Here’s a way of approaching the universe…

From the derpy but occasionally brilliant folks over at Reddit:

Here’s a way of approaching the universe: You are a tiny speck of insignificant biological material in an immense universe that probably defies your brain’s ability of understanding. Yet you are remarkable, in innumerable ways. Every second of every day you are a walking ecosystem of life, housing trillions of microbes that continuously interact with you to keep both you and them alive. Your body is constantly building and rebuilding itself, encoding information on simple strains of molecules at the speed of jet engines, in each and every nucleus-possessing cell in your body. You are a walking, talking, living, breathing orchestra of life, a beautiful display of the potential inherent in our particular universe.

You are the remarkable product of an unbroken, let me say that again, UNBROKEN line of descendants stretching all the way back to the very first interactions of seemingly pointless inanimate molecules. You share a common ancestry with every living thing ever, including the estimated 106 billion humans who have ever lived. You are tied to the trees and the birds and the small phytoplankton that gently ride the crests and dips of the oceans of this world. You are part of the vibrant tapestry of what we refer to as life, a piece of art that stretches back billions upon billions of years. Everything this universe has thrown at you and your ancestors has been roundly defeated – from harsh radiation, to extraterrestrial objects, to volcanic eruptions and more. You are a symbol of utter perseverance, of the sheer will to continue onwards. You are a cry in the dark, the voice of one who will not be quiet.

So now you’ve realized that there is no inherent meaning to existence. So what? This doesn’t mean life has suddenly lost meaning – it means there was no meaning in the first place. So you haven’t actually lost anything. Instead, you have gained a wonderful opportunity. Give existence the meaning it is seeking. MAKE a purpose for yourself. Maybe it should be your kids, or maybe it should be giving from the bounty you have (because let us face reality – if you have an internet connection and personal computer, you are in the top 10%, maybe even the top 1%, of humanity). Maybe you should learn a new skill, explore a new facet of creation that you never realized was open to you.

So why do you teach a toddler how to behave? Because maybe that toddler will be the one to find other life, other existence in our so far lonely universe. Or maybe they will be the father, the mother, the close friend, the lover, the supporter of the one who does. Or maybe they will be the person to speak out at just the right moment, the one to stand up and stand out, who will provide the inspiration, or the moment of connection for the person who does. Or maybe that toddler will be the one to protect the life around us from an otherwise inevitable end, from the sucking void of empty existence that we struggle against every second of our being.

Are you just a breeder? Just biology? What an insult to biology! Just?!? I forgive you, because you know not what you say 😀 You are the product of a few basic particles, a few basic forces, yet you are impossibly complex, impossibly intricate. The sheer unlikeliness of your very existence is staggering, and yet here you are. The title of “breeder” is just a single facet of what you are. You can be a teacher, a leader, a thinker, a cook, a scientist, an artist, a musician, a protector, an enlightener, a champion, a peacemaker, a lover, a friend, a companion, a confidant… the list is as vast as the seemingly infinite complexities of neuron interactions in the collection of molecular structures known as cells in your brain.

And let us not end our poetic license there, for if all that is true, than this is also: There is something after death. The part of you that continues to exist in all life around you will never cease to be, not as long as things from this planet continue to live. You will continue on, interminably, from the beginning of life to its end potentially countless aeons from now, if ever. Maybe through some fluke you will be the Eve for humanity in the future, the one woman every human will trace their ancestry back to. Maybe not. But who can tell what the future holds. Rather than collapse under the imagined weight of nothingness, I posit that you should grasp hold of your life, and take it to heights heretofore unseen.

Richard Dawkins on Death (and Life)

Given that Metaprocess is a multi-decade project by design, there will inevitably be cycles of high and low activity.

Low cycle periods do not come about for lack of project-specific content — there is an epic backlog of that — but simply because joyous life intervenes.

Food for thought from Richard Dawkins:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born.

The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.

In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state, from which the vast majority have never stirred.

“A man must constantly exceed his level”

Bruce Lee was truly a master practitioner of metaprocess.

He may have never heard the term, but he didn’t need it. He lived it, as the below anecdote shows.

Attribution uknown:

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”

He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” –and we’re still running– “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.”

It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.“

On Mental Toughness

“To play ball, you need three things. Heart. Mind. Balls. If you have two, you can play, but you will never be great. To be great, all three.”

– Frank Curiel

“You become a champion by fighting one more round. When things are tough, you fight one more round.”

– “Gentleman Jim” Corbett

The late Earl Woods famously told his son: “Tiger, I promise you – you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in you entire life.”

