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The Mote and the Beam

From the Sermon on the Mount comes the story of the Mote and the Beam. A refresher:

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. — Matthew 7:1-5 KJV 

I’m no Biblical scholar. That’s my dad. But what of the mote and the beam? Is it merely a store about being hesitant to judge others? Maybe. Or maybe it’s something more.

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FullStory—I am here!

If you’ve been reading along lately, you picked up on the fact that last week was my last at Google.

And this week was my first at FullStory.

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Justin Owings, Googler [Deprecated]

It’s been a shade under seven years working here at Google in Atlanta; the longest I’ve worked anywhere.

Today is my last day.

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The Canary in the Coal Mine and Leaving Dysfunctional Groups

The expression “canary in a coal mine” originates from coal miners using canaries as a kind of early warning system. The miners would take the birds into the mine and periodically check-in on their status. The delicate canaries were more susceptible to gases like carbon monoxide, so if they suddenly stopped moving, miners would be alerted of dangerous air conditions.

Hence, the expression “canary in a coal mine” is an idiomatic way of talking about events that portend negative things to come.

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Casey Neistat and Success by Doing (Plus Stochasticity)

If you aren’t familiar with Casey Neistat, allow me to remedy the situation.

Casey Neistat is likely the most burgeoning YouTube star of 2016. Here’s his channel. I’m approaching a year having subscribed to his daily vlog videos and to my eye what Neistat is doing on YouTube is a testament to the democraticization of video content.

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Questioning daily defaults: what’s the job I need done?

Channeling Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-done frame, I’ve started thinking about my daily default decisions. What is the job I need done by [fill-in the blank]?

It’s a useful exercise.

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Digitally Isolated

I keep thinking about being digitally isolated.  What is “digital isolation?” In a nutshell: today we are more connected to anyone/everyone than at any point in history yet (paradoxically) we feel ever more alone. Stranger still, it seems we have chosen this as our preferred mode of existence.  There’s even a joke about it: there are nine ways to reach me on my phone without talking to me; pick one of those.

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What’s Lost in Outsourcing your Life?

David D. Friedman had a thought-provoking post over over the weekend — Middlemen, Specialization and Birthday Parties. Therein he talks about how specialization and division of labor have allowed for us to cheaply outsource various aspects of our lives that were formerly almost necessarily DIY. Below is an example I can relate to now that I’m living as a parent in my own era of kid’s birthday parties — and note Friedman’s reaction (second paragraph):

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Failure to Move is the State of Paralysis

I keep returning to the idea of action (doing) over inaction (thinking). I also have been likening doing vs. thinking as similar to producing vs. consuming.   The problem with the consumption/production dichotomy is that the lines aren’t always clear as to which is which.  Sometimes you have to consume to produce.

Things I consume:

  • food/energy/time (necessary consumption)
  • blogs/books/tweets/email (some necessary, some unnecessary)
  • television (almost entirely unnecessary)

Things I produce:

  • blog posts/emails/ideas (derivative of consumption)
  • work/research/analysis (requires consumption)
  • art
  • well-being

What I mean by producing “well being” is that I create satisfaction through expending effort.  It seems that production takes effort.  I have to push my body through the mild discomforts of squatting 275 lbs. to have the satisfaction (as strange as it is) of a fatigued body.  I have to work through the mental gymnastics of writing out my thoughts to create a blog post.  I have to gather data and cajole understanding to create analysis.  It takes work.

Production has costs.

But perhaps the greatest cost of production is breaking the inertia of not doing anything at all.  Or worse still, imagining all the things you could (should) be doing but never doing any of them.  Not only does all of this low-grade effort fail to produce anything at all, it also reinforces thinking over doing.  It habitualizes inaction.  It amplifies the inertia.

This is why failure to move is the state of paralysis.  It’s a tautology, but it also boils down inaction to it’s most basic component: not doing.

I’ve  been thinking about this lately because I have so many ideas bubbling around in my head, most of which could be “big.”  And it’s that notion that these ideas have huge potential that makes me fear screwing them up.  Meanwhile, by nature of being “big,” they also have explicit costs.  I can very easily envision how much work they will take to make them succeed.  And wouldn’t you know it?  The more I think about them, the harder it becomes to act on them.

And like all productive efforts, all I have to do to break the state of paralysis is to move.

It is that simple.

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How We Get Good at Something

It takes mundane, often boring, always repetitive practice. And often a whole lot of it. We learn by doing and not by thinking.

Watch this short creative take about Ira Glass’s advice on storytelling:

This strikes me as relevant to mastering any skill, and reminds me of George Leonard’s “Mastery” (a bit of a summary of Mastery can be found by Todd Becker, who prompted me to read Mastery in the first place — it’s a quick, inspiring/challenging book).

Watching that video reminds me of how I “became an artist.” I did a lot of art/cartooning as a kid and people would say to me, “You’re talented.” Being an artist was then, and still is today, looked at as some sort of “gift” bestowed from the heavens (and or my genetics). I’ve never believed this personally though.

How I became an artist was much simpler: I kept trying to copy the cartoon image of Super Mario over and over and over again, doing it better and better each time. I remember doing it 20-30 times one night for my classmates in maybe 1st grade. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently practicing how to copy something I saw with my eyes and put it down onto paper. Without any prompting or structured learning from parents or teachers, I trained myself as a five or six year old to draw cartoons.

This is the lunchbox that made me an artist:

A vintage plastic Aladdin Super Mario Bros. Lunch box - this is exactly what I used for lunch in early elementary school.
A vintage plastic Aladdin Super Mario Bros. Lunch box - this is exactly what I used for lunch in early elementary school.

This is how we learn: practice, perseverance, stumbling, and trial and error.