sift everything

“On behalf of the elephants, thank you for listening.”

— Photographer Gregory Colbert at TED 2006

Of course it’s anthropomorphic and a tad melodramatic but still I get that tiny chill in inspiration reading Colbert’s quote above. It’s easy to pretend … transpose … the bigness of elephants into some measure of intelligence. And while that might be fake, I still have a hard time shaking the idea that intelligent animals like elephants, dolphins, primates watch humanity with a great depth of sadness.

They haven’t the voices to share what wisdom they’ve built across time. They haven’t a means to communicate their understanding of the unseen costs of our actions.

Have you ever seen a wounded animal? Have you ever marvelled at the nobility with which they bear their pain? There is something profoundly humbling in the way an animal will greet its death.

So, I ping a little when a man or woman stands between humanity and some endangered species and with grace and dignity thanks the human race for turning aside the wrath of our indifference.

On the side: the TED conference is on right now. It’s my goal is to get to one … to be paid to go to one … within the next three years. I think it’s absolutely spectacular.

… more …

I was fiddling around with some stats generators one of which includes links back to my blog.  Most of them end up being me commenting on someone else’s posts or linking back to my blog within my own posts … kindof a circular conversation with myself. 

I wandered into a post by Fred at A VC because I was following a comment I’d made that included a link back to my site.  I think Fred’s post and my comment are rather good.  So … I’m reposting Fred’s post on my blog in which I comment about myself and linking back to Fred’s post which of course continues the conversation with … myself. 

How’s that for insanity?

The Open Source Metaphor:

December 13, 2004 in Venture Capital and Technology | Permalink

“Open source is a metaphor for the way innovation works best in all ways of life.

Rarely does brilliance come out of nowhere.  It usually comes from being inspired by something and taking that inspiration and adding a little more. 

That’s how open source software works.  That’s how blogging works.  That’s how a lot of things work.

So with that thought rattling around in my brain, I came upon the Trickster’s discussion of bluesman Robert Johnson this weekend.  Robert Johnson is an inspiration to many of the great musicians of our times, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, etc.  But many debate his contribution to the world of music and claim he was a “minor figure” in the development of the blues.

Well I have tried to get into Robert Johnson more than a couple times, but his music is too sparse and too thinly recorded for my enjoyment.

That said, Trickster’s post is worth reading because in it he asserts the exact same point that I was making about the open source metaphor.

To quote from Trickster’s post: ‘Johnson did what hundreds of great artists have done–he took folk material from around him in the world and through an act of creative molding, turned that material into something more than just found stuff. He turned it into literature.’

This is how open source works.  It is how blogging works.  And with the digital revolution upon us, I believe this is how much of the innovation that will result from the digital revolution will work.”

Comment posted by: Jeremy | Dec 13, 2004 6:25:50 PM

“Good take on music. All things with a deep heritage must, of course, be the products of what went before. It’s a subtle aspect of what Newton may have meant when he said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Which, incidentally, was copied from a Jewish sage, Isaiah ben Mali di Trani (b. 1200).

The saying’s obvious meaning is that those that went before are holding us up and allowing an unprecedented perspective. More subtle meanings might include: If you want to be innovative, climb up the mountains of learning around you.

Open source is amazing because it finally puts a business face on old traditions. Traditions like the roles of a father (surely you’ve caught glimpses of your children copying you) are suddenly interesting from a business perspective. When your kids learn and improve on your ideas, they are moding and hacking previous versions. When they take what they see and do it themselves somewhere else, they are copying and replicating working versions into different applications.

I’d be interested to read ideas you have on open-source type ideas in business outside software development.

You might enjoy a post I wrote earlier this month: Copy-cat. Let me know what you think if you drop by.

Thanks for your blog, I enjoy your ideas.”

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Henry David Thoreau on steering time:

“The whole of the day should not be daytime, nor of the night night-time, but some portion be rescued from time to oversee time in. All our hours must not be current; all our time must not lapse. There must be one hour at least which the day did not bring forth — of ancient parentage and long-established nobility — which will be a serene and lofty platform overlooking the rest. We should make our notch every day on our characters, as Robinson Crusoe on his stick. We must be at the helm at least once a day; we must feel the tiller-rope in our hands, and know that if we sail, we steer.”

For most of my life, the two most powerful ways to get me to move were guilt and urgency. If you could make me feel bad, I’d fix it. And if it needed to be done now, I’d drop everything and get on it.

Trouble is, both of those drivers are external. So it didn’t take long until I felt like my entire life was being run by everyone else but me. I tried desperately to make choices of my own but was inevitably distracted by watching, listening, and reacting to others.

