===

“a series of steps, each building on the last, but without a predetermined plan. We did what was necessary and as we made progress or ran into problems it became obvious what needed doing next. It wasn’t a straight line. We made mistakes and not everything worked. But we realized we were learning by doing.”

===

“The devil isn’t just in the details. He’s in the definitions. And, most of all, he’s in the analytical distinctions: in the ability to tell one thing from another. To not mix things up.”

Hanzi Freinacht

===

Where does all our crappy behavior and crappy perceptions of the world come from?

Like most things, it’s mainly the product of learned behavior. That may sound horrible, but we humans are imitation machines. Our subconscious minds constantly take in signals from the environment and integrate them into our mindsets, attitudes and, yeah, even behaviors, all of which end up guiding our perceptions and our actions. And while we want to blame social media, and media in general, the most influential part of any environment is the people in it.

Which leads me to a Toffler, Future Shock, thought.

….. impact of Warehouse of Images (before Instagram existed) …..

Pre-internet we were exposed to a fairly finite, and fairly rigid, sample of the human population to ‘imitate’ or judge our perceptions and behaviors. The people in our neighborhood. In our schools and libraries and community gathering places. At the grocery store. In our office. On the street. On the bus. We lived in smaller community echo chambers, where signals were fewer, and meanings/cues were clearer or, at least, more well defined. The internet exponentially expanded our universes wherein the number of signals we receive has increased exponentially and meanings/cues became scrambled into a moshpit of signals. Our common, well, any commonality, and agreed upon sensemaking lost clarity and gained some fairly vague outlines. In other words, social coherence lost accepted boundaries. Our imitation muscles were overworked as we attempted to learn behavior from a seemingly limitless onslaught of cues of which it became almost impossible to discern the majority from the minority.

Which leads me to the danger and opportunity.

We simultaneously see more crappy behavior than ever before, which creates a perception that everyone is crappy, and, yet, we see more kind and moral behavior than ever before (maybe just not from what we would have easily accepted as an established traditional local influencer in the past) which creates a perception that not everyone is crappy. Generally speaking, it is confusing. Are people good or bad? What that means is because we see more information about other people than ever before we need to be very, very, careful what we normalize because while we may not exactly imitate – we may simply begin accepting some version of crappy behavior. We see videos of crappy behavior of kids in schools, crappy crazy drivers, crappy acting adults arguing in grocery stores, let alone the insane amount of insane self made crappy video rants. All of these things we already knew happened occasionally, but virality implies it isn’t confined to the occasional.  And, well, what a culture sees, is what a culture becomes. The more a person sees something, especially another person’s actions, the more they will either gravitate toward it or simply accept it as “how we are” as people (whether we like it or not). It creates the message that “this is how society is.” Even if it is really not.

Which leads me to what we see (and what we become).

In the wayback machine, we had more control over what we would see. Plus. A smaller community controlled what we saw (in some form or fashion). Simplistically, we had to work harder to see the less-than-normal shit. The problem in today’s world is what we are ‘shown’ doesn’t care about proportionality so the ‘less-than-normal shit’ takes on an oversized shitstorm feeling of everywhere all the time. All this to say we get caught in the wretched inbetween of knowing that access to all this information makes us smarter, can make us safer, and actually can create a more equitable (accountable) society AND knowing that a consistent onslaught, or drip-by-drip, of exposure to crappy behavior, well, suggests we begin imitating some of that behavior in order to be ‘competitive’ in today’s crappy society/world. It’s kind of like the tragedy of commons just with behavior. This all breeds a sense of what is called ‘learned helplessness’. This is where we become conditioned to believe that a bad situation is unchangeable, resulting in an unrealistically negative view of the world and a sense of permanent crisis. Ultimately this eliminates hope, or diminishes it (through crappy perceptions), and we either disengage or assume some crappy behavior aspects.

Which leads me to creating a culture which we want people to see so it can become a better culture.

I have written far too often about how algorithms shape what we see and, therefore, shape culture (at least by my measure). But humans are smarter than algorithms, humans create algorithms, and algorithms do not have culture, do not understand culture nor do they even care about culture – algorithms feed people what they ‘say’ they want. Period. So, we can choose to spread the good stories and starve the bad ones of attention. Period. End of story. The stories we tell and we share, becomes what a culture sees and, ultimately, what it becomes.

By assuming this responsibility, hopefully, we learn something new, good; and we change course.

In the end.

