Learning is Change

Question 133 of 365: When should you pack up and leave?

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Lightning over the outskirts of Oradea, Romani...
Image via Wikipedia

“Last Night” is the title of one of my favorite songs (by The Strokes) and my favorite movies (A Canadian Indie Film). The former has a driving beat and the latter has an exquisite plot device. Last night is something that just happened, and that I am still recovering from. It is something that drove me to leave, and stopped the ongoing plot in its tracks.

Last night, my wife and I packed up and drove home with our two kids from the downtown hotel we were planning on staying at for the week. We did this at 10:00 pm. Our children are not accustomed to staying up so late, but there they were, in pajamas and coats waiting for us to pack up the van and go home across town.

Without explaining too many of that particulars, a single hotel room is not sufficient to hold a family of four. Not with phone calls and door bells going off while we were trying to put our children to sleep. Not with a party going on next door. Not with the heat eminating from the four bodies in the room that all want to go to bed, but can’t.

So we packed it in and cut our losses. We thought it would be for the best, and that is exactly what it turned out to be. We slept in our own beds and we rested in the way that only your own home can afford. We left because leaving was the one thing that was going to make us happier and more sane.

And that is what I am seeking now: sanity. The space to be as loud as needed. The ability to own what is around us. The understanding that there isn’t anything else more important than doing right by the people that I love.

With this in mind, I ponder just how much insanity I can put up with. I think through just how many obligations that are unconnected to my passions that I can really handle. It has become something of a masochistic act to assume more responsibility without seeing a benefit.

Starting something is easy, follow through is hard. Follow through is the insane part. It takes you in so many different directions that seemingly contradict your original intentions. It frustrates and offends your reason. But, we offend it all together. It is a process of accepting the insantity for the sake of not having to retreat. It is the hope of a big payoff somewhere in the future that we put up with the insanity.

And that is what I had hoped to do at the hotel. I hoped that having our beds made for us and getting free breakfast would be enough to offset the bedtime craziness. As it turns out, it wasn’t. It wasn’t worth it because I knew all of the benefits concretely. I could see into the future and predict exactly what our family would get out of a week of hotel living.

The future I can’t predict is in writing and doing, startups, books and schools. This is where I can’t see the equasion of insanity. This is where it gets so hard to figure out if I should pack up and go home. I don’t know where it is that this journey will take me. And that is exhilarating and infuriating.

I know what I need to feel comfortable and to rest easy, and for the most part, this isn’t it. I am staying somewhere away from home, away from the classroom. I am staying here for an indefinite period until I can either buy out the hotel and make my own home or run up a big enough bill and crawl back home in a stupor of debt (even if that debt is really only a deficiency of energy).

Is there any shortcut for this equation? Is there any way to figure out whether or not the insanity and uncomfortablility is worth it? I love working toward something, so long as it does have a payoff. Otherwise, I would rather simply go home and rest, gearing up for the next long excursion.

To put it another way, I feel as though I am on a pilgrimage without any directions or definite destination. I am traveling in the shadows of Chaucer’s tales with just as many anecdotes to tell. I don’t know if I am a reeve or a miller. I don’t know if I have gapped teeth. And I won’t for a while. And I won’t know the equation answer either.

And I guess I must sojourn on, staying at the hotel until the voices in my head while I lay there are too strong. Until they beg me to come home and rest awhile. And maybe that day is coming. And maybe I can handle the insanity for a bit longer.

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Question 132 of 365: Who's shadow are we in?

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Heart Monitor
Image by Rennett Stowe via Flickr

I traveled with my father when I was young. To Australia, to Japan, to Spain. He went there to talk to people about his passion: electrophysiology (the study of heart rhythms). They asked him to come. Paid for him, even. And he brought me along because he thought it would be a good experience. It was.

I didn’t learn as much about the cultures as I could have, but I did learn a lot about what it means to be thought of as valuable. I learned what it meant to be someone in the room that requires a handshake. I learned what it meant to be someone in the room who’s child you had to at least fein an interest in.

