Trailhead: Anne Helen Peterson. "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation". Buzzfeed News (2019-01-05).

It's late so I won't give this the full treatment. It's a long article, and one I'd heard of and wanted to read.

The immediate reaction is: I had never thought of the useless and incessant drive to optimize tasks and habits and hobbies at home? It's always there—not even necessarily in the back of my mind but the front, because I plan every day. It exacts a toll and it's not clear that it's useful for anything. Forget useful—it's not clear that useful is itself useful at home, at least as far as self-tasks go.

I am a believer, in spite of experience and evidence, that form follows function. A thing should work well, and that is more important than how it looks. Every day something happens to disprove that, but still I row against the current. I'm not proud of it necessarily, it's just a habit.

The most common failure mode for me goes like this: I spend quite a bit of time designing something (good), then building it (good), then tweaking it to make it work (good), then I forget to clean up the environment or the thing itself and it looks like a minor disaster (bad)—even if the thing itself works like a dream.

That impression a person gets when they see or hear or smell something before they can touch it or taste it colors the rest of the experience. Build some shelves but leave the room a mess because you'll get that part tomorrow? You'll have to answer for that—not just the mess, but maybe some questions about the efficacy of the perfectly good shelves. Build some shelves but move the mess into a different room and you'll get that part tomorrow? You're a hero who makes the best shelves. Perhaps the best solution yet is to build the thing and clean the mess, but not every project fits neatly in the space of time before the rest of the world—or at least the part of the world that matters—sees the results.

Previous: All models are wrong (2021-08-18)

Although we know that "all models are wrong, but some are useful", that only handles the question of why a model can't do everything right. Right? A hurricane model might be able to get windspeed, precipitation, future track in 24 hours, future track in 2 weeks—but everything? No. We want the models to step right up, and give us everything, but each model is tuned to do some things well because each individual problem to solve in a model in the whole damned mess of problems is complicated enough on its own.

So "all models are wrong" is for the naysayers. It could just as easily be used for the True Believers—the ones who think there is such thing as a complete model of a problem if you just reach for it. A model isn't supposed to be right—"right" as in 100% correct about everything. But useful analysis often gets stopped in the quixotic search for a model that does it all.

Actually, maybe it's not a quixotic search, but a search for a holy grail. I always think of this exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever someone gets wrapped up too tight in overtuning a model.

Camelot!

Camelot!

Camelot!

It's only a model.

Shhh!

This fall semester I'm taking two half-semester classes at Wash U: FIN 532 Investment Theory, then FIN 532B Data Analytics for Investments. I don't have any particular love for either class, nor for the topic, but I wanted to take a more analytical class after taking softer classes (negotiation, change management, power and politics) all year. So I'll hang out with the quantitative kids this semester, especially since I picked one of the sections with the MS Finance students, who are predominantly plugging in from China. Maybe I'll learn some topic-specific Chinese as well.

The topic-disinterest is itself a form of interest. It's like a negative light shone on the things that I don't know much about because I would typically only learn something about the things I'm interested in. It's a kind of interest in filling in the gaps. I don't want to spend too much of my time forcing myself to learn things I don't care about, but as a general rule it's useful to do it sometimes.

I'm down to 16.5 credit hours remaining, and this will cover 3 of them. At this point in the year, I'm just trying to grind through—Mule Time, maybe you've heard of it—so 3 credit hours is enough. Also it's the limit of what the home office will sponsor for the year, so why not shuffle the remaining hours to next year.

Previous: 100 days of planks (2021-02-27)

I suppose, now, that I could have started a daily habit of something more useful 281 days ago, but here we are. Core strength is good, although with a slouchy posture it does lose some of its efficacy. Today, after ratcheting up the time—every day increase 5 seconds, every Monday back it off to 5 seconds longer than the previous Monday, every day increase 5 seconds, and so on and so on—I got up to doing 6 (continuous) minutes of planks. It's not a meaningful accomplishment except in Bro Land, but I have a timeshare there so it's OK for me to celebrate.

Months ago, this daily habit was something that I was latching on to just to get through the days/weeks/months of the pandemic that had just smashed themselves into an indistinguishable mass, like a loaf of sliced bread dropped in the sink. Having something that needed to be done Daily kept the world—the small world, the local world, the one inside my head—in order. Now I accept the daily as useful that gets done in order to keep the streak alive—something I neither look forward to nor think about, something I just know I need to do before I go to bed. It's in a gray area between the habit serving me and me serving the habit, but it doesn't take much time, and the payoff is good for the effort, so it seems like a no-brainer.

Habits are compound interest. Put something in, keep putting something in, take more out later. The opposite is true as well, but the debt accumulates, and the collector comes some day, ready or not.

There are a million forms of this advice—and none of them good—but: choose your habits well. Get something out of them for yourself. Get something out of them for someone else. Avoid the ones that rack up debts—debts in dollars, debts in liver cells, whatever. There's no sense getting to the end of the world—the one in your head—with a pristine machine, but there's even less sense dulling the blade if you want to make something with it.