Mary Panttaja

Goodness.

It’s been a long time since I have posted here. Where has the time gone?

Well, things have changed and we’ve been very busy: launching RebelVox, moving to SF, putting the Healdsburg house on the market for vacation rentals (Kokopelli Retreat), moving apartments (one last time), bicycling, studying sailing, and the usual keeping up. I have not been writing on either the novel or the book. But have been keeping some of that skill fresh writing patents (several dozens)—a total new venue for me.

We are taking a week of vacation finally—heading Monday to Ashland for our 9 plays in 5 days. A small group this time, only a dozen of us. All our kids are coming along. Erin and Tom, the theatre experts, get to really drown themselves. The rest of us just enjoy and explore our way through.

So we’ll see if I can manage to post some commentary about the plays this week. Hard to imagine—but maybe easier to do than I think. No promises.

On the reading theme—reading my daughter’s gift: The Open Road, The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by an author she met in Boston, in preparation for our trip to Madison; and The Mind and the Brain (Schwartz, Begley) inspired by the story, book, and TED talk of Jill Bolte Taylor.

All is very very well.

I finished the book today—read that last chapter, which might ought to be read first. WHY do you want a 4-hour work week? Because “work” is just the stuff you do to pay the bills, and you should be spending the bulk of your time on something more important—your “vocation”, your passions, living life, learning, and helping improve things around you.

Another way to spin this is that “making a living”, that is, earning enough money to meet some specified monthly financial goal is not a worthy endeavor if it does not also meet all those other needs and criteria. And maybe there are other ways to get freedom to engage in you calling than to buy it—even if it only takes 4 hours a week.

In Updrafting, we focus on finding that right thing to be doing—the most important and fulfilling activities of your life. If you find and execute on that, then you will have lived YOUR life to the utmost. Financial success may come, but it is not the key relevant goal of the story. Just as security is fine and all, but a concern for safety should not replace your life’s intentions. No one ever climbed a mountain with safety the first thing on their list of goals. One would never leave the bedroom.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with safety or financial security, but to emphasize that we cannot let our concern for them blind us to what is really important for us to accomplish in this life.

And maybe we don’t have to buy our freedom. Maybe we just take it. Know ourselves to be free of whatever constraints we imagine—or, at least, that we recognize them as challenges to be met, not limitations on our possibilities.

We have a stack of books to read. The choices have come from a lot of different directions: lifestyle, business, new technology, programming, retirement. They all feed into the thinking process: what to create next.

Our process has included: watching what is going on in the blogosphere, attending conferences on new technology, trying to identify the most important thinkers and reading what they write, watching for interesting odd-bits and following their trails.

Tim Ferriss’ new book “The 4-Hour Work Week” came to my attention when he presented at the Ignite portion of the Web 2.0 Conference. His presentation “The Low Information Diet” was voted one of the top four presentations, and so he got to deliver it again at the closing session.

As a writer with books to publish, it has been interesting watching him go through the process of publishing his book, working the publicity trail using all the marketing tricks and techniques available. If anything, he is an agressive marketer and communicator. Something some of us frown at sometimes, though we are interested in the success it produces. This week he has been spoofed by Leno and then collected all the extra marketing appearances that such an event produces.

Reading his book has been on the list for two reasons: 1) Seeing how the publishing process works for him; 2) Learning what he has to say about a 4-hour work week. (Which is, of course, an intriguing idea.)

I was surprised at some of the really good ideas in this book, though I have some issues with some of the attitudes and techniques encouraged. For myself, I can see past the seemingly inappropriate recommendations (to daily manipulate your work efficiency to prove to your boss that you should be allowed to work out of the office, for one), and see that there are some ideas that really shift something about how I think about work and business:

1. It is possible to separate the ideas of earning a living (money to live) and your life and passionate work (see my work on Updrafting). You can build a business that generates the revenue and free time that allows you to dive into whatever you are passionate about. (This does not mean that your passion is not necessarily the same as the business that earns your income, but just that there is a possibility that you can separate them.) (I have done this before in my work, but not figured out Item 3: a strategic mistake; see below.)
2. If you are going to build a business to earn your income, it is most critical to really design a powerful and efficient business model. This is everything, for if the business is not financially efficient, it will not be efficient with your time and resources, and won’t generate income without a struggle. Been there and done that.
3. You can design and build a business model that doesn’t (after it is up and running) create a full-time job for yourself. This was really shocking—I always assume that what I am doing is creating full-time work for myself along with other folks. It was a very new idea to think about creating a business in which, as he says, “you outsource yourself.”
4. You can design an operational process that doesn’t care where you are—helped alot by the current technology platforms available. And he gives a lot of really specific tips, techniques, and references.
5. He gives a few business models for creating a totally outsourced business—they mostly focus around marketing products (things you can buy and resell at a good margin, or books and ideas). They don’t really get into the creative process: some of us are really interested in creating things—which somehow really does take time.
6. But the idea of creating a business the sole purpose of which is to automatically generate the revenue to support your chosen life style is an intriguing new, to me anyway, thought process.
7. If you created an automated income producing machine, then you get to spend your time on whatever you want. Travel and living overseas seem to be his passions, so he has lots of hints on how to do that on the cheap.

One theme that comes up is that where you live is an important part of the cost structure of the lives we have chosen. It is cheaper to live most other places in the world than it is to live here—thereby the reasonableness of really traveling—vagabonding. Many of the new retirement guides also suggest that life can be a lot cheaper for us if we intelligently chose where to live. The nix in the mix is that some of us have extended families that have inhabited neighborhoods for generations (like ours in Northern California), so picking up and leaving isn’t quite as easy as for some. (And though my children don’t live very close, they are also unlikely to follow us to Nevada or Arizona or Wyoming.)

Do I recommend the book? Yes and no. Some really challenging and useful ideas that I have not previously considered, but mixed in a bit with some shortsighted behaviors that are a little too manipulative. But that’s okay, take what’s useful and leave the rest. In general, it is a new angle from which to examine your life and make some decisions. What do you really want to do?

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.

Guy Kawasaki posted his interview with Dr. Philip Zimbardo this morning.

I love this concept for all of us, not just children:

“…to promote in our children this heroic imagination, to make them accept the mantle of being a hero-in-waiting for a situation that will come along sometime in their lives…”

A “lite” version of the bodhisattva vows to help others—”for those who wish to go across the waters, may I be a boat, a raft, a bridge”.*

* From Shantideva’s prayer in “The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”.

I was reading the latest Gary Snyder book last night: “Back on the Fire”. It contains a series of recent essays on a variety of topics relating to nature, art, writing, and the preservation of our world. (Snyder has always been one of my favorite thinkers and important resources. I discovered once that a close friend and I were two young adults who actually wanted to be Gary Snyder. Strange. But then again not every young poet has a famous novel written about his life: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac is actually about Gary Snyder. So we actually wanted to be the hero of a story.)

In his essay, “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder”, Snyder talks about poetry and literature in relation to the language and patterns of the natural world: ecology, environment, nature.

We speak of the ‘ecology of the imagination’ or even of ‘language’, with justification: ‘ecology’ is a valuable shorthand term for complexity in motion.

He quotes a wonderful passage from “The Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry” by Jed Rasula which develops a metaphor for the artistic process, but which can also be used to understand the creative process in all its forms.

Detritus cycle energy is liberated by funghi and lots of insects. I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so ‘enlightened mind’ is to daily ego mind, and Art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like mature ecosystems. turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill; and reviewing memory…blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator for unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. It comes not as a flower, but—to complete the metaphor—as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycella that run widely through the soil, intricately married to the root hairs of all the trees. ‘Fruiting’—at that point—is the completion of the work of the poet, and the point where the artist reenters the cycle: gives what she or he has re-created through reflection, returning a ‘thought of enlightenment’ to community.

The concept of recycling and liberating neglected inner potential really resonates with me, that inner potential really being an updraft of our own lives (or in the life of our societies) with which we have not really connected.

Back to the subject of creating organizations….

