Book Review-Creativity, Inc.

It was earlier this year when I was sitting in a room with a few hundred educators. These folks weren’t your normal educators though. They were attendees at the Pluralsight author summit. They were there to learn more about how they could produce courses for Pluralsight that people wanted to watch. Motivated by a compensation schedule that rewards views they were looking for how to create a better course to get those viewers. However, that wasn’t the conversation that got me started. I settled down to the table with one of the founders, Keith, and his wife to talk casually before the next presentation. We were talking about how to create a culture within the rapidly growing Pluralsight organization. I was hooked on the challenge of creating the right environment for people to flourish even during growth. It was in the middle of this conversation that Keith suggested that I might like Ed Catmull’s (and Amy Wallace’s) book Creativity, Inc. It chronicles the growth of Pixar. While not in the animated movie business, learning how a creative organization works is always good.

The truth is that the folks at Pixar and I’ve always been three degrees of separation – even before Pixar began. When I was in high school I was introduced to some developers who were doing computer graphics for TV network programs. I vividly remember seeing some of the graphics for the NBA championships and thinking they were amazing. When I moved to Indianapolis after high school I was introduced to and interviewed with Truevision. (I didn’t get the job.) Back in the day they were making the hardware to do the rendering of these high end images. Their Targa card was the standard. They were also developing processing cards with RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) processors. It was cutting edge for the animation. It was around this time that Pixar’s logo (and mascot) was initially created. These connections and an interest in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the SIGGRAPH special interest group that was interested in graphics meant I was always watching from the cheap seats as computer graphics improved to the point where it was possible to make animated films a reality. From this context, it was interesting to get a glimpse behind the curtains to discover the organizational challenges in making such an amazing organization.

Hidden Problems

When you look into tragedy, whether it’s the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger or the disastrous failure of the Deep Water Horizons oil drilling platform in the gulf of Mexico, you find that the issues that led to the tragedy was well known by at least a few people well before it was too late. From stock market and economic collapses to disease epidemics, the problems that we’re facing are almost always known ahead of time by well-meaning people who don’t want to sound the alarm bells. An analyst of the stock market once quipped that economists had predicted 17 of the last three recessions.

No one wants to be the boy that cried wolf. We don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. There’s a reason that there’s a saying for “don’t shoot the messenger” – it used to happen all too often and quite literally. There’s such a strong disincentive to be real when being real means bringing bad news that it’s a herculean task to create a culture that embraces bad news. Where it’s just as valued to offer opposing opinions as it is to offer praise.

Creating an environment that makes the hidden problems valuable means creating a culture of sharing, respect, and trust (See my post on Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy) What I often describe in individual terms of relationships between two people, culture attempts to create as the cultural norm (See my post Organizational Chemistry for more on culture.)

Instead of trying to instill a sense of safety and accountability in each individual person, the goal is to instill it – to anchor it – inside of a culture so that new people are indoctrinated into the culture and way of doing things – without having to be taught it individually.

The Art and Craft

When we hire someone to work with us we’re looking for a certain set of skills. Those skills map to what we need them to do for their job. We assume that they have those skills. Those skills are their craft. It’s what they’re being asked to do. However, good people move beyond this and start to demonstrate their art. In other words, they move back from the proficiency in what they do and they move towards being able to look at ascetics. (See Following, Fluent, Detaching in my review of Presentation Zen.)

Even Aristotle knew that there was more to people than their ability to get things done (techne). There’s also intuition (nous) and science (episteme), practical wisdom (phonesis), and theoretical wisdom (sophia). (Thanks to Theory U for the quotes from Nicomachean Ethics.) So what you expect from the folks you hire isn’t the craft of what they do. What you expect (or desire) from the folks you hire is that they’re well rounded enough to deliver on the artistry of what they’re doing as well.

Walt Disney and Albert Einstein

It’s rare that you see the likes of Albert Einstein and Walt Disney put together. On the surface they led very different lives. They approached their world differently. In fact they do have very different approaches to their excellence – their intelligences manifested themselves differently (See Extraordinary Minds.) However, they do exist on the same continuum of greatness. Einstein is known for his persistence and his ability to describe what already exists – to make sense of the senseless. Walt Disney is known for his persistence (See my book review on Primal Leadership which shares about his failures) but also Walt is known for his continuous pursuit of excellence and his ability to describe things which don’t exist yet – his ability to see into the future and grab something out.

For me they represent ideal forms to be emulated. How can you get the amazing clarity of today’s reality with tomorrow’s wonder of the future?

Culture of Creativity

I’ve seen plenty of broken organizations in my years. I’ve walked into organizations so calcified with bureaucracy that they couldn’t get anything done. The words were actually spoken that you only get in trouble for something that fails – you don’t get in trouble for not doing anything. So I’ve seen the bad. And in truth, I’ve seen the good as well. Where everyone works as a team and they’re just doing the best they can with the cards that they’ve been dealt. Instead of bemoaning their condition they’re excited to try things.

However, most of my clients aren’t creative organizations. They’re not focused on bringing something to life that has never existed before. They’re just trying to work together well. There’s a special burden hoisted on those organizations that have to be creative for a living. They’ve got to be tough with their ability to take feedback – and remain comfortable enough to see reality the way it is and make connections that other people can’t make.

Creating a culture where there’s acceptance of feedback and more importantly encouragement to “fail fast” is an amazing feat.

Dialogue in the Brain Trust

It all starts with dialogue (See Dialogue). It starts with the ability to have open, honest communications that leaves everyone more whole while not avoiding difficult topics. If you can master dialogue – and institutionalize it into your culture – you’ve created a powerful tool for learning and growing. Consider the work of Arie De Geus formerly the director of Shell’s strategic planning group when he says that the true differentiator for what will cause organizations to outlast their competitors is their ability to learn faster.

In Pixar the brain trust is that institutionalization of dialogue. It’s the expectations that you’re going to get criticism but it will be about the project not about the person and it will be constructive. It will be not just what’s wrong but at least some hints about how to improve it – or at least what is missing. When you’re confronted with continuous constructive feedback, you have to learn. You have to get better.

