You learn faster by falling down
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset:
The “self-belief” model of motivation assumes that if you acknowledge the possibility of failure, then you’ll be too demoralized or afraid to take risks. In that model, people who believe that failure is unthinkable are the ones who try the hardest to succeed. Yet in practice, things often seem to work the other way around—accepting the possibility of failure in advance is liberating. It makes you bold, not timid. It’s what gives you the courage to take the risks required to achieve something big.
One of the most impactful ways I’ve adapted my thinking over the years, if only modestly successfully, has been to fear failure less and accept small downsides more easily. There’s way more world out there for those willing to trip or even fall now and then.
Building software is great
…even if some days working in corporations or under unwanted pressure makes it considerably less fun.
I also just don’t especially want to stop thinking about code. I don’t want to stop writing sentences in my own voice. I get a lot of joy from craft. It’s not a universal attitude toward work – from what I can tell, Gen Z is much more anti-work and ready to automate away their jobs – but I’ve always been thankful that programming is a craft that pays a good living wage. I’d be a luthier, photographer, or, who knows, if those jobs were as viable and available. But programming lets you write and think all day. Writing, both code and prose, for me, is both an end product and an end in itself. I don’t want to automate away the things that give me joy.
– Tom MacWright, The One About AI
What a great distillation of what makes working on software great! It’s an opportunity to think all day, earning a good wage doing so. Sometimes, to make something of value. Even more rarely, to make something of lasting value. Most of all, to be challenged every day. On the good days, it’s the future we were promised!
Use fewer algorithmic feeds, mostly search-based
Rob Walker via Austin Kleon, More search, less feed:
I’ve been thinking a lot about the search box versus the feed,” he said. “Let’s take Twitter. When I open it, everybody wants me to think about something.
A Ponzi ecosystem of hustle, reality distortion and projection, outright misinformation and propaganda. Plus, folks who just want to tell you the world is miserable. On the other hand, some funny takes and the occasional wholesome content. As goes social media, so goes humanity.
That bit of (attempted) gallows humor aside, the linked article has a good angle: search for more information and do actual research rather than letting algorithmic-people filter it towards you. Caveat: this may have been more useful when that post was written in 2019 than it is in the reality of junky internet search that is 2024.
Reminder: think your own thoughts.
Shell history is more valuable than shell customization
Thorsten Ball, Which command did you run 1731 days ago?:
Recipe for living a good life in the shell:
- Make sure it’s fast.
- Make sure its history can grow nearly infinitely and you can fuzzy-search through it.
A sage developer once told me he didn’t maintain dotfiles at all. He worked across so many machines and servers that keeping a shell configuration working across many systems was folly. Instead, the most important thing for him was making sure his shell history was synced across all those computers.
At first, I thought this was merely amusing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how deeply wise it is. Dotfiles, in the form of functions and aliases, abstract and ossify, the commands you think you’ll run frequently. But reverse searching through your total shell history provides you with access to commands you have run and lets you quickly edit/adapt them in-situ.
This makes the history file for your shell (possibly) the most significant file on your computer. Not just because it’s useful, but as a working memory and a reflection of your journey.
Masters of the space between notes
Virtuosity and speed are nice, in music and life. But you leave some space between the notes or slow things way down? Make some space in between the music for the music to happen? Now you’re cooking something good. For example:
- Aretha Franklin, the greatest of all time at making the most of the space between notes. As I’m fond of saying: there is no song Aretha Franklin could not perform slower and better than anyone else. Compare the tempo of Otis Redding’s Respect to Aretha’s version, both recorded in the same year.
- AC/DC, “Back In Black” or “Highway To Hell”. This is where I’d start rock and roll songwriting 101.
- D’Angelo, “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”. Most of his work is an exemplar, he’s a master of making songs feel spacious.
- Joe Cocker, “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Take a jaunty, mid-tier Beatles song and draw it way out. This makes room for the huge, stacked vocals chorus. Suddenly, it’s right in the feels.
Related: the funk is the notes you don’t play.
Careers are non-linear
David Hoang, Should managers be technical?:
Career development looks more like unlocking attributes for a different subclass in a role-playing game, than picking a distinct class that can never change. It’s not a path. It’s a collection of skills and attributes focused on certain outcomes. Applying foundational skills is heavily contingent on your role and responsibility.
👍🏻 Careers, management or not, aren’t straight lines. The skills you need for your career aren’t a tree with one root. You can skip between various skill trees, if you like! You can go deep, but wide is an option too. The more you know, the more you can delegate!
You should check out David’s newsletter too.
