A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ROOM TO GROW

July 14th, 2019

Lucilius was tinkering with a project in his woodshop when the father of his godson came in.  The kind man smiled at the set up Lucilius had put together in their backyard garage.  He picked up a piece from a new chess set that Lucilius had finished making and studied the fine smooth surface carved from the lathe while Lucilius finished up his current efforts.  A long winding cut on a band saw clipped to conclusion and Lucilius flicked the power switch off, letting the metal band relax from its tinny screech, groaning a long smooth drag like the honing of a blade until it came to a stop.

“What are you working on now?”

“Oh, just some scrollwork that’ll go on the bookcase for the living room.”

The man smiled.  “Can’t thank you enough for all the beautiful work you’ve done for us.”

“Well hey, you’ve given me a beautiful home to be a part of.”

The man laughed.  “Pretty sure I’m getting the sweet end of the deal.”

“Nah,” Lucilius said, “there are no deals between family, least not in the way I see it.  Way I look at it, I get to spend time with my godson.”

The man’s smile was lifted high on a side. “Speaking of your godson, I wanted to ask.”

Lucilius looked up from the scrollwork to meet the man’s eyes.

“We were thinking of moving him up to the guest bedroom, and I wanted to see if you had any ideas about changing it for him? You have free reign of course, we love everything you’ve done.”

Lucilius paused, and thought for a few moments. 

“Yea,” he said.  “I think I’ve got a couple ideas.”

One of the earliest memories that Lucilius’ godson would come to remember for the rest of his life was that of a thick rope always hanging in the middle of his room.  The rope hung from a circular hole in the high ceiling. 

As a toddler, with the help of his mother and father, the boy used it to help take his first steps, and eventually it was used to swing from the bed across the room to the toy chest.  But eventually, the boy began to wonder what was up above his own room.  The perfectly circular hole in his ceiling gave glimpse to another room above where the thick rope was affixed to the second ceiling high above and there was no other staircase or way up to that high and secret room.  The boy grew frustratingly curious about the space up there, his parents sworn to secrecy, and his godfather gently laughing off every request to know what was up there.

“You’ll find out when you’re ready,” Lucilius would say during his visits.

The boy would lay in bed, puzzling over a way to get up there.  At night a dim light came on in the high room and lit the circular hole, creating a nightlight of sorts – something Lucilius had planned so that the space would not scare the boy in the dark, but also as a tempt to wonder.

Then one day, while Lucilius’ godson was building with Legos, he realized a new idea.  He’d pinched a small piece between two larger ones.  They did not technically fit but the boy did not have the right pieces and the improvisation worked.  Seeing what he’d done, he looked at the rope and wondered.

Then he got up and left his room, making his way out the back of the house to the garage where his godfather kept a woodshop. He entered and went over to a long rack of clamps that Lucilius had arranged on a wall.  The boy took a few of the heavy clamps, and lugged them back up to his room.  After puzzling over the mechanism for a moment, trying to remember how his godfather had used them, he managed to loosen one.  He opened the jaws, and then gently eased them onto the rope, and began tightening.  When he could squeeze the vice no further he let go.  The clap hung in midair, bending the rope at an angle with its own lopsided weight.  

The boy took hold of the rope high above the clamp and then hanging from his grip, he lifted his feet and placed them on the clamp and slowly pushed till his weight was fully supported by the clamp. The boy smiled and then got back down and took the second clamp and affixed it to the rope a little higher. He tried his idea again, and used the first clamp as a means to reach just a little higher on the rope, and then, hanging, he managed to lift his feet to the second clamp and push himself still, a little higher.

After a few more trips to the woodshop to collect clamps, Lucilius’ godson was ascending the infamous rope that had taunted him all during his short life.  That rope, now riddled with clamps, was turning into a staircase, the boy climbing up and down to bring clamps higher, until he was nearly flush with the hole in the ceiling.

From there the boy saw something he’d never noticed. What he’d always assumed was a dirty smudge was actually a little bit of writing, scrawled on the inside wall of the thick hole.

It read:

You must be strong enough or smart enough if you’ve made it this far. Each lends to the other.  Keep going, and enjoy the next challenge that awaits above.  Love, Lucilius.

The boy, sweating from the effort, and determined, reached down and took another clamp that he’d hung from a pocket.  With an arm looped around the rope he carefully placed the clamp and secured it, and then lifting his feet to it, he hoisted himself up into the secret room.

