Darius' Thoughts

Turning Frustration Into Success

I find it fascinating how people turn the frustration of failure into success.

Reading about business people, especially Richard Branson, I realized that successful people will try something, fail, try something else, fail, learn, try something else and then succeed.

As I’d read this, I’d think to myself “That sounds exhausting! Failing constantly! It must be frustrating.” As I continued reading and growing in my professional life, I reached a conclusion: successful people still feel frustration from failure, but they do something different with it, and this is part of why they (later) succeed.

Originally, when something in my life didn’t work as expected, I would feel:
“That didn’t work.” “Man, what happened?” “I suck.” “I shouldn’t even be trying to do this.” “How does everyone else do this? Dah.” “I give up, for now at least.”

With more reflection, I broke it down into sequential feelings, which I’ll call a “thought chain”. Mine was:

I failed… so..

I made a mistake so…
- I’m not good at this so
  - I’m a bad person so
    - I feel bad so
      - I want to distract myself
      - I don’t want to feel this way again so
        
        I don’t want to fail at this again so
        
        I don’t want to try again

As I read about CEOs and big thinking types, I saw in their actions a different thought chain:

I failed… so..

I didn’t understand something about this process
- I need to learn something to get it right next time
  - I’ll examine others who got it right
  - I’ll read the directions/books about how to do this
Some other person lead to this not work
- Identify and talk to that person
Some random event made this not work
- Try again
I made a mistake
- IF: Others make this same mistake and eventually succeed
  - Then this seems doable
    - See what others are doing and emulate
  - Simply try again
- IF: Others don’t make this mistake
  - Check again what differences exist between myself and those correctly performing (assumption: same situation-> same result)
    - IF: there isn’t a clear difference between them and I
      - Feel I am not good at XXX
        
        Decide to do something I am good at
        
        (very low probability) Decide that I am a bad person (and thus: feel bad, distract myself, stop trying)

I like to think of the frustration as emotional energy that is then routed along one of the above thought chains and eventually results in an action being taken. The resulting action will likely make you more successful (ie trying again, examining others, etc) or less successful (ie distracting oneself, avoiding failure by not trying again, etc).

So how do we turn frustration into success? By re-routing the energy that comes from frustration. Whenever you feel a thought chain leading to “I’m a bad person” you should probably turn it around and route that energy into something more likely to succeed. Look at others, re-evaluating if the current task is the best way to achieve the given aim, and simply trying again are much better places to set your mind. It isn’t easy, but I do find it works. What do you think?

Why I Am Blogging

Hi, I’m Darius Contractor, this is my blog, and this is my post attempting to tell you why I am blogging.

First, a little history. I’m 29, graduated Stanford with a Computer Science degree in 2002, and worked for two websites, Tickle.com and Bebo.com. I learned a bunch about social networking, how to run a web business and how to get people to click on things. At Bebo, I became a manager and earned enough to take a break.

My last day was Dec 31st, 2009. I took a 3-month world trip to see friends, did a 1-week Buddhist retreat and now I’m home in San Francisco thinking about the future.

I’ve had so many thoughts about what I need, what the world needs, and what’s newly possible at this time. If I had to give a few high-level bullets they might be:

At this point in my career, I don’t need to focus on making money; I’d like to focus on making meaning.
The best way to make meaning is to bring people happiness. The deeper and longer-lasting the happiness and the more people you bring it to, the better.
My past job was understanding complex systems and making simple solutions that work. I’ve done this in technology and in management.
I think the biggest block to happiness in the developed world is ourselves. People not knowing how to focus their energy for the long term happiness of themselves and the people around them.
I think the world is ripe for change. More than ever you find:
- Books looking into how people really work
- Fresh focus on happiness over productivity
- Expanding consciousness of other peoples and the environment
- Growing disillusionment with simplistic and traditional systems of us-vs-them thinking
- I’ve thought about these issues for years. I feel that now is the time to really delve into them and see what I can learn and, perhaps, create.

This is some high-level stuff, but that’s the purpose of this blog. It will help me to clearly lay out my ideas and I hope very much to get your feedback. I think the resulting understanding and inspiration will be worth the work.

As I write this blog, I will be continuing to research these topics, improve my technology skills and rejuvenate myself. My hope is that the ideas in this blog and my own abilities will come together within 2010 and result in worthwhile mental architecture, companies and systems for human interaction.

So, dear reader, tell me your thoughts on this post and what you’d like us to talk about next. Comment below or, if you like, email me at blog at-symbol darius . com.

Good and Evil are Simply Different Optimizations

First, a quick example, then explanation.

Is Robin Hood evil?

Rich man held up on the road: “Yes, he’s evil, he took my money! What if he took YOUR money?” EVIL
Community at large: “Robin Hood is the best, he gives us money that the rich don’t need anyways.” GOOD
Society: “Well, he violates our laws, thus he’s bad. We can’t have people robbing willy-nilly.” EVIL

So it would seem that the same action, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, is evil, then good, then evil again as you expand the scope of people you talk to and needs you optimize for.

Now, some high-level thoughts:

Every “evil” act benefits one entity at the too-great expense of another. If a bandit raids a farmer’s cellar, the bandit eats while the farmer loses his hard-earned food.

Every “good” act benefits one entity without harming another excessively. If a farmer spends a day in the fields helping his crops grow, that is good.

So, the real question is whether an act “harms another excessively.”

Cigarette companies

Let’s take cigarette companies’ executives’ decision to promote a product they knew was likely to result in early death for their customers. Evil or not?

I think it comes down to whether you believe “doing everything legal to increase sales of a product that is likely to kill people” is “harming another excessively”. The executive who made those decisions will say that the rule for what is excessive is set by the law and that people don’t have to buy their cigarettes. So in their minds, the answer is “no, it’s not”. However, many people think that aggressively selling a dangerous product IS harming others excessively, thus evil.

“But Darius, this is obvious stuff, cigarette companies and Robin Hood, c’mon. Give me something interesting.” Very well, lets it break down.

I think you can separate out the benefits and harms of an action into groups of people, time horizons and care factors. Let’s try it out:

Effect of cigarette companies’ decisions

(time horizon is long-term, numbers made up)

	Smokers’ Health	Cigarette Company Profits
Sell More / Be less honest	lose thousands of years of life	Make millions more
Sell Fewer / Be more honest	lose less life	Make millions less

Then you apply care factors:

Cigarette company decision equation: (Smokers’ Health=1, Cigarette Company Profits=1000)
(loss of life) * 1 + (Make millions more) * 1000 > (lose less life) * 1 + (Make millions less) * 1000

Concerned citizen decision equation: (Smokers’ Healthy=1000, Cigarette Company Profits=1)
(loss of life) * 1000 + (Make millions more) * 1 < (lose less life) * 1000 + (Make millions less) * 1

I think the above difference in the care factor is the true reason that cigarette companies can say they feel that they aren’t “harming another excessively”. In their equation, the benefit to themselves outweighs the harm to their customers. However, many people and indeed the government eventually, agree with the latter equation that takes the needs of customers into account more. I think that often by breaking down decisions to people, time horizons and care factors, you can understand “evil” decisions faster and address them.

Some quick other thoughts:

I think the history of justice is one of increasing the care factors on distant parties. We have increased the care factor by which we multiply the needs of minorities, the environment, the disabled and more over the last 100 years.
Getting drunk makes less sense if you’re optimizing for 24 hrs than just 4 hrs.
Adults and kids often disagree about the time horizons to optimize against.
Having a child dramatically alters the core optimizations of people, time horizon and care factors.

Thanks for getting through my first post, feedback welcomed.

Still prep’ing this blog

Hello all, I’m still customizing this blog and getting my first post ready. Check back in a bit!