Mind-Manual

Back online!

2012-04-25T02:03:13Z

You may have noticed the blog went down for over a week. I migrated my hosting to the excellent StableHost after a few hours of research and I’m really happy with them + the price is fantastic.

Will I be updating again?

The blog is till on the backburner, but I’m still thinking about it. I’ve used this blog as a journal in the past and I’m not sure that’s entirely appropriate. I’ve also noticed that I haven’t been super original in the past and I want to do somin about that. I also haven’t done a good job coming up with some sort of topic that I can center this blog on. It’s sorta just been what I’ve been interested in. That isn’t entirely bad, it’s just perhaps I should blog under my own name instead of pretending it’s around a particular topic. Being a bit directionless also makes it more difficult to promote. Any thoughts on the direction of the website? Please leave a comment because this is, in some way, a conversation and you can influence the direction of the site. Thanks in advance.

Where’s the course finder?

That’s still down. I’ll be updating it and getting it back up within the next few weeks, hopefully. If you’re lucky, you may also see some new features.

Order & Chaos – An Introduction to Jordan Peterson

2012-02-21T04:32:04Z

Jordan Peterson spoke at TEDxToronto. He needed a better introduction to his ideas so I thought I’d write it up.

One of the biggest and lasting changes in the way I see the world has been to integrate Jordan Peterson’s idea of order and chaos. If you want to understand yourself, the world and me, it’s fundamental that you understand this distinction.

Order is a place or situation or state where things are predictable. You’re on solid ground and you know what will happen next. Too much order and this state can become boring, restrictive or even repressive. Too little order and there’s not enough structure for anything to exist at all. The right amount of order though, allows you to relax and feel comfortable (activation of the parasympathetic nervous system–sleep/relax/digest/rebuild system).

Chaos is state or place where things are unpredictable and uncertain. They are outside or under the little islands of order we build around us. We don’t know that’s going to happen next, and that can make chaos quite thrilling. But chaos can also be destructive as well as creative. You are most interested when there’s just the right amount of chaos—maybe even excited. Too much chaos and you are overwhelmed, anxious and afraid (activation of the sympathetic nervous system–fight/flight system).

Myths and old stories are often about the relationship between order and chaos, and something that converts one into the other–usually the hero. Order is often represented as some sort of “safe place” often enclosed by boundaries. The fort, the walled city, the island, the house/home we live in, the village in the clearing surrounded by dark forests. Outside the little speck of order, there is great chaos. This can be the darkened forest, space, the desert, the ocean or the city outside your house.

In Narrative

Order and chaos also show up in stories all the time, especially very popular stories that appeal to a lot of people because they have a mythic substructure. Take The Dark Knight, for example, or superheroes in general. They are our modern myths—our Hercules, Samson or Thor. The Dark Knight made over a billion dollars. $1,001,921,825. I’ve checked and rechecked this figure and it remains a shitload of money. Why would millions of people pay to see a man in a silly costume beat up another deranged man with facepaint and scars? The spectacle certainly has something to do with it, but there’s also the dynamic of order and chaos. The Joker says to Harvey Dent in the hospital room:

“It’s a schemer who put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. Look where it got you. I just did what I do best-I took your plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple bullets. Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.”

Then Harvey Dent flips a coin to determine if he’ll kill The Joker.

The hero tends to be a creature in between order and chaos. He converts chaos into order and often revitalizes the culture or community he is coming from, but often he cannot stay in that community because he is tainted by chaos. The cowboy must ride away into the sunset from the town he just saved and Batman must be labelled a criminal and never accepted by the society he defends. In other stories, the hero returns to revitalize the community and is accepted at the top ranks of it. He jumps from being the peasant to marrying the princess and becoming the next king after slaying the dragon of chaos.

These stories teach us how to react to chaos–to the unknown. With courage and resolute strength. Looking fear in the eye and battling to the last breath. A good story or myth contains this element of battling chaos or battling order–especially a tyrannical, repressive one–think V for Vendetta, 1984 or Robin Hood, or your parents when you were a teenager.

In Religion

This interplay between order and chaos shows up in religions all the time, especially since religions are a collection of various myths. The yin-yang symbol is the representation of order and chaos, and only in the harmonious balance between them is some sort of perfection achieved. There is a speck of one in the other with the black dot in the white and white dot in the black.

Take the story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah is going along in order and the totality of reality commands him to do something. He seeks to escape from it and flees from safe and dry land onto the oceans. A great storm comes and threatens the ship. The crew throw him overboard at which point he’s swallowed by a giant whale and taken deep underwater until he prays and is let back on onto dry land to fulfill God’s command.

If you take this story literally, you’ll find yourself at odds with a lot of facts. Whales don’t generally eat people nor can you survive in the belly of a whale. Ancient people had no idea what a whale looked like so the depictions of the whale look reptilian. But through the lens of order and chaos you get a much clearer understanding—and a lesson!

Have you ever had an experience when you’re going along and feeling fine but then something happens to throw you completely off-balance? Maybe your parents got divorced, maybe you had a major breakup, maybe you failed a year of school, maybe you broke your leg or someone close to you died. Unexpected and unplanned things happened and you felt like you were drowning and didn’t know when the clouds would ever part. But one day, over time, you woke up and things seemed less dark. Eventually, you even noticed that the sun had broken through the clouds of your life and you felt like you were on solid ground again. This is an experience everyone who’s lived at all has had and that’s the experience this story of Jonah talks about. That’s why this tale has been repeated for over four thousand years—because it says something true about the nature of human existence.

Additionally this story gives a lesson: listen to the decrees of the totality of reality otherwise risk falling into chaos.

In Politics

Democrats and Republicans in the US tend to align to these two mythological positions. Chaos loving democrats run campaigns based on “change” (perhaps some that we can believe in) while Republicans espouse safety, security and order which tends to come from conservatism.

In Psychology

Psychologists have found out that people’s identity is fundamentally a narrative. What links you now to the 7 years old you? Every single one of your cells has been replaced so your body is not the same. But you tell a story that links you to who you are today. Jung once said that we are all living out a myth and it’s a really good idea to figure out what your story is, because it could be one that doesn’t end well for you. Maybe it’s a story of safety and security that your parents want you to live out by becoming an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, but it’s too much order and boring. Not having a compelling story to live out, though, can cause feelings of living a life that has no meaning. Not the only cause, but one of the most prevalent, especially in the university years.

So, what creates a life of excitement? The feeling of battling chaos (or order) and succeeding—even if slowly. It can also be the excitement of expanding the realm of order and knowledge. The right balance and timing of order and chaos in your life. A compelling story that provides context and meaning for your actions today. You of course need more than this, but this is the big stuff.

More technically, Dan Seigal makes a compelling argument in his book in Mindsight, that if you take almost every psychological disorder you find either an excess of chaos or an excess of order.

In Dynamical Systems Theory

I believe order and chaos represent a particular kind of dynamical system and since our world is infested by dynamical systems; myths and stories teach us how to deal with them. Evolution, for example, is the interplay between chaos and order. Chaos generates new possibilities through mutations and the like. Order selects within the possibilities through environmental, social and sexual pressures. This process keeps going back and forth in order to continually produce organisms fitted for a particular time and place. There is no single definition of “fitness”. The biggest or strongest don’t always win and are often at a detriment (think dinosaurs).

In Personality Transformation

Similarly, human personalities transform through contact with chaos. Things go wrong and we wake up. The unexpected happens and you’re forced to rethink your life, how you interact with it and what your future will be. You fail a test and maybe that means you fail the course and maybe that means your GPA is very low and maybe that makes you wonder if you’re a smart person at all and maybe if you’re not a smart person than you can’t be a success in life and maybe that means that people will always judge and look down upon you. But after dealing with all this, maybe you wake up and realize that what people try to convince you is important in life isn’t actually important, so you don’t worry as much about climbing some social ladder anymore and impressing people, and because your goals are different, your methods become different, too, and you start taking only interesting courses and change majors to something that actually interests you (and perhaps has just the right amount of chaos in it to be interesting) and maybe you turn getting good grades with the minimum work possible into a fun game and figure out ways to hack grades and start doing really well in school anyway.

My old personality died and a new one arose from the ashes, like a Pheonix, and this new one is robust to this sort of chaos.

Conclusion

Our bodies evolved for those two “realities” of order and chaos. We parse up the world as being made up of objects because of the very powerful lenses provided us by the enlightenment and the success of physics. But the world is more complicated than that and has an infinite ways of looking at it (meaning it is chaos) and we’re constantly adjusting the way we look at the world (converting it into order). The other big change I’ve been making is recognizing that objects don’t end at their boundaries. I don’t end at my skin. I’m a combination of my past, my future, my friends, my work, my peace, even the weather and how you see me today is dependent on all those things.

A Life of Voluntary Exposure to Stress & Trauma is Good for You

2012-02-06T20:34:50Z

I argue stressing yourself out can be good for you in this paper. I wrote it for my Positive Psychology class. Positive Psychology is the study of how to improve lives of everyone including the mentally ill rather than just fix the broken and ill minds that the rest of psychology is focused on. This paper was obviously inspired by my interest in personal development. Tim Ferriss was the first person to introduce me to the idea of eustress vs distress but that reference doesn’t work in an academic paper, so I’m crediting him here. Enjoy! You can contact me and lemme know what you think!

Distress vs. Eustress

The story of stress starts with a researcher who was extraordinarily bad at handling rats. Stress as a concept was imported from physics by Walter Cannon into physiology, though the landmark experiments were done by the bad rat-handler, Hans Selye. Selye ran an experiment in which he attempted to inject rats daily with an ovarian extract to determine its function. Unfortunately, he would often try to inject the rats, miss, drop them, spend half the morning chasing the rats around the room, flailing with a broom to get them out from behind a sink, and so on. After a few months of this, the rats had peptic ulcers, greatly enlarged adrenal glands and shrunken immune tissues. Intrigued, he ran another experiment that injected a control group with saline with the same level of finesse. At the end of the experiment, the control group had similar peptic ulcers and other signs of stress. Thus, he discovered some of the effects of prolonged stress. (Selye, 1982).

Selye was also the first person to differentiate stress into eustress and distress (Selye, 1975). Distress is what we are familiar with under the term “stress”, however eustress is a different beast altogether. Eustress is positive stress. They both cause activation of the sympathetic nervous system which causes the heart to beat faster, blood pressure to go up and the body to become ready for fight or flight (though the situation is more complicated than that). Subjectively, distress is perceived as anxiety-producing while eustress is often perceived as exciting. This difference exists despite the fact that the physiological systems are the same, though the activation of the sympathetic nervous system is often lower in eustress than distress for the same level of stressor (Sapolsky, 2004).

Physiologists and endocrinologists have done an extraordinary job of discovering the benefits of eustress and the negatives of distress. Eustress such as excersize, sex, etc, helps increase functioning, prolongs life, increases life satisfaction and is often associated with “being challenged”. Prolonged distress, however, has been linked to a lot of negative consequences, including cardiovascular and heart disease (stressed monkeys had heart attacks, even the ones on low-fat diets), reduced immune function and just feeling terrible all the time (Sapolsky, 2004). However, what is a distressing event or activity and what is a eustressing one? Why will running every day for an hour for ten years increase life span while running from a bear for an hour every day will greatly decrease life span? Why is it that something one person finds distressing (e.g. a roller coaster ride) another person is willing to pay for?

The answer lies in what triggers the stress response. It is in the mind. Since physiologists are averse to anything as touchy-feely as the mind, the role of determining stress triggers falls to psychology. There are some interesting correlates. Some landmark studies have been about the difference between eustress and distress without being named as being about it. Such as the classic Schachter-Singer experiment (Schachter & Singer, 1962) and the “HighBridge” experiment (Dutton & Aron, 1974). What these studies indicated was that there is a dynamic relationship between the physiological response and the emotional-cognitive one, where one may influence the other and feedback to influence the first. This helps provide the basis for the success of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapies involving the technique of reframing. It is thus possible to reframe anxiety and nervousness to become excitement and readiness for action, and distress into eustress (in certain circumstances). A different stress response is activated (one with more glucocorticoids) when a creature has fallen into “learned helplessness” and more of the prolonged negative effects of stress come from glucocorticoid exposure (see Sapolsky, 2004 for review).

Distress into Eustress

A lot of psychological research (and positive psychological research) is focused on how people cope with distress. Concepts such as resilience, trauma-coping, and others are about distress and successfully coping with it without falling into depression or learned helplessness. However, what if events were not interpreted as being distressing but rather eustressing in the first place? What if people pursued positive eustress or even slight distress voluntarily? The positive benefits of pursuing eustress are rarely mentioned by that name. For example, the extensive literature on goal-setting is about eustress—about setting goals that push us out of our comfort zones, but the two terms are rarely mentioned in conjunction with each other (Sheldon, Kasser, Smith & Share, 2002). What if someone decided voluntarily to place themselves in stressful situations and learned to cope with each successively difficult challenge, such as how video game levels are structured? We will return to this question soon.

How does one produce psychological eustress and its benefits? Inspiration to answer this question on this comes from two fronts: the study of myths and Russian psychology. Russian psychology starts with the axiomatic assumption that, anxiety is the basic state of creatures and we learn to be calm, whereas Western psychology starts with the assumption that calmness is the fundamental state and we learn to be afraid or anxious. The Russian view is supported by the simple fact that the amygdala, which generates anxiety, is always on but inhibited (Peterson, 1999).

Fair enough, but what causes anxiety? Anxiety and the stress-response is a sort of “catch-all” phenomena that seems to occur often in cases of uncertainty, and especially uncertainty about negative events (uncertainty about positive events is often anticipation and excitement—such as a lottery ticket). The class of things or situations or states or consequences that generate anxiety might be referred to as “chaos”, which is a central theme in many myths. Chaos refers to change, the generative principle that creates, the uncertain, the unknown, and the multi-faceted. Many of the most popular myths are about the interplay between chaos, order, and the thing that mediates between the two (often referred to as the hero—or the virtual governor in dynamical systems theory). “Order” is the state or situation where calmness reigns. “Chaos” and “order” map easily onto the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system respectively, which are setup in an opponent processing manner much like order and chaos.

Well, what does the hero do in myths? The hero decides to go out to face chaos voluntarily and face the things that cause the hero anxiety and fear. However, the hero cannot go and face the greatest anxiety-provoking thing out there immediately and must instead fight lesser monsters to work up to fighting and defeating the greatest monster of them all. Sometimes the hero will foolishly attempt to attack the strongest monster immediately, but run away when the challenge appears too great, but returns to fight eventually. This is often referred to as a “first flight of the hero”.

There are a few key things about this archetypal story. The first is that this process must be engaged in voluntarily. The second is this has to be done in stages, where the first action is just outside the comfort zone of the hero and after successfully confronting the first monster, the hero’s comfort zone expands and can now comfortably face monsters of the same difficulty. This is, in some way, boring, so the hero must next fight a monster that was previously too far out of his comfort zone but after the first monster, is just outside the new, expanded comfort zone. Why else do sequels to movies always up the stakes, that is, first the hero saves theUnited States, and then the world? (Peterson, 1999)

We know these two key things to be true from treatment of phobias using exposure therapy. If you take someone with a fear of elevators and throw them into an elevator, they will likely have a nervous breakdown. However, if they decide they want to get over this fear and voluntarily face chaos, then they are much more likely to overcome the phobia. Thus, exposing yourself to what you fear voluntarily is important for eustress and also growth as a person. Another stream of research which provides validity for this idea of voluntary exposure to chaos comes from the work of James Pennebaker (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), which involves facing trauma and converting it to order by expressing it in words. This has shown great effectiveness in terms of increasing both physical and mental health.

It appears that human beings may even be built to seek a certain amount of chaos in the form of novelty. A bit of chaos or change is interesting and too much order is boring. It appears that physiologically, excitement and anxiety or nervousness seem to be very similar. What is the difference between the two? It appears that the difference arises from how the situation is assessed. Schachter & Singer (1962)’s experiment indicates this, as do the challenge/threat appraisal experiments (Tomaka, Blascovich, Kelsey & Leitten, 1993).

This is where this discussion parts ways with Richard Lazarus (1984) and most modern psychology textbooks. Lazarus envisioned eustress and distress being along the same dimension, where a little bit of stress is perceived as beneficial and more than that point is perceived as distressing. This is very similar to the Yerkes–Dodson law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). However, this is a simplistic understanding of the issue in which other factors are important for perceiving a situation or activity as exciting or distressing and at least one of them is cognitive appraisal of the situation as demonstrated by the challenge/threat appraisal experiments (Tomakaa, Blascovicha, Kelseyb & Leitten, 1993). Personality factors are also important which includes a personal tolerance for uncertainty and chaos (often measured by sensation-seeking, risk-seeking, tolerance of ambiguity or tolerance of uncertainty scales). This personal tolerance is likely based on two things: a person’s optimal ratio of certainty to uncertainty (order to chaos) in their life, and the current balance of certainty to uncertainty in their life. Too much certainty (order) and life becomes boring and stale without much growth, so a bit of uncertainty brings excitement back into life. Too much uncertainty (chaos) and life becomes stressful and overwhelming. Chaos carries an additional problem: it is not only the unknown but also that which is without pattern and predictability. As pattern seeking machines, most creatures abhor being in situations without any predictability, where cause-effect relations are inconsistent (a good way to destroy a child is to punish and reward them unpredictably) and no stories can be made. In extreme cases, too much uncertainty and inability to discern any patterns in an environment can lead to “experimental neurosis” or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, which is often treated through exposure therapy (Rothbaum & Schwartz, 2002).

So, we have a new prescription: a life well-lived involves eustress and voluntarily exposing ourselves to small amounts of distress and anxiety over time. Colloquially this referred to as “challenging yourself” or “pushing yourself out of your comfort zone”. By exposing oneself to one level of difficulty of trauma and learning to cope, perhaps in the future, an unintentional trauma of the same difficulty will be dealt with more effectively. Thus, a lifestyle of exposing oneself to controlled doses of ever increasing stress (though it is not necessarily increasing from a personal perspective) may have a preventative role towards future trauma by increasing one’s coping resources.

Suffering as transformative is an ancient idea as summed up beautifully by Tedeschi & Calhoun (2004):

The general understanding that suffering and distress can be possible sources of positive change is thousands of years old. For example, some of the early ideas and writings of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and early Christians, as well as some of the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam contain elements of the potentially transformative power of suffering. A major theme of Christian traditions, for example, are the narratives about the transformative effect of the execution of Jesus. His suffering is viewed as having the power to transform others. In some Islamic traditions, suffering is seen as instrumental to the purposes of Allah. A central theme of much philosophical inquiry, and the work of novelists, dramatists, and poets, has included attempts to understand and discover the meaning of human suffering.

Doing something simply because it is challenging or fear-inducing or requires courage is valid for doing it for its own sake, or for the sake of increasing courage. If you take someone through a “why?” activity whereby you ask them repeatedly their reason for doing something such as attending a class, you often arrive at the final “to be happy” answer in the West. Happiness is seen as a fundamental axiom of living life which is rested upon and does not (or cannot) be justified further. Perhaps to seek challenge, courage and excitement should be another such axiom.

References

Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 510–517.

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping Springer Publishing Company.

Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274-281.

Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief Psychology Press.

Rothbaum, B. O., & Schwartz, A. C. (2002). Exposure therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 56(1), 59-75.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers Owl Books.

Schachter, S., & Singer, J. E. (2000). Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional state. Emotions in Social Psychology: Essential Readings, 76

Selye, H. (1975). Confusion and controversy in the stress field. Journal of Human Stress, 1(2), 37-44.

Sheldon, K. M., Kasser, T., Smith, K., & Share, T. (2002). Personal goals and psychological growth: Testing an intervention to enhance goal attainment and personality integration. Journal of Personality, 70(1), 5-31.

Selye, H. (1982). History and present status of the stress concept. Handbook of Stress: Theoretical and Clinical Aspects, , 7-17.

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1-18.

Tomaka, J., Blascovich, J., Kelsey, R. M., & Leitten, C. L. (1993). Subjective, physiological, and behavioral effects of threat and challenge appraisal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 248-260.

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459-482.

Where are you afraid of admitting you don’t know something?

2011-01-09T02:09:57Z

There’s a number of areas in our lives where we’re afraid to get started just because we’re afraid to admit we don’t know it already. Maybe it’s because we feel like “should” know it, or because we’re afraid others won’t think we’re smart if we admit to not knowing. We sometimes don’t even want to admit that we don’t know something to ourselves and try to avoid the whole thing all together cause it’s embarressing. Example 1: money. I’m betting there’s lots of people who’re so afraid to admit they don’t know anything about money that they’re seriously hurting their future. Are you one of them?

If I’m afraid to admit I don’t know something because of the potential for embarressment, I tackle that thing in private first, instead of exposing my ignorance to others out in public. I may order a book on the topic from amazon instead of my library or local book store so I don’t have to deal with people. I may Google the topic with “private browsing” mode in browsers like Chrome or Firefox. But I don’t sit back with my embarressment and work slowly to push through it. I don’t jump into doing the scariest, most uncomfortable thing I can think of in that aera, but maybe I’ll start by reading one single site about the topic. And then I build up to bigger and bigger things as I get more comfortable.

Funny thing is: we are get embarressed and it’s just a part of being human, but no one likes to talk about it. It’s one of those things we all share but no one wants to talk about. Be compassionate with yourself. Remember that everyone’s got something they’re embarressed about, and it’s often things you don’t even expect people could even be embarressed by.

Another example: excersize. Maybe this is more for the macho male thing where guys don’t ask for help cause they’re embarressed that asking for help will reveal that we don’t know about something that apparently should be born with innate knowledge about–physical excersize.

Yet another example: cars and other technical stuff. Again, maybe another macho male thing but guys hate having to admit they don’t know something about cars or other technical stuff. As if we’re all supposed to be born knowing this stuff. Why do guys hate asking for directions? Same kind of a thing.

It can be really embarressing to admit you don’t know something which you feel you “should” know for whatever reason. Maybe you’re afraid of being judged as being unworthy or dumb or not manly or whatever by others, or even by yourself. Treat yourself with compassion, and realize you can push through these feelings and that you’ll still be ok after going through, facing and overcoming those uncomfortable feelings. In fact, you’ll become much, much stronger. Remember that you’ll be waiting for yourself on the other side of something embarressing with a compassionate hug.

How to Dramatically Improve Conflict Resolution & Negotiation Skills

2010-12-20T22:05:32Z

How do master negotiators think and what do they do that helps them come up with creative solutions and get what they want without damaging relationships and creating a sense of injustice and being used on all sides? By focusing on coming up with solutions that gets as many people what they want. I’ve read a lot of books on communication in order to improve my relationships. Oddly, the best I’ve found is Stephen Covey’s classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People even though it’s not directly about communication. I’ve come up with a new sequence of conflict resolution that works even when the other person doesn’t even want to talk that goes like this:

stage 1 – build trust enough and build a high enough emotional bank account so you can talk without attacks or distrust (in 7 Habits — check out the chapter titled “Paradigms of Interdependence” between Habits 3 and 4);

stage 2 – listen to the feelings on all sides, often by you listening first and then being listened to about feelings, not about the actual issue yet (this is Habit 5 - Seek First to Understand and then to be Understood);

stage 3 – once you get a sense of the feelings and everyone feels everyone else understands them (not that you feel you understand the other person, but that they feel you do–which is harder), you can talk about what the issue is and how to resolve it by coming up with creative solutions which are win/win all around (this is Habit 4 – Think Win/Win).

These steps are not always sequential and you don’t have to always start at stage 1. This post is focusing on stage 3 and the part about creating win/win solutions and how this can go awry. I hope to not just parrot the brilliant writing of Stephen Covey but add a few insights which will help you solve your problems more creatively.

Let’s start with a conflict. Say a boyfriend and a girlfriend are negotiating watching TV together after coming home from work. Let’s call them Jack and Jill:

Jill: I wanna watch Two and a Half Men.

Jack: I don’t like that show. Let’s watch this great NOVA documentary!

Let’s stop here to discuss more:

Both of them have lots of trust with each other so they don’t need to start at stage 1, which is great! Neither of them has extremely strong feelings that they feel the need to talk about, so we can jump to stage 3 after recognizing there is a conflict. Now, if they followed traditional ideas of compromise in relationships what they would do is talk back and forth about the various TV shows they can watch till they found one that was acceptable to both of them (but not what they actually wanted). Or they decide to take turns watching TV. But this is a less than optimal solution because 1 + 1 = 1.5 in this case. Neither party gets what they truly want and neither party is as happy as they would have been if they’d just gotten to watch the TV show they wanted to initially (which would lead to a 1 + 1 = 2).

In 7 Habits terminology this is actually a bit lose/lose. Let’s review the different possibilities according to Covey:

win/win
lose/lose
win/lose
lose/win

There’s a distinction from game theory that’s relevant here that Covey doesn’t use (maybe because it wasn’t widely available when he wrote the book) but he tried to cover it with his idea of abundance and scarcity mindsets. This distinction is key; it is the distinction between zero-sum and non-zero sum games. Zero-sum games are situations or actual games in which the fortunes of both parties are inversely correlated to each other. That is, for one person to win, others have to lose. A chess game can’t have all winners. Non-zero sum games are situations where the fortunes of the two parties are not correlated, or in fact, may be positively correlated. That is, for one person to win, all people have to win, or if one person loses, all lose. Or, it can simply be that one person can win and another person can lose but one person’s winning has nothing to do with the other person’s losing. A relationship is a non-zero sum game and it’s often a dysfunctional, unhappy and soon extinct one that thinks that it’s a zero-sum game.

A fascinating history of humanity through the lens of these kinds of games is called Non Zero by Robert Wright. He has a TED talk about it here.

Here’s the most important distinction though which often surprises people who are already familiar with the idea of zero-sum games: zero-sum games are often situated within non-zero sum games. I learned this very important insight from Jordan Peterson. Say you and I sit down to play chess. That’s a zero-sum game and there is necessarily a winner and a loser (or a draw). However, you and I may be playing chess (zero-sum game) in order to play a greater non-zero sum game. The question to ask is, ”why are we playing chess?” Say it is to have fun. Our non-zero sum game is thus to have fun. That means there’s multiple possibilities: that we both could have fun, or neither of us could have fun (such as if you’re a sore loser–saying that someone is a sore loser is a recognition of the concept I’m talking about), or one of us could have fun and the other one couldn’t. The person having fun doesn’t have to be the winner, actually, there’s “good losers” and “bad winners”, or people who’re just so stressed out that even though they’re winning, they’re not having fun.

Let’s add the dimension of time. Say we’re playing a game together multiple times over a longer term. What if you and I repeatedly play zero-sum games together? Well, it turns out that if I constantly lose, then I’m not going to be interested in playing the game anymore with you. Maybe you should let me win sometimes in order to keep me playing a game (or at least, let me do well enough to think that I can win or improve–such as by handicapping yourself which is often considered “fair”). And turns out that even rats have an understanding of this idea of “fair play”. Juvenile rats wrestle as a form of play and winning is pinning the other rat. A bigger rat will actually let the smaller rat win about 30% of the time, even though it could win 100% of the time. That keeps both rats playing the game over the longer term, while being “fun” for both rats. Win/win. You didn’t think rats had any sense of fair play, did you? That’s how deep the idea of fair play goes, evolutionarily.

Let’s get back to win/win, lose/lose, win/lose, lose/win. As you’ve guessed, zero-sum games can only be win/lose or lose/win (or draw which is sort of lose/lose…or win/win depending on whether you have a scarcity or abundance mindset). Non-zero sum games, though, can be all four: win/win, lose/lose, win/lose and lose/win. The thing Covey is trying to tell you in the book is: most of the games you think are zero-sum games are actually non-zero sum games, or, a lot of the games that are zero-sum are actually situated within non-zero sum games and its possible to go up to the non-zero sum game’s level to find a new game in which both win. He calls this propensity to frame most games (including zero-sum games) as a non-zero sum game, the abundance mindset. The opposite propensity: to conceive of most games (including non-zero sum ones) as zero-sum, he terms the scarcity mentality.

So, anytime you start to think “oh I’m going to win” or, “I’m going to lose” and get worked up about it, ask yourself if you’re actually playing a zero-sum game or just think you are. A common dimension for this is wealth or money. People often fall prey to the zero-sum ideas and think that there’s a fixed amount of wealth in the world. That the pie is fixed. Turns out, the pie’s not fixed, but is, in fact, constantly growing. There is a fixed amount of money out there (though it’s constantly growing, too), but not wealth. But this topic is a lengthy blog post for another day.

So, let’s get back to the discussion about TV. Recognizing that they think they’re playing a zero-sum game, Jack and Jill go up to the non-zero sum game:

Jill: Why do you wanna watch that show in the first place?

Jack: Well, I just got home from work and work’s really boring. I want something intellectually stimulating.

Jill: I also just got home from work and I’m exhausted. I want mindless entertainment and to laugh to forget the stresses of the day.

Pause here: Note how Jill seeks first to understand and asks the question before seeking to be understood. Both elements are crucial–that is, you have to get yourself understood, too. It can be dysfunctional and unhealthy if one person can always just do the understanding bit and never be understood. Resentment builds, but I’ll talk about dysfunctional patterns of this stuff later.

If both had one TV and both came down from work at the same time, then their attempts would really be zero-sum, because for one person to get what they want from the TV (intellectual stimulation) is completely opposite from what the other person wants (mindless mirth). If there’s one TV, they can’t just both go off and watch what they want in different rooms. If they came home at different times from work, then they could just watch TV at different times.

We’re at another crucial point here: the partners could do win/lose or lose/win here. Jack could say, “oh alright honey, let’s do what you want. Roll all over me.”. In a healthy relationship, it’s perfectly acceptable to occasionally do win/lose for the sake of another person, to build the emotional bank account. But to do it chronically leads to problems, which I’ll cover a bit later.

Jill: Why do we wanna watch TV together in the first place? We could watch it seperately in different rooms, so why are we even arguing or butting heads over this?

Jack: Well, I just got home from work and I wanna spend some relaxing time with you doing something together. I like that.

Jill: Me, too. Why do you like that?

Jack: Doing something “routine” or “mundane” with you like this helps make me feel like you’re a part of my life. To build a ritual that is really comforting to me. I don’t just want to watch TV with you today, I want to watch it with you every day after work.

Pause again: here’s an opportunity for Jack and Jill to compromise once again based on this new information. They could take turns daily watching something mindless and watching something intellectually stimulating. Jill could just zone out when the intellectually stimulating show is out and Jack could try to watch the mindless show by thinking deeper into what he’s watching. So, over the long term, this may be a win/win on the level of the game of their relationship, but on any given day, it’s not a win/win on the level of getting their after-work needs met. So, they keep trying, back and forth, until they hope to get a win/win scenerio that fulfills their desire to spend time together after work as well as their respective desires to get intellectual stimulation and mindless entertainment.

All of that said, maybe by realizing they just want to spend time together–that that’s their real purpose behind watching TV together, they could both or one of them could say, “I don’t really care about my after-work desire because I’d rather just spend time with you”. So, maybe Jack says, “I’ll just lie next to you while you watch TV and that’s ok even if I don’t get intellectual stimulation cause we’re spending relaxing time together and I get my ritual”. But, maybe they keep trying to find a better solution. This solution may seem like win/lose on one level (Jack doesn’t get intellectual stimulation), but it’s win/win on another level: Jack gets most of his other needs met: to spend time together and to have a ritual. Sometimes, in relationships, you accept lose/win at one level to get win/win at a more important level. This sort of “compromise between levels” can also be avoided as much as possible, but is a much better sort of compromise than the straight compromise on the issue I mentioned earlier, and occasionally you do it for the relationship.

Jack: Ok, so is there anything that means we spend time together and we get our respective needs met? Let’s just brainstorm some ideas first.

Jill: We could watch a movie instead? You may get so engrossed in a movie that that’s more intellectual stimulation than in a 20 minute show?

Jack: I suppose, but then we’ve to find a movie that also gives you the kind of mental relaxation. I guess we can try that.

Jill: <says some movie names>

Jack: I don’t really want to watch those. How about these? <says movie names>

Jack: None of those seem to fulfill both our needs and I don’t really want to watch them. We’re ending up with the same problem as with finding a TV show we can both agree to.

Jill: Ok. How about we go out. Forget TV. We’ll go out for a picnic. If we do this every day while it’s summer, we can both make it a routine. There’s a park nearby and all we need is a blanket. You can watch people and get intellectual stimulation and I can just lie back and watch the clouds.

Jack: That’ll work! And if I get bored, I can just bring a book along.

Deal! Both kept going till both found something that’s fulfills all their needs. Now Jack and Jill are going to have a much better relationship. This “disagreement” actually led to making some serious deposits in each other’s emotional bank accounts, so the relationship actually improved through the course of this disagreement. And everyone got what they really wanted. Amazing. You may say that Jack and Jill didn’t get to see what they wanted to see and they both lost. If you do, you’re paying too much attention at the wrong level. They didn’t want to watch the tv shows for the sake of watching those tv shows–in this case it was to get their emotional needs met. So finding other stuff that fills their emotional needs just as well means they get what they really want.

I’ll admit: most of my discussions don’t go this far. I’m often like Jack and I give in on my needs on a particular issue in order to “win” at the higher level of the game of the relationship. I’m a bit on the self-sacrificial side, but I’m working to improve that (why? isn’t being self-sacrificial noble and a good thing? I’ll get to that later). Also, this whole process can be pretty damned tiring. It often requires a lot of conscious thinking which is often what you’re least interested in doing after a long day at work. But, it’s often worth it to go through this process to get at the results.

Now, you may be thinking, “all this conversation between Jack and Jill is too clean and real people don’t talk like that. It seems forced and artificial and I’d feel awkward trying it in my relationships. Besides, what if the other person’s not interested in playing along–it won’t work if only one person’s doing it?” Let me address those: re-read just the conversation without my commentary and you’ll find pretty normal conversation. Try reading it out loud if you want to test it.

Secondly, if it seems forced and artificial–that’s cause it can feel that way, but only at first. To do anything that improves a relationship but requires change can feel awkward at first, especially if you’re worrying about what the other person will think or how they’ll respond. Well, just push yourself gently through that sense of awkwardness and keep doing it. You’ll start to see rewards.

Finally, what if only one person is doing this? That can be a problem in the long-term for the relationship, but in the short-term, you don’t need both people to be explicitly familiar with these ideas to make them work. If you explained them to the other person in the relationship (or sent them this blog post), they would probably agree with it. But, as proof that this works if only person is doing it: read the conversation again. Only one person is doing it at any given time. Jill is the one who’s applying the 7 habits clearly, and Jack is not trying to prevent her work because they have lots of trust and security. She’s seeking to understand first and then to be understood; she’s the one asking the “why” questions and after she gets an answer, she explains how she feels and she throws out a lot of the options.

Don’t get me wrong: you don’t go from your normal way of dealing with conflict and negotiation to this overnight. I actually found it easier to start off a new friendship with an understanding of these concepts, than to convert old relationships that work differently to this way. Some of those old relationships have been important enough to go through the awkwardness and so forth, though. And if both people recognize a relationship as important and there’s enough trust in a relationship, then it’s ok to talk to someone and say, “listen, can we try out this new way of approaching conflict and negotiating differences? It’ll feel awkward and forced at first but eventually it’ll become automatic. I care about this relationship and I think this will really improve it. What do you think?” Some relationships are setup so that it’s really uncomfortable to admit your feelings (“I feel awkward”) or to tell the other person you care about them and the relationship, or that you want to improve it. But consider carefully whether those are things you’d really like to have an in that relationship. Maybe you’d like to change it so that the relationship CAN talk about feelings, or that they can make a conscious attempt to improve things.

Another note: to go through this process the way Jack and Jill did requires a fair bit of self-awareness. Jack and Jill needed to be have self-conscious awareness of what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling that, and they’re willing and able to articulate it (because of the trust, security and precedent of doing so in the relationship). So, like they immediately told the other person why they want to watch a certain TV show and went to the understanding of their emotional needs rather than just saying, “I wanna watch it cause I want to”.

How do you develop that sort of self-awareness? Journalling really helps. When I’m going through something emotional, I write about it, often in the form of a draft email I may send to that person. Over time, this habit has led to me developing greater self-reflective awareness in the moment rather than only after writing about an issue. Another thing that really helped was practicing mindfulness meditation. There are likely classes somewhere close by to you, or you can find guided meditation cds and mp3s online.

What do you do about situations which are truly zero-sum? While you shouldn’t be hopeless about finding creative solutions, there’s a danger in being too optimistic. What if there aren’t any creative solutions that are truly win/win? This happens when the differences are caused by some fundamental value differences or differences in vision for the future. I’ll answer this question in the context of a marriage but the ideas can be applied to any sort of relationship.

John Gottman, PhD (who is a fantastic researcher who predicts divorce with over 90% accuracy) calls these “perpetual problems” vs “resolvable problems” in his great book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Clearly, if you don’t believe that there’s any such thing as perpetual problems and that all problems are resolvable (and therefore don’t believe there’s fundamental differences between people), then you’re going to have a hard time constantly trying to move an immovable object. You’ll either degrade into constant fighting, or you’ll be constantly be going through the steps I outlined above and get nowhere. So, what do you do?

First, you’ve to figure out which perpetual problems you can live with in another person. Gottman offers an example which I’m paraphrasing: Jack marries Jill and they end up at a party. Jill wants Jack to stop leaving her alone, but Jack wants to talk to new people and Jill doesn’t want to join him in doing so cause she’s uncomfortable around new people. This will likely remain a problem forever. But if Jack had married Beth instead of Jill, they would never have gotten to the party cause Beth is constantly late and that really bothers Jack, and half the time they end up having a fight over this and don’t end up going to the party at all. If Jack had married Jen, then they wouldn’t have even been going to the party together because Jen hates parties. Jack would have just been going to the parties by himself while Jen stays at home. Over time, though, this causes them to lead more and more independent lives and eventually they divorce. So! You’ve to figure out what perpetual problems you can live with.

Secondly, you do have to have a conversation with your partner about the issues and what they mean to them. Following the steps above will do this for you. This way, you’ll know that having a cabin really fulfills a lifelong dream of spending time in wilderness for one person. And you can trust and honour that, even if that dream directly interferes with your dream of saving for your child’s education because the other person wants to spend the money in the cabin. This is where compromise has its value. But compromise with love and in a way that both people agree is fair (which may not be 50-50!).

Thirdly, you’ve to learn to treat the perpetual problem with a sort of peace and as something to get used to. Something that’s a part of growing older, or whatever. Part of the ups and downs of life. Find a way to not treat it as a cutthroat issue that you’ll have massive blowups over. Gottman uses the example of treating it like a “trick knee” or a “bad back”, things that you get used to as you grow older. Maybe you can treat it like the toilet flush lever you always have to jiggle or hold down. An annoyance but you’ve gotten used to it.

This way, you don’t try to cut each other’s necks when discussing a perpetual problem. Some common ones include one spouse not wanting to have a baby but the other does, one partner wants sex more often while the other one doesn’t, one partner wants the other to do more housework when the other one doesn’t, religious differences, whether a spouse sides with the in-laws or with their partner, etc. In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, he gives lots of good “compromise points” ie right balance of win/lose for each partner. Funnily enough, for the bit about how to tackle a husband siding with the in-laws (especially his mother) over the spouse: Gottman says you have to side with the spouse over the mother every time. :p

I mentioned a bit about dysfunctional relationships and this concept. Let me elaborate on that.

There’s a number of ways that a pattern of dealing with “games” in a relationship can be a little bit pathological. Some are obvious. Some are much more subtle. Obviously, I’d say the healthiest way to deal with this is to adopt the abundance mindset (constantly construe situations as non-zero sum), and to keep going till you hit a truly win/win solution. To do that, you’re going to need self-awareness and communication skills, as well as some imagination to think up creative solutions. All those things can be developed. I’ve gotten to the point now where most of this stuff is automatic (though it’s taken about 4 years of practice…but that time’s going to pass anyway, so get to it!). When someone brings up a conflict or asks me to do something I disagree with, I automatically go up a level and ask why, listen to their why for emotional needs/wants, repeat it back to them, then using my self-awareness I identify and use courage to express my emotional needs/wants (though I often fail here and sacrifice being understood to resolve the conflict), then try to enroll both of us in finding creative solutions that are truly win/win, then follow through on my end of the bargain to deliver those solutions and hold the other person responsible for their part. I try to do this in an atmosphere of teamwork rather than me vs you, and try to do with as little resistence as possible. But it’s taken a lot of work to get here and I’m really glad I put in the work because my relationships are way better now.

Anyhoo, on to the pathologies:

Obviously zero-sum thinking (scarcity mentality) leads you to only perceive things as win/lose, lose/win. If one party in a relationship is thinking this way, they’ll constantly see the attempts of the other party who has an abundance mentality as attempts to manipulate them and get their way. Compromises can lead to a lose/lose solution. Therefore, you’ll constantly assign a score to a relationship and be really sensitive to ideas of being taken advantage of and of unfairness and injustice. This distrust will be picked up by the other partner and they’ll start to distrust you. Not a good atmosphere to build in a relationship.

If one partner “constantly” does lose/win and sacrifices themself for the sake of the relationship or the sake of ending conflict. If Jack constantly does that, though, constantly “loses”, he’s going to become resentful and want to stop playing the game. Sometimes that means he may stop playing the game of the relationship and end it, citing that it’s to unfair and that Jill always get what she wants. Or he may just continue to suffer with feelings of being taken advantage of and that Jill never does what he wants, or Jill never sacrifices like he does. Why would someone want to do this when it hurts relationships in the long term? Well, lots of reasons and different individuals do it for different reasons. One may be that someone’s been deeply scripted in being a martyr and of being the “sacrificial one”, often a stoically sacrificing mother. Another way is to have something to hold over the other person and manipulate them. “I sacrificed so much for you, can’t you do this one little thing for me?” But doing these things reduces the emotional bank account and the trust and is essentially emotional blackmail.

Obviously if one partner “constantly” does win/lose, then they’re selfish. That said, for the other person to continue to play the game and not just quit, the other partner also has to have to submit to losing and they may do that for the reasons I mentioned above.

It’s also possible for someone who is in a really self and other destructive pattern to constantly do lose/lose. In extreme anger, it often becomes lose/lose because one partner is trying to hurt the other for the pain that was caused. This is obviously not good for a relationship in the long term. Both partners feel victimized. This can happen when being in a relationship with a dysfunctional person who may come from a dysfunctional family. Being in a relationship with someone who abuses drugs can also be this way. However, you have to ask, well, why does the non-drug user stay in the relationship? Why does someone stay in an abusive relationship in general? There’s many reasons and most of them are not the fault of the person who’s staying in the relationship. Blaming the victim doesn’t get you anywhere. However, there are times that a person feels, for one reason or another, that they don’t deserve any better and that it’s their lot in life to end up in a abusive relationship cause that’s all they’re worth. This sort of dysfunctional pathology can be really bad when someone subtley goes out of their way to end up in an abusive relationship…by subtley encouraging the other person to be abusive. Which really sucks. For example, daughters of alcoholics, despite being abused and seeing the abuse happen to their mothers and constantly saying they don’t want to get into that, end up in a relationship with an alcoholic at a level greater than “chance”. Sometimes this happens very subtley, so she might go find a frat boy who drinks a little bit too much for his own good (but not to an alcoholic level). Then maybe she’ll start to get him mad when he’s drunk (by yelling at him for whatever reason) until he starts to abuse her. Then she’ll play out her role of being the victim which she’s deeply scripted in and which is what she’s been trying to play out. We become deeply scripted in certain roles and it can be hard to change them, and we may feel deeply uncomfortable if we’re not playing those roles, even if those roles are unhealthy or dysfunctional for us.

Anyhoo, so, we’ve looked at dysfunctions of not seeking win/win in a particular situation and dysfunctions of not seeking win/win over the long term and through multiple games. What happens when a particular person who has a certain pattern gets together with someone else who has a different pattern?

Win/lose person gets with win/lose person often ends quickly because the focus of each person is to get their needs met at the expense of the other person. If one person changes to lose/win, then this relationship can continue.

Lose/Lose person gets with lose/win, win/lose or even win/win person. All these tend to end badly because the lose/lose person is just trying to destroy the relationship. If someone’s scripted in lose/win and sacrificing yourself without concern to your own needs being met, then this may continue for a long time with both people in utter misery. These tend to be deeply toxic, abusive (perhaps only emotionally) relationships in which neither partner gets their needs met. The lose/lose person is aiming at destruction, not anything particular.

Lose/win person gets with win/lose person (or vice versa :p). This kind of relationship is where one partner feels they’ve to be self-sacrificial constantly and may see this as their “lot in life” for this sort of relationship to continue. The other person, of course, takes advantage of this to get what they want. This sort of pattern can continue for a long, long time, each each partner but especially the lose/win one constantly feeling like they’re sacrificing. The way out of this patterns tends to come when at least one partner (usually the lose/win one–cause the win/lose one has a vested interest in continuing this) realizes that their legitimate needs aren’t getting met. Often this needs to happen through recognizing their needs are legitimate (in abusive relationships, the win/lose person often tells the other person that their needs are’t legitimate). Take a step back, if you had a best friend you loved who complained about the same things you do about your relationship, would you tell them to leave this relationship? List out your needs aren’t being met by that person or at all (especially be careful if YOU don’t think you should have certain needs) and put the list away for a bit. Come back to it and ask if they’re legitimate for each one and then decide whether you can continue the relationship if they’re not being met and the other person’s not willing to meet them because their whole schtick is winning at your expense. Google “abusive relationship” or “emotionally abusive relationship” and answer those quizes about whether you’re in an emotionally abusive relationship. Careful, cause you may not actually want to find out you’re in an abusive relationship.

Lose/win person gets with lose/win person. This one is kinda funny in that two self-sacrificial person get together and both will feel like–and look for opportunities to–constantly sacrifice for the other person. Then they may both feel that they unfairly do not get their needs met and both constantly feel resentful and that the other person always gets their way. This kind of relationship can go on for a long, long time.

Lose/win person gets with win/win person. This is similar to the lose/win person with the lose/win person. The win/win person, though, will try hard to make sure the other person wins, too, but if the lose/win person is so deeply scripted in lose/win that they won’t even acknowledge that the other person is letting them win too, then they can be resentful and say things after a while like, “you constantly get what you want” or “I do so much for you but you do nothing for me”. Over time, if this relationship continues, it can sometimes transform the win/win person into lose/win or win/lose person to keep the relationship going.

Win/win person gets with win/win person. Hooray!

Quick note for lose/win, self-sacrificing people (such as me): In our culture, we’re taught and deeply scripted in the idea that tis nobel to sacrifice. It can be. But if you’re going around sacrificing when it isn’t necessary so you can feel noble or as not a bad person or to avoid feeling selfish, or to avoid becoming/being thought of as a win/lose person then that’s not very noble. Sacrifice when necessary, when there is no other choice, is noble in that you act with stoicism and courage in the face of a challenge. But sacrificing for the sake of sacrificing can become unhealthy. Your needs are often more legitimate than you think and it’s not necessarily selfish to ask for them. If you feel you do this, then try slowly and gently pushing through the feelings of selfishness, the fear of becoming a win/lose person, and that you shouldn’t have these needs cause they’ll just be let down or that they aren’t legitimate and ask for your needs from the partner. If your partner (who you don’t think has some sort of pathologies) turns them down, ask them if they’re legitimate needs. You can also ask others if these needs are legitimate, such as books on relationships or therapists or google.

Note: what I’ve written here may be categorized as unverified research. A lot of this if from my own experience and my combining the random research I’m aware of. Be very careful when taking advice on relationships, but especially about pathologies and dysfunctions from the intertubes. If you think there may be an issue, go see a qualified professional, whether for yourself (eg if you’re concerned you’re too self-sacrificing and you feel you may be causing it cause you’re playing the victim role) or for your relationship. Good luck!

“I’ve got a year left, I hate my degree but I’m just going to finish it.”

2011-01-10T17:04:16Z

Students often fall into a “survival” mindset and that can cause a lot of procrastination. Thinking that, “if I can just get through this, things’ll get better”. I talk to students all the time who don’t like what they’re doing in school. They’re not enjoying school or enjoying the process of getting a degree, they’re just trying to get a degree and “make it through” before their “real life” starts.

Here’s the problem, that last year or two is a long time. Too long to just “grit my teeth and get through it”. After I failed my first year and took some time off, I was contemplating how many courses to take. I considered trying to “get through it” by taking more than a 100% course load. But I realized that even doing that, it would still take me three years. That’s a long time to be working that much and I would just burn myself out.

My way out of this dilemma is to take fewer courses. I take a 60% course load every year. That, for me, is a sustainable amount. By sustainable I mean I could do this for many years to come. It’s not too little school and it’s not too much school. It’s just right for me. I don’t get burned out or resentful about the neverending march of assignments and readings, but I have enough courses to keep my stimulated. I enjoy my courses a lot more than if I was taking 100% course load, and I get way better grades.

I decided I wouldn’t wait till the end of my degree for my “real life” to start. I enjoy myself a lot. I spend lots of time with friends and have lots of fun. Since my plan after university is to start businesses, I asked myself why I had to wait and I’ve already started. School is not something to “get through” hopefully with a piece of paper on the other side, it’s an intellectual exploration and development. My “real life” is now and school is one equal and important (but not too important) part of it.

The survival mindset creates a lot of procrastination, cause you come to see every assignment as an obstacle to you “getting through it” hopefully with as little pain as possible.

This post was inspired by Cal Newport’s Open Letter to students on the Danger of Seeing School as a Trial to Survive. He didn’t elaborate what a survival mindset was so I thought I would.

Edit: Consider this - while I’m in university, I have way more time flexibility than I will ever again till I retire, I can live more cheaply than I likely ever will and am thus more flexible than ever, I have some of the smartest friends I ever will–indeed some of them are the smartest folks in Canada, I have access to some of the smartest minds in the world in the form of my profs (esp. at University of Toronto which is a top-30 institution in the world), I am more carefree than I ever will be in my life until retirement, I have the fewest obligations I ever will till retirement, I am more intellectually challenged than I may ever be in my life, and I’m growing more than I ever might in my life by virtue of being at this stage in my life. This is truly the best times of your life, and it may well be downhill from here. So, ENJOY IT!

Ask yourself these questions: your profs are ok with you showing up ten minutes late but can you do that in a job? Most people’s friends end up being the people they work with, which may not be the smartest people around, will you really have much smarter friends than you do now? Will you have as much access to leaders in your field as you do now in terms of profs and researchers? How long before you get a kid, a mortgage and an ever-growing list of obligations and can’t enjoy life as much anymore? Will you really be as intellectually stimulated as you are now? Will you be challenged to grow as much as you are now?

University isn’t something to get through, it’s something to enjoy to the fullest. I like to think of it as “intellectual exploration”. Wander around the campus, wander around the courses and take courses which seem interesting to you without regard to which program they’re for. After a while of exploring topics that seem interesting to you, you’ll hit on one topic that you’re so gripped by that it’ll sustain your interest for years. For me it was psychology. You’d be surprised where this approach leads. It’s more uncertain than treating university as job education and getting a “safe” degree, but it’s a lot more fun and interesting. Plus you can always go back to get a “safe” degree. Though ten years out of school, there’s no difference in wages between people who got “useless” degrees like philosophy or english and people who got “safe” degrees like commerce. The only difference is in people with professional designations like engineering or accounting.

Personal Development and Death

2010-08-26T16:51:06Z

A friend of mine once said something profound about the nature of personal development and transformation. I was talking to her about wanting to stop procrastinating and she said, “if I stopped procrastinating I wouldn’t be me”.

Let that sink for a moment. She hit the nail right in the head about personal development. One of the key things we have to do to change is to be willing to let go of those parts of us which do not serve us any longer. It’s one of the reasons I believe that true change only happens when you’ve hit rock bottom and have become utterly frustrated. That’s when you have nothing else to lose and you’re willing to let go of something you consider to be a part of yourself. We have a tendency to try to protect our own sense of identities, even if those identities are hurting us. Sometimes letting go of that part of ourselves, or even our whole self is violent and we have to step up and kill that part of ourselves. In stories, this is often represented by the hero character having to fight an evil version of themself (as in Scott Pilgrim fighting Nega-Scott) or a part of themself often conjured up to fight them, such as a monster from their own dreams. By killing those parts of yourself, you become stronger.

You can see this mythically and in stories, where the hero often loses the first confrontation against the villain and runs away. He learns and is reborn and wins the second round soundly. A perfect example of this is the Matrix. Neo becomes the One AFTER being shot and dying. Trinity then spells out his transformation as she stands over his dead body by saying, “I’m not afraid any more”. Pretty classic resurrection story, based on the Gnostic Bible, and thus the story of Jesus, who also, if you’ll remember, was killed and reborn.

Mythically, further, the snake tends to represent change and death and rebirth, by being able to shed its skin and become a “new” snake, in a way. You may have to do the same and shed your skin and become a new version of yourself. Sometimes the people around you aren’t comfortable killing their idea of your old self and exchanging it for your new one and that’s a part of life. People change.

There’s a few ways out of this for those of us who do not want to change only when things get truly horrible. The first is to change what you identify with as yourself. Are you the same person as you were ten years ago? How about when you were ten years old? How about when you were five? When you were just born? Physically speaking there’s almost nothing that’s the same as when you were that young. Mentally either. Personality-wise, there were significant differences. So what ties you to that child, and makes you think you’re the same person? A name? It can be argued that it is a narrative. It is a story that you tell yourself that starts with, “I was born” and “here I am”. We make up stories in order to make sense of everything around us (including us) and these stories are often incorrect. But we cling to these stories like a drowning man to a life-saving device.

Steve Pavlina/Ekhart Tolle/Buddhism makes the point that you should identify not with the things you consider you identity (your memories, personality, past, future, body, emotions, thoughts, etc.) but with the consciousness on which all of these things play out. The awareness of awareness that you develop in mindfulness practice.

Another related way is to reduce clinging attachment, a la Buddhism, again. Try mindfulness meditation and notice how you cling to things, unwilling to let go because of fear.

Being good at something “naturally” vs having to work hard to get good at it

2010-08-13T16:20:05Z

In moments when I’m not feeling as good about myself, I wonder if I’m not as good as someone who does a lot of the things I’ve learned to do “naturally”. For example, I’ve learned amazing ways to study less and now get great grades by spending much less time studying than I used to for worse grades. However, in those moments of weakness I confess I’m envious of people who are naturally calibrated to spend even less time than myself and do well. Do you ever feel that way?

Another example is that I’m not “naturally” an entrepreneur but I am becoming one. I read books like Howard Shultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It (story of Starbucks) and he writes as if he never had any doubts or periods of thinking, “Am I crazy? Maybe I should just give up.” I reckon I’ll get to a place where I have that much confidence in myself (or the ability to edit my memory of low confidence moments :p), but I won’t have gotten there “naturally”. For some reason, I feel that being naturally calibrated is better than to have to that calibration through conscious hard work. I don’t really know why. It just feels less genuine and less real. Perhaps this is a consequence of our society’s awe and deification of natural ability over hard work, though it seems like both are necessary for success. To be fair though when I’m feeling down on myself, I’m not appreciating the things I AM naturally calibrated to do, such as pursue improvement, or being naturally happy.

I don’t really have a resolution for this yet. Just throwing this out there in case you feel similarly.

Edit: Perhaps this is just the feeling before a quantum leap.

Work-Life Balance is a Lie

2010-07-20T16:48:50Z

“Work-life balance” is a completely useless and perhaps destructive term. Where I work part-time, I constantly see employee development courses on maintaining a “work-life balance”. Screw that. That implies two terrible things: first, that there is my work and then there’s the rest of my life and they should have equal priority, and secondly that “balance” usually implies some sort of equality.

The first point assumes that all of the other roles we play as friends, partners, parents, lovers, children, siblings, human beings and many others go up against the one role of being an EMPLOYEE. My life includes work, but is not going to be balanced out with work, because “work-life balance” implies there is some sort of balance to be achieved. Balance usually refers to somin being equal. If I was to do that, out of every 24 hour day, I should spend 12 hours working and try to cram the rest of my life such as sleeping, working on personal projects, and hanging out in the other 12 hours. That just seems idiotic.

I prefer Tim Ferriss‘ take on the idea of work-life balance. He says there should be “work-life separation”. I still have some qualms about this term, but this at least gives the possibility of reducing the time and attention you give to work, possibly working less than the fabled 40-hour week.

BTW, I’m using “work” in the sense of a job and being an employee. I personally use the broadest sense of word “work” in my life: that of anything that I’d like to do, including job stuff, personal stuff, relationship stuff, humour stuff, personal projects for love not money, etc.

Help! Really long Someday/Maybe List!

2010-05-23T04:09:19Z

I try to follow Getting Things Done by David Allen. I was having lots of problems with a really long Someday/Maybe list which was really hard to review during my Weekly Review, so I found a few ways to deal with it. The first is to simply skim that list moreso than read every detail, but know what to skim is important. I commented over at this post but I thought the comment might be useful to others with really long S/M lists, so here’s the comment:

My S/M list is long (over 200, maybe 300 items) which makes reviewing this list during the weekly review a bit of a hassle. So I’ve done three things:

1. Divided my list up based on when they might be conceivably actionable (by time and by context). So, I have seperate “toRead” lists which I look at if/when I’m looking for a book to read, a “toWatch” list, and a seperate “toBuy” list for when I have a bit of extra money. That is, if I know I have a bit of extra money in a given week, I’ll read that list otherwise I’ll just skim it.

2. Set a rule: put something on the list after I’ve thought of it the second time. I used to put things on the list when I would first think about and get excited about them…except I have way too many ideas which are just interesting the first time and upon sober reflection I would never do them. If something comes up a second time in my head, it might be something I might end up doing.

3. Every weekly review, try to eliminate at least one item off the list, again to keep the list manageable. Some items I just don’t feel as interested in or connected to as I used to. Or my life direction has changed and items which used to be relevant aren’t anymore. Or, I’ll simply realize my motivation for having written something down and decide I don’t want to connect with that motivation anymore. “Read Shakespeare” sounds nice and all, but the reason it used to be on my list was cause it was on other people’s lists of things to do before they die, and cause I thought it was something that would make me “cultured”. But, I realized that unless I want to read Shakespeare out of interest, there’s no point in putting that on my list cause it’ll never get done and it’ll be an injustice to a great artist. I also realized that Shakespeare’s main audiences tended to be illiterate, so it’s funny that its “cultured” to know his work today.

Similarly, “write a book” is one of those things everyone wants to have done, but not everyone wants to actually do page by page. Saying I’m an author at a party is great and all, but it’s not something I’m genuinely interested in right now. And “writing a book” is kinda like “burning a cd”. What matters is what’s shared on either medium. Some things are just best shared in book form.

I would like to add one more note: check out Getting Things Done FAST. It’s a hard-to-find (though easily available on torrents) recording of a GTD seminar by David Allen. It’s really good. He emphasizes that these lists are not to constrict you or to be taken as overbearing rules, but to simply get off your own back so you can go off and live your life. Often, he says, he’ll go do things that weren’t on any lists, but the reason he can do that is cause he has his lists so he’s off his own back.