Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

Lessons taken from Nerina Pallot’s Year of EPs

For every month of 2014, Nerina Pallot has released an EP. Each EP contains five new songs. Nerina is a British musician whose past works include her own releases as well as writing and producing songs for Kylie Minogue and Diana Vickers. I’ve had her new music on repeat and it excites me she took on such a challenge. It’s a huge commitment to release something every month, trying to break free of that creative struggle we all face. We begin to create something, begin crafting, grow bored, and move on to a different project. In her explanation video, she says she has started more albums than finishing them for this reason. Out of my own fears of reaching a plateau stage of my skills and projects, I want to examine where one stalls with creative work, what it means to make a commitment, and what kind of sacrifices and risks there are.

We are nearly there, friends… It’s due in no small part to your encouragement, benign disbelief that it would actually happen and wonderful feedback. You are all always in the back of my mind when I sit down at a piano to write and when I’m wondering whether I’m going slowly mad and if anybody’s listening anyway. You keep reminding me that you are, so please keep willing me on in the home straight. I promise not to let you down.

— Nerina Pallot’s Newsletter, November 9th

Nerina has met her goal every month. I bought at her EPs every month and have been following her progress along the way by listening to her music, checking her twitter page and reading her newsletters. Her hope with the project is it will help her grow as an artist. In her past, she has started a song, works on it, can’t come to call it complete, and gets excited about another song while leaving her current one in limbo. It’s a curse of perfection, and I can relate in my writing when I leave something written for weeks untouched and realize I don’t want to write on this topic anymore. For example, last week’s letter on a year in review started as an excellent idea until I started writing it. I grew to hate it after realizing I’m just copying others’ year in review. I re-wrote it on the day I was to release it and now it’s relatively acceptable, but by far not my favorite letter.

When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again. ‘Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,’ writes author Alain de Botton.

— Austin Kleon, from the book “Show Your Work”

Mr. Kleon addresses everything I fear in creative work — reaching the plateau phase. At some point, you realize you aren’t moving forward anymore, and you wonder why the work you’re doing doesn’t make you think. Maybe it’s your job, your relationship, the conversations you have with others. No matter, we don’t grow, and we find ourselves saying fairly arrogant things, like “that’s the why it just is” when we’re asked why we aren’t improving. This is a mental game, and there are strategies to move away from this slump. I talked in the past about being uncomfortable, but how does one push themselves to that state? Nerina forced herself to reach that level by announcing her ‘Year of EPs’ goal.

It’s difficult to do one-up yourself. The fact is we try so hard to make everything better that we forget that it’s the crafting in which we got into this business, not the fame and fortune. I’ve heard time and again if you’re in it for the money, you’re in the wrong line of business. Creative endeavors involve a lot of time and effort for something someone will notice as such little output. But that’s the true magic of creative work, and what happens behind the scenes is just as fascinating as what is the outcome.

NPR did this series called Project Song a while back where the producers would invite a musician to come to a recording studio and spend 48 hours creating a new song following a given theme. In one episode, the producers invited Moby to create a song about a specific picture given to him, and he took his time coming up with the lyrics, composing the harmonies and melodies, and had a singer come in and do the vocals. He mixed everything together and created a song that my friend and I played on repeat for a road trip to Portland, Oregon. I was astounded of the raw commitment to the deadline and sacrifices one makes when making something out of thin air in a short amount of time.

Nerina has more than 48 hours to create her songs but the constraint still makes it hard to keep with the commitment. In the video, she says there isn’t all day to record a hundred takes and choose the best one. Maybe at most, she gets 3 or 4 takes because of the limited time with the studio and access to other musicians. She must prep well beforehand to really get the songs right. And if it doesn’t come to par with what she would like it to be, so be it. At least she finished the song. Out of these sacrifices, she has somehow made music that I really want to hear every month. Sure, not every song has been a hit, but there have been enough where my interests have been perked each time. And fans like myself are what help drive her to create more. Knowing there are loyal fans who will back your endeavors is huge motivation to get the EP done. Knowing there are readers that are appreciative and will give me feedback is a huge motivation for me to write.

Contrast this short burst of creativity to the anal perfectionist style of creativity. An example that comes to mind is the attention to detail Jackie Chan gives to his movies. In his Hong Kong work, Jackie Chan will take hundreds of shots to get his fight scenes perfectly right. He wants the fight scenes to be as real as possible where the audience can see the blows, feel the pain, and still be able to follow the rhythm. In most modern day fight scenes, most shots cut too fat to show the blow, usually to cover up the fact the main actors don’t know how to fight. But modern cinema could get the right shots, but it would just take too much time. In one movie, Jackie took 2,900 takes for a ten minute scene. It eats into his budget, but because he knows what his audience wants, he’ll go the extra mile.

Being the perfectionist and waiting until you get the perfect take is one way of recording music. Nerina has done this before if you’ve listened to her other albums. In one of her video diaries for her album, “The Graduate”, she shows you she can play all of the back-up instruments and can mix them all together into one performance. With over a decade of record producing, she distills her knowledge and forces herself in limiting her options of creating the perfect. Instead, she has to make the best take in one or two studio visits, which pushes her in her discomfort zone and she must exert a lot of time and devotion to the preparation. The big truth behind creative work is it’s actually really boring. If you watch me practice piano, I will often play the same part over and over for a few minutes. By the time I’m about to move on to the next part, you’ll get up and leave. Sure, you can take shortcuts in music making. You can slap together some lyrics, bad vocals, and editing it like crazy with auto tune. Yes, it will sound decent, but not different. It takes the years of deliberate practice and a devotion for crafting the sound you want to hear as soon as you can before it fades away.

