Yearly Archives: 2015

Lifestyle

Food for thought

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You think what you eat. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

The brain is a hungry organ. In a human being, it makes up only 2% of total body mass but consumes 20% of available energy.

Input and output: these exist in balance.

The best way to be more creative, more thoughtful, and more productive is to feed your brain.

Better outputs begin with better inputs.

Read books, listen to podcasts, observe the world. Go for a walk. Notice what is going on in your environment. Take an interest in what you see, hear, feel, touch, smell. Be curious.

Feed your brain a healthy diet.

Business

Be Preposterous

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Forward-thinkers have it all backwards. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

preposterous, a. (prɪˈpɒstərəs) [f. L. præposter, reversed]
1. Having or placing last that which should be first; inverted in position or order.

“Life can only be understood backwards,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard.

Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, advises us to imagine what we want people to say of us at our funerals, and to live accordingly.

It’s called reverse engineering. Start at the end, work your way backward.

Put the cart before the horse. Read the last page first. The answers really are at the back.

“In my end is my beginning” – T.S. Eliot

Here is a great idea from the writer James Altucher: Take a sheet of paper and a pen. In the middle of the sheet, write THAT’S CRAZY. Now work backwards, figuring out all the pathways to THAT’S CRAZY.

James Altucher is crazy, because he doesn’t let THAT’S CRAZY get in his way, ever.

THAT’S CRAZY is where you want to end up in your life. It’s your wildest dreams, your fantasies, the things you tell yourself you can never have, or do, or be.

Why? Because that’s crazy.

So be crazy, and be preposterous.

Business

What is communication?

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Communication breakdown is not always the same. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

It is the hardest simple thing you will ever do.

That is why communication failure is at the root of many ills.

And, yet, in our hearts and minds we human beings believe that communication is an ordinary, ever-day act—as natural to us as breathing.

Well, what if your communication strategy has emphysema?

Think about this: homo sapiens is older than words, by many thousands of years. We evolved to communicate without a verbal language.

Emotion, gesture, posture, and facial expression trump verbal communication. We need these so much that in the age of social media we have found ways to interpolate them.

☺

Every face is an open book.

Our communication styles vary. We each have a language of our own. Asperger syndrome is a communication style. The language of poetry is another.

Understand, and be understood. This, in a phrase, is the goal of all communication.

Relationships, marriages, and politics all depend upon effective communication.

Businesses fail when their internal and external communications are shoddy.

The work of managing internal communication is Organizational Development.

The work of managing the effective, bi-directional flow of information is Public Relations.

The work of understanding your audience’s needs and perceptions is Marketing.

Figure 1: the three modes of communication

Figure 1

Do you understand yourself and your communication style? Do you understand the audience? Are you a seller speaking the language of sellers, when you should be speaking the language of buyers? Do you have the right message for the wrong audience, or the wrong message for the right audience?

What does communication mean to you, and to your business?

Lifestyle

Authenticity

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“I am, sincerely.” ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

Babe Ruth

Here is something that has happened to every parent:

Child: “Look, mommy. That person is fat!”
Parent: “We don’t say fat, dear.”

The child is authentic. Over time, she is socialized. She learns to be something that is socially acceptable. She simulates, equivocates, euphemizes, gets along.

This is called Being Polite.

An adult does not say, “That person is fat.” Unless he is running in the GOP primary.

Straight-talk, candor, directness, honesty—we value them so much that the simulation of authenticity has become a political art.

We call this hypocrisy.

To paraphrase Captain Pierce, of M*A*S*H: “Authenticity? I could fake that.”

An authentic Babe Ruth signature is extremely valuable. A fake one is worthless.

Give us the authentic goods, not the knock-offs; the original, not the derivatives; the Real Deal, not the imitations.

We cast our contempt upon lies. We want an honest opinion. We applaud sincerity. We are wounded by deception, white lies, double-talk, lack of candor.

“I’m looking through you. Where did you go?” sang Paul McCartney. “I thought I knew you, what did I know?”

What is real? What is authentic?

Deception is undertaken for gain. When authenticity is a valuable currency, expect counterfeit.

Authenticity is never for gain: it always costs something. It is risky.

To be authentic is to follow your conscience, not the consensus. It is to be true to oneself, even if it hurts.

And it will hurt.

That is because authenticity requires that we be open and vulnerable.

It is not enough to say “I am great,” even if that is objectively true. To speak only of your triumphs, strengths, virtues, and accomplishments is to fall short of the standard of real authenticity.

