Frustration and forgiveness

Frustration!!!!

I spent the last two days intensely focused on writing a particular blog post. (Maybe I’ll link to it when I finish it.)

I spent the previous week or two trying to write it, but not so intent, not so focused.

I spent the two months before that intending to write that same blog post, but working much on it. I just kept musing and hoping it would appear.

Frustration!!!

I was writing in circles. I had started writing, was writing, and then rewriting, and then re-rewriting.

I was generating ideas, producing words, deleting words, rearranging thoughts, and making no forward progress.

I seemed no closer at the end of two days then I had been at the beginning.

I went to bed, frustrated. I complained to Bobbi. I resolved to start fresh the next morning. I decided I would debug my writing process.

Debugging day!

This morning I got up at 5:30. Took my usual cold shower. Did my meditation. Made coffee. And started.

I wrote some notes. Diagrammed some ideas. Captured some notions. I’d dealt with this before, I remembered.

So I did what I’ve been doing more and more, lately. I read what I have written.

I’m glad I read them.

I’m glad I wrote them so I could read them.

Knowledge lost, knowledge regained

I found more than 30 blog posts about “writing.” That’s about one out of every ten posts I’ve written. Not the first time that I’d tried to debug my writing process.

I looked for blog posts with the word “debug” or “debugging” in them. I found a few of them.

I landed on this one from December 6, 2016, called “Debugging and reconditioning myself.” When you finish a paragraph, it advised me. Celebrate! I hadn’t been doing that.

And I had forgotten about the “Six phase meditation” that I’d recorded in that post. That was a handy bit of knowledge, I told myself then.

I wrote a post about that the next day: Six phase meditation and reconditioning.

Then I found this one on the 23rd: “More debugging)” It’s about the fact that I’d forgotten this vital insight in just 16 days!

And now I’ve discovered that I’d forgotten again for another two years.

WTF!

The original post

This is the point of the original post, the one that I haven’t written yet.

Our programming is riddled with bugs, and if we don’t take care, even while we’re improving in one area, we’re deteriorating in others.

We humans are programmed to gain new programs: by imitation, variation, and selection. Most variations lead to deterioration. Only mindful self-monitoring (or the environment rewarding or punishing us) can keep us from deterioration.

Once upon a time, I’d imitated what I’d been shown in those talks.

Then I’d varied and selected toward deterioration.

So I went back to imitation. I just finished a couple of paragraphs. Yay for completing each!

I listened to the six-step meditation talk again and remembered one of his six phases: “Forgiveness!” I’d forgotten how important that was.

Suddenly it was even more critical.

Forgiveness

My life had an inflection point around the time I wrote Thank you Past Me. Thank you, random stranger. I had changed my attitude toward my past and future selves. Instead of resenting Past Me for what it hadn’t done, and dismissing Future Me (“Fuck you, Future Me, what have you ever done for me?”) I was grateful to Past Me for my life, and I wanted to pay forward some of what I’d been given to Future Me.

I’d practiced being grateful to Past Me. But I had not applied the lesson of forgiveness. I’d written about forgiveness in The paradoxes of gratitude and forgiveness and A meditation on assholery. But I hadn’t applied it to Past Me.

I’d been grateful to Past Me, but gratitude is not the same a forgiveness.

When I thought about forgiveness, it brought me to tears.

Past Me had worked hard. Writing was often a struggle, but Past Me had done it.

Past Me had left a record of what he’d learned in my blog. Past Me had captured bits of wisdom there.

For who?

Maybe other people will read that blog, and they will get some benefit. But for today, I’m the beneficiary of a series of undeserved gifts from my past self.

Thirty posts worth of recounting the pain of writing and the pain of not writing tells the story of Past Me’s struggle.

Today it paid off.

I recovered some valuable knowledge.

And I realize that gratitude is not enough. Past Me fucked up plenty and yet lives on (I’ll post on that, I promise) suffering, and unforgiven.

It’s time for forgiveness.