Nerina found a different way of approaching music making where the stakes are low enough where failure is alright. But failure isn’t a bad thing. It teaches you what you can’t do and forces you to think in other ways. The audience might not like her most recent EP, and that feedback drives directly back to her next piece of work. Musicians aren’t perfect, and sometimes they don’t get it right every time. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love”, gave an excellent TED talk about failing after success. She talks about stalling the difficulty mentally to write more because she saw that others expected her to write another hit. But she knew it was a damn near impossibility to strike lightning twice. But after a change in mindset on how it was never about the success and the fear of irrelevancy is a mental game, she carried on and wrote another book. That book flopped, but it was the failure that allowed her to carry on. Regardless of outcome, Mrs. Gilbert saw that it was never about writing hits but about writing something she wanted to write. Whether or not the book was going to be a wide success is something beyond her control. What she controls is her creative endeavors. Everything else is just icing on the cake. And in the end, the really devoted Elizabeth Gilbert fans really supported her while other people who were on the “Eat, Pray, Love” hype train jumped off the boat. Mrs. Pallot has the same drive. I thought some songs could use a bit of polishing, but I love this imperfection and the feeling that there is room for an artist to improve. I am a super fan, and will support her future endeavors because I just love the work she produces.

On top of her limited time to write, produce and record her EPs, Nerina has been playing live shows. During the home straight, she played 20 live shows all around the UK. One of her EPs, number 11, contains five songs from her live show in Union Chapel back in October. She is no slouch; she’s knows she has to hustle. Her tenacity for delivering goes above and beyond, and that’s the type of artist I want to listen to.

You might be thinking, “now what?” She’s made the goal, but will her creative juices stop flowing and she will go through a slump? Her latest newsletter assures otherwise as there are more surprises in 2015. I was with an experienced runner this New Year’s Day trail running though the mountains. She told me she almost have up running last year after she meet her distance goal of finishing a marathon. She asked herself, “what now?” and took a hiatus from running and subbed it with cycling. She recently rediscovered trail running, and that’s gives a different running high. Like Nerina’s project, it took a different approach to understand why we do what we do.

I’m not worried for Nerina either, because this was her journey of rediscovery. This project has been an absolute inspiration for me because it helps me put what I do in perspective. It’s also a repeated reminder that it’s always possible to commit yourself to a project like this, but you must be aware of the sacrifices.

In closing, you should check out the entire EP collection from this past year. If you want the highlights, you must check out the following songs. I’ve also made a Spotify playlist if that’s your thing.

• “The Hold Tight” from “The Hold Tight” EP
• “Ain’t Got Anything Left” from “When the Morning Stars Sang Together” EP
• “Million To One” from “Little Bull” EP
• “Rousseau” from “Rousseau” EP
• “Simple Life” from “When I Grow Up” EP

I used to do “A Year in Review” back at my old blog. The last one I posted was back in 2011, and it was more of a chore than anything else, re-posting pictures I thought were cool from each month. In a way, I’ve gone away from posting on Tumblr, which is about posting pictures and re-posting other people’s work.

Touting how I’ve changed this year, this is a good time to log a snapshot of where I am today to evaluate myself in the future. Taking a lesson from someone else’s reflection on the past year, as well as another list, I’m going to bullet point what I’ve learned this year.

The Good From 2014:

• I quit my job back in March. Haven’t looked back, haven’t been back.
• I regained my health and happiness. I started the year with serious depression and was nowhere near fit. I had an unused gym membership for over a year that I was dumping money into. Today, I run three days a week and do yoga two days a week.
• I learned the basics of Ruby to pass the entry test for Dev Bootcamp, which I attended this summer. I learned how to program, but more importantly learned how to learn. I wept at the end after parting with some unforgettable new friends.
• I got a job as a UI Developer. This job pays more, has fewer hours, and I have an awesome mentor.
• I started writing weekly letters, this very series you’re reading in fact!
• I’ve continued journaling this year. I’m six books in for a total of 3.75 years of consecutive writing
• I drove across the country and back, totaling over 9,000 miles driven. 18 of those states I drove through was my first time there (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and New Mexico).
• After the road trip, I hopped on a plane to South Korea. It was the first time I had ever been. I stayed for over a week helping a friend recovery from surgery.
• I ran a coding club for four months after Dev Bootcamp ended. Plans to continue this are tentative next year.
• I attended my first hackathon this year. I had such a great experience, I attended two more.

Top Books I’ve Finished This Year:

• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us - This helped me put a persona to big food companies. I always knew the amount of salt, sugar and fat were increasing with processed food, but now I understand the driving force behind that, and the science they use to justify such actions.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed - This is an old book that looks at adult education in different manner, beginning with the premise that we oppress rather than liberate.
• Show Your Work - Austin Kleon’s follow-up to his first book, “Steal Like An Artist” about getting feedback and how to handle it for creative work. Quick read.
• East of Eden - I hadn’t read this classic before, and after starting a short book club this year, became one of my instant favorite classics. A fictional story that spans decades that resonates the biblical allegory of Cain and Abel.
• Kern and Burns - This is a collection of interviews from design entrepreneurs. It opened my eyes to design in the workplace and how companies are shaped from it.

