Tomorrow May Not Be Better

As you may know from reading my blog, I’m on a bit of a quantified self binge right now. In particular, I’ve set some relatively ambitious goals with respect to fitness and health. As I've reflected on the first month of the process, I was struck by the way in which I repeatedly attempted to delude myself when I was clearly missing my goals.

One of my goals is to increase my physical fitness, as measured by resting heart rate, body fat, and weight. Because of [insert_list_of_excuses], I’m currently not tracking towards achieving this goal. I certainly need to be better, but I also need to be more honest with myself. With a goal like weight loss, there are inevitably fluctuations around a trend. If I weigh myself every day, there are often natural fluctuations of a couple pounds as a result of differing levels of hydration and how recently I’ve eaten. When I’m behind on my goal, however, I’ve found myself much more loathe to step on the scale when I know I’ve been bad. I don’t want to see the quantitive metric that shows that I’m failing. Even though I know  in my head that my weight probably went up, actually stepping on the scale and logging it feels like a failure. Instead, I’m tempted to tell myself that I'll be better the next day and then step on when I’m tracking. Unfortunately, things come up, and all of the sudden I’ve lost 3 days.

On the other hand, I'm ahead of my goal for reading. I'm tearing through books, and keep adding more and more to my list. I know that I'm ahead of my goal, but I still, irrationally, want to read ever more. Having the tracking system in place has helped me consciously slow myself down, allowing me to reallocate time towards some of my other aspirations - writing a simple iPhone app, for example. Having metrics to check in with week over week has provided me with the structure to manage myself, and I think that it has been one more step towards becoming an effective human adult male. 

In reality, just stepping on the scale is the action that allows me to reset. Having that metric, locking in at a new number, that's what forces me to come to terms with my progress, or lack thereof. At this point, I'm tracking 10 discrete goals via Beeminder via a complex network of applications, triggers, and feedback loops. The simple act of looking at my landing page every day gives me the data I need to plan, move forward, and adjust my behavior.

The saddest business book I've ever read

Put simply, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a stunning novel masquerading as a parody of a canned business self-help book. With twelve chapters spanning the unnamed main characters ~80 year life, the book is loaded with humor, meaning, and more than a small amount of tear-jerking emotion.

The trite early chapters (with titles like "Don't Fall In Love" and "Move to the City") slowly deepen in complexity, eventually transforming from the unabashed chronicle of a rising business titan into a touching reflection on aging, love, and finding meaning in life. It was a novel that made me cry, and its generic voice (none of the characters have names, for example) only serves to heighten the universal resonance of the story that unfolds.

To get a sense for the prose, I think that this quote is just so poignant, funny, and indicative of the entire novel: "And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out."

Going into the novel, I really didn't know what to expect, but whatever my expectations, they were unquestionably surpassed. This is a book that I will likely return to later in life and experience in a totally new way as my youth fades and I, like the protagonist, become old.