Category: Better Life

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About Learning Better Life research trust

Trusted Sources 2 – Practical and Personal BL009

There are a lot of factors that could affect which sources we trust. These factors can be grouped into several categories, such as practical, personal, social, and intellectual. There are overlaps to be sure, but it is helpful to separate them for ease of discussion.

Let’s consider practical factors:
  • at hand — physical or electronic resources we possess
  • visible — shows up early in search results; mentioned in another resource; advertised or displayed
  • accessible — free or cheap; no login or paywall; immediate access
  • convenient or easy — little time or effort required
And personal factors
  • familiar — used it before
  • agreeable — supports what we already know or believe
  • feels good — makes us feel safe, powerful, proud, happy, hopeful, virtuous, or simply right(eous)
  • aligned — with what we value or seek
  • supportive — furthers our own ends
In the next post we’ll continue exploring the categories.
Exercise
1. Think about some times when these practical and personal factors have been the most important in choosing which sources you use to answer a question, solve a problem, or make a decision.
2. When do you go beyond these practical and personal sources?
3. What are the pros and cons to selecting sources based on these practical and personal reasons?
4. What other practical and personal factors would you add to the list I provided?
About Learning
Do you find it difficult to settle down and be productive when you are trying to get the exercises done? Here are a few tips that apply to any kind of brain work
  • Put the time in your schedule. Make sure you have enough time to switch gears mentally from what you were doing, settle, do the work, and switch gears back to your other activities again.
  • Arrange with others to have a few minutes without interruption.
  • Turn devices to silent and leave them in a different room.
  • If you using a device, make sure all notifications are off.
  • Work in the same place.
  • Keep the tools you need together and handy, whether it’s software, files, and links on a computer or books, binders, and writing/drawing tools.
  • At the start of the session, take a minute to write down a short list of things that are on your mind, that you are going to set aside for just a little while, because this is important work that will help you be more effective and helpful to others. Cover the list and move it away from your work space, physically or electronically. 
  • Create a parking lot list. This is for anything that comes up while you are working that you don’t want to forget. Keep the list accessible but not visible when you are working. If something comes up, quickly jot down a reminder on that list (don’t get into it!), and move back to your focus.
References
N/A
Diversion
https://xkcd.com/2129/
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About Learning Better Life confirmation bias research trust

Trusted Sources 1 BL008

Research is an essential component of any type of learning. In the last post we looked at the importance of seeking out different sources of information from experts, forecasts, and history, to name a few, in determining our standards, goals and methods.
But we have millions of potential sources of information, and as humans we all have a tendency to seek out information that is familiar, comfortable, that we agree with.
Exaggerating that tendency are the various internet services that provide us posts and ads based on our past viewing. If I click an ad about trampolines, even by accident, I will continue to get ads about trampolines. Annoying in this case, and harmless because I was never interested in trampolines and the chance that I will ever buy one is zero.
A little more disturbing is something that has happened. I clicked a video link on YouTube featuring a very popular public figure that I instinctively dislike. Watching the video confirmed my impression of him as misguided at best, and possibly very damaging. But now YouTube continually suggests videos featuring him, and the channels that love him, and information similar to what he promotes, nearly all at least as questionable, and some much worse — because they are all popular with the same group of people, or have the same keywords, or are promoted by the same advertisers, or however these hidden algorithms work. 
I use YouTube as an example, but just about every site works this way. I don’t “blame” YouTube. Their algorithms are presumably intended to be neutral (though that doesn’t mean they are actually neutral), and I believe I have turned on the settings that allow for this behaviour because it does give me some benefits, but the potential unintended consequences are great. I am a conscious consumer of information and I have to exert a continual effort to validate my choices.
Leaving aside the technology aspects of this issue, in general it has always been important to make some judgements: how do you decide who to listen to, who’s right, who’s to be trusted. Should I listen to the person in the bar, the book that’s prominently displayed in the bookstore window, the talk show guest, the news channel commentator, the documentary filmmaker?
This is not as simple as it sounds, and we’ll take a few posts to delve into this. The questions in this exercise are challenging ones. I’m asking you to take a hard look in the mirror and review what you actually do, why you do it, and how well it’s working. Don’t let yourself off the hook by evading the questions, but do be gentle with yourself with the answers. We’re all human, none of us are perfect, we all make mistakes, and all have lots to learn — that’s presumably why you’ve made it this far in this learning project!
Exercise
1. In what situations do you do a lot of research before making a decision? Why?
2. In what situations do you NOT do much research before making a decision? Why
3. What are your preferred sources? Why?
4. Who do you trust/distrust? Why?
5. How competitive are you? 
6. Are you used to being right?
7. What’s your history with authorities? Parents? Teachers? Governments? Institutions?
8. How do you think your answers to the above affect your research habits — what you seek, and how you view what you encounter?
9. Do you think the decisions you have made are the best possible, based on how they turned out for you and everyone else impacted?
About Learning
Proceeding without the details. I’m a planner. I like to know the goals, blocks of work, activities, effort, and a schedule. This effort is a bit different. After years of working in related areas I believe I know the lay of the land, have the essential skills and the capacity to learn new ones (and get help as resources permit), and having done some high level planning, I now feel sufficiently confident (and at the same time blissfully ignorant), to just jump in and let it evolve. I feel that I can avoid making unrecoverable mistakes, and can at minimum be micro-helpful. I learn so much just by doing it, and future paths and opportunities will arise that I perhaps could plan for, but that are just as successfully addressed as I go. This is not true of more complex or unfamiliar domains.
References
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
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About Learning Better Life improvement standards