Well… with all due respect to the deceased, a few folks might quibble with that.

Like professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton, for instance. There is tough, and then there is tough, as Hamilton’s 2003 Tour de France experience illustrates. From the book “Lance Armstrong’s War” by Daniel Coyle:

Hamilton carried high hopes for the Tour, all of which literally crumpled on a narrow curve near the finish [of the first stage], when the usual thing happened (one rider twitched, another put a foot down), sparking a hideous splintery pileup that flipped Hamilton nearly over his handlebars at 40 mph.

“That hurt a lot,” Hamilton said.

Two doctors X-rayed him, shaking their heads. The right collarbone was fractured, a clean crack in the shape of a V. The Tour’s official newspaper was notified, headlines were written: “Hamilton Out.” Then a third doctor examined it, and noted that while the bone was broken, it was not displaced. In a Hamiltonian stroke of luck, the fracture had occurred near the spot where he’d broken his collarbone the previous year — a mass of fresh bone growth had helped prevent the fracture from spreading. “C’est possible,” the doctor said.

Hamilton, pale and bandaged, wobbled out for stage 2. Space was cleared in the team car; his suitcase was packed and brought to the first feed zone in anticipation of his dropping out. Haven, having driven overnight from Girona, pondered how she’d console him. But he finished the 205-kilometer stage in the lead group, and the Tour was never the same.

“On a pain scale of one to ten,” Hamilton said, “that was ten.”

“It is the finest example of courage that I’ve come across,” decreed veteran Tour doctor Gerard Porte, adding that your average person would have taken three weeks off work. Historians rooted eagerly through the Tour’s ample cupboard of noble wounded — Pascal Simon’s broken shoulderblade in 1983, Honore Bartheleny’s broken shoulder, dislocated wrist, and partial blindness in 1920; Eddy Merckx’s 1975 finish with a broken jaw — and watched as Hamilton steadily surpassed them all. The squad of camera operators featuring Hamilton as centerpiece of a 2005 IMAX movie (tentatively called Brain Power) kept filming, scarcely believing that God could script so perfectly. Back in the States, his brother, Geoff, stayed up late to police the Web page, deleting some of the more heated offers left by teenage girls who make up a high percentage of Hamilton’s fans. Inevitably, it went so far as to tip the other way: a rival team director accused Hamilton and CSC of faking the fracture, precipitating the rarely seen spectacle of a team parading X-rays to prove one of their riders is injured.

Barred by antidoping regulations from taking any actually useful painkillers, Hamilton turned to less conventional methods: physiotherapy and scads of Tylenol. His handlebars were swathed in padded tape and his tires deflated a notch to provide a small measure of cushion. Each night CSC’s lanky Danish healer, Ole Kare Foli, worked while Hamilton tried to sleep, applying acupressure and “channeling energy.”

It seemed to work. On the steeps of Alpe d’Huez a few days later, Hamilton not only rode in the lead group, but attacked four times. It was great, authentically heroic stuff, and soon everybody was going crazy, and the crazier they got the humbler and nicer Hamilton became (radiating that friendly glow, saying “thank you” a hundred times a day, asking other people how they were feeling), which, of course, only made everybody crazier.

Then things suddenly got worse. Favoring the injury, Hamilton compressed a nerve in his lower back, triggering a new pain that dwarfed the ache in his collarbone. The night after stage 10, Hamilton lay on his bed, his torso twisted in rictus, his breathing restricted. Foli tried to massage him, to loosen him up for the needed spinal adjustment, but the pain was too great.

“That really, really hurt a lot,” Hamilton said. “At least what I remember of it.”

Haven’s recollections were clearer. “Ty was lying there in the dark, he couldn’t move,” she said. “Then he says, ‘Just do it, do the adjustment now.’ Ole went to straighten him out and Tyler’s screaming and Ole is crying and I’m crying, wondering what could be worth all this.”

Eight days later, Hamilton provided a succinct answer with his performance on stage 16, a day in which he was nearly dropped early on, ridden back to the pack by his teammates, then broke away and rode alone through the mists up one of the Tour’s steepest climbs, his eyes reduced to slits, his cheeks, according to one breathless account, streaked with tears. (“I don’t think I was actually crying,” he said later. “But it did hurt a lot.”) He outrode the superior power of the chasing pack for one hundred kilometers and won his first-ever Tour de France stage, giving television commentators plenty of time to let their voices dissolve with emotion as they declared it one of the longest and most courageous solo breakaways in Tour history. “That felt really good, because I did it not just for me but for everybody else,” he said.

Hamilton knows a thing or two about mental toughness, yes?

