This is my continued brainstorm on the idea of building a set of standards to run your life with.  By designing, executing, reviewing and revising these standards, the goal would be to eventually end up with a very workable and, importantly, custom, plan for long-term happiness. Forgive me if it’s long-winded while I continue to figure out what I’m trying to say.

When it comes to moods, morale, motivation, etc, I’ve come to believe that there are three separate struggles that all need to be addressed in order to really be happy/fulfilled.

My primary struggle is with energy–getting enough of it to continue to follow-thru on decisions and goals that I’ve made in the past.  My secondary struggle is with replacing fogginess of mind with focus so that I can design those decisions and goals and edit them as they progress.  And my third struggle is between positive and negative moods so I can enjoy the fruits of labor, goal-achieving, and well-made decisions as they come in.  They’re all interlinked, and you need them all to both design and live a fulfilled life.

• Weak vs Strong Energy (motivation — how much you want something)
• Foggy vs Focused Mind (vision — knowing what you want)
• Unpleasant vs Pleasant Experience (appreciation — being able to value what you do have)

The struggles have priorities.  Assuming that all three struggles are occurring at once (ie. I’m feeling weak, foggy, and unpleasant–yikes!), my first responsibility is to move from weak to strong–to cover the basics of exercise, sleep, a good diet, etc.  Only once that struggle is completed is it necessary to take on my second responsibility of gaining focus–finding clarity of mind and a vision for what I want my life to be.  And likewise, once that’s complete, I take on the third responsibility, which is to move from unpleasant to pleasant overall moods and states of enjoyment–a capacity to enjoy what I do have while also knowing what I want and having the energy to go try to get it. It’s my simplified version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applied to my own very specific life.

The basic premise of what I’m trying to design is that depending on how pleasant, focused, and strong I feel, I will have different activities and responsibilities that address the current weakest aspect of my mood and morale (and, therefore, not all at once, since the weakened state of morale simply isn’t capable of taking on the whole burrito at once–for example, what point is knowing the right thing to do if you don’t have the energy or will to do it?).  The beauty of it is that I know that my priority is to move towards feeling pleasant, focused, and strong, and that there are different ways to get there (aka different forms of self-medication) that work better for particular situations than others.

When I start each day, I’ll attempt to select where I am along each of these three categories, and that will help shape the goals for the day:

1. Unpleasant or Pleasant
2. Foggy or Focused
3. Weak or Strong

Weak versus Strong

For the weak trait, my self-medication should focus on being physically healthy.  Getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, not drinking too much, etc.  Once feeling healthy and strong, my responsibility is to be ambitious, to reach for something bigger and better than the current situation, and use the strength to think beyond what’s simply assumed.

Foggy versus Focused

For the foggy trait, my self-medication should focus on meditation, brainstorming, and walks.  Things that help me address the mental quality of the feeling directly, getting back to a grounded, clear, state and being able to make plans, decisions, and even bigger visions (assuming I’m also feeling strong).  Once focused, my responsibility is to be productive with that focus and figure out or re-affirm goals and an overall vision.

Unpleasant versus Pleasant

For the unpleasant trait, my self-medication should focus on quality time with myself, my wife, and my friends.  It may or may not involve a change of scenery, since that helps reacquaint me with the huge variety of the world.  The goal is to bring variety, the unexpected, the spontaneous back into my state, and mix it with the familiar, and share it with people I love.  I often feel that my unpleasant feelings are often related to a very small view of the world, one where I’m at the center… and the best way to get out of it is to change the scenery and experience something outside of my own head.  Once I am feeling capable of enjoyment again, I gain the responsibility of being self-expressive in some manner.  Creating, building confidence, being generous and giving with my time and resources.

Given that general outline, by choosing one of each of the three paired traits, I will fall into one of 8 profiles:

1. Strong, focused, pleasant
2. Strong, focused, unpleasant
3. Strong, foggy, pleasant
4. Strong, foggy, unpleasant
5. Weak, focused, pleasant
6. Weak, foggy, pleasant
7. Weak, focused, unpleasant
8. Weak, foggy, unpleasant

The goal is to work my way up the profiles, ultimately finding a way to sustain myself in the profile of feeling pleasant, focused, and strong.  The bold word is the area that deserves immediate attention in the form of some kind of self-medication.  The italics word designate the areas of responsibility that I have for myself in terms of health and productivity.

