Hacking . Health . Heuristics

Agile PM and Yoga: Parallels and cross-pollinations

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 21:44:00 +0000

My own formal project management training is pretty limited. I've attended some Melbourne Meetup groups, read a few books and articles, and tried to apply some of the principles to web projects.

However I do know about Yoga.

And since yoga is all about being lean, and agile, I figured that there might be a few parallels I could draw.

- Check out the presentation here

Image by Zach Dischner

Social climbing for the lose

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 21:41:00 +0000

I have long been an adherent of kaizen – the principle of making slow, incremental improvements.

You can apply Kaizen to personal development, designing motorcycles, saving money, building a website, and writing a doctoral thesis, and Agile project management.

Following Kaizen is more than embracing the spirit of progress – it is about conscious progress.

After all, I have worked on numerous multi-million dollar professional projects that were admirably ambitious, with all the KPIs and Gantt charts you could want.

Yet these projects failed to deliver – in part, because they lacked the sanity checks that allow for valuable (and sometimes critical) course corrections.

I subsequently embraced Kaizen out of a revolt of these conventional, linear project methodologies.

Rather than setting lofty goals – and getting validation that you were on the right path only when it was too late to change direction – I embraced short ‘sprints’ and tight feedback loops.

In general, I have gained a lot of satisfaction from this approach.

Yet I will admit that sometimes I took ‘continuous improvement’ a little too far, and too literally, particularly in regards to work and relationships.

In exploring the curious world of online dating, for instance, I kept finding myself asking – ‘Can I do better?’

In prior relationships, the thought that I might simply be settling had always worried me a little – and so I overcompensated: going from one extreme to the other.

I floated from one date to another, never really ‘landing’ – spending countless hours trading yarns over coffee with people whom, not that long ago, would have made my day simply by making eye contact.

Yet in the back of my mind during such dates, I was wondering how I might trade up – to ‘graduate’ from one rung of the ladder to the next.

I was no longer anxious about the person sitting in front of me – but rather about those who remained ‘out there’.

Having an abundance mentality can be a double-edged sword – being ‘wowed’ by the variety and quantity of the goods that are out there can ironically lead to a bit of ‘glass half-empty thinking’

Swamped by a sea of possibilities, I lost confidence in my own standards

So instead, I deferred to the standards of others.

I no longer assessed people based on whether they were healthy for me – but rather whether they would bring me cred among my peers.

This in turn allowed others to appeal to my vanity – the consequences of which were most visibly in some of my career choices.

I went to a second job interview, assuming that – as with most job interviews I had attended – my job was to convince my interview panel why they should offer me the job.

Half way through the interview, I realized it was actually the other way around – that the marketing agency was actually trying to convince me to take the role

I was so besotted that I took the job – and in doing so, allowed myself to be flattered into an arrangement that, some five weeks later, I realized to be neither respectful nor healthy.

I realized the mistake that I had made yet I continued to step into that same pothole.

A couple of months later I had offers of employment from two equally awesome organisations, and I found myself like the tale of two donkeys: paralysed in the choice between two mutually exclusive goals.

Again, I focused more on the selection process than the job itself – accepting the offer of the manager who had pitched me the job with the greatest enthusiasm.

I then spent the next several months at my new job wondering how I had gone from a Professional Writing degree – to a career as a digital producer.

I had worked so hard to move to the 'Yes' – never refusing an invitation, never resisting the unfamiliar – that I had forgotten how to say to ‘No’.

I was answering every profile that right-swiped me back, taking any offer of a recruitment agency that wined and dined me.

I thought that I was being adventurous by accepting to every opportunity that availed itself.

Yet playing the field actually ended up meaning playing it safe.

Rather than trying to better myself – I was trying to better my perceived status.

Rather than slowly trying to succeed – I was trying to get better indicators of my success.

Rather than enjoying or dignifying where I was at the time – I was seeking validations.

Rather than wanting to be somewhere, I wanted a sense of momentum – and the assurance that I was always working my way forward towards something, or someone, better.

Rather than using the principles of gradual, incremental improvements to improve my ‘lot’ – I had begun to idolize the very trophies I had sworn to ignore.

It is easy to blame – or indeed to credit – this kind of thinking on the individualistic, even mercenary culture in which we find ourselves; on the school of thought that dissatisfaction, and ambition, is the root of all human progress.

Yet I believe that this is a cover for what is really going on: a need to measure our own progress in life – our improvement, our evolution, our comparative value – through socially determined performance indicators.

We want the validation – of increasingly improved associations – so that we might feel better about ourselves.

A problem with this approach is that we fixate on a *relative* ‘anchor’ for our sense of quality – instead of an absolute one.

Thus, rather than being a source of individualistic empowerment, competing against others actually gives more power to the ‘collective’.

‘Playing the field’ seemed to make sense from a strategic perspective, because it would presumably allow us to negotiate from a ‘position of strength’.

Yet this reflects some very cynical thinking as it assumes that others are constantly trying to take advantage of us.

We are also letting the views of others to determine our life choices, as we live in fear that others, whose opinions matter to us so much, will think poorly of us if we are single and unemployed for instance – when either state is totally okay.

Most importantly, it reflects a very poor view of our own worth – and underrates our own resilience and resourcefulness. [1]

Retrospectives

Since realizing this ‘dark side of progressive improvement’, I have also learned to treat myself – and my processes – a little more critically.

I like the idea of ‘failing forward’, for instance – probably since I feel like I fail quite frequently.

Yet there can be the risk that we start to conflate progress *just* with number of attempts.

Yes, Thomas Edison learned countless different ways of how *not* to design a batter or light bulb – yet I assume he also followed some systematic approach (such as adjusting a single variable at a time).

This is where retrospectives are important: it is not enough to screw up, one must also ask how – to look, Janus-like, backwards as well as forward.

Knowing thy self

I have learned to be more confident in my own assessments.

I am, for instance, a big fan of privileging of systems over goals: heading in the right direction, for instance – rather than being fixated on a singular, specific outcome.

Yet the process by which we determine the ‘right direction’ is incredibly personal.

Scott Adams, for instance, describes about the CEO he met on a plane whose career climbing system consisted of applying for a better job – no matter how much he enjoyed his current one.

“Your job isn’t to do your job,” Adams argues. “Your job is to get a better job.”

Yet how do we define ‘Better’? By the salary that we are paid? By the prestige of the title that is bequeathed us? By the work-life balance and office culture?

If the recruiter’s values differ from our own, then no matter how enthusiastically and sincerely they have promoted our place of prospective employment, we are probably going to have a bad time.

For instance, if they mention collaborative open plan office and the foosball table in the kitchen, the chance of promoting you to a managerial role, and continuing employment – none of these things are of value if we are an introvert, a fan of non-hierarchal, lattice-like organisational structures, and actually prefer high-intensity and well paying short-term contracts.

Life is a series of calculated trade-offs, which is why focusing on what is important to ourselves is thus crucial.

In doing so, we can be confident that our trajectory is indeed one we have chosen. [2]

Back to basics

Lastly, I have also learned the value of getting back to fundamentals – to take one thing at a time.

Rather than biting off more than I can chew – and then chewing like hell – I have tried to focus on savouring each bite; doing a few simple things well rather than many complex things poorly.

Unlike our jet-setting CEO, I resolved to focus on the job at hand – to accept that my job *was* actually to do my job.

Instead of asking myself ‘Is this the best deal that I can get?’ I now ask, ‘Is this the healthiest option for me?’

Endnotes

[1] In a review of the autobiography Born Standing Up, A.H. Chew looks at how Steve Martin had the confidence to quit his life as an established stand-up comedian in favour of a career as a fledging acting:

“How could he just give it up cold turkey? How could he risk it all with nothing else to fall back on?

In truth, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. That said, in a way, as much as Steve had been practicing comedy those eighteen years, he was also practicing something else. Over eighteen years, ten of which were spent literally slumming through backrooms and basement cellars, Steve Martin had developed a more powerful safeguard than any professional “plan B.” He had built a lasting trust and confidence in the work.

Whatever failure he met, whatever success came and went, whatever fits and starts he encountered, there was one thing that always endured, that he could always come back to; the pursuit of his craft.”

[2] Author Neal Gaiman offers some powerful and practical advice on the matter:

“Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.

And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.”

While Gaiman refers to his ‘distant mountain’ as a goal, it is more a kind of moral compass – sufficiently abstract in its destination, and fixated more on values then outcome, that we could call it a system by another name.

It is also worth noting how little money ever factored into his choice of work – or at least starting from the failure to launch his just-for-the-money Duran Duran biography, which he now describes as the worst thing he has ever written.

Image by Anna Gearhart

How group fitness classes solve a First World problem

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 20:01:00 +0000

A few years back I read a blog post by the cartoonist and blogger Scott Adams on how the value of university study has changed over time.

The crux of his argument: historically the world was not that intellectually complex a place in which to live.

Thus, he argued, it was necessary to go out of your way if you really wanted to stretch your mental muscles – for instance, to an institution singularly dedicated to learning.

Having emerged from such an institution, we would be better prepared to handle the one per cent of events that demanded some exceptional cognitive versatility.

More that our brains hurt in times of peace – the less we would bleed in times of cognitive war.
Furthermore, since students studied the full breadth of fields, universities strengthened their mental aptitude across the whole spectrum of ideas.

Yet at some tipping point, reality has become more complex than that for which any university could adequately prepare its students - even if you wish to become an expert in a single, obscure domain.

The territory is finally more elaborate than the map – and the age of the polymath or Renaissance man is over.

Adams, being very much a business-oriented man, was probably thinking of this in vocational terms – so there are bound to be whole domains that remain exception to his rule.

In any case, his point was that there is no reason to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars on tuition fees to acquire an education – particularly when the real world can provide this same education freely.

Regardless though of whether you agree with it, Adams’ model may serve us a useful illustration for another ‘tipping point’ that history has witnessed – albeit in reverse.

It used to be that the world would force us to exert ourselves physically every time that we stepped outside into the world.

Our environment, both natural and urban, would keep ourselves functionally fit – even if resentfully so – simply as a matter of course.

This meant that a lot of sport – whether bike riding, or running, or gyms – was largely unnecessary to the masses, at least for the health benefits.

Burning calories, and appreciating our physicality, was simply an inevitable part of day-to-day existence – no membership required.

Gyms may well have existed some 3 000 years ago in Greece, Rome, and Persia – and yet these were interdisciplinary in an even wider sense of the term, linking thinking with lifting.

Reading took place after bathing, and cultivating a pleasing form was a collective obsession regardless of one’s sexual orientation.

Similarly, their re-emergence was due largely to military necessity – in 19th century Prussia, the gym mantra: ‘The more you sweat in times of war, the less you’ll bleed in times of peace’ would have been quite literal.

The subsequent emergence of the first commercial gymnasiums – and the mainstreaming of lifting – is probably the tipping point to which I earlier referred.

Today, some two centuries later, the middle- and upper-class have zero hope that their standard routine will provide them with a sufficient workout.

The world no longer requires us to have to elevate our heart rate or push our VO2 levels – and even when it comes to warfare, the new weapon of choice is a joystick and drone.

The culprits, of course, include desk-jobs, text-based learning, escalators, and peak-hour traffic – resulting in hunched shoulders, strained eyes, and poor cardio.

Technology has helped us make our lives too convenient for our own good.

Thus, it has become imperative – for our own physical and mental health – for us to make time to carry out weird, repetitive movements that a handful of generations previous would have made zero sense.

Making these movements requires an enormous system of rationalization to others and ourselves.

We are now like the young Daniel Waterhouse, would-be Doctor of Philosophy in Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver, attempting to convince our Puritan father on the value of continuing a formal education alongside our geeky classmate, Isaac Newton.

