Author: neil

Systems Renovation Recap

Introduction

I’m now a fifth of the way – 20 days – into my 100 days experiment to renovate my habits/ system. It’s a good time to take stock, course-correct, examine challenges, celebrate (even/ especially) the small wins, and synthesize the learnings thus far.

Spencerian Calligraphy:

Much energy was invested in the garden today, with all the walking done behind a lawn-mower and whipper-snipper.  I managed to get some Spencerian exercises in before, luckily – the vibration of the machines leaves my arm rather sore for a while, making writing painful or sometimes impossible for a while.

Besides today’s exercises, this week I managed to work on letters J, K done twice, L &  M, and practiced ovals  mid-week.

Walk Every Day:

Making the time to walk for an hour or more is easier when I have an accountability buddy – my wife. We’ve done this every day now, and the pictures I take on these walks are helping jog my memory. The walks also are our time to ourselves to hold each other the space – to connect, to vent, and to verbalise our emotions of the day.

Today’s walk, while in the garden, was a long one and I did not think of taking a photo before and after the work was done.

Vocal learning:

This changed from once a a week to everyday, after a colleague explicitly said that there’s no excuse if it only takes 5 minutes to do a reading exercise. I have recorded every day this week a minute or more of my voice, reading aloud a poem or a blog post.

Write 100 words here every day:

While I struggled in the first few days for ideas or to hit the word count, I don’t have that trouble now. If anything, I am editing as I type, and that takes from the flow of simply pouring out first and then editing.

What I’ve learned (again!)

  1. I have to **make** the time. There’s always something pressing or urgent – for someone else! Making the time is the same as prioritising myself, a little bit of self-care.
  2. Related, but different. There is ALWAYS time. This week I put a 15-minute limit on the browser on my phone. It brought my average daily phone usage time from 2.5 hours to less than an hour, much of that reduced time being YouTube music videos.
  3. Language matters. How I describe the day changes the way I see the day. Thinking in the third person, like Marcus Aurelius’s linguistic trick, helps get through the inevitable mental block that builds up over time.
  4. Calligraphy is incredibly relaxing for me. It’s not a revenue-earning skill I am building as much as a mental-health routine. It also very clearly forces me to deal with my need for perfection – however good the letters look, a closer examination tells me I have MILES to go before the letter is symmetrical or aligned or shaded.
  5. After  a week of recording my voice, I can feel why I have to do at least a few of the warm-up exercises if I’m going to do this in the night, feeling tired. I’m going to try recording in the morning.
  6. For the first time in a while, I’ve continued watching the lectures of a course on Blockchain that I’m doing every morning. I’ve progressed to making notes, and truly attempting to understand the implications of this fast-changing technology.
  7. Writing every night in my journal is forcing me to deal with the emotional weight and worries of the day, take it out of my mind and turn them into words that I can then go back to read later. More often than not, the worries have dissolved in the night, or at the very least, my subconscious mind has figured out a way of tackling the problem in a far easier or novel way than I could have come up.

To the next three weeks:

There will be changes to the routine, chosen or forced. Aim to continue the streak of doing things I’ve set out to do, one day at a time. And don’t worry about adapting them as I find useful. This is not a challenge as much as it is an experiment.

And remember that it’s the small changes, done every day, that will compound to set big things in motion.

Let the light shine through

The sun was up much before I was this morning (nothing new, of course). What I did notice as I walked out was the translucent leaves and the drops of water on them and the amazing color combinations as a new leaf sprung forth from the vine. The leaves simply let the light shine through.

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So much of my effort over the last few months has been on keeping the inspiration spark alive for everyone else around me. Almost everyone I have spoken to this week has framed the problems we individually see using the same phrases of exhaustion, ennui, distrust, and a lack of leadership. It is easy to feel at home with this view, and that’s exactly when I remember Eddie Jaku’s  talk about happiness being a choice.

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In the midst of the exhaustion though, I’m grateful for a conversation I had with a colleague who reached out to me today, and I spoke to for the first time. He is deaf, and yet is an accomplished percussionist. His enthusiasm to share with me his idea was infectious. I will help him craft his inspiring story in a few weeks, and that is inspiration enough for me.

I crafted a note today that I am pleased with; the ideas flowed as soon as I let my brain wander; and the result was well received by the few people I shared it with.

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Rejection, Language, and Gratitude

A storm just passed through, and the lightworks were awesome! We might be able to sneak in a walk before the next one hits.

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Jia Jiang’s TEDx video on rejection has had over 4 million views. The point he makes about seeking out rejection so it no longer has power over him is powerful and yet, terrifying. Come to think of it though, most of my every day interactions, including the ones I had today are an invitation to rejection. But there are so many other things that I don’t do for fear of rejection. An universal problem?

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Lera Boroditsky’s talk on How Language Shapes the Way We Think was a serendipitous recommendation this morning too, after a discussion yesterday during our team’s learning hour.  Her examples of language shapes time and how it’s perceived (the Australian Aboriginal Community in a different coordinate space), number words that allow technological innovations that open up the world of mathematics, early effects (color identification is different), broad effects (gender nouns in German vs Spanish), weighty effects (how blame is allocated in different languages) provoked me into thinking about the unexamined language I use everyday.

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I’m also grateful to several people who reached out today to share their worry and that they trusted me enough to share them with me, even if all I could be was a patient ear. Also to the person who wanted to say the work I’ve been doing in organising the weekly talks at work for telling me how much they valued it: it gave me a boost in my flailing enthusiasm in coordinating more of them.

 

Is Anything Worth Maximising?

Again I managed to get out during a break in the rain for a brisk walk. Lots to be grateful for today, including many conversations that pushed my thinking into clarity or clarification territory.

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This morning, I spent time listening to this persuasive talk by Joe Edelman, about

how metrics affect the structure of organizations and societies, how they change the economy, how we’re doing them wrong, and how we could do them right.

In my current work context – as I suspect is the case with most organisations – I see little hope for this argument to progress through the bureaucracy that measures itself through the metrics it measures. The solutions that Edelman offers also appeals to me, because the potential to disrupt large, tone-deaf organisations is right there for the taking IF done well. The question is, can it be done well?

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A 2005 short paper titled Triple Entry Accounting predates Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin paper from 2008, and makes the case for a melded approach by using a digitally signed receipt to create a bullet-proof accounting systems for aggressive uses and users.