TRANSACTION

October 25th, 2018

Consider the similarities between these two situations:  A friend owes us money and is avoiding us despite our attempts to get into contact with this friend

and the situation when we find out a friend has been talking ill of us behind our back.

Both are disappointing, unsavory situations that can easily spark feelings of anger, frustration and even depression.

Isn’t it interesting that the feelings of being owed a financial debt and being insulted are quite similar?

We might want to look a little more closely at the word ‘transaction’.  In both situations, some kind of transaction has taken place.  One fits the word more narrowly, and the other fits it more abstractly.  In the case of being owed money, the word transaction fits without explanation.  But what about the slight?

The word ‘transaction’ is formed from two parts.  ‘Trans’ meaning across, or between, and action, which needs no redefining. Transaction, at it’s most basic sense, simply means an action between two things, and primarily for our purposes, it’s an action between two people.   Suddenly the insult fits the meaning of transaction: it’s an action taken on the part of someone we know, the ramifications of which eventually flow to us.

Episode 93, entitled The Generator, deals with the concept of generosity, but it does well to bring the concept under the umbrella of transaction.  We might narrowly think of generosity as giving without expecting some kind of ROI, or return on investment, like a donation of sorts.  But even a donation is a kind of transaction.  It’s an action across or between two parties, and like the unsolicited compliment or even the above-average tip it is given with the tacit understanding that nothing further is expected in return.

With this primitive discussion of generosity, we can turn back to the friend who owes us money and ask the question: when have we given enough, or too much?  or we might ask: when has help turned into a situation where we are being taken advantage of?  There are plenty of people who are mindlessly hobbled by notions of greed and behaviors of dependency, so how do we find the cut-off point so to speak?

It depends on two things: memory, and conceptual principles.

The first one, memory, is fairly easy.  If we have a long memory and simply remember the time in the 2^nd grade when such a friend stood up for us on the playground and saved us from some bully, that might go a long way years later when such a friend is stuck on hard times and even worse, hobbled by some sort of mindset that is replete with bad cyclical thinking and ruts of behavior.  Then again, there’s also the notion that feeding such dependency only entrenches such behavior further.  The path here is either sticky or slippery, but it sure isn’t clear.

Such is the reason why conceptual principles is the other pillar for framing such situations properly.  We might think of a startup company that is working on a moonshot problem.  Years might go by and tons of capital might be spent without any kind of result.  With a narrow set of conceptual principles that ride on a sort of “I scratch your back, you scratch my back” framework, such an investor might get fed up and pull funding, thinking that they’d been hamstrung. 

A good example was the genome project.  After 7 years of work, only 1% of the genome had been decoded, and many people extrapolated these numbers poorly and said it was going to take 700 years to decode the whole genome.  That’s a very poor conceptual framework that does not see reality properly.  It’s seeing the situation with the preconceived notion that’s of the same sort as “you scratch my back I scratch your back.”  What ended up happening with the Genome project was that all 100% was decoded within 14 years.  So getting to that 1% turned out to be half the work.  But without knowing the end of the story, it’s really hard to see that without the right conceptual principles to guide one’s thinking. 

If the friend that owes us money is spiraling down into some sort of dependency on drugs, then more money probably isn’t the best idea.  But if such a friend is trying to start a small business, then we might realize that such a person is very busy and stressed, and our repeated phone calls, while warranted, might be just adding unneeded stress during a difficult time.  Many, if not all of us have had the feeling of receiving a last warning sort of notification regarding a bill we need to pay.  Somehow, such notifications impress us to ignore the problem more, probably because they inspire stress and fear.  As the friend who wants money back, we might not realize that our warranted desires are actually undermining the transaction that we want to take place.  When ruthlessness is introduced, the termination of a friendship is always colloquially reasoned away with the precept “business is business”.  And doing so is a retreat to a much more narrow view of what a transaction is and what generosity is. 

We might regard the person who is willing to do the opposite and be generous to a kind of fault as a foolish person.  But we would do well to examine the sort of mindset required to open our wallet again and say “here take more.”

It’s exact in nature to the old advice of ‘turn the other cheek’, which is in essence a declaration to one’s self that there is no bottom to the well of our generosity, whether given or taken.  It’s a creed that leads to a kind of invincible mindset, one that states that no matter how bad things get, I can stand back up, brush myself off, smile at fate – no matter it’s cruelty or greed – laugh in the face of it and move on to something productive.  And we must at this point take a good clear look at what the word ‘productive’ means.  It’s our ability to produce something.  A synonym might be generate, as in, our ability to generate things.  And it’s our ability to generate things that enables us to be generous.

We almost always pay the bare minimum, as set by the seller, the one who has produced whatever thing we wish to acquire and who has set the price, and little is better than something that is free, though the experience feels just a bit hollow.  We might be well to think of the rare experience at a restaurant when we feel compelled to give a tip exceeding the cultural designation.  What has happened in this instance?  The person who inspires such a tip by producing some kind of excellent service still operates with the assumption that their work will be valued in accordance to the cultural norms.  This is one of the areas of life where our narrow definition of the word ‘transaction’ seems to strain the seams of the word and spill out into a more generous area.  There are other less intuitive examples where transaction begins to smear to the point of transparency, and other cherished ideas begin to shine through.

