We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today

July 29, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* January 12, 1976

I recently read that dogs—through the imperatives of evolution—have developed expressions that invite positive interactions from their humans like “What a good boy” or a scratch behind the ears whenever, say, Wally looks me in the eye with a kind of urgency. There’s urgency all right, because he’s after something more than just my words or my touch.

The reward that he really wants comes after this hoped-for interaction. It’s a little squirt of oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide that strengthens bonding by making me, and then both of us together, feel good about our connection.

As you might expect, Wally looks at me a lot when I’m working and I almost always respond. How could anyone refuse that face? Besides, it gives whatever workspace I’m in a positive charge that can linger all day.

Social media has also learned that “likes”—or almost any kind of interaction by other people (or machines) with our pictures and posts—produces similar oxytocin squirts in those who are doing the posting. We’re not just putting something out there; we’re after something that’s both measureable and satisfying in return.

Of course, the caution light flashes when social media users begin to crave bursts of chemical approval like Wally does, or “to feel rejected” when the “likes” aren’t coming fast enough. It’s a feedback loop “of craving to approval” that keeps us coming back for more. Will they like us at least as much, and maybe more than they did the last time I was here? It’s the draw that always makes us stay on these social media platforms for longer than we want to and always keeps us coming back for more.

Social scientists have been telling us for years that craving approval for our contributions (along with not wanting to miss out) causes social media as well as cell-phone addiction in young people under 25. They are particularly susceptible to its lures because the pre-frontal cortex in their brains, the so-called seat of good judgment, is still developing. Of course, the ability to determine what’s good and bad for you is also underdeveloped in many older people too—I just never thought that included me.

So how I felt when I stopped my daily posting on Instagram three weeks ago came as a definite comeuppance. Until then I thought I had too much “good sense” to allow myself to be manipulated in these ways.

For the past 6 years, I’ve posted a photo on Instagram (or IG) almost every day. I told myself that regular picture-taking would make me look at the world more closely while, at the same time, making me better at capturing what I saw. It would give me a cache of visual memories about where I’d been and what I’d been doing, and posting on IG gave me a chance to share them with others.

In recent years, I’d regularly get around 50 “likes” for each photo along with upbeat comments from strangers in Yemen, Moscow and Beruit as well as from people I actually know. The volume and reach of approval wasn’t great by Rhianna standards, but as much as half of it would always come in the first few minutes after posting every day. I’d generally upload my images before getting out of bed in the morning, so for years now I’ve been starting my days with a series of “feel good” oxytocin bursts.

Of course, you know what happened next. My “cold turkey” from Instagram produced symptoms that felt exactly like withdrawal. It recalled the aftermath of cutting back on carbs a few years back or, after I was in the Coast Guard, nicotine. Noticeable. Physical. In the days that followed, I’d find myself repeatedly gazing over at my phone screen for notifications of likes or comments that were no longer coming. Or even worse, I’d explore identical-looking notifications for me to check other people’s pictures and stories, lures that felt like reminders of the boosts I was no longer getting. I felt “cut off” from something that had seemed both alive and necessary.

It’s one thing to read about social media or cell-phone addiction and accept it’s downsides as a mental exercise, quite another to feel withdrawal symptoms after quitting one of them.

Unlike the Food & Drug Administration, I did’t need anything more than my own clinical trial to tell me about the forces that were at play here, because at the same time that IG owner Mark Zuckerberg is engineering what feels like my addiction to his platform, he is also targeting me with ads for things (that I’m sorry to say) I realized I was wanting much more frequently. That’s because Instagram was learning all along what I was interested in whenever I hovered over one of its ads or followed an enticing link.

In other words, I’d been addicted to soften me up for buying stuff that IG had learned I’m likely to want in a retail exchange that effectively made both IG and Mark Zuckerberg the middleman in every sale. IG’s oxcytocin machine had turned me into a captive audience who’d been intentionally rendered susceptible to buying whatever IG was hawking.

That seems both manipulative and underhanded to me.

It’s one thing to write about “loss of autonomy” to the on-line tech giants, it is another to have felt a measure of that loss.

So where does this leave me, or any of us?

How do lawmakers and regulators limit (or prevent) subtle but nonetheless real chemical dependency when it’s induced by a tech platform?

Is breaking the ad-based business models that turn so many of us into captive buyers even possible in a market system that has used advertising to stoke sales for more than 200 years? Can our consumer-oriented economy turn its back on what may be the most effective sales model ever invented?

