WEAKEST LINK

June 25th, 2018

A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

 

One would be hard pressed to find a concept that has been more over-used in recent years.

 

Why is there no talk of chainmail?

 

 

 

 

 

No person is a single link.  A more apt analogy for our psychology is chainmail.  We may not have strong links in every area.  Hell there may even be missing links and holes.  But this does not mean we snap and fail completely like a chain holding some weight, like a person bearing a single gargantuan stress. 

 

Life is a bit more multi-disciplinary than such images suggest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best to think of a net, one that can be used very effectively even if it’s not in perfect shape.  One that can be repaired, a net that needs maintenance and elbow-grease-love.

 

Just as a broken automatic sliding window doesn’t rule out the usefulness of a car, the chain image is of little use except to pigeonhole people and their efforts, to falsely delineate more clearly a sense of good and bad, failed and reliable.  Our insufferable penchant for such dichotomies is bad in that it gives us an inaccurate way of interpreting events, people and ideas, and blinds us from potential missed opportunities.  We see only a broken link when potentially we could see a valuable resource put to work in a different capacity.

 

Another cultural proverb illuminates this problem:  don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

 

Or as Voltaire once put it: don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes there are weak links in all of us.

 

And as long as we don’t neglect them for too long and let them accumulate. . .

 

None of them are deal breakers.

IBRAIN

June 24th, 2018

Much of advertising is designed to appeal to the quick-solution-seeking, lazy parts of ourselves. 

 

How successful would an advertising campaign be if the product proudly claimed that one had to work consistently every day for the benefits of the product to be realized.  Advertising does the opposite, claiming that the product will make this hard work disappear, that the benefits will come effortlessly.

 

 

 

The truth is somewhere on the spectrum between these two extremes.

Technologies can drastically reduce effort and maximize benefit. 

 

 

 

 

The design of the medieval plow underwent a huge change in Eastern Asia, giving birth to the modern shape of a plow and the use of the old design for centuries is claimed to be the single largest waste of human energy ever, due to the inefficiencies of the original plow shape.

But technologies do not always improve so straightforwardly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smartphones are undeniably more versatile but their effectiveness might be called into question if we are spending countless hours scrolling Facebook or Reddit. Just 20 minutes of this a day, say, in bed before falling asleep, adds up to more than 5 full days a year.  Perhaps that doesn't seem like much.  But how nice would it be to get 5 full days of sleep? 

 

How long does 5 days feel if we couldn't eat for that long?  

What if that 5 days was used to meditate?  Instead of an endless stream of mostly forgotten information, we would have a calmer life, clearer thinking, more appreciation, gratitude and self control.  How might this affect the other 1,420 minutes of each day?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I saw this tagline: "the 57 must-have apps for entrepreneurs". 

No entrepreneur has time for 57 apps, especially if they are trying to start a business.

 

 

 

 

Might the number of apps we have and the time we waste using some of them be a good metric for the good or bad state of our brains? 

We have spring cleaning for the house and we take out the trash daily. Might the same be applied to our phones? Our brains?

Versatile technology means we are given a choice about how to use it.  Will we use the technology to help us be better people or just placate the lazier parts of who we are?

 

 

 

 

Very few people are actually laughing out loud, certainly not as much as is claimed.

 

But those consistently using a meditation app to help them build a good habit are actively using technology to build better brains.

 

TWO EYES

June 23rd, 2018

Watching a 3D movie is interesting for about 7 minutes. After that, it’s easy to forget you’re watching a 3D movie. Perhaps that’s because we are so used to 3D . . . i.e. normal life away from a screen.

Close one eye and try and go about your day though, and quickly it’s apparent that something important is missing. You can make sense of everything alright, but it’s flat as hell and distances feel less intuitive.

 

 

 

 

 

Any given subject, no matter how we are looking at it, always benefits from a shift in perspective. Like flipping a card to see who won the poker round. It can seem like the card has changed, but of course it hasn’t. Our perspective of that card has changed. It no longer holds possible promise or defeat, it reveals certainty. Or rather, our perspective reveals that defeat or victory. Our understanding of the card has deepened because of the shift in perspective.

Think of a child with a new toy, turning it over and over, inspecting every facet of it. learning. This is the joy of the 3D world, experiencing in such a visceral way that everything has many sides to it depending on how we look at it.

Our language hijacks the visual experience as a metaphor. Do you ‘see’ a solution? Can you ‘see’ the point she’s trying to make? For good reason too. The more sides of a given topic that someone can ‘see’ the greater variety of useful and possible interpretations are available…

Looking at a coffee mug with one eye is only one interpretation of that coffee mug, like a face-down card. Open the other eye and it pops. Suddenly you have a lot more information.

We need multiple perspectives on the same thing to understand it. And the more perspectives we do the hard work to ‘see’, to learn and understand, the more well-rounded we may be said to be.

Perhaps this is why life has evolved just about all seeing-creatures with two or more eyes.

From birth we learn constantly through two simultaneous perspectives.

How might we take a cue from evolutionary biology?

Who is better suited? The stubborn one banging against the wall? Or the determined one who looks at the whole wall and notices a door in it? Both are trying to achieve the same thing: getting to the other side. But only one is willing to entertain multiple perspectives of the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course it’s no surprise that one-eyed monsters are considered so… one-track-minded….and, well. dumb.

Maybe a good question to ask is:

Are their any topics that you’re being a real dick about?

 

 

 

(P.S. There is a one-eyed animal, it’s called a copepod. It’s really really small, too small to notice. Which is… perhaps appropriate)

TO UNDERSCORE OR ERASE?

June 22nd, 2018

Our brains have a finicky relationship with facts.

