles, harpoons, and nets. Poles, logs, posts. The rot-proof shakes and shingles. The kindling that will always light.”
Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the gratitude spill out. “Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling. I forget. . . . Thank you,” she says, following the ancient formula. “For all these gifts that you have given.” And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, “We’re sorry. We didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back.”

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

places remember what people forget.

She always thought he was just myth. She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

moss-swarmed floor—straight up, with no taper, like a russet, leathery apotheosis.

The spruces near the cabin wave spooky prophecies under the near-full moon. There’s a straight line of them, the memory of a vanished fence where red crossbills once liked to sit and shit out seeds. The trees are busy tonight, fixing carbon in their dark phase. All will be in flower before long: huckleberry and currant, showy milkweed, tall Oregon grape, yarrow and checkermallow. She marvels again at how the planet’s supreme intelligence could discover calculus and the universal laws of gravitation before anyone knew what a flower was for.

They read The Secret Forest again. It’s like a yew: more revealing on a second look. They read about how a branch knows when to branch. How a root finds water, even water in a sealed pipe. How an oak may have five hundred million root tips that turn away from competition. How crown-shy leaves leave a gap between themselves and their neighbors. How trees see color. They read about the wild stock market trading in handicrafts, aboveground and below. About the complex limited partnerships with other kinds of life. The ingenious designs that loft seeds in the air for hundreds of miles. The tricks of propagation worked upon unsuspecting mobile things tens of millions of years younger than the trees. The bribes for animals who think they’re getting lunch for free.
They read about myrrh-tree transplanting expeditions depicted in the reliefs at Karnak, three thousand five hundred years ago. They read about trees that migrate. Trees that remember the past and predict the future. Trees that harmonize their fruiting and nutting into sprawling choruses. Trees that bomb the ground so only their own young can grow. Trees that summon air forces of insects to come save them. Trees with hollowed trunks wide enough to hold the population of small hamlets. Leaves with fur on the undersides. Thinned petioles that solve the wind. The rim of life around a pillar of dead history, each new coat as thick as the maker season is generous.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

Tonight’s poem is Chinese—Wang Wei—twelve hundred years old, from an anthology of poetry she winds through at random, the way she likes to hike:

I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests. . . .

You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.

Then the river is running over her, and she’s done. She douses the dim, low-watt bulb clipped to the headboard. All that’s left her is the moon. She rolls on her side and curls up, her face pressed into the dank pillow. After a minute, the end of her mouth pulls into an abiding smile.
“I did not almost forget. Good night.”
Good night.

Cashflow for Creators

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0530

If you want to someday make money from your skills and your craft, you owe it to yourself to read this.
If you have never read Lucas, you owe it to yourself to read him.
Buy Cashflow for Creators!

My highlighted notes from the book follow …

Craft is the nuts and bolts of how you do The Thing. For a writer, it’s stuff like grammar and spelling and reading. For a glass artist, it’s not mixing different COEs or—at the highest levels—how to mix different COEs. Painters need to understand that light and pigments blend colors very differently, how to prep and clean a canvas, and so on.

Art, as a verb, is how you express yourself through your craft. Stephen King and Danielle Steele both work with the same tools of the craft, but they create totally different books.
Art illuminates an ideal.
As a noun, art is the finished product; the book, the painting, the song, the Thing.

Trade is the business of the finished art. Once you have mastered your craft, you need to master your trade. For writers, it’s how to format a manuscript and how to sell your books. For an artist, it’s how to get into galleries and garner commissions. Maybe it’s how you use Redbubble, Etsy, and eBay. It’s how you pay your taxes and siphon off money to pay the mortgage.

Professional artists must master craft, art, and trade.

The trickiest part about a creator learning their trade?
Never letting the trade into the creative process.
Thoughts like “this will never sell” or, worse, “this will sell millions!” are death to creativity.

A creator with a stressful job must put aside their concerns to create. You can’t fret about your stock portfolio and carve a masterpiece. When you step into your creative space, discard these business concerns in exactly the same way. I promise you that when you finish the day’s drawing or writing or sculpting, those concerns will still be there, ready to be picked up. They won’t even miss you.

Think of art and business as hats.
When you put on the Art Hat, you are purely a creator. You are expressing your innermost self through your craft to create a piece of art. During that moment, you must utterly believe in yourself. Other people have the exact same craft you do. The only thing you own, all you can express, is your sincerity and personal truth. Without letting yourself do that, you have no art. When you finish your work, take a moment to admire it. Tell yourself you did okay. Creative work is still work, so give yourself a chance to rest.
Then take off the Art Hat, and put on the Business Hat. You’ve expressed your personal truth, now it’s time to trade that work. Don’t even think about the creation process while you’re wearing the Business Hat. Don’t consider the trade while you’re wearing the Art Hat. They must be wholly separate.
Even long-time creators have trouble with this. I just had a discussion with a writer whose artistic side is demanding she write a certain novel. Her business mindset keeps shrieking, “You don’t want to be known for this!” Truth is, her inner creator is going to write the book. The only question is, will she come along quietly or will her Muse drag her by the handcuffs? Maybe she’ll put on the Business Hat afterwards and say “No, this can’t go into the trade.” That’s fine. Everybody occasionally creates unsaleable work. Maybe she’ll give it for free to her most dedicated fans, or bury it in the trunk for her literary estate to discover.

Chapter 4: The Long Slow Slog

A creative business that makes money but doesn’t yet pay all your bills is in the Long Slow Slog. You’re making money, just not enough. The Slog might last years. It might last decades. You’re not making enough yet.
“Yet.” That’s the key word. You’re still learning how to make money, improving your artistic skills, and figuring out how everything fits together. So long as you continue improving, you will get there.

The Long Slow Slog is an absolutely critical stage of your career. It’s not an easy time. You’re still doing some sort of day job to keep the roof over your head and food in your belly. It’s also when you learn how the trade (the business of your art) works in the real world.
How do you trudge through this endless era and build a long-term business?
With a support system that includes your family and your attitude.

Keep Creating

The Long Slow Slog started because you love The Thing so much that you kept doing it. You improved at it enough that you started to bring in money for it. That made you think that maybe you had a business here. Perhaps you could even make a living with your art.
Whatever you do: never stop creating.
Money comes from practicing your art. You must keep making new things. One best-selling book or one perfect painting is not a career.

Deliberate Practice

People don’t want more of the same. They want the same, only different. They want the thing they love, plus something extra. They want their creators to achieve new heights, new depths, new something. If you want a career, your art must constantly improve. Without adding new things, your fans will drift away. The cash flow will dry up, and your fans won’t be able to tell you why.
The only way to achieve “the same but different” is through practice.

Deliberate practice focuses on honing one aspect of the art at a time.

How much do you create?
I’m a writer. I wrote four books last year. Easy. How many copies of each book I sold doesn’t really matter in this discussion.
If you make something more tangible, like beads or clay figurines or capybara parachutes, your inventory is the number of them you made. If the items are all similar, a simple tally when you finish each piece will start. If you create different types of thing, you’ll need a separate column for each type.
You also need to know how much you sell of each thing. The way you track this depends wholly on what you make and how you sell it, so I can’t recommend any specific system. Talk to other professionals in your craft. Do what they do.
Also track how much time you spend working on your craft. This isn’t only the time you spend actively sewing or writing or working the welding torch. If you have a dedicated workspace that needs cleaning, count that time. I do all my writing on a dedicated computer in my home office. In theory, I can’t possibly get dirty or make a mess doing it. Even so, I must swill the filth out of my garret every month or two.
If you decide to go full time, this knowledge will be precious—and there’s no other way to get it other than you recording it during the Long Slow Slog.

A small business owner has two rules for spending money.

If it can be a business expense, it is a business expense
Spend money on needs, not on wants

These rules are directly contradictory, except when they aren’t.

So many folks dream of creating to pay their rent. Remember, a dream is something you don’t control. Transforming that dream into a concrete, actionable goal requires knowing how to get there. It requires a way to measure success and risk. You must continuously improve your art, understand business, and run your life as if it’s a business.

there is zero shame in deciding you don’t want turn your art into your living. Relying on your art to feed the kids is not for everyone. You entirely own the choice and the responsibility. Once you accept both, any choice you make is correct for you.

The Bucket shows you how everything averages out, however. Experience has shown me that four books in a year lets me at least scrape by.

the Bucket is a business machine that converts those irregular bursts of cash into a smooth, steady stream. My life is a hole in the bottom of the Bucket. The bigger the hole, the faster the Bucket drains. Rent and food and expenses are predictable, and subject to my control. Before I can control them, though, I must know what those expenses are.

discussing financial disasters is easiest when you aren’t under financial pressure. If you get laid off, you’ll come home with a spinning head, churning emotions, and a pounding heart. You could find a worse time to make financial decisions, but it would probably involve black market organ transplants and an armored car heist.
If your income drops, what expenses will your household cut? What must you keep? The time to decide this is when everyone’s employed, not under pink slip pressure. This discussion doesn’t need to involve everyone; there’s no need to worry the kids. (Once they’re teenagers, having them listen to the discussion might be a useful education.) All decision makers must be included, though, and that’ll vary depending on who’s in your household.

My budgeting vastly improved once I looked in the mirror and conceded that I was an idiot who was going to buy books before food, and set aside money for it. ¹

When the money level drops below Yellow, you’ve crossed the Red threshold. Your business cannot sustain you. It’s time to get back in the straight workforce.
Front-loading decisions relieves huge amounts of stress. Nightmares of going bust have awakened me at stupid o’clock more than once.

Yes, I discuss the Bucket with my family. Money is our society’s last big taboo, but the successful creators I know all discuss money with their families. If you trust your family with your children and the capybara and to sign for you to have emergency surgery when you’re unconscious because you caught the gangrene, you can discuss business with them too. Your family will call you on your daft decisions, point out perfectly obvious things you never considered, and in general help keep you from driving into the ditch.

Where Red is about recovering from failure, the Yellow threshold is about lifestyle. How long are you willing to endure living at Essential Expenses to have the job you want? No extras. No vacation. No cable TV, no meals out, no nothing. Bupkis. You are deliberately deciding to scrape by for this length of time. This is where you say “I’m gonna give it a year and see what happens.”
If you have family, the answer gets more complicated. Your family wants you to keep doing your art, because it makes you happy. But how many months are they willing to live at Essential Expenses level so that you can have the job you want? That’s the core question. Maybe you’re willing to go forever, but your spouse says a year. Or five years. Or never; it’s full expenses or nothing. Get this all out before you set a number of months.
If you can’t reach agreement, you’re stuck with the time demanded by the person with the shortest tolerance. To do otherwise declares your business is more important than your loved ones.

We haven’t discussed income much, because you don’t control it. While working hard, improving your craft, practicing your art, and learning your trade all enhance your chances of making money, other people’s purchasing decisions are beyond your control. What matters is how much the Bucket’s level rises over a year, or two years, or even five years.

If you made over a year’s worth of Essential Expenses last year, maybe you could make a go of it. If you made over five years’ worth of Full Expenses over the last five years, you could almost certainly make a go of it.
My Essential Expenses for both home and business total $2,500 a month. That’s $30,000 a year. Did I add more than $30,000 to the Bucket last year? If so, and if spending the additional time at my art and my craft has a reasonable chance of increasing my income, I have a decent chance.
If I added less than $30,000 to the Bucket, it’s a lot more iffy. How confident are you that working like an obsessed artist will boost your income?

Your life hits a crisis. Should you jump into full time as a creative? If your business’ yearly income exceeds your Essential Expenses, or even your Full Expenses, and your Bucket is way up in Green, do it.
Again, this never happens. In the real world, we have to act on experience, logic, and hope for just a touch of luck. Everybody’s decision is unique.
In my case, I had chosen a technology job that gave me a lower salary in exchange for being treated like an actual person and a total18 absence of company stupidity. Five years later, the company went under. If I returned to a standard corporate gig, my salary would double. So would my stress and my weight. Family dinners would vanish, just like the bad old days. Over on the artistic side, though, I was making nearly as much from my art as from the day job. The Bucket was in the lower end of Yellow and making more than Essential Expenses.
I discussed the situation with She Who Must Be Obeyed. We agreed that I should jump to writing full time. We would go on Essential Expenses for a year and see what happened.
For the next year, I wrote like an obsessed maniac scribbling on his padded walls. A standard corporate job demands nine- and ten-hour days from their technology staff. I treated my craft and my trade like such a job and refused to spend a penny that wasn’t absolutely necessary. I wrote seven books that year and published six of them. At the end of the year, I broke into Green.

If you can’t drain Essential Expenses from the Bucket every month without slipping into the Red, your trade is not yet viable. It is not yet the time to jump to full-time creation.

Knowing your personal Red and Yellow Thresholds, and documenting your Essential and Full Expenses, lets you easily make those decisions.

Me! ↩︎

A Love Letter to Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 18:38:32 +0530

Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas.

— Erik Hoel

I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment.
I decided to post it here too, then.

That quote describes my life to a T, even now.

I might be financially down in the dumps, but when it comes to books, my friends and kinfolk, have always somehow found a way to keep me happy and occupied.

The school librarian knew I used the library for what it actually was, a repository of magic and wisdom, and not what most folks used it for, a sick bay.
Which meant at least once a month, I would tell my teachers I was sick, go to the library and read books for an hour and after a year, the librarian would turn a blind eye to my presence too.
I was lost in Verne and Poe and Dickens.

The roadside vendor at the railway station, who I would buy books second hand from, would always keep the keep the newest ones for me.
If I couldn’t pay, he’d lend them to me on the condition, that I return it in day or two
This is where I got to read epic fiction. Tolkien’s worlds and McCullough’s Rome, all entranced me.

As a young hardware engineer making calls all over the city, I got to know the nooks and crannies of Bombay and more importantly I learnt where I could find the books that I wanted to read.
The Strand, and the roadside vendors at Fountain and Matunga and other nooks and cranies across the expanse of my tiny (in area) city became intimate friends.
Crazy animé, Golden age Marvel, “Banned” books, Old scifi and fantasy authors like Asimov and Niven/Pournelle and and newfangled ones like Gaiman and GRRM and the ones who would merge story telling and philosophy like PKD or Anthony DeMello and Carroll.

Friends, family, bosses, coworkers have all been indulgent too.
I own the Ultimate Sandman, and the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and the Complete Asterix, and a Niven novel that Asimov signed, and lots of Gibran, and lots of Anthony DeMello, and lots and lots and lots of hardbacks thanks to their generosity.

In a life, that has been constantly buffeted by storms, books have been my solace.

I may not not have graduated college, but books have been my education.
Books have gotten me over breakups.
Books have taught me how to save money and make it grow.
Books have made me a better human by passing on the wisdom of the ancients to me.
Books made me healthier by teaching me how to lose weight sustainably.
Books gave me a leg up in life.
Books are helping me reinvent my work life as I change careers to programming.

Books give me a leg up in life.
With books I have been truly privileged and truly blessed!

What to Read, How to Read. Recommendations from Folks, I Admire and Follow (2021 Edition)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:16:35 +0530

*Image, courtesy [Tom Gauld][tgt]*

This post was first sent to my newsletter on February 1st, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Welcome to the first, “serious” newsletter of 2021.
This was supposed to be my year end post, but life, as usual got in the way.

Now that I’ve jammed both the blogs together, most of the personal stuff is going to stay focussed on stuff about books and reading and writing and a few photos thrown in once in a while for good measure.
Seems like that is what I was doing most of last year, anyway.

Let’s get into it.

To start with, let’s get one thing out of the way.
You’re never to busy to read.

The fact is, people much busier than you have been prioritizing reading for centuries. They have been making wisdom part of their daily lives, no matter what’s going on in the world or in their jobs.

If Napoleon, commanding an army of some 40,000 men, could find time to read on a march some 1,600 miles from home, you can find it.
If Marcus could read while he was ruling the world, if Seneca could do it while studying the law, suffering from tuberculosis, while in exile, in the Senate, as consul, while he dealt with Nero’s insanity, you can.

— Ryan Holiday

My reading hero, Ryan shares the best books he read in 2020 as well as recommendations for 2021.

Books are an investment in yourself—investments that come in many forms: novels, nonfiction, how-to, poetry, classics, biographies. They help you think more clearly, to be provoked less, to be kinder, to see the bigger picture, and to improve at the things that matter to you.
Books are a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and stretches forward to today, where people are still publishing distillations of countless hours of hard thinking on hard topics.
Why wouldn’t you avail yourself of this wisdom?

How, does he do it? Year after year after prolific year?
Ryan shares it all here.

Susan Fowler, autodidact, whistleblower,all round hero, shares her list for the year.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized the importance of routine and structure.
I try to make every single day the same: wake up at the same time, eat at the same time, exercise at the same time, work at the same time, hang out with my daughter at the same time, read at the same time, and go to sleep at the same time.
These routines have become the foundation of my life and give my mind the space it needs so that I can be my best creative self. My brain doesn’t work well when it’s focused on figuring out when to eat, what to eat, when to sleep, when to read, etc. When I’m not in a strict daily routine, my mind wastes all of its time figuring out how to do the basics instead of being creative.
Without routine, I can’t write.
Without writing…well, without writing, I’ve got nothing.

Richard Meadows is someone, I’ve begun following this year. I love reading him, ergo, I love what he reads.
This is his list for 2020.
Love that he loves Peter Watts as well.

From his Love Letter to Reading …

Our brains are lumps of meaty plasticine, shaped to a large degree by the people we surround ourselves with. This influence extends to our reading material and even our thoughts themselves, which can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Toxic, ignorant and relentlessly negative influences should be excised before the cancer spreads.

Why not keep company with the smartest, funniest, bravest people who have ever lived? They will become your guides, your muses, the burning coals that light the fire inside. Sure, they can’t help you shift house, but they’re always there for you, only a bookshelf away. If you spend enough time hanging out with them, they will sculpt your brain into something beautiful.

If you want to know, how to read lots, he’s got you covered there too.

P.S. His book, Optionality, is the best distillation and explanation of the mental model, I’ve seen.

Brett and Co, over at The Art of Manliness don’t bother with pathetic, puny yearly reading lists.
The site has a dedicated section, on books and reading and they do it year round, year after year.

If you want to be challenged, they have a thousand books to read before you die. It’s an episode of their podcast, that is well worth a listen and takes an hour of your life.

Reading is serious business there.
From Embrace Reading for the Sake of Reading

there’s an argument for reading for reading’s sake. For spending time with books for no other reason but enjoyment, pleasure — even simply their sheer beauty.

Think about what happens when you go to an art museum. You wander around, looking at pieces of art, unmoved by some, but caught enraptured and unable to look away by others. You aren’t asking, “Are there practical takeaways from this art I’m looking at?”
You’re letting the impression it makes wash over you. You’re wondering what moved the artist to paint a particular brush stroke. You’re admiring the craft and skill of their work. You’re wondering what it is that so entrances you. Above all, you’re just enjoying it. Things that are beautiful inherently bring light to the soul and the psyche.

This is true for any work of art — books included. Most authors spend years crafting their characters, agonizing over every sentence, arranging paragraphs and dialogue in just the right way. And it’s not just novelists — you can’t read the likes of Robert Caro, Candice Millard, Erik Larson, and so many more, without seeing the art and craft of their books.
If you go into a book with the mindset that you’re simply enjoying a work of art, your mind is freed from the need to find the utility in it. It can be enriching and edifying (though in no specific direction and without quantifiable benefit). It can also be just plain entertaining. Consuming art, from paintings and sculptures to movies and books, isn’t just heady, it’s also fun! An escape. And using art — including books — to find that escape, is okay. It’s more than okay, in fact, it’s necessary.

This isn’t to say that you can’t learn something from books while enjoying their diversionary beauty. Learning is its own pleasure — one that you can pursue for the pleasure alone, with no real end in mind. No practical use, no career or personal development application, no note-taking to review later on, just as its own “useless” Good. I hereby give you permission to put down the highlighter and let your brain wander freely through a book, without the intent of finding applications for what you’re taking in.
Let yourself read with no ulterior motives and embrace the simple pleasure that comes from losing yourself in a text.

They also have an awesome plan on How to Read Long and Difficult Books

Make a plan for yourself.
Set a small amount of time or pages per day that you’ll read.
Engage/interact with the text.
Get an edition that you like.
Have a dictionary/encyclopedia handy.
Just get through the hard parts. and finally …
Take advantage of the momentum!

And having plowed through War and Peace, what is The Best Way to Retain What You Read?

If you’d like to retain and secure more of the information you consume instead of letting noteworthy knowledge pass right through you, here’s the best way to do so: share it with someone else.

Ben Orlin, he of the awesome maths and the bad drawings has his list.
Before I share it though, I’d encourage you to read his books.
Magical, funny, awesome, wise and insightful.
I never thought a bird’s eye view of Calculus would be so beautiful yet so easy to grasp.

Now, here’s his list for 2020. There’s all sorts, literary, sci-fi, nonfiction, everything.

Austin Kleon, author of the Keep Going trilogy, and prolific blogger has his list of great books.
Oh, and he’s been at this for years.
And if you have trouble reading,

Be promiscuous. Read more than one book at a time until one pulls you into monogamy.

Read old books! Read old favorites! (Every time you re-read a book you’re reading a new book.)

more here …

Tim Ferriss of the Four Hour Everything, and more importantly the publisher of The Tao of Seneca has a lovely monstrous page up, documenting his year in books.

Complement that with this video of his, on how he takes notes.

The penultimate one is the one that I learnt the most from, over the past decade.
To say, Shane Parrish and fs.blog have changed my life, is both, an understatement and doing them massive disservice.

The Mental Models books are going to stand the test of time. And we are still only two volumes in.
To see what I mean, have a look at the articles they love on their blog this year.

From How to Remember What You Read

“I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

and of course, Speed Reading is Bullshit

Better and quicker are not the same.
A good book, like good sex or a date, is something you don’t want to end. You’re not rushing to the finish (ok, maybe sometimes you are but let’s skip the quickies, shall we).
Instead you’re totally immersed in the activity — you want it to last forever. It’s supposed to take some time.

And without further ado, here’s the obligatory reading list for 2020.

We end as always, with Maria Popova and her Brain Pickings.
If Shane changed my life, Maria saved me.
It was her writing, over the years that got me through depression and the troughs of life.
It’s given me courage and hope and resilience and empathy.
When Munger spoke of the eminent dead, I think of Maria. Only she is eminently living :)
And I am grateful to be alive in a time when she’s giving of herself.
She taught me science, she taught me about the universe, she taught me poetry, she taught me art, she taught me syntopical thinking and Jesus knows what else.

I bought Figuring a year ago, and I still have not started it, beyond reading the Table of Contents and the blurbs.
I haven’t because I don’t want it to ever finish :)
It took her twelve years to write. I might as well savour it in drips and drabs as long as I can.

Here’s the 2020 list.
And just like the other crazy folk on here, she to has been at this for nearly a decade and a half now.

Two of Tim Ferriss’ most popular podcast episodes, have been with her.

So I bid you adieu with a quote from a post on her blog on how reading saves lives, A 100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor on How Books Save Lives.
I hope you enjoy reading lots more, this year.

Dear Friend,

Could you imagine a world without access to reading, to learning, to books?

At twenty-one, I was forced into Poland’s WWII ghetto, where being caught reading anything forbidden by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death.

There, I conducted a clandestine school offering Jewish children a chance at the essential education denied them by their captors. But I soon came to feel that teaching these sensitive young souls Latin and mathematics was cheating them of something far more essential — what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.

One day, as if guessing my thoughts, one girl beseeched me: “Could you please tell us a book, please?”

I had spent the previous night reading Gone with the Wind — one of a few smuggled books circulated among trustworthy people via an underground channel, on their word of honor to read only at night, in secret. No one was allowed to keep a book longer than one night — that way, if reported, the book would have already changed hands by the time the searchers came.

I had read Gone with the Wind from dusk until dawn and it still illuminated my own dream-world, so I invited these young dreamers to join me. As I “told” them the book, they shared the loves and trials of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, of Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality.

A knock at the door shattered our shared dream-world. As the class silently exited, a pale green-eyed girl turned to me with a tearful smile: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?” I promised we would, although I doubted we’d have many more chances. She put her arms around me and I whispered, “So long, Scarlett.” “I think I’d rather be Melanie,” she answered, “although Scarlett must have been so much more beautiful!”

As events in the ghetto took their course, most of my fellow dreamers fell victim to the Nazis. Of the twenty-two pupils in my secret school, only four survived the Holocaust.

The pale green-eyed girl was one of them.

Many years later, I was finally able to locate her and we met in New York. One of my life’s greatest rewards will remain the memory of our meeting, when she introduced me to her husband as “the source of my hopes and my dreams in times of total deprivation and dehumanization.”

There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.

Sincerely,
Helen Fagin

Taking Notes, An Example

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 10:09:47 +0530

I have been telling the young ones, that reading the things they consider important, needs to be engaged.

Engaged with the words.
Engaged with the flow.
With the author.
Her ideas.
The way she makes her case.
Or tells her story.
To wrestle with what is being said, or left unsaid.
To build a mental model with the ideas being presented.
To write it all down.
To wrestle with the work and draw your own conclusions. (which might not necessarily be what the author intends).

It’s heartening to see, that at least one of my chipmunks listens.
Priyanka Saggu has taken to really engaging with the work she reads.
She read Getting Past No when she was getting ready to launch her career and do interviews.
Now that she has gotten one, she’s onto reading Cal Newport’s, Deep Work to buttress her foundations and make the most of it.
I don’t know, if she will ever make her work public, like she did with Getting Past No, but this is just a glimpse into what goes into the mind of an engaged reader/learner.

courtesy Priyanka Saggu. (shared with permission)

While you don’t need to do this with everything you read, there is certainly a case to be made for intentional, engaged reading.

Here’s to the rest of you, reading with engagement and sharing your work.

Book Notes, Ultralearning

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 7th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

The beginning is always today.
— Mary Shelley

The biggest obstacle to ultralearning is simply that most people don’t care enough about their own self-education to get started

Finding Time for Ultra learning
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What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable

There are nine universal principles that underlie ultralearning projects. They are:

Metalearning: First Draw a Map
Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife
Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
Directness: Go Straight Ahead
Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.
Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point
Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.
Retrieval: Test to Learn
Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information “rather than passively review it.
Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches
Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.
Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up
Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things.
Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

Principle 1 - Metalearning, First Draw a Map
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If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
— Isaac Newton

How to Draw Your Map
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How can you apply this to get an edge in your own learning efforts? There are two main ways: over the short term and over the long term.”

Over the short term, you can do research to focus on improving your metalearning before and during a learning project. Ultralearning, owing to its intensity and self-directed nature, has the opportunity for a lot higher variance than normal schooling efforts do. A good ultralearning project, with excellent materials and an awareness of what needs to be learned, has the potential to be completed faster than formal schooling.
Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration”

Break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?”

“Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you.

“What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them.

“How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.”

How Much Planning Should You Do?
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The 10 Percent Rule
A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting. If you expect to spend six months learning, roughly four hours per week, that would be equal to roughly one hundred hours, which suggests that you should spend about ten hours, or two weeks, doing your research. This percentage will decrease a little bit as your project scales up, so if you plan to do five hundred or a thousand hours of learning, I don’t think it necessarily demands fifty or a hundred hours of research, but maybe closer to 5 percent of your time. The goal here isn’t to exhaust every learning possibility but simply to make sure you haven’t latched onto the first possible resource or method without thinking through alternatives.

A good idea is to be aware of the common methods of learning, popular resources, and tools along with their strengths and weaknesses before starting. Long projects provide more opportunities for getting derailed and delayed, so doing proper research in the beginning can easily save a much larger amount of time later on.”

Metalearning research isn’t a onetime activity you do only before starting your project. You should continue to do research as you learn more. Often obstacles and opportunities aren’t clear before you start, so reassessing is a necessary step of the learning process

Principle 2 - Focus
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Sharpen Your Knife
Now I will have less distraction.
— Leonhard Euler, mathematician, upon losing the sight in his right eye

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)
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I had no problem sitting and watching the videos of MIT classes, but I always tackled the first problem sets with considerable trepidation. Had it not been for the intense schedule I was on, I might have found excuses to avoid doing so for much longer.

Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both

Most motives to procrastinate are silly when you verbalize them, yet that doesn’t stop them from ruling your life. Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

Most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break

Don’t ever feel bad if you have to back up a stage, either; you cannot control your aversions or tendency to distraction, but with practice you can lessen their impact.

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)
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Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together.

What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks. If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn

There are three different sources that cause focus to break down and distraction to occur. If you’re struggling to concentrate, look at each of these three in turn:

Distraction Source 1: Your Environment
Distraction Source 2: Your Task
Distraction Source 3: Your Mind

If it ever feels as though continuing working is pointless because you’re so distracted by a negative emotion that you can’t possibly work, remember that the long-term strengthening of your ability to persist on this task will be useful, so the time is not wasted even if you don’t accomplish much in this particular learning session.

Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus
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Improving Your Ability to Focus

There is a procedure you can follow to get better at focusing.

My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest. The impulse to engage in distractions will weaken each time you resist it. With patience and persistence, your few minutes may become large enough to accomplish great things.

Principle 3 - Directness
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Go Straight Ahead
He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.
— Leonardo da Vinci

The Importance of Being Direct
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Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in

We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.

Learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used.

The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. If you want to learn a language, speak it, as Benny Lewis does. If you want to master making video games, then make them, as Eric Barone does. If you want to pass a test, practice solving the kinds of problems that are likely to appear on it, as I did in my own MIT Challenge. This style of learning by doing won’t work for all projects. The “real” situation may be infrequent, difficult, or even impossible to create, and thus learning in a different environment is unavoidable. Roger Craig couldn’t practice Jeopardy! by being on the show hundreds of times. He knew he had to learn in a different environment and prepare to transfer that knowledge to the show when it came time to do so. In such situations, directness isn’t an all-or-nothing feature but something you can gradually increase to improve your performance.

The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing.
Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away. If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills. What matters most here is that the cognitive features of the skill you’re trying to master and the way you practice it be substantially similar.

Principle 4 - Drill
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Attack Your Weakest Point
Take care of the bars and the piece will take care of itself.
—Philip Johnston, composer

Certain aspects of the learning problem form a bottleneck that control the speed at which you can become more proficient overall.

Consider learning mathematics. This is a complex skill that has many different parts: you need to be able to understand the fundamental concepts, you need to be able to remember the algorithm for solving a certain type of problem, and you need to know in what context it applies. Underlying this ability, however, is the ability to do arithmetic and algebra so as to be able to solve the problems in question. If your arithmetic is weak or your algebra sloppy, you’ll get the wrong answers even if you’ve mastered the other concepts.

This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once. That was Franklin’s insight that allowed him to rapidly improve his writing: by identifying components of the overall skill of writing, figuring out which mattered in his situation, and then coming up with clever ways to emphasize them in his practice, he could get better more quickly than if he had just spent a lot of time writing.

Tactics for Designing Drills
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Drill 1: Time Slicing

The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Musicians often do this kind of training when they identify the hardest parts of a piece of music and practice each one until it’s perfect before integrating it back into the context of the entire song or symphony.

Drill 2: Cognitive Components

You’ll want to practice a particular cognitive component.

The tactic here is to find a way to drill only one component when, in practice, others would be applied at the same time. When learning Mandarin Chinese, I would do tone drills that involved pronouncing pairs of words with different tones and recording myself speaking. That allowed me to practice producing different tones quickly, without the distraction of needing to remember what the words meant or how to form grammatically correct sentences.

Drill 3: The Copycat

It is often impossible to practice one aspect without also doing the work of the others.

By copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice. Not only does this save a lot of time, because you need to repeat only the part you’re drilling, it also reduces your cognitive burden, meaning you can apply more focus to getting better at that one aspect.

Drill 4: The Magnifying Glass Method

Suppose you need to create something new and can’t edit or separate out the part you want to practice. How can you create a drill? The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise. This may reduce your overall performance or increase your input time, but it will allow you to spend a much higher proportion of your time and cognitive resources on the subskill you want to master. I applied this method when trying to improve my ability to do research when writing articles, by spending about ten times as long on research as I had previously.

Drill 5: Prerequisite Chaining

One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise. This practice of starting too hard and learning prerequisites as they are needed can be frustrating, but it saves a lot of time learning subskills that don’t actually drive performance much.

Mindful Drilling
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Drilling problems without context is mind-numbing. However, once you’ve identified that it’s the bottleneck preventing you from going further, they become instilled with new purpose. In ultralearning, which is directed by the student, not an external source, drills take on a new light. Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is now up to you to find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult

Principle 5 - Retrieval, Test to Learn
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It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.
— William James

The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

The idea, therefore, is to find the right midpoint: far enough away to make whatever is retrieved remembered deeply, not so far away that you’ve forgotten everything.

The act of taking a test not only is a source of learning but results in more learning than a similar amount of time spent in review.

What Should Be Retrieved?
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The research is clear: if you need to recall something later, you’re best off practicing retrieving it.
What kinds of things should you invest the time in to remember in the first place?

There will always be some things you choose to master and others you satisfy yourself with knowing you can look up if you need to.

How to Practice Retrieval
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Tactic 1: Flash Cards

They work really well for a specific type of retrieval—when there’s a pairing between a specific cue and a particular response.

Tactic 2: Free Recall

A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper.

Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method

Another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later. Instead of writing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, you could instead write the question “When was the Magna Carta signed?” with a reference to where to find the answer in case you forget. By taking notes as questions instead of answers, you generate the material to practice retrieval on later.

Tactic 4: Self-Generated Challenges

Creating a list of such challenges can serve as a prompt for mastering that information later in practice and can expand your library of tools that you are able to actually apply.

Tactic 5: Closed-Book Learning

Any practice, whether direct or a drill, can be cut off from the ability to look things up. By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.

Principle 6 - Feedback, Don’t Dodge the Punches
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Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
— Mike Tyson

The ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance. No feedback, and the result is often stagnation—long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it.

More isn’t always better. Crucially what matters is the type of feedback being given.

Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning. If feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool.

Feedback that includes useful information needs to be correctly processed as a motivator and tool for learning.

Who is giving the feedback can matter, as feedback coming from a peer or teacher has important social dynamics beyond mere information on how to improve one’s abilities.

Be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest.

Feedback-seeking efforts are often underused and thus remain a potent source of comparative advantage for ultralearners.

It is not so much negative feedback on its own that can impede progress but the fear of hearing criticism that causes us to shut down. Sometimes the best action is just to dive straight into the hardest environment, since even if the feedback is very negative initially, it can reduce your fears of getting started on a project and allow you to adjust later if it proves too harsh to be helpful.

These acts require self-confidence, resolve, and persistence

What Kind of Feedback Do You Need?
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The opportunities for seeking better feedback will vary depending on what you’re trying to learn

Outcome Feedback: Are You Doing It Wrong?

This tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.

Informational Feedback: What Are You Doing Wrong?

This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Corrective Feedback: How Can You Fix What You’re Doing Wrong?

This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher. However, sometimes it can be provided automatically if you are using the right study materials.

The best feedback is informative and usable by the student(s) who receive it. Optimal feedback indicates the difference between the current state and the desired learning state and helps students to take a step to improve their learning.

Informational feedback can be worth the effort needed to find such people.

How Quick Should Feedback Be?
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Faster feedback. This enables a quicker recognition of mistakes. However, there’s a possible risk that this recommendation might backslide into getting feedback before you’ve tried your best to answer the question or solve the problem at hand.

Feedback too soon may turn your retrieval practice effectively into passive review, which we already know is less effective for learning. For hard problems, I suggest setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.

How to Improve Your Feedback
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Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation

Noise is a real problem when trying to improve your craft because you need to do far more work to get the same information about how to write well. By modifying and selecting the streams of feedback you pay attention to, you can reduce the noise and get more of the signal.

Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot

Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they’re not able to predict whether they’ll succeed or fail. If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they’re doing things right. If they fail too little, they’ll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches. Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.

Tactic 3: Metafeedback

This kind of feedback isn’t about your performance but about evaluating the overall success of the strategy you’re using to learn.

One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate.

There are two ways you can use this tool. One is to decide when you should focus on the strategy you’re already using and when you should experiment with other methods. If your learning rate is slowing to a trickle, that might mean you’re hitting diminishing returns with your current approach and could benefit from different kinds of drills, difficulties, or environments. A second way you can apply metafeedback is by comparing two different study methods to see which works better.

Tactic 4: High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback

The easiest way to improve feedback is simply to get a lot more of it a lot more often.

High-intensity, rapid feedback offers informational advantages, but more often the advantage is emotional, too. Fear of receiving feedback can often hold you back more than anything. By throwing yourself into a high-intensity, rapid feedback situation, you may initially feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get over that initial aversion much faster than if you wait months or years before getting feedback.
Being in such a situation also provokes you to engage in learning more aggressively than you might otherwise. Knowing that your work will be evaluated is an incredible motivator to do your best. This motivational angle for committing to high-intensity feedback may end up outweighing the informational advantage it provides.

It’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count. Though short-term feedback can be stressful, once you get into the habit of receiving it, it becomes easier to process without overreacting emotionally. Ultralearners use this to their advantage, exposing themselves to massive amounts of feedback so that the noise can be stripped away from the signal.

Principle 7 - Retention, Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
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Memory is the residue of thought.
— Daniel Willingham

Memory is essential, even when it is wrapped up in bigger ideas such as understanding, intuition, or practical skill. Being able to understand how something works or how to perform a particular technique is useless if you cannot recall it. Retention depends on employing strategies so the things you learn don’t leak out of your mind.

How Can You Prevent Forgetting?
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Forgetting is the default, not the exception.

How can you retain the things you learned the first week, so that you don’t need to relearn them by the last week?

You need to pick a mnemonic system, which will both accomplish your goals and be simple enough to stick to. Mostly they seem to work according to one of four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics.

Memory Mechanism 1—Spacing: Repeat to Remember

If you care about long-term retention, don’t cram. Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.

If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst.

Finding the exact trade-off point between too long and too short has been a minor obsession for some ultralearners. Space your study sessions too closely, and you lose efficiency; space them too far apart, and you forget what you’ve already learned.

When it comes to retention, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good enough.

Another strategy for applying spacing, which can work better for more elaborate skills that are harder to integrate into your daily habits, is to semiregularly do refresher projects.

Scheduling this kind of maintenance in advance can also be helpful, as it will remind you that learning isn’t something done once and then ignored but a process that continues for your entire life.

Memory Mechanism 2—Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure

Why do people say it’s “like riding a bicycle” and not “like remembering trigonometry?”

There’s evidence that procedural skills, such as riding a bicycle, are stored in a different way from declarative knowledge, such as knowing the Pythagorean Theorem or the Sine Rule for triangles.

This difference between knowing how and knowing that may also have different implications for long-term memory. Procedural skills, such as the ever-remembered bicycling, are much less susceptible to being forgotten than knowledge that requires explicit recall to retrieve.
This finding can actually be used to our advantage. One dominant theory of learning suggests that most skills proceed through stages—starting declarative but ending up procedural as you practice more

Procedural knowledge is quite robust and tends to be retained much longer than declarative knowledge.

This may suggest a useful heuristic. Instead of learning a large volume of knowledge or skills evenly, you may emphasize a core set of information much more frequently, so that it becomes procedural and is stored far longer

One strategy for applying this concept might be to ensure that a certain amount of knowledge is completely proceduralized before practice concludes. Another approach might be to spend extra effort to proceduralize some skills, which will serve as cues or access points for other knowledge. You may aim to completely proceduralize the process you use to start working on a new programming project, for example, so that you can get over that hump in the process of writing a new program

Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

Additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored.

The first is core practice, continually practicing and refining the core elements of a skill. This approach often works well paired with some kind of immersion or working on extensive (as opposed to intensive) projects, after the initial ultralearning phase has been completed. The shift from learning to doing here may actually involve a deeper, subtler form of learning, which shouldn’t be discounted as simply applying previously learned knowledge.
The second strategy is advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are overlearned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.

Memory Mechanism 4—Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words

They usually involve translating abstract or arbitrary information into vivid pictures or spatial maps. When mnemonics work, the results can be almost difficult to believe.

One common, and useful, mnemonic is known as the keyword method. The method works by first taking a foreign-language word and converting it into something it sounds like in your native language.

Mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories that will endure forever.

Paired with SRS, they can form an effective bridge from feeling as though there’s no way you can possibly remember everything to remembering it so deeply that you can’t possibly forget. Indeed, in a world before paper, computers, and other externalized memories, mnemonics were the main game in town.

Principle 8 - Intuition, Dig Deep Before Building Up
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Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.
— Errett Bishop

Only by developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work. Intuition sounds magical, but the reality may be more banal—the product of a large volume of organized experience dealing with the problem.

How to Build Your Intuition
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Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily

One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further. The first advantage of this struggle period is that very often you can solve the problem you are faced with if you simply apply enough thinking to it. The second advantage is that even if you fail, you’ll be much more likely to remember the way to arrive at the solution when you encounter it.

Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them

Feynman decided to read through the papers meticulously, finding that they weren’t actually so difficult but that he had simply been afraid to go through them.

Feynman didn’t master things by following along with other people’s results. Instead, it was by the process of mentally trying to re-create those results that he became so good at physics. His drive to understand things by virtue of working through the results himself assisted in building his capacity for deep intuition.

Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example

Human beings don’t learn things very well in the abstract. As the research on transfer demonstrates, most people learn abstract, general rules only after being exposed to many concrete examples. It’s not possible to simply present a general principle and expect that you can apply it to concrete situations.

Rule 4: Don’t Fool Yourself

One way to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions

The Feynman Technique
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The method is quite simple:

Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.
In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else.
- If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before.
- If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you.
When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer

The crux of this method is that it tries to dispel the illusion of explanatory depth. Since many of our understandings are never articulated, it’s easy to think you understand something you don’t. The Feynman Technique bypasses this problem by forcing you to articulate the idea you want to understand in detail.

Application 1: For Things You Don’t Understand at All

The first way to use this approach is when you don’t understand something at all. In this case, the easiest way is to do it with the book in hand and go back and forth between your explanation and the one in the book. This lacks the benefits of retrieval practice, but it can often be essential when the explanation you’ve been given baffles you

Application 2: For Problems You Can’t Seem to Solve

A second way to apply this is for solving a difficult problem or mastering a technique. In this instance, it’s very important to go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation you generate, rather than simply summarizing it. Summarizing may end up skipping over the core difficulties of the problem. Going deeper may take time, but it can help you get a strong grasp over a new method in one go, rather than needing numerous repetitions to memorize the steps.

Application 3: For Expanding Your Intuition

Instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have. Imagine that instead of trying to teach the idea, you are being paid to write a magazine article explaining the idea. What visual intuitions would you use to pin down the abstractions? Which examples would flesh out a general principle? How could you make something confusing feel obvious?

Principle 9 - Experimentation, Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
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Results? Why, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.
— Thomas Edison

Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery
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As your skill develops, it’s often no longer enough to simply follow the examples of others; you need to experiment and find your own path.

Part of the reason for this is that the early part of learning a skill tends to be the best trodden and supported, as everyone begins at the same place. As your skills develop, however, not only are there fewer people who can teach you and fewer students you could have as peers (thus lowering the total market for books, classes, and instructors), but you also start to diverge from those you’re learning from. Whereas two complete novices have quite similar knowledge and skills, two experts might have quite different sets of skills that they’ve already acquired, thus making improving those skills an increasingly personalized and idiosyncratic adventure.

A second reason for the value of experimentation as you approach mastery is that abilities are more likely to stagnate after you’ve mastered the basics. Learning in the early phases of a skill is an act of accumulation. You acquire new facts, knowledge, and skills to handle problems you didn’t know how to solve before. Getting better, however, increasingly becomes an act of unlearning; not only must you learn to solve problems you couldn’t before, you must unlearn stale and ineffective approaches for solving those problems. The difference between a novice programmer and a master isn’t usually that the novice cannot solve certain problems. Rather, it’s that the master knows the best way to solve a problem, which will be the most efficient and clean and cause the fewest headaches later on. As mastery becomes a process of unlearning over accumulation, experimentation becomes synonymous with learning as you force yourself to go outside your comfort zone and try new things.

A final reason for the increasing importance of experimentation as you approach mastery is that many skills reward not only proficiency but originality. A great mathematician is one who can solve problems others cannot, not merely a person who can solve previously solved problems easily. Successful business leaders are those who can spot opportunities others cannot, not merely those who can copy the style and strategy of those before them. In art, it was not only van Gogh’s skill but his originality that made him one of the most celebrated painters to have ever lived. As creativity becomes valuable, experimentation becomes essential.

The Mindset of Experimentation
#

The experimental mindset as an extension of the growth mindset: whereas the growth mindset encourages you to see opportunities and potential for improvement, experimentation enacts a plan to reach those improvements. The experimental mindset doesn’t just assume that growth is possible but creates an active strategy for exploring all the possible ways to reach it.

To get into the right mental space for experimenting, you need not only to see your abilities as something you can improve but understand that there is a huge number of potential avenues to do this. Exploration, not dogmatism, is the key to realizing that potential.

How to Experiment
#

A flurry of random activity doesn’t usually translate into mastery.

Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create

This strategy has an advantage, beyond simplifying the choices available to you. In attempting to emulate or copy an example you appreciate, you must deconstruct it to understand why it works. This can often highlight things that the other person does exceptionally well that weren’t obvious from the beginning. It may also dispel illusions you may have had about an aspect of the work you thought was important but upon emulating the other person’s work you realize was not.

Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side

The scientific method works by carefully controlling conditions so that the difference between two situations is limited to the variable being studied. By applying two different approaches side by side, you can often quickly get information not only about what works best but about which methods are better suited to your personal style.

Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints

The challenge of learning in the beginning is that you don’t know what to do. The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do.

A powerful technique for pushing out of those grooves of routine is by introducing new constraints that make the old methods impossible to use.

Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills

For many areas of creative or professional skills, another, more accessible, path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have.

Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes

Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you’re cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy. This allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively, while also giving you a broader range of experience.

Experimentation and Uncertainty
#

Learning is a process of experimenting in two ways. First, the act of learning itself is a kind of trial and error. Practicing directly, getting feedback, and trying to summon up the right answers to problems are all ways of adjusting the knowledge and skills you have in your head to the real world. Second, the act of experimenting also lies in the process of trying out your learning methods. Try out different approaches, and use the ones that work best for you.

Having a mindset of experimentation will also encourage you to explore beyond what you feel most comfortable doing. Many people stick to the same routines, the same narrow set of methods, they apply to learning everything. As a result, there are a lot of things they struggle to learn because they don’t know the best way to do so.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (V)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 16th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game!
#

via pixabay

This probably is the last post, I have on Antifragile, for now.

These lessons over the past few weeks are those, that have sunk in for me, and something that I use on a daily basis. I’ll write more as I learn and internalise some new piece of wisdom (knowing the book, I’m sure I will).

Skin in the Game, is the most important thing, I have learnt from the book.
(It was important enough, to Taleb too, that he went wrote a whole book on it, after Antifragile.

The only folks I should ever listen to, follow, are the folks who have done it, who are doing the work, the folks who have skin in the game.
The world rests of the shoulders of doers.

It is not enough for me to just read a blog to learn Python or programming.
There are a whole lot of folks, spouting opinions, and telling me how to do things. But a guy, who has walked the path I want to walk, who uses his skills the way I aim to, who uses it to better the world he lives in?
Him, I will listen to and do what he tells me to, because he talks to me with his scars.

When I wanted to get out of debt, I read a whole lot of books, but the only person whose advice I followed, was Dave Ramsey

I was a rebellious teen and would have my disagreements with my parents, but growing up, I realise I still live the values they taught me. Because they lived it themselves. Hard work and faith.

The teaching birds how to fly is the flip side of the coin.
It speaks to folks who tell stories and explanations about things and events, after the fact.
Everything, I see, most near everything was built by tinkerers and doers.
Not by folks who theorised and saw the whole picture in their mind and then brought forth perfection.
There might be a few who do that, but that’s not how the rest of the world works.
And I had to learn this the hard way.
There are tons of people who explain things, who tell me how things work, or how things should be done.
But without skin in the game, this is like what Taleb calls, teaching birds how to fly.
Imagine some stuffy manager, with his charts and his plans and his MBA going upto a sparrow and lecturing the poor thing on how exactly it should flap its wings and how it should pose its body for maximum aerodynamic efficiency.
I imagine the sparrow would just ruffle its feathers and go look for the next bird feeder.
The manager, though will still labour under the illusion, that he taught the sparrow to fly!
And then go on to give talks and publish posts on social media as the world’s leading avian technologist.
In the meanwhile it does not matter one whit to the sparrow as it flits about and dives for its grain and berries and whatnot, using its innate knowledge.
So now I always pay attention to whether it is Max Planck himself, who teaches me … or his driver.

This I now know. That when it comes to my relationships or advice or anything that relates to other people, they ought to have skin in the game if they want me to take them seriously.

The same thing helps me look at the big things that I have no control over. Do the decision makers of things that affect me, have skin in the game? Are they affected if things go south? If not, I realise that all this is just a charade, and I am an unwilling victim, and I have to route my life around such events and decisions.

Also applies to the advice I give to my mentees or my friends.
I keep my opinions to myself.
Unless I am asked.
And then, I will only ever talk about the things I have done, the stuff I have experience with, the experiences that life has given me the scars for.
I will happily talk to you about how to lose weight, or computers and networks, or getting out of debt, or writing.
But if you ask me about politics in India or what needs to be done to save the strays of Mumbai, or how to double your money in 10 days, I sadly have no answer for you.
Because I know nothing :)

Look at what the other side is telling you.
Heads, you lose? Tails, they win?
Is someone taking advantage of the fact that you cannot see what they are doing?

It’s simple in the end.
Are they willing to put their money where their mouth is?
Look at whether they have skin in the game.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)
#

In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure
#

via Screenrant

So here’s a little distinction I learnt.
We, ~~who are about to die~~, mortals need to become antifragile.
We know, we are going to die someday, and are always being buffeted by the storms of life, so we seek to get stronger.

But what about the non mortal, the non living?
Are there antifragile, erm things?
Taleb posits, that things have the opposite quality. They don’t have to get antifragile.
They just have to have really long lives, for you to know what is good (or at least common sense and dependable) and what isn’t.
This helps you choose from the daily craziness of what do I do? What do I choose?

It’s simple really.
What things have lasted forever?
What piece of advice, has been handed down from generation to generation?
What book has been passed down through the years?
What kind of architecture has lasted through the ages?

Stick to them, stick to age, stick to ancient wisdom and life becomes so much simpler.
That’s not to say that they can’t be wrong, or that old things cannot fall apart, or that you cannot improve or think new things.
Just that, when you don’t want to do the thinking, or you are not quite up to speed on something, or you are paralysed with choice, choosing something Lindy is the safest (and also mostly, the best) thing that you can do.

The term, Lindy comes from a deli at Broadway in New York city.
Quoting Albert Goldman describing a shared folk belief on the longevity of a comedian’s show/series on TV,

… the life expectancy of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his exposure on the medium.

If, pathetically deluded by hubris, he undertakes a regular weekly or even monthly program, his chances of survival beyond the first season are slight; but if he adopts the conservation of resources policy favored by these senescent philosophers of “the Business”, and confines himself to “specials” and “guest shots”, he may last to the age of Ed Wynn.

Benoit Mandelbrot modified this, and expressed it mathematically to state that regardless of material, the more appearances comedians make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make. (depending on various other factors, of course)

Taleb, then took this concept and ran with it. From Antifragile …

For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.

…

In general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.

He goes on to exemplify this, using my favouritest things, books …

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

And plays on Broadway and ancient buildings,

Gott made a list of Broadway shows on a given day, May 17, 1993, and predicted that the longest-running ones would last longest, and vice versa. He was proven right with 95 percent accuracy.

…

He had, as a child, visited both the Great Pyramid (fifty-seven hundred years old), and the Berlin Wall (twelve years old), and correctly guessed that the former would outlive the latter.

And all this because of time.
Like Warren Buffett says,

It’s only when the tide goes out, that you learn who’s been swimming naked.

Time shows things for what they are.
Time filters the chaff.
Time erodes and polishes things to their essence.
So whatever survives time, needs to be given more weight in my opinion.

How do I use this myself?
#

While I am not necessarily concerned with building something that is Lindy ¹, whenever I want to use something, I make sure I choose the Lindy option.
I use this with the books, I choose to read. As do other smart people, I follow.
I learnt more from the Bible and the Upanishads and the Stoics, than I do from any modern non fiction book.

I use this with the tools, I used to write. I used to earlier write using Word, and then a program called Textmate, followed by a program called Scrivener, followed by a program called Sublime Text, followed by a program called, Visual Studio Code.
It was frustrating, trying to keep up with the changes and incompatibilites and the do this and do that and can work here and not there, nature of these programs. I can tolerate this craziness in other areas of my life, not with my writing.
So I learnt Vi and then Emacs and settled on using Emacs. Why?
Despite their steep-ish learning curve, they run almost everywhere and have been in existence since 1976.
These programs are older than me!
So I’m sure, they will be around and will continue to work for a long time to come.

Dad crafted furniture.
And he was obsessed with all his creations being beautiful, functional and lasting forever.
I have a stool at home, that he made when I was two. Forty years later, I still use it daily.
Mom uses a sickle to break coconuts. She’s been using the same one that he crafted when they got married and she needed cooking implements. That too, is older than me.

I’d bet on Yamaha surviving the vicissitudes of fate and time, more than Uber or Twitter.
Japan has many, many more, by the way.

Same thing with old architecture.
I lay bets on the Taj Mahal surviving longer than all the modern buildings in Lutyen’s Delhi.

So, if you ever need a quick way to decide something, look at what past you did.
Then look at what folks in the older generation did.
Then look at what your grandparents generation did.
And onwards and upwards.

If there is a shining, silver thread that extends through time, then that is what you can safely choose and do.
Listening to grandma’s advice, is always a good thing :)

actually the trick is you don’t have to think about posterity until the posterity ↩︎

Books I Read, October 2020

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Nothing really exciting this month.
I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction.
I needed to escape from the humdrum of life

So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher.
I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character.

And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel.
It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend.
Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month.

I wonder what I’ll do when I get done with all the books.
Well I don’t really have to wonder. I’ll just go read another one.

I have more books, I want to read than I have life left :)
So here’s to reading! See you next month!

If you want to see the titles, click here.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 13:24:23 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 25th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)
#

What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective
#

What does not kill me makes me stronger.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break it kills.
It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

That, in a nutshell, explains my learning today.
To become Antifragile, we need to ~~understand~~ be aware of what we do, our actions and then see who it ultimately benefits.

via Greek Myth Fandom

Antifragility, like I imagined in my head, was me getting stronger with every blow that life dealt me, Hydra like.
If you cut off one head, I would just grow another one.
But I realised that everything comes at the expense of something.
If I am growing Antifragile, something else has to give.
If there’s just nature on the otherside, we’re fine. But if there are people, then we better be careful about how we get Antifragile.

There’s also the notion of scale. Something small, dying to make the bigger collective stronger.
So there’s always a balancing act and a constant need to be observant.

This is how I imagine it, in a few scenarios in my life.

My cells need to die, my muscles need to tear in order that I build up my strength.
Here the individual is nature (my cells), dying in order to make me (my body, the collective) much stronger.
Imagine if that did not happen, if each cell decided, why should I die?
Actually, you don’t have to imagine.
That’s what cancer is.

If I die this year, I am insured. My folks get a hefty payout. (Antifragility for my family’s finances)
But the insurance company can only afford to do this, because they have money from a ton of folks placing the same bet as I did. That we would croak this year.
This is again the individual (me) benefiting the collective (the vast pool of people, who do not have enough saved, yet want to provide for their loved ones).

A nasty one is when someone uses this for their own benefit.
They win, but the collective loses.
Scams of various sorts come to mind here, where an unscrupulous person, takes advantage and become antifragile at the benefit of other people.

The flip side is the hero, where the individual takes risks and sacrifices to benefit the collective
Soldiers, Teachers, Firefighters, Tinkerers, Entrepreneurs are all examples of folks who sacrifice individually so that society as a whole benefits.

