Ray Dalio’s 4 Steps to Better Decisions

In a previous post, I described Ray Dalio’s Truth Machine and formula for a good life. For those who haven’t read it, “Truth Machine” is my term for the core process Dalio has used to become a billionaire investor and achieve everything else he has in life.

One drawback to Dalio’s process is that it involves multiple steps and coordination. Such complexity makes it tempting to dismiss it as a method that’s only suitable for sophisticated organizations. I think that’s a mistake.

In the interest of making the process actionable for regular humans like you and me, here are four things you can do today to help implement Dalio’s process in your own lives:

1) CREATE AN ADVISORY BOARD

For most of us – myself included – critical feedback even with the best of intentions, often feels like criticism. We have a natural tendency to dislike people who criticize us and because other people want to be liked, they often refrain from giving us the kind of feedback we need. Thus we have dynamic where people don’t like getting critical feedback and people don’t want to give it. As a result, we often have situations where we don’t get good outside input when we should.

This dynamic is similar to the problem people face when it comes to exercise: e.g. because we don’t exercise, we have no energy, and because we have no energy, we don’t feel like exercising. And as in the case of exercise, the best way to break the cycle is to create a habit or ritual out of the thing we’d rather not do.

To make a habit of critical feedback, I suggest creating an advisory board. Write down the names of at least two other people whose opinions you value. You don’t have to tell them their new roles, just schedule recurring discussions with these people at least once every three months. Buy them coffee and ask them for their unfiltered opinions when it comes to your most important decisions.

But remember, most people won’t automatically give you the kind of honest feedback you’re looking for. You have to ask for honest feedback and demonstrate that you’ll accept it as a way of improving yourself and your decisions. Don’t make people regret being honest with you.  

2) USE PERSONALITY ASSESSMENTS

“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman

A core principle of Dalio’s process for getting what you want out of life is that you must know yourself. But because our egos make it difficult see ourselves objectively this is much easier said than done. To paraphrase the great Richard Feynman, you must know yourself, and you are the hardest person to know.

Personality assessments are the best tool Dalio has found for building a base of self-knowledge. These tests are useful because they take the conversation about how we are out of own heads and into a space of more objective measures. Dalio has had himself, his family, and every employee at his firm take multiple assessments to help them better understand themselves and one another.

Start by taking one of the following three tests that Dalio has his employees take. 

Myers Briggs Type Indicator

Link: https://www.mbtionline.com/TaketheMBTI

Cost: $50

Time: 15 minutes

Workplace Personality Inventory – II

Link: https://us.talentlens.com/workplace-personality-inventory-ii

Cost: $24-$28

Time: 30 minutes

Team Dimensions Online

Link: https://www.discprofile.com/products/team-dimensions-profile/

Cost: $39.95

Time: Unknown

Once you’ve completed an assessment, examine your results and see how they match up with your self-image and personal track-record. Then consider asking trusted friends or colleagues if they think your results paint an accurate picture of you.

3) FOCUS ON CONSEQUENCES NOT DIFFICULTY

For most problems, we decide whether we need help based primarily on how difficult it feels to determine the right answer. Instead, we should use how important it is to make the right decision as the test of whether we seek other people’s input.

Really bad outcomes are likely to happen not because the decision was hard, but because we were overconfident about an important decision that seemed easy. Shifting the focus from how hard the decision feels to how important it is to get right can help us determine when to call in reinforcements and ultimately make better decisions.

Even when a very important decision feels like a no-brainer, it’s worthwhile to ask for help.

4) BEGIN A MEDITATION PRACTICE

When Ray Dalio was in his 20’s, he punched his boss in the face on New Year’s Eve and was subsequently fired. Clearly, emotional self-control was not his strength then. And yet today the ability to rise above our emotional selves is an integral part of Dalio’s process. For his transformation from brawler to master truth seeker, Dalio credits his practice of transcendental meditation.

Meditation is complementary to Dalio’s process because it is fundamentally self-awareness training. By resting our attention on an unstimulating rhythm like the breathing or chanting a meaningless word, we can observe how subconscious thoughts arise and create emotional experiences. Through practice we learn to recognize and separate our attention from the emotional pull of our thoughts. That separation allows for better focus on the quality of our ideas and more open-minded dialogue with others.

