Mental Pivot #79: Drawings, Goals, Monks

Brainstorming with simple drawings, the arrival fallacy, and how medieval monks fended off worldly distractions.

Feb 03, 2023

Greetings kind reader. It seems my six-week summer hiatus turned into six months. My apologies for the extended radio silence.

I’ll be frank, I was feeling overwhelmed by the internet when it came time to resume: too much content, too much negativity, too much politics, too many algorithmic black-boxes, too many people selling me things, too much noise, too much garbage, too much misinformation, too much attention-seeking, too much attention-stealing.

Ultimately, I got caught in a negative loop and opted to step away for a bit.

That said, I’m happy to get back to crafting new editions of the letter once more.

I should mention that I’m moving to a new publishing schedule. Instead of weekly letters, I’ll be publishing every other week. Hopefully, the slower cadence will afford more deliberate reading and curation, resulting in a higher-quality publication.

During my hiatus, I took steps to squelch the shills, fearmongers, and the outrage machine. Thankfully, there are plenty of smart, thoughtful, good people online doing their thing and making the internet a better place day in and day out. They aren’t as loud and obnoxious as the bad actors, but they’re just as abundant—you just have to look harder!

It helped me tremendously to have these thoughtful voices showing up in my email inbox, inspiring me and reminding how much good stuff is out there.

One such person is Jacob O’Bryant. Jacob’s mission is to improve the tools for online speech. Here are a handful of his projects, all worth checking out:

Yakread: A mobile app that merges content from multiple feeds into an algorithmically-curated feed.
The Sample: A newsletter discovery tool that I’ve recommended in the past.
The Tools for Online Speech: Jacob’s newsletter featuring original essays from the author as well as curated links and articles.

Reading Jacob’s newsletter, and others like his, helped me get back in the saddle.

It might sound corny, but this newsletter is my little oasis on the internet. It’s my small way of connecting with others looking for the same thing: a better internet that embraces curiosity, edification, thoughtfulness, and new perspectives.

Now onto my latest recommendations…

Thinking Tools:

How to Draw Ideas: If writing is a form of thinking, what about drawing? Ralph Ammer demonstrates how simple sketches drive creativity though a whimsical use-case, the design of a novel flower pot. His work reminds me of Dan Roam’s Back-of-the-Napkin YouTube course which also teaches problem-solving and communication through simple drawings. Sometimes it’s easier to explore an idea through prose, other times it’s better to work with a visual medium.
GTD in 15 Minutes: Erlend Hamberg offers a concise guide to David Allen’s personal productivity framework, Getting Things Done. It’s overly tactical, but nevertheless helpful to review the nuts and bolts of the system. One personal takeaway was a reminder of the power of specificity. Instead of vague objectives like “plan party”, defining smaller constituent actions like “email Sarah for her triple-layer chocolate cake” are more effective.
The Paradox of Goals: The paradox of goals, as explained by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is that goal-seeking, as commonly practiced, leads to disappointment no matter the outcome. It’s natural to be disappointed when we fail, but achieving a goal can prove equally disappointing when the anticipated outcome doesn’t materialize. It’s an idea known as the “arrival fallacy”. Le Cunff offers practical tips for counteracting this including tempered expectations and a non-linear metaphor for progress.
What Monks Can Teach Us About Paying Attention: This New Yorker review of historian Jamie Kreiner’s new book, The Wandering Mind, offers a kind of comfort to the modern mind: long before the age of the internet and smartphone, our medieval monastic predecessors struggled with many of the same distractions we are plagued with today. It’s especially amusing to read about the wide spectrum of remedies used and draw parallels with contemporary advice and self-help gurus.
Why Do People (Usually) Learn Less as They Get Older?: Scott Young shares his theories on the topic which, in turn, illuminates the potential solutions. As someone in his 50s, I find this topic endlessly fascinating. I’m not going to stop learning, and I hope you don’t either.

Reading Enrichment:

The Audacious Rescue Plan that Might Have Saved Space Shuttle Columbia: In the aftermath of the Columbia tragedy, nearly 20 years ago, NASA published an exhaustive report detailing the accident and what went wrong. Buried in the report was a speculative plan for extraordinary measures that might have been taken involving a second shuttle, Atlantis. Journalist Lee Hutchinson explains, in gripping detail, how this incredibly complex rescue mission with zero margin for error would have worked. It’s an intriguing look at the dangers of space travel, the infinite number of constraints NASA contends with, decision-making dilemmas, and the never-ending cascade of consequences from those decisions.
Computers Enable Fantasies: On the Continued Relevance of Weizenbaum’s Warnings: I’m a techno-optimist, but it’s important to regularly temper that faith. This lengthy piece surveys the writings of the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. Insofar as Weizenbaum embraced technology, he was also one of its harshest critics. He urged us, especially those closest to technology, to maintain a healthy skepticism and constantly ask “what am I not seeing? And am I being fooled?”
Ur-Facism: Freedom and Liberation are an Unending Task: A classic article by Umberto Eco published in a 1995 issue of the New York Review of Books. Eco experienced fascism firsthand, growing up in Mussolini’s Italy during the 1930s and 40s. Here he lays out a brief history of fascism, defines this “fuzzy” ideology, and offers a cogent 13-point collection of fascist characteristics. In a time when the term is thrown around so casually and thoughtlessly, it’s worth having a baseline of familiarity.

Odds & Ends:

Living Alone in the Wild Siberian Forest for 20 Years is a short documentary video. We are shown the daily routine and battle against the elements of Samuil, the program’s subject. As someone who takes the conveniences of modern city life for granted, it’s a fascinating watch. I also highly recommend the channel that shared this video, Kuin B, which offers dozens of videos about life in Yakutia.
The Ugliest Buildings in the World is a list of mostly UK and US buildings derived by performing a sentiment analysis on Twitter. Despite the geographic limits of the survey, it’s a fun set of architectural works to ponder. Brutalism, in particular, seems to have fared poorly—hardly surprising!
Two recent podcast series I’ve been enjoying are If Books Could Kill and the BBC’s limited series The New Gurus. The former looks at popular non-fiction books from recent decades and casts an extremely critical eye on the book’s contents (books like Freakonomics, Outliers, and The Secret). The latter examines the trend of internet gurus, people who purport to have uncovered some secret to life and want to sell you their ideology (whether it be financial, fitness, relationships, etc.).

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Lastly, I more or less destroyed my blog for a few months during my hiatus with a bad upgrade and database migration. I compounded the error with bungling my domain name records during the recovery. Suffice to say, if you’re looking for the Mental Pivot Blog these days, you can find it at www.mentalpivot.com.