I am glad that I am not in medicine. While my father’s reputation would have opened a great many doors, it would have been nearly impossible to get out from behind his shadow. I would have had to either fail spectacularly or have run in a drastically different direction to make a similar impact. And that is heartening and discouraging at the same time.

I believe that my father loves what he does and that he creates new things on a daily basis because of it. He collaborates and pushes his insitutions to be better in every conversation he has. And each one of these contributions creates a larger shadow.

And I am sitting directly in the middle of it now. The Heart Rhythm Society‘s annual conference is in Denver this year and I just went and received my credentials to attend. At first, they aked me if I had already paid the conference fee. Then someone behind the booth figured something out, and redid my whole entry so that I could have a Master Pass rather than a “Comped ticket”.

I’m quite certain that this didn’t have anything to do with me. It had to do with the fact that my father is on the front page of the Heart Rhythm Society newpaper. While I am presenting on Friday regarding social networks and collaboration, I didn’t have to submit through the rigorous process usually saved for unknown upstarts. I just sat in my father’s shadow and it worked.

The majority of what I do, does not require me to sit there, but for this week, that is where I am. I shake hands as my father’s son, and struggle to come up with something interesting enough to warrant being remembered as something else. I get double takes when people look at my badge. And then, perhaps just a bit, I get a knowing glance. An understanding of why and how I am here is being shared.

And for as much as my father has the best intentions for injecting me into this world, it still isn’t my world. As much as he thinks that I have something to offer and to teach the people that inhabit this world, it is only because of his shadow that I can sneak in and make my own impact. And, for the most part, I am okay to do this for a week.

I am fine to sit here and make a small contribution. It is great to talk with interesting people and try and find out a little bit more about my father. It is wonderful to see him interact on my behalf and see what it is that I can help create with him. It is great to collaborate with my father, seeing as how I talk about finding mentoring relationships in any place we can.

I just couldn’t do it forever. At some point, my fathers shadow would prove too dark. I would crave the sunlight. I would wish to venture out and find truth on my own.

And that is why I hope I don’t make a shadow too big for my own son. While I don’t believe I will be taking him around the world as my father did for me, I do think that there are certain circles that I am passionate enough about to simply monopolize the discussion and the creation within. It is my sincerest hope that I don’t cause my son to run away from what I am ambitious about for fear of not measuring up.

I’m not sure that is exactly why I didn’t become a doctor, but I think that is part of it. If my son feels as though there isn’t enough space to find relationships on his own, he will leave. And I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want it to take us 20 years to come back to the place of mutual benefit, to have our exploits dovetail perfectly.

But, that may be the way that all father-son relationships are. We want what is best for our sons, but we are striving for ourselves all the while. When one gets in the way of the other, which one wins?

The shade that my father is providing this week is cool and comfortable and wonderfully temporary. I hope that my son feels the same way about mine.

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Question 131 of 365: Am I dressing for the job that I want?

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Gentleman wearing bowler hat and three-piece suit
Image via Wikipedia

For an entire year, I wore only sports jackets and ties to work. No matter how hot and no matter how what day of the week, I wore a self-imposed uniform. Better yet, I had a total of three sports jackets to cycle through. A green checkered pattern (without leather elbow pads), a classic black, and one with a blue texture. I wore these to command some respect with my 7th and 8th graders, whom I looked a bit too much like for my taste. I had 10 shirts, at most, to work with and about the same number of ties. If someone was going to make a chart of all of the combinations I went through during that year, I think that they probably only would have come up with a couple dozen. I had a rhythm to this dress and with that rhythm came an expectation for myself to improve my status. It cued me to the idea that I was not merely a teacher, but that I was a professional. I had some pride in what I was doing and wanted to continue with this time-honored position.

