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REPAUSE
A meditation app is forthcoming. Stay Tuned.
MEDITATION DRAFT SESSION 9: STATE VS. TRAIT
January 16th, 2023
On Monday Tinkered Thinking releases a draft of a lesson from the forthcoming meditation app, currently called The Tinkered Mind (If you can think of a better name, please reach out. I'm not crazy about the current one, but I'll be damned if I let an imperfect name keep me from developing a good idea.) The rationale here is simply to stave off project stagnation by taking a wish to work with words on a daily basis (Tinkered Thinking Posts) and combine it with adjacent projects. This also gives regular readers a chance to get a preview of what I'm cooking up and to get feedback before the app launches, which is a tactic that has proved extremely useful with other projects unrelated to Tinkered Thinking.
One further introductory note: The goal of this meditation app is predominantly aimed at helping individuals build a robust daily habit by breaking that habit down and tackling it's consitituent parts one at a time and aiding the process with a new and innovative way of tracking progress, the likes of which has not been seen in other meditation apps or habit tracking apps.
Again, if you have any feedback, please reach out via Twitter
Session 9: State vs. Trait
Take a moment to sit and arrange your posture. Maintain a straight back with plenty of space for the abdomen to expand.
Once you’re ready begin breathing with deep exhales. We want a relatively quick inhale and a slow, longer exhale. I’ll count out a few 4 count inhales followed by exhales with a count of 8
Inhale till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Then..
Inhale again till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Continue this for a couple more breaths, and feel free to allow the exhales to be as long as you want. And once you are ready let your breathing transition to coherence breathing where inhales and exhales are the same length.
Even a few simple slow breaths is enough to alter our mental state. Long exhales slow down the heart rate, and these changes in the body in turn effect the mind. After a few breaths we feel a little more relaxed, a little calmer and clearer in thought. It’s because of this impact and the fact that breathing is so easily accessible by the conscious mind that it’s often a primary focus for meditation. We invoke the physical body in a certain way in order to have a particular effect on our mental experience.
But the mental state created by these changes in the body is just that: a state. The quality of calmness and clear thinking isn’t necessarily a trait of the person experiencing that state. But with a prolonged practice, these states can become personality traits.
After years of daily meditation, I consciously decided to take a break form the practice. The reasons behind this decision were numerous, but a key question I had was whether the practice was still having any kind of effect. Had I permanently changed as a person, or was the practice still having a real and necessary role in my mental life?
Another reason was to prepare for the composition of this very program of meditation. I felt there could be a lot of benefit starting again, much like a beginner, or a personal trainer who purposely gains a bunch of weight and then goes through the process that their clients go through by training the body in order to regain their previous physique. If the challenges of the beginner can be vividly experienced again, then there might be some benefit to the way this meditation program unfolds as it’s created.
The results of this experiment were fascinating. For almost five months I felt very much as though I’d been meditating daily the whole time. But after that five month mark, subtle changes started to roll back.
The plan was to restart the practice after six months, but I didn’t manage to make that happen. It’s easy to say that life was busy and stressful, but in reality the habit was simply gone. It was no longer a daily reflex to sit and train the mind.
And the longer time went on, the more it seemed that my mental life was regressing, and the kinds of emotions and thoughts that started emerging were very reminiscent, if not identical to the sort of mental life I’d experienced previous to my years of meditation.
Now this is of course just one person’s ancedote, and it would be great if a rigorous study of this kind existed, but this kind of “ancedata” is still quite powerful, especially since I’ve seen it replicated in other people.
Last year I reconnected with a friend who I had introduced to meditation. Before developing a practice this person had experienced tremendous anxiety and dealt with issues of anger and rage. About half a year of daily practice had improved these issues to an impressive and noticeable degree. But much later when we reconnected, I discovered this person had started taking medication for anxiety.
I asked about their meditation practice, and as it turned out, they had fallen out of the habit several months prior. In the same breath, this person commented that the should get back into it.
After a few fits and starts with trying to reinstall the meditation habit in my own life, I finally managed to make a dedicated and disciplined go of it. And once I had some momentum with the practice something else interesting seemed to occur. It was as though I was reliving my first couple years of daily practice, the subtle milestones that I experienced during those first two years were arriving again but this time, much quicker. It wouldn’t be much benefit to try and describe these mental milestones at this point, but I believe it’s worth pointing out this part of the experience. If years of practice could be likened to a song, then it was as if I was hearing the opening melody and picking up the beat faster than when I learned it the first time. So even if practice sputters and stops, there does appear to be a lingering affect of the practice, and not only that, every session of practice compounds that effect. It’s my guess that these traits linger in proportion to how long a person has maintained a practice, but of course that’s just a hypothesis.
