Volitional Action Items
When working on self-improvement, I often come across advice that sounds really good, but after reading it, I realize that I don’t have any practical ideas for how to incorporate the advice into my life. For example, if I hear “try to focus more on the present”, I recognize it as good advice and maybe I’ll be more mindful of the present for a few minutes, but soon thereafter I’m right back where I started.
The problem is that this kind of advice only has a lasting effect if it changes you in some way. Just thinking a thought could change you, but usually you just forget about it as soon as you return to your normal life. However, since your consciousness recognizes that you want to make this change, the solution is to find some way of allowing your consciousness to control the process of change. You can do this through volitional action, or action with a conscious intent.
The act of meditation leads to heightened mindfulness, so you may be able to will yourself to meditate and achieve the change you sought. But it is also possible that meditation itself is not volitional. You may be in such a frenetic state that your will-power isn’t strong enough to enable you to meditate at the moment. In this case, you may have to find an easier action item that is volitional that can calm you down enough to meditate, perhaps some physical exercise.
But perhaps your will-power is lacking and you are having trouble sticking to your exercise schedule. In this case, the first step may be to find an exercise partner who will encourage you to exercise every day. Ultimately, it may be that your root action item is to make a post on craigslist advertising for an exercise partner.
Effective self-improvement advice requires volitional action items. It is important to realize that will-power is limited and variable, so “volitional action item” is effectively a relative term in the sense that what is volitional at one point in time for someone may be non-volitional at a different time or for someone else. Thankfully, almost any shortcomings of our will-power can be overcome by a sufficiently sophisticated breakdown of objectives and action items into volitional action items.
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The Pragmatic Programmer
This book is full of practical advice for software developers. However, most of the advice is fairly simple and those with even a small amount of real-world experience will already know much of it. Also, the advice is of the kind that is very hard to learn from reading a book. You can read all about how to setup good testing systems, but you won’t really see how important it is until you do it and see how much things improve. I would recommend this book to beginning developers, but not to experienced developers.
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
This is a fascinating story about the development of an omniscient, omnipotent artificial intelligence. Unlike most science fiction about AI, this one takes place not just after the AI has taken over, but also during its development. It is also unique in that the AI is actually designed to serve humans, so it creates a kind of utopia for people, as opposed to the dystopian world of the Terminator or Matrix movies. One of the best aspects of this book is how it discusses the internal implementation of the AI a little bit. This is just a very creative book, and amazingly it is freely available on the web!
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Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
This book provides a quirky introduction to a very interesting functional programming language called Haskell. Haskell is one of the more modern functional programming languages. It requires a radical change in the way you think while programming. The tone of this book provides some lightness to an otherwise very heavy subject matter. However, don’t be fooled, it is still quite difficult to follow if you are new to functional programming.
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A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
This book gives an academic’s overview of Stoic philosophy. It is written with an emphasis on practical advice, though there is also quite a bit of historical context added in. The main pieces of advice were negative visualization, internalizing goals, and voluntary discomfort. There were also many other points that weren’t as general, but still interesting. The book was very honest and the author’s experiences and thoughts were discussed.
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Kingpin
Kingpin tells the story of an elite hacker who stole tons of credit card numbers online and became the center of the cybercrime community. It exposes some of the wild antics of the fraudsters and the efforts of law enforcement officials to put an end to the crimes. The story is pretty interesting, but I felt a nagging disappointment that these super-smart hackers couldn’t control themselves enough to stick to productive activities instead of crime.
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Test Driven Development: By Example
Test-driven development is a systematic way of producing robust code. The idea is to write a test before you start writing the code that the test is meant for. This will ensure that almost all of your code has tests and it helps keep you focused on making small increments of progress that you lock in once the test passes. It is also important to re-run all the tests very frequently. This gives you more confidence in your changes and can help you be a little more experimental. While the technique itself is great, the book wasn’t so great because a book isn’t the best format for the type of examples that it provides. It is difficult to keep track of all the code changes because you can only see a small snippet that changed. It would have been much better as a video lecture where you could see all the changes take place and see all the code at all times.
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Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
The interesting aspect of this book is that it attempts to break down the process of refactoring code into a set of refactoring operations that each consist of a sequence of mechanical steps that are guaranteed to preserve the semantics of the program. This is really interesting because it means that you can teach the computer how to refactor automatically, which is something that the book discusses towards the end. Most of the refactoring operations are pretty basic and any experienced programmer has probably done most of them, but not everyone thinks of refactoring in such a strict mechanical way. This book provides a perspective that may help programmers think of refactoring in a different way.
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Founders at Work
This is a collection of interviews with founders of technology companies. There are a few interviews that are extremely interesting and enlightening. The founders mostly discuss the issues they encountered and how they became successful from a high-level perspective. One of the interesting points that came out in several interviews is that it isn’t necessary to have the greatest idea initially as long as you respond to customer’s demands and evolve your product based on the customer’s feedback, and sometimes it is best to abandon your original idea entirely.
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Investment Valuation
This book took me a year to read because it was very difficult to focus on. It was very long-winded and dry, in the usual college textbook fashion, but this is just the price that must be paid for covering all of the material in full detail. The book covers a lot of good topics and contains more examples than you need, which is fine because you can always skip the examples if you already understand the idea. The organization probably could have been better – I think “Determining Value” had a much better introduction to discounted cashflow valuation. And there were a few places where pedagogical leaps were made in which non-trivial concepts were assumed without being properly explained. But overall, it is a decent book for mastering the basics of investment valuation.
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