Aspiring To Be Motivated

I've once again thought myself into the corner of trying to understand motivation, trying to distinguish what causes me to take action, specifically habitual action, versus aspiration which just makes me wish I were taking certain actions.

What is the motivation that works when I successfully diet versus when I'm trying but failing?

What drives me to the gym for an hour or so four days a week but can't be marshaled to have me sit at a keyboard or with a guitar for just five minutes once a week?

Some of this will have to do with appetite, subconscious wants closely coupled to biological needs, some will be tied to mental states like anxiety and depression and arousal, and I think some will be associated with identity and drives regarding how we need to be seen by ourselves and the world.

I am interested in the negative motivations, particularly the role they play in my relationship with food and my behaviors toward and around other people, but what I'm really looking to harness right now are the positive ones, like the ones keeping me going to the gym or driving me to show up at the clinic early every weekday morning even though I'm completely free to work from home.

I feel confident all motivation is going to be driven by a sense of reward, but I believe obvious reward is only going to be the foundation of habitual action.

Maybe the reward has to also be fully believed to be achievable. With working out, I started confident the initial changes I was hoping to achieve were attainable, and as I collected the rewards of my work in terms of improved health, I was further motivated to continue.

In opposition is my experience with writing. I have had periods where I took it more seriously and brought more energy and discipline to the activity, but I've seldom had a strong sense that what I was trying to do, writing a story or poem or novel, was achievable. Rather, more often than not my efforts to sit down and write have failed to one degree or another.

Almost all of the exceptions in this realm are straight out of Dead Poets Society: when my goal was not to write but to woo, and writing was just a means to that end, I could bring all kinds of focus and discipline to the effort, which circles right back around to the point that while I have aspired to write since I was very young, actually being motivated to write requires a secondary set of conditions.

Knowing I need that secondary push to change aspiration into action, I can take a more considered look at my life and see if there's a way to repurpose an old motivation or create a new one which will be both consistent and additive enough to make me sit down regularly at this keyboard.

2020's Looking Bright

I don't have anything in the way of personal resolutions for 2020 (except seeing WILD perform live somewhere, and that's not really a resolution), so instead of manufacturing a list of things to be disappointed about come December, I'm going to take a page from CGP Grey and pick a theme for the year.

In light of how happy I ended up being with last year I hereby dub 2020 the Year of Consolidation.

Having made such marked progress in terms of physical, mental, and relational health, I think it would be worth spending a year being mindful of the changes and habits which brought about that health and look for ways to improve and integrate them into a stronger, more foundational part of my character.

With eating, for example, I need to examine my success with both dieting and understanding the effect anxiety can have on my eating patterns in order to develop a better long term relationship with nutrition in terms of physical and mental health.

Similarly, a considered understanding of the behaviors and attitudes which contributed to the improvement in my closest relationships should allow me to more deeply inhabit those changes and widen the circle of people I apply them to.

Believing In The Beat

After watching a fairly convincing Youtube video from Kurzgesagt, I've been trying daily gratitude journaling (separate from the psuedo-CBT journaling I do to manage anxiety), as a tool to keep ahead of depression.

Honestly haven't noticed any effects one way or the other, but I realized this morning that dancing, even for just a minute or two, provides a large and immediate boost to my outlook.

Here's Believer by American Authors. Give it a try.

New Year, New Goals

December was an odd month for me in terms of work.

I had a few fun bells and whistles to add to the two main programs the clinic uses, but overall both programs are stable and I didn't have any outstanding bug fixes or user requests. The two chief projects for the month turned out to be rearranging employee offices and our hard copy archives, and figuring out and managing an incentive project levied by one of the insurance companies we're contracted with.

The insurance project was complicated, and both projects were time consuming, but neither were urgent, and as no other issues cropped up over the course of the month, it was a relaxing December, which is not usually the case.

Having wrapped up both projects a week before the end of the year, I found myself spending the final week looking forward to 2020 and realizing it's time to restructure my job duties and responsibilities, an exciting, if overwhelming, prospect.

I'm in this position due to the efficiency and stability we've achieved at the clinic over the last year:

  • My office manager has grown into her role such that I'm able to back off most of the things related to day to day office function.
  • The two programs I've been writing over the course of the last year and change have matured into a fully functioning environment no longer in need of constant bug fixes or feature completion.
  • The staff and our physical systems have also reached a point of stability and efficiency where bumps and glitches in a given day don't throw us too far off, and we're all able to do more in less time with less energy and stress.

