QUANTITATIVE HIERARCHY

January 15th, 2020

Quantity has a quality all it’s own.

Look at the famous composers.  Guys like Beethoven and Bach, and compare just the quantity of work they produced to mediocre composers of the same time.  Our famous composers didn’t simply produce more work as one might guess.  Not just 10 times as much as other mediocre composers.  The ones we consider brilliant –on average- produced 100 times as much music as the average composer.

Now consider this fact in terms of a composer’s best 10%.  Let’s say a mediocre composer produces 10 pieces of music.  The top 10% of their canon is going to be just one peice.

But our so called ‘genius’ composers will have produced 100 times as much, which means they have 1,000 pieces of music to pick from.  What’s the top 10% of a 1,000?  That’s right, our brilliant composers have 100 pieces of music that they can point to as the best of the best they’ve produced.

Sheer quantity in this case creates the space needed to have a diverse range among the best 10%. 

For the mediocre composer, it’s impossible to have any range or diversity among your best work, when your top 10% is only one song.

For writers and creators of all types, the potential to hit upon something really good goes up the more work they produce.  Quality is more likely to emerge with quantity, whereas if someone focuses just on quality, they might not produce either. 

But there’s a third edge to this sword.  The more work that a creative produces, the larger the base of mediocre stuff they’ve likely produced.  Of course mediocre in this sense should be limited to just their cannon of work.  It’s mediocre in comparison to the creative’s top 10%, not necessarily in comparison to other creatives. 

The third edge has to do with initial exposure.  If a random person dives randomly into their body of work, the likelihood that they encounter one of the best pieces goes down as the creative produces more and more work.  Surely the top 10% grows to include more, but this 10% is most likely becoming diluted.  As the quantity of work increases, the percentage to look at for the best shrinks. 

For the composer who has only produced 10 pieces of music, it’s simply not possible to regard the best 5% of their work because that would be half a piece of music.

And for a composer who has produced 1,000 pieces of music, wading through 100 pieces of music that comprises the top 10% is quite a lot.  It’s more realistic to look at the top 1% of work by a creative that has produced a 1,000 pieces.  With this more realistic shifting percentage of the best, it means that 99% of that creative’s work is comparatively mediocre.

And with that, it’s probably best to keep in mind that Tinkered Thinking has a Most Popular section on the website.  The probability that a random day’s episode is going to be one of the best grows lower every day as episodes emerge. 

Tinker Thinking will soon introduce a solution to this issue beyond the Most Popular section.  Subscribers will soon have access to private podcast feeds that feature only the best material, along with serial episodes that treat a single topic at depth.  So if you enjoy this sort of material and you haven’t yet signed up.  Take a moment at TinkeredThinking.com to subscribe.

Cheers.

This episode references Episode 411: Quality of Quantity

ENZYMATIC EFFORT

January 14th, 2020

Sitting with a problem and trying to figure it out can be excruciating.  You feel dumb, you’re confused, you don’t really, know what to try next.

It’s uncomfortable.

But this is the default state of learning.  Everyone says they love to learn new things, but without this context, few would say that they enjoy feeling dumb, confused and uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, this is what the unknown has in store for us.

Luckily, these feelings are just that: feelings.  And they succumb to strategies like most anything else.  Think of all those tense moments in action movies when stress is running high but our protagonist is suddenly beset with an intricate problem.  They slow down and say out loud:

“I can figure this out.”

There’s a fair amount of faith wrapped up in that sort of statement.  Be sure, we should have a short leash on a word like ‘faith’.

We should have faith in things like gravity.  It’s incredibly reliable in that you know when you drop the coffee mug it will definitely hit the ground, along with pretty much everything we do during a given day which functions with the implicit belief that gravity will keep doing it’s job.  And yet, we don’t really understand what the hell is going on to make us stick to big massive objects like the earth.  So for faith, it must be something incredibly reliable while it’s inner workings remain a mystery.

So faith does turn out to be a good word when we hear ourselves say I can figure this out.

We’ve figured out plenty of things before and if we just put in the requisite time and energy, the next puzzle is bound to give way it’s secrets also.

We sit and stare at the problem and often we feel as though we’re getting no where, but then out of the blue, or rather, out of that mysterious mind we have where seems to sit our consciousness, an idea pops, seemingly out of nowhere.  We try it.  And boom.  Problem solved.

That requisite time and energy is similar to an enzyme, or the activation energy required for a reaction to occur in chemistry.  Without either and nothing happens.

Without the time and energy devoted to a problem, it doesn’t get solved. 

But put in that effort sooner, and sooner comes the answer.

ROCK BOTTOM

January 13th, 2020

This episode extends episode 386 of Tinkered Thinking entitled White Diamond.

