A nice perk of starting my full-time position in January is that I have 3 uniterrupted months “off.” I say “off” instead of off because I am not truly without academic responsibility. For example, I participated in a CCC workshop on finding “grand challenges” in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity and am shepherding the writing of one of the four […]
Tag: personal development
Beginnings: Old and New
“I want to be a C. scientist” That’s what I told my brother, with an impish grin. He was visiting Bombay from New York, circa 1997, during a break from his studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science. He asked me what I wanted to be when […]
How to Use Habit Helixes: A Tutorial
I’m going to teach you how to use habit helixes. If you don’t know what those are, read my previous post. In short, habit helixes intertwine multiple success spirals into a domino chain and embed them into a tigger-routine-reward habit loop. They should be useful for people who already know how to use success spirals […]
Habit Helixes: The case against small change
I’ve had some conversations with people about success spirals. Expectedly, some are skeptics. A common counter-argument is that success spirals are unexciting and slow [1]. Start with writing 1 minute a day? After a month, maybe do 10 minutes a day? How long will it take to write a novel with that level of commitment? […]
How To Conference, Pt. 1: Networking
Conferences can be fun and exciting. You get to travel, meet new people from all around the world, reconnect with old friends, and learn about bleeding-edge work. If you are a student, you even get to do all of this for free [1]. But, conferences can also be nerve-racking — for newcomers and veterans alike. […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough: Update 1
Right now, I am keeping track of some of my success spirals publicly on this spreadsheet. You can read more some details about why I’m doing this in a previous post, but the basic point is to do a live walkthrough of using success spirals to fight off procrastination and actually accomplish things. My plan […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough for 30 days
When I started this blog, I posted a tutorial on how to set up and use success spirals to live your day-to-day ideals. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to do a live walkthrough to share exactly how I use these spirals in practice: From the inception of the success spiral through to its review phase. […]
A Tutorial on Goal Selection: Focus on Effort, not Results
It’s easy to set yourself up for failure with poor goal-selection strategies. In this post, I hope to provide some specific actionable insights to help avoid that. I previously wrote a tutorial for creating effective success spirals. One core component of that tutorial is creating a spiral structure: A comically low starting goal that is impossible […]
How You Can Use Success Spirals: A Tutorial
In my last post, I talked about one of the tricks I use to realize my ideals: success spirals. In this post, I’ll go into a bit more detail of how to create an effective success spiral. Success Spiral Summary To recap, a success spiral is a concrete instantiation of the principle of constant improvement: […]
Spiral Into Control: Using Success Spirals to Achieve Anything
In a previous post, I discussed how to realize your ideals with constant, incremental improvements. The key idea of that post was that drastic change, in theory, need not be drastic in practice. Rather, we can build up to drastic change from very modest beginnings. For example, if you want to exercise more, you can […]