Monthly Archives: November 2018

Cabinet of Curiosities, Lifehacking, Workhacking

Cabinet of Curiosities: Tim Ferriss’ Hack for Learning Anything Quickly

Do you know Tim Ferriss?  No?  A pity.  You should.  As Han Solo said about Lando Calrissian: “He’s a scoundrel.  You’d like him.”

I’m not sure how he describes what he does nowadays, but at some point he said he “deconstructed world-class performance.”  In other words, he figures out how outliers do the things they do.

If you know anything about outliers, you know it takes 10,000 of deliberate practice to become world-class at anything.

Which is why it’s surprising, at first, the Tim Ferriss has a hack, sandwiched right in the middle of The Four-Hour Chef, for learning how to get pretty good at anything, quickly.

“Pretty good”?  For Tim Ferriss, that means “top 5% of practitioners”.

“Quickly”?  That means 6 to 12 months or even — if you’re manic like him — 6 to 12 weeks.

So, you can choose: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to get world-class, or 6 months of somewhat deliberate practice to get to top 5%.

What’s the system?  Two acronyms: DiSSS and CaFE.

The main one is DiSSS, which is

  1. Deconstruction.  What are the minimal learnable units, the Lego blocks, to start with?
  2. Selection.  Which 20% of the blocks gives you 80% of the competence?
  3. Sequencing.  In what order should you learn the blocks?
  4. Stakes.  Set things up so you work hard at it.

You need help with this.  Ferriss discusses several cases in Chef, a couple of which spoke to me:

Shinji Takeuchi is an ordinary Japanese gentleman who developed an approach to swimming which emphasized effortless pleasure instead of the usual competitive thing of maximum output.  Terry Laughlin wrote a book about Takeuchi’s method,  Total Immersion, which does you the favor of doing steps 1-3 for you.  He tells you what “alphabet” you have to learn, which are the most important elements, and in what sequence to learn them.  Alas, he doesn’t give you the stakes :-).

Ferriss also does a case study on shooting basketball three-pointers.  What’s interesting here is that, like Tim Ferriss, I have very little interest in basketball, but a strong contributor to my lack of interest is that I’ve always pretty much sucked at it.  So I was interested.

His recipe:

Find a guru.  He suggests finding somebody who is 5-10 years past fame, so that they’re still fantastic but don’t have an ego about it.

Offer them something for their help.  Probably not money, but a mention in your blog?

Ask them about 1, 2, and 3.  1) What is the “alphabet” of basketball shooting. 2) What the the most significant things that bad players do wrong?  What are the most significant things that bad players can to to improve?  3) What does a progression of exercises look like?

There’s a lot more.  And there’s a lot more in the book.  Highly recommended.

Deep Work, Developer stuff, Programming

Themes for Work and Learning, Week of November 18, 2018

Because of the holiday this coming week, I’m trying something different.

Instead of working on the next chapter of 7 Hard Problems I’m going to give myself kind of a treat and flip over the Deep Work to learning how to program in Go.

Actually, I’ve been at this for a while.  I’ve done the basic tutorials.  I’ve carved out a project — writing a parser to take input from MyLifeOrganized and use it for a variety of outputs — and I’ve got the bare bones of the parser turning over.

I ground to a halt by “death of a thousand cuts” because I basically wasn’t very fluent in the language.  Each time I hit a snag — and they were often basic snags about syntax — the wind would go out of my sails and I’d lose time on the project.

So I decided it was time to read The Go Programming Language, as near as I can find to a definitive reference, from cover to cover.

I’m about halfway through.  In Chapter 5 (“Functions”) to be exact.  I’ve been fitting it in around the edges of the work on 7Hard.

Well, I’m going to shoot my Deep Work wad this week on Go, and hopefully bull through the rest of the book.

Where will I be at after that?  An expert in Go?  Maybe.  What I’m hoping is that I’ll now be fluent enough that I can work away on the parser in smaller dribs and drabs — a Pomo or two at a time, say — and not lose my gumption every time I hit a snag.

Because I have a mission.  My next weight-loss treat.

I’ve been using tech toys to spur my weight loss.  An Android tablet.  An Android watch.  A Sonos sound system for our house.  Etc.

Well the next tech toy is not going to be a product, it’s going to be having permission to finish the MLO Parser.

Why reward myself for writing software?

  1. It’s off-purpose.  I’m supposed to be mainly about 7Hard this next six months or so.
  2. It’s a treat.
  3. It’s not harmful

So off-purpose treats that aren’t harmful are great weight-loss rewards.  And that’s what I’m going to do.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

“How to Skip to the Good S**t in a Long YouTube Tutorial”

I dug this up in Lifehacker.  On the off chance you don’t regularly read it, you should!