Instead of trying to defend freethinking in a theocracy, though, we are explaining why we ‘have’ to hit the gym.

Moreover, we are conducting this pro-fitness debate in an age when we can Uber our way from our doorstep to the train station, PT to our workplace, spend our entire day at a desk, and five days a week.

In our attempts to substantiate our life style choice, we create enormous ceremonies around movement – like colour runs, and triathlons.

Such events are crucial to testing or mettle when opportunities to prove our prowess – for instance, by dragging someone unconscious from a burning building – are otherwise exceedingly rare (unless we are a professional firefighter, that is).

Alternatively, we play down our Yoga as exercise by calling it ‘a spiritual practice with physical benefits’.

We might claim that our exercise of choice helps us cultivate functional fitness – but strictly speaking, we can actually ‘get away’ with not exercising.

At least until we have our first heart attack or stroke, that is.

Image by Tony Felgueiras

Elections as Turing Test

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 01:04:00 +0000

Silicon Valley and friends believed that they would liberate people from work by designing self-operating looms.

Instead, however, they have robbed people of their livelihoods.

This might not be of such consequence in, say, a southern European state – due perhaps to more compassionate welfare states and a Catholic work ethic.

Yet countries such as the United States have a very strong coupling of dignity – and health insurance – with employment.

Making cool stuff is the ‘Turing Test’ of our modern age.

When robots start making that cool stuff we congratulate ourselves for creating a smart machine.

Yet in replacing the roles of the working-class with that smart machine, we have set up those workers to fail, made them look like idiots, and robbed them of their humanity.

Creating industries that can churn out incredibly cheap stuff can make things more affordable.

Yet in doing so we have also robbed people of their very purchasing power – including their ability to buy even such aforementioned cheap stuff.

Jaron Lanier refers to this as the Local-Global Flip – such as when shopping centers undercut the prices of the mum-and-pop stores, send them out of business, so that no one can even afford to live (let alone shop) in the area anymore.

Lanier argues that technological and logistic-superior an organisation like Wal-Mart are too effective and successful for its own good.

These commercial predators inadvertently wipe out the rest of the food chain on which they ultimately depend.

Silicon Valley – and the hyper-efficiencies of globalization that it enables and represents – is just a virtual equivalent of Wal-Mart.

This has probably caused certain demographics – specifically the working class – a serious technological-skepticism that even a love of smart phones has failed to counteract.

This skepticism has affected not only the kinds of policies that favored in a political candidate – but also the *kind* of candidate that is favored.

For instance, Clinton’s very self-restraint and measurement– traits typically associated with efficiency and good judgment – during, say, her Senatorial hearings, arguably doomed her.

Clinton lost herself in the uncanny valley – much like the cyborg Replicants in Blade Runner that reveal their lack of empathy during interrogation.

She may well be highly connected, super-intelligent, and very adaptive – yet these are the very traits that we are starting to fear in machines.

So rather than that playing in her favor as a Presidential candidate, she instead came off as a kind of living embodiment of technological over-encroachment.

She was the personification of small-world networks, Big Data, translation programs, and driverless cars.

Trump is certainly not a very likeable human – yet his ‘familiarity’ could be far more reassuring for many people when compared to his ‘black box’ adversary.

He might be ‘all too human’ – yet in this age of the simulacra it is better to be a money-hungry Tyrell than a ‘femme fatale’.

Image by mini malist

Intersectionality – and men

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:54:00 +0000

‘Intersectionality’ describes the confluence of privilege and disadvantage that intersects identity.

It recognizes that a matrix of attributes – such as race, class, and sexual orientation – influences our position on the social rung.

For example – a bisexual, working-class woman of color has a significantly different experience with patriarchy compared to a straight, middle-class white woman.

Intersectionality is a useful tool in helping make visible the relative privileges that would otherwise be invisible to those who hold it.

However, a couple of assumptions seem to stand out.

One is an underlying assumption that gender is the strongest, most prevalent thread among this intersectional tapestry.

A consequence of this is the tacit belief that loyalty to one’s gender should naturally trump one’s loyalty to family, community, profession, and economic obligation – such as, for instance, one’s credit rating.

Trump’s rise to power at the behest of a substantial proportion of women has started to challenge the realism of that belief.

Secondly, is that intersectionality is referenced almost exclusively in terms of women.

By this logic, even the most disadvantaged males in history had more privilege compared to the wealthiest women.

Some might argue that the disadvantage men face against other men are, on average, negligible compared to the inequalities between men and women.

They might further argue that economic systems – engineered almost exclusively by men – are a means of formalizing these inequalities.

By that rationale, capitalism should terrifically illustrate men’s devotion in their collective conspiracy against women.

For instance, everyone seems to agree that corporations exist largely to generate wealth for their stakeholders.

Yet these same profit-oriented corporations prefer employing men in spite of male worker’s 15-18 per cent premium.

So great, in fact, is this supposed-nepotism towards fellow-males that not a single successful company has opted to reduce its payroll costs by 18 per cent.

If this is all starting to sound a bit weird, then it probably means you are experiencing the effects of cognitive dissonance.

One has to decide then whether profit or patriarchy is the overriding priority of capitalism – because it cannot be both.

Consider, for instance, that men have quite happily subjugated other men in favor of profit – case in point: slavery. Furthermore, when societies have abolished said slavery, have they done so out of a newfound sense of brotherly love – or based on economic drivers? My money at least is on amoral, bottom-line oriented capitalism.

As Heather Norum writes:

“Just because the vast majority of people in power are men, that doesn’t mean that the vast majority of men are in positions of power. This is where the concept of the kyriarchy becomes so useful. Due to class, race, sexual orientation, etc. plenty of men are actually quite disempowered.”

(This may all sound a little abstract and academic; yet taking the position that economics rather than gender drives Western society may help us come to terms with the election results. For instance, it might be a little easier for us to accept why middle- and working-class men *and* women voted for Trump.)

Thus, recognizing the nuances of power balances should include considerations to men as well as to women.

Even labelling someone as being an angry white male comes across like a crude means of scapegoating one demographic for historic and contemporary injustices.

We each draw from an enormous history – our ancestor’s as well as our own – and each miniscule aspect contributes to the decisions that we make, the loyalties we form, and the candidate for whom we vote.

The elaborate matrix of identity and loyalties that constitute each individual extends far beyond simply gender.

While economics may not actually be the strongest ‘thread’, however, focusing on gender as the predominant feature in our identity seems unsophisticated.

Gender theory thus becomes a kind of unified field theory of identity that ignores the shifts in priority as cultural values – and conditions – change.

Image by Sam Leighton

Why did anyone vote for Trump?

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:50:00 +0000

Trump’s support base was very strong among the jaded: those who felt that things were worse off since the last election – and probably would be for at least another generation.

These supporters acknowledged Trump had a bad attitude towards women – and even about his electorate in general.

However, what was most important to them was that he was going to bring the change they desperately desired.

They were willing to take a gamble on someone that they agreed lacked experience and even good judgment.

“And in their desperation,” to quote Alfred Pennyworth, “they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.”

Someone who would give them their safe jobs back – and ensure that their children would have one as well.

Because employed is more than just being able to being able to afford a nice house in the suburbs – it is about dignity.

Trump’s support was admittedly very strong in the older, white, less educated, Protestant male demographic.

Yet arguably, this was because they were more likely to feel jaded.

For this demographic, status among one’s family and peers comes from being a provider: an earner, a taxpayer, an industrious worker, as a contributor to one’s community.

We have socialized working class Protestant males into associating dignity with having a productive job.

Then we replaced their spot on the production line with a robot.

This is why they voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Furthermore, this is why those *women* who are dependent on – and profit from – the success of these older, worker class Protestant males would have also voted for Trump.

Of course, it is comparatively easier on our ego to blame a migrant for stealing our jobs than a machine.

Furthermore, it is easier for a politician to propose building a wall against such migrants – than a moratorium on technology.

After all, we still really do like our smart phones – even if we cannot afford to pay the bills.

Furthermore, there is actually a lot more optimism in such scapegoating.

By blaming foreign – or imported – workers on our misfortunes, there is the implication that we can take our jobs back, and re-open those factories domestically.

We have a much greater struggle at hand if the decline of the middle class in the United States that Trump promises to arrest is instead due to automation.

Trump is helping his voters fight to get back what he or she had – against an economic and electronic machine that is fighting because it does not know how to do anything else.

Image by Gage Skidmore

Why did so many women vote for Trump?

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:47:00 +0000

I would have been surprised if even a single woman had have voted for Trump.

It would have still been horrifying and bizarre had a quarter of women voted for him.

Yet the exit-poll numbers indicate that 46 per cent of women decided against voting for Clinton.

How could the majority of a demographic be directly or de facto in favor of a candidate who held them in such contempt?

What aspect of a person’s self-identity might lead them to forging such an alliance?

Did this group of women vote for him because it was enough that he was white – in a country predominantly white?

Alternatively, was it – as Bernie Sanders suggested – class?

Were women voting on behalf of the working- and middle-class men in their lives – whose workplaces were now the “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”?

People vote with their hip pocket in mind – rather than anything else in their pants –and they appreciated Trump because he appeared to appreciate their financial plight.

Consider, for instance, that in addition to the fifty-five per cent of white women who voted for the candidate in spite of him boasting about sexually assaulting women – there was also the 28 percent of Latinos who voted for the same candidate who also (richly) accused Mexicans of being rapists.

White women and naturalized Latinos voted for him because perhaps because they have up-to-date LinkedIn profiles – and are safe from deportation.

Unlike those ‘other’ Latinos on the other side of the fence, or black women – they have ‘arrived’; they are at home.

Non-Caucasians and women may indeed be ‘internal exiles’ in a Caucasian and patriarchal society.

Yet they still jealously guard their territory gains against the ‘external exiles’: the women and people-of-color even more disenfranchised, who would only serve as competition.

Thus, they put aside their own immediate moral qualms – in order to prioritize their more financial loyalties and interests.

Of course, we can continue to argue that gender – and race – is still more objectively important than economics.

The implications start to look even less appealing and dignifying however.

After all, the only other way to explain away Trump’s large female and Latino support-base is to blame it on false consciousness.

But that’s a *lot* of women and Latinos – which would equate to a lot of self-subjugation and self-hatred.

Does Feminism, at the least, have such a low opinion of women and other subaltern’s subjectivity?

Alternatively, does Feminism take for granted that it is at the forefront of people’s political minds?

After all, the exit polls suggest that overall, gender *was barely even a factor* in people’s voting choice.

Maybe we all need to start, like George R.R. Martin, on considering “women to be people.”

Thus, asking ‘Why did so many women vote for Trump?’ is possibly the wrong question.

Maybe the better question is – ‘Why did *anyone* vote for Trump?’

Image by meg

Is there such a thing as a gender-based voting bloc?

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:43:00 +0000

Much hand wringing occurred in the aftermath of last year’s November U.S. Presidential election.

Particularly concerning was exit poll results that showed 53 per cent of white women voted in favor of Trump.

The choice of so many women to vote for Trump – and thus, seemingly against their own self-interest – befuddled many.

In their defense, those on the Left seemed to argue that they were entitled to vote in their own self-interest for whomever they chose – as unenlightened as that decision may have been.

Meanwhile, those on the triumphant Right pointed out that it was presumptuous for Clinton simply to take for granted the loyalty of women regardless of any other factors.

For instance, in one beautifully titled article – Dear Fellow White Women: We Fucked This Up – commenters argued that Hillary’s winning of the popular vote showed that women did the best they could and/or that the elections were fundamentally flawed.

Others pointed out that Feminism had worked hard to give women the right and confidence to vote.

