Category Archives: Habits

Thoughts on behavior, habit, and changing patterns

Ditching the List

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I turn 48 tomorrow.  And you now have a little bit of an idea as to why the still 47 year old man is partly incapacitated because of all the to do items cluttering his brain.  Is it possible for that habit to change?

The real question might be whether I even need a list at all.  If I had the courage to say no, then I could work consciously to build a whole new set of neural pathways that don’t involve compulsively scribbling down bulleted lists of things to do.  But that might be too much of a thing to ask.  For now it would be enough to just bring the list under control.

What if I still kept a list, but made an incremental shift in how I managed it?  What are the basic requirements given my list keeping pathology:

  1. Infinitely extensible (so bigger than a piece of paper)
  2. Always with me (I start new lists because I don’t have the last one with me)
  3. Enables easy prioritization (Next month’s stuff is separate from today’s)

So against my larger impulses, I’ve reinstalled a copy of Things on my devices and for the last six weeks I’ve been operating off of an electronic to do list. (Just to give you a visual  -Things is running on my laptop and phone and is constantly synching between both)

Why’s that newsworthy? Because (and this is important), it has required me to address a slate of other habits.

  1. I’m training myself to no longer write items down, but instead to add them to the electronic list. The floating sheets of paper have gone away.
  2. It’s forcing me to take a few moments at the beginning of the week to prioritize my activities. And then I can monitor whether the stuff I’m doing is really helping move forward on those New Year’s Evolutions.
  3. I’m not afraid of loss.  The list is endlessly extensible.  And the wild peripheral stuff like Riemann’s Hypothesis?  It can go in the bottomless Someday stack and I need not worry about losing it, nor having it clutter my head.

I hate to say it, but that incremental technological fix is, for the time being, giving me some air cover so that I can get to the real task at hand which is to retrain my underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. I’m training myself to order information, to make decisions, and to follow through.

I am now ready to tend to the next priority:  Dental work.

Interlude: The List

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I now confess:  I’m a compulsive list maker.

My friend Danny often teases me about it.  He once said that if something ever happened to me he wanted my signed copy of The Ants and my Lists.  His point is worth honoring:  the reason I haven’t written (or for that matter, read) The Ants may in part be due to the multitude of distractions on my lists.

And mind you, they are lists.  I start one.  It gets filled to the edge.  I start another. I misplace that one so I start another.  So these lists of duplicate mutually distracting items litter my office.

Why I do dat?

It’s a good question.  I’ll take a stab at it.

1. I’m Seeking Order.  My house growing up was in absolute chaos.  I’ve told some people stories, but I think it might be hard for most folks to imagine.  Junk and trash everywhere.  At times dog shit covering the kitchen floor. No one ever cleaned up.  No one did much of anything.  I had no set bed time, no meal times, often times not even meals.  In that environment it was hard to keep even my thoughts straight and so early on I learned that a list could provide at least the illusion of structure.   I remember over spring break in 5th grade I approached my friend Leo with a schedule for everything we would do and what time we would do it.  He was baffled.  Why do we have to have  a schedule, he asked?  It’s Easter vacation.

He was right.  And yet I didn’t see it as at all weird.

2. No filter: From the very beginning the sheer number of things that would land on that list were near infinite.  In a world without structure and rules, all things are necessary.  And all things are possible.  So on any given day in 6th grade, my list might include: clean the kitchen, vacuum the house, edge the lawn with a pair of hand scissors, buy groceries, do homework, explore the canyon, ride my bike to North Park, read Les Miserables, and make a present for mom.  I had no criteria by which to differentiate between grownup stuff and kid stuff.  In 7th grade a friend once asked me what I was saving my paper route money for.  I’m going to buy a refrigerator, I answered.

And there was no distinguishing between important stuff and non-important stuff.  It was just one big soup.  Everything needed to be done.  My mom’s stuff.  My brother’s stuff.  My stuff.  And it was all possible because there was nothing or anyone to say it wasn’t.