A favorite movie scene:

Is it possible, as far as it goes, to be the mental toughness equivalent of a bare-knuckle boxing champion? To be “harder than a coffin nail,” cognitively if not physically?

Yes. It’s really just a matter of conditioning.

Extend the fingers of your hand straight out, flexed and rigid, as if to form a sort of flat spear. Now jab the nearest flat surface. If you do it hard enough, it will hurt a little.

After loosening up a bit, consider that serious martial artists develop hand strength by slamming their fingertips into wooden boards and densely packed sacks of rice, over and over again. This ruthless repetition adds up. A sensai can spear his hand through a heavy punching bag as if it were made of tissue paper and cotton candy.

That kind of ability – the stuff that causes eyes to open wide when displayed – is cultivated through dedicated training and relentless focus. Like the muscles of the body, the muscles of the mind respond vigorously to targeted efforts.

So why go after it? Why pursue mental toughness?

Because, when properly developed, mental toughness is not just a trait you possess. It is a trait that possesses you. It becomes part of your being, like a quietly commanding physical presence. And it’s always there — a self-replenishing resource, to be drawn on in times of stress. This facilitates two most excellent life-enhancing qualities: peace of mind and the will to execute, in all manner of challenging environments.

Metaphorically speaking, mental toughness can make you harder than the ground you walk on. As such, it can also make long roads short and heavy burdens light.

An aim of Metaprocess is to deliberately cultivate mental toughness through the three main channels — Zen, Arete, Kaizen.

Zen allows you to detach at will — to bear any burden, accept any circumstance, remove the hindrance of ego from any situation. But Zen on its own is all coolness, all tranquility… and coolness and tranquility are only part of the equation.

In contrast with Zen, Arete gives you the inner fire to excel… to sustain and maintain in the face of a challenge. You may find peace and tranquility (i.e. detached enlightenment) with Zen alone. But if you seek to become a champion, you cannot do it without some form of Arete (whether it is known as that or something other).

And then there is Kaizen, the discipline of relentless improvement. Adding to knowledge, tinkering, making small incremental adjustments. Getting stronger, faster, leaner and, most importantly, wiser with each new experience.

As you may have noticed by now (if you’ve been following along), Metaprocess is not “chicken soup for the soul” or “calgon take me away.” It is not a hand-holding means for the timid to nurse their cares and troubles.

No, Metaprocess is more akin to a recipe for greatness and a life fulfilled in pursuit of such — not greatness as defined and recognized by others, per se, but greatness as measured by internal benchmarks and wholly inspired from within.

Because, while true that nothing matters in the end, the absence of a prime directive is arguably as much impetus to go for the gusto  — to live as fully and deeply and brightly as one can — as it is to despair or withdraw or take a cowardly stance to life.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” Henry Ford said. Mental toughness is knowing, at the very deepest levels, that you can.

On the Importance of Snow Days

On Wednesday – after making some early-morning arrangements – Jack played hooky from the markets to go snowboarding with his girl.

The conditions at Alpine Meadows (pictured above) were ideal. The powder was fresh, the sky blue, and the lift lines nonexistent. (Smart locals rarely hit the slopes on weekends.)

It’s important, Jack believes, to not just work hard but play hard. The two have a sort of yin-yang relationship. It sounds like an oxymoron, but there is something to be said for taking relaxation seriously.

This idea is expressed well by a mentor-from-afar, Paul Tudor Jones, in respect to the global macro trading game:

To do the job right requires such an enormous amount of concentration that… it’s physically and emotionally mandatory that you’ve got to find some time to relax. And you’ve got to be able to turn it off like that…

“Physically and emotionally mandatory” is the operative phrase. It is possible to tackle one’s work so enthusiastically and dynamically, day in and day out, as to use up all available reserves.

This type of push – when one gets the mix right, going full redline but not burning out – can lead to regular bursts of euphoric contentment more normally associated with aggressive physical milestones, like crossing the finish line in a grueling marathon.

And then, after the natural endorphin high that stems from maxing out one’s capabilities, comes the need to decompress.

The beauty of the “snow day” dynamic is that work and play effectively compliment and reinforce each other in a sustainable virtuous circle. Working hard gives the body and mind full, unconditional permission to relax and play. Meanwhile, rejuvenating play (and full mental rest) keeps work engaging and fresh, even creating a natural hunger to “get back in gear” after the appropriate chill-out interval has passed.

Work, play, work, play… there is a sort of rhythmic back and forth, like deep carving left and right on an exhilarating black diamond run. From a mental if not physical perspective, the best relaxation is total relaxation. The best immersion is total immersion. To switch metaphors, there is nothing quite like turning the mind loose onto open pastures after running at full gallop for days on end.

