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.

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.

Organization’s Effects

If you take a group of people, a subgroup of the larger population, and expose them to focused messages again and again, you will start to change their point of view. If you augment those messages with exposure to other members of the group, the messages will begin to have ever more impact.

We generally tend to align ourselves with those we’re around. We don’t fully understand why. There is a lot of psychology we know, and then other stuff we can’t explain. Yawning, for instance, can be statistically shown to be contagious. It has been studied for years, yet we don’t know why it happens.

Once a group starts to become aligned, and starts acting like a tribe, the messages of the tribe will become self-reinforcing. When someone is born into that tribe, there is a very high probability she will never know the difference. It is simply her common sense about the way the world works.

Programmed.

Impressions are (nearly) Permenant

“But what will I tell my people?”

Once someone makes a decision about something subjective, it’s almost impossible to persuade them that they were wrong. Not just because it’s difficult to really be ‘wrong’ about subjective things, or sometimes to even quantify them, but because you’re no longer asking them to remake the first decision, you’re asking them to admit an error, which is a whole other thing.

Compounding this, we often make it awkward for someone who is trying to come around to be embraced, largely because they are hurt that they were rejected in the first place.

The opportunity is to encourage them to look at new information and make a new decision. Give them the story they need to rationalize the change. “Well, I know I said X, but that was before she/he/they listened to me and changed…”

Step two is to celebrate the newcomer, not to dredge up their past positions and wave them in their face.

The Marketing Drug

Every time I see my dentist he tries to sell me stuff. Various services they provide that will in some way (they claim) improve my life by addressing some shortcoming or concern taking place in my mouth. I never knew my mouth had so many problems!

I’m all for selling people on things that can help them take care, even if they are merely for pleasure or aesthetics (vanity), but like everything else, there can be a tipping point where we sometimes take it too far, or are too manipulative.

It reminds me of how food is marketed. The marketing has become so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they’ve become.

The cultural feedback loop can’t be denied. The NAACP, which represents a population that is disproportionately impacted by the health costs these products create is actually allied with marketers in the fight to sell ever more and bigger portions to its constituents.

The crime continues because the money taken by corporations that change our culture is used to fund campaigns that conflate the essential concept of ‘freedom’ with the not-clearly-articulated ‘right’ to respond to marketing and consume stuff in quantities that would have been considered literally insane just three generations ago. And we like it.

[I’ll write the previous paragraph’s point again here to be clear: we’ve decided that consumers ought to have the right be manipulated by marketers. So manipulated that we sacrifice our long-term health in the face of its power.]

We ban accounting that misleads, and we don’t let engineers build bridges that endanger travelers. We monitor effluent for chemicals that can kill us as well. There’s no reason in the world that market-share-fueled marketing ought to be celebrated merely because we enjoy the short-term effects it creates in the moment. Every profession we respect has limits created and enforced by society. These rules make it more likely we don’t race to the bottom as we cut those corners or maximize our profits.

The question is this: are you responsible for the power in your hands? If so, then we need to own the results of our work. If not, someone else needs to step in before it’s too late. No sustainable system can grant power without responsibility.

Just because marketing works doesn’t mean we have an obligation to do it. And if we’re too greedy to stop on our own, then yes, we should be stopped.

And don’t even get me started on the marketing of drugs. The pharmaceutical complex is as out of control as anything humanity has ever witnessed. It’s capitalism, and the battle is to win. At all costs.

 

Canned

When our desire and need for simplicity and efficiency replaces authentic human interaction we betray ourselves. Of course nobody is fooled. That’s not even the question. The perfunctory gestures of a polite society help connote a mood of civility. But in order to work, we must care enough to make them authentically.

Of course, it is far better for both parties to engage genuinely. Without that it all races to the zero of noise in the background that, given how busy we all are, isn’t only not needed, but actually becomes a nuisance. And transitions to a burden: “do I have to acknowledge these people?” Maybe you could write a subroutine for it. Let the computers talk to each other!

It’s no wonder we feel more alone than ever, even though we have far more input than ever.

Getting to the Change

One of the most difficult skills to master in life is helping people  (ourselves included) make changes that will benefit them in the long run – even if it means annoyance or sacrifice in the short term. That could mean anything from getting a child to clean his or her room to convincing a customer to switch from a competitor’s brand to yours.

We’re all selling something, but you can’t force anyone to buy it. Worse, if someone feels you are pushing it on them, emotions will take over and they will resist buying it even if it hurts them not to.

That’s why the best salespeople see themselves as trusted service providers and advisors, not product pushers. They understand that change isn’t easy, and that’s what makes them effective in creating strong relationships with customers. Regardless of the context or gravity of whatever the situation is, these basic questions apply:

1. What does the person want to change?
2. Why does the person want to change?
3. What does the she really want? What is the ultimate goal?
4. What is preventing someone from changing? Why has he or she not already changed?
5. What motivates the him? What makes her tick?
6. What is involved in making the change? What will it take?
7. How will the person behave before, during, and after the change?

You can practice this almost anywhere you encounter people, even picking random ones out of a group at a restaurant or park. See what answers you can come up with: Why is this person here? Where does that person want to go in life?

To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” How many times a day do other people ask you to do something without going to the trouble of outlining how you’ll benefit from taking on the task? People need to feel ownership over change, even if the idea doesn’t come from them. Before you ask someone to take a step in a new direction, be sure to communicate your vision of a new and great experience.

“You Have to be Pleasant”

That was a quote from a friend of mine some time ago. So much is revealed in words.

You don’t really have to be kind or pleasant. It’s a choice, like so many others. They all have consequences. For certain desired outcomes to happen, yes, you may well need to provide a pleasant mood.

“Have to” implies it’s a chore. It’s not what you really  want (to do). Or it is, because the outcome you may get is important to you. Either way, it’s really a choice.

You probably don’t really have to “be” pleasant. You may merely choose to act pleasant.

Thus is the story of our lives. We hide behind tricky language to define our reality when it’s really about deciding  (even if it’s subconscious) to do things so that we can get what we want, whether that’s validation, a sale, friendship, sex, to satisfy a need to feel good about ourselves, or quite simply a Pavlovian effort to get our body to produce some chemicals that make us feel good.

Only I could turn a pleasant interaction into some dark, selfish act! Of course it is not so bad. These are things we’re accustomed to doing to get along in society. Little lies. Sometimes bigger lies…and sometimes really big ones. No clear lines, which means we’re always navigating on a slippery slope. It’s all tied to context and mood, which aside from being questionable morally, also makes it unreliable.

I can’t help but wonder what our world would be like if our culture was based around being more genuine with each other.

Accuracy Versus Precision

People conflate these two concepts too much. The two words are used almost synonymously.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about” is a phrase that may mean someone agrees with you strongly, or it could merely mean you are on point, but not in agreement. It’s not a very precise way to communicate because they have distinctly different meanings.

Accuracy connotes correctness. Precision speaks only to the level of detail. It is possible to be very precise, yet inaccurate. This is easily shown through looking at the value of π (pi), the numerical value for the ratio of the circumference of a circle relative to its diameter. We commonly see pi depicted as 3.14. This is accurate, and reasonably precise. We know in the background it is an irrational number; one that can’t be resolved into a fraction. It starts with 3.14159265358979 and continues forever in a non-repeating fashion, but 3.14 is precise enough for most work.

Here are a few different possible depictions of pi and how they relate to the two concepts.

Value                    Accuracy                     Precision
314                           No                                 No
3.8545841                No                                 Yes
3.1                            Yes                                No
3.141592653            Yes                                Yes

 

You possibly learned about scientific notation in school as a way to depict large numbers with relatively few digits. Many students missed one of the underlying points that it also affords an ability to be very accurate without always having to be precise. If I say, “50,000 people were at the concert” do I really mean it was exactly 50,000 people? Of course not. I’m not being precise, but I am (presumably) accurate.

So, to more “accurately” convey what I really mean, I could write that number using scientific notation. It might look like this. 50 x 10^3 people were at the concert. This means 50,xxx people were at the concert. Any number from 50,000 to 50,999 is implied. Accurate, but not precise. If I believe the number is in the range of 50,500 to 50,599, I could write it as 505 x 10^2.

Yeah, whatever. We break all sorts of rigorous rules in communication. What really matters is that we are able to communicate. We usually do okay, but there can be enough slop in it that things go wrong sometimes. We are linguistic beings who count on our linguistic interpretations to define every conscious thought. When we aren’t precise enough in what we communicate, we give rise to unpredictable results.

Accuracy is generally the more highly regarded of the two qualities, but precision may have the most intrinsic value because it is repeatable.

The quote, “it’s better to be lucky than good” may apply here. But when we throw luck out the window and focus more on our ability to accomplish something and get where we want/need to go, precision, or shall I say, consistency, is a characteristic we can use in the process. Otherwise it feels more like a game of chance, which is very difficult to manage.

One of the useful characteristics of religion, or any strongly held belief system, is that it tends to make those people more predictable, if not obedient. At a practical level it’s actually a pretty vital part of making our society work.