Category Archives: Self-Optimization

The Analects – Confucius (trans. David Hinton)

“If you can revive the ancient and use it to understand the modern, then you’re worthy to be a teacher.” – Confucius

Confucius (around 500 BC), stood for family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders, and ritual. He argued that society was made up of the structure of human relationships, and that to be fully human you had to fulfill your role in society with respect to others. He also argued for egalitarian education for all and a meritocracy, as well as espousing an early version of the Golden Rule. While alive, he was one of many philosophers: after his death, his philosophy would be adopted as an official creed in China, and Confucianism is one of the most lastingly influential creeds in history. It also came to stand for obedience to authority and sacrifice of the individual, but at least from the Analects it’s not clear that’s a fair interpretation.

In any case, I thought I’d share a few quotes that struck me!

General Advice

“When you’re an official with free time, study. When you’re a student with free time, take office.”

“For people to talk all day, enthralled with their clever chitchat, and never once mention right or wrong – that must be difficult indeed!”

À la Rumsfeld: “When you understand something, know that you understand it. When you don’t understand something, know that you don’t understand it. That’s understanding.”

On governing

“I can hear a court case as well as anyone. But we need to make a world where there’s no reason for a court case.”

“One day the stables burned down. When he returned from court, the Master asked: ‘Was anyone hurt?’ He didn’t ask about the horses.”

On Society

“To be poor and free of resentment is difficult. To be rich and free of arrogance is easy.”

“We’re all the same by nature. It’s living that makes us different.”

“Don’t grieve when people fail to recognize your ability. Grieve when you fail to recognize theirs.”

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

FlowGraph

“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!

In Praise of Slow – Carl Honoré

“And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”

“Does it really make sense to speed-read Proust, make love in half the time or cook every meal in the microwave?”

I’m going about this backwards, because I reviewed Honoré’s more recent book, The Slow Fix, several months ago, and am now reviewing his older one. Worse yet, I think I like his newer book more, so the need for this review is debatable, since the two are on very similar topics. Apologies to all who find that irritating.

My reasons for preferring his second book are twofold. First, this first can feel dated: it predates the financial crisis, and there are a few sections where that shows. More broadly, though, his second book simply has the better stories and anecdotes of the success of slow, and that’s what makes it such a pleasure to read.

All that said, there are definitely still pearls of wisdom to be found here. Honoré is careful to say that many things can and should be done quickly. Some things, though, must be done slowly, and in the modern world it’s not clear we remember that. How many of us, for example, wince when we read the letter from the Harvard Dean of undergraduates to new students, which suggests that “empty time is not a vacuum to be filled…It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4×4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other 15 pieces around.”

I read recently that most people don’t listen to each other; when they’re not talking, they mentally rehearse what they’re going to say next. That’s why most conversations proceed without pauses, and yet when you think about it, that’s crazy: does no one ever need to stop and think? Fitting in writing blog posts with the rest of my life, I’m the last person to claim speed isn’t useful, but I think there’s a deeper point to be made here. If we don’t remember to stop and slow down over what matters, we may reach a point where nothing feels like it matters.

No amazon links today: you can slowly navigate there yourself, and see if you see any other books that look good on the way there! Or, you could just join the Subtle Illumination email list.

The Book of Chuang Tzu

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” – Tao Te Ching

The Book of Chuang Tzu (also known as Zhuangzi or True Classic of Southern (Cultural) Florescence) makes up one of the three core texts of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching, its arguably more famous fellow, is short to the point of cryptic, and uses as few as words as possible to illustrate the Tao. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, is full of stories, personalities, events, and entertainment, to the point of being cryptic.

Taoism differs from both modern philosophies and its contemporaries in emphasizing that it is a path to be walked, rather than a term to be defined. Rather than review it, therefore, for those interested I thought I’d share an anecdote from the book.