Following Dalio’s example and beginning a meditation practice is something anyone can do to set the stage for better decision making. Having said that, although meditation can seem as easy as sitting on a pillow, developing a practice takes time. Below I’ve listed some helpful resources for taking the first steps to beginning a meditation practice:  

Oak Meditation (Free)

Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oak-meditation-breathing/id1210209691?mt=8

Headspace (Paid)

Link: https://www.headspace.com/headspace-meditation-app

MUSE Meditation Brainwave Detector (Paid)1

Link: http://www.choosemuse.com/

Transcendental Meditation (Paid)

Link: https://www.tm.org/

  1. I hope to have a post reviewing this item soon ↩

 

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

Ray Dalio has written a book titled Principles. The book is over 500 pages. It’s mostly words, and there are no wizards, so a lot of people won’t read it which I think is a shame.

The good news is that the core theme of Dalio’s book can be boiled down to the following formula:

But why should you listen to Ray Dalio at all? And does his formula work? As an introduction to Principles, I’ll use what Dalio calls the secret to his success to try and answer those questions.

THE TRUTH MACHINE

According to Dalio, the secret to his success is something he calls Believability Weighted Decision Making. This is a fancy way of describing what I’ll be calling Ray Dalio’s Truth Machine.

Here’s what it looks like:

 

Find Out Who is Believeable

Using the Truth Machine is a three-step process, and the first step is finding believable people to listen to. Because we’re looking at just Dalio’s opinion, our first step is to determine how believable he is.

To determine how believable someone is, we need to ask ourselves,

“Does the person making the argument have a track record of success and/or expertise concerning the subject matter?”

The better the track record, the more believable the person.

Dalio’s Track Record

It’s worth mentioning that most people find Ray Dalio believable because of his professional track record. Specifically, because Dalio has accomplished two objectively difficult things:

  1. He and his team at Bridgewater have delivered market-beating returns for the past 30 years.1
  2. He built (from scratch) the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates which currently manages ~$140 billion of assets.2

Thus, Dalio is believable when it comes to the topics of investing, leadership and achieving your goals. But great professional success doesn’t always mean a fulfilled life. The question is whether or not Dalio has achieved a good life using his formula.

Because it’s nearly impossible to take a reliable measure of another person’s subjective experience, the best evidence of a track-record we have is Dalio’s own report about his life. And according to him, he’s lead an extremely fulfilling life full of meaningful work and meaningful relationships.

For me, Dalio’s report on his own life in combination with a track-record as someone who can achieve difficult goals is enough to consider him a believable person.

Open Minded Critical Thinking

After we’ve gathered believable people’s opinions, the Truth Machine process requires that all these believable people turn their brainpower toward critically and open-mindedly evaluating the logic of each other’s opinions. Critical thinking is necessary because even a person with a great track-record can be wrong.3 And sometimes a person with no track record can be right.4

While getting a group of smart people in a room together and having them open-mindedly search for the best ideas sounds good on paper, it’s worth pausing for a moment and consider how rare it is for this to actually happen.

It’s rare is because we don’t just have an idea and then carry it along with us independent of ourselves.

What does happen is that our ideas get wrapped up in our feelings and egos. So when we have ideas, we grow attached to them in a way that turns them from just thoughts in our heads to extensions of our self-worth.5

The result is that when people come together in the real world, they come to fight for their ideas, instead of looking for the best idea.

Because it goes against fundamental aspects of human nature, this is the hardest step in the Truth Machine to get right. Asking people to be critically open-minded about their best ideas is like asking master craftsmen to bring their best work to a contest where they know that if it’s not chosen as the winner, it will be destroyed.

A large part of Dalio’s success as an investor has been the result of training himself and other people to be open-minded enough to engage in just this type of process. 

Dalio’s Good Life Formula

Critical thinking means examining the underlying logic of other’s ideas. So that you can apply your critical thinking to Dalio’s opinion, I’m going to try and provide a quick and dirty explanation of his reasoning.

