THE REQUIREMENTS OF AN IDEA

January 8th, 2020

The theft performed by colleges and universities isn’t just financial in terms of student loans.

The bigger theft might be that such institutions convinced so many that you need a degree in order to have a good idea.

Take into account that the added debt that comes with a degree severely limits an individual’s opportunity to take chances.  Debts require regular payments, and regular payments naturally require a job.  Needless to say, there’s not much wiggle room between the acquisition of a degree and the time when a debt comes knocking.

What exactly is higher education for?

The superficial answer that has proved to be nothing but fantasy is that it’s a gateway to a better job and a better standard of living.  The reality shows that it’s generally a way of seducing one’s self into a paralyzing situation.

None of this creates an environment where new ideas flourish with the opportunity to be explored.

Many of the forces that have arisen with the development of college and university programs go directly against the sorts of things required to explore, namely time, space, and the freedom to think curiously.

The quickest way to dumb someone down below their natural level of intelligence is to give them an unnecessarily large amount of stress for an interminable period of time.  The neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has done research to show just how detrimental such stress is on our cognitive abilities.  Debt is the perfect inducement of this kind of stress.

Creative solutions do not arise during this kind of stress.  Certainly there are outliers.  Given a large enough population there is going to be a small subset of people who manage to think well enough despite this stress to invent creative solutions to get out of such stress, and also given a large enough population there are going to be some who just get lucky, but it’s a mistake to tout these rare instances of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps as examples that the poor masses can follow.  This misunderstands the statistics afforded by a large population.  Most people are simply incapable of pulling off this trick.  It’s akin to asking a team of people to perform at work after sleep depriving them for one hundred hours.  Everyone is going to do terribly, and maybe, given a large enough population, there is going to be a tiny portion of people with just the right physiology to pull it off.  But to expect everyone to do it no problem and criticize them as lazy when they don’t?  That’s lazy thinking that results in no real understanding on the part of the person who criticizes.

People respond well to small isolated instances of stress.  Short bouts of stress are good for the body and brain, which means that for the most part, if we want people to perform better, we need to aim for people at large to live more relaxed lives.  As neuroendocrinologists like Sapolsky have uncovered, the science is there to make a substantial health argument for something like a basic income.  Pilot studies for such programs have shown drastic reductions in emotional disorders among a host of other benefits.

On an individual level, however, the implications can be equally powerful.  Instead of solving for the external reason of stress, such as debt or poverty, it is possible to solve for the stress itself from an internal standpoint.

Things like meditation and exercise can – over time - have enormous impacts on the severity and presence of stress no matter the external pressures.  But these require the most important ingredient: time.

Which for such a person – as with all people – is the most valuable resource.  Hoarding some for such personal reasons may seem unwise from a financial standpoint when that time can be further converted into a little more money, but in the long run, such a selfish use of time can pay off enormously in ways that far outweigh the smalls sums that would have been gained had that time been spent at another part-time job.

INSUFFERABLE PERSISTENCE

January 7th, 2020

Many people do not succeed because they don’t bother to show up.  The logic is that the success rate is low, so why even try?

Sometimes, the contours of the answer are embedded in the shape of the question.  And this one gives away the trick.

See what happens when we invert the question:  If few people are bothering to try, is it any surprise that the success rate is so low?

This is one instance where correlation and causation are probably pretty tight.  Our success with anything depends on chance and our ability to persistently try, again and again.

Notice it’s not either or.  It’s not either, we get lucky with chance, or we just bang our heads against the task until it works.  Both chance and persistence are fundamental here.

The reason is because each time we try, we do something a little different.  We internalize failure, ideally learning from it, and our strategy changes a little as a result of integrating this new information.  Our next attempt is a new one, and we can never be sure how it will pan out.  Nor can we be exactly sure what we decide to do for that next attempt.  Our next idea is not something we plan.  It is, like your next thought, a bit random.  This is chance at play in an intimate dance with our experience of being a thinking, acting human being.  While we can plan what we’ll do in the future, we cannot actually know what we’ll do until we get there.  It’s a bit like rolling the dice, but it’s a die with millions of options that are dependent on who we are, how we think, how we regulate emotions, what we know, and what we’ve done.

If there’s something we want to succeed at, it’s a matter of rolling that die again and again.  The odds that you hit upon a strategy and an action that starts working goes up the more times you try.

Simply,

Overwhelm fate with an insufferable persistence and eventually people will say that your success was fate.

ADORABLE GLITCH

January 6th, 2020

It took 629 day for Tinkered Thinking to get on Spotify.  That’s a long time.  And it’s not as though no effort was made in the beginning, it’s just that there was a tiny glitch that held up the whole process.

It required a little digging to figure it out, and a little coding to fix it, but at the bottom of that search the problem turned out to be incredibly simple and so easy it deserves nothing more than an eye roll.

. . . and perhaps an episode to commemorate the tiny glitches that we leave hanging in our lives.

Tinkered Thinking is fortunate that fans reached out and asked for the podcast to get on Spotify and this was a very pleasant reason to dig in to the problem.

In other areas of life we are not so fortunate to have such positive reasons to fix things.  We might think of a falling out with a friend that might turn out to be due to a tiny and innocuous misunderstanding if we were to dig into it.  Or we might think of that oil change we were supposed to schedule last month, or the taxes we’re late on, or the subscription we need to cancel, or the Podcast we’ve been meaning to how some support for by starting a subscription, or the doctor appointment we need to make, or any countless other hanging threads we have in life.