Furthermore, they argue, women were entitled to vote in favor of whomever aligns with their own opinions – the bases of which these commenters consistently declined to substantiate.

Thus, the argument goes, it is actually ‘anti-feminist’ and anti-women to accuse them of voting for a blatantly misogynistic old white male – even if that is in contrast to a politically experienced woman.

Meanwhile, others would complain that Hillary was (somehow) corrupt, or that “she didn't even like identifying as women so please, tell me, as a white woman, how I am supposed to support her?”

Among all of this, both the Left and Right agreed – women were not a ‘natural’ voting bloc.

This thought may seem incredibly strange – how could women, subject to such a history of oppression, fail to value gender-based solidarity?

That the male candidate came across as so incredibly misogynist makes it even harder to understand women’s apparent failure to form a coherent political bloc.

An informed, connected, and population of women voters – possessing all of the same technological and cognitive tools as their male counterparts – should instead be able to put aside their own temporary self-interests.

They will then instead act for their own collective interest – in this case: the dismantling of the patriarchy.

After all, patriarchy is only possible because men put aside their individual alliances – whether they be economic, racial, or whatever – aside and banding together in a collective enterprise to divvy up the women folk.

Political power forms primary along gender line, and men have exploited this alignment with tremendous success over history.

If men can do that – surely women can as well. Right?

Yet there is an uncomfortable implication if we take the position that women are not – and/or should not try to be – a ‘natural’ political bloc.

Namely, that it may force us to consider that maybe men do not form such a natural political bloc either.

Perhaps men have not acted in a coordinated, formal fashion on the scale and formality that we have presumed.

Like women – perhaps men are not as single-minded in their gender-based political agendas as to put aside all other interests, whether they be economic, or ideological, or whatever.

Some would argue that the greatest trick Patriarchy could possibly pull would be to convince the world – like the devil and Keyser Söze – it does not exist.

Yet perhaps patriarchy really is less of a boogey man then we have come to imagine.

I would think that this would be an empowering and encouraging possibility.

It would mean, for instance, that women would not feel so obliged to try emulating a non-existent model.

Nor would women need to feel so bad when they failed to follow a fictional precedent.

Image by Hamed Saber

Some crib notes on world domination

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 04:32:00 +0000

I am compiling some advice on Total War: Empire in the hope that it will make me feel better about the 350 hours I have apparently spent on this crazy-epic Real Time Tactical game.

Numerical superiority

On land

In one memorable confrontation, I sized off against Poland-Lithuania, who had a good chunk of central and Eastern Europe – that is, until I started taking over.

They were one of the biggest player in other words – second only to the Maratha Confederacy

(Incidentally, I attacked the Maratha Confederacy first because being in India my territorial expansion rating would not affect my relationship with the European powers.)

In this war against Poland-Lithuania, the essential ingredient for the kind of warfare I conducted was overwhelming, high quality forces.

To give a little context: this was the year 1820, by which time everyone had discovered everything.

Thus, having upgraded their infrastructure accordingly, we all had access to the same top-tier units.

In other words, technology was no longer a domain in which we could gain an advantage – you cannot outflank people on the tech-tree when there is nowhere else to go.

The key advantage that you then have is simply matching quality – and excelling in quantity and strategy.

There are some exceptions to this – Poland-Lithuania in particular does well to field its limited-edition units: elite infantry, some amazing cavalry, and that badass Puckle Gun.

There are also some very cheap, irregular enemy infantry with amazing range that have caused many a larger unit of mine to route even when buddied up.

However, the benefits of a couple of puckle guns, or the occasional elite troop, is academic in the context of multiple armies reinforcing one another.

Speaking of which, the maximum number of armies that can be involved in one battle is 10 each.

That 10 consists of the initial fighting or defending force – plus nine reinforcing armies.

Each of these armies can consist of stacks of 20 units each – and at 120 soldiers per standard infantry, that is potentially 24 000 soldiers on each side.

However, auto resolving the battles seems to be the only tenable choice when armies of that kind of number get involved with one another.

Which is a pity since I had looked forward immensely to commanding a battle of even just three or four armies each.

Yet I have not yet figured out how to win against such numbers in a standard pitched battle.

In part, this is because the AI is a lot more efficient at bringing in fresh reinforcements that simply overwhelm my defenses.

One exception is if I am defending a fortification, where I have very clear advantage.

Any enemy units that manage to enter a star fortress that I hold tend to get very skittish, very quickly.

These enemy units also become the focus of overwhelming numbers since they generally tend to enter via the gates or a gap in the wall – natural choke points that I can cover with multiple, overlapping lines of fire.

Another exception is when I am the one attacking an enemy fortress with multiple reinforcing armies.

In such scenarios, the enemy generally tends to send their reinforcements into the fray in a much easier-to-manage stream.

Thus, it is possible to demolish a much larger opponent often using just the primary force –while units from my reinforcing armies merely lend a hand

Lime shots and other such mortar or artillery attacks are brilliant (hats off to whoever recommended this online) against defending enemy units that tend to all swarm on one pointed corner of a star fortress.

I can thus target their gathered forces with an endless series of area attacks, using old-school chemical warfare, from a distance.

Not having to micromanage every single battle is one of the key benefits of having superior numbers.

In fact, you are likely playing the wrong way if you find yourself fighting an uninterrupted series of teeth-gritting battles.

This is the best rule that I have learned in playing Medieval 2 – and which Empire really drove home.

The key instead is to field an army of high enough size and quality that even the AI can win on your behalf.

In other words: have battles where you take control not in order to ensure victory – but rather to keep your casualty rate down, and reduce the number of enemies that escape.

You can win battle after battle; however, if the opponent is grinding you down, sieging your city at every turn and raiding your towns, then that region is not earning you any income.

Furthermore, the army that you are using to defend it – and the time you are spending in your life – is running at a loss.

Conversely, you can lose a battle – defending a fortress for instance – and inflict such incredible losses on the opponent that you will be laughing at the end, particularly when you retake the fortress afterwards with ease.

Create a situation that gives the enemy pause both strategically and tactically.

There will of course also be times – as when you are attacking their capital – in which they will not back off.

You will then need to do a bit of micromanaging and finessing – but that is the cost of genocide.

At sea

As sea battles do not interest me as much as their land-based counterparts, having sea superiority also helped tremendously.

I find it vastly preferable and practical to build a full stack of the top-of-the-range ships, auto-resolve the battles in which they engage, and then sell off any captured ships.

Second ship of the lines come relatively quickly - First ships of the line take a bit longer yet are worth it.

Such fleets are so expensive to build and maintain that you need a great economy – which not all nations can afford.

However, you can subsidize their cost by raiding trade routes.

The best trading routes to raid would be the ones going from the Mediterranean south through the Atlantic to India, and west to the Americas.

When you blockade the former, you are also blocking every trade theatre.

Also important to send ships to a friendly and operational dock after every battle and resupply – doing so only takes a single turns as well.

I also recommend positioning ships in choke points near Gibraltar and London for instance, so that you can contain any enemy ships and – with enough fleets – even contain ‘allied’ ships.

With such armadas, I managed to sink numerous enemy fleets that have carried very impressive armies – and doing so has saved me from some painful and expensive battles.

I have then also been able to ferry my own armies to the front lines – and with only a small escort of ships.

This is particularly useful since moving troops around by sea is much faster than by even the best road.

Ferrying armies from city to city is particularly expedient along the South American coastline.

In addition, if you dominate the sea you can ensure that the only fronts on which an opponent will generally attack you will be a direct land route – you can then concentrate your forces there. (In general, try not to open up more than a single front.)

My coastal cities are now typically free from invasions – meaning less costly-to-maintain garrisons.

(However, India and America are probably the exceptions on that last point. There, I learned the hard way I would still need to defend with some sizable armies – some of which I could quickly mobilize across the theatre. My defending forces probably became overkill – since France and Poland ended up fighting for survival on their home ground – however, it beat constantly having to retake my often-isolated colonial cities.)

Managing your armies

Where to garrison

Be selective with your military and fleets – every unit is costing you.

It is very effective to fortify those cities with premium buildings capable of producing the top-tier units – and then to leave the rest defenseless, save for their standard militia.

Then have a few rapid-response armies in the theatre – which you can send to any flashpoints via sizable fleets.

Yes, the enemy can take a few of your minor – and largely insignificant – cities with their own invading force.

However, you can crush these with your mobile defense force.

In short, it is expensive and unnecessary to try to defend everywhere equally.

Being ready to move a large, quality force to where the battle is at is much more cost effective.

At the same time, make sure that the army-production centers remain always under your control.

This allows you to build more units should conflicts take more than a couple of turns to resolve.

Resupplying armies

Reinforcing units so that they are always at full strength is far preferable to wasting time merging units.

Units take two turns to repopulate regardless of whether they are in enemy territory or off-road.

Having several armies supporting one another, with deficient units constantly set to resupply, should ensure that you maintain sufficient dominance in an area, and allowing you to work slowly away at the enemy

Having these masses of armies grouped together means they can easily hold their ground against attacking enemy armies – and intercept any passing forces.

While any army that is actively involved in reinforcing the primary army loses many of its movement points, this can force you to take a gentler pace.

You can slowly turtle your way towards an enemy city, for instance – easily swatting away any attacking forces, while constantly resupplying.

Strongpoints

Conquering enemy cities and fortresses are the milestones for territorial gains.

You can defend these strongpoints much easier – and in taking cities, you reduce the enemy’s economy and ability to support their war machine while boosting your own.

Taking enemy towns has no real strategic advantage as they have no real defensive benefits – and raiding them just makes them more expensive to repair when you have taken over the region.

Fortresses can be cool, and choke points – like around the Alps – are natural places for them.

In addition, you can discourage any attacks by upgrading such defensive positions long before any conflict might arise.

This is particularly relevant if you are expecting a very slow moving front or needing to stay on the defensive against a large force.

Conversely, forget about fortresses if you are expect to sweep through enemy territory.

Similarly, if you can take most of their cities – particularly their ‘home’ regions you can even forget about their forces.

No matter how many armies and fleets that they have, all will vanish should you destroy the nation to which they belong.

Army composition

Actual composition of each army has been a constantly evolving balancing act.

Artillery

Cavalry artillery are certainly mobile – which lets you quickly reposition them mid battle.

However, I rarely utilized this option, and they have lower power – and take longer to unlimber – than other artillery.

Howitzers are great for area attacks and non-line-of-sight targeting – meaning that you can place them behind a hill or within a fortress and they can still be effective.

24-lber foot artillery are the best for the field – and let you use some terrific anti-infantry shots closer to range.

The placement of your artillery is crucial however – particularly when it comes to puckle guns.

Ideally, place artillery high up on a slope so they have a wide field of fire.

Moreover, you need to place artillery so that line infantry can defend them against any enemies that get too close – without that same artillery shooting them from behind.

One solution is to place grenadiers just behind the artillery so that they can throw grenades *over* the artillery at an enemy force.

However, this relies on the enemy instantly routing.

A second solution is to nestle artillery in between supporting infantry.

The third – and ideal – option is to have them much higher up a hill, behind infantry that are down below, so that artillery can shoot over the defending infantry; however, always keeping infantry in the rear in case enemy cavalry running behind your lines.

The third is hard to come by however, as there are rolling fields but few steep hills in Total War: Empire compared to Medieval II.

Howitzers and mortars get around this problem as they shoot over infantry no matter the terrain.

However, they are a lot poorer at accurately targeting enemies that are closer range – without also hitting your own troops that is.

Cavalry

Cavalry are certainly not as powerful and useful as in the middle ages.

Cavalry can only go against infantry when swarming – that is, in groups of several cavalry units – or against a small and poorly defending infantry such as riflemen.