 

Logically, rationally, it would make sense to gobble up as many facts as we can.  Each new fact increases the accuracy of our mental model of the world.  And a more accurate map means you can travel around the real terrain with far more ease.

 

This is not what we do though.

 

If we come across a new fact.  Particularly one that is especially at odds with the way we look at any particular subject.  What do we usually do?

 

We stick to what we know, what we believe, and everything we’ve been doing based on that set of thinking.

 

 

One of the reasons that beliefs are so sticky, is that usually when we come across information that contradicts what we think we know.  Usually it’s false. (like what the crazy person on the street corner says)

 

But not always.  

 

And there’s the catch.  We ignore almost all information that contradicts our ideas.  This means we are also missing out on small bits of important information that could aide us.  We miss out because the habit of ignoring contradicting information is predominately an emotional reaction.

 

How do beliefs change?

  

Beliefs change due to emotional reactions.  It’s the emotional experiences that easily influence how we think, believe and act in the future.

 

Back in the days of the saber tooth tiger, this was bloody useful.

 

Those days are long gone though.

 

The best way to learn is not through our emotional experience of the world.  That mechanism is still useful, but it can also be very misleading.  Calmly, quietly and thoughtfully considering facts gets us to where we’re hoping to go much faster.  Much MUCH faster than simply reacting to what’s going on.

 

Research shows that information contrary to our opinions and beliefs even hardens those preexisting beliefs.  Even if that new information is widely replicated as fact.  The polarization over Climate Change is a prime example.

 

What is the antidote?

 

It’s not easy:

 

It requires slowing down and being skeptical about our own beliefs.  It requires entertaining the idea that our beliefs might be wrong, that our beliefs might even be damaging. 

 

It requires thoughtfully considering.

 

Taking the spotlight off of the quick emotional reaction.

 

Practicing humility.  Remembering:

 

We know far less than we feel we do.

 

There’s a whole lot of world out there.

 

We only have two eyeballs worth of it.  When those two, limited, windows through which we experience the vast universe come across something new.  Maybe different.  Potentially threatening to some entrenched believing system we have.  How do we react?

 

Do you underscore?

 

Or are you willing to erase?

 

And

 

Write something new.

 

Something better.

SLIDING UP

June 21st, 2018

This episode references episode 33 entitled Rose-Colored Cuffs. If you'd like to fully understand the reference, it's suggested that you check out that post first.

We do not install slides where we have staircases for obvious reasons. Slides are fantastic. . .

But only in one direction. 

Every person past playground-age has experienced the difficult results of testing the hypothesis of whether it is possible to go UP a slide. Just like this kid.

Often our success is dependent on a good pair of sneakers and a strong grip. 

Inevitably the stairs prove to be far more convenient.

These structures, and the images evoked by the way we interact with them – or rather the way we try to interact with them can provide some kinder understanding to some of our thoughtfully bad habits:

Our love of conclusions.

Our subsequent tendency to pigeonhole people. . .

Our discomfort with uncertainty.

Our fear of the unknown, the untried & the untested.

On a large enough scale, progress looks much like a staircase. Take this staircase for example.

This staircase, much like the playground staircase, is a ripe analogy.

Each plateau is a rest, a pause between efforts.

And effort here is defined as an interaction with that uncertain space. The space between each stair, between each little plateau. It is the space where failure might creep in. Where we might take a wrong turn. A space that takes energy to interact with in order to make something happen.

Indeed, even when trying to go UP a slide, we invoke the same strategy. With each teetering step, the child tries to grip the slide like a stair. We pause to take a breath, regain balance, and continue.

Each step is like a current conclusion. The last idea we had that panned out. And now we are in a different place, a better place, a higher place with a better perspective, a bigger context. The pattern of the staircase illuminates the solution for getting stuck.

This is often what happens though. We reach a conclusion and we stay there. We get stuck. We get lazy, and we forget what we probably look like from higher up on the staircase.

We form a specific idea about someone, and having reached that conclusion, our ideas about that person stay there, right on that stair and we may be guilty of shackling them with ROSE-COLORED-CUFFS. Totally ignorant of a better perspective, a bigger, more generous context.

Sometimes a person may surprise us. And we are vaulted up a few stairs. 

Somehow, we always seem to forget the surprise and apply it to the future.

We forget that there are more stairs.

In every single aspect of our lives we are climbing a staircase, or usually, just standing in the middle of a staircase, our eyes trained down, locked on the current context. Too lazy to look up and continue the hard work.

Learning something new is climbing a staircase. And each little ‘ah ha!’ moment is the triumph over that uncertain space, when our new footing – a higher footing – is found.

Sometimes the next step is high above, and it’s as if we need to climb a slide to get up there.

Often times this is what we see, looking up at a slide from the bottom. We think, “well that’s not meant to go up.” So we stop. We stay where we are. We climb other stairs. Stairs that still look like stairs. The easy stuff. The low-hanging fruit.

Often times we’d benefit from a little more of that rebellious spirit we all had as kids, when we were willing to entertain ridiculous hypothesizes, testing them, just for the fuck of it, to test our own ability, to test our own ridiculousness.

But then again, if human progress is shaped like that sloping staircase, it shows that walking up the stairs quickly fails as a strategy. The same way low-hanging fruit is easy, but runs out quickly.

To get to the next step, it’s more like climbing a slide.

Enduring the uncertainty for longer.

Entertaining the untried, the untested, and gripping the way up any which way we can, inventing new strategies as we go, and doing our absolute best to do the impossible,

to slide up.

P.S. With practice, with the right idea, the right strategy, or the right technology, getting up that slide can be exhilharating, fast and mindblowing. Like this.