Category Archives: Life

March 20, 2016 · 9:52 pm

Frugality

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

I’d been meaning to read a proper biography of Benjamin Franklin, having previously read his famous autobiography, and now finally have. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson gives a full account of his life and his numerous contributions not just to the creation and founding of the United States, but to humanity in general through his many inventions and scientific discoveries. Besides these great contributions Franklin is also remembered for his list of twelve virtues which he famously practiced in an effort at self-improvement, one of which he also frequently encouraged others to practice is frugality as a means of not just becoming wealthy, but to better aid mankind.

In addition to frugality Franklin also commonly espoused the virtue of industry, for together they allow one to secure a sufficient living to support oneself and not be indebted to others. For by remaining debt-free one can live for oneself and not be subject to the whims of others when payment comes due.

Perhaps the largest platform Franklin used to attempt to spread these virtues was in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in which they were a major theme, as Isaacson points out:

Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure. “Industry and frugality,” he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.”

Franklin did not just practice virtues for his own personal improvement, but also tried to help encourage others to improve themselves and become part of the growing middle class at the time. Even as a child Franklin was already practicing the virtue of frugality, as Isaacson explains:

As a young apprentice, Franklin had read a book extolling vegetarianism. He embraced the diet, but not just for moral and health reasons. His main motive was financial: it enabled him to take the money his brother alloted him for food and save half for books. While his coworkers went off for hearty meals, Franklin ate biscuits and raisins and used the time for study, “in which I made the greater progress from that greater clearness of head and quicker apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.”

Frugality does not mean that one must completely deny oneself of all luxuries, or even of seemingly essential necessities, like food, as Franklin did, but merely taking time to consider the value to be gained by spending money today, versus the value it could have if saved for the future. Through his industry and practice of frugality Franklin was able to retire at the age of 42 and could then spend his time studying and inventing and generally working towards more than just earning enough to survive.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin he describes how when he was first starting out in business he practiced the virtues of industry and frugality to build not only his business, but himself as well. Having helped to fund a subscription library in Philadelphia, Franklin took advantage of it to read and study in his free time instead of going out and spending money on less educational pursuits. Franklin describes his practice of the virtues and gives them as some of the reason of his success saying:

This library afforded me the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day, and thus repair’d in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me. Reading was the only amusement I allow’d myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolicks of any kind; and my industry in my business continu’d as indefatigable as it was necessary. I was indebted for my printing-house; I had a young family coming on to be educated, and I had to contend with for business two printers, who were established in the place before me. My circumstances, however, grew daily easier. My original habits of frugality continuing, and my father having, among his instructions to me when a boy, frequently repeated a proverb of Solomon, “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men,” I from thence considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction, which encourag’d me, tho’ I did not think that I should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner.

Once Franklin became successful he allowed himself more luxuries, but still spread a message of frugality and industry to others as a means of securing their own wealth to enable them to more easily practice virtue, as he says in his autobiography:

In 1732 I first publish’d my Almanack, under the name of Richard Saunders; it was continu’d by me about twenty-five years, commonly call’d Poor Richard’s Almanac. I endeavour’d to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand, that I reap’d considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it, I consider’d it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books; I therefore filled all the little spaces that occurr’d between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

By practicing both the virtues of industry and frugality, one can over time accumulate enough wealth to live comfortably. Industry being important for earning a sufficient income to have enough money to allow for some of it to be saved. And frugality being important to resist the temptation to spend all of the money that one earns through their industry immediately. While both virtues can be beneficial to have on their own, the combination of the two allows for a freer and less stressful life when one does not have to constantly worry about having enough money to cover current expenses.

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March 6, 2016 · 10:02 pm

Time

A Brief History of Time

This week I decided to re-read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in which he describes the origins of the universe and the history of our attempts to understand the laws that govern it through science. In the book Hawking literally starts at the beginning, with the question of when time began, and if it existed before the beginning of the universe. He starts off by looking at some philosopher’s thoughts on the beginning of time, before going into an explanation of our current scientific understanding, say:

The questions of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental (and very obscure) work Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. He called these questions antinomies (that is, contradictions) of pure reason because he felt that there were equally compelling arguments for believing the thesis, that the universe had a beginning, and the antithesis, that it had existed forever. His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever. As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: “What did God do before he created the universe?” Augustine didn’t reply: “He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.” Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

Even if there was something that existed before the beginning of our current universe, as Hawking explains, any information about it would have been lost when our universe began. Just attempting to ponder what could have possibly existed before the beginning of the universe is enough to make one’s head hurt.

