The Latest from Radical Mutual-Improvement

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The Latest from
Radical Mutual-Improvement

• Develop a morning routine (Exercise #2)

  Posted: 24 Apr 2006 12:40 AM CDT

  Here are a few tricks for improving your mornings whether or not you are a morning person:

  1. Set your alarm clock to the real time. That old trick of trying to trick yourself only works for a few days and it's just silly anyway.
  2. Set your alarm to the actual time you want to wake up. Trying to give yourself time to hit the snooze button only means you get less actual sleep and end up more tired than simply waking up when you have to wake up.
  3. Wake up half an hour earlier than you usually do. Most people procrastinate until the last minute before waking up, creating a cycle of having to hurry, being late, being less than ready for the day. All that can be fixed by waking up a half hour earlier.
  4. Wake up at the same time every day. Even weekends. Steve Pavlina explains the benefits of this well in his posts, "How to become and early riser" and "How to become an early riser part 2".
  5. Try it for 30 days, and quit, double down, or revise at that point.

  These few simple tricks can turn a morning from a drag to something to look forward to.

  

• Develop a simple mantra (Exercise #1)

  Posted: 23 Apr 2006 05:35 PM CDT

  “In a healthy and happy way, I am becoming a millionaire.”
  “In its own perfect timing, I am becoming a millionaire.”
  “For the greatest good of all, I am becoming a millionaire.”

  (inspired by combining advice in this interview with Marc Allen with this post on remembering your dreams)

  Replace “becoming a millionaire” with anything that you’d like. Other possibilities include “becoming famous”, “becoming ridiculously powerful”, “becoming one with the universe”, “becoming the CEO of my own business”, and “becoming the funniest person alive”. Feel free to improvise, but once you choose one, stick with it for a while.

  The key to this is to create a vision for yourself in the future. Once you convince your subconscious that this is going to happen, it will put its resources towards pointing out opportunities that lead in this direction. The subconscious has to filter through about 40 million sensory inputs per second and only passes about 10,000 of them to your subconscious. By activating this possibility in your subconscious, it will remember to pass on information it might otherwise have filtered out, and you'll begin noticing things that you hadn't noticed before. This change usually happens, according to Steve Pavlina, with 24 and 48 hours of starting the mantra.

  Every day, say your mantra 20 times out loud when you wake up and then 20 times to yourself. Say it out loud 20 times and to yourself 20 times right before you go to bed. Say it every time you walk through a doorway, start eating, or finish eating. Put the mantra in weird corners of your life that you want to expose or change. By having a vision for what you want to become, and training your subconscious into taking on that vision, you will begin to see opportunities open up towards that road. Be ready for them and take any small step that you see. Be thankful for even the smallest step in that direction, and slowly the steps will become more solid, steady, and obvious.

  

• 30 day trial

  Posted: 23 Apr 2006 05:04 PM CDT

  Steve Pavlina is my nemesis. I've used nemeses in my life as a way to figure out who I want to "reach"… whatever is meant by reaching someone. The first step is to find people that you admire and who seem balanced. There are many ways to succeed that involve becoming unbalanced somehow, and these people we call geniuses. They sacrifice something like sanity, or common sense, or social skills in order to leap ahead in one particular area. We rarely feel jealous of these people, but appreciate them. Very few people would want to be tortured like Van Gogh even if it meant painting some great masterpieces. Same with Beethoven, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, etc. Steve Pavlina, on the other hand, seems to have found a way to live life that improves the quality while at the same time making progress on difficult projects.

  One of his ideas that I like is the 30 day trial. One of the primary obstacles in change is lack of momentum. Our conscious mind can't lobby a new behavior with our subconscious unless there's some momentum or resources available to divert to the project. Maintaining a momentum of positive change in our lives is something that could improve everyone's life… we all know that it's easier to run 5 miles a day when we're already running 4 miles a day than if we haven't run in years. The more you're already doing, the easier it is to convince ourselves to go one step further.

  The 30 day trial is helpful when we're trying to bootstrap momentum. If you have a new idea for a project and have no current momentum on it, it's a little easier to convince your subconscious to partake in a 30 day trial of a behavior than to convince it to start a completely new habit that will supposedly last forever. When I say something like "I'm going to become a vegetarian" I can feel the back of my mind slightly doubt that statement… it goes, "Really? That's a big change… don't you think it's more likely that you'll try it for a few days then give up?" But if I say, "I'm not going to eat meat for 30 days" my mind is more like, "Okay!" The trick is that after 30 days it's a lot easier to say, "Let's do it for 30 more days" or even "Let's do it for a year".

  One of the things about making changes in your life is that we underestimate the difficulty in convincing our subconscious to adopt new behaviors. By admitting that there is a bit of a lobbying issue, and starting things with a 30 day trial, you can slowly train yourself to become more susceptible to new habits.

  My 30 day trial is to post one entry a day here, which I will do by waking up 30 minutes earlier than I usually do.

  

• The tone of this writing

  Posted: 23 Apr 2006 12:54 AM CDT

  I find it really difficult to adopt an appropriate tone when talking about mutual improvement, self-improvement, or any of these overly introspective topics. I've become very sensitive (in a negative way) to the tone of most self-help, marketing, and spiritual talk. It's the reason I can't go to a church service, or have a therapist, or really participate in any of these types of conversations that come across as cheesy, or slimy, or touchy-feely. And yet, I still want to talk about the things that are talked about in these tones. So one of my first goals here is to experiment with a couple different tones to see if I can stumble upon one that I feel comfortable with. This is your warning.