3. Incented to be a generalist: Feral creatures are opportunists.  You don’t know where the next meal is coming from so you take what you can get.  I was too young, though, to distinguish what was truly necessary for survival.  I started reading company financial reports in 5th grade because (and I swear to god this is true), I figured I needed to know how to manage money. This information, I thought, might one day be useful.  So my floor was littered with Huck Finn, Tolkien, notes on scientific experiments I should complete, those financial reports, word searches, a half eaten omelette, recipes I might want to cook, a Scientific American issue devoted to number theory, and Readers Digests.  I grabbed whatever came in front of me. And mind you, there’s no one in my life to set boundaries, to perhaps say it’s not necessary for a nine year old to be reading financial reports or, as the case was, trying to understand periodic functions.

4. DP thinking:  Displaced Persons – folks who’ve been displaced from their homes and consequent emotional stability – tend to become packrats.  I love DP’s – In my twenties and thirties I spent a lot of time with emigres from Latvija and Russia and Germany – in part because I could identify with them.

We all were afraid of loss. And physical objects or pieces of paper become mnemonics for those things we were trying to hold on to. If I lost the piece of paper, I would in turn lose the emotion or idea that I associated with it.

That’s why I still have my record vinyl.  And certain New Yorker’s from 1992.  It’s a very interesting sickness.

And it’s also why, in part, I’ve been buried by my own lists.  If I lose the list, or even an item on the list, I stand to lose another small sliver of my self.

And that self, defined early on by loss, cannot bear it.

Priority 1: Set Priorities

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That’s always the tough one.  Especially when my 2013 list is as crazy and overreaching as it is.  It can also lead to a recursive loop.

If I’m a writer, than writing should probably be at the top of the heap.  And it’s also the thing to be most avoided.  I’ll put it at the top and try to develop some strategies around it later.

As for what comes next, it might help to choose the items most onerous or requiring the most lead time and schedule those up front. Call it the inner Obama.  It’ll take 3 years to get out of Iraq, so you have to start the process on Day 1.  And if you don’t start the withdrawal that first year, you won’t see your peace dividend before year 6.  And you have to reform health care in the first half of your term because you won’t have enough political capital left in the second half.

So in my case, what long term investments should I make right out of the starting gate?  What are the most onerous things?  And which require the most lead time?

The answers are clear, though not entirely self-evident:

  1. Get organized
  2. Take care of dental work and health stuff.
  3. Help secure Natwani funding
  4. Fence train the dog and reign in the chickens.

My rationale:

I haven’t been to the dentist in years.  Some of my cavities have been cooking in my mouth since 1997.  And for me the possible ramifications are severe.  My resistance to dealing with this stuff is huge.  And the victory if I take care of it first is commensurate.

I helped start the Natwani Coalition in 2004.  They’re doing incredible work, and yet their last cycle of grants is running out and they may need to shutter their doors.  The funding will require at least a 6 month lead time.

Lastly, I spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down our chickens and dogs as they roam the neighborhood.  I’ve learned a lot about the habits of chickens and dogs, but I really need to be using that time to do something else.

Okay.  Time to tackle them one at a time.

Faultlines: Siddhartha Gautam

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Siddharta3January 25 was the birthday of a good friend, Siddhartha Gautam.  He died over 20 years ago.

And, strangely, it’s as if he’s not dead.

He’s forever young – he died in his twenties, while all of us have gone on to grow older.  He was also one of the most brilliant, and perhaps effective, people I’ve ever met.  In college would churn out a fifteen or twenty page paper in a night, leaving those of us who were less talented feeling befuddled.

But there’s something else.  Responding to a recent post, an old friend, Linda Goodman, suggested that I’m fine as I am and that there’s no need to change.  I appreciate the words.  And yet Siddhartha was better equipped than I, but he is gone and I am not.

So what responsibility do I have to do some work commensurate with the life he might have lived?

By virtue of my own pulse, what do I owe him?

The Difference Between President Obama and Me

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Obama at Sasha's Dress RehearsalWell.  Actually. I think there are quite a few.  But one in particular stands out.