Cavalry’s best use is running out and attacking enemy artillery, massacring routing enemy units if you are feeling vindictive – and quickly patching some hole in your defenses.

Yet even shoring up wavering, friendly forces is just a stopgap measure until more infantry can arrive.

In Medieval 2: Total War – as well as in real life – the Mongol mounted archers were some of the most versatile and powerful troopers.

In Empire, however, the equivalent – for instance mounted Indian riflemen – are one-hit wonders.

These units are small in number (60), chicken out quickly, and they take a long time to get around to their second round since they all fire at once.

Dragoons are a similar compromise – they let you to get infantry out to the front line quickly, however their low number (60) means that one unit of Dragoons is only ever going to be as half as powerful as an equivalent line infantry.

Infantry

Quality line infantry are the backbone of any army and you should disband any ‘low grade’ infantry.

Having a few grenadiers can be magic in making a large number of enemy infantry route in a short time – as long as the enemy infantry is shooting at another group of line infantry while the grenadiers have time to get into range.

Grenadiers are also brilliant when defending a fortress as they can rain explosives down on enemy infantry.

This is in sharp contrast to defending infantry – who do not seem to care about shooting at attacking forces from on top of a wall.

Riflemen are also terrific: their 120 range – unlike the 60 or 70 of regular line infantry –means that they have a massive range of fire that softens the morale of an attacking force.

In doing so, they can help give your regular line infantry a much easier time at standing their ground.

Colonial infantry from India are less than ideal, as they are lower on many of the stats.

American colonial infantry are very similar in stats to their European counterparts – however, trying to merge units and get them up to full strength is frustrating (while their icon looks identical, they are not interchangeable).

Special units

Puckle guns are great – rocket artillery, overrated.

One-off limited-edition infantry are nice – yet insignificant when it comes to mass invasions.

Moreover, since you cannot merge them with other units they can be a lot harder to keep at full strength.

An ‘elite’ army

1 general
6 elite infantry
4 elite cavalry
3 puckle guns
2 24-lber artillery
2 24-lber howitzer
2 rocket launchers

A regular army

1 general
7 line infantry
2 riflemen
2 grenadiers
2 cavalry
2 24-lber foot artillery
2 24-lber howitzer
2 mortars

The key here is a nice spread of ranges and strengths: the above combination has the whole ‘map dominating’ range of the mortars – down to the close range of the grenades and everything in between.

Forcing the opposing army to come to you gives you a huge advantage – since any time they are moving, they are not shooting, and you are shooting at them instead.

Being able to adapt to any enemy combination is crucial.

While there can be a huge range of opponent armies – they are also predictable.

The Maratha Confederacy are still big on melee units for instance.

While these might seem outdated when faced with line infantry, it also makes them much more likely to swarm attack – particularly since they have no other option.

Moreover, they are good at swarming, so you need to build an awesome – and probably multi layered – defense that can withstand that kind of offensive.

Furthermore, you need to deal with the enormous fixed artillery that they tend to lug with them.

Nation and theatre-specific strategies

England

Playing the English is probably the easiest and most vanilla nation.

Moreover, the AI rarely attacks the British Isles except by blockading its ports.

You can make your ports blockade-proof through placing one infantry unit in each port – and having a nice fleet on standby.

You can then max out the infrastructure in the British Isles – giving you a terrific foundation for expansion.

United Provinces

On the very-hard difficulty settings for both strategic and tactical, playing the United Provinces is difficult indeed.

My dream was to become an all-neutral trading supplier – however, this plan was already frustrated by 1805.

French and Spanish invaded my South American city, cutting off trading routes, and raiding ports – and pirates threatened my East Indies trade theatre.

Moreover, two of my trade partners (along with England) were major Indian powers.

This meant that Plan B - making territorial gains exclusively in India – would have been very expensive.

Thus, one first needs to do a lot of cleaning up – getting rid of pirate scum, securing trade routes, and building defendable cities that are worth investing in.

I gave away my island colony in the Americas, and my mainland colony, as I could not be bothered holding out against the French there.

Moreover, a big trade economy was only an option once I had a sizable navy with which to attack anyone blocking my trade route.

This left the two regions in continental Europe whose economy I slowly developed.

These cities were the only constant and reliable money stream with which to finance my more ambitious endeavors.

After a very slow start, my European cities served as a military launch pad to make bold but successful attacks – and ultimately conquests – against my much larger neighbors.

Then I could afford to dream about building a global trading empire.

Target: India and the Americas

India is probably the best place to make territorial gains, as doing so will only alienate the Maratha Confederacy and the trivial United Provinces.

Thus, you can take the entire sub-continent without falling out of favor with any real European power.

The Americas can then be the next best target – though be prepared to go to war against the Spanish and French eventually.

You will also win by ‘World domination’ should you gain most of those theatres’ regions.

Other considerations

Spies

I should probably have spent more time on getting Spies out into the enemy field – which would have given me a much better idea of the enemy’s disposition.

Instead, I had to get quite conservative when moving my armies around – keeping them with sufficient reinforcements so that they could survive against any attacks from beyond the fog of war.

Alliances

Having friends *can* sometimes be useful.

However, as the English, I cancelled all my alliances right off the bat so that stupid wars with the continent did not draw me in – and I could instead focus on my own territorial expansion.

Otherwise, ally yourself with other nations very selectively – making sure that their natural enemies are not going to be much of a threat to you, and/or are also your natural enemies.

Being trade partners with as many nations as possible brings the money in – and builds good will.

Remember, though, that this game is like Survivor – it is often just a matter of time before you have betrayed everyone.

Economy

Maintaining huge fleets and armies is possible through conquests in Europe, or India – and infrastructure improvements.

However, upgrading all infrastructure in India and America is probably excessive.

Many American towns are very poor – and since the populations max out very quickly in many of their cities, the ROI is atrocious.

Yet doing so allowed me to wage large-scale wars even with tax rates set at Low everywhere.

My income was huge – even after the military costs – when the tax rate was set quite high.

Again, dominating all the trade theatres with trade ships might have been excessive; simply getting all those ships out there was slow and annoying.

I suspect this would only have been beneficial when you are trading with a number of other big nations – and when you do not have to worry about any of them attacking your trade ships or trade routes.

I found that making every town and port a moneymaking one is best – particularly when you have a low tax rate.

Keeping city folk happy even without any churches or entertainment facilities is very easy; and people do not care much for religion anyway once you have made all the enlightenment advances.

Fishing ports are a lost opportunity for more trade – and result in only a marginal increase in population; also, you only need a few key shipyards anyway – so more trade ports the better.

Developing infrastructure proportionate to the returns is probably the best idea – so if a town is well off, upgrade it, and if it is not, leave it as is.

Keeping the nobility and middle-class’ tax as low as possible, for as long as possible, will help ensure economic and population growth – which pays off in the end.

About the only point at which you should increase tax is when

your population growth has plateaued – which can certainly happen quickly in the Americas
you really want to invest in basic infrastructure such as roads and farms
you are in all-out war – particularly towards the end of the game – and need to maintain a thoroughly expensive army.

Research

Be strategic in your research choices: for instance – focus on infantry first before broadening out to more effective cavalry and artillery.

Certainly wait until you want to be a major sea power before investing in ship technology.

Research strongly in one craft and not the other – and upgrade accordingly.

Try to upgrade at least one of your towns as soon as the new upgrade becomes available – as this allows further research to be available quicker.

Having a few big universities is of course important – particularly early on when there is a lot to investigate.

There are quite a few research ‘bottlenecks’ later though – so only a few universities can actually be researching at any one time.

These should be the modern universities and/or the ones with all your Gentlemen in them.

Destroying the non-productive universities, and turning them into workshops, will make you more money – and make the people happier.

Image by Chris Devers

Rise of the underdogs

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 03:17:00 +0000

We tend to think of a disenfranchised, repressed, underdog class when we use the term ‘minorities’.

However, that is not always the case – in fact, minorities can often be at or near the top of their respective food chains.

To give a few examples: the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, white South Africans during apartheid, males in Australia, and even England pre the British Empire.

Each of the above were or are technically minorities within their country or region.

Yet each came to dominate – or at least heavily influence – the political landscapes they inhabited.

How can small groups come to hold such power disproportionate power?

Perhaps, such minority groups feel that holding the reins of power is crucial to their very survival.

For them the choice is either dominate others – or wait until others inevitably destroy them.

It is only by forming a united front, turning up the volume and being the ones doing the repressing that they can they avoid extinction.

The risks inherent then in trying to win a war against a larger force no longer seem as daunting.

That is particularly true when you feel that to do nothing will almost undoubtedly result in your obliteration.

When you have won that uneasy peace, the costs of holding onto that power when surrounded by your enemies might no longer seem so expensive.

Plan B is losing what power that you have and thus facing the much greater risk of genocide.

In such circumstances, you may even be content to endure the constant threat of suiciding bombings.

Thus, boldness is a necessary calculated venture – and stubborn resilience becomes a survival strategy.

This can take the form of strategies both brutal but also calculated – one might even have to say clever.

Minorities will ‘divide and conquer’ – breaking their opposition into smaller, more manageable components.

They can then pick off these components individually – or play them off one another.

They will also find scalable, intelligent solutions to problems rather than relying on brute force.

One example would be the case of the United Kingdom.

The UK was once an isolated, sporadically invaded backwater.

Yet it succeeded when it embraced brain over brawn – and strategy and technology over sheer numbers.

Consider, for instance, that the army of the British at its peak was smaller than the Prussian police force.

Also – that their qualitatively superior navy was the only thing holding back a numerically superior force.

By having a big fleet, the British could ‘field’ an enormous number of artillery pieces without the need of defending infantry.

This meant that they could leverage their engineering and industry might – rather than relying on their head-count.

Yet the combined – or even individual – navies of their continental opponents still often outnumbered that of the British.

In these cases, the archipelago’s force still prevailed in fighting asymmetrical warfare on the high and low seas.

Sometimes they accomplished this by pre-emptively attacking one of their enemy’s fleet.

In one case, that was doing so before it could combine forces with another enemy’s fleet that was effectively land-locked by ice.

Alternatively, they could use their home ground advantage – and simply watch as an attacking armada ran ashore against their perilous coastlines.

Eventually, when the age of expansionism arrived, the British came to realize that they could use this same defensive navy to frustrate their opponents’ colonial ambitions.

Thus, those once bullied became the bullies themselves.

Yet the British brought something arguably positive to the table as well.

They helped ‘sell’ their model to others by building and securing a trade and communications network that spanned the globe.

To grow an empire you must first create the *idea* of an empire – one into which even your enemies can buy.

The British did not simply dominate through a naval superiority – but also excellent brand management.

Today, there are undoubtedly numerous modern equivalents of the British Empire.

They have ‘win over’ even their natural and historic enemiesthrough combinations of carrots and sticks.

These otherwise-persecuted groups include the contentious – such as the ‘1%ers’– and our new heroes: the geeks.

NASA used to be the citadel for this demographic – however they have had to relocate with the end of the Apollo and shuttle programs.

Now there is the west coast fortress for those on the Autistic spectrum.

In Silicon Valley, a single Zuckerberg has as much influence as a medium-sized nation-state.

They may well have given us the web, smart phones, and Facebook.

However, there is still adversity between the geeks and us neurotypicals(NTs), or normies.

While certainly a fringe group – the thought that their child may develop ASD is terrifying for anti-Vaxxers.

In fact, such prospect is reason enough to put their child at risk of dying from an entirely preventable disease.

We may well tolerate our sons to become STEM-experts because that is where the money is.

Yet we still seem to be reluctant to encourage our daughters to do the same.

Why? Because we fear making them pariahs in doing so – even if very wealthy ones.

