The nature of tragedy

What is dramatic tragedy?  Where comedy makes us laugh and drama tells a story, tragedy is harder to define.  I think of it as a narrative that leads to a bad outcome, despite the good intentions of everyone involved.

Against the run of summer Shakespeare, I’ve been reading  concordances, where classical tragedy is described as:

A story in which a person of high status undergoes a change of fortune.  The person is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but of moderate character who falls  from greatness through a ‘tragic error’ (hamartia: tragic flaw), which need not be moral, and may only be a mistake.  This leads to catastrophe and ultimately to self-discovery.

In theater, as in life: How do we distinguish fatal flaws from fatal temperament? At what point do bad behaviours suggest a bad person, rather than a tragically misguided one?  The distinction is important, because it separates those who we might pity or forgive from those we need to judge and avoid.

I think that there are three characteristics that distinguish the two:  Opportunistic violation of trust, harmful acts without regret nor remorse, and selfish social manipulation.   Repeatedly observed, it crosses a  line in business, in friendships, where I just give up trying to excuse or fix things.

Where possible, I cut these people off and construct paths around them.  Yet there are those with money or influence who can’t be evaded.  What tools do we have to deal with truly bad people?

Colleagues suggest that the only approach is force: you bloody a bully’s nose.  I use flattery and temptation if I’m being constructive, guilt and threats if I feel confrontational.  In recent challenges, a combination has worked, but likely more through patience and luck than any particular tactical or rhetorical skill.

I continue to believe, optimistically, that most people are good.  Hard work and sacrifice will yield valuable and redemptive rewards in their lives. 

However, I don’t reciprocally, wish bad things on bad people.  I believe in second chances over forgiveness, and in extending kindness where I can’t give trust.

And I ultimately believe in karmic balance: a small, mean, irrelevant life is the tragic reward of those who fail to transcend their hamartia.

Superpowers

Antony Gormley tries to decipher the meaning of being alive using the body as a guide.  Grief, for example,is symbolized in this sculpture, Loss.   “Art confronts life,”, he explains, “allowing life to stop and perhaps change direction.”   It’s an interesting thought: How would life change if the body altered rather than the circumstances, adding a capability rather than a choice. 

Perhaps mind-reading?  We try to do it all the time, interpreting the tics and tells of peoples faces and fingers to guess their truthfulness or intent.  Let’s simply go to the source.

But imagine all the awful things you’d have to know about everyone…   Okay, then dial it back to something less involuntary, more Mel Gibson (What Women Want) than Charles Xavier.  Imagine being able to reach in specifically to answer a question or to retrieve a moment?

Then you are burdened with the responsibility of acting morally from that knowledge…   It’s too easy to solve it by granting a power to control minds.  So what if it were a choice between reading or manipulating minds, between knowing without being able to act, or acting without really knowing?

There’s more potential for selfish mischief in the latter, but  but both powers seem undesirable on reflection.

What about invisibility?   Its safe and comfortable, and avoids the  knowing / acting conundrum.  Only useful to get away from something, or to get away with something, sniffs the New Yorker.  Another essayist holds that the true power of invisibility is simply freedom from judgment: emancipation from the world’s perpetual, foreboding, nit-picky, relentless condemnation. But as a reality?

Tina Harper writes that women over 50 are already rendered invisible through social indifference.  When the radiologist no longer asks if there’s any chance you’re pregnant. When the cashier at the movie theater, glancing indifferently at your gray roots, suggests you might want the senior discount (years before you might qualify). When people in the subway don’t really look at you as they politely offer you a seat.

For men of the same age, it’s loss of power.  Invisibility means no longer being vital or important to others, respected as leaders, or sought as advisors.  Again, the small cuts matter: the phone stops ringing, emails stop accumulating, invitations stop arriving.

Invisibility is already something I avoid, would I really want more?

What would be your favored superpower? In comics, male heroes seem born with strength, speed, flight, invulnerability,  while female heroes acquire truth-telling ropes,  impenetrable shields, and instant invisibility.  The nature of these powers and of how they are acquired, even whether they are difficult to control, seems embarrassingly gender-specific.  And the comics always show powers to be double-edged, exacting a price and changing the person bearer in unpredictable ways.

Besides, John Jantsch suggests that everyone already has at least one superpower.  If you really take the time to think about your greatest strength or quality—be it resourcefulness or creativity or logic or intuition—and apply it every day to what you do, you'll at the very least be staying true to who you are and letting that guide you.