Between December 16 and January 21 President Obama did the following:

  • He attended a dress rehearsal of his daughter’s school play
  • While doing so he wrote some draft remarks for a talk he was to give.
  • That night he delivered those remarks at the memorial for the New Town families.
  • He celebrated the holidays
  • He engineered a compromise to avoid the fiscal cliff.
  • He initiated a sweeping effort to address gun violence.
  • He got inaugurated.
  • He attended some inaugural balls
  • He launched new efforts to reform our immigration policies
  • With great difficulty he negotiated to raise the debt ceiling
  • And he instigated new efforts to reduce gender and sexual orientation bias in the US military

I would have taken any one of those items, checked it off, and called it a year.

But instead, what did I do?

  • I made some hard cider
  • I celebrated the holidays
  • I lost a chicken to a bobcat
  • I must have done something else, but for the life of me I can’t remember what.

Now Obama, of course, is the President.  And I’m me.  And there are a whole lot of really interesting reasons why that’s the case- perhaps I’ll get to them in a later post.

But the present point is what behavior allows Obama (despite political rancor) to be a bit more effective?  Keep in mind, that in 2006, the thought that an African American named Barack Hussein Obama would soon be elected President of the United States would have been considered ludicrous.  And yet it happened.  In large part, I think, because of his personal habits.

What are some of those?

1.  Intense focus.  I carry with me the image of him the day after his 2008 election victory.  He awoke as usual at 5:30 am.  He went to his regular workout at his gym in Chicago.  And then he reported for work at the campaign headquarters and began the transition.

In hand with this, it helps to remember that Obama began as a community organizer.  To do that, you have to first know how to be organized.

2. Clear priorities.  Obama’s 2008 Campaign Blueprint for Change contains a lot of promises.  And many on the left were frustrated because he didn’t do everything he had set out to do or that he seemed too willing to compromise.  But I would counter that he actually had a much clearer understanding of the reality facing him.  In a divided nation, (and keep in mind how divided we were and still are), you only have so much political capital.  The gravity of his first Inaugural reflected, I think, the depths of the challenges facing us.  We were in economic free fall.  Banks were failing, and those on the inside feared a wholesale economic collapse.

So the priorities were bailing out the banks.  Rescuing the auto industry.  And putting forward the Affordable Health Care Act.  And none of those came easily. That’s mostly all he had capital for.  You could argue that he may have burned too much.  Gay rights, immigration reform, addressing climate change?  All those laudable efforts would have to wait for a second term.

3. Long term investments.  The 2012 campaign began in January 2011 when David Axelrod relocated back to Chicago.  The campaign team began the heavy investment in datametrics, infrastructure, and personnel that helped win the election.  They eventually assembled a distributed organization and data gathering machine of such efficiency that Obama felt at ease enough to play b-ball on election day and Nate Silverman could go to sleep on election eve with visions of sugarplum fairies dancing in his head.  Much of the heavy lifting had been done years earlier.

It also can be seen in policy decisions: In order to see a peace dividend in 2014, the draw downs in Iraq and Afghanistan would need to begin in 2009 and 2011. Or as part of the economic stimulus bill, his administration increased our investments in sustainable energy development from the hundreds of millions of dollars to over 70 billion.  We won’t see all the returns on those decisions until the tail end of his presidency.  But if the returns were ever to be felt, the infrastructure investments needed to be made early on.

So at the tail end of 2012, what dim lessons did I draw from the president?

  1. Stay focused.
  2. Get organized.
  3. Set clear priorities.
  4. Invest in tools and infrastructure early on.
  5. Hire well.

By the way, the photo is of Obama reviewing his New Town remark at the dress rehearsal at his daughter’s play.  He went to the rehearsal because he was not going to be able to attend the full performance that night.

The full raft of Pete Souza behind-the-scene photos of the Presidency are worth a look.  They give a strangely poignant sense of what it’s like for the President and staff to be working within the West Wing.

Hubris

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My good friend Patrick Wilkinson recently pointed out that I may not be one of those persons for whom Resolutions work.  And now I’m essentially going for broke and doubling down on a strategy that’s proven to fail.

He’s right.

I’m basically the George Bush of New Year’s Resolutions.

But that’s the point of blind spots, isn’t it?  That you’re blind to them?  So I stand resolute.