Of course this quickly led to internal chaos. The guilt and urgency expressed by others was rarely in my better interest. I wasn’t growing like I hoped to. I wasn’t becoming who I wanted to be.

This internal struggle became most acute during my first years of college. In response, I plunged into myself. Internally lost, I shuffled around the campus, barely aware of anything but this mess within me. I wandered aimlessly and eventually gravitated to the place I’ve always felt safest … most whole: the library.

Slowly my attention was pulled from within myself up to the titles streaming down the rows. Somehow, among the thousands of books lining the shelves, I chose the most unlikely: Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom. And honestly, I think that book has had the greatest impact on my life of all the books I’ve read till now.

Much like Thoreau, Bloom reminds us that time can be our own. He describes a swirling world of responsibilities, obligations, and other social noise. Time screams past like a flock of angry crows and most of us hurtle along with it — trying desperatly to keep up.

Bloom invites us to stop.

Simply stop, he suggests. See what happens. Wait for the moment when time is moving with dizzying speed. And quit. Quit for just five minutes and take note of the change. Counter-intuitively, astoundingly, astonishingly the world continues to spin, lives continue to exist, and everything continues to function.

Those five minutes can break the chains Thoreau has described above. They put you on a growth curve toward regaining the helm of time.

This understanding has been my single greatest weapon is smashing down panic, guilt, and urgency (when I remember it). It’s made a observable change in the way I approach work and my life.

It’s also made me more sensitive to other drivers, both external and internal. How else are we driven? Where else have we given away the rights to part of our lives?

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poignancy (of poignant) — poign·ant (poin’yənt) — an adjective describing something profoundly moving; piercing; incisive; agreeably intense .

sublime — sub·lime (sə-blīm’) — an adjective describing something characterized by nobility; majestic; of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth.

prosaic — pro·sa·ic (prō-zā’ĭk) — an adjective describing something matter-of-fact; straightforward; lacking in imagination and spirit; dull.

By George Santayana in Sense of Beauty: Being the outline of aesthetic theory:

Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most important element of effect, but it is the most primitive and fundamental, and the most universal. There is no effect of form which an effect of material could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of form, raise the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity with it otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the king’s crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has upon the senses, stimulates us here, where form is also sublime, and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need this stimulus if our perceptions are to reach the highest pitch of strength and acuteness. Nothing can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively.

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Among the myriad benefits of a lifestyle managed with a system like Getting Things Done (GTD), the most worthwhile is not the number of things that get done.

The GTD system is designed to free up bandwidth. It unleashes the psychic energy required by most to track the multitudinous tasks of corporate life. It achieves this by defragmenting tasks.

Unranked and unrelated, the subconscious effort required to keep up with the ever increasing load of tasks is enormous. By collating and synthesizing tasks, most of us can reaccess a surprising amount of previously wasted energy. But almost everybody stops at this first-level benefit of more time spent on better things.

More time with better stuff isn’t the only benefit of these systems and may not even be the best. Even better is the new freedom to point an unfettered mind at the present.

The creativity and insightfulness that springs loose when complete attention is available is something rarely experienced by corporate types but regularly experienced by great artists. People passionate about their art are consumed by their art. Their whole mind is given to their work.

This is the greatest gift of a reorganized life: wholemindedness. If presence is important, the system that enables it is priceless.

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From Chris Corrigan via Johnnie Moore:

The second kind of waiting is the one that really fascinates me. This is waiting when we are fully engaged in the present. The most powerful experience I have ever had of this was when my children were born. Being with my partner through two long labours was a very interesting kind of waiting. Time starts to do funny things - it gets shifty and stretchy, and your awareness of it detaches and solely rests on the emergent moment. A child will soon be born, and the best you can do is to be fully alive to that possiblility. Distraction serves no purpose. In fact, with our second child, my partner commented that at one point it felt as if she was living in a ghost world. As we walked around with her living through this long and low grade labour (40 hours!) she noted that none of people we were walking past had any idea of what was going on between us and within her. She felt in the world but not at all a part of it - like a ghost. But she was deeply within the moment.

This is a deep presencing. It is waiting for something to emerge, something life changing, possibly life threatening, and yet with no way to know how it will all unfold. Radical trust into the moment, radical readiness to accept what will come.

Brilliant example Chris. If you’d used anything but a story, I’d have missed it.

Prescence is something I barely understand — but on “distracted” I’m a viking. I am always somewhere else. If I’m not, I feel like I’m wasting time. Chris’s example is great for me because I so recently came through the same experience.

For 24 hours, Lori labored for our son. And one of the things that never happened during my experience was distraction. Not a single flicker … not even a second of thought. For me, that is rare. Rarer than rare: exceptionally scarce.

