8 posts tagged with "Ideas"

I’ve been thinking about networks lately, inspired by recently reading Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Seventh Sense. The driving takeaway is that developing a sense for understanding the networks in any given situation gives an advantage over an understanding based on older frameworks.

This is not “networking” in the sense of trying to meet as many new people as possible in 30 minutes, or a network in the sense of the people you know. Neither of those ideas will allow you to gain the perspective on how multiple networks interact, which is what Ramo’s Seventh Sense gives you a feeling for.

This seventh sense is not generally a naturally acquired sense. Much like flying, which Ramo has also done at a high level, developing a sense for networks requires lots of practice in tuning in to non-normal feedback.

Perhaps learning how to fly a paraglider recently has attuned me to this oddity. In most other sports, from running to lacrosse to wrestling, your “normal” senses are what give you the advantage. Speed, balance, agility, or strength. None of those are particularly useful in flying sports, where the essential senses are an understanding of where you are and where you’re going in three dimensional space.

While you might argue those are important in other sports, like wrestling, you’d be off by a few orders of magnitude. The difference between a wrestling takedown and going through massive sinking air in a paraglider are more like the difference between knowing English grammar at a doctorate level and fluently speaking Hungarian. They are different worlds.

Now, this isn’t a comparison in difficulty levels. The sense and agency to execute or react to either one take years of practice to develop. It’s just that our six senses (the five physical senses plus a sense for history) is relatively natural to develop in the modern world and the sense for networks isn’t.

Funnily enough, if you go back to indigenous cultures they also developed their senses for networks, which is why you could walk through the woods with a Native American in the 1700s and marvel at their ability to know where an animal was without seeing it.

It wasn’t just that their senses were sharper, it’s that they understood how their network reacted. They had a feeling for the rippling messages passing back and forth throughout the network.

The difference between their network sense and ours is that they had only a few networks to pay attention to and all those moved at an organic speed. Their family, the animals and environment around them, their enemies.

Today we are surrounded by networks moving at light speed. Many of them have grown far faster than our ability to co-evolve our senses to keep pace.

We tend to make the mistake of thinking about networks in just 2 or 3 dimensions; as if they were fishing nets laid out on rolling ground, with us as a knot (or node) connected to others with thin filaments. This is the “topology”, or structure of the network, but it doesn’t account for at least one important factor, which is time.

With a more or less ubiquitous connection available to anyone reading this, the time between each node is limited by light speed; far faster than the “limiting minimum”. This compressing of time has the effect of taking that “fishing net” idea and balling up a football field’s worth of net into something the size of your fist, then making it constantly in writhing motion as nodes connect, disconnect, or rearrange themselves.

Now, that’s just one network. Imagine a few dozen of those all enmeshed together, connected but separate, and you begin to get an idea of the world we live in.

Why is developing a sense for networks important? Simply put: They govern our world. Without a sense for networks, you are as ineffective as a one-legged blind man stranded in the high mountains. Perhaps you survive in your little area, but knowledge of what lies beyond, or the ability to see it, or the ability to effect changes in your life are outside of your ability.

Rather than focusing on the complications of understanding each piece of a network (beyond our capacity) or becoming overwhelmed by the incredible interconnections of large networks (your location, friendships, modes of communication, and buying habits all represent different networks enmeshing), developing a sense for networks requires two habits we all have but use less and less: The habit of listening, and the habit of deep thought.

Listening is commonly thought to relate only to sound, but in developing a sense for networks we must listen not just with our ears, but our eyes, our heart, and our very mind.

This habit of listening ties directly into the habit of deep thought. Listening is just the gathering of information. For listening to be useful, we must consciously attempt to collect, organize, and gradually synthesize the various piece of information we gather.

This takes time and effort. Just as any other skill or sense we care to develop, the network sense can be sharpened through attentive practice. Here are ways you can develop this sense.

