Category: Creativity

  • Who are you? Just beans and franks? (and how to avoid writer's block!)

    One of man’s biggest quests throughout the ages has been to answer the seemingly simple question: “who am I?”

    The answer is not so simple. Or is it?

    We have on the one side the materialists who answer this question with the explanation that we are a “side effect.” In their view, we are a random byproduct of a random universe, kind of like the meat scraps that are swept off the floor then made into bologna or hot dogs. Or a bit like farts….a byproduct of attempting to digest certain kinds of foods like beans. Beans n Franks. That’s all we are. Thank you, Richard Dawkins, for such enlightenment.

    Then we have on the other side the fundamentalists, who answer this question with the explanation that we are a product of an all-knowing, “perfect” God.  We are here to “prove ourselves” to that God. God is perfect, we are far from it. Yet we are supposed to strive to that perfection. We are supposed to make up for the original sin, and all the sins thereafter. Wow, what a burden. I feel tired already.

    If you feel a bit dissatisfied with these two most common explanations of who we are, join the club. There’s an ever-growing cadre of thinking people who accept neither explanation as true, and who strives for a better, more satisfying explanation of existence.

    How about this one?

    An identity is .. a dimension of existence, action within action, and unfolding of action upon itself–and through this interweaving of action with itself, through this re-action, an identity is formed.

    I’ll tell you where that came from in just a bit. But first, let’s contemplate this statement. (I had to read and re-read the corresponding passages several times to really get it. Maybe you’re smarter than I am…)

    What this is saying is that our identity depends on action… the action and re-action of experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Think about that for a second. Are you anything more, or less, than the things that have happened to you throughout your experience (which includes the actions you’ve taken and the re-actions to those?)

    Identity is formed by the flow of actions throughout life. It’s the actions and reactions that define who we are.

    Now here’s an interesting passage:

    Once more, action is not a force from without that acts upon matter. Action is, instead, the inside vitality of the inner universe–it is the dilemma between inner vitality’s desire and impetus to completely materialize itself, and its inability to completely do so.

    Now, this is going to take a moment to explain. Say that, like me, you believe that thought precedes matter, not the other way around. (If you think that matter precedes thought, like the materialists, I’m afraid that this quote will never make sense to you, and you will likely remain philosophically lost, as I was for several decades of my life. Sorry about that.)

    So, let’s say we have an Apple. But, instead of biting into it, we’d like to share it evenly between two people. (Let’s say Adam and Eve want to share evenly in their sinning!). This inspires the possibility of a cutting device with which to cut that apple.

    Before biting into the apple, Adam, being the industrious fellow he is, goes off and fashions a crude knife out of a stone. He now has the first knife, which he uses to cut the apple.

    Aha… but after the apple cutting exercise, it quickly becomes apparent that this knife thing can be used for other purposes. It could be used to hunt… it could be used to shape other tools, like spears and arrows, it can be used to carve patterns, it can even be used to threaten Eve.

    This is action: the materialization of one idea… leads to many more ideas.

    Our ideas cannot completely materialize themselves, because to be “complete” would mean there’s not another idea. Yet each time we create something, it creates more ideas, not less. Action is the continual sequence of these creations, these ideas…

    Now, interestingly:

    Identity, because of its characteristics, will continually seek stability, while stability is impossible.

    Think about that. It’s true. Most of us define our lives by trying to find some kind of stability.

    And yet, if we really found complete stability, we would get absolutely and totally bored.

    We would be the Stepford Wives… squared. It’s a fine balance between these two, the desire for stability and the constant change, that creates consciousness….Here’s another quote:

    It is this dilemma, between identity’s constant attempts to maintain stability and action’s inherent drive for change, that results in the imbalance, the exquisite creative by-product that is consciousness of self.

    and further

    Consciousness, therefore, is not a “thing” in itself. It is a dimension of action, an almost miraculous state, made possible by what I choose to call a series of creative dilemmas.

    So consciousness is a state, coming from this fine imbalance between the desire for stability and the constant flow of action in the universe.

    Then what of Ego?

    Ego consciousness is a state resulting from the third creative dilemma, which happens when consciousness of self attempts to separate itself from the action.

    and

    Ego consciousness…involves a state in which consciousness of self attempts to divorce self from action – an attempt on the part of consciousness to perceive an action as an object … and to perceive action as initiated by the ego as a result, rather than as a cause, of ego’s own existence.

    Here we have this ego fellow, trying to be separate, distant, and aloof. Looking down upon all of the action, and saying: “look, I DID THAT. See how cool I really am??? (look Ma!!)”

    When it is the very fine balance of action and identity which is the root source of Ego in the first place.

    In other words, Ego is a false barrier. It is an attempt to make us separate from the action, better than the action. It’s not all bad, it’s just often misused.

    Here’s why.

    Let’s say that my Ego says “I am an author. And I am a damn good one at that. I just had a New York Times bestseller! Expectations for my next book are very high!”

    Now, as long as I am caught up in that ego, writing the next book is going to be fraught with challenges such as writer’s block.

    I am attempting to separate myself, artificially, from the identity which has been and is being created by the action of writing.

    If I can, instead, just BE the action of writing – i.e. let the sum of actions and reactions be my identity… then I am far more likely to succeed on my next writing endeavor than if I get all wrapped up in the ego of being a bestselling author.

    So here we have a very important, actionable piece of advice that comes from all the philosophical musings:

    Do not get wrapped up in ego. Get wrapped up in action.

    (That is my own quote, it’s not from the book I’ve been referring to).

    Having studied and written a bunch about creativity, this is one of the great secrets. Creativity is a flow, and the more that ego is happening, the more that the flow gets blocked.