Actually, my interest in prescence is motivated by the same event. Well, the outcome of said event. Namely the boy.

I’ve discovered I am distracted with him. I lay out on the floor, ball in my hand, with his bright eyes on my every move and every expression — and I’m thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, or fixing the squeaky floor, or getting back to my book. But never too far from my thoughts is the understanding that I’ll never lay with him on that floor in that way again. Also rare.

But even bigger … even more generally compelling … know that every moment, whether at work or at love, is the last we can ever have of it’s kind. Rarer than diamonds and rarer than the last of any species: our moments.

For me it doesn’t motivate a maniac attention to seconds but it does evoke a deliberate attention to presence.

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bumptious — bump·tious (bŭmp’shəs) — an adjective describing actions that are crudely or loudly assertive; pushy.

It is, perhaps, a blend of “bump” and “presumptuous”.

From Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

“As children get older, outdoor activity becomes less bumptious physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, by they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.”

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I travel from Edmonton to Calgary and back almost every week.  It’s a three hour drive one-way, so I have a big chunk of time to listen to podcasts.  This week I listened to an interview, by Todd at 800CEOread, of Sander and Jonathan Flaum, authors of The 100-Mile Walk: A Father and Son on a Quest to Find the Essence of Leadership and a series of talks given by Alan Watts. Both include fragments of discussion around the importance of the present (versus the future or past).  This is something that’s been nipping at my attention. 

I’ve learned, and am naturally inclined, to greet all new things in life by trying to understand how they relate to the future.  I look past everything.  It’s not only because I naturally lean forward but, as Watts explained, our society teaches us to look forward to “arrival”.

Alan Watts describes how we, from kindergarten on, are taught that next year is better than this year and the end is better than now.  In kindergarten there is grade one!  In secondary school there is post-secondary school.  Then graduate school.  Then our first job and the ladder starts again until sometime in our forties we decide we’ve arrived and can’t figure out what we’ve worked so hard to get.  We realize we’ve lost or never knew all the things we had.  We trade our moments for our future.

In his interview, Jonathan Flaum suggests that the most significant leaders he interviewed have learnt how to recapture their moments.  They block out the past, the future, and all other distractions to simply achieve within the moment.  Using elite athletes as an example, Jonathans describes how spectacular success is achieved by the accomplishments of single moments.  Unlike our education or employment system, athletes are taught to improve momentarily:  in this moment, strive to exhaustion; in this moment, lift to failure; in this moment, be one-hundred thousandths of a second faster.  And, tada, almost unexpectedly, Olympic gold.

It’s an important reminder as I paddle through all these new things in my life, especially as I seek to understand success in this new position. 

I’ve been looking far into the future, trying to understand how the chaos and monotony of today relates to the things I hope to do.  These metaphors suggest that I am at risk of missing the lessons and beauty of this moment.

Watts illustrates this opportunity the best when he compares a journey to a dance.  In a journey we are constantly seeking our destination.  One hour more today is an hour less to spend tomorrow.  One last step now is a step I’ll never have to take again.  But in a dance we aren’t seeking the end.  We are seeking the moment.

We don’t dance to get anywhere; we don’t sing to finish songs.  We do these things for the joy they bring to our moments.  And anyone focused on some climactic conclusion will miss the brilliance of the moments.

Our lives, our careers … my life, my career … isn’t just a series of steps to the end.  It can be a series of brilliant moments where I touch the art of all that lies before me. 

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The first scene in the Matrix shows a woman, Trinity, sitting alone in a dark room. It’s obvious she’s hiding from something, wispering away on the phone.

Her back is to the only door in the room. With the requisite commotion, a bunch of cops burst through the door, guns drawn, yelling for her to put her hands behind her head.

Slowly she stands.

…

One cop, the biggest guy, flicks out some cuffs as he gets ready to haul her in and suddenly she goes nuts. The big guy slams into the wall. The rest of the cops panic. Gunfire blazes into the dark room. She’s a blur. And then, as suddenly as it started, it ends. They’re all dead. She’s amazing.

…

Into the building comes an unarmed man. When Trinity sees him it’s plain she’s afraid. She runs. He follows.

Leaping from building to building, rolling after impossible jumps, Trinity sprints off while the man behind her pulls a hand gun and rattles off several shots. The bullets pound into the bricks beside her.

Ahead of Trinity is an impossibly small window and it’s an impossibly long distance away. But it’s her only hope. She hurtles herself off the building, levels into a dive and crashes through the window. She’s escaping.