• Become aware of and curious about where networks are around you.
• Consciously assess the networks around you. Anything from the movement of cars through traffic to the hum and throb of ideas moving through your circle of friends; use each opportunity to assess how a network affects the environment.
• Spend time investigating how your different networks interact. Friends you email, people you “see” on Facebook, a local stranger you always see at the coffee shop; be curious about the connections beyond your immediate awareness. This applies especially to our digital and physical worlds. Behaving as though the digital is make-believe and the physical is real and that they don’t connect is a common error.
• Engage with your networks and notice the effects. Being an observer of a network is vital, but participating is equally important. Assess your position as a node or link in any network. Query as to how many connections you have. Assess each one for power, speed, time to travel, willingness to participate in the network, ability to change the network’s ability or reach. Pay special attention to those nodes or links that cross between networks.
• Seek out larger and smaller scale networks, from international relations to local neighborhood councils. Having experience across a wide variety of networks allows you to attune quickly to any new network.
• Spend time in natural networks. You were born with the ability and predilection to understand the natural world. Work to develop that understanding. Go into the mountains, or the prairie, or on the lake or ocean, and imbibe the sense of a connected world. Use your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and sense of balance to explore the world.

As you begin to develop this sense for networks and their power, you are taking tentative steps in the direction of a new dimension not yet fully explored.  I highly recommend reading The Seventh Sense to move far deeper into the discussion. In the meantime, go with care, enthusiasm, and a great curiosity. I’ll see you there!

“Sometimes it’s just as valuable knowing what you don’t want to do.” -Dr. Amy Kruse, former DARPA program manager Look, excellence doesn’t transfer. It’s a common mistake to think it does, and one that many SOF vets make.

I know, I know, you were an excellent soldier. You were a medic, or sniper, or intel guy, or drone pilot. You worked for Orange, or Green, or Blue, or Black or whatever they’re calling themselves now. Your CV lists all the impressive credentials you have: Leadership experience, 18 Delta, weapons authority, driving expert, PSD, dive supervisor, Tac Air, and on and on.

Now you’re out and faced with a tripartite quandary: First, contracting is the same thing you’ve already done with slightly different rules, higher pay, and less stability. It’s nothing more than a transition job and you know it. Second, you’re overqualified for jobs you know how to do. Third, you believe you’re woefully uncredentialed for the work you want to explore. You (believe you) were excellent and now you’re nothing. Excellence didn’t transfer. So, here you are, wandering in the wilderness of your post military time. You yearn for a clear mission and a community of pipe-hitters in the civilian world. You wonder why you got out, why your skills aren’t valued in this new world. This new world requires a willingness to stretch your mind into unexplored territory, an acceptance and embracement of mistakes. Many of the mistakes you’ll have to make yourself. It’s how most of us are wired; we don’t believe it until we experience it. You were a superb soldier, so you’re not used to making mistakes. Failing at anything is likely to be foreign to you. The military cultivates a “success” mindset of 4.0 evals. This is reflected in achieving safe perfection over imperfect learning. Hidden in that perfection mentality is the source of your future success: You have been taught and programmed by one of the most effective mind-shaping organizations that ever existed to pursue excellence. The mistake many veterans make is to confuse the value of their hard skills, like shooting fast or coordinating comms between 9 different assets, with their value as a human. Those hard skills have little value in the civilian world, and the realization that you’ve spent years perfecting skills that no longer matter can be crushing. While the skills don’t transfer, the method absolutely does. Your experience of the method of building skills from non-existent to mastered is the biggest advantage you have over most of the rest of the civilian world. The extraordinary bonus is that pursuing excellence creates stoked humans, no matter where on the path they are. The idea of exploring unknown territory is equally as crucial as applying your ability to pursue excellence. When you begin to explore unknown territory and pursue excellence, you’ll discover in your mistakes the deep value of knowing what you don’t want to do. Knowing our dislikes creates a healthy contrast that increases our pleasure in those work environments we enjoy. At this point, with you out of the military and being unsure of your next step, the specific directions I can helpfully give you become less and less accurate; what worked for me may not work for you. The mistakes I made in learning that excellence doesn’t transfer were extensive and at times nearly mortal, but individually are of little use to you. The dream I have and have had will almost certainly not be yours. Still, if you can acknowledge the existence of your own dream and apply yourself to producing excellence, knowing that someone else has engaged successfully on the same quest you’ll get much further down the road then by remaining ignorant of it. At our end of service, we vets walk out into the wilderness of civilian life. The maps we’re provided to navigate this wilderness don’t always match the territory. For many of us, the only information on the part of the map we must explore is the same phrase that thrilled the heart of many an adventurer before us: “Here be dragons.” Many of us have wandered this wilderness before. You are not alone, though you will feel alone much of the time. Others are out here, shining a light in the dark. We have found a place to clear a patch of forest and build a house of excellence, to lay down roads to other clearings, to begin to understand the new wilderness we inhabit. You can do the same, and if we veterans are to build the next, brighter version of the world we wish to inhabit, we share the responsibility to develop that world using the tools we’ve been given of learning to achieve excellence.

