I Will Not Die

Now that is the best kind of war.

Not only is it the best because it’s the sort that makes the best films and the best novels, but it’s also the best because it’s the most winnable kind of war to wage.

The Best Kind of War

It makes for the best of entertainment because it’s the brutal kind of total war that brings to mind the epic, almost endless feud. We’re talking about Greece versus Troy. We’re talking about the free world against the Nazi clenched fist.

It’s the most winnable kind of war because if knowing your enemy fully is the primary requisite to a successful campaign, then you are guaranteed access to the best spy available. You have an ear to anything and everything that’s said, planned, devised. That information will become the decisive betrayal that turns the course of the war into your direction.

But before we get too far, we have to make sure that he or she who you declare to be your mortal enemy is in fact just you and you alone.

Make Your Enemy the Right One

So who is your enemy? Or, if you’re particularly lucky, who are your enemies?

If you’re a younger version of me, they are your father, your jealous bosses, your angry spouse, your coworker. They are your government, your birthright, your poor luck. Your lack of rich friends, rich family, your lack of opportunity. Fight them if you want. Fight them all bloody hell. At the end of the day, bloody knuckles and all, you will still find more of them.

You won’t win that way.

If you choose to fight external enemies, you will squander your precious few days faced off against a horde whose ranks will gladly replenish themselves right in front of your flailing arms and courageous yells of valor. They will mock you.

You must square off in the mirror.

Total War Against Yourself

The less futile route is to envision some future life whose sandy beaches and blue skies above taunt your mind behind the closed lids of your eyes. Imagine who you want to become. He or she must be your new hero; the uncanny villain could be your present self.

At this stage your enemy is just one.

Now this is familiar turf. But far from being a villain of villains, this antagonistic couple is composed of mere antagonists. Like a carefully guarded agreement the future you can gain the epic upper hand and guide with a kind of grace found mostly in full friendship, the present you off on a journey to meet the future you.

Enemies Fewer Than You Think

If it’s your boss who prevents your ascent, you can fight your boss or you can leave. If it’s your father who strangles your growth, you can battle him or walk away. If your friends are holding you back, you can try to change them or you can go off and look for new ones. In each case, the only versions whose outcomes you can guarantee are the ones where you face off against yourself.

You have within you the possibility to make the greatest gains.

You should just remember that those gains will come from your encounter with yourself. Everything else is just a waste of good war.

Dereck :: Nov.06.2008 :: Growth, Perspectives, Success :: 24 Comments »

Forget all the trite little sayings about the advantages of being profound. If they were really that profound, they’d sink in and make major differences in your life beyond the initial little spasm of mental activity that accompanies them when you first hear them.

What the hell am I talking about?

[blub blub, pours more Scotch]

What I have in mind are sayings like “think outside the box,” “keep an open mind,” and “waste not want not.”

Actually, the last one has nothing at all to do with what I’m writing about. (I stole that joke from Paul)

No but really. Thinking outside the box is great! Yeah! We’ve been saved!

“So hey guys! You have any ideas yet?”

“Guys?”

Why profundity is your last, best hope

Ok it’s not your last hope, you could, after all, find a bag o’ cash floating in the ocean. Barring that (and assuming you would even dare keep such a heinous artifact), it is your best hope. Remember follow the follower? We’re not always very imaginative creatures, you know? Of course, this makes perfect sense. The guy who tried to cross the gorge by leaping because he thought it was the creative solution when every other gorge required a bridge to be built first sent us down the path of Forever Cautious.

You go first.

The simple answer? Distinguish utterly stupid from profound. Profound ideas don’t have to result in death or bankruptcy. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that because some profound things have turned out badly (ok, a lot of them have), we develop a resistance to all things profound. (Also, see skepticism below).

But the scary bastard of the truth here is that looking where everyone else has been looking is going to lead to solutions that won’t make any real progress.

Think how profound this was. Fabulous idea. Can it be repeated? Um, not so much. Seriously people, stop it. So some profound ideas work great, repeating them can be tough, and some are just really bad in the first place.

In the end, the big lesson is this: big gains in life come from big ideas. The defining projects of the great achievers that catapulted them to the status of idols were always in some way remarkably profound, but coming up with profound ideas about where to go in life isn’t a very natural thing to do. What you usually end up doing is checking in on your friends to see what they’ve been up to. This is a great start, because it gets you going, it lets you see things you might not see on your own, but eventually, you’ve got to be the one who squeezes the Meisterwerk out of you. You’ve got to do the profound.

