A LUCILIUS PARABLE: TOOL

March 14th, 2021

Lucilius was feeling particularly lazy.  Far more than usual, which is saying something because one of Lucilius’ most prominent and often used definitions of life was that it’s a constant battle with himself to keep laziness at bay in order to achieve anything.  And during this particular struggle with laziness, Lucilius was looking around to outsource his responsibility.  He happened to be taking a creative writing course, for what purpose and use, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out, and he was currently staring at a blank word document in a vain attempt to think of a story that was due the next day for class.  He engaged in those nonsense shenanigans that a procrastinating human in solitude always resorts to: making strange sounds, contorting his face to represent fantastical characters and situations, and then finally, his procrastination was interrupted by the distraction of his roommate coming home.

“Yay, you’re home,” Lucilius remarked.

The roommate was clearly preoccupied with some thoughts, an ambient stress, and didn’t response other than the subtle cues a person will give with facial expression and body to indicate, ‘yes, I heard you.’

“I need your help,” Lucilius said.

The roommate continued with their routine of arrival, hanging their jacket and unpacking a knapsack.

“I need an idea for a story,” Lucilius continued.  “I have a due date.”  Lucilius was completely slumped on the couch displaying the perfect expression of laziness and a lack of productivity.

“Give me an idea about what to write about,” Lucilius restated.

Lucilius pathetically pouted his lips out and asked again with long drawn out words.

“Pleasssssse.”

Lucilius’ roommate finally turned and paid him some attention.  “No, I am not creative like you.  I don’t even understand why you would ask me every week like this.  I’ve never given you an idea.  You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Well,” Lucilius said, “I don’t need a whole story, I just need a little idea, like a kernel, a seed, just a taste.  Then it’s really easy to imagine the story around the idea.”

The roommate seemed to just ignore Lucilius, while he pushed out his pouted lip even more and then smiled.

Lucilius did not stop pestering his roommate, until finally the roommate in a fit of desperation to just be left alone for some peace and quiet yelled “Tools!”

Lucilius was happy there was finally some back and forth, but it wasn’t enough.  “You can’t just say a noun!  You have to tell me something about tools for me to see a story.”

The roommate rolled eyes.  “You’re the one who is supposed to be coming up with a story.”

“I just need an idea.”

“I said ‘tools’.”

“But what about the tools?”

The roommate took out a can of soup and the can opener and set about trying to get a quick dinner going.

Lucilius in the meantime set about on the task to become even more annoying about his ask, becoming a broken record of demand, asking over and over.

The small tool came round the can to it’s start, but the lid did not pop off.  Instead the small rim that allows the opener to latch on clipped off.  The roommate lifted the metal hoop, looking at it and sighed.  The can still wasn’t open and now the opener would no longer latch on.  Lucilius’ roommate was tired and now aggravated with the obnoxious turn of events with an easy dinner suddenly a hassle and Lucilius going on and on like a child about wanting help.

The roommate lifted the can opener and spoke at it, but answered Lucilius.  “Write about a tool which makes it impossible to work when you use it because it doesn’t actually work.”

Lucilius sat up.  “That’s an excellent idea! I love it!”

“Good,” the roommate mumbled while opening the fridge.  “Now leave me alone.”

Lucilius clacked away at his story while the roommate finally organized something to eat in peace.  Finally sitting down after a long day, Lucilius’ roommate breathed easy, took at sip of wine and smiled limply at the meal.  While chewing a first bite the roommate noticed Lucilius smiling suspiciously.

“What?” The roommate asked with a full mouth.

“You realize you’ve set a precedent, right?”

“Huh?”

“You gave me a great idea.  You were wrong all along, you do have good ideas, so I’ll expect another one next week.”

ANTICIPATING NOSTALGIA

March 13th, 2021

The emotional resonance of the past dominates.  So much so that we often miss out on the moment, and the impact that moment could have on who we are and how we experience life, and most importantly, the nostalgia we might develop for what is passing by right now.

An appreciation for the moment inevitably requires an abandonment of the past and a displacement of future plans — if only temporary.

If such a fact impresses anything it’s the fact that we are potentially missing out on so much in the present by diverting attention to past embarrassments, sorrows, regrets and even pleasures and prides.  Just as we rest on laurels won from past achievements, we stew on past failure and heart break, and just as resting on laurels decapitates our ability to innovate and progress, a determined concentration on the unfortunate events in memory blind us from opportunities of the moment.

