I'm Mark Bao, and this is read+reflect.

I gather, read, summarize, and reflect on some of the best articles on the web.

Two-sentence summary: The role of men has changed over the past 100 years, dramatically, due to increased security and relative luxury in Western societies. As a result, men now have no idea what it means to be masculine, since this is the first generation where there is no set blueprint; instead, we have the opportunity to define our own blueprint and our own reality, and we must.

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Mark was researching this question: is there a universal masculinity? Or is masculinity the product of society? Or is it a blend of both?

As it turns out, it’s kind of a blend of both. What we see is a universal striving towards masculinity, which could be seen as a desire to be emotionally independent and move away from our mothers, which results in “masculine behavior,” like assertiveness. But how this comes across is different in some societies.

In some societies, the rites of passage are tough and physical; in others, they are simple and relaxed. The difference, as one study shows, is that societies that are in flux, such as those that are being invaded or that need to protect themselves, have tougher rites passage. Those that are relaxed and have relative luxury have easier ones.

(In addition, Mark introduces the idea of assortment theory, wherein we naturally seek out and filter those who are of a similar behavior; party guys attract party girls, intelligent guys attract intelligent girls. The only absolute is that men must initiate, no matter what.)

Western men today — There is a crisis going on with Western men now, evidenced by the self-help, things like the pick-up artist society, and writing on the decline of the Western man. Feminism could have something to do with it, since women have now moved into the roles that they used to play (as in money and career). But that’s not the whole story.

In the 20th century, women suddenly had a lot more free time and a cognitive surplus, since homemaking moved from a full-time job into a few hours a day, thanks to technology. They moved from a traditionally set identity, of homemaking, to a more free-agent one.

The same applies to men. They used to have a career- and profession-based identity, from which they “asserted their emotional autonomy” and derived self-worth, but that is now gone. Now they spend a few years at a job, and women are working just as hard as them. Where is self-worth and emotional autonomy?

Take a man who had a corporate job and made good money, who went through school and catered to his boss and everything to make money. In the 1950s, this was ideal. Today, this guy would be considered whipped by his boss and taking the easy route. This guy is a failure “stuck working for a job he hates for people he doesn’t like for money he doesn’t need, just to give it to a woman who doesn’t need it and is likely to divorce him anyway.”

Now, economic freedom doesn’t cut it. Our society has relative luxury and security. So what will replace it?

A new masculinity

Economic and social realities forced women to confront and transcend what defined them as women, and now it is time for men to do the same thing.

Popular culture and entertainment show us traditional masculine figures, such as Don Draper, who actually have deep emotional problems of their own—and who could be masculine at the surface, but not any deeper than that.

Now, there is no single “masculinity”:

Created by the absence of our fathers, the futility of conventional career paths, the inundation of a feminized pop culture, this generation of men is floundering and has been for a while.

But the only universal masculinity is defining our own emotional independence and getting validation from other men. Making money doesn’t cut it anymore, achievements aren’t enough on their own, and those things that we thought were important are now not so important.

Enter post-masculinism: combining conventional masculism (dominance, achievement, sexual pursuit) without social roles or expectations. We all have our own rites of passage and value systems, and it is our job to define that.

The common denominator is that we set out to establish ourselves as emotionally independent through our actions. The common denominator is taking action as individuals.

This takes “introspection, emotional awareness, vulnerability, and a willingness to fail — traits most men are not accustomed to.”

We no longer have a blueprint for ourselves, and traditional blueprints have stopped working for the new reality.

Throughout human history, men always had a clear and concise path laid out before them. We’re one of the first generations that doesn’t.

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Fascinating article. I’d love to see more rigorous research into the role of men over the past 100 years and how it has changed, but let’s take this at face value: that the role of men has changed and now we’re left floundering to figure out what that is.

And it isn’t working at a job for 50 years and retiring, making money for The Man and bringing it home doesn’t cut it anymore—in fact, it’s the opposite.

