I’ve written fondly about wisdom literature, however I’m not fond of books that just focus on the idea of “wisdom”.
These two books are more poetic than the Wisdom of Solomon, but all three are thin paeans to the concept of wisdom.
The Chinese books sell wisdom for the sake of a well ordered empire and emphasize balance and relationships.
This sales pitch is more appetizing than Solomon’s heavy handed appeal to a monotheistic god presenting naive choices between right and wrong.
But it’s all thin gruel.
Gotcha.
Wisdom good.
Where do go from here?
䷾䷛
Even so, a book that has survived the test of time to enter the canon of a great empire is most likely worth a download and quick read. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.
Quite a few fits and starts in hidden in plain sight. However, I’ve built up a nice archive, and my recent push with my Notes has established a good rhythm for regular posting over the past year, albeit for a very small audience. Maybe this latest experiment will be the one to hit. Then again, the earlier experiments have become the established infrastructure for my newer projects, indeed, much of this newsletter is repackaging and publicizing what I’ll have already written.
One of the most enjoyable things about being an OPM has been the autonomy in my job and freedom to experiment. I don’t know if other public works agencies work in this manner, but when I joined the State, my supervisor said all he cared about was that I don’t blow the project schedule or budget and to pay our vendors promptly. Beyond that, be fair to the State.
How liberating!
Standard operating procedures and checklists and processes certainly have their place. As a government agency, we have plenty of all of them. However, it was amazing to be given my own office and the freedom and encouragement to try out new ideas and see if they’d go anywhere.
Usually they don’t. Such as my attempts at utilizing gantt charts for scheduling (too detailed for our needs), spreadsheets as tracking mechanisms for all kinds of minutia (not worth the effort), personal productivity hacks (Pomodoro!), and so on.
But occasionally, something hits. The workflow documents for implementing digital signatures in our agency were invaluable when the pandemic hit. The dead-end random spreadsheets projects gave me the skills to kludge together a life and work tracker that I use at the start and end of every day. During the pandemic, I experimented with weekly check-ins with my architect, and now added another weekly check-in with my supervisor that will be recurring long after we return to the office.
Instead of searching for my next success, maybe I should be looking for my next opportunity to fail. The more of those I grab, the higher the chance I’ll get another hit.
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What are some memorable successes or failures when you were innovating at the office?
Hit Reply and lets chat!
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My OPM notes from February
I came across this quote by John Adams which is simultaneously inspiring and challenging. What are we willing to do in order to free up opportunities for our children?
I’m only an excel expert in my office because because architects are notoriously basic when it comes to spreadsheets. It’s not the most useful skill in my original profession, but my attempts to get better at this program over the decades paid off one night in helping out my colleague.
One from the Archives
The link above for my daily blog experiment was for the first post in that year-long run. However, I also wrote a longer analysis of what I got out of daily blogging at the end of the project. The TL:DR version is that daily blogging has its value but takes up a lot of time, and I stopped because I needed a better balance between consumption and production. Even so, it was a good exercise that led to my current twice a week blog schedule. I strongly recommend that everyone start a daily blog. Cut out social and create your own media.
In 2020, I started a system for my personal reading. I took five books to become my current reading list, put them next to the bed, and stashed the rest out sight.
Each of the five books satisfied a category:
Non-Fiction
Fiction
Spirituality
Self Help
Art
When I wrote the first draft of this post, the books on deck were:
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
Collected Writings of Epicurus
Zen of Seeing by Fredrick Franck
Jazz, Henri Matisse
The only book I haven’t completed is Epicurus.
In a world where there is so much information, it is important to simplify what is immediately available. Once resolved, you are free to just read within the preselected menu. If I lose interest in a book, I can either throw it off out of the favored circle (as I did with Epicurus) which frees you up to read other books within the category (I’ve read quite a few wisdom texts over the past couple months. Alternately, I can let a book marinate while I dive into other topics. If so, at least I’m avoiding other books within the same genre, which makes it easier to return to the lagging book.
This system makes it evident if I’ve been heavily pursuing one category over the others. I may or may not counteract against such a trend, but either way, it is good to be clear what is top of one’s mental interests.
This system has turned out to be a well rounded way to wrangle all the good books around me – unread, re-read, library loans, and newly purchased. I’d recommend giving it a shot if your “to read” pile has become intimidatingly tall.
Over the past year, I’ve started making natto, the sticky, pungent soybean fermentation. The process is extended but fairly simple:
Soak the beans for twelve or more hours
Steam it in the Instapot with high pressure for 4 hours
Inoculate the beans with with a spoonful of older beans
Incubate it for 24 hours in a toaster oven set on warm (at around 100 degrees Farenheit).
I started with a commercial natto product and have been backslopping it for multiple generations. However, I’ve hit a couple weak batches.
These modern industrial mono-culture products are not considered particularly resilient, so maybe it’s time to start anew. However, I may also have been at fault. After an extended good run, I might have gotten sloppy and pushed my luck, using a smaller inoculating batch or not being vigilant during this process.
Even though my general philosophy has always been to push for “good enough”, there are still limits on how lackadaisical I can treat the process, since natto is not as forgiving as sourdough.
A sour batch (while still edible) invariably feels like a soul crushing disappointment, but I need to remind myself that I learn more from failure. One doesn’t find the limits via easy success. Boundaries are discovered by going awry.
My colleague made a blunder with his Excel file and lost two days of work. I wasn’t able to help him recover the garbled data, but before hanging up, he asked me if I could look up data on a separate worksheet in order to auto populate cells based off of a furniture tag on the main sheet. That quickly lead to a MS Teams call on a Sunday evening and a couple google searches later I hit the jackpot and save him two more days of labor.