Antony Gormley suggested similar ideas when he created the super-sized sculpture, Angel of the North, near Newcastle.  “No-one has ever seen an Angel and we need to keep imagining them,” he says. “The Angel has three functions - firstly a historic one, secondly to grasp hold of the future, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears…. I wanted to make an object that would be a focus of hope at a painful time of transition.”

Symbolic of the true superpower of being able to find the places, organizations and people to whom and with whom we feel most and fully vital and alive.

Three virtues

My orchid is budding this morning.

It likely doesn’t seem like a big thing, but for a ‘brown thumb’ gardener its nice when a plant responds to my clumsy TLC.  My absences, the winter cold, the radiator’s heat have all stressed the flock, but the chili has new pods, the violet is in bloom, and the vine is stretching.  The back yard herbs are recovering from the January freeze.

I set to tending and trimming, sipping coffee while reflecting, ever busy in my mind.

1- When I checked on you, I found that you have a lot of loyalty to the business and to its people.  They frowned as though that was a problem to be solved.  I held my tongue.

When I believe in an idea, a person, a course of action, then I am long-term loyal to it.  I care about circumstances and work for good outcomes, giving kindness and compassion and expecting it in return. If things go off track, I have believe in talking things through and in giving second chances.

Should we be loyal?  To what, for how long: must it be reciprocal or mutually beneficial?  The concept seems frayed.  Certainly loyalty based on mutual interest in business or nation has faded, and people are too often careless with honesty and selfish in action. 

But I still believe in personal loyalty, often to a fault.  It’s difficult for me to recognize when loyalty reaches its limits, and to understand when I need to become more dispassionate.  When I must, I still suffer remorse and regret that I didn’t do more, differently.

Maybe the investor is right, and I need to let go of some people and products.  But loyalty still matters to me: still doing the right things in times of hard change.

2- Good intentions aren’t just enough, they are everything.  This month, I feel that I will be judged by the outcomes that I achieve.  Motivation and effort are not enough: success is the only criteria.

The Shrink and Sage debated the issue, both concluding that it is better to judge ourselves by our goodness than by our accomplishments.  We should look to intentions, goals that have deep personal resonance and that bring out the best in us, rather than to the attainment of some intended end.

In this season of establishing resolutions, is it better to look to the successful completion of tasks, or to the nurturing of goodness?  Is it more important to strive for greater kindness and empathy, or to reconcile specific problems and shortcomings?

In the end, I know that my failures (should they come) may be mitigated by knowledge that my heart was in the right place, that I did what I could, and that I kept to the high road.  By holding to principles, to intentions, I avoid blaming myself for outcomes that circumstance may have dictated, or judging myself for failures that were simply beyond my capacity to fix.

3- My silence speaks volumes.  I shook my head: If a wrong is being committed, you have a duty to speak up.  Bearing silent witness sends no message; you are simply complicit.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Ellie Wiesel said I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

I am sensitive to the danger of being too aggressive and long-winded in speech, of taking umbrage or venting irritation, of being misinformed or defensive.  An appropriate period of silence can prevent me from making mistakes or helps to soften a response.  A knowing silence can reinforce authority; a reflective one denotes respect.

But silence alone cannot right a wrong: there is no kracht van de stilte.  As King observed,  In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Small differences

For me as an American, few experiences highlight the differences of being expatriate in the UK like shopping for potatoes.   Growing up, we were taught that brown potatoes were for baking, red for boiling.  In my own home, we gained sophistication: brown potatoes Russets, grown in Washington or Idaho, and baby golden spuds could also be boiled.

This taxonomy serves well in the Netherlands as well as the US, but not in the local Tesco.  Starch content is defining, not colour:  King Edward and Maris Piper for roasting, Charlotte for boiling, Desiree for mashing.  The British pair potatoes with food with the careful eye that we reserve for wines.

With a little study, I adapt (I’ve cooked a selection to learn the differences).  But dual ways of thinking about single things (or ideas) pop up all the time, sometimes in cultural contexts like potatoes, other times in business or relationships.  For me, they lead to philosophic reflections worthy of a Shrink and Sage during drives along the motorways.

A few recent examples:

Persuasion  / Seduction:   I was always taught to take an objective, dispassionate approach to business situations.  I operate from a base of  fact, evidence, analogy, and narrative to persuade; have believed in Bob  Sutton’s advice that Strong Opinions, Weakly Held, win the point.  But, after reading the Steve Jobs biography, I wonder whether business success truly can be achieved with dispassion?  Inspirational leadership is as passionate as it is insightful.  to what extent to great leaders seduce rather than persuade?  After glancing through a summary of Robert Greene’s guide to the art, I hope it isn’t (and the NYTimes warns of trying to imitate Jobs)

Hope / Faith:  I’m generally an optimist about the future, an idealist about people. But that has never translated into saying that I have hope about either.  Hope is pernicious when it becomes the last positive approach  to a situation where all prior efforts have failed.  I prefer to say that I have faith that things will work out, even when I can’t say how.  This is echoed by other writers.