Everyone should think about this a bit because the basic premise I offer is the thought if we continuously see crappy behavior, we will start doing some crappy behavior. A lot of people will balk at that. They will believe they can recognize crappy behavior as unacceptable and will never do it. Uhm. I am not so sure about that. I think it becomes just a bit easier to do some crappy things, on occasion, if you have a crappy perception of the context and think everyone else is going to be crappy. Shit. Think about how business culture works (and doesn’t). That said. Ponder. It feels important.

——–

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

Emily Dickinson

———

Life is startling.

Well.

That is if you let it be.

So often we spend time comparing ourselves to others, comparing our lives to others, comparing what we have versus others and comparing where we are, uhm, versus others.

Others, others, others.

Life isn’t a race nor is a competition.

It is a journey for fuck’s sake.

———

“Stop comparing where you’re at with where everyone else is. It doesn’t move you farther ahead, improve your situation, or help you find peace. It just feeds your shame, fuels your feelings of inadequacy, and ultimately, it keeps you stuck. The reality is there is no one correct path in life. Everyone has their own unique journey. A path that’s right for someone else won’t necessarily be a path that’s right for you. And that’s okay. Your journey isn’t right or wrong, or good or bad. It’s just different. Your life isn’t meant to look like anyone else’s because you aren’t like anyone else. You’re a person all your own with a unique set of goals, obstacles, dreams, and needs. So stop comparing, and start living. You may not have ended up where you intended to go. But trust, for once, that you have ended up where you needed to be. Trust that you are in the right place at the right time. Trust that your life is enough. Trust that you are enough.”

Daniell Koepke

———

Life can be a shitload of fun if you enjoy it. If you open your eyes to what is around you and not comparing yourself to what is around you.

Yes.

I can guarantee on the journey:

• You will break down <on occasion>
• You will get caught in a downpour <so strong you cannot see an inch in front of your face> at some point
• There will be nights so dark you will feel alone
• You will get lost
• You will have an accident
• <add in any unfortunate mishap you can think of>

But.

You will drive <you do actually get to steer you know>.

You will experience shit.

You will laugh & cry & be disappointed & be delighted.

You will be startled by how good, and interesting, and vivid people and life can be if you actually look around.

——–

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

Alain de Botton

——

Aw. I don’t know. Maybe I have a whacked view on what and how Life is and should be.

All I really know is that you may think you know what success is, what happiness is, what failure is, what sadness is, and, yet, life will startle you if you pay attention. In fact. If you pay attention to living, you may have time for little else. Ponder.

===

“All things are hidden in their opposites – gain in loss, gifts in refusal, honour in humiliation, wealth in poverty, strength in weakness … life in death, victory in defeat, power in powerlessness, and so on. Therefore, if a man wish to find, let him be content to lose.”

Mulay Al ‘Arabi Ad-Drqawi

===

“The most dangerous creation in the world, in any society, is the man with nothing to lose. “

Al Freeman Jr.

“the second most dangerous creation in the world, in any society, is the man who feels like he is going to lose what he has.”

Me

===

There are gobs of articles about how much people strive to avoid loss even incorporating an aversion to loss into decision making. But I also opened with a piece of research to point out this isn’t really true, scientifically, to make a point that we create loss avoidance narratives in some unhealthy ways.
Which leads me to social proof. In today’s I am leaning more into identity rather than any real “win versus loss” decision. In other words, I am discussing the wacky world of expectations and the absurd levels people go through to maintain wealth status. Yeah. I am discussing money and wealthy people. Dealing with the wealthy people can often be like dealing with paranoid schizophrenics. On one aspect they flaunt their wealth with absurd confidence and on another aspect they are constantly looking over their shoulder for someone or something that will take it all away. They end up with all this money, but it’s almost as if as soon as they’ve got it, they start worrying about losing it. Or somebody taking it away from them. And it scares the shit out of them (despite their confident façade). It’s almost like even though they act like they are deserving of their status, they don’t really think they would get THIS high so once they do achieve such great heights all they start thinking about is what the fall would be like. For them that feeling is like a background program running on your computer that never stops running and constantly drains the battery even when the computer is not in use. It reminds me of something that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said: “we all have public lives, and private lives, and secret lives.” True or not, all wealthy people have a secret life. That said. I believe what most wealthy people are scared shitless about is that their own wealth demise, which they seem to constantly be looking for, will come out of their secret lives. The weird thing is that their obsessive confidence and status identity stances almost encourage everyone to think the wealth bluster is covering up some secret. Anyway. Inevitably the fear of loss is both defining and a consuming thing.

Which leads me to bitterness.

