“You could cut ties with all the lies you’ve been living in” and “Maybe today you could put the past away”

It is so true and poetic. Every day bears the possibility to put all the bagage and mistakes behind yourself. Today you can start to stop the lying and things will get better bit by bit as you get further away from the ledge.

But, I could be on a plane to Windhoek next Thursday and see lions and cheetahs. It is quiet sad to realize that I could have an extraordinary life and that for some reason deep within me I am choosing a regular one just because I am so good at it.

We are alive. We are meant to be extraordinary. We are not meant to sit in front of the TV and watch sitcoms or get drunk each weekend at some party and discuss the silly things we did a couple of years ago when we were drunk at a party. It is time to start being extraordinary. The life up to now was a preparation for that but the preparations are done. Start small but start doing something extraordinary you want.

I can only guess how high the pressure must be to put out a new idea (on the same topic) every day if you write a blog like this. It probably gives these people a real high to write something, have a couple of hundred people read it and be thanked for “helping so much” by people they’ve never met. But, preaching empty shells of thoughts (like “you should follow your own way”) to people who feel lost and alone just to feel superior is plain wrong.

Things written on blogs (and even lots of things written in books) are not truths just because they are written down. In my opinion most stuff written on blogs has just been written to fill empty space and to get the rush of telling someone what to do. I don’t want to imply that all authors are evil but I want to imply that all authors have a motive for writing. And these motives are almost never to help people they’ve never met. Consequently, most of the advice on the internet is not a tailored solution for the reader but just a weak interpretation of something another person (just like the reader) has read somewhere or thought of while sitting on the toilet. There might be a valid idea at the core of it but it should be thoroughly examined before consumption.

But wait .. there might be hope. I realized that I couldn’t write because I demanded that each sentence had to be great just to be adequate for my thesis and when great is barely adequate nothing good can come of it. So I sat down, thought about it and came up with a fix: I am not writing my thesis, I am writing the alpha-version of my thesis. The alpha-version can be crappy, it just has to be a rough first draft which I can edit to become the beta-version which I can give someone to review to become a first release-candidate. This simple relabelling allows me to actually work on my thesis (and it is currently progressing at about 1-2 pages per day).

I almost feel like writing a dissertation (or working on any big project for that matter) is like building a sand castle. You can’t start by engraving the bricks in the towers you have to start by shovelling a lot of sand onto one heap (when I build a sandcastle I am going all in *g* http://xkcd.com/120/).

But .. after two weeks I found myself back at square one without ever doing something wrong or even realizing when I fell back into my old habits. This is something that happens quiet easily. A bad habit is still a habit and without control the brain falls back in its default mode executing known habits instead of the new and improved habits that you would like to foster. In order to introduce a new habit you have to overcome the old one and you should be fully aware that the old habit is there for a reason. You might think that you should go for a run every evening after work instead of relax in front of the TV with a beer but maybe your mind really needs this relaxation time to keep sane. However, if you are sure you want to introduce a change in you behaviour there is a small trick I’ve learned to sustain a change in your life: The seed of change.

Do not try to change your whole behaviour at once and try to sustain that because it will just overwhelm and crush you. Instead, introduce one piece of change in the desired direction and pour your energy into sustaining that seed of change. If you take care of that seed for long enough it will grow and gradually influence other parts of your life. I started by cleaning up half my desk and making sure that this part of the desk remained tidy. I tidied it up every evening (which was pretty easy since it started tidy in the morning) and the interesting thing that happened was that after a couple of days the clutter started to disappear from the rest of my desk. This happened because when I cleaned up stuff from my “clean spot” in the evening I sometimes put things from other parts of the desk away as well (I didn’t force myself to do this it just occurred naturally because I was putting away a related item). I did (and still am) doing the same thing with my fear of loosing. I allow myself to be as afraid of loosing as I want to be except when playing games with friends. In such situations I consciously focus on enjoying the games and accepting to loose. I played chess with a friend last week and found a daring gambit which sacrificed a lot of material for a small chance of a really nice combination. At that point I was already winning and it took a real effort to play this funny line instead of going for the simple win. It turned out I was wrong and the gambit lost me the game but I am convinced it was the right thing to do because it was much more fun that way. By defending this seed of change ferociously against the onslaught of my competitive mind I allow it to grow and as it grows it slowly but steadily allows me to overcome my fear of loosing. And, at one point it will have grown into a habit that sustains itself.

Keeping this part tidy was pretty simple since it started ou

In a recent Review Paper in Nature Neuroscience “Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans” John D. Haynes replicated something similar using fMRI. He claims that he is able to predict a binary decision with 60% accuracy as much as 7 seconds before the participants become aware of it. Even though I believe Libet’s experiments, I really can not believe that this 60% is not an artifact. 7 seconds is just far too long and fMRI using the BOLD signal is a far too noisy measuring technique.

