The 365 Commitment

I have an admission to make that is important for this discussion to make sense. The problem is that conversations with people drain me. Classic introvert problem. When you get into a conversation, you leave feeling drained, like someone took your energy. As a result, you tend to avoid interactions with people, even when you know they are important and necessary.

You simply cannot build a relationship with someone without having conversations with them, and this created a constant dilemma. You absolutely must make time to talk, meet, engage, and interact with the person or people you are trying to build a relationship with. I know this sounds obvious, but for someone like me, it is a mountain I climb almost every day.

Why is this?

I have spent decades wrestling with this problem, and I have figured a few things out. First of all, interacting with people absolutely is an energy transaction. You resist or dread talking to other people because you are anticipating the energy cost of that experience. If, for example, you had to have a difficult conversation with an employee, you would anticipate it being hard. You would know ahead of time that the conversation would be difficult and most likely emotionally challenging. That's how I view every conversation.

This is to not to say that I do not like people. I do. I enjoy relationships and truly want them; it is just the anticipated energy cost of conversation that is hard. So I tend to avoid it, even though I know avoidance is bad. I am not alone in this. Chances are if you are still reading or listening to this, then you have also experienced this or are dealing with someone like this. So what is a technique to overcome the hesitancy to meet with others due to the angst over having another draining conversation?

When someone is already feeling down, discouraged, or struggling in life, then it gets even worse. They want to hide away because they avoid any potential drain on their mental energy while in preservation mode. So this technique must also consider this challenge. The perceived energy cost has to be significantly reduced so a person will not avoid or dread the pending conversation. How?

Although I have many strategies, the one that has been the most helpful to me is the concept that curiosity is cheap. These conversations drain me because of the energy I put into preparing, thinking about, and then replaying them in my mind. I imagine the version of myself that I have historically brought into professional situations: engaged, articulate, carrying conversations, making people comfortable, generating ideas, building enthusiasm. That version of me is expensive in terms of mental energy.

Curiosity, however, does not require that version of myself. Curiosity requires little preparation. When you're socially depleted, the expensive part isn't necessarily being with people. It's the sense that you have to produce something for them. This is the thinking that gets you into trouble:

I need to be interesting. I need to have something intelligent to say. I need to demonstrate value. I need to keep the conversation moving. I need them to like me.

That's expensive. You're simultaneously generating ideas, monitoring their reaction, choosing words, remembering context, managing your presentation, and thinking about what comes next. Curiosity reverses the direction of the energy flow. Instead of producing, you're receiving.

Asking questions is cheap because it reduces self-monitoring. You move away from internal psycho analysis to thinking about the other person. An added benefit: curiosity shows the other person that your intent is genuine interest, which goes a long way to improving any relationship. Curiosity gives you permission to arrive without bringing the show, and that is good for both sides of the conversation.

So remember, if you are dreading the next conversation, use this simple concept. Performance is expensive; curiosity is cheap.

I have been spending more time lately trying to get in touch with my emotions. Finally, after all these years, I am confronting those internal demons and doing what that preschool teacher told me when I was 4. She said, " You need to get in control of yourself! I have spent over 50 years trying to figure out just what that woman meant by that. What is control? Who is in control? How can I control myself? Alas, she probably did not realize the lifetime of mental torment she would inflict upon me, or perhaps she did?

Anyway, one emotion that I experience from time to time is that of aggravation. Or at least that is what I call it. It is this sudden irritation that makes me want to scream, or clench my fists or something of that nature. It happens sometimes at the silliest of moments. I drop something, a pen, on the floor, and that was the last straw, and now I am feeling this sudden massive flood of emotion. I decided to spend some time researching and thinking about this phenomenon.

The important idea that I uncovered is that this feeling of aggravation is a real, low form of anger that is caused by friction. Something gets in the way of what you are trying to do, and that friction causes you to respond. However, why is it sometimes at DEFCON 1 and other times at DEFCON 5? I think there is wisdom in viewing this as an escalation pattern. You experience friction (DEFCON 1), then you feel irritated (DEFCON 2), then you start to get aggravated (DEFCON 3), and then you get angry (DEFCON 4). I suppose the last straw is when you start throwing things, having a temper tantrum, or deciding to sell your house and buy a sailboat.

The emotional intensity often grows not because the actual problem becomes much larger, but because your mind begins accumulating evidence: this keeps happening, nothing is changing, and I have to keep spending energy on it. This added element makes it more than frustrating. The added element is that you feel you shouldn't have to deal with this at all. So frustration plus the friction you feel is unnecessary becomes aggravation.