Setting Standards 1 BL007

We’ve touched on:

  • why to improve
  • what to improve
  • what better might mean
  • setting a baseline for measurement
For any of these topics, when deciding what our goals should be and for how to improve, we could just go with what we know, and do our best based on what we’ve heard. If I want to improve how fast I can run a 5 kilometre race, I could think to myself, “I’ve heard better gear could help” and go buy lighter clothes and better shoes. I could try adjusting my diet and hydration and training program based on what I think might work. Through trial and error I could figure some things out to make improvements.
I think most people find that these techniques do work for most types of improvement, and then performance reaches a plateau. Sometimes performance may even decrease. The unintended consequences of my attempts to get faster could lead to injury, poorer health, too much time spent training taking away from other activities, or other results.
So in most cases when we are serious about improving performance, we want to go beyond what we already know to tap into what the others know. I could ask my buddy, who is about a good runner as I am, for tips. That might help, but I think you’d agree that finding out what the experts know, and some kind of course or coaching, would be a reasonable next step, and ultimately we could figure out what’s the best performance that anyone has achieved and how they achieved it. Study of world-class athletes and coaches could be used to develop new goals for performance and strategies for improvement. 
This doesn’t apply as much for the running example, but you could also study what knowledge was collected, what approaches have been attempted or been successful in the historical past. Sometimes wisdom or techniques have been set aside or forgotten and there is much that can be applied.
A third approach is to use imagination, modeling, simulation, visualization, storytelling and other techniques to project into what the best possible performance and methods could be. In business these may take the form of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called big hairy audacious goals, but it’s not just about goals, it could be about systems, methods, processes, cultures, etc.
These three types of sources — self, others, best possible — can be used for any type of inquiry:
  • what could goals be?
  • what does better mean in this discipline?
  • what are the methods that could be used?
  • what are the possible risks and unintended consequences?
  • what types of knowledge should I explore to understand this field?
Exercise
1. What knowledge and resources do you already possess about your goals, performance, and methods in your area of improvement?
2. Who are the leaders and experts, examples of best performance and improvement, past and present, for your area? What can you learn from what others have done?
3. What is the best possible performance, improvement, methods, that could be imagined? What hasn’t been done yet but might be possible?
About Learning
The role of perfection. Blogs are ephemeral and permanent; standalone and integrated. I’m a perfectionist and as I write I’m continually getting new ideas, associations, and improvements. Each post represents my best thinking within a constrained time period at a snapshot in time. At the same time web pages are captured by people and search engines and bots and probably intelligence agencies just for fun, so they don’t disappear completely. 
 
Is any post perfect? Far from it. I have to aim for “helpful”, “not wrong” and “good enough” and hopefully “not embarrassing in retrospect”. When I review a previous post I always see room for improvement. I’m trying to build up a whole journey so everything will link and connect to something else, and in the context of recent thinking and posts, and continually emerging plans for future explorations and posts, it’s hard not to continually make changes.
References
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James Collins and Jerry Porras
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About Learning Better Life improvement measurement