A wise person from a Destiny 2 Slack:
I guess when you’re done with the main quest, you go back and do side quests
Careers (and lives) are non-linear. Occasionally their trajectories don’t make sense. They may even outright disappoint, in the moment. The silver lining is, they give us unique skills and experience that someone in the world wants if only we can find them. 📈
A tinker for your tinkers
David Crawshaw, jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering. 114 lines, including comments. Nothing revolutionary here. Just a nicely written and well-thought-out “classic hack” for storing data in toy programs and prototypes.
I love a good shower-thought
Regarding Leó Szilárd, a theoretical physicist who first conceived of the possibilities of nuclear chain reactions, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons:
The bath was down the hall. “I remember that I went into my bath…around nine o’clock in the morning. There is no place as good to think as a bathtub. I would just soak there and think, and around twelve o’clock the maid would knock and say, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Then I usually got out and made a few notes, dictated a few memoranda.”
— Richard Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb
Shower thoughts, bath thoughts, lawn mowing thoughts. Great minds think alike, i.e., in similar repose.
Sneaker-net’ing URLs to personal devices in the year 2024
Suppose you’re on a computer provisioned by a corporate IT department. They’ve restricted the software you can install. On principle, you’ve decided that even signing in to websites on a personal account is nice to avoid, where possible.
Given those constraints, how do you transfer interesting web stuff you’ve come across from the sphere of corporate IT into your sphere of IT? Normal tools like bookmarking sites or iCloud sharing are out. Emailing it to yourself is also out, too many steps and too janky.
What I came up with is:
- Find a bookmarklet that will convert the current location’s URL to a QR code. This Codepen worked for me, but I bet there are others!
- Hold my personal phone up to the monitor like a weird person and scan said code
- Now the location is on my phone and I can do as I like
Rails generators reminders
First: use them! Most frameworks have a project boilerplate and that’s it. Rails’ ability to quickly lay down a conventional resource, model, or anything else is a productivity booster. Use it!
Second: experiment with the commands before you run them. Try Harrison Broadbent’s, RAILSG · Ruby on Rails Generator Reference and Command Builder:
RAILSG is a collection of Ruby on Rails generator command references, and command builders.
Third, write your own. When your app gets traction, you’ll probably invent a couple of conventions of your own. Use generators to quickly write new code consistently. Garrett Dimon has become the expert on this, Creating Custom Rails Generators:
Rails generators can help remove significant friction from the process of spinning up new ideas, but you don’t have to limit yourself to the included generators. You can also create custom generators as long as you’re familiar with the available APIs and know where the speed bumps are.
And check out his forthcoming book on the same topic!
Notes on focus and attention
Focus and attention are inputs to producing excellent things. All the talent in the world won't get me far if I’m not focused or attention isn't working in my favor. Beyond my skills at whatever I’m making (software, teams, products, essays, etc.), I need attention and focus.
In other words: I want to make what’s important to me: teams, writing, and software. I need focus to decide what to write/build with excellence. I require attention to sustain that focus.
Henrik Karlsson on multi-armed bandits and focus. First, explore to find what I might want to focus on:
The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible. This is what exploring does. You think you know the distribution of payoffs of the slot machines, but you try something new. You discover that you were wrong. You update your model.
This is a life design thing. Get out in reality, seek novelty, try plenty of things, “touch grass” with the world outside my mental model, the more the better. Experience a bunch of things, surround myself with intriguing, intense, or impactful people.
Surely things could have gone differently for me if I’d done more exploring when I was twenty-something. But, much less of the world was available to me then. More important that I figure out the world needs exploring now and then and that I can explore even with the responsibilities of my forty-something years.
After the exploration, “exploit” what I’ve found. Choose a few things and go deep on them. Things which resonate with me and make me think “this is a thing that I can do or invest my time and effort in”. I start doing it and that is focus.
But, really choose those “pillars” of focus. If I pick seven things, I haven’t really chosen. Pick a few of these things, leave several on the cutting floor. Don't construct some wild productivity system where I can spread my energy out over the seven days of the week, over seven areas of alleged focus and get nothing done (except possibly create a wobbly ideology and maybe a video course selling it 🌶️).
May I recommend the rule of three? It’s great.
Focus-and-exploit lets the brain work the problem even when offline, away from keyboards and tools. Pro-tip: mundane chores are an excellent tool here. e.g. take a shower, mow the lawn, go for a walk.
Why would focus compound? Part of it is time. If you care about less, you spend more time doing what you care about most. Also, you are always nonconsciously processing the thing you focus on. So cutting priorities means you work even when it looks like you’re not working. These days, I’ll spend the afternoon playing with the kids, doing the dishes, repairing the houses—being busy in a mind-clearing way. Then, when I sit down to write the next morning, I can type 700 words without thinking. The ideas have been churning in my head, just below the surface of conscious thought, and come fully formed.
If you're really focused, your brain is always working on those three pillars. It's thinking about whatever it is you're doing, turning over problems, processing that information, compiling it, organizing it while you sleep, and while you do mundane things.
Austin Kleon suggested a similar approach. When he runs out of writing/creative energy, he cleans his pool. Basically, he takes his thinking mind out of the loop. Lets his physical body do something routine and mundane to invite the creative mind to return. (Sorry, I can’t remember which Austin Kleon thing I saw this as a comment on. 🤦🏻♂️)
If you like this explore and exploit stuff, you’re going to really dig Kent Beck’s ideas about explore, expand, exploit.
On the other hand, allowing ideas into my sphere of thought from social feeds designed to put me in a bad mood or get me to buy stuff breaks the focus. I need attention.
Craig Mod, How I Got My Attention Back:
If I tell people I went offline for a month, it’s like telling them I set up camp on Mars. It hints of apostasy, paganism. Tribes seem to find pleasure in knowing all members suffer equally. But, really, is the situation so dire that we can’t wrangle a little more control? We’ve opted into this baffling baseline of infinite information suck, always-availability. Nobody held a gun to our head. We put our own mouths on the spigot every single day.
But it’s so delicious. That spigot goo — buoyed by pull-to-refreshes and pings and wily dots. Giving up attention, so seductive.
I can’t focus if my attention has me thinking of “5 amazing one-takes by Scorsese” or “INSANE Porsche 911 builds”. 🧠🫠 Too much social media feed is an inescapable gravity well of wandering thoughts. Modern, programmed attention makes it difficult to think our thoughts or sustain them.
However, disconnection is a luxury, and a bit ascetic. The real tactic requires figuring out how to thread the needle, striking a balance between connectedness and Waldenponding.
So I need guidelines, even when discipline wanes:
The internet goes off before bed. The internet doesn’t return until after lunch. That’s it. Reasonable rules. I’m too weak to handle the unreasonable.
What works for me:
- Remove the glaring offenders in my “attention” life. Mute, unfollow, etc.
- Set coarse rules that protect my time to focus. e.g., I take the first hour of my day for a writing routine, while my energy is high and the world is mostly asleep instead of eager to distract me.
- Remove decision-making. I listen to the same album on repeat during my writing session (currently, A Love Supreme). I work through the same five-item to-do list every time to get my energy going.
Attention and energy are finite. Don’t worry when one or both dwindle. At the end of the day, after numerous meetings, the weekend after a long week. That’s when it’s basically okay to allow a little temptation into your day. Don’t succumb to hustle culture! I encourage you to take a break from crushing it now and then.
Excellence. This bit started with trying to figure out how focus and attention generate excellent work. In particular, I need more than acumen and experience to make exceptional things, teams, organizations. I need to choose the right thing to focus on. But, tying up excellence with identity can cause misery or generate path dependence. I require honesty with myself when I’m doing great work and when I’m going through the motions to keep the work going. Focus and attention are preconditions for making excellence.
I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a 'Rap' Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time – Andre 3000
It’s all works in progress. Many posts are rough drafts I put out there to keep myself going. I have no idea which ones will stick and which ones will bounce. Plenty of drafts and following the way the wind blows me.
I know that if I let my attention wander, I will put less out there. Ergo attention. And I know that if I try to make several kinds of things, I will put less out there. Ergo focus.
Teams and organizations have focus and attention, too. Builders — developers, designers, etc. — focus on their slice of a problem. Teams focus on the problem as a whole. Organizations focus on solving problems that generate an impact on the metrics or goals they’re chasing.
Priorities are the attention of a team or organization. The negative space in those priorities reflects problems and impacts the group will say “no, thanks” to. That suggests a tidy way to think of personal and group attention; we should say “no, thanks” to attention-sinks which aren’t aligned with our personal goals and priorities. “No, thanks” to algorithmic feeds when our goal is to write, for example.
(Time to land this thing.)
Focus is a capacity to get stuff done. To choose a problem and put many hours and days into it. A sense of purpose, if that’s your thing.
Attention is deciding what the mind is thinking about. Attention can complement focus, or derail it. It’s how minutes turn to hours, in good ways (or bad).
Shallow focus and attention see us bouncing from one idea to another. Often, without our intention to intervene (i.e., dopamine hits). The good focus and attention turns minutes into hours of engagement and days of interesting work into the weeks and months of a notable career or legacy of work.
