pko.ch

So, I kinda blogged daily lately. I didn’t quite enjoyed it as much as I thought I would. Two and a half reasons:

• It would always be an afterthought in the day. I would only remember I hadn’t written right before bed. Doing something in this setup was always unpleasurable. Yes, yes, I know. Make habits and whatnot. Still, that’s how it went so far.
• I really didn’t like not polishing my writing. I like to edit my stuff. I don’t always get to a perfect state but at least I get somewhere where it’s readable. However, doing it everyday would eat up a sizable chunk. In most shorts I’ve written and let myself edit them, I took about fifteen minutes to write and one hour re-reading, correcting mistakes, moving ideas around to have a better reading flow, etc. Editing. This is not really a sustainable pace.
• The half reason is not having a subject before writing. This bothers me but hasn’t been much of a hinderance. Every time I let my thoughts flow into sentences, a pattern — and therefore a topic — emerges quickly. Still, it bothers me because I like to write stuff that deserves to be written about, not just some random ramblings. We all have twitter for that.

Still, I mustn’t let this deter me from writing. I still believe I have to exercise my writing skills and express my opinions more frequently. However, the “short article a day” method wasn’t helping me that much. I have to devise a new rhythm for myself. Without making any promises, I’m aiming for 2 articles a week. It’s more important to keep the flow than to have a rigid method.

Let’s see how this goes.

Taste.

I love and hate to talk about taste. What is, exactly, to have taste? Most say taste is just a set of preferences. And they also argue that taste isn’t open for debate. Fruitful debate, that is.

I could not disagree more. In my not-so-humble opinion, to have taste is to have the ability to both: identify the characteristics of something and, evaluate how well they perform a certain set of goals.

This effort hasn’t to be deliberate nor conscious. In fact, I think most people’s taste is mainly emotional (as in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink interpretation of gut feeling). It’s hard to inspect something so intractable as emotions, let alone discuss. Sometimes, there aren’t even enough nouns in our languages to describe them. However, as always, something being difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Quite on the contrary: solving difficult problems typically wields good rewards.

My reasoning for this particular definition comes from, as a software engineer, repeatedly comparing solutions to a problem at different times of my life. Some of those times, specially when there has been some time since I solved it, my evaluation of what is the solution changes. Why? Why do I, when faced with the same context (and the problem is part of the context here), change parameters? Or, by the same reasoning, dig my commitment to a certain solution even deeper? I have found that — and this is purely empirical with no data whatsoever to back it up — I become aware of more and more facets of the problem. Every time I try something out, I have to bear the pains that solution inflicts and some of these pains obviates something I haven’t before contemplated. And, in further evaluations, I will carry this fresh scar that these fresh pains have ripped on me [1]. If I was to solve only one problem over and over again, I think my axis of evaluation wouldn’t grow much. However, lessons learnt doing one thing spill to everything else you do (assuming you’re sufficiently smart to correlate stuff). As so, every time I solve a problem, even if it’s a repeated one, I get a new opportunity to test how well my solution evaluation system has worked. How my scars have prevented me from getting any more scars.

The very same reasoning for this particular definition also comes from, as a whisky drinker, repeatedly drinking the same whisky at different times of my life. I have tasted other whiskies in the mean time and, surely enough, it’s easier to recognize some slight figment of taste. Easy enough that I can now direct the effort of tasting to other, less explored nuances. Repeated and diverse tastings of whisky teach me how to better savor it because I get more at ease with identifying the various elements in its taste. It’s pretty much the same train of thought. The difference is that you get drunk, provided enough whisky.

To avoid or pursue something, you have to recognize it. It might not be a conscious recognition at first, though. Bringing this recognition from unconscious to consciousness make you able to talk about it. This transition is the hardest part in developing taste. It’s identifying the characteristics of something, as I said before.

So, we nailed the first part. The second part, evaluating how well something performs a certain set of goals, is somewhat easier. The hard part is deciding what’s the correct set of goals and their relative importance. It’s when our preferences, or beliefs, meddle in.

For example, I, when developing software, value

1. effectiveness (accounting getting finished in time);
2. maintainability;
3. efficiency.

There are those who disagree with me. Some wouldn’t consider maintainability (or have it further down the list). And, thus, this influences their work. Knowing the right order is very debatable. People can make money/products either way. They might argue that being successful is the right gauge. However, even if we pin down this definition of success (money, downloads, clicks, whatever), we have so many other non reproducible factors in the process that we’re always comparing apples and trucks.

