ON YOUR MARK

December 2nd, 2019

Just before you start something, anything, especially something creative, there is a moment when the human spirit seems to come up to the edge of an insidious chiasm.  At first it’s just a quick skip to bridge the gap, and then as we hesitate and lollygag, the chiasm grows wider and deeper.  Procrastination becomes it’s own whirlpool, it’s own vicious cycle.

Before we know it, we’re medicating our own psychology with distraction.  Checking a social media app, scrolling through reddit, or going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole of needless research.  Anything to keep from facing the growing barrier between ourselves and the thing we should be doing.  The thing we wish we were doing. 

The answer here is to simply start as fast as possible and let the structure of the process arise on it’s own.  There are tricks to this, like setting a 5 minute timer and hitting the keys before or on the timer, or like a trick used by insomniacs:  don’t lie awake in bed because then the mind becomes accustomed to being awake in bed and fails to associate the environment with sleep, thereby becoming a vicious cycle.  So if you can’t sleep, don’t stay in the bed, or so goes the current thinking on this niche of behavior.

We also have this surreal ability to visualize things on top of the world that we see.  Whether you are reading these words or listening to them while doing something else, for those blessed with visual faculties, it’s strangely possible to suddenly see the green apple floating in space right in front of you.  It just pops up there because I mentioned it.  Of course it’ll fade away as quickly as we forget about it but this ability to superimpose another reality on top of the one we see is a strange tool that is perhaps not used to any remarkably good effect. 

Certainly athletes and performers of a similar nature use visualization techniques akin to this superimposition, and this visualization apparently aides their performance greatly.

But what about for the non-athlete.  How can this visual canvas be used?

Well, to return to that interminable growing canyon of procrastination, one way to use this superimposition is to see – as quickly as possible – the best version of yourself acting as you’d expect that person to.  Leaning into the work before you even feel ready for it.  Imagine that version of you, feeling like they’d left you in the dust, experiencing the exhilaration of leading the pack in a race. 

We are all capable of imagining better versions of ourselves, and certainly many if not all of us sense that this person actually exists in some way, if cooped up by strange constraints, whether that be situational or psychological.  Regardless, there’s a sense that this person could one day finally stretch their legs and take reality for a ride.

Is it possible to visualize this person, and superimpose their actions upon our waking life, and then try to race that person?

Maybe,

But first we have to imagine the mark of that person clearly,

Get set to try and outdo that person,

and then go.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: AS ABOVE SO BELOW

December 1st, 2019

Lucilius was beginning to find his work tedious.  Each day loads of different poisons were carted into the lab and he was part of a massive team that was tasked with figuring out how to process the poisons, finding what potential fuel was available and discarding the rest.  The work had always been interesting, like a puzzle, but now after many years the puzzle was beginning to feel solved.  There were certain elements they just couldn’t do anything with, and some so hazardous that workers in the lab sometimes became casualties to the toxins.  And the ones they could process always abided by the same tools they had.  Lucilius was as good as the rest, but it was now as though there was nowhere to grow.

He began to think outside of the confines of the lab, now more like a factory of labs, he realized.  He was curious about where these poisons came from, why they came to this factory of labs, and at the heart of his curiosity was a question:  could the system be changed?  He knew the labs would be able to become far more efficient if the amount of poison they had to process could be less.

He realized that no one knew who decided what came into the lab.  So he decided to find out.  He headed out and found a strange world.  There seemed to be all sorts of different factories, each with its own workers, each factory specializing in a different material that had to be processed.  He discovered an elaborate transport system that connected them all, and through that system he toured his world, meeting workers of all types.  They were of all shapes and sizes, but all so much like him and his coworkers.  All trained – designed nearly – to tackle their specific job. 

Lucilius stayed with some transport workers who seemed to carry different compounds to all sorts of different places.  He stayed on these rounds for a while, exploring the huge network, until he came to a delivery site where he wasn’t permitted to enter.  There was a barrier that he had no idea how to get through.  So he clung to the area and began to watch, seeing what sort of workers could get in and what sort of compounds they delivered.  It took some time, but Lucilius eventually learned the trick that would allow him through, reinventing himself. 

