Small Changes Need Time

If forever is your time frame, you could solve a lot of problems with little changes. Most of our actions are discounted by time value. The further things are away, the less they matter. That is why we have to rush. Get rich quick. Get fit quick. Get slim quick. Small changes need time. Small changes also love time. I would love everyone on the planet to receive a Universal Basic Income, paid by Community Wealth Funds. One way to do this would be to (1) pay myself one from my engine, (2) build a engine for one other person, and  (3) build an engine building engine. If you invest a monthly amount for 15 years at 5%, then you will have built an engine that can continue paying that amount forever. I call this 'Multiplying Marshmallows'. After 15 years, I would have two engines, and could build a third. Small changes create movement. Add time, and you have a dance.

Self-Awareness – Matthieu Ricard (Tim)

Matthieu Ricard

While self-help and psychedelics may be dismissed as snake oil, the benefits of meditation are increasing well documented by science. Matthieu Ricard is a Tibetan Buddhist monk who has the distinction of being both the “happiest person in the world” and one of the most studied individuals in the history of neuropsychology. Studies on the brains of Ricard and other skilled meditators showed that they were significantly more active in areas related to compassion, conscious attention and happiness, but significantly reduced in their capacity for negative thinking. This is down to the capacity of even the adult brain for growth and change – neuroplasticity. And, as you would have guessed by now, the engine for change in this case is meditation.

Tim Casteling
Part 4 of a 7-part series on Self-Awareness
(1) Self-Doubt (2) Self-Criticism (3) Self-Discovery

Bundles of Ignorance

We know there is too much going on around the world to wrap our heads around. Many people I know have chosen to stop listening to the news because it just gets them down. Instead they focus on those they care about, get on with something useful and try be helpful. Challenging our views is also tiring. It is one thing to be able to think about what we do. It is another thing to think about how we think about what we do. But we also need to do. At some point most of us accept whatever bundles of ignorance happens to be ours and get on with it.

The world is changing rapidly. We really live in a vastly different place from the one where our cultures were marinated. It wasn't long ago at all when the world was mostly rural, borderless, and everyone around us was quite similar. Now more than half the world's population live in cities. Our bundles of ignorance have to change.

Urbanisation

I am a big fan of free speech and social media as a way of airing our ignorance. I don't think anger is that useful in responding to things we disagree with. People don't seem to change their mind when they are on the defensive. Making mistakes in public is a good way of progressing if people are helpful in the way they support us in changing our views. Banter and feedback work best when people know you are on their side. Ideally, there is only one side.

Hans Rosling is one of my favourite presenters. In the TED clip below, they talk about how to challenge our ignorance about the world with some basic rules of thumb. In a democratic world, we want people's views to be implemented by those in charge. We want to empower people. But... in truth, this gets uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. There are lots of crazy views out there. Often the really crazy views are held by small groups. More often than we'd like, they are held by lots of people. Even most people. Modern systems put checks and balances in place to give people a voice but have certain things you don't get to vote on. While it is okay for most of us to create bubbles and get on with it, there are some very complicated things we really need someone to think about deeply and go beyond basic rules of thumb. There are some things where we all benefit if the decision maker goes beyond personal bias, outdated facts and media bias, and makes unpopular decisions.

You can't not be ignorant. You can try be less ignorant. Pick a better bundle.

The Good Stuff

The first job I ever wanted as a little boy was to be a Minister. I grew up in the Methodist Church, but which church I would work in kind of depended on the girl I liked at the time. Westville has lots of different churches. It was explained to me that being a 'Minister in the Catholic Church' would be a complicated way of getting the girl. My crush/stalker behaviour shifted to the Anglican church a little later. The first girl was kind enough to give the second 'helpful hints and tips on how to get rid of Trevor'. I later ended up at the Baptist Church, and had fortunately learnt to play nice. My love letters to the crush at the time were mostly in my journal.

Things were also getting a little more serious on the philosophical side of things. I was a very serious teenager. I wanted to become a member of the church. Membership of the Baptist Church entailed getting baptised. I had been baptised as a baby. In the Methodist Church, you have infant baptism and later get confirmed. In the Baptist Church, you need to be baptised as an adult. The belief being that you need to be fully conscious of the commitment you are making. From my perspective it was the same thing. From people I cared abouts perspective, it was a big deal. Confirmation wasn't the same a Baptism. Being 'rebaptised' would be me saying my first baptism was meaningless. My social circle and community revolved around the Baptist Church, but I didn't want to upset those close to me. So I went back to the Methodist Church I had grown up in for confirmation classes. It always bugged me that these 'semantic' differences caused division between what I saw as the Christian community. For others these differences were not semantic, they were an important part of their belief.

