Return to Micropolis

Snapshot from Sims 2: Micropolis, where happiness is the prosperity of the soul.

One strange effect of the song Into the West playing and replaying in my head: I felt the urge to return to Micropolis, my Sims 2 Prosperity Challenge. (I named it before I knew about the game with the same name.) I chronicled the history of the Micropolis neighborhood for years, until I was lured away by Sims 3. I regret now that I did not continue writing it. It may be too late to resume now: My readers have probably drifted away. But who knows. Perhaps someone will find it again, or someone new will find it.

I quoted the song twice during my writing of that saga, both at rather poignant scenes, so that would be why I suddenly thought of Micropolis when I heard that song. And I realized something, belatedly: My illustrated story of this imaginary neighborhood may have been one of the most important things I have done in my life. I have thought of this before but it kind of slipped my mind, among the many things going on. But the way I act as a “guardian angel” for the sims in Micropolis, my dialog with them and their life with each other, was a unique opportunity to bring across my view of life: What I really think is important, and how to get there.

The story of Micropolis is one of six very different families, all of which had lost loved ones and all that they owned in a hurricane. Together they settled in an abandoned village in the foothills. When I began writing the story in 2007, my “near future” setting seemed unreasonably austere: Everything was more expensive, jobs were hard to come by and almost impossible without college education, which was in itself quite expensive. My founding families were mired in debt from the day they set foot in their tiny houses far from the city. I wrote this toward the very end of the long boom, during its last frothing frenzy, long before the bleakness had sunk in among common people.

Over the course of decades, we follow the families as they go about their lives, but with a very unusual addition: An invisible higher-dimensional being, generally called “the Angel”, who observes them, converses with them, comments on their actions and thoughts, advises them and encourages them. Rather than using brute magic to give them prosperity, the Angel teaches them to use the opportunities in their everyday life to learn useful skills and improve their lot in the long run. Often a very long run, as they continue to rack up debt for a while until they have the skill and the free time to start paying off.

But the long-term project to turn the economy around is not even the most notable part of the project, despite the subtitle “a Prosperity Challenge”. The Angel is first and foremost concerned about the long-term happiness of his people, and help them make friends, find love, and steer each toward their life goals. The purpose is for each of them to achieve during their lifetime what in the Sims 2 is called “platinum mood”, or what we in this world would call “an unshakable mind”, a mental state where an individual is virtually immune to despair and able to always remain happy and do their best even in the face of adversity and disappointment. The wish of the Angel is that each and every one of his people will achieve this during their lifetime, a permanent feeling like the constant fulfillment of all desire.

So no, this state of mind is not permanent in me yet in the real world. But with the help of my higher-dimensional overseer, I still hope to spend more and more time in it until it becomes permanent. In a way, I am preaching to myself with this story, but the funny thing is, in The Sims 2 this really works. Living this kind of life really does bring happiness, peace of mind and peace among people. I don’t need to cheat or hack the game. Doing unto my sims what my own invisible friend does unto me works. Since most of those who will read the story are avid Sims players themselves, they will recognize this. That’s why I can tell a funny and heartwarming story about a small cluster of bereaved families growing into a happy and prosperous town, rather than trying to convince people of some ideology or religion. “Show, don’t tell”. ^_^

The already super long story of Micropolis begins here: http://itlandm-sims-mp.livejournal.com

Things I have learned

It is around 50 years since I learned to talk. It took most of that time to learn to shut up.

It is easier to write wisely than to talk wisely, and very hard to talk wisely until you have learned to not talk. Often it is wiser to continue not talking.

Reading strengthens the mind, and writing makes it clearer.

Good books are like friends, and even mediocre books are like comrades. But there are some books that will hurt you, just as there are people.

Before you speak with conviction about what you have not experienced yourself, make sure to have read many books about it, not one or two or five.

Being intelligent is like inheriting money: It is nothing to be proud of, it is easy to waste, and you end up being held responsible for more.

Intelligence is not enough for wisdom. I am wiser than some who are more intelligent than me, and more foolish than some who are less intelligent.

No amount of running will take you to the goal if you start in the wrong direction and never turn. The same goes for thinking, no matter how smart you are.

Thinking for yourself is highly overrated. By the time you discover the wheel, those who listened carefully have been to the moon and back. First stand on the shoulders of giants, then reach for the stars.

