Interpreting the Chaos

Sometimes it feels like a decision is the defining moment of my life. I work hard at letting go of the idea of defining moments. I try build more faith in the collectivity of moments and how they connect. Part of fearlessness comes from confidence in the ability to repair, recover, and unwind. To nudge into the unknown. 

Derren Brown’s book “Tricks of the Mind” had a big influence on the way I try interpret the chaos. He talks about the big events we experience where we all KNOW for certain where we were... like 911, or when Princess Diana died, or when Nelson Mandela was released. There were studies done where they track the stories people tell, and we are often, very confidently, wrong. 

We change even memories that we are super confident about, as part of our healing process. The human capacity to create stories about the world to make sense of it. Comforting ourselves with an illusion of cause and effect, that suggests we can understand and control the chaos. 

“Tricks of the Mind” also talks about hallucination and hypnosis. Our ability to relax into versions of reality that help us make decisions. Hypnosis is simply relaxing into giving someone else control of decisions. You are not faking. It is not that someone else has control. You are letting them instruct you. Those who are super sensitive to this being “acting” would have barriers to this working. Myself included. Someone telling you to relax often has the opposite effect. 

I saw a show where they removed the middle chair, with someone’s head and feet on the others. They stayed stiff as a plank. It’s not that they were doing something impossible, instead they were not imposing their vision on the world of what was and wasn’t possible. They were relaxing into it, and then physics was setting the boundaries rather than them. 

Going deeper into yoga stretches is similar. It is more about relaxing than about trying. You allow your body to stretch by releasing control. You go deeper by breathing.

Every Day

One of the GMB Fitness trainers, João, often trains in his jeans and slippers. This is because he likes wearing jeans and slippers, and his intention in training is to be able to move easily. So he wears what he wants to move in. 

Another technique he talks about is simple repetition, until the movement comes naturally. Which seems like stating the obvious, but sometimes we repeat till first success rather than till smooth and dependable rewiring has taken hold. We scratch the surface and move on before knowledge is embodied. 

Which is why failure and difficulty can be powerful learning techniques, because they force you to slow down. 

Spaced Repetition is an idea Gabriel Wyner (of Fluent Forever) pushes for language learning, and memory work more generally. You stretch out the periods of repetition till you are just about to forget. You gradually increase those periods. Until it becomes a part of what you deeply know. 

When we change behaviours, the key element is sustainability. Particularly for things like long term wealth creation and compounding. 

For upside, it is the behaviours that you do every day, rather than what you do on any given day, that matter. For downside, yes... you can do a lot of damage in a short time. Creation needs time. Sustainable is possible forever.

Glitch

Even if we could make purely rational decisions, what would that even mean? Not everything can be counted and quantified. This is the challenge. With pure rationality, there are rules of logic. Rules like prioritising and comparing. Creating relative preference. If I prefer apples to oranges, and I prefer oranges to pears, then I can infer that I prefer apples to pears. If you remember your preferences and they are consistent. Our memory is glitchy. Which is useful. It is useful to be able to forget things. To change the story. It is one of the ways we cope. If something is not working for us, we get to rewrite the story. If we could never forget and things were purely factual, that would be a debilitating glitch. So somehow we need to establish how well we want to understand ourselves. Do you want to do the work? It is hard to be honest. It is emotionally challenging. You need to build up the necessary skills to self-reflect. It is not simply allowing harsh internal voices. You need to feel that you are on your own team, in the same way as when we work with other people.

Glitches can be useful

Reds in a Row

“The Gambler’s Fallacy” is the erroneous belief that an event that has no memory is more likely to happen because it has not happened, or vice versa. 

Like thinking the next spin of a Roulette table is likely to be Black because it has been Red 8 times in a row. It is still (just less than) 50% (because of the Casino’s edge). Every spin has the same probabilities. The past does not matter. 

In the world of money and merit, we make the opposite mistake. Besides skills and knowledge, other things matter. Capital and Containers. If you have good luck, and build capital and barriers to entry, your odds do change. Your capacity to handle ups and downs. Your opportunity set. 8 Reds in a row, even through good fortune, inheritance, the lottery of birth, prejudice, or a chance connection, will completely change the game. 