I have my political capital and I plan to spend it!  Or as the case actually was for our former President:  I don’t have any capital and I plan to spend it.

On Habits: Why you do dat?

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One of my favorite stories comes from Jeff Benjamin.

A friend of his had just gotten a new job at a lube place somewhere in New York.  One morning a guy brings his car in, the friend drains the old oil and, for whatever reason, neglects to put new oil in.  (Mind you, that’s essentially his sole responsibility – to put new oil in cars).  Car owner happily pays, drives off, and a few minutes later returns with his car, gears grinding and engine frozen up.  The car has been ruined.

The Korean owner of the lube joint comes out, a look of anguish on his face.  He walks in circles around the car, tears welling up, gesticulating at his new employee.

Why you do dat? he implores.  Why you do dat?

A very good question indeed.  Why do we do dat?

—-

We’re all guilty of doing stupid things.  Some of them we write off as mental lapses (I left the stove on when I left for work.  Or, I snapped at my kid).  But often times those things we write off as temporary lapses also form patterns (I can never find my keys when I need to leave for work and I also leave the lights on.  Or ‘mom – why do you always yell at me?’).

And then there are the chronic things that we do that we consider part of our identity.  I’m a smoker.  Or, I’ve always been fat.  Or hey, that’s too early – I’m not a morning person.  And how often do we berate ourselves for not being smart enough, or punctual, or a good parent, or good at math or science?

Are these attributes really foundational parts of who we are?  And regardless, are they changeable?

In November I picked up a couple of books that cast some cool light on the questions.  The first, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg has been hovering at the top of the pop charts for a while now.  Duhigg explores the idea that our being, this thing that we consider “self” or “personality” is largely a collection of “habits”, patterns of behavior that have become hardwired in our neural pathways.  These habits are actually malleable and subject to change, and that the change isn’t so much about willpower, as about choosing the correct channels by which to exercise that change.

He also goes on to look at the patterns of behavior that are encoded in institutions (to work for Google feels different than working for AT&T, for example) and even culture (racism or patriarchy, lets say). These things, too, are open to change.

The second book, Rewire Your Brain by John Arden, works from some of the same premises, but from the perspective of a clinical psychologist. He’s director of Training in Mental Health for Kaiser Northern California.  Over dinner last year, I was asking him about personality disorders and different sociopathologies and his answers were striking.  A lot of it was about how experiences and trauma can influence our neurochemistry and contribute to the development (or underdevelopment) of different parts of the brain.  We essentially learn, or fail to learn, the control mechanisms, decision making abilities, resilience, and coping skills that allow us to function in perhaps a more healthy and productive manner.  These skills and abilities are, again, encoded in the pathways and transmitters within our brains.  If you approach the challenge in the right way, to an extent the pathways are changeable.

This is big.  It gets to the heart of addictions.  And also our fundamental behaviors.

It helps to explain why we do dat.

Why does my cousin have such a hard time getting off meth?  Why do you stay in an abusive relationship?  Why do my dad and I never get along? Why do some veterans or victims of child abuse have behavioral issues? Why can’t I seem to get my act together?

The answers to why and also to how we can change lead to a lot of diverse fields:  Insight meditation, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, neurochemistry, EMDR among others.  It’s all interesting stuff.

And what would happen if a person, lets say in they year 2013, were to conduct an uncontrolled subjective experiment and consciously apply behavior changing strategies to one’s self?

What would that look like?  And how long would it last?

 

New Year’s Evolution

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On New Year’s Eve, I had the depressing Come to Jesus moment of looking at my 2012 Resolutions.  What were the big important things I wanted to do?    For the record, they were:

  1. Sell a script I had finished.
  2. Transcribe a letter I wrote to Mazie in the first year of her life
  3. Clear my office
  4. Build a Table

What a weird list.

And little surprise here.   Not a single item had been completed.  Not to say I didn’t do anything in the year.  I excavated our yard and built a rock wall (with a lot of help).  I cooked a lot of meals and pressed apples and made hard cider and ran regularly.  I published some editorial pieces around the election.  I submitted  a script to several places and got some good feedback.

