Jakub Petrykowski blog

Methodical work as a habit

Methodical work leads to success. 

Methodical work means being disciplined, working a lot, staying motivated, persevering despite setbacks. 

Methodical work brings results, but the work itself often stays invisible to others.

My personal challenge - and in general the key to long term growth of any person - is to stay motivated, disciplined, to do the work on a regular basis. In other words, I wish to work methodically towards my long term goals.

It's  hard. Why? Well, I guess we all know the answer. It's tiring. More often than not humans crave rest, fun, relaxation, pleasure, peace, quiet.

Work frequently means indecision, ambiguity, effort, anxiety, stress. 

Short term desires are easily satisfied. Instant gratification is easy to get, especially when we have personal freedom, time and money. 

Long term goals, even if well understood by an individual, simply lose to what some call "lack of strong will". 

I am leaning towards the belief that this thing called "strong will" doesn't exist. It's imaginary. It doesn't have its own brain area. It's not that most people don't have it (but some do). Nobody does.

If someone is called disciplined, motivated and methodical, it simply means that he has a habit of working. This habit is stronger in him than a habit of satisfying other (short term) desires. He works more often and with more ease than he watches soap operas or eats donuts.

Working is a habit. It's a habit to choose work-like tasks and actions over non-work-like tasks.

As most habits in most people, it can be trained. I'm training it right now. Not sure how exactly - haven't found a single book on the topic so far. So I'm looking at what hard working people do and how they think.

I recently read a book about methodical work titled "The War of Art".

Now, "The War of Art" has two aspects. One of them is positive, another not so much.

The positive is that the book contains a great description of what methodical work looks like in the real world. The author calls a person doing methodical work "a professional". The book contains detailed description of the behaviors and mindset of a professional (as opposed to an amateur).

A professional does the work every day. He knows his trade well. He doesn't fall victim to everyday excuses. He understands it's going to be tough to work every day. He knows he'll face fear or anxiety of publishing what he did; he doesn't trick himself into believing he'll never get tired or afraid. He doesn't stop when others criticize his work.

A professional does the work every day.

I want to be a professional in that sense. I don't think I ever was; I was more of an amateur (inspired and agitated, but easily distracted), sometimes guided by fear (especially in school, but also at work, afraid of losing face). I'd rather be a professional though, guided by a habit of hard work.

So that aspect of the book, what a real pro looks like, was nice. A good summary of what methodical work is and what it takes to do it. (It's not free! Workaholics usually sacrifice their personal relationships, good health or other life opportunities!)

The other aspect of the book is spiritual. It's pretty bad.

The spiritual dogma of the book sounds so ridiculous to me that it was really painful to find it in the same book as the no-nonsense description of a pro. The author believes that there are gods, or God, demons, angels, Muse, "other dimension" beings all around us. The book mixes all this together in a "surely you must believe in something like this!" soup. Terrible. 

The author believes that all great work comes not from people, but through people. Where does it come from exactly? Why, obviously there must be some ethereal beings that inspire selected artists (the professionals) while not inspiring others (the amateurs). They reward hard work with inspiration.

I do not approve of such nonsense. It's a classic example of a human being replacing what he doesn't know or understand with fantasy that makes sense to him. I think that the usual case is that a person is so uncomfortable with not having all the answers about the foundations of the world that they accept whatever nonsense reaches their ears.

Luckily it is quite easy to skip those "spiritual" parts since the book is divided into a series of extremely short chapters (1-2 pages each). Start a chapter, estimate how many angels show up, skip if more than zero. Worked well for me.

I am now very much focused on how to build a habit of methodical work. Doing some research, but also trying myself. Building that mindset of a pro. Incidentally, I'm a StarCraft player and I watch Korean pro league; it's quite informative as well. These are pros like any other and they also work hard, starting at an early age.

It might be the habit that's extremely hard to build. Once I acquire it though, perhaps I could share the trick with others. Would be really great to be able to help others become methodical in their work -- for a lifetime. Imagine a society that is more methodical at work than other societies around. What an advantage! Or more broadly, what a boost to human civilization if it was typical of people to be hard working citizens?

Also, once I build that habit it should feel great and bring great results quickly. As you may have noticed, I strongly believe that it's learnable and that it's indeed a habit. Could be wrong. That would be sad.

It's going to be hard work to change the motivation to work from "I love doing it so I keep doing it" or "I fear not doing it so I keep doing it" to "I will do it now because I said so, despite really craving something else at the moment". But I believe this is what long term success requires.

Do you?

Writing skills

Most non-fiction books I read are too long, many are poorly written in general. Authors routinely repeat themselves, play with anecdotes and explanations that do not strengthen their arguments, or describe several nearly identical examples when one would suffice. I recognize that it is especially challenging for a non-native speaker to write well, and some of the books I have been reading recently were written by people for whom English is second language. However, isn't it the editor's job to help with that? And what about those many well educated, native speakers? I do not see a connection between the quality of the author's insight and the quality of his writing. 

