Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

Lost Keys

In the frantic rush of the morning, I’m scrambling many things. I’ve got to shower, eat breakfast, work-out, gather my things for work. In this scramble I inevitably ask myself, “where are my keys?”. If I was wise, they would be in my bag. If I was unwise, I start my descent into madness.

In my key’s perspective, it’s a journey through my room. First, they’ll be in my pocket, ready to open a door. Then they will be on my work table, eager to see me when I’m ready to leave. Then they’ll be on top of the drawer because I’m changing my pants. Then they’ll be god knows where because I was in the middle of another activity and decided to place them wherever was convenient. Then I’ll spend an inextricable amount of time looking for them.

It’s times like these I feel helpless to my lack of coordination. I hate my forgetfulness because I lack the foresight to place things in proper places. My keys have a place in my bag, and should always be there. And for the scenario where I don’t bring my bag, it should be in my pocket. But therein lies the problem. If I know I won’t bring my bag, where do I place my keys when I change my pants?

A System

When I was working in manufacturing, we implemented a 5 step program to achieving lean manufacturing. One of those steps was setting things in place. In one scenario, say you use a hammer. You take the hammer from its proper placement, use it for a bit, then place it back. To make things easier, one of our technicians placed an outline of a hammer so it is easy to place the hammer in its proper place. The alternative is placing the hammer wherever, which would be harder for the next person who wants to use the hammer.

With this practice, I should be able to implement it in my personal life. However, I am rarely open to the idea of changing my space. This is prompted by a stubborn attitude that I should remember everything. Added to that, I find moving things around my room to be a chore. And it’s all over when I consider something to be a chore because I’ll try to wiggle out of it any way I can.

Applied System

Back to they keys. Because I lack a system to place my keys in the same place for every scenario, I find it difficult to find them when I’ve placed them in a spot at the time I thought was memorable. I’ve thought about a cubby, or a bowl, but haven’t acted on it. I’m skeptic it works for me.

Question for those readers. Do you follow a system for placing your things at home. How do you remember where you put your things? Does your system cover all scenarios?

Addendum

I’ll be honest. After drafting this letter, I’m going to give the bowl a try. At least I can cross it off my list if it really doesn’t work. Then it’s back to the drawing board.

My bestie has a romanticized version of my life where I am a perky, social butterfly always engaging in social activities. This isn’t true. I spend most days alone when I’m outside of work. I tend to keep my personal life in solidarity.

I’m not averse to being around people. I’ve made the decision to be content being alone. My state of solidarity allows me to relish my life in different ways than super extroverts.

In practice, I hang out with friends, spend time on the phone with family, and rest around a fire pit with my housemates. To my bestie’s credit, I am a social butterfly at social events. But those are anomalies in my daily routine.

I wasn’t always at peace with this idea of being alone. I grew up in a large household where everyone shared everything. There weren’t enough restrooms to go around and weren’t enough space to spend alone. I was reliant on the people around me; I would get sad if I was alone too long.

Once, my grandmother took forever to pick me up from school. Turns out, she fell asleep at the wheel a few moments after she entered her car. This was before everyone had cell phones, so there was no way of reaching her. I was close to tears waiting at the school steps, contemplating whether I should walk home alone.

In college, I had times where no one wanted to grab lunch or dinner, so I would go to the campus cafeteria alone. I found the experience miserable because I didn’t socialize with strangers at other tables. My resolution was I brought food back to the dorm and eat in the common area instead where there would always be people hanging out.

This habit continued into my early working life. I had some of these same fears eating at restaurants alone. In a conversation with my housemate’s cousin, she told me about her experience after beating cancer. She said she had no worries about being alone anymore. There’s too little time in life not to appreciate good restaurants, so if that means going alone, so be it. Her motto in life made me re-think the way I approach being alone.

And being alone doesn’t mean one-on-one time with your phone. Quite the opposite. I like to bring a composition notebook and write or draw if I’m in a restaurant. Or people watch. Or talk to the waiter.

I was on a business trip this past week. There was two days there was no one around to grab dinner with. I’ve used the “alone” mantra to justify eating alone. It was a great experience because I got to talk with a sushi chef and an bar tender about their experiences. Also, there was a lot of people watching. So the big lesson learned is not every activity alone has to be depressive. Look past your ego, suck it up, and enjoy yourself alone.

Intro

The emotional mind is an elephant and the reasoning mind is the elephant rider. The rider has limited control over the elephant. The elephant is heavy and not always willing to listen to the rider. The rider might not listen to the elephant and demand the elephant follow orders by sheer will. The internal conflicts come when neither can work together.

When I was younger, I thought age tames emotion. But after years of watching my dad get angry at little things, I threw that assumption in the waste basket.

I have been misguided by my emotional mind. If I thought about death, my emotional side kicked in and took over reasoning.

Think about the people who will miss you. Think about your body decaying. Think about the future without you.

Even as I got older, those worries lingered. Depression set and anxiety attacks appeared.

Similar feelings arose when I received rejection letters from grad school, isolated myself from loved ones, and after nasty break-ups.

Meditation, Part 1

So, I tried meditation. I learned emotion can be examined and felt. My emotional side can overwhelm me, and I have fought the feeling head on. Instead, meditation says to examine the feeling and to let it happen. You achieve this through a non-judgment lens.

I witnessed the elephant the first few times I meditated. I approached meditation through a book I read. It stressed posture, breathing, and examination of the body. After the second week, my rational mind didn’t see the elephant. It imagined the daydream version of it. Unable to relax as I had with the previous week, I quit.

Seneca

I applied philosophical thought to the response of my elephant. Seneca, Roman philosopher from two millennia ago, taught his pupils to engage in a morning ritual of telling themselves what was the worst possible thing that could happen that day. Imagine it in detail, trying to put yourself in your own shoes. Imagine what you will be doing, how you’ll be feeling, etc. If the worst were to happen, you would be mentally prepared.

This exercise could be morbid, like imagining you or your significant other’s demise. This might be trivial, like getting angry at drivers who cut you off. Whichever end of the spectrum your imagination takes you, you are experiencing that feeling in a controlled dose.

I did this exercise a bunch at my last job. My manager pulled the rug from our projects a few too many times, and I kept feeling wrecked. In the parking lot before going in the building, I’d ask myself what’s the worst thing that could happen that day.

I could be fired. My project could be pulled. I could receive a demotion.

And after a few days of this exercise, imagining what it would feel like to be first, I wasn’t scared of that prospect any more. And I took that insight and wrote my resignation letter.

Meditation, Part 2

I revisited meditation last year when I got a guided meditation app. This was a lot more relaxing as I placed myself in the guide’s practice. I dedicated a chunk of time each morning to practice. If I couldn’t practice at home, I’d take the time on my train ride to work to do it. The app was more motivating, obtaining badges and tracking my progress.

My practice was less examination of emotion than it was a stress reliever. The rider was able to spend more time working with the elephant, and the elephant sensed the rider was less stressed.

After a long vacation, I stopped. I didn’t want to meditate around friends. When I came home, I dropped the practice. But now as I’m writing this, I may give it a 4th chance because I recognize the benefits.

Conclusion

The rider holds the reins of the elephant, but the elephant overpowers the rider. When the rider is too stubborn to acknowledge the elephant, the elephant dictates the outcome. Many times, this is the voice of instant gratification.

When the rider can notice the elephant’s resistance, the rider’s best option is to roll with it. Now, ask yourself, how can I work with the elephant, and not against it? As the rider, we have the ability to plan ahead and take lessons learned from past failures. Now apply that to your everyday conflicts.

Part of the series, “Admission Failure”

The Reaction Dilemma

I made a $400 mistake. I arrived at JFK 6

I asked the ticketing agent if I could grab an earlier flight. She told me it would cost an extra $400 with charges and fees for a flight that left in a few hours. To add salt to the wound, only middle seats were available.

My body said to stay put, but my mind said to go home. I bit the bullet and paid the extra amount. A few moments later, I regretted my decision. But I went through with it, and I cursed myself because it was the worst decision I made all year.

That was four years ago. Today, I wonder what prompted me to make such a mistake. Everything that ticket agent said was rational, yet my thoughts were caught in a sea of emotions. I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it to work the next day. In reality, I would have made it to work on time given there were no flight delays.

I was reacting to my situation without thinking about the long-term consequences. This feeling goes by many names, like fire-fighting, and if you are surrounded by this behavior, you are likely to adopt this frantic role. The behavior is anchored by the perception of time. “There’s not enough time to think” could be the slogan. And in this slip of time, I’m out of control.

Busy Mind

Growing up, I remember watching “The Price is Right”. Each contestant on the game show must make decisions within a short time frame.

Many can’t think straight with the flashing lights, the potential prizes they could have, and the emotional burst of being on television. They look out to the crowd and try to take the advice of other audience members, likely the ones they came with, in hopes their shouting could be the right answer.

This environment promotes a chaotic mind. How can you think straight with the noise? The show’s producers know this and tell the game developers to use common price biases to throw the contestant off.

For example, there’s a game where the contestant has four items to determine if the item is higher or lower than the tagged price. You can bet the game developers take advantage of anchoring, a bias where the contestant will be affected by the first price they see. When the contestant plays this game, the short decision window clouds their judgment, and that’s susceptible to anchoring.

Online shopping is a similar experience. I have many temptations to buy things I don’t need because of the convenient factor. For this reason, I’ve turned off one-click shopping on Amazon as a safe guard.

My weakness is making decisions around limited time deals, like flash sales, items at the checkout line, and Black Friday. If you’ve read my newsletter on catalogs, my seeds catalog was an instant buy.

The recurring solution I’ve found to all of these decisions is to bench the decision for a certain amount of time. For instant shopping, it’s 24 hours. For the flight change, it’s ten minutes. This time period is reserved for calming time — to get rid of extra baggage and emotion when making my decision.

We’ll explore more next week on anger and the calming down effect.

Part of the series, “Admission Failure”

I fail to look past how spotty my memory is. It’s embarrassing how often I give in to the temptation that I will always remember everything pertinent in the future.

While perusing the video store, a stranger walked up to me and asked for some movie recommendations. We got to chatting and it turns out we had similar tastes in movies and video games. I found out we were both around the same age. We were both teenagers; he was a year older. He told me he had moved to this area a month prior and was looking for new friends. I told him I’d be happy to be his friend, and he invited me to come to his place to play video games. Yet I had this tinge I was forgetting something. When I got home later that evening, my dad was furious I had missed my piano lesson.

Surely my memory should be better today. Nope. I’m still failing to remember meetings, engagements, and birthdays. There are some differences between my teenager self and how I operate today. I have a set of strategies to minimize these spots in my memory.

Using a Calendar

I’ve hated time-boxing when I was younger. Chunking time made me feel like I couldn’t have any unstructured time. But I’ve looked past it after I saw how much benefit I got out of it. The important thing is to have the calendar ubiquitous. For example, if I am planning to attend an event next month, I will put it on the calendar immediately.

There’s a major flaw. I forget to do mark my calendar every now and again, especially if I’m busy that moment. Take last weekend as an example. I scheduled to have brunch with some friends, but I forgot to mark it on the calendar. Another friend asked me to help him out around the same time. I agreed and put that in the calendar instead. It was the night before when I had my “a ha” moment.

Calendars don’t work for everyone. You will have to use the tool you feel most comfortable with. It could be a bullet journal, or a paper calendar, or a wad of post-it notes shoved in your pocket.

Delegate When You Can

I suck at the follow-up. I’ll be at a meet-up and forget reach back to people who gave me their card. Let me let you in on a secret about productive people. They are great at delegation. There’s not enough time throughout the day to do everything you can imagine. At most, I can reliably do one thing a day. Anything more is a godsend. So ask the other person to reach back instead. Or ask them to do something they can’t refuse for you. An example can be to make the other person text you when they get home so you don’t get worried about them.

Write Personal Messages

I love personal messages to myself. I have trouble listening to other people, so I listen to myself a lot better if I wrote them in a tone I’d listen to. Here’s a calendar event I set for Saturday, March 3rd, 2018.

Dear Jeremy,
I know you have a tendency to neglect your taxes until April. Don’t do that. Instead, this is a reminder for you to get started on them today.

By now, you should have all of your tax documented gathered. Most likely, you’ve piled them in the corner of your desk. Here’s a checklist of all of the documents you should have.

— List of Documents —

Next steps is to login to Turbo Tax and log in the data. You have kept your donation receipts in this folder.

In case you need it, here’s last year’s tax return.

Cheers, and happy tax filing,
Ghost of Past Jeremy

Automate When Possible

An extension of all three of these ideas culminate to a set it and forget it mindset. If I set the email for next year, why can’t I have it recurring every year?

Or automation could be behavioral. For example, if someone gives me a book recommendations, I have an automatic response to write it down. Developing routines saves us mental energy. Automated strategies are not always technological.

Final Thoughts

These strategies are guidelines, not a matter of fact. Adopt one or all if you so choose. Or modify them to fit your needs. The world’s too much for a one-size-fits-all approach.

I’ve gotten too cozy on the sidelines. Ive justified my position by lame excuses, like “I wouldn’t know how to help. A moment from middle school stands out.