Anger / Umbrage:  Life is filled with irritating incidents that annoy or irritate.  While I can feel a degree of anger when I get wet because I forgot an umbrella or I read an untrue critique of my product or project.   But if a colleague spreads an unjust comment about my performance or someone just behaves badly, is my feeling justified anger, or only umbrage at the lack of respect?  The soft skill to properly attribute anger is as important as distinguishing the type and response (and, for the latter, the Shrink and Sage reference Aristotle’s maxim to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, while Russell factor analyzes his way to list nearly 200 varieties of the experience of anger).

Love / In-love:  I have always used the two terms  interchangeably, to tell a partner I love you, and to say I am in love when talking about them to others.  But it’s also true that there are people I love who I am not in love with (the opposite, unrequited love, is also possible).  To say I am in love with you sounds much better than simply I love you, but it’s not the everyday expression of affection.

The minor pairs that have been good for conversations while driving the Sheffield-Poole axis include

• Persistent / aggressive:  It’s a cultural distinction.  Americans are used to the give and take, while the British, ever indirect, are the most uncomfortable with direct questioning.  The Dutch, usually plain spoken and blunt I expressing themselves, fall nicely between.
• Anger / Fear:  I have learned that when someone is angry, its good to pause a moment to look for defensive anxiety. A surprising percentage of my irritations are expressions of fear or umbrage.  I often find it when others turn confrontational, opening better ways  to solve problems.
• Safe / Certain:  My peers are increasingly seeking security and predictability as they age.  I’m still sorting this in conversations, particularly whether safety comes from certainty, from feeling taken care of, or from stress-free confidence that life’s risks can be surmounted.

To pursue your own duals, a good reference site is Difference Between, a fount / font of similar dorm-room debate fodder.

Force of habit

He paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular place and moment in his life.  He knew that habits begin to form at that very first repetition.

And so often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits.

-- Robinson, 2312

What habits have I adopted, consciously, unconsciously, settling into a new place, expat among unfamiliar people, language, culture?  It’s a funny little question to ponder.

On vacation, I find a particular place to eat where the food is good and the people are nice, so the next night, I’m back. Repetition.  The third, I’m looking forward to it, recommending it to friends.  Habit?

In the late afternoon, I push back from my computer, switching Skype to Away and disabling Messenger.  Gym clothes in the bag, I drive cross-community to the Leisure Centre and take an hour’s break, reading or watching television while pumping away on the bike.   I come home separated from my work, ready for the evening cook and connecting with people.  Scheduled?  Or habit?

We build our lives around repetitive patterns and expected actions.  Some I create fresh in the places that I live, among people that I care about.  Others, I carry in from previous lives, unpacked and adapted to my new circumstances.. 

My conscious habits are true pleasures.  Developing a sense for art and skill for cooking has outlived the people who encouraged it in me.  Days spent walking cliffs and beaches, biking Dutch hills, photographing faces and towns, are rediscovered joys. 

Some habits, coastal sailing and life-drawing with charcoals, are temporarily aspirational, set aside in crowded days; interest in cultivating gardens or making music have become vestigial, unlikely to ever return.

Taken as a whole, they make meaningful and defining interests and traditions, familiar and personal.  They define me even more than they structure my day.

Of course there is no such thing as a true repetition of anything;  Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on.  The pattern of the day might be the same, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different.

Thus, there is both habit and surprise, constructed as a little work of art.

The edge of becoming

St. Patricks Day was quiet in Maastricht.  Despite the sizable Catholic presence who might honor the Saint, the streets were silent, the restaurants empty, and only the occasional green-hatted reveler roamed the cobblestones.  I walked down to St. Amorsplein (named for the pilgrim monk Amor of Aquitaine, depicted in a long robe with hood, a pilgrim's staff, and a travel bag: the quintessential expat) for a late biertje.

Absent the expected singing and toasting of Chicago-style St Patrick’s day, I ordered some bitterballen, sipped my drink, and browsed scribbled dichotomies that I’d transcribed into Evernote.

Build vs. Defer the future:  I hold tightly to a dream of what I want my future to become.  I believe there will be a day when the products reach market and the businesses succeed and exit, when temporary residency permits and shared rental housing give way to coastal property in a committed relationship, when travel and leisure come into more favourable balance with striving ambition.

I’m prepared to sacrifice to achieve the dream.  But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that deferring everything until success is certain likely leaves me with shreds of nothing.

I have come to realize the importance of attending to the journey as well as the destination.

Its important to continuously build tangible elements, assets as well as experiences, just like I do with startups and residency.

So, as the business regains the promise it held 18 months ago,  I’m committed to building my future, not postponing one.  This translates into engagement with long-standing questions of passports, where to live,  how to balance personal and professional commitments, strengthening personal and family relationships, and making the most of expat opportunities.

It still begs the question of whether the life that I’ve chosen, the life I love, is one that anybody else would find appealing.  But, in building it to tangible reality, there’s at least the opportunity to find out.

Know vs. Believe what is factual:   I was thinking about how well I understand events in my own life, whether I confuse facts with beliefs?   I have certainty about events that I witnessed, where I have physical evidence, or where causal laws of nature hold.  I concede that I am less grounded about events that I’ve only heard about, intuitions about other people, or inferences from observed consequences.

The Dutch distinguish two kinds of knowledge: denken (to know by reflection) and weten (to know by experience).   While weten are, for me, unquestionably true, I am learning that only direct participants can share that certainty.  Similarly, my imagination and intuition, my denken, can also convince me of truths that have no actual basis in fact, certain of propositions that others know are false. 

I’m not sure how to subjectively recognize the difference, except to force myself to examine assumptions reflectively or in conversation.  But that degree of open-mindedness, critical thinking, passionate objectivity, and suppressing fears is really hard to do consistently.

Past vs. Future on my mind:  Amit Sood observes that the mind operates in two modes: a focused, attentive mode immersed in external experience, and an internal wandering mode associating past and future events.  The former attends and accomplishes; the latter imagines what-ifs, floats up purposeless dialogs, and connects unrelated facts, usually with some negative bias.  Research, sadly, suggests that we spend the majority of our thinking time in aimless internal idling.

This isn’t necessarily bad: the mind should be teasing out lessons and anticipating threats. But, as Steven Metcalf recently observed,  obsessive rumination about the past is the basis of depression, while excessive worry about the future forces anxiety.  I think that this is a marvelous distinction, and useful in assessing how I think about significant events, and whether I allow feelings and consequences to colour my everyday life.

I do think a lot about the past.  I embrace my experiences, good and bad, accept my feelings as valid, make peace with myself.  Life’s direct lessons need not rationalized, suppressed, or converted to something that they are not.

But I don’t ruminate over it: I worry most about the future.  What are the right lessons to draw, the necessary changes to make, the feelings that I want to recapture?  I describe these with reference to the past, but my intention and energy is for the future.

The Shrink and Sage argue that discontent and worry are actually a positive, the wellspring of Motivation.  And Motivation drives the definition of goals and confidence in achieving them.  Together, they give direction and purpose in life.

The trick, then, is again balans en grenzen,  boundaries and equilibrium and daily necessity of holding a kind thought for the present moment and my traveling companions.

=======

I admit, sipping my biertje, that there is more than a little sophistic naval-gazing in my taking these three propositions out for a little exercise on St. Patrick’s Day.  Yet each is relevant to major questions that I still try to sort as I approach 60:

• How do I most effectively lead my life, rooted in opportunities and tensions of being a long-term expat, ambitious entrepreneur, and committed partner?
• How well do I, can I, understand reality, knowing that I am immersed in different cultures, confounded by poor translations, and confronted with incomplete knowledge?
• How can I improve my work and build my relationships, trusting both my understanding of myself and my intuition about others?

There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming.  -- Sue Kidd

Interrupting life, or imagining it?

There’s a lot that I like about sharing thoughts and images here: the chance to sort ideas, to post pictures, to keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues around the globe.  It sharpens my eye for an image (Heathrow 5, right), my ear for a story, and my heart for making the most of life’s opportunities and passions, old and new.

It sometimes drives people a little nuts to be with me, scribbling a note to write about later and holding the group to grab a few pictures.  Then, evenings, I’m on the computer adjusting and cropping, checking references and rewriting passages for an hour, then posting.

But it’s healthy time for reflection, communication, and connection.

Or is it?

The Agony of Instagram, fretted the NY Times.  Its about is about unadulterated voyeurism… idealizing every moment…with every last image an “Advertisements for Myself.  There are a lot of awful braggarts whose posts have a vibe of ‘Hey, you’re not invited to my awesome.’   A similar charge is levelled at Facebook, where narrative becomes an aspirational deception.  The effect is only highlighted when the stream consists of images.

