Shifting and Fule Efficency

Recently I have been staying at a friend's house and he has been kind enough to let me borrow his car to be able to get around town a little more easily. This has been awesome for me, giving me a bit of extra freedom to get around the city and get to some things in just a few minutes that could take upwards of an hour by bike or bus.

However, this car is a stick shift, and a diesel at that. Though I started driving on a standard shifter, it has been several years since I have driven one regularly and I have never driven one that is a diesel. So after a few days of driving a and a few fill ups my friend shared with me that the car is getting about 25% less MPG than when he's driving. Essentially, I'm shifting really inefficiently, letting the car wind up much father, and in general enjoying the pep and fun of driving the car, but not letting it settle into it's normal rhythms.

In the same way, I've been finding a lot of inefficiency with shifting my mind.  The last few weeks, I have tried messing around with my normal schedule. I've been putting my programing learning at the beginning of the day, trying to get in about an hour of learning and creative thinking at the top of the day. After that I was swapping over to my day job. It turns out, this is not the best idea. At the end of the learning hour, I'm psyched up for the day and on fire to do more programming, however, that is not my daily job. So I then ended up spending another hour goofing around trying to get my brain back into work mode and get things done. In the end, I was losing two hours of my most productive time and really only gaining an hour of good learning time. The process of shifting my mind from one mode to another was so incredibly inefficient that I was getting no where, fast. By the end of the two weeks I have shifted back to starting to work on my day job right off the bat in the day and trying to get learning in during the evening.

I'm still struggling with this, I'm missing a lot of days for learning, but I am way more productive and less stressed about "work". I have found a few tricks that help with the mental shifts I need to do in a day. The biggest one seems to be physical activity. Even if it's just an extra long walk on my way home from working at the coffee shop I seem to be able to very quickly swap mental gears and get a nice productivity boost post activity. The shift also seems to work well around meals. If I take a break to make dinner, post dinner picking up work again or swapping to learning or creative tasks is much easier. Now I like to think of these breaks as putting the car moving the car through neutral and disengaging the clutch before going into the next gear. The longer breaks, especially those with physical activity feel a lot like really double clutching, disengaging in neutral, matching the engine speed and taking off running.

So the take away this week is that if I'm wanting to get a lot done in many areas, using the necessary breaks in the day (working out, eating, even a shower) to break up those tasks ends up in a much more efficient use of the day and my energy.

Inspiration is Fleeting

Inspiration is fleeting. Having solid direction and making small uninspired steps towards that every day is more consistent. A code is more consistant. A moral stance on life is more consistant. If I have a set of value that I live my life by and I ask myself every day if I have acted in accordance with those goals I believe this is the most consistant way to make life long progress. I try to think about that every evening. I rely on the code I am building within myself, really a personal set of If Then loops, to help me become the person I want to be. In my mind, consistency is king, but those truly inspiring moment, they sure are helpful.


Nightly Check In Sheet:

Core Values - Fitness, Friendship, Freedom

Did you make decisions today that are in line with those values?

If not, why?

Travel, My Horcux

Yesterday we set out on a new leg of the journey this year. Headed up out of Florida and into the middle of the country for some visiting. Pulling out of Jacksonville, I feel like I'm leaving a little bit of my behind. Like a small piece of me is still sitting out on that beach, waiting for the waves to pick up or for the dinner crowd to roll in and go grab some amazing seafood. I made some great friends down there at the very end, and I'm sure that even with only knowing them for a few weeks, they will keep a piece of me too.

I have always felt that way. All the way back to going to summer camp as a kid. Leaving would be so intense, I was always sure I was loosing part of myself in the process. Going off to college, same deal, almost every year of moving back and forth, pieces of me started to scatter about. Since college I haven't stayed in one town longer than two years.

Last night we rolled up into Asheville North Carolina, to be greeted by one of my travel partners old friends. He welcomed us into his home, gave us a spot in his driveway and so much hospitality. I know already that I will leave a part of me behind here. I have yet to see the famous mountains or the thriving university town, but just sitting here in a quite house, I know it will happen.

