At tonight’s clinic, there was a lecture about setting goals and creating lasting change. It’s difficult to achieve lasting change because the reason that we are as we are now is because that’s the comfortable rhythm that we’re marching to. Venturing away from the comfort zone to make a serious commitment to change is difficult, but it is something that I’m sure we’ve all had to do at one time or another in our lives and it is probably something we will always have to do. The lecture led me to think about how goals work, how they don’t, and what things are important to keep in mind and I decided to write those thoughts down.

There are multiple goals. The handouts we were given focused on one particular goal, asking us to write it down, to consider what we would gain by achieving that goal and what we would stand to lose by not achieving it. Usually, when talking about setting goals, we talk about a single goal, but I have never found it to be the case that I have only one goal in my entire life. My life has many areas and in each I have something that I want to accomplish. Of course, this leads to an interesting problem: it’s all fine and good to want everything at once but I can’t do everything at once. What’s the best way to juggle the various goals that I have for my life?

Prioritize the goals that make other goals easier to achieve. My running goals are at the top of my priority list. I run two evenings and one morning each week, I’ve committed to changes in my diet and a morning workout, and I’ve committed considerable time and thought to figuring out the best ways to eke more performance out of my muscles. Promoting good health will give me more energy and with more energy I can accomplish more things. Prioritizing my health above all else makes my other goals easier to achieve.

As often as you can, kill two (or more) birds with one stone. This is actually from a piece of advice I read on Sacha Chua’s blog about how to do a lot. One of her tips for doing a lot is to do things that complement each other, so that when you are working on one thing, that work actually goes towards many areas at the same time. This creates a synergy; the things you do feed into each other and create a cycle of positive results. This is something I’ve actually always had difficulty with because my interests tend to be all over the place (and sometimes quite specific or niche). I have not yet found ways to create more synergy between my efforts in different areas of my life.

Set realistic goals that you can achieve in a relatively short period of time. One of the best ways to become incredibly frustrated with yourself is to set and commit to an absolutely impossible to achieve goal. It can be tempting to go for the large victory but you’re more than likely to be defeated. Over time, those defeats can turn into a negative cycle of demotivation. Instead, setting goals that you can achieve within a relatively short period of time allow you to create a positive feedback cycle. Your celebration of small victories motivates you towards more of them and the scope of what you set your sights on grows little by little. Before you know it, you’ve achieved something great but you were so focused on the process that you might not even remember how much work it took. Of course, the other side of this is that you should be careful not to set the bar too low. That feeling of achievement will be quite muffled if the task was so easy that you didn’t even have to break a sweat.

If it isn’t important, cut it away. Again, we can’t do everything. Achieve the things that are most important to you and cut the rest away. Time is a precious resource; there is too little of it to squander it on things that aren’t important. People change and so can our motivations and goals. That’s OK. Changing your mind to focus on something that is now more important to you isn’t a sin. This is related to one of my favourite quotes by Jonathan Swift:

“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”

Consider both what you stand to gain and what is at stake. It’s very easy to set a goal to achieve a particular benefit, but there are actually two distinct, basic motivations for our actions: gaining pleasure and avoiding pain. That latter part is sometimes forgotten. Yes, if you lose that weight you’ll feel more energetic and more attractive and that’ll be awesome, but what do you stand to lose if you don’t succeed? Avoiding that unpleasant result can be just as motivating (sometimes more so!) as imagining the happy result.

Those are my current thoughts on setting goals. I don’t think that I’ve considered my goals carefully enough since moving to the new city and perhaps that is the reason why I’ve had some troubles feeling fully content with the current state of things. Perhaps it’s about time to review my mental notes and see what I really need to be working on in the new year.

Today’s post will be a reflection on the writing that I’ve done this month, which will hopefully help me to continue full throttle through the rest of November.

Record ideas when you get them. I mentioned this in my previous post but this month it really came in handy. By keeping even a very brief list of things I’d like to write about, I was able to spend less time sitting at my keyboard thinking “what should I write” and more time actually writing it. Even just a bit of brainstorming while waiting for buses recorded into a text file on my MacBook managed to yield a couple of ideas to expand on which turned into full posts.

Write it, rewrite it, and then write it all again. I found that I would write one draft and then scan over it, trying to find ways to rewrite it to be more fluid. It really has to happen in that order because without the first draft, I don’t have the full picture of what I’m trying to express. Once I have that, I can work on ways to express the same thing but better. Even if I scrapped the entirety of what I was working on, the thoughts I had while writing it would still stay with me for attempt #2 (or 3, or 4).

Telling a story is important. Even in cases where it seems like there isn’t a story to tell, you can probably find a related one to tell. When I wrote my recent article on RSpec matchers, I added something to my usual approach to technical writing: I tied the subject to something that I’d experienced and told the story of how I was introduced to it. For my reviews, the synopsis section has been excellent practice for conveying a lot of story in very few words. I think all of these exercises have greatly improved my writing. They give it a certain colour that my previous writing just didn’t have.

