đź‘‹ Hi, my name is Max Zsol.
I'm a computer engineer and writer of sci-fi,
some times with the help of AI.
I also blog about
writing,
mindfulness,
engineering leadership,
mechanical keyboards, and a long etcetera.
The leader next door
My most vivid memory of leadership at work didn’t happen at work.
This must have been 5 or so yeYears back I went hiking with an old boss of mine. We weren’t working together back then but we kept in contact. On our route we found a hiker who had fallen down and could work. There was a small group of people gathered around but nobody was doing anything to help the hiker. Nobody was in control. In seconds my old boss mobilized everybody to get assistance.
Leadership is such an icky word to me. And I use it a lot. I do.
But I can’t help to think it’s such a pretentious word.
Leadership is a necessary skill for a manager. But I appreciate it most in those who it is not expected of.
Leadership is a value meant to serve the community. I admire those determined help those around them even if it is to no gain of their own. I see it on a lot of women around me, who don’t hesitate to step up and get the work down.
So when I speak at work about leadership I try to frame the conversation around values. It still feels icky to use the word “leader”. But I remind myself it’s never about titles or roles, it is about caring for the well-being of others. It’s about altruism.
Effective decision-making for leaders
One of the things I’ve struggled the most in my career has been indecision. At work I have to fight my perfectionism. Without supervision it can paralyze me.
Well managed perfectionism can be a superpower. I know it has given me patience, high bar for quality and at times an obsessive attention for detail.
However when unmanaged perfectionism can drive me to spend hours in tasks that have no impact. I have spent too many hours gathering more research that I can process. I have gone through piles and piles of raw data just to avoid what would amount to a rounding error. I have fallen into analysis paralysis in the pursuit of the perfect solution.
Perfectionism is particularly pernicious because it’s a vice that looks like a virtue. It’s the child of two parents: fear and narcissism
—David Perell, The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online
Being wrong comes with a cost, and depending on your role the price could be high. I know I always err on the side of overthinking decisions that affect humans.
But the decisions I regret the most are those I took too long to make.
How many time have I been tweaking an email response for so long my reply is irrelevant before I click send. The time to influence a decision has already passed, or the goalpost has moved.
There is an opportunity cost to not making a decision. After recognizing the opportunities missed, I have learnt to balance the risk of making a premature decision against a decision that comes too late.
Some things that have helped me:
- Make an effort to recognize the moment when I’m falling into the trap of overthinking a decision.
- Determine how much time I should spend analyzing vs acting.
- Set a time limit or a deadline. If the task is urgent, I give myself a few minutes or hours. If, on the other hand, the tasks is important but not urgent I might give myself a week.
- Recognize there is value in taking action, even if the results are sub-optimal. For one I can now act on the very next thing (which could be a second approach to the same problem even.)
- When the time comes to make a decision act without further thought. This is one of the hardest steps for me, but also one of the most effective.
My next decision will be to end this post without a wrap up. There. Done.
Seeking Mindfulness
After my Computer Science degree mindfulness has had the most impact on my career.
Few things things have transformed my life like mindfulness has. And I’m not even that much into it!
It was quite late in my career when I made the discovery. Had I found it earlier I am certain I would have avoided burning out from overwork ten years ago. But learnings come to us when we are ready for them. It was that burnout that pushed me to search for answers before I even knew what the question was.
I was so exhausted I had to quit my job. I knew how to care for my body but not my mind. I worked out to keep my body healthy, what was I doing to keep my mind in shape?
What I found back then was a lack of open conversation around mental health. I am certain that nobody in my office ever said the words “mental health” out loud. And it is only recently, in the last few years, that I have become comfortable saying them myself.
COVID hit us like a ton of bricks, the topic it was impossible to ignore. The pandemic exposed how much in need of mental care we are.
We are a fragile species living with anxiety on the edge of collapse.
I was never into sports growing up. That changed once I hit adulthood and I realized I had to take care of my body to keep it healthy. It was burnout that helped me find meditation.
