We wake up each day with the same attention budget as everyone else. This is the one thing all humans equally share.

Spending that attention budget by doing this is what gives meaning to our lives.
It's is only through doing that we learn. It is only through learning that we find meaning.
Yet many of us waste attention budget exclusively on consumption. Seeking the random dopamine hits that tickle our curiosity. Yet we seek only the convenient things to do.
Activities that are convenient, that takes little effort don't consume a lot of attention. But enough of these small distractions will. But unfortunately, there's little learning taking place.
The struggle we all face in our modern information abundant society is finding a purposeful and thus meaningful focus to spend our attention budget. The Japanese Ikigai is all about doing.
Ikigai is about doing with a purpose. We structure our lives through work because work gives structure to all the smaller tasks that we do. Greater meaning is gained through structured doing. This is what it means to do things with a purpose.
Wealth is therefore quantified as the fraction of your daily attentional budget that is spent on doing what you love, you are good at, and what others need. All of these can only be found through learning.
A flow state is a consequence of competence. It's not your attention that is trained, it is the introspection of your proficiency at a task. It is that mental state where time ceases to exist. Yet, it cannot be reached without a mastery of something.
Introspection is valuable, but inward attention by itself does not lead to meaning. Someone who is depressed spends a lot of time in inward introspection. What is key is the mastering of one's introspection. This can only be learned through structured attention.
Meditation is the mastery of one's attention. Although this practice is commonly associated with Eastern religions, you can also find it in more mature Judeo-Christian faiths.
Civilization and technology both compete for your attention at the same time offer the opportunity to gain more control of one's attention. Both provide conveniences that previously did not exist.
It is the allure of these conveniences that also takes away from our ability to do things. Many people find meaning in cooking, but we never experience this if we always conveniently order cooked meals.
But progress does not prevent you from cooking. It is your choice if you want to do this or not, and this is what technology provides. That is the choice as to where you focus your attention.
What technology been conspicuously absent is in the tools that teach you how to structure your attention. The greatest competency we will ever find is the competency over our own minds.

More from Carlos E. Perez

Programming in abstractions is very different from a system that is capable of its own 'abstracting'. But what does abstracting mean? We only know of its inputs and outputs, but we fail to describe its inner workings.

I like this short video about living in space. This is because it makes you realize the gaps in your knowledge when you turn off something (i.e. gravity) that you have always assumed to be present.


Perhaps we can understand 'abstracting' better if we turn of many assumptions that we unconsciously carry around. Perhaps we need to get rid of the excess baggage that is confusing our thinking about abstraction.

Turning off gravity and living in space is a perfect analogy. We somehow have to turn off a cognitive process to understand the meaning of abstraction.

The first step to divorce ourselves from our habitual cognitive processes is to realize the pervasiveness of 'noun-thinking' .

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

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A THREAD ON @SarangSood

Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.

Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen

1. Keeps following volatility super closely.

Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.

Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.


2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.


3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result

He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.


4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega

Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.