On this day

September 8th

Empathy

September 8, 2023

Previously I’ve mentioned David Gross who’s written a long series of articles on virtues. It’s worth discovering his Notes on Empathy.

The basis of empathy is being able to see things from someone else’s point of view. Empathy lets us ‘walk a mile in another man’s shoes’, look at the world through the eyes of another, or any number of other now-clichéd phrases. But while that perspective-taking seems intimately tied to the emotion of the thing – you walk in someone’s shoes to feel their pain, look through their eyes to understand their feelings – it need not be. As recent research suggests, there are times when becoming too emotionally involved actually stifles our empathetic capacity.

~ Maria Konnikova from, Empathy depends on a cool head as much as a warm heart | Aeon Essays

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I wonder the ordering of the following shifts in my experience, and how these shifts influenced each other: The decrease in the frequency, duration, and intensity of anger I feel? The realization that the anger I was feeling was not—certainly not as often as I believed it was—righteous indignation, nor even true indignation? The understanding of what petulance is and feels like? The increasingly frequent experience of empathy and the emotional experiences it enables? The shift to experiencing frustrations (in the noun-sense that a door is a frustration to movement) as opportunities for further exploration, rather than as blockades and existential crises?

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Clichés

September 8, 2022

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. […] Clichés are detrimental in so far as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

~ Alain De Botton

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What he means

September 8, 2021

If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

~ Mortimer Adler

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Why and how

September 8, 2021

Your ideas are worth less than you think—it’s all about how you execute upon them.

~ Chris Bailey from, Your ideas aren’t that unique – Chris Bailey

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The pull-quote says it all. I recently had a pleasant conversation, wherein the idea of the “why” and the “how” came up. Thanks to Simon Sinek, we all know to, “start with why,” (that is to say, start with the idea.) The idea is important, but it’s literally worthless without the execution. Because anything, multiplied by zero, is zero.

To my 20-something-year-old’s surprise, knowing Al Gebra turned out to actually be useful. Take, for example, evaluating some idea and its execution: The total value could be calculated by multiplying the value of the idea by the value of the execution. (Note my use of, “could be.”) Great ideas are represented by a large, positive value, and terrible ideas by a large, negative value; Similarly for the execution. Great idea multiplied by great execution? Huge total value.

This simple model also shows me how I regularly ruin my life: Terrible idea, (represented by a negative value,) with great execution… Or, great idea, with terrible execution, (represented by a negative value,)… either leads to a large negative total. Interestingly, the slightest negativity—in either of those cases—amplifies the magnitude of the other parameter’s greatness.

This leads to an algebra of idea-and-execution. If you’re going to half-ass the execution, (a negative value,) or you’re concerned that you cannot execute well, it’s better to do so with a “small” idea. Only if you’re sure you can do the execution passably well, (“positive”,) should you try a really great idea. If you work through the logic with the roles flipped, the same feels true. This leads to a question that can be used in the fuzzy, real world: Is this pairing of idea and execution in alignment? Am I pairing the risk of negative-execution align with a “small” idea, or pairing the risk of a bad idea with “small” execution. That to me is a very interesting “soft” analysis tool, which falls surprising out of some very simple algebra.

What I’m not sure about though is what to do with the double-negative scenarios. (Which I’ll leave as an exercise for you, Dear Reader.) Perhaps, I should be using a quadratic equation?

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Tracking without judging

September 8, 2020

What has worked better is tracking behavior without particularly striving to change it. Rather than drawing a “good enough” line and striving to meet it, you commit only to tracking the relevant numbers -– dollars spent, calories consumed, miles walked, pages read. What you discover is that simply knowing this data changes what you want to do, so that you’re not constantly fighting with yourself. You don’t need to depend on winning endless should/shouldn’t battles in order to change.

~ David Cain from, The Myth of Grit and Determination

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I believe this is true with one important caveat: The value you are tracking must be close to the actions. Allow me to explain…

If you track your weight, this will have little effect: When I pick up a cupcake, the scale is nowhere near—if I could think, “don’t eat the cupcake because weight loss,” then I wouldn’t be tracking my weight trying to affect my weight loss. But, “if I read for a few minutes now I can then mark off—right now—that I did some reading today. So, tracking, “ate more veggies,” works… or, “did something active,”…

Anyway, that’s been my experience. ymmv :)

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Get out of the way

September 8, 2019

This is why “culture” in business matters. Because it allows people to see whether or not they’re allowed to cut the metaphorical knot.

~ Hugh MacCleod, from «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2019/08/28/gordian-knot-culture/»

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I was recently asked, “What’s the hardest part, for you, about podcasting?”

Staying out of the way.

I’ve spent so much of my life diving in and fixing things, that it has become my first instinct. To rush in and grab the controls. To attach a sense of artificial urgency to everything. To become frustrated that others aren’t immediately taking action now that a solution or idea has been found.

Certainly, an important step is to first cultivate a team who can do great work. But once that’s done enough, the hard part for me is staying out of their way.

Many people would say that I value action over thought. This is absolutely not the case. I am driven to find evidence, to investigate, to look for previous examples of similar solutions and ideas, to gather data, to analyze, to sort, to organize, to imagine… and then I act— often frenetically.

It is right before that last step that I’m learning to self-intervene.

Ready!

Aim!

Get out of the way.

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Loneliness in time

September 8, 2018

It seems to me that in a country so fundamentally shaped by immigrants, a societal sentiment so suddenly unwelcoming to them can only be the product of an absurd narrowing of perspective — an unthinking self-expatriation from history, a willful blindness to the cultural legacy of the past, and an inability to take the telescopic perspective so vital to inhabiting the present with lucidity, integrity, and a deep sense of connection to the whole of humanity.

~ Freeman Dyson from, Loneliness in Time: Physicist Freeman Dyson on Immigration and How Severing Our Connection to the Past Shallows Our Present and Hollows Our History – The Marginalian

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Well, regarding trying to understand “the other.” I initially agreed with her characterization and then I thought, “How much of it is spin?” and “How w/could I begin to unravel some of it?” Answer: By talking to people in the other camp.

Dyson adds a wonderfully generous and optimistic counterpoint: Not that I dislike the Americans on the whole; it is probably in the long run a good thing that they live so much in the present and the future and so little in the past. The fact that they are more alone in the world than average English people probably accounts for their great spontaneous friendliness. I had heard this friendliness attributed to the size of the country and to people’s loneliness in space, but I think the loneliness in time is more important.

~ Maria Popova

This strikes me as amazing. (As in, “I am amazed,” not, “wow, this is awesome.”) “Friendly” is not a word I’d choose to describe Americans. Hell, I don’t think it would make my top 3 list of such words. If I was being kind when selecting my words, I’d say, “motivated,” “inspired,” and “principled.” If I was being unkind— well then I’d hew to the old, “If you’ve nothing nice to say, say nothing.”

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Empathy Is a Clock That Ticks in the Consciousness of Another

September 8, 2017

Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.

~ Alan Burdick from, Empathy Is a Clock That Ticks in the Consciousness of Another: The Science of How Our Social Interactions Shape Our Experience of Time – The Marginalian

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I have awesome friends

September 8, 2015

(Part 30 of 72 in series, My Journey)

Eric and Anabella left me a bday gift bag on my desk… this is several levels of awesome: A *large* shirt. The meme is perfect. It’s really good rum. And, inconceivably, it’s the same rum I selected from a huge Rum list at the Jerk Chicken place where everyone had dinner in Toronto after the event.

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Dog’s life

September 8, 2014

When taking a dog for a drive, there is no way for the dog to comprehend that you have control of the vehicle. There is no way he can realize that you turning the wheel or pushing a pedal makes the car move. He must think that both of you walk out to this adventure box, you have your seat, he has his, and you wisk off to a mystery location – sometimes parks, sometimes the vet; You just roll the dice and go on adventures together.

~ unknown

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