To put this all in a useful phrase that has helped me put this into perspective: Aggravation is often the emotional response to repeatedly spending attention on something you believe should not deserve that attention.

The canary principle can be best stated as follows:

Before exposing the whole system to a change, expose a small part of it and watch closely.

This idea comes from coal mining. Miners faced invisible threats such as carbon monoxide. Because canaries are more sensitive to dangerous gases than humans, a caged bird could provide an early warning that the atmosphere was becoming unsafe. Poor canary.

This concept has since been used in software development. Martin Fowler, one of the forefathers of modern software development, describes it as gradually rolling out a release to a small subset of users before making it available to everyone. You have probably experienced this before when using a software interface, but you didn't realize what was happening. Perhaps you thought you were special for getting a new feature, but in reality you were the canary!

This principle applies outside the development world and even in our personal lives. Consider an expanded definition:

When uncertainty is unavoidable, reduce the cost of learning rather than trying to eliminate uncertainty.

We all know we'll eventually have to face reality. However, perhaps we do not have to confront reality all at once. This life philosophy could serve us well.

For example, are you considering changing jobs? The all-at-once strategy would say that you need to quit your job, start your consulting gig, and see if you like it. Wow! That is a big risk; what if you hate it? The canary principle would say you should take one consulting engagement first, see what the work is like, and then decide whether you want to go to the next level.

You do not need to go all in and make irreversible decisions when reversible experiments will answer the question. Ask yourself, what is the smallest version of this that I can try? Can I reverse this decision easily, and how would I know if it was working? In essence, the canary principle encourages you to risk a little to learn a lot before you risk a lot.

We all instinctively know this is not right, yet we tolerate it. Anyone who has recently made it through K-12 or has been a parent of these young people knows what I mean. School has increasingly substituted evidence of work for evidence of learning. A completed worksheet, a submitted Google Classroom assignment, a passing quiz, satisfactory completion of an online module. These all fall firmly into the evidence-of-work category.

All of these things were intended to support learning, not replace it. They have become proxies for learning, and now we have a problem. Artificial Intelligence is brutally effective at exposing bad proxies. So schools are now banning devices, banning AI use, and spending billions on district-controlled devices and methods to restrict cellular traffic. Doing everything they can to prevent what they are referring to as the mechanism that is harming education.

A student can now produce the worksheet, the five-paragraph essay, the chapter summary, the vocabulary definitions, the discussion-board response, and perhaps even the presentation without much underlying knowledge. Schools understandably see this as a crisis. Countless dollars spent on software, online curricula, and evidence-based modalities are now at risk.

This begs the question. What exactly is under threat of being lost?

If the educational activity was primarily “read this, answer these questions, submit it by Friday,” AI has not destroyed teaching. It has destroyed the mechanism schools were using to verify compliance. That is uncomfortable because it forces education back toward the expensive, difficult thing: actual teaching. What is being exposed here is a fallacy. For decades, we have often treated the production of academic artifacts as the same as the development of a mind. They are not the same thing.

Three things that I was not eager to do in school were to read, write, and solve math problems represented in paragraph form, what kids call word problems. An essay is important because writing forces a person to organize their thoughts. Math problems help you build intuition for problem solving, and reading builds sustained attention and fosters comprehension. It is absolutely correct to fear that if a student performs these artifacts while skipping the cognitive work, then yes, something important is being lost.

However, the answer cannot be "We need better ways to make sure students complete the worksheets themselves.” Which is almost a direct quote that I heard from a school administration official recently. AI proliferation is almost universal, at least in the halls of U.S. high schools, so it will get increasingly difficult to confuse completion with competence. The question is not whether the student completed the activity. The question is, did the student do the cognitive work the exercise was intended to create?

Perhaps the real educational opportunity AI presents is that it makes busy work nearly impossible to defend. If a machine can complete an assignment perfectly while learning absolutely nothing, we should at least ask whether completion of that assignment was ever particularly good evidence that a human being had learned anything in the first place.

We all already know this. AI did not create the crisis in education. It revealed that much of education had already been automated before AI arrived. We now need to make the thinking visible. Measure thinking, not completion. We can no longer focus on assessing the artifact. We will have to focus on our ability to explain, defend, apply, question, revise, and extend what we have produced, whether AI helped create it or not.