After giving a summary of our major scientific theories and discoveries, Hawking eventually gets to Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. One of the major aspects of the theory is that time is not absolute. Each person, or observer, depending on their speed and location can experience the passage of time differently, in relation of another observer’s perception of it. As Hawking explains it:

An equally remarkable consequence of relativity is the way it has revolutionized our ideas of space and time. In Newton’s theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers would agree on the time that the journey took (since time is absolute), but will not always agree on how far the light traveled (since space is not absolute). Since the speed of light is just the distance it has traveled divided by the time it has taken, different observers would measure different speeds for the light. In relativity, on the other hand, all observers must agree on how fast light travels. They still, however, do not agree on the distance the light has traveled, so they must therefore now also disagree over the time it has taken. (The time taken is the distance the light has traveled–which the observers do not agree on–divided by the light’s speed–which they do agree on.) In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.

For example, for someone traveling at near the speed of light, they might experience the passage of a few years, only to return to earth and find that a few thousand years have passed there. Relativity also plays a very important role in the functioning of GPS satellites, where differences between the time on the satellite and that on the surface must be accounted for in order to accurately determine one’s location.

Although Hawking is talking about the actual passage of time, I was reminded of what Joshua Foer had to say in Moonwalking with Einstein in regards to our perception of the passage of time. We can find ourselves looking back at the past and wondering where the time went. As Foer explains, if we are not often having memorable moments, then our memories of our recent past will tend to blur together, leaving us with little to recall, and wondering what we did with our time, he says:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next–and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Our brains tend to ignore and discard common occurrences, which is why we might get to work and realize that we don’t remember anything from the drive there. By frequently having new and novel experiences or adventures, we create more opportunities for memories to form and stick, thereby lengthening our perception of time when we later recall our lives, even though time might have felt like it sped up during the experience. The opposite of course also holds, during a boring or routine experience, our perception of time in the moment may make it feel like it goes on forever, then later we will likely find that we can hardly recall anything about it. This phenomenon is known as psychological time, which Foer explains with a quote from the pioneering psychologist William James:

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

By attempting to live a varied and interesting life although it may feel like it goes quickly at the time, we will be able to look back and recall many of the interesting experiences we have had and hopefully feel like we have lived a full life. Whereas if we fall into a routine and experience little variety we may feel like our life is long as we live it, but then later find ourselves looking back at our life and wondering where the time went, as we have little to show for it. The passage of time is relative, we therefore have a choice as to how we would like to experience it, and the way in which we live our life is how we go about making that choice.

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February 28, 2016 · 9:59 pm

Obstacles

The Obstacle is the Way

This week I decided to take a look back at The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday, which serves as a modern introduction to Stoic philosophy. Using a variety of famous figures from more recent history as well as more recent historical events, Holiday explains how we can use Stoic philosophy to deal with the obstacles that we encounter in our lives. One of the main sources of inspiration for the book is of course the famous Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations. On dealing with obstacles, Marcus said in Meditations:

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it–turns it to its purpose, incorporates it into itself–so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

When nature encounters an obstacle it does not allow the obstacle to stop it, instead nature keeps pushing and working until it has found a way around, or through, the obstacle. This is perhaps best expressed through the metaphor of flowing water. When water encounters an obstacle, it does not stop, it eventually either finds a way around the obstacle, forces its way though it, or just drags the obstacle along with it, it does not allow the obstacle to stop it from proceeding for long. We should therefore attempt to be like the flowing water, not allowing obstacles to get in our way and simply just continue on in whatever course we can possibly follow.

In our own lives we will frequently encounter obstacles, and it is up to us to determine how we will face it, will be give up at the first sign of difficulty, or rise to the challenge and find a way past. One of the main tenants of Stoicism is being grateful, or expressing gratitude, for everything that happens to us, regardless of whether we actually wanted it to happen or not. On this point Holiday said:

It’s a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lie within adversities. We know that in overcoming them, we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered. There is little reason to delay these feelings. To begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best, when we could have felt that in advance because it was inevitable.

Often after something bad has happened to us, when we reflect back on it later, after having gotten past our initial reactions to it, dealt with it as best we could, and gained some perspective, we can find that ultimately there is a positive takeaway from what happened. As we were forced to find a way to deal with what happened. In the moment we are generally so occupied dealing with what is going on that we cannot take a step back and look at the event in a larger context and see how it might benefit us, only hindsight can really show us how we were able to grow and adapt because of it. If we try to keep in mind as bad things are happening, that when it is all over, we will emerge as a better and stronger person, it can help to keep us going and give us the strength to face the challenge before us.

Early in The Obstacle is the Way Holiday quotes from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations in which Marcus gives a concise explanation of how it is that we deal with, and benefit from obstacles when he says:

Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.
The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.

When faced with an obstacle we are forced to adapt, obviously we cannot continue in the direction that we were going and must change our approach. When we think that something has stopped us from proceeding, it really has not, if we are determined, we can continue on, it may just takes us longer to get where we were going now, as we have to find an alternate course.

Life is nothing but a continuing series of obstacles, each time we think that we have made it past and are in the clear, another one arises to block our path, or as Holiday put it towards the end of The Obstacle is the Way:

One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles.
On the contrary, the more you accomplish, the more things will stand in your way. There are always more obstacles, bigger challenges. You’re always fighting uphill. Get used to it and train accordingly.

After we have faced an obstacle and have grown and adapted from the challenge, instead of getting easier, things will tend to only get harder. As we have proven ourselves facing smaller obstacles, we will be presented with greater challenges, which will only have more, and larger obstacles for us to face. This is good for us, as the obstacles help to keep us busy and our life remains interesting. As frustrating and discouraging as it can be at times as we struggle to surmount the obstacle in front of us, consider how boring life would be if we were never challenged.

There will always be obstacles in life, that we cannot control, what we can control is our reaction to the obstacles that life presents us. Do we get frustrated and complain and ask why life is being so unfair to us, or do we take on the obstacle and find a way past it, and use it as an opportunity to grow. We will never reach the end of the obstacles, as long as we continue living, all that we can do, is accept that we will encounter obstacles along the way, and attempt to prepare ourselves to handle them as they come along.

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February 7, 2016 · 9:24 pm

Adventure

Shadow Divers

In one’s life there are many ways of obtaining a sense of joy, satisfaction and accomplishment, one of which is adventure. Adventures allow us to get away from the stresses of everyday life and do something both fun and challenging. They give us a real feeling of being alive. While contemplating the importance of adventure in one’s life I was reminded of some tales of real adventures I’d recently read. The first of which was Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson, the story of a quest to identify a sunken German U-Boat found off the coast of New Jersey, where no such boats were supposed to be.

The location of the wreck was originally given to Bill Nagle, one of the pioneers of wreck diving, who dove to depths nobody had been to before and was the first to explore many wrecks.

Nagle pushed deeper. Diving below 200 feet, he began doing things scientists didn’t fully understand, going places recreational divers had never been. When he penetrated a shipwreck at these depths, he was often among the first to see the vessel since it had gone down, the first to open the purser’s safe since it had been closed, the first to look at these men since they had been lost at sea. But this also meant that Nagle was on his own. He had no maps drawn by earlier divers. Had someone visited these wrecks before, he might have told Nagle, “Don’t brush against that outboard beam in the galley–the thing moved when I swam by, and the whole room might cave in and bury you if you do.” Nagle had to discover all this by himself. It is one thing, wreck divers will tell you, to slither in near-total darkness through a shipwreck’s twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of swirling silt and collapsing structure. It is another to do so without knowing that someone did it before you and lived.

With no guide to follow every dive was an adventure for Nagle, with the strong possibility that he would not come back up.

One of the divers Nagle brought with him to find out what was at a set of coordinates he was given, was John Chatterton. Chatterton had also been breaking ground in wreck diving, going deeper, and into seemingly inaccessible places before anyone else.

For the next three years, Chatterton owned the Doria. He penetrated into third class, second class, the first-class galley–all groundbreaking achievements that for years many had thought impossible. In a sport famous for hoarding, he gave away priceless Doria artifacts, asking fellow divers, “How many teacups does one guy need?” He gained a reputation as one of the best shipwreck divers on the East Coast; some said he might be among the best in the world. One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

Like Nagle, Chatterton pushed the limits of what seemed possible, and unlike many other wreck divers, did it not for the treasure he could get, but more for the adventure of going where no one else could.

Switching to the opposite end of the adventure spectrum, I also recently read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer an account of disaster at the top of Mount Everest. While attempting to reach the summit an unexpected storm came in, forcing many to fight their way back to camp, and ultimately killing five climbers.

Early in the book Krakauer gives a summary of the values of the climbing community. For them climbing is less about just getting to the top and more about the way in which one gets there, taking the most difficult paths.

And climbing provided a sense of community as well. To become a climber was to join a self-contained, rabidly idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large. The culture of ascent was characterized by intense competition and undiluted machismo, but for the most part, its constituents were concerned with impressing only one another. Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. Nobody was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware.

