Category: Learning

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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:

  1. “All the products purchased by a consumer aim to be cohesive with that consumer’s identity.”
  2. “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:

  1. They react, each upon each other, (coherence in the system);
  2. they reflect back on us, casting an identity back at ourselves (coherence with our internal identity);
  3. 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.

Why I Hate Books – My Favorite Book of 2018

My favorite book of 2018 was The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling

I stumbled upon this book while reading Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work.

Even before I read it, the book’s title resonated with a disenchantment I’d been feeling with reading itself.

Reading books is easy.

Doing things is hard.

I still believe reading can be valuable. But I don’t think it’s as productive as people would like you to believe.

It comes down to the difference between strategy and execution:

Our predisposition to favour strategy at the expense of execution can be attributed to the fact that strategy is fundamentally easier than executing. This is because strategizing is a conceptual exercise, a manipulation of our mental landscape which is in effect a simulation, and a simplification of reality. Execution, by contrast, necessarily entails a confrontation with reality in all its complexity.

Books are consumed with the tacit agreement that they (the author) will tell you what worked for them and you (the reader) will go out and figure out how to do it yourself, irrespective of the difficulty of the endeavour.

For example:

Image of book on how to climb Mount Everest.

And that’s fine, books are often a good place to start.

But it’s important to recognise that it’s much more productive (and painful) to execute.

Most books, either by necessity or design, quietly pass over the chasm separating word and deed.  

The Four Disciplines of Execution lays out a compelling framework for navigating the space between an ambition and its implementation.  

You can expect to hear more about how I’m using it day-to-day in 2019.

Happy New Year!

Better is a Story

Why do self-help books exist? I’ll tell you why.

Write down your worst habit.

Now go stop doing that.

This is no brainer advice – solid gold. But you won’t do it.

Now imagine I could play you a movie of what your life would be like if you stopped that bad habit.

Say I played you an episode of that movie for you every morning for three months.

How much more likely are you to change?

People are not computers.

We respond to stories, not commands, no matter how logical they are.

Better is a story you have to sell, no matter how obvious it is to you.

Why Motivation Doesn’t Work

The Motivation Mindset And Its Discontents

“Discipline equals freedom” – Jocko Willink

When a task is painful and the outcome is uncertain, it’s often the case that motivation seems to somehow vanish. At such times, stepping away to improve our strategy seems like a reasonable way to rekindle and reconnect with the feelings that lead us to the work. This is one of the ways we fall into the trap of over-strategizing but it also speaks to a deeper misunderstanding of the role that motivation should play in achieving our goals.

When we approach our goals with what I’ll call the Motivation Mindset, we expect that our motivation to reach our goal will translate into motivation to do the work necessary to achieve it.  

For example, the motivation mindset assumes that because we’re motivated to learn French, we’ll also feel motivated to spend hours learning to conjugate French verbs. It’s also the reason people say things like, “he just didn’t want it badly enough.” when someone fails to achieve something. The flaw with this approach to our goals is that it places too much stock in the durability of motivation.

Motivation is a treacherous currency because it is a fundamentally forward looking emotion. It is a why, why you’re doing something. Motivation concerns itself with the future and because we are quick to discount the future in the face of difficulty, it is fundamentally fickle. As such, relying on motivation will almost never get you through the work required for a worthwhile goal.

An alternative, and in my experience superior approach is to approach our work with what i’d call a Discipline Mindset. Which is to say that we should expect that, irrespective of our initial motivation, discipline will be required.

Motivation and discipline differ in that if motivation is about the future then discipline is about the present. If motivation asks why, then discipline asks how? How will I get through the drudgery of conjugating verbs? By drinking a strong coffee and not getting out of this chair for an hour.

It is a subtle distinction, but I would argue it is a worthwhile one because in essence, a disciplined mindset creates more realistic expectations. The result is that instead of feeling like we’re doing things wrong because we’re bored, tired and pissed off, we can begin to recognize those emotions as signals that we’re doing exactly what we should be.

Discipline Creates Motivation

There is a further relationship between discipline and motivation that’s worth exploring. It’s how, in certain circumstances, discipline can lead to a renewed sense of motivation. This occurs when disciplined output provides high-quality feedback which in turn leads to truly productive adjustments to our strategy.

As we observe said adjustments creating real changes in the efficiency and/or efficacy of our work, the result is motivation to do more work. Which is to say that when we feel more confident that our plan will work or we’ll feel better while we do it, we feel motivated to follow through and execute.