The tip of the iceberg was two grown men hooping and hollering about a successful excel formula.
This moment was only possible with the powerful suite of technology in our homes. The laptops, the broadband, and our newfound familiarity with video calls. A simple text on a cell phone became a full blown weekend meeting in a few minutes.
Under that were years of tinkering in Microsoft Excel, starting when my dad showed me formulas on a spreadsheet while I was in junior high. Normally, I’m not really into tech, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Excel. The spreadsheet is such a seductive way to numerically model the world. I’m nowhere near a ninja, but I’m in the upper percentile compared to other architects. I’ve never taken a formal course, but every time I’ve run into a question, I’ll make that extra web search to lock in the answer. Every little moment accumulates into a decent library of knowledge and an easy ability to search for what one doesn’t already know.
And then there is my relationship with my coworker. We first met at a previous firm and worked together for a couple years. He moved on but soon invited me to pursue this gig with the state. We come from different worlds, but we’ve always had an bond with each other beyond the transactional relationship.
We’ve always had each other’s back, especially on a quiet Sunday evening as the kids are wondering why daddy started dancing around the home office.
I bought this book so long ago, I checked the copyright to see if I had bought it before leaving California. From the date, it was published a couple years after my wife and I had started dating, so it seems that my memory of buying it in a comic shop in Texas might be accurate.
Last week, I noticed it in the garage on top of my big row of boxed up books, waiting for a permanent home with bookshelves. My daughter saw me flipping through it and wanted to read it.
It was time. I wrapped it up and gave it to her as a birthday present last week.
The girl went so quickly from being a concept, through infancy and toddlerhood, and is now blasting through books and graphic novels with abandon.
It goes fast. Even her prehistory can’t keep up with her.
Last night I had a dream. I led some folks around on a wild foot chase around the neighborhood and then snuck into the office, pretending nothing had happened. To my chagrin, a police officer walked in soon after. Even though I didn’t hurt anyone, someone had slipped and broke their ribs during the run around.
For goodness sake, what’s a more certain sign of aging than having your subconscious punish you for second order effects from your dream-state actions? Maybe its a budding sign of a grown up wisdom?
The book itself is a pretty easy read. It’s a more or less heartwarming collection of stories. Even though your start isn’t as important as it may seem, there are definitely good and bad outcomes at the end.
The main takeaways are to avoid alcohol and smoking, practice good mental acceptance techniques, and create a good network around you. Honestly, this isn’t much different from what everyone tells their kids. Even so, it’s nice to have a few longitudinal studies to lend common sense the authority of science.
Other Takeaways
There were three other key takeaways that I think are worth lifting straight out of the book.
George Valliant identifies six adult life tasks:
Identity: Finding a sense of one’s self, values, etc., separate from your parents.
Intimacy: Finding a life partner.
Career Consolidation: More than a job, this is one’s work.
Generativity: Guiding the next generation, community building.
Keeper of Meaning: Conservation and preservation of the culture and institution, beyond individuals.
Integrity: Facing death and life at the end.
Valliant also lists key “adaptive coping mechanisms” that will help you navigate the vagaries of life. Maladaptive ones are projection, passive aggression, dissociation, acting out and fantasy. There are also mature defenses:
Such virtues include doing as one would be done by (altruism); artistic creation to resolve conflict and spinning straw into gold (sublimation); a stiff upper lip (suppression); and the ability not to take oneself too seriously (humor).
page 64
And finally, Valliant closes his book with a quote from E. B. White, via a valedictory address by Timothy Coggeshall.
Yeah, yeah, its a great game. It’s something that even our 6 year old plays well. It doesn’t surprise me that this game has sold 5 million copies.
My one quibble with the game is the scoring system. Clearly it’s an issue because the publisher changed it between the original release to the copy we just bought.
The original scoring system with the jockeying pawns looks a bit fussy, so I suspect that randomly pulling scoring gems from a bag is a better fit for the light filler mood of this game.
But better doesn’t mean correct.
I’m not the only one who is uncertain about the new scoring system. Otherwise the rules wouldn’t have included a variant where one merely earns set points for each place you finish.
I get the conundrum. Some puzzles are just harder than others. So there is already some randomness backed into the game, even if skill matters in the aggregate.
Which brings up the interesting design question, does adding randomness on top of randomness improve the game? Is it better to stack unfairness upon unfairness?
I don’t know, but I suspect we’re heading into philosophical territory about life, the universe, and everything.
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
John Adams
I’ve played with various mission statements over the last couple years slowly condensing into the motto “Mutual Delight and Refinement”.
In spite of our current political and medical turmoil, I still hope that the world will continue to improve. I’m well aware this is not guaranteed, just look at the Dark Ages or the brutal centuries of war after the Zhou and Han Dynasties. However, I suspect that staring fully into the abyss would only cast a shadow over today while doing little to help prevent a dark tommorrow.
So I hope. Every time I imagine a future for my own kids, I find them producing something of beauty, making things better around them.
My boy had picked up an odd habit of skipping the number fourteen when counting to twenty, while washing his hands in this COVID shaped world.
On the one hand, that makes him a good Asian (14 is an unlucky number that is a homonym with death in Chinese). However, we have no idea where that came from because we aren’t a superstitious household.
We didn’t make a big deal about it. He hasn’t even turned three, so we’d rather celebrate that he’s nailed nineteen of the numbers on the way up to 20. Then again, we couldn’t just let this mistake stand, so we would correct him every time as he washed up for a meal.
Yesterday he got it right.
He was so pleased with himself he stumbled past sixteen through twenty.
Meanwhile, I stood at the sink, struck with a lingering sadness as another phase of his life suddenly came to an abrupt end.
