Mind-Manual

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

2010-08-29T18:11:10Z

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 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.

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.

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.

“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut

2010-04-05T04:16:00Z

I really liked this story. As always, Vonnegut combines cutting satire in a rivetting story. The original short story is here. It’s a short read–under ten minutes. The wiki page on it is here. Enjoy and share what you think in the comments!

Python tip: Test Easier with Nose testing instead of Unittest

2010-04-01T05:34:58Z

I learned Python for a computer science course I’m taking as an elective and I was introduced to Test-Driven Development. Test Driven Development (TDD) is a programming technique where you first write a test for a piece of code, such as a function called hello_world that returns a string containing “Hello World!”. But! You write the test first, before you write the actual function.

I am now a convert to TDD. For Python, you can either use the built-in Unittest (good but not great) or use nose. I used to be a real fire-from-the-hip type of programmer and I’d just go off and start writing code soon as I came across a problem. For small projects, not a problem, but for bigger ones, things would get really hairy. TDD forces me to focus on planning what every part of my program does and thus prevents messiness. I know from first hand experience that it saves me time. I know, as a programmer, I have a tendency to think any time spent not actually coding is not productive, but a lot more of programming happens in the planning stage.

Without further ado, here’s what TDD looks like for a simple Python program. If you’re familiar with TDD, skim this, cause there’s some interesting and useful shortcuts that make testing and painless as possible and make it much easier to stick to a TDD style.

In Python, this would look like:

import nose
def test_hello_world():
   '''Tests hello_world()
   '''
   assert hello_world() == "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
   nose.runmodule()

Let’s take each line in turn. The first line imports the nose library. The second line defines a test function. The next line is a comment. I believe in writing code that’s easy to read, not easy to write–code is read a lot more often than its written, often by you! The next line is more interesting. The “assert” wishes the assert that hello_world() is indeed equal to “Hello World!”. This is the actual “test” bit. The if __name__ line means that if this code is being run by itself and not as an include in another program, then run the code in the if __name__ block. Google if you’d like to know more. nose.runmodule() tells nose to run on the current file only. There’s other ways to call nose, too, such as nose.main() and nose.run() which finds all tests in the directory the file is in that nose.main() is called from. The way tests are found are “if it looks like a test, it’s a test”. So, if you include “test” anywhere in your function name, it’s a test and nose will run it.

Let’s get back to the programming. If hello_world() does not equal “Hello World!”, which it does not in this case, you’ll get this if you run it:

E ====================================================================== ERROR: __main__.test_hello_world ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "c:\python25\lib\site-packages\nose-0.11.1-py2.5.egg\nose\case.py", line 183, in runTest self.test(*self.arg) File "<string>", line 4, in test_hello_world NameError: global name 'hello_world' is not defined

———————————————————————-
Ran 1 test in 0.000s

FAILED (errors=1)
SystemExit: True

Broken, eh? That’s cause we haven’t defined the function yet! But notice something, there’s not a whole lotta information on which test actually ran, and when you get into many tests, it can get confusing, so: let’s change an option with which we run nose and write in the hello_world() function.

import nose

def hello_world():
   '''Returns a string "Hello World!"
   '''
   return "Hell World!"

def test_hello_world():
   '''Tests hello_world()
   '''
   assert hello_world() == "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
   nose.runmodule(argv=['nose', '--verbosity=3'])

Ok, so let’s run this thing:

Tests hello_world() ... FAIL

======================================================================
FAIL: Tests hello_world()
———————————————————————-
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “c:\python25\lib\site-packages\nose-0.11.1-py2.5.egg\nose\case.py”, line 183, in runTest
self.test(*self.arg)
File “<string>”, line 11, in test_hello_world
AssertionError

———————————————————————-
Ran 1 test in 0.000s

FAILED (failures=1)

Aha! Improvement! Notice two things: 1. We now get the docstring from the test function showing up to indicate which test was run and what happened, and we’ve stopped having an Error (which is fatal) and we are now getting a Fail, which just means that the assertion failed but that the program would still run. A different kind of bug is often a sign of improvement. So, how do we fix this bug?