Taking your thinking out of the domain of normalhood and into profound territory isn’t as easy as the phrases that say you should are to say, and here’s why:

We people-things like sturdy things

We want conviction damn it! We’re the people who build steel skyscrapers for crying out loud. Skyscrapers! You see? Don’t you see the profundity in that?

No really, we like solid, sturdy things. But that tendency for solidness is a trap for any of us who want to escape the sturdy, boring, uninteresting lives. What is it that we do? We get an inkling about where we want to go, then we go looking for role models. When we find them, we try to replicate. There’s a wonderful sense of solidness in knowing your treading on ground that actually led someone else to the place you want to go.

“How do I know this bridge will take me? Because it took that guy!”

We’re almost all skeptics at some level

And boy has skepticism done wonders for us. “Hi there scary snake! What nice fangs you have there!” The early Homo Sapien drunk beer buddy who watched his friend writhe on the ground with two small holes on his forearm could have been the very first skeptic, you never know. Hence the phrase, “like hell” was born.

But at the root of skepticism lies the obstacle that defines it: failure. It’s easy and truthful to acknowledge that most things in the world just don’t work. In order to avoid coming up with ideas that will fail, the easiest way is to just never come up with any ideas. In fact, let me tell you how to be completely perfect:

Don’t ever do anything.

That way, your skepticism will always be justified. That way, nothing you will ever try to do will ever fail. In fact, here’s a cool little homework project. Do what I just said to do for an entire life, and the whole while be fully skeptical that doing anything unordinary will succeed. Then, at the end of a life, let me know how many things you did resulted in the failure that your skepticism said you would fail at.

Dream baby, dream!

Dream! Fill your head with an endless supply of ridiculous, nonsensical ideas. Like that dream I had where my wife was upset because, for whatever reason, she insisted on using cheap damp toilet paper to clean carpets. Do you have any idea how this helped us with chores? Do you? Ok, it was a disaster.

You have to cast out to un-fished territory. You have dream of endless and crazy ideas. Massage them, make them rational, turn them into pragmatic ideas. Work with them until they become something meaningful and useful. Start with wild initiatives and employ them as fringe utilities.

With an eye to profundity

But the biggest problem with not so profound sayings on how to be profound is that we rarely really own the ideas. Profundity is an idea outside of ourselves. We’re never really in the box we’re told to think outside of. It’s an abstraction. It’s a thing over there. It’s a tool we never use in a drawer we never open. We want someone else to be profound for us.

Do you own it?

I mean, do you really own it? Is profound thinking the hidden unused tool in the shed, or is like your wristwatch on your, …wrist? Is the thought of new idea generation your constant companion wherever you go? Is it a part of your character? Is coming up with ideas the way people you know would define you, if given the chance?

Give them the chance.

Wrack your brain. Press the limits of your imagination. Make thinking about new ways to old problems an obsession, of sorts. Make it the first and last thing you think about each day. “What else can I try? That didn’t work, well how about this? Ok that was silly, but what about this?”

Do you always have an eye to the profound?

Dereck :: Sep.04.2008 :: Growth, Perspectives :: 10 Comments »

pro·pen·si·ty
1. a natural inclination or tendency.
2. Obsolete. favorable disposition or partiality.

We all want to grow. Of that, I doubt there could be any reasonable disagreement. By grow, I mean to advance in life, to gain wealth, status, freedom, or a thousand other things unique to a thousand other people. But the very same thing that causes each of us to want to grow should indicate a certain futility in our efforts. By that I mean what happens when we look around at our surroundings and get the urge to get new ones. It’s the impetus to move on. The impression we get that tells us “not here” but “there” gets our feet moving to head on off to someplace else. But even a child knows that when we get to where we plan on going, there’s one thing for certain that we’ll do the moment we get there: we’ll have another look around.

And I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m going to suggest that the unfulfilled promises that punctuate our path to human growth are as meaningful as the next goal we go after. But before I go much further, what is the nature of human growth?

Human growth has both a good side, and a bad one. It is at the same time both blessed and damned. Human growth is good when it is used as a way to define the class character of one thing or another. There’s something wholly virtuous about striving for more. There’s something virtuous about extending oneself beyond one’s natural course. There’s something virtuous about plain old kicking ass.

