Eric Tian

I don’t believe in strict routines.

It’s always seemed unnatural to do the same practice at the same time every day. If the world and its creatures change with the seasons, it makes sense for us to shift with the weather as well. When it comes to habits, immaculate consistency is robotic.

Despite this, I am an advocate of doing good things repeatedly over time: 1% improvements every day can lead to huge results later down. A solution to build productive, yet sustainable and natural habits, is the 10% difference rule.

The 10% difference rule basically means every day, change 10% of your routine good habit to keep it interesting. Some of these examples include:

• Wear a slightly different outfit every day (change the socks, or underwear, or hat)
• Brush your teeth in a slightly different pattern each time
• Begin each journal prompt with a different entry

This has two benefits.

First, you still retain your habits, but it becomes funner. In mixing up the nature of the activity, you don’t compromise the effectiveness of it. If an experiment leads to failure of the habit (say, brushing your teeth with your feet), then change the intervention.

Second, you will learn more. The act of thinking of, and trying new variations will cultivate curiosity at the confidence. You may begin to discover more about your capabilities and weaknesses, and notice how you respond to shifting circumstances. These trials often make great stories to tell later on as well.

Even now, this post is an example of a 10% difference rule. I rarely ever write “instructive” pieces like this one, but tonight I just decided to mix it up. These last ten minutes have been great fun.

One of my favourite gardening concepts is compost heaps. The idea that you can combine organic leftovers into soil to create natural fertiliser blows my mind.

In a way, we are compost heaps are well. Everything we experience – from the mundane to the extraordinary – gets shoved into our heaps where it is digested and turned into something beautiful. It is from our junk that great ideas begin to grow.

As Ann Patchett wrote in her memoir:

“You will take bits from books you’ve read and movies you’ve seen and conversations you’ve had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you won’t even realize you’re doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots.

It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”

Perhaps the most unique aspect of medicine, alongside its intimate dealings with life and mortality, is its undiscriminating nature towards all. Medical practitioners are taught that no matter the patient, whether white or black, male or female, saint or sinner, gay or heterosexual, right- or left-wing, each person deserves an equally high standard of health care.

The Declaration of Geneva, the oath taken by incoming doctors across the globe, states this quite plainly:

“I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient;

I will maintain the utmost respect for human life;

I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat;

I make these promises solemnly, freely and upon my honour.”

This is strange to accept because it is so unnatural. It is entirely normal to pass judgments onto others and behave differently depending on the circumstance. When put with dangerous individuals, one should behave cautiously to protect their life. To treat everybody as equals is either a complete failure of emotional intelligence, or a radical form of love.

Fundamentally, the Declaration of Geneva borders on a devotion as radical as religion.

Yet, in an unrelated field, one with far less glamour and drama, a similar type of radicalism can be found. This is in the world of literature.

An underlying theme in good novels is the idea of non-discrimination. In works that move people, taboos are examined closely and sensitive issues like rape, abuse and death are embraced with full acceptance. In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist is a murderer. In The Fountainhead, the protagonist rapes a woman. In War and Peace, nearly half of the main characters die. No issue is off-limits.

As Ernest Hemingway said:
“As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge.

You should understand.”

Over the last few months, I have committed to writing one short story a week – as of today, 11 short stories ranging from 1000 to 4000 words have been created. This initially began as a challenge with my partner, but has since become perhaps my most important weekly commitment.

The surprising thing about fiction writing is how painful it is, for to invent a story requires payment of one’s own soul. At the beginning, you have energy but no character in existence; then as the character is birthed and develops, you begin depleting your own energy. By the time you have created a believable being, you have nearly emptied yourself. To compare it to the pain of giving birth would not be unrealistic.

The story that ruined me the most is called “Pitiful Love”. It is based on an old detective’s reminiscence of his first love, who he discovers was murdered. This grief is juxtaposed with the reality that he is happily married to another woman and this conflict, alongside alternating time periods of the past and present, represents the idea that one’s past never really abandons them. It is crudely written but by the end, I wanted to crawl into a hole and hibernate. The creation of this story had almost emptied my soul.

Journal writing, or blog writing, is child’s play in comparison.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to a writer:

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell…

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.”

When an athlete gives an extraordinary performance, or when a musician plays the most enchanting music, we tend to forget that it took many rehearsals to get there.

Behind the scenes, a lot of criticism and misplays were required before they could reach the pinnacle of performance.

The unusual thing about our lives is that we really only have one go at it. Though Islams and Christians have paradise and Hindus and Buddhists have rebirth, one thing is common: this time in this body is unique. We really only have one chance in this moment.

This presents the dilemma: how do we know what to do, since we cannot compare our decisions to a previous experience? There is no means of testing what course of action is better, because we have no means for comparison. If life is a performance, everything is paralysing.

But what if we thought of it the other way around? That this moment is just a rehearsal, and everything is a safe opportunity to fail and improve? How much more liberating would that be?

And perhaps one day, when it is really is time to perform, our mistakes will have made us into something quite extraordinary.

When I was a boy, everything was fascinating.

How did trees grow? Why was the sky blue? What made stuff fall down, instead of up? My curiosity was insatiable.

