The Constant Pause

It is good to have a firm grasp on the realities of reality, even at a young age, despite the fact that we grow up with fables, but, to the extent that perception is reality, we can also teach and have a bit of poetic license with the facts. What one might see as a disaster or betrayal, another might see as a test or cry for help. Therein lies the notion of the 'constant pause'. The beauty of being in a constant state of meditation is the ever-present micro-second you have before witnessing an occurrence in the world and interpreting what it means. To me, that micro-second is the difference between happiness and sadness. It highlights the power of choice. You may not be able to control what goes on in the world, but you can control what goes on in your world: the universe within. It is a matter of choosing to place people and events in a context that is broad enough to stitch them together in a more meaningful fabric, rather than seeing things as raw transactions in a cold, unyielding world. This is not a new concept. It is core to many philosophies and personal stories of survival and success. Still, it is not, as far as I can tell, something that many of us actively practice or teach. We are often times too far into the world to look down upon it. It is hard to read the map while you are in the map. So the next time you feel as though you are going to have 'a moment', try to have a micro-second first ;-)

Exact Change

If you are old enough to remember actually buying something with cash, you probably have run into the situation where you have something like a 5 and 10 dollar bill on you, but the item you’re buying costs $5.01! In lieu of having that extra penny, you hand the cashier a 10 dollar bill, and get back 4 grams worth of dollar bills and 36.5 grams worth of coins. This is quite a weighty burden. One that the mind rejects, but must often accept upon registering the completely non-empathetic look on the cashier’s face. (Again, if you are old enough, you may recall a time when the cashier would happily spot you that penny.) Upon receiving your change, your mind might have an ever-so-brief moment of euphoria, as, indeed, you do have a penny!  But it is only as a result of not having exact change that you find yourself in possession of that newly acquired penny.

So it is in life: The lessons we learn from the mistakes we make are no cause for celebration for the things we break.

Your mind may experience a brief moment of euphoria to the contrary, and your mind may, at times, be correct – there are, of course, times when it is not too late to learn from one’s mistakes and salvage the life we know. But beware: Sometimes it is the absolute sacrifice of the life we know that brings us the most salient and poignant lessons, and these can only be applied to the future. The very thing you miss by virtue of nostalgia, the very thing you want to return to, is no longer there. To return to what is no longer there, in hopes of applying the very lessons that were born of its very death, is a futile exercise indeed, so it is worth a little time and reflection before looking into the reflection of time; especially time past.

Local Optimization

Local Optimization: One of my favorite things I do when I am working in New York City is carve out the 2 x 2 block area where I will live out my entire life while on site. It allows me to learn a bit more about the people and the places, versus the more transactional nature of going to a new place every day. Come to think of it, even when I am on vacation, I tend to favor hanging with the local folks in the local 'joints'. Anywho... My main point here is that if you are anywhere between Hudson / Varnick and King / Vandam, look me up ;-)

The Knowing Smile of Self-Delusion

Have you ever had occasion to deal with someone who predicts tragedy for 5 things, is wrong about 4 of them, but then flashes you the 'knowing smile of self-delusion' when the 5th item goes wrong? As if to say, "gather round children, and basque in my omniscient negativity". To me, this elicits a kind of sadness, aside from the impetus to wipe said smile off of said person's face, because it reveals one of the greatest pitfalls of the human mind - confirmation bias: the tendency to identify and interpret information in a way that confirms one's beliefs. Of course, there are pros and cons to be had in just about everything, so I am not really saddened by confirmation bias per se. It is the bias towards the negative that makes me sad. If someone predicts a stellar outcome for 5 things, disregards the 4 that were, indeed, tragic, and then rejoices in the 1 item that went well, I might very well like this person ;-) The flip side, on the other hand, represents someone with a poisonous mind, that might (might) be able to see his or her way clear to greater self-awareness and more objective thinking (or, at the very least, subjective thinking in the positive), but, all too often, I feel that once a person has engaged in this mindset for a long enough period of time, the negativity becomes part of their persona - how they see themselves in the world - and any argument to the contrary is quickly ingested into the mind and broken down into ideas that feed current thinking - e.g. a sunny day becomes a potentially skin cancer causing day. In terms of strategies for dealing with this kind of person, I have become familiar with two: (1) 'fire and forget', wherein you employ the Socratic method to help them see that it is just as easy to predict a positive outcome as a negative one, and hope that in that realization they can see their own culpability in selecting the latter, with no expectation that they will see this; and (2) 'forget', wherein you simply 'raise shields' and turn off the 'universal translator', something that might save you some heartache, at the risk of narrowing down the field. Of course, there is the 3rd option that pertains to an escalation of wiping smiles off of faces, but, at the risk of committing the sin I have just written against, this would likely end up in tragedy :-/

Alive and Live

The other day I was in my favorite steakhouse, wherein I spied a man in his 80s, possibly 90s, who could barely walk to the table and barely take a seat. He placed his order, and then sat, barely upright, sipping water. 20 minutes later, his order arrived: A steak fit for Conan the Barbarian and a glass of Merlot that almost appeared to be a double. I thought to myself -- "there you have it: You are either alive or dead, it's a binary thing, and so long as you are alive, you might as well live".

The Ill-Advised Revival

If you’ve seen Pet Cemetery, you will, no doubt, remember how the sheer, utter sadness of losing his son, Gage, caused Louis Creed to bury Gage in the ‘Pet Sematary’, where dead things come back to life. Of course, this does not turn out so well, because Gage is hardly the little boy he used to be after he is revived – he ends up killing his mother and another person before his father has to kill him with his own two hands. Even after this episode, Louis Creed’s grief-stricken faculties continue to subscribe to the flawed concept of revival, as he buries his dead wife in the cemetery, confident that the reduced timeframe between her death and her burial will make a difference in her revived behavior. Not so. This is a great horror story (one of the classics), but also a great lesson in the lesser, perhaps, sometimes, greater, lessons in life: There are times when revival is not the best course of action. There are times when loss should be accepted, no matter how heartbreaking, so that you can move on, instead of trying to revive something that may, ultimately, do you more harm than good. Surrender to the outcome, as they say.

The Morality of Dynamic Pricing

I recently commented on a very good article by a friend of mine (Chris Taylor, see http://lnkd.in/bCKsVDB) regarding the Internet of Things and the effect that it might have on pricing. Specifically, the possibility of applying realtime, dynamic pricing to a broader range of products and services. I am blogging my comment, because I think it bears repeating: The availability of *big data* and the kind of distributed processing that allows us to operate in a much 'smarter' capacity runs the risk of us over-applying more sophisticated methods to interactions that, in my opinion, should remain patently unsophisticated for moral and practical reasons. Here is the comment: "Aside from the econometrics of pricing, there is also a moral question, which, I think, is further accentuated by the ever increasing bipolar disparity in income and wealth - not just in the United States, but the world at large. In today's world, the person who makes $5/hr can still complete for a cup of Starbucks coffee with the person making $40/hr, just by virtue of standing in line to pay a predetermined price. In, potentially, tomorrow's, realtime 'price elasticity' world, the $5/hr person may very well be priced out of that cup of coffee when they get to the front of the line, just by virtue of the accumulation of people at the back of the line. In cases where real, long-term planning cannot be effected by the purchaser of a specific good or service - i.e. buying an airline ticket or booking a hotel - the moral question of realtime dynamic pricing is a very interesting question indeed, especially when one has already paid a real price in terms of time spent waiting to effect the transaction. As a society, we'll need to take care to make sure we don't create dynamic models for interactions that should morally and practically remain static. It would really suck if 2015's Valentine's Day dinner were based on realtime data of 2014's post Valentine's Day dinner climax ... Or maybe not ;-)"