Now that I’m starting to think about the business side of Health Month, I get to wade into the wonderful world of what success means to me, and what it means for Health Month, the business.  Noah Kagan from AppSumo was helping me think it through this morning.

Your success and the success of what you’re working on can be two different things, or they can be the same thing.

When success for you personally isn’t aligned with the success of what you’re working on, bad things happen.  Discontent, confusion, lost years, ulcers, etc.

When success for you personally IS aligned with success of what you’re working on, beautiful things happen. Meaning, fulfillment, purpose, drive.

Why then is it so difficult to align the two?  I guess maybe because we don’t really think about it sometimes.  When we build something, or work on something, we assume that its success is the same as our success.  Because it’s ours, we’re working on it, etc.  But how often have I found myself working on something (be it a job, a friendship, a relationship, a personal project, etc) only to realize after some time that its success was not the same as my own?  Okay, not a whole lot but a few big ones stick out in my head and were doozies.

So, I want to make sure that my success and Health Month’s success are aligned.

At Amazon there was this idea of a “fitness function”.  I think about it often.  It’s a number that represents the fitness of the whole system.  Your fitness function could strive to stay at a certain number, or it can strive to go higher and higher.

Body temperature is a good homeostasis fitness function for the body.  If it’s at 98.6, you can know that pretty much everything is in order and good.  If it’s too high or too low, you know something’s wrong.  You don’t know WHAT is wrong, you just know that something is.

The stock price of a company is another good fitness function (usually).  You want it to go up.  If it’s going up, it’s usually a sign that things are going well at the company.  You don’t know exactly what is going right, but you know that something is.

I am going to try to create two new fitness functions for my life.  One for myself, and one for Health Month.  The one for my life could include things like weight, money in the bank account, quality time spent with Kellianne and Niko, quality socializing time, etc.  In fact, Health Month itself may be able to track my fitness function for me, given that most of the variables that I think are important to my own success are tracked in there.  Those that aren’t…. should possibly be added.

Second, there’s the success of the site itself.  Is it helping people improve their health?  That’s the number one question.  Once that’s established, how many people is it helping?  That’s the second question.  Is it sustainable, making enough money to run itself and for my small family to live off.  That’s the third question.  Am I finding the work enjoyable and fulfilling and meaningful to the world?  If I can come up with a simple algorithm that combines those four variables (1 with a survey, 2 with a database query, 3 with a look at financials, and 4 with a subjective self-survey) then I’ll know how healthy Health Month is.  And the higher I can make that number go, the better.

Fitness functions are an amazing way to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable.  I will probably try to talk about it at the Quantified Self meetup I’m hosting (for the first time in Seattle!) next Wednesday.  You should come!

Just watched the now semi-infamous DICE talk by Jesse Schell from February.

Basically, a parody-esque warning about the dangers of over-gamifying our lives. And he’s right, gamification is an idea that is going to be used for evil as well as good. I’m hoping that Health Month, while rewarding many of the same behaviors, can reward them for better reasons (healthier and happier living through improved habits).  There’s no reason why the powers-that-be will be the ones controlling the game mechanics of our lives.

That said, I want to back up a little.  I want to think about what it means to gamify your life, whether or not it is even possible, and whether or not it is useful.

What does it mean?

To me, the gamification of life is all about tapping into the motivational parts of our behavior.  If we have something that needs to be done, no longer tie it to the “should” or the “have to” motivational engines in our brain, but instead tie it to the competitive and/or fun part of our brain.  The game part.  That’s it.  It’s simply a behavior-changing trick.  It has nothing to say about whether or not you use that trick on all of your behaviors, nor about whether or not those behaviors are truly the right behaviors for you.  It’s just a trick.  That can be used.  On them.

Clever advertising is a trick. Peer pressure is a trick (see my Ignite talk about using peer pressure as a motivational tool).  Deadlines are a trick.  New Year’s Resolutions are a trick.  Guilt is a trick.  Authority is a trick.  Money is a trick.  Making it a game is a trick.  See what I’m trying to get at?  Tricks are the fuel that we need to get things done.  The things we get done, on the other hand, are a separate story.  And are up to us, entirely.

Can you map games to real life?