If anything we should look to anticipate nostalgia, meaning, we should anticipate moments that will last indelibly in memory as treasured gifts.  To do otherwise is to miss moments absent-mindedly, like scrolling uselessly on a phone while a child takes first steps.  

While civilization goads us to become more and more preoccupied with distractions and plans for the future, and frail psychology ropes us into perseveration over a past of disappointment, we are cleaved from the real gift of living more and more.

The past is double edged in it’s painful reminder and it’s bittersweet remembrance, but as time slides by, our focus can learn from the experience of memory.  Repeated exposure to something embarrassing or a mistake most certainly has far less of an ideal impact on our ability to navigate the future than does an appreciation for past good.

FORCED PHASE

March 12th, 2021

Motivation is an equation far more easily solved when people are counting on you.  There’s clearly something hardwired into our social nature that binds the expectation of others to the gas pedal.  Much of the economic and business world functions on this simple fact.  However, when something needs to get done and there’s no one else waiting, it can be extremely difficult to abide by a self-imposed deadline.  We negotiate with ourselves constantly, knowing both that we want to push that deadline back and exactly how to argue to justify it.  Resisting this self-sabotage seems to be at the core of much discipline, but there’s an easier way to cut out the negotiation altogether and force the function in favor of our sincere hope.

The sense that other people are counting on you works because there are some very good incentives at play,  Reputation, which exists solely within the perspectives of people other than yourself hinges on this kind of cooperative performance.  And a good reputation naturally means that people will be likely to cooperate with our own designs when the time comes.  Such incentives are far weaker when we are left alone.  Our reputation with our own self is a far more squishy and debatable concept, and further, it can change and our idea of that reputation doesn’t necessarily have a consistent effect though time.  The incentives to even maintain the scoreboard on this internal game are simply just not very strong.  This asymmetry between external reputation and internal reputation means that a different set of incentives are needed when trying to self-motivate.

Instead of trying to incentivize motivation through reputation, another way of tackling the problem is through the idea of windows of opportunity.  We can, with a full awareness that we are likely to be lazy and less motivated in the future decide to set a kind of trap for ourselves and design a window of opportunity that has a hard and unalterable expiration date.  This is simply a way of taking the infinitely negotiable deadline we give ourselves and somehow giving it external form.

For example, imagine someone has the goal to write a book, but just can’t seem to get the ball rolling.  So, they devise a new kind of word processor, and this one requires 100,000 words to be written within a week or anything that has been written during that week gets deleted automatically at the end of day 7.  This sort of magical program would create an increasing pressure to work as the work proceeds, to ensure that any good content isn’t lost.  This is, of course, presuming that nothing can be copied and pasted out of the timed document.

Naturally we don’t all have such a fantastical tool, and our goals are infinitely varied.  The design of such windows of opportunity just requires a sensitive and curious understanding of incentives, and which kinds are most likely to drive the behavior we hope we take.  The difficulty isn’t so much dreaming up such designs as it is just having too much faith in the weak possibility that when the time comes we’ll get it done, because the fact is, that time almost never comes unless someone else has set that time or we can virtuously trick ourselves.

SILENT MIND

March 11th, 2021

As a species we don’t seem to have any provisions about sound.  Fact is: if there are people around, chances are, it’s loud.  Cities are enormously noisy, but even the eerie silence of a lifeless suburb is daily destroyed by the infernal buzz of some landscaping device.  The only structural prohibitions regarding sound have to do with either professional recording, movie theatres, or ironically, libraries - ironic because when libraries first came into existence they were very noisy affairs.  Apparently it took mankind a while to figure out how to read silently.

The forceful lack of silence in urban areas begs an interesting question: are we simply careless about silence, or are we purposely trying to drown something out?

If it is silent, what exactly is left over?  We often seek company, even if it’s just the TV blabbing nonsense in the other room, and the reason for many is due to a horrifying vulnerability.  If it’s truly silent, then we are forced to hear our own selves: our thoughts.

For some who purposely seek out silence, it’s often because listening to their own thoughts is a pleasant, interesting and fruitful experience.  For others it’s an anxiety to avoid, perhaps because thoughts are dominated by negative self-talk, or simply because there’s a fear about what might be there, or what may not be there.