Put in terms of the Sisyphus Matrix, motivation is the feeling we get when our perception of a task moves from Task t1 to Task t2:

This is why people spend, and often waste money on “gear” and its equivalent. It creates the expectation of a more pleasurable experience and thereby the motivation to take another shot at the work. Unfortunately, for things that require true skill, better tools often provide only a minor improvements to our process and our motivation quickly dissipates.

Authors Note: This piece originally appeared as part of the post Avoiding Procrastination – Genius, Productivity & The Sisyphus Matrix but in order to make it more accessible (shorter), I’ve republished it here. 

Do The Worst You Can

The thing that we learned, though, is that: every one of our films, when we start off, they suck.

– Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Walt Disney Studios

Do the worst you can.

We often poison our ambitions by comparing our first attempts to others finished products.

In doing so we fail to recognize that almost everything great started out bad. All masterpieces start as sketches, all films as rough drafts, all books as outlines.

Give yourself permission to do the worst you can and then make it better.

Don’t give up before you start.

P.S. Checkout this blog post about how the Oscar winning movie Toy Story’s early drafts were terrible.

60 Days of Meditation With The Muse Meditation EEG Device

We all know someone who meditates. And we all wonder if it actually does anything for them. And more importantly, if it would do anything for us.    

I’ve tried meditation a few times but it never took. I figured it was because either I couldn’t stick with it because I can’t seem to stick to anything or because I was doing it wrong.

So when I saw the Muse Brain Sensing Headband, I thought it would be a great opportunity to challenge myself to dive further into meditation.

I set myself a challenge. Meditate everyday for 60 days and see what happens.  

Why the Challenge

The potential benefits of mediation 

  • Increased ability to concentrate
  • Increased emotional resilience 
  • Better mood 

See if meditation would become a habit

Studies have indicated that it takes about 60-90 days of regular practice for something to become a habit. This challenge was an opportunity to see if meditation could become a habit

The chance to observe how meditation changes as I get better at it  

In a previous post, I discussed how skill changes the experience of things. Part of the attraction of this challenge was the chance to observe how my experience of meditation would change over the course of the challenge.

See if I could be consistent

Meditation is a great challenge for people who struggle with consistency because it requires so little. No need for fancy clothes, or equipment. No showing up to a gym or studio. All you need is a quiet place, a timer and time. In other words, No Excuses!

Of course, I made things slightly more complicated than that but the point is that you don’t have to.

How I Did It

Meditation Type:

Breath Awareness – There are many types of meditation. Being acquainted with breath awareness meditation, that’s what I decided to do. If it’s good enough for Yuval Noah Harari, it’s good enough for me.

Wim Hof Breathing – I used the Wim Hof breathing method as a way to prime myself before meditation. Numerous people have expressed that doing this prior to meditation improves their experience of meditation.  

Tracking Tools:

Google Sheets – Google sheets is my favorite tracking tool by far. It’s on my phone and any computer that I can get my hands on so there’s no excuse for missing a day. I put together the below simple spreadsheet for tracking my daily meditation practice.

It has columns for the date, duration of the meditation, Muse % calm score and notes. In the last few days of the challenge, I added column to record my own subjective score of how the meditation session went.

Muse Headband – This headband is a EEG device. It measures your brainwaves and translates the results into sound. Ideally, this sound provides feedback that tells you when you’ve fallen out of a meditative state so that you can bring your attention back to whatever your object of concentration is.

Using the Muse brain sensing headband was an opportunity to add an objective measure of meditation progress to what is usually a highly subjective experience.  

Notable Results

Muse headband data 

One thing I was hoping for was to observe a trend in the results provided by the Muse headband that aligned with my subjective sense of my meditation performance. No such thing occurred.

To the contrary, I had many sessions where the Muse headband indicated I had been calm for a high % of the session when in fact my mind was all over the place or I was daydreaming.  

I’m convinced that the Muse headband has little ability to detect whether or not someone is in a meditative state. It can detect if you’re moving around or materially distracted but it can’t tell the difference between daydreaming and meditation, at least for me.

The Phenomenon

By far the most interesting result occurred towards the beginning of the challenge.  

Specifically on day eight, in the hours after the session, I experienced what I can only describe as a deep and profound sense of well-being. It was a feeling seemed to encompass my entire body, a relaxation into the concept that everything was ok and I was happy to be where I was.

