A Meaningful Life

Simplicity is Sustainables Best Friend is an article I’ve just done for TheCalmSpace.com. Simplicity is a key area of interest for me on many levels, business and personal, so this article was a fun one to write.

Society has somehow decided that simple is bad in many situations. There is a fight to give simplicity back its good name. Simplicity is a very sustainable and freeing existence for people to undertake…

Photo: The Lehmann families home made pasta

Some time ago I wrote about transition time costs and how they are a big cost to personal and business efficiency. Problogger Darren Rowse was right on the money today in his post about batch processing tasks together to get efficiency in his blogging business. I think he misses the “why” it works but the crux of the strategy is there. The approach can apply to managing businesses, finances, sales, marketing and even getting the chores done around the house. Just about any area in your life can benefit from the batching strategy.

The Powerhouse Museum has posted over 400 Photo Plates on Flickr. You really have to take you hat of to them. It’s wonderful to make this so available to Australians. Hat tip to Sean Carmody.

This shot is quite sentimental for me. I grew up about 100 metres around the bend on the left from when I was two until four years old. I then moved to Perth until I was twelve before returning to live at Beauty Point (the right side on the other side of the water) until I was eighteen. After that I moved to Manly for a few years (bottom photo about 200 metres out of shot to the left).

This really gives me mixed emotions. Seeing the time difference between then and now gets me present to my short time on this earth, my mortality.

I often do a spring clean through folders, bookmarks, contacts and now my twitter account. I could use the time savings excuse not to do it but I know it’s an excuse. Small amounts of time spent on cleaning pays wonders in productivity. The kicker is that great clean mind feeling. It’s so much easier to work.

Yesterday while working on some demo/marketing slides for Saasu I realised how many web-pages, screenshots, images and thumbnails that 8 years of business will accumulate. It made life very slow and very difficult, surfing the directory structure and filtering. It took half a day to do something that should have taken an hour. So post our next release it’s getting a spring clean.

Clean out some people

Likewise my twitter account. I cleaned out people. Yes, that sounds horrible. If you aren’t following me then I cleared you out. Main reason is that I like twitter for the conversation and will push not to have it become a marketing soapbox. A little marketing is ok, but balance is required. After all the real world soapbox is pretty dead, and that’s because it wasn’t a conversation.

Time cost vs. benefit of the clean-up

There is a peak where productivity gains are lost relative to time spent cleaning. So the short sharp super clean is the way to go.

Minimalism is a great antidote for messy

The simplicity of minimalism is so rich. When you distil out the very best ideas and possessions from your life and concentrate your thoughts and energy on them then their richness grows immensely.

If you’re messy your probably impacting others

Just look at messy teens sending their parents nuts. That problem pervades the world and no doubt is a major factor in parent/teen relationship problems that are all too common.

Last word

Stay messy, if you like it. I saw a pig once who was damn messy and he looked very happy, happier than me I’d say. So there’s nothing wrong with being messy if your happy in it and it doesn’t impact others.

When any group of people operate at a new level of difficulty, scale and focus then the arguments and wars of the day become smaller issues and begin to lose their power.

If humans can change our point of relativity from local/country to global/universe then I believe it can help stop wars, bring countries closer and shift the human focus.

It’s like Hyena’s fighting over a carcass. The petty squabbles stop when the Lion arrives.

How much of your time is spent in transition? Home to work. Desk to Water Cooler. Email to website to blog to blah.

Do we need to analyse this to work out what transition time is costing the human race? It’s a cost. I’m confident we would find a correlation between the quantity of stuff (material and mental) in our lives and transition time cost associated with it.

What transitions could you remove? What mental or physical stuff could you give up to give yourself more time and clarity on the important things in life?

For a while there our kids were fighting a lot and sometimes it would crescendo with a fight over something stupid like toothpaste sharing just before bed. Yep, fluoride, a really stupid thing to fight over. So I hit the net, the books, and even a few Super Nanny episodes to work out this fighting thing. I initially put it down to natural behaviour. After all my brother and I fought as kids so it somehow feels normal.

We’ll we changed a lot last month and noticed dramatic changes.

No1. Improver was less TV. I’m convinced the TV is more bad than good for kids. I never would have beleived the difference it makes. Since we cut it back to a show a day there has been an incredible difference. Better attention span. Obviously more outdoor play, more sport, more puzzles, drawing, cubby building etc. Good old stuff I remember doing back in the X-Gen days of bad and free TV.

Here’s my scribble from my search on sibling rivalry over recent months. Don’t take anything as gospel, I noted things down, can’t remember where and when the source was (apologies). *The ones with a asterisk are ones I worked out myself through experience of having a 2,5 and 7 year old.

Sibling Rivalry Causes

• Position in the family. The oldest has more work to do/help with. Worry and responsibility.
• Son is jealous of a sister because father is more gentle with her.
• Daughter might wish she could do boy things with Dad.*
• Personality traits - mood, disposition etc.
• Evolving needs - toddlers claiming toys, asserting themselves.

Never

• Give into the “its not fair” guilt pedalling.
• Argue in front of the kids, they watch how we resolve disagreements.
• Compare one to the other in a verbal benchmarking exercise.*
• Create situations that cause guilt or worse still pedal guilt to get my way with the kids.*
• Interfere if they can settle differences themselves.
• Take sides.
• Put focus on figuring out who is too blame.
• Let them think it should always be fair and equal. Life isn’t.

Always

• Ignore the teasing.
• Tell the teaser that enough is enough when it gets there.
• Have a system for distributing privileges/gifts etc.
• Separate kids until they are calm if they have been fighting.
• Try to set up a win-win to resolve conflict.
• Have rules - no swearing, no yelling, no door slamming. Get their ideas on the rules.
• Quality time for each kid, one on one.
• Acknowledge appropriate vs bad behaviour on a 10:1 ratio.

Got anymore let me know, keen to swap notes with other parents. When it comes to parenting I’m still in the mailroom.

I’m intrigued by the whole area of applying natural world systems to the business world. This area has fascinated me since I went on my first Nature excursion at nine years of age to the bushland at City Beach (Perth, Australia). We learnt about termite nest construction. Despite being young I understood that the ants were following a pattern or system to create this amazing structure.

Many years later I learn’t that the Ants have a genetic design using chemicals, scents and behaviour that is systematic.

Humans are a little different though. Burdened with self awareness we are given creative license to ignore genetic impulses and adopt all kinds of knowledge and ideas. Some for the better and some for the worse. One of these is the idea that we need to accumulate lots of knowledge. This Idea Virus or Meme has been a two edged sword for humankind for centuries. Would we have moved ahead a lot more if we applied more knowledge and hunted a little less for it? I often wonder.

So often we accumulate knowledge and it never enters a realm in which it is actioned. Systems can create this outcome for you. This isn’t any special insight I have. Most reading this know this too well but sometimes our blind-spots are right in front of us. Well I found one the other day.

When I get up in the morning I make myself a Coffee, grind the beans, etc. It’s a ritual. This gets my mind buzzing and by the time I’m on my way to work my mind is back racing with ideas and plans. Some come and go quicker than I can write them down or commit to memory. Anyway I had been losing count of the amount of times I would think, “Damn I gotta blog that.”

I had no system in place to deal with this and my blog was left underused more due to my vaporised ideas and busy day than lack of enthusiasm.

Anyway, I got a notebook and am jotting things down to remind me. Yes I know that is very X-gen, I should be more Y-gen but something about writing seems to commit better to my brain. I think its because you read it, do something physical and have thought about it. 3 checkins to my brain.

Well, with the system in place here’s the first blog post result.

I’m an X-files fan, I admit it. I love a search for the truth but there is a major problem.

Truth and reality are constrained by the observers knowledge, wisdom and measurement (senses). We know that scientific process is designed to maximize observation, but it is still always so constrained.

While you have not obtained perfection in the senses (and the sciences) you can never begin to come close to the truth. The more knowledge you acquire the less certain you become about the truth of things. I think it’s a bit like a persons age having an inverse relationship to the knowledge the feel they have. The older you get the more you realise you don’t know.

So my aim is not to seek absolute truth but instead to simply close the theoretical gap and then be a creator. Apply the gain, the improved understanding, the better knowledge.

I love fables, here’s one I quickly made up to demonstrate my point about how truth despite being so blatantly obvious to everyone as observers can be absolutely wrong. My previous post in jest about letting my kids believe in Santa relates to this point. It applies equally to business such as what you think you customers want and who you think your market demographic is.

Ambitious Ant Seeks Truth

An ambitious ant is seeking the truth. He spends a lot of time trying to understand his world. One day determined to know the truth he goes on a mission. A month later he returns and the colony welcomes him. In his great returning speech to the colony he makes a profound declaration “I have traveled further than any ant in my colony has before. It has taken me nearly my whole life, a whole month, but I have discovered that there are grasses 100,000 times as big as ours with vast numbers of large round leaves on massively high stems. It takes a whole day to walk around one of these stems, I’ll call it a tree and the stem I’ll call a trunk. The universe is made up of trees and between them is the grasslands we live in. They appear to have existed long before our kind. So knowing this truth, I declare as your leader, that I will now be making the decisions for the colony based on this new truth and knowledge, the reality of our world.” The ant’s quest for knowledge rewarded their species with a better life, new foods from the great trees. However the truth was short lived. The next day one drop of ant-rid killed the entire colony and the Ants obviously never observed the cause of their demise.

How naive can the ant be, obviously we humans are the most advanced creatures in the universe. Just ask the majority of people who know this to be the truth due to the lack of evidence to suggest otherwise.

To continue the story. In 2100 A.D. (earth time) the Universe scratches the itch on its bum. Amongst fellow Universes it is well known that this itch is only a single planetary death roll. These death rolls are caused by species who have consumed there habitat or destroyed themselves with nuclear war. The Megaverse assures the Universe that the itch will go away.

How naive can we humans be to think we know and can even begin to understand what the truth is.

There are three main things my gut feeling tells me are probably right in life:

1. Evolution seems to universally proclaim via repetition that reproduction or creation is an evolutionary requirement. So I’ll make this truth mean that having children is good!
2. I should cause as small a ripple as possible that harms humankind. I should create as big a ripple as possible that helps humankind.
3. We probably didn’t win the “intelligent life lotto” 1 planet in 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 probability and getting more unlikely with every new telescope.

The truth is out there, pick a version but be careful how you use it. It might just be wrong.

In an old movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy a light plane pilot throws a coke bottle from his window and it hits an African Native on the head. The African Native hasn’t had much to do with western culture and thinks it came from God. He decides it might be a weapon because when he hits people with it, it hurts.

Most know it as a coke bottle. However, the ‘truth’ is that it’s both and neither at the same time. It’s what you make it to be. There is no absolute truth just versions/stories of truth.

You might be saying to yourself that education removes the ignorance and science reveals the truth but even then the reality is limited by the language and measurement capability you are able to use to describe, measure and classify things like a coke bottle. The coke bottle is silica it’s not a coke bottle. The coke bottle is atoms. Nope, it’s a string theory construct. Not it’s not. We may never know the truth that many of us seek.

Get the drift? No truth, no reality.

The good news. This means Santa is real! Yep I let my kids choose that if they want. Knowing this truth, that there is no truth makes life a joy! It allows you to be a creator of your own world how you want it to be, a God like power.

Inspired by some other good posts on Santa by Rosemary , Lance and Rowan