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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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 20, 2015 · 8:16 pm

Giving

A Christmas Carol

During this holiday season it seemed appropriate to discuss gift giving and receiving this week. Having just read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in which the famous Ebenezer Scrooge undergoes a drastic transformation from a miser into a generous giver, I began to reflect on the change into attitude experienced towards Christmas and giving in general as one gets older. As a child one looks forward to Christmas thinking of all the presents you might get and what you’ll do with them when you finally get them, with little or no thought for giving anything to anyone else. As Dickens said in A Christmas Carol:

…for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.

Christmas as a child is a magical time, the only other day that really compares is your birthday. As a child it’s easy to come up with a long list of things you’d like to receive for Christmas. Then later, as an adult, it becomes much harder to come up with gift ideas, most of the things you really want, you’ve probably already bought for yourself and anything you might want, you could likely easily get for yourself as well whenever you choose to.

Once we’re older though and have enough income to buy the things we want without having to rely on others to buy them for us as gifts, one’s perspective on Christmas and gift giving in general likely undergoes a complete reversal. It’s no longer about what you can get, but what you’ll get for others. We begin to care more about making others happy than about getting or keeping more stuff for ourselves. After Scrooge has met with the ghosts, he tells his clerk:

A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavor to assist your struggling family…

When we give a gift we feel good, having done something nice for someone else. The act of giving can make us feel good both through internal and external means. We first feel good internally, before and as we are giving a gift from being generous, caring or helping someone else in someway. We then get a second boost from the external source of the other person receiving the gift, and hopefully responding positively and with gratitude. The giving of a gift, or even the gift itself doesn’t have to be extravagant to have this positive effect. I was reminded of a quote from Jack Keroac in The Dharma Bums about giving simple, not necessarily highly valuable gifts:

“Smith you don’t realize it’s a privilege to practice giving presents to others.” The way he did it was charming; there was nothing glittery and Christmasy about it, but almost sad, and somethings his gifts were old beat-up things, but they had the charm of usefulness and sadness of his giving.

The simplest gifts can often be the most well received, the more care or effort we’ve put into a gift, especially if we’ve made it ourselves, instead of just buying something from a store, can make a gift much more memorable, and likely to be cherished. Similarly, a gift that requires someone to go out and doing something can produce memories that last a lifetime, which can be far more valuable than something bought at a store.

When someone gives a gift they get an emotional boost from the act of giving, a feeling of goodness from having done something nice for someone else. On the receiving side, there can be quite the opposite effect. After the initial warm feelings have worn off from receiving a gift, we’re left with a feeling of indebtedness, we now owe this person for what they have given us. This desire to reciprocate is part of our nature, as explained by Tren Griffin in Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor:

The urge to reciprocate favors and disfavors is so strong that even someone smiling at you is hard not to reciprocate. The indebted feeling that humans have when they receive a gift tends to make a person feel uncomfortable until he or she can extinguish the debt. The urge to reciprocate in some way so as to cancel the debt is so strong that it can even make people give up substantially more than they would if the process was fully rational.

When giving a gift a large part of the struggle when picking something out, beyond finding something that you think the person might like, is trying to match the value of what they have given you in the past, or what you expect they might give you in the future. We don’t want to not give enough and not fully payback or cancel out the debt we feel that we owe, while at the same time, not putting the recipient in too great of a debt to us. Although feelings of generosity can make us give more than is strictly necessary, it’s better to give too much, than to not give enough.

This holiday season, focus less on what you can get and more so on how you can give. Gifts don’t have to come from a store, even spending time with someone could be considered a gift. Instead of just buying something that they likely don’t really need, you could take them somewhere to do something they enjoy or have always wanted to try. We generally only think of getting material things for gifts, because it’s easy. Coming up with an idea of what to get might be difficult, or time consuming, but once you finally do, you can get it and give it and not give it another thought. The true spirit of giving is showing that you care, which can be expressed simply through the gift of your time.

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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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December 6, 2015 · 7:56 pm

Biographies

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

Recently I’ve been wanting to read more biographies, to learn more about the historical figures who’s names most people have heard, but whose deeds we know much less about. I came across a book called Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin, which has many great quotes about learning and models which we can use when making decisions. Munger is the lesser known business partner of Warren Buffet and also a voracious reader and continuous learner. Early on in the book there was a quote which made a good case for reading more biographies as well as an explanation of why Munger has read so many of them.

Unfortunately, they are missing a key point: no one can ever be Charlie Munger, just like no one can be Warren Buffet. The point is not to treat anyone like a hero, but rather to consider whether Munger, like his idol Benjamin Franklin, may have qualities, attributes, systems, or approaches to life that we might want to emulate, even in part. This same process explains why Munger has read hundreds of biographies. Learning from the success and failure of others is the fastest way to get smarter and wiser without a lot of pain.

Reading a biography lets us learn about what someone accomplished in their life and how they were able to do what they did. Knowing how they were able to succeed, we can apply those lessons towards our own lives and work when we have to make decisions.

In addition to what someone did right in their life, by reading a biography we can also learn about the mistakes that they made. Learning about and from other’s mistakes hopefully allows us to do better if presented a similar situation, or teaches us how to avoid the situation entirely.

By reading many biographies we can fit multiple lifetimes worth of lessons into a much shorter period of time, since we don’t have to actually live them all out ourselves. By modeling ourselves on the best that humanity has and has had to offer we can work to become better than we otherwise might be. Regarding models for living Munger said:

There’s no reason to look only for living models… Some of the very best models have been dead for a long time.
–Charlie Munger, Berkshire Annual Meeting, 2000

Often a person’s life and contributions to humanity can’t be properly judged until after they have passed away. By modeling ourselves only after living people we risk choosing for models people who may start to live in a way which is no longer a worthy model to follow, that we may not recognize until it is too late. By also modeling ourselves after those who have already died we can benefit from history which will filter out those less worthy of emulation and highlight those of real value.