    The flow of creativity is a series of actions. It’s making ideas real… either as words on the page, notes on an instrument, or what have you…

    If Ego is sitting there saying “I’m separate from the action, because I’m better than the action, and I’m going to be judged by other Egos for the action that I’m taking” it stifles the very action it’s trying to take.

    So, if you want to be truly creative, you need to BE the action, not be apart from the action.

    This is who you are. It is who I am. We are that fine imbalance of actions and reactions with our desire for stability.

    On this little sojourn of ours, let’s consider one more quote, from a different book:

    Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.

    This quote is from Brené Brown’s book “Daring Greatly.” It’s all about the power of vulnerability in creating a better life experience for ourselves.

    And what is vulnerability but the elimination of our Ego barriers and immersing ourselves fully in the actions and experiences of life?

    It’s not that Ego should be entirely eliminated. It has its function in helping us have a unique experience, apart from other humans. Without it, we would be just one big collective consciousness. But that compartmentalization of experience is it’s only real function. Sadly, it seems to have been blown way out of proportion by the likes of Freud and whole generations following him.

    At our core, we are just our experiences. We create our actions and experience them. It is a never-ending stream, through which we constantly grow and change. Our identity is not static, as much as we may want to cling to that. Indeed, it’s the desire to cling to that kind of static identity that causes so much bitterness and nostalgia, rather than embracing the present fully.

    If you want to live a truly great life, immerse yourself in your identity; an identity of action and re-action, of having ideas and finding ways to make them real, of experience, of change. It is truly that simple.

    –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

    Ok, so I promised to tell you where those quotes came from, and I will. However, that’s a good story in and of itself, which distracts from the story here.

    Therefore, I’ll talk about the source in a separate post, here. However, before you go read that, I highly recommend that you think about the truth of these statements of their own right.

  • The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us!

    Zombies, zombies, everywhere.

    If you look to Hollywood, the world is but about to become a big zombie-fest.

    Life imitates art, or so they say.

    That being the case, I’ve pondered the meaning of all the zombie movies of late. They seem to be taking off where the “robots that conquer the world” left off. (For some reason, I had more affection for the robot stories, like Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix, Terminator, etc… not any good ones lately, though)

    In any case. Does this say something about our culture? The preponderance of zombies?

    I think it does.

    We have been living under the pall of the industrial era. It turned us into good little zombies…(or robots), obedient to the “system” so we could crank out widgets on the assembly line.

    Don’t get me wrong. I love the creature comforts that the industrial era has provided to humanity.

    But all good things must come to an end. It’s time to move on.

    Yet our economy, our schools, and most of all, the big mega-companies who prefer drones rather than thinking humans as employees, perpetuate the old way. The zombie robot drone way.

    Humanity is waking up. We realize that old way no longer works. We want something more, something better, something more freeing.

    Unfortunately, most of us haven’t yet figured out how to get it. (Hey, it’s why I’m doing what I am, to show that there IS another way, by example…)

    So we sit back and fantasize about wiping out the evil flesh eating zombies. That’s fun and all.

    But it is no substitute for the real work we have to do:  to escape the zombifying system that we’ve grown up in and to replace it with something better.

  • The BIG Lie!

    You’ve been fed a big lie.

    The lie goes thusly.

    You must study hard in school (creativity killer #1).  You must get good grades (creativity killer #2). You must listen to teachers (creativity killer #3). You must do what you’re told (creativity killer #4).

    Then, you must get into a great college or university by taking a standardized test (creativity killer #5).

    Once you’re in, you study (#6), listen well (#7), and get more good grades (#8). You don’t talk back to the professor (#9 and #10).⁠1  You accumulate student debt (#11).

    You graduate. Yay!

    The world is your oyster!

    You get the house and the mortgage (#12), the car with the car loan (#13).

    You find a job (Creativity killer #14-20 as you subject yourself to the every whim of your employer). Yippe doodle dandy! Money!

    You work hard to get promoted into the corner office-someday – and you schmooze with the boss (#21).  You listen to the gurus that tell you all you need to do is work harder and smarter (#22).

    You keep going down that path, blissfully unaware at all the ways in which you’re killing your creativity, bit by bit, until you hit retirement.

    Wohooo! Retirement. You escaped creativity killers #1-#42 with your body (but not your spirit) intact.

    You get to roam the country in your RV, doing whatever you want, whenever you want.  If you’re one of the lucky ones, you visit a few tropical beaches, and sip a few margaritas while watching the 20-somethings walk by in skimpy bathing suits.

    Soon, boredom sets in. Unless you find some other outlet for your creative energies, and quickly, the statistics aren’t on your side. You’ll be dead soon.

    It is not a path to happiness. 

    It is not even a path to real success.

    A lot of people, if asked what success is, they’d look hungrily at millionaires and billionaires on TV, and say: “that’s success!”

    I’ve met some of those people who have made millions (and even one who’s made billions).

    Take, for example, internet marketer Frank Kern.  His story – which he sometimes tells at events, is a rags-to-riches saga.  He went from broke and flooded out of his trailer home to generating millions of dollars in an online business.

    He talks about how – after generating his first million or so – he was at his most miserable ever.

    He had to go on a journey of self discovery to find his way to more happiness – after becoming a millionaire.

    Money helps – but it does not create happiness.  It does not create success.

    Success in life is more than just getting the stable job, the decent salary, and the white picket fence.

    Success is about living in the exciting flow of life.  Success is about having an impact on the people you meet.  Success is about changing the world in positive ways.  Success is about having enough money so that you’re not struggling constantly just to survive.

    Yet, if you’ve followed the path laid forth by tradition, you may well be headed in a very different direction.

