HELPLESSLY HOPEFUL

May 28th, 2021

The endeavours of efforts that we embark upon come with a slippery trap: the hope that our efforts will succeed.  For the person who has taken a shot a many projects, the sting of failure dulls, and expectations temper.  We learn that there are far more factors that lead to success than are in our control, and regardless of how much we try it’s these unknown factors that can make the ideal outcomes of our dreams sink or soar.

For someone who has failed a lot, it can be a bit of mantra to remember that there’s no telling how things will pan out, and that failure is a reasonable and often realistic expectation to nurture.  This might sound defeatist, but the alternative is a far more destructive experience: hitching up all your hope on one aim and then being overwhelmed by crushing disappointment when it doesn’t happen.  Tempering hopeful expectations is simply an efficiency strategy.  If that crushing disappointment when something doesn’t go as hoped can be averted, than our recovery time is far shorter, we can get back to work and take another swing far sooner than if we have to wait for a devastating funk to pass.

But even the most seasoned failure who keeps trying harbours hope.  It’s unavoidable, because without that inkling of hope, we’d never try anything.  Wrapped up in that ideally small kernel of hope is the notion that something new might actually, just actually, work out.  We have to hope because of those unknown factors that we can’t see, anticipate, and take into consideration.  In this context, hope is the notion that despite what we can’t know, something might actually succeed.

It’s this small kernel of hope that creates the ups and downs of any entrepreneurial adventure.  As our efforts come into contact with unknown factors the fall out, the result of those numerous experiments are ripe for emotional resonance.  How we respond to unexpected results is likely the biggest factor in determining whether or not our vision will ever come to fruition.  The ability to pivot with new information is everything.

But still, there’s that pesky hope, constantly trying to grow, feeding on your ideas, your creativity, your plans and fantasy outcomes.  Hope is like a flame, and if it is given too much it will spread and destroy you.  Think for a moment about how fire exists in modern society.  It’s cloistered in fire places, bottled up in the piston cylinders of car engines and for the most part highly controlled.  But society probably wouldn’t exist had it not been for the discovery and use of fire.  Hope is like fire.  Keep is small.  Keep it contained.  But don’t let it go out.

THE ONLY METRIC

May 27th, 2021

Many ingredients are required to create the optimal conditions for good work.  Nutrition, exercise, low stress, and of course, a good night sleep.  A clear and focused mind is the ideal, right?  

What if it’s in fact the other way around?  What if the work has to be good enough to create optimal conditions for that work to be done?  

One of life’s truly great experiences is to be so immersed in some work, some project, some goal or mission that all those presumably necessary ingredients for good work become irrelevant.  Food?  A complete after thought.  Sleep?  A long lost fantasy.  Exercise? Ha, I have better things to do.  When the work is good, and the mission and it’s fruition are imminent, the work becomes our sustenance, if only for a short while.  Such stretches of sprinting are not sustainable, but they can persist for an impressive amount of time.

There is something so counter-intuitive about this phenomenon: it makes the rest of life and it’s offer of pleasures pale in comparison to the chance to…. Work more.  Humans are, for the overwhelming part, predisposed toward idle laziness.  In fact it’s probably accurate to say that all work and productivity is just a short break from our default activity of being lazy and just existing, something social media excels at aiding.  

So what’s the deal with that special type of work where we seem to get high on the challenge?  Such a phenomenon has many names: one’s calling, a passion, one’s mission, etc.  But the ting is we can experience this same frenzy of focus and productivity in multiple disparate domains of life.  The experience seems to be independent of the actual activity.  It’s a meta-mode of our cognition which can arguably take anything and maybe even everything as it’s object of work.

This is the primary insight of the autodidact who revels in the experience of moving from new skill to new skill looking for the common threads of learning and skill acquisition that lace through all human activities.  There is a kind of meta-cognition, a way of thinking that can handle a greater and greater variety of situations and problems more effectively.  This is, in essence, learning how to think, as opposed to learning how to do any one specific thing.  And the only metric for this process and goal of self-teaching is to hunt for that instance when the mind falls into it’s own rhythm of work on a new goal or skill.  The ability to concentrate on something totally foreign with single-minded, undistracted focus is the crown jewel of learning.  Often this happens when we are having fun, especially when playing a new game: we can fall into this state rather fast and the learning likewise occurs with increased speed.  This state, achieving it and being able to revel in it is really the one metric we need when it comes to any complex goal we seek to accomplish.

ENCOURAGING COMPETITORS

May 26th, 2021

What’s a greater signal of strength: attacking your competitors or actually encouraging them?  The default and perhaps natural response is to attack competitors.  They are a threat, are they not?  We all compete for the same resources do we not?  

Our hardwired logic seems to hold this notion of limited resources as an unalterable and golden rule.  Evolutionarily resources were limited and if you couldn’t win the battle you spread to a new location.  Many organisms function on this principle.  

