Refining Conversation

Conversation is not the same as the written word. 

When you read a transcript of a lively discussion, it often looks as if we’ve forgotten how to speak. Sentences zig-zag, filler words appear, we change tack mid-thought, someone interrupts, and on paper we can seem semi-literate. We blame the voice-to-text software, but the truth is that real-time conversation is messy by design. 

Think about how we listen. We are not like a driverless car with hundreds of sensors. We have one brain that’s simultaneously attending, drifting, and free-associating. We catch enough to respond, yet our thoughts wander to whatever the moment triggers. Transcribe that dance and it’s chaos. 

Inside my own head (and, I suspect, yours) there’s a five-person committee chattering away. Jonathan Haidt’s “rider and elephant” analogy captures it well: the rider (conscious mind) believes it’s steering, but the elephant (subconscious) actually decides where we go, and only afterwards does the rider cook up a justification. Free will exists, but it’s more like gentle guidance than total control. 

That’s why stories matter. They take those bouncing ideas and smooth them into a clear arc: beginning, conflict, resolution. Even then, a short story or a two-hour film is a drastic simplification of real life, which is infinitely messier, full of randomness and ambiguity. Storytelling is how we compress complexity so we can think, and act. 

Writing is the workshop where this compression happens. Forcing thoughts onto the page helps us sequence them, trim the excess, and discover what we really believe. It’s also why I’m excited about large language models. They act like mirrors to our half-formed ideas—reflecting, rearranging, challenging. Modern AI isn’t rigidly rule-based; it learns the way children and, yes, elephants learn: through iteration, feedback, and embodied patterning. 

That’s not something to fear. Humans excel at adaptive learning too, especially in the context of relationships and collaboration. The task is to stay aware of what our inner elephant is absorbing, remain reflective and conversational, and keep refining the stories that steer us. 

Conversation is the raw material, writing is the refinery, and learning (human or artificial) is the fuel that keeps the whole system evolving.

Will of the Elephants

Agreements are made by getting to know elephants. In Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the conscious choices we make are the riders, and normally when they pull left, the elephant goes left. The riders think they are in control because the choices are followed, but in reality the elephants want to go left. 

One day, when the elephants go right despite the pull... we don’t even admit the lack of control. We make excuses. We defend. We rationalise. We change the story. The power team of a public relations officer and defence lawyer explain away our behaviour. Like after a difficult relationship, or being fired, or other traumas... we have inbuilt coping mechanisms to make sense of the world. To believe in cause and effect. To believe we have control. The real intelligence is in our habits. 

The real communication is in our complicated and intimate relationships. Full of noise and deep soaked. This means epiphanies are not enough. You cannot just decide to change direction against the will of the elephants. You have to put in the hard work of retraining.

Feeling the Choices

Local markets should be more responsive to changes in preference, because they are able to respond to tacit knowledge. The stuff we can’t put into words. The stuff we don’t always understand ourselves. Our inconsistency. Our moods. 

Local markets mean relationship building and consequences. Huge markets become more abstract. If you sell someone something that isn’t a good deal for them (because you need/want the money) and it affects them badly, size matters. In a huge market, you disappear in search of the next sucker. In a local market, you still have to engage with the people. 

Local forces commitment, recognising that what we do matters. The boundaries between client, colleague, friends, and family blur. It gets complicated. Dealing with strangers is cleaner. It is transactional. Local and intimate means getting involved in the nitty gritty. Local means we experience the results of each other's decisions. Local means wrestling with issues. 

Standardization can give comfort. Where you do venture away from local to explore, some recognition is useful. When you (think you) recognise something, you don’t have to give it thought. Conscious choice is hard. 

Daniel Kahneman talks of “thinking fast and slow”. You want to embody a lot of decisions and make them fast. Jonathan Haidt talks of our rider (head) and elephant (body/habits). We think the rider is in control, but it is mostly the elephant. 

To embody and relax, we have to trust. It is hard to trust when you haven’t done the necessary wrestling to deep soak shared agreement.

