Adam Decker

This is not the post I had written for today. In that one, I talked about my interests growing up and how they relate to me now. I just couldn’t get it to work.

So what do you do when you have writer’s block or can’t get the stupid thing you’re doing to work for you? You do it anyways. You write about writer’s block or the stupid thing. Even if what you write sucks.

You do it anyways because it shows that you are going to accomplish what you set out to do. Even if it’s not today.

Inspiration doesn’t strike and then everything becomes easy. It barely even strikes for last-minute panic, as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes was fond of saying.

Inspiration strikes for those who show it they want it.

Your doubts, fears, and comforts will tell you, you don’t need to do it today. They will lure you into thinking that you can leave your comfort zone another day. They lie.

Strike out now. Strike the iron while it’s hot. As a friend recently said, don’t bet against yourself. Don’t assume you will fail, or that you’ll have more time later.

Your time is precious. Begin now.

I sat at my job wracking my brain, trying to cobble together enough focus to finish my quota for the day.

The next day was my most productive ever.

Managing focus and attention is not an easy feat by any means, but it means the difference between floundering in a high-stress scenario and remaining calm and solving the problem.

Mental Models and Attention

Smarter, Faster, Better says that people who build mental models in their heads are better at directing their attention.

A nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit was making her rounds checking on the babies. She paused at one crib. Something struck her as off about this baby’s condition. She called for a doctor and ordered immediate intensive care, though she didn’t know why.

Turns out, the baby had a blood infection. One that, if the nurse hadn’t caught it right then, would almost certainly have killed the child.

And reason she stopped at that baby? It didn’t look the way she expected a healthy baby to look.

This nurse had a mental model of what healthy babies look like, and she kept on imagining that in her mind. When this baby didn’t look like she expected, her attention latched onto that.

An airline pilot once successfully landed a jumbo jet missing half a wing and an engine by imagining the whole thing as a tiny Cessna aircraft. If it wouldn’t work on the Cessna, it wouldn’t work on the big plane.

Telling Yourself Stories

We focus our attention by telling ourselves stories. We tell ourselves how our day will go before it happens.

As I drove to work that day, I turned off my audiobooks, turned down the radio, and imagined what my day was going to be like. I imagined sitting down at my desk, preparing for the day, how I was going to write my assigned blogs.

When I got there, I knew what I had to do. My attention was drawn to the pain points I had imagined. I didn’t need to first search for what I should be doing before doing it. I already knew what needed to happen.

Whatever your career or vocation, start making mental pictures and stories and models about how you expect things to go. Imagine what you will focus on and what obstacles you will face. Imagine how you will overcome those obstacles.

If you do this, you’ll find more mental energy focused where it’s needed. You’ll be more productive, and ultimately, more satisfied with how your work has gone. I know I have.

 

 

Have you ever had a book make an immediate change in how you live your life?

Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg did that for me. It’s made my work days more productive. It makes me exercise every day now. Twice a day, actually. And that’s from applying only 2 of the 8 principles of productivity. Today I’ll talk about the first one.

Decisions, Values, and Motivation

If you feel like your choices help you have control over your life, you will take charge of what you do.

If you ask yourself “why am I doing this thing?” your choices will reflect your values, and you will have motivation.

This is a much more powerful principle than a first glance might tell you. Let’s take the opposite of the first point. What happens if you feel your choices will have no effect? You have no motivation to try because it won’t do any good.

This sense of helplessness is awful. I’ve felt it a few times, mostly when I was in college still trying to find a normal career path. Grades didn’t matter (still don’t,)I had no motivation to do homework, and the careers I looked at all felt forced and empty.

The second point helps accomplish the first. I have an over-curved lower back, and I’ve wanted to fix my posture for a while. “It’s too much trouble,” the mind says. “Hey, remember that other thing? Let’s think about that instead of fixing our back.”

I read this book, and asked myself “Why do I want to fix my lower back?” “Because,” I told myself, “I want to stand tall.”

Since then, I haven’t missed a day of back exercises. As I continue to do them, the small set of stretches and strengthening exercises is slowly expanding, enhancing my regimen.

