Bucket List

To help me prioritize how I spend my time, someone suggested I make a bucket list. Three lists, actually. What would I do if I knew I were going to die in a year? In five years? In ten? (Maybe I'd do some research to understand whether I should say "if I knew I was going to die" or "if I knew I were going to die" and why I should make that choice).

I had no trouble with the one-year list. If I only had a year to live, I knew right away that I'd move to Boston and spend as much time as I could with my kids and grandkids -- with occasional flights to San Francisco to spend some time with my kids there. If  Bobbi, who hates cities, came to Boston with me that would be wonderful. If not -- well, I'd go anyway.  That much was clear.  (I'm still working on the five and ten year lists.)

I wouldn't be doing it to spend my final days with the people I love best, but to pass on more of what I've learned. My goal wouldn't be to live through my kids. It's not about me at all. Or them, really. It's about knowledge.  That was an interesting insight. 

I've spent a lot of my life acquiring knowledge. Indeed, I've spent the better part of my life doing it, pun intended, thank you. Why? Lots of reasons.


In part, I want to have answers when people want them. When someone's got a question and I've got the answer -- or I know where I can get it -- I love it! 

In part, it's because I think it's just plain cool to know things.

In part it's because I love to see how all the pieces of the world fit together in a beautiful pattern. I like solving puzzles, and life's a giant puzzle. I can't solve it all, but I can solve bits of it. And that's fun.
But as much as I like sharing my treasure,  until now I've cared more about collecting than sharing.
Listen up, kids! I'm not going to die in a year--at least not as far as I know. But I really do want to pass on what I know.

In part, it's because I like it when people admire me for knowing stuff. 

Some say knowledge is power. It is, and for me knowledge is also treasure. It's treasure that I'm very willing to share--even eager to share--with people who value knowledge as I do. Hell, I'll share it with anyone willing to sit still and listen. 

Thinking about the end of my life makes me realize that when I die my collection dies with me. And that doesn't have to happen.

My kids are special to me for lots of reasons. They're special in this context because they're the people most likely to listen when I've got something to say. They'll listen especially carefully if they think I won't be around much longer to say it. 

Knowledge is valuable. Knowledge is beautiful. Knowing is joyful. My store of knowledge is my treasure. I can share all of it without losing a bit of it. In fact, I will gain by sharing.

But I realize, sharing knowledge is not cost free. Every minute I spend sharing my fortune is a minute taken from expanding it . My bucket list thought experiment tells me I don't want my fortune to vanish when I die. I want it to live on. It tells me that I've been selfish and shortsighted enough to keep building my fortune and only stop when it's clear that I'm going to lose it very soon. Only then would I get serious about giving it away.


It's time to change my strategy. More time for estate planning and sharing my wealth--even if it means less time adding treasure.

Here's the first installment.

I hope you like it. If you do, you're welcome! Add it to your own fortune and consider spending more of your own time sharing your own wealth. 

Is There Anything Good About Men?

Image via CrunchBase

Roy Baumeister's paper analyzes some of the popular and feminist views of the differences between men and women.

Men and women are the same--or at least pretty much the same--in many ways, but only when you look at averages. They are different in an important way: there's a lot more variation in men than in women. There are more men in positions of power than women for example--which leads feminists to cry 'patriarchy.' But there are also more men who are homeless and in jail. There are more men who are geniuses, but there also more who are what we used to call retarded. And so on.

The reasons for the differences are evolutionary: roughly 80% of all women who have ever lived have reproduced, but only about 40% of men. Evolution has wired men in for more risks--including prenatal development risks--and wired women to opt for more safety.

The full paper is here, and well worth the reading.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

The author has done extensive research in self-regulation (he coined the term Ego depletion), irrationality and self-defeating behavior, and the need to belong. His profile on Wikipedia is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Baumeister

Think Differently: Stop Working On The Proof

Per JK Galbraith, quoted in "Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking: "Faced with the choice of changing one's mind or proving there's no need to do so, almost everybody gets working on the proof."

Always challenge assumptions and be prepared to think differently. (Or Think Different if you're an Apple aficionado. It's a good practice. And it takes practice.