When we are children, we cannot choose who to learn from. As we grow older and seek to learn deeper truth, the right teacher becomes very important. A good rule is to know them by their fruits.

Being highly skilled is often less useful than being able to cooperate with others. Even if you are strong, there are things you cannot lift but which three or four can lift together.

Sims 2 and small hells

The Sims 2 was arguably the first game where artificial intelligence was sometimes indistinguishable from natural stupidity.

I installed The Sims 2 on my laptop, and was surprised to see that it ran noticeably faster than on my old desktop.

You may wonder why I was surprised: After all, the laptop is four and a half year newer than the desktop, and that’s 3 “generations” of Moore’s Law.  Today, that Law is usually quoted as “the capacity of computers doubles every 18 months”. This is slightly different from what Moore actually said, but easy to remember and pretty close to what we observe in the real world. That would mean an 8-fold increase in computing power, more than enough to overwhelm even the difference between a desktop and a laptop.

(Yes, this means computers become 10 times more powerful in 5 years, 100 times more powerful in 10 years, and 1000 times more powerful in 15 years. Do you really want to turn your new computer on in 15 years? What if it takes control of you instead of the other way around? Luckily, what has happened is largely that instead of making large, insanely powerful computers, factories are churning out smaller and cheaper computers. These days they are called “smartphones”. ^_^)

***

Sims 2 is a lot of fun when it starts quickly and runs smoothly like that. But even so, I notice that after a while (about half an hour or so, for me and Sims 2) I begin to grow more irritable and grumpy. A feeling of dissatisfaction begins to emerge from within. These are hellish feelings, as you know if you have been on the receiving end of them. They are certainly not heavenly. And this happens even though the game is a lot of fun and I want to play it more. But even as I do so, I can feel my patience wear thin and my temper begin to fray. Why?

One day I felt compelled to write something like this: “On the way to Heaven, the sinner stops in Hell, thinking he has arrived.” I am not sure if this is literally true for the afterlife, or even whether there are ways and time in the afterlife (at least in our sense). What I mean is that this happens to us in everyday life. We seek after the Good, the True and the Beautiful. But on our way we come to surrogates which please us, but on a more shallow level than what our hearts really seek. So we stop and cling to these things, but this is the cause of a growing sense of wrongness. As long as we project this wrongness outward, thinking that we have been wronged by others and not by ourselves, it cannot be abated. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada:
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who harbor such thoughts
do not still their hatred.
“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me.”
Those who do not harbor such thoughts
still their hatred.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.
By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.
This is a law eternal.

***

With The Sims 2, there is also the detail that the sims have needs and wants. And as with us, the two are not always in harmony. Their needs are such as hunger, bladder, fun and sleep. Their wants may vary, for instance to increase a skill or to become friends with a particular other sim. If their needs fall too low, bad things happen, all the way to starving to death. If they never fulfill any wants, they start worrying and eventually go insane. If you have any plans for them beyond this, that just complicates it even more. And if you tend to empathize (not to say identify) with the little computer people, some of that conflict will be felt in yourself. That is how I see it. In The Sims 3 this factor is less intense, because they take better care of themselves, and they don’t go crazy if they don’t fulfill their wants. They just pass over some benefits. So that might explain the difference between the two games.

But there is still some of this fraying of tempers in all games I play, although some hold out better than others. (City of Heroes, which will be discontinued on November 30 after 8 years, was quite possibly the best of them. I think part of this was its innate goodness. Even though roleplaying a hero is a kind of self-satisfaction, it is still aligned with good. I tried playing the included villain scenario, but this irritated me again.)

I believe that this restlessness and irritation and lack of satisfaction is a natural result of spending too much time in a lower world, a world less real than ours, even if it is fun. Conversely, spending time in a higher world can be distinctly unfun , but leaves us with a sense of deep satisfaction. (By higher worlds I mean not only those of religion, accessed for instance through prayer and meditation, but also secular studies of mathematics or physics, the laws on which our universe depends. It is not that these activities cannot result in great joy, even bliss, when we reach some new insight. But they are not entertaining or fun in the same way as playing a video game.)

So does this mean I am going to stop playing Sims games? Well, probably not yet. But perhaps I can learn to stop once my Fun bar has been filled…?

