Author: phillip

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The Dichotomy Between Memento Mori and Future Planning

Zorba the Greek poses a key question:

Look, I was passing through a small village one day. An old fogey ninety years old was planting an almond tree. ‘Hey, grandpa,’ I say to him, ‘are you really planting an almond tree?’ And he, all bent over as he was, he turns and says to me, ‘My boy, I act as though I’m never going to die.’ I answered him in my turn, ‘I act as though I’m going to die at any moment.’ Which of the two of us was right, Boss?””

You certainly want to keep death in the forefront of your mind. You can easily forget that the future is not guaranteed. You can easily trade the present moment for an uncertain future. As Marcus Aurelius stated so succinctly:

You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

But this does not mean that you forego planning for the future entirely. You do not know when your death will come, and you may be blessed (or cursed) with a long life. It would be a mistake to ignore the future in your calculations.

This is the dichotomy between memento mori and the need to consider the future. You want to adopt a middle road, if you can find it. Plan and invest as if you’re going to live forever (plant that tree, continue to invest in learning). At the same time, keep your death firmly focused in mind. Enjoy the present – for that is all that you are ever really given.

One perspective cannot be allowed to dominate the other.

References

  • Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
  • A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine

    As Seneca notes, “If God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.”4 And after celebrating having been given another day to live, we can fill that day with appreciative living.

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Creating and Editing Require Different Mindsets

When you’re working as a creative, whether that is as a programmer, a writer, or a musician, it is important for you to recognize that creating and editing are two different mindsets. You need to separate the two processes. If you don’t, you will block the creative process. You’ll be at risk of tuning into “K-FKD radio”. You’ll also be less effective, as you’re not aligning the work in front of you with the mode you’re in.

Application for General Creative Thought

Fundamentally, you want to create and edit at different times or on different days. One way to approach this physically is with Walt Disney’s three-stage creative process.

What we are really trying to separate is the generative flow and the critic. When ideas are coming, we want to receive all of them. Their quality is not important when the ideas are flowing, just capture them while they are coming.

The time to review ideas, to edit a work, or to scope the effort is separate – nothing stops the flow of ideas like those types of activities. And when you’re in that critic mode,

Application to Writing

Start with a brain dump – don’t organize or edit or filter, just let it flow. Then, later, reorganize into a coherent outline.

Write your first draft by vomiting on the page. Then, later, go through and edit it into something more succinct and effective.

Recognize what mode you’re in, and tune your tasks to that.

Application to Programming and Product Development

Writing new code, in the sense of exploring a problem space or taking a first pass implementation, is more creative/generative in nature. So is coming up with the design for a (sub)system, brainstorming product features, and figuring out what kinds of tests you might need at the factory.

Code reviews, design reviews, refactoring code, running static analysis tools: these are tasks for the critic mode.

A common problem in software development is that we don’t often enforce good separation of these modes, often mixing the work. We set out to write new code, but end up getting sucked into refactoring work along the way. It would be much better to refactor first, then write new code. Or solve the new problem first, and then refactor to a more elegant solution. Similarly, the time to clean up commits is at the end of a working session, not in the middle of it.

Mob programming is often held up as an alternative to code reviews. The problem is that writing the code and reviewing code mixes the two mindsets, and the same separation idea applies. Also, if you’re focused on solving a problem as a group, you’re going to approach the work differently than if you’re focused on looking at the code as a group with the editor mindset applied.

In fact, how powerful would it be to have mob code reviews? Look over the code as a group and identify all the ways you can make improvements. Why not schedule that as a regular weekly team activity? How much better could you make your code base?

References

  • A Guide to Code Inspections by Jack Ganssle

    The author is present to provide insight into his intentions when those are not clear (which is a sign there’s a problem with either the code or the documentation). If a people shortage means you’ve doubled up roles, the author may not also be the reader. In writing prose it has long been known that editing your own work is fraught with risk: you see what you thought you wrote, not what’s on the paper. The same is true for code.

  • Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

    Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.

