The Routine Less Travelled

You know it's a bad scene when it's been more than a three week delay to put together a post about beating procrastination. *sigh* Oh the irony. Incidentally, I don't know if you've noticed how distracting the internet can be...

"But getting stuff done isn't that complicated." you may say. "Just stop goofing around so much!" Well first of all, that's easier said than done. Secondly, and this may sound silly, "hard work" is much harder work than it sounds. No really, you should try it! And I don't mean that one night you chugged twelve coffees and stayed up all night to do... whatever, by the flickering blue light of your monitor. I mean sustained, sustainable hard work that you can then use to "realize your dreams" and what not. It doesn't help that the media we consume everyday focuses almost exclusively on the result; the end of the race, the knockout punch, the moment of victory... the exclamation at the end of the sentence! "Real-life" is presented as a never-ending series of climactic moments, happening one after another in full HD splendor. Oh, and have another Coke while you're at it.

But then clearly there are people who have made something of themselves. Elon Musk, for example. Here's a man whose entrepreneurial journey has led him from founding PayPal.com all the way to his latest company SpaceX, whose mission is "...to ultimately enable people to live on other planets". Nothing cooler than a guy whose factory floor was used for the filming of IronMan 2, while also probably being the director's inspiration for the portrayal of Tony Stark. But what can us ordinary folk do? Clearly these people must have some edge, some special ingredient that gives them the drive and determination to accomplish so much. Maybe if I could just find out what cereal he eats in the morning...

But then again, Albert Einstein spent years working at a relatively menial clerk position in a patent office before he became recognized by the physics community. Athletes prepare for years to shave the merest fractions of a second off their times. Good singers don't become awesome just by doing lots of karaoke. It would appear as if there's more to the picture than just the Kodak moments that we focus on. While there's definitely an aspect of natural talent involved, greatness seems to be built from the ground up. The challenge for us seems to be more in consistently harnessing the little things rather than expecting success (whatever that means to you) to come suddenly in one big epic moment.

If I may, it seems to me that the trick is to figure out how much it's possible to do in a given day. Lets say everyone has a certain number of "Decision Credits" available per day. So on a day when you wake up feeling great, you have more credits. Or you wake up with a runny nose and don't feel like getting out of bed, that's less credits to use. It also explains that feeling where you're literally "spent" at the end of a long day. A post on the 'Four Hour Work Week' blog calls this state "Ego Depletion". Of course, all this is purely subjective; even some super successful, super healthy person probably has days where they feel shitty but the key thing is the concept of a limited amount of energy to put to use.

If that's true, then it would make sense to make to invest each Decision Credit carefully to make sure one gets the most out of it. At the same time, expend as little energy as possible on decisions that could be made automatic by setting up, say, an auto-pilot schedule. How that works is that you schedule repeating tasks on particular days so that from day to day you only have to manage the unpredictable stuff. Stuff like this is a one-time cost that then pays huge dividends in the amount of mind-space it would free each day. In fact a lot of the anxiety people deal with day-to-day probably stems from a feeling of constantly having forgotten something. And this sort of "background fear" constantly erodes away at your already limited stock of credits.

But planning isn't enough without knowing what to plan for. Here, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs might be of some help. 

Lets say that you're deeply concerned with making a name for yourself in whatever field you're in but you find yourself constantly frustrated by failure. Taking a cue from Maslow's pyramid, maybe your "foundation" isn't strong enough to support you so you find yourself struggling. Whether it's starting a business or even just learning the guitar or trying to take better care of yourself, ultimately some kind of support structure is required to succeed. So initially spending credits on the basics will then free up mind-space over time to start being awesome at higher levels. Even if your current situation doesn't allow you to take time off to get everything exactly right, keeping the pyramid in mind gives a sort of framework in which to make the best use of what's available.

One last thing to be said about routines is that it's sad that they've been so maligned and misrepresented, to the point where the very word has become a synonym for druggery and "same ol' same ol'". But Barry Shwartz put it interestingly in a Ted talk on The Paradox of Choice. While talking about the importance of having some basic structures, he used the example of a fish in a bowl. The bowl itself is definitely a limitation on what is possible but say the bowl is shattered, now truly everything is possible. But instead of freedom, what the fish gets is paralysis because effectively nothing is possible.

