Kilroy Cafe

The Facebook Bubble: Running the Numbers

2012-01-27T20:21:00.000-08:00

I don't usually comment on current affairs, but the impending Facebook IPO is irresistible. I've got to predict doom and gloom while I still have the chance. Don't get me wrong: I love Facebook and use it every day. I don't expect the website itself to collapsed, but the numbers being thrown around for the company's value just don't make sense.

Supposedly, the company will be valued at somewhere between $75 and $100 BILLION when the IPO happens, which would make it one of the world's biggest companies, even though it has a vague and completely unproven profit model.

Let me do a crude financial analysis here. Facebook claims to have 800 million active users, so that means investors are essentially paying $100 for each of those users. How can the company possibly squeeze that much value out of all of its users or even a majority of them?

Those 800 million users include just about everyone in the world with a computer. They are rich and poor, but mostly poor. The vast majority are no better than casual users, logging in once a week or less. And when they do log on, they don't look at advertizing. They are concerned with their photos and comments, and they are not in the mood to buy things. Facebook has one of the WORST click-through rates of major websites. People just aren't interested in buying stuff while they are there. (In contrast, when people do Google searches, they are much more motivated to buy.)

You could argue that the user base is bound to increase, and 800 million is only the beginning, but how far can it go? Keep in mind, there are only 7 billion on the planet, 1 billon of whom live in China where Facebook is blocked. As Facebook pushes a billion users, you got to wonder whether the remaining 5 billion even have computers. At some point, the numbers have to plateau, as people dropping out of active use match those just signing up. In other words, any real growth beyond a billion seems highly unlikely.

And no one yet has evaluated the quality of those users -- that is how many truly active users there are. That will start happening as soon as the company goes public.

According to standard valuations, a company is usually worth about 10 times earnings. So if Facebook is valued at $100 per user, it has to make a profit of $10 per user per year to be considered a break-even investment. No way can this happen!

To generate $10 in profit, Facebook has to generate a lot more revenue because there are also expenses to pay, mainly the huge cost of server farms. Facebook is essentially providing each user with unlimited photo storage forever, and this costs money. (See previous blog entry.) Storage and bandwidth costs are a non-negotiable expense. The price of these things is always coming down as technology advances, but probably not as fast as people are uploading photos. So Facebook's expense are going to continuously grow over the years. To make a $10 profit, Facebook may have to sell $20 worth of advertizing to EVERY user, so it can pay its server expenses, and it may have to earn more and more every year just to keep pace with storage growth.

True, Facebook has unprecedented access to people's habits and activities, which is highly valuable to advertisers, but this value is not unlimited. At a certain point, advertiser will say, "So what? They're not buying things, so why do I need this information?"

I don't know about others users, but I have used Facebook intensely for over three years, yet have clicked on ads only a couple of times, and I have NEVER bought anything through those ads. Who would pay for clicks like mine?

I fully expect the coming IPO to be a big success! That's because a lot a naive investors with poor math skills are eager to climb on board. It's just like every past Gold Rush. People hear from their friends that this is a great investment, and they don't want to miss the boat. They use Facebook every day, think it is great and want to be part of the action, but they have no skill in valuing stocks.

These dumb investors may keep the bubble inflated for a little while, but what ultimately determines stock price is profit, and in Facebook's case, the profit is trivial and may always be trivial, at least nowhere near the profit that the current valuation suggests.

I don't expect the Facebook website to cease operation. It is still a valuable asset, just nowhere near its valuation. A lot of investors are going to be badly burned when the stock price finally reaches a rational level. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg is forced out and replaced with more conventional profit-driven management.

In the future, expect more intrusive ads and the introduction of fees for things that were previously free. There is no way around it. If you want an expensive service like this, you have to pay for it, and personally I would be happy to do so.

I depend on Facebook, and I hope it survives the crisis ahead.

Repent Now! - The Facebook/YouTube Crash Is Coming!

2012-01-24T19:01:00.001-08:00

Social media is a new economy, and there are sure to be problems down the line that we can't anticipate now. It's not all endless growth; there are bound to be crashes. Here's one problem I see that could be a big problem in the not-so-distant future....

Facebook, in its new Timeline feature, has invited everyone in the world to chronicle their entire lives on the site. Many will accept this offer, uploading every photo they have from their past. But then what happens? Those photos sit on Facebook's servers forever, rarely viewed and never generating a cent of profit for Facebook.

Multiply this by millions of users, and you have endless terrabytes of dead storage that Facebook must pay for but is gaining little economic benefit from.

True, storage is always getting cheaper, but will the technology keep pace with the added burdens? And storage will always cost money, while photos that are never viewed generate no revenue.

Facebook can plausibly generate revenue on new photo albums that people actually look at, since they can sell advertising on the margins. They gain no revenue when active interest in those photos expires, as usually happens in a couple of weeks. Then the photos are merely a money-sink for Facebook, since it has to pay for storage. And this dead storage is constantly growing at an ever-quickening pace.

This has to end badly sometime in the future. Facebook simply can't store everything for everybody forever. There has to be a breaking point.

YouTube also faces the same problem. People are uploading videos every day. Each of those videos have an active life when they can generate revenue, and after that they become dead storage that never goes away. And video files are HUGE, dwarfing still photos.

I have often recorded videos for only one person. I upload the video -- as big as one gigabyte -- the target audience views it, then the video is never viewed again. It sits in storage until the end of time.

The Google search engine doesn't face this problem as much. It doesn't have to store or index the whole web, only as much as it wants to. As the web grows exponentially, Google doesn't have to keep up.

Not so for Facebook. With its Timeline feature, it is implicitly promising to keep everything you upload forever. Imagine the outcry if Facebook ever said, "We're going to delete some of your old photos."

Facebook's economic base is still unproven. It can make money selling advertizing and by selling all the data it is collecting on people's behavior, but it is doubtful this revenue stream can increase at the same exponential rate as Facebook's new commitments to users.

This is beginning to take the same form as every conventional economic crash in the past: A belief in magical infinite growth that will go on forever. In the midst of the boom, people believe in anti-gravity, but real gravity always wins in the end.

So don't upload your photos to Facebook or videos to YouTube thinking they'll be there forever (as, unfortunately, I have). Regardless of revenue, there will come a time when no amount of cheap storage can keep up with the demands being made.

One way or another, gravity will eventually win.

[Also see next entry: The Facebook Bubble: Running the Numbers]

My Social Media Policy

2012-01-24T03:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a road map of how all my various social media accounts fit together....

Facebook

Facebook is my photo diary, the place I upload all my photos as I take them and where I record most of my other work as it is released (videos, blog entries, etc.). It is also my place to communicate with actual non-virtual friends. Most of my Facebook page is public and anyone can subscribe, but I friend only people I know or who I have an obvious connection with. (You can always try to friend me, but I'll run you through some filters before I accept.)

Facebook is linked to everyone I know—family, friends, casual acquaintances—so my postings there are designed not to offend. It is an ideal forum for pretty pictures, links to travel videos and other things that are unlikely to upset anyone's apple cart.

My photos on Facebook are usually edited, and they may be posted hours or days after they are taken. I have HUNDREDS of photo albums on FB from all over the world, indexed on my photo page.

Twitter

I use Twitter when I want to speak my mind, without worrying much about discretion. Although I don't try to keep my Twitter account secret, very few of my Facebook friends follow me on Twitter. Twitter is simply too much work and takes too much initiative for most, so there is a de facto firewall between the two (at least in one direction). This allows me to be more spontaneous and truthful, making uncomfortable observations without fear of offending my conventional friends and acquaintances.

Here are my Best Tweets of All Time as judged by my followers, and here is what they like right now.

Twitter plays a special role in my social media strategy because it is not just a real-time feed. My tweets are permanently archived in a system of my own creation: BadDalaiLama.com. This provides a sort of personal diary of where I went, what I did, what I was reading, what I was thinking and what I stumbled upon in life—as much for my own record as anyone else's. (I am frequently looking back at the archive to find old links and where I was on a particular date.)

Twitter is also my main forum for words of wisdom. I spew aphorisms like you wouldn't believe! (The timeless ones are reposted on @BadLamaWisdom.) Whenever I tweet something, I want it to have permanent relevance, fifty years from now as much as today, so I try not to clutter my timeline with many here-and-now tweets or too much conversation with others. (I generally prefer DM's for personal exchanges.)

My photos on Twitter are usually posted "as they happen", directly from my iPhone without editing. However, I may also post some of my best edited photos after I have uploaded them to FB.

I tweet many times a day! Hardly a waking hour goes by when I don't spew something. For my full Twitter policies, see BadDalaiLama.com

Google+

My Google+ is is not nearly as active Facebook and Twitter. I use it to repost important things that might be lost on my other dense feeds. My rule for G+ is "only the best!". I used to post a lot more photos there until I upgraded to Timeline on Facebook. Now I might post once a day at most, and only my very best stuff.

YouTube

YouTube is my video archive. I don't participate much in the social media aspects of YouTube. I just post my own original videos there. (Since YouTube is the standard video forum, I see no reason use other video sites like Facebook, TwitVid or Vimeo.)

Only about half of my YouTube videos are "public" and directly shown on my YouTube page. The rest are "unlisted" and can be viewed only if you have the link. These video usually are not secret; I just don't want them to clutter up my YouTube channel and distract from my better work. My video page is intended to index ALL of my videos, including the unlisted ones. I will also announce most of my videos on Facebook and Twitter as they are uploaded. My travel videos are also cross-referenced on my photo page by location (currently incomplete).

Yup, I still use it! I have a dozen valid addresses, but most of them channel into BadDalaiLama (at) gmail.com, which is the fastest way to reach me.

Inactive and Low-Activity Accounts

I use FourSquare only as an easy way to update both Twitter and Facebook with my location. Unlike some 4SQ users, I'm not going to tell you everywhere I go. I'll only report interesting locations or places I have something to say about. Most of my 4SQ posts appear on Twitter and Facebook, so there isn't much need to follow me on 4SQ.

I am on LinkedIn, but I am not an active user. (Since I have no marketable skills, LinkedIn isn't much use to me.)

In 2010, I maintained a Tumblr Blog of my best videos, but that has been replaced by Google+. You can still browse it for some nice photos from that era.

I have experimented with many other forums, including TwitPic, TwitVid and Facebook Video. Ultimately, I gave them up, but they still have some interesting archive material.

My first Twitter account was @KilroyCafe. This was my 18 months of training before @BadDalaiLama. A lot of great forgotten tweets, with a home-built archive system to access them.

Blogs

Kilroy Cafe is my main forum for philosophical essays, songs and other verbal work. If my message is too long to fit into a tweet, I'll probably post it here. Active since 2008!

Homeless by Choice is my forum for extreme budget travel, although I rarely update it anymore.

Area 51 Loose Ends is where I post random things about the secret Groom Lake military base in Nevada. I am no longer an active researcher in this field, there may still be a story or two I want to publish.

Things You Don't Need has been inactive since 2009, but I reserve the right to post there in the future.

The Problem with Multitasking

2012-01-18T08:46:00.000-08:00

Back when personal computers first appeared in the early 1980s, you could do only one thing at a time. You could run a word processing program or a spreadsheet but not both at once. If you wanted to switch between them you had to save your work, completely exit the application, then start up another one.

Then in the mid 80s, something called "time-slicing" came along. A computer would hold several applications in memory and the CPU would divide up its time between them. It worked on one task then switched periodically to another, but it did it so quickly that it seemed like the programs were running simultaneously.

Multitasking was born.

Today, we take it for granted that we can open multiple applications, keep them running simultaneously and switch between them with a single click. You can now get multiple inputs at the same time: one window plays music while another shows you the latest news and you do your main work in a third.

People are also multitasking in their personal lives, assuming they can do things the same way computers do. There are more sources of stimulation than ever before, and people feel they need to do them all simultaneously or in rapid succession: computers, TVs, cellphones, iPods — not to mention all the endlessly replicating real-world tasks we find ourselves obligated to. Before personal computers, it was fashionable to say that humans used only 10% of their brain capacity. Now they are using 110%! That doesn't mean, however, that people are more productive or happier. The cost of quantity is quality.

The problem with multitasking on computers is that your PC can eventually become so cluttered with active tasks that it slows down and becomes unusable. This is true no matter how much processing power you have. Computers today have 1000s of times the CPU speed of computers in the 1980s, but when you crank up your word processor it may run so... incredibly... slow... that you almost wish for a nice simple one-task computer from the old days.

The really disturbing thing is that most of those processes slowing down your computer are junk tasks you don't really need and may not even be aware of. It could be a virus slowing down your computer or some unused application you installed long ago and forgot about. Personal computers today are a mess! In spite of any "optimizing" you may do, they are always compromised by irrelevent processes.

Likewise, people are undoubtedly busier than ever before, but most of those processes are junk tasks that don't really move your life forward. Of course there is the obvious cerebral junk food like video games and trash TV that soak up hours in a heartbeat, but junk can also come in appealing packages that don't seem like junk on the surface. It is hard to resist a five-star movie or an exciting vacation or a party with a lot of nice, interesting friends, but even this good stuff can be junk if there is too much of it.

