BAMBOO

October 31st, 2020

The most common definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  This commonplace notion is unfortunate because it betrays most long-term thinking.  Many things that we undertake with a framework of long term thinking have the property of yielding no meaningful results for a great deal of time, hence, long-term thinking.

Meditation as a practice that yields such delayed beneficial fruit falls into this long term category.  It simply takes quite a long time of daily, consistent practice before the benefits of meditation begin to show themselves.  MRI scans show it takes a minimum of 3 - 4 months of daily consistent practice in meditation before changes in brain structure can be detected.  Anecdotally, 2 years of consistent practice also seems to signal another inflection point of benefit in the practice.

Endeavours, practices and investments undertaken for the purpose of long-term benefit are a lot like growing bamboo.

A perennial grass, bamboo is one of the most useful and fastest growing plants on the planet.  But it requires a long term perspective.  Most trees grow steadily.  A sprout pops up in a few weeks and slowly and steadily it increases in size and height.  

Bamboo is a totally different animal.  It is a long term animal.  For the first four years bamboo doesn’t break ground.  And then, relatively over night in a period of just 5 weeks… just under 3% of the total time it’s spent growing, it breaks the ground and achieves a height of 90 feet.  It grows so fast when it actually does break ground that it’s almost visible to the eyes growing an inch and a half per hour.

This sort of asymmetry is available to us individually in all sorts of ways.  Investing years ago when a stock was cheap can yield tremendous results with enough time.  Engaging in meditation for weeks upon weeks upon weeks can suddenly begin to change the way we experience reality.  

Contrary to popular and commonplace belief, some of the best things we can do for ourselves and for others fits snuggly into that original definition of insanity: doing something over and over and expecting a different result.  Fact is, when it comes to those actions we can take that do eventually have a long term benefit - these things do look insane, practicing without any reward, holding an investment without any growth, and then with enough time, persistence and faith in the process, changes begin to amount rapidly.

REASSESS

October 30th, 2020

There is always more than one way to do something.  It can be extremely difficult to remember this, especially when hours upon hours have been invested in a deep rabbit hole scheme that seemed like a promising avenue towards success.  There’s a sort of knack that anyone can develop in order to figure out when a rabbit hole of exploration has gone too deep without yielding the goods of progress.  But to develop this knack - this intuition - requires a bit of a cost: it requires venturing along a good handful of unproductive avenues in order to know what to avoid.

The ability to reassess a situation isn’t difficult at all: it’s merely an intersection that anyone with any level of competence can navigate.  The real trick is the timing.  Spending days upon days trying to make a suspected solution work may very well feel like a lot of wasted time when the situation is reassessed and a new avenue begins yielding productive fruit far faster.  In that situation, the question isn’t why wasn’t this new direction sought out first, but why wasn’t it sought out sooner.

Progress on any project or within any field is really a matter of perseverance through pivots.  But the trick to faster progress has to do with the placement and timing of the pivots we make.  The sooner and faster we are willing to pivot might seem like the wisest option to find a viable pathway, but if we are too quick to pivot again, we might abandon a good thread of thinking before it has time to yield fruit.  This sort of timing depends on the field.  Compare for example the world of coding with the field of woodworking.  Learning to code is best done with a very rapid and quick ability to pivot.  While woodworking can take a while before potential success is realized.  Compare these two to something that takes even longer like winemaking.  The wine needs to ferment, then age, and in that case it can be years before an experiment gives up it’s result. 

Each of these have a different average time or distance between pivots in order to make progress.  This is an area of meta-learning, that if in awareness while dealing with a new project becomes a useful framework for questioning what is happening and what might be a better direction to explore.

When in doubt, it’s generally better to reassess sooner rather than later.  Most people default to this.  We have short attention spans and lose interest quickly in anything that doesn’t yield results with a reasonable amount of immediacy.  The problem is that most people apply this on a level that is too high.  Instead of pivoting within a field of possible interest, many people are most likely to simply pivot away from that field.  There is a tremendous gulf between pivoting within a field and pivoting to other fields.  Each one has some sort of barrier to entry and even with some beginner’s luck there are nearly always bound to be levels of competence barred from entry without the persnickety process of pivoting between different potential avenues of advancement.  

