Meditation is awesome.

It’s pretty much the simplest, cheapest way to improve your life that has ever been invented.

The only problem with meditation is that it’s just too simple. I can’t get a hold of it for very long — it resists habitification. Maybe you know what I’m talking about?

I’ve tried. On Coach.me I’ve had a few stretches of 4+ straight months where I meditated pretty much every day.

I’ve used Headspace. I’ve used Brain Beats. I’ve used Equanimity. I’ve used nothing. I’ve used NSR. I’ve read The Power of Now, Waking Up, Creativity Inc, Wherever You Go There You Are, Search Inside Yourself. I’ve done a 10 day silent meditation retreat. I’ve meditated on BART, on walks, on a cushion in a private room, at my desk. I get meditation, with its paradoxical mission of focusing so intently on not focusing on anything at all. I’ve done “it”.

And yet.

There’s something slippery about meditation. I can never quite get a good grip on it. I feel like someone with Alzheimer’s waking up each morning having the same conversation with myself about who stole my shoes, then some stranger I’ve never seen before gently informs me that they’re right where I put them the night before.

The people in my head

One thing I learned during my silent meditation retreat is that my head is full of random voices. When I stopped talking for a while, the voices slowly started running out of things to say, and I could start telling them apart. Some voices had different characters, even. Different …

Let’s say you want to build an amazing product or start an amazing company. Where to start? Here are 3 lanes (Existential/WHY, Experimental/WHAT, & Execution/HOW) that work for us.

Lane 1: The Existential Lane. Discover WHY you should exist.

1. Figure out what you want to have an impact on. How do you want to change people? Make them happier? More productive? Better at their jobs? Choose your North Star, the ultimate outcome you want to increase in the universe.
2. Who do you want to have this impact on? Do you have a way to reach these people? Do they want to change? If not, you might want to pick different people unless you can think of a way to change them without requiring any effort from them.
3. Changing people is tough. You probably don’t even know how to change yourself very well. Multiply that by a million to estimate how difficult it is to change someone else… much less change many someone elses.
4. One way to change people is to find something that they’re doing that’s important to them. Find out why it’s important to them.
5. Draw out the steps that they use to do this important thing. Do this by actually talking to them directly, not by using your imagination.
6. Find a step that you can remove (therefore making something easier, or faster) using technology or second order effects of technology. The step can be physical (replace mailing letters with just hitting send), mental (replace remembering everyone’s phone numbers with tapping names), or emotional (replace feeling …

This is my 9th year of yearly birthday reflections. Here are the previous 8:

• 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

It is also the 6th anniversary-ish of my 8:36pm project (see the story here). This year I took a photo at 8:36pm on 339 out of the 365 days, missing 26, for a 93% success rate. Over the 6 years in all I’ve taken a photo on 2,114 of the 2,197 days, for an overall success rate of 96.2%.

Update on last year’s motto: more kiloslogs

My 37th year started off on an exploration of the kiloslog, which is my made-up word representing the idea of working slowly towards a distant goal (see 1 Metric Kiloslog for a full explanation). I set the goal to do 1,000 small things that would get me closer to running a marathon. I’ve been thinking about this all year and ended up finally going on a couple 5+ mile runs in the last few weeks after spending almost an entire year working on knee issues. I actually felt quite victorious even with this small goal since the frustration of this particular knee issue has felt extremely frustrating in its lack of progress despite PT, stretching, and lots of patience. I’m still not entirely sure that I’ll be able to fully recover without giving in to knee surgery, but since it’s gotten a bit better recently I’m holding out hope. That said, I also have a referral for a good local orthopedic surgeon to take a look the …

“The concept of a person is arguably the most important interface ever developed.”  —  a key line in an amazing post by Kevin Simler about etiquette and design.

What is the concept of a person?

Until reading the sentence above by Kevin, I wasn’t even aware of the fact that “the concept of a person” was a thing, much less an interface, and of course I had never considered that it might be the most important interface. But as soon as I read it, it resonated with me — it felt true, or at least it felt worthy of further consideration. It seemed important, too. Truth is, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for the last few weeks.

Rather than attempt to dissect the whole thought at once, I broke it up into pieces. Are concepts interfaces? How do interfaces become important? How is the concept of a person different from other concepts?

Are concepts interfaces?

Let’s take the concept of a car. Q. What is a car? A. Well, it’s a large mechanical structure about the size of an elephant, with wheels, that people can get in and which one person drives in order to transport people and things from place to place. The concept of a car is basically a manual that surfaces the most relevant information to an assumed audience/user of the concept. In that sense, yes, a concept is an interface: it tell us how to interact with it both by including it in other concepts and by acting on it.

The concept described above is …

There are 2 ways to be “smart”, and one way is better than the other.

Smart Version 1: Know the answer to question X.

Smart Version 2: Know how to find the answer to question X.

If someone were to build 2 giant computers, one that was Smart Version 1 (SV1) and one that was Smart Version 2 (SV2), what differences would they have?

Computer 1 (C1) would need a database of answers to all questions X. For every question it received, it would parse it, interpret it, look up the corresponding answer, and return the answer.

Computer 2 (C2) would need a set of programs that could answer all questions X. For every question it received it would need to parse it, interpret it, look up the corresponding program that can answer that type of question, run the program, get the answer, and return the answer.

Subtle difference but important.

The benefit of C2 over C1 is that the there are probably fewer answer-finding programs required than answers. So the step where the look up happens would probably require many orders of magnitude fewer rows of information to look through.

On the other hand, the downside of C2 is that getting the answer would be much slower, since it would require a program to be run… and so far we haven’t promised any minimum amount of time that the program can run before it needs to return an answer.

Now switching from computers to humans, when we think about our education system and the skills that we are given during our schooling years, are they training us to be …

Today, @horse_ebooks sorta died. Long live @horse_ebooks!

I remember playing around with Markov chains back in the day, and thought that it would be fun to see what that looked like when fed all 15,000 of my Tweets.

How do Markov chains work?

They are pretty neat. There are a couple different ways to do them, but the general idea is that they take some corpus of text and keep track of how often various words appear before and after each other. Using some amount of randomness they then construct sentences based on these percentages that have most likely never been put together before, but, in some strange alternate grammatical universe, might have been put together.

The result? Frankensentences that have a bit of the personality of the original text, but often in sort of ridiculous new configurations. Pretty funny (to me at least).

And of course many more.

A couple people asked for how this is done:

So I posted the (relatively disorganized but hopefully comprehensible) code here:

Follow @buster_ebooks here. And let me know if you do something with this. Enjoy!