Out of Time

This is it.

As promised over a year ago, this will be the final post for this blog. The reasons for this are primarily:

1. I think it has reached a point where I am saying many of the same things over and over, only differently. Not useless, but less than ground breaking.
2. It is time for ME to move on, which has been one of the underlying themes as well.

I figured the last day of the year would be a good time to make the change, but one thing led to another, and I couldn’t get it done. So here we are. It is not easy. I like doing this, but, in addition to the reasons above, I don’t really have time for it anymore.

My plan a year ago was to work through all of the posts I had in a draft state to get them online before signing off. I failed. Just like what happens in life, time caught up and I didn’t get everything done I wanted to do. There are dozens still sitting incomplete. I have decided to let them go. I’m not a big fan of symbolic actions because I think they ultimately don’t work. We know we’re doing it symbolically, which belies our sincerity and speaks as much to a need for drama. Show business can be powerful, but the power is often fleeting. All of that is true in this case as well. So…I’m not suggesting I will not write again. Only that it’s time for this blog to rest in peace.

On the occasion that I go back and read previous posts I am at once astounded and proud of how good and insightful some of them are, and also disappointed at how incomplete or lacking in any innovative thinking others are. To the astute reader, I have revealed a lot here, about myself, and human nature in general.

It was never for anyone but me. I never promoted it or cared how many people looked on. It’s simply my art, and started as a way to get some basic thoughts down. Something about writing things down codifies them, forcing the writer to think rationally in complete sentences and to ground statements and feelings. A worthy exercise, and one I think I got better at over the seven years of posts.

It evolved, as I knew it would, though I found myself surprised at how it evolved. I don’t know how obvious it is, but there was actually a turning point in the nature and presentation of the subject matter. It would be interesting to bring someone in to read through it all to see if that stands out. It’s blatantly obvious to me when I read many of the posts before and after that time. It happened over a number of months, but began here (not coincidentally, that post is the most linked to throughout the rest of the blog, barely beating this one.), and began to get momentum here. Life changes, sometimes in ways that there is no undo button for.

As a sort of farewell gift, I offer up my top 50 favorite posts (not already linked elsewhere in this one), which was an agonizing process that probably wasn’t worth the time it took, especially since the list would likely be different if I did it again next week. I hope that for those who come along later, this might get you started with what’s behind the scenes here. In chronological order…

1. Common Sense
2. If the Voltage Gets High Enough…
3. Boundaries
4. Start by Doing a Good Job
5. Religion and Politics
6. Hierarchy of Money
7. Science Has a PR Problem Too
8. Policies
9. Brass Tacks
10. Battle of the Unknown
11. Compromise
12. Love Will Find a Way
13. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
14. The Curse of Perseverance
15. Love and Trust
16. I See Dead People
17. Serendipity
18. Dedication
19. The Drain of Friction
20. The Value of Images
21. What Life Really Is
22. Ideal World
23. The Chosen Ones
24. Forgive
25. A Metaphor for Life
26. The Result of Answers
27. Creativity
28. In the Flesh
29. Move Past Go
30. The Pretty Girl Gets Kissed
31. A Beautiful Story
32. Hope is Not a Strategy
33. Morality
34. Caged
35. Free Will is Fake
36. Burning Ships
37. Blind Spot
38. Delusions
39. Why Love Wins
40. Strength
41. One Step
42. Trust, the Hidden Part
43. Probability: Facts, Statistics, and Reality
44. Changes
45. Pride and Face
46. Comfort
47. Atheism: Instrumental versus intrinsic
48. Reasons or Excuses
49. New Information
50. The Opposite of Success
51. Bonus: the whole Happiness series

 

And here are a few random facts.

• The most visitors to the blog in one day was on 1/6/2015, after this post.
• 2015 was the busiest year for visitors, with 2011 close behind.
• 2015 also has the most published posts, at 81.
• Nearly 2,000 unique people visited the blog throughout 2015.
• After the United States, Germany had the most visitors.
• The most viewed page, by far, was the home page.
• The most looked at post was this one, followed by this. It appears traffic to the site was more influenced by my use of a couple of popular terms people search for than the actual content of the blog. Humbling, though not surprising.
• The longest time gap between when an entry was started and when it was actually completed and posted was 56 months.
• There are almost 1,000 comments posted across the 493 blog entries.
• There are over 22,000 comments not posted, as they marked as spam. Unfortunately some of those are/were legitimate comments. I never got to sorting them all out. Sorry about that.
• There were 520 images posted over the course of the blog. The images are very important, and often contained additional information/meaning.

