The implicit diss is when you are talking about your own life, your own preferences, thoughts, opinions, etc, but under the surface you’re actually trying to make a point about another person’s life, thoughts, opinions, etc.  Usually in a harsh, diss-like, manner.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint what exactly annoys me about this particular style of conversation for a while. And I haven’t been able to pinpoint it because I didn’t have a word for it.

The implicit diss is annoying because the person being judged can’t necessarily call out the dissing that is happening. It’s cloaked. To call it out would appear to be being perhaps too sensitive or navel-gazing for thinking that a person is talking about them when they’re really supposedly about something entirely different.

The implicit diss lives in the sub-narrative of a conversation.  It’s supposed to go mostly unnoticed and unacknowledged, merely a light tap of criticism that may or may not have even been intended.

The implicit diss betrays a (possibly subconscious, possibly not) malicious intent, or insecurity, on the part of the disser.

Rather than calling out implicit disses, the key is to not interpret them as under-handed criticism, but rather interpret them as a potential insecurity being made apparent.  When people reveal insecurities, it’s helpful to think about what that person is afraid of, or unsure about.

If it’s something that has anything to do with you, it might reveal that you have been implicitly dissing them or otherwise making them feel inadequate, and the solution to the problem could be in changing your own behavior.  On the other hand, if it’s something that doesn’t have anything to do with you, then it’s nothing to take personally, and perhaps there’s a way to step out of the criticism’s way, mentally.

For now, I’m just going to try to pay more attention to this particular behavior and sense when I’m implicitly dissing others, and when it’s happening between others.

I like this point.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

From The death of uncool, by Brian Eno (via Rick Webb)

It is weird to notice this change because it is happening right under our feet. It’s difficult to tell if it’s simply because we’re in the present right now that all styles seem to exist in the present, or if our sense of time and style and aesthetic has actually moved from being something that moves and changes to something that simply gets wider and wider.

A couple days ago Kellianne and I were taking a taxi to meet some friends on the hill, and our driver got a phone call. He quickly informed the caller that he was at work and would have to call her later. He hung up and said, “My daughter. She says, ‘You must come home right now!’”  We laughed, then he added, “She’s beautiful. And I have two young sons as well. Sorry, forgive my saying, but 10 days ago, my wife and I, we separated.” Kellianne and I looked at each other sadly, and gave him our best comforting words despite the seeming infinite abyss that stretched between us and the cabbie. A few minutes of silence later, he added, “She said, I am just not the same person.” We sat in traffic up Pike St for a few more blocks, and saw him discretely wipe away a tear at one stop light.

A friend who I know mostly through the Internet, and SXSW, Matt Haughey, has recently discovered that he has a sizable brain tumor. I’ve probably only met or conversed with him a couple times, but he’s widely acknowledged to be a terrific guy, and I wish the best of recoveries for him. I can’t help but put myself in his shoes… to imagine receiving such a startling and life-changing piece of news out of nowhere. These kinds of things happen to all of us, and if it hasn’t happened yet, at some point the frailty and vulnerability of life will make itself known to each of us in its own way.

Coming home from the same night as the taxi top the hill, we came back down the hill and saw Belltown bumping with its usually crowd of drunken, freezing, high-heeled, loud, folk. We scoffed a bit at first, and then one of us said, “They’re just living their life, like we’re living our lives.”

We’re all the same, really. Just living our lives. Continue on.

Our brains love to make connections, tell stories, etc. We all do it. Especially when sleeping, but also when awake. Here’s an interesting article about how creativity comes from this ability to confabulate:

While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature.

via Tall Stories « idiolect.

The whole article is interesting. I’m particularly interested in how our ability to make connections between wildly different things, and our ability to filter those connections so that they have an element of justifiability, might mean that even the sanest of us, and the most rational, are really just the best story-tellers.

Confabulation is how we solve problems. We have a problem, and we let our brains explore potential scenarios until one of them passes all of our self-critiquing filters and presents itself as the best potential answer.

Confabulation is how we understand ourselves and the world. Without it, we’d have nothing but a pool of unconnected thoughts. No beliefs about how things should be, no visions of the future, no understanding of how each of our personalities and beings remain consistent from moment to moment.

We’re all making things up all the time.

Make it up and make it happen.

What matters paradox, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

Sometimes I need to remind myself that the categories that my brain dutifully slots everything that passes its way are merely fabrications that help turn my world into one that I can handle, and aren’t correlated to an actual quality in the world.

Mu.

We’re like sharks. Sharks have to keep moving to stay alive, to breathe. They have to move even in their sleep. We don’t have to physically move, but rather, our brains only notice things that are changing. If we’re in a room with a certain constant smell we’ll only be able to perceive it for a few minutes. If we’re at a job that sorta sucks, we’ll slowly stop noticing exactly how much it sucks.

Same goes for good things. A great new position. A million dollars. A stable relationship.

This implies that in order to keep appreciating something, either it, or we, must constantly change.  Lest we suffocate.

The real point I’m trying to make is not about this eternal thirst for change and novelty, it’s about our threshold for what we notice as change.

The world is always changing around us. And we’re always changing within the world. Therefore there should be no need to seek out novelty… it’s around us all the time! The real source of our suffocation is our sometimes-too-high sensitivity to change.

Not only do we only notice things that change, but as we grow older and our brains become more efficient and noise-resistant, we raise the threshold for what we notice as change. We ignore all the kinds of change that “don’t matter”, and we constantly raise the bar on what “matters”.

This is useful in the sense that it will mean that we’re more likely to notice things that “matter” and not lose them in the shuffle of a million things happening at once. But, this trick of the brain that helps us become more efficient also makes us less likely to notice things that are enjoyable or painful or beautiful or ugly or silly or nonsensical simply for their own benefit.  It’s the noticing of small changes in the world that contributes to our aesthetic enjoyment of it.  The progress of the brain from one of enjoyment to one of efficiency over time can be seen as a benefit of aging. Or it can be seen as a cancerous growth that takes over our ability to enjoy the every day.

Notice small changes around you. Small changes in how you feel, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Don’t worry about bringing anyone else’s attention to these small changes, they’re probably not big enough to have value in that way. These small changes are yours, the reward is in having noticed them, and they don’t need to be saved or shared or captured or memorialized. Just noticed and appreciated.

How to build a scalable website with only one developer, how to stay simple, how to delve into a single thing and find the layers of complexity and richness within it, rather than go shallow and wide, how to be easy on myself, how to sell a condo during the economic slump and the holiday season, how to find a bigger, better, cheaper house, how to lose 10 pounds, how to play the guitar, how to stay focused, how to stay warm in a cold office, how to keep people’s interest in an iPhone app over time, how to survive winter, how to spend less money each month, how to find my running shoes, how to get another photobooth working for a friend’s wedding, how to get my stuff done, how to do my best stuff, how to course correct, how to not feel so much pressure to get things done that I can’t get anything done, how not to disappear, how to be a good parent, how to be a good husband, how to stop biting my fingers, how to relax, how to be a good friend, how to have fun, how to pay back all this debt, how to start a company, how to balance things.

What you should do today, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

I didn’t realize how hard I was being on myself until I took a second to relax and give myself a break. So I wrote this out and have it on my desk until I can get it through my head that the only way to keep going for as long as I want to keep going is by giving ourselves a break and forgiving ourselves for not being 100% every waking moment.

Consider this a public service announcement to remember to relax.

Course correction is made up of a few moving parts:

• A course
• A desire to stay on the course
• A way to monitor your position in relation to the course
• Skills to get back on course when you find yourself off it

Course correction is the immune system of the will, of our conscious.  An immune system on the other hand lives in the subconscious, but could serve as a great model for what course correction should strive to be. The immune system is an amazing invention of biology.  It is a system designed to protect you from the billions of bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins, and parasites that would love to invade your body and make their new home.

Rather than try to know every single possible thing that might go wrong, an immune system tries to determine when something’s simply “not normal”.  Rather than know everything that might go wrong, it just needs to know what normal, or optimal, looks like.  The strength of the immune system is obvious from the fact that, when we die, all of the things that it was keeping in check will basically take over and dismantle our bodies in a matter of weeks.

Think about this in terms of our own goals, and our own course correction systems as it relates to achieving our goals.  How many of us give up on a goal (see New Years Resolutions) the moment we have a single set-back?  That’s evidence of no course correction system at all… as if the first virus to make its way into our system was given full reign upon arrival.