Big Ideas I: The World Isn't Going to Hell

Matt Ridley, author of book called The Rational Optimist, starts his Ted Talk this way:

When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s,the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives.The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out. And a nuclear winter would finish us off.  

I lived back then. I remember these dire predictions. And because all these claims were supported by large amounts of data and backed by respected academics, they seemed credible. Our doom seemed inevitable. And to top it off, the war in Vietnam was ramping up. A lot of us felt hopeless and helpless.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb." Ehrlich's thesis: resources are finite. Population is growing exponentially. Many people were already starving, and with growth, more and more would starve. Sooner or later (sooner, Ehrlich said) we would run out of food. Early editions said this:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Cover via AmazonIn 1972 a think tank called "The Club Of Rome" published a report called "Limits to Growth." Wikipedia describes the Club of Rome as a group of " current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.^[1]  Using computer models developed at MIT and data on available resources to support their claims, the authors argued that the world was rapidly running out of resources, and with population growing exponentially, predicted that population would overshoot world's ability to sustain its population. According to the models, The inevitable result would be mass starvation, chaos, war, and Other Bad Things.

Around that time I read two books that not only changed my way of thinking about these predicted crises, but changed my way of thinking about all later projected doom scenarios . One book was "Utopia and Oblivion," by R. Buckminster Fuller. The other was "The Year 2000" by Herman Khan.

From Fuller's book I remember these key ideas:

• Prosperity is the best form of population control. In poor countries it is rational for parents to have as many children as possible: children are cheap to raise, and if one or several are even moderately successful, then they can support the parents in old age. In rich countries, it is rational for parents to have only a few children: children are expensive to raise, and there are other ways that aging parents can sustain themselves. So as countries become more wealthy, their reproduction rate drops.
• The world is becoming more prosperous. While it's awful that billions still live in poverty, it's also true that billions today live better than kings did a few hundred years ago.
• The history of the world is the story of doing "more and more with less and less." Fuller cites, among other trends, the change in the number of hours spent working for necessities (we get more and more food with less and less work), the amount of material required to build a building (we get bigger and better buildings with less and less material), the growth in food production (more and more food from less and less land.)

(I also learned that it is counter-factual to refer to sunrise and sunset. Fuller reminds us that since we know that the sun neither rises nor sets, we should properly refer to both events as "earth turn." He likewise points out that upstairs and downstairs are counterfactual descriptions. Since the earth is roughly a sphere we move in and out, not up and down. His recommended terms are outstairs and instairs.)

Khan argued that the apparent scarcity of resources was an illusion. We've had about 100 years of oil since oil first became a commercially important commodity despite exponentially growing demand. We had (as I remember) only about seven years of tin. Khan argues that since it costs money to explore for new resources, the investment in finding new resources should be based on the difficulty of finding them. Tin is very easy to find, so it does not make sense building inventories. Oil is somewhat harder, so a hundred years worth seems to be a stable number.

Doom-sayers are right to say "if things go on as they are" then things will get bad. But they have been repeatedly wrong when they assume that things will go on as they are. Nearly all earlier similar predictions have proven fabulously wrong.

In 1980 Julian Simon, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, and the doom-saying Paul Ehrlich made a wager. Simon challenged Ehlich to choose any five commodity metals that he believed would be in dramatically shorter supply (and therefore would demand a higher price) over a ten year period. The wager was based on a $200 investment in each of the metals, and the agreement was that Simon would pay Ehrlich the difference between the initial price and the closing price if prices went up, and that Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference if they went down. Simon's potential loss on the wager was unbounded. If to cost of the metals rose by a factor of 20, he'd be out $20,000. Ehrlich's loss was bounded: if the cost dropped to zero, he'd only pay $1,000.

In fact, Ehrlich lost more than 500.00 on the wager. And despite all his predictions having been completely wrong, still maintains the rightness of his position.  He said:

The bet doesn't mean anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor. I still think the price of those metals will go up eventually, but that's a minor point. The resource that worries me the most is the declining capacity of our planet to buffer itself against human impacts. Look at the new problems that have come up: the ozone hole, acid rain, global warming. It's true that we've kept up food production -- I underestimated how badly we'd keep on depleting our topsoil and ground water -- but I have no doubt that sometime in the next century food will be scarce enough that prices are really going to be high even in the United States.