Reworking my job for 2020 feels a bit like making New Year resolutions, but because it also encompasses the direction of the clinic as a whole for the year, I guess it's technically more a yearly business plan.

So, what will I do in 2020?

Learn project management

I've been using OmniFocus for years, and have basic task tracking down well enough, but I'm terrible at project management, resorting to bits in OF, bits in Things, bits written down on scraps paper or in random text files, and worst of all, bits floating around in my head.

I don't generally screw things up too badly but the more complex the project is the more of a mess I tend to make, redoing things which weren't done correctly the first time through, having to deal with sudden emergencies which should've been planned for, etc.

I think the basic skills I've learned about designing software can be brought to bare in learning how to plan and organize projects, and I can see where lessons learned here can be transferred back to programming, and I'm certain all the other things I'm hoping to accomplish this year will be made easier if I spend some time learning how to better organize my projects.

Youtube has been a remarkable source of useful information when it comes to learning about things like weight training and wood working, and a quick search shows plenty of OmniFocus related content there. I know the The Omni Group also maintains a pretty good learning section on their own site, so I shouldn't have a problem finding useful information.

Write more code

While the function of our programs is stable and currently complete, behind the scenes the code base is a mess of me learning as I go, and there are great swaths of the early code which need to be cleaned up and made more efficient. I've learned so much this year about using protocols, delegation, and encapsulation that when I do have to go back and work with the older parts of my code base it's incredibly tedious, full of redundancy, and error prone.

And despite current completeness, there is still a ton of room for evolution in the programs, and I have a whole list of ways I'd like to do that. As my skill has grown, so has my vision of what's possible, and I can see ways we can advance functionality, even if my users can't, so don't know to ask for it.

For example, I need to develop an iOS version of at least one of the programs for use when the doctor does rounds at the local nursing homes. I've done almost nothing with iOS so far, so that will be a whole other experience.

There are also a whole host of accessory tasks the staff does which could be made faster, easier, and more accurate by automating them, not to mention figuring out how to bring custom machine learning algorithms to some of our work.

Improving the doctor's workflows

The amount of information my wife has to deal with in terms of patients health, insurance company impediments, and just maintaining her status as a practicing physician in Texas can be overwhelming. Working to improve her workflows in all these areas isn't at all new, in fact all my work at the clinic seeks to help her specifically to one degree or another. This year, though, I'd like to make a more focused and wholistic effort to identify ways to make things easier on her in terms of tracking, interacting, and executing.

Quality of life for staff

I've tried to engage our staff for years on ways I can try to improve their quality of life for the 40 hours a week they spend at the clinic, but I don't think I've ever gotten any feedback. When I can think of things which might increment their QOL I implement them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but as with improving the doctor's workflows, this year I plan on taking a much harder look at the problems and possibilities involved in creating a more healthy atmosphere for the staff.

It's easy for me to get bogged down in minutia and routine; it's comfortable and requires less mental energy. This year, though, I need to continue breaking through the familiar to expand my vision and understanding.

I Forgot It Could Be Like This

2019 was an exceptional year. The best in memory, honestly, a realization which snuck up on me, causing much surprise.

A lot of that exceptionality had to do with the positive development of relationships, both internal and external, particularly with my wife, which can't be easily quantified, but have definitely increased the quality of my life a hundred fold.

There are other things which can be more easily enumerated:

  • Traveled much more this year including trips to:

    • Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England
    • Galveston
    • Eureka Springs, Arkansas
    • Oklahoma City and Tahlequah, Oklahoma
    • Austin (twice)

  • I drove in Ireland, which gets its own bullet point, having been a terrifying boot camp in how to navigate on the opposite side of the road from the opposite side of the car without killing myself or others.

  • Lost more than 25 pounds and decreased my body fat by more than 3%.

  • Almost doubled the amount of deep sleep I get from an average of 51 minutes per night in 2018 to 92 minutes for this current month.

  • Saw over 30 live performances, including my first Italian opera (Madame Butterfly) and the amazing Noah Kahan.

  • Discovered and committed to a community of people where I can comfortably and safely work on social anxiety issues and hopefully learn how to become a more active, positive part of a larger group.

  • Became a real software developer getting paid chiefly to write code.

I feel like this all sets a solid foundation for 2020, and I'm eager to get started enjoying a wonderful new year.

Mistakes

We went to see Andy Gullahorn at LMFA a few Saturday nights ago with some friends, and had a wonderful time. He was a very funny performer, particularly singing Teenagers and when he led us in the anti-sing-a-long sing-a-long song 'Shutup'.

Mr. Gullahorn liked to tell stories, and it felt like the story for each song tended to be longer, sometimes by a factor of 2, than the songs themselves which led him into a bit of an issue when he decided to sing Not Bad Enough. The story he led into the song with was particularly longish, with tangents and asides, so when he got to the performance itself he'd already made quite an investment of his time and ours. However as this is one of his older songs which he apparently doesn't sing as often anymore, in the process of telling his story he'd forgotten how it started.

He tried several tricks to remember, starting and stopping a number of times, stepping back from the mic, turning away from the audience, but he just could not remember the opening words and chords of the first verse. Finally, in desperation, he picked up his iPhone, opened up the Apple Music store, looked up the song, and played the first 20 seconds or so until it sparked his memory enough to set the phone down and begin playing the song for us live.

I can only commend him on his determination, and can't help but think how mortified I would've been in the same circumstances.

It reminded me of the previous Saturday when we went to see the Shreveport Opera performance of Man of La Mancha (which took me completely by surprise, but I'll talk about that in another post). Within the first few minutes of the beginning of the musical a performer's mic started going bonkers, as though it had come loose or were positioned wrong and was rubbing against costume or hair. It was deeply distracting and would've easily ruined the show.

As my discouragement grew, out of the corner of my eye I saw Steve Aiken, the SO General & Artistic Director, hobbling forward down the stage-right aisle. He'd had bunion surgery earlier in the week and had a post surgical boot on his right foot, so while he was trying to move both quickly and quietly, he was accomplishing neither.

As the actors tried valiantly to work through the misbehaving mic, Mr. Aiken made his way slowly up the stage stairs then out onto the middle of the stage itself, waving his hands, shouting "Stop! Stop!"

It was exactly like something out of a movie or sitcom, and I couldn't help but chuckle to see it happening in real life.

He apologized and explained as it was so early in the performance he believed it would be better for everyone involved if they located and fixed the errant mic and just started all over. He was right, and I'm so very glad he did it, but that is probably going to be the moment I most remember about the performance.

That memory led me even further back to a performance of "Spreading it Around" in Jefferson by The Opera House Theatre Players a couple years ago. The play itself was funny enough, and while the scenery and props were a bit of a mess, it was the actors who took the cake.

The lead actress was first on stage and she carried a handful of index cards with her. It took a few minutes for us to figure out it was the script and she was reading her lines from the cards. Next came the lead actor, who was not carrying a copy of the script with him. We knew this for sure as about four or five lines in he suddenly stopped cold, got a troubled look on his face, then called out "Line!", at which point the director, with a loud whisper from the balcony above us, fed him his next line. This went on regularly for the whole of the play, and was an aide the other male actor also took advantage of.

One might think I'm wallowing in schadenfreude and snark, but that's actually quite far from my point. In all of these cases the thing I remember most is actually the courage.

Performing in public is itself an act of bravery, but to be willing to acknowledge and work through mistakes and shortcomings up there on stage in full view of the audience takes a true measure of trust and courage.

As someone who struggles with social anxiety and can be paralyzed by the thought of being seen failing in front of other people, the way these individuals pursued their performances in the face of adversity, regardless of embarrassment, while, yes, entertaining on some level at a cost to their egos, is mostly remembered as encouragement to act in the face of difficulty, risk, or possibility of being mocked.

A Bit Of Geek Joy

Writing an extension this afternoon to encode some data to JSON and I finally came across an obvious place to use generics, which is something I've been eagerly waiting for. I know there are probably a ton of places I could've and should've already been using them, but I haven't really got my head around them yet. Here, though, it was obvious even to me a generic was the perfect answer.

I haven't actually tested the code yet as I was called away to dinner at the local Indian restaurant, but I look forward to testing and refining it tomorrow.

extension Encodable {
    static func saveEncodedData<T: Encodable>(_ data: [T], toFilePath path: URL) {
        let json = try? JSONEncoder().encode(data)

    do {
        try json!.write(to: path)
    } catch {
        print("Failed to write JSON data: \(error.localizedDescription)")
    }
    }

}

Disconnected

Morality is a function of relationships which exist in multifaceted, compound contexts acting more often as veils and walls, than doors and vistas. Disconnected from understanding our own needs and urges, but not from their effects on our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, we remain distanced from each other and stunted in our ability to connect, falling back on power constructs standing in for the honest morality of how we behold and behave towards others.