To think that we are grappling with either of these questions today would be an illusion.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has just fined Facebook (which is IG’s owner) for failing to implement and enforce narrow privacy policies that it had promised to implement and enforce years ago. The FTC also mandated oversight of Zuckerberg personally. Unlike the CEOs of other public companies, because he has effective ownership control of Facebook, his board of directors can’t really hold his feet to the fire. But neither the fine nor this new oversight mechanism challenge the company’s underlying business model, which is to (1) induce an oxytocin dependency in its users; (2) gather their personal data while they are feeling good by satisfying their cravings; (3) sell their personal data to advertisers; and (4) profit from the ads that are aimed at users who either don’t know or don’t care that they are being seduced in this way.

Recently announced antitrust investigations are also aimed at different problems. The Justice Department, FTC and Congress will be questioning the size of companies like Facebook and their dominance among competitors. One remedy might break Facebook into smaller pieces (like undoing it’s 2012 purchase of Instagram). However, these investigations are not about challenging a business model that induces dependency in its users, eavesdrops on their personal behavior both on-site and off of it, and then turns them into consumers of the products on its shelves. The best that can be hoped for is that some of these dominant platforms may be cut down to size and have some of their anti-competitive practices curtailed.

Even the data-privacy initiatives that some are proposing are unlikely to change this business model. Their most likely result is that users who want to restrict access to, and use of, their personal information will have to pay for the privilege of utilizing Facebook or Google or migrate to new privacy-protecting platforms that will be coming on-line. I profiled one of them, called Solid, on this page a few weeks back.

Since it looks like we’ll be stuck in this brave new world for awhile, why does it matter that we’re being misused in this way?

Personal behavior has always been influenced by whatever “the Jones” were buying or doing next door (if you were desperate enough to keep up with them). In high school you changed what you were wearing or who you were hanging out with if you wanted to be seen as one of the cool kids. Realizing that your hero, James Bond, is wearing an Omega watch might make you want to buy one too. But the influence to buy or to imitate that I’m describing here with Instagram feels new, different and more invasive, like we’ve entered the realm of science fiction.

Social media companies like Facebook and Instagram are using psychological power, that we’ve more or less given them, to remove some of the freedom in our choices so that they, in turn, can make Midas kingdoms of money off of us. And perhaps their best trick of all is that you only feel the ache of dependency that kept you in their rabbit holes—and how they conditioned you to respond once you were in them—after you decide to leave.

Saul Steinberg in the *New Yorker,* November 16, 1968

Maybe the scariest part of this was my knowing better, but acquiescing anyway, for all of those years.

It’s particularly alarming given my belief that autonomy (along with generosity) are the most important qualities that I have.

I guess I had to feel what had happened to me in order to understand the subtlety of my addiction, the loss of freedom that my cravings for connection had induced, and my susceptibility to being used, against my will, by strangers for their own, very different purposes.

By delivering “warm and fuzzies” every day and getting me to stay for their commercials, Instagram became my small experience of mind control and Big Brother.

Over the past few weeks, I see people looking for something in their phones and think differently about what they’re doing. That’s because I still feel some of the need for what they may be looking for too.

It gives a whole new meaning to “the dog days” this summer.

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I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar experience with a social network like Facebook or Instagram. If we don’t end up talking before then, I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my July 28, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

February 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Gathering your thoughts, working them out on a page, and sharing that page with others is the spur for high level, creative problem-solving and the best (most productive) conversations. Instead of “winging it” by making up what you think, want and propose as you go along, the discipline of writing your thinking down first makes a remarkable difference.

It’s more than laziness that gets in the way of our doing so, although laziness and the smug belief that our wits will be enough is certainly a part of it. There is, after all, a long tradition of not thinking too much “while going with what we believe and feel” in American culture. The great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote AntiIntellectualism in America in 1964, and others like Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason (2008) have picked up the thread more recently. Anyone viewing the political maelstrom today can see a ton of beliefs and emotions for every ounce of careful thinking.

So our reluctance to think through the issues beforehand is nothing new. And our suspicion of “intellectuals” who actually do helps us to confirm our general unwillingness to read about, consider, write down our thoughts, learn how to dissent from others’ thinking, and really converse with one another. There are several contributors to this reluctance, and I guess I’m working my way back through the list, having already discussed the emotional bars to political conversation (or how “The Danger of Absolute Thinking is Absolutely Clear”) and the generative quality of dissent (about Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers) on this page.

So what does writing down our thoughts before sharing them with others have to do with living and working? As it turns out, quite a lot.

As a group, Americans clearly don’t believe that the act of thinking (for itself) is as great as all those intellectuals keep telling them it is. As a people, our reaction is kind of: show me what’s so good about it and then I might try thinking-about-it-more if I’m convinced that it might actually be useful.