    How did it come to be this way?  We’ll discuss that in the next post.

    Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about how to optimize your “creativity pipeline” to help you find balance in your business and life, go sign up here.

     

    1 Oddly, I often talked back to my professors. Maybe that’s why I became one, so I could experience what it was like to deal with a cantankerous rabble rouser like myself!

  • Productivity is NOT about getting more done!

    Does anyone remember record players? I suppose that statement dates me.  But the one big flaw of record players is that when a scratch was present, they could get caught in a “loop” – endlessly playing the same litte bit over and over.  It was annoying as hell to be listening to your favorite song and to suddenly have the last three words of the verse go on endless loop.

    That’s a lot like the notions of “productivity” that are out there.  It is and endless loop: get more efficient, cross things off your list more quickly, outsource more – and you’ll magically get to the top of the field.

    It just ends up with lots of people more stressed out and overwhelmed than ever, because they’re missing a “secret ingredient” that the truly productive implement in their lives (don’t worry, it won’t be so secret once I finish with this post).

    Let’s take an extreme example: Bill Gates. He’s a polarizing figure, but almost nobody can deny that he’s been successful.

    Is he a billionaire because he “gets far more done” than other people?  Of course, that’s a ridiculous notion. If you compared the fortunes of Bill Gates to that of the average McDonalds clerk, he earns like 10,000 times more from interest on his investments alone than does the clerk, but if he was working 10,000 times harder, he’d be dead by now!

    Some – who are particularly susceptible to the poverty mentality – may argue that Bill Gates makes his money “off the backs of others.” I know of at lest two people who have jobs working for Microsoft that help them support their families, and if Bill Gates didn’t exist, those jobs probably wouldn’t exist, either.

    Then, what is the difference between Bill and the thousands of people that work for Bill, and make far less than him?  If we suddenly “evened out” the pay so that everyone at Microsoft earned a salary equal to Bill (by giving him a huge pay cut) – how long would the payroll stay even-steven? NOT LONG.  Companies like United Airlines have tried experiments along those lines, and there are always those who rise to the top, and those who sink like a falling stone.

    No, Bill has a “secret ingredient” that would very likely get him back on top if he were to loose his fortune.

    • It’s not his connections. Those are helpful, but they aren’t the answer. There are plenty of people in poverty who have connections
    • It’s not his “golden spoon” – that makes success easier, but by no means assures it. Just look at the history of people who’ve won the lottery – many of them return to poverty after their winnings run out
    • It’s not his “extremely hard work” – I’m sure Bill worked hard at times, but like I said above, not 10,000 or 100,000 times harder than others.

    His secret ingredient is his creativity.  He found a way to creatively come up with the right solutions at the right time for a fledgeling market in computers. He didn’t just do that once – he and his team did it time and time again! That is how he got to be a Billionare.

    Take another example: Steve Jobs.  In his Stanford commencement speech, he talked about how the design of the first Mac was a creative endeavor – bringing in new typography (and building on ideas that he’d seen at Xerox Parc labs).

    Some say he “stole” the ideas from Xerox, but they misunderstand creativity. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum! You don’t go from nothing to a complex idea in one single step.  It’s almost always incremental. Steve may have gotten ideas from them, but he and Wozniak built on those ideas, creatively.

    Did you ever see the first iPod? I had one. At the time it was a fricking revolution – storing 5GB of songs in your pocket.  It was a leap beyond the other players at the time, like the Archos jukebox (I owned one of those, too).

    Now, compare the current ipods and iphones to that first iPod. There’s no comparison! The current lineup is far more advanced, smooth, holds more songs, is easier to use, etc… (and the price is lower!)

    It didn’t happen in one step. It happened in many small steps – iPod touch, original iPhone, iPhone 3, iPhone 4, etc.

    If Apple had stopped innovating (creating) with the first iPod, would Apple exist today? Of course not. Their success is in direct proportion to how much they can apply focused creativity to solve the needs of the market in new ways.

    My point is this: if you want more success, you’ve got to bring your creativity into your endeavors – in a focused way. Lots of people associate creativity with dreamers and other often not so focused applications of creativity.  If you apply it willy-nilly, you’ll get willy nilly results!

    The challenge for a lot of us (me included) is that our schools teach us to thoroughly develop the left-brained skills of analysis, mathematics, etc – but they do almost nothing to develop our creativity.  That’s why some of the most successful people (like Steve Jobs) were college dropouts – they weren’t exposed to so much of the over-development of the “left-brained” skills.

    So, if you want to be more “productive” (i.e. getting to your goals faster) – learn to develop a balance between the right-brained skills of creative, big-picture thinking and the left-brained skills of rational analysis.

    If you are a business owner or entrepreneur interested in more training on that topic, check out https://morgangiddings.com/o/overwhelm

     

  • Life is meaningless! You are nothing but space debris!!!

    Over breakfast and interesting conversation evolved about the state of physics and what it tells us about the meaninglessness and purposelessness of our lives, both individually and collectively.

    I’ve been thinking about physics lately, well, because I’m a mad scientist, but also because my brother visited.  He’s an actual, bona fide, physicist.  Plus, a friend of mine mentioned an article on the Higgs Boson to me on Facebook – the supposed God Particle.

    Now here’s the thing: the state of physics right now reminds me of where biology was in the early 20th century.  Back before Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin came along and showed us that DNA was at the heart of all cells, and was the carrier of information from one generation to the next, biology was a mess.

    Really. A big mess.  We had people going out, collecting species from all over the world, dissecting them with extreme care under microscopes, and trying to figure out “how it all fit together.”  The result was a field called taxonomy, which was all about sorting and sifting through these species and seeing how the limb of a frog looks kind of like the limb of a human, so must somehow involve something similar going on. It led to overly complex book volumes that would discuss these similarities (and differences) at length.  People spent lifetimes debating them. Oh, what a waste!

    Once we finally figured out that DNA was at the core of it all – in every cell – it dramatically simplified things!  It’s not that biology is now simple. Genomes are incredibly complex.  However, they give us a simple unifying principle for how cells grow, mature, and pass on information from one generation to the next.  As a result, the advances in biology have been dramatic.

    If we turn our telescope to the field of physics, which is attempting to bore down into the deepest of recesses of our universe to figure out “how it works” – it is very much like those microscope-wielding biologists in the pre-DNA days.

    The field of “quantum field theory” does the same kind of sifting and sorting through the “taxonomy” of the universe that biological taxonomists did in the early to mid 1900’s.  We have particle after particle being named and endlessly debated. We have massive supercolliders that are much like the microscopes that biologists used… attempting to probe ever deeper into matter.

    And yet… there’s something missing. Something very big. It’s that unifying principle thing.

    See, the assumption of these physicists (like my brother, whom I love very much), is that the universe is like a big machine. It is no more and no less than a machine.

    What got that machine going is “outside of their scope.” How it got there is “irrelevant.”

    So, they peer and dissect and postulate and theorize, all based on this “universe is a big machine” theory.

    Our best and brightest are all working to “prove” that our life, and our universe, is essentially meaningless.  Because if it’s just a machine, then it IS meaningless.

    If it is a machine, then everything we do is just a product of gears turning away in the deep recesses of matter, and we have no control whatsoever over what happens.  We are just cogs in that machine, going through the motions.

    Maybe the reason that physics has failed to figure it out is that it is intentionally ignoring the unifying principle.

    What if that unifying principle involves consciousness and awareness, rather than gears turning away endlessly and meaninglessly?

    Harumph. Well, physics won’t go there.  It can’t go there. There is a great fear among the sciences to admit anything that sounds like God might be involved.  The schism goes too deep, and science has thrown the baby out with the bath water.

    What if we don’t have to refer to “God” in any traditional sense to find our unifying principle? What if, instead, we refer to a simple “field of awareness” that exists, and of which we are a part? There are many ways we could use the concept of awareness or consciousness without having to refer to God. But, no. Anything that remotely hints at anything even slightly God-like is BAD. It’s got to be rejected.

    Because of that penchant to reject even the slightest whiff of consciousness, to admit that it’s not all just a machine turning away its gears, we have our best and brightest, across the world, working very hard to prove that life is meaningless, to prove that our universe is a machine, and to prove that our cells are just little machines inside the big machine that we call our lives.

    These folks – intentionally or unintentionally – work to deny that there could be some reason that we exist within our magnificent universe, such as being here to enjoy life, create, and grow. Any reason is “outside the scope.”

    Well, what if you were crossing the desert, and you found a big machine that looked kind of like a printing press, but it wasn’t.  You started to take it apart to figure out how it worked. You carefully dissected it, classified each gear, and each circuit. You drew diagrams and equations of how they all fit together.  You could even put it back together if you needed to.

    But you never stopped to ask yourself: why is this machine here in the desert? Who made it? What is it’s purpose?

    That’s how physics is today.

    The sad part is that many of us look to our best and brightest for guidance about “what does it all mean?”  But they can’t give us guidance. They’ve for the most part stopped asking that question. Instead, the only thing they can tell us is “this is how the parts fit together.” As if the meaning were in the gears, equations, and circuits.

    No. The meaning of any machine is in its purpose.  No human would build a machine, investing time and effort, if it didn’t have some purpose.  So, why is it that we think that the most complex machines we know of (human brains) are entirely purposeless?  It’s fucked up.

    Don’t let them tell you that it’s meaningless. They have no clue. They are not looking for meaning. They are looking for the absence of meaning.

    Because meaninglessness is what they’re looking for, meaninglessness is what they find.

    So, don’t let them convince you that your life is meaningless and purposeless. It is not. It is just that you have to find it yourself, since you can’t look to anyone to find it for you. They aren’t looking in the right place.

     

  • Eight Years of Scorn and Mockery: Persistence and Genius

    These two guys that you may have heard of suffered scorn and ridicule for over eight years. They persisted, and they changed the world!

     

    If you want more help letting your genius flow in your life, work, and business, visit https://morgangiddings.com/o to grab the new über-productivity video series!

  • cynicism and astronauts: death and rebirth of the dreamers

    My friend Rob recently wrote on Facebook:

    I was seven when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We were camping with family friends on a plot of land on the shore of Lake George, site of our future summer camp. Dad had car batteries, an inverter, and a small black and white TV. Reception was horrible. We had never watched TV at the lake before – this was something special. In the midst of the VietNam war, which I was largely isolated from, we had a man walking on the moon. It was late, I was tired, but I watched intently. America could do anything. Looking back at the last 43 years, it is very hard not to feel that we have fallen extremely short of our potential. I miss that dream. [emphasis added]

    Indeed, how and why has America fallen so far?

    Think about rock stars. Most of them rise up to fame for a short period, then they loose it… they fade slowly back into oblivion. When they’re on tour (if they are), they always replay the great hits, because that’s what the crowd wants.

    There are exceptions.  Those are the bands and players that keep going for a decade or more, folks like The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd.

    The reasons for America’s fall are hidden in the distinction between these two.  Before the “big reveal,” let’s consider another case: that of the science professor.

