random un categorized notes

how igor ticks
≡

There are lots of rough ideas I have that are not yet categorized, or good enough to be a thought. This will be a place to store them.

Igor as a business model

Igor’s UVP

  • Mantra: People cry when I move on.
  • Ideas Executed Brilliantly.
  • Growing teams

Igor’s Key Activities

  • Free Association Journaling
  • Prototyping Software
  • Cognitive Health
  • Blogging Everything

Post mortems

  • Emotional Health
    • Link to site.
  • Physical Health
    • Link to blog post.
    • Intermittent Fasting

Magic: Great example of Seth Godin principles

  • Choosing myself, hard work, building trust, and deserving attention.
  • NOT: Building a tribe, because there is no scale out/distribution.
  • Challenge Expectation - Do magic on bus, when people are expecting to stare off into space.
  • Connection
    • Signed card
    • Do you know a magic word?
    • Signed card ambitious card
    • In hands card routine.
  • Q: How do I build MORE connection to audience.

Quotes

  • Half the pressure, twice the speed - do it without stress/pressure, but do it quickly.
  • Length of minute depends on what side of the bathroom you are in

Focusing on quality of life

  • Climbing the steps again and again at work
  • Getting the gym that was closest to work
  • Optimize for the most enjoyable commute (not necessarily the shortest)

Blog posts for this week?

  • Carrying my own cultural bubble (atmosphere)
  • Chop chop vs people first
    • Efficiency is the wrong metric for people first.
  • Count books is the wrong metric for libraries
    • Right metric is customer engagement

Igor’s Work Advantage Some of these are extra valuable depending on your teams culture

  • Very good at tools, and grinding through data.
  • Dive deep vs level up
  • Relationships first (vs efficiency)
  • Ideas or the week
    • I CHOOSE TO
  • Listening to books on tape that are low SNR but high in inspiration.

Journaling Prompt

  • What do I want for Zach?
  • Empathy Exercise
  • Understanding Exercise?
  • Someone has been kind to me exercise.
  • Someone has been positive
  • What is my thought on rituals?
  • What is my thought on making things sacred?
  • What do I want to teach Zach?
  • What does being a successful father mean to me?
  • What do I enjoy doing?
  • Why do I procrastinate?
  • What would Tori find most helpful?
  • When was I acting empathically
  • What would 16 year old Igor say if he popped into time
  • What would future Igor say if he popped into time.
  • What are the wins, big and small, that I can celebrate?
  • What was I doing when I was achieving my best results?
  • What mistakes did I make over and over again?
  • What are the experiences and achievements I would love to look back on this time next year?
  • What is my ONE most important thing for 2018? (*This is what you will focus most of your efforts on in 2018)

Wisdom

  • Be Deliberate Disciplined Daily
  • Always ask questions
  • Isn’t that curious
  • Seek first to understand
  • Find Win/Win Solutions
  • Synergize
  • First Things First
  • Appreciate those around you
  • Be Present
  • Be Grateful
  • First things First
  • Start with the End in Mind
  • This too shall pass
  • Appreciate

Intimacy Questions

  • Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
  • Would you like to be famous? In what way?
  • Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
  • What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
  • When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
  • If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
  • Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
  • Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
  • For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
  • If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
  • Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
  • If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
  • If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?
  • Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
  • What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
  • What do you value most in a friendship?
  • What is your most treasured memory?
  • What is your most terrible memory?
  • If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
  • What does friendship mean to you?
  • What roles do love and affection play in your life?
  • Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
  • How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
  • How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Progressions

7H: Dependent, Independent, Interdependent

Career: Learn, Scale Out, Reap rewards

Life Stages; 20-Exploring; 30 - Stopping what don’t like; 40 - Doing what do like; 50 - Unknown (being selfless??)

Best Friend Conversation: Getting Drunk; Getting Married, Kid Did X; Did you know bob, he’s dead

Models

Marginal costs - just this once

Never assume just this once, assume it’ll happen forever, because it will. Standard story:

Skipping church or skipping meditation.

Strategy : Defined vs Emergent

Types of capabilities - Resources, Process, Values

Being a class act

  • NEVER speak badly of anyone
  • Only what you’d say to their face.
  • Take full responsibility
  • Give all credit to others.

Knowledge vs Wisdom

  • Knowledge - The rider knows it.
  • Wisdom - The elephant knows it.
  • How to train the elephant? Curiosity

Curiosity

  • Feels good
  • Self Awareness, focus on ‘how curious’ instead of cognitive
  • How curious, is less judgmental

Cognitive vs Curiosity based improvement

  • Reframe
  • Cognitive Control (rider) is hard, BUT curiosity is much easier.
  • Curiosity does not take discipline, just awareness.
  • From Curiosity, can make progress.

Love and rejection

  • Afraid to love because fear of rejection
  • Very common statement, in the grand, but happens in the small too.
  • Someone needed a charger, I could give it to them, but i didn’t.
  • Why? fear of rejection.
  • Win/Win
    • I offer/needed - Someone feels loved, and I feel great - WIN!
    • I offer/not needed/Appreciate - Someone feels loved, I feel great - WIN!
    • I offer/not needed/grumpy - Someone feels angry, I feel sad - LOSS! (how often?)

surprise: these are my daily affirmations

  • Deliberate, Disciplined, Daily
  • Essentialism (I choose to do the most important thing)
  • Appreciate
  • First Understand, then be understated
  • Provide Context

Random Stuff

From Clarisaa Magic Lecture

  • Take the peas out of your shoes. If something causes a problem, even a tiny one fix it as it can drag on for ever. Plus fixing it makes you happy
    • Her example w ssetting up her suit case so that she everything had a place. That way she could see if she had forgotten anything, and it was perfect
  • Keep the core there, but leave in space to pack in new stuff
    • Core suit case, but another suit case of new stuff, that way always have a good show, but don’t get bored.
    • When stuff get good graduate it into the core
  • Focus on the remembering self in interactions with others
    • How will co-workers remember you in the future? Focus on the moments.

Heath brothers

Made to stick

Switch (Elephant, Rider, Path)

Loading (/switch)

Moments

Loading (/moments)

And at work

Loading (/moments-at-work)

Decisive

Loading (/decide)

Yak Shaving

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html

“Yak shaving.” Our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab. This is a shame, because it describes all too well what I find myself doing all too often.

You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.

Here’s an example:

“I was working on my thesis and realized I needed a reference. I’d seen a post on comp.arch recently that cited a paper, so I fired up gnus. While I was searching the for the post, I came across another post whose MIME encoding screwed up my ancient version of gnus, so I stopped and downloaded the latest version of gnus.

“Unfortunately, the new version of gnus didn’t work with emacs 18, so I downloaded and built emacs 20. Of course, then I had to install updated versions of a half-dozen other packages to keep other users from hurting me. When I finally tried to use the new gnus, it kept crapping out on my old configuration. And that’s why I’m deep in the gnus info pages and my .emacs file – and yet it’s all part of working on my thesis.”

And that, my friends, is yak shaving. (Not that this particular example happened to me recently or anything.)