When I later read 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel, it resonated deeply. Before the true adventure of an ocean journey starts, Pi flips and flops between various churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. To be fair, his motivations were more wholesome than mine considering my stalkerish tendencies. But to be fair to me, as a little boy - having a crush basically just meant I thought the girls were awesome. And they were. Even their rebuffs were kind. Pi went from place to place taking the best bits. Looking for a story that resonated.

We are all very bad at changing our minds. We can change them, and do all the time, but the process is very slow. All of us are hypocrites. We have issues that we feel passionately about and release our righteous anger, and we have moral blind spots where we don't even notice the damage we do. What gives me optimism is that when two ideas conflict, we struggle with that conflict. Slowly we change what we think to accommodate the belief that is more important to us. I think we tend to shift toward the good stuff. Not all the time, but more often than not. Alain De Botton has done a wonderful TED talk where he talks about how people who don't believe in religion, can start to engage in the good stuff of religion.

We have a tendency to focus on areas of disagreement in debates. This ends up casting more heat than light on most arguments. When last were you in a discussion where someone had their argument broken down, and so changed their mind? Normally we just look for a new argument. If the ideal is a consistent, good philosophy that allows us, our family, our community and the rest of the world to live deeply fulfilling lives perhaps we would do better to focus on the good stuff? We can allow a bull quota for the stuff we disagree on, and politely change the subject but stay engaged.

Over time, I think people iron out their issues. I think people are good. I think the best bits win.

Default Face

No decision, is a decision. It just feels better because no one else has made it for you, and you also have an excuse if things don't work out your way. The vast majority of our decisions are made for us unless we take an active choice to do something. Life will deal us cards. I wrote about this in 'Having Power' and I am a strong believer that people have far more power in liberal democracies than we realise. We need to stop looking to central powers to sort things out and just get on with it for ourselves and for each other. Stop asking for permission for things you are already allowed to do.

One more fun aspect of 'No decision' that was pointed out to me recently was our 'default face'. A friend of mine had been warned not to make her default face a bitch face. Nice. When you are just sitting there and your mind starts to wander, what does your face do? Is there a slight smile or a slight scowl?

In the same way as giving people the benefit of the doubt can lead to happier choices, your default face probably gives some indication of whether you are giving yourself the same leeway. There are some famous studies showing how smiling makes you happier. Simply holding a pencil in your mouth made those looking at cartoons find them funnier. A psychologist friend told me how he once helped train someone to walk. The patient had been 'a walking apology'. By getting him to stand up a little straighter and pushing his shoulders back, his body gave his mind the signal that things were ok.

All things makes sense to me. Whenever I am not in the best of spaces, my first check point is whether or not I am exercising. Exercise tells the body it is required. The body then tells the mind it is required. Your body language, including your default face, shapes who you are.

Seduced by Success

Errol Stewart was a legend old boy from the school I went to. He played rugby for our provincial rugby side, and represented South Africa in cricket as well. In 1995 he won the Currie cup with the Natal Sharks rugby side and the Currie cup with the Natal Dolphins cricket side. At school, he also made the provincial teams for hockey and athletics. As sport has become more professional it is unlikely that these sorts of feats will be repeated. David Epstein takes a look at some of the reasons that we have 'gotten better, faster and stronger'. While specialisation does improve our focus, and arguably makes sports more entertaining, I quite like the idea of a goal independent of competition. A goal which doesn't require complete specialisation.

I spoke of yesterday of the communication challenges that come from filtering. The more we specialise, the more difficult it is to talk to each other. We share less context. We do need some brave souls to venture out to that lonely edge to find truths to bring back. For most people though, the ideal should not be to be unique. Unique for unique's sake is overrated. The focus then becomes on what others are doing in and semi-paranoid search for words to describe what your competitive advantage is. I believe in a search for competitive advantage. In its place. I love finding companies that I think do something great and have some sort of barrier to entry to protect their ability to carry on doing well. They make great investments. I don't think that is where happiness lies. What you are good at should be an engine for you to explore the things that are worth doing, not because you are the best, but because they are worth doing. Make your excellence your muse, not your prison. Sometimes the most efficient use of your time isn't the best use of your time.

