Defining the ‘what it’s like moment’ – a 10,000 hours rule for skill selection

In his influential paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the difficulty of describing and explainng the subjective experience of other entities. Specifically, he asserted that subjective experience of each being is unique, and in many important ways, fundamentally unknowable to others.

Exploring a similar theme in the context of learning and skill aquistion, I have pointed out that every learner’s subjective experience of practicing a given skill changes dynamically as they move from being a novice to having some expertise. And, just as Nagel argued that we can’t truly know what it’s like to be a bat, I argued that our subjective experience of what it will be like to practice a given skill is, to a significant degree, inscrutable even to ourselves until we have gained a certain level of proficiency.

This post will further explore the implications of this idea and how we can define what I call the ‘what it’s like moment’ in skill acquisition. By ‘what it’s like moment’ I mean to describe the point at which you have become skilled enough to confidently make judgments about what it will be like to practice a given skill going forward.

Consider this scenario: if you are just a few hours into learning to play the piano, you haven’t yet crossed the ‘what it’s like moment’. The reason being, the subjective feelings during those initial hours are not reflective of the experience of playing the piano once you’ve developed a considerable level of proficiency.

I believe that this ‘what it’s like moment’ exists because while skill-level does change the subjective experience of things – that while being a master is different then being a mere practitioner – it does not do so indefinitely. The subjective experience practicing a skill is dynamic, especially at the beginning, but is not random, and we do acquire knowledge of ‘what things are like’ as we gain expertise. This is why it is possible to get a sense of what things are like before completely mastering them.

If we take this as true, the inevitable question that arises is, “how much skill do we need to obtain before we get to this ‘what it’s like’ moment?” I’ll try to answer this. But first, let’s examine how identifying and learning up to the ‘what it’s like moment’ can help us in our pursuits and careers.

Benefits of learning to the ‘what it’s like’ moment

Here, I hope to convince you that determining the ‘what it’s like moment’ for skill acquisition isn’t some esoteric, academic notion. It’s a practical pivot point that has the potential to dramatically reshape the bounds of our careers and personal expression. With that in mind, let’s unpack how it can help us make better better decisions:

Optimal Skill Switching: Understanding when we’ve sufficiently experienced a skill can prevent us from prematurely abandoning it. Many of us, myself included, often switch skills before we’ve gained enough knowledge to make an informed decision about their suitability for us. The ‘what it’s like moment’ provides a practical rule of thumb for how much time and effort we should expect to put in before we’ve given things a fair go, and can serve as a valuable litmus test, guiding us on when to persist and when to pivot.

Overcoming the Dip: Bestselling author Seth Godin, in his book “The Dip,” talks about the importance of pushing through the tough times in any worthwhile endeavor. More specifically, Godin addresses the rewards we can achieve by becoming uniquely skilled at things in a hyper connected world. Cultivating an understanding of when we’ve genuinely experienced a skill can help us decide whether we want to continue towards the level of mastery that Godin advocates for.

Facilitating Meta-Skill Transfer: By committing to a skill to the extent that we fully experience it, we often acquire meta-skills or ‘transferable skills’ that can be applied to other areas. This allows us to effectively compound our skillset, enhancing our versatility and increasing our overall competence.

This intuition is backed by scientific research. Specifically, the seminal work of Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th-century German psychologist famed for his research on memory. Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve demonstrated that memory retention declines over time in a predictable way, unless we consciously reinforce what we’ve learned.

In other words, the deeper and more thoroughly we explore a skill, the better our chances of breaking free from Ebbinghaus’s curve and maintaining our proficiency over time. As such, an emphasis on mindful skill acquisition can provide us with a tangible, measurable edge, especially in dynamic professional fields where the ability to adapt and evolve is vital.

As I hope to have briefly demonstrated, identifying a generalized ‘’what it’s like moment’ milestone in skill acquisition is not merely an intellectual endeavour. It’s a heuristic that can guide us towards more thoughtful and ultimately rewarding skill acquisition. If specified correctly, it should serve as a signpost indicating when we will begin to truly comprehend the reality of the path we’ve chosen.

Generalizing the ‘what it’s like moment’ – Revisiting Gladwell’s 10,000 hours

Having examined the merits of identifying a ‘what it’s like moment’, let’s now circle back to the question at hand. Exactly how proficient do we need to become before we arrive at this profound ‘what it’s like’ terrain?

The challenge here lies in pinpointing a generalizable stage in the acquisition of any skill where we can confidently proclaim that we grasp its essence – something akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s popular 10,000 hours rule. For those who are unfamiliar with Maclolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, it asserts that mastery of any skill is within reach after a 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Now, we could just put a number of hours on the ‘what it’s like moment’, like Gladwell does, and being conservative, ensure that we are well within the bounds of confidence. But I don’t believe that is the optimal way to approach this question. Firstly, because the ‘what it’s like’ stage can happen much faster than mastery. Additionally, the quality of practice and the natural talent of the individual also mean that a numerical figure can make any number highly misspecified – a critique frequently applied to Gladwell’s rule

Instead, I believe that the most effective strategy for defining the ‘what it’s like moment’ is to identify both subjective milestones and qualitative attributes of the skill being practiced that demonstrate we’ve moved into an area where practice has become self-similar and we are firmly in the ‘what it’s like’ sphere of skill acquisition.

Understanding the stages of skill acquisition – The Dreyfus & Dreyfus Model

To answer the question in this way, it’s helpful to start with an understanding of the stages of skill acquisition. To that end, here I’ll use an academic model of skill acquisition that was created by Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus as the basis for describing the process of acquiring skill.

The Dreyfus model presents a five-stage model of skill acquisition that starts at the novice level and ends at the master level. The five stages and descriptions of their corresponding mental processes are outlined below.

	Skill Level
Mental Function	Novice	Competent	Proficenet	Expert	Master
Recollection	Non-situational	Situational	Situational	Situational	Situational
Recognition	Decomposed	Decomposed	Holistic	Holistic	Holistic
Decisions	Analytical	Analytical	Analytical	Analytical	Analytical
Awareness	Monitoring	Monitoring	Monitoring	Monitoring	Absorbed

In the context of this model, I believe the ‘what it’s like moment’ occurs for most skills at the boundary between the competency and proficiency stage.

These are the stages where individuals begin to develop a conceptual understanding of the skill or task, which allows them to start creating plans and making decisions based on conscious, analytical reasoning and perspective. They can recognize patterns and prioritize tasks based on their importance.

In contrast to the earlier stages where actions are guided largely by predefined rules and context-free instructions, at the competent stage, individuals start to rely more on their own judgment. They can deal with complex situations but they might still need to think and deliberate about the best course of action.

