Random Reading

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“I’m reading over 50 books at the same time. (Parallel Reading [<link; short read])“

“Really? How?“

“I have them in PDF format and I use a little program I found on GitHub called RandomFile [<link] to randomize them.

I have the books in two folders called ’20’ and ’80’. The program allows you to pick multiple folders and select a weight for them – that is, the probability of extracting a random file from each folder.“

“What weights did you set?“

“80% probability of extracting a book from the 20 folder. 
20% probability of extracting a book from the 80 folder.

A little aesthetic touch.

I’m most likely to get books from the 20 folder, but once in a while, I get a book from the 80 folder which is a nice surprise.“

“You mean on top of the surprise of not knowing what you’ll be reading from next?“

“Indeed.“

---

P.S. If you want to download the RandomFile program from GitHub, click on the green button labeled ‘Code’. (I had to look it up.)

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Modular Meditation 2

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“Remember Kenton Whitman’s wonderful GLOW meditation [<link, video]?“

“Yes. Remind me what GLOW stands for.“

“

• Gratitude – bringing to mind one or more things that you are grateful for, focusing on the feeling.

• Love – bringing to mind one or more things that you love, again focusing on the feeling.

• Oneness – releasing your sense of self and feeling the connection with any and everything.

• Wonder – accessing curiosity: ‘I wonder what magical amazing wonderful unexpected surprises are going to come into my life today.’

I’ve recently discovered another wonderful meditation by Vishen Lakhiani. He calls it the 6-phase meditation [<link, video]:

• Love and Compassion – feeling the energy of love and compassion radiating from you, and gradually expanding the feeling to all humanity and every living being on Earth.

• Gratitude – bringing to mind multiple things that you are grateful for, to produce an emotional flooding [<link; short read] effect.

• Forgiveness – bringing to mind someone you haven’t yet forgiven and forgiving them.

• Future Dreaming (Creative Visualization) – thinking of some aspect of your life a few years into the future and imagining yourself experiencing the ideal outcome, feeling the joy you would feel as if it were already happening.

• The Perfect Day – thinking about what you want/have to do today and visualizing each of them unfolding in the most perfect way possible.

• The Blessing – imagining there’s a loving higher power above you that’s supporting you in your vision and intentions and giving you endless strength and energy.

“

“I notice a pronounced imagination component in Vishen’s meditation.“

“That’s the beauty of it. It’s also imagination and visualization practice.“

“Which one do you like more?“

“Notice how both have the same structure in that they are made of several components. I like to call this kind meditation structure modular meditation. Each of the components that make up the meditation is an interchangeable module. 

I like both meditations, so I’m taking pieces from both and creating my own meditation.“

“What does it look like?“

“It’s a play in progress. I’m experimenting with it.“

The Language of Play

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“How can I practice Play?“

“To practice is to remember to practice. One aspect of the practice is to make Play more present in your mind. One way to do that is through language, by using words and phrases evocative of Play. I call the collection of all such words and phrases the Language of Play.

There are two aspects to it: 

– using existing words and phrases – identifying such words and phrases from your play history and using them more often
– creating words and phrases – playing with language to create words and phrases that remind you to play; we might call this languageplay

One type of such languageplay for instance involves substitution of various words with the word ‘play’.

eg 

pay => play
Paypal => Playpal (reddy2go [<link])

work => play
workout => playout

Another one involves adding ‘playful’ before various words:

eg
Playful Awareness
Playful Learning

This a an instance of what I call Generative Play – playing with coming up with new ways to play.“

Parallel Reading

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“What is parallel reading?”

“By parallel reading, I mean reading from multiple books at the same time during a reading session. By contrast, sequential reading is reading from one book at a time.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“There are two benefits: variety and creative serendipity – it increases the likelihood of connecting ideas you wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“Can you give more details on how it works?”

“Let’s take the idea as the information unit. You’re basically reading from idea to idea. If you read optimally, you skim through unuseful ideas and read only the useful ones. So in optimal reading, you proceed from one useful idea to another.

In sequential reading, you proceed from one useful idea to another within the same book. In parallel reading, you likewise proceed from one useful idea to another, but across different books. You read from one book until you find a useful idea. You process the idea, and then you change to a different book, repeating the process until a pomodoro passes.”

“So if, say, during a pomodoro of sequential reading you go through 10 ideas, during a pomodoro of parallel reading you go through 10 ideas from 10 different books.”

“Precisely.”

How I made the local graph usable in Obsidian

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“As you know, I use Obsidian [<link] as one of the two components of my PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system.“

“What’s the other component?“

“The CommonBook [<link], the digital commonplace book I created with my brother. I use it to store my quotes collection [<link].

One of the beautiful features of Obsidian is that you can see your notes as a graph.

Obsidian’s global graph view

You can see them as a graph globally (all notes) or locally (all notes connected with the selected note).

I especially like the local graph feature, but I wasn’t using it much.“

“Why?“

“I like to keep the local graph at depth 2 to see more connections.

At depth 1, you see only the notes directly connected with the selected note – level 1 notes.
At depth 2, you also see the notes directly connected with level 1 notes – level 2 notes.

The problem was, I was seeing so much noise that the local graph became unusable.“

“How did you solve the problem?“

“I identified the most important categories of notes. For me, they fall into two categories:

• Highest-Leverage Notes. I look at all my notes through the 80/20 filter. 20% percent are the most important, highest-leverage notes. I started tagging those notes (I use the tag #hl – highest-leverage).
• Onlyness Notes. Onlyness means that which you and only you can do. I started tagging the notes that fall into this category (I use the tag #onlyness). Onlyness notes are inspiring and remind me of what I should focus more on.