I think we need to be careful of being seduced by the comfort of things we do well. We need to be careful of being seduced by things that can easily be measured. It makes life more comfortable once we get onto a path that we get a sense we are good at. We get on a roll and get better and better. We start to hum like a well oiled machine. We are not machines. Time can pass and you can realise you have been doing something really well but a whole bunch of other things that were important to you have been missed. They never screamed loud enough to get attention. They just waited for you.

Lonely Edge

School can feel a little like a filter. Actually, life can feel a little bit like a filter. A filter where we are searching for that thing that we are good at, or the thing that will make us happy. Slowly other stuff that is not relevant gets filtered out. The mind is ruthlessly efficient at ignoring stuff that we haven't prioritised, even if it is important to us. It may be true that you need ruthless focus if you want to be an outlier. If you want to be Nelson Mandela and save the world, it may be true that you end up sacrificing your family life for the good of the nation. If you want to dedicate your life to a particular task and become world class, i.e. better than anyone else, you may need to cut yourself off from other things. Bobby Fisher may be an example of the extreme sacrifices some make to reach greatness (see Against the World).

We need another Nelson Mandela. Perhaps we wouldn't if everyone wasn't filtering. Machines are very good at specialisation. It doesn't require creativity. Once a task can be well defined, it is likely that a machine will be able to do it. That should in theory make more time available to us, if we aren't scared of free time. If machines slowly release us from filtering we would have more common ground with those around us. As we specialise, we suffer from the curse of knowledge. It becomes harder and harder to empathise with people who don't understand what we understand. It becomes harder for us to understand what they understand without their context. Those pushing the boundaries of human thought may have a handful of people (if they are lucky) who will understand them. They may have to create entire new vocabularies. Catch phrases or chunks get used to explain something and if you don't understand the chunk, you won't understand the something. You have to come back from the boundary if you want to speak to real people. If you overspecialise, you run the risk of no longer being one of those real people.

Education has industrialised the filtering process. One person may have loved looking at the stars and wondering about the way they formed or where they end. The poetry with which she asked questions may have lead her down the artistic route. Yet what of the science? Why not both? Another person may have been told that art and biology are not money makers, and so pushed to drop those subjects in favour of something that will one day allow him to support his family. In an attempt to be outliers, you have to think in relative terms. You have to compare yourself to others and do something differently. You have to think how you can be unique. I think that is a sticky trap. Better to think about doing things well. To rethink education and life as food for your creativity. We don't have to play by ourselves on the edges when we can play together in the middle.

Ken Robinson is one of the leading thinkers on how we can relook at the way we learn. I really enjoyed 'The Element' and 'Out of Our Minds' after watching him deliver still my favourite ever TED talk. His next book, 'Creative Schools' is due out soon.

Precious

What would happen if we all won the lottery? If a machine was discovered that could make a limitless amount of everything including itself. Prices would then be meaningless since they are only set by having a limited supply and something to compare it to. A price is a way of comparing X many massages to Y nights in a fancy hotel. The flip side of jealousy is the feeling you get from having something that others don't. The closest word I can think of to this is Schadenfreude although that is pleasure at someone else's misfortune. The Germans have some cool words so they probably have one for this too. We would have to let that pleasure go.

Who would be the 'wealthy' people? They would be the ones who had the things that couldn't be replicated. In order to get them, they wouldn't be able to pay with money though. They would need to have a deep sense of empathy to discover what the owners of these pieces of art or performance or time really wanted. Presumably even this ability wouldn't matter unless other people also desperately wanted that precious thing, and couldn't get something else that could compensate for that unmet desire from their machine. They may even want precious so much they forget they have a machine of their own. Does it matter that someone else has more than you if you have everything you want?

Exclusivity is the thing that really makes something's price explode. Possibly the number one lesson in managing your finances is 'Never be a forced buyer or a forced seller'. You can certainly extend this beyond finances to other life lessons. I know that I personally am at my very least attractive when I find a lady incredibly attractive in every possible way. It may be just a slight taste of desperation, but it can be like just a drop or two of crude oil in a bottle of fine wine.

