Mary Panttaja

Cycling our new “daily” loop the other day, an entire blog evolved in my head. (It’s that or a single song that pumps along with the peddles—I try to remember to chant, but often other things seem to happen on their own.) The loop runs to Geyserville on a tiny back road (actually Highway 128) and then back on a larger local road. 18 miles or so. Quite a bit of composing time—so my next “tool” is a recording device.

Here is my attempt to recreate the original—more thoughts on our proclivity to measure ourselves, which often means to rate ourselves against others (or even ourselves on another day). Why do we do this? So we can award ourselves with feeling good? Or punish ourselves by feeling bad? “We’re better than that” or “Look how truly sucky we are.”

The Trap

The first thing to notice is that the process itself is a trap. You are trapping yourself into a particular measurement of success. If you can measure it, it has limited scope. It’s about a simplistic measurable element of the whole: the weight, the time, the revenue, the count of customers. It is inherently not the whole thing—only a minor reflection of one element of what you are doing.

Now these measurable elements (the revenue, for example) are useful measures in their limited niche—used for precisely what they mean, but no more. They can be used to measure our skill level (how well we sell) or single facets of complex behaviors and their results. Since we learned to measure things we have used that information to evolve. This is good, useful, and challenging. Especially when we really know who we are—then careful measurement of our progress on our path can be a useful tool. But we need to remember, that the things we can measure are not usually the whole story—there are things in our lives, important things, that cannot be measured, but must be experienced and evaluated through our subjective experience.

Missing The Updraft

Last May, when I walked up (it is always up) the trail into Macchu Picchu, I really experienced how I could screw up my moment to moment life by comparing myself to others—even inadvertently.

The walking trail into Macchu Picchu is very difficult for regular folks: up over three passes, 14, 13, and 12,000 ft, with some radical descents in between. If you are lucky you’ve spent a few days in Cusco at 10,000 feet, which helps because the trail starts at 8,000. You are walking with several hundred other people scattered on the trail—the government controls the daily total—some of whom are locals (porters and guides) and do this every day. We never seriously compare ourselves to them—we can grant ourselves that leeway. But my experience was that almost every other person on the trail was stronger than I was. And walked faster than I ever do. Sometimes, it seems they walked faster than I can imagine.

As people would pass me I would find myself picking up some of their speed, unconsciously trying to keep up. I would subtly measure the difference in our speed, and my lack of capability was hard for my ego to absorb, and it would try to “pick up the pace.” Then, if I happened to walk by someone going slower that myself (a very rare occurance), I would “pick up the pace” suddenly feeling good about being stronger than someone else. Every time I walked faster I got into trouble—I would have to stop and catch my breath and recover.

What’s the problem? The problem is that when I did this I was not running my own race; I was not working with my own capacities; I was defining the challenge using someone else’s game plan. In the old fable of the hare and tortoise, it wasn’t the tortoise’s slowness that brought success, but that the tortoise executed its own game plan, ran its own race. This is how we get the most from ourselves and our organizations. And we can’t do anything more than to maximize our own capacities in the moment. So I could never walk up that mountain any faster than my capacities last May; that was all I had to work with. And to maximize my success, I had to walk my own speed, execute my own plan which acknowledged my capabilities, talents, skills, and motivations.

Choosing Our Own Manuevers

This means that we have to maneuver in our own updraft. The maneuvers we choose must be our own. They cannot be adopted from someone else—they are in a different updraft, with different skills, knowledge, and capacities. Adopting someone else’s maneuver can be a recipe for disaster—like walking too fast for your heart. Or using a particular flight plan that is working for “those guys over there” when in reality they are in a different air current than you are, not to mention that they are in a different aircraft.

The skill of getting stronger and more successful is always about knowing your own capacities and working your own plan—never about measuring yourself against someone else.

We did a couple of things over the weekend that made our exercise more fun by making it a part of another activity. Like one would naturally do if we lived in the city and walked to the store. (Here in the country, I just hike down to the garden before dinner.)

We still needed to buy two more replacement boats and we managed to turne it into an diversified activity. To try out the boats, we rented them and took the first pair off to Sailor Bar on the American River and paddled around 40 minutes in the current. We swapped those boats out for a second pair and set up a river run from Sailor Bar to Elmante—about 4 miles on the river. We only brought one car, so we set the shuttle up with our bicyles. You have to think it through (bike routes AND river routes) and decide whether to bike first (and have the car at river’s end) or bike second (and have to go after the car).

So here’s how it went:

• We drove to the boat take out and dropped the bikes off—locking them up of course.
• We drove to the put-in and parked the car, packed the boats, and headed down river.
• We took out, swapped the boats (locking them up with the bike lock) for the bikes (changed shoes as well) and headed back up river to the car.
• Then we loaded the bikes, drove back to the boats, loaded the boats and were ready to go.