The question that remains is: Do we have a free will? In my opinion the answer is: The question is misleading. There are a lot of questions that could be meant by this question and most of them have simple yet contradicting answers when replied to the original question. If we knew everything about the physical world (even though such knowledge is physically impossible) we could predict the future. So from a global point of view we don’t have a free will. But, does this have any effect on how I make decisions, live my life or whether I am responsible for my actions? No, of course not. On a local scale (regarding humankind and me in particular) free will does of course exist. No one has ever read my thought and no one ever will. I am responsible for the decisions I make just like everyone else. As far as the universe is concerned I probably don’t have a soul but as far as I am concerned this does not matter. I am the me looking at the world through my eyes and thinking my thoughts and I can feel my soul even if it just a figment of it’s own imagination

The good thing about this method is that it is easily applicable to almost everything that seems too big or too complicated to do. Your room is untidy (mine was)? Clean up for one song every day and after a week or two you’re done. 5000 eMails in your Inbox that need sorting? Find a good song everyday and sort emails as long as the song is playing. It will take a long time to finish the job but it will get finished eventually and without the need to ever sit down and “sort 5000 eMails” or “clean the whole apartment”.

When the song is over and you feel like continuing with the task you are of course free to do it but it is critical that you allow yourself to stop doing it as soon as the song is over. If you continue to work on something unpleasant after the song is over your subconscious will remember that and it will be much harder to start the task the next day because your mind thinks “oh damn, I probably have to go on even after the song is done”. If your mind knows “hey, it’s just five minutes and it is over” it will allow you to do it.

1. Superhuman memory: The system will record everything you see and can e.g. tell you “Where do I know this guy from?”, “Where did I leave my keys?”, “How many people were at that party last night” and so on.
2. Superhuman perception: Think Dustin Hoffman in Rainman. Stuff like “counting the number of toothpicks on the floor” will be done instantaneously by your vision system. We can even go further and the system can have a good guess what age/height/weight/.. everyone around you is. Even more freaky is the idea that mind reading or at least lie detection could be possible. A camera that captures facial expressions, body language and the heat coming of the face of your opposite (given that we are using a camera that can capture IR) could possibly be used to do this.
3. Superhuman control over machines: Right now Human Machine Interaction (HMI) is very limited. But with a good vision system and a good machine learning algorithm you could train a system which will allow you to teleoperata any accessible system in your vicinity with very little effort. My vision would be tell the coffee maker to do it’s work or turning the mannequins in a shop window by a simple pointing gesture (both of which are theoretically possible today but I’m thinking of a situation where HMI of this level is a natural part of everyday life).
4. Superhuman instant knowledge about the surroundings: Augmented reality in an unconstrained world would allow a user to be presented instantaneously with relevant information about the thing he is looking at. For example when you are looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre the vision system would detect and register it and present you additional information in an HUD. Or, when you are fixing your car the system could insert pictorial information about the next steps in your field of view.

All of those things would be really cool but I am still not convinced that this is all the future has to offer. Perhaps some further brainstorming will unveil some more.

It took me quite a while to work out some sensible guidelines to shooting-star wishing that might actually get granted:

1. Don’t wish for something you have no control over. Wishing to win the lottery won’t help a bit because small pieces of rock burning up in the atmosphere do not influence plastic balls several days later.
2. Wishing for something fairly general like “I wish I were happier” or “I wish work wouldn’t be so hard” is a good start because it will guide your thought process to the thing that’s bothering you most at the moment. Try to think of a more concrete wish. What could happen that would help you with your problem?
3. Try to wish for something small that would make your life better. The smaller the better. It will cost a lot of brain-power to find this small grain of sand that is keeping the machine from running smoothly but it is probably worth it.
4. Shooting stars don’t work linearly. If you see four shooting stars you are not granted four wishes. Try to focus on one wish at a time.
5. Write down your wish and pin it somewhere where you will see it every day for a week. Just keeping the wish active in your mind will help.
6. Try to think of a small active step you can take to help the shooting-star change the probabilities in your favor.

As it turned out I got my wish granted. Ok, it wasn’t the Lamborghini Gallardo I first wished for and it also took some work for me to get this wish but it was a small thing which actually made my life a bit easier. Shooting stars do grant wishes but only if (and only because) you formulate your wishes precisely and don’t wish for something that is not completely out of your hands. It’s like a metaphysical placebo effect

The most important ideas for owning the ToDo list are:

1. Keep it flowing: if something is on the ToDo list for more than two weeks it should be kicked, reformulated, hacked down into smaller pieces or dealt with in some other way.
2. High throughput is more important than perfection: Do the things quickly and aim for “good” instead of “perfect”. Once you’ve finished you can check if it is good enough and add another item to the list to improve it.
3. Don’t be afraid to discard actions: Just because something is on your ToDo list doesn’t mean you actually have to do it.  If you think about it and come to the conclusion that it is not important, that you don’t have time for it right now or that it is just not feasible right now you are allowed to remove it from the list. You can put it on the someday/maybe or the “ideas for another time” list if you still feel it is important. But, it has to be a conscious decision “not to do it”.
4. Eating frogs: Randy Pausch said it in his awesome lecture on Time Managment “If you have to eat a frog, don’t send too much time looking at it. If you have to eat three frogs don’t start with the small one!