How I'm applying the mindset around sustainability to everyday life

Maximize income/profit is something that is always on my mind as a business owner. The problem I face is that there are many ways to maximize profit. Many of them have negative externalities, like pressuring employees to work harder.

When I say minimize spending, I am not talking about staying at budget hotels in the bad part of town when you go on vacation, or eating only top ramen. Rather, I am talking about psychology and self reliance.

Minimize spending led me to understand the concept of the hedonic treadmill, that my basline levels of happiness will be the same whether or not I have a sportscar or live in a fancy penthouse. I moved toward self-reliance: I started cooking more rather than going to restaurants, doing my own home repairs (though I'm still a novice here), utilizing open source software, and I'm gearing up to grow my own vegetables next year, to name a few. The thought experiment I am constantly running is "what if I had to do X without spending a penny. What would I do?"

I am operating on the hypothesis that these additional skills I'm learning will be able to lead to profit and/or impact (helping people independent of profit) down the line. I understand that a lot of the modern convenience economy is built so this stuff can be automated and outsources so we can focus on our high-value skill set (our job/speciality). I understand that I could spend the whole day doing home repairs (poorly) or tinkering with my Emacs config file (if you know what that is), which would negatively affect the company I have to run. I get that. That is not the point. The point is knowing how to do these things. The point is being resilient, self-reliant, anti-fragile, so you can handle the minor or major disrupations often come with uncertainty.

A lot of operating in uncertainty means being able to make rational decisions. As such, I am trying to work on my rationality overall. Having a goal like "improve or maximize rationality" is a bit broad. However, a lot of rational decision making involves being aware of the cognitive biases that can lead to irrational decisions. This is written about quite a lot on LessWrong, a community devoted to the art of rationality. Notice the mentality is consistent with this article: becoming less wrong rather than more right, something that influenced my "minimization" approach.

As such, one way forward is to turn the tables and simply get good at understanding one's cognitive biases. There are the standard ones that Kahneman and Tversky orignally studied (which have since been expanded), but then there are biases that are much more personal.

For example, I am trying to de-bias my understanding of current events. I think I read a lot of "fake news" in my college years through my mid 20s, before I became more critical of the news media. I hopothesize that there is some "malware" running in my head from any low-quality journalism I consumed (or perhaps still consume). As such, I am pulling articles from less biased news sources (eg. AP) and seeing what happened in earlier years (eg. 2012) through the lens of AP rather than whatever I was reading at the time. This also addresses more general biases around human memory as well.

I am hypothesizing that this de-biasing will allow me to make more rational decisions in the present moment, and perhaps make more accurate predictions of the future. I am critically examining the latter by keeping an excel sheet where I make predictions about the near-term and long-term, so my beliefs can enter a directed feedback system.

I am a jazz musician (primarily bass, but currently learning jazz piano). The jazz mindset is one optimized for self-expression. You have to be able to embody the spirit of the music and then play new music on top of it, on the fly (a solo).

When I focus on maximizing that (which I have been doing all my life), I spend hours tinkering with different riffs and expressions. While I get really good with self-expression given my technical skills, I do not improve beyond a point. However, when I focus on mimizing hindrances to self-expression, that gets me sufficiently motivated to work on technical exercises, scales, etc. These are the things that help me improve more substantially as a musician. Again, they have always been like pulling teeth for me, but when I flip the script and focusing on minimizing hindrances, I finally have the motivation to do this.

I have been lifting weights since 1999, and I rarely skip a workout. Earlier, I would optimize for maximum strength. This would be the mindset of no-pain-no-gain. I would give it my all. I still do, but later in life, being more vulnerable to injury, I have flipped the script.

If I want to maximize some movement, like the deadlift or the bench press, what I have to do is minimize inefficiencies. In other words, I have to swallow my pride, and use lower weights while optimizeing for form. Once my biomechanical inefficincies have been ironed out, then I can go to higher weights. As a side effect, this mindset has lowered the probability of injury, and has simply made me more athletic and physically resilient.

