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Why You Should Be Turning Flywheels, Not Playing On Swings

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Thursday, 7.49pm

Sheffield, U.K.

It takes a long time to get good at something, so it’s important to begin as early as possible so that we can improve and begin to see the compounding benefits of the work over time. – Priscilla Chan

Small things matter over time – often more than big things.

Jim Collins writes about this as the flywheel effect.

A flywheel is a wheel with a very heavy rim, a wheel that’s hard to turn.

If you put your back into it, however, you’ll start to overcome its inertia – the weight keeping it in place.

And then, as you turn it, it will move, first slowly then faster and faster until it starts to be pushed along by its own weight, with only a small bit of additional effort required from you to keep it going.

You now have momentum on your side.

A swing, on the other hand, is quick to get on and start going – and you go quite high and it feels good.

Then, at the end, you go the other way and it feels good.

There is a reason swings are rarely used in machinery and flywheels are.

Collins argues that the metaphor of a flywheel is useful to keep in mind when thinking of what to do with your business.

It’s rarely the big swing, the giant push that gets results.

Instead, it’s the gradual build up of capability and competence and experience that does.

It’s easy to believe that it’s the big hitters that matter – the ones that make the difference in a game.

They may the most visible, the most flamboyant.

And you may think that they make a difference – but that’s because you don’t see all the people who tried ot make a big hit and failed.

But all around you, everywhere you look, you can see people who did something day after day and built their careers and their businesses and their reputations.

The sudden elevation to fortune is a romantic myth – something that we try and bring to life because we love stories.

That’s why shows that have a competition with a winner are so appealing – we want to believe it’s possible to jump the queue and get there faster.

It wouldn’t be much fun watching a show following the twenty-year career of an intern who eventually becomes a CEO.

Sometimes it’s easier to hope than work – to wait for that big change instead of working it out day after day.

But when you do put in the hours, the time – the focused effort to build up your capability – then eventually you’ll find that what you’ve created starts working for you.

As Collins says there isn’t one push that matters – all the ones matter until you reach the point where what you’ve created becomes self-sustaining, reaches a tipping point – where it now pulls you forward with little additional effort.

And that’s a good position to be in.

After all, you could be on a swing where, just as soon as you reach your furthest potential, everything starts to go backwards.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Do You Realise That Where You Start Is Often Where You End?

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Tuesday, 9.09pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken. – Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

I came across at TED talk on the pleasure trap by Douglas Lisle and got hooked instantly.

Lisle is funny and he uses drawings to illustrate complex ideas – so what’s there not to like.

The core concept that you should take away from the talk is that we’re driven by feelings.

That is, when we do things they result in feelings – and those feelings often make us decide what to do next.

They’re like signals that tell us how we’re doing – and they’re often wrong.

They give us bad information – you can’t trust them.

Here’s why.

Let’s say you have a pretty healthy diet right now – the right balance of food groups. and not much salt, sugar or fat.

The kind of thing your parents give you while keeping the treats for themselves, or the kind of food you might eat if you lived somewhere the processed food industry hadn’t found yet.

At that point you eat when you’re hungry, the food is tasty and life is pretty good.

And then you get let out and experience what sugar and fat really taste like.

Your pleasure sensors register levels that go sky high.

I remember this feeling when I first went to a developed country and discovered Coca Cola – this amazing drink that tasted so good.

40 pounds later…

The thing with junk food is that it’s great when you first get it – so much better than fruit or salads.

But after a while you get used to it – the junk food gives you about the same amount of pleasure as the healthy food gave you earlier – you revert to a baseline.

Now, if you go from a diet of takeaways and junk back to a healthy diet – everything tastes dull and boring.

Your pleasure sensors register levels way down low.

Even though you’re moving from a bad situation to a good one, your body is telling you that you hate what’s going on – which makes it very hard to stick it out and not go back to the bad food.

But if you do stick it out, then healthy food starts tasting good again.

And you’re back where you were when you started.

