BRAND

June 26th, 2020

What’s the difference between a brand and a reputation?  The two seem remarkably similar, but few people think about their own person as a brand.  Certainly people rebrand themselves when seeking to switch careers, but do we think of our own personal brand on a daily basis?  When talking with friends, while meeting someone new, while working on a personal project, while working for someone else?

Reputation seems to be the word we gravitate towards in most of these circumstances.  We have a reputation to uphold. . . supposedly. 

The two words have one subtle difference that holds across all these considerations: Reputation is what you end up with based on what you’ve done, whereas a brand is a concept through which we project.

Certainly there is an enormous amount of overlap between these two words, but notice this way of using them.  We end up with a reputation, we don’t end up with a brand.  At the same time, a brand can have a reputation, for being a good brand or a cheap, flimsy, unreliable brand.

If a Brand can have a reputation, does that mean a reputation can have a brand?

There’s something awkward about trying to make the words fit in reverse in this way.  The reason may be because one is forward looking, and the other, our reputation, is evidenced only by looking backward.  A brand is a kind of template, or a limited pallet of emotional and topical considerations.  This isn’t to say that something is necessarily out of the purview of the brand, but that the constraints of style and concern that are represented by a brand create a productive lens through which to move forward.  The blueprint of a brand functions like a guiding set of principles about what to create and how to create it.  Whether this be a physical product, a service, or even a relationship between people. 

We all have a reputation, for better or worse, and we all seem to settle on a style, also for better and often for worse.  The result of our life in these capacities is somewhat passive compared to the pressure that a brand-concept can sear into a vision of the future.  In this way, a brand is deliberate, and can aid each of us in the effort to be more deliberate about the life we want to live, tomorrow.

ATTENTIONAL RECURSION

June 25th, 2020

What were we just saying?

How is it that we can forget something that just happened, especially words that we our selves came up with and spoke, and then heard ourselves say? 

The same thing happens somewhere else in our daily experience:

Can you pinpoint the moment when you fall asleep?

In both instances there’s a break in the quality of our attention which has an effect on our memory of the moment, in that moment.

Our normal experience during the day, is a constant renewing and redirecting of attention.  While awake, the attention seems – for the most part – to have an awareness of itself.  Even when we aren’t consciously paying attention to attention itself, attention still seems to have some stewardship of itself. 

A distraction pops up.  The phone rings, a text dings, someone in the room asks a question, and then afterward, the attention surveys the options, checks them against recent memory and if the match is meaningful, we get back to what we were doing. 

Flow states certainly pose an exception to this.  Whether it be the experience of being lost in a good workout or in the details of a project, our actions achieve a kind of synchronicity with our immediate environment, our attentional capacity relaxes it’s recursive efforts.  This variation of how attention functions might explain the similarities in experience between dreaming and flow states.  Both lack the staccato quality of normal waking life that is distracted and disorganized.

Life as we experience it seems pinned with a tension that constantly draws us between this attentional recursion and attentional relax.  We turn on another episode because the experience of being lost in the narrative is pleasurable in the same way a flow state is, or a dream.  And yet the same mechanism seems to be at play when we can’t tear our face away from a social media feed that is causing us to grow increasingly depressed, angry or disturbed.

(As an aside, it might be healthier to regard such feeds as we would a movie with disturbing content – more a function of entertainment than a reality we should take seriously.)

In meditation, a great deal of benefit is won as a person attempts to create the opposite of what most people think of as meditative.  A worthy exercise in meditation is to resist being swept away by the drama wrapped up in a string of thought that carries our attention off in a little “flow” state for a minute or two.  We eventually return to the moment and realize that we’ve failed to pay attention to the breath or the posture, or any number of things that are actually happening.  So we return again and again.  Meditation as a mindfulness practice is an exercise in attentional recursion.  In some sense, we practice by constantly asking: where is my attention right now?  Of course, by verbalizing the question, even in the sub-vocalization we hear in the mind becomes the object of attention.  It is just another thought, the next thought.  But by returning with the object of this question over and over, it seems to become internalized as a process as opposed to an explicit thought. 

