(2018-01-05) How To Ride Your Brain Bicycle

Venkatesh Rao: How to Ride Your Brain Bicycle

In which I explain what Steve Jobs meant by his bicycle-for-brain line

The interface, with all its frictions and latencies, becomes invisible. To your prefrontal cortex, the interface feels like another part of the brain rather than an external artifact.

Steve Jobs famously called the computer a bicycle for the brain. Have you ever wondered why a bicycle in particular?

Why do resolutions fail? (cf No Goals)

I'm convinced that these three classes of Failures don't actually account for as much of the intention failure rate as we think. I'd attribute only about 15% to each.

let's zoom out

I think the majority of long-term action failures, about 60%, are Commitment failures. We are plagued by doubts about whether what we are doing is what we should be doing at all.

Not doubt about being able to do pro-chess right, but about whether pro-chess is the right thing to do.

This is not doubt about outcomes.

The bicycle metaphor is why I've gotten increasingly suspicious of all the agonizing about Facebook and Twitter hacking your attention with addictive dark-pattern interaction design.

This kind of doubt is what we call angst: doubt that is seemingly about meanings and values, ultimate purpose, a sense of being in a calling

Design failure doubt shows up as means-ends skepticism: will writing clear goal statements really create focus?

Implementation failure doubt shows up as confusion and fatigue: Wait, is this the actual next action?

Prediction failure doubts show up as a sense of missing something in the picture

But angst-ridden doubt doesn't feel like this. It does not have an external locus but an internal one. A deep gut-level discomfort and sense that you should be doing something else with your life. That you're playing the wrong game.

We're almost back to bicycles. Here's the thing: distractability is almost entirely a function of angst and commitment failures, not the other 3 kinds of failure modes or external factors.

if you're getting distracted, at some level, you're choosing to be distracted. Your commitment to your intentions is simply not as strong as you think.

the Facebook-can-do-no-wrong libertarian would derp: "...and you should take responsibility for that choice and not blame Facebook."

the progressive would derp, "...and it's not your fault at all, Evil Corporations have systematically weakened your ability to commit strongly by building addiction technology."

your subconscious decision to be distracted is in fact the right one almost all the time, because your angst is likely well-founded and worth listening to

There is no point being focused, with a finely tuned productivity system, and maniacal discipline against distractions, if you're not sure what you're doing is worth doing.

Commitment is not the absence of distractions, but the presence of stabilized focus.

You can now ride a bicycle without it occupying 110% of your attention. Maybe it's at 70%

Now you can use the remaining 30% to pay attention to the environment while riding a bicycle

The scenery isn't "distraction" getting in the way of riding your bicycle. It's part of the point of riding the bicycle

Parts of it might even be crucially important input you need to take note of

What happened along this learning curve?

Basic meditation is learning to be conscious of the "breath bicycle." Go back and re-read points 29-39, but replace all external factors with the obvious corresponding internal ones.

This latter stage is what mindfulness meditators are aiming for

to put it another way, you've got like 5 Facebooks inside your own head (cf Society of Mind)

You'll go through the other stages, all the way to where only a part of your mind is being used to maintain meditative breath-bicycle balance, and the rest is free to look around and enjoy the ride.

Meditation uses simple focal devices such as breath or a candle flame because the balance zone there is light enough to master quickly and safely

Now let's move on (FINALLY) to resolutions and actual computers. Your breath computer isn't good for much beyond just existing. It's a pretty limited bicycle. It won't write novels or build startups.

Fortunately, today, nearly all kinds of bicycles can be implemented as computers.

Think about a resolution (or system, or habit, or trend assumption, or whatever) you've adopted for the year. Ask: what is the underlying bicycle? Can you actually ride it? If not, can you learn in time to get where you want?

I mean literally something in the form of an interaction loop that gets leveraged work done,

not everybody can learn to ride all kinds of computers-as-bicycles. So this is NOT a trivial question

I suck at riding the chess bicycle. I am fairly comfortable riding cooking, basic math and simple coding bicycles

Now we are in a position to consider angst. Believe it or not, though angst seems like it's about Meaning and Values and Purpose, it is really about bicycle-rider fit (BRF).

Angst is the question: "can I ride this bicycle well enough for it to be the balanced state of motion from which I experience the universe? Or do I need a different bicycle?"

Flip the question of distraction around. When are you in a state of perfect absorption

Is it when you're distraction free and 100% laser focused, unaware of everything going on around you except the task at hand, never checking Facebook or Twitter? Again, NO.

You are angst-free when your attention has a dynamically stable and pleasant balance state from which you can experience almost anything the universe can throw at you without getting knocked off or working too hard.

Zooming back out the year level, what makes for a successful year? When are you able to look back and say, "that was a good year"? (Yearly Review)

I guarantee you this: it's not when you manage to "stay focused" and check off every resolution and "execute" perfectly

What makes a year a good year is if you can log strong memories of periods of effortless, angst-free bicycle riding. When, at least for a while, you felt you were living as you were meant to. When you can look back and say, "it was a complete mess, but for one good week in July I was in the zone and moved mountains

There is no One True Bicycle out there for your particular mind. It can take years, even decades of searching and maybe you never find a bicycle you like.