Month: April 2023

Sleep. Was I sleeping or not? I felt awake and restless. The tracking device will tell me I guess.

I now have a Whoop on my right arm and wear a watch on my left. An Apple Watch.

It’s a bit much.

I’m going to have to start wearing the Apple Watch to bed to cross-check the performance of the Whoop. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? It’s tracking devices all the way down.

I will experiment for a good while with the tracking device lifestyle. Is it useful? Is it interesting? Patience. Give it a year or two. See what happens.

At the moment, the Whoop is providing noise: I don’t know the meaning of what it tells me. What is “recovery” in Whoopspeak? Let’s wait to see. Maybe my ancient Apple Watch plus an app will give me better sleep data than the Whoop.

100 days in a row of writing a minimum of five minutes and publishing something—anything—every day.

Publishing started on Twitter. Now it’s here. I had The Third Site to write on as well. Now it is dormant and I will abandon it. I write here and I write professionally.

https://laststanding.app

Thank you, Ultraworking crew. This is transformative.

Day off today.

The plan: road trip to a nice town and have lunch in a nice restaurant.

Let’s start. The usual “new day” tasks, and now I sit, with my morning coffee, writing for the new day. Day 100 of 2023 as it turns out.

This is a test of resolve. In the same way that the methodical training schedule for running is paying dividends, it is time for the methodical schedule for business. Give it a breather today. Soak up the sun.

I will explain.

I have a set schedule for increasing my stamina and distance in running—in preparation for a half-marathon. The plan is boring, normal, and doesn’t push the envelope of effort. I didn’t think it up—it’s the building block of every recommendation I saw.

I am emphasizing these points: (a) no genius involved, only copying; (b) underperformance, underwhelming efforts; and (c) time. T

hree days a week, short/short/long. Rest days between.

No Push the Tempo.

And it’s working. My aerobic performance is great. Yesterday I could have gone much longer than my set target, but I stopped. My joints, muscles, and tendons need time, too. I don’t let the driver push for More.

More distance will come in time.

That same approach is now to be deployed with the business. Relentless, achievable, methodical, measured effort—with intentional rest days included.

That is how I will approach the building of a new capability, a new line of business.

And that is why today is a rest day.

There are basics. Earnestly pursued they create contentment.

Be honest

With others, of course. But especially with yourself.

Cash register honesty is easy. Telling yourself the truth about yourself is hard.

Be kind

With others, of course. But especially to yourself.

Petting kittens and playing with puppies is easy. Entertaining a toddler is easy.

Knowing when to push, when to hold back, when to cut—with the objective of what is best for the other person—is hard.

Especially it’s a matter of kindness to yourself. It’s too easy to be too hardcore (my one “10K every day” exercise routine mantra is an example) or too soft (“why yes I will eat half a cheesecake, I can eat less tomorrow”).

Physical exercise and diet are the easy examples. Interactions with people? Hard. What is best for them? For me? For the group, community, society?

Get good at something

This is underrated and so important.

Pursue something—really, it could be anything—and become really damned good at it.

This will take time. You will realize that there is no “there” there. The pursuit has no finish line.

You will, from a position of mastery, respect other masters (in your own field and elsewhere) as peers, fellow pilgrims. They are not competitors.

You will recognize hidden masters all around you, in plain sight. They are special, because they seek nothing, they want nothing, they just are. You can become one if you choose. This is the highest calling.

This to me is every man’s fate: to deliberately choose the path of apprentice, journeyman, and master of a difficult endeavor. Or . . . emptiness.

One chooses this path in the same way that a man chooses the path of Father—not for himself, but for his children yet unborn, for whom he willingly and quietly bears a lifetime of responsibility.

It’s early—before dawn. My mind has been working for a while, even before wakening. Dreams of work. Those dreams of logic and process that don’t quite make sense but almost make sense so I obsessively return to the start and replay the sequence to make it work better and it doesn’t so I return to the start . . . .

All while telling myself, in dream state, that I will remember this when I wake up and it’s all extremely valuable. Which of course it’s not. It’s just a fever dream without the fever.

I get these dreams when I have work pressure. This one is about a current project.

So my mind is cranking and I awaken and there is no going back to sleep.

A bite to eat, early. Let it settle for a couple of hours, then run.

See how the rest of the day turns out. I have Plans.

I am quietly streaming Scriabin’s complete piano sonatas while I’m working on my laptop. Me and PDFs and Keynote and Word and my head full of decades of technical stuff. And Scriabin.

From nowhere a passage muscled itself from background to fully occupying my consciousness. Stopped me dead cold. I could do nothing but listen. It brought to mind Evie’s funeral, and Hal’s anguish. And then, the music released its grip and allowed me to return to work.

Music can make me weep. Misere does it. So does Ebben? Ne andrò lontana.

And that ancient opera recording (1910s? 1920s?) that I have sought for decades now. Heard in the car, on KUSC and played by Jim Svejda I would guess. A Sunday night. I remember that. A soprano, an old, tinny, scratchy recording, all of the musicians long dead of course. I often wonder who or what I heard that night.

But a few minutes of piano that can command front and center of my consciousness at its will? That’s a first.

Find a purpose outside yourself.

You, alone and tumbling through empty space and darkness, are not enough.

Scale. Understand scale. Understand who you are. What everything else is.

Now find something bigger than yourself. And go.

This is from an important (to me) blog post. It introduces a useful way of thinking about my activities and approach to life, work, and everything.

How can we call a function that doesn’t exist? Well, it’s an exercise in imagination. As we’re writing main, we can ask ourselves “What kind of function would we like to call here?” What name would make sense for it? Would it need to take any arguments? If so, what? Would it return any results? How many? What type? And so on.

In fact, this is a good way to design such a function—and, by extension, the whole public API of our package: by using it.

There’s a Zen saying that applies here:

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

In other words, if we want to design a package, we should begin by pretending it already exists, and writing as code that uses it to solve our problem. When this code looks clear, simple, and readable, we probably have a nice design. The hard part is over: all we need to do now is actually implement that design.

Write packages, not programs

Apply this to today’s planned activities, and what do you get? The development of three universal introductory modules that will work until the underlying premises on which these ideas are built are altered. (I am constantly watching to see what Darth Vader does).

Packages vs programs. The illustration that crystallizes the idea is:

The biggest shift in our thinking, then, is from solving our very specific and parochial problem, to solving a general class of problems that includes ours. For example, instead of writing code to calculate the square root of 2, we write a package that calculates any square root, and then we apply it to the number 2.

Write packages, not programs

Slept. That is good. Now the standard morning routine, this time punctuated with a couple of extra bananas.

Today. Let us build the secret business.

And the visible one? You haven’t put the time block into the calendar and respected it. That’s one reason it is stagnant.

Yes. So today is a focus day. The product. The “thinking about your thinking” applied to the secret and the visible businesses.

Funny. Focus time. I keep blowing that aside. Back to the beginning it is. A familiar cycle: productive actions, mentalities fall by the wayside and . . . why have things gone to shit?

Today I learned a new word and gained a new perspective on How Things Really Work.

The only way forward is to stop singing threnodies for a vanished political order, and start thinking strategically about how to survive in the one that replaced it.

https://unherd.com/2023/03/what-posie-parker-learnt-from-brexit/

Threnody:

A threnody is a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person.

The author’s insights into How Things Work are new to me. They make a sense of chaos that I observe. (I am sure there are other ways of making sense of chaos).

Every politician needs brownshirts, but at a plausibly deniable distance.