    The science professor works her ass off through graduate school and a postdoc position (kind of like a Medical residency) just to get offered a starting faculty position.  Then she works even harder for 5-7 years to earn tenure.  Tenure just means that her colleagues approve of her, and permanently accept her into the fold.  Once tenured, it’s very hard to fire her.

    The period of working towards tenure is often the most intensive of a scientist’s life.  I know, because I did that.

    When I was done, I lost the dream.

    I wandered aimlessly through a land of mental cynicism and angst for several years after tenure.

    The challenge was gone.  The dream was over. I’d reached the pinnacle. All that I could see in front of me was more of the same, but without the challenge, without the goal, without the prize to reach for.

    How did I regain the dream and recover from the cynical post-tenure blues? Therein lies the secret of how America could, if its people wanted to, recover from the slump.

    The problem with achievement

    There’s one big problem with achievement of any kind – whether it’s putting a man on the moon, writing a hit song, or getting tenure.

    Those achievements can breed a festering fear.  It’s a fear that comes from a few sources:

    • Fear of having lost the dream.  Once the dream has been achieved, it’s no longer a dream.  Seems obvious, right?!  Yet for the person experiencing this firsthand, it’s almost never obvious what the problem is.  There’s just a gnawing inner sense of “now what?” We’re not taught as a society how to deal with the “now what?” Think about all the popular stories and movies (e.g. Star Wars): they always center around a challenge, a dream, or a problem, and at the end of the story, the problem is resolved or the dream is achieved.  But those stories never show what happens next… unless a new challenge arises in the sequel.
    • Fear of loosing the status. A related fear is that of loosing the status achieved in pursuing the dream.  When I got my first big science grant with a score that put me in the top few percentile, I thought to myself: there’s no way I can repeat that! It’s impossible!  I had a fear that I couldn’t top my own success. I was gun-shy. That fear slowed me down.  I didn’t want to submit another grant and be knocked from my pedestal.  It reminds me of a TED talk by author Elizabeth Gilbert, who discussed the angst that comes with having written a bestselling book, centered around the question: “can I do it again?”
    Because of these fears, achieving something great after a first-time achievement is often just as difficult (if not more so) than the first time was.
    These fears lead to cynicism.  They lead to skepticism. They can even lead to mental poverty.
    Which pretty much describes the state of America today.
    We’ve been suffering from both of the above-named fears, as part of a sort of collective, zombified sleepwalking state after our successes of the early to mid 20th century.
    And so we can find a way out, in the same way that great bands and musicians, and great writers repeat their success over and over again.  We can find a way out in the same way that I found a joie de vivre again after the post-tenure angst.
    Actually, there are two ways, but I believe one way is far inferior to the other.
    The first way is that we lie dormant in our sleepwalking, zombified state until a new problem or challenge comes our way, which forces us to get sufficiently inspired and motivated that we get off our asses and creatively rise to the challenge.  The recent economic challenges have done this for some people, but not enough to really make a difference.
    The problem with this approach is that it leaves us waiting for the right challenge to come along, and for that challenge to happen to inspire the right feelings of motivation and even anger such that we get un-zombified and into action.  Those kinds of challenges can be pretty random, and personally I think it’s foolish to leave one’s future to randomness.
    The second way is to take charge and to create a new dream for ourselves.
    Kennedy pushed the dream of a Man on the Moon. When he pushed it, we had no idea how we’d accomplish that feat – yet we did.
    What happened after we achieved it? We didn’t replace the dream with something even more inspiring. That’s why we are so stuck. That’s why we are so cynical. Stuck just like I was in my life, until I built a new dream for myself after getting tenure.
    Recently I was at a conference with some high-powered scientists. A debate erupted over science funding, and one of the scientists pointed at the moon walk as a “boondoggle,” whose money should have instead been spent on “important” science like cancer research.
    I responded by showing the population graph of the world, which happens to be an exponential curve (if you know what that means, you know that it’s a wee bit scary).  We have no shortage of people.  But we do have a shortage of inspiring dreams.
    Having lost my father to cancer, I’d like to see that particular problem solved.  However, when we solve it, what are we going to do with all those extra people living longer lives?  Especially if many of them are just as aimless and dream-less as most of the population is?
    I quipped that, indeed, we needed to send a few more people into space (and there would be no shortage of willing volunteers for a Mars mission)!
    The “cancer research” vs “moon landing” debate is revealing. It speaks of an attitude that says, “dreams are unimportant, only facts and figures are important.”  One can look at the number of cancer deaths, and argue readily that “cancer should be cured!” without ever contemplating the biggure picture, or the “then what?!”
    With facts and figures, one can argue that we should spend more on cancer research than space exploration, without ever asking ourselves the key question: does cancer research inspire the next generation of scientists in the same way as curing cancer? (the answer is: no, it does not)
    Ultimately, science is supposed to be fun. Life is supposed to be fun. We’ve lost that understanding somewhere in a sea of “grim statistics” which lead to skewed priorities and lost dreams.
    So here’s the way to recapture the dream: forget about the statistics. Stop being so damn “rational*” and left-brained.  Start dreaming again.  Think big again.  Enjoy life again, and inspire others to think big, too.
    The only way to do this is from the bottom up. That means you, and that means I.
    One at a time, we can each start being dreamers again.
    And one at a time, we can help America regain the dream again.
    Morgan
    * About “rational” thinking: it’s almost never as rational as it seems. There are always underlying beliefs that “rational thought” is based upon, and those underlying beliefs are not often rational in their own right. Even if you try to get to the bottom of those beliefs through rational analysis, you must refer to deeper beliefs. There is no bottom to this: instead, you’ll find yourself in an infinite loop of drilling deeper into beliefs, one beneath the other. Here’s the left-brained version of that: Logician Kurt Gödel showed us that, in fact, there is no self-complete logical system that is “provable.”  Look up Gödel’s theorems if you want an enthralling left-brained read about the nature of “logic.”

  • What are you changing into? (and why this explains the horrible economy)

    The title of the post alludes to an old cliché, “the only constant is change”.  Today I had a strong reminder of the importance of this saying – especially in these challenging times.

    It’s a Sunday. Rarely do I check my email first thing in the morning, because it’s counterproductive to getting real work done (i.e. real work being the important creative work like book writing – checking email is almost never real work).

    It’s bad.

    Because it was Sunday, I let my defenses down a bit, and I had a peek at what was going on in email-land.  I noticed an email from one of the newsletters I subscribe to.  I rarely read this one anymore, but today something caught my eye, so I succumbed to a dire-sounding headline.  This newsletter is put out by Chris Martenson, whose goal in his work is to warn people of the impending economic and social collapse.

    I read a few articles, such as this one about the dying middle class. I got a bit depressed.  That’s why I don’t read these things much anymore.

    It’s worse.

    Right after that, I did a Google search on “house prices.”  I was curious about what’s happening nationally to home values, because I just made an offer on a house.  After reading the article on Martenson’s site, I was a bit paranoid, and wanted to reassure myself.

    I wasn’t reassured.  The search turned up another site that was all about the post-housing-bubble situation, where families and the middle class are being squeezed out, and rich investors are the ones buying all the houses. Following the article, there were a slew of posts by middle class folks who are stuck in situations not of their choosing – such as living long-term in an apartment, or being stuck underwater in a mortgage.

    The banks are to blame.

    Most of the folks there were blaming the bankers for their predicament.  Those greedy bankers (and Wall st types) are ruining the middle class; they’re ruining the ability of the average person to own a detached home.

    The politicians are to blame.

    The folks who weren’t blaming the “greedy bankers” were blaming the “stupid/inept/greedy” politicians, who are running our economy into the ground just so that they can get reelected.

    Everyone was blaming someone or something, yet nobody placed the blame where it really lies.

    What’s really to blame: an expectation of “stability”

     For a while after World War II, there was a suburban housing boom in the USA.  This boom gave us the promise that we could own detached homes with two car garages, in order to live the American Dream.  This went on from about 1950 until 2008 (though signs that it was headed towards problems were appearing in the late 90’s).  For fifty years, most Americans could count on being part of this particular “American dream” – and now, many Americans are being left out of it.

    50 years is but a mere blip in history.  On the scale of human development, it’s nothing.

    Just because something is a certain way for 50 years doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay that way for the next 50.  In fact, it very rarely does.

    Yet in all of the dire warnings by people like Martenson about the economy and the future, and from those who track the housing crisis, there seems to be an underlying belief that change must be painful and bad.  The belief seems to be that it will lead to instability and chaos.

    This runs deeply.  It’s not just these pundits – it’s nearly everyone that seems to think that stability and insulation from change should be the order of the day.  Maybe we’ve been fed too many movies where the hero lives “happily ever after,” so have come to expect that in real life.

    Real life doesn’t ever meet our expectation of stability

    Think about owning a car.  If you don’t fill it with gas, change it’s oil, and clean it regularly, then soon it’s going to be a worthless piece of junk (no matter how nice it is to start with).

    This is true of any object we “own.”  If you get a house, and then you don’t maintain it for 10 years, it’s going to get run down and dilapidated quickly.  If you don’t mow the lawn, it’ll be only a few weeks before the city is going to be giving you fines for your weed lot.

    There is no truly stable situation in life.  Stability is an illusion!

    Physics tells us why

    There’s a classical physics problem called the “three body problem.”  In this problem, we try to use Newton’s laws to predict three heavenly bodies that are interacting in orbits around one another.  It turns out that predicting their behavior far into the future is not only difficult, it is practically impossible.  The tiniest variation on the part of one of the bodies leads to major variations in the orbit patterns later on.  No computer is powerful enough to predict the effects of these tiny variations very far into the future.  And that’s for only three planets.

    While there are patterns of orbits that appear to be somewhat stable, they always still acting chaotically and unpredictably.  They may stay within certain semi-orderly patterns for a while (this is a so-called strange attractor for the physics geeks), but at seemingly random and unpredictable times they can shift the pattern.

    In the three body problem, there are only two states: somewhat unpredictable, and completely unpredictable.  There is no constancy, and there is no stability.

    Our social and economic systems are a 7-billion-body-problem

    If physics can’t even predict the behavior of 3 planets in orbit, and if there is no constancy in this system, then what does that tell us about a vastly more complex system involving 7 billion living, breathing humans? (Or, if we want to confine ourselves, we can look at just the 300+ million in the US).

    It tells us two things:

    1) predicting what will happen is impossibly futile.  It would take a universe-sized computer to predict what’s going to happen even in the next 10 minutes, much less what will happen a year or ten years from now.

    2) that stability doesn’t exist at any time or anywhere within this system.  Everything is always changing.

    This is truly a universal law

    It’s kind of weird that nobody else has labelled it as such, but that gives us the opportunity to do it.  We’ll simply call it “the Law of Change.” This law says that everything is always changing.  It tells us that any expectations to the contrary are in defiance of a deep, universal law, and are bound to be dashed upon the rocks of history.

    If we consider the housing situation from a “numbers” perspective, it follows this law well.  There has been no time in the past 50 years in which the housing situation has been stable.  It’s been either growing or shrinking.  The suburbs were either growing or dying.  Neighborhoods were coming up, or going down.  There is no constant.