The first principle in Dalio’s formula is that a good life is a life full of things you value. For example, Dalio’s values are meaningful work and meaningful relationships.

Your values may be money and nice cars, and that’s ok. What is important is that you make an effort to truly know yourself in order to accurately diagnose what your values are.

Once you understand your values, the next step is to set goals that will bring these values into your life. A goal could be an amount of money, a change you want to see in the world or a job you’d like to have.6

As we all know, goals don’t just happen. Therefore the next step is to craft processes to achieve our goals. Our ability to achieve our goals comes down to two factors, our decisions, and luck. Since by definition we cannot control luck, the question of achieving our goals becomes how to make the best decisions. Good decisions, Dalio argues, can only be achieved by accurately understanding how the world works.

For example, if we want to bet on the results of a coin toss, our best method for making good decisions (bets) will be figuring out whether the coin is fair (a 50/50 chance of heads or tails) or weighted in some other way that skews the odds of the results.

As in life, the result of any single toss will have an element of luck but over many coin tosses, the weighting of the coin will act as a signal that overcomes the noise of luck.

Dalio believes that most people’s biggest obstacle to understanding how the world works is not a lack of intelligence, but a tendency to avoid confronting painful realities. When confronting the reality of the world would violate a long-held belief or entail a truth about ourselves that we don’t want to face, we avoid acknowledging the truth to protect our ego’s.

When we turn away from reality and make decisions based on a flawed model of how the world works. The result is decisions based on fantasy that presumes the world is one-way when really, in the immortal words of Marlo Stanfield, “it’s the other way.”  

The Truth Machine plays an integral role in Dalio’s process for getting around ego and confronting reality so that he can make good decisions, achieve his goals, get things he values, and have a good life.

Take A (Believability Weighted) Vote

The final step in the Truth Machine’s process is to put believable people’s opinions to a vote. But it is not a normal one, man, one vote situation. Instead, each person’s vote is weighted by their believability. More believable people’s votes count for more and less believable people’s count for less.

Each person’s weighted vote is tallied up and the opinion or course of action with the most votes selected and voila! You have a truth machine decision. 

Although it may seem a little strange at first, believability weighted voting really just a more formal way of expressing what we do in ordinary life.

For example, if you’d never studied physics and need the right answer to a physics problem, you would value someone with a degree in physics opinion much more highly than your own. In fact, you’d value their opinion so highly that even if their answer didn’t make sense to you, you’d probably use their opinion over yours.  7

When it comes to physics, it’s easy to see that only an idiot would believe the best answer was already in their own head. That’s because we understand that physics is difficult and complex. But when it comes to other areas like relationships, careers, politics and investing, we tend to presume that we can come up with the best answers on our own. And of course, that’s where we get into trouble.  

Unfortunately, we can’t take a believability weighted vote on Dalio’s formula. But you can make your opinion heard in the comments, or discuss it with your friends to get more than just your own opinion on the subject. 

The Best Worst Truth Machine

In an ideal world, by using the Truth Machine, every decision would reflect the truth about how the world works. But of course, even the Truth Machine isn’t perfect. As Dalio would be the first to admit, all the Truth Machine does is get you closer than any other system he has found.

Most of us go through life using only our own brains to make our decisions. The insight that’s made Dalio a billionaire has been to realize that his own brain isn’t that great and that that’s ok. It’s ok because he’s discovered that if he can get a lot of pretty good brains together and train them to only care about the best answer, they can get a much better view of how the world works than he ever could on his own. 

That’s the essence of Ray Dalio’s Truth Machine and the foundation of his formula for the good life. In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss some methods to bring Dalio’s process into your own life and business.