But over the years, life got in the way and little by little, my reservoir of enthusiasm began to diminish. And now, sometimes I spend more time lost in a virtual world than the actual world itself.

There are two reasons why this matters.

First, curiosity drives creativity, something becoming increasingly important to me over the years. As journalist and author Walter Isaacson observes in an interview with The Knowledge Project:

“What Leonardo da Vindi had, just like Benjamin Franklin had, and just like Steve Jobs had, was an insatiable curiosity and a willingness to be curious about those things that you and I quit noticing after a while… We’re all curious as kids until grownups say, “stop asking so many dumb questions”, but Leonardo teaches us that to be creative, all we have to do is nurture that curiosity we all have inside of us.”

Second, things are generally more interesting when you’re curious. “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows,” Epictetus wrote, and to the know-it-all, the world becomes increasingly mundane. One of the biggest things I look forward to each day is learning something new, or having my mind changed. You know something is up when the world doesn’t fascinate you anymore.

And so, I’m on a quest to rediscover curiosity. It will take a lot of journalling and observing to make notable changes, but this post is a start. More updates to come.

22 was one of my favourite years yet. Here’s to 23.

1. Minimum Viable Happiness

2. On the Fear of Forgetting

3. On Taking Notes

4. The Red Team Mentality

5. On Breaking Rules

6. “The World is a Beautiful Place”: Interpretation

7. Avoiding Buridan’s Ass

8. The Most Important Blog Post

9. This is Only a Test

10. The Beauty of the Winding Path

11. Things That Make Sense, But Not Really

12. Taking Things Less Seriously

13. Nobody Has to Do Anything

14. The Power of 1%

15. The Bronze Medallist Mindset

16. Burning Through the First Draft

17. How to Read More Books

18. On Regrets

19. Shifting Identities

20. Ways I’m Changing My Mind

21. Shine.

22. “Perfect, or It’s Not Happening”

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our attention, and never before has our attention been so violently fought over.

Even now, as I am typing this, and as you are perhaps reading this, my attention is stretched and fatigued, pulled in an infinite amount of directions. This is a suboptimal state to be in.

As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in Several Short Sentences About Writing:

“But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.”

A beautiful reminder.

Credits: Austin Kleon

Red team-Blue team is a military exercise where a group plays the role of a competitor and tries to break into their own defences or structures. In cybersecurity for instance, a group of software engineers may try to hack their way past a firewall they created to gain unauthorised access to assets. This attacking group is the red team, and the defence is the blue team.

There are various goals of this exercise, including the promotion of creative thinking and problem solving, but the primary benefit of red team-blue team is to find out if there are any holes in one’s defence and to fix them correspondingly.

Why Dostoyevsky is so good

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pouring over Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Upon reflection, I’ve realised that one of the reasons why these classics are so compelling is Dostoyevsky’s use of the red team mentality.

In a debate, it’s easy to utilise the strawman fallacy, where one oversimplifies an opponent’s stance to make it easier to attack. In doing so, one makes their own arguments look better – but ultimately, it is a disingenuous form of arguing as the point is often misrepresented.

The highest and most difficult form of arguing is when you take your opponent’s argument and make it as strong as possible (a so-called iron man argument) and still defeat it. This method requires much more understanding of the other side and skill to pull off.

What Dostoyevsky does so well in his novels is he makes the “other side” of his contention as brutally strong as possible, and still defeats it. In Crime and Punishment, the main character of Raskolnikov has every possible reason to murder. He is poor, charming law student and has the potential to do much good. On the other hand, his pawnbroker is a rude, dishonest rich woman who is generally disliked by everybody. Her murder is made as defensible as possible.

But when Raskolnikov commits the murder and spirals into chaos, Dostoyevsky’s point is made in its fullest force -that even though a crime may seem utilitarian or defensible, one’s punishment for a crime is the moral burden itself, and this is irrespective of whether the killing was “right” by any standards. If the murder was portrayed as disgusting to begin with, the same effect could never have been made, for a reader could argue that some murders can be justified. But not here.

Generally speaking, the red team mentality can be seen as an appraisal. If you think you have a strong idea, try putting everything you have to tear it down, and see if it withstands the test. If the red team wins, then you’ve seen its flaws and can work to improve it.

But if the red team fails, despite making the strongest effort possible, then you know you have a strong idea.

One of my favourite games growing up was RuneScape. It’s a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), meaning you control a character that can interact with other characters in the same, enormous world.

RuneScape was great because there was so much you could do. You could embark a story quest that gave you rewards, kill monsters to become stronger, or level other skills like woodcutting or fishing for quality-of-life.

If you play RuneScape, there is always something to be done. Your account isn’t one big pot boiling to a singular goal – there are always little pots bubbling in the background.

The impossible question

One of the most difficult questions to answer is “what do you do?” because it’s impossible for anyone to give a complete answer. Everyone does something; it could be as basic as brushing your teeth, or something unusual like running a marathon.

What people usually mean by “what do you do?” is “what’s the thing you write when a form asks you for your profession?” which is nowhere near the same thing.

Yet in a way, this question is helpful because it reminds us that we are not one-dimensional creatures.

We all have pots bubbling in the background; skills that we have started learning but yet to master. Ideas waiting to emerge and characteristics evolving into something new.

Do not neglect these pots.