But what about those Resolutions?  Why didn’t I fulfill any of them?  Some of the items were not the right ones (build a table).  Others were right, but not at the right time (clear office).  But there’s a deeper fault here, and it’s related, I believe, to discipline and execution.

So I’ve spent the first month of this year thinking about that 2012 list, and also thinking about what it means to make a Resolution. What have I discovered?

  1. I believe in Resolve.  But I don’t believe in Resolutions.  Resolve is the ability to commit.  Resolutions imply that a task has been brought to completion.  But are they are ever, really?  A resolution is an end.  But does the world ever end with an end?
  2. I believe in Revolving.  But I don’t believe in Revolutions. Revolving objects return to the place of beginning, except that time has passed.  You appear to be in the same place, but the world is in fact subtly different.  But a Revolution implies a large and sudden change.  It implies upheaval.   It also suggests “progress” or improvement.  But the world neither progresses nor improves (these things require criteria and criteria are subjective.)  Instead the world changes.  It fluxes.  But change is neither progressive nor regressive.  It’s simply change, and the direction of that change depends entirely on one’s vantage. (The eradication of polio is good, unless, of course, you’re polio.)  And Grand Revolutions in hindsight are sometimes not so grand.  Our own American Revolution was essentially a tax revolt (remember the Tea Party?) and assertion that we had the right to protect ourselves from overreaching power.  Which is why 2013 is shaping up to not just be about the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and equality, but also about keeping guns and not paying taxes.True revolutions don’t result in great movement.  You just become a little older. And hopefully a little wiser.  And if you’re lucky you pass on a little of what you learned along the way.

Which ultimately explains why the one true thing I believe in is Evolution.  Evolution is not about progress (ditch that misleading image of the monkey slowly becoming erect until he is homo sapiens).  And forget that whole creationism god thing.  Evolution in the simplest terms is a model of how life adapts to occupy ever changing and ever emerging environmental niches and conditions.  Even more importantly, Evolution is a vast body of thought that explains the mechanisms of change and inheritance (more on this later) across both living and non-living things.

Perhaps we’re sowing the seeds of our own destruction if we strive to make Resolutions that are Grand, and Final, and are Revolutionary in Their Consequence.

Change (in most cases) is incremental, non-directional and without closure.  It’s closer to Evolution.  So this year I’m giving it a different approach.  This year I’m going to try and slowly jettison vestigal stuff that’s been bogging me down for years.  And I’d like to devote some attention this year to evolving some new habits.  And some of those new habits, as they take form, will hopefully have real world consequences.  In some ways it’s similar to making Resolutions.  But instead I want to slowly accrete these changes over the year.

The list should be short and finite.  One of my present habits, however, is overreaching ambition.   I sometimes try to do everything and succeed in doing nothing.  So for now, though the list is long, the underlying intent will be to accomplish just one of the things on the list.  Another intent will be to observe the process.

For the record then, here’s the abridged list of my 2013 New Years Evolutions:

Writing

  1. Revive Snowflakes Edge
    1. Boat Story – finish
    2. Creatures
    3. Habit
    4. Energy
  2. Get an Agent
  3. Dani Q – send out to folks
  4. Finish Family Photo Immigration Narrative
  5. Transcribe Mazie Letter
  6. Get Natwani funding
  7. Write Summary of Riemann’s Hypothesis that could be understood by a 14 year old.

Personal Stuff

  1. Develop new Organizational Habits
  2. Clear Office
  3. Organize computer files
  4. Organize Library
  5. Clear Room of Recapitulation

The Damn House

  1. New Electrical Panel
  2. Refinish Porches
  3. Convert Room of Requirement
  4. Plant fruit trees and olives

Well Being

  1. Wear fluoride trays every day
  2. Get fillings
  3. 2 teeth cleanings
  4. Run 1/2 marathon
  5. Learn to Swim.  Really.

A greater explanation of some of this stuff is forthcoming (Fluoride trays?  And why is teeth cleaning on my list and not on yours?)  Let’s see what change happens.  And what does not.

Wish me luck.

On your mark.

Get set.

Go.