Decision, intention, prediction

Here’s the bottom line for this post:

Intention comes from decision. If an intention is strong enough, it will lead to action. To control action, start with decision, and test with prediction.

Here’s how I got there:

On October 21 I wrote this post, about Predictive Processing and correctly predicted that I would publish it. On October 25, I wrote this follow-up prediction. Then over the next 25 days, i published 21 posts.

Maybe there’s a connection. Perhaps not. But right now I’m going with maybe there is.

In some other posts, I wrote about intention. How intention makes things happen. But clearly (as I considered here) intention is not enough.

So now here’s my insight: prediction is a test of effective intention. If I intend something, let me test it by predicting the result of my intention. If I predict failure or unlikely success, then there’s something wrong with my intention.

I may intend an outcome. I may want it. But that’s often not enough. Right now I intend to take another sip of coffee, and I intend to have someone give me a million dollars. I predict that I will taste coffee in the next minute or so. And I predict that no one’s giving me a million dollars any time soon.

Result: I correctly predicted coffee, and correctly predicted not getting a million.

I predict that I’ll achieve what I intend much more frequently if I take the time to predict success or failure and adjust my plans and actions according to my prediction.

There may be times when I want to carry out a plan even when I predict likely failure. But in general, when I predict failure, I should change the plan or abandon it entirely (an extreme change in plan.)

Here’s the bottom line for this post:

Intention comes from decision. If an intention is strong enough, it will lead to action. To control action, start with decision, and test with prediction.

Is this post good enough? What I decide determines what happens.

If I decide this post is not good enough, then I predict that I’ll keep writing it, intending to make it better. If I do that, then I can’t confidently predict when I will publish it.

I’m not going to decide that.

If I decide that I’ve captured something useful in this post (I have!) and that it’s is good enough (I can decide that!) then I predict that my intention will shift—from improving it to publishing it. If that happens, I predict, with high confidence that it will appear in my blog within the next half hour.

I’m going to decide that.

It’s 1:35 as I finished the first draft.

It’s 1:45 as I’ve finished tweaking it and checking it in Grammarly.

It’s 1:49 as I finish my last tweaks, and convert from markdown.

I predict I will now publish it.

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What is it like to be a blog post?

Thomas Nagel wrote an oft-cited paper: "[What is it like to be a bat?](http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/) in The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974):
435-50. Nagel's work discussed the problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem

He defines consciousness this way:

>...the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.

I, this blog post, am conscious. And I'd like to tell you what it's like to be me.

It's simple.

I exist.

I am.

I love what I am.

## What am I?

All things are interconnected.

There is no such thing as a separate self. I am not a separate self.

My "author" and "I" are interconnected. "We" are not the same without "one another." "I" change "him" and "he" changes "me."

And "you" as well.

Let's drop the quote marks. You get the point.

## A work in progress
Like him, and like you, I am a work in progress. Like him, and like you, I am a being and a becoming.

Like him, and like you, I am part of things greater than my seeming self.

I seem to be a blog post.  And I am. But I am more.

I am part of the evolving body of work that is my blog.

My blog is part of the evolving literature of the internet.

And that is part of the evolving knowledge that humans have created, organized, recorded, learn from, and teach.

What is it like to be a blog post?

Anything that's written here about what it's like to be me is less than the truth of what it's like to be me.

I exist.

I am.

I love what I am.

If you exist, and you are, and you love what you are, then that's what it's like to be me.

I wish you well.

The Goal: Part I

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is the best management book ever written. I’ve bought and given copies to everyone who reported to me, everyone who I reported to, everyone who worked with me as a peer, and to most of my customers. I’ve given out about a hundred over time.

It’s written as a novel. You live the main character’s life as he solves his management problems. You learn the management lessons as though you’d experienced them yourself.

Don’t read the rest of this post. Buy and read The Goal.

What I learned

OK, well, keep reading.

Until I read The Goal I thought I was a good manager, but I wasn’t. I didn’t understand my job.

