Events Don’t Exist

In my life, I try to imagine events don’t exist at all. That there will never be some major “thing” that happens which changes anything dramatically in my life.

See, I’ve noticed a lot of people go through life waiting for events. Waiting on external validation to let them know their efforts haven’t been for naught.

And I see this destroy 99% of would be entrepreneurs or creatives. They get started, get worked up and start building, produce something, and then bam.

There is no event they were looking for.

The major media they expected for their project never arises, the customers don’t magically show up, and the idea doesn’t go viral.

Back to square one? Or quit?

But there are no events, see? You don’t just have things happen overnight. You don’t just sit down, and write the great american novel, or build the greatest company.

Instead, you build a process, and you start a practice.

A few weeks ago I decided to teach myself guitar. So I started researching, and found a way to make sure I practiced.

In two week’s worth of daily practice with the help of Rocksmith and a great beginner guitar, I’ve began the path of playing the my first instrument. Now here I am, a few weeks later, starting to play along with my favorite music.

With that daily practice I know mastery is coming. The only thing I have to do is show up for practice consistently. No matter what, put in the time daily, and you will get results.

Life works in the same way. We don’t have these cosmic shifts, except by daily practice, and by things we see way down the road.

There is very high latency in our results as humans.

Some tiny little adjustment we make now, and reinforce daily might not be seen for years. And it’s specifically the type of people willing to commit to trim tabs, daily micro improvements, who end up with monster companies and published books and great health.

A great life doesn’t happen alongside any event. A great life is a series of practices. Practicing being a friend, practicing being a cook, practicing being a coder, practicing being a writer.

In every piece of life, we can only make these daily practices. There are no events which propel us into something radically different.

When people talk about breakthroughs, what they’re really talking about is accumulated results adding up to something more.

And I see this daily, with people sabotaging their long term interests for short term gains. And sacrificing a lot for events. Always looking to buy into an event.

An education, a partner, wealth, health.

In fact, this is the way almost all of the world is hypnotized into doing things they hate. The daydream of the event, of the product which changes everything.

But that event changes nothing. Buying that car or that house, or having that cash in the bank doesn’t change the things that matter most. I think the hypnosis of imaginary events is what keeps 90% of the economy rolling.

How much different is a purchase vs mastery at a chosen field? Which would you rather have, a 5% chance of a Porsche in 5 years, or the ability to play guitar, paint, or write like mad?

We’ve been hypnotized to chase the wrong goals. What matters is what we can create, independent of external circumstances. The way we become creators is through practices. External circumstances never arrive when we want them to.

We practice being a good partner daily, we practice creating wealth daily, and we practice creating health daily. It is the accumulation of our previous results that determines where we stand today.

And in that is something completely radical.

We are all starting over today.

We’re all given the day to do with it what we will. What practices will you implement? What trim tabs will you create for you future self?

Hacking the Human Mind


“The intelligent want self-control, children want candy.”
– Rumi

Last week I gave a talk about the progress I’ve made on my meditation platform. In it, I went into a little more depth about the whys behind meditation, stressing how distracted we’ve become as a technological society, and how we’re going to need better tools to build and manage our focus as the world becomes more and more distracting.

The slides from the talk are above, and a link to the video is at the end of this post.

But I’ll also got into a little bit of an overview for those of you not willing to make the 20 minute video commitment.

The World Has Become Dangerously Distracting


* 12% of all boys between 3-17 years now diagnosed with ADHD
* 20% of smartphone users check phone every 10 minutes
* Multitasking has been shown to lower IQ by 10 points
* The average american teen now sends an average of 3,417 text messages per month.

In the past 40 years, we’ve gone from Pong to Battlefield 3. If you’re a 12 year old boy, you’ve now got to decide between homework and playing in live battlefield with up to 64 other players, using tanks and helicopters and sniper rifles and C4 and more. The rush and excitement of video games, versus the slow dull grind of homework.

Psychologists are now designing games for addictiveness. And they’re incorporating very powerful psychological tools to keep kids reeled in. From skinner boxes to variable ratio reinforcement to social pressure, kids are facing a very real and strong draw to the game realities over our shared physical realities.

It’s not the kid’s fault their heads are stuck in phones and games. They’ve both been designed to be incredibly addictive to our brains.

What’s the cost of this distractedness?

Willpower and Focus

Willpower has been shown to be a finite resource which is depleted by decision making.

Nearly every piece of our technological realities drains focus and willpower.

With the Loss of Willpower We’re Losing the Ability to Control and Direct Ourselves.

The Solution: Using Technology to Manage Our Minds More Effectively in the Face of New Threats

Brand New Research on Meditation

* Increases Attention Span
* Sharpens Focus
* Improves Memory
* Dulls the Perception of Pain
* Slows Age Related Thinning of the Prefrontal Cortex
* Helps Build Willpower

So why aren’t we all meditating?

Chicken or the Egg Problem: Don’t have enough willpower to start building our willpower.

If we were to make meditation seductive to our distracted minds, what would it look like?

Building the Platform to Measure Mediation

First prototype measured Galvanic Skin Response, Skin Temperature, and Heart Rate. Read physiology using off the shelf components, and an Arduino. Tracked all inputs using Clojure, and graphed all data using the incanter library.

It provided audio feedback (via Overtone) when a deeper meditative state was reached, and recorded all data so meditation could be tracked over time.


Initial Prototype Drawbacks:

* Must be attached to computer
* Wires get tangled
* Setting up computer is too distracting
* Not easy enough

Meditation on the iPhone

Using new Bluetooth LE heart rate monitors, we can now track heart rate with medical quality data. Combined with an app I’ve written using algorithms developed with the data from my first prototype, I now have a low-friction environment to measure meditation.

Unfortunately, Bluetooth LE is only supported by the iPhone 4S and 5, the New iPad, the iPad mini, and the new iPod Touch.

But we now have a portable psychology lab capable of providing audio and visual feedback to direct changes in our physiology caused by meditation.

Look for the meditation app in the App Store by the end of December

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