  

• Begin with the end in mind

  Posted: 22 Apr 2006 11:14 PM CDT

  The end for me is to reach a state of self-sustaining radical mutual-improvement with the people around me. I want to fill a hole that I see in the world–a space that exists between life hacking, personal development, and the things you want to do with your life, where using technology and psychology and common sense and existing well-known practices in society and religion to improve yourself and others really works in an deliberate way that is benefitial to all and not reliant on hype or marketing. Gandhi and Benjamin Franklin both described their philosophy on life as mutual-improvement, where you never have to engage in win-lose scenarios, and adversity is not something that you avoid, but instead accept as a challenge that will act as a catalyst in you and everyone else's benefit.

  To be more specific, in the short term this means:

  1) Starting a life-coaching business or possibly non-profit organization (I haven't decided yet) that is inspired from existing organizations like Toastmasters, Alcoholics Anonymous, investment clubs, Juntos, book clubs, Vipassana meditation retreats, Landmark Forum, Mormonism, pickup artists (it's actually sort of interesting), and of course the new field life coaching itself. Some small details include an inexpensive membership, weekly or bi-weekly meetings, an emphasis on interviews and problem-solving, and occassional "What's your best idea?" conferences.

  2) Opening a bar/art gallery in Seattle with a friend. It will be small, able to be run by one person on Sundays-Thursdays and two people on Friday and Saturday night. Very limited food options, only open from 5pm-2am, and integrated with the life-coaching business so that members can hold meetings there.

  3) Writing a book/manifesto to help build these other things off of. I've found that I cannot keep all of the ideas involved in this project in my head at once. Memory needs to be improved or supplemented in order to better manage these ideas. I think my options are to either become more concise in my articulation of the ideas, or develop a memorization trick in the form of a book.

  4) Contribute to the conversation of life hacking and self-improvement, and converse with some of my role-models that are currently writing about this on the internet.

  

• Can you laugh? Can you cry?

  Posted: 22 Apr 2006 09:05 PM CDT

  Try to laugh naturally. What do you do? First, if you’re like me, you’ll try to think of something funny, and then you run that funny thing through your mind trying to provoke yourself to laugh. Consciousness has ways of manipulating the subconscious responses that we have… but it’s a bit crude and doesn’t always work.

  Some subconscious reactions are more difficult to control than conscious ones. For example, can you burp on command? How do you do it? Can you cry on command? Can you fall asleep on command? Each of these things is a subconscious response to a particular environment. We can’t activate these responses merely by willing them in the same way that we can move our arms and legs.

  Understanding the link between the conscious and subconscious (the methods we have created for communicating back to our subconscious and receiving messages from our subconscious) is a subtle but important way of getting to know yourself better.

  

• You are what you see

  Posted: 22 Apr 2006 08:51 PM CDT

  We all know that in a materialistic way we are what we eat. At least, our bodies are what we eat. But I think our minds and personalities are what we see. If you see the world as boring and uninteresting, then there's a good possibility that slowly you will become boring and uninteresting. On the other hand, if you see the world as challenging, compassionate, and full of love, you too will slowly become a challenging, compassionate, and loving person.

  

• The convergence of many fields

  Posted: 22 Apr 2006 08:42 PM CDT

  An article in the May/June issue of Utne titled "Saffron Robes and Lab Coats" talked about how some neuroscientists are beginning to see parallels with Buddhism in their investigations of the brain. One interesting overlap is in the investigation of suffering.

  "While their approaches to suffering may sound different, Mobley said, neuroscience and Buddhism both acknowledge the Four Noble Truths regarding suffering: There is the fact of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the path to end suffering.

  "'The traditional Western approach to end suffering is to block the inputs that cause it,' said Spiegel. 'But that's not the whole answer.' Spiegel noted that there are more neuronal connections in one person's brain than there are stars in the universe, and that focusing on compassion, for instance, makes it possible for those connections to 'reset' the brain. 'Reverberating circuits can amplify or dismiss pain and depression,' he said."

  I think this convergence between science and religion is only going to start happening more and more. Our brains are good at mixing things together, the lines will begin to blur between psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, religion, superstition, self-help, and popular culture. I want to help that convergence along. One of the areas that I see emerging as a possible container for these similar thoughts in a variety of fields is in life-coaching. It's a brand new field that is still figuring itself out, and admittedly is right now a bit confused about whether or not its a big marketing pyramid scheme, but its goal is simple and relevant to all of these fields… using your knowledge about yourself to improve your life.

  

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• To Thine Own Self Be True

  Posted: 24 Apr 2006 10:33 PM CDT

  Hamlet's in my zeitgeist today. A coworker quoted another line from Hamlet to me earlier today, "Things are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes them so." Which also applies to what I'm about to talk about here.

  I'm going to start trying something sort of weird. I'm going to take new posts from Steve Pavlina and write my own post with the same title, addressing the same issue, but with my take. After reading his site for a while I've found that he continues to address really interesting topics–in fact, things that I've been thinking about and writing about for years with slightly different names, references, and answers–and since comments are often turned off, one way to continue to the conversation around the web is to do what I'm doing here. I hope nobody interprets this as me trying to ride his wave… I do have a day job after all and have not spent nearly as much time thinking about this stuff as he has. What am I trying to do though? Honestly, I'm not quite sure… other than trying something new.