Truth is, there is limit to how many apps your brain can run without the whole system getting fried.

CPUs in computers have their hardware limits. There is a maximum number of simple transactions you can force through them in a second, and once this limit is reached, you're going to have a systemic slowdown. People don't realize that human consciousness also has its hard limits. These parameters are much more difficult to define and measure, so it is easy to assume ones brainpower is unlimited, but there is a definite maximum-thoughts-per-minute and we find ourselves bumping up against it all the time.

We are all familiar with the problem of driving and cellphones. Studies show that drivers talking on phones are every bit as dangerous as drunk drivers. Governments respond by banning hand-held cellphone use, but speakerphones are almost as dangerous. The problem is not holding the phone but subdividing ones consciousness. A phone call, even a trivial one, is a high-priority brain task which pushes driving into the background. People run red lights and cut off others without even knowing it.

Whatever consciousness may be, it employs a form of time-slicing. It focuses on one task for a certain amount of time, then switches to another. The slice given to each task is measurable and significant, more in the range of seconds than milliseconds. Sometimes the switch between tasks is internally prompted—daydream thoughts that segue naturally from one idea to another—and sometimes it is triggered by an outside event. If you are driving on a straight road, your thoughts can wander for some time until something happens in front of you that snaps your attention back to the road. (That is, unless another more involving task gets in the way. )

It is no mystery that the more you slice up a pie, the less of it each person gets. If conscious thought is a limited commodity and you divide it among twenty tasks, each task will get, on average, one-twentieth of the attention. Inevitably, there are some tasks that monopolize more than their fair share of attention, and these aren't necessarily the most important ones. A trivial phone call while driving will kill you just as surely as an important one, because all calls take priority in consciousness.

Simple math says that the more you divide up quality thought, the less quality gets allocated to each task. "Quality" means devoting sufficient processing power to a task to do it well. When driving, quality is obvious, if you miss a red light and drive right through it or if you miss some other clue on the road like slick ice ahead, then the quality of processing is low, and you could die for it.

The same applies on the macro level. If you go from one hour-long activity to another and another with no gaps in-between, then you may have been focused fully on each task but you have had no time for any higher-level processing of the experience. You don't have time to regurgitate and reprocess, which is an essential part of learning. If you engage in an hour-long learning task, it is better to have a free hour to think about it afterwards. Then you have time to integrate and process what you have learned and you will probably do it better the next time than if you had no intervening thinking time.

In the modern world, it seems to be taken as a badge of honor to have a busy life full of involving activities from dawn to dusk, but what this often means is a trite and superficial life that isn't nearly as productive as it seems to be. The main goal in life is not to do a LOT of things but to do the RIGHT things, and this is where heavily multitasked people usually miss the boat. They have no time to think about what they doing, no time to ruminate on whether this is really the best path, so they can easy go off on unproductive tangents for years at a time.

Another thing you notice about overprogrammed people is that they are very passive. In other words, they will will respond to events around them but they rarely initiate them. Initiative takes time, thought and effort that these people just don't have. This makes the vulnerable to whatever stock solution someone else hands them, whether or not it it really right. In an unexpected crisis, multitask addicts may try to buy their way out of it instead of stopped to analyze the situation, which they don't have time for.

Overprogrammed people may be full of surface life, but don't expect a lot of deep interaction from them. They will respond to your questions but may not give much attention or care to their response. They may smile, but their mind is only half there. They may be full of promises but weak on follow-up. They are always racing to the next item on the agenda. If an unexpected issue, crisis or opportunity comes up, they can only devote to it the few available seconds between other activities.

Heavily multitasked people miss some of the best things in life because those events are not on their prepared agenda. When unexpected things happen, they just can't process them, let alone take advantage of them. Multitasked people aren't very curious about the world around them because they don't have time to be. Aliens could land on the front lawn, but they'd just shrug it off because they don't have time to investigate.

Computer technology has certainly come a long way since the 1980s, but it's not clear that our lives have gotten better for it. In the old days, you could still switch tasks—from word processor to spreadsheet—but there was a high cost of doing so, so you didn't do it very often. Now, it is a too easy to switch. Your time is sliced into ever-tinier bits, without much quality devoted to each. On the macro level, people are leading busy, superficial lives, blessed with a stunning variety of sensory input and no time to digest it.

You CAN get back to the 80s—back to the mythical age when people supposedly had time to think—but only through deliberate effort. You have to aggressively cut down your inputs and slough off obligations faster than you take them on. A 100% activity level isn't healthy for anyone. You have to be doing a lot less with your body before your mind can catch up and give meaning to what you do.

The thing most tragically lost in multitasking is the opportunity to think things through. You want to be taking MEANINGFUL actions in your life, not just busy ones.

Santa Claus and the Aliens: Charities That Don't Work

2012-01-15T22:44:00.001-08:00

A friend referred me to the website of the HEARTbeats Foundation, a 501(c) charity that intends to improve the lives of impoverished children around the world through music.

Based in Los Angeles, the HEARTbeats Foundation strives to help children in need harness the power of music to better cope with, and recover from, the extreme challenges of poverty and conflict, in hope of creating a more peaceful, sustainable world for generations to come.

In essence, this is a group of American musicians who travel around the world giving concerts to poor children, thereby improving their lives and "making a difference". Their first 6-day journey to Nepal was a great success. The photos show they brought great joy to many children.

Mind you, they are not doing anything concrete to improve the lives of impoverished children, they are just helping them "cope" with their poverty though the power of music. The 9-person team includes a 3-person film crew so they can record themselves bringing joy to others and making a difference.

So as I understand it, these musicians are improving the lives of desperate children by entertaining them. Sure, all children love entertainment, but this is very expensive entertainment, imported from America. These are concert violinists and cellists from prestigious American symphonies. Certainly impoverished children in Nepal will appreciate that!

This is an example of what I call a "Santa Claus" charity. They parachute in, give people some nice presents, and leave. Without a doubt, they bring joy to the people they give the presents to, but the joy doesn't last any longer than the gifts do. In spite of the short-term satisfaction of both the gifters and giftees, these charities can cause a great deal of long-term damage by disrupting local ecologies and giving people false hope.

To illustrate, here is a little parable I wrote for my friend...

Alien Contact

After years of speculation, the truth is revealed: Alien life exists!

A flying saucer comes out of the clouds and finally lands on the White House lawn. The whole world is mesmerized. All other television programming is suspended as every channel covers this one stupendous event.

The saucer opens and six strange grey aliens get out. They set up their instruments and start playing a concert of curious alien music. They dance and sing in a strange language. Then they get back in their spaceship and fly away.

Without a doubt, it's a joyful, amazing event! It is perhaps the most impressive occurrence in the memories of millions of Earthlings, especially the young people.

But then what happens?

The aliens don't come back.

People are left wondering, "Where did they go? Why did they leave?"

Yes, we now know that alien life exists, but they're not communicating with us anymore. They just abandoned us. Did we do something to offend them?

Can you imagine the trauma this would cause on Earth? Aliens come down from the heavens, show us joy, then leave, taking the joy with them.

Some of the young people on Earth are curious about the weird instruments the aliens are playing. They would like to play those instruments, too, but they don't exist on Earth. We don't have that
advanced alien technology, and aliens didn't leave anything behind to help us obtain it.

People also wonder: We've got some serious problems on Earth -- global warming, war, overpopulation, poverty, hunger. These aliens are very powerful. Why can't they help us with these things?

People who were starving before the aliens came are still starving after they leave.

Oh, I forgot to mention something: The aliens brought a film crew with them. The purpose of the film crew was to record the six aliens bringing joy to Planet Earth. The joy is real and the film crew captures it! Without a doubt, the whole Earth is filled with wonder as the aliens perform on the White House lawn, and the film crew, pointing their camera out at the audience, accurately record that wonder.

But the film crew leaves with the aliens. It does not hang around to record whatever confusion or trauma takes place after the aliens are gone. As far as the aliens are concerned, the concert is over, but as far as the Earthlings are concerned, the questions and soul-searching have just begun.

You got to question the motives of the aliens when they bring a film crew with them. Are they really here to bring joy and hope to Planet Earth, or are they here to record themselves bringing joy and hope to Planet Earth?

Isn't that the REAL purpose of the mission? Now the aliens can go back to their home planet, show the film to all their friends and say, "We made a difference!"

But did they really make a difference? Did they really improve life on Planet Earth or just confuse the hell out of people? In the long run of five or ten years, did this concert help or hurt our planet? It's really hard to say. It is an alien event with a million different interpretations. In fact, most people can't process it at all. It's just this weird thing that happened.

The only clear thing is that any joy the aliens brought to our planet left as soon as they did.

The End.

Taoism vs. the Western Way

2012-01-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

[This post is a modified version of a letter to a friend.]

There was once a girl I liked who gave me a book, The Tao of Pooh, I don't know if you've read it: Taoism explained in terms of Winnie the Pooh. Pooh is the most Taoist of all characters. He doesn't try to impose his will on the world; he just lets the world flow through him.

I loved the book! I wished I could write a nice simple book like that. But at the same time I recognized the flaws of Taoism, how it is really a corrupt philosophy if taken by itself.

Taoism taught me to take advantage of the winds as they are, not expecting them to blow where they're not. But if you take this philosophy to the extreme, you're just casting yourself adrift, subject to the storms and winds of the sea, and you'll get nowhere.

Taoism is poisonous when it encourages people not to take an active position in their own lives, which I think was the aim of the girl who gave me the book. The dark side of Taoism is passivity and fatalism. Taoism may account for the fact that the Chinese had gunpowder but never thought of guns, had sailing ships but never bothered to explore. Taoism = no initiative but to wake up in the morning and accept the world as it is.

In real life, people like Pooh get abused and eaten alive. Life doesn't give you a pleasant, protected Hundred-Acre Woods to live in. In real life, you have to take initiative just to protect yourself. If you just let life pass through you, you're going to be victimized. You're also going to be a mindless, boring twit with no curiosity or initiative.

The Western materialistic way is to impose your will on everything, which is equally corrupt. You barge ahead regardless of the winds. You cut all fish into uniform square bricks and sell them as Filet o' Fish sandwiches. The Western way is to try to force the world into a system that you design, which has all sorts of collateral damage. If you cut all your fish into square bricks, wiping out their individual quirks, you'll be wasting a lot of fish as well as depleting the local fisheries and exploiting the people involved in production. The Western way denies nature and wastes a lot of resources, but it had taken over the world because it is reproducible on a massive scale.

A middle ground is life aboard a sailing ship. In the age of sail, you had to listen to the winds and move with them. At the same time, people had places to go. They had goals to achieve, which Taoism really can't account for. Non-Taoist sailors actually went out and explored the world, whereas the Taoist would never leave port. Often the goals of the explorers were deluded -- searching for Eldorado -- but at least they were motivated by SOMETHING.

My own modified Western-Taoist position is that I'll listen to the winds, but I'm also driven to get someplace. I don't have specific goals, like Eldorado, I have "meta goals" -- certain creative directions I want to go in when given the opportunity. It is the difference between drifting aimlessly in the Caribbean and choosing to at least go East or West.

Taoism is popular these days because it helps justify people's passivity -- not taking action in one's own life. Passivity is often a result of being overprogrammed and deluged with stimuli, so you just don't have time for thoughtful decision making. The average TV viewer is very passive and Taoist. He just lets the TV schedule flow through him and is never motivated to leave his couch.

The Taoist is poor at thinking ahead. He isn't trying proactively to head of crises before they happen. Because he is living in the "now", he is not a very good chess player, where you have to think many moves ahead. Because of this, the Taoist is often abused and exploited, like Pooh would be in the real world or how millions of Chinese now are in the slave labor camps of the Walmart corporation.

I've never been a passive type, but the crises of my adulthood really turned me into the master of my own ship. I'm not going to deny the winds, but I sure as hell am going to take the rudder! Even when I chose NOT do something, I don't do it passively. It means I have thought through the implications and have made a conscious decision that doing nothing is my best alternative in this instance.

Life is a series of forks in the road. At each of them you make a decision. You listen to what nature wants, but it is still your responsibility to actively decide your path, using all the resources at your disposal to try to foretell the future. Sometimes you choose wisely, and sometimes poorly, but you always learn something from it to apply to the next decision.

You can't just "go with the flow" as a Taoist would. You must actively decide what stream to follow then actively steer your ship upon it.

Kilroy Cafe #17: So you're having an Existential Crisis (Welcome to the club!)

2011-11-10T10:07:00.001-08:00

Here is a repost of a Kilroy Café philosophy essay from 2008. (Previously available only as a graphic.) You can print this newsletter on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters

So you're having an
Existential Crisis
(Welcome to the club!)

By GLENN CAMPBELL

So you’re having an existential crisis. You’ve been looking in the mirror and asking yourself “Who am I?” Due, no doubt, to an unfortunate series of events, you now find yourself at a personal crossroads and don’t know which way to go.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Millions are suffering from the same disorder. Unfortunately, society doesn’t offer much sympathy or support. “Don’t you know who you are?” people seem to say. “Are you some kind of dummy?”

