Here’s something that is sometimes hard to remember:
Maximal is not optimal.
Imagine, if you will, a highway.
Really picture the flow of cars down this highway…
Fast ones, slow ones, tractor trailer trucks, sedans…
All speeding along.
If we’re checking out this highway in the early afternoon, we might see a smattering of cars.
Not too many, everyone moving at their own pace, perfectly content.
This highway is not at capacity.
We are not maximizing the number of cars on the highway, despite how happy everyone is.
Now, imagine we come back and check out this highway in the middle of rush hour.
A very different picture:
Cars stuck in gridlock, beeping and honking, crawling along.
No one’s particularly happy. In fact, scowls are the order of the day.
In this case, we are maximizing the number of cars on the highway…
But we still aren’t at optimal capacity, because no one’s going anywhere.
In both instances, the highway’s throughput – the rate at which cars get to where they want to go – is lower than it should be.
In the early afternoon, throughput is down because the number of cars is too low.
During rush hour, the number of cars is way up – but throughput is still down, due to congestion.
Thus:
Maximal is not optimal.
Let’s put this another way:
Any system that is operating at maximum capacity is not operating at it’s best.
This is a hard one to swallow.
Imagine your calendar.
Let’s say I want to optimize your productivity – help you get as much done as you can within the allotted time.
One approach might be to maximize the amount of tasks you do.
I could fill up every available moment of your schedule. Every single white space on your calendar, filled up.
By doing so, I’m guaranteeing you will complete the most tasks possible…
Right?
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you care at all about quality of life), this is not the case.
Because as the week goes on, you will become more and more burnt out…
More and more tired…
More and more stressed…
And your productivity will decline.
Pretty soon, you’ll be lucky if you’re staying upright at your desk, much less getting anything done.
Maximal is not optimal.
Adding any more tasks to your schedule results in diminishing returns – a reduction of throughput.
So, very often, when I work with people who want to improve their productivity, I achieve almost immediate results by…
Taking things off their calendar.
Just like the highway has the optimal throughput by finding the sweet spot between more cars and less cars…
We find the sweet spot in our work by balancing more with less, and work with rest.
One final metaphor:
Imagine you are climbing a mountain.
It’s steep. You’re miles up.
Everywhere around you is wind, and jagged rocks, and ice, and death.
You scan for the next hand hold; you can feel the strain in your forearm.
Your muscles are tiring. They’re screaming as the lactic acid builds, and builds, your entire bodyweight balanced on a few tiny fingertips…
But you see noting.
No hold.
No crevice.
A dead end.
And at that very moment of realization, you feel your fingertips slip away…
And the mountain begins to recede into the sky.
You are falling.
Certainly to your death, were it not for…
The rope.
The rope you tied around your waist.
Ask yourself now, as you fall…
Ask yourself the only question that matters:
Is there slack in my rope?
-Dan
Some Cool Stuff For You To Read:
I wrote a blog post about creativity – and why certain ideas are your responsibility, even now. Read it, then go make a bunch of shit and share it with me.
Content Warning: This email includes a fairly well-known but still-disturbing photo of a malnourished child, as well as some brief mention of suicide. If that is not your thing, you might want to skip this one.
…and came across a tweet that made me stop and think.
The tweet and photo in question.
How incredible, I thought.
How sad, I thought.
What an ending, I thought. Lands like a ton of bricks.
I was about to scroll on, but instead I paused for a moment.
Something felt….
Wrong.
You may have this feeling yourself, as you scroll through the internet nowadays. It’s a very distinct sensation.
I felt like I was being played.
But I didn’t know why.
I went back and examined the tweet again. I thought about it for a bit.
I wasn’t familiar with the story, so that wasn’t it; I had no foreknowledge or background to pull on.
The story itself seemed almost…perfect.
Like a zen koan depicting man’s inhumanity to man, the callousness of modern media, and the devastating effects of success.
Suddenly, it struck me – and I knew why I felt like I was being played.
So I did what every good internet sleuth does:
I googled it.
The first result for the name “Kevin Carter” is Wikipedia:
“Carter shot an image of what appeared to be a little girl, fallen to the ground from hunger, while a vulture lurked on the ground nearby. He told Silva he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, and had chased the vulture away. A few minutes later, Carter and Silva boarded a small UN plane and left Ayod for Kongor.
Sold to The New York Times, the photograph first appeared on 26 March 1993, and syndicated worldwide. Hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask the fate of the girl. The paper said that according to Carter, “she recovered enough to resume her trek after the vulture was chased away” but that it was unknown whether she reached the UN food center.
In April 1994, the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
In 2011, the child’s father revealed the child was actually a boy, Kong Nyong, and had been taken care of by the UN food aid station. Nyong had died four years prior, c. 2007, of “fevers”, according to his family.”
While Carter did commit suicide in 1994, his suicide note mainly spoke about money troubles and:
“…the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners”.
I moved on to Googling “Kevin Carter” and “Two Vultures” to try and source the quote that supposedly sent Carter into a depressive spiral.
But I could find no original source for this quote anywhere…
Only more tweets and a few blog posts repeating the same story, nearly verbatim.
All cited the source as a “call-in show,” but don’t bother to name it, or whether it was on TV or radio, the network, etc.