What You Can Do

So how do you apply this? Begin by making a few very small choices that will definitely make a difference. Choose to clean your kitchen. Choose to read a book. But make these choices because they declare your ability to shape things.

When you do a new chore, ask yourself “why am I doing this?” It can be something you want to have or something your want to avoid, it just has to matter to you.

Make your choices become an expression of what you value. If you do that consistently, you will find more satisfaction in what you do every day and move closer to your goals.

It’s 1:06 am. I don’t have brainpower to write. Here’s a haiku for now. Christmas parties are awesome.

Enjoyable Friends
Amazing food, song, and dance
A late night ends well

Have you ever read 11 books in 3 months?

Earlier this month I wrote about the booklist my mentor gave me last fall to kickstart my knowledge as an entrepreneur. Eleven books on motivation, planning, marketing, and psychology.

I’ve summarized and review the books on motivation and planning earlier, but I realized I wouldn’t have the mental energy to do a full post on each one just yet. I will at some point.

So instead of doing a post for each book, I’ll do talk about my main takeaway from them and what I liked or disliked.

22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

This book is a straightforward look at the basic laws marketing needs to follow in order to stand out and be effective. Great book, and it really helps out when analyzing and creating business marketing strategies. This one is best if you memorize the principle so you have them on call when you need them.

Hooked

This book teaches a framework to help you make products habit-forming. I almost didn’t like it, until I realized it could help with things like making educational apps that you keep coming back to. That’s the sort of thing it should be used for.

Fascinate

This was one of my favorite books. It talked about the 7 different types of fascination there are, such as mystique, prestige, power, and trust. It gave amazing stories of how different companies use the different types of fascination to claim a space in people’s perception and gave a framework for how to use fascination for your own business.

Made To Stick

Oddly enough, this book didn’t stick very well. I remember that it talked about how to make stories that stood out in the mind and stayed there, such as urban legends. The legends stayed in my head, but the method for making that sort of story didn’t sink in as well. The information here is good, but you have to work to keep it and be able to use it.

Mating Intelligence Unleashed

You know all of those books, guides, and coaches that promise to transform your dating life? Well now the scientists have gotten in on that act too. This book is a summary of a lot of studies on our dating habits and preferences. Surprisingly, there is some really fascinating stuff here, both for social/dating life and for marketers. They talk about the 4 qualities girls really want in a guy (confidence, assertiveness, easy-going-ness, and altruism,) and about how much of our daily life is influenced by the desire to, well, further our species. Overall one of my favorites, but it was a very dense book.

The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

This was the one book I honestly did not like. I could see why it was recommended, and a few ideas are valuable, but this book was far too machiavellian and manipulative for my tastes. Robert Greene, the author, tells stories of the greatest seducers of history (not always playboys. Benjamin Disraeli and the story of his relationship with the Queen was in here.) The tone of the book is “take what you can. Lie, manipulate, do anything you can to get what you want.” I greatly disagreed with it on that point, but I did find knowing about ways I could be manipulated enlightening, so there is that.

Influence by Robert Cialdini

This book was one of the strangest to read. It was wonderful and terrible. A master psychologist writes on what influences our decisions. If you read this, be prepared that you may have an existential crisis. It made me wonder if free will was real, if so many things have such a strong influence on our actions. I eventually decided that we do, especially when we understand what can influence us if we live without thought. Overall, this was a magnificent book.

I’ve got something like writer’s block today. So I’m writing about having that.

I know what I want to write about. I want to write about how innovation happens, and things you can do to think in innovative ways. I want to say that innovation happens most often from combining ideas, not from creating something new.

I want to talk about how building a memory palace like i wrote about in my last blog makes innovation much easier. It does that because much more knowledge is available right at your fingertips, so grabbing ideas to combine becomes much easier.

I would write a little about the Esty shop I made, and how I marketed the dragons I sold. I’d write about how the social media site imgur.com loves stories, and how a book I read told me that people buy things they can see already fitting into their lives, and how I made an advertisement doing just that.

I’d write about these things, but I can barely bring myself to peck out the basics onto my keyboard.

I’ve learned today about concise writing. I’m not doing a very good job of it here, and yet the paragraphs above could be one of the most concise articles I’ve written. I presented the main points of what I want to get across. But it feels lifeless.