  Today's post was "To Thine Own Self Be True," and here's my version:

  The question posed is "How can you decide what to do with the rest of your life?" The question is difficult to figure out because it is impossible to frame the question in a testable manner, therefore you can never know for certain if you have the right answer. You get one guess, and one attempt to implement the guess, and no way to really know how you played except by setting up your own point system. There is no objective system that we can all reference to see how we're doing. When you ask yourself most questions, like "What should I eat for lunch?" you know which dimensions lunch will be judged on, and you have results from previous lunches to compare today's lunch with. This may seem obvious, but the fact that we do not know exactly which dimensions on which to judge life and we have no previous lives to compare our current life with. True, there are religions and philosophies and game theories to help some of us along, but the lost souls of this world like myself that have no faith or certainty in anything other than the fact that we are sometimes wrong and sometimes right, and want great things for ourselves but don't know how to achieve them, we are on our own.

  Or so it seems at first glance. There are a series of insights that together provide a way out of this circular thought pattern.

  1. What you do doesn't really matter.
  2. You are what you see.

  I don't want to sound like a depressed existentialist… I'm far from a real existentialist of any sort. But if you have a strong negative reaction to any or all of the points above, I want to emphasize that this is not a hopeless perspective that I'm advertising. It's actually one of the most enjoyable and life-affirming realizations that I've had in the last couple years.

  It begins with what I call the "it doesn't matter paradox". As most of you know, our brains function in such a way that we can't register absolute values. We rely entirely on changing values to see (our eyes wiggle back and forth for this reason) and we judge changes in value by comparison to nearby values. Losing a dollar in a bet doesn't matter unless it's the last dollar you have. The dollar only "matters" in the context of the system in which it exists. The same is true with everything else. These contextual systems that create value, meaning, and mattering are human creations (at least, unless you believe that there's a God who would score our lives based on a point system). Some things might seem to matter no matter what, but it's really just an aesthetic preference most of us keep because the alternative is to most a depressing and inhuman thought. This is because we have trouble acknowledging a perspective bigger than our own lives, or the history of humanity, or even of the earth. But we all know that if we could see anything from the perspective of a galaxy 100 billion billion light years away, we would understand that it didn't really matter whether or not Kelly Clarkson won American Idol or that other dude did.

  And yes I know this thought feels repuslive to you. Me too, usually. Very few people actually believe that nothing matters (other than when we're drunk and trying to feel sorry for our latest breakup–it's usually followed up with philosophies including the fact that we're going to die alone and that at least we have our kitties to keep us company)… but for most it's an ugly belief and one that one might register as possibly true in some abstract logical sense but not really accept into your heart and emotions without a lot more insight to help squeeze it in sans ugliness. One of the additional insights, however, is that because "mattering" is relative, the absolute value of how much things matter also doesn't matter. The paradox is this: when nothing matters, everything suddenly matters again. Mattering becomes an aesthetic and emotional experience perhaps with no monetary value at all… but when something has no absolute value you can begin to appreciate it for what it actually is instead of what it is worth. Everything is an end in itself; a word and its own definition a the same time. Your career and job and life no longer matter in terms of what they are worth to some undetermined point or value system… they simply are what they are: beautiful, textured, multi-dimensional, and weird. If you think about it, it's the only truly human answer to this question; the only one that makes room for a truly rich experience of life. The alternative is that life is a game with concrete rules or absolute values where you place value in things according to some established system. And yet, because we're not given access to these rules and values we get clever people like Daniel Gilbert create theories about The Futile Pursuit of Happiness (where he realizes that we are never made as happy as we predict we will be when we achieve the things we think will make us happy) and marketers start trying to get around you by trying to find out why you really want to hire that milkshake (the real reason we buy things).

  In his post, Steve comes to a very similar conclusion when he talks about solving the "what should I do?" questions by figuring out who you are, and being that person wholly, rather than figuring out which actions will provide the most fulfillment. Ultimately, being what you are is your primary occupation in life. If it were anything else wouldn't it be a disappointment?
  But, a somewhat subtle point that Neil Strauss often makes (he's a popular journalist and most recently writer of a book about the secret society of pickup artists called The Game) is that the answer is not simply being yourself but being your best self. Do not simply take the you that you were given, but work to make it the best version of yourself that you can.

  Easy to say, but how do you do that? Isn't finding your best self as difficult as finding your fundamental purpose in life?

  No, because you yourself are a purely subjective experience. The best you is the one that you most enjoy being. And the best world is the one you most enjoy seeing. This is where "you are what you see" comes in. We see the world through a filter of our own emotions and thoughts… in fact, it is our subconscious that actively filters what we see for things that match our emotions and thoughts. It is well known in neuroscience that the 40 million plus sensory stimulations that come in per second into our brain must be narrowed down to something closer to 10,000… and the way that it chooses which 10,000 sensory inputs it will send to our attention is by seeing which filters have been recently activated in our brain. We've all experienced seeing a new word that we just learned suddenly appear everywhere. Or, when one thing goes wrong suddenly more things seem to go wrong. We are fed what we have recently eaten when it comes to emotions and thoughts. Think about this the next time you feel like you're at a boring party, or, alternatively, the next time everything seems to be going right for you: you are actually perceiving the environment that exists internally… to a point. This is probably only about 75% true–most of the time we're not so immersed in ourselves that we're completely blind to novel occurences outside of ourselves–but it's a lot more true than most people give it credit.