So, let’s recap:
Kevin Carter did, in fact, take this photo.
This is a picture of a little boy, not a little girl.
Carter reportedly scared the vulture away after taking the photo.
The child lived.
Carter DID kill himself, but over money troubles and accumulated stress from his job.
I could find no record of the “call-in show” or the “two vultures” comment, other than in various social media posts.
I think we can safely pronounce this story Complete and Utter Bullshit.
If the story itself is so easy to discredit after ten minutes of Googling, why is it being passed around?
Here’s the thing:
We are much less likely to give it the scrutiny it deserves when it reinforces our preconceived notions about how the world works.
This convenient little parable fits right into some of our current cultural narratives:
The actual callousness of “liberals” who proclaim to care…
The moral bankruptcy of the media…
But even if you somehow managed to never give in to your own biases…
(By the way, if you are nodding your head right now and thinking that, yes, “they” often fall prey to cognitive biases, I have bad news for you: you’re absolutely, 100% just as guilty of it as “they” are)
…You don’t have ten minutes to Google every cockamamie “fact” that crosses your Twitter feed.
There are people out there right now doing their damndest to get you riled up, angry, upset, to get you to tune out, or stay home, or shut off – and they couldn’t give two shits if a story isn’t exactly “true” or not.
I haven’t even mentioned the people that aren’t aware they’re doing this, the people blinded by their own incentives.
(After all, clicks on the internet mean dollars, and nothing gets clicks like strong emotional reactions.
All online content creators are incentivized to get you mad as hell, or sad, or horny, or some unholy combination of the three ).
Poor Kevin Carter – this man battled mental illness and put his life on the line to bring the plight of the poor and starving to the world…
Just to have his good name torn to pieces by internet trolls who can’t be bothered to spend five minutes on a simple Google search!
….But.
Of course, that’s a narrative, too.
And this, my friend, leads us towards an incomplete solution – but perhaps a useful one.
Since we don’t have time to engage in endless internet sleuthing, let’s turn instead to heuristics:
Handy rules of thumb we can use to decide if something deserves a second pass or not.
I call this one the “Just Perfect” Rule:
If a story is “just perfect,” it almost certainly isn’t true.
When we a say a story is “perfect,” what do we really mean?
We mean it felt right.
We mean it worked out in a such a way that delighted us, or surprised us, or shocked us.
It means we enjoyed the narrative; that we got wrapped up in the story.
But reality isn’t a story.
Reality doesn’t follow a narrative structure.
Reality is messy, and complicated, and endless…
Without borders, without boundaries, full of ambiguities, chaos, noise…
Reality is natural.
Narratives are man-made.
Examine any historical event that you think you understand – the Boston Tea Party, the War of the Roses, the birth of Islam…
And the deeper you get, and the more you learn…
The less sense it will make.
You’ll discover countless counter-evidence and facts that don’t fit and confused timelines and people acting “out of character.”
This is because to create any narrative – be it historical, or social, or personal – we must first sand down the edges of reality.
Remove the chaos.
Turn down the noise.
Simplify the plot.
We remove some pieces that “don’t seem to fit.”
We add a few flourishes that “enhance the effect.”
Sand down enough edges…
Remove enough noise…
And sooner or later, you can fashion a story that “makes sense.”
That conforms to our expectations.
But behind every story, there is a guiding hand.
A playwright.
An author.
And every author writes with a purpose:
To persuade, or cajole, or to confuse.
The problem with the internet is that in all it’s chaos, it’s very easy to miss the narratives…
And mistake them for reality.
So the next time you find yourself immersed in something that seems too good to be true, too perfect, too chef’s kiss….
I’m enjoying Twitter very much – but trying to use it more as a search engine. Type in any question and it’s a fabulous way of finding any number of interesting jumping-off points.
Here’s a thing that is both exhilarating and terrifying:
There are certain ideas only you can come up with. There are things in this world – Paintings, songs, books, concepts, speeches, organizations, businesses, products, romantic evenings, longing glances, buildings, achievements, inventions… That will only exist if and when you decide to birth them. They are completely and uniquely yours. They are your responsibility. This is not like saying “you could cure cancer one day, if you put your mind to it!” Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell ain’t curing cancer anytime soon. I’m not saying you can do anything. I’m saying there are some things that you can do that no one else can. I know this to be true, no matter WHAT you think your capacity is. Here’s how I know: Right now, and for every moment of every day, you are being bombarded. By ideas. By statements. By observations. By sense data. By thoughts. By interactions. Every moment, of every day, billions upon billons upon billions of bits of information are streaming through you, through your sense organs, into your brain. And each of these bits, you process. Some, you store away. Some, you discard. But every bit gets processed in some way. How do we determine what to keep, and what to get rid of? How do we determine what keeps us up at night, and what we forget? That’s a function of you. Your experiences to this point… Your upbringing… Your genetic disposition… Your tastes and preferences… Everything that makes you you, and not someone else. The things that are unique. The common pieces of human life that, combinatorially, make you an individual. Somewhat like everyone, but exactly like no one. Every day, this unique lens – This filtering mechanism that exists solely inside your brain and your brain alone – Filters this infinite stream of data, keeping some things, discarding others. That, in and of itself, is pretty incredible. But where do new ideas come from? What is creativity, really? It’s the combination of existing pieces. The spotting of previously-undiscovered connections. The archaeology of how things are alike and unlike. As with any system, different inputs produce different outputs. So if your base of information – The things you believe are important, or rare, or impactful… Are unique, different than anyone else’s… If your palette contains colors that exist nowhere else on earth in that exact formation… Then there are ideas that can only arise within you. You’re the only one with the pieces to build… whatever it is you have within you to build. Not every idea you’ll have is unique, of course. But you have within you the seed of a completely original idea. Something that is – And I say this very carefully – Your responsibility. You either do the work to bring those ideas into existence – Or they fade away forever. Only you decide. Only you can do it. Only you have the choice to do the work or not. Only you.
I’ve been trying to manage a kind of balance, lately.
For one, I believe I have a civic duty to stay informed, to stay updated on COVID-19, to know what’s going on so I can best act to protect myself, my family, and my community.
On the other hand, reading about COVID-19 all the time is stressing me the fuck out.
As in, deep-pit-of-despair, knot-in-your-stomach stress.
A while back I wrote an article about managing the “pulse” of your news and information – and even said some pretty smart things. Maybe.
But I haven’t been doing a good job of taking my own advice. The relentless drum beat of school closings, ventilator shortages, new cases, country-wise-shutdowns…it’s been too much to look away from.
But it isn’t healthy – either in the biological or psychological sense. At some point, it’s all just too much, and you can neither extract value from or appropriately act on the information you’re “processing.”
So today, I went live on Facebook with some tips on putting yourself in “information quarantine” – staying up to date and informed without driving yourself up a fucking wall.
This is Part 2 of our series on the Reasonably Rational Thinking Process. Read Part 1 here.
Dejected, the man once again surveyed his surroundings. Trees, strecthing up towards the sky and blocking the sun, towered everywhere. The seemingly endless columns of bark were broken through only periodically by shafts of anemic light; nowhere was there any indication of a way forward. How can I escape, if I can’t even begin? he thought.
Helplessness may be learned, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
As we discussed in Part 1, helplessness emerges in the face of two primary criteria:
They is no clear cause of the problem; and
There is no clear next action.
The process of solving an intractable problem, then, hinges on two primary elements:
Determing the critical root cause; and
Determining our most effective next action.
We will deal with each of these stages in turn by exploring the Reasonly Rational Thinking Process.
The Reasonably Rational Thinking Process is based on the Logical Thinking Process developed by William (Bill) Dettmer.
Dettmer’s system was originally designed to help large organizations take poorly-defined systems problems and slowly, but surely, move towards a solution.
Dettmer summarizes his approach here:
Dettmer’s process is meticulous – he takes a great deal of time breaking down every possible component part of a systemic problem.
He does this because, at the level of large organizations, potential mistakes in defining the nature of systemic problems can lead to massive wastes of time and capital.
The problem for us – people who simply want to think more rationally about the problems we face in our own lives, or in smaller businesses – is that this meticulous approach makes the entire Logical Thinking Process incredibly unwieldy.
For normal, every day problems – or for businesses with less than, say 20 people – I don’t think a full and complete run down of the LTP is necessary to make progress.
In fact, I’d wager that speed of implementation and the ability to get feedback from efforts to make things better is more valuable in those situations than adding 10 points to the “rigorous thinking” scoreboard.
After all, the potential downsides in these scenarios – some wasted time, some wasted effort – is considerably less.
What we need in these instances isn’t a completely Logical Thinking Process – we just need to be Reasonably Rational.
We need to avoid the most common mistakes and pitfalls of complex problem solving…without becoming obsessed with complete logical accuracy.
(This is not a problem with Dettmer’s approach, by the way – in fact, Dettmer’s approach is absolutely the right one for the companies he typically works with.
We’re just going to hack his tools a bit to serve a different market).
With that, let’s explore my own simplified version of the Logical Thinking Process – The Reasonably Rational Thinking Process.
Reasonably Ration Thinking Process #1: The Goal Tree (or, What The F*** am I Doing?)
A huge amount of suffering is caused by the fact that we have no clearly desired outcome.
Many times we think we know what we want – more money, a better job, whatever – but we’re unclear about what, specifically, constitutes those end states.
How much money, exactly?
Better job, how – less hous, more pay, better coworkers…?
Many situations call for optimization of one thing or the other – choices must be made.
You can lose fat, but not gain muscle.
You can maximize revenue, but you’re going to lose profit margin.
You can date for variety, but have less time to spend with each person.
If we’re unclear about our priorities, and what really matters, we subconsciously avoid progress for fear and making the wrong choice.
What’s more, problems only exist in relation to a goal; no situation is an issue unless we have a desired alternative.
(Sure, it’s raining. But that’s only a problem if you need it to be sunny because you planned to propose during a picnic and you’ve already packed 400 egg salad sandwiches because you’re a compulsive over-cooker and they’re all going to go bad and start smelling up this uber unless you figure something out).
So, not only is a clear understanding of our goal critical for understanding what to do next…it’s crucial to even understanding the nature of the problem.
And yet…it can be frustratingly hard to know what our goal really is, sometimes.
I recently had a conversation with my wife, who is volunteering for a literacy non-profit. She goes into a middle school once a week to spend about an hour reading aloud with two young students.