Sherry Turkel, whose wonderful 1995 book Life on the Screen anticipated many of the conflicts between personal identity and online media, added to the debate with another OpEd, The Documented Life.   Her thesis is that we are simply becoming accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives….when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device, unable to resist a selfie, unable to sit still alone with our thoughts.

Isolation, preoccupation, distraction, narcissism. ‘ Too much living in the meta: thinking about life instead of simply living it.

Still, I see it differently (as I usually do).

I had a ten minutes wait outside early Saturday, morning sunlight catching the green needles and red trunks of our maritime pines, wisps of cloud drifting beyond.  Bored, a little impatient.  I’d rather be sailing. 

I looked at the trees again, reading the day on the water in them. The shape of the clouds, the sigh of the wind, the blown angle of the trees promised a very good day running downwind to the east, unlikely to rain. 

And if I’d rather be painting?  Then it’s composition and balance; viridian green and cadmium red, lift the clouds and brush the branches. Or photographing?  I took a few contrasting pictures of the trees with different settings,trying to bring out the contrasts, the Dutch glow the Dorset light.

Each perspective is a lens; and each changes the way I see trees and skies.  It places them into a context, adds meaning.

Similarly with words and photos.  Every day is a whirl of experiences and choices.  Mornings may start with a walk along the beach; middays filled with conference calls discussing lab results ; evenings up to the elbows in some recipe, weekends at galleries staring through a sculpture, bedtimes bracketed with bookish essays and punctuated with China podcasts.

But when I sit to write, there’s a perspective in mind and it’s a lens to see the events.  The essay is a way of interpreting the day, of putting events together into some context. Far from narcissism, it’s reporting, exploring.

Analyst John Dickerson makes a similar point on Facebook: I can think of lots of moments where the picture I took or Tweet I wrote allowed me to capture something and makes the moment richer and more lasting.  He went on to write:

You can live in the moment and capture it…technology  has improved this process of engaging with life through pausing to capture it.  And when you pause to write about something you are engaging with it.

In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion explains, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

Something within you is inspired and, at the very least, you've got to pick the words and context to convey meaning for your private recollection or, if you make it public, for the larger world.

For me, this gets it exactly right.

How do we know what we know?

In Nederlands, there are two words for knowledge.  One is to know by direct experience (Denken) and the other is to know by indirect reports (Weten). 

Denken is overwhelmingly more valid but necessarily limited in scope.  I can only explore limited time and space, befriend only a small circle and learn from a few actions. 

Further, to be really useful, I have to massage experiences into knowledge by reflecting, talking, or writing about it.  ‘Which takes away from having more experiences.

Weten, tapping into the knowledge and skills of others, gives greater scope for learning.  But it also requires establishing relevance, communication, and trust in sources, whether news, experts, literature, friends or social media.

The classical model for accessing second-hand knowledge is to search for answers to questions.  So I check out a book, talk to a friend, follow recommendations,  then test the quality of the answers by their alignment with reality and the  outcomes that they produce.

When I find sources I like and trust, then I accept more of my information from them.  I attend a business class, read the Economist, share conversation over coffee.   ‘Good, but still limited in three main ways.

First, it’s hard to keep up with the flow of people and news that interests me.  My aggregator has a growing backlog of unread blog posts; old issues of magazines pile up in my tablet.  I call a friend to ask about their health,, find out that she has new vacation pictures, stories about kids, a change of job I hadn’t suspected.  I feel like I can’t keep up, much less think through, the news and conversations that fill each day.  (Even if only the ones in English!)

Second, I identify new sources using similarity searches: friends of friends.  “Find more like this” works well for music and movies, but I know that it gets dangerously constrained when applied to news and commentary.  A single point of view, endlessly reinforced, creates a brittle and embattled outlook towards life and people, nurtures homogeneous communities that feel both exceptional and victimized.  As the Economist notes, “Americans prefer talking heads because they increasingly prefer to hear opinion rather than fact.”

Finally, I am all too aware that I am taking samples from someone else’s narrative, colored with their motives and biases.   Even with the best of intentions, people pick examples by analogy, tell you whet they think you need to hear, omit context and embellish details.  I’ve had situations go horribly wrong in the past few months despite getting trusted advice  which, in hindsight, was simply misguided or malicious.

I want to keep up with people and trends that are meaningful and important  to me.  I want to be deeply informed about things that matter to me and occasionally surprised and challenged by new ideas.  I want to grow my social and professional circle.

Dave Winer talks about one alternative: rather than pulling items individually by polling trusted sources, we should embrace the flow of a “river of news”. 

