A Brief Conversation With Ava

And so I found myself here, on the ship RMS Colossal, talking to Ava. I could recount to you the long and treacherous journey I had taken, through the wormhole from 2021, the year I was from, to this age, 2102: but that would be a story you'd need to settle down for the night to read. For the moment, I'd like to invite you to take a glimpse through the window of my life where you can watch it as it unfolds now. I'm sat with 22 year old - or at least she looks that age - Ava, within the inner depths of the biggest ship of this time. The personal bedroom we're in is minimalist yet still luxurious. We're both sitting in our own deep red coloured sofas with glasses of coffee, facing each other from across the wooden table. The walls show no sign of being part of a ship: I've been told they're composed of a new meta-material - one of the hardest composites created in our labs to date - but that information goes over my head. All I know is that the cream wallpaper covering these inner walls conceals all hint that we're inside a ship. As I sit, sipping my coffee, Ava is telling me about a romantic adventure she had.

"... and as he held that puppy, completely covered in growing jelly, all of a sudden I was overcome with a deep sense of quicklamber for him", Ava said. 

"What’s quicklamber?" I asked.

"Oh, for a second I forgot that you’re from the 21^st century. How do I explain this..." Ava frowned and groaned. "I can't believe your people didn't have a word for this!"

"What do you mean?"

"Your generation’s ability to articulate feelings was so primitive. No wonder you all had troubles expressing yourselves. The labels you had at your disposal were just inadequate."

I sat that, confused. "Like quicklamber?" I asked.

"Yes, like quicklamber. Well, take love for example. When you say, 'I love you', it could mean all manner of things. You’ve only just scratched the surface of what you're trying to say. You’ve only just introduced the topic. What kind of love do you feel? Is it a warm, brotherly kind of love? Is it a sharp, romantic kind of love? Is it a yearning, a needing kind of love? Or an appreciative kind of love? None of those have their own specific labels in your time. And that’s just describing the type of feeling that you have. What about when you need to bring time into the description? What if it’s a love brought about in the brief instance of our moment together? What do you call that? What if it’s a love that’s eternal? No wonder everyone’s so scared to say that they love others in your age! You might want to say you have an appreciative love - just in that moment - but you know the ambiguity of the sentiment expressed and you’re worried that I may interpret it to think you’ve had a fierce romantic love for me for as long as you can remember!"

"Wow... I've never thought of it like that," I said. I was lost for words. I sat, trying to ingest the information, drinking the remaining amount of my beverage as I do. To fill the silence, I got up. "Hey, I'm going to atom-assemble some more coffee, would you like some?"

Fake It 'Til You Make It

There seems to be a continued shift towards a 'fake it 'til you make it' mentality in our culture when it comes to success and happiness.

This is exacerbated by the fact that our 'personal brand' is becoming more and more visible, and platforms are being created that facilitate our visibility to the public. But it's shifting our focus towards spending a disproportionate amount of time on our image rather than the natural source that this image should come from.

Faking it 'til you make it is an important initial seed for success: we need to portray an image of success to attract more prospects for success in the future.

As well as this, we also need to focus on our image to some extent as it's our way of communicating our lives to people. But just like at work: we can either spend all our time creating presentations & attending meetings for the work we should be doing, or we can focus our time on actually doing the work. We can only ever do one of the two activities at any one time. We need to get the balance right. There's no point spending all our time planning & communicating, leaving no time to actually carry out the plans and the tasks we've so eloquently described. In the same way, we need to develop our image, but this should only be a small part of our time.

It takes time and effort to fake things. Instead of focusing on creating an image of success or an image of happiness, focus on developing the tools of actually achieving success or happiness. The image is just a symptom.

In the same way when starting a business: focus on creating a good product or service. If you've really made a solution to someone's problem, and you set up your company to align with a capitalist system, the money will just be a symptom. And in the same way as being careful not to spend all our time on our image rather than the cause of our image: we need financiers to understand how the flow of money operates in our companies, but when the CFOs start becoming CEOs, the company is doomed, in my opinion. The directionality of cause and symptom gets confused: the slave becomes the master.

The Pain Of Having Dreams

I've been recently working on a personal project that I hope has potential to one day turn into a commercial product. But at the moment, I realise that these hopes are still well and truly within the 'dreams' section of my life rather than the 'reality' section. The stage that I'm at right now is one of the very first stages of development I need to go through if I ever want to realise a commercial product. I don't even have a prototype yet.

Having dreams is a hard thing. It takes time to realise dreams. A lot of time. At the moment I'm just learning how to code and understand a piece of kit that facilitates my project. That was what I was doing all of yesterday evening. My housemates asked if I wanted to go out for a drink with them and a big group of friends yesterday. It seemed like it could have been a good night. But I've always got something on, if I let it. Small distractions. Small events, eating away my free time until I have nothing left. Football on Monday evening, second job on Tuesday, Gym/board games on Wednesday... the list goes on. I have to sacrifice something. We only have 24 hours in the day. So I decided to sacrifice seeing friends and ended up staring at code, alone in my silent room, for 4 hours. I didn't get very far. I learnt a few tricks but it definitely didn't feel like 4 hours worth of learning.

With a lot of dreams, we have to have a little bit of faith. How do I know that the product I'd like to create would be bought by anyone? This product is solving a problem that I perceive as being big within my life, but on talking to my friends, they don't seem to agree. How do I convince them, or anyone else, that this is a problem they didn't realise they had until it's been fixed with my product? How do I know that they'd see any worth in the product? Or, more specifically: more worth than the value I'm selling it for? Even if I do put the hundreds of hours in... how do I know that it won't all be for nothing?

This morning I asked my housemates how their evening was. They said it was really good: it turns out a lot of people were able to go and it was a good group. That hit me a little bit. Is my dream really worth missing countless evenings like these with friends, when I don't even know whether it'll ever become reality or not?

The transition from dream to reality isn't a sliding scale, in my view. It's almost binary. All of the development of the product or service needs to remain within the 'dream' realm: you need to first make sure your product is viable, you need to see if you can find the right group of manufacturers to make it, you need to put it up on Kickstarter and get a proof of product to show that people would actually want what you're making. You can't rush those things. Putting lots of money into creating a fancy website and setting up deals, to find out you can't develop the product isn't logical. Developing your product, setting up the manufacturing line, spending loads of money on raw material to make it... to find out no-one will buy it because you were too impatient to do a Kickstarter or study target markets isn't logical. You need to get everything ready before you invest money, constantly working out whether it's a viable product, until everything's ready to go and you can transition from dreams -> reality.

At the moment, I've only just set off from the start. I've moved along the timeline a little bit, but I'm still well on the 'dreams' plateau. But as you move along the timeline, it'll only ever get harder. I'll have invested more and more time and energy, and the dream will still have obstinately remained a dream. It'll still remain a dream for a very long time until I've got everything in place, and only then can I make a decision about whether we can actually go forward with making it all reality. The thought of this is pretty unnerving. I can see why a lot of people decide to relinquish their dreams in favour of a "normal job".

On the flip side, I see why people rush into projects and try to make their dreams a reality way before they're ready to do so. It's painful to continue to put time into something without seeing any kind of returns for years. I've read many books which recount people who just quit their jobs, proclaiming "I'm going to start a yoga class!", with no idea of the 'business' side of running a business, and fall flat on their face.

That timeline is a bit misleading as well. It implies that when you've finally turned your dreams into reality, you've made it: it's the end of the timeline. Really, though, the 'dreams' section is just cleaning and priming the wall, preparing it to make sure it's ready. Then you turn it into reality and the big stuff starts happening: you need to start actually painting the wall. It's at that point that things get rolling.

I think Sam Esmail summed it all up pretty well in his series, Mr Robot. This is from Season 1, Episode 5 (the last five minutes, if you want to look it up):

"My father picked me up from school one day and we played hooky and went to the beach. It was too cold to go in the water so we sat on a blanket and ate pizza. When I got home my sneakers were full of sand and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn't know the difference, I was six. My mother screamed at me for the mess but he wasn't mad. He said that billions of years ago the world shifting and oceans moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach and then I took it away. Every day he said we change the world... which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe full of sand home until there is no beach. Until it made a difference to anyone. Every day we change the world. But to change the world in a way that means anything: that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. Its slow. Its methodical. Its exhausting. We don't all have the stomach for it."

Ad Hominem Absurdities

My colleague was telling me the other day of an instance when Obama came to the UK to give advice. Obama said, "if you leave the EU, you'll be at the back of the line when you come to negotiate trade agreements."

My colleague told me that we didn't like what we heard. Not because of the information we were told: rather, we thought Obama had no right to get involved with British politics.

We didn't see the information. We didn't say, "okay, thanks for the feedback, I'll see how this information fits into what I already know and see if I need to re-assess my decision making." We reacted, saying, "who are you to tell us what to do?"