History allows us to learn about the lives of some of the greatest people who have ever lived and see not just what they contributed to humanity, but what they could have done better, allowing us to build on their work and correct mistakes that they made.

In America, we tend to view the founding fathers as almost godlike, infallible figures, but despite their achievements and lasting legacies, they were still only men, just as capable of making mistakes as anyone else. I recently read a biography of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham, which clearly illustrated the point within it’s introduction.

In the end, for all the debate and the division and the scholarship and the symposia, there may be only one thing about Thomas Jefferson that is indisputable: that the man who lived and worked from 1743 to 1826 was a breathing human being who was subject to the passion and prejudice and pride and love and ambition and hope and fear that drive most other breathing human beings.

Thomas Jefferson has gotten a lot of flak in modern times for his hypocritical views, including writing the Declaration of Independence, in which he declared “all men are created equal”, while being a slave owner his entire life. As president he worked to reduce the national debt, while also being in debt for most of his life.

Because of the reverence paid to the founding fathers, it seems to come as a bigger shock to us when we learn that they weren’t perfect and did in fact make mistakes. Even in his own time Jefferson recognized the attribution of superhuman knowledge and abilities to himself and those with whom he helped to found the country.

The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. “Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” he wrote in 1816.

They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved will of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present: and 40 years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading: and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

Even though the founding fathers were not perfect, they can still offer us many valuable lessons in living. Despite their flaws, they created a system of government which allows change, both to allow it to adapt to changing times, as well as to fix problems that have arisen from it. The passage of time has given us experience and changed philosophies which has allowed us to correct the most glaring mistakes within the system that they gave us.

History has yet to find anyone who has lived a perfect life, but offers us many who have lived good lives upon which we can model our own in an attempt to better ourselves. By reading many biographies we can accumulate lessons and models for living to better equip us for living and help us to be better people.

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November 29, 2015 · 10:27 pm

Gratitude

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

In the spirit of Thanksgiving it seemed appropriate to talk about gratitude this week. We frequently can find ourselves confronted with a problem or obstacle that seems unfair or too difficult to have to face, but for many of us there are those out there who would be grateful to only have to face the types of problems we do. As conditions change for the better we quickly adapt to our new normal and things that once seemed to be desirable or were only minor annoyances can soon be come to be seen as real problems.

We tend to undervalue the things that we already have and overvalue the things that we do not have, but would like to have. We think that acquiring a new gadget or a new car will make us happy, but not long after acquiring them the novelty will where off and we’ll start thinking about something new we would like to have, leading to a perpetual cycle of buying. Regarding these things that we don’t have, but would like to have, there is an excellent quote from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, Book Seven, Quote 27 translated by Gregory Hays as:

Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them. But be careful. Don’t feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them—that it would upset you to lose them.

I found that the quote was more commonly referenced from another translation of Meditations which puts it a bit more poetically, but expresses the same idea:

Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours. At the same time, however, beware lest delight in them leads you to cherish them so dearly that their loss would destroy your peace of mind.

If we were to suddenly lose the things that we currently have, but don’t properly value we would quickly learn how valuable they really were. We never know how long we might have something for, a natural disaster could come along and destroy everything that we’ve ever owned, or the loss of a job might force us to sell things just to survive. Even if none of that happens, time will inevitably take its toll, degrading, destroying or devaluing the things we once coveted so much. In the end we will likely find that thing that we just had to have and would do anything to get, was far less valuable than we’d initially thought. No matter what happens to us and our things, though, there is one thing that we will always have.

As part of Book Two, Quote 14 in Meditations, Marcus reminds us that the present moment of our life is the only thing we really have:

The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

The past is gone and the future is not promised to us, everything we own can be taken away, except for as long as we live we will always have the present moment, it is the only thing we can truly own. We can become attached to possessions, but if you stop to carefully examine each thing you own and consider its true value, beyond any sentimental value it may have, most of your possessions would likely be considered to be junk, or worthless by a complete stranger, with the exception of your life.

Perhaps the best time to practice gratitude is before eating, since as long as we have the essentials for survival, including something to eat, we don’t really need anything else, the rest is really just nice to have. In Eight Weeks to Optimum Health Dr. Andrew Weil recommends taking a moment of gratitude before eating for whatever has given its life so that we might preserve ours.

Most of us eat three times a day or more, so there is no shortage of opportunity. Moreover, the act of eating offers a profound glimpse into the mystery of life and the strange interconnectedness of spirit and matter. Life lives at the expense of other life. It matters not whether you are a carnivore or a vegetarian; you perpetuate your material existence by depriving other organisms of theirs. The recycling of forms in this way is a useful focus for contemplation, and we have a chance to look at it squarely every time we eat. I find that a useful technique for raising spiritual awareness is to take a moment before eating to remember our dependence on other living things and our need to take life in order to sustain life.

Life, at least in the present moment is the one thing we truly can own, and we would fight in order to preserve it if sometime tried to take it away from us, yet we regularly deprive other beings of their lives for the continuation of ours without giving it a second thought. You don’t have to be a spiritual or religious person to express a sentiment of gratitude for a meal in front of you and the life that went into creating that meal. Being at the top of the food chain, we’re lucky to not have to worry about being preyed upon by another creature for its sustenance.

As long as we have something to eat, drink and shelter we have something we can be grateful for. If we do not have these things then we have something of true value to desire and can be truly grateful for them when we do have them. Anything beyond the bare necessities for survival we should also be grateful for, as there are many who don’t even have those. Finally, we should be grateful just to be alive, because we never know how much time we have left.

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