Yes.  Like Jesse Schell entertainingly illustrated, everything can be turned into a game.  School can be turned into a game where the rewards are grades.  Having a job can be turned into a game where the rewards are money and promotions and job titles.  Relationships can be turned a game.  And self-motivation can be turned into a game.

The operative part of the phrase is “can be turned into.”  They are not games by default, but they can be played like games.  A game layer can be added on top of the experience, just like a carrot can be dangled in front of a rabbit as a layer on top of a race track.  If rabbits raced.

The way I think about it now is that the game layer is science.  It is an abstract model that describes, with a particular metaphor and model, the way people behave.  Just like physics is an abstract model that describes the way atoms and molecules behave.  Physics can predict to a pretty high degree of accuracy how objects in the real world will behave, but it is not 100% accurate.  It makes assumptions, and ignores small unknown random factors that will always sneak in.  The game layer, similarly, can describe how people are likely to behave in certain contexts.  It can name the motivating factors, the psychological tricks, the social obligations that make us often times behave in a certain way.

On the other hand, you can create crazy, beautiful physics models that do all kinds of outlandish things that the real world will never see.  And the same is true for games.  You can link game mechanics up to certain behaviors and motivate people to do things they would never do for the intrinsic value of those behaviors alone.  You can also make people feel good or bad about doing things that they would feel differently about outside of the game.

The trend in games, though, is to make them map closer and closer to real life.  To become more authentic games.  Casual and slow games that play at the same pace as real life.  And in the best case scenario, games that reward you for things that you already want to do, or that discourage behaviors that you already want to stop.

That’s where they become really interesting, in my book.

Is it useful to think about life as a game?

I think so. The key point, however, will be that we allow people to design their own games.  In order for this to not turn into a new way for corporations, the government, our bosses, parents, and religious leaders to control us (hello, conspiracy theorists!), we need to take ownership of our own lives, make sure that we design our own games, and that those games we design have a 1-to-1 relationship between what we want to do, and what we reward ourselves for doing.  This is one of the epiphanies I had while creating Health Month.  All of the fitness and nutrition sites out there tell you what to eat.  And every 6 months, a new expert finds some new trick that they then market to you, you buy, and they get rich.  Who cares about them? We are on our own health path, with our own opinions, and what we need is information about which nutrient we need most, which recipes provide those nutrients, and which mental tricks we can employ to get our behaviors to slowly move towards healthier living.  That’s all.

Life is long.  We don’t need to solve everything right this minute.  But, we can use games to make small changes in our lives, over long periods of time, in a sustainable way where we don’t burn out.  I think that’s where games are going to be most useful, as we move into the future.

When I turned 30, my birthday motto was “Higher highs and lower lows.”

When I turned 31, my birthday motto was “Double down.”

When I turned 32, my birthday motto was “No problem.”

Last year, my 33rd birthday coincided with my last day at the Robot Co-op and the beginning of Enjoymentland.  My motto for the year was “Frugal to the max.” I just did a little calculation and it looks like our spending over the last 12 months compared to the 12 months prior was 34% lower.  So, at least on the money front, I think we did pretty well on the frugality goal.

In the meantime, I spent the whole year working on my own projects, and managed to stay somewhat afloat finance-wise.  Also, we had a baby.  I guess that’s not very frugal on the DNA front.  But we did have the baby in fairly frugal way: without selling the house (not our choice), without buying a car, without doing all of the screening tests, and hospital visits, and without even requiring a hospital’s intervention.  I’m pretty proud about that, and think Kellianne’s more amazing than ever for having gone through the process with such grace, strength, and confidence.  And we were also very lucky, as there were a couple near misses on needing a hospital transfer, and I know that it’s entirely possible for someone who does everything right, and has the best intentions, to still have a high-risk pregnancy.  We are lucky that we never had to draw that straw.

My brain on this morning of my 34th birthday is highly rearranged from previous years (I think I say that every year though).  I’m not quite sure what this new arrangement is all about yet.  I’m definitely still thinking a lot about building things.  Over the last year, Locavore and 750 Words have been successful and highly enjoyable to work on, and I will continue to work on them, but I’m still looking for something.  There is another less public project that I’ve been working on for a good part of the year, and I hope to be able to talk more about it soon.  Its future is still in flux.