So this is what I learnt. To see how actions towards antifragility (mine or others) have ramifications on my life.
To always see if I or society benefit. Not someone else taking undue advantage.

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 18th, 2020
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)
#

I fell sick and missed writing last week.
I have to live up the name of the news letter, anyhoo.
It would not be erratic without me whiffing once in a while, non?
Apologies all around, anyway!

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks
#

Basically a shortcut to figuring out whether you ought to do something or not, based on the risks it entails.
How do we take a decision, when we don’t know all the pros and cons?
How do we decide in an uncertain world?
Simply put,

What kind / amount of loss am I willing to accept, to gain some reward?

Life basically consists of three outcomes:

The safe outcome, with little to no success, but you don’t lose anything
The normal outcome, with some middling success, but you stand to lose some.
- But here’s the kicker. You might stand to lose everything, if you don’t understand the risks you take, or if the risk is unknowable. (Blow ups due to these unknown risks are what are now popularly called, thanks to Taleb’s earlier book, Black Swans)
High Risk, high reward! You know you will lose, but if you win, you win Big! It helps if you take risks with a domain that you have deep expertise in.

Taleb suggests that the best and safest way, to make decisions that propel your forward with minimal risk, is to ignore point 2 altogether.
Most of your daily life decisions ought to be with point 1.
Some of your decisions you, go to point 3.

Your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be, instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.
— Taleb, The Black Swan

And that is the barbell strategy.
It looks like an unbalanced barbell actually, like the one on the cover of his next book, Skin in the Game.

This is what will give you maximum peace of mind.

Risk taking also becomes easier, if you have options like I pointed out last week.
The best worst case scenario, is one that you have the option to reverse. (like buying something you need, but uncertain about how it’ll be? Easy to buy it, if the thing comes with an option to return it if you don’t like it.)

Three personal life cases,

Money
#

I don’t understand investing.
I do know, that I need a nest egg for when Abby & I are old :)
Ergo, barbell strategy.
Most of our money is parked in safe investments like the Provident Fund and fixed deposits.
And some of it, in risky stuff like stocks and equity mutual funds. (since this is not my domain of expertise, I pay someone trustworthy to help me out.)
So if the market crashes like it did earlier this year, I was not as worried as other folk.
I did not lose my shirt.
I could follow, what the given advice at the time was (Stay Invested) with a clear, calm mind.
And I am confident, compounding will work its magic over time over both sets of investments.

Work
#

Let’s put the barbell, to work here too.
Your safe, boring job is one end of the spectrum.
Your risky side projects, hustles, are the other.
You need both.

You could either do both together, or serially.
Work a safe job for a few years, then take up a risky moonshot, and if it doesn’t pan out, go back to another safe job.

While right now, I am in between jobs, due to health reasons, in my earlier lives, I had pretty boring jobs.
But, I write a lot. I teach a lot.
And that brought me a lot of opportunities that helped me through really trying times in the past two decades.

Health
#

This is relevant to me, because it helped me get fit over the past year.
I have three slipped discs.
Do I have surgery?
The docs are undecided. Or rather they are, but are unwilling to guarantee, how long the surgery would help me.
And I had bloated to 98 odd kgs at my worst.
What do I do?

So, the safe thing to do was to lose weight.
And the hard thing to do was to get strong.
Both of which, are progressing along nicely.
I lost 30 kgs and am doing aggressive physio to build up my back muscles, so that my poor vertebrae don’t have to do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
I feel much better today, better than I did in my twenties!

And that about does it for using barbells to help make decisions.
That’s all we have for you this week :)
I really do hope, this little heuristic, changes your life as much as it did mine :)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (I)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 05:45:00 +0530

There seems never to be the right time to write or the right amount that I could learn from Antifragile, so I’m just going to take a long, rambling stab at it this morning.

It will be a living document that I’ll keep adding to on the blog, sooner or later, but for now, this is just for you, my dear newsletter¹ family.

Here goes …

While I love the way he writes, I don’t have that much a familiarity with English that, I can easily process stuff like this, every time I just want to grab a principle quickly.

“what physicists call the phenomenology of the process is the empirical manifestation, without looking at how it glues to existing general theories.”

“In Peri mystikes theologias, Pseudo-Dionysos did not use these exact words, nor did he discuss disconfirmation, nor did he get the idea with clarity, but in my view he figured out this subtractive epistemology and asymmetries in knowledge.”

Drives me bonkers every time.
Hence this little screed for me to look at, whenever I want to.

Antifragile
#

I got lucky when I stumbled on Antifragile in early 2013.

I was slogging at the end of nearly a decade long effort of digging my sorry ass out of debt.

And while I was doing that, I was trying to learn how to handle money better.

How to invest it well or at least the general principles, of how not to lose money, forget about growing it.

And more importantly, how be resilient enough, to handle stuff that life threw at me.

How not to stress.

I had it upto here, stressing about every bad thing that came along.

I was thinking about the same thing that Taleb espoused in this book.

It was not the title, Antifragile, that grabbed me, but the subtitle:

How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand

And the Prologue sucked me in totally,

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition—like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics—have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.

How?

He then takes nearly 500 pages of dense prose like the two quotes up above to explain the how.

Make no mistake, I loved it. I enjoyed it.

I re-read this book every 8–12 months.

But I am definitely not smart enough to extract the principles I need, at a moments notice.

Hence this post(s).

Everything below, is now what I understand, (or think I understand) from Antifragile.

And why am I doing this?

Because the book changed my life for the better.

It gave me what Zig Ziglar called a new pair of glasses, to look at life with.

Or what Charles T Munger and Shane Parrish would call, a latticework of mental models.

Reading Order
#

If you get into Taleb zealotry like I have, and want to read the entire Incerto, then this is the order I suggest you do it.

Antifragile
Antifragile
Antifragile
The Bed of Procrustes
Skin in the Game
Fooled by Randomness / The Black Swan

Antifragile is the main work.

Even though it is the fourth chronologically. Every other book can be looked at as offshoots of some chapter in Antifragile.

Optionality
#

It is always good to have options. It is always good to check alternatives.

You gain a lot of freedom that way.

Options might be free, or you might have to pay for them.

But unless they are really expensive (which it really is not in most of life), it is always good to have options.

Case in point, after one case too many of being burnt over non refundable tickets, I started buying my air tickets, directly from the airline with the option to get a full refund.

Twice now, paying a bit more for this option has saved my hind quarters. Once I had to reschedule an entire multi city trip and the other was full refund, just as Covid hit.

Lesson learnt.

Now I look for options and alternatives even more in other areas of my life.

Domain Blindness
#

Some principle you use / do / see in one area of your life, can just as easily exist in others.

You can either diet and go to the gym and lift weights or become a manual labourer who hasn’t enough to eat and carries loaded bags.

The principle is the same. And the end result is the same. You drop fat and gain a six pack.

If you we can’t see the principle at work, we have a case of domain blindness.

I knew I could do a little bit every day on a certain task at work and get it done.

It never struck me to do the same to develop my skills.

Now that I see and am no longer domain blind, I use the same principle (steady, slow iteration) to lose weight, to complete my 12th standard and learn programming.

This is all I remember for now.
I’ll write more, as I realise more.

This was sent to my newsletter subscribers on Oct 4th, 2020. If you are reading this on the blog, you really should subscribe, if you want to read my stuff as soon as I put it out. ↩︎

You are Awesome

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 05:45:00 +0530

I want to keep reading books and stories about how folks pick themselves up.
It helps me deal with the storms in my life better.
It assures me I am not alone.
And people often have it worse.

Neil Pasricha shares his story in You are Awesome.
Most of which are relates with everything we face in our lives.
And I was meh.
But he also shares his parents stories.
And those are really, really inspiring.

I stumbled on the book, after I stumbled across his 3 Books project.
And I stumbled upon that after Shane [retweeeted] about his episode on said project.
A week of binging and I now have so many books to read.
You don’t have to go listen to all the episodes if you just want the book list. They are readily available here.

So where was I? Oh Neil’s book.
I heard about it on the podcast and went and got it.
He is a gifted storyteller with an awesome voice.
So listening to the podcast or reading the book, never feels boring.
He takes us from beginning to the end in a lovely, engaging, flowing manner.

The book is not about the stories though.
It’s about how you can pick yourself up, dust your self and get back on the horse after life’s kicked you in the gut.

Some quotes, alongside the nine steps to become more resilient.

Add a Dot-Dot-Dot
#

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is simply making the decision to keep going.
I use my mom’s story to show how easy it would have been for her to just stop and give up, to shut off the taps. It’s much harder to keep the taps on. It’s harder to add a “yet” to the end of a self-judgment.
How does the magic word look in practice?
“I can’t meet new people… yet.”
“I don’t have any better options… yet.”
“I’m not good at anything else… yet.”
“I don’t waltz… yet.”

Shift the Spotlight
#

When we fail …

We have to be aware and remember that we are quick to internalize. To self-flagellate. To point the dagger straight at our stomachs. To let the spotlight shine brightly into our own set of eyes. But a big part of resilience, of remembering we really are awesome, is performing this crucial mental separation.
“Oh, wait. I’m thinking this failure is all about me. I’m pointing the spotlight at myself. I’m taking all the blame here.” Stop. Separate. Remember:
It’s actually egotistical to think it’s all about you.
So what do you do?
Dance with it. Work with it.
Set it beside you, not inside you.
It’s not about you. It’s not about you. It’s not about you.
You have to shift that spotlight.
Why?
Because there’s a lot more work to do.
And you can’t start till after you shift that light.

See It as a Step
#

See the failure you’re going through as a step up an invisible staircase toward a Future You in a Future Life you can’t even imagine yet.
We all think that the way things are now is the way things will continue to be.
But inevitably, everything we go through in life really is a step to help us get to a better place.
We confuse the challenge of picturing change with the improbability of change itself.
But there are more steps.
And change will come.
It always does.

Tell Yourself a Different Story
#

Your problem is not the outside world. Your problem is the story you’re telling yourself about the outside world. And that story is a choice. If you’re not happy with the story, tell yourself another story. Period. That simple. And most people will hear what I just said and not change anything.

Do you hate your stretch marks? Can you try to see them differently? Can they be timeless tattoos commemorating how you brought your beautiful children into the world?
Are you ashamed of your dozens of one-night stands? What if they helped you understand your own sexual chemistry enough that you knew what you needed in a partner?
Do you curse yourself over the extra ten pounds on your gut? Can you instead love the fact that you have a weekly pizza and wings night with your friends?
We have to remember that we retain the choice, we hold on to the choice, we get to make the choice to tell ourselves a different story.
We can rewrite our shame stories, we can be gentler on ourselves, we can take the kindness we preach… and treat ourselves more kindly first.
Tell yourself a different story.
Three big questions to help achieve this secret

Will this matter on my deathbed?

Can I do something about this?

Is this a story I’m telling myself?

The truth is that most of what we think is a story we’re telling ourselves.
Only you can decide what story you tell yourself. So tell yourself a better one.

Lose More to Win More
#

We don’t want to hear that some things just take time.
They just take time.
They take lots of failure, lots of loss, lots of experience.
So ask yourself:

Am I gaining experience?
Will these experiences help?
Can I stay on this path for a while?

Sometimes the answer will be no. Sometimes the answer will be yes. But the answers will help point out the fact that you are learning, you are doing, you may be failing, but you’re moving…
Moving through failures is the real success.
Do you love it so much you can take the pain and punishment, too?

Go to parties (where you don’t know anyone) (aka, put yourself in a position to fail. where the downsides are low. – mjb)

Have a failure budget

Count your losses
The truth is when we look at our flops we’re really giving ourselves credit for all the learning and stamina and resilience baked into those moments when we made ourselves a little stronger.
We don’t trust people who haven’t failed and we really don’t trust people who don’t even know they haven’t failed or like to pretend they haven’t failed.
We need to talk about failures. Flops. The more we have, the more we grow. So put them out there. The jobs you sucked at, failed at, got fired from. The relationships you failed at. The goals you didn’t accomplish. We know they moved you forward. Share that. Share how. Not only will owning your failures humanize you, but being honest about your trip-ups and slip-ups means honoring how you got to where you are today. Acknowledging that growth helps you recognize and appreciate it.

Do it for free for ten years.
Take more losses.
Take more pictures.
And talk about it.

Lose more to win more.

Reveal to Heal
#

We all need contemporary confession.
Research also shows that holding on to regrets causes us to take more aggressive and risky actions in the future. So the healthiest and happiest people are aware of regrets they harbor and then choose to let them go.
Every morning I grab an index card or a journal and write these three prompts:

I wil let go of …
I am grateful for …
I will focus on …

It takes only two minutes to do, and the difference in my life has been both immediate and incredible. Completing three simple sentences helps me “win the morning,” which helps me start to “win the day.”

Find Small Ponds
#

There are far more problems and opportunities in the world than there are talented and hard-working people to solve them.
Different is better than better.
Find the small ponds so you can be the big fish.

Regardless of age, socioeconomic background, nationality, or cultural upbringing, when you’re in a smaller pond, your opinion of yourself—what’s called “academic self-concept”—goes up. And importantly, *it stays up even after you leave the pond.
There’s no shame putting yourself in situations where you feel really good about yourself. Should you downgrade yourself? No! Definitely no. But there’s nothing wrong with entering the marathon in the slowest category. Playing in the house league instead of the rep league. Teeing off from the tee closest to the pin.
You know what you’re doing?
Setting yourself up for success.
You’ll move up because you believe in yourself.

Go Untouchable
#

Before you jump, ask yourself:

The Regret Question: What will I regret not doing more when I look at it from the future?
The Plan B Question: What will I do if it fails?

As our world gets busier and our phones get beepier, the scarcest resource of all is quickly becoming attention. How are we supposed to focus?
I finally found a solution that I feel has saved my career, my time, and my sanity.
I bet you need this solution, too.
I call it “Untouchable Days.”
These are days when I am literally 100% unreachable in any way… by anyone.
(read Cal Newport’s Deep Work or check his blog for a really deep dive into this point – mjb)

Never, Never Stop
#

There is magic in doing things simply.
It’s the final step to remember on the path to awesome.
The fact is we can only ever really go forward.
So the point is to just start going that way.
And never, never stop.

