Monthly Archives: January 2016

January 31, 2016 · 9:33 pm

Resilience

Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

This week I decided to review my notes from Eric Greitens’ Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life so that I could catch up on some other reading. Greitens, a former U.S. Navy SEAL offers advice on living life, and dealing with challenges, to a fellow SEAL having difficulties after leaving the service. From the title it is clear that book is about resilience, which is the ability to recover from challenges or setbacks. Early in the book Greitens offers an easy test for judging how resilient someone is likely to be:

But I do believe that there is one question that can tell you more than any other about people’s capacity for resilience. Ask them: “What are you responsible for?”
The more responsibility people take, the more resilient they are likely to be. The less responsibility people take — for their actions, for their lives, for their happiness — the more likely it is that life will crush them. At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results.

The more responsibility we have, it is likely, the more frequently we will face challenges or setbacks and must therefore either adapt and respond to the challenge, or else fail to fulfill our duties towards our responsibility.

When we are responsible for something, it is possible that we will not accomplish a goal we are tasked with completing, or not fulfill all of the requirements we are expected to in order to call the goal complete. If there were no possibility of failure, there wouldn’t be any responsibility. At some point during the process of attempting to accomplish the goal, it is likely that something will not go as planned, or something unexpected will arise, it is our resilience that determines our response to these types of situations. We can either give up and say that we cannot do something, or accept that something bad has happened, and figure out how we are going to deal with it, and what we can do to get past it. Or as Greitens puts it:

The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences — good and bad — of your actions. You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you deal with what happens to you.

When something does not go according to plan, often it is beyond our control, as long as we’ve attempted to plan for more than just a best case situation, if it is something that could not be foreseen, although it is not our fault that it happens, it becomes our responsibility to deal with the consequences of it.

When we take on a challenge, and succeed, even if there are no unforeseen problems that arise, it can still help to build our resilience. Any sufficient responsibility will likely involve some amount of stress, as we plan how we are going to handle the responsibility, and worry about potential negative outcomes. By facing this stress and worry, overtime our confidence can grow, making the next similar responsibility less stressful, as we learn that we can handle it.

Increasing our resilience requires us to take on more responsibilities and face the challenges that arise while trying to carry out that responsibility. By becoming more resilient, we learn new strategies for dealing with challenges. By facing a variety of challenges and finding appropriate solutions for each one, we can build up a store of potential solutions to draw upon in the future. So even though a particular challenge may be one which we have not faced before, it could be similar to one that we have seen, and we can then use a similar solution, or combination of solutions which we used in the past to deal with the current challenge.

Much of Greitens’ philosophy reflects that of the ancient Stoics, the most famous of whom is of course Marcus Aurelius who had expressed a similar sentiment about accepting what happens to us, both the good and the bad:

You take things you don’t control and define them as “good” or “bad.” And so of course when the “bad” things happen, or the “good” ones don’t, you blame the gods and feel hatred for the people responsible–or those you decide to make responsible. Much of our bad behavior stems from trying to apply those criteria. If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.

While we cannot control everything that happens to us, we can control our reaction to it. Bad things will happen to us, it’s a fact of life, but how we react to them determines who and what we are as a person. Do we accept challenges as they arise and use them as opportunities to grow, or do we give up and let life defeat us? Marcus offers some advice on how to deal with situations when things go against us:

And why is it so hard when things go against you? If it’s imposed by nature, accept it gladly and stop fighting it. And if not, work out what your own nature requires, and aim at that, even if it brings you no glory. None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good.

There are many things that we just cannot change, nature especially, the only thing we have the complete ability to change is ourselves and we can use these challenges as learning opportunities, to identify the skills or knowledge that we do not yet have, but will need to acquire in order to get past the challenge in front of us.

As we accept responsibilities and learn to handle the challenges that arise while working to fulfill them, over time we become more resilient, and better equipped to handle greater responsibilities, and the greater challenges that come along with them. By agreeing to take on ever greater responsibilities and facing the greater challenges that come with them we can shape who we are and allow ourselves to grow.

