[AKN #82] How To Design Habits Which You Actually Do
LAUGH: We Out Here Tryna Function, LOVE: Artificial Intelligence Modernizes Historial Figures
Sup homies?
Wishing you a happy Twosday (February 22, 2022) on this Tuesday!
An especially fun day given the numerical representation when you write the date out in DD/MM/YYYY format.
I’m coming to you from San Francisco today.
SF is in the news a lot recently because we are going through a big Recall season — starting with the Recall of the SF Board of Education and moving on to the DA in June.
Regardless of how you feel about the recalls, we should all agree on one thing:
The focus of SF should instead be on how absurdly beautiful this city is.
This city is gorgeous and it has spent the better part of the last two years being shit on — both literally and figuratively.
I look forward to the moment when we can just appreciate how amazing it is again without breathlessly yelling about how it is dying and decaying.
Personally, I’ve tried to focus more on the positive of this city by learning to appreciate the subtle beauty which pops out of a neighborhood when you are let in on the little secrets.
For example, take a look at the following photo:
At first glance, it looks like just a regular ole street with some classic SF Victorian architecture.
But if you peel the onion deeper, you can see the rich history.
Like on the right you have the traditional SF Victorian architecture, but as you move to the left you see a sharp transition to a hodgepodge of architectural styles.
This transition can be traced back to when California commissioned the major highway nearby.
Rather than demolishing the homes which were in the path of the new highway, they picked them up and placed them in this neighborhood right next to the classic homes. Pretty fun, right? A little story which makes an ordinary picture seem extraordinary.
When we stop focusing on the doom and gloom of local politics, we can start appreciating the awe inspiring beauty and rich history which exists around us all the time.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: How To Design Habits Which You Actually Do
My house is littered with the work in progress of my ambitions.
Half used journals. Half read books. Half executed workout programs.
But right alongside them are the trophies of work taken to completion.
Journals with more pen on the page than white space. Books with every other page annotated. Workout spreadsheets filled with sets and reps for months.
Why is it that sometimes I follow through with what I say I want to do and other times I fail miserably?
The answer to this question is similar to the answer I give a lot in my professional life.
Built To Last
I am a “hardware design for reliability engineer.”
I ensure that hardware is designed to withstand the expected wear and tear a user is going to put it through.
The vast majority of people don’t even know this role exists…
To understand why it exists at all, lets consider a design problem:
Assume you were designing a castle for The King of Staten Island.
What would you make the castle out of?
Now you might start out thinking about cost of material.
You think “oh well there is a ton of trash in Staten Island. Maybe I could just build it out of trash. Very avant garde and it would be a perfect homage to Staten Island.”
But then you start to realize you can’t get the aesthetic appeal you want from simply building a castle out of trash.
So you end up settling on a substance which is cheap, aesthetically pleasing, and been used time and time again to make a castle.
That’s right. You choose sand.
While you’re busy patting yourself on the back and telling your colleagues all about how you pulled an all nighter designing the castle, it’s my job to tell you that you made a poor decision.
Yes, sand will make a castle…but this castle needs to exist outside for years and there is NO WAY a sand castle will last through even the high tide we will see tonight!
No amount of perfecting a sand castle will make it survive the normal conditions you expect it to see (let alone the extraordinary conditions you expect it to survive like Hurricane Sandy.)
You’re going to need to go with something more permanent like stone or whatever they made the Red Keep out of in Game of Thrones if you want it to survive these more intense conditions.
The design problem is meant to illustrate that reliability is a function of how you plan on using it.
If you just need something to survive a sunny day with no wind, rain, or high tide, knock yourself out and make a sand castle.
However, if you need a castle which is going to survive Hurricane Sandy, you are going to need a castle like the Red Keep.
That should solve your problem and make the King of Staten Island happy…unless a (spoiler alert!) dragon attack is coming in which case maybe we should consider other design concepts.
But what does this have to do with why I finish some books I start and leave others half complete?
Because just like our hypothetical castle, certain decisions made early on in the “behavioral design” process will dictate whether or not you will finish the book.
Designing for Reliable Behavior
Whether or not you personally follow through on something depends a lot on understanding yourself and how much time you can give to something.
For example, let’s say you want to read War and Peace and you say “I’m going to read this whenever I find the time.”
Now, if you’re a college student pursuing a liberal arts degree, this behavioral design may be sufficient because largely speaking liberal arts majors are a total fucking joke so you probably will be able to find enough random chunks of time to read a 1,200 page book.
However, if you’re working a 9-5 job and have three children, there is a zero percent chance you’re going to ever read that book.
Worded differently: what works for one person may not work for another because people are different.
Rather than “finding the time”, the busy parent would be better off structuring something like “I’m going to read at least 1 page of this book every night before I go to sleep.” It may take them 3 years to read the book, but it’s now only a matter of time before they finish it instead of an aspiration with no plan.
To generalize this, what I have found is:
The key to long term success with any habit is to design a routine which fits my lifestyle.
It would be lovely if I could just hijack another person’s routine and skip the experimentation phase, but it never works.
It never works because I am not them.
I have a different lifestyle, different priorities, different everything.
Thus, whenever I try to copy and paste their routine, I inevitably fail. Because yes for them it might make sense to have an email auto responder, but for me I feel like a total pretentious tool doing that so I would never be able to keep it going for the long haul.
However, whenever I get something to stick long term, it is because I designed a routine which I was able to execute over and over again given my lifestyle.
Like my journaling routine was the product of iterating many times over and over again before I settled on one particular set of actions which I can execute every day before work.
It only works because I designed it knowing what my day to day set of tasks and responsibilities look like. No one else could possibly know those things except for me.
So if you want some new routine to last, I recommend designing it yourself.
LAUGH: We Out Here Tryna Function
Not sure I’ve ever answered “I’m functioning” to “how are you doing?”, but I love this meme nonetheless.
LOVE: Artificial Intelligence Modernizes Historial Figures
An AI system took in photos of historical figures and made them into modern people and it is way more fun than you think it is.
Love the wine glass it added for George Washington. He does look like a total wine snob. Legend has it he was discussing the tannins in his wine as he crossed the Delaware.
There are 16 of these recreations plus a bonus at the end where Tim Urban links to this same thing, but for Disney characters and what they would look like in real life.
Of the 16, my favorite is Beethoven.
My guy is about to write Symphony No. 10 and accept a Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Award for his guest appearance in the most recent Twilight movie.
So many cool applications of AI.
Hard to believe that one day its going to go from making fun pictures of our forefathers to enslaving us.
CLOSING TIME
You don’t have to go home, but you can subscribe here:
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
K.Rapp