Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • The Lifting Fog

      “Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis

      Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering all the time. And, as we all know, you can’t change other people, only yourself. So focus your energy in the right place.

      We begin another work week with deep fog outside. The heat of yesterday gave way to a cold, clammy fog that descended into the woods and surrounds the house this morning. It inspires me even as it drives nails into the ankle I thought was healed. The fog offers lessons: This day marks a new beginning, as every day does. Enough hammering opinions and defending positions.

      If you’re wondering, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, AKA Juvenus, has a wealth of wisdom/great quotes you’re familiar with in The Sixteen Satires (like “who watches the watchmen?”). Worth a search if you geek out on such things (as I clearly do). There are days when I wish I could just read all day just to catch up on things that I skimmed through in school because I wasn’t mentally developed enough to fully grasp what they were saying at the time. But that’s what lifetimes are for.

      “You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.” – John Barton

      And so we change, day-to-day. The fog slowly lifts, and a new understanding develops. I’m clearing out the fog of politics and rancor from the last several months and looking ahead with clarity and purpose. To grow in the new light emerging from the fog. To begin again.

    • Making Decisions

      “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” – Michel de Montaigne

      “If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.
      When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.”
      – Derek Sivers

      When you’re presented with a choice, there are a few paths in front of you. You could go with the flow and see where it leads you. You could just say no to everything and stay the course on whatever you’re currently doing. Or you could explore the path, decide if it’s a hell yeah! or a maybe yeah and jump in… or jump away.

      I found myself a while back with an attractive offer to go play in another sandbox for what was on paper a big chunk of money more. I contemplated it, talked to a few people to bounce the idea off of them, and thought about it some more. Tempting. Distracting. But admittedly less than Wow! for me. I’m at a point in my life where time expended on the unknown for incrementally more profit better mean a Wow! or it’s necessarily a No!

      “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      And so it was that at 4 AM I woke up for a bathroom break and lay there with the Sivers phrase above spinning through my head, reminding me that this thing you’re contemplating? It’s not a Hell yeah! for you. It’s an opportunistic money grab. And what of the time expended in its pursuit? For life is very short, as living keeps reminding me. So it’s a “no”. Which led me to wondering, then what is my Hell yeah! anyway? And it was right in front of me all along. And then I knew where to double down.

    • November and the Ninth Wave

      “November retained its name (from the Latin novem meaning “nine”) when January and February were added to the Roman calendar.” – Wikipedia

      And there it is: November. I’ve wondered about October before. I mean, “octo” is eight yet October was the tenth month. I hadn’t thought much about the origin of November until I stared at the November 1 on my calendar a beat longer than normal. And so here we are, with “novem” forever associated with nine for me. (novem ≠ 11, novem = 9, but November is the 11th month so deal with it. Don’t even get me started on December). We learn through association. Those Romans forever shaped the minutia of our world…

      November has always had a special place in my heart, for in the Northern Hemisphere its the month of quiet walks on crunchy fallen leaves, when the world opens up to reveal all that was hidden previously by foliage. In the United States November is associated with Thanksgiving, the very best of holidays (at least in my family) because it’s only about giving thanks together with family and friends. There are November birthdays of note in the family, and personally, one very notable anniversary coming up in a few days to punctuate the importance of the month in this household.

      And then there’s the election. Every four years in the United States we have the national election to choose our President. The “first Tuesday after the first Monday” of November was chosen and made into law in 1845 “to establish a uniform time for holding elections for electors of President and Vice President in all the States of the Union.” So Election Day can never be held on November 1, since it must follow the first Monday (unless the law is changed of course).

      This year has been relentlessly charging along, both rapid in the spinning of days and painfully slow in getting it all over with. Nobody who loves life wishes away time, but we all wish away the current situation we find ourselves in. November marks the moment when we vote and either validate the current administration or reject it wholeheartedly and install new leadership. I know where my vote goes. Choose wisely with your own vote, fellow citizens.