Ehrlich's metaphor is as flawed as the reasoning that lost him his bet. No sane individual who jumps off the Empire Sate Building would say how great things are going. His stomach would be doing flip flops; he'd be spinning around unable to do anything useful or productive; the wind would be tugging at his clothing. And there is no self-regulating feedback mechanism that would keep him from inevitably hitting the ground and splattering.

Change Is One Decision Away--If You Practice

As I've written before: If I want to be a writer, I just have to be a writer. I don't have to do anything. If I want to do writing, I have to be a writer, and then start writing. If I want to have written something, then I have to be a writer, do the writing, and then keep at it until the piece is done.


The start of any change--to be something different, to do something different, or to have something different is just one decision away. Making decisions is not hard. If I'm not writing, and I want to write or to have written something (wanting is not the same as deciding) then the change will start when I decide to be a writer. Many times that's enough. I declare (once again) I am a writer.  The decision results--almost magically--in me starting to write. And after a while I will have written something.

If deciding to "be a writer" doesn't do it, and I still want to have written something, then the next change is just one more decision away: to decide to write now. Not time in the future. But now.

The decision has to have a now in it because decisions have an expiration date. They are ephemeral. My decisions to be a writer and to write are effective only as long as I am on my way to writing (that is, walking up to my office, or pulling out a notebook,) or actually writing, or doing something while maintaining the deliberate intention to write about it later (doing it as a writer, rather than just doing it). Once I stop re-deciding or re-creating that decision, I go back to whatever state of being my environment seems to demand of me at the time--or if no demands then to just drifting.

Decisions produce change. A decision may start a visible change (a decision to act), or it may cause an invisible change that flows naturally into action (a decision to be).  Absent decision things may happen but nothing really changes.

Making a decision is a skill. And keeping a decision in place is a skill. As with all other skills, if you don't deliberately practice you won't be very good.  If you do practice, and do your practice deliberately, then after enough good practice, you will get good.

That's the goal of all practice: to be able to carry out an act without thinking about it. I've become strong at deciding to do my daily pages per The Artist's Way. Nearly every morning I decide "it's time to do my pages." The decision is effortless. The doing is nearly effortless. And I've got a stack of notebooks to prove it. What's in them? Who cares. The goal of doing pages is just to have done  them. And I've done them. For more than three years.

But my other writing is sporadic. I think it's because I make the necessary decisions in a weak and undisciplined way, when I remember to do them at all. Here's what I do most often: not decide. Here's what I do second most often: I decide to write something (later), and later never comes. Here's what I think I should do:

• Remember to decide to be a writer
• Decide to be a writer
• Decide to write
• Write
• Keep those decisions fresh until the writing is done

As I am doing right now.

Periodically I realize that I am letting circumstances and inertia make decisions for me and I decide to . When I realize that I'm drifting, and I decide to change.  I need a periodic reminder: "Decide!"

Then I need to practice making the decisions I want to make more decisions become as effortless as my decision to do my pages.

Such a decision has gotten this blog post started, and now finished. 

Now, let me decide what to do next!

Most common words in English

I'm working on improving my typing speed. The theory is:

If I can type in larger chunks then I can type faster.

So I should learn how to type the most common words, really, really fast.

Here are the 100 most common words.

How to type upside down.

˙ɯopuɐɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ 'ʎןןɐǝɹ sı sıɥʇ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ ʎɐʍ ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥ

˙ǝuo sıɥʇ ɹo 'ǝʇıs sıɥʇ oʇ oƃ

˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ uɹnʇ ʇɐɥʇ sǝƃɐd ǝʌɐɥ ʎǝɥʇ

˙ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝpoɔıun oʇ ʇxǝʇ ɹɐןnƃǝɹ ʇɹǝʌuoɔ ʎǝɥʇ

ɥƃnoɥʇ sɹǝʇʇǝן ןɐʇıdɐɔ ǝʌɐɥ ʇ,uop ʎǝɥʇ

¡uɯɐp