#a friend already did a little excel graph that accomplishes most of the same stuff so i'll use something like that

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

y'all i've been upset about nanowrimo's shenanigans since last year, when kids weren't safe, and now there's this AI shitshow, and i want to cry about it again, because nano has been SO IMPORTANT to me since 2008--it helped me hack my writing process and make a bunch of cool shit, and i've written so many stories i love using it as a jumping off point. but. we gotta protect kids, and we gotta get the fuck out of here with AI bullshit.

so. the decision i have come to is that i will still be participating in nano. but now it stands for "now a's [that's me] novel writing month." i'm still going to write a book in november, and i'm still going to shoot for the 1,667 words/day (even though my finished projects wind up way longer than that, invariably), because i've structured my creative life around this routine, but i won't be using their site any more.

i will also not be tagging my november project posts as nanowrimo, but i WILL still be tagging them as "nano[YEAR]" (because that's been my tagging system for untitled projects for uh. years.). and it's now a's novel writing month :)

[edwardlando]

The Perfect Painting

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I think the most powerful thing an entrepreneur can do to move toward success is to improve his or herself.

Just like startups, we too have to be iterated on over and over. We have to throw away what doesn’t work and refine what is working. And in both cases this is very hard and requires consistent, unrelinquishing commitment.

Every year at this time people draft a list of “resolutions,” promises they make to themselves about how they will act differently in the coming year in the hopes of changing their lives.

Promises they almost inevitably end up breaking.

We all do this.

Why is it that we break promises to ourselves?

I think it comes from lack of self-awareness.

We have two selves: who we actually are and who we wish we were. The real self, and the ideal self. And ambition is the tension between these two.

When we think about who we will be tomorrow, 6 months or a year from now, our human imperfections are abstracted away. We’re not tired, or lazy, or impatient, or jealous or scared as we are today, right now. In this simulation it’s very easy to imagine that we’ll do all the right things. (And by the way, we often do know what the right thing is! The hard part is doing it when the time comes.)

Setting goals that only our ideal selves can reach is dangerous because by failing to live up to them we lose trust in ourselves and our ability to improve our condition.

If you’ve already tried 10 times to quit smoking, lose weight, wake up early, be more patient with your family, save more money, or whatever it is and always end up falling back into the pit, you disrespect yourself and your promise over and over to the point that you don’t believe in trying anymore.

To avoid this, we should set imperfect goals.

Well, goals that take in account who we really are and not who we wish we were. Hedge fund manager (and modern philosopher) Ray Dalio talks a lot about hyper-transparency and self-awareness in Principles, and he’s built his company and success around this modus operandi.

Self-awareness allows you to trick yourself into doing the right thing. By anticipating ahead of time what your weaknesses will have you fall for, you can set up a game or situation so that you will not be faced with that trap.

Yes, you are the architect of the game. And the game is your life.

Ulysses did that when he put wax in his men’s ears and asked them to tie him to his mast in approach of the Sirens.

No one can resist the Sirens. Not even Ray Dalio. But some people just become better at making sure they never have to fall into their trap.

So if eating ice cream in the middle of the night is your demon, don’t have ice cream in the house. I promise you will be too cold and tired to go outside into the cold and buy some (although the on-demand economy is your enemy here…)

Or in my case waking up early is still something I am fighting to do.

Well, to make it happen I can go to bed earlier. I can wake up and go to sleep at the same time at least during week days to get alter my circadian rhythm and start getting tired at 11pm.

I can also create things to look forward to in the morning, whether that be the thrill or reading or writing over steaming coffee while the world still sleeps, making a fresh, healthful breakfast, or maybe going on a run along the water at sunrise while listening to my favorite playlist.

Combining a “painful” task (or what feels like one today) with a reward (or a shower of rewards) has been incredibly effective for me. I have learned to crave my berry protein shake after each work out.

Another way to “trick” yourself is to become aware that the best way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with something else. Whenever you feel the impulse to do that thing you’re trying to do, it’s much harder to suppress that urge entirely than to quell it in some other fashion.

Or as illustrated in the graph below, it’s easier to go from A to B than it is to go from A to C. This graph was used by HBS Professor Alison Brooks to make a point about public speaking: many people who are nervous tell themselves to calm down while instead it would be much easier and more realistic for them to translate that nervousness into excitement.