The ability to reassess isn’t necessarily the question of whether to abandon something but rather a question about how to pivot along the path of perseverance.  

FUNNELLING FRUSTRATION

October 29th, 2020

Mistakes are annoying.  Particularly in retrospect.  Most, if not all of them look dumb or silly or easily avoidable.  And because of this, it’s perhaps understandable that new mistakes can be instantly frustrating and endlessly annoying. These siblings to anger might be due to the idea that we should have wised up by now - learned from the past and figured out how to navigate around these pesky obstacles.  Some mistakes certainly don’t have to be perennial, there are repeated mistakes from which can be gleaned a way forward that is devoid of such folly, but that doesn’t mean the future will ever be clean of new mistakes and obstacles.

Learning is mostly taken to be a sort of knowledge acquisition.  It’s the process of getting something in a book or something someone says into our head.  At least this is how many seem to think of it.  But learning, more than anything, is about emotional regulation.  This might seem like an odd tie-in, but when it comes to the subjective experience of navigating a new field to figure out how it works, that process is roiling with emotion.  That emotion may be rooted in curiosity, and the experience - subjectively - might be quite enjoyable and fun.  But more often than not, it’s quite the opposite:  learning is often a battle against frustration, annoyance and confusion.

Compare for a moment those two experiences and wonder:  who is likely to make progress in understanding faster?  The frustrated person who is annoyed with their own confusion?  Or the curious person?  

The answer is obvious, of course, but we seem to ignore the reason why, and how it can be used to our benefit in frustrating circumstances.

More important than the answer is to ask: what is the difference between frustration and curiosity that allows for faster learning with one instead of the other?  That is certainly a topic fit for a book, but it dovetails into the core of the topic at hand:  

If one emotional state is more conducive to our task and our progress and our ability to learn, then regulating emotions is a subtle key to unlocking our ability to make faster more efficient headway - no matter the task at hand.

The person who can funnel frustration into focus becomes unstoppable, first and foremost because that person is no longer in their own way.

THE SLIPPERY EXCUSE

October 28th, 2020

The problems of friends and family often have painfully obvious solutions.  It’s a perennial challenge and difficulty of loving anybody to negotiate this huge dissonance between the behaviour of those we love, and their simultaneous blindness to better ways of thinking, acting and doing.  Holiday can easily feel like holy wars when people try to point out “the obvious” to their loved ones.  The intention is almost always as pure as the holiest of holy saints, but the result almost always lands about as far from the intention as possible.  One of the primary reasons for this is that resistance to advice and an alternative perspective often inspires a redoubling of effort to persuade, which further inspires a mounting resistance, and the whole affair quickly escalates to destructive levels.

The alternative to this hopeless task can seem to be total passivity, inaction and silence.  There is however, a middle way that is far gentler, easier and effective.  The main difficulty with this solution is that it requires a degree of patience and perspective that is often rare between loved ones.

To start, recall the first response that is likely to rear it’s slimy head when a person suggests an alternative perspective or a piece of advice.

Without missing a beat, an excuse pops up, almost instantly.  And for the person who conjures this excuse, the logic of the excuse seems to feel ironclad, if pressed.  It’s fascinating to pause for a moment and just appreciate the astonishing speed which accompanies the inspiration of such slippery excuses.  It’s incredibly doubtful that even the most advanced computer in years to come will ever be able to match, let alone exceed the speed that excuses can be generated by others.  Truly astonishing.

There is something slippery about the phenomenon of these excuses, their speed, and their seeming infinite flexibility.  No matter how strong the counter rebuttal we might give, it always begins to feel like grabbing and picking up an incredibly slippery fish: no matter how hard you try, success wiggles out of grasp and grasping tighter only seems to make it slip away faster.

The gentler, more effective path requires patience.  Advice or recommendations met with slippery excuses is best seen as a possibility that a seed is being planted.  And it’s here where the patience of the gardener makes a great deal of sense.  Seeds don’t sprout immediately.  We plant them and then we wait, and if conditions become ideal, then that seed cracks open and begins to reach up for some light.