If you capitalise your luck rather than consuming it. If you release your misfortune, rather than compounding it. If you consciously choose the events to connect.

Donkey Begins

People will say “Don’t carry your history with you”, “let it go”, “live in the now”. I am not one of those people. I live in my history. I am always curious about why I think the way I do, and what built that up. I know there is path dependence. I know that because of various events, my life could have gone another way. As I get older and new things happen to me, it changes my memory. I like reflecting on memories repeatedly, and saying, “Okay, well now I see things differently.” You are having a conversation with your past self to understand how your values have evolved.

How we see, soaks deep

Point of Focus

Some of our waves of money anxiety are memories. Both of our own experiences and those of the bubble we are born into and raised in. These thoughts that push our decisions in various directions may not even be things we are aware of. The Yoga Sutras call memory waves Smriti, and they can be mighty obstacles. Smriti are not all negative. Some generational strengths get hidden beneath dirt, waiting to be rediscovered and polished. Beneath both the positive and negative lies the permanent. The point of focus that lets us unravel all the randomness, complexity, and ambiguity. Becoming aware of our subconscious, conscious and dreams and building a daily practice around that point.

Relative Size of Sun, Earth and Moon

Stories that Serve

Compound growth is both powerful and dangerous. I am a believer in both localisation and globalisation. In unlearning and learning. In strong foundations and courageous stretching. Conn Iggulden is a powerful storyteller who bases his tales on as much factual evidence as he can. Then fills in the gaps, collapses characters into each other and creates a story. I think that is how our memory and sense making works. His conqueror series focuses on the rise of Genghis Khan. An interesting part of that is how connected Genghis stays with his people. The life of the leader and the life of the people don’t have multiple layers of abstraction. Genghis still lives in a Ger (a portable round tent). Part of our strength lies in the institutions we build. The Nations, Companies, and Groups that we use. But if they become more powerful than us, we need to reconnect them to the base. Stories shouldn’t be more powerful than the people they serve.

Ger

In the Stillness

The Gambler’s Fallacy stems from our obsession with patterns. Our desire to attribute to the world cause and effect, in our attempt to control it. When something has no memory, history is irrelevant. People have memory. It colours our world and is the basis of our personal hallucination that is our interpretation of reality. Real Reality regularly has no memory. Whatever happened before has no bearing on what happens next. The Gambler will believe that there is more likelihood of a six because there hasn’t been a six for a while. The Fair Dice doesn’t care. The probability is the same. There is something empowering about not trying to make sense of everything. About not attributing cause and effect to everything. Of accepting that every decision is complicated and has advantages and disadvantages. Every decision has unintended consequences. The only thing that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present is Silence. That moment you pause to breathe.

50-50 and the Law of Large Numbers

Erinnerung

The French word for worried is inquiet. The German word for memory is erinnerung. More thesaurus than foreign if you look at the substance. Jonathan Haidt talks about the Elephant and the Rider. Daniel Kahneman talks about thinking fast and slow. What is it that we take from the conscious level and soak into our inners? Is there a quiet focus or a noisy angst? Haidt points out that the Elephant is in control, and the Rider just gives suggestions. Our conscious slow thoughts are the things we sit with. The things we dwell on. The things we chew. The training we follow. The Rider can train the Elephant by being conscious of the things we do every day. The habits. The scripts. The rhythms. The beat. The Elephant will listen to words that are whispered consistently and over a long period of time. Through a process of bringing in. Erinnerung.

Soaking

Trial and Error

I am using Duolingo and Memrise to learn Spanish. I still regard myself as Monotongue. I did years of Afrikaans but my vocab and confidence are weak. I have attempted various other languages - Zulu, Xhosa, German, French, and Italian in various stop-starts. I am really enjoying my current stab. It feels like computer-assisted learning is coming on by leaps and bounds. There is something very different when a person tells me I got something wrong, and a computer does it. Judgement free. The computer is genuinely ambivalent, and I can just crack on. The computer doesn't get bored, annoyed, or impatient. The computer can also give instant feedback, which helps me learn immediately. The reason I am learning is to engage with people. This is consistent with the way I use Social Media. As a catalyst for real-world interaction. I don't think Artificial Intelligence will replace human interaction. I am confident it will help us learn and communicate better. Exciting times.

