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.

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.

Still thinking about the conditions needed to do your best stuff.

I find myself going in cycles of high productivity and low productivity, and am wondering if that cycle is necessary or if there are ways to avoid the low productivity part of the cycle.  One part of me says that the low part of the cycle is necessary as a way to rejuvenate between periods of high productivity.  One reason for weekends.  But through practice I’ve learned that my high/low productivity cycle rarely adheres to the 7-day week. Hence all the books, right?

I have long had a funny theory about the nature of passion. My theory is that passion is merely caring about something more than it’s worth. It makes sense that passion is not rational, because otherwise rationality wouldn’t have the stigma of being somewhat passionless. Right?

If passion is, at its core, a mistaken accumulation of caring, you would think that it’s something that should be corrected. Rather than take that route, I think that the fact that passion is rationally a mistake says more against rationality than it does about passion.

I justify this because there are a few passions that we all have which are completely irrational, and yet are core to our sense of selves.  For example, the desire to live.  We all know that in the long run, we’re going to die.  That the things we are striving for now will all have to be given back at the grave.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have to care about life.  We should have a strong passion for the short lives we’ve been given, and this is the same spring from which we get most of our passions.  As a way of fighting back against the futility of our own mortality.

Back to the high/low productivity cycle. One could argue that the low part of the cycle is about resting. But the truth is that the low part of the cycle, at least in my case, is about 10x more stressful than the high part of the cycle. During the low part, I endlessly pace back and forth and wonder why I’m not getting as much done. Wondering where my motivation has gone. Question my own ability to produce, or be creative.

In a way, the low part of the cycle is like death. It feeds my fear of incompetence, and throws log after log into the fire for the need to produce.  Then, when some threshold is met, and I’m able to pull my head around and get working again, that accumulation of energy, fear, fight, and will burns brightly during the high productivity part of the cycle.  It makes me care more than I should about working, about creating, about building.

But of course, passion is exhausting, and that fire eventually runs out.  Motivation without passion is about caring about things exactly as much as they should be cared about. And maybe that isn’t enough to really make significant progress. And self-doubt comes in, and the low productivity part of the cycle begins.

If this is true, then rationalizing it out as I have could be dangerous. If I start thinking about the low productivity part of the cycle as being a necessary part of the creative cycle, I might become too lax during it and not generate the same level of panic, fear, and passion that is required to launch me into the high productivity part of the cycle.

And this is where I usually end up, after having thought about it too much.

Isn’t fear’s best costume the appearance of wisdom? Is it possible to separate the two in a mixture? How often do we rationalize something with facts, anecdotes, statistics, and group agreement when really we’re covering up the fact that we’re afraid?

Of course, sometimes wisdom can lead to fear. Putting all of your money on black at a roulette table is something that should be scary, right?

But what about those times where there’s simply fear but not wisdom? Going somewhere you haven’t gone before. Doing something new. Putting something to the test. Starting a new job can be scary, but by default it’s not necessarily an un-wise thing to do. And yet it’s easy to imagine rationalizing the choice away.

What tests are there to take to help determine if your choices are being made based on wisdom, wisdom and fear, or just fear?

An interesting post from Alice, excerpted here:

I’d argue that attention is an important part of the status metric; but I don’t think more attention always translates to more status (the term “famewhore” comes to mind). But perhaps the attention is what encourages people like Julia Allison or Nick Starr to continue living public lives, even as they receive a great deal of negative attention at the same time. I would be interested to see if attention of any kind correlates with participation, or whether it is only positive attention; if the YouTubers had thousands of hits, but an equal number of vitriolic comments, would they continue to post videos?

Finally: We hear a lot about the “attention economy” or “publicity culture,” in which the most valued skills are those which increase attention. And many people decry this culture for bubbling-up sensational, sexual, or violent content– or just short bursts of info-nuggets– rather than meaningful, thoughtful, difficult ideas.

via tiara.org.

I definitely think that attention of any kind (positive or negative) would be found to correlate with participation.  Attention will motivate you to participate because it is a venue for communication, and regardless of whether you feel encouraged to continue what you’re doing, or encouraged to defend what you did, it seems like either way you’ll be strongly compelled to continue to participate.  Maybe Sarah Palin is the exception here, but I doubt it.

So, yes, attention is a form of status, but it’s not necessarily going to be a rewarding or intrinsically valuable kind of status.  In fact, perhaps this is the simplest argument against trying to game the system of attention / status / fame / popularity.  It is a self-feeding ecosystem of increasingly-growing participation that can grow and grow and yet not necessarily have any direct link to value.

To de-link attention and status, perhaps it’s better to use the concept of reputation instead of status.  They are similar–they are both given to you by other people / society in general, however a good reputation implies a certain amount of respect.  High levels of status merely imply feeling like you’re higher on some social ladder than another without saying why. Any celebrity will benefit from their own celebrity status and attention (special access, more opportunities, special treatment, etc), however, not every celebrity will be said to have a good reputation, and therefore not every celebrity will be able to say they are living a rewarding life, one that builds meaningful and loyal relationships with people while also maintaining their own sense of self and ability to respect themselves.

On the other hand, non-celebrities can also achieve this form of status even without the incredible amount of attention that would give them access to the perks of high status.

The discrepancy between status and reputation can cause people to exhibit feelings of hate, unfairness, and disgust commonly seen in our own treatment of people who abuse the power of their societal status.  Unfortunately, reputation doesn’t have the same direct relationship to attention that status does, and therefore many things of high reputation lack the exposure of their high status cousins.  It’s unfair, possibly, but a natural result of sticking to what matters (being a respectable person) instead of doing whatever it takes to game the system and get as much attention as possible.

Every day or so, I’m going to post to the @enjoymentland Twitter account a set of three words that hint at a fourth word (described in the post from a few days ago, Dress, dial, flower).  In the case of “dress, dial, flower” you would dm me back “sun”.

In the case of “sleeping, bean, trash” you would dm me with (hover for answer).

In the case of “loser, throat, spot” you would dm be with (hover for answer).

And the tough one from that previous entry was “man, glue, star” (hover for answer).

I’m thinking of building a quick iPhone app around this idea, but sort of want to gauge interest in the game first.  Also, I want to see if the accuracy (or number of correct answers) fluctuates much from set to set.

I will think about posting the winners, stats, and maybe any close answers right before the next set gets sent out.  Not sure yet.

So, if you’re interested, friend @enjoymentland if you haven’t already, and wait for the first game (or see if there have been any previous sets to play).