“Hui Tzu spoke to Chuang Tzu, saying, ‘I have a big tree, which people call useless. Its trunk is so knotted, no carpenter could work on it, while its branches are too twisted to use a square or compass upon. So, although it is close to the road, no carpenter would look at it. Now, Sir, your words are like this, too big and no use, therefore everyone ignores them.

Chuang Tzu said, ‘Sir, have you never seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lies there, crouching and waiting; east and west it leaps out, not afraid of going high or low; until it is caught in a trap and dies in a net. Yet again, there is the yak, vast like a cloud in heaven. It is big, but cannot use this fact to catch rats. Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.”

Honestly, if you want to find out about Taoism, you’ll have to read it yourself: you can pick it up here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list!

Essays – Michel de Montaigne

“Everyone is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.”

(Note the second part of this review can be found here)

Michel de Montaigne is perhaps best known not for his own works, but for his influence on other writers, including Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, Balzac, Asimov, Shakespeare, and perhaps most recently, Taleb. He popularized the essay as a literary genre, and was one of the first authors to combine serious analysis with personal anecdotes, but as well as a writer he was a statesman, classicist, and skeptic.

Some of his works will ring oddly to modern ears, perhaps particularly his views on women and the need for obedience to authority, but in other ways he has much in common with modern viewpoints, including his dismissal of contemporary criticisms of the native peoples of North America as barbaric, arguing that cultures tend to assume everything different from themselves is barbaric without seeking to understand.

His essays vary from wide-ranging discussions on death, friendship, and education to narrow treatises on whether a commander should go to a parley in person or why we wear clothes. It is a book that relies purely on the judgment of the author, and in that respect he is actually more accessible to the modern reader than most of his contemporaries. For myself, I liked some of his essays and disliked others, but the good ones are very good, and even the poor ones are worth reading; agree or disagree, he has put considerable thought into his perspectives, and draws upon centuries of history to support them.

Next week, I’ll focus on his essays on Death and Education, but in the meantime here are some some samples of his thought:

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”

“I, for my part, am very little subject to these violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehensions, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.”

“I have lived in good company enough to know the formalities of our own nation, and am able to give lessons in it. I love to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome.”

You can pick up your copy of the Essays here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, if you’ve got a kindle, the essays are often cheap or free!

Decisive – Chip & Dan Heath

“[T]hat, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape behind it.”

The shoe company Zaapos offers all trainees $1000 to leave immediately and not work for them. Why? Consider the following decision-making process.

You’re faced with an important decision. You first look for your options, but narrow framing means you ignore several critical ones. What options you’ve found, you analyze, but confirmation bias means you fail to adequately look for information that disproves your thesis. Then, you make a choice, but fall victim to short term emotion and temptations. Finally, you live with your choice, but overconfidence means you’ve failed to prepare for error.

That, essentially, is the process Chip and Dan Heath describe in Decisive. Our brains are wired to act foolishly in some situations; how, they ask, can we do better? To help, they outline a series of mental tricks and approaches that allow us to better analyze, understand, and most of all improve our decisions.

What really comes through, however, is how often we don’t do what we obviously should to make a good decision. In a study of businesses, only 29% of teams considered more than one alternative option, while experts forecasting the future do less well than a simple extrapolation of base rates (though better than novices). Simple techniques can therefore be powerful; searching for options until you fall in love at least twice (better for houses than for marriages, perhaps), testing the future instead of predicting it, focusing on process, and asking yourself what you would do if none of your current options were available, can all have large payoffs.

All of which brings us back to Zappos and their $1000 offer. People who accept it, Zappos argues, are people they didn’t want anyway. It forces employees to stop, think, and decide, not just accidentally drift into a job they didn’t want. Those who remain know that they valued this opportunity so much they turned the offer down.

I’m not sure I learnt very much reading Decisive, but it was a quick and easy read, and some of the tricks for improving decision-making will certainly be useful. If you’re looking for a substantive addition to the literature, I can’t recommend it, but if you’re looking for a fun summer read it’s worth picking up.

