Every week I have several ideas for a blog post, but lately haven’t had a chance to sit down and write, even when I block time on my calendar to do so.  Obviously, Apple/Oracle/Microsoft/Adobe have a leg up on me here… perhaps I can reconfigure my mental hardware to slow down to a crawl if I don’t get these posts out reliably once per week.   

There. I’m implanted the seed of the idea into my subconscious, Inception-style.   Let the idea grow.

Erica Goldson, the Valedictorian at Coxsackie-Athens High School, recounted the following story this past June (HT SRDill) :  

There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, “If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen?”

The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years.”

 The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast – How long then?”

Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.”

“But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?” asked the student.

“Thirty years,” replied the Master.

“But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student. “At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?”

Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.”

This is the dilemma I’ve faced within the American education system. We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective.

A true education, peace of mind, positive relationships – these and other things require more than the achievement of narrow short-term objectives.

How to reconcile this with the idea of pushing through barriers, trying your hardest, going beyond your limits, etc.?

Maybe it has to do with the difference between overcoming resistance that is externally imposed, versus overcoming resistance that is fed by your own efforts?  

There’s an example of this in physics in the principle of the critical angle of attack  which features prominently in space flight, particularly atmospheric retry: If you don’t try hard enough (too shallow an angle), you bounce away and don’t get where you want to go.  If you try too hard (too sharp an angle), you burn up and fall to pieces.  In that example, it’s all about finding the sweet spot/angle and having the appropriate amount of heat shielding to allow for the minimum required friction plus a margin of error.

A simpler example might be the role of interpersonal facilitation.  Effective communicators know that “trying too hard” gets in the way of getting the change they want, and also know when to “push through” challenges.

Easy to talk about, but how to know the difference?

According to the New York Time Book Review by Farhad Manjoo:

The time we might free up by ditching TV is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” — an ocean of hours that society could contribute to endeavors far more useful and fun than television. With the help of a researcher at I.B.M., Shirky calculated the total amount of time that people have spent creating one such project, Wikipedia. The collectively edited online encyclopedia is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought, Shirky found. In other words, in the time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-size projects — and that’s just in America, and in just one year.

If it seems far-fetched to imagine the industrial world’s TV-watching hordes fleeing the couch to build projects as demanding as Wikipedia, Shirky has some news for you — they already are. “Cognitive Surplus” teems with examples of collaborative action.

That’s all well and good… and I feel better about my Facebook-to-Wikipedia-and-back-again-digressions already. Hey!  Look! This isn’t procrastination… it’s “building a social knowledge platform in order to leverage an authentic conversations with stakeholders”…or something like that.

Manjoo wraps things up with this cautionary note:

Nearly every one of his examples of online collectivism is positive; everyone here seems to be using the Internet to do such good things.

Yet it seems obvious that not everything — and perhaps not even most things — that we produce together online will be as heartwarming as a charity or as valuable as Wikipedia. Other examples of Internet-abetted collaborative endeavors include the “birthers,” Chinese hacker collectives and the worldwide jihadi movement. In this way a “cognitive surplus” is much like a budgetary surplus — having one doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll spend it well. You could give up your time at the TV to do good things or bad; most likely you’ll do both.

Ah yes… and this brings us to Rule #1 of Time Management and Productivity, which was nicely summarized once upon a time by Peter Drucker: 

  Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

Email is one of the worst inventions ever, in terms of human-machine compatibility. We typically ”become one” with our tools, but somehow email systems (along with CD jewel cases) don’t quite get integrated into the neural network….  our brains can seamlessly handle a whooshing jet plane, a zooming automobile, heck, even  a watermelon in one hand and a razor-sharp kitchen knife in the other, but for whatever reason, our brains don’t deal well with a rapidly accumulating email inbox. 

Back in June, I wrote a simple Facebook status update / plea for help:

Dan Spira yearns for Inbox (0) but is at Inbox (4228)

The comments and updates that followed from there became a Mission. I pledged to bring myself down from Inbox (4228) to Inbox (0) and achieved that goal within a week – but with some important lessons along the way that I’m still processing and attempting to sustain.

