The idea of a Project Persona, the incarnation of a project, as an alter ego, with it’s own set of online accounts where you log and share the life of the project.

Possibility and expectations are antonym. This is a powerful insight. Because the two terms are so related. Possibility and expectations. What is more powerful? It’s clear to me. Expectations are the result of planning, targeting, and being productive. Possibility is the result of being present, open, attentive. Possibility and Expectations.

If you zoom in enough, empty. If you zoom out enough, empty.

The process of turning digital assets into material objects. Someday we will talk about materialization with the same interest we put today into digitalization.

If a task is open ended, then timebox it. If it’s finite, finish it when it’s done perfectly.

Finish the book The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, beautiful, simple, captivating. Like a window on a life that is ordinary but significant. I want to revisit that house, that garden, sometime again in the future.

The autonomous fleet would return at the end of the day to the parking lot for recharging. The kids had come up with this game to jump in front of them, daring closer and closer to prove their courage.

Discipline is a superpower. And not only it is a fight against your own impulses, but a social struggle. I’ve found that some people will try to mock you out of it, perhaps because of their own frustration.

Discipline is impossible, you will eventually fail. The important skill in to balance strong will and compassion. Opposite and complementary. Yin and Yang.

When you learn a physical exercise for the first time, your focus is on what do you need to do for the movement (like how do I need to turn or where do I need to position my hand). At a certain point, those aspects, that once required your full attention, become second nature, and at that point the focus shifts to what can the movement do for you. At that point you become aware of the momentum and other external elements that can assist in the movement. This way, the maneuver becomes effortless and graceful.

Credibility and reputation is in the work produced, not in its author. Somehow the work infuses the author with it, but it comes from it. This is typically thought in reverse. The author must be grateful to the work, not the other way around.

Feels good when you explicitly say no to something because you are concentrating on something else. Somehow your level of commitment with what you are doing is significantly higher. As if when you say yes to something, you have unconsciously created an excuse to not really do anything well because, you know, I’m so overwhelmed.

It’s interesting to read myself two years ago, it seems like reading the Unabomber manifesto left me kind of angry. It makes me think on the influence of our inputs in what we think. In the end, we want to believe we hold hard won truths but our world view seems more influenced by the book we are reading, the last movie we’ve watched or the last thing we ate than a genuine construct of the world, result of our careful deliberation and experience.

Want to change the way you see your life? Change your diet and your book.

1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself or others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the way.

Exceptional TV show! It does not leave you indifferent. The white rich always win. The only thing they won’t get away with, though, is they are still themselves. Referred to by Austin Kleon.

Just read Klara and the Sun. While the setup is SF it’s more an exploration of human emotion than a thorough scenario of a future with AI. Anyway, good read. And a reminder that radical transparency and candor win over, but also that something so obvious can be the most difficult to pull off, specially for humans.

If I could choose again I would be an architect. I miss the chance to leave a lasting impact. On the other hand, it’s easy to take for granted the degree of freedom and empowerment that a single developer has. You can build stuff and have full control over what you are building.

Finished Lisey’s Story, the TV show based on Stephen King’s book. Formally impressive, a bit empty on the character side. So much from it reminds me of On Writing! Feels like a love letter to his wife.

The attraction of the things you need to break in. Those stiff leather boots. That goruck backpack. The sour flavour of the beer, and the strength of the whiskey. The powerful tools you master. The skills that take a long time to acquire. The stuff, in a nutshell, that you earn.

The clarity of knowing what to do next. The confidence of being ready. The focus of giving your full attention.

After a long while wanting to do it, I finished the game Firewatch. Not strictly a game but an interactive story. A bit disappointing on the gameplay side, too guided and never had a feeling of possibility or challenge. The story is very engaging, though, and the experience in first person and, most of all, with headphones, is very very good. It is really an auditive experience and, as such, it’s great to experience it.

It left me willing to play Death Stranding.

Treat preparation time as sacred. But tasks during preparation time should have very little cognitive or emotional load. They should be executed like mindless rituals.

The distant rumor of the highway is a deafening roar today. Must be the wind. I cannot decide whether it is soothing or unnerving. Soothing for what it is, unnerving for what it represents. I guess it is my choice, like so many other things.

When you’ve been doing something for a while, it is at the point of boredom, of losing faith, of what is the point of all this?, that you most need the clarity: should I persevere or should I quit? Am I at the brink of breakthrough or am I wasting my time? So difficult.

Some stuff is self generating: the more you use it, the more you do, the more you give… the more you have! In a scarcity minded world, where everyone believes we live in a zero-sum game, it’s amazing how the more important things in life behave exactly the opposite: care, love, smile, positivity…

When the feeling is: There’s no time for everything I have to do, the blind reaction should be: limit work in progress to one thing and put all your attention into it.

—You’ve seen it, right? —I’ve seen it, right.

Finished On Writing. It’s non fiction so well written that it gets on your nerves. Must distill the keys I want to incorporate on my own routine.

Finished WandaVision. Nice show. Turns boring the more conventional superhero it gets. I anticipate a turn from CGI heavy spectacle to more bold storytelling soon. A chance for Neil Gaiman’s content to get through the screen.

Trust is a pre-condition for agility. Trust is more correlated with predictability than speed. So focus first on improving predictability, build trust, remove control layers, improve speed.

You begin, and when you get distracted, you begin again. That’s when you realize that the act of beginning is a blissful moment. One day, you lose the ability to begin because you are already doing it. That day you miss it.

Beginning again is not a sign of failure, it is a privilege.

I love and hate that expression. Let me take a step back… yes, we’re living in a planet orbiting a sun in a galaxy among millions and nobody has a fucking clue what’s going on. But yes, let me worry about your circumstancial issue as if my life depended on it.

You should be doing something else. You could be doing something else.

You should be doing something else. You could be doing something else.

Two weeks is the standard estimation for anything. What you really want to say is: I don’t have a fucking clue but I cannot work on it right now. I will do it in the future.

Two weeks then run over you like a bus.

At a certain point, in my adolescence, my nose entered my visual field…

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

A sense of belonging requires some bond. That bond results in like-minded people. The tribe shares something, at least a target, probably an opponent. Is diversity opposite? What is the balance between both forces? Can a group be a tribe and diverse? Or is it just a matter of the drivers that bond us and the ones the we don’t use to discriminate?

We are verbose because we want to give context, we want to avoid misinterpretations. When we’ve articulated our point, we go and rephrase it, just in case. It’s all about the fear and insecurity of opening a weak flank.

In the process of securing your position, you waste your audience time, insult their intelligence, and lose effectiveness.

The defining factor of this stream of thought is that the indivisible entity is the stream, not the thought.

It is impossible to link to a single idea here, the only way to find it is reeling through the whole stream.

With every new annotation the stream grows, but is still an indivisible stream.

The impossibility to edit it is also a feature, not a gap.

Casey Neistat -> Van Neistat -> Tom Sachs… part of the same scenius. One whose defining character is handcrafted products, imperfect, where message, function and content take precedence over form and aesthetics.

We trade off convenience for freedom. Convenience is the capacity to do something easily and fast… in a way, the factor is cognitive load and time. The only factor that can alter the equation is mastery, i.e. with mastery and craftsmanship you could eventually become more efficient at a certain task, while still retaining all the freedom.

Always present principles and values against the ones they supersede.

Speaking in absolute terms brings no insight. It is when we deliberately propose something to be before something else, that we can grab its true meaning.

Example in agile principles:

• Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools
• Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
• Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
• Responding to Change Over Following a Plan

If you are living with ADD, separating the two is of critical importance.

While THINK and DO live in the same moment, new ideas will be created and will spin out of control, hijacking the DOING.

Sidetracked… note it, and move on. DOING is sacred. Trust that the time to THINK will come.

Showing the process of creation, when done by a craftsman, becomes hypnotic and fascinating. This is one way to engage an audience. Create the content while you are presenting it.

Be precise and correct. Never compromise in the HOW. Always improve your methods. Be lax on the WHAT, but be obsessive on the HOW. The HOW will imbue the WHAT with character and substance… it will be the scaffolding of the WHAT, and the WHAT will grow over it. Be obsessive on the HOW.

Just be aware of it, let the brain work some magic and make it happen without doing.

This is no means to an end. This is both the means and the end. The how becomes the what becomes the why.

The drama of current technology is that it is impossible to recognize that a human has been here.

Some things should remain difficult. Inaccessible. Hard. Removing the entry barriers to some things is wrong.

the spirited man creates it’s own environment and crafts his own tools, custom, everything is the way it is supposed to be, because the tool shapes the work, and if the tool is also special the work will be special, and everything is crafted out of a same mindset of very personal expression

I listen to the rain typing on the ceiling. Each idea drops. I listen to the stream and soon it will be lost. Perhaps another time, those drops will spring.

Trying to say something, and saying it in a way that is different. Finding a voice.

When you put special emphasis on the differences you create a division, and inevitably a hierarchy. From there, you have just people trying to justify that belief.

When you try to amplify the similarities, you create a sense of belonging, but you cannot do it without emphasizing the differences with others, therefore creating the breach again.