What’s interesting is that when you went from good to bad, the feelings you had were good.

And when you went from bad to good, you registered the opposite – your feelings were bad – of deprivation and loss.

In fact, you would have to overcome your feelings to avoid going for the junk in the first place – and overcome them again if you were trying to get off your addiction.

And this is just food we’re talking about.

When it comes to addictions like smoking and drugs – your feelings are so high and so low that making a change is one of the hardest things you can do.

It would be so much better for you if you never started at all…

Because there is no good news here – it’s going to be hard and painful to get through that trough of whatever is the opposite of pleasure.

You will need help and support and friends and a plan for what you’ll do when you slip back.

When, not if.

Now, if you look at this chart what you’ll see is that normal doesn’t change.

You go back to the baseline – to where you started – whatever you’re doing.

This is the voice of your system.

Willpower is not enough – if you really want to make a change you have to change the system that’s resulting in that graph.

The one thing to remember is that if you’re trying to change something – don’t focus on the people.

People and their willpower abilities are not a good or reliable way to engineer change – they’re swayed by their environment and their feelings far too much.

You have to change the things around them first.

With food, you have to change what you have and how you buy.

You can’t eat junk if it’s not in the house.

With work, you have to change where you are and what’s around you.

If you go to the same place to work every day at the same time – it gets easier to get started.

Change the environment and the physical conditions that you operate in and your feelings will find it harder to drag you back to bad action.

And that way you have a fighting chance to end up somewhere different.

Somewhere you want to be.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Sort Of Approach To Teaching Or Thinking Actually Works?

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Sunday, 9.25pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. – Robert M. Pirsig

If you’re read this blog for a while or glanced at the intro you’ll know I’m interested in Systems Thinking.

This is something that many people have opinions on – and don’t really agree on as well – all over the Internet you can find proponents of different schools of thought sniping at each other.

But, what are they saying and why is it so hard to understand?

I saw a social media post recently that tried to use the language of Systems Thinking to describe what’s happening around us right now with the Coronavirus, and it reminded me of an important bit of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

And that’s the utter futility of trying to explain something you understand to someone else.

Let me explain.

I keep trying to take courses on Coursera – thinking that this will help me pick up a skill I lack.

I elect to audit the course, try a few bits and then recoil – utterly and totally bored by what is in front of me.

And that’s because I think the teachers try and break things down into teachable chunks – they create modules and divisions and ways to introduce you to the subject bit by bit.

This is the way of analysis, breaking things down and then dealing with them piece by piece.

Analysis has something to do with understanding through discourse.

Pirsig explains that you start to notice some weird things when you stop trying to use analysis and look at it instead as an object in itself.

And he uses a motorcycle to explain the idea.

For example, if you wanted to analyse a motorcycle you’d break it down into its parts – a running assembly and a power assembly – and then break those down further, into frames, wheels, an engine, the chain and so on.

Isn’t that what people do when they try and teach you anything?

Break language into grammar and nouns and verbs. Break martial arts into stance and footwork and punches?

And the thing that you notice first, the thing that’s loudest and most in your face is just how crashingly boring all this is – just like I found with the Coursera material.

But, says Pirsig, if you get past this you notice a few other things.

All this description only makes sense if you already know what the person is talking about.

If you look at my picture, for example, can you tell if it’s a motorcycle?

Of course you can – because you know what one is – but if you didn’t you might accept the idea that a motorcycle is a bicycle with a human providing the power assembly.

The next thing about analysis is that it gets rid of any human observer.

So, no one tells you how someone came up with this rule that means you now write the way you do because they misspelt something in a play that went on to be famous.

Analysis also forgets to think about making value judgements – is this good or bad, pure or not?

And finally, this analysis happens to have happened this way because someone chose to use this particular way of slicing things up – they used an intellectual scalpel that you just don’t even see.

Now… if you’ve read this far and don’t know what I’m talking about – that’s because you don’t already know and haven’t read Pirsig’s book.

So here is the point to take away.