Thinking is overrated

Perhaps you can figure it all out on your own, from the basics – if you live for several centuries.

Thinking for yourself is a lot more effective if you first have absorbed the foundation for higher thinking from the great lights of history.

I seem to know an unusually large number of people who say: “Don’t follow traditions, especially not religion. Think for yourself.” I don’t agree with this, even though I have a “gift” to make others think. And I myself have thought a lot too, over the course of the decades. But what I have found is that thinking (much) is not for everyone. Even when it works, it is rarely the best course of action. There are faster, easier and more fruitful ways to accomplish one’s life goals.

Confucius thought that there were three ways to wisdom: Reflection, which was the noblest. Imitation, which was the easiest. And experience, which was the bitterest.

Obviously we would be in a pinch if no one ever took the path of reflection. We would not have all these great quotes, for instance. ^_^ But in this age where we have gathered the wisdom of the ages and of the various civilizations, there is already quite a supply of this. So the path of imitation is wide open. By reading good books, for instance, we can easily receive what others have struggled hard to bring forth. There may not be a lot of wise people around in your family, workplace or neighborhood who you can imitate, although it would be nice if you could find one. But we have the memory of others through the ages, who set a high standard indeed.

If you are single and have more time than you know how to use, and have a brilliant mind, and your passions are limited and known to you, then by all means add to the pool of those who arrive at wisdom by reflection. After all, each perspective is a bit different, and none can see it and tell it just the way you do.

But if you are not such a person, it may be better to learn from others, and think only when necessary, or when you particularly enjoy it.

***

There are of course situations when we need to think for a bit. We may be working in a problem-solving job, for instance. Or we may find ourselves in a new situation with no recourse to handbooks. So it is not a bad thing to be able to think. But it is a waste of our life to invent the wheel over and over again.

If you hire someone, you don’t just take a random person from the street, give them tools, and say: “Think for yourself.”  You hire someone who has studied the experience of others and trained under the supervision of others and can by now do a wide range of tasks without having to think about them.

The game of Go has only 5 simple rules, and you can make your work from there with pure logic. But the great Go players – and there are actually professionals doing this for a living in Asia – they have all studied the games of those who were already masters, and absorbed for themselves what others have found by hard thinking or good luck. It has taken thousands of years from the game was invented till it reached its current level of mastery. Even if you learn it as a child and live for a hundred years, you have little chance to catch up to that with just your own thinking.

Why then do you think that in the matters of your soul, of your lasting happiness and the progress of society, you will succeed by throwing away in your youth the experience of thousands of years, and the wisdom of the greatest lights of human history?

It is true that we see many religious people who are stupid and malicious. But from who have they learned? Have they learned from the wisdom of Solomon or Jesus Christ? No, they have they failed to do so, and simply imitated the equally backwards relatives and neighbors around them. Repeated studies show that benevolent atheists are more familiar with Christian scriptures than the petty-minded religious person. When religion degrades to a form of ethnicity, as it has done in much of the western world, it becomes a label rather than a vehicle for transmitting a higher form of thinking.

By all means, think. But first thing about when it is useful to think, and when it is useful to first gather the necessary basis or foundation for higher thinking. To be born into a civilization is a privilege. Throw it not away lightly, thinking that you are the greatest thinker who has ever lived. Chances are billions to one that you are wrong.

 

Vexation or compassion?

I have a feeling this may become a recurring picture. Although in my case it feels more like I am returning from a different planet and seeing my own with new eyes.

A little background before we get to the philosophy. I am still trying to learn the ancient Oriental board game of Go. The rules are simple but the strategies almost unlimited. One of the resources I use is the Go Teaching Ladder, a website where you can comment on games by those less skilled than you, and get comments from those more skilled than you. More importantly, there are thousands of commented games, with various skill levels both in the commenter and the players. Walking through these can be very instructive.

I was stepping through a couple games played by 28-kyu players (that is very close to the bottom of the newbie league) and commented by a 2-dan player (that’s someone who may have a small chance at becoming a professional, depending on luck and location). The comments were instructive (if a bit above my head from the midgame onward) and amusing. You got a pretty good feeling for how he experienced watching the blind fighting the blind. At one point, when one of the players had made variations of the same error a number of times in a row, “magnus” (not me! the 2-dan player) exclaimed that playing like that  “is like bashing your own face with a brick”.