Top Films I’ve Seen This Year:

• 12 Years a Slave
• The Wind Rises
• Chef
• Boyhood

I want to start a new list for the upcoming year that doesn’t involve resolutions. I have made resolutions in the past, and I have not been very involved in making them happen because circumstances change, or the goal wasn’t specific enough, or I just don’t like the goal anymore. Instead, I’m making a “I don’t give a fuck” list to live by for the next year.

The Fuck-It List of 2015:

• Being nice. Throw that out. Be kind and be able to confront others by telling them what’s right, not cater to what they want to hear. But don’t be a dick about it.
• Being a liar. Seriously, honest is the best choice.
• Spilling the whole can of beans. As a corollary to the above, I to be succinct. Entice others with a small amount of information first. Then see if they’re interested in learning more.
• Pleasing everyone, or living up to anyone else’s expectations other than my own. Why should I fantasize about making other people happy when they don’t always have my best interest? I am the sole person responsible for myself, and I should never forget that.
• Haters. Period.
• Fitting in to a mold. I don’t need a label nor social circle to define me.
• Guilt. I have felt this weight long enough, and its time to stop dwelling on this one.

This list was inspired by these two lists, both from the same author. This list item from one of the list rings so true to me:

#14. Falling in Love

If I learned anything in 2013, it’s that love — the overwhelming, this-is-the-one kind, the love that makes you weak in the knees, if not slightly duller in the head — isn’t real. It exists outside of reality, in a world devoid of calories and Kardashians. The fall is fun, for a while. But big love is just that… oversized and oversold. Overstated and filled with impossible expectations. I don’t want to fall into that kind of love again. It lacks substance. I prefer the little loves. My best friend’s daughter running around the kitchen chanting, “It’s all rainbows,” over and over again. The wag of a dog’s tail when you scratch the sweet spot behind her ear. Neglected nuances, subtle sincerity — that’s where love lives. Lost in a pile of unmatched socks, it sits and waits for you, overlooked and underappreciated. Flawed but sturdy; frustrating but frank. A beautiful mess of sadness and hope. Fuck engagement rings and moonlit walks on the beach. Love hurts because that’s the only way to tell that it’s real.
— Chantielle MacFarlane

Everyone, have a Happy New Year!

With the past few weeks of heavy and light downpour here in California, I’ve been hearing repeated conversations. There’s been talk about how the drought is ending, how bad the streets are flooding, how heavy the rain can get, how bad the traffic is and how bad the drivers are during the storm. People demonstrate how out of touch they are with mother nature and how fast they can bring it back into focus. Typically before the storm, we have this feeling that as long as we keep doing what we’re doing, I don’t have to worry about how bad mother nature can turn against us.

As a prime example, the rain has delayed construction of a brick pathway to the house I’m renting. My landlord could not foresee the bad weather. When the rain started, there was little concern it would last. But weeks past, and the halt proved more worrisome. We would like to continue next week but now we understand how unpredictable the weather is and we can’t be certain. We aren’t complaining heavily since it’s something we have absolutely no control over, but we’re all anxious because the construction blocks our driveway, and there’s the unsettling feeling of being incomplete every time I get home from work.

I’ve tried something new this week. I stop myself from fueling the fire to complain about the bad weather and think about the teachings of the Stoics. Seneca once practiced the art of thinking about the worst so he can brace himself if something bad happened. Instead of freezing up, Seneca would be able to face the perils because he’s already primed himself with it. Someone who doesn’t prepare mentally is more prone to be shocked and find themselves blocked. As an example, last week, my friend asked me, “What is there really to do on a rainy day? Nothing!”

As I sit at a cafe, sipping my hot cocoa by the fireplace, I think back to some memories of rainy days. I remember gray skies drooped over Berkeley on any typical week day. It felt morbid and unsettling because you were in transition between sunlight and rain. In elementary school, this weather had no effect for the children playing in the yard during recess. We got used to this slumber weather, and that became the norm. On those rainy days, we had a sigh of relief because it finally felt like the weather wasn’t fooling us with that gray drape. But that limited outdoor play and we would have to stay indoors and play adult supervised games. For the first few times, it would be great playing board games, heads-up 7-up, or some other interactive game. But there wasn’t much variety to the selection of games, so some kids would get bored. And a bored mind tends to produce unsettling behavior, like screaming, whining, or pacing about the room. As kids, we’re expected to have the ability to run amuck and transfer that gulp of energy into physical activity. But when it rains, and there’s nothing else to do, we’ll exhibit the same behavior in closed quarters. We woke up with the expectation on this day to be able to have our outside time, and now the rules are changed on us.

Santa Cruz has this tradition called first rain. Many call it the naked run, and when it rains for the first time during the autumn season, students would rush out and streak. The first instance of first rain began in the fall of 1989, weeks after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Students were afraid to stay in the dorms at Porter College, not to far away from the UC Santa Cruz campus, and slept outside. On some dares, a few students ran around naked, and thus began the tradition. Over the years, the naked run, as it was called, happened spontaneously during the first heavy rain. But people wanted to create structure for the chaos, and meetings were held to discuss the rules of first rain. Something as unpredictable as when the first heavy rainstorm has been transformed into its own spontaneous social event.