Among other things, this skepticism was the subject of another recent post about Robert Kaplan and his Earning the Rockies. Kaplan notes that Americans “washed” all the philosophizing that had trailed them from Europe in their vast frontier, reducing that thinking and ideology into something that they could actually use to build a new way of life. “Show me how all of these ideas can help me to solve the problems I face everyday, and then, maybe I’ll take them seriously.”  It’s no mistake that Missouri, the gateway to the American frontier, is also called the Show-Me State.

What Americans found on the frontier (and translated into a national way of life) was that ideas are useful when they help us to improve our hard-working lives and, in particular, to make more money while we’re at it. I suspect that this makes us unique as a country and a people. Unlike the intellectual elites of Europe who argue ideas, our favorite “intellectuals” are of the practical variety. They show us how to live and work better (entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) and to make more money while doing so (Warren Buffett and Vanguard’s Jack Bogle).

Which is where Jeff Bezos comes in.

In a week that saw him fighting with the National Enquirer about nude pictures that he exchanged with his mistress—more on that later—we also know Bezos as the founder of Amazon, which has become one of the largest companies in the world and made him the world’s richest man in only 20 years. Like Jobs, Musk, Buffett and Bogle, there has been a great deal of intellectual rigor, with highly practical outcomes, behind Bezos’ and Amazon’s remarkable success.

While I’ve been talking for months about Amazon’s anti-competitive and job-killing behaviors, it also seems fitting to recognize one of the insights that Bezos has used to drive Amazon’s dominance–and how you might profit from it too.  All that is necessary is overcoming the laziness of easy answers and some of our native suspicions about thinking too much.

1. On Writing Your Thinking Down Before You Share It

To build one of the largest companies in the world in two decades took several really good ideas, and even more importantly, several really good ways to turn those ideas into solutions for the legion of problems that every new company faces. Many of those solution-generating approaches were applied by Bezos, and one of them, in particular, has been a key to Amazon’s supremacy as an on-line retailer and to its leadership in related industries, like cloud-based data solutions.

In his excellent 2-5-19 post on what he calls Bezos’ “writing management strategy,” Ben Bashaw gathered the underlying documentation and made several of the observations that I’ll be paraphrasing below. He starts off by noting:

There’s probably no technology company that values the written word and produces written output quite as much as Amazon….

Bezos is Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world.

(How, how, how instead of why, why, why are questions that practical intellectuals ask.)

As a manager, Bezos grew impatient with meetings as brainstorming sessions early on. He came to appreciate what the behavioral research tends to prove: that individuals are better at coming up with new ideas on their own, while groups are better at recognizing the best ones and deciding how to implement them.

But he also appreciated that for groups to engage quickly, a new idea needed to be delivered “in high resolution detail” by the individual who had come up with it. The insight led to a June, 2004 email that banned the use of powerpoint presentations at Amazon and insisted that people with ideas tee-up the meetings that would receive them with tight, well-structured and reasoned narrative texts.

The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Bezos banned powerpoint presentations company-wide because he knew that to generate new ideas consistently, a business needs better processes it can repeat every time. He was also convinced that writing your ideas down clarifies your thinking about them and improves the chance that your ideas will be good ones because you’ve thought nearly everything through beforehand.

When composing a detailed narrative, logical inconsistencies are no longer hidden but acknowledged and (if possible) addressed. To set up “a deep debate of the idea’s costs and merits,” these 4 pages are designed to be “a full logical argument” by the idea’s sponsor that includes a narrative about the issue; how others have attempted to address it before; how the sponsor’s approach differs; the advantage of the new idea to the company; a defense to potential objections; and attachments that include the relevant data. In other words, in drafting the memo, the idea’s sponsor has considered it from every angle he or she can think of before it’s presented.

A link that Bashaw includes in his post references first-hand group responses at Amazon after the sponsor provided his or her written narrative. Discussion is “very focused” around the proposal; meeting participants are “incredibly sharp” and “you can expect the meeting to be among the most difficult and intellectually challenging that you will ever attend”; “data is king” and had better be well-researched and assembled; and how Bezos would “consistently surprise” the idea’s sponsor with at least one question about “the big picture” that the sponsor had never considered before. No more rambling brainstorming meetings where powerpoints create the illusion of depth but fail to engage the participants productively. It is one practical reason why Amazon has grown as quickly and boldly as it has.

What may be most interesting here is how drafting a tightly written narrative that contains your full logical argument can stimulate engagement with groups and others that you need to engage on any issue that is truly important to your life and work. It is taking a full stand about something, declaring yourself in a way that immediately invites respect and collaboration. It is a demonstration that you’ve thought about everything you can think of already—including what these others stand to gain—on whatever issue you are raising. The work that you’ve put behind it makes you an immediately credible partner to explore the next steps.