And I guess during this month that I’m taking off from working on anything, I am still thinking very much about what I’m going to want to work on, what I am working on, and what’s going to sustain us over then next 5 to 10 years.

At the same time, I’m rather obsessed with my 13 day-old son, Niko, Mr. Crane, and plan on putting a big chunk of my mental and physical energy into guiding his person and personality.  I feel like my work and home interests dovetail into a common goal of enjoying and appreciating the short confusing surprising life we’ve found ourselves in, and if everything can find inspiration in that tangle, everything should tie together pretty well.

Retweeted last night, and still appropriate this morning:

Human nature has a tendency to Admire Complexity and Reward Simplicity.

Another somehow related quote from page 37 of Hemingway’s Garden of Eden:

Be careful, he said to himself, it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

You know, only a few years ago I had such a different view of parenthood and baby-making.  I thought of it as a Plan B, something to do when you had struck out with your own personal ambitions.  A way to pass the buck to the next generation.  I interpret things differently now, of course, and think that building a family is a great foundation and source of strength to work with, for, and from.  We all need a core, and that core needs to grow.  A solid core will help make the right decisions and recover from mistakes and bad luck without sinking the ship.

It’s important to find the core, but it’s equally important to cultivate it.  Rotate the crops, bring in new soil, let it rest and recover.  It’s a living thing, and our deepest values and strongest convictions are going to ebb and flow and shift in the wind just like any other living thing.  The core is going to have moods, and get sick once in a while, and the only way to keep it going for the long haul is to feed it, challenge it, allow it to change.

I’ve had a core set of goals to live by for 3 years now, and it has been shifting every year or so, adapting to my life.  I post it on the front page of my homepage, busterbenson.com, as a reminder more to myself than anyone else.

Here they are, one more time, with a bit more temporarily added to each sentence.

1. You must not dilly-dally, so that the Resistance doesn’t trick you.
2. You must be your word, so that you trust yourself.
3. You must have good intentions, so that you do not betray yourself.
4. You must admit to being the maker of meaning, so that you know what you’re getting.
5. You must not feel sorry for yourself, so that you do not become a martyr.
6. You must have a vision that you are striving for, so that your work moves in a direction.
7. You must tie creativity and experimentation with survival, so that you don’t take your work lightly.
8. You must be the change you want to see, so that you don’t blame others.
9. You must rally others with your vision, so that your vision gains momentum.
10. You must stake your reputation on your better self, so that you become your better self.
11. You must be comfortable with the consequences of being who you are, so that you grow in responsibility.
12. You must share, so that your motivations remain clear.
13. You must make your own advice and take it, so that you trust your own instincts.
14. You must manage your stress, health, and clarity, so that your core stays in balance.
15. You must study your mistakes, so that you don’t make incorrect generalizations.
16. You must retry things you don’t like every once in a while, so that your tastes grow.
17. You must make time to enjoy things, so that you have time to enjoy things.

I want this year to be the year of cultivating the core.

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.

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?

A couple days ago Kellianne and I were taking a taxi to meet some friends on the hill, and our driver got a phone call. He quickly informed the caller that he was at work and would have to call her later. He hung up and said, “My daughter. She says, ‘You must come home right now!’”  We laughed, then he added, “She’s beautiful. And I have two young sons as well. Sorry, forgive my saying, but 10 days ago, my wife and I, we separated.” Kellianne and I looked at each other sadly, and gave him our best comforting words despite the seeming infinite abyss that stretched between us and the cabbie. A few minutes of silence later, he added, “She said, I am just not the same person.” We sat in traffic up Pike St for a few more blocks, and saw him discretely wipe away a tear at one stop light.

A friend who I know mostly through the Internet, and SXSW, Matt Haughey, has recently discovered that he has a sizable brain tumor. I’ve probably only met or conversed with him a couple times, but he’s widely acknowledged to be a terrific guy, and I wish the best of recoveries for him. I can’t help but put myself in his shoes… to imagine receiving such a startling and life-changing piece of news out of nowhere. These kinds of things happen to all of us, and if it hasn’t happened yet, at some point the frailty and vulnerability of life will make itself known to each of us in its own way.