Learning Tools

I recently downloaded Tinycards in my attempt to break my English monotongue world. It is old school flashcards made easier. You can put photos or text on either side of decks of cards you create. It then gamifies it, to make learning easier. I first heard of Spaced Repetition Systems through Fluent Forever, and Anki SRS. The basic idea is that instead of hammering away at things you know, you focus on the things you don't. Just as you are forgetting something it gets tested again. The gaps getting bigger, and bigger, as the knowledge is soaked more deeply. Almost forgetting, and the little bit of struggle to 'find that info' is a great way to create the meaningful connections that make things stick.

Light for Dark

There are words that aren't really big words, but there are other ways of saying them. I remember hearing 'ameliorate', 'eponymous' and more recently 'apocryphal' and having to look up their meaning secretly. I tend to remember things where I have an emotional connection, and embarrassment/confusion means I often connect these types of words with a person. I know I had heard them. I know I should know the meaning. I know I do now. When I looked up the words, I started hearing them more often.

That feeling of suddenly seeing that something as more common, because it now has meaning to me, is why I have been doing the 100(ish) word series on countries, cities and areas. With 7.5 billion people on the planet, it is easy to ignore massive chunks because we have 'no' connection to them. The spider thin web of travellers and traders from more than 600 years ago that wandered over deserts, seas and silk roads has grown significantly. We are now connected via language, religion, common ancestors, commerce, food, stories, and other ways that make distant people matter. 

I am trying to understand the Nationalism v Globalism conflict. Starting with understanding what the story is that connects people to various nations is seems a good place to start.

100 words can create a trigger that lights up dark areas of our Ignorance Map.

Connected World

Meaningful Memory Hooks

I write a daily blog and study happiness and learning. The issues I am most passionate about are Global Citizenship, a Universal Basic Income and meaningful living. How do we empower and connect people? We shouldn't be held back by lotteries of birth and circumstance. I think a lot about how to build communities. I think a first step is creating meaningful 'memory hooks' so that when we hear about other places, they have an emotional connection. Otherwise we all melt into merely being facts and figures. The juice of life is in the story.

Generous Forgetfulness

Raising kids seems to be a form of adapted warfare. But where you genuinely love your enemy. I have only ever been an innocent bystander. Able to give them sugar and hand them back. Pull a funny face. Then retreat. More like a sniper than hand to hand combat. Watching 'Band of Brothers' felt like a more genuine dramatisation of what war is like. Not the constant action of most big explosion action movies. More like long periods of boredom salted with absolute fear and panic. As an outsider, the most challenging part of raising kids looks to me like the long periods of patience required. Long. Where if you hand out sugar, you deal with the consequences. So you keep it to Easter and special occasions. You ration.

What is most impressive about most of the people I have seen making their way through this process is the 'strategic thinking'. Being able to focus on the winning the war and not each battle. As adults, I think we often take interactions with people to be an insight into who they are. We look for patterns. We look for cause. For intent. For the story. With children, the story is still being written and so they hop from utter and complete devastation, to a giggle, to a burst of energy, to a collapse, to being nasty, to being kind, to being funny. They even have the ability to reflect back behaviours as a form of feedback. A friend told me that being with her kids has taught as much as she is teaching them through seeing them interact. Seeing how relationships are built. Unconditional love. Forgiveness. Time. Even the bits they will never remember form a core of the relationship.

The biggest transferable lesson I have learnt from my friends and family who are raising the next generation is to not add too much story to every event. Not to see patterns where they aren't there. To be able to see battles as battles, not wars.

To always keep a store of smiles, jokes, hugs, tickles, spins and kisses. To be generous with our forgetfulness.

Character and personality also exists outside patterns.

We are defined by every event.