In an aside to this basic wisdom, it’s hardly surprising that Bezos used his customary approach to narrative writing when he accused the National Enquirer of blackmail this week. The Enquirer threatened to publish nude pictures that Bezos took of himself during an extramarital affair if he refused to abandon prior legal claims that he had against the gossip page. (If you have not read Bezos’ refusal to bow to these threats because–as it turns out–he was willing to publish the photos himself, here is the link to “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker”.)

What I found interesting enough to share with you was the following: (1) how many other people, both in and outside business circles, take Bezos’ writing seriously and (2) how one subsequent commentator actually provided a tongue-in-cheek critique of his “think of everything” writing style a couple of days ago. Jenni Avinns, a writer for Quartz business news, led off with the observation that Bezos’ post “clocked in at fewer than 1500 words” or, by my calculation, the four pages that launch all good ideas at Amazon. Then she gave some additional observations on how Bezos writes down his thinking, including his willingness to:

Embrace the poetry
If pictures of your penis are at the center of the confrontation and the person threatening you is David Pecker, don’t shy away. (Even if your blue-chip private security consultant is de Becker and it rhymes.) Put that Pecker right in the headline. Put a “Mr.” in front of it to emphasize the indignity: “No thank you, Mr. Pecker.” …

Make up Words
If the English language isn’t complex enough to provide the word you need to describe how your ownership of a national media outlet complicates your dealings with other powerful people [including the President], make one up. “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” People will know what you mean, and even appreciate that you didn’t permit a tedious copyeditor to question you, though you clearly employ some.

Make fun of their words with “scare quotes” and repetition
“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our [i.e. the Post’s] investigation” of his company’s relationship with the Saudi government, wrote Bezos. Apoplectic is a strong word, and honestly makes this person sound kind of hysterical and unhinged. If someone says they’re apoplectic, turn it around and say it again, like it’s a medical condition: “A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. “ …

Just [provide] the facts: I’m Jeff Bezos, and you’re not
If someone attempts to question your business acumen, school them:“ I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world.”

But act relatable
… “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”

Once again, great narrative writing skills always translate when you are trying to solve important problems at work or in private life. Unfortunately, they can rarely explain away incomprehensibly poor personal judgments. Perhaps it’s no accident that the last time I imagined pictures like this, they were taken by somebody who was (improbably and poetically) named Mr. Anthony Weiner.

On the other hand, and practically speaking once again, whether his post succeeds in solving Mr. Bezos’ immediate problem with the Enquirer is something I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

An Image of How Tight Narrative Writing with High Resolution Details Might Actually Look

2. How I’ve Used This Kind of Narrative Writing Recently

An important problem ahead of me is attracting interest in my first book.

I want to make sure that its disparate parts (arguments, short stories, etc.) hang together; that they reinforce one another nicely and enhance the freshness of my thesis; that likely questions about the approach I’ve taken are asked and answered by me; and that the benefits to readers in my approach are clearly in mind throughout.

Moreover, these problems are closely related to another one, because what will attract a publisher most is a well-considered and organized book with fresh ideas that meets readers’ needs to take more satisfaction from their work.

These are precisely the kinds of problems that “tight narrative writing with high resolution detail” can package for everyone who faces me down the line, including agents, publishers, retailers (like Amazon) and, of course, the readers themselves. In other words, it’s not just about your book but how you tell the stories that need to be told to others about it.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on the written materials that serve up my book to everyone outside of my book writing process. Without handing out the book itself and expecting people to read it, these are the shorthand essentials: descriptions of key concepts and how they operate, along with demonstrations of my ability to persuade with an argument, tell a good story and understand who might be interested in them. In other words: tight narrative writing with high resolution detail.

Quite frankly, it has been a lot of work, but its almost done. I’ve been amazed by the foundation it has provided to promote my book and how much the book itself has changed (and improved) from my efforts to capture it in its own narrative.

I had also taken this approach before I learned that Jeff Bezos had been taking it at Amazon too. It’s a great idea that’s long been out there waiting to be picked up and put to good use. But best of all, anyone can take the same approach to face a challenging and skeptical world with a maximum of confidence when trying to solve an important problem.

This post was adapted from my February 10, 2019 newsletter

Facing Risks, Finding Control

November 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Introducing some risk into your life and work can remind you what it’s like to feel alive. Not that we’re sleepwalking exactly, but if “personal comfort” trumps most other considerations, you have probably insulated yourself from anything more serious than inconvenience—and there’s a price for that.

What we do everyday can easily fall into grooves of predictability where there are few occasions to be confronted with anything surprising, let alone alarming. But if we deprive ourselves of occasions where we need to find some courage and “fall back on” ourselves to overcome our fears, what used to be called “one’s constitution” begins to slip away.

