Peace of Mind

May 25, 2021

When I put my head on the pillow at the end of the day, I want to go to sleep peacefully. It’s okay to occasionally get excited or nervous about what’s the next day will bring. Perhaps I’ll be hosting a training to a broader audience, or I’ll get to meet a person where we’ll decide on something that affects my future. It’s a healthy type of stress as long as it’s not negatively affecting my sleep for days in a row. However, I don’t want to keep thinking about a task that’s not finished or how my code will behave if the demand in Asia will cause a peak while I’m sleeping in the European timezone. I also don’t want to think about how I should have behaved differently on a specific occasion. I certainly don’t want to be bothered with the thoughts of how I risked my money on some specific financial asset

. I want to sleep without being mentally disturbed, and it’s only possible if I have peace of mind.

Some people can easily avoid getting second thoughts while they’re about to sleep. When you don’t challenge yourself at work or stagnate in your life, you could have peace of mind because you don’t even try to grow. After all, stress comes with change as a response to adapt. The same is true for people who don’t invest. If they don’t risk their financial assets for better outcomes, they don’t have to worry about losing; however, they also don’t have the chance of winning. If you’re a person who wants to grow, you take risks with what you are and what you have. Having peace of mind, in this case, gets more challenging because there are uncertainties. There are known unknowns that you know that you don’t know. This unknown type adds a bit of risk that you can avoid by simply educating or positioning yourself correctly. Then there are unknown unknowns

which you can’t do anything about them. They are “what if”s that bother you when you lay down and close your eyes. They are the worst enemies of having peace of mind.

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Is it possible to have it, then? Can we have our cake and eat it too? I believe it’s possible to challenge ourselves, take risks, continuously grow and also have peace of mind in our lives. When we don’t stagnate, we will always be in a state where change is evident. With change comes uncertainties. If we can delegate what’s troubling us to a wide selection of instruments, then we’ll have the chance to minimize the risk and clear our minds.

Artist: Gülfemin Buğu Tekcan — cosmodotart

Software engineering provides incredible beneficial tools to minimize the risks associated with what the business entails. Let’s go over some of them and then see how we can translate them into our daily lives.

One of them is automated tests. When a professional software engineer programs a particular type of feature, they also implement a piece of code that’s called a test. The goal of this test is to make sure the feature works as intended. The test can be as simple as checking if two plus two equals four if the feature is a mathematical addition. It can also be very complex testing a sign-up flow by inputting dummy customer values to check if the validations work correctly. For example, in most sign-up forms, you should provide a valid email address. A test would challenge this by giving incorrect email input values and checking if the form will complain. A good test is the one that runs automatically and often—thus catching potential problems quickly if some other engineer changes the code and breaks the sign-up form.

Another tool software engineers have in their toolbelt to minimize the risks is called defensive programming. “It is a form of defensive design intended to ensure the continuing function of a piece of software under foreseen circumstances.”

While automated tests protect software engineers from known unknowns; defensive programming aims to minimize the risks coming from unknown unknowns. A software engineer follows defensive programming by limiting the functionality of a feature. Let’s say our feature is mathematical division. It’s not mathematically possible to divide a number by zero, but a user of this software can still input zero as the divisor. The engineer prohibits using the number zero

as the divisor to cover the unknowns of user behavior.

While both techniques are specific to software engineering, what they do is fighting against uncertainties. You can easily find as many or even more uncertainties as in your life than a software system. I came to understand that we can successfully translate these two techniques into our daily lives.

To fight known unknowns, as the first step, one can use principles. Ray Dalio, the author of Principles, suggests everyone “develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles.”

Whenever you deal with an unknown you encounter, you can construct a principle based on how you respond to it. Then, the next time you experience it, it will no longer be an unknown—you are aware of the reality, and your response comes from your principle. This is much like software engineers implementing new automated tests whenever they encounter a bug in the system. When a bug appears in a given piece of software, it becomes a known unknown that the engineer needs to respond to. After fixing the bug, the engineer implements a test to make sure the same bug does not surface again. You can follow the same path in your lives and implement your principles as you go. “Having good principles for dealing with the realities we encounter is the most important driver of how well we handle them,” adds Ray Dalio—they are the perfect tool to have peace of mind in the presence of known unknowns.

Then comes the unknown unknowns: The queen of the uncertainties. It is impossible to fight with unknown unknowns simply because we don’t know and can’t anticipate anything about them. Software engineers program defensively to avoid an unknown set of unknowns. You can follow a similar path and act defensively in your life. You don’t know how much the world will need your profession or expertise in the future, for example—thus, it makes sense to scale your skillset not only vertically but horizontally as well.

Same goes valid with finance which is our second example. There is an adage attributed to Warren Buffett on not putting all eggs in one basket.

Investment itself is a great driver of achieving peace of mind, even starting with a single cent—although the more, the better. To be better prepared for the uncertainties, it’s wise to spread the investments through multiple instruments and sometimes even countries.

Peace of mind is about achieving growth through sustainable risk levels. You can still take huge risks with your life, career, or investments. However, you wouldn’t stay sane if you didn’t take more minor risks to save yourself if your bet fails. On the other hand, having principles ready will help you go through your daily life by exploring the correct responses to specific events and then using them in the long run. If you keep true to your principles, you also won’t experience any second thoughts while getting ready to go to sleep.

PS: If sleeping peacefully is not enough reason for you, research shows that people with peace of mind have more positive dreams than that don’t.

Too many people are taking huge risks with cryptocurrencies these days.

“Unknown unknowns are risks that come from situations that are so unexpected that they would not be considered.” — There are known knowns on Wikipedia.

Defensive programming on Wikipedia

This example can be found on Page 7 of Defensive Programming slides from the Software Security course by Penn State University.

Please take a look at principles.com, which also covers the book itself.

There is a metaphor called T-shaped to explain people with both vertical and horizontal skillset.

When does putting all of your eggs in one basket make investment sense? by Tony Byrne on Wealth & Tax Management. The article is interesting because it suggests that the opposite of the egg-basket adage could make sense and attribute this idea to Warren Buffett.

If you live in a country that doesn’t have economic stability, it makes sense to move some of the assets to other countries as a means to take advantage of foundational trust.

Peace of mind and anxiety in the waking state are related to the affective content of dreams by Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, and Antti Revonsuo from the University of Turku, Finland.