Eventually the attentional recursion sweeps enough of the mental dust away and we begin to have the ability during short strings of moments to pay attention to the raw data of the moment without judgment, provocation or a need to double-check the status of attention. 

The real benefit here - the “point” you might say - of meditating and developing this ability is that it enables two things to occur: you gain a new level of thoughtful control over your life and the actions you take.  And secondly, within that control, an individual becomes free from the intoxication of emotion and memories, of future plans and reactions – all of this is swept aside at will, at your discretion, leaving only the pleasant experience of being alive, right now.

DELIBERATELY INSUFFICIENT

June 24th, 2020

What does the concept of an ellipsis have in common with a question?

The trailing 3 dots at the end of a statement or often half statement creates a space. . .

A question does the same thing structurally.  A question creates a space where we imagine an answer might exist.  Or we might see that creates space as a threshold through which we can pass in the hunt for an answer.  Questions are after all calls to adventure to quest on toward a new place of comprehension.

Good teachers to the same thing in reverse.  Say for example a student asks an insightful question that shows they are on the brink of realizing the answer.  Should a teacher answer the question?  Or would it rob the student of an important opportunity to make the cognitive leap on their own?  The great teacher chooses to be deliberately insufficient, realizing that the best answer to some questions is no answer at all.

Great teachers who are sensitively attuned to the cognitive adventure which the student is on, will purposefully create gaps in their lessons, creating a kind of obstacle course to be navigated and surmounted on the part of the student.  The professor who blindly professes at a student is no teacher at all.  The process of learning, instead, is a sort of dance, a conversation, that is likely lead by the teacher but brought to full fruition by the student’s effort, not simply to follow along, but to complement.  We might even wonder about a lose structure of questions and answers being volleyed in pairs, the way puzzle pieces are often composed of both keys and locks for other pieces.  The teacher offers the student a question, which is returned by an answer and a further question to delve deeper into the topic.  We can imagine the teacher following suit, potentially answering the question, but flavoring it, warping the perspective by asking another question for the student to ponder.  We calibrate to one another in this way, approximating toward a common ground of similarly understood perspective.  The role of the teacher, however, is marked by a mind that already knows where the ground is for the perspective to take place, and each question forms a small quest or redirection on a larger quest toward that landscape of perspective the teacher has in mind. 

So why would a teacher seek to be deliberately insufficient?  Why is it important to create gaps that require the student to take a leap, or form the next step or figure the direction on their own?

It would now be quite natural to expect this process of thought to answer it’s own question.  But imagine if this last sentence and this current sentence, and this whole final paragraph didn’t exist.  Imagine if the question stood and you were now in charge of finishing the writing of this episode.  Where would you take it?  How would you finish it?  If the questions and the ideas here created some momentum in your thinking, where does that momentum continue onto as it passes from this sharp turn away from the topic?  You might sit down and put words to paper, perhaps even typing out the question and some of the previous paragraph in order to regain that steam, or perhaps not.  There’s only one way to find out. . .

GAME YOUR BRAIN

June 23rd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Terrence.  You can connect with Terrence on Twitter with the handle @inkwithterrence

You are a system.  Your brain, your body, and even your life, is an interconnected set of systems.

Mental health is highly correlated with a sense of agency, the sense that you can actually do something, that you can have an impact on the world around you.  Mental health declines when we lack a sense of this agency.  And what does that mean in terms of these ‘systems’?  It means that there’s a disconnect between your brain as a system and your larger life.  The two, as a larger system, aren’t functioning properly.  Many people point the finger outward, at the way the world is, and blame that system for the malfunction, the disconnect between their own self and their ability to have an effect.  But all this does is further relinquish a sense of agency. The system can’t really hear you.  Other people can, sure, and so such complaints might have a meaningful impact on the minds of others, but how does this effect your own sense of agency?  Can you see the impact?  Can you measure it?  Do you have evidence?  If you’re focus is on the so-called ‘system’ and it doesn’t seem to change, how does that inform your sense of agency?  Certainly, the result can easily be for the worse. 

In psychology, this leads to something called learned helplessness.  If a person, or even an animal like a dog, attempts to change their situation but their efforts have no effect, and this ineffective effort is taken enough times, the person will begin to believe that they can’t actually do anything.  When placed in a new environment where an impact can be made, such a person won’t even try.

