Education

I found a great tutorial online, http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html.
The author, Zed A. Shaw, says:
"A major part of this book is learning to research programming topics online. I'll tell you to "search for this on the internet," and your job is to use a search engine to find the answer. The reason I have you search instead of just giving you the answer is because I want you to be an independent learner who does not need my book when you're done with it. If you can find the answers to your questions online then you are one step closer to not needing me, and that is my goal."
....
"If someone tells you to stop at a specific exercise in this book or to skip certain ones, you should ignore that person. Anyone trying to hide knowledge from you, or worse, make you get it from them instead of through your own efforts, is trying to make you depend on them for your skills. Don't listen to them and do the exercises anyway so that you learn how to educate yourself."

I love this author's attitude!

What amazes me these days is the number of "young" people I deal with who say, "teach me," in response to my advice to read the book or play around with the concept until you master it.

Language of My Body

Just as there is a language for communicating with our animals, e.g. dogs.

There must be a language for communicating with my body.

A great example is the urge to go to the bathroom, to pee.

I drive a long distance, drinking coffee.

I come to a place where there is a restroom.

My body, suddenly lets me know, it is time to go.

The door to the rest room is locked.

I try to tell my body with words, thoughts, images that this doesn't work, wait.

My body won't hear it.

Yet it does recognize that the opportunity should be there. 

Communication is happening, it is just as not refined as speaking to a person.

Bio Feed back

One of the most interesting new experiences for me at my advanced age of 59 it discovering the feedback that my body gives me.
I wake up in the morning, and I don't want to exercise.
I sneak up on the exercise slowly, wash my face, shave, start stretching on my yoga mat …
Soon I am doing the full work out, pushing my self to failures, embracing the cold early morning air before sunrise, letting my self imposed deadline for starting my job for the day slip by because I am working out!

And my body gives me the feedback to keep this going.

Then on other days, I find the my body wants to do stuff, so I listen to what my body has to say, "exercise," "study," "do chores." and I find that my life is so much smoother if I cooperate with my body.
On the other hand, my body does need to be trained in much the same way I have trained dogs in the past.
The parallel between my body and a dog is amazing to me.
Reward it and it works.

Writing Style for Web Log, AKA BLOG

My experience with logs started with deck logs in the US Navy. Each entry starts with a time and a brief description of note.
That is what I need to do with this blog.
I have fallen into the habit on only posting lengthy, edited items.
This takes time, and results in many potential posts falling by the wayside, because they never get through the editing process.
I know from past experience with paper journals that insights can come and come again, without recognition that they are "old" insights, unless the record is checked.
Interesting to me, is that Karen Horney described this phenomena in one of her books, and she described the remedy to it. (Finding this remedy is left as an exercise for the interested reader.)
So hence forth my web log, will be more of a log, than a well written exposition.

We are what we do ...

Paraphrasing Aristotle, "The unplanned life isn't worth living."  

The more I dwell on this, attempt to attain traits of character and skills that I value, the more the truth of Aristotle strikes me.

We are what we do.

I am what I do.

I may have grand plans, but they coming to nothing if my daily activities are not related to my goals.

I need to focus on the day, each day, and make that day a part of my vision for my life.

I saw in myself last week, two kinds of motivation to have myself do things.

1. One kind, the kind I have known most of my life, and can recall developing as a child, is becoming intensely focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else.  Distractions from achieving the one thing were painful. Steps toward the one thing were pleasant. (This must be psychological pain and pleasure.)
2. Second kind, that I tasted for the first time last week, was "observing myself" in the sense of Gurdjieff's teaching (see "In Search of the Miraculous" chapter VII, eleventh paragraph that ends with the sentence "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"). Seeing the rapid shifts and fluctuations in who I am from moment to moment, feeling how easily my efforts are diverted from my intended tasks of the moment. Yet able to once in a great while bring myself back on track. Able to achieve the same objective results of the first kind of motivation discussed above, but without losing overall awareness of myself, my surroundings, and the context that I am working in.  The sense of this lasted only a couple of days, occurring just a few times each day, and it was very powerful. As the week progressed, it dwindled into a memory of something I knew about but couldn't do. (Would this be moral pain and pleasure? or spiritual pain and pleasure?)

