How I write by John-Paul Flintoff

Top UK author, lifecoach and social entrepreneur J-P Flintoff writes this way:

"I used to spend a long time dreaming about how I intended to write something before I wrote it. I might do that at a table, with a cup of tea, or lying in bed in the morning, after everybody else had got up. But one day - after years working as a journalist, cranking the words out under pressure of deadlines - I realised that, in practice, I never wrote the way I had dreamed I would write. I often wrote something entirely different. I also realised that it was more fun that way - to have no idea what I was going to write until I wrote it. In the process, by actually writing, I learned my own mind. And I concluded that dreaming-about-writing was a waste of time. From then on, I decided only to write when I was writing, and to apply the same approach to other things to. Don't think about something if you can actually DO it. This has saved me an awful lot of time, and made me very productive. I have also, since then, been better able to a) enjoy my cup of tea as a cup of tea and b) get up at the same time as everybody else, and have breakfast together." John-Paul Flintoff, author of How To Change The World www.flintoff.org

perpetual motion in life

In 1150 the Hindu astronomer Bhaskara mentions a perpetual motion machine made with mercury and slats that contain and direct its motion. In the 1200AD Arabic manuscript of Ridwan there are six perpetual motion machines described and illustrated. By 1235 the idea had travelled as far as Europe, and we went crazy about them. Making perpetual motion machines became a widespread fashion, a sort of mechanical and legitimate parallel to alchemy. By the by, all kinds of developments were made in gearing and levers- but most of all in precision. It was the gradual increase in precision that led to accurate clocks and measurement and the successful mechanisation of cloth manufacture, armaments and wind, water and ultimately steam power. The childish and captivating dream of perpetual motion- an endless quest format – succeeded in supplying us with machines far more incredible, and certainly far more useful, than the original concept. The Greeks had already discovered steam power – Hero’s engine – but without precision transmission it was useless except as a toy- and toys only captivate us for a while. Perpetual motion supplies a far more compelling story- something miraculous and free, forever just out of sight.

In parallel with this introduction there have been esoteric ideas introduced by Arab writers that work like the perpetual motion machine. They engage and intrigue and set in motion an endless quest, and the ultimate effect on refining and extending human potential is far greater, and more life affirming and astonishing, than the magic and seeming miracles initially promised. 

one way to progress

For various reasons Captain Cooke did not think particularly highly of the research that showed the anti-scurvy qualities of limes and lemons. It was obviously ahead of its time. But he knew there was a problem. What he did was to combine all the anecdotal evidence available, all the cures that seemed to work, and enforce them rigorously- sauerkraut, lemons, fresh meat and vegetables, clean dry clothes and bedding- and it worked- not a single man went down with scurvy on his ships.

If we suffer an ailment or problem try everything that seems to limit it in some way. This is like the strategy for making the boat go faster. You don’t need a reason- if it works- use it.

Later you may come up with a good scientific explanation, or, you may not.

passion or money? Take a cross-over path

You hear it all the time- especially on self-help blogs- go after what you are passionate about and money will follow...er, right, but what if you're skint?

I have said similar stuff- my solution, for myself, was to work for money at weekends or downtimes and use my primetime- the day- to do my own thing.

But what if you have a family to support? You can't do that easily working a couple of nights.

You need to be both self-supporting and also, preferably, on what I call a cross-over path.

If you earn your bread at a call centre and spend your free time doing what you are passionate about the passion will probably fizzle out. You'll be so pissed off you'll want to spend your downtime doing other stuff.

A cross-over path is one that earns money, reasonable amounts, but allows you to cross over more and more to what really interests you. Journalism is a good cross-over path to writing and film making. Think of activities that are congruent with your ultimate ideal way of earning a living/spending your days. Take a long term approach. Look for other people who are doing what you want to do and see what cross-over path they used.

Polymathics #1

I see polymathics as a re-orientation of the way we think about knowledge. Polymathics is a way of studying something from multiple angles, using knowledge and insights from many subject areas- from art, science, craft and personal experience. A polymathic study of violence would include reading about it, studying the psychology of it, observing it, learning martial arts, looking at violence in cinema and art, meeting the victims of violence and its perpetrators. Polymathics is not mere generalism, a fuzzy image. It is like taking shots of a subject from multiple angles, creating a complete view.

We need to re-orient towards this.

Definitions of Orient:

(i) via Latin oriri, ‘to rise’, from the Greek words ornynai ‘to rouse’ and oros ‘mountain’- implying both the sunrise and the sense of rising up, improving. The feeling of climbing a mountain to its summit where the sunrise will be seen.