But you’re no dummy. Just recognizing the existence of a crisis is evidence of your intelligence. Most people coast through life playing simple-minded roles: fireman, fashion model, soldier, mommy. You at least have the presence of mind to know you have a choice and that none of the available roles quite fit.

An existential crisis is sometimes known as a “mid-life crisis.” You recognize in a panic that your life is half over and that most of the things you intended to accomplish aren’t happening. That’s when middle aged men dump their wives for younger girlfriends and invest in the proverbial red sports car. Alas, it rarely solves the problem.

Turns out, a mid-life crisis can happen at any stage of life, and the earlier you start having them the better. There’s nothing wrong, in fact, with being in continuous existential crisis from the age of 14 until you die. All of us are facing a deadline, and none of us can afford to waste much time.

Not knowing what to do with ourselves is an inherent condition of life. Things are easier when we have no choice—when our career, relationships and goals have all been arranged for us by others. Once we recognize our ability to choose, we start to fret about it and wonder if we are accomplishing all we are capable of.

The pain is numbed when we fall into a role and it is reasonably successful. Someone playing the role of “doctor” or “corporate executive” doesn’t usually think much about where his life is going because the role itself takes up so much time. It is mainly when we are unsuccessful in our chosen pursuits that a crisis emerges.

And thank God for that! Our most important and potentially rewarding decisions are prompted by failure. Had you been successful in your original plan, you would have continued along a fairly bland straight-line track. Failure forces you to make a bold departure. It is riskier than the straight-line route, but the potential is also greater.

So what should that departure be? In the midst of a crisis, everything is on the table. Should you chuck it all and join the Peace Corps? Should you change your sexual orientation or even your whole gender? (Chop, chop, snip, snip!) Or should you just quit the game altogether, opting for a clean or messy suicide? (A plea from the living: Please don’t be messy.)

While it is useful to think about all the theoretical options, your practical choices are much more limited. You’re not going to get a sex change, and it would be silly to check out. It would also be unwise to completely change your career. If you are already a doctor, it doesn’t make much sense to try to become a lawyer. It is just too costly to start over from scratch.

Listen up because this is the important part: You’ve got to stick with what you know and what you’re already good it.

Okay, your life up to present may have been an abject failure, but you’ve still built up certain skills and assets, and you shouldn’t abandon them lightly. In a crisis, there is often a temptation to completely discard the past and start over in an entirely new field. Unfortunately, you’re probably a babe in this field and are competing against those who grew up there and are much better at it than you are.

The first step to resolving your existential crisis is making a cool, objective inventory of your assets. For example, there are things you have been doing since your earliest consciousness—singing, writing, drawing, etc. These skills are part of your nervous system, so it is senseless to try to purge them. You need to be working with your native skills, not against them.

The solution to your crisis lies not in radical change but in rediscovering to your roots. What do you do well? What are you already set up for? What product comes out of you effortlessly? It is easy to devalue your native skills because they come so easily to you, but in the context of society, they are still remarkable and shouldn’t be dismissed.

Once you complete an honest inventory, an existential crisis usually resolves itself. There are things you can do with your current resources and opportunities and things you can’t. Obviously, you are going to focus on what is doable right now.

You don’t need to know where your whole life is going to make adequate decisions for the moment. You just look at the real opportunities in front of you and choose the one that’s most consistent with your past and your core abilities.

Just work with what you have.

—G .C.

©2008, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy writings at Glenn-Campbell.com/philosophy.

It turns out we also published this issue as a blog entry in 2008.

Kilroy Cafe #4: Teenage Insanity Explained at Last! (reposted from 2008)

2011-10-14T04:41:00.000-07:00

Here is a repost of a Kilroy Café philosophy essay from 2008. (Previously available only as a graphic.) You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters

Teenage Insanity Explained at Last

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Monkeys can be clever. If you hang a banana just out of reach and leave a stick in their cage, they’ll eventually figure out how to use the tool to obtain the treat.

Human teenagers are almost as smart. If you hang something they want just out of reach and give them the tools to attain it, they’ll eventually learn to connect the two, but maybe not as quickly as the monkey.

First, they have to throw a tantrum, insisting it’s IMPOSSIBLE to obtain the goal with those pitiful tools. They complain bitterly about your cruelty in not giving them the banana directly. Their strategy, of course, is to coerce you into fetching it for them.

But if you cave in and do what they demand, they only hate you for it. The more bananas you give them, they more they resent you and devalue what you’ve done for them. They’ll take whatever you give, bitch about it, then demand you give even more.

Generally speaking, monkeys are easier to work with.

There seems to be vast misunder-standing among the general public about what a teenager is and what he expects from the world. Parents and other social workers often make the mistake of trying to reason with the teenager using words alone. They expect him to think like an adult, when in fact adults don’t even think like adults most of the time.

He used to be this sweet little thing who saw you as a hero and followed you everywhere like a puppy. Then puberty kicked in and it was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Everything you did became wrong and your old bag of tricks didn’t work anymore.

We are pleased to report, however, that adolescent humans can be success-fully managed and occasionally turned into productive citizens. You just have to think like they do.

Around puberty, a youth becomes afflicted with an overwhelming need for identity. He is driven to distinguish himself from all the other humans around him, which is no easy task. Spiked hair, outrageous fashions, risky behavior, graffiti—All are attempts to say, “Here I am!” They don’t want to be a puppy anymore; they have to be their own dog.

This drive for identity is more powerful than anything else: food, sex, sleep, safety. It is also inherently something you can’t do for them, even if they demand it.

Teens make fantastic rodeo riders because they’re absolutely driven to make their mark while having very little common sense. This, of course, is what terrifies caregivers. What is the teen going to try next, and will it be fatal? If you give him the keys to the car, will he blow his brains out with it?

The solution is to not give him the keys to the car. In fact, a teen shouldn’t be given anything. No keys, no bananas—nothing for free.

Consult the child abuse laws of your state. There are penalties for beating the kid, raising him in squalor or with¬holding basic nutrition or medical care.

Under the law, it is not considered child abuse if you fail to provide video entertainment or decline to take him to the mall for the latest fashions. As much as he may cry child abuse, it isn’t child abuse.

If it isn’t abuse to withhold a discretionary entertainment or fashion, then why are you providing it?
Here at Kilroy Cafe, we firmly believe in one guiding principle of parenting: Every child should be required to pay for his own upbringing.

Maybe not the full retail cost, but whenever a kid wants something, he should have to pay a price for it. If he wants dinner, he must contribute something to dinner. If he wants a ride somewhere, he must do something to compensate you for your time and gas.

No matter how wealthy you may be, the best environment for your kid is one of moderate poverty where nothing is taken for granted. If you have assets, hide them. Give the kid nothing for free, apart from your time. If he has a goal, he has to use his own resources to obtain it.

If he asks you for something, your first response should be “What will you do for me?”

You want to connect the kid with the real demands of the world as quickly as possible. He’s going to face them anyway when he moves out of your home, so why not start early?

Then the banana will have value, and you’ll be amazed by the ingenuity of the monkey.

—G .C.

©2008, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Bandwidth in Personal Relationships

2011-04-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

"Bandwidth" in electronic communications is the amount of data that can be passed through a communication channel. For example, with a high-bandwidth internet connection you can play movies, while with a low-bandwidth one you can only exchange email.

Bandwidth, in personal communications, refers to the amount of information that can be passed between individuals. This kind of bandwidth is different between different pairs of people. Some people you can communicate a lot with, others very little, even though you all speak the same language.

In this case, you can't really increase the raw data stream. All of us are communicating through words and gestures. Instead, you have to make these tokens carry more meaning. This happens when people know each other well and have common experiences to draw on.

The Coen Brothers, the sibling filmmakers, are known as the "two-headed director" to actors because if you ask either of them a question about the film, they'll give you the same answer. They can be said to have a very high bandwidth between them. However they are communicating between each other, it is obviously with a very economical use of words, based on their shared past experience.

When you communicate with a person on the street who you just met, it is usually a low-bandwidth connection. You can talk about the weather and recent news stories but little else.

We hesitate to talk about meaningful things with strangers because we fear they might not understand us or, worse, that they might be offended. You want to feel them out before you attempt complicated topics.

If you see that someone is reading a book that you have also read, then suddenly you have a body of knowledge in common. You can safely launch into a complicated discussion about the topic of the book, and the amount of information passed between you can be quite large relative to the number of words you are using. A person sitting near you who hasn't read the book might not have a clue what you are talking about, because he doesn't have the common knowledge base.

Since we are all operating with the same language—English—with a limited number of words at our disposal, bandwidth has to do with encoding and decoding mechanisms. When we have shared knowledge base with someone else, we can encode information into smaller packages, knowing that they will accurately decode the message at the other end.

But bandwidth involves more than shared knowledge. There are plenty of people who have years of shared experience with each other but who nonetheless communicate very poorly. We see them bickering in public places. No doubt, you too have been involved in relationships where there was shared experience but poor communication. It can be hell!

It turns out, high bandwidth involves a certain emotional sync between people. Furthermore, some people have such emotional blocks that they can't communicate deeply with anyone at all.

People develop emotional blocks when they become heavily invested in things—be they life choices or belief systems. People can also get out of sync with themselves, where there own brain is rife with inconsistencies. Both of these things can form a barrier to external communication.

Theoretically, the more common experience you have with someone, the better your communication will be, but it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, communication just gets worse and worse, until you tiptoeing around, doing your best not to set them off.

If you are only communicating a small portion of what you think and feel to another person, then you have a low-bandwidth connection, regardless of how many years you have spent together. Like it or not, your investment in shared experience really hasn't paid off. Now, you have to decide whether the investment should continue.

The benefits of high bandwidth are great, especially in creative partnerships like the Coens'. You can economically communicate instructions to each other knowing they will be understood. The more experience you have together, the more complex projects you can collaborate on, like whole movies.

In a low-bandwidth relationship, you are forever trapped in a cycle of retractions and corrections, misinterpretations and apologies, and the volume of information you actually convey is very small. When you are out of emotional sync with your communication partner, nothing works right. Messages are decoded in a completely differently than how you encoded them, then you are supposed to apologize for how your message was misinterpreted.

If you're already heavily invested in the relationship, you may try all sorts of tricks and therapy to try to make communication better, but they rarely work. High bandwidth involves many personality factors, and for the most part, personalities can't be changed.

If you want high bandwidth, you have to build it, but you also have to select for it. Face it, you just can't communicate with most people in the world. You can discuss weather, sports and other non-controversial topics, but anything deeper is going is going to trigger their sensitivities. There's nothing you can do to change this.

While common experience is useful, there are also people you can communicate with almost instantly. 99 out of 100 people you sit beside in airplanes are dolts, but 1 out of 100 is reachable. You will get a lot farther investing in them then you will with the others.

Invest in a dolt and years later they will still be a dolt. And you will be watching your words very, very carefully.

Identifying Your Own Narcissism on Twitter

2011-03-16T03:54:00.000-07:00

On Twitter, we are broadcasting short messages to the world about ourselves. Every tweet has some of its author contained in it, but not all tweets are narcissistic. What distinguishes a narcissistic tweet from a non-narcissistic one?

A narcissistic tweet is something that aggrandizes the author without giving anything of value to the reader. "Here's what I'm doing" or "Here's what I'm feeling" or "This is my opinion." It's all "I" centered, concerned only with the needs of the author. If you don't think that's bad, imagine removing you own name and reading the same tweet from someone else. Would you even care?

The simplest test of narcissism is whether the tweet would be compelling to the world regardless of who wrote it. If it's not meaningful with the author's name removed, then it's probably just self-centered crap, destined to be forgotten instantly.

The difference between narcissistic and useful can be hard to distinguish in your own tweets. Just because you are talking about yourself and your own activities doesn't make a tweet worthless. The question is whether the tweet gives stand-alone value to others.

We are all, at our core, narcissistic. We want others to love us! But some of us learn to step beyond this primitive urge and actually serve the needs of others. In the end, people should value you for how you contribute to their own lives, not just for being you.

It is not necessarily narcissistic to travel to some interesting destination and tweet photos and descriptions of things you discover along the way. If those observations are unique and interesting in themselves, they are useful to your readers. Even though the journey is centered on you (where you are going and what you are doing), you are still performing a public service. You are taking your own experience, filtering it and giving only the most interesting and useful parts to others. Traveling has inherent value to others, just like being in the middle of a major news event, but you have to find the parts that are universally meaningful.

Should you also tweet photos of yourself while traveling? Sure! If I was visiting the Taj Mahal, I would almost certainly turn the camera on myself in front of the monument and tweet that photo to my followers (hopefully geotagged with the Taj Mahal's address). Is this narcissistic? Certainly! Deep down, I am saying, "Look at me! I'm special because I'm in a special place!" but you get a pass on something like this if the photo is interesting in itself and contributes to the credibility of your tweet stream. There are thousands of photos of the Taj Mahal already on the web. The world doesn't need another unless there's something unique about it. Placing yourself in the scene gives your tweet stream some immediacy and makes people pay attention. It shows people that you are actually tweeting from experience, and this increases the value of whatever you subsequently tweet—which is the interesting and ironic things you find in Agra.