He envisions sitting on the bank of the news crawl, the Twitter feed, the Facebook scroll. We become aware of new information as it becomes more prevalent, we inspect it if it’s interesting, we discern trends in the evolution of the stream.  Last week, Dave released River3, a Dropbox based aggregator implementing the principles: you can see sample output at MediaHackers.

Another idea is Curated Content: diverting streams from the river related to particular topics.  These can be crowd-sourced (Digg), organized by an editor (Paper.li)  or scrapbooked (FlipBoard magazines).  I prefer the latter: I don’t trust crowd-sourced content (selection can be superficial and self-reinforcing) and newsletters too often pile up, unread.

And then there’s the question of who is doing the curating.  As Google, Facebook, or PRISM watch us, they build up profiles leading to predictions.  They create individualized filters that constrain and, ultimately, manipulate what we see and do.

And it’s likely to be inaccurate.  To paraphrase William Buffet, we are obsessed with having our public persona being seen, but also with our private self remaining hidden.  Basing our trusted sources on our projected selves cannot yield truth.

I’m not sure that we’ve yet seen the ideal way of learning through weten.  More data is available, but it’s getting harder and harder to organize, collate, and prioritize.  And there’s no choice but to keep listening, reading, sampling, analyzing, and learning.

And even then, it still comes back around to denken.

Events, experienced first-hand, often prove how little I really do know.  The bite can be really painful but, in the end, I hope  it doesn’t make me cynical.

Insight and wisdom are best gained by simply living.

Thursday musings

Just a little time today to sit and think between calls and assignments.  I’m feeling a bit like two icons from Cefalu:  a crowded mind and a fleet footed narrative.

. 

On language learning:

Wisdom from the FT’s Michael Skapinker

Learning a language requires effort, memorising vocabulary, looking over the grammar, watching television, reading newspapers and talking to real people rather than just two hired participants. The learner has to take responsibility.

Successful language acquirers do something else: they don’t worry about getting things wrong or making fools of themselves.

If you haven’t already…

Today would be a good day to back up your residency and travel documents.  I scan my passport, residence cards, and driver’s license, front and back, each year into a single .pdf document and e-mail it to myself.  That gives me a reference that is accessible from anywhere, any time, if there is an emergency.

And a thought:

“Create more value than you capture.”  -- Tim O’Reilly

He notes that great ideas grow in great soli: the growing Commons that we all draw from and (should) give back to.  It’s one reason that I teach and mentor, others publish or preserve, donate or fund.

But you have to help maintain the ecosystem.

Plus an archetype:

“Davos Man”

This is a construct of the FT, signifying “a member of the global elite with a reverence for innovation, a blind faith in capitalism, and an assumption that globalization is beneficial and unstoppable”. 

To that, I would add a distaste for governments, a disdain for media, and remuneration wholly decoupled from talent, effort, or social contribution.  Like (the very different) Tea Party Conservatism,  It’s generative and constructive as a coherent point of view that identifies problems and suggests potential solutions.  But it’s also brittle in its purity: volatility, competition, and disruption require social systems with resilience to maintain continuity.

I was listening to a lecture about how change is a necessary aspect of living things: they either adapt or die in a competitive world.   At the same time, I was gazing across the dunes and grasses of a beach that has been a stable living thing for millennia.  That would seem to be the greater truth, that living things adapt to maintain homeostasis, individually and as ecosystems.

Davos Man is an adaptive experiment, not the next stage of social evolution.

It’s a 5-2 world

The Royal Society of Chemists held a wine tasting in Cambridge last week, a festive event with good conversation and excellent bottles from The Wine Society.The  moderator,  a leading sommelier, started everyone off with dilute cups of tartaric acid, glucose, and ethanol so that we could learn the location and progression of each component.  The cups were then combined in various mixtures so that we could characterize flavors and alcohol content.  Then on to a selection of 12 wines, from both an aesthetic and chemical perspective.

I got pretty good at tastes, but we didn’t have similar guidance for smells.   I struggled all evening with identifying fruits and flowers: I‘m not a naturalist like my British peers, who quickly specified sources down to the genus.

In Latin. 

Nonetheless, it was a really fun and interesting evening, and I have a better approach to a glass in a good restaurant.

Along the way, the sommelier was asked how often it was safe to drink wine.  He commented that his partner, a physician, told him that excessive drinking leads to up-regulation of the liver enzyme that breaks down ethanol.  The enzyme also creates free radicals when not metabolizing alcohol, thus causing associated liver damage.

The way to avoid liver damage was to prevent up-regulation.  This could be accomplished by abstaining from alcohol two days each week.

The 5-2 Rule: In each week, do what you want for five days, but abstain for two.