Now, if I can only remember not to forget!

Other posts in this series:

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The Goal: Part II

This post is a follow-up to an earlier blog post on Eliyahu Goldratt’s book, The Goal.

Some of this is a restatement. Some is an amplification. All of this was in inventory. Inventory is a liability. Now it’s out.

I didn’t know my job

Before I read The Goal I thought I was a pretty good manager. So did other people else. I was wrong. They were too.

I thought my job was to set goals and then help and to push people (including me) to reach them. I did that. I was wrong.

I thought my job was to help remove roadblocks and to increase productivity and efficiency. I did that. I was wrong.

I thought that if I made things better every day that I had done a good job. I did that. I was wrong.

A lot of what I thought was wrong.

I learned that (and why) most of the “improvements” I made were worthless. I learned many of them made things worse(!)

Only some of the things that I did made things better.

So I stopped doing the things that were worthless and worsening. I paid attention to finding the few things that made things better and tried to work on them and nothing else.

Bad habits die hard. I never was as good as I could have been. But I was a lot better than I had been.

Thinking different

The Goal made me think differently about management.

I had everyone around me read it so that they’d understand my thinking and be able to think that way, too.

What you learn from The Goal seems counterintuitive—wrong, even. Then The Goal changes the way you see the world. It improves your intuition. What was counterintuitive becomes obvious—but only to people who understand it.

Once we all understood this different way of thinking, we came to decisions faster.

We made the right decisions quickly because they were obvious.

We spent no time debating. We spent less time deciding.

Throughput went up.

Throughput? What’s that?

Read on.

TL;DR The Goal

The world view of The Goal depends on two fundamental ideas: throughput and bottlenecks.

Throughput means “the value of completed production.” Progress does not count; only completed production. Defining value and completed production are different for each organization. Defining them correctly is critical.

Production is the result of a network of activities. The bottleck is the one node in the network that is running at full capacity. Only one node is the bottleck at a given time.

Only improving the bottleneck's capacity increases throughput. The capacity of the bottleneck limits the system’s entire capacity.

Your job as a manager is to define value and completed production correctly; then to identify the bottleck; then work to increase its productive capacity.

A simple manufacturing example

Suppose you are in charge of manufacturing for a company that makes just one product.

The number of units of that product that you produce determines your throughput.

The number of units you deliver to customers determines the company’s productivity. Manufacturing fewer than you can deliver is a mistake. Manufacturing more than you can deliver is also a mistake.

Suppose that the process for making a unit is to put it through steps A, B, C, D, and E.

Suppose A can handle 50 units per day, B can handle 40, C can handle 30, D can handle 70, and E can handle 100.

If sales can’t sell and deliver 30 units a day, then sales is the bottleck. If it can, then the bottleneck is in manufacturing, and it’s at step C.

It’s one or the other because there’s always only one bottleck.

Assuming you want to produce more than 30 units, anything you do to improve D or E has no effect. Throughput remains the same: 30 units. You are wasting your time.

Anything you do to improve A or B makes things worse. Things are already jammed up at C. Nothing more gets out. No increase in throughput. More time handling the jam.

The only thing that you can do to increase throughput is to improve C. Let’s say you improve it so it can handle 60 units. Now the bottlenck moves. It’s now B. The only thing that will increase throughput is improving B. Then it moves again.

A more complex manufacturing example

We’ll get to software. I promise.

Now suppose you’re manufacturing many products. Each kind of product goes through the same process, but not every type of product goes through the same steps.

The process network is more complicated, but there’s still only one bottleneck. And it’s a bit harder to find.

First, you need to know how much of each thing you produce is demanded by the outside world. Then you need to have a value assigned for each unit of production.

Your intuition will likely break down and gives you the wrong answers when you assign value. Let’s suppose you use a machine to make component—a fancy screw, say—that’s used in several finished products. Say it takes 6 minutes to make each screw.

What value should you assign to the screw?

Intuition says: figure the cost of running the machine per hour, including overhead, and divide by 10. That’s the value.

Intuition is wrong.

That’s the cost but not the value. The value depends on what product uses a particular screw.

Let’s suppose that the company produces just a product that needs only one of those screws. Suppose the value of the product—what customers pay—is $100. Then the value of the screw is $100.

Suppose the company also produces a product that uses one of those screws, and that product’s value is $1,000. Then the value of a screw is $1,000 until they’ve made all of that type of product that can be sold and delivered. Then the value drops to $100 until they’ve made all that second type of product that they can sell and deliver. Then the value drops to zero.

I hope you see why this is the right answer. If the company can’t sell a $1,000 part because it lacks a screw, then the company’s throughput drops by $1,000. The value of each screw is the value of the larger assembly. As long as you can sell more of those $1,000 parts, you make more of those screws. The machine’s throughput is $6,000 per hour.

When there’s no demand for screws for the $1,000 product, the value drops to $100 per screw, and the machine’s throughput drops to $600 per hour. When there’s no more demand for screws for the $100 product, then you use the machine to make the $10.00 product.

Inventory is a liability

Traditional cost accounting counts inventory as an asset. The Goal says it’s a liability.

In a manufacturing operation, your inventory makes you no money. Only throughput—products delivered to customers makes you money. To the contrary: inventory costs you money. You need a place to store it. You need to move it into that place and take it out. You need to keep track of it. And while it’s sitting in inventory, it will deteriorate. Or become obsolete.

In a software operation, features that are complete but not in production make you no money. Only throughput—valuable features in production—make you money. Bit rot is a real thing. While features are sitting in inventory interfaces may change so that the features don’t work anymore. And market needs can change, and features become obsolete.

Summary

• You have one goal
• Your goal is throughput, not progress.
• Throughput is work that is done.
• Done means passed on to another part of the organization.
• Done also means: unlikely to come back for rework.
• There is no credit for progress. Only for throughput.
• For most organizations done means: making profit
• Inventory is a liability

The mistakes that software contributors make

Working on more than one project at a time reduces throughput. Better to work on one, complete it, and then the next. Half done work is of no use to anyone.

Coding up multiple features at a time gives you a false sense of progress. Better to work on one, complete it, work on the next, complete it. And so on.

Remember: nothing is done until it’s in production.

For managers

• You need to assign a value to completing each project or product. Completing. Not making progressing. Completing.
• You need to make your assignments public, so your team, and your management, and your internal customers know what you are doing.
• You will often find that your internal customers won’t agree.
• Your team’s throughput over any period is the value of what your team has completed over that period.
• You don’t have competing priorities. You have one priority: maximizing throughput

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The illusion of free will

A friend who has started a meditation practice using the Waking Up App reports that one of his gains has been “dissolution of the illusion of free will.”

This is a big deal because free will is mostly an illusion. Not always. But mostly. And dissolving the illusion is goodness.

Who gives a fuck?

I do, for one.

So should you (I’m speaking to you, Future Self, among others).

Why it matters

Our conditioning constrains what we call our lives. We think we are free agents, but we’re usually just robots doing what we’ve been conditioned to do.

If you imagine that free will exists when it doesn’t you are preserving and promoting an illusion.

By preserving the illusion, you keep yourself and others trapped.

The only way to become free is to see through the illusion of free will and step outside of it.

The only way to help others to become free is to help them step out.

Initial conditions of conditioning

Once upon a time, we were infants.

Our biology conditioned our behavior. It conditioned us to seek pleasure. To avoid discomfort and pain. It conditioned us to mimic others. To repeat what was successful. To vary what we did and choose the best variant.

All mindless. All conditioned.

Our inborn conditioning was designed to help us survive and to expand the scope, complexity, variety, and sophistication of our conditioning.

Our inborn conditioning let our environment—our parents, the people around us, and our culture—further condition us. When we did what the environment wanted, the environment rewarded us. When we did what the environment did not want, the environment did not reward us—or it punished us.