Managing Energy

While on Table Mountain with two friends recently, we sat to take a break. In truth, two mountain goats sat to wait for a donkey to catch up and regain control of his breath. But the views from the top are spectacular and they weren't moaning. Suddenly one of them broke out into a passionate rendition of a beautiful piece of writing he had heard. The words were spot on for what John and I needed in that moment. When you spend lots of time thinking about all the the problems in the world, you can feel overwhelmed. It is much easier to pick something and crack on. The truth is, you need to manage your energy. You can't always be fighting or you won't have anything left for the next day. Galeo taught us the idea of the 'Half-Hearted Fanatic'. Always keeping something back for the moments, activities, places and relationships that feed you.

What was wonderful, is that he had internalised these words. Socrates didn't write. He thought this 'modern invention' would make people lazy. Even once there were books, the literate would studiously memorise them because chances were they would only see them once. To 'read' them again would require being able to close their eyes and recite the words in their heads. To chew on the words. To savour their meaning. It isn't good enough to know where to find something. When you are on top of Table Mountain with two friends in need of a boost, it is a powerful thing to be able to take a deep breath, and say...

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotised by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."

Edward Abbey

HT Galeo Saintz 

Sunshine on the Table Cloth with Galeo and John

Thin Slicing

When trying to wrap my head round something that is vast and scary, I have started trying the idea of 'Thin Slicing'. Asked for a super-super-summary of most of the reading I have done on happiness and learning, I would say the two key things are (1) create space, and (2) create meaningful connections. We remember things when they are meaningful to us and we have the energy and time to chew. Things are meaningful when they are connected to other things that matter to us.

Thin Slicing involves looking at just one aspect of something, and then looking widely to find how that connects and relates to other things. Same aspect. The Kevin Bacon game, but for ideas. Instead of figuring out how many degrees of separation between an actor and Kevin Bacon, you take something that doesn't seem to matter to you, and find how many connections that do matter to you there are, to get to that idea.

School always used to be divided into subjects. Ideas divided into folders. People divided into tribes. That never worked. Things get fuzzy. Tags or Labels for connections are far more powerful. They allow for us to connect dots and make division obsolete. That is the heart of creativity.

Thin Slices

Tick Tock

Most of our thinking is done in comparison. Something isn't dark. It's darker. It's not light. It's lighter. We look at new things in light of old things and discovering is fun. The surprise of being different from what we expect can delight us. There is so much we don't know that constantly looking for experiences that expand our choices can be a wonderful incentive.

Without change, we can become accustomed to almost anything. Your 50th night in first class on a plane is not the same as your first night. At that point you realise that your bed at home is better than the bed in first class. Airlines charge more for something being less horrible. Closer to what you get on the ground. Think how delightful getting a clay mug on a plane would be and then look how many you have in your cupboard. A real, actual, metal spoon. Luxury. You tell the kids of today, and they won't believe you.

One implication of this is that happiness can actually come from making things simpler most of the time. Making things less pleasurable. Not horrible, but unremarkable. Then occasionally do something amazing. Our minds are largely just a bunch of memories. Memories come from stories. Stories are mostly about highlights, and the way they end. Daniel Kahneman calls this 'Duration Neglect' and tells of experiments where patients talk about the pain of procedures. Their memory is not of the average pain. They remember the worst point and the last point. 

One story I like to think of in terms of managing going back to things we like (but not often enough that we get used to them) and experiencing new things comes from Intel. Moore's Law is the idea that that chips will get faster and smaller at a consistent rate (doubling every two years). This comes from the number of transistors and the microarchitecture. Intel alternates which one they focus on. Every tick represents a "Shrinking", and every tock represents a "Redesign". This has helped them keep up with the incredible increase in power of computers. I can still remember my first black and white family computer. We used to smash the hell out of the left and right arrow keys playing a game based on the Seoul Olympics. Games are a tad more advanced today. You tell the kids of today, and they won't believe you.

