Purpose, purpose, purpose. This theme has been running in my mind ever since I started reading The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.

A thought ocurred to me about purpose and religion. There seems to be a strange double-think in religion about whether or not religion is good for you, and whether or not that should matter. Rick Warren pitches a closer relationship with God by stressing how great it will feel. He says, for example:

The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concertate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel.

Wow, I think to myself. That sounds very powerful, and appeals to my desire for success and productivity. If I have purpose, then my life will be organized! But I don't think Rick Warren would want to encourage that line of thinking. He would rather say that I do it because I want to serve God.

Why do people go to Church on Sundays?

There's two purposes: the stated purpose and the effective purpose. The effective purpose, in most cases, for attending Church on Sundays is inertia. You do it because you did it last week. The stated purpose could be all sorts of things, but I imagine it to be, "It's good for my family," or "It brings me closer to God," or "It helps me get in touch."

However, it seems that the only legitimate purposes for attending Church have to be something other than self-serving ones. Your stated purpose could be, "It makes me happy," but Rick Warren wouldn't approve of this as a reason to believe in Christ.

Now, back to the title of this post. There is a fundamental thought experiment in philosophy: Why shouldn't you spend all your time helping the kids in Africa?

One response I heard is, "Would you have rather have it that Socrates spent his time helping the slaves rather than creating his life's work?"

That's kind of an unfair argument because not all of us are going to be as important as Socrates.

But really, why shouldn't we all be doing more community service?

I decided once, "Hey, my life needs purpose" and I signed up for a bunch of community service. I found myself terribly bored, even depressed, like I was wasting my time. While I knew on one level that I was helping people, I could not ignore how sick it was making me. I eventually had to throw my hands up and quit.

Looking back now, I understand that this was a conflict of purpose. Because if I asked myself, "What is my primary motivation," I would have answered, "To make my life more meaningful." In other words, I was trying to use service as a way to get an emotional upper.

Now, I'm starting to think that you'll never get the emotional benefits of doing something meaningful if you don't actually care about what you're helping with. Your motivation can't be, "Well I need a kick." It's got to be, "I want to help these people."

So, long story short, I've come up with this principle:

Your primary motivation is your effective purpose.

Cross-posted on Drunk Log

First, we need to define faith as a principle:

Uncertainty is the predominant state of affairs. We don't know whether this year will be better than the last. We don't know if we're on the way up or on the way down. We just don't know.

If all your confidence comes from things you can see, then you'll be in a chicken-before-the-egg problem. You won't believe in yourself until you succeed. But then you won't succeed if you don't believe in yourself.

So where do we get faith from?

Have the advancements of psychology in the last 150 years made us a "Nation of Whiners"? That is what Tony Soprano, in the first season of The Sopranos, bugs his therapist about.

I don't agree with him, but here's what I think is correct about it: Any bit of advantage you gain, inevitably raises the bar of the kind of advantage you expect. For example, if you take Advil whenever you feel sore from playing rugby, what happens is you'll play more rugby. Then you'll move onto newer problems, which is when you'll start to seem like a whiner.

So, in a way, becoming a Nation of Whiners means that our problems today are less significant than our problems of before. This is in some ways, a sign of progress.

I have a friend that refuses to take Advil, ever, for anything, even if he gets sick. That's a little unheard of nowadays. My understanding is that doing so would make him feel like a baby. I can say that I've wrestled with that issue before, but I came up with a principle to untie this issue:

Having a high fever really stresses your body, making you feel weak and full of pain, which can accelerate the fever further. So it's okay to take Advil or Tylenol just to reduce the symptoms.

By extension, and going back to Tony Soprano's complaint, deep levels of depression are very much a cause for further depression. And so I'll agree with the line of thinking that suggests taking anti-depressants to temporarily rehabilitate emotional levels. It helps you get unstuck, and from there you can move forward to fixing whatever caused your depression in the first place.

(For the sake of personal disclosure, I wrestle with deciding whether to take stuff like kava kava, valerian, and St. John's Wort because of these issues).

Cross-posted on drunk-log, which has the keystrokes that made this post.

faith is confidence in the absence of evidence.

Now, that does have potentially dual interpretations: faith is confidence in spite of the absence of evidence, or faith is confidence in the lack of evidence itself

Viktor Frankl's, Man's Search for Meaning, is one of the most intriguing books I've read. The book basically revolves around the idea that humans have an innate, core desire for meaning. In the book, he introduces the concept of the "Sunday neurosis." When people finally pause at the end of the weekend, and have nothing to do, they may experience a sudden sense of meaninglessness. This is a phenomenon that I can relate to.

But what is meaning? That book doesn't go into detail on how exactly one can find meaning in life. And the elephant-in-the-room question is, "What is Viktor Frankl's meaning?" Turns out Viktor Frankl's meaning in life is to help other people find meaning. How convenient.

But I figured out a simple tool that can help approximate a meaningful life. You simply ask your heart, "is this meaningful?" I found it easy to get reliable answers from my heart.

And so I took an inventory of all possible directions I could take my career, and I put a check-mark next to each one that I found, in my heart, seemed meaningful. Afterward, I then started stacking my work-flow with meaningful projects.

So far so good.

