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."