    Unless you’re building a sailboat or the Taj Mahal, I give you a free pass to screw up as much as you like. The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building. Set forth without fear and without self-censorship. When you hear that voice in your head, blow it off. This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz. Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect. You are not allowed to judge yourself.

  • The Jerry Seinfeld Guide to Writing by David Perell

    Writing and editing should be separate activities.

    Seinfeld treats his writing self and editing self as two separate people. He treats his writing self like a baby. He nurtures it, loves it, and supports it. But once the editing phase begins, he changes his personality. He turns into a “harsh prick, a ball-busting son of a bitch” who says “that is just not good enough. That’s got to come out or it’s got to be redone or thrown away.”

  • Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Lafley and Martin

    At this reverse-engineering stage, there is absolutely no interest in opinions as to whether the conditions pertaining to a given possibility are true. In fact, expressing such opinions is counterproductive. The only interest is in ferreting out what would have to be true for every member of the group to feel intellectually and emotionally committed to the possibility under consideration.

  • Quintus Curtius, on Twitter

    In my view, an author generally should not try to: translate his own work, narrate his own work on audio, or be the only person to edit his work. Reason? You need a fresh perspective. It’s too easy to slip into your own world, and overlook problems.

  • Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert Martin

    The idea here is that writing code that works and writing code that is clean are two separate dimensions of programming. Attempting to control both dimensions at the same time is difficult at best, so we separate the two dimensions into two different activities.

To say this differently, it is hard enough to get code working, let alone getting the code to be clean. So we first focus on getting the code working by whatever messy means occur to our meager minds. Then, once working, with tests passing, we clean up the mess we made.

This makes it clear that refactoring is a continuous process, and not one that is performed on a scheduled basis. We don’t make a huge mess for days and days, and then try to clean it up. Rather, we make a very small mess, over a period of a minute or two, and then we clean up that small mess.

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Walt Disney’s Three-Stage Creative Process

Creating and Editing require different mindsets, so you often don’t want to mix the two activities.

Walt Disney agreed with this idea. He would break up the process of thinking up and refining ideas into three distinct phases, focusing on only one stage at a time:

  1. Dreamer
    1. For fantasizing, creating raw ideas without any filter
    2. This stage is about “why not?”
  2. Realist
    1. Re-examine dreamer ideas and rework them into something more practical
    2. Not about the reasons it could not be achieved, only about what could be done
    3. This stage is about “how?”
  3. Spoiler/Critic
    1. Shoot holes in the refined ideas from the realist stage

Ideas that survive this three stage process are the ones you should work on. By compartmentalizing the stages, you gain distinct advantages:

  1. You can come up with ideas without letting reality or criticism get in the way
  2. You can refine ideas without the harsh filter of a critic
  3. You can criticize and examine a well-thought out idea, something with a bit more structure.

The problem is that most brainstorming meetings (or meetings in general) involve a group of people with mixed roles/focuses – a combination of dreamers, realists, and spoilers. In a mixed environment, dream ideas don’t stand a chance.

Physically Representing the Stages

This process is best implemented physically. You can do this in multiple ways.

The simplest approach is to work in the different stages at different times, whether that is times of day or days of the week. Alternatively, you can steal another lesson from Disney and compartmentalize the stages in different rooms in your office or house. For example:

  • Conference Room A in your office can ONLY be used for the dreaming stage. No filtering, realism, or spoiling is allowed in this room.
  • Conference Room B can only be used for the realist stage. The only activity allowed is finding ways to convert dreams to reality.
  • Conference Room C can only be used for the spoiler stage – being a critic and editing to find weak spots before an idea goes live.

Another way to physically embody this is to associate each of the roles with different pieces of clothing. You can take the “wearing different hats” metaphor literally, putting on a different hat (or no hat at all) depending on your target role. You could also use shoes, slippers, or other accessories as a trigger for the specific mindset.

By consistently following these rules, you will find it much easier to trigger the desired state of mind.

References

  • Disney Brainstorming Method: Dreamer, Realist, and Spoiler
  • The Practice by Seth Godin

    Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks, or boredom.

  • Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

    There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect. Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

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Quotes on Discipline

Training for New Alpinism, by House, Johnston, and Twight:

There is also beauty in the wisdom of discipline, a wisdom that offers the sweet taste of knowing you did everything right. Then, instead of lying broken at the base, you might get lucky enough to stand on an obscure summit with just enough left to safely descend, breathing rarified air and feeling like some mystical powers of the universe conspired with everything you have, everything you trained for, and everything you sacrificed to get there.

General Slim, quoted in Gen. Slim Gets it Together by Steven Pressfield:

This was not the first, nor was it to be the last, time that I had taken over a situation that was not going too well. I knew the feeling of unease that comes first at such times, a sinking of the heart as the gloomy facts crowd in; then the glow of exhilaration as the brain grapples with problem after problem; lastly the tingling of the nerves and the lightening of the spirit, as the urge to get out and tackle the job takes hold. Experience had taught me, however, that before rushing into action it is advisable to get quite clearly fixed in mind what the object of it all is. I sat down to think out what our object should be.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene:

For the future, the motto is, “No days unalert.” Nothing should catch you by surprise because you are constantly imagining problems before they arise.

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Revise, Revise, Revise

When I write, I typically write a first draft, edit it once, have Rozi review (if she’s able to), and then publish. This means I experience two drafts, or three at most.

This is not enough. I am stopping too soon. I can always let some time lapse, come back to the work, and find egregious errors or significant refactorings. This means that I need more drafts. After all, McPhee’s excellent book on writing is called Draft No. 4) for a good reason.

Another aspect of revision is treating each draft in a slightly different way. For example, John McPhee’s revision process involves using each draft for a distinct effort:

  1. Write the first draft
  2. Read the second draft aloud
  3. Go through the piece for the third time (removing the problems observed while reading), enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes
  4. Search for replacements for the words in the boxes

Of course, four might not be enough – Steven Pressfield points out that he does between ten and fifteen drafts of every book he writes.

References

  • On the Move by Oliver Sacks

    It seems to me that I discover my thoughts through the act of writing, in the act of writing. Occasionally, a piece comes out perfectly, but more often my writings need extensive pruning and editing, because I may express the same thought in many different ways.

  • Essentialism by Greg McKeown

    An editor is ruthless in the pursuit of making every word count. Instead of saying it in two sentences, can you say it in one? Is it possible to use one word where two are currently being used?

  • Daily Creative by Todd Henry

    The way in which I conveyed the most resonant ideas in each of my books appeared through revision, not in the first draft.

  • Draft No. 4, by John McPhee

    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. The basic thing I do with college students is pretend that I’m their editor and their copy editor. In preparation for conferences with them, I draw boxes around words or phrases in the pieces they write. I suggest to them that they might do this for themselves.

  • Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t by Steven Pressfield

    I‘ll do between ten and fifteen drafts of every book I write. Most writers do.

  • 3-2-1: Handling Challenges, Living Authentically, and Giving Value by James Clear

    Revising a book before it is published is incredibly useful. The extra polish improves the first impression.

    Publishing a second edition a few years after publishing, even if it involves the same revisions, is less useful. The brand has already been established.

    Refine at the right time.

  • Writing Matters (pdf)
    • This is exactly why we edit – improve understandability, make it easier to find the key message, and make more concise. The exact same benefits apply to editing writing and source code.

      We estimate the effect of language editing on perceived writing quality and perceived academic paper quality by comparing the average judgement of original and edited papers. Our results show that writing matters. Writing experts judged the edited papers as 0.6 standard deviations (SD) better written overall (1.22 points on an 11–point scale). They further judged the language–edited papers as allowing the reader to find the key message more easily (0.58 SD), having fewer mistakes (0.67 SD), being easier to read (0.53 SD), and being more concise (0.50 SD). These large improvements in writing quality translated into still substantial effects on economists’ evaluations. Economists evaluated the edited versions as being 0.2 SD better overall (0.4 points on an 11–point scale). They were also 8.4 percentage points more likely to accept the paper for a conference, and were 4.1 percentage points more likely to believe that the paper would get published in a good economics journal. Our heterogeneity analysis shows that the effects of language editing on writing quality and perceived academic quality are particularly large if the original versions were poorly written.

