Is it possible to know a person without ever meeting them in person? Without a doubt, yes. My family now live in my wife´s grandparents old house since 2019. I never got the honor to meet them because they both died before I met my future wife. The person I am referring to here is Kurt, her grandfather. By walking in his footsteps and observing his sometimes very creative and especially fast solutions to technical problems on the premises, I think I now know him very well. And the reason is that his approach to problem solving is as antithetical to my own that is humanly possible. The contrast couldn’t be larger even if I tried. And that is an invaluable lesson to a guy like me.
Tomorrow starts my third week of 100% focus on dad duties. It’s been an interesting time, and a fantastic boot camp for learning better micro-management skills. No matter what task you are trying to accomplish, the only person that can have your back every single time is your past self. Preparation and Routines are crucial. From breakfast to dog walks, you won’t have time to look for misplaced stuff. I have found these weeks thoroughly enjoyable, and it has been the perfect healing that I badly needed for my soul.
A month ago, I passed a thousand published videos on YouTube with at least one daily upload for about 2,5 years. It was not only the video publishing that got put on hold, but also work. I am now on parental leave for the first time, and it has been very relaxing to combine it with a “social media de-tox”. The mind is a fascinating machine, and habit formation is basically how to rewire your brain into certain patterns, depending on what you want to achieve. The things you do every day become insanely powerful, no matter how small they are. It all adds up exponentially in the long run. It is a good thing that the video production gets some rest for now. I am way too busy creating new habits with my boys.
Last weekend we celebrated midsummer at my parents and all the relatives. Our boys put big smiles on everybody’s face, but especially my grandmother, who now has great grandmother on her CV. She also celebrated her 90th birthday on Saturday which coincide with Midsummer, which is a big Swedish holiday, so we had a nice celebration. When the dinner was over, and it was bedtime for the little boys, 3-year-old Elis was nowhere to be found. We looked and finally we found him with great grandma, who had already gone to bed. She was watching TV and Elis had cozied up in the double bed sofa next to her. And when I told him it was time to go to bed he just said. No dad, I am sleeping in THIS bed and watch TV. Great grandma had zero objections. We don’t see each other that often because we live in different cities. I noticed the biggest smile I had ever seen, literally, on great grandma’s face, when she finally had the opportunity to just be together with him. This was clearly one of those occasions when rules had to be broken. I just laughed and said, OK, you sleep here that’s perfectly fine. I also noted that Elis eyes were very tired, and minutes later he was snoring. It was the best 90th birthday present ever.
It is a good idea to completely wipe your computer occasionally, because it tends to clog up with all kinds of bloatware with time no matter how good care you take of it. And after a complete format and reinstall, everything feels 10X snappier. I think our mind has some similarities with this principle. I’m not that old yet, but I am starting to see a pattern in my own life history when my mind became so full of “bloatware” that the best way to sort it out was a reinstall of the “operating system”. In the case of the mind, that could mean a long vacation and/or change in environment so that the mental flywheel of the mind can come to a complete stop (it takes a lot of time). Only then can you give it a proper service and grease the bearings.
Elon musk recently told Tesla Employees to get back to the office for at least 40 hours per week, or “pretend to work somewhere else”. I noted that there was a significant backlash to this statement in the comments sections on LinkedIn for example. Clearly, many people do not agree with Musk and appreciate the choice to work from home or the office and where you consider yourself most productive. It is a question that evoke a lot of emotions. Personally, I think Musk is correct. I also think it is useful to evaluate this question and compare it to education.
Yesterday me and my wife listened to Dr Jordan Peterson’s lecture in Stockholm, with the same topic as the title of this blog post. As a person who is extremely high in openness, I find this especially interesting. People with this personality trait, creative people, can often have a problem that they keep shifting from one thing to the next without ever finishing anything. I can recognize myself in this to a certain degree. But I also know that I am not too extreme in this regard either. Raphael, a friend of mine might very well be the most creative person I have met. And he told me something that is probably only is visible to someone in the 99,9th percentile in creativity (i.e. way higher than me, even if I should be in the 99th percentile…). “Rikard, you are an artist, but you are also very practical.”
“Yes” is a commitment and “No” equals freedom. I like that saying and seldom have it been more appropriate than yesterday when I published my final daily upload on YouTube after publishing at least one video every single day since November 2019. I had concluded that video is the medium of the future, and decided that I needed to get comfortable in front of a camera, and that the best way to get there was to publish at least 1000 videos with a minimum of one per day. It is physically impossible to not get at least decent at it if you do it one thousand times. Yesterday, after I pressed the upload button for the final time in my somewhat insane endeavor, I experienced a strange and very satisfying feeling of inner peace. A sense of freedom.
During the Covid years of 2020 and 2021 I went all in on distance education and experimented wildly with live-streaming and recording of lectures. But this spring I am back in the classroom again, and it has been very interesting to apply the lessons learned and the content created. In 2021 I held a few lectures in Building Physics on the topic of moisture, which I also recorded. It was the first time I lectured on the topic and my full focus was simply to keep my nose above the water line and get through the lectures without making to big a fool of myself. The students were very clear in their feedback and most wished for more calculation examples and less lectures. Consequently, this year, I thought about how to approach this and decided to replace all the scheduled lectures with calculation sessions instead. I am now extremely curious to see what the students´ judgment will be.
Since 2014, I have been practicing a musical instrument for 15 minutes every single day. It is a habit that I love more and more, the more I do it. I have found that the little-by-little approach starts to resemble exponential growth a couple of years. The last couple of years I have tweaked things up to eleven, by setting “impossible” goals for myself, like learning to sing opera in just twelve months from scratch for example. The key lesson here is that the impossible goals will constantly reward you with maximum growth if you only have the patience to sacrifice the present for the future. And the principle is likely valid for just about any domain in life.
Your past self is one of, or perhaps the most important friend you’ll ever have. I have recently started my annual course in Building physics which consists of Acoustics and Moisture transport. By now, I have enough experience to simply “wing” the acoustics part and get away with it, but Moisture theory is something completely different. Being a teacher in a topic you do not fully master is one of the scariest things I can think of. And now I have four lectures is Moisture transport approaching fast. Here, my past self has got my back covered, because last year when I did the lectures for the first time, I recorded all of it. It turned out extremely useful for rehearsal purposes.
The famous quote by Nietzsche: “He who has a why can bear almost any how” is a personal favorite of mine. Last weekend I was reminded of the why in a rather funny way. My wife, who also is a motorcycle rider, mentioned on the fly that it might be time to consider a mini 50 cc dirt bike for our petrol head son. Time flies. I used to love motorcycles. Around ten years ago, >20 000 km per year was an average season for me. But since becoming a father my offroad bike has mostly collected dust. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it anymore, but the problem is that it is not an activity that can include my family. Riding the bike is a solo endeavor. However, when my wife planted that PW50 seed in my mind, I instantly visualized a new timeline where the motorcycle passion might enter my life again but in a different format.
A couple of weeks ago, I was checking out a musician 2nd hand site. And I noticed something extremely unusual for a site like that, a vintage Bruel and Kjaer type 2209 sound level analyzer. There is something very appealing with the design of vintage measurement equipment. Everything from the big knobs and clunky switches to the choice of text font just oozes with hand made quality. I thought that this would make an excellent addition to our Umeå office. As a conversation starter, it doesn’t get much better than a professional sound level meter from five decades ago.
Last Saturday, I was going to take my dog out for a short night walk before we all went to bed. It was the last task of the day and everyone else had already gone to bed. Me and my dog were the only ones awake. We started walking towards the forest and everything was illuminated by a full moon, and the temperature was around zero degrees – very comfortable. Once my eyes got used to the moonlight, I didn’t really need my headlamp to see so I turned it off. We kept walking and after a short while we had entered a forest road with no houses or civilization in sight. The short walk ended up being the longest walk I’ve had in a long time. We just kept walking and I loved every minute of it.
I will never forget the final couple of months when I was finalizing my PhD thesis for the print. Several years of extremely focused work was reaching its conclusion. And the thing I remember best is that feeling of “I understand this topic now!”, that you can only get when you are close to the finish line. Everything kind of snaps into place and it feels like you can write the perfect thesis. However, when you finally reach that stage, the time is almost up, so you will only be able to write a fraction of all your ideas. It’s a wonderful and frustrating paradox.
Campus is open again for business. In a month from now I start the 2022 edition of my building physics course. It feels a bit strange to return to the physical classroom. I haven’t done a real lecture since early 2020. They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it. We will see in a month whether there’s some truth to that. I have been very active posting vlogs every day since 2019 and I have a feeling that the experience gained it will come in very handy now. Such a weird feeling, I have practiced so hard in front of the camera - around 1000 videos. It will be very interesting to see how that translates into a physical room.
Life as a consultant can often feel overwhelming, and I have certainly felt just like that for a couple of months now. However, when things feel rough, I think about the books I’ve read by Jocko Willinck, where he lays out the concept of Prioritize and Execute. He tells stories from his war deployment where one of his teammates falls and is badly injured, while they come under assault and must deploy their machine gun instantly. At the same time, a thousand other things happen and there is only time to do a couple of them… I think you see where this is going. There is no way on earth that consultancy work can come even close to that pressure (even though it can feel like it). And still, Jocko and his team survived using the only method available. Rank-order the list of tasks that needs to be done and start to tick them off in order of importance. What else can you do?
The sun painted everything golden all the way to the horizon. As far as the eye could see, there was ice. My son Elis was riding his Stiga Snow Racer pulled by our dog Jussi. The three of us were on a round trip on the ice around a nearby island, with the sea as a backdrop. That morning, my son woke up at 05:44 which had interrupted my morning routine. But what an interruption! It was one of those mornings that you only get a handful of throughout a lifetime.
To make real progress you need both the carrot and the stick. I have got plenty of carrots, and last week I finally got a proper batch of stick. It’s amazing how much productivity boost that can be achieved by a feeling of impending doom. My to-do list had been growing steadily for quite some time, perhaps for a couple of months. I was adding things faster than I was ticking them off. Problems like these are appropriate to consider the saying “How did you go broke? Little by little then everything at once.” So, when you get that feeling that you are inching slowly in the wrong direction, be careful. Be very careful. Because then suddenly everything might twist and turn at once and you don’t want that.
Tonight, when I was reading our daily bed-time story to my three-year-old son, my eyes teared up with joy. It is without a doubt the best part of my whole day and I am so grateful and blessed to have this daily routine. You have little kids for four years and then it’s GONE, never to return. And you miss it at your own peril because it is the literal definition of “peak life”.
