A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE MIND'S PIROUETTE

January 5th, 2020

The alarm blared a stabbing noise.  It was still dark, and even under heavy covers Lucilius was cold.  He reached out from the warmer cocoon of bed and slapped around until the buzzer went dead.  He was tired and it was too early but he had to get up.

The taxi was late and Lucilius shivered in the cold rain without coffee in his belly.  The lines at the airport were long and everyone seemed as though they were competing for the worst of moods, miseries breeding purer forms of themselves.  Lucilius managed to lighten up with a little curtesy just for the customs officer, knowing the futility of competing with authority.  He proceeded after the stern nod and once he was at the gate the reprieve before boarding only created the space to dwell on how much of a dismal day it was.

Dotted lines of rain ran spitted down the window.  Beyond, everything faded into the deep gray day.  The lethargic herd of people dripped down into the jet way and slowly –painfully- organized themselves in the plane.

The fluorescent light seemed to pierce the retina and reach back and poke a wounded part of the brain.  Lucilius slumped into his seat, closing his eyes and rested his face against the cold window.  It would all be over at some point.

The plane taxied out and waited in line for its runway.  There was always a slight thrill with takeoff, Lucilius thought, but the grim taste of his mind curdled his appetite for joy.  Misery wanted to last as long as anything else and it held as much reservation about snuffing out its replacement as any living thing might.

The plane finally met its turn at the runway and with some speed it stepped up into the thick wet air, rattling with bumps that felt like personal slights to the people aboard trying to rest with their misery. 

The windows grew dark with thicker cloud as the turbulence increased.  Lucilius opened his eyes, annoyed but curious as the light of day seemed to backtrack.

Water streaked in smooth moving lines across the window.  He watched the wing with it’s red light tilt and wiggle against the dense patches of air as they climbed.

Then the plane broke through the cloud cover and Lucilius’ eyes were filled with a magnificent blue sky, the morning sun flooding a thin layer of gold across the clouds, now a peaceful rolling landscape below.

Lucilius studied the texture of the lofty gilded sea.  It wasn’t until he sighed a deep breath of relief that he noticed how much he was smiling.

THE RAMIFICATIONS OF BUSINESS

January 4th, 2020

By what metric do we understand a business?

The obvious answer to this is that money is the metric.  But this is perhaps only the first step.

The first aim of a business is to be solvent in order to continue operating.  Many would claim that the only other aim of a business is to generate profit, and for those that’s where the game essentially stops. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the concept of a business is a far more expansive.  It has far more to do with cooperation than it does monetary gains of some owner, whether or not this cooperation is in focus or not.  The ramifications of people cooperating in a business will have far greater breadth and reach than will the gains accumulated by a few people who primarily profit from the business.

A rather negative example of this fact is oil companies.  The use of oil as an energy source is a fact that touches every human life either directly or indirectly.  In comparison the profits of this industry have benefited a tiny number of people.   As we’ve seen recently in Australia where thousands of people have been displaced by horrific bushfires and an estimated half a billion animals have perished, it’s clear the real ramifications of this business are now having effects that far exceed anything that a few rich people might do with their pot of gold.

An odd ball company that turns this lack of foresight on it’s head is Tesla.  All the controversy of Tesla has nothing to do with the Tweeting characteristics of it’s CEO and everything to do with that second metric of business: profits.

The primary focus with publicly traded companies is quarterly profits.  Almost nothing else comes close in importance, and Tesla’s direct refusal to make quarterly profits a top priority is the source of all it’s controversy.  Any gains the company has made in its early years has been for the sake of research, development and growth, leaving little left over for investors who have enormous difficulty seeing beyond a Quarterly statement that is always less than 3 months away.

Tesla has stated many times that the main objective of the company is to accelerate the transition to renewable resources.  This is not a metric that can be achieved in any short term way, let alone something that can be tangibly measured on a quarterly basis.  Such a metric might as well be in a different language when delivered to money hungry investors.  Many people simply don’t consider things on such a long timeline, and this is certainly taken into very little account when trying to figure out how well a company is doing.