Because we now have the emotional security and luxury that was still up in the air 50 years ago, and women have their own careers and no longer primarily do homemaking. (I wonder if this phenomenon of feminism has a) injected more value into the economy, especially with volume of money being moved) and b) has created a new void in those things that women used to do, such as eating out/cleaning/that kind of thing, creating a new market and moving the market even more. Also, what is the next step after feminism and masclinism? What will continue to do this? And will it continue to be based in economics or?)

So that pushes us towards being more extraordinary than that, but we don’t know how. Instead, it’s an open playing field.

Fascinating idea, and I think it makes sense. I think from an emotional perspective, we now have the scary opportunity to define what is important for us, because now society doesn’t. And we are confused because we don’t know what’s “right” to do, when in fact it’s important that we just do something to show that we are emotionally independent.

Luckily, that means we have to develop new traits that make us better humans, like introspection and willingness to fail and reflection, something that we haven’t done. And this is important, since this means we are continuing to transcend evolutionary necessities, and now we are developing more levels of abstraction on top of the “lizard brain” that we already have.

I think this is a mark of us becoming better as a human race, for that result: that this is forcing us to really define who we are and want to be, and in the process we are learning important things that make us better people.

Two sentence summary — Joy and pleasure are quite different, and sometimes, joy isn’t very pleasurable. Joy is a completely different emotion entirely, something that makes you feel like you’re running on emotions, and, well, it’s kind of hard to explain.

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Zadie Smith talks about the difference between pleasure and joy. She says that she has a lot of pleasurable experiences, and she seems to have them a lot during the day. Food is the thing that brings her a lot of pleasure (me too. —M)

But she’s only experienced joy maybe six times in her life. Each time, she tried to “forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.”

One example was when she was on ecstasy at the Fabric club in London back in 1999. She was all in a mess when she met a skinny pillhead who was a kind and funny and all-around awesome person, while they danced in the crazy club and felt that joy of the amazing moment they had.

Pleasure is something that you experience. But it seems like joy is something you’re pulled into. Joy takes you over. Joy isn’t pleasure; it’s something else entirely.

A beach holiday is a pleasure. A new dress is a pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy, or some small piece of joy, with all these other hundreds of people who were also a part of joy.

But then the day after came, and the joy seemed shattered. The amazing “jester spirit-animal savior person” was just another skinny pillhead and the joy was gone.

Even still, it was a good experience to have. Joy happens, and it’s good to realize when it has.

Julian Barnes, on mourning:

It hurts just as much as it is worth.

What a crazy deal. Pleasure can be replaced by pleasure, but we shouldn’t sensibly choose joy. Should we?

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It seems like pleasure is experiences that make you smile, and joy is something completely different. It seems to me that joy is kind of like pleasure, but something that is of a longer length, and it’s something that’s pleasing on a significant level. In that, joy is a different animal than pleasure; it’s more like satisfaction. And inside that joy, there are many, many more emotions than pleasure.

I guess what is important is your realization of this joy. What makes you think it so? What makes it so different? The combination of emotions and the environment you’re in at the moment? At what point do you transition from just living the regular life, and then, boom—joy?

And what about the end of that joy? Why is it so bad? Maybe it’s being out of that joy, being out of something that you really wanted to last and when you felt like you were really living life, since we live for these moments… maybe the contrast is difficult to take. Maybe joy ignores the reality and when reality comes back, it’s unbearably real.

Yeah. Understanding this is very important. Joy is very different than pleasure. I think joy is truly this satisfaction, the idea of self-realization, like living on another level of life.

As for the idea of “it hurts just as much as it is worth,” I’m inclined to think this is true. At least, the relationship is there: how much it is worth to us is how much it hurts to us. The things that hurt the most, like love, or work that we do, are worth a similar amount, too. But I think that we should accept joy. Should we seek it out? I’m not sure, since the question is whether we can, and if we try to, whether that’s even authentic. But we should seek out joy as much as we seek out pleasure. To me, joy is self-realization, a self-actualization of our ideal of life, of how we think it should it should be. And we shouldn’t avoid that, because that is one of the most important things in our life.