Obama is part of the other tribe. He's not part of us, therefore he has no authority over us. Him even trying to tell us what to do is an insult to us.

It's the same logic as football fans:  "you're evil because you support x whereas I support y. Don't even try to look at me because, although we both are fiercely passionate about the same thing, you're not part of my group".

Football fans are an example of when you take the Ad Hominem argument to attack groups rather than individuals. But it's the same reaction: they're not part of our tribe, so we attack them based on their lack of association with us rather than what they do.

And when you start seeing how this plays out in groups: when applying it to sales, we might glean an insight into another reason why Trump won. Trump is very good at targeting a market. You'll notice Ivanka Trump has also picked up this ability. Ivanka is always talking about how she's trying to represent womens rights: and although I would like to believe her, this is a a sound business market target as well. By making her 'tribe' women, she's creating a very strong brand for half the population to associate with. And half of the population is a huge market to sell to.

Donald Trump did the same thing. While Hilary was busy alienating all the bigoted/racist people by calling them 'deplorables', Trump recognised that these 'deplorables' still had exactly power to sway the vote as other, more 'upstanding citizens'. By giving some rhetoric that advocated a bigoted mindset, he created a tribe that included all those people. Suddenly his popularity rocketed. These people, plus the people who felt disenfranchised with politicians and their ability to positively impact their lives, were a huge influence for Trump's success. Trump also gets double points for using tribalism as a tool to win popularity, because he gains the racist people's votes by using their hate for other tribes: in the case, Mexicans, by blaming Mexicans for all their shared shortcomings.

Although, at times, watching this kind of behaviour makes me lose a tiny bit of faith in humanity, to isolate myself from it and to say "humans are idiots" would be the highest form of hypocrisy. I would be making the rest of humanity the 'other tribe' and then be carrying out the same behaviour I condemn so much. Sometimes all we can do is to take a big breath, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and try again to work together so that we can move ourselves forwards and create a better future for ourselves.

The Right Tools For The Right Job

I wake up to read an article on Trump this morning.

"It appears to be a recognition that Mr. Trump’s simplistic and angry campaign rhetoric may be much more difficult to accomplish."

We all want simplistic ideas. But we live in a complex world. With complexity comes difficulty. Difficulty brings doubt. And in a complex world, doubt is not a pleasant condition... but certainty is absurd. When will we learn not to be seduced by over-simplistic, certain ideals? When will we learn to become comfortable with a complex system:  when we have to actually research what we're jumping into before truly jumping?

Maybe the discrepancy lies in the scale of the task. Normal, every-day people don't usually have to worry about how to overcome hugely networked, complex tasks. Normal every-day people tend to have to work out whether they should plan their dinner with friends for Friday or for Saturday.

We develop different problem solving tools throughout our lives based on the tasks we face. If all we're doing is planning whether we should have dinner Friday or Saturday, we'll only ever develop the tools to overcome that task. On top of that, the implications at stake with this task aren't that great: say you organise the dinner for Friday. If everyone says they can't make it, you can change the dinner to Saturday. Even if you screw it up... you can just organise it for another weekend. The idea of creating research groups to study the full extent of whether Friday night or Saturday night is better, or to consult all the 'stakeholders involved' about the full implications of each nuance for the choice between Friday and Saturday probably sounds like overkill. And it is.

But when it comes to the direction of a government, we need highly developed tools and processes to overcome highly complex tasks. Millions of people's lives can be affected, and yet it feels like we treat these problems like choosing what night to organise dinner. It's like we're using a sledgehammer and a chisel to change the fillings in someone's teeth.

So now we have two choices. We can choose to equip everyone with the correct tools so that they are able to assess a problem and maintain the democracy we have. This will take people years to achieve: they're essentially learning a new skill. You can't become a piano master overnight. On top of this obstacle is the fact that not all people will want to put in the work to become a 'piano master'.

The other choice is that we can start picking specific people who are equipped with the skills to actually assess a complex problem properly, and assign them responsibility to decide what to do.

Very extreme conclusion: maybe democracy isn't the answer. Maybe it's time to apply a more suitable tool for the job.

Is Technology Pushing People Towards Two Extremes Of Sexual Behaviour?

Technology is great. Never in history have humans been so effortlessly connected with each other as the time we live in now. And this has implications with how we create romantic relationships with others.

On the one hand, this means that we can move our thumbs to swipe right a few times, type in a few messages and find ourselves on a date with a completely new person. Our ability to have sex with strangers has never been greater. This means that technology could be creating a more and more extreme type of sexual behavior: it's creating the super slut variant.

On the other hand, we've never before been so under the microscope from our peers with regards to our self image. We can spend hours engineering the perfect photo to post to our friends: sculpting the narrative of our lives that we want to tell others. This technology can start to make people more and more aware of their image and more anxious to achieve perfection in it. Not a single strand of hair should be out of place. The thing is, though, that sex is a pretty messy activity. In this way - as well as many other ways - sex is quite a personal act: we need to let our guard down and let people past that perfectly manicured image that we've created, to the real life version of ourselves. But when technology is making us more and more anxious about our image, it might be making it harder and harder for people to let their guard down to facilitate sex. Technology could be creating another type of extreme sexual behavior: the perfectionist frigid variant.

So there's my hypothesis. Technology is pushing people towards to extremes of sexual behavior: the super slut type and the perfectionist frigid type. I might delve into some surveys of how many people the population have had sex with over the years. Although finding out a way to isolate how technology affects these numbers from other cultural reasons might be hard.

Is Your Invitee List Half-Attending or Half-Absent?

I've recently noticed a difference in approach between my friends and myself with regards to expectations on friends to come to events.

I'm of the approach that if you don't explicitly say you're coming, you're not coming. But some of my friends are the other way round: they think you're coming unless you explicitly say you're not.

To me, this is a variation of the "glass half-full, glass half-empty" thought experiment. Are your expectations of your friends half-full or half-empty?

Invitee List Half-Absent
I'm very sensitive to whether people want to come to event or not, and I hate the idea of trying to persuade someone to come to something when, to everyone else, it's obvious that that person clearly doesn't want to come. In this way, I'm probably a lot quicker to throw in the towel with trying to have my friends show up for events, and I always create clauses in my invitation so that anyone can back out easily. I often use the line "I want to see people who want to see me" along with this. An example of how this manifests in my communication is the text: "I'm going to be here at 6 PM to see a friend, give me a ring if you can make it, otherwise no worries."  The expectation is they'll not make it, and I don't do the dreaded nagging, and they can actively tell me if they do want to come.

You expect nothing, so that you're not upset if no-one turns up, and you have a baseline from where everything can only get better. It's a bit Nihilistic.


Invitee List Half-Attending
On the flip side is how my friends think about events. They think "why wouldn't everyone want to come to this? We always have fun and we're good friends."  An example of how this manifests itself into communication is, "Guy, when are you coming tonight??" The expectation is that I'm coming, unless I actively tell them I can't.

Maybe it's a sign that my friends are able to create more secure attachments than I am. Although is that mentality an inherently good thing? Yes, a secure attachment sounds inherently better than an insecure one: the word "secure" has associations with positive qualities, but the mindset of how we approach situations has trade-offs for each.


The Same Mentality Used In Trust Models
This also leaks out to how we trust people. The old question to reveal our mindset in this situation is, "do you think trust is earned, or do you think trust is given until proven otherwise?". In this question: 'trust is earned, not given' (glass half-empty: expect nothing unless people show you otherwise) or 'trust is given until shown otherwise' (glass half-full: people are inherently good and can be trusted until shown otherwise). I'm definitely in the 'trust is earned, not given' camp.

So What Does All This Say About Me?
Maybe I have trust issues. Maybe I should allow myself to trust people more. I know that I've been let down by friends and in relationships before: maybe that's affected me more than I realize, and it's changed my mindset to be more cautious and expect less from people. On the flip side, when I think back to all big relationships I've had: I've not really been fucked over, and, even though all past relationships have at some point ended, I've always walked away feeling like they've added something to my life. I've been very lucky with the people I've met. It's just that sometimes things don't work: I can't expect everyone to fall in love with me, and it's been a real shame that sometimes I just haven't felt that spark with others.

Maybe we can allow ourselves to focus on either the negatives or the positive. Consciously, I can focus on the positives and tell myself that I've been lucky with the people I've met. Unconsciously, maybe I've focused on the negatives too much: allowing the times that people have let me down before to affect me more than the countless times they've been there for me.

Either way, I'll definitely continue to consider whether I need to change my mindset. But the first step in solving a problem is recognising a problem. If I decide that this is a problem mindset in the future, I'm already past stage one...

Product Focus or Brand Focus

I've been looking at buying a Ducati recently. I put a few tentative bids down on eBay and I bought a book that describes the development of the bike I've been looking at. I got really engrossed into how they created the bike, how everything they do is derived from two principles: handling and power. How they pretty much build the whole bike around the engine, and the heritage they have with L-twin engines.