And this, dear congregation, is my text today: Living in the dark and making the same mistakes over and over is like bashing our own face with a brick, and not knowing who is doing it.

***

I suppose a “dan player” in the game of real life is one who is able to understand the great masters – the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Socrates etc – and not only learn from them on a conscious level, but also practice wisdom, even if not necessarily on the highest level and all the time. Such a person would live a wonderful life in some ways, but would also be almost completely surrounded by the sight of people bashing their own faces with bricks, cutting themselves by grabbing knives by the blade, burning themselves by picking up red-hot coals to throw at other people, all that kind of stuff.

I can’t even claim to be on that level, but I guess I am not a beginner at life anymore, at least not in all ways. And one of the things that really bother me about social networks such as Google+ (not to mention Facebook, well, I mentioned Facebook but I don’t go there every month) is the sheer number of people bashing their faces in public and holding onto hot coals, getting angrier and angrier the more it hurts.

But enough about the American election campaigns.

The question is, how do I react to the self-inflicted suffering of other people? Given that I have inflicted a lot of suffering on myself over the past and will likely do so in the future, just on a more private and subtle level, my first response should be compassion. And there is some of that, if I must say so myself. (And who else would?)  But then someone – I or another – tries to given them some helpful advice. And this makes them very upset, causing them at best to run inside and close the door, at worst to hurt themselves even more. So after a while, some of us reach the conclusion that this is not a forum where we can actually help people.

In theory, it should be possible. I think it may happen occasionally, but it is so rare at least that I cannot offhand recall seeing it.

There is a tendency, when the less skilled fail to accept advice, that compassion turns to vexation. This is not a good thing, I think.

In the Christian story of the Incarnation, God had to go all the way down to where the people were, down in the manger, down in the desert, eventually down in the grave. Because with the possible exception of the few scattered saints of the Covenant, people just weren’t able to get up on high ground despite the best advice. Looking at this story from almost 2000 years later, there is some doubt as to the effectiveness even of this rescue expedition. Although I think my country would have been worse off if we were still following Odin, truth to tell. (Odinists may disagree. The Håvamål has some pretty good advice, after all.)

Anyway, it may be vexing to see people demand the right to keep bashing their own faces with bricks, but let us remember that it could have been us (or for some of us, it actually was) and hold on to compassion.

The beauty of our weapons

This dagger is radiant with beauty – at least when seen by the one wielding it!

I was playing Daggerfall as a Linguist, probably the most underpowered character class possible to make without hacking the game files. A life on the brink of extinction, running away a lot, progressing slowly.  And then I got my hand on one of the most overpowered items in the whole game, the Dagger of Life Stealing. (Mages Guild, Grayidge, Tulune.)

The surge of elation and confidence was on behalf of my imaginary character, but I still felt it in my physical body. I also noticed just how pretty the thing looked, which was why I took the screenshot. But as the “voice in my heart” pointed out: It probably doesn’t look that good from the other side, that is, for the person it is pointed at. Isn’t that the truth for all weapons?

***

There are also abstract weapons. For instance, here in Norway we talk about the “strike weapon”, when workers go on strike against employers or against some perceived injustice in society. I am sure my friends on the political left see the beauty in this weapon, but it is clear that most people who get stuck at an airport or find their supermarket without milk or their doctor appointment canceled, don’t see the beauty of the weapon so clearly.

Conversely, the members of “Occupy Wall Street” and similar organizations probably fail to see the beauty of a well-ordered troop of policemen coming their way with shields, batons and pepper spray – a beauty that is plain to see for my conservative friends.

So that is the lesson I was told by the Voice in my heart. It would probably have been better if I spent more time with that teacher than with my old flame Daggerfall, but what can I say. This is what happened. Sometimes we forget the obvious: That the beauty of a weapon depends on whether you are behind it or in front of it. Even words can have the power to wound, and I remember the satisfaction of giving a particularly sharp-edged reply. There is a lesson in this for almost everyone, I think.

A lesson from Go

Evidently the Japanese are not entirely unfamiliar with the Dunning-Kruger effect (“How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in the words of the original study).