Come to think of it, when have I had joy myself? Maybe 2 or 3 times, I think. The most recent one being when I thought I was “in love”. And I, too, have tried to mostly forget about that. I suppose love really brings about joy, to a certain extent.

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In a further email to Will Peng, who showed me this article:

Here’s what I think: joy is when you have a moment of self-actualization, where you’re kind of on a higher plane of life. You have an experience that you identify with what it really means to be living. It’s definitely far different than pleasure. It’s a combination of the moment you’re having, and the setting you’re having it in, and the emotions you’re feeling at the moment, that create a kind of satisfaction about the moment. Not everything is pleasurable in that moment, and you kind of accept that, but you really feel satisfaction with the whole of the moment you’re in.

That’s kind of what I came up with while trying to study my own few experiences of joy, and what they meant and how they felt. So yeah.

I thought the quote at the end was interesting as well, that “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” You thought it might not be exactly the same, but I think the relationship is there; the more it hurts you, the more it affected you and therefore the more you probably care about it. In that, the fact that it affected you so much means that you do care a lot about it.

Why is The Office so interesting? Because it is actual management theory. Books consistent with this theory, the Gervais Principle, include Organization Man and Images of Organization.

Basics of The Gervais Principle

organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.

Hugh MacLeod defines the corporation as having three entities:

In the Gervais Principle, their roles are as follows:

• Sociopaths: the capitalized group that drive an organization’s function.
  
  
• Clueless: those that devote themselves to the organization and exist in middle management.
  
  
• Losers: those who have cut a bad economic deal (trading their capitalization ability for a steady paycheck). “They’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability… They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create.” They can either become Clueless, Sociopath, or stay a work-just-enough Loser.

Their timing into a company is as follows:

• Sociopaths: enter and leave when they want, and execute plans to get on top. “The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages, where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive.”
  
  
• Losers: they seek happiness and good living, and enter and exit reactively. They don’t have a loyalty to the firm, but they do have a loyalty to other people.
  
  
• Clueless: they do not become part of the labor economy freely, and are loyal to the firm. They hang on to the idealized visions of the firm and stay with it longer than others.

The lifecycle of an organization in this fashion is as follows:

1. Sociopaths create the organization.
2. Sociopaths recruit Losers to get stuff done.
3. Sociopaths convert Losers to Clueless to keep the company going (and for more reasons like to take the blame for hard decisions.)
4. Sociopaths and Losers hit diminishing returns and leave.
5. Clueless remain as company goes towards end-of-life.

Versus other management principles

The Peter Principle says that all people are promoted up to their level of incompetence. But this doesn’t happen in reality.

Scott Adams says the Dilbert principle works better: the least-competent employees are promoted to middle management to limit potential damage by those middle management employees. Also untrue, when tested against Gervais. The most competent are promoted to the middle management.

The animation of The Gervais Principle

How do the dynamics work in this system? Let’s take the average Loser.

One thing that Losers do is overwork themselves, even though they’re not being paid relative to their economic worth.

The simple reason is that if you over-perform at the Loser level, it is clear that you are an idiot. You’ve already made a bad bargain, and now you’re delivering more value than you need to, making your bargain even worse.  Unless you very quickly demonstrate that you know your own value by successfully negotiating more money and/or power, you are marked out as an exploitable clueless Loser.

You might be competent, but you show evidence that you’re exploitable. So you turn into Clueless, where you are exploited as middle management, now even more valuable because you’ve demonstrated that you are clueless:

A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, where the average, rationally-disengaged Loser will do.

Otherwise, there are two other methods to take: take steps to move up to the Sociopath level, or stay a Loser and do the minimal amount of work possible.

Ryan, the intern in the show, decides to move up. “The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one… He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit.”

Stanley, a Loser that intends to stay that way, “acts according to a mix of self-preservation and minimum-effort coasting instincts” by continuing to be a Loser with the minimum work possible.

When the boss of Clueless Michael Scott is fired, we learn that he’s not put up for that Sociopath position. He isn’t even considered, since he’s a Clueless. However, Ryan, with ambitions to be a Sociopath, positions himself for that position.