I studied abroad in Germany a few years ago for a summer. I hadn’t packed an umbrella or rain gear and was completely helpless to the flash rains that would pour for a few hours at a time. The first time it happened, I got soaked while carrying my camera. Needless to say, the camera broke and I had to purchase a new one. With this new camera, I was able to photograph another incident where it was raining and a group of my friends wanted to take a photo in front of a fountain. We stood there looking very soaked and a group of tourists joined in on our fun. It was laughable at first, but more and more strangers were rushing in to the photo. For the next three minutes, I was confused by the crowd, but also invigorated by the enthusiasm of everyone around me. Suddenly, I forgot where I was, and the rain didn’t matter.

Sometimes, we forget the destructive power of the rain. On a family vacation in Florida, my father drove us on a day trip through Key West. The weather report that day said there would be a storm that night and that we should expect high winds. We limited our time we there and left by mid-afternoon. But the weather report was wrong, and it began storming an hour after we left. We sped through the two-lane highway and my father made some risky decisions passing up drivers with our rented all-wheel drive SUV. The palm trees were blowing fiercely, and I was worried they may fall on the road. Visibility was terribly low, and it felt as if this was it. But my father got us through it, and we made it back in one piece without crashing into a ditch.

This summer, after a long road trip from San Francisco to Chicago, I was ready to meet my roommate at a place I subleased. As I would find out at the apartment building, this rental was a scam. This roommate had their identity stolen and I wired money to the scam artist. Having felt the rug pulled under my feet as I thought about what to do while eating at a Panera Bread, it started raining hard. Someone mentioned to me this rain would last all night. Unprepared, I went across the street to a drug store to purchase an umbrella. I panicked; I had no idea where I was going to sleep and I was going to get severely wet. I didn’t know how to handle these changes, and it felt like my world was crumbling. But a friend of mine came through; I stayed with a friend of a friend to recuperate. When I got there, I took my wet clothes off and stared out of the window to the lake and felt a calming sensation. “It’s not so bad,” I thought. “I’ll figure this out just as I’ve worked other things out.” I found another apartment the next day and was able to make it to my first day at Dev Bootcamp.

A few months later near the end of my Chicago experience, I thought it would be great to go to Hot Dougs before it closed for good. I enlisted a friend to wait in line with me, and all seemed good. There was a two hour wait and it was just blistering hot. About the hour and a half point, the skies turn to a shade of gray. The storm was coming, and it was going to be huge. There was a choice to make: wait it out for another thirty minutes and get soaked, or forfeit and get something else to eat. Choosing to wait, my friend and I were soaked from top to bottom wearing a shirt and shorts. My wallet and phone made it through, but everything else was miserable. We were shivering, my shirt had shrunk, and my socks were mushy. I got into the store taking in the warm, sausage ladened air and thought, “this better be worth it.”

The rain doesn’t have emotions, doesn’t care whether its going to rain hard or lightly. We have no way of bending the rain or nature to our will. And inevitably, the rain passes, and we are left with this faint odor. Scientists call it petrichor; I like to call it hope.

At a former job, I was faced with a dilemma on a project I was leading; I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like an imposter and didn’t feel I belonged with the other engineers. Psychologists coincidentally call it imposter syndrome, and it affected my work performance. I knew what the end product was supposed to look like, but after many failed starts, I was losing hope I could finish this project. Instead of asking for help, I mocked a plan and tried to go with that. By the end of the week, my boss came up to me to see what kind of progress I was making. I told her everything was going well when really, I had a hard time conceiving a solution. I talked her away by telling her I was working on process A, B, and C, but really I had no idea what I was doing. The excuses I made felt like plausible deniability if it came up in my performance review.

Inevitably, the project fell apart. My inability to ask for help cost the company a business deal and bonus upwards of thousands of dollars. Looking in hindsight, I was afraid and didn’t want to appear inferior to my supervisors or engineering peers. I wanted to blame the company. I wanted to blame the other engineers. But in the end, I could only blame myself; I was unable to expose my ignorance.

At some point, we may lie to ourselves and think we already know everything. In my early twenties, I was very arrogant and had a hard time letting others teach me anything new. When someone took the time to explain something to me, I would only grasp about 10% of it and nodded my head in agreement, pretending to absorb everything they just said like a sponge. When someone asked me if I knew about something I didn’t know, I would say, “Yeah, I know what that is” so I wouldn’t be seen as a fool. But I was a fool. I practiced appearing smart and I missed out of great learning opportunities.

Possibly from old wise tales, common sense, or some other form of “modern thinking,” men are supposed to just know how to do something. If you talk to my dad, he will proudly wear this ignorant-free badge with honor. He hated it when others didn’t know what he was talking about and would yell at you if you spoke up that you had no clue what he was talking about. Growing up, I remember he yelled at me when I couldn’t tie my shoes after showing me for the third or fourth time. An accumulation of those experiences led me to stop asking questions, nod, and affirm I knew things I didn’t know. This behavior spilled over to my interaction with friends and schoolmates. One of my best friend in elementary school recalls back in the first grade asking if I knew what a condom was. Having absolutely no idea, I told her I thought it was an animal. Honestly, I don’t remember saying those words, but my friend won’t forget because she found it to be the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

Of course, that’s not to say the feeling of linking shame and ignorance is solely for males. It’s a common feeling amongst everyone, man and women and people not on the binary spectrum of gender. There are those like me who were shamed into thinking ignorance was bad. Then there are those like my father who would get angry if someone exposed their ignorance. But what can we do if we find ourselves in this predicament?