In a way, most of us, and certainly most of the people reading this blog have won the lottery. I spoke in 'Global Citizen' of just how big a factor where you are born is in determining your happiness. Another factor is when you were born. Forget stories of 'The Good Old Days'. Perhaps get some perspective from your Gran. The best time to have ever been alive is now. Take a look at 'Our world in data' or read The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. We need to be careful that we are choosing what we want. Winning the lottery isn't enough, you have to realise it.

Intention

Last night, Ponciano told our Capoeira class the story of 'The Tiger who killed a Wife'. The husband was so distressed, he grabbed his bow and arrow and went deep into the jungle to find the tiger. When he saw it, he stilled himself and fixed his gaze on the target. He pulled back the arrow and released all the pain and anguish at his loss at the tiger. The arrow sunk deep. He went across to the tiger and found that it was in fact a stone. A stone shaped like the one who had stolen his world. The arrow had not broken, instead it had sunk deep into the stone because his intention was so intense.

Like Eric Mead in the TED clip below, I have always been fascinated by the Placebo Effect. As a scientifically minded person, you want to strip out the story and make it replicable and testable. You can certainly do that, but it removes a whole lot of the good stuff. For some people something is only interesting if it can be proved wrong. If you can't say it in a way that has the possibility of it be shown to be false, it can be beautiful, but not 'interesting' in a scientific way. By its very nature, belief and intention are not replicable. You have to buy into stories. Through dance, art, poetry, music, writing we can feel beauty and we can do incredible things. I believe much of this is actually because we allow ourselves to drop our negative beliefs. The beliefs we have that say we can't do certain things. I described one of the first times this really sunk home for me in 'faking it'. Hypnosis can be seen as faking or it can be seen as simply a very deep state of relaxation where you become very open to suggestion. Real limits then act as your boundaries rather than the limits you create in your head.

Ponciano's story of intention is relevant for me. If you are able to focus your intention on something, it can be a form of hypnosis. A form of meditation. If you can relax out of any self created concern, you can become incredibly powerful relative to your doubt-ridden self. In my 5th class of Capoeira there are still a lot of real limits. I have to do lots of strength work. I have to teach my body the rhythms. I have to learn the forms before I can forget about them and just play. I thought the Tiger story was beautiful though, and diving into stories helps you learn.

My Capoeira adventure:

1. First Class - You have to start somewhere
2. Deep End - Learn a little, and enjoy
3. Shattered - This impact is bliss for your body
4. Left from Right, Arm from Leg - Training your body to have an awareness of where it is

Safe in Your Tribe (by Neville Scott)

Guest Post: Neville Scott

I met Neville in my first job after university. He headed the glamorously named 'Modelling Team'. It was their job to work with the Actuaries in Product Development to take whatever ideas we had and clarify them. If ideas could be clearly articulated, they could be built into models that could do what they were meant to. Neville also arranged weekly learning sessions where we would focus on a different concept that would help in our quest to think better. One of the most lasting lessons I got from those Monday mornings was the idea of describing something (and yourself) by what it is rather than what it isn't. I wrote about this idea in 'Aporcupine Apineapple'. Neville is always curious and has lots of interesting ideas. I hope this is the first of many guest posts.

Safe in Your Tribe
by Neville Scott

Many years ago I saw an experiment on a TV program. They set up a huge pyramid of coke tins in a supermarket. With a touch sensor and a device to collapse the pyramid when touched. Successive people looked at it, touched it, and then witnessed the calamitous collapse of tins clattering noisily over them and all over the shop. Lawyers, doctors, housewives, ministers, children all touched it and triggered the collapse, and every single one declared loudly "I never touched it!"

They all lied.

The experimenters put forward an interesting hypothesis. People are herding animals who don't individually have all of the tricks needed for their own survival and need to stick together. Herding creatures know that expulsion from the herd means death. And apparently collapsing a monster pyramid of coke cans in a supermarket generates a significant herd-rejection fear.

On the science level, we've got at least two completely independent brains: the survival brain (amygdala) and logic brain (frontal lobe). Simplistically our amygdala maintains lists of life threatening stuff. It got high speed hard-wiring to sensors (sight, hearing, ...) and hard-wiring to the central nervous system to trigger action. If it senses something on its list, it fires survival actions. And it doesn't consult the far slower-acting logic brain. It doesn't concern itself with morality or logic. Its sole job is to keep you alive. It manages its list:

• Every time it learns of a new risk it adds it to the list. Cars. Rocks. Pointy things. Big Johnny.
• If it is repeatedly exposed to a listed item with no ill effect it may shift down the list. Even off the list. Fear of heights can be overcome.