      In sailing the ninth wave in succession is the largest. It’s the one that might sink the ship and drown the crew. I reflect back on the stunning masterpiece Ninth Wave by Ivan Aivazovsky that I was blessed to see once in my lifetime. The Ninth Wave offers a glimmer of hope for those clinging to the mast in a raging sea. The sun is rising through the storm, marking a turning point of sorts. Danger remains all around and there’s no guarantee of survival, but again, there’s hope. And that’s what I think about on this first day of November. November (novem), marks the turning of the seasons towards winter. Change is coming. We all know it, and now we all face it. With hope.

    • Where The Knowing Is

      “The explorer returned to his people, who were eager to know about the Amazon. But how could he ever put into words the feelings that flooded his heart when he saw exotic flowers and heard the night-sounds of the forest; when he sensed the danger of wild beasts or paddled his canoe over treacherous rapids?
      He said, “Go and find out for yourselves.” To guide them he drew a map of the river. They pounced upon the map. They framed it in their town hall. They made copies of it for themselves. And all who had a copy considered themselves experts on the river, for did they not know its every turn and bend, how broad it was and how deep, where the rapids were and where the falls?”
      – Anthony De Mello, The Explorer

      Reading this story three times, my mind flashed back on moments over the last year when I transcended the maps: hiking trails where every rock was a wince, Scottish roads that proved narrower and a spouse who grew more horrified by the non-existent shoulder than the oncoming truck, carefully arranged graduation reservations scrapped by COVID and a banner at the ready should a party someday be a reality. Each an example of what I thought I knew turned on its head. Each a learning experience.

      2020 was the big number on the horizon we all wondered about. Places we’d be, events we’d experience, moments we’d celebrate. Now we’re all living through the actual 2020, in ways that we didn’t anticipate. It’s just like any other map or plan in that way. Each event, each trip, each person and each day won’t be what you expected in some way or another. The maps and guides and itineraries and YouTube videos of those who went before help frame things, but you’ve got to go out and experience life to really know anything at all.

      We all think we know how things are going to turn out. But living through the moment, exploring and testing our limits of understanding and endurance, going and finding out for yourselves, that’s where the knowing is. That’s where we fully realize the feelings that flood our hearts.

    • Process and Persistence

      “Process saves us from the poverty of intentions.” – Elizabeth King (via Seth Godin & Tim Ferriss)

      “You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.” – John McPhee, On The Writing Process

      Blogging is a process that saves me from my poverty of intentions. I’ve intended to write for years, but pushed it aside in pursuit of everything both worthy and irrelevant. Sure the site needs work, the writing has typos now and then and Yoast SEO is fixed in a permanent frown, but so what? If you’re along for the journey, welcome, you’ve apparently overcome a ton of SEO blunders on my part to get here.

      If there’s a common theme throughout life, its the fact that we can never do quite enough to reach perfection. I’m nowhere near it myself. But I walk the path one step at a time, writing, editing, publishing and starting again at the beginning every day. And that’s a victory in itself. Screw perfection – give me process and persistence.

      “Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

      And that’s where I am, focus narrowed and repeating daily towards a level of mastery I may never achieve. But I’ll be closer for the effort. There’s some measure of the Pareto principle in that James Clear quote. Focus on the 20% that achieves the goal. SEO doesn’t necessarily matter. Likes and follows don’t necessarily matter. The work matters. So do more than focus, do the work.

    • Striving for Prévoyance

      “C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”
      (“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”)
      – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

      Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to the markets, or business, social trends or simply whether to bring an umbrella with you on your walk. It also helps greatly when managing our own lives. I heard a richer and more profound definition from David Hackett Fischer when describing this trait in Samuel Champlain. He defined prévoyance as “the power of a prepared mind to act upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty.” My French hasn’t reached that level of nuance just yet (and never will without immersion), so I’m grateful when people point out the magic sprinkled in such words.

      The problem with learning is in learning what you don’t know, or levels that you haven’t yet reached in life. But within that inherent underlying frustration lies growth and progression towards a higher self. And that’s where I find myself: decades into life and scrambling over jumbled bits of acquired knowledge in a climb to wisdom and higher truth. The promised land that I’ll never quite reach, but a step closer than I was yesterday or the day before. Sisyphus has nothing on me.

      “It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard. It was best to be cunning and focus on results rather than inputs. Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard working did not.” – Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle

      In this life I find myself climbing a succession of mountains, looking around with a sigh, and descending back down to climb yet another (refer to yesterday’s post). Perhaps with a bit more prévoyance I might have climbed fewer mountains, and chosen the right one much earlier in life. But such is life: we don’t know what we don’t know until we gain experience or acquire and leverage knowledge from others who have had the experience.

      “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

      That distinction between greatness and meanness lies in which mountains we climb, and how soon we turn back down the path to ascend a different mountain than the one we’re climbing. And that leads back to foreseeability, to prévoyance, and acting upon chance events in a world of deep uncertainty. And so I stuff the brain with as many bits of knowledge from as many perspectives as I can consume, for knowledge, well-used, is the key to prévoyance. This blog, in many ways, is the public-facing library of that accumulated knowledge (such that it is), and the breadcrumbs on the path of where I’ve been recently. And in the 370,000 thousand published words, perhaps it telegraphs where I’m going too.

    • Choosing the Path

      “A lot of people don’t want to pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don’t want to, for example, physically move, or they don’t want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships.

      So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path that they’re on, maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top. Or like Charlie Munger jokes; ‘You know people always ask me how do I get to be rich like you except quicker. I don’t want to be the old rich guy, I want to be the young rich guy.’

      So I think these are the hard parts. The hard parts aren’t the learning it’s the unlearning. The hard part isn’t the climbing up the mountain its the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. Its the beginner’s mind that every great artist or every great business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero. Because you have to realize is that what you already know and what you are already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential. And most people just don’t want to acknowledge that.” – Naval Ravikant, on The Tim Ferriss Show Episode #473

      That’s a long quote, but I found it compelling enough to include it in its entirety. Naval has a way of waking you up to yourself. He’s a deep thinker who demands deep thinking from you as well. And he reminds you that you ought to demand it of yourself.

      Sometimes you climb to a certain rise in your career, your relationship or with some other pursuit you’re deeply invested in, you look around and realize that the path you’re on isn’t going to the top of the mountain you were meant to climb. That’s happened to me a few times in my life. It will surely again at some point in the future should I stick around long enough. The question is whether you make the decision to go back and start all over again. Can you teach an old dog a new trick?

      The obvious example of this is in my inner circle is the crew of Fayaway climbing off the mountain in their individual careers and going back to zero (income) with a three year sabbatical to see the world. And with the pandemic they’ve descended back down off of this mountain that they just started climbing and gone back to jobs to reset yet again. I admire their willingness to keep at it, and they challenge and inspire me to climb other mountains myself.

      So the question is, are you climbing, descending or stuck in place? What you’re already doing is an impediment to reaching your full potential. Staying put is the easy part. The hard part is turning back down the mountain and starting all over again. So where are you going anyway?

    • Reading is Autobiographical

      “The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.”

      It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh Walpole’s Reading: An Essay. Short enough to devour in a few quick bites, I blew through his essay in no time at all. I suppose it was inevitable, I’ve heard about this short essay for years, but never got around to it… until I read the quote above.