“The language learner finally becomes able to combine phrases he uses into whole sentences, with subordinate clauses which enable him to describe whole situations to request, demand, order, etc. whole states of affairs. The chess player now sees aspects such as ‘unbalanced pawn structure’ as either irrelevant or crucial to some overall strategic goal, such as ‘attack or ‘play for a positional end-game advantage.”
Dreyfus and Dreyfus, A Five-Stage Model Of The Menetal Acitivites Involved In Directed Skill Aquisition

These cognitive milestones describe the point at which the learner begins to be able to take his or her eyes off of the metaphorical rulebook, to ‘look up’ for at least brief intervals and to experiment with their own ideas. In these moments the subjective experience shifts to something that is more like ‘what it’s like’ or what it will be like to engage in any given practice with a reasonable degree of skill.

“What it’s like Moment” subjective milestones

The ‘what it’s like moment’ is marked by a number of subjective milestones that can indicate we’ve arrived at this level of skill. The first of these is the ability to perceive the ‘bigger picture’ – to see beyond isolated tasks and understand their place in the whole. Another is finding ourselves capable of problem-solving and adapting our approach in real-time. Finally, we can recognise a state of ‘self-similarity’ where we can anticipate patterns in the tasks that we perform to the extent that we can begin to experience the first blossoming of creativity and expression which I believe is the ultimate indicator of achieving stability in the subjective experience.

Understanding the Bigger Picture: The first sign that you’ve moved into the territory of a practitioner is when you start understanding the bigger picture, not just the individual tasks or elements of the skill. You are able to see how everything fits together and affects the overall outcome.

Adaptive Confidence: You start to notice a growing sense of confidence in your ability to adapt to new or unexpected situations. This isn’t just about solving problems as they arise, but also about a subjective feeling of being prepared for uncertainty. You begin to trust in your ability to handle whatever the day might throw at you, and this self-assuredness can be a powerful sign that you’re moving into a stable subjective experience. You are not just following set procedures but are able to change your approach depending on the situation, and you do so with an inherent confidence.

Self-Similarity: This is when you start to see patterns in the subjective experiences of performing the tasks or goals that require the skill. Tasks may start to look similar and your previous experience can inform your approach to new tasks. This leads to a level of comfort and familiarity with the skill that allows for creativity and expression.

Creativity and Expression: A clear signal that you’ve accumulated enough skill to grasp ‘What it’s like’ is that you are beginning to express yourself within the broader context of the skill. The confidence to employ creative freedom and go beyond basic rules and guidelines to innovate and experiment is a reliable indicator that you have begun to have a holistic perspective. The emergence of improvisation, and the capacity to change directions with a clear grasp of the associated risks and rewards, are signs that you are not just performing the skill but experiencing it holistically and consistently.

‘What it’s like” objective milestones

One confounding issue that can trip up learners in identifying the ‘what it’s like moment’ is that as we improve, what we consider comptent can become a moving target. What we see as ‘high-level’ at the start of our journey can quickly become merely average once we gain the foundational level of skill. As the Arabic proverb states, the deeper you go, the deeper the ocean gets.

This is why supplementing our personal benchmarks with tangible metrics can be advantageous. In this segment, I’ll provide several more objective milestones to compliment the subjective indicators detailed in the preceding section.

Reduced Reliance on Reference Materials or Guides: When a learner no longer needs to consistently refer to instructional materials or guides, they may have reached the ‘what it’s like’ moment. This could indicate that they have internalized the skill.

Recognising Multiple Approaches: Can you automatically think of multiple approaches and/or potential solutions to common problems?

Ability to Teach the Skill: One key milestone might be when a learner feels confident enough in their understanding of the skill to teach it to others. Being able to explain a concept or process to someone else often indicates a deeper level of understanding.

Initiation of Skill Enhancement: When the learner starts seeking ways to enhance their skill – looking for advanced techniques, methods or tools related to the skill – this could be an indication of the ‘what it’s like’ moment.

The journey of skill acquisition is a complex undertaking in which our perspective on competence can change rapidly. Thus the ‘what it’s like’ moment is a can be difficult to discern. Yet, recognizing the ‘what it’s like moment’, though nuanced and often elusive, can be significantly facilitated by this blend of subjective experiences and objective metrics. With these markers in our compass, we’re better equipped to identify when we’ve stepped into the terrain of ‘what it’s like’.

Putting a number on it – the 1,000 hours rule

So far I have avoided assigning a numerical value to the ‘what it’s like moment’, favoring subjective and objective skill milestones instead. Nevertheless, I cannot overlook the fact that numbers offer an attractive intuitive reference point, a mental anchor if you will.

As a basis for determining an approximate hours range for the ‘what it’s like moment’, I turn to the world of language learning, as I believe it serves as an effective example for discerning the ‘what it’s like’ juncture, given the universal nature of this skill.

The language concept of ‘conversational fluency’ – as defined below – fits nicely here, representing the stage at which most skills start yielding a consistent, functional and creative experience.

Wikipedia defines native fluency and conversational fluency for language learning in the below paragraph:

“Language proficiency or linguistic proficiency is the ability of an individual to speak or perform in a language. As a framework for understanding proficiency, speakers who demonstrate both accuracy and fluency, and employ a diversity of discourse strategies are considered proficient… Native-level fluency is estimated to require the mastery of between 20,000 and 40,000 words, but basic conversational fluency might only require 3,000 words.”
Wikipedia, Conversational Fluency

As the above excerpt highlights, achieving native-level fluency necessitates the command over 20,000 to 40,000 words – a level of expertise we can consider analogous to Gladwell’s definition of mastery.

Conversational fluency which I take to be roughly analogous to the Proficiency level in the Drefyus skill model, is estimated to require 3,000 words. Using this scale, and conversational fluency as a rough analogue for the ‘what it’s like moment’, we get 1,000 hours as an estimate or roughly 10% of the time required for mastery.

With this perspective, I propose that the ‘what it’s like moment’ in skill acquisition typically manifests after about 1,000 hours of deliberate practice. However, this benchmark could range anywhere from 100 to 1,000 hours, thus enveloping a broad confidence interval.

The success investment and expression dividend

For me, the beauty of the ‘what it’s like moment’ lies in its power to help us from deceiving ourselves. To paraphrase the psychologist John Astin, our clever use of language can often seduce us into believing we know how things will be before we even know what things are. This obscures the reality that learning a skill is not merely a matter of getting familiar with the terrain, or ‘growing to like it’ over time, but is instead a practice that entails a metamorphosis of our experience as we journey through the stages of skill acquisition.

The other crucial takeaway is the reinforcement of the virtues of a methodical approach to engaging with new skills. Given the variety of things we could learn, it’s easy to be drawn towards a more casual learning approach, picking up interests that pique our curiosity and inclination. Yet, the concept of the ‘what it’s like moment’ reinforces the case that a concentrated approach is likely to reap many more benefits.

Instead of just trying things ad libitum, it suggests that specific milestones, clearly envisioned and ardently pursued, can help guide our efforts and bring us more quickly to that elusive moment of subjective stability. So as we approach any skill, it’s worth considering whether we are willing to invest the required hours to achieve the ‘what it’s like moment’ — that point where we begin to stabilize our understanding of how it is and will be.