Let’s say you want to teach someone to write a novel – don’t start by breaking down the process into pieces.

Get them to start writing instead.

Give them a prompt, a topic, ask them to magic a few hundred, a few thousand words out of thin air.

Then start to teach – because they now have something they know – which they can then understand.

I remember back in engineering school getting passing marks in an exam by writing about relays – even though I had no idea what one was and had never seen one.

You can fool people some of the time if you simply recite what you’ve memorised.

You can do courses and learn the structures and look like you’re doing great.

But you can’t fool yourself – and you know inside that you don’t know.

And you will never know until you’ve done the work.

Do the work first – and then try to understand what you’ve done and how you could do it better.

That’s the way to think better, to do better and, eventually, teach better.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Work Out Your Brand Personality?

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Saturday, 9.51pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. – Jose Ortega y Gasset

I’m getting a lot of my inspiration from TED talks at the moment – mainly because I watch them while putting the kids to bed in a bid to avoid falling asleep myself.

And Morgan Spurlock’s talk The greatest TED talk ever sold came up on my feed.

It’s about Spurlock’s vision to create a film about product placement but the bit that caught my attention was twelve minutes in where Spurlock decided he needed an expert to help him understand his “brand personality”.

He went to Olson Zaltman, founded by Dr Gerald Zaltman who came up with the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique, or ZMET.

The process they used with Spurlock came up with the idea that his brand personality was “mindful-playful”, which seemed to sum up his approach of going into deep, important subjects in a different, imaginative and irreverent way.

So, what is ZMET and how does it work.

It turns out that it was patented and I came across another associated patent on using the technique along with physiological monitoring.

The basic point Zaltman makes is that most communication is non-verbal, although that’s debatable, so market research methods that are based on verbal means miss the stuff that isn’t being said – the things people are less aware of.

The ZMET is a way to make these “hidden” preferences more visible.

The picture above takes elements of the MET that’s described in the patent – 14 steps in all.

The process starts with something like a storyboard – select images that are important to you and talk about them, tell stories to the researcher.

Sort your images into groups – try and see what’s common about them.

The reason you’re doing this is to study something – yourself perhaps – or your product brand – so dig into that product using all the senses you have, including sound, shape, touch, smell, taste and feelings.

From all your images select one that is the most representative – what describes you best.

Now that you’ve seen all you’ve seen, think about what you couldn’t get – talk about that.

Talk about the opposite of what you are.

Talk about the one critical message you want the audience to get.

And talk about what they will want to hear least – what’s the message they will be most resistant to.

Now, if you’ve done all this you have a rich trove of material to work with – lots and lots of metaphors.

Then you put things together to create a mental map – what I’m used to calling a conceptual model.

Something like “mindful-playful”.

It would be nice to see if there are other groupings like that but I didn’t find that in my brief search, no doubt there are papers on the topic.

The thing with this method is that it’s like a storyboard on steroids.

We know we’re told to collect pictures of what we want – get that image clear.

But this approach takes those images and really digs into them to find out what’s underpinning them – and that’s why I think it’s really quite powerful.

Personally, I might do it with drawings, just because that’s even more organic.

You know – talk to someone about the important events in their lives and get them to draw rough sketches, sort of like I’ve done in the picture.

But really, it’s about trying to hear what’s often not said.

And it’s when you do that that you discover what’s at the very core of who you are.

And when you do that you know everything you need to know to get your brand personality right.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How Do You Know When To Walk Away From A Prospect Or Promoter?

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Friday, 9.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. – Lord Robert Webb-Johnstone

I’ve had some interesting conversations recently and one of them reminded me about how to walk away – when do you know you have to do it?

You will come across a great many opportunities in life – which often come along with a friendly face trying to get you to buy into them.

Sometimes that face belongs to you.

It’s not always clear what you should do – will you miss the opportunity of a lifetime or will you breathe a sigh of relief that you dodged that bullet?

Cliches exist in this space because they’re true.

I spend a lot of time listening to people and I’ve started to realise one thing.