  • The Jerry Seinfeld Guide to Writing by David Perell

    Clarity: Ultimately, I want to make my writing so clear that my reader forgets they’re reading. So in this stage, I remove anything that would cause friction for the reader. If an idea is confusing, I reorganize it. If a sentence is confusing, I rewrite it. And if a word is unnecessary, I remove it.

  • Earthquake in the Early Morning, by Mary Pope Osbourne

    Fun – that’s the magic word for me. Writing a story should always be fun. At the same time, it requires lots of work, such as rewriting and rewriting. I rewrite one Magic Tree House book many times, but I always try to have fun while I’m doing it.

  • Gary Provost wrote: “Baby puppies” is redundant. A “little midget” would be redundant, as would a “big giant,” a “long-necked giraffe,” or “six a.m. in the morning.” “Red in color” is redundant because a thing can’t be red in size, shape, or age.
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Quotes on Learning and Teaching

Ethan Hawke, Rules for a Knight

“Be humble or get humbled,” Grandfather would say. “A knight is never so arrogant as to think he has nothing left to learn.”

Seneca:

There are indeed mistakes made, through the fault of our advisers, who teach us how to debate and not how to live; there are also mistakes made by the pupils, who come to their teachers to develop, not their souls, but their wits. Thus the study of wisdom has become the study of words.

The Way of Zen by Alan Watts

By this method of opposites mutually related there arises an understanding of the Middle Way. For every question that you are asked, respond in terms of its opposite.

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The Effort of Countless Generations Brought us Here

How easy it is for modern humans to forget that we are part of a Great Wave moving through time. We are the heirs to countless generations’ worth of effort, reaching all the way back to the emergence of life on Earth. We do well to be grateful for the efforts and sacrifices that brought us to the world we live in.

It is easy to criticize when we lose sight of this context. We bemoan global warming and fossil fuel emissions and the earlier generations who did not try to prevent these problems. But we forget that we would not necessarily want the world without fossil fuels, either. They enable so many good things: consistent warmth in the winter and cooling in the summer, fertilizer for improving food security, refrigeration, and countless goods and services (including the electronics that people use to bemoan the state of the world).

It is our duty to shape the world into something we want to live in – and to shape it to support future generations. But we must also realize that same effort has been going on for an unfathomable amount of time. Even if the result is imperfect (and some results are horrifying), there is still much to be grateful for.

Quotes

  • John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

    We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us.

  • Quintus Curtius in Acknowledging the Debts to Our Predecessors:

    There is something petty, something small-minded and mean, in refusing to recognize those who taught us. It offends one’s sense of right. No accomplished man should ever believe that he arrived where he did solely because of his own efforts; he stood on the shoulders, and was carried along, by the aggregate labors of those who preceded him.

  • Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa:

    “Shut up! Don’t you see you’re barely grown? There’s nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what’s good for it.””

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Two Quotes on Cultivating Awareness

Diana Montalion on Metacognition and Self Awareness:

If I were forced to recommend only one practice for improving thinking, I’d pick this one. But 5:00am journaling doesn’t work for everyone. At different stages of my life, different self awareness practices have worked — meditation, yoga, therapy and long hikes in the wilderness for example. Gandhi spun thread. When cultivating self awareness, what matters is practice , not the framework you use to implement it.

Epictetus on a Stoic meditation from the Enchiridion:

In everything which pleases the soul, or supplies a want, or is loved, remember to add this to the (description, notion); what is the nature of each thing, beginning from the smallest? If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken, you will not be disturbed. If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed.

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Allow Your Mental State to Drive Your Work

It is common practice to outline a schedule of work to do in advance. Whatever is next on the list is what you try to tackle, regardless of the mood or state of mind you are in. Some days, this works wonderfully, and you enter into a flow state. Other days, it feels like you are trying to lead a team of pack mules uphill through deep mud.

