one way to predict the future

The desire to predict the future is usually mixed with wanting to change the future. When we hear about people wanting to change the world, or even saying it ourselves, then they are desiring to change the future- as they predict it. The message is: without us, or our proposed change, the future will be worse, grimmer, less full of possibilities. So whenever we propose a change we are imagining a possible future world without it. We are pessimistic in a way. In fact the more changes you want to make the more you are saying that the current trajectory is rubbish.

Another position is that of the change-rider. He accepts that things change, he tries to spot them and either avoid them or ride them like a wave of good fortune. He doesn’t have any belief in his efficacy. He can’t, or doesn’t believe he ‘can make things happen.’ His self-identifying image is that of greater perception, more insight than the herd.

Your position can depend on what time scale you are operating on- 20 years ahead or maybe less, or maybe more. If you an insider in a company and know its plans its probably quite easy to predict three years ahead. I remember reading an interview with a Japanese businessman saying ‘we Japanese are thinking 200 years ahead’ whereas the Americans only think 2 years ahead. Yeah yeah- but what a great way to freak out your American competition! After the slow down in Japan and its twenty year slump you tend to hear less of this sort of thing- on a par with Western comments that the business cycle no longer applied owing to the amazing financial instruments we have invented.

Enter the Black Swan theory, which effectively brings a healthy measure of humility back to the process of futurology. (Black Swan events are rare events you can’t predict like Hurricanes over Britain, stock market melt downs and the Arab Spring). Nicholas Taleb, the inventor of the concept has the view that things pretty much stay the same, or ride gentle trends until a Black Swan comes along and upsets the apple cart. The winners are those who adapt fastest.

Which brings me to the better and bigger point of predicting people rather than events. Think about it- predicting an event is almost insane. Unless you have a habit of recording your dreams and discovering (as some indeed have) they prefigure disastrous events (dreams rarely provide greed related info sadly like the winner of the Derby two weeks in advance- it seems warning dreams are there to protect life rather than benefit a few with cash ), then trying to predict events in the future is kind of bonkers.

But people are easier. People operate- usually- on cycles. You know their cycle and you can predict the kind of thing they’ll be doing in the future. Some have ‘crash and burn’ etched like Cain’s mark into their persona- deep darkness and negativity obvious to most people who meet them. There are people who consistently gravitate towards others who will do them no good. I remember watching an elderly man, who, having shunned the innocuous company my friend and I offered, proceeded to interrupt what he saw as a better conversation with an (obviously) angry man who ended up threatening to punch him. A few people have behaviours that erode any good luck they may have. Others really seem plain unlucky. Or really lucky, often allied with good timing. Some people have great promise, you know they’ll succeed- and they do.

closing the gap between knowledge and action

Action-Knowledge is the real stuff. It comes about from having digested experience. Digested means making something you’ve seen part of you. Is it different from just copying? Well imitation is the beginning of learning, but digestion implies a ‘becoming something new’. I guess if you imitate generosity it is mechanical. When you have digested the need for generosity your capacity to use it beneficially to all around including yourself, will have increased. There is nothing weird and mystical about digestion. It happens naturally after any experience, as long as you don’t block it by filling the ‘space’ otherwise occupied with mundane stimulation or a new stimulation to pile on top of it. Travel aids the digestion process, as does being in unfamiliar situations.

The West focuses on closing the gap between ignorance and knowledge. That’s why school, university and the media are held in such high esteem. We are taught to see this gap between ignorance and knowledge as vast, but it’s actually very narrow. An ignorant man can be well informed after reading a few books and listening to the radio 4 Today program. But will he ACT on his new knowledge/information? Probably not. Because the really huge gap is between knowledge and action.

We get closer by gaining action-knowledge, either in a general form- habits and principles that aid action, but even more usefully, by learning how to code information into action-knowledge.

The first step, though, is acknowledging the gap between just knowing stuff and actually doing things with it.

I knew smoking was bad for me when I was 21. I read a book at 22 that gave me the tools to give up. But I didn’t give up completely until I was 42. I had all the information, but no action-knowledge to kick me forward into effective behaviour.

You find action-knowledge when your desire is refined by sincerity of purpose- you’re either desperate or so pissed off with failure that you’ll do ‘anything’ to succeed.