In the vein of continually getting better, I just started sending out a "pre-interview" request for the Paleo Treats podcast.  This one went out to Gavin McClurg, a paraglider.  They'll probably change as I go along, but I thought you'd enjoy it. *******BEGIN PREP EMAIL ******** Gavin, Tomorrow we are going to spend an hour or so on Skype having what is literally a contrived conversation. For both of us it will be a relatively tame adventure, but it is, as of now, an unknown. We've never met and yet I'll be asking you to share some of your private thoughts and life with me and more importantly, my audience. In order to make this conversation between us better, and deeper, and more effective, I'd like to make a few requests. First, whatever your "go-juice" is in the morning, drink deep. Whether you're a coffee snob or a cocaine freak, load up. No half-measures please, no holding back. Finish the dregs, drink to the Lees, snort like a bull 'til the end of line. If you're not a substance abuser, knock out a hard workout with heavy weight, the kind that has you prowling around the house looking for phone books to tear in half. I want the best, the fullest, the most intense version of the Gavin McClurg experience possible. Second, about 5 minutes before we get on, pull up a video online or from your computer that makes you laugh hard. I'm a fan of the ol' Butter Floor Prank, but anything that makes you guffaw is good with me. Third, just before time starts, take a look outside, breathe deep from wild and fresh air, and remember one of your best moments. Could be totally public, could be intensely private. I won't ask you to share it, just to remember it as intensely as possible right before we talk. Ok, I know those are a bunch of weird requests and probably intrusive. Hell, some of them could be downright insulting, especially if you think I'm serious about the coke. Still, do the best you can and know that on my end I'll be doing the same. Coffee is my drug, max bodyweight squats my workout, and the clean sea breeze just sniffable from my rooftop in San Diego my final breath before coming in to my sound room. Ultra fucking stoked! NFH *********END PREP EMAIL******