Our relationship to silence is a gauge of our relationship with ourself. 

This dual quality of existence is perhaps an accurate way to look at it.  While we can’t multitask with a dozen things, attention can be safely divided into two.  Just think of a pianist that is doing two radically different things with each hand simultaneously and in concert.  Or someone who is driving a manual car and working the stick shift with one hand while turning the wheel with the other.  Our brain itself is famously sectioned into two symmetrical hemispheres, each with their own manner of attention. 

So when it comes to this experience of the ‘self’, it can very easily slide into the form of a friendship.  The brain will think it’s thoughts and we can - perhaps with a bit of training - sit back and just listen, as we would with a good friend.  

There is the widespread misconception that meditation is the absence of thoughts.  People seem to imagine a silent mind.  But this is far from the case.  If anything, much of what meditation achieves is a different relationship to this internal, buzzing, talking self.  The connection of meditation to compassion is no accident.  After enough effort toggling attention and exploring the mind, a compassion arises as it would for a good friend who we have come to know.  Now certainly there are other aspects of meditation that are beyond the scope of this episode which aide this transformation of attention and compassion, but the idea of a self-contained friendship is not inaccurate.    The larger point is that the mind is rarely, if ever silent.  Like a city of consciousness, it’s rarely quiet, and even when it is quiet there is still something going on, be it the feel and smell of soft spring air, the ache of a knee unaccustomed to the sitting posture, or an electric jitter from a cup of coffee taking effect.

Unfortunately, much of the external world is designed with little consideration for this internal world, and we are constantly pulled away from our own internal world to be overwhelmed or lost in the stimulation of brightly coloured apps, honking traffic, screaming engines and of course other people, haggling, complaining, bickering and trying in vain to extract from others what they f

CORE OF COMMERCE

March 10th, 2021

Supply and demand is the golden equation that underpins all of commerce and economics.  Right?  If so, then how exactly does innovation fit into this funny little equation?  Because, with innovation there’s an inherent property that is not exactly available for our economics equation.  The point is best illuminated by a question:

How can there be demand for something that doesn’t exist?

Or better yet,

How can someone demand something they don’t even know they want?

The first question is more manageable.  An obvious problem begs of a solution, and even if a solution isn’t currently imaginable, the demand is still real, hence the pressure on supply to manifest the solution and put it into practice.  But what about things that don’t necessarily solve an obvious problem but turn out to be incredibly desirable?  How can you want something you can’t even imagine yet?  And for which solves no current and obvious problem?

Here, the world of business enters the holy sanctum of success: the new and the innovative.  And one way to talk about this unknown space is with a surprise party.

What exactly does it take to plan the perfect surprise for a friend or a loved one?  Certainly we can do the token party or get together, which just really involves coordinating a bunch of people for a particular time, a little secrecy and of course the food, music and decorations.  But what does it take to make it really special?

First and foremost, you have to know the person really well.  Only then is it possible to imagine something that might delight them in a singular way.  It’s a bit like an inside joke: it’s unique and situational, it’s tailored specifically for the person involved.  To do this sort of thing really well requires a combination of two things: creativity, and empathy.

It may not seem obvious but creativity and empathy become superpowers if well combined in the business world - it’s at the core of much innovation.  The aspect of empathy enables a designer to imagine how a total stranger might perceive and interact with the new product being developed.  So many products induce only aggravation and confusion, and this is clearly a result of the fact that such a product was designed by someone who assumed the entire world would perceive the product in the same way they do… which is obviously a magnificent mistake.

Any product or service, when being designed can benefit immensely from exercising the empathetic power of imagining what it would be like as a total stranger to come across this product or service.  Would it be confusing and incomprehensible, or would it be a delight? Would it be intuitive and fun?

Notice how money hasn’t entered this discussion of commerce and innovation at all.  Money, in this case, is simply the byproduct of a job well done, an indication that the product or service has enough of the required components, whether that be simple utility or also creativity and the hospitable and intuitive quality of empathy.

While money is often decried as the root of all evil, perhaps this perspective on the core of commerce can peel back that ugly veneer to reveal a world that is grinding away to become more cooperative as opposed to a mad game of king of the hill.  While innovators can amass unreal fortunes for their creations, none of this would be possible without the cumulative involvement of all playing this great came we call civilization.