During this past summer at Dev Bootcamp, I practiced exposing my ignorance. Being a beginner in Computer Science, I had to figure out the things I didn’t know, and one of the best ways to do that was to ask stupid questions to experts. We had plenty of teachers who we could approach and ask these stupid questions. Slowly, I built a muscle on asking stupid questions, and I learned better questions can come out of those stupid questions. Once I got over the hump of looking like a fool, I finally felt I had permission to be ignorant. I showed myself I could understand something a lot better with these interactions rather than figuring it out by myself.

As a family therapist I was taught to throw off the notion that I had expert knowledge about other peoples’ lives. To approach people with a “not knowing” stance. This is a hard pill to swallow, whether you’re a newbie therapist or newbie programmer. Your instincts tell you to hide your ignorance, to feign expert knowledge, but this only stunts your growth and inhibits the work you are trying to accomplish. Taking this lesson with me from one career into another has served me well. I’ve actually grown attached to feeling ignorant on a daily basis, it lets me know I’m in the right place. I’m growing.

Dave Hoover, co-founder of Dev Bootcamp

Indeed, we cower from ignorance because it makes us feel inferior and uncomfortable. But let us suppose you try this out. What’s the worse that could happen? Someone else thinks you’re a fool. Or that same person might take the time to teach you something. And if they do, you need to really listen. Once they’re done talking, you need to repeat what you heard to find holes in your comprehension. You may annoy some people along the way, but working off of assumptions of what you heard produces shoddy work.

When I was talking to my dad a few months ago, my dad asked if I knew about this specific type of clamp. Instead of telling him I knew what he was talking about, I said, “I don’t know, can you explain that to me?”. He was frustrated at first, and then in a pissed manner explained it to me. I felt a bit of victory and pride when I said that to him.

Sometimes we are blind to our ignorance. But as Dave Hoover says above, take that “not-knowing” stance and you will find holes in your knowledge. Make that a daily practice. It prepares you to ask for help when you need it the most. Join me on this journey, because chances are, you may also have no clue what you’re doing.

I really miss having a weekly post where I consolidate the week’s Internet findings. This is, perhaps, another way for me to get back into things now that I do a lot more writing.

We’ll start with different British accents, something I really adore and try to emulate. I really like the video because Siobhan Thompson tries to explain the accents with famous people.

This Ask Metafilter Thread has a few gems when one user asks how to get really good at something.

Another year, another DJ Earworm annual mashup. They seem to be coming out earlier and earlier.

10 Hairstyles and make-up in 1 minute from the past century.

When I pick up a new piece of music, I break it down into sizable chunks. What kind of structure does it have and can I break it down into something simple like an ‘ABACA’ pattern? If it does, I would learn that ‘A’ part first. Are there complicated rhythms or strange fingerings? Break it down even further. I only start playing when the piece is in manageable chunks.

Do I feel satisfied I can play this chunk? Yes? Then I would move on to the next chunk. After learning a few chunks, I would combine these chunks and try to merge them together in one take. The take will probably be terrible, so I go back and work on the areas I have the most trouble with. This is the process of jumping in between low and high level of learning something new. I can not play the composition well enough until I have dived deep in this form of practice.

At first glance, I see the composition as a whole and I think I could never play this piece. I’m usually at a high level of discomfort. “The wall is too high to climb,” I think. But when I give a second glance, I start thinking strategy. How could I break it down to manageable components. When I’m through, I’m at a lower level of discomfort and have many small challenges that’s a lot more manageable. The hours of practice don’t matter. You have practiced enough when you feel very comfortable with the piece.

I’ve been told many times in the past to get out of your comfort zone. But when I apply this advice, I wonder, how far out of your comfort zone should you go? I say, go as far as you can before you feel that feeling you want to quit. This is part of a bigger concept called flow, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont College.^[1] Flow is the state of being fully immersed and involved when one performs at an activity. It’s a balancing point and you will inevitably feel it when you are so involved with the activity, you lose track of the time. I attempt to strike that right balance by taking an educated guess on my complexity threshold. More likely than not, I will estimate incorrectly, and that’s when I will adjust myself.

Here’s a fun example of how you can follow this pattern with a trivial activity. This past Wednesday night, I spent 30 minutes solving logic puzzles online. Once I completed the logic puzzle, the page would redirect and show a summary of my results. This includes graph showing a normal distribution graph of complexity of the puzzle and the time to complete it. There was a star to indicate where you compare to other logic puzzlers. During my first puzzle, it took me over 5 minutes to solve the puzzle. My star was in the right tail end of the percentile on the graph. By the end of the 30 minutes, my star was on the middle, meaning around the 50 percentile, i.e. average. I proved to myself I can get better at solving logic puzzles. If I go back and do more puzzles, I would move up the difficulty to medium, but I know I’m doomed to be on the tail end of the medium puzzles when I first begin.

Another case: this letter. One of my biggest faults as a writer is my inability to edit what I’ve written. After typing my stream of consciousness, I think the first draft must be the best draft. However, the harsh reality is I don’t want to read my own writing because I’m afraid that it’s all shit. Hell, I will admit it now. The first draft I wrote for this letter was a piece of shit. It’s as Anne Lamott says in her book, “Bird by Bird”. “All good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” The second reading through my letter, I started to notice grammatical, sentence structure and diction mistakes. The third read through I noticed the problems of how the letter flowed.