  Once you realize that you are what you see to a large extent, it's time to think about the variables that contribute to what you see.

  1. Your emotional state and your chosen subconscious filters.
  2. Your chosen environment (see: angry/negative people can be bad for your brain).
  3. What you choose to do in that environment and with that emotional state.

  As you can see, there is still a lot of choice involved here, if we choose to exercise it. That is primarily why it is my goal here to give you 101 exercises that work towards one of these levels of experience. Some exercises will help create or revise existing emotional filters. Some will help shake up the environment that you've chosen to build around you. And others will be ways for you to explore your own contribution to that environment… as you are as much a part of it (and therefore a contributor to other peoples' lives) as they are a part of yours. Your primary obstacles will largely exist within your own head, either in the filters you've created, the environment you've chosen to build around you, or in the contributions you've chosen to release into that environment. Your primary tool will be momentum… bootstrapping it, directing it, and letting it spiral outward into the various corners of your life. Momentum (by which I mean the inertia that propels us forward into making changes for the better, and expecting greater and more exciting things out of our and other peoples' lives) is (I think) the single most important ingredient that most of us lack, but when we have it… when we're in the groove and we're in our element and working instinctually and skillfully towards our own happiness, then everything else just falls into place as if by design, and we're left in wonder, confabulating fantastic tales around our own success, meanwhile happy as drunk kittens in cups.

  

• Adopt a nemesis (Exercise #3)

  Posted: 24 Apr 2006 10:51 AM CDT

  My definition of a nemisis isn't quite straight from the dictionary.  To me, a nemesis is someone whose life you envy and who you can use as a vision with a name and a face in order to try and catch up to them.  Adopting a nemesis is a great way to visualize the future because you can idealize their good qualities, ignore their bad ones, and use the neutral qualities simply as filler that help you better imagine your own future.  I've had nemeses my whole life and when I look back on them I realize that each subsequent nemesis is a bit further ahead, and that, in many ways, each one represents a particular part of my life that I was interested in working on at the time.  When that part of my life was figured out, I stopped thinking of them as my nemesis and moved on to the next one.  Another funny coincidence is that I generally became good friends with my nemeses… this type of nemesis relationship doesn't have to be one of hatred or bitter jealousy, but rather appreciation for their strengths and a desire to learn from them and absorb as many of the traits as possible.

  Traits you want to look for in a good nemesis:

  1. Someone that is experiencing some aspect of live that you wish you were experiencing.  Whether it's that they are a published writer, or seem to have great friends, or own a bar… it can be anything as long as it's something that you want for yourself.
  2. Someone that you can research.  Whether it's because they've had biographies or that they have a blog or that you know where they hang out regularly, it's good to have some exposure to them so you can watch them and plot and plan against.
  3. Someone who's name you can invoke in a state of wrath or jealousy.  We all have weaker moments and those moments are easier to handle if you can treat your nemesis as a bit of a scapegoat and egger-on.  If something is proving difficult, just imagine your nemisis's smug face doing that task with ease and usually this will help spurn you on a bit longer, if only to show them that you are someone to reckon with.

  Of course, you don't want to take this too far and actually go about sabotaging your nemesis.  A good nemesis is all in you mind.  And, like I said, can sometimes even be a good friend in "real life".

  

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• Biznik is going to offer health insurance for its members

  Posted: 25 Apr 2006 07:30 PM CDT

  This is an interesting development. Biznik is a Seattle-based group of people that are trying some bold experiments. Their primary experiment is to create a "radically different kind of Seattle business networking group", and their latest experiment is to give health care options to its members. The group is comprised mostly of freelancing and contracting professionals in a number of creative industries and so getting health care is a particularly fresh nightmare for most of them. So, ganging up and getting options for health insurance that just aren't possible for small companies or individuals sounds like a great idea. For more details about it, Chris Haddad answered a bunch of questions in this post.

  

• Uncovering hidden biases

  Posted: 25 Apr 2006 04:37 PM CDT

  Mind Hacks linked to an interesting article in Science News, "The Bias Finders", which is about the relatively new "implicit association" tests that can tell how much you are subconsciously biased regarding certain issues such as race, gender, social status, etc.

  Particularly disturbing was the observation that these biases seem easier to create than to remove. When people are told stories with nonsense words fitting a pattern where one subconsciously associates a certain kind of word with positive connotations and another kind of word with negative connotaions, people immediately tested to have an implicit bias towards the positively connotated words. When asked to retake the test with the associations switched, the people said that they prefered the positive words, but tested to still implicitly preferred the words that were now associated with negative connotations.