If you do decide to pick it up, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right instead! (Doing both also permitted…)

Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan

“Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

Why do you eat what you do? How was it produced? If you can answer with more than the aisle of the supermarket you bought it from, well done. If you can’t, does that worry you? Is all food created equal and of equal health benefit? Is beef from a grass-lot the same as feed-lot, or vegetables grown industrially the same as organic? Do you know the answer to that? If not, does that worry you?

Michael Pollan argues it should worry us. Three principle chains of food sustain us, all of them linking one biological system, ourselves, with another, a patch of soil. Most of us, however, remain woefully ignorant of any sort of understanding of our food systems. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan explores each of the three methods of food creation, industrial, organic, and hunter/gatherer, and examines the costs and benefits of each.

There are a lot of shocking facts in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but to highlight one, I hadn’t realized that in industrial production of beef, cattle are dosed with antibiotics as a preventative measure, since they are so susceptible to disease from the poor conditions in which they live. Antibiotic resistance may be one of the most serious problems humanity as a whole faces in the coming years; to squander our antibiotics in a manner almost designed to create resistance is for me simply unacceptable. Shaving pennies off the price of beef just doesn’t seem worth the cost of our ability to fight disease. Health warning: readers of sensitive stomach may find they learn rather more about how broiler chickens are raised than they might have wanted.

There are of course two sides to every story, and Pollan is careful to examine the benefits from cheaper food in terms of health and living standards. He’s right, and the animal rights movement sometimes unfairly ignores these benefits. The reality though is that most of us aren’t in a position to decide either way; we remain willfully blind to the reality, ignorant of what we eat and where it comes from. Perhaps the tradeoff is worth it, but we should at least be aware of the processes our food goes through, whether that means glass walls on slaughterhouses or increased education about industrial production. In the end, what you eat is a personal choice, but it’s one that should be made out of information, not ignorance.

If you want to learn more about what you’re eating, you can get Pollan’s book here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande

Are you using enough checklists? It feels like the world is getting increasingly complicated, and I’m sure we’ve all experimented with various memory aides to try to remember everything we have to do. These range from the humble checklist to the mighty online planning tool with hyperlinked entries. For most of us, though, I suspect it’s hard to know what we’re doing right.

Gawande, a surgeon himself, is firmly convinced by the virtue of the checklist, and in his hands it becomes a powerful and thought-provoking tool to confront complexity. He begins by pointing out there are two reasons we fail: ignorance, if we don’t know something, and ineptitude, if we know how to do something and do it wrong. It is the second problem that is the most serious in the modern world, he argues, and checklists can make a dramatic difference.

There are approximately 150,000 deaths following surgery in the US, about 3x as many as deaths from car accidents, and so he’s got a point. If checklists can reduce even a small percentage of errors in surgery, it could make an enormous difference. Fortunately, Gawande has a number of stories of astonishing success from checklist adoption. When Johns Hopkins introduced a checklist for central line insertions, for example, infection rates dropped from 11% to zero; when Michigan did, it probably saved over 1,500 lives in 18 months. The results are much the same in fields as diverse as aviation or skyscraper construction.

He does caution readers not to overreach, however. Checklists longer than 5 to 9 items long become cumbersome, and people start ignoring them. Good lists therefore focus on the steps that make the biggest difference, and the ones likely to be forgotten. Too long, and they stop being effective. They also need to be carefully tested: much of the book is devoted to failed attempts at introducing checklists, as people have a tendency to ignore or fail to follow the list unless it is designed well.

The book’s a quick and easy read, but the idea is extremely powerful. Gawande talks about his own initial reluctance to adopt checklists, seeing himself as above them, and his more recent reversal of opinion. When he asked surgeons about the value of a checklist, 20% said it did not improve safety. When asked if they would want it used in surgery on them, however, 93% agreed. I suspect we could all benefit from a bit more humility and a few more lists.

Want more wisdom? Sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Or, keep reading (or in the UK or Canada).