I’ve been writing for myself over three years non-stop. I have a daily deadline to write in my journal, and I haven’t missed a day since March 13th, 2011.^[2] It’s all been stream of conscious writing though, so there’s not much afterthought in what I write. In an interview with Current a few years ago, Ira Glass talks about beginners and the phase of crap. When your starting out in a creative profession, nearly everything you make is awful. The distinguishing factor you have going for you is that you know you have good tastes. I’m in that awful phase with my writing. The big difference between when I started writing and today is I’m finally sharing my work and getting feedback on what to improve. By applying the feedback, I can discard what makes a piece a failure and focus on the elements that make great writing. If you really want to learn from mistakes, Jason Fried of Basecamp (formerly 37Signals) writes what failure really teaches us is what not to do while success teaches us what to do. I’m striving to reach a point where my writing is more than just crap, and that it adds meaning and value to my readers.

The feeling of discomfort pairs well with the feeling of flourishing. And the opposite seems to be true; the feeling of comfort pairs well with the feeling of being stagnant. One of the ways to combat the plateau phase is to embrace discomfort. In “Infinite Jest”, David Foster Wallace describes this type of activity for a complacent type playing tennis.

Then [there’s] maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still—his whole game is based on this plateau now.

And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Although I am saving the plateau phase for another letter, I wanted to touch on it briefly. David Foster Wallace understands the comfortable feeling and how it can stall their growth. Instead of trying to focus on how to better themselves, they may lose their matches and don’t let failures teach them something. The person has a good attitude about losing and doesn’t pass judgment, but he or she has no vision to desire a better outcome^[3] Take it from chess world champion Emmanuel Lasker. “A bad plan is better than no plan at all.”

To conclude, I want to leave you with questions to ponder about. Do you recognize this discomfort in your life? Are you passing non-judgment to the feedback you get? How can you improve your current skills?

Footnotes

[1] His Ted Talk is spectacular. His book is a reinforcement of his ideas with more examples and clarity on the general concepts that flow includes. I wouldn’t recommend it cover to cover, more of a book to skim and find sections to hone in on.

[2] White lie. I have written entries the day after I was supposed to. Also, when I’m traveling overseas, I’ll be too confused by the timezone and may crap out on what day it is exactly.

[3] I adapted this concept from Tim Gallewey’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis

For the past few years, I have often neglected people close to me in the pursuit of my own endeavors. For example, my family rarely gets to see or hear from me, maybe once a month. It takes the occasional gatherings, such as this past Thanksgiving holiday, to really spend some quality time with them. I know I should make an effort to be around them often, or at least call, but I’ll make up some excuse or forget to do it entirely. I’m not a thoughtless person; I think of it in hindsight, but I am at fault. You don’t even want to hear about how I’ve neglected friends.

This last year, out of practicality, necessity, and taking a really hard look at myself, I made a few changes that has had a tremendous impact. One of these changes was to spend meaningful time with friends, even if its just for an hour. A few years back, there was this segment from The Daily Show about true friendship versus Myspace friends. The professor interviewed made a good point there was not enough time to keep up with 9000 online friends. Knowing there’s a finite amount of time, instead of spending a mindless weekend playing video games or watching the same Youtube clip over again, I chose to cut that out and try to schedule time to spend with those who have touched me in some significant way.

Note: the video may take a minute to load

It wasn’t easy to start. There was an internal struggle undermining my efforts, a resistance if you may. This resistance questioned all of my actions. “Do you think they will even answer you? You’ve neglected them for so long.” That resistance subsided the more people I reached out to when I got replies back. Some other factors were scheduling issues and lack of contact information. But as I slowly trudged along, calling up friends that I cared about, I started to realize this was a possible endeavor, even if the circumstances to meet up are difficult.

I owe a lot of thanks to my friends and family who put up with my silence. When I started talking to my friends about reaching out to people close to them, I was surprised at how many of them said the same thing. “I suck at reaching out to people.” Usually, I would get some follow-up. “How do you do it?” Honestly, I have been struggling with how to answer that question. Not practicing the skill of reaching out for so long, I had to re-learn some things that we all think are common sense. Here’s some tips though.

Work on their schedule. When you make it easier on them, they don’t have to put as much effort. If you want, go the extra step and make it close to them as well. The more you cater to their needs, the more they just can’t say no. Of course, I say this with a bit of precaution. Don’t over-do yourself with a relationship that takes but never gives back.

It’s not all about you. I think the number one thing turn-off is someone’s lack of empathy. The act of listening is as important if not more than the act of talking. When we feel listened to, we feel more appreciated.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Short messages do not constitute a genuine connection. Sherry Turkle, teacher at MIT, remarked at her Ted Talk that all those little tweet-sized messages do not amount to one real conversation. Texting back and forth may be okay for some quick Q&A, but it does not substitute for real conversations and connections. Online dating is nothing but messaging back and forth until that first date. It’s only then when you start to see if there’s real connection.

Don’t forget to thank them. If you really value their time and if you really enjoy hanging out with them, don’t forget to thank them.

