It started with the boxes and ended with me going to Barnes and Noble and buying five copies of The Night Circus. It’s not something I wanted to do, but I had to.

I should begin by telling you my friend Angie likes to read in book stores. She likes the feel of books in her hands, the smell of ink and paper. Angie likes to do nice things for other people. And Angie likes a pleasant surprise.

Angie’s the kind of person who will take a book off the shelf, turn to the last page and write, “Great book, huh? Love, Angie.” She will do this to random books in a bookstore including books she’s never read and doesn’t intend to read. This is what irritates me about Angie.

My childhood was full of books and though I don’t remember my parents ever telling me not to write in them I’m sure they did. I’m certain of it because I have a strong aversion to tampering with a book and I don’t think this happens without stern guidance. I won’t dog ear a corner, make notes in the margin, set a cup on an open page or use a back cover as a receptacle for stale gum.

Even in college I couldn’t bring myself to highlight or underline text. I bought used books that already had the important stuff highlighted.

When Books are More than Books

It’s a deep seated reverence for the printed word that goes beyond reason or logic. A book is just an object, a collection of pages printed and bound. You can buy it, read it, sell it, destroy it. You can make another for less than a dollar. People pay more for a pack of cigarettes than some paperbacks sell for, consuming them in fire and lust. But it still feels wrong.

I have a particular aversion to burning books because it has historically been used to destroy knowledge. I know you can’t destroy knowledge just by burning a book, but I still have the feeling that once a book has been created it should be passed on rather than destroyed. That there’s something inherently good about published thoughts.

But I’m learning to let go of old thoughts and overcome ingrained habits. I’m decluttering my brain. So I’m trying to see that a book is just a thing. I’m coming to understand that not everything published is worth saving and books themselves do not represent knowledge, just a particular form of knowledge transmission.

They’ve had a good run as the primary source of information transfer but their reign is coming to a close. Digital media is now the preferred method of recording and transmitting ideas. Quaint as they are, books will never be as efficient as a computer.

I get this. I believe this. But it still seems like a struggle against my younger self, my childhood self, the self that learned to love reading by holding a hefty book and turning pages. I know the future of publishing is digital. Intellectually I know it, but it doesn’t yet feel right to me.

Getting My Mind Right

I started decluttering by emptying boxes of computer cords and installation CDs. I got rid of two old CRT monitors and then started in on the paperwork. I had owner’s manuals for appliances we didn’t own anymore. I had the closing documents we got when we bought our second house which we sold seven years ago. I had land surveys and engineer reports and architectural drawings of a remodel we never did. I don’t need any of that but it’s the kind of stuff I carried around for years because I thought I might. I either thought I might need it or I didn’t want to go through it and decide if I needed it or not. It was easier to just have boxes of stuff.

It’s hard to go through boxes of belongings because even things you didn’t care about initially take on special significance once you’ve had them for years. They become mementos of that time, artifacts of an ancient civilization whose influence is still felt. At the very least they remind you of thoughts and dreams you had, and those are hard to let go.

Just holding a drawing of the septic system of our house on Whidbey Island takes me back. I remember working on the guest house and mowing down blackberry bushes. I remember the children when they were young and how we thought we’d live in Oak Harbor forever. But that was five moves ago.

I have to steel myself against such thoughts when I declutter. I have to be strong and stoic and efficient. I have to just ask the simple question, Do I need this anymore? I get rid of a lot of clutter that way. I’m sorting through the boxes.

I’m sorting in the family room because there’s a lot of open space and it’s out of the main flow of traffic which goes between the living room and the kitchen. The family room is off to the side and there’s a big Persian rug where I can spread my stuff out and make piles and organize. There’s also a fire place and winter gets cold in Maryland.

My daughters like a good fire and I’ve got a lot of unnecessary clutter in the form of paperwork so my daughters burn old loan documents and phone bills and notes from college classes. We’re making good progress and the fire rages. While snow is falling outside, our house is being warmed by the destruction of unnecessary memories and abandoned dreams.

Dreams of Flying

I used to fly jets for the Navy. Technically I still could but realistically my flying days are done. I’ve packed around a lot of flight gear with the hope I’d be back in the cockpit one day. I’ve finally come to realize it’s not going to happen. So I’m getting rid of those seabags full of gear.

This is not a straightforward, logical decision, it’s a huge emotional deal. I enjoyed flying and I never wanted to think it was over. I knew it was unlikely but there was always this hope I’d held onto for years–a hope I didn’t even want to admit to myself because it was so illogical. But then why cart around the gear? Just in case, I suppose.

I have been in the Navy for twenty years but I am not a Navy Man. I do not self-identify with the Navy. I don’t need the Navy to define who I am, it’s just something I did. That’s hard for some people to accept. Hard for retired sailors and officers to identify with. They think after doing something for two decades it would be synonymous with my life. But I lived for two decades before I joined the Navy too, and I expect to live a couple decades after I get out. It is an activity, not a personal quality.

There are things I enjoyed about being in the Navy. One of them was flying. I liked being in a small and amazingly powerful jet, flying fast and maneuvering dynamically, skirting the edges of fluffy clouds and plunging dramatically toward the ground. It’s the kind of assignment you can never get enough of and long to return to. But the Navy, as every large organization, has a way of weeding out those who don’t quite fit in and advancing the favored children. I am the former.

Dreams of Reading

Once I got past the death of my dream of flying I could kill some of my other dreams. I decided to attack some of the less intense, though equally improbable, expectations. Boxes full of papers from my college days were a testament to my intellectual misconception. The thought I would ever read all those notes I took in college is ludicrous. Not just because I haven’t looked at them in over a decade, but because I never even read them while I was in college.

Was I taking notes as an exercise in stenography or simply to have something to do with my hands? Clearly it wasn’t to have something to study later. But I put a lot of work into producing them so I moved them from house to house thinking one day I’ll want to review my physics notes or read that interesting economics article I printed out but never got around to reading.

Dan Ariely claims there’s a connection between the amount of effort we put into something and the value we place on it. Perhaps because the notes had taken so much time to produce I imparted an unrealistic value to them. But I don’t think this tells the whole story. I also had those articles which cost nothing to produce but had a similar hold on my psyche. I think it’s more likely they captured an idea I had of myself. Like all my flight gear they held a use not for the person I am but for the person I wish that I was: an aviator, an intellectual.

To dispose of those notes is, for me, the death of a sort of juvenile intellectualism, a delusion that I read academic papers for pleasure over a healthy breakfast. As though I had been kept from reading them not by a lack of compelling interest but by a shortage of available time. In my mind I was always “this close” to climbing into the cockpit of an airplane and writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times mid-flight.

I can’t say that it was easy to throw away those dreams, but it was liberating. I needn’t pretend nor hope any longer.

Burn it All

My children, of course, were glad to torch what was left of my younger self, oblivious to my internal struggle and happy to throw the notes and articles into the fireplace. They reveled around the raging fire and delighted in the beauty of the flames enveloping my past, my life, my identity–false or not.

Children are good at helping us let go of our dreams. They have a vision of us as complete and set, an unchanging model of what it means to be an adult. They don’t see a need for us to study or to fly. We’ve lived our lives. Such an image of ourselves might be painful but for the loving innocence with which it is delivered. And the blow is lessened by the availability of a genetic surrogate. Our children are the perfect substitute for our own ambitions, we can transfer our hopes and dreams to them.

I was on a roll in the decluttering department and I started pulling books off the shelves in the family room. Books I’ve never read and never will read. Books I was saving because I thought all knowledge was good and books were inherently beneficial to mankind.

I had copies of The Third Indochina Conflict and Examinations of Paranormal Psychology my mother had given me. Probably because she couldn’t bear to throw them away. But as I sat in front of the roaring fire, these volumes in either hand, I suddenly felt like throwing them into the blaze.

I had never done anything like that before but as they began to be consumed I felt a rush. A thrill of liberation and adrenaline. I was in a world I didn’t belong, a place I had no excuse for being. There was no turning back and no recovering. It was the kind of absolute decision I abhor making.

I would much rather throw a book in the garbage then see it burn but I couldn’t take my eyes off the tragic scene. And as the fire withdrew, I took the poker to the charred books until they spilled open fresh pages to the hungry flames. I didn’t want a half-eaten book as a grotesque reminder of what I had done. I wanted them to be entirely spent.

Owning My New Mind and Accepting Consequences

I did not burn any more books, I donated the rest to the local chapter of Books for International Goodwill. But I had gotten past my reverence for the written word and the sanctity of print books. I could finally disregard them as easily as an ephemeral blog post.

There are times in my life I’ve felt grounded and certain, as though I were walking across a wide field with purpose. I am both making progress and am free to absorb the world around me. My mind feels a strong sense of direction and accomplishment while maintaining a rich curiosity for everything passing through it. I delight in rediscovering the smell of freezing air and the solitude of winter.

The Barnes and Noble is warm and welcoming with a few shoppers quietly pacing the shelves, fingers poised. I pull down a copy of The Night Circus and do something I’ve never done before–I write a note at the end and put it back on the shelf. I look around but no one has noticed or cares what I am up to. I take down another and then, drunk with giddy excitement, three more.

A girl in khaki pants and a green apron is walking down the aisle towards me. She has a pleasant expression. Her name is Melissa.

“Are you writing in those books?” she asks.

I have no idea what to say. She is half my age but I feel the reproach of conscience familiar to anyone who has driven past the exit marked “moral high road.” I am damned by my own judgment and feel like a child being chastened. My only hope is to convey the spirit in which the inscriptions were penned.

“Yes,” I said cheerfully. “I was writing this.” I opened a book to the last page and gave it to her.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “I’ll ring them up for you.”

[photo by mashleymorgan]

I enjoy talking to crazy people. They’re the only ones who make sense to me. People with big ideas are interesting, but people who are always talking about big ideas and never accomplishing anything are intriguing. These are the ones people give up on. These are the ones relegated to the fringe of society.

My buddy Bill is constantly talking about big projects he’s thinking about doing. I love talking with him, I love hashing through ideas and figuring out problems. It’s like a game, a hobby, a sport in which the ball is constantly in motion but never reaches a goal line. You see, Bill doesn’t actually do much of anything.

People like quirkiness as long as the quirkiness is big. People with banal quirkiness aren’t all that interesting. My friend, Brian, has some pretty quirky habits. He goes through a prolonged ritual before he goes anywhere; he orders four or five entrees at a restaurant. He says things with a confident certainty even when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t always agree with him but I find him irresistibly fascinating because he speaks with such confidence.

As for myself, I’m too interested in seeing other people’s perspectives to be forceful in my own. Why should my opinion carry more weight than someone else’s? It seems like a reasonable, mature perspective but it makes me too thoughtful to be interesting. Interesting people take strong positions. They do things that are abnormal and don’t care what other people say. They’re convinced of their own rightness with an absolute certainty that defies reality.

Wearing a jumpsuit to high school every day. That’s odd. It’s odd enough to be quirky. Having an amusement park in your front yard or living in an old Boeing 747 carcass is quirky. They’re quirky because they’re unusual and intentional. But they have to be backed up by success. Showing up late for work, getting drunk at a party, misspelling words. Those things aren’t quirky, they’re just laughably, dismissably mundane. Nobody thinks the guy who always comes in late is making a statement, they just think he’s lazy. Driving a ten year old car is sad, driving a car sixty years old is awesome.

There’s a fine line between interesting and insane. Interesting people live outside the norm in a way that sets them apart from the rest of the world. But they accomplish things. Accomplishment is the key to sanity.

When I was eight my brother explained the world to me. He told me things I’ve never forgotten.

“If you’re rich,” he said, “you’re eccentric. If you’re poor, you’re crazy.”

That’s why Michael Jackson can have a zoo in his yard but the guy down the street can’t have twelve ostriches. My brother was the smartest person I knew. For three months out of the year he’s two years older than me.

For Their Own Good

My friend Bill Cavanaugh is always talking about changing the world. He hasn’t had a steady job in his life, can’t work in the same place for more than a year, but he knows how to change the world. I would tell you about some of his ideas but he’d sue me. I’m serious. He has ideas about LFTRs (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) and ammonia powered cars, about private internets and personal spy satellites. Ideas he doesn’t want other people to know about–I may have said too much already.