Cultivating Hyperflow

Wikipedia describes “flow” like this:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.

Long a fan of flow, Jack has lately been experimenting with what he calls “hyperflow.” The idea is taking flow to ever higher levels: turning up the volume,  increasing sustainability and frequency, experiencing flow yet more intensely for ever longer periods of time.

The experience of hyperflow is a sort of aggressive transcendence. To a significant degree self-awareness is minimized, the sense of individual existence minimized, so that only the full-immersion activity, the one-to-one correspondence between right thought and right action remains.

To sustain a hyperflow level of concentration and focus absolutely demands regular decompression intervals. The snow days become “mandatory” in the manner PTJ describes.

Metaprocess further assists in this work / play balance by assuring that worries and anxieties do not creep in when work has been set aside. To live in the moment, to have fulfilling personal goals, and to recognize that all activities have intrinsic worth and enjoyment aspects today, as opposed to merely bearing utility in respect to some future goal, allows for ultimate release of one’s fears. When today fills your focus, when the now is what matters, tomorrow is of no pressing concern.

And so whether one calls it flow, hyperflow, kicking ass, or just plain old working hard, regular intervals of total relaxation and immersive play — i.e. “snow days” — are vital if one wishes to maintain a champion’s pace.

PTJ on Failure and Self-Discovery

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

~ Michael Jordan

Metaprocess is not just about Zen. It is also about Arete, the Greek concept of excellence. Per Wikipedia:

Arete (Greek: ἀρετή; pronounced /ˈærəteɪ/ in English), in its basic sense, means goodness, excellence, or virtue of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one’s full potential. Arete in ancient Greek culture was courage and strength in the face of adversity and it was to what all people aspired.

As we will later explore, Metaprocess is also about Kaizen, the process of continuous self-improvement through enhanced efficiency and elimination of waste:

Kaizen is a daily activity, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work (“muri“), and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes. The philosophy can be defined as bringing back the thought process into the automated production environment dominated by repetitive tasks that traditionally required little mental participation.

Putting these three things together (Zen, Arete, Kaizen) you get the holy trinity of Metaprocess… a sort of natural recipe for being a badass (for lack of a more precise term).

In a nutshell, Zen allows for full emotional control — fully cultivating the ability to detach and let go at will. Arete makes room for striving, challenge, excellence, and even a healthy sort of bloodlust; the natural desire to live life at full throttle and make the most of one’s time in existence. Kaizen tops it all off via constant and continuous improvement — getting a little sharper, a little leaner, a little wiser, day in and day out, in all things large and small.

All the above will be explored in greater detail (MUCH greater) at a later time ( over long extended intervals of course).  The quick intro / recap felt necessary at this juncture, however, as we switch gears somewhat.

The Michael Jordan of Trading

As a further point of background, it is useful to note that Jack (the pseudonymous author if this blog) is a trader. Trading is in Jack’s blood — maybe even his DNA. What’s more, Jack’s passion (and career path) is wholly oriented towards the “global macro” style of trading: a top down focus on major asset classes — stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies — and big, sweeping trends.

Given as much, one of Jack’s long-time heroes is Paul Tudor Jones, or “PTJ” for short. (Traders have an unofficial hall of fame much like football and baseball players do, though there are no ceremonies and no collectible cards. The business is much too discreet for that.)

PTJ — who also practices the global macro style — is arguably the greatest trader of his generation. His nickname is “the Michael Jordan of trading” (giving some idea of his age).  Jones made something like $100 million in his early thirties in the 1987 stock market crash, has gone 25 years in his flagship fund without a single losing year, and has roughly $11 billion under management today (a good chunk of which is his). On top of that, PTJ leads a very full life, with a strong emphasis on travel, hunting and fishing (not to mention family).

That degree of success — one might reasonably call it “extreme” success, not just via lucky break or blip, but over a career and a lifetime — is important to keep in mind while digesting the man’s thoughts on failure. This is someone who knows the heights.

The below excerpt [bold emphasis Jack’s] comes from a postscript Q&A with Paul Tudor Jones in a new, annotated version of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, originally published circa 1923 (and still arguably the greatest trading book ever written):

Q. Part of the appeal of the book is Livermore’s journey of self-discovery as a person and as a trader. Have you had the same experience as a trader and portfolio manager, or was your path easier or harder?

Jones: Probably the best lessons to be learned from this book come from his repeated failures and how he dealt with them. In the book I think he lost his entire fortune four or five times. I did the same thing but was fortunate enough to do it all in my early twenties on very small stakes of capital. I think I lost $10,000 when I was 22, and when I was 25 I lost about $50,000, which was all I had to my name. It felt like a fortune at the time. It was then that my father flew up from Memphis and sat me down in my tiny New York City apartment and began lecturing me as lawyers do. He commanded, “Leave the gambling den behind. Come home and get a real job in a safe profession like real estate.” Of course, I did not, and the rest is history. And real estate these past few years has been about as safe as shooting craps to pay the rent, so I was twice blessed. If I’d have taken my father’s advice, I might have lost all of my money again these past few years in my fifties.

Anyway, I think it’s no coincidence that our greatest champions, our greatest artists, our greatest leaders, our greatest everything all seem to have experienced some kind of gut-wrenching loss. I think their greatness, in part, was fashioned on the crucible of that defeat. Two years before Lincoln was elected as maybe our finest president, he lost that monumental Senate race to Stephen Douglas. To a certain extent, I think that holds true in my field as well, and I am leery of traders who have never lost it all. I think that intense feeling of desperation that accompanies such a horrifically deflating experience indelibly cauterizes great risk management reflexes into a trader’s very being.

There are two unpleasant experiences that every trader will face in his lifetime at least once and most likely multiple times. First, there will come a day after a devastatingly brutal and agonizing stretch of losing trades that you’ll wonder if you will ever make a winning trade again. And second, there will come a point when you begin to ask yourself why it is you make money and if this is truly sustainable. That first experience tests an individual’s grit; does he have the stamina, courage, guts, and smarts to get up and engage the battle again? That second moment of enlightenment is the one that is actually scarier because it acknowledges a certain lack of control over anything. I think I was almost 38 years old when one day in a moment of frightening enlightenment, I knew that I really did not know exactly how and why I had made all the money that I had over the prior 17 years. This threw my confidence for a jolt. It sent me down a path of self-discovery that today is still a work in progress.

One does not have to a be a trader to appreciate PTJ’s wisdom. (Arete in spades, but Zen in there too — particularly the bit about ongoing progress and relinquishing a false sense of control.)

Artist, writer, trader… architect, programmer, salesman… whatever one’s profession or found calling, the experience of failure — real failure, of the soul-searching, gut-wrenching variety — can be taken as an excuse to turtle up, wuss out,  and never truly compete again, going through the motions forever more. Or, it can be the hot burning fire that ultimately forges an iron will… a sort of passionate fuel for excellence that few ever have the privelege to apply or experience.

What’s more, without any artificial reasons to excel — e.g. desire to leave a legacy, anxious effort to impress someone, neurotic need to prove something to the world, and so on — excellence can be pursued in its purest and truest form: for its own sake alone, in the context of a life fully lived.

The Fun Race

Why does it have to be “the rat race?” Why can’t it be the fun race instead?

Idea being: What if, instead of seeking to impress the most people, accumulate the biggest pile, or score the most guilt-driven brownie points etcetera, one’s life goal was to simply have as much fun as possible (over the full spread of a life well lived)?

When you think about it, a lot of people’s supposedly sober and respectable goals are downright idiotic trivial. Beyond a certain threshold of comfort, does making lots of money really have any more merit than, say, trying to accumulate the greatest number of Facebook friends? (And don’t even get Jack started on how pathetic it is for people to live out their entire lives in thrall to the judgments and opinions of others they don’t even like!)

Admittedly, to make life a pursuit of pleasure (i.e. “fun”) could be considered a selfish thing. And in that respect, Jack is glad that many think differently. He observes with gratitude that plenty of  others are willing — eager, even — to prostrate themselves at great personal cost before the feet of their fellow men. In pure economic terms,  light-hearted selfishness is all too rare a commodity. Pious sacrifice is in no short supply.

Does living to have fun mean wasting one’s life then? Not necessarily. And even if it did, what of it? In matters of ultimate meaning, Jack is inspired by the great Diogenes of Sinope:

When asked how he wished to be buried, [Diogenes] left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, “Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!” When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied “If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?”

One might object that living for fun means destroying one’s body with drugs, drink and the like. But if such temptations do not strike you as fun, then why indulge in them? Some people’s idea of fun might be solving complex mathematical equations, translating philosophical texts from the original Greek, or tracking the mating habits of Himalayan blue sheep.The point is to find and embrace what floats your own boat, not someone else’s boat.

But to pursue fun as a sole objective is not rational, still others might object. Well why the hell not? In fact, what could be more rational in the face of ultimate futility? Consider this cheery bit from Bertrand Russell:

“…All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…”

Oh, how deeply depressing — for the poor silly sod who shoulders the heavy burden of purpose that is. It is all rather amusing to Jack.

And speaking of “rationality” as juxtaposed with “fun” — can a sufficiently motivated individual not apply rational means to even the happy task of having a damn good time?

A maximally lived life is one that embraces a diverse mix of pursuits (i.e. not all steak, not all chocolate cake). Figuring out the right mix requires discipline, concentration, creativity and forethought.

We are used to casting aspersions on those who make fun their life goal because such individuals are typically loosely disciplined at best and bad at life management on the whole. But the chips need not fall this way. The sufficiently enlightened individual can recognize that sacrifice and planning are required over the course of a well balanced life — even in pursuit of fun.

From the vantage point of respectable society, Jack intuits a knee-jerk aversion to this idea. Why might this be? To hazard a guess, because society wants something from you. Society wants your allegiance… your obeisance… your submissive acceptance of the established ways. The great herds of sheep do not like the contrarian-minded fellow who dares wander off on his own. They squint in suspicion and suspect him a wolf. Self-righteousness and unhappiness, insecurity and suspicion — these things go hand in hand.

You mean to say I can chuck all that societally imposed bullshit and just… live life the way I want to?

Well, Jack would argue, it depends on what you genuinely believe. If you firmly believe the answer is no, then you are correct — the answer is no. Self-imposed limitation equals self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s practically axiomatic.

But if you believe the answer is yes — that yes, you can be free — then once again the truth becomes what you make it. No one and nothing beyond or outside ourselves has the power to dictate who and what we live for… unless we hand that power over, by accident or on purpose.

Creative Analysis and “Failure of Imagination”

Jack recently read (or rather inhaled) Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason.  What an amazing story.

Mason is a fascinating character in so many ways. From both a success and failure standpoint, his “risk management” efforts make for compelling reading. He sees a big score as “a complicated puzzle to be solved,” always thinking first about the risk — not unlike prospecting for, and executing on, a major trading or investing opportunity.

The below paragraphs in particular caught Jack’s attention. “Failure of Imagination” is a deliciously apt way to describe both catastrophic lapses in risk management (i.e. Bill Miller at Legg Mason, for those familiar with the fund management world) and the routine pitfalls of conventional wisdom in market analysis (i.e. mundane, plain vanilla, “status quo” type assertions that cover the same tired ground and fail to account for key dynamics or critical hidden variables).

In terms of practical application, Mason has inspired Jack to more actively and deliberately “use his imagination” when trying to anticipate how and where things could go wrong; how various theme-driven scenarios might unfold both in markets and in life; and to be more conscientious on the whole in regard to seeing with fresh eyes.

Here’s the text (from Chapter 18):

Former astronaut and Eastern Airlines CEO Frank Borman coined an incredibly apt phrase in 1967. Testifying before a House committee investigating the deaths of three astronauts during a ground test, Borman attributed the disaster to a “failure of imagination.” He said that the engineering team had been unable to envision such an occurrence in the first place, and therefore were completely unprepared to prevent it or deal with it when it actually happened.

Similarly, I eventually came to realize that when a detective or security expert used a flattering phrase like “superhuman” in connection with one of my scores, what he was really doing was covering up his own failure of imagination. If he couldn’t figure out how I’d pulled off the heist, he retreated behind the excuse that the thief must have been “a human fly” or “the best there ever was.” What other explanation could there possibly be, other than that the detective wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, which is not something a law enforcement professional is anxious to admit.

In the context of metaprocess (and best life principles), one can further ponder the “failure of imagination” diagnosis as it applies to envious dismissals and unfortunate missed chances in life. When a person accomplishes something extraodinary, there seem to be two general types of public response — the more common revolving around “He was just lucky” or “He was born with superhuman talent” (i.e. the luck diagnosis once removed).

The second, more enabling response is “How can I do that too” — or perhaps, more firmly, “I know I can do that too” — the big difference between the two mindsets being a matter of quiet self confidence and the mystery of the “how.” The more common response (superhuman / just lucky) declares the “how” to be impossible sans any true effort to crack the nut, thus giving in to failed imagination (and conveniently letting mere mortals off the hook).

Belief is Blindness

The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

– Wired magazine, The Neuroscience of Screwing Up

Scientific experiments tend to fail. A lot.

An eye-opening piece from Wired on the neuroscience of failure reveals this unsurprising truth. What does surprise is not the tendency for experiments to fail, but the tendency of scientists not to learn from their dead ends and mistakes. Oftentimes an experimental failure has some useful new insight or potential new line of inquiry to impart — and yet this subtle windfall is all too often missed or ignored entirely.

According to researcher Kevin Dunbar — a scientist who studies other scientists — the reason why scientists consistently “fail to learn from failure” is rooted in the brain. In accordance with the way the brain works, our preexisting beliefs create a sort of manufactured obliviousness to disconfirming data. The original hypothesis (i.e. preexisting belief) becomes like the vision-restricting blinders one sees on a carriage horse.

“Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.”

The technical / neurochemical explanation of just how belief equates to blindness is found in this (lengthy) excerpt:

As he tried to further understand how people deal with dissonant data, Dunbar conducted some experiments of his own. In one 2003 study, he had undergraduates at Dartmouth College watch a couple of short videos of two different-size balls falling. The first clip showed the two balls falling at the same rate. The second clip showed the larger ball falling at a faster rate. The footage was a reconstruction of the famous (and probably apocryphal) experiment performed by Galileo, in which he dropped cannonballs of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. Galileo’s metal balls all landed at the exact same time — a refutation of Aristotle, who claimed that heavier objects fell faster.

While the students were watching the footage, Dunbar asked them to select the more accurate representation of gravity. Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) They found the two balls falling at the same rate to be deeply unrealistic, despite the fact that it’s how objects actually behave. Furthermore, when Dunbar monitored the subjects in an fMRI machine, he found that showing non-physics majors the correct video triggered a particular pattern of brain activation: There was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue located in the center of the brain. The ACC is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions — neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit — so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong.

So far, so obvious: Most undergrads are scientifically illiterate. But Dunbar also conducted the experiment with physics majors. As expected, their education enabled them to see the error, and for them it was the inaccurate video that triggered the ACC.

But there’s another region of the brain that can be activated as we go about editing reality. It’s called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC. It’s located just behind the forehead and is one of the last brain areas to develop in young adults. It plays a crucial role in suppressing so-called unwanted representations, getting rid of those thoughts that don’t square with our preconceptions. For scientists, it’s a problem.

When physics students saw the Aristotelian video with the aberrant balls, their DLPFCs kicked into gear and they quickly deleted the image from their consciousness. In most contexts, this act of editing is an essential cognitive skill. (When the DLPFC is damaged, people often struggle to pay attention, since they can’t filter out irrelevant stimuli.) However, when it comes to noticing anomalies, an efficient prefrontal cortex can actually be a serious liability. The DLPFC is constantly censoring the world, erasing facts from our experience. If the ACC is the “Oh shit!” circuit, the DLPFC is the Delete key. When the ACC and DLPFC “turn on together, people aren’t just noticing that something doesn’t look right,” Dunbar says. “They’re also inhibiting that information.”

The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. The physics students, for instance, didn’t watch the video and wonder whether Galileo might be wrong. Instead, they put their trust in theory, tuning out whatever it couldn’t explain.

A hat tip once again to accidental neuroscientists Simon & Garfunkel. It seems that the line “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” — recently referenced on this blog, oddly enough — is literally true.  (At least if one equates seeing, hearing, and so on.)

And the antidote to this neurochemically imposed awareness deficit? Two quick prescriptions are offered:

1) “shock yourself out of your cognitive box,” and

2) “try explaining to somebody outside your field.”

Dunbar found that when belief-blind scientists “were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves,”

…these abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain.

To learn from failure requires one other thing too — the ability to let go of ego. Many fail at this first hurdle. A mind already suited to seeing what it wants to see / hearing what it wants to hear can only grow more rigid when emotions are involved.

For Jack, the most fascinating aspect of the piece was clarification of just how an inability to conceptually “see” stems directly from the workings of the isolated mind. To an astonishing degree, key factors in regard to who we are, what we are and how we are stem from sociobiological realities of physical existence! (A concept known as “neuroplasticity” offers a glorious free will escape from this seeming Skinnerian prison, but that is a topic for another day.)

It may not be necessary to constantly engage others in the search for clarity. One could instead play devil’s advocate in a journal, for example… or get in the habit of trying to “kill one’s creation” via brutal intellectual stress tests… or even write out persuasive layman’s explanations to a fictional Aunt Sophie. What does seem necessary, regardless of the method applied, is a willingness to stretch and engage the brain on multiple fronts, and to put aside ego in doing so.  One then has a better shot at profiting from Samuel Beckett’s advice: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“I live therefore I think” – José Ortega y Gasset

One of life’s small joys is finding a compelling new thinker, writer, musician etc. through the easy camaraderie of dialogue and shared experience.