If you listen for long enough and ask enough questions you’ll start to get a feel for the kind of foundations an idea is built on.

Some ideas have no foundation, they are right down there at ground level already.

These are ideas with little ambition, few prospects.

I think we all start with these kinds of ideas when we first come up with them – it’s the equivalent of a child’s lemonade stand.

Isn’t that sweet, we think, and hand over some money for a drink.

Although I have to say, I’ve never actually done that – in this modern age the kids seem to reach straight into my wallet for some kind of sponsored activity or the other.

But, most business ideas you come up with that have to do with you personally spending time on they are, by definition, hard to scale – because there’s only one of you.

If you create crafts or art or do photography, there is a limit to what you can do yourself – unless you change your model.

For example, you can create a franchise, do online training or focus on design and outsource production and delivery.

At the other and are ideas that are rather on the fantastical end.

This is where someone comes up to you with a plan to create the next YouTube or the next Apple or the next something that already exists.

These are what you should recognise as castles in the air.

There is a recognisable shape to the idea, something plausible and similar has been done before.

But, does this person you’re talking to have the ability, experience and finances to make it happen?

How sound are his or her foundations?

You see, we shouldn’t really be swayed by the statistics that say things like 95% of all startups fail.

What we should do is look at the characteristics you need to succeed at anything at all in the first place.

And, if you want to succeed, it helps if you know what you’re doing.

It helps if you have a background in the subject, some knowledge, some ability to deliver, a track record of some kind.

Every once in a while you will find someone that enters a field that is completely different to theirs and disrupts it – creating a whole new industry and category of products and services.

But even those people will have a history – one that is built through testing and learning and failing and succeeding.

They will have foundations.

And foundations matter – because that’s what you build on.

Without them, you have nothing.

People will tell you that foundations don’t matter – what you need is belief.

And sometimes belief can keep a castle up there – you only have to look at what happened before the dot com boom and the housing boom and the tulip boom to know that belief is a very powerful thing.

Belief can support a castle in the air while gravity is busy doing its own thing watching over apples.

That doesn’t make it a sensible long-term strategy, however.

All it takes is for gravity to notice that there’s some funny business going on and you will find that the ground starts coming at you rather quickly and in an inconveniently unstoppable way.

That’s usually the bust part of the journey.

But these ideas are really tempting – be honest, how many of you stayed away from crypto during the hysteria in 2018?

I didn’t.

Here’s the thing.

It’s sometimes very hard to tell whether something is solid or not.

All you can do is think for yourself – don’t believe everything you’re told.

Ask questions.

Pointy ones – ones that try to figure out what’s really going on.

Because you’re trying to see if there is some substance to the story, if it’s built on solid foundations.

And if it’s not?

Walk away.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Is It That Really Makes Us Happy?

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Thursday, 9.44pm

Sheffield, U.K.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. – Dalai Lama

I came across a TED talk by Robert Waldinger about the longest study on happiness – 75 years old in 2015 – so in the region of 80 now.

Waldinger says that many of us think that what will make us happy is getting rich or famous, preferably both.

But it turns out that what makes us happy – and healthy – is good relationships.

And there are three aspects to good relationships.

First, it’s good if you have a social life – one connected to family, friends and your community.

Second, it’s not the number of connections that’s important but the quality of connections – conflict is a bad thing.

And third, being in a secure relationship in your 80’s helps your brain stay sharper longer.

It sometimes feels like everything we do is taking us in the other direction.

We spend time on our devices, shut away in a private world so that we don’t need to acknowledge anyone else around us.

That private world is filled with pictures of perfection – of carefully curated content that shows up the inadequacy and messiness of your own life.

And, when you see how perfect everyone else has it – or at least everyone who seems to be on your screen – you’re dissatisfied with what you have.

It’s clearly not a good thing – and people were rebelling.

The increase in meet up groups and face to face sessions seemed to indicate a bit of a reaction to how technology was taking over our lives – and not really for the better.