Beyond that secret barrier, Lucilius found a place that was unlike any he had ever seen.  Instead of workers processing compounds, this place was filled with a chattering network.  As far as Lucilius could explore, the workers here were passing messages.  While he didn’t completely understand, and no one seemed to be able to explain the big picture of what was going on, he suspected that this network somehow had an impact on the work that all the factories were tasked with, and after watching the process for some time, he grabbed a message that someone was stuck with and handed it to someone else who quickly and mindlessly took it and off it went into the system.  Soon enough, someone handed Lucilius another message, and then another and then another, but he couldn’t tell what they meant or what he was supposed to do with them so he simply passed them along.  Soon he had many workers handing him all sorts of messages, but he’d grown suspicious of the work and began experimenting.  He tossed some messages to see if there was any difference.  Then he cycled through the workers he handed messages to, giving some none, and giving others far more than usual.  It took years, by moving around to different spots, he began to see patterns.  Most workers simply passed along their messages.  But some seemed greedy to receive them faster.  Some messages were clearly about what was going on in the factories, and others directed those factories.  But there was an even more subtle layer of messages that had to do with something that seemed completely alien.  As though there were patterns that had nothing to do with the factories but also dictated what happened to them.  It seemed as though there were portals to another world where information came from, information in the form of patterned messages, and those patterns seemed to dictate a lot of what was going on.  Lucilius eventually met similar workers who had similar theories, and painstakingly they roamed the network of workers to try and understand what was going on.  But it became ever clearly as they studied that the only way to understand was to change what was going on and see what happened.  So they coordinated their efforts and began to slowly apply pressure on one set of workers they had grown suspicious of.  A group that always seemed very eager to work.  The group agreed with Lucilius’ idea that it might be interesting to see what happened if those workers simply took a break. 

In another world of sorts, a different sort of Lucilius was sitting at a bar, looking at the drink that had just been placed in front of him.  He’d been thinking about the whole world and how so many of the people in it were confined, constricted by systems that lacked the malleability to let their creativity and potential thrive.  The screen above the backbar flipped to a news station and the latest atrocity was being reported with unsteady footage.  It all seemed a sad mess, and certainly there was reason to drink.  A slight smile came to him as he remembered the beverage in front of him.  He gingerly grasped the glass and brought it closer to him.  But as he was about to lift it for a sip, he felt strangely different.  His habit of drinking had been on his mind lately.  And something new was there – a feeling that bothered him.  The lure of blurry relief pulled on him.  Then he let go of the glass, fished out some cash from a pocket, tossed it on the bar and walked out.

WANDERING LIGHTNING ROD

November 30th, 2019

Can you plan discovery?

Can you plan when you’ll have your next great idea?

Perhaps discovery can be anticipated, but planning when a great idea is going to show up?  That’s likely a fantasy.

But despite how difficult it is, we can create conditions where it’s more likely we’ll be struck by a good idea.

We need to create the right conditions for lightening to strike, and lightening rods don’t work very well in basement offices.

We are not unlike lightening rods in this respect.  In order for ideas and giant pulses of electricity to strike, there are a couple non-negotiable ingredients:

We need space.  The right sort of space.

Somewhere to wander, which is easy enough to do.. for a person the range of subjects and topics that are available for your average human are so abundant that a few lifetimes would be fairly easy to fill.

The problem is the other variable.  We can’t wander if we don’t have the time.  And while this is widely acknowledged as the most important resource we have, few actually take the long hard look at their life to maximize this resource. 

Many would rather wile away 8 hours a day 5 times a week and feel reasonably safe about shelter, finances and social connection than perhaps take a big fat red marker to this equation.

As is commonly reported and apparently never taken to heart: no one regrets not working more when they find themselves on a deathbed.

but of course this prescription is phrased in a negative, and without some sort of substitute, the mind is quite poor at filling in the punch line.  We can only imagine the thing being discussed which is of course work.  It’s akin to being asked not to think of a pink elephant.  What do you think of? 

So no wonder people don’t delve into the implications of our tired, dusty aphorisms. 

What’s the opposite of work?  One might think rest and relaxation, so perhaps the question doesn’t correlate with our perspective of the subject.

Perhaps the better rewording of the question is:  what’s the opposite of busywork?

Certainly most people who have contemplated the precious fleeting nature of life will shutter at the idea of wasting it with mere busywork.

The opposite of busywork might be to wander.

We seemed to intuit the value of this also.  Travel is the the ultimate activity in today’s day and age.  But we cram wild, highly scheduled trips into tiny one and two week stints and completely miss the gist of what it means to wander.

We gain return to that important variable: time.

If time is so important, than we need to examine how we are wasting it, and we must look hard at what comforts and pleasures we must be willing to sacrifice in order to have more of this one precious gift.

THEORY OR EXAMPLE?

November 29th, 2019

What comes about first?  And which is more powerful?

Our theory, or an example of that theory?

It can go both ways.  We can come up with a theory and then look for examples where the theory holds true, or we can draw out a theory from examples.

The directions of deduction in these two cases are not equal. Our choice about what to do is better off drawn from examples. But this can be quite dangerous.  As we look for examples about what to do, we naturally look around at what everyone else is doing and thinking.  We can then fall into the trap of following the most common example, and if this becomes our course of action, then we’re no better than a sheep, and at worst we might be a buffalo in the middle of a herd that is headed straight off a cliff.

Naturally the most common thing has tons of examples by default.  Go to school, get a job.  Get promoted over and over or go back to school to get a better job.  This is a common string of examples that people follow.  The strange thing about this prevalent example is that the end result is not only highly predictable, but the probability of the most widely followed path leading to a radically better outcome is going to be rare in proportion to the widespread nature of the mainstream example.

We can turn our attention to examples of paths less followed.  Looking at people who have traced out tangents from the herd might make it seem as though they were simultaneously lucky and courageous and the combination simply worked out.

But this perspective is too reliant on the example in isolation, and fails to incorporate any kind of theory that puts these tangents from the herd into a framework of understanding.

For example, after reading enough biographies of innovative and original people, we might come to discover that their obvious success was preceded by constant failure and setback.  If we find this to be a trend among such people, than an assessment of mere luck and courage might not be a full explanation of what’s going on with these people.  Clearly there’s an ability to endure the pain of failure.  And perhaps it might go even deeper than that.  Perhaps such people follow unconventional ideas that fail because the falsification of their ideas is in fact the only way they can update their model of the world.

Regardless of the theory that we form about such innovative people and the reason why they succeed in ways that are tangential to the herd, it’s more important to notice that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of examples and the necessity of a theory.  If something has a ton of examples, like the aforementioned stereotypical path of success, then we may be in less of a need for a theory to understand it, because the outcome across examples is so robust.  Why bother?

But with less examples, especially examples that follow wildly different paths but that end up at similarly successful places, the formation of a theory is perhaps more appropriate. 

When the obvious choice gets you the obvious outcome, there’s little need for some sort of theory.

But when the counter-intuitive choice is required to get a rare and radical outcome, there’s an opportunity to place things in a framework that can evince the core of the sort of counter-intuition required to find rare and radical outcomes.

This episode references Episode 514: Falsify

TIME & THE QUESTION OF PRESSURE

November 28th, 2019

Any task or goal takes some amount of time to accomplish, and some sort of effort or pressure.  And these two variables toggle each other.

Apply more pressure to the task, and it’ll get done faster.  Apply less pressure and it’ll take longer.

The obvious ideal is to somehow maximize the pressure we have available so that we can get more done.  This is the logic behind the sort of person who is always busy. 

As they say, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. 

The logic holds.  The busy person is someone who is constantly applying a lot of pressure and effort and therefore things get done faster.

The implication of this thinking can lead to questions about how to maximize for energy.  How do I get more energy to do all that I have in mind.  And certainly there are oodles of things we can tinker with in order to unlock more energy for ourselves.  Whether it be exercise, sleep, nutrition or something else.  

Those variables look at the pressure of effort we might apply from a biological energy standpoint.  But these factors don’t give us any kind of direction about where we should then apply our effort, and this is where the most important factor regarding our pressure and effort comes into play.

We can ask: why do we actually do anything at all?

At the heart of anything we do is some kind of emotion that is pushing us to act in a certain way,

These emotions are categorized in all sorts of vague and hazy ways, whether it be drive, determination, ambition, and all like-manner of hollow noun that riddles the pages of magazines like Forbes.

Is there a better way to characterize the set of emotions that drive a person?  That allow that person do discover more energy, effort and pressure to apply to their task?

That question alone, hopefully provokes an emotion, whether you’re reading or listening to it.  There is a strange yawning curiosity that is now waiting for the answer.  As with any question.  Am I supposed to answer it?  Or is someone going to tell me the answer here?

The question itself opens up a cognitive space, like a low-pressure that draws you in.  The well formed question that remains unanswered spawns an entire platoon of subtle emotions that throw us forward - off balance – and into a situation that pressures us to come up with a solution.

Things like drive, ambition, and determination are better explored as the underlying question that is driving someone.  At base someone is wondering a form of: is this possible? Is my understanding wrong?  Naturally for any domain these questions become far more specific and nuanced, but in terms of sheer motivational power, the right question trumps all other mechanisms for generating the energy to apply pressure to a task.

How much pressure is inevitably correlated to the question a person asks themselves.  If we want to save time by finding a larger wealth of motivation and energy, it’s worth it to slow down, and ponder if there is a deeper, more pressing question that we can ask, one that reframes the entire situation in tenser terms – creating a framework of emotion that is more efficient, and therefore faster.