Just finished Robin Sloan’s very fun book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel. Here are my Kindle highlights on it.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the idea of a Codex Vitae:

“And this is the other treasure. Following in the Founder’s footsteps, every member of this fellowship produces his or her own codex vitae, or book of life. It is the task of the unbound. Fedorov, for example, who you know”—he nods to me—“is one of these. When he is finished, he will have poured everything he has learned, all his knowledge, into a book like these.”

The Codex Vitae is something that special members of this fellowship “earn” the right to create, after rising up in the ranks. When written, it’s submitted to the fellowship, approved, and encrypted. 3 copies are made of the book, 1 goes to the central library, and 2 others go to branch libraries in other parts of the world. The key to the encryption is only given to 1 person, and it remains a secret until the writer’s death.

Such an interesting idea.

To pour everything you’ve learned into a book, to be made public upon your death. A sort of immortality, a summary of your life’s meaning and learning.

We should all do this.

I was sort of surprised to think about this and realize that we as a culture don’t do this very consistently or well. This, as in, summarize and store our most strongly held beliefs, our most …

Solution/problem fit: A solution is a strategy that fits the needs of a specific problem. If a strategy technically works, but is too expensive, or too slow, for the specific problem, it still won’t fit and the problem will not be “solved”.

Product/market fit: a product must fit a specific market before it will take off and grow.

Idea/person fit: Ideas must fit the people who are working on them. Tell 10 people an idea, and each person will know rather quickly if it fits their values, beliefs, needs, aesthetic, self-identity.

Idea/company fit: A product idea also needs to fit its company culture. I spent a couple months this year trying to help a team spread the idea of social at one company I contracted at, and it just didn’t fit. The same idea is grafted into the DNA of other companies. The quality of the idea is unimportant… what matters is that it fits.

People/company fit: And the people at a company must also fit its culture. Each hire changes the people/company fit of the next hire, and ultimately change the idea/company fit of ideas and products within that company.

A/B Fit has been turning up everywhere for me.

The best A (apple, app, answer) doesn’t exist.

There is only the best A (apple, app, answer) that fits B (meal, situation, context).

The implications of this are huge (at least, in my own head).

Quality doesn’t exist as a stand-alone attribute. It only exists in relation to the timing, location, and needs of the …

It’s been about 3 years since my last update on my self-tracking setup. I figured I should write about it again since I’ve recently found a system that works really well for me, and is simple enough for anyone to do.

Why do I track things about my life?

Despite my long-running obsession with Quantified Self and history of tracking pretty much anything that is trackable, it has been many years now since I tracked anything simply for the pleasure of tracking it. That pleasure, for me, is gone. The only reason to track anything, now, is to learn something new and meaningful about myself.

What am I tracking right now?

I’ve found, over the years, that there are certain things in my daily routine that have more impact on my happiness, productivity, and purpose than others.

They are small things like getting enough sleep, walking to work, eating mostly plants, doing meaningful work, running, quality time with my wife, and quality time with my son.

One of the striking qualities of these things is that they don’t really require much gadgetry to quantify.

Sure, I can use a Zeo to track sleep, and a Fitbit to track walking, and a calorie tracker to track what I’m eating, but for the purposes of finding new meaning in my life this isn’t necessary.

How do I track?

I use a spreadsheet saved to a Dropbox folder so I can access it from any computer.

The fields in the spreadsheet are: date, day of week, city I woke up in, hours of sleep, weight, walked to work, cups of coffee, alcoholic …

My father passed away 19 years ago today.

Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast hard yesterday.

Stepping back and remembering that we’re all mortal and fragile can bring us closer together.

It makes you want to hug your family, your friends, and even random strangers.

It adds a filter of meaning over everything.

The moments are rare when this reality descends on us collectively, so take advantage of it. Use it to up your empathy not only for the people who are near you, but for all people who are face to face with this realization every day.

What if we could always think and act from a place of respecting the big picture, of being zoomed out and seeing the vulnerability of life?

Dad, I miss you.

Every behavior change fanatic out there loves this quote. Probably has it on their bathroom mirror.

The formula is so simple.

You = what you do every day

And therefore:

if (what you do every day == excellent)

Then:

You = excellent

And also, if you’re trying to solve for excellence…

You + X = Excellence

You now know that

X = do excellent things every day

And…

You + (do excellent things every day) = Excellence

I know what you’re thinking.

And more importantly, just be excellent.

And here, it becomes clear.

The quote by Aristotle is actually not helpful at all.

Last night I had a great conversation with @e_ramirez, @cwhogg, and @aarondcoleman over a few beers. It was a thoroughly enjoyable behavior-change app-building quantified-self throw down.

Despite all of us having fairly different ideas about to build RIGHT NOW, given the current state of the market, what we know about behavior change, and what works and doesn’t work, there was a moment of clarity when we all agreed on the fact that:

Behavior change is belief change.

You can’t change what you do without first changing who you are.

Two parallel universes (and a rather cliched example):

1. You step on a scale, and don’t like what you see, and you wish you could change.

2. You step on a scale, and don’t like what you see because that person isn’t you.

In the first parallel universe, you are the person on the scale, and you wish you could read a book, buy …

To accept who you are seems to suggest that there’s no reason to gamble it all on who you want to be.

