Marcelo Menegali

One of the struggles I have in life is that there are countless subjects that pique my interest. To give you an idea, I have more books than I can read in half a decade, and I have bought or bookmarked more online courses & tutorials than I can watch in a lifetime.

And I'm often faced with a feeling of overwhelm, of wanting it all but not having the time and the focus to pursue everything. What ends up happening is that I end up in an intellectual brownian motion of sorts (the random, aimless movement of particles), being pushed and pulled by inner forces and by the environment I'm in, always in movement but never going far.

Let's pick, for instance, one of the activities that I'd like to get better at: art. When I'm feeling the pull of art, I might do one or two lessons from an online course or go to the park to sketch something based on observation. The next time, I'll pick a lesson from a different course or choose a different media to work on (e.g., gouache instead of graphite sketches). Then, after some months, I'll go back to the first course having forgotten the lessons I watched... so I'll start over. Then, I'll rewatch a Youtube tutorial because last time I thought it was interesting, but I didn't put it into practice. You get the picture. At the end of this process, six months have gone by and I don't have much to show for it. I haven't gone deep in anything, I just got my toes wet in several different shallow ponds.

Now apply this same process for my interests in math, in machine learning, in 3D modelling, in computer science, in robotics, in French, in Italian, in ancient history, in playing the piano, in singing, in playing the guitar, in weightlifting, in running, in martial arts.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's okay to have multiple interests. It's an admirable feature of a human being, in my opinion. I'll call this feature philomathy. I'm avoiding polymathy because this word implies that you're already skilled. So, philomathy is desirable.

But it needs to be expressed in a better way than that.

Thinking about this problem, one of the solutions that came to me is to think in terms of holons. It might be OK to pursue wildly varying activities, as long as they amount to something larger than themselves: see all activities as pieces of a puzzle, bricks on a building.

So, how does one put this into practice? The pragmatic shift begins with reflection: taking the time to write about what I truly want from life, identifying my core interests, and seeing the threads that might link them.

This leads to the second step: choosing my next activity with this larger map in mind. Sometimes I'll have to find an activity that, while not scratching the immediate itch, is close enough to what's alive in me and has the added benefit of being a better piece for the larger puzzle.

From there, it's about breaking a large mission into smaller, more completable parts. A grand desire like "become fluent in Italian" feels overwhelming, but it can be broken down into intermediate steps like "read one book in Italian" or "have a ten-minute conversation in Italian with a native speaker".

It can be distilled even further into tiny, achievable actions: "do today's Duolingo lesson", or "read a single page of a book in Italian and take note of the words that are unfamiliar", "talk to Gemini about the verb X in the Y tense". I don't need to have the entire grand mission figured out, but if I can just ensure each small activity serves a next-level goal (even if that goal is simply to "repeat this activity N times and see how it feels) my efforts will already have a set direction.

Finally, I've realized that with a little intentionality, almost any activity can become a holon. This very text, for instance, began as a registry of a stream of consciousness before bed last week, and I decided to transform it into a holon by making a blog post out of it. In fact, it was while writing the original version of this text that I decided to create this blog, so that I would have a channel to more easily convert activities into holons (blog posts, in this case).

The asymptote to strive for is that every moment of my day is used in building a cohesive life, a monument being laid out brick-by-brick, a joyful journey.

The term holon was coined by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book, "The Ghost in the Machine". The term is derived from the Greek word for "whole" ('ὅλος', or 'hólos') and the Greek suffix for "part" ('-ον', or '-on'), and it means an entity that is a self-contained whole and, at the same time, a part of a larger system.

For instance, a single cell in your liver is a complete, self-contained whole. Yet, it is also fundamentally a part of a larger system: the liver. The liver itself functions as a complete organ, but it too is merely a part of a greater whole: the person. This nested structure of "whole/parts" is precisely what defines a holon, making both the cell and the liver perfect examples of the concept.

Koestler argued that the stability and efficiency of any complex system, whether biological or man-made, depends on it being a hierarchy of stable, intermediate forms. He argued that a system composed of holons is more resistant to disruption and can evolve more quickly than one that is not.

This principle is brilliantly illustrated in the parable of two watchmakers, by Herbert A. Simon, in his essay called "The Architecture of Complexity":

"There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who manufactured very fine watches. Both of them were highly regarded, and the phones in their workshops rang frequently -- new customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered, while Tempus became poorer and poorer and finally lost his shop. What was the reason? The watches the men made consisted of about 1,000 parts each. Tempus had so constructed his that if he had one partly assembled and had to put it down -- to answer the phone, say -- it immediately fell to pieces and had to be reassembled from the elements. The better the customers liked his watches, the more they phoned him, the more difficult it became for him to find enough uninterrupted time to finish a watch. The watches that Hora made were no less complex than those of Tempus. But he had designed them so that he could put together subassemblies of about ten elements each. Ten of these subassemblies, again, could be put together into a larger subassembly; and a system of ten of the latter subassemblies constituted the whole watch. Hence, when Hora had to put down a partly assembled watch in order to answer the phone, he lost only a small part of his work, and he assembled his watches in only a fraction of the man-hours it took Tempus."

I find this to be a profoundly important concept, and I look forward to further explore it in my next post. Stay tuned!

I have recently run across the following quote on social media apps:

"First, make it exist. You can make it good later."

This is a powerful mantra for anyone starting a new endeavor. It's a direct counter-attack to the paralysis that often comes from high expectations. We often have a grand vision in our minds, and the gap between that perfect ideal and our blank canvas can be intimidating.

This initial step is all about momentum. It’s about taking action and putting something down: a rough draft, a messy sketch, a single blob of code that barely works. It's the tangible proof that you've started.

Once that first version exists, you have something to react to, critique, and improve. It can even serve just as a reference in case you decide to start over from scratch. This iterative process of refinement can only begin once there is something to refine, though. So, for now, the focus is simply on making it exist.

Welcome to my blog!