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January 24, 2016 · 9:58 pm

Self-Control

Thinking, Fast and Slow

This week I started reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow about how we think and biases that can arise from our intuitive thoughts and judgment. One thing that really stood out to me was a relationship between self-control, intelligence, and academic performance. Intuitively, it would seem that intelligence would have a greater effect on academic performance than self-control. While self-control is required to complete work, generally the greater one’s intelligence, the better they will do in school and other academic or intellectual tasks.

I was reminded of some similar findings which were presented in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, where quoting from some research it was explained that:

“Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not…Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

No matter how intelligent someone is, if they don’t have the discipline and self-control to sit down and do the work required of a course, they are not going to do well. While someone with slightly less intelligence, but greater discipline and self-control can complete the work and earn better grades.

Unfortunately, willpower, which we use to exercise our self-control and maintain our focus on a particular task, is a finite resource; having to exert your willpower throughout the day to get work done and maintain your focus on a task will deplete your reserves. This can lead to negative effects later, as Kahneman explains:

It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.

When we are distracted, or at the end of a long day, it can become difficult to find the motivation to do any more work, or resist the temptation of sitting on the couch and relaxing. Having spent the entire day doing the work that you have to do, it can be very difficult to get home, then do the work that you want to do, to improve yourself , or just to get things done, having done so much work already. This problem was also expressed through an analogy in The Power of Habit where Duhigg said:

There’s been more than two hundred studies on this idea since then, and they’ve all found the same thing. Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.

Like any muscle, our willpower can become tired from continuous use throughout the day, when we have to do the things that others want us to or require us to do, rather than the things we’d like to be working on. The bright side of this comparison of willpower to a muscle, is that like a muscle, our willpower can be strengthened through practice and training. As Kanheman states in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. Other research by the same group identified specific genes that are involved in the control of attention, showed that parenting techniques also affected this ability, and demonstrated a close connection between the children’s ability to control their attention and their ability to control their emotions.

By building our attention we can improve our self-control and discipline. This can also have lasting effects on our intelligence. Although the study focuses on academic performance, it seems reasonable to conclude that any intellectual work could benefit from an increased attention span and greater self-control and discipline while working.

While there are many ways to train one’s attention, an easy one that can be done almost anywhere is through the practice of meditation, which can have benefits beyond an improved attention span and ability to concentrate. As Shunryu Suzuki explains in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go. Then they will be under control. But this policy is not so easy. It sounds easy, but it requires some special effort. How to make this kind of effort is the secret of practice. Suppose you are sitting under some extraordinary circumstances. If you try to calm your mind you will be unable to sit, and if you try not to be disturbed, your effort will not be the right effort. The only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. We say concentration, but to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

By practicing meditation, especially when your willpower is depleted, or you are distracted and do not really feel like sitting, over time one can build up both one’s self-control and willpower, simply by sitting when we don’t want to, as well as our attention span, by maintaining our focus and concentration on our breathing.

By strengthening our willpower we can not only focus better and concentrate more on our work, but summon the motivation to get work done even when we do not feel like doing it as well as resist temptations when they arise in our lives. Stronger willpower can help us to get more done at work or school, then leave us with enough reserves to do our own work when we get home and resist the temptation to relax and put off our work of improving ourselves until we have had an easier day.

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January 17, 2016 · 9:33 pm

Habits

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

As it’s still early in the new year, it seemed like a good time to reread Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business for a reminder of how to go about changing bad habits, or establishing new good ones. Habits have the power to free up our mental processes to allow us to get things done without constantly having to make the same decisions over and over again, but if we allow a bad habit to get established it can lead to a struggle as we have to actively work to avoid and change the habit to prevent the bad behavior from continuing in our lives. As the books’ introduction points out, we likely have far more habits than we are aware of:

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892. Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

Without habits and routines we’d never be able to get anything done, having to constantly make the same decisions each day, what to have for breakfast, which route to take to work. Habits allow our brains to go into a sort of autopilot, leaving us the more important decisions to make. While habits are essential for our daily functioning, if we are not careful, we can also end up with bad habits, as they can easily form without us noticing, until it is too late. The key to any habit is the habit loop, as Duhigg explains:

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.

To establish a new habit, we likely already know the routine we would like to accomplish, so to help motivate ourselves and to establish the habit, we should choose a reward for accomplishing the routine, such as a smoothie after a workout. Then all that is needed is a cue to trigger the habit, so to continue with the workout example, as soon as you get home from work, you will workout, then reward yourself with a smoothie. By following this habit loop, over time it will become ingrained and automatic.