Defining Your Starting Point BL006

It’s said that if you don’t know where you’re going you won’t know when you get there. It’s also true for improvement that if you don’t know where you started, you won’t know how much progress you’re making.
Measurement is also a way of focusing your attention, and intention, regularly on what you’re improving, why you’re improving, what you’re measuring, and how things are going. Supporting your improvement with measurement helps you take a more structured and disciplined approach, and helps work with other people on improvement and in demonstrating and communicating results.
One type of data is “hard” objective data, measurable with instruments, easily comparable and agreed upon by different people.
What and how you measure doesn’t have to be “hard”. “Soft” measures can be any kind of impression, observation, feeling, strength of belief. These may not be agreed upon by different people, and so they have to be used differently, but they are still importantly and useful. 
Consistency is important for all measures — the same people, under similar conditions, using the same methods, similar times of day, etc.
For example, if I want to improve customer relationships, a valid measure could be customer feedback. Often surveys ask whether you would recommend the service to another person, but it would be equally valid and perhaps more useful to ask at various times during the service delivery whether you felt valued and respected.
It’s important to measure for some time before making any changes, to get a solid baseline. Just selecting some things to measure and starting to measure them is a change which could have a positive impact, and you might actually start seeing some improvements without having “done” anything.
There is a lot more to be said about measurement, and it varies depending on the area to be improved, but let’s get started with measuring your baseline.
For your improvement area, review your criteria for judging whether it’s better than it was. For each criterion, consider how you will measure, and set up a simple system to measure this daily or weekly (depending on the measure and your time frame). For example, if I want to improve my sleep, I might start by noting my lights-out time, estimated sleep duration, and how rested I feel in the morning. 
 
Get going with measurement, and try to do it at the same time of the day/week. Do keep track of any ideas you have about how to improve the measurement system, and also about how to improve your performance. I am suggesting not making any changes until you set a baseline of at least 6 measurements. 
 
If you do make a change, make sure you keep track of what you’re changing and why. A goal here is not only to improve, but to learn about improvement and learning.
 
About Learning
You could just read all these posts in a few minutes each. I suggest that 90% of the value is in the exercises. It’s only when ideas are applied and adopted are they contributing to a better life. Think about it and do what will give you the results you want and need.
 
References
N/A
 
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About Learning Better Life ethics relationships

What Does Better Mean 2? BL005

How did it feel to explore what you value?

If you’re not used to it, questioning how you think and feel and what you believe, can be uncomfortable. It’s one of the most critical habits to develop, which we will revisit in various ways.
A personal example. I decided that I wanted a better romantic relationship than previous ones. I’ll focus here on my exploration of what better meant.
When I started, I don’t know if I had a defined idea. To mention just a few things, I wanted to feel better (whatever that meant), be happier, have less conflict, feel safer and more secure, less anxious. To begin with I was focused on what I wanted for me.
As I deepened my thinking through reflection and study, I focused more on my potential partner, the two of us as a couple and the relationship between us. My list above might sound universal, but it’s actually quite personal. Everyone wants to feel safe and secure, but if they are generally safe and secure at the core and have had relationships where this wasn’t an issue, then feeling safer and more secure would not be a conscious priority.
Better would mean finding out what better meant for the other person specifically and understanding whether there was enough overlap between the two of us.
At one level this might not sound surprising. You’ve probably heard that having common values is a strong predictor of relationship longevity and quality. And we could get into that, but this is a different level of values — not what we each value in life, but what we each value in a relationship.
Better would have to mean both of us feeling the way we wanted to feel in the relationship.
If I am looking for a long-term relationship, then it means we would have to feel the potential to keep relating well over time, and that we could mesh well with each other’s communities of family and friends.
The details here are not essential. The example is just to highlight that my thinking deepened, that I extended who and what I cared about, and my time frame.
Do a search on ethics and explore a few different sources. What are some ideas about what should be considered when deciding: what better means? what good means? what right means? If Bentham’s approach from last post doesn’t resonate with you, is there something else that does?

About Learning
We’ve considered setting up a routine for study, and devoting sufficient time. Moving too fast isn’t helpful. If you have extra time, dig deeper on each subject rather than trying to move to the next topic. If it takes two weeks or two months to complete the work from a single post, it’s better to take that time than to move ahead. Having said that, there may be value in skimming ahead to get the lay of the land, especially until a roadmap is developed.
 
References
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. John M. Gottman
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Sue Johnson
Ethics references in the previous post
 
 
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About Learning Better Life ethics philosophy

What Does Better Mean 1? BL004

You started exploring what better means for an area you want to improve. Another way to put this is understanding what has value. Congratulations, you’ve entered the field of ethics.