Many of Jack’s seminal life influences made their way in not via official channels or academic study, but rather through the casual recollections of friends, family members and colleagues.

Another thinker has been serendipitously discovered in exactly this fashion: José Ortega y Gasset.

Though not having read (yet!) a single page of Ortega y Gasset’s work — he died in 1955, but is wholly new to Jack as of this posting — the man’s philosophy (as described by Wikipedia) sounds brilliant, and remarkably in synch with the (independently developed) core tenets of Metaprocess.  Wikipedia excerpt follows (underscore emphasis Jack’s):

Circunstancia

For Ortega y Gasset, philosophy has a critical duty to lay siege to beliefs in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality. In order to accomplish such tasks the philosopher must, as Husserl proposed, leave behind prejudices and previously existing beliefs and investigate the essential reality of the universe. Ortega y Gasset proposes that philosophy must, as Hegel proposed, overcome both the lack of idealism (in which reality gravitated around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (which is for him an undeveloped point of view in which the subject is located outside the world) in order to focus [on] the only truthful reality (i.e. life). He suggests that there is no me without things and things are nothing without me, I (human being) can not be detached from my circumstances (world). This led Ortega y Gasset to pronounce his famous maxim “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (“I am myself and my circumstance”) which he always situated in the core of his philosophy. For Ortega y Gasset, as for Husserl, the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ is insufficient to explain reality—therefore the Spanish philosopher proposes a system where life is the sum of the ego and circumstance. This circunstancia is oppressive; therefore, there is a continual dialectical exchange of forces between the person and his or her circumstances and, as a result, life is a drama that exists between necessity and freedom.

In this sense Ortega y Gasset wrote that life is at the same time fate and freedom, and that freedom “is being free inside of a given fate. Fate gives us an inexorable repertory of determinate possibilities, that is, it gives us different destinies. We accept fate and within it we choose one destiny.” In this tied down fate we must therefore be active, decide and create a “project of life”—thus not be like those who live a conventional life of customs and given structures who prefer an unconcerned and imperturbable life because they are afraid of the duty of choosing a project.

Raciovitalismo

With a philosophical system that centered around life, Ortega y Gasset also stepped out of Descartes‘ cogito ergo sum and asserted “I live therefore I think”. This stood at the root of his Nietzsche-inspired perspectivism, which he developed by adding a non-relativistic character in which absolute truth does exist and would be obtained by the sum of all perspectives of all lives, since for each human being life takes a concrete form and life itself is a true radical reality from which any philosophical system must derive. In this sense, Ortega coined the terms “razón vital” (“vital reason” or “reason with life as its foundation”) to refer to a new type of reason that constantly defends the life from which it has surged and “raciovitalismo”, a theory that based knowledge in the radical reality of life, one of whose essential components is reason itself. This system of thought, which he introduces in History as System, escaped from Nietzsche’s vitalism in which life responded to impulses; for Ortega, reason is crucial to create and develop the above-mentioned project of life.

Much that is powerful in that brief description.

Top 1,000 Amazon reviewer Guillermo Maynez gives a further taste of Ortega y Gasset’s style and approach in his review of “What is Philosophy”:

In this book of essays, the great conservative philosopher from Spain exposes his theory of “vitalism”. His main line of argument is that what really exists, what we truly are able to know it’s there, is life. Not the I, not thought, nor matter, but life. Hence, the central problem of philosophy is the nature and essence of life: what it is, where it comes from, where it leads, how to cope with it. The whole idea is that philosophy should not be an eternal and circular reflection on abstract thoughts, but a well-ordered system of thought that enables us humans to live better, to understand better life and all that it is filled with. Caution: Ortega never argues in favor of a vulgar popularization or a cheapening of philosophy. He only tries to give the message that philosophy is for the living, for the common people (as individuals connected to community, but never as masses, cfr. “The revolt of the masses”).

Philosophy, then, must be connected to real experience. The philosopher must come out of the Ivory Tower, and experience life in the streets. Otherwise, philosophy will remain an abstruse and esoteric matter, only for those initiated, and that philosophy is not much useful. As with other thinkers, Ortega is overlooked for not being included in the Anglo-Saxon canon, but I think his work is one of the most alive and meaningful of all philosophy. It does have a message for people living at the beginning of the 21 century, and it would be worthwhile to read or re-read his, by the way, extremely clear and sraightforward voice. Ortega is not a Nietzsche musing upon disordered dreams of supermen (although he elaborates on this very philosopher). His is a well-thought, systematic and clear view of the world, and that makes it a very readable work.