And, for some of us, the enforced seclusion required to cope with the coronavirus has actually rekindled fires of community spirit that had gone out.

In many places people have now met their neighbours for the first time – helped them out – been there for them.

When we are threatened we pull together – we suddenly find that we are stronger as a community and society than we are as individuals.

The fact is that this virus has forced us to change our habits in ways that that we might have done eventually – because it’s the right thing to do.

We should work from home, if possible.

We shouldn’t drive and create air pollution if we don’t need to.

We should look out for the others in our communities.

We should think about families and societies.

And, when things are normal, we’re too busy to do any of that.

And normal will return one day.

But will it be the old normal?

Or will we have learned something from this experience?

Time will tell.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Are You Living A Life Worth Living?

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Wednesday, 9.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The method of science is logical and rational; the method of the humanities is one of imagination, sympathetic understanding, ‘indwelling. – Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology

When I was young and had to decide what I would be when I grew up, there were only three options open to me.

I could go to university to study to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer – because of the subjects I has studied at school.

If I had been free to choose I think I’d have studied English, perhaps tried my hand at writing.

As it happened, I failed into engineering – and picked up a few skills along the way – the sort of skills that help you make a living by making things work.

What I was told was that doing a degree like engineering gave you options – you could choose to be anything you wanted after that.

But really, what people meant was that certain degrees had market value – you had a better chance of getting a job with one of them.

There are children all over the world who are being pushed towards STEM subjects – the “hard” disciplines as opposed to the soft, fluffy ones you also see dotted around.

And this leads to a few things that may be worth keeping in mind.

First, how do you work out whether you’re living a life worth living?

“Worth” is seen differently from different points of view.

I started browsing thought The art of being human: The humanities as a technique for living by Richard Paul Janaro and Thelma C. Altshuler, where they address this question head on.

The approach most of us are familiar with is the idea of “net worth” – how much do you have in the bank – how much will you leave when you die?

This is an economic concept of worth.

But there is another concept of worth – which has more to do with a “good” life.

A life where you travel, see other cultures, appreciate art and music and the other things that are uniquely human.

But it’s not quite as simple as that.

If you have no money but are deeply sensitive and appreciative of art and music – is that a good life?

Surely it’s better to have a roof and a bed and be able to see a play?

What happens if you take it to extremes – like when very rich people go to very expensive cultural programmes and preen and flatter themselves for their appreciation and sophistication?

Of course, I’ve never been to such events but I imagine there are some out there…

When it comes down to it I don’t think there really is that much of a separation.

It probably has a bit to do with Maslow and his hierarchy.

Learning a trade or a practical subject is going to help you meet your basic needs – and perhaps get you a partner.

But, if you stop there then you’re missing out on quite a bit of what life has to offer.

In particular, the humanities teach you to appreciate other humans and their creations.

Perhaps the right approach to education is a layered one.

Start with a grounding in a practical skill – the trades, the professions.

Work for a while.

Then, go back to school or do a self-study programme and learn the humanities.

And you’ll probably find that you become a better professional and a better human.

And isn’t that worth doing?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Make Your Writing And Ideas More Interesting

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Tuesday, 9.31pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. – Albert Einstein

I’ve been thinking about writing some marketing copy – and when it comes to doing something or finding a way to procrastinate – I find myself usually doing the second.

Why do something when you can read about how to do it instead?

You could just sit down and write something… but would it be any good?

What is it that makes a piece of writing or an idea interesting?

A book called The lively art of writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne caught my eye as I thought about this – and it has an interesting central idea.

Here’s the thing that Payne asks you to sear into your brain.

“All writing is the sound of one voice speaking, and all writing can be heard.”

Good writing – the kind of writing that works – makes you sit up and listen.

And that’s because when you read you actually hear the words – writing is simply a magical way to capture the words someone says in letters, where they stay until you release them by speaking them to yourself.

Good writing is a conversation between the writer and the reader.

