Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Choosing the Mindset

      “Your mindset is the filter through which you see the world. It determines how you spend your time, what decisions you make, and where you invest your resources.

      There’s an old saying in business that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

      If you want to be fit, hang out with friends who exercise.

      If you want to think big and aspire to change the world, hang out with people who have Moonshots and a massively transformative purpose (MTP)….

      As an entrepreneur, answering these questions is a critical part of your journey to be successful during this era of exponential change.

      The next step on that journey is choosing the mindset(s) that works best for you.”
      – Peter Diamandis       (from his Twitter thread)

      I found myself lost in PowerPoint for the last two days, creating a presentation well into the evening for a meeting on Monday afternoon. You might think being lost in PowerPoint is a bad thing, and we’ve all suffered through plenty of really bad PowerPoint presentations, compounded by webinars that eliminate the human-to-human interaction that makes them more engaging. But in this case, I was taking a large topic and boiling it down into concise slides. And the time flew by as I researched crime data and regulatory requirements and other such things that make a slide deck come alive. It occurred to me that I actually loved the creative aspect of creating slide decks. And then it occurred to me that it isn’t using the Microsoft product that I love, it’s finding creative ways to tell the story that I love.

      How to best leverage that creative energy remains (always) the question. And I think about Moonshots and massively transformative purpose in the way that Diamandis suggests, and find myself challenged to perform at a higher level still. Blogging every day seems to be a good direction, but I’m not seeing it as the community of writers I thought it would be. I suppose it was never going to be that. Blogging may not be a Nitya Puja, but it is a daily step on the journey that pushes aside the accumulated clutter of life for a time. Writing becomes a meditation of sorts, and brings you closer to the truth… so maybe, in a sense, it is a Nitya Puja after all.

      Jim Rohn said, and Diamandis references in the quote above, that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. In a pandemic that generally means being inside your bubble of family and a few close associates. Every other relationship and engagement with others seems to be remote: Zoom, Facebook, InstaGram, Twitter, TikTok and all the rest. Are those people raising your average or dragging you down? Increasingly it feels like the latter. Watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix and see how manipulative the world of social media is, and ask whether it should be a significant part of your life (Netflix has mastered manipulative distraction itself). And yet I pulled the Diamandis quote from Twitter, so there’s value in social media platforms. But little value in distraction.

      All that noise is clogging the mindset filter, and I find myself wanting to cut the cord once more. When you start checking how many likes your last post had or figuring out how many views you got on your last blog post it can drag you into the depths of distraction. How do you get anything meaningful done if you’re always distracted? And getting things done seems to be the real purpose. Not meaningless things, but the purposeful things that make you a better human. To contribute more. To be more. To reach your potential in this maze we call life. And it begins with your mindset.

    • A Moment With Harold Evans

      “I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren’t bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know,”
      ― Harold Evans, Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters

      When the world seems to be looking too far inward, when everyone around you seems to be spun up into things that shouldn’t matter, when the conversation turns towards the latest scandal in Hollywood or Washington or Buckingham Palace… seek other voices. Because the only way you’ll grow is to rise up towards it. The larger conversations in the world are happening without you until you join the adult table. When you get to the adult table, by all means be ready to join the conversation.

      Sir Harold Evans passed away last week at the age of 92. In a wild case of six degrees of separation I once had Thanksgiving dinner with Harold Evans and his wife Tina Brown, putting me literally at the adult table with two of the most influential and brilliant people in the publishing industry. I was a college student who happened to be in the right place at the right time – they lived next door to the place we were for the long weekend and we invited them over. Simple. The parents were up to the conversation at hand, I wasn’t quite up to the task – a college kid who still thought he knew everything and not bothering to do the work needed to get closer to there. Harold Evans asked me a question about which candidate in the Republican Primary I liked, and without any thought to the matter I blurted out “Bob Dole” without explanation. It seemed like a safe answer at the time. He looked at me patiently and diverted to other topics with someone else, ending our conversation instead of trying to draw any logic out of my answer. He and I both knew I’d punted. I always regretted not being better prepared for a conversation like that.

      “His parents had taught him to make the most of himself, so he had. Though he kept a certain working-class deference and friendliness, did not shout, was “Harry” to everyone and would quite kindly tell reporters their copy was hopeless, he had taken on almost every part of the establishment and made it quake.” – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Reading about Evans’ life, I was struck by how hard he had worked to raise himself up and to demand the best from himself and others. I remember he was a voracious reader, and would often devour several books on the drive from New York City out to Quogue, New York. As the editor of Random House he needed to read quickly because he had an endless stream of books coming at him. I would try speed-reading a few times over the years attempting to get as much from it as people like Evans did. But I’ve found that speed-reading doesn’t work for me. I like to linger on words and sentences a bit too much. If I were to have that one conversation with him again I might ask how he approached reading. I suspect he did it two ways, for work and for pleasure, and the speed varied based on which it was. It would have been a better conversation than the Republican Primary of 1987-1988.