It was a four mile paddle and a seven mile ride. The drive was a little longer because of the roadways, but not too taxing. It’s an economical way to do river runs, but you could also use it for any paddling—across a bay, along a beach, or around a lake. We’ve used this technique on the Snake River to great effect. It would be more challenging in hilly country where the bike ride could become a real challenging part of the day. (One secret is that only one driver has to actually do the bike ride! Everyone else could rest. We don’t let ourselves know that.)

Yesterday we rode into town (normally 7 miles, but we added 3 miles to the trip to make it more work), had breakfast, dropped off prescriptions, and rode back (added a hill). We got our exercise, but also got some chores done.

All good and the bike riding gets to seem like an normal part of the day.

An interesting post this morning from Tim O’Reilly about an NSF grant for research on translating American sign language (ASL) to speech. This will accellerate (cute!) the development of the use of accelerometer sensors as part of the input device into the computer. ( Accelerometers capture the speed and direction of movement.) I asume the ASL speaker would wear devices on his hands/fingers.) This is what the Nintendo Wii has done with its new hand-held controller that captures directional movement. Last week we learned to play tennis on the Wii at my son’s house. Jim and I got a kick out of using full arm swings, though Jon just uses his wrist.

I get a kick out of a reference in Tim’s article that is becoming mainstream (at least mainstream in the geek communities): The Minority Report UI, from the movie Minority Report. This refers to the elegant computer interface used in the movie, with a clear class wall as in the screen and dramatic arm gestures to control the high-bandwidth visual data being displayed. So this sci-fi movie reference is becoming a defining factor in how we talk about the future of our technology. Of course, this is a ongoing relationship between future-looking fiction (they do their research) and our culture (we get to see the future before we build it.)

Speaking of alternate UI technologies, we spent some of the weekend playing with the speech controls on our Macs, to only middling success. (It works better if you wear a microphone.) I am hoping to start using a recording/transcription device while I ride my bike—just to capture ideas and sentences that occur to me. (More on that in another post.) So finding multiple ways to move work into the computer is just in the air these days.

Jim and I were half way through a morning ride the other day when we stopped for quick drink of water. Jim’s report from the GPS analysis was encouraging (we finally purchased a replacement GPS for the ones missing from our bags on our return from Peru). We were two miles per hour faster this day than the previous run which was in a dastardly wind. Over just 9 miles, that is a meaningful increase in speed.

Of course, it reminded us not to pay too much attention to speed, since it would always be dependant on outside variables, like wind—elements of the world arising outside of our control. So we can’t take too much blame for slow speeds but also not too much credit for quick runs. So then we mused, if we can’t tell how well we are doing by our speed, then maybe we track time, time on the bike. But then, your “credit” is less if you go faster—which is always a seeming goal—to go faster. So maybe then it’s how far you go—how many miles you can clock.

Suddenly we realized that we were scouting around for the definitive way to measure our experience. And left staring at the question of what that was: the need in us to measure it all. It felt a little silly, and Jim said, “just ride” as we took off on the second half of the loop.

And, while I understand that with some goals, measurement is a helpful tool, it seems that we have a tendency to lose the focus on our personal living experience and grasp onto external measurements to evaluate how well the day, our lives, our work is going. Even though we know, if we think clearly, that external measures are always going to be part of the whole world’s arising into being and not simply a function of our effort. We can have done our part valiantly and, for external measures, it may look like a failure. And on the other hand, sometimes we win through the “luck” of the draw, because of the flow of events.

But what is really meaningful to our workouts is the continuing development of the strength and health of our bodies and minds. Any measurement is a minor reflection of that, a simple tool, but never the actual, useful result. Our evolving capacity for participation, whether in our exercise program, our life, or work, is really the measure of our growth.

And, okay, sometimes it is nice to go fast.

Sorry for the short post, but I’ve been trying to upgrade WordPress this afternoon and got stuck. Turns out you HAVE to especially set the encoding to ASCII. I didn’t, so the originally files were damaged. Well here we are now. Only sort of working. But lets see if this post goes out properly.

This edit screen is messed up and there is no “view post” section on the page. I may be sorry i did this.

Later. Hopefully.

PS Okay I found the preview—they moved it. Whew!

I have been writing two books and have discovered a real need for a non-linear way of writing and presenting material, which of course is rather obviously something we understand in the digital medium. I am looking to both produce and present material as a “context” (instead of a linear flow) with overlapping and interweaving meta-structures. (Structures and attributes like time, sequence, themes, voicing, tempo, density, audience, multi-modal, etc.) We can improvise this with tagging and linked-lists, etc, but I can imagine a tool that supports the structures and illustrates how each unit of writing is woven into the weft of the material. I built a few kludgy tools to help me, but didn’t find the ability to manage as many of these threads as I would have liked.