It's not so interesting to tweet your location in your own hometown when you happen to be meeting friends. "I'm at the Berry Barn, 123 Main St., with Joe and Sue." That's fine if your only friends are Joe and Sue and people who know Joe and Sue. For the rest of your followers, it's just noise, and if you tweet too much of this stuff they'll unfollow you.

If you aspire to having followers around the world, not just on Main Street, then you have to broadcast things with worldwide appeal, which doesn't include the Berry Barn. You tweet above has value to Joe and Sue's friends, but it has only a COST to everyone else. Someone in another country is forced to read your tweet while getting nothing out of it, and this pulls down the value of your whole tweet stream.

A narcissist thinks his activities are important just because they're his. Therefore, he spews lots of tweets about what he is doing and how he is feeling. He also thinks his own opinion is important to tweet just because it's his. He'll tweet, "I love Sarah Palin" or "I hate Sarah Palin," but in both cases, he isn't giving the world anything it hasn't heard already. You get a pass if you can say something clever and funny about Sarah Palin, but even then the bar is very high. It has to be funnier than the million Sarah Palin jokes already out there.

Unless you happen to be a celebrity, no one cares about your opinion! Instead, people care about insight. If you have new information to offer, something that's never been said before, then it's worth tweeting. If you're just adding your voice to a million others, then it's noise.

If you ARE a celebrity, then you can get away with just about anything. For a stream of pure narcissism, check out @KimKardashian. For some unfathomable reason she has almost 7 million followers, even though she says nothing of value to anyone outside her personal clique. If she didn't happen to be a celebrity (and constantly referencing other celebrities) she wouldn't have more followers than the average teenager.

The rest of us can't get away with that. We have to actually give value to people if we expect strangers to follow us, and it takes time for strangers to recognize this value. It can be a long, hard slog!

@CharlieSheen may be able to attract a million users overnight, but the rest of us have to fight for every 100. This doesn't matter! In the end, we will win and Charlie will lose, because Charlie will never learn how to gain self-worth by giving to others. He will be forever trapped in the most primitive form of narcissism: "I'm special just because I'm me." (Or in his words: "I'm tired of pretending I'm not special.") He'll never learn to modify his behavior to serve the needs of others, so eventually he'll self-destruct. Like other narcissists, he'll perpetually seek perfect love and adoration that can never be achieved.

We may all be narcissists at our core, but some of us get a clue: To be loved by others, we have to serve their needs. We have to step out of ourselves enough to see what those needs are and filter our own output to address them.

Reducing narcissism in your own tweet stream doesn't mean eliminating yourself from it entirely. Frankly, you SHOULD tweet about yourself from time to time. Use of "I" and "me" is not necessarily selfish. In fact, it may be essential! Why? Because if you don't insert yourself and your needs into you tweet stream occasionally, people will start taking it for granted as a free public service. It is important to let people know there's a real person behind this output and not a robot or organization. Otherwise, your efforts will never be appreciated.

Yes, you WANT people to love you, but it has to be for the right reasons. You want to be judged for what you DO, not who you ARE! Children are valued for who they are. Adults should be valued for what they do for others.

If your tweet stream does something for people, then you ought to be recognized for it. If that's narcissistic, so be it. It's good kind of narcissism: seeking love and appreciation by doing good things for others. That's a noble undertaking! It's not noble to just say: "Here I am. Love me!" Sadly, that's how most people think, because they haven't broken out of childhood. They expect to be treated as special without doing anything for anyone.

You can break out of that, can't you? Just work on giving value to others, without losing yourself in the process, and the respect of others will (probably) follow.

Also see my YouTube video: "How to Twitter (and How Not To)"

Knowledge is not Wisdom!

2011-03-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Our society's knowledge base seems to be expanding almost logarithmically! Never before has so much relevant data been available on so many subjects.

However, that doesn't mean that wisdom has increased in the world. On the whole, people don't seem any wiser now than they were 100 years ago. That's because wisdom and knowledge are two different things.

Wisdom can be defined as mature judgment in dealing with the problems in front of you. Knowledge give you the facts, but wisdom tells you how to weigh these facts against each other to reach a final behavior that works.

Simple example: driving a car. You can collect all manner of facts about cars, memorize the highway codes, know how a car works and where you are going—and still not be a good driver! Driving is a holistic, non-verbal skill that requires the weighing of many more factors than can ever be described. When should you pass other cars or cut into traffic? When can you "disobey" the traffic laws by driving over the speed limit? Sure, it's good to know the traffic laws and how a car works, but driving is more than that. It's an exercise in operational wisdom, and the proof of that wisdom is having fewer accidents.

Driving is a skill that can be gained only by experience, and you need time to get good at it. Time and experience don't guarantee wisdom on the road, but they are a minimum requirement for it. Furthermore, you can't say that drivers today are better than drivers fifty years ago. On the contrary, drivers today have too many distractions with all their incoming data and are probably worse!

The same applies to virtually any other real-world skill. Just because you have unlimited facts at your disposal doesn't make you a smart operator. You can read 100 books on management and still be clueless when thrown into a management situation. No matter what data you gathered on the internet, only real experience is going to teach you how to do it.

Society is currently intoxicated with information, thinking that information will solve everything. In fact, information solves nothing! The same problems of the world persist! Certainly, good data is important input to any decision, but data doesn't make the decision; wisdom does. If balanced wisdom isn't there, then the decision will fail no matter how much data you have.

Data, in fact, can be as much a burden as an asset. It can bury the truth in irrelevancy, so you "can't see the forest for the trees." It can also distract you from the real-world experience you need to make good decisions.

Before visiting a foreign country, you can read every available travel guide, analyse every map on the internet, look at other people's photos and read their accounts, and still get lost or tripped up when you visit the country. Instead of wasting all that time collecting data, maybe you should have just visited the country first! Actually experiencing something, rather than collecting data on it, is the best way to start putting that activity into perspective—to start collecting wisdom rather than information.

Many people think they don't need that. They stay at home, collect facts on the internet and think they understand something. Then when they do venture forth into reality, they get beaten up by it! No matter how much data you have collected about something, only reality can show you what really matters. If you rely only on the internet, then you end up preparing for the wrong thing and getting blindsided by the right thing.

Wisdom is balance that comes from experience. To a certain extent it can be taught—say, from parent to child—but only by direct interactive experience over an extended period of time. You don't pick up wisdom from a weekend seminar or even a semester course. You get it by direct experience and perhaps some nudging from someone who has already learned things the hard way.

Even in the internet age, wisdom today is gained as it always has been—by personal experience and personal relationships. Don't expect faster data streams to improve things. For the most part, that just helps us make stupid decisions faster!

Complexity and How to Find It

2011-02-06T04:22:00.000-08:00

Complexity is the quality of being intricate and compounded. For example, the human body is a very complex life form compared to an amoeba. It's not just a matter of there being trillions of cells in the body but that they are connected in many different ways we're only beginning to understand. Complexity is hard to define precisely, but whenever you compare two objects or systems you can usually say without a doubt that one is more complex. One has more layers, more systems, more internal connections. An aircraft carrier is more complex than a sailboat. A chess game is more complex than tic-tac-toe.

Complexity also applies to people. Although we all have approximately the same number of brain cells, some brains are much more intricate than others. You can probably quantify this by slicing open someone's brain and examining the number of connections between cells, but that option isn't usually available to us.

An easier way to judge someone's complexity is to talk to them! Are they a one-song band or a multifaceted orchestra? Although complexity can't be precisely defined, you know when someone is complex and "deep" or simple and shallow.

Complexity is like layers of onion. Some people have many layers, others only a few. You find out which is which by spending some time with them. Assuming that you yourself have many layers, those with fewer get boring very quickly.

When you are trapped on an airplane, sitting beside a stranger, you may strike up a conversation with them just to be friendly. How long this conversation continues is a hint of their complexity. You might learn they are married, have a new baby and are a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, but the conversation peters out after that. There's just nothing more to talk about.

Then there are the rare people you find yourself beside where each question you ask leads to another and another, and soon you're engaged in an hours-long conversation that occupies the whole flight. Those are the complex ones. Each layer of them you peel away reveals a new, more subtle layer. They show signs of having thought things through, having built system upon system to deal with the challenges of their life.

In fact, these conversations usually end only when YOU reach the limits of YOUR complexity, to the point where you don't know what they're talking about—or don't want to. Their solutions may become upsetting to you when it is clear they have outpaced your own development. You curtail these conversations yourself because it is painful to see all that they have done that you haven't.

Complexity is different from success. Many simple-minded people achieve great outward fame or wealth yet remain very one-dimensional to talk to. Complexity is also not the same as intelligence, at least by standard measures. A mathematician can be brilliant in his field but still not know a thing about life outside it. Complexity is a holistic measure of emotional depth, not just abstract intellect.

Someone who is simple has one or two core areas of interest and sticks to them. He has only a couple of dimensions, which you come to understand quickly. He doesn't inquire beyond his current sphere and doesn't display much real humor about himself. Someone complex has multiple interests and appreciates the ironies of life. She can laugh at what she is doing and appreciate the absurdities of it without getting offended. The simple people are ants who see only their little ant world. The complex people see the world from above, from outer space, and even if they have to live in the ant world they are always striving to understand their place in the cosmos. They want to grasp the big picture and the underlying mechanisms, while most ants are content with the surface world in front of them.

Complexity is a treasure! It is something we want to nurture in ourselves and seek out in others. In ourselves, complexity means that we aren't just seeing in black and white but in a subtle range of colors. We see systems within systems in everything we look at, so we end up making better, more nuanced decisions.

Complexity in others helps enhance our own complexity. If you hang out with smart friends (on the internet or in real life), you're going to get smarter yourself, because these people will help you see all the subtleties of life you've been missing.

So how do you identify complex people, short of dissecting their brains? Listen to them. Watch them. Most of the data you need is being spewed out of them spontaneously. When you want more data, poke them. Ask them questions and see how they respond. Push them out of their comfort zone and see what happens.

Any data stream from the person is useful. For example: Look at their Twitter feed! People can pretend to be anything they want, especially on the internet, but they can't fake complexity. Even if a tweet stream consists entirely of articles and retweets from others, it is either a complex stream or a simplistic one. Is there intelligence in the selection of material, or is it based on a simple algorithm a computer could replicate? Are we seeing a growth curve, or are the tweets of today the same as those a year ago?

On Twitter, a good gauge of complexity is how long you want to keep reading someone's tweets. A tweeter may seem fascinating when you first subscribe, but over time you see them repeating the same ideas over and over. Once you understand their schtick, you can write it yourself and you end up unsubscribing. When your own complexity exceeds someone else's, you eventually want to move on.

Complexity has nothing to do with how many followers you have. Some celebrities with millions of followers are extremely boring and give you nothing back for your time. They are popular because most followers are simpletons themselves. They want the same things repeated over and over again because it's predictable and reassuring. If you happen to want complexity, then you have to look at a person's output objectively. Would you be following this stream if the person wasn't a celebrity or didn't happen to be a friend? Are you really getting any benefit from this output stream? Is it increasing your own complexity, or just taking up your time?

The same is true in real life. We are connected with all kinds of people—friends, family, co-workers. We receive, in some form, an "input stream" from each them. We are emotionally attached to some people, but that's a separate question from whether their input is useful in itself. Although we are very fond of a person, we may not be gaining much by interacting with them. When our own complexity exceeds theirs, they start dragging us down.

Almost everyone has something to teach us. The have techniques and perspectives that are useful to us. However, with most people, the lesson doesn't last long. We learn all their tricks, and then it's like we're trapped in First Grade with them when we really should be in Second.

Romantic relationships ultimately fail when complexity diverges. When you're in love, you see far more of that person than you normally would. After the honeymoon period, you quickly learn their limitations. You know the song they are going to be singing over and over for the rest of their lives. If you stay with them, they're going to hold you at this level, for better or worse. If you aspire to something more, then you've got a tough decision to make: Do you detach yourself, or do you accept a permanent burden on your own complexity.

In circumstances like this, where the decisions are painful, most people prefer to sacrifice their own development. That helps explain why there are so many simpletons in the world. Complexity is hard! It involves hard decisions about which input streams you are going to reject. If you have a dear friend you've known from childhood who isn't doing anything for you in the present, do you pull away, or do you continue giving them your precious time?

There is a limit to the input streams you can follow. If you are following dull and repetitive streams then you can't be following the complex ones that are going to benefit you most. Over time, you become whoever you associate with. If you follow a lot of fascinating Twitter streams, yours will become fascinating too. If you hang out with a lot of smart people, you'll become smart yourself. But of course it works in the other direction, too.

Time is your most precious resource. How you spend it—and who you spend it with—is the best predictor of who you will become.

Going with the Flow

2011-01-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

We all want things. You want things. I want things. Whatever position now you have in life, you want to improve it. Whoever you are, there are goals that you want realized because you think they will bring you greater happiness.

