Life 2.0

The joy of leaching*

Words are abstractions -- pointers to things.  And of course, abstractions are very useful.  They provide us with shortcuts to common understandings, instead of having to reinvent the wheel all the time.  Most of what we are taught is through words and concepts -- this world of abstractions.... it's just seems much easier that way.  The problem is we have a tendency to forget that abstractions are at least one step away from reality itself.

Abstractions are also how we attempt to make sense of a world that (we believe) would be overly complex without them.  But is that really true?  Isn't it the abstractions themselves that have grown more and more complex as we try to include all the little bits that don't fit our old ones, and as we wrestle with the edge cases that some how refuse to fit existing mental models ?

The problem is that our abstractions are now so familiar to us, and we have grown so dependant on them, that that is all we really see.  We loose site of the underlying reality and mistake the abstracted world for truth.  The world we see through our mental frames has become so comfortable and unquestioned that we forget it is a world within our minds.  It  appears  real and joyless because we have so little recall of what it is like to experience life just as it is, unfiltered.

But there is another way to learn.  One that doesn't take the comfortable, familiar paths that abstractions provide, but is focused on experiencing what is in front of us right now.  It's not a mental exercise but an exploration and discovery  -- an  un-learning of what we hold as true, in order to experience reality as it is --  sans  abstractions.

Words are useful here too, but now more as markers than abstractions.  We can use them as stakes in the ground to peg insights and flashes of inspiration so reason can fill the gaps in later.  They help us to identify a shared meaning, and mark our exploratory paths.

There's an incredible power in two or more coming together to discover truths first hand.  But this requires letting go of our old concepts of what a teacher and learner is (of one who walks a step in front and another a step behind)  in favour of truly collaborative venture. 

Strange isn't it, there's over 200,000 words in the English language and yet we don't seem to have a word for learning and teaching at the same time.  I think it would be good if we did.  :)

Any ideas? 

* actually 'leach', as a mash-up of the verbs 'learn' and 'teach',  perhaps wouldn't be too far away form what we are after.  I mean leach in the sense of extracting the essence from that which appears course and complex... filtering the truth from the soup of opinions and perceptions.

Bonus:  Here's a wonderful essay called  'A Mathematician's Lament'  written by Paul Lockhart, an assistant professor at Brown Brown who left to teach  a mathematician's point of view to very young children.  In his own words, "I want them to understand that there is a playground in their minds and that that is where mathematics happens."

Note:  The video demonstrates a wonderful immersive and fun learning tool.  What a great way to learn physics!  You may have to click through to watch the video if it doesn't appear in your feedreader.

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The Great Depression

.... click to enlarge.

" I see all this potential, and I see squandering.  God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars.  Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.  We're the middle children of history, man.  No purpose or place.  We have no Great War.  No Great Depression.  Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives.  We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars.  But we won't.  And we're slowly learning that fact.  And we're very, very pissed off."
—Fight Club, 1999

.. and here's a  few more arguments  against working as a wage slave.

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What happened at Whole Foods when the checkout computers went down.

I came across this little Christmas story via  Lars Pinds  this morning: 

What happened at Whole Foods when the checkout computers went down: 

There was no storewide announcement of the problem, or its consequence.  Cashiers simply told customers there was a computer glitch, bagged their groceries, wished them a happy holiday and a safe drive, and sent them on their way.

Hall estimated that up to $4,000 in groceries were given away before the computers began working again.

She said Donoghue did not consult headquarters before making his decision and said she has heard no negative feedback from the top brass.

"They just totally trust us to do what is right for our customers," she said.

If this story spreads (as some blog stories do) then someone will probably do the math and work out that the ROI on that $4000 in terms of marketing spend is astronomical.  But in doing so they will have completely missed the point.  Expressions of love are their own reward... they have traction and power  because  they are genuine, spontaneous and without ulterior motive.  If this act had been contrived it would go nowhere.

After reading so much up-yer-bum stuff about redefining marketing for this super connected world of ours, this story is so refreshingly simple (and effective).  Genuine expressions of caring don't follow any business rules or economic logic.  The smallest of gestures can have far greater impact than the grandest plans.  And the more freedom we grant ourselves to give unconditionally, the more our capacity for giving increases.  There really is no cost to anyone.

I know it can be hard for some to resist trying to capture and then teach these things;  but it's only when we try to tie this stuff up neatly into a formula, a policy or as part of some 'great plan' that it all becomes so elusive and ephemeral.