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-skip-to-the-good-shit-in-a-long-youtube-tutorial-1830466952.

I’m always vexed by video content because you can’t skip ahead.  You’re forced to drink in info at the rate the author wanted you to.  What good is that?

This post has three or four suggestions about how to skip the guff and get to the point.

Have a great weekend!

7 Hard Problems

Summing Up the Week’s Work

A friend wrote yesterday:

The cooperative/competitive discussion is going in a great direction. Love your application of it to education. And your flat-out declaration that it doesn’t prepare for work – which I agree with.

First of all, thanks for the feedback, DB.  I try to pay attention to every bit of feedback.

I think the tack of doing case studies from various institutions — family, school, workplace, government — works well for this chapter.   A lot of interesting anecdotes flow out of this, and it’s a nice framework for thinking about the dichotomy Cooperation/Competition.

I was disappointed as usual with the amount of vomitout I got done this week, but I’m holding myself in check on that until I finish all 7 of the problems and see if the overall project has helped forward the book.  I kind of think it has.

David Graeber’s books on bullshit jobs and the joys of bureaucracy were great serendipitous arrivals this week.  I immediately pressed Bullshit Jobs into service for the vomitout, and intend to do the same with Utopia of Rules once I read it.  Graeber is amazing IMHO.

I was able to get some stuff down on paper about hyper-partisanship as a form of failure on Cooperation/Competition but I’d also like to have more of a theory of “why hyperpartisanship now?”  I expect it has at least something to do with technological advances in both audience segmentation and soundbite-ology which are hastening a “normal” corrosion of democracy as we slide downhill toward… the death of the Republic?

On that cheerful note…

7 Hard Problems, Tradecraft

Why Both Science and Philosophy Are Important

Warning: This post is a little arcane.  tl;dr

Most of us understand why science is important, even if we don’t explicitly study it ourselves.

First of all, there’s the unbelievable track record of scientific research paying off.  Health.  Productivity of industry and agriculture.  Longevity.  Well-being.

Well, that’s an argument for somebody studying science, but maybe not us ourselves.

Then there’s the scientific method itself.  The basic idea:

  1. Theorize something true: e.g., “what if vaccines caused autism”
  2. Devise an experiment that will show if the theory is false: “see whether significantly more vaccinated children are on the autism spectrum”
  3. Perform the experiment: No Significant Difference
  4. Adjust the theory based on the result: “Vaccines probably don’t cause autism”

Note the “probably” in #4 and the “false” in #2.  You need multiple independent reps of the experiment in order to be pretty damn sure about it.  And you can never prove a theory right; you can only prove a theory wrong.

The scientific method is worth implementing in your everyday life.  You have a hunch why your toilet doesn’t run?  Do the experiment, observe the result, rinse and repeat.

You have a hard time finding stable relationships?  Why might that be so?  Try an experiment to see.  Rinse and repeat.

So science has some legs, both for all of us and for each of us.

What about philosophy?  Isn’t that just a bunch of people asking, “how do I know if reality is real”?

Well, yes and no.

Philosophy is a bunch of people sitting around asking dumb, obvious-sounding questions.  But it isn’t just a bunch of people asking dumb questions.

It’s cleaning the mind for better scientific theories.

Mark Twain said a ways back:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so

That’s what philosophy is for, cleaning out your mind so that you don’t think you know something for sure when you should have a bit of doubt (ok, a lot of doubt).

It’s what we call a “reality check” when we do it with our feelings.  But with philosophy we’re doing it with our thoughts.

Maybe another analogy is strength training for the mind.

How can you start a practice of thinking philosophically?

One easy thing to do is to ask yourself “why” 5 times about your answer to any big question.

“I have trouble with relationships because I care too much.”

“Why?”

“Because I think that love is all about both people caring more for one another than they do for themselves.”

“Why?”

“I need someone else’s validation to approve of myself.”

“Why?”

OMG.  Great question.

That was only three “why’s” and it led to a true Moment of Zen.

Try it.

7 Hard Problems

In the Week’s Work So Far

The “master anecdote” for this week’s chapter — “Cooperation vs. Competition” — is a sketch of a family that’s run completely on a competitive basis: the kids have to earn the right to a ride to school, etc.

The point was to establish that some institutions in society — family is the prime example — are overwhelmingly cooperative.  And even institutions that are more competitive — school, work — could use a balance between cooperation and competition in order to run better.