If you abuse it for too long it gets confused and can malfunction and start firing false alarms. Anxiety attacks, panic disorder, PTSD, shell shock - these are the survival brain misfiring. Apparently most people are born with spiders & snakes pre-coded on the list. And mice are born with cats in their list - a newborn mouse panics when exposed to cat hair.

The frontal lobe does the thinking and moralising and logic stuff. But it doesn't have the same hard-wire privileges of the amygdala. It gets information far later and takes longer to respond. Throw a ball at a person. They will invariably duck immediately, then say "what was that?". The survival brain saw the danger immediately and generated the ducking survival action. The frontal lobe eventually woke up and got vaguely fascinated about what they hell just happened. It seems we are hard-wired to survive; and be logical later.

The Amygdala (left red) and the Frontal Lobe (right blue)

So we've got these brains operating independently. When we're scared the survival brain is dominant and triggering defensive responses. When we're safe the logical brain is dominant and making moral and sensible decision. Simon Sinek tells us why good managers make you feel safe.

Let me stretch the hypothesis and suggest that herding creatures feel safest when they are in the company of others that "feel" like the same herd: Genes, Qualifications, Profession, Race, Religion, School, Politics,... The 911 attacks triggered enormous herding polarisation. Winning the rugby world cup defined the "South African" herd and aligned those within it against an external common enemy. My takeout is that environments of perceived safety allow morality, tolerance and peaceful co-existence. Perceived danger awakens defensive responses and cause polarization into herds and survival responses. "I never touched it!"

The moments when the brightest, most trusted people look you straight in the eye and blatantly lie. They're scared. Something has awakened their fear of herd expulsion. For managers and governments: if you want teamwork and a sense of national identity - make people feel safe.

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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 

Space

As we become uber specialists knowing more and more about less and less, we become a little like that guy at the gym who only works biceps. He can't brush his teeth so his workouts aren't going to help with the ladies, and everything else looks like it is about to snap. TED.com helps provide connections to other ideas. Talks of 18 minutes from experts in various fields (with coaching and support on presentation skills) touch on 'ideas worth spreading' in a digestible format. They have recently extended the concept to books. TED books aim to expand slightly on the talks but still be in a format that can be read in one sitting. I just read my first TED book on 'The Art of Stillness' by Pico Iyer. 

Most books seem to have a single core theme or idea. Once you have got through the first few chapters you get the point. The rest of the book is padding. When a book offers multiple ideas we often tend to forget them because we only read it once, rather than chewing on the ideas and coming back to them again and again. Tyler Cowen is favourite of mine who has also tried to break this mould. I can strongly recommend two of his 'single sitting books'. 'The Great Stagnation' talks about the different requirements of a growing country bursting its Industrial Revolution, unshackling itself from poverty, and then a refining country starting to look at the how of living. 'Average is Over' is a fascinating discussion of what happens when average is no longer required? With computers and robots doing all the unskilled labour, what work will be required by others? This is not a new question. Keynes thought we would be working 3 hour weeks by now. He didn't quite factor in how afraid we are of free time. This connects to Pico Iyer's book and the value of learning to go nowhere. 

The concept of introducing space in order to enjoy life extends widely. Musicians talk of the beauty of the space between the notes. Some religious leaders talk of God being the spaces in between what we know for sure. One of my favourite examples comes from Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen. He talks of always ensuring any talk you give is comfortably shorter than the allotted time so that you leave the audience interested in finding out more. Living in Japan, he connects his ideas to the Japanese saying Hara Hachi Bu which means eat till you are only 80% full.

Even if that means you have to stop mi

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 

Play for Placebo

A Placebo is a scientifically ineffectual placeholder. It is used in Double-blind tests to check the facts behind a theory. Some people being 'exposed' to whatever the thing being tested is will get a placebo. They will think they are getting/doing/experiencing the thing, but in fact they aren't. It is called double blind since the experimenter doesn't know who is receiving the real deal and who isn't either. This is a way to strip out people's biases. The age old story of you will only see if you really believe can be true. You will see. The mind is incredibly powerful. Stories are incredibly powerful. It is hard to call what people are experiencing faking. I also think that if you insist on discarding everything that has been proven to be a placebo effect, i.e. it works simply because you want it to, you can miss out. Much like watching a movie, if you don't suspend your disbelief, you don't get to enjoy the story.

Benjamin Wallace tested 12 incredibly expensive things in an attempt to test whether you can buy happiness. It is a wonderful clip. It ends with the well known point that people really do enjoy expensive wines more, not necessarily because they are better, but because they are expensive. He doesn't say that everything that is expensive isn't really worth it. The two they have stuck with me from this clip is that it is worth spending a little extra on your bed. You spend a third of your life in it. It is also probably worth getting a Japanese toilet.

So what do you do? Do you not buy expensive wines even if you can afford them because you don't want to be a sucker? Do you buy cheaper wines and hypnotise yourself into thinking they are more expensive. You can't really make a deal with friends and family to occasionally lie to each other about the value of things since once the deal is made you will always be suspicious. Or will you? Perhaps you will forget the deal and allow the occasional lavish story to pass by undetected, because you want to believe it.

I think beyond a certain level of consumption, a lot of pleasure becomes about the story value. 'Three Studies of Lucian Freud' by Francis Bacon was sold in November 2013 for $142m. Here the price tag is largely for the way something makes someone feel. The word priceless springs to mind. Since if this is indeed a 'placebo effect' where some trickery and conspiracy can give the same feeling, then those without money but with a desire to control their mind could have a one person lottery ticket.

'Three Studies of Lucian Freud' by Francis Bacon

One of the reasons I don't like the statistics regarding income distribution as a point of equality is that I think they distract from what the people using them are actually most concerned about. If your aim is to have people having equal access to happiness, then absolute poverty and 'placebo free' consumption equality should be of far more concern. Then the artists, musicians, poets, writers, dancers and actors can add all the story value you want. Don't pay for placebo, play for placebo.

Passionate Speaking

People aren't nasty. Some are, but those skebengas are a rounding error. One of the biggest fears people have is public speaking. This is a great example of where we think people are thinking things they aren't thinking. Usually when you have an audience of people listening to you, they really aren't trying to shoot you down. We want to enjoy ourselves and when we listen to someone speak, we look for reasons to enjoy it. Perhaps our fears come from school orals. Little kids standing up in front of other kids and doing talks when they are nervous. Now you may have already started finding holes in my story... people aren't nasty but sometimes kids are horrendous. They haven't learnt yet that no one really likes a bully. At some point even the nastiest of kids learns that it is more fun for everyone if you play nice.

My favourite TED talk is one of the first I watched. What Ken Robinson does so well is that it is just a conversation. His voice is the same voice you would imagine him using if you were sitting having a cup of coffee together. So you feel like that is what is happening. Now he is a witty Brit, and does have a way of telling stories. But mostly, he is calm. He is in control of his breath and the focus is on the content. The best way to become a great communicator is to really know and be passionate about what you are speaking about. This shines through in his talk. He really believes that we can do a better job of finding the magic that makes people tick. We all feel passionately about something, and it is rather sad that we don't tend to talk, write or share because we are worried about what people will think about our ability.

Perhaps the trick is to write or talk like you are with someone you trust. When your voice switches to school oral mode the fear may have kicked in. You forget that actually people want to hear what you are passionate about.

For some fantastic resources on presenting, check out PresentationZen.com.

 

Living Better

We are watching. I had a discussion with a friend recently about whether education was a force for peace. Education in my view is not simply teaching someone a specific vocation. Education is at the heart of how we improve. It is the sharing of a better way. There is something that drives us forward. Collectively as we have learnt about each other and the world, we have learnt to engage with people we don't understand. Power over people has been ripped from hereditary families and fewer people have died in games of thrones.  The power of governments has then been reduced by putting in place checks and balances. The power of majorities to impose themselves on minorities is waning. We are treating each other better. We are living better. That is what I think education is.

Education is part of why reality is less of a Game of Thrones

Part of our bumpy long term improvement comes from transparency. Information is becoming harder to hide. In George Orwell's 1984, we had the image of a Government who is always watching. Technology is bringing about that transparency, but instead of Big Brother - we are watching. It is becoming more and more difficult for those who cling to ideas that prevent the world moving forward from doing so. I found the clip below very inspiring. The simple idea that you will not get away with it has to impact behaviour and make it far harder to conspire. The gains and rewards start to slip away in comparison to the chance of getting caught.

