Early Retirement Extreme Forums

@MF
I've heard good things from a couple people that have attended United Bicycle Institute classes. I grew up in Ashland trail running for years, there are miles and miles of wild single track trails for running and downhill mountain biking in the Siskiyous. If you haven't already been to Ashland you'd probably love exploring!

Thanks @shaz. I like @theanimal fam one more, but I am getting better at expressions.

@Bicycle7 - I have explored Ashland a little bit. There is a half marathon there that I want to do at some point. The Ashland Hill Climb - 13.3 miles, but 5000 feet of gain! haha.

I am in love with the animal family portrait.

Your update gives the impression that your life is full of diverse, rich, and engaged experiences.

AxelHeyst wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 31, 2023 5:29 pm

Your update gives the impression that your life is full of diverse, rich, and engaged experiences.

I had a few months in the past year that were like this. I was in a flow state for a lot of last month. I have been trying to keep that focus as I inevitably task switch. This also takes practice from going from individually engaging activities that put me in a state of flow to switching between them and keeping that focus. I think that the environment I am in (ecologically/geologically/socially) is also really helpful. When my mom visited for our wedding she pulled me aside and said "Your entire life you have been very restless and searching for something, but it seems you have found it here." Here was referring to where we live, our friends, our jobs, our hobbies, each other. I have been feeling bottomless creativity lately... so much so that I occasionally get anxious for having to choose what to start to focus on. haha.

Cool to hear about your progress with the bikes! And happy that you're experiencing flow states and such deep creativity.

@mF has been kind enough to offer multiple times to pick us up wherever we are on the trail if something was wrong or we wanted to go elsewhere. He offered to pick us up early when fires on the trail changed our plans. The day before he was going to pick us up, I got stung by a yellow jacket and Mrs. Animal got stung again, so we decided to get off early. We told him we'd find a way to get to our arranged spot by the next day. But instead, he responded that he'd come get us and left that moment, driving an extra hour to come get us! However, he had the poor luck of experiencing baby animal riding in a car seat for the first time in some 45 days. If he had any desires left to have kids before that car ride, they were gone by the end.

As @mF said, we all had a lot of fun and it was a real pleasure for us to meet the @mFs. @mF is yet another example of someone we met through these boards that is unbelievably generous. We found that very inspiring and it remains something we aspire to. I was telling my mom about this and she was amazed how these types of relationships can develop on the internet. "Is this another one of those early retirement guys? And how do you get to know each other? Are you like instant messaging?" Haha. I'm already looking forward to more IRL interactions going forward!

We love the family portrait and are planning on framing it along with some PCT photos.

Thanks @RoamingFrances. It has been great all around.

theanimal wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 03, 2023 9:13 am

If he had any desires left to have kids before that car ride, they were gone by the end...

We love the family portrait and are planning on framing it along with some PCT photos.

Ha! No desires, but that car ride added some confirmation bias. Lol. I will share a higher resolution one with you if you want to print it. I am stoked it might make an appearance on your limited wall space.

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Weekend bicycle wrenching has been really, really fun. I taught myself how to use the shop slide hammer to cleanly extract bearings from a hub. Younger me (5 days ago) would have just used a hammer and screwdriver.

All packed up and headed out early AF. Picking up the @animal clan tomorrow, camping near some hot springs to let them soak and then headed down to ERE fest. Stoked!

Here are some sketchnotes illustrating how I approach the web of goals (WOG). There's no one right way to do this. After some discussions at EREfest, I thought it might be good to write up how I'm currently thinking about this. It hasn't really changed in the last few years, but I've gone through two cycles of making broad directional plans and then opportunistically executing against that plan.

For my purposes, I view everything in terms of time, our only truly limited resource. For practical living purposes (philosophy aside), everything collapses to the linear arrow of time: the rolling window of 3 seconds ago, now, and three seconds ahead (viewtopic.php?p=254180#p254180). Planning can go beyond that window, but in the end, actually executing plans will come back to that rolling window.

I provide links for my examples, but I keep the descriptions purposefully vague. I think that the purpose of doing exercises like this is what you get out of it by doing it using your ideas, understanding, experience, and circumstances, not copying someone else's. If you are still at the copy-someone stage, you may not be ready to think about this. Read and think more! You will get there.

My meta-goal is to internalize all of this so that I can focus on that rolling window we call "now" as much as possible. I take in new information as I go, update on the fly, and continue rolling on. Here is the framework for internalizing that I have been using successfully for the past few years.

A very important note for all you concrete thinkers: these exercises are to build associations in your head preemptively. When combining goals as an exercise vs. practice, the main difference is that you did many simulations using your imagination ahead of time so that as you are rolling through the window of now you will more likely see connections and ways to combine things on the fly. This will make your web of goals much more robust and flexible to the inevitable wrenches that get thrown at you from the external world. Or to put it another way, you are building intuition for multi-goal alignment that can be done on the fly. You will also build up intuition to quickly and automatically zoom in on individual goals and zoom out on the whole web with practice.

A layer framework for web thinking:

1) Fish Bone Diagrams as a *first pass*:
- Go through each of your goals or activities or skills one by one.
- You cannot do just one thing, and everything is a tradeoff.

2) Try combining goals in a linear fashion by linking them together.
- Notice the waste in flowing between activities (physical, time, etc.).

3) Are there any activities/goals/skills that can reduce waste?
- Example 1: If the waste is physical, can I build something from it? Can I compost it?
- Example 2: If the waste is time, can I learn organizational skills/mental frameworks (e.g., Kaizen) to reduce or eliminate that time waste?

4) Can I cluster my goals and skills? I can have individual goals with measurable outcomes that might feed into one another. These are easier to learn if you are doing them in tandem (viewtopic.php?p=277205#p277205).
- Example 1: Drawing and painting from life both use overlapping observational skills.

5) Visualize all of your goals in some way. I have a printout of the yearly goals posted directly at eye level of my drawing desk. I literally look at it every day.
- Cluster the like goals together.
- Come up with a layout that makes sense to you.
- For me, it is broad categories of flow-inducing activities and skills: MAKE (e.g., draw), LIVE (e.g., Cook), THINK (e.g., program/write), EXPLORE (e.g., run/ride).

2021 Broad Vision: viewtopic.php?p=251624#p251624
2021 Review: viewtopic.php?p=252182#p252182

2022 Goals: viewtopic.php?p=255612#p255612
2022 Review: viewtopic.php?p=267179#p267179

2023 Goals: viewtopic.php?p=266348#p266348

Now that we have a list of goals/skills/activities, we can start to look for ways to spend our time that fulfills multiple goals at the same time. This will be easier for goals that are more closely clustered (6) than goals potentially further away (7).

6) Think of this as a layer that lives on top of your goal cluster visual. Work through 2-3 goal clusters and think through activities that you can do that might fulfill each at least partially. If you were to do the activity repeatedly it would consistently move you towards multiple goals at a 60/40 rate. Always moving forward, perhaps some backward.
- Example: Drawing sketches of a place to get composition and value ranges before then underdrawing for a painting. The individual paintings are then the panels for a zine. The zine topics are also blogged about on the blog...
- Example 1 - viewtopic.php?p=251654#p251654
- Example 2 - viewtopic.php?p=251676#p251676

7) Now for a more distant goals overlap layer. For more distant goals or to try combining more than a few goals, you might benefit from some sort of randomization process. This is actually one of the most important exercises because it really stretches your creativity.
- Randomization: viewtopic.php?p=242959#p242959

8) The final layer is the social layer. This is where we consider if any of these goals can be accomplished with other people and/or what the social and external costs are.
- Social layer: viewtopic.php?p=251695#p251695

Notes and Caveats:
It is important to note that each of these goals can be accomplished individually as a base, but when combined with other goals or other people, you are more often using multiple forms of capital in the rolling 6-second window of now.

By pre-simulating scenarios you can more easily be an instant opportunist. Even if the connections are not exact to what you simulated, they might be damn close, allowing you to not hesitate a shift in directions, perhaps even a radical shift.

This is more or less the same way of thinking taught in permaculture classes. You gradually layer on information and build in connections atop a base.

What is most interesting about this is the non-linear returns. It will seem like some individual goals are hobbling along, then all of a sudden multiple things align and things get done. This happens more frequently now and contributes to all the stuff I report in my monthly summaries.

The major caveat to all of this is that it does not work at all if you have externally set arbitrary deadlines. Nothing will kill this opportunistic goal slaying faster than someone in an assembly-line mentality (bosses, your own internal assembly-line boss, etc.) imposing "must be done" on an arbitrary deadline schedule. All the more reason to control your own time as much as possible and learn Just-In-Time ideas or similar for managing personal productivity.

mountainFrugal wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 21, 2023 12:35 pm

All the more reason to control your own time as much as possible and learn Just-In-Time ideas or similar for managing personal productivity.

There's another Plato's cave embedded in this statement. It centralizes upon the linearity of time - as a singular, nonfungible resource.

Lately, I've been drifting away from the perspective. My inflection point came from reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. She discusses how Taylorism's emphasis on incremental productivity permeates Western assumptions around time. Then explores alternate conceptualizations.

This lead me to worry less about min/maxing, instead to focus on enjoyment of ebs and flows. Also to place greater value on the ripple effects of actions. Yes, through time, but maybe more importantly - space and culture. How I behave at say the food pantry, could positively influence how others behave, causing far more change than any amount of productive work I do.

There's an underlying assumption on my part. That my existence is a temporary manifestation of the universe. I exist as part of the greater whole exploring itself. So there's less urgency to maximizing the moment, than I may have previously defaulted to. It's part of my perspective that makes this revised outlook on time work.

Anyway, another angle. It relieves a lot of the pressure to achieve. I've further reduce the flurry of activity in my life. More typically, I'm residing in the ebs of time, watching to ride a good flow.

If you read or have read Odell's book, I'd be curious what you think.

Thanks for this write up, @mF. This cleared up a lot of questions I had about the web of goals process and I like your additions of the random scenarios and layering the social world on top of it. I'm going to give this a try with my own goals and see if it helps clarify my process for me.

Great write-up indeed, this member of the peanut gallery here is loving how everyone came back v energized from the fest - content and discussions lately have been great across the board.

To add to the above: the social layer doesn't have to come last. Indeed, it can be a goal in and of itself, say at stage 2, producing some "waste" that you might then consider eliminating -- simplest example I can think of is, "can I invite my back porch hangout buddies to a hike/nature walk", where you keep the socialization aspect but combine w a physical activity goal -- or another skill goal, I guess, "let's go tinker with your bike" or some such. 7w5's Stich and Bitch groups from the other thread come to mind, too

@Scott 2 - I have not read Jenny's newest book, but I have read her other one. I think that she is a great artist/philosopher of our time. The comment that you quote is a specific throwback to my distant self. He might have resonated with that statement. I think with all of these things... the more that you practice and integrate these ideas to make them intuitive, the less you actually need them. I will read her new book and provide further comments. My audience for the post was not my current self, but my past self obsessed with these types of things. In the reality of the day to day I am much more calm and operating by riding the ebs and flows like you reference.

Please share your insights @AE!

@etryu - I specifically ordered these as they are to appeal to the "rugged individuals" that are frequent here. I too often put the social aspect first and foremost and not as an afterthought. Thank you for providing this additional perspective. Putting the social first often times makes all the other layers gel more quickly. I like your examples as they perfectly show what I am trying to convey.

mountainFrugal wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 21, 2023 11:44 pm

I have not read Jenny's newest book, but I have read her other one.

Imo it's better. Very thought-provoking on various levels, at least for me. I really appreciated her discussion of how, to find true freedom, we need to free ourselves not just from the need to go to a job and have our time structured by someone else, but also to free ourselves from the internalized relationship to time we ourselves have as people who have enculturated under capitalism

@etryu - I specifically ordered these as they are to appeal to the "rugged individuals" that are frequent here.

I don't mean the following as a criticism to you or your presentation of your ideas, more as a criticism of the rugged individual practice of "putting social last." In the thread on attracting women, Sclass called me out in a very excellent fashion, and his point (absolutely spot-on) was that I tend to focus on "solitary skills" as an act of avoidance as much as an act of personal development. Basically, that I'm telling myself I'm engaging in hella personal growth by focusing on skill set A when really, what I'm doing is garden variety avoidance. Ditto with the "rugged individuals" optimizing the hell out of their systems without - and before - stopping to consider where people fit in, and then wondering why it's so hard to take their beautiful system and include others.

mountainFrugal wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 21, 2023 11:44 pm

I too often put the social aspect first and foremost and not as an afterthought.

@mF - This is the behavior I admire and try to emulate. A social center differentiates your goal setting. Similar to @ego's encouragement of serendipity. The perspective may not be intuitive, especially for those drawn to ERE 1.0. It wades into sacrifice territory.

I've been reading Super Thinking. Two related mental models come to mind:

1. Culture eats strategy for breakfast
2. Increasing your luck surface area

A relationship focus facilitates both. It's the energy that turns a WOG into a self-reinforcing spiral. Looking to my own plateau in WL5 - interdependence is the obvious missing factor. I've not been willing to make the associated trade offs.

I do think the WOG exercise eventually backs into the realization.

What I like about putting the social dimension into the WoGs is that it solves a social problem that ERE can cause. Namely, once you get out of Plato's cave and reject normative Kegan3 standards, it's easy to end up in a position where everyone else is stuck inside the cave and now relationships aren't built into your life by default.

Specifically, I'm talking about how if you follow LifeScript, you'll end up with relationships automatically via coworkers, family members, kids, etc. But if you reject activities like paid employment, what can happen as a byproduct is you've also accidentally rejected methods that bring most people relationships. So unless you consciously think about how to add relationships back into your life, you end with fewer opportunities to socialize. Adding the social dimension into the WoG intentionally helps mitigate this problem.

mountainFrugal wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 21, 2023 11:44 pm

@etryu - I specifically ordered these as they are to appeal to the "rugged individuals" that are frequent here. I too often put the social aspect first and foremost and not as an afterthought. Thank you for providing this additional perspective. Putting the social first often times makes all the other layers gel more quickly. I like your examples as they perfectly show what I am trying to convey.

I used to pursue a "never say no"-policy when it came to social engagements in case they would lead to serendipity. Over time, however, this strategy has become overwhelming. These days I often feel like everybody wants a piece of me to the degree that there's nothing left for myself. Kinda like the standard professor trajectory of starting out in research but eventually getting so bogged down with teaching, grantsmanship, and outreach, that there's no time left for research anymore.

As such, I'm increasingly moving towards saying no in order to change my connection strategy. The first connections to go in this otherwise exponentially increasing network are the most "wasteful", e.g. zapping a days worth of energy on "small talk/catching up/why don't you ask someone else"-type interactions. Obviously this observation is based on a sample size of N=1. As a semi-popular introvert, I occupy a somewhat weird/contradictory subspace in the total outcome-space.

@etryu and @AE- If the social layer seems like the hardest to you (the general you/reader), this might mean putting it first is the right call to avoid all of the scenarios you both describe. Avoiding avoidance?

Scott 2 wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 22, 2023 9:00 am

1. Culture eats strategy for breakfast
2. Increasing your luck surface area

A relationship focus facilitates both. It's the energy that turns a WOG into a self-reinforcing spiral.

It is the major ingredient in the secret sauce. As an example, last night at the monthly drink and draw, a new person came and painted Warhammer like figurines. I knew of him through friends of friends, but never really talked with him. After chatting he let me paint part of one of his figurines. One thing lead to another in our discussion... he asked to see my travel sketchbook. I had a number of drawings/paintings/sketchnotes in there from ERE fest. He really liked the chainsaw workshop sketchnote. Before leaving he offered to pay me to design three t-shirts for the local non-profit he works for. Of course I will!

@jacob - The really successful profs get HHMI funding that buys out their teaching and outreach load . I think your problem is in-fact unique. It is likely that those that actively seek you out will benefit much more from that exchange than you would get out of it. Having more control over the interactions by being in charge of the planning (e.g. marching) is the best way around it. You are putting up a bit of a barrier to entry and doing something you want to do. I find organizing activities that I would want to do anyway (drink and draw, epicurean dinners as examples) sort of self filter for what types of folks are interested.

Add: And to be clear... I still spend a large majority of my time doing solo activities or hanging with just DW. The social time tries to be rich in things I am interesting in doing.

Nice! I'm excited for this mF, thanks for writing and drawing it up. I'm going to work with it a bit and then come back with any impressions/thoughts.

It seems to me that the layers can be thought of as cyclical, or as a loop. The only time step 8 is 'last' is on loop #1. By the nth loop, where n>>1, there isn't really a beginning or an end to it. Similar to how there isn't really a 'first' step in Boyd's OODA loop. It's an intuitive/internalized style of thinking or conceptual spiral, ultimately, rather than a formalized and linear exercise (yeah?). The order in which you've presented them isn't random but it's only important for people learning the thinking-mode fresh.

(This relates to a minor realization I had over the past month, which is that WoGs are dynamic processes/systems of relationships, not static structures to be built and set. More Boyd: uncertainty is unavoidable and so 'winners' let go of needing to eliminate uncertainty (which, ironically, leads to isolation, rigidity, and implosion) and instead focus on becoming good/comfortable at making fluid decisions with incomplete information.)

I love the web of goals write-up! I've been planning to share ideas on goal-setting with someone who leans more into concrete thinking, so your note to concrete thinkers is a helpful orientation for me. And also a good reminder to myself who can get too bogged down in abstract plans to remember at the end of the day, I want to build muscle memory for when opportunities come along that fit within my web.

Step 7, the randomization goal coupling made me smile, I'd never thought to do that! For me it seems a natural fit with generating serendipity in a fun way.