Success, on a personal level, up to the level of society, boils down to gaming the system.  This phrase generally has a negative connotation associated with cheating and tricks.  Wikipedia has a definition ideally worded for this discussion.

Gaming the system can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system to, instead, manipulate the system for a desired outcome.

There is nothing inherently malicious in this definition.  It’s certainly easy to see how this tactic is a good fit for nefarious aims, and we’re all quite certainly aware of how our larger shared systems have been gamed in ways that are perhaps unfair.  But now turn this mechanism back on to yourself.  If you consider yourself a system, defined by the way you habitually behave and think, encoded – we might say – by the structure of your brain, the layout of neurons and the way they are calibrated to habitually fire, then ask:  has your system been gamed?

Certainly.  The proof lies in the tension between the words influence and manipulate.  We’ve all been influenced by those around us, and certainly a great many of us would admit to being manipulated, be it by lovers or politicians or car salesmen.  But the two words mean the same thing, one is merely positive and the other is negative.  Both words define some sort of transitive effect that’s carried out on one party by another with the aim of creating a desired outcome.  Whether that outcome be to sell a broken car, or get a vote, or to avoid telling the truth about where exactly someone was last night and who they were with.

Notice for a moment that much the same thing is happening when someone is trying to tell a convincing lie, or someone is trying to tell the truth.  In both instances the effort is to convince the listener to  believe something in a certain way. 

Now consider this question: can a system game itself?

Time for a personal story – something that just about never happens on Tinkered Thinking.  Ever since I first read the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, I’ve had the desire to be a meditator.  And for all my effort, I couldn’t figure out how to make it a solid practice.  I tried many times over the course of many years until finally I stopped trying.  Despite the fact that countless people, just like me, had figured out how to make a practice of meditation over the millennia, somehow, I just couldn’t.  Does this sound familiar?  This was an instance of learned helplessness.  My efforts consistently failed to have the desired effect, and so, I stopped trying.  Seems sensible.  How many times can we remember hearing “well, if it’s not working out, then just stop, do something else.”  How many times a day is this the advice being given?  How many people are instead saying “well, if it’s possible, then there must be something you’re still not seeing about how it works.”

Many years later several key pieces of information fell into place that allowed me to game my brain.  The first is that structural changes in the brain as attributed to meditation are not detectable until after 3-4 months of daily practice.   What this means is that there’s just a bunch of grunt time that you’ve go to put in.  The next piece of information has to do with habit formation.  Doing something sporadically is the functional equivalent of not doing it at all.  On top of this, sporadic effort is far less likely to result in any tangible result, especially with something like meditation which takes a few months before anything worth much notice takes effect.  (That being said, as an aside there are recent clinical studies that show consistent meditation for just 10 days reduces stress by a noticeable percentage, and this percentage increases significantly by the time you hit 30 days in a row.)  Nonetheless, there appeared to me to be a virtuous fitting together of puzzle pieces.  By the time meditation starts having an effect on my brain, I’ll have already passed that critical habit threshold of doing something 30 days in a row.  The whole endeavor was suddenly much simpler:  I’m just going to sit here every day for at least 10 minutes and not worry about progress, or doing it correctly or anything.  I realized that I could game the system of my brain by focusing solely on the idea of creating a behavioral habit with the realization that if it just kept happening as a part of daily autopilot, then I would eventually reap the benefits.  It worked.

Something similar has happened with Tinkered Thinking. Today marks 800 episodes.  Over half a million words, churned out a little bit everyday.  It certainly seems like an impressive number, but somehow it has required surprisingly little effort.  How can that be?

The brain was gamed.  Tinkered Thinking became a habit, and now, the distinct behavior of a person sitting down to write for 20 or 30 minutes has become a default facet of each and every day.  800 episodes is just the compounded result of one thing done everyday. 