Why is this all necessary?

The Sociopaths know that the only way to make an organization capable of survival is to buffer the intense chemistry between the producer-Losers and the leader-Sociopaths with enough Clueless padding in the middle to mitigate the risks of business. Without it, the company would explode like a nuclear bomb, rather than generate power steadily like a reactor.

The average-performing, mostly-disengaged Losers can create diminishing-margins profitability, but not sustainable performance or growth.  You need a steady supply of Sociopaths for that, and you cannot waste time moving them slowly up the ranks, especially since the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed.

What are the characteristics of the Clueless?

The clueless have apparent success, so they have to somehow explain it. The result is that they believe steadfast in the organization, and set up this mini-world, a theater of delusions. And others play along in this world, either out of kindness or just indifference. Lastly, to keep this all up, they require a lot of validation to keep it all going, and when they get it, they hang on to it.

Putting it all together

• Losers either realize the bad economic bargain and underperform and pivot for upward mobility (Sociopath), realize it and slack off just enough to get work done (self-aware slacker), or don’t realize the bad economic bargain and over-work themselves (Clueless in the making).
  
  
• Clueless are the ones that can be exploited because they aren’t aware of the bad economic bargain they’ve made. As a Loser, with a bad economic bargain (speaking in capitalistic terms), they over-performed, making a bad bargain worse. Thus, they’re clueless, and can be used as pawns by the Sociopaths to buffer between the doing-stuff Losers and the controlling-stuff Sociopaths, and they become attached to the company. They are more useful here than as bottom-feeding Losers, since they can take the blame away from Sociopaths, blame that just comes as risk of business.
  
  
• Sociopaths drive the promotion of certain enlightened Losers, who they recognize are aware of the bad economic bargain. They also promote over-performing Losers to Clueless levels, in middle management, where they become steadfastly attached to the company, and can be used as pawns by the Sociopaths to make difficult decisions for the company and drive marginal returns.

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This is an incredible theory of management that totally turns my idea of management on its head. The main thing at play here is that every person has a different idea of where they stand on the capitalistic scale. It’s a decision for how you want to live your life.

Are they inclined to fully capitalize themselves, while potentially sacrificing loyalty to others and be ruthless in management? And see the bad economic bargain of freedom for a paycheck impossible? Sociopath is the way to go there.

But are they, instead, inclined to live a good life, chase happiness, but realize that this might require them to trade their freedom from a paycheck? Then they are a Loser, and they lose in the sense of leveraging their capitalistic ability and instead trade freedom for a paycheck. And the ones that continue to be slacker Losers continue to make this trade and are apparently happy with it.

All societies need both. But the third class of Clueless is created by the Sociopaths to get further, to protect themselves from the randomness and risks of doing business by using the Clueless to buffer them between the masses. They know that risks happen with businesses: layoffs and re-orgs happen, projects fail, and everything like that—how do they optimally execute the things that they need to do? Preferably without taking blame for it?

Now that’s a fascinating idea. And this gives me a better idea of what “nasty executives” actually do. But I’m not sure if “blame” is the reason they do it all, so that’s my biggest thing with this theory. What other functions do Clueless offer other than being able to buffer blame between the Sociopaths and the Losers when the Sociopaths want to do something drastic out of necessity?

Lastly, it seems like the Sociopaths go by the person’s understanding of their economic position and how they should act accordingly to make a decision on who might be a good Sociopath. In essence, they believe that a person’s realization of their economic position suggests that they think the right way. I If they over-perform, they’re Clueless and their non-awareness of their decision bleeds into their work too. If they under-perform and are aware, that suggests that they are inclined to think correctly, and thus would make a good manager.

And if the Sociopaths are only breeding people like themselves, since they have the power to do so, then we stagnate as an organizational society. Now that is something to think about. What are the effects of that? Are Sociopaths actually the best leaders, or are there better methods of management?

I wonder how well this applies to the real world. There’s a lot more posts in this series, so I’ll pass judgment on it just yet.

The main problem at hand: we forget a lot about what we read.