There are many standards you can use to decide what good is, what better means, what has value, and how people should behave. Without getting into the history of it, people around the world have been considering how people should behave for a good life, and for a good society, for thousands of years. 
We’ll jump into it. An approach that may sound familiar is Jeremy Bentham’s “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong“.
Let’s use this statement as an entry point to make some observations and ask some questions:
– this approach is based on the outcomes of actions, as opposed to motives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, goes the saying, so it seems to make sense to focus on consequences.
– it isn’t time-bound. Does it mean short-term happiness, or long-term?
– whose happiness counts? Only humans?  Only those living right now?
– what’s happiness, or what contributes to it? How can we measure it for self and others?
– is happiness the only or the best thing to focus on for the rightness or value of all actions?
– are there situations that come to mind where the statement seems to be clearly wrong or unhelpful?
– what other questions come to mind?
Exercise
Review what you wrote in the last exercise. Apply Bentham’s criterion, and the questions I’ve posed, to your answers.
If this is your first exposure to this field, be patient with yourself. If you can take away just a few things to think about and apply, that is a big step. I do recommend an ethics course for everyone, very much enjoyed my university course, but if you don’t have time for that, check out the references below.
About Learning
In addition to thinking about frequency of self-improvement work, it’s important to consider how much time you will devote each session. Choose a duration that feels manageable but meaningful. It takes time to put aside your other concerns and activities, to focus, to think, to write. About a half hour per post including associated exercises would be a minimum in my view to make significant progress, but do what you can! Some is better than none.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
Online lectures from an ethics course – I have only watched enough to think it’s promising but it is serious college-level stuff https://youtu.be/lSazDI2wBCA
A lighter set of videos https://youtu.be/FOoffXFpAlU
Categories
About Learning Better Life ethics improvement sleep

What Needs Improving? BL003

You took some time to revisit why you want to improve something. And then looked at what you want to improve. 
If you wrote something down for both of these questions, that’s awesome! 
Whatever you wrote isn’t final, doesn’t need to be complete or perfect. As long as it covers off the items that are relevant to you right now, that will be good enough for now. And good enough really is good enough. You can revisit and revise at any time.
What Needs Improving
You could have listed just about anything under what you wanted to improve. You could have listed results or skills or feelings or … (I’ll use … often to keep things open-ended. You can imagine it sits at the end of many lists. I don’t have the time or feel the need to research every sentence, so you could always have your own additions.) 
Here are a few thoughts about items of different types that I might put some focus on, but everything is fair game.
  • sleep better
  • have a more loving romantic relationship
  • physical health and fitness in general or to perform a specific activity
  • improving effectiveness within a group or organization
  • ability to make good career and financial decisions about your future
  • be prepared for unexpected adverse effects
  • reduce your ecological footprint
  • foster inclusiveness, belonging, and contribution of everyone
I will choose examples and case studies that I know something about and/or am familiar with relevant resources. I believe many of the topics will have universal or at least very broad applicability. But of course you can go in whatever direction you need to go.
There are a couple of directions we could go from here. We could get into approaches and techniques about how to improve in the areas you’ve chosen. But I think we’ll come back to that, and first take some time to visit What Does Better Mean? and soon What Do You Care About?
Example
Let’s first think of a sample about thinking about what’s better than something else.
We can think about a spectrum from badness to goodness. First, it’s open-ended. It’s hard to think of something that is perfectly bad or perfectly good, where nothing could be better or worse. 
Then within the spectrum we place anything only in comparison to something else. By imagining alternatives we can say that something is better or worse than something else, based on some conscious or unconscious criteria. 
For me, a shorter, deeper sleep is better than a longer, shallower sleep. 
Let’s look at that statement. Why is it better? I could say it’s because I feel better when I wake up, but it’s helpful to be more precise: I feel more alert, more rested, am more physically coordinated, am less irritable and easier to get along with, and so on.
So if you agree that: 
  • being more alert, more rested, more physically coordinated, less irritable, and more easy to get along with are 
    • a) valid criteria about how to measure whether sleep is good, and 
    • b) a majority of the most important factors to consider 
  • and you also agree that a shorter deeper sleep produces more of those results for you personally compared with a longer shallower sleep, the majority of the time
then you can probably agree with the original statement.
We could ask more questions about the statement, such as:
  • Is it always true? That a longer, shallower sleep is never better
  • What do you mean by deeper or shallower? Can it be measured scientifically in a way that aligns with perception?
  • Is what you feel by deeper and shallower the same as what I feel? Does it matter?
But for our purposes I think we can leave those aside. What I want to focus on is that there are some criteria that we can identify and define, that we use those criteria to make a comparison between two or more alternatives, and we use that comparison to make a judgment about what is better.
This may not be a familiar way of thinking for many people. It is detailed and precise, structured and logical, and designed to clarify and make visible thinking in a way that can be examined, assessed, and very importantly, shared. 
If you aren’t familiar with this type of reasoning (Note 1) and are willing to give it a try, then let’s keep going. I won’t be going to the extent of being philosophically rigorous, but I will encourage more of those features: detail, precision, structure, logic. This isn’t the only type of thinking, but I think it has to be one tool in the toolkit. There is also room for creativity, feelings, perceptions, and subjectivity, but it is called out as such.
Exercise
Think about one of the improvement areas from your list and explore the following questions. Be as detailed and precise as you can be.
1. You said you want to improve in this area. What does being better or worse look like in this field? What are the alternative behaviours or results that you are comparing?
2. What are the criteria that you use to judge?
3. Would different people in different situations agree on those criteria for their own situations?
4. Make a table or list to compare your alternatives using the criteria you identified.
5. If you explained your situation and criteria and how you judged your alternatives, would others understand or agree how you judged your alternatives for yourself?
About Learning
I mentioned doing improvement work a couple of times a week. This was just a guideline. You will have to choose what works for you. The key is to have some time set aside, to schedule it in, to make it a routine, and to do it often enough that you have momentum. You want to choose a frequency that’s achievable so that you will feel successful. On the other hand if you miss one or more scheduled self-study sessions, that’s absolutely okay: don’t beat yourself up, remember this is something you can do for yourself, review where you are in the process and carry on!
 
Notes
1. If you don’t have experience with formal reasoning, a philosophy course is a great way to get introduced to it. I’ve been watching the lecture videos from a course on the philosophy of death and the afterlife, taught by a professor, Shelly Kagan, at Yale University. It sounds morbid but I think most people would find the topic interesting. He’s a good lecturer, and while it doesn’t give the practice of having to generate arguments in the form of essays, watching the videos can only help improve your reasoning and understanding. Here’s the URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0
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About Learning Better Life frequency improvement inner voice learning meaning momentum motivation Purpose teaching What why

Why a Better Life? BL002

You’ve written down a few answers about why you might want to improve. That’s a great start! As with everything we may revisit them. You may find that you can expand or change that list.
There are lots of reasons you might have come up with about why you want to improve. Remember that I asked about intrinsic reasons, things that have value to you for their own sake. This is just my very short brainstorm list for your consideration; some of these may resonate with you, and others may not.
  • make a bigger contribution to a person, group, or cause (a cause can be just about anything – some purpose that has meaning to you and others)
  • have better relationships romantically and with family, friends, co-workers, community members (by community I mean any group of people that you interact with)
  • feel proud, content, satisfied, or happy (in my mind I bundle a lot of things behind these but you might split them out)
  • feel healthier (here too, there are a lot of sub-items)
Exercise
Take at least 5 minutes to review and revise your Why list. It’s important to get clear about this. If you don’t know your core reasons for improving, it will be hard to keep motivated to do the work.
Next, spend at least another 5-10 minutes to write down a list of What? What areas of your life do you want to pursue improvement in? In this exercise, there are a couple of approaches. I encourage you to pursue both. One would look into what contributes to your Why? list. Perhaps you listed feeling happier. What would contribute to making you happy? The second would be about life goals. If you were to look back on your life from old age what would you be most proud of?
You might feel an overlap perhaps between “Why you want to improve” and “What do you want to improve”. I think it’s important to be aware of the difference but not to be strict about it. The idea is to think about those things that give you satisfaction, value, meaning, for their own sake, and then what areas contribute toward them, and to make sure both areas are covered.
About Learning
Were you disappointed that I didn’t provide a long list and tell you what the right answer is? There might be right kinds of answers, answers that meet the intent of the question, but the right answers are your own. I will encourage you to consider things you might not have thought about, but it’s up to you, on an ongoing basis, to think, decide, and revise your answers.
Categories
About Learning Better Life improvement invitation meaning motivation Purpose why

Would You Like a Better Life? BL001

I think nearly everyone would like a better life. Would you?

Since I was a child, I’ve been pursuing improvement. Perhaps I was discontent, perhaps I was just exposed to a lot of knowledge and philosophy, or maybe I was just bored. As a professional for a few decades I’ve worked on improving organizations, systems, processes, and people’s lives. As a person I’ve had my share of learning and improving through life experiences: relationships, marriage, divorce, children, marriage of children, grandchildren, death of parents. I think I have something unique, useful, and important to share from study, application, and experience.

So this is an invitation to join a continual journey of “just a little bit better”. I’ll add more context as I go. For now let’s jump in.
 
Exercise
The first set of questions is about “Why?” Why do you want to improve? What will motivate you? [Often people start with a vision of where they want to get to. And this can be part of the picture, but I think it misses the point.]
 
Give yourself about 5 minutes to write down some answers, and find a place where you can keep all of your work together. The idea here is to focus on reasons that are important to you directly, for their own sake (“intrinsically”), not indirectly, because of what they do for you (“extrinsically”). 
 
What’s going to get you to sit down and do some work on improvement a couple of times a week?