  This only supports my argument that we should begin brainwashing children in school as early as possible… to adopt biases towards equality, and positivity towards all ethnicities, genders, and social status levels. There's something about it that just sounds wrong though, isn't there.  Hmm…

  

• How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

  Posted: 25 Apr 2006 01:17 PM CDT

  In response to Steve Pavlina's "How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off":

  I like his take on training the body to act without thinking. The ways that the mind can control the body's action are many-fold. For example, you can think "Arm, raise!" and it usually works (unless it has fallen asleep or has been recently exercised too much). Or, you can think "Face, cry!" and there's an intermediate step of first conjuring a sad memory and then pushing it into your subconscious until it returns emotions that potentially result in tears. Or, finally, in the case of the alarm clock where you're trying to influence behavior at a future time when the consciousness isn't at its strongest, you can use thought to train the body in a Pavlovian sense to react automatically to certain stimulus. It's a subtle form of self-brainwashing, and I think this type of behavior is under-utilized in our lives. Because we place so much weight and significance on the power of logic and free will, we oftentimes overlook the fact that 90% of our daily behavior is automatic… either trained into us by our parents, or our peers, or habits we picked up along the way. The true victory of the will over our behaviors (if that's something that you're interested in) will come when we embrace techniques of automatic behavior (sadly demonized by the term "brainwashing") and conscious habit-forming. I like this quote:

  We can go a bit further and observe that “benevolent habituation” — the ability to do the right thing by unconscious or half-conscious reflex — is precisely what we normally mean by expertise.

  - Habituation, Expertise, and Undo Operations

  It's true. We associate concepts like "being in the zone" or doing something "by instinct" as the highest form of skill. When you know something like the back of your hand, or could do something with your hands tied behind your back, or could do it while asleep, then you know you really know something. The ironic part is that this only happens when your mind stops thinking about it.

  A bunch of the exercises in my list of 101 exercises will involve playing around with our system of habits… forming them, breaking them, revising them, re-experiencing them. Because nothing is as new and fresh than going against habit (breaking out of the routine), and nothing is as instinctual and skillfully done as a well-formed habit.

  

• Stop wearing a watch (Exercise #4)

  Posted: 25 Apr 2006 10:49 AM CDT

  There's no reason anymore to wear a watch other than to complement a fashion choice.  And if you're wearing a watch for appearances, there's no need for the watch to work.  So, wear a watch only if it's broken.

  Watches are training wheels for learning how to live within a world demarkated by timed periods.  And yet, they are addictive.  People with watches, when you suggest they stop wearing one, will look longingly at their wrist, perhaps cup the watch and their wrist in their other hand, and say, "But I like wearing a watch."  It's an emotional decision, but if you ask them why they like wearing their watch, most likely they will confabulate a logical reason for their literal attachment.  Usually: I need to know what time it is in order to keep my appointments.

  Though I've conducted no scientific studies on the matter, I am fairly confident that there is no correllation between people who wear watches and people who are punctual.  In fact, wearing a watch may give you a false sense of control over time… even if you're going to be late you'll know exactly how late you are when you arrive.  Being punctual is  an important trait to try and adopt, and is much better addressed directly.  In order to be on time, do not get a watch.  Instead, make a conscious effort to be realistic about time.  Study your own time predictions and see where your instinct is off.  Ask your friends if you are punctual and if you aren't then ask them how late you usually are.  I can categorize my friends into buckets based on how late they usually are: people who are on time, people who are 5 minutes late, people who are 15 minutes late, and people who are 30 minutes late.  People become consistent on this metric and subconsciously know how late they usually are and feel pressured to maintain that punctuality because that is what they have trained friends and family to expect from them.  But, one single adjustment of somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes could solve the punctuality problem forever.  It's not a watch thing.

  So, I encourage everyone that wears a watch to stop wearing one for 30 days.  Your wrist will adjust.  You will find other ways to figure out the time (for example, you probably already have a cell phone with the time on it).  You will learn that understanding time can become an instinct and precision will not matter as much as the spirit with which you engage the time-driven world.  Ride ahead of it, don't be its bitch. 

  

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• Pronoia: noun

  Posted: 27 Apr 2006 10:38 AM CDT

  “The sneaking feeling one has that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.”

  At first, this sounds a bit like a definition in a Hallmark card, and in fact the term was popularized by a wacky group of new age “Zippies” (which stands for zen-inspired professional pagans!)  who, in the early 1990s, believed that they had a new generation of hippies plus technology with which to battle the growing forces of yuppies.  Who knows where these “hippies with zip” are now?  I’d actually like to know.

  There’s actually some game theory behind pronoia too.  An atmosphere of pronoia is self-sustaining.  Another way to think about this in game theory jargon is that life is a non-zero-sum game: if you took all the winnings in Vegas, then subtracted all the losses, you’d end up with zero… on the other hand, if you took all of the benefits gained from a healthy community and subtracted all of the losses, one would come up with a sum greater than zero.  A zero sum game is like chess… it is impossible for both people to win.  In a city, family, company, or friend group, on the other hand, it is possible for every member of the system to benefit… cooperation in a complex environment will lead a gestalt to form where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  When a community works together to mutually benefit all of its members, a philosophy of pronoia is healthy and accurate and will contribute to the continued amplification of benefit. 

  One of the goals of focusing on pronoia is to gradually broaden the set of people that you believe are conspiring behind your back to help you.  Mutual-improvement can happen in any sized group, from a relationship, to a family, to a neighborhood, to a company, to a city, to a country, and eventually to the world.  Maybe I am a Zippy after all.

  

• Carry around a voice recorder (Exercise #5)

  Posted: 26 Apr 2006 11:07 AM CDT

  Why is it that nobody likes to hear their voice when recorded? Because it sounds strange, as if we were speaking through somebody else's body: our words, their voice. And for some reason the voice usually sounds particularly idiotic, not the articulate, insightful voice that we hear in our own heads.