If you forget this – if you write for an audience, for a market, for a group – then what you come up with is probably something else – a bland lecture perhaps, a list of things, meaningless prose.

It’s about as satisfying, Payne writes, “as a conversation with a wall.”

If you want an example of this kind of writing just take a look at the stuff I was writing back in 2016.

Now, I’m not saying that what I’m doing now is an example of what good looks like.

But, I gave myself ten years and a million words to get the hang of how to do it and I’m three and a bit years in and at 770,986 words – 70% of which are in this blog.

And all I want to be able to do is write simply and clearly, in a way that makes it easy for you to read.

And why would anyone want to do this?

Well, I suppose it’s because words matter – they shape the way we think and see, and what we see and think shapes our words.

For example, Charles Faulkner, in a TEDx talk, shows you how people react to words viscerally, instinctively.

He pours salt into two containers, and then turns them around.

One is labelled salt, the other cyanide.

Most people, you included, would probably avoid the bottle labelled cyanide, even though you saw both being filled from the same source.

Just like right now on supermarket shelves the one beer you can be confident of still finding is Corona.

Faulkner says that knowledge isn’t enough, quoting Einstein.

You have to be able to imagine, because that’s what pulls you forward, what creates something new.

Knowledge is all about what you know already – and it can be really quite dull.

Imagination, on the other hand, is vibrant and exciting, and it’s fuelled with words and story.

So, if you need to write some marketing copy for your service why not try asking yourself this.

How would you tell your best friend about what you do?

Did they get it?

And if they did – begin with those words and the chances are that you’re off to a good start.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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What Would Happen If You Tried To Answer This One Question Every Day?

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Monday, 8.50pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, saut̩ it, whatever. MAKE. РJoss Whedon

Have you ever wondered why you do what you do?

Many of us never set out with a grand plan for a career – we might have chosen subjects in school that worked for us – and ended up taking a temporary job but somehow staying there for a couple of decades.

I’m not sure I know that many people who really had a clear idea of what they wanted to be when they grew up.

I’ve seen one – a little boy who writes and draws stories – and who wants to be a writer when he grows up.

The rest of us tend to muddle through somehow – taking whatever route seems like the path of least resistance.

I found a book on that by Robert Fritz called The path of least resistance – which has an interesting little model that’s worth keeping in mind.

He asks why Boston is laid out the way it is – streets going this way and that.

He says it’s because the first paths were trodden by cows as they went about their business.

A cow, seeing a hill, doesn’t see it as a challenge – something it must climb – it simply finds the easiest way to get around it.

And this, Fritz says, should help you get three key insights.

The first is that animals, people, things, follow the path of least resistance.

The second is that the path they follow is determined by the terrain, the structure they’re in.

A river, for example, follows the terrain, the contours of the land as it makes its way from the heights to the sea.

The third insight is that you can change your terrain to something that works for you – something animals and rivers don’t really think too much about.

What all this leads to is an answer.

An answer that says that the reason you are where you are right now is because you took the easiest path given your environment – the structure of your life.

I don’t know what you do – but the chances are that you’re happy doing it, or not happy.

If you’re happy, don’t bother reading any further.

If you’re not, then the question I think that’s worth asking yourself is “What did I make today?”

I think if you really want to get in touch with yourself – you have to figure out what the creative part of you wants.

If you’re not sure what a creative part is – just watch a child.

Children just do this – they play and imagine and make things up.

And sometimes, they make things.

They run to you and show you – they want you to get involved – they want to teach you.

“Look at this thing I did,” they say, “Let me show you how to do it as well.”

Children get bored and crabby when all they do is watch telly.

They light up inside when they make stuff.

And I think we do as well – I know that when I create something I’m a lot more satisfied than when I don’t.

Creativity for me is writing, drawing and programming.

Sometimes it’s designing, repairing, teaching.

Sometimes you’re in a job where you don’t get a chance to make stuff – you’re busy getting other people to do things, moving stuff on, chasing, brokering, selling.