Ask yourself: “What would I do if all I had to rely upon were my wits, if I suddenly had to decide between two uncertain outcomes, if none of my insulations were there to protect me—and my only choices were either to crumble or persevere?” I’d argue that it’s good to put ourselves “on the line” from time to time and find out. It gives us a chance to get in touch with “our elemental selves,” to store up some fortitude for the next time, and to recall our bravery and resourcefulness when we could use some inspiration.

Taking some risks, facing your fears and learning something new about yourself and others have been newsletter themes before. As you know, I’m an off-the-beaten track traveler who encountered some sketchy characters in Rome (“What’s Best Is Never Free”) and a genuinely menacing one in New Orleans (“Risk Taking, Opportunity Seeking”). The reward each time was to discover something about these cities and their people that I could not have found out any other way. On the spot, I felt more alive. And where I could have responded better, I thought about how I‘d do things differently the next time I leave my comfort zone.

The upside of taking risks also drove the migration from Asia that settled the Western Hemisphere 15,000 years ago. These new Americans didn’t stop in the first fertile valley they discovered. Instead, they pushed to the edges of nearly every corner of North, Latin and South America with astonishing speed. It was insatiable curiosity and the thrill of conquest that drove them on, despite their having to confront megafauna (really big animals with razor-sharp claws and teeth), the challenges of wilderness travel with children and elders, and a total absence of convenience stores. In his book about it, Craig Childs cited the research for the proposition that an appetite for risk is hardwired into our DNA, giving rise to human progress and the rush of adventure that quickly follow.

Two new stories this week provide additional food-for-thought about our psychological risk profiles and a literally “ground-breaking” documentary delves into the motivations behind Alex Honnold’s “ free solo” climb up the rock face of El Capitan. I hope they’ll contribute to your thinking about staying confident, willful and alive.

Two recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal consider fear-inducing situations from opposite directions. One, called “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” argues that you can raise your spirits by confronting something that scares you and building a record for bravery. The other, “Travel Mistakes That Hurt,” is about foolishly throwing caution to the wind when you’re in a vacation state of mind. Taken together, they provide something of a template for healthy risk taking.

It’s amazing what fools we can sometimes be when we’re traveling. Incapacity from drinking too much alcohol or not enough water, injuries from mopeds and other unfamiliar vehicles, assuming wild animals are “cute,” hiking or climbing beyond your physical limits, and falling off cliffs or into traffic while taking pictures of yourself. The “Travel Mistakes” article features an interview with Tim Daniel with International SOS, an organization whose travel coverage includes rescuing people from every kind of harm. Daniel says travel is disorienting for almost everyone and that when we’re inundated with all that new information we can end up focusing on the wrong things and making poor choices.

Some of us go with the first thing we’re told instead of testing its reliability. Other times we’re susceptible to “the bandwagon effect”: if others are jumping off a cliff and into the water then it must be safe for us to jump in too. We may cling to our preconceptions (this neighborhood was safe 20 years ago) whatever evidence there is to the contrary today. Daniel argues that our blind spots always become more pronounced when we travel.

They are one reason it’s helpful to travel with companions who know you well enough to warn you about yours before it’s too late. Or if you’re traveling alone, it helps to think about your worst inclinations in advance and to keep them in mind before they get you in trouble. Navigating the unfamiliar (including its risks) makes travel exhilarating, but to maximize the potential gains and minimize the possible losses, it helps to know the baggage that you’ve brought along with you.

On a more positive note, it turns out that “amping up the adrenaline to get out of an emotional rut” is also a prescription with some science behind it. This is the kind of “funk” we’re often trying to leave behind when we seek a break from our daily routines. Sociologist Margee Kerr has written about what happens when we face our fears about loss of control in challenging situations.

When we’re terrified, our sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of that flight or flight response, floods the body with adrenaline and the brain with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. Our blood vessels constrict, to preserve blood for muscles and organs that might need it if we decide to run. And our mind focuses on the present. The physical response lasts a few hours, but the memory is what we draw strength from.

The woman who wrote “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” is also a scuba diver. She explored the theory’s immediate and long-term benefits by choosing a particularly demanding dive in Iceland, between the continental plates that separate North America from Eurasia. During the dive, she confronted her fears multiple times “but pushed through by refusing to acknowledge that quitting was an option.” As soon as she did so, she felt “strong, brave and happy.” Moreover, the memory of that experience was even stronger. Whenever she’s struggling to get through a bad day she says: “I go back to that place where I can do anything.”

Finding your control when risks give rise to fear is exhilarating at the time and empowering for as long as you can relive your resourcefulness.

