Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it your target, the more you are got to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the intended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.** (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
There’s a huge amount of new home building happening on my side of Edinburgh. If you were to evaluate this building push on houses and apartments appearing then it appears that nothing is happening for ages.
Of course, there’s a huge amount of work happening: determining where ground level will be, stabilising this, laying drainage, putting in building roads, and then laying the foundations.
No one would want to buy a property where this hadn’t scrupulously taken place.
Of course, foundations and superstructures is a much used way of thinking about our lives, as is the more natural growth of a plant. Whichever image we prefer, we know we must never rush or ignore what happens below the surface if we want to see anything worthwhile appearing above the surface.
The best news is, unlike houses, and even trees, we can go return to the foundational things for our lives whenever we want or need to. Indeed, the wise person knows that this is a daily must.
(*Thank you to the Wombles for the title. (**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
What matters isn’twhat a person has or doesn’t have; its is what he or she is afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.* (Nassim Taleb)
Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones.** (Alain de Botton)
If someone employs me, they don’t only receive what I have but also who I am.
Who we are and what we contribute are immutably joined. Yet we see no reason for including these in our educational curriculums.
What if the following were embraced as skills to be learned alongside reading, writing, maths and science:
Be fully present. Empty our mind of preconceptions. Take our time. Reject distraction. Weigh advice against the counsel of our convictions. Deliberate without being paralysed.^
These are listed by Ryan Holiday as the skills and qualities used by John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As much as what his office made available to him, it was about the man Kennedy was trying to be.
Alain de Botton in writing on existential maturity and emotional intelligence reflects:
how we are taught may matter inordinately, because we have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare, unless our defenses have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud, or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that could save us.**
This is a fragile place to be. Humility changes this. Wrongly thought of as being a way of losing oneself or becoming invisible, humility is how we find our strongest and most beautiful self, destroying the ego and its appetites, providing us with something real to build on:
Constraints are the womb of creation.^^
Though most of us are surrounded by the ordinary we can become generative, alchemists, if you will:
A refined soul is in general one with the gift of transforming the mostlimited task and the most petty object into something infinite by the way in which it is handled.*^
Burn old logs. Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.* (El Sabio)
We have the technology of an advanced civilisation balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves.** (Alain de Botton)
It’s not what you do, it’s if you should do it.
Seth Godin began my thinking today, asking of the sentences I’m writing (it could be whatever we’re doing):
This sentence, then, what’s it for? If it doesn’t move us closer to where we seek to go, delete it.^
I can write my sentences but should I? Nassim Taleb adds to Godin’s thinking for me when he considers the real test of his writing would be its longevity:
So, my real judge being time, it is the stability and robustness of the readership (that is, future readers) that counts.^^
I then read a post from Maria Popova on existential and emotional intelligence – not something that grows passively over time but is a skill we learn:
[Emotional maturity] is, as Toni Morrison well knew, ‘a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory’ – the product of intentional character-sculpting, the slow and systemic chiseling away of our childish impulses for tantrums, for sulking, for instant self-gratification without regard for others, for weaponising our feelings of shame, frustration, and loneliness.*^
We can get all the stuff, all the technology, but where’s the help about how to use it? To do the right thing at the right time takes a lifetime of learning and practising and is found in the aged and tested expressions of our lives and loves.
I finished off with some thoughts from James Carse about how finite players, if the prize they seek is life, are not properly alive:
They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play but the outcome of play.Finite players play to live, they do not live their playing.^*
Not so for infinite players who live to play rather than play to live:
Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.^*
Carse is here echoing the chiseling process Popova has described in the skill-learning of emotional intelligence. The ego dies and something much larger lives in is place.
Scientists have recently determined that it takes approximately 400 repetitions to create a new synapse in the brain – unless done with play, in which case it takes between 10-20 repetitions.* (Karyn Purvis)
Whoever touches and whoever it touched cannot but be surprised.** (James Carse)
There are many reasons why “we-move-rather-than-touch,” one of which is surprise-avoidance. But there are surprises and surprises: the nasty kind and the nice kind.
On Sunday a friend shared how she’d lost a bracelet recently received as a gift. I happened to bump into her yesterday and she told me that her son had encouraged her to go to the shop the bracelet had come from, just in case someone had handed it in.
She didn’t hold out much hope but went along anyway and explained everything. The assistant told my friend that nothing had been handed in, but the shop manager on hearing the story, told the assistant to provide another bracelet.
That’s the kind of surprise that can happen if we turn up and play, which is what my friend did despite her doubts.
There’s no substitute to turning up every day in our values and abilities, and playing.
When we do this over a long enough period, we can be sure we are in quite a different place. Play does this:
Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness beneath. […] It adorns life, amplifies it, and it is to that extent a necessity both for the individual – as a life function – and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a culture function.^
In these words from Johan Huizinga, we look on the reciprocity there ought to be between playfulness and seriousness, each giving to the other, though it is more likely that playfulness and not seriousness seriousness will take us into surprise because it is always exploring.
[T]hat inner voice, I have found, exists in counterpoise to the outer voice – the more we are tasked with speaking, with orienting lip and ear to the world without, the more difficult it becomes to hear the hum of the world within and feel its magmatic churns of self-knowledge.* (Maria Popova)
[T]ry to be here, which as you know is the hardest place to be. Can you be present to this little bit of now?** (Richard Rohr)
In a world so full of voices, the hardest to hear can be the one within. To hear this voice we must find stillness and solitude which, if not unknown, feared or undervalued by ourselves, certainly can be in our society.
In his short but wonderful Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse writes about how life has provided us with the opportunity to play an infinite game – infinite meaning everyone is included to play for as long as possible and if either of these are threatened then we have the possibility of changing the rules.
So often, though, our lives are dominated by finite games – selected players working towards a deadline and holding that these are the only rules we can play by.
Though we know we must sometimes play a finite game – I must go to work, vote, pay when I shop for something – we do so knowing these are played within an infinite game. The quality of interaction between the infinite and the finite determines how the inner and outer voices most creatively listen to one another.
This cannot take place if we only listen to the outer voices. Carse names this interaction as touch, reminding us that:
Whoever must play cannot play.^
We do not arrive at our truest play by the sole direction of some outside source – which Carse describes as being moved – but by a conversation between inner and outer voices:
In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.^
This freedom to play is where we find our “genius,” now we can be fully “here.”
This conversation between inner and outer voices is what you and I are capable of, but not in a way that leaves one of us untouched. Here is surprise for both of us.
I hear my inner voice but you hear yours, too. What we imagine is something new, not pre-determined – whether by you or me:
I am touched only if I respond from my own centre – that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own centre, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from without towards a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself.^
What we are seeing here is what Theory U imagines as generative dialogue, a development from dialogue in which I might tell you more about myself or you may tell me about yourself but neither of us had to do anything with what we now know. The generation of something new occurs only when we are both prepared to let go and let come.
Yesterday, I happened upon a note of four “brave moves” identified by Nipun Mehta^^ which will only come about as we are prepared to touch rather than move one another. I offer them here as something for you to play with:
Consumption to contribution Transaction to trust Isolation to community Scarcity to abundance.
I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.* (Wendell Berry)
The very desire for shortcuts makes you eminently unsuitable for any kind of mastery.** (Robert Greene)
First of all there is the exploring.
Something inside gets us up and out from what we know in order to explore what we do not know, where we find little that is familiar.
It can mean all kinds of things. Ursula Le Guin encourages us to learn how to read new genres of books:
If you don’t know what kind of book you’re reading and it’s not a kind you’re used to, you probably need to learn how to read it.^
Thomas Kuhn wrote about how those who wanted to come up with new scientific paradigms firstly having to learn their domain:
Everything that grows has to succumb to the darkness first.^^
There’re no shortcuts.
Which means there’ll be voluminous time and energy involved.
Which brings us to what we need to find, namely our motivation:
In fact, one of the most fascinating things about motivation is that it often drives us to achievements that are difficult, challenging, and even painful.^^
Your motivation won’t be of much use to me, nor mine to you. We each have to find our own to be able to grow. Only then may we discover that the unfamiliar we have been visiting is a place we want to return to and stay.
I’m not sure if there’s caffeine in Dandelion and Burdock but my wife Christine and I were wondering what we’d had that kept us awake last night after sharing a bottle.
Foods and drinks have so many different effects on us.
Count Dracula is reminds us that we also think of our interactions with others being food and drink experiences!
Which made me wonder about who feeds me?
There are plenty of snack-people who do more harm than good in the long run, but who are my starter-people, my dessert-people, and, most of all, my main-course-people?
And me, how can I avoid being a snack person, instead offering something substantive, satisfying and energising?
Specialisation, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labour from the fruits of labour.* (Nassim Taleb)
When we are talking about emergence, disruption, discontinuous storylines, and points of divergence and convergence, I light up.)** (Anthony Weeks)
Because we are not different to nature but we are nature then we have a lot to learn from our natural environments. One is that a plant is a plant from beginning to end: first the seed, then the shoot, then the sapling, then the tree, then the seed … .
It’s how oneness flows.
Modern life doesn’t feel like this. We often find ourselves doing one small thing within something far larger, often through separation.
Each of us is capable of beginning something, nurturing it into something sustainable and watching the fruits grow.
Being involved in something from beginning to end gets us to where the unexpected and interesting things emerge.
You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing* (Nassim Taleb)
These are the two questions that lie at the heart of the work I am involved in with people, and they belong together:
Who am I? What is my contribution?
Without these two questions most of the books ever published would vanish – and those about their subsequent states of identity: clubs, parties, team, nations … .
Out of these questions form the myths or stories we live by when we are alone and when we are with others.
One question without the other is unhelpful. We cannot do something that matters unless it is intrinsically part of who we are, and we cannot know who we can be unless we do something that puts soul in the game.
When we do something and reflect, do something and reflect …, things begin to happen.
The reason it’s difficult to learn something new is that it will change you into someone who disagrees with the person you used to be. And we’re not organised for that. […] The alternative is to sign up for a lifetime of challenging what the self believes. A journey to find more effectiveness, not more stability.* (*Seth Godin)
Most of us then default to one of a handful of templates and filters for all their experiences; everything gets pulled inside of what my little mind already agrees with.** (Richard Rohr)
The important thing is not what you’re passionate about but that you own and explore your passion.
Passion is your key to opening new rooms and worlds and universes. Connect with it and you’ll find within it what you must do next, though many miss this:
I walked away remembering passion was a rare commodity.^
The remarkable thing about all of this is that when we live our passion large, we find ourselves transported into places and spaces we never imagined going before, into the rooms and worlds and universes of others.
THIN|SILENCE 
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