Matt Warren

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Author: Matt

  • Growth Mindset

    I’ve been reading this book, Mindset: the new psychology of success by Carol Dweck. It’s been on my list of books to read for several years now and I’m finally catching up on the backlog.

    What finally brought it to the top of the list was finding out that this book is forming the basis of the corporate culture at the newly reborn Microsoft since Satya Nadella took the reins. Understanding what has changed at Microsoft to transform the company over the last while from a place that didn’t appeal to me at all just a few years ago, into a vibrant and positive company is interesting.

    The quick takeaway from the book is the distinction between having a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. These are not innate but are learned beliefs about various aspects of ourselves and others. For example, you might believe that IQ is a basic measurement of our core ability that doesn’t change. On the other hand, you might believe that IQ scores can change based on learning and training. These distinctions exist across a wide variety of our beliefs – Leadership, salesmanship, introversion, extroversion, personality, sports skills, music talent.

    The book re-enforced things which I believed to be inherently true, but framed the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets in a way that shone a light on people and interactions I have had in the past. And in that regard, I hope that it will help to make me more conscious of the distinction of foundational beliefs in future conversations

    Highly recommended book, which is becoming more important than ever as tribalism has reduced our ability to understand different perspectives.

  • Producing Video and Audio

    Over the last several weeks I have been doing quite a bit of learning. One of the things I’m doing more of is going deeper on producing video and audio content for podcasting and YouTube channels. My home office now has enough equipment to do an adequate job with audio and video production.

    My YouTube channel has been reconfigured and re-branded for a podcast and video channel I’m building about the moon.

    The first 2 episodes of the audio podcast are recorded and scheduled for early February. The first video episode is developed and scheduled for YouTube.

    One big lesson in this, is just how much work can go into creating good videos. Assembling videos from stock clips and images is time consuming. It took a full day of editing to make a relatively simple 15 minute video. It is making me think about changing the format to more of a video of me – talking head style.

    In addition to my moon project podcast I am also helping to produce a series of podcasts about meditation.

    All in all, I’m quickly ramping up my knowledge of podcast syndication and publishing, as well as YouTube strategies, as well as how to use video and audio editing software.

    One of my primary goals with all this, as I mentioned before, is to improve my speaking and presentation skills. So far it seems like it’ll be well worth the effort.

  • My Genius Ideas Notebook

    My Genius Ideas Notebook

    Last year I started a notebook specifically to collect ideas that I feel are particularly innovative or interesting. I keep it on my desk – one of the few things.

    While I believe that ideas are usually worthless without taking the action to implement them, or at least further investigate their feasibility. Collecting ideas into one place has some value. It becomes a source of inspiration to draw from when feeling bored.

    Good ideas take time to form and a notebook is a good place to mix words and sketches and build the idea over time until they become more fully developed. I tried iPad notebooks, which with the pencil has good support for sketching, but digital things tend to get lost below the fold in a way that physical books on a desk do not.

    What are some of my ‘genius ideas’? I’ve got a space launch system that doesn’t need rockets which I’m trying to solve for a lower scale system that would still have a viable market. I collected ideas for a unique proof of work algorithm, and AI system for learning languages, an inline electric bike pedal assist motor, the vision for a Canadian moon mission, inflatable furniture, and more.

    When inspiration strikes I try to write it down. Sometimes those ideas are fleeting and it’s good to catch them before they are forgotten.

  • Personal Brand

    Over the years I have done a lot of things. much of that history is documented on this website, but much more isn’t. Many of my projects and business ideas were purposely separated from my personal site and I didn’t even reference them here or elsewhere. Some of that was to avoid sharing more failures, some was to give things a chance to prove themselves without the influence of family and friends.

    I’m starting to have a change of heart. So I’m revisiting this website and will be slowly turning it into more of a nexus of every project that I’m working on and as a hub for the businesses that I’m launching.

    You may have noticed that I added some links to the top level navigation on this page. The Moon To Stay Podcast is a project I’ve been working on for the last 2 months. Writing and preparing to record a series of podcasts all about the moon. When thinking about this project I originally thought about creating a new website for it – buy the domain name, build a podcast specific site to host the feed, and show notes.

    The more that I thought about it though, the goals of the podcast is really about myself. Gaining confidence with speaking, interviewing, and recording. Showcasing some expertise and interest in the subject, and attempt to have some personal impact on humans in space. Doing a commercial style thing just doesn’t fit with that set of personal goals.

    So I’m putting the podcast on this website.

    The decision got me thinking about some of the other things that I work on that I haven’t really integrated with this personal blog. It’s important to celebrate your successes, and promote the work you do. If nobody knows about all the great things you do, then nobody will every find and use it. Communication of all these things is and important aspect of giving value to the world.

    So one of the tasks I have for myself for the rest of January is to pull in a lot of different things to this website that show off things I am currently working on, and show some of the historical projects that have been done before.

  • 3D Printing

    3D Printing

    For Christmas this year, I got a 3D printer to add to my ever busier home office. My hope with the printer is to create more in 2019. And I have a backlog of ideas for things I want to make with it.

    I hit a wall with my bike design a couple months ago due to lack of tools to take things from a sketch and 3d model into a prototype phase. I hit the same wall earlier in the year trying to prototype an active support structure. My hope is that a 3D printer will let me take some of these ideas and make functional prototypes, or make the jigs and tools to help me make them.

    In addition to the ambitious things, there’s plenty of little things that these printers are particularly good at. Wire clips, mounting hardware, models and little odds and ends that I hope will keep my office neat and tidy will be fun to play with.

    While I wait for a couple pounds of plastic filament to arrive I’m combing through the 1,000,000+ models on thingiverse looking for stuff to print.

  • Velocity vs Speed

    This past year has been one of the most interesting I’ve had. Quitting my job gave me the time to pursue a wide variety of interests. And I did use the time this year to get a lot of unique things done – blockchain development, built a chat/finance app, wrote a space strategy plan/planned a podcast, launched a couple dozen websites, built a beer fermentation cooler, did some e-commerce, designed a bike and custom electric motor, prototyped an AI app to learn Mandarin, designed a space launch system 1/100th the cost of SpaceX, invented a new scheme for proof of work, and designed a business strategy AI.

    These are things that wouldn’t have happened if I was also doing a job.

    However that variety and wide range of things had a drawback that very few of these things moved forward enough to get traction. Speed in lots of different directions, but low velocity. 

    My resolution for the next while is to plan and focus on velocity. To structure my time and the work I do to lead in a singular direction. 

  • Designing a Bike

    I love bikes, want to be able to use them more often than I do, and have been looking for something to do as a hands on project that doesn’t use the computer so much. Building my own bike seems like a neat and unique project.

    When thinking about what I would want in a bike there are a couple things that I would put as the most important design constraints.

    1. the frame should be as simple as possible, ideally something that has very few parts and could be manufactured entirely by robot.
    2. It should be hackable and extendable for easily adding trailers, baskets, etc.
    3. should allow for electric motor version with a mid-mounted motor.
    4. should should theoretically possible to make it very inexpensive to build.

    While thinking about and researching a lot of the existing products on the market I thought there was some opportunity to create something better and unique. It started with an electric motor and transmission design.

    I designed a motor integrated with the crank and isolated sprocket so that the pedals and motor can independently power the belt drive. This is housed in a single small unit and will allow for a simpler fixie style rear wheel hub while still allowing the pedals to idle. By moving most of the mechanical complexity into a single component which can be enclosed and made water tight it can be made maintenance free and high reliability.

    For the bike frame itself I want to think about something that requires no, or very little welding, ideally it would be made from as few parts as possible. Car unibody design gave me the idea of doing something with stamped metal sheets. I wondered if there was a way to build a bike frame from a single piece of metal with only a couple of mount points for the seat post, stem, rear wheel, and crank to attach to it. A key thing was to have a rear wheel mounted on only one side (like some motorcycles do). This allows the frame to be stamped out of a nearly rectangular piece of metal which reduces wasted scrap and eliminates many steps from traditional bike manufacturing.

    What’s next? There are two things I need to solve. Firstly, there’s a lot of engineering to refine the design enough to validate it. Secondly, I need to build a prototype. The steps and knowledge required to get to a testable bike is well outside my expertise so any realistic future where this gets built will need a team working on it. There are two ways that I could get this done. Either open source the bike design and try to attract a community to continue working on it or hire people. In either case one of the logical conclusions for this kind of project would be to do a kickstarter to fund production after the prototype is validated.

  • Two years of Bullet Journaling

    It was two years ago that I learned about a system of keeping an agenda/journal that really made sense to me.  Bullet Journal is a flexible way to organize a plain physical journal so that you get exactly what you want out of the practice without the rigid space limitation and structure of pre-printed agendas or digital note taking apps.