Help to Acquaintances

On the journey to school, I noticed a group a guys harassing a girl from my school. They were across the street, so I stopped and stood there watching. I was one of many bystanders watching my fellow school-mate get angry at these boys. She was screaming at them to stop teasing and calling her name’s. I could have run across the street and intervened, but I didn’t, thinking one of the other kids would help. They didn’t either. After several minutes of heated escalation, a teacher intervened and had the crowd scramble.

Help to Family

These events of “should haves” and “could haves” filled me with regret. The most painful one happened a few months later. One night, as my grandmother was leaving my parent’s house, she fell down on our front porch steps. My parents rushed outside as I watched from the window. They carried her back in the house and my father called emergency services. My grandmother had lost some blood and was loopy.

During the brief time before the ambulance came, I sat in another room frozen. I didn’t offer to help; I was crying because I thought I was losing my grandmother. During the time leading up to this event, I was going through my first major depressive period.

The ambulance came and did some initial diagnosis. They determined my grandmother was fine. The EMT took her to the hospital just in case.

When the chaos subsided, my mom asked me why I didn’t help out. I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t sleep that night, wondering why I froze up. My belief was I couldn’t bear witness to someone dying. But my grandmother didn’t die that night.

It was after my depressive period that I could see more clearly the problem. My resolution to any similar situations would be to set aside emotions and focus on the task at hand. People involved in a crisis matter beyond my emotions. And I know that line’s not always clear, but let’s not open that set of moral ambiguities.

Help To Strangers

Two years ago, I was challenged with a different dilemma. I was with a date walking around at night when we met a beggar. The beggar was younger than us, a woman with disheveled hair and ragged clothes. She was begging for food for her daughter and her.

The fraud center of my brain began to whirl. My date looked at me to see what I would do. I decided to help this young woman, so we bought her a pizza at the restaurant nearby. As we were waiting, she told us about her money situation, how embarrassing it was to ask for help, and how many people ignored her. She thanked us profusely when the food arrived and we went on our separate ways.

Takeaways

I’m not going to talk about how to evaluate panhandlers and beggars. That’s its own article. Instead, here are two takeaways.

1

My college economics professor started each lecture with a simple saying. “Doing nothing is always an option.” At the time, he was explaining financial opportunity costs. I’m translating it to everyday decisions. If you are on the crossroads of sideline and intervention, choosing the sidelines is a choice. It is up to you to determine if it’s the right choice.

2

I was at the National Civic Day of Hacking event in San Francisco, and the organizer captain, Jesse Biroscak, delivered an outro. To paraphrasing a point I thought was important, “You are the only ones who can help. Look around the room. This is it. There is no one else.” I looked around the room and saw around 30 people.

“Oh my gosh,” I thought, “he’s right. If I want to see change, I’m going to need to start the campaign.”

Jesse was talking about projects for the SF Brigade. One can easily translate that to everyday situations. See debris in the middle of the road? Call highway patrol. A blind person is judging if they should cross the road? Tell them if the coast is clear. Have the skills to help out a non-profit? If you can make the time, do some pro-bono work.

My glasses were falling apart. I owned them for 4 years and couldn’t persuade myself to get a new pair. To obtain a new pair, I’d need a new prescription. And being sensitive about my eyesight and didn’t want to face the prospect of the optometrist diagnosing me a stronger prescription.

So I did the insensible. I neglected to replace the pair of glasses. And I had no excuse. I had health insurance. There was a hurdle in my mind I couldn’t jump over.

The hurdle started with facing the news I will have a stronger prescription. Which leads to being deemed legally blind because my eyesight had deteriorated. Which triggered my fear of being blind.

At that point, I’d think about something else. When the topic came up again, I’d repeat this cycle of worry, hesitation, and negligence.

I broke down when bad became worse. On of the nostril pads came off, so I needed a replacement. I came to my senses and figured out the first actionable step.

Breaking the Cycle

I went online to determine how to schedule an appointment with an optometrist. My hospital website had had online booking. Bingo.

I went in for the appointment and to my surprise, my eyes were the same as they were 4 years ago. By letting myself slip, I failed to see the absurdity of my own bias. All the moments of worry were for nothing. All the times I wondered what if, wasted.

An Introduction

We all make mistakes. We all fail to do, or sometimes not do, the important things in life. I want to raise the bar and stop this repetition.

The negligence problem is one of my failures. It’s one of many failures. Each week I’ll break down a different repeated mistake. My aim is to generalize failures common to everyone, although my intent is to write it for my future self if I were to relapse. If this model helps other people, that’s an added benefit.

Bookmark this for later. Re-read often. We’re going to have a fun two months exposing my weaknesses.