This represents a much better strategy: make a recommendation - if it’s met with slippery excuses, then clearly the soil and the conditions just aren’t right.  Leave things where they are and perhaps that recommendation will lay dormant in the mind of the other, and when conditions do change, when perspective and time have developed, then perhaps that seed will activate.  It might be weeks, months, or even years, but there’s decent chance the subject will come up again, and if that happens, then it’s best treated like a new sprout.  Remember first that such things are fragile, easily killed, and need only gentle encouragement to continue growing.  The same goes for any new perspective in others.  We flirt with possible changes in the way we see the world.  Our old worldview fights to remain, to persist, like any other organism or gene or meme.  Even individual mindsets are trying to survive and flourish, no matter how bad that mindset is for the individual.  It requires a seemingly unnatural amount of self-awareness to realize this is the case with one’s own mind.  Regardless, it’s incredibly easy to see in others.  So any changes need to be treated like a fragile underdog - don’t smoother the progress with love.  Coax it along with patience and even a little bit of curious teasing.

This gardening approach to slippery excuses is not only more effective, it’s far less energy intensive, at least when compared to Thanksgiving-style escalations of disagreements between family members.  Such scenarios play out like fishing by trying to swim after the fish.  Not only is  it exhausting and virtually impossible, but if you actually grab ahold of the fish, its slips away easily.  The goal isn’t to shove the hook down the fish’s mouth, as so many “suggestions” seem to be from loved ones, but to lure it gently and unsuspectingly, like a seed that might one day yield bountiful fruit needs a gentle touch in line with how it grows.

The slippery excuse isn’t an obstacle as so many treat it, but an indication, a reading on a thermometer, it’s a status of what the health of the mental soil is where we hope to plant a new idea.

A CHANCE FOR CHANCES

October 27th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Nathan

The best chance we can take is to try and create more chances.  In it’s simplest form, a chance is just a possibility for something to happen.  There’s a chance it might rain.  But to take a chance explicitly defines something about what we do, our action, and the results that might come about.  To take a chance to create more chances isn’t just a clever sounding trick, it’s an instruction to make moves that are most likely to result in the possibility of more options.

In this sense of creating options, options are identical to a certain type of perspective: one rooted not just in possibility but also practicality.  Take for example something a bit more concrete.  All of us dream up ideas everyday for the fantastical things that might be possible with future technology.  But those who actually take the time to learn and understand what technology is available currently and exactly how it works are afforded the ability to dream in a totally different way.  Someone acquainted with the cutting edge knows what is possible from a practical standpoint.

A vast imagination can be quite a hinder when trying to accomplish something in the real world.  With a head always stuck in the clouds of tomorrow, the real opportunities of today are missed.

The best way to create more chances isn’t to have a more active imagination, but to learn something.  Learning by default requires a change in perspective; the journey through confusion sheds an old way of understanding for a new way of looking at the world.  The primary change after having learned something, especially something practical, like welding, or coding, or woodworking, is having a tighter understanding of what is actually possible.  Then a vast imagination can more efficiently filter itself into avenues that are far more likely to be real paths in life.

Everyone has an idea for an app, and this is usually a mashup remix of all sorts of components of other apps that we all use on a daily basis.  It’s reasonable to think these remixes would work, but only a coder can see if and more importantly how it would be done.  But the practicality goes beyond this.  With practical tools and knowledge at hand, there is a flip side: other creations not even dreamed of can be seen by the mere juxtaposition of very real possibilities.  So often the process of creation yields new things that were never planned nor dreamed of; but this can only happen with real action, actual effort, and the required skills.

It’s the skills we acquire, and the practical knowledge associated with them that generates a real chance.  Unlike the fleeting and fickle nature often associated with luck and opportunity, the hard-earned path of plying one’s attention and focus consistently to a topic can eventually generate opportunity, not by manifesting luck, or even preparation, but simply coming to a clear understanding of what’s actually possible - and then acting upon it.