Ideas take time to nest. You let them into you, then sometime later, you find them living in there. They quietly settled. Now they are.

The idea of aleph as an ever changing circle with a bitmap pattern that is evolving organically, as a planet which is alive and ever changing.

The idea of aleph as an ever changing circle with a bitmap pattern that is evolving organically, as a planet which is alive and ever changing.

Like there’s two ways forward: one is to keep building on the platforms laid out by others, the other is to dig down the foundations to figure out what was possible but was made unavailable.

One gets you higher. The other gets you deeper. Both take you somewhere else.

I’m all in for the latter. I think we can all use a bit deeper.

This id a quest to uncover the invisible defaults we have inadvertently opted in for.

On the necessity to change our defaults to open up new possibilities.

Habit tracking and a single composite % of quality are powerful tools to change behavior. Think Sleep Cycle: just that creates the incentive. While the indicator is too simplistic, it is very very effective. I don’t think you can have the too.

I’m just testing that the new location for StreamOfThought is working well.

Practice with a purpose in mind. Carefully considering the process. Frustrating at first, because it challenges your defaults. But over time, as you climb the learning curve, your new neural pathways are carved and the skill happens.

Deliberate practice is necessary to unlearn.

The key point is to avoid wanting, and to foster the idea of developing, improving and customizing what I already have.

Developing, improving and customizing what I already have requires skills, acquiring what you want requires money. One enslaves you, the other frees you up.

Sometimes it feels as if the quality of the thoughts depends on the physical conditions and not the other way around.

Maybe it’s some sort of feedback loop, one supports the other. Mens sana in corpore sano.

But the physical conditions you can be aware of, and you can exercise verifiable influence on. The way you seat, the frown in your forehead, the rhythm of your breath.

Check in on those physical conditions every now and again. Ritualize the posture. Find what works for each mind state.

You don’t really understand anything until you have built it.

It’s only through the full engagement required to create something that you can fully grasp all its implications.

Theoretical discourse is very limited. Distrust opinions based on conceptual foundations. Trust the practitioner.

Mentoring should put the experienced right by the side of the apprentice.

Work dignifies. The pursuit of excellence and improvement in one’s craft. Achieving flow by tackling new challenges. Building your own tools. Crafting your own solutions. Bringing beauty into this world.

It’s not the incapacity to inhale, but the incapacity to exhale.

It’s probably the lack of confidence, the need to hold on, out of fear.

Peace of mind is in the exhale. In the absolute trust that once you’ve emptied yourself and are vulnerable and weak, a new breath intake will come.

Seems like this guy travelled the world looking for wisdom from different places, engaging in debate with the sages of the time, and incorporating what sticked to his worldview.

How powerful is the same travel in today’s world… moving from one text to the next, immediately available to us?

The tree’s trunk and main branches remain constant. The sprouts and the leaves change constantly. An eternal spring of ideas.

It’s better when it has character. When it has roots. That means that when it’s trying to be something else is not that good. When you introduce some character to a certain palette. A certain voice.

It’s better when it has character. When it has roots. That means that when it’s trying to be something else is not that good. When you introduce some character to a certain palette. A certain voice.

The act of reading with the intention to find an answer. Reading for the sake of reading is wandering, looking for resonance and serendipity. Deliberate reading is probably more effective, hence the concept of How to Read a Book on turning every reading into deliberate by explicitly identifying what are the questions that the author is trying to answer.

One is the regular marriage, your wife and children; other is work, with whom you spend a lot of time of your life too; the last one is yourself.

Should probably treat them in a similar way.

As explained by David Whyte.

I surf my thoughts during 10 minutes letting them carry me to wherever they go. Most of the time the mind is agitated, waves carrying me north and south, west and east. When you surrender to that, knowing that there’s no danger here, it’s like being cradled. You simply move with the flow.

Meditation has made me aware of the beauty of ordinary moments, has made me insensitive to unnecessary stimulation. The values we assign to experiences are, most of the time, imposed, imprinted in our minds. When you access the core of it, everything carries a beauty that doesn’t need to be explained. A simple life, yet wonderful. A candle flickering in the darkness before dawn. The light entering the room. The rain tapping on the window.

That koi swimming upstream, against the current. She’s fighting against all odds to reach her destination. That place that lives only in her imagination, but that she knows it’s there, waiting for her to arrive. She is pure determination, pure fire. Every minute is a small battle, no time to rest, until she wins over, up there, where the river is born. She can only imagine the struggles she will have to go through, and she’s at the same time frightened and driven by them. She remembers the wise words:

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

That other koi swimming downstream, flowing gracefully with the current. She lives here and now, present in this very moment, where everything unfolds and she witnesses. She smiles at the beauty of this world. She is kindness and compassion, love and attention. The flickering lights, the slow moving waters, the riveting wonder of the little mundane things. This life is a miracle and it has to be breathed.