Whole Foods have done something brave and wonderful, but also something really simple.  It is this:  They've given their people the freedom to express their own notion of caring without the fear of unintended consequences.  And then they've got out of the way.  Isn't that all that's needed?
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Related Article:  Strange Math 

Credit:  Painting entitled 'Peaceful Co-existence' by  Art By Wicks

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The Renaissance of Love

Four months after the start of WW1, in the winter of 1914, the Germans had been in a fierce battle with the British and French.  Both sides were dug-in, in muddy, man-made trenches six to eight feet deep that seemed to stretch forever.  Already hundreds of thousands had fallen.  But despite the constant machine gun fire and artillery bombardments, and even though in some places front-line troops were a mere 60 yards away from the enemy's lines, Christmas gift hampers containing food and tobacco prepared were delivered to troops on both sides by their governments.  The Germans, who had a direct land link to their home country (British soldiers in Belgium were separated from England by sixty miles and the English Channel), also managed to send small Christmas trees and candles to troops at the front.

On that Christmas Eve, an extraordinary event took place.  The Germans set trees on trench parapets and lit the candles.  Then, they began singing carols, and though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were not.  After a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than belligerent and crawled forward to watch and listen.  And after a while, they began to sing.

According to Stanley Weintraub, who wrote about this event in his book, Silent Night, "signboards arose up and down the trenches in a variety of shapes.  They were usually in English, or - from the Germans - in fractured English. . 'YOU NO FIGHT, WE NO FIGHT'  was the most frequently employed German message.  Some British units improvised  'MERRY CHRISTMAS'  banners and waited for a response.  More placards on both sides popped up."

By Christmas morning, the 'no man's land' between the trenches was filled with fraternizing soldiers, sharing rations and gifts, singing and (more solemnly) burying their dead between the lines.  They exchanged gifts.  Chocolate cake, cognac, postcards, newspapers, tobacco.  In a few places, along the trenches, soldiers exchanged rifles for soccer balls and began to play soccer.  According to the official war diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment, 'Tommy and Fritz'  kicked about a real football supplied by a Scot.  "This developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter.. The game ended for Fritz."

It didn't last forever.  Some of the generals didn't like it at all and commanded their troops to resume shooting at each other.  After all, they were in a war.  German and British soldiers reluctantly parted, in the words of Pvt. Percy Jones of the Westminster Brigade, "with much hand-shaking and mutual goodwill."  Soldiers eventually did resume shooting at each other.  But only after, in a number of cases, a few days of wasting rounds of ammunition shooting at stars in the sky instead of soldiers in the opposing army across the field.

As a celebration of the human spirit, the Christmas Truce serves as a great reminder of the absurdities of war.  A Scottish poet, Frederick Niven, may have got it right in his  "A Carol from Flanders," which closed,

O ye who read this truthful rime
From Flanders, kneel and say:
God speed the time when every day
Shall be as Christmas Day."

To me, although the Christmas Truce of 1914 may seem like a distant myth it remains a symbol of hope to those of us who believe that a recognition of our essential nature will soon prevail.

Fast forward now 30 years to the next World War and yet more unimaginable atrocities.  In his book, Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl talks about what he learned from his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz.  He writes, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstance, to choose one's own way."   The extreme experiences of the Flanders troops and Victor Frankl remind me that no matter what the circumstances we are always free to choose freedom.  We can be carried on the tide of the world's habitual fearful thinking -- by 'circumstances', or we can give our attention to our essential loving nature and allow that to be our guiding light.

Love or fear in any of it's forms, that's what choice really amounts to.  Just these two.  But for most of us, ensconced in our comfortable modern lives, we forget this.  By default we choose the latter and then there appears to be a gazzillion other choices.  As Sir Winston Churchill once said, "Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across the truth.  Most jump up, brush themselves off and hurry about their business as if nothing had happened."  Isn't that sad?

It often seems as though our mind is master -- telling us what to think and do.   But in truth our mind can only serve.  And the choice is whether to serve Love or something else.  But this choice isn't one between equals.  The choice for love has all power in it, the other, none.  This choice at first seems scary but only because it's unknown and we don't know the shape of things to come.  But one thing is certain.  When we let go of our need to control our life and choose Love as the cause, we can rest assured that effects can only reflect this choice.   This is true freedom.

Another thing that can hold us back is a misguided sense of selfishness.  It feels a little weird to choose to inhabit a world of peace, and simply refuse to join others on their battlefield.  But in reality there is no greater service we can provide another than to stay firmly put in our own Truth.  Joining others in suffering may seem charitable and compassionate, but isn't offering them the opportunity to join you in heaven far preferable to joining them in hell?

There's a quickening in the world that's happening in the world right now.  Just below the surface there's a Renaissance of Love that's seeping through into our collective consciousness.  To me, this is the bigger story behind the rise of messaging and blogs and social networks, that will eventually be told.  It's a  Renaissance fueled by our re-discovering that our identity and power lies in our connection, untouched by what we thought were our differences.