Authenticity demands that we be honest about our fears, doubts, failures, weaknesses, hopes, and loves.

The authentic person is exposed. His humanity is there for all to see in its glorious imperfection.

An authentic dollar is what it is. We accept it as legal tender, even when the bill is wrinkled and soiled.

Likewise we reject the counterfeit, no matter how shiny it may be.

Lifestyle

Warning: this is bad for your health!

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Warning: this article contains healthy subject matter ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

Warning
Photo courtesy of Thomas Leth-Olsen, Flickr

Some things are so bad for you, they come with warning labels.

WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.

Many things that are bad for you don’t come with a warning label. Yet you know they are bad, because you can feel the badness.

Some things that are bad for you may be good for someone else. Health is complicated. It is individual. It comes in various forms.

Mental health, physical health, emotional health.

It is up to you to make your own labels.

WARNING: Reading The Comment Section Only Makes You Angry.

WARNING: You Are Getting Nothing Of Value From Social Media, And You Know It.

WARNING: You Are Surrounding Yourself With Toxic Relationships.

What do you love? What makes you feel good? What nourishes your body, soul, and mind? Make a health label for this, too.

WARNING: You have let your love of nature fall by the wayside. Put down the smart phone right now and go for a walk in the woods.

Write a list of ten things that make you feel good. A favorite song, a movie, a friend, a place, a meal, a book that changed your life, a vacation, a hobby. Whatever it may be, write it down.

When was the last time you enjoyed these pleasures? Days ago? Months? Years?

WARNING: Life is busy. We are all surrounded by distractions. It is easy to lose sight of the things that make you healthy, and to fill your life instead with unhealthy substitutes.

Put your list of loves where you are most assailed by distractions and toxicity. It is your personal warning label.

Lifestyle

On knowing your limits

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Everything is impossible, until it isn’t. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

Weightlifter
Photo courtesy of Peter Reid, Flickr

What would it be like to live in another era, or another country? What would it be like to live your life as a king, as a slave, or as the opposite sex?

What would it be like?

The many answers to the many forms of this question may be less interesting, and less useful, than the observation that most of us never bother to answer it.

One of the most powerful insights into our human condition is the tendency of our species to live within the limits.

– the limits of our physical endurance and strength
– the limits of our understanding
– the limits of our beliefs
– the limits of our intelligence
– the limits of our will, knowledge, and comfort

There are names for those who test limits.

The weightlifter who can comfortably lift x pounds sets a goal to lift x+10 pounds.

The runner who can complete 3 miles in 25 minutes determines to run 3 miles in 20 minutes.

These people are called athletes.

The person who imagines what it would be like to wake up as a giant cockroach, and who writes a book about it, is called an artist.

The athlete wages a battle against physical and mental limits. The artist confronts the limits of imagination.

There is no name for the people who never test their limits, because they are simply ordinary human beings.

Limits show us where the possibility of growth exists.

The limits of political will define the status quo. Will is the wall that encircles every social order.

The politician says “that’s impossible,” when what he really means is, “I lack the will to do it.”

Don’t accept the world as it is, because it will be that and nothing more.

Questions push up against the limits of what is known. The answers lie beyond. Don’t ask questions, and you will forever live within the limits of your current knowledge.

There are emotional limits, mental limits, physical limits, psychological limits.

Fear, lack of confidence, comfort, doubt, resignation.

Everything has an absolute limit: but since we so often accept the given limits as if they were absolute, we don’t explore the realm of the possible.

What is impossible? Airplanes, medicine, going to the moon. A 2-hour marathon. Time travel. The line between what is and what could be is a line we are re-drawing every day.

Artists, athletes, explorers, innovators, and philosophers do not accept limits. They identify that which is unknowable, undiscovered, unseen, unthinkable. They know, discover, see, and think.

Find a limit and push against it. Accept nothing as it is, and it will soon be something else.

Lifestyle

Time to trick your brain

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Think outside the watts. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

Brain

Your brain is lazy. Here is the proof.

Take a piece of paper and a pen. Make two dots. Below the dots, draw a line. Like this:

Smile

Your brain decides immediately that this is a face and files the information accordingly. But two dots and a line could be any number of things, or nothing.

We know it’s not a face, but we can’t not see a face. The brain is a tyrant.

Your brain, the lazy tyrant, takes the easiest route.

Every piece of information that the brain receives is treated in the same way, usually without your awareness. It organizes the world into boxes, whether you like it or not.

In a perfect world, from your brain’s point-of-view, nothing new or strange ever happens. Dots and lines are forever going to be faces. Your brain is not interested in whether or not it’s really a face. It’s interested in putting the information into a box, already.

Everything is assigned by the brain to pre-fabricated categories determined by assumption, prejudice, routine, familiarity, and efficiency.

To do this, your brain needs less than 20 watts of electricity.

According to Moore’s Law, the power of computers will double every two years. A computer as powerful as the brain would consume 10,000,000 watts of energy, about the amount required by a small city.

Your brain is more interested in efficiency than it is in insight or innovation. It has evolved to make quick decisions in potentially life-threatening situations, with minimal expenditure of energy.

The brain thrives on routine.

And so, we are creatures of habit, set in our ways.

The script in our head keeps us from considering new ways of seeing and being. The brain is happy to remain set in its ways. This is efficiency.

To change your life, you first have to overcome the lazy tyrant that is your brain.

Go somewhere you have never been before—a country, a neighborhood, a part of town. Surround yourself with unfamiliar people and languages. Eat new foods, redecorate your office, shake up your routine. Make your brain think new, more healthy thoughts.

Reinvent yourself and reinvigorate your life by making your brain do something it doesn’t like to do—break out of the routine.

Politics

Right Brain. Left Brain.

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Today the technocrat, tomorrow the artist. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

The historian looks backward in time to understand the present.

The lawyer argues from precedent.

Technocrats study the world as it is and apply rational, systems thinking to their endeavors.

Interpretation, argumentation, and rational systems thinking.

Artists create something from nothing. They see the world that does not yet exist, the world that may never exist, the world that the powerful do not want to exist.

Creation.

Imagination is an act of will. To create something from nothing is to choose a radical form of human freedom.

Rational thought is also an act of will. To understand the world as it is, and to apply this knowledge to human society, is to choose the freedom of living according to natural law.

The world was created perfect. We shall create the perfect world.

Human nature is fixed and eternal. Human nature is a creation of human beings.

The laws of the natural order must prevail. Human freedom must prevail.

Progress is an illusion. Progress is the human story.

We must look to the past for our answers. The answers will be found in the future.

Conserve. Progress.

Right. Left.

The will to imagine the world in radical new ways versus the will to conserve and manage it as it is: this is human politics.

Politics

This is why you hate politics

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I’m the King of the Castle; you’re a dirty rascal. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

politics

A zero-sum-game is a game of winners and losers. For every winner, a loser; for every loser, a winner.

A zero-sum-game is a game of gains against losses, of distribution, of competition, of conflict.

I gain X at your expense. My gain of X is balanced exactly by your loss of X.

By necessity, a zero-sum-game is an attempt to gain advantage over others, employing tactics and power.

In a zero-sum-game, we are not all in this together. We are divided. Our interests are not the same.

The reality is that most people live their day-to-day lives playing a non-zero-game. We seek win-wins. We are not in conflict with our friends, our families, our neighbors.

We prefer harmony over conflict, co-operation over competition. We negotiate and share and look for the greater good.

Life in a healthy human community is not a zero-sum-game, but politics is a zero-sum-game.

You belong to Party X. I belong to Party Y. One of us must defeat the other.

A vote is a unit of marginal utility. We compete for votes.

My 51% of the votes does not give me 51% of the power, or the authority, or the right to govern and to legislate. I get it all. Your 49% of the vote gives you 0% of the power.

In everything other than politics, we seek to make the pie bigger. We want to ensure everyone gets a slice, and that we deal with others as much as possible in a spirit of fairness, respect, and co-operation.

In politics, I must win and you must lose. We cannot share. We are in conflict. We can not cooperate. The values and morals of ordinary human life do not apply, and must not apply.

A zero-sum.

Politics

Money, politics, and marketing research

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Money and politics. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

In the 2011 federal general election, 61.1 percent of the 23,971,740 eligible voters of Canada voted.

A majority government was formed by 39.62 percent of this 61.1 percent.

Here is a graph of the historical trajectory of voter engagement.

Voter Turnout

39.62 percent of 61.1 percent is 23.79 percent. Under ¼ of eligible voters in Canada elected a majority government in 2011.

As voter engagement declines, mobilizing voter engagement becomes an increasingly valuable commodity.

1,323,927 votes separated the majority party and the official opposition—or 9% of the actual vote and 5.5% of the eligible vote.

In markets where small margins determine big outcomes, targeted campaigns are required. Targeted marketing campaigns require enormous market research.

Market research is expensive.

When you realize that everything depends upon mobilizing the 5.5% to capture an elusive 9%, the value proposition becomes clear. The rules governing money and campaigning noticeably change.