Most of the wealthy people I have glanced off of have a thread of bitterness and cynicism about the world despite the fact they are not only living the good life they are clearly living life better than the majority of people. They struggle to envision a happy ending. Within that thought, tucked somewhere below the fear of losing, is a simmering blend of outrage and hurt at the state of the world relentlessly pursuing their wealth. At that point you can feel a bit of bitterness and sadness, a sense of ill fate lodged in these people. In an interesting twist of irony, they have simultaneously accepted the ‘die had been cast’ with regard to their success and feel like the die are constantly being rigged against them by others seeking to ‘win away’ their cast in life.

Which leads me to the consequences of fear of losing.

Wealth often translates into a fundamental belief in some fundamental rights – which are typically grounded in some extreme ‘self ownership’ ideals. This also means a constant belief that everyone is always trying to take their money and give it to someone else. This includes the government, but cascades down to the ‘lazy’, welfare queen, socialism grabbers.

In their minds they see the ‘grabbers’ espousing the marketplace is unfair while they see the marketplace as fair with winners who deserve all the winnings and losers who deserve all of their losing. That said. While I don’t believe that the world, nor the marketplace, is fair, the wealthy people HAVE to believe it is fair to attach to their fear of losing something. Why? Because then the only way they lose is by being a victim not of their own circumstances, but of others efforts. This begets a winner-take-all competitiveness and within that concept resides a constant fear of losing. This gets a bit worse. What I mean by that is the nefarious mental jujitsu of “if this, then that” inevitability. If I lose this, what’s next? This means a wealthy person treats every slight loss as a potential precursor to losing it all. To be clear. Most things that start, stop. There is no “slippery slope.” But that gets in the way of the internal narrative so the wealthy walk around increasingly paranoid of losing, well, anything. This constant paranoia makes them douchebags to be around and generally unhelpful in creating positive solutions for a better society. I would be remiss if I didn’t end this with pointing out that losing anything you have gained is painful – to everyone. All I am suggesting is some perspective is lost among the extremely wealthy. Ok. What I am suggesting is that a LOT of perspective is lost among the extremely wealthy. And that lost perspective is unhealthy for not only them, but society. Ponder.

=========================

“I’m a firm believer in the power of change. 

But there is one thing I’ve learned, and that’s the hardest part of moving forward is not looking back.”

Felicity

=====

Progress is difficult <and easy>. Changing is even more difficult <and easy>. Now. I am not sure if it is more difficult if you discuss this as ‘one’ <an individual> or as a ‘whole’ <groups, countries, society>.

Well, to me, the reason why I kept on throwing in easy is because I believe we look at “difficult” incorrectly.

Maybe difficulty is simply difficulty.

Maybe there are no ‘degrees of difficulty’ when it comes to change.

Maybe there is no ‘little or big’ change.

Maybe it is simply, well, change … no size … no degrees … and it is all difficult.

One size – same degree of difficulty.

In fact. Maybe I should be arguing we diminish, or boost the whole concept of difficulty by trying to find levels within it. And maybe a philosophical young student Tv character <Felicity> simplified change and progress and difficulty into the simplest form — not looking back. In other words, change difficulty is all about the past and not looking back. Therein lies the hardest part or the “difficult” as it were with change – looking forward & just doing and not looking back at what you may, or may not be, leaving behind.

That said.

Individuals or societies, the ones or the manys, always seem to want to go back or look back <in some form or fashion>. It’s funny. We do this even if we know it isn’t the right thing or the best thing. We look at the past holding on to what exists with ragged tenacious claws.

Worse? We sometimes <often> delude ourselves into believing we are proceeding in the most rational way by weighing all of the pros and cons of various alternatives which are actually alternatives usually based on looking backwards <with an eye on a future thought>.

Oddly.

Quite often it really isn’t rational thinking because in the end most often the decision ends up no more than “I liked that more than I liked the other alternative.”

Oh. And that is scary. Because our attitude and perception with regard to the past is wacky.

Wacky not only because, all things created equal, we not only view the past differently than it really was <we tend to gloss over things> but also how we think and feel today <please note this is the first time I have mentioned anything to do with the present> influences how we remember yesterday. Yeah. Whatever we are feeling now and about ‘now’ is a filter in which the past has to sift its way thru. That matters because tomorrow’s anticipated gains and losses inspire today’s decisions and actions.

–          Example one:

After being shown an ad talking about the wonders of Disneyland, including shaking hands with Bugs Bunny, people were asked about their own memories of visiting Disneyland. 16 percent vividly remembered shaking hands with Bugs Bunny, even though there’s no Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. (He’s a Warner Brothers character.)

–          Example two <using some research>:

This is about what is called Time perspective. It’s not the actual real events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. It is actually our attitude toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves <ponder that one for a minute or two>.

Our time perspective — whether we tend to get stuck in the past, live only for the moment, or are enslaved by our ambitions for the future – effect our attitudes and behavior and decisions <lets call this ‘progress’>.

Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created this idea of time perspective. After a boatload of research over a lot of time <10 years> he concluded our attitude toward time is just as defining as key personality traits such as optimism or sociability. He concluded time perspective influences many of our judgments, decisions, and actions. Zimbardo identified five key approaches to time perspective.

These are:

• The ‘past-negative’ type. You focus on negative personal experiences that still have the power to upset you. This can lead to feelings of bitterness and regret.
• The ‘past-positive’ type. You take a nostalgic view of the past, and stay in very close contact with your family. You tend to have happy relationships, but the downside is a cautious, “better safe than sorry” approach which may hold you back.
• The ‘present-hedonistic’ type. You are dominated by pleasure-seeking impulses, and are reluctant to postpone feeling good for the sake of greater gain later. You are popular but tend to have a less healthy lifestyle and take more risks.
• The ‘present-fatalistic’ type. You aren’t enjoying the present but feel trapped in it, unable to change the inevitability of the future. This sense of powerlessness can lead to anxiety, depression and risk-taking.
• The ‘future-focused’ type. You are highly ambitious, focused on goals, and big on making ‘to do’ lists. You tend to feel a nagging sense of urgency that can create stress for yourself and those around you. Your investment in the future can come at the cost of close relationships and recreation time.

Anyway. All the research aside … here is an uncomfortable truth. Most of us are either focused on the past or the future. Or even both.

Here is the uncomfortable part.

That means if we are so preoccupied with past and future, well, that inevitably makes the present, well, smaller.

Yeah. The present becomes the smallest part of our attitudes which inevitably drives our behavior.

Unfortunately <or fortunately to any change consultant>  change actually begins and ends with what you actually do in the present. Nothing else really matters when it come to change.

Yikes. That sure explains a lot.

Anyway.

The hardest part of moving forward is not looking back. Heck. Maybe the hardest part of moving forward is not only not looking back .but not looking forward too.

<note: my head hurts after typing that>

Change is, adn will always be, about flipping today to tomorrow. Easy, and as hard, as that.

I imagine that change will always be difficult and the only thing that may matter is to make the present a little bit bigger in how you think in the scheme of things. I say that because when you do flip the present, and what you do in the present, and tomorrow looks bigger & better you will most likely have no desire to look backwards anymore, less likely to hold with ragged claws to anything you used to do, and more likely to just have, well, changed … and it is all said and done.

=====================

originally written October 2013

===================

===

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”

Carl Sandburg

===

In a world where we so often talk about time being money I am surprised we don’t see this quote more often.

Oh.

Sorry.

I know why. Because it suggests you control your time and popular wisdom suggests that our time is out of our hands (and that there is not enough of it).

Carl suggests a different perspective.

Time is currency in your wallet and just like that ten dollar bill you have a choice how and where and when to spend it.

I am sure there has been a book written suggesting this, but suffice it to say thinking about time as money in your own wallet that you have to spend (and earn) is actually a useful thought.

It’s bigger than “time management” and closer to “time budgeting.”

Anyway.

A similar thought <which I liked> is time spent is not distance covered. I don’t know who wrote this, or said this, but it seemed appropriate here.

How we use our time is a discussion I am fairly sure we will never tire of.

Well. We may tire of it but we will never stop discussing.

Mostly because we worry whether we are using it wisely, or efficiently or whether we even have any control of our own time at all. In addition many of us assess our time investment by ‘distance covered’ <distance being defined by any variety of something tangible so that we can have some type of ‘measurement’>. In fact, we use measurement in some fairly absurd ways to judge time.

Look. I see many <many> people spending the coins of their life, not flippantly for sure, but I question whether they do so wisely. There is more time spent on … well … time … than almost anything else I can think of. People, websites, apps, far too many other things to list, all telling you how you should spend your time, on what, and how, and for what. So many people being told HOW to invest their time.

But it’s your money. Do you really want others spending it?

Sure.

We all have responsibilities but at some point, I admit this may be a selfish perspective, if I only have ten dollars of time I sure as hell do not want to let someone spend all ten dollars for me.

To be clear, whether I really know what I am talking about what I do know for sure is that Carl makes a valid point.

One which I believe is worth thinking about. Ponder.

======

In the scenery of spring,

nothing is better, nothing worse;

The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short, some long.

Ryōkan

==

1st day of Spring. I have always had this crazy idea that we should celebrate the first day of spring instead of New Year’s Eve.

I say that because I sometimes find it odd we celebrate new year’s day which seems to be associated with regrets and leaving ‘things’ behind and ‘starting anew’ as if you completely throw out the old and start with a clean slate <which sounds good but is not really possible>.