James read a book that was important to him, eschewing the beautiful lakeside surroundings he was in, to be engrossed in his book. But at the end, he could hardly remember the details about it. What gives? Why do we read if we don’t retain any of it?

When we read some books, we might just want pleasure—but some books are for information, too. And what’s the point if we don’t remember that information?

He turned to a friend that knew a lot about reading, to which he posed this question. She said:

“I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book,” Wolf replied. “I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major.”

Books change the way we think, by creating pathways in the brain, making new networks of thought. As for the content, we might not be able to recall specific content, but the gestalt of knowledge (that is, the collective knowledge gained from the book) is still with us. 

This was very encouraging, and it makes intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time. As for the arts, I can remember in detail only a tiny fraction of the music I have listened to, or the movies I have watched, or the paintings I have looked at, but it would be absurd to claim that experiencing those works had no influence on me. The same could be said of reading.

And yet, if we’re reading for information and want that “gestalt of knowledge” to be stronger than just that, we should read closer and take notes and all of that. But that reading is with us.

—

Cool. I was talking to Dan Shipper about notetaking techniques and forgetting about what you read, and seeing how we can prevent that. It seems that it really does stick with us, which is what I expect—it’s in our subconscious, we can recall points of it (maybe with some assistance), and I think it does affect how we do things.

Just like if you watched the entire collection of the show Friends, you probably wouldn’t recall many specific episodes. Maybe the general storyline. But I’d argue that it affected you and your relationships and how you see the world. And maybe made you want to go to Central Perk in NYC.

But yeah, if we’re reading for research, then we need to be more meticulous. Taking notes, really. I mean, this is the reason I’m doing read+reflect.

Part 5 of Aaron Swartz’s Raw Nerve series. Raw Nerve on read+reflect.

To understand experts, folks studied them. It turned out that there were two classes of experts: one set that were actually experts and that could prove it to you (like chessmasters, who could show you by beating you), and experts that weren’t actually experts (pundits that weren’t better than “everything will stay the same”, or therapists that weren’t any better than the patient simply talking to someone, anyone).

So why are they different? The real experts engage in deliberate practice, where they do something, get immediate results from it, and change course accordingly. Pundits can’t do that since they’re predicting things over a long period of time, even though they try to attach qualifiers like “this thing I’m punditing will come true if, and if, and if”.

Many ambitious people fall into this trap, by picking huge challenges and chipping away. But over time, it’s kind of a joke: picking a hard problem is actually very easy, because you can put off the illusion of making progress without doing so. “It’s such a hard problem, but I’m making progress.”

So we have to set up small challenges along the way. Can my writing change the world? Start with your friends. Can I write software to change how people think and make money? Start with a few people and make a few dollars.

Self help books are interesting because it’s difficult to convince people to take their advice. It’s hard to persuade people. And when people read the books, they think “whoa, that’s great!” and not change their lives at all. Chris MacLeod calls this “epiphany addiction”, to be addicted to having epiphanies but not learning from them.

“Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default of feeling lonely and unsatisfied with their life. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”

So pick something that you might fail at, and try to succeed at it.

Reality is painful — it’s so much easier to keep doing stuff you know you’re good at or else to pick something so hard there’s no point at which it’s obvious you’re failing — but it’s impossible to get better without confronting it.

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One of the less to-the-point articles in the Raw Nerve series, but I still think it has some use. The idea about deliberate practice and experts is a fascinating one. I recently read a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which talks about deliberate practice and letting yourself learn tennis naturally by getting feedback. In addition, there was also an article from the other day that skateboarders are so good at what they do because of the constant feedback they get from learning.

So it seems like Aaron is saying that many people pick big goals and make the illusion of chipping away at them. Yes. And the way we prevent that is to set up smaller goals that are scaled-down versions of what we’re trying to achieve. Double yes. They are milestones that lead us to solidify the concept of “this idea will work” (or not).

And I definitely know where “epiphany addiction” comes from. And how it feels. I did do that for a while. But now I try to apply what I learn to my life, a big one being Zen Habits’ The Intentional Life. It’s one thing to read and learn; it’s a whole different thing entirely to apply.

