6 minute read

Friday Thoughts & Learnings

This week Oliver Burkeman helps me become a better procrastinator, the creator of CAPTCHA and co-founder of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, teaches me how to solve two problems with one solution and James Clear gives me even more reasons to hit the gym to change my brain for the better.  Enjoy!

Becoming a better procrastinator

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

As a counterpoint to the seemingly endless pursuit of productivity, I’ve chosen this week to dive into an alternative view.

Oliver Burkeman points out in his book Four Thousand Weeks that an average person alive today will live to 80 years old.  Which is about 4,000 weeks.  In my case I hope I’ve got a bit more than 1,500 weeks to go. 

It’s a similar idea to what I’ve heard about raising kids.  You only have about 18 summer holidays with them so make the most of each one!

His main point is we are becoming overly obsessed with mastering something we will never be able to achieve.  That is, you’ll never be able to accomplish everything you’d like to do in the time you’re alive.  

It’s a modern problem we’ve created for ourselves following the invention of the clock and the industrial revolution idea to pay workers for their time.

The more you try to conquer your time, the more frustrated, stressed, and empty you feel, rather than satisfied you are doing more than before.  He calls this the paradox of limitation.

Facing up to this is liberating he says and gives you agency to choose to live a life that has meaning, which ultimately makes you feel better than obsessing over doing more of what’s not important.

I found it interesting to learn about German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s view that all we are is a limited amount of time.  So how we choose to spend our time, in his view, is actually who we are. 

So, striving to get everything done may not help you do what should be done and being the person, we want to be. 

Oliver also points out the reason doing work that matters can at times cause discomfort is that it forces us to face our limitations.  You might find that you don’t yet have the talent to pull off a creative project.

So, you tend to delay or avoid working on it by succumbing to distractions.  (Note: In last week’s post I shared how Rick Rubin overcomes mental blocks by saying to himself what he’s doing is just a ‘diary post’ that no one can criticise.)

Solutions

Oliver’s primary solution to our modern productivity mania is to become a better procrastinator. 

That is to prioritise limited goals, pay yourself first with your time and be clear on what you won’t spend time on. 

He suggests letting go of over planning and a ‘when-I-finally’ mindset that puts conditions on our ability to enjoy the present moments of life.    In the eyes of the universe, writing a book or pursuing any goal that you care about is a worthy way to spend your 4,000 weeks.

This way you get to experience more of what matters to you in the limited time you have. 

Note:  Only 49 weeks of 2024 to go.

Solving two problems with one solution

Guy Raz’s interview with Luis von Ahn

Luis von Ahn invented the software CAPTCHA as a PhD student and founded Duolingo, a language learning app that’s valued at US$9 billion. 

In 2000, Luis von Ahn was a 21 yr old computer science student when he learned about one of Yahoo's biggest problems at a talk he attended: automated bots were signing up for millions of free email accounts and generating huge amounts of spam.

It became his PhD research topic to find a solution.  How can bots be stopped from opening new email accounts? 

Luis boiled the problem down to answering this question:

What can computers automatically create AND only humans can do that will prove they are human?

Luis found that computers can create distorted images, but they can’t read them. 

This became the idea behind the software CAPTCHA, the squiggly letters and images that appear on a website we need to decipher to prove we are human and not a bot.

He wrote some code to prove his idea would work and sent it to Yahoo.  Within a week of giving the solution to Yahoo, it was functional and live.  Surprisingly he gave away that idea for free.

After a few years of people giving him a hard time for wasting 10 seconds of their life whenever they needed to prove their human credentials to a computer, Luis pondered how to do something useful with the roughly 500,000 hours a day people collectively across the globe were using CAPTCHA. 

He then became aware of another problem.  It was proving to be very hard and costly to digitise a publishing archive of over 100 million published books because computers at the time found it difficult to read all the words on scanned pages.   At the time roughly 30% of the words on every scanned page were not readable by a computer because they were blurry.

This new problem, and a chance meeting with someone from the New York Times, led to the development of reCAPTCHA.  

In addition to using allocated words to prove their human credentials, users were prescribed a word a computer couldn’t read from a scanned New York Times archive article to decipher.  If 10 people typed the same word to the archive article image they assumed it would be correct.  This became an early form of crowdsourcing. 

Because Facebook was using reCAPTCHA software at the time, it took only a week to digitise an entire year of New York Times archive articles.  Luis later sold reCAPTCHA to Google.

It was awesome way to create a secondary solution from solving an initial problem. 

Luis then went on to use his crowdsourcing experience to create the most popular language learning app Duolingo. 

How exercise fuels motivation as we age

James Clear, in a secret chapter to his book Atomic Habits: The biology of bad behaviour, shares research that shows how changes in our biology significantly influence our motivation and behaviours. 

An example of how biology influences our actions and motivation is how we age. 

The natural process of aging influences dopamine production.

Dopamine peaks around age twenty, declines gradually through your early thirties, and falls further as you enter your forties and beyond.

Dopamine levels can drop by about 25 percent over your lifetime. As a result, motivation tends to decline over time.

For some people, life begins to feel less urgent as they age.  The desire to explore new things for some tends to drop over time.

Ultimately, all our actions are biological in origin.

James says “…motivation is nothing more than the release of dopamine and other chemicals. The state that you call “pleasure” or “satisfaction” is simply the firing of the reward system throughout the brain.  Naturally, if these biological and chemical interactions change, so do our behaviours.”

Solution

Richard Burchard’s research in High Performance Habits found over the long-term high performers exercised regularly and were physically fit. 

Research has shown weight baring exercise for people over 40 increases production of dopamine as well as stems the natural muscle wastage caused by the aging process.  Aging causes 3%-8% muscle mass loss per decade after age 40.

If you’re on the other side of 40 (as I am) time to hit the gym for that new year’s resolution of getting fitter (and smarter) this year!

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