So let's remember that real choice has nothing to do with circumstance.  We are always free to step back and let Love lead the way.  We are free right now to tell each other the truth about who we are and what is real.  And by doing so we undo the past in the present, and replace our imagined future with the beautiful,  nourishing Flow  of this endless Now.  This is the choice for everyday miracles.

Have a wonderful New Year.

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Note: you may have to click through from a feed-reader to play the video

Related Article:  Let Go and Let Love... Why did no-one tell me it's so simple?

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Life before iPod.... Steve Jobs at home in 1982

“This was a very typical time.  I was single.  All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”..... Steve Jobs
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Photo Credit: Diana Walker from the book 'The Bigger Picture'

Tags:  Apple, iPod, Steve Jobs

 

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A World Wide Web of Ideas

Reading Stephen Fry's excellent post  “Is this the greatest living Englishman?”, I find it incredible that it was as recent as 1990 that  Tim Berners-Lee  first cooked up the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and the complete architecture for the web.  It's probably made the biggest change to our lives since the invention of the printing press... completely transforming commerce and the way we communicate.

Altruism

To me, his gift was not http (someone, somewhere would surely have invented something similar), but his decision to make his invention free for all.  There were no patent dues, no royalties and no restrictions:  it was an open book.  His dream was a free interchange of information, and he stood by his principles.

It's others -- the Googles and Yahoos of this world, and a million more, that have built their fortunes on the back of his work.  Meanwhile Sir Tim still works away today, as modest and as unassuming as ever, heading the WC3 Consortium towards an open, free and wholly public web from his base at MIT.  Still driving around in his beat up old VW, I believe.

But lets just consider for a moment the difference he has made.  Ten years ago money was synonymous with power.  Brands, both political and commercial, got build through mass media advertising campaign -- TV, newspapers, magazines.  Not any more.  How much have Starbucks or Amazon spend on advertising?  Word of mouth now rules.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the hyperlinked word. 

Influence

PageRank (now one of the main leading indicators of influence) is based on the number and quality of inbound links.  But how many people do you think link to Proctor and Gamble, BMW, Intel or any mainstream corporate site?  Would you, as a blogger, every have reason to link there?  Probably not.  Corporate sites have a hell of a job attracting links directly, because what attracts interest is rarely the products or the companies themselves, but the experiences and stories that people tell about them. 

The upshot of this is that if someone writes an informative or revelationary piece about their experience (good or bad) with a company's products or service, that piece will quite easily hit the front page of search results for that company.  Let's not miss the significance of this: An interesting and authentic article written by you can have a bigger impact and more immediate effect than the entire marketing budget and efforts of a global organisation. 

Now THAT is influence.  And although the potential of weblogs may not be fully appreciated by bloggers themselves, it's certainly not lost on many a head honcho in industry, marketing, PR and big media who are bricking themselves right now.

Freedom

But, at least to me, it's not the power to disrupt the status quo that's most interesting or significant.  It's the ability to allow good ideas to fly.  Blogs, being frictionless, can be catalysts for quantum leaps in our understanding.  This opens up completely new opportunities... particularly in the way we work together, organise ourselves and create things. 

People talk about Enterprise 2.0 being the democratisation of the work place and the replacement for the old hierarchies and control models, but I don't think it's about democracy.  It's far better than that.  It's a new meritocracy.  And not a meritocracy of people but of ideas.   

When ideas can come from anywhere we let go of our dependency on leaders and experts.  Without the pressure on a few to deliver for the many, everyone benefits.  We all become responsible; and people get valued for what they bring to the table now, not their resume or position.

An enterprise is  the sum of its people  and, like all living systems, it thrives on energy.  This energy is the flow of ideas, of inspiration and also of love.  This flow is the life blood of any organisation.  As we learn at school, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it's always there.  We don't do anything to make energy flow - it does that already.  What we need  'do'  is simply remove the barriers -- the systems, the doors and policies that cause the friction... and then get out of the way.  Living systems thrive, adapt and self-heal when they become self aware -- when the connections are open and free.

Connection

 

NOTE: You may have to click through from some feed readers to see the video
I've recently been playing with social network to learn what all the fuss is about.  As yet, they don't really do it for me.  Some of them feel like thinly veiled attempts for someone else to establish a power base.  I also get the feeling that in the rush to try out the latest shiny new 2.whatever toys we forget the power of leverage that the web bestows on worthy ideas that are reasonably well expressed.  But I do think we can improve blogs by making them more social.