For example:

Table

What is the value of a vote? This is the $125-million dollar question, and it has an answer.

The value of a vote depends upon the likelihood of someone voting for you.

Those who will never vote for you, no matter what, have low value—because they cannot be bought.

Those who will always vote for you, no matter what, have low value—because they don’t need to be bought. Money spent on either of these categories is wasted.

The most valuable voters are undecided. They are disengaged, low information voters. They are swing voters. They are waiting to be persuaded. They can be bought. In all likelihood, they must be.

They are the elusive 9% who determine everything. They are all that matter.

Money, marketing, and modern politics.

First Nations, Interviews

An interview with Justice Murray Sinclair

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Wayne K. Spear in conversation with Justice Murray Sinclair | August 1, 2015
Murray Sinclair
Photo by Fred Cattroll

The reality is that until we have fundamental change about the way we see things and think about things, there’s not going to be effective change

WKS: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released an Executive Summary this June, and in December you’ll be releasing the full TRC report. What can we expect from that?

JMS: Many people are still looking for the basis for why we said what we said. The full report will reveal all of that. We have to produce that report in French and English, so that takes time.

WKS: At the final TRC event in Ottawa, the media seized on the phrase “cultural genocide.” Do you think this was a good place to start the conversation about the meaning of residential schools and reconciliation? Or would you have preferred the focus to have been elsewhere?

JMS: I was quite fine with it. We knew when we were writing the report that it was going to be the big question. It’s not only important to Survivors, but I think Canada and the political leadership of the country needed to know what we were going to say about it. It’s an important part of the foundation for the conversation going forward. It puts all of this experience into a proper perspective. This was not simply nice people who made a mistake. This was a truly unacceptable intention to wipe out Aboriginal people through the elimination of their cultures.

WKS: During the TRC you had occasion to comment on murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada. Your comments made me think of the death of Helen Betty Osborne and your work with the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba. It seems that little has changed. Looking back over you long career, do you feel there’s been much positive progress?

JMS: I’ve always maintained that the kind of change we need—the change I’ve been talking about since the AJI [Aboriginal Justice Inquiry] days, which is really systemic change—is going to take a long time to achieve. It’s going to take several generations before we can realistically say that we are on our way to a decent end. Changing systems requires changing the way people believe about the law, they way they believe about their political systems, the way they believe about their institutions, and the way they believe about how they’ve been educated themselves. Those challenges are hard for people to come to terms with.

I think we expect that there will be some conscious, and unconscious push-back even, on the part of the people who are going to wonder if there’s not a different way of doing it. The reality is that until we have fundamental change about the way we see things and think about things, there’s not going to be effective change.

WKS: How do we even have a conversation about systemic change when we are on the margins—of the media, of the institutions which will necessarily provide a space for conversations to happen? Aboriginal people have to be invited into these spaces, at someone’s good grace. It sounds to me like we may need to envision and create new institutions, new spaces to host the discussion about the change we need.

JMS: If we start thinking about things that way, we will immediately reject any solutions, because the idea of building from scratch is too overwhelming for most people. But what we’ve said in our report is that you can take what we now have, and you can build on that. This came out of the past. This will soon be our past. We need to figure out how do we take what we now have and change it enough that we can be assured that, in the future, we will have a better relationship, starting with a vision of what the future is going to look like. We have to ask ourselves “Is what we are doing each step of the way going to get us to that vision?” It’s feasible. Highly possible.

WKS: Thank-you, Justice Sinclair.

JMS: Thank-you.

External links: TRC | Murray Sinclair Biography | Settlement Agreement

Business

Mining for your data gold

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To give is to receive. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

Data
CC image “Data storage—old and new” courtesy of Ian on Flickr

Do, Dare.

To the English-speaking reader, it looks like an inspirational slogan.

In Latin, it is a verb. Do, Dare, Dedi, Datus: I give, to give, I have given, I am given.

Data are things given.

We live in a world of data. As you navigate the Internet, you give. You are given.

Do, Dare, Dedi, Datus.

You give yourself away. Your Google searches, your browsing history, your conversations with friends.

User-generated content, marketing, and advertising are converging. You are the copy writer and the content marketing department and the customer.

The ads that you see on Facebook are echoes of your posts. This is called re-marketing.

Too much is given, and yet not enough. Your age, gender, location, and income. Your web history. Your click-throughs and conversions and bounces. Your likes and favorites.

Adaptive marketing seeks to tailor the browsing experience to the individual user. The problem is not lack of data, it is abundance.

The future belongs to the experts—to those who can interpret data. You are the expert on you.

That’s why you must become the snitch and the mole and the collaborator. We are all collaborators in this work of giving ourselves, and others, away.

Collaborative filtering is used by Amazon to recommend books. If you and I both enjoyed reading Y, the fact that I enjoyed reading X suggests you, too, will enjoy reading X.

Once upon a time, your personal details were gold. They were secrets surreptitiously mined. You had to be taken, without your awareness.

Then you learned to give. You became data. There was no more guessing at your inner life, drawing upon hit-and-miss clues like your age and zip code. You knew where your gold was, and you gave it away.

The future is convergence and integration and collaboration. You are the creator of the advertising script woven into your friends feed, the conductor of a private focus group, the expert. You are the giver of all that is gold.

Business

Brother can you spare a two-dollar bill?

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2-dollar-bill
Use value versus perceived value. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

There are about 1.5 billion US $2 bills in the world. A $2 bill is worth $2.

Two-dollar bills are scarce, yet you can get one at any time from a bank.

When most of us get one in a transaction, we put it in a drawer, because we perceive it as valuable. Perception yields scarcity, and scarcity yields perception.

How did 2-dollar bills become scarce?

The answer is use value. When US notes were introduced, in the late 19th Century, you could buy most anything with a dollar. The two-dollar bill lost a use-value battle.

This is why there are no slots in an American cash register for a two-dollar bill.

Because people are creative, they manufacture use value for two-dollar bills. This is called a Spend Tom Campaign.

A two-dollar bill stands out. The person who uses it gets attention. Attention is value.

Tip: give a waitress a two-dollar bill, and she’ll remember you.

In the past, companies have chosen to give their employees $2 bills to draw attention to their economic contribution to the community. Two-dollar bills have been used as a marketing tool by the tourism industry, by sports teams, and by champions of the Second Amendment.

Scarcity and attention. The power of perception. Find something with perceived value that is scarce but readily available, and leverage it as a use value.

Lifestyle, Wayne's Picks

This is the meaning of your life

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When you die, the people who loved you unearth your significance. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

There we all stood, looking at the man’s tattoo. We knew what it was, but no one could think of the word caduceus.

Everyone knows what a barber pole signifies, few know what it means.

No matter how long your life, it can be reduced to a sentence.

Joe is funny—he’s a man who will always help a friend: he has a big heart.

Significance and meaning.

The word fossil means something dug up. Many bones were dug up before their significance was known.

For centuries, astronomy was the reigning science. The word paleontology was invented in 1822, at a time when the significance of the earth sciences was finally understood.

Until the nineteenth century, we looked to the heavens for meaning. Then, geology taught us to look down.

We forget the dictionary meaning of things because that is not their significance. A barber pole signifies that “I can get a hair cut here”—a caduceus (because it is often confused with the Rod of Asclepius) that “I can get medicine and be well.”

While we live, we struggle with meaning. When we die, the people who loved us unearth our significance. They are the paleontologists of our lives. They are the experts.

Imagine what you want them to say, and live accordingly.

Business

The power of Why?

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Your clients are giving you valuable answers. ✎ By Wayne K. Spear

There are a lot of wonders, mysteries, and unanswered questions.

Are there multiple universes, is there intelligent life on other planets, is it possible to travel backwards in time, how do birds know where to fly in winter?

I met someone who studies migratory birds. Birds, I learned, use ultraviolet light, the sun, and even the positions of stars to find their way.

An answered question can be as mysterious and awe-inspiring as an unanswered one. Questions are portals to wonder.

Just about everything in the human and natural world is an answer to a question and/or the solution to a problem.

Numbers on houses, birdsong, pneumatic tires, leaves.

Every day the world is evolving to solve problems and to answer questions. Pay attention to this.

People are mysterious, especially in business. What do they really want? What do they really need?

Take note of the solutions people are willing to pay you for. These customers are bringing you your answers as well as their questions.

There are times people don’t really need what they tell you they need, or want what they tell you they want. We all come up with poor answers. And the solution to poor answers is better questions.

Listen carefully. Your clients will give you valuable information if you ask the best question of all.

Why?

– We need this quick solution.
– Why?
– To communicate better with our customers.
– Why?
– Because the benefits of our services are not understood.
– Why?
– Because we don’t have a clear sense of our brand.
– Why?
– Because we need help.

Use questions to migrate from something your client’s don’t need to something that they do.

Why? is the ultraviolet light, the sun, and the stars that will help you find the way.