Distracted Fortune

Category: Self Improvement

  • Context Switching into Oblivion: How to Manage Multitasking in the Agentic Era

    Context Switching into Oblivion: How to Manage Multitasking in the Agentic Era

    When I first started this blog about 50 years ago, I thought about writing an article about multitasking. To be precise, about how multitasking is a myth.

    There is no multitasking, there is only rapid context switching. And that quickly exhausts someone with a short attention span.

    The punchline was, work on one thing for a while and don’t switch contexts until you’re done.

    Well, this same problem has surfaced in the age of agentic engineering.

    At first, telling a LLM agent like Claude or Codex about the program you wish you could have, then having them build it, feels like a superpower. All of a sudden, projects that felt like a pie in the sky are now possible to build TONIGHT.

    “I’ll build more projects!” Now you’re spinning up several agents at a time, each working on something different. My God, you think, I can build anything!

    And then you start hitting the wall. “What was this one doing?”

    Personally, I tend to start feeling like just sitting and staring out the window, to let it all settle down. But the urge to keep telling these agents what to do is almost irresistible – they don’t work until you tell them what to do. The bottleneck is my instructions!

    There are a lot of words for this, like “infinite backlog”, “prompt fatigue”, or “agentic scope creep”. But it’s nothing more than rapid context switching – classic multitasking.

    Let’s break down exactly why this artificial multitasking is bankrupting your focus, and look at some engineering constraints you can use to stop it.

    The Tax

    Psychologists have studied the process of context switching in humans since the late 1900s. Most of these studies involve people performing one task, switching to another, then switching back to the original.

    For example, people were studied while reading numbers off a page in their native language, then in a second language, then back again in their native language. The researchers found that, not only did they take a longer time to recite in their second language, but they took even longer still when they flipped back to their mother tongue.

    This lengthening of the amount of time to do something was termed the cognitive tax. It’s the result of the mind having to take several steps when moving attention from one task to another.

    1. Goal Shifting – new task requires a new objective
    2. Rule Activation – new task requires different skill set

    The price of context switching can be less than a second, but if you’re switching over and over, it adds up. Plus, it takes mental effort to perform those two steps.

    Double Taxed

    For those of us with ADHD, the tax can be an especially heavy burden. I wrote a while back about how the ADHD brain works. It takes extra effort to activate interest in someone with inhibited executive function. This is why it’s generally hard for us to focus in places like school or meetings. But when something is especially interesting, we get engaged. With only a little more energy, we get so engaged that the entire world can melt away – this is the state of “hyperfocus”.

    Programming a computer can be very effective in inducing hyperfocus. Small, incremental changes layer on capabilities, and it feels a little like the perfect transparent medium for creativity to manifest.

    Now, say we get interrupted in the middle of a hyperfocus session. That attention immediately drops below the threshold, and we must now struggle to get interested and engaged in the new activity. That’s not to say we don’t like to chit chat, we do! But when we try to get back to the former activity, it can be extremely hard to get back over that interest threshold, not to mention going back into a hyperfocused state.

    The feeling of productivity that comes from repeatedly prodding multiple AI agents to do more work is an illusion. The agents are doing the work. You are spending a limited tank of energy that isn’t getting replenished, and burning loads of extra ATP (the brain’s energy source) on just the switching part. Eventually, you’ll get zonked, frustrated, and possibly hit melancholy.

    How to Manage Agent Number One

    So how do you deal with this? Give up and become a painter? Gallons of Red Bull?

    There are a few strategies that all can work together, which I’ll list below. But the most important thing to realize is that the old way of programming is gone. Over are the days of the coding hero. Nobody can code more efficiently than an AI agent.

    But that means that the programmer’s job has changed, and in a way that benefits those of us that can hit hyperfocus more easily.

    Here are a few strategies I’ve found to be most important, in this new agentic era.

    1. Write Full Requirements Documents

    As soon as the first steps of a major programming project are imagined, the ADHD brain wants to start smacking down some for loops and lambda functions. But that’s a trap.

    Modern LLMs have huge context windows, and they’re getting bigger all the time. Perhaps there will be a limit in the future, but right now they’re big enough for anything you would want to write to them.

    For example, Claude Opus 4.7 can fit a million words into its context window. That’s War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The latest Grok model (4.20) can fit two million – that’s Harry Potter. The entire 7 book series. The effective window is about 60% the maximum number of tokens, but that’s still more than you’re likely to write into the prompt window.

    What this means is, you can throw a complete requirements doc into the LLM, and it won’t flinch.

    Instead of taking the time to write code, your job is to instead spend that time writing the requirements doc.

    1. Write the Requirements with LLMs

    And, since LLMs are so great at taking a rough idea and smoothing it out into prose, you can go back and forth with the LLM refining the requirements doc.

    Spend 10 minutes yapping into a recording device to flesh out your idea. Just say everything that comes to mind about your idea, including the kind of toilet paper you’re about to use (we know where you use your phone). Then dump that into Gemini and ask it to convert it into a first draft.

    Then, read through it and flag things you think sound off, or missing, or just not what you want. Then, stick that version back into the LLM and tell it to rewrite. Then, stick the doc back in, and tell the LLM to find the problems. Here’s a prompt:

    Act as a strict QA engineer and technical product manager. Review the attached requirements document and identify every area that is fuzzy, ambiguous, or prone to edge-case failures.

Specifically, flag any requirement that lacks clear constraints or cannot be immediately translated into a definitive pass/fail unit test.

Output a bulleted list. For each issue, provide:

The exact quote from the document.

Why it is dangerously vague or problematic.

A direct question the author must answer to resolve the ambiguity.

    Do a few rounds of revision like this until the document looks pretty good. If it gets too complicated, tell the LLM to summarize in a way that doesn’t lose the meaning, but is better understood for someone whose attention is flagging.

    1. Ensure Atomicity

    So you’re afraid that Codex will go off the reservation and start reprogramming your operating system while you read a book?

    There’s no foolproof way to prevent that, but one way to minimize the risk is to break the requirements into atomic pieces and iterate. After each iteration, the program should be left in a “walking skeleton” state – it runs from end to end, and the tests all pass.

    Here’s an appropriate prompt:

    Act as a lead software architect. Break the attached requirements document down into a strict, sequentially ordered list of small development Issues.

You must adhere strictly to the principle of Incremental Stability:

1. Issue 1 must build a 'walking skeleton'—the absolute bare-minimum end-to-end structure.

2. Each subsequent Issue must add only a single layer of complexity.

3. The application must remain in a 100% reliable, runnable state at the completion of every individual Issue.

For each Issue, provide a short title, a one-sentence goal, and the specific pass/fail unit test required to serve as technical documentation for that feature's behavior.

    If you have the LLM running through atomic steps, then when you come back to it and it’s inevitably stopped somewhere, you can quickly find out where it stopped (just ask it), and kick it off again without having to answer “what needs to be done next?”.

    1. Issue Driven Development

    Now that you have your requirements mapped out, and broken into a sequence of issues, you pump them all into the all powerful coding agent! Right!?