And then a weird realisation happened. I realised that I was buying the brand more than I was buying the product. I was buying the story of the bike and the association with Ducati, more than the technical ability of the bike. I had shifted from my product focused philosophy to a brand focused one.

Up until now, I've rarely cared about a brand. I've always judged a product's merits based on it's ability alone - untethered to where it actually came from. And I still think this is the correct approach if you'd like to be rational.

But other people judge a product's merits, less on the actual product, but more on where that product came from. They have "Brand Focus". This isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's not a completely rational thing to do in my opinion - but there is definitely an intangible value about owning a specific brand: a bit like art has intangible value. You can't rationally derive the value from specifications: speed, braking ability, durability etc; rather you start deriving value from how the product makes you feel. And that, in my opinion, is a slippery slope.

Regardless of all that, however, is that Ducatis seem to really maintain their value well.

So, in the end, does it really matter where the value is derived, as long as it's stable and predictable?

Being Upset With Myself

I think we have a lot more control over our emotions than we admit: we can allow ourselves to feel happy or sad, angry or closed off... and this morning, I came into work in a real mood. I decided that I'd allow myself to be moody. I decided not to put the small effort in to smile at anyone, to ruminate on my failures, to focus on the negatives. Why? I feel like I deserve it.

Why do I feel like I deserve to feel upset? Because my progression on the project that I'm currently working on is going a lot slower than I would have liked. I sometimes get the feeling that my colleagues are starting to wonder if I'm actually doing work. And this judgement gets to me all the more, because when I was almost complete (about a week ago), I slacked off for a few days. Now that my head is completely back in the project, more work has come out of the woodwork and I feel like they're justified in thinking that, as well as feeling like I'm chasing a point of where I should have been, had I focused 100%. I'm usually good at not allowing people's judgement of me get to me. However this one did: no insult hurts more, no judgement of our self stings greater, than one laced with truth.

But I've come to realise that being upset with myself is not the best thing to do. My productivity slips even more if I'm not in a good place, and what could have been a lesson to learn - so that I'm more productive next time - just becomes more emotional baggage. I may well deserve to feel bad for being lazy for a few days, but emotional self-flagellation won't help: to allow myself to do that only acts as a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem.

So I have two choices: the first is to continue to ruminate on my failings and punish myself, and the other is to forgive myself and move on. The odd thing is, I feel like 'me' is the hardest person for myself to forgive: I have control over my actions, anything that I do to upset myself is my own making and I should know better.  That's why the decision to forgive myself is all the harder. Sometimes the best thing to do, not only for our mental health, but for our productivity, is to forgive ourselves for not achieving our expectations. After that we pick ourselves up, learn the lesson so that we don't do it again, and move on.

Compliment Avoidance

Complimenting someone shows our own vulnerability. It's a sign that we like someone. Once people know what we like, they can use that knowledge against us. We're invested in the people/things we like, and we'd do things to keep them around. So some people act indifferently, because they're scared of what will happen if they show their hand.

This kind of mentality can be characterised with Attachment Theory: it falls under the 'anxious-ambivalent: C2 ambivalent-passive' attachment type.

There is an anxious-avoidant type as well, which is less about avoiding the caregiver, and more relating to learnt helplessness: where we feel than no reaction we have will impact the outside world, so we stop caring about how we act around others. This is contrasted with anxious-ambivalent, where we actively show an indifference: because we feel that a reaction (and a sign that we have an attachment to anyone) will negatively impact us.

Show Don't Tell: And It's Links To Philosophy

A few articles ago, I focused on one of writing's golden rules: Show don't tell. This article I'd like to focus a bit deeper on one particular point, point no. 3:

3. Sometimes there may be multiple causes for one set of symptoms.  And who are you to tell the reader that they should interpret something in a specific way, if there are many ways to interpret it? Moreover, you might be missing a chance to fully show the rich, colourful diversity of something's origins by attempting to explain it. In attempting to explain it, you would make it bland through black-and-white over-simplification.

This points has roots deep in philosophy. To give it a bit more context, we need to go back to Ancient Greek times: where there were different camps of thought developing as to how to interpret the world. There were the rationalists/empiricists: people who need for find the root cause for things. Then there were the skeptics: people who are able to find the root cause of things but don't close off their options for other causes - the skeptics say that there is no way we can prove what we know.

If the rationalists/empiricists were the guys that were always saying, "okay we've done that one, next!", then the skeptics were the annoying ones in the back of the room who said, "wait, but have you thought of this?" And the most annoying part: they were completely valid in saying that.

Sometimes we can't close things off. Sometimes there are many variables that can affect an outcome and there's no way of isolating which variable it is (if there is only one we can narrow it down to). On an even deeper level, how can we be completely sure that we're aware of every variable that could affect a symptom? There is no way we can prove that we're aware of everything we don't know (more on this in a later article).

If Show Don't Tell was coming from a philosopher, he'd be a Skeptic.

One Of The Biggest Limiting Factors For Ascertaining Knowledge?

"Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers" - Voltaire

Yet in the internet age, this is now only half the story. Not only do you need to be able to ask a question with very clear definitions and boundaries, you now need to know the path to direct that question. If you don't know the multitude of available routes to finding the answer to your question, and you don't know the correct one to use for each situation, you'll only ever be as smart as the guy next to you. Because all you'll end up doing is asking the guy next to you. You won't know any other process.

The process that you use to find answers, I think, is one of the biggest limiting factors for our knowledge today. There are so many tools out there that have to power to answer questions - most of them fuelled by the internet age - that our ability to create these processes has, arguably, never been more important than now. Especially with the internet: our ability to clearly articulate, define, and use key search terms is paramount. After that, filtering out the sources of information is vital. There are so many sources of information - a lot of them are just plain wrong - that we need to be especially careful. It's the curse accompanies the gift of the internet: an unregulated, free flow of huge-volume information... but sadly most of it is porn or thoughtless, fallacious utterings. We have to find a process for filtering through the rubbish.

Maybe Voltaire needs an update.

"Judge a woman not by her answers, but by her questions, and consequently the application of her questions."

Yeh, I know what you're thinking. Definitely not as catchy.

I'm So Cool

I was at a friend's birthday meal yesterday and the topic of what it means to "be cool" came up, regarding what we want to be seen doing. One companion said, about his birthday a few months ago,

"the day after my birthday, I told my co-workers that I had gone on a birthday meal. They asked, "where did you go?", and I think they expected me to say somewhere fancy. When I told them that I went to Wagamama's they just looked at me and I don't think they thought I was very cool."

I found this pretty odd. Is being cool: going to a posh restaurant just so that you can say, the next day, that you had been to a posh restaurant in the past? Regardless of the actual enjoyment you got out of the posh restaurant: just so you can be judged on what you chose to spend your time doing? Judged by an equally superficial set of people who also do things - regardless of whether they actually enjoy the things the choose to do or not - so that they can tell other people that they had done them the next day?

If this is what being cool is these days, I want no part of it. You can find me reading a book on a Friday night, or going for a quiet drink, at a venue that's not completely ram packed (just because it happens to be the flavour of the month) with one or two close friends.

Stop Inadvertently Setting Yourself Up To Fail

As some of my other blog posts might allude to, I'm an engineer. This means that I try to make sense of a lot of different scientific phenomena, manipulate them in a way that allows me to use them, and then use them to make money, or "add value" (which, if aligned well with the rules of a capitalist system, then translates into money).

At the moment, I'm getting more responsibility with a piece of kit that measures reflectivity of things (think of it as something that scientifically measures how much glare your phone gives on a sunny day). With this kit – we can’t think about all the mechanisms and how they interplay together simultaneously. It’s just too much work. When I was younger I thought that as I learnt more about pieces of equipment, I’d be able to see more about how they interplay simultaneously together. I'm starting to think that I was barking up the wrong tree. What we can do is to create processes to control each mechanism, so that we don’t have to worry about them: we’ve already got them under control. This can be generalised to a problem mitigation process: when we realise problems are happening, we need to set up a system that deals with the problem automatically, which means we’re not allowing the problem to catch us out later on or to unnecessarily test us (and potentially allow us to fail the test) later on. And I think this way of thinking can be applied to everyone in their daily lives.

I know all of this sounds very complex and engineer-y and you might be thinking, "gosh I don't think I have anything in my own life that this could even apply to". That might be because I'm over-complicating things a bit. Or maybe I don't understand this simple idea well enough to apply it - still simply - to more complex task. But I believe that this idea, when solidified from it's nebulous form into the purest version of itself, can be applied to everyone's lives. Here's an example.