…

Glass explodes everywhere. Trinity crashes through the window, tumbles down a flight of stairs, and lands on her back at the bottom with two hand guns pointed back the way she just came. She’s terrified.

Lying there, heaving and broken she says, “Get up, Trinity. You’re fine. Get up — just get up!”

—

These are the three milestones of success:

1. We are amazing and we can prove it. After proving so much, some decide they’ve proven enough and stop growing. After having come so far, some decide they’ve come far enough and stay down.
2. We are afraid and we run from our fears. After climbing so high only to still find fear, we finally run instead of fight. And once we begin to run, the fear overtakes us. Panic sets in.
3. And each of us, sometime, lies heaving and broken on the floor. For each of us that will continue to grow, there is a moment in the blur of panic that we either set it aside or let it take us completely.

It is our fear that holds us down; the obstacles can not keep us there.

—

In this transition from government to private company … from advisor to investor … I forgot why I was amazing. I’m not amazing in the most general sense. But in some things, honestly, I am stunning. I forgot.

And in this time I’ve chosen fear instead of reality. I made up barriers, constructed misperceptions, and manufactured suspicion. I let these things pin me down.

Looking at this clearly I saw what I had done. I recognized that all these walls were mine. And I’ve decided to let them go.

It is fear that holds me down; but fear is mine to own.

I’ve hit a snag with the Foundation Series. It reads like crap.

I’m still wobbly on what I ought to say so I default to obfuscation. Orwell said it best, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” I’m not bogus, but perhaps affected.

You can see it in the buzzy words that start to slide out. Terse plus undecided almost always equals gibberish. And spotting gibberish in my posts set me down.

For me, there’s three lessons here.

First, there’s a lot of rhetoric about how we’re all marketers (ahem … Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra). Yeah, sure, that’s fine — but what about it? See, it’s great to acknowledge there’s a need to market but there’s nearly zero translation from the people who draw up Budweiser ads to the folks who rattle off briefings to the Minister.

So, while I’ve got loads of experience in banging up recommendations to senior officials, I’ve got close to none in using marketing verbage in a corporate setting. But verbage is where most marketing people stop. So there’s a gap. That’s the lesson.

Second is form. Blogging is good for lots of things but running deep into complex ideas isn’t one of them. For this series I should’ve used essays.

It was the same story in government. We were always writing one page briefing notes or 11 page powerpoint presentations (with 13 words per slide) while trying to provide depth and understanding around massively complicated issues. Bad form. Bad decision.

Alright, I get that people are busy. I understand (perfectly) that important decision makers make many decisions daily. But there’s a trade off between many, crappy decisions and fewer, better decisions. In the short-term there’s going to be a backlog, but the hope is that fewer come back to be made again.

Anyway, blogs aren’t a great form for working out complex dynamics like power in large organizations. The lesson is: Pick the right form.

Third, while many talk about marketing and some talk about form, few talk about daily corporate issues like: power struggles, pushing up ideas from relatively low power positions, tracking issues using fragmented information sources, getting time with decision makers, muscling out high-experience, low-passion deadbeats, etc. These are the daily fights of a massive number of people.

These same people flock to Apple’s carnival of products, the Spiritual/Relationship section of Chapters, and Starbucks and all the marketing people pretend it’s a consequence of marketing. Balloney. It’s not that they’re instinctively pulled to high design, high thought, and high caffeine. It’s because they’re attracted to richness.

Corporate life is vulnerable to desertification. In the past we’ve invested lots of energy in driving out nourishment like passion, ideas, and responsibility. In their place we’ve put career plans, meetings, and hierarchy. And the most important result has be that today people left aching to find color again.

So rattling about marketing and writing styles and all that other entrepreneur garbage misses the point if it doesn’t implicitly link to that powerful corporate worker’s hunger for depth and meaning. And that’s where I got off track.

Buzziness betrays insencerity and inauthenticity. We’ve got too much of that already.

P.S. Neither Kathy nor Hugh are wrong, the cartoon by Hugh below is brilliant, and I’m a big fan of both … but that’s not the point.

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Today my wife and I share our 8th anniversary.  And tomorrow is Valentines.

So … a love song.  Get the tune here.

“If single words like love mean more than ever before:
you’ve brought back life to time
and through you I’m forever changed.”

Who says I’m no rockstar?

Eric Schwartzman recently interviewed Doc Searls.  In the chat, Doc talked about the ways he uses RSS.  Listening to that conversation I finally understood the tremendous power of RSS functionality.

Until now I’ve just used RSS to keep me up to speed on the many blogs I frequent.  Any new post shows up in my aggregator and I don’t  wander through all the various sites that haven’t been updated.  Doc’s changed that.