Clear, concise books are priceless. I admire 37 signals team for their short, fun and informative "Rework". I regret that "The Black Swan" is so hard to read, because it probably makes many people abandon it or not recommend it to others (despite its great content).

When a book I'm reading is too long, but seems to have valuable content, I try skipping parts that are just illustrations of an argument the author had already made. When it is just poorly written - which often implies poor structure - it is hard to skip large fragments without risking losing important content.   

I realize I will have to work hard to become a good writer myself. I have always enjoyed writing and it seems to be growing in importance in my life. This blog is an exercise in writing just as much as it is a tool for recording and sharing what I learn. I am spending considerable time editing each post even after it is published. I share some of the articles with a friend or two before publishing to get feedback - a practice I borrowed from Paul Graham. I have recently read "The Elements of Style". I am now experimenting with Etherpad as a tool to find out a bit about my own process of writing. Here's an example of what it can do for you (hit the "Play" button). I also started reading "Thinking on Paper", a book about how the process of writing not only allows you to record thoughts, but also facilitates thinking and discovery. I welcome your feedback on my writing style.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I read "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A fascinating book.

It took a while; it is not an easy read, nor is the style particularly appealing to me. The message of the book, however, is profound. I feel compelled to re-read the book (which is very rare) to understand it better. I am also humbled: I want to share with you what I have read, but I am not sure I can do it in a way that will encourage you to read the book. And you should read it, so that you become aware of the black swan problem, and manifestations of the many other human-conceived (!) problems related to it. 

I'll only cover the main point of the book here, which is the Black Swan itself.

In short, all events in the world are divided into two realms: Mediocristan and Extremistan. 

Mediocristan is where no single observation (in a big enough sample) can significantly affect the aggregate. Height of humans is a simple example. If you take a few hundred people, and take their average height, there is no human whose height would significantly disrupt the average if added to the sample. Height/weight of people, or life expectancy, are from Mediocristan.

Extremistan is different. In Extremistan, a single new observation can completely disrupt the aggregate. An example is stock market. You may have a stock that stays steady for years, and than on one day it skyrockets by a few hundred percent, which makes returns on that stock from all time before that day (say, +75% since IPO) get dwarfed by returns from that single last day (say, +300% on a single day).

The author writes:

"What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

Black Swans are from Extremistan.

Most of our social and economic world is in the realm of Extremistan. Wealth, income, social status, wars, politics, success in business, book sales, etc. all have properties of the Extremistan. 

The problem is that people mistakenly believe that these matters are from Mediocristan (which is very strongly connected with Gaussian statistics). That lack of awareness of the distinction between the two makes people especially susceptible to negative Black Swans in almost all areas of life.

Now, Black Swans by definition cannot be predicted - but being aware of which area of your life has what properties (Extremistan or Mediocristan) can help you not to be a sucker. 

Why am I so excited about this book?

First, it has proven me wrong in a way that made me feel better. That is rare. Rarely I feel better after someone proves me wrong about something! I was not wrong in my absence of awareness of the black swans - I was wrong in falling for what the author calls "narrative fallacy", and in my Platonic attitude towards life: my general preference to prefer theories and elegant analytical concepts (mental models) over empirical, a bit dirty approach to "doing" things.

Author advocates empirical skepticism. I was always a skeptic, allright - much more so than almost any of my friends (most of which are otherwise educated, smart people). But I was a Platonic skeptic - basically, an idiot wanting the world to fit my thoughts rather than someone trying to adjust my thoughts to the world.

Second reason of excitement comes from the feeling of vindication. "I was right." I have always felt that people have no clue why things happen certain way, that most of the predictions people make are worth nothing, that people do not realize the extent to which randomness drives events, and that people believe too much in their ability to explain events. I am a skeptic, I have an inquiring, analytical mind. Most people don't. Groupthink, well sounding explanations, hindsight bias etc. are all things I had to deal with somehow, and I thought maybe I was being stupid? I was always able to provide several alternate plausible explanations for every one provided by my adversaries - but they never gave up, they were sure they got it right. 

The author suggests that I'm not wrong. Of course, I have committed many of the same intellectual crimes as the people I considered to be "stupid" - but hey, at least I am honest enough to now say that I don't know something, and that I cannot predict the future. I used to be a pure Platonic skeptic. Well, I will now rethink my attitude... and hopefully be more of an empirical skeptic. But I realize there is much more depth to my rather vague feeling that people suck at making proper conclusions from events.