Around 1784, Immanuel Kant published an essay asking the question, " What is enlightenment? He was at the tail end of the Enlightenment age, and people were now assigning that label. The Renaissance came and went, and now Kant immortalized the idea that there was a new age that was just experienced. A new period of human enlightenment. If he only knew what was to come!

The French spoke of les Lumières, or the lights, speaking of the bright minds and intellectuals that were pushing society toward curiosity and away from superstition. The Germans called this Aufklärung. Which, if I remember right, is literally the actual concept that we describe as enlightenment today. The awakening of people to flee ignorance and embrace reason, religious tolerance, education, and individual rights.

Would we recognize it if we were living through an equally significant transition right now?

People inside major transformations usually recognize the phenomena before they recognize the era. They notice printing presses, factories, railroads, computers, AI, declining institutions, new philosophies, strange new occupations, changes in how people communicate. Only later does someone give the whole thing a name. Which produces an interesting thought:

History's great ages are usually named by the people who come after them, but they are felt by the people who live through them.

In my opinion, we are now in a new age. I will call it the Age of Knowledge. For the first time, access to almost all human knowledge is ubiquitous. The Enlightenment gave humanity access to reason. The next age will require humanity to learn what to do when knowledge itself is no longer scarce.

The previous problem was: how do I obtain knowledge? Now we are in a new shift where the scarcity becomes judgment. Kant might therefore describe this not as an enlightened age, but as something like an age of discernment, in which the defining human capability is no longer acquiring information but exercising judgment over it.

The whirlwind of news cycles, the political theatre, data centers in space, wars between the usual suspects are easy distractions, but take a moment and realize just what we have done. Knowledge is near universal now, and that will have a major impact on all of humanity. The same way the Enlightenment brought on the fall of monarchs, new laws establishing human rights, and the exponential progress that led to the Industrial Revolution. Who knows what is in store for us?

I have always understood intellectually that developing habits is a good idea. In the way that you comprehend that brushing your teeth every morning and night is necessary. If you want good dental hygiene, you must form this habit. So I plodded along through life, trying to develop good habits here and there, but I found myself stuck in a vicious cycle and never quite living up to the expectation. I always thought this was because of a lack of motivation, discipline, or even a mental illness. Why can't I just stick to something? Why do I have a string of stops and starts all the time?

Then, one day, after keeping the habit that led to this daily blog for over 90 days, I discovered that habits are the foundation on which personal transformation depends. Transformation is the compounding of multiple small, incremental habits that build until your positive success is inevitable. With habits, you are no longer dependent on fleeting and temporary things like motivation, and discipline is no longer a giant mountain that you have to climb every morning.

If you need to make a change in your life, then you must first focus on the core habits that will lead you toward that destination. The first step to improvement is always to just start walking along the path, and habit formation is that path. You may wonder: what habits should I develop to become who I want to be? The answer is surprising, because the habit itself does not matter that much.

You definitely need your initial habits to be in the same domain. For example, if I want to become a marathon runner, a habit that gets me on my feet regularly and repeatedly is absolutely necessary. If I want to become a better writer, my habit must put me in a situation where I write every day. The specific habit that you do is not as important as the habit must be getting you to engage with the principal action that a person who exhibits the qualities that you want does every day. Runners run. Writers write.

There are no magic pills and no secret ways. The beauty of the internet these days if you have no lack of people and machines feeding good ideas to you for habits that you should adopt. The reality is that picking one and doing it every day matters more than which one you pick. The key concept is doing it every day. Every day is every day, as I like to say. If your habit isn't quite right, it will work out over time. No prescription is better for fixing behavior than repetition. When I started running every day, my mind, my body, and my lifestyle adapted to the habit. When I chose to write every day, then the same thing occurred. My entire life warped around the need to keep the habit.

You will become more efficient, faster, better over time. You will automatically gravitate toward efficiency. Your body and mind are incredibly advanced, and you will need no coaxing to figure out what is wrong and adjust. That is what humans do: adapt to change. So the first step is to force a change through habit, even if the habit is tiny to begin with.

The real risk is not beginning. It is what happens after the easy gains are gone. This is one of the biggest misconceptions that keeps people from taking on new initiatives that could change their lives. They fail to start because they fear initial failure. They fear that it will not be enough. People overestimate the risk of starting and underestimate the risk of continuing.

The initial plunge feels dangerous because uncertainty is highest. But in many endeavors, the beginning actually contains the easiest opportunities: enthusiasm is high, expectations are low, obvious improvements abound, and the first customers, pounds lost, miles run, dollars earned, or features built can come surprisingly quickly.

Then you reach the first plateau.