International Standardization

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

Training your Elephant

Shallow learning is when you force feed your Elephant, and then it goes round the corner and gets rid of it. Would you pass your school exams if you sat them now? We value Conscious Knowledge, but our Elephants are actually way smarter than us (if by us we mean the narrating Riders in our heads). Smarter, if we feed them slowly. The Rider takes the credit and explains away mistakes, but the Elephant does the doing. The Elephant absorbs and processes. The Elephant has the intuitive genius. The stuff that appears magical to us... because it requires no conscious thought. Like walking. Like talking. Like the basic tasks that impress us so much when babies learn them, but that we only remember are really complicated when we get injured. Don't force feed your Elephant. Train it. Slowly.  Patiently. Every day. Consciously. Then let go, and be amazed by the magic that compounds.

Training my Elephant

I spend a lot of time in my head. If you are like me, it is noisy there. More a committee than a voice that makes sense a lot of the time. Often quite harsh. I started Yoga about 9 years ago. The point, I was told, was to still the waves of the mind. Basically, to ask the committee to take a tea break every now and then. I like tea breaks. This sounded like something for me.

I came across the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider in one of my favourite books of all time. Jonathan Haidt's 'The Happiness Hypothesis' is a wander through the history and current thinking around well being. Other books like 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman, 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell, 'Focus' by Daniel Goleman, and 'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin all touch on a similar idea.

We tend to identify with our Rider. The Rider tells the story of our lives and explains our behaviour. The truth is that it is really the Elephant that does the doing. The Elephant may go right or left at the command of the Rider most of the time, giving the illusion that the Rider is in control. The Elephant just wants to do the same thing on those occasions. The Rider has no ability to make the Elephant do something it doesn't want to do.

The Rider can, with patience, train the Elephant. The Elephant is in fact far more powerful and intelligent than the Rider. The Rider is slow, deliberate, and forgetful. The Elephant embeds knowledge. To change what the Elephant knows and does takes time, patience, and attention. Rather than justifying or excusing your Elephant, the first task is to observe it. To understand it. To not take the credit, or the blame, for everything it does. Realising that your Elephant actually understands a lot you don't. Then you can tweak and teach, with humility.

Step one is realizing you are not the committee in your head. Give them a tea break.

Going Dark

I want to trust people. My natural disposition is to give people the benefit of the doubt. I find if I assume the best intentions, then I can listen more closely to points they are making. If I get triggered by words, I normally try rein in my raging elephant, and after a few breaths assume they meant something different to what I think they meant. In an ideal world, I believe if you give people unconditional love the relationship will be stronger, because they won't have to fear you walking away. Unfortunately, the people closest to us are those who know how to hurt us most. Unconditional can be brutal. So occasionally, it is useful to 'Go Dark' and think of the worst case scenario. If you can gain comfort that you can survive that, that you can cope, then the darkness will not kill you. Then you can trust.

Bane

Decision v Process

I don't believe we have the 'unit' of who we are correct. Stopping at identity is lazy. There are conflicting voices beneath that. Some of the divisions of who I consider 'me' are linked to circumstance. If certain things happen, the emotional cocktail that leads to my regular response may be one I like identifying with, and it may not. As I get older, there are aspects of me I want to change, but that get harder. I have worked hard at 'training my elephant', so I am relatively good at creating habits. Some habits are deep soaked. We don't change by changing our beliefs. Our beliefs soak deep, and become ingrained responses. Change isn't a decision. Change is a process.

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.

The Missing Voice

Have you heard yourself speak? It is quite disorientating. The voice in our head sounds different. Played back, we are able to see ourselves in a different light. We can pick up the excessive use of particular phrases (awesome, nice, effectively, as I was saying, basically, you know) or 'pause words'. Uh/ Um/ Er/ are parts of speech, not parts of our usual writing. They are crutches for the heat of the moment. When we are in conversation, we speak from the gut. It's a dance. We pick up on body language. We send out body language. We get wired up by what the other person is saying. Wired up by what they aren't saying. Emotions are deeply wound into what is being communicated.

Reasons tend to come after the fact. We build out supporting evidence for the way we feel about things. Unless we slow things right down, and methodically unwind all the ways we look at the world. Question them. Seek alternatives. Even then our emotions will fight back. Jonathan Haidt talks about 'training our Elephant'. The Rider may think they are in control, but the Elephant will do whatever they want in times of crisis. The only way we change the source of our views is by slow, patient, training. By playing what we are saying back.

Listening to Elephants

To understand what others are saying, we can't just listen to their voice. You have to spend time with someone to understand their context. Catch a glimpse of the feelings underlying the responses. I believe we only really listen to people who we believe are mostly on our side. Our Elephants don't do strangers. The dance of ideas needs to include 'the benefit of the doubt' for movement to happen.

Sometimes the missing voice is beneath the one you thought you heard.

----

This post is part of a tandem series with seven other writers. We each write using the same title and publish at the same time. I discovered Nick Frost (@Nick_Frost) when he last did one of these series with a friend of mine. My favourite piece is 'Magic Words' and the art of swearing. He imagines JK Rowling thinking 'it's time they learn in life there's no substitute for a swear word - even for those capable of wielding actual magic.' Here is his interpretation of 'The Missing Voice'.

 --- Brett - Candice - Dave - Ashley - Megan ---

Angry Elephants

It is difficult to push on through reading a book where you don't agree with the ideas. It is not quite as difficult as having a conversation with someone with aggressively different views, but it is hard. When the clash of ideas is live, the thing I struggle with is body language. We are very good at telling if someone is on the same page as us. A nodding head. The way legs and arms are crossed. Whether the way they sit is mirroring us. Tone of voice. There isn't a checklist, but we know. And we like it when people agree.

If we are able to allow a 'Bull Quota' for all the things we completely disagree with, there is a chance that we can get to some interesting ideas that will improve our questions. It is easier for our rational side to hold ideas in mind that we disagree with. Someone 'believing' that 2 + 2 = 5 is not upsetting. Where it gets difficult is when the language someone uses pushes our buttons. When it does trigger an emotional reaction. How do you train your elephant to behave?

There is an art to putting across ideas without emotional triggers. Absent the triggers, writing and conversation becomes boring. So art, and life, is normally applied in adding triggers and passion rather than taking away. Most books seem to be written for people who already almost agree with the author. They are peppered with lines that would upset people outside the tribe. Unlike live conversations, when the triggers come up, you can just put the book down. People are much more complex than books. They don't come with summaries and reviews. With Amazon ratings. You may be thoroughly enjoying the 'first few chapters' and then come across some impassable bridge. What do you do? How do you carry on enjoying their company when your elephant gets restless or even angry?

Impassable Bridges

Enjoying the Process

There is a strong conflict between our short term desires and the the view from the top of the elephant of where we want to be. Change happens very slowly but what we see, feel, smell, taste, and hear is right here and now. One proposed definition of happiness is an alignment of short and long term incentives. A story that makes sense. In 'The Happiness Hypothesis', Jonathan Haidt looked at professions where the aspects of something being a job (what you do to survive), a career (something you build) and a calling (something you value) align.

He looked at Journalists and Geneticists. The Geneticists felt like they were in a golden age. The work they are doing is rewarding in and of itself, it is valuable to society, and the financial incentives reward good work. They don't feel like they have to 'sell out'. The Journalists on the other hand were getting more and more frustrated. Anyone could sit and home and write a blog in their underpants. Formal media has become more of a big machine and more polarised. This is who they are competing with or working for. The sexy, scandalous, violent or shocking is where the (decreasing) reward is. Often in small, repetitive, digestible soundbites. Many would have been drawn to journalism as a founding pillar of democracy. A deep belief that free speech will keep people honest. A desire to bring the research of people on the boundaries of human thought back to the man in the street. The noble goals then get out of line with the short term realities and things fall apart.

We aren't very good at doing the things that are good for us in the long term if they conflict with the things that make us happy in the short term. It seems we know this and it bugs us. The trick seems to be to somehow get coherence. How can the small, achievable, daily goals that add up over time become something we do for their own sake. Some of us are heroes. The rest of us have to do the hard work and in truth, it just isn't going to happen. Just do it. Um, ok. Tomorrow.

If there was an effective diet that consisted of sitting on the couch eating fat, salt, and sugar while binge watching our favourite TV series - we would all be rippling muscle machines. The Rider can train the Elephant but I don't think it can be done without incentives. We can summon little bits of will power to make little changes here and there. Big changes compound over time and need sustained habit formation. For that, we need to enjoy the process.

We have to remember the Elephant is the boss.

A Little Distance

The battle between what we do and what we want to do is tragicomic. My favourite metaphor comes from Jonathan Haidt. He describes our mental and emotional processes as a Rider and an Elephant. The Elephant is the one who does the living. The Elephant came first. The Elephant has the kind of intelligence bees have. Able to coordinate, delegate, specialise and communally survive with a built in understanding of the world. We have been around for millions of years and slowly but surely the elephant has trained itself to behave in certain ways.