To get back to something less disturbing, I am still trying to learn Go. I can feel that I have come further than I ever have before. (I try to learn Go every time I have watched the anime series Hikaru no Go. So at least three times now, probably four.) This time, I feel like I have achieved lift-off, in a sense: I can actually watch other people play Go and understand some of what happens. When watching 17-kyu and beginner games, sometime their intentions are pretty transparent: They are trying to cut off the opponent, or capture stones, or avoid getting stones captured. So I watch and think: “He is not going to fall for that. He is going to connect at A, and you will have to play B to save your own group.” And sometimes the other player does fall for it, and I have this unfamiliar feeling of having actually seen something another Go player did not see (even if it was another beginner like me.)

And then I go back to the 13×13 training board against my Galaxy Tab, and it crushes me mercilessly. I don’t see the traps when they are for me, and once it takes the initiative, I never get it back. I am chased and either cut to pieces or besieged in a small territory while the computer reigns most of the board supreme. I guess Go is a lot like real life: It is easier to see what other people should do, but hard to see the same when it comes to myself!

An online friend (or nearly so) has just taken up playing Go as well, and described his first meeting with a Go robot as a lesson in humility. I guess that is one way to put it. Did you know that this ancient board game only has 5 rules, all of the quite simple? You can learn it in a couple minutes. And yet professional Go players have usually practiced for hours a day for a decade or so. Over the course of about 3000 years, no one has been able to master it, to find the sequence of moves that cannot be surpassed, the theory that can win every game.

That is the challenge of one of the world’s simplest games. And yet there are people who think that their amazing powers of logic lets them understand life, the universe and everything. If not in detail, then pretty well. Good luck with that.

Accustomed to this world

“Everyone has grown accustomed to this world” says Asuna in Sword Art Online. Ain’t that the truth.

The closer we come to the end of our life in this world, the more accustomed we are to it.

Philosophy and religion occur in the strangest places. This season unveils the anime Sword Art Online, a story with a rather dark beginning. In 2022, ten thousand people have signed up for the new online role playing game “Sword Art Online”, which is the first that uses a brain scanning helmet to fully control the in-game character by using the same type of signals used to control one’s real body. Unfortunately for them, the creator of the game is a madman who has coded the game interface to electrocute them in real life if they die in the game. Also, you can’t log out.

The story is moderately interesting, but the premise struck me as being a kind of metaphor for materialism. It is this way with most people, after all: We think, at some level at least, that if we die in this world, everything ends. Although various religions claim this is not the case, we habitually act on the assumption that death is the end of all things

However, Sword Art Online is not entirely without hope. There is a giant tower of supposedly 100 levels, each progressively harder than the one below it. If the inhabitants of the game manage to clear them all, they will supposedly be free. Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure whether this is the case until it is done, just like nobody knows for sure whether they will really die in real life if they die in the game. They only have the word of the game creator for it. And so, people are hesitant to risk their hide to help clear the higher levels. After all, they have a life of sorts in the virtual world. After a while, they have gotten used to it, and have carved out their niche in this world.

***

In my Master of Magic fiction story resumed from 2008, the main character is a 18 year old boy from our world (or one indistinguishable from ours). He is drowning after driving into the sea, when his soul is pulled into a body in the magical world of Arcanus during an attempted resurrection of a young boy there. Probably. Or he may be in a coma in the hospital and imagining it all. He is somewhat undecided at first. But after seeing magic used first hand, he realizes that it is similar to programming, something he is very skilled at. It may take a lot of time and unreasonable effort, but he has decided to learn magic until he can figure out how it works, the very nature of the world he is trapped in. He intends to bypass the operating system of the world, writing his code directly into its registers, to slip through the laws that holds him in this world and ascend to the real world.

*** 

I think it is a very fascinating concept. But in my own life, I am not actually making this great effort to clear the enemies in my own nature, or to understand the laws of the mind that keep me trapped. It is more like a hobby, really. It would be nice to think that some outward event, some circumstance, would convince me if it is really possible to survive death. But I don’t think such a circumstance would actually make the big difference I imagine. After all, it was Jesus Christ who once said: “If they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, they won’t believe if someone rises from the dead.” History kind of proves him right on that, doesn’t it?