Therefore, our new technocrat overlords wearily scan their borders as the 99 per cent circle.

They are right to be afraid – for little more than the fear of losing their internet connection holds back these masses.

And those without a smartphone having nothing to lose.

Image by Joe Wolf

Coming out of the stationery cabinet

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sat, 07 Jan 2017 21:32:00 +0000

I have long identified as an introvert.

In primary school, I was content to sit by myself during recess and lunchtime.

Teachers, and other kids, would drop by occasionally, genuinely concerned – asking, for instance, whether some group had kicked me out, or if I had hurt myself during a game.

Yet I was busy – happily daydreaming about the adventures on which my pet rabbit, Rabby, was embarking.

While I found more socially acceptable ways to keep to myself, this nucleus of my personality seemed fixed.

Slowly I learned how to break the ice with others – yet felt as if all was bravado and role-playing.

Like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in Brick, I came to know all the angles – but still chose to stay on the outside.

However, this is not to say that I have always been a loner.

I went to plenty of parties while at high school and uni – and I would generally enjoy myself.

Yet when I did not enjoy myself, I would be unsure whether I was just in the wrong mood – or the party did genuinely suck.

When dating extroverts, I would play their ‘plus one’ at dinner parties and nights out.

While I would give plenty of lead-time before bailing, I would invariably have to announce my premature departure as I neared my tolerance threshold for socializing.

I was not a people person by any account: I could fake it – but I could never really make it.

Getting paid to make uncomfortable conversations

Recent developments however have had me seriously question this simplified label.

One of the first inklings of this was while I was working at RMIT as a media officer – interviewing teachers, students and alumni around the university and writing articles about them.

The marketing department would (hopefully) publish these articles online – and people would (again, hopefully) read them.

The job was part-time, just for the year, and involved little else apart from chatting with people over coffees.

I would either impress or spook them with the cyber stalking I had done before hand, ask them about their aspirations, and try to get them to formulate some useful sound bites.

Yet this limited scope was exactly what I needed – to practice the whole ‘interacting with other people’ routine over and again.

As my guru Tim Ferriss remarked,

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

I had made similar efforts during dating binges – yet the challenge of interviewing someone is on a completely different scale.

On a date, there is a general air of shared optimism: both parties hoping that they will get something tangible out of the encounter by the nights tend – and it is okay to drink.

With interviewing people, the onus was much more on me to convince people to take time out of their busy schedule, often against their will, and then even relax around me.

Then I had to write it all up well enough to justify my wage.

Over time, I successfully turned any number of – otherwise uncomfortable – conversations into friendly, caffeine-fuelled chats and public relations pieces.

Yet it was when my partner at the time, and I, decided to take a ‘break’ that my oomph levels took off.

No longer preoccupied with the emotionally demanding manoeuvrings and negotiations of the relationship, I found my social energy freed up.

I expressed myself more enthusiastically at work, melted into conversations with greater ease, and felt good about myself.

After a couple of weeks, my partner and I met up again, had our ‘talk’, and got back together – and at work I went back to keeping mostly to myself once again.

A few months later – with things having again gotten predictably turbulent – my partner and I had a most uncomfortable conversation and broke up for good.

Emphasis on the ‘good’ part.

Zen and the art of cat herding

Flash forward a few months: I have taken the summer off for a staycation and have started working at another university

This time it is a full-time gig, though still fixed-term – ‘Here for a good time, not a long time’ as I like to say.

A recruitment agency has brought me into a project to create giant Excel spreadsheets, which end up crashing people’s workstations.

Eventually I transition to giant collaborative Google Sheets, which end up driving people crazy instead.

After a couple of months, and now it is my turn to freak out – for my job somehow ‘evolves’ into stakeholder management.

This entails ‘encouraging’ over a hundred web marketers across ‘faculty land’ to buy in to our processes and clean up their act.

As it turns out, however – I am actually quite good at it.

I can hold my own when making videoconference calls with staff – though I figure that talking into my computer’s microphone while staring at a (typically) blank screen does not really count.

I get chatting with the boss’s PA, who sits beside me about our extracurricular activities – one of mine of course being yoga – and she asks me whether I had considered becoming an instructor.

I joke that I would inevitably suck at it since I was so poor at communicating with large groups of people.

For instance, I had only lasted a year as an English instructor in Japan – at an organisation considered the ‘McDonalds of eikaiwa’.

While there, I received consistently appalling reviews – and the only thing saving me from having my contract prematurely terminated was the country’s strict labour laws.

The PA then sternly explains that our boss raved consistently about how good I was when dealing with our stakeholders – particularly those who could make or break our project.

As it turns out, any time our boss had an issue with someone she would send him or her my way – and his or her grievances would ‘go away’.

This was indeed pleasant news: I was the like Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction – I solved problems.

I knew that our boss trusted me with winning hearts and minds – after spending a day together on a marathon schedule of videoconference workshops with a cross-section of those stakeholders, she and I had patted each other on the back.

However, it was news to hear that I had such a good reputation for being the team’s ‘fixer’.

Eventually, the staff member for whom I was filling in came back from holidays, my contract neared its end, and I nervously returned a missed call to my recruitment agency representative.

We made small talk, with the rep mentioning that he had heard ‘good things’ about me from my boss.

I replied that her positive appraisal of my current conduct was much more important to me than whether they decided to keep me on for another month or two.

(In fact, at a stand-up meeting earlier that morning she had explained to a colleague that I was totally on top, and in control of everything, and all my work was down pat.)

The representative agreed that I had my priorities on straight, and then went on to clarify –

My boss had actually said my work was brilliant, and she wanted to extend my contract.

Flash forward a few months again – the project is over yet I remain, and now the university actually employs me directly.

Here for a good time *and* a long time.

Post script

In some ways, I feel a little ripped off, misled, and even betrayed – as if many of those around me have lied to me about myself.

This sense of betrayal, however, pales in comparison to how much I feel I have lied to myself.

I had convinced myself to believe a specific self-image: a shy, introverted being who can only be boisterous and passionate in small – often chemically induced – bursts.

While there is some truth to that motif, it was not actually the whole picture.

It may also say as much about others as about me – for instance, people have helped me push the boundaries of my reserve, and ostensibly wanted me to express myself more passion, yet it often ends up being a very specific prescription on how they want such passion expressed.

The aforementioned experiences have helped me appreciate that my introversion was not the only factor at play when dealing with people.

My ability to express myself ‘properly’ is not the only determination of intimacy – there is also other people’s healthy respect of boundaries, and their own receptivity, that also come into play.

Different people would make ‘deposits’ and ‘withdraws’ from my emotional ‘bank’ at different rates – some to a net gain, others to a net loss.

I learned that it is worth avoiding the latter group simply because they do not pay their way.

For the sake of diplomacy: it is not so much a question of how ‘good’ or toxic they might otherwise be – rather their effect.

Compatibility, after all, is a relative trait – not an absolute one.

However, sometimes the party really does just suck.

Image by Thomas Huang

Self-improvement versus romance

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 20:22:00 +0000

Is fervent self-improvement and romance mutually exclusive?

Sure – the cooler we are the more we are likely to attract others.

Yet perhaps we can only grow those appealing qualities when other people are not actually around.

Mutually exclusive activities?

Socializing and dating activities are so often distinct from self-development.

We tend to prefer to chill out with friends and partners relatively passively – at the cinema, or watching a band, or drinking and eating.

Conversely – going to the gym, commuting into work, or spending evenings studying typically require a lot of focus and commitment.

We are unlikely to maintain that focus and commitment when also trying to focus on and commit to our significant other.

Finding overlap in the Venn diagram is problematic because it is so hard to find that special someone who shares the same level of commitment.

Simply dating a personal trainer, colleague, or a fellow student would not alleviate that.

We also must find one who is interested in striking the same balance as us.

Furthermore, the objective of many relationships seems to be to create a ‘safe space’ for our egos.

Challenging each other can become synonymous with attacking one another.

In such challenge-averse arrangements, simply bush walking together can put the most solid relationship to the test.

Therefore, we end up on date nights at the movies for bonding with our partner.

We will then save base-jumping for bragging rights while we are with on vacation with our mates.

Then, on the Monday morning, we will listen to self-help pod-casts while staring outside our train.

Fitting it all in

Yet with only so much time in the day, it can often come down to one or the other.

If we are single and solitary – do we work a bit of overtime to get ourselves in better standing with our boss?

Alternatively, do we grab a coffee with someone we met online?

Even if we have a partner or a group of close friends, we will lose both when we keep declining their party invitations.

Yet socializing and self-development can be a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’.

Their respective past times do not need to take much out of the day we share with others.

We can go for a run around the block before our partner even rises.

Alternatively, we can revise for an exam after they have fallen to sleep.

Those with good self-discipline and time-management skills should be able to accommodate multiple streams.

So why can there be such pushback when we try to advance ourselves?

The narrow band we tolerate in others

Perhaps it is not so much the division of time that can unsettle others.

Maybe it is instead the perceived division of attention.

Turning our attention inwards and to ourselves can be seen in the same light as an emotional affaire.

The cynical art of game theory might help explain why.

When two or more people come together, it is safe to assume that they are relatively happy with what the other is bringing to the relationship.

At that point, encouraging our significant other to improve himself or herself then becomes a balancing act.

We must trade-off the benefits of them becoming less of an embarrassment to us – with the risks and anxieties of us becoming an embarrassment to them.

We might want them to improve their ‘stock value’.

However, we do not want them to get ‘out of league’.

Thus, a person may start going to HIIT-classes – or getting a suit that actually fits them – because their partner has insisted they take more pride in themselves.

Yet that same partner may then calculate that it’s *not worth the risk* of having a boy/girlfriend that is so attractive to the competition, and consequently break-up.

For instance – the New York Times recently followed a group of people who had radical weight-reduction surgery.

In what should have been an overwhelming positive experience, the article instead found:

“There was a lot of talk about changed relationships. Some patients had divorced or separated from a spouse. Some said that a partner did not like the way they looked, or that their partner was still obese and jealous, or that the partner complained, “You’re not the person I married.”

Thus, relationships can go from “Don’t ever change” to “You have to change” and end at “You’ve changed.”

And how to break free of those bands

There are at least a couple of available work-arounds –

One is to simultaneously

encourage them to improve their lot – for example: appearance or earning capacity
build their dependence – for example: emotional or economic, by devastating their self-esteem or threatening to bale.

They then undervalue their own social market value – while we reap the benefit of their work (out).

(Certainly, co-dependence is just as possible as one-way dependency: couples can reciprocate their negging and/or nagging, resulting in an uneasy yet lasting peace they sustain well into old age – see Nash Equilibrium and Mexican Standoff.)

The other is compersion: we make sure that we build confidence in our own, independent value.

We can then emotionally afford to revel in the successes of our friends and lovers – just as we should.

Image by Amy Wilbanks

The ‘evolution’ of domestic violence

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 04:14:00 +0000

As a kid, I was aware of the discussions going on around me on the ethics of corporal punishment for children at school and home.

I recall the challenge parents and teachers found themselves facing – namely, how to exert control without a cane.

Some were aware even then that this would actually ‘force the hand’ of some adults.

With the state having denied them their strongest weapon against defiance – whether that be a literal slap of the wrist, or a belting – they would simply find a work-around.

They would resort to a more insidious form of operant conditioning – the emotional and psychological.

Moreover, the wounds of such punishments would be all the easier to hide.

Emotional abuse is the new physical abuse

Having successfully reduced and denormalized physical violence, we are today much more sensitive to the sophisticated forms that violence can take.

We are also a little more appreciative of how inventive and resourceful that cruel people can become when given a handicap.

This is, I figure, thanks to the flow-on effects of the shift from corporal punishment of children to emotional punishment has had on our adult relationships.