(ii) A pearl of great lustre

(iii) To turn towards the significant

(iv) The East

Therefore, to Re-orient is to re-establish the above- which might also mean: look again at the pearl in the oyster- a piece of grit which over time evolves in the right environment into a great jewel. Reconsider the East where a different less materialistic approach to knowledge flourishes even today. Return to climbing that mountain. Rejoice in the sunrise- where the source of all energy resides. Return to the significant in life and eschew the trivial. Reflect on self-improvement, personal evolution.

Polymathics could be the most dramatic change in the way we view knowledge since Descartes set us on the wrong path in the early 17^th century. 

Descartes was understandably fed up with the theoretical speculation of the schoolmen- medieval philosophers who theorised about theological ideas. Instead he longed for a method of getting at the truth of anything. One of his earliest works- unpublished in his lifetime- was a list of rules for 'the direction of the mind'.

He was not a monk- unlike all the earlier medieval philosophers. He could earn his living as a tutor to others. This gave him great freedom. He also lived for twenty years in the Netherlands which was a very liberal society at the time.

Despite being a maths genius, Descartes was an arrogant type, he decided to ignore all knowledge that had come before him. But what about language- why not ignore that too? Or the language of maths? He’s actually quite inflexible- in one sense a typical product of the medieval education he reacted against. There’s a reason why Pascal and Dr Johnson dismiss sceptics like Descartes and Bishop Berkeley- their childish insistence on doubting everything leads us astray- it looks like a promising method but it’s really a reaction to the sudden increase in book knowledge in the 16^th/17^th/18^th century. It was no long possible to know everything- which was equated with having read everything- so the arrogant move was to dismiss everything as nonsense and start again. And this does generate new material but it isn’t really useful to us right now.

Descartes, despite his scepticism, was still dependent on the concept of certainty. He shows all the hallmarks of someone who had invested a lot in concepts of theological certainty used to indoctrinate children in Europe (as opposed to intuited certainties of the divine). He then ‘woke up’ and over-reacted but because he was conditioned to having certainty he looked for it elsewhere. He found it in logic, maths and his sceptical method. Instead of being a grown up and realising certainty only makes sense as an intuition, a passing intuition in a moving world, he produced a whole ‘philosophy’ rooted in this weird thought experiment of doubting everything. As a byproduct (think Kepler and Newton who produced scientific breakthroughs on the back of crazy ideas) Descartes discovered a lot of things. His status therefore remains high- but this doesn’t alter the fact that the quest for certainty is flawed.

Certainty appeals to children, those who live in troubled times, and those who have mental problems. I define a mental problem in this context as mental inflexibility as a default safeguard to preserving identity. Everyone knows people who seem very smart but through mental inflexibility are unable to learn anything new because it ‘threatens’ them in some way. You have to be comfortable with a grey zone, not really knowing ‘for sure’ when you start learning something new. Linguists are usually comfortable with this lack of certainty, that’s why they make good travellers- they are comfortable with a shifting state of affairs. Young people usually learn better than old because the grey zone is normal to them. Scientists, engineers and mathematicians are usually averse to learning new languages. Richard Feynman famously mocked knowing the name of a bird in four languages as opposed to knowing ‘the reality’ of a bird- presumably though observing its life or even dissecting it. Note the odd need to oppose these forms of knowledge- a form of inflexibility in itself. But Feynman later reversed this- he learnt Portugese and lived in Brazil- a sense of curiosity overcoming the natural rigidity of thought associated with scientists and others who work in tightly policed thought zones.

The idea that knowledge is rooted in certainty seems ‘obvious’- but isn’t it just a weird reversal of seeking certainty in knowledge- in that which is written down? In illiterate societies there can be no such demand. There is no set text- only stories and proverbs. A story is remembered because it doesn’t work if it isn’t- legalistic minutiae doesn’t feature at all. Proverbs work because again our minds seem fitted to recalling them, though, like quotations they can lose their edge. Stories, too, can lose sophistication and become mere genre examples- a tale of complex multiple meanings reduced to a horror tale. I’ve seen people round a campfire reduce their own interesting experience to just a funny tale with a punch line, in more congenial and relaxed company many more dimensions of their experience would have emerged. But, in general, stories and proverbs are among the most durable storage containers we have for human knowledge.

The quest for certainty is not the quest for knowledge. Descartes asks a naive question- how can I be certain of anything? He is looking for something to stand against the assumed certainty of the Bible. Descartes is using the equipment of knowledge seeking –asking questions, testing the answers against experience- to undermine the reality of all knowledge. There is something decidedly screwy about this- but it is legitimised by the assumption that the quest for certainty is a legitimate goal.

What if certainty is a transcendent goal? By this I mean, the more you aim at it the further you get from it. Relaxation is like this- the harder you ‘try’ to relax the tenser you get. Some things you have to kind of sidle up to like a crab. You have to ‘aim off’ a bit. The front gate may be locked but there’s a way in at the back. Some things aren’t obvious. Non-scientists often don’t realise how much palpating and massaging goes on before data is extracted from ‘real life’. I liken it to rock climbing- the famous faces are scrubbed clean. But come across a rock face in real wilderness and it will usually be messy, may have trees growing out of it, grass on ledges, loose rock- it will need to be gardened before any real climbing takes place.

But gardening changes the ‘reality’ of the face. And some things are so fragile and subtle- are not, in fact, tough like rock, and the process of ‘gardening’ destroys their essence. You want to photograph snow leopards- you don’t go stamping around shouting about it – you have to get a bit sneaky and lateral minded.

But most of all you have to accept the possibility that knowledge has many different textures. Some things – just as ‘real’ as the science of optics or genetics- may only be intuited. People who have ‘the eye’ – and make a good living out of it as art dealers- know that science is a baby in such areas, useless in its fumble fingered requirement for ‘holds’ that just aren’t there.

The texture of some knowledge might include the fact that it is surrounded by things that falsify our direct perception of it.

Take that away- that certainty should be an important focus, and replace it with something that is less culture bound- something that can be seen as truly human, encompassing as many different cultures as possible.

Maybe 'the ability to learn new things' is a much better focus. It is a dynamic concept. It can also be measured to some extent- people can either walk a high wire or they can’t, they can either speak Japanese or not.

The more areas, the greater the breadth of someone’s learning the more ‘open’ we can say they are. We can also say they have good learning abilities.

If someone only knows maths they only know maths. If they then try to ‘describe the world’ in maths terms then they will have to do a lot of ‘gardening’. Physics is hard like granite- only a few loose rocks there to clear away, but most of what is important to us gets swept away before maths can find a hold. Hence mathematical geography and biology seem less useful and real then plain accurate observation in the field linked to comparative knowledge from elsewhere.

Justin Majzoub is an entrepreneur with a wide base of learning- he studied maths at school but Arabic and Persian at university. He has devised several revolutionary ways to help beginners learn ‘difficult’ languages like Arabic. I travelled with him in the Egyptian desert to the ruins of Qsar El Sagha- described by several archeologists simply as a temple. Majzoub observed it has several features in common with the oracle temple at Siwa- namely odd intentional holes in walls that would enable priests to listen and speak without being seen. He was also aware of the mixture of real insight and sleight of hand that goes on in modern oracles and fortune telling. All this knowledge from a width of experience and learning informed his discovery- that El Sagha is an oracle temple. When I told an officially qualified archeologist this excited considerable interest.

If you are looking at birds in Alaska and notice something that reminds you of ants in Bulgaria you may make a new discovery. But the whole effort of modern science lies in specialisation. To get your Phd in Alaskan birds you’d need to spend three years in a frozen hide just staring at them. Only by chance would you know anything else.

Science loves randomness. Its also the way science advances. Only because of some random experience OUTSIDE the field under study does a new insight occur.

Except it isn’t really ‘random’. You can choose to study a wide variety of subjects. You can look for likely useful links before you even start. You can devise a large knowledge map and deliberately look for links between widely separate areas.

And an essential element has to include practise. Real world physical interaction not just reading and thinking. This real world practise provides perspective- which is absolutely essential.

Polymathics aims to enlarge and in some cases radically alter much of conventional knowledge. A polymathic study of French would range from the way the muscles move in a French native speakers mouth, to studying people who rapidly acquire French, to learning to speak it, to reading French History to travelling and living in France.

Polymathics replaces science as the cornerstone of knowledge acquisition. Science is downgraded to being just one tool in the box (by analogy think of the way science is only one factor in technological innovation, another might be business application). Science is downgraded because science as a research program is flawed and dangerous. It has lead us to great material wealth but to experience poverty, narrowness, arrogance and mental inflexibility. Science ‘gardens’ reality and distorts it, this is then fed back to us via social experimentation that is useless and even dangerous. We need less theory and more experience. We don’t need depth we need greater breadth of study.

Be honest- the only students who really like undergraduate study are the dorks and nerds- university is an education in becoming a dork! I exaggerate but young people intuit the grave unnaturalness of many university courses where theory and over indulgence in mathematical reductionism have made things boring.

