Section of Novel, draft
7 7 2018 - 937am
The fun and productive method--make everything you can both fun and productive, or as close as you can get. Easy and productive. Relatively easy and productive. Something along those lines.
I worked an office job, doing billing and registration work for a hospital. I also had a kid, and another on the way, and a wife. I was 38. My son is 3. My wife is my age. We are due for our next child in 5 months.
Doing my office job in a way that is fun while also productive--how do i do this? The work itself often doesn’t require much concentration. You can daydream a lot. I suppose if i wanted to really advance far in this field i would want to be looking for very productive approaches that were also fun. I don’t know how into the work i am. Not very, i guess. It pays the bills.
So i can listen to books while i do my work, or podcasts. Anything that is interesting and allows me to enjoy myself while i work.
One problem is dealing with my boss. She’s a somewhat unpleasant person. When we have meetings, she is often critical and doesn’t listen very well so it’s hard to make your point with her. I don’t think she’s a bad person. I think it’s more an interpersonal quirk that makes her difficult.
Anyway, what is a fun way of dealing with her. What is a fun way of dealing with her in a way that is productive, meaning things are better than they would otherwise be, i suppose. That definition might not be perfect but let’s go with it for now.
Well, when we have meetings, what could make them enjoyable--one on one meetings, me and my boss?
I think maybe if you look at the meeting as a conversation. In a conversation, to make it fun, talking about things that are interesting to you, or talking in a way that is fun, like joking around or playing some intellectual game like wordplay or something, can be fun.
You could talk about what is interesting to you in the meeting as much as possible. You could ask questions that are interesting to you. If something isn’t interesting then you just give the minimum, some polite, barely-good-enough response. Also if your boss is not interested in what you’re talking about, shift to some other thing that is interesting to you, and see if your boss also finds that interesting. You’re looking for common interest, essentially, since talking to someone you’re obviously boring is not fun, even if you like what you’re talking about. The poor reception from your listener dampens the enjoyment.
So that is i guess one approach. If you can’t seem to find something that you and your boss find enjoyable to talk about, then i suppose the next approach is to just make the meeting less unpleasant. I find a kind of detached approach to be somewhat helpful. Do the minimum. Be polite. Respond noncommittally. ‘Why did you do this?’ ‘i don’t quite remember.’ it’s not maybe going to make a great impression, but nothing much seems to anyway so why expend a lot of energy?
Save the energy for more important things.
Like your family. A lot of parenting is drudgery but it’s not quite as bad as it might look to non-parents, because your kid is so important and loveable doing drudgery for them becomes a lot easier. Not easy necessarily, but easier. So a non-parent might not quite understand that. Honestly, if you observe parents closely without being a parent, i could see it spooking you away from being a parent. We’re not designed to think about parenting and plan to be parents. We just do what we like and we become parents and then we find it’s not too bad. By and large anyway.
But there is drudgery. If you can make the drudgery better then you make parenting better.
My wife and i have debates over the tv. Our son is 3. He’s been watching tv since he was pretty small. Under a year probably. There are claims that it’s bad for a kid to watch tv. Doctors say you shouldn’t watch any tv until you’re older than 2, i think. And then kids should only watch around 2 hours a day as maximum.
I’m skeptical. I looked at a metastudy of the research on tv and kids and it did see correlations between tv and poor school performance, if i remember correctly, but it didn’t really seem to show that the tv watching was causal. Kids who watched a lot of tv also tended to have other things going on that correlated with poor school performance, that were harder to control. So it does make some sense that doctors would recommend you control what you can control of what kids do that might have some effect on their learning in the future.
The doctors don’t really have ‘skin in the game’ as nassim taleb puts it, though. If they were in a situation in which they didn’t have much time or energy or money to hire a babysitter, they plausibly would put their kid in front of the tv for more than two hours a day so they could get a break or so they could do some chores around the house. (~1015am)
239pm
Anyway, the tv has made parenting easier. I don’t think it’s destructive to my kid. Generations of people have been raised with tv screens and don’t seem obviously worse than previous generations. I’m not saying the studies are wrong that tv is bad for kids, but it’s not obvious to my non-expert eyes. And people seem to think it’s okay in their behavior--they don’t throw people in jail for letting their toddlers watch more than two hours of tv a day.
In any event, letting your kid watch some tv can at times at least take the weight off your back of parenting for a bit. You can get a break. It’s there if you need it. Relatively more productive tv shows would be prefered--by that i mean shows that maybe teach you something. Maybe steer your kid in that direction and away from the tv that doesn’t inform much.
