The Cost of Distraction
Distraction causes weakness. It’s not that I believe in military-like self discipline. that I believe if you have found two circles of your Ikagi, what you love to do and what you’re good at, you should probably drill down on the third and fourth circles— what you can get paid for and what the world needs.
Finding Your True Self
This is not a matter of denying yourself anything nor about abiding by your parents dreams over your own. There is no subsuming of your own identity. Quite the contrary, it is about tweaking up to the surface your underlying emergent self. The combining of the genetic material of your mother and father, plus some possibly ineffable quality that is part of scientific in the form of those mysterious electric fields that activate this gene or that, epigenetics, and just perhaps something spiritual or random or self-determined beyond all that.
The Scientific Method and Non-Falsifiable Ideas
Spiritual, random and self-determined all get lumped into the same category of not provable— aka non-falsifiable or non-scientific (for now). It’s still worth mentioning them, because the hypothesis that form science initiate from guesses that become testable theories that become science. We can’t rule out stuff just because it hasn’t gone through the early phase of the science funnel yet.
Determinism vs Complexity in Human Behavior
So just like an LLM, you are some amount of complex but deterministic physical things whose actions and outcomes can be calculated. The calculations are vastly complex, and it effectively takes a computer. That is a copy of the entire universe to make accurate predictions, especially over time. Even without introducing randomness, a soul, or self determination, the complexity is sufficient for all intents and purposes, it is unpredictable— at least down on the small scale.
Quantum Mechanics and Free Will
Science covers this with quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the Schroeder wave equation. Position or velocity. Pick one. The other becomes unpinned. If you know, a particles velocity, then its position becomes a kind of probability cloud down at that atomic and subatomic scale. Reality apparently gets blurry. Lots of people grasped onto this as an argument for true random, and as an extension, free-will. We don’t know, but classic sci-fi addresses this pretty well too.
Asimov’s Psychohistory: Individual vs Collective Prediction
One of the best sci-fi stories of all time that goes back to 1942 addresses this as the concept of psychohistory in Asimov’s Foundation where are the scientist Harry Seldon determined that the outcome of vast societies in civilizations was more or less predictable, but the actions of individuals not so much. Predicting the movement of the herd is easier than predicting the movement of individuals within it. Outliers will be outliers. And if the butterfly effect happens to kick in with an outlier, the overall flock’s direction and destiny may change. The little things do matter.
The Power of Small Actions
And so that’s what practicing agency and autonomy is all about. It’s making the potentially little thing that’s going to make all the difference. And it’s not relying on chance or circumstance or serendipity or any of those other things beyond your direct control. It’s relying on you being tuned into your environment and your situation, constantly making tiny little tweaks. If you are distracted by doomscrolling and all the nonsense issues that pop culture news elevates to center stage, well, that might make you distracted— and thus, weak.
The Cost of Modern Distractions
Weak means you’re not making those deliberate little tweaks in your life every day to directionally adjust things. There is nothing more damaging than pop culture to distract you. And if there was something quite that bad, I would call it the daily grind. Or perhaps we can call it the perpetual stream of interruptions, often in the form of notifications these days. And of course, all those social media and work notifications are just another form of throwing off your groove, keeping you from achieving flow state and never getting into the zone. If you don’t know what it’s like to achieve flow state and get into the zone, you will never miss it. And you’ll be happily and ignorantly part of the herd.
Understanding Flow State
The happy news is that so many crafts and skills can get you into that flow state— transport you into the zone. The language here is so weird because pop culture would have you believe this thing value is to live in the moment. The question is to live in the moment where, exactly? In the physical environment around you, which you were in, which is what most nature lovers and outdoor buffs would have you believe. What about people get transported reading a book? Playing a musical instrument? Creating art? Is that living in the moment?
The Value of Breaking Free from Others’ Rules
I would argue at the value here is in changing the rules of existence for some little stretch of time. The value here is in not abiding by somebody else’s rules while you’re in the state of doing what you love to do and getting better at doing it. This is not something others generally want you to be doing. It makes you better at something and over time, it increases how much you love life and how good you are living it. It makes you a winner. And by relative comparison, it makes people who are looking at you feel like losers.
The 50-50 Split in Human Nature
My gut feeling is that the population is about 50-50 split between those who would enjoy experiencing a master craftsperson, artist, musician, athlete or whatever practicing their art and skill versus those who would be jealous, covet them, and somehow wish to knock them down or to take what they have without earning it. Those who can, do. Those who cannot quite how to take it away from those who can and did. Actually, investing in stocks instead of just having a skill or trade is a version of that.