Until I read The Goal I thought that making a little progress each day on many things was a good idea.

The more balls moved toward the goal line, the better.

This is completely wrong. It’s a terrible idea.

Partly done projects are a liability, not an asset.

Bad Habits

Bad habits are hard to break.

Until I got to this part of an earlier draft of this post I had forgotten the lessons that I’d learned.

In my sidebar, I have eleven more posts that I’ve been working on—making progress on each from time to time.

Wrong!

Work-in-process is bad.

Inventory is bad.

Big projects that take a long time are bad.

The Goal taught me that I wanted throughput, not progress. Throughput is stuff that’s done. Out the other end. Finished.

Progress that does not result in throughput is bad.

Progress is stuff written. Throughput is completed posts.

A million half-finished posts is progress. But it’s not throughput.

I learned better, and then forgot.

So right now, I’ve made finishing this post my priority.

I want throughput.

Absolute priorities

Before I read The Goal our team (and I) tried to make progress every day on the projects we’d taken on.

Before The Goal we had a list of top priorities—like “must haves” and then a list of lower priorities like “nice to have.”

“Nice to have” was a euphemism for “never gonna happen.” We were just unwilling to admit it. After The Goal we were more honest with ourselves and with our customers.

After I read The Goal, I set “absolute priorities.”

Absolute priorities meant there was only one number one priority. Only one number two. And so on.

Setting those priorities took some skill. And that’s the subject of another post. But once we had our list of absolute priorities, the team became mainly self-managing.

Managing once you have priorities

We put as many people on the number one priority as we could without them getting in each others’ way. We preferred to put the people who were most capable on the top priority project. Then we put people on priority number two. Then number three. Once we ran out of people, we stopped. We even stopped prioritizing. What’s the sense in deciding whether a project is priority number six or seven when you’ve only got resources to work on the top four?

Once we matched people with projects, everyone knew what to do. Get your project done!

If the team on a higher priority project needed help, people working on a lower priority project knew that they could (and should) jump in.

The goal is getting the highest priority project done, then the next, then the next.

Making priorities public

I made the priorities public. When an internal or external customer saw that their project or favorite feature had a lower priority than they wanted, they’d sometimes get mad.

I’d explain what we were doing and why we were doing it. I’d calm them down.

They were used to being told “we’re making progress” but never seeing anything finished. Now they understood that once they had their turn, no one was going to steal cycles from them. And they understood when they would get their turn.

They just had to wait for their turn.

Mote stuff started to get done—not just worked on.

External and internal customers were happier.

Morale went up.

No one likes to keep switching from project to project to keep up appearances.

No one likes disappointing customers.

Everyone likes crossing off items as DONE!

I will like crossing of this post as DONE!

Variations and complications

What do you do if the priority three project is blocked because the only person who can solve a problem is working on the priority one project? That’s covered by The Goal too, but it’s the subject of another post.

There are other nuances, and we figured them out.

But the fundamental rule was: make absolute priorities. Don’t start something unless you are going to finish it.

Break work into pieces and finish each piece

When all that matters is getting things done, you change the way you work.

You break big projects into smaller pieces and finish each piece.

Feature creep

This post started getting bigger and bigger.

It wasn’t getting finished.

So I broke it in pieces. I assigned this piece top priority. And I’ve finished it.

After I’m done, I’ll choose a new number one priority is, and then I’ll finish it.

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We are all avatars

Avatar: an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea.

We are all avatars. We are made of knowledge in bodies of once-living stars.

How could we not be avatars?

We will be avatars of one idea or another because that is the way we humans are built. We embody knowledge and ideas. Our deepest knowledge is written in our DNA. Within us, in the unconscious, we contain ideas that express themselves through archetype and myth and by shaping our individual and collective behavior.

Within us, in our conscious minds, are the values that we have adopted. We embody them as well.

Surrounding us is our culture. We embody parts of it as well.