Don’t put off following up. After the initial meet-up, be the better person and follow-up. I don’t think I ever had this right growing up. My family never made thank-you letters for gifts they would receive. I would receive thank you letters and I felt like an asshole because it was one-sided, like I was not gratuitous in this exchange. I was the taker in this relationship. Of course, I did say thank you when I received presents, but the letters meant something else. This person took the extra step to really say thank you and somehow, that means more than simply saying thank you. I took that feeling and I started my annual Christmas Card tradition two years ago, and I haven’t looked back.

Last week, I attended TedxSanJoseStateUniversity and was really moved by Chi-Wen Chang’s talk. He was inspirational because for all of his short-comings, he was able to still add value to other’s lives, as a father, teacher, and phenomenal speaker (he sang at the end of his talk and it was very endearing). He said for over a decade, he would call up and sing happy birthday to people he kept in touch with. My god, the effort. Taking that advice in and seeing what I’m doing, I know I can do more, and I strive to try to also add value to the people I care about. Saying thanks is one of the first steps, and keeping in touch are the next steps.

Chi-Wen Chang, shown above at the Tedx event at San Jose State University.

At my last coding club, I was asked by one of the members that I should write about my experience on going to hackathons. It peaked my interests that there are those out there who have never been to one, so here’s some of my limited experience attending them. I joined my first hackathon two months ago and haven’t really thought hard about what is it that I love about them. They’re fun! You get to work with other people, sometimes people you don’t know. You will get to bond with teammates and work on something that interests you all. You get to work with people of different working styles. You get to hack away at something exciting, and perhaps new. The winners aren’t the ones to gain something from the hackathons. It’s also a great networking event.

But let’s go back a moment and ask, what are hackathons? They are events where an individual or team will compete against others to develop a solution to some problem in a short amount of time, whether its what can we do with this new API to what can you hack that is science related? I have participated in three hackathons and will be attending more in the near future. There aren’t necessarily prizes at the end, but someone is a winner.

You can find them through looking them up online (Google your local area and hackathons). If you don’t have one in your area, that might be an opportunity to start one in your area! Living in Silicon Valley, they are ubiquitous. If you do find one, contact the administrators of the event and tell them about yourself and your interest in participating. They are more than helpful to get you started, especially if you don’t have any teammates. If you know others who are going, or if there’s an open forum for the event, talk to others and see if you can join a group. It’s not impolite to contact organizers or participants. In fact, it should be required you do so before you go to the hackathon so you can know more about the event!

I’ve only been to three, so I consider myself a newbie. Also, I’m a relatively new developer, so I always feel inadequate going to these events. But here’s the thing. Everyone wants to learn, and most know the participants are on different levels, so participants and organizers will try and accommodate you. I felt very privileged my first hackathon was at Science Hack Day in San Francisco because the organizers were the best. I walked around aimlessly trying to find a project to join and I asked one of the volunteer staff there to help me, so we walked around and helped me break the ice with groups of people working on projects. I learned that I wanted to be a part of every project, but in the end chose to help out on a groundwater project. Although I didn’t use any of my developer skills, I was able to help out with my limited electronics experience.

SETI Institute

The latest hackathon I went to was at the SETI Institute in Mountain View and we got to play around with asteroid data. I met some amazing astrophysicist who graciously explained to me what near-earth asteroids are, why it’s difficult to simulate all of them to tell us when the next biggest asteroid will hit us, and why the public should be more aware of space and help fund our future. Hackathons are better than conferences, in my opinion, because you’re an active participant rather than a passive listener. It’s something I don’t get with TED Talks; you watch them, you feel enlightened, but you forget about it easily. With hackathons, it’s less talking and more working because you’re getting ready for a live demo at the end.

Science Hack Day SF 2014 @ Github HQ

Possibly the fun part is walking around and looking at solutions to problems you may have never considered, and it may be an opener to work with those people in the future. I absolutely love the Science Hack Day demos because they were interactive or had some cool component. And I love Science and love learning about things I typically never get to encounter at work. If anything, I’ve made friends at these events, and I’ll continue to go to them.

Don’t be so hung up on the past. At this present moment, do you find yourself asking if you should’ve done something else, or could’ve been making yourself more productive, or you would’ve done that nagging task if you just reminded yourself at the time? Please stop thinking. Don’t over-stress yourself on the banalities of those tiny decisions because they don’t make a difference. Instead, close your eyes and think of something blank. Our past mistakes aren’t something that can be over-written, edited with a few clicks on your profile page. They already happened, and you can’t reverse time and fix those mistakes. What you can do is think of what you can do now and then do it. There’s nothing better than knowing you can make a decision now that will impact the future.

Of course, some might call me impossible. Let me give you a scenario. You’re driving to work and there’s something you’ve forgotten to do before you left. You think, “Damn, I should’ve done that before I left.” Stop, breathe, and listen to your body. Are you tense? Are neurons firing off giving you a fight or flight experience? That may be indication you are stressing yourself for no good reason. The fact is, you have no control of those actions anymore. They have already happened and you can’t do anything about it. What can you do about it now? Could you call your significant other to deal with that task? Do you have to wait and do it after work? Alternatives pop up, reasonable ones with some level of action you can take right now. If you have followed this process successfully, you may have saved minutes of your time worrying with a proper solution.

This process can be learned today. However, let me give you a caveat and say it may take some practice, but I believe if you can follow a methodology, you can feel better about yourself at the end of the day. Stress accumulates to something when gone unnoticed. I find friends who go through similar situations all of the time, and it is a signal to tell them to stop worrying; life will continue.