I’ve been practicing a 5:2 diet for a couple of months and dropped 15 pounds by fasting on Monday and Thursday.  Now a 5-2 path to liver health.

Do two examples point to a rule?

• 5 days work : 2 two days rest at the weekend.
• 5 days training : interspersed with 2 days rest to let the muscles recover (and Standard 5:2 Split routines within workouts)
• The aesthetically perfect Golden Ratio (right).  Ah, you say, a bridge too far: the value of the Ratio is  1.618!  Yes, but the formula  (1+√5)/2, is at least in metaphoric distance.

Maybe not. 

But my point is that the secret to achieving balance in life may rest with something as simple as taking two days off for every five days doing it. 

I’ve long taught (but seldom practiced) that it’s important to keep balance in life: a new business will suck every moment that you offer it and always demand more.  A proportionate break, a 5:2 strategy to embrace life’s alternatives, to stop doing something that is good in moderation but bad in excess, is a nice strategy...

  …that you may observe discretion and your lips reserve knowledge.  Proverbs 5:2

What makes a great Group?

I stopped through the Orchard Tea Garden today, outside Cambridge in the historic village of Grantchester.  It’s a garden in an oasis.  Grantchester was, for many years, a bohemian bedroom community of the colleges five miles away, a lazy day’s punt along the Cam or a brisk walk through the surrounding fields.  Literary lights including Byron and Archer (not really in the same league) resided there, and it’s said to have the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners of any spot on earth.

The Orchard was a rooming house where poet Rupert Brooks lived at the turn of the century: the tradition of sitting in folding canvas chairs among the trees for tea, scones, and conversation sprung up around him 100 years ago.  You can still sit among the trees on similar chairs (in the rain, today) and read poetry written by the members of the Grantchester Group of writers, philosophers, and artists who met there.

The Grantchester Group started as an offshoot of the London-based Bloomsbury Group, of which Keynes, Woolf, Russell, Wittgenstein and others were also members.  Many went on to become famous writers, scholars, thinkers, and teachers.  Accounts of the period highlight the remarkable composition of the group and the unique ways in which the members struck intellectual sparks from one another.  All credit the early influence of the others as a factor in their later success.

But to what extent is their later individual success a function of that early association?

Certainly there are partnerships that bring out latent talents and creative works that transcend what individual members might have accomplished alone.  Like a virus, ideas can spread among receptive and energetic minds, especially in an isolated and relaxed social settings  Startup accelerators operate on those same principles today.  A bright gang of 20-somethings, playfully topping one another, can incubate enough ideas to fill a career.

But it may also be that these groups are simple self-promoting, retrospectively.  When each of member looks back on their lives, did they fondly remember their youth, giving it undue credit for focusing and motivating their later works?  I think that we all reflect back on formative experiences in our 20’s, whether first love, going to war, off to college, road trips as coming-of-age stories that shaped our later lives and works.

Would the Grantchester Group be remembered for it’s own product if it’s members hadn’t had individually remarkable careers afterward?

These Great Groups, artistic and literary, seem to share at least two traits.  They are young: contrast Groups like the pre-Raphaelites or the ‘Lost Generation’ in Paris with older Schools like the Bauhaus.  And the Group created it’s major body of work after the members dispersed, following their own intellectual trajectories. 

In that sense I wonder if “Group” isn’t more of a convenient label afterwards than a causal force ahead of their success.

Destiny, taxes, and founding equity

I watched The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon the other night – diverting and touches on some good philosophic issues. Are our actions determined (predestination), or our outcomes determined (destiny), or neither (free will)? And how could we ever know?  The movie’s “Adjusters” keeping people on track towards their destiny, at one point justifying their actions by revealing

If you leave her, she will become a legendary dancer and a world-renowned choreographer. If she stays with you, she will spend her life teaching dance to sixth-graders.

That is absolutely haunting; is it true? Can our lives be determined to that degree by our choice of affections? I want to believe that our talent ultimately carries us, modulated by partners who can help or hinder (and who we facilitate in return, who we mutually grow and flourish with).

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More prosaically, Barclays started withholding tax on my UK bank accounts, even though I’m resident in the Netherlands.  They gave me HMRC form R85: Getting your interest without tax taken off, but then returned the completed form to me, saying that it only applies to UK residents. 

A bit of research followed, and the correct form is IR 105: Application for a not normally resident saver to receive interest without tax taken off.

I do like the clarity of British labeling: the comparable US form is called “Request for Taxpayer Certification”

And, yes, too much time is spent managing this kind of trivia.  But if you don’t, it’s death by a thousand small cuts.