Lately she’s been having an issue with keeping the kids on task; they’re still reading, but they often don’t enjoy reading aloud (one of the primary aspects of the program). They’d rather read quietly on their own.
Is this a problem?
Really, it all depends on the goal. Is the goal:
The encourage in the kids a love of reading (one of the stated program goals)
To improve their ability to read aloud (their teacher’s stated goal)
In this case, it seems these two goals conflict.
(In actuality, they may not – more on that later.)
In any case, it’s hard to determine what action she should take – or whether she should take any action at all – without truly understanding our primary goal.
When you’re in these kinds of situations, the best way to figure out what you really want is by creating a diagram called a Goal Tree.
The Goal Tree
A goal tree takes a broad, overarching aim and breaks it down into actionable component parts.
Basically, it takes a dream and tells you what to work on in order to achieve it.
The best part is, you don’t really need to know the answers beforehand in order to make it. In fact, the process of creating the diagram will itself help you to determine what needs to be done.
I think of the Goal as the benchmark – the thing against which we measure everything we do. Is it moving me towards, or away from, my goal?
Let’s take the above example: My wife’s students are resisting reading aloud.
Before we start addressing and diagnosing the problem, we need to have a clear idea of our goal. So let’s start there.
The first thing we need to ask ourselves is: What’s the ultimate goal of everything we’re doing here?
Another way of phrasing that is:
What’s the one aim towards which all my effort is directed?
It’s OK if we’re not 100% sure how to answer this question right now – we can revise later. But for now, we need a sense of what the big, overarching goal is.
So, for example, our goal could be:
The students are able to read aloud proficiently.
Something about that feels incomplete, right? It practically begs the question: why?
Why do we care if the students can read aloud in class? What’s the point?
Same goes for:
Encourage in the kids a love of reading.
It sounds nice, but again – why? Why do we care if they have a love of reading?
Let’s think it through:
We want them to be able to read aloud…because they have to do that in school.
OK. Good so far.
And we want them to love reading…because that’ll mean they read more, increasing their reading proficiency.
Great! We’re making progress. But…why do we care if they’re proficient readers?
Well…proficient readers will have access to lots of information from written sources, and be able to access those resources whenever they need. And that’ll make them more capable and resilient.
NOW we’re getting somewhere. All of a sudden, THAT sounds like a self-sufficient goal…something that is obviously worth while. Whereas before, they felt a bit intermediate – nice, but not the end result towards which all our effort is directed.
Let’s say after a few stabs at this process, we come up with this as the Ultimate Goal:
My ultimate goal is…
Students are resourceful enough to handle the challenges they meet in school.
Now we’re going to write that down at the top of a piece of paper (or, in my case, in a piece of flow chart software. Either way is totally fine.)
Now that we have our ultimate goal, let’s focus in on a single question:
What conditions are indispensable for this result?
In other words:
For the goal to be true, what other things have to be true?
These indispensable conditions are called Critical Success Factors. You literally cannot achieve the goal without them.
Typically, you are going to have no more than 3-5 of these.
Remember: we’re not thinking too broadly here. Our stated goal is that the students are resourceful enough to meet the challenges they’ll run into in school and life. What are the things they absolutely require in order to achieve that goal?
Let’s brainstorm.
To be resourceful enough to handle the challenges they meet in school, they’ll need:
To know the resources available to them
To be willing to seek those resources when needed
To be able to access those resources
This makes sense, right?
If they don’t know the resources, they can’t be resourceful;
If they can’t access the resources, they can’t be resourceful;
If they won’t access resources, they can’t be resourceful.
Let’s add those Critical Success Factors to our chart. We’ll place them below our Goal, and connect them to the goal with lines, showing the relationship.
Now that we’ve laid out some Critical Success Factors, we need to ask:
What conditions are indispensable for the achievement of our Critical Success Factors?
We’re going to repeat the process we just went through – but instead of thinking about the Goal, we’re thinking about what we need in order to achieve our Critical Success Factors.
We call these Necessary Conditions.
To recap:
We start with a Goal – the benchmark against which we measure everything in a system.
Then we figure out our Critical Success Factors – what are the indispensable elements of achieving our Goal?
Then we figure out our Necessary Conditions – what are the indispensable elements of achieving our Critical Success Factors?
After some time brainstorming (and more than a few edits), here’s what I got:
What this tree gives us is clarity into why we do what we do.
If something isn’t on the tree, it’s not moving us closer to our goal.
Likewise, if we’re neglecting the things in the tree, nothing else matters.
This works particularly well for complex issues. Below is a goal tree I created when I wanted to completely rebuild our client success systems in my marketing agency:
I ignored the “sales” branch of the tree because I was focusing in on customer service…but you can see here how every important element of what we do plays a role in moving us towards our goal (“Large number of monthly clients”).
There’s another aspect of the Goal Tree that is incredibly valuable:
The easiest place to start is with the Necessary Conditions at the bottom of the tree.
While the system can look impossible complex, the only things we need to focus on right now are the Necessary Conditions with nothing below them, i.e., the bottom layer of the tree.
If you’re starting work towards a large goal, this is how you do it:
Define the goal
Define the Critical Success Factors
Define the Necessary Conditions
Identify the lowest level of Necessary Conditions and start there
This is also a critical step towards addressing problems…
Because, as we said earlier, problems exist only in relation to our goals.