To quote a friend, “It’s time.” I could drone on about all that I’m thinking as the final letters get typed, and the unused material gets trashed, but it’s a frivolous delay of what I have decided.

It’s a lot like life. Time runs out while we still have things on our to do list.

I do have another potential endeavor in the works. If anything gets going on that I may return here to leave a trail of bread crumbs to it.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

All the best,

David Stewart

 

 

 

 

Conservation of Energy

In physics, the law of energy conservation states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant. It can’t be created or destroyed; rather, it transforms from one form to another. Our understanding of the universe relies on this principle.

It often (not always) applies to people and relationships, too.

If you escalate (cut off in traffic, angry at the gate agent, frustrated at your boss), you’ve just added (negative) energy to a conversation.

If you escalate (enthusiasm, a hug, encouraging words), you’ve just added (positive) energy to a conversation.

Once the energy is added, it has to go somewhere. Often, the person you’re engaging with throws it right back, or even increases it. The problem with taking offense is that it’s really hard to figure out what to do with it after you’re done using it. Better to just leave it on the table and walk away. Umbrage untaken quietly disappears. A talented, mature person might take your negative energy and de-escalate it, or even swallow it and permit the conversation to calm down or end. But don’t count on it.

You can ‘win’ a conversation by overwhelming your opponent with energy they can’t handle. But of course, they’re not your opponent and you don’t really win. Being aware of the energy you add or take from interactions is a sophisticated technique that radically changes the outcomes of the conversations that fill your day. Add the good stuff, absorb the bad stuff and focus on the outcomes, not the bravado. Winning isn’t the point.

Infinite Game

Short term thinking sometimes causes us to betray ourselves in the long run. It could be from making a bad, if convenient or safe decision. Often it’s from making no decision. How long is the long run? It’s hard to know, and seems to depend a lot on context. Some people tend to measure the world in flashes, and they’re happy to do something they call generous for a few seconds, as long as they get a payback before a few minutes up. More common and more celebrated are people who play a longer game. They build an asset, earn trust, give before getting, and then, after paying their dues, win.

There’s something else available, though, something called an infinite game.

In finite games (short and long) there are players, there are rules and there are winners. The game is based on an outcome and is designed to end. In the infinite game something completely different is going on. The point is to keep playing, not to win. In the infinite game, the journey is all there is. And so, players in an infinite game never stop giving so they can take. Players in this game throw a slower pitch so the batter can hit it, because a no-hitter shutout has no real upside.

A good mom, of course, always plays the infinite game. But it’s possible to build an organization or even a society that does this as well. Build hospitals and schools instead of forts and barricades…

You probably know people who play this game. You may well have been touched by them, inspired by them and taught by them. The wrong question to ask is, “but how do they win?” The right way to understand it is, “is it worth playing?”

Imagine a Future…

We’re pretty good at playing out the future in our imaginations when things make sense, and there aren’t difficult, unanswered questions at stake.

A way of defining (non-clinical) anxiety is as, “experiencing failure in advance.” If you’re busy enacting a future that hasn’t happened yet, and amplifying the worst possible outcomes, it’s no wonder it’s difficult move forward.

Sadly our culture doesn’t have an easily found word for the opposite. For experiencing success in advance. For visualizing the best outcomes before they happen.

Writing yourself fan mail in advance and picturing the change you’ve announced you’re trying to make is an effective way to push yourself to build something that actually generates that action. One reason this is difficult is that we’ve got a false humility that pushes us to avoid it. The other is that when we’re confronted with this possible success, we have to confront the fact that we’re not there (yet).

Go ahead, write yourself some fan mail, in advance.

Imagining a future without your sacred cows is hard, but necessary if you want to be thorough, and  reasonably prepared. In business this means groping for what you’d do if the environmental conditions you rely on for success changed. Maybe energy prices fluctuate. Or people no longer read things on paper. Or phones have really good cameras in them. Or an app is developed for what you do? Or the means are invented for you to find your own audience, so you don’t have to be selected, etc. What if we cure diabetes?