This photo, along with the shot that tops this post, are of Alex Honnold climbing the sheer, rock face of El Capitain in Yosemite National Park without ropes or safety gear. 3000 feet of sheer granite, thousands of hand and foot holds, it took him 3 hours and 56 minutes. What’s known as “Free Solo,” his climb was a first in the annals of rock climbing, and is the subject of a documentary that’s in theaters today.

I’m not good with heights and so far have been afraid to see it. But somebody named John Baylies was brave enough, and he described his experience this way in an on-line forum:

I judge this the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Impossible not to get personally involved. Two big questions loom. What disease does this man suffer, that he has no fear and what the hell were the guys in animal costumes doing 1000 feet into the climb? If this were fiction it was a perfect comic relief for was the tensest 20 minutes on film.

However curious I am about the animal costumes I may just have to read about it, but the buzz around his climb got me interested in Honnold so I tracked down a TED talk he gave along with an extended interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast since the documentary came out. I think you’ll enjoy them too.

The highly informal Honnold-Rogan exchange provides several glimpses into the type of person who would train for 20 years with the goal of finding control while facing a succession of nearly overwhelming risks to his personal safety. Watching and listening to Honnold talk was fascinating. Humble. Direct. Thoughtful. Articulate. The farthest thing from a daredevil, much of what drives him was revealed by Rogan’s question about all those people he must have inspired to follow in his footsteps. Honnold says simply that he guesses he would be pleased to inspire people if it were “to live an intentional life” like he has: knowing what he wants and working to achieve it.

Honnold’s TED talk elaborates on what living that way means for him. In it, he contrasts a free solo climb he completed at Half Dome (also in Yosemite) which proved unsatisfying with his encore at El Capitan, which he describes as “quite simply the best day of my life.”

At Half Dome in 2012, he never practiced beforehand and had the cocky over-confidence that he would somehow “rise to the occasion” and make it to the summit. Then he reached a point in his climb, almost 2000 feet up, where he could not find his next hand or toe-hold. Honnold knew what he had to do (a tricky maneuver) but was overcome with fear that he’d execute the move incorrectly and would likely die. After much deliberation, he did manage the move successfully and reached the top safely—but vowed that he’d never be that reckless again.

Five years later at El Capitan, Honnold worked for months on its rock face finding and memorizing every hand and foothold so there would be no surprises on the day of his climb. He removed loose rocks along his path, carrying them down in a backpack. He anticipated everything that was likely to happen and how he would respond to it in what became a highly choreographed dance.

The way that Honnold managed his fear was to leave “no room for doubt to creep in.” Always knowing his next move, his mental and physical preparation made the actual climb feel “as comfortable and natural as taking a walk in the park.” Why did he succeed at El Capitan when he felt so much less successful at Half Dome? “I didn’t want to be a lucky climber, I wanted to be a great climber,” he said.

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Finding the calm and mastery of control in the face of risks—as big as Honnold’s or as small as any of ours might be—is always a function of preparation. To extend yourself and overcome a new challenge takes planning and visualizing what you’re likely to encounter along with understanding yourself, the mistakes you are prone to make, and the strategies you’ll employ to avoid them. In Honnold’s words, “it takes intentionality” beforehand. You have to want to do it in the right way.

The upside in taking risks and pushing your envelope isn’t found in the speculation that you’ll be able to handle whatever comes your way. You may end up being lucky, but just as likely, a group like International SOS may be coming to your rescue. On the other hand, when you’re ready to assume the risks, the rewards are becoming fully and completely alive in the moment that you face them and the recollection of your bravery and resourcefulness whenever your confidence flags.

This post is adapted from my November 11, 2018 newsletter.

How Stepping Back and Really Noticing Can Change Everything

October 14, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Pieter Bruegel’s The Battle Between Carnival and Lent

I’m frequently reminded about how oblivious I am, but I had a particularly strong reminder recently. I was in a room with around 30 other people watching a documentary that we’d be discussing when it was over. Because we’d all have a chance to share our strongest impressions and it was a group I cared about, I paid particularly close attention. I even jotted down notes from time to time as something hit me. After the highly emotional end, I led off with my four strongest reactions and then listened for the next half hour while the others described what excited or troubled them. Most startling was how many of their observations I’d missed altogether.

Some of the differences were understandable, why single “eye witness accounts” are often unreliable and we want at least 8 or 12 people on a jury to be sharing their observations during deliberations. No one catches everything, even when you’re watching closely and trying to be insightful later on. Still, I thought I was better at this.