A final noteworthy benefit of learning using the ‘what it’s like moment’ heuristic is how it can facilitate greater creative expression both through its emphasis on conversational fluency and meta skill transfer.

Often, in our hyper-productive society, we are driven to learn for the sake of tangible returns — to earn more money, to achieve status. But most often the most profound value of learning is recognised in the new dimensions of self-expression our skills unfurl, and the unique understanding of the world they allow us to articulate.

I believe that an awareness of the ‘what it’s like moment’ in planning our learning journeys can help us make more mindful decisions about when to persist and when to let go, and in doing so help us extract the greatest degrees of expression and fulfillment from our limited time and attention.

The Limits of Performance and the Universal Laws of Success

Once upon a time, while surfing the interweb, I was served a tweet recommending a book called The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. I knew the tweeter to be a thoughtful guy so I clicked the link.

Then, on the Amazon page, I saw Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, had given the book an endorsement. Anyone who follows Nassim will know that he is generous with his criticism and sparse with his praise.

I’d never heard of Barabási before or read any of his previous work. Which is to say, I had no direct experience of the quality of the man’s work. And yet, the combination of those two endorsements was somehow strong enough for me – I bought the book.

I belabor the details of my purchasing decision because it is just the kind of seemingly inscrutable process that Barabási tries to shed light on. Why did I buy the book? My interest in the subject matter was tickled, and the endorsements fueled my decision. In the case of this book, two recommendations were enough. But would one have sufficed?

Barabasi’s work tries to answer questions like this and others that seek to untangle the web of performance, quality and social cues on the outcomes we see in the world. Questions like:

What is the value of a single positive review?
How much does attending an Ivy League school contribute to one’s success?
Is a social media influencer who pays for followers wasting resources, or do they possess hidden knowledge?

In The Formula, Barabási distills his findings into five distinct “laws”:

Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

Previous success x fitness = future success.

While team success requires diversity and balance, a single strong individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.

With persistence, success can come at any time.

One of my favorite examples of these laws at work is the story of famed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his lesser-known collaborator, Al Diaz. Both were talented artists, but when objective measures of success were absent, the social network and external factors played a significant role in determining their respective levels of recognition.

The disparity of their success highlights the importance of networks and social connections when performance cannot be objectively measured. In the art world, where personal taste and subjective factors heavily influence success, it was Basquiat’s relationships and connections that ultimately propelled his career. He was able to forge connections with influential figures in the art scene, such as Andy Warhol and gallerist Annina Nosei, which significantly boosted his visibility and reputation.

On the other hand, Diaz, despite his talent, did not obtain the same level of access to influential networks. As a result, his career did not reach the same heights as Basquiat’s. This example underscores the first law in Barabási’s book: Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.

In cases like Basquiat and Diaz, where there is no objective measure of success, an individual’s position in their network and the strength of their connections become critical factors in determining their achievements.

Diaz and Basquiat

Performance is a Rare Case

All of Barabási’s laws were intriguing, but for me, it is his second law that continues to assert itself as a valuable lens through which to examine our modern world.

The second law states that, performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.

In essence, there are numerous fields where our performances are quite similar but our sucess is not.

In fact, one of the key insights from the book is that true performance measurement is more of a special case. It’s far more common to find competitions where performance can be measured, but to a limited and imperfect extent. But even in those rare cases where performance can be measured, the results we receive from them are highly dispersed (more on this later) and as soon as we move away from domains where performance can be measured precisely, things become fascinating rather quickly.

Barabási provides examples of wine tasting and classical piano competitions as areas where either performance is bounded, as in the case of piano competitions where everyone plays the piece flawlessly, or our ability to distinguish between performances is limited, as with wine tasting, where people can’t consistently agree on superior wines.

In the world of wine tasting, Barabási argues the evidence suggests that high-level performance is not possible to measure objectively. In fact, expert tasters consistently hold diverging opinions on the quality of a particular wine, leading to success being driven more by social factors such as reputation, networking, and marketing. In this case, the actual performance of a winemaker is often not the determinant of their success. He writes:

“It’s not as if the judges were ignorant amateurs – they are the top wine tasters of the world. Yet, in the face of such remarkable inconsistency, you may wonder how we can trust any of their opinions. Indeed, if these judges can’t agree with themselves, how can we expect them to agree with one another? In wine competitions, they don’t. In 2005, Robert Hodgson, a statistician at California State University, analyzed the results of sixteen major U.S. wine competitions and found that ‘the probability of winning a gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a gold medal at another competition.’ In other words, winning gold at one competition doesn’t increase your chance of winning a gold at another.”
Barabási, The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success

These are areas where our intuition tells us that performance should matter, and it does, but it doesn’t determine the winner. In such cases, we decide the winner based on other subjective criteria.

Success is Distinct from Performance

In our minds, success and performance should be linked, which is why we seldom differentiate between someone’s success and their performance. For Barabási, however, they are two very distinct and measurable concepts, each with its own unique properties.

Success is, by its nature, a social phenomenon, with its rewards contingent upon the dissemination and utilization of information among people. In the age of mass media and social networks, this as become an even more exponential phenomenon.

This distinction between performance which is linear and success wich is exponential aligns with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s framing of the transition from linear to exponential domains as moving from Mediocristan to Extremistan. As we move away from areas with objective performance measurement, the interplay between performance and networks becomes increasingly crucial.

Consider the example of tennis players from Barbasi’s research. Tennis offers a relatively objective measure of performance through rankings, win-loss records, and head-to-head matchups. However, even in such a performance-driven domain, success is often influenced by factors beyond raw skill or talent.

In the world of tennis, the unbounded nature of success can be uncovered by examining the economic rewards achieved by players. For instance, two tennis players with comparable rankings and performance levels might experience vastly different levels of economic rewards. One player may secure lucrative sponsorship deals, attract media attention, and have a strong fan base, resulting in substantial financial gains. This player’s success may be amplified by their marketability, charisma, or personal story, which resonates with fans and sponsors.

Barabási further shows that, even for tennis, a linear improvement in skill doesn’t necessarily yield a proportional increase in rewards. This implies that a player who may be merely 20% better than their counterpart can attain rewards that far surpass what the next best player obtains.

Moving away from tennis to areas where performance can’t be measured, success and social phenomena start to interac in even more powerful ways. These cases often exhibit self-reinforcing feedback loops or ‘preferential attachment’ to use the technical term (as seen with the Basquait example). Success enhances perceived performance, and perceived performance attracts more social success, further perpetuating the cycle. Hence why those people paying for followers may not be as sad and crazy as we think.

Extremistan and Mediocristan Implications for Career Choices

One key takeaway from the work of both Barabási and Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the need to remain cognizant of the landscape you are competing in. The world of Extremistan, where success is skewed and influenced by factors beyond performance, demands a particular kind of awareness. Thus, it is worthwhile to cultivate realistic expectations in these domains, as they present unique challenges that call for a nuanced understanding of what it truly means to succeed.