And thus, the environment conditioned us.

Why?

Because their environment had conditioned the people in our environment to condition babies, children, and even other adults.

Why?

To pass on the knowledge that’s helped them survive.

When people condition the people around them, they preserve the knowledge they’ve acquired through their own conditioning and the knowledge they’ve acquired throughout their lives.

Cross-generational and cross-cultural conditioning is a survival strategy.

Conditioned responses

When people do things that others don’t like, they often react with blame, or resentment, or anger or worse. They react more strongly when they know that the offender was aware of the effect they might create—and did it anyway.

Fuck them, anyway!

Why do people do things like that? Because their conditioning leads them to do them.

Why do we react that way? Because our conditioning leads us to react.

Reacting is reasonable, but it’s not reasoned. It’s conditioned.

It’s part of the illusion of free will. We believe that people have a choice in what they do and when they seem to make a bad choice, we choose to respond as though they actually made a choice.

But it’s an illusion.

It’s conditioning, all the way down.

And seeing through the illusion can help us.

Stepping outside of conditioning

Long ago, Gautama Buddha was able to break away from his conditioning. He conditioned others to break from their conditioning. And so on through the ages.

I was conditioned to read books and sometimes follow the suggestions I read in books. After I read the Sam Harris book, “Waking Up”, my conditioning led to me follow his suggestions.

And so my conditioning caused me to step outside my conditioning.

It was not the first time I had stepped out of my conditioning. I had done so several times during my time with Scientology. But it was the first time I had a reliable and repeatable way to step out on my own.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll realize that almost all your moment-to-moment behavior and even your reflective decision making is automatic. Conditioned. Mindless. Robotic.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to spend more time apart from your conditioning.

I believe it’s possible for anyone to step outside their conditioning, but I also think that it’s not easy to remain there.

The illusion that we are not conditioned is convincing. A logical argument that almost all of our behavior is conditioned is not enough to penetrate the illusion. It takes effort even to step outside momentarily. And it takes a lot more to step out long enough to change our conditioning.

I believe we can be free of our conditioning only to the degree that we’re aware of our conditioning.

We can free ourselves from reacting to another’s conditioning to the degree that we are aware of our own conditioning—and theirs.

But ironically, we’ve got to condition ourselves to do that.

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Believe not what is true, but what is helpful

In an earlier post, I wrote about Mark Manson and some things that he’d written that I’d liked.

One of them was: “Believe not what is true, but what is helpful.”

Wait? What?

Shouldn’t you always and only believe what’s true?

Maybe not.

What’s helpful?

There’s a ton of stuff packed inside that question.

Helpful to whom?

Helpful over what timeframe?

Helpful in what context?

What if two things are both helpful? What then?

What if we think something is helpful, but it turns out that it’s not?

Never mind that complexity. Let’s assume we have a good idea of what’s helpful.

What’s true

The only thing I can know is true is that I experience consciousness. Same goes for you. Anything else could be an illusion.

But certain things are more-or-less likely to be true, or more or less likely to be reasonable approximations of what is true. Should our belief be based on the degree to which something is closer to being true?

The way the universe works, what’s true is often also helpful. And what’s outright false is generally unhelpful. But that’s not always true.

Most of what’s true is irrelevant. Consider two galaxies. It might be true that one is older, or more massive than the other. But for our purposes, the answer is irrelevant. Believe what you want. Or believe nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Some of what might be true is currently unknowable. There will eventually be a correct (or roughly correct) answer to the question: “What will the be the temperature on this day, next year, at this location?” But we really cannot know what it will be. We might make some reasonable guesses, but the true answer, at this point is unknown and unknowable. And what I believe may not change anything.

But now consider the question, “Will I finish this blog post?” The answer is also unknowable. There will eventually be a true answer. Either I will finish it, and it is true, or I die, and it is not true. Does it matter what I believe? In this case, it does.

If I believe I will not finish it, then there’s little sense in continuing to write it.

If I believe that I will finish it, then Predictive Processing says that it’s not only a good idea to keep working on it, but my belief in its future state will cause me to finish it.

Would it matter if I believed I would finish it in the next ten minutes? Or in the next hour?

It seems to me that believing that I will finish in the next ten minutes is not helpful. It put me under impossible pressure. Or it’s something I ignore. In any case, it’s not helpful. So I believe I’m best off not believing that.

But it seems that believing that I will finish in the next hour might be helpful. It’s not necessarily true, but it does seem helpful. So I’ll choose to believe that.

Belief in God

Pick a God, any God. Do I want to believe that that God exists?

If I pick a God that demonstrably cannot exist—say one that’s in this room right now and visible to me—then I see nothing useful in such a belief. To the contrary, I now must explain to myself why I can’t see a God that I have defined as one that I can see.

But if I pick a God that can exist—say a benevolent and invisible God that will help me get this post done in the next hour—believing in its existence might be helpful. Writing is often a lonely and uncertain business. It makes me feel better to think that I’ve got some help. It might not be true, but it’s certainly helpful.

So I’ll believe in that God. And I’ll believe it helped me get this post done.

Sure enough! It’s done.

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Waking up, May 8: what attention feels like

I’ve been meditating daily for more than 173 days now using the Waking Up App to sustain my practice. This post is to help me remember one of two memory-worthy recent daily meditations. This one on May 8 and this one today as I post this, May 15.

Notice what attention feels like

In the daily mediation for May 8, Just before 4:00, Sam Harris said: “As you pay attention to the breath, notice what your attention itself feels like.”

He then goes on to “Does it feel like it’s originating in your head?

And then goes on: “If so, then notice that every reference point that you have for your head…anything you can notice by which to define the source of attention….that is simply appearing in the space of consciousness.”

I went in a slightly different direction.

Attention is just something in consciousness

I saw that attention itself was just something in the space of consciousness — just one more thing.

This description is not entirely accurate because, at that moment, there was no “I” that “saw.” There was an awareness of attention and an awareness of what attention was.

Consciousness included — if only in moments — the awareness that attention itself was something that arose and passed away.

Consciousness included an awareness that awareness (as well as attention) was something that arose and passed away.

It was clear that consciousness was prior to both attention and awareness.

All of that arose, and then passed away.

And now this arises

Some fragment of whatever the fuck it is or means or could be or could mean arose in the chat channel that I shared with my sangha.

“Sooner or later,” I told them, “you will wake up and read what I wrote and what I wrote will arise and pass away in consciousness for each of you. And as we chat away even that which has arisen in this channel will scroll up, and pass away in this channel.”

And you, reader of this blog, this idea has now entered your field of consciousness. And soon it will pass away.

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Waking up May 15: uncomfortable thoughts

I’ve been meditating daily for more than 173 days now using the Waking Up App to sustain my practice. This post is to help me remember one of two memory-worthy recent daily meditations. This other one on May 8 and this one today, May 15.

Think of something

In the daily mediation for May 15, after setting the scene, Sam Harris said:

Take a moment to think about something that has been bothering you or worrying you; something you find annoying or embarrassing or a source of anxiety. Any negative thing.

What came to mind was my frustration about writing.

Days have gone by with nothing written. Many more days have gone by with nothing finished.

More accurately: I’ve written and completed emails. I’ve written stuff in chat channels. But nothing of the kind of writing that matters most to me. This kind of writing.

No finished blog posts. No completed articles.

Nothing. Nada. Nichts!

Simply bring it to mind and see if it produces any negative emotion and then feel that emotion clearly as a pattern of energy in your body and mind.”

That sure produced a negative emotion!

My face contorted. Tears began to flow. I felt the frustration that I’d been whining about to Bobbi again and again; the frustration I’d been complaining to myself about, endlessly.

Where is it?

What is it?

What are its implications?

Just feel it as an object of meditation.

So I did.