    The same is true of our money system.  In the Nixon era, a nice car cost less than $10,000.  Today, a nice car is over $30,000.  The “value” of our money is always changing, due to a lot of factors in our complex system (such as monetary policy, but not only due to that).

    The Law of Change says that constant expectations are the real problem

    There are a lot of people who are down and out in our current economy.  Most of those people don’t understand the law of change, and they blame the politicians and bankers for the changes that have rendered their lives much different (and seemingly less satisfactory) than they used to be.

    The real problem is not the bankers or the politicians.  The real problem is a failure to acknowledge the changes always happening around us, and to creatively work to keep ahead of (or at least up with) those changes.

    Clinging to the old American dream is clinging to a past that no longer exists.  That dream said: get a steady job, get a loan, get a nice house, get an RV, and you will be happy ever after.  We could debate about whether that dream ever did lead to any true happiness, but that’s for another blog post.

    Here what we need to see is that, while there was a brief period in history where that equation worked for quite a few people, that equation no longer works.

    No amount of finger pointing, blaming, or even more extreme action such as rioting and wars, or anything else, is going to bring it back.  The world has moved on, as it always does, never to turn back.

    Some people are nonplussed by change (and in fact, profiting from it)

    In the forums from that housing site I was reading, many commenters were pointing blame at those evil investors who are buying up houses, making them unavailable to plain American families who might otherwise occupy the homes.  Those evil investors rent out the homes, preventing those families from owning the homes.

    This misses the reality quite stunningly.  The reality is this:

    1) Because many of these families are still clinging to the old American Dream, looking for a stable good-paying job and an affordable mortgage – yet not achieving it (because it no longer exists) – many cannot afford a home – even in today’s down market.  If they can’t afford the homes, then who’s going to buy them?  The alternative to the investors buying up homes is to have a glut of homes on the market, further depressing values and causing even more foreclosures, short sales, and the like.

    2) Those investors are the people who understand the Law of Change – at least to some extent.  They are people who see where things are headed, and have come up with a way to ride the wave of change in the housing market.  Many of them are making out quite handsomely as a result.

    This doesn’t excuse malfeasance.  It doesn’t excuse corrupt bankers or the like.  But what it does do is say this: any time change occurs (which is always) there are those who sit around resisting it, and there are those who embrace it.

    Those who sit around resisting it and complaining about it are those whose fortunes sink.

    Those who embrace the change are those whose fortunes rise.

    Change and the rise of Hitler

    If we think about one of the most dire economic situations of the 20’th century, the Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic that led to the rise of Hitler – there were many people suffering and resisting change.  But there were also people profiting, who rode the tide of extreme currency change that was happening.

    Which of these two groups more enabled the rise of Hitler? The change resistors, or the change adopters?

    If we look at what people who resist change do, they blame the “negative” changes they see on other groups.

    If we look at what people who embrace change do, they don’t usually sit around and point fingers, they usually are too busy creatively keeping up with the changes to sit around and to point fingers of blame.

    While the reality of the Weimar was certainly more complex than this, we can know quite likely which group it was that spent more time blaming the bad state of the Weimar on the Jews: the change resistors.

    If more people had said, “ok, look, this currency business sucks, let’s figure out an alternative” and they had focused on building that alternative, there wouldn’t have been as much time to sit around pointing fingers at the Jews.

    To be clear, the rise of Hitler was due to more than just the change resistance.  But the change resistance did play a part.

    Resisting change is the problem, not the solution

    Chris Martenson (and many others who have a similar message) says that we can’t rely on the old ways anymore.  He’s right. We can’t, and we never could.  The only difference between now and twenty years ago is a matter of degree.  Right now, the challenges we face are forcing more people to face this universal truth head on.  The longer people resist, the more the struggle and difficulty (and perhaps war/etc) that occurs as people are forced to deal with the changes that have been resisted for decades.

    At any time in our lives, we can choose to either resist or embrace change.  

    Resisting change is often the more comfortable and less scary route – but far less satisfying.  It tells us that we are nothing but hapless pawns who can’t help our circumstances.  We shift all the responsibility to outsiders, and so if bad things happen, we aren’t to blame (except that, by our own resistance, we are ultimately to blame for what happens to us). There’s no fear about doing the wrong thing, because we don’t have any responsibility.

    Embracing change is the more scary but also far more rewarding route.  When we embrace change, we can find ways to stay on the leading edge; to grow with the times where growth is happening.  But when we embrace change, we are forced more directly to take responsibility – if we make a decision to try something new, and it fails, it is much more difficult to blame someone else.

    There’s not any actual difference in where the blame lies for our failures; in reality, we are always and the only people to blame, ever, for our failures. But in the change-resistance mode, it is much easier to deny responsibility for failure, and pretend to pin the blame on someone else.

    Change and the rise of  YOU

    It’s a shame that our standard educational system doesn’t prepare us for what’s going on. Our educational system teaches nothing about being entrepreneurial or creative.  It only prepares us for a standard job and a standard life – the one that no longer exists for an increasing number of people, as the world continues to change.

    As with alcoholism and drug addiction, the first step to a cure is always to admit there’s a problem.

    The problem we need to admit here is that maybe we’re a bit too addicted to the idea of stability, or to an unchanging and unchanged “American Dream.”

    If we can truly admit this problem, it then opens us up to begin looking for creative solutions to the problem.

    The creative solutions abound, and I’ll talk about them in other places. But we can’t even start on the creative solutions until we’ve said, “yes, I have a problem.”

    Once you’ve moved down this path, you’ll realize that the number of possibilities is nearly endless.

