Incoming links: Procrastination
Ciro Santilli feels that all really important and productive activities come spontaneously, without being internally forced upon people.
You may say that this is because Ciro is lazy and irresponsible, but Bill thinks this isn't necessarily always bad:This is yet another manifestation of YAGNI.
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
As another way to put it, Ciro has very little "self-discipline", and acts very heavily based on small passions that take hold of him. Related: high flying bird vs gophers.
You may also say that Ciro is an idealist, because what to do when the food will run out and you have to hunt? To which Jesus replies at Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive):Also closely related: man shall not live by bread alone.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Ciro is also fond of the description of the work method of Yukio Mishima presented in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (TODO based on Mishima's self descriptions?). Ciro Santilli's father highlighted this to him, and Ciro had already watched that movie and thought it was amazing:This is perfectly complemented by him making tea, as if suggesting:
Every night I return to my desk precisely at midnight. I thoroughly analyze why I am attracted to a particular theme. I drag it into my conscious mind. I boil it into abstraction. I am constantly calculating until I sit down to write. Only then can my unconscious dreams take over.
Don't rush the work. Just let it happen. Every day at midnight, I would boil a teapot of tea. I would watch the steam rise, and with it feel my consciousness deepen. Everything was pure silence. When the hand was ready, it would, by itself, pick up the brush, and writing would start.
Another good one is Hemingway's work method:
Always stop while you are going good and don't think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.
Ciro generally feels that many major developments in his life happened "by miracle", beyond his control. So when he saw the quote by Carl Jung:Ciro tends to do major decisions in his life due to uncontrollable passion rather than logic.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Ciro believes that this is linked to his self perceived creative personality, Because Ciro gives in to such uncontrollable passions, this leads him to do things which are more unusual/creative, because other more logical people would write such options off as weird.
Another type of laziness Ciro is to blame for is passionately seeking Instrumental goals rather than hard end goals, in order to reach the hard goals more effectively. This is well put in the quote apocryphallyref attribute to Abraham Lincoln:For example, whenever joining a new company, Ciro would first try to improve any exceedingly shitty systems, like the build system or test system, rather than doing whatever random task the manager felt like doing that week. He was somewhat fired for that actually. But in the end, if your infrastructure sucks, your project will fail, so better be fired early and go work on something that might succeed than later when the enterprise goes bankrupt.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe
Related:
Alan Watts' wuwei talk
. Source. During this talk, Alan quotes Jesus: Matthew 18:3 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.".Alan Watts' "How to turn work into play" talk
. Source. Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)
Source. www.openculture.com/2013/02/dont_try_charles_bukowskis_concise_philosophy_of_art_and_life.htmlWe work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.
Charles Bukowski Scandanavian TV interviews
. Source. I think the magic moment is when you're walking around the house and you think: "Typewritter!". And I know, when I sit down, I never have any idea what I'm gonna write, there's nothing in my mind. And you walk in, you move toward it, and there it is, and things come out of it.
The side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:
Sometimes, even if our end goals are too far from reality, the side effects of trying to reach them can have meaningful impact.
If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!
By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.
This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.
This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.
Going into such productive procrastination is also known informally as yak shaving.
There are of course countless examples of such events:
- youtu.be/qrDZhAxpKrQ?t=174 Blitzscaling 11: Patrick Collison on Hiring at Stripe and the Role of a Product-Focused CEO by Greylock (2015)
The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:
