Programming in Mindfullness

Hello, and Thank you for being here today. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jack Murphy and I’m a software engineer on the Content team.

Today, our task today is simple.

We’re going to reprogram a human brain .

BUT before we dive into that I want to ask you a quick question.

How many decisions do you make in a day ?

Okay now. Put a pin in that, write it down and put it in your pocket. Or do whatever you need to do. But don’t forget that question. Because we will be coming back to it.

Okay now let’s get into the topics that we’re going to cover.

For that I’ll be covering the following topics

Topics:

• Parameters
• IF Statements
• Testing
• Automation

Now, let’s start with…

Parameters

Parameters are

“a limit or boundary which defines the scope of a particular process or activity.”

Although we’re dealing with software It might actually be easier to visualise this using the hardware we have.

We can only grow so tall, run so fast and lift so much.

These are the parameters that we are limited by. The most successful people understand these parameters and understand that they must do their best to optimise what they can within their parameters.

We are not boundless and we can not do everything. As much as our ego likes to tell us otherwise sometimes. As much as our ego likes to tell us otherwise.

When it comes to the software, the processes that run in our brain, we have control over the decisions we make within a commonality that we all share.

We all have 24 hours.

Jeff Bezos priorities going to sleep early and waking up early. Kobe Briant prioritised starting practice before anyone else. At 75 Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to the gym every day.

Tim Ferris meditates for 21 minutes each morning. Cristiano Ronaldo doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs.

These people all voluntarily limit themselves. They choose to be deficient in some activities so that an be abundant in others.

The parameters that they stay within forms the structure that they base their identity. Their actions reinforce it. It is a continuous cycle. With every successful day’s repetition as reinforcement into the kind of person they want to be.

When you define what your parameters are, you define who you want to be. You build a wall around your garden and you tend to what is inside. You plant seeds, pull weeds and make your garden beautiful. You do the best to grow what you can and practice gratitude for what you already have.

The discipline that is required to stay within your parameters gives you the freedom to spend your most valuable resources, time and attention, on the things that you have predefined to be the most valuable aspects of your lived.

Whether it be your family, career, health or anything else you value. By limiting what you focus on, you get to give more of yourself to what you value the most.

Okay, so what are the takeaways from this first section

Takeaways from this section:

• The parameters that you stay within create your identity
• Your discipline to stay within your parameters gives you more freedom to enjoy what you value.

Question:

What would you put in your walled garden ?

Answering the question from the start

I’m going to bring your attention back to the original question and answer it

How many decisions do you make in a day ?

The answer is:

I have no idea, and neither do you. Some estimated say that we make anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000 choices a day. I imagine many of them are subconscious, like how far our stride is when we walk, but there are many that are in our conscious mind that we reduce to white noise.

But what if we became more mindful of the decisions we make? That brings me onto our next topic.

If Statements

if (this.isInteresting){
  payAttention()
} else {
  openReddit()
}

For the Brain, most of our conscious lives are made up of a complicated series of If statements.

Now I’m going to ask you the same question as before, but with a little more to it.

How many decisions do make in a day, that positively or negatively effects your brain?

It’s hard to tell, because we don’t pay anywhere near enough attention to it as we should. We are often flying with an untrained autopilot when we should be paying attention. We will find ourselves thinking of the future or living in the past. We struggle to sit with no external entertainment for more than a few moments before our minds pull us in a seemingly random direction before swiftly judging our thoughts and pulling us in a completely different direction.

We may not know what the right decision is each time we have to make one, but if we become mindful that we are about to make a decision, we can add or remove parameters that can influence the outcome.

As Viktor Frankl put it:

“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl

It’s within this space, that we have the opportunity to decide who we want to be…

What if a parameter you add to your decision is honesty.

Let’s say you’ve had a bad day and you’re stuck on something you’re working on.

We never gave ourselves the opportunity to do anything but rejectHelp(). This is an example of a default setting.

But what if a parameter you add to your decision is honesty.

We can make a decision in the direction we aspire to; we give ourselves new opportunities that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

Mindfulness gives us the opportunity to add or remove parameters to the decisions we make. With this, we can choose to act with our virtues.

By paying attention and frequently spotting opportunities to be mindful, we are able to assert the kind of person we desire to be in any given moment. It is not a necessity that we respond in anger to a given situation when a college or friend makes questionable comment to us, even if we have done so in the past.

To be mindful is to be present in the moment and to get to decide who you will be in that given moment.