And read+reflect is a big part of it for me.

Mastering your life is as simple as playing The Sims. But in this case, we aren’t the one in front of the computer — we are doing so in real life, and the Sim is ourselves.

Four lessons from The Sims.

1. Good decisions require little thought. If we want to get fit, we click and select Exercise. To learn more, click and select Read. We don’t need to think about what shoes we should wear or what exercises will be part of our regimen. Just do it, essentially.

2. Nurture your state. Not much can get done if you’re in a bad state, so make sure you’re in a good state to achieve your goals. Be fed and all of that.

3. Build selected skills. Select the skills you want to work on and say no to the skills that you don’t have time for. You can’t do them all or you’ll have little progress on many fronts. Pick them and execute on them.

4. The game is indifferent. At the end of the day, we all die and that’s it. But that means we should make the most of what we do have. So we must.

—

Love this analogy of life to The Sims. It seems like The Sims acts as a utopian system of life, where there is no resistance or, better put, no willpower to use to do something. If you tell a sim to do something, he will do it. No questions asked. No willpower is being used here.

But we are different. Yet, these ideas still are good. We do over-complicate and under-simplify the stuff we do. We make “exercise” more than exercise but research and reading and bla bla bla whereas we just need to exercise. Same with writing or anything.

Sometimes this thinking is good, but often times we think too much and defer it to later and the time we used to “look into it” could have been more advantageously used, well, exercising.

And yes, we need to focus on the specific skills we want to build. And skill building is like leveling up in The Sims. Just chip away at it.

Nice article.

We have intentions behind all the things that we do. When we wash the dishes, we intend to keep things clean; when we drive to work, it’s because we need to make a living.

But a lot of the time, we simply fall into the habit and forget why we do those things in the first place.

What if we repeated our intention before we did things? “What if you washed the dishes, but first said you are doing this as a service to your family, to make them happy, and as a form of meditation for yourself, to practice mindfulness? Doing the dishes would suddenly take on much more importance, and would cease to be boring.”

If we remind ourselves of our original intention of what we’re doing, we see the meaning in it and enjoy it more. 

A simple practice of intentionality: before you do the next action online or at work, pause a moment, close your eyes, and mentally say your intention. Why are you doing this? Is it out of compassion for others, or yourself? Is it to make someone happier? To improve the world? Out of gratitude for the work and kindness of others?

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Reflection

Lovely. We do tend to forget why exactly we do things, even if they’re important to us. Our brain settles into the habit and we do the thing at hand, but the idea of why we do it rarely crosses our mind.

I think the why is important, because sometimes, these habits can become tedious and annoying, and things we don’t want to do. But if we remind ourselves of the meaning, we can refocus and remember our original meaning.

This might even work with things other than habits. Maybe it might work for work you’re putting off, or a phone call you’ve been needing to make for a while. Maybe that phone call is to a friend who you haven’t talked to for a while. Thinking about the intention—improving your relationship with that friend and making both your days better—might make you inspired enough to go ahead and make that call.

This is a way to refocus on the meaning behind what we do. That meaning is sometimes hidden since we optimize our thinking to think about the what, which is usually “I have to do a bunch of work”, and less of why, which tells us the reason that doing that work is worth something.

—

Also, a nice thing that comes from this is that we have to actually think about the intention behind something, which can tell us whether it’s worth it or not. Sometimes we mosey along and do things that aren’t really worth much, but we do them anyway because of impulse or whatnot. And this might be a good way to filter those things out of your life.

Part 4 of Aaron Swartz’s Raw Nerve series. Raw Nerve on read+reflect.

Exercise is painful, and if we set out to simply avoid pain, we’d never exercise. But we keep exercising because we know in the long run that exercise is positive and makes us healthier and whatnot.

That’s a big difference, because this long-term thinking allows us to push through the pain, and the pain almost becomes pleasure—when we encounter pain, we know we are getting better.

Psychological pain is like that too. Things we don’t want to think about, things we don’t want to deal with, the most important ones seem to be the ones we avoid since they’re painful. With those things, the stakes are high and we try to avoid dealing with them.