Since the ‘weapon of choice’ in adult relationships aligns with the same type of weapon used in childhood, those whom a parent and/or teacher physically assaulted them, when they were children, would have normalized such type of violence.

This would mean that they would be more likely to tolerate receiving such violence – or dishing it out – from or to their intimate partner as adults.

Yet Victorian public school banned corporal punishment in 1983 – so for anyone who started going to school from that point onwards (at least in Victoria) his or her exposure to violence would almost exclusively be emotional.

Now, 30 years later, such children have come of age themselves – and are reaping what our significant others sowed.

With their parents or teachers having emotionally abused them in their youth, those exact same strategies inspire them as adults.

With this rise of emotional abuse, we become more able to detect it, more aware of the scars that it leaves, and more penalizing those who resort to it.

We are de-normalizing emotional abuse – whether in the work place, at home, or in schools – just as we did with those who resorted to physical abuse in the 80s.

Yet as with the end of physical abuse, cracking down on one form of violence will inspire the use of another.

Again, this will likely be even subtler to detect – and increasingly difficult to police.

‘Just in time to fight the last war’ – the rise of online abuse

I suspect that the next ‘weapon of choice’ in intimate partner and adult-to-child violence will be reputational.
Flaming, trolling, doxxing, and other forms of cyberbullying will make up the arsenal of the next great (civil) war – and sabotaging another’s online reputation will be the new ‘headshot’ of character assassinations.

Cyberbullying – including of children by adults – has been accumulating a literal body count at least since the mid-2000s, and I figure that this figure will only rise as digital natives come of age.

Consider, for instance, that those whose earliest memory could have been browsing Netscape Navigator are now in their mid to late 20s.

They have grown up in a world where they won and lost social wars not in meatspace but on Myspace.

Their work emails feed into their smartphones, they may have met their partners on OkCupid, and they buy iPads for their infants.

As much as Jaron Lanier would hate to think – we are now our gadgets.

How we perceive and relate to one another online is as consequential as our real-world interactions.

Now, they are settling down, getting married, and having children; and they are learning to ‘discipline’ those children – as well as, perhaps, their spouses.

Which means that even when we decry slapping or negging, abusive parents and partners will still find a way to get to their victim.

Only this time it will be via their avatar.

Image by Apollo Scribe

The torment of child rearing

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 04:07:00 +0000

Read the following signs of emotional abuse in intimate partner violence:

Your partner demands that you account for your time.
Your partner freaks out when they can’t reach you whenever they feel like it.
Your partner tries to control your money.
Your partner tries to keep you from your friends and family.
Your partner makes you question your sanity.

Now try replacing ‘partner’ with ‘parent’ and read it again.

That is right – most of the manifestations of emotional abuse are par for the course in parenting.

#1, #2, #3 and #4

These are no-brainers – most mothers and/or fathers demand control and/or visibility over their kid’s time, location, finances and freedom of association and movement.

Moreover, we tend to see them as responsible for doing so.

#5

Consider the description of many a teenager’s cases of self-expression – ‘Going through a phase’.

Is it possible to get any more casually depreciating of someone’s subjectivity?

Alternatively, take the following anecdote, which – while probably an exceptional case outside of white upper-middle class upbringing – shows how to *formally* deprecate a child’s interiority.

I probably the most insolent I ever got as a kid when I was about 13.

It was around then that my parents told me that they wanted me to start seeing a psychologist.

I knew the man they mentioned: a friend of the family, married, with a young daughter, dog, and a new Apple Macintosh.

I had gotten along fairly well with him in the past – in part, because I helped him learn how to use his workstation.

However, I refused to go along with the plan simply because I found it so offensive.

Fair enough that they took issue with my attitude – which, in being contrary, was the whole point.

However, to bring my neurology into question, and pathologize my behaviour?

As childish as I now consider that same behaviour – questioning my very own faculties is just plain rude.

In fact, nowadays we tend to have a name for it – ‘Gas lighting’.

#6

Last on the list is actually, “Your partner pressures you to have sex when you don’t want to.”

Which I omitted because it would have obviously thrown a spanner in the works of my argument.

After all, most of us would be aghast at parents who pressured their kids into being sexually active.

However, we would probably also consider it a human right to be able to choose for ourselves *whether* we have sex.

If someone were to bully you into abstaining when you did not want to, you would rightly be insulted.

Just as you probably felt when you were a teenager.

Postscript

The predictable counterargument to all the above is that, well, children are not adults - kids actually require a metaphoric ‘firm hand’.

This is a particularly popular opinion, I assume, ever since literally firm hands started to fall out of favour – along with most other forms of corporal punishment.

However, it sets up an enormous dissonance between what we say and what we do.

After all, we live in an age when ‘human rights’ are one of the touchstones of justice.

Yet we somehow manage to exclude young people from access to many of those rights.

Is this to say, then, that young people are not yet fully ‘human’?

I can say from my own childhood experience, that this impression left a very bitter taste in my mouth.

Moreover, I know from the accounts of others that treating little people as less deserving of dignity than bigger people has dark consequences.

These consequences are not contained to their childhood – shaping how they go on to relate to themselves, and others, beyond their youth.

For better or for worst, the models of behaviour to which our significant others subjected us to as children will be the models by which we operate as adults.

‘After all,’ children will think as they come of age – ‘what was good for the gosling is good for the goose.’

Image by Jessica Lucia

Social media, smart phones, and relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 22:11:00 +0000

Much has been made of how tech such as smart phones and the internets has changed relationships.

Yet this has largely focused on, say, the processes – for example, how online dating apps have morphed dating.

Instead, I am more curious about how technology has changed how we *relate* in relationships.

Smartphones have become extensions of ourselves – and the internet the external hard drive of our memories.

Thus, when we are dating someone we can feel like we are also dating his or her gadgets.

The consequence being that we now risk conflating our real world personas with our online personas – confusing the map for the territory.

We now feel that to know a person truly, you only need to know the contents of their Facebook timeline or their webmail inbox.

This can mean that we spend more time on digital surveillance – and perhaps less on actual dialogue.

We place so much emphasis on another’s online interactions that we judge them by their digital profile and behaviour as harshly as their physical one.

This may seem defensible; after all, the world – particularly the dating world – is a dangerous place and we need as much actionable intelligence by which to go as possible.

Yet this preoccupation with information gathering is going to have, and is already having, some rather bad consequences – for us and other people.

Surrendering privacy

There may have been a time when coveting access to those forms of eternalized memory was far less socially acceptable as it is now.

Photocopying and distributing someone’s hand-written diaries, or their notes to a loved one, would have been as disgraceful to the copier as it was embarrassing to the diarist.

Obviously, something has changed to make violating a person’s privacy via their documentation more tempting.

Perhaps this is due to the ubiquitousness of electronic communication, or maybe its ease of distribution.

Yet I think it also has a lot to do with how we have come to devalue privacy overall.

We can in part thank corporations – private information has indeed become ‘privatized’, commercialized, and monetized, with each of our cloud-based Facebook confession helping inform other people’s algorithms as to what advertisements we are most susceptible.

Part is also thanks to government – take Snowden’s NSA leaks that reveal how many are now living in a surveillance state.

Such government-sponsored surveillance has set a dangerous precedent for our willingness to survey one another – whether our children or partner.

We have taken stalking lessons from the government.

The consequence of this carrot and stick combo is the feeling that we can either give our personal details away for the likes and lols – or lose control of them to the authorities anyway.

With little confidence in being able to police the boundaries of our own privacy, we no longer respect the boundaries of others.

In addition, we learn to shroud our true thoughts.

For instance, we may initially celebrate whistle-blowers for their public-interest revelations.

However, this can result in a ‘chilling effect’ of our online discourse.

When we no longer trust that our words will remain confidential, we quickly learn to use plausibly deniable doublespeak – or remain silent.

A new type of violence

We have learned from our governments that it is permissible to defend our own interests is to play ‘Big Brother’ to others.

We tell ourselves that reading their ‘playbook’ on the sly is a fair way to gain an advantage in our negotiations with them.

We have also learned that the best way to attack our opponents is via their reputation, anonymously, and leaving no visible bruises – case in point: cyber warfare.

Legislation is catching on, albeit in fits and starts – bullying, whether offline or on-, is now often criminalized.

One Australian judge for instance has described a person’s cheap shots online akin to a football field fight getting out of hand – while calling one’s spouse ‘fat’ in the UK is now a form of domestic abuse.

When our real-world social life blends seamlessly with social media, telling someone to avoid cyber bulling by going offline is like telling him or her to avoid toxic fumes by staying indoors all day – or simply ceasing to breathe all together.

Yet trying to control our reputation – particularly in a virtual sandpit containing billions of fellow web denizens – can become a potentially endless task.

Furthermore, facing off the trolls can become a problematic task when we have – at one point or another – probably been part of the lynch mob egging those trolls on in the first place.

As big an ‘ask’ as it may sound, the best way to fireproof our online personas may be to stop holding others so accountable for their online reputations.

Profiling

In the 90’s movie Gattaca, we had a glimpse of a “not-too-distant future” society when corporations and governments would to leverage ‘big data’ in their own policy formulation.

In Gattaca – unlike the 21st century we have actually come to inherit – individual’s DNA strands are an open book rather than our inner thoughts, determining which jobs we get, and what relationships we can form.

While the NSA will use its own big data to decide on who goes on the No Fly List – the film’s titular Aerospace Corporation uses genetic testing to decide which citizens go into orbit.

Yet the societal impacts are similar – a belief that we can determine a person’s fate based on metrics, whether that is a digital footprint or a genetic signature.

The film portrays the indifference such society has to the false positives – the outliers, the exceptions.

It also shows the outrage we can have to the false-negatives – for those who make a lie of our own typecasting and prejudices.

In the dating scene, the film shows gifting a person a strand of your hair as the only way to prove your fitness as a mate – or, stealing a strand the best way to prove theirs.

Today’s equivalent would probably be giving someone your smart phone password when he or she questions your fidelity – or, installing a key logger on his or her laptop.

Some final thoughts

The availability of all the knowledge we now have – or can have – at our disposal has excited us greatly.

Yet we have not stopped to wonder whether it is the whole picture.

Maybe we have come to think that we can throw enough data at a problem – to just ‘smart’ our way out of it – without nuanced judgement or wisdom.

We like to think that the cold logic of big data can be the hammer to all of our nails – yet logic is the beginning of wisdom – not the end.

Our worship of the ‘meta’ has made us lose sight of the smaller details, blind ourselves to all of the other ‘non-measurables’, and discredit our own intuition.

We even use big data to help us to determine whom to date, yet we depersonalize the observer and the observed when we believe that we can reduce everyone to either a left or a right swipe.

For there is no gene for the human spirit – and no one is going to tick the checkbox for ‘terrorist’ or ‘psycho’.

Image by Georgie Pauwels

On the importance of empathy

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 02:05:00 +0000

I came to appreciate how much my very positive relationship with my late father helped me in building a relationship with three kids whom I helped look after for twelve months.

I would like to think that it was a highly customized approach –

I took the best bits that I had learned from my own childhood experiences, updated it for the 21^st Century, and added my own twist.

However, I can see that the core of my approach was very much thanks to the affection that, I take for granted, my father had for my family and me.

That affection made everything else possible.

I really looked up to my dad, and I adopted his principles and behaviours when I interacted with my partner and her children.

I figured – and probably unconsciously at the time – that in doing so I would become the recipient of the very same affection and admiration that I gave to my father.

I saw that - to quote Anne Michaels – I had to give what I most needed.

Yet there was something more fundamental at play.

A sense of entitlement to the affection of these three kids did not motivate my childhood re-enactment.