It’s as incomprehensible as if the oil companies at the beginning of the last century had said that their main objective was not profit but to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a significant margin thereby raising the global temperature.  This would have seemed ludicrous, even though it is the most salient fact of this industry in retrospect.

The question any prospective business owner would do well to ask themselves before starting is:

How will people’s lives be different after the entire life of this idea has run it’s course?

NTH TRY

January 3rd, 2020

Children have an amazing capacity for repetition, if it’s worth doing once, there’s a chance it’s worth doing fifty times in a row.  Whatever aspect of early development underlies this idiosyncrasy of behavior it’s worthy to note the value here.  It may be the reason behind the brute persistence children throw into their learning.  No matter how many times they have fallen and cried from pain, they will always try to run again.

Adults on the other hand prove to be veritable wimps when it comes to this sort of persistence.  We try something once and fail and conclude, well…. I suck at that.

We have to wonder, what exactly are we trying in such an instance?

Are we trying to succeed?

Or

Are we merely trying one strategy that we believe might lead to success?

Regardless of whether or not we are successful, it is always the later.  We are always trying out strategies by carrying out the plans generated by that strategy.  The result is feedback from reality telling us merely how well that strategy worked.  Or didn’t.

It may look like children are doing the same thing over and over, but chances are high they are paying attention to different aspect each time.  A while ago the children’s show Blues Clues underwent a study when it was found that children would watch the same episode 5 days in a row.  Turns out they were picking out new things with each viewing. 

Is it any surprise?  Do you pick up all the details the first time around?

Or is it more the other way around?  Is it that there’s often so much going on that if we don’t luck out with some surprise dopamine hit from beginner’s luck that we’re in fact so overwhelmed by all the details we know we’d have to study that we give up out of a kind of laziness?

There’s some efficiency in laziness.  Learning is costly, and deciding not to figure something out saves a lot of time and energy.  But time and energy is wasted if we don’t use it to learn something else.

And if we turn down the opportunity to learn anything than we may want to wonder if we can begin to lose the ability to learn at all.

What a scary thought.

Often we default to a passive filler activity, like Netflix.  But what would happen if we just sit with ourselves alone, with nothing to do.  What curiosity would eventually arise?  What would we want to investigate?

With all the busyness of life pushed aside for one damn moment, what human drive remains?

Give it a shot.

And if it doesn’t feel like it yields anything,

Give it another shot.

And another.

There’s something there.

It might just be a hidden key to unlock a better future.

This episode references Episode 53: There is No Try

FEEDBACK SPEED

January 2nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Gray Wheeler

The more you poke reality, the more you understand about how you can effect reality.  The faster you poke reality, the faster this understanding grows.

This boils down to a question like:

Would you rather be a fast learner or a slow learner?

If you feel like you are a slow learner, it may not be something fundamental about you.  It may simply be the way you are poking reality that is an issue.  For example, if you take up archery the feedback loop is pretty straightforward: you take a shot and it either lands closer to the center of the target or father away, and based on this information, you change what you are doing in order to get a better result, a result that is more predictable, and you may take hundreds of shots everyday in order to improve.  Each shot consists of a single run of this feedback loop. 

But if your chosen activity is writing fiction specifically geared to elicit delight for people who will exist 100 years in the future, then your feedback loop is 100 years long, as opposed to archery where it’s perhaps a couple of seconds.

The different ways that we can get feedback on our writing is an example where we can see these different mediums achieving the same goal at different speeds.  If you go the “traditional” route and send your writing out to publications for consideration, you have to wait for a response, and this can often take months.  But if you post your writing online for everyone to read freely, your ability to garner some feedback drastically increases.  Twitter is a great example of this.  It’s possible to get better at expressing yourself in such a limited format because the feedback loop is very tight on Twitter.  You write on the platform, you post it, and feedback can be instant.  In fact, the complete absence of feedback on Twitter is extremely valuable if you compare it to the months of silence that follows when you mail a piece of writing out to a publisher.

The true difference here is between digital and analog.  Digital is simply faster with the internet, whereas the physical analog is cumbersome and takes comparatively huge amounts of time to move through space in order to run the route of a feedback loop.