Ideas beget ideas. It’s interesting how I would always complain that I didn’t know what to write about but when I committed myself to writing something every day, I started to come up with more things to write about. If you’ve ever wanted to blog but think “I don’t know what to write about,” it might help if you just start writing. When explored, ideas often lead to other ideas; you just need to get the ball rolling.

I don’t think any of this is particularly new. November is very likely filled with blog posts giving all sorts of advice about writing. But perhaps the best lessons are still those that we learn for ourselves. Some things are best learned by doing, especially crafts that require practice to make perfect (or close enough, anyway). What has your writing taught you about yourself and about the art of writing?

RAM holds the current information that a program is working with, but it doesn’t hold on to it forever. Once the program has exited, the RAM it was using is (ideally) reclaimed by the operating system for use by other programs. If a program needs to keep information for the next time it executes, it will get written to the hard drive or to another form of persistence.

I imagine short-term memory as being very similar to RAM. The thoughts are in your head, but they aren’t going to stay there forever. Even long-term memory is not entirely reliable; the act of recalling something changes it slightly. So if our memory isn’t the best place to keep ideas for later, where should we keep them? In writing.

The act of reading words doesn’t change them. The letters which were printed may become illegible but they will never change. The information that those written words encode persists, and is the same every time you read it. The written word is how we have aggregated the collective information of our entire species with the accuracy and efficiency that we needed to make our social and technological advances.

One of my goals for 2010 is to write more things down and stop trying to keep so much in my head.

I’ll close this brief thought by quoting a blog post I read recently about writing:

The amount of information our brains can fit into our short term memory at once isn’t a lot. If you never have thoughts that require notes, then all your thoughts are small or unoriginal enough to fit into your tiny short term memory.

Writing allows you to record your short term memory into a format that you can examine and reflect upon, so you can suss out what makes sense, and how it makes sense, and then expand on the original seed. When you expand your thought all the way into a piece of coherent writing, it becomes complete. It would have been impossible for you to have that size of a thought without writing–your brain just isn’t powerful enough.

@joncrowley: "I'm convinced that the key to failure is thinking of life as something that is done to you, rather than something you do."

It’s easy — comfortable, even! — to feel like you are stuck in a rut, a victim of circumstances that prevent you from being truly awesome, but it’s simply not true: you are always in control.

You can’t ensure the outcome of every endeavour you undertake, but you choose your actions, your reactions, your thoughts, and your words. Even though you command all of these things, you may still feel like you are burdened by obligation or paralyzed by fear.

Take the reins. Steer your life in the direction of your desires. Work hard to achieve those things which are most important to you as you cut away those things which bring you down. Don’t let life just happen to you. Your life is finite and fleeting. Be present and engaged in every single moment and wring out every bit of joy and excitement that you can. Unless you have a very strong belief in life after death, this time which is steadily elapsing is all you’ve got. Even if you do have faith, why waste time?

That’s what I think anyway, but it’s your call.

You can’t fix yourself.  You have to rebuild.

Take stock of who you are, where you are, and what has changed about your life and yourself.  And then do the things that will make you happier, make you smarter and better and stronger, and do them because you want to.  No one who is trying to fix a loss, or a heartache, is going to move on – if you do this, you are defining yourself by your tragedy.

This is such an important point that I felt I needed to echo it and add a bit of my own experience to it.

I’ve made the mistake of trying to “fix” myself. I’ve continued making that mistake for very many years. Jon explains that we can’t fix ourselves because we are simply so complex that it’s like trying to patch the foundation of a building. I’ve discovered that there’s an even more sinister factor at work when we try to fix ourselves.

To dedicate effort to fixing ourselves, we must first think that we are broken.

It’s sinister because in our well-intentioned attempts to improve the things we do not like about ourselves, we are subconsciously reinforcing the belief that our current state is unacceptable, that we are not good enough right now. Nothing could be worse for self-esteem.

If you are truly “broken” you will heal with time, just as your body does. If you feel that the requisite time has passed but you are still deeply injured, I would suggest seeking professional help to put yourself firmly on the path to recovery (again, just as with our bodies). But if you assume you are broken, I challenge you to question that assumption.

My attempts at self-improvement had always started from the position that I am currently not acceptable and that I must fix myself to become good enough. But then I noticed situations in which I thought a lot worse of myself than others thought of me and it caused me to question the way I think about myself. I realized that contrary to what I believed then, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I am acceptable as I am now.

The lesson I have learned about trying to “fix” ourselves, then, is this:

Start from the position of accepting yourself for what you currently are, then figure out how to do even better. Do not “fix”, improve!