I will keep working on the book; as usual I took lots of notes. The book is deep, and may have applications to most areas of life. Just reading it once is not enough for me. It'll take the time to really process it. I'm really grateful to the author. I read his previous book, "Fooled by Randomness", but even though it touches almost the same topic, it had less content and was far less convincing.

Some links:

• Nassim Taleb's website and Twitter account
• Wikipedia article on the Black Swan based on the book

If you read the book, let me know your thoughts. A big "thank you" goes to the author of the book.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

"Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert is probably the best written popular psychology book I read. It is funny, intriguing and a pleasure to read. Here's what I learned from it. If you want details, get the book yourself. 

We humans suck at predicting what will make us happy. We even suck at remembering how we felt in the past. We think our future will be mostly like our today (with minor tweaks), but we really have no clue. Our mind projects our current reality into the future, but omits critical details - without realizing it. And it is these details, the ones we just have no information about and can't possibly predict, that influence the future to a degree that makes it often radically different from what we predict.

The book covers various mental mechanisms that cause all this mess, including lots of "stupid" built-in cognitive biases. Gilbert explains scientific experiments that demonstrate how we fool ourselves into believing we remember the past accurately or that our future will be what we think it will. In reality, our memories change over time, and how we feel at the moment and our current beliefs affect what we "remember". Same with predicting how future events will make us feel. For example, we tend to exaggerate how bad we will feel after significant negative events. 

The most ugly part of all these mental biases is that even though we keep misremembering and mispredicting all the time, we fail to notice that. It's that sick.

There are several practical implications of what Gilbert writes about.

The first implication has to do with the past. We misremember it, for example we believe that we felt how we now think we must have felt then. It is also impacted by our current emotional state. We know it's better not to trust memories of feelings and events too much. So we can keep a diary; record feelings and thoughts as they happen. 

I have started doing it long ago, and after reading the book I've increased the scope and volume of notes taken every week . This is an incredibly valuable source of information. I no longer need to wonder how I felt in the past. I just look into the notes from the past few months and there it is: what I thought about various events and people, or how I felt on a particular day. No more fake memories, no more guessing.

Notes are also great for learning. I record what people said, how to do things, what I learned from projects, or what approaches didn't work. Moreover, I can share all this with others (including you on this blog). Yes, it takes a lot of effort to write this all down and organize what I think, what I experience, what I learn, what other people say. I've created a whole system that makes it easy for me. I use email, mobile phone, and online word processor to collect notes and have them accessible whenever I feel like. I'm always on the lookout for better tools to make this more efficient - but even the results I've gotten so far with rather suboptimal tools are great. I believe this will be huge and critical part of the future: people will record more and more thoughts and events and conversations, extract knowledge from it and share it with others, or apply this knowledge to what they do. I'm just starting probably a bit earlier than others.

Try keeping a diary like this yourself for a year and then play the following game: ask yourself what did you think about given person, relationship or product 6 months or a year ago. Then look at the notes. You will  be surprised: "I wrote that?!" I get it a lot. Usually, the more stupid or weird something sounds, the happier I get: it means that I'm learning! (Or I'm fooling myself about this, too, and it's just belief shift - not necessarily in the right direction. Who knows? I'm not that good at introspection to be able to answer that...)

The second implication of the book has to do with the future. We mispredict how future events, especially things we never tried, will affect our mood. When trying to predict such things we should actually ask other people who tried them. It's remarkable how similar we are to one another in that sense. It's been shown that assuming you will feel like other people in similar situation is generally the best known kind of predictor you can use. So if you want to become a doctor, ask other doctors about how they feel about their work, what do they like and what sucks for them. It'll be much more indicative of your own future emotional state than trying to imagine "what it would feel like to be a doctor". You better stop this guesswork right now, seriously. It just doesn't work.

The last implication is that we should try as many activities in life as possible if we want "more fun" or "more enjoyment". We can't predict which of those activities will make us feel great, but some surely will. The idea that you can ask others how they feel when doing certain things only works if you have those other people to ask! And if it doesn't take too much effort. Otherwise the only reasonable way to find out is just to try things for yourself. The reasoning behind this attitude to try out as many things in life as possible doesn't come from the book... It's just a strategy I sympathize with; a strategy to maximize happiness in the long term. The world is huge, and there's so many different ways of living, different kinds of people, countries and cultures, different hobbies and careers and relationships one can build. It's huge opportunity. Try out as many as you can, see what tastes best, go for it, and drop the rest. Note, however, that it takes me a very long time to adopt this attitude fully! Comfort zone is a terrible thing.

If you want more of Gilbert's insights (on related topics), check out his TED talk videos:

• Why are we happy? 
• Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations. 

The field of cognitive psychology, heuristics and biases is something I'll be touching on more in the future because it's amazingly interesting, and there are things you can do to work around them... to a degree.