Hipsters create bobo culture. They make or sell or serve, or simply pioneer, what bobos buy. Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.
…on this flight she was sitting by chance in a row with two Indian-looking passengers, neither of whom knew the other or knew her. But collectively they aroused the suspicion of other passengers or crew, and when the plane landed, heavily armed troops stormed aboard, handcuffed the three of them, and took them off for extensive questioning. After which they were eventually released with “no charges filed.” Which is fair enough, considering that like everyone else on the plane they were simply trying to travel from Denver to Detroit and had done absolutely nothing wrong except to have “suspicious” looks.
Master Sgt. Stevenson was on his tenth tour of duty, fighting in wars seemingly for the majority of his adult life. He was caught in a vicious multi-day firefight with insurgents, and helped to kill 80 of them. And he was operating in a remote, barely populated mountain range in Afghanistan’s extreme southeast.
In a way, that firefight is a perfect encapsulation of the astounding sacrifice we ask soldiers to endure: enormous costs to personal safety, family, and to their own lives, in tiny battles that don’t change the war’s fundamental dysfunction: a complete lack of strategy.
Designers like saying that design isn’t about making things pretty, and they’re right. Design is about understanding the world and people and how things work so that things can be made more useful and beautiful for people.
In Search of Original Thought
A few months ago, I read a talk given by William Deresiewicz at West Point last year. I urge you to read it, it is a great speech and one that forced me to revisit my own definition and understanding of leadership.
The topic of original thought interests me so much is because I believe it to be one of the most important and underrated qualities for leadership. In his talk, Deresiewicz mentions how a lack of original thought is leading to a crisis in leadership in America:
What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
Later on, Deresiewicz makes the connection between solitude of thought and leadership. In his own words, this can seem “like a contradiction”. As he later writes, solitude doesn’t mean just being alone, it can:
…can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better.
What I took away from his talk was that it often isn’t the actual original thought that matters, but the process itself. It is the ability, the discipline, the training that we all need to to have an original thought and to not be afraid of it.
I say afraid, because we are always under pressure to conform - not because of fear of being singled out, but fear of falling behind.
In the rat race to be the first to know, it is important that we see, read and hear everything everyone else does; because we need to be in the know. We are always connected because we believe we can’t afford to not be.
This begs the question that what can we do, in this age of hyper-connectivity to train ourselves to have an original thought? In other words, how can we ensure the individuality of our thoughts and the strength of our convictions in what we do.
I have taken a few pointers from Deresiewicz’s talk itself. I have started to read more quality literature versus more quantity. This means fewer feeds in my Google reader and fewer Tweets from the people I follow. It also means less time on social networks.
Social networks aside, I have also started to spend more time thinking about what I read and then conversing about it with friends. This last part is also a suggestion from Deresiewicz; what he calls the “deep friendship of intimate conversation”.
Lastly, I think it’s important to test your thoughts by acting upon them. Though to be successful at this, I believe you need one more skill: being a good listener. This is something that Deresiewicz does not mention explicitly but alludes to, in his talk.
Will any of this work? I don’t know and I doubt I will know. I can only hope that when the time comes and I have a difficult decision to make, I am able to do it without self- doubt and without wavering in my conviction.
If everything you could ever possibly want to achieve is in that list, then you are always working towards your goals.
Barbra Streisand & DJs & Football
Eight months ago, a reality TV star and a married Premier League footballer (soccer player) began an affair. Frankly, it wasn’t all that interesting to me till about two weeks ago when a Twitter user identified the couple in a tweet.
Thus began a new chapter in the drama that has come to be known as The 2011 British Super-Injunction Controversy. I personally prefer Twittergate. What is really interesting about this whole affair is something known as the ‘Barbra Streisand Effect’.
The effect basically states that the more you try to hide or remove information (primarily on the world wide web), it will more often than not result in that information actually becoming more publicized. Yes, the effect is named after Barbra Streisand.
In the case of the footballer, his undoing was when he decided to sue Twitter after his name got tweeted. This result was tens of thousands of mentions of his name by various Twitter users all in protest of his super-injunction against the press.
Kashmir Hill at Forbes says it perfectly:
Filing lawsuits has a nasty effect of bringing even more attention to that thing you are filing the lawsuit over. The Guardian has published a graph making fun of he-who-shall-not-be-named, not including his name, but showing how many times his name has been mentioned on social media channels since filing his lawsuit.
It didn’t help that he was identified in parliament by an MP either. For now, the footballer has successfully created his own PR disaster - all because he couldn’t understand the lack of extent of privacy laws on the internet.
On the flip side, this is the most I have ever had to google Barbra Streisand. This and when I was looking for Duck Sauce.
Living through Characters
Over dinner with a friend last night, the topic of ‘favorite characters’ came up. We were all chatting about characters from books, movies and TV shows that we considered favorites and those that we identified with.
This got me thinking about a well crafted character in a book or on TV and what that really meant to me. Identifying with a character is simple enough - since you are essentially looking for yourself in a mirror that is the page of a book or a scene on TV.
It is adopting a character as a favorite that is really the interesting process in our minds. We tend to oversimplify the process but in reality, it tells a lot of who we would like to try being (even if it is for a short period of time like a book or a movie).
I like to think of this as reinventing ourselves for a brief period of time. We step out of who we are and try to experience life as someone else. Seems almost autoscopic, but what it really means is that you are privy to the learnings of someone else’s life.
***
One of my favorite characters from a book is Mr. Stevens from Remains of the Day. My affection for his character stems from from his ability to remain optimistic when all that he has trusted and known in his life has failed him.
To me, it is terrifying to have to self-doubt your life’s work. Yet, Mr. Stevens does it and moves forward. The force of everything that I (as a reader) learned about him (as a character) from the preceding 244 pages in the book comes to a head and distills itself in one memorable sentence:
Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.
When I put myself in his place, I become depressed and deeply discouraged. Then, I remind myself that Mr. Stevens chose to take it in stride and move on. I teach myself that it is the best I can hope to be should such a moment arise in my life.
***
Oddly enough, while one of my favorite characters is an English butler, the other one is a criminal drug lord. This is Russell ‘Stringer’ Bell, from The Wire, which I consider to be one of the greatest shows ever produced for TV.
This is a character that I admire deeply because it is a recreation of the something we all admire - the brilliant and ambitious entrepreneur / business person except in a setting we all universally deplore - the world of drug-gangs in inner cities.
As Bell builds his empire through the series, you begin to sympathize and maybe even admire his work. Yet, in the end he dies a gangster’s violent death - as retribution for his life and his work. There is no memorial, no eulogy and no remembrance.
To me, his character brings out the inherent hypocrisy in all of us. I like who he is but not what he does. Yet in my own life, I choose so often to overlook such a character flaw. However, being Bell even for a minute exposes this hypocrisy like never before.
***
As I write this post, I am reminded of a brilliant piece by Robert Rowland Smith about reinvention as rediscovery. I like to think that reinventing ourselves briefly as characters in a book or a movie allow us to rediscover our own lives through their short, but memorable ones.
What’s your Legacy?
Late last year, I was in the midst of applying to Business School. I had started the process by listing six schools that I really wanted to go to and after some serious deliberation, I brought it down to two.
My thought process was simple. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do after b-school and which schools I thought offered me the best shot at doing that. Also, I was adamant that I would only apply to schools that I knew I would attend if offered a spot.
Going to b-school is a $100k+ decision that takes two years out of your life. I had no interest in settling for a backup. That is sort of like trying very hard to be prom queen or king and then settling to be a nobody.
Due to various reasons, including the fact that I really don’t like being too far away from Jinal Shah, I ended up choosing a school on the East Coast as my favorite. However, my other choice was a school on the West Coast.
This post is about my second choice for b-school and how an essay in their application stumped me, beleaguered me and then forced me to rethink the purpose of both my career and my life.
The question was simple enough: “What matters to you the most and why?” At first, I thought it was really straightforward.
I just write about what matters to me. That can’t be that hard. In fact, I could run a laundry list of things that mattered to me - from the unimportant like my smartphone to the personal like my wife to the slightly more serious, like access to education.
Therein lies the problem - I couldn’t pick the one thing that mattered to me the most. In fact, I really didn’t know mattered to me the most. After struggling for a few months, I accepted defeat and decided not to apply until I knew the answer to that question.
