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Everyone is equal, but we all have different capacities.

Equality means to me that all people should be treated with respect and dignity, and get to pursue happiness as they see fit. But it's foolish to insist that all people are the same.

If someone walks off the street into a gym, the trainer will have them do some exercises to assess their strength. Some people are born naturally strong, and maybe they work a physical job, others maybe not so much. There's no shame in how strong or weak one is; it's just a capacity.

Some people have very little capacity for discomfort. Children think eating their vegetables or wearing Sunday clothes is excruciating, because they don't yet know real discomfort.

Some adults have never experienced real discomfort. Parents are alive and well as is the family dog, grandparents passed before they can remember. Popular in high school, got into their first choice college, dated the person they wanted to, broke up amicably.

We like to mock the social media influencer type who has a meltdown when they can't get the selfie they wanted. But when someone says it's the worst day of their life, that may be true, even if it doesn't look that way to the rest of us.

We feel pity for the unkempt hopeful at the stoplight with a cardboard sign, and then we feel contempt for the social climber who drives their expensive car past wothout stopping. Or, maybe, you feel contempt for the bum with the sign, and think they should be more like the successful.

None of these people are good or bad, including you and me. We just have different capacities for emotional weightlifting.

The person who has the greatest ability to fool you is yourself. You know all your secrets, you know how you think. All of us have an insider position from which to fool ourselves.

That makes fooling yourself your greatest threat. I also believe that great success comes from cutting through illusions, seeing things as they are.

Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the same time. But there's a reason one of them is a household name and the other isn't.

When Newton published his theory of gravity, he included a disclaimer: "Fingnum non hypotheses". I feign no hypotheses.

Newton couldn't explain gravity. But he had a really excellent description of it. A description so good, it destroyed all the other descriptions.

Newton knew he was on to something big with the calculus, because it lined up with reality. He could predict the movement of the planets, the tides of the ocean, rays of light, cannonballs.

But he also knew what he didn't know: why. 300 years later and we're just starting to figure that out.

How great it is to know what you don't know, and admit it. How much that increases your understanding of what you do know.

Practice intellectual humility.

The quality I seek in everything is simplicity, because it's the hardest quality to understand.

There's a common misconception simple and complex are opposites, but that's not quite right. The opposite of simple is complicated. But complex and complicated are not the same.

In watchmaking, anything except the hour and minute hand is called a "complication". Weekday, second hand, or phase of the moon all make the mechanism more complicated than it needs to be to tell time.

This doesn't mean a movement for a watch which only has hour and minute is not complex. You'll have all kinds of tiny parts fitted together in intricate ways to tight tolerance. Simplicity comes from leaving out everything unneccesary.

Science has a specific word for the opposite of complex: trivial. Sometimes only one word truly fits to describe a situation accurately. In those cases, using the more specific word is not a complication; it's essential to clear communication. Simple, but complex.

In writing, people often fall into a trap of using more complicated words than necessary. They hope the words will make their subject more complex. Instead they only make the message less clear.

The process of weeding out the unnecessary words requires great effort, because it's a process of figuring out what you truly, deeply, want, and that's the hardest question to answer.

Simple ain't easy.

Anyone's life can benefit from practicing the process of an artist.

Lots of people have an aversion to calling themselves an artist. They think it sounds pretentious, that artists are weirdos. I have a different defintion of what artist means though.

An artist performs experiments on the subjective – domains which can't (yet) be measured or repeated.

I'm a commercial software developer by trade – a programmer. Most folks think programming and computer science are identical, but they're not. Programming is an art.

Science experiments on the objective. A program can be tested over and over under the same conditions, establishing various measurements with confidence.

But these measurements are not how we ultimately judge programs. Instead, we judge programs based on how much we like them. The new version that runs more features faster and costs less may not "feel right". Context matters: the same person may like a program in their day job, and dislike the same program when they're moonlighting.