This feeling lasted for only an hour or two but it was so distinctly different from my normal state of existence and unique in that I could not account for it by anything other than the morning’s meditation.  

Looking back, it’ impossible to say whether this was a placebo effect or a real change in my mental state as a result of my meditation practice. I continued to hope that the phenomenon would repeat itself but it didn’t.  I did have some good meditation sessions but nothing like what experienced that day. 

I can say though that if that feeling could be an even intermittent result of a meditation practice, then I would say sign me up for two!  

Missed three days

I missed three days during the challenge. No excuses, I just forgot. The best way to combat this happening was to do first thing in the morning. Life tends to get in the way otherwise.   

Sitting down became easier 

Once change I noticed was that sitting for long periods became easier. At first, just doing a 15 minute session would leave my back and knees screaming. By the end I could easily sit for 20+ minutes without experiencing a distracting level of pain. 

Wim Hof Breathing

Wim Hof breathing method definitely seems to make meditation easier and/or more pleasurable. Doing the breathing beforehand felt like clearing the mental palate before sitting down. I was still prone to distraction and it didn’t make every session a success but it helped prime me for what could feel like a daunting task, especially when going over 20 minutes in a session.  

Diet, Sleep & Time of Day Matter

Diet, sleep, and time of day seem to meaningfully affect the quality of my meditation sessions. If I’d been eating poorly or had a long weekend of drinking, it felt much more difficult to concentrate. It was also harder to just get myself to sit down at all.

The time of day also seemed to play a big role. If I was tired I would often slip from meditating into dreaming. Most of my meditating was done first thing in the morning and I found that on many days my anxiety seemed to mount as the session progressed. 

This might be the result of rising stress hormone levels first thing in the morning. The effect could also possibly be attributed to a waning of whatever psychological state is induced by the Wim Hof breathing exercises I did before the session.

Whatever the cause, I still recommend doing meditation first thing in the morning if you can. 

Increased concentration

I can’t say that my concentration improved in any objective sense. But I can say that I did notice that when I got distracted I would remind myself that just as in meditation I needed to return my focus to the work, even though it wasn’t the most interesting thought in my head at the moment.

It would be interesting to find an objective measure of concentration and test it over the course of another challenge. 

Habit Not Formed

Meditation did not become a habit for me as a result of the challenge. While I’m definitely less intimidated by the prospect of sitting in silent concentration for 20+ minutes, I have no desire or compulsion to meditate when I wake up in the morning. Maybe it takes 90 days for me to make something a habit or maybe I need to try a different form of meditation. 

Overall thoughts

On some days doing 20+ minutes of meditation actually felt good but I didn’t see enough benefit in my day-to-day living to convince me that meditation practice was something I have to keep doing. Nor did it become a habit as I hoped it might. 

That said, I remain fascinated by “The Phenomenon” experience described earlier. If a believable person could convince me that, that type of feeling was the inevitable result of a meditation practice, then I would definitely sign up for another challenge.

What I Would Do Differently

Give yourself a subjective score

I wish I’d given myself a subjective score for each one of my practices. Even if you have an EEG device, a subjective score can be a useful tool for making a relative comparison of your results over time.

Increase the intensity

If I could do this again one variable I would want to experiment with is the intensity of my practice.

The book Altered Traits seemed to suggest that breakthrough levels of skill often occurred when meditatiors went for intensive retreats. Perhaps it’s necessary to immerse even more deeply in order to “level-up” at meditation.

Get a coach

Over the course of the challenge, I noticed a persistent anxiety as to whether or not I was doing things “right”. Despite reminding myself that the challenge was more about consistency then performance, it kept creeping back into my thoughts.

Next time, I think getting a coach would be helpful for allowing myself to feel like I was on the path to getting better at meditation. 

Resources For Doing This Yourself


Skill Changes Everything – How to Avoid Quitting Too Soon

“The problem with language is that it’s a little too facile, in so far as it leads us to believe that simply because we have words to describe our experience we actually know what those experiences are.”

– John Astin

Dr. Richard Davidson (Ritchie) was a young Harvard graduate student when he made the trip to India for his first ten-day intensive meditation retreat. The schedule called for nearly twelve hours a day of meditation. Ritchie quickly found that instead of focusing on his breath as he was supposed to, his attention was hijacked by a growing sensation of pain in his right knee. Over the course of the first day, this pain intensified and spread to his other knee and lower back. By the end of the day, Ritchie was on the verge of giving up on the retreat.

Ritchie persevered, in spite of the pain, and on the third day, as the instruction changed from breath observation to monitoring his body, Ritchie noticed a gradual shift in his perception. The ache in his knees and back morphed from being acute pain into a mere sensation. At the same time, he began to experience a profound sense of equanimity and well-being, it was as if he had somehow opened his mind.

This feeling of well-being persisted for the remainder of the retreat and by the end, Ritchie was able to sit for up to four hours at a time, even going back for additional meditation after already doing twelve hours. And though the intensity of the euphoria waned in the months that followed, his experience was so transformative that it convinced him to devote his academic career to the scientific study of meditation.

Why We Underestimate Change

Ritchie’s story illustrates an important lesson that applies to all skill based endeavors. Namely, that we consistently underestimate the dynamic nature of our own experience. More specifically, we fail to appreciate how profoundly our experience of a thing will change as we become more skilled. Cultivating an appreciation for this can help us make better decisions about when to stick with something and when to quit.

The reason we fail to account for the dynamism of our experience because we think in linear terms. For a sense of this, please humor me by answering these two questions:  

Question 1: Do you like ice-cream, and will you like it in the future?

Question 2: Do you like running, and will you like it in the future?

Now, think for a moment, how did you answer those questions? Like me, you probably thought about your recent experiences of ice-cream or running, and with some minor adjustments, projected them forward.

We think this way because it’s useful for things like ice cream. Ice cream, like most things we do, is a largely static experience. Eating ice-cream in the future is going to be a lot like it was in the past (hopefully!).

But for endeavors that entail any degree of skill – think careers and hobbies – it is a counterproductive approach to forecasting what we’ll like and dislike. It’s counterproductive because when skill is involved our experience isn’t static. To the contrary, it is dynamic – it changes as our skills do.

How Skill Changes The Feels

We recognize that skill can account for differences in experiences between people doing the same thing. For example, imagine how it would feel to run a mile at your fastest pace.

And now, imagine what it would feel like for the world’s fastest miler Hicham El Guerrouj, to run a mile at his fastest pace.

It is, I think, intuitive that the experience of running a mile would be materially different for you then it would be for Guerrouj. And further, that it would likely be considerably more enjoyable for Guerrouj then it would be for you.

What’s less intuitive and more profound, is how our own experience of something can change through time, and specifically as our skill increases.  

For a sense of this, now try to imagine how it would feel for you to run a mile after a year of dedicated training with the world’s greatest running coach…

I know, you’d still hate it, right? But it wouldn’t be the same as today would it?

It wouldn’t. Running the mile today would be a fundamentally different experience than running that mile after a year of training and coaching. Your breathing would be different, your stride would be different, your relationship to your whole body would be different.  

Running, as you experience it, would undergo a transformation so profound that to speak of running today and running a year later as the same experience would be silly. You are doing the “same thing” but it is not the same experience.

That our own experience of the same thing can change so drastically is why endeavors that involve skill are a domain of life where our recent experiences are very poor predictors of what we’ll like and dislike in the future. This poses a challenge to the commonsense method of evaluating whether something is right for us, or not.

Traditionally, we assign a lot of weight to how something makes us feel today. Hence the saying, “You don’t know until you try”. The implication of a highly dynamic experience is that we not only don’t know until we try but we also don’t know until we’ve become proficient.

Linear Thinking’s Trap

The most common result of linear thinking is the error of quitting too early. Like Ritchie at the beginning of his meditation retreat, we allow ourselves to become anchored to our present experience and project it forward.

The reality, of course, is that generally speaking, as your skill increases the experience of something improves. Whether it’s because you win more, get paid more, or can express yourself more confidently, more skill leads to a better experience.

And we know this – that the beginning is usually the hardest part – at least intellectually. It’s the reason parents encourage their kids to get back on the bicycle when they fall off.

But as adults wrestling with more complex skills, it’s easy to lose this perspective and in its absence, every setback feels like a failure and what is really just the beginning seems like an eternity.

Thus, we fall into what psychologists term the fixed-mindset, an essentially linear perspective that assumes we’re either right for something or not. Once we’ve adopted this mindset, quitting becomes the seemingly rational decision.

Luckily, there is a simple and effective way to counteract our tendency towards fixed mindset thinking.  

Recognize & Correct Linear Self-Talk

Among the first and most recognizable symptoms of fixed-mindset, linear thinking is our internal dialogue. We start telling ourselves things like:

“I’m no good at this.”

