Author: neil

Synchronous Pain

I discovered through a painful lesson today that I have a complicated reading setup.

Feedbro is wonderful because I have discovered the joy, constraints, and workflow of reading on one device. It forces me to time box the reading, and act on things I can while discarding everything else.

I have three machines (not including my work machine!) that I have suddenly accumulated in the last three months. A Macbook Pro that I resurrected over the holidays, a very basic Windows PC that I use for specific applications that don’t run on Mac, and an emotional purchase of a Windows Surface tablet that I thought I’d use exclusively for reading (in bed!)

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Edge browser on the Surface and on the PC. I had signed in using my MS account which means the extensions are synchronised on both machines. I don’t use Feedbro on the PC, so I removed the extension without thinking too much about it, and continued to read my feeds on the Surface.

About 15 minutes or so later, Feedbro disappeared on the Surface as I was reading. I realised in a few moments what happened. Edge helpfully removed the extension on all browsers I was signed in to. Feedbro only stores the feeds locally on the machine I was reading, and when the extension is removed, all feeds went with it (I must validate that extensions delete all data).

In any case, it took me a while to recreate the feed list. Two hours that could have been invested in something else, but I won’t do that mistake ever again 🙂

Oh, it was also MT’s wedding today that I decided not to attend, thanks to my recurring cough. I missed meeting many old friends too.

Ideas: Richard Hamming

Talk: “You and Your Research” at Bell Labs, 1986

💡 Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-research-by-richard-hamming

  • Do great work. Not just ‘good work’, but great work, worthy of a Nobel Prize
  • Luck has little to do with. Preparation is critical (Einstein thought about speed of light when he was 13/14/15
  • Brains are measured differently, so also overrated. Success begets more success because you build confidence, build more courage, become more articulate
  • Have courage
  • Age has an effect. Perhaps because once success arrives, there’s less time for great work and more time for speeches and ceremony. When you become famous, hard work (ego, etc) to work on small problems.
  • Working conditions don’t matter as much (hmmm) you can do great work by turning around the problem a little bit, rephrasing it.
  • Great drive (John Tukey story) “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” Knowledge & productivity are like compound interest
  • Tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started.
  • Feed the subconscious the problems and starve it from others for answers, sometimes
  • Ask “what are the important problems in my field?” Work on the important problems. You won’t do great work otherwise.

Important problems: It’s not consequences that make it an important problem, it’s that you have a reasonable attack.

  • 💡 “Great thoughts time”: Friday afternoons would discuss only great thoughts.
  • Pursue opportunity for great work when it shows up. Drop all other things. They go after it because they’ve already thought this thing through
  • Do you job in such a fashion that other people can build on it. Don’t stand on each other’s feet.
  • Selling your work. Distasteful, ignored, and yet the most important. Three things to do in selling:
    • Write clearly so that people will read it
    • Learn to give formal talks
    • Learn to give informal talks
  • Technical people love to give a deep, restricted, TMI technical talk. The audience wants a broad, general relatable talk.
  • Educating your bosses so you get control over what you work on. Will take time, is hard work.
  • Use leverage (story about using computing time to ask for named credit for the people doing programming, then using credit in published article to ask for resources)
  • Is the effort to be great (scientist) worth it?

I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

  • Why do so many people who have brains and talent fail?
    • Lack of drive, commitment
    • Personality defects (control freak, not using the system to advantage)
    • Ego assertion (dressing as a form of self-expression). Appearance of conformity is enough, you don’t have to conform 💡
    • You can fight to reform the system or you can do great work, not both.
    • Anger
    • Unable to look for positive side (I bragged about something so I’d have to perform. I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable.)
    • Self-delusion (Well, I had the idea but I didn’t do it and so on and so on.)
    In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

Spencerian: John Gardner

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

Listening modes

I deeply appreciate the ideas that Rob Walker of “The Art of Noticing” shares in this weekly newsletter.  To be able to do meaningful work, I have found myself taking the time to notice or observe people, the circumstances, the problems, etc a little more mindfully than I have been used to.

Edition 82 featured user-research expert Ximena Vengoechea, author of “Listen Like You Mean It”.  There’s one particular idea that she suggests tuning into that has been on my mind: “Know your default listening mode”.

Are you a natural problem-solver, always scanning for the problem (and solution) in a conversation? Do you tend to be an identifier, prone to offering your version of a situation unprompted (Me too! That’s just like my experience with…). Maybe you are more the defuser, ready to crack a joke and lighten the mood whenever things get heavy.

No mode is better than the rest, but it’s useful to know your own mode so that you can adapt it as needed, since sometimes our instinct about how to listen is wrong.

There are particular people in my life that I need to adapt my listening style to. They have grown/ changed, and I seem to not have changed how I listen to them.  By default, with them I am a natural problem-solver, even when they don’t need my help. It’s unhelpful, to both of us.

I’m grateful that I have the the opportunity to set that right. It will take effort and pain, but what good things don’t take effort?

Spencerian: Louise Erdrich

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Work or Fun?

It’s been a few weeks since I started volunteering at the local volunteer-run radio station.  I’ve thought of it as an opportunity to contribute to the local community, while also learning some skills I am interested in.

In the last two weeks or so, I found some time to give the website a facelift, or at least a little foundation makeup 🙂 I learnt how Elementor works (and how it’s been used to hack together the site), the various plug-ins that slow down work by an order of magnitude (I literally spent over a day waiting for the site to load!) and how to disable them while I work. Integrating a payment method to reduce payment friction for memberships, reviewing the 5-year strategy and cash flows, creating website features that didn’t exist weeks ago – a wide range of skills being reused or learnt along the way. The micro-skills I’m learning are improving the speed (not necessarily the quality) with which I’m getting things done.

Because most people I’m working alongside seem to have either not the skills required or the willingness to do what’s required, I get the opportunity to speak up, roll up my sleeves, and do the work. Someone commented that I might be doing all the work (I don’t really care because there are no ‘accountability goals’).  If I’m having fun and learning while I’m doing this, rather than wasting time on things that are either meaningless or non-contributing, I don’t think of it as work.

 

Spencerian: Richard Feynman

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”