My favorite habit: Write three positive things about today
I’ve been talking about this habit a lot recently and I thought it deserved its own blog post. It’s a really simple thing you can do to change how your brain scans the past. Rather than scan for negative, you’ll start scanning for the positive things, the little victories that you had throughout your day.
All you have to do is write down three positive things that happened to you that day.
In Evernote, I have a document called “Three Positive Things - December 2012” and in it each for each day, I have something that looks like this:
12/16
Matthew gave me a book on investing in the stock market and taught me a bunch
Brunch with Fabien, SheShe and Emily was a lot of fun
This was a nice, restful weekend
This habit comes from Shawn Achor’s The Happiness Advantage where he suggests tiny changes you can make to your life to dramatically alter your happiness.
I also use Lift to log and monitor each time I do the habit. I created a community on Lift which is growing quickly where you can join and get support from peers who are trying to start and continue this habit in their lives.
I log my three positive things every night or if I forget, first thing in the morning. I’m not too strict about when I write my three things down, as long as I do it.
In terms of habits, this one is pretty easy to start and continue. It’s one of my favorite parts of each day, I hope it can be for you too!
What are your favorite habits? Let me know on Hacker News!
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I’m trying to be less hyperbolic.
I’m trying not to speak in hyperbole because I feel that the majority of our disagreements come from statements that mean to be everything though they never can be. I’m trying to avoid hyperbole in my life because a hyperbole is a lie - sometimes for effect, sometimes for art, sometimes because thinking the rest of a thought through is difficult and time consuming.
In Shunryu Suzuki’s brilliant “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” Suzuki-roshi talks about controlling others and how it is impossible. The way we can control others’ actions is to control our own, Suzuki says (I’m paraphrasing).
So it is with that thought that I’d like to try to be less hyperbolic in my own thoughts and speech.
No more ‘This is the best {noun} ever!’
No more ‘That person is the funniest person ever!’
No more ‘Oh my god, this is incredible!’
Or ‘That event was the worst.’
Or ‘This is the best way to write this code.’
Or ‘The Republicans/Democrats are going to screw up America.’
Because none of those are true.
Those statements exist to draw your attention away from the truth of each statement.
“This {noun} is very good.”
“That event wasn’t a good use of my time.”
“You should write this function in this way because…”
“American politics is a pendulum that sways back and forth, it will all even itself out in time.”
And so I hope to make this effort and if it interests you, I hope you will do it too.
To be less hyperbolic.
Because I believe it will make our large world, marginally better.
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Build what you want. Create from the heart.
In my life I’ve made a bunch of things. I’ve created and released a four iOS apps. I wrote, produced and directed a 12 minute documentary on Rosewood, an abandoned insane asylum in Owings Mills, Maryland. My intention with this paragraph is not to boast about the things I’ve done but to talk about how I see each of these in relation to creating things from my heart.
In my first semester of college, the professor of my Intro to Computer Science class gave us a very open-ended final assignment: create something useful with the concepts from this semester. We could make what we wanted with any language or technology.
I thought about the problems in my life and since I was an out of state student, I took the bus a lot from Boulder to Denver for concerts and from Boulder to DIA to fly home. This was Fall 2008, there were no iPhone apps or web apps for the bus system in Colorado, called RTD. So my final project was a simple one: six gigantic PDFs that I stitched together from smaller PDFs that I crammed into an iPhone app. The app was called RTD Mobile Bus times and showed me the schedules for just two bus routes. I made the app purely for myself because it solved my own problem. That summer, I released it to the public, selling it for 99 cents with resounding feedback, “Why are there only two buses in here?”
I took that feedback and went back to the drawing board, releasing Beeline RTD the next summer and Beeline RTD 2 the summer after that. I love those apps. I know they’ll never be the next Angry Birds but I made them because I wanted them and it turned out that a bunch of other people did too. The first time I held a build of Beeline RTD in my hand, after getting it from my developers, I literally jumped up and down at the though that this app had come out of my head and I could now put it in my pocket and use it whenever I wanted. One of the most rewarding feelings I’ve found.
When I was 18, my senior project in high school was again, a completely open-ended one. I had to create a group of students and make something. Some kids went to Hawaii and did a report on the surf there, some kids worked in museums and wrote about their experiences. I made a documentary about Rosewood with my friend Zack.
Zack and I had been fascinated with Rosewood for years. We’d snuck around inside of its buildings late at night on weekends with other groups of curious 16-year-olds. We were obsessed with its architecture, its history, its soul. So we made a documentary from start to finish and to this day, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.
We made the documentary because we wanted it to exist, not because we cared what anyone else though of our idea. We loved those buildings and haunting ideas of ghost stories and things that went bump in the night. So while other kids used their senior projects to go on vacation, we ran through abandoned buildings with a camera, bringing what we wanted into the world.