Here's a few things that would probably make them more useful:

• It's not easy to groc the whole 'conversation' that a post inspires when it's spread across a number of blogs.  A visitor to my blog can read what I have to say but they can't see behind any inbound links to see what other people have picked up on and are posting.  It would be a much better reading experience if the conversation wasn't fragmented in this way, and we could read whole thing in one place.
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• If we find someone with similar interests, as well as reading their blog wouldn't it also be good if we could see what other content they had created -- comments on other blogs in particular.  There is already a movement towards this so with services such as  FriendFeed.
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• I've touched on this previously I know.  Dialogue has been our principle method of organisation since we first banded together as gatherer-hunters, and still serves us admirably when we trust the process.  What we haven't yet figured out is how implement a conversational style of organisation on the web.  We have weblogs which are great for dialogue and we have separate project management tools (which often feel unnatural to use).  Weblogs would become incredibly useful if, as in the real world, the talking and doing could be one process. 

In short, there's probably just a couple of little evolutionary steps that would give weblogs both the sociality of the likes of FaceBook, and make them a powerful tool for getting things done together. [As an aside, this is something I am working on right now... and ideas are always appreciated. :-)]

Care

Ideas that are shared grow stronger... and now that we have a platform that allows us speak the truth as we find it to the whole world, there's little to hold us back.  We also have the ability to scale relationship beyond a close circle of friends and colleagues. -- what better way to heal our prejudices?  What an incredibly powerful tool we have in our hands.  Stephen King in his book  'On Writing'  says this about our approach to the written word:

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair -- the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart.  You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly.  Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly;  I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humour (please God you have one).  This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church.  But it's  writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner."

But writing a weblog is writing on steroids.  You and I are in the surreal but incredibly fortunate situation that we have already got the  green light  from the publisher.  When we click the save button on our blog editor, our article is going to get published no matter what... no questions asked. 

Fun

So, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, all that's left to decide is this:  What are we going to do with all that power?   

This is not a someday-maybe question, it's a question that's only really relevant now, because permission has already been given.  To put off deciding is like saving sex for when we are old.  It makes no sense at all.  Unless, of course, you  end up here.
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Related Articles:

• Blogging's Hidden Jewel 
• Rethinking the way we run our Organisations 
• What they don't Teach You in Business School 
• Ten Incredible Things we get for Free
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Credits:  To  this post  from Hugh and  this post  from Tara for inspiration; and to  Commoncraft  for the video.
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Self Illumination

I wrote a guest post recently entitled  Self  Illumination  over on my friend Wade's bog -- The Middle Way  while he's on a month long retreat at the  Zen Mountain Monastery  in San Francisco. 

If you get a chance, go and take a look around Wade's site.  Like a quiet Zen garden it's just a lovely place to hang-out over a coffee break.  In fact it's one of the few I actually go visit rather than read through my feed reader.
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Stumbling towards a blogging mojo.

My apologies for the lack of posts lately.  I've been really busy with worky projects.  I mention this not as an excuse, but as bit of background to a little problem, a not so little insight and a slight change of direction here on Life 2.0.

Up to just Life 2.0 has been a sort of hobby of mine (which I really enjoy) and an outlet for my 'philosophical' musings.  The problem is, when I get really busy the time I have for musing (by this I mean the times when I just goof off and reflect on things like why men have nipples, and occasionally deeper stuff) tends towards zero.  I'm not complaining in the least because life, though much busier, seems to be moving towards one big serendipitous soup... no real place to get a firm foothold, but far less need to do so -- a slightly scary but an absolutely awesome ride where your feet no longer touch the floor.

But, and here's the thing, I don't really have different parts of my life anymore -- I love the work I do and it embodies much of what I believe; I get a huge kick out of building businesses as it's my personal sandpit for trying out my ideas in the real world... and some of the day to day stuff is, at least to me, far more interesting than anything I read in any philosophy book.

So I've decided to stop trying to make this blog fit an aspect of my life that doesn't really exist independently anymore.  From now on I'd like to share more of my experiences, the things I'm learning and working on, stuff I come across you may find interesting...  More off-the-cuff material and not so much editing.

I suppose this is more 'thinking in words' than writing in the traditional sense, but this should be easier and more fun for me.  I enjoy sharing ideas, I love hearing what you think and I get a buzz from the general socialness (is that a word?) of it all.  Hopefully I'll get to write more too... and again, that's good for me, because it helps sort the wheat from the chaff in my mind and clarify my ideas.  Besides which, I definitely need more writing practice ;-)

As I type this I can hear Paul Simon singing in my mind,  "But all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity".  I must have a subliminal fear that if I write stuff that's too unconsidered those words will come back to haunt me.  My kids used to take the Mickey out of me for my two little foibles -- refusing to go anywhere if I haven't had a shave or got clean shoes.  I guess it all amounts to the same thing.  Old habits eh!  But what the hell, I'm going to do it anyway.

So there you have it... I hope you enjoy the new format and thank you for being so patient with me. :-)

BTW, I'd love to hear about your own journey to finding your blogging flow.
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