It is a disturbing observation that the closer we come to the end of our life in this temporary world, the more accustomed we have become to it. And in the end, we only have stories from long ago that there is a way out, that the end of this life may not necessarily be the end of everything. Everything pales in comparison to that – in theory. In practice, even the smallest coin at arm’s length will completely block the sun.

Talent is misunderstood

The secret to Hikaru’s success is that he learns something regardless of whether he wins or loses. If he loses a game, the important thing to him is that he got stronger – that he learned something he can use in the future. Is this talent?

I’ve bought the Kindle version of the book Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin. It is liked and quoted by Farnam Street, the wisdom-seeking blog, which is a pretty good recommendation. Even Bjørn Stærk has been known to retweet Farnam Street occasionally.

I have only read 19% yet, but it strikes me how similar the impact is to the Japanese manga and animeHikaru no Go, which I have been rewatching lately. (It is no coincidence: One of the Farnam Street quotes got me to start watching it once more.) The book of course is more scholarly than the fiction, although the book is also very accessible at least for us who are used to reading non-fiction.

As the name of the book signals, the author believes that talent either does not exist or is unimportant. The great masters throughout history became great because they started early, were schooled by experts and continued practicing for a long time. For instance, Mozart’s father was a composer and teacher who trained his son from early childhood. Even so, the early works are unremarkable. It was only as a young adult that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came into his amazing abilities. And even after that, people did not realize how amazing these were until later – in other words, his semi-divine status is a later addition. In his own time, he was just one of the greats.

There are various such anecdotes and scientific studies quoted, all of them implying that being “gifted” (intelligent, in general or in some specific category) only matters in the beginning. After years of practice, only the practice matters. Those who did the right type of practice and lots of it, they are the ones who become grand masters. Those who practiced less or stayed in their comfort zone during practice, they become the also-ran.

This may be so. But I don’t think we should underestimate talent either. I think so based on my own experience, but also an interesting detail that I picked up elsewhere. It turns out that a disproportionate number of athletes are born in January. Now you may think this is proof of astrology, but even astrology does not claim this. Besides, the number of successful athletes continue to drop over the months, to a minimum in December. The explanation is of course that kids start school depending on the year they were born. And they do so at a young age, where months of lifetime still count. So the ones born in January are nearly a year older than those born in December. Naturally they are better at sports. They are bigger, stronger and have better control of their bodies. If there is a competition, they win, and if not, they still get more praise and encouragement. This causes them tolikesports, and do more of it, and over the course of growing up this makes them athletes.

This is my model of how talent works. Talent is when you can practice something so intensely that you make progress, and like it. I know I did with programming. I rarely left my “comfort zone” in the sense that I always did it for fun. Sure it took some thinking, but I enjoyed it. My intelligence and particular talent for programming was the equivalent of being born on January 1st for an athlete. Because it came easier to me, I did more of it; and the more I did, the easier it became. I did not even need to be praised, the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of succeeding was enough for me. And so it became possible for me to create the debt collection software that my best friend’s father made a living from selling for some years, and which helped Norwegian companies save millions.

Of course, the mysterious entities that projected solutions to programming problems into my brain telepathically also deserve credit. But I am told that such muses are common in many arts. You may call them a form of talent too, I suppose?

Back to the anime Hikaru no Go. The secondary character Touya Akira is the son of one of Japan’s best Go players (a board game played with white and black stones) and the son (an only child, it seems) is trained from he is little more than a toddler. This is exactly the recipe for creating super “talented” people according to Geoff Colvin’s book. The main character Shindou Hikaru has a more peculiar origin, as the ghost of an ancient Go player attaches itself to him toward the end of junior high school. His original success is as a medium for the ghost, which causes Touya to blink him out as his rival. This becomes Shindou’s motivation for practicing day and night once it is him and not the ghost that plays. He learns first from spending every day of the summer vacation watching the game, and later from playing every day. He plays against ever harder opponent, getting out of his comfort zone, exactly as recommended by the book. And he gets timely feedback, another crucial factor. From the book, it is not hard to guess that these two boys are going to go far.

So, the anime is a great way to learn what talent really is. But if you want to go outside your comfort zone, by all means buy Colvin’s book. ^_^

Deliberate practice for what?

What comes before the step before the first step?

What comes before the step before the first step? Well, if the step before the first step is  firm intention, then the step before that would be awareness, I guess?

I have mentioned Bjørn Stærk in the past, one of the wisest men who knows my name. (Wisdom is a rare trait at the best of times, and there is little but fortunate coincidence or divine intervention that might cause a meeting between me and a wise person, in the physical world or the electronic world. I am not a Great Attractor pulling such people to me, at least not yet. ^_^)

Thanks to persistent retweets from Mr Stærk, I have become aware of Farnam Street, a blog of specialized wisdom seeking, in a totally secular setting as far as I have seen. (The same goes for Stærk himself. Also, unlike the other, he has gradually come to concentrate on writing for the Norwegians, who have their own language. My own language, used to be. Well, I wish him luck with that.)

Farnam Street recently had an entry called “What is deliberate practice?“, a timely reminder that practice does not make perfect unless it passes certain criteria. First of all, it must not be too easy. Repeating what can already be done without conscious effort will not give noticeable progress (although I would add that it can keep us from backsliding.) On the other hand, if it is alien enough that we just flounder and panic, we cannot actually practice. (We don’t learn from our errors if errors are all we do, only when they are exceptions.) I already knew these. But we also need immediate feedback. I did not know that! That makes it much harder. I notice this at work.

It is a good article and I recommend it. I may even buy the book. But I already have a backlog of books to read.

***

But if I know how to make progress, I still need to know what to make progress in and preferably also why. When you are a student, this question is easy. Your teachers tell you what you must study. Later on, you may be lucky and find a workplace which is similarly structured. But for most of us, life is pretty disorganized. The tasks we meet at work are either repetitive, or they are seemingly random so that we can’t prepare for them. The same applies to most things we meet at home.

The only obvious exception I can think of is learning a new language, and you probably didn’t even think of that if English is your mother tongue. Still, there is a number of us who either know people in other countries or want to go there, or simply have an interest in the culture of another nation. For instance, Japan is the “holy country” for many young people around the world. Learning even the basics of that language would certainly take deliberate practice!

But I’m 53 years old now, even though my hair is the only part of my body that has realized it yet. I have begun to see the impermanence of all things. When I think about the effort of deliberate practice, a quote springs to mind from one of the least popular books of the Bible, the rather cynical Ecclesiastes, here in Chapter 4, v 7-8.

Then I turned my attention to something else under the sun that is pointless: the situation in which a solitary individual without a companion, with neither son nor brother, keeps on working endlessly but never has enough wealth. “For whom” [he should ask], “am I working so hard and denying myself pleasure?” This too is truly pointless, a sorry business.

For whom or what am I making effort and denying myself slack? Well, I’m not, really. Not much at least. But given the requirements we just noted for deliberate practice, it certainly is – as the article repeatedly says – not fun.You have to suffer somewhat. (And if you practice the violin or trombone, so must your neighbors.) Why? What is worth doing all this?

There are Olympic games going on these days. Despite the name, it is not all fun and games for those who participate. They are almost without exception mutants with abilities others cannot achieve if they strive for them all their life. And even then, they have to discipline their body and keep it in slavery. And for what? Some money, a brief appearance in the news, and the knowledge that they have become the best or at least one of the best. And then they die. Well, we all do, and I guess it is better to die having accomplished something than nothing. Who knows.

But for me, even accomplishment seems hollow unless it too is for someone or something. As in the quote above, it may be for the benefit of a son or brother, that is to say, a family member. It could be for some greater cause, like the happiness or prosperity of a number of people, even people we don’t know.

I must admit, I am fascinated by people who set out to radically change themselves. I enjoy reading exercise blogs, weight loss blogs, exchange student blogs etc. Actually I would probably enjoy reading a weight gain blog as well: It is the intentional transformation of oneself that fascinates me.

But what I really wish I could read was a theosis blog – the ongoing story of a human becoming transformed into divine nature. Now that would be inspirational. Still, there are good reasons why this cannot be blogged about and only rarely even be subject of an autobiography. There is a “general law” as Mouravieff puts it, which will seek with great strength to stop anyone who tries to break out from their sleep. Calling attention to oneself while still in the process is like trying to break into a guarded house. The Conspiracy will come down on you like a ton of bricks, as they say in America. So I shall content myself to read about your efforts within this life.

How about you? Hopefully you have someone or something you want to work hard for. Even if it is just your livestock, I would not mind hearing about it.