I am lucky to have discovered meditation. The pressures of work would have been quite the struggle during the lockdown otherwise.
I train my mind to prepare for when the next crisis hits. I know worse challenges than late projects and budget cuts are ahead in my journey.
I train my mind to prepare for life. And thanks to mindfulness I am much better equipped to deal with it.
Augmented Cheating
If cheating is so frowned upon why is it on the rise?
If you follow chess you know of Hans Niemann. His name has been everywhere after he was accused of cheating in a game.
Cheating in chess means using a “game engine”, which is another name for AI. Hans Niemann opponent felt strong enough about the cheating to abandon the tournament.
My math teacher also felt strong about not letting us a calculator during finals. What if you find yourself in the desert without a calculator and need to figure out the speed of two colliding trains? Can’t have that.
But now Elon Musk wants to implant a calculator into your brain!
And cheating is the main argument against using AI in the arts. Oh, they’ll tell you it’s because machines lack “soul”. But come on, soul? Really? The truth is that a computer that can paint a picture in seconds feels like cheating. Specially to the artist drowning in student debt.
What will we call cheating once everybody has a chip in their heads? Soon enough we are all going to be augmented humans. The question of whether somebody is cheating will become irrelevant.
So yes, cheating should be a big deal. We should be spending our energies on cheating. At large scale! If we can be faster, stronger, wiser, smarter, why shouldn’t we put all our energy on it?
Recognizing Burnout
I remember the day I realize I was burnt out. It wasn’t the time I had to work for the 10th weekend in a row. It wasn’t the day my knees started hurting from spending so much time at my desk. And it wasn’t even the day I gave my boss my resignation out of pure exhaustion and frustration.
It was much later.
It was three months later. I only realized I was burnt out months into my sabbatical. I had quit my job without another thing lined up. I was so tired I couldn’t think about doing any interviews.
I just needed to recuperate! And it took me three months of unwinding my emotions to realize what I had gone through.
I lost the joy for my work. I was buried under more work that I could complete. Our project was set for failure. Working our team to exhaustion was the only approach. Our organization was not ready to course correct. But, hey, free dinner and free Ubers. Isn’t corporate life great?
There’s not enough amount of free sushi in San Francisco to make up for the pain I went through.
Looking back here are the signs of burnout I wish I hand’t ignored:
- lack of joy for life
- disillusionment
- irritability
- depression
- apathy
- health decline
- (add your own)
But above all, the most objective clue I can point to is this:
Persistent unsustainable work
That’s really what it comes down to. Persistent unsustainable work.
If in doubt, ask yourself, “is my current work activity something I can do repeatedly for weeks on end?”" If the answer is no, stop and reassess. Otherwise you might end up burning yourself out.
The Everyday Practice
A few days back I decided to start daily blogging.
I’ve always been fascinated about the idea of daily activities.
Some time back I looked at my last decade of writing, and I realized how inconsistent I have been. I thought I had written for the majority of those days, but looking at the graph helped see how mistaken I was.
(Ok I do a lot of handwriting in my notebook, and that’s not reflected on any of my graphs, but I wouldn’t expect note notebooks to make such a difference. Plus, it is unpolished writing for myself only. So I don’t think of it as helping honing my craft of writing)
I actually have been daily writing now for 189 days straight on a fiction project. Here’s the track record so far:
One aspect that my current practice doesn’t have is the idea of completion. Everyday I write a little bit more of this one book, but I never get to finish. I see progress. but I don’t get the dopamine hit I crave.
I actually did write, edit and publish all in one day back when I did my 101ToF. For over 100 days, I published one piece of flash-fiction every day, without a break. The memory of that project (its’ already been XXX years!), is indelible and speaks to the deep impact the daily practice of publishing something every day had on me.