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When starting a  new company, there is always the question of how to divide the starting shares.  The easiest thing is to simply split the equity equally, or in proportion to contribution.  Now, Norm Wasserman, a Harvard business researcher looked at 500 US startups and found:

• The more varied the team is in entrepreneurial experience, idea generation, and capital contributions, the lower the probability of equal splitting.
• The larger the founding team, the less likely it is to divide shares equally.
• The more combined work experience a team has, the less likely the team will split the shares equally.
• Teams where founders are related through family are more likely to split the equity equally.
• An equal split is associated with a lower valuation than an unequal split, especially in cases of quick negotiations.
• Founders who split equally when they should split unequally may be giving up a substantial amount of financial value. (Related research suggests that such teams may also be less stable.)

It’s interesting research: in my experience, I’ve found that folks contributing money often want a disproportionate share, arguing that they are ”the only ones with something to lose”.  They also tend to be more sensitive to having their proportion or terms challenged.  Work experience, entrepreneurial experience, and contribution to the founding idea should also count alongside the amount of capital invested into the venture.

And the negotiating tactics of contestants on Dragons Den and the Apprentice are absolutely miserable. They beg rather than trade and, predictably, the Alan Sugar’s of the world call their bluff every time and walk away with the deal.  It’s painful to watch.

In my element

I have always lived in the future.

When I was young, I read Tom Swift books and imagined the things I could invent, the adventures I could have.  I avidly followed ‘hard’ science fiction, especially Clarke and Wells.  In elementary and high school, I took on a special science curriculum in fourth grade (Optimum conditions for growing brine shrimp as a prelude to establishing a salt water aquarium), assisted in the computer lab in high school (a PDP-8/S that I programmed in FOCAL), and hacked the school’s timeshare system in the Guidance office.  I fell out of love with Physics and into affection with medical signals (and the campus radio station) in college, then on for advanced engineering and medical degrees.  ‘never much good with hardware, I had a knack for programming signal interpretation, and that defined my passions and career path for decades to come.

I visited the London Science Museum last Tuesday – it was coming home for me. Where I go through gardens, bird refuges, and natural history exhibits, I fall out of the ‘naming games’ that the British are so good at.  But in halls of machines, I could name them all, knew their purpose, principles, and inventors.  I was among familiar friends.

The purpose of the visit was to hear Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist who invented scanners, reading machines, music synthesizers.  Lately, he’s been promoting the idea that all technologies grow exponentially, and that we would soon be facing a singular moment when machines become smarter than humans.  At that point, they would become capable of advancing their own evolution, with uncertain consequences for humans left behind.  Philosophers debate the consequences, engineers speculate how machines can be harnessed, but it seems clear to me that human dominance and self-determination would be at an end.

The talk itself was a bit of a let-down: Prof Kurzweil has created a movie promoting his ideas and the MIT Forum meeting turned out to be a screening, preceded by some introductory remarks.  I had to leave half-way through to catch the late train back to Cambridge, but absorbed the self-promotional thrust before leaving.  I would have preferred to hear his ideas instead of his story, our future instead of his past.

I hurried past the rows of silent machines: future vision can always be turned towards Cyberpunk-horror or Trek-utopianism.  The debate has been going on for centuries, yet man always finds his way past the supposed end-times, yet never arriving at Ecotopia.  I’m  optimistic: machines ultimately serve human ends.

Yet, what if this time was different?

I’m reminded of another MIT scientist Edward Fredkin.  I heard him speak in a radio interview, starting with a simple question.  Throw a ball: imagine it stopped at an instant of time, mid—flight. Advance a moment, and the ball moves ahead in a straight line.  Why does it do that?

To Friedkin, the ball must somehow remember where it has been to know where to go next.  Or, perhaps, the space the ball is in remembers how it entered and has rules for where it should go next.  Perhaps, then, the whole of space and time is made up of cells with programmed rules, much like John Conway’s Game of Life.

According to Friedkin, the universe is a computer, unwinding the future step by step according to local rules of “digital physics”.  It’s a fascinating notion, yet one that comes up again and again.  Thermodynamics, for example, has intimate links to information theory via entropy.

If  space and time are quantized and the laws of physics reflect  local rules coded into that cellular automata, then information is more fundamental than matter or energy.  The physical universe and consciousness could simply be a solipsistic epiphenomena of this underling reality

So, Matrix-like, the Singularity could be the latest evolutionary refinement in how the Universe conceives Itself.

I smiled, headed toward the all-too-physical Tube with all-too-little Time.  It would have made a better talk: be courageous with the idea that computing is fundamental and see where it takes you into the Future.