He quotes Ray Dalio:

It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way. Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way. At the same time, nature made the process of getting stronger require us to push our limits. Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful. In other words, both pain and strength typically result from encountering one’s barriers. When we encounter pain, we are at an important juncture in our decision-making process.

So, instead of avoiding pain, realize that it makes us stronger. And when we encounter pain, it’s another chance for us to get stronger. And when we push through pain, we’re getting stronger.

In agile software development, there’s an idea which is: if it hurts, do it more often. Used herein is the example of merging code in software, where two different people worked on it. If we leave it for last and procrastinate the merge, it’s a huge ordeal which cyclicly gets more and more postponed. Agile says: do it more often. And a hundred micro-merges is less painful than one mega-merge.

So, don’t run from the pain. What really makes us anxious is the important things that trigger a fight-or-flight response. Instead of running from the pain, see it as an opportunity to get better and stronger. See the pain as a long-term pleasure. Start small, and just think about what causes you pain at first, then figure out how to attack it.

Next time you start feeling that feeling, that sense of pain from deep in your head that tells you to avoid a subject — ignore it. Lean into the pain instead. You’ll be glad you did.

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Reflection

Leaning into the pain is an extension of the idea of getting out of your comfort zone. The only way that we develop is when we go outside our comfort zone. And naturally, like Ray says, it causes pain. But the pain should be an indicator that you’re really outside of your comfort zone.

This “juncture in our decision-making process” that we encounter when we encounter pain is essential: it is the fork in the road where we decide whether or not to go through with it all. When we feel a bit of the pain that accompanies the pursuit of the task at hand.

I’ve been trying to adopt this idea for the past six or seven months of traveling. I think that we have to have a balance of facing pain and enjoying pleasure, but we should be leaning in one direction or another. I picked facing pain. And here and there, now and then, I decide to go to that city that I’m a bit scared of going to. Do that 6-hour hike that I know will wreck me. Go and socialize when I’m not feeling totally there.

And it’s such a huge part of why I’ve been so happy with my travels: because those things that were painful to do have also turned into the most fulfilling things that I’ve done.

Pain is an indicator that something outside the ordinary is going on. When you’re pursuing something new, it indicates that you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone. And we should be making a habit out of recognizing when we feel this pain and accept it, and even let it push us forward.

In general, I think we should cultivate a habit of being more accepting of pushing forward. We don’t have to do it every second of every minute of every day—we lose comfort, which I think is important—but we should also make sure that we are actually regularly moving forward. And maybe then, if we do that, and if we lean into the pain, we can spend time becoming better people instead of running away from the important things we don’t want to face.

I can’t summarize this speech. You should read it or listen to the speech in audio form.

This is an interesting speech by an intellectual great. The main idea seems to deal with the concept of what we decide to think about, and how we decide to see things. We are susceptible to falling into usual, self-centered ways of thinking, and that is not a good thing, because we don’t consider things outside of that frame of thought. We are confined by it.

No, we should reconsider that frame of thinking and go outside it. Go outside of the idea that you are the center of the universe. One way is to practice compassion. See the annoying people and events in your life with a different perspective.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

And the thing is, we unconsciously decide what to worship. He didn’t flesh this idea out that much, but it seems as if we have experiences, learn from them, and those experiences affirm what we see as important. What we worship. What we think has meaning and is meaning. And we worship those things more. Money. Power. Attractiveness. Intellect. (Fascinating idea.)

So we need to step back and consciously choose how to think. Do we think in a self-centered way? What should we do instead?

And yet, I think having complete compassion for others is important to do—but not always the right answer. That person that cut you off might be in a hurry. Or maybe they’re just an asshole who thinks they’re more important than you do. We should be giving the benefit of the doubt to others. But we should also avoid denying that people are not always compassionate themselves and they are far, far from perfect.