In the meantime, I want to share the video below (HT Gil Yehuda) on the Pomodoro Technique, which I’ve started using with success.   I vaguely remember seeing this a few years ago in passing… I thought it was a silly gimmick.  But no.  For certain working styles and situations, it is a simple yet profound solution to increasing productivity and reducing distraction, procrastination and burnout.  

More to come on this topic. 

1. skill of execution, and
2. strategic use of the landscape. 

The first is celebrated and easily remembered; the second is often forgotten and makes all the difference.

PART ONE –  SKILL:  “He who knows how to speak, knows also when.” -Archidamidas

The idea of being a Spartan (whether as salesperson, seducer, information worker or well-oiled Greek soldier) and operating in a disciplined “bare-bones” manner has an enduring appeal, despite all the historical evils and misdeeds of the ancient Spartiatites.

Spartans are specialists who work with a minimum of complexity and a minimum of fluff.  Spartans use just a few well-chosen weapons and pieces of armor (metaphorically or literally) and speak with an economy of words. Certain business/interpersonal communication styles (e.g. the classic “Direct” or “Driver” style) have a powerful precedent in the Spartans’ historically celebrated laconic manner of speech.  According to the Greek historian Plutarch, a lecturer once said, “Speech is the most important thing of all,” to which Agis II (King of Sparta, 427‑401 B.C.) retorted, “Then if you are silent, you are of no worth at all!”   Agis was all about getting to the point:  He said that Spartans did not ask ‘how many are the enemy,’ but ‘where are they.’ 

PART TWO –  LANDSCAPE:  “Good, then we’ll have our battle in the shade.” -Dienekes

What makes the Spartan approach work is not just disciplined skill in battle (or communication) but also the strategic use of landscape. Given the right type of landscape, 300 well-trained Spartans can hold off an army of 250,000… as long as they maintain the right positioning on that landscape. As a warrior/communicator, if you’re going to be simple and direct, then you have to choose your platform carefully. 

Direct communicators (aka “Drivers”) hate email, text messages and voicemail because these forms of detached communication puts them at a tactical disadvantage. The strength of a Driver becomes a weakness in email communication. Just like the Spartan who avoids a wide-open battlefield with multiple “incomings,” the Spartan/Driver communicator prefers short-range, face-to-face interactions… none of those arrows shot from far away.

Of course, sometimes Spartans can use the text-message medium effectively, as illustrated by this historical example involving Philip II of Macedon:

Text Message from Philip II of Macedon:  You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city. If I win this war, you will be slaves forever.

Text Reply from Sparta:   If

Philip and his allies decided to avoid Sparta.

Another strength of Spartan communicators with respect to email:   They know how to clear an inbox full of emails that might otherwise clutter their mental space and reduce productivity. A Spartan responds to emails with a simple “yes,” ”no,” or “ok.”   They smash their way through an storm of inbound requests and distractions much like these guys did in the movie 300.  Click… click… click… don’t look back… just keep pressing [Delete] or [Archive] and keeping moving forward.

Above all else, when it comes to the decisive moment of using their prowess to “go for the kill” or  ”ask for the order,”  Spartans know they need to consummate it in person, not by txt msg.  

IN SUMMARY: Keep it Simple, but Stay Smart

Spartans are specialists who depend on not just on their skill, but also strategy — they must operate in a landscape that is conducive to their simple, direct approach.

Spartans who lose their strategic advantage will fail, no matter how strong they are.  At the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans were outflanked by the Persians.  At the Battle of Leuctra, the Thebans broke the Spartan phalanx with an eschelon formation. Both cases involved a surprise move by the opponent, upending the Spartan’s strategy. The Spartan approach is about simplicity, focus and specialization, and a changing landscape (or changing rules) is the enemy of specialization.  To overcome change, you need to do more than just let loose your team’s battalion of 300 direct Drivers… you need to direct (and re-direct) their drive. 

Yes, it is possible to keep it simple, without being stupid.

In his famous (yet not quite famous enough) 1964 book, Games People Play, Montrealer Eric Berne introduced the world to his concept of Transactional Analysis and a system understanding interpersonal dynamics as a series of games/transactions involving a psychological currency called Strokes. 

“A stroke is a unit of recognition”  - Eric Berne

The wikipedia article on Transactional Analysis (TA!) has this nice description of strokes:

Strokes are the recognition, attention or responsiveness that one person gives another. Strokes can be positive (nicknamed “warm fuzzies”) or negative (“cold pricklies”). A key idea is that people hunger for recognition, and that lacking positive strokes, will seek whatever kind they can, even if it is recognition of a negative kind. We test out as children what strategies and behaviours seem to get us strokes, of whatever kind we can get.

The neat thing about strokes is that once one person decides to withhold them, that behaviour cascades across the system and suddenly everyone starts withholding them. Like a good currency, it can generate its own demand or lessen it, depending on how it’s used.  Also, different parties may value that currency differently, depending on where it comes from and what else is going on in the relationship economy.

In extreme cases, a strokes liquidity crisis can spread across a relationship economy, with creditors who become unwilling to invest their strokes, resulting in a collapsed system. An artificial Stimulus Package of strokes may help sometimes, but ultimately, people’s fundamental need to go about their lives and do business is what gets the stroking transactions flowing again.  (Settle down, Beavis)

Much of parenting advice, relationship advice, religion and free love hippie movements boil down to telling people to be more generous with their giving out of positive strokes. The promise is this:  More positive strokes increase liquidity in the stroke economy. After a relatively small initial seed investment of strokes, the Love Can Flow.  Bay-bee.

Yet life is demanding, our schedules are jammed, and we don’t have the time or energy to give out strokes. 

Enter the Interwebs 2.0 and the world of quick comments, hat tips, and the like.   Ever wonder why Facebook’s “Like” button has spread like wildfire? Along with the “Digg” the “ReTweet” and a multitude of other variations, why has the ”Like” become such a basic user interface element of social media?  No, it’s not because we’re becoming, like, inarticulate. 

Facebook’s “Like” button is an ATM with an endless supply of psychological validation, flooding our starved attention economy with a currency of cheap, easy strokes, creating a warm bath of ambient intimacy that we can soak in 24 x 7….just as long as we log-in, share our data, look at some ads, click on some links.

How transient is this “Like” phenomenon?  How embedded will this become culturally?  Is this a case where a much-maligned, frivolous technology actually makes us into better people?   Is the “Like” actually a collective cry for help — a fleeting nod of recognition exchanged between two ships passing through worsening storms of information overload, distraction and disaffection? Or is it just something that makes us into a bunch of, like, teenie boppers ‘n stuff..?

 Bonus track of Tali Mali… combine him with Dalton Sherman and you have weapons-grade motivation:

Imagine the following learning objective:  Upon completing this training, given a random probability of life events, the learner will demonstrate the ability to be luckier than before, by a factor of 80% or more.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has done some clever experiments investigating what makes people “lucky” or “unlucky.”  He then took his research and applied it to demonstrate that a person can change their luck through training.  A brief description of his work:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

(HT to DRZ)

Put this concept of deliberately having the right attitude together with the concept of hard work per Thomas Jefferson (“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”) and you’ve got a winning combination… but it’s not an easy combination to achieve, because  ”trying too hard” can get in the way of luck. As Wiseman’s experiments show,

…unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

Another take on this:  In his recent philanthropic pledge / open letter in FORTUNE magazine (HT to MF-G), Warren Buffett exemplifies two complimentary (and self-reinforcing) conditions:  Demonstrating luck and demonstrating gratitude.

Feeling lucky, punk?

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.
— Sir Winston Churchill

Try it out at: http://www.spaceded.com/DanSpira/courses/299-Word-Power-Vocabulary-Builder

…it’s fun, fast, free, and colloquially expansive!