WHY APOLOGIES DO NOT WORK

July 13th, 2019

The current ‘cancel culture’ that rages through the avenues of social media is an intensely supercharged case study that highlights why apologies don’t work.

I’m sorry.

Everyone hears this, everyone says it.  And it doesn’t take much digging around to realize the subtle and inconvenient mechanism here that makes sorryvery problematic – especially in a culture geared towards instant satisfaction.

We can approach the problem more obviously by invoking a perennial example:

When someone apologies repeatedly for the same mistake, how meaningful is the apology?

Most everyone has had some exposure to this kind of behavior, whether in themselves or others.  If a mistake is continually made and apologized for, then the apology quickly loses any meaning.  It starts sounding like a lie because it is not indicating any change in behavior for the future.

The hazy ground here is intention, especially when we care deeply for the person apologizing.  In that case we truly want to believe the apology because we yearn for a better world where the mistake isn’t being made.  This lovable human foible is completely non-existent in cancel culture because the social platforms upon which cancel culture thrives is occurring just about exclusively between strangers.  These are not loved ones attacking loved ones as might happen over a turkey dinner during Thanksgiving.

It’s far easier to dismiss someone and their apology when people have no interest in believing the apology.

This is at the heart of why apologies don’t work, especially in the age of social media: an apology, as an indication of changed future behavior has a 50% chance of being a complete lie.  When faced with a mob there’s simply no other option than to try to apologized, but it’s obvious to everyone that such an apology is more about saving face in that moment than it is about behavioral change. Even if there is an honest and genuine intention behind the apology, the crucial ingredient to test for it does not fit into the framework of social media, that is: time.

The only way to find out if an apology truly is genuine is to stick around and see if the person apologizing makes the mistake again.

We must, for a moment take an aside to wonder about the individual’s sheer ability to change.  Behavioral change can be very difficult, even with a complete and genuine wish to change.  A single visit to an alcoholics anonymous meeting or any drug addiction support group meeting will demonstrate just how confused, conflicted and angry a single individual can be about the paradox of their own behavior when held up against their wishes to act otherwise.

Regardless of this core complicating fact of human behavior, the audience for most apologies just isn’t willing to stick around to see if a person will change.  The default assumption is that such a person won’t change, because they are either lying, or because behavior change is so difficult, that such a person simply can’t change, despite how genuine the apology might be.

In terms of probability, with the odds of behavior change stacked against the person making the apology, the receiver of such an apology makes a safer bet by assuming that the apology will not bear the fruit it promises… as pessimistic as that might sound.

The framework of social media as epitomized by the infinite scroll of the social feed that constantly gives us something new, has no time nor mechanism to wait around to verify the behavior change of a person apologizing.  Within this framework, the default assumption reigns supreme.  Social media makes no room for any other option.  Because there is a constant and never-ending line up of things we can experience on social media, we only ever have time for a first impression.

What percentage of tweets or posts do people go back to 3-4 times to reflect upon in order to fully unpack the context?  This kind of behavior is without a doubt extremely rare.  And given the way social media has been constructed, the likelihood that we will see a behavioral change on the part of the masses using such social media is extremely low, like an addict who is functionally blind to the chemical framework of addiction that lies active deep within their brain.

Given that we’ve placed ourselves between the rock and hard place of social media frameworks, we are left only with brute force strategies that are hard to swallow.

Considering that it’s impossible to apologize in a way that immediately wins over the masses, the only option left is to apologize only once and then endeavor to change behavior accordingly.

As part of the mass audience for apologies, the strategy is to delay reaction, to counter the intoxication of the tribe with the reflective pause of the individual mind and reserve judgment for the long-term.

Both of these require difficult long-term behaviors that are only possible with a calm mind.

As the old adage goes: actions speak louder than words,

but note:  actions take time, and words we can rattle off nearly instantly.  So what speaks loudest takes time to hear.

AFTER DOES NOT EXIST

July 12th, 2019

Particularly in the world of exercise and physique, the practice of comparing ‘before’ and ‘after’ is widespread.

Exactly what is the subject here when we refer to a situation before it and after it?

Some sort of change, naturally.  However, this is a cognitive misnomer.  The concept of ‘before’ whether it refer to physique or something else is representative of an old status quo.  The real problem is with the term ‘after’.  It telegraphs the sense of what movies do with montages. That there is some sort of concentrated event and voila, there’s a new easy status quo that is remarkably better.