Coming home from the same night as the taxi top the hill, we came back down the hill and saw Belltown bumping with its usually crowd of drunken, freezing, high-heeled, loud, folk. We scoffed a bit at first, and then one of us said, “They’re just living their life, like we’re living our lives.”

We’re all the same, really. Just living our lives. Continue on.

We’re like sharks. Sharks have to keep moving to stay alive, to breathe. They have to move even in their sleep. We don’t have to physically move, but rather, our brains only notice things that are changing. If we’re in a room with a certain constant smell we’ll only be able to perceive it for a few minutes. If we’re at a job that sorta sucks, we’ll slowly stop noticing exactly how much it sucks.

Same goes for good things. A great new position. A million dollars. A stable relationship.

This implies that in order to keep appreciating something, either it, or we, must constantly change.  Lest we suffocate.

The real point I’m trying to make is not about this eternal thirst for change and novelty, it’s about our threshold for what we notice as change.

The world is always changing around us. And we’re always changing within the world. Therefore there should be no need to seek out novelty… it’s around us all the time! The real source of our suffocation is our sometimes-too-high sensitivity to change.

Not only do we only notice things that change, but as we grow older and our brains become more efficient and noise-resistant, we raise the threshold for what we notice as change. We ignore all the kinds of change that “don’t matter”, and we constantly raise the bar on what “matters”.

This is useful in the sense that it will mean that we’re more likely to notice things that “matter” and not lose them in the shuffle of a million things happening at once. But, this trick of the brain that helps us become more efficient also makes us less likely to notice things that are enjoyable or painful or beautiful or ugly or silly or nonsensical simply for their own benefit.  It’s the noticing of small changes in the world that contributes to our aesthetic enjoyment of it.  The progress of the brain from one of enjoyment to one of efficiency over time can be seen as a benefit of aging. Or it can be seen as a cancerous growth that takes over our ability to enjoy the every day.

Notice small changes around you. Small changes in how you feel, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Don’t worry about bringing anyone else’s attention to these small changes, they’re probably not big enough to have value in that way. These small changes are yours, the reward is in having noticed them, and they don’t need to be saved or shared or captured or memorialized. Just noticed and appreciated.

Course correction is made up of a few moving parts:

• A course
• A desire to stay on the course
• A way to monitor your position in relation to the course
• Skills to get back on course when you find yourself off it

Course correction is the immune system of the will, of our conscious.  An immune system on the other hand lives in the subconscious, but could serve as a great model for what course correction should strive to be. The immune system is an amazing invention of biology.  It is a system designed to protect you from the billions of bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins, and parasites that would love to invade your body and make their new home.

Rather than try to know every single possible thing that might go wrong, an immune system tries to determine when something’s simply “not normal”.  Rather than know everything that might go wrong, it just needs to know what normal, or optimal, looks like.  The strength of the immune system is obvious from the fact that, when we die, all of the things that it was keeping in check will basically take over and dismantle our bodies in a matter of weeks.

Think about this in terms of our own goals, and our own course correction systems as it relates to achieving our goals.  How many of us give up on a goal (see New Years Resolutions) the moment we have a single set-back?  That’s evidence of no course correction system at all… as if the first virus to make its way into our system was given full reign upon arrival.

The right course

But let’s step back a bit further. The body has a very complicated and balanced view of “health” that it’s protecting.  It’s almost always true that our immune systems are protecting us and trying to keep our bodies in an optimal state.  When it doesn’t, though, some of the most insidious problems result.

How close are our goals aligned with our optimal selves? A strong immune system that strove to keep us on the wrong path would be just as dangerous as no course correction system at all.  So, it’s obviously important to first have the right course (set of goals) mapped out.  That’s a whole problem in itself. For the purpose of this entry, let’s assume you have the right goals.

Desire to stay on course

Obviously, having a goal isn’t enough to get it done. You need to want to complete the goal as well. This is a matter of building motivation, interest, desire. Another mysterious animal in itself. A good course correction problem is intertwined in the desire to stay on course, mostly in the sense that it should help constantly renew the desire and not let it deplete entirely.  But to begin, there needs to be a pretty strong desire to start with. Every engine needs fuel, and that’s what this is.  The course correction system is more of a gas station along the way.

