Micro versus macro adventures

Sometimes you need the prospect of a big adventure to get you out of bed and moving. But ask yourself first- do I want to do this for itself or because of the attention it will get me?

Climbing Everest and going to the poles sounds dandy but not if to have done is better than to do. Are you really trying to be ‘the kind of guy who has climbed Everest’, with that mountain like a kind of adventurer’s phd after your name?

I can talk because I’ve never climbed it, nor been to either pole.

What I can say is that a big adventure is a big idea and big ideas are inspiring. But the REALITY of a big adventure is lots of little adventures joined together. Sometimes a single micro-adventure can be more satisfying than a chain of such micro-adventures that become a macro-adventure.

An example from last week. I was driving through the desert and arrived at an oasis town 370km from Cairo. I had fuel for another 50 km. But the two stations in town had sold out. We would have to wait- days- who knew? But my pal Richard had a plane to catch the next day.

A guy in a landcruiser saw us dithering. He came over rather diffidently and asked ‘do you live on road 267?’ I do. It turned out his office was on the same road in Cairo and he’d seen my car. He asked if he could help. I told him we were out of gas. He phoned a friend in the oasis- who- get this- has a stockpile of benzine (gas) just in case of such emergencies. We were told to drive to an intersection on the edge of the oasis and wait for the friend.

As we drove Richard said, “This is amazing!” But I kept quiet and thought I’ll believe it when I see it.

Sure enough the intersection was deserted. A dusty triangle of roads going nowhere. We waited in the 40 degree heat. Luckily we had more water than fuel. Then behind us came a honk of a horn. A big old landcruiser pulled up and the driver smiled and opened the trunk. Inside: 4x 25 litre jerry cans of gas. Saved! He didn’t even want extra money! But we gave it to him anyway.

I’m not down on macro adventures, it’s just that micro ones are good too. You can have them everyday rather than once in a lifetime.

How to judge things a little better

Who wouldn’t want better judgement? Getting older we fancy that our ability to judge is getting better, more refined but is it? You may know what you like rather better, you may be able to judge a fine wine or a good dish of food rather better than you did as a mere stripling but this is of secondary importance to judging the real stuff: people, and dangerous or difficult situations- many of which also turn on judging people.

Do you judge by the face, the smile, the body language? You might. Or do you rely on reports, interviews and psychometric testing? But what if you are in the back of beyond and a little far from a tame psychologist? Then you’d better improvise. One of my favourite methods is without any scientific basis at all. But it works. It’s simply a refinement of first impressions being important. The idea is to isolate, remember and rely on your first thought on seeing a new person with whom you will have future dealings. It helps if you don’t actually hear them say anything before you observe them, before any skilfull dissimulation can occur and cloud your judgement. Sometimes your feeling can be as brief as “I like this person”, or, usefully, “I trust him”. I have employed people who I registered dislike of on this first test, against my better judgement, and they have always been a bad choice. So the first skill is really simple: clear your mind of any preoccupation and just remember your first impression – and you must really concentrate on this as the second impression, after their charming smile and flattering conversation have kicked in may make you forget that intuitive gift of judgement.

Next: tests. You can give someone a small task and see how they deliver.

When you interview someone and they are late by more than five minutes- forget it, they’ll always be late. If they make problems at the outset they’ll always make problems- I met a potential expedition member in a pub and he didn’t want a drink. Now there’s no law against not drinking but if you’re going to spend three months 24/7 with someone you want someone who is a bit biddable, a bit open to your suggestions. But even he I considered until he didn’t phone me when he said he would. If someone agrees to doing a small thing and doesn’t deliver you can be sure they’ll screw up something bigger. Whatever fine excuses they offer.