For example, you might want a better job doing more of the things you enjoy doing and fewer of the things you hate. Or you might want more money, because you're tired of struggling to pay the bills. Whoever you are, you have problems right now that you would like not to worry about in the future. Maybe you want to move yourself into a position where you can use more of your talents or get more recognition.

I don't know what you want from life; that's for you to decide. But once you decide on your goal, how do you go about getting it?

The stock answer is you fight for it! You set your sights on the goal, and you drive relentlessly toward it, overcoming any obstacles in your path.

Unfortunately, that's not always the best answer. Between you and your goal, there will be barriers, some of them unexpected and extremely costly. If you drive directly for them, then you aren't taking the most efficient route, and if the costs add up, you might not reach your destination at all.

The opposite philosophy is: don't try to seek your goals at all! Just let things happen as they may. Whatever will be, will be!

In that case, you are never going to attain your goal because you are never even going to head in that direction. Frankly, this is the method used by most people. They dream of great things, but they never even make the first step toward realizing them. They usually figure it is something they will do later, but as long as it remains in the future, they never start moving in the present and the goal is never achieved.

This corresponds roughly to many Eastern philosophies, like Taoism. One should not actively seek happiness but merely seek to free oneself of want. Go with the flow of the universe, wherever its currents may carry you.

Bull! If you're going to be like that—merely a piece of driftwood on the ocean of life—then there's not much point in living at all. Existence is exerting your will in the world. It is a quest for SOMETHING, even if you don't know exactly what. If you're not going to at least try to do something, then why are you wasting space on this planet?

It is good to have the motivation to change yourself and improve your lot in life. All I'm saying is there is such a thing as trying too hard and driving too directly for your goal.

The good message of Taoism is that you shouldn't fight the currents of life when you can avoid it. "Go with the flow" is a very good philosophy when the currents are going in the same general direction you are. BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO CHOOSE A DIRECTION.

You don't want to be a piece of driftwood bobbing helplessly in the sea. You want to be a sailing ship! As captain of the ship, you have to understand and respect the ocean. You can fight the currents, but it is very costly. It is much better to recognize the way the water is moving and use it to your advantage.

But above all, it is your responsibility to STEER the ship, not let it drift aimlessly. If one current doesn't do what you want it to, then you take control of the rudder and change currents! Sometimes, you have to fight rough waters to get where you want to go. Sometimes the crew will grumble. But as the captain, it is your responsibility to choose the best route for the ship.

The trouble with those hard-driving people who head directly for the goal is that they ignore the currents. They are more like a powerboat than a sailing ship, ploughing through the water regardless of the circumstances. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of energy, and their fuel may run out before they get there.

Sailing is the way to go! Certainly, you should know the direction you want to go, but you must also pay attention to the winds and waves. If the sea "wants" you to go in a certain direction, it may be a good idea to listen to it.

But you are the captain, not a victim of the waves. It is your responsibility to plot a wise course to the best of your ability as far ahead as you can reasonably see. The only problem is that it is hard to see ahead sometimes, so you often have to deal with circumstances as you find them.

It is good to have goals, but once you leave port, you must listen to the sea.

Eastern Europe: Your Next Vacation!

2011-01-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

If you are planning a vacation for next summer, let me put in a plug for Eastern Europe. It is cheap, safe, easy, and you don't need any visas. Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bosnia... there are too many countries to mention, many of which you probably know nothing about. I define Eastern Europe as all those countries that used to be Communist, and there's a lot more of them now than there used to be then.

Eastern Europe is not the dark dismal place of the Communist era, nor the ethnic battleground of the 1990s. These are optimistic, green and generally prosperous countries, very welcoming to tourists. The tourist trails are not so well-worn as in Western Europe, and there's more opportunities to get lost, but that's part of the adventure.

Above all, it's a safe adventure! Crime seems no worse here than in Western Europe or North America. And did I say cheap? Last summer, I wandered around in a half-dozen countries for only about $25/day for food and lodging. Then it was $25 to $35 more each time I took the train to the next city. Airfare notwithstanding, that's a lot cheaper than any vacation in the USA!

You don't need to know a single word of the local language (of which there are many). English is sufficient for communicating with ticket agents and lodging staff. (English is, after all, the language of Rock n' Roll, which the whole world speaks!) If you are lost, the first person you talk to may not speak English, but there is almost always someone in the vicinity who does—it's not as English-friendly as Germany but roughly equivalent to France.

You don't even need an itinerary! Just choose a city you can fly to cheaply, reserve your first night's stay, and the rest of your itinerary will take care of itself. Bring a laptop, plug into the wifi at your lodging, and plot your next move.

If you actually plan to go, the following is more detailed advice....

Start at HostelWorld.com, to see the accommodations available. You can book hostel beds here, but this is also a good place to find private rooms. Throughout most of Eastern Europe, a hostel bed for $15 is common, as is a private room for $40. Even if you walk out of the train station and stop at the first hotel you pass, you'll probably find a very reasonable rate by US standards. If you're the sort of wuss who needs to stay at the Hilton or equivalent sanitary lodging facility, I'm sure you can find that, too, but you're on your own here. One huge advantage of hostels, apart from the low price, is that you meet lots of people, which might never happen in the Hilton.

June and July are glorious! So is September. Avoid August, though, because all of Europe is on vacation then; trains may be packed and lodging booked.

If you are an American, Canadian or European, you don't need any visas for the Eastern European countries. (Check the US State Dept.'s travel site to be sure.) Only Russia requires a visa, and the hoops you have to jump through there seem almost as complicated as they were in the Communist era. For the other countries, just go as you wish. Ukraine? No problem!

Train is generally the way to get around. You can usually look up the schedules and fares online, then just go to the station on the day of your travel to buy your ticket. My all-day train ride from Zagreb to Sarajevo was only $25, and other point-to-point fares aren't much more. There is really no need for a rail pass with prices this low! (In Western Europe, plan to spend 2-4 times as much for an equivalent trip.) Eastern European trains tend to be old and a frayed at the edges, and stations can be dismal, but the whole system works and gets you there for a reasonable price.

You could also rent a car. In a car, unlike a train, you can start and stop at interesting places along the way. However, a car doesn't make much sense on your first visit to a new country. In that case, you want to cover as much ground as possible without the stress of driving. On your first visit, your main focus is the old town centers, where you get around on foot anyway and parking is a bitch.

One really cool thing about many of the trains in Eastern Europe: You can usually open the window and poke your head outside. That's way more exciting than a sanitary ride on the TGV, where you can't even sense how fast you're going!

One annoyance is money. Some countries use the Euro, but most still have their own unique currencies, which means you need new money at each new country you visit. The easiest way to obtain the local currency is to use your ATM card at a cash machine. Beware, however, that your bank may note the unusual activity and cut you off from your funds (believing it is fraud). You can avoid this by informing your bank of your travel before you go. (Call Customer Service to tell them.) Even then, you should be prepared for the possibility that your ATM card could be cut off.

If you go to a tiny country like Bosnia, you have to plan your transactions carefully, so you have enough cash for your visit but not too much. (Just like the old days in Europe before the Euro!) Acceptance of Visa/Mastercard is not universal, even for train tickets, so you can't depend on it.

Power is the European 220 volt standard, using the same plugs as the rest of continental Europe. Most modern electronics (like your laptop and camera power adapters) run on both 110 and 220 volts. (Look at the print on the adapter.) All you need is a small plug adapter (converting flat American prongs to round European ones), NOT a voltage converter. Adapters can be hard to find, so you need to have one before you leave home. (Walmart usually has a universal adapter in their luggage section.) Don't forget an extension cord or branching cube so you can charge all your devices at once.

Wifi is standard the world over. You need to make sure your lodging has it before you make your reservation; if not, don't go there.

Do not use your cellphone in any manner outside of your home country, unless it works on Wifi. The charges are astronomical, even for the simplest text message! Lots of visitors Skype on the Wifi at their lodging (much to the annoyance of their roommates).

So you have your first hostel night booked in the city where your plane lands. You plug into wifi and plot your next move. At the hostel, you will also meet your fellow travelers and you can ask their advice. This is especially important in Eastern Europe where there may not be a lot of information online. (For example, look at Bosnia on Google maps, and you'll see a big blank area.)

I don't need to give you specific advice on where to go, because you can figure that out on your own. I enjoyed the places I visited—Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Transylvania and Budapest—but there's much more I haven't seen. In particular, you shouldn't be afraid of the Balkans. The wars of the 1990s are long past, and these are stable countries now. Romania, also, is not the horror show it once was. I travel here with the same comfort as visiting the Netherlands.

On the other hand.... Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is a perfectly lovely vacation spot. So is Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Where else in the world can you find a higher density of miniature golf courses? Disneyland, Las Vegas, Six Flags... I know a many Eastern Europeans who would die to visit these places.

However, I expect a little more from you.

Also see my blog entry: How to Sleep in a Hostel

Roads are more important than destinations

2011-01-18T04:41:00.000-08:00

Photo: Martin Liebermann

Standard inspirational advice usually goes something like this: "Set your sights on lofty goals and never let go of them. Choose your destination, and the road will take care of itself. If necessary, you'll make your own road! Dream big dreams, pursue them unwaveringly, and those dreams are bound to come true."

Bad advice! This invariably means young people choose grandiose, unobtainable dreams—movie star, rock star, sports star—and waste many years of their lives throwing themselves against the obstacles that stand in their way. In the end, they are usually defeated because the goal disregarded what was realistically possible.

So what is the alternative? "Choose a wise road, and the destination will take care of itself."

It's okay to have a general direction you want to go in, but it should be more of a meta-goal then a specific one. For example: "Use more of my creative abilities on things I find meaningful." Within that general goal, a lot of things are possible. You don't need to know right now exactly what the destination will be.

At this moment (and every moment), you stand at a crossroads. There are a number of roads open to you. There are also a number of roads not open to you. You can't become a movie star right now because no one is offering you the position. Your wisest move is to choose the most promising road from those that are actually available to you.

Right now, at this crossroads, you must look ahead at each road as far as you can see. You aren't looking for a specific destinations but the spectrum of choices that this road offers. One road may lead to Europe and another to Africa. You don't need to know the exact city you'll end up in; you are just evaluating the range of options each continent presents. In your current circumstances, you may see that Europe offers better options, so that's the road head off on.

A funny thing happens on roads. Unexpected things turn up—things you weren't expecting when you first made your plans. There are unexpected obstacles, but also unexpected opportunities. If you have already fixed your sights on a specific goal, then you are going to barge through the obstacles and breeze past the opportunities, because they weren't part of the plan.

If your goals are more general and you aren't driven by a schedule, then you can afford to listen to the road. You can stop at the obstacles and figure out what they are trying to tell you. You can also stop at the opportunities, do a little analysis and say, "Wow! This is a lot better than my original plan!"

The nice thing about unexpected opportunities is they are organic. They flow easily. You don't have to force yourself. An opportunity is when the world has a need, and you happen to be in the right position to fill it. That's different from you having a need (to be a movie star) and demanding that the world fill that need.

The conventional advice says, "If the world doesn't give you the road you want, then pave your own." Unfortunately, that's very expensive—clearing all that forest, etc. It's much better to use a natural road when available. If you want to get to the next valley and a mountain range stands in your way, you shouldn't draw a straight line on the map and follow it blindly; you look for natural passes in the mountains. They may not take you exactly where you intended, but they get you past the obstacle.

Likewise, there is no particular value in choosing a specific destination in life and barging toward it come hell or high water. For one thing, by the time you get there, the destination may be gone! The trouble with choosing a specific goal right now is that it is based on information from the past. You don't know how the world is going to change or how you yourself will change. In most cases, those lofty childhood goals are just you trying to reproduce someone else's success. They aren't you finding your own success.

It sounds like a truism, but traveling is a journey. You can't really know what works for you until you get there. By all means, visit Europe, but don't decide beforehand what you are going to like best about it. You don't want to choose your destination, force your own road through the mountains, then find out the destination wasn't all that great anyway.

To a certain extent, you have to trust the road. You use all your skills to choose the most promising path, but once you're on it, you have to listen to it. Don't let a better opportunity pass you by because you were on a fast-track to somewhere else. Stop and smell the flowers!

Maybe that was what you really wanted anyway.

The 6 Essential Communication Skills of Modern Life

2011-01-01T03:58:00.000-08:00

To communicate effectively in the modern world, you have to master the current forms of media. Turns out, most of these skills haven't changed much since pre-internet days, but we call them by different names. Instead of "quotations", we now have "tweets", and instead of "essays" we have "blogging", but the basic abilities are the same: You need to be able to write, speak, take photos and argue effectively to get your point across to others.

Here, in modern terms, are the six essential skills of human communication...

1) Twittering. You need to be able to distill your most important ideas into a compelling package of 140 characters or less. Of course, 140 is arbitrary, but the need to compress a message is universal. Some of mankind's greatest shared wisdom is passed from generation to generation in these short sayings. E.g. "There's no use crying over spilt milk." You probably have 1000s of these verbal gems stored inside you, and they guide your life as much as anything your parents or teachers have given you.