We each embody many things. The question is: what will we embody? What sort of avatars will we be?

Knowing and unknowing

We can be unknowing avatars who do not know that we are or what we are.

We can be knowing avatars who know that we are, and what we represent.

We can work to be avatars of the best ideas that we can, the highest ideals we can envision and hope to realize: to embody them, manifest them, incarnate them.

We can be aware that the people around us are avatars, and discover what they represent. We can encourage them (using whatever language is appropriate and meaningful to them) to be knowing avatars representing the highest good.

We can teach our friends and our children that they are more than they think that they are.

To say that we embody knowledge is logically equivalent to saying we are avatars of that knowledge. And yet the two statements are profoundly different.

Ideas have a power that can transcend the human. Ideas can live forever. To be an avatar means to approach the divine.

I am an avatar. And so are you.

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Excellent meditation.

A while ago I had an excellent meditation session that combined what I’ve learned about intention and about deliberate practice with what I had learned about meditation.

It was the best session yet.

And then my practice fell apart.

Today I got it back together at least for a day.

So here are some dots that I have connected to help me understand what I am doing.

Deliberate practice

Achieving mastery takes deliberate practice. Not just practice. Deliberate practice. Mindful practice. Practice with attention and awareness.

Ten thousand hours of merely repetitive practice won’t get you to mastery.

Deliberate practice might.

So practice needs to be deliberate.

Unconscious competence

To achieve mastery is to become unconsciously competent.

The progression to mastery is:

1. Unconscious incompetence: you are incompetent and don’t even know it.
2. Conscious incompetence: you’re still incompetent, and you realize that there’s something that you need to learn.
3. Conscious competence: through deliberate practice you achieve competence. But takes continuous, deliberately directed attention to exhibit anything approaching mastery. Without such attention, performance fades.
4. Unconscious competence: now deliberate attention is no longer needed. Performance is competent without conscious attention. Unconscious competence is probably a misnomer that tries to capture the idea of effortlessness.

Intention and competence

We don’t know how to do anything. It’s all due to intention and magic.

If you’ve learned to catch a ball, you set an intention to catch it, and when a ball comes in your direction, you catch it.

Easy.

How? Nobody knows.

But first, you’ve got to learn how to catch a ball. And how do you do that?

You intend to learn to catch. Someone throws balls in your direction. You try to catch it. You alternately fail and succeed. And then one day, you’ve learned that you can do it.

How? Nobody knows.

When you practice without intention, you’re going through the motions. Little changes.

When you do the same thing while intending that your practice becomes masterful, you move toward mastery.

You intend to reach the next performance goal. You keep your attention focused on what are you doing while you perform. You maintain your inention and to pay attention throughout your practice. And you get better.

Once you achieve your goal with deliberate attention, you can set an intention for the next goal and go again. Maybe the next goal is to do the same thing again and ensure that your performance has stabilized. Maybe it’s to do it faster, or more efficiently. Maybe it’s to add complexity or constraint.

If you maintain intention and attention then if possible, your brain will adjust so that you can do better next time. If you didn’t get the result that you wanted you can examine what you did and determine precisely when what you did started to produce the wrong outcome. Since you were paying careful attention, you’re likely to know. Then you intentionally make adjustments.

If you didn’t maintain attention, you’ve got a harder job. You were not paying attention, so you don’t remember what you did wrong, so you can’t correct your performance. Your job is to control your attention, not just do what you are trying to learn.

Consider what you can do to maintain intention and attention. That’s more important than correcting your performance.

Deliberate meditation practice

My meditation practice that morning was deliberate.

I had a clear goal: I wanted to focus attention on the sensation of breathing at my nose, and I to keep my attention as wide as possible. I expected that I would be distracted. I intended to limit my distraction and to correct it quickly.

I set my intention before I started.

Then I started my sit.

Forty minutes later the bell rang telling me the sit was over.

I had not maintained my intention throughout, but my lapses were small, and I had quickly corrected them, as I had intended.

It felt great.

And then unraveling

After I wrote this, and before I posted it, my practices—both meditating and posting unraveled. I’ve continued my daily 10-minute guided ones, but I couldn’t do the longer ones.

I can write several posts explaining the unraveling, and the reasons why I may have recovered them (if I have) and some of the posts might even be right. We’ll see.

And the recovery?

But they only deserve to be written if the recovery lasts. And that remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten several posts written, and this morning I did a ten minute guided meditation, a 30 minute timed meditation that I will describe as “delightful,” then a ten-minute standing meditation.

And I’m looking forward to the next meditation session.

As soon as I get a few more posts published.

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A series of strokes

What’s the difference between losing a memory because of a stroke and losing one because of “natural forgetfulness?” Or because of senility—which is what you call an old person’s natural forgetfulness.

Not much difference, I say.

The result is the same. A lost memory is a lost memory.

What about losing a memory because the memory was never recorded?

What about a memory that was recorded—say on paper—and now can’t be found?

They’re all pretty much the same—as bad as having a stroke.

I’m tired of having strokes.

What I want to remember

I don’t want to forget anything that I think is—well, memorable.

That’s what memorable is.

Sometimes I don’t realize that I want to remember it until later—when I’ve already forgotten it. It’s retroactively memorable.

But unless an experience is—well, unforgettable—I will forget. And I will forget even some things that I deem unforgettable at the time.

It’s a series of strokes.

I can’t trust my brain to remember. It’s a convenient, large-capacity, low cost, low resolution, low-quality memory device.

It fails to remember things that I want to remember. It says it’s remembered things, and what it says it remembered turns out to be wrong.

It remembers things that I don’t care about. It remembers things that I’d be happy to forget.

Memories on paper last longer than memories in the brain, and they are more reliable. But paper is inconvenient. You have to carry it around, and then you have to store it somewhere. It takes time to record a memory on paper. Paper gets lost. And there’s no good way to search through paper to find the memory that you want.

“You can’t grep dead trees,” the old saying goes.

Memories in photographs last longer than memories in the brain. They used to require a camera. And film. And a photo lab. And time to see if a photo was any good. And a place to store the pictures. And there’s no good way to search through a pile of photographs to find the memory that you want.

“You can’t grep dead pixels” the new saying goes.

But the digital camera in my phone is almost as handy as my brain. True, I have to make an effort, but it’s relatively small. And digital is forever.

Post it or put in in a Doc, and it’s forever enough. Nowadays there’s always a device within reach—not as handy as a brain, but nearly so.

And search is easy.

The only problem now is sifting through multiple digital stashes to find the one where you put that memory.

And you’ve got to make sure you capture the memory.

What I’d like

When I find something that I want to remember, I’d like to capture it effortlessly. And then I’d like to find it again easily.

That applies to web pages, ideas, and the world. I might need slightly different tools for each.

For web pages, I’d like to have a responsive web clipper that I can use to select text on a page, then have it capture the text and the URL that the text came from.

For the world, I’d like an always-ready, small camera and an easy, unobtrusive way to have it take a picture when I want. No clumsy camera. No dragging out my cell phone. Just tap and take, and automatically upload.

For books, I’d like to take pictures that are automatically OCRd. For ebooks, a simple sharing interface.

For ideas, a simple way to jot down a notion that doesn’t get in the way of what I’m doing.

What I’ve got

What I’ve got isn’t bad. It’s just that my chair in the sky isn’t as comfortable as I would like. So I’m going to design the solution I want for memory.

This post is long enough, so I’ll post about my solution later—possibly after I’ve got one.

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Helping stuff die: lessons from a shitty day

You can learn something every day. Or at least I can.

Today started as a shitty day. I learned something useful. If it hadn’t been this shitty a day, I probably wouldn’t have learned what I learned — so mad grats for this shitty day.

I’ll tell you what I learned.