“I’m just not cut out to be a graphic designer.”

“I really don’t like tennis as much as I thought I would.”  

And in this way, we begin convincing ourselves that we know what it’s like to do something when in the truth is we’ve barely scratched the surface the experience.

Personally, I’ve found that the easiest way to counter linear thinking is to make small modifications to this internal dialogue. When I catch myself saying, “I’m no good at this”, I change the sentence to “I’m no good at this, yet” or “I haven’t put in the work to be good at this yet.” And I still get to be pissed off at myself but in a more intelligent way.

Silly as it may first appear, these subtle shifts in language are often enough to remind ourselves that what we’re experiencing now is only a moment in a journey. That things not only can get better but they are in fact likely to, so long as we continue to put in the work to improve.

Where To Go From Here

A highly dynamic experience is in a way antithetical to our concept of self. After all, if what I like and don’t like is highly changeable, then who am I really?  And so it’s not surprising that we’re not wired to fully appreciate our full range of possible experience.

But appreciating it may not be necessary. If we can just stop ourselves from falling victim to fixed mindset errors, then we at least retain the ability to push forward and allow the future to surprise us by being more interesting than we ever imagined it could be.

Ending Procrastination – Genius, Productivity & The Sisyphus Matrix

“Genius is the ability to get from A to D without going through B and C.”  

– Hollow Man, Andrew W. Marlowe

The above quote has stuck with me for a long time because like everyone else, I am attracted to the idea of genius in its many forms. From iconic figures like Leonardo DaVinci, to the golfer who can make what should take three shots in one, there is something seductive about people who can do seemingly impossible things.

I believe this attraction to genius goes as deep as our species evolution; several million years ago humans sacrificed muscle and mechanical output for brains and superior abstract reasoning. Unsurprisingly, that trade-off has echoed out from our DNA out into our society. Capitalism and thus the modern world is predicated on the notion of productivity – the idea that we all benefit when people solve the problem of how to get more with less.

Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that we seek genius’ equivalent in our own lives. We want not only to be productive but to be optimally productive about our productivity because it doesn’t take a genius to see that the ultimate skill is not a thing you learn but learning to learn itself.

But as with any good idea, our drive to be productive can be taken too far. My own experience has been that the inclination to strategize and/or optimize has caused the abandonment, and failure of many personal goals.  

This post is an attempt to provide a framework that I’ve found helpful for thinking about productivity, work, motivation, discipline, and getting things done.

Getting What You’re After – The Ideal Approach

Achieving anything in life involves some combination of an objective, a strategy and work.

The objective is whatever you set out to achieve, your goal. Strategizing and/or optimization is the time you spend improving your approach to achieving your objective. And the work is the work, the execution.

There is a tension between strategy and work, between thinking about how best to do something and actually trying to do it. Both are important, but time spent doing one is time spent not doing the other.

In an ideal world, we would have the wisdom to find the harmony between the two that gets us to our goal the quickest. But in the real world, things are messy and we don’t know what the right balance is. And because it’s easier to strategize than it is to execute, we often favor strategy over output – to our detriment.

Strategy’s Trap

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson

Our predisposition to favor strategy at the expense of execution can be attributed to the fact that strategy is fundamentally easier than executing. This is because strategizing is a conceptual exercise, a manipulation of our mental landscape which is in effect a simulation, and a simplification of reality. Execution, by contrast, necessarily entails a confrontation with reality in all its complexity.

I mention this because it underpins the fact that strategy and execution deliver feedback of differing quality. And it’s the quality of the feedback we get from strategy that can make it into a trap.

Broadly speaking, when we strategize we get low-quality feedback, and when we execute, we get high-quality feedback. Strategizing provides us with general information and is always simplified to some degree.

By contrast, by when we endeavor to execute, to do the work, we are getting feedback that is unique to our specific situation. Such high-quality feedback is often psychologically painful because it is so specific to our own limitations and shortcomings.

It’s tempting to presume that those of us who overindulge in strategy at the expense of execution do so out of laziness. But I believe it’s ambition that makes strategy so dangerous. We strategize not because it is the absence of but because it is effort.

Strategy becomes an insidious trap when it allows us to feel like we’re doing something, even if that something isn’t productive. At its worst, strategy is the junk-food of work, a procrastination for ambitious people that lets us feel good about getting nowhere.