A big problem for me as a parent of a 3-year-old is that you and he naturally aren’t interested in the same things very much. I like to keep a podcast on my smartphone ready and the earbuds in my pocket in case i need something interesting to listen to while i’m watching my kid. If he’s playing at a playground safely, i can watch him and also listen to some comedian riff on his podcast. And this improves my ability to hang out at the playground and let my kid explore more and have fun.
But a lot of the time i don’t need to do that. I play with my kid without any earbuds in. we build stuff with building blocks. We draw stuff. I had wanted to get into painting and my son is at an age where the crayons and paper are fun to use. So i’ll paint at the table while he colors. I get to learn how to paint while spending time with my son.
I think probably the biggest help i can be to my son is to help him find good niches for himself, and to help him learn how to create niches for himself. There’s what you’re good at and there’s what you enjoy. I read somewhere advice that said you should find the intersection between what you enjoy doing and what makes money. The fun and productive method is that, essentially. You’re looking for what is enjoyable now and makes you better off in the long run. The enjoyable aspect serves as motivation. It keeps you in the game. I read a book a while ago that independently made this point regarding exercise--the book was called ‘no sweat’. The point it made was you should enjoy exercise and if you don’t, you’re not going to stick to it. A lot of life seems like that, to me.
Anyway, i’m trying to teach my kid some of the fun and productive method. I wish i had known it when i was younger. Maybe i could get some insights by imagining what life would have been like had i used the fun and productive approach earlier.
Well, so much of your childhood is in school. School is a major source of boredom, obviously. I was never very good at sitting and studying. If i could have made studying fun then maybe i would have done more of it, and done better academically. I did fine, but i followed a pattern i would later read is associated with adhd, which was that i did well in the lower grades when i didn’t need to be organized or disciplined and could rely on my smarts to get by, but as the higher grades came in, when studying and organization was more important, i’d do poorer.
One trick i developed as a got older was reading what was interesting in a text. I’d jump around looking for the interesting bits and skip the rest. I’d check off the sections that i read, pencil marks by the sections i had read, so i could avoid rereading and find what i hadn’t yet read. Interestingly, sections that looked boring and that i skipped on first pass would sometimes become more interesting when i came back to them later, after reading more interesting stuff. There was also something inherently sort of fun about trying to make sense of writing by reading out of order.
~4pm
The fun and productive method--make everything you can both fun and productive, or as close as you can get. Easy and productive. Relatively easy and productive. Something along those lines.
I worked an office job, doing billing and registration work for a hospital. I also had a kid, and another on the way, and a wife. I was 38. My son is 3. My wife is my age. We are due for our next child in 5 months.
Doing my office job in a way that is fun while also productive--how do i do this? The work itself often doesn’t require much concentration. You can daydream a lot. I suppose if i wanted to really advance far in this field i would want to be looking for very productive approaches that were also fun. I don’t know how into the work i am. Not very, i guess. It pays the bills.
So i can listen to books while i do my work, or podcasts. Anything that is interesting and allows me to enjoy myself while i work.
One problem is dealing with my boss. She’s a somewhat unpleasant person. When we have meetings, she is often critical and doesn’t listen very well so it’s hard to make your point with her. I don’t think she’s a bad person. I think it’s more an interpersonal quirk that makes her difficult.
Anyway, what is a fun way of dealing with her. What is a fun way of dealing with her in a way that is productive, meaning things are better than they would otherwise be, i suppose. That definition might not be perfect but let’s go with it for now.
Well, when we have meetings, what could make them enjoyable--one on one meetings, me and my boss?
I think maybe if you look at the meeting as a conversation. In a conversation, to make it fun, talking about things that are interesting to you, or talking in a way that is fun, like joking around or playing some intellectual game like wordplay or something, can be fun.
You could talk about what is interesting to you in the meeting as much as possible. You could ask questions that are interesting to you. If something isn’t interesting then you just give the minimum, some polite, barely-good-enough response. Also if your boss is not interested in what you’re talking about, shift to some other thing that is interesting to you, and see if your boss also finds that interesting. You’re looking for common interest, essentially, since talking to someone you’re obviously boring is not fun, even if you like what you’re talking about. The poor reception from your listener dampens the enjoyment.
So that is i guess one approach. If you can’t seem to find something that you and your boss find enjoyable to talk about, then i suppose the next approach is to just make the meeting less unpleasant. I find a kind of detached approach to be somewhat helpful. Do the minimum. Be polite. Respond noncommittally. ‘Why did you do this?’ ‘i don’t quite remember.’ it’s not maybe going to make a great impression, but nothing much seems to anyway so why expend a lot of energy?
