The Social Animal

My Friend,

Stop reading. Go purchase The Social Animal by David Brooks. I suggest Audible:

http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B004NEKPK4

Ok, done? Good. This is one of the most important books I've encountered in years, at least to a reader of my letters. So good, I'm not even going to comment on it. But I will excerpt:

All his life, Harold had been surrounded by people with a set of socially approved motivations: to make money, to get good grades, to get into a good college. But none of these really explained why Harold did what he did, or why the Greek heroes did what they did.

The ancient Greeks had a different motivational structure. Thumos was the desire for recognition, the desire to have people recognize your existance; and not only now, but for all time. Thumos included the desire for eternal fame, to attract admiration and to be worthy of admiration in a way that was deeper than mere celebrity.

Harold's culture didn't really have a word for that desire, but this Greek word helped explain Harold to himself.  All his life, he had been playing games in his imagination. He had imaginged himself, as a boy, winning the World Series, throwing the perfect pass, saving his favorite teachers for mortal peril. And in each fantasy his triumph had been delirously witnessed by family, friends, and the world around him.

This fantasizing, in its childish way, was the product of by thumos. The desire for recognition and union, that underlay the other drives for money and success.

The thymotic world was a more heroic world than the borgois careerist one Harold saw all around him. In the modern world in which he lived, the common assumption is that all human beings are attached at the earliest and lowest level. All human beigns are descended from common ancestors and share certain primitive traits.

But the Greeks tended to assume opposite: that human beings were united at the highest level. There are certain ideal essences, and the closer one is to taking possesion of the eternal excellence, the closer one is to this common humanity. Thumos is the drive rise up to those hights. It is the dream of the perfect success.  When all that is best within oneself blends with all that is eternal in the universe with perfect synchronisity.

Thumos. Delicious. A deadly serious virtue if there ever was one.

And this is just a taste of the narritive that Brooks has put together, one that manages to capture the essense of what I have been trying to write on for years, but more thorough, insightful, and enjoyable. Masterful.

Enjoy, see you when you're done, and looking forward to your thoughts!

 

Yours,

Phaedrus

 

Empathy in Business

I would venture that there is no more important skill in business than empathy.

Most view negotiation as a confrontation, but if your negotiations have become hostile, you have likely already lost. Truly, negotiation is an expression of empathy more than anything else. The savvy negotiator will be able to completely immerse himself in his counterpart's perspective. He will understand the frustrations his counterpart faces when dealing with our companies competitors, and how it manifests in a curtness or rudeness when dealing with us. He will understand the enormous stresses placed on his counterpart, or conversely, will understand that his counterpart is not emotionally engaged in his work at all. Our expert negotiator will recognize all of these things instinctively, not rationally, but through a distinct sense that is born into him and honed through training. He will, in every way possible, *become* his counterpart, understand what he wants, and achieve an agreement that best satisfies not only his own needs, but the needs of his counterpart as well. He will have not only achieved his goals in this negotiation, but at very little sacrifice also started to achieve his goals for the next one by building goodwill and trust.

Empathy should also be a manager's go to tool. One might look at the rigorous discipline structure of very successful large organizations like the United States Army and think you have found a flaw in my theory, but I disagree. Empathy is not softness, or weakness, or coddling. Empathy is seeing another person, seeing what they need and want. Sometimes, what your employees need or want is rigidness and structure. Other times, it is space, flexibility, and freedom. When is one correct and when the other? A manager with a finely honed empathic sense will know. So many times, I see a manager who develops a "style" that is mostly about them. No, this is egotistical and foolish. A manager's choice of tools should depend not on himself, but on his understanding of those he is managing and the tasks they face.

In marketing and sales, too, we find one of the strongest domains of empathy. We all have an image in our head of a charismatic salesman, maybe a guy at your local Apple store or the person who runs the small sandwich shop down the corner, who is always convincing you to try one of his fresh cheeses. And we tend to think of this charisma as a natural, inborn ability, something about good looks or a nice smile or a way of speaking. But likely, it has little to do with these things, and mostly to do with how that person makes us feel. What we don't see is the inside of our salesman's head, where when you walk in the door, he pulls up a rich image of you, colored with your favorite things, and makes you feel right at home. If you cannot put yourself in someones shoes and see the world through their eyes, there's very little chance you will ever sell them anything.

Empathy, what a powerful tool. And trainable too. Next time you are sitting in a train station, instead of withdrawing into your iPhone, take a look around. Try to imagine the lives of the people around you. Feel the sore feet on the nurse waiting next to you. See the insecurity lurking below the boredom of the teenager with those crazy piercings. Hear the cry of pain and hope from the old man singing the blues, and think what roads he might have walked to learn those tunes.

Before you know it, your powers will grow. It's a philosophical fact.

As you are hopefully now imagining, the power of empathy stretches well beyond business. But why not business? Yet so few business gurus and writers talk about it. What are you afraid of?

That your business might become too personal?