(School is famous, for example, for not training workers very well for the world of work.  There are multiple reasons why this is so, but balance of cooperation and competition is among them.)

The work is going pretty well, although I was no more prepared for this chapter than for 1 or 2.

7 Hard Problems, Cabinet of Curiosities, Workhacking

Cabinet of Curiosities: David Graeber, Trans-national Treasure?

David Graeber is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I’m reading with great interest.  But he is a man of many parts.

In the first place, he is described as an “anarchist activist”.  He was involved with Occupy Wall Street and is a card-carrying member (if they carry cards) of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (their slogan is terrific: “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”).

And these interests have prompted two recent books, which I discovered the other day and now have on order:

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is a great title.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

And Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is an even more terrific title.

I’m guessing that the two books are following a new thread for Graeber: the meaninglessness and folly of work in the “advanced” countries.

His thesis, or one of them, seems to be that instead of shortening the work week as work becomes less necessary, our captains of industry are draining the meaning out of jobs but insisting that people show up in costume regardless.

I’ve been interested in two memes about the world of work, in the past as a VC but now as an author: 1) the “Mechanical Turk-ization” of work (Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s work-by-the-drink project for turning people into computer-like clones) and 2) the Millenial-driven quest for meaning in work, which is a reaction and a hopeful sign.

I’ll be interested to see what Graeber has to say about these.

(I’m calling him a trans-national treasure because he is currently evidently in London teaching at the LSE.)

7 Hard Problems, Deep Work

Themes for Work and Learning, week of November 11, 2018

So, I didn’t finish the vomitout for Chapter 2 last week either.  There seems to be a pattern.

I’m going to persist with my scheme, though, and continue vomiting out with Chapter 3, “Cooperation vs. Competition.”

In terms of reading, I was idiotically ambitious about my reading last week.  I did a tad of reading in Black Reconstruction, not a word of reading in Capital in the 21st Century, and a solid amount of reading only in Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

“Solid”, but not definitive.  I still haven’t finished Debt.  Sadder but wiser, I’m just going to aim to finish Debt, this week and let the chips fall where they may.

So, finish Debt and personfully try to vomitout Chapter 3.

Honestly?  Sounds like a recipe for fudging whether or not I got to the finish line.  But so be it.

Another issue coming up.  I’m starting up teaching a course, my Winter 2019 MOOC at University of Maryland on “Validating a Business Model”.  I’ve had the luxury the last couple of months of no teaching responsibilities and was able to do Deep Work four days a week (and many of those days got up to a decent # of Pomodoros of Deep Work, so all to the good!).

That’s going to change now.  I have to think how to schedule my Deep Work in the week (which may affect my blogging schedule).  The course starts up Monday the 26th so I’ll have some new conclusions by then.

Lifehacking, Workhacking

Hack of the Week: Evernote to Scrivener

I’ve seen all kinds of allusions to hacks that allow integration between Evernote and Scrivener.

Kind of a specialized hack in some sense, but enough people seem to want the capability that it’s worth reporting a success.

Here’s what I got from a Denise Olson post on Moultrie Creek Gazette about how to send an individual Evernote note to Scrivener.  I’ve gotten it to work on my Mac Scrivener (3.x).

  1. Save the whatever-it-is to Evernote
  2. Make sure your Scrivener is open to a project where you want the note to go
  3. Tell Evernote to Print the note, and then pick the PDF option
  4. You will see an option to “Send PDF to Scrivener”
  5. The note will appear in pdf form in your Scrivener Research section.

OMG

7 Hard Problems

Summing up the Week’s Work

Once again, the vomitout proved more difficult than I thought.  As I said on Tuesday, some of that came from new sources creeping into the work.  That’s not at all a bad thing, but one of the massive challenges of this project is reining in the scope.  Each of the 7 Problems could be a book in itself (or more! cf. Marx or Freud or Kant) so the challenge is to 1) say something interesting about each one and 2) not get bogged down.  It’s easy in these vomitouts to kind of skate over the material at what we might call the “Wikipedia” level of detail.  Nothing wrong with that except that people can just go look at Wikipedia.

Also, once again, the material was completely relevant to current events.  The talk about muckers this week jibed 100% with new (and newly senseless) mass attacks.  The talk about debt and debt forgiveness jibed 80% with our environment of trade wars and “nationalism”.

So that’s heartening in the sense that the project continues to seem very relevant.  If individuals applying a “self-improvement” narrative to themselves can improve our overall human performance on these seven hard problems, my work will have all been worthwhile.

A couple of comments and “likes” this week, as well, which is very heartening to me.  Please keep commenting!  I’m basically doing all this blogging in order to hear from you.