If you can tune in to sincerity without having to be desperate it makes accessing action- knowledge a lot easier. Instead of being the lovable boxer who has to be taunted and abused before he’s ‘angry’ enough to fight you can dial up fighting power anytime, anyplace.

deluded? moi?

The chairman of the management committee of a local mental hospital was taking a nice stroll in the grounds of the hospital. He fell into conversation with a patient who was leaning on a gate. He asked the patient's name and then said, "Do you know who I am?" The patient said he did not. "I am the head of the hospital," said the Chairman. The patient, thinking the man was clearly delusional asked, "Which ward do you come from?" The chairman's expression can only be described as very disconcerted...

taken from Desmond Rochford's pamphlet Tales from Tone Vale Hospital

more on precision

Precision minded people can be very disdainful of iterative types. I remember walking through a chaotic looking stationary store in Egypt and thinking ‘how can they make money?’ But then I noticed the stock was always changing – new things were tried- if they succeeded they’d be re-ordered and you’d see a shelf-full. If not, it’d be gone in a week. In fact the turnaround was way faster than a similar chain store in the UK- and, no surprises, it had GREAT stock- all manner of goodies for a fancy notebook and pen enthusiast like myself. The iterative approach is actually what lies behind the secret of classical economics and its love affair with supply and demand theory. Only with lots of transactions does supply and demand work- you need feedback, lots of iterations.

School is a precision minded training environment. Precision types will probably be rewarded- you only get one stab at an exam, you only get one go at writing your essay or thesis- you can’t do version 2.0, 2.1.

I’m interested in the impact precision mindedness has on energy. In carpentry the saying is: measure twice, cut once. You HAVE to be precise. But really top carpenters do things by eye. In the past people even made spokes and wheel axles entirely by eye. Kind of like zen monks drawing a perfect circle. Why not? Practise enough and you can score penalties almost everytime.

So you gain precision but in a different way.

But practise, in this way, is a form of iteration. You have to have loads of time on your hands to muck about, experiment and make mistakes and recalibrate- all generating better awareness. Schools may yabber on about how we all learn from our mistakes but actually the preferred student is the one who never makes a mistake, who knows almost before they are taught, who gets top grades every test. A school in which experimentation was encouraged would be half full of people doing nothing and half full of what else? (I certainly would have been doing nothing).

I think precision/iteration is a very interesting way at looking at the world. In several ways the topic was well dealt with in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”- but the idea of momentum energy perhaps not emphasised. To my mind WHY we do things has a lot to do with energy, more to do with energy than with motive. If you feel energised you look for things to do. If you feel de-energised you look for a place to rest.

If iterative practices energise us then they are more likely to succeed, in the long run.

earthly pleasures

As I grew older I thought it was hard to tell how much insight and growth of sensibleness (for want of a better word) was simply due to aging and how much, if any, was due to doing work on oneself. I used to think sometimes you might as well go with the flow, you’ll be pretty much just as wise as someone who has laboured at trying to improve themselves.

But age a bit more and you can see how relatively easy it is to go off course. Losing the path is one way of describing this. People generally get a bit wiser as the end game approaches. But without some kind of thought and reflection and effort the prospect of leaving this world gets more and more off putting. So we try and forget it. We do this by stabilising in this world, pretending to ourselves life is simpler than it is. When younger, maybe we accepted being off kilter a bit, put it down to being young. When older we say, hey, I need some certainty here!  And older people are usually a bit better at living and know what they like and so the ability to stabilise on food, holidays, work, an obsessive hobby, children, your property- are all there, ready and waiting.

So this is where growing old and getting wiser part company. ‘Wisdom’ in this case simply means nudging yourself back on course, not getting freaked out by the end and not settling for earthly pleasures as the be all and end all.

But there is also the wrong headed notion that 'wisdom' is something you acquire like a new suit. Instead it must be more like removing things that get in the way of what you could have seen anytime if those obstacles hadn't been there. You're already wise- you just need to get rid of what might be stopping it.

10 things sci-fi films get wrong

1.   No old houses lovelingly restored and cherished with properly sourced floorboards and windows

2.   No Jehovah’s witnesses, Muslims or Wicca people- all fast growing religions and likely to proliferate even more in the next few centuries. Think what has to happen for a religion to actually die out.