The effect of gaming systems in this way creates a rippling effect.  First you game your own brain, and begin to see better results in your day.  Then with that increased agency, your ability, probability and possibility of gaming a larger system in which you exist goes up.  Tinkered Thinking started off as a somewhat accidental gaming of one brain, and now the message of Tinkered Thinking has thousands of people paying attention, and the hope is that this content games their brains for the better.  We call this influence, but it’s my hope that Tinkered Thinking gives people the knowledge and the tools  and the curiosity to hopefully systematically manipulate and game their own brains, so that each and everyone of us can have a little more agency.  Not only does this make us have greater wellbeing, but it also means that our chances of having a meaningful impact on the world as a system, goes up.

It’s a stale platitude to say it all begins with one’s self.  It’s true, but the platitude is incomplete.  It implies some sort of magic combination of willpower and faith that somehow transforms you into this force for good, and that set up of expectation does little good.  It’s far more practical, and effective to look at yourself as a system, a system that can be gamed, a system that can game itself. 

That original description of gaming the system defines the use of rules and procedures that are meant to protect a system.  That’s a key right there.  Why do we as individuals have habits, both good and bad?  Well the brain can’t tell much difference between the good and the bad ones, it just does them because they make up the set of behaviors that have worked in the past.  One of the rules or procedures that is baked into our beings is this habit circuitry.  It may even be responsible for things as fundamental as breathing and eating – things which we do habitually, and which protect, support and maintain our system as a living organism. 

It’s this habit circuitry that is perhaps the most approachable and offers the greatest potential return.  It’s the thin edge of the wedge that helps us crack open the door to a better life.  But as with any system, there are many levers to pull and many buttons to press, and often we don’t hit upon the right combination for a while.  The same is true of our thoughts, many of which just aren’t helpful, and in order to game that mental world, in order to game your brain, you first have to start by tinkering with your thinking.  

AESTHETICS & FUNCTION

June 22nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the Twitter handle @BlkCab2016

What’s the difference between something that simply works, and something that works just as well but is also beautiful?

How much do aesthetics play in the efficaciousness of any given product, tool, or even an argument?

Most often we just need something that works, something that gets the job done.  Beauty is an afterthought.  A worthy example of this is ropework.  During the golden age of sail, the sort of ropework that evolved is truly a thing of beauty.  The far less august practice of macramé grew out of the ropework developed on ships.  When it comes to rope on a ship, there’s a simple, effective way to get it done, and then after that there is an endless number of ways to accomplish the same task in ways that are increasingly beautiful.  Naturally, these ways require time for the effort, something of which sailors at sea had an abundant amount. 

When the chores are done, beauty is the thing we seek.

As we learn a new skill, our efforts are almost never even concerned with the notion of performing that new skill beautifully.  When beginning, we just want to make something work.  We seek to gain the agency.  It’s only afterwards that our style of agency becomes a point of focus. 

Where exactly is the threshold that separates and joins these two realms of human endeavor?  What is the moment and point when a functioning tool begins to express a sense of beauty, designed or not?  At what point does the young sailor stare at the rope work and begin to see a larger pattern, that is then in the mind remixed, rearranged with a higher sense of design that doesn’t just achieve the original goal, but does so beautifully?

The realm of beauty is not separate from the function we design into our tools, our toys and our lives.  Beauty emerges as the original intent to creates reaches ever further toward the goal which it may have already achieved.  From there, questions of efficiency and improvement become investigations in elegance.  Beauty emerges as function is informed by aesthetics for the better, when the task is not merely done, but done well, and then done beautifully.

The best performers, athletes, sailors, carpenters, painters, dancers, all of these people achieve a better form of their art with an economy of effort, making their work look effortless.  And what does such a paring down of effort and energy achieve?  What is the grand point behind such aesthetic pursuits?

When an artist, or a craftsman has winnowed down their own abilities to bare essentials based on fundamentals, the mind and its energy is then free to abound upon new possibilities with fuel and focus that was once dedicated to sorting the mechanics of function.  Now the artist explores an insipient land. Function is no longer enough, and the task – to stay challenging cracks its own shell to reveal new aim, seeking forever more to refine itself down to an impossible point, always revealing more space to range, like the gap between the mathematician’s asymptote and the number it never reaches, seeing always with a wider imagination, a narrower, deeper realm to venture.