    Wrong. You have to treat the LLM like a wunderkind junior developer, who might get overwhelmed with a massive project. Feed the agent one issue at a time. Force it to complete that one issue, and hand you a fully functional walking skeleton application.

    One way to enforce this is to prevent the LLM from committing the changes to your version control system, like Git. The main coding agents have a way to enforce certain behaviors. While every AI coding tool handles this differently, you can usually set hard boundaries.

    For example, if you use GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code (my personal setup), you can put some guardrails into a file called copilot-instructions.md located in a .github directory at your project root. GitHub Copilot automatically reads that file before following any prompt, so there you can say something like

    After completing any Issue driven change, present the user with a clean commit
message. IMPORTANT - *You do not commit. Only the user commits.* Your job is to
change code and offer a commit message to report your changes.  Do not begin
working on the next Issue until the user explicitly provides it.

    If you went and ate one of those poisonous Federal Donuts someone left in the office pantry while Copilot was working, now when you come back to your desk, you have a nice summary of what was done. You commit, then feed the next issue into the agent.

    1. Externalize Your Working Memory (Test Driven Development)

    For an ADHD brain, working memory gets wiped the second you walk away from the screen. If it’s tough to remember where you were and where you’re going, force the LLM to act as your external RAM.

    Unit tests are the living documentation for an application’s behavior.

    Before you leave your desk, if the LLM is paused, make it write one failing unit test for the next issue. That way, when you come back, you can just run the test suite to see what’s failing, and jump start the LLM on the next issue by making that test pass.

    At the end of the day, the workplace is still filled with distractions. Even with these tips, a good programmer can get burned out from switching tasks all morning. If you find yourself staring out the window, mind flitting from the past to the future, unable to concentrate on the next task your LLM agent was supposed to do, go take a break. You deserve it.

    At the end of the day, the workplace is still filled with distractions. Even with these guardrails, managing agents takes real executive function, and you can still burn out. If you find yourself staring out the window, unable to concentrate on the next step, simply get up and walk away. Because you are now running a system instead of just prompting a chatbot, you aren’t leaving behind a broken application and a tangled mess of half-finished prompts. You have a stable, runnable walking skeleton, and a failing test waiting to tell you exactly what to do tomorrow.

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  • What is and How to Use Exposure Therapy

    What is and How to Use Exposure Therapy

    I’ve got two major diagnoses to deal with: ADHD-inattentive, and Anxiety. They both sprinkle generous heaps of caltrops on my daily path to extraordinary success.

    Closely connected to anxiety is Fear. This article is about how to deal with both.

    One form of anxiety that really stops my progress, is social anxiety. Here’s how it works. We live pretty close to a college bar. During big games or other college events, the line of kids with fake ids stretches down the block around the corner. They’re just kids to me. I have no problem interacting with college kids.

    But when I try to walk down the sidewalk next to this line of party, my knees buckle, I break out in cold sweat, my breath starts getting shallow. It takes everything I got to keep my body moving normally. I almost cry!

    My fears take over. “What if somebody says something to me”, “what if I’m dressed like a hobo?”, “What if…”, there’s always something that could happen that could embarrass me in front of all these people.

    In the end, who cares? For some reason, I do.

    But I’ve mostly gotten over this fear. The way I did it is through exposure therapy.

    In this article, I’ll explain what it is, how it works, and how you can design an exposure therapy strategy that will help you overcome your own fears, crippling or otherwise.

    What is Exposure Therapy?

    Exposure therapy is a strategy used by psychologists skilled in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to handle pretty much any fear or phobia their clients are trying to overcome. Practitioners of CBT believe that you don’t change underlying cognitive disorders by just talking about them. You start by changing actual behaviors. The new behavior drives the changes in the underlying condition.

    For example, let’s say you are afraid of snakes, like Indiana Jones. One glance at a snake generates massive, pants shitting fear, and an immediate urge to flee the scene to safety.

    The writers actually trapped Indy in a textbook forced-exposure scenario. In the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when he hops into Jacques’s plane, he meets Reggie – the pet boa constrictor. Stuck in the cockpit with the snake, Indy can’t flee. He is forced to sit there, panic spiking, while the plane takes off. Because he can’t escape, his brain is eventually forced to realize that Reggie isn’t a threat compared to the poisoned darts behind them. That’s the core of exposure: staying put until the panic runs out of gas.

    It’s that assured survival that makes exposure therapy effective.

    The strategy is to put yourself into environments that you know will trigger that panic, handle it for a while, then exit. Once you exit, you reflect how you survived the interaction. You’re teaching your rat brain that you can willfully enter the threat zone, and be OK.

    As you structure those interactions to become riskier and riskier, you may not totally overcome the fear, but you do learn that you can do it.

    You grow your confidence.

    Design Your Own Exposure Strategy

    DISCLAIMER I am a writer sharing my personal experiences and research, not a licensed therapist or a medical professional. If you are dealing with severe anxiety, panic disorders, or trauma, please talk to a professional before trying to rewire your brain. Exposure therapy is a highly effective tool for everyday fears and social anxiety, but it is not a cure-all. Do not use this framework to jump off a roof, wrestle poisonous snakes, or try to navigate an active volcano. Know your limits, use common sense, and seek a qualified guide if you are dealing with the heavy stuff.

    I like to think about this as programming myself. I wrote a while back about how we are really at least three beings in one: Beast, Rider, and Marshall. The fear comes from that Beast, at which the Rider wheels the steed around and rides it to safety.

    We can instead wield the Marshall’s personality, and rewrite the commands executed by your Rider.

    What follows is called a Fear Ladder (or, clinically, an exposure hierarchy).

    1. Identify the Fear

    Vague fears cannot be targeted. You need to identify fears, and then identify the fears behind the fears, until you can’t go any further.

    For me, it’s any environment that screams “PARTY TIME” (surface fear). I’m afraid that I will get embarrassed and that it will matter (deeper fear). Really, I’m afraid that I don’t deserve love and will be abandoned (primary fear).

    For you, it may be something else. Maybe you’re really scared of spiders. Whatever, dig down. Use your Morning Pages to get to the root.

    1. Build the Fear Ladder

    Write down 10-15 scenarios related to your fear, and then rank them from 0 (completely relaxed) to 100 (blind panic).

    For example, in my case:

    Anxiety Score

    (0-100)

    		 Exposure Scenario
    Level 10 Asking the grocery store cashier how their day is going.
    Level 30 Asking a stranger on the street for the time or directions.
    Level 50 Making 5 minutes of small talk with another parent at a baseball game.
    Level 70 Attending a neighborhood block party for 30 minutes without a ‘shield’ person.
    Level 90 Sitting alone at a crowded bar and initiating a conversation.
    1. Identify and strip away “Safety Behaviors”

    This one is big, and people usually miss it.

    Safety Behaviors are things that we do to cushion our feelings during a scary situation, so we don’t actually have to face it. Common behaviors are: staring at a smartphone, mentally rehearsing every sentence before speaking, watching the TV, just concentrating really hard on something to pretend it’s important.

    To make exposure work, you have to eliminate these safety behaviors during the exercise.

    1. Execute the exposure!

    Start at the bottom of your Fear Ladder, and do the action.

    One thing I’ve been trying at this stage is to recognize when the anxiety starts to spike, when I start to feel the need to flee. At that moment, it helps to mentally holler “CHARGE!!!”

    When you’ve gotten into position, don’t leave. The golden rule here is that you have to stay in the situation until your anxiety drops by half.

    If you leave the exercise while your anxiety is still spiking, you’re teaching your Rider that the only way to survive is by escaping. We need to stop reinforcing that belief.

    If you stick around and let the awkward feelings wash over you, eventually your brain will get bored and realize “I’m not dying”.

    1. Repeat

    Do that low level exposure over and over until it doesn’t spike your anxiety any more. Then, go to the next level of your fear ladder and do that exposure exercise.

    Keep going until that top rung of the ladder is yours!

    This process takes work, and it’s really easy to stop in the middle and think you’re cured. Or, think that you’re permanently screwed.

    Both of those are fictions! Keep going, and do the work.

    Bonus: Program Your Own Ladder with an LLM

    If you’re staring at a blank page struggling to break your fear down into 10 or 15 incremental steps, you can use an AI assistant (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) as a collaborative architect.

    The secret to getting a great clinical framework out of an LLM is providing strict constraints. If you just ask it for “an exposure ladder for social anxiety,” it will give you generic boilerplate. You need to give it a role, clear definitions, and an iterative process.

    Copy and paste this exact system prompt into your favorite LLM to map out your custom regimen:

    Act as an expert psychologist specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy frameworks. 

I want your help building a personalized "Fear Ladder" (exposure hierarchy) for a specific fear I want to conquer. Before generating the ladder, you must understand two things:
1. My surface fear, deeper fear, and the situations that trigger me.
2. The "safety behaviors" (crutches, distractions, avoidance tactics) I usually use to hide from this fear.

Do not generate the entire ladder yet. First, ask me 2–3 targeted questions to get the context of my specific anxiety. 

Once I answer, you will output a clean Markdown table with columns for:
- Anxiety Score (0 to 100, graduated in increments of 10-20)
- Exposure Scenario (Highly specific, real-world actions)
- Safety Behaviors to Eliminate (The specific crutches I am forbidden from using during that step)

Acknowledge that you understand, and ask your first questions.

    Why this prompt works:

    • The Interactivity Gate: By telling the AI not to write the ladder immediately, you force it to interview you. This ensures the final output is tailored to your actual life, not a generic textbook definition.
    • The Safety Behavior Constraint: Forcing the LLM to explicitly list which “crutches” you have to abandon at each rung removes your ability to cheat the system when it’s time to execute.

    Give it a spin with your own root fears and see how sharp of a tracking matrix it builds for you.

    If you’ve tried using your own exposure hierarchy, write about it in the comments. Who knows, someone with your same anxieties may read it and get inspired.

  • How I Used AI to Make Technology Disappear (and Saved My Son from “Screen Withdrawal”)

    How I Used AI to Make Technology Disappear (and Saved My Son from “Screen Withdrawal”)

    Mid-year 2025, my son became obsessed with Major League Baseball. He had started playing Little League the year before, and we had seen a couple of Phillies games, but suddenly he was hooked on the progress of the season.

    There was just one problem: my kid is a screen hunter.

    When he wakes up in the morning, he hunts for the TV remote. If he can’t find that, he hunts for the Nintendo Switch. Then the tablet, the computer, my phone, and my wife’s phone. You get the idea. He’s on the hunt.

    We’ve been trying to address this because once he gets on a screen, getting him off is nearly impossible. It usually leads to a “verbally violent” outburst-from him, not us-and he stays a bit of a jerk for a while after.

    My wife and I call it “screen withdrawal,” and with our two boys, it feels very real.

    The baseball scores became a flashpoint. I wanted him to follow the scores; it’s an innocent hobby, there’s math involved, and it’s the National Pastime. But I didn’t want him looking at a screen to get them.

    The “Screamsheet” Solution

    My first workaround was digging into the scores myself and dictating them to him, but that’s a hassle when you’re trying to get breakfast on the table and kids out the door for school.

    Then I tried supervised screen time, but the second I turned my back, he’d drift from baseball highlights into the typical “junk” on YouTube. The algorithms don’t care about your age; they only care about keeping you watching.

    Then I remembered something from my childhood. I used to be into cyberpunk role-playing games-not even playing them, just delving into the worlds they created. I remembered a futuristic item called a “Screamsheet.” The idea was basically a high-tech fax machine: you put in a buck, it prints out a sheet with the latest headlines, you read it, and you toss it away. I thought: Wouldn’t it be great to create a Screamsheet for baseball? A physical page that prints every morning, ready for my kid to read like his own little newspaper.

    Building with the “Vibe”

    I decided I wasn’t going to program this all by myself. I was going to get AI to do the heavy lifting. I fired up Gemini and told it what I wanted: a morning summary of yesterday’s games, who won, the scores, and a chart of the current standings.

    Gemini spit out the Python code. I stuck it in a GitHub repository and started running it. It uses an online API (MLB Stats) to pull the data, assembles it into tables, creates a nicely formatted PDF, and drops it into a folder.

    The last mile was the hardware. We have one Linux box in the basement connected to a printer. I used Gemini to help me write a simple Bash shell script and a “cron job” that tells the computer to run the program and print the file automatically at 6:00 AM.

    The Result: A Silver Bullet

    The first morning it worked, I heard the printer running at 6:00 AM on the dot. I ran downstairs, grabbed the sheet, and put it on the kitchen table. My son came down, saw it, and just started reading while eating his breakfast. He didn’t say a word, but he also didn’t hunt for a screen.

    Then he told me “Dad, the Brewers are the top team” (he likes poking at my Wisconsin heritage).

    But I didn’t care about the Brewers at that minute – Team Parents had won this game!

    Since then, I’ve embellished it. If the Phillies played, the back of the sheet now features a full box score and a “journalistic blow-by-blow” generated by the Grok API.

    I even modified the prompt to match my son’s morning mood: if the Phillies (or whatever team you pick as your favorite) lose, the AI is instructed to write the summary like a local fan who is absolutely fed up-just totally throwing the team under the bus and ready to chuck a cheesesteak at the wall. Matching his “energy” has actually helped my boy commiserate and get a kick out of the loss instead of just losing it himself.

    Expanding the Feed

    Once the season ended, I kept the habit going with MLB trade rumors so he could read about how teams were transforming in the off-season. Now, I’ve expanded the system to include:

    • NHL and NFL scores.
    • The Presidential Screamsheet: A morning scan of news sites and WhiteHouse.gov, summarized by AI into stories under 200 words.
    • The Sky Tonight: A front-page star chart with an LLM-generated “reenactment” of Star Hustler’s Jack Horkheimer describing the night sky, plus horoscopes for my wife and me.

    Making Technology Invisible

    The point of all this is that I’ve taken advanced technology – Large Language Models – and used them to make technology disappear. Instead of sifting through an infinite scroll of noise and being held hostage by an algorithm, we’re reading good old-fashioned paper. The computer is now an invisible aspect of our morning.

    This personal project actually mirrors a larger movement happening in my own community right now. My wife has been active in the Lower Merion School District board meetings, where a growing group of parents is pushing for a “Bell to Bell” phone ban and the right to opt-out of 1:1 tablet use in favor of Pencils Over Pixels.

    My goal is to use AI to make technology as invisible to my eyes as possible so I can regain my concentration and attention. I can force these tools to give me exactly what I want to see and hear, and nothing else.

    I’ve posted the link to the code below. It’s all on GitHub – feel free to fork it and make it your own. It includes architecture diagrams and READMEs so your own LLM can read the docs and help you extend it to whatever you’re interested in.

    If you have questions on the setup or suggestions for new sheets, drop a note in the comments!

    Screamsheet

  • Blocked Writers Still Must Write

    Blocked Writers Still Must Write

    I was supposed to have a new article out this morning, and a newsletter last weekend. Clearly neither happened.

    The big reason is this. I set myself the task of lining up two informational interviews at my last newsletter. I tried to set one up and crickets. So, I got embarrassed, because I don’t have any results to report.

    But, that doesn’t mean I get let off the hook! You, dear Reader, still deserve something!

    As Julia Cameron says, it’s much harder to be a blocked artist than to just do the work. So I’ll write about what I’ve been thinking about.

    Before getting in to that, I have a request for YOU, dear Reader. If you are enjoying this blog, and have anything you would like me to write about, please either comment on this article, or just email me at distractedfortune@gmail.com.

    Without further ado, here we go.

    The Minister

    I go to church kind of regularity. Well, I have a church I go to when I can. The ministers send out emails every day with a reading, their analysis, then a prayer.

    The latest one that got me was about the difference between how Paul presents Jesus, versus how the gospels present Jesus.

    One way to look at the meaning of Jesus in our lives is, live like him. This is the Jesus of the Gospels. He was a great man who did great things, cared about the poor, and taught about God. You should walk in his footsteps.

    Paul presented a different version though. He didn’t talk about how Jesus lived, only how he was resurrected. The Post-Crucifixion Jesus.

    My minister said he once thought the New Testament should be laid out in the order in which they were written – Paul wrote his letters first, and the Gospels came much later.

    But why didn’t Paul describe how Jesus lived? I know that about half way through his ministry, the Jewish Christians who followed him were getting a little frustrated waiting for Jesus to come back, the so-called “Second Coming”. So, Paul pivoted his teachings to make it a spiritual second coming. Probably, Paul was a little frustrated too.

    The Campground

    My older boy had a school camping trip this past weekend. I went too as chaperone, and also because I like to camp.

    At one point, I got to talking with the principal of the Lower School. Somehow, I got to talking about this dichotomy of the two Jesuses, and he revealed that he was part of an Eastern Orthodox church. Antiochan (Syria) to be exact.

    He told me a little about the Great Schism of 1054 AD, when the Eastern Orthodox Christians split from the Western, mostly Roman Catholic Christians.

    That was all from him. So I did a little digging on my own.

    Here’s what I found, along with my conspiracy theories. Please do your own follow up research, and don’t just go on my word. Imagine this is right up there with “Drunk History”.

    The Schism

    Jesus was crucified. The story is that he rose from the dead after three days, appeared to a few believers after that, then flew away at the beginning of Acts.

    Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire. Herod was a lower Roman governor, and Pontius Pilate was his sheriff in Jerusalem.

    Why was he crucified? As an example to the rest of the Jews who had started to follow him. Don’t challenge the authority of the Emperor – no revolts or alternative kings of the Jews.

    After that point, the Christians were a thorn in the side of the Roman Empire. You just couldn’t kill and feed them all to lions! Especially with Paul running around, organizing the churches that Peter set up, explaining to people why the resurrection was so important.

    So, after a while, if you can’t beat them, join them. Or rather, usurp them.

    Emperor Constantine saw a golden opportunity in a stupid argument a bunch of the christian leaders were having. Was Jesus God, or was he the Son of God?

    To settle this once and for all, and for the greater glory of Rome, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea. At this council, all the bishops hashed it out until they came to an agreement. Well, not exactly an agreement. They came to a point where a strange contortion of language was created, and codified in what we now call the Nicaean Creed – The Son is Consubstantial with the Father.

    The Nicaean Creed reads kind of like a legal document, which it was. It basically decreed an answer that didn’t really solve the problem, and was not agreed on by all parties. Specifically, the Eastern Christians didn’t really buy the argument.

    At the same time, Constantine moved the center of his empire to Istanbul, named it Constantinople, and ordered that the Western empire would forever and henceforth be ruled by a Pope.

    A Pope with an army.

    This lasted until 1054. In that year, the western Pope excommunicated the eastern Patriarch, and the Patriarch responded by excommunicating the Pope. And a great supernova was recorded in China, which lit up the night like a sun for two whole days.

    Venice

    In the middle of all this was Venice, who operated maritime trade routes between the East and West. They saw in this conflict a great opportunity, like the Roman Emperor before them.

    It may be noted that the appointment of Pope to be supreme ruler of the Western Roman Empire by Constantine, the “Donation of Constantine”, was discovered by some Renaissance collaborators of Nicholas of Cusa to have been a hoax. Most likely, a hoax sprung and used by Venice to ensure the world was engulfed in permanent conflict in which Venice itself could profit.

    In 828 AD, some Venetian merchants nicked the remains of St. Mark the Evangelist (of “Gospel of Mark” fame), and brought them to Venice. The Venetians quickly claimed St. Mark as their patron saint, and declared independence from both the Western and Eastern churches. Hence, they could operate independently of both, and as a go-between.

    The financiers of Venice who profited from the trading manipulated both sides to be always at battle, weakening each other while enriching Venice. Without this split between the two sides, Venice could not have grown as a neutral financial power in the region.

    Today

    I don’t think Pope Leo is an agent of Venice, but I do think the schism was a crafty way to split and weaken the power of Christianity. Personally, I’m more Episcopalian than Catholic. But I’m not above thinking that somewhere in the Catholic church still lives a vestigial belief that their authority over Christendom was bestowed directly by a God-Emperor.

    What does all this have to do with getting rich while repeatedly failing less and less catastrophically? It’s important to let your imagination wander now and then, because it helps to feed your soul. Who knows why we tend to obsess over ideas that appear to have little bearing on the immediate pressures of the day?

    I tend to think those urges to find out more come directly from the Great Creator himself, in the form of a little voice. Follow those urges. Take care of your business, but follow your curiosity and turn it into some kind of expression that others can enjoy.

    Also, maybe, we can take a little lesson from despicable Venice. There are massive flows of money in our world right now. It takes some creativity and chutzpah to tap into those flows with a well placed side hustle. But there’s enough flowing for everybody.