Again, bring these negative thoughts to mind and feel whatever feelings follow in their wake. But clearly. Precisely. Become interested in the physiology of these feelings.

So I did. The feelings didn’t change at first, but my feelings about my feelings changed right away. I stopped fighting. I became interested in them. I experienced them as clearly as I could.

“Watch them change and dissolve.

And they did.

“In the final minute of the session, simply rest your mind like an open sky and let whatever appears pass through.

My mind opened. It was like an open sky.

Resolve to react to nothing for just one minute

I tried to do that, but my mind was too full of excitement. I wanted to tell someone, anyone—everyone—what I’d experienced.

Finally, the minute ended, and Sam continued:

And what I’m hoping you discover when we do this sort of thing is that there’s a place to stand prior to it that is not implicated in it. You can simply let it arise and subside. And this is no less true for emotion that comes on you unbidden in direct reaction to something that has happened in your life. You can find this place of simply witnessing once again.

I’m going to do that meditation several times more, so that I can find that place again, and more quickly. It’s a great place from which to experience life—both good and bad.

And it’s incredibly useful to do this. So as you go about your day and you find yourself entangled with strong reactions, or emotions, see if you can find even a moment before you’re swept away, to become interested in the pattern of energy.

And to be clear, this is not a way of distancing yourself from the emotion. In fact, it is a willingness to feel it even more intensely, to fully experience it. It’s that willingness to give it all of your attention that cuts through it. Because your thoughts in that moment, are part of an effort to no longer feel what in fact, is arising, whether it’s anger or sadness, or fear.

That’s something I realized from reading “Get out of your mind and into your life.” Some of the problems we face are due to the thoughts and the emotions that we experience. But most of the suffering comes from resisting them. By fighting what can’t be fought.

Simply be willing to burn up with whatever emotion is appearing. If you do that, you’ll see that the half-life of any emotion is very, very short. We’re talking moments, not minutes, certainly not hours.

If you want to listen to that meditation, I’ve put it here.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Mark Manson, a blogger who's helped me

Mark Manson has a site with a bunch of long essays that once have been blog posts. It’s markmanson.net.

He’s also written a book, “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck.”

I’m not sure how I came across him, but, hey, I did. Probably some blogger was writing about how much he liked Manson’s stuff. Kinda like this.

I highly recommend him. I’ll be writing more about him. He’s helped me.

The road to subscribing

After a couple of weeks of reading Manson, I decided to become a subscriber. For $48.00 a year I get full access to his site. Not just the tons of stuff he provides for free to everyone with a browser, but the “premium content” for people who pay $6.00 a month, or $48.00 a year. Well worth it, I say.

He reeled me in by offering to swap me an eBook called “3 ideas that can change your life” for my email address. Then he sent me an email every day with a link to a tasty blog post. I’d read the blog post and follow links to other posts. Eventually, I’d get to a premium content post and be asked subscribe. After a week or two of that, he reeled me in. I’m glad he was so politely persistent and so useful.

The three ideas

I thought swapping my email for an eBook was a pretty good deal. I thought it was an even better deal after I got the eBook.

Here’s my quick summary—more to remind me than to inform you. If you want to be fully informed, do the swap and get the ebook. You can get it by going to this page .

First: the list

1. Two minds.
2. 80/20 your life.
3. Believe not what’s true, but what’s helpful.

Two minds

You have two minds. A thinking mind and an observing mind.

The thinking mind thinks. And thinks. And thinks. And thinks. Most of the time it’s entirely out of control. And it causes dissatisfaction and suffering.

The observing mind can observe the thinking mind. Or it can become “fused” with it. Then there’s only thinking. And thinking and thinking.

Once you get used to “defusing” the thinking and observing minds, the observing mind can observe the thinking mind. Better decisions result.

80/20 your life

Apply the Pareto Principle to your life. Get rid of the shit that provides you with no value. Not as useful to me as the other two.

Believe not what is true, but what is helpful

This one I like a lot.

Enough to write another whole post about it. Later.

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