As important as it is, the skill of good twittering is extremely rare. That's the reason 99.99% of the public Twitter feed is crap. A great tweet, like a quote from Winston Churchill, says something ironic, memorable and useful. "Democracy is the worst form of government except for the alternatives." If you can gain the skill of effective tweet writing (which is too complex to describe here), you're well on your way to controlling the world.

2) Blogging. You also need to be able to express yourself in a connected linguistic message of MORE than 140 characters, whether it be a blog entry, email, essay or written report. Not everything you want to explain to others can be expressed in one line. Sometimes you have to expand on your ideas with an organized series of sentences and paragraphs. Most Twitterers make poor bloggers because the skills are different. You have to come up with a plan and a structure for what you are going to write, a lot like a computer program. In fact, that's exactly what writing is: a software program written in English rather than Perl or Java. Instead of a CPU processing the instructions, the human brain is, so you have to understand both what the instructions do and how the brain works.

At various points in your career, you'll have to compose a compelling email or written proposal to convey your ideas to others. If you lack this skill, you'll be crippled. To develop your writing ability you need to actively use it, so you should write whenever you can, for whatever excuse. Even if your blog entry gets lost in cyberspace never to be heard from again, at least you are developing the skills of organized linguistic expression so you have them when you need them.

3) Photography. On Twitter, people say, "Photos or it didn't happen!" and with good reason. There are many things that just can't be conveyed effectively in words. It is senseless to try to describe a visual scene verbally when a snapshot will do it instantly. Nearly all of us now have this capability via the cameras in our smartphones, but like tweets, most photos are crap. If you want to communicate effectively, you have to learn how good photography works.

The skill of photography lies in stepping outside yourself and seeing what is actually in the viewfinder, not what you want to be there. Certain photos are interesting and others are boring, even if they show the same event. In the good photos, the photographer has taken control. Instead of just standing there and clicking the shutter, he has moved, engaged himself in the event, and arranged the elements of the photo in such a way that the composition is now compelling in itself. There is an element of deception in good photography (It's usually much more exciting than real life!) but by adding this spice you are much more likely to get your point across.

4) Video. There are many things that can't be conveyed with either words or still photos. Certain activities can only be understood via video. This is one medium that has changed dramatically in recent years. Forty years ago, you had to be a movie director or TV reporter to have access to film technology, and a hundred years ago, this facility wasn't available at all. Now, it's an integral part of our culture, and if you want to convey your ideas to others, you have to be able to use video effectively. Many of us have this capability on our smart phones, but few people know how to make a video you'd actually want to watch.

Like photography, video involves seeing what's actually there on the screen, rather than what you want to be there. From the same New Years Eve party, there can be interesting videos and boring ones. The boring videos are made by boring people who just stand there. The interesting ones are made by people who have actively explored the medium, made some mistakes and learned what really works on the screen. We can't all be movie directors, but we can all learn to make compelling videos that advance our own personal mission.

5) Public Speaking. As you master the skill of video, at some point you are probably going to turn the camera on yourself and want to say something to your audience. This used to be called "public speaking". It is pretty much the same as standing at a podium and speaking to an audience. Most people are terrified of public speaking and equally terrified of speaking on television. If you had to speak LIVE to an audience of sixty million, with no teleprompter in front of you, how would you hold up? It is pretty much the same when you talk to the camera for a YouTube video or when you stand up at a meeting to give a presentation. If you have gained this skill of speaking extemporaneously to a passive audience, there are many ways to use it to advance your message.

Public speaking is a lot like blog writing, in that you have to come up with a plan and a structure for your message. You have to know where your talk will be going before you begin, and you have to have a road map in your head for how you are going to get there. Unlike writing, however, there is no rewriting and no error correction. You have to get it right the first time! You are also appealing to the audience in a more emotional way than you do in an essay. You are using simpler words, and you are pretending to speak to each audience member personally. If you connect with people emotionally, then they'll overlook the inevitable errors and typos in your speech. The important thing is that it be "real" and emotional, not stiff and distant.

6) Conversation. You remember conversation, don't you? That's when you sit down in the same room with someone and communicate directly with them using words and facial expressions. As the other media rise, conversation is becoming a lost art, but it's still an important skill that you're going to need sooner or later. Technically, you are also conversing with someone when you Skype them, engage in a running exchange via instant message or respond to others in Facebook comments, but the archetype for all this is the classic face-to-face meeting over coffee or across a desk. Believe it or not, such meetings still take place, and when they do, you need to be ready.

Unlike the other 5 forms of communication, conversation is a two-way street. You aren't just expressing yourself. You are also LISTENING, and after you have listened, you are going to tailor your response to what the other person just said. As with public speaking, emotions are important, but in conversation you aren't just pretending to connect with the audience, you are actually doing it. You aren't just listening to the other person's words; you are trying to read the emotions and subtext behind the words. There's a lot more to conversation than we can possibly review here, but like the other skills, the more you do it, the better you'll get at it.

All of these 6 communication skills require a certain detachment. Frankly, most people are terrible at these skills—all of them!—and that's because they are so enmeshed in their own needs that they can't see the needs of others. They tweet exactly what they think and photograph exactly what they see without trying to understand how someone else is going to receive it. Good communication, in any medium, means stepping outside yourself and seeing what the audience does. Most people are so trapped in narcissism that they can't pull it off. They "communicate" only in the most rudimentary sense—like a barking dog or squawking bird—and they are unlikely to sway anyone to their viewpoint.

You will communicate better by switching off your narcissism and looking at your output as though it was the product of someone else. Would this be a compelling photo, tweet or blog entry if you stumbled upon it at random with no idea who produced it? If so, then you have probably created a good one. If not, you've still got work to do.

The Limits of Selfishness

2010-12-05T08:30:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, a chain smoker named Ayn Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, which has been a favorite of college sophomores ever since. Her contention is that altruism is a sham. Even those who claim to care about others are just in it for themselves (reward in heaven, etc.), so you might as well give up the charade and just go for shameless self-interest from the start.

Sadly, Ayn is dead now, succombed to smoking-related heart failure. I harp on smoking because if she was so self-interested why couldn't she quit? The achilles heal of selfishness is that it doesn't really give your life meaning or motivate you to move one step beyond your hedonistic desires. If you know an Ayn Rand fan, they are usually isolated and emotionally restricted people, with a bent toward the paranoid, who don't seem to be taking much pleasure in their selfishness.

Say you accept selfishness; then what do you do? You can make a lot of money—Ayn's all for that!—but then what are you supposed to do with the money you've made? Is it really satisfying to buy another boat or mansion, and how many times can you visit Antarctica? You could give your money to charity, but—Oh no!—that would be altruism rearing it's ugly head.

Altruism may be an illusion or selfishly motivated, but there just isn't any other worthwhile objective in life. You will live and die on this planet, so you might as well do what you can to improve it. It may be selfish to think this way but you want people to say after you're gone, "He made this world a better place." It seems so much better than, "He screwed people over," or "He didn't make a difference at all." Your motivations may be less than pure—You want others to appreciate you, care about you and remember you after you're gone.—but even an illusion of altruism feels better than none at all.

It turns out that a lot of our self-interest is tied up in other people. To relate to others, we have to give them something they want, so we have to start thinking about other people's needs apart from our own. The Randian merchant—represented by Frito Lay and Coca-Cola—is going conduct marketing research and give the people exactly what they want, sufficient only to make them turn over their money. A more altruistic merchant is going to give people more of what they actually need, even if it is less profitable. Selling quality rather than crap is just more satisfying to the seller. It lets him sleep better at night than the Randian merchant.

Selfishness, processed through intelligence and foresight, begins to look a lot like altruism. If you care about other people, then they will care about you and often give back things that serve your needs. Ayn Rand may teach you how to make money, but if you want more subtle rewards like love and personal satisfaction, you have to start negotiating with others. You have to at least pretend to care, and after you pretend for long enough, you actually will care. In spite of your selfishness, it will matter to you what happens to others.

The main problem with altruism—wanting to help mankind—is how to go about it. There is very shallow altruism where you simply take every resource you have and give it to someone else. If other people are hungry, then you feed them, up to the point where you can no longer feed yourself. The trouble with this simple form of caring is that it doesn't work. It doesn't really improve the planet. Feeding people doesn't improve their self-sufficiency or address the underlying problems that made them hungry. Airlifting food and dumping it on hungry people has certain value in crisis situations, but in the long run it doesn't help them. For one thing, they're probably going to procreate and produce even more hungry people.

To really be effective in the world, you have to be clever and strategic, outwitting the many forces that work against altruism. That's where selfishness comes in. Before you can realistically help others, you have to help yourself. You have to build up your own resources, knowledge and skills. The smarter you are, the better equipped you are to help others. If you are significantly advanced and socially connected, then you're not just going to feed the starving people of Africa; you're going to marshall the diplomatic forces to stop the civil war that makes them hungry. That's a complicated task, and to address it you've got to become a complicated person. You have to make a huge investment in yourself before you get to the point where you can solve those higher-level problems.

So selfishness is good, at least in the sense that it's good to invest in your own skills and resources. Your body and mind are the tool by which you help others. For maximum effectiveness, you have to refine and maintain this tool, and this can involve a huge investment. Instead of spending 100% of your time and resources on others, you might spend 90% on building up yourself, on the assumption that the remaining 10% given to others is going to be more effective. One strategic diplomatic move—or one well-placed missile—can sometimes do more than billions of dollars in direct food aid. Deciding where that move should be made requires a long-term investment in your own education and social positioning.

Altruism isn't just feeding one hungry person but all of them. If a beggar comes up to you on the street and asks for money, the simple-minded altruist is going to give it to him. The smarter, more self-conscious altruist is going to say, "Wait, is this really the best use of my money?" Maybe the best use is to retain your funds, guard them for yourself, and invest them in your own education and skills.

Altruism may be an illusion, but so is selfishness. The best route is in the middle, using your selfishness to pursue higher altruistic goals. By this philosophy, you can quit smoking! If you care about others, then you'll have the motivation to change yourself.

Sad thing about poor Ayn: She just didn't have anything to live for in the end.

Just Hit the Ball! (The Philosophers' Football Match)

2010-12-02T14:53:00.000-08:00

Do you remember The Philosophers' Football Match? It's a Monty Python sketch about a soccer game that pits the Greek philosophers against the German philosophers.

The ball is placed in position, and the whistle blows. Both teams then begin furiously debating amongst themselves, pontificating about what to do. This goes on for most of the game. As many theories are concocted on both sides, the game remains locked at nil-nil, with the ball still untouched in the middle of the field.

Then Archimedes with Greeks gets in idea. "Eureka!" he shouts, and HE KICKS THE BALL! After that, the game is all with the Greeks as they breeze past the dumbfounded Germans. The Greeks hit the ball into the net and win the game in the final seconds.

It's a perfect metaphor for one of the main problems of human behavior: taking initiative. Most people just won't do it. They dream of great things, but they won't take the steps to make them happen. They won't even take that critical first step: hitting the ball to get the game going.

People expect success to be delivered to them. They want to follow someone else's plan. Humans are basically sheep. It's in our nature. As long as we can follow a leader and a plan, we're reasonably happy. It's the leaders that are rare. Everyone has the opportunity to be a leader in his own life, but most just don't do it.

When people dream of success, the dream usually includes someone delivering success to them. They dream of being "discovered" for their latent talent. Someone else makes them a star or gives them funding or hands them a plan. Alas, the chances of this happening are extremely thin, because there aren't many "discoverers" out there.

If you want success, you have to make it yourself. You have to step out of your comfort zone and take the initiative. YOU HAVE TO HIT THE DAMN BALL!

Imagine there's a little structure in the human brain that controls initiative. If this region is damaged, people can still respond to events thrown at them, but they can't initiate events. (There may be some clinical evidence for this, but I'm just theorizing here.) Throw a ball at these people, and they'll catch it, but they can't throw the ball themselves.

In most people, this section is a tiny little pea-size thing. They can follow the plan, but they can't make the plan except in very limited circumstances. These are the sheep of society—i.e. the vast bulk of mankind. Give them some free time to use as they wish and they'll watch TV or do a crossword puzzle or engage in some other programmed entertainment. They can't intiate and maintain a productive plan for themselves otherwise.

This class of "low initiators" can include some very intelligent people, like engineers and college professors. In fact, especially engineers and college professors! A person can have brilliant mathematical skills, adept at solving any problem placed in front of them, yet be totally inept at deciding what that problem should be.

The world is full of pseudo-artists—people who claim to be writers, musicians, painters, filmmakers. What they really are, however, is technicians, people who follow the plan. They go to school, learn an instrument, form bands, go to gigs, but they never become what they intended to be: creators. They'll never write a great song, because they requires independent initiative, which they just don't have.

Give these people a great creative opportunity, and they'll let it pass. Dangle a carrot in front of them, and they'll sniff at it, but if it wasn't part of the programmed plan, they won't reach out and grab it.

They want to become great writers, but they won't write. They'll feebly do the assignment given them by their creative writing teacher, but if the opportunity arises—today, right now—to write something meaningful without the teacher, they won't do it. Their little pea-size initiative center can't push them to do it.