The right course

But let’s step back a bit further. The body has a very complicated and balanced view of “health” that it’s protecting.  It’s almost always true that our immune systems are protecting us and trying to keep our bodies in an optimal state.  When it doesn’t, though, some of the most insidious problems result.

How close are our goals aligned with our optimal selves? A strong immune system that strove to keep us on the wrong path would be just as dangerous as no course correction system at all.  So, it’s obviously important to first have the right course (set of goals) mapped out.  That’s a whole problem in itself. For the purpose of this entry, let’s assume you have the right goals.

Desire to stay on course

Obviously, having a goal isn’t enough to get it done. You need to want to complete the goal as well. This is a matter of building motivation, interest, desire. Another mysterious animal in itself. A good course correction problem is intertwined in the desire to stay on course, mostly in the sense that it should help constantly renew the desire and not let it deplete entirely.  But to begin, there needs to be a pretty strong desire to start with. Every engine needs fuel, and that’s what this is.  The course correction system is more of a gas station along the way.

Components of desire:

• Passion / motivation
• Opportunity
• Momentum
• Positive feedback

Course correction

What happens when you slip from your goal?  Do you hate yourself?  Tell yourself that you aren’t able to do it?  Maybe next time?  Or do you start back up?  And if you start back up, do you have the same amount of motivation and momentum as you did before the setback?  How many restarts do you have in you before the restarts start taking longer to start back up, and before momentum has dwindled to zero?

Course correction not only needs to start you back up, but it needs to re-fill motivation, momentum, and avenues for positive feedback to pre-setback levels.  It needs to pretty much erase the setback from ever happening.  This requires, obviously, a pretty amazing system.  Isn’t it insane that our bodies are able to rebound to 100% health even after a flu or cold that had us on our backs for days?  Isn’t it amazing that we usually don’t have any permanent damage or lack of health after every illness?  Our course correction systems need to strive for this same level of competence.

Our immune systems don’t get demoralized because perfect health hasn’t been 100% achieved. They have almost no emotional response to failure at all, something that we as goal strivers don’t have the luxury of having.

What you need to course correct effectively

You need a lot of energy. The energy needs to come from a calm, strong place, and not leave resentment or martyr syndrome in its wake.  You need to be healthy, and have ways to motivate yourself that are sustainable over long periods of time.  You need to be easy on yourself, able to forgive yourself quickly for slip-ups–the best way to do this is to be sure that your motivations are good and pure, and that you aren’t selling yourself, or anyone else, short.  You need to find ways of getting positive feedback for your work, as that helps generate more motivation and energy to replenish what has been spent.  On top of it all, you need to enjoy the ride.

In some ways, it feels like we need to be superhuman.  But remember this, even our immune systems will eventually fail.  We don’t live in a perfectly sealed container where energy is endlessly replenishable and nothing ever takes on any wear.  We are finite creatures of motivation, will, and health, and all we can do is our best, and that will need to be enough.

Components of a healthy course correction system:

• Energy from positive feedback, enjoyment
• Well-balanced so nothing is needlessly drained to the point of burning out or poisoning you
• No guilt or self-beating-up over mistakes and setbacks
• Embrace that it’s all in flux, constantly changing, and ultimately its own reward and nothing more
• Easy on yourself, quick to forgive

Thoughts?

Fascinating (though somewhat long) article about the idea of what people have been calling the “vulnerability gene”. A gene that makes you more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, aggression, etc. Some new studies are saying that it’s not necessarily only a negative gene, but that it makes you more sensitive to both positive and negative experiences, and could have something to do with the rapid evolution of humans in the last 50,000 years.

Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

via The Science of Success – The Atlantic (December 2009).

I like the colloquial names for the two kinds of genes: dandelion genes (that make you resistant to experiences, and generally stable) and orchid genes (more unstable, but more likely to benefit from positive experience or be damaged by negative experience).

Of course, all of this genetic talk is dangerous, if it encourages stereotypes or feelings of self-worth or pre-determination of personality traits. Still, what it’s really saying is that genetics and experience are interwoven in really complicated ways (some genetics are only triggered by certain environmental conditions) and that really it’s all important, and it’s all malleable, and it all matters.

This post has a ton of Mad Men spoilers if you haven’t seen the Season 3 finale yet.

Mostly, I want to transcribe my favorite conversation in the episode, if not the entire season.  It comes near the beginning, when Don makes the pitch to buy the company back.

Bert Cooper: Young men love risk because they can’t imagine the consequences.

Don Draper: And you old men love building golden tombs and sealing the rest of us in with you.  You’re done, you know that right?

Bert: So I  should just throw away my fortune?  I don’t have the rest of my life to earn it back.

Don: I understand.  I’ll let you go back to sleep.

Bert: Why do you care?

Don: Because I’m sick of being batted around like a ping pong ball.  Who the hell is in charge?  A bunch of accountants trying to make a dollar into a dollar ten?  I want to work.  I want to build something of my own.  How do you not understand that?  You did it yourself 40 years ago!

Bert: That’s true.  But I’m not sure you have a stomach for the realities.

Don: Try me.

Awesome. I think this dialogue has been happening inside my own head now for the last 5 or 6 years.  And probably any other entrepreneur who has to decide between safe stability and risky possibility.  What’s really going on here though?

There is a tension between youth and risk versus age and stability.  It’s easier to take risks when you’re younger for two reasons.  One: you don’t know the consequences as intimately.  Two: you have more time to recover from mistakes and therefore it’s a little less risky.

But there’s another level to it.  Being young and taking risks is also equated with being awake, being alive, and possibly even doing the right thing.  Doing things because you have a passion for it (I want to WORK) rather than because you can turn a dollar into a dollar ten while asleep.  But is that true?

The third level: fear.  Don has lost almost everything, and needs something to cling on to in the midst of his divorce, his past creeping up on him, and his potential obsolescence in the face of joining the “sausage factory”.  It’s as much of a last thing to cling to rather than a choice of pure motivation and passion.  And, it almost comes back to bite him as he realizes that people like Peggy, Peter, and even Roger Sterling know that Don doesn’t actually value his relationships to them, he uses them to his own end and takes them for granted.  He is smart enough to realize this before his social capital is completely depleted.

Roger Sterling: And now you’re sniffing around because I have a golden pork chop dangling from my neck. I want to see what you look like with your tail between your legs. I’m not going to throw it all away just because he doesn’t want to work with McCann.

Don: Do you want to work there?

Roger: You don’t value what I do any more than they do.

Don: I was wrong.  I learned that with Hilton.  I can sell ideas but I’m not an account man.

Roger: You’re not good at relationships because you don’t value them.

Don: I value my relationship with you.

Roger: You do now.

Don: I do.

He admits that he’s wrong to several people in this episode.  He thought he was the shit because of people like Hilton.  When Hilton abandons him, he realizes that he’s not as great as he thought he was.  He has to go back to the people who he’s been using, and he is able to persuade all of them (except Betty, who, it could be argued, he doesn’t really try to win back and therefore probably doesn’t want back).

Winning Pete Campbell back:

Don: Pete, I don’t blame you for bailing out, the way you’ve been treated.

Roger: We want your talent.

Pete: Really, what are my talents?

Roger: You’ll do what it takes.

Pete: No, I want to hear it from him.

Don: It’s not hard for me to say, Pete. You saw this coming, we didn’t. In fact, you’ve been ahead on a lot of things: aeronautics, teenagers, the negro market.  We need you to keep us looking forward.  I do, anyway.

Winning Peggy back:

Peggy: Do you want anything?

Don: Yes I do.  You were right. I’ve taken you for granted. And I’ve been hard on you. But only because I think I see you as an extension of myself. And you’re not.

Peggy: Well thank you for stopping by.

Don: Sit down. Do you know why I don’t want to go to McCann?

Peggy: Because you don’t want to work for anyone else.

Don: No. Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you or me. Then something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.

Peggy: Is it?

Don: With you or without you, I’m moving on. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Will you help me?

This is the third time that Don has said that he needs someone this episode (Roger, Pete, Peggy). It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be alone.

The lesson here

We can take risks, but we can not abandon people.

It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish passion from fear.

If you rally people to your vision, and do it with their best interests in mind along with your own, then risk and fear are not powerful and the illusion of bravery and drive can take you forward.

In many ways, not being alone is the true reward.

In order to not be alone, you have to commit.

Roger: So you want to be in advertising after all.

Before I met Kellianne I was thinking of downsizing my living quarters from 880 to about 300 sq ft.  I’m all for the tiny house movement, and totally agree that we try to fill the space that we live in. Given that I only have a fraction of my attention to devote to my living space, a smaller house means being able to pay more attention to the details.

This guy has a company that designs and builds tiny houses.  He built one for himself that’s 96 square feet (8x12ft).

Homes are shrinking in America. After doubling in size since 1960, the national average dropped for the first time in nearly 15 years (by 9%, the size of an average room). But far from this new average of 2,000 plus square feet are the so-called tiny houses.

From A Tiny Home Tour (via @jasonfried)

Ten Years of My Life is softly relaunching. Happy to see Matt’s long-term photo project coming back to life. That’s the challenge with these long-term projects, how do we keep them on track?  I think it’s all about course correction, not being a perfectionist, and enjoying the big picture that emerges from the small pictures, one at a time.

While browsing the new Flickr App Garden I came across this cool game that I think I’ll start playing, called Noticin.gs.  It’s my favorite kind of game, the kind you play slowly, during your day, that attempts to improve the quality of your day while capturing something novel and interesting about it. Along the lines of 8:36pm and Plus 1.

The rules: They seem to be evolving still, but here are the basics. During your day, you take pictures of things that you notice (interesting things, things you might otherwise not notice about your environment, and they can’t be people), upload them to Flickr, and tag them with “noticings”. Once a day, at 3pm GMT (or 8am PST), they bring in all the pictures from Flickr and you will get points for each photo.  What’s interesting is that the scoring algorithm seems to change depending on the kind of thing you noticed, where you noticed it, etc.  For example:

• +10 for noticing something.
• +5 for noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
• +10 for being the first person to notice something in a certain neighborhood.
• +50 for noticing something during 12pm and 2pm every day for a week.
• +70 for noticing something every day for a week.
• x2 for noticing something that has been lost (until Nov 8th, when this rule will change)

Of course, I know that I have a particular fondness for this because of the point system.  And while I REALLY LOVE that there is some editorial process to this (someone has to be there to approve when something is lost, obviously), I worry about how this will scale.  What if the creators stop wanting to do this every day?  Will the game stop?

They also get points for referencing my favorite self-referencing game of all time, Nomic, in their post about rules.  Nomic is a game where each turn involves the players changing the rules of the game.  It’s one of the most mind-bending and interesting games ever invented.

There currently isn’t anyone playing in Seattle, but I hope to change that sometime today.

Frantic energy comes from sugar, alcohol, stress, fear, deadlines, rivalries, and anger. Calm energy comes from a healthy diet, an exercise routine, enough sleep, good intentions and a clear plan.  They are two ways of gaining that shy doe of motivation.

Frantic energy is quick, cheap, and strong.  Calm energy is slow to build, expensive, and easy to lose.

Almost all of my motivation comes from frantic energy. I bet others are pretty similar to me in this. Nothing motivates like a deadline, nothing gets you working hard like a bill you have to pay off.

But what are the trade-offs of frantic energy?  I’m guessing that the primary one is health.  Burning frantic energy all day long will create pollutants that have repercussions in your long-term health. The hope is that you will reach some kind of big reward before all the frantic energy pollutants kill you. And many people do reach that point, and are able to retire, or at least calm down, or else just burn out and change courses at some point when it is no longer seen as worth it.

Calm energy is difficult to find because it’s not a matter of pulling a single lever, like the coffee lever or the deadline lever, or the beat the competitors lever.  Calm energy requires that a whole system be in good working order: health, clarity of mind, good intention, ability to enjoy good things when they come along, etc.  Any one of those being off could cause calm energy to dissipate, leaving you feeling unmotivated and possibly unfulfilled… making the temptation for frantic energy boosts more alluring.

However, a calm-energy-system in good working order will be self-maintaining.  It will feed itself, it will be sustainable for the long term, and it will increase the quality of all of the systems that it relies on… making one healthier, clearer or mind, with better intentions, and better ability to enjoy the fruits of labor that come.

I’m not sure what to make of these thoughts, other than to simply say them.  I’m still a frantic-energy junkie so it almost pains me to think about this so clearly for once.