The backstory
About half a year ago, I was part of a work baking competition, so I had baked some super-tasty cakes the evening before taste-day and left them on dining room table to take to work. When getting ready in the morning, I saw them in the dining room and thought to myself, “don’t forget those cakes just before you leave the house”. The classic memory-test-for-future-me. Then I continued with my day, and went up to brush my teeth. No. All wrong. I’m setting myself up to fail. And guess what happened? I forgot the cakes. I had to go back for them.

The next time I had cakes to bring in to work, I was getting ready in the morning, saw them on the dining room table. At this point, I told myself, "OK, I forgot them last time, but I've learnt from my mistakes: I remember that I forgot them last time therefore this time... I'll remember not to forget them." That's the logic that I've had for the last 26 years... until now. And honestly, that's one of the most insane things that I've allowed myself to believe. Nothing about my memory has changed since last time I forgot them. Only the new information of, "I forgot cakes this one time." No suggestion that my memory has actually gotten better because of it, and the knowledge of having forgotten things in the past doesn't mitigate any forgetting I might do in the future. Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. In fact, all evidence suggests that I will forget the cakes this time, because I forgot them last time, and because my memory probably hasn't changed.

The pivotal moment
So, second time round of seeing cakes. I froze, mid-run up the stairs as I spotted them on the table. Game time. I had a crucial decision. I could either set myself up to potentially fail by deciding to "remember not to forget them later". Then I thought, “I’ve remembered them right now, which means that I have a window to make sure I don’t fail. How do I create a system where I don’t fail?”

So I placed them on top of my work shoes. Sure-fire way to make sure I won’t forget them.

Doesn't sound so complex now, does it? And I bet we all have one or two areas of our lives that we allow ourselves to fail in.

The most common ways we set ourselves up to fail & further examination
Ultimately, there are two reasons why we go wrong: due to the lies we tell ourselves, or by failing to appreciate the ways in which something can go wrong. By looking at the questions/statements we ask/say about the situation, we might be able to illuminate whether we've fallen into either two category:

"What could go wrong?" - Asking this question could be due to a failure in appreciating the ways in which something can go wrong. Be careful.

"Last time something bad happened, but I've learnt from this and now it won't happen again" - This is a tricky one, and requires a two step process to examine whether you have justification in saying this.

First step: Always ask yourself how you're learnt and are now mitigating the mistake. E.g. "I've remembered that I forgot last time, so this time (how I'm mitigating the mistake:) I'll remember not to forget."

At this point your brain will probably want to go, "I have a reason why I won't fail, therefore I won't." Daniel Kahneman, author of "Thinking Fast And Slow" calls this mode of thinking, "The Lazy Controller". The Lazy Controller often likes to replace an answer to a hard question with an answer to an easier question, because thinking is hard and The Lazy Controller is lazy. This is the case here.  The question we're answering here has turned into, "do I have a reason why I won't fail for this task?" But anyone can come up with any reason for anything. The real question is, "Do I have a good reason why I won't fail this task?" This is a harder question, which requires another step to establish whether our reason is good or not:

Step Two: challenge the reason you've given yourself. Why is, "I'll remember not to forget", a good enough reason? Well... as soon as we start to challenge this, we realise there are a few flaws in our logic. Remembering to forget is only moving the "forgetting" part to another step along an infinite step cycle of forgetting. Next time after forgetting, I'll tell myself, "but this time I'll remember I forgot I forgot, therefore I won't forget again". On examination, it's using the same tool that failed at the task before, and there's no reason why this should change next time. So we need to change the method, and then critically ask again why this one would work.

Closing message
 So next time you come to a decision like this in your lives, try to remember the idea of setting up processes to mitigate failure. It might stop you from having to walk home for some cakes.


FUN META-NOTE: At the end of writing this post, I realised that it was a more developed version of another post that I wrote last year, entitled, "The Lies That We Tell Ourselves".

Issues With Big Companies

As I delved into the idea of blame, failure, and incompetence found at work in the last blog post, I started thinking about how these things really start adding up in large companies. It made me realise that it's vital to employ intelligent, self-aware employees. Self-aware, because incompetence in itself isn't a killer: but the lack of self-awareness to see that we're incompetent in a certain area is.

Finding a root cause for problems is hard enough when it's just mechanical: when we're trying to find out which piece of equipment is failing. Finding out if a person is incompetent is one step more complex. They may be in charge of a process or piece of equipment, so the equipment might be hard to control or the person might not have good understanding of the kit. We have to take into account the equipment and the person, now, not just the equipment. After that, they may be interacting with others, and the interdependence between others starts creating problems where blame can be shared. It starts becoming pretty hard to find the cause of why something is going wrong, and it'll be hard to test the process to see that the point of failure is someone's incompetence.

In this way, the more employees we hire, the more chance there is of any one of them being bad at their job and taking down the whole company. It only takes a few incompetent, un-self-aware people who are let off the leash to ruin a company. They start tinkering in areas they think they have minimal knowledge in, and all of a sudden, the car has no brakes. In this way, hierarchy becomes important. If the employee can't take responsibility in assessing whether he's competent at his own job or not, a manager is vital to keep their employees in check. But this isn't ideal: it means that a lot of time is spent by the manager just assessing a subordinate's work to see if it's good enough or not.

The solution, in my mind, is self-awareness. After that, you can de-localise the manager to a greater extent. Each part conducts their job self-sufficiently, and each person says when they know they're out of their depth. From there, more help can be given accordingly, and then the manager has a larger bandwidth to work on other things. Because ultimately, a manger will never be able to fully keep up with everything each employee does anyway, so if a subordinate is good at being incompetent, it's only a matter of time until problems arise.

Blame Culture: Part 2

I've been thinking about the idea of a "blame culture" a lot since it's been put on my radar by leaders in the company I work for. In the last blog on this subject, I said that, "my leader is at fault for even blaming himself, as in this way, he's encouraging the blame culture. Even if it is by blaming himself, he's still using blame culture to try to eradicate blame culture."

However there was a flaw in my argument. And I knew it. Now I was blaming the leader in my company for using blame culture when he shouldn't have done. I was falling into the same pit as the man I was condemning. The flaw had been nagging at the back of my mind for the last two weeks. It seems like every way we turn, we can't avoid blame. So what's the solution?

Let's look at what happens when we're trying to assess machines on the manufacturing line. When we see problems in the manufacturing line, we try to assess the symptoms. From there, we try to associate a cause with those symptoms. The cause is usually an out-of-control piece of equipment. From there, we can blame the piece of equipment, treat the problem with the equipment, and solve the problem.

If any one person is incompetent, just like a piece of out-of-control equipment, it can cause serious issues with the whole process. Just like how we should blame a piece of equipment for a failure if we find out the equipment is malfunctioning, we should blame a person if they're incompetent at the job we give them.

Blame IS important, as it helps us to realise our weak links and points of failure. Without blame, we can't move forward and start to fix the process. But if we can't get rid of blame, what can we do?

We can change our perspective of what failure/incompetence/blame allocated onto people means. No-one comes to work wanting to do a bad jobs, some jobs are harder than others, and sometimes we're not given the correct training. Sometimes we're given tasks that are greater than our bandwidth. These things are all okay - we can't all be amazing at everything and it doesn't make us lesser human beings if we fail in a certain area - but we need to address them so that we can move forward.

It's the way in which we blame people that's important, not blame itself. So how do we go about giving blame? It all comes back to emotional intelligence.

Bad:

• Giving "fixed mindset" blame: blaming the person irregardless of the task or failing to show a temporary, time-dependence to the failure. We all fail some times. That doesn't make us inherent failures. Example of bad inherent blame: "You're a failure"
• Emotionally negative connotations: "You fucked up"

Good:

• Giving "growth mindset" blame: saying the task is hard, rather than person being intrinsically incapable. As well as this, focusing on people's skill set: they're not incapable, they just may not have the correct skill set at the moment. This implies it can be learnt later. Again. Not intrinsic, only temporary. Example: "How can we make sure you can keep on top of things? Do you need more training? More help at the moment?"
• Emotionally neutral/positive connotations: "We're should address how we can keep on top of this problem" / "It's good that we've addressed this problem as now we can look to solve it"

There is something I was right about in the last blog post, though. In the last few paragraphs here, I touched upon how the person who had failed should perceive blame, but the last blog post did a good job at addressing how others should perceive blame in the person who has failed.

The last blog touched upon the fact that the person who failed doesn't make them any worse than us. We all fail. It's just that - on this occasion - someone else was the weak link. We all need to address the failure together, work to solve it, and move on. We need to be careful to maintain respect for others, maintain collaborative effort. Because a lot of the time, we're better together.

Why I Prefer Science & Engineering To Music

I've always loved music. I've played the guitar & piano since the age of around 12, I've created mixes and songs, have my own soundcloud etc. But there's something that really bums me out about music. Scares me about being a musical artist, even...

 It's so contemporary.  I can't deal with the idea that 99.999% of musical artists are only big inside their own spheres, or big names around the world, but only for a few years. Only a few choice names can be remembered. The Beetles. Led Zep. Mozart. I wonder who these names will be for this generation? (Please, history books, don't let Beiber represent our generation). After that, everything the 99.999% ever worked towards gets buried underneath the sands of time. No one will have known they even exist, there will be no reason to try to uncover them. There are so many great artists that I know people won't have heard of in twenty/thirty years time. Won't know they exist, and will never know. Submotion Orchestra. Wolfgang Gartner. Chiodos. Panic At The Disco. I just can't work in an area that has such a fallible final product. There's something about it that really scares me. Perhaps it makes me all too aware of my mortality. Of my scale. I am just a tiny drop in a limitless ocean. Perhaps I have yet to come to terms with my scale. Because what is an ocean, if not a multitude of tiny drops?

In contrast to music, science and engineering works from a series of platforms. "If I can see further than others, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants". The progress made within science today is made build from the foundation created by Newton, Einstein, Tesla, Feynmann. In this way, scientists are immortal. Every piece of work is coherently woven into the great tapestry of scientific knowledge. Even the areas on the fringes - these are peer reviewed, are deemed good papers or not, and then act as sense-checks for each other. After that, they act as supporting documents that always lead back to the middle. Everything works with each other. In this way, even the weaker scientists contribute and become immortal in their quiet, unassuming way. And this reassures me in some wierd way. There'll be some part of me left when I'm gone. I'll exist through the value I've created. And that value will always be relevant, because it will always act as a foundation.

Perhaps I'm looking too short-term. In a few billions of years, chances of humanity still existing is slim. Which means that everything we've worked together to achieve, all of our knowledge, will be lost. Like the £5 I dropped whilst drunkenly ordering a double vodka coke I shouldn't have last weekend. Faced with a realisation of such insignificance with everything we do, maybe I should just stop worrying and do what I enjoy doing in this moment.

What Golf Has Taught Me About Life

I'm starting to really get into golf. It's different to a lot of sports because it's truly like an experiment. If you go to a driving range, every shot is exactly repeatable. Everything is set up in the same way. You're the only moving part: you don't need to take the bounce, spin, speed of the ball coming towards you into account and adjust your shot accordingly (like in tennis, the other sport I play quite a bit). In this way, you can really start to analyse how things go wrong. Here's what I've learnt - which I also can apply to every day life - about golf.

1. Failure Is A Lot Easier Than Success
You only need to do one thing badly to hit a bad shot and fail. To succeed, you need to do everything well simultaneously. And then do this every shot.

2. Our Response To Failure
Every time I hit a bad shot, I struggle to not get frustrated. All the work I've put into practising, and this rubbish shot is what I have to show for it? It's important to address our frustration and our anger with failure, and then to get rid of it. The anger doesn't help: it's only there because we aren't achieving the expectations we arbitrarily set in our heads. Even after knowing this, it is a constant effort to address my emotions and keep them in check if I hit a bad shot... but this effort is getting easier over time, the more I work at it. What we can do with failure after this - rather than to get angry with it - is to learn from it.

3. Actively Seek Out Failure

Every failure is feedback. We should seek out the areas where we fail, so that we can analyse what’s going wrong. It’s often easier to analyse how to change what we’re doing wrong than analyse how to continue what we’re doing right. This is because of point no. 1: to be successful, we need to do a lot of things right in parallel. But to fail, we only need to do one thing wrong to fail. In this way, it's easier to isolate individual things we're doing wrong to change them, rather than work out all the things we're doing right.

4. Focus On The Dominant Failure Mechanism
There may be 100 things wrong with your golf game every time you play, but usually there's one specific thing that stands out and is stopping you from progressing. You need to work out what that one dominant thing is and focus on it, until it becomes negligible. After that, you'll see a big boost in performance and then start to plateau again. This is when another failure mechanism starts becoming dominant.

A while ago, I struggled to hit the ball in the middle of the club face consistently. Pretty amateur. I couldn't get a consistently good shot at all with that problem. Now that's fixed I've got another. At the moment, I know my drives are swinging uncontrollably to the right and this is due to a tailing club-face (i.e: my wrists aren't being stiff enough and allowing the inertia of the club to make it lag behind the arc of my swinging arms, opening up the club face and making the ball slice to the right).

(Also, in quite a funny way, another dominant limiting mechanism in the rate of my progression turns out to be my vision. When I hit the ball far, my eyes just aren't good enough to follow it. Which means I have no idea if I actually hit a good shot or not. The solution to this? Get some contacts. I consider it a bit of an "out of the box" problem, as it's not instantly associated with reasons for bad golf play).

5. If You Refuse To Re-Adjust When You've Hit A Set-Back, It Causes More Problems
Everyone hits a bad ball every now and again. It's just statistics. If you're a better player, the stats of you hitting a bad ball reduces. Maybe to almost negligible, if you're a pro. But there's always that chance. And when you do hit a bad shot, you need to adjust.

So many times I've hit a bad ball, gone behind the trees or scuffed it, and then tried to get out through the trees or smash the ball to make up for the lost distance. And almost every time I do that, I create more problems. I hit the trees and lose the ball, or I don't swing properly and I lose form because I'm swinging way too fast.

We've got to accept the scenario when we hit a set-back, re-adjust, and then make sure we're doing everything we need to do to succeed on the new path. The old path has gone. Chasing it means looking for shortcuts, which 9/10 leads to more setbacks. Hit a small ball out of the trees back onto the fairway to set yourself up for success next shot.

What Weightlifting Has Taught Me About Life

1. You can't be impatient to progress
When lifting weights, being impatient to progress - adding more weight on the bar than you're able to do - will get you injured. You need to understand that there's a natural rate at which you progress and not look for shortcuts or try to extend further than your ability, just because you're unhappy with where you are right now. There's a path to the top of the mountain, but you can't jump up in one leap. All you can do is pick the most efficient path and start walking (/progressively overload).

2. You need to form good habits
Going to the gym requires work. Sometimes you don't feel like it. A successful person is someone who gets the job done, whether they feel like it or not. Habits can help immensely in this.

3. Our bodies need down-time
We can't push ourselves all the time. In life, there are often two sides to the same coin. We're in a constant cycle of atrophy and hypertrophy (muscle breakdown and muscle building). Consumption and production. Maintainence and improvement activity. Work and rest. Just like how we can't re-grow muscle-fibres if we don't rest, we need to find a way to balance both sides of the coin. To deny one side would be to hinder growth.

4. Sometimes progress is painful
That last rep is the worst. But it's that one last effort that helps grow your muscles the most. Growth can be painful. Not everyone wants to put the work in. You've got to understand what it means to be successful, and whether you really want it enough. Some people will realise that they don't.

5. Doing the same grind can lead to great things
Sometimes we don't need to go through an amazing process to get an amazing result. Sometimes it just require hard work, persistence, and the dull, daily grind. Although, if we get bored of that... we can always make it into a montage (Rocky style).

6. Doing one weight once is not the same as doing half the weight twice
As you increase the weights, they don't increase linearly in difficulty. As it is with a lot of things in life, too. If we double the complexity of what we want to achieve, the difficultly of it can get a lot larger than double. Understanding non-linear task progression is important if we don't want to get tripped up by setting unachievable targets.

"Blame Culture"

I've heard the word 'blame' being used in a lot of different contexts recently.

At work: our senior leadership team standing up and giving a speech on how, "we need to remove this blame culture that we've got. If anyone's to blame, I am. Blame me."

Recently with the UK Brexit campaign. The 'remain' voters blaming the 'leave' voters for their bad decisions.

The black and cop shootings in America.


It made me realise that as long as we have this word, 'blame', as long as it was available to be allocated to someone or something, it'll exist and be used.

Yes, there are times where it's appropriate to blame people. Horrible people who do terrible things.

But so many other times, like at work, where none of us turn up thinking, "today I want to do a bad job": it's not appropriate. Like in a country, where our kind neighbours were shaped by the information they were given, and are now the enemy: it's not appropriate. Not just 'not appropriate', it's outright toxic with the potential to be lethal. It destroys something that we need in order to move forward. It destroys our ability to work together and collaborate. As soon as there's blame allocated, it dissociates us from the guilty party. It creates an 'us and you' situation. Even if the person you're blaming is yourself. You're the one in the wrong. I'm the one in the pure white clothes, the victim of this situation. There's no collaboration any more. No possibility of it. There's only segregation. We can isolate them, and give them the blame. And their resentment of being shunned will be enough for them not to want anything to do with us, either.

Often a company is only as strong as their weakest part. The bottleneck for production. Is it wise to isolate our weakest link?

In a country, it divides the people and makes the country weaker as a whole. At best it creates benign, uncomfortable segregation. At worst it eats the country whole, each side destroying the other, fueled by mutual hate.

Why do we do this? Because it's easier. It's easier for our egos to take, if we don't have to come to terms with the idea that we might be part of the problem. That the systems and ideals we advocate are part of the problem. If we can push everything that's wrong with this world into a small little box, to externalise all of it. And then send it away, where we don't have to associate it with us.

Because God forbid that we try to relate with the people who 'are at fault'. God forbid we turn to them and say, "how can I help? How can we all help make this world a better place?"

What Writing Has Taught Me About Life: Show Don't Tell (Part 1)

I've been reading a lot of Stephen King lately, and I've realised that he's the master of writing's golden rule: "Show Don't Tell".

The rule of show don't tell is kind of the same as, "leading by example". You show people how to live by doing it yourself, or you show people what's going on by writing about what's happening. You leave the "why it's happening" up to the reader to unravel.

Here is an excerpt of Stephen King just describing his life, and why he writes, in the prologue to his book, "Just After Sunset":

"And now, let me get out of your way. But before I go, I want to thank you for coming. Would I still do what I do if you didn't? Yes, indeed I would. Because it makes me happy when the words fall together and the picture comes and the make-believe people do things that delight me. But it's better with you, Constant Reader."

After reading this a few times, I realised that he's being a bit sneaky. He's showing us - not telling us - why we would want to be writers. Not for the fame or the popularity or the money. But because we love writing. Even in his prologues - the parts removed from his story telling - he's still a master of show don't tell.

So why would we want to use this technique? There are a few reasons I can see why we would want to use "Show Don't Tell":

1. You engage the reader more by showing them what's going on. Saying, "Sally loved Harry" is one step removed from everyday life. In everyday life, where we can see what's going on and where we actually see the symptoms of love, we can be moved emotionally and engage a lot more than just being told, "this is this". Readers want to be transported and feel like they're living in the story, not feel like they're being told it.

2. You don't want to insult the reader. By explicitly spelling something out for the reader, you're almost suggesting that they aren't able to interpret the symptoms and come to the right conclusions themselves, so you'll just tell them instead.

3. Sometimes there may be multiple causes for one set of symptoms.  And who are you to tell the reader that they should interpret something in a specific way, if there are many ways to interpret it? Moreover, you might be missing a chance to fully show the rich, colourful diversity of something's origins by attempting to explain it. In attempting to explain it, you would make it bland through black-and-white over-simplification.

4. It's a sign of poor writing, in and of itself. If you need to resort to telling the reader how to interpret something, you haven't shown something well enough for the reader to come to the same conclusion as what you're trying to say. If you haven't described the symptoms of, "Sally loving Harry" well enough, the reader won't have come to the conclusion that the writer wants them to, so the writer will be forced to tell the reader.

The fourth point reminds me how I feel about art, as well. If the artist has to tell you what the art represents rather than showing something well enough for the viewer to come to the same conclusion, the artist hasn't done his job well enough. "Show don't tell" is really a sign of quality.

5. I got talking to a friend over dinner the other day and he started talking about how he found it really off-putting how some people try to publicise how a picture gives them inspiration. For one picture, on a sunset, someone wrote, "chasing the sunset into the ocean". To me it seemed like this was a "show don't tell" moment. But what was wrong with this?

It's like he was trying to add a narrative to his own life. To tell the listeners/readers the story he liked, rather let the truth just lie bare. Beware of trying to paint colours of the narrative you like over the wall of your life. If it the paint is too thin, the viewer will still easily be able to see the cracks in the wall.

On Listening To Ourselves

A friend sent me this Quote:

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.” - Maya Angelou

After wondering what this could mean for a while, I asked my friend what what she thought Angelou's message was, and this was the response:

"It's one of self-actualisation. And the responsibility of the self to realise this for the individual. Therefore if you choose not to liberate yourself, even through naivety or non-realisation, it's still your choice"

This made everything a lot clearer for me. It made me realise that I thought the imagery in Angelou's quote was a bit off-putting and not quite synonymous with her message. It confused the message I was trying to interpret.

Rather than a tightrope, for me, her message depicts a series of pathways that stand in front of you. You start at the point where they all meet, and they then all diverge to go their separate ways. We need to choose a path, and that choice is excruciating and there's a threat of eternal indecision. So what do we do?


Being Led Down The Garden Path

We all have external voices that tell us what's best for us. When we're younger it's our parents, and when we get older we start listening more to our peers and getting exposed more to adverts. All these people and things, whether they realise it or not, for one reason or another, are telling you what they think is good for you.

"It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."

With all these external voices, it's hard to hear the one inside ourselves that tells us what we want to do and what's right for us. So we stop listening to the one inside our head, and chose to get mindlessly led by the voice that is telling us it knows best for us. The voice knows best, and is telling us to walk the garden path. From where we start - the nucleus where all paths start to diverge and go their own way - we start to follow the external voice and walk the garden path.


Why The Voice Occurs/Why We Listen To The Voice

Sometimes we are forced to consolidate subjective, grey areas into black or white statements. Parents, managers and experts in their disciplines at work need to consolidate grey issues into black and white boundaries and instructions, so that they're (over)simplified to the point where a layperson can understand the problem and know what to do. The solutions won't be perfect, but it's better than overwhelming others with the complexity of the problem and getting nothing done instead.

Others use the voice to gain power. The ability to consolidate grey, confusing life into a series of simple instructions will always give you control. Even if the instructions are completely wrong. Some people will listen to you, because it's too difficult for them to work out what they need to do. 

When we're younger, our parents know better, and it's safer to listen to them and act by being directed by their knowledge. But as we get older, this black and white incentive starts to turn grey.

I think a lot of us struggle with the idea of objectivity vs subjectivity. I certainly feel compelled to have a truth that's objective. And we can treat external voices as the voice of truth, the objective truth. A lot of the time, people think they objectively know whats best for you. Perhaps because they too struggle with the idea of subjective truth. And it's easier to listen to a truth and treat it as gospel, rather than struggle with the subjectiveness of it all.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd" - Voltaire

We are all influenced by the external voices. And we can allow these external voices to lead us down the path that they think is right for us, regardless of what is the right path. And the right path isn't objectively better or worse than any other path: it's just a path that is right for us.


Why We Don't Go Back To The Nucleus & Start Again When We Realise We Got It Wrong

Some of us can't interpret the many conflicting voices in our head to work out where we can gain meaning from life. Even if we do manage that, some of us won't be able to come up with a plan to achieve it. Others don't like the idea of losing the position they've got to along to the path they've been already walking. Seeing as everything's subjective, walking the path that we want to walk is no better than the path that was shown to us by the external voices anyway, right? Nope.

Let's imagine that our subjective brain is a vending machine. This vending machine sells happiness, all you need to do is put a few coins in to get happiness out. There's one problem, though - it runs on a very specific currency - and this currency is made from our own subjective preferences and tastes. Everyone has their own currency, because everyone has their own preferences. Each path that we walk down gives us money in one of those currencies as long as we continue to walk down it. Now it becomes more obvious that no matter how far down the yellow brick road we've got to, it makes sense to click the heels of our red slipper together, three times, and say, "I want to go back to the nucleus".


Complications: Changes Of Currency And Bonuses

This is where things get a bit harder and we require another skill to navigate and choose our paths successfully. That skill is foresight.

Often, as we progress with our lives, the type of work we do evolves and develops over time. So if you start doing technical work, and eventually become the expert in one area and that area needs to grow so that many people need to be able to do what you do, you start to become a teacher more and a technical operator less. Your currency and bonuses change.

How do we resolve this? Well, the best way to move forward is to pick a path that instantly gives you back the currency and bonuses that you can use, and then changes currency to another that you can still use down the line.

However our lives are uncertain, we don't know where our paths will take us. Often the paths we walk down branch off like tree leaves, just because we walk down one path for a while, doesn't mean we'll only have one option in life later down that path. Walking down one path will open more paths up later down the line.

Other times, people don't walk the path that gives bad currency, even if a bit further down, the currency and bonuses change into something really good. Sometimes we need to walk the path that doesn't given us a good return so that we've got far enough to get a currency we like. In this way, we should have foresight and ability to delay gratification so that we can be on a better path in the future.

 "You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like." - Layer Cake

The Two Reasons Why We Want Words To Come Out Our Mouths

There are two reasons why we communicate. Just two. Every time something comes out of our mouths, if we track back the incentive for doing this, can be categorised into two boxes:

1. To make someone think something (to convey information).
2. To make someone feel something.

If we're really good, we can do both at the same time. Martin Luther King informed us about discrimation and unfairness whilst creating a strong emotional attachment to this information as well.

This realisation got me thinking about what most of us talk about in every-day lives. Our romantic conversation, the conversations down the pub, the conversations with our co-workers. I realised that I have a very strong tendancy towards wanting to always communicate for the use of conveying information: I'm a thinker a lot more than a feeler. I prefer intellectual stimulation rather than being moved emotionally when talking.

This explains a lot - it explains why I've always hated banter. I've always said that banter is boring as it can only go two ways if you want to be successful: someone insults you and you insult back, or they insult you and you play along. If you want a quick demise, you get upset by what they say. But this filter that I use to deconstruct information completely removes the emotional side of the conversation. No wonder I find it boring.

It also got me thinking about the correct use in applying conversation for intellectual stimulation, and applying it for emotional stimulation. If I'm on tinder, I've always found it weird that not many people want to talk about their ambitions and goals: it's too close to the planning, intellectual side of using our brain. Elon Musk once joked that he went on a date with someone and just asked, "what do you think about electric cars?" Understandibly - it didn't go down too well.

Sadly - for me - it turns out that a lot of people don't enjoy using conversation for intellectual stimulation. Given the amount of people I've met, I'd say that I was able to engage with only about 10% on an intellectual level. The rest just weren't that bothered. They'd only want to use that side of things for work, and then move back to the emotional side of things. As the philsopher Edward De Bono said, "the purpose of thinking is to abolish thinking". We go to work and think so that we can pay for ourselves not to think for the rest of the day. Maybe they're on to something.

Some Perspective On What Success Means

I played a round of golf yesterday.

I don't play a lot of golf. I never really cared for golf, but a work competition is coming up and I like playing sports so I thought I'd sign up and see how well I can hit a golf ball. I thought it could be a bit of fun.

So I've started practising and hitting balls most day this week.

All of a sudden I now care about golf. I care how well I hit the ball. I care about my handicap. I care about birdies and albatrosses and bogeys. A week ago I didn't care at all.

And every time I hit a bad shot, it bothers me. I've been sucked into a world and I've lost perspective of why I'm playing. I'm wasn't playing to win, or to prove anything to anyone. A week ago I didn't care how I played in golf. But I've forgotten that the reason why I started in the first place was to just enjoy going outside and seeing if I could progress and just making sure I have one more thing to add to my life. I've been sucked into the game and forgotten why I'm playing in the first place.

Maybe it's more of a commentary about my mentality. I focus on my bad shots - what I did wrong, how to fix them - more than I do my good shots. Is that a negative mentality? Maybe my mentality is the problem rather than the application (golf).

But a critical mentality is a good way to make progress. Without critical analysis, we can't learn very quickly. I remember listening to an Elon Musk video and him saying that we should actively seek out criticism because it's the best way to learn and move forward.

So what is the take-home message, after all this? The conclusion I come to is that we need to take on two mentalities in parallel. The first is the critical, focussed mentality of Elon Musk that helps us to reach our potential. The second is the mentality of stepping back and realising that the reason we do anything is to add enjoyment to our live. Not to lose perspective and get sucked into the game. Take life less seriously and just watch the rabbits run around, while the ball we've just pitched sky-high plummets gracefully into the nearest pond.

The Artist

The artist wakes up to her alarm ringing, ringing. She stares at it through sleepy eyes and it stares back at her, with fluorescent eyes, telling her that it's time.

The artist gets up, washes, eats, brushes her teeth, gets dressed and shuts the front door behind her as she makes her way out for the day. Maybe this day will be different. Maybe this day she'll make an impact on the world. A big enough impact to cut down through the sand.

She hurriedly makes her way down to the interface, where land meets ocean. She steps from cold rock onto soft sands. She looks around to see that a few other artists have already started their work for the day.

She starts creating her piece. She works the sand with her hands, cutting lines into the beach. The lines get deeper and deeper, and a picture starts to unfold in front of the prying eyes of the gulls that spy overhead. Around her, the gulls see a huge mass of others trying to do the same. Some are using tools that they've created to etch the picture. They're all desperately trying to cut further with their skills, to reach the hard rock below the sand so that they could just scratch the surface of the rock. Make an imprint in the world, before the day is done.

The gulls watch those that use long poles to try to make their mark. The poles look like an extension of the artists' own bodies, yet in reality, they're only a product to try to help the owner make some kind of mark.

As hours draw by and the sun makes its decent back into the ocean, the artists have finished their works on the sand. Over the course of the day, the gulls took special interest to those that had carved their pictures deeper into the sand.

Our artist has finished her last piece. She sits, tired and empty, as she studies her work. The gulls fly overhead but don't seem to care about what she's presenting them with. She knows she didn't craft a piece with enough quality to cut into the rock below.

Then, quietly, the sea rises. Slowly, slowly, it starts to wash away what the artist has created, until it can hardly be remembered any more. It was washed away, in time, to fade into all the other pieces that came before it on that beach.

She gets up and starts to walk home, her head quietly hung low. Maybe tomorrow she'll create something with enough quality to etch the rocks below.

On Skills, Knowledge, And Skill Acquisition

If any of you are interested in how we go about learning, I'm sure you'll have heard of the 4 Stages Of Competence (FYI - it's another of Maslow's pieces. I love Maslow. His Hierachy Of Needs was touched upon a few articles back).

I think this is good, but I've been thinking about my own learning. It's a little bit like Maslow's, but it's a bit different. There are 3 stages:

1. Quality Incomprehension
2. Knowledge Of Quality
3. Skill In Producing Quality

Quality Incomprehension
Say you went to a top quality steak joint when you're six years old. Are you going to turn around and say, "fuck. That was a good steak"? Probably not. Probably because you're not ballsy enough to say "fuck" yet, but mostly because you haven't built up enough knowledge of the general quality of steak to know when one is relatively good compared to one which is relatively bad. Your taste develops as you add more data to the chart.

Knowledge Of Quality
Once you've built up a picture of what quality looks like, you can start working out what exactly contributes to the quality. Was it the delicate peppercorn sauce on the steak? Was the the juicy tenderness? The ratio of fat:muscle?

Skill In Producing Quality
Okay. You've worked out what makes quality. But now you need to know how to create that quality. How hot to make the pan before you add the steak. How much oil to add. How long to show the steak to the pan for each side. How long to put the steak out for before cooking. What to season the steak with. ...how to make the delicate peppercorn sauce (I don't know why I'm talking about this sauce, I don't even particularly like it).

What Next?
To produce anything, sadly, will usually rely on a number of skills. As an Engineer, I could quite easily list a few skills that I need just to maintain and run a single piece of equipment we use here:
1. Technical knowledge of operation of the kit
2. Underlying scientific principles on which the kit works
3. Organisational skills to maintain data so that it can be found & understood at a later date/achived
4. Communication/presentation of results on a level where others can find it most useful
5. Time management
6. Quality assurance/validation of the equipment (create logical tests to make sure it's doing what it's supposed to be doing - based on my knowledge of the kit)

You'll notice that I made the first two in italics. That's because I'm going to separate these from skills as really, these bits are knowledge, not skills.

The Difference Between Knowledge And Skill
Knowledge lies dormant and waits to be called upon.
For example, knowledge of the kit doesn't help me in and of itself. It needs to be applied.

Skills are applied as an action.
So validation of the equipment is a skill. It requires me to understand how the kit works and then go about creating structured tests to make sure it's outputting what I expect it to be outputting, based on my knowledge of it. I am acting upon the piece of kit, and it is outputting (hopefully) quality information.

Creating Quality: A Combination Of Skills And Knowledge
Acquisition Of Knowledge
Knowledge is almost a pre-cursor to skill. But acquisition of both comes about in different ways. The first thing you need to do it work out what you'd like to create. I'm looking to write a book at the moment, so this is how I usually deconstruct a book to assess it's quality:

Writing:
Grammar, syntax, flow, style, making the writing beautiful.

Characters:
Depth of personality, how relatable they are, how believable they are, how much I love/hate them, how much I empathise with them.

World:
This is usually most important for sci-fi/fantasy books: how well constructed is the world around them? Is it exciting? Does it make you wonder what else could exist in that world? Is it well constructed enough to make sure there's no confusion with how it's made?

Plot:
Pacing, conflict, resolution, clarity in the conflict & implication of the conflict.

Theme:
What is the book trying to say? Does it say it well? Is it clear in it's message? Does it's message move me or change the way I see the world?

This can be further broken down. Let's take the characters section:
How believable they are
This is based on a knowledge on how different people behave, their psychology, incentives, how different people react to various "stimuli" based on their personality/defense mechanisms ect. This knowledge also helps in achieving how much I empathise with them because if their motives are believable and relatable, I should empathize with their plight, as long as they're coming from a place that's rooted in some kind of idea of "good".

So that's the kind of framework I use to assess books, as well as assess/deconstruct anything I'd like to write before I write it. There is a skill in the assessment of quality and how to organise knowledge.

However, the easiest and quickest way to attain knowledge is to be fed it by someone who's taken the time to organise it themselves. Why work discover the world yourself when it's been discovered and organised by someone else, for you to consume as easy packets of information? All you need to do is find what you want to know more about, and then start consuming the information. It takes ten minutes to discover the elements of Helium and Hydrogen exist from someone else. It takes years to amass enough data & the create tests to question it, to produce those tiny pieces of information. A good mentor to point you in the right direction to find the all important relevant information is invaluable (although for now, articulating a good question & google serve as mine. Voltaire said: "Judge a man not by his answers, but by his questions". Nowadays, computer scientists call this - although applied to a slightly different mechanism: "garbage in, garbage out").

But back to writing. After all that knowledge, then comes the actual writing.

Writing Skills
Nothing can prepare me for writing a book, other than writing. I can hoard as much information as I can, but when it comes down to it, I need to apply this to paper. I need to put in the 10,000 hours to become a master. And that's when I realise: it's one thing to critique, yet there's a whole new side to actual writing. Things like imagination now become important just to create things to categorise into my nice little sections.

Half the problem is just realizing the skills you need to develop to be able to create quality. You don't know what you don't know. If you don't know what skills you're supposed to be looking for, they'll usually remain invisible until someone point it out. There doesn't seem to be any site that tells you, "to create this, you'll need this area of knowledge and this collection of skills". You've got to work it out for yourself. I guess there are a million different things you can create, a million different pieces of knowledge/skill that you need to do it. And I guess half the fun of life is in working it out...

Our Profession And The Status Of Our Profession

Meet Bob and Charles. They're neighbours.

Bob and Charles both have cars, yet both of them look after their cars differently. Bob makes sure that he always gives his car a good clean after each week of using it - it's sparkly and spotless to everyone else. But because he spends his free time cleaning it and making sure it looks good to others, he rarely finds the time to give it a service that will extend the duration of its life and increase its performance.

Charles doesn't bother looking after the cosmetics - his car looks a bit dirty and unremarkable - however he does look after the internals of the car. He's always changing the oil, the filters and making sure everything is ticking over nicely.

I'm trying to write a book at the moment. When I decided I wanted to commit to writing a book, I decided it would be safe to tell everyone. Maybe they were interested in critiquing any work that I had written. But what happened at that moment is I became Bob. I had put out a goal - a flashy external status: "I'm an aspiring writer" - without doing any of the leg work to work towards accomplishing that goal.

Life's a bit like that. There's a lot of stuff that people are working on under the bonnet. And most of us want to look like we're busy people all working at achieving something with our lives. Perhaps the most productive people are those that don't worry about publicizing or validating their status, they're just interested in the actual production associated with that status.

It makes me think: what else are my friends doing in their free time that never gets studied? There is so much unaccounted time with all my friends and they could be doing all manner of amazing things.

It also makes me assess my own reasons for wanting to be a writer. Do I want to write just with the shallow intention of saying, "I'm a writer!"? Or do I truly want to transport people to a whole new world, have them connect in a deep, personal way to the characters that I've managed to materialise from my ideas and hopefully give some sort of message along the way? Maybe I'm just shallow but later I've attached more meaningful reasons to try to rationalise what drives me... kind of like this Dilbert strip:

Maybe all I want to do is to write these kind of blog posts, but I realise that not many people are going to read them in this form. I need to create a packaging for them that entices people to read what I've written. If I write about them in a way that uses characters to tell the narrative of my messages: it's in a more mainstream, accessible product.

Or maybe not. I don't know. The question continues...

A Commentary On Confused Understanding Of Mindfulness

So I've just read this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/forget-mindfulness-stop-trying-to-find-yourself-start-faking-it-confucius

I have a few comments...

1. "Stop finding yourself." Okay so the article has conficting messages here as this is the message given in mindfulness, yet later it says, "stop doing mindfulness." Mindfulness teaches that there is the "me" - the person who feels the feelings, and then there is the "I", the person who observes the "me". The "I" can be seen as the "blue sky", and the feelings are clouds that come and go. Mindfulness teaches that you should try to move towards the "I" - a detached observer. There is no "I am happy/depressed" - there is, "I am feeling happy, depressed at this moment." With regards to "stop finding yourself", this mindful mentality states that you can never truly know the "I": the observer cannot observe itself, just as an eye cannot see itself and a knife cannot cut itself. Essentially, mindfulness teaches that we can never know ourselves, or know the observer.

2. The article writes, "stop looking inward, start looking ouward," but now we've over-reacted and just shifted the problem from one side of the see-saw to the other. The trick is to do both. you can't run a successful company by getting loads of sales and winning business if the product you're making - you're making at a loss. Likewise, you can't run a successful human if you're producing loads of stuff but inside he's a mess. He might be able to produce something, but he might not be happy with where he's going or his life.

Comfort And Productivity

I've been reading a lot of books lately where I've noticed a common theme: the idea the when we get too comfortable, we become lazy. I'll allow Hemingway to say it better than me:

"Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."..."They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body."..."He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, when writing Antifragile, writes:

"Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste. He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will."..."Cato would have smiled hearing about the recently observed effect in aeronautics that the automation of airplanes is under-challenging pilots, making flying too comfortable for them, dangerously comfortable. The dulling of the pilot's attention and skills from too little challenge is indeed causing deaths from flying accidents."

These ideas bring up the question... how do we maintain our edge? How to we realise our full potential? By being led by our passion? By being pushed along by the prospect of doing something before our slowly creeping death? By removing our comforts?

Factors For Happiness

Over the years I've noticed that my levels of happiness have been affected by a few different factors. I've taken the time to think about and found that they can be classed into two different areas: environment and social perceptions & judgements:

Environment
The Kind Of Job You Perform
Some jobs require more slow, deep thinking than others: such as engineering, coding - any technical subject. As such, happiness can actually a detrimental attribute for these jobs. The feeling of happiness is associated with actions of spontaneity and quick decision making. These attributes could be seen as mindless, quick recklessness: undesirable in a job where a mistake can be costly and where slow, deep thinking needs to take place.

How People Feel Towards You
Later I'll talk about how people perceive your emotional state... even if they like you as a person. This point, however, touches upon whether people do actually like you or not. If people aren't happy being around you and show that they don't really like you, it can make for a very uncomfortable environment. This environment makes it a lot harder to be happy and can easily cause unrest and discomfort.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs - Bottom Two Platforms
We need to have food, water, shelter, safety, security and comfort within our environment to facilitate happiness. I won't dwell on this one two much as you can look up Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs if you'd like to know more.

Social Perceptions & Judgements

How You Perceive Your Own Happiness (Self-Talk About Your Happiness)
This is perhaps the most important factor in determining your own happiness. How you perceive your happiness has a huge affect on how happy you actually are. I'll just leave that there for a second, because to me, that's quite a big one. One of these is a perception - being aware of a feeling and making a judgement on it. And one of them is actually the feeling. And the judgement affects the feeling. If I judge myself to be happy, I start feeling happier. If I tell myself (judge myself) that I'm happy, it's almost like I re-calibrate and anchor my baseline happiness (if such a thing could be said to be on a spectrum) back up to a feeling of being happy.

We ask ourselves the question, "Am I happy?" We answer in either, "I am happy", or "I am not happy". This is a problem, though. Happy relative to what? And what process are you going through to make that decision? Because we like to rationalise things, this is usually based on how our lives are going with regards to a judgement of personal goal completion, but after a while can still be detached. Why can't you tell yourself that you're still happy, even if you haven't completed your goals? If you're not completely fulfilled in an area of work? In the end, due to, "happy relative to what?", we can answer affirmative or negative with truth 99% of the time. Ultimately, this comes down to our own mentality - do we think negatively or positively? If we think negatively, we'll find flaws or problems with how we're doing. Of we think positively, we'll look for what we've done well.  And how you answer affects how happy you actually are.

How Your Friends Perceive Your Happiness Levels
How your friends perceive you is like a feedback-loop, feeding back into your own self-evaluation of happiness. If they see you as a sad/upset person, although they might not say it explicitly or even work around it implicitly, their perceptions and judgements will make themselves known through the language that they use and the way they interact with you. This behaviour will feed back into how you see yourself - validating your own judgement about your happiness, or throwing your own self-evaluation into question.

How You Judge Your Performance In Completion Of Self-Set Goals
Intellectualising and judging how your life is going based on pre-set goals can impact your happiness. If you deem your life is going well based on the targets you've reached, you tell yourself that you should be happy. If you deem that you haven't reached the goals that you should have reached by now, you tell yourself that you shouldn't be happy. This is important, because it's vital to understand that 99% of us have things that we have yet to do in our lives or yet to fulfil in our lives. If we constantly focus on this aspects that we have yet to fulfil, we will judge our lives as not meeting the goals we have set ourselves and we'll rationalise that we shouldn't be happy. This will go on to affect our perception of whether we think we are happy or not.

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs - Top Three Platforms
Love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation also are social factors that affect happiness. Again, I won't dwell on these further, as you can look this hierarchy up if you're interested.