THE ART OF EXPECTATION

August 15th, 2020

It’s one thing to manage the expectations others have of you.  You think the project will take two weeks, you tell client it’ll take four weeks and to their great delight, you’re done in three.  Often we over promise and under deliver. We say two weeks and deliver after three.  Managing the expectations others have of you is mostly a matter of giving yourself more than enough time, and hustling to over deliver.

This sort of trick takes a bit of work.  It’s easy to deceive our own self into thinking we’ll have superpowers.  But this can lead to slipshod work done too quickly.  Trial and error with a little reflection mixed in allows anyone to become quite good at managing these expectations.

But what about our own expectations of the world?  How do we keep from fooling ourselves when we imagine a certain reaction from the world?

We build the business expecting the customers will show up.  We fire off the email expecting it to land perfectly.  We publish the book expecting rave reviews.  We hang the painting expecting wide and wanting eyes.

It’s a bit of a dilemma:  to make something for the world in order to have a certain effect, but to expect nothing anyhow.  It’s a bit like the theatre or the movies.  We suspend our disbelief and forget that we are merely sitting in a chair watching a story in order to get lost in the story.

A similar trick of the mind is required here: to give it your all and calmly, placidly, and peacefully expect nothing in return.

The art of expectation isn’t so much an art as it is a magic trick: one of self-hypnosis.  Why work so hard if there’s maybe nothing in return?  Nearly no one is going to logically enter that sort of agreement.

There is of course a deeper hack to this sort of magic trick.  

What if you just enjoy doing the work regardless?

This isn’t a hack so much as it is a solution to that original dilemma.  At the end of the day, you only get one go at putzing around in this life.  Now what’s a better way to spend it?  Working for some kind of potential return from others?  Expecting that?  Or expecting nothing and merely enjoying the process, because the expectation is displaced, replaced and properly in place:  the expectation is that the effort will be worth it no matter what, because it’s the experience of that effort that we are expecting.

DRY RUN

August 14th, 2020

How many times was the school essay banged out at the last moment during the all nighter and handed in without even a second look for fear of just how bad it would be?  In retrospect its somewhat amazing how well a student can do while implementing the worst possible process.  Then again, Tinkered Thinking isn’t too much different.  None of these episodes are edited and the only second glance they are given is during the reading for the podcast.

But of course, this rapid-fire-rough-draft is the name of the game for the Tinkered Thinking experiment.  

That being said, when it comes to efforts of much larger and more complicated effort, a few comb-throughs are absolutely essential. 

For example, Tinkered Thinking has been developing an online store, coding it from scratch, all for the purpose of launching a book.  The store has technically been functional for days, but each of these days evinced another set of bugs in the code that had to be carefully hunted down, scrutinized and squashed.  Word of the store has been carefully guarded and carefully leaked to more and more people during these days in order to facilitate more dry runs of the store, and the strategy has been essential.  Come launch day, with fingers crossed, all should go well.  And regardless of how much Murphy’s Law gets in the way of that hope, it’ll certainly go better than if all these bugs hadn’t been rooted out.

All problems concede to attention, if attention is ample, generous, unending and focused.  A dry run, whether it be for an online store, or a play, or a jujitsu maneuver, is a particular iteration of attention, one that gets a new view of the situation - a view that is bound to uncover things we missed.

Unfortunately there’s no dry run for life.  While we get a lot of repetition with each day holding a similar structure to the one before, we only get one shot at each.  The days in this respect are like Tinkered Thinking episodes - there is no rewrite: you just have to go for it, do your best, and see what happens.

CONTROLLING THE INCENTIVE

August 13th, 2020

How many people try to control you?  Perhaps there’s a boss that needs you to do things.  Control might seem like a harsh and overbearing word to ascribe here.  We can always quit, walk out, say screw it.  But of course, then the pay-check won’t show up.

The other side of the equation can be even more morose:  trying to control others can be a doomed goal leveraged with all possible friction.  The mindless approach devolves into force, both mental and physical, as though people can be squashed into the shape imagined, as though they can be guided with force like the limbs of a puppet.  Even if this sad mission is somehow carried out to effect, the interaction is the opposite of elegant.  Violence of all types doesn’t just rob us of the best ingredients of humanity, it saps the art out of life.

Whether it’s just correlation, there seems to be a connection between the quick turn to force and a lack of control such an agent commands over their own self.  Perhaps the observation answers itself:  without an ability to control ourself, we turn to the crudest means to try and control others.  In the absence of the ability to effect the world in ways we want by our own means, perhaps we try to have that effect through others, by coercion?  This somewhat kicks the can down the road a bit.  A lack of control once removed doesn’t result in genuine influence.  Sure, with untold quantities of physical force at one’s disposal, others can be forced, but the charade lasts only as long as the force does.  It is a constant 1:1 tradeoff of input and output.  

Teleporting now to other realms of living, it’s possible to inspire someone for a lifetime with the smallest kernel of influence.  This sort of effect can be enormously asymmetric.  A single inspiring conversation, or experience can send a person off with untold energy, renewing itself on a tiny sliver of memory.

There’s a bit of a spectrum now created.  There’s physical force which influences only as long as it is present, then there is the pay check which influences as long as it takes for the check to arrive, and then there is inspiration which can influence for an unlimited amount of time.

All of these are incentives of varying effect.  Persuasion is really just the art of incentive as applied to other people.

But the real art enters when we apply this whole framework of influence, control and incentive to our own self.  Do you have to twist your own arm to make something happen, or do you dangle a carrot? 

Or do you know how to inspire yourself?

PLATEAU

August 12th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the individual who operates the Twitter handle @Route2FI

Some Tinkered Thinking episodes aren’t all that great.  This episode might be one of them.  So it may be best just to skip it.  And worse yet, it might be part of a string of mediocre, lukewarm episodes that work more as sleep aides as opposed to revving up the brain in the morning - which was the original hope for Tinkered Thinking:  snackable, thought provoking episodes that can be consumed over a cup of morning coffee.  (As an aside, there is at least one person who has admitted to consuming this content in just that sort of way, which means the whole platform is a total success and can now be retired with infinite satisfaction.)

Alas, the words keep rolling, regardless of how good or bad.  

A string of off days, or bad writing happens.  As with any skill or practice, we hit plateaus.  It’s quite easy and natural to get stressed about such plateaus.

Have I lost my touch?

Am I no good anymore?

Will my spark return?

These all seem like legitimate questions, but frankly they’re just awful.  Notice what they have in common:  they all have some sort of personal pronoun.  The focus is inward, and attention is splattered against the flimsy mask of identity.  By asking such questions we get overly concerned with something that has very little if anything to do with our inspiration:  who and what we think we are.

Let’s flip the whole issue inside out and make the same point from the other side of the fence:  When you are in a flow state, when inspiration is firing on all cylinders, when time is flying by and you aren’t the least bit distracted but at the same time things feel a bit dreamy….. where is one’s sense of identity in that circumstance?

It’s of no concern.  These flow states are often described as losing one’s self.  Like watching a good movie, or spending time with someone who electrifies the moment, or reading an excellent book.  We lose ourselves.  So what exactly is the thing being lost during these moments?

The thing being lost is the very same thing referred to by those overly self-conscious questions:  when we relinquish our attachment to identity, the door opens to inspiration.

That issue about identity and worrying about whether you’ve lost your touch is a bit like being obsessed with the chicken-and-egg question when really you should be making an omelette. 

When inspiration ‘strikes’ we don’t suffer the loss of our identity,

So that being the case:

are you willing to sacrifice your identity in order to welcome inspiration?

WHY THINK ABOUT WHY?

August 11th, 2020

Questions take a few basic forms.  These forms are the journalists’ mantra: the who, what, when, where, why and how?

Each word heralds a different cognitive realm regarding how we make sense of the world.  The form of each family of questions are vastly different.  For example the question that begins with the word “who” is really a subdomain of the form of “what”.  To demonstrate we can ask: What caused the accident?  The answer can be, that guy over there, which also answers the who.  But this can’t work in reverse.  If you ask What caused the accident? And the answer we get is, the foundation gave out, well then this answers the what, but we’re still left in the dark regarding who might be involved or at fault.  This is because who refers only to people, whereas the word what can refer to everything and anything, including people. Obviously.

Evidently, the word what automatically refers to a larger pool of answers than who, and this is by default.  Regardless, both questions seek to pin down nouns for the most part.  They refer to actual things.