In the local graph, I created color groups for those two tags, and I filtered the local graph to see only the notes containing those tags:

tag:#hl OR tag:#onlyness

The result is beautiful and extremely useful:

My filtered local graph

Now every time I select a note, every single node on the local graph is meaningful and powerful.“

The Deliberate-Practice System

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“How can I optimize deliberate practice?“

“There are two aspects to deliberate practice:

– Skill-Specific Practice
– The Deliberate-Practice System

The former varies with every skill; the latter stays the same regardless of skill.

Gain clarity on and endlessly optimize the deliberate-practice system.” 

“What are the components of the deliberate practice system?“

“I’ve identified the following:

Deconstructing Skills

Every skills is a bundle of sub-skills. To deliberately and efficiently practice a skill, you need to identify its highest-leverage sub-skills – the fundamentals. Practice the fundamentals until they become second nature.

Identifying Principles

Principles are essentially mental models. They are meaningful, abstract patterns that are transferable across disciplines.

The Practice Loop (Scott H. Young)

Repeatedly performing a skill with the intention of improving it. Deliberate practice is a feedback loop. The purpose of the loop is two-fold:

– identifying and fixing weaknesses
– identifying and internalizing quality

Writing/Journaling

The most efficient way to practice is by having access to a coach. In the absence of a coach, you need to become your own coach. In this process, writing is invaluable. It helps you gain clarity on your practice, it allows you to track progress, and it helps you gain self-knowledge.“

“Self-knowledge? Are you still talking about deliberate practice?“

“All practices, regardless of form, converge on the same Path: The Path of Wisdom and Mastery.”

On Meditation and Meaning

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“There are two aspects to the practice of meditation. One is about the mechanics of the practice – what to do, and how. The other aspect is about meaning. You can make the practice more powerful by making it meaningful.“

“How can I make meditation meaningful?“

“You’re essentially imbuing it with meaning and connecting it with your values. You’re weaving a personal story around it. Here’s a glimpse of my own personal story:

Meditation is Mental Training. You mind requires training just like your body does. On the Path of Mastery, meditation is a fundamental aspect of that training.

Meditation is Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge. Meditation is a playful exploration of your inner world, and through that, a fundamental means of learning about yourself.

Meditation is Ritual. Meditation is a gateway into the universe of The Sacred.

Meditation is Self-Love. Meditation is a profound act of Self-Care and Self-Love, thus an expression of Love. The practice of meditation is the practice of Love.

Meditation is Peace and Joy. There’s a quote I love by Thich Nhat Hanh:

If you feel happy, peaceful, and joyful, you are practicing correctly. (Thick Nhat Hanh)

Meditation is the practice of coming home to yourself – a sacred Homecoming. Peace and Joy are the sign that you’ve arrived.

…

You can get inspiration from my story and shape your own.“

The Templating Game

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“What do you mean by the templating [<link; medium read] game?“

“I mean playing with linguistic templates. 

One way to play is by creating templates. Whenever you notice a meaningful, recurring linguistic pattern, you turn it into a template. That is, you take the variable part of the pattern and turn it into a variable.“

“‘Variables’ as in those used in math?“

“Precisely.

For instance, here’s a familiar linguistic pattern: 

The art of living
The art of design
The art of donkey riding
…

‘The art of’ doesn’t change, but what comes after, does. So we can turn it into a template: 

The art of x

Another way to play is by taking a (general) template and generating (specific) instances.

For instance: 

Every x is an opportunity.

Every obstacle is an opportunity.
Every unwanted thought is an opportunity.
Every Monday is an opportunity.
…

And another way to play is by coming up with new ways to play with templates. I call this the game-making game.“

Funny Examples

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“How can I make learning more fun?”

“What are you studying?”

“I want to get better at editing, so I’m studying punctuation. As part of my learning process, I’m writing a handbook [<link; short read] on the subject.”

“You’re giving a lot of examples to explain the rules, I imagine.”

“Yes.”

“One way you can make it more fun is by using funny examples.

Make it a habit to make all your examples funny from now on. You can thus practice humor at the same time.”

The Art of Asking Questions 4

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“How do you deliberately practice questioning?”

“I have a system for it. I’ve even created my own terminology.

The system has several components:

• QuestionCollecting (QCollecting)
• QuestionGeneration (QGeneration)
• QuestionEvaluation (QEvaluation)
• QuestionOptimization [<link; very short read] (QOptimization)
• QuestionTemplating [<link; medium read] (QTemplating)

QCollecting is exactly what it sounds like. I collect questions to use as tools and to learn from them. Key to this process is collecting not only good questions but also bad ones – they help you identify error patterns.

QGeneration and QEvaluation are complementary practices.

QGeneration is the practice of generating multiple alternative questions. One component of it is a practice I call QStorming [<link; short read], which is essentially BrainStorming with questions. You start with a central point of focus (QFocus), which can be a theme or a problem you’re trying to solve, and you generate questions based on that focus.

QEvaluation is the practice of narrowing down the generated questions to discover the best ones. Another aspect of it is a practice I call QAnalysis: deconstructing questions with the purpose of learning from them.

QOptimization is the practice of optimizing questions. Taking a bad question and turning it into a good question. Taking a good question and turning it into an optimal question – or set of questions.

QTemplating is the practice of turning repeated question patterns (QPatterns) into question templates (QTemplates). This means, whenever you notice multiple questions with the same structure, keeping the fixed part of the questions and replacing the changing part with variables:

How can you optimize Learning?
How can you optimize Writing?
How can you optimize x? (QTemplate)

What ties everything together is a practice I call Meta-Questioning: the process of asking questions about asking questions – I call this type of questions Meta-Questions [<link; short read] (MQ).

Can you ask a better question? (MQ)
Can you ask a bigger question? (MQ)
Can you ask a x question? (MQTemplate)
Can you ask this question better? (MQ)
…

“