Deliberately choosing to take the more challenging path results in a greater adventure as you face the greater challenges encountered along the way, and a greater sense of accomplishment when you do finally make it to the top. As we complete each adventurous task we set for ourselves, repeating the same feat over again can quickly become boring, so we must then look for new mountains to climb, or new ways of climbing the same mountain, to maintain the same sense of adventure.

The slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of 1996; the credentials of many who’d come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or thinner. When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as thought half the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.

For most, the only reason for wanting to climb Mount Everest, is simply because it’s there, it’s a challenge to be faced, and conquered. Just getting to the top is liable to be the greatest adventure of one’s lifetime, assuming, of course, that you also make it back down.

To face the biggest challenges in life, even when we know that the odds are against us is what makes for the greatest adventures. Although, for most people, simply doing something new and different is enough to qualify as an adventure, even if others have done it before us.

Just getting out of the house and exploring where we live could be considered an adventure. Or trying a new sport. There are opportunities everywhere to create our own adventures and really live our lives, we just need to look for them and see the potential in the areas that surround us.

While we can’t all necessarily dive deeper or climber higher, finding someway to squeeze a sense of adventure into your life is what makes life worth living. Adventures are an opportunity to learn about yourself, who you are, and what your limits are, and the chance to push yourself to, and beyond them.

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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 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 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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December 27, 2015 · 9:40 pm

Resolutions

Letters from a Stoic

As the new year approaches most people start thinking of what resolutions they’d like to make for the new year, to attempt to improve their life and themselves. I just read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which had some good advice for living life and working to improve oneself. One quote in particular seemed especially appropriate at this time of year, as people are creating their resolutions for the next year. Regarding making plans for the future, Seneca said:

I shall put myself under observation straight away and undertake a review of my day – a course which is of the utmost benefit. What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.

When making resolutions most people tend to think only of what they would like to become or achieve and don’t consider their past and factor their own past behavior into their plans for the future. Instead of just focusing on the future, we should first look back at our past, particularly the previous year, and attempt to identify what mistakes we have made, or the things we wanted to do, but did not, before attempting to plan for the future. Our past can give us a strong indication of how we will likely behave going forward, despite our best intentions, and taking that into account, we can create a better and more realistic plan for the new year.

Instead of creating a single, large, difficult resolution, that will most likely get abandoned, or forgotten, after a month or two, we should instead break it down into smaller, more attainable goals that we can keep track of on a weekly or monthly basis. A large resolution is typically too vague, allowing us to put it off, after all, we’ve got the entire year to work at it. By dividing up a large goal into smaller, specific steps we can make more continuous, incremental progress towards our overall goal.

In addition to too vague goals, one of the other biggest impediments to attaining or accomplishing our goals is distractions. We allow ourselves to get distracted surfing the Internet or watching television instead of working towards our betterment. We end up doing what is easy, or tell ourselves that we’ll take a short break, then hours later find we’ve gotten distracted and haven’t accomplished what we’d intended to do. On distractions Seneca had this to say:

Let us cut out all distractions and work away at this alone for fear that otherwise we may be left behind and only eventually realize one day the swiftness of the passage of this fleeting phenomenon, time, which we are powerless to hold back. Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at.

It’s easy to get distracted, especially when we are trying to work on something difficult, although even when we have free time, the choice between doing something productive that can benefit us in the long-term and indulging in a short-term distraction requires an exercise of willpower and long-term thinking.

If we allow distractions to continuously occupy our time, we can find ourselves looking back at the past and wondering where the time went and realize that we have nothing to show for it. By seizing each day and working, no matter how little, towards our overall goals, we can look back at where we started and find that we’ve made large gains through a series of small steps.

Regarding distractions I was reminded of what another famous stoic, Marcus Aurelius had to say in Meditations:

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time–even when hard at work.

In addition to the obvious distractions, mindlessly surfing the Internet or sitting on the couch watching television, we can find ourselves seemingly actually working at something, but the work has no real benefit. Often when we have real work that we are supposed to be doing, but are not sufficiently motivated to do at the time we create busy work for ourselves, as a way to avoid working on our real task, while also being able to tell ourself that we’re still working. This busy work is just another form of distraction that can prevent us from achieving our goals. On trying to avoid and eliminate these distractions Marcus suggests:

Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”

While this is an incredibly simple way to try to avoid distractions, it is not so easy to do. It requires the awareness to remember to question what we are doing and why we are doing it. A good way to practice and develop this awareness is through meditation, where as you focus on your breathing, you should attempt to recognize when your thoughts are wandering, and return your focus back to your breath.