Regardless, the experiment was valuable mainly for that second reason - for becoming a beginner again and experiencing the same frustration that can arise when trying to start something new and failing to make it stick.
Installing a habit in your life is difficult. A fair amount of discipline is needed in the beginning to gain some momentum, but the interesting thing is that well established habits require virtually no discipline whatsoever. No one has to goad themselves into brushing their teeth, it just happens. And it’s because of that difficult initial period of installing a habit that this program has been designed to hopefully take away some of the strain by piecing the habit apart and tackling it in stages, and gain a little momentum while the mind can be preoccupied with the sort of content you’re listening to now.
So, in this last minute, again bring your attention to your posture, make sure the back is straight and note any difficulties you are having with the seated position. Simply thinking through the mechanics of where and how your body’s weight is or isn’t being supported can help you figure out nuances about how best to arrange your body for the practice. Feel free to do a quick body scan as we went through in the last session, imagining a sheet of light above you descend and trace a ring of attention down around your body…
Then, take a few slow deep breaths through the nose and reflect on how far you’ve already progressed with this habit. If you’re listening to this session then you’ve racked up a solid number of days, and already there’s a strong momentum gathering in your habit. This momentum will continue to grow with each day and each session, and it will be this behavioral foundation, this habit of taking time to sit, where we will have the space and the tools to experience new states of mind, and eventually work towards turning those states into traits that we carry with us into the rest of our life.
Let’s transition now from coherence breathing back to deep exhales, and try to notice any thoughts that pop up as we go through out counts.
Inhale till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Then..
Inhale again till 4, starting on
1 - 2 - 3 - 4
hold for a moment and then exhale
8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 -1
Continue like this for a few more moments while the session ends.
A LUCILIUS PARABLE: TECHNO-SHUNT
January 15th, 2023
Even though he’d now known these parents for years, Lucilius held it together while delivering the news. He left them with that solemn prognosis and did not return to his office. He found a secluded stairwell where he sat and buried his face in his hands. Lucilius sobbed, the image of the child’s face torturing his mind, his understanding filling with fire the story he knew was playing out behind that child’s face, in the blood. It was quite a while before he was able to collect himself, and when he did he was grateful for that reflex of distraction: mindlessly grabbing for his phone.
An old friend had messaged him.
Boy do I have something to show you! Wanna stop by tonight or whenever your crazy shift is over?
Lucilius tapped to reply, an excuse already lined up to bail and delay any potential meeting for some other time. But he caught himself. Thinking about the stress he was under - the news he’d just delivered and that despite all his knowledge and research he was all out of answers. He was at the end of his rope and there was nothing he could do.
Be over soon, he responded.
Lucilius slipped the phone back into the pocket of his long white doctor’s coat and stood, gathering himself further. He reflected again about how unfair it all was.
“I need a drink,” he said out loud to himself before turning to go button up his department and leave.
When the apartment doors opened he saw a black sphere sitting in the center of the loft. Thousands of wires bound in a huge rope snaked across the floor from a computer and split off, each wire reaching up connecting to a different point on the sphere.
Lucilius slowly walked toward the black sphere, wondering what on earth his friend had done. Circling the sphere, looking at the different lights as they blinked, Lucilius guessed the enormous sphere to be nearly 9 feet in diameter. Luckily the loft apartment had high ceilings.
Suddenly a strange shifting sound emanated from deep within the sphere and then a loud click. The top half of the sphere spun about half a foot and then the sphere cracked, the top half lifting, the wires bound to that hemisphere pulling their slack from the floor around the base.
Lucilius bent over to look inside and saw a man’s torso. The man bent and looked at Lucilius.
“Lucy, you made it!”
“What on earth…” Lucilius barely muttered as he watched his friend spread curtain of wires and gingerly step through and out from the narrow opening.
It looked like the man was wearing a pair of cycling shorts. Lucilius just shook his head, confused.
“You gotta try this out. Hold on, let me get you a fresh pair.”
Minutes later, Lucilius was crawling into the split sphere wearing just some cycling shorts.
“It’s better naked, but whatever.”
Lucilius gave his friend a strange and skeptical look. “Exactly WHAT is better?”
His friend simply wore a wide smile.
“You’ll see.”
The ring of light around Lucilius began to shrink until it blinked out of existence and he was in complete darkness.
