The Problem Is...

Imagine a big pothole on the road. A farmhand is driving a truck full of eggs from the farm to the market. The truck falls in and out of the pothole. Eggs break.

The farmhand says The Problem is the truck can’t fly over the pothole. So the farmer and the engineer start building wings and jetpacks for the truck.

What if the farmhand said The Problem is there is a big pothole on the way to the market, the truck falls in the pothole which makes the eggs break. Now the farmer can do several things: call the county to repair the pothole, repair the pothole themselves, try a different route, give the farmhand a taller seat, or glasses or both so the farmhand can see the pothole coming and swerve, put better shocks and springs on the truck, put the eggs in a padded basket, and on and on.

The way we state a problem drives how we fix it.

Jet packs or simple pothole repairs? Which is easier?

Intellectual Humility

We often think we are above average than our peers:

• We think our personality is better than most people we know — that we are kinder, intelligent, loving and more giving than others
• We think we have better attitude
• We have more self esteem

This is called Self-Serving Bias.

Majority of us cannot be above average… this is not how average works! But this trait can help us be resilient. People with depression have less self-serving bias — they tend to have a more accurate view of themselves in relation to their peers.

It sounds like Self-Serving bias is a good thing: more resilience, less depression — what’s not to like about it? It can make us less humble.

Enter Intellectual Humility.

This is everyday humility plus reflection. This is reflecting accurately about our own emotions and intentions, about our personality and attitude.

By first being humble, and then reflecting on our limitations and gaps, can we start being curious about getting better.

Here is an intellectually humble question and I don’t know the answer to it: does this mean people predisposed with depression will have trouble finding curiosity? Would exploring unknowns make them feel less capable than their peers? Does their depression turn into a slippery slope, from “I don’t know how this works” to “I must be incompetent”? How does someone struggling with depression find curiosity?

Thoughts?

Choice Blindness

When you ordered the hamburger instead of the salad, were you intentional?

After you have already ordered, you may say it was intentional.

“I’ve been going for daily walks”

“I ate a salad earlier this week”

“I’m going to the gym tomorrow”

“One burger isn’t going to hurt my health”

It is our nature to stand behind our choices, even if it is the wrong choice. I am not saying an occasional burger is a wrong choice, that is for you to decide.

We do this with work all the time.

“I thrive in meetings all day”

“It’s normal to get so many emails over a weekend”

“Everyone works on Sunday evenings to catch up”

“60 hour weeks are normal in my career”

Brad Stulburg calls this Motivated Reasoning in his book Practice of Groundedness

The first step to better is to recognize this blindspot. We can not effectively fix the blindspot and bridge the gap if we don’t know what the gap is.

Footnote: I first head of the idea of Choice Blindness from the book, Making Habits Break Habits. This book is a gold-mine of ideas! Read more about understanding Choice Blindness to break bad habits in this book. There is more via study by Johansson, P., L. Hall, S. Sikstrom, and A. Olsson 2005 "Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task"

Ego Depletion

This is one of those ideas that provides missing pieces to so many puzzles.

Willpower is limited. It is like a muscle. When you have friction and stress, you need willpower to keep going. The more you use willpower, the less you have left to use, until you can replenish it. This is ego-depletion in a nutshell.

What sucks my willpower?

• Doing anything that it outside natural routine
• Incessantly checking email to not miss anything
• Last minute meetings
• Fires to put out
• Narcissistic people
• Ever-expanding to-do list
• Impossible deadlines

How to replenish it? We are still learning how to replenish willpower, though here are ways that have worked for me.

• Rest, rest, rest — when my day starts getting tough, I start simplifying the evening
• Turn rumination into questions: when my willpower depletes, I start ruminating about hypothetical ways problems will arise. I have started to turn those ruminating thoughts into questions via this TED talk. Having a question to answer energizes me to think of a viable solution instead of losing willpower to suffering in the problem
• Reflect on Core Values: Having a simple list of the values that are important can give you a temporary boost
• Reflect On Good Outcome of Goals: Not fantasizing but imagining what a good outcome looks like can also help with a temporary boos to willpower

What sucks your willpower? How do you replenish it?

