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.

A new way to divide up the world

People are either Precision oriented or Iterative oriented. A few can master skills of the other- they achieve great success.

Gardening is an iterative process, you keep sweeping by tugging a few more weeds out each time. You don’t get all the tomatoes picked but most of them- the ones you miss you get a few days later. Organic stuff is best approached in an iterative fashion because things are changing and growing- it's more dyanamic than sheet metal and electronics- which is why engineers can be precision minded (though not all are- the hammer and duct tape school).

Some writers are iterative- they do sweep after sweep to get a ‘perfect’ result. Others try and score it in one shot with a tidy up afterwards. They are precision oriented.

Really precision oriented people spend ages setting something up before they attempt it. Lots of planning and every possible mistake you might encounter thought about and planned for. Iterative folk jump in and adapt, knowing they’ll get a few second chances.

Some cultures are more precision oriented- UK for example- which is why, I suggest, the highest quality precision engineered products- motor racing cars are made here, iterative- Egypt and the US.

Precision orientation enables you to succeed if you can have the gumption to try. But often Precision Oriented folk scare themselves by saying ‘They don’t have the right tools for the job”. Iteratives may keep on giving it a go with slap dash tools.

data base problem

There can only ever be one database. When it divides and is separately updated then you are lost. If you have two lists and don’t transfer everything from the old to the new list- and try and run from two lists- you are lost. If you have a manuscript and you update it and then you also have an electronic version without the corrections then you are lost.

Long ago it was hard to replicate data. Paper was rare and expensive. No instant copy function. Now we are drowning in copies of copies. It’s all to easy to spread out sideways indefinitely rather than make any forward momentum.

But the real problem is the proliferation of databases in the cyberworld. All with stuff about you and with automatic updating algorithms. So when a piece of wrong info gets lodged in enough databases it's very hard to dislodge. They keep re-infecting each other with this duff piece of info. Recently I moved into a house where the previous resident had given up trying to change his postcode to the correct one- he used the wrong one because that is what was on most of the official post code databases. It took us about 15 different conversations, calls, emails to get it changed- and still some places have the wrong one listed.

I imagine a future in which there are so many databases with so much wrong or conflicting information that we will return to the old skill of using our nose and our nous to decide what is true or false.