Missing key details and reaching the wrong (or woefully incomplete) conclusions affects much of our work and many of our relationships outside of it. Emotion blinds us. Fear inhibits us from looking long and hard enough. Bias makes us see what we want to see instead of what’s truly there. To get better at noticing involves acknowledging each of these tendencies and making the effort to override them. In other words, it involves putting as little interference as possible between us and what’s staring us in the face.

As luck would have it, a couple of interactive challenges involving our perceptive abilities crossed my transom this week. Given how much I missed in the documentary, I decided to play with both of them to see if looking without prior agendas or other distractions actually improved my ability to notice what’s in front of me. It was also a nice way to take a break from our 24-7 free-for-all in politics. As I sat down to write to you, I thought you might enjoy a brief escape into “how much you’re noticing” too.

The Pieter Bruegel painting above–called “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”–is currently part of the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work at Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum. Bruegel is a giant among Northern Renaissance painters but most of his canvases are in Europe so too few of us have actually seen one, and when we have, they’ve been in books where it’s all but impossible to see what’s actually going on in them. As it turns out, we’ve been missing quite a lot.

Conveniently, the current survey of the artist’s work includes a website that’s devoted to “taking a closer look,” including how Bruegel viewed one of the great moral divides of his time: between the anything goes spirit of Carnival (the traditional festival for ending the winter and welcoming the spring) and the tie-everything-down season of Lent (the interval of Christian fasting and penance before Good Friday and Easter). “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” is a feast for noticing, and we’ll savor some of the highlights on its menu below.

First though, before this week I’d never heard about people who are known as “super recognizers.” They’re a very small group of men and women who can see a face (or the photo of one) and, even years later, pick that face out of a crowd with startling speed and accuracy. It’s not extraordinary memory but an entirely different way of reading and later recognizing a stranger’s face.

I heard one of these super recognizers being interviewed this week about his time tracking down suspects and missing persons for Scotland Yard. His pride at bringing a remarkable skill to a valuable use was palpable–the pure joy of finding needles in a succession of haystacks. His interviewer also talked about a link to an on-line exercise for listeners to discover whether they too might be super recognizers. In other words, you can find out how good you are “with faces” and how well you stack up with your peers at recognizing them later on by testing your noticing skills here. Please let me know whether I’ve helped you to find a new and, from all indications, highly rewarding career. (The test’s administrators will be following up with you if you make the grade.)

Now back to Bruegel.

You can locate this central scene in “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” in the lower middle range of the painting. Zooming in on it also reveals Bruegel’s greatest innovation as a painter. He gives us a birds-eye view of the full pageant of life that embraces his theme. It’s not the entire picture of “what it was like” in a Flemish town 500 years ago, but viewers had never before been able to get this close to “that much of it” before.

It’s also a canvas populated by peasants and merchants as opposed to saints and nobles. They are alone or in small groups, engaged in their own distinct activities while seemingly ignoring everyone else. In the profusion of life, it’s as if we dropped into the center of any city during lunch hour to eavesdrop.

The painting’s details show a figure representing Carnival on the left. He’s fat, riding a beer barrel and wearing a meat pie as a headdress. Clearly a butcher—from the profession that enabled much of the festival’s feasting—he holds a long spit with a roasted pig as his weapon for the battle to come. Lent, on the other hand, is a grim and gaunt male figure dressed like a nun, sitting on a cart drawn by a monk and real nun. The wagon holds traditional Lenten foods like pretzels, waffles and mussels, and Lent’s weapon of choice is an oven paddle holding a couple of fish, an apparent allusion to the parable of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes for a hungry crowd. On one level then, the fight is over what we should eat at this time of year.

As the eye wanders beyond the comic joust, Carnival’s vicinity includes a tavern filled with revelers, on-lookers watching a popular farce called “The Dirty Bride” (that’s surely worth a closer look!) and a procession of lepers led by a bagpiper. On the other hand, Lent’s immediate orbit shows townsfolk drawing water from the well, giving alms to the poor and going to church (their airs of generosity equally worthy of closer attention).

Not unlike our divided society today, Bruegel painted while the battle for souls during the Reformation was on-going, but instead of taking sides, this painting seems to take an equal opportunity to mock hypocrisy, greed and gluttony wherever he found it, making this and others of his paintings among the first images of social protest since Romans scrawled graffiti on public walls 1200 years before. While earlier paintings by other artists carefully disguised any humor, Bruegel wants you to laugh with him at this spectacle of human folly.

It’s been argued that Bruegel also brings a more serious purpose to his light heartedness, criticizing the common folk by personifying them as a married couple guided by a fool with a burning torch—an image that can be found in almost in the exact center of the painting. The way they are being led suggests that they follow their distractions and baser instincts instead of reason and good judgment. Reinforcing the message is a rutting pig immediately below them (you can find more of him later), symbolizing the destruction that oblivious distraction can leave in its wake.