The funk is in the notes you don’t play
Funk is unique amongst musical genres, in my perspective, due to the importance of the notes you don’t play. The space between notes, and not “shredding” every possible moment, is important in all genres. But I find that the funkiest stuff gets that way from missing expected notes and shifting expected notes to moments where they shouldn’t be.
Funk was a rhythmic system of tension and release over time, but also simultaneous tension between some players exercising maximum restraint and others exhibiting maximum expressiveness. Most of all, funk was a science of subverted expectations, syncopation taken to its ultimate destination. With funk, things weren’t always where you thought they’d be.
– Dan Charnas, Dilla Time
Digital Underground, Rhymin’ on the funk. Recommended.
Funk not only moves, it can re-move, you dig?
– George Clinton, P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)
The LFG called life
LFG: looking for game. An ad-hoc scheme, often forum-esque, where strangers looking to play an online game that lacks matchmaking find each other and coordinate starting a game.
No matter how famous they get, the forward-thinking artists of today aren’t just looking for fans or passive consumers of their work, they’re looking for potential collaborators, or co-conspirators. These artists acknowledge that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that the experience of art is always a two-way street, incomplete without feedback. These artists hang out online and answer questions. They ask for reading recommendations. They chat with fans about the stuff they love.
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
This is how I found so many of my online pals and past/future collaborators. The wonder of blogs, “web 2.0”, and then Twitter. We were out there posting, finding tribes, and, occasionally teammates.
You have more writing material than you think
Jim Nielsen, Blogging and Composting:
But as a byproduct of whatever you’re building you undoubtedly learned, observed, or cursed at something along the way.
And if you blog, you can make good use of that experience!
Show up (almost) every day, stack some drafts. Write down what you learned or what surprised you or what amazed you. Sooner than you know it, you’ve got a thing going. Maybe even a thesis or long-running schtick. Works for any kind of writing, not just blogs. 📈
Weekend in Portland
Day two: breakfast, books, public transit! Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (surprise guest: Maya Rudolph!) put on an excellent show. (Not pictured: very, very cold.)
Grits ’n Gravy. Enjoyed.
Powell’s Books. Enjoyed, transacted.
The light rail line back to our Airbnb. It’s nice to get around sans car now and then!
Dinner plates say what we meant to say at Bottle and Kitchen.
Seeing lady comics at a concert hall, not a bad way to spend a night out of town.
Work in progress
I’ve had this sitting prominently in my Muse workspace for a while. Seems like a good time to deploy it now.
Barry Hess, You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist:
I’m not going to look down on you for micro-posting on your blog, either. Heck, I might do it myself. I don’t prefer it, though. A blog isn’t Twitter. Just like I don’t think of a blog as something containing 2,000-word, heavily researched posts.
You don’t have to be an essayist. (Though you can be one if you want!) Don’t let those essayists discourage you from blogging.
Just write. Just blog.
Cosign.
Weekend in Portland
Day one, travel day. Air travel is fine. Green carpets are green. It’s cold and dreary, as expected. There may be snow. We persevere.
Obsidian + LLMs
My experiments (with obsidian-copilot) have yet to yield a satisfying intersection between LLMs and Obsidian. I generally find OpenAI’s models write too much like breathless clickbait instead of an interesting human. I don’t want a summary or rewrite of my notes generated in that style. For querying/searching/discovery, OpenAI’s notebook-esque web interface is fine.
I’m still hoping to come across something that uses indexing and embedding to help me organize and connect notes I wrote, by my hand, in intriguing and novel ways. 🤞🏻
That said, if you’re already running an LLM locally via llama, obsidian-ollama looks like an excellent way to integrate it into your note-writing/knowledge management scheme. The code of this plugin is easy to follow and nicely structured, making it a good one to look at when the temptation to write Obsidian plugins comes. (Which, for me, arrives as a potential distraction more often than I’d like!) Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this one yet!
Journal for work/life/everything
Ray Grasso, Long Live the Work Journal:
Keep a journal for work, champions.
It’s pretty easy to get started—just create a text file.
Throw in a new heading each day and write down whatever you did—a single line for each task is usually enough. I put the newer dates at the top so it’s less scrolling to get to the most recent content. Over time you end up with your own little private reverse-chronological blog-in-a-file.
Each day, dump in commands you’ve run; links to documents you’ve created, reviewed, or read; tasks you want to get done; or goals you want to achieve.
You’re building a little outboard brain where your work history is just a short grep away.
Endorsed. Journals are the best PKM impact-to-effort ratio out there. I like DayOne, been using it for more than ten years and thousands of entries. But, anything works! Your notes app, a text file, a document in your preferred word processor. Anything you can search later and access anywhere is good!
The most important thing is to turn what’s in your head into “words on paper”. That’s when the magic happens!