Social Mode

“So we cheated and we lied
And we tested
And we never failed to fail
It was the easiest thing to do.

You will survive being bested.
Somebody fine
Will come along
Make me forget about loving you.”

Southern Cross Lyrics – C,S and N

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Jun 7
Blame! Blame! Blame! Boy do we love to dish it out in this country (only country I have any insight into, FYI.).

Who screwed up the oil rig? Who fat fingered the computer on the flash crash? Who ruined main street? Who heated up the oceans and melted the glaciers? Who started these wars?

And on a more personal level – who’s to blame for this relationship or that messed up deal or that poor choice or that car accident…

On the flip side, we also like to heap praise on ourselves, our celebs, our CEOs, our saints, our leaders for how much of a difference they made. Without you, where would we be? Here’s a big bonus just for you. Here’s the MVP trophy. Here’s the street cred.

All of this assumes way too much control by humans over the incredibly complicated interconnectedness of the world – in business, sports, relationships, politics. No doubt specific folks shape and contribute, hurt and hinder, but no single person is due that much credit nor blame.

I don’t know when our culture gained this orientation. Maybe it was from the beginning… the whole “American Way.” Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You can do it! It’s up to you!

The attitude is maintained by repeated association of blame and praise to the negative and positive happenings in our lives. The association is inaccurate but is very hard to break. Perhaps there is some juice in this attitude. Maybe it helps keep people working more. Maybe it helps people commit longer than they would with a different view.

Personally I don’t think it’s healthy. Nor do I really think it leads to bigger business, better policy, or decades of championships. I think our individual powers don’t extend much beyond keeping ourselves alive. It takes a tremendously positive mix of variables to help us thrive beyond the basics in life.

Persistence is the key. Survive long enough for the mix of positive variables to align.

Fear of failure and over indulgence in taking credit are the enemies of persistence. They are energy wasting red herrings. So much of persistence is about maintaining your energy (physical ability, concentration, passion, etc. etc.).

Change when it’s too painful. Help others along the way. and keep going.

Americans’ View of Failure Assumes Way Too Much Control and Personal Responsibility

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Jun 6
I put Ubuntu 10.04 on a Dell XPS laptop on Friday. All weekend I’ve put it through the paces on general computing, mobility, battery life, software installs, programming tasks, and everything else to test whether I can use it on a daily basis.

Good news! I can!

It might be the very first Linux distro and version I’ve been able to completely use out of the box without doing a single compile of a driver or essential software package.

From WiFi to backlit keyboard to stand by mode to webcam and skype calls to long painful ATI 3d drivers. It all works.

Even better… the darn thing is very “pretty”. I love the integrated mail, chat and social stream into the desktop alerts. I love the new default visual styles. I love the Ubuntu Software Center.

On a very nerdy note I was delighted that the Eclipse package is finally up to the latest for Ubuntu in the officially support repository. I hate when I have to go do something special for a decidedly popular piece of software.

Now I still don’t think the basic PC user should bust out Linux. There’s still enough that CAN go wrong and when it does they will be lost or calling a pro. It pains me to say that, but it’s the same way I feel about phones, cars, TVs… if you’re mainstream, stick to mainstream stuff where the support will be easier and cheaper and more standard.

Linux or not… this is a freaking sweet release. You gotta love great software no matter your brand preference.

Review Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

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Jun 6
We’ve become a society that is afraid to break shit.

We wrap our phones in protective shells. We pay geek squad to install basic things. We go to jiffy lube to change the oil.

The world isn’t this fragile people. It’s all marketing.

What happened to figuring it out? Do it yourself? Hack it? Tweak it? Craft it? Open it up and put it back together?

Seriously.

I think all this technology and post 911 world is making us afraid to try. All the warnings, alerts, recommendations are making us afraid to get it done. We might be raising a generation of people who won’t move without a for dummies book or tutorial or specialist assistance.

Here’s a call to arms, in a very slight form of a blog post, to do something yourself today. Take your iPhone out of its sheath. Unbox your new tv. Change your own car oil. Replace your bike tire. Add new memory. Shake it, tweak it, beat it, break it. Put it back together.

The world isn’t as fragile as you think. Mankind has figured it out for a couple hundred thousand years………

fear of breaking things

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Jun 3
I do not tow a political party line. I avoid posting political rants on a blog. However, the primary election here in California is really driving me bonkers.

Many of the candidates are trying to sell citizens that the solution to California’s problems is to run more like a business. The commercials claim we need results and efficiency…

yes, AND… we need transparency, leadership and citizen engagement. Businesses do not necessarily embody, inspire or guarantee those and neither do most government entities.

Stop selling a tag line, start leading.

No, Meg Whitman, Carly Forina and others California should NOT be governed more like a business!

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Jun 1
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

—H.L. Mencken: attacker of ignorance, intolerance, frauds, fundamentalist Christianity, osteopathy, myths and writers that mocked him for sport…

Just sayin’…

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May 26
To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…

Fourth in a 5-Part Series for http://www.SocialMode.com

(1)   Sports, like businesses or social movements have goals and costs.

(2)   The best way to advance is through the “Do”.

(3)    Focus on long-term benefits as well as short-term gains

(4)   It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.

“Automaticity” is the perception that someone is in the ‘flow”; they make what they are involved in look automatic.

Competitors train to do stuff right; winners train so they can’t do it wrong.

In business and in sport the level of skill at which automaticity is attained is constantly changing. When the rate of that change slows too much, in sport and in business, things start to get dicey.

Most people never develop beyond their hobby levels of expertise because that is the level at which they are able to do things ‘automatically’. We’ve all seen those people in business. We’ve also seen them in different sports. Their comfort level is large and ever present.

For club golfers, swimmers or competitive tennis players, their levels of expertise for ‘doing stuff right’ in their sport are sub-par, as it were. To truly excel, there is always some part [life, sport, relationships] that is not automatic yet that needs attention.

When you raise the bar in each component area, you’ll move from an automatic state (large comfort zone) to a non-automatic state (‘zero’ comfort zone). Some can’t hack the loss of comfort. Others find it’s OK to have small comfort zones because you are betting they are only temporary.

It becomes a balancing act between that automaticity important in the “now” is the elite level to be reached you were working toward. One elite athlete I know said to me,

“The day I take the elevator rather than walk up ten floors is the day I’ll have decided to give up being World Champion.”

So most of us settle short of an elite status (business /sport); for club performance, for less, for sub-par.   Thus, we rationalize not reaching our highest potentials in one area when we come to value our current level, or “other” events or circumstances. That too is OK because you know what you are doing. That is life.

When we settle in business, others may identify it as ‘lost opportunity costs” and that may not be OK. But know that the number of mountains to climb – literally and figuratively – are enormous and, clearly, some are more fun to climb than others.

You get to decide.

Business People Learning From Elite Athletes: One Approach

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May 26
Historically, the search for a way to describe the mechanics of what is going on out there in the world and how it impacts what is going on with organisms [sometimes referenced as “the mind”, personality, cognition, consciousness, intuition, etc.] is that the fields of psychology have always used metaphors, similes, and analogies, in part, because most of the areas morphed out of philosophy, religion and literature.

Clearly for Descartes, mechanisms [particularly clocks and hydraulics] were big at the time and from there it wasn’t a stretch to embrace the naturalistic model, then the disease model, then the computer analogies, all the while not letting go of the metaphors, analogies, and similes that preceded it.

Yes, don’t forget the impact of the 70’s drug culture on 40+ years of speculation on consciousness, the inner self, higher self, etc.

The outcome of much of the theory and speculation was increased awareness at the cost of precision. All three influences are with us today as embedded vernacular, imagery, and rationales’ applied to the understanding of organisms. We still embrace the vernacular and the idioms of Freud as if they were true, valid or valuable. At another level, these approaches are embraced and morph as needed because there is little to replace them that the populace could cling to considering Western Judo-Christian history, laws, and sometimes even a bully Western philosophical interpretation of all matters. The terms, concepts, etc., work because they explain behavior to many that are clueless and communication-less without such pop-snarkness, having otherwise to depend on greater superstition, folklore and ‘commonsense’ explanations than they currently do. Said more succinctly, while the theory of mind may keep us from looking at the causes of behavior, it has some value, more than other Freudian alternatives or those endless literature dumps proposed by philosophy, theology and sociology.

As metaphors are wont to do, they work to make intangibly complex relationships more tangible, understandable, usable and communicable. Science has not had a history of doing that well either so the result is there is little pragmatic value change in understanding what the heck is going on out there and ‘in’ there if science doesn’t make cases well enough.

The lay vocabulary we end up using is residue that provides consistent, sometimes vivid equivalents for concepts until the understanding of relationships and patterns can get sorted out. A MAJOR problem comes from the reification of those terms like mind, need, motivation, personality, evil, addiction, intuition, etc., such that they are never scientifically challenged or shown to be what they are; a trail of metaphysical left-overs from philosophy, theoretical speculations and dependence on analogies, similes, and metaphors.

Unfortunately, the metaphor has become reified to the extreme by the world’s citizens and, through the conditioning we all used to get an education, became the reality of what it was a ‘place holder’ for. We’ve all seen it over and over: what had been an incomplete story-like example became the “thing” studied, described, interacted with before suddenly becoming raison d’être.

There is no bridge between pragmatism and articulated science. If one can’t use what science provides people – even academia – will embellish what they have and use it it as they have for centuries. Traditions allow us to avoid the constant assessment tasks that are needed.You know the old saw,

“insanity is doing the same things over and over and expected the results to be different’ (-Einstein or W. Deming; take your pick)

By embracing those states that come to keep us comfortable and un-questioning, only those events we subjectively or theatrically sense as catastrophic will generate uncomfortable questions that when answered will make a difference.