Yes, coffee does solve everything. Even uncomfortable anxiety

Note: I originally intended to release this back in September, but I put it off until now. The advice is not outdated, but events in this story are.

Instead of pounding in the ever-so cliche phrase, “be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” it’s better to describe my most recent experience with this. Three months ago, I was packing up for a road trip from San Francisco to Chicago. As in previous trips, it dawns on me how much of my life can be packed into a luggage bag. I was to spend a week driving, stay in Chicago for 9 weeks, road trip it back to San Francisco Bay Area, and fly to Korea for another week. As my car was packed, I realized I was really uncomfortable leaving everything I had built up at home; friends and family that I wouldn’t see for a long time. But I told myself to “suck it up cupcake” and go on this adventure.

I drove solo through the mid-west, and it could have been incredibly boring, but it wasn’t with my countless hours of podcasts and audiobooks. When I got to Chicago, I found out I was scammed an apartment. I spend a night panicking, being thrown out of my comfort zone and feeling very unsafe. There’s a difference between being out of your comfort zone while being in a safe place versus an unsafe place.

There are four places you can usually be as your doing some activity:

A quick diagram I created to explore this point.

As I was road tripping across the west, I had all of the signs tell me I was going to have no apartment or living situation when I got to Chicago. I was putting myself in an unsafe place, but I was still comfortable. However, after realizing this, I quickly moved to an uncomfortable zone and felt very unsafe. When I settled the matter the following week and found a different place to live, I was finally in a comfortable zone and felt very safe.

Dev Bootcamp, the reason I went to Chicago in the first place, tries to push you in the uncomfortable zone while making it a safe environment. I felt very safe around my cohort peers because I was able to expose my ignorance and sound like a curious kid again. At the same time, I was pushing myself away from the things I already knew, or sticking with being in a comfortable spot. At the same time, I wasn’t over-whelming myself with the amount I was learning, described as the unsafe zone and being uncomfortable. This is commonly drawn as three concentric circles.

Source: Seth Sandler

I borrowed this picture from Seth Sandler’s blog post which shows where the learning zone is. I love this description because I use it in all other activities non-work related as well, like learning how to improve my communication skills. Given your environment, figure out how to find the sweet learning zone. It’s different for every person, so you’re going to have to experiment. Remember to enjoy this process, because if you find it useful, you’ll want to apply it everywhere too.

The Levenshtein Distance problem, also known as the edit distance problem, is to find the lowest cost path to turn one string to another string. It is commonly used in spell checking, Google search results for ‘did you mean…’, and DNA sequencing (Bioinformatics).

An easy example is if you misspelled “word” for “wird”, there would need to be one replacement to get from “wird” to “word” (change the letter “i” to “o”). There is one algorithm that answers this problem efficiently, as we now of right now. This algorithm compares one letter of the first string to all of the characters to the other strings and gives it a ranking or a score. There are three ways you can modify a character, by inserting another character, deleting, or replacing that character. Each of these modifications cost one value.

Typically, you will see this as a matrix, as shown above. The first row and first column show the length of the strings. The rest of the matrix is filled out following that you do a nested for loop, taking one letter at a time for the first string and go through the rest of the letters in the second string. Here’s a quick look with Ruby:

(1..second.length).each do |i|
  (1..first.length).each do |j|
    # Do your logic here
  end
end

We traverse this matrix starting at [1] [1] (one square diagonal of the top left square), and move to our right until we get to the end of the matrix. Then we continue to the next row and go back to 1 (matrix [2] [1]). We place a conditional in our code. If the letters we are comparing are the same, then there is no cost penalty and we take the same value as the diagonal on the square’s top left. However, if it is different, we take the minimum cost to each of our modification choices.

• Insertion: When we insert a letter in our first string, that shifts our word column, so we take the same value as to the square to its top, plus 1 for an additional modification cost.
• Deletion: Same as insertion, but we take the value of the square to its left
• Replace: We take the value of the upper left to the square and add 1 to it.

The result is at the bottom right corner, which will tell you the minimum cost of changing one string to another. If the score threshold is low enough, Google will ask you, “did you mean…” if the search ran through the algorithm and could match a more common search term.

A side note

My coding club looked at this algorithm with no prior knowledge of this problem and tried to understand it. Now that I’ve taken the time to review this, I have a much deeper understanding of this now.

Resources

Levenshtein distance implementation in different programming languages

MIT course on Algorithms: Levenshtein distance problem explained with dynamic programming

A Drawn DBC Wall

I’ve reached the end of my DBC experience and am currently going through career week right now. I’m glad, and yet sad, my nine week experience here in Chicago DBC is over.

It’s still a bit too early to see the outcome of this program on me, which may take months, and even past my first job. But here are some takeaways I learned about myself while doing this program.

• I really enjoy leading a team
• There’s always lots to learn on the “soft skills”
• Taking feedback isn’t easy work, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Embrace it and act rationally.
• It’s perfectly fine to cry in a room of adults, even if you’re the only one doing it.
• As adults, we forget all too often that we really try hard to hide embarrassment in front of others. Stop worrying about that. If they talk about you, what’s the worst that could happen?

I’m by far not the first person to blog about my experiences at DBC, and I can not do it justice in one blog posts. As I learn more about myself and what has really been the most telling things that I should have been working on all along, I’ll share it.

Until then, Goodbye.