They seem to generate permalinks for the converted audiofiles. So if you listen to podcasts from time to time … here are the links. If the links don’t work anymore, give the site some time to come back up (or drop a comment).

Merlin Mann – Who moved my brain? (28.49MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann – Toward Patterns for Creativity – Macworld (25MB .mp3)

Webvisions 2010 Keynote – Merlin Mann: “Bold Ideas and Insane Possibilities” (25MB .mp3)

Inbox Zero (Merlin Mann)  (GoogleTechTalks) (26,84MB .mp3)

Merlin Mann on Time and Attention (Getting Things Done) (GoogleTechTalks) (32.37MB .mp3)

Oh by the way, if you need a nice Windows tool for downloading music or videos for Windows, try our Youtube Song Downloader (from Abelssoft, where I’m working at). It’s really a very nice piece of software.

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1. 
   
   The first section of timeframes is driven by the outside. You begin your life as a baby and grow up under the supervision of your parents (hopefully). During this time, you cannot do anything to influence your development. Your parents and your surroundings influence who you will become.
2. Then comes the time when you slowly but surely can influence what happens in your life. This can be anywhere between 14 and 40 years of age, but will usually be around the age of 18. From here on, its a bit more finegrained. Usually, you choose which kind of job you will do for the rest of your life. You invest at least 1.5 years and maybe upto 10 years into that area of life – and it defines the next timeframe: work.
3. This worktime-section is the third timeframe. I guess you’ll be in this section for about 35-40 years if everything works out fine. Within this time, you’ll become an expert in your field and maybe climb the ladder to learn new things when/if you get bored with the old work. Or maybe you just do one thing till this timeframe is up. This is the longest timeframe in your life, and it will shape your mind and body, most often for the worse if you don’t watch it closely.
4. Then you’re old and retire. This is the part, where you’re expected to do nothing anymore, as your mind is too slow and your body too broken to get anything meaningful done. If you were lucky and your body still works fine and your mind isn’t shrouded by some mental illness or because your brain took damage in a stroke or accident, you might even be enjoying this episode for some decades, as you get your returns for your work and can do whatever you enjoy.

Now for the message of this post: the timeframe where you choose what your life will be like – timeframe no. 2 – is the most important timeframe of everyone’s life (that they can influence). No matter if it’s 1.5 years or 10 years – it’s well invested time considering that you’ll spend approximately one thirds of your awake-time in your work-life from now on and that this profession you chose will either keep your brain and body intact or maybe deaden your mind and break your body which in turn will be deciding when your turn old. You don’t even need to think about the monetary concequences here as money doesn’t define happiness.

The point is, that pupils in school need to understand the graveness of the time that follows. If you need to learn one single thing in school, then it should be that the post-school education will be the most defining factor of your life, that you have the power to influence yourself. (And that your life is pretty long and doesn’t end at the age of 30.) If anything bad happens during your childhood, you can’t do much, but if you pick the easy path and don’t learn a profession after school, you fucked up your whole life all by yourself.

Some few years define a lifetime. Don’t switch to No. 3 before you’re ready.

photo credit: Paolo Margari

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photo credit: Mark Strozier

I played a lot of games

In my teenager times (and arguably also after that), I loved playing every kind of game. I enjoyed board games, strategy games, mind games, card games, role playing games (pen-and-paper) and all kinds of computer games (economic simulations, fighting games, RPGs, strategy, puzzles,…) . And I think after some time, you realize that most of the game mechanics and strategies involved reoccur in other games, and that playing games makes you better in playing other games too.

Side note: When we discussed a school reading (don’t remember if it was “The Catcher in the Rye”), my English teacher hammered in this one sentence that was occurring in the book: “Just connect”. My teacher stood there, looked at us if it was the only thing we really needed to understand so that he could gladly leave the room and know that we’ve learned something today. Just connect the pieces of information. I didn’t like my English teacher too much, because he was pretty much focused on discipline, but he was clearly the teacher I learned from the most. So, if you don’t take anything away from this article, please remember that you just need to connect all the information from the different areas of experience and you’ll understand the big picture more, every time you do it. Just connect.

Becoming an expert

In fact, I firmly believe that you become an expert in anything that you do a lot. Your brain is like a complex muscle, and training a certain activity will strengthen this special muscle and support other muscles when doing related activities. It’s the same with your job, with games, with sports and any skill you can imagine – which is positive.

You will become better in everything you do a lot. You can even become some kind of “negative expert” when you do a lot of unadvisable stuff, like watching TV all day, getting sucked into World of Warcraft style addictive games, drinking too much alcohol, hanging out with questionable people and doing questionable or illegal activities, eating fast food or developing fear of something because you keep away from it too often (people, new experiences, work, …).

Good games

What I always liked about games is that with many of the games you can evolve and become better. You learn the rules, you make them your own, you see the hopes that you can exploit, you try and test and fail and try again and succeed. I often see this theme in other players, and with all games that take some time and are somewhat competitive. Competition itself is also very important, and usually also the factor why you want to grow your skills in the first place – as without competition or other gains, why would you?

Speaking of qualities, the games I like have to be enjoyable. They always include some kind of strategy. You always have some way of being clever, interacting with other players or make risky but rewarding maneuvers. You often have an entertaining story that gets told, or some imagination that awakes in your head as the game progresses. If all that doesn’t happen, the game is crap.

The best game I have played to this date is called “Magic – The Gathering”. It’s a card game with ever changing rules, diverse strategies and a big social component to it, as I usually played it on tournaments – and getting there was always a matter of finding people to attend, organizing a car for the day(s) and then beforehand reflecting over the cards that everyone was playing, and what the other tournament-players would pick for their decks (this was called the “metagame”, and your deck was highly dependent on what other players were playing).

To be true, for my life this game was like the worst thing that could happen. I got sucked in. In classes, I wasn’t trying to understand what was taught, I tried to find better combinations of cards, or a silver bullet combination for the metagame. If I would try to calculate the CPU cycles my brain spend in thinking about Magic-decks, I guess I would find several years of my life wasted. Okay, it was really fun playing this game, but after all it got me nowhere, as to be able to make a life out of it, you would need to stop having another life and play and reflect on this 24/7, and a whole lot of luck – and filling in lottery tickets only needs luck and doesn’t cost that much time. So the economical responsibility to stop playing this best of all games and find a better one that could be combined with having a life.

Game mechanics

Having played a lot of games, I can tell that game mechanics are never unique. You always see them in a lot of different games, and you can always draw on the experience of other games when you recognize a game mechanic. In resource driven games for example you can most likely benefit from acquiring the most possible resources as this makes it possible to acquire even more resources. If for example a race-like mechanic is included like the game ends at a certain point an you need to collect points, you have to recognize the time when you have to switch from buildup resources to power out resources for points.

After having spent enough time on games, you realize that many game mechanics also can be found in the real world. Here understanding game mechanics is often referred to as “Logic”, “Economy”, “Statistics” or “Creative thinking”. I also saw many game mechanics in my studies in computer science. In fact, the central theme I picked for one of my assignments was “gaming theory”.

photo credit: Toni Blay

Life

And finally, I think I found the only game that you can enjoy to full extend without having to not have a life anymore: it’s life itself. Life has a big number of players, is a competitive setting and there’s an infinite number of rules to learn, bend and use, and there are far more scales that count the points you receive – happiness, money, experiences, enjoyable moments, building a family and having a profession that you can master. The spectrum of values that you can collect points for is diverse, you can define yourself which points you care for the most and that should be added to your most favorable counter.

I think that playing games to a certain extent prepare you for a successful life, as you can transport many of the logical connections you learned that work in games also describe problems in the real world, that you then can solve more easily. But after all, its always the real world that you come back to, so never get stuck in a game or a fantasy reality, no matter how good the story is, how good the mechanics are or how strategic the options in this game are, because after all, you shouldn’t specialize in a game but in mechanics you can reuse in the real world. And ultimately, the most challenging, competitive, strategic and most enjoyable game with the best stories, gameplay and mechanics is life itself. So play that – and have fun!

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But it can also be other way round. Some people give absolutely nothing on other thoughts, on society, on values. This Diogenean way of seeing life cynically it also fatal, as it implicites a life cut off from society. Nevertheless:

“What do people think of me?” seems to be one of the most overrated and stupid question that makes our society a mess.

photo credit: joshuahoffmanphoto

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But who is the elite today? In fact, I often think the elite are those people still evolving. What means who are willing to not only keep their way of living and consume but who are constantly trying to make everything in their lives a bit better and keep changing for good. And even if you define the elite as this presumably usual way of living, its unbelievably small.

Look at your parents: do they still change? What about your friends? Your teachers? I think there’s only one constant of success: change. If you change, you seldomly will change your life to be worse. Therefore, you should embrace change, look actively what you can change and change often.

My take of the elite is, that its pretty easy to be part of it, and that EVERYONE can be part of the elite. Stop the fear, the complacence, conservationalism. Just change. Its not that hard.

photo credit: tsevis

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Isn’t that a waste of time?

I was quite shocked, as I think that I can’t use my private time much wiser than by training the skills I’m earning my money with, having fun on a project I like and maybe get something out of it at the end that I might like to play myself and maybe even get some money via advertising, to come up for the server costs. So the answer is clearly: no, it’s not a waste of time. But it got me thinking what a waste of time is in my eyes. To answer this question, I must first address this question:

What is meaningful?

My first definition is: Wasting time means that you do something meaningless instead of something meaningful.

Meaningful would be something, that you had to do anyways or that gives you something in the long term. This includes learning for your job, acting to reach or keep your desired familiy situation (dating, learn to know new people – or spending time with your family), working to develop your economic measures and grow your character.

Not meaningful would be something that gives you nothing in the long term. Watching TV, playing games, consuming drugs / alcohol / cigarettes, surfing the web, listening music, comsume sports in the media, sleeping (longer than 8 hours), watching funny stuff on YouTube, relaxing on the couch, … the list goes on.

Hobbies

Hobbies are a special thing here – basically because everyone will constantly tell you that some of those “WasteOfTime”-activities just are important for them, as the person is not fullfilled or not happy without them.

Using time on a hobby for some time of the day makes you happy and fullfilled in the long term – so if you would count computergaming or watching a certain TV series as a hobby, I’d say its meaningful – for a certain amount of time, where its not procrastination of other things, that are really important or that would have to be done anyways.

If you don’t do the other stuff, that would bring you forward, hobbies are a waste of time. Especially the behavioural pattern of acting out this hobby is addictive – as usual for World of Warcraft-playing or online addiction nowadays – then I would clearly brand this as waste of time.

What helps me and others in doing meaningful stuff is the Getting Things Done-methods, that clearly stress your long-term-goals. After formulating them, you should try to do one task that is connected with your goal every day – which makes sure you evolve. (btw.: At Abelssoft we”re developing a ToDo-application that will also help you developing your goals, I’ll update you on this one as there’s still a lot of development to be done)

Bonus: the Time Eater

My definition is of course only a subjective view on this topic – even if I think its pretty nicely thought out. In spire of this, for some people, the most useful activity is giving in into some drive, like being lazy, eating or watching TV or gaming or taking drugs all day. THAT is clearly a waste of time in my eyes.

Especially the TV set earns an honorable mention here: is a time-eating machine. Most people burn time in their TV – and a TV set already is declared as a necessity of life by law! And as I already said in a former acticle I wrote in german: Time is the stuff that life is made of. Its the most precious good there is. With time, you can have fun, generate money, live your dreams. So don’t burn it in the TV-oven. Some also use the TV in a meaningful way, but that usually means watching the news – which doesn’t take long anways.

Final Thoughts

Make a list. Define who you want to be, which character traits you want to develop or get rid of, define which kind of social (family?) situation you want, which goods you want to have (car? home?), what you want to reach (professionally, skills, achievements) and put all this on this list. These are your goals. Try to do one thing that gets you into this directions every day, before you give in to your drives. It might take years, but you will see success sooner than you think.

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I just thought about which blueray-movies I’d like to have. Lord of the Rings extended. X-Men 2. 300 (already got this one). Matrix. Stuff like that. But when will I watch them? I guess the good old days of sitting together with some friends and watching three parts of a movie with 2 hours each are gone. And after all, its not that bad, as all that are basically films I have seen before. I would more likely sit together with friends 6 hours in a bar, talking about the world and how our lives have developed, rather than watching some movie I already know, with some more pixels. We’ll see if 3D-TV can change that.

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