SpaceX & The Hierarchy of Feedback

For a sense of how the hierarchy of feedback plays out in the real world, consider how the company SpaceX dealt with the tension between strategy and execution.

SpaceX’s objective was to create rockets that could carry objects into space and then return safely to earth. Sending rockets into space is very expensive, so SpaceX was highly incentivized to spend as much time as they could perfecting their strategy and design before spending the money to test-launch a rocket. As such, the company invested in the brightest rocket scientists and the most powerful computers money could buy to simulate how the rockets would perform.

The economics of SpaceX’s situation dictated that if there was any way they could simulate their way to a rocket that worked, they would. But they couldn’t. They had to send rockets into space because their most valuable feedback came from the information they received during each attempt at launch and each failure.

SpaceX launched more than 10 rockets costing the company hundreds of millions before they finally achieved a rocket that could return safely from earth’s orbit.

Rocket engineering is an admittedly extreme example but the principle does, I think, carry over into our own more modest objectives; irrespective of the endeavor there is no substitute for the feedback you get from getting off the page and out into the world.

Where We Over-Strategize – The Sisyphus Matrix

While we’re predisposed to favor strategy over execution, not all activities are the same. In my experience, there are two qualities of a given task, variables if you will, that determine how likely we are to fall into the trap of strategizing at the expense of doing:  

Variable 1: Pleasure/Pain – How enjoyable or difficult producing output i.e. doing the work is.

Variable 2: Confidence/Anxiety – How confident or anxious you are that given enough work, you’ll get the outcome you want.

The danger of strategizing when we should be executing is the greatest when the work is painful and the outcome feels uncertain. It’s worth noting that pain alone is often well tolerated if we know it will result in achieving our goals, and uncertainty is also bearable if we can at least tolerate going through the motions. But as the experience of a task shifts towards the combination of both discomfort and anxiety, the fear that our misery may be pointless often drives us to either quit or retreat to the drawing board.

I’ve titled the above table the Sisyphus Matrix because the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus is a striking, if fictional, example of how these two facets of our experience combine to shape our relationship with a given task.  

The myth tells of a king named Sisyphus who was both greedy and cunning. In order to glorify himself, Sisyphus deceived the Gods Hades and Zeus – making them look like fools.

For believing he was more clever than the gods, Zeus devised a special punishment for Sisyphus. He would be forced to roll a heavy boulder up a mountain, only to watch that same boulder roll back down the hill as soon as he’d finished, for all eternity.

Sisyphus’ punishment is terrible because it is both painful and so definitely pointless. It is the Platonic antithesis of productivity and genius – an eternity of meaningless suffering.

As such, Sisyphus’ punishment lands in the very top right corner of the matrix. Whereas a task that is both pleasurable in its execution and highly certain in its outcome would be in the bottom left-hand corner.

Most of our endeavors won’t be as forlorn as Sisyphus’ punishment. But because the world is a competitive place, worthwhile things are often difficult things, and so our objectives tend to cluster somewhere towards the middle right region of the matrix.

Thinking about our work in terms of these variables can help us identify when we’re likely to be pushed towards the siren song of unproductive strategizing. Again, the more painful the process and the more anxiety we have about its outcome, the greater the likelihood that we dither.  

That said, there are times when it’s right to go back to the drawing board or just plain give up. But more often than not, we succumb to procrastination in the guise of strategizing long before we’ve given ourselves the chance to get the feedback we need to make a good decision.

The Motivation Mindset And Its Discontents

“Discipline equals freedom” – Jocko Willink

When a task is painful and the outcome is uncertain, it’s often the case that my motivation seems to somehow vanish. At such times, stepping away to improve my strategy seems like a reasonable way to rekindle and reconnect with the feelings that lead me into the work. This is one of the ways I’ve fallen into the trap of over-strategizing but it also speaks to a deeper misunderstanding of the role that motivation should play in achieving goals.

When we approach our goals with what I’ll call the Motivation Mindset, we expect that our motivation to reach our goal will translate into motivation to do the work necessary to achieve it.  

For example, the motivation mindset assumes that because we’re motivated to learn French, we’ll also feel motivated to spend hours learning to conjugate French verbs. It’s also the reason people say things like, “he just didn’t want it badly enough.” when someone fails to achieve something. The flaw with this approach to our goals is that it places too much stock in the durability of motivation.

