How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don't read that book the boss lent us.The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we're amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can't help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?

The lizard brain.

via Seth’s Blog: Quieting the lizard brain.

I’m in total agreement with Seth and Merlin Mann in regards to the quiet, mysterious, and often counter-productive power of the lizard brain.

I like how Seth has given the power a name: The Resistance.  The Resistance is what makes you do things other than what you really want to do.  The Resistance works through almost every aspect of our reasoning and emotions, from fear to really good excuses.

I just bought The War of Art that both Seth and Merlin recommended in their recent podcast. Reading books is something that The Resistance loves to do, as it serves as a form of procrastination.  Well I did it anyway.

One point for The Resistance.

I got 12 out of 17 of my predictions right.

What I got right:

1. It’ll be called the iPad
2. It’ll have a 10? screen (9.7, close enough)
3. It will run a new version of the iPhone OS, and come with a new SDK
4. It’ll have a new version of iTunes on it
5. It’ll sell books, magazine subscriptions, TV shows, and movies through iTunes
6. The App Store will offer a selection of iPhone apps (I assume we’ll need to re-submit our apps to be compatible with the Tablet before they show up)
7. No webcam
8. Yes geo-location
9. Some new multi-touch gestures to wow us
10. It will have a screen keyboard and an option for a bluetooth keyboard (actually, was a keyboard dock, but close enough)
11. It won’t have Bing as the default search engine
12. It will be available for pre-order, but won’t ship until at least March (no pre-order yet, but I’m assuming soon)

What I got wrong:

1. It’ll be something like $999 and have some way for a phone company to subsidize it if you sell your soul to them (was actually cheaper than I thought, so didn’t need the phone company subsidy)
2. There will be multiple carriers offering 3G connectivity, not just AT&T (I heard something about it being unlocked, so there’s hope)
3. The same will be available for iPhone users
4. It’ll have some drawing on the screen, or handwriting on the screen, capability
5. It will support Flash (I assume not, since they didn’t explicitly show it, but could be wrong)

Not bad, really.

I did get really excited about the possibility of creating a new “web content store” for people to sell subscriptions and issues of their own content… but that’s seems to have been an innovation entirely owed to the creative brain-turnings of Apple fans.  It’s interesting to think about how innovation can happen when we try to guess other peoples’ innovations.

Anyway, back to work everyone!

I might as well write them down because I think it’ll be funny to compare predictions to reality tomorrow.

1. It’ll be called the iPad
2. It’ll have a 10″ screen
3. It’ll be something like $999 and have some way for a phone company to subsidize it if you sell your soul to them.
4. There will be multiple carriers offering 3G connectivity, not just AT&T
5. The same will be available for iPhone users
6. It will run a new version of the iPhone OS, and come with a new SDK
7. It’ll have some drawing on the screen, or handwriting on the screen, capability
8. It’ll have a new version of iTunes on it
9. It’ll sell books, magazine subscriptions, TV shows, and movies through iTunes
10. The App Store will offer a selection of iPhone apps (I assume we’ll need to re-submit our apps to be compatible with the Tablet before they show up)
11. No webcam
12. Yes geo-location
13. Some new multi-touch gestures to wow us
14. It will have a screen keyboard and an option for a bluetooth keyboard
15. It will support Flash
16. It won’t have Bing as the default search engine
17. It will be available for pre-order, but won’t ship until at least March

Those are my guesses!  Totally uneducated, as they are all based entirely on rumors, hear-say, hopes, dreams, hype, and out of this world expectations.

I also fully hope that there’s something that is cooler and more amazing than all of those predictions put together, because as I can currently imagine it, it’s still not something that I would necessarily buy right away.  And I want it to be something that changes the world (more than the Segway).

We’ll see, nerds!

More and more, execution is also easy.

What’s difficult is taking a good idea and a good execution, and running with it.

In this way, someone with two all consuming passions is less fortunate than someone with one all consuming passion.

It’s easier to run with something when you’re only trying to get to one place.

This is really only a question because I’m a self-tracker by nature and I’m fascinated with the idea learning about yourself through all the “accidental metadata” that you leave around.  It’s also why I love the 8:36pm project.  A simple picture has in it an action, people, a location (because the phone geotags), a time and date.  It’s anchored in reality and carries much of that information with it wherever it goes.

And now recently I’ve been obsessed with the idea of private journaling.  Mostly because I think the habit of writing privately is something that the world of social networking addicts is sorely missing.  Our brains need time alone to spin and process and create meaning in our lives, unattached from the pressures of the world.  The content of a private journal… personal thoughts, the makings of true introspection, unfiltered fears, desires, subconscious bubblings-up… are perhaps the richest soil of our selves outside our neurons themselves.

Because of the magic of technology, we can in many ways strain information out of the unfiltered words of our stream-of-conscious thoughts.

I’m beginning to explore all of the ins and outs of this data on this new Explore page.  But I’m trying to think of more… if anyone can think of other ways to harvest information out of text, I would love to hear about it.

The Regressive Imagery Dictionary is totally amazing.  It’s a set of 3,000 or so words separated into 3 main categories: Primary, Emotional, and Secondary.  It suffers from bad labeling.

From what I can tell, the Primary category is for very physical, basic, almost animalistic concepts, sensations, instincts, and passions.  The Emotional category is for the emotions of course, but more like the moods that we go through throughout the day rather than the initial reactions to everything.  And Secondary is all about rationality, thought, cognition, abstract thinking, etc.

It takes a text file of any sort and parses out the words to figure out which categories (and the magic comes from the subcategories, like Icarian Imagery), the text is heaviest in.

You end up with percentages of the top level Primary, Emotional, and Secondary categories, but you also get a lot of information about how the text scored in all of the subcategories.

A few of my favorite subcategories include:

• Primary -> Need -> Sex
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Timelessness
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Icarian Imagery
• Secondary -> Moral Imperative
• Emotion -> Anxiety
• Emotion -> Glory

Someone was even helpful enough to port the script to Ruby. I’ve got a plan to put this into use on 750words.com in the next couple days.  It’s gonna be pretty awesome, I think.

I added a few features over the last couple days to 750words.com, my daily, minimalist, private, unplanned, unfocused writing app.

1. Search – you can now search your writing in case you want to go back and find something you wrote about on some other day.
2. Export – you can export your daily writings by month.
3. General stats
   1. Timer – You can see how long, on average, it takes you to write 750 words during a given month period.
   2. Speedometer – You can see how many words per minute you write, on average, to get to 750 words
   3. Streaks – you can see how many days in a row you’ve completed your 750 words
   4. Scoreboards per month – go back and see who won on any month that you did some writing
4. Customize – you can change the font color, font size, font family, and background color of the writing page to suit your aesthetics
5. Extra point for writing in one sitting – added an extra bonus point if you finish your daily writing in one sitting in less that 30 minutes
6. Last 10 completed pages – you can see who the last 10 people to complete their pages were, and how long it took them.
7. Tab – you can now tab from within the textarea that you’re writing, in case you want to indent or format lists that you’re writing.  All these little tweaks that make it feel more like a real writing tool are super interesting to me.

This is a silly project, but I’m finding that it does have a noticeable effect on my mental state and productivity (on things other than working on this project) when I’ve done my daily writing.  Which is why I guess I’ve been doing it on and off for 4 years, when I needed some forced brain purging.

Anyway, I’m getting a kick out of this.  I hope you do too!

It’s sort of weird to think about but each of us has a conception of ourselves, and everyone else around us as (people first, but then as) collections of things we’re capable of.  Capable of helping us fix a computer, capable of having a drink with us without much notice, capable of enjoying a dinner party, capable of talking about our relationship, capable of making out with, etc.

It’s a simplification but we are simplifiers at our cores. We reduce things in our brains to their basic utilities, and have ways of unfolding those basic understandings into more well-rounded personalities, relationships, and people, but then folding them back up when we aren’t focused on the complexity of a particular person at a particular moment.

What’s been on my mind recently is how we come to some kind of understanding of ourselves, and our own capabilities, and our own self-worth.  How we know if we’re doing what we should be doing.  We think of ourselves as bags of capabilities for the most part as well.  We have strengths, we have some weaknesses, we have our common uses, our rare abilities, our surprise tricks.

Subconsciously, I think I’ve been on a life-long mission to increase not only my bag of capabilities, but the awareness of my capabilities.  It probably stemmed from years of being unpopular in school but knowing that I was capable of more than people thought I was.  Having a very large bag of tricks… which I would only make known to people who bothered to get to know me.  It was safer that way.  But as I grow older and have a more public persona, I rely more on my “reputation” as a source of self-worth.  I don’t think that’s necessarily a healthy thing, but it’s the truth.  I suppose that some parts of my self-worth are still wrapped up in my personal understanding of myself and my intentions, but more of it is out there.  Not necessarily with any one person or group of people, but spread across different groups of people who know different things about me, etc. My bag of capabilities is largely public. Whatever new capabilities or strengths I display are usually discovered by other people around me at the same time that I become aware of them myself.  Starting a bar, for example, or building an iPhone app, or the upcoming parenthood project.  I learn these new things publicly, and as a result largely determine my success at them based on public reaction.  Is this screwed up?  Am I a freak for saying that my sense of self-worth is tied so strongly to the opinions of others? I’m not sure.

Approvers can be anyone who notices that my bag of capabilities have increased (at least in their conception).  If that noticed improvement also matches with my own personal understanding of myself, then that act of attention and approval results in an increase in my own sense of self-worth.  Of a job well done.  If it doesn’t match up (I already knew I could do what I am gaining recognition for doing) then it doesn’t really increase anything other than a sense of dissonance between me and others.

If, for example, I find out that I can be a good parent, that will be a big deal to me. Because I don’t know it yet, or, I haven’t demonstrated it.  If I find out that I can run a successful business for iPhone apps or something else that I haven’t done yet, same deal. However, once I’ve learned that these new talents are a part of my “bag of capabilities” something interesting happens.  I no longer thing it’s a big deal to get attention for such a thing, and I also have an even bigger set of capabilities that I’m expected to work with for my next project.

Approval leads to raised expectations because of an increase in capabilities to work with.

Anyway, that’s my tangential thought for today.

I continued the 8:36pm project through all of 2009.  Since I know pretty much exactly what I was doing, where I was, and who I was with at 8:36pm, I decided to break it all apart and see if anything interesting jumps out:

Here’s the breakdown.

Most likely, this won’t be that interesting to anyone but myself, but I looking it over I feel like it does a good job of capturing the people, places, and actions of the year.  It’s a slice of a single minute in the day, but when it’s done consistently over a period of time, that slice can in many ways represent the whole.  I guess that’s been the point of the project from the start.

I love this project.

“Stars are not important. There’s nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important because they’re very so rare. As far as we know there are only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys!” – Terry Pratchett on religion

Wow, and just realized that the complete collection of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is available for instant play on Netflix!

Over the last couple days I thought of, and built, a site that I think serves a single simple purpose: to encourage a kind of writing that is in danger of being neglected in this age of public, edited, thoughtful writing on the internet. Here’s the very basic statistics page from it:

The site’s called 750 Words, and the premise is simple, to write 750 words a day. 750 private, unfiltered, unplanned, words full of tangents, spelling mistakes, inconsistencies, repetitions, lost trains of thought, etc.  It was highly inspired by a thing called Morning Pages from The Artist’s Way (read a PDF excerpt of the Morning Pages passage here.)

I think this kind of writing is different from the kind of writing that we’re doing more and more of on the internet.  Different not only in audience (yourself instead of someone else) but also in character.

I think public, edited, thoughtful writing is self-expressive in nature.  It condenses ideas, it summarizes thoughts, it explains complications, it offers opinions.  It takes the world and creates a lens that you can see it through.

Not so with private, unfiltered, unplanned writing.  This kind of writing is entirely different.  It’s self-investigative in nature. It opens up messy drawers of thought and lays everything out on the table, it takes a 99% completed thought and tears it apart into its inconsistencies. It is short on manners, etiquette and practicalities.  It dismisses entirely valid trains of thought for no reason, and dwells on nit-picky details that seem to be entirely solid.

We need both kinds of writing. They go well together. The private writing becomes fodder for later public writing. Just like our secret inner thoughts are fodder for our more simplified public personas.

Of course, writing used to be private by default. The entire world couldn’t read the notebook in the bottom desk drawer. But they could read that blog post that had as as little thought put into it.  But, after 10 years plus of writing online, and going through the first dozen major lessons of writing online, I feel like I’ve slowly edited out the crazy spontaneous and unruly voice of my subconscious from my writing. And, through neglect, I’ve slowly given it less and less attention, all the while hoping that it would produce the same gems of thought and creativity that it had back when it was given more fuel.

So, 750 Words. Yes, online, because that’s the only way I can write anymore, given that I’m on any of 3 or 4 different computers at a given time.  And because my hand has forgotten how to write long hand.  But, private.  Because it’s more about writing than reading, I’ve used a few tricks to make the writing process more enjoyable:

• Break open the text box. Let it take over the whole page, like a Word document sorta, but I like to think of it more like a typewriter.  The page automatically scrolls as you get near the bottom of the page.
• Let it auto-save. No need for a save button… you didn’t need one in you paper journal, why do you need one online?
• Count the words. Paper has a size, the internet page doesn’t. So, count the words, and know when you’ve gotten to 3 pages (the magic number).
• One entry per day… no need to title it, tag it, open it, close it, categorize it, preview it, post it, date it, or anything. One entry a day, no more no less.
• Motivate. We all need motivation, even for things that we want to do.  Even more so for things that we know are good for us, but that take work. So I added a bowling-inspired point system that rewards writing several days in a row, but not so much that it breaks your heart if you miss a day. 3 days in a row is a turkey.

I’ve been doing my version of 750 words in a private wiki for the last year… and at current count only wrote on 81 of the last 300 days.  Even that has been a great benefit to me though.  I hope to continue the practice for the foreseeable future, as long as it continues to benefit my days.

I thought of building this little tool (let me check my wiki) on December 11th. I was still thinking (and writing) about it on December 12th, so I bought the domain.  On December 13th I used one of my stub Rails site bundles to get the basics up and running (Facebook Connect, jQuery, Compass) on my shared server, created a few models, and looked up a few jQuery plugins I’d need.  Tested it on December 14th, launched on December 15th.  When the idea’s there, and the tools are there, things can happen fast.  But having those 1.5 days to brainstorm about it before taking action were what really made it happen and made me confident that I could build it without distracting too much from my other work.

Anyway, I’m going to use it. If anyone else finds it useful, that’s great! I’d love to hear any feedback that people have, too.

Generally speaking, if you wake up one day and aren’t sure what to do with your time, do something small that helps someone else. As a nice side benefit, you’ll probably feel better as well.

via The Art of Non-Conformity » Annual Review: 2009 Life Lessons.

I think this is true. When at a loss for something to do, think about the people in your life and try to think of something nice that you can do for one of them. And then don’t mention anything about doing it.

It’ll all backfire if you expect credit or congratulations or even attention for the favor. For favors to work as self-medication, they have to be rewards in themselves, private to yourself, and with no residual expectation of pay-back.

Is that possible?

1. An action that one person does for another
2. The action isn’t done out of obligation
3. The action is determined by the recipient
4. No reciprocal favor or action is necessarily implied

We should all ask our friends and family if there are any favors we can do for them. It’s a win-win.

The American Humanist Association has launched a holiday ad campaign called “No God?… No Problem!”

“No God?…No Problem!” proclaim the ads, featuring an image of several smiling, Santa hat-clad individuals. The ads will kick off in Washington, D.C. in time for Thanksgiving weekend, running inside 200 buses, fifty rail cars and on the side or tail of twenty buses. The campaign will continue with ads appearing on select buses in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco starting in early December.

(Read the press release)

I’ve been reading about these guys for the last week and really dig what they’re doing… as controversial and potentially offensive as it is, I think it’s a responsibility for us non-religious folk to be at least somewhat interested in making our beliefs more acceptable in the world.

Anyone else out there identify as a humanist?

I can’t concentrate lately.

I don’t know what my problem is. I get enough sleep, I wake up, I take my vitamins, I eat my breakfast, I stare into the blue light for 15 minutes, I write 750 word of morning braindump to try to clean out the neurons and get to the good stuff, I go on a walk, I have my own space free of distractions, I close down all the social networks, I make lists, I have projects that I like, both short term and long term, I exercise several times a week, I turn on calming thinking music, and yet.

I can’t concentrate. I don’t have the energy or the focus to do more than the mindless tasks of preparation and maintenance.

I try something new each day. A list of things I am grateful for, write out imaginary ideal futures that might plant hooks in me to pull me forward towards them.

I relax, I meditate, I go to yoga, I draw pictures.

What’s wrong with me?

My best guess is some kind of seasonal energy problem that my Vitamin D and blue light treatments haven’t kicked in yet. Crossing my fingers for some placebo effect as well.

Or maybe one of my last glasses of wine killed off the queen bee neuron of my creativity brain cluster.