More on that in the next segment – the Problem Tree.
This post is part of a series (currently in progress) on the “Reasonably Rational Thinking Process.
The sense that “I should have solved this by now” brings a sickening mix of anger, frustration, and shame.
There’s no excuse, we think.
We work so hard, for so long, desperately seeking an answer..and get nowhere.
Eventually, our frustration leads to despair, and that despair leads us to simply stop trying.
We’re now in a state of Learned Helplessness.
“For science”
Torture a dog long enough and he will eventually stop trying to escape.
Psychologists Steven Maier and Martin Seligman discovered that learned helplessness emerged in the face of insoluble problems – and became internalized, changing behavior even in completely different situations.
From the New Yorker:
Seligman and Maier first attached dogs to a harness, a kind of rubberized cloth hammock, with holes for the dogs’ legs to dangle free. As the dogs hung, their heads were kept in place by two panels, which they could easily press with their heads. At random intervals, coming between sixty and ninety seconds apart, they would receive a series of shocks to their hind feet.
Some of the dogs could control the shocks with a simple press of the head against either of the panels; for others, the head-pressing did nothing. The moment the dogs with the functional panels touched either one, the shock ended. Otherwise, it lasted for thirty seconds to begin with, and for increasingly shorter durations thereafter.
The next day, each dog was set free inside a shuttle box, a two-compartment cage separated by an adjustable barrier. Each time the lights in the box went off, half of the floor would become electrified, shocking the poor animals. But if the dog jumped over the barrier and into the next cage, the shock could be avoided. This time, each dog had the power to end its discomfort quite easily.
When Seligman and Maier analyzed the results, they found a consistent pattern. The dogs that had learned to avoid the shocks by pressing their heads against the panels on the first day were quick to jump the barrier on day two. Not a single dog failed to learn to jump quickly after the first go-around. Those that had been unable to escape the shocks, though, weren’t even trying. They were free to move, explore, and escape—but they didn’t.
Two-thirds of them were still hovering in the electrified side of the box by the end of the experiment—and for the remaining third, the average number of trials to learn to escape was just more than seven, out of the total ten. A week later, five of the six dogs that had failed to learn were still unwilling to even try: they once again failed the shuttle-box test.
The effect of the harness experiment was been both severe and lasting.
The lesson I take from Seligman’s work is that we all have a tendency to retreat in the face of helplessness; if we learn we can’t affect our future, then why bother? Why do anything?
Being faced with intractable problems creates real psychic pain. Eventually, the cost/benefit analysis stops working out, and we simply roll over and take our lashing.
But why are some problems so intractable, while others seem easy to solve?
In my experience, intractable problems have two key characteristics:
They don’t have a clear cause.
There is no clear next action.
Cause and Effect In a Complex World
Humans are narative creatures.
In all things, we try to explain our experiences through stories.
If we’re bullied in school, we may internalize that there’s something wrong with us. Contrarily, you could take that experience and come to the conclusion that people are inherently cruel.
In eithe rstory, the effect – being bullied in school – is not up for debate. Instead, it’s the cause that’s the subject of the story.
Why did this happen to me…and what does that tell me about the world?
Reality, however, is not so simple. Rather than basic cause and effect, the world around us is governed by complex system dynamics – a interlocking web of relationships.
The systems of the body…except that this map doesn’t include the connections between the varying systems.
All of these systems interact with one another, affecting each other in unexpected ways.
The complex systems of the body – except that this map doesn’t even show the interconnections, which is where the magic happens.
What’s more, qualities possessed by none of the component parts of a system can emerge from within the interactions of those parts.
Individual ants, which are extremely limited in their capabilities, can produce fantastic acts of intelligence at the colony level. No particular ant is smart; yet the colony as a whole is brilliant.
This is known as emergence – a trait not found in any of the component parts nevertheless appears in the system as a whole.
When you several complex interlocking systems together with emergence we get a world in which the “effect” is oftentimes very far away from the “cause.”
We dance, and it rains.
I pray, I heal.
I feel these things are connected…but how?
Late Night Snacking in a Complex World
Let me give you a real-world example.
For the past 4 years or so, I’ve been meticulously weighing and measuring my food. I tracked everything down to the gram and logged that data into a weekly spreadsheet.
I did this because my natural portion control is fairly poor, and it was the only method I found that gave me control over my weight without harshly limiting my food choices.
That is, up until 2019.
Around Thanksgiving of 2019 I decided to take a break from all the food tracking.
My weight was in a good place, and I wanted to enjoy the holidays without stressing about weighing my aunt’s broccoli and cheese casserole.
The plan was to take Thanksgiving to Christmas off and start up a new plan January 1st.
As I write this, we’re getting perilously close to March – and I’ve been absolutely unable to get back on track.
I find myself eating bowls of cerel in the middle of the night, raiding my kids Halloween candy stashes, and constantly craving snacks. I haven’t been able to remember to track my food consistently, even though this was something I did reliably for years. My caloric intake is see-sawing up and down, and despite resolving to fix the problem several times, I find myself repeatedly backsliding.
So – what’s going on?
Looking for a simple cause and effect relationship here can be frustrating.