They both swim in the void, in the incomprehensible waters of this life. If looked carefully, both kois are one and the same, and are indistinguishable from the very same waters they swim in: a mystery that escapes us, and is only accessible in fleeting moments of joyful awakening.

Rhyme and rhythm touch something in us… they are satisfaction that dignifies what it contains. It’s the anticipation, it’s the expectation that is met. And in that pattern we find home, and everything in that home is familiar, and is true. How can it not be true if it meets what is expected? But within it, there’s an open question. The expected messenger delivers and unexpected message, and the contrast captures us.

It’s a space of words, words unresolved, that invite but don’t conclude. It’s a circle that is not closed, it’s a shape that is only hinted, turns into something for you. It’s a cloud in a sky. It’s that push to ride the bike. I will carry the weight so that you can fly.

It touched something, it opened something. Like the world is bigger now. This room has more space. There are corners I had not seen before. Corners that hold things to explore, things that can leade me somewhere else.

There are activities that are engaging for me as play. They don’t look as a struggle. I crave them. They keep me growing in a way that is joyful. Why not spend our time on those? Because they don’t pay the bills, or because the moment you wrap them into commitments and expectations, they rot and they become struggles.

That koi swimming upstream represents the determination and commitment to a target, the struggle to get there, the strength and the growth. That other koi downstream represents presence and joy, kindness and compassion, warmth and brightness. Our lives are the balance between the two. In the middle, not one and not another, there’s something else: play. It’s that space where you’re simply toying around, not a target, but learning, not compassionate, but joyful. Play is an intermediate state of mind. It’s the pencil mind.

You don’t have to be a guru, you can just be a guide.

To be a guide, you just need to have done something and reflected about it; then be willing to share.

When you get worried that you are being crumbled by other’s expectations… just be aware that everybody else is just worried about themselves. Nobody really gives a fuck about you.

That means there’s quite some margin and that the main viewpoint is not yours, but the other’s.

Zooming out, what was the frame becomes the content.

An experience that stimulates all your senses.

It’s my 3 year old room. No shame. Just play. It’s not even called play. It’s just the life of discovering, excitement, and joy.

In this world we live in, reacting slowly, moving slowly, is a sign of beauty and distinction, as if that person belongs to a different realm. Common people rush. That cast is accessible to all of us. It’s not a matter of money or status, it’s a matter of presence.

Fernando risks it all in every move. As in: “I will win or I will die”. If he dies, he starts over again. And the starting over is part of the appeal.

I risk it all because all is really nothing.

Maybe women like gardening while men prefer the idea of empowering. Gardening as in spending time and attention caring for something and watching it develop. Empowering as in enhancing capabilities through the development of skills & tools.

Everyday we come up with hundreds of new species. This biodiversity is amazing. Life on this planet is not discrete. Big animals are more difficult to find, but in the microscopic space life is like snowflakes. No two life forms are the same.

Desire paths are those ghost passageways in the grass that represent the walkers’ redefinition of the official paths. It is the organically grown urbanism that rejects the right angle.

There is a time to think and a time to do.

There is a time for productivity and a time for presence.

There are things that cannot be reconciled. At best they can take turns.

It is precisely when we stare at the void that we become something. There are many reactions possible, and nobody knows which one is correct—probably correct is not even the right term. We have to choose ours. It is probably the most essential choice we make.

Just would love to confirm that this actually works after a good number of attempts trying to solve the problem of the carriage returns and the line feeds.

My god that was a thing…

During meditation I notice some of the hidden tension. Thoughts lead me to be aware of my head, and I typically notice the pressure in the eyes and forehead. I can release it. It’s there but I was not aware until I pay attention. Releasing it affects my mood. That connection between physical state of my body and the tone of my thinking is fascinating. And the fact that cause/consequence can be inverted is magical. Releasing physical tension changes the quality of the thoughts. Incredible.

Answering the question “is this the most important thing I should do right now?” is very difficult.

The possibility that I have answered that question wrongly haunts me every moment. It triggers the fear of missing out on what’s really relevant.

I must find a way to avoid the question.

I do stream of consciousness, then groom what I’ve written as if looking for pearls in the bottom of the sea.

The sea is an organic chaos, subject to currents and happenstance. Pearls are little miracles of order and beauty.