METAQUESTIONS

November 12th, 2019

The ability to form a question is our most vital tool.  It might even be our only real tool from which we derive every other tool we’ve created.   Everything we’ve created has stemmed from some version of

how would I do this?

 or

what can I do with that?

Each step in the process is usually a new question about what we are doing.  And when we find ourselves stuck in the process, one useful thing to wonder is whether or not we have the best question in hand in order to proceed forward productively and efficiently.

This isn’t something we necessarily pickup naturally, but the ability to ask:

Why am I asking and pursuing this current question? 

Can save us loads of time that would otherwise be wasted.  We sometimes catch ourselves in this circumstance.  We’re wrapped up in our thoughts, perhaps we’re looking for something around the house that we’ve lost, but in the process we find something else we forgot we owned, and we notice that it’s broken, but easily fixed, and before we know it, we’ve spent twenty minutes tinkering with it, when suddenly we step back from what we’re doing and ask: what am I doing wasting my time with this?  Wasn’t I looking for something?  Oh yea…..

We can replicate this sort of reboot by having some meta-questions on hand:

Why am I trying to answer this question?

How am I trying to answer this question?

Should I be trying to think of a better question?

It’s helpful at this point to remember how Tinkered Thinking defines a question.  A question is an open-ended concept that creates forward momentum.

In that framework, just about everything we do can be viewed as stemming from some sort of question.  You go to your job in the morning because at some point in the past you asked yourself: how am I going to make money?

Perhaps it’s time to revisit that question.  For example, we can apply that third meta-question to this query about money.  That is: Should I be trying to think of a better question?

A potential example of a better question with regards to making money might be:  Am I aware of all the different ways that people are making money today?

This is essentially asking:  is my information about the world up-to-date.

Perhaps we apply that third metaquestion again:  Is there a better question?

And we realize that we can energize our thinking about new, potentially better questions by using another metaquestion:

Why am I trying to answer this question?

Essentially, why am I trying to answer this question about making money?

The logic is pretty simple:  So I can eat and pay rent and all that stuff.

But like a child equipped with a Why-Shovel, we can keep digging:

What’s the point of paying rent and eating, why am I trying to make those happen?

The answer here seems obvious but people often don’t face it fully.

The answer is, so you can live.

But living really refers to time well spent, not time grinded up at a day job.

So now we can return to the original question: How am I going to make money?, and rephrase it in a much deeper and potentially life-altering way:

How am I going to spend the time I have alive?

INDICATION OF A BAD QUESTION

November 11th, 2019

We do not have a system for identifying good questions and bad questions.  Neither do we have a process for making bad questions better.

We are somewhat plagued by questions.  Far more than we might observe in other species.

What penguin or tortoise is so concerned with the meaning of life that they develop ulcers?  None.

And yet we are primarily driven by questions of one sort or another.  Without being all that conscious about it, poorly formed questions can drive us in unproductive directions or perpetuate self-sabotaging behavior for years.

This happens because of two reasons, one which stems from the other.

First, it’s an unanswerable question.

And because we never achieve a satisfying answer, this question gets repeated.

Here’s an example that many, if not all of us have heard in some circumstance, and in some form or another.

Why don’t you act like I want you to?

It’s easy to imagine a confused and frustrated parent saying this to a child.  And it’s not unimaginable to hear this between lovers.  Certainly it has been said in hushed angry tones between couples in public.

Setting aside all of the problems we might be able to flag for this question, the repetitive nature of such questions – the fact that they are asked over and over to no avail is a very important indication that we might have a bad question.

Another similarly common question that flags the same trouble is:

Why am I so stupid?

Who hasn’t asked this question of themselves?  And yet, the obvious issues with this kind of self talk are abundantly clear beyond the fact that people might be chastising themselves with this unanswerable question on a daily basis.

Other repeated questions might be more subtle, but if you find yourself asking the same thing over and over, it’s time to ask another question, namely:

What’s a better, more specific version of this question that I could ask?