And despite how self-interested my strategy may sound, I never saw reciprocation as something that I deserved – or which they would owe me.

Indeed, I never assumed that it could be ‘earned’ – in the sense that it was a ‘given’ if I bought them enough hot chocolates or took them on enough treks.

Instead – and crucially – I believed that it was *possible*.

For here’s the rub: you can, by all accounts, be an excellent human being – you can do everything ‘right’, and indeed win the affection of children, and partners, and friends.

Yet without a reliable ‘touchstone’ with which to assess, or compare, their affection – you won’t believe them.

What made my time with them so fun was the positive models of behaviour from which I had to draw.

Yet what made it possible in the first place was a positive model of *experience*.

I *believed* that those kids – and my partner – could feel affection towards me.

I trusted them in their gestures – and I knew what feelings those gestures represented.

This was all – if not ‘only’ – because *I had felt that affection too*.

I had felt it in an analogous situation, in another household with another family – some thirty years prior and looking upwards.

It may have been from having my father show a sincere interest in one of my own hobbies – sitting down beside me to glean an insight into my world.

Or it could have been when he patiently initiated me into a hobby of his own – one that he treasured, and wished to share with me.

So, when one of the children looked up to me, with an expression of gratitude and wonder, as we explored the functionality of his new gadget, any words of thanks from him would have been redundant.

When one of the other children described how a hiking expedition we went on was the best moment of her life, I wanted to say, “I know exactly what you mean.”

Without that good faith in the affections of others, we will eternally question their motives, their sincerity – and the idea that we wrong about everything will haunt us.

They will never be able to repeat ‘I love you’ enough times because every single one will be suspect.

Yet if we had had that primal encounter with affection, we would never have to ask.

That is because we would see the familiar signals, we would trust those gestures, and so we would already know.

Image by Amanda Tipton

Role models, intentions, and the little gestures – a few throwaway observations from looking after children

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 01:51:00 +0000

I had the awesome pleasure and privilege of parenting three children – one single digits, two in their early teens – a couple of years ago.

Knowing how much a bad experience – even those experienced vicariously – can ‘break’ children, I was acutely aware of how much was at stake in my own parental experience.

Yet I focused on the other side of this – that positive experiences in childhood can also ‘make’ a person’s life.

I chose not to handle them with kitten gloves out of fear that some offhand remark I made towards them would give them some complex (possibly requiring decades of psychoanalysis to undo).

Instead, I just tried to approach them in as dignifying and humanising manner as possible.

While my partner’s children were not my children, I liked to think that the healthy role models that I had had as a child might translate into them growing up into well-adjusted adults.

I drew from my own heritage in the process, believing that a memory may not be from our own lives – yet can still be ‘close to home’.

For sharing in a history is not dependent on the blood that runs through our veins but the culture or community in which we feel a part.

With their help, I also came to appreciate more that it was not so much the ‘letter’ of what you do for people that resonates – yet the spirit in which you do it.

It is the ‘why’, and not the ‘what’ or ‘how’ that counts – a slow and tough lesson to learn as a male, INTJ, and aspirant project manager.

When it comes to the benefits of an ordered and stable household, for instance, all the rosters – and Gantt charts – pale in value when compared to cultivating a spirit of generosity.

All the vacuuming or salary earning done for their benefit would have become ash in their mouths if they had sensed that it was done out of a martyr complex, or resentment, for instance.

Additionally, rather than grand gestures, it is the little acts of involvement in the everyday that tend to leave their mark.

I took pride not (just) on planning long-weekend hiking in the Grampians but also the brunches cooked that brought us together.

I saw in my habit of always being the first to hit the sink after a shared meal an opportunity to show myself as a part of their household – and combat gender stereotypes at the same time.

That, and dishwashing at dinner parties happens to be a useful refuge for introverts.

Image by Jeff Turner

Intergenerational awesomeness

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 01:40:00 +0000

There is a libertarian fantasy that children are ‘thrown’ into the world, emerging behind a Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, so that they make of their lives what they will.

Yet we are products of our family’s history as well as our own.

It is tempting to focus on the negative angle of this – like when I hear stats about the abused children going on to become abusive adults themselves.

Such inherited violence does not simply dissipate – like a financial windfall – but echoes in eternity.

Much has been made of the effects of ‘intergenerational memory’ – even intergenerational trauma.

Per Wikipedia, transgenerational trauma is

“trauma that is transferred from the first generation of trauma survivors to the second and further generations of offspring of the survivors via complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanism.”

Indeed, such intergenerational trauma – as, for instance, with the descendants of holocaust survivors – can modify us on the genetic level.

However, it can also be reassuring to know that our forebears ran into trouble – yet bounced back from that hardship.

Knowing our history can thus give otherwise scary and overwhelming experiences a precedent.

This can help generate both a vicarious pride – and a ‘resilience by proxy’.

Thus, collective memory can suffocate us with the weight of history – yet it can also serve as a cushion or pillow for our emotions.

Image by NASA

Honeypots, canary traps, and sacrificial territories

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 21:45:00 +0000

To gauge how well your parent or (prospective) partner respects your boundaries – just make one up.

This could be a physical space or a sensitive topic that – you at least tell them – is strictly off limits.

You can use such artificial boundaries whether facing off against a controlling persona or filtering out the psychopaths.

For instance, you would use a honey pot as a type of bulwark against their further encroachment.

Or you could use a canary trap as – at risk of mixing metaphors – a canary in a coalmine; that is, an early warning system.

The Honey Pot

Think of a honey pot as a defensible – yet strategically unimportant – position that will likely serve as the front line against your adversarial significant other.

With nothing of actual value there, and little (except principle) at stake, policing and protecting that boundary can be emotionally inexpensive.

Like sugar-addicted bears, those who lack respect of your privacy will predictably ‘out’ themselves when they jimmy the lock of your ‘Bluebeard’s door’ – only to confront an empty room.

The Canary trap

An example of a canary trap would be to set up a sock-puppet email account to flirt with your personal account.

If your partner then accused you of infidelity, they would have to admit to having read your emails.

This would then allow you to quit the relationship – while still holding the moral high ground.

That is – assuming you were not actually having a real-world affair...

Moral and emotional considerations

The key difference between the two is reusability: you can easily reset honeypots by adding more honey, for instance.

In the case of canaries, though, there is no coming back from the death of your sentinel animal.

While a relatively cheap way of protecting one’s boundaries, each mechanism still carries its own moral and emotional costs.

Little except principle may actually be at stake in one’s social engineering experiment – yet you still have to treat it dead seriously – to ‘die with the lie’.

When they breach your bulwark, you have to act as if the relationship is at stake – and when they kill your canary, it is time to GTFO ASAP.

Otherwise, they will have even less respect for your inner citadel – and might start threatening to boil your bunny for real.

Also, Catfishing yourself – for the express purpose of seeing whether your partner would betray your boundaries – seems just as cynical and distrusting a form of entrapment as honeytrapping them.

Image by Evan Blaser

(Mal)adaptive strategies of dealing with narcissists

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 21:27:00 +0000

I have been privy to what it is like to have an abusive parent or partner via the accounts of a few of my close friends.

Some of my friends have decided to keep their ex-abuser at arm’s length.

Others have pushed that parent or former spouse entirely out of the picture.

Their abuser may have been – or still is – a certifiable narcissist.

In other cases – maybe the parent or partner was just a horrible asshole.

All my friends have used different mechanisms to survive the bad luck of their birth or marriage.

These mechanisms have included:

‘playing dead’ – turning as inert and dull as a grey rock
going on the offensive – fighting fire with fire
retreating – into the arms of another
surrendering – learning to forgive and forget.

These have often shaped the methods they use to cope with the frightening, lasting effects of that abuse.

Yet I wonder how adaptive these coping mechanisms actually are – and whether, in their response to their trauma, they are not simply setting themselves up to be re-traumatised.

The Grey Rock Method

Those with little choice to escape their abuser can learn to live very undramatic lives.

They play down their successes, or emotional engagement, to stay off the radar.

Sometimes no attention is better than bad attention.

Better to be ignored than let their narcissist gain a foothold to their lives.

However, those who have internalized their own charade as unaccomplished may go on to suffer from imposter syndrome – or simply become very boring adults.

Fighting fire with fire

My friends typically have not admitted to dreaming up revenge fantasies.

Yet such fantasies seem prevalent among the anonymity of Reddit’s ‘r/RaisedByNarcissists’ community.

Users plot giving their tormenters a ‘taste of their own medicine’ – of ‘beating them at their own game’, of finally ‘turning the tables’.

As little as they may like to think so, they have ended up modelling themselves on their tormenters.

Rather than defining themselves apart from their parents – they have become them.

For “when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change. The devil changes you.”

Finding a new jailer

Children of abusive parents may seek out strong willed romantic partners to either

give them the affection that they lacked as a child
stand up for them on their behalf
be a source of validation that allows them to wean themselves off their parents.

The risk here though is that they merely replace one abuser on whom they were dependent with another.

To wit – friends who have escaped toxic households go on to describe stumbling into one destructive relationship after another.

Forgive and forget

Some – perhaps encouraged by popular demand – have decided to make peace with their pasts.

Their capacity to rise above those historic injustices without holding a grudge is impressive.

Yet I am suspicious when such reconciliations have coincided with their own offspring entering the picture.

They may have expunged parents, in-laws, or ex-spouses from their lives life for very good reasons.

Yet those reasons fade away as offers to help with their children begin to tempt them.

Principle gives way to practicality – and virtue becomes a disguise for wanting a free babysitter.

In other cases, they have given in to pressure from family members telling them to let ‘bygones be bygones’ – that blood is thicker than water.

Yet perhaps those advocates for forgiveness are too ashamed to confront their own privilege – or have simply let the narcissist cow them as well.

After all, family members can often prefer the milder emotional cost of transferring the blame to the victim than confronting the true culprit.

Lastly, when childhood trauma results in extensive amnesia, ‘forgive and forget’ is not a figurative virtue – it can be quite literal.

I fear that my friends who are unable to remember the past will be condemned to repeat it.

In any case, I worry for those who have struck such truces with their tormenters.

For they will be a lot less likely to respect the boundaries of others when they do not have respect for their own.

This is far from this being a hypothetical anxiety.

For I now find myself observing in terror as some such friends – once guilty only of having been born into the wrong household – become perpetrators themselves.

Whom we forgive is – arguably – whom we become.

Image by Lisa Monster

Are we gaming ourselves? A holistic self-assessment

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 06:08:00 +0000

In a recent yoga class, our instructor explained how we could extend our practice beyond the confines of the studio.

To paraphrase his remarks –

“Every action and move can be an asana.”

I had probably heard similar sentiments expressed before – from either holistic health articles or new age websites.

Yet something about it resonated on this occasion.

It made me think of how readily I might compartmentalize aspects of my life – to treat things in isolation.

I can become so fixated on reaching some arbitrary number – how much I can deadlift, or how fast I can cycle – that I can start to ignore the cost of the journey.

After all, if corporations game themselves, individuals can as well.

More recently, I have tried asking myself whether my efforts are leading to ‘conversions’.

Is the time and energy I spend on the task translating into tangible – and valuable – results anywhere else?

For instance, when improving the UX on a website, I quiz my colleagues how it will actually boost our bottom line.

There is little point in improving a microsite, for instance, if hardly anyone is visiting it in the first place – or if the course it is promoting runs at a loss.

Additionally, I ask myself whether a hobby actually leads to a heightened sense of wellbeing – even, or especially, when I am not doing it.

Thus, I like the fact that I can apply yogic breathing techniques to manage stress even when I am not actually doing yoga.

However, this is not just about working smarter rather than harder – it is about working more effectively rather than just more efficiently.

