A Day In: My Life as an Entrepre-thingymajig (on a scale across decades)

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A post shared by 正 (@_jerng) on Sep 19, 2020 at 3:04pm PDT

Cooling system leaked, car towed, date cancelled. FML. Second time I've tripped up on this lady with an engine overheating. Lol. Otherwise it was a productive day. I defragged the production floor furniture, and anchored my bed at home. I hope to remain relatively unaffected by loss of relationships, as it helps to guarantee my focus on work. Perhaps I will go walk my rock after I get home - maybe even push the codebase along a little. I also owe a business partner some phone number lookups, so I must remind myself to do that as I walk home from the workshop where my car ended up. It is a neighbour's shop and he is notorious for being expensive. I hope this is not too painful.

Later, as I walk down dark alleys, with a weight plate, to a nearby park, I get some sense that I've almost become the 37-year-old I wanted to be when I was in my twenties. I don't feel that I've learnt a lot of late. It feels like I did my specialisation around the age of 19-to-20-years old. After that I focused even more on seeking breadth over depth. As I approach the park, I remember getting hurt in the dark while playing hide and seek in a dark park when I was 10, some 27 years ago. A recent partner who reminds of my best friend from when I was seven, thirty years ago, is surprised that I remember that far back. But I remember things from further still away ... we all know how curated memories are subject to corruption.

We each carry such different appreciations of time. Some are shocked that others can wrestle with objects five-years-long, others find it simple. My first premeditated grind was six-years-long - I was sent to a Chinese language school against my explicit preferences - I was six-years-old when it began. My first long project was nine-years-long. I was probably eight- or nine-years-old, and the task was to get into college. College was supposed to be a four-year holiday. I really enjoyed that. Near the beginning of college, I was working on the optimisation problem to decide what to focus my studies on - there were some medium-sized distractions, but mainly I was interested in a question I had assigned to myself earlier in highschool after watching the Matrix, on my friends' recommendations, and finding it conceptually uninspiring, albeit cinematographically impressive. I set out simply to understand how to quantify human experience, and prepared myself for two decades of study - surprisingly, it was not so tedious, and progress was made within two years or so. Then I just focused on getting my degree finished, so that I could get a real job to focus on something new: the study of commerce which I had avoided thus far. I graduated in 2005, and it seems now we are 15 years in, so I feel great about having stuck to one project (with some holidays) on this time frame. And I really look forward to seeing what comes next eventually, one day, maybe years from now, as I am not yet done with commerce. Nevertheless, I get up each each day expecting to be surprised - though usually I am not, and it is a stoic plod through the mundanity of people who are driven by material gains.

Today, as I lie on a pillow reviewing the last 36 hours, I am not so pleased with my gains over this period. I can do better. So I am planning to put a bit more focus on my partner (the date) though don't know what it is exactly I am going to do - I feel our communication is yielding a low SNR, so I either have to fix my appreciation of it, or fix it itself. As for my business partners, I have as always, so many things to polish - that remains my primary occupation.

"Getting Sorted 2020" : item 7, reestablish daily quiet time

Following up on earlier steps of operations tuning, in this cycle:

Group 1

1. Set up general storage facility and interior architecture.

2. Set up sleeping quarters, washroom, laundry, pantry, and physical conditioning assets.

3. Set up electronic workstation, with large planes perpendicular to line of sight, to buffer verbal and visual memory.

4. Set up vehicles of commute from home office to production floor.

Group 2

5. Establish social ties with familiars, for physical and conversational intimacy/infrastructure.

6. Establish tracking of desk time as a precursor to partitioning time between desk and non-desk work. Software development, bookkeeping, public intelligence, visual design, etc. versus building maintenance, talent imprinting, logistical fulfillment, ground intelligence, in-person networking, etc.

Now, 7. I am planning to reinstate daily quiet times. (In the Christian tradition I was raised in, these would be once- or twice-daily events lasting a few minutes each, with a process of rituals for memory management, ethical review, and emotional recalibration against in-memory models of external entities. I am not here interested in the in-memory model of a deity, but all other components of this sort of daily event are revelant to the strategic layer of any operation.) Plan, daily:

7.1. Review any business priorities dangling in short-term memory.

7.2. Dredge up business priorities from mid-to-long-term memory.

7.3. Rewrite forward-8-hour execution path/priority-list.

7.4. Repack S/M/L-tM (7.1.-7.3. are the mental conditioning part.)

7.5. Check physical condition, social condition, financial condition, and tactically recondition any requirements antecedent to the success of 7.3.

7.6. Zoom out of the business context, and review the prioritisation of 7.1-7.5. against broader ethical considerations, in general. Reiterate back through 7.1.-7.6. as needed to reduce incoherence.

Group 3

8. Administrative debt: to be addressed in the future ... I do have a number of personal obligations such as quit rent which I need to pay, and tax declarations, which have not been addressed of late.

Rant: Autism, Abnormal Labels, Sickness, and Statistics

Was discussing this set of social phenomenon, { 

1. "the assertion that some behaviours are normal, despite being implicitly present, rather than explicitly defined", 

2. "the assertion that people should demonstrate sociability by assuming the first assertion, then complying with it", 

3. "the assertion that non-compliance is a disorder",

4. "the assertion that disorders are to be made compliant with the norm"

}

Haha, high-context cultured people who believe in common sense sensitivities are welcome to castigate rule-oriented people as "disordered", and rule-oriented people are symmetrically welcome to castigate emotionally sensitive people as disabled, I think 😛

I just happen to have chosen to believe, years and years ago, that sensitive people are cripples. I don't think there's an objective right or wrong, it's just a preference for what sorts of societies we each want to build out of the world that we are collectively given.

Well, my personal view is that high-context cultures are degenerate and I am generally opposed to endorsing them.

On Gazing; Aside, Body Language

 On gazing. I was telling a friend, I spend half my life worrying that "my stare is too intense", due to various complainers. So generally I have a program to regularly reduce eye-contact duration with conversationalists who are new to me. In reaction to this, I have had feedback from potential investors (who later become er, friends), that my body language during pitches was not sufficiently robust due to my sporadic eye-contact. So in conclusion, I must say, it is best to just imitate the eye-contact pattern of your conversational partner, based on second-to-second feedback. Most people do not actively manage this. But some people do.

As for deception, we have to assume that anyone may be smart enough to lie through performance of whatever body language they presume to be suitable for the event.

So body language, like other language has to be read as "what the subject says," in the broader context of "pay less attention to what people say, than what they do."

"I don't meet people"

 Thoughts on introverts and social meetings: a lot of them assert, "I don't meet people." This should be read as "I don't meet people, except when I really want to." Hence, if you're in a meeting and this comes up, it means that you're a special person and you should treasure their time explicitly (it is polite, by their culture). And if you're not in a meeting and this comes up, it basically means "fuck off". Given that I don't not-meet people, I should probably assume for the purposes of this edict that I'm an extrovert. Of course, the running joke I tell my friends is that I'm a repressed extrovert. Maybe I want to spend all my time with people who are clever and safe ... whereas it seems that most of the people I run into seem stupid and dangerous. Or maybe I would be crudely social if uninhibited, so offensive as to be imprisoned if I didn't just avoid socialising obnoxiously. Ah, the joke. I am.