To change an existing habit, the routine is generally already known, so the cue and the reward must then be identified. Once we know the cue that causes us to execute the habit, and the reward that we are seeking from it, through a conscious effort, we can work to shift the routine when we see the cue. By keeping the cue and the reward the same, we modify the existing habit, instead of having to completely erase, or establish new habits, which can be much more challenging.

While most people are likely more concerned about correcting their bad habits than establishing news ones, having positive habits in our lives can lead to changes in our other habits as well. Another interesting book on habits and routines, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey opens with an explanation of the importance of routine for people in creative fields:

The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” Ironically, James himself was a chronic procrastinator and could never stick to a regular schedule.

Artists are typically pictured as free-spirited people, that work when they are inspired; but in order to consistently create quality work many rely on a routine to keep themselves working each day, whether they are really feeling inspired or not.

Finally, I was reminded of a wonderful quote from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, in which he points out how quickly we can fall into a new habit or routine, or end up following the paths of others with very little thought.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

The malleability of both the earth and our brains are quite similar in this regard, we can quickly wear a path which we follow without thinking and once established find it takes more effort to clear a new path than it did to create the original. By observing what causes us to fall into a habit loop, and the reward we receive at the end of it, over time we can change our bad habits for the better. Or, by carefully choosing appropriate rewards and easy to follow triggers, establish new good habits. It all relies on the deliberate observation and planning of our own habit loops.

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January 10, 2016 · 9:20 pm

Practice

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

While rereading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, I was struck by the book’s suggestions on how to go about practicing, which although it was within the context of meditation, still seemed applicable for anything in life which we must practice at. Just the title alone gives us one of the major points that seems to contradict our normal way of thinking about learning. Generally when learning something new we want to quickly get past our beginning mistakes and into a more proficient practice, failing to recognize the value in our lack of knowledge. As Suzuki says regarding “beginner’s mind”:

In Japan we have the phrase shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind. Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen to you if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it. The same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while you will keep your beginner’s mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind.

When we first start learning something we generally have no clue what we are doing. We have the potential to go in almost any direction. As we being to learn more though, the knowledge we acquire can start to restrict our thinking. What might have initially seemed like an important question or suggestion will seem ridiculous after we have learned better. As we practice then, we will no longer look in that direction, as we know, or think we know, that there is nothing to be found over there. But often it is in these directions, rather than in the well worn paths that that new and interesting ideas can come from. The right, or seemingly right, path has already been explored, and most of the major discoveries already made, while the path we believe we know better than to traverse may still contain much to be explored. By maintaining a beginner’s mind and leaving ourselves open to possibilities that might seem absurd we may discover the solution to a problem we are facing in an unexpected location.

While we are learning, and practicing what we are working to learn, we can become discouraged as we find that we have not yet met our expectations of where we would like to be, or are not progressing as quickly as we’d like. While having goals and expectations is important for beginning to practice, they can also end up hurting our practice if failing to meet them causes us to get discouraged and to stop practicing. On discouragement when practicing Suzuki said:

Even when you practice zazen alone, without a teacher, I think you will find some way to tell whether your practice is adequate or not. When you are tired of sitting, or when you are disgusted with your practice, you should recognize this as a warning signal. You become discouraged with your practice when your practice has been idealistic. You have some gaining idea in your practice, and it is not pure enough. It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice. At that time, forgetting all about your mistake and renewing your way, you can resume your original practice. This is a very important point.

Often when we practice something with a particular goal in mind we can become discouraged as we fail to meet our expectations. It is then that we should remind ourselves that it is more important that we are taking the time to practice than necessarily hitting our goals as quickly as we would like to. If we maintain consistent and deliberate practice then eventually we will improve at what we are working at, perhaps not as quickly as we would like, but eventually.

When attempting to learn anything practice is critical, both as part of the initial learning process and then later to actually retain what we have learned. Regarding practice and the importance of it in life-long learning I was reminded of a quote from Charlie Munger which I had read in Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you …. So if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning. I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multidisciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to others, and it’s made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps.