And, yet, Spring is actually all about new from existing, growth from that which is and, well, hope <not regret>.

To me, as nature begins to throw off the cold thoughts of winter and days get longer, it seems natural to think of possibilities. And <returning to my crazy thought on ditching new years’ eve> it seems like it would also be much easier to become the change we seek in ourselves in Spring than when you are in the dead of winter and you have to fight off not only last year’s regrets but the grayness and coldness of winter days.

Spring abounds with, well, a life to come.

==

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

==

Spring begins what could be called the narrative of hope.  The narrative can be religious or philosophical or both intertwined. Regardless. The narrative revolves around a speculation of what could be.

This I am today.

That I will be tomorrow.

I say this knowing full well that speculation is not an end in itself.

Speculation must involve some meaningful application.

While you have hope for growth in a belief of freshness and emerging growth from what already exists, you have to water the plant <you get the metaphor>. You have to do some shit in order for all the ‘hope shit’ to happen.

Spring isn’t about putting aside old habits and things it is about using them as stepping stones to grow and move forward.

I would argue that Spring helps us with hope because it suggests possibilities. This is good because far too often hope tends to stunted in pragmatism.

In other words, fulfillment of hope is much much easier in spring then in the dead of winter.

Behaviorally speaking, the pragmatic constructs of life and improvement seem much colder and stricter and harsher and less attainable in the winter.

And, yet, those same pragmatic constructs of life seem more open and warmer to adapting to change in the onset of spring and, most importantly to attitudes & behavior, more attainable.

And, yes, I do believe pragmatism and possibilities have a symbiotic relationship.

Now.

While you actually have to do some shit to make change and growth happen, Hope is a pretty powerful thing. Hope, which actually offers nothing more than mere speculation, actually provides us with the very basis of living.

Seriously.

Think about it.

What is existence without the hope for a better tomorrow or expectation of things to come?

<answer: not much>

We long for meaning which is certainly intertwined with hope — a hope for being as good as we can. A hope for being better today than I was yesterday and better tomorrow than I am today.

All that said.

“Dum spiro spero”

(While I breathe, I hope)

Alexander Pope

As long as we breathe, hope breaths.

Spring is about, well, breathing. Breathing life into hopes & dreams.

I would argue New Year’s Eve is about suffocation and is grounded in the despair of past dreams.

Ponder that a bit.

How often have you stood on the threshold of a new year looking to discard things <to start anew> and felt this?

                   “From where you are you can hear their dreams.

The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams.”

Dylan Thomas

Conceptually, for New Years to exist it means some dreams have died. Yeah. On New Year ’s Eve we put to rest some of our dead dreams … and create new ones.

<please note: I do not believe any dream should die>

On the first day of spring we let the seeds of our dreams burst forth from the ground and grow.

Now that, my friends, is something worth celebrating.

Spring is here.

Hope lives.

Think of the possibilities.

====

“All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”
Aristotle

===

I am both a complexity person and a “cause & effect” person. I believe all actions have a stimulus in some form or fashion. Yes. All actions. That said, I also know unwinding a usual complex interconnection of things to isolate a specific cause is often a fool’s errand. But the truth is that something always gets the ball rolling and it is often quite useful to spend some time thinking about causes of things. specifically, I rarely think “man, was that a stupid thing to do” when I see someone do something. Instead my first thought is almost always “gosh, I wonder what made them think that was the right thing to do.” To me that is a useful reflection of cause.

So. If I take that type of thinking and put Aristotle’s thought in place every time you see or hear someone say something, and rather than going ballistic or laughing or shaking your head or whatever,you place one of these into your head:

• Chance
• Nature
• Compulsion
• Habit
• Reason
• Passion
• Desire

Maybe, just maybe, you will generate a more reasonable response to the situation than doing or saying something silly.

I will tell you that I wish more managers (or people managing people) in the business world would try this thinking out when managing people.

Too often I have seen ill considered responses to people’s actions in business environments and it becomes more of a “slamdown” rather than a teaching moment. Or are just plain stupid with regard to this topic (although I like to err on the side of “not investing the energy to teach”).

Cause and effect is any easy thing to grasp and I wonder why managers forget it. Maybe it is because we seem to often get caught up in the “blame game” versus “teaching game” (probably because of the alliteration). Or maybe we get caught up in the complexity narrative and begin thinking there is no cause for any of the effects happening. Either of those two beliefs are less than useful if you want to foster an effective business.