    So how about you? What’s one manual process at your job or in your life that you find tedious but necessary? Somebody else may find it so as well, and might pay for a solution you invent to automate it.

  • This One Ability is a Superpower, and You Already Have It

    This One Ability is a Superpower, and You Already Have It

    Imagine a world without keyboards. A world where keyboards are used rarely only by specialists, like a court reporters stenograph or a draftsman’s compass.

    While keyboards are found in every home, workplace, and now school backpack, I think this is going to look antiquated in about a decade.

    What will replace them? Your own voice.

    Sure, you’ve used dictation software before, like Nuance, your phone’s voice recorder, and it all just kind of sucks. Lots of umms, lots of errors and random punctuation thrown in while you pause and think.

    But just try an experiment. Take out your phone right now. Find your recording app (Voice Memo on iPhone, Recorder on Android), hit Record, and just describe something you’ve been working on. Some life problem you’ve been trying to solve. Like, who’s driving the boy to baseball tonight, since both you and your spouse are busy. Talk a lot. Repeat yourself. But record it.

    Now, take the transcript (both apps automatically generate this), copy it and paste it into your most or least favorite LLM. I usually use Google Gemini, but ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok are fine too. Paste your transcript, hit Enter, and watch what happens.

    If you’re like me, that first experience ruins the keyboard.

    This is the wave of the future, and good riddance. Your voice is one of the most miraculous parts of you.

    “I hate my voice!”

    I’m biased. I think humans are separate and above the animals as a creature, and special in the universe.

    My bias started growing long ago, but really solidified during my decade with Lyndon LaRouche. One of the things we did that in hindsight looks pretty culty, was sing. We would strive to do a voice warm up every morning as a group, and would practice singing Bach and other classical songs several times a week. Then, we would get together next to one of our tables that howled “9-11 Was An Inside Job!!” and sing beautifully to the passersby.

    There were many reasons to sing. For example, it got us used to working together to make something beautiful. It also helped strengthen our vocal cords to talk to a hundred people a day, sometimes over loud traffic and other background noise.

    But the main reason we sang is because, as humans, we use our voice to communicate ideas. Singing was a way to teach each other the mechanics of how our voices do that.

    Ideas are objects that animals just can’t understand. Maybe they can sense there’s something there, but not as anything more than “there’s something wrong” or “boss is happy”. But you can’t explain something like justice to a dog.

    We use our voice to communicate those ideas. Chimps use their voices too, and they do it to express themselves and their needs. But ideas are not sensible objects. They are only sensed in your mind.

    I don’t know if our physical vocal instrumentation was specially designed for communicating human ideas, but it fits the purpose really well. A lot of our ums and ahhs are there because we don’t know what to say next. But some are there because they’re supposed to be. It’s those pauses and inflections that don’t have to be there, that we use to “get the idea across”.

    When you speak (or sing), you’re creating sensory stimuli intentionally, to create patterns of sensory stimuli on the sense organs of the listener. That listener can pick up on the sounds or silences that aren’t supposed to be there, and use those clues to regenerate YOUR idea in THEIR minds.

    When done well, we get forms of art like poems and songs. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a pamphlet a couple hundred years ago called “In Defense of Poetry“, where he claimed that the earliest form of human language was poetry. We were testing this vocal tool’s ability to describe things that had never been described before. So, concepts that had no words yet, could still be described using this special ability of the human voice.

    AI thirsts for your voice

    Did you run that little experiment above, and drop the recording transcript into your LLM de jure?

    If so, you’ll find the response is vastly more rich than what you get when you type a prompt. I can bullshit about why this happens, like how attuned the LLM is to tiny details like punctuation, etc etc. But I think the main thing is, when you speak, you tend to follow the natural contours of thought. You’re more likely to say some detail that wouldn’t make it into your typed prompt. You might even just go down a tangent you wouldn’t have expended the finger effort to explore.

    All that extra context you provide gives the LLM so much more information to work with. Neither I nor anybody else really knows what’s going on in these models when you give them a prompt. We can wave our hands about “just spits out the statistically most likely next phrase”, and other derivations from the true logical design of these systems.

    However, even if that’s the case, speaking ideas out loud naturally and necessarily incorporate concepts that just don’t typically go together, and that a logical system certainly wouldn’t “think” to string together. This makes the output of the LLM become something like a novel, rigorous extension of your paradoxical idea concept to limits you haven’t taken the time to explore. And it does this in seconds.

    And, sometimes, it’s just quicker to say “Hey Google, put garbage bags on my grocery list in Keep” than to type it. That’s also a big win.

    People were not designed to type words on a device. We were meant to speak them into existence, and these new models make a return to that existence possible.

    End of the Keyboard

    The keyboard was a compromise – a mechanical bridge that allowed us to communicate with dumb machines. But those machines can now speak Human, and understand the intent of what we’re saying.

    As we move toward a world without keyboards, we move into a world where we can reclaim the oral tradition that Shelley and the other poets championed. We are speaking our ideas into the world, one messy miraculous word at a time.

    So open your recording software, take your hands off the keyboard, and speak a comment below. The AI will clean up the mistakes.

  • Use AI To Get The Fire Blazing

    Use AI To Get The Fire Blazing

    Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links. If you click on them and buy the products, I’ll get a cut of the profit. They’re good products!

    This post is pretty much going to be a list of ways I use AI in my general life, which I do every day. I’ve found these programs to dramatically help me overcome blocks, get things done, and make sense of my world.

    I remember when ChatGPT first stormed the ramparts back in 2022. I felt great apprehension, that they would steal my creativity and render myself just a stick of meat.

    However, when I first started creating this blog, I got hooked. I certainly wrote all the articles, but I used the AIs to get things over the goal line. Whenever I got stuck writing or looking for ideas, I would just paste my draft and my frustrations into Google Gemini, and it would IMMEDIATELY spit out ideas.

    In fact, the name Distracted Fortune came out of just such a brainstorming session. I told it who was the target audience (you, dear reader!), and what the intended story was, and then demanded 25 short titles. Over and over again. I don’t remember it ever coughing up exactly “Distracted Fortune”, but the ideas it did spit out led to the title.

    The main ways I use these programs is to generate ideas, research products, overcome blocks, stay on task, and of course, write programs. I’ll go over each in turn.

    The AI Toolbox

    There are a few AI chat bots you could turn to. I find they each have their strengths and weaknesses, their own personalities. Here’s how I choose:

    1. Google Gemini

    This is the generalist, my first stop. I have a few specific prompts stored in its memory so it can refer to specific aspects of my life and travails when answering questions. It can also search the web, save things in Google Keep, adjust or check my Google Calendar, and integrate with my Google Home smart devices.

    Also, full disclosure, I have a premium account here because I pay for Google Storage. So, you might not get as much mileage with Gemini as I do.

    1. Grok

    Grok is like my crazy conspiracy theorist buddy. It has realtime access to all of X (nee Twitter), so it’s my primary news source. I go here if I need a rundown on a specific story.