It’d help to know the value that failed. There’s two ways to do that. Know the assert line? I can rewrite it this way:

assert hello_world() == "Hello World!", "Function output does not match 'Hello World!' instead it is: " + hello_world()

By adding a comma after the assert equation, I can add a string to be printed if the program should fail. So here’s the new test output:

Tests hello_world() ... FAIL

———————————————————————-
Ran 1 test in 0.000s

FAILED (failures=1)
SystemExit: True

Notice the bolded line. It now tells me what the bad value was so I can fix it, and the bad value is that I missed an ‘o’ in “Hello”. Hooray! This sort of line is often shortened to “assert a == b, a + ‘!=’ + b”. In fact, this is so common, there’s even a function that does this for you, called eq_(a, b). For example, if we had used eq_ instead of the assert statement above, the bolded line in the nose test output would read:

AssertionError: 'Hell World!' != 'Hello World!'

Very helpful! So, let’s change our code to take advantage of this and fix the error:

import nose
from nose.tools import eq_

def hello_world():
   '''Returns a string "Hello World!"
   '''
   return "Hello World!"

def test_hello_world():
   '''Tests hello_world()
   '''
   eq_(hello_world(), "Hello World!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
   nose.runmodule(argv=['nose', '--verbosity=3'])

And run nose test again:

Tests hello_world() ... ok

———————————————————————-
Ran 1 test in 0.000s

OK
SystemExit: False

So, now we KNOW that hello_world is correct and that I’m DONE programming. Here’s another advantage of TDD: changes to the code can be tested to make sure “improvements”, “new features” or “bug fixes” haven’t broken anything else. While you’re programming, you’ll be creating a set of tests that can be simply be run to make sure nothing has been broken by your changes.

Another tip and then you can go off your merry way, developing in a test-driven fashion: often tests are in other files than the ones you’re programming in. To prevent time-consuming switching back-and-forth between making changes and running the tests, you can actually add the file name that you want to be tested to the nose.runmodule call. So, let’s say we seperated the function and the test function into two files:

hello_world.py contains:

def hello_world():
   '''Returns a string "Hello World!"
   '''
   return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
   import nose
   nose.runmodule(argv=['nose', 'test_hello_world.py', '--verbosity=3'])

test_hello_world.py contains:

import nose
from nose.tools import eq_
from hello_world import hello_world

def test_hello_world():
   '''Tests hello_world()
   '''
   eq_(hello_world(), "Hello World!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
   nose.runmodule(argv=['nose', '--verbosity=3'])

So, now if I hit run/compile/debug in either file, the tests will run.

Happy testing!

US Healthcare Debate

2010-03-30T18:23:55Z

I’ve been watching the US health care debate with…bemusement. When I hear the people against some form of public health care caricaturing it as socialism or communism, it really makes me wonder if they’re not paying attention to the world around them. Almost all of the developed countries in the world have a better public health care option or system than the States does. America is not in danger of becoming a nanny state or falling to socialism, it’s in danger of falling behind–well, further behind. America’s health care system seems downright barbarous and primitive to me.

One of the major concerns of Americans in leaving their jobs or getting fired is that they would lose health care coverage. It is one of the major reasons people claim not to start small businesses and America cares about business. Here’s an interesting fact for you: Canada has a higher rate of personal entrepreneurship and small businesses than the States does. It may or may not be linked to having global health care, but it makes me wonder whether America’s economy would get a boost by having people start their own businesses. It would certainly be a good way out of a deep recession, and the increased tax revenue would also be fantastic.

WordPress Plugin: Edit posts by double clicking them on the website

2010-03-30T18:24:41Z

I found an awesome plugin called Front-End Editor. It allows you to double click on the text of a blog entry or a page to edit it. So, if you were logged in, you could double click on this post to edit it. No more having to log into the wordpress admin panel to fix a typo. Amazing. Check out this screen shot below:

You can get it here.

World Population Hits 7 Billion Around April

2010-02-08T01:29:31Z

Yay! I guess!

PS I’ve been going through a lot of personal stuff for the past almost year, so postings will be sporadic at best. Sorry. Subscribe via RSS and you’ll just get a post everytime I send one.