The question about when does mush the same thing.  We define time fairly rigidly and with great precision, and we synchronize this precision across the globe.  The possible answer for when something occurs is inherently narrow.  Whatever it is, it can either be pinpointed to an exact moment, or the beginning and the end can be, thereby defining in time quite narrowly when something happened.

How something happens begins to broach a much larger range of territory.  Suddenly we are launched into the realm of constructing a mechanical narrative.  The task is one that casts us in the position of a Sherlock Holmes.  Suddenly we are gathering all the pieces that we can ascertain by asking what happened, and reanimate these pieces in reverse, and engineer the history from a backwards perspective.  I hold the last domino, now which of these other dominos was the one that hit it?  And so forth and so on we track a string of interlocking events and pieces until we arrive at the start just before everything happened.  With the introduction of how we have moved far from present reality which neatly contained the what and the where, and the who.  With the introduction of when, we are flung into an imaginary territory to track exactly how things happened.

But after the entire cognitive exercise of assembling the moving puzzle through time is finished, we are left with a final imaginative trial:  why?

Why is simultaneously the most useful and most difficult question to answer.  It’s no wonder that children zero-in on the utility of why so quickly.  If an adult can actually answer their question about why, then their curiosity gets the most bang for its buck.  If we get a solid answer to the question of why then it leapfrogs the need to sift through the who, what, where, when, how.  The answer to why inherently involves and subsumes all of these.  No correct answer to why is going to leave out the important aspects that one needs to discover slowly by asking who, what, where, when, how.  At the same time, the answer to why may dispense with needless details contained in the answers to those questions.

The problem with why however, is that it can be difficult to know where and when to stop when you’re digging for the answer.  The question of why someone did something can quickly branch into details of genetics and environment, which ultimately requires examining parental genetics and the legacy of environment through time.  By asking why over and over, the bounds of when are breached and the reasons for anything occurring at all begin to ramify backward into the past until we start skimming along the domino of reasons citing, because this person’s grandparents originally met in this town, which was settled ten years prior, because these people moved into this part of the continent, because of European exploration, because of civilizational density, because of agriculture because of evolution of man, because of the evolution of mammals, because of the evolution of eukaryote cell, because the formation of the earth, because of a yellow dwarf we call the sun because of coalescing gasses and galactic formation… all the way back until we can say: why did it happen?  Well because there was a big bang, apparently.  

When a child asks over and over why something happened, each response an attempt to get at a deeper reason, the final reason at the bottom of this recursive hole really is something like:  the big bang.  But then the proper answer to any question about why something happened is a careful and ridiculously complicated narrative that starts with the big bang and ends with the results in real time that are being questioned.  And even then, if a parent or a teacher attempts the tour-de-force task of threading that string of narrative, a child, or anyone can turn around again and ask: why did the big bang happen?  At which point everyone should be forgiven for throwing up their hands and saying, I don’t know.  

The whole point of wandering around in the ramifications of the question why is to highlight the enormous difference in the size of answers that different questions hint at.  Questions like what, and when are quite easy, and they are easy because they are specific.  We are tasked less because the steps required to get to the answer are few.  We can unknowingly wade into mental quicksand if we ask why something happened in a way that isn’t tightly bound.  

An example is: why are things so unfair?

This is simply an impossible question to answer effectively.  Any answer we do come up with also isn’t going to be all that helpful.  But compare that use of the word why to this one:

Why wasn’t I able to hit my usual amount of reps during that exercise at the gym this morning?

This use of the word why is far more bounded.  We can track back pretty quickly, analyzing how we can end up with low energy, examining the previous 24 hours and then identifying a really bad night of sleep as the cause, which perhaps was in turn caused by a huge meal and perhaps a few too many drinks.  

While Why has the potential for having the largest, most complex and most difficult answer to pin down, the scope and complexity of this answer can be hugely narrowed by the way we cage and frame the question that uses the word why.  

Interestingly, why can also self-destruct in a very helpful way.

For example, when you realize that you’ve been stuck trying to answer a bad question, you might wonder:

Why aren’t I asking myself a better question?

The answer to this question ceases to matter the moment the question is asked -it self destructs- because by that point, you’re already fishing around for a better question, one that doesn’t keep your head in the past, but one that might actually help you move forward.