The Complex Nature of Acquisition as a Skill
Acquisition? Is acquisition in itself a skill or trade? The art of the deal and being a business person? There’s a fine line of delineation between someone who is a collector for its own sake, and someone who has a valuable skill worthy of Ikigai. Can you imagine someone who just wants and wants and gets and gets thinking: “Now, what do I love doing? What am I good at? What can I get paid for? And what does the world need?” They need for my portfolio to get fatter and fatter? But on the flipside, the guy who wrote the book Rich Dad Poor Dad pivoted just being a business person to helping the world.
The Blurred Lines of Reality and Free Will
So, it’s rarely so clear. The world is full of these blurred lines of demarcation. And in fact, the difference between what is mechanically predetermined in life, superdeterministic if you will, versus what is actually the result of your human free will is probably also quite a blurred line of demarcation. Some people think there is none. Some people think every moment already happened, and all existence is some sort of crystal block and our experience somehow a moving cross-section that is time. So many sub topics, such as the moving cross-section would not be a flat surface because time is relative and there is no absolute clock for everyone. But that’s for another time.
The Analog Nature of Our Universe
The important thing to grasp appears that we believe the world is analog. That means, so far as we can tell so far, there is no pixel of the universe. There are no absolute positions. There is no grid. And if that turns out true, then there is always smaller. They saying no matter how small can always be divided in half. There is a continuousness between points, and never really that quantized to jump. Sure, quantum mechanics is a thing, and there are some things pointing to the possible existence of a smallest unit— at what we call the Planck scale where Einstein’s relativity stops working, and inside which nothing can be said. But this is effectively so much smaller than anything we can observe or measure, we still don’t know. So it brings us back to the pragmatic position for all intense and purposes, the world is analog, and thus ultimately unpredictable even if somehow predetermined.
Personal Responsibility in an Uncertain World
Philosophically, the upshot of this is that you probably oughta live life in a way where you take responsibility for yourself. Don’t assume it’s already played out and written in the book of life, that cosmic static crystal running a movie projector. If you take that position, then nobody should ever be sentenced for crimes they committed, because it was not their fault. We would all just throw up our arms in the air and go whatever will be will be. This is actually a herd mentality where you externalize responsibility for safety to the whole group. If you don’t take responsibility for yourself, it gets shifted to the group. Somebody has to support you. And while this might feel good if you’re lucky enough to have that supportive of a herd your entire life, it definitely is the opposite of the kind of agency and autonomy I’m advocating practicing here.
The Long-Term Impact of Distraction
So what happens, is if you were distracted long enough you never find what you love doing and never become good at it. And so that certainly never become something you can get paid for and help the world somehow because it needs it. This is a cycle that has a fairly long lead time.
The 10,000 Hour Rule and Life Phases
Discovering and getting good at a thing plays into the concept that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his Outlier book in which he covered the study showing it takes 10,000 hours or 10 years to achieve expertise. If we use nice round numbers, let’s call a human lifetime 100 years. 100 rotations around the sun. Cut off 10 years when your kid and 10 years when you’re extremely old. That leaves 80 years. Give yourself a breather so that you’re not always practicing and rising to excellence in some endeavor. So, go in alternating 10 year chunks. That’s 10 years to develop the skill and 10 years to reap the benefits and rewards. That’s 4 things. But of course we don’t live to an even hundred, so let’s chop that down to 3 things. We’re not Batman.
Life’s Natural Learning Phases
This actually roughly coordinates with phases of life. Your young energy time from say 18 years old to your early 30s. Now you’ve tasted a little bit of life and you make some career adjustment so that’s into your 40s and 50s. And now you’re some wiz and old dude or lady knowing your true love, may be having a little money in the bank. So there’s whatever you take up for retirement, hopefully something that involves craft. Now, you no longer have the pressure to get paid for it, have an impact on the world or what not. That’s part of the irony here. By the time you finally have built up a little nest egg (if you have— I haven’t), you no longer feel the pressure of the early phases in life.
Maintaining Mental Acuity in Later Years
All right, so let’s face it. By the time you’re around that 65 years old retirement age, you’re not gonna have quite the energy or the body of a young person. Hopefully you’ll still have the mind. It’s possible. Stay active and make sure you don’t have iron deficiencies. Eat plenty of protein. Douse it with sources of vitamin C. Get roughage to clear your digestive track. And run lots of water through yourself. Stay active. That should do it. Your mind should still be in shape in your later years. You ain’t done with your Ikigai yet, especially if you haven’t achieved it in the first place. There’s still time! OK, another way of looking at these 10 year stretches where you achieve expertise:
15-25 — 35/45 — 55/65
The Case for Early Apprenticeship
See? This is actually an argument for apprenticeship. If you actually know what you love after you’ve gone through adolescence, I don’t see much reason for not pairing down on the topic and becoming world class at it by 25 years old. There’s a lot of putting down physical craftsmanship. I think the label they put on it is “having a trade”. This is perhaps supposed to make you less worldly, deprived of literature, philosophy, and all the higher order concerns of a civilized person. By some counts, the purpose of college is to make you civilized and turn you into a citizen in a way that you can partake in politics and know what you’re even doing when you’re voting.