What makes us lose our finely honed judging skills. Drink and drugs. Love and family. Deseperate wanting. Impatience of others. Anger. Greed. Optimism of a deeply unrealistic nature. Anger is easy. Never ever make a judgement or decide a thing with any kind of future consequences when you are angry. Wait a day. Or a week. But put it off. Likewise the impatience of others “Decide now!” they tell you and you panic. There are very very few moments when you can’t take two minutes to decide what to do. Two minutes is a long time when you have no distractions. Should I go for treatment to a local hospital at the ski resort where I just broke my arm or fly home with a plaster on and deal with doctors whose first language is English. Take two minutes before you reply. Two well spent minutes where you clear your mind of everything else.

Greed is the bedfellow of bad judgement. Greed is what makes every con trick work, from the three card trick to a Ponzi pyramid investment scheme. It’s hard to outwit greed if you haven’t learnt how to self-observe and note its presence, the concomitant feelings of rush and desire and I-want-that-now. Again, avoid making an instant decision, take a day, or two minutes if that is all that is available. Ask awkward reasonable questions, the kind of question you’d ask if you didn’t care whether you pissed off the provider of the opportunity on offer. I don’t mean be rude, but be penetrating and see how they react when you ask to see evidence, records, samples, references. The simple best defence is to ask yourself: “is it too good to be true?” Anything that is should set off alarm bells if it also requires some kind of payment from yourself.

Judgement of tricky situations that don’t involve people but might feature taps that won’t shut off or cars that are smoking heavily from under the bonnet or damp patches on the ceiling you cannot trace (water is on the mind obviously); such knotty problems can be exacerbated badly by poor judgement. Sometimes you must act fast, usually, in fact. But acting wrong, fast is never going to be fun to recall especially when your car has gone up in flames on the slip road of the M4. (By the way if you do face the smoking bonnet don’t open it and provide oxygen to the fire within- instead fire an extinguisher up and under the radiator before opening up to check the damage.)

Obviously practice helps, and a bit of knowledge. Forethought- running the odd what-if through your head. But despite all this you could panic. Good judgement in tight situations is all about curtailing the panic reaction. Remember Corporal Jones as the desire to scream descends upon you. The best guard against panicking is visualizing that instead of hot blood in your veins you have ice flowing therein and the tougher and nastier things get the colder the ice. This sounds nutty but it works- just picture that ice flowing through you- the real iceman. It helps to try and imagine yourself as a soldier on a mission rather than a harassed commuter with a broken scooter in the pouring rain or whatever other dire emergency requires clarity of thought and purity of action. If you recast yourself mentally as a tough combatant this will minimize your woes and reduce panic. It works.

Build your own skunk works

Creativity requires having either more information or a different perspective than the rest.

The rest define the status quo. They aren’t looking for improvements really. So your new idea must be really novel to catch their attention. That’s another problem- the wow factor needed. Maybe a less showy solution would work better?

To be creative you need to build your information base and be able, if possible, to be able to come at problems from a skew whiff perspective. Richard Feynman solved the space shuttle disaster problem by looking at it from one of his favourite slants: the naïve observer. Because he had a nobel prize he could carry this off, just as Einstein could. For those who have to ‘prove themselves’ we run the risk of being called an idiot.

Those with the qualifications get through the door. They have the same perspective and they are unlikely to come up with something new, or, better, really useful. The ‘idiots’ some of whom are actually idiotic- just to make things more confusing- hang around waiting for their emails to not be replied to.

The skunk works is a famous research facility used by Lockheed. Situated on an old sewage works site- hence the name- it was far removed from the admin part of the company- and its crazy inventor staff answered only to their boss and not the bean counters. The key to their amazing output was effective isolation from people with trivial (ie. day to day business) concerns and a huge collective information base undiluted by being spread all over the place with ‘executives’ administering you.

But mostly corporations are manned by people anxious to further their own career. Such thinking is not good training for thinking up really new and useful stuff. So you need to have your own internalized ‘skunk works’- a way of being invulnerable to the crappy mundane suggestions of executives. Or the crappy mundane executive within you.

It’s very hard if you are normal, and not austistic or greatly egocentric, to isolate yourself from the desires of others.

The skunkworks in your head must be isolated by being stocked by different information.

If you read and watch what everyone else reads and watches your ideas won’t be yours- they’ll be the same as everyone else, and someone with the ear of the president will get there first. Plus, as what gets made and done is fairly crap your ideas will be crappy too.

So stock your brain with stuff that others don’t have.

Second- get at least three different perspectives. These have to be real, not simulated or imagined. To get a new perspective you have to spend time with people whose concerns are NOT yours. That means elderly people if you are young, children if you are old, indigenous peoples if you live in a city, farmers if you hate the country, millionaires if you are poor. And so on. You need to ‘catch’ their different perspective for a while. It has a strange effect- especially on the bus journey home when you may have your best ideas. If you don’t ride in buses get someone to drive you in your car. Driving alone isn’t as fruitful I find. Likewise- walking beats bicycle riding.

Buy! Buy! Buy!

Dr Ragab's Universal Language is published today. Head out to your local bookshop and buy or order the book today!

industrial strength capitalism

My grandfather Colonel H. Twigger, before he joined the army, ran away from home and got a job working on an early car assembly line in Britain in the 1920s. It was not an hourly wage but piece work. Being a nascent polymath Col H saw that the eight bolts and five springs he had to fit could be added far faster if he built a series of jigs to make the process even faster. Every time he came into work he would assemble his special bolt and spring loading jigs and get to work. His Stakhnaovite output was so astonishing the other workers got nervous and told him to slow down. He was making them look bad, worse, it could mean a lowering of the amount paid per piece. Finally ‘management’ sent the time and motion study group to investigate. The word was that they would adjust downwards the piece rate for everyone if his output was really that high. Colonel H saw them coming, disassembled his jigs and allowed them to time him unassisted. A good time they concurred, but not a great one. The rate stayed the same. Then back came the jigs- and his wages at the end of the month were higher than the foreman. Finally he was rumbled. Did they ask him to design jigs for the whole factory? No. He was fired for deceitful practices and inciting worker discontent. But then Col H never was one for buttering people up.

The whole logic of industrial strength capitalism is in this little story. 1)jobs that are complex- how many people do you know who could build a car- are broken down so that anyone can do it 2)there are lots of anyones out there and you employ them 3)but only the least intelligent and least active will remain unbored by such undemanding work- work should stretch us- not dull us to yawning tedium 4)so people are paid to be bored- and paying people to do something is what Pavlov called conditioning so 5)the capitalist world is a conditioning machine producing bored people.

Boredom. Marx sort of edged around the idea by talking about alienation, but had convoluted ideas about its cause. Boredom describes it better for our time and place. And every job is always in the process of being broken down into simpler and simpler bits so that anyone can do it. Every job- even the ‘professional’ ones. Of course we still need a few specialists, a few wizards- but fewer than you might think. Industrial strength capitalism yearns for one product domination. If Hollywood could produce one film a year and make more money that way- it would. Thankfully the realer world isn’t that simple.

Caught up in the maw of industrial strength capitalism you are part of a machine designed, without malice, a side effect merely, to make people bored. That could be a terrible thing if there weren’t escape routes all around. It’s still pretty unpleasant. The escape routes are small scale capitalism, doing your own thing, lifeshifting.

The bad kids on crap estates learn young, pick it up from their surroundings. They always whinge- ‘there’s nothing to do here’- of course there are a million things to do – just go online and find out how to build a sailboat from stuff in the skip- but that rightwing-take misses the point: they are telling us  “We have been trained to be bored. We are bored. The training succeeded.”

Who wasn’t bored at school? The quick kids get bored if the teacher paces the class for the slower ones. The slower ones switch off and get bored if the pace is fast. Five years to learn how to not-order a coffee in French- that’s not teaching that’s mind boggling. Training for work though. Training to be bored.

Boring people are strangely fascinating, up to a point. They are usually thick skinned, fond of the sound of their own voices. Sometimes, if a bore is interested in the same subject as you, it can be interesting- for a while- and then you realize what is happening- a)the bore is only interested in what you say as a springboard for his next boreload and b)he does not distinguish in interest between things even in the realm under examination. Everything is equal.

The bore, lacking the fundamental human quality of discernment- ie. what to ignore and what to pay attention to- concentrates instead on a tiny field where he doesn’t need any quality control. He can abdicate responsibility, put that part of his brain to sleep and graze equally on everything.

But it’s a fundamental human quality.

What you ignore and what you pay attention to.  It has been said that the difference between high achievers and the rest is that the high achiever makes better choices about what to pay attention to. Certainly in the field of aikido the top people don’t think about ‘the right move’- which obsesses beginners,  but about something as simple as balance. They are paying attention to different things.

Boredom is one thing. Being trained to be bored is another. We learn young. My first job was washing cars at a garage. I was paid for three hours but if I finished all the cars they let me go early- but I got less money. So I always took three hours. It was mostly boring. I took to phoning in sick from time to time. Finally I was a bit surprised that they fired me. Another job I had was to input data into a computer. Instead of seeing it as a challenge I thought: screw this and walked out. Sadly that was one of the better jobs I ever had.

The fact is- for a short period or if you are really desperate for cash you can bite the bullet and really demolish any kind of job however boring. But for a longer period, boredom is a killer- literally- cancer is more likely to occur in people who describe their lives and work as ‘boring’.

Those who can deal best with a boring job are perhaps the bores. Lacking discrimination they can mechanically coast through the day. Industrial stength capitalism is a machine that favours bores and creates boredom. Wow! That’s quite an achievement!

on the verge of being lost?

One of the world’s largest underground railway stations is Ikebukero station in Tokyo. I used to pass through everyday when I worked as an English teacher at a high school in Japan in the 1990s. I never learnt the right way through that station, even though I passed through it daily. I used to just muddle through, keep going until I saw some exit sign that looked familiar.  There wasn’t even the excuse that the signs were in a foreign language, because they weren’t- they were all in English as well as Japanese. I tried to picture the station in my mind but I just didn’t care enough to really explore and set all the details in my memory. You could say the whole time I was in that station I was on the verge of being lost.

I didn’t care because I didn’t want to be there. I was doing a job I thought was pointless, just to pay bills. The pointlessness of what I was doing meant I didn’t pay much attention to things around me. I just muddled through on the verge of being lost all the time. 

Now I find it amazing that I put up with muddling through without bothering to learn the station’s layout. I recall kidding myself I enjoyed the uncertainty and ‘spontaneity’ of it. I didn’t. I was just another confused person doing what he thought was his level best. It took an encounter with some of the extreme training methods used in Japanese dojos to help me redefine ‘doing your best’.

I hadn’t even learnt a basic lesson: paying attention is something you use or lose. It’s your fault if you put yourself in a situation where you don’t want to pay attention to your surroundings. By not paying attention you lose that ability- an ability which is crucial to learning in general.

I mention this story because if the main structure of your life is not in place then the motivation to shore up the super-structure or the bolt-ons and additions will be lacking.

Some people beat themselves up because they are ‘inefficient’ (me included) but that could be a reflection of the fact that the main structure is not in place.

I love hiking and the simplicity of the structure- you get up, you pack all your gear and you walk. I am very efficient about hiking because the whole structure is in place and agreed.

Getting lost in the station was like a signal, a wake up call: change the basic structure of your life. Instead of doing a job you hate in the best part of the day, do a part time job to earn money and do what you love full time. So I did.

Strangely, when I started doing aikido full time I found that riding a bike took less time so I stopped using that big station. So I solved that problem too.

gold bug

By the Sudanese stools is a satellite TV shop

Offering a kilo of gold, a solid gold bar

To anyone who enters their game, signs up, the usual show.

My neighbour’s son is mad for it. He wants a gold bar more than anything.

He is eight and I have been asked to help him with his maths.

I see this as a perfect teaching opportunity.

“One ounce is worth a thousand dollars,”

He smiles

“There are twelve troy ounces in a pound,”

He nods

“And 2.2 in a kilo- so how much is each bar worth?”

I lost him long ago. At last, face pained, he protests:

"I don’t even know what an ounce is."