Boring. But polymathic study is the opposite. It is naturally interesting. It has to be interesting because then you are ‘open’. Research shows that being open and ‘into’ a subject is vastly important in speeding up learning.

Theoretical knowledge becomes counterproductive and useless without a parallel increase in practise and experience. You end up like the schoolmen debating angels on pinheads. Which is current string theory.

This is radical stuff. All school curricula would change- language study would involve biology and drama. Physics would involve art and music! There would be no subject areas as defined by medieval schoolmen (which is where the categories we now use ultimately derive from (and before that, from Aristotle). 

Universities would cease in their present form. Product design courses which admit people with a bit of engineering and some art and tech drawing could be replaced by creative products courses that would include sociological, anthropological and technical study balanced with time spent in third world workshops where traditional technology, bodging and necessity allow a hi-tech product to be fixed in what looks like an allotment hut. Studying French would involve biology, much travel and drama studies. History woud include re-enactment. Archeology would include war studies and time in a monastic environment. I polemecise but the gist is: breadth but not breadth without practice/travel/experience.

Descartes downgraded experience. He rooted knowledge in that which could not be doubted, rather than in that which is useful, valuable, important and significant.

Even his celebrated bedrock statement: I think therefore I am means little more than ‘a thought exists’. 

Obsessed by maths and the way it builds from very few propositions all that logically interlink, Descartes thought all knowledge proceeded this way.

Of course it doesn’t. More important is the fact that Descartes cuts us off from experience.

I don’t just mean experiment- which is a part of experience- I mean experience itself.

Experience- always overlooked- from childhood through to death- is what informs our hierarchy of values. What we hold to be worth spending time on, and what we think is a waste of time.

The ‘experiential net’ is the web of experiences we have which assigns importance to things we perceive or simply live with, come across.

You can get some idea now that pure book learning- by which I mean information encoded in language and written down is greatly lacking in one dimension- experience. Though the author can convey something of his own experience, and convey his own experience inspired hierarchy of values- unless the reader has some shared experiences he won’t really make sense of what he is reading.

Roger Bacon says that unless you perform the proof in Euclid book one, proposition one you will not be certain- you won’t KNOW. Mathematicians are fond of saying this- unless you’ve proved it yourself you don’t really know it. And it doesn’t mean inventing your own proof, it just means experiencing the process of doing the proof.

Even the ultimate ‘head’ subject, maths, needs experience.

But what about the acres an acres written about economics, farming, psychology, finance, gambling, martial arts and religion? How many economists have actually tried to make money or run a firm? Experiential nets are needed to learn anything – to KNOW anything.

Polymathics posits the science of experiential nets, how much we need to get a value hierarchy for a subject, how to fine tune the experience you have and how to use the experience of others- by connecting to the ‘mastery code’.

Why now? Because the world is experience poor.

Drugs are seen as a form of experience, a version of Bacon’s ‘divine inspiration’, a way to rank in importance what you have already experienced. When you are young you don’t know if earning money is more ‘important’ than doing what you think is significant. How do you rank them? You look for insights, a sense of certainty- what we call ‘knowing what to do’.

Experiential nets versus pattern thinking. When people lack experience the current culture cons them into accepting pattern thinking as a substitute. Ever wondered why most liberals, conservatives, engineer types, hippies all share group beliefs? They don’t all start out the same. But once you subscribe to one corner of the pattern the rest makes ‘perfect sense’- it absolves you from having to actually experience anything. Pattern thinking allows you to ‘know’ what is important because it is part of the pattern. If you subscribe to a conservative pattern you may ask yourself are state schools any good? The answer will be no- you’ll ‘just know’ this is true. But actually when sceptics take time to visit a variety of state schools they find they are often very good and teachers can be found everywhere who are excellent. If you are liberal you will ‘automatically know’ that someone who bad mouths immigrants is a ‘bad person’. But why? They may even be joking at your expense and may even be working with immigrants in their job and trying to help some actual immigrants in the flesh instead of just talking about them in general. Which is how you know you are in a form of pattern thinking- you ‘know’ something without any experience and you react to its generalised form rather than anything real and specific.

An 'experiential net' is different from pattern thinking. Definite experiences- and most importantly, the experiences of others- together with factual information (which is only given a value through experience) combine to form a sort of net that can be thrown over something newly encountered. It includes the need for noting ones intuitive responses. It includes learning strategies such as 'submit to the discipline, then master it'. The net is a learning approach not a way of turning 'other' into 'same'- which is all that academia does.

