List #4: don Miguel Ruiz and the Four Agreements you should make with yourself

Whatever life takes away from you, let it go. When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment. Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.

*For the next list, I’ll probably create a slideshow and publish it to YouTube

In today’s edition of Nerdy Lists we have don Miguel Ruiz and The Four Agreements [Kindle].

A short simple book with intuitive wisdom on how to create a fulfilling life. If I take away one lesson it is: never ever listen to the negative voices in your head. It reminds me of what Lucy Malory said: “Every thought a person dwells upon, whether he expresses it or not, either damages or improves his life.”

The author’s life is fascinating: youngest of 13 kids, surgeon who becomes a shaman after a near death experience, born in rural Mexico and now a bestselling author fluent in English and Spanish.

The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz. You should agree to…

1. Always Do Your Best

Your best is going to change from moment to moment…Under any circumstance, simply do your best

2. Say What You Mean. Mean What You Say

Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others.

3. Never Take It Personally

Nothing others do is because of you. It is because of themselves.

4. Never Assume

Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.

*The agreements are reordered and rephrased in a way that I prefer. For the original, check wikipedia.


(author Miguel Ruiz on Oprah’s Network: “Be impeccable with your word”. Did you know impeccable is Latin for “without sin”?)

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TED talk notes: Nick Bostrom on what happens when computers become smarter than us

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (sorry, it takes awhile to load).

This week features two talks from Nick Bostrom on super intelligent computers. One is a TED talk and the other is an author talk @ Google.

* * * * *

Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?

  • human brains are largely similar to those of apes (only in the last 250K-1M years did ours begin to differ)
  • AI used to be commands in a box
  • now there’s a paradigm shift, today it’s about machine learning, about algorithms that learn from raw data like an infant
  • because of this, AI is not domain-limited
  • machine substrate is hands down superior to biological tissue: no speed or size limitations
  • AI will evolve similarly to human intelligence: it took animals millions of years to develop basic intelligence, but complex intelligence developed faster by orders of magnitudes(“AI train won’t stop at human…will swoosh right by”)
  • believes super intelligence will have preferences and will – to some extent – get what it wants
  • what are those preferences?
  • we must avoid anthropomorphizing (ie, we can’t assume it wants what people want)
  • there will be unintended consequences no matter what goals we specify (eg, say we ask it to solve a math problem, and it realizes the best solution is re-organize the planet into a giant supercomputer to solve the problem!)
  • mentions the King Midas myth (everything he touched turned to gold)
  • what we should do now is specify precisely our constraints, goals, and design principles to guide AI’s development

* * * * *

Nick Bostrom: “Superintelligence”

  • how do we control AI?
    1. control and limit its capabilities – for example, only allow it to exist in a box with no ethernet, or only print output on a screen. but to realize its full potential, you must give it full access, and super intelligence can by definition outsmart you
    2. control its motivation – change its motivations, preferences, and end-goals
  • the difference between normal risks (e.g., war) and existential risks (e.g., give everyone the ability to make and detonate a nuclear bomb)
  • AI/superintelligence is an existential risk
  • “we only get one shot at it…but humans are mostly bad at getting things right the first time”
  • we need to develop control mechanisms, the right ways to think about and constrain and optimize the problem, before AI gets ahead of us
  • when asked by experts to estimate the median years until development of human-level machine intelligence, estimated 40 years (2050)

* * * * *

Here’s the full list of TED notes!

List #3: David Brooks and the 4 Commitments that define you: “It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

David Brooks is my favorite big thinker, a more grounded version of Alain de Botton. A longer essay about David Brooks and his work is coming, but for this week’s edition of Nerdy Lists I want to introduce his Four Commitments.

The people we admire most, Brooks says, make FOUR commitments: to family & friends, to a lifelong vocation, to a belief system, and to a local community. These commitments are hard to make and even harder to sustain, but they define us. People who make them are moral exemplars, our modern day heroes who improve the world and inspire everyone around them, both in person and from a distance. People like Atul Gawande and Dorothy Day and Stephen Lerner.

Brooks shared these commitments in his Commencement Address at Dartmouth:

David Brooks’s Four Commitments

“In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that’s almost perfect.” – David Brooks in The Atlantic

1. To Spouse and Family

Love humbles you. It is both a gritty commitment (like washing dishes) and transcendent magic. And love is not zero-sum: the more you love, the more you can love.

2. To Career and Vocation

A vocation is something “that summons you”. You feel drawn to it, called towards it, despite pressures and obstacles that would push you away. The most important passions are often found, importantly, not by looking within, but by looking at the world and seeing where there is a void, where people need help.

3. To Faith and Philosophy

4. To Community and Village

I wonder if Brooks would make an exception for strong online communities. It would be interesting to get his take on self organizing groups like Wikipedia and bitcoin and reddit.

And how do you become like these role models?

  • Through habits: fake it til you make it. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are very good at helping you do this
  • Like St. Augustine: continually examine and question yourself
  • By imitation: surround yourself with admirable people and mimic them!

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

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The habits of tennis great Ivan Lendl

Ivan Lendl's habits

From Derek Sivers’s notes on The Power of Full Engagement:

Ivan Lendl was far from the most physically gifted tennis player of his era, but for five years he was the number-one-ranked player in the world. His edge was in the routines that he built. He followed similar routines in every dimension of his life.

A routine = a bundle of habits. Flossing is a habit. Good dental care is a routine.

Lendl also practiced a series of daily mental-focus exercises to improve his concentration -and regularly introduced new ones to assure that they remained challenging. At tournaments, he gave clear instructions to friends and family not to burden him with issues that might distract him from his mission. Whatever he did, he was either fully engaged or strategically disengaged.

A useful reminder that what you don’t do (eg, don’t enable distractions or invite interruption) is very important and often overlooked.

On the court, during matches, he relied on another set of rituals to keep himself centered and focused, including visualizing entire points before playing them and following the same multiple-step ritual each time he stepped up to the line to serve. It is perfectly logical to assume that Lendl excelled in part because he had extraordinary will and discipline. That probably isn’t so. […] What Lendl understood brilliantly and instinctively was the power of positive rituals – precise, consciously acquired behaviors that become automatic in our lives, fueled by a deep sense of purpose.

Visualization seems to be a common practice among elite athletes (eg, Michael Phelps). I’d like to try. Singing might be easier than writing since it’s more structured and based on technique.

Overall, powerful stuff. I never watched Lendl play but his consistency and grit were legendary. Good habits = good routines = high performance.

List #2: Steve Pavlina’s 11 Personal Assessment Categories

Welcome to the nerdy lists project! Each week I publish a new list about habits and personal growth.

List #2 is Steve Pavlina’s eleven areas of personal assessment. These 11 categories are a mece way to assess your life performance. About once a month (or when I’m lazy, once a quarter), I review each item on the list and give a score between 1-10. Steve recommends that you replace any rating below 9 with a 1, for motivation (this I haven’t done).

The categories are curated from his book, Personal Development for Smart People [link]. His blog is incredible, too, and Derek Sivers has great notes from the book.

Steve Pavlina’s 11 Personal Assessment Categories

Pavlina’s essential question: how do you routinely measure and monitor the important areas of your life?

in each category, I provide an example of a personal benchmark

1. Habits & Daily routine: did I average 7 hours of sleep a night?

2. Career & work: did I focus on one main project instead of several side projects?

3. Money & finances: was I able to invest some money this month?

4. Health & fitness: did I exercise at least 4 days each week?

5. Mental development & education: did I finish at least one book?

6. Social life & relationships: did I hangout with friends every weekend?

7. Home & family: did I call Mom at least once a week?

8. Emotions: did I meditate 10 minutes each day?

9. Character & integrity: did I not gossip? (I hate gossip)

10. Life purpose & contribution: have I published at least once a week to Kevin Habits?

11. Spiritual development: did I go to Church at least once, and/or read the Bible (and other religious texts) regularly?

Since October 2008, I’ve completed this exercise. Some categories have persistently low ratings, and I struggle with improvement. Also, I should analyze my scores and identify trends. I did this, once, and a conclusion I can remember was that calling Mom more often was correlated with higher average scores. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to maintain that particular habit :)

In general Steve has great essays on habits (my favorite technology for behavior change). Here are some:

  • Why you should add the best and drop the worst habits: Be down to earth and specific. When you choose a specific habit, there will be a clear and sharp dividing line between success and failure. Either you did the action or you didn’t. There’s no gray area in the middle.
  • How to keep up not-quite daily habits: I find that when I occasionally skip habits that are part of a longer daily chain, it’s fairly easy to put them back in again as long as I continue to maintain the first and last links in the chain.

Thanks for reading! What are your favorite lists? Here’s the full index, including what’s to come.