Man stands in an empty ball field at home plate. It’s night. Half a moon, maybe less. A few clouds scud across the sky. Dull glow on the horizon, some distant city. Enough light to see, but barely. The wind moans through the batting cages. Lonely. The man holds an old, well loved wooden bat in his right hand. Work boots, well worn jeans, untucked shirt, forearms scratched with many cuts, t-shirt flecked with dark slivers of glass. Stubble, un-combed hair. Skin creased. Eyes intense. Behind him an enormous pile of lightbulbs. All the way behind him to the fence, twice as high as he is, they flow down to his feet, perfect in their manufacture. The ground directly around him covered with shattered white glass and the metal screw bottoms of broken bulbs. Thousands. Holding the bat loosely, he turns and steps back. Shoes crunching on broken glass in the quiet. He leans and reaches for the pile of bulbs, picks one up. Steps back to the plate, faces the mound. Turning the bulb in his hand, he inspects it. White glass, perfectly complete. Flipping it in his hand, he catches it by the bulb. In one smooth motion, he lightly tosses it up, brings the bat to his shoulder and swings mightily. The bat catches the bulb perfectly. In slow motion the bulb shatters, filament giving off the briefest small spark that dies in the night. The metal screw bottom flies crazily into the blackness. A slight stagger as he follows through the swing. Glass crunches again. He pauses, breathes, wipes his mouth. Turns, and selects another bulb. Repeats process. This time a tiny sliver catches him under the eye. It bleeds, but not much. Pulls out the sliver, smears blood. Wipes his fingers on his jeans. Turns, selects another bulb. The stars swing ‘round overhead. The mound of bulbs shrinks and moves and grows like a breathing being. The man swings again and again. Glass shatters, screw bottoms veer unsteady into the night. The moon begins to set. The broken glass around him ever deeper. Over and over, they break, unable to stand up to reality. Over and over, he swings. The lights of the city sputter in the distance. Light is not unavailable to him, but it is his own light that he seeks. The man swings, the bulb explodes, again and again. A thousand times. Ten thousand. Ten thousand and more. He turns again to the pile, selects a bulb. Holds it, inspecting. Perfect white bulb, perfect screw bottom metal. He spins it in his hand, holding the bulb. Pauses, breathes in. In one smooth motion, he lightly tosses it up, brings the bat to his shoulder, and swings mightily. The bat catches the screw metal bottom perfectly. Sharp, grunting exhale at contact. The connection, the angle, the power, all in alignment. Slow motion, the bulb shivers but holds, arcing away, racing off toward the fences. The man watches, mouth open, hoping. Intense silent prayer follows the arc. As it flies, the bulb tumbles, the screw bottom metal now leading the way. The screws catch the air and it begins to spiral, to spin. We see its destination now, in the distance but closing rapidly. A row of black poles, sentinels at the far edge of the field. A socket looms on some far lamp post. The bulb flies closer and closer, riding the curve of its arc, dropping out of the sky toward the socket, sliding through a perfect trajectory. Still spinning, it closes through space to the socket, halving the distance infinitely. At 1,000 frames per second we see the puff ring of dust pushed out of the socket as the bulb enters it. The spiral motion forces it to seat itself, the bottom makes contact. The bulb blazes brilliantly, reflects off the cloud of dust motes shaken loose by impact. Temporary victory, heralded only by the screaming lonely night. The far off seething city knows nothing. To the left and right of the blazing light stand more socketed and bulb-less posts, black in the night. They stretch all the way around the ball field, to the edge of the world, each empty. Back to the man. He sees the light in the far distance, his pupils widen then constrict back down. He smiles crookedly, raises a hand to his eyes to shade them. Turns back to the pile, selects a bulb. Trust me kid, you’ll never run out of bulbs. Just don’t run out of game. NFH

There's been an idea bumping around in my head for a while. It's as old as training and as new as the latest hyper-fit craze; I'd like to take a crack at combining an ultra endurance event (most likely the Leadville 100) with something that is totally power & strength oriented; max benchpress of bodyweight followed by a 1 rep max squat and deadlift. Simple stuff to understand, ultra hard to train for and do well. Dennis & I talked about this a while ago; hell 10 years?  He was telling me about setting up a bench station at the end of a 10k and cranking out reps as soon as you cross the line. I like the idea, and I'm going to take the next 2 months (until January 1st) to set out exactly what it is I want to be able to do.  Not in general terms, but in dates, weights, and times.  I'll post it here, and figure out a way to set up a training log, maybe through Strava, so I can look back and see how the whole thing went down. As much as I love running, I miss being under weight, and being strong.  It's one thing to have set of legs and lungs, it's another thing entirely to have enough meat on your frame to get the hard work done when it needs done gettin'. Are you interested?  Do it your damn self, and shoot me an email with your results.  To hard work and measurable results!

