The process...............

 Why is improvement hard?

Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning.

Let's call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like.
Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.

-James Clear, from today's effort

On trusting the process..............

 

 . . . I’m about to run into trouble, because I don’t have everything I need (the right arguments, good enough material, whatever) for the bit that’s coming next. This bothers me less than it used to, though, because again and again, the missing insight, anecdote, or angle arrives just in time. I’ll open a book at random, or hear something on a podcast, or a friend will make a comment, or I’ll notice something on a walk, and it’ll be exactly what I need for everything to fall into place. It never seems to arrive until the moment it’s required, though, so that’s more way it’s being constantly hammered home to me that trusting yourself/reality/the process is the whole game here. 

-Oliver Burkeman, from this edition

On guessing/investing.............

 

The difference between a good investor and a bad one isn’t access to some hidden truth. It’s the quality of the process. How disciplined is your research? How well do you manage risk when you’re wrong? How honest are you with yourself when a thesis breaks down? Good investors aren’t right more often because they know more. They’re right more often because they’re more rigorous about how they guess, and quicker to admit when they’ve guessed wrong.

-Eric Soda, from this newsletter

connection and support............

 

We've been saying that human beings are social creatures; in essence this simply means that each of us as individuals cannot provide everything we need for ourselves.  We can't confide in ourselves, romance ourselves, mentor ourselves, or help ourselves move a sofa.  We need others to interact with and to help us, and we flourish when we provide that same connection and support to others.  This process of giving and receiving is the foundation of a meaningful life.  How we feel about our social universe is directly related to the kinds of things we are receiving from and giving to other people.

-Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

on processes..................

 

     The key to focusing more on process is to understand that good outcomes follow good processes.  Without understanding the underlying process, good outcomes could just as likely be due to dumb luck as to skill.

     You should be reminded of this every time you read the disclaimer "past performance is no guarantee of future results."  What you are actually seeing is an admission of random outcomes.  When past performance is the result of luck, then it provides zero insight into what future results might look like.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

Let me count the ways..............

 

Condorcet wrote as though social progress is inevitable, and wars and revolutions were just Europe's way of sorting itself out.

     His serene assurance arose from the conviction that culture is governed by laws as exact as those of physics.  We need only understand them, he wrote, to keep humanity on its predestined course to a more perfect social order ruled by science and secular philosophy. . . .

     Condorcet, however mistaken in details and hopelessly trusting of human nature, made a major contribution to thought through his insistence that history is an evolving material process.  "The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences," he declared, "is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant.  Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature."

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience:  The Unity of Knowledge

idols of the mind...............

Through light shed on the mental process, Bacon wished to reform reasoning across all the branches of learning.  Beware, he said, of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall.  They are the real distorting prisms of human nature.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge 

Pretty good question................

 

How much priority do your investors, clients and employees put on building processes that do well in chaos?

-Seth Godin

Tanmay Vora...............................

 

............................goes with the flow.

joy...........................

 

Joy is in the doing, not in the outcome after the doing.

 

Do more things you like doing.

-Annie Mueller, from here

data.....................

 

"Are you asking what the point is when it isn't a perfect straight line from goal to achievement?"

I looked at the floor.  Yes.  That was what I was asking. . . .

"This is the process.  The process is what it is even though it doesn't always match our expectations for ourselves or the expectations others put on us.  But being real about the process is the way forward.  Taking one step forward and then two steps backward is not a calamity.  It's the inevitable process."

"So we just expect to fail again and again?"

"Is that so bad?"

"It certainly feels bad." . . .

"Think of it in science terms, not in moral terms.  Each of these attempts at the next step is an experiment.  It doesn't give us victory or defeat.  It gives us data. We need that data.  When we reframe from 'success or failure' to 'experiment and data,' we capture the truer sense of what this is."

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves Us

honest, essential generosity..............

 

"These steps are not prescriptive, they are descriptive.  All of it, relapses included, are just how people change.  The process becomes less painful when we honor the honesty of it, when we honor the truth that nonlinear progress is still progress." . . . 

"So what does honoring this process mean, then?" . . .

"It means that we don't expect to be perfect.  It means when we miss a goal and slip backward, we smile and acknowledge that it isn't a tragedy, that it is the process working as we expected.  When we give ourselves that honest, essential generosity, it isn't so painful to try for that next step, because missing isn't a refutation of what we have accomplished or who we are.  It is just another experiment.  More data." . . .

There is no central wisdom that turns messy human endeavor into easy, linear efficiency.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

On growing up.....................

 All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I was never going to grow up—that growing is an ever-ongoing process.

-M. Scott Peck

It's a process........................

 Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

it's a process...............

We're often told that if we want to develop our skills, we need to push ourselves through long hours of monotonous practice.  But the best way to unlock hidden potential isn't to suffer through the daily grind.  It's to transform the daily grind into a source of daily joy.  It is not a coincidence that in music, the term for practice is play. . . .

 Elite musicians are rarely driven by obsessive compulsion.  They're usually fueled by what psychologists call harmonious passion.  Harmonious passion is taking joy in a process rather than feeling pressure to achieve an outcome.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

debating one's self..........................

 A few years ago, I decided I would try to change my mind about something at least once a month – and that turned out to be way too easy.

I started with politics – we are a polarized nation and I’ve got plenty of opinions about why the other side’s policies are so awful. But if the US is split close to 50/50 on most of these issues, I can’t possibly believe that 160 million people are dead wrong. Or stupid. Or misguided.

I needed to approach my beliefs the way I did when I was debating in high school. I had to prepare myself to be able to articulate and defend a certain side of an argument, but I had to do so without knowing until right before the debate which side I would need to argue for.

The more I did this, the more I realized how shallow so many of my opinions were . . .

-Marc Randolph, from here

processes.........................

 Success in education seems to mean only that a child leaves the classroom with more information in his or her head than when he or she walked in.  That crude way of thinking about what teachers do is exemplified in the (comprehensively misleading) documentary Waiting for "Superman," where learning is visualized as a teacher simply opening the brains of students and pouring knowledge in.  This is a ridiculous way to portray the work of schooling, even setting aside the fact that sharing knowledge is in fact a very small part of teaching.  (Facts can be Googled; it's learning processes, skills, that make education valuable.)  No one who has ever taught would agree that teaching children is a straightforward affair, or that all children are equally easy to teach.  

-Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

Wisdom................................

 

Contrasting outlooks...........................

      The difference between Hopper's version of history and IBM's ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit.  It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation.  Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps.  Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM's Endicott facility.  This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment— are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.  Neither was of looking at technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying.  Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

a daunting task............................

The value of natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.  Whereas, the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.
     Challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature.  Being comfortable making up visions of success, before the methods are clear,  is a phenomenal trait to strengthen.  Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgment is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence.  Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline.  And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving one something in the physical world—is the essence of productivity.
     Being able to bring all these ingredients together, with appropriate timing and balance, is perhaps the major component of competence for this new millennium.  But it's not yet the norm of much professional and personal behavior; far from it,  It's still a daunting task to apply this awareness to all the aspects of one's life.  The natural planning model is natural, but in many cases it is not automatic.

-David Allen, Getting Things Done:  the art of stress-free productivity