But human growth has a bad side too. The gluttonous conquer reminds us of the cost of growth because all growth must have some cost. In the process of rolling the ball up the hill we sometimes crush the roses in our way. Where that cost becomes too high depends on each individual’s tolerance of gluttony. This is not an exaggeration. In fact, it’s the seed in the center of the fruit of growth. It’s what is laid bare when we peek deeper than the instantaneous litmus test, the gut check, that validates our request to move forward with our plans to achieve. It quantifies our ambitions.

So what is natural? For that, we turn to Africa.

Way back in our early human history, right when our first ancestors stared across the plains that surrounded the jungles in which we evolved, they must have been thinking about something grand. They must have had some reason to want to grow out and away. They must have had an impetus that drew them from the shade out into the sun. Those curious furrowed brows atop the steady eyes that stared long off into the grass relaxed and gave way. Then our ancestors made a decision. So they set off.

That.

That is our human propensity.

But that original human act of desertion has a quality to it that lacks any and all morality. That original act predated morality. It was still mere animal instinct. A lion eating its cub sheds no tears. The erupting volcano under the sea, far off someplace in the wilderness of the Pacific has no value. But the one that rocked Pompeii is indecipherably tragic. We are aghast when we imagine the children becoming ash. But how does human morality fetter human growth?

Morality places human growth in chains because it forces all of us to observe a cease-fire while we consume the natural instinct that is our ammunition to proceed. We are now, not the animals we once were. Morality is the primary class character that governs our exit from the adolescence of the animal kingdom. We are now better than they are. As a rule, we do not eat our cubs. Morality is our measure of the consequences.

All forms of human growth incur a cost. This is not debatable. You might think it is, but no, it is not. The basic, and undeniable premise is that all forms of human growth require time. As a result, even the most private forms of human growth require attention to competition. Growth that is uninvolved with competition is a flagrant impossibility. All forms of competition have consequences, and the measure of those consequences is acknowledged through our morality. Unfettered human growth is unfettered competition, two animals fighting for supremacy.

As a result, we live out our lives trying at the same time to both unleash the natural propensity to grow and to capture and relax it so as to lessen the consequences. That is the more complete version of human growth. It is both the conservative instruction to slow down and the liberal instruction to intervene at the same time. Most people end up falling somewhere in the middle.

But there is one more crucial component to human growth. It is what I consider to be why most people fail to grow. It is this:

The passage of time does not equal human growth or achievement.

The best example of this is when we take human growth at its most literal. As children, we gain an expectation to become taller in the coming months and years. We mark our bedposts, mark our walls, we brag to aunts and uncles about our height and about our age. In reality, there is nothing to brag about. This form of human growth is a natural consequence of life and we are the fortunate passengers of nature’s grand achievement that makes us each taller, makes us each older every year. And while I foresee no necessarily detractive interpretations of this, one thing is for certain: we are stamped with an expectation that we own as a personal achievement.

For this, I think there are consequences. Not necessarily bad ones, but ones that have the capacity to inhibit all the ways we can grow that have nothing to do with how quickly we can expect to reach the cookie jar.

For most people, they think they are growing but they are not. Not in the way that makes us smile at a virtue. Instead, they are merely a passenger of nature, and they mistake the natural movement of their lives as one of growth and achievement, but they are wrong. All natural growth in this world is going to happen whether we strive to out step the pace or not. In other words, we can always do nothing and will always be doing something.

Most people recognize that rapid advancement in a career is difficult. If you have little experience in your field, it’s quite common to aspire to the notion of “paying one’s dues.” In other words, you have to wait for the 3-5 years so that your resume can say 3-5 years. So they work in their career knowing that simply by showing up everyday, they are growing because they are building the credentials that will enable them to advance. But I want to challenge that person by asking, “are you really growing?” I say that that form of growth, and the thousands just like it, are no more than natural consequences. I say that “paying one’s dues” is waiting until next year so you can tell your aunt you are now “five.”

If you really want to grow, you have to test your litmus, acknowledge the limitations of what consequences you are willing to accept, and recognize that merely going with the flow is the greatest illusion stopping you from becoming great.

It’s time to leave the jungle friends.

Dereck :: Aug.23.2008 :: Growth :: 18 Comments »