    1. Github Copilot

    This is my programming buddy. I have it integrated into my Visual Studio Code, so I can tell it what I want a program to do, and it will just write it all up for me. It’s also available directly on GitHub, where it can review my code repositories, create issues, and do other programmy things.

    1. ChatGPT

    I use this one mostly at work. It’s also a generalist, can search the web, and give me code snippets. However, I find it has the ability to think a little deeper than the other three. Really, I just use it as a different voice in the pack.

    Sometimes, if I don’t trust an answer from one of these, I will put the whole conversation into another. I recently reorganized my whole family finance review system, and had to shop the discussion back and forth to all four of these.

    Generate Ideas

    “Hey Program, give me a few ideas for a date with my wife next Friday, during the day.”

    Yes, I have a bit of a date palsy. But Gemini does not! Within moments, it will hunt through Maps to find locations open on the day and time within walking distance, see if they’re open, and see if any of the places have something interesting scheduled. Then, it will list them out, along with suggestions how to make each spot extra fun.

    You see, these programs don’t have emotions, so they don’t get hung up on the emotional weight of the ideas. They just get automatically generated.

    Research Products

    “Hey Program, I want a watch I can wear at night so I can see what time it is. Should be big enough so I can see the time without my glasses, track my sleep, and be cheap as hell. Give me three options.”

    Bam! Three options in three seconds. No more scouring product reviews and “here’s some random junk available on Amazon right now” sites. The LLMs will give a few leads right away, especially if you tell it a LOT about what you’re actually looking for. Remember, these programs have context windows that can hold around 100,000 words. They remember your entire conversation.

    Tell it what you’re looking for, criticize its first, second, third tries. You’ll eventually get to whatever you were looking for out of the billions of possibilities.

    (I ultimately got an Amazfit Band 7)

    Overcome Blocks

    I started writing this article about five times. Finally, I put my fullest draft into Gemini and told it I thought it just wasn’t going in the right direction, sounded too self deprecating, and needed to change. It suggested I cast AI not as a crutch, but more like “an exoskeleton” that accentuated my abilities. Then, it gave me a few ideas for an introduction.

    I didn’t actually use any of those introductions, but it got me moving on the current draft.

    If you’re ever having trouble starting something, just tell the LLM what’s going on, and you need some help. Sometimes, all you really need is a few novel ideas to get moving.

    Stay on Task

    Most LLMs have some kind of memory storage, where you can make it remember important details about you so you don’t have to repeat every time you return.

    Back when I was building my SigmaK annual filing program, I realized too late that I hadn’t pitched it to anybody yet, and I’d sunk a lot of time into it. After breaking down, gnashing my teeth, shaking my fist at the sky a few times, I came up with a new idea. I had Gemini help me come up with a memory it could store, which we call both “Prime Directive” and “Golden Rule”.

    Every three prompts, Gemini must warn me that I’m going down a research hole, and then ask me what person I will discuss the topic with. “No idea is finished until it’s tried on a real person.” It’s annoying, but it does get me to move and talk to people as a first step now.

    Write Programs

    My boys are into baseball. They’re also into screen time. Their parents are into NO screen time.

    After spending a few mornings prying various devices out of my oldest kid’s hands, I came up with an idea. His “foot in the door” was to explain he just wanted to check the MLB standings from the day before. I decided to write a program that would print out the standings on paper every morning at 6am.

    Out of that thought, the Screamsheet was born.

    Really, I had GitHub Copilot write the program for me. It’s since expanded from baseball scores to hockey scores, MLB news, and political news (for Dad). I even have the Grok API summarize games for me. You can see the code here.

    AI is a Life Lever

    The reason for this post isn’t to get you to use a new program. It’s to use a special kind of program to get more effective in the real world.

    I don’t talk to Gemini to keep talking to Gemini. I talk to Gemini, so I can be more present with my kids, talk more clearly with my wife, and have better control of where my money goes.

    Use these things as tools. These programs are what we always hoped search engines would be: a way to cut through the noise and find the signal.

    Now, time to put down your phone and go do something interesting.

    If you liked this article, please leave a comment below, share it with someone you know, and get on my email list!

  • Reviving a Dead Blog: My New Strategy

    Reviving a Dead Blog: My New Strategy

    It’s been a couple months since I published anything on here.

    I’m back.

    Here is the plan.

    The Web Log

    I’m not going to push for 1000-1500 word self-help guides anymore. Instead, I’m going back to the roots of the blog form.

    For now, I’ll shoot for 250-500 words instead, and talk about what I’ve been up to. Things I’ve tried, things I’m working on, failures I’m trying to learn from, and other subjects that end in prepositions.

    For example, I spent winter vacation in Stowe, Vermont, working on a product to sell to small hedge funds. It’s a report that compares annual SEC filings from companies to their prior-year filings, to identify any new or deprecated risks.

    I’m still working on it, and kind of shipped a version of one to a hedge fund guy. He never responded, and I put the kibosh on the project.

    Why?

    Because I’m committing to a different strategy now. Ship first, build second. I should have ham-fisted a report with my own eyeballs and fingers first, before trying to build a computer system to do it. Then, ship that and see if there’s any interest at all.

    If there’s no interest, why waste the time banging out code!?

    Mailing list

    Besides maintaining an exciting log of my weekly foibles and follies, I’ll send out a weekly email with my latest thoughts to you lucky subscribers. No more random links, no 1500 word manifesto. Just me, sharing what’s working and what’s not, as I build in public.

    So, put down your drink, enter your email address, and hit Subscribe.

    Thanks for reading. See you next week!

  • Burn the Ships: How to Force Yourself to Risk Success

    Burn the Ships: How to Force Yourself to Risk Success

    In 1519, Hernán Cortés faced a crisis. His men, fresh off the boat in Iberoamerica, were terrified of the powerful Aztec death cult and plotting to retreat. His answer? He burned the ships.

    Cortez ensured there was no illusion of retreat. And while few of us are launching expeditions to conquer empires, we face equally paralyzing fears every day. We aren’t afraid of human sacrifice, but we are terrified of rejection, failure, and embarrassment.

    For example, success in business is dependent on building a network of people that will help you grow your enterprise. If you don’t ask someone to buy your thing, then nobody will buy your thing. But what if you suffer from social anxiety, and dying sounds like more fun than networking events?

    This article is about how to remove retreat as an option, and force yourself to risk success.

    Case Study: Phone Calls

    I have a habit of not making phone calls to anybody. Especially my family. I’ve gone years not talking to my parents, siblings, and other relatives, simply because I hate talking on the telephone.

    The phone calls are risky. What if I agree to do something I don’t want to do? What if I say something offensive? My family is pretty liberal, but I’ve turned, and now support Trump. What if they find out, and no longer love me? What if the call eats up my whole day?

    All of those are really empty fears, but they’re fear enough to make me put off a phone call until some future date, every time.

    A few months ago, I noticed that I rarely miss scheduled meetings at work, and it’s easy for me to send out a calendar appointment. I still get hit by anxiety before the actual meeting happens, but I almost always push through and do the meeting. And it usually goes much better than I anticipated.

