Shadows and Cursesfive days beforeIn this Halloween-themed episode, I wanted to share a story that might…Embrace the suck

The gifts of failure2023I may have written about this before. It’s a trick that I’ve…The titular phrase is well-known in the military, though this might be a different take on the adage. This one came out of a morning conversation with fellow FLUX-ers, where we briefly chatted about life experiences that we didn’t look forward to, didn’t like when we were in the midst of them, yet have grown to cherish them over the years. To draw a line, we’re talking about experiences that didn’t involve actual threats to life or violence.

The Suffering of Expectations2020I have been thinking about the relationship between expectations and suffering, and…Picture a simple framework. There are three attributes that can have positive or negative value: anticipation, experience, and satisfaction. The “anticipation” attribute reflects how much we are looking forward to or dreading a situation we’re about to experience. “Experience” describes what we feel throughout the situation. “Satisfaction” is our long-term attitude toward the experience.

Lining up possible values, we have a simple three-row four-column table, starting with all three attributes being negative (“hated coming into it, hated being in it, and keep hating it ever since”) and eventually flipping them, one-by-one, to positive (“loved the idea of it, love every minute of it, still smiling when thinking about it”).

If we try to draw a graph of experiential learning on top of that table, it is fairly evident that the amount of experiential learning is the highest in the middle, and lowest at the edges – kinda like a bell curve. Those experiences that made us uncomfortable at first, but turned into a fond memory later are the ones where we learned something. Perhaps we didn’t realize how much we’d love broccoli. Or maybe reliably shipping the same product instead of trying to build something new every few months. Everyone will have their story of a transformative experience like that. On the fringes, neither experience is particularly educational: the left-most predictably sucks and the right-most reliably rocks.

Learning from the nadir2023In the top quadrant, we are the happiest and perhaps even bored.…Cravings and Aversions2021Though immediate effects of model flattening are already pretty dramatic, its largest…Effectiveness and certainty2021There’s something about the relationship between the degree of certainty we have…Mental models2022I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured…However, if we try to draw a curve of learning potential, we’ll see something more like a power curve. Despite us learning a lot in the middle of the graph, it’s all of the obvious kind: we were thrust into a novel situation and were able to orient ourselves using some tweaks to our existing mental models. The highest potential for learning will hide in the least pleasant corner: it is here where we weren’t able to relate to the environment in a productive way.

Practices to break out of the cycle of not-learning2022The Fallout station will feel like ruin, and most of the pain…Transformational Learning2020Building on the ideas in The Suffering of Expectations, I want to…It is in these situations we have the most to learn, to update our models of the environment. The suckiness is the signal. It tells us that there are gems of wisdom and insight to be discovered. This will feel counterintuitive – I had a bad experience, and that’s the one where I stand the most to learn from? Shouldn’t I just shove it down into the back corner of my memory and never think about it again? And usually, it feels so right to do just that.

The cycle of not-learning2022We’ll begin the tour at the Lament station. Usually, we find ourselves…Awareness of interoception2022Recently, I have been fascinated by the wonderful and mysterious part of…Dandelion or Elephant?the same dayThe discovery of the dandelion/elephant framing was exciting and my fellow FLUX…To countervail, we can develop a habit to look at our past totally sucky experiences with a kind of inward-focused curiosity: what was it within me that reacted so negatively to it? What was being protected and why? Is there perhaps something to learn about this part of me that is being protected, something that would help me see this past experience in a different light?