What we do, What we want to do

Source: ArtFire

The rider is a fairly recent addition. As we developed language, and the ability to look backwards and forwards, our worlds were forever changed. Our learning ceased to be purely instinctual. Through words and culture we could learn lessons. We gained a memory. Not only of our own deeds, but of what others had learned. We could bend and change the world. Our brains effectively became a communal asset, where what we knew was much less relevant than what dots we could connect. There is absolutely no way I can absorb, process, retain or understand all of what we do.

But we still have our Elephant. And our Elephant is still the one that does the doing. Elephants are strong and willful. They are a collection of habits. A habit isn't just something you hear about and do. It requires training. We know we should save. We don't. We know how to get to a healthy weight (eat better, exercise more). We don't. There are all sorts of things our Riders know and our Elephants just ignore. There are also things our Elephants know or do, and our Riders don't understand. Rather than admitting this, our Riders act as Public Relations Officers and make up reasons why we did stuff. The Rider prefers that to admitting they don't understand or aren't in control.

 

I like the metaphor because it resonates for me. In some places I have built up habits that make my rider smile. Others are deeply embarrassing and frustrating. The Rider-Elephant idea allows a little bit of distance between what I regard as 'me' and what I do. Almost like I am an Avatar in a game. Instead of 'I am angry'. I can think, 'My Elephant gets really angry in these situations'. Just this small bit of breathing space means I can think of how I can train my Elephant to respond differently, rather than identifying with the thing I can or can't do. I am not a runner. I can't dance. I am not handy. etc. Instead, characteristics become tasks or goals. Even feedback becomes less of an attack on the soul.

I used to say I was my harshest critic. Turns out I just hadn't met enough people. But I do find the distance between what I think of as 'me' and the stuff that makes that up is a form of relaxation. The more I am able to connect to the things that really matter to me, the more I can see the other stuff as noise. The less the habits matter, the easier they are to change.

Still doesn't mean they change as quickly as I'd like, or my Rider is as good a coach as I'd like. But it adds perspective.

Getting Bigger

Getting bigger makes things more efficient. Getting bigger makes co-ordination and understanding a lot more difficult. As we have scaled production of very specific things, we have got incredibly efficient. Foxconn in Taiwan employs over 1.2million people and is probably involved in the manufacture of a large chunk of the electronics you own. Walmart flipped the way retailers sold food. Sam Walton focussed on smaller towns, and cut down profit margins believing that giving clients a good deal would deliver the scale that would make up the difference. He was right and the Walmart story is a powerful one. Things do change as you grow and systems become more complex. Walton was a hands on manager who learnt to fly so he could wander around America getting to know his customers and what they needed. Seth Godin makes a powerful case that 'small is the new big'.

One of the issues of getting bigger is the 'Postrel Problem' - we are not good at articulating much of our understanding. Often we know how to do something but not why we know how. We have tacit knowledge. If we try to articulate, we often get it wrong. We don't feel it is good enough to say, 'I don't actually know, but it seems to work'. Instead we throw out untested thoughts, normally very confidently, about our theories or rational. Although the definition can be different, I think it is useful to think of an 'interesting thought' as one that can be proved wrong. If that is not possible, the thought can be beautiful, but not interesting. That doesn't mean they aren't useful. We may still have to discover the way to frame the question in an interesting way. Our Elephants are actually very intelligent but they pick things up through patterns and repetition, making trial and error leaps of judgement. Our Riders are very rational but also rather self-conscious, insecure and unwilling to admit doubt. The Rider wants to believe they are in control, and so will attempt to explain things. The bigger an organisation gets, the bigger the gap from the understanding and the more insecure riders involved in the communication links.

One of the quandaries that come with growth as well is our ability to understand the 'big picture'. As soon as things get big, we need to specialise. The lack of broader understanding means that while we are doing well in our area, a coordination problem can exist. Globalisation has allowed us to grow the number of people we are exposed to. Communication and travel has allowed us to live further and further away. One of the challenges this poses is how to let people know the things they would have known through body language and presence when words escape. Sometimes it is hard to ask. When you live in a communal area, the uncle will see Mom and Dad need a break, and without words exchanged take the tyrannical, uber-Lord, tantrumming, titan, two year old for a few hours. When you live in a neighbourhood where people know each other, the teenager who has a few hours spare may (I did say may) help someone who is washing their car.

