Thrust is the push, and vector is the direction of travel.
All power and no control is no recipe for success; exquisite control with no power won’t get you anywhere fast.
Whatever level you’re flying at, which do you need more of?
Which one(s) do you need to learn to handle better?
Plenty of good reading this past week, but I want to highlight two excellent listens.
First up, the most thought-provoking podcast I’ve listened to in quite a while, an interview with English mythologist Martin Shaw by Emergence Magazine.
Among the many, many ideas still resonating with me from that conversation — about place, about which “temples” we’re serving in, about language and story — one that’s especially sticky right now is the idea of trading comfort for shelter.
Martin introduces the concept by talking about the kind of work we have to do to name and claim our place in the world, or be claimed by it. In his case, it was years in a yurt in his home place in the wild west of England, chopping wood for his own fire and living hard till he felt truly home. The experience nearly killed him, he said.
Surely each of us is invited to go on such a mythic quest at least once in our lives, in order to know the world and ourselves in it. But I couldn’t help thinking how we might all do well to trade some comfort for shelter — or, if you prefer, the many thousands of ways our culture is designed and organized so that we trade shelter for comfort.
We trade the shelter of comprehensive healthcare for the comfort of slightly lower taxes.
The shelter of privacy for the comfort of convenience.
The shelter of community and ownership and stewardship for the comfort of fast fashion (of all kinds).
The shelter of truth for the comfort of bias-confirming assertion.
And on and on and on.
Which begs the question: are those trades working for us? Might we wish to make different ones now? Which new tradeoffs should we make, and how might we begin?
***
And the other listen? Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s new album, Reunions, was released everywhere on Friday. It’s haunting and beautiful and real — well worth trading an hour of mindlessness for the shimmering shelter of great music that invites you to step inside, pitch your yurt, and stay awhile.
In the woods along the road where I’ve been walking these past months, there are old stone walls.
On the treeless sides of hills in Ireland, there are stone walls.
Neither walls have purpose. The walls in the woods were cleared from fields which now grow the forest. In Ireland, the walls were never intended to demarcate land or confine animals, but only to occupy the hands and bodies of idle, starving men.
These walls’ inutility is obvious: they run straight up hillsides, many of them, and often simply end, without forming the corners you’d expect of a pasture.
They were built during an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, when the Irish starved and the English, whose only concept of welfare was pay for work, had to invent a day’s work so a meager day’s ration of gruel and maybe a couple of pennies could be properly earned.
And so the starving men picked up stones and put them in straight lines, up hillsides, to no end.
And every day, walking up and down the road to no practical end, I look at the walls in the woods, and I marvel at how the forest can re-grow, and how men can starve each other.
My friend Emily said to me yesterday that “a false sense security is the only kind there is.”
Ditto, I would add, certainty or control.
Normally, we like to think things are more or less certain and secure. We also like to think that we can trade resources for security or control — a higher fence, another camera, a fancy diploma.
Some of those trade-offs still work, but so many don’t.
And so we’re faced with the falsehood of our sense of security, and the truth about how much security money can buy.
After two decades of mostly manufactured insecurity, it might be time to rethink what we’re seeking and how we’re going about it.
Moving school online.
Online education.
We’re seeing a lot of both right now, but they’re not the same thing.
Schools (including universities) do school — and that’s what they’re trying to move online.
Other people and organizations have figured out online, and now they’re creating all the teaching and learning they possibly can.
Consider:
Back in 2012, MIT professor Michael Schrage asked, “Who do you want your customers to become?“
We’re about to spend six months being inundated with messaging of all kinds — economic, social, and, above all, political.
As all of these messages flood in, ask yourself: who am I — who are we — being asked to become?
And is that really who you want to be?
I lived (and voted) in Washington State for a year, which exposed me to two ballot features completely unfamiliar to my Northeastern upbringing.
First, all ballots are by mail in Washington. There’s no looking up polling places, standing in lines, or scheduling time. Better still, you don’t actually have to post the ballot: there are special collection boxes at civic buildings like the police/fire station.
Second, party affiliations are listed simply as preferences under candidates’ names. This sounds like no big deal — until you see it on the page:
JOHN DOE
Democrat
JANE DOE
Prefers Democrat
Washington is hardly a bipartisan utopia, but the promise on the ballot is different. “24/7” means something different than “most of the time.”
It’s time for voting by mail to become standard practice nationwide. Party preferences might be nice, but voting by mail needs to happen now.
Some people will cry wolf about fraud; their real concern is much more likely to be higher legitimate participation.
And, speaking of chicanery, beware bad design — as with party preferences, it’s amazing what a difference a little [benign] intent can make.
Last week, Kirsty saw right through this little project without even taking a look at it.
How much is it copying and rephrasing my role models, and how much is it digging in and doing original work?
All good work starts from copying, but you’ve got to try to move on from there sometime.
(Yes, I sort of copied that last line.)
With more than 500 consecutive posts in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start taking some bigger risks. Strap in — let’s try to have some fun with this thing.
The single best read of the past week was Kevin Kelly’s brief, witty, and typically insightful “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” presented on the occasion of his own 68th birthday. Sure enough, I re-learned one the hard way just the other night, when I found a lost item within easy arm’s reach of where I’d last seen it — just on the other side of the wall, where I hadn’t looked hard enough.
Next up were some more technical but eminently accessible reads about remote work — especially from the perspective of management and communication. Three that really stood out:
Finally, there was Texas Monthly‘s list of “All 143 Willie Nelson Albums, Ranked.” (Another birthday project, and no, I didn’t read every single word.) I happen to like his music — though it turns out I know a lot less of it than I’d like to think — but that’s not really the point of this project.
One hundred and forty-three albums. Just think about that for a moment: it’s more than an album a year, for more than half a century. I wouldn’t recommend $32 million in back taxes as creative fuel, but let’s take a moment to marvel at the sheer output of the guy, shall we?
Here’s a flyer — a wild idea outside my competence but within my interest:
With all the talk about governments possibly taking equity stakes in companies as part of the unprecedented bailouts going on, how might we think about making the same or a similar move with student debt?
Whereas debt is extractive irrespective of outcomes — the mining company owes its creditors whether or not it strikes paydirt — equity is a way of sharing in an investee’s fortunes. Debt extracts more or less certain money from student borrowers (at around 6 percent, in an age of near-zero central bank rates) regardless of their educational or professional outcomes; equity — or some other form of financing — might reduce students’ cost of capital and force those who finance students to care about what happens to them after their studies.
There’s a lot more to be thought through here, but now seems as good a time as any to think about investing in young people’s futures rather than treating them as an extractive resource.
Colin Steele 