In math, the same value can be expressed many different ways. You could say six thirds, the square root of four, or one plus one. But your math teacher rejected all those forms, not because they're incorrect, but because they're unsatisfying. The satisifying answer is "two". Same measurement, different feeling. Mathematicians call this quality "elegance", and they prefer elegant solutions over correct but clunky ones.

Scientific process focuses on ensuring repeatability. In forms of art, no situation is ever truly repeatable; every time a person appreciates a work of art it changes them. The context changes constantly.

So contrary to popular misconception, artists must practice process discipline as rigorously as scientists. Tiny changes can have huge and unpredictable effects on how people feel, so those changes must be tightly controlled. Any artist worthy of their tools can recreate tiny changes on demand.

Artists process.

Happy New Year! The first of the year is a time for new beginnings, when people make resolutions. Some things I do very well also represent common New Year's Resolutions: diet and exercise, playing an instrument, speak a foreign language, computer programming.

If you're considering making a resolution to do one of these things, here's my advice:

Don't. Let me give you an alternative. A secret from my successes.

New Year's Resolutions fail because of a misalignment between desires and habits. You want some end result, but you don't take into account the end result is composed of a hundred thousand tiny habits.

A great teacher once said, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. If you practice wrong you will never play right.

When you start something and then don't keep up with it, you're practicing adding habits wrong. Habits have to be cumulative, which means they need to be permanent.

So here's a resolution essential to all the disciplines I mentioned: drink water. Nothing else will improve your mental and physical performance so much.

Every night, put a full glass of water where you can see it. When you get up, first thing, drink it.

Do that every day for a year. You'll probably miss mornings, here and there, especially as you get started. No worries, just drink it when you remember. Aim to drink a glass first thing every morning; but consider it a success if you drink one sometime before bed. If you miss a day completely, don't get discouraged, just keep at it.

It's keeping at it that you're actually practicing. That's the resolution. That's what you need to get good at.

I would say 'good luck' except luck has zero to do with it.

Good keeping at it.

Couple months ago, I put a programming course I'd written into beta testing. It didn't work out how I expected, but I would never call it a failure. I learned so much. Instead, I'm going to pivot.

Pivoting is essential to balance. To avoid falling, to balance, we have to make constant small adjustments.

In 1954, Chuck Berry invented rock on accident. Grinding out three sets a night in small clubs on the outskirts of St. Louis, he played unremarkable R&B as a sideman in pianist Johnnie Johnson's band. On a lark, he started playing revved up versions of country tunes, and the crowds went nuts. In 1955 he recorded "Maybelline", an adapted version of Bob Wills' "Ida Red", which instantly became a big hit.

This is what startup culture calls a "pivot". Reddit started out as an article-reading app ("Read it"). Microsoft's first product was called "Traf-O-Data".

Balance consists of knowing when to pivot, and when to hold. After "Maybellene", Chuck Chuck tried changing again almost immediately: the calypso-flavored exotica of "Havana Moon". That didn't work, and thank goodness Chuck didn't keep trying. Sticking with to the successful formula, he gave us a string of stone cold classics based on the same theme: "Roll Over Beethoven", "Back In The USA", "Promised Land", "Johnnie B. Goode". Just like Reddit and Microsoft stopped when they found winning formulas.

When he invented rock, Chuck Berry was in his early thirties. He'd done a short sentence as a teen, but turned it around, had a family and a day job. He played and wrote for the sheer love of the act.

You get to reinvent yourself every second, but the payoff gets higher the longer you hold out.

Pivot and balance.

Some things get called 'acquired tastes', inaccurately. They should be called 'earned tastes', because you have to put in the work to learn them.

The art behind any earned taste consists of repetition and variation.

For many years, I thought of the work of Claude Monet as cheesy. The impressionist version of Thomas Kincade. No doubt largely due to the use of "Water Lilies" in every other Dentist's waiting room, the freebie calendars businesses hand out at year's end, and so on.

To start to understand Monet's genius, you need to see one of the water lilies in person. He created them at epic scale: six feet tall and 42 feet wide. If you stand dead center at arms length, it fills up your entire field of vision. Like the 19th century version of a VR headset or curved gaming monitor, it is immersive.

