How will you solve today’s challenges for your own LLM?
We are large living language models. Our brains are much more advanced than any AI on the market, our chemical/physical memories carry more information than Google. And how you feed and train your own mind is critical to your growth and evolution.
What are your inputs?
- Conversations with others (in-person, zoom, email, text)
- Ingesting new information (reading, watching illuminating media)
- Mindless media (social media, dumb tv, tv news, online news, celebrity anything)
- Trash reading
How Are You Organizing Your Data?
What AI does well, beyond what our brains are capable of, is catalog and access a massive LLM of data all at once. RAGS is the term used for the software equivalent of memory recall. Retrieve, Augment, Generate. I’m going to let the experts explain it a bit better than I can.
Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) is an architecture that augments the capabilities of a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT by adding an information retrieval system that provides grounding data. Adding an information retrieval system gives you control over grounding data used by an LLM when it formulates a response. For an enterprise solution, RAG architecture means that you can constrain generative AI to your enterprise content sourced from vectorized documents and images, and other data formats if you have embedding models for that content. – MSFT – on RAG and Generative AI
And this same tech article gives us a great starting point for my examination of our own human RAG system.
An information retrieval system should provide:
- Indexing strategies that load and refresh at scale, for all of your content, at the frequency you require.
- Query capabilities and relevance tuning. The system should return relevant results, in the short-form formats necessary for meeting the token length requirements of LLM inputs.
- Security, global reach, and reliability for both data and operations.
- Integration with embedding models for indexing, and chat models or language understanding models for retrieval.
My Human Training Levers
Learning what gives you pleasure is a core requirement of our journey as humans. Some will take this process to the extreme at the expense of other necessary parts of life. (addiction, violence, binging) As an evolving human, with ambition, I have put some time into understanding my own pleasure principle and a simple flight plan for my journey. I’d like to share a little of those ideas.
We are pleasure-driven animals. Most of our activities are fueled by our desire for some pleasurable outcome. Some are better at delayed gratification and can build businesses and empires based on what they want further down the road. Most of us, are more immediate in our need for ya-yas.
Some of the ways I get my ya-yas:
- Eating a great meal
- Watching an intense/artistic form of entertainment.
- Intimacy
- Playing competitive tennis (and winning)
- Holding hands and cuddling with my significant other
- Getting my two dogs all ecstatic with love and joy
- A quick pop in my hot tub (endorphins on demand)
- Sweets
- Mid-day nap
- Reading a good book
- Uninterrupted time to write (like I have most mornings as I get up between 5 – 6 am)
Learning what gives you inspiration.
- An exciting project I’m working on (business or creative)
- Working with other smart and focused people
- Helping someone else realize their dream or potential
- Talking to a deep thinker about their passions
- Reading inspiring or challenging books
- Going on a movie jag for a director I admire
Learning what brings your energy down, or depletes your enthusiasm.
- Mundane chores (housekeeping, dishes, laundry, bill paying)
- Mechanical work tasks involving poorly structured data (sorting data in Excel rather than in a database)
- Working with people who are pedantic, arrogant, angry, lazy, or unappreciative of the team
- Working out in the form of torture (gyms are not my happy place)
In Our Human Flight
We’ve only got one purpose in our singular flight on Earth: Love fully and completely.
- Love our children and families
- Love our body and it’s health
- Love our partner with care, time, and patient attention
- Love our mind (the care and feeding of your brain IS what provokes joy or depression)
- Love our planet and fellow pilots
Find our path to joy by doing more of what we love and less of what we hate.
Navigating the Balance
I’ve got to do a number of things I don’t particularly enjoy today. How I approach them, my attitude while doing them, even my current moment of dread at having to do them, all form a chunk of my lifestream. Let’s say it’s the dentist. Gross. Painful. Expensive. Yet, important if I plan to keep skipping along my life with a healthy smile.
What is essential in our short life is several riddles that only we can solve for ourselves.
- How am I going to make enough money to survive and then do what I want to do?
- How can I keep my body healthy and fit without drudgery?
- How can I experience love deeply? (For me this means exploring all of life with a single partner.)
- How can I express my joy and love to others? (partner, kids, colleagues, the world at large)
- How do I keep my own engine running smoothly, inspired, aspirational, and creatively vibrant?
Money, Health, Love, Creative Expression
For me, creative expression is one of my deepest forms of pleasure, meditation, and prayer. In Mathew Fox’s work, I learned about the Via Creativa. Our creative expressions are prayers to God. Our sharing of our creative expression is like fellowship. And our tribe of like-minded travelers becomes our church.
Who are you spending time with? Who gives you ideas and sparks new imaginative conversations? Who drags conversations into the muck of politics, celebrity, or mindless entertainment?
Do not waste your precious flight on activities,
people, and projects that do not feed your soul.
John McElhenney — let’s connect online
Facebook & LinkedIn & The Whole Parent
*image: a dayplanning app from my sci-fi novel hyper:soul
Resources:
- Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore
- Original Blessing, Matthew Fox
- The Little Red Book of Mindfulness, John Oakley McElhenney
- RAG Overview, Microsoft Azure
Please check out a few of my books on AMAZON.