Furthermore, it is not just about doing things right – it is about doing the right things.

When it comes to any health-related activity – whether that is dieting to lose weight, or lifting to gain it – I check whether I am actually better off for it.

Certainly, I find motivation and reward in my hobbies – otherwise I would not be spending so much time on them.

Yet am I doing them for the right reason?

Are they helping me cultivate a balanced physique and mindset, for instance?

On the other hand, does some all-consuming and competitive spirit drive me?

Are they improving my health – mentally, physically, emotionally – overall?

Alternatively, am I doing them because I desperately need to have at least one standout thing going in my life – a point of pride – in an otherwise turmoil and despair-filled life?

If the gym, or the yoga studio, is the one place that I feel in control of my life – then it is great that I go there.

However, perhaps I need to start confronting the other places in my life as well.

If a day spent working-out makes me more confident and willing to stand up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – rather than simply endure them – then it was a good day.

For me, success is more than having a breakout success ‘by the numbers’ in one aspect of my life – it’s about reducing conflict and promoting harmony between all.

Image by Johan

Some tricks on fitting in 10 000 hours of deliberate practice

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 01:47:00 +0000

Malcom Gladwell’s rule of 10 000 hours states:

“The key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours.”

I figure that the idea that strategic and sustained effort is a – or even the only – path to awesomeness tends to appeal to me largely because I am meritocratic and Libertarian.

That is, I have embraced Gladwell’s rule – that deliberate practice is a pre-requisite to expertise – largely because like to believe that I am an agent of my own destiny.

Contrastingly, I would probably be a lot less receptive to Gladwell were I to believe that the ‘game is rigged’, that ‘life is unfair’, and that forces beyond my control negate all my own efforts.

For me, then, the question that remains is, ‘How I can spend more of my time on getting better – and less on grunt work?’

Reduce switching costs

In the last year, I have thrown myself into yoga – often at the expense of other physical activities such as cycling, hiking, and running.

Such approach means that my progress is more marked – which is great for my morale – yet also, I am not having to ‘juggle’ the logistics and emotional requirements of multiple practices.

On a micro-practical level, even keeping travel time down to a minimum can be imperative if I want to fit in as much exercise as I can handle.

Similarly, were I bold enough to learn a second language, immersion within the culture would make a lot more sense compared to sporadic classes.

Living and breathing the language, in the context in which it relates, is more economical than dipping in and out every couple of days.

… Yet also keep things diverse

This is where cross training comes in.

Triathlons are a curious case: on the other hand, much of one’s success in triathlons seems to rely on managing switching costs – not only transitioning from one means of transport (and all the associated gear) to another, yet also engaging different muscle groups in different environments.

On the one hand, they seem to penalize those who overspecialize in one area at the expense of another – thus ensuring that the victor is the one who remains relatively well rounded and balanced.

Similarly, yoga tends to offer an amazing diversity of some 1350 asana postures – unless the 26 Bikram poses have caught you in an endless loop, that is.

Which means focusing on your weaknesses and limits – and pushing them

Among those 1350 asana postures – some of those poses we are going to love, others we will tend to loathe. And yet, as my ruthless instructors will advise me –

“The pose begins when you want it to end.”

“The pose that you don’t want to do is the one that you should be doing.”

Similarly, when it comes to professional work, I have come to realize that the bottleneck in my career advancement is not a deficiency of technical skill.

Simply doing further study is not the answer.

Rather, it is how enthusiastically I build rapport with my colleagues – which is a bit of a challenge as an introvert, for whom ‘communication overhead’ is particularly costly.

Yet, as Tim Ferriss remarks: “A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Become friends with discomfort.

… Yet also respecting your ‘quota’ – and spending it wisely

Even at his peak, Arnold Schwarzenegger could ‘only’ hit the gym for around two hours per day, six days a week.

A total of 12 hours per week is very different from the 30-odd that most professional cyclists spend on the saddle.

Allowing adequate time for recovery is key – as is having the self-awareness to measure our reserves, whether those be physiological or, say, emotional.

For me, the quota on which I am most likely to max out on a daily basis is social.

This means that I pay particular attention to the emotional costs of my interactions – and while I start no dramas, I do try to finish them.

True success is sustainable – so to avoid burnout, always keep careful track of how many fucks you have left to give.

Image by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Winning the battle and losing the war in marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 01:34:00 +0000

I have long wondered – having worked in university marketing now for a decade – about the financial return our advertising efforts procure.

Typically, our customers are students, and our products are the courses they study.

Our budgets and jobs are safe if a new website design, or SEM campaign, seems to have secured more ‘bums on seats’.

However, the operative word here is *seems*.

For in spite of being in an age of big data – website Analytics, heat mapping, and CRM databases – there remains little effort to correlate a campaign’s metrics to, say, enrolment and retention numbers.

Probably because we are afraid of not getting the right result.

And rightly so: when we try to tell our customer that marketing is money well spent, it’s our jobs – even our profession’s reputation – that’s on the line.

Thus, we resort to vanity metrics like how many people ‘favorited’ their Instagram photo.

However, in all fairness – the challenge of proving bang for buck would not stop there.

Calculating the profit from any one course, or even faculty, is notoriously difficult.

Without this number, it is tough to know whether to concentrate our efforts in the MBA or the Arts degree.

One choice is to push the most prestigious course in the hopes that it will prop up the overall standing of the university – after all, a rising tide lifts all ships.

It does not matter – the theory goes – whether the university is renowned for its MBA or its BA, or which one is the more profitable.

Any renown of a flagship course will have a trickle-down effect to the rest of the fleet – like a café selling lattes at a loss so customers then purchase the profit-making meals.

Think of Ikea: you come for the hotdogs, but stay for the couches.

What we are renowned for does not even have to be our primary specialization – the biggest smile (or largest drinking culture) can outshine the most Ivy League of colleges.

Yet while reputation building seem reasonable, it is even harder to calculate brand awareness – particularly when promoted through social media.

Furthermore, how do you determine which course is your ‘couch’ – and which is your ‘hotdog’?

What if the most successful degree on campus is actually running at a loss – and you are practically paying people to buy your product.

After all, lecturers require big salaries, high-tech facilities are high-maintenance – and advertising agencies eventually expect to be paid.

When every dollar that you spend in promotion is actually a liability, then your marketing campaign is no longer just a case of false economics – it is actually counterproductive.

The moral of the story –

We can become fixated on success among our peers – on winning the battle for people’s hearts and minds.

Yet in doing so, we end up losing track of whether winning the war is even in our own best interests – and we might not even care.

Image by Thomas Hawk

Paid work that complements our passions

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 01:19:00 +0000

I have about four to five hours of quality creative work in me per day – and that is if I play it right.

Conversely, full-time work requires me to spend some seven to eight hours a day on my job.

This means that I am potentially losing three to four hours a day on repetitive tasks that I could be doing in my sleep – or perhaps should not be doing at all.

When I spend those four hours in a time and place of my choosing, my sole interruptions tend to be an occasional coffee break or walk around the block.

When it comes to paid work, on the other hand, I have to accommodate all the distractions of an open plan office.

In addition, the countless channels by which coworkers can instant message me via pop-ups can further dilute the quality of my salaried work.

Add to that the

hour or two that I might spend each day commuting to and from work
half hour I take for a lunch break
hour or so I spend on recovery and recuperation from my job.

and the time I have at hand to spend on my own journey to expertise shrinks further.

It is by this line of thinking that I came to realize how precious – and indeed finite – my time is.

Therefore, wasting time on the job does not just do our employer a disservice – it does ourselves one.

It is vital I spend it wisely, wherever I might be, no matter how tempting it is to imagine someone is paying me just to sit in front of a workstation and occasionally Google things.

This is by no means an original one, yet I think that earlier career advisers have sold it badly.

It is not necessary or even desirable to make our work pleasurable – only that we make it an adventure.

Furthermore, the warning, ‘Turn your hobby into a job and you’ll lose a hobby’ is only true if you have just the one hobby.

Here, then, are some of my ‘work hacks’ –

Turning my workplaces into a workbench.

Learning, experimenting, and creating at every opportunity – no matter how banal my work may appear to be, or how pressing my deadlines become.

Go hard – or go for a walk.

Sure, I need frequent reprieves from sifting through spreadsheets – yet alt-tabbing to my social media feed is not exactly giving my brain or body a rest from sitting in front of our workstation.

Maintain a time sheet.

Keeping a log of my hours has been essential while working professionally on a wage, and/or part-time and flexi time. However, I have maintained this habit even when working full-time and salaried – helping me be more disciplined, focused, and accountable while I am ‘clocked in’. It also gives me more license to unplug mentally from my work the moment I ‘clock out’.

Image by Iks Berto

Becoming a 3 x expert every eight years

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 00:44:00 +0000

One of the biggest things that I like about Gladwell’s 10 000-rule is how many different domains to which it can apply.

From billionaires to The Beatles, Gladwell shows that the simple notion of putting quality time into making good art can pay off.

Sure, there are exceptions – such as less ‘structured’ domains like pop stars and entrepreneurs.

However, I would argue that being a celebrity is not synonymous with being superb – just smooth.

Moreover, I might have trouble taking pride in ‘faking it until I make it’ – particularly if I want to make something meaningful.

The question then arises: how much can I reasonably expect to dedicate towards my deliberate practice, each day, while remaining efficient.
Professional novelists such as Haruki Murakami, for instance – who choose when, what, and how much to write each day – tend to work very early morning, for around four to five hours.

Furthermore, Lance Armstrong spent up to 28 hours per week training – or four and a half hours each day, six days a week.

Any more time on their craft – whether redrafting a manuscript or become King of the Mountain – actually became counter-productive.

Doing so meant less recovery time for one thing – whether letting torn muscles regrow, or the mind to recuperate.

At the end of the morning, when Armstrong took off his helmet, the only way that he could become a better cyclist was to take performance enhancement drugs

Similarly, even when writing his next Magnus Opus, Murakami has to come up for air.

The 10 000-hour rule may thus appear difficult to ‘scale’ – yet that is only when trying to add on extra practice in similar domains.

For example, after cycling Lance Armstrong could pick up a pen and co-write his autobiography.

While Murakami can put down *his* pen, and spend the afternoon training for his next ultra-marathon.

Variety can be the key to ensuring a high-performance life-style actually translates into a successful and productive life.

High Intensity Interval Training, for instance, is viable because while our heart might well be racing for the full forty-minutes, we also cycle through various parts of our body on each station.

While our triceps are burning during our plank poses – our quads get to take a holiday after some mountain climbers.

These case studies of professionals such as Murakami and Armstrong’s suggest then that 25 hours per week is a rough quota of time to dedicate to our primary activity.

Yet allowing for a good night’s rest – that still leaves some 50 hours per week to kill.

My question then is – Why settle for a secondary sport, or craft, when the week allows for a third such expertise?

One can be physical, one creative and intellectual – the other emotional, spiritual, or social.

That can even mean approaching parenthood or a relationship as a constantly improving art form.

After all, one’s expertise does not have to be competitive or moneymaking – though that can certainly help.

Rather, it just needs to be a valued challenge – to be among the elite, you have to fall in love with practice.

In the case of weight lifting, for example, it has to be what you think of, and look forward to, every time you wake up.

The challenge of course is that you can make enough money out of one of these activities –while another is enough to keep you social, sane and balanced.

That – and a sponsor, mentor, and a very compassionate community.

To become such an ‘accelerated expert’, requires that we dedicate 25 hour of deliberate practice per week, over 400 weeks – or slightly under eight years.

Yet the super-charged version allows us to modularize that into three distinct streams.

Imagine that – each eight years becoming an expert on three different domains.

Image by Sunova Surfboards