    I have tried various attempts to use things like Evernote, Google Docs, Apple Notes, and a few smaller todo list apps.  All of them suffered from a lack of physicality. Apps disappear into the background or get forgotten about when the browser tab is closed. It is easy to copy/paste huge amounts of content into an app that you will never read and won’t remember. 

    A journal that sits on my desk has a permanent presence. Looking at it is a reminder to continue with the ritual and to revisit my goals on occasion. Everything in it has to come from my own written hand which makes it easier to remember. Hand writing takes more time to do, and that is kind of the point. By taking up physical space as a book with a single purpose, and by requiring time each to consciously think about it and write in it adds to the importance and effectiveness.

    By asking simple questions every morning: “what is the date?”, “what do I want to accomplish today?” “What events do I have today?” and then taking time to flip back though pages occasionally to answer these questions, each day is given more intentionality. It makes me feel like I’m writing my own life instead of having Google Calendar dictate it to me. Some things in life are better left not automated.

  • No More News

    I have been finding myself increasingly frustrated with the amount of American news that I see as a Canadian. On many topics it seems like I know more about what is happening in another country than in my own. A sad state of affairs. Most of these things are actually meaningless to me personally. Decisions made by American politicians are unlikely to cause me to change anything in my day-to-day, affect my decisions or something that I would have influence on. As a result, everything I know about American politics represents wasted neurons and wasted time.

    American News is a drama. The characters and their emotional conflicts play a staring role keep us hooked like a soap opera. It draws us back in day after day to find out what happens. It stays on our mind through the day, speculating about what will happen next.

    It made me think about all the media I consume. 

    Increasingly I have been withdrawing from all consumption channels. With Facebook, I have disabled all notifications, and log in less than once a month. I stopped using my feed reader and unsubscribed from everything that explicitly was world news related at the beginning of the year. Yesterday, I purged my phone of Reddit, CBC News, and Pinterest. The last of my consumption-only news feeds. Twitter is my only remaining source of outside information – but I’m careful about who I follow.

    Either you control your brain, or your brain controls you. I want to make sure I am consciously in control of my own brain by ensuring that what goes into it aligns with my goals, that I reduce my risk of being influenced by media hype or fear tactics.

    My goals are that I want to be building as much as possible. To focus on creation, I’m limiting the hours spent consuming.

    The consumption that I am trying to do more of is books. The ideas in books have been baked for years before they make it to the printed page. They undergo multiple levels of review and editing before publishing, and they have the length to more fully explore and explain things. Choosing a book to read also aligns with the desire to control what goes into my brain which is very different from the lack of control we get from skimming through clickbait headlines.

    As I have been cutting down on media consumption my phone has become less and less useful. I’m thankful of that, since it gives me more time in the day to be the author of my own future.

  • Scary Future

    If the climate models recently published by the IPCC are accurate, then things are not looking great for the future. Indeed, if we continue on the same path that we are currently on then it is unlikely that my daughter will live long enough to die of old age.

    When rising ocean levels force a mass migration in India and other highly populated coastal cities, then our recent experience with the mass migration of Syria foretells just how bad of a situation it could be.

    More frequent and more intense storms threaten to destroy our infrastructure and homes. Increasing droughts and desertification put our food production at risk.

    It is a seriously bad situation.

    We know the cause. Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are capturing more of the suns energy.  It’s our fault. But even if it wasn’t, we still need to do something to stop it from getting worse.

    There are a few things we can do, and there are multiple concurrent things we need to work on.

    1. Everyone’s next car should be electric. The shift to electric transportation is critical to staying below a habitable temperature increase.
    2. Minimalism. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like having stuff. There’s a lot of wasted time and money on things we don’t need. I’m trying to reduce my consumption of things as low as possible.
    3. Eat less meat. Cows are a horribly inefficient way to grow food calories and nutrients. We’ve cut our meat consumption way back and eat more vegetarian meals than we used to.
    4. We should be encouraging Plan B options. Elon Musk’s colony on Mars or Jeff Bezos’ vision of living in space needs some serious consideration and funding.
    5. We need some geo-engineering technology to sequester carbon out of the air. 
    6. Urban planning needs to take a good look at efficiency.  Higher density housing, and mixed-use zoning make walking, biking, or mass-transit an option for more of our trips.

    Right now it seems like we are living on the edge of it being too late to act. IPCC has determined that a 1.5 degree rise is only possible with carbon sequestration technology that currently doesn’t really exist. Current government policies are on a course for an unlivable planet.

    This century is looking pretty bleak to me right now.