Let’s try something simpler, less debatable. Food. One’s preferences on food are not up to debate. They’re intrinsically always successful. I like spicy, you don’t. That’s ok. However, there’s also lots of intersections: most people like sweets. Theoretically, If we identify all the flavors and nuances of taste in some delicious dish and we also know what some person’s preferences are, we can pre-determine how good they’ll think that dish really is for them. We can identify success a priori, as per their definition of success.

The lack of fruitful debate in taste lies solely on the preferences or beliefs. Everything else is, surely, very debatable.

Inspired by Day 30: Carving A Lens.

[1]: Some call this experience. But don’t get hung up on this word, as it’s also too vague to be discussed. Focus on the scars.

You have to setup yourself for success.

It’s getting really hard to make you to the “post a day” commitment. But, how? Alex seems to pull it off so good. Ok, while I can bet it’s not easy on him, I can say he got one thing right: he did it in the morning. I’m not the morning guy. But still, letting this daily duty linger in my list until the very last moment is not doing me any good.

It’s important to have the right setup. If not, even worse than not having a frictionless environment, you’re making yourself a serious target for procrastination. Don’t do it now, it says. You’re not in the right mood. You don’t have a subject to write about. You’re way to tired to produce anything other than crap.

While all of these might me be true, you have to ignore this whimsical voice. It’s always the same thing when you’re trying to do anything that you don’t particularly like. To those who think you have complete and solid control of your willpower, I can make you see this very clearly in just one word: “diet”. It’s not easy on anyone. The trick is to think once, at the start, at the commitment, and only let yourself think after the hard work is done. If not, the loudest voice will be procrastination. Even so, you want to think about what you’re doing. But, listening to yourself at the wrong time, you’re just setting yourself up to fail.

Make sure you sculpt the landscape as much as you can to make things easy on you. Don’t listen to temptatious muses. Taking the first couple of steps takes willpower. Making it uphill takes perseverance. Only give yourself permission to stop after you’ve climbed over that crag. The moment you stop, it’s downhill from there.

I really like meditation. Like many things in the “zen way” (whatever that may be, I think that concept has had it meaning over-butchered by pop media), its lessons aren’t to be taken literally.

It’s really easy to meditate. Find a comfortable place where you can lie down, or sit, comfortably. Close your eyes. Relax your body as much as you can. Now, focus your awareness on your feet (or another peripheral part of your body). Relax it. Move you awareness to an adjacent part and relax that one too. Do this until you’ve successfully relaxed your entire body. Then, pause your senses and awareness for a moment, and concentrate solely on your breathing. If you can concentrate on nothing at all, so much the better. Let yourself linger in this state and follow it wherever it may lead you.

On first sight, it really seems like an easy recipe for attaining the answer to life, universe and everything else. However, it’s a ridiculously hard challenge. First off, your mind wasn’t trained to stay still. Like a child, it’s always an elephant in a china shop. Constantly stumbling thoughts over another thoughts; and when it settles down, there’s always something in the corner, alluringly shining, longing for unrestrained attention. And off it goes. Have you ever tried relaxing while trying to look out for a kid that, “accidentally”, drank your whole mug of coffee? Yeah, you get it. Relax. Right.

But even when you do get over such enormous challenge of just relaxing on your own, you have the “concentrate on your breathing part”. The mischievous child is none the quieter. Ok, maybe a little. You did, actually, tame it just enough for you to relax. But that’s it. While you have that child to take care of, it’s going to be hell to concentrate on your breathing.

Ok, I just painted a really grim picture. However, there are some of us who did manage to educate themselves into not being such rambling rattling thinkers and did actually get around to meditate. How? They didn’t quit. And, more important than that, they kept at it lightly.

When your thoughts drift into the next shinning thing, it takes a while for you to become aware that you drifted. When you do, allow yourself to return to your effort. Just that. No self-incriminating talk. No “Damn it! Drifted again! I suck at this!” That won’t help you regroup. You know what really helps you regrouping? Just regrouping. Forget the rest. That’s already done. You’ve already drifted. Nobody cares. You’ve done no harm and nobody is keeping score (they would run out of algarisms).Get back to what you were doing. If you share this experience with someone else, they’ll probably just make a brief metal smirk and tell you “Yeah, that happens. Don’t mind it. It will get better with practice.” You just have to get back on your bandwagon. Just do it. Again, if it’s still not how you’d like it to be. That’s how you get good at things. That’s the recipe. Meditation is good exercise to get better at any and every thing, in a way.

Next time you fumble at something, do the same thing as when your heart skips a beat: keep beating.