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy these other articles related to Principles:

Ray Dalio’s Principles – 4 Steps For Better Decisions

  1. This is hard. Billions of dollars a year are spent on out-performing the markets and few have been able to do it consistently for as long as Dalio and his team at Bridgewater. ↩
  2. It’s worth noting that being the largest hedge-fund does not necessarily happen because you beat the markets. It’s an accomplishment in and of itself. Becoming the world’s biggest requires strong returns but it also requires a world-class organization to support it. ↩
  3. Einstein’s Mistakes – https://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Mistakes-Human-Failings-Genius/dp/0393337685 ↩
  4. Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers – https://www.wired.com/2013/05/twin-primes/ ↩
  5. Dalio writes that this is due to fundamental properties of how our brains work. Specifically, that the amygdala plays a large role in creating the feelings that give our ideas an emotional character. ↩
  6. It’s interesting to note that this assumes you can accurately estimate the time it will take to get the things you value and that either your preferences will be stable through time or that you can accurately estimate the preferences of your future self. ↩
  7. Is Gravity An Illusion? – https://youtu.be/NblR01hHK6U ↩

Passion is Bullshit – Cal Newport on Finding Work You Love

Once upon a time, my job was to sell bonds. I didn’t like my job. I spent a lot of time thinking about what job I should do instead. The internet said that people should do what they are passionate about. So I thought, what am I passionate about? And I thought about it some more. But the answers were never that compelling.

There were a lot of things I was interested in, but nothing had that quality of deep and soul consuming fire which sends people up the tallest mountains or dodging bullets to feed refugees. So I kept thinking about it. And then, finally, I read Cal Newport’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Now I can tell you that passion is (mostly) bullshit. There is a better way to find work you love.

Why Passion Is Overvalued And Overblown

The myth that passion is the way to find work we love, like any good lie, is built on a grain of truth. That truth is that when someone is innately passionate about something, and it works out it for them, it just makes so much sense. We see someone who was born passionate become successful at what they love, and think by golly that’s the way the world is supposed to work. But we forget that this is like looking at someone who was born with a passion for playing the lottery and happened to hit the jackpot – it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for everyone.

The second reason we over attribute success to innate passion is that we tend to like what we become good at. There are a whole lot of people who did not decide what to work on based on any preexisting passion, but developed passion because they became good at what they did. These people then confuse things by telling themselves and others that they have been passionate about what they do all along.

Cal Newport opens So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Steve Jobs as an example of someone who was not always the quintessential passionate entrepreneur. In truth, Jobs was a bright young man who stumbled into something good and then developed a passion for it only after experiencing some success.

As evidence, Newport cites the fact that Jobs was a co-founder at a startup company before starting Apple but abandoned his job without telling his co-founders to spend months at the All One spiritual commune. Not the type of behavior you’d expect from a person who was supposedly deeply passionate about starting a computer company.

Finally, some people just lie about being passionate. They say they love what they do because they’re afraid to admit they don’t. This is a symptom of the fact that our society presumes that to be good at something you must be innately passionate about it. So much so that many people feel it is a mark of personal failure to even admit they do not LOVE their jobs.

For all these reasons and more, passion gets way more credit than it’s due.

Ask Not About Passion But About Career Capital

Instead of trying to figure out what we are passionate about, Newport urges us to focus on acquiring what he calls career capital. For Newport, career capital is rare and valuable skills.

How is this different than the passion-based approach?

First, as a question, the career capital framework shifts the focus of our decision criteria from a question that is centered around “I”, “What am I passionate about?”, to a question that is centered around others, “What is the world looking for that I can become really good at?”

Second, it specifies that the skill must be rare and valuable. For instance, writing words on the internet about books you’ve read is not a rare and valuable skill, so getting good at that is probably a waste of time.

Third, the career capital framework does not demand passion as a prerequisite for trying things. This means you won’t prematurely disqualify things you may end up having a great career in before you have a chance to try them.

Fourth, using the career capital framework makes it explicit that you have to not only identify what skill you want but also acknowledge that you have to get really good at it. Getting good at things is hard. To become genuinely skilled at something you have to get up and do stuff that is tiring and dull and uncomfortable and you have to keep doing it, often for years. Acknowledging this up front helps you make decisions about what you are willing to pursue.*

Finally, the Career Capital approach also provides a safer road-map for getting to where you want to be because as Newport points out, passion can be dangerous. Dangerous because making decisions on passion alone can lead us to attempt things that we are genuinely unprepared for. Passion has lead many people to start businesses armed only with good intentions and no skill or contacts.

Unfortunately, this is like jumping out of an airplane without really knowing how to use your parachute. Yes, you are deeply motivated to learn how to open your chute but you only have so much time to do it and the results will be devastating if you don’t. I did this when I started a business without customers. It’s painful, don’t do it.

Career capital is not as sexy as passion. No one is going to put “Develop Career Capital” on a t-shirt or mug. In fact, it’s so economically intuitive as to be banal. But it is a better approach because it both changes the questions we ask and better defines what we’re seeking.

Once You Have Career Capital, Bargain for Control

The final but critical step in Newport’s formula for achieving work you love is to bargain with your accumulated career capital for control and autonomy over what you do.

To see why these qualities are critical to having a career you love, imagine what it would be like to be a rock star without them. Yes, you’d be famous, and make a lot of money but if you only had three weeks of vacation per year, and no say over where and what you had to play, you’d probably grow to hate it in the long run.

Now imagine you’re a rock star that gets to decide where and how often you work (within reason), and you’re also allowed to pick most of the songs you play. You’d probably end up hating the former and loving the latter scenario, even though they are technically the same job.

Part of the brilliance of Newport’s framework is that he makes it explicit that our ability to set the terms of how we work can be just as, if not more important than what we do.

Work Past And Future

In 1931 the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that given the rate of improvement in economic productivity, in the future (our present), we would only have to devote a few hours a day to paid “work.” The real problem, he predicted, would be figuring out what to do with all our leisure time.

Keynes’ vision of the future has not come to pass. We still spend a large portion of our lives doing whatever people are willing to pay us for. There has however been a somewhat compensatory shift in focus towards making that work meaningful and enjoyable.

The problem, up to now, had been that no one gave much serious thought to how to intelligently go about finding work you love. Cal Newport’s career capital framework has changed that. Both by re-framing the questions we ask and by better defining what it is we’re looking for, Newport gives us the tools to make better decisions and ultimately create more meaningful lives.

I Is Not Enough – Amartya Sen on the Utility and Moral Dimension of Thinking Beyond Ourselves

One of the reasons for this blog is to share different frameworks of thought that I’ve found helpful or interesting with others. I am the kind of person who really enjoys having a conceptual framework for why, what and how I go about doing just about anything.

In the introduction to his book, The Idea of Justice, the economist Amartya Sen makes an eloquent case for his attempt at crafting a theory of justice. What I love about the passage that follows is that you could replace the word justice for any number of things such as: nutrition, monetary policy, relationships, investing, meaningful work, and have a compelling argument for why we should strive to build a theory around our actions and the actions of others:

The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates us to think about justice and injustice, it is also central, I argue in this book, to the theory of justice. In the investigation presented here, diagnosis of injustice will figure often enough as the starting point for critical discussion. But, it may be asked, if this is a reasonable starting point, why can’t it also be a good ending point? What is the need to go beyond our sense of the word justice and injustice. Why must we have a theory of justice?

To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We have to ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them. One issue relates to the reliability of our feelings and impressions. A sense of injustice could serve as a signal that moves us, but a signal does demand critical examination, and there has to be some scrutiny of the soundness of a conclusion based mainly on signals. Adam Smith’s conviction of the importance of moral sentiments did not stop him from a seeking a ‘theory of moral sentiments’. Nor from insisting that a sense of wrongdoing be critically examined through reasoned scrutiny to see whether it can be the basis of a sustainable condemnation. A similar requirement of scrutiny applies to an inclination to praise someone or something.

*Sen, Amartya Kumar. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U, 2011. Print.

As compelling as this is for me, there are, I’ve been told, some people who consider an intellectual framework to be superfluous, if not downright stupid. To such people, a theory is nothing more than an extra layer of unnecessary complexity around a problem. Instead of theoretical frameworks for action, such people assign value only to their intuition and unique personal experiences.

For example, people often dismiss the need for an intellectual framework in the context of weight-loss and exercise. They say things like, “If I want to lose weight,  I just eat less and exercise more.” or “If I want to get stronger, I just go to the gym and lift heavy weights.” And in some sense these people are right, they recognize that often it is doing simple and effective things that make real progress and over intellectualizing can be a waste of time and energy.

The problem with this type of thinking is that it runs a dangerous risk of oversimplification and ignores the role that generalizable framework plays in improving the lives of others.