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

“My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.”  – Josh Waitzkin

Joshua Waitzkin was national chess champion in the U.S. 8 times, inspiring the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and more recently has earned two world champion titles in Pushing Hands, the martial arts version of Tai Chi. It’s fair to say that he knows something about learning.

Quite a bit of The Art of Learning is devoted to Waitzkin’s career in both chess and pushing hands, and unfortunately though enjoyable it is perhaps a bit short on wisdom. Interspersed with that, however, are discussions of how he sees the learning process and the principles he believes underlie expertise in any discipline.

Waitzkin introduces a few vague lists of principles, but in essence argues the key to excellence is the gradual mastery of fundamental principles, over time interlinked into complexity and integrated into our subconscious.  The key to such learning is to take the small things you learn and ‘chunk’ them into larger ideas in your memory, ensuring efficient storage and retrieval. As a result, an expert martial artist and a beginner actually perceive different things. A complicated strike may be made up of six parts, but an expert perceives it as one moderately fast attack. The beginner, on the other hand, sees six different moves, all blindingly fast. Mastery of the fundamentals can actually change not just how you perform an event but also how you perceive an event.

Once you’ve achieved this chunking of basic concepts into complicated ones, he argues, you start achieving the deeper mastery critical for progress, and the correct decision can even seem intuitive. Studies of chess grandmasters, for example, have shown they do not see many moves farther ahead than weaker players. Instead, they have an intuition on which moves may be best, and so though they study the same number of possible moves, they study better quality ones.

Given Waitzkin’s success, the book is certainly inspirational, and mixed in with the story of his life are a few seeds of wisdom. I think my favourite story was that apparently as an offshoot of Soviet hypnosis programs, young Soviet chess players were taught to tap a piece quickly but softly against the table, in an effort to subliminally speed up the thinking of their opponent and encourage errors. Who knew?

Want to learn more about learning? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the subtleilluminations email list to your right.

Sugar as Toxin – Fat Chance by Robert Lustig

“If the food comes in a wrapper, the wrapper has more health benefits than the food.”

Added sugar is everywhere. Something like 80% of all food items sold in the U.S. contain it, and Americans yearly eat about 130 pounds each. It’s a drastic change from history, when sugar was at best available only seasonally, when fruit ripened.

Lustig thinks that sugar is toxic, evil, causing the obesity epidemic, and a poison, and that’s before he really gets warmed up.  Not only have food companies started adding sugar to almost everything to encourage consumption, he says, but they also remove the fiber to improve shelf life. Yet it is fiber, Lustig points out, that helps us process sugar. This is why eating a fruit is fine, but fruit juice is not (calorie for calorie, fruit juice is worse than pop): the fiber is destroyed by the juicing process.

The answer to obesity, says Lustig, is threefold. First, we must control the environment in which we live, reducing our intake of substances like sugar that destabilize our bodily hormones and lead to overeating. Second, we need to increase our consumption of fiber. Third, we need to exercise. An overweight person who exercises may well outlive a thin person who does not, and 15 minutes of exercise a day appears to add about 3 years to a lifespan.

I can’t say I found Lustig’s analysis of public policy compelling: it’s not his area. On nutrition, on the other hand, he’s an expert. That said, I must admit this may be one of those (very) rare instances it may be easier to just read the news article or watch the video interview. Unless you want to understand the biology behind it all or really want a broader perspective on the issue, saying sugar is bad doesn’t really take a full book.

What Fat Chance has done is reinforce my impression that the chief advantage of most diets, regardless of content, is that they make you think about what you’re eating. Both vegetarians and non-vegetarians can be healthy, but vegetarians have to think about what they eat, and that matters. But if I were you I’d cut out sugar too. Maybe throw in some extra fiber.

Keep reading (and in the UK or Canada). Or if you want to stay up to date with reviews, subscribe to the subtle illumination email list! The sign-up is on the right of the screen.