Thoughts

Here is a short Zen story. A man finishes a retreat at a monastery and, before leaving, is allowed to make a question. He thinks for a while and asks: “How do you find peace?”. The monk replies: “I say yes. Whatever happens to me, I say yes.”.

There is a principle in economics called the velocity of money. The health of an economy depends less on how much money exists and more on how fast that money circulates. A small town where every pound changes hands five times a week can outperform a wealthy one where everyone sits on their savings. Movement is what creates value, not stockpile. I believe ideas work the same way.

I am sure you have played the telephone game at some point. A message starts at one end of a chain, gets whispered from person to person and by the time it gets to the other end its completely mangled. Its fun, and carries a deep lesson about how information degrades.

Starting is easy, anyone can do it! Open your editor, write a couple of lines and you have started a project. Read the first few pages and you have started a book. Sign up to the gym and you have started your journey to get fit. Now that technology is lowering the barrier of entry to many things, starting has never been easier… and more meaningless.

Our currencies used to be backed up by gold, a finite and scarce resource. Because the supply of gold would not fluctuate much over time, this meant that one could move value across time with relative ease. What a nice property, right? What if we could think those terms again?

Until recently I worked with a particularly difficult TL. He fitted the sterotype of Silicon Valley psychopath that sees the people around them as disposeable tools to achieve his goals. This person was (and is) very smart, and was one of the early adopters of AI in my environment. Eventually that got him an internal transfer to another more AI-centric position so he moved on… and came back changed.

The first months after you start exercising you improve regardless of how efficiently you train, just because doing anything is better than doing nothing. These are called newbie gains and they are everywhere: we are bound to make rapid progres at pretty much almost anything that we start learning deliberately, at least in the beginning. But what happens after the newbie gains are over? You need a method. And if you are an adult leading a busy life and wanting to dig deep into a new pursuit, that method better be good.