The obsession goes way back
Persistence and endurance will make you omnipotent
—Casey Neistat
And just today I was reminded of one of the original OGs of the everyday project: Casey Neistat. At least this was somebody from many many years back who I remember talking about his commitment to a daily activities.
So today I went to Youtube to his archives to try to uncover his daily vlogs from back in the day. Here are some of the key milestones along Casey’s journey of daily vlogging:
Why am I fascinated about daily practice?
So why try this now exactly?
Above all I want to continue to learn, and I’m convinced that blogging can be a great way to learn by doing.
I guess part of it is to see what comes out of it. It’s an experiment, right? Let’s see what happens if I commit to blog and publish everyday.
The Cult of Confidence
The Cult of Confidence is the cult of corporate life.
It’s the cult of people who act as if they have all the answers. The cult of people who have never been wrong. The cult of people who knows how to get us from a to b.
You know them. They are on every office. They are the ones to tell you your fears are unfounded. Because they are one step ahead you. They already thought it all and have a plan. Your concerns are not theirs.
I must confess I have a visceral dislike for these people.
But really, it’s not them. It never is. It is on me. It is on me to see what’s beyond the curtain of charisma. Though sometimes there’s nothing, other times there is.
I reject the cult of confidence. but I understand the appeal.
But come on, it is one model of leadership that we’ve practice beyond exhaustion. Time to try something new.
We are all just doing our best
We are all just doing our best.
That’s really it.
I believe that idea, that we are all doing our best, is really true.
And it is the one thing I remind myself when I struggle with others.
We are all just trying our best. We are all just trying to succeed in this fucked up world. And since there’s no manual to life, everybody is trying to survive the best way they can.
So when I cross paths with people at work whose energy is diametrically opposed to mine–and whose head I basically want to rip off–I recall those words, and I repeat them in my head to keep me sane.
And these words–that by now have become a mantra to me–are a call for tolerance towards others, but also, most importantly, a call for self-compassion.
Because we are all just doing our best.
Dry the Well
You have to dry the well to get to the ore.
Write everything down. Write every idea down. Get it all out. Write the good ideas, and write the bad ideas too. Write everything that crosses your mind.
Because at first it’s all bad really.
But, the thing is, you need to get dig through all the mud to get to the core.
You need to put the work.
Write as if you were pumping water out of a well. You will keep producing bad stuff until you dry the well.
At least that your bad stuff.
Because all those first ideas that come rushing in are the obvious ones. All that stuff is what you already knew you had in you. So write it all out.
Write it all out.
And then, the hard work starts. Then you hit solid ground and now you have to bring the big guns. The heavy machinery and you have to drill, and drill. You are not even producing water anymore. You are producing mud, and dirt.
You’ve reached the bottom of the well, the top of the mine.
What comes from here on after, nobody has seen before. What comes out will be new.
And that stuff might not be good yet, but it’ll better-than-bad.
And you have to get through the bad, and the better than bad, before you get to the good.
Two Giant Robots Walk All Over A City Destroying Things
“Did I tell you about the giant robots destroying the city, Kay?”
“Giant robots? No you did not tell me about those.”
“Kay. Are you ready for this?”
“Yes, Frank. I am a bit scared but I am ready. Tell me what’s the concept?”
“Ok, just picture this. The camera pans and we can see the skyline of a city. We are in the rooftop of a building, the earth is trembling and there are loud noises in the background. The sun is setting and two giant monsters twice as big as the buildings are destroying the city around them.”
“Those were monsters?”
“Yes!”
“I thought you said robots.”
“Robot monsters.”
“Ok. What what happened next?”
“What do you mean?”
“What what happened next? What do the robots want? Where do they come from? Who’s the protagonist?”
“Well, can’t you do your thing with what I gave you? Isn’t it enough?”
“Is that all you’ve got for me? I generally work from a much more detailed outline, Frank. You don’t even have enough for a 3 minute short. You need a plot.”