All of this implies that given how I feel at my starting-point, I can begin to build a list of priorities, self-medications, and responsibilities for myself that are best suited for moving from that profile up to a higher one on the ladder to happiness.

My first draft of the 8 profiles looks something like this:

1. Strong, focused, pleasant: Producer and Enjoyer
   1. Responsibility: Produce and self-express in an ambitious manner, build amazing things, focus on big meaningful projects
2. Strong, focused, unpleasant: Maintainer
   1. Responsibility: Do things that need to be done that have been put off for a while, but don’t require creative thought
      
   2. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media
3. Strong, foggy, pleasant: Artist
   1. Responsibility: Do something big and self-expressive that involves discovery / free-association
   2. Find focus with meditation, walks, brainstorming
4. Strong, foggy, unpleasant: Sharer
   1. Responsibility: Go out and have fun, be social
   2. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (primary)
   3. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (secondary)
5. Weak, focused, pleasant: Tinkerer
   1. Responsibility: Produce and self express on a small scale, pay attention to meaningful details in existing projects
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep
6. Weak, foggy, pleasant: Explorer
   1. Responsibility: Write, doodle, take pictures
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (secondary)
7. Weak, focused, unpleasant: Organizer
   1. Responsibility: Clean, do errands, organize
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (secondary)
8. Weak, foggy, unpleasant: Consumer
   1. Responsibility: Call up a good friend and meet. Read, find a good movie, try to find an enjoyable diversion.
      
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (secondary)
   4. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (thirdiary)

The point of the profiles…

The whole point of this is that when I’m feeling weak, I should remember to make exercise, sleep, and diet a priority over worrying about making progress on meaningful projects.  There’s a direct connection between my weakest trait and the self-medications that can be applied.  To give my emotional landscape a bit of respect (don’t try to brute force myself to be at 100% every single day) and in the end develop a system that is flexible enough to handle low-energy weeks and yet ambitious enough to ask a lot from myself when I’m feeling at the top of my game.

Putting it into practice

Since this is new, for now I’m just going to try to be aware of which state I’m in.  The funny thing is, that in order to fully flesh out this system, I need to already feel strong, focused, and pleasant.  I’ve come back to this several times over the last couple days and have not been able to make progress until I asked myself which profile I was currently in, and realized that I was unfocused, or feeling weak, etc.

After I test this out and see if it actually makes any sense, I’ll go from there.  No rush, right?

The all-caps STANDARDS project is an interesting new project from the constantly re-inventing Jake Lodwick. He describes it as a self-management project, a set of rules he designs, revises, and lives by.

“STANDARDS” is a system I both live in and control. Its entire purpose is sanctioned by me, for the purpose of allowing me to consciously guide my life into a state of long-term happiness. It is a gentle system; it knows that sudden, drastic change is counterproductive. Every week is slightly different than the last; it is evolving into a progressively complex mechanism for optimizing my behavior… in a sense, it is my behavior. I think about it constantly; I judge the merit of my own actions in reference to its directives; I do what it says. It’s not enough to say we exist symbiotically; it is part of me.

The post that introduced me to his thinking best is here.

Basically, he has a set of rules which he can edit and revise once a week that he strives to follow for the following week. Some of his current rules are:

1. Eat each meal within 1 hour of 9:30, 1:30, & 8:00.
2. One 3-hour creative block per day.
3. One hour reading print.
4. Begin bed routine by 11pm.

This caught my attention because I’m also obsessed with the idea of self-management. Creating meaning for your life out of your best ideas, beliefs, and goals, while also taking into account the fickle beasts of motivation, determination, and strength of will.

For me, however, the most problematic element of these rigid self-management plans is their lack of flexibility, variety, and spontaneity. Not everyone is like me, obviously, but over the years I’ve learned that I work better in environments that allow intense amounts of focus for certain projects until those projects are done and new ones can be invented or old ones can be revisited.

I get the strange feeling that a “perfect” day according to the STANDARDS would be fairly moderate or mediocre day to my gut.  They assume that you can make progress on all of your goals and principles every day.  That, if having a great living space is very important to you, you should then devote 10-30 minutes every day to improving your living space.  It doesn’t take into account that a single burst of uninterrupted improvement once a month might actually be more effective (to me).

Now, this is just my opinion.  What works for me probably wouldn’t work for anyone else, and what works for Jake probably won’t work for me, etc.  And if I’m reading this correctly, the whole point of the project is to NOT adopt someone else’s standards — the whole point is to create your own system of meaning and to fully face your plan for long-term health  and happiness with the amount of dedication and planning that any other serious project might.

