Listing the way my mind works in computing metaphors. Mind OS and apps (foreground and background).

I also like to call it my MONQ mind.

• modus operandi
• narrative
• questions

What this soft machine does

• Going from awareness / knowing -> understanding -> acceptance -> internalisation -> implementation -> practice -> mastery. It’s hard to capture in writing but these are not linear. You brush against each stage, slowly absorbing the adjacent nodes. Then you do another round, with deeper resolution. Infinite iteration.
• Translating knowing into doing
• Pruning wants into need
• Everything into questions. Discovering useful questions in different contexts
• Translating requirements -> scope -> design -> solution -> implementation
• Transforming constraints into strategies
• Data into info -> insight -> applying context -> knowledge -> wisdom
• Why -> What and When -> How -> Who
• nope -> wow (direction of comparison)
• I want to -> I get to
• Debugging code -> debugging my own mental state and thought process
• Opening my radar as wide as possible. I follow unfathomable amount of people from a mix of wide ranging background on social media. IG, twitter. just to keep up, and let the different, open to different views, ideas, lateral. creative thinking, problem solving, creative process, expression, frame of references.

The Human OS

• Wired for survival and replication.
• We crave certainty.
• We desire control.
• We can’t not judge. We can only choose what is worth judging.
• From judgement comes expectations. Expectations distances us from seeing the reality as it is at this moment.
• Social status, social anxiety.
• The practice is in pulling your attention back when it strays, making the next right decision when it’s hard, building that reputation with yourself by keeping the promise, getting the reps in, building the mental muscles, resilience, habit, capacity.
• We reject and miss truths when they look obvious, simple, and boring. Hidden in plain sight. We think there must be secrets.
• We take things we have for granted, crave things we don’t have yet, and obsess over things we once had.
• We want to feel useful, needed
• We want to be understood more than being loved

My foreground apps

Things I am driven by, operating under, and spending most CPU cycle on:

1. Sense making
   • make sense of the world and make sense to the world
   • fear of not making any sense, not being understood
   • desire to make sense of the world. Collecting maps, building models, keeping references
   • the hunt for phrases to describe the world (experience, phenomenon, trend) and articulate my thoughts as accurately as possible. collecting phrases
   • collecting data points, life stats, mental, physical, stream of consciousness, to analyse and surface patterns
   • Seeking “what is true about the world, what makes it true, and try to get the most accurate picture”. Stripping out as many assumptions as possible. Back to basics. Rethinking. Starting clean slate.
2. Change tracking, making the evolution / iteration explicit. Rigorously and obsessively documenting my personal merry go round ride / quest in accumulating truth. Backing up my brain digitally.
3. Mental decluttering, defragmenting. Untangling mental constipation / indigestion.
   1. capture as many of my stream of consciousness, keeping my head empty, create headspace to think and come up with insights
4. Overly myopic data collection (limiting belief: incomplete data can lead to wrong conclusions). I also prefer raw data. Different levels of abstraction can be applied later.
5. Being meta and abstract. And looking for people to have extremely analytical conversations about nothing in particular.
6. Quest for equanimity
7. Picking up “horizontal skill sets” that can be applied to verticals. Transferrable skills.
8. Quest for universal truths, underlying principles, across the niches. the trend, the truths, the universal truths about human, business, life
9. Information architecture aka architecturing my own intake, processing, and output of data, information, knowledge, concepts, frameworks, contexts, and applications of it.
10. Getting fluent (thinking, conversing, and presenting ideas) in English.
11. Noticing the different lenses I use to view the world.
12. Leave enough traces of thought in the world that people will be able to answer
    1. “What would tre do?”
    2. “Would tre like this?”
13. I’m here to name things we all intuitively know but have no words for.
14. I’m a learner.
15. Getting ideas out of and into your head. this sums everything up. It encompasses:
    1. communication infrastructure
       1. techniques, tools, frameworks, hooks, technologies
    2. information architecture
    3. knowledge management
    4. knowledge transmission (in different contexts, through different mediums, constraints, e.g. remote env)
    5. cognitive science
    6. art and science of learning and personal development
       1. explicit – tacit knowledge
       2. techne – episteme
       3. knowing self vs doing self
       4. data -> information -> knowledge -> insight -> wisdom -> mastery
    7. physical and mental fitness
    8. emotional management
    9. motivation
    10. goal setting
    11. reframing
        1. reframe something that’s inherently autotelic e.g. eating into the after sensation you’d like to have (empty nice comfy tummy, the sensation of healthy digestion. instead of the discomfort and guilt of being stuffed)
        2. reframe something that’s inherently less autotelic, to make every step autotelic (for heating up body, as gratitude, you can still do it)
        3. ~~shortening~~ manipulating length of feedback loop to suit the goal
        4. aka “articulation”

My background apps

Questions floating at the back of my head:

• Why do I do the things I do
• Why I know but don’t do
• Who needs what I have to offer?
  • knowing and deciding who i can serve best. who I want to spend my time with. who I want to hang out with. who I want to be surrounded by
  • Who am I for. who’s my tribe
• Am I asking the right questions here?
• What am I assuming here
• What needs to be true for this to make sense
• What would a $4k version of this project look like?
• What is the underlying question that I am trying to answer by reading this article / book?
• Where did that [thought] come from?
• What is the underlying question behind [these group of things] e.g. https://twitter.com/RussThornton/status/1126534805649334274
• What do other people have in their minds?
• What is the formula here. What is the pattern. What principle can I draw out of this? What hypothesis, what lens can I start wearing to test this out in real world?
• all about mindset. core

What I’ve found myself doing

1. Finding out names for my interests, finding out that these are established fields.
2. Training my muscle to snap out of “for later but never” mode / condition. “digital hoarder lifestyle”.
   1. Apparently, the solution is not (only) work hard (training), but work smart (noticing and removing frictions / bottlenecks, untangling knots of Resistance / underlying anxiety)
3. Johari window
   1. Shifting as many of the other quadrants into the known known quadrants for myself
   2. Shifting as many things in the self known-known to public known-known
4. Monitoring my mind for MOnQ
5. Discovering problems I am drawn to solving / interested in / find fascinating
6. Tracking how I spend my time

Bug in my Kernel

Noticing the different armours I have on that prevents me from perceiving and experiencing the world and reality as it is, as frictionless / clearly as possible. Identifying and dismantling limiting beliefs, identities, wounds, tendencies, vices.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi

Things that gives me anxiety. Sources of my problems, root causes of my worries.

1. Engaging in too much self censorship.
2. Infested with FOMO, maximiser-mindset daemon running resident
   • am I going as fast as I can?
   • am I working on the right thing?
   • is this the absolute best way to spend my time right now?
   • did I do my best? am I missing something here?
   • I need to experience all combination of this activity that I can. museum going, alone, with loose acquaintances, with best friends, stuff like that. makan bubur, campur, mix, permutasinya harus totalitas
3. For later but never
4. Mental constipation caused by the irrational quest for roadmaps, playbooks, secrets, shortcuts, final formulas, perfect entrypoints, best structure, and most accurate articulations. Instead of defining and iterating on it.
5. My core fear: fear of not making any sense. This pathological urge to be coherent and articulate. A wound of being misunderstood and internalised stereotype of nerdiness == bad communication skill.
6. Opportunity costs. When you’re doing something, you’re not doing everything else. Maximiser mindset.
7. Cost of inaction, like the time is running out.
8. Conflicting wants, needs, shoulds. Self discrepancy theory.

Also published on Medium.