Although distractions can prevent us from accomplishing our goals, they are also a necessity. Without having some kind of outlet, we’d never be able to relax and replenish our willpower so that we can continue to work towards our goals with purpose and meaning. The trick is to find and work to eliminate or minimize the unnecessary distractions, while leaving ourselves the occasional release.

A key to avoiding distractions is to make resolutions, or set goals, that are attainable and measurable, by having something relatively small to work at, and being able to see our progress towards a goal, it helps to provide us with a feedback loop that can help motivate us to continue making progress, and working towards our goals.

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December 13, 2015 · 10:12 pm

Biases

Fooled by Randomness

Recently I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets which showed how we often mistake skill for luck when dealing with random events. Part of the reason why we make these mistakes is due to biases that we are unaware of, or do not take into account. Even when we think we’re evaluating things perfectly rationally we have inbuilt biases which can effect our evaluations.

While Taleb’s book mostly uses finance and financial markets as a basis for examples, I’ve found that finance can often provide us with examples and strategies for dealing with situations in everyday life outside of financial decisions.

One of our biggest biases is to rely too much on the past when trying to determine what can happen in the future. Obviously, the past is the only thing we really have as a basis when trying to predict the future, but the past can also restrict our thinking, as we tend to think that the future will look much like the past and don’t sufficiently plan for unexpected outcomes. Regarding this Taleb said:

We could be either too lax or too stringent in accepting past information as a prediction of the future. As a skeptic, I reject a sole time series of the past as an indication of future performance; I need a lot more than data. My major reason is the rare event, but I have plenty of others.
On the surface, my statement here may seem to contradict earlier discussions, where I blame people for not learning enough from history. The problem is that we read too much into shallow recent history, with statements like “this has never happened before,” but not from history in general (things that never happened before in one area tend eventually to happen). In other words, history teaches us that things that never happened before do happen.

When the unexpected happens we tend to be shocked and surprised, even though history is filled with instances of the unexpected happening. This surprise at the unexpected can be partially explained by two different biases, normalcy bias, in which we tend to expect things to continue happening in much the same way they have been and hindsight bias. When we look back at the past, things tend to look much less random and far more predictable than they actually were. Taleb explained hindsight bias by saying:

Past events will always look less random than they were (it is called the hindsight bias). I would listen to someone’s discussion of his own past realizing that much of what he was saying was just backfit explanations concocted ex post by his deluded mind.

In hindsight we can generally easily see why something happened that was completely unexpected at the time and wonder how we did not see it coming. The lesson that this should teach us, is that we are not being imaginative enough or looking for the possible, but improbable scenarios.

A book that illustrates how principles and lessons from finance can be applied to other areas in life, including sports, is Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which chronicles how the Oakland A’s used statistics and widely held biases, to find talent in unlikely places and build a winning baseball team on a budget. Lewis explained the connection between economics and baseball as:

Paul wanted to look at stats because the stats offered him new ways of understanding amateur players. He had graduated from college with distinction in economics, but his interest, discouraged by the Harvard economics department, had been on the uneasy border between psychology and economics. He was fascinated by irrationality, and the opportunities it created in human affairs for anyone who resisted it. He was just the sort of person who might have made an easy fortune in finance, but the market for baseball players, in Paul’s view, was far more interesting than anything Wall Street offered. There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t. There was also a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next. Thirdly–but not lastly–there was the bias toward what people saw in their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to the reality. There was a lot you couldn’t see when you watched a baseball game.

The A’s were able to take advantage of biases on the part of other teams, including their heavy reliance on recent past performance as an indicator of future performance to acquire talent for less. They also exploited the other team’s failure to consider certain types of people playing a position, just because that type of person hadn’t done it before. On the team’s ability to do what had never been done before Lewis said:

As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

Sticking with what has worked, or been done, in the past may continue to work in the future, but is unlikely to lead to unprecedented success, instead you must look for the opportunities that others have not, or cannot see, to reach new levels of success.

When making predictions about what is going to happen, we should be aware of how the past can bias and restrict our thinking and not just look for what seems like the most likely scenario, but also for the unexpected or improbable. By trying to think of the situations which may seem ridiculous or impossible, no matter how unlikely, and having a plan ready for them just in case, we can equip ourselves to take advantage of, or avoid them, while others are struggling to react. Because the one lesson we should really take from history is to always expect the unexpected.

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