Motivation is a treacherous currency because it is a fundamentally forward looking emotion. It is a why, why you’re doing something. Motivation concerns itself with the future and because we are quick to discount the future in the face of difficulty, it is fundamentally fickle. As such, relying on motivation will almost never get you through the work required for a worthwhile goal.

An alternative, and in my experience superior approach is to approach our work with what i’d call a Discipline Mindset. Which is to say that we should expect that, irrespective of our initial motivation, discipline will be required.

Motivation and discipline differ in that if motivation is about the future then discipline is about the present. If motivation asks why, then discipline asks how? How will I get through the drudgery of conjugating verbs? By drinking a strong coffee and not getting out of this chair for an hour.

It is a subtle distinction, but I would argue it is a worthwhile one because in essence, a disciplined mindset creates more realistic expectations. The result is that instead of feeling like we’re doing things wrong because we’re bored, tired and pissed off, we can begin to recognize those emotions as signals that we’re doing exactly what we should be.

Discipline Creates Motivation

There is a further relationship between discipline and motivation that’s worth exploring. It’s how, in certain circumstances, discipline can lead to a renewed sense of motivation. This occurs when disciplined output provides high-quality feedback which in turn leads to truly productive adjustments to our strategy.

As we observe said adjustments creating real changes in the efficiency and/or efficacy of our work, the result is motivation to do more work. Which is to say that when we feel more confident that our plan will work or we’ll feel better while we do it, we feel motivated to follow through and execute.

Put in terms of the Sisyphus Matrix, motivation is the feeling we get when our perception of a task moves from Task t1 to Task t2:

This is why people spend, and often waste money on “gear” and its equivalent. It creates the expectation of a more pleasurable experience and thereby the motivation to take another shot at the work. Unfortunately, for things that require true skill, better tools often provide only a minor improvements to our process and our motivation quickly dissipates.

Conclusion – In Defense of Platitudes

“Action is the foundational key to all success” – Picasso

Slogans like the above, and many others, used to bother me for being patently incomplete descriptions of what it takes to be successful. After all, surely there is something to be said for working smarter not just harder and therefore “Just do it” can’t be a complete description of what it takes to succeed.

But if that’s the case, why do seemingly smart, accomplished people treat these blatant oversimplifications as gospel? For instance, one of my favorite artists, the filmmaker Casey Neistat has both “Do More” and “Always Be Closing” tattooed on his arm.

So how to account for this? Are people like Picasso and Casey just so lucky and/or talented that simply “Doing More” without any thought to “How To Do It” has brought them so much success that they’ve bought into the idea that their personal experience is a worthy universal maxim?  

Possibly. We are all susceptible to reading too deeply into our own experiences. On the other hand, to dismiss these people as naive and the slogans as platitudes might be a dangerous oversimplification in itself.

There is, I think, a more nuanced approach to interpreting the situation that helps reconcile the reverence with which people attend these oversimplified mantras. One that gelled for me only when I came across the following quote by the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, he wrote:

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Framed within the lens of the above quotation, I think it’s possible to view slogans like “Do More Work” as expressions of what Homes would characterize as simplicity on the far side of complexity.

Which is to say that successful people do understand that there is more to achievement than just doing the work, that there is a need for both strategy and execution. But they also understand that the dynamic between the two is such that while there is a role for being clever, it so often dwarfed by the opportunity to improve by putting our heads down and getting our hands dirty, that saying anything other than Do The Work would be a waste of breath.

Ray Dalio On How To Run A Meeting & Other Business Tactics

Reading a book is easy. It’s much harder to take what’s in the book and incorporate it into our lives. I like to tackle this problem by distilling books down to a few tactics that I can implement quickly. 1

In a previous post, I outlined 4 ways that you can make better decisions using Ray Dalio’s life principles. In this post, I’ll outline what I think are the most impactful and actionable tactics from Dalio’s work principles.

Here they are:

1) How To Run A Meeting

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.” ― Dave Barry 

Dalio often describes his organization as an intellectual version of the Navy Seals, and it’s clear from his Principles that like the military, he has an affinity for structure. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he thinks the most important part of running a meeting is to be clear about who is in charge and what the meeting is supposed to achieve:

Make it clear who is directing the meeting and whom it is meant to serve. Every meeting should be aimed at achieving someone’s goals; that person is the one responsible for meeting and deciding what they want to get out of it and how they will do so. Meetings without someone clearly responsible run a high risk of being directionless and unproductive

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – A

Dalio’s second Principle for running effective meetings is to assign someone to keep track of both responsibilities and the conversation flow. Said person ensures that any tasks to be done are assigned to specific people and not forgotten. They also ensure that the meeting doesn’t veer too far off topic.