But then, there were further questions. There was something lacking in my calculation. What makes something meaningful? All I had was a feeling I could tap internally that evaluated a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on meaning. When is something more meaningful than others? And what if my internal judging mechanism is off a little bit?

These problems came to fore when I had two projects that were both meaningful. I found myself naturally favoring one over the other, but I couldn't tell why. Somehow my meaningfulness-measure lacked predictive power.

But now, I think I figured out the extra sauce that makes meaningfulness more... well... meaningful. The extra sauce is "purpose."

If there's anything I got from The Purpose Driven Life, it's this principle:

There can be no meaning without purpose.

Using Sartre's thought experiment in Existentialism Is a Humanism, let's look at the case of the knife. If you were an alien and discovered a knife floating across the universe, what would you think? You'd notice the ridges, you'd notice that it was sharp, and you'd notice that it was connected to a blunt cylindrical portion. But without knowing what the purpose of the knife is, you wouldn't know the meaning of those features. If you knew the knife's purpose—that it's for cutting—then you'd understand that that the ridges are meant for something. Everything about the knife suddenly makes sense. The handle is meant for gripping. The sharp edge is meant for slicing and dicing.

Likewise, if you know what your purpose is, then you'll know the meaning of all of your features. Everything you do finally gets a context. You'll be able to answer the question, "Why was I born talented in this one area, but not so good at this other thing?"

Focusing on the purpose of what you do re-balances and centers your motivations. Every opportunity we encounter will have a completely different composition. One project may pay better, but doesn't use your motivated talents. Or another project may pay less, have less pleasant co-workers, but is related to some life-long dreams you've had. When the number of dimensions start piling up, you need a device to unify the decision-making process. If you know the "why?" of what you're doing, then it puts everything into context. Why do you need money? Why do you need more money? Why do you need to work in such-and-such field? It all depends on purpose.

Just thought of a new principle: a free mind is not attached to any ideas.

I think we all know in the back of our minds that being dogmatic or an ideologue is a bad idea. But as I was driving around, I dug deeper to figure out why. Why shouldn't we be dogmatic? Simply put, attachments by definition are difficult to let go of. When you let yourself become attached to a dogma, you're implicitly putting a chain around your mind.

I think it's okay to believe in something and have faith, but to become attached is against the principle of having a liberated perspective.

And just to set the mood, here's En Vogue's Free Your Mind:

... A garage start-up of today will unseat a giant tomorrow.

In the late 90s, Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, was given a tour of Microsoft's campus. Bill Gates pointed to one building and said, "That's Microsoft Word." Then he pointed to another building and said, "That's Excel." Then he pointed to another building and said, "That's Outlook." The point was to make Sabeer scared that even if Hotmail decided against selling out, Microsoft could just make another building and devote it to webmail.

Sabeer wasn't scared, and against the pleas of his board, he turned down a $250M+ offer.

Because at the end of the day, what the Bill Gates's, Michael Dell's, Steve Jobs's, and Sergey Brin's of the world know deep down inside, is that the little guy in the garage start-up is the one they have the most to fear.

Microsoft came back with a $400M offer, and finally Sabeer accepted.

I think the reason why it's so easy for a garage start-up to unseat a big boy, is that simply put, the way people do things is always changing, and big companies are systematically slower to adapt. As time marches forward, the rate at which change happens will be increasing, and so agility will be more favored in the future than enterprise.

I had a thought today that I think relates to the concept of fear and writing. It's the following:

Writing is an attachment.

What I notice is that the process of writing, of committing something to paper, is an expression of the form, "I'm not willing to part with this." Think of the most basic form of writing, a little shopping list or a TODO list. We do these things because we "don't want to forget." By extension, I think we write ideas down because we want to keep them, to pin them down. Inevitably we become attached to what we write, and so sometimes we intentionally write something down to form a bond.

Is a fear of writing, in some cases, some sort of attachment-anxiety? An unwillingness to be tied to a particular idea? There's a fear, perhaps, that if I put something out there, in writing, I'm forever bound to these words and these ideas.

This is a principle I've adhered to for many years. It's a principle from improv that was told to me as the "Yes-And" principle. What you do is that whenever anybody says anything, in your mind you think, "yes, and..." and then say whatever's next. What this does is it keeps the conversation flowing, and climbing to ever-taller heights of creativity. When you say no or contradict what was just said, everybody's minds shut down. For improv this could kill a performance. For ordinary conversations, it can bring the conversation to standstill.

The Yes-And principle is a trick that keeps improv actors coming up with spontaneous creativity, of the kind that often seems either prepared or some from of divine inspiration. But what I've found is that when you adhere to that principle, almost anybody can have innovative, open-ended conversations.

In America, there's another principle about conversations, "never talk politics," which I don't follow at all. With the "Yes-And" principle, the conversation doesn't devolve into a flame-war. When you're always looking for the positive in what people say, even if they're at the opposite end of the spectrum, everybody learns something.

The whole point is to keep the conversation going. You want to be someone who always has something to add to conversations.

This has served me well time-and-time again as a freelance developer. I often feel that many of my clients like working with me simply because I provide a space and soundboard for them to really express themselves and develop their ideas.

"In good times, people make bad decisions" - Warren Buffett

To a starving person, almost everything looks appetizing.

Once government charity starts, it's hard to stop.