A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PEEK-A-BOO MAGIC

October 28th, 2018

Lucilius found himself honored with the opportunity to be a Godfather.  He sat before the smiling infant and wondered what thoughts were running through the child’s mind.  Such thoughts could scarcely be anything couched in words, but more like a kaleidoscope of concept, Lucilius concluded. 

He decided to play the age-old game with the child.  He covered his face with his hands, and then after a few moments, he smiled, opened his hands and said:

Peek-a-Boo!

The young child squealed in delight and surprise at the sight of Lucilius’ face.  Lucilius covered his face once more and the child’s delight simmered down to the usual quiet babble.  He smiled, opened his hands once more and repeated:

Peek-a-Boo!

The child squealed again with delight, and what seemed to Lucilius an equal amount of surprise.

He sat for a moment, smiling at his Godson.  Thinking.

The godson’s mother watched Lucilius’ curious face from across the room, and her new-mother-nerves made her cautiously curious.

“What’s up over there?”

Lucilius looked over at his godson’s mother.  “Oh nothing, I was just thinking about this peek-a-boo thing that we do with kids.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well,” Lucilius said, looking at his godson, “ he probably doesn’t yet have a full grasp as to what constitutes a hand, let alone be able to recognize my hands.  It’s faces that we probably learn first.  Yours is most definitely the very first, and that makes fairly intuitive sense… you are his sole source of nourishment and where he’s spent most time.”

“Yea, ok.  What’s that got to do with peek-a-boo?”

“Well, peek-a-boo doesn’t work with anyone older.  We all know wha t’s going on, and when a person covers their face, there’s no surprise when they take their hands away.”

“Yea, ok, so?” 

“I was just thinking about what must be going on in his head when we play peek-a-boo.”

“Well he can’t see you anymore so he thinks you’re gone and he’s happy when you show up again, whereas I know you haven’t actually left.”

“Yea, I think you’re spot on,” Lucilius said.  “But what occurred to me is what it would take for someone older, like us, to have the same level of surprise.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess like a magic trick.  A magician will count on the thing that we take for granted, which is that when we cover our hand with something, it’s still there behind our hand, like my face here when I play peek-a-boo.  The magician does some sort of switch so that when the result is uncovered there’s been some kind of unanticipated change and that’s how we get that little thrill of excitement like this little guy gets when I play peek-a-boo.”

“I’d never thought of that, but I guess that makes sense.”

“Yea, but I think the cool part is, that this guy wouldn’t get a thrill from the magic trick.”  Lucilius looked to the mother to see if she was following his thinking.

“No… I guess he wouldn’t.”

“Yea… he doesn’t expect anything because he hasn’t learned that my face is still behind my hands when I hold them in place.”

The mother thought for a moment.  And Lucilius continued.

“In some sense, he’s having a more authentic version of reality than we are.  For him, things are simply arising in consciousness, and he’s taking them as they come, whereas we create a story that we go along with, and – for the most part- reality seems to go along with our story because what we’ve figured out is generally accurate, but then there are those simple and easy magic tricks turn us into infants again for a moment.”

The mother looked at her son with a strange look of appreciation.  “yea, you know, it’s been interesting to watch him slowly learn little things.”

Lucilius laughed.  “Perhaps it’s a mistake to learn some of the things we think we know.”

The mother laughed in turn.  “Tell that to my husband.”

Lucilius smiled and turned back to his godson.  He covered his face for a moment and then, smiling, took them away again.

Peek-a-boo

PEBBLE OR SEED?

October 27th, 2018

Anyone new to gardening might pick up a seed and even after close inspection have no idea whether they hold a seed or a pebble.

Imagine such a novice gardener planting a small pebble and nurturing the soil tenderly with hopes that it will sprout and bloom.

Because of that initial mistake, there’s simply no amount of TLC that is going to get a pebble to sprout.  Much energy might be wasted, doubts may rise, motivation may resurge, and all manner of strategy may be employed, but in the end, a pebble is no seed.

