Categories
Thoughts

Mindfulness Economy

Imagine our economy without advertisements. What would it look like? Facebook would not exist, Google would be a fragment of its current self, and for that matter, most tech companies propped up by VC money would be gone. Sports would only be seen in stadiums and played by athletes making minimal salaries. Media reliant on CPM would be no more. And that’s just the start.

We accept advertising as a way to subsidize the products we enjoy.

We sanction almost all aspects of our life to the effect of the attention economy. “Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging”.

How vastly different would the world be if we had to pay for things with our money rather than our attentions? We would be mindful of what we consume and wouldn’t by junk that looks nice online. Products may be more expensive, but imagine how improved they would be. The best products would survive by our recommendations to others. Real, in person recommendations. Not purchased reviews.

With our minds free from the barrage of stimulation, we could explore and share stories of our experiences. Maybe go see the world instead of getting the latest gadget. New ideas would spread by word of mouth and mindfulness would flourish as we place focus on our thoughts and emotions. We would become a more empathic people.

Businesses making products to better human kind would survive. Space exploration, solar, and entertainment would return to its roots with movie theaters, bookstores, live music, and Broadway shows. Writers will ensure the most important relationship is with the reader, not the advertiser.
And basic necessities like food and clothes would still be required, but stripped of their grandeur (stoicism) to their essential qualities: nutrition and function (with a bit of expression). Life would be more real and less inflated.

So how do we get there and how can it stick? Products should focus on real innovation and organic growth. We should not make something to get people addicted and hooked, but build a product to get people excited. Excited about life, growth, and being human.

Categories
Random

Watch me

I like this commercial. Watch me.

#notasponsor

Continue reading “Watch me”
Categories
Journal Thoughts

Journal

One year and three months ago I wrote this in my journal:

“I want to start writing more for my blog. I am going to start by making an effort to sit down for five minutes (at least) and note what I am thinking about. Time seems to fly by lately. It would be enlightening to have a journal of past events to look back and remember what was going on in my life.”

In that time, I’ve amassed quite the collection of musings. I thought journaling would naturally overflow into blogging, and while it hasn’t yet turned out that way, the practice allows me to focus and make sense of things. Today I began reading what I wrote. We’ll see what comes of it, but I’m already happily surprised and excited to continue.

If you want to connect thoughts in your head, remember events in your life, or track growth over time, take a snapshot. Write it down. Make the nebulous, physical. As time passes, you can go back and reflect.

Categories
Technology

Timelapse

Want to stitch together a video of GoPro timelapse photos? They are all in the format G00XXXXX.JPG (G0050192.JPG), so throw all the photos in a single “Timelapse” folder and use ffmpeg!

ffmpeg -r 24 -start_number 50192 -i G00%05d.JPG -s 1440x1080 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 -vcodec h264 DriveToDomaine.mp4

Sit back and chill for a few minutes (or meditate), and soon enough you will have a new timelapse video! Feel free to play around with the settings to your liking. This will get you a 1440×1080, 24fps, QuickTime compatible, mp4 file. #justnerdthings

Enjoy!

Edit:
To concatenate mp4 files in the same directory use the following:
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i <(for f in ./*.mp4; do echo "file '$PWD/$f'"; done) -c copy drivingTour.mp4

Categories
Books Thoughts

Three Questions

“Remember then: there is only one time that is important– Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!”

From Three Questions by Leo Tolstoy

Categories
Thoughts

If you want to improve

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

-Epictetus

Categories
Thoughts

Empathy

“If you believed what he believes, you’d do precisely what he’s doing.

Think about that for a second. People act based on the way they see the world. Every single time.

Understanding someone else’s story is hard, a job that’s never complete, but it’s worth the effort.”

-Seth Godin, Empathy is difficult

Categories
Podcasts Thoughts

A Riddle

"Do not pretend, if you live in LA or in New York, that just because you live in a diverse city that you are now protected. In fact, you may be worse off because you see things every day. Your brain has to notice [biases]."

Thoughts from On Being – The Mind is a Difference-Seeking Machine (Transcript)

In her talk with Krista Tippett, Dr. Mahzarin Banaji presents many hidden biases within our culture and ourselves. From how we view people differently on Airbnb based on the the spellings of their names to analyzing political events in terms of the human condition, Dr. Banaji wants us to learn from others’ perspectives.

With some context, during in the conversation Dr. Banaji presents a riddle:

“The riddle goes like this: a father and his son were in a car accident. The father dies at the scene. The boy, badly injured, is rushed to a local hospital. In the hospital, the operating surgeon looks at the boy and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.’ How can this be if the father just died?”

Think about it for a moment.

 

80 percent today of people who read this riddle do not know the right answer.

 

Got it?

 

Leaving it to Dr. Banaji, “the surgeon is the boy’s mother … Duh”

Think it was the boy’s stepfather? At first, Dr. Banaji did as well. Unconscious bias is everywhere, the trick is learning to recognizing it.

Categories
Thoughts

Finish

Finish what you start. After overcoming the blank slate, we need to follow up on our intentions and complete what we set out to do. Once we begin, progress is easy. We don’t have much to compare against so we accomplish a large proportion of our overall work. However, when we start making actual progress and we face obstacles in the way of our advancement, we must endure. Do not mistake iterative progress with fully realizing your goal. It is easy to leave your previous work behind and pick up a new task to feel the same sense of early productivity. After all, 80 percent of the results is accomplished with 20 percent of the effort. However, it is the last 20%, 10%, and 1% that counts. It is in these moments when our ideas become realities. Don’t stop when things get difficult. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but when it is ready enough, show the world, take feedback with an open mind, learn from mistakes, stick with it, and be prepared to continue building on what you accomplished.

Categories
Thoughts

Reflection and Boredom

“We’ve adopted the Google ideal of the mind, which is that you have a question that you can answer quickly: close-ended, well-defined questions. Lost in that conception is that there’s also this open-ended way of thinking where you’re not always trying to answer a question. You’re trying to go where that thought leads you. As a society, we’re saying that that way of thinking isn’t as important anymore. It’s viewed as inefficient.” -Nicholas Carr, The End of Reflection

“Sitting around with nothing to do is a great way to think about things that might not normally come to mind. It’s a time to bounce a ball off the wall or walk around outside looking for “stuff” without knowing what you are looking for. Being bored is what motivates you to take something apart just to see what’s inside, even if you may not get it back together.” – Rhett Allain, It’s Ok to be Bored

Categories
Productivity

The 4-Hour Workweek for the 9 to 5 Type

Tim Ferriss, author of “books with titles that sound like infomercials”, touts tremendous productivity techniques which can result in 10x’ing your hourly output (thus the 4-hour workweek, 10×4=40). He is slightly controversial in regards to a few of his approaches (who outsources email?), but many are applicable to just about everyone. The questions is, how do people who work 9 to 5 fit these techniques into their lives? Sure someone like Ferriss who only works four hours a week (slight exaggeration) has time to read 2-3 books a week and meditate twice a day, but how can people who spend a large portion of their time at their job work these teachings into their lives? It takes a bit of effort, but it can be done.

Start by retooling your morning. What do you do? Get up after hitting snooze on the alarm one too many times. Check your phone for email and social media updates. Skip breakfast because you need to get out the door.

Even if you are not a morning person, tweaking your morning schedule slightly can be easy and have tremendous benefits. Start by waking up 20 minutes earlier than you would normally (come on, it’s not that bad). The iPhone alarm snoozes for 9 minutes. Say you hit it twice every morning. If you wake up with the first alarm you’re pretty much already there.

Here’s an aggregate morning routine from a few of the guests on the Tim Ferriss show (Ryan Holiday, The Glitch Mob, Alexis Ohanian, Peter Diamandis, Robert Rodriguez, plus Ferriss on Freakonomics):

  • Wake up without hitting snooze (Ryan Holiday and Marcus Aurelius)
  • DO NOT CHECK YOUR PHONE (Pretty much everyone on the show)
  • Silent meditation for 5-20 minutes (Glitch mob, Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss)
  • Light exercise and/or stretching to invoke deep breathing and blood flow (Glitch Mob, Diamandis)
  • The following are common, but the order is often different:
    • Breakfast: eggs (Glitch mob) waffles (Ohanian) sardines!? (Ferriss)
    • Journaling (Holiday, Ferriss, Diamandis, Rodriguez)
    • Reading (Holiday, Glitch Mob)
  • Finally, plug in and get on with your day.

This may seem like quite a bit to accomplish in the morning, but if thought of as part of your daily routine, rather than things which need to get done, you will probably find it all rather easy. Meditate for 5 minutes, do 100 jumping jacks, and write down your thoughts. If you are efficient, you can fit all of this into the time you spend snoozing that alarm. Try it out, tweak the times, and find a schedule that works best for you.

If you take public transit (and can get a seat), the time spent commuting can be used mindfully to accomplish parts of the routine. Instead of sleeping or listening to music, you can write in a journal or read a book. If you drive as part of your morning commute, listen to a podcast which sets your mind in the right place for the rest of the day (it is not condoned to read while driving to work…).

The rest of the day:
Keep the baseline that while you are at work, you are working (and doing so at 10x your usual rate). But what about lunch? If you have an hour for a lunch break, take 10 minutes of that time to meditate and 10 minutes to journal. You still have 40 minutes left for your meal.

Night:
On the way back from work, try the morning routine in reverse. Read and journal on public transit, listen to podcasts in the car, meditate upon arriving home to decompress and take count of the days events. Let your work-mind settle and move your thoughts into goals for your personal life. And don’t forget to relax. Even Elon Musk plays video games sometimes.

Weekends:
Carry this schedule into your days off as well. Sure you can sleep in a bit later, but don’t deviate just because it’s a lazy Saturday. Start your day of productively and you will set the tone for the day to align your actions with what you want to achieve.

There are over 150 episodes of the Tim Ferriss Show, so there is bound to be variations to these routines. Everyone is different and you will find some techniques employed by certain people will work better for you than others. As Ryan Holiday mentions, find a person or character you relate to, see what you like about yourself in them, and use it to bring out more of those qualities. Also, see what you don’t like about yourself in them and use it as a cautionary tale to stay away from those qualities. In this regard, find a routine that works for you and fits in with your life goals. Pull from others’ successes, continually tweak your daily regiment, and strive to keep improving.

P.S.
Tim, how about you interview someone with a 9 to 5? Not everyone has a 4-hour workweek, but we are all trying to become the best versions of ourselves.