As a creative, it is a mistake to fight against your current mental state by trying to force particular work. Instead, adapt your work to fit your current state of mind.

Your mental state influences how much energy it takes you to finish a given piece of work. When you are in alignment with your current mood, tasks can feel effortless to complete. Misalignment can cause them to take longer, be more painful to execute, and result in a lower quality output.

Of course, you don’t have to rely purely on your mental state. You can also generate momentum intentionally, making it easier to enter into a flow state.

States of Mind

In his Just-in-Time Project Management series, Tiago Forte provides some examples of states of mind and work that benefits from it:

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Quote
Note that each of these states favors a certain kind of activity, which produces a unique kind of value:

  • Mischievous cleverness would be good for hacking a piece of software to do what you want
  • Geeking out is good for late night projects tinkering in the garage
  • Appalled incredulity can inspire wonderful reserves of anger and motivation toward a goal
  • Righteous indignation is very useful for writing passionate thought pieces arguing for a change you care about
  • Melancholy has long been used by artists to tap into deep reserves of creativity
  • Motivated curiosity is great for exploring a rabbit trail through Wikipedia to try and understand an idea

The problem is that creating these states of mind is often expensive and difficult. You might require long periods of waiting, investment in rituals, or working in a particular environment. They are also unpredictable, and can come and go at moment’s notice. Even worse, attempting to force a particular mental state often pushes you further and further away from it. Because we cannot produce states of mind at will, it is better to adapt your current work to your state of mind.

References

  • Extend Your Mind by Tiago Forte:

    Our moods are extrapolation engines, putting us in the appropriate state of mind to take advantage of fleeting opportunities, without having to wait for full information. You can think of a given state of mind as a temporary bias, increasing our sensitivity and responsiveness toward a certain kind of reward that seems to be in unexpected abundance.

  • Just-in-Time Project Management (Series) by Tiago Forte

    I believe that our states of mind have become our most important assets as knowledge workers. In an economy based on creativity, it is the state of mind that we enter through our creative process that is even more rare and valuable than any product or deliverable we produce while in it. Our ultimate competitive advantage is a way of thinking.

    Because of this, it is worth designing a way of working that puts us in certain states of mind as often and for as long as possible, and leverages what we produce during that time into tangible results.

    Let’s start with a definition for “state of mind.” A SOM is:

    • difficult or expensive to reproduce (in contrast to simple emotions)
    • illegible and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts (in contrast to cause-and-effect habits)
    • primarily somatic and affective, not intellectual (in contrast to belief systems or worldviews)
    • temporary and ephemeral (in contrast to mindsets or attitudes)

    There are a few important things to understand about states of mind. They are:

    • Expensive
    • Unpredictable
    • Valuable
    • High leverage

    States of mind give us tremendous leverage, because they dramatically influence how much energy it takes to complete a given task. When you’re in Errand Mode, running an additional errand doesn’t take much extra energy. But if you’re in the middle of a deep focus session, even the simplest errand can feel like a harsh imposition.

    Motivation has a direction. Performing a task in line with your motivation is easy and satisfying (reading a book when I’m feeling quiet and introspective), whereas trying to go against my motivation is difficult and frustrating (reading a book when I’m feeling social or scatterbrained).

    In other words, moods drive us to act opportunistically – to do more of what’s already working. Our brain extrapolates that what has just happened will keep happening, forms expectations of the rewards it will encounter, generating anticipation, which is the key motivator of action.

    Instead of trying to force our state of mind to fit the task at hand, we can change the task at hand to fit our state of mind.

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Two Quotes on Slowing Down

Carol Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching:

We are not meant, as we are advised in the I Ching, to always be on the go, but to regularly have a time for being quiet. Achieving inner quiet requires that we allow the inner static of restlessness to subside.

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts:

The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an “I” for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh:

How can we stop being victims of overscheduling? Our society is so caught in our daily concerns and anxiety we don’t have time to live our life or to love. We don’t have time to live deeply and touch the true nature of what is there, to understand what life is. We are too busy to have the time to breathe, to sit, to rest.