I say improve the lives of others because meaningful lives are the result of good decisions (on average) and good decisions are the result of understanding how the world works. In light of that understanding, the failure to try and think beyond our own intuition and experience can be viewed a failure from a moral dimension.

The failure to attempt to think beyond ourselves is a moral failure because it means we never stop to ask if and how our experiences manifest the underlying reality of the world. Such an approach to life precludes the possibility of creating a generalized framework that can be communicated, tested and then shared to better the lives of others. 

That said, there are good reasons to be skeptical of theory. Sometimes theories are bullshit.

Economics, Mental Models, Philosophy, Random 3 Minutes

My Favorite Tools For Escaping Social Media and Taking Back Attention

Social media is addictive. That it’s addictive is not an accident: Social media is built to be addictive. In the same way casinos design slot machines, the companies behind services like Facebook, Tinder, SnapChat, and BuzzFeed spend billions of dollars researching how to maximize your time spent on and continued use of their products. After all, more time on their sites = more advertisements served = more profits – it’s just good business.

But what’s good for Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is not what is good for our lives. Social media habits can rob us of our ability to concentrate, to get sh*t done and even disrupt our relationships.

The good news is there are new tools that can help you take control of both how you use social media and your ability to focus. After a few weeks of experimenting with a number of these tools, I’ve achieved a level of social media use that lets me get the most out of what good these services do offer while maintaining control over my attention during the most productive hours of my day.

Here’s what I’m using:

Freedom App (Paid) 

An app called Freedom is the best tool I’ve found for taking control of media use and attention. Using VPN technology, Freedom allows you to control when and what you can access, across all your devices. Freedom lets you to block not only apps like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat but also specific websites, as well.

What really makes Freedom powerful is the level of control it gives you. It allows you to create customized lists of blocked services and then associate those lists with schedules that can be specified to times of day, days of the week and different devices.

For example, I created the above Blocklist titled “SansGmail” to block a number of social media services. I then associated that Blocklist with the below schedule to restrict those services from  6:30am to 8:00pm, Monday through Saturday, just on my phone.

By scheduling blocked-out times in advance Freedom allows you to stop relying on your finite supply of willpower to change. I made progress changing my social media use before using Freedom, but this app is what has allowed me to automate those changes to the point that they now feel like a habit

Strict Workflow Chrome Extension (Free)

The Strict Workflow chrome extension is a simple but effective tool for re-training yourself to focus and avoid mindless content while working. The app inserts a timer icon into your browser that will block any websites you specify for a set amount of “work time”, followed by an interval of “break time”, when nothing is blocked. For example, you would set the timer to block Facebook, Twitter and other news sites for a 45 minute work interval, followed by a 15 minute break interval.

After just a few months of using this extension, my ability to concentrate has improved dramatically. That said, at least once a week I still find myself reflexively going to Facebook or Bloomberg and I’m happy that all I have to do is press the timer to cut me off and keep me focused.

Turn Off Notifications (Free)

For anyone who wants to decrease their social media use turning off all notifications is an easy first step. Let’s face it, there’s no reason for your phone to buzz every time someone likes the latest photo of your lunch.

Similarly, moving social media apps from the first page into the depths of your phone can make it easier for you to resist the urge to sign into these services. If nothing else, having to swipe or click through numerous screens will make you more aware of how often, and how much time you spend reaching for social media dopamine hits.

Deleting Apps Method (Free)

Ok kids… time to turn off the Instagram……

Do you remember when your parents would tell you to turn off the TV for the night? I do. And I’ve adopted a similar strategy for tuning out habit forming apps like Instagram. I delete the app every evening, reinstalling it during my approved viewing hours at night, then delete it again before going to sleep.

I started doing this because I became so disgusted at how reflexively I checked Instagram. I realized that just seeing the Instagram app on my screen increased the likelihood that I’d try to open it, whether it was blocked or not.   

Airplane Mode (Free)

When I first started to take control of my ability to focus I used a combination of the Strict Workflow app and my phones airplane mode. Many people will balk at the idea of being completely cut off from their cell-phones. But if you do any kind of thoughtful work it’s more important for your career that you find a way to keep your attention on producing quality then it is to take every call the instant it arrives.