Perhaps Artificial Intelligence and electronics can help. We may know the questions that are tougher to ask, and ask them. If you sat down and said and were asked what chores you would be willing to do for a few friends and family (without them asking) and then we they logged on, they saw a willing source of support, perhaps they would jump at the offer. More broadly, a computer could co-ordinate known skills with willing users. The broader question is with all the gains scale has given us, how do we counter the loss of non-verbal communication and coordinate tacit knowledge?

Parenting your Elephant

It is great that we breathe without thinking. It is not great if, without thinking, we don't breathe properly. Our ability to do several things while only being conscious of a few and normally only one (even if the one jumps around) is what makes it so difficult to get computers to do even a fraction of the things that we can do. It also means that sometimes we have to train ourselves. There were quite a few books out on this subject a few years back. My favourite was Daniel Kahneman's 'Thinking, fast and slow' although as an incredible storyteller I look forward to Malcolm Gladwell's books with about as much anticipation as I did every new release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. 'Blink' deserved that antici          pation.

The best metaphor I have come across to describe this approach to looking at the way we come at life is from Jonathan Haidt. If I could choose one book that I could give a copy to everyone in the world it would be 'The Happiness Hypothesis'. In it he introduces the Rider and the Elephant. The Rider is our conscious mind. This is probably who we most consciously identify with when thinking who we are. The Rider is only in control in the sense that should she choose to, she can train the elephant. Assuming she has developed a good relationship with him. Even if she is a world class trainer, the Elephant's sheer size and power means he is still in moment to moment control. The Rider may have the impression that  when she pulls to the left and the Elephant goes left, it was her decision. In fact, the Elephant does as he pleases and will go left when requested if it is convenient. Should he go right, there is not much to be done. At this stage, she will probably try to explain what he did (PR manager), justify what he did (Lawyer) or sulk.

Why I find this idea so powerful is that in part it allows you to distance your identity from your actions. Particularly the ones you are less proud of or can't shake. It is empowering. Forming habits and learning to slowly train our Elephants in order to release their magic is possible. If you break a year down into a series of months and days and moments, you can identify your habits. You can plot. You can tweak. I imagine though, that in order to train your Elephant, you also have to be kind to him. You have to treat him with the same compassion that we treat children. We give them time and we try identify and build up their strengths. Parents often talk of their need to act in various roles for their kids. Perhaps the role of encouraging parent can be added to the portfolio of PR Manager and Lawyer for our own Rider.

Happy Meal

If you had to choose a chief candidate for a happiness battleground - what we put in our mouth would have to be right up there. Tastes, like music or photographs, can link almost directly to memories of happy times. Food is a part of our identity. Our favourite dishes are friends. When we are sad - there is the buddy we turn to. To celebrate, we might have a favourite restaurant that we go to as a reward for a job well done. It can also be the glue that holds relationships together. A meal your mother made you. Somewhere you and your friends love meeting. Perhaps a memory of when you fell in love with someone. Cooking may be where you find your sense of flow.  It can be central to a national cultural identity, e.g. the braai.

It is also one of the biggest disconnects between what we rationally know we should eat, and what we want to eat. Beyond the simple question of eating healthily, there are now more questions being raised about the sustainability and ethics of how we generate our food. In 2008 I had an epic series of blog post debates with Stuart Torr (@muttface) on Vegetarianism with myself arguing for the meat eaters. In theory, I was trying to understand his decision not to eat meat, but in truth I was defending myself. We didn't resolve much other than I agreed:

1. Meat makes up too large a proportion of most wealthy people's diets.

2. The practises in factory farming are very concerning and there is persistent animal cruelty.

I subsequently started getting into Yoga, in which Vegetarianism is a very central part of the philosophy. Diet has not been one of the areas that I have focused on. This is in part laziness, in part not having enough time, and in part a deep emotional connection to the food I eat.

The amount of self-control required to not eat meat in a culture where there are only a few vegetarian options on most menus is huge. ORDER ENVY. I am not just fond of some meat meals, I have had a lifelong love affair with them. My brothers would argue that Trev and Spaghetti Bolognaise are synonyms. Then there is ignorance. I don't know how to prepare tasty vegetarian meals and to ensure that I am getting all the elements I need to stay healthy. None of these things were a problem on the two month long yoga courses I went on, and I felt awesome.

A very happy Trev. A very tasty meat free meal.

For the more militant activists out there, the ones who believe that our current culture of meat eating is perpetrating a holocaust (thus breaking Godwin's law), I think addressing some of the cultural and emotional attachments may be a better approach than a direct attack using moral philosophy. Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) talks of being intellectually convinced after reading Peter Singer's (@petersinger) work but that it didn't affect his behaviour. It just added a layer of guilt. A video of a slaughter house stopped him eating meat for a while because it induced disgust, but that faded and the meat eating habit returned. I have a fair amount of self discipline and yet struggle when it comes to food. Reducing how much meat we eat and so helping to reduce the demand that leads to undeniably cruel practices within factory farms is going to have to rely on some very serious Elephant Training. What we eat and logic are only acquaintances. What we eat and our emotional engines are lovers.

Fighting Feedback

In general feedback sucks. We want to be the bigger person but normally despite our best intentions our elephant** will go on the rampage. Clearly you need feedback to learn. It is much easier for other people to see what you are doing wrong then for you to be able to evaluate yourself.  It is however much easier to correct mistakes you see yourself than when others see them. At school it was much easier to get feedback from my Maths teacher than from my Art teacher. The worst criticism I could get from my Maths teacher was that I sometimes tended to 'go via Cape Town' in solving my geometry problems. Cape Town is a long way from Durban where I was at school. I was fine with that. I was still right. If I was wrong, there was a clear, unemotional mistake that had been made that could be fixed next time.

When my long socked, gecko-decorated-labcoated, purple-shorted, crazy haired, arm-punching, guttral-sounding art teacher used to criticize me it was a completely different story. Now it was personal. There was no right or wrong. It used to drive me nuts. Tears would well behind my eyes. The steam from my blood would rise from every pore in my body. It was war. The core struggle between my art teacher and me was to stop trying to be so clever. The painting below was my first. It was a self-portrait and like lots of teenagers I was struggling with the various sides of my personality. The introvert. The extrovert. The academic. The artist. Religion. Friendships. Family. I tried to capture this with various forms of symbolism.

My first oil painting - A self portrait aged 15 (1995)

Mr Lichkus wanted me to relax and explore art. To take a break from my head, but every piece of criticism felt like an attack. We persevered in our war and two years later I ended up doing the piece below and diving far more into abstract work and falling in love with colour and texture (and in the painting below fire as well). For the next two decades, art has been an escape for me. My happy place where I can go looking for beauty instead of trying to solve problems.

Earth (1997)

Feedback, even well intentioned and correct, even when it is worth the fight, is much harder to deliver when it isn't objective and when it is in any way related to an individual and their elephant. 

It is interesting looking at the approaches of Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) and Nassim Taleb (@nntaleb) in pushing public debate forward. They appeal directly to the Rider*. They don't play nice and certainly are likely to be low down on the list of people's most desired dinner guests unless they speak and then leave quickly. Taleb takes the approach of directly insulting his readers and pointing out that they are chuckling and thinking he is insulting someone else when he is insulting them.  I think you can take this approach once who have already won someone over. Once they already know you like and respect them or have some reason you will stick around. You can tell your buddy he is looking chubby and should hit the gym, because he knows he is your buddy. A professor can mock a students line of logic because they wouldn't even bother tutoring them if they thought they didn't have the intelligence to correct their mistakes. I suspect there isn't a lot of space for feedback when the elephant is suspicious. Feedback is most effective when the elephant feels safe and the problem is being looked at in a detached/solvable way. That is why I think Jonathan Haidt is onto something when he talks about us needing to get better at talking to the Elephant first when trying to solve some of our bigger problems. The Riders are making reasons up, and unless there is common ground or some sort of good will - get ready for a fight.

 

 *Rider: Rational-side. Explains and justifies behaviour and attempts to direct it. Trains the elephant.

**Elephant: Decision-making, action taking emotional and automatic side. Listens to Rider when it wants to.

Making New Mistakes

Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. Don't mix friendships and work. Barriers start to become harder to enforce as information starts to flow freely. They also become harder to enforce when the people around you don't come from the same place, look the same, have the same broad beliefs etc. We spend so much time at work that if we don't share something of ourselves, there is the chance that you lose it. You end up spending significantly more time at work than with your friends and family. The things that really define you in your eyes become the things you don't talk about with the people you spend the most time with. Professor of Business Ethics at NYU-Stern Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) studies the intuitive foundations of morality. His work is trying to find the common ground that we can't find through rational thought. He is the one who came up with the Elephant-Rider metaphor I love so much. In The Righteous Mind he looks at why good people disagree. I think it should be prescribed reading for politicians, religious leaders or anyone who is attempting to steer a path towards improving peoples lives.