How do I escape this prison of myself?

Send notes via my email or paper to my future self?  

How often, all the time, my self of the moment ignores and downplays the importance of directions written down in moments of inspiration!

Start with "activities of daily life."

They must support my aim, and my goals of who I will become.  They give me the memories and experience to shape me into who I would be.

Make commitments to myself that honored to the level of the commitments that I make to others.

Problem Solving Questions from How To Solve It by G. Polya

Summary taken from G. Polya, "How to Solve It", 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1957, ISBN 0-691-08097-6.

1. UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
   • First. You have to understand the problem.
   • What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
   • Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
   • Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
   • Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
2. DEVISING A PLAN
   • Second. Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
   • Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
   • Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
   • Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
   • Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
   • Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
   • If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
   • Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
3. CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
   • Third. Carry out your plan.
   • Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
4. Looking Back
   • Fourth. Examine the solution obtained.
   • Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
   • Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
   • Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?

How to Read a Book, or any other written document

How to Read a Book ;  Survey, Skim, Scan, Read, Study​ ;   How to Read a Book - Syntopical Reading​

Everyone should be familiar with the different styles of reading, and be able to pick the appropriate style based on what they need to understand: survey, skim, scan, 

read, study, and syntopical reading of many documents.

This is very important when dealing with a lot of email.

---

 

 

How to Mark a Book, or a Procedure!

A few key lines from this essay:

Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points.

If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone With the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep.

...

But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.  [i.e. writing is thinking!]

Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.

And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. 

...

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:

• Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
• Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
• Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
• Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
• Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.​

Value of Planning and Insights to My Life

I am fortunate to still be walking and talking after many of my friends have passed away due to disease or blunt trauma.  The past year I have come to recognize influences of my behavior that I presumably would never have come to recognize if my life were over at an earlier time.  In the effort to plan what time I have left, I have discovered, again and again, how challenging it is for me to stick to the plan.

What I mean by "stick to the plan," is basically to continuously evaluate my plan for the good life against changing opportunities and circumstances.  When I was young I stuck to a plan simply because I had made the plan and I was going to follow it no matter what. This didn't turn out so well, and for a while I did very little planning outside of my job, fitness, and drinking beer.  After reading Aristotle's observation that the unplanned life isn't worth living, and overcoming my initial resistance to the idea, I decided to give planning another try. I did a little research by reading what others have to say about planning and execution and realized that I wasn't allowing myself enough flexibility to adjust the my plan as I and the world change.

Looking at all the things I want to do, and prioritizing them into what I most want at this point in my life made the truth that we are what we do very real for me.  By prioritizing my goals I saw that I had a desire to be someone different from who the goals I "like" to pursue where taking me toward.  The example being technical versus business, I enjoy solving technical problems, but I want to find the problems that have the best business payoff, e.g. a business man.  To satisfy my scientific technical desire I include a small amount of technology as a minor goal, but it is subordinate to finding the problems that have the best payoff in a business sense -- ultimately more satisfying to me in the long run.  (Look at the life of Tesla versus Edison or Westinghouse for examples.)

I have been a failure at executing my plans for the last year, but I have learned a huge amount about what motivates me and what makes the people around me special by the effort to plan and contemplation of my failures to carry out, or adjust the plan as circumstances open up to me.

Specific insights:

1. We are what we do. (Implicit in Aristotle's words "These virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions".)
2. I am strongly motivated by the desire for approval from others. This was very hard to face, because it puts me in the category of a "second hander?"  If I have a choice between working a little harder or better for my clients vice spending some time getting my personal finances in order, I find myself doing the work for my clients.  The underlying motivation when I compare how I feel during both activities is that I imagine the clients appreciation for me when their product is early or better than expected. (Imagination is a powerful servant, but a terrible master. Clearly there are two kinds of imagination. -- TODO: need to research this idea about kinds of imagination, someone must have expounded it already.) 
3. The problem is that I am not making a decision according to my plan, I am making a decision based on feelings and whims of the moment. Using my plan I can take care of myself and my clients.
4. I have come to see that my feelings of anger have roots deep in my childhood. On reflection this moment of writing, the insight comes from expecting others to be like me, and feeling angry with them when they are not like me.  Only by looking at what others can contribute to the current project from a business (time, money and value) perspective did I come to see that others are not like me.  This had something to do with opening up my own memories of when I first had these kinds of feelings -- frustration with others leading to anger.  When my focus was purely technical I didn't care about others around me except to keep an eye out for people with technical skills that I wanted to learn.
5. A very old insight, but still felt as a "new" insight, is the struggle to follow a plan. Now I have the potential to witness the struggle in the moment vice retrospectively, but I keep forgetting to do it.  It is humiliating to "see" the slave I am to "false personality" and imagination. Rather than feel the humiliation I go instantly to "sleep" for hours on end.

The Unplanned Life ...

"Aristotle said that an unplanned life is not worth examining, because it is one in which we do not know what we are trying to do or why, and one in which we do not know where we are trying to get or how to get there. It is also not worth living because it cannot be lived well" (Adler, Mortimer J. Aristotle for Everybody. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1978.)

Then consider what Peter F. Drucker has to say about planning in the Harvard Business Review article at (http://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself/ar/1):
"The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. … Feedback analysis is by no means new. It was invented sometime in the fourteenth century by an otherwise totally obscure German theologian and picked up quite independently, some 150 years later, by John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, each of whom incorporated it into the practice of his followers. In fact, the steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came to dominate Europe within 30 years."

I'm sure that John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola learned this from Aristotle.

Two meanings of "Going with the flow"

One of the things that I have learned from working on this process organizing my activity by 12 week cycles as an "operating system" for anything I do, for my life, I discover that I am what I do. My first 12 week cycle was dedicated to having a successful surgery and recovery. The second 12 week cycle has been taken over by continued recovery and transitioning back to full time work at my job. ("Going with the flow!")

I've known intellectually that we are what we do for a long time, but now I really get it in my gut. (For a number of years I believed that we are what we be, but I slowly came to realize that being is expressed and defined by action in the world. I heard a Landmark Communication course leader say this back around 1990, but it took until now to really penetrate to my "gut.")

What we do is what we become.

I discovered this as part of the 12 Week Year planning process. By comparing the various projects and tasks I was inclined to take on against the long term visions that I have for my self.  I was trying to resolve the inconsistencies between the things I wanted to do moment by moment with the things that I knew I needed to do to accomplish the projects that I wanted to get done. I woke up at about 2 am on morning in December with the deep realization,  in my "gut," that what I do moment by moment determines the which the projects that I accomplish.  I have the opportunity to choose my tasks and therefore the projects that support my vision of myself.

 

Examples:

• if I want to be work as a project manager for my company I have to do different, slightly different things, than if I want to be a technical expert such as a system architect.
• Similarly for my health and fitness. Do I eat a lot of carbohydrates in a week or balance the carbohydrates against my actual activity levels?
• I didn't start making big numbers in my beer club until I began to manage my drinking according to the rules of the club. Instead of drinking on impulse, I only drank what counted for numbers in the club, i.e. beers that I had never drunk before. 

I found that "going with the flow" doesn't work, but there are many flows to choose from if I don't jump in to the "flow of the moment" hence "going with the flow" can work if it the choice of flow is managed to support my vision for my self.  

So I find that phrases such as "going with the flow" have what I call a "casual" meaning and a "formal" meaning. The casual meaning is pliable and hard to pin down. The "formal" meaning is consciously defined.  What does it mean to consciously define something?  I've been down this road of hard knocks also. Consciously in this context means to exercise my full being to greatest extent possible — logically, morally, emotionally, and with intuition. This requires a willingness to listen to what cannot be said, but is sensed.  

Every day we reason with what cannot be said. For example how do I learn a new skill like juggling three balls?  How do I balance conversation among a group of people so that everyone is appreciated?  The same kind of apprehension of full being must be brought to the understanding of "go with the flow."