Life of (f)Utility: Hacking the Human Race

Wanted: Mistakes, Regrets, Screw Ups, and Failures

I’m nowhere near ready for it. It’ll never be perfect. I’m kidding myself if I think I’m going to be a PHP/Drupal wizard in anytime soon. And I don’t want to make the mistake of inaction. So here’s a link to my “experiment #2“.

I’ve not at all had much time to devote to my “mistakes database.” More than anything else right now, I need ‘mistakes’. I struggled for a while on what to call it. For now, I’m calling it: the Database of Human Errors or “DOHE!” (like the expression made popular by Homer Simpson.) Please take a look and give me any sort of feedback. I anticipate that over the month or so, I’ll transition this blog to the blog on dohe.blogrlab.com.

If my vision is realized, those of you who are reading this post right now represent a tiny fraction of the total number of visitors that will eventually go to this website. As a result, I’m not as concerned with how polished the site is right now. If it remains ‘in my head’ - I run the risk of it staying there. I just want to get it out there.

You’ll find that on that site (dohe.blogrlab.com), I go by my real name ‘David’, instead of ‘blogrdoc’. Feel free to call me whatever (profanities excluded).

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5 inspiring themes from a kids movie: Ratatouille

I just watched Ratatouille last night and I absolutely loved it. It beautifully summarizes all the important themes I’ve touched on in this blog. Here’s a summary.

Appreciating good food

Our hero rat, Remy, who has been taught to eat garbage all his life decides for himself that there is more to life than scarfing down whatever he can get his hands on. He naturally appreciates the complexities of flavor and the infinite combinations that can be explored.
Related: Cooks Illustrated, Art and Science of Grocery Shopping, Michael Pollan - Eat No Food That Makes a Health Claim

Innovation vs ‘Following the recipe’

In an attempt to foil Remy and Alfredo, the villain, Skinner, orders Alfredo to cook a recipe which he knows will produce a terrible dish. Thanks to Remy’s brilliance, he avoids following the recipe and creates a new and delicious creation which catapults the restaurant into a raging success.
Related: A blogrdoc original

Rejecting ‘Generally Accepted’ Assumptions and Striving for More

Throughout the movie, there is a recurring theme of cultivating the self to an even higher ideal.
Related: Evolving beyond survival of the fittest

Leadership

Towards the end of the movie, Remy directs an army of his friend rodents to do all the cooking for the restaurant. Filled with the competence, confidence and vision, he gives clear instruction and masterfully orchestrates a large organization.
Related: The Jedi Mind Trick, The fine print on leadership

Inspiring Transformation in Others

In the end, the stuffy restaurant critic, Anton Ego, recognizes the brilliance of Remy’s cooking and is transformed into new life.

This last topic, I haven’t posted much on. As far as inspiring others, I strongly believe this single truth:

You cannot give what you do not have.

This doesn’t mean I try to be expert in all topics to give all sorts of instruction, but I do believe that when you demonstrate earnestness, commitment to excellence and integrity (the core traits), you will inspire others to do the same.

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To Laugh, to Learn and to Love

I’ve always said that in my life, I learned the “big L’s” from my parents.

My father taught me to laugh. At any time, I can give him a call and in a moment, and he’ll make me laugh. He’s an Elvis impersonator, need I say more?

My mother taught me to learn. As I was growing up, she always wanted the most for me, which forced me to push myself. And she also forced me to confront my weaknesses. I remember her saying to me, “Well, maybe you really aren’t that smart!” This motivated me to work harder and understand my limits.

From both of them, I learned how to love.
When I met my wife, I felt myself change. I did things I didn’t want to do. I had only known this behavior from one other set of people in my life: my parents. Countless times, they did things they didn’t want to do for my sake.

Seeing this pattern in my life, I then knew this was someone I could love without limit. This behavior is not intuitive. It is learned. We learn how to love, I think. It really doesn’t come naturally. Motherly love, perhaps… but between husband and wife? I’m not so sure.

Anyway… there you have it, the three L’s. It’s something I think about every now and then and it just gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.

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The Point of No Regrets

4/12/2008

On Feb 02, 2008, I wrote down these ‘accomplishments’ that I had completed since Dec ‘07:

(note that this following list was written 2 months ago)
1. I’m getting up at 5am consistently.
2. I’m 90% vegetarian.
3. I’ve brought my blood pressure down to 120/75.
4. I’ve started a self-help blog.
5. I’ve turned $300 profit this year so far in craigslist business.
6. I’ve started a tech support service for which all profit will go to a charity.
7. I’m consistently leaving work ~4-4:30 pm.
8. I’m getting back to reading books.
9. I finally cleaned out my garage.

An Awakening and Saying Good Bye to Regret

I’d say for years, every Sunday, before the week would start - I’d have this tremendous sense of guilt that I didn’t have my act together better. And then, something happened. I’m not sure what it was. I ‘woke up’.

Since this ‘awakening’, I haven’t had this nagging feeling of guilt. I decided that I’m not going to put off my dreams. I decided that I’m not going to wait till I’ve ‘made it’ to begin to give back to my community. It’s as if I drew a line between myself and everything around me and I told myself that I’m going to stop being acted upon and that I’m going to be the one in the drivers seat. The world may crumble around me, and may even squash me, but I’ll live every day as if it were my last with one key idea in mind: no regrets.

A Brand New Day

Once I ‘woke’, I realized that in order to get to that ‘Point of No Regrets’, I need to get my life in order. The list above just came naturally. I’m proud to say that I’ve added a lot to that list. Most recently, I just found out that I brought my cholesterol from 201 (6/2007) to 165 (4/2008) with no medication, just change in diet and lifestyle. I am particularly proud of this achievement since there are no shortcuts to doing this. Other than genetics, there is no ‘luck’ that I’m aware of. It just takes consistency. This achievement is the embodiment of what I’ve blogged in the past about correlations, minimizing variations, and conservation. Most importantly, looking back, despite my knowledge that I wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle, I forced myself to go to the doctor to get my labs done so that I could at least establish a starting point.

Forget ‘Mike’, I want to be like ‘Peter Parker!’

Other accomplishments include: I’m up to 17 pull ups and 30 dips now. (A few months ago, I could only do about 7 pullups.) The 30 dips translates to me benching 50lbs over my own body weight (currently 155lbs). I’d love to be able to press 100lbs over body weight. Getting to 225 should be straight forward. Going from 225 to 255 is going to be tough. More important to me than maxing at 255 is the 100lbs over body weight. So, I hope I don’t gain in body mass!

About the Picture

I took this picture when we went to go to a Blazer’s game. I was struck by the gloomy background and the lit sign with the even more illuminating message.

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The Engineer’s Cooking Publication: Cook’s Illustrated; Price of Rice

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about food and eating. Though I can’t boast about cooking all the time, I can say that I can do it if I need to. What can I say? I’m spoiled right now. There was a time that I did a lot of the cooking in the house and during that period, I was always looking for new recipes and techniques.

There is a particular magazine that I think is extremely good: Cook’s Illustrated. I call it “the Engineer’s Cookbook”. They do variations on recipes to optimize the flavor and quality. They explain what is going on inside the food while it’s cooking. Not only do I find it interesting, but it I feel it really keys me in on what are the important aspects of cooking, which makes me a better cook. For example, to get an excellent creamy bechamelle white sauce, technique is critical, otherwise the butter just clumps up. Cook’s Illustrated dissects it for you.

So Packed with Value, there’s no Ads!

Here’s another startling find: it’s so value packed and concentrated on delivering value that it doesn’t even have advertisements. This might be why it’s a little pricey, though it’s still a great deal. In fact, when you thumb through it, it looks a lot like a scientific journal!

Real Value

Yes I love to eat, yes I believe in eating healthy, yes I love this magazine, but perhaps most importantly: I think ‘Cook’s Illustrated’ is an example of a product which provides incredible value, especially for weekend-warrior type cooks like me. Everytime we have guests over (that don’t like Chinese food), I serve up the meanest bolognese lasagna in town. Satisfaction guaranteed. Having guests over and enjoying a good meal is priceless. ‘Cooks Illustrated’ is the ‘tool’ that taught me how.

###
From the sublime to the ridiculous…. has anyone else noticed the price of rice?!?!?

There are riots in Thailand over this. To calibrate the uninitiated, a bag of rice used to cost me $25. Now it costs me $35 and apparently, stores are rationing supplies! This picture was taken this past Sunday during my grocery shopping trip.

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Affluence, Softness, Decadence, Extinction

Sustainability and “Saving the World”

Tim Ferris just blogged on ‘Green’ Index Funds that are environmentally conscious. He comments that ’saving the world’ is too nebulous and I agree. Starting small is not just the ‘best’ way, it’s the only way. It is the way.

Starting Small: Examples Elsewhere

As a human race, we understand this (hopefully) now more than ever. Look at ‘the slashdot effect’ or ’swarm phenomena’ like bittorrent. What I’m referring to here is that when you add a bunch of small things up, the resulting effect is massive. In the physical sciences, we know that the macroscopically observed phenomena is dictated by what’s going on in the nano-level.

How to “Save the World”

We know the recipe for how a civilization falls: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. We see this pattern in the United States. Maybe not ‘extinction’, but certainly, as we have grown wealthy as a nation, we have also grown complacent and our competitive edge is shrinking quickly.

So when I say, ‘Run Lean, Pack Light and Stay Hungry’, apparently, this isn’t just a good mantra for daily living: it’s the recipe for a sustainable society!

Affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. - this is definitely going into my mistakes database! (I’m cracking myself envisioning some anthropomorphic person resembling the US or the human race, saying …”Note to self: avoid affluence …”)

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Blogrlab Results - the Brutal Facts

4/4/2008

“Leadership does not begin just with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications. ” Jim Collins, From Good to Great

(Note that these are the results for year to date.)

Experiment 0 (this blog)

Traffic: approx. 40 uniques/day (as reported by cpanel)

Net income: I’m excited to say that my revenue for this blog is in the quadruple digits. The only problem, however, is that this description of the income includes decimal points and, also - there is a negative sign.
-$40.00 (ouch)

Total amazon.com income: Again, this is another extremely exciting number I have to report to you. This time in the triple digits (including decimal points)
$0.17 (double ouch)

Experiment 1 (Starbucks Tech Support)

Net income: $591

Experiments 2, 3 - not yet in monetization stage.

Discussion of results

In light of these results, applying the concept of conservation of time/energy and concepts of correlations, you will definitely begin to see some changes on this blog. Perhaps the only reason that I will continue to post at all is that there is an upward trend of my traffic.

One of the biggest revelations that I learned from analyzing my traffic is that traffic will precipitously drop off if content gets stale. The biggest knob I found in maintaining sustained “elevated” levels of traffic was to post frequently. This hypothesis is further supported by one particular case study which I will blog later about. Unfortunately, frequent posting is not sustainable solution for someone not doing this full time. Moreover, seeing how I just received my biggest raise ever from my employer (which dwarfs experiment 1 results), I will definitely not be pouring more time into this blog. I must deal with the brutal facts.

As a final note, aside from just bad content, I suspect that there are 2 other primary reasons for the dismal results for experiment 0 (this blog).

1. Blog is still too young. Arguably also not in monetization stage.
2. Not leveraging social media

Clearly there is a lot of room for improvement. Any suggestions?

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Are You a YAC man?

I’m feeling like I’m coming down with something. I’ve got headache, I’ve not slept enough. It’s Friday, it’s 9pm, and I’m still at work. Leaving right after I click ‘Publish’ on this one.

In football, there’s this great statistic called ‘Yards After Contact’. It describes the ability for the ball carrier to gain yardage even after being contacted by the opponent. Some of my best moments are the times when I feel beaten down, barely able to walk, back is aching and I’m still going.

Yes, I believe that you have to take care of yourself and take it easy. But there is a time to take it easy, and there is a time to keep trudging along.

It’s a funny coincidence that today, I’m wearing my football shirt that I got when I was in middle school (1988). It still fits!

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My GTD Practices

Image of my ‘GTD’ sheet. It’s a weekly printout of my Outlook calendar along with Tasks and I can’t function (well) without it.

I’ve been a Steven Covey fan for a long time. So when I heard about how awesome ‘Getting Things Done’ was, I had to check it out. Despite a number of objections I have with GTD, I am overall extremely pleased with having read it. Buying it used on Amazon (4 bucks!) was definitely the way to go for me, since I like to mark in these kinds of books, where you know you will later want to refer to a specific passage for a nugget of wisdom.

I bombed through the book in 3 or 4 sittings. In addition, I listened to a bunch of David Allen podcasts and watched his presentation at Google on Youtube.

In summary, there were four main points that have stuck with me that I now naturally, actively practice. I didn’t really have to ‘work’ to make these habits. I was already doing things very similar, so the adoption of the practices took practically no effort.

1. Back of the envelope planning
2. Next Actions
3. Minimize your collection buckets
4. Contexts

1. ‘Back of the envelope planning’

As a (sometimes) overly analytical person, I’m often guilty of trying to get things ‘perfect’ or waiting till I have some time to set aside to ‘brainstorm’ the idea. I’ve now come to the realization that all that stuff is for the birds. Now, I try to start with a short list of whatever comes to mind, try to work with that and then go from there.

2. Don’t put non-directly actionable items on your lists: next actions

I realized that this is why so many things on my list didn’t get done. This was actually a huge ‘a-ha’ moment. So simple and so obvious. Once I started this, I got a much higher conversion rate on my weekly lists. Self-trust improved, as did productivity. The next actions are a direct result from [1] - back of the envelope planning.

3. Minimize your collection buckets.

Prior to reading GTD, I had a composition book for my car, one on my night stand, one at my desk, one in my backpack. My (erroneous) thinking was that I always wanted to make sure I had a scratch pad to write on. Now I’ve got 2 notebooks that I keep with me at all times (one for work and one for ‘blogrlab’) and I’m working on combing those into one notebook.

4. Contexts and batching

I really liked this since it fits well with my idea of conservation of time and energy. At work, I have two main contexts: in the fab or on the computer. I don’t find myself using this trick as often as I would like since some schedule conflict or ‘emergency’ shows up.

Postscript

Though there are many David Allen/GTD vids on Youtube, I think the one by far that is the best is his presentation at Google.
Acknowledgements: David Allen

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7Million in 7Years

AJC at 7million7years just blogged about this site and one of his most profound and inspiring statements is:

You gotta ‘need it’. Just wanting it isn’t going to cut it.

Herein lies the problem. I don’t need $7 million dollars in 7 years. I don’t think anyone does. I forgot to ask AJC what, in his life, prompted the need for 7Mill in 7 yrs, but I digress.

Ultimately, as we all know, money is not an end in and of itself. It is a means to an end. What is that end? This is up for us all to decide what is important to us. But let’s take this line of thinking a little further.

I am an engineer. Does this mean that I eat, breathe and sleep engineering for the sake of engineering? Though it might sound like I do from how I write on this blog, I can assure you that it isn’t. What is important to me? If you’ve been following this blog, or read the ‘about’ section, you’ll get an idea, but I won’t go into that right now.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Isaac Stern:

The instrument isn’t really that important. It is a means to an end. In other words, you don’t use music to play the violin. You use the violin to play music.

Here’s a man who transcended his brilliant musicianship. He devoted his life to championing the arts and connecting with people. I would say that on a grander scale, he became the violin and his life was the music.

Acknowledgments:
AJC at 7million7years.
Issac Stern (see video. As a side note: notice his facial expressions as he plays)

(p.s. By the way, ‘From Mao to Mozart’ is an incredibly inspiring movie.)

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