Category: Thinking

Do you believe in fate

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you believe in fate/destiny?

I think life is a game that favors people with ambitious goals. Some people may have better cards or natural advantages or disadvantages. No matter what cards are dealt, a person with a goal is more likely to reach that goal than a person without it. A person who works relentlessly to climb Mount Everest is more likely to get there than a person who plays Fortnite in all of their spare time. The Fortnite player may one day win a Fortnite tournament while the mountaineer probably won’t do it.

Here’s what I wrote about The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle on Goodreads (btw, that book was 5/5):

…excellence comes with the right kind of practice. You need to challenge yourself and keep doing whatever you are doing over and over until the brain wires properly.

Work hard. Be nice. Baby steps. Praise for effort. Self-discipline. Make it fun. Did I say be nice? Repeat.

myself

Another reason to be kind

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

I found this nice 2012 article on r/psychology about how our experience and intuition fool us into making wrong predictions. The emphasis in the article is on underestimating others and overestimating ourselves. It says that there’s no amount of knowledge about the thinking errors and biases that will make our thinking quality better but it can make us slow down and invest more effort when we recognize that we would like good results.

Not sure if the article is worth a $6 subscription but is definitely worth the read, and so is the main source for it – the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

The biggest challenge over the next 6 months

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

An easy answer would be some individual problem, like health, loss, or work. The hard answer is – dealing with uncertainty without dwelling on the endless negative outcomes. I need my imagination to be helpful.

People have come to many ways to calm their fortune-telling never-ending internal narrator:

  • Meditation. Whatever the future, focus on the present. Life is simple in the now. Ignore the past.
  • Religion. If God will take care of all of us after all, why worry about the future? Study the very distant past.
  • Psychology. Whatever the future, nobody can take away your past.
  • Capitalism. Imagine this fantastic new car, don’t bother with the other things. Go shopping for dopamine highs.
  • News. Be afraid, be very afraid. We will use your internal narrator to make you come back and buy things.

And so on. It is a long search.

The drop

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

In 1998, I had the privilege of studying under the old accounting professor Kosta Pergelov (may he rest in peace). He would love to sneak philosophy into his lectures. One of his proverbs stuck in my mind. He would stand in front of the full hall with about 100 students and slowly yell if you can imagine slow yelling:

Colleagues! The drop drills the stone not with force but with persistence.

I adopted that in my personal belief system. Perhaps it helped that Professor Pergelov would repeat the proverb every other lecture with his signature slow yelling.

Give the drops enough time and they’ll carve a path to the stars.

Partial rewrites

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Every complex software system tends to have sub-systems that are in the process of being rewritten but stuck in limbo. I call this myself the Hydra, although it’s a term that doesn’t exist outside of my head.

Generated with imgflip.

The subject of second systems deserves a full essay but while I sit on it and finish the books I have in mind, let’s enjoy this gem from Artur’s blog:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s law