When the dark sphere finally split again nearly an hour later, Lucilius was in an amazed state of shock.
The face of his smiling friend was nodding in the ring of light where the sphere had split again.
“What did I tell you?!?!”
“Wha… how… This is incredible… What just happened?” Lucilius barely muttered, astonished, as he regained his bearings and crawled out through the parted curtain of wires his friend held aloft.
During that hour, Lucilius had been transported to another world. He’d certainly played video games before, but this was on an entirely different order of magnitude. He had actually been there, and now that he returned, he was under the impression that his body had been actually transported to the world he’d visited. The smells, the heat of the sun, the feeling of the grass between his toes as he walked around and down to the beach. The weightlessness as he’d gone swimming. His skin had been still damp when he was transported back but now he was dry, as though nothing had ever happened.
“Ok, explain it to me. Now!” Lucilius said.
His friend laughed with an extreme delight.
“Can you guess?”
Lucilius looked back at the dark sphere. “I mean it truly was like I teleported to another reality, but if I had to guess… I don’t think I actually left the sphere, nor this room.”
His friend nodded. But Lucilius shook his head. “I have no idea how this thing works. It just seems unlikely that you teleported me to a place I can’t identify.”
“The actual reality was just something that I generated with a Chaotic Diffusion Model. Nothing special there. That’s what they’ve been doing with all video games since Stable Diffusion got the Chaotic upgrade last year.”
“Ok…” Lucilius said. He was marginally aware of what was happening in the AI generated space and new that breakthroughs were happening all the time.
“Wait, so, you’re saying that entire experience was AI generated?”
“Yep?”
“But… it’s more than the video game stuff. It’s not just a visual and spatial world, I could smell things, and touch them, and there was heat and cold and I even pulled at a few blades of grass and chewed on them because I just couldn’t believe how real everything was, but against all reason.. I mean.. even the grass tasted like grass. How… how does that happen with a Chaotic Diffusion Model that people have been using to just generate the visuals for video games?”
“It’s the sphere man.”
“The sphere? What the heck is it?”
His friend smiled. “The sphere generates a plasma that fills all the space between you and the inside edge of the sphere, and based on the world generated by the Chaotic Diffusion Model, the plasma will reconfigure to support and interact with your body.”
“Support and interact? What on earth does that mean.”
“So when you went swimming… you went swimming right?”
“Yea.”
“Your body was actually making those movements. The plasma gets denser where you see water in proximity to your body, and when you were actually swimming, your body was actually making those movements inside the sphere, but the plasma move in accordance to your movement in the simulation. Or rather the plasma reconfigured in accordance to physical changes in the simulation so you’re body actually feels it. Heat, cold, texture, even light, the plasma is reconfigured for all of it.”
“Light? Wait are you saying that it generated all the light I was seeing?”
“Yes, but it’s optimized just around your eyes. 99% of the sphere is dark but there are two hemispheres cupped around each of your eyes where the plasma generates light. And of course heat and texture, hence the feeling of sea water on your eyeballs when you open your eyes under water.”
“Holy….this is… crazy.”
“Well a lot of it has to do with my advanced access to Chaotic Models. The publicly available models can’t generate much beyond the visual spatial world. But the one I’m using is cutting edge since I’ve been developing the plasma sphere.”
Lucilius thought for a moment. “Wait, that was a pretty basic world. How fast does the Chaotic Model generate?”
“Oh it only takes a few seconds. I actually figured out a way to make it make further renderings based on what the person inside the sphere does.”
“Can I try to design a different Chaotic Model?”
“Oh for sure, it’s pretty wild what you can do with it. Just over here, type whatever.”
An idea has pierced Lucilius’ mind, and the single-minded determination that dominated most of his working life had come alive. He rushed to the computer and started typing away. His friend looked over his shoulder, brow furrowed until it went soft and his eyebrows lifted.
“Whoah, what?”
“Oh yes,” Lucilius said. He stood up from the computer having generated the model and walked back toward the sphere.
“Are you sure you…”
“-Yep, I have an idea how this might help my work.”
“Lucilius, it’s not tested for that kind of - “
“-I don’t care. I’m out of options. Fire it up.” Lucilius said as he crawled back into the dark sphere.
“Are you sure you’ll be ok? This is a…I haven’t tested it for anything like this.”
“Punch it.”
His friend turned back to the computer and with a few keystrokes the sphere began to contract, the ring of light shrinking until it blinked into darkness.
The next day, Lucilius knocked on the front door of a house he’d never seen before. The door opened and a woman was started to see him.
“Oh, uh, doctor! Um what are you doing here- - I’m sorry, please come in,” she said, swinging the door wider for Lucilius to enter.
About half an hour later, with the child safely out of ear shot, the parents finally understood what Lucilius was trying to say.
“A.. mystical experience? But a placebo?” The mother said.
Lucilius nodded. “I know, I know it sound like pure fantasy. And I cannot promise that it has even the slightest chance of having any effect, but as you both know - painfully - we’ve tried absolutely everything, and despite how fast modern medicine is progressing and how powerful it is, we simply won’t have a cure for this any time soon and when tested against any drug that hasn’t proved to be a complete cure, placebo still works better. As amazing as that fact is, and this kind of experience could induce a placebo-like response. Your child is still young enough where the realms of the real and the realm of the imagination are still blurry enough that he might. Just. Truly. Believe it. But in order for this to work I need to do some very unorthodox things. He’ll need to be sedated, transported, and all of this is not within the scope of my medical license, but I of course I don’t care. If you understand and you’re willing to try…”
The parents looked at each other and then back at Lucilius. “Yes, of course we’ll try anything,” the Father said. “We’ve trusted you completely, and we’ll trust you till the end.”
“If this works, there won’t be an end,” Lucilius said.
Several days later the sedated boy was placed within the dark sphere, and it slid shut. The parents held each other as they watched it close.
Lucilius had spent the intervening time working on the Chaotic Diffusion model, designing it, fine tuning it with the help of his friend.
“Are you sure the boy will wake up?”
“Of course, general anesthesia has come a long way in the last two years. It’d been fully vetted. He’ll wake up in exactly…” Lucilius checked the count down on his phone, “almost exactly 2 minutes. And he’ll fall back under in exactly 62 minutes.”
“Ok,” his friend said. “Well, let’s see how well this experience that you designed… works.”
Although Lucilius was now working as a medical doctor and researcher, he had spent years studying the varieties of religious experience. It had been a hobby of his for many years before he’d decided to become a doctor and he was quite well versed in the kinds of perspectives and experiences that people had prior to the rise of scientific rationalism. For all it’s tremendous advances, there was still something within the human mind that contained a strength and a power that could not rival medicines that were short of cures. Lucilius knew this on a truly deep level, and he had designed a tremendous experience for his young patient, one that explored every facet of mystical experience Lucilius was acquainted with. He’d not just read and researched the topic. Lucilius came from a very old tradition of experience, and he drew upon this deep memory to design an experience that would reach deep down into the very core of what made the boy human, and shake it. It was vital the boy would be convinced it was real, hence the need for timed anesthesia. The boy would wake up in a world that he recognized, his room with his parents, and then it would slowly, effortlessly transform into something Lucilius truly hoped might reach into the deepest recesses of the boys brain, with the aim of triggering the body’s most far-reaching powers. There was just so much that Lucilius knew science had yet to uncover. He knew that a cure for the boy’s condition was perhaps only years away given the incredible advancement of medical knowledge using machine learning. But it was still a couple years away, and the boy Lucilius raged to save had mere weeks at best. Lucilius knew this. The parents knew this. And with no hope in any of the traditional nor cutting edge solutions that Lucilius had tried, there was nothing to loose. It was a hoax, but Lucilius knew that a hoaxed believed with the power of a human mind behind it could alter the reality of that boy’s body.
“It’s going to start in 10 seconds,” Lucilius’ friend stated.
“You have readings on body position, right?”
“Of course.”
Ten seconds later, Lucilius’ friend stated. “The boy has woken up. Its starting.”
THE FALLEN DANCER, PART III (REWRITE)
January 14th, 2023
The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.
Click here to start at the beginning
Part III: Veiled Levers
Luck and chance transcend everything: language, religion, culture, location and history. As a concept, Luck has wiggled it’s way into virtually every single person’s brain. As far as the stickiness of ideas go, it supersedes some of our most powerful ideas. Like God. Two people of different religions might argue over god, but when their argument is interrupted by someone falling and hurting themselves, they’ll both say: that’s bad luck. Even religion cannot adequately explain the fickle nature of good and bad luck. In the absence of a good explanation, the default is: God works in mysterious ways! A statement that has no actual utility. Linguistically and cognitively it is a dead-end. So what is going on: is God’s mysterious method a set of dice?