Anyway. There is a Law of Cause & Effect which states that Every EFFECT has a specific and predictable CAUSE and every CAUSE or Action has a specific and predictable EFFECT. I do not buy into that ‘law’, but, as a concept it is useful in exploration. It can be useful because it means that everything that we currently have in our lives is an effect that is a result of a specific cause (or groupings of causes). Simplistically, in a business world, these causes are the decisions we make and the actions we take on a daily basis. Whether our decisions seem small and rather insignificant, or whether they are significant and transformational in nature, does not matter. Each and every decision we have made and action we have taken has set events into motion creating some predictable and specific effects, and some unpredictable and specific events, that we are now experiencing in our lives.

Which leads me to Chance.

The Law’s premise is that life (or any personal action) isn’t built upon accidents, chance or luck. It is rather built upon Cause & Effect. While I think that is a bullshit, absurd, less-than-realistic, thought, I will suggest that for business it has some usefulness. In business you have to believe you can shape your future and destiny in some way or let’s say “nudge chance in your favor” or why be in business at all.

Lastly.

While I simplify cause and effect down to a sound bite “stimulus-response” when teaching high school kids, this thought is really overlooked in personal relationships.

It may be that in long term relationships there becomes such a comfort & routine that you stop paying attention to details or maybe better said “cues” as to what is really going on. Let’s call this “the slippery slope of indifference to stimuli.” In other words, ignoring (or simply overlooking or even being simply oblivious to) the cause ‘cues’ to specific actions and effects. And once you begin to overlook things you run the risk of beginning down that infamous slippery slope.

In the end.

While I began with Aristotle I will end with Harry Potter.

“Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.”

Albus Dumbledore

We do have a knack for doing what is worst for us.

We should invest at least a bit of energy wondering why because we aren’t stupid.

I believe it is because we don’t invest enough energy asking “why did this happen?” when we do the ‘worst.’

Instead we choose “precisely the things that are worst for them” and shake our heads and move on.

Maybe if we seek to understand the cause for our actions a little better we could make good ole Dumbledore a little less insightful. Because, well, the answers to our actions are everywhere if you look around a bit. Ponder.

==

“Life is a test of endurance, strengths, challenges and patience.”

Kim Hoth

==

We all have an inner strength that is difficult to assess until you actually have to access it. But we ALL have that inner strength.  A source we would rather never have to tap into, yet, we do — or we will.

It is inevitable in life.

Because Life is nothing if it is not consistent in that it challenges us.

Constantly.

And I also believe most of us are surprised not only by our own capacity when tested, but also certainly when seeing the capacity of the others around us.

I was reminded of this several years ago. The experience reminded me that Life gives each of us different tests and the experience reminded me of perspective — perspective on what is truly a Life challenge versus what we sometimes believe is a ‘challenging life’.

And, once again, in self-reflection, the experience made me wonder “would I be that strong?”

Or maybe more importantly “would I be strong enough?”

In other words, would it pass my limits?

Ok.

Here we go.  Envision this scenario.

(WARNING: this is short … but tough)

Your oldest daughter passes out in the shower at home.

She isn’t breathing.

You, the father, frantically give mouth to mouth while someone calls 911.

She is brain dead on arrival at the hospital.

She is dead the following day.

A blood clot in the brain in a healthy 15 year old young woman.

Dead at 15.

No warning

Your daughter is gone.

And you, the father, couldn’t save her.

—-

(I am taking a break here)

—-

I typed that fast.

I had to.

I type things out of anger.

I type things out of thought.

I type things out of frustration.

I have never had to type anything like that ever before.

And I had to do it fast and not dwell.

The words?

That is what my friend Mike actually experienced several years ago.

Ok. He experienced significantly more, and still is, but from me, someone looking in from the outside that is all I believe I had the right to write.

I cannot envision being in his shoes.

I cannot envision the pain & emptiness.

I cannot envision the depth of helplessness.

I cannot envision the burden.

I am not a godly man.

At least not in the traditional sense.

I say that before I use this quote:

“Life’s a test. I was taught in church that the Lord wouldn’t put more on you than you can handle. But it’s getting heavy.”

Dusty Baker

I used Dusty Baker because Mike & I are not close friends.  We are ‘within work environment’ friends.  And we would seek each other out for our shared love of baseball.

And I imagine that the heaviness he feels today is close to more than he can handle.

“It’s getting heavy” as Dusty suggests. It tests the limits.

I believe we all think life gets heavy on occasion as we face our day to day issues. I know I have faced some things and I know I have felt the heaviness of life. But I have never faced anything like this.

I know, for sure, we shouldn’t measure the heaviness on day to day stuff.

Maybe heavy is this scenario.

And that is the standard. Anything else is just light or a lesser burden.

He and his wife have three more daughters.

