Monday, December 3, 2018
Friday, August 4, 2017
Friday, May 27, 2016
Kuleana Kids
We had a table at the Women's Veterans Conference to spread the word about Kuleana Micro-Lending. We handed out twenty-five Kuleana T-shirts, along with numerous brochures and applications, and business cards. We'll see what happens!
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel (Ben Fountain)
• a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. (34)
• he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy. (35)
• stoic vein of male Americanism defined by multiple generations of movie and TV actors, which conveniently furnishes him a way of being without having to think about it too much. (37)
• these verbal arabesques that spark and snap in Billy’s ears like bugs impacting an electric bug zapper (37)
• There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America—how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was just, so, obvious, what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature as the war dragged on. Why don’t they just . . . Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul. Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives. (37)
Page 40
they know they’re being good when they thank the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness.
Page 41
karma account, that running tally of good and evil that Shroom described to him as the expression, the mental crystallization, as it were, of the great cosmic tilt toward ultimate justice.
44
No matter their age or station in life, Billy can’t help but regard his fellow Americans as children. They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children. These boys and girls. These toddlers, these infants. Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.
Page 48
the guy who seems about 60 percent there about 40 percent of the time.
Page 51
He wanted to punch someone. Rich people make him nervous for no particular reason, they just do, and standing by the hostess station in his kudzu-green class A’s Billy felt about as belonging here as a wino pissing his pants.
Page 56
The men have the hale good looks and silver hair of successful bank presidents or midsized-city mayors, tanned, fit sixty-year-olds who can still bring the heat on their tennis serves. Their wives are substantially but not offensively younger, all blondes, all displaying the taut architectonics of surgical self-improvement. So proud, the men say, going around shaking hands. So grateful, so honored. Guardians. Freedoms. Fanatics. TerrRr. The wives hang back and let their men do the honors, they look on with vaguely wistful smiles and not an ounce of evident lust.
Page 59
So perhaps, it occurs to Billy, this is the whole point of civilization, the eating of beautiful meals and the taking of decorous dumps, in which case he is for it, having had a bellyful of the other way.
Page 65
You’ve got your business and we’ve got ours, so you just keep on drilling, sir, and we’ll keep on killing.”
Page 66
the dynamic of all such encounters, the Bravos speak from the high ground of experience. They are authentic. They are the Real.
Page 66
Here in the chicken-hawk nation of blowhards and bluffers, Bravo always has the ace of bloods up its sleeve.
Page 78
“Some days I think I’m living in a bad country song,”
Page 98
how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, four educational deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh, 4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O’Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the “do not volunteer” box as to service overseas.
Page 103
There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.
Page 112
famously nipped, tucked, tweaked, jacked, exfoliated mug that for years has been a staple of state and local news, Norm’s very public saga of cosmetic self-improvement. The result thus far is compelling and garish, like a sales lot for reconditioned carnival rides.
Page 114
Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars.
Page 114
Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.
Page 115
Works on your mind, all that. The randomness. He gets so tired of living with the daily beat-down of it, not just the normal animal fear of pain and death but the uniquely human fear of fear itself like a CD stuck on skip-repeat, an ever-narrowing self-referential loop that may well be a form of madness.
Page 114
the luxury of terror as a talking point,
Page 131
All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms. Billy himself never noticed how fake it all is until he’d done time in a combat zone.
Page 137
he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody’s always talking about. They want it to be easy and it’s just not going to be.
Page 140
Alpine crevasses of dizzying cleavage into which a man could fall, never to be seen or heard from again.
Page 165
Dude, maybe they don’t hate our freedoms, maybe they hate our fat!
Page 164
It seemed that football must be made to be productive and useful, a net-plus benefit for all mankind, hence the endless motivational yawping about teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, and other modern virtues, the basic thrust of which boiled down to shut up and do as you’re told. So despite the terrific violence inherent in the game a weird passivity seeped into your mind. All those rules, all the maxims, all the three-hour practices where you mostly stood around waiting your turn to be screamed at by an assistant coach, they produced an almost pleasurable numbness, a general dulling of perception and responsiveness. In a way it was nice, constantly being told what to do, except after a while it got boring as hell, and at a certain age you started to realize that most of the coaches were actually dumb as rocks.
Page 166
Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation by anyone’s standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.
Page 172
Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipeline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants.
Page 183
Only America could take such a product-intensive sport and grow it into the civic necessity it is today.
Page 184
Billy tries to imagine the vast systems that support these athletes. They are among the best-cared-for creatures in the history of the planet, beneficiaries of the best nutrition, the latest technologies, the finest medical care, they live at the very pinnacle of American innovation and abundance, which inspires an extraordinary thought—send them to fight the war! Send them just as they are this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat, send the entire NFL!
Page 186
the Christian Bible is mostly a compilation of old Sumerian legends, not something he particularly needed to know at the time but which has afforded some solace during these past two weeks of practically nonstop public prayer. America loves to pray, God knows. America prays and prays and prays, it is the land of unchained prayer, and
Page 194
“I’m sure I was,” he answers. “I know I was. But it happened so fast I didn’t have time to think. I just did what my training told me to do, like anybody else in the squad would do. I just happened to be the guy in position.” He assumes he’s done, but they’re quiet, still primed for the payoff, so he has to think of something else. “I guess it’s like my sergeant says, as long as you’ve got plenty of ammo, you’ll probably be okay.” This does it; they throw back their heads and roar. In a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along. Sometimes he has to remind himself there’s no dishonor in it. He hasn’t told any lies, he doesn’t exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.
Page 197
Here at home everyone is so sure about the war. They talk in certainties, imperatives, absolutes, views that seem quite reasonable in the context. A kind of abyss separates the war over here from the war over there, and the trick, as Billy perceives it, is not to stumble when jumping from one to the other.
Page 214
I’m not like that guy who goes around saying greed is good, but it can sure as heck be a force for good. Self-interest is a powerful motivator in human affairs, and to me that’s the beauty of the capitalist system, it makes a virtue out of an innate human flaw. It’s why you’re gonna live better than your parents, and your kids are gonna live better than you, and their kids better than them and so on, because thanks to our system we’re going to keep on finding more ways, easier and better ways, to solve the problems of living and accomplish so many things we never even dreamed of.”
Page 220
Billy has these visions sometimes, these brief sightlines into America as a nightmare of superabundance, but Army life in general and the war in particular have rendered him acutely sensitive to quantity.
Page 222
Happily there is retail at every turn so the crowd doesn’t lack for buying opportunities, and it’s the same everywhere Bravo has been, the airports, the hotels, the arenas and convention centers, in the downtowns and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.
Page 223
This is where the vital part of her energy goes, into the semi-mystical, all-consuming, positive-thinking hustle for exposure and notice, the miracle moment of prime time that will lead to the big break. She wants to be on TV. She wants to be a star.
Page 223
they emanate the worst of both worlds, rural sloth plus urban malevolence.
Page 235
He’s too self-conscious and church-averse to accept a completely straight notion of god, so how about this—chemicals, hormones, needs and drives, whatever is in us that’s so supreme and terrifying that we have to call it divine.
Page 235
They love to talk up God and country but it’s the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull, punch up the heat a few degrees and they rise to a boil, spill over the sides. Do they even know? he wonders. Maybe they don’t know what they know, given that what he sees before him is so random, so perfect, porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope.
Page 245
Somehow their faces have ended up mere inches apart, and this seems like the most natural thing in the world, as basic as wind, tides, the magnetic north.
Page 249
It makes him aware of himself being aware of himself, and here is a mystery that seems worth thinking about, why this stacking of awareness should even matter. At the moment all he knows is that there’s structure in it, a pleasing sense of poise or mental ordering. A kind of knowledge, or maybe a bridge thereto—as if existence didn’t necessarily have to be a moron’s progress of lurching from one damn thing to another? As if you might aspire to some sort of context in your life, a condition he associates with adultness.
Page 259 |
Billy moans with the pleasure and pain of it, these violent oppositional forces that are physically molding him into something new.
Page 270
You die by the slow no in this business, lemme get back to you, lemme get back to you, lemme get back to you, everybody’s so scared of screwing up they’d rather lose a kidney than make an actual business decision.
Page 276
the paralytic force field of his mesmerizing narcissism.
Page 306
they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he’s lived what he’s lived and knows what he knows, which means what, something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war? Their reality dominates, except for this: It can’t save you. It won’t stop any bombs or bullets. He wonders if there’s a saturation point, a body count that will finally blow the homeland dream to smithereens. How much reality can unreality take?
Page 307
How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Daniel Pink— Drive
Type I (intrinsically motivated) and Type X (extrinsically motivated)
"self-determination theory"
The main mechanisms of Motivation 2.0 are more stifling than supportive...the less salient they are the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating...instead, create environments where our innate psychological needs can flourish.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
Type I behavior is made, not born.
Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run.
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition.
If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline— i.e doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work— that person's motivation will crater, regardless of whether that person in Type I or Type X...one reason adequate pay is so essential is that it tkaes the issue of money off the table so they can focus on the work itself.
Recognition is similar. Type I's like to be recognized for their accomplishments because recognition is a form of feedback...but it is not the goal itself.
Type I behavior is a renewable resource.
Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.
Ultimately it depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose...self-directed...connects the quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
Autonomy
Our default setting is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances— including outdated notions of "management"— often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Tyoe X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance, it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors. (what about due dates)
Mastery
While Motivation 2.0 required compliance. Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery— becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential to making one's way in the economy.
Mastery begins with "flow"— optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities. Small workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with "Goldilocks tasks"— not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules:
• Mastery is mindset: it requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable.
• Mastery is pain: it demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice.
• Mastery is an asymptote: it's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
Purpose
Humans, by their nature, seek purpose— a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional business have long considered purpose ornamental— a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn't get in the way of the important things.
But that's changing— thanks in part to the rising tide of baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new "purpose motive" is expressing itself in three ways: — in goals that use profit to reach purpose;
— in words that emphasize more than self-interest;
— in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.
This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate businesses and remake our world.
"self-determination theory"
The main mechanisms of Motivation 2.0 are more stifling than supportive...the less salient they are the better. When people use rewards to motivate, that's when they're most demotivating...instead, create environments where our innate psychological needs can flourish.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
Type I behavior is made, not born.
Type I's almost always outperform Type X's in the long run.
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition.
If an employee's compensation doesn't hit the baseline— i.e doesn't pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn't equitable compared to others doing similar work— that person's motivation will crater, regardless of whether that person in Type I or Type X...one reason adequate pay is so essential is that it tkaes the issue of money off the table so they can focus on the work itself.
Recognition is similar. Type I's like to be recognized for their accomplishments because recognition is a form of feedback...but it is not the goal itself.
Type I behavior is a renewable resource.
Type I behavior promotes greater physical and mental well-being.
Ultimately it depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose...self-directed...connects the quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
Autonomy
Our default setting is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances— including outdated notions of "management"— often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Tyoe X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance, it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors. (what about due dates)
Mastery
While Motivation 2.0 required compliance. Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery— becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential to making one's way in the economy.
Mastery begins with "flow"— optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities. Small workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with "Goldilocks tasks"— not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules:
• Mastery is mindset: it requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable.
• Mastery is pain: it demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice.
• Mastery is an asymptote: it's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
Purpose
Humans, by their nature, seek purpose— a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional business have long considered purpose ornamental— a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn't get in the way of the important things.
But that's changing— thanks in part to the rising tide of baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new "purpose motive" is expressing itself in three ways: — in goals that use profit to reach purpose;
— in words that emphasize more than self-interest;
— in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.
This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate businesses and remake our world.
Daniel Pink— Drive
The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0
• Motivation 1.0— biological motivations that come from within
• Motivation 2.0— external rewards and punishments delivered by the environment
•Motivation 3.0— 'intrinsic motivation' fueled by the innate, internal desire for Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose"self-motivation"
Motivation 2.0 has endured for a very long time due to industrialization and Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" (workers are just small cogs in the 'machine' that is a company or business); however, as scientifically proven, it can actually work to undermine the goals it professes to achieve— once you introduce monetary rewards into work it actually reduces people's pure enjoyment of a task and therefore reduces their productivity; this is especially applicable in relation to heuristic (open-ended) tasks versus algorithmic (rote) tasks; similar to Ariely's social/moral norms versus market norms (once you pay people for volunteering it no longer has its moral value and is thus less satisfying on an intrinsic level; money as a reward can become addicting— you need more of it each time you want to 'inspire' someone to do a task s/he obviously didn't want to do to begin with
Why Carrot and Sticks Don't (Often) Work
Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks:
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. (most recently, like the teachers and administrators in Atlanta Schools)
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
If you have routine/rote task that must be done and you need to offer a reward (which can be effective in these circumstances), make sure you:
— offer a rationale for why the task is necessary;
— acknowledge that the task is boring;
— allow people to complete the task their own way. (doesn't sound like a lot of assignments in school)
Then offer an extrinsic reward that is unexpected (i.e. not necessarily promised at the beginning of the task). Engage in "now that" rewarding versus "if-then."
• Motivation 1.0— biological motivations that come from within
• Motivation 2.0— external rewards and punishments delivered by the environment
•Motivation 3.0— 'intrinsic motivation' fueled by the innate, internal desire for Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose"self-motivation"
Motivation 2.0 has endured for a very long time due to industrialization and Frederick Taylor's "Scientific Management" (workers are just small cogs in the 'machine' that is a company or business); however, as scientifically proven, it can actually work to undermine the goals it professes to achieve— once you introduce monetary rewards into work it actually reduces people's pure enjoyment of a task and therefore reduces their productivity; this is especially applicable in relation to heuristic (open-ended) tasks versus algorithmic (rote) tasks; similar to Ariely's social/moral norms versus market norms (once you pay people for volunteering it no longer has its moral value and is thus less satisfying on an intrinsic level; money as a reward can become addicting— you need more of it each time you want to 'inspire' someone to do a task s/he obviously didn't want to do to begin with
Why Carrot and Sticks Don't (Often) Work
Seven Deadly Flaws of Carrots and Sticks:
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. (most recently, like the teachers and administrators in Atlanta Schools)
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.
If you have routine/rote task that must be done and you need to offer a reward (which can be effective in these circumstances), make sure you:
— offer a rationale for why the task is necessary;
— acknowledge that the task is boring;
— allow people to complete the task their own way. (doesn't sound like a lot of assignments in school)
Then offer an extrinsic reward that is unexpected (i.e. not necessarily promised at the beginning of the task). Engage in "now that" rewarding versus "if-then."
Friday, August 12, 2011
Daniel Pink— Real Brainstorming
Based on Tom Kelley's book, The Ten Faces of Innovation:
1) Go for quantity.
Good ideas emerge from lots of ideas. Set a numerical goal— say, a total of one hundred.
2) Encourage Wild Ideas.
Extremism is a virtue. The right idea often flows from what initially seems outlandish.
3) Be Visual.
Pictures unlock creativity.
4) Defer Judgment.
There's no such thing as a bad idea, so banish the naysayers. Think creatively first and critically later.
5) One conversation at a time.
Listen, be polite, and build on others' suggestions.
Capture everything in writing.
1) Go for quantity.
Good ideas emerge from lots of ideas. Set a numerical goal— say, a total of one hundred.
2) Encourage Wild Ideas.
Extremism is a virtue. The right idea often flows from what initially seems outlandish.
3) Be Visual.
Pictures unlock creativity.
4) Defer Judgment.
There's no such thing as a bad idea, so banish the naysayers. Think creatively first and critically later.
5) One conversation at a time.
Listen, be polite, and build on others' suggestions.
Capture everything in writing.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
High Concept, High Touch
High Concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.
High Touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of hyman interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
The Six Senses
DESIGN
It's economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.
A combination of utility enhanced by significance...far more accessible to the masses both in terms of exposure and generation (democratization of design)...Design is inter-disciplinary... ultimate purpose— changing the world.
STORY
It's not enough to marshal an effective argument...The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative.
Context enriched by emotion...a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters...Stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember...'humans are not ideally set-up to understand logic; they are ideally set-up to understand stories.' An organization's knowledge is contained in its stories.
SYMPHONY
What's in greatest demand today isn't analysis but synthesis— seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.
To detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; to invent something new by combining elements nobody thought to pair...perspective is more important than IQ...be a "boundary-crosser"...risk thinking unconventional thoughts...convention is the enemy of progress..."imaginative rationality"— mastery of metaphor...MQ (Metaphor Quotient)...the more we understand the appropriate personal metaphors, the better we understand ourselves...relationships between relationships...
EMPATHY
What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others...to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling...to stand in others' shoes, to see it with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts (as opposed to sympathy— feeling bad for someone).
Good designers put themselves into the mind of whoever is going to be experiencing the product or service they're designing...understand context... (Paul Ekman)
PLAY
In the Conceptual Age, we all need to play...Too much sobriety can be bad for your career and worse for your general well-being.
MEANING
Abundance has freed us from day-today struggles and allowed millions of people to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.
High Concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention.
High Touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of hyman interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
The Six Senses
DESIGN
It's economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.
A combination of utility enhanced by significance...far more accessible to the masses both in terms of exposure and generation (democratization of design)...Design is inter-disciplinary... ultimate purpose— changing the world.
STORY
It's not enough to marshal an effective argument...The essence of persuasion, communication, and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative.
Context enriched by emotion...a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters...Stories are easier to remember because stories are how we remember...'humans are not ideally set-up to understand logic; they are ideally set-up to understand stories.' An organization's knowledge is contained in its stories.
SYMPHONY
What's in greatest demand today isn't analysis but synthesis— seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.
To detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; to invent something new by combining elements nobody thought to pair...perspective is more important than IQ...be a "boundary-crosser"...risk thinking unconventional thoughts...convention is the enemy of progress..."imaginative rationality"— mastery of metaphor...MQ (Metaphor Quotient)...the more we understand the appropriate personal metaphors, the better we understand ourselves...relationships between relationships...
EMPATHY
What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others...to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling...to stand in others' shoes, to see it with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts (as opposed to sympathy— feeling bad for someone).
Good designers put themselves into the mind of whoever is going to be experiencing the product or service they're designing...understand context... (Paul Ekman)
PLAY
In the Conceptual Age, we all need to play...Too much sobriety can be bad for your career and worse for your general well-being.
MEANING
Abundance has freed us from day-today struggles and allowed millions of people to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Jim Collins— Good to Great, The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles)
The Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:
1) What you can be the best in the world at (and equally important, what you cannot become the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn't mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best in the world at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.
2) What drives your economic engine. (single denominator-- cash flow per x)
3) What you are deeply passionate about. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.
A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at.
It takes four years on average to get a Hedgehog Concept.
Characteristics of the Council:
1. The Council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing an organization.
2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people.
3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from an egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.
4. Each Council member retains respect of every other Council member, without exception.
5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.
6. The Council includes key member of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, not is every executive automatically a member.
7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.
8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter.
9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.
10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or formal documents.
1) What you can be the best in the world at (and equally important, what you cannot become the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn't mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best in the world at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.
2) What drives your economic engine. (single denominator-- cash flow per x)
3) What you are deeply passionate about. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.
A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at.
It takes four years on average to get a Hedgehog Concept.
Characteristics of the Council:
1. The Council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing an organization.
2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people.
3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from an egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.
4. Each Council member retains respect of every other Council member, without exception.
5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.
6. The Council includes key member of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, not is every executive automatically a member.
7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.
8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter.
9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.
10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or formal documents.
Jim Collins— Good to Great, Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
Confront the brutal facts of your current situation.
When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.
Creating a climate where the truth is heard involves four basic practices:
1) Lead with questions, not answers.
2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
3) Conduct autopsies, without blame.
4) Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.
Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you. You can overcome the liabilities of having charisma, but it does require conscious attention.
Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. Great leaders understand this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard, and ultimately, for the truth to be heard.
Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.
** The Stockdale Paradox**:
Retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
Spending time and energy trying to "motivate" people is a waste of time and effort. The real question is not, "How do we motivate our people?" If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is to not de-motivate them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.
When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.
Creating a climate where the truth is heard involves four basic practices:
1) Lead with questions, not answers.
2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
3) Conduct autopsies, without blame.
4) Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.
Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you. You can overcome the liabilities of having charisma, but it does require conscious attention.
Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. Great leaders understand this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard, and ultimately, for the truth to be heard.
Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.
** The Stockdale Paradox**:
Retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
Spending time and energy trying to "motivate" people is a waste of time and effort. The real question is not, "How do we motivate our people?" If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is to not de-motivate them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.
Jim Collins— Good to Great, First who...Then What
First, get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it.
Build a superior executive team. Then figure out the best path to greatness. (Versus the "genius with a thousand helpers" model.)
Compensation and incentives are important, but for different reasons... The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there.
Three principles:
1) When in doubt, don't hire— keep looking.
2) When you know you need to make people change, act.
3) Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.
Whether someone in the "right" person has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background, or skills.
One of the crucial elements in taking a company from good to great is somewhat paradoxical. You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate— sometimes violently— in pursuit of the best answers; yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.
Build a superior executive team. Then figure out the best path to greatness. (Versus the "genius with a thousand helpers" model.)
Compensation and incentives are important, but for different reasons... The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there.
Three principles:
1) When in doubt, don't hire— keep looking.
2) When you know you need to make people change, act.
3) Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.
Whether someone in the "right" person has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background, or skills.
One of the crucial elements in taking a company from good to great is somewhat paradoxical. You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate— sometimes violently— in pursuit of the best answers; yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Dan Ariely— The Upside of Irrationality, Introduction
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely)
in a perfectly rational world, procrastination would never be a problem. We would simply compute the values of our long-term objectives, compare them to our short-term enjoyments, and understand that we have more to gain in the long term by suffering a bit in the short term.
We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed. “Later” seems like a rosy time to do all the unpleasant things in life,
When the designers of modern technologies don’t understand our fallibility, they design new and improved systems for stock markets, insurance, education, agriculture, or health care that don’t take our limitations into account (I like the term “human-incompatible technologies,” and they are everywhere). As a consequence, we inevitably end up making mistakes and sometimes fail magnificently.
This is the real goal of behavioral economics: to try to understand the way we really operate so that we can more readily observe our biases, be more aware of their influences on us, and hopefully make better decisions.
Inventors, companies, and policy makers can take the additional steps to redesign our working and living environments in ways that are naturally more compatible with what we can and cannot do.
This is what behavioral economics is about—figuring out the hidden forces that shape our decisions, across many different domains, and finding solutions to common problems that affect our personal, business, and public lives.
in a perfectly rational world, procrastination would never be a problem. We would simply compute the values of our long-term objectives, compare them to our short-term enjoyments, and understand that we have more to gain in the long term by suffering a bit in the short term.
We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed. “Later” seems like a rosy time to do all the unpleasant things in life,
When the designers of modern technologies don’t understand our fallibility, they design new and improved systems for stock markets, insurance, education, agriculture, or health care that don’t take our limitations into account (I like the term “human-incompatible technologies,” and they are everywhere). As a consequence, we inevitably end up making mistakes and sometimes fail magnificently.
This is the real goal of behavioral economics: to try to understand the way we really operate so that we can more readily observe our biases, be more aware of their influences on us, and hopefully make better decisions.
Inventors, companies, and policy makers can take the additional steps to redesign our working and living environments in ways that are naturally more compatible with what we can and cannot do.
This is what behavioral economics is about—figuring out the hidden forces that shape our decisions, across many different domains, and finding solutions to common problems that affect our personal, business, and public lives.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Jim Collins— Good to Great, Level 5 Leadership
"Level 5" refers to a five-level hierarchy of executive capabilities, with level 5 at the top. Level 5 leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company (school, non-profit, etc.), not themselves.
Below "Level 5" is:
• "Effective Leader"— Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.
• "Competent Manager"— Organizes people and resources toward the effective pursuit of pre-determined objectives.
• "Contributing Team Member"— Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.
• "Highly Capable Individual"— Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.
Level 5 leaders set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation, whereas egocentric Level 4 leaders often set up their successors for failure.
...look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well. At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.
... display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated.
... are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company (school, non-profit, etc.) great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.
...display a workmanlike diligence— more plow horse than show horse.
...attribute much of their success to good luck, rather than personal greatness.
Below "Level 5" is:
• "Effective Leader"— Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance standards.
• "Competent Manager"— Organizes people and resources toward the effective pursuit of pre-determined objectives.
• "Contributing Team Member"— Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.
• "Highly Capable Individual"— Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.
Level 5 leaders set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation, whereas egocentric Level 4 leaders often set up their successors for failure.
...look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well. At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.
... display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated.
... are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company (school, non-profit, etc.) great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.
...display a workmanlike diligence— more plow horse than show horse.
...attribute much of their success to good luck, rather than personal greatness.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Meeting with Kina Mahi, Hawai'i Community Foundation
Kina Mahi from HCF/Island Innovation Fund and formerly of Hawai'i Community Loan Fund was very gracious to attend one of our Kuleana meetings (along with her three-month old daughter) to share her knowledge of micro-lending.
Kina shared with us how the Hawai'i Community Loan Fund existed for approximately ten years from the mid-to-late 90's to the early 2000's. They specialized in non-bankable loans to individuals and families to start businesses. They serviced about 30-45 active loans ranging from $15,000 to $100,000. (Although an article from the Advertiser puts the top range at $250,000. Either way, that's way higher than we propose.) Some of the enterprises that received loans were Ho'ala School and a restaurant on the North Shore that is still around (I forgot the name). The staff consisted of some very talented people who did loan servicing, accounting, and technical assistance that helped to customize the payback route for each loan.
They started off with $1.5 million in seed money from local banks and OHA. The interest rate charged was usually about 12-14% and was used to fund their revolving loan fund. Ultimately they ran out of operating capital to pay the salaries of the staff members and they were reluctant to charge much higher interest rates in order to be more financially sound.
One of the challenges they faced, as expected, was getting people to pay back their loans, one of the many arguments skeptics make about micro-lending in Hawai'i or any other first world economy. Some borrowers would say things like "you're a non-profit so we don;t need to pay you back." Kina said they also found a direct linear relationship between borrowers' credit scores and repayment/delinquency rates. One of their problems is that they didn't have a cut off for a minimum credit score for applicants. (We don't plan to either, but we're hoping that the referral process from our partner agencies will help us avoid some of those pitfalls.)
Other areas that she said we should be aware of or look to implement:
— a standardized program to train borrowers. (We can hopefully look to Maui Economic Opportunity or even Grameen America for workable models in that area.)
— collateralization. Rebecca Soon mentioned that this is very difficult with low-income borrowers but is still a good idea, especially if the money borrowed is used to buy inventory of some kind.
— technical assistance is important, but mentoring could possibly make up for a lack of quantifiable metrics
— board representation by the banks can be good or bad, depending on mission. She mentioned that we should look to the credit unions as well.
— reporting to credit agencies could also be a good idea
— engendering a professional environment is important to create a higher level of expectation from the borrower
— private donors tend to be better over the long term versus foundations or even banks (who expect their money to be paid back)
— Loan Loss Reserve— 20% of loans outstanding— crucial!
One idea that came out of the discussions was to create steps in the loan implementation process that reinforce the idea of success for the borrower. For example, finishing the basic financial education course should be celebrated with a formal occasion; making eleven consecutive payments could then allow the borrower to skip the twelfth. We could even time it around Christmas time so that if the borrower makes a minimum of six consecutive payments on time then s/he could skip the payment in December or January to offset holiday bills.
All in all it was a great conversation about what is possible, what to look out for, and how difficult micro-lending can be.
Kina shared with us how the Hawai'i Community Loan Fund existed for approximately ten years from the mid-to-late 90's to the early 2000's. They specialized in non-bankable loans to individuals and families to start businesses. They serviced about 30-45 active loans ranging from $15,000 to $100,000. (Although an article from the Advertiser puts the top range at $250,000. Either way, that's way higher than we propose.) Some of the enterprises that received loans were Ho'ala School and a restaurant on the North Shore that is still around (I forgot the name). The staff consisted of some very talented people who did loan servicing, accounting, and technical assistance that helped to customize the payback route for each loan.
They started off with $1.5 million in seed money from local banks and OHA. The interest rate charged was usually about 12-14% and was used to fund their revolving loan fund. Ultimately they ran out of operating capital to pay the salaries of the staff members and they were reluctant to charge much higher interest rates in order to be more financially sound.
One of the challenges they faced, as expected, was getting people to pay back their loans, one of the many arguments skeptics make about micro-lending in Hawai'i or any other first world economy. Some borrowers would say things like "you're a non-profit so we don;t need to pay you back." Kina said they also found a direct linear relationship between borrowers' credit scores and repayment/delinquency rates. One of their problems is that they didn't have a cut off for a minimum credit score for applicants. (We don't plan to either, but we're hoping that the referral process from our partner agencies will help us avoid some of those pitfalls.)
Other areas that she said we should be aware of or look to implement:
— a standardized program to train borrowers. (We can hopefully look to Maui Economic Opportunity or even Grameen America for workable models in that area.)
— collateralization. Rebecca Soon mentioned that this is very difficult with low-income borrowers but is still a good idea, especially if the money borrowed is used to buy inventory of some kind.
— technical assistance is important, but mentoring could possibly make up for a lack of quantifiable metrics
— board representation by the banks can be good or bad, depending on mission. She mentioned that we should look to the credit unions as well.
— reporting to credit agencies could also be a good idea
— engendering a professional environment is important to create a higher level of expectation from the borrower
— private donors tend to be better over the long term versus foundations or even banks (who expect their money to be paid back)
— Loan Loss Reserve— 20% of loans outstanding— crucial!
One idea that came out of the discussions was to create steps in the loan implementation process that reinforce the idea of success for the borrower. For example, finishing the basic financial education course should be celebrated with a formal occasion; making eleven consecutive payments could then allow the borrower to skip the twelfth. We could even time it around Christmas time so that if the borrower makes a minimum of six consecutive payments on time then s/he could skip the payment in December or January to offset holiday bills.
All in all it was a great conversation about what is possible, what to look out for, and how difficult micro-lending can be.
Meeting with Dana Tokioka and Keith Emerson from Tradewind Capital Group
Dana Tokioka and Keith Emerson were very gracious to take me to lunch to offer feedback on the Kuleana business plan.
They encouraged us to emphasize the mentoring component along with loan payback/accountability and life skills as features of our program that will distinguish us from other micro-lending ventures. It's also crucial to highlight the true impact of the money donors will contribute so that people don't feel they are throwing their funding at an abstract goal. How we measure success, both tangibly and intangibly, are important message to convey.
Scale was another area that they wondered about. It's not the first time we've heard that concern and certainly won;t be the last. It's a question we will confront for the foreseeable future: how will we be able to serve more and more people, especially if our program proves to be successful.
Other helpful questions:
Is $5,000 enough to really cover start-up costs of a viable business?
What are the legal implications or restrictions of what we're proposing?
How do you make winners out of the people who's businesses fail (and many, if not most, of them will)?
They encouraged us to emphasize the mentoring component along with loan payback/accountability and life skills as features of our program that will distinguish us from other micro-lending ventures. It's also crucial to highlight the true impact of the money donors will contribute so that people don't feel they are throwing their funding at an abstract goal. How we measure success, both tangibly and intangibly, are important message to convey.
Scale was another area that they wondered about. It's not the first time we've heard that concern and certainly won;t be the last. It's a question we will confront for the foreseeable future: how will we be able to serve more and more people, especially if our program proves to be successful.
Other helpful questions:
Is $5,000 enough to really cover start-up costs of a viable business?
What are the legal implications or restrictions of what we're proposing?
How do you make winners out of the people who's businesses fail (and many, if not most, of them will)?
David Brooks— The Social Animal: Mindsight
The truth is, starting from before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revelaed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days or hours ago, we call education and advice.
Some people believe that humans are careful theorizers...rational scientists, constantly weighing evidence and testing explanations.
However, a rival hypothesis states that we automatically simulate others, and understand what others feel by a version of what they are experiencing, in ourselves. In this view we are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We're able to function in the world because we partially permeate each other's minds and understand— some people more, some less. Human beings understand others in themselves, and they form themselves by reenacting the internal processes they pick up form others.
...the processes of perception and evaluation are intermingled...the more two people imitate each other's movements, the more they like each other— and the more they like each other, the more they imitate.
Minds are intensely permeable. Loops exist between brains. The same thought and feeling can arise in different minds, with invisible networks filling in the space between them.
Most jokes are intensely social and bubble up when people find a solution to some social incongruity. Laughter is a language that people use to bond, to cover over social awkwardness or to reinforce bonding that has already occurred.
People are born into relationships— with parents, with ancestors— and those relationships create people... a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds.
Some people believe that humans are careful theorizers...rational scientists, constantly weighing evidence and testing explanations.
However, a rival hypothesis states that we automatically simulate others, and understand what others feel by a version of what they are experiencing, in ourselves. In this view we are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We're able to function in the world because we partially permeate each other's minds and understand— some people more, some less. Human beings understand others in themselves, and they form themselves by reenacting the internal processes they pick up form others.
...the processes of perception and evaluation are intermingled...the more two people imitate each other's movements, the more they like each other— and the more they like each other, the more they imitate.
Minds are intensely permeable. Loops exist between brains. The same thought and feeling can arise in different minds, with invisible networks filling in the space between them.
Most jokes are intensely social and bubble up when people find a solution to some social incongruity. Laughter is a language that people use to bond, to cover over social awkwardness or to reinforce bonding that has already occurred.
People are born into relationships— with parents, with ancestors— and those relationships create people... a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds.
David Brooks— The Social Animal: The Map Meld
Marital satisfaction generally follows a U-shaped curve. couples are deliriously happy during the first years of marriage. Their self-reported satisfaction declines and bottoms out when their children hit adolescence, then it climbs again as they enter retirement.
There's something to the old joke that women need to feel loved in order to have sex and men need to have sex in order to feel loved.
Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than non-religious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones. (Roy Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life
They say that foreplay for a woman is anything that happens twenty-four hours before intercourse.
An organsm is not a reflex. It's a perception, a mental event... some women can achieve orgasm just by thinking the right thoughts... the mental traits that are associated with ease of orgasms— a willingness to surrender control, the ability to be hyptnotized, the inability to control thoughts during sex...
There's something to the old joke that women need to feel loved in order to have sex and men need to have sex in order to feel loved.
Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than non-religious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones. (Roy Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life
They say that foreplay for a woman is anything that happens twenty-four hours before intercourse.
An organsm is not a reflex. It's a perception, a mental event... some women can achieve orgasm just by thinking the right thoughts... the mental traits that are associated with ease of orgasms— a willingness to surrender control, the ability to be hyptnotized, the inability to control thoughts during sex...
Friday, June 17, 2011
David Brooks— The Social Animal: Decision Making
Rob and Julia
Rob, being a certain sort of man, took in most of what he wanted to know through his eyes. His male Pleistocene ancestors were confronted with the puzzling fact that human females do not exhibit any physical signals when they're ovulating, unlike other animals. So the early hunters made do with the closest markers of fertility available.
Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, shorter distances between the mouth and chin and between the nose and chin, and a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7.
...there is nothing that so enhances beauty as self-confidence.
...when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine not fake.
Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half... (Women) are compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his... There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road.
People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right.
Despite what you're read about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves... People generally overestimet how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracle... people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person's level...90 % of emotional communication is non-verbal.
Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation... the most frequent one hundred words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4,000 words account for 98% of conversations... a couple will exchange about a million words before conceiving a child.
...there's plenty of evidence that men fall in love more quickly, and subscribe more to the conviction that true love lasts forever.
...kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women.
The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman's attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband's annual income. (That makes me an outlier... :) )
Human culture exists in lareg measure to restrain the natural desires of our species.
...smell is a powerful way to read emotions.
...lack of emotion leads to self-destrictive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don't lead well-planned logical lives... emotions measure the value of something, and help unconscioulsy guide us as we navigate through life
The brain is not separate from the body— that was Descartes' error. The physical and the mental are connected in complex networks of reaction and counter-reactions, and out of their feedback an emotional value emerges.
The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.
Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon the emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.
Rob, being a certain sort of man, took in most of what he wanted to know through his eyes. His male Pleistocene ancestors were confronted with the puzzling fact that human females do not exhibit any physical signals when they're ovulating, unlike other animals. So the early hunters made do with the closest markers of fertility available.
Men everywhere value clear skin, full lips, long lustrous hair, symmetrical features, shorter distances between the mouth and chin and between the nose and chin, and a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7.
...there is nothing that so enhances beauty as self-confidence.
...when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine not fake.
Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half... (Women) are compelled to choose a man not only for insemination, but for companionship and continued support. And to this day, when a woman sets her eyes upon a potential mate, her time frame is different from his... There are more lemons in the male population than in the female population, and women have found that it pays to trade off a few points in the first-impression department in exchange for reliability and social intelligence down the road.
People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right.
Despite what you're read about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves... People generally overestimet how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracle... people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person's level...90 % of emotional communication is non-verbal.
Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation... the most frequent one hundred words account for 60% of all conversations. The most common 4,000 words account for 98% of conversations... a couple will exchange about a million words before conceiving a child.
...there's plenty of evidence that men fall in love more quickly, and subscribe more to the conviction that true love lasts forever.
...kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women.
The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman's attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband's annual income. (That makes me an outlier... :) )
Human culture exists in lareg measure to restrain the natural desires of our species.
...smell is a powerful way to read emotions.
...lack of emotion leads to self-destrictive and dangerous behavior. People who lack emotion don't lead well-planned logical lives... emotions measure the value of something, and help unconscioulsy guide us as we navigate through life
The brain is not separate from the body— that was Descartes' error. The physical and the mental are connected in complex networks of reaction and counter-reactions, and out of their feedback an emotional value emerges.
The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.
Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon the emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.
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