These days though, I'm ok with it. I think it will be my super power. Like Voldemort of the famous Harry Potter series, I'm splitting my soul up and flinging it all over the globe. I know that with these pieces of me out in the univers, my spirit is insanely hard to kill. I can draw on these seeds of self to find strength and comfort in hard times. I know there are many places I could go and happily call home, being welcomed by at least a few people. By the end of this year I hope to have planted many seeds and feel comfortable in more places I can count. This is preparation for immortality  make your mark in as many places on as many people as you can. Travel, and live forever.

Core Value: Fitness

This is where I've been running the past few weeks.

The last month or so, I've been really focusing on my core value of health and fitness. The more I dig in and explore this, the more I believe that a foundation of health and fitness is the key to building a platform that will allow me to achieve many of the other goals in my life. I really want to be able to help others, but without the physical capacity to work hard and be in good health, I just can't give others the energy and interest they really deserve. In poor health I end up turned inward, hurting and just trying to limp by.

So that said, I have as I have written about before, some very lofty goals, and one of those is to run an IronMan in the next 4 years. Where am I at now. I can run about 3 minutes. Yup, that's it. So one might say that this will by my journey of couch to ironman. I'm going to document some of that journey here. I'm not sure how regular the checkins on this will be, but I'm really trying to keep all my efforts and food on myfitnesspal, which so far, plugged in with my DigiFit account has been the best tracking app I've found yet, and I've tried quite a few. Here is the link to my diary if you feel any sort of inclination to check it out. http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/paigetech

So right now I'm working on the Couch to 5k running plan, 8 weeks to running a 5k. I'm focusing a lot on form and cadence trying to learn to run "right" while I'm training my body to move. I'm also following a body weight regimin on my off running days. I'm planing to add in some biking in the next week or so to help build my fitness with less impact on my legs, since I had knee surgery three times before I was 21 and have been suffering with the consequences of never getting back in shape ever since. 

So that's part of my journey. Healthy. Wealthy. Wise.

Gaming

Short thought:
We like to play games because it is imminently clear what is required of us.

The rest of life is much more ambiguos. Even in most jobs, it's not 100% clear what we are supposed to do all the time. There are no DPS meters to read in real life. There is not "Win Senario" where we know that we have made it, we have gotten to the end, we have done what was required of us.

This feeling extends to sport, to racing else where man has created all the rules and has agreed on them together. In those moments, we are in control, masters of our destiny by in large. There is always the demon of chance, the rolling of the dice, the root on the path that you didn't see and cost you the race. But in the end, you know in broad strokes if you have beaten the final boss, if you have completed the race.

I think this is why the idea of gamification is becoming so popular. The more clearly we can reward people for specific things, the more they will know how to perform.

How are you making your life a game?

On Contentment

Contentment, which I believe is the most true form of happiness, can only be found from within. It is a foundation of contentment that allows us to experience the almost external or more euphoric versions of happiness. On the outside is this happiness that is common, and is what people talk about, and which is often faked. You can usually see this happiness on others. I say on, not in because I believe that it is the last layer or the whole package of happiness, the frosting if you will, and like frosting it is wonderfully sweet and it is so tempting to lick it all off and be on your cupcakey way. Well at least it is if you are me, because I have kind of a thing for frosting. Anyhow, if that's the outside happiness, what is the inside, the core. I think it's contentment, and like so may things in life, it's the foundation that is the hardest to get right, the easiest to ignore in favor of the flashy frosting layer.

Lately, I've been running again. Well, running may be a string word, more like shuffling and gasping interspersed with walking. I've been down this path before, usually I get myself to the point where I can actually run a mile before injury takes over or my will power runs out. This time though, I'm doing it differently, this time I'm working on the core of running, I'm drilling he skills of proper foot fall, learning good cadence and building a solid foundation to run from. And you know, this time feels very differ, it feels like I am takin running into myself in a way I never have before. It's like taking the time to retrain my brain and body has also opened up a different part of my spirit to the running. Like the core of me is beginning. To understand that this is valuable to me and that I can do it with this foundation.