Components of desire:

• Passion / motivation
• Opportunity
• Momentum
• Positive feedback

Course correction

What happens when you slip from your goal?  Do you hate yourself?  Tell yourself that you aren’t able to do it?  Maybe next time?  Or do you start back up?  And if you start back up, do you have the same amount of motivation and momentum as you did before the setback?  How many restarts do you have in you before the restarts start taking longer to start back up, and before momentum has dwindled to zero?

Course correction not only needs to start you back up, but it needs to re-fill motivation, momentum, and avenues for positive feedback to pre-setback levels.  It needs to pretty much erase the setback from ever happening.  This requires, obviously, a pretty amazing system.  Isn’t it insane that our bodies are able to rebound to 100% health even after a flu or cold that had us on our backs for days?  Isn’t it amazing that we usually don’t have any permanent damage or lack of health after every illness?  Our course correction systems need to strive for this same level of competence.

Our immune systems don’t get demoralized because perfect health hasn’t been 100% achieved. They have almost no emotional response to failure at all, something that we as goal strivers don’t have the luxury of having.

What you need to course correct effectively

You need a lot of energy. The energy needs to come from a calm, strong place, and not leave resentment or martyr syndrome in its wake.  You need to be healthy, and have ways to motivate yourself that are sustainable over long periods of time.  You need to be easy on yourself, able to forgive yourself quickly for slip-ups–the best way to do this is to be sure that your motivations are good and pure, and that you aren’t selling yourself, or anyone else, short.  You need to find ways of getting positive feedback for your work, as that helps generate more motivation and energy to replenish what has been spent.  On top of it all, you need to enjoy the ride.

In some ways, it feels like we need to be superhuman.  But remember this, even our immune systems will eventually fail.  We don’t live in a perfectly sealed container where energy is endlessly replenishable and nothing ever takes on any wear.  We are finite creatures of motivation, will, and health, and all we can do is our best, and that will need to be enough.

Components of a healthy course correction system:

• Energy from positive feedback, enjoyment
• Well-balanced so nothing is needlessly drained to the point of burning out or poisoning you
• No guilt or self-beating-up over mistakes and setbacks
• Embrace that it’s all in flux, constantly changing, and ultimately its own reward and nothing more
• Easy on yourself, quick to forgive

Thoughts?

Frantic energy comes from sugar, alcohol, stress, fear, deadlines, rivalries, and anger. Calm energy comes from a healthy diet, an exercise routine, enough sleep, good intentions and a clear plan.  They are two ways of gaining that shy doe of motivation.

Frantic energy is quick, cheap, and strong.  Calm energy is slow to build, expensive, and easy to lose.

Almost all of my motivation comes from frantic energy. I bet others are pretty similar to me in this. Nothing motivates like a deadline, nothing gets you working hard like a bill you have to pay off.

But what are the trade-offs of frantic energy?  I’m guessing that the primary one is health.  Burning frantic energy all day long will create pollutants that have repercussions in your long-term health. The hope is that you will reach some kind of big reward before all the frantic energy pollutants kill you. And many people do reach that point, and are able to retire, or at least calm down, or else just burn out and change courses at some point when it is no longer seen as worth it.

Calm energy is difficult to find because it’s not a matter of pulling a single lever, like the coffee lever or the deadline lever, or the beat the competitors lever.  Calm energy requires that a whole system be in good working order: health, clarity of mind, good intention, ability to enjoy good things when they come along, etc.  Any one of those being off could cause calm energy to dissipate, leaving you feeling unmotivated and possibly unfulfilled… making the temptation for frantic energy boosts more alluring.

However, a calm-energy-system in good working order will be self-maintaining.  It will feed itself, it will be sustainable for the long term, and it will increase the quality of all of the systems that it relies on… making one healthier, clearer or mind, with better intentions, and better ability to enjoy the fruits of labor that come.

I’m not sure what to make of these thoughts, other than to simply say them.  I’m still a frantic-energy junkie so it almost pains me to think about this so clearly for once.

How many years does it take to find your stuff? That stuff that feels like it’s yours, that’s an expression of your true self and as much a part of you as your personality. It’s what you do, it’s what you were meant to do.

Once you find your stuff, be it a job, a creative pursuit, or a role in life, how often will you do it? How interested are you in doing it? How high of a priority does it have over all the other stuff that you do, that isn’t yours? The stuff you do because you have to, or because it’s easy, or because it helps pay the bills, or because it’s what others expect from you.

Once you find your stuff, how do you get good at it? Is it important enough to get good at? Do you have enough time to get good at it?

What about the best stuff that you do… how often does that see the light of day? How often do you do your stuff in such a way that it truly feels like it’s the best stuff you’ve done?

How did you get there? How can you stay there?

The narrative is the container for all the different stories we tell each other. Some of the stories are public, that the whole world knows, others are public to our social circles, others are considered private even though many people may know the story (it just isn’t supposed to be spread to others), and some are just in our heads.

We are very sensitive to the narrative in all of its contexts. If someone tells us something that happened, based on the way that it is told, it becomes part of one or all of our stories. The way we treat people is based partially on our understanding of the stories we share in common in the narrative.  Sometimes, a new twist in the narrative can change how we view all of the other stories in the narrative as well.

Our own personal narrative, which is part public and part private, determines a lot about how we interact with others. It is more difficult to interact with people who have conflicting stories in their narrative, without some required distance.

Each relationship has a shared narrative, the story of the two people. Friends, neighbors, co-workers, we all have the shared narrative, and we all obey according to how the narrative makes us out to be (which can be slightly different for each shared narrative in each relationship).

When something significant happens, there are cues to sync up the shared narrative about what happened.  If there are disagreements, sometimes each person will consult others on the side to gain support for their version of the story, and gain confidence that even though the other person doesn’t fully agree, that consensus says that this is what actually happened.  And by sharing the story with others, your shared narrative with them also shifts, and the part of the story that happened in one relationship now has a bigger audience and therefore more weight.

Things can get ugly around here, if people become too attached to the narrative. People might talk bad about others behind their back in order to make them look better. Or people might try to force other people to agree to their version of the story by telling it over and over again until it becomes, by default, the “official” version of the story.  Sometimes, the truth becomes obscured because one person or another didn’t fight enough for that story to enter the narrative. At that point, it doesn’t matter what happened, the narrative moves on, history is written, and the sub-narrative is shelved until someone tries to bring it back.

The narrative is fascinating to me. It’s a way of viewing personality, stories, gossip, fear, passion, success, and failure that rings true with me these days. It’s a shared story that has its own rules, rules outside of the rules of fairness or truth, and are more in line with the rules of entertainment, social hierarchy, and fun.  And it’s not all-powerful.  I think truth is still a more powerful entity, it’s just not always in the foreground.  History, in a way, could be interpreted as an eternal battle between truth and the narrative.

I woke up in the middle of the night two nights ago and couldn’t get back to sleep.  But I was sort of stuck in this strange nostalgic mindset where I felt removed from my life, looking down on it, and in particular comparing the current moment to various moments in the past.  It was weird.  Does that ever happen to you?

I believe in the Hedonic treadmill concept (first introduced to me by Cameron Marlow way back when).  It’s basically that regardless of the current situation, good times, bad times, etc, that you’ll eventually return to the same baseline level of happiness that is your, for whatever reason, equilibrium.  That equilibrium varies person to person based on genetics, temperament, and whatever other factors factor in.

I also believe that people can make slow progress with moving their equilibrium up or down, either intentionally or accidentally.  Not with specific events, but with a gradual shift in mindset, lifestyle, health, and factors out of our control.  That’s why I’m so interested in the Track Your Happiness project, the big vision is to create tools that help you learn which shifts in lifestyle are the most effective and correlated contributors to your happiness.

That said, I was surprised at how much my life has changed in the last couple years, and how completely happier I feel now that a few things have changed.  For one, I’m in an amazing relationship.  For another, I’m getting my financial situation in order.  For another, I don’t have a ton of responsibility other than to myself, my wife, and our future.  It’s a much more stable place, and I think it has had a tremendous impact on my stress levels and my base happiness levels.