What fails to come across with the use of ‘after’ is that a process of change is often still in motion.

It would be more appropriate to say ‘before’ and ‘during’, since the results that we are reporting are the result of a process in progress.

The real difference between before and during is not some isolated incident like popping a pill.

The difference is merely starting.

DOORS

July 11th, 2019

In movies, doors seem frivolous, mere commas in the action of the story that characters pass through, unless of course a door has a particularly guarded significance, like the door to a bank vault. These special doors aside, characters in movies appear to have far more relaxed rules of personal space regarding doors.  Opening an unlocked door and casually venturing forth is far less common in real life than it is in movies.  It’s useful to ask, why?

The narratives that we create and tell each other are ultimately imbued with far more courage and risk taking than we ourselves are comfortable taking in real life.  With such stories, we are not just seeking to explain parts of our own existence, we are trying to influence the way we exist, and the way we behave.

Throwing out a counter-productive personal narrative that has had us spinning wheels for years is a fast way to touch ground with those tires and gain traction.  Often the story we tell ourselves has us distracted from other, better stories that are either available or waiting to be invented.

The story we tell ourselves is most likely filled with doors that we never dare to open, just like real life.  Everyday we walk past hundreds if not thousands of doors and we only ever try to open doors that we know we are meant to open. Granted, those of us who are not thieves respect what we imagine these doors to mean in real life.  Concepts of privacy and personal property dominate our milquetoast daring, and mostly for good reason.  The highlight here is how casually these concepts are violated in fiction, and often for a greater and justifiable purpose.

We might challenge ourselves with a thought experiment entailing all the doors in the real world: how many physical doors exist that we can walk through without any negative consequence.  We might think of the front doors of the headquarters for a company we admire and perhaps dream of working at.  This number alone can be in the hundreds if not thousands. Phone calls and emails and even tweeting at someone all constitute walking through a kind of doorway.  And all of these things are free, and yet, in spite of being free we often find them far more difficult than spending large amounts of money for some thing or endeavor or vacation, even though these free chances could lead to far better lives.

Unlike a wall, a door is fundamentally meant to be used to go through.  The catch is who is allowed to go through that door.  Often we have automatically decided against our own selves, when really the doors we seek might be unlocked.

CRAFTING RIDDLES

July 10th, 2019

Einstein once said “we cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.”

The cognitive move that he’s suggesting is termed lateral thinking.

If rational thinking is often visualized as a step by step process, each step giving rise to the next, in a sequential order like stepping stones, then lateral thinking would be the equivalent of taking a right turn and swimming off into unknown territory.  To echo Einstein, it is the ability to abandon the train of thought in which a problem is created in order to approach the matter from a radically different angle.

The word problem is appropriately a bit… problematic in this sense.  Problems can perpetuate, like a sort of static quo.  We think of problems like stubborn, hard-to-move realities, which do not lend well to the discovery of their solution.

We can ask: what is the first step in order to solve a problem?

This question actually represents – recursively – the first step to solving any given problem.

It is a micro problem, and what it reveals is the connection between problems and questions.

Problems can be reworded as questions, and often the solution to a problem is dependent on rephrasing the problem into the appropriate question.  We generally don’t give much thought to the art and practice of forming questions, but this is the underlying practice that creates a foundation of creativity in nearly all fields.

We are always only a single question away from thinking in a much better direction.

Riddles, present one of the juiciest examples of question forming.  The solution to many riddles often depends on some alternate lateral interpretation of some key piece of information.

Take for example this short riddle:

Say my name and I disappear.  Who am I?

Finding the answer depends on reinterpreting the subject of the riddle and realizing that the ‘name’ is not a person at all, but a thing.  We can reword the riddle and see that it’s perhaps easier to solve.

What ceases to exist while we are speaking?

The questions have the same answer, but they reframe the problem differently.  We can rephrase the question again and see if the solution becomes even more obvious:

What is present while we are not talking but suddenly doesn’t exist once we start talking and is therefore probably like the opposite of talking?

In this way, rephrasing problems as questions and then rephrasing those question can actually allow us to close in on an answer, so much so that the rephrased questions begin to describe the solution.

Solving problems, is in many ways dependent on the art of crafting riddles, or simply put, asking better questions.