I've had a couple people ask me for business advice lately, and I was taken aback by how little I know about business as I tried to come up with an answer. It didn't jibe with how successful Paleo Treats has been; you'd think I'd know more.   In 3 and half years we've grown from making batches in our kitchen and selling them at the 2009 CrossFit Games to being one of the bigger Paleo food companies in the business and selling not just throughout the U.S. but internationally on a regular basis. As I racked my brain for what "secret formula" there is for success, I kept coming up against the basics, nothing fancy, nothing exotic, just the basics.  They are summed up in my head as the pursuit of perfection combined with plenty of joyous work and just enough luck to get you over the occasional hump. Whether you're starting a business (and I recommend everyone start at least two) or starting a workout program or just trying to get through the holidays without eating every last cookie and piece of cake shoved into your face, success seems to come from those three things. First, the pursuit of perfection.  It's not whether or not you achieve it, but the pursuit itself that's important.  Aside from the obvious benefit of coming up with top quality products, it draws others into your circle who are following similar goals, who walk similar paths, and that leads to joyous work (more on that later.)  The old saying that birds of a feather flock together is just as true of folks seeking perfection as it is a bevy of quail.  It's a hard road, the path to perfection, and there are an awful lot of exits you can take.  It's much easier to stay the course if you're surrounded by good friends with the same intentions, and if you just put your head down and slog it out with them at your side you'll find that you hit what you thought were impossible goals and only notice it when you're a few miles beyond where you thought you'd ever be. One of my favorite stories about this can be found here. In the case of Paleo Treats we're after perfection in a Paleo dessert.  We haven't found it yet, at least not in any one dessert, although our Mustang Bar comes pretty close; I've heard it referred to as a "Paleo-gasm" (thanks Heidi F.)  Still, it's the pursuit that matters, and it shows up every time we see someone take a bite of a Paleo Treats sample; they always seem to expect mediocrity and are so surprised and stoked to find that the people that made this treat actually give a shit about taste AND health. The second key to success is plenty of joyous work.  I don't mean by this that you love everything you do; some tasks just suck and there's no way around it.  What I'm talking about is probably best shown in an old Gary Larson Far Side cartoon.  It's a picture of a guy wheeling a heavy wheelbarrow up a steep path in Hell.  It's hot, the wheelbarrow is loaded with bricks, he's scrawny and sweating, everyone around him is miserable.  Incredibly, he's whistling away, shown so cleverly in just a few musical notes and his pursed lips.  The Devil is looking on from the side of the path, and he turns and says to his minion, "We're just not getting to that guy."  Whatever else that guy did to get to the hot place, he understood the value of joyous work, of being able to be stoked with whatever you're doing, whether it sucks or not. We take that joy pretty seriously at Paleo Treats, so whether we're out hustling to sell cookies at a sample sale or rocking out newsletters or just shipping out box after box, we remember that joy is what YOU make, not the job you're doing, and if we're stoked to be doing whatever it is we're doing that somehow seems to translate pretty consistently into success.  I think that joy comes through every time we talk to folks, and maybe that's why I get asked for business advice; folks want to know not just the secret of success, but the way to make that success be so much fun. The final ingredient to success is a tiny helping of random luck.  Sometimes it's bad luck, and you learn some huge and awesome and valuable lesson by zigging when you should have zagged.  Mostly though, it's just a little good luck; knowing the right person, being in the right place at the right time, or just plain getting lucky.  This last "lucky" piece isn't something you have control over, although it seems that the more joyfully and the harder we work, the luckier we get. Still, there's that undeniable element of luck in every venture; the weather window that opens up at just the right time, the Oprah show that stumbles upon the Paleo diet right after we made a huge batch, the passing acquaintance from years ago you run into at the airport who is perfectly positioned to give you a boost right when you need it, the phenomenally gifted employees you hire who are better than you could have asked for had you designed their lives yourself. So that's it: The pursuit of perfection, joyous work, and enough luck to get you over the humps. That wraps it up for my holiday wisdom, feel free to drop us a line via email or phone. Cheers, NFH Paleo Treats