On a personal level, imagining the future can be difficult because the future is messy and we’re not focused enough to make sense of it all. The past is neat. People who chronicle the past are connecting the dots, editing what we remember and presenting a neat, coherent arc. We can publish the history of Ottoman Empire in 150 pages, but we’d need ten times that to contain a narrative of the noise in your head over the last hour. Even viral videos are easy to describe after they happen. But if these experts are so smart, how come they can never predict the next one?

We’re not very rigorous in our understanding of what we want. Vague wishes and ideals are nice, but they don’t come with a roadmap. It’s not intuitive, and nobody really trains us to be specific about it. We have fantasies about happiness and contentment, families, social events, a loving and supportive companion, and a nice home. But we don’t do the hard work to sit down and map out exactly what all of that looks like and consists of.

Until we are older. By then we’ve been bounced around enough to have a much more grounded understanding of what we want. Here you are. Given that time travel has yet to be invented, your options are to give in to the inertia and play it out, or shake things up to get what you want.

Imagine a future that looks like you getting what you want out of life. Imagine it in detail. What are the principle parts? Can you devise a systematic way to you can start working to move forward on a couple of them? If one is a nice house, then take the time to learn what that costs, what payments are, what your credit worthiness needs to be, and how much of a downpayment you need. You can map it out. Not saying everything is a simple checklist like this, but you can at least figure out enough to increase your odds. Want that loving and supportive companion? Start by being awesome yourself. What does that look like? What steps can you take to be more awesome?

Or…wait around to be selected. But don’t hold your breath on that one.

 

Fear of Fear

Most of the things we avoid are avoided because we’re afraid of being afraid.

The negative outcomes that could actually occur due to speaking up in class, caring about our work product, interacting with the boss – there’s not a lot of measurable risk. But the fear… the fear can be debilitating, or at the very least, distasteful. So it’s easier to just avoid it altogether. We avoid the feeling of fear.

On the other hand, artists and leaders seek out that feeling. They push themselves to the edge, to the place where the fear lives. By feeling it, by exposing themselves to the resistance, they become more alive and do work that they’re most proud of.

It usually looks higher from up there. When we find ourselves on the edge of a precipice, looking down at the depths of the chasm below, it’s easy to think that our plan is far too risky, or our behavior too weird.

The funny thing about perspective is that most bystanders don’t see you standing on a precipice at all. They see someone doing something a little risky, or even questionable, but by no means off-the-grid nuts. You’re far more likely to go not-far-enough than you are to go too far, especially if you tend to find yourself worrying over what others think.

Internal monologue amplifies personal drama. To the outsider, neither exists. That’s why our ledge-walking rarely attracts a crowd. What’s in your head is real to you, no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can see the resistance you are battling. And most don’t care about it.

How deep is the water? If it’s over your head, does it really matter?

At some point, when the stakes are high enough, you will swim. And when you swim, who cares how deep the water is?

How much does it cost you to avoid the feeling of risk? Not actual risk, but the feeling that you’re at risk? What are you missing out on? Feeling risk is very different than actually putting yourself at risk. Over time, we’ve created a cultural taboo about feeling certain kinds of risk, and all that insulation from what the real world requires is getting quite expensive. It’s easy to pretend that indulging in the avoidance of the feeling of risk is free and unavoidable. It’s neither.

The fear doesn’t care, either way. The choice is to spend our time avoiding that fear or embracing it.

 

Crystal Palace

It’s beautiful. Looks fantastic. A great ideal to hold on to.

Thanks to technology, (relative) peace and historic levels of prosperity, we’ve turned our lives into a type of crystal palace, a gleaming edifice that needs to be perfected and polished more than it is appreciated.

We waste energy whining over slight imperfections, while we’re simultaneously losing our ability to engage with situations that might not have outcomes shiny enough or risk-free enough to belong in the palace. By insulating ourselves from perceived risk we spend our days in a prison we’ve built for ourself.

Shiny, but hardly nurturing. And still fragile.

Growth is messy and seems dangerous. Life is messy and inherently somewhat dangerous. When we insist on a guarantee, an ever-increasing standard in everything we measure, and a Hollywood ending, we get none of those.

