Pyrrhic victories are victories where you won but it was not worth winning. Historically, this term is applied in the context of war. The side that "wins" lost so many lives and it cost them billions of dollars. In everyday life, pyrrhic victories look like waiting outside dunkin donuts for 30 minutes to get a free donut that costs only $2. Our time is far more valuable than what we gained. Free things are never free. Rivalries that lead to mimetic violence turn into pyrrhic victories for on...

Everywhere means nowhere. -Seneca In Book 2.1 of Letters From A Stoic, Seneca discusses this idea of quality over quantity. Think of going on a Europe trip to ten countries in a month versus visiting one place for a month. We like to pack as many things in. But the more we pack in, the less we truly absorb and digest our new experiences. Seneca writes about this concept of everywhere is nowhere to advise Lucilius on learning and digesting content. Seneca recommends: stick to a limited n...

What would sustain us? We know what distracts us, what excites us, but what would sustain us? -James Hollis This is a question that probably needs asking on a regular basis. The answer is always changing. I know the answers to what excites me and what distracts me without much thought. They are obvious and have remained more steady over the years. One interpretation of this question is what would be enough for me? What would be enough to keep me going in a sustainable way? Balance in all th...

“The intended space between leaves are as important as the leaves themselves”. — Henri Matisse from the Le Platane serigraph The space between the leaves is just as important as the leaves. Music requires silence between the notes to be music. Light and dark. Matter and void. Yin and yang. They all require what is often called their opposite. But really all of these are complements of each other. You need one to reveal the other. We naturally focus on the leaves and forget that we need t...

When I was about 20, I took my first Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. I am an INTJ. It became a little hobby to type strangers at a bar by asking only four questions (I know, this is a very INTJ thing to do). I got decent at it. I know many people push back against personality tests. They are not a box in my opinion. These tests help you understand yourself and relate to others better. When I learned I was an INTJ and started reading all about them, so many things clicked into place. It ...

Out walking with two companions, I'm sure to be in my teacher's company. The good in one I adopt in myself; the evil in the other I change in myself. — Confucius from Analects No matter what situation we find ourselves in, there is an opportunity for learning. Both good and bad role models teach us different things. Sometimes lessons of what not to do stick with me longer. However, learning what not to do does not inform us of what to do. Ideally we have both types of examples in our life. ...

Fear says, Life is too much. It's too big. You can't manage that. You're not up to that. Hide out, hang out, stay away. It's better that way. Lethargy says, Chill out, cool off, have a bonbon, turn on the telly. Tomorrow's another day. Both are the enemies of life. - James Hollis from A Life of Meaning Fear and lethargy prevent us from living our best life. It is such a simple idea presented by James Hollis, but it really resonated with me. In each situation we are in, it is helpful to unders...

Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion. Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving. - Erich Fromm The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm is one of those books where I remember where I got i...

It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage. - Paul Graham There is a fine line between good pain and bad pain. In sports, it is often difficult to decide whether to keep training through the pain or to take a few rest days. Over time, this line has become slightly more clear to m...

And still, the friendship spooled on and on, a long, swift river that had caught him in its slipstream and was carrying him along, taking him somewhere he couldn't see. - Hanya Yanagihara from A Little Life Friendships make us grow and take us places we cannot foresee. Our friendships impact the quality of our life. Everyone loves quoting the idea about us all being the average of the five people we spend the most time with. I do not know how much I agree with the concept. From a habit stand...

A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then comes that day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief—right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and “it is very quiet...

Today a new chatGPT was released by OpenAI called o1. chatGPT o1 "thinks" before it responds. This o1 AI model is said to outperform human experts at PhD-level science questions. Based on a few tests I did, o1 says "thinking" for a few seconds and then spits out something that would have taken me hours to compile from the literature. It is really wild. Yesterday I made some notes on CMV in pregnancy after bouncing around some review articles. The purpose was to get up to speed on CMV in pregnan...

CMV = Cytomegalovirus CMV is a herpes virus that the majority of people have been infected with. Most immunocompetent people do not know when they were infected due to very mild symptoms or a complete lack of symptoms. But most of us would have been infected as children. CMV is not something a healthy adult needs to worry about...unless they get pregnant. Some facts: 50-85% of people have been infected with CMV no vaccine for CMV most people are asymptomatic CMV is spread through bodily flu...

Dogs are angels. Human's best friend. Dog is god spelled backwards. It makes sense. Dogs love us as we are. Not who we want to be. Dogs love us unconditionally. Dogs do not care what we look like, how much money we make, or what our jobs are. Dogs just want to spend time with us. I have learned more from my dog than probably any human. Patience. Sometimes dogs want to sniff in one spot for a very long time. I cannot see what she is smelling. But it is clear that it must be good. And I must wai...

How you do anything is how you do everything. — unknown but popular saying We are who we are both at work and out of work. If our identity = repeated being, then what we do out of work influences us at work. If we are mindless at home, why would we be mindful at work (or vice versa 1 )? Likewise, if we spend 40+ hours a week at work, then our way of being in everyday life will be deeply influenced by how we are at work. Intentional focus is not something saved up for big deadlines. It is pra...

What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this: (picture of a serpent eating its tail, forming a circle). — Kurt Vonnegut I love this quote. I hate snakes though. But in Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut has his little drawing of the snake eating its tail. I learned many years later that a snake eating its tail is called an ouroboros. The ouroboros is a very ancient symbol that has several meanings. Often it is used as a symbol of eternity, wholeness, infinity, and life and ...

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. — James Clear from Atomic Habits As time goes on, small differences get magnified. The farther the target, the more off the bullet may be. One day my tennis coach was teaching me how to serve the ball. When you toss the ball up, you want your arm to be as high as possible when you release the ball so the ball does not have to go very far. The lower your arm the more off course the ball can get before reaching the optimal spot for hitting ...

The material objects in our life serve to link our past and present lives 1. As time goes on, we have less anchors to our past. Technology replaces many of these objects with one object, the smart phone. Most technologies were single-use prior to the iPhone. You take notes in a notebook. You talk on the phone with a phone. You listen to music with an iPod or CD player. You read a book. You take pictures with a camera. Digitization leads to fewer anchors. Examples: Facetiming friends vs h...

Identity means repeated being in latin 1. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. —Aristotle We are what we do. We are what we do the most. The more often we do something the more us it is. If we run, we are runners. If we read, we are readers. If we write, we are writers. If we teach, we are teachers. Likewise, we are not that one mistake but we are our repeated mistakes. We must change our identity before changing our habits. We have to focus on who we wa...

According to some AI bot on google, about 7.5 million blog posts and about 1,000 news articles are published every single day (I hate to add to that number with this baby post). Astonishingly, 11,000ish new books are published each day. We have very limited time and are in the age of information overload. This is a terrible combo. We must be extremely selective about what we put into our brains. So how do you find the good stuff amongst all the garbage? Hint: the answer is not CNN or Fox News....

Do not hurry; do not rest. — Goethe Have you ever tried to sprint a mile and then rest for a few minutes and then repeat that several times? Compare that to running at a steady pace for the same total distance. The latter is a million times easier. There are so many things in life like this, where we are doing the sprint/rest instead of a steady pace. What would it feel like to do the steady pace? Ultramarathon running is all about training yourself to hold back. It is so hard to start off ...

In a fog you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. — Shunryu Suzuki from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Real progress is slow. Brick by brick. When it pours rain, you get soaked. When it is foggy, you get soaked but it takes a long time and you don't really notice. This reminds me of the paradox of the heap. One grain at a time. At what point does it become a heap? No one grain makes a heap into a 'heap'. Tipping points and thresholds are sim...

There are two types of people on this Earth. People who can say 'no' and people who cannot. Once you learn how to do it, it becomes easier. Some people are born better at it due to their personality types, while some people really have to work at it. I think more people are bad at it than good at it. If more people were good at it, we wouldn't be as surprised when we encounter someone who is good at it. Saying no is almost a superpower. Saying no to something today means you can say yes to some...

When talking about slack, I am not talking about: the app for teams that distracts and prevents people from working anything to do with slackers (a term for lazy people) The term slack I am referring to is from Tom DeMarco's book Slack published in 2001. This book was ahead of it's time and has never been more relevant than now. DeMarco describes a visualization for slack as a 3X3 tile board filled with 9 tiles. If there are 9 tiles present, no tiles can be moved (100% efficiency). With one ...

It is 22:35 and the clock is ticking. I still did not do my daily writing. I kept picking up old books and finding favorite quotes. Too many. I never picked one and wrote something. Just kept looking for something. Not sure what though. I think I kept finding topics I wanted to write about 'right'. As in not this short tiny thing. My perfectionism got the best of me. And the day slipped away. Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and mor...

Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. As long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard that’s what you get to do with it. There’s a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to get you to...

Test and learn rather than plan and implement. You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. — Henry Ford If we treat life like a series of experiments, we can just get started. Not tomorrow. Now. We don't need all the information to plan something and then implement. We can go at it with a different mindset. A 'pilot experiment' mindset. This mindset is about testing and learning rather than coming up with the perfect plan. There is no failure. We are learning from any outcome. ...

Nothing lasts forever. I have been sick for two weeks now. Whenever I get sick, I forget what it feels like to be healthy. The idea of going on a run seems crazy. Breathing has been difficult doing nothing. Or when I have a cut in my mouth. One day you wake up and you're not sick. Or the cut is gone. And the kicker is that you hardly notice. You being me. I hardly notice. After wishing to go back to normal, I hardly notice when things go back to normal. It is the same with the seasons. Or an...

Curiosity without drive leads to never finishing things. Drive without curiosity leads to speed with no direction. Curiosity + drive = success. Curiosity alone is not enough. Drive alone is not enough. We will be most successful doing projects for which we are naturally curious and have a certain level of drive in the chosen field. I am curious about a million things. But my focus and drive are in a specific field. I am very curious about music and have wanted to learn piano for ages. But ...

Today is one of those days. I could do nothing or I could do a little something. The whole day is jam packed from early morning to late at night. No exercise. No journaling. No time to take care of myself. But I made a commitment to this 100 day writing challenge. So here we are. I am writing something. Days like this make me question why I have to pile on to already difficult days. I always want more. More data. Cram more experiments into one. I can do way more in a single day than I used to....

Generosity, charity, honesty. The sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it. — Marcus Aurelius I love this quote from Marcus Aurelius in Book One of the Meditations talking about positive traits that the people in his life had. This quote was talking about Maximus. To me this idea is about walking in a straight line. Do we choose to walk in a straight line or is someone forcing us to walk in a straight line by putting fences around us? Both outcomes are the same. We...

The hardware dictates what software can be run on it. I am not a computer person. I like computers. But I don't really code or anything. But I learned this idea from Cal Newport. Cal Newport is one of those people who I like all of his work. Not a piece of one of his books. But all of his books. I like the direction he is headed. I am always excited to see what he is thinking and doing next. Point is, our background tends to make us think in certain ways. I am a scientist and I see things throug...

Day 4 was missed. Three days in and I already forgot that I was going to write everyday. Oh well. The old me would quit here since the streak is already broken. But the new me says "Let's keep going." Every day is day zero. It doesn't matter what you did yesterday or what you plan on doing tomorrow. All you have is today. It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you. — John McPhee Your last paper will n...

The Four Tendencies by Gretchin Rubin. The Upholder, the Questioner, the Obliger, and the Rebel. Each type is motivated differently. Upholders are motivated by both external and internal expectations. These tend to be the over-achiever type A personalities. Obligers are more motivated by external expectations than internal expectations and often are the people pleasers and care takers of the world. On the other hand, Questioners are mainly motivated by internal expectations. Sometimes internal e...

Boundaries. I get frustrated that people cross boundaries. But people will always cross boundaries. It is out of our control. The only thing we can control is how we respond to our crossed boundaries. Do we uphold them? Firmly and respectfully? Or do we get steam rolled? The problem I find with boundaries being crossed is that while I want to be annoyed at the person who crossed them, I am actually annoyed at myself. It was my job to uphold the boundary. It was not their task. In a perfect world...

Today is day 1 of the 100 day writing challenge. I have wanted to practice daily writing for at least four years now but I always delay. I say that I am too busy. Or I have nothing to say. Or why can't I just write and not share it? Why do I need this external accountability? I don't really have these answers. All I know is that this writing challenge has been avoided like the plague for years now. Which means clearly I have some baggage around it. Probably the typical sorts of "I am not good en...