I shudder to think of a life where my business wasn't.

Thinking of you often, my friend,
Phaedrus

Some Questions about Go

I recently received an interesting letter from a friend. I'm grateful to have his permission to share the exchange with you.

Hey Phaed,

I've been playing a lot of Go on my phone recently, and I was wondering about a few things.

Do good Go players tend to become generally capable in the same way that good Chess players become generally capable? Like, Peter Thiel or Tyler Cowen or someone.

What does playing Go feel like to you? Like someone that I talked to about a grappling martial art says that it mostly feels like various body parts have associated amounts of tension, and that wrestling feels like doing things with the body parts to release tension in a way that puts them in a more advantageous position. Is Go kinesthetic? Does it feel like moving?

Thanks,
Apollo
Hey 'pol,

Awesome. Love go. You seen this yet? 

Do you mind if I post this entire exchange to Letters?

Also, let's play a game sometime! I'd also be thrilled to either give or receive a lesson as appropriate. :)

More comments below.

Do good Go players tend to become generally capable in the same way that good Chess players become generally capable? Like, Peter Thiel or Tyler Cowen or someone.

Hmm. Interesting question.

For starters, I'm not convinced that good chess players become more generally capable to a degree higher than other tasks, like, say, managing a fast food chain. Higher correlation, but not sure that it's the cause. 

That's important because everything I say about go in this regard has the same caveat. That said, I've never found an activity that better stimulates the entire range of strategic concepts than go. 

To quote myself:

If I had a religion, Go would be at the center of it; I firmly believe that to become a great Go player, you must know yourself, your biases and tendencies, your instincts and habits.  It can also be an incredibly frustrating game.  One of the great lessons that Go has to teach is humility; the complexity of the game staggers the human mind.  Seriously.  If you try to grasp it, it will overpower and defeat you.  All you can do is find ways of coping with the complexity, and those ways that the human mind has to cope with this complexity make up the study of tthe game of Go.

So, if we're buying the hypothesis that game playing is an excellent way to grow these capabilities, and not just experience and exercise them, then yes, I think Go would be in the very highest level of exercises like this, alongside some kind of poker, music, martial art, and yoga/meditation. 

I think chess exercises similar abilities, but with more of an emphasis on studying precedent and less of an emphasis on creativity and dynamic strategy. If I wanted to study careful application of improvisation to precedent, I would study warfare or football.  

What does playing Go feel like to you? Like someone that I talked to about a grappling martial art says that it mostly feels like various body parts have associated amounts of tension, and that wrestling feels like doing things with the body parts to release tension in a way that puts them in a more advantageous position. Is Go kinesthetic? Does it feel like moving?

The primary sense is definitely visual. Experienced go players actually get very annoyed with visual irregularities, like oddly shaped or sized stones. The board even has a defined square length-width, which is not the same, so that when looked at at an angle they appear mostly the same.

I think this matters so much because so much of the "logic" of the game lives in highly developed visual pattern recognition.

As for metaphors, the three I use most often are warfare, music, and conversation/debate/negotiation. It very much feels like those things. 

Warfare is probably the best, because it's a constant blend of tactical ability to execute, high level tradeoffs in different "theaters", understanding your chances of success in a given theater and the impact that either success or failure (actually, generally dozens of potential outcomes) will have on the global situation, deciding in which theaters you need to be aggressive or dedicate some resources to shore up defenses or mitigate a potential defeat.

It feels like music in that it is a very instinctual skill. It's hard to describe in words why you chose a move in the same way that it's hard for a musician to explain why he chose to play a given note at a given time.

It's like a negotiation because, in many ways, the most important thing is not the underlying facts, but rather how well you can steer the conversation and the perception of events to the places that benefit you. In go, one of the core strategy concepts is called sente, and has to do with whether you are reacting to your opponents moves, or he is reacting to you.

Does it feel like moving? There are some comparisons to martial arts in particular. But I think not particularly, no. It's actually very easy to draw comparisons to go with lots of things, because it is an organic system that arises from very simple rules. But one of the limitations is its turn based, linear nature, which prevents it from encapsulating strategies for dealing with real time decision making. 

But the tension analogy is very good for go. Particularly the idea that, you're trying to both relieve tension in a particular area, but also have the outcome be a globally more advantageous position, yes.

Some of my favorite go concepts are also martial arts terms.

Kiai and Aiki are related japanese words.

In go, kiai translates to "fighting spirit," and refers to the "fuck you" spirit. There's a saying in martial arts that goes something like, don't block, block-and-attack. Don't punch, punch-and-attack. Or some similar thing.  (Let's attribute it to Bruce Lee. Wouldn't be surprised) This displays kiai. It shares etymology with most of the "shouts" associated with an attack for lots of asian martial arts. ("kiai", "kiyup",  etc)

In go, this saying means, always be trying to thwart your opponents plans. When facing two otherwise equal moves, make the one you think your opponent expects least.

