Happiness, passion and love aren’t things that you find they are choices you make and skills you develop.

We generally think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable. But it reality the world is fixed and we are malleable. The world follows are series of mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect.

When also believe that our mind is fixed in comparsion to our bodies which we can change. The mind however is just as malleable as the body.

We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies- all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths.

Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.

We are slaves to our default programming, accepting that is who we are. But we can choose to change and to be anything we want.

Happiness is a highly peronsal skill that can be learned, just like fitness or nutrition.

Happiness is an evolving thing, it’s meaning changes throughout our lives and is different for everyone. To Naval happiness is what is there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

When you remove that sense of something missing, what you are left with is a neutral state. This is the existance that little children live. Small children on balance are quite happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.

Therefore happiness is not about positive or the absense of negative thoughts. It’s not about good or evil, it’s about the absense of desires.

Nature knows no concept of happiness or unhappiness. It follows unbroken mathematical laws and a series of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now.

Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.

The final week of the second month of a Life of Focus centred on the fact that connection requires effort and the easiest but perhaps forgotten way maintaining a rich social life is to join something. As the second challenge drew to a close we explore what to do after the declutter and tips for maintaining moderation going forward.

Cal began the week highlighting the point the connection requires effort. There are two components necessary for deep social interaction: an analog component (e.g. in person) and some notion of effort or sacrifice. This in is direct contrast with the characteristics of online communication.

The next lesson built on the first and concerned an almost forgotten tactic for maintaining and enhanced a rich social life. That is to join something. Some of the benefits of joining something explored were; a good way to enforce regular analog social interactions, build connections in your community and exposing you to a diverse group of people.

The rest of the week pertained to what to do after your digital declutter and tactics for maintaining moderation in digital devices.

This week marked the end of my digital declutter and for the most part it was a success. I have deleted instagram and facebook from my phone and didn’t even look on them on my laptop. Unfortunately I kind slipped with twitter, and redownloaded it on my phone on the last week. In the past instagram has been a real black hole for me so progress on that makes me proud.

I will definitely be not downloading those apps going forward, however I will start looking at them on my laptop again (ideal for instagram as it is hard to mindlessly scroll through stories).

My completed 11 hours of deep work this week. I feel I am slipping back into old working habits and need to reassess them again as I start the last month.

“I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have.”

Naval explains how his reading habit accounts for any material success he has had in his life. A claim like that gets taken extremely seriously by me.

During my teenage years I was able to devour 700-800 page fiction books in a week for fun, in the last few years I still managed to get through 10 or so non fiction books in a year thanks to Audible but I have so much room for improvement.

Inspired by this passage I have made a conscious effort to get back into reading fiction (or any book) every day. The goal is to get to an hour of reading a day.

Naval has certain tips around reading:

• Read what you love until you love to read.
• If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
• The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
• Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
• Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.
• You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

P.S

I believe and I think Naval does too, that you can better the seven years average by reading the classics and great books in certain order. However, different books speak to people differently so it is hard to say with certainty.

We have well established at this point that decision making is everything, and we are now optimsing to becoming better decision makers.

To begin, we need to accept that we are shit at making decsions.

Human brains are memory prediction machines. We usualy make decisions with the follow rational;

‘X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future’.

This is not a good way to make decisions, its too based on specifc circumstances.

A better way to make decisions is to filter them through principles or mental models.

Farnham Street defines mental models as:

A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

An example of a common mental model is ‘The Sunk Cost Fallacy’.

When we look for examples of people that use or have used mental models to make decisions, we find some of the greatest minds such as Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb and Benjamin Franklin.

There is one cavet with mental models, which is if you don’t have the underlying experiences to validate or support the mental models. Then they just become a collection of quotes. This does not mean they are usless, it just means that to learn and iternalise them you have to relate them to your own life.

Mental models are just compact ways to recall your own knowledge.

There are so many resources out there full of mental models, especially on Farnham Street, however the surest way to encounter new mental models is to read, a lot.

This week in a Life of Focus centred on the fact that humans are hard wired to enjoy creating over consuming things. Cal and Scott offered advise to select and enjoy creative hobbies. These creative hobbies are to fill the void created by our digital declutter.

Cal kicks off the week by highlighting that our digital lives are driven much more by consumption than by creation. He explains how the act of creation can be meaningful and rewarding in itself. This focus on creating creative hobbies is important as it can be restorative when done in addition to deep work.

They continue by offering some tips to help make your new creative hobbies as enjoyable and beneficial as possible. Some points include: focusing on the process over outcome and the perils associated with digital hobbies.

The final lesson of the week contemplates boredom. Cal explains how boredom is a craving like hunger and should not be ignored. He advocated that boredom should be respected as it demands useful activity.

My extra circular study this week consisted of studying the first four principles Scott developed for Ultralearning (Metalearning, focus, directness, and drill). This principals compliment the concepts covered in a Life of Focus, especially the second principal focus. The other principles are more suited to the deep working technical and tactics.

These last few weeks, this one included have suffered greatly as a result of social engagements. My deep work total this week was 11 hours, four hours short of my target. I have also concerns that my failure to batch tasks correctly is resulting increased attention residue from switching.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

In this age of infinite leverage as we have already found, one right decision can win everything. So how do you improve your ability to make decisions?

This path of improving decision making is very popular among hedge funds and venture captialists. If you can be more right and more rational most of the time, you’re going to get nonlinear returns.

The first step in improving your decision making is to see reality. To do this you have to be radically honest with yourself. Being honest with yourself allows to see the world as it is and make decisions accordingly.

This is easier said then done. Richard Feynman’s famous quote illustrates this perfectly.

“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Further steps to improving your decision making skills include collecting principles and mental models, however those only work when you start with honesty.

One of the most important skills in life is to be able to uncondition yourself.

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” – Buddhist saying

All of our egos are constructed in our formative years- our first two decades. They are influences by our family, environment, and society. All of these habits, biases and constructs affect the way we see the world. We spend our lives interpretting everything through our egos.

The ability to uncondition yourself, is the ability to take your habits apart and ask “Does this still serve me?”, “Does it make me happier?”, “Does it make me healthier?”, “Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?”.

This ability to uncondition yourself is always highlighted when life circumstances destory your ego. For example Bruce Lee had to accept that he could no longer be a competitive athlete due to his injury, so he forged a new identity as a philospher.

Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.