  It's rather jarring, actually. It makes you realize that other people hear you completely different than you hear yourself. The next question to ask is, "Do I want to know what I sound like?" It's a difficult question to answer, actually… because most likely it will involve some kind of dreaded "coming to terms with reality" that is never really a great time a first. But what can be a great time is knowing exactly how you sound around others, especially after you've given it a bit of conscious attention and are a little more happy with it than you originally were. Knowing that you have an accurate picture of yourself is rewarding (not to mention useful).

  I meet up with friends once a week to drink and hang out. The last couple weeks I've brought a digital voice recorder and have conducted short friend interviews. They're fun in the sense that you can laugh about the stupid things you were talking about the next day, but they're also useful in the sense that everyone gets to hear how they sound and it's a friendly environment so nobody has to feel too self-conscious or awkward about it. Everyone sounds like a dork. It can actually be a bonding experience.

  Even by simply carrying one around with me everywhere, it makes constantly aware of the possibility of having the conversation recorded and also makes me pay a little more attention to the quality, tone, and content of random conversations through the day.

  

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• Don’t think twice, it’s alright

  Posted: 28 Apr 2006 05:45 PM CDT

  Just found an interesting article from a few months ago that nicely summarizes some of the current ideas and studies that are being done to find out just how useful it is to "think problems through":

  In a study I conducted with Dolores Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dana Dunn, a social psychologist at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, people in one group were asked to list the reasons their relationship with a romantic partner was going the way it was, and then rate how satisfied they were with the relationship. People in another group were asked to rate their satisfaction without any analysis; they just gave their gut reactions.

  It might seem that the people who thought about the specifics would be best at figuring out how they really felt, and that their satisfaction ratings would thus do the best job of predicting the outcome of their relationships.

  In fact, we found the reverse. It was the people in the "gut feeling" group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all. Our conclusion? Too much analysis can confuse people about how they really feel. There are severe limits to what we can discover through self-reflection, and trying to explain the unexplainable does not lead to a sudden parting of the seas with our hidden thoughts and feelings revealed like flopping fish.

  It goes on to talk about how overanalyzing a problem when we're currently feeling down is especially damaging.   Self-reflection just makes you more depressed because the activated part of your brain is a negative filter, and will have no problem coming up with more and more things that are going wrong, some that aren't related at all to the current problem, and it will send you into a downward spiral.

  Read the whole article here: Don't think twice, it's alright

  

• Change your appearance (Exercise #6)

  Posted: 28 Apr 2006 04:57 PM CDT

  What is the difference between being in a rut and being on vacation? Why do the streets seem different in Paris than they do in your current city? Why do people in Paris have to go somewhere else on vacation? It all comes down to what your mind chooses to filter out and what it chooses to let through. Consciousness only registers change… things that stay the same eventually disappear from your consciousness (even if you liked those things and want them to stick around) and a little subconscious robot stands guard next to that unchanging thing and waits for it to move. As soon as it does (BING!) a little message gets sent to your mind telling you that that sign you walk by every day is now a new color (even though you don't remember what color it was before). This is a subtle point: there is no direct way around this. You can't stare at a dot on the wall forever without it disappearing. This is your brain being efficient… it's a tool that we cannot control that helps us have enough resources to pay attention to things that matter right now.

  The twist with this tip is that even when you're on vacation, you're still with yourself. How do you see yourself as if you were visiting yourself for the first time? How can you take that feeling of exploring a new city and focus that feeling on yourself in such a way that you notice all those things about yourself that subconscious robots are standing guard at and keeping from your conscious mind?

  The first exercise that is an easy one to do (and which future exercises will be more specific about) is to simply find some way of changing your appearance. Shave that beard. Grow a beard. Dye your hair. Paint your fingernails. Lose 10 pounds.  A simple change like this will send ripples of subconscious robots sending messages to you whenever you see yourself in a reflection as you're walking down the street. Hey, that's me! I look different!

  A curious side effect is that other people will see you as well. Some people say that doing things like this is "merely for attention" and in a way they're right. Attention is the primary currency of the consciousness… it's more valuable than money and can't be saved in a bank. People who fight for attention are simply addicts for the rush that attention brings… attention is what creates revelation and analysis and change. Most people aren't attention whores… and I would only advise this tip to someone that typically resists or is afraid of attention. But for the right person, mixing up your appearance and getting a little attention could be just the thing that makes you realize that there are a lot of things about yourself that you've stopped noticing. Sweep out those subconscious robots and maybe you'll catch a glimpse of what's actually going on with your appearance, your presentation, your body language, your tone of voice, and your approach to life.

  

• Pronoia: noun (Definition #1)

• Posted: 27 Apr 2006 10:38 AM CDT

  “The sneaking feeling one has that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.”

  At first, this sounds a bit like a definition in a Hallmark card, and in fact the term was popularized by a wacky group of new age “Zippies” (which stands for zen-inspired professional pagans!) who, in the early 1990s, believed that they had a new generation of hippies plus technology with which to battle the growing forces of yuppies. Who knows where these “hippies with zip” are now? I’d actually like to know.

  There’s actually some game theory behind pronoia too. An atmosphere of pronoia is self-sustaining. Another way to think about this in game theory jargon is that life is a non-zero-sum game: if you took all the winnings in Vegas, then subtracted all the losses, you’d end up with zero… on the other hand, if you took all of the benefits gained from a healthy community and subtracted all of the losses, one would come up with a sum greater than zero. A zero sum game is like chess… it is impossible for both people to win. In a city, family, company, or friend group, on the other hand, it is possible for every member of the system to benefit… cooperation in a complex environment will lead a gestalt to form where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When a community works together to mutually benefit all of its members, a philosophy of pronoia is healthy and accurate and will contribute to the continued amplification of benefit.

  One of the goals of focusing on pronoia is to gradually broaden the set of people that you believe are conspiring behind your back to help you. Mutual-improvement can happen in any sized group, from a relationship, to a family, to a neighborhood, to a company, to a city, to a country, and eventually to the world. Maybe I am a Zippy after all.

  

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• Mutual-Improvement (Definition #2)

  Posted: 29 Apr 2006 10:51 PM CDT

  I've borrowed the term "mutual-improvement" as a twist on the traditional field of self-improvement, and originally inspired by Benjamin Franklin's description of his amazingly productive Junto:

  I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual-improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory; and to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

  If you can get past the stiff puritanical tone of this passage, it talks about something pretty radical.  Where in our society today do we have an opportunity to meet regularly with our peers to work on the mutual-improvement of all members?  From this Junto that Benjamin Franklin put together (and which continues to this day in the form of the American Philosophical Society) sprouted the volunteer fire department, lending libraries, improved security (night watchmen), and a public hospital.

  A similar, but slightly more corporate-sounding and slick, term that is familiar to most people is the "win-win" situation where all participating members benefit from a given situation.

  The power of mutual-improvement and win-win situations is that all members of a group can act selfishly and selflessly at the same time.  There's no need to implement a complicated set of forced rules or ethics that keep people in line, as the situation itself allows everyone to come out ahead merely by acting out of their own self-interest. 

  

• The three levels of listening

  Posted: 29 Apr 2006 03:56 PM CDT

  Did you learn about the three levels of listening in school?  If not, here's a good summary from a book called Co-Active Coaching:

  In Level I the listening is internal.  We hear the words of the other person, but the focus is on what it means to us.

  Level II is focused listening.  The attention is laser-focused over there: on the other person.

  Level III is a global range of listening: hearing that picks up emotion, body language, and the environment itself.

  Levels I and II listen primarily for words.  Level III picks up everything else including all of the sensory data as well as mood, pace, energy.  

  A pretty simple breakdown that makes easy sense.  However, doesn't everyone know people who only ever listen at Level I?  And aren't there times when we ourselves feel like we're trappen in our own heads and aren't listening very closely to the people we're talking to?  Next time you're talking to a stranger or friend, ask yourself which level you're listening to them on.  Practice listening at Level III, and bring into the conversation information that you're picking up from emotion, body language, and the environment to see how that impacts the conversation.  

  

• Sleep on it (Exercise #7)

  Posted: 29 Apr 2006 02:13 PM CDT

  Our culture has become highly favorable to the conscious, deliberate, weighed decision as favorable to making “gut decisions” or decisions “on a feeling”, which are left more as anecdotal or possibly superstitious practices for quality decision making. However, we’re slowly finding scientific studies that validate and illuminate techniques for incorporating our subconscious into making decisions regarding complicated problems.

  I’m sure you’ve heard of the magical number 7 plus or minus 2 that George A. Miller proposed in 1956 as the limit for the amount of information that we can hold in our short-term memory at a given time. I just read via wikipedia that this has been found to be slightly inaccurate. The real limit may actually be time-based: the amount of sound that we can store in our working memories. Rather than 7 chunks of data, the real limit may be about 2 seconds of sound. For example, the limit for people who speak faster (such as the Chinese) is closer to 9 plus or minus 2, and for the Welsh the number is closer to 6 plus or minus two.

  In any case, most cognitive psychologists do believe that the short-term memory (or working memory) that we use to manipulate information with our consciousness differs structurally and functionally from long-term memory. To move information from working memory to long-term memory requires a physical change in the neurons of the brain to occur… something that can occur while awake, but is also strongly linked with the activities of the brain during sleep.

  The implications of this are pretty interesting and can be practically applied to your own decision-making. Say that you’re trying to decide whether or not you should move to a new city. Recent studies show that decisions which have fewer than 10 factors or so are better made the old fashioned way: consciously and deliberately. However, for decisions which have more than 10 or so factors, people who “sleep on it” are more likely to make a better choice, and less likely to regret their choice, than people who don’t sleep on it, or even people who make their decision based on a long lists of pros and cons.

  However, a key distinction here is that the problem must be introduced before you sleep. So, to try this out, simply review a difficult problem in your life for a few minutes before you go to sleep. Try to conjure up as many of the factors involved as you can, warming them up in a way. Then, fall asleep and when you wake up, check how does your gut feel about the decision?

  To read more about the exact studies conducted in this area, check out these additional articles:

  • How to solve problems: let your subconscious do the thinking (Email Overloaded)
  • Why sleeping on it may just work (CBC News)
  • 'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions (New Scientist)
  • Sleep on it, decision-makers told (BBC News)
  • Just sleep on it: and empty the brains 'inbox' (Harvard Gazette)

  

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• Get a flask (Exercise #9)

  Posted: 30 Apr 2006 11:14 AM CDT

  A flask makes you feel old and young at the same time.  One one hand, children rarely carry flasks.  They're reserved more for serious alcoholics and snobs.  On the other hand, you can now sneak alcohol into any event.  It gives you the exhilaration of possibly doing something secret and wrong that reminds me (at least) of younger days.  Carrying a flask around you for a couple weeks (if you don't already) will give you a new perspective on public and private spaces.  If you don't drink alcohol, fill it with apple juice.  It doesn't matter!