The generation of ideas does well to take into account this mistake of seed and pebbles.  Often the generation of a new idea is more important than dwelling on the development of a prior idea.  This becomes a hazy and vague line.   It’s good to persevere and push through adversity, but doing so could just be adding to a sunk-cost that never yields any of the success we might look or hope for.  When is perseverance and pushing through adversity a good idea and when does it become clear that it’s time to stop and pivot? 

For example, it’s generally established within the scientific community that meditation does not yield noticeable brain changes for at least three months.  The subjective experience of such results might be difficult to pin down, but if it were fair to say that a person also does not experience much change in the way of subjective experience until this three month period is accrued, it would be a shame for anyone who stops after two and a half months.  Such a person might give up the practice, thinking that what they’d been nurturing was just a pebble when in reality they were feeding an Infernal Parking Meter  (See episode 78 for what constitutes an Infernal Parking Meter).

The problem of pebble or seed may be more a question of scope.  Plants and trees generally produce lots of seeds for the same exact reason that a  gardener should not fuss over any given seed that may be a pebble in disguise: even some of the seeds don’t sprout.  In this respect we have zoomed out to a larger picture.  We see gardening on a larger scale and realize that in order to grow a whole garden, we cannot obsess over the possibility of one small flower. 

We can take such an image and apply it to our individual financial strategy.  Wealthy people rarely only have one source of income, they have many.  While many of us devote the majority of our time and effort to one job, like a gardener who cares for only one plant, a wealthy individual is generally stimulated by the process of nurturing many incomes.   In this respect, it suddenly makes sense that losing one’s job is one of the most stressful things that can happen in a person’s life.  Losing just one source of income out of many is never mentioned in the same company.  For equally obvious reason: all is not lost if there are auxiliary sources of income in place.

The productive writer also benefits from such a practice.  Following the first idea just about never pans out.  One writer once referred to the practice as akin to sifting for gold: going through a lot of material and only occasionally finding small useful nuggets.    But tiny shiny pieces stand out from pebbles far better than seeds and the whole difficulty of whether to try and develop an idea or move on is lost. 

We might want to ask ourselves at this point:  how do I know if I have a pebble or a seed?  Should I just move on?

We can spend years gazing at the darn little thing, and we might make the mistake of thinking all those wasted years are proof that what we have is indeed no seed because it’s never sprouted.

The mistake here is of a different order.

If we never ship a project, we’ll never even have the chance to nurture it.

If we don’t write down the idea, we won’t see if it leads to a bigger idea.

If we don’t open up our business concept to the market, we’ll never know if it’ll yield another income.

Simply,

If we don’t plant what we have in our hand, we won’t know if it’ll sprout.

This episode references Episode 78: Infernal Parking Meter and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

October 26th, 2018

Such a phrase is pinned to the passive dreamers.  Those who seem to do a lot of thinking, or day dreaming and not much action.

They might have a look as though they are far away, as though they imagine themselves in a different place from where their body is, often thinking of some kind of idyllic future, or nostalgic past.

The problem is quite the opposite from being far removed from one’s self.  Someone with their head in the clouds would be hard pressed to be more isolated from those clouds, the sky, and anything around them.  They are in fact buried within themselves, lost in a made-up story of their own making.  A narrative that can be increasingly fraught with inaccuracy when cut off from reality.  This is a kind of blindness, one that can be worse than the loss of eyesight, for it robs a person of the greatest gift we have: the present.

Being lost in thought isn’t much different from having one’s head in the clouds.  Such prolonged ‘thinking’ has almost no lasting effect unless we act on such thoughts or translate them in some way, through writing or some other medium.  Chances are high that all that thinking is just a waste of the present.

We’d do well to ask: how often do I have my head in the clouds?  How often am I lost in thought?

Nothing is more powerful than being present in the here and now.  The present is our only tool for shaping the future, but if we have our head in the clouds we relinquish that tool and we will fail to see that particular opportunity passing by that could make tomorrow look more like that vision we see in the clouds.

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.