Be careful not to lose personal responsibility via group decision making. Too often groups will make a decision to do something without assigning personal responsibilities, so it is not clear who is supposed to follow up by doing what. Be clear in assigning personal responsibilities.

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – H

Watch out for “topic slip.” Topic slip is random drifting from topic to topic without achieving completion on any of them. One way to avoid it is by tracking the conversation on a whiteboard so that everyone can see where you are. (Emphasis mine)

– Principles, Work Principle 4.4 – F

Applying Dalio’s tactics may make people feel uncomfortable at first, but in the long run, it will reduce peoples anxiety about meetings because they’ll know how they’re expected to behave and that their time won’t be wasted.

2) Use Standing Meetings

Our true priorities are defined by where we spend our resources, and that most often means where we spend our precious time. Too often though the distractions of daily business pull us along low-value tangents that take ours and others time away from where it would best spent. Dalio has found that the best way to avoid these distractions is to habituate your time allocations by setting standing meetings. For instance, if your company priority is sales, you should have a weekly sales meeting.

Use standing meetings to help your organization run like a swiss clock. Regularly scheduled meetings add to overall efficiency by enduring that important interactions and to-do’s aren’t overlooked, eliminating the need for efficient coordination, and improving operations (because repetition leads to refinement). It pays to have standardized meeting agendas that ask the same feedback questions in each meeting, (such as how effective the meeting was) and nonstandard meeting agendas that include things done infrequently (such as quarterly budget reviews).

– Principles, Work Principle 13.3 – D

3) Use Daily Updates To Stay In Sync


Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. I ask each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief description of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them, (i.e., seeing other people’s takes on what their doing together), I can gauge how they are working together, what their moods are, and which threads I should pull on.

-Principles, Work Principle 10.6 – C

Imagine if you woke up every morning instantly knowing what everyone in your company intended to work on that day and everyone else knew the same thing. Appealing, because of how incredibly efficient that might make everything, right? And, at the same time, kind of terrifying because you don’t want everyone looking over your shoulder judging what you intend to do every day.

The latter concern was why I first resisted using daily updates. I told myself, “I’m competent. I don’t need someone looking over my shoulder to do the right thing.” But now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I’ve come to see the value in it.

For me specifically, it’s as simple as sending my colleague a list of things I intend to work on each day. And in addition to it being a useful communication tool, it helps me organize my day and prioritize what I need to work on first. By contrast, my old habit of jumping into my email first-thing would lead me down a rabbit hole that didn’t necessarily reflect my priorities.

4) Use Process Flow Diagrams

Dalio’s ideal is a company that runs like a machine. At its core, a machine is a set of processes. Using process flow diagrams can help you visualize the different processes that make up your organization. These visuals help managers understand how resources will be allocated and interact with each other. But more importantly, they help ensure that everyone understands how the organization is expected to run and their role within it.

Understand that a great manager is essentially an organizational engineer. Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers or artists. They are engineers. They see their organizations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them. They create process flow diagrams to show how the machine works and to evaluate its design. They build metrics to light up how well each of the individual parts of the machine (most importantly, the people) and the machine as a whole are working. And they tinker constantly with its designs and its people to make both better.

– Principles, Work Principles, 10.1 – B


Process Flow Diagrams. Just as an engineer uses flowcharts to understand the workflow of what they’re designing, a manager needs a Process Flow Diagram to help visualize the organization as a machine. It might have references to an organizational chart that shows who reports to whom, or the org chart might supplement the Process Flow Diagram (PFD). Ideally the PFD is made in a way that allows you to both see things simply at a high level and drop down to low level. 

– Principles, Appendix

Since reading Principles, I’ve used process flow diagrams to visualize a number of personal and professional activities. I find that creating visual representations allows people to communicate more effectively about complex processes then they could otherwise.

 

 

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If you enjoyed this post, check out these other posts on Ray Dalio’s Principles:

Ray Dalio’s Principles – 4 Steps To Better Decisions

Ray Dalio’s Secret Sauce – The Truth Machine & The Good Life 

 

  1. The difference between tactics and strategy is strategy tells you what you should do, tactics tells you what to do. In other words, a strategy is the more general goal and tactics are the things you do to make that goal happen. ↩