  

• Write out your ideal scene (Exercise #8)

  Posted: 30 Apr 2006 11:06 AM CDT

  This is step one in Marc Allen's The Millionaire Course, a book which I'm currently reading for the first time due to reading some interesting interviews and book reviews on Steve Pavlina's blog.  Writing out your own personal ideal scene for the future (for the next 5 years or so) seems like great advice, and advice that I for one am surprised is so difficult.

  Most people would assume that they've got some kind of concrete vision for their lives.  One might say things like "I want to have that job, be madly in love, move to a tropical island, and have a million bucks."  Or, "I want to have my own restaurant, and drive a fancy car, and have a mansion full of hot love slaves."  I think there are a few things that get confused with an "ideal scene" as described by Marc Allen.

  Fantasies

  A fantasy is something that you daydream about, but who your inner critic doesn't actually think is for you.  These are the things that come out when you ask people what they would want in life if they could have anything.  Ask yourself.  And then, as soon as you utter your greatest dream for life, wait for that second voice to pop up (it can never stay quiet).  It'll say something like "Yeah, all I need to do is win the lottery." or, "That would've been nice 10 years ago, before X."  A fantasy that you believe is impossible is a dangerous thing to have because it feels like you have an ideal scene for your life when really it's just a fake placeholder that you would never actually try to make manifest.

  "Practical" Scenes

  These are scenarios that your inner critic comes up with.  Rather than a tropical island and a world famous rock band, you come up with "get promoted to assistant to the assistant manager within the next two years."  Or, "retile the bathroom sometime in the next year or so."  Sure, you've got crazy unrealistic fantasy above, but what's more immediate and makes more sense is a baby step scene that takes the smallest possible step of self-improvement that still qualifies as not standing completely still.

  So, if these things aren't ideal scenes, then what is?

  The Ideal Ideal Scene

  Think on a five year time period.  This is a useful trick that helps you avoid generating false fantasies and scenes that are too limiting or practical.  Five years is a period of time that's long enough to be able to imagine great change in yourself, but also a period of time where you can imagine yourself looking similar, having the same personality, and general keep you from trying to wait for time travel and flying cars in order to acheive your goal.  If you want big change to happen in five years, it might help to start working on it now.

  Be as creative as you can be.  The biggest limit to our own lives is our imagination.  For example, take your fantasies and your practical scenes.  How many other people would give the exact same answer to those questions as you do.  Yes, everyone would like to win the lottery even though studies have been made that lottery winners are rarely happier after 5, 10, and 20 years than they were before… in fact, Timothy Wilson in Strangers To Ourselves gives some interesting evidence that lottery winners are less happy after winning than they were before.  Try coming up with an ideal scene that fits your personality more than it fits anyone else's.  Something custom-tailored to your passions, dreams, and view of the world.  Let it get as wild as you wish… the imagination likes to be stretched.

  Write it down.  Draw a picture.  Even if you can see everything perfectly in your mind for the ideal scene, write it down and keep it somewhere safe so that you can come back and read it in the future.  This ideal scene should eventually become the dominant vision for your life.  Stronger and more familiar than your doubts about it, more obvious as an eventual reality than as a forgotten daydream.  Do everything you can to make this ideal scene feel real, tangible, and certain.  Add to it over time, draw more pictures, fill in the details, and think about it often.  Marc Allen claims that as soon as this ideal scene is burned into your consciousness, you can begin making concrete steps towards it.  For now, just make the scene and see what comes out.

  Some questions from the book to ask yourself that might help flesh out the ideal scene:

  1. What kind of work and career do you have?
  2. What is a typical day for you?
  3. What are you doing to contribute to a better world?
  4. Where do you live?
  5. What are your most intimate relationships like?
  6. What is your family life like?
  7. How would someone close to you describe you?

  

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• The Architecture of Happiness

  Posted: 01 May 2006 12:38 PM CDT

  Like Christian over at Mind Hacks, I too am a big fan of Alain de Botton and am probably going to read his new book, The Architecture of Happiness. Unfortunately, unless I buy it from Amazon's UK site, I won't be able to get it until October.

  The Guardian article on the book, A punch in the façade, is less than glowing. However, from a quick comparison of the review with the book's synopsis makes me think the reviewer might be missing the point of the whole book.

  From my thorough review of the book's dust jacket, I think Alain might be critiquing architecture from a deliberately unique angle. In particular, for not taking itself seriously enough as an controller of human emotions. We are, in many ways, a product of the places we live, and the environment we're surrounded by. Chairs, tables, desks, and hallways contribute to a good percentage of the 40 billion pieces of sensory data that enter our eyes, butts, and fingers per second. Most of that data is filtered out in our routine day, but is still processed and categorized and analyzed by our subconscious. I have noticed that simply changing the color of a wall or getting a new sofa will do a lot to affect my mood over a long period of time, even though I can't pinpoint exact reasons for the change. Alain, I'm guessing, is taking this point and running with it in his typical clever and articulate manner… and I think he deliberately left out more practical and common perspectives of architecture's usefulness and aesthetics for real architects.