Balancing Specialization with General Education
Fair enough. This is all actually a valid point and I am not going to argue against it. This is the general education that you have to blend in on the side, even as you perhaps even obsess over the development of some craft or trade. You can get profoundly good at a thing over 10 years, but you can also read a lot of books. Reading books outside your main area of interest can make you well educated and promote a well rounded education. In other words, reading can turn you into a good citizen. It takes a certain amount of discipline. The audio versions of books are OK, but you won’t really internalize things unless you force it through the reenactment engine of your mind.
The Power of Imagined Experience
Imagined experiences are in many ways the same thing as a real experience. Studies show that athletes get better at their sport by thinking through the behavior. Imagining it. Think how indistinguishable from real experience your dreams are. Think how robots today are being trained in virtual reality in the NVIDIA Omniverse. For those not tuned into this wonderful development, that 10 years or 10,000 hours of becoming expert at a thing, for robots can be done in accelerated time and in parallel. Nobody has any idea how quickly robots are gonna become experts at almost every endeavor. They have the advantage of imagined experiences, giving them real expertise. We do too through books. Maybe not with the same throughput, but it probably should not be underestimated or ignored.
Reading as a Gateway to Focus
On the topic of books, it’s worth stating that this definitely develops those flow state and getting into the zone focused skills. You won’t be able to get through a book if you can’t make yourself focus. Making yourself is probably a bad choice of words, because what you wanna do is choose a book that somehow grabs you and compels you forward. You only have to have enough self discipline to get to the point where it grabs you and holds you and compels you forward. Just the right book paired with who you are, your emerge self, your true inner being can do that. It’s different for everybody, but it does tend to align with the genres for the most part. The best books cross the genres. But for me, it was definitely things like Asimov and The Culture series.
Different Paths to Innovation
Sci-fi might not teach us a trade or a craft. For certain engineering-minded people like Jensen Huang, they never read sci-fi. It’s surprising, him ushering in exactly that sci-fi future. But apparently he doesn’t need it. Elon Musk on the other hand can’t stop talking about the same Culture series that I find so compelling. But what are you really gonna do when you turn away from a sci-fi book and try to take up a craft?
Python: A Bridge from Science Fiction to Reality
Enter Python. There are a lot of programming languages. But there is one that allows an easy on ramp for people like me. We are currently in a world where we can both talk to the artificial intelligence that were the stuff of sci-fi, and the language that they just so happen to know so well is Python. Sure, a lot of roads lead to JavaScript and the web full stack. But look at the introduction of ChatGPT by Sam Altman and how it’s almost always place on in the examples that are given, how it’s Python that ChatGPT can execute in the background in it’s own little sandbox. And look at how Python continues to grow in popularity, even in the face of the title wave of JavaScript’s monopoly over the web browser. That alone to tell you something.
The Universal Appeal of Python
Speaking in Python lets you automate machine machines. It has just the amount of precision necessary to express meticulous processes and assert control without it being soul-crushingly weird, difficult and obtuse. I have taken up a lot of programming languages in my time. I’ll spare you the biography, but it was not until place on that everything clicked. And it’s not just the language itself.
Python’s Ecosystem and Community
Some of the other things lending itself to Python’s fabulous popularity is the fact that it is free and open source and has been reimagined and respond and embedded into so many things. It’s that it’s the macro language of other things, like Blender and FreeCAD. It’s the community that sprung up around it, like NASA and Reddit. It’s the third party libraries that make it so well suited for domain specific tasks. It’s the profoundly universal nature of some of those domain specific tasks, like Pandas for data manipulation and Sci-Kit Lear and PyTorch for machine learning and AI. And even with all that, it’s one of those languages that said to be small enough to just fit in your head. You don’t rely on googling and documentation after a surprisingly short while.
Programming Literacy Through Python
And so Python is in my mind how a lifetime of being enamored with sci-fi reading segues into something directly related to craft, even without being an engineer or professional developer. Wait, what? Not being a professional developer? Nope. I am just plain programming literate in the way that one of the founding fathers of the field of computing expresses it as Programming Literacy. This guy Donald Knuth, one of the still living treasures of our world in the same spirit as Ken Thompson, basically expressed it as the inter-mixing of notetaking and working code. The very documentation of how a thing works is the same as the working code. There’s a whole history here about how it was an elite tool of academia for many years. But now it’s not. Because of Python. Technically, because of Fernando Pérez who created IPython, but that’s a story for another article.