Ownership of Responsibility

Lean manufacturing has received a great deal of press now. Whether it’s seen as the outgrowth of Deming’s work or as the Toyota Production System (See Unleashing Innovation and Change or Die for more about lean), Lean has a handful of tenants that allow it to be successful in many environments. It’s built on the idea that the more you can get everyone to be a part of problem solving – to caring about the outcomes instead of just their jobs – the better off everyone will be.

Creating responsibility for fixing problems in everyone in the organization seems trivial but in truth is rather hard to do because people taking responsibility means that everyone has to believe that it’s OK for them to take the initiative to solve problems. Every time they try and fail – and waste (consume) some money – you have to know how to respond. Any business leader hates waste. The trick is to realize that it’s an investment in failure. It’s an investment in people being able to make mistakes and allowing them that space.

Every time that you respond poorly to someone’s failed attempt to solve a problem, you make it harder for the next person to try to fix things. I know that it’s very hard to bite your tongue and reframe your thoughts when you see a particularly big mistake happen – but it’s necessary if you want to get to the place where everyone is willing to solve problems.

Mistakes as Footsteps

The truth about business is that mistakes are just like footsteps. If you’re going to get anywhere, you’re going to make them. You’ve got to figure out not how to prevent mistakes – because that’s fallacy. The big thing that every business leader has to learn is how to make mistakes faster, to learn more, and to recover quicker when the mistakes are made.

Aptitude of Recovery

When they’re teaching a new pilot one of the parts of the training is something called unusual attitudes. In this training the instructor tells you to close your eyes and he purposefully does some maneuvers with the aircraft to disorient you. He then places the airplane in an unusual attitude and tells you to open your eyes to recover. Unusual in this case is usually pitched up or down and banked. In most cases you won’t do both at any extreme at the same time. In most situations, you’ll not do both at the same time with very much intensity.

The objective is for you to figure out what you need to do to get the airplane to the straight and level quickly. There’s an order of operations to it so that you don’t stall the aircraft and create a problem – or rip the wings off which is worse. You’re taught how to recover from the unusual circumstance quickly and efficiently. However, this seems like an odd thing. Why would you ever get into the unusual attitude?

The answer is simple. It happens. You’re wandering off in your mind, you’re distracted, or you’re simply not paying attention. The training doesn’t deny that problems will happen – in fact the training you receive assumes that problems will happen and that you’ll have to learn how to do something about it when they do. As a result, when a pilot finds himself in an unusual situation he knows what to do.

The ability to find yourself in a bad spot and knowing what to do to get out of it isn’t just a flying skill. It’s a life skill. We can deny problems happen all we want – or we can create the skill of recovering from things when they do go wrong – because inevitably they will.

Managing well isn’t about perfectionism or never making a mistake – it’s about making mistakes, recovering from them, and learning from them.

Suck Until You Succeed

You wouldn’t expect an organization like Pixar who has done great work with animated movies to say that “…all of our movies suck.” Unless of course you realize that the full quote is “Early on all of our movies suck.” Perhaps even then you’ve got the view that the movies that Pixar makes were ones divinely inspired and are destined for greatness. It’s a great illusion – but it’s just that it’s an illusion.

Whatever you work on, whether it is movies or products, they’re going to suck when you start. The key to the Pixar process – and any process – is iterative development. That is that every day you try to make whatever you’re doing suck less. Sometimes that means making it suck more so you can see how much it sucks – and then you know you’ve got to change it.

In an environment where failing is OK and failing fast is better, it’s OK to have movies that start out sucking because they can learn to suck less over time.

Randomness, Luck, and Success

I’ve read a lot of books about business success. And I have to agree with Creativity, Inc.’s statement that there’s a fair amount of luck involved – and that most business success books leave this out. They want us to believe that it was the owner’s skill that navigated them through the rough waters of business and not that occasionally they got lucky. Having shared the struggles and the situations where Pixar was on its last breaths, I know that Ed Catmull understands how close to the brink we’ve all come in running our businesses.

The truth about running a business is that it takes a little bit of luck to make it work. If everything always stacked up against you, you wouldn’t have a prayer of making it. I know that over the years I’ve depended on luck when nothing else seemed to be working. However, luck is really just randomness. In our rational minds we want to make randomness seem more explainable so it becomes luck.

It has been said that “Luck favors the prepared” and I believe that. I believe that every organization’s success as it comes through luck is based on the organization’s ability to respond to changing circumstances and adapt to the new reality. This creates the ability for randomness to be converted into luck – or good fortune.

Steve Jobs and Inventing the Future

I’ve never been a “fan” of Steve jobs. Maybe because I’m missing the “fan” gene. I have, however, been impressed at Steve’s ability to present, to be a showman, and to be a visionary to create new products that the world has never seen. So the glimpse of Steve that the book shared was a welcome treat for me. I got to peek into the life of a great man, without needing to become a great fan.

One of the most interesting things I read was “I’m not a filmmaker … but …”. It’s interesting because Steve respected the craft and the artistry that was filmmaking. Steve was an excellent story teller. Many people study his work and try to emulate his timing and pizazz. I can’t help but wonder if he didn’t refine that by interacting with the folks at Pixar over the years – learning how to tell great stories through the people at Pixar who loved to tell stories.

The good news is that you can read the story about Pixar, the people who loved to create stories, whether you’re a raving Steve Jobs fan or not in Creativity, Inc.

Book Review-The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

During my interview with Steven Kotler, the author of The Rise of Superman, he credited an idea to Josh Waitzkin. He was careful to share with me that Josh was a chess champion and the subject of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher” (which I’ve still not seen.) This lead me to wanting to find out more about what Josh had learned about high performance. For me he was an interesting bridge from the action sports focus of Kotler and the mental challenges of business that I was more focused on. Josh had started his career with chess and has “evolved” to be more focused on martial arts. It was in this context that I started reading The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence.

A funny thing happened as I was reading. I began to realize how much the passion for excellence is more important – and more effective – than a pursuit of results. I began to realize how disruptive success can be because it breaks the routines that have led you to success. I also started reverberating like a tuning fork as Josh shared how he learned to think with music and how he started to see one thing – Tai Chi – as another thing – chess.

Conquering Challenges and New Challenges

Some of the most disconcerting times in my life have been when I’ve achieved a goal that I’ve set for myself. It’s weird. I finally reach the goal that I’ve set for myself and instead of the happiness that I expected, I felt uneasy. This isn’t too surprising given that most of my research on happiness says that we can’t predict our happiness. (Most notably this appears in Stumbling on Happiness but also tangentially in The Happiness Hypothesis and Hardwiring Happiness.) However, there’s more to it than just not being able to predict our happiness.

Perhaps it’s burnout. Once you’ve reached a pinnacle of your chosen interest, what challenge is next? (I wrote a pair of articles for TechRepublic.com in 2003 – Tips for Identifying Burnout in Yourself and Your Staff and Talking Shop: Break out of Burnout Mode at Work which discuss the nature and responses to burnout.) It could more simply be just disillusionment. Lottery winners find themselves with more money but the happiness they expected to flow from the money may have never come. According the The Success Principles, 80% of lottery winners in the United States file for bankruptcy within 5 years.

For me the answer once you’ve reached the pinnacle of your chosen area is simply to climb another mountain. In other words to create mastery in another way. The thing that I think is most powerful about Josh’s story isn’t his love for learning or his success at chess. The interesting thing to me is that he pivoted his life, found a new love, and worked to become great at it.

However, that’s about choosing your new challenges. What happens when the challenges choose you and they’re not the challenges that you want. While is sounds strange to say that sometimes the challenge of fame is a burden, it seems clear to me that it is and can be. Fame is such a powerful thing that it can pull you from your compass. Instead of being focused on the love of the art form and the desire to become better one can become paralyzed in the must be seen as box. (See The Anatomy of Peace for more about the box.) By taking your focus off your compass it’s easy to lose your way.

History is littered with famous people who have destroyed their lives as they have struggled to manage the results of their success. Their fame drove them into painful addictions to alcohol or drugs. Maybe they avoided the traditional chemical addictions and started extramarital affairs which ultimately brought them down. The pains that they weren’t allowed to deal with kept bubbling up into bad behaviors. (See Chasing the Scream for more about how pains bubble up into addiction.)

It should come as no surprise that the skills needed to be excellent at chess aren’t the same skills that it takes to deal with fame. The logic of the chess board and even the psychology of seeing into your opponents thoughts aren’t the same as being able to push away throngs of fans. The cold mathematics of pieces doesn’t compare to the warm compassion of “dealing with” people.

Endgame of Reduced Complexity

Larry Bird used to practice free throws more than anyone else in the game of basketball. It wasn’t because he was bad at them. It was because he wanted to be better. He knew that if he could perfect this simple fundamental he could change how he played his game, not just from the free throw line but also wherever he was on the floor. Josh describes working on chess from the end game first. Working with only a few pieces where the fundamentals really mattered.

By focusing on only a few pieces, he could focus on the learnings that he could leverage at every stage of the game. If he started from the beginning and had to evaluate all of the variables, all of the strategies, all of the options, he’d be awash in all of the complexity and his chances of learning would have been greatly reduced. By focusing on something small he could learn fundamentals without the distractions. (See Information Diet for more about distractions and The Paradox of Choice for having too many options.)

My chosen area has been technology. In truth for me it was my endgame of reduced complexity. I know that there are several people – including my wife – who would disagree that technology is not complex, however, for me it is simplicity. Electrons always flow the same way. I could work on a small program and I could understand what was happening. I could simulate what the computer would do. I could build mental models for how everything worked – and my models would generally be right. (See Sources of Power for more on mental models.)

I moved from development to infrastructure in a world where I could learn about the OSI model and learn how the network really functioned. I learned how RS-232 serial communications worked by debugging it and watching the signals with a breakout box. (See Serial AKA RS-232 and Relearning for more about how I learned RS-232 communications.) For me it was a world filled with fundamentals that I built up into solutions. I’d learn blocks of content and learn to understand how things worked and would assemble those blocks into larger and larger solutions.

I moved fluidly back and forth between infrastructure and development. I moved from one technology to another. There was always something to learn but also at the same time always something familiar. Even today when I’m working on some of the command line programs I remember the way that the DEC terminal servers for the VAX worked. The command structure between Cisco IOS and those early terminal servers is nearly identical.

Now my world is filled with a great deal more subtlety and complexity as I work on psychology and sociology. As I work to change organizations I had the technology to deal with – but that’s the easy part. The hard part is mapping enough of the internal psychology of the participants to build a model of how they will react – and how those interactions together form the emergent behavior of the organization.

Thinking to the Music

If I want to induce a flow state, calm myself, or just get into a rhythm of thinking, I’m going to pull out music to help. There’s music playing around me practically all the time. It’s not that I don’t need and enjoy silence at times – like when I’m reading. Instead, it’s that when I’m writing and when I’m working on creating I’ve typically got something going on in the background. I tend to think of it as a governor. It keeps my thinking speed in the right channel or zone. I’ve got playlists that include themes like love but also speed and intensity including a playlist called ‘Aggressive’.

At some level this makes sense. Robin Dunbar mentioned in an RSA talk that I was watching that dancing and singing triggers endorphin release – which is a very pleasurable experience. As I mentioned in my review of The Rise of Superman, the switch that happens from an adrenaline fueled stress reaction to the relaxed state in which we can enter flow is a critical one. It relies on nitric oxide for the switch but coming out of the release, but the landing zone is perfect for flow if the endorphins and dopamine get started.

Passion for Learning

If you were to ask Josh what he does best what might the response be? Certainly he could say chess and with all of the titles he’s one, it wouldn’t be hard to accept. After winning titles in martial arts he could just as easily say some form of martial arts. However, that’s not what he says. What he says is that what he does best is learn. He’s got a passion for learning. He’s got a thirst for learning more that isn’t easy to quench. It’s his passion for learning that drives him forward.

Carol Dweck speaks about a fixed mindset and a growth mindset in her book aptly titled Mindset. She speaks about how those with a fixed mindset are trapped in the belief that if they fail they’re a failure and that they can’t do better where those with a growth mindset use the set back as a learning exercise. I bring this up for a few reasons. First, Josh spoke repeatedly about how he leveraged his setbacks to fuel his growth. Perhaps it’s because his mother was a horse trainer that when he was “thrown off the horse” he “got back on.”

In his passion Josh had to trust his instincts. He says “my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it.” There’s wisdom in the idea that you have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable to be able to learn. If you stay inside your comfort zone, you’re not learning. The Success Principles describes it as “a prison you live in – a largely self-created prison.” The moments of greatest opportunity to learn are the moments when we’re the most uncomfortable. It’s not that we’re going to be comfortable all the time – that we can live without discomfort. However, what defines our learning is how we act in those moments of discomfort.

Sometimes opening ourselves up to this discomfort is necessary. Sometimes we have to leave open the possibility of losing so that we can learn. This means that we surround ourselves with people who are capable of beating us. Instead of being afraid of loss we welcome it – in so much as we can – as a way to learn. It’s not that losses don’t hurt, they do. It’s what you can learn from them – even when you’re “an expert.” Josh says that William Chen calls this Investment in loss. Whether you’re purposefully allowing an opponent an edge to make things more even or you’re picking more challenging opponents being willing to lose so that you can learn is an important component.

I can remember as I was playing Pokémon cards with other adults while my son was competing with the kids. I’d lose over and over again. I’d get clobbered by things in the game I had never seen. While I never wanted to be a grand master of Pokémon it was painful to endure defeat after defeat. Josh says that you have to win enough to keep your self-confidence up. In my case, I knew that this wasn’t my only thing so I could transfer my wins in other ways to support my ego while I got pummeled. I didn’t enjoy the experience but it taught me that I could persevere. It would be OK.

What I learned about the game was important but what I learned about myself was more important. I learned that I could allow my ego to be bruised even if I didn’t like it.

Ego Management

Managing our egos is a precarious thing. On the one side we are self-deprecating and depressed. We’re unable to get better because we’re filled with guilt and shame. (See Daring Greatly for more on guilt and shame.) One might describe it as being humble but Humilitas describes humility as “Power held in service to others” rather than lowering ourselves. On the other side, when we think too highly of ourselves we’re perceived as arrogant. We’re prevented from learning by the need to create the perception that we have it all together and that we don’t have anything else to learn.

Our ego is a well-protected mechanism in our psyche. As I mentioned in my review of Change or Die the book The Ego and Its Defenses catalogs 22 major and 26 minor defenses. It doesn’t like to be managed. It has defenses for that. There are a set of well warn tapes that play inside our head that try to keep our ego firmly entrenched in its position. Its position is built on a lifetime of messages of little tapes that play in our head. Our conscious perception of our ego is a small part of what is really driving us to believe what we believe about ourselves.

At some point when we’re surrounded by the message of greatness that we try to project to the world so that we can attract others to wanting to work with us we sometimes begin to believe the messages we’re sending out. It’s like we start living out our resume which according to Who: The A Method for Hiring is “It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.” That is we have inflated ego that serves to prevent us from learning.

Recovery Time

While reading the book Dialogue I was introduced to the works of Richard Moon who is an Aikido master who says that it’s not that the great masters don’t lose their center, it’s just that they discover it sooner and recover quicker. (I mentioned this in my post titled The Inner Game of Dialogue.)When Josh speaks of recovery time he’s often speaking of the time between rounds where you have a chance to recharge before the next battle. However, there’s also an awareness of downward spirals and the tendency to make a series of errors and it’s that spiral that needs to be interrupted. That is once you’re off your balance how do you get back on track?

From the point of view of making a mistake, being triggered by an opponent, or even triggered by the song that is getting stuck in your head, the recovery time is important – but how you get to the right recovery time is perhaps more important. If you don’t have any proven techniques which help you to become recovered then you’re waiting around for recovery to come like a gift out of the blue. If you want to recover quickly, you should know what techniques you have available to you to do the recovery.

I find that many recovery techniques work most of the time. Rarely do I find that one technique works 100% of the time. By learning different techniques that typically allow me to recover, I improve the chances that I can recover quickly.

Breadth or Depth

The one place where I had a serious disagreement with Josh may not be as much of a disagreement as it is the imprecision of words. Josh says “Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.” To agree first, I want to say that the quest for exposing our hidden potential, the desire to enable and support our creativity, the necessity of leveraging the invisible, intangible, and unconscious power in all of us is absolutely dead on with what I’m looking for in my life and what I believe others are looking for too. In my review of Incognito I mentioned the fact that our consciousness is just a small portion of what our brain is really doing. So fundamentally we agree in the destination.

What I’m not so sure of is that the path is the right path. Josh goes to lengths in The Art of Learning to share that everyone has their own style to learning and that their mastery must be in harmony with their core way of being. So at some level it’s clear that he agrees that not all roads to excellence are the road that he’s followed. What’s more interesting to me is that he speaks of how he would think in Tai Chi and be playing chess – and vice versa. To me that exposes that he’s integrating very diverse – or lateral – thinking. I think that in this he’s creating and adding to both arts in substantial ways. I believe that we’ve got plenty of students that are learning one discipline to “mastery.” I believe that what we need is more people who are seeking to achieve a level of mastery at multiple domains so that they can bring these advances from other areas of experience.

From my point of view, I find that having such diverse interests allows me to connect thinking between disparate ideas. Josh speaks of chunking – the ability to treat multiple things in a group. This, to me, speaks of how people learn. It reminds me of Efficiency in Learning and how to create content so it can be consumed by students. It also connects me to The Art of Explanation and the need to discuss the forest before the trees so folks can put their knowledge in context. It connects me to The Adult Learner and how we teach through the need for the student to know. It connects to Gary Klein’s work in Seeing What Others Don’t and Sources of Power and how we create mental models and how those models allow us to function in the world. Chunking and the related concepts sit at the core of Information Architecture and appeared in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites as well as Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web.

Do I have more color and character for the concept of chunking given a view from learning, information architecture, psychology, etc.? In my mind the answer is yes. I’ve got a perspective on chunking that someone who approached only one of these disciplines could never have. They couldn’t see all the facets simply based on their limited perspectives.

However, as I said, it’s my belief that my disagreement with Josh is a language issue. I think the issue is that depth is a proxy word for a level of mastery. I believe it’s a simplification of the yearning that he feels inside of himself – and one I share – to learn as much as possible about what I’m doing. I believe he’s frustrated as I am with all of the people who are looking for the quick answers, the formulaic solutions, and the easy. He mentions a few times how in chess those competitors who focused on the opening moves rather than the principles weren’t the strongest competitors. From my point of view, they weren’t trying to understand the principles underlying the rules.

Following, Fluent, Detaching

I’ve written before about the idea of the Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master most recently when I reviewed Presentation Zen. In short, apprentice – those who are first learning – are simply following. They’re given instructions to follow. Journeyman – those in mid-career – are fluent. They don’t need specific instruction and they know a few different recipes for getting things done. They’ve got the basics mastered and they know the rules. Masters, however, are different because though they’ve memorized the rules they know when to break them. They’ve learned the principles which sit behind the rules. They’ve learned when a rule is an unnecessary constraint. Josh discusses the positioning of arms and the small advantage having the inside position has – and how he would allow competitors to have this so he could leverage the larger principles – and a physical weakness due to injury.

I believe that what Josh is saying above about depth really is about reaching a level of mastery where it’s possible to detach from the rules and understand the principles in an intuitive and visceral way.

No End to Learning

While there was an end to The Art of Learning – I’m quite sure that there’s no end to Josh’s quest to learn. Are you starting to learn, or are you ending?

Book Review-Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

It was back in October of 2011 when I wrote my book review of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Finding Flow. That was very early on in my process of knowledge building. In fact, I didn’t write my post “Research in the age of electrons” until February 2012. Knowledge building for me is the process described in “Research in the age of electrons” where I highlight, copy, re-highlight, and write. Finding Flow wasn’t the last reference to the flow state. When reviewing my notes I realized that I didn’t mention that Emotional Intelligence referred to flow repeatedly. However, after reading The Rise of Superman I realized I need to come back to Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow and make sure that I really understood it. If I was going to spend my life seeking out better performance and deeper understanding, I needed to make sure that I more fully understood what the “father” of flow thought – and the place for that is his book simply titled Flow.

Finding Happiness

There’s got to be a reason to seek anything and in the case of flow, it seems like the reason is happiness. I’m no stranger to looking at the topic of happiness and trying to decode its mysteries. I’ve tried Stumbling on Happiness and I’ve tried The Happiness Hypothesis. I’ve even tried Hardwiring Happiness. However, none of these books have a recipe for how to get happiness. Perhaps we’ve not come that far since Aristotle concluded that most men and women are seeking happiness.

The answer to finding happiness may not be in external things. Instead the answer to finding happiness may be in how we view things. Our attitude to whatever our circumstances are seems to matter more in terms of our happiness than what is happening to us. Whether it’s the relative stability of Viktor Frankl expressed in Man’s Search for Meaning or winning the cortical lottery and having a more positive set point.

However, equally interesting is that happiness can’t be pursued directly. One can’t say that they’re going to just “be happier.” Even Hardwiring Happiness admitted that there’s no front door to walk through. However, one of the things that we know about the flow state is that its residue – what you’re left with after you’ve been in a flow state is a sense of happiness. So perhaps the road to happiness is through flow. The people who are measurably the happiest are the ones that spend the most time in flow.

Minding the Gap

On the outside in America we’re one of the most affluent countries on the planet. We have conveniences today that our grandparents couldn’t even dream of. Consider the mobile phone that you carry with you and how foreign it would have been to your grandparents when they were a child. If someone told your grandfather that he wouldn’t get the newspaper that he’d read anything he wanted from a screen he wouldn’t believe you. Actually you’d first have to explain what a screen is to him. So in this world of affluence why is it that we’ve got more depressed people. Why do we have so much anxiety – and most tragically so many suicides?

On the one hand we have everything that we could possibly want and more and on the other hand we’re empty and devoid of happiness. Some of this can be explained away by our lack of social involvement and the fragmentation of extended families but not all of it. Bowling Alone spoke about how we’re simply not staying connected to broader groups of people. We’re not joining clubs like our parents and grandparents did. We’re not as philanthropic. We’re more self-absorbed. We’re always connected to one another but we never deeply connect with others.

This started with the Industrial Revolution which shortened the life spans of the members of several generations and made people less happy in the process. We’ve reignited the same forces in the information age to drive our unhappiness.

Converting Leisure into Enjoyment

Despite our striving for material success we still have a relatively large amount of time that we can spend in leisure activities. Except for a small percentage of the population we still have the option to spend roughly a third of our time in leisure activities. However, what leisure activities you choose may lead to more or less happiness. As it turns out to be enjoying something you have to be actively engaged. Despite this all too many of us are sucked into the lure of television and are there by just passive consumers of the experiences that others have packaged for us. We can have a pleasurable experience but not really and enjoyable one without activity.

There are barriers to creating enjoyment from our leisure time. As the book Demand explained, there are hassle maps between what we want to do and where we are. With leisure it could be the drive between you and the bowling alley. It might be the difficulty in lining up your schedule and the schedule of your friend for a game. The barriers no matter how small add-up and make it less likely that you’ll do something – including converting leisure to enjoyment.

The television has had a strong lure since its introduction but over the years we moved from broadcast programs to rebroadcasts to video cassette recorders to digital video recorders and on-demand TV. It used to be that there were barriers to watching something interesting because it wasn’t broadcast. Cable TV lowered that barrier by streaming in much greater quantities of content to choose from. Once we could record content – and the barriers to the recording process were reduced – we can now literally watch almost anything we want at any time. This has given rise to binge watching. We’ve so effectively removed any barriers from using the TV to fill our leisure time that there’s almost no barriers left. I suppose that you have to have power and an Internet connection but reliability of both are so high that it’s quite rare that you can’t watch TV.

Like a household filled with sugary and salty snacks and frozen meat we tend to snack on things that aren’t good for us. While TV can be used for education and thought provoking programs, most TV is filled with situational comedies and increasingly mock reality shows. Instead of being actively engaged in the process of learning and growing we’ve settled for the snack food equivalent of filling our time. While most of us like a sugary or salty treat (because we’re wired that way) we can’t live on them every day.

Conversely, I’m the beneficiary of another set of hassles being reduced. The reading experience is much different than it was. I can find a book on Amazon.com, purchase it, and be reading something new within a minute. I don’t have to go to a store or a library or even get out of my pajamas to get the next book in a series or start to learn about something new. Reading is one of the most often described flow generating activities. The mechanics of it are good encouragement to the flow state. By removing the barriers to actually getting the book it’s easier for everyone to read.

So it’s not like we’re only removing barriers with TV – but we’ve certainly eliminated a lot of them and we’ve made it so easy that many Americans instinctively flip on the TV as they walk into their home. They don’t know what they want to watch but they know that they’ll find something to entertain themselves, even if it doesn’t create any kind of lasting enjoyment.

Mimic another Life

One of the challenges that I have is in being a fan. I struggle to be a fan of anything. I do have favorite artists and experts. However, I seem to be missing the gene that is responsible for converting interest into fanaticism. Having this deficiency makes it hard for me to watch sporting events. I simply don’t care whether the Colts win or lose. For me I don’t feel connected to them. They’re at home in Indianapolis, where I’m at, but otherwise I don’t feel like my interest helps them to win or lose. I don’t believe that I’ll learn something from watching them play that will be valuable – or even interesting – to me. It’s not just football either. It’s auto racing. While I’m interested in some of the drivers that I’ve met, I’m not interested in the race itself. It’s basketball. In Indiana basketball is practically a religion. I can’t bring myself to the alter of basketball.

In junior high school I remember vividly an assembly at the beginning of the year. We were all sitting on the bleachers in the gym. The principal made some perfunctory comments about the school, the year, and the students. However, he chose to pull out an album version of Whitney Houston’s song “Greatest Love of All.” I still remember the smoke top on the turntable and the spinning of the record. The lyrics of the song were resonating through me even though the soulful bass wasn’t. In “learning to love oneself” there seemed to be a hidden message to not try to be anyone else. If you love yourself why would you want to be anyone else?

You can’t manufacture flow in an assembly line. You can’t follow someone else’s recipe for it. You have to find flow yourself. Flow is about inner life and inner game. It’s about managing emotions and keeping our egos in check. Using someone else’s map on the city that is inside our minds won’t work.

Means and Ends

Aristotle separated means from ends. However, flow mixes those together into one cohesive form. Flow is autotelic – that is it is its own reward. While you need an object to focus on in order to get into flow. You need something where your skill and challenge are appropriately balanced. However, what that item is doesn’t necessarily change the state of flow. If the state of flow produces happiness in your life doesn’t it then become the goal? However, with flow the goal is always something else. The end is always another thing. It may come with additional mastery of flow but you can’t attempt to master flow directly. Because flow requires a relaxed state you can’t focus on the state itself. (See The Rise of Superman for more.) Flow is seen as the means to the end of greater productivity in some specific area of our life. It is, however, also and perhaps more importantly, the way that we are able to get happiness in our lives too.

One of the natural traps that nearly everyone falls into at some point is forgetting what we do for enjoyment and beginning to become more focused on the results of the endeavor. Take, for instance, my review of Platform where I highlighted my challenges with Michael Hyatt. I don’t understand how you can write for you (like I do) and at the same time follow a rigid set of rules about how to write. Somewhere along the line it seems like he got pulled off course from self-discovery towards monetization.

I write to force myself to understand things. I’ve said repeatedly over the years that I write my blog for me – not for you. Not that I am not happy that you can find value in the blog. Quite the contrary, it makes me happy to know that I’m helping others. However, that’s not my primary purpose for writing. My primary purpose for writing is to create an object for me to focus my thoughts on. For me the end game is understanding the material deeply. It’s never been to make money from the writings. I use Amazon.com affiliate links for the books that I review because it costs you nothing and can provide some meager income. In truth it doesn’t even pay for my “book habit.” Other than the Amazon.com associates fees I don’t make revenue from this blog.

One might quickly say that I get business from the blog. The truth is that I’ve yet to receive any business consulting work through the blog. Whether that is that people just don’t buy like that, my writing isn’t compelling enough, or people don’t like something about me, it is truth. So quite literally I’ll spend more than 10 hours a week working on reading and writing and get nothing from it. So why do I do it? Well, to learn more.

Would I love to be making money from my blog posts either directly or through speaking and coaching opportunities? Absolutely. Has it become the end that I’m seeking? Not yet. There are numerous people who have converted their hobbies into their vocations and they’ve loved it. However, there are some where the process of converting their hobby to a vocation robbed them of the joy. This is particularly the case with artists who must bow down to what the client wants rather than to their own internal aesthetic voice.

The Necessity of Challenge

In the Matrix movie series it was exposed that humans were enslaved by the machines and given a perfect virtual world without struggle or challenge. The humans rejected the virtual reality and a new virtual reality was created where the humans “in the matrix” were given a world in which to struggle. It seems like as humans we need to struggle. Without the struggle we lose our will to live. Like the rats in Rat Park who were deprived of anything that makes life worth meaning (See Chasing the Scream for more on Rat Park) humans without challenges lose their zest for life.

How Children Succeed talked about the necessity of challenge to instill grit and perseverance. It’s the raw materials for building the skills that we find drive people to the most success – and happiness- in life. When we take away all of the challenges we deprive folks of the things that bring happiness (and frustration) to our lives.