  

Final thoughts 

Ultimately all of this is about freedom. Freedom from worry and anxiety, freedom to do the things you really want to do with your time. Procrastination essentially amounts to a daily tax that you impose on your dreams. Tomorrow, if the opportunity you've been waiting for presents itself, you should be in the best possible position to take it. Weird as it might sound, it's the simple, normal stuff that we take for granted that might be the difference between success and failure.

“We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions in life - those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of life and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength.” 

~ Oswald Chambers

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
~ Anton Chekhov 

  

A word of caution...

With all this talk of scheduling however, there is a danger in taking all of it too far. After all, life as such has it's own inherent roughness and doesn't always conveniently fit itself to schedules. Plus, to think that one has any kind of complete control over life would be self-delusion at it's most epic. The important thing to understand is that having a routine is only a kind of framework and shouldn't become a thing unto itself.

“Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationship to man etc. Then he becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.”
~Bruce Lee.

Treated with a  certain healthy detachment however, a routine can become an invaluable tool to help you do whatever you want.

What do you think, what're some of the tricks you use to conserve "Decision Credits". Leave me some comments. :)

An Ode to the Curves of Sir Benoit Mandelbrot

Celadon Surf by ~mandelbrat on deviantART

If you've been around the internet for any length of time, you're bound to have stumbled onto trippy stuff like this. Well it's based on a branch of mathematics called fractal geometry and it's... What's that... you're saying you've heard about fractals and have had questions about it ever since high school? And what, you were just thinking how great it'd be if someone were to explain the basics and their relevance to everyday living? Well today is clearly your lucky day! Pioneered in 1975 by Sir Benoit Mandelbrot, fractal curves (also called Mandelbrotian curves) are rarely given more than a passing mention in school. Thus denied, the average barely-pubescent male must then seek his curves elsewhere... *wink wink*

But I digress. Traditionally, what we're taught in school is the regular ol' Cartesian geometry. We graduate from the doodling of our early years to learn about straight lines and how to construct them. Then it's on to squares, circles, rectangles and triangles. Then it advances to three-dimensional shapes and all their possibilities; not just spheres, cubes and cones but then conical-sections as well. Conical-sections incidentally, are the different 2-D curves (the ellipse and others) you would get if you were to take a katana and go to town on a traffic cone.

So with all of these shapes available, it seems like we're pretty much set to go out with a pen and capture pretty much anything on paper and so we did! We built bridges and buildings and skyscrapers and even sent a man to the moon! But over time, it started to become apparent that Cartesian geometry had some serious limitations when it came to describing the geometry of naturally occurring objects. So for example if you had to design a car you were golden. But what if you had to describe the way a tree was growing, or the way that lightning strikes the ground. Sure, you can draw it out but the point is that you don't really know any more about it after you're done.

Enter Benoit Mandelbrot. *Cue Superman theme*

"Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity."

~Benoit Mandelbrot

The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977), Introduction, xiii.

So when he looked at a picture of lightning, he noticed several properties like self-similarity (that a zoomed-in version looks exactly like the full picture) and scale invariance (the zoomed-in version has the same mathematical description as the overall picture). Basically there's no difference between the branching that happens at any scale level, it's the same rule applied recursively over and over again until you get the entire branching structure.

Self-Similarity illustrated in a lightning strike

This was a huge breakthrough because it suddenly allowed people to study things that were earlier dismissed as just being "too chaotic". Medical science made massive headway in terms of our understanding of the lungs (because of the way bronchi branch into bronchioles and then subdivide until it finally reaches the alveoli) and in the circulatory system (again, because of how chaotically it seems the arteries branch into capillaries) among others. Fractal geometry also led to a greater understanding of seemingly chaotic events and heavily influenced modern Chaos Theory. Fractals can also be seen pretty much everywhere because the mathematics allows you to automatically generate say, a landscape or a sea of clouds rather than having to actually model them by hand.

A landscape from Minecraft

(Side note : Check out Minecraft if you have some time to kill and want to do something that feels constructive. Or watch the minecraft-yogscast if you just want to waste time. ^_^)

I'm hoping some poor soul didn't have to sit and draw this all out. :p

But here's where it gets really interesting for me. What Sir Benoit Mandlelbrot essentially accomplished was to actually measure the seeming randomness of things, what he called 'roughness', and in doing so managed to create a new geometry. A geometry for thing that didn't have a geometry! Over the course of his work he expressed all of his various insights in what is called The Mandelbrot Set where as you continue to zoom in you keep seeing the same patterns getting generated over and over to infinity. The video below is a zoom down to the 6th-level mini-set, set to Jonathan Coulton's "Mandelbrot Set". Check out the lyrics btw, highly amusing. :)

What's cool about the Mandelbrot set is that it demonstrates that an infinitely complicated structure can arise from the recursive application of simple rules. This is super important, so I'm going to say it again: "...an infinitely complicated structure can arise from the recursive application of simple rules."

And here, i think, we may have been too timid with the way we apply fractals. We've applied the learnings of fractal geometry to a whole bunch of things but when we've applied them to ourselves we seem to stop short at a "hardware" level. So we're quite comfortable talking about how our lungs and our blood-vessels and even the rhythm of a heartbeat have a fractal construction (Check out the Music of the Heart project btw. Music from ECG recordings = super cool tunes). But at a "software" level it seems we haven't considered that we might ourselves be somewhat fractal in nature in terms of even our personalities. The truth is that it's a worrying thought that we might not be completely in control. But as much as we might protest that we are the masters of our own fate or destiny or whatever, evidence would suggest that the course of every life has a strong element of the haphazard to it. At the very least we can admit that we don't control every single aspect of what goes on in each and every day. But rather than let that be a worrying thought, maybe fractals could offer another way to examine our lives. Like if you want to figure out what your life might be like in the next twenty or forty years, take a day and just kind of walk around your own life as it is right now. Patterns might start to emerge that might let you glimpse the future. Or maybe you're not particularly happy about something in your life right now. Rather than something drastic where you're booking a trip to the Himalayas to meet with the Rishis, maybe the answers you need are right in this moment.

As an approach to problem-solving as well, fractal geometry might have something to offer. Say there's a particular situation you feel anxious about, it might not be practical to try to fix the entire big picture all in one massive burst of change. Maybe all it would take is to handle the littlest thing right now, and then again in the next moment and again over and over and to just stay watchful as each moment compounds on itself. Eventually a new picture will have emerged out all of the individual decisions. I read a quote once that neatly summarised it:

"Watch your thoughts, they become words.

Watch your words, they become actions.

Watch your actions, they become habits.

Habits become character, and character becomes destiny."

~Lao Tze

And again,

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

~Aristotle

And at a larger scale, if a city is composed of individuals then maybe whole societies could be analysed as having this sort of fractal, recursive element to it. I'm not quite sure how one would do so but if you could model a city in this manner then solutions might present themselves to problems like large-scale waste management, or poverty or health care or racism even, who knows! Anyway I'm not really going anywhere with this line of thought, it just continues to fascinate me how much Philosophy is present in Math and Science and how they kind of just blur together at the edges. In closing, I leave you in the capable hands of the legend himself:

A word before we begin...

A patchcord is just a little electrical cable, something we used extensively in our college labs to rig circuits. But more generally it's any cable that can connect two separate electrical or electronic or optical devices and get them operating together.

At this point in my life there are lots of decisions that I need to take and a whole lotta options. Too many, one might argue. Take just career for instance. In school I veered toward software and computer science. In college, for several reasons, I chose a predominantly-hardware based engineering degree in telecommunications. And now at work I have people suggesting I consider management as an option. As much anxiety as all these options cause in the present, the hope is that I can somehow leverage this somewhat wide perspective to do better in the future.

This blog, then, is an attempt at trying to distill all the information, experiences and ideas I've accumulated thus far; to take seemingly disparate ideas and connect them, and then start converting inspiration into action.

Also, 'Patchcording' seemed a nice euphemism for what others might take for wasting-time-on-the-internet. :p

Anyway, I'm excited... let's get to it. More posts soon. :)