Category: Ideas

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Aim For the Gaps

Sports offer excellent metaphors that are used for general success in life precisely because they exist to be entertaining microcosms of life itself. Individuals or teams vie in a competitive landscape typically officiated by imperfect referees. Preparation is allowed, but on-field performance is all anyone remembers. Sports reflect real life in numerous ways, and each sport brings its own flair to the conversation.

Golf of any variety is a wonderful mix of planning, tactics, and execution. It’s about discrete decisions, managing each shot based on given strengths and the likelihood of success. I became overwhelmed each time I tried untangling these metaphors. It was too much.

Let me instead focus on one mindset adjustment I first jokingly heard in a disc golf YouTube video, but which I found impactful: The woods are mostly air. Aim for the gaps.

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The Sunday Paper

Wake up to a slight chill in the air, a quiet morning with leaves strewn across the sidewalks, brown and red and orange and yellow, preparing to crinkle later that afternoon once the morning dew glistening upon them evaporates. Throat is a bit scratchy. Pull up the covers for an extra moment of soft warmth before stretching out, rolling to the side, bare feet on wood floor.

Wipe eyes, grab some water, and go shut the window accidentally left open overnight leading to this moderate discomfort and grogginess. On second thought, it’s going to warm up today. Not too much. Just enough to keep the window cracked and let some warmer air make its way through.

Out the door, to the kitchen, striding gently and quietly so early in the day, trying to avoid the edges of the floor that habitually creak.

Ah, warm relief from the living room rug. Remember back, just a minute ago, when the sheets were pulled up, everything protected against the air that is fondly referred to as “crisp.” The thicker patterns in the rug shield against drafts from the windows—also left open—that spill across the floor.

Walk to the window and peer outside to see new piles of leaves collected on the sidewalk, listen to the birds chirping as the sun breaks through the mild canopy of the neighborhood, and smell the slightly humid air. Eyes cast about, taking it all in, then rest on the small red plastic bag at the base of the porch stairs.

The Sunday paper has arrived with its bold headlines, Associated Press blurbs, comics and box scores, and hyper-localized reporting. It is quaint and fun and supports a good cause; it is the perfect reading material to skim through on a calm, quiet morning.

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Erin’s Completed PhD Thesis

My wife, Erin Gilbertson, officially has her PhD in Biological and Medical Informatics from the University of California, San Francisco. You can read her entire thesis, entitled Machine Learning Insights into the 3D Genome: Diversity and Gene Regulation in Human Populations, online here.

I’m incredibly proud of all of her work. It’s been amazing watching her grow, learn, persevere, and succeed in so many aspects. I’m thrilled I’ve been some part of that journey.

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Holding Onto Yourself

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read.

I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me:

Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.

Merlin Mann

This message is increasingly acute in a world where it’s easy to externalize experiences, activities, and values. We’re encouraged to create horcruxes across social media which changes our self-perception and ability to fully understand who we are beyond what we share. This is accelerated among those whose livelihood requires them to be online, particularly if their mainly compromises their daily lives.

But the situation doesn’t need to be nearly this extreme to be impactful. If we define our worth in this world solely by factors that others nominally control, we have no sway over how we view ourselves. While we can hope to surround ourselves by well-meaning friends and lovely individuals, it’s still unhealthy to lose that sense of self by spreading it around. We each need ways to focus on ourselves and gain a better understanding of who we are independent of those around us. We can often define much of our lives by how we relate to others, but the way those relationships pan out are a product of who we intrinsically are.

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The Fallacies of Millennial Impact

In college, I started seeing low-effort headlines claiming yet another corporate industry death at the hands of millennial. A typical example is the casual sit-down restaurant, and you can see a compilation of such claims (along with subsequent refutations) in this CB Insights post. I’d rather focus on the broader phenomenon and the various fallacies of thinking that lead to these poor and useless critiques of an entire generation.

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Doodling With Words

Doodling is more than scrawling sketches and shapes in the margins of your notes. It encompasses any idle, unguided, and spontaneous bursts of creativity.1The exception is playing music. All musicians know that equivalent of “doodling” on your instrument is “noodling”. In a light-bulb moment a few months ago I rediscovered my love of doodling with words, and it’s now something I try to do when I have spare time. Doodling is a phenomenal way to passively develop a skill while enjoying the process.

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    The exception is playing music. All musicians know that equivalent of “doodling” on your instrument is “noodling”.
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Let Work Be the Work

I enjoy playing with technology, trying new apps, and adjusting my processes. I listen to podcasts that nominally focus on productivity and the tools to get work done. You can look at my track record of changing writing setups to understand what I mean. It’s easy to conflate optimizing how you work and the work you’re trying to do. It’s rarely the case that these are one and the same, so it’s good to remember that the only way to accomplish a task is by doing it.1Some of this post was discussed in OHAC 52.

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    Some of this post was discussed in OHAC 52.
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Exploring Effective Altruism

I recently came across William MacAskill and his books Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future.1I actually came across Future first and had it on my reading list, then came across Doing once I was ready for a new book. The former details a template for a model of approaching the world called effective altruism, while the other looks at an adjacent set of ideas called longtermism. While I’m still working through the second book, I’ve become quite interested in the concepts laid out in each and thought it was worth sharing.

In short, the idea behind effective altruism is that if we want to do good things for the world in which we live, it’s best if we focus our efforts on making the largest possible impact. MacAskill argues that this requires a tough look at the relative improvement one can make in the lives of others. Five dollars has a much higher impact on a farmer in rural Africa than it does on people poorly off in the United States.

From this basic tenet, MacAskill addresses just about every question and caveat that popped into my head2 Some highlights include determining whether it’s best to spend your career earning as much money as possible so you can give away as much as possible, or finding a career that is directly impactful on society. while reading Doing Good Better. It’s a difficult idea to take to its final conclusion, yet the depth of thought that goes into the provided framework is clear and insightful. There are value judgements galore, and socioeconomic estimates that, to a certain extent, you simply must accept if you’re going to get anywhere. But they are all explained, and the focus on transparency and a scientific approach to altruism was extremely innovative and inspiring.

I don’t think it’s necessary to commit to the book. Just check out https://www.effectivealtruism.org to get the basics; if it appeals to you there might still not be a need for the book. But I do recommending taking a few minutes to read through what they present and let the ideas simmer. There’s something refreshing about this practical approach to making the world a better place.

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    I actually came across Future first and had it on my reading list, then came across Doing once I was ready for a new book.
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    Some highlights include determining whether it’s best to spend your career earning as much money as possible so you can give away as much as possible, or finding a career that is directly impactful on society.