The well-paid executive of a charity for example.  As a person who might want to donate to a charity, it might seem against the nature of a charity for the top executive to receive a 6-figure salary.  If such a person wants to work for a charity, shouldn’t their life and means reflect such?  This is a narrow view of the notion of transaction with regards to the nature of running an organization that hopes to do good.  The board of such an organization might be stumped as to how to level-up their fundraising abilities in order to do more good, and so they find a capable candidate who can help such an organization level-up and ultimately do lots more good, but in order to attract such a candidate, there has to be a good salary to match the generous talent of such a person.  To the person of little means who wishes to make a donation, this seems at first glance to just be another play by the greedy corporate world, but given the logic above, it’s possible such a person could easily be wrong.

Transaction, might at first glance be unsavory when applied to all nature of human interaction.  We probably feel uncomfortable thinking of our generosity as a sort of transaction because such would imply an expectation of return on our part which is not at the core of our equally-narrow definition of generosity.  However, both words, taken in tandem can open each other up.  If we look at transaction less as an equal trade and more as an act of generosity, we might find in the long run – one that outstrips our memory and may even go beyond our conceptual principles, the generosity comes back to us, in accordance to another old precept:

What goes around, comes around.

With this cycle in mind, we might ask: what am I adding?

Even more important would be the question: What else can I add to this cycle?  More than what I’m currently getting back?

The episode references Episode 93:The Generator, Episode 125: Rut, Episode 42: Level-up.

ENDLESS LOOM

October 24th, 2018

In the old Greek epic The Odyssey, Penelope, the wife of Odysseus sits at a loom each day and works on a piece of tapestry, and each night she undoes some of her work.    She does this because she’s announced that when the work is done she’ll finally remarry, when in reality she’s trying to buy time in hopes that her husband Odysseus will come home and help her put things in order.

Penelope has a good reason.  But many of us do not when it comes to a project that has been dragging on for months or even years.  Something we’re sort of always working on but never bringing to any kind of fruition. 

Penelope genuinely did not want to finish because she simply didn’t want to remarry.  But what about our project.  Why does it take so long?  Is there some unsavory marriage waiting for us at the end of the journey?

Perhaps there is.  Perhaps we fear being married to the fallout when we ship our project and maybe it fails.  So we make one little part of it a little more perfect.  We fuss over another part that needs to be redone.  We scrap some of it, we get down on ourselves and stop working on it all together, we do anything but make meaningful strides towards the finish line.

The genius of Penelope’s plan was that it had no fixed deadline, and she could drag things on in all sorts of ways, by undoing her work and letting the scope of the project get bigger and bigger and bigger. Considering her husband Odysseus took nearly two decades to get home, it’s wise that she did not cap herself with a deadline of say 6 months.

Penelope’s genius here is exactly at the root of our own problem when it comes to projects we are working on.  We would be best served not to launch our project when the work is done, because the work is never done.  We would be best to fix a deadline, and launch on that date, no matter what.  Such a date starts moving towards us, like the walls in a trash compactor, and what was once slow fussy work starts turning into light speed productivity.  The way to cure the endless loom is the deadline, the line drawn in the sand of time that signals that the current phase of the project, no matter what will die when we cross that line.  Doing so might just give life to another phase of the project when it starts to yield some meaningful feedback. 

GONE FISHING

October 23rd, 2018

Spend enough time on the sea and you’ll see something breach.  A whale or a dolphin or a fish.  Something will eventually split the surface and come into full view for a second or two.

This happens in the same way that everyone gets a good idea.  If we wait long enough, some half-decent idea will come around, even if we don’t have the practice to recognize it and write it down before it disappears into the abyss.  Or if we don’t have the discipline to execute on it and the wherewithal to analyze the result.

Anyone who has been on the sea in any capacity knows that looming wonder of what else is beneath the surface.  Even a child who knows little of the sea can probably guess that there are tons of creatures that never come even close to the surface, let alone breach in a way that we can see them.

Such an image is well suited to the pool of ideas that we as individuals may draw on from within our own selves.  We might treat our creative spirit like whale watching.  We simply just wait for things to come up.  Some days are good days when there’s more than a couple sightings, and other days are terrible when nothing is seen but flat blue ocean for as far as the eye can see.

Still yet others have figured out how to produce content of all manner every day.  Compared to the whale watchers, these people might be akin to deep sea fishermen, who know where to go and what to do to haul up goods of all sorts: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Like someone who will not surrender the day without creating something novel and potentially useful, the fisherman is more a trade and a practice rather than some kind of divinely inspired activity.  

Just imagine how successful a fisherman would be if he had to wait for something to breach the surface in order to try and catch it.  This would be a nearly impossible task, and surely such a fisherman would quit and go on to do something else.