We see well programmed brains throughout history, who’s consistent mindful actions precedes them, such as:

“Honest Abe” (Abraham Lincoln — President of the United States)

or

“Verissimus — Truthful one” (Marcus Aurelius - Emperor or Rome).

These people were born with the same capacity for selfishness and mindless reactions as we are, but they chose, in each of their moments, to bring forward virtue and character so that their decisions have a positive impact.

If we choose to act with virtue, we are actively choosing to parse the external world through a filter of our brain. Throughout different schools of thought, there is an underlying thread that tends to run through them all.

We focus on what we can control and how we react, and let everything else take its course.

When we focus on choosing how we react to the external inputs, we are choosing to provide valuable outputs. Our mindful mentality up-cycles the input we get and output something better than what we received.

If we aren’t mindful to how we react to the outside world we are limited to a simple processor thats default is “Garbage in, garbage out”.

Each time you choose to do what you believe to be the right thing, you win. You win against a lesser version of yourself. One who mindlessly responded without consideration.

Let’s say you do that. You make the right decision, in your own opinion. The bi-product of that is that you have developed confidence in your decision making abilities. When we win, our subconscious brain floods itself in serotonin.

That’s the same chemical we use in anti-depressants. It’s what gives us motivation to do more. It activates the brain to intrinsically reward you for whatever it is you just did. Which also means that when faced with a difficult decision, you are aware of the intrinsic reward your brain will give you when you make the right decision.

So, I’ll ask again. How many decisions do you make in a day ?

And I’ll add to it.

How many opportunities for winning are you passing up on?

Takeaways from this section:

• We make countless decisions each day that we are not mindful of. That gives us countless opportunities to be the best versions of ourselves.
• When we are mindful of our decisions, we can add or remove parameters that dictate our responses.
• When we make decisions that include positive virtues, our brain rewards us with serotonin. The happiness drug.

Moving onto our next topic

Testing

When we make a pull request, best practice dictates that at least one other member of our team should review it before we commit to merging it into production.

Why?

Because two sets of eyes is better than one. We are human, we make mistakes and we absolutely would prefer to figure out we made a mistake before it went to production.

We would rather encounter a beast in a zoo, behind glass than in the wild with nothing protecting us between it.

So why do we write tests? We write them because testing gives us confidence that what we made does what it is supposed to do. The better the test, the higher our confidence is.

How many tests have you had in your life that you lemented when it occurred, only to walk away a better person because of it ?

We see this all the time in sports. Athletes practice over and over again, to etch each movement it into their minds until it becomes second nature. Some of you might remember Michael Jordan famously closing his eyes before scoring a free throw.

Where did that confidence come from ? Do you think it was innate within him or was it created from the hundreds of thousands of free throws he practiced in training?

Lets bring it back to programming the brain.

Today I’ll be walking through the testing pyramid we all know and love

Testing Pyramid

If we look at the testing pyramid, we see that most of the tests that we have in a codebase are unit tests, followed by integration tests and then End to End tests.

The unit tests make up the bulk of our test suit. They are made in isolation and are meant to test atomic behaviour. Think of a small “if” statement.

The integration tests are when individual modules are combined and tested as a group.

Let’s say you have 3 modules that you’re testing, and hoping will pass.

1. Food
2. Exercise
3. Sleep

If each module does not pass, the integration test of

Ooof… that’s not good. I guess I need to change something so this won’t fail in the future. But I’m glad I have this test. I have information I can work with now.

It’s better to fail early, fast and clearly than to have let a mistake sneak its way into production. A comprehensive set of tests that you run on yourself daily is vital to ensure long term success.

And finally we have:

End-to-End tests.

These are the tests that step through your whole system. They are very valuable as they show you the whole experience of all the components you’ve been working on. They give you the most confidence that what you have built will operate as expected in the real world.

Let’s use another example

When tests fail. It can often hurt. They take a long time to run and it can feel like your efforts were for nothing. But that’s not the case at all.

What do you do when you have a failed test? You debug through it and find out WHY it failed. You fix it and then you get right back up and run it again.

You’ve just identified the problem. And that problem can be an opportunity for innovation and creative thinking.

There is a good reason Test Driven Development requires your tests to fail before they pass. You don’t want false positives. Failures are not failures if they lead to better things.

As we can see. The value of having tests in our lives is absolutely vital if we want to do anything with confidence.

But what is the point in having a testing suite if we do not monitor it and respond to the results?

That would be like a mission control room with flashing lights without any action on improving the situation.

That sounds very anxiety inducing to me. And personally, I don’t think id like to be in a room like that for very long.

So what do we do for ourselves?

Personally, I recommend Journaling. Specifically using a Bullet Journal using the Ryder Carroll writing Method. I can talk about that another day, but it’s helped me over the last 5 years and I have every confidence it would help you. This book keeps me accountable in the same why that the tests do. I’ve found it’s much harder to fool yourself when you have to write it down.

What are the takeaways from testing?

Takeaways:

• It’s good to fail fast and adapt.
• Testing breeds confidence from a series of successful passes.
• A failed test is an opportunity to do things better.
• Monitoring our tests on ourselves is the only real way we can monitor progression or regression.

Now let’s move onto the final and fanciest section of them all.

Automation

Now I’ll ask you:

Most days, we will ask ourselves the same questions. For examples:

• Should I get out of bed now or hit snooze?
• What should I wear today?
• What should I eat today?
• Have I drunk enough water?
• Do I need to take out the bins today?

The problem is…

Humans suffer from decision fatigue, which means that the more decisions we make in a given day, the worst they get over time. So, I’ll bring you back to my opening question

How many decisions do you make in a day ?

We’ve already established that I’m just as clueless as anyone to answer this already. And so are you. We’re all in the same boat here. But what we do know, is that we want to make sure that when we need to make a good decision, it's better to have some resilience and enough energy in the tank to make the right one, and set that parameter.

Buddhist Monks know this and choose to wear the same clothes each day. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Obama were known for their repeated clothing choices. They did not value the decision of “What should I wear today?” over the return of potentially being able to make better decisions later on in the day.

When asked how he was able to be so productive in his lifetime Winston Churchill responded

“Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down” — Winston Churchill

He was fiercely protective of his mental and physical energy, and so should you.

However, at some point these decision need to be made. Nobody is going to be thanking me for turning up to work without clothes on because

“i dOnT vAlUe mAkinG tHaT dEcISioN EacH mOrNinG”.

No!

But the decision on how to answer them doesn’t need to be made repeatedly. They just need to be executed repeatedly.

Would it make sense to re-write a script every time time you need it to run ? No! What a waste of time! So why would we do that in our lives?

This is where automation comes in. And for this, I will be importing the “Atomic Habits” library written by James Clear.

Practical Examples:

For Hydration, rather than say, “I want to drink more water”, you can set a process in place.

“At 8pm every night, I will fill up my 2L water bottle and leave it in my bag for the morning.”

Not only have you made good choices, but you no longer have to spend the energy required to decide what you’re going to do every day because you have already decided that you would.

Your discipline has given you the freedom to focus your limited resources on what matters most to you. Through discipline you get things done.

With enough repetition, these processes will run on autopilot.

Your mindful investment into your future and your discipline to implement it has lead to more mental freedom to focus on what matters most to you.

Takeaways from this section:

• Automate repeated decisions that have low value to you.
• Make your decision in advance, be specific, make it easy to do the things you want.
• Discipline = Freedom.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Recap

• Parameters: We get to define the person we want to be.
• If statements: We can change the parameters our decisions are based on, before we decide. Giving us the opportunity for better results.
• Testing: We must give ourselves opportunities to test our abilities if we are to be able to grow and refine ourselves.
• Automation: We can build habits that bring us closer to our goals.

Final thoughts

Many of us have had a similar path in life. We are formally educated for the best part of 20 years. Some more some less. And yet, we all still make mistakes and blunders.

As far as I can tell, the only person who doesn’t make mistakes is my mother. She assures me of that. But other than her..

Nobody is free from the grips of stupidity when it strikes. We’re all human and that is something that will never change. With this in mind, we should be aware of the boundary of our own parameters and not expect absolute perfection from ourselves. Improved attention and a willingness to strive for small improvements is good enough.

I think James Clear said it best

In the beginning, there is basically no difference between making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse. But as time goes on, these small improvements or declines compound and you suddenly find a very big gap between people who make slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don’t.

Here’s the punchline:

If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

…

I hope you’ve Enjoyed this talk. It is the first one that I have done. And I’d love your feedback.

If you have liked what I said. And you think that anything else I might have to say may serve you well, feel free to follow me. I enjoy writing and plan on publishing as often as possible

Before I go, I’m going to leave you with a question:

How many parameters do you put infront of being happy?

if (I.haveAnExpensiveCar && I.ownABigHouse && I.amAMillionaire && everybodyLikesMe == true){
	beHappy()
}

Congratulations on programming your mind using Mindfulness