I think that the true (or, as DFW says, the capital-T True) way to do things is to have a balance. We should consider compassion with people. We should show empathy and really try to understand others. But we shouldn’t see it all as

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

At the end of the day, the answer really is awareness. We need to be more aware of how we think and what that means for us—what that means for how we see the world. We need to have this awareness to, as DFW says, “keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”

I think I need a few more reads of this speech to really get it. I expected it to be more than it was. Maybe because I’m already beginning to see things in different perspectives, and that’s something that I’ve been actively working on, so it’s not as obvious to me as it might be to others. But there were definitely new ideas in this speech, some of which really left me thinking.

Part 3 of Aaron Swartz’s Raw Nerve series. Raw Nerve on read+reflect.

Semmelweis, a doctor’s assistant in Vienna, introduced handwashing as a way to reduce childbirth mortality rates—as much as 18% to 2%… to 0%. Yet, he was attacked by doctors and people published works against him, leading to him going crazy and being committed to a mental institution, while mothers were dying due to the terrible hygiene he was trying to change.

People don’t like to hear bad news of themselves. We do things and then we justify those things that we did, even if they were bad. “We hate hearing bad news about ourselves so much that we’d rather change our behavior than just admit we screwed up.” Our friends don’t give us bad news either, worried about the social repercussions of doing so.

But to improve ourselves, we need to look at ourselves objectively. What if those doctors admitted their wrongdoing? Instead of being ridiculed and disgraced, they would be respected for doing the right thing. (And killing less people is indeed the right thing.) Aaron cites examples from different sources, from Oprah to JFK, to your own boss.

We are more satisfied when people are true to us. A boss taking responsibility instead of blaming others; a doctor fessing up than covering it up.

But we don’t naturally want to see ourselves objectively. We like to accentuate the good and hide the bad under the rug and rewrite our histories. The thing is, we only know our own realities, our own histories. We see exactly what we do and the results, and we justify those results from what we do. But, when we see others, we just see the results.

Because of this, and because we know our own history and context, it’s difficult to look at ourselves objectively since we always try to justify the things that we did.

When we screw up, it’s for a reason. When other people screw up, it’s because they’re screwups.

Aaron’s methods for looking at oneself objectively:

• Embrace your failings. Be honest and accept reality. “Be willing to believe the worst about yourself.”
• Avoid euphemism with yourself. Don’t cheat yourself.
• Reverse your projections. If you’re saying something about someone, think about whether that could be said of you.
• Look up to people, not down on people.
• Criticize yourself, so others feel comfortable doing so.
• Find honest friends that will tell you the cold, hard truth. They are rare.
• Listen to the criticism, instead of rejecting one piece of criticism for five pieces of praise. The criticism is rare, and is important.
• Take the outside view.

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Reflection

Looking at yourself objectively is critical. We all like to kid ourselves and do exactly what Aaron mentions: being a revisionist and justifying everything that we do. It’s hard to get out of this mindset, but it’s essential.

When we look at ourselves objectively and honestly, we stop cheating ourselves and thinking that we do everything the right way or that our reasons are sufficient for what we did. We identify what we really are, and allow ourselves to change. If we think we’re all perfect, we can’t change at all.

Maybe another way is, when we think we did something correctly, simply consider the case that we didn’t. This might lead to lots of OCD-like thinking, but it’s something that might work.

We should be doing this regularly. We should have a practice to constantly see ourselves objectively. And maybe we should work this in our life, so that we can perhaps automatically see ourselves objectively. (But that might be taking it too far.)

Related: The idea that it is positive to be honest with everyone and confess everything when you’ve screwed up is an interesting one. That means that we have a certain disposition to honesty, a quality of honesty that we see as important. And even when people let us down, like, say, Oprah and her incident with defending James Frey, their actions show us that they are honest and we can trust them in the future. They make mistakes like us, but the underlying fact that they were trustworthy and honest about it is incredibly important and respectable, since that honesty would underlie their actions, whereas mistakes are just things that happen at times that we are all susceptible to. Whereas, if Oprah refused to believe she was wrong, her reputation would be damaged because that suggests that she has a disposition to not be honest and not accept the cold, hard facts, breaking our trust with that person. Just an interesting thought.