Simple cause and effect often (but not always) doesn’t fully explain what’s happening around us…and this can be extremely frustrating when we’re trying to solve a problem. We’ll come back to this diagram (and come up with an alternative) in our next post.
Am I simply weak-willed? Seems unlikely, since I was able to follow this same diet plan for years.
Is it just access to food? Maybe, but I removed most of the offending snacks and still found myself eating random things from the kitchen.
Have I simply given up? Maybe, but I still feel like I want to eat on plan.
The reality is probably far more complicated than any of these options make it out to be.
If I believe there’s a simple cause and effect relationship here, all I should have to do to prevent the effect is remove the cause.
Remove the candy from the house, you’ll stop eating.
Strengthen your will, you’ll stop eating.
Renew your motivation, you’ll stop eating.
But if this isn’t a simple cause and effect relationship, it’s likely that the effect will still occur even when I’ve addressed what I believe to be the cause.
And that is a recipe for deep frustration.
Remember – taking action and seeing no resulting improvement leads to learned helplessness.
Just like the dogs who learned that they couldn’t control when they were shocked, constantly banging my head against a seemingly insoluble problem doesn’t just mean I don’t solve this problem; it means I start to internalize an inability to solve any problem.
Realizing that we’re just one part of an interconnected web of complex systems can leave us feeling powerless, because we can’t see a way to exert control over our situation.
In other words:
If nothing I do works, then why bother?
You Can’t Move Forward Without a Next Step
Let’s talk about procrastination.
I don’t view procrastination as an entirely bad thing – it might be that our expectation of permanent peak performance (or 3P, as I will now refuse to stop calling it) is more fantasy than reality.
But it’s certainly true that the experience of knowing what you have to do, and wanting to do it but simply feeling unable to get started is a deeply frustrating one.
We tend to attribute this kind of procrastination to laziness. But I think there’s actually a much more common culprit:
Not knowing the next step.
Many of us think we know what the next thing we need to do is – “research cancer rates,” or “send memo to boss” or “write blog post.”
These seem like relatively simple tasks.
But those “simple” tasks are actually quite complex – there’s some uncertainty built in.
Research cancer rates…how?
Send memo to boss…saying what?
Write blog post…but what’s my argument?
Every task has within it a complex series of subtasks.
Even “google my company name” has a series of steps hiding inside it that we take for granted ..
(open up your browser…oh, well, first you’ll need a computer. So get your laptop out. It’s not charged? Find the adaptor, plug it in…OK, now open up your browser. Find the URL bar. Type in “google.com“…etc.)
These sub tasks, if they’re not well understood, create the slightest sense of uncertainty.
And uncertainty leads to inaction.
Humans, in general, hate uncertainty. Acting under uncertain circumstances brings risk, and risk is, well…risky.
Better to avoid uncertainty altogether than risk looking foolish, or resource loss, or even (in some cases) death.
While it’s unlikely that you’re going to die while writing your next blog post, that tendency to avoid uncertainty remains, nestled deep within your reptilian brain. Hence, the endless ways we can find with which to avoid the task at hand.
(Ever find yourself suddenly cleaning a closet that’s been a mess for years, just so you won’t have to do the thing you’re supposed to be doing?)
Intractable problems tend to have no clear next step – whether because we can’t find the true cause (as discussed above), or because we can’t think of any way to help. Both of these situations lead to analysis paralysis – we don’t act because we’re not sure how to.
Solving Problems in a Complex World
Given that we’ve established the two characterists of intractable problems – a complexity that makes finding the root cause difficult, and no clear next step to take…
How do we go about solving them?
The best answer I’ve found is called the Logical Thinking Process.
Admittedly – not a great name.
It sounds pedantic, boring, serious – and not particularly applicable to everyday life.
If I go on to tell you that it was created in the 80’s by an Israeli physicist, it’s probably going to sound even less useful than it did before.
“I’m trying to stop snacking in the middle of the night, Dan, not send a god-damned rocket into space.”
And you’d be right.
The Logical Thinking Process, in the forms that it is currently available, is intimidating, overly complex, and not particularly useful in every day situations.
But.
What if I told you that by utilizing a dead-simple diagramming process, you could:
Figure out the root cause of any problem, no matter how complex;
Know exactly how to move forward towards solving that problem;
Create a clear-cut path towards accomplishing any goal, and
Align a team of people around solving any problem AND give them the tools they need to continue solving that problem on their own?
….Oh.
And it’s only going to take me a few minutes to teach you each step.
AND, once you know it, you will immediately be able to teach it to someone else.
Over the next few posts I’m go to show you this exact process – boiled down so that it’s instantly applicable to your life.
The key here is that we already have within us the ability to solve nearly any problem.
The key here is that we already have within us the ability to solve nearly any problem.
It’s become very fashionable, in business/productivity circles, to hate the news.
And with good reason: the news can feel cheap, trite, designed for a brief spike of rage or indignation or fear…and not much else.
“I don’t watch the news” is up there as a humble-brag along with “I don’t even own a TV.”
“Your life will be the same no matter who’s president,” is another line I hear quite a bit, perhaps a cousin of “I don’t even watch the news.”
All these statements can feel right because, in fact, the news is quite unpleasant. And being too tied into the news does have negative effects.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, distressed, and helpless – constantly bombarded by bad news you can do nothing about.