I have been reading two different books that are basically about evolution: “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, and “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. One traces the power of evolutionary forces from biology through the evolution of cultures. The other illuminates the power of co-evolution, species evolving in concert for the benefit of both. Another new focus of evolutionary thought these days is the evolution of individual and group consciousness, growth in our capacity for awareness and action.

Evolution is a great model for managing our relationship to the things we are trying to create as well. Our effort to create things (lives, families, corporations, products) is just a slightly more conscious movement of that creative impulse that has evolved everything we experience.

How does the evolutionary model help us think about the choices we make?

The process of evolution itself is a creative mechanism, that is, it is a pattern of discovering success and failure through a natural mechanism of creativity. The universe has created/discovered/evolved (??) a process that results in ever more of what it is trying to create (which seems to be more diversity, awareness, complexity, and creativity.)

Once you find a functioning mechanism that through its regular actions succeeds in continuing to create what you want, or moves in the direction of what you want, you only have to allow the mechanism to keep functioning. Of course, if you are creating something new then the mechanism must allow for movement towards something you don’t want, and adjust for that. Path correction must be part of the mechanism.

So what do these mechanisms look like?

(In the case of evolution, I will, of course, be oversimplifying.)

A plant evolves by doing its thing the best way it knows how and living to create offspring that mostly know what it knows. In addition, it blends what it knows with a sexual partner in a slightly random sort of way that mixes it up—creates some new and different ways of getting by. Some of those succeed in the environment and some fail—some don’t live to create offspring, or create fewer successful offspring. So the mechanism is something like this: make more of what works and keep throwing new ideas into the mix. The “new ideas” are really important because the enviroment is not a single stable thing, but is itself changing making survival more or less likely. Biological evolution doesn’t have to know what its going for in terms of form or function—the mechanism results in life continuing to find a way in a changing world. (Of course, sometimes the mechanism comes up against an environmental change it can’t cope with—it takes times to find new ways of getting by. A meteorite was more than the dinosaurs could work their way out of.)

More about co-evolving next time.

Well, what a surprise. I did not know how timely I was in my comments on Cormac McCarthy’s most recent book, “The Road”. I am amazed that Oprah is recommending it, knowing what a broad reach of people will now read it. I am pleased for Cormac McCarthy and the readers who will get to experience this wonderful artistic effort. But I am still a little concerned for some sensitive readers who will take some time getting over the experience.

The violence in “The Road” is by no means gratuitous. It is core to his vision and allows him to set his elegy on human devotion in the most stark contrast possible. As I have said, it is a beautiful and startling achievement. But my daughter has taught me that we each need to be responsibile for what we read and watch knowing and caring for our own sensibilities, and that some of us are not able to find a manageable perspective or a relationship to difficult work.

I, for example, have tended not to read books or watch movies on the subject of losing a parent to Alzeihmers. It’s too close to my life and something I haven’t wanted to watch dramatized. Though I am starting to consider exploring the topic myself in my next novel. (And, for a weirdity, I never have watched “Jaws”.)

So read “The Road” if you are brave. (I think Oprah is quite brave to recommend it so broadly.) But don’t read it if you are prone to nightmares. At least don’t read it when you are home alone.

I just finished reading “The Road”, an amazing novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The book is actually shocking on so many fronts. It is a delicate elegy to the bond of love between a father and his son set against the most horrific situation you can imagine (and I’ve dreamed some pretty bad scenarios). The effect is stunning. I am still in awe of how Mr. McCarthy accomplished such a wondrous thing. Of course, these characters live with him and he had only to put them in this eviscerated world he envisioned using his brilliant skill and inspiration.

The odd thing is that I cannot recommend the book to you. You will have to come to on your own. It is a very dark thing and has some very difficult moments. (I discovered that I should not read it while home alone at night.) So on its merits, I would say that this is a brilliant book—but its material is not for everyone. Some sensitive souls might not bear up. (I would not recommend this to my daughter, for example, though she may want to read it.)

On a personal note: I apologize for the week’s disappearance. A construction project and bad virus sapped my week. Not yet well and not yet done. We’ll see how this week goes.