THAT PROMISING DUD

October 22nd, 2018

Anyone who has seen a firework show has probably been able to pick out one of the duds. 

One of those wiggling dots of light goes up and simply disappears.  No explosion, no burst of light.  Someone probably primed that firework, someone made it, someone integrated it’s launch into the rest of the sequence, and when finally it shoots up.  Nothing happens.

But we would be well served to expect this.

We do what we can, we design, we prepare, we build, and in the end our effort sails up into darkness and. . . nothing happens.

Sometimes that happens.  Sometimes its helpful to figure out what happened.  Other times its impossible to figure out what went wrong, and it’s better to refocus on the present and move forward.

Imagine what a terrible firework show it would be if the first rocket that went up was a dud, and because that first attempt didn’t go as planned, the show ends.  Right then and there.  No, these firework shows are equipped with hundreds if not thousands of rockets, all rigged with care, with the full knowledge that some of them just won’t work.   

Our efforts for any given project or in life in general might be better thought of like a firework show.  There will be duds, there might be a lot of them,

but if anything,

they only set a darker stage for a brighter bang when the next thing works.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE PRECIOUS WEAK LINK

October 21st, 2018

In the early 1830’s when Lucilius was learning the ropes of being a sailor on a merchant ship ferrying goods round the horn to California and beyond, he found a lot of his work catering more and more to the maintenance and reconstruction of the ship as they sailed.  As the weeks at sea went on and he learned how to splice and lash, serve line and repair sail, the Boatswain gave him more and more work, presumably because he was doing a good job.

He was high up in the rigging repairing some sail and noticed how the sails were attached to their spars.  The line used was untarred, it was weaker line.  Lucilius had noticed such line in a few places around the ship and figured that it was slipshod work.  Someone lazy had been unwilling to go get more of the correct line and do it properly.

Lucilius took a moment after finishing his patch with the sail and looked out at the long expanse stretching out over the world and into the offing.  The wind was steady from the west and held taught the sails like cleaved pillows, weighing the ship forward.  The sea toward the morning sun wore a gash of white spotted light, like a single calm candle flame reaching from the horizon to the ship.  It was a beautiful morning and Lucilius decided to do the extra work and start replacing the untarred line with extra he had in his bag.  He cut lose the first untarred lashing, put an eye splice in fresh line, cow-hitched it and began to make turns to secure that part of the sail.

The Boatswain had been higher up in the rigging and paused in other work to watch Lucilius.  He left his perch and climbed down to where Lucilius sat straddling one of the spars.

“Replacing one of those lashings?”

“Yeh, figured I would.”

“Ye can’t use tarred line for that.”

“Reason I decided to replace it is because none of these are tarred.”

“For good reason.”

“But they won’t last as long.”

“Rather replace them more often than have them be too strong.”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about it Lucy, something is gonna break.  Something always breaks.  Whether from age, or chafe, or during a storm, or what have you.”

“I know, so wouldn’t you want it to be stronger so it doesn’t break?”

“Doesn’t matter how strong you make a thing, something’s still always gonna break.”

“I don’t understand,” Lucilius said, looking at all the untarred lashings along the length of the spar.

“Look what that sail is attached to.”

“The spar.”

“And what’s that attached to?”

“The Mast.”

“And being a young’un here who seems to like fixing things, which of those three would you rather repair when something breaks.”

Lucilius kept looking at the equation.

“Think of it this way.”  The boatswain grabbed a hold of a rope band that Lucilius had fashioned around his own wrist.  “Let’s say I attached a hundred pound weight to this here Turk’s head and threw it over board.  Which would you pray snaps off first, the rope right here, or your arm?”

“The rope of course.”  Lucilius said and then looked back at the rigging.

“Same with the ship.  Things are gonna break.  An sailors have been dealin’ with it for long enough to know that we can control how things break when they do break.  Would much rather have to deal with a limp sail draggin’ at the end of a line than have the sail take the spar with it, or worse, take down the whole damn mast.”

Lucilius smiled, thinking about the genius behind such foresight as the Boatswain started to climb back up to his work.

“A weak link can be a very very good thing, if only you know where to place it so that it’ll be an advantage to yeh.”

CUSTOMIZING AUTOPILOT

October 20th, 2018

Set it and forget it is the protocol with any kind of autopilot system.  Such systems, we try to design so that they will take care of themselves throughout the duration of whatever important task we entrust.

Autopilot as a concept in human cognition can be helpful when we apply It to our habitual behaviors, both good and bad.  Much of the time we are running on autopilot.  All bullshit jobs are catered to by people who are mostly running on autopilot.  Few in such undemanding jobs require much more than being present and going through the daily motions required. 

In diametrical opposition to the bullshit job is the innovator, who is constantly trying to push into new territory where new and useful things might exist.

Such innovators seem to have made a habit out of this difficult work, and to someone striving to do something more interesting with their life, it might appear not only difficult but strangely paradoxical to make a habit of such agile and construct dismantling behavior.  The difference is not as contradictory as it may first appear.  A habit of innovation arises from a person who has customized their autopilot with a different set of rules.  Like a random number generator that is designed to spit out anything but a pattern, building a habit of innovation is more like building a springboard instead of a train track.  While the later leads to a set and predictable outcome, the former is an amplifier that can magnify whatever occurs in the moment.

A more practical example rooted in better habits helps clarify the springboard.  Let’s say physical exercise is a habit that we would like customized into our autopilot.  In a fantastical situation, we might imagine a bedroom that has in it’s center a deep recess with walls fashioned like climbing walls and the bed far down at the bottom.  Such a strange set up would force one’s self to climb up the walls every morning when starting the day. This would in essence be a way of taking the autopilot out of the person and designing it into the structures we inhabit.  Given enough time in such a circumstance, the urge to do physical activity will probably still remain if the structural situation changed.

Most of us, however, do not have the luxury of designing such fantastical structures into our lives.  Customizing the autopilot requires a subtler restructuring depending on what sort of behaviors we’d like to make an automatic part of our lives.

Some kind of innovative habit might be as simple as: write something everyday, period.

A physical habit might be: take the stairs, always, and then take them 2 at a time.

We might even try to design traps for ourselves.  Let’s say we’ve started a slow-carb diet that has one cheat day a week.  We might decide to go shopping for food at the end of such a cheat day when we have gorged on foods we have been craving and now feel quite gross.  Throwing the healthier option into the shopping cart is far easier with this state of mind.

While life is short and spending a single moment on autopilot might seem like a bit of a waste, it’s also unrealistic, and in the grand scheme of things, the tendency to go on autopilot appears to be a fact of human behavior, but one that we need not begrudge, but one that we can use to our benefit.  If we can mindfully customize it and endure those difficult periods of change and rewiring, we might find we progressively enjoy a better and better life because so much of the things that contribute to better life are now just a part of the autopilot.

The episode piggybacks off of Episode 44: Autopilot.  If you’d like to explore the prequel to this episode, please check out that one next.

ALL OR NOTHING, OR NOTHING TO ALL?

October 19th, 2018

The idea of an ‘instant conversion’ captivates many people, and regardless of it’s origins in religious traditions, many still hope for some kind of moment when things start to fall into place.  Many cultural memes play on this concept of “finally getting one’s shit together.”

This all-or-nothing attitude may work for a tiny majority of people who wake up one day and suddenly act and perform in the way they have always dreamed.  But it’s unlikely, and unrealistic. 

The all-or-nothing attitude might seem like a reality because of the stark difference between people who seem to operate with high levels of achievement and those who seem perpetually stuck in a RUT.

But in such a case, we only ever see the result, never the process, because we do not tag along with people during every moment of their development to see how they went from nothing to all they are at the moment.  This is another case of the Montage being False.  If such a person were interviewed, we might get a few quaint anecdotes from their past, but it’s potentially a huge mistake to attribute any success to such anecdotal moments.  Just as the False Montage leaves out all the boring parts, so do such interviews.  Even if the boring parts are somehow packaged into a quaint anecdote about hard work, such an anecdote is still just a tiny narrative, and in terms of a medium, the story of hard work should not be seen as the same thing as hard work.  Like a humorous experience that does not translate well into a story, such boring growth on the part of a person may fall into the same category of “you had to be there.”

Such a process that only pathetically translates through story, like an analogy should not be thought of as some overnight sensational change, as mythical stories like comic books like to portray. 

This is potentially good news to the person who is stuck in some sort of all-or-nothing attitude who does not even try because to try would require firing on all cylinders all the time after the car has been rusting in the backyard for god-knows-how-long.

Instead of the all-or-nothing attitude, we would be better served by wondering how we start at nothing and go to all.  With any endeavor, merely starting is the most important part, because progress can compound, especially once we start to get a handle on what we’re doing and where we’d like to go.  We need not know our last step to take our next step.  And in that spirit it’s best to try and just pick one thing that can improve.   Such an improvement in one single area might free up some kind of resource to be reallocated into a second area of improvement, like starting a small business to build the capital for a larger business, or getting good sleep in order to have enough energy to hit the gym which in turn builds more resolve with regards to food choices.

What separates all and nothing is not some kind of mystical quantum leap, but a process that we can break down by looking thoughtfully at our own lives, establishing priorities and making small changes that can compound into radical shifts.  We might discover tricks and tips from others that help us leap in good directions, but it’s most likely a mistake to think that we can go to sleep disappointed in ourselves and wake up with a totally different life as a new person.

The all-or-nothing mindset might be useful when it comes to these tiny changes that we start with.  A commitment of all of one’s self to making one small change is far more likely to be successful than some fantasy of committing to changing everything that we’d like to see change.

Perhaps the all-or-nothing mindset should be treated like a tool, one of many that we have and that can be implemented sometimes when it fits the situation just right?

STUPIDITY WISDOM

October 18th, 2018

Wisdom is simply the act of making a better decision based on past experience.

Somehow, this is an incredibly difficult feat, and often requires not doing things that we have done in the past.  It begins to sound like a sort of stupidity when we examine the simple things that would make life much better.

Don’t eat that donut.

Don’t go to bed so late.

Don’t see that toxic person again.

Don’t go to that website.

Don’t dwell on this negative thought.

A large part of what keeps us from levelling-up our own lives has to do with shooting ourselves in the foot over and over and over with habitual behaviors that continually drag us down.  Nutrition is an obvious one.  The body is constantly trying to achieve a healthier state, but we drag down it’s ability to achieve such with that donut or that cupcake or that candy bar or that beer.  Watching just one of the endless documentaries about food shows just how eager our bodies are for regaining and maintaining a healthier state.

It might be possible to build an igloo with Lego shaped sugar cubes, but building a complex fighter jet with Lego sugar cubes is bound to look like a wreck.  So too is the case with our bodies. We’d be best to think of food as a kind of tool and building block as opposed to the colloquial analogy of ‘fuel’.  Considering how much high-energy food is available in this day and age, our bodies need ridiculously little ‘fuel’ and mostly crave better tools and better building materials for the job at hand.

But such is the trap of stupidity wisdom.  Our dopamine pathway keeps those bad choices well-oiled.  While such a shortcut-searching mechanism of our biology served us well before the agricultural revolution, it certainly functions far more like a gun aimed at our own foot in today’s world.

Wisdom is the act of mindfully making a somewhat painful choice for a better outcome.  Our dopamine mechanism ensures that making a different, wiser choice is going to be more painful.  Such is the cause of cravings.  The better choice is often so obnoxiously obvious it’s rather stupid, but the design of our biology makes this stupidly simple choice rather difficult.  Nothing is more powerful in this case than a mindful, thoughtful pause.  Cravings pass.  They spike like difficult emotions, but if we can experience and then remember the fact that they do not last, they do not endure, then we can remind ourselves when they occur: This too shall pass.  And every time we succeed in doing so, it will be easier the next time, and the craving – the downright stupidity – will pass faster.

Unfortunately it’s not overly simplistic to say that wisdom can be achieved by simply not making the stupid choice.

However, if the bad choice and the bad outcome is the only thing we know, we must also create room in this psychological equation for the fact that the brain is simply incapable of thinking of a true absence.  Thinking about not giving into the craving of eating a donut, is still a thought that has a donut as it’s subject.  We might develop a strategy of thinking about some other particular thing every time such a craving arises, such as doing ten pushups every time the craving arises.  This is far more effective than merely thinking about resisting a craving. 

But what is also available is an undistracted presence of mind.  This can be developed through meditation and can enable a person to mindfully disengage from a thought like a craving for some shoot-me-in-the-foot-food.  The craving itself can become an object of meditation in such a way that diffuses it of it’s power.  This might seem paradoxical and contradicting of the precept that the mind cannot think of an absence, but just as the sun heats up the surface of water and draws the water up into the air closer to the sun to form a cloud in the sky, such concentration on the part of the sun inevitably blocks out a view of the original water with the cloud.  The cloud is a different form of the water that has been brought closer through the directed power of the sun, and this altered state seems to relinquish whatever power the original thought had over the minds.  Such mindful concentration on any object seems to increase the mind’s power, like the sun’s rays being reflected back by the white albedo of the clouds it creates.

It might seem stupidly obvious to state, but our success with regards to anything is merely a process of choosing the right thing to concentrate on, but training our ability to make the correct choice is what builds wisdom out of the pieces of stupidity we carry around.

This episode references Episode 35: You Are Not All of You.