From HBS Professor Alison Brooks’s paper: “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement”

So for example if you get hungry in the afternoons and have a bad snacking habit, you can indulge that habit but make healthy smoothies or eat another real meal instead of going for the chips.

Another very helpful trick in my case has been to re-frame my perception of certain tasks.

I used to absolutely despise any administrative matters: paying bills, doing taxes or dealing with the government in any way, returning an item, going to the doctor, checking my bank statements. I hated these things to the point that any physical letter I received elicited fear in me. Fear because I was afraid of what was inside them but also of what would happen as a consequence of my taking 2 months to deal with what should have taken 1 hour. Paying something, mailing something, check books. Who the hell still uses paper? Who the hell has a check book? Why do people keep bothering me and wasting my precious time?

Those were my thoughts and they harmed me. I paid late fees, forgot to renew things and in general wasted more time than I would have taking care of these things in the first place.

I learned my lesson.

Now when I get hit with these administrative tasks I deal with them on the spot no matter how much I wish I could do that other more interesting thing I was doing before I got interrupted.

The reason I used to ignore these is that I thought they were a waste of my time.

And that makes sense.

There are after all only two types of tasks: pleasure seeking and pain avoiding. We start off at neutral, or 0 on the thermometer indicator if you will, and pleasure seeking tasks can take us above that neutral level to those warmer temperatures: we focus on doing the work we love, we go for dinner with friends, we watch a movie.

In comparison, doing laundry, going to the DMV or applying for insurance is not going to take us above 0. These chores will just ensure that we won’t get to the negative numbers.

It’s much less exciting because the very best outcome is being back at 0. The upside is so boringly limited. It’s what we dreadfully call “being a grown up.”

If you’re a novelist lost in your beautiful world, would you rather write another few pages of your masterpiece or call AT&T about your excessive phone bill?

You get the point.

What has saved me has been to reconsider my perception of these tasks. These pain avoiding activities are not only about getting back to zero. They’re about making sure that we don’t lose all the positives. Quite literally, they allow us by completing to avoid what is otherwise certain pain. The rest of the skyscraper will collapse if we do not take care of these foundations even though they might be invisible, beneath the ground.

I have taken on the habit of listing daily goals as bullets, many of which are pain avoiding tasks. And I take just as much if not more pleasure and pride in getting those done than the things that come naturally to me. Tearing through the the boring, unpleasant stuff feels like a great accomplishment, a triumph over myself.

Consider two oversimplified types of people: the “creative” and the “operator.” These two actually come up quite often in the world of startup founders. (Using masculine pronoun here for convenience.)

The creative didn’t get good grades in all subjects, only those that he found interesting. He might have written brilliant stories but always made spelling mistakes and had messy handwriting. He was often late, lost his homework all the time, and continues to be a little messy today and still doesn’t check his bank account like his mom asks him to.

In contrast, the operator is the person who gets shit done. He never wrote “The Catcher in the Rye” but wrote high quality albeit slightly dry analyses of literary passages as required and did just as well in math and science classes. An all around excellent, balanced student without mad genius in any category.

The creative and the operator would not do as well working individually. The creative would end up broke, writing poems or drawing in an apartment with no heating because he forgot to pay the bill last month, and the operator would be doing fairly well in a corporate job and yet feeling that he could do more but not quite knowing where to start.

It would be silly for the creative to try to become the operator and vice versa. Because of nature and nurture, they are not wired the same way.

As Ray Dalio explains, being successful in your job and life is about focusing on your strengths and turning them into killer weapons and overcoming your limitations by surrounding yourself with people who will help you with those and make sure they don’t get in your way.

Finding complementary partners works in business, love, friendship and pretty much everywhere.

I do think that for our own personal esteem, it is still important to become competent even at those things we dread so that we stop fearing them and at least understand what is going on when someone else takes care of them.

In drafting goals for improvement, I try to keep both of these in mind: I can trick myself into becoming better at the things I don’t like by setting up the game in a way that doesn’t make me fall for usual temptations, and I can partner with people who are complementary to me and concentrate on sharpening what already comes naturally.

In both of these, becoming more self-aware by asking ourselves and our close ones what we are good and bad at is the key to making promises that we will keep.

Perhaps food for family dinner discussions.

Happy New Year :)

Thank you for reading.

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