Which just sort of proves an obvious theory: that long-term intense stress has an impact on baseline happiness.  Or, actually, maybe it’s not that direct.  Maybe stress merely impacts your calmness.  And calmness is one element of happiness… not necessarily creating it, but, along with energy, focus, and enjoyment, allowing happiness to happen.

I do my best to avoid multi-tasking during work by closing email, Twitter, and social networking notifications for a 4 hour block each day, and trying to “do meaningful work” in two different chunks of time (around 2 hours each).  They can be for the same or different projects, but they have to be one at a time.

I have a wiki page open, titled with the date, that I jot in any thoughts that can’t resolve themselves.  This is my best defense against multi-tasking.  Rather than switching tasks, I simply unload the multi-thought into a text box and let it simmer in there while I return to the work at hand.

But now I’m learning that multi-tasking isn’t really the enemy.  It’s the multi-thinking that is almost impossible to avoid, and which multiplies exponentially as the number of projects increase.

Sometimes while writing in the daily pages dump that I do every day I try to write and wait for multi-thinking to try to distract me.  It could be checking my phone, or it could be checking email, or it could be thinking about a separate project than the one I’m working on.  It’s weird how itchy I get to switch projects or chase a distraction when that impulse comes.  It’s very physical, like a mini-shock of tingles that can only be defended against by chasing down the distraction.

It occurred to me that this mini-shock of tingles is our subconscious.  The whisper of our bottom-of-the-ocean brain sending up a command.  It sends the somewhat mindless command with an Inspector Gadget-like time bomb attached.  Obey this command or this message will self-destruct.

The subconscious is also good friends with the Lizard Brain.  If I disobey, the Lizard Brain wakes up and starts asking why I’m wasting time.  Why I’m not getting things done.

I remember reading Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, which was all about the million different modules that exist in our brain just below the level of consciousness.  Processing, repeating, instigating, reacting, attacking, defending, etc. This is like that. If only I could articulate better this little dance that constantly goes on between the conscious and subconscious minds.  If only we knew just how controlled we are by the impulses and the punishments and the rewards that our subconscious minds give us.  Not only that but I don’t even hold a grudge towards my brain for doing this… I blame myself.  Of course, now I sound like a schizophrenic talking about my subconscious brain as separate from myself.

Does it really matter that we have so little control?  Is control over-rated?  Is it inevitable that we need to delegate so much of our mind’s activity to this underground current of mindless responses and reactions and repetitions?  Without that structure of immense complexity constantly churning away below consciousness, we’d never be able to get anything done, we’d never be able to find a pattern, or know how to respond to something that we’ve experienced before, or learn.  Do we have to choose between being in control and being productive?

Does your life have meaning? Does your day have meaning? Where does it come from? Were you born with it, was it given to you, did you find it, or did you make it?

What is meaning anyway?

Is it a set of rules? A job? A mission? No.

It’s the juice from a story. Meaning is what comes from a series of images/words/sounds in a row that, together, produce a vivid story about your life, about your day. Impactful, memorable, intangible, meaningful.

Meaning is pure importance. It’s a story that you emotionally connect to, that you feel is so powerful as to have been permanently fused to your sense of self.

It’s a story that you may have found, but the meaning is something that you yourself made and fused to yourself.

Does your life have meaning? Does your day have meaning? How did you make it, which story did it come from, how fused are you to it?

You can share the story, but not the meaning.

What is fear? It’s basically one response to the suspicion that something that you want or have is not safe. That it’s threatened.

Fear is rational, in this way, because nothing is safe. Everything is always in danger of ending, being taken away, etc.

But is fear the right response to the natural order of things? Should we be afraid of everything simply because it will eventually be taken away or end?

Fear makes us want to protect. Hide it, bring it into a crowded area where it won’t get noticed, attack, distract, claim as yours, turn it into an absolute, forget that it’s in danger.

But in the end nothing can be protected, everything will end. Can we protect and enjoy at the same time?

Is enjoyment a possible replacement for fear? Isn’t enjoyment as much of a reaction to the suspicion that something will end as fear?

Isn’t the enjoyment of things that will end really the only true way to protect that thing, to justify its existence in the first place?

Then what threatens enjoyment? Is it safe?