Fat rejection 4 days in

It's wonderful. I love it.

Some people have a skewed image of their body, and no amount of convincing will convince them they look good enough. Other people are fat. Convincing a fat guy he should be content with his disgusting body isn't doing him any favors. Here are some nasty unintended interpretations:

1. Looks don't matter (so why shower? why shave? why replace tattered clothing?)
2. Your body is good enough. Don't bother about making it better, it's fine the way it is.

I've had a few people say I should be getting in shape for myself, not for women. I suppose that now that I'm sufficiently disgusted with being fat, not being able to do a pull-up, dehydrating more readily when playing team sports, etc., I am doing it for myself. If I didn't get disgusted with being fat, the only reason I would have done it was to increase my odds with the ladies. And really there's nothing wrong with that. 

People do all sorts of things with finding a mate as a primary motivator; I don't think it's sacrilegious to have that as a reason to get a better body. I don't see why when someone hears sex appeal as a reason for working out and fixing their eating habits they immediately encourage the person to do it for him/herself instead. Motivations are really a personal business. It's a more effective motivator for my workout to be disgusted with being fat than to do it for girls, but it's bizarre how that's a motivation that's not socially acceptable. What are people trying to do, demotivate fat guys from taking steps to quit being fat guys? No. I think it's well-intentioned leftover inertia from discouraging people (especially young women) with improperly poor body images from developing eating disorters. But as long as I actually am fat, don't worry!

My motivators, in order:

1. Stop being fat, then never be fat again
2. Win the love of a beautiful woman
3. Live to 100 (hooray for a family history of heart disease!)

After that, yeah, I'd like to be able to do a pull-up. But that's about it. I'll keep these motivators, especially #1, as a reason to maintain an active lifestyle, which is fortunately easy around here between hiking, walking, kayaking, skiing, biking and sports leagues. It'll be a lot of fun and I'll never be fat again.

Information Hiding when teaching

An aspect of teaching I haven't yet consciously appreciated is the ability to hide the extent of your own knowledge. The human mind has a limit to how much new information it can absorb, and if you want to teach effectively you need to plan around that limitation. I don't teach often enough to know what that limit is.

This limiting of information is challenging for me for a few reasons. First, I want to show off. When I know a lot about the subject, I get a kick out of explaining as much of it as I can at once. I need to stop myself so that my informal students have a chance to internalize the material, but often I don't. It's too much fun showing off.

As an example, I know a lot about chess that's worth teaching to other amateurs. I'm chalk-full of opening wisdom, tactic names, endgame basics, ways to dissect a middlegame position and book recommendations. The key for me is to slow down and deliver it in manageable chunks. The four-sentence rule applies here.

Goal setting

I love Amazon. I love my team. You have to push yourself. If you’re hitting more than 70% of your goals for the year, you’ll get scolded for not pushing yourself enough. It’s an interesting rule of thumb and I love how that contributes to challenging ourselves constantly.

How about this: The first year on the job, commit to goals of a certain value. Maybe even hit these 100%, you sandbagger. Next year, commit to delivering double the value. Hopefully now you’re in the 70% zone. For the next year, commit to delivering double that 70% value (140%). 

You should hit about 70% of that value (we’re at 1.4 * .7 = 2 * .7 * .7 = .98). .98 / .7 = is a 40% year/year growth in the value you can deliver, which makes sense in your first few years at a company between early ramp-up and increasing ROI from early tool development. 

If you’re automating anything repetitive, if you’re constantly soliciting customer feedback, you’ll be working much faster on more of the right things. Since 6/7 of software projects fail and the #1 reason for project failure is building the wrong thing, you won’t be doing 1.4x the work every year but you may still yield 1.4x the value. And if you can do that, nobody cares if your actual effort increases. J