Thus, for you to entertain changing your sense of how anything works, business, families, social networks, corporations, football teams, etc. (you get the idea) you’ll need to get fired, get shunned, get de-friended, get passed over, lose the Super Bowl, and many other things equivalent to a kick in the ass. When that happens, most of us change our perspective a wee bit after we get up… others just continue to blame or claim the world is evil, unkind, gone mad, filled with greed before setting out to get restitution, get even or get a lawyer.

How’s that last option working?

Are traditions roadblocks or safety nets?

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May 25
Oh how I miss the day of drawn out conversation in life and business!

Instead of two hour chats by forced physical constraints modern technology has ushered in the stunted conversation. Dropped cell connections, Twitter, instant messaging, emoticons, email clients, reduced lunch hours….. All of these cut the conversation up. There’s no flow anymore. Just chunks.

Flow is so essential to forming complex thought and behavior.

I’m certain stunted conversations are not optimal for human thought. Overtime I worry if we over come this. Then again maybe the complete thoughts and conversations we think we have aren’t all that important…..

What say you?

stunted conversation

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May 24
Pressler in his NYT article of May 18^th 2010, takes a stab at explaining why Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal and other unnamed people in the lime-light say and perform in corrupt or dishonest ways to get ahead can be accounted for as “rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft.”

If only life was so simple and had a list of absolute causes and values as he posits. His argument is flawed; No, not in the straw-man ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ sense.

Just because he lived in the midst of the Vietnam War changes doesn’t give him or his generation any special knowledge [as implied] of that period he calls the “The Technicality Generation”.

“… many in my generation knew they were using a broken (but legal) system to shirk their duty. They cloaked themselves in idealism but deep down had to know they were engaging in a charade. (I, too, was against the Vietnam war and felt that people should protest, but not dodge their draft responsibility.)

The above quote shows that what Pressler valued, others didn’t, be it the system, the War, the ‘duty’ to serve, and so on. It also points out a more insidious case that (1) fear of consequences is a pervasive driver of behavior and (2) we [Homo sapiens] don’t have the slightest understanding of why we do what we do and don’t do what we don’t do.

The latter point (2) is the point of this response to his article.

Pressler has confused the causes with some effects — in his castigation of others in his article. It is not BECAUSE of the Vietnam War, but having an understanding of what you value was up for assessment in the 60’s. Rules of life were changing. More and more people were seeing patterns that didn’t make sense. More and more people were questioning the basis of past rules in the context of their 28,500 days on earth. They were questioning the basis of past antecedents linked to how they were supposed to behave as well as the expected consequences for that behavior.

The fact that “someone poorer or less educated, and usually African-American, had to serve” when others didn’t, is one of those consequences in life, not just for Vietnam, but for life in general. As a Rhodes Scholar Pressler might want to review history, contingencies management, and factors modulating individual behavior.

Besides finances and education, many of those who served were also culturally separate, had different histories, had different contexts and had different prospects for the immediate futures than those who didn’t. Yes, there were a large number of African-Americans. There was also an abundance of other minorities as well, just as it is today in a volunteer armed services world. This ‘abundance’ has an abundance of causes. None of those minorities had exactly the same set of values [learned rules in cultural – community] for enlisting, serving or NOT serving and avoiding Vietnam.

This Pressler logic implies that everyone who used the law, their circumstances, etc., and didn’t go to Vietnam had similar values and everyone that did go to Vietnam had a different set of values – like those aligned with Pressler himself which he contends were the correct values. As if Pressler himself or his generation invented functional dualism, Pressler then castigates others for not doing what he did concerning his definition of “basic responsibilities.”

“Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.”

Please!

If all that happened in the 60’s hadn’t happened as it did, things would be different today than they are.

His contention is that things would be better. I maintain that he has a long way to go to show any such reason for that conclusion. If anything he has shown that ‘the system’ that he and others fought for, works… including catching up to Mr. Blumenthal’s and having the consequences of his betrayal of constituents, state, friends and family come into play. Maybe due to the thorough level of vetting of individuals Pressler’s article should more poignantly have been titled: “FROM THE VETTING GENERATION: WELCOME!”

Richard Blumenthal and “The Technicality Generation”

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May 20

Social Mode

Southern Cross Lyrics – C,S and N

Americans’ View of Failure Assumes Way Too Much Control and Personal Responsibility

Review Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

fear of breaking things

No, Meg Whitman, Carly Forina and others California should NOT be governed more like a business!

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

Just sayin’…

**To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…**

(4) **It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.**

Business People Learning From Elite Athletes: One Approach

stunted conversation

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…

(4) It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.

How’s that last option working?

Please!

**To start, the goal is not to be an ‘elite’ athlete…**

(4) **It is not ‘automaticity’ per se that leads to high proficiency.**