That episode seeks to introduce and describe the concepts of vicious and virtuous cycles.  They are most accessible by thinking about good and bad habits.  Both compound in opposing ways and they gain momentum in their respective directions. 

All personal development might even be described as merely building good habits and doing away with the bad ones.  Easier said than done.

There’s a fishy phrase that floats around talk of the bad habits.  When self-destructive habits compound to the point where we might hit Rock Bottom.

The problem with this idea, this rock bottom, is that when it comes to compounding vicious cycles,

there is no bottom.

There are only breaking points when some small heroic part of our mind looks at the mess and says ‘enough is enough’.

This might even happen often, because it’s the next step that’s hardest.  After reaching a breaking point and saying ‘enough is enough’, where do you go from there?  It’s not simply a matter of feeling a sudden surge of motivation to turn your life around.  Doing such doesn’t happen in a day, nor a week, nor a month.  It happens on the same time scale that habits do; a month is a good start, but in order to really turn things around, it’s important to think in terms of years and decades.  Empowering moments when we feel flooded with rare positive outlook… these are fleeting, and while they feel good and might help us with a burst of productivity, they are unstable and are prone to feel like a let down when the high passes.

Left unaided, vicious cycles spiral downward forever.  They are asymptotic.  It’s simply impossible to get to the bottom in order to bounce, as rock bottom is often said to be of good use for.  Rock bottom is a deceptive myth.  It’s a false comfort in a dangerous way, because it implies that no matter how bad things get, you can always let things get worse because you’ll just eventually hit rock bottom.  This, however, isn’t the case.  Just as the addicted keep trying to chase a certain high, rock bottom forever recedes until other things simply give out.  Like a person’s mental health, or even their bodily systems, as we see with so many accidental suicides and deaths via the opiate crisis.  How many of these people were un afraid of taking a step further down such a path, thinking that they’d eventually hit rock bottom?

What many people call rock bottom in retrospect, was really a breaking point.  Some part of the mind wakes up and tries to exert a rare influence on how things are going.  A person might come across many breaking points as they try to gain a footing and climb back up the wall of that slippery vortex which has become a life and a mind that feels out of control.  It’s counter-intuitive but when things are so dismal, it’s a strange relief to give up effort and slide down even further.  But another breaking point occurs and we try to stop sliding and then attempt the superhuman feat of climbing back up against the slippery tide.  We lose the grip and slide again.  Back and forth, this is the sort of mental and emotional struggle that inundates the minds of those who feel like they’ve lost the ability to move forward in life.  It doesn’t help that the sort of stress that abounds in such situations cripples the mind’s ability to think critically and make long-term plans.  It becomes harder and harder for a person to discern what the best course of action actually might be as they descend further.  The mind becomes quite literally drunk on stress.

If you have a decent life and things are going well, it’s worth wondering about it in this way:  Would you make good decisions if you were hooked up to a perpetual I.V. of alcohol and you were forced to stay up and sleep only an hour or two a night?  Of course not, but this might serve as an accessible analogy to understand those who just can’t seem to turn their life around.  Who seem stuck.  Can you imagine a life where every waking moment is so difficult that you are in a perpetual search for relief?  But you can’t rip out the I.V. and you can’t keep yourself asleep….

While such people might seem unnecessarily angry and destructive, it’s worth remembering that the path and experience of such vicious cycles is an incredibly lonely one, even if there are lots of people around.  It’s lonely because such a person feels as though they’ve lost touch with the most important person, the one that could actually change it all: themselves. 

Without your one guaranteed friend, it’s easy to feel like the world is against you.  And if a person feels like the world is against them, they become desperate for some of that world to join them.  Such a person feels broken, having lost themselves, so they want to break the world. 

Just so they don’t feel alone.

The situation is as though a person’s demons are actually caged angels.  Something needs to be broken, but it’s not the world, and it’s not other people, as so often happens when hurting people lash out.  It’s the vicious cycle they are in that needs to be broken.  That’s the breaking point we blindly try to hit as we lash out in such situations. 

But all too often our flailing makes the situation worse.  And it is always a mistake to think that rock bottom will show up.  We lose too many people, and this small turn of language might seem harmless, but like all language it’s a part of the brick and mortar of how we make sense of the world.  We make better sense of the world without rock bottom.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: DIRTY MIRRORS

January 12th, 2020

The little boy knelt to his sandal, too big for him and the leather now old, cracked, long baked beneath his feet from the hot sand.  He pulled some young reeds and wrapped the broken sandal and his foot, tying the two together.  The boy no longer had a name, since he’d been taken from the rich wet lands to the west. He could only remember moments, his mother screaming, his siblings as confused as himself, and then the long journey. Now he only knew himself by the sound his master yelled at him. 