Now the economics change. The next increment of progress requires more time, more specialization, more capital, more discipline, or a different strategy. What got you there may no longer work.

Starting a company, writing a book, getting fit, learning a skill, building software, or changing careers can produce enough early evidence of success that you think you've validated the entire endeavor. What you've actually validated is only the first stage.

When you first create something, obvious improvements are often available. You solve the biggest problems, serve the easiest customers, capture the clearest opportunities, and fix the most visible defects. A relatively small amount of effort can therefore produce surprisingly large results.

Then you exhaust the low-hanging fruit. At that point, every additional unit of success requires disproportionately more effort.

The real risk is not starting. Whereas the startup is uncertain, the plateau is expensive. Plateau Risk is the risk that appears after initial success, when the easy gains are exhausted, and continued progress requires disproportionately more effort, skill, capital, or change.

So if you're thinking about starting something and worried that your startup attempts will fail, you are worried about the wrong thing. Chances are that when you start, you will have some success. Perhaps more than you had considered possible. The real worry isn't your initial success, but how hard it is to get off the first plateau.

I remember taking a basic survival course when I was younger. The instructor took us outside to demonstrate a basic surveying technique called triangulation. The concept is simple, so if you are unfamiliar, let me explain. If you know the location of two points and the distance between them, then measure the angles from those points to a third object, you can calculate where that third object must be. If you have ever hiked in the wilderness, you will occasionally come across these brass survey markers. Surveyors used networks of these triangles to map enormous areas without physically measuring every distance. These markers formed the basis for establishing known distances.

Later in life, I bought a boat, one of the best and worst decisions I have made in life! However, I decided to take an online "captain" course because taking my boat out into the harbor was extremely intimidating for a newbie like me. That course had a section that was basically the same thing. A sailor might take bearings on two known landmarks, such as a lighthouse and a headland. Where those bearing lines intersect tells the sailor where the ship is. This is often called taking a fix or using cross bearings.

This basic principle is that of never trusting one source. So you can triangulate instead. If Source A says one thing, and source B says the same thing and then you find a thir source that also points in that same direction then you can draw some inference as to what reality might be. Where independent lines of evidence converge is your best estimate of reality.

The philosophical implication is that you cannot triangulate with only one point of reference. That may be one of the central problems with trying to determine truth from a single news source, expert, ideology, institution, or algorithm. Yet we do this all the time.

Just this morning, I saw a news flash that some famous actor was caught cheating on some famous actress. There was even a video showing the actor kissing another woman. The headline was pure clickbait, and no doubt generated a lot of that. I decided to read the comments, and in those comments I saw various stages of triangulation. Many people accepted this one source as absolute truth. Others looked at other sources but found conflicting information. Others questioned the validity and motivations of the original source altogether. If you had the patience to sort through the various comments, you finally determined the reality. This was completely fake. The picture was real, but it didn't show the actor in question. After a few hours, they found the real person; although they looked similar to the actor, they were not the same person.

The new fun phrase people like to use today is "AI slop." They will say, "Oh, that is AI slop," or "That looks like AI slop." The danger behind this thinking is that this is not triangulation. This is using your ability to make quick assessments, which your brain is really good at, but it can also be deceived. The test we use to determine if something is AI, called the Turing test, is designed to see if the system can fool another human into thinking that this is coming from another human and not a machine. So, using a quick dismissal like " this is AI slop, is not a good solution. That will work for obviously poorly crafted material, but what about everything else?

The answer is that we are going to have to dust off the old textbooks, crack open the surveyor handbook, or nautical charts and learn how to triangulate as our default reaction. Accepting content, viewpoints, news, or other material from external sources at face value is simply no longer an option. We have to follow basic reasoning principles with everything we consume. We should have been doing that in the first place, but now more than ever, this is imperative lest we be led around by the nose.

I developed a superpower over the course of my life without intending to. I had a really hard time understanding things growing up. I desperately wanted to, but some concepts eluded me. They didn't come easily to me, and my cognition took a while to develop. I did not want people to discover this, so I would pretend that I knew things and then spend countless hours thinking about them until I could finally figure them out. When I finally did figure out the concept, I would enthusiastically teach other people what I had discovered. Over time, people started thinking that I was really smart, which was not the case. I think I am pretty average on an intellectual level, but what I developed was a profound ability to naturally decompose systems into explainable parts. This was my method of figuring things out, and so I naturally gravitated toward job roles where this type of thing served me well.