Part of it is some artists – David Bowie, Hendrix, Miles, some artists you can't deny their talents even if you don't like their style. Monet's talent, his mastery of the craft, is absolutely undeniable. Part of it is convetionally romantic – his palette of summer sunset, purple, pink and green. Part of it is sheer numbers – he painted 250 different angles of the garden at these massive sizes.

But always at sunset, in the same colors. In his Cathedral series, he switched the restriction, and created transcendant art.

In 1892 Monet rented a space facing the west facade of Rouen Cathedral. Over two years, he painted the subject about 30 times. The exact same subject from the same angle, but at different times of day, different times of year. On a muggy summer's night, and a crystal winter morning.

Monet intended through this innovative restriction to capture the essence of light itself. Through repetition, the similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. To do this he employs super modernist technique: following the contours of the cathedral, he builds up paint so thick it makes a sculpture standing off the canvas, so tall it actually casts a tiny shadow on the flat paint behind it.

Blues music has several similarities, which make it an "earned taste".

All blues incorporates some restriction. Sometimes it's a limitation of the instrument, or the performer. Sometimes the performer and their instrument are hyper-capable, the artistry is limited instead by the form. But there's always a limitation (blues without limitations becomes jazz).

Learning how to listen to blues depends on repetition. One excellent method: go through the common standards – "Rollin' And Tumblin'", "Dust My Broom" – and listen to versions by various artists. The similarity fades, and what's left is the difference. You'll start to feel the personality of each artist emerging from the material.

The layers of paint Monet built as if sculpting were avant-garde and controversial at the time. Likewise, blues music often has a barrier learners need to overcome in the aesthetics of its production. Early blues got recorded on early equipment, the sound quality is often terrible by modern standards. And recording conventions were less formal. A performer might give a little spoken word intro before starting a song, or maybe stop mid-song to address a thought. Tuning is not standard.

Programming is an art which requires an earned taste. You largely do the same thing over and over again, that's the practice. Every time, you do something a little different, that's the variation.

You're trying to separate the similar from the different. Computers are hella good at doing the similar, so the better you can identify the different, the better your program.

But every time you try one thing, you reject all the others.

Innovation comes from restriction.

In physics, the word "universe" has a few different definitions. One of these suggests that in a very real way, we all inhabit our own personal universe.

One practical definition, the "known" universe, is everything we've been able to see. The known universe gets bigger in fits and starts, every time we build a better telescope. It has irregular borders – if there's a nebula or a galactic center in the way, we might not be able to see as far in some directions as others.

A perfect telescope would have a maximum limit, called the "observable" universe. In order to see something, the light has to have had time to travel here. The observable universe defines a sphere around Earth 14 billion light years across. That's the furthest away we can possibly see, because that's the oldest light arriving.

There's still regular stuff on the other side of the boundary: more stars, nebulae, galaxies. It's fair to call this border "imaginary". But physics points out a deeper significance: if something can't be observed, then it can have no possible effect on you. It might as well not be there at all.

Imagine a star 14 billion years away that blinks into existence, emits one single photon, and then shuts down. Depending where we are on Earth, you might be close enough receive that photon and I might be too far. It's possible I can be affected by events that have no reality to you, and vice versa.

14 billion light years is such a great distance, we "round off" and act as if there is only one observable universe, whose center is the Earth. But every observer has their own boundary.

These individual universes overlap almost completely. But "almost completely" does not mean "identical".

Science describes the overlapping universe, the world we share outside of our heads. Inside, we describe our own universe in the language of art: myth, metaphor, spirituality.

I believe the next great frontier in Science lies in studying the internal reality. Neuroscience makes the first attempt at applying physics to the brain. Imagine instead measuring the interior world by the position of the stars, or collapsing the wavefunction of a lifetime.

A Science of the humane.

Solving a bug, whether in code or anywhere else in life, takes the same skills. Beginner's mind is one of them.

Every bug stems from a discrepancy between how the system actually works, and how you think it works. In order to solve a bug, you have to identify the part of your understanding that's incorrect or incomplete.

How do you look for something you don't know how to look for?

Something you think know hides the thing you don't know. Beginner's mind starts by putting your entire mental model on probation. Treat everything you think you know with a baseline suspicion, regardless of how fundamentally true it seems.

You know how tech support always starts by asking you to confirm everything's plugged in, and then makes you reboot twice? Beginner's mind is why. You can waste an infinite amount of time if you don't check the most obvious cases first.

To shift into beginner's mind, start by postponing your intention to fix anything. Successful debugging starts by understanding alone. The desire to fix gets in the way.

Novices often try to find and fix the bug at the same time. They throw stuff at the problem in the hopes that something will stick. This makes everything worse; before, you had case x you didn't understand, now you have case x and also y + z + some other random stuff.

Remember debugging means identifying some way in which you are wrong. The process has an element of an exercise in humility. I've seen talented but egotistical programmers stumped by a bug because they can't admit they could be wrong. The problem isn't exactly staring them in the face – it's subtle – but they are willfully blind to it.

All of these things apply to everyday life. Doctors have a principle, "primum non nocere" – first, do no harm. The first lesson in surfing has you sit on the beach and just watch the waves. Asking questions works better with other people than placing demands. And so forth.

Another valuable life lesson from programming.

The best and worst thing that happened to me shaped my entire life.

When I was five, my parents decided to move cross country. They sent me to my Grandma's for the summer while they took care of business.

Along the way, my Mom developed health problems. The summer turned into fall, and winter, and another summer. It was a year and a half before they were able to take me back.

Grandma's house was on the coast of the Pacific ocean in Washington state. Days I spent combing the dunes and the beach. Weird stuff would wash up, animal remains brought from the unspeakable depths, debris from fishing vessels that floated thousands of miles on the Japan Current. When the weather kept me inside, I'd go to the second floor and scan the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

Nights were a different story. Grandma sat in the easy chair with her "special" orange juice and turned on PBS. I was welcome to watch if I wanted; what I was not welcome to do was distract her.

There wasn't much for a five year old to do solo. I had few toys, and they were boring without other kids. We'd go to the library for kids books once a week or so, but I'd plow through those in a couple days.

So I found the dictionary.

It was a big, old school Random House, unabridged. Grandma had been a high school teacher back in the day, and I'm sure she valued having a serious reference tool.

It was beautiful: a thick, textured hard binding. Gold leaf on the edges of the pages. Little notches with letters to put in your finger and flip straight to a section. An atlas with maps, lists of the highest mountains and longest rivers, flags of the world.

Each page had a handful of illustrations, and at first I just looked at the pictures. But sometimes I wouldn't recognize a picture, so I'd read the entry next to it. And then I wouldn't understand a word in the entry, so I'd look that up.

Every night for about a year and a half, I read the dictionary. This was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.

The benefits probably don't need explanation. I hoovered up any information in my general area, and stored it in a giant memory palace, which I could visit and explore any time I was bored. The drawbacks were at least equal though.

Other kids saw me like an alien, bizarre and incomprehensible. A few liked it, most didn't. I got in my first fight, defending myself against three other kids, because I used the word "exacerbate".

Internally, I had a burden to bear. I had eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, been cast out of the garden. I understood concepts like failure, pain, and death; as well as a seven year old can, anyway. My Dad remembers me greatly concerned about the "Solidarity" labor movement in '83 Poland. I remember reading a pamphlet graphically describing political torture in Iran.

It was the best and worst thing. School was easy, but that made it really hard. Some people saw my ability and wanted to use it; others wanted to squash it.

Every time I feel the pendulum swing one way, towards better or worse, a counterexample occurs to me and balances it out.

This is the most true thing I've learned: nothing is good or bad in itself, or you could say it's good and bad at the same time. We choose how we interpret events.

What you choose is very much the same as what you are.