Dan's Notes / Issue 2: Compounding consistency • Class 1/Class 2 Problems • Progress mindset

Hi! Welcome to Issue 2 of Dan's Notes. We don't have a better title yet but I'm officially out of "one and done" territory 🎉

For those of you who are new here (welcome!), I started this weekly email as writing practice. I'm sharing a few of my favorite links from the past week plus anything else that's on my mind.

Results of last week's "morning walks" experiment

Last week I wrote about how going outside shortly after waking up (not opening the blinds, not looking out a window, but actually going outside) is really great for your health. My usual morning routine involves reading in bed with a cup of coffee within ~10 minutes of waking up, so I thought it would be fun to run an experiment for a week where I postpone my coffee until breakfast and go for a walk instead. Here's how that went:

• ☕️ The first half of the week was, as expected, an adjustment period. Thankfully the weather here in LA was ridiculously nice last week and summoning the will to go for an early walk was easy. I did miss my usual caffeine boost that I rely on to wake my brain up and propel me out of bed and to the gym.

• 😴 Afternoons & evenings were mostly the same, although strangely I was tired enough by late afternoon on Monday & Tuesday to take a short nap, which is very rare for me.

• 📈 By the end of the week I was finally feeling some benefits. The best part by far was aligning my morning caffeine boost with the start of my workday instead of the inconsequential parts of my morning like showering, making breakfast, or reading in bed.

• 🔁 I also began to see how a new morning routine could take shape around this habit: wake up, read & write for 20 minutes, have a snack, bike to the gym, eat a big breakfast, and start my workday. That's more structure & consistency than I have now, and I'm going to try running that routine throughout the upcoming week and see how it goes.

What's your morning routine? I'm always interested to hear how other people start their mornings - it's a highly personal time of day and different strategies work well for different types of people. Mine is (clearly) a constant period of experimentation. If there's something that works well for you, I'd love to hear about it.

Moving on to this week's links:

Photo by Tim Urban

The Small Steps of Giant Leaps

One reason that I'm continuously tinkering with my morning routine is because I know that small changes executed over a long period of time can compound into big results. Compound interest doesn't just apply to finance! And when it comes to habit formation - taking a walk in the morning, going to the gym daily, sending a weekly email - consistency is key.

For your choices to compound, you need to be consistent. Intensity will only carry you in the short term but if you want compounding results you need consistency. In the absence of immediate rewards, we can keep up the intensity for a while but most of us become intermittent. 

Class 1 / Class 2 Problems

Kevin Kelly writes about a framework for thinking about two classes of problems that new technology introduces. "Class 1" problems arise from imperfect technology. Facial recognition isn't 100% accurate. AI data models develop the same racial biases found in the real-world data they're trained on. We expect a far higher level of perfection from self-driving cars than human drivers. As the market solves these problems, they're replaced by Class 2 problems: problems society must contend with when the new technology, now perfected, is ubiquitous. These problems are far harder to solve because they require a re-imagining of the way the world works, which happens slowly and with more resistance than technologists would like (or have the patience for). Great companion to the piece on builders vs. maintainers I shared last week.

Whereas once the problem was “not everyone has this technology that doesn’t work very well” now the problem is “everyone has this technology that works very well.” We now contend with a technology that is present everywhere, all the time. [...]

To deal with ubiquitous accurate facial recognition when it comes (and it will come) requires a societal consensus on what it means to have a face that is both personal and public, to re-evaluate what public or private even means, to ensure symmetry between watchers and the watched, and to encourage expansive ideas around the very notions of identity of any type. A lot of this work is beyond the realm of dollars, and will take place in schools, courts, forums, communities, tweets, congresses, books, and late at night. [...] To solve the problem of perfect facial recognition demands an expanded imagination, society wide, with new and different ideas about our face and identity.

Collaborative Fund: Six Questions for Derek Thompson

Six questions for Derek Thompson, a columnist at The Atlantic. Like the author, I too enjoy Thompson's writing (most recently: this piece on the "abundance agenda"), and I really like his answer to this question: Optimism as the default long-term forecast: Smart or oblivious?

I imagine a 2x2 grid in my head, with optimism vs pessimism along the X axis and evidence vs ideology along the Y axis. Some people are ideological and pessimistic. They’re doomers. Some people are ideologically optimistic. They’re boosters. Some people are evidence-based and pessimistic. They’re skeptics. But some people are both optimistic and evidence-based. That’s the sweet spot. Call it educated optimism, or the progress mindset, or the abundance mindset, or the improving mentality. Whatever it is, it’s where I want to be—and where I want my writing to push people.

My personal level of optimism ebbs and flows; some periods are more difficult than others, but I try hard to stay in that top-right quadrant of evidence-based optimism. When I'm down, I try to remind myself that pessimism is a disservice to those who are working hard on progress, and that progress has never been driven by pessimism.

Better Laid Than Never

In 2008, California taxpayers approved a $10 billion bond measure for a 220mph train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost 15 years later, the projected cost has more than tripled, it's now a normal-speed train, and exactly 0 miles of track have been laid. What was I saying about optimism, again?

Ogeh Ezeonu's workspace

Swooning over every detail of Ogeh Eneonu's workspace, featured in the Workspaces email list. The backlighting against the green wall is just 🤌✨ I also suddenly want a desk pad; thankfully the workspace owners in this series typically share which products are on their desk, and I tracked down this desk mat for my wishlist. Great newsletter, by the way - shows off creative professionals' work environments.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading! As always, I'd love to hear what you think. And if you know someone who would enjoy these emails, here's a link to subscribe.

Until next week,

Dan