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.
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/
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.
Up early after going to bed late. Went to bed late because too much caffeine too late in the day. Memo to self: no need to replicate that experiment.
Long day today. Zooms bracket the workday, then go run.
And so it goes.
What do I want? Not what I have. The fuckity-fuck problem exists and I’m pissed off still. Convo next week is required.
The plan is:
Consider joint venturing with someone. John or Dan. or brainstorming with them. Ask David if this is too hard core.
Do I have my eye off the ball?
No forward action apparently.
The inertia is staggeringly hard to overcome. It’s impossible for people to see why their efforts are even bad.
How to think. How to define. How to commit. These are hard skills to acquire and wield.
Start somewhere. Do one thing. Do it well. Repeat.
Define crisp. Model it. I have a vision that is clearly different, but I don’t articulate it well. I will have to talk to David about this. “What would you do if you wanted to be utterly thorough?”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
And again I wake up and write.
I have a draft of what I want to publish on Friday. The draft is a mess. How do I get from mess to done? See, these little daily exercises build momentum but I need effortless production.
What to do?
I’m inspired by the guy who I’m listening to on the podcast who said now he can blow out his videos in one take, whereas when he started it took 4 hours.
It’s been surprisingly hard to find competent email newsletter software. Mailchimp is shit to use for writing and formatting, but the alternatives have their own problems.
Well the day started with the “Welcome to Hollywood” refrain in my head. There is a song from the 1970s with that title and the lyrics tell the same story of Hollywood then that is Hollywood today. Yet the hopeful keep coming.
I only mention that because the mind throws up random memories and that was one of them.
Today let’s do what needs to be done. It’s another recovery day so take it easy on the exercise front.
For work, let’s see. Things are moving. (1) Sublease: the wheels are in motion. (2) The Big Decision? I don’t know still. I know what I want to do but I don’t have a Plan B for what would happen next.
I think getting more insistent on checklists. The trouble ticket analogy is the way to think about it. I’m going to try those systems.
Like the song, I’m starting to see benefits from the tiny action mentality.
First, let’s get books out of the way, and specifically two books: Tiny Habits and Atomic Habits. Useful? Sure. Marginally helpful? Probably.
But nothing happened until I started doing. Started taking action. The Last Resolution Standing game of write daily for five minutes and hit publish — that was the pivot for me. I’m doing that now, in fact.
This showed me it was possible for me to do something to install a new habit. And it showed me that I could do much more if only I planted a seed.
I write much more now. The extra is not published daily but it is published. I applied the tiny start, tiny regular action to running and last week I ran 13 miles.
In LRS there are now five of us. I will be the last one. What happens when they want to take down the website? Maybe they will just start 2024 and I will keep going.
Or I will keep my streak alive all by myself.
I’m training for a half marathon, starting from being able to run two miles.
My objective: finish and don’t walk any part of it. Time/speed is irrelevant.
My strategy: three runs a week, two shorter and one longer. Get the long run to 13 miles by increasing distance 1/2 a mile every week. Today I ran 5 miles. In 16 weeks I will be at race distance.
The short runs also get increased weekly. At the moment they are at 4 miles. I am not sure how I will maintain a sane differential between long and short runs. Right now they are indistinguishable.
Increase overall weekly distance by about 10% each week. I will allocate a bit more to the long run and split the rest between the two short runs.
All the complexity from YouTube is comical. I’m happy.