Author: Alexey Chernikov

Breaking problems down

~ Alexey Chernikov ~ Leave a comment

I was practicing guitar – a piece I’ve played thousands of times through over 4 years of near-daily practice, and have not yet mastered: Cliffs of Dover, by Eric Johnson.

I was going through it with the mindfulness of my mental laziness – tendency to avoid working the most on the things I know least about – and noticed a particular section that I’ve never broken down to its last detail.

To give context, I have played most of the tricky parts of the piece in isolation hundreds of times, from snail-level slow, to 32 times as fast, experimented with technique, every possible finger placement and transition, different ways of holding the pick, etc – I’m obsessed with perfecting this song.

But this, I’ve known for years, was my weakest part of the song, it came least naturally to me, and feels most tricky, though it has a very ancillary place in the song – it’s not the star, it’s not marvelously beautiful – more like a very impressive space-filler.

And I realized that it was also my least practiced part of the song. So one lesson for me was: always make sure to be very aware of what the weakest, least understood area of thought is, and focus most on decomposing it.

The awkwardness of it comes from the fact that it’s supposed to flow continuously and very quickly, but it has a very jagged, non-continuous shape on the guitar neck, and you need to jump around a lot. But the split-second stopping points of the melody are never during the finger jump.

And so I found that I always practiced the melodies between the jumps, as practicing it with the jump was very awkward.

And that was my biggest mistake. What I should have done instead – was isolate the jumps, and repeat them 1000 times.

So I started to isolate it, and repeat it – and there are 3-4 consecutive awkward jumps in a row, so I repeated those. And an hour later, I found that I had committed the same mistake as before – of not focusing on my weakest area the most.

I found that between 2 jumps, there’s a section without a jump, which I really suck at, and that is what actually makes the jump hard. And I was further able to isolate it to merely a 3 note chunk – that repeats a few times. Working at this 3-4 note level, I was able to really understand the mechanics of making all these jumps possible, and devise an optimal fingering.

I’ve played that part for years, and I don’t think I was ever aware of how poorly I understand how to make that section happen, while being painfully aware of every detail about every other part.

In hindsight, this lesson is too obvious: break down a problem to its smallest components to understand it in depth; isolate unknowns by trying to break the problem down further and further. Always ask “what’s still not known”, and strive to find the smallest knowable thing. Sometimes finding a bigger thing can fool you into thinking you’ve attained understanding, and never be satisfied.

Triggers

~ Alexey Chernikov ~ Leave a comment

One thing I’ve experimented with is switching intentions.

For instance, I can “become” shy, outgoing, focused, impenetrable, or sensitive, or relentless, or uncertain, positive, regretful, or even non-feeling intentions – be as a rock, or be like water. I can project these essences of feeling, and I have a certain degree of conscious control over it: to a degree, I can choose an intention, and my body language, posture, and thinking patterns align around it without further effort. It’s like acting… Except the key thing that I’ve thought about using it for is for the thinking differently, or thinking in a certain way.

It seems as though if I learn to best leverage this type of acting, I can skew my thought process towards generating certain kinds of conclusions, and maybe I can even know which sorts of errors I’m more prone to in various mental states. I could imagine precise thought to benefit from a cold rational intention, and sensitive personal interaction to benefit from thought patterns that aren’t so demanding and exact, that allow for much more error.

I was thinking about this on my walk today. When I take walks, I like to listen to music, and work on my vision – I’ve been doing it for years, and I’ve gotten some results, and I just like to believe that vision can be improved with work; I try to allow my eyes to relax, and focus more clearly. I found that switching around my intentions allowed me to change what I could do with my eye focus – certain intentions allowed for more clarity. More serene and thoughtful and reflective modes, but also more focused and confident modes. This didn’t change my vision by itself; I still had to do the same mental work I normally do, but different intentions changed the characteristics of how difficult it was to focus on smaller things.

As I was trying to channel memories from different times in my life, playing around with my intentions, I noticed that certain songs – that I listened to a lot during certain periods in life – were like a gateway into an intention, they allowed me to channel experiences and thoughts attached to a part of my life, and made for a very powerful and effortless fusing with that character.

I found that I can channel other sorts of patterns of thought, ones that I don’t have any recurring pattern (like a song listened to on repeat) attached to. But I found it much harder.

And so I thought of this as a tool to compartmentalize modes of thinking – attach them to a repeated trigger, like a song. Have a ritual, a mantra, whatever – any repetitive action that through Hebbian plasticity will trigger a mental state – do it every time I need to summon a character, and then work hard to sustain that focus and attach it to the trigger. Suddenly, I understood why rituals and traditions and other similar patterns of behavior have been so popular around the world for so long.

Change

~ Alexey Chernikov ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about ways to excel at thinking, inspired by thinking about the technical interview process for software engineers. Interviews famously focus on skills that are different from everyday work, but I don’t want to have to study for them by learning algorithms and carefully practicing writing them out on paper. I don’t want to “crack the coding interview”, though I’ve done that in the past with great success: you can really become quite good at being meticulous and error-free on this one task, with practice.