We are told that everything works out. In the end? Everything works out. Right? But this too is a cop-out of extraordinary proportions. It is at odds with some of the most horrific things that have happened to human beings throughout our history. When we hear of some horrific massacre or the death of a starving child, shall we conveniently forget the belief that everything works out in the end? Certainly it wasn’t the case for such people who had to exit life in such devastating ways. What shall we say then? Do we shrug and say, that’s just bad luck?
Strangely, bad luck appears to be a better explanation than squaring such patently terrifying details of reality with some sort of compassionate god. But The Fallen Dancer is not about god, and the discussion here is only to emphasize the truly ubiquitous role that Luck plays in virtually all peoples’ view of reality.
Putting aside Luck as pure chance, instead let’s regard luck as access to leverage, and this access dilates depending on whether we have good luck or bad luck. Good luck means access to more leverage.
But let’s get even more nitty gritty: what is leverage?
Lev•er•age, noun
1. The exertion of force by means of a lever or an object used in the manner of a lever.
2. The power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome
Archimedes once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
If there’s one quote that forms the back bone of The Fallen Dancer, it’s this one. But the purpose of this entire escapade of words has to do with one ubiquitous confusion:
Where’s the lever?
And even more important:
Are you even looking for a lever?
Since we’re dealing in metaphor, we’ll place aside the first (literal) definition of leverage and focus on the second: the power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome.
Power evokes images of people in office, kings and queens, and perhaps business magnates and bosses.
What exactly is Power? In this case the literal definition from physics is quite useful. Power is energy expended over a certain amount of time. Another way of saying it is: how much work gets done in a given amount of time. A hard worker only has a limited amount of power because they are only one person. But if that person can use the gains of their handwork to magnify their effort. That’s a different ball game. For example say a hardworking person creates a business and the business generates enough money to hire an employee. That original person’s power grows because now twice the amount of work can get done in the same amount of time because there are two people working on the same vision. This is like having a lever that is twice as long, which means it can apply a lot more force.
The business owner now has more power, meaning their ability to literally change reality in order to reflect their vision for their business has increased. The more successful the business becomes, the more people that can be hired, and as a result the business owner is eventually regarded as a powerful individual.
There’s an important caveat here that’s often missed. Hard work alone does not necessarily accrue power. The ability to successfully leverage that hard work is what unlocks additional power. Working very hard every day on balancing an egg is not going to accrue power no matter how hard working that person is, and many people are doing the equivalent of just that: David Graeber called them Bullshit Jobs.
Just because you’re getting paid, doesn’t mean you’re doing anything that’s actually useful. Working very hard also doesn’t mean that anything truly useful is getting done. And just because someone isn’t getting paid doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something useful. But this dichotomy will become more important later on in the chapters about Artists and Entrepreneurs.
For now, the point is: you only live once, so look for the leverage.
But how? Where are the levers that magnify one’s own hard work into something more powerful?
The ability to see the veiled levers that are available to us is the reason for setting the context with the Huainanzi parable. Hopefully, by juxtaposing the onlookers’ narrow perspective with that of the wise Father who interpreted things with an expansive perspective, we have a hint of where these levers lie. Paradoxically it’s also the one crucial ingredient to understanding Luck which isn’t present in the parable: resourcefulness.
Paul Graham discovers a beautiful species of resourcefulness in his essay A Word to the Resourceful. In the essay he explores a strange metric he discovered while working with start-ups. He noticed that people who would eventually succeed with their start-up were very easy to talk to. While those who would go on to fail with their start-up were very difficult to talk to. In the essay he realizes why this is the case:
“…the key to the mystery is the old adage ‘a word to the wise is sufficient.’ […] What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they’ll understand immediately. You don’t have to explain in detail; they’ll chase down all the implications… Understanding all the implications -even the inconvenient implications- of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It’s conversational resourcefulness.”
This is a very niche definition of resourcefulness - a subset, as he says. But it is a particularly useful instance of resourcefulness because it is a purely cognitive one, which highlights acutely a difference in perspective. The resourceful entrepreneur is easy to talk to because as you speak to them, they are trying to interpret what you are saying from as many points of view as possible in order to hit upon the correct implication that is the actual meaning of your message.
Compare this to the opposite: when you say something to someone and they don’t understand. By default they’ve missed out on at least one possible interpretation of your words: the actual meaning you are trying to get across! This isn’t to say such a person doesn’t search for additional implications of what you’ve said. It means that over the course of many conversations if this person continually has trouble understanding what’s been said and constantly requires further explanation, then they are on the whole seeing fewer potential meanings than someone who doesn’t need further explanation. It’s a definition of degree that is important between these two perspectives.
It’s a matter of answering the question: why is this person more resourceful than that person?
The more resourceful person is simply traversing more imaginative territory where the correct answer might lie. The less resourceful person is blind to that part of the territory because their aperture of focus is too narrow.
Resourcefulness is dependent on a range of focus: too narrow, and it blinds a person from seeing potential resources, implications and levers that exist outside of that narrow field of focus. A wide range of focus simply includes more options, and the resourceful person knows how to open up their aperture of focus as wide as possible in order to survey as many potential resources as possible. This enables the resourceful person to have a more generous selection of options to pick from.
Now, recalling the Huainanzi parable, who had the narrow range of focus, and who had a larger range of focus?
In the case of the Huainanzi parable, the Father’s larger range of focus essentially renders Luck to be net-neutral. But as mentioned earlier, there’s a crucial ingredient missing in that parable. At no point in the parable do any of the characters seek to deliberately leverage any resourcefulness available to them. The role of all characters in the parable is passive. The Father’s perspective in the Huainanzi parable might be more resourceful because he can imagine more implications for the present conditions, but as no point does he actually do anything to accrue leverage, he is open to the whims of fate, for better or for worse, and despite his ability to have an expanded outlook.
With this frame of reference, consider again the very first question: why are evil people so Lucky?
Or rather: considering how inactive the father is in the Huainanzi parable, let’s consider an alternative question: are evil people passive?
THE FALLEN DANCER, PART III
January 13th, 2023
The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.
Click here to start at the beginning
Part III: Veiled Levers
Luck and chance transcend everything: language, religion, culture, location and history. As a concept, Luck has wiggled it’s way into virtually every single person’s brain. As far as the stickiness of ideas go, it supersedes some of our most powerful ideas. Like God. Two people of different religions might argue over god, but when their argument is interrupted by someone tripping and falling and breaking their nose, they’ll both say: that’s bad luck. Even religion cannot adequately explain the fickle nature of good and bad luck. In the absence of a good explanation, the default is: God works in mysterious ways! A statement that has no actual utility. Linguistically and cognitively it is a dead-end. So what is going on: is God’s mysterious method a set of dice?
We are told that everything works out. In the end? Everything works out. Right? But this too is a cop-out of extraordinary proportions. It is at odds with some of the most horrific things that have happened to human beings throughout our history. When we hear of some horrific massacre or the death of a starving child, shall we conveniently forget the belief that everything works out in the end? Certainly it wasn’t the case for such people who had to exit life in such devastating ways. What shall we say then? Do we shrug and say, that’s just bad luck?
Strangely, bad luck appears to be a better explanation than squaring such patently terrifying details of reality with some sort of compassionate god. But The Fallen Dancer is not about god, and the discussion here is only to emphasize the truly ubiquitous role that Luck plays in virtually all peoples’ view of reality.
Putting aside Luck as pure chance, instead let’s regard luck as access to leverage, and this access dilates depending on whether we have good luck or bad luck. Good luck means access to more leverage.
But let’s get even more nitty gritty: what is leverage?
Lev•er•age, noun
1. The exertion of force by means of a lever or an object used in the manner of a lever.
2. The power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome
Archimedes once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
If there’s one quote that forms the back bone of The Fallen Dancer, it’s this one. But the purpose of this entire escapade of words has to do with one ubiquitous confusion:
Where’s the lever?
And even more important:
Are you even looking for a lever?
Since we’re dealing in metaphor, we’ll place aside the first (literal) definition of leverage and focus on the second: the power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome.
Power evokes images of people in office, kings and queens, and perhaps business magnates and bosses.
What exactly is Power? In this case the literal definition from physics is quite useful. Power is energy expended over a certain amount of time. Another way of saying it is: how much work gets done in a given amount of time. A hard worker only has a limited amount of power because they are only one person. But if their hard work can accrue gains that they can then leverage to multiply their hard-work, say by, hiring an employee, then their power grows because now twice the amount of work can get done in the same amount of time. This is like having a lever that is twice as long, which means it can apply a lot more force.
The business owner now has more power, meaning their ability to literally change reality in order to reflect their vision for their business has increased. The more successful the business becomes, the more people that can be hired, and as a result the business owner is eventually regarded as a powerful individual.
There’s an important caveat here that’s often missed. Hard work alone does not necessarily accrue power. The ability to successfully leverage that hard work is what unlocks additional power. Working very hard every day on balancing an egg is not going to accrue power no matter how hard working that person is, and many people are doing the equivalent of just that: David Graeber called them Bullshit Jobs.