We all have enough stress in our lives already.
But I would argue that the smug dismissal of “the news” as something that only rubes pay attention to has its own risks.
For one, so much smugness can hardly be good for your health.
More seriously, “the news” is really code for “engagement with society at large”…a responsibility that is dangerous to abdicate.
Why do we need news, anyway? What purpose does it serve?
Primarily, it does one thing:
It lets us know about events/things we would not have otherwise known about.
(After all, you don’t need the news to tell you what you had for breakfast this morning…you need it to tell you about things that happened outside your immediate sphere of influence).
That may sound really obvious, but think for a moment about what things are generally outside your sphere of influence:
People who are unlike you
People in situations unlike yours
People in power
The news, then, is one of our primary channels for developing empathy – since it’s hard to feel empathy for people you neither know about nor understand.
It’s also our primary channel for accountability – it’s hard to hold those in power to task when you have no idea what they’re doing.
The news is one of the few ways we have of reliably seeing others – and without truly seeing others, we are often unable to truly empathize with them.
The mind’s eye is where empathy is born.
Skip the news, and you skip the ability to develop this empathy over time.
The “no matter who’s president, your life will be completely the same!” is a great example of this lack of empathy problem. People’s lives DO change significantly depending on who’s in power…just, perhaps, not the people in your immediate sphere of influence.
Migrant children outside the U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station in a makeshift encampment in McAllen, Texas – 2019. Photo Credit
As just the most blatantly obvious example – the kids pictured above would have wildly different experiences, depending on the immigration laws in place.
You might think that’s good or bad – but the point is that their lives would be different.
The same goes for people of lower socio-economic status in general, and people for whom policing policies have a strong impact, and people for whom health care policy have a strong impact.
That you are not affected by political changes does not mean people are not affected.
They just don’t tend to be people you know about.
And because you don’t know about them, you don’t care about them.
This is not a moral failing – we’re just terrible at extending sympathy and empathy to those we can’t picture.
Call it a vestige of our more tribal days, where we operated in a limited sphere of moral concern. Back in the day, if I didn’t know you, if I didn’t depending on you for food, or resources, or companionship, then I didn’t care about you.
We live in a democratic society – a social construct that asks us to think deeply about not just our own needs, but the needs of those around us. That’s hard. It’s really, really, really fucking hard, and we’re all bad at it.
But the news – our window into what happens elsewhere – is one way we counteract this tendency.
If The News Is So Great, Why Does It Make Me Miserable?
Here’s the thing:
Information has a pulse.
You can think of “pulse” as the speed at which information is delivered and consumed.
On Instagram, I might scroll through a hundred different posts and stories in a few minutes – it has a high pulse.
On Facebook, I might consume less than that, since I have to slow down to read more/the content is less visual – it has a lower pulse.
And of course, reading a book that was written 100 years ago has a very low pulse – not only is it slow to consume, it took time to get to me.
What’s important to note is that information is filtered over time – so information with a higher pulse will, by necessity, be less filtered and more “noisy.”
It takes a few seconds to tweet something – so misinformation travels fast, and is both consumed and regurgitated at a rate that makes adequate vetting of information impossible.
High pulse = immediate, but with a much higher chance of being wrong.
Books, on the other hand, tend to be more valuable, on average, the older they are. You can relatively sure that there’s something of value in anything that has survived a century of criticism.
What makes us miserable about the news is not the news itself, but the pulse of the channels from which we receive the news.
Twitter is a great social network for conversation, but it’s terrible for news – consisting mostly of “hot takes” that are forgotten as quickly as they are consumed.
TV is a great entertainment medium, but it’s a terrible place for news – focused on attracting eyeballs at any cost, with all incentives structured for rewarding speed and immediacy over impact and accuracy.
So, how can we consume the news – and develop empathy, and hold those in power accountable, and deepen our understanding of the world – without making ourselves miserable?
Lower the pulse of the news.
Slow News Day
For my money, the two best ways to consume the news are:
Newspapers
Long form journalism
My personal preference is the Sunday New York Times; that’s just my opinion, of course, but the “Sunday” part is no accident.
By Sunday, the big stories of the week tend to have been established, and “summary” articles are included. Most of the “noise” has had time to filter out – the false starts, the outright lies, the mistakes, tend to have been more or less ironed out by Sunday.
Is that always the case? Of course not. But the signal to noise ratio is significantly higher over the weekend, so you end up getting a more balanced picture of the week by skipping the news entirely and just catching up on Sunday.
In terms of long form journalism, I’ve been partial to magazines like Harper’s or The New Yorker because I’m an East Coast Liberal Elitist – but pick any magazine of similar bent.
These periodicals tend to address timely issues, but to do so in a non-time-crunched, more in-depth way.
Are they as low-noise as, say, books? No. Are they anywhere near as low-noise as, say, books published over the previous 50 years that are still in print? No.
But the pulse is significantly lower than trying to “stay on top of” the news each day.
And because the pulse is lower, the effect of the news is very different.
Rather than feeling stressed out about fires half the world a way…
You can start to learn about the effect those fires have had.
Rather than reading tweets about the continued villainy of those on the other side of the aisle…
You can start to get a deeper understanding of how their policies are affecting communities outside your own.