A few members of our species—and I mean very few—don't have this problem. They've got big, grape-size initiative centers. They just think about something, then do it. They don't dream about where they should go, what they should do or who they should be; as soon as they know, then it's done. They change course instantly and become that person.

Think of Leonardo da Vinci. That dude did stuff! Painting, sculpture, engineering. He just thought of things and did them. Within the contraints of his resources (primitive by our standards), he kept going and never stopped. The rest of humanity is more like those dithering German philosophers: talking endlessly about doing things but never actually doing them.

So how do you develop a grape-size initiative center? Easy: you just exercise it! You think stuff, then you do it. You hit the damn ball! Then you hit it again and again. The more initiatives you take, the easier it will become and the bigger that brain structure will get.

It sounds so easy, hitting the ball, but you have to do it yourself, you can't be led. That's where most human sheep can't pull it off. No college course can teach you to take initiative. No self-help book can do it for you, because if you're reading the book you're not acting.

There's a big philosophical connundrum here: If you think you have initiative, you'll have it, but if you don't think you have it, then you won't. The trouble with most of those pea-brain people is they've got a million excuses for not doing stuff. Give them a great opportunity, and they'll hem and procrastinate, like the Germans, and come up with some excuse why they can't reach for it. Once you recognize this in your fellow man, you see it everywhere: people who could change their life in an instant but don't, who prefer to suffer in a rote path when a simple course correction could change everything. They are addicted to the status quo, even if it is painful, and they won't change unless change is forced upon them.

Turns out, initiative is scary. Whenever you do something out of the ordinary, there's a risk of screwing up. Truth is, there's also the risk of disaster if you don't do anything out of the ordinary, but if you take the initiative, then failure is your fault; you have no one to blame but yourself. People hate this—being responsible for their own destiny—because it's so emotional and so damn important. They can take little initiatives, like eating when hungry, but the big, emotional initiatives overwhelm their little pea brain. They'd rather skip the stress and let others tell them what to do.

People also make investments in the way things already are, and taking initiative threatens those. If you try something new and it works, what does that say about everything you've done so far? It means you've been a failure! Change means you have to let go of the past and accept it as a miscalculation. To step into the future, you have give up something from your past, which most people are loath to do.

If you're smart, if you want to develop the skill of initiative, then you've got to use your initiative, not tomorrow but today, right now. If you screw up, so be it. The low initiators quit at that point, but the high initiators press on. At least you have exercised the initiative part of your brain, made it a little bigger and made bold moves easier next time.

It's okay to theorize, but to get the game going, you have to hit the damn ball!

Twitter post

The Crisis of Human Evolution

2010-11-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

The state of human evolution appears to be in crisis. All the rules that were at work during most of our development no longer apply. It is no longer the best and brightest who breed but the dull and dumbest.

If we look at current evolution purely in terms of numbers, the poor, weak, impulsive and unintelligent now have the most babies, and thanks to our society's relative prosperity, most of those babies go on to breed as well.

The most intelligent and highest functioning are less likely to breed. They have careers that preempt child bearing. It is now socially acceptable for smart people to not have babies at all, and when they do, they have fewer of them than dumb people.

This would seem to put humanity on the fast track to oblivion. If the inept do most of the breeding for us, then humanity on the whole is going to become less intelligent with every generation.

Any attempt to control and manage human breeding is politically unacceptable in any country in the world except China and Singapore. So should we despair? Has positive human evolution ended?

Not necessarily. While humanity as a whole may be getting dumber, the best lineages of our species are probably getting brighter.

While the creative and intelligent don't breed as prodigiously as the dull and inept, they do, in fact, continue to breed, and they do it relatively wisely. Think about it: When an intelligent man or woman chooses to breed, he or she does it highly selectively, with someone similar in ability. Their children, then, are likely to be highly intelligent themselves.

Furthermore, there has never been more opportunity for talented people to find each other. High-functioning humans—the best of our species—have virtually the whole world to choose from. No longer are arranged marriages acceptable; now people choose their own mates, which is probably far more effective than having Mom and Dad do it. More than any time in human history, the best and brightest are choosing the best and brightest.

What this suggests is a bifurcated evolutionary system, where the dumb breed with the dumb and the bright breed with the bright. Since there is less and less interbreeding between them, this could eventually result in humanity splitting into two species: a vibrantly evolving upper class, and a genetically moribund lower class.

There would be a lot more members of the lower class, but in the modern world, that doesn't matter. It is the best and brightest who write the rules, create the systems and come up with new innovations. As long as they continue to selectively breed based on ability, the rest of humanity will be pulled along.

If the dumb get dumber, it is probably going to result in greater suffering on the planet, but there will also be continued growth and innovation in the higher classes, and this highly talented gene pool will continue to drive culture and technology.

That is, until they give up breeding altogether and become purely virtual.

Kilroy Café #69: "Truth and the Art of Photography"

2010-04-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

Truth and the Art of Photography

By GLENN CAMPBELL

The world is full of lousy photos. You've seen plenty of bad snapshots: pets with glowing eyes, tiny people standing stiffly in front of tourist attractions, children and spouses just sitting there, surrounded by too much empty space. These snapshots may mean something to the people who took them but not to the outside viewer.

Anyone can take better pictures. The secret is simple: "See what's in the viewfinder, not what's in your head."

Your head says, "I'm having fun, so if I take a picture now, that fun will be preserved," but photography doesn't work that way. If you take a picture now, without seeing as the camera does, your photo will probably be lifeless and capture none of the fun. It may help you retrieve the memory of the feelings you had at the time, but those feelings won't be visible in the picture itself.

Looking through the viewfinder should tell you everything you need to know. Regardless of the camera you use, certain compositions are more effective than others. If you can clear your mind of needs, it's easy to improve your photos. In most cases, all you have to do is change your position or change the moment when you take the picture.

For example, little figures in front of Mt. Rushmore are boring. Big faces with a blurry Mt. Rushmore in the background are much better. It takes no formal training to experiment with composition, timing and the settings on your camera. With digital cameras, experimentation costs nothing, so why won't people try?

Because they are trapped inside themselves! They feel something at the time, and that feeling corrupts their vision. They expect reality to conform to their emotional needs and can't imagine how the two could be different.

More broadly, the problem is separating feelings from facts. Feelings are the fun you're having, the awe you're feeling, the vows you're making or the needs you're addressing. Facts are the images that actually appear in the viewfinder. Most people are so controlled by their feelings that they brush the facts aside. The facts, however, will win in the end, producing a dismal final product.

A good photographer—and a wise human—can detach himself from his own needs and follow the facts. It's nothing magical, just a matter of accepting the data right in front of you. The art of photography—and of life—is learning to see the world as it really appears, not as you want it to be. When you learn to see the world like a camera does, new opportunities appear all around you. It's like the blind learning to see!

But that's also when the lies begin.

You see, photography can be an avenue to truth, but only for the photographer. For the viewer, photography is usually the opposite. It is lies, distortion and deception! No medium is more false and manipulative.

What? How can this be? Photos don't lie! Aren't they just showing the physical facts as they are?

No, a competent photo is the artificial creation of the photographer, who is recording a highly selective slice of space and time. Whether this slice accurately reflects the reality is entirely at the photographer's discretion, and art usually demands that this discretion be abused.

When a politician holds a news conference, dozens of expressions will pass across his face. The supposed "photojournalist" will choose whatever moment in time suits his own needs and those of his editors. Whether the politician seems angry, resolute or deceptive depends solely on the moment chosen. A photographer can't create images that aren't there, but he usually has a wide palette of feelings to choose from.

Likewise, elements of a scene can be pressed together in ways they aren't in real life. Buildings can be pushed up against distant mountains. People can be seen to have relationships that don't exist. Any two things can be associated in the frame in ways that distort the truth.

It's amazing how well these scams work. People who would be skeptical of words will usually accept photography at face value. That's why it's such a critical element in advertizing. Absurd claims that would be illegal if spoken are swallowed easily when expressed in images. For the majority of viewers, image overpowers reality. What you see in the photo isn't what was really there at the time it was taken, but people still accept what the image tells them.

The only thing keeping the photographer honest is himself, but even with the best intentions photography is an illusion. The photographer is essentially creating reality, or at least molding it to his own aims. He captures a distorted slice of space and time, and that image, in turn, forms the basis for people's memories. Happy photos create happy memories, sad photos sad ones, etc.

The best that can be said about the photographer is that he created a good illusion serving a responsible purpose.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Orlando, Florida.
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Kilroy Café #68: "The Secret of Great Perfomances"

2010-03-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

The Secret of Great Performances

By GLENN CAMPBELL

The secret of a great performance, in any field, is seeing yourself as the audience sees you, not as you want to be seen. It sounds easy but it's not.

Any of us can sit in an audience and accurately evaluate the person on stage. One comedian is funny; another is not. If we don't know the performer, it's easy to be dispassionate about the performance and see it for what it is.

This detachment evaporates when it's you on stage. Then, your ego and your familiarity with the material distort your perception and keep you from accurately seeing the performance. You may start obsessing over details and miss the big picture. You may see your performance as better or worse than it really is and be drawn into fatal mistakes as a result.

Almost everything we do for others is a "performance". This includes every art form but also most business and social interactions. We are presenting a product to an audience and hoping they will buy it. The audience can be six million viewers on TV or just one potential customer in front of you. If you are the customer, you know what you want, but when you become the seller, your vision of what the customer wants is clouded by your own emotional needs.

It's a fact of life: Most performers are not very good. They make the audience cringe with what they think is a great performance, but everyone else knows it isn't. Diplomacy may require that the audience applaud anyway—in public at least. In private, though, they turn their attention elsewhere and don't come back to that performer again.

Why does the audience lie? We all do it because we don't want to hurt the performer's feelings. We know instinctively that if the performer knew how we really felt, he would get upset. In all likelihood, he would become either depressed or angry, maybe even vengeful and violent, so we all learn to hold our tongues. We'll talk freely to others about the performance we just saw, but we will be honest to the performer only if it was spectacularly good.

We might want to offer "constructive criticism" to the performer, but this is risky and costly. The great irony of performance is that the people who are most in need of advice are those least capable of accepting it. Their ego requires a positive evaluation, because otherwise they'll be crushed by shame. It's a self-defeating cycle: The fear of humiliation on stage drives people into delusions and denial which eventually result in their humiliation on stage.

The process can also work in the other direction. Someone can put on a fantastic performance, as seen by the audience, but then discard it as worthless. They dwell on microscopic imperfections in the show, while neglecting the fact that the audience loved the whole package.

Accurately evaluating your own performance is one of the hardest tasks on Earth. It's easy to do if you have no stake in the outcome, but as soon as you become invested in something, your perception gets skewed. Emotions instead of facts start dictating your evaluation.

In some cases, your audience will give you immediate hard feedback on how you are doing. Stand-up comedians operate in this environment. Either the audience laughs or it doesn't, and it's pretty easy to tell polite laughter from the uncontrollable kind. Making people laugh is a brutal business, but at least you know where you stand.

Most other kinds of performance don't provide such reliable feedback. When you lose a sale, you usually don't know exactly why. As soon as something valuable is at stake (money, a job, love, etc.), a wall goes up between the buyer and seller. The buyer holds his cards close to his chest and the seller can only guess what they are. Rarely are the cards laid on the table, even after the fact, so the seller can see what he did wrong.

If you ask most people what makes a great performance, they'll probably say "practice, practice, practice". Wrong! Practice often means just repeating the same dumb mistakes over and over. The key to success in any field is aggressively honing and fine-tuning your performance, seeking out accurate feedback and responding to it.

When no audience member is available to supply that feedback, you have to do it yourself. The great performers are able to sit in their own audience and view their performance with detachment. They radio their observations to the guy on stage, who adjusts his performance accordingly.

Most people are just too narcissistic and self-centered to pull it off. They can't step outside of themselves to see their behavior as others see it. They may succeed by dumb luck but not by skill.

There is no easy remedy for this. You can't make detachment happen in others, only in yourself. No matter how much may be at stake in your performance, you have to be able to release yourself from it, drift to the ceiling and see it from afar. If it wasn't you on stage but someone else, what would you be thinking?

It's both easy and incredibly hard.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Las Vegas. Inspired by a celebrity impersonators convention. (Photos)
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Kilroy Café #2: "BAN GAY MARRIAGE (heterosexual marriage, too!)"

2010-03-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

Here is a repost of a 2008 Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed. This newsletter can be displayed on blogs and websites under the terms given here.

BAN GAY MARRIAGE!
(heterosexual marriage, too!)

By GLENN CAMPBELL

It is a polarizing political question: Should committed gay and lesbian couples be allowed to legally marry? Should the institution be restricted to "one man and one woman," or can it also be "one man and one man"? For that matter, what about "one man and two women" or "one man, one monkey, three sheep and a donkey"? Where are we going to draw the line?

In my opinion, everyone has the question upside down. Instead of lobbying the legislature or sponsoring voter initiatives to promote one side or the other, we should be talking to each gay couple directly. We should be sitting them down, perhaps in a Christian setting, and counseling them on the facts of life.

