The optimal thinking pattern: diffuse vs. focused

here I patiently await in hiding..

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?

Mine’s been pretty good this week! I felt like I finally had some time to think. I spent quite some time updating my vision book. One of my favourite things about the vision book is seeing how previously scary goals became a reality. It’s actually crazy how much has changed since November when I made it.🤯

(๑*ᗜ*) Anime

Yay anime! As you can see, anime is life and I simply cannot go more than 2 days without watching anime. I watched a lot of anime this week…

I finished Plastic Memories, which made my heart break a little even though I didn’t actually like it that much?? That probably makes no sense lol but if you’ve watched it lmk if that makes a modicum of sense to you. 😅

dkm Plastic Memories fans…

I also started watching Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea and Dr. Stone. Since I’ve been on a slice-of-life binge, let’s feature Dr. Stone today! It’s a super over-the-top shonen - think Naruto but even more over the top. The art is hilarious. If you can get over the style, it’s seriously amazing.

Isn’t this actually impressive LOL

The premise is that this high school guy Taiju finally decides to confess his love to his long-time crush. And just when he starts doing that, a blinding green light strikes the Earth and turns every single human into a stone.

‘freaking dammit’ - Taiju, probably.

Anyways, several millennia later, Taiju wakes up to find that the modern world disappeared and nature has taken over everything. His genius science friend, Senku, also survived and had been awake for the past few months prior and already started doing science stuff with the goal of reviving civilization and all its lost science.

Animals were spared though.

Rivalries and things happen, but the BEST PART is the explanations as Senku reinvents scientific discoveries (eg. gunpowder, electricity). The explanations are super accurate and detailed. I’m learning so much that I didn’t pay attention to back in school. I genuinely think schools should show this anime in class to spark more interest in science.

Highly recommend!

📖 Books

I continued reading Blue Ocean Strategy and The Body Keeps the Score from last week.

As a refresher, The Body Keeps The Score is a book about trauma (**CONSIDER THIS A TRIGGER WARNING**). It explains how trauma manifests itself and wrecks havoc on your body and mind. Through a combination of scientific literature and storytelling, Bessel explains how trauma rewires the brain to put people in a constant state of stress or numbness, which in turn results in a bunch of physical issues as well.

Trauma may be able to explain some things that you struggle with and just can’t overcome no matter how hard you try.

Last week I mentioned that the scariest thing to me is how insidious trauma is. So many people live with trauma, get stuck in it, and just unwittingly screw things up and miss out on so many parts of life.

I’m nearing the end of the book and am now learning about the methods to help resolve trauma. There were a couple of themes that especially stood out to me. The first is the idea of integration. It seems that a lot of healing and therapy is focused on integrating the trauma with the present self; whether this is through speech, movement, or enactments of the past.

I think it’s like all these pieces that were neglected and ignored are made to be part of the self again.

The second theme is the power of physical actions. In particular, the book explains that intentional breathing is one of the only actions that can help you bridge between the cortex (the outer layer of the brain where conscious higher-level functions take place eg. language, decision-making) and the subcortex (the older inner layers where more primitive functions are processed eg. emotions).

I’ve been told that breathwork is supposed to be good for you but tbh I never took it seriously because I didn’t understand the science behind it. I’m definitely going to incorporate breathwork into my life now. 😮‍💨

I just want to clarify that I’m obviously not a therapist or any sort of licensed professional. This is just what I got as a layperson reading this book, so please don’t take what I say as any more than things to perhaps think about. I could have misunderstood many things. Please seek professional help if any of this pertains to you!

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

The focused vs. diffuse thinking model was popularized by Barbara Oakly who created the Learning How to Learn course.

Focused thinking is concentrated and depends on established neural pathways and existing thought patterns. It’s about thinking through familiar problems and executing sequentially. For example, it’s the thinking mode for writing boiler plate code that you’ve done something similar to before.

In contrast, diffuse thinking is when your mind relaxes and you go into a daydreaming state. The diffuse thinking mode allows your subconscious to roam free and make connections between disparate ideas and concepts, resulting in innovative solutions. For example, when I get stuck on some code, I usually go for a walk. When I come back, I often suddenly realize how to solve the problem because my brain was subconsciously working on the problem in diffuse thinking mode.

Kinda looks like pinball doesn’t it?

In practice, Barbara says the best approach is to cycle between focused and diffuse thinking. For example, you may want to use focused thinking to define the problem you are trying to solve or the concept you are trying to learn. Then, you’d want to go into diffuse thinking to allow your subconscious mind to process and come up with solutions.

I try my best to follow this thinking pattern when I’m working on projects. This week, I spent a lot of time in diffuse thinking mode thinking about what kind of course or product I could make that can deliver a lot of value for y’all. I came up with a few ideas, my favourites so far being:

1. A YouTube Academy (I think what’s missing from programs already out there is that there’s not as much focus on designing accountability into the process - it’s a hard grind for a LONG time tbh).

2. A full course on how to do “adult learning” ie. consistent self learning. It’ll have detailed topic guides and revamped templates for scoreboards and an accountability community too of course!

I’ll be thinking more about this for the next few weeks so please do let me know your thoughts and/or suggestions! ❤️

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👨‍💻 Coding

As reflected by my scoreboard, I resumed the blockchain course again! 🎉I worked through transactions and also familiarized myself with the codebase of the capstone project and started working on it, even though I’m only 1/3 of the way through the course.

This is a tip that’s actually been a game-changer for me. Especially for technical courses, what I always do is prime myself by familiarizing myself with either the final capstone project or a project that I really want to do that inspired me to take the course in the first place. Priming is scientifically shown to help with faster learning and better retention. Personally, I also find it more motivating because all the parts of the course seem less disjoint if I can envison how they fit together in the end!

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

⚠️ This one is pretty hard in SQL!

Meta/Facebook is quite keen on pushing their new programming language Hack to all their offices. They ran a survey to quantify the popularity of the language and send it to their employees. To promote Hack they have decided to pair developers which love Hack with the ones who hate it so the fans can convert the opposition. Their pair criteria is to match the biggest fan with biggest opposition, second biggest fan with second biggest opposition, and so on. Write a query which returns this pairing. Output employee ids of paired employees. Sort users with the same popularity value by id in ascending order.

Duplicates in pairings can be left in the solution. For example, (2, 3) and (3, 2) should both be in the solution.

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️

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PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina