ego puncturing

How many times have you read or heard your ego is your worst enemy, that you block your own light, that your self is getting in your own way?

But how to do something about it?

There are a number of traditional solutions: practising gratitude is one.

Then there is pushing your own sense of tolerance. Note the things you just won't or can't tolerate. Then experiment for a while tolerating them.

These are shortcuts. If you don't use them, over time- maybe years- life will deal you an ego blow. It is of course, up to you how you react to it, but it'll come.

changing yourself

If you want to change yourself, change your environment.

If you can't change your environment go with your limitations- use them to your advantage. Acknowledge your weaknesses and program stuff to fill in the time and space when you are 'at risk'. 

good advice if you'll take it

Some people are faffers. Mucking about, wasting time, doing all the taks except the one you have to. If you are one of life's faffers then it's OK to faff about before a big project or trip because the percentage of time faffing- a few days, a week maybe is nothing compared to the months or years of a big task. But if you do small things of shorter duration faffing takes over and becomes what you do. So you end up doing nothing with your life. Of course if the big thing has little momentum and is really a sequence of little things the same faffing incursions occur and you end up failing to complete. So, do big things that have their own momentum. if you're a faffer.

who benefits from complexity?

In modern urban culture finance and the law become increasingly complex. The way to make money in both these areas is to find loopholes in the regulations. Those with a better tolerance of complexity will succeed. They will regard increasing complexity as a benefit as it sorts out the players from the amateurs. By business-evolutionary pressure the peculiar aspergery/dedicated/creative combination needed to flourish in complex regulatory environments will further encourage complexity in that area. The complexity handlers will be vastly well rewarded, the rest will get little. A priestly caste will emerge, albeit one which is not hugely difficult to join if you have the right mindset. 

But since this is a positive feedback situation the only brake on complexity increasing will come from outside. A Gordian knot solution (Alexander didn't bother to try an unravel the impossible knot, he cut it). In this case someone with a gun takes over the land and resources of the complexity masters.

Or is there another ending?

patience and intuition

Patience is a virtue- how many times have you heard that and dismissed it? Old school, not relevant in this fast paced world. Things DEMAND to be done NOW don' t they?

Maybe not.

A virtue is a self-training tool that has been observed and eventually shorn of its connection to higher understanding. It has some 'worldly' value- patient people are generally happier and more contented than those in a constant and demanding hurry- but not always. Patience, like any other virtue, has been 'seen through' in these challenging times. The problem with this cleverness is that masks the bridge that patience provides.

Patience is how you learn to be intuitive about timing, about the right time to act. 

You can hone your intuition about WHAT to do as much as you like, but if you miss out WHEN, then you are like someone running past bus stops and hoping a bus will just turn up as you approach (which does sometimes happen of course- just not very often).

By practising patience you learn the texture of time, you get a feel for the moment to act by learning how to bide your time. To learn this you need to allow a patient approach into every area of your life. Look at how you do things and ask- am I simply being a bit impatient here?

Don't drop the Clangers

Clanger creator Oliver Postgate's wonderful autobiography 'Seeing Things' contains many interesting insights. One that struck me forcibly was what he said after talking to animation students at the Royal College of Art, 'They taught me more than I realy wanted to know about how our simple direct craft had been inflated into a manic pretentious pseudo-art....They wanted me to see how visually stunning their work was and how well it fitted into the current state-of-the-art fashion, in fact how 'good' it was....[But] you can't really ask how 'good' a piece of work is by itself. You can only ask how well it does what it is setting out to do.'

I meet people all the time obsessed with whether their work is 'good' enough. Instead they would be far more productive by asking the simple question: does it achieve what it sets out to do? And, therefore, what is it setting out to achieve?

the problematique

In some languages things are better expressed; thinking about a network of problems, an inter-related set of problems- the problematique- one is mentally better prepared for positive action- if this is indicated. In English we think too much on 'a problem'- a unitary thing, whereas it is almost always linked to other things, inextricably often. Identifying the linkages and emphases of a series of problems, exploring their context (even if such descriptions irritate you) is a form of reconnaisance- and it is time seldom wasted.

Thinking about unitary problems encourages the opposite too: panacea thinking about solutions.