Instead, I want to have superpowers. I want my brain to be able to produce those optimal algorithms flawlessly, with full confidence, without taking time out to prepare for an interview.

I want the fundamental way my brain works to produce error-free thoughts, and give it a notation to naturally express itself with laser-like precision (i.e., write out code as naturally as thoughts).

So instead of focusing on “how do I solve algorithms questions?”, I’m going to focus on “what are the components of thinking, and how do I perfect each one?”.

What are the components of thinking? I hope to get more and more insight and depth around this question. I have something to start with, however: focus, creativity, thoroughness, seeing blindspots and edge cases, understanding assumptions, logical and critical thinking, systems thinking, humility, sensitivity, respect.

I want to think about how to improve each of those components. And I want to have standardized loops to measure these things for myself. I won’t be able to be scientific, but I’ll try my best to be honest with myself in evaluating exactly why the routines I choose don’t go perfectly smoothly, and figure out what sort of improvement in my way of thinking could have remedied it.

One reason I wish to improve my thinking in this way, is that I believe that applying this sort of thinking the best you can, every day – leads to a dramatic difference in how you grow, who you become, over time; I believe that through every action, the path of someone who puts this much care into every aspect of life – shines through; and I believe that that is the best way to be human, the best way to connect to other people, the best way to be a source of positive change.

I’m going to apply this to: creative puzzle solving (such as algorithms), learning pieces of music, learning Spanish, training to do a handstand, improving dancing in tango and zouk, improving my posture, a hobby project app/game that I’m working on, and my everyday work, which involves time-sensitive operations that require great care, prioritizing, scheduling, diagnosing, thinking creatively, teamwork, planning, and executing plans. I’m going to do my best to use these time slots as opportunities to watch my mind think, and understand what about that thinking lies outside of my framework for optimal thinking.

When I say “standard loops”, I mean something quite subtle. For instance, when writing out algorithms, one thing to keep track of is how good the algorithm is; similar, when practicing music, a thing to look at is how well the melody comes out. For the sake of this work, I’m not going to care about those aspects of practice at all. Instead, I’m going to care about what my mind is doing while it’s trying to come up with an algorithm and write it down, and retroactively look for what went wrong. I’m going to look at the thinking process that creates the performance process, not the performance process itself, and that will be the “standard loop”. Which is why I put it in quotes; there’s no standard path; I’d solve the same problem differently on a different day, though I hope to isolate the aspects of thinking, and practice them individually, similar to how I may practice a dance move 1000 times.

Some things that make sense to measure: how well did I understand a problem after first encountering it, how thoroughly did I explore solutions, was the solution I arrived at optimal, did I make any trivial mistakes as I went through it, did I panic or get lost or discouraged or distracted, did I lose sight of my goals, did I focus on the wrong aspects of the problem, was my solution perfect?

This will always be pushing the front in how I think, and perhaps some “improvements” will cause me to make more mistakes. I’ll have to get outside of my comfort zone, be honest with myself, and focus on the smallest, improvable details of how I think. The outcome will be thoughts, rather than numbers.

 

Lies

~ Alexey Chernikov ~ Leave a comment

Some things are easy to lie about: a resume, history, past events, who said what, who you are.

Some things are impossible to lie about. How you dance, or juggle, or play music – skill inevitably tells a truthful story.

It’s a story of years – commitment, dedication, focus. It shows how broadly you see, and how deeply, whether you pay attention to detail. Skill requires humility, inspiration, an incessant drive to improve, never being satisfied; being sensitive to people around you, incorporating feedback, stepping past your ego. If one knows what to listen for, a deeper story of character is revealed in the subtleties of every human motion.

Anyone can do a dance move poorly. It says nothing of how long you’ve danced, or what you care about, or who you really are. But a move executed flawlessly speaks volumes. There is no way to attain that other than through a remarkable story of personal strength and resilience.

Sometimes, I forget why I do what I do, I forget even who I am, or how I got to where I am. It gets lost in the noise of everyday life, gossip, plans that don’t work out.

But my story is always with me, imprinted deeply, and no one can take it away; a tattoo on my soul. Doing, seeing how I do the things I do – I can remind myself: why did I start on the path I’m on. I can remember – how low I started, what it took to make progress. The struggles I went through to learn to dance, to fix my body, perfect a foreign language, move to a foreign country, master the skills I needed to succeed in my career. And how alone, and vulnerable, yet alive I felt – the moment I challenged myself to learn guitar, and committed to being an artist.

It was one of the most difficult times in my life, but through those trials I committed to making it amount to something meaningful, and using the time I have wisely, living with purpose; doing my best, in every moment.

Imprints on your soul can not be bought or stolen, only earned. Thousands of hours of committed, dedicated practice imprint an undying flame – a reminder to keep going forward with purpose, leave fears and doubts behind, and push past disbelief, resistance, and the inescapable negativity of those around.