This is at the heart of why tech companies can and do grow so fast.  Before the internet the business of companies had to rely on totally analog forms of communication, which simply take time, as per the speed of mail, and the physical transportation systems through which mail flows.  Telephones certainly sped this up, then fax machines, then email, and now there is an absolute sea of variety when it comes to how we might communicate, all of them perhaps slightly nuanced for different situations of communication.

Any feedback loop at it’s core is a connection through which communication occurs.

The arena of sports is a good example of how we experience this feedback loop outside the realm of language.  An athlete takes an action on the field and immediately they receive feedback as the game changes.  Compare this iterative speed to our traditional writer who has an address book full of possible publications.

One area where this feedback loop seems to have a troubling application is conversation.  Considering how much we all talk, it’s rather a surprise that we aren’t all masters of dialogue, virtuosos of rhetoric and geniuses when it comes to persuasion.

We certainly all put our time in, so what’s going on?

One aspect of this problem is evident when we compare the conversations on News Channels with the conversations we hear on podcasts.  New Channels are obligated by their business model to limit conversation in terms of time.  This creates a situation that is little more than a volley of predetermined sound bites.  Podcasts on the other hand have no time limit and this freedom creates a space where perspectives can be explored and unpacked.

So conversation does have some of the constraints that come with analog forms.  It literally takes time and space in order to speak.  Whereas a message on twitter by a single person can instantly be read by hundreds of thousands.  To put that in perspective, just think about what it would take for one person to say a single sentence to hundreds of thousands of people?  Such an amount of people simply take up too much space to all be in one place where our orator could maybe yell such a sentence at the top of their lungs.  Online platforms like Facebook or Twitter make a person’s speech replicate ad infinitium.

But conversation, despite its analog limits often lacks the mastery of one crucial tool.

If conversation is defined as the presence of two people’s perspective, then as long as each person gets an opportunity to talk, the conversation is an absolute success regardless of whether they agree, or hate each other at the end of it.

The art that underlies what we might think of when we consider being good or bad at conversation is really

The Art of the Question.

It’s not a description of our own perspective that we should use to poke reality for feedback.  In some sense, that perspective doesn’t matter unless it’s somehow translated into action, and creating sound waves is a fairly minimal action.  If we really want to stir up reality, the best way to do it is to ask a question.

But what exactly is a question?

For that, check out Episode 390: Question about the Question.

Thanks again Gray.

DAY ONE

January 1st, 2020

People seem to be of different minds when it comes to New Years.  Many see it as a time of reflection in order to reorient and redirect. Others rant about how the calendar is a fiction.  Others love to point out that gyms will be packed for a couple weeks and then they will empty out again for the rest of the year. 

Those with serious dedication to their habits and the practice of their values often scoff about this phenomenon, and for good reason,

every day is a new chance, a new opportunity to change direction.  Why wait for one specific day of the year to give something a good shot?

Tinkered Thinking which is 626 episodes strong started on a random Monday in April of 2018 and this fact is so superficial that I actually had to look it up…

But one underlying fact that seems to fly under the radar with regards to all these considerations about the new year is the fact that people actually get some free time that is casually devoted by culture to reflection and planning for a better future.

Compare that fact to something Bill Gates does: he takes off whole weeks in order to just… think.

How many other people have this sort of luxury?  For those working your 9-5 hustle, these virtually never happen since vacation time is often allocated to busy vacations to stave off the feeling that life is somehow being wasted.

Only those who are independently wealthy can afford something like a ‘Think Week’, let alone multiple Think Weeks during the year.

This variable of time is the most overlooked variable when it comes to innovation in any area, whether it be personal development or product development.  Culturally, it evokes a certain nervousness to simply… do nothing.

This is a secret for creative people.  They schedule time in order to explore, and in the beginning this often means doing… nothing.  Once some sort of process of creation takes root and it’s consistently productive, it’s hard to see that creative period as ‘doing nothing’ because so much ends up happening.  What’s important to focus on is the actual time allotted to such.

What if, for example everyone had a random day off during the week that functioned like New Years Eve.  It was a time totally detached from normal life and work that was casually allocated to just think about the direction of one’s own life. 

How would this affect people?

Impossible to know.

Unless of course , you try it out for yourself.