You’ve probably seen TV journalists asking soft questions to politicians with whom they - or the boss of their network - are sympathetic. You know, like ‘Have you always been motivated by a desire to serve your country?’ or ‘Can you explain how your spending cuts will help our economy?’

Quantum mechanics doesn’t involve questions like that. It teaches you to ask questions that might actually produce a useful answer, and over time it will enable you to organise your thoughts about the natural world. It shows you how to prove things through experiment, and how to take nothing for granted, no hypothesis, until it has been exposed to every test of cause and effect.

…I wanted to try and pierce the fabric of reality, and, when it came to social action, take the skin off all our assumptions and see what was underneath. Advanced mathematics and quantum mechanics allowed for that.

To get to the truth, you have to look at your behaviour in how you set up the experiment and see how much the outcome has been affected by what you did and how you did it.

You have to find a true measure.

You have to look at how things are constructed - and how you yourself have constructed your way of looking - so as to get some insight.

Now, the more I looked at this feature of quantum mechanics, the more I saw that it might constitute the thing I had long been looking for: a theory of change, a theory of human-initiated change in the world.

Want to make people run? Don’t give them a badge for running. Give them a ball and shove four sticks in the ground. They’ll run around the field chasing the ball (and each other) for ages. The experience is intrinsically challenging and amusing, and the running is a by-product. Games rely on dynamics like these and rules to generate the conditions for positive engagement.

…The badges in and of themselves are meaningless. They’re only of value in the context of an activity that is intrinsically rewarding enough to make people want to participate in it. When an activity is designed well enough to be intrinsically rewarding, you can start assigning extra rewards like badges. These rewards gain endogenous value – a value that truly exists only within the context of the game.

Stop telling people you’re learning to code unless they’re technical and you want them to help you.

When you’re starting out, your goal should be to find a technical mentor or two, not impress your other non-coding friends with the fact that you’ve taken the first step.

I’m a firm believer that if you talk about what you want to do, you never actually do it. So unless you’re talking to someone you hope will be a mentor, close your mouth, put your head down, and keep building.

There’s a reason that these kinds of substitutions don’t work, and it’s because they’re based on wrong theory about how cognition and language relate to one another. Words that you can simply replace one for the other in the language are synonyms. So if two words can equally go well into any phrase, that means they have the same meaning: they are synonyms.

And so when you make that kind of replacement, what you’re saying is “french” is synonymous with “freedom”. So “french fries” are “freedom fries”, “french toast” is “freedom toast”, “french poodles” are “freedom poodles”, “french kissing” is “freedom kissing”, and then you have “freedom manicures”. What shall we call France then? “Freedom Land”? French would be the “language of freedom”? It’s setting up the wrong kind of mapping.

…If we understand how language and thought interact in the mind, we can even be nationalistic in a more effective manner. If we really want to annoy the French, take all the things that the French hate, and call them French. That will really annoy them. For example, ketchup becomes “french sauce”, McDonald’s will be the “French Cafe”, shorts will be “french pants”, mimosas will be “french cocktails”, Disneyland will be “France”, Americans will be “French people”, the English language will be called “French”, and so on.

The studies have suggested that the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following:

1. We confront tasks we have a chance of completing;
2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing;
3. The task has clear goals;
4. The task provides immediate feedback;
5. One acts with deep, but effortless involvement, that
removes from awareness the worries and frustrations
of everyday life;
6. One exercises a sense of control over their actions;
7. Concern for the self disappears, yet, paradoxically
the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow
experience is over; and
8. The sense of duration of time is altered.

The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

It’s called persistent starting. Anytime I give someone motivational advice this is the most important thing. It’s super easy and works like a charm, as you now know.

Pick something you want to do but keep putting off. It can be anything. Tell yourself you’ll spend five minutes doing it and then quit after five minutes *if* you still don’t want to do it. After five minutes if you still want to quit then quit. No tricks or mind games. You won’t want to quit. What happens is the part of our brain that plans and carries out our day to day actions takes over our bodies and we just keep doing what we’re doing. Planing the next step, executing the current one. Autopilot in a way.

It’s from a book called The Now Habit that came out in the eighties. Pretty good advice overall but this part is the best.