San Francisco seems to be at the epicentre of one of these clashes of people trying to figure out how to reconcile conflicting ideas. Getting more involved with Twitter recently (@trevorblack), I am amazed how many American's define themselves very strongly in their profiles as being Anti-GOP or Anti-Democrat. I am sure those are just the noisy ones, and there are more silent pragmatists in the middle. America has conquered a lot of the big ticket barriers to liberty and so these points of common ground are forgotten. California is very Democratic but is right at the front of some very cut-throat Capitalism.

'If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.' - Clemenceau talking of his son

The heart of Capitalism is a recognition that we don't know how to price things because we all want different things and there isn't enough to go around. Enter Adam Smith and the theory of the invisible hand that helps us out by with supply and demand. The price of something has nothing to do with the effort that was put into making it. It has to do with how much there is of it, and how much people want it. As it turns out this is a really effective way of driving resources to where in reality they are most wanted.

In doing this though there are incentives to affect both supply and demand. In 'Hide & Don't Speak' I spoke about how appealing the idea of collaborative work is. The Netflix documentary on '3D printing' looks partly at this idea and the conflict between Open Source and Proprietary Development. This is a conflict between our romantic idealism and the competitive fuel that keeps us running. The documentary is also an interesting look at some of the other areas of conflict in the capitalist approach. One interesting one is how an employee can invest themselves in a company and receive payment and at some point be thanked and asked to leave. The rationalist in us believes they have been paid and that exchange means all is fair. We don't account for the unpriced/unpriceable part of themselves that they lose. It doesn't just happen to employees (although that is most common). Steve Jobs was famously ousted at Apple. Bill Gross has left PIMCO in the last few days after around four decades.

We aren't purely rational. In the Ultimatum Game, the first of two players is given a sum of money to divide and the second player can either reject or accept the offer. If they reject it both get nothing. In a rational world, the first player would offer a tiny amount and the second player would always accept a non-zero number. This isn't how the game is played by real people.

It is tempting to see our rational sides as the masters of our destiny and believe that by calming our emotional side, we make better decisions. In a world where the other players are people, I don't think that is the case. All this directly ties into our happiness and how we choose where to work, what work to do, who to work with, whether we want to grow, how we want to grow and what to believe in.

I think the work that Haidt and others are doing is fascinating. I also think looking at the stories of the successes and failures of others is a great way to avoid having to repeat the mistakes of others. We get to make new mistakes. You don't have to, and in fact can't, go it alone.

Maintaining Momentum

Josh Waitzkin has an incredible story. His is the kind of book you will read over and over, savouring every word and lesson. He started life in the Chess world and moved on to Martial Arts. He talks of himself not as a prodigy but as one who is in love with the process of learning. Much of what he does is slowing things right down. Unlearning mistakes. Training muscle memory. Developing Flow. He is an Elephant whisperer.

Source: en.chessbase.com

One of the things I found interesting in his approach was his ability to maintain momentum. I sometimes get into a good habit of regular exercise, but then a work trip, holiday or injury knock the habit and it takes me a while to get back into it. Waitzkin tells a story of a broken arm that is awesome. Not long before a major Martial Arts contest, he had entered into a weight category above his to test himself. He had won but had got injured. He continued training, building up the strength in other areas he normally neglected. The result was that the injury made him a better athlete.

I haven't been great at that. Identifying the bigger picture plan and using injuries as opportunities. Since starting my new blogging/learning life, I had managed to do yoga each day. It is amazing what a difference regular practise makes and how stress starts to evaporate from the muscles. One of the lessons I have learnt though is to try and control the inner competitive South African male in me when yoga and my neck are involved. Just over a week ago I had had two rather long sessions in two days and my neck was feeling it. Had I been Josh, I would have worked on strengthening my abdominal muscles and flexibility while resting my neck. Not Josh, I took the week off exercise, and focused on other learning projects. While back into it now, I am a little removed from reality, work and life do catch up and 'restarting' can be very difficult. When I have had similar episodes before, it has often taken a few months to pick something up again if at all. I won't list good habits that lasted then faltered and disappeared. Developing an art of maintaining momentum through bumps is wonderful foundation for life.