The object of a polymathic method is to get at the truth. By using multiple approachs it aims to avoid the pitfalls of a single viewpoint. If it can lift 'knowing' from meaning 'book based academic knowledge only' then a real step has been taken.

The Polymathic Principle

Everyone will tell you one thing; specialise, specialise, specialise…don’t.

Suppose you have a child who seems unusually talented at science, who appears to have a natural inclination towards math and physics. You might be tempted to send your offspring to special classes in extra math with the dream that they would achieve great things if only they specialised early enough. Walter Alvarez, a doctor, saw things differently. His son Luis was gifted in science but he chose to balance this by sending him to a school specialising in arts and crafts. Instead of fast tracking through advanced calculus, Luis worked at technical drawing and woodwork…which didn’t stop him from going on later to study science and ultimately win the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physics. Luis attributed his success to his ability to build any experimental apparatus he could imagine.

Developing fine motor skills was also essential to the success claimed by celebrated US astronaut Storey Musgrave. His early training as a boy growing up on a farm gave him the skills ‘to fix anything’ just as crucial in a space station, as later degrees in engineering and medicine.

There is informal recognition of the advantage of a polymathic background: 82% of scientists and engineers surveyed by Robert Root-Bernstein answered Yes to the question “Would you recommend an arts and crafts education as a useful or even essential background for a scientific innovator?”[1]

But scientists and engineers are not alone in needing inspiration from elsewhere. Artists and writers also gain from having a non-arts background. WH Auden, Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekhov and David Foster Wallace all had maths or science educations in addition to their literary pursuits. In terms of multi-modal skills, Foster Wallace was also a sports scholar as a young man. Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey were both football players; Albert Camus played in goal for the Algerian national soccer team and Samuel Beckett was a notable cricket player in his native Ireland.

An early taste for multiple expertise is rather more common than we might think. My own childhood background is far from unusual: I built treehouses, go karts, repaired bicycles and motorbikes, took photographs, went rock climbing, looked at things under a microscope and wrote poetry. I managed to maintain this wide spread of interests into adulthood- by ignoring the advice given to me by careers officers, teachers, employers but luckily not my parents.

They understood the need to maintain a wide base of knowledge. Intuitively they understood about the synergetics of knowledge.

Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine learned, when he was a child, how to stitch incredibly tiny and intricate patterns from his lace making mother. He later used this skill in making ground breaking advancements in the field of surgery.

Hans von Euler-Chelpin focussed on fine arts at college before an interest in colour lead him to the sciences, eventually leading to the 1929 Nobel prize in chemistry.

Leading astro-physicist Jacob Shaham claimed, “Acting taught me how to read equations like a script with characters I had to bring to life.”

All these high achievers are demonstrating the same thing: there is great synergy in having multiple areas of expertise.

The  engine of polymathics, why it works, is the synergy between different areas of knowledge. The more you know the better- but not just arithmetically, exponentially. Fields of knowledge cross-fertilise each other in many, often surprising, ways. The kernal of creativity is, after all, putting together things that have never been put together before. Learning skills, honed on one area become useful in another. You get different perspectives the more you know, and a different perspective can mean everything.

Synergy is the ‘extra energy’ liberated in system that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an idea that has been around since Aristotle.

If you have three or more areas of expertise there is a real rise in many allied areas of knowledge acquisition and deployment. You learn faster and act smarter.

Why three or more? It’s what I have noticed. And the wider apart they are the better. Best is a physical or modal skill such as dancing or bookbinding or fly tying or parachuting PLUS a factual/informational field be it scientific, historical or literary PLUS an area of creative endeavor- singing, acting, writing, painting.

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[1] Lamore and Root-Bernstein 2011

the simple and the subtle

Broadly speaking, formal, ‘public’, or, if you like, ‘modern’, life presents things as significant the louder more shocking and in your face they are; it also presents things that are super complicated as being more significant than that which is very simple. 

But I wonder if the opposite is true: that life is better appreciated by looking for, and showing a preference for, the simple and by being better attuned to the subtle.

When people start aikido they quickly get into very complicated discussions about foot placement and angles and such like. The real masters tend to say the same things again and again: it’s all about stance, for example. After a while you realise it isn’t the actual words that matter so much as the importance you attach to them (if that makes sense). The better you get at aikido the more importance you attach to something seemingly very simple that is ignored by a beginner who prefers more complicated (an by implication, truer) explanations.

Becoming more aware, building awareness builds an appreciation of subtleties. All wine tasters know this. Having the courage to stick with the simple also helps. I wonder if a preference for over-complication is a dry intellectual substitute for subtlety.