Placing your phone on airplane mode and setting a timer for 30 minutes is a great way to begin practicing attention and deep work habits.

One Day At A Time  

Habits are hard to change. It’s a rare person who can go to sleep one night saying they are going to be different and jump out of bed the next morning a changed man or woman. In reality we change incrementally: Bad habit’s don’t just stop, instead they are modified or replaced with more benign ones – one day at time.

I wrote this post because using these tools to change my social media use and take back my attention has changed my life. Being free of the mindless urge to look at Facebook, Twitter or Instagram is like having a whole other compartment of your brain freed up. I couldn’t be happier with the results and I think you will be too.

Brett Victor – Building Technology to Human Dimensions & Being Conscious of The Adjacent Horizon

The Humane Representation of Thought from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

The Humane Representation of Thought from Bret Victor on Vimeo.

At almost 1 hour the above talk by Brett Victor is both long and incredibly thought provoking. In it he explains how our current technological landscape utilizes only a narrow band of humanity’s capacity for thought.

People like to talk about where technology is going and what it will do for us but as Mr. Victor demonstrates, technology doesn’t move towards its highest expression by improvements in processing power or market forces alone. Instead it requires people equipped with the intentionality to design technology that work with and across the scope of human capabilities.

Humane won’t just happen. This not just like Sussman’s technology that is going to happen because there’s already really powerful forces at play. Humane is never a default. And humane only ever comes out of deliberate and conscious design work. If you do the incremental thing, and just ride the current wave of technology and let technology lead you wherever it leads you it’s going to lead you to a tighter and tighter cage…

For me his point about the needs for intentionality in how we design technology speaks to a larger issue in our society. That is, the misguided assumption that outcomes are driven by market forces through a competitive evolution towards their most useful and desirable incarnation. This is naive, many things are shaped almost irrevocably by the design decisions at their beginnings, or to use the technical term they exhibit path dependency. The way that cities are designed is a good example of this.

This is worth talking about because only once we acknowledge this reality that things won’t take care of themselves can we begin to look at the edges of what might have been, and what better future might be on the adjacent horizon, but only with our help. As Mr. Victor eloquently ends his talk:

Built to Lie to You – Learning About Media Manipulation From Ryan Holiday

I like to think I’m skeptical but after reading Ryan Holiday’s media tell all, Trust Me I’m Lying, I realize I have not been skeptical enough. Ryan Holiday, the self-proclaimed media manipulator, has worked in public relations for the fashion brand American Apparel, as well as the bestselling authors Robert Greene, and Tucker Max. In Trust Me I’m Lying (TMIL), Holiday takes the reader through the mechanics of the modern media cycle and it’s ugly. But it’s also eye-opening; the best thing about Trust Me I’m Lying’s is how it has forced me to examine and reconsider many of my assumptions about the media. Here are a few of them.

Assumption 1 –  Blogs Have Standards like Newspapers  

I can say that before reading Holiday’s book I knew there was a difference between the New York Times and The New York Post and yet somehow when it came to the world of digital media everything sort of blurred together. To me, a story published Business Insider was pretty much the same as a story published in The Washington Post. More broadly, I was operating under the assumption that any sufficiently large media outlet was governed by some sort of overarching code of media ethics – something akin to the Hippocratic oath for media – a code that you have to follow if you want to respect yourself and be respected by others. And I was totally wrong.

New digital media aka blogs are not incentivized to care about standards. If they do publish something false, they can blame it on poor sourcing and issue a correction. As long as the story has generated page-views and thereby advertising revenue they’ve still come out ahead. As TMIL puts it:  

Blogs need things to cover. The Times has to fill a newspaper only once per day. A cable news channel has to fill twenty-four hours of programming 365 days a year. But blogs have to fill an infinite amount of space…

Assumption 2 – Newspapers Have Standards

More established media outlets like The New York Times and CNN may have more stringent sourcing standards but they also live and die by advertising dollars. Thus if a story is generating a lot of attention at lower level blogs, established media outlets will feel immense pressure to cover it as well.