So, perhaps there you need a hobby – as many people do – they create and make in their spare time to make up for what they don’t get at work.

So, here’s the thing.

I have a theory that if you end each day knowing that you’ve made something that didn’t exist when the day started – you’ll be happier.

But first, you need to make it possible to do that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How To Become Happier By Using Better Mental Tools

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Sunday, 9.01pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain. – Bo Dahlbom

Today I came across a talk by Daniel Dennett for the first time, in which he introduced the quote that starts this post.

The quote resonated with me because much of my work over the last couple of years has been around trying to make sense of things – finding some kind of clarity in the messy real world that we live in.

It feels like different people have approached this in different ways over the years.

At one extreme you have approaches that are rooted in meditation and thought – the kind of thing you imagine Zen Buddhists doing.

It’s a long process of study and practice – at the end of which they achieve enlightenment – which I imagine is making a sort of peace with reality.

Although I did read a quote that said something like if anyone thinks they are enlightened, they should spend a weekend with their family.

At another extreme you have people of certain forms of science who believe that if it cannot be observed and measured it does not exist.

For them it’s about research and measurement and electrical flows and visualisations – about the detail of what’s going on in the physical world.

Now, it feels like there are many extremes as you think through the options.

For example, another extreme is the self-help guru, the person who has come up with a method that has worked for them and which they believe will work for you.

You find these everywhere, because surely if someone has achieved something then doing what they’ve done will work for you.

In Dennett’s talk he says you should install a surely alarm.

Whenever you see the word “surely” in a passage what it means is that the author hopes you’ll accept the point without questioning it.

They’re not totally sure about their point – if they were, they’d simply say that.

So, with the “surely”, they’re often trying to get something they believe to be true past you, hoping you won’t notice.

But you should – and perhaps probe more deeply into what’s going on.

Another extreme is Dennett’s own field – philosophy.

Some people believe that philosophy is the way you understand things – a rigorous way to understand what is true and false.

But really, what you need to understand is that philosophy is a form of logic, much like mathematics.

And Godel proved that even with maths, there are things you need to believe – things that can’t be proven using the system of maths you’re using.

Axioms.

What this means is that pretty much everything is rooted in a belief – and the reason you carry on believing is because nothing absurd results from thinking that way.

So, what I’m saying here is that some people believe that you have to just “get” it for yourself, others that you have to break it down scientifically, others that they have a way that’s worked for them and a few others who say this is the logical way to do things.

And then there are probably a few more ways to go.

What I’m taking from this is that reality is complex and complicated.

There are so many threads of thought, things that happen and what we think about those things happening – so many different ways we could approach the world.

What often matters is finding a way that works for us.

It’s what I’ve thought of as “models” for a while – perhaps what Peter Checkland calls a “holon” – and something that might be captured by Dennett’s concept of an “intuition pump”.

This is something that “focuses the reader’s attention on the ‘important features'” – something perhaps like I do in the model above.

Although what I’ve done is draw some circles around a random bunch of squiggles.

Still, perhaps, looking at those sections of squiggles can help us make some sense of what’s going on.

And I think that’s the point.

We’ve got to a stage in human evolution where just thinking about things isn’t enough.

There are tools that can help – and I suppose we are taught quite a few of these in school.

But many of us then forget these, or don’t go on to learn more tools, and end up trying to get through life on our bare brains alone.

What I see is that approach leads to discontent and worry and stress.

I remember, early in my career, as experiences piled up and I found it harder and harder to get what was happening.

And then I went back to university, did a management degree, and was introduced to models and ways of thinking that helped me make sense of the experiences I had had.

All of a sudden the feelings fell away – having words to describe what was going on meant that I could understand it better, and so there was no more need for feelings of doubt or inadequacy or shame.

Making sense of things matters – but there is no grand “sense” that we all share.

Instead, you have to make your own personal sense of things – but having good mental tools will help.

Some of which I have tried to use as I write this blog – the point of which really is to help me make sense of the world around me.

I hope it helps you as well.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh