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If you recognize that BS is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but, “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?”

This, from one of the stories below, is a critical success factor―at work and in life. 

Most people never follow their dreams partly because of it. They focus on how daunting it feels to even start. But we never start from the beginning, do we? There's an expression in storytelling: in medias res. It means in the middle of things. It's a narrative device that helps you pull readers into a story quickly. 

A couple of examples to illustrate. 

"It's 10:47 PM on Wednesday evening. I ask my son to take a picture of me to understand that I am not dreaming. "And where do I send it to you?" He says. Later you'll understand the reason for the question. I am in / on foot at the totem pole of the McDrive in Trento Sud, waiting to make my reservation.
This is a story of how the cell phone has swallowed our lives, of how we make mistakes under stress."

Gianluca Diegoli writes about e-commerce e digitale. In my translation, I moved to active from passive voice, because it's a personal story.

"What was Sarajevo? "A legendary multi-ethnic reality, where the rabbi went to dinner with the Imam and where the Orthodox priests went hunting in the mountains together with the Catholic ones, where in the homes of Christians there was always a pot that had never contained pork, to be able to host Muslims and Jews. A city where I had seen a real cohabitation and the birth of a new non-nationalist generation ». The miracle of Sarajevo ended in the first days of April thirty years ago, when a siege began that would last almost four years and would have caused 12,000 dead and 50,000 injured. Eventually, Sarajevo's population would almost halve."

Mario Calabresi is a journalist. My translation was more literal, because he opens with a statement of facts to lay the ground for a more specific story that will follow.

That emotional scene pulls you into the story. Right then and there, emotion is when you decide to pursue something. Perhaps your dream. There's more about middle-principles below, because this is another valuable set of thinking tools.

You can reframe a lot
if you don't care who gives you credit.  


You get a certain sense of freedom with that. Because you and you alone can raise the stakes. I decided I was going to be a simultaneous interpreter in America when I was six years old. It took me more than twenty years to get there. And I made plenty of mistakes. But never once have I wondered about who was going to think less of me because it was taking so long.
 
The problem with social media is that it's too performative. It's really hard to resist. I don't care if you tell me you've got no ego. You do it anyway, because you're human. Social validation is part of what makes us tick.

Another trap we fall into, and we all do, is to try to find fault in others. I don't mean the big stuff, we do plenty of finger pointing there. Even the small stuff. Literally, you'd be waiting at the cash register somewhere, and there's this annoying person chatting up the clerk. Have you noticed getting impatient? 

Finding faults in others is a reaction. After all, we can't control what other people do. But here's where it gets interesting. When you reframe you discomfort or annoyance or frustration as someone else's fault, you ease the foot off the responsibility pedal: "It's not me." The other thing that happens is that you feel bad stuff should not happen to you.

[insert pause here to reflect]

[soothing music, maybe classical? Eno?]

Here's where it gets sticky. When you interpret problems as the crimes of clear perpetrators, you open a never-ending cascade of retaliations. Of course, there are faults. But it's a bit less linear than we suspect. That person at the cash register just realized something important. Or is anxious and chatting is a way to feel more at ease. The point is: people don't make you late. 

They can (and do) however, test your patience. We're all familiar with the chatbots (which don't solve the problem) and texts from unknown numbers (phishing schemes), and finally the gazillion calls and emails we all get all day (spam) and now the messages through social media. All in pursuit of scale through cheap labor. Spam-as-a-Service. it's a thing.

I wrote a couple of articles this week. A conversation with Anita Roddick about embodying business values. A question to test whether intelligence is artificial. And my take on how technology is impacting narrative and culture.

I've gone back to the original "Buy me a Dragon" button. Because PayPal has an atrocious customer experience. And I decided life's too short to spend it with chatbots and horrendous AI. I'd rather spend it doing something useful for our collective benefit. 

I'm doing a deep dive on the art of the interview for a playbook. (Not the job interview. All the other kinds of conversations we use to discover things). If this is something you do a lot of, I want to talk to you. Also, if you have questions or are curious about interviewing, I want to talk to you. Either way, hit reply and we'll take it from there.

 

1
MIDDLE-PRINCIPLES THINKING

"What really creates weak, fragile thinking is not reliance on analogies or distaste for numbers, but reliance on social validation for your psychological payoffs. Where products of thought are merely a way to feed recognition hunger, they tends to be weak and breed timidity and tastelessness instead of boldness and taste." Venkatesh Rao on Fermi Estimates and Dyson Design.

+ "Fermi-Dyson thinkers avoid shallow distinctions like physics versus engineering, theory versus experiment, or even humanities versus STEM. Those distinctions are for minds trapped by the status distinctions that matter within institutions."
 

2
DEEP LISTENING

"The art of impact evaluation, therefore, is not to publish fancy reports, but to apply it in such a way that it deepens the internal understanding of issues at hand and strengthens the collaboration between actors. When this is the case, It builds empathy and human connection, and enables stakeholders to jointly develop shared meaning and scenarios for social change and transformation. In other words, impact evaluation is based on and deepens listening." Jannik Kaiser on The Art of Measuring Change.

 

3
THE FAULT IN OTHERS

"Monitoring this tendency in yourself can be revealing – to witness how the mind generates suspects and verdicts within seconds, and how emotionally-driven the process is. It becomes clearer that villainizing is mostly a coping mechanism, rather than a sensible way of understanding or addressing problems." David Cain on Why Do We Want Problems to Be Someone’s Fault?

++ There's tremendous power in letting go. But consider how our mind is fine-tuned to discovering patterns. Herein lies the tension between being and doing.
 
Buy me a Dragon

4
ROOM FOR ERROR

"When you’re in the middle of a powerful trend it’s difficult to imagine a force strong enough to turn things the other way. What we tend to miss is that what turns trends around usually isn’t an outside force. It’s when a subtle side effect of that trend erodes what made it powerful to begin with." Morgan Housel on How People Think.

 

5
SPAM-AS-A-SERVICE

"If you’re curious about where all the billions of dollars of venture and IPO capital are being spent by all these Software as a Service startups, I have figured it out. The answer is in my inbox. They’re taking all this money, paying saleskids one year out of college to hit small business owners on LinkedIn or guess the email addresses of people like me. It’s cold calling, but lazier." Spam as a Service (Reformed Broker.)
 

 
6
BETTER BUSINESS PRACTICE

As she tells the story, at 150 shops they made the biggest mistake: They went into the stock market. It was 1984. “Don’t ever do it,” that’s how strongly Roddick felt about it. Embodying Business Values.

+ A definition is an instrument of purpose. A short example on reframing words that can have a large impact: Is Intelligence Artificial? 

Technology Impacts Narrative and Culture. "I think it's important to underscore how the results are mixed. Not all technology, not all the time. Search finds as much as it obscures via popular vote and commercial interest, for example. Immediacy reduces friction, but sometimes friction is valuable. How do you reconcile authenticity with the ease of producing fake?"

++ Work with me, and you get no BS.
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