Aiki, as in aikido, is the spirit of accepting your opponents actions, and finding ways to turn them to your own advantage. In go, it means, instead of having a strategy in mind and blindly following it, to a certain degree, you need to let your opponent do what he is intent on doing, and find ways to turn the outcome he wants to your advantage.

These two concepts are entirely contradictory, but work together, as the yin and yang of your reactions to your opponents intentions.

Yours,
Phaed

Hey Phaed,

Huh, that's interesting. I should definitely reflect more on the interaction of kiai and aiki.

I don't mind at all if you put this up on letterstoafriend.

The reason that I'm wondering about the moving aspect of it is an intuition that something like motor processing is the main way that humans actually do things in the world, more than other sensory modalities.

I've certainly found that thinking about Go is interesting, and it's revealed a lot of my patterns of behavior to myself. Like, my weakness of trying to connect things that I'm doing in a way that limits my options, or my strength of continuing to play even when things look decided in a way that disrupts the computer player and fairly consistently leads to them losing a group in the endgame.

In Awesomeness,
Apollo

Hey 'pol,

I'm a big believer that we think with our senses. I also believe you can find clues in language to which sensory intelligence is being used. 

Do you see what I mean? Does that feel true to you? It rings true to me. 

Motor intelligence... I'm intrigued. I imagine that could be a whole set of intelligence distinct from simple touch. There are definitely major neural structures dedicated to coordinating motion. I wonder if they have been co-opted, the way I believe language derived structures largely enable our logic and math, and our spatial reasoning centers have developed to support the abstract interaction of complex ideas like strategy. 

(to oversimplify)

Yours,
Phaedrus

Hey Phaed,

I think that we almost certainly think using different sensory modalities, and that this is ridiculously important relative to the amount that it's being talked about by people in general.

Yeah. I think motor processing is probably more closely linked with spatial reasoning than it is say, verbal intelligence. My intuition says that anything that involves an adaptive response -- like pushing, noticing resitance, and changing how much you push back is more like motor processing than anything else. Planning actions, doing search trees, etc.

Go with me,
Apollo

A fascinating exchange. Lots of interesting ideas to explore further. Thanks Apollo, and all my friends who keep the life of my mind rich with new ideas to explore.

Yours,
Phaedrus

Prayer

My friend Sebastian is getting back to his time tracking, and as part of his tracking, he has listed, in his end of day routine,

Make a request of my subconscious:

What does 'make a request of my subconscious' mean?

I am not a Sebastian, but…

Our brains are immensely layered and complex. Many people, myself included, believe that by meditating on something your higher, conscious mind would like, it helps send that message down the ladder to the many subconscious layers.

Especially if you want something internal, like the courage to make a bold move, or the willpower to change a habit, I find meditating on it before sleep to be hugely effective. But even external things, I want to improve my relationship with my girlfriend, I want to spend less time on distractions, I want to be rich, I’ve also found to be effective, FWIW.

Sounds a remarkably lot like prayer, eh? Turns out, effective habits survive, and the rationalization is usually an afterthought anyway. :)

Be well,
Phaedrus

Give It Away

My friend,

In software engineering, one of the easiest traps to fall into is premature optimization. It happens all the time, because real optimization is hard, so people optimize the easy parts, the parts they understand well, even if those are not the parts of the program causing it to perform poorly.

I'm starting to realize, this is one of the easiest traps to fall into in life as well.

Most people spend their time optimizing the resources that they have an abundance of already. Because, well, those are the ones they know how to do.

Real optimization involves careful measurement, finding the bottlenecks, and focusing on freeing up the resources that are actually holding you back.

Do you know what's actually holding you back? Don't say money.

I can almost guarantee you it's trust and respect. For 98% of ambitious people I know who are not yet there, they have a deficit of trust and respect, and it's the single resource that's preventing them from excelling. Because trust and respect is very hard to earn, and very easy to lose.

The single biggest way to gain trust and respect? Provide value. Tons of it. Way more than you receive, on a consistent and predictable basis.

Can't find work? Can't convince anyone to pay you for the value you want to provide?

Give it away.

You may not get money, but you will certainly get back trust and respect. Trust and respect very easily converts into more money, more time, more flexibility, more freedom. But none of those things easily convert back into trust or respect.

Yours,
Phaed

Grinfuck

I learned a great new word today.

I'm going to keep my commentary to a minimum, as the linked article and his linkthroughs cover the topic quite well.

I'm also reminded of some of Sebastian's writing lately on politeness and friendliness. And I touched on this subject last week in my thoughts on friendship. 

I really just like the word. Grinfuck. I despise grinfuckers. It's the human's evolved equivalent of a beast's snarl.

Stay real brothers and sisters.

Yours,
Phaedrus

Love

My friend,

Robert Heinlein taught me,

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

John Lennon taught me,

All you need is love.

Seriously, guys, where have the years gone.
To my friends dead, but not gone. 

All of my love, all of my love, all of my love to you now.

Phaed