This creates a kind of echo chamber effect whereby stories we get exposed to are not those that are important but those that resonate and reverberate through the medium of our modern media, which is, of course, the internet.

Even within publications, the burden of proof for the print version of a newspaper might differ drastically from what reporters need to go live with a blog post. As media outlets grapple with tighter deadlines and smaller staffs, many of the old standards for verification, confirmation and fact-checking are becoming impossible to maintain.

Assumption 3 – The Truth Will Out

I always thought there was a symmetry to the news; e.g. if a there was a big scandal, then discovering that the scandal was manufactured, bogus or just plain wrong would be equally newsworthy. As Dwight Schrute would say, this is False!

Bad behavior makes us talk, public shaming and gossip are things we love to share with others. On the other hand, finding out that we were wrong about something, that our outrage and condemnation were based on nothing more than hearsay, or outright media manipulation is not the kind of thing we’re dying to share on Facebook. The media knows this and adjusts their publishing accordingly.

The example Holiday uses is Toyota. You probably heard that Toyota was pounded by the media for supposedly selling cars that accelerated on their own. Toyota ended up recalling vehicles and settling with the Department of Justice to the tune of $1.2 billion.

What you probably never heard is that an investigation by NASA determined that there was no electronic malfunction that could have caused large unintended acceleration. And yet Toyota remains guilty even after being proven innocent because exoneration doesn’t get page views.

Assumption 4 – The Media Is Selective

It’s human instinct to associate popularity with importance. If you see someone looking up, you’ll naturally tilt your head skyward to see what’s going on. In the same way we also tend to assume that if a popular media outlet is publishing something it’s worth reading. Not so.

This is because one, blogs don’t care about what’s important, they care about what’s going to generate interest. Two, they have to almost zero marginal cost for each additional story they produce. So when marketers want to pitch or even write stories for these publications the blogs are more than happy to oblige. TMIL illustrates this almost ad nauseam but my favorite example concerns a memo on the subject from Business Insider to the world at large:

In April 2011, Business Insider editor Henry Blodget put out an advisory to the PR world. He was drowning in elaborate story pitches and information about new services. He just couldn’t read them all… So he proposed a solution: the publicists could write about the product launches of their own clients and Blodget’s site would edit and publish them. ‘In short’ he concluded, ‘Please stop sending us e-mails with story ideas and just contribute directly to Business Insider. You’ll get a lot more ink for yourself and for your clients and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted work.’

While TMIL can at times feel repetitive, braggadocious, sensational and self-righteous, it’s more than compensated for by the fact that I’m sure I’ll never look at the media the same way again. In fact, reading TMIL has convinced me to go on a media diet, a diet I think I’ll actually stick to for a change.

The Secret To Finding Work You Love – The ABP Criterion

Finding work we consider meaningful and enjoyable, in short, work we love, is one of the most important and difficult challenges we face. Important, because the majority of our waking lives are spent at work, and difficult because of the complete lack of attention devoted to the question by our educational system.

Indeed, given how much of our lives are spent working, consider how strange it is that you are infinitely more likely to spend a semester taking calculus, greek, or acting than you are seriously addressing how to go about finding what meaningful work means for you. In this absence of any coherent framework for addressing the problem, it’s no wonder that many people feel lost and depressed as they struggle to find the answer on their own.

The good news is that intelligent people have given the matter some serious thought, and there are tools you can use to dramatically increase your odds of success.  Among the most powerful of these tools is a three word decision rule that, if used consistently, will naturally guide you towards work you truly love.[note]I came across the ABP criteria in a wonderful essay by entrepreneur Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/love.html[/note]

The rule goes like this:

A always

B be

P producing

And that’s it; Always Be Producing or ABP for short, is simply a way of saying that the true test of whether you’re making progress towards doing work you love is whether you’re producing.

For example, say you think you’d love to work as a Hollywood screenwriter.  The Always be Producing (ABP) rule asks, are you consistently producing (or trying) to turn out screenplays? Or, if say you want to be fashion designer, are you expending time and effort towards creating production quality designs?

The ABP rule states that if the answer to those questions not an unequivocal yes – if you’re not consistently producing – then you’re not doing what it takes to find work that you love.