Just because you’re getting paid, doesn’t mean you’re doing anything that’s actually useful. And just because someone isn’t getting paid doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something useful. But this dichotomy will become more important later on in the chapters about Artists and Entrepreneurs. For now
You only live once, so look for the leverage. But how? Where are the levers that magnify one’s own hard work into something more powerful?
The ability to see the veiled levers that are available to us is the reason for setting the context with the Huainanzi parable. Hopefully, by juxtaposing the onlookers’ narrow perspective with that of the wise Father who interpreted things with an expansive perspective, we have a hint of where these levers lie. Paradoxically it’s also the one crucial ingredient to understanding Luck which isn’t present in the parable: resourcefulness.
Paul Graham discovers a beautiful species of resourcefulness in his essay A Word to the Resourceful. In the essay he explores a strange metric he discovered while working with start-ups. He noticed that people who would eventually succeed with their start-up were very easy to talk to. While those who would go on to fail with their start-up were very difficult to talk to. In the essay he realizes why this is the case:
“…the key to the mystery is the old adage ‘a word to the wise is sufficient.’ […] What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they’ll understand immediately. You don’t have to explain in detail; they’ll chase down all the implications… Understanding all the implications -even the inconvenient implications- of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It’s conversational resourcefulness.”
This is a very niche definition of resourcefulness - a subset as he says. But it is a particularly useful instance of resourcefulness because it is a purely cognitive one, which highlights acutely a difference in perspective. The resourceful entrepreneur is easy to talk to because as you speak to them, they are trying to interpret what you are saying from as many points of view as possible in order to hit upon the correct implication that is the actual meaning of your message.
Compare this to the opposite: when you say something to someone and they don’t understand. By default they’ve missed out on at least one possible interpretation of your words: the actual meaning you are trying to get across! This isn’t to say such a person doesn’t search for additional implications of what you’ve said. It means that over the course of many conversations if this person continually has trouble understanding what’s been said and constantly requires further explanation, then they are on the whole seeing fewer potential meanings than someone who doesn’t need further explanation. It’s a definition of degree that is important between these two perspectives.
It’s a matter of answering the question: why is this person more resourceful than that person?
The more resourceful person is simply searching more imaginative territory where the correct answer might lie. The less resourceful person is blind to that part of the territory because their aperture of focus is too narrow.
Resourcefulness is dependent on a range of focus: too narrow, and it blinds a person from seeing potential resources, implications and levers that exist outside of that narrow field of focus. A wide range of focus simply includes more options, and the resourceful person knows how to open up their aperture of focus to the limit in order to survey as many potential resources as possible. This enables the resourceful person to have a more generous selection of options to pick from.
Now, recalling the Huainanzi parable, who had the narrow range of focus, and who had a larger range of focus?
In the case of the Huainanzi parable, the Father’s larger range of focus essentially renders Luck to be net-neutral. But as mentioned earlier, there’s a crucial ingredient missing in that parable. At no point in the parable do any of the characters seek to deliberately leverage any resourcefulness available to them. The role of all characters in the parable is passive. The Father’s perspective in the Huainanzi parable might be more resourceful because he can imagine more implications for the present conditions, but as no point does he actually do anything to accrue leverage, he is open to the whims of fate, for better or for worse, and despite his ability to have an expanded outlook.
With this frame of reference, consider again the very first question: why are evil people so Lucky?
But with this frame, consider an alternative question: are evil people passive?
THE FALLEN DANCER, PART II (REWRITE)
January 12th, 2023
The Fallen Dancer is a series here on Tinkered Thinking exploring a recent shift in perspective. The resulting framework appears to tie together many topics explored on Tinkered Thinking over the years such as resilience, struggle, patience, curiosity, emotional regulation, artistry, entrepreneurship, winning, honesty, and communication. This series will be an attempt to unify them in a cohesive treatment.
Part II: We’ll see (REWRITE)
One of the most famous parables comes from the Huainanzi, an ancient Chinese text that records a series of scholarly debates at the court of Liu An, Prince of Hainan which occurred sometime in the second century BC. In Western society, this parable is often referred to as “The old man lost his horse“, “Maybe so, maybe not”, or simply: We’ll see.
Here is a translation based on Les grand crates du Hainan zi, Clare Larre et al.
Good luck and bad luck create each other
and it is difficult to foresee their change.
A righteous man lived near the border.
For no reason, his horse ran off into barbarian territory.