Some of these ideas are years old, he’s never done anything with them and I’d put money on the fact he never will, but if I told you what his ideas were I’d be letting the cat out of the bag. He shares them in the strictest confidence because every one of them would make billions if he were to get them off the ground. Of course it’s the getting off the ground part that is the problem.

His ideas are always big. I’ll give him that. And they’d certainly make him rich if any one of them actually worked. Not just a little rich either. He’d be super rich. That’s why he doesn’t want me to discuss his ideas. He doesn’t want to end up like the Winklevoss twins, settling for a few lousy million. There’s something grand about a person who doesn’t have any money being unwilling to settle for millions of dollars.

“What do you know about Sierra Leone?” he asks.

“It’s in Africa,” I say.

“It’s a poorly run African nation. One of the worst. But I think we could turn it around. With your understanding of economics and my business savvy, we could have the economy humming in a couple years. We would improve the infrastructure, improve the schools and then implement democracy. We’d be doing the Sierra Leonean a favor.

“Did you see their economy last year?” he continues. “Barely five billion dollars. The U.S. has 500 companies that made more money than that last year. We could definitely turn that place around.”

“How would we ever get into a position of power in the Sierra Leone?” I ask.

“Are you kidding me? We could just walk in and take it. Their military is only 15,000 strong and they’re undisciplined. You get 150 former special ops guys over there and you can have the place locked down inside a week.”

These are the kind of projects he works on. Not getting a job, not earning rent money, but taking over Sierra Leone.

Negotiation and Machination

Bill lives in a van. He doesn’t buy groceries. He eats one meal a day. At three in the afternoon he goes to the Golden Corral and stays a couple hours. He convinced the manager to give him the senior citizen rate even though he’s not even middle-aged.

“Look,” he told the manager, “you wouldn’t offer the rate unless you were making a profit. You can give me the rate.”

“No.”

“Okay,” he tried again, “I’m in here every day. Don’t you think I should get a bulk price discount?”

The manager was firm. “No.”

“Here you go,” Bill started afresh. “I’ll only eat the food you’re just about to throw out. You know you throw out a lot of food. I’ll just sit here and when the staff is getting ready to throw something out just bring it to my table first. Do we have a deal?”

This is what Bill does. He’s relentless, he’s logical, he wears you down until you can’t say no anymore.

“I know how we’ll do it,” he tells me when I see him again.

“Do what?”

“Take over Sierra Leone.

“We get permission to shoot a movie in the capital, Freetown. It’s a war film so all our ‘actors’ will need to have weapons. We set up to shoot near the Presidential Palace then the actors, who are really our hired special ops guys, attack the palace with their ‘fake’ weapons, subdue the guards and oust the president. It will be over so fast they won’t know what hit them.”

This is the way he thinks. Brilliant, tactical, logical. Even though he can’t make money off this idea he’s going to be mad that I shared it. “That’s a silver bullet,” he’ll say. “A one-time thing. Once someone does it everyone will be on the lookout for it. It will never work twice and you just gave it away.”

His intentions, by the way, are pure. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone; it would be a bloodless coup. And he only wants the best for the poor Sierra Leonean. He would do all this at his own expense for their benefit. Just to make the world a better place. In this scenario the liberated and enriched Sierra Leonean all love him after a few years and don’t want him to stop being their president because their lives are so much better.

Once in power he’d build a series of LFTRs and export ammonia. He’d take the profits and invest them in infrastructure and education. He’d bring Sierra Leone into the twenty-first century and have ubiquitous, free, high-speed, wireless internet. He’d crack down on crime and open more public libraries. They won’t do this on their own because they need someone to show them how, they need someone to set things right and then he’ll turn it back over to them.

All Bill has to do is come up with a few billion is seed money to get his military invasion funded. And he has a few ideas about how he can make that happen.

Mister Ambassador

If he ever gets it off the ground I know the perfect Ambassador; my friend Brian. I want him to be an ambassador like Africans want free internet. He seems like what I would imagine the ideal nineteenth century ambassador to be like. Amiable, interesting, intelligent but with a definite personality. He says brash things and then backs them up with thoughtful and intelligent observations. He makes you laugh at the absurdity of a position only to walk away a few minutes later nodding, thinking it sounds pretty reasonable.

And Brian is quirky. He is constantly late because he has to go through a ritual before he goes anywhere regardless of when he’s supposed to be there. He’s got this whole process he goes through before he’ll drive anywhere. He doesn’t let anything rush him. I suppose it’s his meditation, but it’s like watching water evaporate.

One day we’re meeting some friends for lunch. He walks outside and looks around. Not just a cursory glance, he takes the time to soak it all in. His eyes narrow like a soldier surveying a hostile horizon. As though everything within sight is being observed and analyzed. He’s standing, I should remind you, on his front stoop car keys in hand. I can’t tell what he’s thinking but he looks thoughtful. He pauses much longer than is comfortable, much longer than a normal person stops on their stoop to take in the neighborhood.

If he only did this when something was amiss I could get behind it. If he noted small inconsistencies in the neighborhood happenings that led to the discovery of a drug ring or a terrorist plot I’d say, take all the time you need. But although he looks pensive, he never notices anything. He’s not looking at specific details, he’s just taking in the beauty of the world. The joy of being alive. It’s kind of irritating really.

He’ll stand there for minutes just slowly breathing. Not meditating, not breathing rhythmically, just taking a few deep breaths like one does on a crisp fall morning when you first encounter the coldness of the air. For that moment you stop and breathe in deeply through your nose, your nostrils appreciating every bit of a long pull of autumn air, and you say “Ah, I love the smell of leaves.”

But he doesn’t say anything about the air or the smell. And he doesn’t just pause for a ten second deep breath. He stands there long enough to make me look at my watch and if he weren’t breathing deeply I’d check him for a pulse. But his deep breaths let me know he’s alive and they make me think he’s doing something important, something deeply thoughtful. At least they did at first, now I know they’re just his ritual.

After the looking, breathing, standing completely still routine we walk to the car. He clears his throat, says “hmmmm” to himself as though he just thought of something. His shoulder jerks in the spasm of a dog chasing a dream rabbit. He pauses with his hand on the car door handle. I could be anywhere while all this is going on. I could still be in the house. I could be across the yard. I could be sitting in the car with my seat belt on. Nothing I do seems to have any effect on the ritual.

Brian looks like a man who has accomplished things in his life. He’s a sturdy man with thin hair and glasses. He speaks intelligently on issues of importance. Brian will be rich one day I know that much. I’ve known it forever.

And On the Inside Too

Once in the car he sweeps the cockpit like a pilot. Left to right, checking the switches ensuring everything is in place. He touches everything. I imagine him going through a mental list. Windshield wipers off…check, blinker off…check, headlights off…check. Radio, climate control system, emergency brake. Everything in order according to some checklist in his brain. It takes minutes. Several minutes. Several minutes is a long time when you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a car with your seatbelt on. It’s a long time when you know you could have been at the restaurant fifteen minutes ago. When you know your friends were there five minutes ago and you still haven’t even left the house.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about other people or is unaware of their frustration. He just sees it as a choice they have to make. If they’re going to ride with him they know he’s going to go through this ritual and if they don’t want to they can find other arrangements. He may not even make it to the restaurant before lunch is over and our friends have left. He’ll still have lunch there. Without them. And yes, it’s too bad they couldn’t be there he would acknowledge. It would be much more fun if they were, but it’s like getting stuck in traffic. Once you realize there’s nothing you can do about it you just let it go and live with the situation.

He was that way in high school too. Maybe that’s when I decided I liked him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit to school. Yes, a one piece mechanic’s jumpsuit. Solid blue. He wore it every day. Just decided to wear it one day and then decided he liked it. Did the other kids think it was weird? Well, yes. But he didn’t care. He was just doing his own thing. Why would he care what other people thought?

His hair was a bit of a mess so he bought a ten dollar pair of clippers and took it all off. By himself in the bathroom mirror. Just put the number one guard on it and traced his head as though he were combing his hair only instead of laying it flat he was creating a pile in the sink. And then that was his look, buzz cut and blue jumpsuit. Every day of his high school career.

There’s something maddeningly frustrating about being disregarded. When someone doesn’t care what I think it gets under my skin. But there’s also something intriguing about that kind of independence of spirit. How can you just not care? Don’t you feel hurt, lonely, embarrassed? How can you just “do your own thing” all the time? I wish I could do that. I wish I were that confident in myself.

I’m at Brian’s house because I can’t be at mine. At my house I’m supposed to be writing but as soon as I walk in the door I can’t stand to think about writing. The piles of short stories I’m supposed to be reading, the million half-finished or barely started pieces that sit on my computer all weigh on me like a tank. The only thing I can motivate myself to do at my house is sleep, so I end up at Brian’s.

Brian is the most interesting person I know. He’s both quick and slow, mentally quick and physically slow. He moves deliberately and thoughtfully but not passionately or purposefully.

“I talked to some people today,” he tells me. “I think I did pretty well. At least judging by their facial expressions and the tone of their responses I think I did well.”

“What did you talk about?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “Something. Nothing. Everything. But I think I did well. I adumbrated an idea I had about pedagogy and the education system and I must have been compelling. There was a lot of head nodding and their faces looked like they were interested.”

It’s Always Important to Someone

Brian is a collector of ideas and I suppose that appeals to me. My dad was a collector too but he had a more tangible purpose. He was a collector of things. He collected things to recycle because recycling was good for the environment. It was an enlightened collecting. He kept his stacks clean and organized. His stacks didn’t smell like urine.

When I was a child someone broke into our house. They got in through a basement window and took all the bottles my father had been collecting for the deposits. There must have been $50 worth of bottles down there all lined up in rows and stacked neatly. They were all gone. He was working at the A&P back then and the next day some boys came in with the bottles.

Cartload after cartload of bottles all clean and neatly stacked, their faces beaming in anticipation.

“What’d you do?” I asked him.

“I gave them their money,” he said.

Because even though everything was about money with my dad, it was never about the money. Money was the kind of thing you dealt with when you had to but you couldn’t base your life on money. Money and stuff. It can’t be all about the addiction to possessions, man.

For Betty everything is a sign. If her neighbors lose their dog she shouldn’t take the new job at the hospital. Or she shouldn’t have. She did anyway and it turned out badly. After two weeks they let her go.

“I knew I wasn’t supposed to be working there,” she told me later. “When Branson came up lost I knew that was specially a sign to me. I knew God was telling me not to take that job. But what did I do? I went and took it anyways.”

Betty’s living room, and from what I can tell every other room, is full of stuff. Stacks of papers and boxes and things piled on furniture which more things get piled on top of.

“Oh, excuse the mess,” she says as though she’d left a dish towel across the back of a chair. There was in fact a dishtowel across the back of a chair but it looked like it had been there for quite some time. I have a feeling of compassion and revulsion.

There were stacks of newspaper she was going to recycle someday. A section for the aluminum cans that were worth ten cents in Michigan and a box full of instruction manuals she’d never read but kept on hand just in case. These piles always start out neat but over time things get cluttered. She’d put a book down on top of a stack of newspaper and then when she wanted to put the next newspaper down she didn’t want to put it on the book so she’d start another stack until she got around to moving the book.

There were passageways through the rooms around the piles of stuff. The house smelled vaguely of cat urine.

Operation Blockbuster

I wish I could change her life, put everything in order.

I could have this place cleaned up in three days. If she would let me I’d throw away the trash, put the clothes in the laundry, organize the rest. I’d make the house livable and get rid of the cat smells. I wish she’d let me clean her house. Every time I go over there I want to clean her house but I hope she doesn’t ask me. I don’t really have to worry, she would never ask. She complains about the mess, how overwhelming it all is, but she couldn’t possibly let anyone touch it but herself.

I don’t want her to ask me for help because I’ve been down that road before.

“Is this trash?”

“No, I want to keep that.”

“What about this?”

“No, keep that too.”

“Is there anything you want to throw away?”

“That pizza box, that can go. Oh, wait. Is there a coupon on it? Make sure you get the coupon.”