Will that lessen the burden?

Shit.

I don’t know.

I don’t know how a father ever leaves the helplessness of not being able to protect, and save, his child.

I am not going to preach here.

I am simply going to remind.

No matter how hard you try to protect someone you love, sometimes you just can’t.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you should value every day you have.

Regardless. Life is going to test your limits. I am unclear we really know what our limit is until you have to face it. All I know is any time your limits are tested it is something serious. And serious things that test limits do not go away. What I mean by that is the situation may, but the consequences lurk forever. Ponder.

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self-care is creating a life you don’t routinely have to escape from

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the words you speak become the house you live in.

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I’m both better and worse than you thought.

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“I need to escape for a while.” Yeah. How many times have you said this, heard this or read this? Well. Let me say I have heard this a gazillion times. It becomes the impetus for staycations, mental health days and luxurious vacations. In fact, it has bred a humongous industry (industries) offering solutions to this simple statement (basically leeching off your desire to escape).

Maybe we should take a minute and ponder this simple statement of ‘escape for awhile.’

Should people have to escape and is “awhile,” if you actually do need to escape, even a worthy objective? I imagine the answer to the latter is obvious. It isn’t. It’s not an escape, it’s simply a break. But this isn’t about what is a worthy break and what isn’t, this is about why we believe we have to escape at all.

To be clear. Vacations are fun. Family vacations to Disneyland, Pigeon Forge, the mountains, an event, are all good things. They aren’t really a ‘break,’ they aren’t really escaping, in fact, they are more about leaning into life. Getting engaged with aspects of what makes like meaningful. And maybe that is where I begin making my point.

Leaning in because it is meaningful and escaping because, well, maybe meaning has become a bit more difficult to find if not even just discern. Somewhere along the way, in business, people began needing to escape. I honestly do not know when that began. I struggle to believe it has always been this way. Sure. A shitload of people wanted to escape their lot in life. And many of those people truly should have aspired to being a in a better life than the one they were currently living in. But they didn’t want to escape life, they just wanted to get somewhere else. That distinction seems important.

But isn’t there a deeper problem in society, and in business, if more people are seeking to ‘escape’ life?

Speaking personally, I have maybe only had two professional existential periods where I truly sought to escape. I never needed alcohol or drugs because I can honestly say that I loved working and most of what I did. Sure. I needed breaks, but I never needed to escape. I only share that to say business and society may need to do some serious navel-gazing if a shitload of people are ‘escaping’ through increased addiction, increased depression and increased escapism activities. Maybe the problem isn’t people, but the system itself – which means we should stop offering people ‘ways to improve’ and start offering ways the system could improve. Once again, I point out I am fairly sure this particular type of escapism didn’t always exist. And, yeah, its quite possible that industrialization and specialization (a consequence of industrialization) shifted the systems in ways that made feelings of escapism increase, but I also tend to believe that industrialization itself could be crafted in ways that don’t actively encourage escapism. I also believe that industrialization could be designed in ways that don’t actively encourage the need for some of the radical escapism shit that gets thrown at us to fill in the escape gaps – mindfulness mumbo jumbo, life coaches, retreats, motivational exercises and maybe the worst – “productivity hacks” which are this weird “if you work to be more efficient you will have to work less and have more time to escape.” Once again, I would point out that the seemingly unending system coping mechanisms that have arisen are indicators of a larger issue and that maybe we shouldn’t have to embrace the never-ending lists of “things we should do to be better” and rather rebuild the system so we don’t have to seek some unhealthy solutions or always feel a nagging feeling of needing to escape.

Look. I believe the system is a bit screwed up and I believe society doesn’t really have its head screwed on right at the moment with regard to some priorities. And I know the world can be a shitshow sometimes and I know people can be pretty shitty sometimes. Given that escape can seem like a pretty fucking smart thing to do. But maybe, instead, you lean into the shitshow a bit instead of escaping it. Maybe that is the only way the system changes. That said. What I do know for sure is if all of us escape, the system will not change. Ponder.

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“The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

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This is about measurement in business, specifically, about learning and developing a learning organization.

First. Let me say I am dubious of almost all measurement. Why? Because in today’s world everyone is (a) incentive to make a specific measurement usually at the expense, with no cost, of other things that could be measured, and (b) measurement creates objective blindness.

Suffice it to say, if something is going to be measured people will figure out a way of gaming the system to attain whatever is to be measured. Sound cynical? Not really. Its just reality. If you have a system that rewards attainment of things measured you create a culture, society and civilization believing only what is measured is important.

