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.

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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.​