***
A few weeks later, I was in LA for the first Institute of 2012. I had the great opportunity to work with two folks from the Long Now Foundation. Part of the work they were doing involved a game that was designed to help people think about their legacy.
A quote that stuck with me from their brief of the game was one by Jonas Salk: “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?” That got me thinking about the essay question for b-school that eluded me.
The truth is I had been approaching the question the wrong way. I was thinking about what mattered to me just now or maybe in the future - like five, ten, twenty years from now. I had no idea, I can’t read the future just like any one else.
However, I knew that I wanted my life to count for something. In effect, I had always been plagued about this thought I had about what I would leave behind for my children and their children after them - not wealth, but the world they would inherit.
When I was younger, I was cockier and I would say I didn’t want to be a footnote in history. When I think back now, what I really meant is that I didn’t want my legacy to my children to be unworthy of them. That is what matters to me the most.
Well, why should it matter? It matters because regardless of what you do with your life - in the end, it will matter most to those closest to you, your children. They are ones we look to for sanction and they are the ones that look to us for guidance.
There is no better guidance than a life well spent. This is why we work hard, play hard, we find a passion and we live it. We do it all because we want to be worthy of those we leave behind. So that they look at us with pride and carry on our legacy.
JFK once said this:
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’
There’s no better indicator of this legacy than leaving a mark on the world. This is why we must change it - not just because there is so much suffering and inequality but because we must make it important enough to dedicate our lives to it; so that those who come after us carry on our work.
It doesn’t matter how much we do or how far along we get. What matters is that we try - beginning now.
This is what matters to me the most and why.
Motivated Reasoning and Crowd Wisdom
I am sure all of you might have read, seen or heard of the recent birther controversy. It’s high point being this great punchline which produced even better polling results. The birther issue interests me deeply - not on a political level, but on a psychological level.
I have always been curious about why people believe what they believe and why it is so hard to convince them otherwise. As a add-on, how do these few die-hard believers end up rallying more people around their claim? Two great pieces I have read recently talk about these issues and provide some great insight.
The first is what I consider to be one of the best pieces I have read in a long time. Chris Mooney writes about the Theory of Motivated Reasoning. I never read much psychology after my required 101 class in college; so I was expecting this to be a challenging read, but Mooney’s deft writing was easy to read and captivating.
In essence, Mooney writes that as humans, our ability to reason is clouded by our emotion and everything we try to think out afterwards, is tainted by that initial burst of emotion we feel. It’s not that we don’t reason, it’s just that it happens much more slowly and while it’s happening, our minds have already formed biases based on our emotions.
In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt [10]: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers. Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.
The piece then goes on to describe how this works on key issues and controversies such as climate change, gay rights, the war in Iraq and one that I had never known about - vaccines. So then, Mooney asks, “What can be done to counteract Human nature itself?”. The answer in his own words:
You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
I have to admit, I thought this was plain common sense. However, I can’t remember the last time I made a conscious effort to ‘lead with values’ versus as I always do, ‘lead with the fact’. I think this evades us always, since we are as prone to rationalizing our beliefs as easily as the person we are trying to convince.
Mooney’s piece helped me better understand, among other things, why birthers believe what they do. That led me to wonder - how does it go from a few ardent believers to an actual national campaign? One that resulted in among other things, a press meeting for a long form birth certificate.
This is where the second piece I read comes in. John Timmer writes in Ars Techinca that it isn’t that hard to limit the wisdom of a crowd by influencing what information they have access to. This explains why certain controversies take root so fast in mass media and very soon develop a sort of cult following. As Timmer writes at the end of his piece:
It does, however, serve as an added caution that, just because there’s a crowd involved, we shouldn’t assume that anything that comes out of the crowd is wise. As the authors note, we seem to have a tendency to make exactly that assumption. “Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they conclude. “The wisdom of crowd effect is valuable for society, but using it multiple times creates collective overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”
By the way, there is some really cool jargon in both these pieces such as confirmation bias, social influence effect and the range reduction effect. All that aside, the two pieces talk about something we must consider seriously enough as we debate some very important issues that face us; except maybe in the case of those poll results for Trump.