Each has the potential to compound with time into unwanted results that far exceed their original worth.  It’s the exact opposite of a good investment.

The best investments take the marathon view.  You buy stock with a long term view and forget about it and time takes care of the rest.

The glitches in our life are things we should have taken care of once, and then likewise forgotten about.  Instead they linger, giving us unnecessary amounts of stress that only grow with time each time we remember what we didn’t do.

So often when we finally dig into it, the reaction is:

Oh?  That’s all it was?

Thinking back on all the stressful remembrances it’s worth wondering how much better life would have been without all those pinpricks of stress.

It could easily turn out to be a benefit to imagine the future negatively every time some small pressing issue comes up.

Is this going to stress me out every time I think about it in the future if I don’t take care of it right now?

Then we can ask:

Would you like to give your future self the gift of a life with less stress?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE MIND'S PIROUETTE

January 5th, 2020

The alarm blared a stabbing noise.  It was still dark, and even under heavy covers Lucilius was cold.  He reached out from the warmer cocoon of bed and slapped around until the buzzer went dead.  He was tired and it was too early but he had to get up.

The taxi was late and Lucilius shivered in the cold rain without coffee in his belly.  The lines at the airport were long and everyone seemed as though they were competing for the worst of moods, miseries breeding purer forms of themselves.  Lucilius managed to lighten up with a little curtesy just for the customs officer, knowing the futility of competing with authority.  He proceeded after the stern nod and once he was at the gate the reprieve before boarding only created the space to dwell on how much of a dismal day it was.

Dotted lines of rain ran spitted down the window.  Beyond, everything faded into the deep gray day.  The lethargic herd of people dripped down into the jet way and slowly –painfully- organized themselves in the plane.

The fluorescent light seemed to pierce the retina and reach back and poke a wounded part of the brain.  Lucilius slumped into his seat, closing his eyes and rested his face against the cold window.  It would all be over at some point.

The plane taxied out and waited in line for its runway.  There was always a slight thrill with takeoff, Lucilius thought, but the grim taste of his mind curdled his appetite for joy.  Misery wanted to last as long as anything else and it held as much reservation about snuffing out its replacement as any living thing might.

The plane finally met its turn at the runway and with some speed it stepped up into the thick wet air, rattling with bumps that felt like personal slights to the people aboard trying to rest with their misery. 

The windows grew dark with thicker cloud as the turbulence increased.  Lucilius opened his eyes, annoyed but curious as the light of day seemed to backtrack.

Water streaked in smooth moving lines across the window.  He watched the wing with it’s red light tilt and wiggle against the dense patches of air as they climbed.

Then the plane broke through the cloud cover and Lucilius’ eyes were filled with a magnificent blue sky, the morning sun flooding a thin layer of gold across the clouds, now a peaceful rolling landscape below.

Lucilius studied the texture of the lofty gilded sea.  It wasn’t until he sighed a deep breath of relief that he noticed how much he was smiling.

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF BUSINESS

January 4th, 2020

By what metric do we understand a business?

The obvious answer to this is that money is the metric.  But this is perhaps only the first step.

The first aim of a business is to be solvent in order to continue operating.  Many would claim that the only other aim of a business is to generate profit, and for those that’s where the game essentially stops. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the concept of a business is a far more expansive.  It has far more to do with cooperation than it does monetary gains of some owner, whether or not this cooperation is in focus or not.  The ramifications of people cooperating in a business will have far greater breadth and reach than will the gains accumulated by a few people who primarily profit from the business.

A rather negative example of this fact is oil companies.  The use of oil as an energy source is a fact that touches every human life either directly or indirectly.  In comparison the profits of this industry have benefited a tiny number of people.   As we’ve seen recently in Australia where thousands of people have been displaced by horrific bushfires and an estimated half a billion animals have perished, it’s clear the real ramifications of this business are now having effects that far exceed anything that a few rich people might do with their pot of gold.

An odd ball company that turns this lack of foresight on it’s head is Tesla.  All the controversy of Tesla has nothing to do with the Tweeting characteristics of it’s CEO and everything to do with that second metric of business: profits.

The primary focus with publicly traded companies is quarterly profits.  Almost nothing else comes close in importance, and Tesla’s direct refusal to make quarterly profits a top priority is the source of all it’s controversy.  Any gains the company has made in its early years has been for the sake of research, development and growth, leaving little left over for investors who have enormous difficulty seeing beyond a Quarterly statement that is always less than 3 months away.

Tesla has stated many times that the main objective of the company is to accelerate the transition to renewable resources.  This is not a metric that can be achieved in any short term way, let alone something that can be tangibly measured on a quarterly basis.  Such a metric might as well be in a different language when delivered to money hungry investors.  Many people simply don’t consider things on such a long timeline, and this is certainly taken into very little account when trying to figure out how well a company is doing.

It’s as incomprehensible as if the oil companies at the beginning of the last century had said that their main objective was not profit but to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a significant margin thereby raising the global temperature.  This would have seemed ludicrous, even though it is the most salient fact of this industry in retrospect.

The question any prospective business owner would do well to ask themselves before starting is:

How will people’s lives be different after the entire life of this idea has run it’s course?