Respect For or Restrained By Fear

If you were to ask me if I fear electricity, I’d answer no. I’ve wired up over 720 single-phase amps in one sitting. I’ve connected two strings of 18 car batteries to power an experimental electric vehicle. I’ve never been afraid of electricity. However, I do have a deep respect for its power and its ability to cause harm. As a result I frequently put in an extra set of safety checks. I monitor more closely when I’m working with large amounts of electrical energy. But I don’t fear it.

Strangely as I reflect on the readings about flow it seems like those who can obtain flow easiest are the people who respect the mountain. They respect the snow. They respect the activity that they’re able to achieve flow with. They don’t fear it. They’re not driven by adrenaline – at least they’re not sustained by it. Instead they’re driven for a respect and they’re making decisions on the fly – or seeing possibilities – without paralyzing fear.

Relating Creativity and Flow

As I mentioned in my review of The Rise of Superman, there’s a curious thing going on. In flow we’re doing lateral thinking. We’re observing more intently. However, the process was kicked off with a cocktail of neurotransmitters which included adrenaline which is known to narrow our focus. We should be narrowing our focus based on this – not broadening our awareness and our lateral thinking that is demonstrated to be happening.

Where things get interesting is when you realize that creativity relies on these long-reach connections, large blocks of lateral thinking, and the ability to simultaneously evaluate a problem from multiple dimensions. At the same time, creativity is shut down by guilt and shame – which are the parts of the brain which get shut off in flow. (See Creative Confidence for guilt and shame’s ability to shut down creativity.) Creativity requires a growth mindset (See Mindset) and the desire to get just a little bit better each day. Flow requires continual growth – with an optimal 4% increase. So given this, what is the relationship between the state of flow and the creativity that the world is seeking more and more?

As our society moves to a “creative class” which encompasses over 30% of people today, do we need to create and instill flow for these creatives to be effective? (See Theory U for the quote from Richard Florida.) It seems like the answer is to create more flow in our lives.

Flow as the Means to the End of Happiness

In the end Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book about how to be happy and productive – through Flow.

Book Review-Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Neurology isn’t a particular favorite of mine as I mentioned in my review of Emotional Intelligence. Honestly I feel a bit like it’s trying to dissect a live cow. Sure you can come to know all of the parts but there’s an emergence that happens when you put the pieces together that leads to unexpected things like mooing. Besides, it seems like carving up a live cow would hurt. However, Incognito is a wonderful journey through how the brain works that doesn’t center on neurology (though Eagleman is a neurologist). Incognito centers on understanding what’s happening inside of our own heads – without our knowledge.

Optical Delusions

The difference between a hallucination and our vision is simply that our vision is grounded to external stimulus. When I watched A Beautiful Mind I was intrigued by the idea that Nash was seeing (and interacting) with people that weren’t there. I couldn’t imagine how he could see people who weren’t there. (I mentioned more about this in my review of Change or Die.)Even more intriguing to me was that he ultimately solved that these hallucinations weren’t real by working them out logically. I wondered how could a brain create such vivid images and them not be real. The problem with this is that our brains are doing this for all of us – all of the time. I don’t mean that we’re all hallucinating. Instead, I mean that the images that we see in our minds aren’t at all what we’re taking in in the form of sensory input.

There are plenty of examples of optical illusions that trick the brain into seeing depth, in seeing pictures that don’t exist, in seeing motion where there is none. Escher’s work with varied perspectives is still a favorite of mine. So it’s not a complete diversion for me to think that our eyes shouldn’t always be trusted. In the age of digital photos and Photoshop we’ve learned that others can trick us with photos. However, what most of us don’t realize is that our brains are tricking ourselves anyway.

One of the creepy things from the book was the blind spot in each eye originally discovered by Mariotte. If I told you that you had a blind spot in each eye – you might initially deny it. How can you have a blind spot in each eye? You can “see” an entire field around you. However, there is a spot where the optic nerve passes through the optic disc where there are no photoreceptors and as a result we can’t see. However, our brain is constantly compensating for the blind spot – and when we have both eyes open the blind spot isn’t in the same position so our brains use the visual data from one eye instead of both.

What happens when you close one eye is even weirder. If there is a background pattern present where the blind spot is our brain doesn’t fill the blind spot with white or black or some other neutral color. It generates a matching background pattern to fill the blind spot. So you’re not seeing the pattern but in order to make the blind spot blend in it creates a fake pattern. So we don’t see reality. We don’t see truth. We see what our brains want to tell our conscious is out there.

Tip of the Iceberg

Our consciousness, what we believe is our “us-ness” is a relatively small construction in the brain. Most of the things that are going on in our bodies are completely outside of conscious control. Most of us can concentrate on our breathing and change our breathing rate. However, most of us don’t have the ability to directly change how we digest food. This is a good thing. I can’t imagine how we might muck up our digestion if we had direct control of it. In fact even without direct control of our digestion we find that there are many gastrointestinal issues that are caused by our mental state. In Change or Die shared a fact – dating back to 1955 – that 80% of our health care costs are consumed by five behavioral issues. Our behavioral issues are generally how our pains and psychological dysfunction surface. (See The Rise of Superman for more on bubbling pains.)

A long time ago I was sick in the hospital with a fever due to a kidney infection. I was really bored. My mother said something about being able to keep my temperature down so I could eat solid food. Somewhere in the fog I remembered this. I managed to figure out how to control my pulse so that I could push it into my fingertips and so that I could reduce my heart rate. I also learned that I could change my skin so that I got goosebumps. I call them “parlor tricks.” They’re not useful for much other than freaking people out. However, there’s a limit to how much I can control things even if I stay focused. I can’t sustain either of these over time. Eventually my subconscious kicks in and pulls me back to a normal state.

That’s one more example of why I love the rider-elephant-path model so much. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis for more.) When the rider gets tired the elephant takes over. It’s the elephant that rules. It just looks like our rational rider is in control. It also demonstrates why we recognize that we have our conscious – and our subconscious. We can’t connect with our subconscious. We have to look for signs (above the water) which give away the subconscious’ position. For instance, a change in our heart rate or our breathing. That’s something the conscious can monitor to see that the subconscious is agitated about something.

Like an iceberg what we see about our mental processing is only the tip of the iceberg – or as Eagleman says the headline of a news story that’s already happened. There’s a phenomenon called What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) where we believe only what we can see. We believe that if we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. (See Thinking: Fast, and Slow for more on WYSIATI.)

Children believe that when mommy leaves the room she’s gone forever. They develop object permanence and suddenly they can accept that mommy is just away for a time. This happens by the time the child is two (See object permanence for more.) Despite this relatively early psychological development we still struggle to believe in things that we can’t see and touch. Whether it’s the challenges of a heliocentric view of the solar system or the idea of germs when things are beyond our ability to see we tend to not believe them or resist them. (See Choice Theory, Thinking: Fast and Slow, Sources of Power, Beyond Boundaries, Change or Die, and Who Am I? for more on confirmation bias.) The simple fact of the matter is that we grasp the abstract through means of the concrete. (See Pervasive Information Architecture and The Art of Explanation for more on how we grasp abstract concepts.)

In other words, we don’t believe it if we can’t see it – or relate it to something we know. So how do we conceptualize our subconscious? Neurologists are trying to figure out the pieces and how they work. However, in truth the real emergent properties of our subconsciousness are a mystery. The fact that we would call them emergent means that we don’t understand how they come to be from the parts that we understand. Is it any wonder then that we have such a small awareness of our sub consciousness and how large it is? We can’t see it and we don’t have any reference model for it.

So how large is our subconsciousness? Is it the 90% of our brain that we don’t “use?” Or is it simply seven times the amount of our consciousness like an iceberg is?

Lessons from Knowledge Management

Over the years I’ve done a fair amount of research, work, and presenting on knowledge management. At the core of the knowledge management discipline is the challenge of extracting and cataloging knowledge. There’s the explicit information that we have written down or at least can write down. However, there’s also tacit knowledge that is difficult to capture and transfer. From riding a bike to flying a plane, it’s hard to help others understand how to do it – without them actually doing it. In my review of The New Edge in Knowledge, I spoke about the pioneers of the knowledge management movement Michael Polanyi and Ikujiro Nonaka and how their views of tacit knowledge differed from “we know more than we can tell” to “unarticulated knowledge awaiting transfer.” Inherent in this conflict is the conflict of the conscious awareness. Polanyi knew that there were things that were unknowable to our conscious mind. Take for instance, chicken sexing – that is the practice of determining the sex of a chick very quickly not sending pictures of chicks via text messages.

Incognito speaks about the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan which can teach people how to quickly and accurately assess the sex of a chick so that the males and females can be handled differently. The problem is that no one can figure out exactly how it’s done. They can’t tell you how you can know that a chick is one sex or another – except through trial and error. There’s no manual. There’s no computer based training. You have to do it to get good at it – and have feedback about your performance.

If we were in command of all of our faculties then we’d be able to articulate what makes us know a chick is one sex or the other. However, as we learned in The Paradox of Choice even trying to access that information can muck with our perceptions like the students given art posters and being asked to write about their choices. Patients with severed corpus callosum wouldn’t rationalize answers when they couldn’t explain their behavior. In experiments where patients were shown something in their right eye causing them to take action and were asked to describe it they made up stories – since language comes from the left hemisphere of the brain. In other words, our brains are in part a rationalization engine, trying to make sense of the world that we operate in – even when it doesn’t make sense.

We’re more than just our consciousness. As Kahneman asserts in Thinking: Fast and Slow, our System 1 (subconscious) tells System 2 (consciousness) what to believe. Our conscious mind doesn’t check what the subconscious passes along – not that it could if it wanted to.

The Brain and ASICs

Our brains, unlike the brains of other animals or even mammals, are uniquely suited towards optimization. We may learn something through conscious processing but quickly our goal is to get that knowledge worked into our subconscious so that we don’t even have to think about it. Consider how much concentration it took the first time you rode a bike, drove a car, or perhaps flew a plane. It took all you could do just to keep up with the task at hand.

However, after years of driving most people barely remember what route they took to work much less the number of stoplights that they hit that were red. We stopped processing driving as a conscious activity. Instead it’s a relatively subconscious or unconscious activity.

We transition our learning from conscious to subconscious. Once we have a good pattern for handling something it’s handed off to the subconscious for execution. If we have really good patterns they’ll get burned all the way down into our DNA – over the course of generations. That’s the uniqueness of humanity. We leverage our relatively slow, power hungry, and error prone consciousness to learn how to build programs that our subconscious can run.

Our brain is an energy hog. It consumes about 2% of our total body weight but also consumes roughly 20% of the energy in the body. It’s a great place to start if you’re looking to cut down on the energy use of the body. In fact, leaving the glucose (energy) expensive frontal lobe engaged all the time is incredibly draining. The idea of converting the patterns discovered by our general purpose computation engine our consciousness into patterns that can be run by our sub consciousness is so useful.

This is much like how in the computer industry we’ll often leverage general purpose computers to do a task until we know the best way to do it then we’ll create something like an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). These are literally hard wired circuits designed to do a task extremely efficiently. While you can use a general purpose CPU to accomplish the same task it will require more power to do so.

We’ve found in our development of processing capacity that it’s advantageous to create solutions that require less energy and so it is for our brain. However, we also need flexibility

Optimization and Flexibility

The problem with ASICs is that they’re inflexible. Once the ASIC is burned it does the one thing very well but it doesn’t do other things well. In evolutionary terms this is bad. As conditions adapt we need to be able to adapt with them. Having an efficient program for hunting wooly mammoth is great until they become extinct or they’re driven away from your hunting areas. It’s important to be able to adapt our programming – even programming that’s been embedded into our DNA when the environmental conditions change and it’s appropriate to learn new programs.

That is one of the reasons that having the frontal lobe is still necessary. It needs to learn new programs and devise new solutions to problems that occur in the environment that never occurred before or that there’s not a program available for.

Going Incognito

You may not be able to peer deeply into your own thinking but perhaps you can go Incognito on a journey of trying to find out more.