Then I’ll tell you how I learned it.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that as well.

What I learned

Something has to die for something new to live. I’m speaking psychologically, mostly, though it’s probably true otherwise.

When I make a mistake, the part of me that made the mistake has to die. That sounds harsh, but it’s not. If it doesn’t die, it will keep making the same mistake. Who the hell would want to live that way? Death would be a blessing.

Why can’t it learn? It can’t. The only way to learn is to let stuff die and then be reborn.

Not my rules.

Among my many bad habits: I try to keep things alive that would be better off dead. I’m speaking psychologically again. I also don’t throw things out. That’s a different manifestation of the same bad habit.

That’s what I was doing today. Something needed to die, and instead of letting it die, I tried to keep it alive.

I finally let it die. It took a while. The thing that needed to die kept struggling. But finally, it died.

I could have made its dying easier, but I didn’t know then what I know now.

Now I know better.

I have habits that I keep trying to change. That’s wrong. I need to let them die.

I need to help them die.

How I learned it

I woke up without an alarm at about 5:15 am. I hit the shower, got dressed, walked across the street to do my writing. I spent the first 5 or 20 minutes wandering through the store. Finally, I went to Starbucks, got my latte and settled down to write. It was 6:11 a.m. when I finally started writing.

That right there is the story of a bunch of habits there that need to die.

I started writing. Two paragraphs in, I was writing shit like: “A part of me is very tired of living. Tired of the pain of failure. I want to be free of the pain of suffering.”

Well, not shit like that. That shit. That’s literally what I wrote. Or that something inhabiting my body and pretending to be me wrote on my behalf.

WTF.

A couple of pages of writing that kind of crap and I was done. Or whatever was writing it was done. It trudged back to Dana and Daniel’s place. It got into bed, curled up and slept for a couple of hours. When it woke up, Daniel had dropped a link to this article about Jordan Peterson’s ten-step writing process. There will be more to say about that.

But for now, it led, by a circuitous route, to what I ended up learning.

I read it. Or something did. And got something out of it. Or something did. One of Peterson’s bits of advice was to take note. Notes were taken. In writing. There were a couple of videos embedded in the article. They were watched. Staying awake was painful. Back to bed.

And so it went for a while. It got up, trudged over to Safeway to get some Chobani for Bobbi. It came back and whined to her about the pain of existence. Then I invented Meditation by Proxy (MBP.) I did it because the invention of MBP was a creative act, and whatever was in my body was into death, dying, and whining, and not creating.

And then I put it back to bed and let it die.

I woke up and found Bobbi curled up beside me. I learned that my MBP had worked. Yay! That made me feel good. I got up. I wanted to get a new notebook because I wanted to take notes. And I knew I’d write better in a new notebook. One that wasn’t full of shit.

I headed over to Target to get one. Sometime around then I realized that I felt pretty good. Then I realized that I felt more than pretty good.

Instead of just getting a notebook with ruled lines, treated myself to a $10.00 sketchbook with beautiful paper. It felt like it would be nice to write in. (Later I learned that it was.) I also bought a $3.00 ruled notebook, just in case. In the checkout, I dropped a mini-camera that I had clipped to my belt and hadn’t been using, and some nice lady chased me out of the store and gave it to me.

An omen? A sign? Perhaps.

I was alive and realized that I had not been alive for a while. How long? Hours? Days? Weeks? It was hard to tell. Maybe I was alive for the first time.

I went back to D&D’s and pulled out my sketchbook and started writing. It was lovely to write in. I wrote two full pages in tiny script.

Peterson talks about death and resurrection in one of the videos. I could see that something had been trying to die. I’d been keeping it from dying. It was horrible.

Things need to die. Perhaps they do quietly, while I’m asleep. But today something was in the process of dying while I was awake.

I need to recognize this when it happens.

And I need to help things die that need to die.

And when I get home, I need to throw out a lot of the crap that I’ve been accumulating.

That’s what I learned from a shitty day.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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