I envision a tool in three parts:

• A visual, multi-structural context editor which allows you to identify media components (text, images, sound, video, whatever) with threads/identifiers/sequences and weave them into the context; ideally both the context data and the components are stored in a database;
• A flexible text editor with html/xml as basic targets and CSS applied according to the meta-structural definitions so that readers can “feel” the structures;
• A deployment module which delivers to a database, print, web, blog, wiki, or a hypermedia-context object (which includes a potentially infinite number of components) with all the links, sequences, and meta-structures as defined by the author.

I can hack a simple version of it with hypertext if I keep a complex diagram/map of the context, but without any support for the structures being built and the meaning of the links and threads. But, of course, modifying or restructuring anything, which is one of the important features of this medium, causes massive rework.

I can also see using the meta-structures to deliver the materials, allowing the reader to meander along paths, diverge, regroup, etc. making the intentional threads more obvious as navigational tools. (Also recording the paths taken.)

In short: I’m looking for a tool that allows the writer to create complex contexts instead of linear lines of development, but that includes a visual way to understand and manipulate the structures underlying the context.

It has been interesting to see these requirements arise in both my fiction and non-fiction writing . For the fiction, I was able to evolve a complex enough linear sequence to represent what I was getting at, but I don’t really see a way to properly sequence the other book—it really wants to be multi-structural. The concept of “writing contexts” (you can’t really call them books anymore) is an obvious application of the technology we have now—but I don’t really see a tool that covers what I envision.

So, the question is, are you aware of anyone who is working on such a model for both the writer/developer and the reader/consumer? Where the writer can define the complexity of the meta-structures within which he wants to compose and weave the context (with whatever constraints he wants to put on them); and the reader can explore the material within the meta-structural context with some access to the structures themselves.

I’m just thinking out loud. Sorry if I’m not quite making sense of it. I wanted to see if anyone knows someone working this direction before I start to think about tackling something like this myself.

Any suggestions?

(Some things I have looked into: Storyspace, Tinderbox (the closest thing I’ve found so far), hypertext editors; I’ve tapped into some of the research going on at UCLA and Vectors-A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular; also, publications by MIT Press in their Mediawork series.  And this morning I found a post over at Web Worker Daily with a lot of suggestions that I will be following up on.)

PPS. I meant to add that I realized that in many ways I’m looking for an object oriented component manager with multiple inheritance….a weird blend of my writing and software architect selves.

I read Seth Godin’s “The Dip: The Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit and When to Stick” over the weekend. (In about an hour actually—I was slow.)

It has some interesting approaches to life and work. Let me paraphrase:

If you (or your company) want to be “the best in the world” at something….

(Where “best in the world” is relatively subjective; that is, you define what “the world” is and your own criteria for “best”.)

…you need to work through the beginning phase of development and be able to hang on and evolve through the long development phase, which he calls “the dip”…

(Where the “something you” pick should have a substantial “dip” (so you can outlast and outsmart your competitors) and you pick a “something” where you have an advantage/talent/leadership.)

…and you need to drop any distracting investments of time and money for which you do not have adequate advantage to make it through “the dip”—this is called “intelligent quitting”…

(in some ways this idea of quitting with integrity is one of the most important ideas in the book; that we spend a lot of energy working on things we’re just working on to be working on; where we do not really have the potential to really succeed—-in my parlance, these things are called “hobbies.”)

…the long development phase, which can get progressively more difficult, might be a “dip” with success at the end of the tunnel, or a “cul-de-sac”—a place where you can work forever and never get the rainbow. And you have to learn to discern the difference…

(Most people get stuck in a rut and never figure out that they aren’t really going anywhere; successful people figure out earlier that they need to quit. The best quote in the book is: “Quit fast, and quit often.” The key is to not spend your time doing things that aren’t getting you where you want to go.)

There are big advantages that accrue to those who are “best in the world”.

For me, this is fine as far as it goes. It is about congruency of action and alignment with purpose. This all good. But for me, while this applies to some of us in some of our endeavors, it’s emphasis on “best in the world” as a measure of success is a little damaging. Some of our endeavors are not really meant to measured against others; keeping score is not the point of everything.

So as you apply these ideas to measuring your business or your budding high-tech career—it can be useful. But as a way to evaluate a teacher (she needs to be the best possible mentor to her students, and it’s not reasonable to measure “best in the world” even if you could), I think that particular concept is not useful. Also, in comparison to Updrafting, there is little discussion of really figuring out what your are “meant” to be doing, your true talents and purpose, which we think is key to finding success.

But I do love the concept of quitting early and often—we tend to spend a lot of our time working on things that are not really to the point. Or to any point. That is a key element of Updrafting, being consistently congruent in what you do and have all you do be finely aligned with your direction and purpose.