For more information on this topic, see paper "Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?", 2000 by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven and Tice

Slow Hunch

Good ideas generally don't come from a bolt of inspiration. They first form as a slow hunch.

Here is the hard part: we have to be open and receptive to slow hunches so they grow in our brain.

The bolt of inspiration lands when a slow hunch crystalizes into an idea. Newton must have been thinking about Gravity before the apple fell. Archimedes must have been immersed in thinking about mass and weight before he had the "Eureka" moment in the bathtub. They all had slow hunches or intuitions.

Here are some of my slow hunches:

• Re-read books from the last five years that left me sad because I had finished reading them
• When I don’t feel like following my schedule, it is a sign that I need rest
• Pick up woodworking again, even if I have not done it in five years
• Take a pause on my hobby of Grassroots car racing
• Double down on Attention, hone it, craft it, deepen the roots

Further reading on this topic is “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson, 2011. It’s on my reading list.

Variety in My Reading Diet

A sure-shot way for me to lose interest in reading is when it gets monotonous. Reading gets monotonous if I read book after book without extracting new ideas from it, when book after book feels stale. Pursuit of unknown-unknowns is key, and this comes from reading a variety of books.

Plus, I love making connections between two ideas taken from two very different contexts. Here are two examples: Management and Team Building principles from Italy Talgam’s Ignorant Maestro (which is about Symphony conducting) and Suzanne Clothiers Bones Would Rain From The Sky (which is on dog training)!

I get majority of reading recommendations from the books that I am already reading. When an idea I am reading stands out, I look at the footnotes to see what paper or book the author is referencing. If the idea looks rich, I add the source book to my reading list.

Getting to the source material an important activity — A book is an author’s interpretation of the source idea. Interpretations are selected by authors to forward their own thesis. It reflects the author’s worldview and their biases — and these are valuable. It is the photograph of a slice of cake from a specific angle.

But also of value to me is the original idea in the source material — I don’t know what that might spark in my own thoughts. This is like getting to the whole cake so you get to decide what it tastes like.

Now, source material has its limits. It keeps me within the same echo chamber of the idea. It is important for me to get out of the echo chamber.

This is why I have challenged myself to get reading recommendations from novel sources this year. Here are how I plan to do them:

• Ask friends what they are reading — I have three new recommendations from friends and acquaintances so far
• Stroll around a library and pick up books that sound good
• Stroll around a used book store — this will require some traveling since good used book stores are on the decline. I discovered Phillip Pullman’s excellent “His Dark Materials” trilogy browsing down cluttered aisles of a used book store
• Join a book club — this is harder than it seems. I crave face-to-face discussions. This is nearly impossible given the small town I live in and the unstoppable pandemic. I’ll settle for Zoom.

Literature Notes

I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Fleeting Notes

If I am going to devote a lot of time reading a book, I want to remember what caught my attention. This is my way to honoring the attention I give, by capturing ideas in the book that provide an attachment-point for my attention.

Attention comes from the latin word Tenere which means to stretch and make tense (via Matt Crawford The World Beyond Your Head).

So I take notes as I read.

• I read with a notepad and pencil by my side
• I mark the books with a pencil — underline or double vertical lines in the margin
• This is key — I don’t mark sections that don’t interest me and only mark those ideas make my eyes go wide. My job is not to write a book summary, but to distill those ideas that provide a robust-enough attachment point.
• I note the page number on a note pad and the name of the idea, just a few words
• Sometimes I will quickly jot down a connecting thought or story that surfaced so I can explore it later

Once I finish reading, I will use the Fleeting Notes as a prompt to write Literature Notes, more on this another day.

I find this incredibly helpful when I pick up the book after a few days break — a quick refresher of the ideas that caught my eye.

Writing by hand is found to increase retention in a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in 2014.

How do you read non-fiction?

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

My Reading Habit

Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

• Deleted all social media apps
• Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
• Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
• Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
• Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
• Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!