Save the energy for more important things.
Like your family. A lot of parenting is drudgery but it’s not quite as bad as it might look to non-parents, because your kid is so important and loveable doing drudgery for them becomes a lot easier. Not easy necessarily, but easier. So a non-parent might not quite understand that. Honestly, if you observe parents closely without being a parent, i could see it spooking you away from being a parent. We’re not designed to think about parenting and plan to be parents. We just do what we like and we become parents and then we find it’s not too bad. By and large anyway.
But there is drudgery. If you can make the drudgery better then you make parenting better.
My wife and i have debates over the tv. Our son is 3. He’s been watching tv since he was pretty small. Under a year probably. There are claims that it’s bad for a kid to watch tv. Doctors say you shouldn’t watch any tv until you’re older than 2, i think. And then kids should only watch around 2 hours a day as maximum.
I’m skeptical. I looked at a metastudy of the research on tv and kids and it did see correlations between tv and poor school performance, if i remember correctly, but it didn’t really seem to show that the tv watching was causal. Kids who watched a lot of tv also tended to have other things going on that correlated with poor school performance, that were harder to control. So it does make some sense that doctors would recommend you control what you can control of what kids do that might have some effect on their learning in the future.
The doctors don’t really have ‘skin in the game’ as nassim taleb puts it, though. If they were in a situation in which they didn’t have much time or energy or money to hire a babysitter, they plausibly would put their kid in front of the tv for more than two hours a day so they could get a break or so they could do some chores around the house. (~1015am)
239pm
Anyway, the tv has made parenting easier. I don’t think it’s destructive to my kid. Generations of people have been raised with tv screens and don’t seem obviously worse than previous generations. I’m not saying the studies are wrong that tv is bad for kids, but it’s not obvious to my non-expert eyes. And people seem to think it’s okay in their behavior--they don’t throw people in jail for letting their toddlers watch more than two hours of tv a day.
In any event, letting your kid watch some tv can at times at least take the weight off your back of parenting for a bit. You can get a break. It’s there if you need it. Relatively more productive tv shows would be prefered--by that i mean shows that maybe teach you something. Maybe steer your kid in that direction and away from the tv that doesn’t inform much.
A big problem for me as a parent of a 3-year-old is that you and he naturally aren’t interested in the same things very much. I like to keep a podcast on my smartphone ready and the earbuds in my pocket in case i need something interesting to listen to while i’m watching my kid. If he’s playing at a playground safely, i can watch him and also listen to some comedian riff on his podcast. And this improves my ability to hang out at the playground and let my kid explore more and have fun.
But a lot of the time i don’t need to do that. I play with my kid without any earbuds in. we build stuff with building blocks. We draw stuff. I had wanted to get into painting and my son is at an age where the crayons and paper are fun to use. So i’ll paint at the table while he colors. I get to learn how to paint while spending time with my son.
I think probably the biggest help i can be to my son is to help him find good niches for himself, and to help him learn how to create niches for himself. There’s what you’re good at and there’s what you enjoy. I read somewhere advice that said you should find the intersection between what you enjoy doing and what makes money. The fun and productive method is that, essentially. You’re looking for what is enjoyable now and makes you better off in the long run. The enjoyable aspect serves as motivation. It keeps you in the game. I read a book a while ago that independently made this point regarding exercise--the book was called ‘no sweat’. The point it made was you should enjoy exercise and if you don’t, you’re not going to stick to it. A lot of life seems like that, to me.
Anyway, i’m trying to teach my kid some of the fun and productive method. I wish i had known it when i was younger. Maybe i could get some insights by imagining what life would have been like had i used the fun and productive approach earlier.
Well, so much of your childhood is in school. School is a major source of boredom, obviously. I was never very good at sitting and studying. If i could have made studying fun then maybe i would have done more of it, and done better academically. I did fine, but i followed a pattern i would later read is associated with adhd, which was that i did well in the lower grades when i didn’t need to be organized or disciplined and could rely on my smarts to get by, but as the higher grades came in, when studying and organization was more important, i’d do poorer.
One trick i developed as a got older was reading what was interesting in a text. I’d jump around looking for the interesting bits and skip the rest. I’d check off the sections that i read, pencil marks by the sections i had read, so i could avoid rereading and find what i hadn’t yet read. Interestingly, sections that looked boring and that i skipped on first pass would sometimes become more interesting when i came back to them later, after reading more interesting stuff. There was also something inherently sort of fun about trying to make sense of writing by reading out of order.
~4pm
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