Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

18 Jul 2010

Reasons to Quit: Questions to Ensure You’re Doing Work That Matters

Fried and Heinemeier Hansson in Rework suggest the following questions to ensure you don’t ‘throw good time after bad work’:

‘Why are you doing this?

What problem are you solving? – ensure it’s not an imaginary problem

Is this actually useful? – don’t confuse enthusiasm with usefulness

Are you adding value? – sometimes things you think are adding value actually subtract from it

Will this change behaviour? Is it really going to change anything?

Is there an easier way? – Problems are usually pretty simple. We just imagine they require hard solutions

What could you be doing instead? – what can’t you do because you’re doing this?

Is it really worth it? – can you determine the real value of what you’re about to do before you take the plunge’

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18 Jul 2010

The Management of our Attention

‘The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We need attention in order to truly listen to others – and even to ourselves. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex or to be in love or when we are simply contemplating nature. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.’ – Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel

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Posted in Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Happiness, Mindfulness and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
10 Jul 2010

The Unfathomable Depth of Our Phenomenal-state Space

I’m nearing the end of an epic nine month consumption of Thomas Metzinger’s ‘The Ego Tunnel’:

‘The mathematical theory of neural networks has revealed the enormous number of possible neuronal configurations in our brains and the vastness of different types of subjective experience. Most of us are completely unaware of the potential and depth of our experiential space. The amount of possible neurophenomenological configurations of an individual human brain, the variety of possible tunnels, is so large that you can explore only a tiny fraction of them in your lifetime. Nevertheless, your individuality, the uniqueness of your mental life, has much to do with which trajectory through phenomenal-state space you choose.

Nobody will ever live this conscious life again. Your ego tunnel is a unicum, one of a kind’

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Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Neuroscience and tagged , | Leave a comment

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