Book Review: Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler

Published by Bobby Lin on June 22, 2022

Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Impossible-Peak-Performance-Primer/dp/0062977539

Flow Triggers

Intrinsic Drivers (Curiosity, Passions and Purpose [Massively Transformative Purposes])
Autonomy (Freedom to do)
Mastery (Challenge-Skills improvement)

Curiosity

List down 25 items that you are curious about. For example, you will spend your free time on researching a topic or problem, read a book on a subject, attending a lecture, watching a youtube video and keeping track of the topic in news or social media like Twitter.
Make sure that the listed items are specific enough so that your brain can look for patterns. If the topic is too broad (e.g. Application Security), then it will be hard to discover what exactly you want to explore.
Hunt for the curiosities intersections. Discover the overlapping areas between the different items that you have listed.
Curiosity by itself is not enough to trigger any motivation. You need to stack one curiosity on top on another. The more you stack, the more powerful the list of stacked curiosities will be to motivate you to research and learn more.
Whenever you recognize a new pattern between what you are curious about, your brain reward you with Dopamine.
- Helps you to focus on the task
- Detect more patterns by improving signal-to-noise ratio
- Makes us feel good about doing an activity.
- Enhance our memory on a specific subject.
Spend time on these intersections. Allocate 20 to 30 minutes daily on listening to podcasts, watching videos, reading articles, books, lectures, doing practical projects related to any aspects of the intersections.
- For example, if you are interested in how solving Leetcode problems can help to improve your programming skills. You might try to read a few pages on a Data Structure and Algorithm (DSA) topics. Then try to solve 1 related question to the topic that you are reading. Or you might read a specific book on the programming language such as Fluent Python and see how you can write better code.
Engage in these curiosities everyday. This will allow your brain to adapt and process the new information in the new subject slowly. This method is similar to “incubation” stage where your brain is joining the old information with the new information to form more patterns. Let our brain naturally make these connections without forcing our brain to make any discoveries.
Pay attention to these two things while you are engaging in your curiosities:
- History of the subject. If you note down the historical details of the subject, your brain will create a narrative that help you to snitch the details into a coherent story that you can remember easily without effortful memorization.
- Technical Language. There are precise definitions for jargons in the field that you need to understand in order to make better connections between what you are exploring. To communicate and understand the subject better, you need to note down the jargons definitions. The experts in the field use the jargons to explain something precisely.
Go Public. Before going public, make sure you spend time playing around the intersections of your curiosities. At least have some unique perspectives and ideas before going to public (online forum, book clubs, meetups etc.)

Purposes

Write down your massively transformative purpose (MTPs). The purpose (reason why the work is done) that is large and audacious, and bring significant change to an industry, community or to the planet.
Look for areas where your core passions intersect with the MTPs. You want to look for the overlap between passion and purpose.

Personal Notes:

Although the book presented like an algorithmic process for triggering flow that help to accomplish the daily tasks, the process is not so linear. You might not know what are your MTP (massively transformative purposes) while reading the book. This discovery of your MTP might take time and explorations of your curiosity.
How do you even have 25 list of items that you are curious about? It can be things that you learn from books, online courses, youtube videos, internet forums, social media or from friends etc. Everytime you consume the information, take note of what you are curious about and the questions that you want to ask further on a specific area.

Using ACTA methodology to Bug hunting writeups

Published by Bobby Lin on September 26, 2021

Ideas

In the security industry, we are lucky to have many hunters sharing their write-ups in public. To learn deeper from these write-ups, we should have some methodologies to extract knowledge from these experts.

Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA) is a methodology used by researchers to elicit knowledge from different domain experts. I think it is an interesting methodology to experiment with to see if we can extract knowledge in a structured way from the bug hunting experts.

Note: I will be experimenting with a few techniques from ACTA and adjusting it to secondary texts like bug write-ups, blogs, youtube videos, news, Github commits etc. instead of the interviews with experts.

The goal is to see the contrast between Novice bug hunters like me and Experts bug hunters and then use the learned knowledge to improve my own hunting methodology.

How do you conduct your Breadth studies?

Published by Bobby Lin on April 10, 2021

Breadth studies are any studies which takes you outside of your field of specialization. You want to do breadth studies as it helps you to rest from your field of specialization.

Today, there are so much information about different subjects from books, MOOC and internet blog posts. We need an approach on how to conduct our breadth studies without becoming a dilettante and make the studies to be sustainable.

Criteria for picking subjects

Don’t learn something for the sake of learning or because it is popular (appearing in media and news article). Instead, consider using below criteria as a guide to your decision:

Humanity-Natural reason: Subjects that makes you be more connected as a human and to nature.
Complementary reason: Subjects which helps to advance yourself further in your field of specialization.
Exploratory reason: Subjects in which you might want to add to your specialization but unsure now.
Practical-Living reason: Subjects which teaches you how to live practically in modern world.

One of the most practical truths that Daniel Miessler shared is that learning is an integration problem. When you learn something new, you have to decide whether to integrate this new thing into your life and work.

There are many techniques available (e.g. Spaced Repetition) which can help you memorize this new thing that you are learning. At some point, you cannot just remember things. You need to consider whether to integrate this thing into your life or dropped it because it is too difficult to integrate into your work / life.

For Breadth studies, you will face the integration problem. If you cannot integrate what you learned in your Breadth studies to your actual work or life, then it will not be sustainable. Think hard about how you can use this thing that you have learned.

How do you know what truly engages you?

Published by Bobby Lin on April 8, 2021

I felt that many news, tweets, YouTube videos, blogs and forum / aggregators are constantly to trying to engage my attention. As a result, I struggle to know what are the things that I truly find it engaging.

Everything seems engaging to me because they looks new and something that I don’t know. But I seldom have any sustainable engagement with these resources. Therefore, I should not use these resources as a measurement of what I truly want to engage in.

Instead, I should try to study and practice the foundations of these resources that I am often trying to look into. Only with a sustainable study of these foundational fields, then you can truly know what engages you the most.

The “question” heuristic

How do you know what truly engages you? Use the simple heuristic: If you have many questions while studying the fields, the chances are that this field of work engages you the most compare to other fields.

You might also find other fields to be engaging as well but not something you want to deep-dive. In that case, you should treat them as breadth studies (just by knowing the fundamental principles should be sufficient).

Beware of judging that a field is not something that engages you just because you have no questions while doing an initial study.

There is also a possibility that you are using the wrong resource to study (that is why you don’t even know what to ask to find out more). A good resource brings out more questions from your mind. Or you are missing some knowledge or real life experience to ask any questions. Thus, you cannot pre-maturely judge that the subject does not engage you because you have no questions now.

But if you have done a thorough study and yet the questions are not flowing out of your mind, the chances are that the field is not engaging enough to your current life context.

Category: Learning