So, today I drove into town and bought a sandwich at Starbucks so I could use the network and get into Second Life. (We are working it out with our service provider to see if we can make it function at home.)

Yesterday offered a disparate set of chores. One minute I was researching venture funded companies, the next, the in-memory database market, the next, building a drip system for a new garden bed. But at lunch, I was reduced to trying to figure out how to use the arrow keys to keep my avatar from running into a wall. Don’t get me wrong, it was a little compelling, a bit like learning to paddle a recalcitrant new kayak in a swirling current. (Without the benefit of the actual river.) One that can fly and in which your paddling leverage occurs only at 90 degree angles.

And that was it. In 30 minutes, I got Second Life working and walked and flew around the training area. There were a few other people there, but clearly they were in the same self-conscious state I was and we carefully ignored each other. I found a Buddha-like frog and tried to see if I could elicite any wisdom from him, but to no avail. I managed to wander into the ocean and was assured by some commentary that I wouldn’t drown—not to worry.

In retrospect, I can see that my relationship to this is why I haven’t ever gotten into playing computer games (not that I’m a great games person anyway, to the chagrin of my entire family). I have some trouble measuring the time used against all the other things I want to accomplish. So it will be interesting to see if I can get passed that sort of reticence enough to actually experience what’s going on in Second Life. We’ll see.

I do like my little avatar—a purple and black Manga get up with pigtails. I’ll have to see if I can get a picture of her into the real world. (I mean me, a picture of me.)

PS. Now in First Life, we did find some really cool kayaks last week. Seems that to buy river kayaks, you have to go to the river. A real river, that is.

The research has begun. And where did it lead today? To Second Life—that otherworldly place where people talk, do business, learn, meet to play, listen to music, and create art.

After reading a series of articles on Second Life, I went to sign up only to learn that the first thing I had to do was choose a name that can not be changed. Suddenly, I was stuck. Choose a new name for yourself? this was going to take more than the time usually spend on choosing a login/user name. It seems important. It took 20 minutes of research and thinking to come up with a first name only to discover that I had to choose a last name from a list—okay that was weird, to have to build an identity from a small subset of name choices. Who can you be? Who do you want to be? I focused on how it sounded with the first name, trying to create something that could roll of the tongue.

The decision making process and the pause it caused generated a basic change in my relationship to Second Life; suddenly it was important; it meant something. This engagement was increased when I had to choose an avatar. (Okay, I can change this later.) But suddenly I had to think about the style I want portray. What did I want people to see? And I’m not stuck with any existing genetic or historical baggage. I can look like anything.

Okay, that’s the interesting news—that I was surprised by the engagement created just by signing up. The bad news is that I can’t get in. I’m not yet sure why, but I think it has to do with the speed of my connectivity. I can see the enticing entry scene—but no dice.

So the potential of the experience seems more compelling than I expected, though the technology hasn’t come through for me yet. I expect that it will.

More when I get there.

End of trip wrap-up notes:

• Saturday in Mammoth Lakes was still cold. The promised warm-up didn’t happen until Sunday as we were leaving. We rode the gondola up to the top of the ski mountain—13 Degrees and 20-30 mile an hour winds. A very beautiful place, Mammoth, though I’m not sure I’d want to be here when the ski crowds are here. (They are still skiing here now; Jim says their target closed date is usually July 4.)
• We waited all day for the temperatures to climb, and finally did our bike ride at 46 degrees. One time when the only thing you want to do is ride uphill (to keep warm.)
• Sunday, we drove to Coloma (essentially a state park) in the foothills (the place where Sutter first found gold in the Sierras) assuming that we surely could get some warmer weather there. And we were right. Didn’t quite know why Jim picked Coloma, but when I chatted up a man at the local market (whose only fresh vegetables were onions and potatoes) about his really cool play boat (kayaks designed for free-style white water kayaking; tiny—like 4.5-5 feet long) we found out that there was a great kayak store here. I never know how Jim knows these things. (Yeah, right.) But we biked over to Lotus and tried on some boats. (Just checking to see how many parenthetical ideas are percolating in here.)
• We are at the Coloma Resort which is a campground with cabins and a mile of frontage on the American River. The also run the Coloma Outdoor Discovery School, which does rafting, ropes courses, kayaking, and swimming camps for kids. It seems like really great location with the river and the State Park right here. (They could lose the braying goat though.)
• The temperature range for the trip: 13 to 106. Only precip was snow. And sand, if you count the sandstorm—still finding piles of sand inside the equipment. �

So now we’re on the way home. We’ve a lot of notes for improving the camper set up; top on the list is to figure out how to run the computers offline.

(I’ll post a note later if I manage to insert pictures into these travel logs.)