Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

src: Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process - 2024-08-05

Abstract

The author follows a design process that worked for him, which is an iterative process:

• pay attention to the context
• remove what’s frustrated him
• expand things that made him feel alive Often, the situations do not follow his visions / goals, but they fit him.

Reviews

2024-09-13

Why did I want to read this? I’m curious on how people are making their life principles. However, it’s often quite abstract and difficult to follow.

What did I get out of it? His design process is quite easy to understand (not sure if it’s easy to follow) and easily actionable. I’ll try to use a bit of his wisdom.

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.1 Put simply:
• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.
• I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.
• Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.
• When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the context—as Christopher Alexander argued in Notes on a Synthesis of Form (1964). This is true of relationships, and essays, and careers: you want to find something that fits.
• A glove is well-designed if it fits the hand nicely.
• A relationship is healthy if it fits the personalities and needs of the people involved (and the resonance between them).
• An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader’s mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.
• The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context.
• To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
• The context is smarter than you*.* It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
• If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
• It is a feedback loop between you and the context. By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design. Your design ends up smarter than you.
• The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.2
• Applying to university, I looked in the catalog and thought, Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to be a diplomat! I spent half a year applying to the political science program and going through all sorts of schlepp. Then, after 18 months, I realized I didn’t like it at all. It had been a vision. I panicked, dropped out—and then came up with a new vision.3
• Instead of trying to force a vision, here is how you can lean into unfolding.
• You observe the context (when applying to university, trying to figure out what my career should be, this would have meant, among other things, observing what kind of tasks I liked doing again and again and again; what kind of people I want to surround myself with; how the job market looks; and what I am interested in).
• You form a mental model of the context (a guess about what kind of work I should do).
• Then you use that guess to decide how to take your next small step in the context (“Maybe I should email someone who does the kind of work I’m considering and ask them what it is like?” “Maybe I should do a small project in your spare time?” “Maybe trial and error is a waste of time right now, and I would do better by figuring out who is the best at doing this, and study them?”).
• Acting like this produces new information, and you update your understanding.
• Repeat from the top.
• Having spelled this out, I can see several ways to get better at unfolding. Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.
• Here are some questions to ask.
• Can I increase the amount of information I get from the context? - Are you looking for a partner? Talk to people who are happily married and ask them what they did. Run experiments. Are you unsure about having a kid? Ask if you can babysit your cousin’s kid.
• My preconceptions are a filter that reduces the amount of information I get from the context. How can I filter less? - A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status? Maybe you would have more time to write if you took a high-paying job, consulting part-time, instead of funding your writing by selling pieces to magazines?  - By unbundling things, by seeing through the abstractions, you get more information. You can use this information to unfold in more fluid ways—which to less perceptive people will look incomprehensible, like you are walking through walls, or like you are cheating. This is the hacker mindset.4 - It will be easier if you can overcome your social fear of looking stupid or incomprehensible. Wanting to be understood by others, or not wanting to contradict ourselves and our established identity—these are major blockers to unfolding. - Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else. Venkatesh Rao has a good description of this mindset.5 
• Can I increase the speed and precision with which I act on the context? - A painter does not want technique to get between them and the canvas. The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback. By increasing the speed at which you can act on the context, trying new things will become cheaper for you—and so you will take more risks, and extract more information from the context. Write faster, prototype faster, ask for feedback faster. Velocity is underrated. It sounds crass and careless—speeding up. But it doesn’t have to be. When I improve my listening skills, for example, I increase the velocity at which I can get to the heart of what my wife is thinking about. Dropping the cost of mutual understanding means that the kinds of conversations that we would previously only have had if we had the whole day off—now we can do that over lunch. This is lovely. Not everything can be sped up like this (a shared history can’t, nor virtue), but where it is possible, speed lets you learn and unfold to a deeper level.
• If you cycle through this feedback loop ferociously for ten years, you will end up with a well-designed life. It will not look like you imagined it would. It will have unfolded around you, and you will struggle to wrap your head around how you ended up where you did.
• You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don’t have to remember. The form does.

This ended up being a dense post. Let me know if there is any particular part you’d like me to unpack. There will—I think—be a few follow ups. (Also, the footnotes on this one is about as long as the post itself, so keep scrolling if you want more.)