It sounds ridiculous in analogy but this is exactly what many expect and submit to when it comes to that deep desire to create something, whether it be a novel someone wants to write, a company they want to start or a movie they’d like to make, or any other myriad facets of creativity that we as people might be compelled to do.

An interesting aspect of this analogy with the fisherman is his isolation.  He cannot acquire his catch in the safety of his home, or at the bar with friends or while watching T.V.  The fisherman is out on his own, maybe with a small group of fisherman, on a boat, getting the work done.  We might take a cue from such isolation and cut out all the distractions that keep us from doing more interesting work.  This might require turning off the phone, or even abandoning the computer and taking a couple blank sheets of paper and a pen somewhere quiet.  Perhaps we need our own ‘do not enter’ sign.  Perhaps it can say something else, like,

gone fishing.

THAT PROMISING DUD

October 22nd, 2018

Anyone who has seen a firework show has probably been able to pick out one of the duds. 

One of those wiggling dots of light goes up and simply disappears.  No explosion, no burst of light.  Someone probably primed that firework, someone made it, someone integrated it’s launch into the rest of the sequence, and when finally it shoots up.  Nothing happens.

But we would be well served to expect this.

We do what we can, we design, we prepare, we build, and in the end our effort sails up into darkness and. . . nothing happens.

Sometimes that happens.  Sometimes its helpful to figure out what happened.  Other times its impossible to figure out what went wrong, and it’s better to refocus on the present and move forward.

Imagine what a terrible firework show it would be if the first rocket that went up was a dud, and because that first attempt didn’t go as planned, the show ends.  Right then and there.  No, these firework shows are equipped with hundreds if not thousands of rockets, all rigged with care, with the full knowledge that some of them just won’t work.   

Our efforts for any given project or in life in general might be better thought of like a firework show.  There will be duds, there might be a lot of them,

but if anything,

they only set a darker stage for a brighter bang when the next thing works.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE PRECIOUS WEAK LINK

October 21st, 2018

In the early 1830’s when Lucilius was learning the ropes of being a sailor on a merchant ship ferrying goods round the horn to California and beyond, he found a lot of his work catering more and more to the maintenance and reconstruction of the ship as they sailed.  As the weeks at sea went on and he learned how to splice and lash, serve line and repair sail, the Boatswain gave him more and more work, presumably because he was doing a good job.

He was high up in the rigging repairing some sail and noticed how the sails were attached to their spars.  The line used was untarred, it was weaker line.  Lucilius had noticed such line in a few places around the ship and figured that it was slipshod work.  Someone lazy had been unwilling to go get more of the correct line and do it properly.

Lucilius took a moment after finishing his patch with the sail and looked out at the long expanse stretching out over the world and into the offing.  The wind was steady from the west and held taught the sails like cleaved pillows, weighing the ship forward.  The sea toward the morning sun wore a gash of white spotted light, like a single calm candle flame reaching from the horizon to the ship.  It was a beautiful morning and Lucilius decided to do the extra work and start replacing the untarred line with extra he had in his bag.  He cut lose the first untarred lashing, put an eye splice in fresh line, cow-hitched it and began to make turns to secure that part of the sail.

The Boatswain had been higher up in the rigging and paused in other work to watch Lucilius.  He left his perch and climbed down to where Lucilius sat straddling one of the spars.

“Replacing one of those lashings?”

“Yeh, figured I would.”

“Ye can’t use tarred line for that.”

“Reason I decided to replace it is because none of these are tarred.”

“For good reason.”

“But they won’t last as long.”

“Rather replace them more often than have them be too strong.”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about it Lucy, something is gonna break.  Something always breaks.  Whether from age, or chafe, or during a storm, or what have you.”

“I know, so wouldn’t you want it to be stronger so it doesn’t break?”

“Doesn’t matter how strong you make a thing, something’s still always gonna break.”

“I don’t understand,” Lucilius said, looking at all the untarred lashings along the length of the spar.

“Look what that sail is attached to.”

“The spar.”

“And what’s that attached to?”

“The Mast.”

“And being a young’un here who seems to like fixing things, which of those three would you rather repair when something breaks.”

Lucilius kept looking at the equation.

“Think of it this way.”  The boatswain grabbed a hold of a rope band that Lucilius had fashioned around his own wrist.  “Let’s say I attached a hundred pound weight to this here Turk’s head and threw it over board.  Which would you pray snaps off first, the rope right here, or your arm?”

“The rope of course.”  Lucilius said and then looked back at the rigging.

“Same with the ship.  Things are gonna break.  An sailors have been dealin’ with it for long enough to know that we can control how things break when they do break.  Would much rather have to deal with a limp sail draggin’ at the end of a line than have the sail take the spar with it, or worse, take down the whole damn mast.”

Lucilius smiled, thinking about the genius behind such foresight as the Boatswain started to climb back up to his work.

“A weak link can be a very very good thing, if only you know where to place it so that it’ll be an advantage to yeh.”