Author: alearningaday

I grew up a very impatient person. It showed in everything I did. I used to rush to the end of a detailed math problem and miss a word or two that had the clue to unlock the right answer.

“Careless mistake” was the refrain that followed me through those years.

In truth, “careless” was not the right descriptor. Impatient was. I wanted fast progress. If fast progress wasn’t possible, the result was frustration. A lot of it.

In many ways, writing every day on this blog has been the therapy I needed to overcome this proclivity. I debated using the term “unhealthy” to describe it. Like all things in life, impatience is useful in moderation. But I tended to overdo it.

Writing every day for over sixteen years has helped me make friends with patience and progress. I had no other choice. I sought confidence and learning. There were no quick fixes to get to these outcomes. And then again, do you ever “get to them”? You just keep working on them for the rest of your life.

Perhaps it is that long-term view that changed my relationship with patience. Here’s an example.

I was on an exercise routine that involved a swim in the evening through the summer. As fall arrived, it was time to change it up and go back to exercising in the morning.

In the first week of this switch, I wasn’t able to get to exercise in time. I hadn’t budgeted for it and my morning work priority list wasn’t done. So I just made do with a 5 minute workout.

I realized that the sweet spot to get that 30 minute workout was to get going at 645am. I still couldn’t do it in the next week. So I managed 10 minute workouts.

Last week, I got it up to 20 minute workouts.

If I had to guess, I think I’ll be at the 30 minute mark this week or the next.

Now, I could have easily admonished myself for poor prioritization. I know how important it is to exercise. Why am I over-indexing on work? Etc.

But this is where taking a long-term view and making friends with patience and progress has made a difference. There’s no point getting frustrated and over-correcting.

Best to take the first step, then the next, and so on.

Patience.

And progress.

There’s a friend I’ve been catching up with on a roughly yearly cadence. That sort of cadence is fascinating because life just 2 or 3 catch ups ago looked and felt wildly different.

This friend reminded me of problems that were top of mind “just 3 calls ago.” I’d have taken the problems I have right now in a heartbeat.

That’s not to say life is always up and to the right. But that we often just take for granted the many good things that come our way and look to the next horizon.

We almost always pay no attention to small bits of progress we make every day.

And yet, they compound over time as long as we keep plugging away.

The combined area of our rear view mirrors is much smaller than the windshield for good reason. We can’t drive if we’re focused on the rear view mirror.

But it’s important to look back from time to time and acknowledge the many gifts that have come our way.

A team from MIT shared a breakthrough recently – a solar-powered desalination prototype that is showing great promise.

There are 2 interesting nuggets from the article –

(1) No batteries or grid connectivity: The system can quickly react to subtle changes in sunlight. So it maximizes the utility of solar energy, producing large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day.

The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight.

(2) Brackish groundwater. The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources.

“The majority of the population actually lives far enough from the coast, that seawater desalination could never reach them. They consequently rely heavily on groundwater, especially in remote, low-income regions. And unfortunately, this groundwater is becoming more and more saline due to climate change,” says Jonathan Bessette, MIT PhD student in mechanical engineering. “This technology could bring sustainable, affordable clean water to underreached places around the world.”

I’m rooting for their success.

When we’re trying to make change happen, emotion trumps logic.

And momentum trumps emotion.

An object in motion has a way of staying in motion.

When in doubt, solve for momentum.

“It is often easier to fight for our principles than it is to live by them.”

Words are wind.

I had the opportunity to observe a friend deal with some potentially sticky social situations recently. There were two fascinating things about their responses –

(1) When the responses weren’t what they wanted to hear, they just moved onto trying something else. No drama.

(2) When I asked this friend if they felt hurt or annoyed by the unpleasantness, they shrugged. The secret to their temperament was not taking it personally. They just focused on what they wanted out of the situation and ignored everything else.

There’s a simple idea I shared recently from Mark Manson’s book that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – We all walk around giving too many f*cks. We let far too many things bother us – none of this is going to matter when we look back years from now. Leading a good life is about learning to give a f*ck about the few things that matter.

This friend’s temperament and behavior was a great illustration of this idea.

I found it inspiring.

It isn’t a question of whether we’ll take our blessings for granted.

We will.

It is just a question of whether we’ve gotten enough reminders built into our daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly routines to take stock of all that we take for granted… and recommit to making them count.

London began fining high-emitting vehicles roaming their city streets in April 2019 to reduce pollution.

A study looking at experimental data of the kinds of transport kids took to school showed a fascinating side-effect – kids in ULE (ultra low emission) zones were twice as likely to walk to school instead of getting dropped off.

And as you can imagine, there’s a whole host of health benefits from children walking to school.

Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the behavior.

There have been a collection of headlines about nuclear energy powered data centers of late – involving major technology companies (Google, Oracle, Microsoft). On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense – a nuclear plant provides a steady flow of energy and datacenters need a constant supply of power.

Nuclear energy has a tendency to inspire extreme reactions. However, given its obvious promise/potential, the lack of forward momentum on nuclear has always intrigued me.

Until I came upon a simple and logical explanation involving learning curves.

All new technology that is deployed en-masse gets the benefits of learning curves. As we deploy it, its costs get cheaper. And, as it becomes more abundant, we also learn how to use it better – increasing its benefits.

Today’s Artificial Intelligence/AI wave is a great example. It is expensive to deploy large language models right now. However, the cost of doing so has come down over ten-fold in the past two years. This will continue happening over the coming years – thanks to learning curves.

However, as Matt Ridley explains in “How Innovation Works”, nuclear energy hasn’t had the benefit of learning curves because of the cost of experimentation.

The cost of error in any nuclear reactor is high. As a result, nuclear is highly regulated. This results in a “waterfall” model of deployment vs. a more learning-filled agile model. For example, this means that teams on the ground are prevented from making any changes from the original spec that was approved by regulators – even if it makes little sense to continue as per plan. The costs of such rigidity add up quickly.

One area of experimentation with nuclear energy of late has been to go “modular.” This means smaller nuclear reactors that can be deployed in various places. This modularity might succeed in reducing the cost of error. That, in turn, might enable nuclear energy production to finally experience learning curves that other energy sources have benefited from.

Either way, the cost of not learning will continue to inhibit the growth of nuclear energy – at a time when solar and wind continue to grow exponentially driven by falling costs from their own learning curves.

This offers an important life lesson too. Learning compounds. While we often focus on the upside, the cost of not learning has a compounding negative effect that can have a debilitating effect over time.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

This is especially true under stress – in sports, at work, and in our life.