This episode references Episode 30: The Only Tool

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE MOVING MIND

November 10th, 2019

Lucilius was walking along campus when he overheard several friends in debate.  They were looking up at a tree as it swayed in the wind.

“It’s not the tree that’s moving, it’s the wind.”  One of them said.  Lucilius closed his eyes for a moment and enjoyed the feeling of the wind on his face.

“Of course the tree is moving,” another said.  “Can’t you see it move?”  Lucilius opened his eyes and watched the full branches sway back and forth against one another.

A third tried to help.  “The tree is certainly moving, we can see that, and we can feel the wind, so  can’t we say that both the wind and the tree are moving together?”

The group seemed to contemplate this, until a forth spoke up.  “If we weren’t here seeing the tree and feeling the wind, could we say that either are moving?”

“That’s like asking if a falling tree makes a sound in the woods if no one is around to hear it.”

“I suppose,” the other wondered aloud.  “But what if it was a different kind of absence.  What if this was just a dream?  Would there really be wind or a tree?  What would be left to move?”

At that moment Lucilius awoke, opening his eyes, ignorant for a moment as the world around him rushed in.  He laid still breathing in the morning air.  Slowly, his scattered attention began to resolve and he picked up on an image as it moved, coming to life in staggered blips and starts until he caught the flow of his dream and it came to life in his mind.

GENERATING RANDOMNESS

November 9th, 2019

What is creativity?

We can look at the root word, create, and decide that something is somehow being produced.

At this point, most people think of the originality of the thing being produced – that is, the actual creation.

But there is an important ingredient that is often overlooked:

What is the original ‘stuff’ that creativity is reshaping in order to create?

Let’s switch contexts for just a quick second and think about girls trying to describe qualities they’d like to have in a boyfriend.

How cliché is it to hear: spontaneous.

And why is this?  What does it mean?  Clearly it’s for the same reason that we all keep scrolling on social media sites:

We want something fresh, something new, something creative.

But again, what is the original stuff that is used by creativity in order to provide something fresh and novel?

The answer is randomness.  The creative, spontaneous person simultaneously breaks the routine and the predictable, and with randomness generated, then creates a new order.

As a society we’ve created repetitive systems, like the habits that an individual does routinely, and these repetitive systems are an order that we’ve created.  Anything otherwise would just be chaos, and we humans are very very uncomfortable with something as uncertain, unpredictable and uncontrollable as chaos.

Creativity, instead understands both sides of this coin, and requires both.  It generates randomness, or disorder and then creates new order from the non-routine. 

This is why we sometimes hear that destruction is a form of creation.

It’s not, at least not totally, but it is a first step.  The second part of creativity is constructing a new order, a new system or structure, ideally something that might work better.

That first step is why taking a chance on a new project or endeavor can be so scary for many people.  In order to do so we are required to abandon some kind of comfortable routine order and strike out into the unknown, entertaining chaos as we generate randomness.

It’s from that strange substance that we then begin to build anew.

THE SISYPHEAN PLATEAU

November 8th, 2019

The intuitive vision of progress is linear.  We imagine that things will steadily progress each and every day, and each and every effort will contribute to this progress.  This strategy for the future envisions an inclined plane, and each day is just a tiny fractal segment of that wedge.

it’s never the case.  Not only do efforts often fail to produce the results we imagine, but even after much progress, the situation can change and suddenly it can look as though all that progress was in the exact wrong direction.  With enough perseverance, however, and enough willingness to pivot, the project can seem to come all together right at the last moment.

Sound familiar?

When we think of that linear progression, we’re better off to tilt our head as we look at it.  It’s not just a false idea of how progress functions, it’s actually a plateau, a Sisyphean plateau that we return to again and again, thinking falsely once more that this is how things will go.

Progress on most things is more like a stair case, always with fits and starts, and each stair is best imagined as an exponential curve.

For the longest time it seems like nothing is working.  The beginning of an exponential curve is almost flat, and a linear progression looks far far more productive at this point.  But then the exponential curve hits the elbow and suddenly progress looks like a vertical line. 

That is until we hit the next stair in our effort for progress.