On this day

November 27th

The core group

November 27

Some assembly required. It’s always written on the package as a sort of warning: This thing looks fun… see the photo on the box? …well it it’s not going to be like that… until you put some effort in. Is there an adjective-form of that phrase?

I am conservative about varying the membership of meetings or groups because each person gained or lost resets the entire group’s confidence that they are on the same page. Attendance matters a great deal for the same reason. Other attendees can come and go but there must be some core group that identifies as such and shows up consistently.

~ Andrew Bosworth from, https://boz.com/articles/mutual-knowledge

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It turns out that everything is always some-assembly-required. Anything that isn’t some-assembly-required is of little value (and probably of no value.) Some-assembly-required implies the result is more than the simple sum of the parts.

Life gets interesting—deeply enjoyable and fulfilling—when I can find a some-assembly-required group of people. The question I continue to have, each time I imagine a potential group, is: Can people simply assemble into a group? …or must there be something around which they assemble?

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Looking at new things

November 27, 2022

The third reason is that looking at new things, even if they’re just new streetcorners or deer trails, helps me recover a certain uncomplicated way of looking at things that used to be automatic when I was a kid.

~ David Cain from, https://www.raptitude.com/2022/05/how-to-get-the-magic-back/

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Just as I read this, it occurred to me that a big part of the “magic” of my experience with Art du Déplacement (aka parkour) came from the effect that Cain is describing. I’ve always felt that when I decide to “just go out” and try to train, there was always some component of magic missing. By myself, it always felt simply as if I was slogging away at “exercise.” When I’m invited by others to join them, quite often somewhere I’ve not previously been, there’s a lot of “looking at new things” that happens automatically. Randonautica (click through to Cain’s article) is clearly one way to force that novelty upon oneself.

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Specific

November 27, 2021

In fact, some of the best advice comes in the form of clichés. Be yourself. Seize the day. Fake it till you make it. Despite how trite these phrases sound now, they are still deep, paradigm-shifting insights about being human. They’ve undoubtedly changed countless lives, which is how they became trite. Precisely because these principles have been discovered and expressed many times, in many contexts, they’ve become too general and too familiar to revolutionize how someone does something.

~ David Cain from, https://www.raptitude.com/2021/11/advice-gets-good-when-it-gets-specific/

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Everyone knows by now that the ‘S’ in SMART goals stands for “specific.” I completely agree with Cain. My experience has been that magic happens if I can—when appropriate, when asked—give both the generic cliché and a specific example. For example, “Fake it ’til you make it. People can detect confidence. So work to overcome your nervousness and self-doubt by keeping your communication as simple as possible. Simplify until you have clear, simple statements and clear, simple requests.”

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Think for yourself

November 27, 2020

That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: You can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: How much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

~ Peter Thiel

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Getting things done

November 27, 2019

GTD

The fact that you can’t remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn’t mean that you’re not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It’s all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you’ve given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you’ve created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can’t do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of you psyche will continue to hold you accountable.

~ David Allen from, Getting Things Done

I talk often about David Allen’s, Getting Things Done. It’s one of a few books which I keep extra copies of on hand to give to people. There’s a Wikipedia article, Getting Things Done, but it talks more about it rather than describing what/how to do it.

I recently found a talk given by Allen which has been repurposed as a short podcast; Getting Things Done: 55 – Removing System Drag is well worth the few minutes it takes to listen.

Aside: Learning when and how to “go deep” is an important part of what you gain when you understand GTD. If the thought of spending five minutes listening to someone teach you something abhors you, you may need GTD more than you think. /preaching

If, however, what Allen said interests you, a fellow podcaster named Jey Jeyendran, (of Productivity Heaven,) is working on a mini series of podcasts on Allen’s GTD. They’re bite-sized, inspiring and you should check them out. https://productivity-heaven.simplecast.com.

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On blame

November 27, 2018

What I like about that phrase, “I hate the person who invented Mondays,” is that it reveals the absurdity of one of our very human habits. We have a tendency to find some part of our environment to scold — a person or thing — whenever we run into some kind of problem in our lives. Something unpleasant happens unexpectedly, and the emotion of blame arises. We search for a source to our suffering, and fix our dislike on it and align ourselves against it, as if our sheer, bitter ill-will can transmute a part of life we hate into something we like.

~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2009/11/blame-is-useless/

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It’s important for me to distinguish between cause and blame. Cause—it seems to me—is something I can work at picking apart. It’s unlikely I’d have a full understanding of cause-and-effect in any random situation, (“why exactly did that guy just spill his beer on me,” is pretty complicated after all,) but picking at the threads of the seemingly unknowable knot-that-is-the-cause… That tends to lead me to a more thoughtful view of the world. And a more thoughtful view invariably leads me to a more optimistic view of the world.

Here’s a tangential thought as an example: Is it “Western Civilization” that is taking over the world? Or is it “Best Civilization” is taking over, and the areas we label “western” have just gotten to the ideas [all, some, or just one in particular under discussion] first? If I ditch, “who’s to blame,” for the specific changes in civilization which I dislike [think: social media] and instead ask, “what is causing that change?”… well, that changes my view of things significantly.

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Plan, Measure, Suceed?

November 27, 2015

(Part 5 of 36 in series, 10,000 Reps Project)

Heading into the holiday season usually means falling off the “activity” wagon in addition to over-eating. Since I’m deep into my 10k project, I’ve been working with my accountability partner ( Hi Clif! :) to map out my training goals. So the idea is to have a plan of exactly what I’m supposed to do on which days. (Plus the other regular stuff I’m doing well with as general habits — parkour class on Sundays, Tracy and I running Tuesday/Thursdays, walking regularly, etc.)

So here’s a glimpse behind the curtain and what happens at my desk nearly every day to keep the planning on track. Here’s my most recent message to Clif where I’m checking in. Below, if you care, I’ll explain a bit more about what’s going on here:

did today’s 10k stuff; no problem
tomorrow is another set of 10k stuff (with a trivial bump of +10 bar precisions) AND the pullup assessment
saturday very busy, heading into Brooklyn and no idea what sunday holds
but sun/mon are planned-clear so I’ll still be on track
still have to decide what I’m doing with pullups starting next week…
I have “50” pencilled in under pullups, and then a regular +5 increase just to see how it plays out for catching up the pullup numbers:

Screen Shot 2015-11-27 at 11.31.29 AM

…so there’s a lot happening.

  • “10k stuff” refers to the set of 5 exercises (pushups, pullups, body-weight squats, seconds-in-handstand and bar-to-bar precisions) that I’m attempting to do 10,000 repetitions of within one year.
  • Rows in the spreadsheet are days. Today was day 129, Friday Nov 27, so that row has “actually did” numbers.
  • Weeks start on Mondays. This week has yellow cells on Saturday — that’s “planned” repetitions — and zeros on the cells where I have a day off.
  • Daily is the number of reps, Total is the running total number since day one, Remaining is the spreadsheet subtracting from 10,000, and Rate is the spreadsheet computing how many reps I would have to do EVERY SINGLE DAY to the end of the 365 days to make it to 10k.
  • RATE is like the ticking clock of death. If that number is creeping UP, things will get harder and harder as I dig a hole of reps that I have to finish in a sprint. Bear in mind that if I injur or overwork some part of me, then I have to take a rest, and the rate just keeps tic tic ticking upward.
  • Next week – days 132-138 are sketched out tentatively. When I report in to Clif with an actual plan, the cells will be “locked in” colored yelllow.
  • This week (that I’m finishing) and next week are odd: I’m jiggering the reps to pull four of the exercises to matching total counts on Monday, day 139. I’ve been tinkering for weeks so that they all align AND pass over 2,000 reps in the same workout. Just a fun short-term motivational thing.That’s why tomorrow, bar pre’s goes up to 70 and then down to 40 next week.
  • Pullups are my weakest activity. For the last 24 days, I’ve run twice through a 12-day “pullup increase program”. I started with a max possible of 3 [crappy] pullups, and now I’m up to 5 easy, clean pullups, with a 6th and 7th available to max out. So you can see the problem: The “rate” under pullups says about 38, meaning I have to about 80 pullups every other day to make the pace. But if I can only do little sets of 3 or 4, then doing 80 takes like an hour. So I’ve been focusing on the pullup program so I can get up to some real rep numbers. (Every pullup that I do as part of the program I mark down though.) Saturday (tomorrow!) is the assessment day at the end of the second cycle through the pullup program. When I see what I have for a number, I’ll decide if I’m going to just go back to doing small-number sets (what the spreadsheet has pencilled in as 50, 55, 60 etc) or if I’m running the pullup program a third time.

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