It would be many years before Lucilius would name himself.

The little boy stood, wagged and stamped his foot to make sure the leather sole would stay and then continued on his way.  He arrived back at the merchant tent where his master was rapidly pressing a dried and pointed reed into a tablet of soft clay.  But when the man saw Lucilius, he yelled, making the boy startle and cower.  The man took a stiff leather stock and struck the boy’s bare back, then he pointed at the copper mirrors and threw a wollen clump at the boy.  Lucilius took soft bunch and went to the copper mirrors his master had pointed at.  He looked up from the clump of wool and saw his own big eyes, rounded down by the feeling of tears held back.  He saw his own little mouth in the mirror quiver, and then he squeezed his eyes shut to keep himself from seeing it.  He looked away, down the busy market street that lead to the giant blocked building, radiant in the sun, the ramps cutting such long straight lines against the smooth wall of the building.  Lucilius had never seen anything like it before he’d been brought to this place.  He squinted at the brilliant reflection of sun on the gold ornaments atop the temple, and seeing their shine he remembered his task. 

He turned back to the copper mirrors to find a calm face and a steady gaze.  He bobbed his head at the boy in the metal, tinted like old sun, as though they both understood what should be done.

Dust kicked up from the main thoroughfare had coated the copper mirrors and Lucilius gently began to polish the shining plates back to their full luster.  He worked diligently, clearing each one and on the last he found a blemish, some blood or spit, he could not tell, but he rubbed harder with the crude wool, smearing and then slowly clearing the mess, and as he worked his tired arm against the mirror he leaned in closer.  The blemish cleared and before Lucilius sat back he looked again at himself in the mirror sheen.  He watched his eyes twitch as he looked at different parts of his own face.  Then he slowly turned his head away, straining his eyes to see as he did, and  when he could see himself no more, he whipped his head back as though he might catch the sight before it shifted.  But alas there he was again, looking at himself.  He leaned in closer, seeing his eyes grow and then he started looking off into the mirror as though he might see around the edge, but only the blocky temple came into view.  He got closer, wondering if the mirror world in there went on forever.  He pressed his face against the copper, as though he might be able to push into that world and get away from this one.  He wanted to know, what was in it.  Surely it wasn’t what was behind this plate of copper.  There was something else in there, and he might be able to get at it if only he could somehow get past that image of himself pushing back with his cheek.

His master yelled his new name again and Lucilius jolted, trying to turn to see where the man was as the leather stock landed again on his sore back.  The man hit the boy, over and over, as the boy held on to the plate of copper, terrified of letting go, knowing the mirror would get dirty again if it fell.

FORGOTTEN GIFTS OF CHILDHOOD

January 11th, 2020

We’re always amazed how quickly kids learn.  As chaotic and unruly as they might appear to us, something in all that cloud of activity is figuring things out at a speed that adults can only admire with in frustration.

And then puberty hits and we gain such a claustrophobic degree of self consciousness that we spend much of our adult life trying to get rid of it, or somehow get around it.

Aphorisms like be yourself and don’t care what others think don’t really apply to children in the way that adults covet such ideas.  Children are generally so immersed in their experience of reality that the who concept of a ‘self’ is far less important than it proves to be for adults.

And it’s likely because of this small identity that children are so fluid with their failure and as a result, they learn very quick.

Our ideas surrounding failure are fundamentally tied to our sense of identity.  Failure is somehow a commentary on who we are.  We somehow take it personally and our own value is called into question in our own eyes.  The recursiveness here is only detrimental.  Children, on the other hand generally don’t have this sort of recursive issue.

Failure is but a passing road sign on the way to doing something new.

We as adults, however, are not wholly exiled to this torturous realm of self-conscious paralysis.  It’s possible to down-regulate your identity and the importance of your sense of self until your relationship with failure becomes both enjoyable and challenging in the same way that playing tennis or chess with a friend can be.

The process is simple, but requires consistent effort.  Dusting off that forgotten gift of childhood depends solely on the ability to simply pay attention to the moment.

It’s a simple as that.  If you are paying close attention to the moment, then you’re simply not in your own head anymore. But doing this reliably and consistently requires a dedicated effort.  One that can be achieved through meditation.

But a whole practice of meditation with some sort of teacher and exercises isn’t necessarily needed.  You can prove this point about the moment to yourself easily.

As you go about your day today, try to remember this idea, and when you do, simply stop, pause, and look around at the life in which you are immersed.  Try to soak up every detail, as though you’re in some fantastically realistic videogame.  Allow yourself to marvel at the fact that you even exist – no matter what you life entails, how much difficulty or sadness, the chance to pay attention this closely is always on offer.  Let the details of reality sink in and you just might find some relief, perhaps even a joy that feels distantly familiar.