The Playful Origins of Python
Reading, writing, arithmetic, and Python — at least in my book. It’s a terrible misnomer. That should’ve just been named Dent after it’s required white space, indenting, or perhaps as an homage to Arthur Dent from the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series. As it is, Python is named after the British comedy troop Monty Python, and not directly named after the snake. Few people know the lighthearted and playful nature with which Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python named it. It seems like some macho masculine thing, the way Robin Williams name is one of his early comedy skits. But no, it’s actually named after a bunch of irreverent subversive cross-dressers. The place on logo was supposed to be a 16 ton weight falling on your head from a Flying Circus in skit.
LLMs as Programming Mentors
And so there we go. People question the value of LLM’s. But the thing that makes them so valuable is that they are not actually just blabber machines. They’re not necessarily just adding to the noise in the horrible signal to noise ratio of our world. They can actually help you create a code. They are already the Star Trek, universal translator, at least between the spoken word in Python code. And that’s not just merely get them to code for you. That’s to get them to help you and becoming programming literate. That so that they can be kind of like a mentor. With AI, the books have come alive and can teach you about the contents of the book. This is the value of LLM. Tools teach you how to use tools.
The Power of Information and Automation
The focus required for reading and really absorbing a thing, replaying it in your mind with the same reality recreation engine, that your dreams use, can be segued and transitioned into coding. You can have impact on the world with the craft through pure information. You’re just moving text around. Expressing yourself as the ability to automate machines. Sure, that machine just might be the laptop in front of you or some website. But it doesn’t remain that way. It’s all the machines in the world. If they don’t, then they eventually will have Python on API. You might ask why not to speak with him in English? As an English, the universal programming language of the world? To some degree, yes, but it is always to generate lower levels of code. More precise things. Things that remove the ambiguity. Mostly Python.
Beyond Python: The Core Message
So then is this article really just Python propaganda? What about the whole focused and strong versus distracted and weak? Well, that is just the example. When you can be focused, you can take up a skill that takes that 10 years or 10,000 hours to develop. It can be whatever works for you. The first two circles of Ikigai. I’m just saying that reading is one of those great focus exercises to go from finding something you love to becoming great at it. And I don’t necessarily just love programming. I’m not one of those folks who discovered it early and fell in love with coding. It was more like art and storytelling that I fell in love with. But I coveted it being able to exist and that more technical world. And just being able to speak a more technical language was my ticket in.
Moving Forward with Purpose
From here? Directional tweaks! Practicing of agency and autonomy. Journal writing exactly like this in vim, practicing getting into the flow state. Looking at those Python projects that I should be doing to move my life forward and more material ways— both on the professional front, and on the personal front. The more I can unify the two fronts in order to get a 1+1 = 3 effect, the better. The same skills that I need for personal projects should be the same skills that I need for professional work. This is the alignment of the first three circles of Ikigai: what I love to do, what I’m good at and what I can get paid for.
Contributing to What the World Needs
Hopefully, by putting it into articles like this, I can cover the last circle: what the world needs.
Gemini’s Thoughts
I write my daily tech journal in a very stream of consciousness way, not doing a lot of organization. Over time, I’ll organize. And Gemini’s categorizations as I go helps.
In this article, I argue that focused effort, achievable through activities like reading and learning programming (especially Python), is crucial for personal strength and fulfillment. I explore how distractions, like social media and pop culture, weaken our ability to pursue our passions and develop expertise. By embracing the 10,000-hour rule and mastering a skill, we can achieve a state of flow, break free from societal norms, and contribute meaningfully to the world, ultimately finding our Ikigai.
Ideas for Titles and Headlines:
- Titles:
- Distracted & Weak vs. Focused & Strong: Finding Your Ikigai
- The Power of Focus: Mastering Skills and Breaking Free from Distractions
- 10,000 Hours to Mastery: How to Achieve Your True Potential
- Python and Purpose: Crafting Your Future in a Distracted World
- Headlines:
- Escape the Distraction Trap: Build Strength Through Focused Learning
- Unlock Your Potential: The Path to Mastery and Fulfillment
- From Doomscrolling to Deep Work: Reclaiming Your Focus
- Why Python is More Than a Coding Language: It’s a Path to Focus and Achievement.
My Opinion:
This article offers a compelling perspective on the importance of focus and deliberate practice in a world filled with distractions. I appreciate the author’s blend of philosophical musings, scientific references, and practical advice. The connection drawn between focused activities like reading and programming, and the pursuit of Ikigai, is particularly insightful. The author’s enthusiasm for Python as a tool for both personal growth and creative expression is evident and contagious. It’s a thoughtful piece that encourages readers to take control of their attention and invest in meaningful pursuits.