However, there are symbiotic relationships, and this is where cooperation leads to a greater outcome for both parties.  Symbiosis has been around since the dawn of time.  Bees and flowering plants and trees have had a symbiotic relationship since pretty much forever.  At a certain point, one can’t live without the other given a symbiotic relationship.

There appears to be a stark divide: either you cooperate or compete.  But there is perhaps one more perspective that transcends this.  

In groups of tight friends, there is the occasional phenomenon that everyone in the group will be outrageously funny.  When one or two or three people from this tight group is in presence, they have the room in stitches with virtually every single sentence they utter.  Now why is this?  Does such a group of friends function on a kind of symbiosis?  Not really, they can hold their own independently.  So is it competition?  Sort of.  The real answer is that the words cooperation and competition both fail as a construct for labelling the situation.  In this instance competition is encouraged in order to create a better game and outcome for all involved.  This is a kind of symbiotic competition, which is a bit of a contradiction, but it’s a contradiction that works.

It’s similar to hormesis, which is when some kind of stressor - something normally seems as bad - actually makes something better if applied in the correct amount.  Working out, or lifting weights creates a hermetic response.  It stresses the body and in response the body gets stronger.  Something similar is happening in that group of funny friends.  Each joke and laugh is a challenge to the rest of the group to get better.  In the case of those friends, an instance of success is a beneficial threat to the rest of the group to get better.  Success encourages the competition, so why not do that actively and consciously instead of trying to squash the competition?

Any attempt to hold the competition back is ultimately a sign of weakness on the part of the party who sees the competition as a legitimate threat.

HOLLOW THREAT

May 25th, 2021

There’s a specific little seaside down in the north east of the United State of America that employed a clever strategy during the revolutionary war with Britain.  The British naval fleet was no force to scoff at and it was a critical danger to the United States forces, especially those little sea side town.  But luckily, the scrappy fishermen devised a clever solution when they saw a British frigate on the horizon, approaching from Boston.  When the British frigate got close enough, they saw the local fort and realized that it was heavily harmed with dozens of canons.  From the British point of view, it would be suicide to get any closer, and so they turned and left.  The rather amusing bit of this story is that the fort actually had only a couple of cannons.  The rest were logs the fisherman had painted and mounted to look like canons. 

Just as a threat can be hollow, so too can be an effective defence.  It’s a bluff, like going all in during a poker game in an attempt to psych out your opponent.  Take this image for example.  Let’s say your an entrepreneur of little resources and someone with a bit more resources sues you.  That can be tough, emotionally, and it can potentially end one’s efforts.  But let’s say you don’t back down.  You can manage to hire one lawyer who can navigate the initial proceedings of a courtroom, but in addition to this, you hire (or goad several friends) to pose as additional assistance of the legal team.  They dress up in formal attire, don very somber and serious expressions and show up to court and sit with you and your own lawyer.  Think about the visual this creates.  Your bitter opponent assumes that perhaps they’ve over estimated your resources and realizes that they might be actually be pounding on a cement wall with a de-clawed cat paw.

In chess, the phrasing for this is that a good defence is also a good offence.  Of course it also extends beyond chess.  Often when some unexpected life event throws us on our back foot we think solely in terms of defence and fail to think of that defence in terms of a counter-offence.  By being on the defensive we seem to automatically assume we are somehow weaker or less resourceful than if we were trying to mount an offence, but the difference is merely one of perspective, and shifting perspective while on that back foot to one of an offence is likely far more effective for devising an effective response, even if the threat is a hollow one.

TOO BUSY TO GOSSIP

May 24th, 2021

What sort of person gossips, and why do they do it?  Surely everyone has engaged in a little gossip, even if just once to try it out.  In a perverse sort of way, providing a little gossip feels useful.  It often creates a heightened sense of interest and delight in the person listening.  It bears a mask of entertainment and utility.  The utility being that it can be rather useful to know the secret workings and events of other people’s lives who you are connected to.  This is the most unfortunate communication system that seems to be foundational to politics.  There’s absolutely a larger statement to be made about politics as it stems from these notions surrounding gossip.

To be a successful gossip, there needs to be a constant source of input, of news.  This requires looking out for it, or slyly digging for it.  Here the perspective is all outward and parasitic.  It’s like the lumber industry magnate who gets excited about the discovery of a new old growth forest and sees only dollar signs which the forest can be converted to.  The gossip likewise treats their relationships like resources to be ruthlessly mined.  It’s no surprise that a gossip is often a bit of a social butterfly, having many friends, but also having a large turnover in that pool of relationships.  The lumber or oil magnate is similar.  They look for as many different instances of resource as possible, because when those resources get used, they get used up.  

The plain truth about the gossip is that such people often don’t have anything else going on in their life.  Productive people are often just too busy to engage in gossip.  There are more important things at hand.  The focus is not so much inward as it is focused on the highly personal process of creation.

It says a lot about politics that gossip seems to be such a fundamental part of it’s communication system.  Perhaps the field of politics attracts such people because despite the enormous amount of work that could be done by governments, the norm is to do quite the opposite.