    Then it hit me – an accepted meeting invite is more powerful than a thousand reminders.

    So, I started doing that with my family. If I wanted to call my Mom, I’d send her a text that says “Mom, I’m going to call you on X day at Y time. OK?” Then, even if I was nervous about making the call, I did it anyhow.

    Sending out that invitation burns the ships. No retreat.

    How it works

    Calling family is not really high stakes. How about making one sales pitch for your new product? Higher risk of failure, so higher risk of not making that pitch.

    In a previous article, I talked about removing friction to get things done. If you have to take two steps instead of one to perform an important action, you’re twice as likely to avoid that action. Removing all intermediate steps, though, makes it far easier to get it done.

    When you burn the ships, though, you’re adding friction. Friction becomes your friend. You’re adding friction in front of the action of avoidance. And, yes, avoidance is an action, sometimes more difficult to carry out than whatever it is you’re avoiding!

    An invitation that gets accepted introduces the friction of tarnished reputation. “If I ditch Ben today, I’ll look like a jerk.” Scheduling a presentation before an audience does the same. Anything that includes an acknowledgment by somebody that you will do something at a given time or place adds enough friction to make it hard to avoid.

    Burn a Ship Today!

    Here are three opportunities you could use today, to get yourself off the couch and into a potentially risky but profitable situation.

    1. Schedule a phone call

    That person you’ve wanted to call every weekend for the past forty weekends? Send him a text and ask if he’s available this Saturday at noon for a 30 minute phone call. Then call him.

    1. Pre-Sell the Ghost Product.

    Stop letting your idea gather dust. Email your 10 best contacts today with a non-refundable, steeply discounted pre-order price and a firm, 30-day delivery date. You don’t have a product yet, but now you have ten paying customers and a cash-backed deadline that makes retreat more expensive than work.

    1. Interview someone

    Email some idol of yours, and ask to set up an interview (phone, in person, whatever). Then, send them a Google calendar invite.

    There are all kinds of ways to leverage this tactic to make ourselves do the things we fear. What ship are you burning this week? Let me know in the comments below.

    If this article got you off the couch, please leave a comment, share it, and get on my email list!

  • Beyond Logic: How to Listen to your Little Voice

    Beyond Logic: How to Listen to your Little Voice

    My youngest boy has been obsessed with the British band Muse recently, much to our chagrin because we want him to obsess over classical music. But, no, he takes his violin out, and uses it as an air guitar to play Uprising. He used to have a small toy acoustic guitar, which he smashed last week. Now he wants an electric guitar.

    Unplugged, an electric guitar is almost inaudible. Unless you are close by, you can’t hear it. However, plug it into the proper amplification, and the guitar’s sound can fill a large city block.

    Human beings play the part of amplifier as well, to an instrument that I call the Little Voice.

    This article presents what the Little Voice is, what I think its origin is, and how to use it. Once you understand that last part, you will become unstoppable.

    What is the Little Voice?

    When you are talking to a good liar, but you can tell they’re lying, how do you know? A good liar will never come out and say “I’m lying, sucker!”, and won’t give away any obvious clues.

    It’s hard to put your finger on the “tell”, or the unconscious mannerism or combination of facts, that gives away the lie.

    For another example, when viewing an AI generated image, you just can tell it’s not real. What in the image gave it away? Usually, after studying the picture a bit, you can find what actually tipped you off – uniformly unfocused lights, too many knuckles on the hand, face is too symmetrical, etc. But when you felt that tug that says “wait, this isn’t real…”, it wasn’t the result of logical deduction. It was almost an unconscious thought.

    The rule of thumb here is, if you think a person or image is lying, you’re probably right!

    That hunch you feel is the presence of the Little Voice.

    The Little Voice is Quiet

    As we go about our days, conscious thoughts hold reign. “Ugly pants”, “I need to email my boss”, “Pick up some toothpaste before getting home”, “ugh, that stinks”, and so forth.

    That Little Voice is there too, just too drowned out to hear.

    But if you can quiet down the loud voices and listen, you can hear that little guy, giving you all kinds of great ideas.

    Sometimes you might experience this is while reading, or while meditating (if you do that kind of thing), while praying, or while dreaming.

    For example, maybe one day you were pounding on a problem you found hard to solve, like a math problem or where to sit your Mom during Thanksgiving. Upon waking up the next day, you realize that the solution came to you in a dream. That’s your Little Voice too.

    Your Little Voice is what gives you your next great idea, helps you out of tough situations, and comes up with great punchlines to jokes. It’s the true source of your creativity.

    Who is the Little Voice?

    The concepts of the “conscious” and the “subconscious” mind are pretty standard in modern culture. You can think of the Little Voice as messages that get through to your conscious observation from your subconscious mind.

    While you’re going about your day, your subconscious is working out of sight. It takes whatever information you give it, like when you read a book, take a class, or watch a movie, and then it tries to make sense of it. The products of that work pop into your mind, as ideas.

    So, is the Little Voice, your voice?

    I read a great book recently, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, all about how to reawaken your creativity. Reading that book is really what got me all excited about the Little Voice, though I’d had this concept from years ago. In it, Cameron suggests that that Little Voice is actually the voice of God. Then, she waves her hands a bunch to say you don’t have to believe in a great, bearded gentleman in the sky for her methods to work.

    But I think she’s not wrong. I think it’s one way that God expresses His love for His creation – he talks to us, and helps us.

    At the very least, it’s a playful, childlike part of you, that pipes up when you are listening for it.

    Whoever that voice belongs to, when you hear it, you should follow its advice.

    Learn to tune in that Little Voice

    Here are a few techniques that I use to hear my own Little Voice better. Maybe some of them will work for you.

    1. Walking

    A simple ten-minute walk fills that playful side of you with new sensations and helps you quiet the noise.

    1. Praying

    An ancient way to listen to that voice, the ultimate goal of prayer is to listen for the voice of God.

    1. Morning Pages

    This practice helps you squeeze out all the “pus-thoughts” to clear a space for creativity.

    1. Taking Action

    This is the most critical step. Cameron describes the voice like a curious child—you must follow its whims to show that you’re listening and encourage it to keep talking.

    Like the electric guitar, that Little Voice inside you is tiny and quiet. It is only through you that its will can be made manifest. You are the amplifier. Let that Little Voice sing.

    If you liked this article, please leave a comment below, share it with someone you know, and get on my email list!

  • Why Planning Less May Be a Better Plan

    Why Planning Less May Be a Better Plan

    Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links. If you click on them and buy the products, I’ll get a cut of the profit. I promise they’re good products!

    Story time!

    I embarked on my productivity porn addiction back around 2013, when I discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). After skimming a bootleg version of his book on my tiny iPhone, I reckoned I had found the secret to life!

    In short, the goal of GTD is to offload all chores, plans, and to-do lists to a filing cabinet, to free your mind from the burden of remembering everything. Instead of never getting to large projects, you break all projects down into a series of smaller actions, listed on a piece of paper for you. Each day, you get a bunch of those next-actions in front of you and complete them.