Why would you want to screw up a perfectly good relationship?

Research shows that most divorces are caused by marriage. Furthermore, science can also prove that gay marriage will inevitably lead to gay divorce, just as nasty as the hetero kind.

Marriage, in fact, is downright dangerous. It's like handing out guns to teenagers. Who among us, when afflicted by love, has the mental capacity to comprehend "Til death do you part"? Who among us is truly competent to say, "I have thought through all the implications, and this is the only path I will ever want for the rest of my life?"

Gay couples don't know how good they got it. They can never make the Big Step. They can never go down to the Chapel of Love one drunken night and throw away all future discretion. They can never just close their eyes and jump.

They have to think things through. Due to the protective restrictions in current law, they can only take their relationship one step at a time, in a process resembling reason. They must explicitly choose to share property, death benefits and child custody on a thoughtful, case-by-case basis, not as a single blind package. Yes, there are still a few retirement benefits that gay couples can't share, but most marriage services are available á la carte to anyone with some creativity.

Pity the poor heterosexual couple, living together in sin. To them, marriage is always the elephant in the room, the dark cloud hanging over their heads. When the relationship isn't perfect and you wonder what's wrong, it is easy to think that a lifetime contract must be the missing piece.

You can ask a divorcee: When did the relationship start to fall apart? A common reply is: "On the day we got married." Most relationships don't need and can't support the whole marital package. The most dangerous part is that individuality and self-responsibility often get suppressed, setting the stage for an explosion later on.

If you truly love someone and want to be with them, then why do you need the contract? If you are drawn together, so be it; if you grow apart, then you split up. Isn't the government contract, and all the economic and social baggage it carries, getting in the way of your free expression? If you're unmarried and you stay together, you know it's love. If you're encumbered and you stay together, you can never be sure.

If your particular insanity is to lust after the opposite sex, then government should tolerate your personal preference, but it doesn't need to sanction it. Marriage is, in essence, a form of religious expression that government ought to stay jolly well clear of.

Who is behind the marriage conspiracy? It's the Big Corporations, of course! They have fed us this delusion for years, because they know it is easier to sell useless products to trapped married people.

Only the gays are still free.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Las Vegas (March 28, 2008).
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
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Kilroy Café #67: "Curiosity: The Hallmark of Intellect"

2010-03-01T14:13:00.000-08:00

Curiosity: The Hallmark of Intellect

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Curiosity seems pretty simple. When something unusual happens in your environment, you check it out. Children do it all the time. If they are walking in the woods and encounter a strange-looking mushroom, they'll examine it, poke at it and eventually submit it to destructive testing to see what's inside. It's bad for the mushroom but good for the child, who learns about the world through aggressive investigation.

Adults, as a rule, are not curious. They may turn their head in response to a novel stimulus, but they won't go over and check it out. They passively observe but won't actively investigate. Most adults are curious only within the bounds of the field they have chosen to be curious in: Naturalists may be sensitive to novelties of nature but not those of the human world. Adults, it seems, have a comfort zone and are loath to leave it unless forced to.

So what happened between childhood and adulthood? And what is curiosity anyway?

Curiosity is the impulse, when a novelty is detected in ones environment, to actively explore it until it is understood.

Relatively few animals exhibit curiosity. It is generally limited to the mammals and the young ones more than the old. Reptiles aren't curious, except as related to immediate food or threat. If something unusual appears in their path, they'll simply walk around it. Monkeys, on the other hand, are quickly attracted to changes in their cages and will investigate like human children do, even if they don't expect reward from it.

The benefits of curiosity are far-sighted and intellectual. It is the first step in learning. When something is novel, it means that we don't yet have a model for it in our head, so it makes sense to explore it in case this knowledge might be useful in the future. We don't need to know exactly how it will be useful; we only need to know that exploration, as a whole, is beneficial to our survival.

Curiosity can be dangerous. We know it killed the cat! Whenever you poke something, there is a risk it will bite you back. The compensation, however, is higher adaptability. Curiosity is one reason our species has come to dominate the planet. At least a few members of our clan have been drawn to things they don't understand, which has ultimately given us our technology and science.

But curiosity is also dangerous in a personal sense, especially to adults. Most adults have already committed themselves to personal and emotional investments based on certain assumptions about life, and unfettered curiosity runs the risk of disrupting those assumptions. That's why they don't dare explore.

For example, if you are committed to a certain career and have already invested 20 years of your life in it, you will resist any form of curiosity that might suggest that a different path would have been wiser. Curiosity is tolerated only to point where it generates anxiety, then it is turned off. The more boxed in you are by your past decisions, the less curiosity you can afford without triggering that most powerful of human emotions: regret.

There are four steps in the process of curiosity: Orientation, Exploration, Integration and Release.

Orientation is turning ones attention toward a novel stimulus. Almost everyone will do that: turn their eyes and head toward anything out of the ordinary. Most drivers will notice an oddity along the side of the road. Only a few, however, will stop the car.

Exploration is the next step. You actively investigate and experiment with this novel thing—poking, prodding.

Integration is when you absorb this new phenomenon into your internal theories, so it no longer seems unusual. This may take minutes, weeks or years, but eventually the novelty becomes routine and uninteresting because it is understood.

Release is when you let go of the previously novel object and move on. This step is very important because it leaves you free to be actively curious about something else.

Even if they get to the Exploration phase, adults often get stuck on the Release phase. If something is initially intriguing to them, they often try to own it and never give it up. All sorts of old novelties clutter up our lives like this, preventing new novelties from getting in.

An active and dynamic intellect dances continuously with curiosity. To be able to truly grow, you need to be uncommitted enough to allow random exploration and also be willing to let go of whatever you find.

Most minds just can't do it. They get trapped at one stage of development and curiosity dies shortly thereafter.

If the opportunity of a lifetime sat down beside them, they wouldn't know what to do. They would ask no questions, and the moment would pass.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Ontario, California.
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You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #66: "Life is Logarithmic!... Not Linear"

2010-02-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

Life is Logarithmic!... Not Linear
An oddity of statistics may help you make better personal decisions.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Believe It Or Not!... If you collect a set of numbers from almost anywhere in the universe—such as sports statistics, heights of trees, incomes of workers or masses of stars—a bizarre phenomenon usually emerges. Far more of those numbers start with "1" or "2" than with "8" or "9".

Try it yourself: Open your local phone book and look at the house numbers (e.g. "342 Park Ave."). Make a tally of the digits that each of those numbers begin with (in this case "3"). Once you collect a few pages of this data, a pattern usually becomes clear: There are far more house numbers starting with low digits like "1" than high digits like "9"!

This statistical phenomenon is called Benford's Law, and it happens in most forms of collected data from nature and human activity—regardless of what you measure or the measurement system you use. It seems at first to defy all reason. Since each measurement seems random, shouldn't the leading digit be random, too?

The phenomenon arises because real-world data is never completely random. It is distributed in a certain way, typically weighted toward the low end of whatever scale you are using.

Take the phonebook example: In most of the world, there are far more short streets than long ones. All streets will have low numbers but only a few will have high numbers. Thus, on aggregate, there will always be more 1's than 9's, more 10's than 90's and more 100's than 900's. Get it?

The same thing happens everywhere: There are more short trees than tall ones and more average sports players than exceptional ones. People earning $15k a year will always outnumber those making $95k, and people making $100k will always outnumber those making $900k. That's how the digits get skewed.

Turns out, most things in life are not distributed linearly but logarithmically—on a rapidly diminishing curve approaching zero. No matter what you measure or how, there are many little things and few big ones. It is also usually true that when something happens repeatedly, the largest impact is at the beginning, with diminishing effect later. Once you understand these logarithmic distributions, you see them everywhere.

This isn't just a phenomenon of statistics but of human happiness, desire and need, all of which follow logarithmic curves. If you grasp the curve, you may see that you have been approaching life with inappropriate math.

For example, if a little of something makes you happy it doesn't necessarily follow that twice as much of the same thing will make you twice as happy. If that were true, it would be a linear relationship. Real life, however, abhors straight lines. It is more likely to give you decreasing satisfaction when you do the same thing repeatedly. Economists call this the Law of Diminishing Returns.

You may be happy if someone gives you $1 million, but you wouldn't be ten times happier if they gave you $10 million. Truth is, $1 million, thoughtfully used, is plenty for most of us. Any additional money only encourages us to be less thoughtful. In the end, the additional $9 mill will have only a marginal impact on our lifelong happiness, if any.

So why does anyone bother seeking more than they reasonably need? Good question!

People, it seems, are much better at thinking linearly than logarithmically. Linear conclusions are much easier to calculate and understand. Twice the chocolate must mean twice the joy. All you need for this math is addition and multiplication, not any fancy calculus.

It takes great maturity—and some bitter experience—to anticipate your own changing needs, especially if you are excited about something right now. Every kid learns his lesson: One cookie is good. A whole big package eaten at one sitting: not so good. On bigger issues, though, adults may take years to grasp the non-linearity of life, and by that time it is often too late.

The worst mistakes of individuals and nations are when they try to impose a linear prediction on a curve, cycle or feedback loop. They take the trend of recent events, project it forward in a straight line then make irrevocable commitments based on that prediction.

Reality, however, has no respect for our predictions. It does what it wants, which is usually to adjust to a stimulus and respond to it differently over time.

If you have committed yourself to a straight line, that's your problem.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Las Vegas.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #65: "Taking Control"

2010-02-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

TAKING CONTROL
The key to solving your problems is usually in your mind.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Everyone has problems. Sometimes they are severe: war, divorce, illness, unemployment. At times, we seem to be the victims of forces beyond our control. Even if our own misjudgment got us into this mess, that doesn't mean our own actions can get us out.

But still we have to try. As long as you live, you have to struggle for the best possible outcome regardless of your situation. If you learn you have untreatable cancer and only six months to live, you still have a responsibility to make the best of it. You have to see cancer not as a curse but an opportunity. An opportunity for what? That's for you to figure out.

Most of us face more mundane, non-life-threatening problems, but the challenge is the same: how to make the most of what we have. At this moment, you have both burdens and gifts and only a limited time left on Earth to work with them. What will you become?

In that struggle, your only enemy is yourself. All that stands between you and the "success" of making the most of yourself are blocks within you that you yourself enforce and maintain.

A block is a potential approach to a problem that you refuse to consider due to your artificial expectations about what life owes you. Blocks come in many guises, but they are usually expressed in the form: "I can't do X because of Y."

For example: "I can't fly overseas because I can't stand sitting in an airplane that long." Result: You never go. Or: "I can't quit drinking because I don't have the willpower." Result: You don't even try. Or: "I can't travel without my personal physician because of my delicate constitution." X and Y can be an endless number of things, leading to all sorts of artificial requirements in health, diet, lifestyle, fashion and entertainment.

If you collect enough of these "I can't" restrictions, soon all avenues for solving your problems are cut off. You feel trapped, but it's not your problems themselves that are trapping you as much as your refusal to consider some potential solutions.

You can argue that some things are non-negotiable. You wouldn't seriously endanger yourself or the people you care about, but nearly everything else is negotiable: your home, your possessions, your public image and all the silly restrictions you have placed on your own behavior.

The key to dealing successfully with your problems is replacing your "I can'ts" with "I cans". You can live without most of the things you thought were necessities. You can do many things you thought yourself incapable of. You can endure more pain than you imagined and still come out okay.

You know your self-restrictions are dubious when other people are functioning perfectly fine without them. Others are flying overseas and living without addiction, so why can't you?

That's where the excuses come in. You insist your situation is special, that different rules apply to you. You have sensitive skin, fragile self-esteem, an inadequate upbringing and a special lack of willpower. That's why you can't do what others can.

"I can't do X because of Y," is almost always based on flawed reasoning and distorted data. In most cases, you haven't experimented much or pushed yourself very far. You may have had one or two bad experiences with Y and simply given up, probably because you could afford to. It was the lazy way. Instead of facing your fears and using your creativity to overcome the challenge, you wrote an imaginary rule for yourself and started blocking yourself in with it.

This may work okay until a crisis comes along, like running out of money, and your elaborate structure of "I can'ts" becomes unsustainable. Something has to give! Either you'll give up some of your cherished restrictions or the crisis will break you. If you fail to change, real events may force change upon you, but it is always better to be pro-active and do it on your own.

It is amazing how many people die clutching their old dysfunctional habits until the bitter end. If someone has only six months to live, you'd think they'd give up some of their preconditions and actually live those six months. Instead, they cling in misery to every one of their original demands, as if they would be answered in the afterlife.

Dealing with problems and getting the most out of life is all about overcoming your own inertia. Are you going to control your problems or let them control you? Taking control of what happens to you really means taking control of yourself. It means recognizing that some barriers you thought were real were only in your mind and thus can be stepped right through.

You can't make cancer go away through force of will, but you can change the lens through which you are seeing it. At will, you can change what you expect from life and the very definition of what misfortune is.

Not a curse but an opportunity.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Denver, Colorado.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
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