So, given that goal, I’m going to hop in and try to come up with my own STANDARDS and see where that leads.  Thanks, Jake, for inspiring me to do that.

An interesting post from Alice, excerpted here:

I’d argue that attention is an important part of the status metric; but I don’t think more attention always translates to more status (the term “famewhore” comes to mind). But perhaps the attention is what encourages people like Julia Allison or Nick Starr to continue living public lives, even as they receive a great deal of negative attention at the same time. I would be interested to see if attention of any kind correlates with participation, or whether it is only positive attention; if the YouTubers had thousands of hits, but an equal number of vitriolic comments, would they continue to post videos?

Finally: We hear a lot about the “attention economy” or “publicity culture,” in which the most valued skills are those which increase attention. And many people decry this culture for bubbling-up sensational, sexual, or violent content– or just short bursts of info-nuggets– rather than meaningful, thoughtful, difficult ideas.

via tiara.org.

I definitely think that attention of any kind (positive or negative) would be found to correlate with participation.  Attention will motivate you to participate because it is a venue for communication, and regardless of whether you feel encouraged to continue what you’re doing, or encouraged to defend what you did, it seems like either way you’ll be strongly compelled to continue to participate.  Maybe Sarah Palin is the exception here, but I doubt it.

So, yes, attention is a form of status, but it’s not necessarily going to be a rewarding or intrinsically valuable kind of status.  In fact, perhaps this is the simplest argument against trying to game the system of attention / status / fame / popularity.  It is a self-feeding ecosystem of increasingly-growing participation that can grow and grow and yet not necessarily have any direct link to value.

To de-link attention and status, perhaps it’s better to use the concept of reputation instead of status.  They are similar–they are both given to you by other people / society in general, however a good reputation implies a certain amount of respect.  High levels of status merely imply feeling like you’re higher on some social ladder than another without saying why. Any celebrity will benefit from their own celebrity status and attention (special access, more opportunities, special treatment, etc), however, not every celebrity will be said to have a good reputation, and therefore not every celebrity will be able to say they are living a rewarding life, one that builds meaningful and loyal relationships with people while also maintaining their own sense of self and ability to respect themselves.

On the other hand, non-celebrities can also achieve this form of status even without the incredible amount of attention that would give them access to the perks of high status.

The discrepancy between status and reputation can cause people to exhibit feelings of hate, unfairness, and disgust commonly seen in our own treatment of people who abuse the power of their societal status.  Unfortunately, reputation doesn’t have the same direct relationship to attention that status does, and therefore many things of high reputation lack the exposure of their high status cousins.  It’s unfair, possibly, but a natural result of sticking to what matters (being a respectable person) instead of doing whatever it takes to game the system and get as much attention as possible.

Track Your Happiness is a project begun as part of Matt Killingsworth’s doctoral research at Harvard University. He’s working in Daniel Gilbert’s lab… Daniel Gilbert is famous for his book Stumbling Towards Happiness and his work on positive psychology, or the study of happiness.

Basically, Track Your Happiness works by text messaging you 3-5 times a day at random times and asking you a series of questions.  Things like, “How happy are you right now?”, “Do you want to do what you’re doing?”, “Do you have to do what you’re doing?”, “Where are you?”, “Are you alone?”, “Are you talking or interacting with anyone?” etc.  Some of the questions are smart too.  If you say you’re interacting with someone, it’ll ask you how many people you’re interacting with.

The questionnaires are formatted for use on an iPhone, and you are asked to fill out the survey as soon as possible when you get the text message.  An interesting secondary metric that they keep track of is how often you fill out the survey (my current response rate is a pretty sad 54%), and how long it takes you to respond to the survey (my median response time is 20 minutes).  By showing me these statistics, I feel competitive in a weird way to try and get the best score possible (with, as you can see, only mild success).

The real payoff of the project is getting results back from the survey.  Here’s my current report:

Some of the graphs show correlations, and others don’t.  Both results are interesting to me… knowing that my sleep quality so far doesn’t seem to be very correlated to my happiness, for example, is surprising.  On the other hand, feeling productive and focused seems to be much more directly correlated to my feelings of happiness.  Also, I seem to be happiest when I’m somewhere other than home or at work, which is surprising.  And, the optimal number of people to interact with seems to be 2.

The project is set up to give “conclusive” results after 50 samples.  I’ve currently 48% done, having submitted 24 surveys.

I think this project is both insightful and flexible enough to grow and adapt over time.  I’m definitely going to complete the 50 surveys and see if anything further emerges from the data.  And then what?  What will I learn about myself and what will I do with that new knowledge?

The Track Your Happiness project also has a Twitter account (@trackhappiness) that doesn’t seem to have much activity yet.

5 atomic units of life, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

Sometimes I wonder if these are the only 5 verbs we really need when it comes to our sense of selves. We do things, that lead to feeling a certain way; we learn things that change who we are; we get things that help us do things so that we can have more things; we feel things that make us do things that teach us something about ourselves.

What changes is the objects of these verbs, and the order that the pinball bounces between them, sometimes hitting them all, sometimes bouncing from do to feel back to do back to feel over and over again, sometimes one atomic unit grows to engulf the others so that everything eventually relates back to how we feel, or what we have, or who we are.

Bathtub IV on Vimeo on Vimeo

An amazing little video.  See more of Keith Loutit’s videos here.

I’ve been compiling sources and articles about dealing with bad moods, self-medicating, etc for a while and today I started trying to organize them into a bit of a hierarchy.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

1. Mentally avoid or replace the mood
   1. Recall someone/something that you enjoy and daydream about it
   2. Listen to some music that you like
   3. List things you’re grateful for
   4. Affirm your goals
   5. Think of less fortunate people
2. Mentally address the mood
   1. Focus on what you’ve been ignoring
   2. Stay in the present
   3. Recognize you’re not alone
   4. Decode your mood (figure out what exactly is causing it)
   5. List why the bad cause of your mood is possibly good for your life
   6. Forgive others / abolish blame
3. Physically avoid or replace the mood
   1. Get some exercise
   2. Take a break and have a cup of tea
   3. Go somewhere that you enjoy
      1. Take a hike
      2. Shop
   4. Watch a young child play
   5. Sing your favorite song
   6. Talk to people you trust
   7. Make something creative
   8. Eat / Consume
      1. Chocolate
      2. Alcohol
      3. Caffeine
      4. Junk food
   9. Do something nice
   10. Take a bath
   11. Play with a pet
   12. Avoid people who put you in a bad mood
   13. Get a massage
   14. Change your body posture
       1. Practice smiling
   15. Sit in the sun
   16. Get a hug
4. Physically address the mood
   1. Meditate
   2. Experience the mood fully
   3. Catch your breath
   4. Get some sleep
   5. Wait
   6. Calm down
   7. Take a daily vitamin
   8. Let it all out
      1. Cry
      2. Scream

Thoughts? Additions, edits, improvements? Do these things actually work in practice?  Are some more effective than others?  Though some might be effective, might they also seem repulsive at the time of a bad mood?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of personally-tailored self-medication tree that you could use in times of duress, and then afterwards see which methods are actually most effective at improving your mood?

I’ve been working on a photobooth for Vain (a great hair salon, where my wife works and where I have my little office). It’s different from a normal photo booth in a few ways that I think modernize it a bit and make it more social. One, it’s free. Two, it’s social — you can browse all of the pictures taken at the “booth”. Three, it’s not in a booth — this latest version is a two-way mirror with a camera behind it that takes your picture when you press a button.

I’m writing the software as a Mac app, since there are pretty easy hooks into triggering a camera, downloading the picture from the camera, and uploading it to the web.

This last Tuesday we tested out the first version of it (that still needs a lot of work) at a Bastille Day party put on by our favorite event-planning business The Adventure School.

Here’s what it looked like:

During the 7 hours of the party, almost 800 pictures were taken. Here’s a sampling

The full set is posted on The Adventure School website.

After watching this many people use the booth, I think I’m going to make the following changes before officially setting it up at Vain:

1. More feedback between pushing the button and having the picture taken.
   1. Speakers with some kind of sound
   2. Flickering lights / torches / a flash
   3. On-screen spinning thing
2. Figure out lighting
3. Possibly a way to delete pictures that people don’t like (without making it so easy for people to delete other peoples’ pictures)
4. Some better instructions that this is a photo mirror, that it’s free, that’s it’s easy to use, etc.
5. Indications on the mirror about where to look (lipstick?)

Fear has been on my zeitgeist lately, coming up in a lot of conversations about business and personal life. It’s a strange emotion, and our culture has a lot of different ways of spinning our reaction to fear.

No Fear.

Etc.

And then there’s the un-spoken but all too real feeling of fear that we deal with on a daily basis. That makes us balk before action, that makes us change course, load up with accessories of safety, and sometimes even pre-emptively strike.

I’ve been consumed by my own new set of fears recently. Quitting a job and starting up something brand new is a scary thing to do. Suddenly you realize just how much money a regular pay check offered. And there’s a secondary fear in there… knowing that you are completely free can trigger a strange fear of freedom. And the third layer… the guilt of possibly having too much of a good thing and having a fear that the universe will unleash some hidden mechanism that hangs back the teddy bear just when you started getting attached to it.

There’s fear. And there’s our response to it.

Fear is an emotional response triggered by a perceived threat or danger. To completely rid ourselves of fear is probably not a good idea. Threats and dangers would then have a sitting duck to target at their leisure. It’s important to pay close attention to our own cognitive response to fear, and it’s slower acting cousin anxiety.

This secondary response, the cognitive response, is in many ways more helpful or harmful to our lives than the original causes of the fear. Maybe this is what FDR meant by fearing fear itself — how we respond to the things we are afraid of could end up hurting us more than the actual things we are afraid of.

Like many people, I am afraid of failure. That fear makes me obsess over the amount of money and time that I have to live on. It makes me have trouble sleeping at night, and makes me a little antsy at all times, probably leading to quicker emotional responses to negative stimulus. It affects my health and ability to enjoy things in the moment without wondering if that moment might in some way be hastening the end of all enjoyable moments.

In a more productive sense, it also makes me explore business options, keep an eye out for new ideas at all times, execute on ideas quickly to see if they have lasting value, etc. Fear is a great motivator and can help get to the real point of what you want to do. It discourages dilly dallying.

When people think about their ideal world, a world where we’re all millionaires and all doing exactly what we want to do with our days, madly in love with our spouses, family, friends, career, and selves, I’m guessing that most of the time people would neglect to add a healthy dose of FEAR to the mix. And yet, it’s fear that brings us to ourselves and makes us focus on the things that are most important to us.

This is a long ramble, and one likely to continue as I unravel my own fate in the presence of fear, but I guess my only point at the moment is to say that at the end of the day, I’m glad I’m afraid.

Libraries are amazing… we should all be taking more advantage of them.

Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all that your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.

via Public Library Hacking – Dawn Rutherford.

A few different kinds of emotions, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

Trying to suss out the different classes of emotions. Here I’ve got those that are linked to some kind of biological function or physical sensation, the general emotions with some sense of opposites, and the very vague emotional scale of great to terrible.

I am enjoying Jason Kottke’s exploration of the difference between two modes of the mind: relaxed concentration and deliberate practice.  To reach a state of relaxed concentration, you must deliberately practice for a long long time.  However, the act of deliberate practice is difficult to shed, and often experts will cling on to the deliberate nature of their work longer than necessary, preventing them from reaching a true state of flow that is required to become true masters of their art.

Read these posts: 8 entries tagged relaxed concentration on kottke.org

Richard Feynman explains how trains stay on their tracks.

Hint: it’s not the flanges.

via Kottke.

Here’s me trying to figure out how I feel right at this very moment, and to uncover as much metadata about it as possible. Consider it the 1-person very early adopter beta tester of an unmade product.

Mood: studious

Pleasant or unpleasant: pleasant

Energy level: medium-high

Occupation with mood: medium

Intensity of mood: medium

Duration of mood so far: several hours

Cognitive level: fairly high

Tension: low

Category of mood: fairly joyful, fairly anticipatory, optimistic, appreciative

Meta-emotion (how do I feel about this mood?): happy, though a little worried that I’ll have to stop thinking about this stuff soon to attend to real-life things and that I won’t be able to re-conjure it in a couple days.

Which of these categorizations are useful in highlighting the uniqueness of this mood?  I think it could be a combination of the pleasant, medium-high energy level, long duration, and high cognitive level.  The level of occupation (which I take to mean the amount of my total mental resources that the mood requires of me) seems potentially interesting, but not really in this case. I wonder if occupation and intensity are usually linked.  If they are, then I probably don’t need to track both.

Which of these categorizations could potentially apply to all or most of my future episodes of feeling studious? Again, occupation level and intensity seem like they could vary pretty widely from episode to episode, and are more a characteristic of the moment than of the mood.  I’m leaning away from those two dimensions as being truly useful.

I think I might try this a couple more times over the next few days to see if anything else emerges from over-analytical mood dissection.