Leveraging memories for growth (Part Two)

As we look back into our memories, a failed business venture, a badly chosen relationship, an opportunity we missed, a foolish argument, an impulsive decision, a misplaced trust and a career choice we later regretted, are so many “arrows” we can label: “Don't you repeat it again!” 

So, the ideal tool is the one that enables us a way to spot these bad situations earlier next time in order to turn regret into preparedness. Sure, as I mentioned yesterday, that exercise should not get us into a nostalgia trap. Maybe instead of “nostalgia” we should call it “rumination”. Nostalgia says, those were wonderful times. “I wish I could go back...” while rumination suggests “Why in the world did I do that? If only I had…”

Neither of the two necessarily make us learn from past experiences. What I’m proposing instead is a third relationship with the past by revisiting it, extracting the lesson, and leaving it there. In other words, our memory should be treated more as a laboratory than a museum. 

I’ve never thought about it this way, but I like it! I also see an intriguing asymmetry as we usually assume that experience makes us wiser because we lived through things, but perhaps wisdom can also be accumulated through deliberate retrospective learning. 

Imagine someone my age (78) looking back over his life and identifying 30 or 40 consequential mistakes. He might discover that five or six basic tendencies account for a surprisingly large proportion of them. Things like: 

• Acting too quickly 
• Being overly trusting 
• Avoiding difficult conversations 
• Caring too much about what others thought 
• Failing to recognize when circumstances had changed 
• Confusing confidence with competence 

The resulting insight could be far more valuable than remembering 40 individual incidents. At that point the summary shows us something like a personal history of errors and it raises a wonderful question. Could we deliberately become wiser by studying not only what happened to us, but how we repeatedly managed to get things wrong? 

As far as I am concerned, what I found were two recurring patterns. Acting too fast, indicating a need for enhanced patience, and lacking self-confidence or being shy. Call this excessive fear or timidity at times. The other, positive side of the coin is worth remembering too. In my case it was intuition and persistence that were my “best arrows…” 

Now I know and you can too if you go through the exercise!

Leveraging memories for growth (Part One)

Most of us will agree that we learn from our biggest mistakes and part of the wisdom we gain from them is to make sure not to repeat them again. This said, if we take the time and effort to “scan” our memories for all of our misguided moves or other errors we still remember, we should be able to inure the same benefits and add them to our quiver, without being sucked into the nostalgia trap, right?

I happen to believe that this basic proposition is quite sound. If a painful mistake can teach us something, we should be smart enough in learning from it so we won’t ever have to repeat the mistake again. Since we have decades of accumulated experience sitting in our memories, why not deliberately mine it? 

Sure, we need to remember an important caveat in that our memory isn't a video archive and its contents are not always totally objective recordings. They are reconstructions as with time, we tend to soften some things, exaggerate others, forget our own motivations, and sometimes rewrite ourselves as the hero—or the victim—of the story. 

As a result of that consideration, a useful "memory scan" shouldn't ask simply “What did I do wrong?” but should go deeper and more specifically, 

• What decisions did I make that turned out badly? 
• What did I fail to see at the time? 
• What warning signs did I ignore? 
• What assumption proved to be wrong? 
• What did I do repeatedly despite already knowing better? 
• What did I not do that I should have? 
• What did I learn from the experience that I subsequently forgot? 

Plus I leave one last question at the very end, “Are there patterns connecting several apparently unrelated mistakes?” That last question may be the most valuable as it can be the most actionable. One mistake is an anecdote but a recurring pattern of what leads to mistakes constitutes some serious information. 

As I mentioned above, in my "quiver" metaphor, life gives us a quiver of arrows, but we tend to think of the arrows as our successes—skills, accomplishments, good decisions or experiences. Yet, it’s fair to say that our mistakes belong in that same quiver too! 

So in the next blog we’ll take a look at these bad arrows and see how we can turn them into positive experiences that will add to our wisdom…

A slower learning pace

Over two years ago, I decided to learn Spanish from scratch and thanks to new tools tapping into modern technology, including now AI, I thought it would be a cake-walk compared to the horrible methods I used in the past and during all my youth when I set to learn English, German and Italian. 

Since my return to language learning, I found out the hard way that some “kinks” got in the way of my “gift for learning foreign languages”. 

Now, my progress is more slower and no later than yesterday, I stumbled when I was ask by my AI tutor what flowers were in my garden, I could name two or three species like daisies and columbines, but stumbled lamentably when I was looking for the equivalent names in Spanish for lavender and lupine, but couldn’t even remember them in English or French. 

I thought something might be going wrong with my memory. Sure, there’s a difference between forgetting and having trouble retrieving a word. What reassured me, however, was that this was not really a failure of knowledge. I knew perfectly well what lavender and lupine looked like; what failed me was the retrieval of their names. And that distinction may become increasingly important as we grow older. 

Perhaps learning a language later in life is less about how much we can absorb than about how quickly we can retrieve what we have already learned. The vocabulary may still be there, somewhere in the crowded attic of the brain, but finding just the right box can take a little longer. 

So I should stop blaming my “gift for languages” and start making allowances for the rather more crowded filing cabinet in my head. The good news is that curiosity is still working perfectly well—and as long as that’s the case, I intend to keep opening new drawers, even if I sometimes have to wait a little longer to find what I put in them...

Using AI as a purchasing tool (Part Three)

The sketchy details I garnered from the contractors and the guidance received through the AI estimate motivated me to go and visit the fence manufacturer located in Provo, one hour drive from Park City. '

I finally understood what the fence contractors were unable to explain about the product, not because they were ignorant, but because that smartly engineered product was precisely marketed by engineers who had no idea how to tell the full story of their wonderful product in ways that fully explained their product working potential.

Then, I realized what the “Park City curse” is, as seen by people who don’t live in our town, but work there all the time and deal with many affluent folks who don’t seem to care about what they’re asked to pay. 

So these contractors are trained by our environment never to hesitate to charge as much as the market will bear. In the process they’re blindsided by the fact that not all of their potential clients are millionaires. They should instead be sensitive to that reality, namely the potential for “real folks” that live among the überrich, and somehow leave the door ajar to invite a request for a discount. 

Let me be clear, by just asking for instance: “What don’t you like about my quote?” or “Is it a cost problem that prevents you from moving forward with the project I presented to you?” If they can easily take advantage of the super rich, good for them, but they clearly end up losing business by scaring the rest of normal people like me and the rest of us...

Using AI as a purchasing tool (Part Two)

In going on line, I identified three or four contractors that I felt could do the job and had reasonably good ratings. I drafted a Request for Quote (RFQ) and sent it to them. The first company that responded sent me an estimator who quickly and erroneously measured the job, showed me some samples and a couple days later sent me his quote. 

It was as high as I expected, maybe even higher, outrageous as most construction bills are these days. I could have bought the material and built the goddamn fence myself, but I felt that I had passed the age for this kind of punishment. 

So I went to some of my favorite AI sources and asked the robot to take the quote apart by describing it in detail and feeding it the PDF file containing the estimate and the company’s conditions. 

It returned a result that pulled apart the cost of that exact type of fence, shortcomings in the offer and the complete labor cost estimate based on an expensive place like Park City at the current working rates. 

It showed me step by step how to negotiate, including what to say and not say, and suggested I aim for a 25% reduction, noting that I would be quite happy if I only could obtain a lesser, 20% discount. 

That’s what I did with the best bid I had received, and after quite a bit of wrangling got to my ultimate target. Thank you AI! Tomorrow I’ll share with you my take away from that first in-depth experience with AI as a negotiator...

Using AI as a purchasing tool (Part One)

Making a large and complicated purchase that includes a chain of components is never clear-cut and often involves various price structures independent of one another. Home building, projects and renovations are such perfect examples that incorporate a multitude of elements and the variability of each one of them.

If not properly handled, they can end up having a huge impact on the final cost of the project especially considering the job uniqueness and its infrequent occurrence. Early this month, I decided to build a 262’ long fence in my backyard. There was a short 45 year-old 89’ wooden fence in the south end of my garden that was totally rotten and ready to fall that I felt needed to be dealt with. 

I didn’t like it that much but was a convenient 3’ tall fence separating my property to that of the neighbor to the south. As always, one thought led to another and “while I was at it” I decided to look for a more encompassing fence, 6’ tall, that would free me of the deer invasion that we’ve suffered since 2020. This is the thought process that initiated the project. 

Tomorrow we’ll see how I turned to AI for the cost estimate….

My trick for falling asleep (Part Two)

My trick for falling asleep sounds so simple that you might say, “It can’t be true!” I’ve challenged it myself by researching deeper into the subject and found that my description of the “hyperactive brain” was spot‑on. Calling it this way is just what clinicians describe as cognitive arousal — the mind generating thoughts, associations, and narratives that keep the nervous system alert. It doesn’t require insomnia; it’s simply a mind that doesn’t downshift easily. 

The way I describe it — thoughts that grow, get loud, and become hurdles — seems to be a very accurate depiction of how mental activity can block the transition into sleep. In fact my breathing technique is not just intuitive, it’s grounded in solid science. The idea of focusing intensely on one’s breathing is essentially a form of attention anchoring, a core mechanism in meditation and in many clinical sleep interventions. 

In fact by giving my mind a single, simple task, I prevent it from spinning up new thoughts and that’s exactly what mindfulness‑based therapies aim for. By moving to slow, attentive breathing I tell my body to shift into a “rest and digest” mode. It makes my heart rate drop, decreases muscle tension, and transitions my brain toward sleep‑friendly rhythms. It also interrupts rumination loops by becoming my sole and unique focus. 

This is precisely the mechanism that breaks the chain of escalating thoughts. It’s certainly true that your years of meditation help. People who meditate regularly show faster sleep onset, lower nighttime anxiety, better emotional regulation, improved ability to redirect attention. Still that very simple technique is accessible to anyone, even without meditation experience. 

I’m not presenting this approach as a magic cure or a rigid rule. I’m just describing my experience, my struggle, my discovery and my encouragement to others. Finally, I’m not trying to force sleep, I’m just creating the conditions in which sleep can arrive on its own. Of course, much easier said than done!