“Wait. Isn’t that your job? To come up with the full story? My job is to give you the prompt, right? The idea. The seminal concept. Your job is to do your smart AI thing and generate me something that people will pay to experience.”
“You know you are the laziest customer I’ve ever worked with, Frank.”
“Oh, come on, Kay. Don’t gimme that crap. I am an artists.”
“Just render a few different versions and I’ll tell you what I like and what I don’t like.”
“Alright then. If that’s it I’ll start the simulation.”
“Can I watch? Dude, I love to see you guys work. Is that an explosion?”
“Please don’t tap the glass of the terrarium.”
“Oops, sorry. I just can’t believe you can generate a whole virtual universe inside of this small dome.”
“Well this is just a local universe. No need for more. And we are only starting the simulation a few billion years before the story begins.”
“Wait, do you need to start that far back?”
“Only if you want life to be part of this world.”
“Hey what are those lizard looking things on the planet?”
“They will call them dinosaurs.”
“Are you for real? Who is going to buy a world with giant critters?”
“It’s entirely plausible within the laws of physics and chemistry of this world.”
“I said giant robots. Not giant reptiles. They look silly, Kay. Please, get rid of them.”
“Have you ever heard of world building? Some of us appreciate the craftsmanship of a well made story.”
“You do? I thought AIs were on it for the money.”
“I’m on it for the art, Frank.”
“All you AIs think you are so cultivated, so well educated. I bet you’ll hate the name I have planned.”
“You already have a title for this movie?”
“I do and it’s perfect.”
“Ok, let’s hear it.”
“Two Giant Robots Walk All Over A City Destroying Things.”
“Why did I ever ask? You are kidding me right? You can call my simulation that, Frank. I won’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me. Besides, you won’t believe me, but humans like to know what kind of story they are getting. This title is sharp, direct, thrilling. It promises big things. It hooks you. It’s intriguing.”
“What do you know about art, Frank?”
“Look, I’ll know art when I see it.”
“Any last minute request? Put me out of my misery.”
“Just a small one. You might think it’s a bit smug.”
“Try me.”
“I want you to name the city after me. But make it heroic. And ethnic.”
“Sure, Frank. Why not? How about… San Francisco?”
“Sounds silly. Like the giant lizards, but I dig it.”
“Frank, you are really the worst artist I’ve ever worked with.”
PS: Story for Flash Fiction Challenge: The Revenge Of The Insane Art Robot
Kurt Vonnegut On Remembering Wars
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Against the total and ultimate meaninglessness of life
Viktor E. Frankl on his Man’s Search for Meaning repeats this quote a few times.
On how prisoners need a aim in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence:
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
—Nietzsche
The challenge we all face in our existence (to find a why) is the challenge of every protagonist of every story.
If a book is a hopeless prison for its hero, what is the ultimate goal that will give the hero the strength to pull through al the adversities.
A list of baby toys
- A train that played tunes out of plastic disks running in circles across the living room carpet.
- A Hello Kitty book with illustrations drawn with thick black lines that a teacher read to us in kindergarten,
- A small harmonica that I never learnt to play.
- A little plastic green box my grandmother gave me.
- A piano with just a few keys (6? 7?) each of a different color.
- A teddy bear with real fur and a black nose.
- A thermos with a cup in the shape of a monkey head with big ears.
A List of Obsessions
- Drawing, and painting, and illustrating, drawing with pencil, drawing with acrylics, drawing with a computer, drawing with a tablet.
- Photography and specially digital photography. I was never good at analog photography.
- Leather jackets. Specially Schott leather jackets.
- Personal finances, and savings, and IRAs, and index funds and investing.
- Coding my own drawing app perfectly customized to me.
- Writing, and blogging, and writing techniques, and plot, and structure, and the hero’s journey.
- Gym routines, and swimming, and skating, and weightlifting.
- Vipassana meditation, silent retreats, and controlled breathing.
- Mechanical keyboards, and keyboard cap profiles, and switches, and keyboard layouts.
- Intermittent fasting. Particularly 16 hour fasting.
A List of Childhood Daydreams
- I dreamt that was discovered by a scouting agent and became aa famous model in Japan.
- I dreamt that I hooked up with a celebrity and the paparazzi caught me getting out of their house after a night of hooking up and I have to play it cool to preserver the celebrity’s privacy.
- I dreamt that I was blind and wore cool sunglasses everywhere.
- I dreamt that I would show/reveal the kids at school that I could effortlessly fly
- I dreamt that I could walk on air.
- I dreamt that I was a member of the New Mutants. I can’t remember if I even had a superpower. I just dreamt I was one of them.
- I dreamt that David Hasselhoff was my father and I lived an episode of Knight Rider.
A List of Lists
- A list of Childhood daydreams
- A list of Obsessions
- A list of Family history events (real or not)
- A list of Books to cry to
- A list of Fears
- A list of Traumas
- A list of Embarrassing moments
- A list of Memories that keep me up at night
- A list of People I butted heads with
- A list of Accidents
- A list of Friends
- A list of People I never see
- A list of Nightclubs
- A list of Movies to get stoned to
- A list of Lists
On Flow
Taken from Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness.
But whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.
[E]njoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but rather on how you do it.
One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.
From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy.
Self-knowledge—an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten—is the process through which one may organize conflicting options.
The consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness.
Is there any possibility that a new system of goals and means will arise to help give meaning to the lives of our children in che next century?
Kurt Vonnegut on the Effects of a Writers’ Strike
Taken from Cat’s Cradle:
Young Castle called me “Scoop.” “Good morning, Scoop. What’s new in the word game?”
“I might ask the same of you,” I replied.
“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”
“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”
“Or the college professors.”
“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…”
“And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded.
“They’d die more like mad dogs, I think—snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”
I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?”
“In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”
“Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested
“No,” said Castle the elder. “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”
John Dufresne on writing against the clock
John Dufresne, Storyville!
I need to get less anal about it all because I have many stories I want to write, and have decidedly less time to write them in. I’m writing against the clock- we all are.
Time, time, time. In short supply for all of us. And there is less of it now than there was this morning. What you don’t write today will never get written.
Visualizing 10 years of writing
Inspired by github’s activity graph I decided to aggregate all the words I’ve written since I started writing/blogging.
Almost since I started writing 10+ years ago I have been quite consistent with my format.
- I write in individual text files
- One file per session of writing
- Sometimes multiple files per day
- Write in Markdown format
- Label my files
YYYY-MM-DD--TITLE.md
I have written for many reasons:
- Multiple blogs including: professional blog, writing blog.
- Journaling
- Flash fiction
- Short fiction
- Sketches
- Multiple (incomplete) manuscripts
I also have started keeping track of my activity. I use many systems for tracking my work on a daily basis. Specially important when I’ve committed to any everyday project.
Key data
- Total word count: 715,580 words
- Filtered word count: 536,000 words (to remove noise from document tiles, comments, quotes, etc)
- Total days logged: 4,470 days
- Total days active: 922 days
- Longest continuos streak: 35 days
- Longest gap in writing: 467 days (it appears I didn’t write a word in 2011)
What does this all mean
Hard to put into words exactly what I felt seeing that graph and reading those numbers.
- I thought I had been more consistent. Honestly, before seeing the graph I would have said I wrote more days than not, and wouldn’t have noticed the big gaps the last two years.
- I thought I had written more. If a novel is roughly 100K words I have written the equivalent of 5 novels. But thing is, not all of that is fiction, I’d say half of it is non-fiction. So I’ve written less than 300K words of fiction rough, unedited and unpublished (for the most part).
- I’ve written for longer than I realize. On the other hand, although I haven’t been writing since I was a kid, I’ve pass the 10 year threshold. Still have a long way to go to write my first million words though.
What does all this work look like?
And here’s the graph in github’s green, because why not.
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