Moore's Law - Wgsimon

I like 'Tick/Tock' for a few things. I try follow Joshua Foer's advice from 'Moonwalking With Einstein' to go back to books that I have read before. Tick. To savour the ideas in them. The same way someone who is religious savours verses in their Holy Book. If an idea is really profound, you need to chew on it. Not just taste it. Then I will try new books. Tock. I read more than one book at a time, and what I read depends on my mood, but the idea normally applies to which books get added to the pile.

Another Tick/Tock philosophy can apply to coffee shops, restaurants, running routes, etc. Ticking and tocking between things that are familiar and things that are new prevents you from getting used to things, and exposes you to new things. The best of both worlds.

Tick Tock

Learning to Ride

I can't remember learning to ride a bike. It would have involved the BMX which I can remember. We had a dead end at the end of my road which became our playground and I would do loop after loop of that. My brother had a Racer which was more difficult to ride than the BMX and a little too big for me. It was red. I can vividly remember part of learning to ride that one. It involved a crash. 

We had two 'across the road' neighbours. One had a driveway you could do a U-turn into on the start of a hill. Then there was a steep drop to the next one. (Both also had a Trev - the son at the first T2, the dad at the second T3). When you have big brothers, sometimes you attempt things they can do before your time. You don't want to wait till you are big. I watched my brothers zipping into T2's driveway and wanted to give it a go. I hopped on the too big bike and rode down the hill, but I hadn't quite mastered the turning and brakes, so rather than turning into the driveway, I turned into the steep drop. The brakes became my split legs and the fence. I learnt about pain.

But as you do, I eventually learnt to ride without using my body as the brake. The saying goes that some things are like 'learning to ride a bike'. Once you get it, you never forget. The body does have incredibly muscle memory. I recently met a hardcore marathon runner named Tiago. He did the Unogwaja Challenge for the first time without having done a lot of cycling training. I don't know how many marathons he had run by then, but he recently ran his 400th! He has run 200 in the last year. He figured running was a more effective use of limited training time (family and job need their share) so focused on that. He paired with someone who was more of a cyclist and they helped each other. He leant on his teammates for the cycle (c.170km a day x10), and then was able to provide support on the run (The Comrades Marathon). He did the challenge two years in a row. First time round the cycle started off really tough. He really had to draw on mental reserves to get through the first few days. Despite taking the same approach the second year, he said the cycle was much easier. His body remembered.

Yesterday I picked up my new bike. I have applied to do the Unogwaja Challenge next year. Only a small group of about 10-12 is selected so I may be accused of putting the bike before the donkey. But as Yoda says, 'Do or don't do, there is no try'. I believe exercise is a big part of happiness, and so I am not getting on my bike just for a challenge. In fact, John has suggested dropping the word challenge from the event. Unogwaja isn't about the plod & pedal. That is just the vehicle for conversation, action and walking with people as they empower themselves. You don't have to apply to be part of the solution.

I didn't have to learn to ride, but I had to learn to use a those cleat thingies. I headed to the park to find a soft place to fall should things go wrong without driveways and fences (my body remembered). My big brother is still helping me, but this time he is on the other end of a phone. I then realised I hadn't attached the cleats properly, and went back to the shop for help. Attempt two went better. Then I had to learn to use all the gears. Again, not all that complicated, but the mist still descends when you are picking something up. There was no dead end for me to do loops round, but I did find a quiet carless block to do loops of till things started to click in place.

I also learnt that apparently you aren't supposed to wear white socks. Red socks and me are better friends than red bikes and me.

Call Me Trev

If you had a superpower, what would it be? Somehow this came up as a conversation piece with a Barista at the Coffee Angel in Edinburgh. He told me he had the power to wave the extra charge for using paywave for amounts below £5. I told him that was a cool power, but I would probably choose something else if given the choice. He agreed, and said he had always wanted an invisible monkey tail that could go through anything. I granted him his wish.

The super power I have always wanted is a little more boring, but I think very powerful. I would love to be able to know everyone's name. Even better, I would like to know everyone's preferred name, along with the preferred pronunciation. A friend named Tota once introduced himself to someone who replied, 'I am sorry, is there a short version of that?'. That tends to be another way of saying you didn't quite catch it. There is another one. 'How do you spell that?'. I particularly enjoy the expression on people's faces when I spell out, 'B... L.... A... C... K...'.

