Decision Making

I am a creature of habit. I like processes and patterns. Things I can understand. When I am part of a team, two things that drive me nuts are a lack of clarity around decision making, and unjustified superiority complexes. Unjustified by who? By me. We don't operate in a functional meritocracy.  I am more than happy to take instructions from someone when: 

1) I am learning from them, 

2) I don't feel like they are simply outsourcing the jobs they don't want to do to me,

3) We like each other, 

4) We share a common purpose

When there are structural reasons why any of these rules don't work, my inner elephant goes on the rampage. I can intellectually try pretend I can carry on doing what needs to be done for other reasons, e.g. money, expectations, patience, accepting that is the way the world works. I know I will fail. Inside me is a raging righteous indignation when I feel like things aren't the way they should be.

Freedom isn't a lack of constraints. Good rules can make the game far more enjoyable. Freedom isn't even free will and the ability to make the decisions. Freedom is a feeling that I am part of something bigger that I believe in. Not just a cog. An integral part of something that matters.

Craft the Mundane

Why don't I floss? I know I should and it really doesn't take that much time. Every time I sit in the oral hygienists chair I feel like a naughty schoolboy as I wait for the question as to whether I have sorted myself out. Sometimes it inspires a few days in advance of diligence. I used to wear contact lenses before I got my eyes zapped. I can remember the optician telling me to be diligent about cleaning the lenses before and after going in my eyes. He said five seconds was enough. Turns out five seconds is too much for a morning routine that is exactly that - a task.

Cooking. Cleaning. Admin. Anything that feels like it just needs to get done sucks energy out of you. The Yogis have a term for this feeling - Tamas. A heaviness or lethargy where you just can't be asked. It is that feeling when you have eaten something heavy. Sometimes we don't do things because it is hard to start (Inertia) and sometimes we don't do things because in reality we want something different from what we say we want (Revealed Preference). Sometimes we don't do things just because they slip our mind (Order v Spice). Other times, it might be something we want to do, can prioritise, and can probably start, but we just don't really feel up to. We have run out of energy.

It may be because you aren't getting enough exercise, sleep or good food, but I suspect the source has to do with time poverty and space. Someone asked me last night what I had learnt about happiness from my first six months of daily blogging and full time thinking on the subject. It is not my aim to come up with a 10 point plan to happiness, or a magic bullet. I think that happiness is something you practise rather than something you attain. Having said that, pushed to identify the most powerful thing to improve the quality of people's lives, it would be to ensure that there is some space. This assumes material needs are being met or close to being met, but as Maya Angelou said, 'We need much less than we think we need'. 

Maya Angelou

When you have space, you can enjoy things for their own sake rather than just trying to get them done. You can cook because cooking is fun rather than because you are hungry. You can make an event out of it. You can craft your morning routine so that music you like is playing, a breakfast you enjoy awaits, and even the flossing becomes an unrushed act of pleasure. This is a theory of course. I haven't reached that state where I look forward to making my bed or working my way through the mail shortly after it comes in.

It is an interesting question though. How can you take the mundane and craft it to be something you enjoy? First you need space.

Lifelong Learning (by Jeffrey Cufaude)

Guest Post: Jeffrey Cufaude

I talked in 'Finding your own river' about my excitement at the ongoing disruption of education. While information is becoming more freely available, one of the biggest attractions of 'expensive education' is the network. Even if you are able to get access to the same great content, how can you meet the same great people. Facebook is about people you know personally. LinkedIn is about people you have or might work with. You don't need to know people on Twitter. Think of it as a dating service for ideas. In amongst the usual noise of marketing and trolls, there are some amazing people on Twitter. You get direct access to an unfiltered filter of authors, thinkers, scientists, leaders, peace-makers, artists and doers and they engage!

I met Jeffrey Cufaude through Twitter. Jeffrey is a US-based designer and facilitator of high impact learning experience including conference keynotes and workshops. He currently is at work on his first book, Say Yes Less: Why It Matters and How to Do It. This essay is based on his 2012 TEDx Indianapolis talk (10 minutes) and an updated and expanded version (25 minutes) presented at the 2014 ACPA Convention. More info about Jeffrey can be found at www.ideaarchitects.org. Twitter: @jcufaude 

I think our banter started over the brilliance of Roger Federer, and then expanded to the lives of mere mortals.

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Lifelong Learning

by Jeffrey Cufaude

Lifelong learning? I gave it a whirl once, but it's really not for me.

It's unlikely anyone who hopes to lead a good life in the 21st Century would ever say such a thing. We toss out "lifelong learner" as implicitly desirable, but I'm not sure we've sufficiently unpacked the obligations that come along with self-proclaiming ourselves to be one.

Doing so may be even more important given how many of us will live longer... much longer: what is required to be a lifelong learner when life is long? I'm finding four dimensions help me answer the question: (1) increasing diversity, (2) ongoing discovery, (3) personal discipline, and (4) intentional disruption.