Second. I believe most of the truly important things in business and in life don’t need to be measured because if they are truly important, they will trigger the intrinsic energy with everyone to go out and make those important things happen. As a follow-up to that, yes, there are unimportant things that need to be done. And, no, they don’t need to be measured to make sure they are done (and done well). if you have a system in which intrinsically people attack important things, they will do the unimportant things simply because they know they need to be done.

Third. As Arie de Gues said: “Institutional learning is much more difficult than individual learning.” The individuals know there must be a better way to do the business of doing business and what ‘growth’ should be and, yet, the institution, collecting all that may be important, i.e., what is foremost to the institution itself, warps its ‘directed learning’ toward its wants, not the individuals, and seeks to shape the individual TO what it wants.

Which leads me to learning cannot be measured.

Judged perhaps, but not measured. But that has never stopped us from measuring learning. We try and try and try and then claim it has been measured. I would suggest we do this as part of some devious command and control ideology. What I mean by that is we use those measurements to dominate others and control their actions and behaviors under the guise of “intelligent leading” when it really is in the pursuit of institutional objectives. Regardless. Measurement, or let’s call it ‘performance management’, cause some real issues:

1. Gaming 81% of the time
2. Information manipulation 74% of the time
3. Selective short-termism 55% of the time
4. Give an illusion of control
5. Negatively affect social relationships 81% of the time

While measuring learning has all the appearances of being critical to the learning processes it more often creates results counter to the objectives of the business, i.e., agility to meet emergent opportunities and adaptability to optimize situational needs. In other words, measurement tends to stratify, not make the business more elastic. That said. I would argue you can only ‘measure’ through direct observation of performance or by examination of a ‘conclusion of activity’ that required use of acquired learning (that’s more individual-activated self-learning rather than some L&D initiative).

To make a distinction. While I tend to believe how we measure learning in schools (mostly below college level) is fucked up, I do believe measuring young people’s learning progress, retaining of knowledge and usefulness, is good.

• Source: Measuring Student learning, Cornell Center for Teaching innovation

Anyway. The truth is business learning and rational thinking demands a bit a setting aside the ego; and measurement almost always triggers ego. Learners be open to include a changing, overlapping knowledge of minds/thinking which can come from anywhere at any time. Since a person cannot collect all relevant information if they are to be competent at identifying relevant actions/possibilities, they must to some extent know where to look for the apparently most useful information as well as be open to connectivity within a community of people who knows things they do not.

Which brings me back to business.

Most businesses fear unmeasured learning not because of wasted time, but more so wasted efficiency. What I mean by that is business fears anything that could create a complicated and time-consuming process that less-than-efficiently stitches together all the necessary knowledge/data to decide or do something. The fear is that reality is vague if there are no numbers to create an outline to see (and business fears vagueness). The fear is that any actionable learning is too late to make the optimal impact on financial performance. Look. Learning shouldn’t be judged on efficiency only effectiveness. Learning has no need for logic other than learning is good and therefore learning has no need for measurements other than “am I consistently providing an environment which encourages people to pursue learning.”  I know that sounds like heresy in a business world religiously attached to measurement.  I think of “intelligence” as less to do with “knowing a bunch of stuff” and more to do with figuring stuff out in new and uncertain situations, but that skill is only developed by actually being in uncertain situations full of unknowns. So maybe measurement should be reflective of ‘effective navigation’ (financial performance is an outcome of this done well consistently).

Which leads me to end with Mary Parker Follett.

Follett offered 3 core concepts and five principles to support what she called the “circular reflective learning arc.”

Concepts:

1. thinking in terms of wholes
2. harnessing the creative power of self-organized integrative thinking
3. enhancing our ability to respond to what she called “the law of the situation”

Principles:

1. engaging our internal sense of intention and purpose
2. engaging and learning from the intentions, values, and purposes of others who are different or who think differently
3. designing change through a process of co-creation informed by those differences
4. enacting and acting on those designs where experiences meets experiences
5. adapting and learning from those experiences, the doing, learning about, and living of life itself.

Basically, at the core everything Follett suggests is connective and as part of a community – I AND We. None of it is solely individualistic except possibly self-awareness. I imagine I end here to point out that learning, driven in direction and interest of the individual, combined with that learning forged against other’s learning, is about the only thing truly measurable – outcomes of various situations navigated. But. You don’t measure learning because, well, who knows what learning will be most important in future situations? You don’t. Ponder.

• postcript: there are a number of highly qualified people in my network of friends and acquaintances who absolutely are wrapping their heads around this measuring issue. in particular, Rachel Happe and community measurement, Hilton Barbour on culture, and Jeppe Haansberg on internal networks. I imagine most of them, if not all, would debate me on this issue. And that’s a good thing.