On Oliver Sacks

If you have ever been a fan of Oliver Sacks, give this New York Magazine article from November a read. It's a short and sweet look into him as a person, featuring stories from his childhood, personality, passions, focus, and life. It's full of little snippets that I loved, including the phrase neurological marbles. Here are two more:

"The great moment of his genius was not giving those people the drugs; it was walking into that home for the incurable, that warehouse, and having the moral audacity to imagine that some of those patients were different from the other ones and that they were in fact alive."

We may be our brains, he wanted to say, but we also shape them as we backpack through the world with all our trinket-y neuroses.

For your introspective Saturday night.

On meetings and feeling like a fraud.

I found both of these articles at least a year ago, but have been reading and re-reading both lately.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. This talks about two major ways people in business/entrepreneurship/the startup world allocate their time in order to best get things done. The maker's schedule allows for long stretches of productivity (or, "maker time"), while a typical manager's day is divided up into one-hour increments. Bringing the two together can be problematic, and it's something I've noticed in myself the more I've grown in my career and have had to move toward the latter. I haven't figured out how to reconcile the two yet, but I've tried to experiment with meeting clustering as much as possible, to allow for at least 2 to 3 hours of uninterrupted work time every day. It's a challenge, but a fun one to take on.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing (or “The 3 Types of Knowledge”). I've linked to this before (when I wrote about interdisciplinarity), and here it is again.

Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?

This opening paragraph gets me every time. This post talks about these three types of knowledge: shit you know, shit you know you don't know, and shit you don't know you don't know. Steve Schwartz describes the last as the most dangerous, and poses that the goal should be to make that slice smaller – even if it's goes into the "shit you know you don't know bucket," rather than making the "shit you know" bucket bigger. He says that the more things there are that you know you don't know, the more stressed you can be or feel like you have no idea what you're doing. I frequently feel overwhelmed by all the stuff and expertise out there that I don't have a grasp on yet, but maybe that's better (or "less dangerous") than being blissfully ignorant of it all? Really interesting stuff, and easier to follow if you click through and look at his charts in comparison with one another and read his examples.

More cognitive easter eggs

This week's NY Magazine is making me bounce all over the streets. And I'm not even halfway through it yet! The part that I want to particularly share is in the main feature, In Defense of Distraction. It talks about the dozens of things that divide our attention these days; whether or not they are terrible for us; whether or not the great minds of history would have been able to accomplish what they did in today's world ("If Einstein were alive today, [world multitasking expert David Meyer] says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity."); etc.

Here is a little portion from the last quarter of the piece:

...The most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

If that isn't a lovelier and better thought-out articulation of cognitive easter eggs than I could ever write, I will mistake my wife for a hat. Isn't that nice? I loved reading Sam Anderson's take on things.

I recommend reading the entire article, actually. A lot of interesting pieces of history and research come into it, and as serious a consideration this whole thing is, Anderson balances it with a great amount of humor and optimism for our future. Also, he endorses reading about the Boston Molasses Disaster two or three times ("The world is a stranger place than we will ever know"), and I wholeheartedly agree! I wrote about it last June, check it out. It's the oddest historical disaster you'll read about all week, I bet.