We can spend a lifetime learning about a wide variety of topics, but if we don’t frequently go over the material and find a way to practice it, we are liable to quickly forget what we have learned. Munger offers a suggestion for how to go about a practice of life-long learning:

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

By developing a habit of frequent reading and consistently practicing it we can slowly build up our knowledge over time. Of course as part of this it is also important to try to maintain a beginner’s mind throughout, as the acquirement of knowledge works to restrict our thinking to what we know, or think we know, we should leave ourselves open to all possibilities

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January 3, 2016 · 9:17 pm

Creating

The Great Bridge

Recently I have been reading The Great Bridge by David McCullough, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and which not just describes the construction of the bridge, but also details the people that made it happen. Reading about such an enormous and lasting creation got me thinking about the importance of creating and the effects it can have on one’s life. The bridge was originally designed by John A. Roebling who when describing his creation said the following, while it was still just a proposal:

The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age. Its most conspicuous features, the great towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and as a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.

He set out to design something that was not just functional, but that could also be appreciated as a work of art. Over 130 years later it still stands and is one of the most recognizable bridges in the world. While not exactly modest, his description of the bridge generally seems to have held up, and at the time was rather accurate, he certainly had a great appreciation for his work.

Following an accident during preparations for the building of the bridge Roebling ended up dying of a tetanus infection before he could he see construction even start on his great bridge. His early death did seem to have one noticeable affect on the public as McCullough describes:

Flags were flown at half-staff all over Brooklyn, and when it came time to take the body down to the ferry, to start the trip to Trenton, there was slow going in the streets because of the crowds. As a subject of popular interest, Roebling seemed a more notable success dead than alive. His training, all his ambition and ability, his entire life’s work had been building toward this greatest of bridges and he had not lived to do it–that was a tragedy people could readily understand regardless of how little previous interest they may have had in either the man or his work.

Even though Roebling did not live to see even the start of construction, he left behind sufficient plans that his son was able to take over and manage the construction of the bridge. Just what he was planning to do was enough to draw people to recognize his life and the tragedy of not living to see his greatest work built.

While we all can’t build things as grand as the Brooklyn Bridge, taking time to create, anything, can help us to find, or create meaning for our lives. In the classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl describes three ways in which to find meaning in life:

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

While all are valid ways to find meaning in life, by creating we can define our own meaning, instead of allowing others or our life circumstances to determine the meaning of our life for us. Everyone suffers at some point and the way we deal with suffering can show our strength and shape who we are and how we live our life. If meaning for a life can be found through the passive appreciation of other’s creation, then by creating something, we can not just find meaning for our life, but help others to find meaning for their own life.

By creating, we can take a more active role in shaping our life and determining how we will be remembered. If our life circumstances are such that we cannot possibly do anything, then there can be meaning in our response, how we react to the situation. But if our circumstances allow us the opportunity to do more than just react, then we owe it to ourselves to take advantage of the opportunity to do something, while we still have it. On these opportunities to act and shape our lives and the world around us Frankl said:

The man who experiences his way of being merely as something totally provisional is no longer taking his life quite seriously. So he is at risk of a kind of life in which he does not actualize the possibilities that are offered to him, but rather he forfeits them: he lets them pass him by. He constantly waits for something, without doing his part to make it happen. He becomes fatalistic. Instead of acting from the consciousness of a responsibility, he has the point of view that he should let things go, laissez aller, and let other people do as they please–laissez faire. He changes from a human subject into a mere object–an object of circumstances, of current conditions, of the moment in history. But he overlooks the fact that in history nothing has already been done–rather, everything is to be done. He overlooks the extent to which current conditions depend on him, the fact that they are creatively shapeable; he forgets that he bears a share of the responsibility.

Our consumer culture pushes us to consume ever more, leaving us less and less time to create something of our own. By taking action we can actively create our own history, instead of allow it to happen to us, or be created for us. Creating could be in the form of writing, art, music; but creation doesn’t have to mean the making of a physical object or something tangible. We can create experiences by arranging for something to happen, we can create relationships by interacting with others. Anything that allows us to actively decide what we are going to do and live with intention, instead of merely passively accepting what life hands us and waiting for something to happen.

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