Letter to a friend: ***, There's nothing I have experienced that's anything like being on a stormy ocean on a small boat, out of reach of all mankind, reliant totally upon self and the fickleness of the sea gods. Not all the nations in the world with all their resources can do anything to affect the course of one boat out in the ocean when Nature, that uncaring and sublimely beautiful bitch, decides to wake and scream. 2 miles, 10 miles, 200 miles are all the same when you're in it, when wave and wind work together to manifest all that is creative and awesome in the truest sense of the word, showcasing ancient forces unknown and unknowable to those not willing to risk their most precious asset. There is no sound, no taste, no feel, no color to match the uncaring fury of Homer's ancient wine-dark sea.  Nothing.  Having that memory as mine I cherish it, nurture it, look in on it cradled in the cloak of my mind like my own yellow white candle of intense experience when I wonder, "Have I lived?" "To be truly challenging, a voyage, like life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest." Any kind of unrest, the uncertainty, the unknowing of the outcome has proven to me to be the key to a meaningful voyage.  Storming up a pass in Patagonia, sailing through heavy weather, even out on those long runs when the Muses decide to smile with their terrible brilliance, to ask with flashing eyes and sharp teeth of steel for more than you think you have to give, when you just don't know if you have it, when there's no guarantee for greatness, when you have to reach and fail and reach again to leave this plane of experience for the next. That moment of flight, that moment when the breaks turn your way, when the energy starts to run through you, when the follicles swell and the hair stands erect, skin crawling, lungs stretching and expanding, legs strong and unstoppable, feeling the strength flow through you from the sky, that's the moment of physical reassurance that you're still alive. Reaching that, that moment, never seems to come from a state of knowing, a state of confidence that all will be well.  Remembering that uncertainty is necessary for inner victory we each pursue it in our own way; combat, physical action, mental peregrinations, all are built on the base of unknowing so important to the human condition of fleeting satisfaction followed by unfulfillment. We live incomplete in order to enjoy all the more those ephemeral moments of satori gained by our own efforts, knowing that it can't, it won't, it shouldn't last.  It's why we do what we do, and it's awesome in its simplicity and impermanence. "[The wise man] does not have to walk nervously or cautiously, for he has such self confidence that he does not hesitate to make a stand against fortune and will never give ground to her.  He has no reason to fear her, since he regards as held on sufferance not only his goods and possessions and status, but even his body, his eyes and hand, all that makes life more dear, and his very self; and he lives as though he were lent to himself and bound to return the loan on demand without complaint.  Nor is he thereby cheap in his own eyes because he knows he is not his own, but he will in act in all things as carefully and meticulously as a devout and holy man guards anything entrusted to him.  And whenever he is ordered to repay his debt he will not complain to fortune, but he will say, "I thank you for what I have possessed and held.  I have looked after your property to my great benefit, but at your command I give and yield it with gratitude and good will.  If you want me still to have anything of yours I shall keep it safe; if you wish otherwise I give back and restore to you my silver, both coined and plate, my house, and my household.  Should Nature demand back what she previously entrusted to us we shall say to her too: Take back my spirit in better shape than when you gave it.  I do not quibble or hang back: I am willing for you to have straight away what you gave me before I was conscious--take it."  What is the harm in returning to the point from whence you came?" -Seneca, On the Shortness of Life. Love especially the "Take my spirit in better shape then when you gave it."  Such a great way to live, and look at life. Charge! NFH

The AI (Art Intensity) building: 1. Paleo cafe serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and betweens. 2,000 sq ft 2. Guest artist studio (Spencer, Banksy, etc) 1,000 sq ft 3. Working craftsman: hand made bikes, welders, blacksmith, electrician, custom doors, 6,000 sq ft 4. Full metal, wood, and machinery shop sunlight, heavy wood beams, metal window frames, nooks and spaces, human sized, bike racks, easy parking.  All artisan work, from doorknobs to floors to name plates.