1. Increasing diversity ... of the content we consume, the communities in which we interact and contribute, and the connections we make in our personal and professional networks. It is not uncommon that later in our life our range of experiences begins to narrow. The types of life changes that force us to broaden out or start anew often become less frequent: job changes, geographic locations, et al. Lifelong learners know the value of continually diversifying the people, places, and publications that they explore and engage in periodic self-examination to ensure they do so.

2. Ongoing discovery of the possibilities of the diversity we encounter as opposed to automatic dismissal of perspectives that don't ring true with what we already believe or know. But the accumulation of our life experiences and the meaning we have made from them often rejects new findings that don't correlate and we succumb to confirmation bias.

Diversifying our experiences is of little value if we don't approach them with the curiosity of a beginner's mind: open, receptive, interested. Doing so requires sitting longer with what we are experiencing (observations) before trying to make meaning from it (inferences). See the ladder of inference for more information about this phenomenon.

3. Personal discipline to facilitate increasing diversity and ongoing discovery can be likened to both compounding interest from regular savings and interval training on a treadmill. Regularly set aside a small amount of money on a consistent basis and over time the reinvested interest and principal can amount to quite a lot. The same is true for small, but doable bites of lifelong learning. They accumulate value regardless of how small our ongoing investments. One "savings" habit that is part of learning discipline is to routinely hang out (read, write, etc in new environments. Routine immersion in different spaces populated by different people causes me to think differently.

Building cardiovascular endurance also requires interval training (interspersing shorts bursts of maximum effort with brief rest periods and the repeating immediately), particularly for longtime exercisers who have hit a plateau with their normal workout regimen. The same is true for lifelong learning: we need ongoing "steady state" learning that is comfortable for us to do, but as we age it increasingly needs to be coupled with interval learning in which we take short, but deep dives into content or a community.

4. Intentional disruption of our discovery, learning, and meaningful-making systems is inevitable if we want to avoid our once helpful routines becoming limiting ruts. Unlike a Twinkie, no personal discipline process can last forever. Forcing yourself out of a routine lets you disrupt yourself before the demands of the world around us do it to you.

As author Marina Gorbis notes in The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the SocialStructured World "The new system of learning is "best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows."

Living longer requires learning longer. May we all be successful at both.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com 

Order v Spice

Two important motivators beyond money are a sense of control and of variety. The two fight each other a little since pleasant surprises are awesome but control prevents negative surprises. Outside of the work environment, many have a desire to just let things be. We don't want to apply the same 'productive rigour' we do in the office at home. I am certainly guilty of my personal admin being nowhere close to as in order as my work stuff. We don't want to do things like balanced scorecards, annual reviews, core values and team meetings since they start making life seem like a business. We separate business like conduct from personal conduct. One example of this is the way relationship building is approached from a business perspective. It is very helpful to keep a record of meetings to refer back to. The approach may be to make sure you speak to someone at least once a quarter, see them in person at least once a year, and ensure that you respond in a timely and considered fashion to their questions or issues. How many friends do you apply that to? Quite often I can end up not seeing a friend who is very important to me and then have to take a wander through my mind to figure out when the last time we saw each other was. At worst, I don't even know what is important to them any more.

Atul Gawande wrote a very interesting book called 'The Checklist Manifesto' where he looked at the impact of checklists on various professions including Nursing and Pilots. He believes that sometimes important things just get missed, not on purpose, but because of the way our minds work. Part of the strength of the human brain is the ability to fill in gaps and make jumps. This means our minds are comfortable with holes. Without a consciousness check, nurses may miss appropriate tests and pilots may think they have flicked a particular switch (partly because they have flicked that switch thousands of times and so the memory of having done it may be a memory from much further back). This has multiple applications. Investment analysts may have lists they work through to make sure they have covered the important bases in analysing a business. Teachers may have lists to check that they have looked for various progress milestones for their students.

When it comes to personal relationships, we seem to have an inbuilt resistance alarm that goes off immediately when thing seem too constructed or ordered. Even in the work environment, those lists seem an infringement on our authority over our choices. The temptation is to go with the flow. Important stuff can then get missed. Birthdays is the obvious example. Even just seeing or talking to friends is another. I think one of the issues that messes with happiness is that we end up not giving the attention we want to give to some things, not because they aren't important, but because we simply didn't think of it. When we remember, we berate ourselves. Martial Arts are well known for their routines. I have added a video of a little kid doing his first kata. Developing set movements helps ensure the bases are covered. I do the same in the style of yoga I practise and teach. There are 12 basic postures you work through to make sure nothing important is left out. As long as you don't cut out spice and surprise, making sure you make some time for everything that is important is vital. Use it or lose it.

http://www.sivananda.co.uk/