      Written in 1929, the essay references “The War” frequently, and I shudder to know what he didn’t know about the world to come over the next 12 years. There would soon be another war. Walpole would pass away in 1941, well before the outcome was certain. A discretely gay man in a time when discretion was required, he never had children and turned his energy into a prolific writing career. Reading: An Essay is a love letter to his favorite pastime, and I found myself plucking quote-after-quote from it. I’m sure there are plenty I missed, and perhaps I’ll read it again sometime soon. But who wants to get everything out of an essay on the first go-around anyway? With reading, Walpole is a kindred spirit from a hundred years ago. He capitalizes “Reading” as if it were a person or a sacred subject, because of course it was to him. And in his reverence for the topic, the essay felt like a quiet conversation with a friend. So here are a few gems from this short essay:

      “I believe, with the pleasures of Reading it can be nothing if it is not autobiographical, for the only certain thing about Reading is that it is personal first, personal second, and personal all the time, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Comedia may be the twin dominating peaks of a glorious range, but they are nothing to you whatsoever if you happen to be looking the other way.” – Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay

      “For the rest of my days there should be always at my hand a land of escape and enchantment.”

      “Reading must be a personal adventure or the salt goes out of it.”

      “Libraries should be penetrated with the love of books, so that when you enter a room where the books are the air is warm with a kind of delicious humanity, and the books have been always so affectionately treated that, like the right kind of dog, they know no fear and yet have their fitting dignity.”

      “I believe that circumstances have altered very little, and that a novel to be absorbing has to have precisely the two ingredients that it had a hundred years ago, a narrative gift (and it doesn’t matter whether the narrative is about a tea party or a murder trial) and the creation of living characters.”

      “There is a kind of luxury in reading which is perhaps the best thing in the world; it is to be captured only, I think, through the old books, books that you know so well that they step out and meet you, take you by the arm and whisper in your ear: ‘Now lie back and talk to us, and then we will in turn tell you a thing or two. There’s no need to be clever this evening, we don’t want you to shine, we’ll have an hour or two together so pleasant that you’ll scarcely know we’re here.’”

      All of this talk of libraries and Reading makes me want to immerse myself in a good book. The house is still quiet, the sun hasn’t risen yet on this cold morning, and there’s time for another mug of coffee and a few chapters before the frenzied swirl of activity begins. If you’ll excuse me…

    • Vif d’Esprit et de Corps

      To be quick in mind and body – vif d’esprit et de corps – that is the goal. In this year of years I’ve seen many recede into dark places, or spritzed with wine or spirits or awash in binge-watching Netflix, or worst of all following the every move of the orange narcissist. Or maybe all of the above. I find myself sliding into these darker places, la détresse, when I’m too immersed in Twitter or Facebook. So I took a 30 day hiatus from Facebook beginning Sunday and just deleted Twitter for the next five days to force a reset of the brain. I’m doing the same five days off without alcohol, just to show it who’s boss.

      Where are you most alive? Doing what? To be quick-witted and vibrant requires work, but the work doesn’t have to be tedious or painful. It just requires consistency of effort. Who makes you feel most alive? Why aren’t you spending more time with them being so? What gets you invited to the dance? Raising your own game, of course. Becoming more. Doing more. Seeing more. Learning more. Not for water cooler talk (virtualized for the foreseeable future), but for a hand up on the climb. I view the next 20 years as the climb of my lifetime, and I’d better be mentally and physically fit enough to squeeze as much of the zest out of the experience as possible. And after the next 20? Well, I’ll worry about that when I get there, but it will have to start with a strong base.

      Ultimately, it becomes a matter of how do you live with yourself? What makes you interesting enough to hang around this being for any amount of time? What is the next act? Immersion in a French or Portuguese-speaking culture? Knocking off peaks and waterfalls and old castles? Chasing dark skies? Visiting every fascinating country on the list? Sailing across the pond? Building (or building on) lifetime friendships with choice adults, children, grandchildren (should they come) and dogs? Finally finishing those dusty classics taking up space on the bookshelf? There’s time for all of these things, and yet no time to lose. And no time to waste on the stuff of little consequence.

      To be quick in mind and body, vif d’esprit et de corps, begins with this next step. And the one after that. Let the adventure begin.

    • 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.