In the interview, Doc explained how he uses Technorati, PubSub, Icerocket, Google blog search, and Feedster to track conversations.  He made a distinction between what he calls the “live web” and the rest of the web.  Where the regular web is made of static, architected web sites the live web is an organismic, dynamic environment made up of constantly changing publications like blogs and podcasts.

None of that stood out for me.  But his explanation of how he aggressively subscribes to topic searches did.  He called it “watching the river of fresh posts”.  That phrase alone let me see how widely I had missed the importance of RSS.  Instead of watching single conversations roll out on blogs, I can listen to all conversations.   Moving past favorite bloggers, I can watch favorite ideas.

I bet it’s obvious to everyone else but for me it was a revelation. Ever been in a room with seven really cool conversations happening at once?  Ever struggled in vain to both track your own conversation and hear the other ones around you too?  RSS lets you do that without looking like a fop. Even better, it lets you listen to every conversation … everywhere.

Doc likens it to drinking from a firehose, only you get to make your own firehose.  I’d suggest it’s more like drinking from the municipal supply, only you get to pick your watershed.

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Christopher Alexander in an interview with Kenneth Baker:

“If you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there. … If you’re working correctly, the feeling doesn’t wander about. If you have a feeling-vision of the thing — a painting, a building, a garden, a piece of a neighborhood — as long as you’re very firmly anchored in your knowledge of that thing, and you can see it with your eyes closed, you can keep correcting your actions. … It’s not a question of holding onto every little detail, but of holding onto the feeling.”

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Have you heard of Christopher Alexander? I’ve written about him before (1, 2, 3).

I’m fascinated by his ideas and have yet to read a single book he’s written. But his interests in the human response to patterns and space seem to be narrowly applied. They could explode beyond architecture. These ideas seem to count for anything where the decisions of one determine the environment for many — whether that’s physical, emotional, or mental space. In particular, Alexander’s ideas on wholeness have captured my attention.

I’ll say it now: I’m a suspicious guy. It’s something I try to keep tamped down but, honestly, I’d love to be a conspiracy theorist. I just think there’s way more to life than we acknowledge … aliens … not so much … but deeper levels of sensation and mental capacity … oh yeah.

So I’ll publically throw in a vote on this: wholeness. I keep wondering if all the things we’ve got, can buy, or are given are just fragments of thier whole. A bit metaphysical, maybe. It’s a lot like the prime discussed by Plato/Aristotle.

Are we only getting fragments of perfection? Is all this just a broken off piece of something spectacularly beautiful? And to be really whacky … I think it pushes on Nelson Mandela’s proposition that “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate … our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Anyway … All that to say,  Kenneth Baker’s review of “The Nature of Order” series got my attention.  The paragraph that spurred on this post is below.

“Every critic of the arts learns to discern wholeness or the lack of it in artworks, even in the temporal media of musical performance, theater and film. And all of us discern the wholeness of situations and things and respond to them, as when we spontaneously delight in the unfussy warmth of a well-used room or effortlessly recognize a person’s face despite its never-ending fluctuations of expression, age and well-being.”

Oh man, I think this is fun stuff.

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platitudinous — plati·tu’di·nous — a derivative of plat·i·tude (plăt’ĭ-tūd, -tyūd), a noun meaning a trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant. Without freshness or appeal because of overuse: banal, bromidic, clichéd, commonplace, corny, hackneyed, musty, overused, overworked, platitudinal, shopworn, stale, stereotyped, stereotypic, stereotypical, threadbare, timeworn, tired, trite, warmed-over, well-worn, worn-out.

Even better are platitudinousness, another noun, and platitudinal, an adjective.

Summarized by Johnnie Moore, written by Dave Pollard, talking about leadership:

“American business leaders are treated with deference and wild adulation, as if they were direct descendants from God. Autobiographical business books ghost-written for insanely overpaid CEOs, pontificating on how to be a successful leader, sell like hotcakes. Case in point: The platitudinous blatherings of Rudolph Giuliani in his book Leadership, featuring chapters on The Importance of the Morning Meeting, Preparing Relentlessly, Making Everyone Accountable, Surrounding Yourself with Great People, Reflecting, then Deciding and on and on. Common sense that any five-year-old would know, sold with enormous success for $25.95 a copy.”

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flibbertigibbet — flib·ber·ti·gib·bet (flĭb’ər-tē-jĭb’ĭt) — a noun meaning a silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person. A derivative of flibberty-gibberty.

Quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in Troublemakers — What pit bulls can teach us about profiling:

“There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs,” the writer Vicki Hearne points out. “Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog.”

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