For example, in most service professions where local prominence is enough, such as plumbing, the competitive landscape is considerably more forgiving. Exceptional talent and luck are not the sole determining factors of success in such fields, allowing individuals to thrive on the merits of their work without facing the daunting pressures of global competition.

However, when one aspires to become a tennis star or an internationally acclaimed artist, the game changes. It becomes crucial to recognize the considerable role that exceptional talent and luck play in reaching the pinnacle of success in these areas – often, both are indispensable.

By understanding the nature of the field we play upon, we can establish appropriate goals and adopt the right mindset to traverse the path to success. Moreover, acknowledging the influence of luck and external factors can bolster resilience when confronted with challenges, and foster a sense of both gratitude and humility for any success achieved.

Fairness in a Social World

For me, the scarcity of true performance-driven success, and the distorting nature of social influence felt like a call to reconsider our conventional notions of fairness. Neoclassical economic notions of competition often lead us to naively assume that the world is fair and that the distribution of reward has at least a rough correlation with performance. But Barabási’s research seems to prove that in most cases this couldn’t be further from the truth. The policy implciations of this are, of course, broad and important but beyond the scope of this blog post.

I Recommend

The Formula is engaging and eminently readable. It delves into many other issues and investigations, some mentioned only briefly here or not at all. I add my recomendation to the pile.

Desire’s Second Derivative

There is a famous observation from the world of advertising, often attributed to marketing guru Theodore Levitt, that “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.”

This observation emphasized the need for marketers and businesses to understand and address the actual problems their customers are trying to solve, as this is what truly drives their purchasing decisions.

Today, it seems to me that the most winning products convince you not only that you will solve your problem but that you will want to solve your problem.

We want food that makes us hungry.

Lovers that make us want to have sex.

Entertainment that compels us to watch more.

Gyms that call us to exercise.

We are not after fulfillment but fulfilments second derivative – seeking a thing worth wanting whether or not it’s worth having.

Effortless Creativity and the End of Sharing Anxiety – The 3-Speed Creativity Strategy: Finding Balance in Your Creative Work

I recently spoke to a friend about whether she should continue her YouTube channel, which would be in addition to her 9-5 job. She said he wanted to keep it going, but it needed to be easy enough to make it enjoyable.

This resonated with me as I face a similar challenge with respect to blogging. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to try and write a post that meditates on how we can achieve a balance between ease and quality in our creative hobbies.

In the course of writing this, I’ve arrived at a strategy I call the 3-Speed Creativity framework, which I believe can be useful for ensuring our creative endeavors are both manageable and satisfying.

Two Approaches to Creating – The Perfectionist vs. Ad Libitum Approaches

When thinking about this problem, I found it useful to begin with the two distinct approaches that bookend the spectrum. On one hand, we have the perfectionist, who demands nothing less than flawlessness. On the other side, we have the ad libitum, who spits out their ideas with reckless abandon, like popcorn from a popper.

If we examine both extremes – their virtues and their pitfalls – we can gain a clearer understanding of what we want to keep and what we want to avoid as we navigate towards a more productive middle ground.

Perfectionists – The Long Slog

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
Robert Hughes

There are good psychological reasons for this perfectionist mentality. First, it ensures we don’t waste people’s time with half-baked ideas or lackluster experiences. Second, it minimizes the risk of later regret for publishing something that’s not up to snuff. Other benefits include higher quality output, greater attention to detail, a sense of professionalism, and the space required to achieve new levels of skill.

But the perfectionist approach also has some serious drawbacks. Most importantly, it often turns our hobbies into obstacles, robbing us of the joy of creation. As I mentioned in a previous post, The Sisyphus Matrix, climbing mountains is hard, but climbing mountains that feel like they lead nowhere is where we are likely to give up and abandon worthwhile goals.

Finally, our lofty standards often mean we don’t get the satisfaction of producing anything – inevitably most of our ideas remain locked in our heads, doing little good or harm.

Ad Libitum – The Quick Hit

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the approach of sharing our random thoughts and ideas as they occur to us (ad libitum). The pros of this are that we get near-instant satisfaction, rapid idea generation, flexibility, and spontaneity. Perhaps more importantly, in the age of social media, we get the chance to engage with others, build creative momentum, and in doing so, build a following.

Just as with the perfectionist approach, there are drawbacks to this mode of creation. We tend to value it less because it is, in a sense, the junk food of the creative impulse – a quick fix that doesn’t truly satisfy. We may even come to regret what we’ve made because it was produced thoughtlessly or simply because we see it as thoughtless by virtue of having been its casual author. Above all, the ad libitum approach can be unattractive long-term because it fails to push us to the limits of our abilities, to stretch who we are and what we can convey.

Having it All – A Strategy for Achieving Balance

As usual, the issue is that we want to have it all: the satisfaction of creating, the feedback from engaging with others, and the rewards that come from pushing ourselves to new limits of skill and expression, all without any amount of effort that resembles actual work.

The realist in me first jumps to the notion that we can’t, in fact, have it all, but after further consideration, I think we can, or at least we can have most of it.

The challenge is to design a coherent system that places each type of content within its own container and also links them together in a way that feels satisfying. This will entail finding ways to facilitate the difficult creative acts that we assign meaning to while also enjoying the rewards that come from easier mediums and methods of creating.

That is to say, we have to create a strategy for creating that recognizes both our need for quality and difficulty and the dopamine that comes from completing something and sharing it with the world on a regular cadence.

The 3-Speed Creativity Framework – A Productive Approach

The strategy that I propose is that organizing our work in terms of quality and communicating those categories to our audience is the most effective path to achieving a balance between our competing creative priorities.

To do this, first, I suggest categorizing output into three distinct types based on the effort, time, and polish we’re willing to invest. I’ll call these ‘Rapid Fire’, ‘Cruising Speed’, and ‘Deep Work’.

Below, I outline these three buckets and also include some thoughts on how you can signal to your audience that each represents a specific level of output:

Rapid-Fire: This type of content is all about getting your ideas out there quickly, with minimal effort and focuses on sharing thoughts and ideas without getting bogged down in the details or niceties of our own perfectionist tendencies. Spelling mistakes be damned! Design flaws be welcomed. More seriously though, to manage your audience’s expectations, consider using disclaimers or platforms that inherently signal a more informal approach.
Cruising Speed: This tier is for content that requires a moderate level of thought and effort but not so much that it overwhelms you. Think short essays, podcast episodes, newsletters, or themed social media posts. To convey this standard to your audience, you might adopt specific formats or templates that hint at a more structured approach while keeping things relatively light and breezy.
Deep Work: This should be reserved for projects that demand the highest level of effort, polish, and creativity. This category could encompass long-form articles, comprehensive YouTube videos, or in-depth guides. To signal that you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into these projects, promote them with some extra oomph and emphasize the time and resources you’ve invested.

Again, the strategy is designed to provide a framework that both helps manage creative anxiety and allows room for persona growth by categorizing projects into three distinct workspaces, with Rapid-Fire allievating the self-imposed pressure for perfection and Deep Work projects allowing room pushing the boundries of our existing skillsets.

Communicating Quality – The Hard Work of Reaching Out

Creating anything is, almost without exception, the act of reaching beyond ourselves and into the world, which is inexorably in itself a form of communication. As such, it’s easy to feel like the work we do when we make something should be sufficient – that we shouldn’t have to explain anything further beyond making what we want. I am guilty of this, full stop.

The problem with this mode of thinking is that it lays the path to a psychological sink-hole of creative anxiety. If the work must stand alone, and the work must speak for itself, then the work must be perfect, and since no work is ever perfect, we end up releasing no work.

This is why transparency and communication of your intentions with your audience are so important for implementing the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy. It gives permission both to your audience and to yourself to navigate the varying levels of quality in your creative output. This way, you can optimize and, dare I say it, even come to enjoy your creative work by reaping the rewards of both perfectionism and the ad-libitum approaches while minimizing their respective downsides.

Find media to platform fit – The Medium is The Message

While I strongly believe it’s worthwhile to ‘do the work’ to be more comfortable communicating your creative intentions with your audience, one final tactic that can help implement the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy is by simply matching your creative output and your intentions for it to the platform it’s shared on.

In keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s famous concept, “The Medium is the Message,” each social media platform carries its own culture and audience expectations. For example, Rapid-Fire content might vibe on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram stories, while Cruising Speed content could be the sweet spot for YouTube, podcasts, or a newsletter. For Deep Work, consider platforms that encourage in-depth exploration like Medium or YouTube.

By syncing your content to the most aligned platform, you won’t just optimize for audience engagement, you’ll also make it easier for your fans to recognize and appreciate the different levels of effort behind your work.

Easy, Light, and Fun

The ambition of this post and the 3-Speed Creativity Strategy is that by achieving clearer distinctions both externally and within ourselves across our work, we can build a sustainable and rewarding creative practice that provides space for personal growth, audience engagement, and ongoing inspiration.

If you’re already using something like this that’s worked for you. Leave a commment below and let me know what it is.

Tickets to the show – Feynman and the birth of the AI age, Sparks of AGI

In 1945, while Richard Feynman was a young physicist working on the Manhattan Project he and other scientists were invited to attend a test of the new weapon known as the Trinity test.

The scientists were situated about 20 miles away from the blast site at the base camp. They were instructed to wear welder’s goggles to protect their eyes from the intense flash of light caused by the explosion.

However, Feynman was curious and wanted to see the explosion without any filter. He came up with an idea to observe the blast through the windshield of a truck, knowing that the glass would absorb most of the harmful ultraviolet radiation.

As the bomb detonated, he watched in awe as the intense flash of light lit up the surroundings. He was one of the few people who saw the explosion directly without any protection.

Feynman later described the explosion as “a giant ball of yellow fire,” and he felt the heat from the explosion even from 20 miles away. In that moment, he realized the immense power of the atomic bomb and the potential devastation it could cause.

This was the advent of the atomic age. Something truly new in the history of human civilization.

How much would people have paid to be there?

If the recent sale of a pair of Michael Jordan’s basketball shoes for USD $2.2 million is any indication, we can assume the amount is a staggering figure.

The Birth Artificial General Intelligence and the AI Age

It’s with this in mind that I share the below video featuring Sebastian Bubeck a Microsoft employee and AI researcher which was the inspiration for this post.

Before watching this video, I counted myself among those skeptical as to whether the AI tools recent release actually qualified as intelligence. I, like many others who used the AI tools, found that they easily made mistakes that could be characterized as dumb from a human perspective. This in combination with pronouncements by prominent AI scientists about the limitations of these models, made me assume that these large language models were essentially fancy parrots, who would try their best to come up with something that sounded good without actually doing any deep reasoning.

But watching the below video and its illustrations in the jump of capabilities that has occurred from ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-4 has nearly convinced me that something truly profound has been created. Something that is reasoning or doing some type of effective approximation to it.

More specifically, the examples he provides of ChatGPT solving problems that involve creating representations of the world and correcting its mistakes are highly compelling.

Based on this video, my own naive opinion is that it seems increasingly likely that we are standing at the beginning of another historical transition point and unlike the atomic age which required top security clearance and a 20 mile exclusion zone, the tickets to the show are free.

Implicit versus explicit disruption, why AI will be more profound than The Bomb

One final point I think worth making is how much larger the impact of AI is likely to be than the atomic bomb. Or perhaps rather how explicit the impact will be in our day-to-day lives by comparison.

This is because atomic weapons have thankfully been mostly implicit (with the notable exception of the bombs dropped on Japan) weights on the balance of national power. They do not intrude on our daily lives. Which is not to say that they have had no impact but rather that it has been hidden.

This has been noted by many including the author Yuval Noah Harrari in his book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” Harari discusses how the threat of nuclear weapons, particularly during the Cold War, led to a sort of forced peace between superpowers. This, in turn, enabled cultural exchange and creativity to flourish, as nations were more focused on developing cultural, economic, and technological innovations instead of engaging in large-scale wars.

AI by contrast is likely to infiltrate our daily lives to a degree perhaps only matched by our mobile phones. We will use it while we drive, while we cook, while we game. Our children will have AI friends and teachers. And inevitably someday these children may ask us where we were when we first interacted with an AI. That is, if we are still referring to them as AI by that point.

30 Quotes I’ve Known and Loved

I recently found myself reflecting on a few of these quotes and thought it would be nice to share some of my favorites in one place.

Enjoy…

–

“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.” – Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The great source of both the misery and the disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another… some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to the others but none can deserve to be pursued with the passionate ardor which drives the rules of either prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.” – Adam Smith

“It is harder to be kind than clever.” – Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” – Ernest Hemingway

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” – John Maynard Keynes

“The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” – Robert Hughes

“The man who said, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’ saw deeply into life.” – Woody Allen

“A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.” – Winston Churchill

“We do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” – Archilochos

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman

“Observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments…. For the uncertain future has yet to come, and with every possible variety of fortune.” – Solon

“Many shall be restored that are now fallen, and many shall fall that are now in honor.” – Horace

“A man who has committed a mistake and does not correct it, is committing another mistake.” – Confucius

“Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” – Aristotle

“They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.” – Robert Prising

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” – Machiavelli

“He who wishes to be rich in a day, will be hanged in a year.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of Occam

“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” – Konstantin Stanislavski

“But the essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself. Strategy does not eliminate scarcity and its consequence—the necessity of choice. Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.” – Richard Rumelt

“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good… If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.” – Sam Harris

“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.” – Shakespeare

“What saves a man is to take a step, then another step.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“A day will dawn when you will laugh at your past efforts, that which will be on the day you laugh, is also here and now.” – Sri Ramana Maharshi

Maximum Exposure – How Hemingway Went Bankrupt

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. Gradually and then suddenly.”

– Ernest Hemingway,
The Sun Also Rises

The above dialogue, often presumed to be the pithy observation of an aristocratic drunk, actually recalls Ernest Hemingway’s personal financial circumstances around the time he wrote his breakout novel. It merits our attention because the decisions that lead to those circumstances illustrate a principle of risk-management used by all of the worlds most successful investors from Warren Buffett to George Soros and beyond.

The principle is an investment formula known as The Kelly Criterion. Simply put, it is a mathematical definition of the difference between intelligent risk-taking and recklessness. The image below neatly summarizes the results of the mathematics:

In the above graph, the middle point of the curve describes the optimal size of any given gamble.* Bet any less and you’ll fail to maximize your long-term returns. Bet too much and, even with an advantage, you’ll (eventually) go bankrupt. In practical terms, the graph describes the boundary between intelligent risk-bearing and doomed recklessness.

Paris or Bust

In 1924 Earnest Hemingway was a relatively unknown reporter in working in Toronto. Sick of his day-to-day duties and yearning for a return to the romance of Paris, Hemingway and his wife Hadley broke their lease and fled back to the left-bank.

This was the Hemingway’s first risky decision. The move meant foregoing the substantial salary Hemingway had been earning in Toronto. With their first child just over a year old, this was a daring and some might say reckless decision for a young family.

However, given that the Hemingways had lived for several years in Paris prior to this and knew the city, the people, the cost of living, I would submit that their decision was a form conscious risk-taking. They knew the terrain, and thus to a degree, what could wrong. Plus, they had Hadleys small but not insubstantial trust fund to live off of.

Hadley had a trust fund, bestowed upon her by a banker grandfather; she called it “my sweet little packet of seeds.” It would give the Hemingways $2,000 to $3,000 a year to play with. It was a relatively modest meal, but nourishing enough. – Everyone Behaves Badly, Lesley Blume

Unfortunately, what the Hemingway’s did next proved to be even less calculated and ultimately reckless.

Upping The Ante

Not long after arriving in Paris, Hemingway’s determined that Hadley’s trust fund was being managed too conservatively. Perhaps out of a desire to generate more income to fund their lifestyle, the couple directed that their investments be managed more aggressively.

This decision was reckless first and foremost due to their personal circumstances. With neither working and a young child to provide for, no modern financial advisor worth their salt would recommend or allow an aggressive portfolio.

Recklessness, as described by the Kelly Criterion is a matter of intensity; bet the ranch for long enough and you’ll eventually lose the farm. But in practical terms, there is another variety of risk which is so often a precursor to recklessness that is a species of the thing in its own right. I call it domain risk.

Domain risk manifests when we move from one domain to another, often without realizing it. Think of the race-car driver who tries to ski like an Olympian or the business tycoon who gets burned playing his hand in the art world. When we move outside what Warren Buffett calls our circle of competence, we expose ourselves to new dimensions of hazard.

The Hemingway’s third decision exposed them to domain risk and the results were disastrous. As Lesley Blume recounts in her book, Everybody Behaves Badly,

The couple had concluded that their trust company was too conservative, and instead handed over management of the fund to the husband of a friend of Hadley’s. This wizard not only managed to halve the fund’s capital but also even left the Hemingways without an income for several months. Hemingway squandered precious hours trying to trace the trail of the lost funds, but the couple was ultimately left bewildered and nearly destitute.“It was my ‘complete poverty’ period,” Hemingway reportedly told a friend later.

The Hemingway’s decision to change their financial manager was a subtle but important second dimension to their recklessness. In addition to additional market risk, they exposed themselves to manager risk. As their unfortunate outcome demonstrates, knowing what risks you’re taking is as important as knowing how much risk you’re taking.

The Line

The Hemingway’s were artists and as such perhaps it was in their nature to push things to the limit. Ernest Hemingway was famous for his admiration of bull-fighters and mountain climbers, endeavors where success requires a finely calibrated ability to balance exposure and self-preservation. I, for one, find it revealing that when Hemingway wrote about what he admired in a bullfighter he did so in mathematical terms which echo the Kelly formula:

Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technique that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bullfighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing. – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises [emphasis added]

It’s worth noting that in this case mathematics provides the illusion of precision. In real life, the boundary between risk and reckless is almost never a bright line. Some people cope with this uncertainty by being ultra conservative and forgo the potential benefits of intelligent risk-bearing. Others have an appetite for risk that often crosses into recklessness and like Odysseus, have to find ways to chain themselves to the proverbial masts. And still a third class possess an intuition for hueing the line – the people who can just smell a good deal.

Being aware of our own proclivities to risk can be the best defense against erring toward conservatism or recklessness. In building and maintaining that awareness, it often helps to have a trusted third-party as a sounding board.

*Image Source: Fortune’s Formula, William Poundstone

Quarantine Shopping & The Diderot Effect – Why You Can’t Stop Buying Shit

It is a principle of advertising that people who make big life changes are susceptible to marketing. Events like birth, death, marriage, and moving all interrupt our normal patterns of behaviour and thereby open space to pursue new avenues of consumption.

In the wake of SARS-COV-2 pandemic, the world is undergoing the largest pattern interrupt in modern history. We’ve been collectively catapulted into the quarantine lifestyle, and the result is we are doing a lot of online shopping, often a lot more than we would like.

The Diderot Effect – How Identity Influences Your Shopping Habits

On a fundamental level, we buy more at ‘life events’ because we are doing things differently and therefore have new problems to solve. If we were perfectly rational, that would be the end of it. Each purchase would happen in isolation. To paraphrase Marx; for each need an Amazon order, and to each need an actual problem.

But we are not rational, and far from being mere tools in service of our goals, the things we buy are enmeshed with our self-image to the degree that a mismatched sweater or sofa can feel like a mismatched limb. This feeling of disharmony has the potential to catalyze a spiral of consumption in which we pursue a mental unity through unity in our possessions.

My own experience of quarantine shopping has borne this out. Does this sounds familiar….

I bought a kettlebell and now that it’s arrived; I’ve realized that I really need another one or two to do the same kettlebell workout I did at the gym. With that many kettlebells, I’ll probably want a kettlebell rack, and a pullup bar to decompress my spine, a new yoga matt so I can do yoga at home now, which of course means I’ll need a foam roller to get that fascia mobilized and so on…

Our knives weren’t as sharp as I’d like them. So I bought a knife sharpener. In the process of buying that sharpener, I thought “hey since you’re cooking at home more; you should get a nice paring knife.” So, I bought the sharpener and the knife, and now every time I stick that fancy knife in the drawer, I think what I really need now is a knife holder…

This tendency to seek unity of self through unity in our possessions was first noted by the French philosopher Denis Diderot and later named after him as the Diderot effect. Diderot first identified this phenomenon after he purchased a beautiful new robe. Almost immediately, the brilliance of his new garment cast a kind of shadow over his other possessions that made them seem shabby and out of place. The result was an epic shopping spree that nearly bankrupted him. He wrote,

“I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one … Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth.”

The implication of the Diderot effect is that when we think we are just putting together our wardrobe or our living room, we are unconsciously toying with the fabric of our identities.

My Patagonia Habit & Diderot’s Two Principles

I first learned of the Diderot effect from a fantastic YouTube video by the Nerdwriter. In his video, the Nerdwriter points out that the Diderot effect is built on two psychological principles:

“All the products purchased by a consumer aim to be cohesive with that consumer’s identity.”
“The introduction of a new product, in any way deviant, can trigger a process of spiraling consumption.”

In my own life, I admit to a penchant for Patagonia clothing and other expensive outdoor gear that, within the confines of my sedate urban lifestyle – the most likely scenario for me ending up on a mountain top is falling out of an airplane – cries out for explanation.

The Diderot effect explains that I buy Patagonia because it has created an identity of environmentalism and outdoorsmanship, something I consume as much as I do the garments themselves. That is to say that even though I don’t do that much for the environment (certainly zero activism) and I don’t spend that much time in real wilderness, just by buying Patagonia clothing, I can feel like these things are part of who I am.

Buying Patagonia is, in a sense, an offering towards the person I’d like to be. And this is the unsubtle genius of their marketing approach. Would some other brand’s clothing do the job? Maybe, yes… actually, I don’t really know… And in the space of this uncertainty creeps the justification for building my identity around their branding. A process that ends with the rationalization that my money is going to go somewhere; it may as well go to them.

Attention and The Delicate Balance

The Diderot effect describes the way that we require the things we own correspond to the internal construct of identity. But the Diderot effect seems to me to be only one aspect of the way we project ourselves into the things we own and use.

Take, for instance, my recent spiral of gym equipment purchases. Having more than two kettlebells, a yoga mat, and a foam roller to go with them is still about me, but it’s about a different aspect of my identity then say, my fashion choices.

Our possessions act as something like a three-way mirror:

They react, each upon each other, (coherence in the system);
they reflect back on us, casting an identity back at ourselves (coherence with our internal identity);
and they project outward to the world who we are (coherence in our outward identity).

My kettlebell problem is about achieving coherence in an externalized system (coherence in the system). This is an aspect of my identity because when I feel like I have a more complete system, I feel more complete, as if some good part of me has been externalized. By the same token, when a system is incomplete or even less than elegant, its failings are also a reflection on me.

I make this point to illustrate the fact that all our passions exist in a state of delicate equilibrium, both between themselves and against our own mental constructs of them. An equilibrium that is mostly maintained by an absence of attention. For if we look hard enough at any part of our lives, we’ll begin to see the possibility of improving some aspect of our systems, and that, as we’ve seen, has the potential to spark a chain-reaction of consumption. So be careful what you pay attention to.

Schrodinger’s Shopping Cart – How the Stuff You Need Creates the Things You Don’t

Another important implication of the Diderot effect is that that contrary to our intuitions, each purchase does not bring us closer to having ‘enough’ or being ‘complete’ but instead, takes us a step further down a rabbit hole of consumption.

In this way, our consumption resembles something like an infinitely branching decision tree where each step forward opens the door to several more likely purchases. This means that that from a probabilistic perspective, buying a kettlebell is in effect a decision buy both the kettlebell and half a kettlebell rack.

This fact is no secret to retailers who are increasingly building and refining tools that capitalize on this principle, injecting it into the infrastructure of our online experience. The case in point being Amazon’s “frequently bought together” suggestions which feature on almost every page of its website.

Reinforcing the Habit – The Pavlov’s Shopping Drone

The psychological undercurrents of our compulsive shopping are neat. But to lay the blame squarely on these niceties of our psyche risks missing the more obvious but no less potent fact that shopping is itself habit-forming. We are sitting at home, bored as hell, and buying things is fun.

You know how it goes, you’re wandering around your apartment and something catches your eye so – a problem to solve! So you go online to find a solution, maybe you spend a few minutes (or a few hours) doing the modern equivalent of celestial navigation; comparing, contrasting and triangulating between, stars, reviews and prices until finally, target locked, and emboldened by strong drink and the prospect of free shipping and returns, you smash that checkout button, and you get:

A. the satisfaction of having solved the problem to a degree in your mind, and;

B. the joy of anticipating when that solution will come.

I presume that I am not alone in manically checking my shipping updates when I buy something.

Then, finally, the thing arrives, and you have the dopamine hit of opening it and playing with it, putting it in the neat little place where it solves your problem (maybe) and then roving around your home like a drone looking for the next thing to buy. And thus, with every purchase, you are reinforcing your Pavlovian predilection.

Minimalist Mental Jujitsu – Hacking the Diderot Effect Through Identity Shift

While there are many powerful tactics to curb out-of-control shopping (get rid of Amazon Prime), one that combats the Diderot effect most directly is consciously shifting our identity towards one that values things other than consumption.

To do this, all you have to do is visualize solving the problem through a different identity. For instance, think of the minimalist version of yourself, the thrifty version of yourself, the survivalist version of yourself. How could that person figure out a way to solve the same problem with what they already have or at a fraction of the price?

I recently employed this tactic in my own life when after seeing the difference between chlorinated water and filtered water had on my sourdough bread, I decided I needed a water filter. To try and counter-act the urge to buy my way through this ‘problem’, I re-framed the problem to, how I could set up filtered water without buying anything? After some quick research, I realized I could boil the water and then put it into a container I already owned which could then act as my filtered water source for my drinking and cooking needs.

Looking at my problem in this way was helpful in two ways. First, in the short-run, the challenge to do it myself gave the little hamster on a wheel in my mind something to do without going online shopping. And second, in the long-run, I got the superior satisfaction that comes from MacGyvering through a problem, instead of just Amazoning it. I say superior because solving the problem through your own ingenuity endures in a way that goes far beyond the happiness you’d get from just pointing and clicking your way to a fix.

Whether it’s a minimalist or creative mindset, by shifting our identity, we hack the Diderot effect to our advantage. By re-imagining who we are, we perform a kind of mental Jiu-jitsu in which we flip satisfaction we would get from buying something into another container and in doing so, we become more complete by integrating into ourselves the virtue of the things we don’t have, instead of extending ourselves into the inevitable disappointment of buying another thing we don’t need.

Jack Dorsey’s Sauna Routine

Why Sauna

As humans, our ability to adapt to heat and cold has been at the core of our survival. We are the only primate that uses a technique called persistence hunting; the practice of running after our prey until it is exhausted. In effect, weaponizing the climate to our advantage.

But while that may be true for our ancestors and traditional cultures, I certainly won’t be chasing down a wildebeest anytime soon. Quite the opposite, I wilt like an ice-cream cone as soon as the temperature starts to rise. Case in point, after a short run last summer, I spent the whole day in bed, head pounding from what I believe was a mild heatstroke.

As usual, the yawning gulf between the human potential and my own pathetic reality sparked my curiosity.

Sauna’s Benefits

Experimenting with cold showers / ice-baths convinced me that the body can adapt to different temperature exposures and even learn to enjoy them. Could sauna do the same for heat?

Curious, I went looking through the interweb. There I found a video by Dr Rhonda Patrick explaining the potential benefits of a sauna practice. These include:

Improved cardiovascular mechanisms and lower heart rate.
Lower core body temperature during workload (surprise!)
Higher sweat rate and sweat sensitivity as a function of increased thermoregulatory control.
Increased blood flow to skeletal muscle (known as muscle perfusion) and other tissues.
Reduced rate of glycogen depletion due to improved muscle perfusion.
Increased red blood cell count (likely via erythropoietin).
Increased efficiency of oxygen transport to muscles.[efn_note] Health Benefits From: https://tim.blog/2014/04/10/saunas-hyperthermic-conditioning-2/ [/efn_note]

Given the laundry list of benefits, and my own inclination to be better in the heat, I was sold.

The only issue was dosage. How much saunaing did I need to do to before I could start getting the benefits? After no luck searching the internet, I found a Sauna protocol from an unlikely source.

Jack Dorsey’s Sauna Protocol

Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter and Square. But, despite being CEO of two billion-dollar companies, he lives more like a monk than a typical executive.

Important Disclaimer:  The material on this blog is for informational purposes only. As each individual situation is unique, you should use proper discretion, in consultation with a health care practitioner, before undertaking the protocols, diet, exercises, techniques, training methods, or otherwise described herein. The author and publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information contained herein.

Jack meditates for 2 hours each day, walks an hour to work, each way. Eats one meal a day and takes ONLY cold showers.[efn_note] Jack on the Ben Greenfield podcast: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/time-saving-workouts/ [/efn_note] A cornerstone of his monastic health regiment is daily heat and cold exposure.

His routine starts with a 3-minute ice-bath in his coldtub. After the ice bath, he moves to the sauna for 15 minutes and then repeats it 3 times.

Cold: Ice Bath With Circulator at Chiller 37F / 3C
Heat: Sauna 220F / 104C
Duration: Cold 3 minutes / Sauna 15 minutes 3 rounds
Frequency: Everyday usually in the evening

Jack credits this routine as being among the most important things he does for health and wellness.

Suggested Modifications

Jack Dorsey’s sauna routine is extreme. It also involves some pretty expensive home-gear. Your first sauna forays will likely be at a local gym. Here are the modifications I would suggest for anyone just starting out:

220 degrees is HOT! Unless you have your own sauna, it will be hard to find one that’s 220 degrees, and you probably wouldn’t want to start that hot anyway.

Joe Rogan 200+ degrees is hot – don’t try this at home.

Because your sauna will be cooler, 20 minutes is likely closer to the right amount of time. Stay in until you feel some slight discomfort but don’t overdo it. I find that 20 minutes at (180F / 82C) can be tough.

Most of us don’t have ice baths or cold plunges at our gyms, but we do have showers. A 3-minute cold plunge is a near equivalent to a 5 minute cold shower.

Going into the sauna wet means it takes longer to heat your core temperature. So dry off with a towel after your cold exposure or do sauna first.

Sauna Benefits: Frequency vs Intensity?

There is also the question of frequency versus intensity. Is it enough to just go to the sauna every day for 10 minutes? Or are the benefits a result of the sessions intensity – a function of both the temperature and how long you stay in it?

Both matter but based on my reading and experience, intensity is the more important of the two. For example, a study by the U.S. military found that exercising in the heat was the most critical factor for predicting whether someone would become heat adapted.[efn_note] Human Adaptations to Heat and Cold Stress: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/p012427.pdf [/efn_note]

I advocate for saunaing until it’s slightly uncomfortable (See Disclaimer – Don’t Kill Yourself). The more often you can do it, the better but once or twice a week should be enough to start seeing benefits.

Jack’s practice is at the extreme of frequency and intensity. But like I said, the man is a monk.

———————–

Three Lessons from the Life of Leonardo Da Vinci

I’ve been listening to Walter Isaacson’s Biography of the polymath Leonardo Da Vinci. A few anecdotes from his life struck me as worth sharing here.

Leonardo The Reluctant

In 1504, both Leonardo and his rival Michelangelo were commissioned to create paintings that would face each other at The Hall of the Five Hundred in Florence. The intention of this dual commission was to spark a competition between the two greatest artists in Italy.

So it is ironic that both Leonardo and Michelangelo hated painting. Of Leonardo, many contemporaries noted that “He couldn’t stand to look at a brush.” What he really wanted to spend time on was science and engineering.

Michelangelo also hated painting. He thought of himself as a sculptor. While working on the commission in Florence, he wrote in his journal, “I am not in the right place and I am not a painter.”

The lesson I take is that it doesn’t matter how good you are, sometimes you just have to work on things that aren’t that interesting to you. Even geniuses sometimes have to take what the market is offering.

The Anatomy of Failure

Leonardo is famous for the way he was able to blend his love for science and discovery with art. Among the most famous of these pairings is the anatomical drawings he created based on his dissection of cadavers.

His keen mind allowed him to discover things that wouldn’t be known for another 100 years (such as how blood flows through the human heart) and his abilities as an artist lead to renderings of the human body that to this day stand unmatched for their accuracy and aesthetics.

Yet his achievements languished undiscovered in his notebooks until the modern era. This is because Leonardo never published his work. His partner in his anatomical studies died of plague and Leonardo did not have the discipline or inclination to bring the project to term.

The lesson is that insight and output do not necessarily correspond. Without a clear vision, discipline and perhaps a good partner, even the brightest minds can achieve less than their potential. As Walter Isaacson notes,

“One of the things that would have most benefited Leonardo in his career was a partner who could push him to follow through and publish his work.”

Leonardo Da Vinci The Original Consultant

As Europe awoke to the fact that there was a new world laying across the ocean, Leonardo’s home city-state of Florence realized that it would need to acquire a port to get in on the action. This meant conquering a nearby city and Pisa was chosen as the most attractive option.

Pisa was vulnerable if the Florentines could divert the river Arno from its course, effectively cutting it off from supplies. Leonardo was put in charge of figuring out how to do this.

Leonardo knew he had to dig a massive channel in order to divert the river. He calculated that it would entail the movement of over one million tons of earth. Knowing this, he had to determine how many men and how much time it would take. But instead of blindly estimating, Leonardo conducted the first of what has now come to be known as a time in motion study.

Using a watch he studied how long it took a man to fill a bucket of dirt and move it to a machine he’d designed to carry it away. Based on his measurements, Leonardo calculated that it would require over fifty thousand worker-days to complete his project.

After making his designs and calculations, Leonardo left instructions for the project and returned to Florence. Unfortunately, the person who was selected to oversee the actual operation went against his wishes and started digging two canals, instead of one.

Leonardo and his compatriot Machiavelli tried to pressure the engineer into sticking with the original plan but failed. In the end, despite heavy rains, the two half as deep canals failed to divert the river and the plan was abandoned.

The lesson in this is that you can have the most brilliant strategists but if the actors don’t play their part, the plan will fail.

Peter Cook's Blog