Effective Altruism

How do you decide what charities to support? We already struggle to decide how to spend our own money. We tend to spend more impulsively than we would like and not enough of us step back to plan how to allocate our own resources. History has shown us that effectively allocating resources is a rather difficult problem. Pushing the decision of how to spend money down to those spending it was the way capitalism approached a solution. We have been hugely successful in wrenching billions out of poverty and the world is changing for the better. That said, we still have huge unsolved problems and portions of the world who have far more than they need and others who don't have enough. How should those with enough to give away think about doing that? We don't trust Governments as effective allocators of resources. Like politics, sometimes charities can become about pet causes, and we worry that the best communicators or most persistent campaigners get the money rather than those who are best at the job.

I am one of those noisy people. I am happy to put effort into fund raising and try balance this against shifting people's giving away from cause that are important to them. I hope that some of my silly fund raising antics cause people to give more than they otherwise would have. Otherwise I am wasting my and their time and just manipulating where money goes. Peter Singer is the philosopher best known for his thinking on the subject of effective altruism, so part of my year end reading will involve his book 'The Life You Can Save'.

He has also done a TED talk on the subject of effective altruism and he points to some good sources. I have also added another talk on giving directly which a friend yesterday donated to in lieu of a charity I was actively promoting.

1. Giving What We Can  - How much should you give?

Toby Ord set up an organisation to research effective altruism and answer some of the tougher questions that surround it like cost effectiveness, giving without excess sacrifice and the relationship between income, happiness and giving.

2. 80,000 hours - How to make a difference with your career

Many people want making a difference to be a priority in how they choose their career. This organisation was set up in order to create a global, evidence-based conversation about the world's most pressing issues. Interestingly, for some, the most effective altruistic career may be in banking or finance if the earning power that gives you allows you to make a bigger difference than you would have otherwise.

3. GiveWell - Which charities are the most effective?

GiveWell is dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of their analysis in order to help donors decide where to give. Individual donors are the largest source of altruistic funding (>100 times the Gates Foundation and >5 times all other sources combined). GiveWell aims to provide research and conversations to help direct these resources effectively. The four charities they recommend are:

• Against Malaria Foundation
• GiveDirectly
• Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)
• Deworm the World Initiative

4. Giving Directly - Send money directly to the extreme poor

Giving directly is showing itself to be one of the most cost effective and high impact ways of making a difference. It is a great example of technology allowing us to cut out a lot of the waste by using money transfers to the mobile phones of those most in need. Although we may think otherwise, they are in the best position to know what will make the biggest differences in their lives. No committee in a distant country needed. No research papers. No central planning. 

Like Magic

Derren Brown is a magician who doesn't believe in a magic. At least not it the mystical sense. He frequently denounces those who claim psychic or paranormal abilities and yet performs the same tricks that they do. The thing is that with sufficient mastery, people can develop skills that appear to be magical. I find touch typing a little magical. That my fingers become an extension of what I am thinking after sufficient practise still leaves me in awe when I do think about it. Before the printing press and widespread literacy, even the ability to communicate over long distances must have seemed magical. We used to be able to take technology apart and then put it back together to figure out how it worked. Nowadays you take things apart at your peril. I like the idea of a deity messing with us. We have become so used to someone just saying something works (without divine intervention) that we may accept something that is impossible without even batting an eyelid.

Derren Brown

Source: www.theatrepeople.com

We also ascribe some learning to an inherent talent, and so if there is a struggle assume that means that we are not good at it or it is not meant to be. This ignores the hump before a skill is learnt and our different approaches to dealing with the hump. For some, they are able to pick up momentum early on. They grasp enough to start to believe they have a natural talent and so push on. For others, they need to fight on despite a feeling of clumsiness and self doubt. Some other sort of love for the subject needs to push them on.

At some stage the magic kicks in with most fields. My first boss used to magically be able to identify the two or three things I felt slightly uncomfortable about in a report with a few minute skim read. Magic but not magic. Chess masters can simultaneously play multiple boards against multiple opponents at the same time. Magic but not magic. I was going to use Federer as my third example, but I think he was put here by the deity I mentioned who was tricking us. I am not fooled.

I wrote about how Derren Brown's 'Mind Tricks' gave me an insight into hypnosis in 'Faking It'. The essence is that all hypnosis is is a deep state of relaxation and openness to suggestibility. This releases all sorts of potential because while useful, our scepticism also restricts us based on what we think is or isn't possible, or what we think are or aren't our talents. I think scepticism is very useful and it is actually more healthy to be aware of your clumsiness and self doubt. The world is complicated and being too confident that you get it, is a recipe for disaster. At the same time, excessive self doubt can stop you making the magical leaps to things that are actually possible but leave you with a sense of awe.

In the same way I argue for a 'Bull Quota' when listening to others to get to the good stuff, I think we need to learn to allow ourselves similar leeway when learning. The way to rationalise this is that these are emotional techniques that help us because we aren't completely rational. If the tricks help and no one gets hurt, then there is no harm done. Amy Cuddy makes a powerful case for using body language in this way. If we know that 'faking it' makes the 'faking' disappear, then perhaps we are being fake by not faking it?

Beds & Desks

I don't think we choose to sleep too little. It just joins the 'find the time' queue. Churchill was famous for being able to nod off at any given gap to try and catch up. Napoleon could apparently sleep on horseback. I got inspired by a more alive famous person when I read 'How Life Imitates Chess' by Gary Kasparov. It is a good example of remembering that I loved a book, but not remembering much of the book. One point that did stick out is that Kasparov was a big fan of the afternoon snooze. I have always suffered from the traditional afternoon lull around three o'clock when productivity falls through the floor. Kasparov argued that pre-lunch sleeps were a great boost and shouldn't just be for later in life. I was working in Bermuda at the time, and completely convinced, decided it was worth zipping back to where I was staying for a power nap during the lunch hour. The problem was that the conflict now lay with two other happiness sponges - traffic and heat. Well, heat isn't a happiness sponge if you are wearing little more than a cold drink, but add it to hooting cars and smiles disappear.

We are only just starting to learn how to create work environments that really allow us to be creative, productive and happy. A unpleasant commute isn't the only solvable problem we face - John Medina in 'Brain Rules' gives a number of other suggestions. The one that stuck out for me was the idea of 'walking desks'. If you are walking at a comfortable pace - say 1.5km/hour - it isn't strenuous exercise but keeps you moving and allows thoughts to flow. Kate, a friend and HR business leader, has always been a fan of the lower tech, cheaper, and easier to implement method of going for walking meetings. If you have an hour long meeting with someone, why not walk around the block or the park together?

Spike Milligan said money can't buy you happiness, but it can bring you a more pleasant form of misery. The one area Benjamin Wallace believes it is worth spending money is on a quality bed. If you aren't going to be able to get some sleep during the day, because it would mean a double commute, then investing in an awesome bed is probably worth it. If you are going to spend 12 hours a day at your desk - you may be forgetting the 'use it or lose it' rule of the body. Perhaps walking desks are the awesome beds of the office?

Finding Flow

One of the disadvantages of our inability to keep lots of things in our head at one time is that we aren't great at stepping back, looking at the big picture, and deciding what tradeoffs we want to make. One of the advantages of our ability to not keep lots of things in our head at one time is focus.

Meditation is not something mystic or fluffy. You can dress it up any way you want to make it appeal to you, but what it really is is practising focus. We are all good at putting the majority of things out of our mind. It is just the last few things that we struggle with and hop between. Enter Flow.

Flow happens when you are involved in a skill based activity where the feeling you have is so intense you feel like you don't exist. Your identity (worries, daily life, fears, responsibilities) disappears from your consciousness. That sounds almost exactly like a definition of meditation. The great thing with flow is that we all find it in a different place, and often it is when we are engaged in the process of creating something new. Even when it is not necessarily creating a physical thing, watching someone in flow is a thing of beauty (Federer, Messi etc.).

I believe strongly the world is moving forward. The reason being that a fundamental thing that makes us happy is being creative. We find something that pushes us. Not so much that we are anxious and not so little that we are bored. As each of us push a little, we all benefit. One challenge we face is that we have lots of people whose daily tasks are such that the skill level required is low and the challenge is low. Worry, apathy and boredom can become a habit. If we are able to nudge more people out of those zones then I think we will be on the right track.

So if you want to start a meditation practice, one way to do it is to find something that has a long path of progression where the challenge can push just beyond your skill level. Something that offers life-long learning.