The Undoing Project

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 06:52:10 +0530

It’s a Michael Lewis book.
That alone, is enough for me to tell you to go read it.

Kahneman and Tversky’s work has probably been the biggest influence on my life in recent years, since Taleb.¹
We cannot think in probabilities in our daily lives.
We keep fooling ourselves, with various biases.
And the intuition we have, is because we are really amazing biological machines. And even that is subject to error. Unless the intuition is backed by extensive experience. And even then we can easily be fooled.
That basically is the gist of their work (to me, so far).
I flunked nearly every experiment in Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.²
We need to think slowly, through every implication, when it comes to the few big decisions in life.

So how did this work come about?
The Undoing Project tells us the story.
Of Kahneman and Tversky’s friendship and years of collaboration.
Of how a MacArthur Fellow and and Nobel Laureate are in the end, only human, and even they could not undo the events in their lives and their relationship.
Of how the world is patently unfair and never treats people equally.

It’s a lovely read.

Taleb was the one, who introduced me to Kahneman’s work, in the first place ↩︎
A Lindy book, if there ever was one ↩︎

Change is the Only Constant

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 12:04:24 +0530

If Taleb convinced me that Mathematics was beautiful philosophy, Ben Orlin is the one made me fall in love with it.
Change is the Only Constant is beautiful and funny at the same time.

It’s the story of Calculus over the ages and through domains.
It weaves through life and time, through people, interesting and otherwise.
And the way Ben tells it, it bears no resemblance to the dry crap that is taught in schools and colleges.
It’s beautiful and wonderful, but not paramount and still subject to the vagaries and complexities of life and nature.

In their more insufferable moods, the “hard” sciences like to boast and crow, as if “hard” means complicated and “soft” means simple. This is, of course, exactly backward. The softer the science, the more complex its phenomena.
Physicists can predict what atoms will do. But gather enought atoms, and the calculations grow unwieldy. We need new, emergent laws—chemical laws. Then, gather enought chemicals, and complexity overwhelms us again. We need biology to step in with new theories and rules. And so on down the line. At each tipping point, the role of math evolves: from certain to tentative, from deterministic to statistical, from consensus to controversy. Simple phenomena (like quarks) follow mathematical rules with slavish fidelity. Complex phenomena (like toddlers) less so.

Loved it!

The Biggest Bluff

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 11:36:41 +0530

Really good book.
Gave me a new set of mental models.
Notes follow.

“Focus on the process, not the luck”

“Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat”

“I feel like I will never make sense of it all. I tell Erik as much.
It will all make sense, eventually,” he tells me. “Don’t sweat it too much.”

“Poet, W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.”
Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure”

“How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become. It’s not just a question of semantics: telling bad beat stories matters. Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it.”

“I make myself two promises. First, I am going to stick with this. I will master this game, even if it takes more than a year. I will be a winning player. I will be someone to contend with—or give my all trying. And second: if I’m known as anything in this game, I want to be known as a good poker player, not a good female poker player. No modifiers need apply.”

“The trick is to get past the plateau. The relationship between our awareness of chance and our skill is a U-curve. No skill: chance looms high. Relatively high skill: chance recedes. Expert level: you once again see your shortcomings and realize that no matter your skill level, chance has a strong role to play. In poker and in life, the learning pattern is identical”

“Always ask why: Why is someone acting this way? Why am I acting this way? Find the why and you find the key to winning.”

“Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it. And never judge anything others do without asking the same question. “Every action your opponent takes has a reason behind it, whether conscious or unconscious”

“I need to get out there and put this all into effect. It’s good that I’m observing and learning and seeking advice from so many different people, but there is such a thing as too much. “Too much studying without playing makes it hard to fully absorb knowledge,” he tells me. It will leave me with a head full of statistics and facts—and a mess when it comes time to execute.” this one is specially for me

“I SPEND THE NEXT week playing day after day after day, taking conscientious notes, talking them through with Erik, and putting in diligent hours. I’m a detective, a storyteller, an explorer—not a lost minnow about to be eaten by the sharks. It’s a mantra I repeat over and over, hoping that it will eventually stick”
“It’s dispiriting, playing event after event after event with nothing to show for it. It saps my motivation. It makes me feel like everything is for nothing, that I can’t improve no matter what I do.”

“People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations. If you can get a person’s behavioral profile—a catalogue of those reactions in an if-then relationship, such as “If I feel threatened, then I will lash out”—you have a far better read on who they are or how they will behave in a certain setting than if you have only a set of trait rankings.”

“it’s like John Boyd’s OODA loop playing out at the table instead of in the air. Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. Figure out what they are observing, how they are orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result. That way, you can anticipate them.”

“I do have a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones that I gave myself as a gift after that Foxwoods adventure to drown out the little girls.
What I have to start doing is being proactive rather than reactive. When I react, it’s already too late.”

“Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself? And can you really do one without the other?”

“there’s a difference between knowing what you’re supposed to do and actually having the nerve to do it in the moment”

“People will often actively avoid information that would help them make a more informed decision when their intuition, or inner preference, is already decided. They will, for instance, avoid learning how many calories are in an attractive dessert, or how much they will be paid if they choose to take on a boring task instead of a more exciting one. Part of them knows that the information might mean they need to change their decision, so they choose to ignore it.”

“Identify the weaknesses and you start the process of responding to them in the moment rather than after the fact. “If you’re at the table under extreme pressure, you’ll often revert back to mistakes you wanted to avoid even though you consciously realize it. You need to train yourself, remove your triggers so that you don’t have that emotional response in the moment.” Here’s what Jared proposed to do for me: work through my underlying emotional holes and teach me to be a one-woman bomb squad, defusing the emotional bombs and getting rid of them before they show up and cloud my judgment.”

“Jared gives me an assignment: I need to map out my emotional process so that I can start finding ways to solve each problem. I need to actually sit down and make a spreadsheet. Each time something happens, write it down in the situation or trigger column. In the next column, write a description of the thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors that the situation or trigger causes. In the next column, give my best assessment of the underlying flaw or problem, and finally, write a logic statement that I can use in the moment to inject some rationality into the issue.”

“There’S the constant anxiety that I’m letting people down—the players who believe in me, the people who back me, myself. It’s a fear of high expectations that I’m afraid to subvert. The fear of making mistakes that has never quite gone away. Often as I play, I can see myself from afar, a fly observing what’s going on below. There I am, knowing exactly when I’m supposed to bluff and how, and not quite having the guts to pull the trigger. And I know that I can’t actually pull that trigger unless I’m feeling it. It works only if your mind and heart are behind it. Otherwise, people will spot the fake, the weakness, the half-heartedness. That’s what I’m supposed to spot in my opponents, not the other way around. When I overcome the jitters and just go for it is when I play the best—when I start winning. But I somehow can’t summon that inner strength at will.”

“we make a plan where I don’t go more than three weeks without playing—but I make sure to recharge fully in between. That, too, is crucial for learning the game. The recharging is also a part of playing well.”

“We take a twenty-minute break. Jared has created a routine for me, and I now follow it by the minute. First five minutes of break: off-load and brain dump. I write down some of the key hands so that they don’t occupy any of my headspace going forward. I’ll analyze them later with Erik. For now, the important thing is to get them out of my system so that my mind is ready for new information. Then a few minutes of contemplating my decision making. Asking myself: How was my thinking? Were there any emotionally compromised decisions? Again, I’m not analyzing now, just noting for the future. Next ten minutes: nothing. No poker talk. No thinking. Just walking and relaxing. And then, right before the end of break, a few minutes of warm-up for the next level. Get myself mentally ready, psyched, in gear. My goal is to keep my mind as clear and fresh as possible, for as long as possible. With every break, that will get harder and harder as fatigue sets in. For now, though, I’m ready.”

“Jared wouldn’t approve of my thinking, but I can’t help myself. We worked on this very thing. “Remember,” he tells me. “You haven’t seen those players in the lead-up to their peak. You don’t know that they were staked in their first hundred-K. You don’t know the serendipity that happened to get them there.” I try to remember this as I look at the table and feel like everyone deserves to be here except for me. “Everyone got lucky at some point. Strip down the mythology around their greatness. They still have weaknesses. They are humans first, players second.”

“One hand at a time,” he says. “The nerves go away when you are paying close attention to play. You’ve got this.”

“Erik texts me soon after—he’s following along online—and confirms what I already know: I screwed up, badly. But then he types something else: forget it ever happened. “Put it out of your mind and back to work,” he writes. We will discuss strategy later. For now, just focus on the next hand and forget the chips you’ve lost. Reset mentally, and play your short-stack game. One hand at a time.”

“Another hour passes. I’ve once again dwindled down to just over twenty big blinds—still playable, but not particularly comfortable. Nothing major; just bad cards, bad boards, and not many spots to do much but fold and wait. But now I’m far more comfortable doing just that. Waiting. Picking my spots, just like Erik has always said. The theory always made sense. My mental discipline has now caught up at last.”

“I’m torn. I try to think through the logic of both decisions. Would he play his really strong hands this way? Would he play a marginal hand this way, after I’ve already called twice? After all, I lose to even the marginal hands, with my bottom pair. A nine, a jack, those all beat me. I almost fold. But then something pushes me over the edge. I remember what Phil Galfond told me all those months ago over dinner in Vegas. Retell the story from the beginning. Does the narrative flow—or are there logical gaps? I’m a detective. I’m a storyteller. What does the expertise I bring to the table outside of poker tell me now? I slow down and rewind, not just the story of this hand, but the story of the gentleman’s play over the past three hours. How did he play his strong hands? What did he do when he was bluffing? My poker strategy knowledge is exhausted, so back to doing what I know best: looking for inconsistencies across behavior that can help me.”

“Our older gent gets the better of me soon enough. After I check a flop, he barrels the turn and river, and I decide to just let him have it. It’s five o’clock, and the day is getting to me. I’m tired. I haven’t eaten. I’m running on pure adrenaline. I can’t fight every battle, and I make the strategically suspect but personally necessary decision to wait for another moment to strike. I need to refuel,”

“I don’t know if it’s the movement, the caffeine, or the snack, but when we sit down to play twenty minutes later, I feel like a different person. I can do this. Enough with the surrender. I may be the shortest stack by far, but that makes me powerful, too: I can pressure players without fear of getting bluffed. All I need to do is push my chips into the middle, and they know I have nothing left to lose.”

“to win a tournament you absolutely must get lucky. Skill alone won’t take you over the finish line.”

“this time I’m ready. I’ve spent the past two months working on this exact part of my strategy, practicing heads up play almost exclusively.”

“If I’m to finally crack that puzzle, establish, in White’s words, “an honest ratio between pluck and luck,” I need to go that extra step: keep going and confront the goddess of luck head-on. Otherwise, how will I ever know: Am I really good—or did I just get lucky?”

“TWO WEEKS LATER, I’M at the European Poker Tour in Barcelona, where I notch my best ever EPT finish. Thirty-fourth place out of over 1,500 entries, for €9,200. Far from a min cash. When my husband comes to join me for a post-EPT vacation, I have enough to pay for the whole trip with some left over. The day I return from Europe, I take a bus to Atlantic City for the WPT Borgata. I’m still on European time, but I’m playing well. I make the final three tables—not a final table, but pretty damn close, and pretty damn satisfying. Twentieth place, from 1,075 unique entrants. That’s a real run, and real money. Almost $25,000. My first year’s salary as a writer in NYC was $23,000. Not a bad payday, this. I’m not winning more titles, but I seem to have gotten over the hurdle of simple luck. Some skill appears to have seeped through. I settle into a rhythm. When the Global Poker Index, or GPI, awards are announced, I find that I’m a finalist for the award for Breakout Player of the Year.

“There is, of course, the inevitable downturn: in the summer of 2019, I realize that I’m losing money for the year. I may have profited over $100,000 the year before, but now it’s going in the other direction. Luckily, I have the tools to understand what’s going on, the ability to not panic, to analyze, to study, to move on. I’m willing to leave my ego at the door and revisit my thought process, over and over. I get into the habit of writing down the results of every all-in confrontation to see if I’m running at chance levels, and realize that I’m on the wrong side of variance—I’m losing more than my share of flips. It’s reassuring: variance plays both sides, and at least I’m not losing despite being on the right side.”

“Author and statistician Nassim Taleb distrusts the premise of my entire project: he believes we cannot use games as models of real life because in life, the rules derived from games can break down in unforeseen ways. It’s called the ludic fallacy. Games are too simplified. Life has all sorts of things it can throw at you to make your careful calculations useless. And that’s true enough. After all, that knowledge is precisely what brought me to poker. That life is uncertain. That we can’t know everything. That we can’t control it all, no matter how much we think we may be able to.
But one thing that poker has given me are the very skills necessary to deal with the chaos that can be thrown at you from outside the poker table. Experiencing smaller one-off events over and over during play has taught me both the mathematical and the emotional forbearance to accept them for what they are—and to emerge on the other side.

“Nothing is all skill. Ever. I shy away from absolutes, but this one calls out for my embrace. Because life is life, luck will always be a factor in anything we might do or undertake. Skill can open up new vistas, new choices, allow us to see the chance that others less skilled than us, less observant or less keen, may miss—but should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.
And the biggest bluff of all? That skill can ever be enough. That’s the hope that allows us to move forward in those moments when luck is most stacked against us, the useful delusion that lets us push on rather than give up. We don’t know, we can’t ever know, if we’ll manage or not. But we must convince ourselves that we can. That, in the end, our skill will be enough to carry the day. Because it has to be.”

“You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions. “Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.” If we cannot do it ourselves, we cannot control it. We control how we play the hand, how we react to its outcome, but that outcome itself—that, we don’t control”

Tiny Habits

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 19:22:30 +0530

In a world where Atomic Habits, did not exist, I’d call Tiny Habits the best book on behavioural change and habit building.
Or maybe, I am biased because I read James Clear’s book first.
Just like Cal Newport took Anders Ericsson’s work and ran with it; so did James build on BJ Fogg’s.

Tiny Habits is lovely, has pretty tables and is a lovely engaging read.
If you want to change your behaviour, you simply cannot go wrong by learning from the man, who has taught many of our modern day influencers like Ramit Sethi or Instagram founder, Mike Kreiger.

We Need To Talk About the British Empire

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 16:13:54 +0530

It’s an Audible Original.
And it’s “free”, if you are an Audible member.

A look into what Empire means today.
It’s a series of engaging podcast episodes on what being a part of the British Empire meant/means for its subjects and its descendants, with stories from across the globe.

My only quibble being they did not go deep enough.
The people being interviewed are mostly, subject descendants of British origin (and not as I would expect, an actual survivor from the partition or someone here in India, or Somali coast or Sierra Leone.)

No one knows much of the aftermath of Partion and there’s a lovely little story, tightly told that illustrates the horrors of the period.
Somalia was used, abused, robbed of all they had and then left to find for itself.
Bunce Island, in Sierra Leone was home to a slaver’s bay, where the island hosted a prison for the captured natives who were branded and sold as slaves and a golf course for the gora sahibs.

What struck me (from the interviews and some of the reviews) is that the British have no clue of the generational ramifications of their actions.
They think that enough time has passed by, it’s all water under the bridge and we ought to have picked ourselves by our bootstraps by now.
I realise why Tharoor demanded reparations.

At about three hours, it’s well worth a listen.

A Tale of Two Cities

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 17:56:21 +0530

Just the two popular ones here …
Dickens writes such fluid prose here, I would quote the whole book.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Orwell’s 1984

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 16:23:43 +0530

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face … forever.

That, probably is the quotable line, I found.

The book’s terrible, and I hated the story (too bleak, too dystopian).
The only reason for its popularity is that events in real life, are proving Orwell right.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 20:29:19 +0530

In my youth, I came across the work of [Robin Williams][rw].
No, [not that one.][rwa]

She introduced me to the beauty of [CRAP][crap].
And the fact that the PC is not a typewriter.
But most of all, she introducted me to the [beauty of type][tndtb] and [design][tnddb]

Fonts, and line spacing and kerning and everything else lovely, about the written word.

And now if you want all that wisdom distilled, into a short, opinionated, beautiful web series, look no further than Matthew Butterick’s, [Practical Typography][pt].

The content is freely given, and the book is [reader supported][rs]

What is typography?
What is type composition?
How do you format text?
Are there two spaces after a line? Or one?
What are the best fonts to use, instead of tired old Times New Roman?
How do you layout your page for a letterhead? a research document? a presentation? a résumé?
And why in God’s name, does typography even matter? Isn’t print dead?

Answers to these, and many more questions in the book.
If you want your prose to look polished, you owe it to yourself to read it.
[rw]: https://www.peachpit.com/authors/bio/e26dd8f0-52aa-4ce5-9852-28f3fa1e3417 [rwa]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams [crap]: https://vwo.com/blog/crap-design-principles/ [tndtb]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41601.The_Non_Designer_s_Type_Book [tnddb]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23846768-the-non-designer-s-design-book [pt]: https://practicaltypography.com/ [rs]: https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.html

The Picture of Dorian Gray

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:25:52 +0530

Word for word, the most epigramatic book I have read.
Short, sweet and beautiful words and lines and dialogue.

Here’s a few.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

Ben Hur

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 12:15:47 +0530

Decided to reread the old stories I had read in my childhood.

Started with Ben–Hur.
You might know the movie, more the book.

Adventure, slave galleys, a love triangle, and of course really well written historical fiction.

Loved it so much that I went and got the rest of Lew Wallace’s fiction.
The rains are going to be so much more enjoyable :)

Forest 404

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 17:38:59 +0530

It calls itself, an eco thriller.
But that is selling the series short.

It’s a lush, beautiful soundscape.
The forests still ring in my ears.
The drums still thump.
The future is chilly and industrial.

The writing and the dialogue are crisp.
And most importantly, it has an all woman cast.

And that is all I am willing to share.
Find the podcast here. It says episodes available indefinitely.
So go have fun!
I binged it. I’m sure you will too.

A Hundred Days of Code, Day 036

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 09:57:41 +0530

While the storm passed us by, it bought upon us a day of no power.
So I just deciced to make the most of it and read a book, I’ve wanted to, for quite a while.

Finished Jon Stokes’, “Inside the Machine”.
This book is like a 5000 feet, overview on how the CPU inside a computer works.
If you’re curious like me, and don’t want to delve into the nitty-gritties of Computer Science, this is just the book for you.
Starting with a fictional CPU and then racing through the Intel/AMD (x86, IA-64, x86-64) and AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorala - PowerPC) line of CPUs, this is a wonderful exposition of how the brains in your computer work.
(spoiler, they are really dumb and plenty fast!)

This was a wonderful, wonderful, book!
I cannot wait for the new edition to arrive!

Introducing Regular Expressions

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 16 May 2020 11:38:54 +0530

Done with Introducing Regular Expressions, by Michael Fitzgerald.
The subtitle, of the book says it all.

Unraveling Regular Expressions, Step-by-Step

Michael is a funny, patient and pithy author.

The book breaks down the basics of Regular Expressions into its components and then walks through explaining them in examples, line by painstaking line.
Any book that uses Coleridge to teach me Regular Expressions is awesome, so I’m biased :)

Definitely worth a read if you are brand new to the powerful world of RegEx.

A Hundred Days of Code, Day 026 (Grokking Algorithms)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 08 May 2020 19:00:00 +0530

With my area in near-quarantine, I was too busy rushing around, making sure family was ok.

Had a lot of patches of free time, in the middle of things though.
So I decided to read about algorithms.
I know I need a good base in the future, and knowing about the turtles that underlie my new world.

I decided to start small, and picked up Grokking Algorithms.
I loved it.
It taught me about the big low hanging basic problems that folks need to solve using computers and the patterns / recipes / algorithms we use to solve it.
Problems like how to sort stuff (selection sort, quicksort) And how we can break down a big problem into a set of similar problems that get smaller and smaller and solving them all using a single solution from the inside of the problem onion, outwards, or from the smallest Matryoshka doll to the largest. (recursion)
And how lists function and how to find the most efficient way to get from point A to point B.
It covers a set of the basic algorithms in use today and has plenty of pointers to more efficient ways of how things are done in the real world and also where to find more advanced problems.

It’s engaging, teaches its points with stories and pictures and has exercises to ensure you are paying attention.
I loved it.
I loved it so much, I finished it in a day :)
If you are just beginning and you want an easy way to understand what all this computer stuff is made of, this is a very good book.

Study Less, Study Smart, Marty Lobdell

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:45:21 +0530

Study Less, Study Smart, Marty Lobdell

The book is the text form of this youtube video.

I bought the book as a thank you. (and because I did not want to watch an hour long video everytime I needed something.)
It summarises into one, tiny package, what I took years and books to learn

Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:32:40 +0530

Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday
#

This is the fitting conclusion to Ryan’s Stoic trilogy. (The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy, being the other two)
Must read! Quick Read.
Stillness, intention, doing the work with deliberation, and focus; the book delves through it all in a beautiful manner.
Passages I loved …

“Wrestle with big questions. Wrestle with big ideas. Treat your brain like the muscle that it is. Get stronger through resistance and exposure and training.”

and

“Always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.
In every situation ask:
What is it?
Why does it matter?
Do I need it?
Do I want it?
What are the hidden costs?
Will I look back from the distant future and be glad I did it?
If I never knew about it at all—if the request was lost in the mail, if they hadn’t been able to pin me down to ask me—would I even notice that I missed out?

When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to the things that matter.”

A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 10:33:14 +0530

A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston
#

fun read
when a working actor, tells their story, it’s always a treat.
when a working actor, who struck it big, tells their story, it’s a roller coaster :)
Bryan has fun with the book; there are tales that appear so real, until he yanks the rug, telling you it wasn’t. And there are passages that are unbelievable, but true.
Loved this passage in the book …

Early in my career, I was always hustling. Doing commercials, guest-starring, auditioning like crazy. I was making a decent living, but I confided to Robin that I felt I was stuck in junior varsity. I wondered if I had plateaued. Ever thoughtful, my wife gave me the gift of private sessions with a self-help guy named Breck Costin, who was really wonderful with actors and other creative people.

Breck suggested that I focus on process rather than outcome. I wasn’t going to the audition to get anything: a job or money or validation. I wasn’t going to compete with the other guys.

I was going to give something.

I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance. If I attached to the outcome, I was setting myself up to expect, and thus to fail. My job was to focus on character. My job was to be interesting. My job was to be compelling. Take some chances. Serve the text. Enjoy the process.

Learning Python

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 18:46:26 +0530

Did I need to read a fifteen hundred page book to learn Python?
At the end of fourteen hundred pages, I can safely assure you, I did not.

If you want to just solve your pressing issues or scratch your itch, or just plain get started with programming (and programming in Python specifically), I’d recommend starting with a simple, fast paced book, like Python for you and me, and then doing tons of practice.¹

Mark Lutz, as he closes the book, himself laments that Python has gotten too big to hold in your head. And by doing so, has lost some of the simplicity and the joy and fun and the magic, Python held for the early adopters of the language.

And yet, having said all this, boy, am I glad, I read the book.

This is a master class from a master.

I may not have understood everything. I may have skimmed a chapter or two (Lutz assures me, it’s ok :P), but what this book has done to my mind, the furrows it has ploughed, will be with me forever.

I have been trying to get into the book, multiple times since I bought it.
It took me a long time, before, as Mortimer Adler puts it, I could come to terms with the author.
The only reason I kept coming back, was because, Mark’s earnest teaching voice shines through, and I loved it, even if I did not quite get what he was saying in the beginning.
And the reason I could get through it (and enjoy it) this time, because I decided to follow his advice and follow along on the computer.
To actually type in the code, and see what happens.

Yes, the book is big, yes, the concepts are repeated a couple of times, but as I progressed, I could feel him sweating the small stuff over and over, just so that I could understand things, so that I would not get scared away.

Time and again, the book reassured me, that what was said, was not as complicated or hard as it read on the page.
And that turned out to be true as I kept trying the examples out.

While I still have a long way to go, before I can remotely be called fluent, I know this book will have a been a big reason, I will be.²

This book was last updated, oh, some six years ago, and yet unless Python decides to change radically, I dare say, the principles in here will stand the test of time.

This was a great read and will serve as an awesome reference on my Python journey.
If you are slightly kooky like me, and you want to know, why things are the way they are as you learn to program in Python, get this book.

Which is actually, what I am doing. ↩︎
Besides the practice, that is. ↩︎

The Final Word on Building Habits – Atomic Habits

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 21:38:48 +0530

If you want to build a habit, this is the definitive book on the topic. ¹ You could read about habits in other books, to learn more, but if you actually want to be building them, look no further.

This was the first book in a long time that moved me to actually take action.
Succinct, pithy and packed with advice, there isn’t a wasted word in its 300 odd pages.
And unlike other self help or non fiction books, it does not feel like three-hundred-pages.
Moving from introduction to positing its arguments to tactical advice to conclusion, this feels more like a fast paced novel.

Get 1% better every day

1% worse every day for one year. vs 1% better every day for one year.

Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits.
Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits.
Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.
Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
You get what you repeat.
YOUR HABITS CAN COMPOUND FOR YOU OR AGAINST YOU.

Beware the Valley of Disappointment.

Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment.
You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere.
It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last.

In order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.
If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees.
Change can take years—before it happens all at once.

Forget about goals, focus on systems instead

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. ²
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Be the change, you wish to see in yourself

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs.
The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.

The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.

The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.

The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

So how do we go about changing our identity?

It is a simple two-step process:

Decide the type of person you want to be.

Prove it to yourself with small wins.

I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad? She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would become that person. She was right.

The four laws of behavior change

How to Create a Good Habit

The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious.
The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive.
The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy.
The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.

How to Break a Bad Habit

Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible.
Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive.
Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult.
Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.

The Best Way to Start a New Habit

Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation intention is:

When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.

The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Meditation. I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.

Exercise. I will walk for two hours at 6 p.m. in my neighbourhood.

Marriage. I will make my wife a cup of lemon & honey at 5.45 a.m. in the kitchen.

Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.

Then, stack ’em!

Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. Going to the bathroom leads to washing and drying your hands, which reminds you that you need to put the dirty towels in the laundry, so you add laundry detergent to the shopping list, and so on. No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.

So we best stack our habits. Easiest way to form new ones. How?

The habit stacking formula is:

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

Meditation. After I meditate for one minute, I will go do physio

Study. After I start walking, I will learn French lessons

Marriage. After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.³

Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

Alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones. Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

Try and use a single device as much as possible for a single task. Associate a place with a specific action.

… divide your room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating. You can do the same with your digital spaces. I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit should have a home.

What happens if we do this?

If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing that happens in your bedroom. If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.

You take my Self Control

Simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

So how do we get out of this pickle? By using what Taleb calls, via negativa.
James clarifies …

Cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours.

If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy.

If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out of the bedroom.

Now that you’ve made habits and have made more by stacking, you want to make them irresistible to do. How? Reward yourself by doing something you want to do.

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].
After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].

I have to do my physio daily, and I love Jon Stewart shows so …

After I meditate, I will do physio.
After physio, I will check out Jon Stewart on Youtube.

This shit is hard! (Or how to reprogram your brain to enjoy hard habits)

What if you’re trying to do something that is hard and unpleasant?
I have to do this. I have to do that. I have to go work. I hate this, but I have to.

Imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.

Exercise. Many people associate exercise with being a challenging task that drains energy and wears you down. You can just as easily view it as a way to develop skills and build you up. Instead of telling yourself “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.”

Finance. Saving money is often associated with sacrifice. However, you can associate it with freedom rather than limitation if you realize one simple truth: living below your current means increases your future means. The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month.

And then, just keep swimming. Make it easy to do. And keep doing it!

Walk Slowly, but Never Backward
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it. You just need to get your reps in.

Why? Because of Hebb’s Law

Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
Mathematicians, have increased gray matter in the inferior parietal lobule, which plays a key role in computation and calculation. Its size is directly correlated with the amount of time spent in the field; the older and more experienced the mathematician, the greater the increase in gray matter.

To build a habit, you need to practice it.
And the most effective way to make practice happen is to make it easy.

Every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want.
Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit.
Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm.
Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly.
You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers.
The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them

How now? Remember environment design above? This is where you see its benefits.

When deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
Prime the environment for future use.
There are many ways to prime your environment so it’s ready for immediate use.
If you want to cook a healthy breakfast, place the skillet on the stove, set the cooking spray on the counter, and lay out any plates and utensils you’ll need the night before. When you wake up, making breakfast will be easy.
Want to exercise? Set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time.
Want to improve your diet? Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers, so you have easy access to healthy, ready-to-eat options during the week.

You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult.

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

The Two-Minute Rule states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version:

“Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.”

“Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.”

“Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.”

This is a powerful strategy because once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.

As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
By developing a consistent power-down habit, you make it easier to get to bed at a reasonable time each night. You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.

The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.

Strategies like this work for another reason, too: they reinforce the identity you want to build.
If you show up at the gym five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape. You’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.

Once you’ve established the habit and you’re showing up each day, you can combine the Two-Minute Rule with a technique we call habit shaping to scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal.
Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior. Then, advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build while still keeping your focus where it should be: on the first two minutes of the behavior.

Examples of habit shaping – Becoming an Early Riser

Phase 1: Be home by 10 p.m. every night.

Phase 2: Have all devices (TV, phone, etc.) turned off by 10 p.m. every night.

Phase 3: Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night (reading a book, talking with your partner).

Phase 4: Lights off by 10 p.m. every night.

Phase 5: Wake up at 6 a.m. every day.

Make sure you are happy at the end of it all

We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. This is entirely logical. Feelings of pleasure are signals that tell the brain: “This feels good. Do this again, next time.” Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.

The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time.
The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.

I want it all, now!

Our preference for instant gratification reveals an important truth about success: because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction.
The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.”
Most people know that delaying gratification is the wise approach. They want the benefits of good habits: to be healthy, productive, at peace. But these outcomes are seldom top-of-mind at the decisive moment.
Thankfully, it’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification—but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.

“One of my readers and his wife used a similar setup. They wanted to stop eating out so much and start cooking together more. They labeled their savings account “Trip to Europe.” Whenever they skipped going out to eat, they transferred $50 into the account. At the end of the year, they put the money toward the vacation.

Select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than ones that conflict with it.
If your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cream, then you’re casting votes for conflicting identities, and it ends up being a wash. Instead, maybe your reward is a massage, which is both a luxury and a vote toward taking care of your body. Now the short-term reward is aligned with your with your long-term vision of being a healthy person.

Eventually, as intrinsic rewards like a better mood, more energy, and reduced stress kick in, you’ll become less concerned with chasing the secondary reward.
The identity itself becomes the reinforcer.
You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through.

Incentives can start a habit.
Identity sustains a habit.

It takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge though. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.

How to keep your habits on track? You just track it all!

A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit.
The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine.
As time rolls by, the calendar becomes a record of your habit streak.

What can we do to make tracking easier?
First, whenever possible, measurement should be automated. You’ll probably be surprised by how much you’re already tracking without knowing it. Your credit card statement tracks how often you go out to eat. Once you know where to get the data, add a note to your calendar to review it each week or each month, which is more practical than tracking it every day.
Second, manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits. It is better to consistently track one habit than to sporadically track ten.
Finally, record each measurement immediately after the habit occurs.
The completion of the behavior is the cue to write it down.
This approach allows you to combine the habit-stacking method, with habit tracking.

The habit stacking + habit tracking formula is:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].

After I hang up the phone from a sales call, I will move one paper clip over.

After I finish each set at the gym, I will record it in my workout journal.

After I put my plate in the dishwasher, I will write down what I ate.

It’s all shot to hell! What now?

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible.
Before long, an emergency will pop up—you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time.
Remind yourself of this simple rule:

Never miss twice.
Missing once is an accident.
Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast.
The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.

This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.
Furthermore, it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it—even if you do less than you hope.
Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.

How to stay focussed when you get bored working on your goals

“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”
He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else.
The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
Mastery requires practice.

But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.
Perhaps this is why many of the most habit-forming products are those that provide continuous forms of novelty. Video games provide visual novelty. Porn provides sexual novelty. Junk foods provide culinary novelty. Each of these experiences offer continual elements of surprise.

Everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
We all have goals that we would like to achieve and dreams that we would like to fulfill, but it doesn’t matter what you are trying to become better at, if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.
I can guarantee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business, there will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. When you’re at the gym, there will be sets that you don’t feel like finishing. When it’s time to write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing.
But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.”

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
You have to fall in love with boredom.

Break the beliefs that hold you back

In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of “pride” that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing.
This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits.
The more sacred an idea is to us—that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity—the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.

The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.

“I’m an athlete” becomes “I’m the type of person who is mentally tough and loves a physical challenge.”

“I’m a great soldier” transforms into “I’m the type of person who is disciplined, reliable, and great on a team.”

“I’m the CEO” translates to “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.”

Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even when the world is shifting around us.
Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.
A lack of self-awareness is poison.
Reflection and review is the antidote.

And in conclusion

The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.
It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.
It’s remarkable the business you can build if you don’t stop working.
It’s remarkable the body you can build if you don’t stop training.
It’s remarkable the knowledge you can build if you don’t stop learning.
It’s remarkable the fortune you can build if you don’t stop saving.
It’s remarkable the friendships you can build if you don’t stop caring.

Small habits don’t add up.
They compound.
That’s the power of atomic habits.
Tiny changes. Remarkable results.

P.S. If you like these posts, tell your friends (and your grandma too) to subscribe.

in my opinion :) ↩︎
Scott Adams also writes about this in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big … ↩︎
I should do this! ↩︎

Looking for Something to Read in the New Year?

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 15:48:43 +0530

As the year draws to an end, here’s what the folks I follow read this year.

Vishal Khandelwal, has a couple of short, sweet posts on “The Books That Made Me.” Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

If you’ve already read (and reread) Taleb’s books, here’s a list of books he loves (and hates).

Here is Ryan Holiday’s evergreen list and here’s what he was unto in 2018.

Patrick Collison has a whole antilbrary. (via this ttfs episode).

James Clear wins most organised list.

I follow this not a blog and this tumblr, because these giants who I have grown up on, always have something to recommend.

Not an annual list per se, but Brett McKay’s recommendations have always been awesome!

And finally the big daddy of them all, the annual Farnam Street reading list. While Shane Parrish changed my life in more ways than one, by teaching me how to read and focus, it was his opinions on the books he read that made me follow him all those years ago.

My own eccentric list of books is here.

And there you have it. My little gift to you.

I have about a hundred of you awesome folk on this list. And no matter how infrequent or erratic I am, more than half of you always read every mail I send.
And you always have an encouraging word for me.

For your time, and your attention, and your little acts of kindness, I am truly humbled and thankful.

Merry Christmas to you all! And a Happy New Year!

Gratefully, Jason

P.S. And if you haven’t already, you can always subscribe here.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 13:22:33 +0530

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

Who’s it for?
What’s it for?
What is the worldview of the audience you’re seeking to reach?
What are they afraid of?
What story will you tell? Is it true?
What change are you seeking to make?
How will it change their status?
How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?
Why will they tell their friends?
What will they tell their friends?
Where’s the network effect that will propel this forward?
What asset are you building?
Are you proud of it?

— “This Is Marketing”, Seth Godin

The Personal MBA

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 19:02:03 +0530

There is absolutely nothing I can say about the Personal MBA that hasn’t been said.

I cheat and present Derek Sivers’ notes on the book.

But here’s his point about the book as a whole …

Wow. A masterpiece. This is now the one “START HERE” book I’ll be recommending to everybody interested in business. An amazing overview of everything you need to know. Covers all the basics, minus buzz-words and fluff. Look at my notes for an example, but read the whole book. One of the most inspiring things I’ve read in years.
Want proof? I asked the author to be my coach/mentor afterwards. It’s that good.

My main regret? That the book was on my shelf nearly three years before I picked it up. Talk about lost time.
And as someone who’s helped friends with their MBAs and helped his wife with her DBA, I can absolutely attest that the Personal MBA, does what it claims to do.
It’s world class education for less than 500 bucks.

I’m also a bit jealous and awed. Josh read and synthesised and made notes on so many books and created a smashingly amazing syntopical work. Which is what I do so agonisingly slowly here :P

Short, pithy notes and chapters, keep you engrossed and the book is pretty fast paced and engaging for the enormous breadth of knowledge it seeks to distill within its 500 pages.

Personally biased, I loved the chapters on antifragility, optionality and tinkering. Those are Taleb terms. Josh calls them Resilience, Fail Safes and The Experimental Mindset.

But the whole book is awesome!
It’s my new quake book.

I learnt so much and I know I will learn much more as I revisit it again and again.
I’ll close with two things. The short B. C. Forbes passage (all emphases, mine) that Josh closes the book with, and a short audio introduction below.

Your success depends on you.
Your happiness depends on you.
You have to steer your own course.
You have to shape your own fortune.
You have to educate yourself.
You have to do your own thinking.
You have to live with your own conscience.
Your mind is yours and can be used only by you.
You come into this world alone.
You go to the grave alone.
You are alone with your inner thoughts during the journey between.
You make your own decisions.
You must abide by the consequences of your acts …
You alone can regulate your habits and make or unmake your health. You alone can assimilate things mental and things material …
You have to do your own assimilation all through life.
You can be taught by a teacher, but you have to imbibe the knowledge. He cannot transfuse it into your brain.
You alone can control your mind cells and your brain cells.
You may have spread before you the wisdom of the ages, but unless you assimilate it you derive no benefit from it; no one can force it into your cranium.
You alone can move your own legs.
You alone can move your own arms
You alone can control your own muscles.
You must stand on your feet, physically and metaphorically.
You must take your own steps.
Your parents cannot enter into your skin, take control of your mental and physical machinery, and make something of you.
You cannot fight your son’s battles; that he must do for himself.
You have to be captain of your own destiny.
You have to see through your own eyes.
You have to use your own ears.
You have to master your own faculties.
You have to solve your own problems.
You have to form your own ideals.
You have to create your own ideas.
You must choose your own speech.
You must govern your own tongue.
Your real life is your thoughts.
Your thoughts are your own making.
Your character is your own handiwork.
You alone can select the materials that go into it.
You alone can reject what is not fit to go into it.
You are the creator of your own personality.
You can be disgraced by no man’s hand but your own.
You can be elevated and sustained by no man but yourself.
You have to write your own record.
You have to build your own monument—or dig your own pit. Which are you doing?

Book-Notes on Janusworx

Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin

My highlights, from the book #

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

Why? #

Minimal Friction #

Outsource your brain? No! #

The System #

For Books (the Corner Marking Method) #

Projects (Professional and Personal) #

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life #

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla

Zettelkasten

List of Books to Read Before You Die

This is Water

The Science of Interstellar

Draft No. 4

On the Difference Between Coding, Programming, Engineering, and Computer Science

Brave Enough

How to Pronounce Knife

A Mathematician’s Lament

The Comfort Crisis

The Overstory

Cashflow for Creators

A Love Letter to Books

What to Read, How to Read. Recommendations from Folks, I Admire and Follow (2021 Edition)

Taking Notes, An Example

Book Notes, Ultralearning

Finding Time for Ultra learning #

Principle 1 - Metalearning, First Draw a Map #

How to Draw Your Map #

How Much Planning Should You Do? #

Principle 2 - Focus #

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating) #

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted) #

Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus #

Principle 3 - Directness #

The Importance of Being Direct #

Principle 4 - Drill #

Tactics for Designing Drills #

Mindful Drilling #

Principle 5 - Retrieval, Test to Learn #

What Should Be Retrieved? #

How to Practice Retrieval #

Principle 6 - Feedback, Don’t Dodge the Punches #

What Kind of Feedback Do You Need? #

How Quick Should Feedback Be? #

How to Improve Your Feedback #

Principle 7 - Retention, Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket #

How Can You Prevent Forgetting? #

Principle 8 - Intuition, Dig Deep Before Building Up #

How to Build Your Intuition #

The Feynman Technique #

Principle 9 - Experimentation, Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone #

Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery #

The Mindset of Experimentation #

How to Experiment #

Experimentation and Uncertainty #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (V)

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game! #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV) #

In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure #

How do I use this myself? #

Books I Read, October 2020

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III) #

What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II) #

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks #

Money #

Work #

Health #

What I Learnt from Antifragile (I)

Antifragile #

Reading Order #

Optionality #

My highlights, from the book
#

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

Outsource your brain? No!
#

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Finding Time for Ultra learning
#

Principle 1 - Metalearning, First Draw a Map
#

How to Draw Your Map
#

How Much Planning Should You Do?
#

Principle 2 - Focus
#

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)
#

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)
#

Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus
#

Principle 3 - Directness
#

The Importance of Being Direct
#

Principle 4 - Drill
#

Tactics for Designing Drills
#

Mindful Drilling
#

Principle 5 - Retrieval, Test to Learn
#

What Should Be Retrieved?
#

How to Practice Retrieval
#

Principle 6 - Feedback, Don’t Dodge the Punches
#

What Kind of Feedback Do You Need?
#

How Quick Should Feedback Be?
#

How to Improve Your Feedback
#

Principle 7 - Retention, Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
#

How Can You Prevent Forgetting?
#

Principle 8 - Intuition, Dig Deep Before Building Up
#

How to Build Your Intuition
#

The Feynman Technique
#

Principle 9 - Experimentation, Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
#

Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery
#

The Mindset of Experimentation
#

How to Experiment
#

Experimentation and Uncertainty
#

Teaching Birds How to Fly, & Skin in the Game!
#

What I Learnt from Antifragile (IV)
#

In a world with too much choice … Lindy is the cure
#

How do I use this myself?
#

What I Learnt from Antifragile (III)
#

What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective
#

What I Learnt from Antifragile (II)
#

The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks
#

Money
#

Work
#

Health
#

Antifragile
#

Reading Order
#

Optionality
#

Domain Blindness
#

Add a Dot-Dot-Dot
#

Shift the Spotlight
#

See It as a Step
#

Tell Yourself a Different Story
#

Lose More to Win More
#

Reveal to Heal
#

Find Small Ponds
#

Go Untouchable
#

Never, Never Stop
#

Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday
#

A Life in Parts, Bryan Cranston
#