 

Risk of Unprepared

Toronto gets a lot of snow. No one freaks out about it because there are machines and people to get rid of it, and an attitude that it’s hardly a problem worth hyperventilating over.

Many problems are like that. When we prepare for them and get used to them, they’re not problems anymore. They’re merely the way it is. We intuitively know this, although when new problems arise we sometimes react poorly, and we don’t like the accompanying feelings.

What about an individual? Is there much worse we can say about you and your work? “You are unprepared.” But the word “unprepared” really means two things. There is the unprepared of the quiz at school, of forgetting your lines, of showing up to a gunfight with a knife… this is the unprepared of being an industrial cog in an industrial system, a cog that is out-of-whack, disconnected and poorly maintained. What about the other kind, though?

We are unprepared to do something for the first time or to take a leap into the unknown, always. We are unprepared for our first hit, or for a massive failure unlike any we’ve ever seen before. We are unprepared to create a new kind of beauty, to connect with another human in a way that we’ve never connected before. We are unprepared to fall in love, and to be loved.

We’ve been so terrified into the importance of preparation, it’s spilled over into that other realm, the realm of life where we have no choice but to be unprepared.

If you demand that everything that happens be something you are adequately prepared for, I wonder if you’ve chosen never to leap in ways that we need you to leap. Once we embrace this chasm, then for the things for which we can never be prepared, we are of course, always prepared.

Because uncertainty is not the same thing as risk.

Often, the most important stuff we do doesn’t bring a guaranteed, specific result. Usually, the result of any given action on our part is unknown. Uncertainty implies a range of possible outcomes.

But a range of results, all uncertain, doesn’t necessarily mean you are exposing yourself to undue risk. It merely means you’re exposing yourself to possible outcomes you can’t fully play out and fall in love with in advance.

The question to ask yourself is, “are you hesitating because you’re not sure the future will match your specific vision, or is there truly a life-endangering risk here?”

A portfolio of uncertain outcomes is very different from a large risk.

Feedback

The feedback you’ve been wanting: “You did a great job. This is exactly what I was hoping for. I wouldn’t change a thing. You completely nailed it, it’s fabulous.”

Of course, that’s not feedback, really. It’s applause.

Applause is great. We all need more of it.

But if you want to improve, you should actively seek feedback. And that feedback, if it’s more than just carping, will be constructive. It will clearly and generously lay out ways you can more effectively delight and create a remarkable experience that leads to better things.

If you’re afraid of that feedback, or unwilling to listen, it’s probably not going to arrive as often as you’d like it to. On the other hand, if you embrace it as the gift it can be, you may decide to go looking for it.

Empty criticism and snark does no one any good. But genuine, useful, insightful feedback is a great gift.

Applause is good too.

The Critic and the Poop

We’ve all been criticized at times. Sometimes brutally or without thought. The intent may or may not be to help. Keep in mind that there will always be someone around to tell you that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. Feel free to listen to and act on the facts, but you’d do well to filter out the emotional baggage the sender may be trying to bestow upon you.

That’s part of the struggle of choosing your own path. Of course, nobody ever erected a statue for a critic. On the other hand, statues are the ones that get pooped on by passing birds. There is no way to avoid this if you want to get anywhere or do anything great.

It washes off.

Winning Combination

Tom Brady wasn’t a superstar in college. And nobody knew who (coach) Bill Belichick was before they got together. What about: Ben and Jerry. Warner Brothers, Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wasniak, Click and Clack. The Wright Brothers. Larry Page and Sergy Brin. The cast of Top Gear or Friends. Simon and Garfunkel. Rush.

All were (or are) great together. Winning combinations.

Here’s another kind of list:

• Stephen Duffy (Duran Duran)
• LaTavia Roberson/LeToya Luckett (Destiny’s Child)
• Michael Dempsey (The Cure)
• Dik Evans (U2)
• David Marks (The Beach Boys)
• Doug Sandom (The Who)

Do you recognize those names? They’ve pretty much been relegated to answers to trivia questions.

History is filled with great partnerships and teams. Groups of people who came together to do something special that the same individuals couldn’t have accomplished on their own. Their power together being greater than the sum of the parts.

Finding a winning combination is magic, like catching lightening in a bottle.

When you find a winning combination, I would encourage you to pursue it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the same one your whole life. But it’s so important to see the power in the combo – the team. You can go to new heights, together.