Or, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls it: antifragility. I like the word optionality because it seems more neutral, almost boring even, and yet it is probably one of the most simple and powerful ideas that I’ve ever encountered.

We tend to build systems that converge on a single design over time (see monocultures) because they are predictable and efficient in a given environment. But environments change, and without the ability to predict how those changes will happen ahead of time, optionality is required even in the safest of environments.

The gist is that there are two kinds of knowledge: matters of fact, and relations of ideas. Matters of fact aren’t accessible to us—we can never know something for certain, only that it hasn’t been proven wrong yet. We can only create a self-referencing network of ideas that are related to each other. What we think of as truth is merely the ability for a particular idea to fit into this network of ideas without causing irreconcilable contradictions.

This is my 13th year of yearly birthday reflections. Here are the previous 12:

• 41: Seek endarkenment
• 40: Mind the loops
• 39: Make wiggle room
• 38: Cultivate quality time
• 37: More kiloslogs
• 36: Talk it out
• 35: Love the struggle
• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

I usually do these on my birthday at the end of May, but it’s now July. Whoops. Most (okay, all) of my energy is going into 3 things right now and for the foreseeable future: family, work (Patreon), book. Book, by virtue of being the most flexible, is taking the 3rd rank there, and is therefore the most behind. Meaning that, given time to think and write, which this post generally requires, there’s usually a higher urgency need to work on the book directly. Hence the delay. That’s my story.

But, I know that self-reflection of the past and coming year is fundamental to actually being a productive and healthy contributor to family, work, and the book… so here we are.

One notable thing about all of this is that my 3 priorities are converging more than they ever have in the past. I’m looking back at the mottos from last few years: cultivate quality time (38), make wiggle room (39), mind the loops (40), and seek endarkenment (40)… these are all links in the same chain that now turns out to be a universal mindset that applies to family, work, and writing. I guess that’s a convenient byproduct of systems thinking… eventually it all has to fit together …

On communication

Robert Cialdini, in Influence:

• “Most of us think that the message and the merits of the message are the things that will convince people. That’s usually not the case. Very often, it’s the relationship we have to the messenger. It’s not always about the argument, but about the delivery.”

Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

• Yes and no … this or that … one or zero. On the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is computer memory which stores all its knowledge in the form of binary information. It contains ones and zeros, that’s all.
• Because we’re unaccustomed to it, we don’t usually see that there’s a third possible logical term equal to yes and no which is capable of expanding our understanding in an unrecognized direction. We don’t even have a term for it, so I’ll have to use the Japanese mu.
• Mu means “no thing.” Like “Quality” it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, “No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no.” It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. “Unask the question” is what it says.
• Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer. When the Zen monk Joshu [= Chao-Chou] was asked whether a dog had a …

This is my 12th year of yearly birthday reflections. Here are the previous 11:

• 40: Mind the loops
• 39: Make wiggle room
• 38: Cultivate quality time
• 37: More kiloslogs
• 36: Talk it out
• 35: Love the struggle
• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

Random aside: if you look at the locations for these 12 years of birthday posts, you can see that they started on LiveJournal back in 2006 for the first 3 years, then they were on a Wordpress site I had for a long time (but which has since died and so I’ve archived them on Github), then 2 years on Tumblr, then 1 year on Svbtle, and the last 4 years have now been on Medium. I wouldn’t have guessed that Medium would remain my publishing platform of choice for longer than all of the others (other than maybe LiveJournal, which extends back to at least 2002). But here we are! I’m thankful for Medium and am happy to be an early adopter of their new membership experiment. Long live Medium!

In my Life by Weeks chart on busterbenson.com, two events stood out from the rest: Louie Phoenix Benson was born on August 6th, and Trump was elected on November 8th. They were quite different in terms of how I reacted to them. I also started writing a book about how to draw better conclusions while avoiding bias, and took on a lead role at Slack for the platform team.

Last year’s motto: mind the loops

The last year really was a lot about minding the loops. The now see feedback loops, …

My favorite habit from this book is habit 5: seek first to understand, then to be understood. Stephen Covey seemed to also share this favorite:

“If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey