MAGIC COMBO

May 10th, 2021

Would you rather be a master of one thing, or really very good at two things?  The traditional answer to this is the axiom: Jack of all trades, master of none.  The judgement is clear, no one wants to be just a ‘Jack’ and a master is far more esteemed.  But this is a bruised spot on the fruit of common sense - it just doesn’t hold true.  What the Jack of all trades can do which is totally unavailable to the master is combine disciplines.

Being an excellent coder likely just means a person is highly employable.  But being an excellent coder and also being good at something else, say painting and drawing, means that a person can cross-pollinate these skills and create for themselves a dirt cheap online store that looks fantastic and works with a droppshipping company that does canvas prints so there’s virtually no overhead.  Such a thing would also be totally automated meaning the artist can now spend more time painting and drawing instead of working as a coder for some company they don’t actually care about.

This example is an individual capitalizing off of the synergy created between a combination of skills.  Imagine now if a third skill was present.  Say for instance this coder also has an unusual amount of knowledge and know-how regarding an industry that has been untouched by digitization.  Gardening for example.  Our hypothetical coder/artist/gardener could build a gardening app, and this build would be driven by the fact that our individual knows what a gardener wants or needs, and this person would also be their own graphic designer.  Everything can be done “in house” literally.  

The fact is, mastery is not as important as it once was.  We think of celebrated composers or mathematicians as having some kind of magical focus that enabled them to become successful, and that’s where our imagination about what’s possible stops.  Frankly, being a master composer in today’s day and age certainly wouldn’t elevate a person the way it would have two hundred years ago.  But a composer who could reinvent musical notation by building a digital app which simplified the entire world of music and made it more accessible to people who haven’t learned musical notation?  Now that could go somewhere, because everyone yearns to be musical in some degree at least: it’s our original language and socialization - who wouldn’t want to express themselves in such a new and primordial way?

The hard part to striking a spark of synergy is in the ability to strip away narratives.  Often our skills are siloed in a narrative about who we are while using that skill, and as a result we are blind to it’s potential use in a totally different area of our own life.  Our thoughts fail to cross-pollenate because the narratives that generate them are incompatible.  But if a person can ease up on their own sense of identity and relax the grip of that narrative, ideas start leaking out and mixing with new areas, and this is where synergy can occur.  Magic is no longer cloistered in the determined drive to master one thing, it’s now in the soup, like a witch’s cauldron that requires just the right amount of different things in order to work.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LITTLE LIE

May 9th, 2021

When Lucilius was a young boy, someone lied to him.  Luckily, the lie worked.  Being a young boy he was full of naiveté and optimism, the perfect combination in order to be gullible.  The lie wasn’t on purpose, of course, as Is the case with most lies.  It was more incidental, a passing thought really, something mostly to entertain the liar than anything having to do with deception.

Lucilius merely asked, as all young children do, what happens when you die?  Where do you go?

“You start over,” was the answer.

“Start over? What do you mean?  Like, you have a new life?”

“No, it’s the same one?”

“Like you start in the same place but you can do things differently?”

“No, it’s the same exact life.”

The boy Lucilius took a moment to contemplate this strange turn of events before asking further.

“So it’s like a loop that just goes over and over?”

“That’s right, which means you better make it a good one, a really good one, full of fun and adventure and excitement and deep experiences. Drink it up now,  otherwise you’ll spend the rest of eternity being thirsty.”

This instantly filled the young Lucilius with a very useful anxiety.  There was so much to do, some many places to go, so many people to meet.  He worried he wouldn’t be able to fit it all in.

It was years later before an older Lucilius realized that he was still operating with that same underlying idea that he would have to live this life over and over, even though he’d long come to his own conclusions about the nature or likelihood of knowing anything about experience after death.  The lie had made it’s mark, but Lucilius was glad for it, his life was indeed full, brimming, and there was still so much more left to explore.

CUSTOM EFFORT

May 8th, 2021

Sometimes the perfect fit doesn’t exist.  But we can spend an extraordinary time looking and waiting for it to turn up.  In a decent handful of these cases, it actually makes a lot more sense to figure out how to make it on your own.  Obviously this doesn’t work for everything: a new set of teeth, for example should best be left to a dentist.  But the perfect backpack? Or the perfect desk?  Or the perfect app?  

There are an unusual number of benefits when out comes to trying to figure out how to make something specifically for yourself.  The most obvious one is that if you succeed, you get exactly what you wanted.  The second is the skills learned along the way to make it happen.  And a sly third benefit is that you understand the real weaknesses of the final product.  By stitching together a custom leather backpack, one develops an intimate understanding about it’s construction that’s simply impossible with something purchased.  If the custom object breaks, not only are the reasons almost instantly understood, but the potential ways to fix it also pop up.  This is almost never the case with something store-bought, in which case we usually just throw it out and buy a new one and hope for the best.

However, it’s so much easier to be lazy.  At least it seems that way, but it’s worthy to wonder about two different lives that a person can live.  One where they have exactly what they have always needed, along with the added pride of achievement due to the fact that they’ve made the darn thing themselves, or another life, where a person is just constantly on the lookout for that one special thing they have in mind, nagged by the need, the idea for days, weeks, months, and even years.  Suddenly a little effort and learning doesn’t seem like such a tall task compared to the long subtle torture of waiting for what you want.

PROMISCUOUS SOURCE

May 7th, 2021

The nature of the news has changed drastically since the advent of the internet.  Formerly esteemed and reputable institutions of information have been sucked into the race-to-the-bottom that is the click-advertising business model.  This is almost old news.  In order to get as many eyeballs and clicks on ads as possible, then the news has to be eye-catching.  But, what if nothing particularly eye-catching happens on a given day, what is a large corporation with a responsibility to make income supposed to do?  This question is at the heart of the poisoning that news organizations have been self-administering.  The answer is to make everything eye-catching, and the best way to get someone’s attention is with something negative.

If asked to look at two screens, one a sea of smilie faces with one frown face, the other a sea of frown faces with one smilie face, we are much much quicker to pick out the single frown face than we are the single smilie face.  We are hardwired to have a penchant for noticing the negative.  This probably has a very understandable evolutionary origin: being able to spot the one predator in an otherwise idyllic environment is far more important than seeing the one positive thing when the situation is awful.  In this way the natural world generally selects for pessimism. And so, pessimism sells, because it’s what people pay attention to, and if people are paying attention, then they are more likely to click on that arbitrary advertisement that likely has nothing to do with the content being consumed.  The ironic thing is that clicking on an advertisement directs someone’s attention away from the original content.  One would think that if the content were so enthralling then a person wouldn’t get distracted by an advertisement, but the business model is counting on someone being distracted from their content.  Seems a bit backwards.  In the days of newspapers, it’s a bit different to run an ad.  In that context it’s really a notification or a reminder that something exists, but in the age of screens, one click and it’s like the entire newspaper disappears.

Faceless corporations aside, what is the individual wishing to be informed to do?  With this layer of poor incentive skewing information into strange pockets of rage and idealism, where does the average person look for a sound perspective on what’s going on in the world?

The answer at first seems like a lot of work: it’s to be your own journalist and triangulate what’s going on across many sources.  Of course this is what the news is supposed to be.  Individually, few of us have the time to go hunt down sources for any given event  or newsworthy item.  But we do have the tools now.  During the age of the newspaper, that was the source.  Perhaps the TV to.  But notice, even with these technologies it wasn’t uncommon to read a couple different newspapers, or check a few different news stations to see what the similarities or different takes on any given issue are.  The internet age only magnifies this capabilities.  Instead of a couple news papers or a few new stations, we can now curate tools to deliver hundreds and thousands of sources.  The key is to realize that curating this set of sources is the only thing the requires any effort.  Take for instance Twitter: some people hate it, some people love it.  The difference is feed-curation.  Those who enjoy it and find it useful and informative have gone through the trouble to tailor who they follow, seeking out individually wise voices on a variety of topics so that when an event occurs, there’s a small pantheon of trusted opinions to scroll through.  

Notice also the difference regarding incentives.  The click-advertising incentive is non-existent for this sort of pantheon of opinion.  A great deal of accounts on twitter are motivated by a sense of trust shared with their audience, and that’s it.  Perhaps there’s a product or a book or a service attached to such a person that they plug, but it’s very likely to be on brand.  Not always, but when authenticity is important for trust, it becomes a metric for filtering the sources  one pays attention to.  The advent of click-advertising took authenticity off the table for many if not all of the large new organizations.  In an age where no single source can be trusted, the key is to be a little promiscuous with one’s sources.  Promiscuous, and picky.

SONG OF THE MIND

May 6th, 2021

Shine a light through a crystal and it’ll split in a certain way.  Toss a pebble into a lake and the ripples will collide with the natural waves.  Say the right combination of words to someone and the song of the mind will change it’s beat.

Generally, though, very few words ruffle the beat of anyone’s mind.  Certainly those who are easily ‘triggered’ or ‘offended’ might seem as though they get ruffled, but that sort of reaction is almost always just part of the song - a chorus if you will.  It’s a song primed to react in a habitual way to a verse with the right sort of content, such things are ‘hooks’ in the exact same way that a pop song might be written.  And if such an idea is offensive, one might pause first to wonder: is this sort of idea a legitimate rock tossed into a placid pond, or is this just more proof in the pudding between a pair of ears comprehending these words.  If such an analogy is offensive, perhaps that’s grist for the mill that proves it.

What’s more interesting than the normal fluctuations and vicissitudes of our mind’s song is when something actually disrupts the regular flow of thought.  Most people don’t have a mental song calibrated to receive this kind of influence.  Most are hearing out the rhythm of their own melody, on the lookout only for the notes in their environment that fit into the tune.

Think of a new musician.  Getting plopped into a jazz band as a new musician would be a nervous and stressful experience for most newbies.  It requires a fair amount of experience, and most importantly, a desire and receptivity to open one’s self to a new experience that does not have a predetermined outcome.  There must be a curiosity about the unknown for the mind’s song to be disrupted by some arrant combination of words, some idea, some concept.

Otherwise, raw experience is far more effective.  Life is constantly ripe with the opportunity to dive into something completely new, and unlike the words that we can easily fail to hear, misinterpret or ignore, the experience of reality can be far less apologetic in the way it bores into our sense of being.  Any experience worth having is going to carry some sort of stress.  And even the one’s that don’t seem worth having, while also stressful, can yield fruit.  This is the difference between post-traumatic stress and the lesser known post-traumatic growth.

Regardless of whether it’s an experience, an idea or some words we read on twitter, the opportunity to be effected by such things is a matter of our current outlook: are we willing and receptive? Or are we closed for business?  Closed for change, and closed for the opportunity to experience life in a different - potentially diversified and well-rounded way.