It seems like as you go through life, you gain constraints. Good constraints, for the most part, things like "don't throw food at people" or "you can't put both pant legs on at the same time". I think part of what we consider learning a skill is just internalising the constraints of the domain that skill applies to. Some of those constraints are necessary and some aren't, but it's pretty tough to know which.
Worse still, constraints seem to become part of our identity. You learn not to be too loud at parties, and eventually you start thinking of yourself as being a not-loud-at-parties person. Even positive qualities like listening to people have hidden constraints, like never not listening to people. You usually internalise those constraints to the point of not even thinking about them, but you're still constrained just the same.
There's a Buddhist concept called shoshin, or beginner's mind, based on the idea that the best attitude when studying is that of a beginner, without preconceptions. I think this applies even more strongly to problem solving: many seemingly intractable problems stem from not being willing to abandon certain constraints that you take for granted.
And of course the constraints that you take the most for granted are the ones that make up your identity, the ones that you consider part of who you are. We are very reluctant to let go of them, if we notice them at all, because we feel like they would make us into someone different. But maybe by abandoning one of those constraints you would discover that it wasn't actually necessary, and with it gone your problems become easier to solve.
In that sense you would become someone different, but someone better.
Sometimes when I don't achieve a goal I feel the urge to try to make up for it by compromising something else. I plan to take the bus to an event, but I didn't leave enough time so I take a taxi instead of being late. Or I've scheduled my current task until 2pm followed by some exercise, but it's 2pm now and the task isn't done, so I skip the exercise to make up for it. The worst is when I plan to do something before bed, and then stay up too late when it takes longer than I expect. I like to think of these as "takebacks", because I'm trying to take back time that I've already given away.
Occasional takebacks can be reasonable enough. After all, being able to adapt to exceptional situations is very useful, and people usually build in flexibility to their plans for that very reason. But the danger is that the flexibility can hide systemic problems that would be obvious in a stricter setting. Maybe you never leave enough time for getting ready or always underestimate your tasks. However, instead of those resulting in obvious consequences like lateness or tasks not getting done, you end up spending too much money and getting fat and tired.
Another manifestation of excessive takebacks is the ever-slipping deadline. The project was meant to be finished today but isn't, so tomorrow you just keep working like crazy to try to hit the deadline for yesterday. If it's still not done, you just keep working, all the while convincing yourself that you're still trying to hit last week's deadline. Of course, the deadline is gone, there's no way you can take time from the future and put it back in the past. The right answer is to eat the missed deadline, make a new deadline based on the actual facts and proceed sensibly from there.
But it's easier said than done. Nobody likes to fail, especially because failures sometimes have serious consequences. Of course, the takeback has consequences too, but future consequences instead of present consequences so they're easier to ignore. All that time has to come from somewhere, though, and unfortunately the problem often cascades: a takeback from yesterday means not enough time today, which means even more takebacks to deal with tomorrow. And what about when a real emergency happens? All that flexibility you planned in is already used up by everyday takebacks.
For me, at least, I've been aiming for no takebacks. It might not always work out, but I think it's a noble goal. It's a hard, humbling thing to just say "I wanted it done by 2pm. It's 2pm, it's not done, and I failed." But in the long run it's better to have learned from a series of real failures than fake successes.
Here's an interesting idea: a finger-drumming music search engine. Sometimes we know what kind of music we're in the mood for without knowing an exact genre name or artist, but maybe you could tap out a rough rhythm pretty easily. One of the most distinctive elements of most musical styles is their drum beat. A finger-drumming search engine would turn that beat into a fingerprint that you could match by tapping a screen or a microphone to the rhythm you want.
There are already music search engines like Musipedia or Shazam, but none that are designed to specifically pick up on drum beats. Mostly that's because they assume you're looking for a particular piece of music. I think it would be interesting to search through whole genres and even different tempos within a genre.
Plus it'd mean the desk-drumming skills I have acquired over the years can be useful at last.
I stumbled on a neat trick today while I was trying to get some work done. Sometimes it seems like there's an endless stream of distractions when I try to focus. I reduce them as much as I can, but even so there are unavoidable distractions that come from my own thoughts: a task I've been meaning to do, something I've been meaning to look up, someone I've been meaning to get in contact with. And the problem is these things might be important, so I have to think a bit about them before I can go back to focusing.
So I started using a random notebook as a distraction pad. Anything that came into my head that might distract me, I just wrote down. And as soon as I did that, the need to think about it just melted away. The thought was dealt with now, so there was no point in dwelling on it.
Hilariously, the vast majority of things I wrote down are totally pointless. Now that I'm not working, my desire to look up how to mark an email as read from an Android watch has completely evaporated. But even knowing that I probably won't do anything with these stray thoughts, writing them down seems to convince me that they're in hand and don't need further attention.
Thanks, brain. You're a source of constant curiosity!
It's strange that, even if you know you're good at something, even if lots of people tell you you're good at something, you still get a special kick from someone offering you a job. Similarly, you can create a thing purely on the basis of it being good according to your standards, without regard for other peoples' expectations. But it still feels great to see someone you've never met praising that thing. I think this goes beyond simple ego and into something to do with the nature of reality.
One of the best definitions of reality I've heard is that it's something that doesn't change when you change your mind. There are people who believe in relativism: the idea that there is no absolute truth, only the truth as you see it. While that might make for an interesting abstract debate, the point is that when you drop a rock and really believe that gravity will make it go upwards, it will still go downwards. Reality doesn't care what you think.
None of this would be necessary or even meaningful if our minds weren't so damn malleable. It's hard to imagine, for example, having to explain to a computer that there's a difference between things as they really are and things as you wish they were. But, for whatever reason, those seem equivalent to us, and it's easy to get misled. You think you're eating well when you're eating badly and not thinking about it, thinking you're making progress on some work when you've actually been distracted most of the time, and so on. It's actually very difficult to trust your own assessments when they are so easily influenced by what you wish was true.
And I think that's what causes the special kick you get from a good job interview or someone you don't know talking about you. There's no fuzziness there. There's no sense of, well, maybe I'm just making this up because it's what I want to believe. It's just harsh reality: these people have no reason to lie to you, and they're saying it anyway. Hard metrics are the same. Assuming you're rigorous, the numbers don't lie. If they say 5 hours, you did 5 hours. There's no room for fuzziness or self-deception.
This is the reason why I've started to prefer more quantitative self-assessments over vague qualitative ones. There's a feeling you can't get from introspection alone, and that's the feeling that reality agrees with you.