And yet, I stopped. I don’t still wear that uniform, and yet I do not feel any less pride in my work. I do not feel as though I am less serious about creating change or affecting lives with ideas. Somehow, wearing blue jeans hasn’t stopped me. I had always heard that you should dress for the job that you want and not the job that you have. Yet, this trite expression of optimism has never made me feel anything other than depressed, even as I was adhering to its rule of law. The rigid adherence to this standard keeps the emphasis on our physical presence rather than our accomplishments and it makes it so we are excluding a huge portion of the population whose access to business clothes is severely lacking. And yet for all of the signs to a more casual working environment (including my own progression on the matter), the expectation is still a suit and tie. And I still oblige this obligation much of the time. I bow to tradition and to peer pressure.

Tonight is no exception.

Tonight I was planning on going out to a business function to shake some hands. I was planning on wearing a nice shirt and some slacks (slacks is the preferred way of addressing one’s pants), preferably something comfortable enough to not worry about how I looked. And yet, I did worry. I started worrying this morning. I worried so much that I went out and borrowed a nice tie (nicer than the ones I keep in my closet, I will admit) and I purchased a sports coat. The whole time I was in the store trying on the coats, I was thinking that it was ridiculous that I was letting such a maxim dictate what I should wear.

I’m an unconventional fellow, interested in unconventional things (or so I tell myself). I had Mini business cards printed instead of the normal size. I put my twitter account info on them, even. I’m hip. I’m edgy. But, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I would be labeled instantly as someone not worthy of a conversation for wearing anything except for the required uniform. More than that, I know that if I showed up the way I had planned this morning, I would have lacked the confidence to have some of the deep conversations I am looking forward to. I’m not sure how my jacket can inject confidence into a handshake, but I do think that it happens.

Perhaps it is because I have to become someone else in order to talk to people that I don’t know. I have to act like someone who enjoys that sort of thing. Starting up a relationship has always been this way for me. It is as if I have to put up a caricature of myself so that people will not be too frightened off by the immediate lack of experience or presence. Then, I slowly chip away at the caricature and fill in the holes with little bits of authentic self. I think that it is the only way I can not be hurt by the pressure of situations like that.

And maybe that is why I feel the need to dress up the way that I do. Maybe that is why the trite expression makes sense.

Perhaps we are just putting on armor so that we don’t feel so exposed. If we look like the other people in the crowd, we will not be as easily attacked or questioned for belonging. We want to guide the conversations that are about us, and we don’t want them to be about what we are wearing. We want people to see us across the room and talk about our successes and virtues rather than immediately see what could be construed as flaws.

So, in that sense, I am dressing for the job I want. I want the job of being in a relationship with other people who share my passions. And, the only way for me to do that right now is to show them that I am relationship material. Even if it means suckering them in with homogeneity and then asking if it is okay to put on something more comfortable. Once that bit of trust has been established, casual intercourse can transpire. I just hope that my conversation doesn’t get too promiscuous.

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Question 130 of 365: When are we open for business?

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Image representing Kazaa as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I am a part of the first generation of file sharers, the first set of adults who felt entitled to free music and software. More than anything else, peer-to-peer networks have shaped the way I think about ownership. When .mp3 files became more numerous than word documents, something within the computer and within us shifted. The business models of a dozen industries have been rocked by this shift. Yet, it is the root of this generation that is most intriguing. It is the file sharing ethos itself that has created so much change. And, it is this generation of adults, whose expectations are so drastically different from all others before them that will continue to drive the shift in politics, business and education. Other people have done this analysis in books and such, I will spend an entire post on it.

I used to have two pieces of paper taped to my monitor, one on either side. On the left side were perpetual searches that I would run whenever I got bored. I would type these terms into Gnutella, Napster, and later Kazaa. They were all names of bands that I admired, and already owned a significant number of albums from. I would download dozens of bootlegs for each of these bands, most of which turned out to be cover songs by wannabe artists.

I think that is why I became so enamored with authenticity. I became incredibly skeptical of any band that claimed to be one of my chosen few. I tried to match the vocal stylings and lyrical patterns, but at the end of the day, I just wanted to know that those artists that I believed in, could really be believed.

That is where the business opportunity comes in for the left side of our monitors. I would have paid for access to validated files. I would have ventured my own capital whenever I was asked, if I could only see a little bit more about the people that I idolized. In a world where everything can be copied and nothing is original, the only true value is in what can be validated and contextualized within something that we already respect. It is why the iPad works and Windows CE was a bust. We see that the iPhone OS has value already and it has been validated already by millions. Windows CE was not validated in any way because of the vast numbers of devices that have run that operating system. Each one watered down the validation; each one contributed to the knock-off status of every other device.

The people that we love are even more important than the brands as well. Those that can validate their contributions will increase the value of those contributions. Those that can validate their content within new and expanding formats (like mp3 files in the late 90s), will do the best of all.

As for the right side of my screen, these were the songs that I would search for and cross off as I found them. I went through many more pieces of paper on the right side than on the left. After I downloaded Breakfast at Tiffanies, I crossed it of. After I downloaded the A Cappella version of Two Princes (by the Spin Doctors), I didn’t have to worry about that one anymore. These are songs that I probably would not have paid for, but I downloaded them and enjoyed them imensely.

There is a huge business opportunity here for those things that we absolutely do not need, but would make our experience so much better. This is the back catelogue. The nostalgia factor.

I believe that these things need to be as free as possible. We need to keep the things from our past and our collective consciousness as open as we can. The stuff on the right side of our monitors needs to be at our fingertips at all times, because it is only through these features (I am talking about applications, knowledge, creative processes, and physical objects as well as songs here) that we will be able to grab hold of those who are also willing to part with money for new works as well.

I understand that it may be a fine line between nostalgia and new, but I think it is an important one. We should not have to pay for our own legacy (stuff we have already paid for, stuff that is in our understanding of possention and ownership), but rather, we should be paying for the legacies of others (and our future nostalgia, I suppose). The things that we have already come to expect, is not where the growth lies. It is in getting people to understand that they need more, by offering the rest of it for free.

It boils down to this: If we would like to own the future of education, business, or politics, we need to offer the past for free. Curriculum and textbooks must become free, but the method and interaction of learning must become our bread and butter. The feature sets of yesterday must be open sourced, but innovation must be at a premium value. The democratic precedent must be opened up for search and analysis for the masses, but the voting process and taxation for creating a better word is where we need to fully invest.

That is where the opporunities lay. For both the perpetual search and the list that we can check off. I don’t think either is easy, but if file sharing and the culture of entitlement can teach us anything, it is this: We can’t go back to a completely closed system. Everyone is empowered now, and we must fight our way back from the brink.

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Question 128 of 365: Why should we smoke?

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Common adverse effects of tobacco smoking (See...
Image via Wikipedia

I got to know my wife by smoking hundreds of cigarretes with her. We would sit outside of the dorm and talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. We would meet each other after class and hop in her car that constantly leaked oil. We would crack the windows and smoke to our hearts content (or not so much, if we are being realistic). The parliaments would sit in-between us, temping us to make the trip a few minutes longer.

While I am glad that we no longer smoke, I am also glad for the time that we had while we did. I found out more about her, faster. I learned things that you can really only share over something that is actively killing you. And, it was wonderful.

And on nights like tonight, when I am only really trying to figure out how a house gets so messy after only two days of being lived in with children. On nights when my whole world is comfortable and easy. I miss the chaos of ciggaretes. I miss thumbing my nose at health and sensibility. And, I wonder what it is that actually replaced those moments of laying down in the courtyard of a university, looking up at a cloudless sky and learning about your future wife’s childhood.

I knew that I was going to marry her while smoking. When she told me about her grandmother who constantly frightened her with thoughts of hell, I knew. When she told me that she was not going to accept her Americore placement, I knew. When we waited for the all clear to sound after a particularly late-night fire drill, I knew.

I have outgrown the need for a cancer stick in my hand while I talk to my wife, but for a while, it was my crutch. It was the easiest way to have an excuse to go outside and think out loud. It was the way for us to dig deep for an adventure when we both knew that there really wasn’t anything much going on.

So, what has replaced smoking for figuring out our future?

Mostly, it is going on walks and sneaking away from work while our children are at school for a lunch or late afternoon appetizer. Now we choose to put one foot in front of the other and make that our habit. Now, we look directly at one another for longer than most people are comfortable doing. We talk about the days we have had and the ones we know are coming. We let the connection we have built waft up into the sky above us, or hang low around our heads.

We have become our own glowing embers, inhaling deep the daily adventures with our kids. We take deep drags off of our own shared sighs, knowing that the days are hard and that the only relief is one another. And we never throw the butts of our days out, instead choosing to save them to ensure that we don’t litter the world with a longing or resentment for what has passed.

While this isn’t really about mother’s day, it is in a way. The mother my wife is today has everything to do with the woman that I shared cigarretes with, when there was nothing at stake. She could have chosen to share a pack with anyone, and she chose me. She could have quit on her own, but instead she chose me to support her. She could have chosen to have children with anyone, but she chose me.

And that is why I love her. She chose all of those things, and she continues to make those choices for our family. She worries and hopes and creates and communicates by choice.

And if one day when my children ask if we ever smoked, I will tell them that it is how their parents met. I will tell them that it is why their parents know each other as well as they do. But, I will also tell them that it was only by moving on from ciggaretes to children that we became addicted to the right mix of chemicals.

They might think that is cheesy, but I know it to be true.

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Question 127 of 365: Whose hands are we in?

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I used to have trouble reading. Not with the words that were on the page or with figuring out the metaphorical language either. I had trouble listening to what the author had to say. I constantly let my world view crowd out anything that was being intended. It can be said, that for a time, I couldn’t read.

Specifically, I couldn’t read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I couldn’t understand that there could have been a time when people thought of God as only angry and not filled with grace and love. I kept apologizing for the author. I kept on injecting my evangelical upbringing into the equasion because that is the only way that it made sense. My background blinded me to the truth that was meant to strike fear into anyone that heard those words. When I spoke from this ignorant perspective, my English teacher corrected me, and rightfully so. He wanted me to be able to see what was really there and not what I was putting there in its place.

I would like to think that I can read now, that I can listen to everything that is coming in and respond to it as truth. I would like to believe that my response to the world is not of replacing reality with my own, but in responding to the reality that other represent so that we can all exist without modification.

But, I’m not sure I still can read things while I suspend my own world view. I’m not sure that I can have conversations without my narrow-minded focus getting in the way.

Today, I had a discussion about the virtues of collaboration, as I do on many days. This time, though, I monopolized the conversation because people were looking to me for possibilities. I brought forward options for co-authoring a resource. I put together a collaborative document, and then let the idea fly.

My question is, what didn’t I read by doing this?

What world-view, no matter how steeped in my own experience, is causing me to keep reliving the same event with my English teacher all those years ago. Back then, I was told I was wrong. Today… nothing.

The biggest reason for it is that I didn’t allow allow silence to occur as it naturally would as people are thinking. Akward pauses do not mean that people have nothing to contribute, but I treated them that way. I didn’t allow the pause to mean as much as the note (to borrow one of my favorite musical metaphors). If I was half the collaborator that I am claiming to be, I would have let people not talk for more than 30 seconds. I would have asked people their stories about their own co-creative endeavors. I would have not tried to “push-back” on others ideas, but simply listen and try to absorb what it is important.

Here is one thing that I believe: All the world is a text.

Not a stage or a performance or a game or a challenge. The world is a text, to be read and understood. To be listened to and noted. It doesn’t need my additions in order to be complete. It needs me to underline and annotate. It needs me to put up sticky notes and tell others just how great it is.

And if the world is a text, I need to read it better. The information is there, I just have to try and figure out what it is telling me.

So, here is what I would like to do:

1. Take 1 e-mail a week and try to figure out with other people exactly what is being communicated. I would like to dissect the diction and parse the syntax. I would like to analyze the stories and try and see the significance of the words. I would like to ascertain the author’s purpose and use all of this information to better figure out just what the relationship is between the sender and myself.

2. Take a single meeting a week and not talk. I would like to take copious notes on everything that I hear, but I would like the luxury of not talking in at least one meeting a week. I would like to use this time to hone my listening and contextualizing skills.

3. Draw a lot. I am a terrible artist, but there is nothing that is so honest as a few chicken scratches. I don’t feel awkward about being wrong in a drawing. I can represent the texts that I see around me, and be proud that I am doing my best to represent them alone because I don’t know how to be more artful. In writing, I can make things more descriptive (and perhaps deceptive) than they really are. In a crappy drawing, they are what they are.

In the end, I want to be in the hands of anyone that is angry. I want to get caught up in the text of those experiences. I want to know them intimately and believe that they are someone’s truth. Those hands are the only kind that matter to me at this point because the hands that I chose to create only support an increibly small amount. I want big strong hands, those that support everything we need to experience the texts around us.

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Question 126 of 365: Is multi-tasking noise?

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multi-tasking desktop
Image by natala007 via Flickr

People have been up in arms since the iPhone came out that it doesn’t allow multi-tasking. In fact, I was one of those people with arms outstretched. I couldn’t understand why any company as visionary as Apple would want to limit their devices to only doing one thing at a time. At any given moment, I have at least 20 programs running and another 20 tabs open in Chrome. This is the way that I work. It is how I communicate with other easily and how I push the flow of data along. Now though, I am beginning to question whether or not this multi-tasking mania is really good for my creative prospects.

I think I get why Apple has resisted multi-tasking so much on their devices. They wanted each one to provide an experience for their users that was unlike anything else they have seen. They wanted to make sure that each app downloaded would feel as though it were made just for them, and not as some distraction for other distractions from real work. As I have gotten used to working on the iPad, I have realized just how powerful it is that I don’t have twitter up while I am writing. I realize just how intriguing answering an e-mail becomes when I’m not distracted by downloads or multiple tabs that keep on redirecting my attention.

On the desktop, I set up tasks in separate programs. I start one and then jump to another while that one loads. I sometimes forget about the first one until I am closing out of things a few hours later. On the iPad, I don’t feel that rush. Everything is fast and the apps don’t work together at all. Ordinarily, I would be frustrated, but at the moment, I like the fact that I am drawing a vector illustration in one app, taking a screenshot, rotating it a second app, then sending it to my blog with a third. Each task becomes sacred. It becomes more time with the process of making something great. On a desktop, it is all done for you. You don’t feel as though you have accomplished something.

And, I want to accomplish something. I want to take my time editing and producing and completely forget that there are other tasks that need to be done. For the moment, there is just one. I will follow it to its logical conclusion and then move on to the next.

It lets my mind be something it doesn’t ussually get the chance to be: organized.

It is like the one time that I cleaned my room for real.

I don’t think that I am alone in complaining about having to clean up my room. Also don’t think I am alone in doing a half-hearted job most of the time because I knew that it was going to get messy again quite soon. I am also willing to wager that I am not alone in having spent one full afternoon really cleaning my room so that I was proud of the result.

I set up action figures in fight scenes on the bookshelves. I put each of my baseball cards into their protective sleeves. I made my bed with special folds at the top that were far to intricate to be accidental. I sorted my books by genre and put the series books into their correct order.

In short, I cleaned that room like it was my job. And, I enjoyed it. I took time with those action figures to make sure that the scenes were believable. I found out new statistics about my favorite ball players. I thought about how many times I had slept in that bed while I folded the top sheet underneath the blanket. And I made mental notes of when I should read those same books again. Each event had its place and I wasn’t worried about getting all of it done because I knew that I would eventually create the finished product.

I feel like that is the power of not multi-tasking. That is the power of quiet.

While I need the noise sometimes to do a lot of things quickly, I know that I will never enjoy them as much as if I only were doing one task at a time. So, the iPad may get multi-tasking this fall, but I can tell you that I will never use it to create noise. I will never enable it just so I can devalue each step in the creative process. I will only use it to know more about the one task I am concentrating on right now. On this device, I will set up workflows only to create better work, never more output.

Because for me, output and work are two totally different things. The latter I love because it gives me more purpose. The former I despise because it gives me generic accomplishments and false understanding.

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