“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.” 

"The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words.

 This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward.

Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would from guaranteed payments. 

This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. 

This is why people would rather play the lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO."

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal 

It amazes me how much people will ignore things that do not work. They will just tune the problem out, and then pretend that is has to be that way, or that is how the people in charge want it to be.  They never seem to get the idea that they can change things, even though if asked or nudged, they will agree they could, maybe.

Everything changes, and since it does, you can influence that change, you can make anything change direction. 

It may take time, I know it will take work, and it will take disagreeing with the current process, and arguing with those afraid to change, but you can change the world around you.

People seem to wait around, looking at a big problem, and hoping that somehow it either will go away, or someone else will fix it. More often than not, no one comes, the miracle doesn't happen, and you limp along never making it better. People will often act like sheep, staring at the future with blank eyes.

I can't do that. 

I simply can't, and that means is sometimes hard to be around me, but I cannot wait for someone to fix a problem, I just have to make it happen. I am the guy who pokes a stick at the snake to see what it does.

You make a decision, and if it doesn't work, then you figure out why, and do it again. 

You have to look for opportunities for action.

How do you fix a big problem?

First off it isn't a big problem. That is in your head.

What is bothering you is that there are several small problems around you and you are not looking close enough, so you think there are one big one.

Look closer, everything can be broken down, and then it becomes clear and simple.  

if you break problems down into steps and then start solving them one at a time, the problem becomes less massive, and more manageable, and things change.

As things start to change, you can momentum, and suddenly everything starts to change.

Everything.

D

What I learned this week.

By the way, above is a picture of all the notes I made of things I learned or needed to research during the week. My pocket gets kinda full by Friday.

“I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.” 
― Louis CK 

1. I became convinced that creating and documenting processes for anything you will do more than once is essential to your sanity. To quote Rob walling from Start Small, Stay Small "It’s true; you can fly by the seat of your pants and get by, but it makes you a hostage to your work. If you’ve ever been a manager you probably like process and understand its benefits. If you’re a developer you probably dislike process or see it as a necessary evil. Startups, being lean and mean, seem like the perfect place to eliminate documents, have no systems, and no processes…but that’s far from the truth. Without process it’s impossible to delegate, difficult to bring on a business partner, and easy to make mistakes. With processes in place it’s much easier to sell your product if/when you want to make an exit. The fact is, creating processes will bring you freedom through the ability to easily automate and outsource tasks. "


2. That Direct Marketing is incredibly interesting. I have become obsessed with the Classic Old School Direct Marketers and I ordered 
a rare book about Chase Revel. I am learning niche marketing.



3. That Bridging is hard, and it is going to take me a long, but it will make it all worth it. My goal to use body weight training is going well, and I can now do  the full squat and I am ready for start the process for the one legged, I can do the full pushup and I am ready to start the process for the one arm, and that I have a long, long way to go for the one armed pull up and the full bridge. Best workout I have ever had and it requires literally nothing.

4. I am reading the book Willpower, and it is interesting that the minute McDonald's put salads on their menus the sales of Big Macs jumped. Apparently just looking at the possibility of a healthy meal is enough to short circuit willpower and for you to reward yourself. I learned your brain is far my auto-responsive than I thought, and you always have to remember why you are disciplined, not just that you are.

5. I am reading a book about Bruce Lee, and every time I think he cannot get cooler, he does. For example:" Lee did not believe in learning by accumulation, but instead believed that the highest form of mastery was one of simplicity, of "stripping away the inessentials", much like Lao Tzu believed in the need to disband all schools of formal learning."


D

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

I kept returning to something Ben Pridmore said in a newspaper interview, which made me ponder just how different his memory and my own might really be. “It’s all about technique and understanding how the memory works,” he told the reporter. “Anyone could do it, really.” “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” he said.

It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways” using the “extraordinarily simple” 2,500-year-old mnemonic technique known as the “memory palace” that Simonides of Ceos had supposedly invented in the rubble of the great banquet hall collapse. The techniques of the memory palace—also known as the journey method or the method of loci, and more broadly as the ars memorativa, or “art of memory”—were refined and codified in an extensive set of rules and instruction manuals by Romans like Cicero and Quintilian, and flowered in the Middle Ages as a way for the pious to memorize everything from sermons and prayers to the punishments awaiting the wicked in hell. These were the same tricks that Roman senators had used to memorize their speeches, that the Athenian statesman Themistocles had supposedly used to memorize the names of twenty thousand Athenians, and that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books.

 A trained memory was not just a handy tool, but a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. What’s more, memory training was considered a form of character building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas truly be incorporated into one’s psyche and their values absorbed. The techniques existed not just to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards, but also to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.

If rote memorization is a way of scratching impressions onto our brains through the brute force of repetition—the old “drill and kill” method—then the art of memory is a more elegant way of remembering through technique.

“The brain is like a muscle,” he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it’ll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It’s an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory—the proper retention and ordering of knowledge—was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.

Buzan was eager to sell me on the idea that his own memory has been improving year after year, even as he ages. “People assume that memory decline is a function of being human, and therefore natural,” he said. “But that is a logical error, because normal is not necessarily natural. The reason for the monitored decline in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training. What we do to the brain is the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes, drives to work, and maybe does some exercise once a month that’s violent and damaging, and spends the rest of the time watching television. And then we wonder why that person doesn’t do well in the Olympics. That’s what we’ve been doing with memory.”

Ed explained to me that he saw his participation in memory competitions as part of his attempt to unravel the secrets of human memory. “I figure that there are two ways of figuring out how the brain works,” he said. “The first is the way that empirical psychology does it, which is that you look from the outside and take a load of measurements on a load of different people. The other way follows from the logic that a system’s optimal performance can tell you something about its design. Perhaps the best way to understand human memory is to try very hard to optimize it—ideally with a load of bright people in conditions where they get rigorous and objective feedback. That’s what the memory circuit is.”

Those techniques have a surprisingly rich and important legacy. The role that they have played in the development of Western culture is one of the great themes in intellectual history whose story is not widely known outside of the rarefied academic corners in which it is studied. Mnemonic systems like Simonides’ memory palace profoundly shaped the way people approached the world from the time of antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And then they all but disappeared.

Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.

Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.

All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain’s physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.

One thing is clear, however: The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception—some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web.

In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a fictional version of S, a man with an infallible memory who is crippled by an inability to forget. He can’t distinguish between the trivial and the important. Borges’s character Funes can’t prioritize, can’t generalize. He is “virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas.” Like S, his memory was too good. Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true.

Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding.

It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” It occurred to me that this was a kind of manufactured synesthesia.

D