I am currently at the Praxis company retreat in Wilmington, NC, with my colleagues at a beach house with nothing but a notebook, a pen, and several books. No phones. No computers. No tablets. No screens at all. (This post was written earlier this week and scheduled for today.)
I occasionally post on different tips that help me strive towards excellence in my constant path of deschooling myself, creating things, and manifesting my values in the world (see the PIE category). One of those themes is minimizing. I’ve gotten rid of most everything I own minus my books and some minimal furniture and a coffee press. I give myself an overarching theme every day to strive towards. I have weekly goals to achieve. Monthly writing goals, sales quotas, and a given number of days I promise myself I will be on the road.
Yet I am constantly distracted.
As Sam Altman noted on his blog the other day, removing distractions on our cognitive processes is astonishingly difficult:
12) Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.
These “things that don’t really matter” come in plenty of colors. For some people it is gossip around the office and the neighborhood. For others it may be television. For me, it is the desire to constantly be connected to the world around me. I’ve recently downsized from my full-sized laptop to an incoming Surface 3 for this reason (fewer things to carry, fewer distractions on the desktop).
Our retreat gives me the opportunity to really delve into a book in a way that is normally very difficult for myself. Usually when I sit down, my phone will ping with a new email or notification, an alarm will go off on the computer, and I will be off managing 12 different connections at once. Flow is not achieved nearly as often as I would like.
I’ll be sitting down with a handful of books and be taking notes on them. Some of them are new reads for me. Most of them I am revisiting for that experience of flow with a clear goal of what to achieve from them.
These are:
- Antifragile, Nassim Taleb
- The Counterrevolution of Science, FA Hayek
- Zero to One, Peter Thiel
- The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden
- The Politics of Obedience, Étienne de La Boétie
As I’ve noted before in my posts on the schooled mind, there’s a mindset of constructivism that is the consequence of many years of traditional schooling. This is not purposeful brainwashing and indoctrination. Rather, it is a way of viewing the world as a series of closed systems with obvious institutions built into them. Each of these books above touches on this mindset, though totally outside of the schooling setting. Taleb speaks of systems that benefit from disorder and chaos, Hayek of the different ways of doing science and viewing the world, Thiel of what is needed for companies to achieve success, Branden on how individuals achieve success, and de La Boétie on how individuals keep themselves fixed within systems that do not benefit them.
My goal is to tie these works together more explicitly and build my own thesis against the constructivist mind.
The world cannot be planned and designed. We know this much. The collapse of the Soviet Union taught us this about economies. Then why do we use schools that function on a pedagogy that runs totally counter to that lesson?