      “Running a newspaper gave him “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil”. – Harold Evans’ Obituary, The Economist

      Harold Evans was fired from The Times by Rupert Murdoch, setting up his move to New York and his rise to the top of the publishing industry. Had he not been fired I would never have met him. He used it as fuel to rise up even higher, and it was surely a gift not having to cater to the whims and biases of Murdoch. Attacking the devil was a purpose, and I wondered sometimes what he thought of the nastiness of present-day politics. But there it was, an interview from 2017 where he called Boris ‘buoyantly reckless’, Trump dangerous and May ‘terrifically smart’. I believe he was on point with all three. No surprise for a man who did the work necessary to find the truth of the matter with the most evasive of characters. Thinking back, I was no match for him at the time. But he helped inspire me to try harder, as I suspect he did with many others over the years. I wish I’d had another conversation with the man, I was more prepared for the next one.

    • Life on Venus

      “Apparently it smells basically like death… It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.” – Clara Sousa-Silva, NPR interview

      Life on Venus? Not exactly, but life swirling about in the clouds of Venus is apparently a very real possibility. That there’s a possible confirmation of life in the universe beyond Earth is extraordinary. That the life in question – Phosphine – smells like the bad gas of a rat after a night of dumpster diving is extraordinarily 2020. And yet here we are.

      In another year the announcement of life on another planet would have been front page news. But Phosphine isn’t particularly sexy as life goes, and we have enough alien life to deal with right here on Earth already. Honestly I’m happy there are brilliant people like Clara Sousa-Silva and her peer Jane Greaves are out that the very thing that we’ve all been looking at all along has potential living matter dancing in the Venus clouds. My mind simply doesn’t function in such a way that I’d make that connection between the chemical signature of Phosphine as proof of life on Venus. Or rather, life in the clouds of Venus.

      That brilliant women are leading the discovery of life on Venus leads to the rather obvious men are from Mars, women are from Venus analogy, but I dare not go further than that. I’ll simply concede that these women are far ahead of me in the brain matter department and doing mind-blowing work. I spend my time with words and images and making connections between people, not immersed in science. Shame on me, really, for this is really fascinating.

      And yes, I’ll admit it: Venus and I have had a long relationship. It’s not exclusive, mind you, but we get together often on long evening walks or quiet moments of stargazing. I admit I even take the binoculars out sometimes to get a closer look. But I knew the relationship was best kept long-distance. Venus has a toxic personality, after all. Best to look but not touch. And now to find out that she has bad breath too. It’s all too much, really. To gaze in wonder at this heavenly object for years only to find out she’s not at all what you expected her to be. But expectations are funny things, and we spend far too much time elevating objects of our affection to higher levels than they ought to occupy. That’s a lesson we can bring right back to Earth straight from the clouds of Venus.

    • The World As We Know It

      “… and anyhow travel is over, like one’s books and the rest of civilization” – Rose Macaulay

      This Macaulay quote, plucked from the extraordinary Erik Larson book The Splendid and the Vile, was from a letter that she wrote to a friend after her London flat was destroyed in 1941 during one of the many attacks the city suffered, wiping out all of her books and personal belongings accumulated over her lifetime to that point. I found this particular quote profound because in many ways I feel that way about 2020, when the idea of travel and any semblance of civilized discourse seems illusive at best. It shines as a reminder that others have been in far worse places than we’re in now, and this too shall pass. The war eventually ended and some level of civilization returned. Macaulay went on to travel extensively, writing some best sellers along the way.

      Of course, I can’t just read a quote like that and not look into the source, and Macaulay doesn’t disappoint. I’ve added her to the list of authors I need to invest more time with once the stack of books has reached a respectable level of completion. For now, here are a couple of quotes from Dame Rose Macaulay that particularly resonated for me:

      “It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.” – Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages

      “Life, for all its agonies…is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing…and whatever is to come after it — we shall not have this life again.” – Rose Macaulay

      I suppose the takeaway from each of the three quotes is familiar ground for readers of this blog. The world as we know it will continue to change, and so must we. Savor the dance to the last note. Savor youth while you have it and the moments always. And in the darkest days, remind yourself that the world will be there for you when you’re ready or able to venture out into it once again.

    • Social Media Fasting

      For all the madness in the world, it feels both quiet and ordinary most days. Until you pick up your phone and read the stream of toxic opinion and rage tweets anyway. In an attempt to dial down the craziness I deleted the Twitter app three days ago and find it a refreshing non-factor. There’s a lot I like about Twitter, but a lot I can do without too. Blog posts are automatically tweeted out, but ironically I don’t even see my own posts.

      This isn’t a post bashing Twitter or Facebook. I enjoy the experience of being on each. Instead I’m reflecting on fasting now and then. A friend of mine is doing intermittent fasting and lost twenty pounds. With social media fasting you don’t lose anything. Instead you gain time back in your life for substance and meaning. Time for reflection and deeper conversation. Time to read the books that stack up resentfully waiting for you to put down your damned phone. Time to think. Time to be.

      I lived without Facebook for the first three months of 2020 and felt I didn’t miss much of anything save a few pictures and an endless stream of opinion posts. I’ve dabbled in opinion posts and find the upswell of indignation they generate a complete waste of time and energy. So rather than fight the urge to contradict the inane ramblings of a zealot I simply delete the entire post and wish people Happy Birthday! and leave it at that. With the election coming in the United States it may be a good time to step away from Facebook once again. With significant life events happening I’m holding out for the time being.

      Twitter on the other hand is an attractive rut you just can’t seem to crawl out of. I’ve followed authors and thought leaders of substance and gain the experience and wisdom they offer. But Twitter is set up in such a way that you also become subjected to seeing posts or suggestions that person you’re following likes or comments on that you may have no interest in pursuing. It’s clickbait on steroids. The rut quickly becomes a rathole. I don’t want to hang out in either ruts or ratholes, thank you.

      In omitting or limiting Twitter and Facebook time you open up thinking time. Outdoors time. Get things done time. Mask-to-mask time. Thinking time. Experience time. Learning time. And generally more time in your life time. That seems to me a fair trade for the very real information you might glean from each platform. And so I fast.

    • Seeing Stars

      “The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveller.” – John Milton

      One side effect of the wildfires in the West are the clouds of wispy smoke high up in the atmosphere turning the days an overcast grey. At night the stars are obscured by this wispy smoke, the remnants of trees and homes and life disrupted 3000 miles away masking the stars above us. I’m reminded of how much I measure the night by the stars above. Companions lost in the haze. I believe that if this doesn’t convince people of climate change what will? But the stars aren’t the only ones lost in the haze. I’m often surprised at what people will believe, but the larger tragedy is what people will make people believe to raise their own status. Even at the cost of the quality of life for all current and future inhabitants of this planet.

      “Little by little,
      You will turn into stars.”
      – Hafiz, Skinning Your Knees on God

      We’re all connected beings on this planet, and we’re all connected matter in the universe. The universe is part of us, and someday we’ll once again be a part of it. We’re all swimming about in this dance of energy and light and Faith. This interconnectedness is lost on too many people concerned more about us versus them. What impacts the west coast impacts the east coast in another way. Borders are manmade creations that betray the interconnectedness of all of us. These are the rules we’ve established in this game, but the universe knows that it’s all just a game.

      That hazy smoke above is matter that was once energy in the form of trees and grass and wildlife. Eventually the fires will burn out and the skies will clear again. The stars will come out and shine brightly. The universe is constantly in motion and will reset once more. The smoky remains of forests and lives forever altered will eventually be absorbed and convert to fuel and substance and energy once more. Will we remember the fires and the hazy days? Will we make meaningful change while there’s still time? The universe doesn’t care, but we should.

    • Rising Up in Sterner Days

      Well, it’s 9/11 once again. And judging from the animation on both sides of the political spectrum, we aren’t as unified as perhaps we should be as we stare down a pandemic. I have friends who chafe at wearing a mask, friends who chafe at Black and/or Blue lives mattering, friends who despise the current President, friends who go on boat parades and friends that despise the boat paraders. I struggle internally with some of these friend’s beliefs, but they’re friends just the same.

      This speech by Winston Churchill is famous for the never give in bit, but to me the most powerful words are the final words. I recommend reading it in its entirety – its not that long – and reflect on what kind of leaders we want for our own country in these sterner days.

      “Do not let us speak of darker days; let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived. ” – Winston Churchill

      Churchill said these words during the Battle of Britain, as his country stood against Hitler and fascism. I wonder what he’d say to us should he look around at our discord? The pandemic is a challenge, but as a nation shouldn’t we rise up together to face it, as we once did in the days after 9/11? I should think so.

    • Over and Over

      “To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.” – Heraclitus

      Heraclitus seems to be trending on the blog, coming up a couple of times in the last 24 hours of writing. Purely coincidence, but then again maybe there’s something in the September air. The days grow shorter, the air cooler, and the last of the harvest has begun. And yet we’re still in a pandemic, just as we were in the heat of summer and the early spring days when it all seemed uncertain. And many of us are still working from home day-by-day, chipping away at our jobs in the new normal, never quite feeling that way. My daughter began her senior year of college in the basement where she used to play with legos and costumes. I know she’d rather be amongst her peers on campus, and want it for her.

      Reading about the Battle of Britain in Erik Larson’s book helps me appreciate the relative ease with which we live through a global crisis compared to our grandparents and great-grandparents. We’re asked to work from home and wear a mask to avoid getting sick? Perhaps a moment of inconvenience in “living your best life”? Think about the souls being bombed from above night-after-night, wondering if this was the bombing that launched the expected German invasion. Looking at the full moon not in wonder but with dread for the illumination it offered to the enemy. No, wearing a mask doesn’t seem all that controversial in the big scheme of things.

      “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.” – Mark Twain

      The funny thing about reading about fascists is seeing traits inherent in some world leaders of today. Critical errors made because of a character flaw changed the course of history then, and do so today as well. We just haven’t lived that history yet. But you can see the ripples that are building into waves in extremism and with climate change. Will we check the progress of the ripples or let them build into waves that wash over all of us? Appeasement didn’t work out well for Europe in the 1930’s. What are we tolerating now that will come back to bite us if unchecked?

      I suppose I should stick with the original themes of this blog, but seeing the same things over and over again gets frustrating. Sometimes you need to raise your voice and lend a hand to advance what is right. There will be moments of enlightened observation to come, but it ought to be balanced with a willingness to stand up and be counted. We can’t let the chorus of the ignorant drown out the voices of the informed. If that sounds like arrogance and elitism, well, let’s talk through our differences. There isn’t as large a gap as some might lead you to believe.

    • Collapsing the Space Between Us

      “Walkers pass tight lipped, eyes averted
      Only dogs tugging on leashes want to collapse the space between us”
      – Ken Burns, In the Social Distance

      A couple of days ago I had the audacity to post an opinion on Facebook and immediately faced the crush of for and against dialog that’s lasted far longer than the typical family picture flurry of activity. And those were friends, family and acquaintances, not anonymous Twitter trolls. But that’s the world we live in right now – divisive and reactionary. And yet we’re all basically the same people with a few differences of opinion.

      Ken Burns wrote a poem that describes the time we’re living in, and read it on a NY Times podcast. You can find the transcript here. This bit about collapsing the space between us got me thinking about a guy we met hiking on the Carter Dome last weekend. Or rather, we met his year old retriever Emma, who was way ahead of me on the list of 48 4000 footers. I’ve completed 10 since I started re-tracking this year. She’s completed 40! Her owner was an older gentleman, I’d place him at 70, but he was incredibly fit from hiking all the time. He mentioned that his last dog hiked Mount Adams 65 times!

      It occurred to me that I never learned his opinion on politics, nor he mine. Just people talking longer than they might have otherwise because of the dynamo swirling about us. Sure there was hiking in common, but really Emma was the bridge between us. When we parted her exuberance was the part that remained on my mind, apparently still, for there remains a glow of joy when I think about her rolling in the dirt. The world could use more dogs collapsing the space between us, and less media driving us apart.

    • The Seven Daughters of Atlas

      “Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,
      Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”
      – Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

      Orion and Taurus, the hunter and the hunted, have a long-standing adversarial relationship in the skies above us. If the Hyades are the face of Taurus turned towards Orion, the “body” of Taurus is a cluster of stars known as the Pleiades or the less magical M45. Looking up well before the dawn this morning they took my breath away. I carefully ran into a dark house for my binoculars for a closer look. While Mars and Venus and the Waning Gibbous moon setting in the west dominated the sky, the Pleiades drew most of my attention this morning.

      The Pleiades cluster has many names across the globe, but my favorite is the Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters, all daughters of Atlas, dance in place, forever hunted by Orion (but just out of reach!) as their father holds up the heavens. I have but a sketchy knowledge of Greek mythology and rely heavily on Wikipedia and Google to help me out (the Tennyson above and the Hesiod poem below were both posted originally on Wikipedia). But the cluster was familiar to me, having always been there waiting for me to pay more attention.

      “And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
      when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
      and plunge into the misty deep
      and all the gusty winds are raging,
      then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
      but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.”
      – Hesiod, Works and Days 618–623

      This poem serves as a warning, for in late October and November when Pleiades is seen setting in the western sky it signals that winter is coming, and with it storms. Get your ships off the ocean and work the land instead. It’s September of course, but there have been plenty of storms already in 2020. And more change is in the air as the days grow shorter and we pivot towards Autumn. Our lives are nothing but change, no matter how much we sometimes wish to just dance in place forever like the Seven Sisters. But that’s not our fate.

      Pleiades reminded me that I need to get up earlier more often, for the brilliance of the sky above is wasted on me in my sleeping ignorance. The magic hour between 3 and 4 AM seems to be the time with the most to see, but how rare it is for me to be outside at that hour to witness it! I feel like an overnight passage or a night awake on a summit are required in the near future. Sleep is essential, but the stars silently dance without you while you’re blissfully dozing. Like Orion, those Seven Sisters are just out of reach for me, but I swear they flirt back at a fellow Taurus. And stir my imagination.