There is a lot more I want to say here, but that will be for a future article.

I have been writing in a digital journal since 2009, and a pen-and-paper one since 2006. Some of the writing is personal, but a lot of the writing centers on ideas. For the sake of my company, or for the sake of future employers in a recession where layoffs are around the corner for everyone, it helps to have visibility beyond your resume. As such. One way of doing that is to have a block, substack, personal website, or something of that nature where you can share your work.

So I built a website where I can share the things that are important to me. What should I write about? How do I find the time to write? Well, I go into my thousands of pages of journal entries and think of the whole thing as a first draft for articles, books, and whatever else. In the permaculture sense, I am "reclaiming" content that would otherwise be "dissipated as heat."

Marketing thought leader Seth Godin is a great example of value reclamation in terms of writing. Whatever he writes he puts in his blog, where he appears to post every day. He then utilizes material he's already written to write new books. I know this because I bought This Is Marketing when I was starting my business, and it read like a polished and organized set of blog posts (it was a good book nonetheless).

This one is a bit more well-trodden, so I'll keep it brief. We all add value in some way. We all have a sense of what we can do that people will pay money for. With my company, I started out as a general purpose per-hour consultant. I am now slowly productizing my services and selling deliverables rather than my time. These productized services are in turn being developed into standalone products. I am far from complete in this journey, but this is how I am orienting myself. From a permaculture sense, one might think of this as energy efficiency.

I was a bit late to the party in terms of productization, but a couple friends of mine who were doing similar things to me when I graduated quickly scaled their services into SAAS products while I was still consulting. That wasn't my path, but both of them have been very successful.

In my company, I originally was getting paid to do single cell bioinformatics. While I still have that as a service, I have added additional services oriented toward up-skilling bioinformaticians in things like unsupervised learning, something that is not always the primary focus of a bioinformatics and data science education.

This has three effects. The first is I get to impact more people. The second is that it is a path to productize my services. The third is that it diversifies my value-add portfolio, which from an economic sense makes me more robust. Based on my experience, I think I can add more value teaching than I could just five years ago. I see this becoming more true as I gain more experience. Thus, I expect teaching to become something I do more and more.

Consultant Alan Weiss has this model. He was originally an organizational consultant. He then started teaching consultants how to consult. He wrote some books on that. He then took his experience from writing books and wrote a book on writing. He then, as an older person, wrote a book on how to thrive as an older person. You see the pattern. Maybe we're not meant to write books on every aspect of our life, but I'm sure we all have plenty of valuable things to teach.

I run a bioinformatics company, and that's what puts food on the table. But is that all I am? At some point, I stop working. I have hobbies, responsibilities, friends, and family. In short, I am a human being trying to survive. So is there a better way to think of myself rather than a job title? This is a relatively new idea for me, as my years in grad school consumed me to the point where I was a grad student above all else. But now that I'm away from Stanford, away from Silicon Valley, in the still busy but more relaxed city of Berlin, and married, I know that there is more to me than my job. More to life than my job.

These days, I like to think of every aspect of one's life (job and beyond) as interconnected systems with inputs and outputs. For example, my company takes coffee as input to convert bioinformatics data into insights. My family takes the profit from my company as input and converts it to shelter and food. My shelter (apartment) has a balcony, which converts sunlight into vegetables via potted plants. And so on.

Furthermore, the insights from my company's data analysis can be fed back into my company as expanded and increasingly automated products and services. A positive experience from my clients can lead to a good review and evangelism, which can help my sales funnel. A healthy sales funnel will lower stress, which will make me a better husband. You get the idea.

We can take this a step further. A former client of mine was the CIO of a successful biotech company, and also taught group fitness classes at the local gym. So is he a biotech CIO or a fitness professional? Or for that matter a husband and father? Systems thinking allows us to see ourselves as all of the things, and allow us to make decisions that help out more than one system at a time. For example, working out and eating right helps one's ability to teach fitness and perform well as a CIO and have a healthy meal plan for the family. I think this is a healthier way of thinking about who we are.