I don’t know how to write both concisely, and with heart. And yet the feedback I got today on an article suggested that I don’t write with heart yet either. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve written a lot in my life. I write for a living after all. At least for now.

I’ve broken all the rules about writing to give flair. To play jazz with words. Apparently I’ve been playing the wrong notes the whole time.

That’s probably not entirely true, but it is frustrating to have written a good amount, to realize I’ve still got a long ways to go.

Ah well. No sense in letting it get me down any longer. Time to practice.

I very nearly didn’t like this book. I’m not a fan of ideas that have the potential to make people addicted to things that could be bad for them. When I was young, I hated The Phantom of the Opera because of how much control the Phantom had over Christine.

I almost didn’t like this book because I don’t like the idea of people being under other people’s control.

The book talks about using triggers to get customers to use the product, actions they can take while using it, variable rewards to keep them guessing, and has them invest in the process so they keep coming back, and only then does it discuss the ethics of using the method. (“You know, you really should have stolen the whole book. The warnings come after the spells…”)

Nir Eyal talks about how nothing can be called a superpower unless it can be used for both good and evil. The ability to make habit-forming products is no more no less than that–a superpower.

He goes on to lay the foundation for what he holds as ethical use of building habit-forming products. I don’t remember the entire thing, but I do remember the right use, because it struck true to me.

If your product benefits your customer’s lives, and you, personally, would use your product habitually, then it is ethical to make it habit forming. I agree with this framework.

The reason for that is that there is a product that I believe would be immensely beneficial to building brain power, but the product is incredibly boring and difficult to get into a habit of using. (I’ll talk about this product another time.)

I would redesign that product so using it is fun and addictive, because that’s the only way to get the benefits of its brand of brain training.

So use the principles of this book to make it easier for people to improve themselves. That’s where its real strength is.

 

As I was reading a book list that was 11 books long list last fall, I realized I wanted to remember more of the principles than I would be able to with just reading them. I needed an edge.

If you’ve seen BBC’s Sherlock, then you likely have heard of the mind palace, or memory palace, before. When Sherlock Holmes comes up against a particularly difficult problem, he retreats into his mind palace to think and remember. Once he spends enough time there to recall what was relevant he goes on to save the day with his magnificent deductive powers.

The memory palace can actually do much of what you see Sherlock do (not everything. It is TV after all.) It is an old mnemonic memory technique used by greek orators to memorize long speeches and stories. Back then it was called the method of loci, or the method of location.

The method of loci uses a vivid imagination and a memory of a physical place to code things you want to remember. Take, for example, making a shopping list. Imagine your home. You need to buy eggs, milk, and bread. In your mind, walk up to your door. There, you see eggs splattered against your door in a smiley face. Open your door and walk in. There, on the coat rack, you see Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter hitting himself over the head with the jug. Now go down the hall to the bathroom. In the sink, you find mice creating sailing rafts out of the bread in the bathtub.

That’s the general idea. The list can be as short or as long as you need, as long as you have spaces to put them.

And that was my main frustration with the system. I had heard about this memory technique as a teen and tried to use it, but couldn’t get past how cumbersome using my house was. There weren’t enough spaces to get everything I would want to remember, and I would have to make a new one in a real space each time. It felt too awkward to be practical.

During the summer right before, I had been playing a new video game called Ark:Survival Evolved. The game was about surviving on a deserted island with nothing but your wits and thousands of dinosaurs. It was a huge island, with mountains, forests, plains, even caves to explore. I realized that I had a massive location in my head that I could use to create my memory palace. I could use the terrain, caves, and forts of the map and have a nearly endless variety of places to hook memories to.

I filled caves, forts, and strolls along the beaches with images of dinosaurs conversing amiably at a water cooler, a stegosaur who laid a bee-striped egg, a cat sitting on a shark’s head, and many other weird and memorable images that I used to remind myself of principles and applications from the books I was reading.

As I discussed each book with my mentor, I was able to recall each principle and better think of applications for them. It was fantastic.

If you’ve been looking for a way to boost your recollection of facts, figures, or principles, I would highly recommend giving the method of loci a try.