And what I’ve come to realize is that each of these things that I create that I’m most proud of - it really comes from my heart; it comes from a piece of me which I think the general public would say is “weird.” Apps for readers or public transit riders. A documentary about an abandoned insane asylum. These aren’t mainstream things.
Ben Huh touched on this in his post, Here’s to the weirdos:
And when I say “weirdos”…I’m talking about those who believe passionately in the world you want to build for them.
Choosing your audience limits the pool that sees your work, but it also sets you free. You know who you’re going after now as much as you know who you aren’t going after. Being comfortable that someone isn’t going to like your post or your software is part of the game.
You know that thing that you want? Build it. Create it. Make it happen. Because even if you want some of your work to be incredibly popular, your audience has to start with a group of weirds who, like you, believe in the exact same thing and support you as you make it happen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Continue this discussion over on the thread on Hacker News.
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Life is about Three Things
(Photo: Horia Varlan)
In the past few weeks I’ve been developing this, thinking a lot about this theory. It’s still a work in progress so I hope that you think about it, expand it, propose changes, remix it, refute it.
Life is about three things:
- Storytelling
- Contrast
- Communication
Storytelling
As humans have been around, we’ve relied on stories. Stories gave birth to religion as throngs of people believed a story enough to swear by it. Stories gave birth to science as throngs of people tried to explain how our world works. Stories gave birth to history, literature and a million other things.
Life is all about telling a good story. Everyone is interesting if they tell a compelling story. You sell yourself, products, ideas, through stories. You meet friends, enemies, boyfriends, girlfriends, new people, all through stories. When stories overlap, they allow us to connect and relate to one another.
Your mental perspective can change rapidly if you tell yourself a brand new story.
Alex White, the CEO of Next Big Sound, gives great talks on the importance of storytelling. Watch Alex’s recent talk from TechStars For a Day in Boulder (skip to 25:06).
Contrast
Contrast in people, fashion, viewpoints, relationships, skillsets, color.
I started thinking heavily about contrast as I’ve learned how to design. Think back to Powerpoints that your classmates would give in middle school. Remember the neon green text on the yellow background that destroyed your retinas? Contrast was hard back then. It’s still hard.
Contrast makes outfits and websites beautiful. It guides our eye from one thing to the next and helps us discern vital information. Contrast helps us make decisions.
Think about the person you’re dating, or most recently dated…or whatever people do now that someone used to call dating. You guys were similar in some ways and different in others. Similarities and contrast make that other person interesting to you.
Companies with great contrast are able to be more than the sum of their parts. Specialization comes from contrast and helps create more total good in the world.
Communication
I also call this “making decisions easy for other people.”
What I mean is this: If you do your share of the legwork in most situations and communicate your desires and intentions effectively, it should be relatively easy for someone to make a yes or no decision.
Non-verbal communication also falls into this category, showing – not telling – the world what you want.
If I’m starting a band and I walk up to a drummer with and idea of what I want kind of music I want to play, demos, a little knowledge of his past projects, the musicians who influence me and who I imagine the band sounding somewhat like, he or she can take all of that info, know that I’m semi-legitimate (at the very least) and make a decision from there.
If I want something from you, I need to do my part to communicate that I’m thorough, that my plans are thought-out and that my intentions are just.
Like I said before, this is all a theory. I hope that I can evolve and expand upon this as time goes on. I hope you modify this and lend your input, if you feel so inclined.
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9 things I wish someone had told me about life after college
The last two years of high school every teacher talked about getting us ready for college. I guess they did a good job because the transition to college was relatively painless. I packed up all of my stuff and moved to Boulder but for the most part, transitioning was easy.
Nobody talks about transitioning out of college, into the real world, where your life is a brand new place. I’m writing this because I found the transition from college to life after college to be much harder than I expected.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the transition agrees. Nobody talks about this transition much, so I thought I’d write a little something about it. This is the advice that I wish someone had given me about life after college:
- Prepare for your world to change. There’s no more Spring break or three months off for summer. Wednesday is just Wednesday from here on out.
- Your first job out of college won’t make you or break you, most likely. Finding great people to work with is most important.
- As soon as you get out of college, join a gym. Figure out a time to go and go. Or run. Make sure you stay active somehow, because life gets in the way really quickly when you don’t have the comfortable lattice of school.
- Go to group dinners and put everyone’s phone in a bag. Great conversations ensue.
- Keep those hobbies going. Keep playing soccer, or pool, or surfing. Keep doing yoga. Keep reading. Keep doing you. You’ll develop some great friends around those interests.
- Happiness is already built in, you just need to look around. Getting to whatever that thing is won’t make you happy long-term.
- Play with your schedule. Wake up earlier, go to bed later. Time-shifting is your friend.
- Work hard, be nice to people. If you make eye contact, say hi. Everybody felt this way at some point, you’re not the only one who’s uncomfortable.
- The un-comfortability is good for you. Comfort zones need to be stretched.
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