So if the foundation of something as seemingly simple as running is complex and need thought and training, how much more so must happiness need it? So how do you build contentment. I think it may be different for everyone, but let me suggest this, I think you build contentment by choosing actions in your life that most closely align with your values and ideals. And I don't mean your external ideas like six pack abs or a 110k retirement account by 30, I mean the ideals that make you tear up inside, like making beautiful things or serving others or honoring the natural world. The values make the core of us and I think that stepping in line with them builds the most lasting contentment to the point where even this inner foundation of happiness begins to shine through to the outside and you wear the glow of the truly happy, the content.

Whither Hence

"Life is just a habit, so get working" - Brett Sutton

This year I've embarked on a remarkably unremarkable journey. At least that's what it feels like from the inside. I have set off in a 24' Motor Home and am spending my year working online from all diffrent parts of the country. I normaly call New England home, so the first step in the journey was to run screaming from the cold winter down to Florida, where I have now spent 2 months in the sun, walking trails by the canal, spending some time with The Mouse, and generally soaking up Florida. In the next few weeks I'll be heading north through the heart land and stopping into a few places for long overdue visits.

The thing is, writing it here, it sounds special, even to me. Yet, here in the middle of it, it feels dull. It's not the amazing adventure I'd made it out to be in my head. I'm not out fighting off bears or diving into deep all night chats with people over amazing local cuisine. I think a lot of life is really like this. No matter how much crazyness and adventure your life has in it, going through things we tend to almost instantly adjust to them as "normal". My life of sparkling canal water and cresting dolphins is status quo. Tell that to anyone back home who is still waiting for the soil to thaw and they will shoot me.

In many ways I feel like this is the trapping of the human mind. It has in its vast set of powers, the ability to make anything bearable, anything normal, and as I have said for several years, the most dangerous place to be is a comfortable one. When we are comfortable, there is no reason to grow, no reason to change, and even if your ideals are much higher than your current state of being, there is no stress there to create that change. I believe that in many ways, the mind is just a muscle, it can grow and change, but like a muscle, you need to work it out, to cause some sort of breakage in the fibers of it's structure for it to need to grow.

So this experience and this philosophy stand some what at logger heads. It offers me the question, whither hence? Where do I go from here? How do I challenge my mind to grow if it possesses a nearly limitless capability to both find and encourage a state of normalcy in even the strangest most complicated situations? I think for me this is about habit and positioning. I have a great ability to find comfort in all situations, my mind seems primed for it. With that, I seem to be able to reach a platue with anything quickly and my brain starts screaming at me "See, we did some, isn't that great? Isn't that enough?" but my heart wants more. My heart and my ideals want more from myself, more fitness, more success, more serving. So I will stand on my platues for a moment, enjoy the views and then slog onwards. I'm going to spend this year putting myself in those uncomfortable situations that will help forge me into the person I want to be.

Right now, I know I want to get out and meet people, learn how I can help those around me, serve my fellow man and leave a legacy of at least one life better because of my presence here on earth. Yet inspite of that deeply held beliefe, that need in my soul, I have been unfriendly, shy and at some moments down right standoffish on this trip. So here in the middle of forging a new body and honing my mind, I also want to open my self up to those around me, to work on putting that kind of stress on my mind till it is no longer a place of effort, but a natural comfort. I will put myself in positions of mental and social strain. I want to abuse the minds power to find status quo while being aware that it is happening. This I think is how we use our natural abilities to reach our unnatural feeling goals.

Treats and Finding the Path of Acceptable Resistance

There seems to be no shortage of information on how the chemicals in "diet" or "sugar free" products are bad for you. Personally, having cleaned up a lot of the rest of my diet to be whole and healthy foods, I swear I can actually feel it when I get a bunch of nutra-sweet in my system, it's almost like it starts to coat my taste buds.

Now that said, I'm not out on a crusade to stop drinking diet soda and making some sugar free treats. I've tried to give it up in the past. Several times I've gone a few months with no soda, but the will power it takes to get there seems to open up all these other holes in my armor and I end up with candy bar in hand not too far into the experiment.

So what I'm trying to find is this path of acceptable resistance. Meaning for me, that there are things I need to change, but there is a hierarchy for them and I need to find out which ones I can push through together while still having over all progress. Right now for me that means eating whole foods and low carb but getting to have sugar free "treats" occasionally and drinking diet sodas. This concession allows me to really attack the carbs and also to have the will power to be out exercising and also working on coding.

So in that vein, I give to you my idea of the week: Jell-o Sugar Free Pudding made with Coconut Milk. This is delicious! I made it with coconut milk because I've found that dairy seems to both interfere with my weight loss and it's a gate way drug for me, I just can't stop eating things like cheese, ice cream and cream once I start. So here is the quick instruction I threw into MyFitnessPal which I'm using to track things lately (and loving by the way, it links with Digifit which I use on my iPhone when I run and has the best food database I've seen yet, and I've worked with quite a few)

Sugar Free Jello Mix


Refrigerate coconut milk till cold.
Shake the can vigorously to blend the coconut milk.
Measure 2 cups of coconut milk into mixing bowl.
Add Jell-o Pudding mix. (cheese cake is my favorite so far)
Whisk or beat with fork for two minutes.
Separate into containers and chill for 2 hours. (Takes a bit longer to set than milk in my experience.)

Makes 4 serving, 165kc per serving or there abouts.

Personal Development, Taking it Personal

Personal Development is a broad topic, but comes together under one underlying principle: Are you working to improve yourself in some way.

The past few years I have been really focusing on trying to find ways to purse personal development as an over all life quest. I want to be constantly becoming more. More healthy, more wealthy, more wise.

I've made some pretty remarkable changes in my life in the past year or so and it has defiantly impacted what I would think of as my "Progress" in personal development. Looking at myself and my core values now, I am further along the path, incrementally in all areas, but none of them have seen what I would call a marked improvement, baring perhaps programing. I now feel comfortable attempting to write small programs in either Ruby or PHP and that is a pretty drastic change from a year or so ago.

Sitting down and thinking through the past year or so, I think i've started to realize that it's not that I need to be trying to do more with myself, but I need to be stripping away to what is really necessary, what really matters. The thing about that is that it does mean giving up some things. Some things I really enjoy. It's a hard thing to try to figure out what of the things you are doing you really "need" or are really making the impact on your life that you need them to, as Antoine de Saint Exupery said "Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away."

So right now I focus on taking things away. Trying it out. Do I need to play video games with my friends? Surprising answer, yes. I need that time to be social at least a few times a week and right now being on the road it's the only way I'm staying connected to my "community". So having tried taking that out for a few months, I find that I'm happier and more productive with it. However cutting out access to 90% of the web durring the week so I can focus more, total life improvement  Using apps like Self Control and Concentrate is enabling me to get more done in the day and have time at night for my partner and to recharge the creative muscles, or work on some side projects instead of feeling constantly under the gun.

So the next month or so I'm going to be trying to cut away to what really matters in my health decisions. I think that health is the foundation from which all other progress can be built so I want to really dial that in and then spend the rest of my 31st year building on a solid foundation. I'm working on an exercise schedule and trying to find ways to make having a healthy diet both enjoyable enough and easy enough that I'll actually make it happen. I'm getting close, but I still feel like there are things to change, so we'll see. Progress reports to come.

Ruby array to text file.

I've been learning ruby for a few months now, and I'm still a serious beginner, but I'm getting somewhere. However there are some questions that good googling still seems to take a good while to answer, so I thought I would post them here, both for my reference and for public use.

Problem: I have an array, and I want to save it as a text file with each array entry on a new line.

Question: How do I save an array to a text file with ruby.

Answer:

array = [ 'dog', 'cat', 'fish', 'bear']
out_file = File.open("output.txt", "w")
array.each do |line|
out_file.puts line
end

So there it is. If I've done something wrong, forgive me please. As I said I'm just getting started and I welcome any feedback.