3.   No People who hate technology

4.   No avid gardeners

5.   No hobby falconers

6.   No golf

7.   No one using Latin tags such as caveat emptor or ad hominem

8.   No widespread depression, anomie or mental illness with an undiagnosed cause (at least officially).

9.   No countries or even places of origin. Or Americans who self-identify as Persian.

10.                 No family meals. No Christmas and New Year.

I think what we want to change blinds us to what we can change. Most sci-films are a kind of yearning to not be human. As if people realise their MAIN problem is they are human- they can either face up to that or fancifully sidestep it or imaginatively deal with it, by imagining different worlds.

be persistent- but when?

We’re all familiar with the old adage that only persistence counts, that being persistent will get you everything in the end- the money, the car, the fabulous friends, not to mention the country mansion, and yet who hasn’t met someone who has persisted very well indeed…at the wrong thing.

Being persistent- well crying kids are rather good at that. They wear their parents down until they cave in and offer them an icecream to shut up. Is that the right model? Might be.

On a long distance walk persistence is very useful. You know what succeeds- walking- so you just keep doing it.

But very often people persist, or develop the habit, before they’ve found out what succeeds. They persist in doing something that doesn’t work. For decades sometimes.

Persist at what succeeds. Drop what doesn’t.

How do you know though? Weren’t razor blades shunned by everyone at first? Wasn’t Hary Potter rejected by 19 publishers?

Well, you have to be a bit more canny than that. You have to do your own thinking for a start. It’s amazes me how ready I am to take an appealing off the shelf concept such as ‘be persistent’ without really unpacking when and where it is appropriate.

You have to be sensitive to signs.

Your Mum liking something sadly is not a sign.

Your best friend liking it is not a sign.

A slight unwillingness to talk about it in public to people – acquaintances say, is probably a sign that it isn’t great. Whatever ‘it’ is.

Do you find your project attracts ‘luck’- ie. interest from others, or do you have to work really hard to get anyone to notice it at all? Good stuff needs some pushing- but not that much.

Do people talk about it to other people? If so- then you’re in business. Do people buy it for other people- another good sign.

But the key good sign is when the idea, product, whatever, is talked about in a positive way (not lampooned!) behind your back. When you get the email or phone call from someone saying  “I heard about it from X I hope you don’t mind me getting in touch”- that’s the key sign the thing has legs.

It is developing its own life. It’s going viral. Breeding without needing to be in the intensive care unit of PR and advertising.

Where does persistence come in? Well CD Baby founder Derek Sivers says you must be persistent in inventing and improving your ideas- not persistent in repeating the same mistakes. Once a project shows some promise, keep honing it, keep optimising what works and shelving what doesn’t.

Or take a leaf out of the book of the guys who invented hula hoops and silly putty- they had hundreds and hundreds of ideas that didn’t make the grade. They just kept trying them out. When something caught fire- pretty early on- they pumped the oxygen of publicity into the project. Otherwise it was left to die its own death.

If something is available and no one wants it- it’s a very good sign it’s probably better to move on. Persist in generating new ideas, or improving things so that they are generally acceptable, instead of persisting with something that has proven it has no appeal.

Impro is a good way to roadtest lots of ideas and quickly find out their appeal. You keep making up stories with a partner and ditch anything as soon as it seems dull. What you find is that 90% of good stories seem good from the word go, from the initial package and set-up. “A man-eating shark terrorises a US resort”- yes please. “A brainy shark learns algebra with a brainy kid”- er, maybe. “A man gets on a bus and goes home.”- not really (not unless his wife has left him or his dog has started talking when he gets home).

So, another sign worth bearing in mind is the instant appeal the idea has. If it’s hard work to describe it to anyone, if you get embarrassed telling your friends and family about it, it may not be such a great idea. But be canny. If your family have a certain ‘view’ of you they may be down on an idea that is really very good. But if a stranger, with no agenda, likes the idea it’s a positive sign.

Isn’t this like market research? Kind of. But it’s finer and more subtle. Potentially much better. Look at all the crap out there. Some focus group gave it the thumbs up. Companies are rather poor at coming up with what people really want. (One reason why Apple were such a rare delight for years). Mostly corporations (or corps(e)) push old stuff that’s more or less OK. Well, that works if you have a massive ad spend and a low unit cost, but mostly you want to be working on stuff with more promise. You need to be more sensitive than a group of paid volunteers ‘assessing’ a product.

Persistent learning and adjusting are what’s required, dynamic persistence if you like; rather than static persistence- doing the same damn thing for ever.