    Once we stop clinging to a narrow dream (that was defined by movie script writers and politicians), we open up a wide realm of new and more satisfying ways that we could be living.  We open up ourselves to the fun and the challenge of moving towards new goals and new ways of being, rather than the boredom and fear of trying to maintain the status quo.

    Once you open up to, and embrace the change, you open up the door to your imagination.  You have the possibility to then re-imagine your life in whatever configuration you’d like it to be, and you get to move towards that.

    Doing that is way more fun that clinging to a sinking ship, and pointing fingers at all the bad people who caused it to run into the iceberg.

    That’s why I no longer regularly read stuff like Chris Martenson’s blog or the Oil Drum.  That’s the game they’re involved in.  Instead, I’ve become involved in a very different game: how can I take advantage of change, to increase life satisfaction and well-being.  I’ve found out it’s more than possible.

    Do you need an antidote to all the gloom and doom out there, without a bunch of touchy-feely mumbo jumbo?

    I will show you how to tune out all the dire predictions and negative thinking.

    I will show you how to “reimagine” your career and life, making you more valuable to your employer or customers and increasing your life satisfaction.

    I will show you how to stay ahead of the changes that are happening, so that you can be a person that benefits from them rather than suffers from them.

    Check out the free new videos I’ve made for you, including “You can take this job and shove it!” and “$215,517 per hour.”

  • Goal oriented or fun oriented?

    Today, I had fun.

    For the past few years, whenever I’ve gone on a bike ride, I’ve been goal focused.

    Mountain biking: distance and elevation. Have I pushed myself hard enough?

    Road biking: speed. Have I kept up a high enough average pace? How many people have passed me? How many did I pass?

    Today: cruising around on my city bike, in no hurry, the scenery is great, isn’t it? Stop at the wine store, buy a few nice bottles, cruise around through the neighborhoods, look at the mountains, cruise past the river to see all the people having fun in the water.

    I haven’t had that much fun in years.

    Ok, well, I admit – I have had some fun moments on my mountain bike, cruising around the great trails here.

    But the point is the same: it was refreshing to drop the goal orientation, and just…. ride.

    This isn’t a biking blog – I previously wrote plenty about that at cycle9.com. This holds a deeper lesson.

    Somewhere along the way, I, and many others, lost sight of the “fun” and got caught up in the “achievement” and “goals.”

    What’s up with that?

    Goals and achievement are good, in moderation.

    Yet life is a lot more than that. Life is here to be enjoyed. To be experienced. To have fun with.

    Ours may be an overreaction against the freewheeling 60’s.

    It’s one whopper of an overreaction.

    It’s time to get fun oriented again. We all deserve it.

  • Would computers really want to do math proofs?

    Roger Penrose wrote a book titled “The Emporor’s New Mind.” The book roused quite a bit of controversy, because he claimed that he had proof that computers can’t think in the same way that humans do.

    To illustrate, he used the complex subject of mathematical proof making. Using various fancy arguments tied to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, he basically said this: computers can’t go beyond the logical system they’re already inside of, and math proofs must go beyond what’s already known, therefore humans are doing something when making math proofs that computers can’t do.

    There’s been a lot of argument about the points he raised. Some artificial intelligence proponents have shown ways in which computers can do things like mathematical proof making. The arguing back and forth goes ’round in circles of complex logic and abstract math theory, with neither side really gaining all that much traction in the debate.

    Yet, it’s almost twenty years after the book was published, and we still don’t have self-aware or creative computers. Sir Penrose was onto something, but I think he somewhat missed the boat on a much simpler argument that could have been wielded for his side: would computers really want to do math proofs to begin with?

    No. Not unless a human programmed them to do math proofs. That is the one and only instance in which a computer will do math proofs.

    This is really where the argument lies. Computers have no inherent self-awareness, and hence no intrinsic motivation to accomplish any goal. The only “motivation” they ever have is that supplied by their human programmer.

    Now, a simplistic argument might go like this: ok, Ms. smarty pants, but our human motivations are simply programmed functions of our DNA and our environment growing up! Despite that there is no hard proof for this would-be-assertion by a would-be-hard-core-artificial-intelligence-practicioner, it is nonetheless likely to be wielded much like a shield wielded by a knight going into battle.

    The counter-proof to this not-really-proof is simple: humans often go directly against our programming. For the new book I’m writing, I’ve been doing a bit of research on the Wright brothers. You know, those guys who invented powered flying machines that actually worked. They went against their programming in many ways. They gave up their bike shop, which provided them with economic well being, to have the time to pursue the flying, and they suffered financially. Multiple crashes resulting in broken bones and potential death, but they kept flying. After their first successful flights (albeit short ones), they faced scorn and outright hostility, with many newspapers calling them liars. They were going firmly against their programming of self-preservation, social belongingness, and economic well-being to pursue a crazy idea that nobody had evidence of actually being able to work.

    No computer can do that, or will do that – at least not as presently constructed. A series of binary switches, no matter how complex, is still just a responsive mechanism. There is no place for motivation in there. There are just inputs and outputs. That’s all. Those inputs and outputs may do some incredible things, and do them very fast. But at no time is it suddenly going to become magically “aware” as the computers get faster.

    A lot of people think that when computers reach the computing capacity of our brains that they will automatically become aware. Ummm no. That’s about as logical as saying that putting a bigger engine in your car will help it drive itself. Putting the bigger engine in your car will help it go faster, but the car still needs a driver.

    Computers are ultimately just machines, much like that car. It’s a fine and noble mission to be giving them ever “bigger engines” so that they can do more stuff and faster. But to assume that, at some point, this will automatically lead to them being self-aware and self-motivated is much like assuming that your car is going to suddenly start driving itself. It is just a fantasy.