Empathy starts with awareness.
Accountability starts with awareness.
And we need both to be responsible citizens – to be the kind of people that engage with the world around us, rather than simply shutting our eyes as tightly as possible while we “optimize” our lifestyles and bank accounts.
So. Read the news. Pick out what’s interesting to you. Slow the pulse.
I think you’ll find the benefits to be substantial… And the rest of the world needs you.
For some strange algorithmic reason, this song I wrote somehow has 2.5 million views on YouTube.
People who know me through non-musical contexts are typically surprised by this.
And they are generally more surprised by the fact that I receive about 1-2 messages a week from depressed people asking for advice.
I don’t claim to have any special expertise on the subject at all – clearly, I’m neither a doctor, nor a therapist, nor even remotely qualified to be one.
But I’ve been very open, creatively, about my struggles with depression – and public vulnerability is often in very short supply.
Recently, while responding to someone on Instagram I realized I should put some thoughts down on the blog and hash them out a bit.
So, here you are: My thoughts on depression, from a semi-famously depressed person.
I’ll tell you what helped me.
1: For one, realize it is all chemical.
Your body is a highly complex system, and depression is a physical negative feedback loop.
Don’t give it any moral weight – it’s like throwing your back out. It hurts like hell, but it means literally nothing about your worth as a person, or your future, or your character. It’s an emotional knee injury, nothing more.
2: Healing is primarily about time.
Lives go in cycles, systems work in cycles, everything happens in cycles.
All cycles have down periods, by definition. Can’t have an “up” without a corresponding “down”, otherwise it wouldn’t be an “up.” Part of the added pain of depression is thinking we shouldn’t experience it – but it’s part of the package.
Many “depression hacks” are placebo + good timing (“I started feeling slightly better, so I started exercising. Then my depression lifted!”) Sometimes you need to just do your best, embrace the suck, and release the expectation that you need to “fight” to “get better.”
Time everything. It’s really just a matter of sticking around to see the far end of the tunnel.
3: Once you let go of the guilt and blame – might as well spend your time working on your quality of life.
Quality of life improvement, like many things, is best accomplished with a barbell strategy.
Imagine a barbell. On the left, you have risk avoidance. On the right, you have high risk, high potential reward behaviors. In the middle, you have balance.
People instinctively go for the middle. “The golden mean,” and all that. But really, the middle brings the boredom of safety without the rewards of risk. It’s safe but it’s boring and it doesn’t get you very far.
Instead, focus your attention sequentially – first on the left side of the barbell, then the right.
Meaning:
Cap your downsides first. Take care of the basics – avoid the big risks.
What’s the big risk with depression? Fucking killing yourself. So take care of that first. How can you insure that won’t happen?
Be around other people. Get a therapist. Meditate or medicate if you need to. Check yourself into a hospital if it’s bad.
Always ask for help if you need it. If you can’t handle the above, I guarantee you can find someone who will do it for you. Really have no one? Walk into the nearest emergency room.
No messing around with the worst-case scenario.
There’s a reason they take your shoelaces in the hospital. Take all your shoelaces away.
Once that’s taken care of, move on to the next thing. Depends on your situation, but what’re the major contributing factors to everyday depressive episodes?
Poor sleep
Screen exposure past sundown
Poor hydration
Poor diet
Lack of exercise
The BASICS.
I’m not saying these things cause depression; they just make it harder to get out.
Take them one at a time. Focus on small behaviors and habits that slowly build positive momentum. Make your foundation solid.
Can’t do great things if you can’t sleep and you’re strung out.
(By the way, you don’t need to be perfect – you just need to not be operating a deficit. I don’t always get a perfect night’s sleep, but I’m not consistently sleep-deprived, either. We’re not optimizing, here…just making sure we’re covering our bases).
4: Once our basics are taken care of – and not before – we move a small amount of our attention to the right side of the barbell.
Risk. Risk is our friend, in small quantities.
Too much and we’re overstretched, with too much downside.
Too little, and we’re bored of ourselves with nothing to look back on with pride.
Take one thing that entails a risk – personal, emotional, financial, whatever – risk that’s important to you.
And put some time – say 20% of your time – towards it.
Start a business.
Learn to attract the romantic partner of your choosing.
Learn Jiu Jitsu.
Travel to Ireland.
Start a podcast.
Whatever.
Put yourself in a position where you can fail, and where you must struggle to grow.
The great secret to everything is that we die in the absence of struggle.
Growth is what sustains happiness – growth and service to others.
But…
It’s hard to serve if we can’t do anything.
The more you focus on growth, the more you learn to validate yourself – the scale for success is internal, not based on what others think, but on what YOU think.
Relative growth is all about where you came from, not where you are.
This is the core of true freedom, both of action and of expression: internal validation.
Once you got your first thing, you start a new thing.
It never ends.
Constant growth begets constant change, which brings interesting people into your life, which begets more change.
Sooner or later, you will look back and not even recognize your own life.
So.
1. Strip depression of its meaning 2. Realize that it’s time more than anything that helps, so take the pressure off. 3. Take care of the basics and cap your downside 4. Risk wisely
That’s all I got. It isn’t much, and everyone’s different –
But I hope if you’re feeling depressed, this gives you some context.