The coupon expired a year ago. The crusts inside have petrified. I pick up a piece and knock it against the table. Solid as a rock. They raddle around in the closed box like little soldiers running across a marble floor.

The only way to save Betty is to fix it for her without her permission or assistance. I need to get in there and save her from herself. With a team of hired cleaners I could have that place cleaned up in no time. And she’d be so grateful.

Betty isn’t crazy–at least I don’t think she is–but like, Bill and Brian she gets the stink eye from society because she hasn’t accomplished much. Not enough to be considered eccentric at least. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the people I’ve crossed paths with it’s that our intentions will always be interpreted by our productivity.

We live in a world were productivity is the social differentiator and quirkiness is tolerated only inasmuch as it doesn’t interfere with aggregate output.

[Photo by Richard Elzey]

What would my life be like if I really understood people I talked to? I often catch myself making assumptions about other people’s thoughts and intentions when talking with them. How could I ever possibly know such things? The answer, I know, is that I cannot. But it’s a difficult tendency to overcome.

Oddly, I don’t act this way when confronted with a person who has some obvious deficiency of perception or comprehension. Because the fact they see things differently from me is so obvious, I make an effort to understand their views. For everyone else I assume they see things the same.

Yet how often can we say our mental processes are exactly the same as another’s? I imagine what a plot of comparative abilities would look like, a scale on which each aspect of my peculiar world view were compared with those I come in contact with. I know there would be people on every side of me, both near and far.

It is a difficult thing to take all those variables into consideration however, and impossible to try to mentally compare one person with another except in a very limited scope. It reminds me of trying to compare movies. While I can easily say whether I liked a movie or not, I have a hard time comparing one with another.

I conceal this fact by giving people what I think they want to hear, as in so many areas of my life. My entire career has been an effort to find the intersection between expectations and reality. And when it comes to hearing clearly, I’m at something of a disadvantage owing to an experience on my grandfather’s farm.

Is My Masculinity Too Loud?

My grandfather had a farm in Michigan, on the placid flatlands just south of Mackinac Island. It was the kind of place you could look out across acres and acres of gently undulating fields with a lone tree the only thing breaking the blue horizon. The kind of place depression era farm equipment was still employed because why should you replace it if it still did the job?

As a teenager I would help him during the summer–bringing in the hay or doing other farm chores. Once the hay was in we’d drive along the fence lines in his weathered Dodge pickup and fix the tangled barbed wire or replace damaged fence posts.

Wooden rails would have been more aesthetically pleasing but my grandfather was at times overcome with practicality and had opted for narrow metal posts instead. We hammered in the new ones with a post driver–a weighted metal cylinder with handles on either side.

Once the post was spotted he or I would pull forcefully down on the driver pounding it into the reluctant soil. In harsh contrast with the tranquility around us, the noise of our work traveled for miles. As we slammed the weighted driver onto the metal post the sound was explosive; an earsplitting metal on metal clang that clawed its way across the fields again and again.

The sound was cruel, intrusive, prolonged and unavoidable. Gripping the driver firmly I stood inches away from the post, the rusted metal of the driver close enough to kiss–or to despise. With every painful beat of the driver the concussion reverberated through my chest, quivering like a frightened field mouse.

It was not one of those times where proper hearing protection is an afterthought; an edit made much later in life when the damage done inspires a selfish grieving and propels a begrudging rewrite of history. It was something I longed for in the moment. A desire arrested twofold by my grandfather’s stoic presence.

In the first place I knew he had nothing in the truck. If he did have any hearing protection back at the house he surely wouldn’t waste the time driving back to get it. Second, his antiquated belief that any painful endurance was a desirable attribute of manliness made such a request tantamount to confessing my love of figure skating.

“You want what, Nancy?” I could hear him say, his voice painfully serious, “earplugs?”

“Yeah, I got a pair in the truck. Right next to the sunbonnet and the parasol.”

I kept my girly mouth shut and buckled down to the task at hand driving post after post throughout that afternoon. I went to bed exhausted, arms aching. My face and neck were sunburned and my ears rang long after the pounding in my head had stopped.

Deceptive and Conflicted

When I later joined the Navy my grandfather was momentarily proud of me having been a sailor in the Second World War himself, but his enthusiasm evaporated when he heard I was going to fly jets.

“I thought you were going to join the Navy,” he said.

Being an aviator subjects you to an annual flight physical. Consequently, every year I have to lie about my hearing. In the soundproof booth I sit with a cord in my right hand and listen for the tones coming through the headphones I’m wearing. When I hear a tone I depress the button then quickly release the button.

What I should be doing is listening intently, instead I’m counting heartbeats. One, two, press the button. Beat, beat, press. Sometimes I hear a tone, sometimes just a ringing in my ears at the same frequency as the tone I’m supposed to be hearing.

“Prefect hearing as usual,” says the technician when I’m done.

I cup my hand behind my ear. “What?”

She laughs.

Humor is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth. I think Pablo Picasso said that. Sometimes humor is our way of saying what we want to say without having to own it.

I feel guilty about lying but I don’t want them to tell me I can’t fly anymore. To be Grounded. NPQ as we say; not physically qualified. It’s a pride thing too, a masculine refusal to admit weakness even when I clearly should. I’m becoming my grandfather.

But my hearing is not the only thing I lie about. I lie about my favorite movie too. I’ll sometimes say “Top Gun” (which is a great film) but I also love The Sound of Music. It’s hard to say which is the better movie. I really wanted to like the Lord of the Rings movies because I enjoyed the books so much but I’ve only seen the first one and part of the second so it’s hard to convince myself I enjoyed them.

The truth is, I don’t lie about movies to be deceptive. I just don’t know what my favorite movie is. I don’t think anyone really does.

We like movies for different reasons at different times. It could be the people we saw a movie with or the mood we were in when we saw it. Trying to compare a mental movie library accumulated over a lifetime is literally an impossible task. There are too many factors and our memories are imperfect and biased receptacles of data.

It would take too much effort to think about every movie I’ve seen and analyze what was good and bad about each one. I can’t even compare every positive or negative emotion I felt about one movie with those I felt about another. The best I can do is qualitatively assess whether I liked a movie or not, I can’t provide a quantitative ranking capable of comparing it with other movies.

In the end I just classify movies into two broad categories: “movies I liked” and “movies I didn’t.” When someone asks me my favorite movie, I simply pull a movie from the list of good ones irrespective of how it compares objectively with others in the “good” category.

Dealing with Fellow Humans

In the same way we can’t hold all aspects and attributes of a movie in our mind at once, people are too complex, and relationships too subjective, to keep a detailed understanding of individuals in our heads. We consequently look for ways to quickly categorize people we meet and then only record the broad characteristics in our memories.

This mental shorthand is a huge timesaver and a necessary survival technique. The mental calculations necessary to understand each person we meet as an individual are energy sapping and time consuming. But what we lose in the process is the ability to see the nuances of a person’s unique personality characteristics.

The reality of human interaction is that it’s based on the assumption people fit neatly into specific categories. In the short term we can keep these categories separated; people we like/people we don’t, good people/bad people, intelligent people/ignorant people, etc. But in the long term, and as the number of people we meet grows, the tendency is to pile everyone into two categories and imbue them with generic traits.

The people we like tend to be thought of as also being good and intelligent and in general possessing positive characteristics. People we don’t like are bad and ignorant and in other ways inferior to our friends. When a good person does something uncharacteristically negative we make allowances, if a bad person does something nice we gloss over it or assign a selfish motive.

It keeps our interactions simpler but deprives our lives of the richness, the full spectrum and complexity a vibrant ambiguity provides. It limits our dealings with others and causes us to see the world too narrowly.

It is always the sign of a good author when a story contains characters who defy these boundaries. When the hero does something unjustifiably wrong or a villain behaves kindly and selflessly it challenges our assumptions about them.

Recognizing the Arbitrary Nature of Compassion

When I listen closely to silence there is a faint, high-pitched tone that never goes away. It doesn’t bother me but I know it’s there. I know there are some things I don’t hear. I think many people experience the same thing. I can never know for sure that the person I’m talking to is hearing exactly the same things I am. In fact I’d be surprised if they were.

But these hearing differences are slight and usually don’t significantly affect our communication. People with substantial hearing loss are in a different category however. Not necessarily in functionality–I believe the hearing impaired are just as capable as anyone with full hearing–but in how they experience life.

And when I interact with people who have a hearing disability I am aware they are experiencing a reality different from my own. This makes me hesitate before making assumptions about what they are thinking, feeling or understanding. I’m more open to their feedback and to examining where our perceptions converge and diverge. In short, I make more of an effort to understand them and help them understand me.

This is true whether the perceived differences are with respect to hearing, sight or any of the other senses. It is even truer when it concerns comprehension or mental abilities. If I’m interacting with someone who has been through a traumatic experience, someone with diminished mental capacity or even someone from a radically different background, I will give them substantial regard.

I find I’m most often upset with others when I think I know their motives and that I make inferences about other people’s intentions based on my assumptions about their perceptions. When I assume people see, hear and comprehend the same things I do I’m much more likely to believe the motives I ascribe to their behavior are accurate with little confirmation they are actually experiencing those things.

The end result is that people who have no obvious differences in perception or comprehension get lumped into the same category as everyone else because it’s easier to deal with a lot of people who are similar than to consider a myriad of subtle individual differences. But the people who do have notable deviations from the norm get the kind of attention and care I should be giving everyone.

A Category of One

Can this position be extended? What if we included not just deficiencies in comprehension but differences in emotional perception and social backgrounds? If we truly considered all the ways in which our mental models differed from those around us I’m sure we’d recognize no one is seeing the same world we are.

I’ve wondered how it is we all start out so similar and yet grow up to act so differently. While we are all genetically different, the experiences which help form our personalities and develop our character are what brings out the physiological differences in our genes. And while every parent hopes to mold their child through conscientious nurturing, not one in a million of these innumerable life events are controllable.

Every child grows up perceiving people differently from each other, empathizing inaccurately, projecting their own world view on others. Some of these children figure out how to bring out the best in the people they meet, some inspire fear or disdain, some simply learn to cope with loneliness and find happiness in spite of their social failings.

But when I meet people I rarely think about whether or not they are acting in socially unacceptable ways because they intend to be disruptive. I act as though they perceived the world the way I do, that they have the same way of expressing themselves, and that the emotion I feel when talking with them is what they intend for me to feel.

I know this is not rational, but it is natural. I believe other people behave the same way. I’ve been called a jerk before for doing things I thought were perfectly acceptable. Consequently, unless someone is so socially inept I can’t help but give them some allowance, I treat them as “normal” and give them no consideration at all.

And that’s a tragedy because people speak in many different ways and I can only hear certain things clearly. Maybe I’m deaf to their particular struggle, perhaps they’re simply speaking in a tone I can no longer hear; their voices running after me like the echo of a metal fence post being driven into the ground across a distant summer field.

[photo by Rob Ireton]

I grew up with hard-working parents who never had enough money to survive. We lived on the edge of starvation and it wasn’t beneath my folks to find dinner in a dumpster behind the local grocery store.

People cringe when they hear that but really, it sounds worse than it is. Once you get dumpster groceries home and cleaned up, they’re just like all the other expired groceries in the cupboard. And frankly, some of the most fun I had with my dad growing up was finding salvageable stuff in dumpsters.

One of the downsides to it however; I was always aware of how close we were to not making it. I grew up with a fear of ending up broke and homeless. It always seemed to be just around the corner.

When I was sixteen years old I took a Greyhound bus to visit my grandparents on their farm in northern Michigan. It was summer and my grandfather always needed help bringing the hay in. I was looking for an adventure and even at that age traveling alone didn’t bother me.

To the contrary, it empowered me; when I traveled by myself I felt a surge of freedom, as though I could go anywhere. I was high on life and life’s endless possibilities.

I was young and spirited and it was summer. My days were spent in the fields but my mind was always somewhere else. I thought about traveling to Europe or exploring the Canadian wilderness. I envisioned quaint Swiss villages along the Alps and majestic Canadian mountain ranges carpeted with evergreens as far as the eye could see.

“I’m in Chicago…I’m just not coming to your house.”

The work was hard but it felt good to sweat in the sun and to be treated like a man. I felt a great sense of accomplishment riding back to the barn on top of a trailer piled with the freshly baled hay I had stacked. I spent a few weeks on the farm and when the hay was all in, took another bus to see my uncle who lived in Chicago.

On the way to my uncle’s house however, a funny thing happened. I decided not to go. I had always been afraid to be homeless but there, in Chicago, I suddenly decided to try it out. I called my uncle from the bus station.

“So, you’re not coming to Chicago?”

“No, I’m in Chicago. I’m just not coming to your house.”

“Why in the world not?”

“I just thought I’d stick around downtown and see if I could earn some money. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

He tried to convince me to come stay with him. I could be gone all day if I wanted but at least I’d have a place to sleep. I couldn’t tell him that was the point, I didn’t want to have a place to sleep. I didn’t want to have anything I didn’t earn myself.

I like how Danielle LaPorte explains the difference between fear management and fear leadership but I’ll save you the trip and just tell you, I was in fear management mode.

I found a day labor place called Ready Men right downtown, filled out a short information sheet and sat down with the rest of the guys waiting for work. It was a rough looking crowd with used up faces and tired clothes, shoes splitting at the seams. I would later refer to it, the way other regulars did because of its clientele, as “Ready Bum”. I untucked my shirt.

When they looked at me I looked right back, hoping not to look scared but also not look like I was staring. I was sending out a vibe I hoped was saying “I’m one of you”. Given I’d had a shower in the last week and a haircut within the last year this was difficult to pull off.

“Everything in that place was ancient and neglected.”

It was ten in the morning and I didn’t realize it but I’d come during the doldrums between the morning crews that got called at eight and the afternoon crews called at three. The people who stuck around in between were the people who were desperate enough to hope for anything and those with nowhere better to be.

They chatted amongst themselves and picked through the collection of cigarette butts on the floor to see if there was anything worth lighting. Or they dozed, absently swatting flies. I looked at the broken linoleum tiles and noticed how they’d been worn smooth from use, the exposed glue beneath them catching dirt in swirling patterns.

I wondered how long the place had been there and how many nameless men had worn the wooden benches smooth by sitting, waiting, squirming, slouching. It was like driftwood, smooth but not flat. I ran my hand along the bench. Everything in that place was ancient and neglected.

The room was long and narrow with filthy pane glass windows in the front and a small counter at the rear beneath an opening five feet up the wall. This is where they handed out the jobs and it attracted our gaze like the blue light of a backyard bug zapper. As though if we could just catch his eye he might suddenly motion for us to come up there for a job he was saving for someone special.

When three o’clock rolled around I was lucky enough to get called for a second shift job. He passed the slip down to me with the factory’s address.

“You give this to the supervisor when you get there,” the guy at the counter told me. “You need money for the bus?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I said. “I got it.”

I was working in a metal fabrication plant making what looked like loaf pans. The supervisor gave me the ten minute rundown on what to do and what not to touch. I was supposed to pull them out of a solution and stack them on a cart. Just like stacking hay, I thought, but a lot lighter. Piece of cake.

At midnight all the workers left the factory and I started wandering around looking for a place to sleep. Ready Bum was closed and the city looked more forbidding than it had in the daylight.

I found a piece of cardboard in an alley and lay down but was startled awake some time later by the guy who apparently lived there. His piece of cardboard. Sorry.

My body surging with adrenaline I wandered around for a while again surveying the empty streets, evaluating options for sleeping places. Walking down an alley I noticed the security bars covering an apartment window were directly beneath the raised ladder of a fire escape.

Climbing the bars I was able to ascend the fire escape to the roof. There wasn’t much up there but at least I’d be undisturbed. I huddled on the leeward side of a chimney and drifted off.

“Just like stacking hay, I thought, but a lot lighter. Piece of cake.”

Somewhere before dawn I was awakened by the sound the “L” clattering past my building. It had begun to drizzle—just a light mist—and I sat on the black tar looking out over the downtown skyline. To my left was Lake Michigan and to the right, the iconic Sears Tower.

I only had a couple bucks and a work voucher in my pocket that was worth around $20. I had no food or shelter. No security whatsoever. But at that moment I took a deep breath of the cool, moist Chicago air and I felt like an absolute king. I felt like Chicago was my city and my opportunities there were limitless.

I knew there were days of hard living ahead (I spent a week there being “homeless”) but I knew I would get through them. I knew if I could make it through a day, I could make it through a week. And if I could make it through a week I could survive.

I knew if I could step off a bus in Chicago with only a couple dollars in my pocket and survive. If I could make enough money to get something to eat and find a place to stay, I had nothing to fear from financial ruin.

It was a lesson I needed to learn in order to be fearless with finances, to get over my worries of “what happens if…” In most instances the worst case scenario is going broke, and now I knew I didn’t have to fear that anymore.

So when Dave Doolin, writing on his blog about passion being the new cool, asks this probing question: what drives you? The fear of being broke?

I can honestly say, not me. Not anymore.

[photo by HeyRocker]

My favorite job was working for a restaurant called Frontier Pies in Provo, Utah. As the name indicates, they were known for their delicious pies and had an extensive bakery to keep the refer stocked with their soul-satisfying goodness. I worked in the bakery as a pie maker.

I was in my early twenties and once again working my way through college, still hacking away at an associate’s degree. To save money I was living out of my car and needing to be at work at five in the morning was a good excuse for being caught sleeping in the parking lot.

I loved those mornings. Climbing out of the back of my 1979 Volvo station wagon I would stand in the chilly morning air and savor the stillness of the city. Provo, a bustling college town, is normally a hub of frenetic activity but in the predawn hours it was bathed in tranquility.

I would stand in the parking lot aware of the inadequacy of my thin shirt against the cold but content to give it another minute or two before going indoors. I would breathe deeply through my nose and let my chest swell, eyes closed, while I sucked in nature’s goodness.

It was as though the air came rushing down from the mountains to expand my spirit and I could taste, more than smell, the earthy goodness of its origins. I felt like a king, the master of my destiny. As though nothing were impossible and no door was closed to me.

My cold body would shiver in rebellion at my protracted delay and I would say to myself, don’t tell me what to do. I’ll go in when I’m ready. And I’d stand there a few more minutes until my body finally relented and said, okay; stay as long as you like. And that’s when I’d go in.

Happy stomach, happy life

The head baker Angela, having arrived before me and lit the stoves, would be playing music in the bakery as I walked in from the cold. A wall of warm oven-air and the smell of flour would greet me with open arms as I entered.

On the counter would be a handwritten note, the items listed in pencil: coconut, banana, German chocolate…She had already counted the leftover pies from the day before and written out a list of the pies we needed to make that day. She made the fruit pies and I made the cream pies. We’d work on the lemon meringue and pecan together.

“We were like free-floating electrons, dislodged from our former homes.”

I liked this arrangement as it allowed me to work essentially on my own. I baked the crusts and cooked the pudding. If any of the crusts broke–and at least one always did–I would dip the broken pieces into the fresh pudding and maybe put a little whipped cream on it.

Best breakfast ever.

But that would only whet my appetite. As I worked throughout the morning I would help myself to spoonfuls of pudding and even whole pieces of pie if I felt like it. I would say, on average, I ate a whole pie each day.

The waitstaff started showing up at ten to get ready for the lunch rush. We were like free-floating electrons, dislodged from our former homes, carelessly floating through the Utah autumn air until we found another atom to revolve around. Line cooks fired up the grill in time for me to get an early lunch before heading off to class.

Life as performance art

It was a curious ballet we danced; the dainty waitresses in their freshly pressed uniforms were the royalty of our world. The cooks, the sweaty, harried and crude antagonists.

“Where’s my Navajo Taco?” a waitress would snap. “I put that order in twenty minutes ago.”

“You want to come back here and run the grill?”

“I’ve got customers waiting, Rich.”

“And I’ve got ten orders in front of yours, Amber, so keep your skirt on.”

She’d cool her heels in the break room commiserating with fellow malcontents while Rich wiped his hands on an already filthy apron and sneered at her back as she walked away. It was a constant struggle of who worked for whom in the kitchen.

“Busboys have to please just one constituency, the waitresses.”

The dishwashers were under no such illusions. Unseen and unspoken to they pushed racks of dishes through the spray of super-heated water and slid on the greasy dungeon floor. Their hunched backs wet with condensing steam, they kept their eyes averted as they humped piles of clean glasses to the drink station.

The busboys played the jesters, largely uninvolved in restaurant politics. They had no beef with the cooks, no frustration with the dishwashers. Busboys have to please just one constituency, the waitresses who would share their tips at the end of their shift.

There was all the normal drama which accompanies college-aged kids, relationships mostly, the occasional car trouble or school problem. But mostly it was a world unto itself and people who left were never heard from again and those who arrived were quickly assimilated.

It was simple and distracting; it was enticing at times and demanding at others. It was money in my pocket and food in my usually empty stomach. And in the end I remembered it all as delicious fun.

The best or the happiest?

In many ways Frontier Pies was my favorite job, but it was not the job which did the most for me. It did not demand much of me nor teach me invaluable life lessons. It did not take me to the breaking point and then push me further.

That was a job I had eight years earlier.

I was 14 and had recently dropped out of school. I had moved to Denver to live with my father who had a job in a plastic molding factory.

“What are you going to do?” he asked me.

“I thought I’d take some time off,” I said. “Try to figure things out.”

“I think you need a job.”

The factory had a policy about familial employment: no direct relations could work together. My father got around this by saying I was his nephew.

“I told ‘em you just turned 18. Happy birthday.”

I was sure no one would believe I was eighteen but they never said a word. My only previous job had been a paper route so being at the factory was adventurous. I had to be careful not to spill the beans about our real relationship and my actual age. It was a world of us and them; I felt like a secret agent.

I loved hanging out with my dad too. I felt like a man. It seemed to put us on equal footing, my dad and me. I wasn’t his son, I was a peer. We worked the huge machines side by side as they spat out the freshly molded plastic, still warm to the touch.

It’s not about doing the easy thing

When lunch time came the break room filled with people intent on sucking in as much satisfaction as possible from a pack of cigarettes, so we took our lunch on the factory floor. It was eerily quiet as we passed each other peanut butter sandwiches and ziplock bags of carrots.

The normally raucous equipment sat idle and made our voices seem tiny in the enormity of the factory. We spoke quietly then and sometimes not at all, lost in our own thoughts. When I’d eaten my sandwich I’d often lie on the cement floor and stare into the exposed metal rafters. The solid girders and supporting braces forming a dusty, steel web.

I would imagine the world turned upside down and what it would be like to walk among those beams and climb over the enormous ventilation ducts. Then I’d close my eyes and savor the sweet odor of heated plastic that still hung in the air like the memory of a kiss.

“I was moved to the graveyard shift and my father was laid off.”

But the work was tough and the adventure began to wane. Eventually it receded altogether leaving only the drudgery with which every factory worker in the world is familiar. The repetition of task and the monotony of the interminable eight-hour shift ground away at my spirit, and even the momentary pleasure of watching a barn swallow building a nest in the rafters was not enough to lift my mood.

As winter rolled around the economy took a turn. I was moved to the graveyard shift and my father was laid off. I was ready to move on.

“I think I’m going to quit,” I told my dad one night as I got ready to leave for work.

“Why’s that?”

I told him the way I’d been feeling and I think I actually used the phrase, “this job is killing me.”

How I learned to do hard things

He gave me some great advice, though I’m not even sure he knew how valuable it was when he said it. I’m sure he didn’t know how profoundly true it was or how it would affect me for the rest of my life. He was just speaking from his heart and conveying a lesson he’d learned from experience.

“You seem to be unhappy with this job. And I can see why you would feel that way. You can leave if you want,” he said, “but don’t leave because the job made you quit.”

He said I should keep working until I felt like I was in control of the situation, that when I felt as though I could stay or go, then the choice would truly be my own.

“When I told my body and mind who was in charge, they eventually listened.”

“If you leave now, when things are difficult, you’re letting the situation control you. You’re letting circumstances determine the course of your life. If you bow to pressure now, you’ll give in for the rest of your life. You’ll always be thinking, ‘this is hard, I want to quit.’ Make sure when you make a decision it’s because it’s the right decision not because you couldn’t stand the alternative.”

I did stay on at the factory and it got worse before it got better. But my dad was right, I could overcome my feelings. I could force myself to do hard things. And when I told my body and my mind who was in charge, they eventually listened.

I ended up working there for another year and when I did leave it was on my own terms, not because I had to get out of there. It was not the funnest job I ever had but I think I learned the most. I learned to appreciate my ability to direct my life and not to let hard things push me around.

My job at Frontier Pies was nowhere near as demanding, but it didn’t cause me to grow as much either. The reality is, I probably never would have had the job at Frontier Pies except for the self-management skills I learned from my factory job. You could say one was my vegetables and the other dessert.

Which was the “best job”? It’s hard to say.

[photo by Wisconsin Historical Images]

I recently overheard my daughters singing along to the popular Shakira song Waka Waka. It’s a fun, rather addictive melody made world-famous by her stunning performance at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg. The rest of the day I found myself reflexively humming the chorus “…this time for Africa.”

As I repeated this phrase it got me thinking about the vast and beautifully diverse but still tragically impoverished continent of Africa and whether it may be, as some have suggested, on the cusp of a dramatic period of economic growth. In recent decades we’ve seen explosive growth in other regions of the world such as South America, the Far East and, most recently, in Asia.

As emerging economies become developed economies, investors inevitably begin looking for The Next Big Thing; the next idea, technological innovation or geographic region primed to experience spectacular growth. The fifty-three nations comprising the continent of Africa are collectively the world’s perennial hard luck story. Their position at the tail end of every list of human achievement is a given.

“They’ve been losing for so long the laws of probability practically demand they win.”

Yet they are rich with natural resources and it makes sense for them to developmentally catch up with the rest of the world at some point. In fact, their current ranking of last place among inhabited continents makes even modest improvements appear dramatic, so Africa seems a likely contender for the next economic growth spurt.

At gambling tables from Monaco to Macau hordes of amateur statisticians would swear it’s a mathematical certainty their luck is about to turn. And there seems to be a similar sentiment with Africa. It’s as though they’ve been losing for so long the immutable laws of probability practically demand it’s their turn to win.

Africa is a complicated place. And while questions of causality abound, I believe good leadership has to come first. Everything hinges on the ability of each country to independently create the conditions necessary for economic expansion. It will only be through the combined efforts of African leaders the continent will finally break free from its tenacious bonds. But in my view, Africa will not be the next area of economic growth because it cannot get its political house in order.

A frank assessment of foreign direct investment

I am just a novice economist but I have a particular interest in the economics of poverty and have studied the economic condition of the African continent for years. As one who loathes poverty and suffering I would be thrilled for Africans to collectively achieve a higher standard of living. To see their current condition as an inchoate world power is appealing to me on an instinctive and emotional level.

“China will be unable to continue investing because of more pressing needs within their own country.”

Certainly there are hopeful signs. Chinese investment in African countries has increased as their growth forced them to seek raw materials to fuel their economic expansion and find new customers for their goods. And this investment has not decreased despite the worldwide economic downturn.

But sadly, I believe hopes of seeing Africans collectively get their economic act together are misguided and unrealistic. While Chinese investment has been increasing, it will not be the salvation of the continent in the long term. Chinese economic success will plateau in coming years as China will have to deal with political issues at home. (For more background see Ian Bremmer’s comments in this Barron’s interview.)

Nor can Africans count on Chinese investment to bring them out of their cultural quagmire. Not because the Chinese are uncommitted to continued investment, nor because they will no longer desperately need the resources Africa has to offer, but because China will be unable to continue such investments while addressing more pressing needs within their own country.

In every comparison of human wellbeing I can think of, the continent of Africa comes in dead last: per capita GDP, mortality and morbidity rates, educational attainment, and crime and corruption statistics. What positive data can be found is almost un-African. The few bright spots lie at the continental extremes– those countries along the Mediterranean and in South Africa.

Are we asking the right questions?

Most anthropologists believe humans, that is Homo sapiens, originated in Africa and spread throughout the world from there. According to this view, Africans have been around longer than any other people. Africa is the cradle of mankind. Shouldn’t they be more advanced then? More technologically developed or culturally superior? More socially harmonious if nothing else.

Instead we see them lagging in every indicator of advancement we can measure. What is it about the continent which seems to restrict their economic progress and social development? I have asked myself whether we’re being ethnocentric in the metrics we use to measure success. It’s conceivable. We’re naturally inclined to believe the things we are concerned about and good at are the things everyone else should be concerned about and good at as well.

“If it’s not measured, how can we get to the heart of what is successful in Africa?”

Can a case be made that Africans are achieving success in ways western researchers overlook? If there is, I haven’t seen it. Knowing we’re inclined to see success measured in Western terms I’ve tried to look at the situation with fresh eyes.

I’ve assumed the questions we’ve been asking are the wrong ones and asked what other criteria we might use to capture what is unique and special about the development of Africans. Maybe they are doing some things well. But if it’s not captured in economic data, health outcomes, educational attainment, violence statistics or measures of government corruption, how can we get to the heart of what is successful in Africa?

When I look at indices such as the Human Development Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index I get discouraged. Time and again the collected data show Africa as the world laggard in metrics that matter.

Why what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working

Every time I travel to Africa I love it. I love the history and cultural diversity, I love the people and the rich combination of different landscapes. Granted, I don’t live in Africa and their success or failure as a continent will have little impact on my life, but I genuinely want them to succeed.

Wealthy and well-intentioned people want to help but they are unsure how best to provide assistance. C. K. Prahalad, whose book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid provided direction to a generation of corporate idealists, advocated a self-sustaining capitalistic model of assistance while others, like Britain’s Tony Blair, have called for increased foreign aid.

To be sure, there are complex issues at work here. No one is certain of the casual factors. Does good governance lead to economic prosperity and human growth? Does literacy and good health increase economic drive? Does prosperity and education cause people to demand better governance and health care?

Philanthropists have grown weary of throwing money into a bottomless pit. Decades of aid appears to have done little to alleviate suffering or produce any lasting change in living conditions. The continent desperately needs commercial investment but investors dislike uncertainty and are wary of corrupt and ineffectual governments.

Likewise, aid donors don’t want to their money used to support oppressive or corrupt regimes. Investors don’t want to invest until there is sufficient infrastructure and educational development to support production. This creates a system in which potential leaders are encouraged to get their share, and their people’s share, before it’s all gone and they’re left with nothing. It is in essence a waiting game, each person hoping someone will do something to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Africa finds itself in a conundrum of massive scale and supreme importance. What it desperately needs are national leaders who can inspire their respective countries to excel, to take the initiative and propel one of these factors forward so others will follow.

The lack of African leadership

Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire and founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, has been perennially bullish on African economic prospects. He has funded the development of the Index of African Governance, an annual assessment of progress toward good governance by African nations, and the $5 million Ibrahim Prize for African Leadership which recognizes “honest, democratic governance.”

Unfortunately, the foundation has failed to find a suitable recipient for the Ibrahim Prize in the past two years. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation is quick to point out the bar has been set intentionally high to encourage extraordinary leadership and it is not expected to be given out each year. Still, considering there are fifty-three countries and almost one billion people in Africa, the inability to find one suitable candidate says something about the state of governance on the continent.

“Do you see indications of a rapid economic expansion in Africa?”

Rachel Gisselquist, research director for the Index of African Governance and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, is a wealth of knowledge regarding African governance. She specializes in comparative politics with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa and has spent years doing research in over 25 African countries.

I recently spoke with Dr. Gisselquist about her work in Africa and her research for the Index. I was interested in what trends she had observed and, as an African expert, what her thoughts were about where the continent was headed. Her optimistic assessment of her experience was that there is a general improvement in governance throughout Africa as a whole but progress was slow and segmented.

While I understand a bit about politics and economics, I’m not well-versed in African affairs. Given her years of experience with the data I wanted to know her gut feeling about the future of Africa. “Do you see indications of a rapid economic expansion in Africa?” I asked her.

Some people do, she admitted, “but that’s not my finding. I see hopeful signs of improvement, but dramatic growth is not just around the corner.”

I echo her assessment. My apologies to Shakera, but without courageous, visionary African leaders we can dance and sing Waka Waka all day without changing the continent’s future. While many people yearn for their success, it’s Africans who will determine when it’s “time for Africa.”

[photo by Picture Taker]

Americans are passionately, stupefyingly, electrifyingly in love with the rags-to-riches story. It speaks of limitless opportunity, the nobility of the downtrodden and of the inextinguishable hope we harbor for a better tomorrow. We crave these ideas, devour them like ice cream or buttered beets. They represent the apogee of American idealism and are the sine qua non of America’s implicit promise: all your hard work will be rewarded.

Born in 1883, Chester Dale was the son of a Manhattan department store salesman. A contumacious, red-headed boy, he could not be constrained. His father sent him to Peekskill Military Academy for some structure but Chester spent most of his time and all his allowance at the nearby horse track. At the age of fourteen he decided Peekskill wasn’t for him and made his way to New York City where he got a job on Wall Street as a runner.

“He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it.”

The stock market wasn’t all that different from the race track and he soon worked his way into a job as a broker and, by the age of 35, into a large fortune as well. This was the Roaring 20′s and fortunes were being made overnight. He was one of the first to recognize how valuable public utilities could be and soon became a tycoon. Timing, as they say, is everything and Chester had it in spades. He made his money before the Great Depression and had the good fortune to hang onto it when the economy faltered and then fell.

His wife Maud had a passion for art and had piqued his interest in the French Masters years earlier. He began collecting famous French works and then his tastes expanded; in addition to Eugene Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David, Chester bought works by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet. The catalog of his collection reads like that of a well-funded museum. He acquired modern works from Picasso and Matisse. Salvador Dali painted his portrait as did Diego Rivera and Guy Pène du Bois. He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it.

While many former men-of-means were liquidating their estates, Chester Dale was filling his Manhattan apartment with bargain-basement masterpieces. Between 1926 and 1936 Chester bought over 500 paintings and 30 sculptures. When space ran out in his Plaza Hotel apartment, he started filling a five storey mansion at 20 East 79th Street in New York City. During the dark night of America’s economic collapse the art world had a new benefactor and his name was Chester Dale.

Shrewd love

But Chester was not just an art enthusiast, he was a skilled investor. With the help of his wife, an artist and art critic, he learned how to recognize works of lasting value. The pieces he acquired throughout his life were worth much more at the time of his death than he had paid for them. So while his collection helped both to conserve prominent, historic works of art and to support the work of living artists, it also served to build his personal fortune.

How good an investment is art? It’s a difficult question to answer with art tastes and trends considered fickle at best. To attempt to authoritatively track art as an investment seems a fool’s errand. But for several years two NYU professors from the Stern School of Business have been trying to answer that very question with some confidence. Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei looked at repeated sales of the same works of art dating back to the late 19th Century. The result is the Mei Moses Fine Art Index.

“George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester’s prized Cezannes seeking inspiration.”

The index now tracks the recorded sales of thousands of pieces of art and gives annualized returns for a number of art categories. In their latest report (July 2010), the Mei Moses All Art Index is up 13.4% since the end of 2009 with the Contemporary and Impressionist & Modernist Indices leading the way. The long term annualized returns for art are comparable to equities over the past fifty years with stocks narrowly beating out art 9.4% to 8.9%.

The major disadvantage to investing in art, as Mei and Moses point out in their 2002 paper Art as an Investment (.pdf), is the “heterogeneity of artworks and infrequency of trading.” Unlike stocks, which trade continuously and behave as fungible commodities in the marketplace, each work of art is unique and can remain off the market for generations as it’s passed from heir to heir. Artwork tends to be cherished by its owners and treated as a part of the family. Chester Dale, who remained childless, at times referred to his paintings as “my children.”

But art’s longevity and singularity are also the upside of owning art; you get to enjoy it. No one ever said, “Step into my study, I want to show you the 200 shares of Intel I just bought.” A quality work of art however, can bring years of enjoyment to generations of family members and friends. It can be appreciated by houseguests and a source of endless conversation. George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester’s prized Cezannes seeking inspiration.

National Gallery of Art

Throughout his life Chester lent pieces to various galleries and museums but when he died in 1962 the bulk of it was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I took my daughters to see the Chester Dale exhibit a few weeks ago and it is absolutely extraordinary. The scope of the collection alone is awe inspiring. I tried to imagine what his houses must have looked like with all those magnificent pieces decorating various rooms, glass curio cases filled with delicate Hummels in between I suppose.

The National Gallery categorizes works and displays similar periods together, the East Building displaying 20th Century artists and the West Building housing Renaissance through early 20th Century works. Because Chester’s collection spans these periods it was split between the two buildings, but this year, and through next July, the entire collection is on display on the ground floor of the West Building.

While Chester welcomed many guests into his home-turned-art-museum, the works he preserved and loved could not be enjoyed by the vast majority of humanity. It’s likely he left his collection to the National Gallery because, as one of the most visited art galleries in the world, so many more people would be able to appreciate the art he had collected during his lifetime. These inspirational and masterfully crafted works were too valuable to be seen by only a few.

“Its virtue is that it makes us feel good.”

There’s something to be said for the transformative power of fine art. It’s in the definition of the term itself: “art which serves no practical purpose.” Why then do we have it? We have all seen buildings, furniture, automobiles, and even appliances which could be considered works of art. But in each of these cases they also have some function beyond their aesthetic beauty.

Fine art on the other hand, has no purpose aside from being a work of beauty which pleases the senses. Its virtue is that it makes us feel good. And humans have craved it from the earliest days of our existence. Sure, some cave drawings were communicative in nature and were intended to convey information. The fact we find them beautiful today may only be a function of improved communication technology. But even in these earliest societies there are examples of art produced solely for the pleasure of its visual appeal.

How technology changes art

I’m not an art cognoscente but I know some works are considered “important” as well as being pleasant to view. Some of these challenge the social or political status quo, some usher in new artistic techniques and still others allow us to see inside a world we had never before imagined. They are not merely well crafted examples of the medium, but catalysts which transform the world in which we live.

The invention of photography eliminated the need to reproduce scenes manually, but we still use hand-drawn images for their aesthetic qualities. Sometimes the goal is not to capture an object or scene as it actually looks, but to capture the essence of what we see in it. These pieces move us, they provoke and inspire us, and they distill, from our base natures, nobility. As an aficionado I claim art is as valuable a tool in shaping the world as math or science.

Now, if we truly believe there are works of art which are valuable for humanity, that produce some social benefit beyond their utilitarian functionality and that have the ability to change our world, wouldn’t we want them to be as widely distributed as possible? While we can debate the value of our “advanced” society in terms of individual happiness and social harmony, there is no questioning the fact we are infinitely more knowledgeable and prosperous today than our ancient ancestors.

“The world has advanced on our ability to quickly transfer knowledge from one person to another.”

The critical mechanism for humanity’s exponential advancement has been the ability to transmit information from one person to another. From the development of written language, which allowed information to be transmitted between people who never personally saw each other, to the printing press, which enabled the mass production and distribution of these writings, the world has advanced on our ability to efficiently transfer knowledge.

The linked computer networks of today have lifted our ability to share ideas to unprecedented levels, providing an almost instantaneous transfer of thoughts from one person to everyone else. Perhaps in some future society technology will have advanced to the point our thoughts will be connected to the consciousness of everyone in our network and when one person learned a new language or skill, everyone would know it.

In the waning days of Chester’s life a new generation was being born, a generation through which the world would enter a digital age of enlightenment. The art collection Chester Dale amassed contained many important works, but it was constrained by its physical nature to be viewed by a relatively small audience. With the ability to digitalize information the education and cultural experiences once available only to the rich would soon be available to everyone in the world.

We’re all rich now

In the early days of the internet age people were still unsure of the value of such a connected system. What would it be used for? What types of applications were needed? Brewster Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer science and engineering. In 1989, Brewster developed the Internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), and unknowingly set in motion his destiny. In 1996 he began a lifelong project of immense scale and unimaginable ambition–to collect the world’s accumulated knowledge in one enormous online database.

Brewster Kahle’s massive archival project, the Internet Archive, is a repository of information on the order of the ancient Library of Alexandria which was fabled to hold every published book of the time. In the 2nd Century B.C.E. this is impressive but comprehensible. But Brewster’s Internet Archive holds more than just books. It houses movies, television programs, radio shows and even archived internet sites from the web’s earliest days. It’s a feat which boggles the mind and is only made possible by the digitalization of information.

Brewster has amassed over 2.5 million publically available texts which are free to download and view on your laptop or eReader. But because Brewster prefers to read physical books he has also devised an ingenious way of getting books into the hands of those without internet access or a local library. His bookmobile, a simple cargo van, travels around dispensing books like a traveling library but without a return date. The van has internet access, a printer and book binding equipment onboard. At a cost of about $0.01/page the bookmobile can print and bind a copy of any book in their archives. That means the accumulated knowledge of humankind is available for about $3 per book.

“During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to.”

Now imagine a similar repository for great works of art and that a traveling van could print and frame an actual-size reproduction of an influential work of art you could hang on the wall in your house. A high quality giclee could provide a cost effective, high quality image produced on canvas or watercolor paper to replicate as closely as possible the original work. Imagine impoverished families living around some of the greatest works of art ever produced. Imagine members of these families inspired to pursue their artistic dreams, develop their own creative talents and to see their value to humanity as more than manual labor.

While their lives barely overlapped, and their paths never crossed, in many ways the dreams of both Chester Dale and Brewster Kahle were the same, to give the public access to the accumulated wisdom of humanity. One through collecting great works, the other through distributing them on a massive scale. During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to, but today we can all be as richly immersed in fine art through the digitalization, transmission and reproduction technologies Brewster helped develop.

[photo by wallyg]

As a young child my grandfather would take me to the dump with him and let me wander through the piles of rubbish while he unloaded our trash. Of course we never brought anything but worthless garbage to the dump but I always found a few useful items in other people’s waste to take home with us.

Sometimes surfing the internet feels like going to the dump with my grandfather again. I climb over piles and piles of garbage looking for the good stuff.

The promise and curse of the internet is an abundance of information. So much information is available it’s not uncommon to hear people referring to this wealth as “information overload.” Most often we’re not overwhelmed by information, we are overwhelmed by sifting through all the junk trying to find what we want.

One of the early attempts to structure the vast online information landscape was Slashdot (1997), a social bookmarking site that allows users to comment on and vote up popular stories. Following Slashdot, sites like StumbleUpon (2001), del.icio.us (2003), Digg (2004) and Reddit (2005) followed similar methodologies.

These sites allow users to see what other people think is good, noteworthy or worthwhile. What they don’t do is personalize their recommendations to each user. Everyone who visits the site sees exactly the same recommendations.

Today, hundreds of cutting edge applications are taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning–as well as a boom in online social networks–to create even more effective ways of curating our information.

Early Approaches

Before we ever had an internet people were telling us what we would like and what we should do. Reviews of plays, books and movies were popular ways of figuring out what was worthwhile. As America became more mobile travel guides like Michelin provided advice on where to stay and what to eat while on vacation.

These reviews provided a professional opinion but of the least personalized type. The advice was the same no matter who was reading it and was based on the experiences of a cadre of elite experts. Popular opinion was used when available but few venues provided measurable data. Movie theater receipts and record sales were two notable exceptions.

The explosion of connectedness facilitated by the internet however, allows for collaboration and democratization as never before. Rather than recommendations from a handful of elites, we can crowdsource recommendations from the billions of people with access to the internet.

We can get restaurant recommendations that aggregate the combined wisdom and experiences of thousands of people with sites like UrbanSpoon, Zagat and the new Dinevore. These sites use user-generated information to make recommendations (though Zagat still uses professional critics too).

Like box office blockbusters and “Top 40” hits, review sites which rely on user interaction tell us what’s popular but not necessarily what we are personally going to like. The whole appeal of recommendations is to find more of the good stuff and avoid the garbage. But what if the garbage is popular? In other words, what if we are in the minority? How do we find the things we like?

Predicting Future Happiness

Knowing what we’re going to like is a tough nut to crack. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert elaborates on how difficult it is in his excellent book, Stumbling on Happiness. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding happiness.

Dan Gilbert claims everyone is bad at knowing what will make us happy in the future, yet we constantly engage in this predictive activity. Not merely for ourselves but for others as well. Whether we’re entrepreneurs attempting to make a product people will like or a romantic partner trying to endear ourselves to our lover, we are making predictions about what will please someone else.

Ultimately all of these recommendation systems are trying to do the same thing, predict future pleasure. When prediction systems work well we’re thrilled with the recommendation. We go to a restaurant we’ve never been to before and we love it, we see a movie we knew nothing about and it blows us away.

The problem with using aggregated data is that it frequently misses the point. Sometimes we go to a restaurant for all the wrong reasons; to make someone else happy or send social signals. How many people have eaten at Sardi’s for reasons other than the quality of the food or had dinner at Masa as a way of displaying their wealth and status?

What we really need is a structure that takes human bias and subjectivity out of the system, a way to reduce the noise automatically, even mechanically, and see patterns in the way people behave. The computational power and consolidated data available on the internet provides a rich soil for such fruit.

More Complicated Tools

Some recommendations are mechanical in nature. Amazon recommends Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children because you bought Night Circus and other people who bought Night Circus also bought Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

As opposed to the popularity contest of the “I liked it so you’ll like it too” recommendation system, purely mechanical systems follow the “this goes with that” principle. No matter how unpopular your particular niche interest is, people with the same taste reveal implied recommendations through their purchases or viewing habits.

Last.fm is another site that looks at revealed preferences. It recommends music by asking you to pick an artist or song you already like. It matches the music you said you liked with music other people who enjoy that music also like. People who like James Taylor for example, also like Jim Croce.

This type of algorithm-based recommendation was the first to really make customized recommendations. You may not like Jim Croce, but it only recommended him because you told the algorithm something about yourself–that you liked James Taylor.

Everyone who goes to Amazon or Last.fm get recommendations specific to their tastes as expressed by some input. But everyone who buys that book or selects that song will get the exact same recommendation. In this way it is somewhat customized but not quite personalized.

Bundle is a recommendation site that let’s you get a little more specific. It uses aggregated credit card data along with demographic information about the card holder to build mechanical recommendations for products and services. Users can filter their recommendations by specifying the demographic category they fit into and then seeing what similar people bought.

The Ultimate in Personalization

In order for recommendations to accurately predict what you will like, sites need to know a lot more about you. Dan Gilbert concludes his book with the advice that we will be happiest if we follow the recommendations of people who are similar to us. Most of us surround ourselves with people we share interests with and call them friends.

Not surprisingly, as social networking sites became popular people began looking to them for recommendations. These sites provided the crowdsourcing benefits of aggregated input with the customization of being pulled from people similar to ourselves. Surely the websites, movies and music being recommended on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ would be the most accurate.

Aside from knowing how far your high school buddy ran this morning or what he had for breakfast, one of the benefits of social networks is the ability to reduce the internet to a manageable size. Friends acting as curators of the internet naturally recommend things they find interesting. And because our friends are likely to have the same tastes we do, we’ll probably find them interesting too.

This combines the curation and up voting aspect of social bookmarking sites with the personalization of our specific network of friends allowing (theoretically) the recommendations we received to be uberspecific to our tastes.

Did I hear a chuckle? Anyone who’s been on social media knows it hasn’t worked out that way. The logic was sound but didn’t take into consideration how our behavior changes online. When developing friendships was constrained to people we personally met and it grew organically from shared interests our friends were a good reflection of our preferences and interests.

But in the online social world things are different. We “friend” people we knew when we were younger but haven’t been in touch with in decades, we connect with people at work for political reasons that have nothing to do with shared interests, we follow people because they follow us and following back seems like the right thing to do.

In other words, online friendships mean little when it comes to analyzing our preferences and social media curation is pretty much a joke.

Even under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t recommend the same thing to all my friends just because I liked it. If I know my friends well enough to know their preferences I would only recommend things I thought they would like. And those recommendations would be different for different people.

What are the Best Algorithms Now?

The most personalized recommendations will be those which are able to take into account a whole host of factors. Not just what book you bought today, but all the books you’ve bought in the past and how much you liked them. It will take into consideration which books people who have preferences similar to yours have liked (whether you are friends with them or not).

That’s what GoodReads is doing. You tell the site which books you’ve read and how much you liked them and it matches your library with libraries similar to yours so you can find books you haven’t read that those people liked. It creates a specific profile of you so recommendations are different for everyone based on their specific reading history.

One of the most advanced movie recommendation engines is run by Netflix which uses factors such as how much your preferences have changed over time and how likely you are to overrate a good movie after seeing several good movies in a row. The downside is, because these systems are built entirely on your preferences they need you to rate a lot of books and movies before they can accurately predict what you will like.

Pandora Radio on the other hand, creates a profile of your preferences and then “learns” what type of music you’ll like by seeing which songs you give a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” to. Pandora is built on an index of song characteristics called the “Music Genome Project” which has been so successful many new sites have attempted to map other “genomes.”

Jinni recommends movies based on its Movie Genome and StartupGenome attempts to gauge the viability of a startup company based on certain characteristics of its genome. But in many ways these attempts still rely on what people say they like. The real advancements in recommendations will be when machines will be able to learn what our preferences are without us having to tell them. The highest rate of error in prediction technology is the difference between what people say they like and what they actually do.

Future Advancements

We will get this right. It’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence advances sufficiently to predict our future happiness at least as well as we can. In fact, AI will probably be better at it since it will be based on the actual outcomes of choices rather than on a biased perception. But they will only be as good as the data they have to work with.

It will require a lot more information than is currently available including how our personal thought processes work and when we’re likely to be lying to ourselves. For example, I may say I’m adventurous when it comes to eating but every time I go to a Filipino restaurant I get something safe. I can continue to rationalize why I got the crispy pata yet again and probably convince myself I’ll try the balut another time, but the data of my historical choices reveals my true preferences. (I’ve never tried balut.)

This collection of preference data is already taking place online. Every time we look something up on Google it stores the search. Recommendation engines (if given access) could build a picture of the things we’re interested in by using this data. That’s why police detectives always seize suspects’ computers and analyze their browsing history. Were the suspects searching for “ways to poison someone with household products” or “how to rob a bank”?

I’m not saying this to be alarmist or to suggest the internet knows too much about us. Quite the contrary, I think it needs to know much more. The more our thought processes get recorded online the better the recommendations will be.

If you’re interested in finding out more about AI and Machine Learning, Stanford is offering online classes this fall for free. Go to http://www.ai-class.com to register. But hurry, classes start October 10.

I’ll see you there. Or maybe not, last I heard over seventy thousand people had registered to take the course. I’m glad I don’t have to grade those papers.

This is a story of unrequited love, the story of a lopsided romance. It’s about a man who cherished an idea so deeply he could not see the truth, a man so enamored with the love story in his mind he could not perceive reality. It’s a tragedy from one perspective–as all love stories ultimately are–but it’s also a story of rebirth as illusion gives way to reality.

This is my story. And my erstwhile lover…well, you’ll meet her momentarily. She was both my muse and my demon, my inspiration and my condemnation. You see, every once in a while you meet someone so attractive, so alluring and radiant, so surprisingly blunt they consume your thoughts. They make sense of a chaotic world and make you feel good about yourself. They make your chest swell with pride before you even realize you’re doing it.

I was twelve or thirteen when I fell in love with neoclassical economics. She was so elegant, so mature and wise. She was youthful but had an ancient soul. She explained the world to me and I believed it–every bit of it–and it clarified why the world was the way it was. She showed me the future, a land of promise and opportunity, just waiting for someone who really wanted to take it. It was all within my grasp, all within my control. I was limited only by desire. All my efforts would be rewarded.

When I was discouraged, thoughts of her comforted me. When I was successful I could hear her effusive praise. She was the smiling hand that patted my back, the sparkling eyes full of pride. She was the shoulder to assuage me, the hand that cradled my defeated head.

Eventually she let me down. Or rather I let myself down. I realized the world wasn’t what I thought it was when I was with her. Ultimately I realized she was never really what I had made her out to be. Yes, she was elegant and full of promise but the love was never real, the woman was a creation. I misinterpreted her and made her into something she was not. All evidence to the contrary I continued to believe she loved me back and that distorted my thinking.

And that’s how it is with love, you want to believe it so you do.

Walter’s Passion

When Walter opened a graphic illustration company he didn’t expect to become rich, famous or influential, he was simply doing what he’d seen his peers do and what people in America had always done. He was making a living. In his mind that meant starting a business—if you were fortunate you succeeded, if not you failed and had to start all over again.

To Walter, America had always been an agricultural society where people grew up understanding a simple formula: grow more than you consume, sell the surplus, reinvest in what worked, and pray for good weather. As the economy transitioned into an industrial machine the vagaries of weather patterns mattered less and less. Where previously, prosperity had been closely linked to factors outside of our control, the industrial revolution convinced us our success was completely within our own power to determine.

When Walter’s company failed to attract clients and bills continued to pile up, it became apparent his business was a failure. If we believe the deterministic premise above we must conclude it was his own fault. Walter was not the victim of a drought or a late-season frost. He had failed in some fundamental business skill. He had improperly marketed his services, taken on too much debt, expanded too quickly or failed to provide a value-added product.

But failure was not the end of the road. Determined to succeed he collected himself, dusted himself off, relocated, regrouped and opened another business. He was presumably smarter this time–having learned from his past mistakes–and more business savvy. But his second company fared no better than his first.

There are certain things we see in successful people, attributes we don’t see in ourselves. We look for these missing pieces, these essential ingredients to triumph, and find them in passion, desire, and self-discipline. We tell ourselves, those who succeed are those who want it the most or who force themselves to put in long hours, endure hardship and turn back the approaching tide of failure by sheer force of will.

Everyone will tell you it’s that fire in the belly which gives successful people a divine claim on victory. You cannot justly withhold success from someone who wants it so badly it infects every fiber of their being. As romantic as this notion seems, as right as it feels to our soul, it’s just not true. It is neither passion nor skill alone which guarantees success.

The Library of Smith

From around 300-50 BCE the Library of Alexandria was the repository of all written knowledge and was alleged to have contained every published work of the time. Today the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress which holds almost 22 million books but still only claims to preserve a “representative sample” of all published material rather than every book ever published.

Large as these examples are they are infinitesimal compared to a theoretical library conceived by Daniel Dennett. The Library of Babel, as Dennett describes it, contains not books actually written but every book it is possible to write. It contains volumes of every combination of English words possible and therefore, by definition, contains every book ever written and every book which will be written in the future, as well as trillions of volumes of nonsense.

Building on Daniel Dennett’s conceptual Library of Babel, Eric Beinhocker uses the Library of Smith (named after the original economist Adam Smith) to represent the landscape of all possible business plans including every conceivable business idea.

Imagine each business plan were evaluated, rated and plotted on a near-infinite grid using height to represent usefulness. Many business plans would be useless blather but the good ones, the ones society could benefit from, would rise from the landscape of mediocrity. The really great ones would tower above the landscape as mountains rising from flat plains.

On the landscape of the Library of Smith, the winners are those which create a more efficient use of the world’s resources. When this happens the world is better off because less of its resources need to be used to meet people’s needs or alternately the same amount of resources can be used and improve the world’s condition.

The highest peaks in this landscape are the ideas which revolutionize how things are done, that turn conventional wisdom on its head and make Herculean leaps in productivity. These ideas make their discoverers rich but also make society much better off by providing a way to use resources most economically.

Exploring, Discovering and Inventing

To discover where the highest peaks are on the landscape of the Library of Smith let’s imagine we send out explorers with a simple mandate, find the highest ground. These economic explorers are placed randomly on the grid and simply look around them choosing to step toward a square higher than the one they are on. When there is no higher ground they stay put.

This simplistic exploration would allow us to get to a high state of efficiency but there would remain places which would be out of reach. Peaks surrounded by a lower ridgeline for example. Areas of localized super-performance would trap explorers because once at the peak a step in any direction would be downward.

To give our hypothetical society a better chance of reaching the highest, most economically efficient peaks, we need to prevent explorers from getting caught on intermediate ridgelines. Let’s modify our explorers’ mandate. They will continue searching for the highest ground immediately around them, but every so often they will leap in a random direction.

Wherever these leaping explorers land they start looking again for higher ground. Models have shown this technique to be more effective in producing positive results but it also produces some catastrophic failures. Explorers leap into deep pits or from a relatively high position to a lower one. Still, the overall outcome is positive with more explorers finding previously unreachable peaks.

As a society we want these explorers to succeed because we all benefit from their discoveries. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee their success. In fact we know some of them will fail. And that’s the crux of the capitalistic dichotomy; it creates an economy which is wildly successful in the aggregate, but which requires a small number of people suffer miserably.

Predicting Success

No one really knows which businesses are going to succeed. I mean that. No one. I have a friend who keeps the books for a flower shop which has been on the brink of failure for years. Several years ago, when she first started working there, my friend told me, “I’m going to start looking for another job. This place is going to be out of business in a month.”

The shop was in debt, had no inventory controls and had over-purchased underperforming supplies: baskets nobody wanted, miles of ribbon in off colors. The shopkeeper was constantly taking money out of the till for personal expenses and putting off paying business bills and rent. They were doing little to no advertising and provided no customer service. It was only a matter of time. Months perhaps, if not weeks.

But somehow the shop would survive crisis after crisis. It has for years. Whenever I see this friend, who still works for the same florist, she still tells me the store is about to close. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the store is run over the years, they just seem to get an influx of orders when it’s crucial for their survival.

Now this is just one shop but I could tell you many more similar stories. Other stores that did everything wrong but somehow survived and I could tell you about plenty of stores which were well capitalized with a solid business plan but still didn’t make it. No one can predict business success confidently. Evidence of this is everywhere.

If success could be determined in advance venture capitalists would get the same return as U.S. Treasury bonds. There would be no stock market because everyone would dump the losers and buy the winners. Every investor has access to the same information, but some think company X will succeed, others think it will fail.

But if it’s not effort and passion and knowledge that determine success, why does it look that way? Why does the economy seem to reflect neoclassical theory? Because some people must suffer.

Choosing Our Glasses

It’s okay to think about suffering if we can assign it to personal failings; the person who doesn’t wear their seat belt, the one who eats raw chicken, the idiots who jump off tall buildings and try to deploy a parachute before hitting the ground. These people make choices which directly cause their own suffering and they get what they have coming. The glasses through which we view the world influence the policies we enact, the causes we support and the way we treat others.

So it makes a huge difference in our attitude whether we think business success is self-determined or random. If we believe success is as random as an explorer arbitrarily jumping onto a high peak we have compassion on the failed businessman. But if success is a product of our own behavior, the losers only get what they deserve. All events are interpreted by the lens through which it is observed.

It’s the same with love. It not only rejuvenates us and makes the world seem much more interesting, but it actually causes us to reshape our perception of events to conform to our beliefs. It literally blinds us to the truth by making it impossible for our brains to see our lover’s actions for what they are. It alters the shape of the lens through which we see the world.

Who knows what forms our concept of the ideal theory or the ideal woman, what combination of youthful experiences makes us prefer fair skin over a deep tan or hesitant, stilted conversation over polished banter. But whatever shapes our preference for theories or mates must reside deep within us because when attraction strikes it resonates to our core.

Not some superficial attraction but one that works its way to the center of our heart. Subtly at first, invisible to the senses, but then we suddenly we realize we’re in love, that we have been for months and are just now becoming aware of it. Even when we know it’s not real, that the attraction was false and one-sided, the feelings are impossible to ignore. It’s a disease you can survive but never fully recover from. A sickness which only needs a hint of encouragement to return with full force.

We rarely think about these glasses of perception, they develop over time and the things we see through them just seem natural and right. But we can choose to see things differently. We can change our prescription if we want to, if we see a need to.

If at First You Don’t Succeed

After Walter failed three times you might think he’d get the hint, he wasn’t cut out to be in the animation business. But he started again and this time got a toe hold producing short cartoon features. Before long Walter Disney’s company was making money and becoming well known in the industry. Today The Walt Disney Company is a global empire and while Walter passed away in 1966, no one can dispute he was an extraordinary success.

And that’s the allure of neoclassical theory, the siren song that tells us we were right to believe in hard work and devotion as the determinants of success. I only have to hear her name to feel my body react. My heart races, my mood brightens, I become expectant–though for what I’m never quite sure.

She says something innocuous to me and I turn it into a love song. I interpret everyday courtesy as a lover’s deference. It’s said perception defines reality but this is only partially true. Our perception does not define other people’s reality, but it does define our own.

I want it to be real, to feel my attraction reciprocated, to fulfill the romantic fantasies of loving looks and implied flirtations. To see the world so simply again, so wonderfully and purely explained. And I know I will never be free. We can reinterpret events so easily; see a compliment as a slight and vice versa depending on how we think the other person feels about us. And amazingly we can revise and reinterpret these memories well into the future as new information impresses itself upon us.

All it takes is a hint of success for me to believe in self-determination again, to think I was right to love her all along. Any crack of sunlight will cause me to believe in love again and I know that would be a mistake. In order to see the world clearly I must forever fail.

Recommended reading:
Michele Boldrin–Against Intellectual Monopoly
Steven Johnson–Where Good Ideas Come From
Kevin Kelly–What Technology Wants
Eric Beinhocker–The Origin of Wealth

[photo by Kirstea]

My earliest memory is of visiting my great-grandmother. She lived in a trailer on my grandfather’s farm in Cheboygan, Michigan. It sat behind his house where the grass grew waist high until the stalks bent under their own weight. Their dark green length appeared to be bowing in deference to the silver, egg-like throne around which they gathered. Her home was a remnant of a travel trailer she shared with a long-haired white lap dog who had a hard time keeping her hair.

The air inside was stale and pungent, the unventilated accumulation of lost dreams and sorrow. Though it was the middle of the day she was lying in her bed at the rear of her home.

“Come here,” she said. Her voice raspy and quavering.

While only in her eighties a hard life had taken its toll and she was pale, wrinkled, and frail. She spent all of her time in the trailer with the shades drawn. Inside it was cluttered and hadn’t been cleaned in years. My great-grandmother was not a messy person but her dog was, and evidence its rude nature was abundant.

She held out a hand to me. Not a soft and welcoming hand, not the smooth feminine hand one would appreciate being touched by, but a gnarled and bony hand, its knuckles swollen, its fingers curled in a prolonged muscle spasm. As I appraised the shaky appendage thrust toward me in the dim light, I saw she had feces smeared between her fingers. Whether hers or the dog’s I didn’t know but I recoiled at the thought of her grasping me in a warm embrace of human or canine excrement.

She was our oldest living relative at the time, the familial doyenne, and though her physical presence had long ago deteriorated the force of her influence was ever present. I looked at her hand and the crap between her bony fingers, I smelled the foulness of it rising over the accumulated stench of her filthy trailer and my mind froze. I could neither advance nor retreat. My legs, stiff as charcoal sticks, were immovable as I clung to my father’s pants. Looking away I hoped she would disappear, that I would wake up and realize I had simply wet my bed again.

“Come here,” I heard again in the back of my mind.

I stared at the carpet and didn’t move. I stared at the crumpled balls of tissue held rigid and tightly packed together with dried snot. I stared at the accumulation of generations of bread crumbs and the frayed edges of her old wool sweater draped over the arm of a chair she never used. And I stared at the white dog hairs that clung to everything like a light dusting of slender, straw-like snow. My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind.

My dad said something apologetic and leaned down to kiss her.

Child prodigy

I was never what I wanted to be. Never the object of my own adoration. Art was a refuge from my life and I poured my frustrations out on thick paper. When I was ten my mother convinced an art instructor at Kent State University to allow me to attend his class.

“I know every mother thinks their child is brilliant,” she told him. “But look at some of his work. You’ll see he has…” a gift, she wanted to say but dared not be so presumptuous. “You’ll see he has potential.”

At first I was thrilled to be among adults as an equal, our brooding teacher circling the minefield of easels, his floppy beret cocked just so. His path weaved in and between his students who were intent on a bowl of oranges and a draped sheet, gently cascading to the floor. He stopped to consider my rendition and admired my shading technique.

“Your fabric, it’s so light, like a dust,” he gushed. “Very nice.” My cheeks flushed as I imagined my classmates’ jealous stares.

I reveled in my celebrity status as a child prodigy but the college scene proved too much for me. My fellow artists tried too hard to pull off an affected look of arrogance in shabby, second hand clothes, intentionally stained with the feckless evidence of our passion. One classmate’s threadbare jeans were marked just above the right knee with excess paint from the brushes she cleaned there; her slender arm, as she sketched and gazed, absentmindedly placed her pencil against her thigh as though to wipe it clean as well.

The rebellion, the angst, the false gravitas and rhetorical posturing of my fellow students wore on me. And then there was the constant pressure to produce.

“Stop pestering me for my sketches,” I barked at my poor mother one evening. “How am I supposed to find time to sketch when I have to learn how to reduce an improper fraction?”

When my schoolwork began to suffer, art had to take a backseat to academics for a while. I dropped out of my college art class midway through the first semester.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact so many companies are searching for creative talent these days, when so much emphasis is put on math in schools at the expense of creative pursuits. It’s all well and good to occupy yourself with crayons and washable markers while you’re young, but no one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade.

Yet regardless of how distasteful it is, or how bad you are at it, every American will be forced to study math until they graduate from high school. This may have been what America needed in the 1950s–mathematicians and engineers–not now. Now computers are taking over math-intensive fields and we’re realizing the mistake of smothering generations of creative development.

Disillusionment

There’s always been a mystique surrounding the creative process. It seems the real masterpieces are produced by tortured individuals holed up in austere solitude, wracked by their own personal torment. They must be either pitied or revered, these creative geniuses. We read their thoughts, their manifest expressions of turmoil, with slack-jawed amazement and shed admiring tears at the product of their disturbed minds. We revel in our fortune at experiencing such artistic perfection and curse a fate which left us with such club-like hands and feeble minds.

My left brain constantly berates my right for its banality. Is it possible you could have an original thought you pathetic imposter? My portraits look like cartoon characters and my landscapes akin to a pitched roof house with four-paned windows framing a door, the sun shining brightly from the upper right corner in straight rays. I wish I’d never had a creative thought than these urges without hope of release.

Where is the originality, the spark? Who can see the world like Amedeo Modigliani or Paul Manship? If only I could paint like that or sculpt. Perhaps if my life were more miserable it would happen. But in the end I take the hint and pack up my childish tools—the charcoal sticks and gum erasers, the sketchbooks and canvases. I put them in boxes marked “Siddhartha’s art stuff” and move them from house to house unopened.

A 2008 study by Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes examined the relationship between depression and artistic expression. Their paper The Dark Side of Creativity reveals a link between negative emotions and increased creative output. “Historical and empirical data have linked artistic creativity to depression and other affective disorders” they write, but there is also evidence for “strong situational factors influencing creativity.”

Essentially, they found social rejection increased artistic creativity and this effect was strongest in those with a biological propensity toward depression. This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent. Luminaries such as Henri Matisse and Francisco de Goya battled depression and, from what I understand, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky would occasionally feel blue as well.

Resurgence

In my mid-teens I again pursued collegiate art education, this time in Washington, D.C. Closer now to my classmates in age but no better able to relate to them. I had few friends. My social retardation however gave me plenty of time to work and my persistent social rejection fueled my creative drive. Yet for all my forward momentum I was rudderless and still uncertain whether I was more inclined to overthrow the government or paint a masterpiece.

On a class trip to the Corcoran Art Gallery I found what had been missing from my art education: conceptual art. The gallery was displaying a collection of works by Jonathan Borofsky and I was thrust into heaven. Staring at his giant, two-dimensional signature piece, Hammering Man, repetitively hammering without constructing anything, I saw my life. Counting, the three foot tall stack of lined notebook paper containing the meticulously handwritten numbers from 1 to 2,346,502, spoke to my soul.

But I was enthralled by another piece in one of the Corcoran’s back rooms. It was a closed door from behind which emanated the muted sounds of intermittent hammering. I stood there for several minutes marveling at the subtle message of workmen laboring in anonymity and then smiled thinking how embarrassed I’d be if it turned out not to be a work of art at all but actual workmen constructing another display on the other side of the wall.

But that’s also the beauty of conceptual art. It’s not about the artist, it’s about the viewer. It’s about an emotional revelation, a reaction to the observation. It’s conveying an idea that naturally wells up from within the observer, not imposed by the artist but facilitated by him. The true art is not in the presentation but in the conceptualization of the experience.

When I left home at sixteen I thought, now is my chance to live an artist’s life. I took a bus to Chicago and lived on the street then traveled south and rented a small house in Augusta, Georgia. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. Not a chair or a table. I slept on a piece of cardboard on the bedroom floor. The nights were interminable, unmercifully hot and unbearably humid. I cultivated an artistic scowl and didn’t wash my hair.

I lived on a pittance reading by the light of a bare bulb and eating raw potatoes. In this artistic atmosphere I was determined to really break out. My intention was to produce a series of paintings, bold canvases in the primary colors, but after Blue I became disillusioned and cynical. I let my mind wander and began noticing art all around me. I saw the beauty in the mildew growing around the edges of the bathroom tile. I marveled at the rigidity of cracked linoleum and the ants which ate dead cockroaches off the floor.

Just as there is beauty in nature, conceptual art can occur organically and unintentionally. I began to see beauty in everything. Rusted air conditioners sitting in forlorn windows, the siding beneath them stained by the rusty discharge. Even bags of garbage whose contents provided the unconstructed but perfect composition of humanity’s discarded byproducts caught my eye. These were as random and enjoyable as the natural world, as fulfilling as a sunset or a mountain skyline. Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find.

Finding Art All Around Us

It was a catharsis of sorts, this realization of art’s omnipresence. My need to create, and to punish myself for my lack of ability to create, withdrew. I left art behind and became a missionary and after a couple years joined the Navy eventually finding myself in Pensacola, Florida as a flight instructor.

An acquaintance was moving and asked for my help which I was happy to provide. When I arrived at his house however, I was overwhelmed by the scene. The miniature house he and his wife were renting was barely 800 square feet. They don’t even make houses that small anymore. The owner, probably realizing the property’s only value was in the land, had let it deteriorate over the years and was renting it for just $300 a month.

It wasn’t the dilapidated condition of the house which amazed me however, it was the amount of detritus inside. Piles upon piles of old newspapers and fast food wrappers. A half used tube of Chap Stick whose contents had melted out onto the floor collected dog hair and dust balls. A lost sock and a Happy Meal toy sat next to a dusty jar of home canned peaches and I wanted to sit down and just take it all in.

I thought taking a break from helping them pack to stare at their cluttered house might make them uncomfortable so I came back later that evening and broke in when I knew they’d be gone. I stood alone in their abandoned refuse and studied it carefully. I thought of the one time I had seen my great-grandmother and remembered her immured in her lonely trailer. I pictured a frightened great-grandson refusing a tender embrace. I imagined the pain of such a moment in the twilight of one’s life.

I thought about that moment and then I imagined leaving her trailer and saw myself looking back over my shoulder to see an old woman with her hand outstretched. I presumed she would be in pain but instead I saw her mouth bent in a gentle smile and in her eyes understanding and contentment. I never saw her after that visit but I like to pretend she understood.

In the Pensacola evening I lay down upon the filthy floor of a squalid house and in the long light of evening’s protracted departure I looked at the lopsided ceiling fan coated in dust and the grease from a hundred smoky dinners and my eyes grew bleary at the beauty of it all. The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare.

“Time is the school in which we learn,” wrote Delmore Schwartz. “Time is the fire in which we burn.”* And so it is. All things will pass away, both the common and the divine; but we’ll never know the beauty we don’t find.

*From “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge.

[photo by Zanthia]