I found that I could look at a complicated thing, determine what its meaningful components are, understand how those components interact, and then compress the whole thing into a model that another person can actually hold in their head. My first real job was teaching Microsoft Excel to a team of accountants at a CPA firm. I was nervous because it was onsite, in their office, and I had never opened Excel in my life. I had to learn the program over the weekend before my first class on a Monday.

My instinct kicked in. I did not just need to learn Excel. I needed to answer the following questions:

What are the essential concepts here?

That course was incredibly successful and basically launched my career into computer science. One person told me that they had never had a better course in their life. That was a massive ego boost for me and caused me to change my path in life. What I thought was just a job to pay the bills turned out to be my entire trajectory.

I would later learn in an educational psychology course that this methodology was not something that I invented; it was a process that people were taught, referred to as decomposition. This is why troubleshooting complex problems can be hard for people, because this is not natural. Instead of jumping to answers, it is better first to break the system up into subsystems that can then be easily isolated.

I take this approach when writing about things. I take something vaguely sensed, separate it into ideas, give those ideas names, arrange them causally, discard unnecessary pieces, find an example, and reconstruct everything into a coherent narrative.

Many people are using AI these days. There is no magic intelligence behind any of this. All the hype about AI taking over humanity is funny. At the core, it is really an incredibly large model, running on super-fast computing, with a neural network that is incredibly accurate at predicting the next most logical word or phrase. We have all learned the perils of trusting this too much: answers often look good but aren't accurate at all, and sometimes they're even made up.

I brought up this superpower of conceptual decomposition because, if you follow these basic principles, you can avoid most of the challenges a predictive algorithm can introduce. If you ask a Large Language Model (AI) a question, do not accept the first answer. I highly recommend follow-up questions. If, for example, you were asking about something, you might follow up by asking:

"What is this called?"

People talk about all these ways to craft the perfect prompt to get a better answer out of AI, and some of that may be true. Context always helps, but take it from someone who has been building, designing, and working with complex AI for a long time. If you want a great result from AI, then first try to practice this art of decomposition. Sorry, but AI works better when you actually think.

I have been keeping the same seven basic habits for several years now. Every day, no matter what, I must complete the habits before I can go to bed. Admittedly, on some days, I just did the bare minimum, but I still got the habits done and kept the streak alive. One of those has been writing this blog. This marks the 3,181st day in a row I have done so. Not all have been the best quality, but I can say that I did it at least. One lesson that I have learned along this journey is this: the longer you wait to get something done during the day, the difficulty rises exponentially.

If I were to give someone advice on maintaining a life-changing habit, the first thing I would tell them to do is do that habit first. Get that habit done before you do anything else. Wake up in the morning and do the habit, no questions asked. No delay, no excuses, no time to think. You don't need to prepare anything, and you don't need to buy anything. In fact, you do not even need to think about it; just do it.

In my case, one of the early habits I built was running, or at least walking or a light jog if I could not do that. When I woke up, I rolled out of bed. Threw something on, laced up my shoes, and just went out the door. No matter the conditions, no matter how I felt. Just out the door. Did not matter how far or how fast; it was just the fact that I made it out the door. Early on my brain would fight me even at 5am, but eventually, I would be 10 minutes into a morning run before I even realized that I was awake.

There were days that I would have to catch an early morning flight, so I could not run that day. I would have to wait until later in the day when I got to my hotel room and then go for a run around the block or on a treadmill. Those were extremely difficult to do. My mind would invent a million reasons to take a rain check on my commitment that day. I remember one evening in Minnesota during a snowstorm at 11 p.m., leaving my hotel to run on icy sidewalks. I did not make it that far, but I did it. Despite my brain screaming at me not to, I did it anyway.

One of my early blogs talks about the Mark Twain quote about eating a live frog for breakfast. The idea is that if you do the worst thing to start the day, then everything else is downhill. This may have some truth to it, but I have revised this concept. Instead of doing the worst thing first thing in the morning, do the most important things. The things that you cannot afford to skip. The deposits you are making toward your health, well-being, and spirituality.

The day gets on, and as the world wakes up, so do the demands on you. The distractions, the important deadlines, the urgent nature of what is expected of you. The longer you wait to do the things that are the most important to you, the more likely they will not get done at all. You increase the likelihood that your brain will defeat your intentions and quietly say to yourself, I will pick back up tomorrow, or next week, or next year.

Do not let that happen. Get the first things done before you can come up with an excuse. If you are struggling to keep a life-changing habit, try doing it first before doing anything elaborate.