Patience, Comprehension and Will

In my reflections of what made me tick and overcome the clutches of attention deficit and mild - moderate depression, i saw the following things.

a) as of today, contemplation on 'Observation without center' works a lot better than 'Observe non judgementally'. Observe non judgementally seems to have more of a numbing effect.

this may be due the fact that 'Observe non judgementally' keeps the attention locked into internal mental states / feeling etc, whereas 'Observe without a center' is closer to the idea of 'Nirvikalpa / 

b) historically, i never set out to improve my will power in the period circa 2005. i only had a will to improve comprehension and had a state of 'Observation without a center'.

c) interestingly, this led to a improvement in globalized will power.

the hypothesis is that practice of comprehension and 'Observation without a center' is the route to improved Will Power.

probably has something to do with Comprehension / Observation being the bottlenecks to the process of Willing neurobiologically for me as a person.

May not be something that works for everyone.

Beauty

It took me 22 years(well, not exactly) to realize that there are 2 ways of doing things.
The beautiful way of doing it and the useless way of doing it.
The beautiful way demands excrutiating effort typically, but its the only way to do things.

The Response (How not to bang your head against the keyboard)

How we respond to a situation can be the whole essence of what we make of life. and code !
I find that i am naturally wired to respond with emotion, or atleast a lot of emotional content to go along with logical experimentation and deduction when faced with any challenging situation.
However, this is a sure recipe of disaster while dealing with automatons like computers. Computers can do things to drive us nuts sometimes (since i code and debug for a living), but it is really not the computers fault (the blame game so deeply ingrained in us). Feelings of disbelief, helplessness, frustration, overwhelm are common human responses to bizarre software bahaviour.
The good thing is, that it appears to me to be possible to train oneself to zap out the emotional content and have great fun experiementing with stuff and building causal models. In my limited experience, i find that it is more often than not a matter of time before the issue resolves with logical enquiry.
Skills of inspection by contrasting to known basics, pigeon holing, exclusion, understanding complex automata flows are all useful in understanding the causes of issues.

And saving oneself from tearing the hair out :)

The Response (How not to bang your head against the keyboard)

How we respond to a situation can be the whole essence of what we make of life. and code !
I find that i am naturally wired to respond with emotion, or atleast a lot of emotional content to go along with logical experimentation and deduction when faced with any challenging situation.
However, this is a sure recipe of disaster while dealing with automatons like computers. Computers can do things to drive us nuts sometimes (since i code and debug for a living), but it is really not the computers fault (the blame game so deeply ingrained in us). Feelings of disbelief, helplessness, frustration, overwhelm are common human responses to bizarre software bahaviour.
The good thing is, that it appears to me to be possible to train oneself to zap out the emotional content and have great fun experiementing with stuff and building causal models. In my limited experience, i find that it is more often than not a matter of time before the issue resolves with logical enquiry.
Skills of inspection by contrasting to known basics, pigeon holing, exclusion, understanding complex automata flows are all useful in understanding the causes of issues.

And saving oneself from tearing the hair out :)

Inspired, Motivated and Flowing ! Some stuff on software too

The last couple of weeks have been just amazing (coginitive bias maybe :) )

I am really not sure of when i last experienced this quality of flow. Not for a few years atleast.

The inflection point came from reading an interview of Terry Tao, in which he compares math to advanced piano playing, stressing upon the importance of sheer technical practice. I always thought there was something more to intellectual insight than mere overlearning of basics, and maybe there is, but overlearning of basics appears to be a necessary thing for hitting the topmost(or any non trivial) points of performance. This is one fact i am eager looking forward to applying in my own field (software for now, possibly finance at some point in time). At the very least , overlearning of basics assures of flow while trying to solve incrementally harder problems. It makes the work fun and engaging at the very least even if it may not be top notch.



As goes for the hammer and nail thing, everything in life looks like skill to me now. Every area of life looks like an art and a science. Interacting with people looks like an art to be mastered, so does conversation, so does fitness and so does bargaining and negotiation (these are my not so great points). So does pool.



This may be overgeneralizing and all these areas may require differing degrees of experiential learning and practicing rule based techniques. Some may actually involve quite a bit of luck too.



However, it can surely not harm to overlearn (and overpractice) the basics of any field. The next steps to peak performance can be contemplated after i overpractice this principle of flow.



For the time being, i notice that my work in software needs systematic and detailed thinking as a base skill. Something which is not my natural strength , but something i think is worth stretching to the limit. It requires clear and patient thought involving systems, mechanisms , causality (yes, minus the philosophical debate on it and the fuzziness causality assumes in other areas like finance). In software, its usually sufficient to trace causes to a certain mechanism, or a certain detail and there is generally no ambiguity. Designing is about building of software components with certain guidelines in mind (which can be overlearnt and overapplied). Debugging is a lot more about patient enquiry into causal mechanisms, and requires building incremental models of the underlying systems and its neighbouring and dependent systems (It is therefore a harder skill to acquire and people with natural impatience (like me ) can have a hard time with it)



I feel more clearheaded right now than in a very very long time. Hopefully, the overlearning continues :)