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But his farther spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”
Several months later
his horse came back with a group of good, noble barbarian horses.
Everyone congratulated him.
But his father spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you bad luck?”
The rich house had good horses
and the son mounted with joy to ride.
He fell and broke his leg.
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But his father spoke to him:
“Who knows if that won’t bring you good luck?”
One year later
the barbarians invaded across the border.
Adult men strung up their bows and went into battle.
Nine out of ten border residents were killed,
Except for the son, because of his broken leg,
Father and son were protected.
Hence: Bad luck brings good luck
And good luck brings bad luck.
This happens without end
and nobody can estimate it.
Before reading on, take a moment to let this parable sink in and see how it effects you. Do you agree with the message it’s laying out? What exactly is the message?
Further, it’s important to point out that this is a translation, and it’s ultimately a fool’s errand to approach interpretation pedantically, especially a translation of a text that comes from a culture that existed over a thousand years ago. Instead, the goal is to use this parable as a springboard to explore perspectives on luck.
In the common western version of this parable the volley between observers and the father is “You’re so lucky!” or “Oh how unlucky!” And to each, the father simply says: we’ll see.
When it comes to Luck, what is the highest utility that we can glean from this parable? While parables generally have a fairly obvious lesson that’s intended to be laid bare for any reader to notice and understand, the deepest lesson we can extract from this parable is more subtle than what at first seems obvious.
It seems that the lesson of the parable is summarized at the end. That good and bad luck are linked, and one brings the other. It seems like life and luck is a never ending series of getting one-step-forward followed by a push backwards, and in the grand scheme of things luck levels out to a neutral zero-sum game. But notice again those first two lines, specifically the second: it is difficult to foresee their change. That’s the whole point of this parable, and it’s chief value: second and third order effects are very difficult to see. In this sense the Father’s response in the western transmutation might fit the parable better. Instead of labelling each occurrence as either a potential herald of good or bad luck, the Father says simply: We’ll see.
Who’s to say that good luck doesn’t bring more good luck? But, that’s not the point of this parable.
While this is a cute story about unintended consequences and second and third order effects, does it really unearth the nature of good and bad luck in a way that we can understand?
What’s strange to realize about this story is that it doesn’t actually contain any bad luck. All of the bad luck turns out to be advantageous in some way, making it good luck temporarily veiled by perspective as bad luck. All the good luck is… well, lucky.
So again where is the bad luck?
Beyond this, some very large questions still loom. If we are to permit the influence of this parable on our perspective to be characterized by the way it ends: that luck is zero-sum and evens out in the end, then this parable does nothing to explain the phenomenal and consistent good luck that some people seem to have. And what about people who seem like they can never get a break? Where do things even out for those people? This parable does nothing for us in respect to understanding how good or bad luck tends to pile up for some people.
These larger questions aside, the parable does do two things for us that are of extreme value considering what’s to come. How you react to this parable says a lot about how you see the world, your effect on it, and the role of luck as you see it. Some people read this parable, hear the zero-sum nature of luck and nod their heads. It’s akin to throwing up your hands and saying: I’m just along for the ride! asdf
The other function this parable performs regards perspective, and the effect is pronounced in the western transmutation as characterized by the Father’s response of, “We’ll see”. Compare the perspective of the father who says “We’ll see” to that of the onlookers who judge the situation as either lucky or unlucky. Whose perspective is wider and whose perspective is zoomed in - narrow? The perspective of the onlookers is localized. They are considering the event as separate from the future. Whereas the father is taking tomorrow into consideration when trying to assess what is happening now. Presumably, the father is remembering many times in the past when bad things turned out to be beneficial and good things lead to unwanted outcomes. He’s then mapping that information onto the present and the future, while the onlookers seem oblivious to anything but the isolated event.
The real utility of this parable is that a change in perspective can neutralize the quality of luck.
This is just a starting point. The argument here is not that we should adopt a perspective that neutralizes luck, its only to point out for now that perspective plays an enormous role in the elusive entity that we call Luck.
Our large questions still loom, and the main event is still to come. But, just as a shrewd general seeks the advantage of picking the location of the next scrimmage, a context is being constructed here - one that hopefully illuminates the different perspectives that people have when it comes to luck. While this might do little to reign in that elusive creature into a usable frame work, what it does do is set the stage to show how people’s perspective on luck radically impacts what kinds of actions they take when navigating life.
Stay tuned for the next installment of The Fallen Dancer I will be posting new installments and drafts 5 days a week Tuesday - Saturday until the project is complete.