Self-esteem expressed in Ruby

It’s a valuable life lesson made incredibly concise in my favourite programming language, Ruby. I leave the interpretation to the reader. It relates to some themes that I’ve already written about before and will probably write more about in the future.

About a week ago there was a discussion about this on programming Reddit. The original poster, a programmer, feels a sense of inferiority because while others can succinctly explain the “awesome” in what they’re doing, he cannot. I sympathize with this sentiment. I love what I do but how do I transfer that passion without drowning the other person in the technical details? It feels like without the finer, technical details, my job description becomes distilled to “I make websites.”

Really? That’s it? That’s what I do for a living?

But is the problem really that what we’re doing isn’t interesting to the layperson? Web developers built Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and many more technologies that people use every day. We are building cool web applications that, while they might not gain the same degree of popularity or critical mass, can potentially provide just as much value. If we didn’t think that web development was an awesome career, a lot of us probably wouldn’t be doing it.

(And by the way, if you’re making money doing something you have absolutely no passion for, you might want to try and fix that.  Just sayin’.)

So why do we have difficulty getting people to identify with this?  Perhaps this comment from the Programming Reddit discussion might shed some light on the topic (emphasis mine):

Obnoxious braying girl: (To me and a friend) Oh, i bet i can guess what you do! go on, let me! (Obnoxious braying girl makes a few guesses about my friend’s job, eventually works out he does some sort of admin thing in publishing, polite words exchanged about this field) Obnoxious braying girl: (to me) Hmm.. you’re… a graphic designer? Me: hah! god no OBG: A journalist? Me: Well, that does sound like fun, but no (back and forth for a bit until she eventually asks me what i do Me: (in jokey, self deprecating tone) – I’m a massive nerd, basically – I program computers and make websites for people OBG: oh, right… (she stares down into her drink) Me: (trying to salvage this conversation) – so, and what do you do? OBG: Oh, i work at a corporate events company! it’s really exciting, basically we…. Cue 15 minutes of skull-numbingly boring monologue about basically being a travel-agent for corporations. It puzzles me though – why is anyone who doesn’t work with computers given licence to go on and on about their job (Despite the fact that asking people about work is basically a social nicety and not interesting at all to anyone socially), wheras anyone whose interests (whether work based or not) include anything technology or science-based are automatically percieved as boring socially-inept people who can’t talk about anything else? Fuck that shit – next time i’m introduced to someone I’m going straight into explaining recursion.

There are a few things that one could criticize here but the point I’ve decided to focus on here is the blatant self-deprecation. If you read the rest of the comments in the discussion, you might notice, like I have, that this is actually surprisingly common — it’s like many of us have been conditioned to believe that what we do is simply not interesting to a vast majority of people, so we might as well just say “I do computer stuff” and get it over with.

Alun Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist magazine, would beg to differ (emphasis mine again):

Science writing used to be slightly apologetic: [puts on whiny voice] “this is all going to be terribly difficult, but I’ll try and make it easy for you”. Like they’ve sugar coated something you don’t really want to take. Our goal was to really change that – change the people and the ideas – to be self-confident. Science often suffers from this sort of cringe factor – “I’m a boring scientist, you probably don’t want to talk to me”. My policy was if you’re talking to someone else the approach is: “what’s happening in science is the most interesting thing in the world, and if you don’t agree with me just fuck off, because I’m not interested in talking to you”. You had to have that kind of attitude. That tended to be the kind of attitude of people in the arts: [in snooty voice - think Brian Sewell] “Of course I am doing something interesting”, so I took the same attitude. If you’re not interested, I don’t want to explain to you – you’re just a fucking idiot, so get out of my way! And it worked, because if you write like, “I’m really interested in this, it’s not only interesting its really important. If you can’t see this, you’re probably a moron!” It works. It has to be true to a degree. Otherwise it’s just piped bullshit, or triumphalism or something. The thing is, it is really interesting and important. People from the sciences do often have massive inferiority complexes.

I believe that what I do is interesting, important, and valuable. If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else. And so, I will endeavour to find a way to convey that value and importance and when someone asks me what I do, that is how I will answer.

Anyone who absolutely can’t identify with my passion for what I do is probably somebody I really wouldn’t like anyway.

“When I get sad, I stop being sad and be AWESOME instead. True story.”
– Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother

I think that this is an incredibly inspirational line. While it seems kind of silly to take advice from a television show, I think it makes an excellent point: it is the times when you are at your lowest that you must put in your absolute best. Energy spent being worried and sad can and should be reallocated to taking action and facing the very things that are bringing you down.

And really, all else being equal, being awesome is much more, well, awesome than being sad.

Sometimes, it seems like it is impossible to reconcile self-acceptance with the desire to grow and improve. After all, if you accept yourself as you are, what reason do you have to grow? And so, we might compromise one way or the other. I’ve found that I push myself really hard to improve and often don’t fully accept myself as I am. But do self-acceptance and growth really need to be mutually exclusive?