And yet…

To gamble everything on who you want to be seems to suggest that you’re really unhappy with who you are now.

This has always been an unsolved paradox in my head as I generally seem, upon inspection, to be both happy where I am, and eager to gamble a lot of it on something bigger.

In the shower today I decided to just let these two voices talk it out, without me getting in the way. And within about 30 seconds they had come to an agreement.

Who I am now agrees to accept who I want to be, and who I want to be agrees to accept who I am now. Neither voice will try to persuade the other on their primary belief, but rather accept that the other belief exists as strongly as their own. Seems obvious, but I can’t tell you how many years I’ve forced one or the other voice to shut up.

Our identities can be made out of paradoxes as long as we don’t enforce them to constantly duke it out. It’s like an auto-immune disorder of ideas, and it can all go away if we just accept that paradoxes live within us.

I got started on this kick of letting internal voices talk to each other without my getting in the way when I learned about the Internal Family Systems Model. It’s weird but really useful sometimes.

One of the things I love on the internet is this tap-essay manifesto slash free iPhone story app by Robin Sloan: Fish. I return to it pretty often.

The premise is that we have a desire to return repeatedly to the things that we love. And that, on the internet, the deluge of information overload sometimes discourages returning much to individual things. Instead, we collect containers of things, and curations of things, because they’re always new.

I particularly love the full story of Agassiz mentioned in Fish. Enough even to want to save the actual text of it here. It was written by Samuel H. Scudder. Originally published, I think, in American Poems (3rd ed.; Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co., 1879). Enjoy!

“The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz”

It was more than fifteen years ago that I entered the laboratory of Professor Agassiz, and told him I had enrolled my name in the Scientific School as a student of natural history. He asked me a few questions about my object in coming, my antecedents generally, the mode in which I afterwards proposed to use the knowledge I might acquire, and, finally, whether I wished to study any special branch. To the latter I replied that, while I wished to be well grounded in all departments of zoology, I purposed to devote myself specially to insects.

“When do you wish to begin?” he asked.

“Now,” I replied.

This seemed to please him, and with an energetic “Very well!” he reached from a shelf …

I want to change some of my behaviors. What else is new, right? (I’ll tell you what is new!) I have a new strategy for getting through my habit-gimmick-resistant brain.

Between now and the end of October, I’ll give $1 to the first person who calls me out at any time if they witness me doing any of the following:

1. Complaining about anything. Anything! Complaining is stupid.
2. Talking ill about anyone behind their back. Gossipping.
3. Eating junk food, drinking soda.
4. Drinking anything alcoholic except red wine.

2 social habits, 2 health habits: a good start for now. I might edit or add as I go along.

I’m planning to use Chirpify to pay people, since I’ve been wanting to use their service, and like how it automatically adds a public element to the self-challenge. So anyone on Twitter or the internet at large can feel free to call me out whenever!

Please, call me out!

Also, if you want me to call you out on anything, let me know! It can be a thing we do. Ready?

It’s on!

If there is such a thing as “one habit that rules them all” it might be the habit of overriding the voice in my head that says, in the moment, that I don’t want to do something when, in theory, I actually do want to do it.

For those who are really interested in getting to the bottom of habits and behavior change, why not face this conflict head on and turn the act of overriding this voice, itself, into a habit?

Start by committing to do one thing, every day, that:

A) You don’t want to do, and

B) You don’t already do automatically.

It should be something that takes under a minute (it’s really a split second of self-defiance that is the brunt of the work). The specific action that you do can repeat from day to day, as long as you continue not wanting to do it every day, and it continues to be non-automatic.

It’s the anti-habit, in a way. As soon as the action becomes automatic, or enjoyable, stop (or don’t, but don’t continue for the sake of this habit). The point of the “I don’t want to” habit is to put continuous, deliberate, willful pressure on that voice that says “I don’t want to” when, actually, you do.

Changing all kinds of other habits will then become much easier.

I remember when we all blogged like nobody was watching, back in 1998-2003ish. Diaryland -> Livejournal -> Movable Type -> Typepad -> Wordpress -> write my own -> back to Livejournal (yeah, I still use it). I learned a whole lot about Kellianne by reading through 5 years of public Livejournal (she turned them all private after I told her I had read them, though). There were a few big public deals where people got fired or embarrassed by their open writing, and things slowly clamped down and people started acting safer in their writing (and less interesting, in my opinion) (I’m definitely guilty of this too).

I also remember when we used to tweet pretty much anything. Lunches, crushes, opinions of your boss, deep personal thoughts. Maybe not as freely as the blogging was, but still pretty open. Back when nobody was really watching on the Internet.

I’ve always tried to be the same person to everyone, simply because I’m not good at keeping my stories straight. But I’ve noticed that rather than change who I am, I do some rigorous filtering depending on audience.

For one thing, being older, I have more roles and each has a different filter. Writing as a husband, as a father, as an entrepreneur, as a friend, as a developer, as a bar owner, as a blah-de-blah…

Now that I work at Twitter, it’s gotten extra weird… everything has been sprinkled with meta-consequences.

I wanted to jot down some meta thoughts on it, as a way …