    Instead of using your mind as your to-do list, you can now use your mind to be creative while still getting everything done.

    That’s it. Mind like water.

    (Before you true believers out there pillory me, yes there’s more to it. Like, the machine that prints out labels for all the file folders.)

    I got obsessed, bought two beat up filing cabinets, and filled them with file folders for everything in my life.

    And I just couldn’t keep up.

    I’ve since tried a few ways to approximate Allen’s write-out-all-steps approach, and sometimes have made a bit of progress. But I could never quite make it take off.

    The part that filled me with guilt and failure, was that I just couldn’t bring myself to take every project and break it up into action chunks. While dealing with this guilt, and getting some things done half-assed, I kept wondering if maybe there was another way.

    Then, a few days ago, it hit me. There is another way!

    In this article, I’ll describe this other way, which is more like mathematical induction than exhaustive introspection. And, I think both you and I will become happier and more productive in the end.

    Enjoy Failure

    I’m reading a book called Fail Fast, Fail Often, by John Krumboltz and Ryan Babineaux. Their strategy so far feels a little like a learned faith. They studied the happiness and success of over a bajillion people, and have come to the conclusion that the most successful and happy among us act first, and plan rarely.

    Most of us are the opposite – we plan always, act never. The authors instead found that it’s through trying new things and failing, that people encounter the most opportunities for growth and success. Those of us that plan out all our actions before taking the first step tend to blame everyone for our failures, while the fault really lies in our lack of action.

    It is by fearlessly blasting toward little failures that we learn, and at the same time experience life in a way that the planners could no.

    The behavioral therapy these authors suggest are 1. follow your curiosity, and 2. if you feel like doing something, figure out how to fail at it as soon as possible.

    But how do I know if my curiosity is leading me in the right direction? And, if I fail a bunch of times, won’t I just go broke and lose my house?

    To answer these questions, we need a little bit of mathematics.

    Calculus!

    I know you failed calculus long ago (so did I!), and there’s no way some dry subject like this can help with human psychology.

    But it can. Give it a minute.

    Think about power lines hung from electric poles. They hang in a conspicuous “U” shape called a catenary. It turns out that every chain, rope, bridge, string of lights, whatever, suspended between two points, will hang in that same shape. It’s pretty easy to do experiments to investigate this shape. For example, get a chain necklace, or just a length of chain, and hold it between your hands. That U is the catenary.

    If you get a friend’s help, you can demonstrate something surprising about the catenary. While you hold the chain, have your friend pinch the chain somewhere else gently, so the chain stays pretty still. Now, you let go of the string on that end. The rest of the chain will remain in the identical catenary shape.

    If you follow this experiment all the way down to the smallest bit of chain, the shape continues to remain.

    German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz discovered that the shape goes all the way to the smallest conceivable length of chain, of length zero. He called that smallest length the infinitesimal. That infinitesimal can’t be a straight line, but must be some shape that represents the catenary’s curvature.

    Leibniz showed a surprising relationship between that infinitesimal and the full catenary curve. He invented a new math called integration, where all those infinitesimals can be added together to form the entire, beautiful catenary curve.

    In other words, the smallest bit of action, constructed properly and repeated over and over, is sufficient to recreate the full goal of the curve.

    The challenge Leibniz and his collaborators, like Johann Bernoulli, faced, was to create a new mathematics to both describe this minimum-maximum relationship, but also to discover the relationship for new types of curves. This mathematics is today called “Calculus”, and it is crucial for understanding all areas of physics.

    Tiny Actions, Giant Results

    We can apply the laws of infinitesimal calculus to our own lives. I call this “trust the process”.

    The way this works is by identifying certain behaviors that tend to aim towards success, and then practicing those behaviors even when they lead to failure. And when failure strikes, learn from it.

    In fact, Krumboltz and Babineaux stress that failure, itself, should be a daily behavior!

    The authors pack their short book with examples of people who apparently bumble into wild success. For example, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X). Dorsey got interested in the network problem of dispatch – like, selecting the best cops to get to the scene most efficiently. He got hired to a company to work on their dispatch software, and the company soon went bust at the end of the 1990s. Instead of jumping back into programming, Dorsey went and dabbled at massage therapy, botanical illustration, babysitting, and fashion design. Several years later, while working as a programmer again for a podcasting company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, he pitched the idea that would become Twitter. The rest is history.

    Krumboltz and Babineaux show, from various angles, that trying new things and failing is not only a great path toward success, but an efficient path. Instead of pinning your hopes of success on some future goal that you might never get to, you spend your time doing little experiments and learning from them.

    They suggest a few ground rules for picking an action to take, so you’re not just failing for failure’s sake. Here are the ones I thought most important, found in the chapter called “Think Big, Act Small”:

    1. Keep it specific

    Don’t pick something vague, like “start writing better”. It needs to be something that happens at a point, like “send a sales email to a bunch of my friends and family this afternoon”.

    1. Keep it easy

    Instead of trying to bench press 500 pounds right now, and getting discouraged, try benching 50 pounds instead.

    1. Keep it fun

    Cutting off a finger is not fun, though it’s probably pretty easy and specific. Do something that will make you smile instead.

    1. Keep it immediate

    If the action occurs way in the future, like planning to hit up a networking conference two months from now, you’ll have too much time to talk yourself out of it. And, that’s two months wasted not taking any other risks! Pick something you can do today.

    1. Keep it cheap

    The point here is that the only hurdle should be fear. You don’t want to stick your life savings into something that might pay out in a year. It needs to be something that, if it results in failure, doesn’t set you back at all but rather provides some form of lesson.

    1. Keep it real

    “Think about the good things that happened yesterday” doesn’t count. The action has to be something that will move your life forward, like “show my coworker my productivity side project and get his feedback.” Or, “send my most recent article to ADDitude magazine and see if they’ll publish it”.

    1. Keep it social

    This was the “ah ha” step for me, since I tend to be on the bashful side. A key to success is to be seen and heard by others. Remember, ultimately, other people give you money and other valuables. These things do NOT grow on trees in your own personal garden. Showing your little project to someone else will provide some form of feedback, and may open a door to a new experience or opportunity.

    Trust the Process

    That cycle of “act small – fail – learn” may sound somewhat awful. Like some kind of tedious homework assignment that never ends. But here’s the surprising bit Krumboltz and Babineaux drive home: this process actually builds happiness along the way.

    When you manage to take just one tiny, low-risk step driven by curiosity, you get a little jolt of confidence. That confidence delivers its own ounce of joy. And that little spark of joy? It creates momentum, making you want to try the next small thing. Suddenly, each tiny step you take – even the ones that end in a “teaching failure” – has the power to make you happier right now.

    Sure, trusting that these small, sometimes fumbling steps will eventually lead somewhere worthwhile might feel like a leap of faith. But isn’t it more realistic, more attainable, than rigidly following a complex set of rules towards some vague future state that might contain happiness?

    So, what can you do today that could lead to a teaching failure?

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