The poor Baristas at Starbucks get the worst of it. I resorted to calling myself Bob after getting variations such as Tevor, Travor, Trivur, Travo, Trivor and the like. Trevor is a Welsh name. It means 'The Rock'. More truthfully, it means prudent or reliable. That brought a few chuckles when I started learning Xhosa in Cape Town. Prudence is actually a relatively common Christian name in South Africa. Christian names came about when we of the lighter tanned variety decided we couldn't pronounce names so would give new names to make things easier. For us of course.

Image Source: The trees around Nunhead

I am unfortunately also of the almost monolingual variety. I can speak Afrikaans, but am only really comfortable when I have had a few drinks. Until then, I am very aware of how much I am stumbling over words and searching for ways to express myself. As someone who is fond of wordplay and banter, not being able to get the right meaning across switches my character off. The problem is as an English speaker you forget that most other speakers are speaking their third or fourth or fifth language. They have even changed their name for us! A little humility is perhaps in order.

Names are important. I realised that I have a much warmer reaction to people who call me Trev. One of my closest friend's kid calls me 'Uncle Trevy'. I love it. When someone calls me Trev, it makes me feel like they like me. I like it when people like me. I like them back. Perhaps it is subtle, but when someone calls me 'Trevor', (which to be fair, is my name) it feels very formal. Call me Trev and it feels like we have history. Even if it is the first time we have met. If your name happens to be Gail or Dale, you can call me Donkey. I like that too.

We like our names

Names matter. Pronunciation matters. Words matter. It may seem like a silly super power, but like Batman (who doesn't actually have any superpowers) you can actually gain it with some effort. All you have to do is pay attention.

Black One

When we listen to a language we don't understand, there is just a string of sound. The idea of spaces in between words for reading wasn't the way writing started either. Scrolls were just strings of letters. Punctuation to help us understand came later (Emojis even later). The same is true of the way we see. Part of our ability to see in 3 dimensions comes from memory. We rapidly recognise objects and from their size, and the relationship we expect between them, our minds are able to create the world we see. A mass of intermingled blue, green, and brown becomes the sky, leaves and a tree.

Meaning creates our world. Things that matter have meaning. What we see depends on what we've seen. The rest is a blur of sound, colour, smells, objects, and people. Game of Thrones is nasty to us. It makes characters meaningful to us before it gets rid of them. We are unaffected by the string of deaths in battle scenes. Create a connection, and a single death can be gutting.

Part of what fascinates me with Mentalists as magicians is their ability to add meaning to the world. The incredible memory tricks come through paying attention and creating connections. They 'build worlds' in their heads with paths between ideas that matter to them. They see the same blur of a world going past as we do, but they have learnt more of the words. They have learnt more of the sounds. They have learnt more of the smells. All these different sources of flavour create a richer world.

Three shades of Black - Grandfather in trademark overalls in the workshop

One blur for me has been mechanical things. My Grandfather is at his happiest when he is elbow deep in grease in his garage and my Dad did mechanical engineering. It is therefore weird that I am not 'mechanically minded'. This is not true though. I just haven't learnt the language. So when my brother who has done the Cape Epic asked me what commuting bike I bought in London 7 years ago, my answer was a 'Black One'. I understand the language of colour.

Everybody knows a Dave. One of my favourite Dave's is my brother.

It is time for all that to change. Yesterday my brother joined me in a Bike shop to point out the options. I went into another one this morning, and will check out another one this afternoon. It is still all a blur to me, but it is starting to matter. Once I actually get on my bike and start riding, new blurs will start making sense. I am looking forward to discovering the bike lanes of London and surrounds. The ones that don't head into the centre of town and work. The ones that aren't competing with Big Red Busses. Those busses made me put the 'Black One' aside to gather dust. In Bus v Trev, Bus wins everytime. Busses scare me more than sharks or terrorists.

I am looking forward to seeing how getting on a bike changes the way I see the world.