Everywhere else Bruegel invites his viewers to draw their own conclusions. You can follow this link and notice for yourself the remarkable details of this painting along with others by the artist. Navigate the way that you would on a Google Map, by clicking the magnifying glass (+) or (-) to zoom in and out, while dragging your cursor to move around the canvas. Be sure to let me know whether you happen upon any of the following during your exploration (the circle dance, the strangely-clad gamblers with their edible game board, the man emptying a bucket on the head of a drunk) and whether you think Carnival or Lent seems to have won the battle.

Before wishing you a good week, I have a final recommendation that brings what we notice (say in a work of art) back to what we notice or fail to notice about one another every day.

The movie Museum Hours is about the relationship that develops between an older man and woman shortly after they meet. Johann used to be a road manager for a hard-rock band but now is a security guard at the same museum in Vienna that houses the Bruegel paintings. Anne has traveled from Canada to visit a cousin who’s been hospitalized and meets Johann as she traverses a strange city. During her visit, he becomes her interpreter, advocate for her cousin’s medical care, and eventually her tour guide. But just as he finds “the spectacle of spectatorship” at the museum “endlessly interesting” as he takes it in everyday, they both find the observations that they make about one another in the city’s coffee shops and bistros surprising and comforting.

Museum Hours is a movie about the rich details that are often overlooked in our exchanges with one another and that a super observer like Bruegel brings to his examination of everyday life. One of the film’s many reveals takes place in a scene between a tour guide at the museum (who is full of her own insights) and a group of visitors with their unvarnished interpretations in front of “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” and other Bruegel paintings. You can view that film clip here, and ask yourself whether the guide is helping the visitors to see what is in front of them or diverting their attention away from it.

As we shuttle between two adults in deepening conversation and very different kinds of exchanges across Vienna, Museum Hours asks several questions, including what any of us hopes to gain from looking at famous paintings on the walls of a museum. As one of the movie’s reviewers wondered:

“Is it to look at fancy paintings and feel cultured, or is it to experience something more direct: to dare to unsheathe oneself of one’s expectations and inhibitions, and truly embrace what a work of art can offer? And then, how could one carry that open mindset to embrace all of life itself? With patient attention and quiet devotion, these are challenges that this film dares to tackle.”

That much open-mindedness is a heady prescription, and probably impossible to manage. But sometimes it’s good to be reminded about how much we’re missing, to remove at least some of our blinders, and to discover what we can still manage to notice when we try.

Note: this post was adapted from my October 14, 2018 Newsletter.

A Fateful Choice in the Seconds After You’re Accused

September 30, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’re threatened, everything that ends up mattering happens in seconds. You take a defensive, even defiant stance and can’t (or feel that you can’t) step back and retain any credibility. You pick up a gun and, as often as not, end up shooting your innocence and outrage in all directions.

Almost nothing is more threatening to people than to have “how they view themselves” called into question. When I believe I’m generous and am accused of acting selfishly, my self-esteem is challenged. And it’s not just how I see myself. It’s how I’ve presented myself to others too. When determining my response, it’s also about everyone else who’ll be disappointed if I don’t defend how I want them to see me.

That larger group always starts with the people who are closest to me: my spouse, children, parents and friends. If you’re ambitious and need others to vouch for your work, their number expands. Teachers, coaches and priests who can attest to your character for first jobs or college admissions; colleagues who can speak to your honesty; subordinates you’ve mentored and bosses you’ve impressed. If your rise is meteoric enough, your supporters might even include Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and President George W. Bush.

So if you’re Brett Kavanaugh, you won’t just be defending yourself when you’re accused of wrongdoing, you’ll be defending what your legion of supporters think about you too. As a result, the frontline in need of defending is long and you’ll feel that it’s up to you to be “brave enough” to defend every inch of it.

And yet…

The fateful decision on how we’ll respond is often made in seconds, because that’s how the “fight or flight” response works when we’re threatened “to our very core.” At such times, it’s too easy to confuse our instincts for bravery.

You almost never stop to think about what you’ll do next because in that moment it’s incredibly hard to leave the reptilian parts of your brain for the more dispassionate parts, where it’s possible to admit that you’re not as perfect as you’ve convinced yourself and almost everybody else to believe that you are.

We also know that the most fateful decisions should never be made in a rush, particularly when you’ll be insisting that your white coat has never gotten dirty—not even once—in the ways alleged. But of course, that wisdom isn’t enough to overcome a knee-jerk urge to defend your honor. Part of what was so compelling about this week’s confirmation hearing was the defiance and combativeness that taking an irrational position always seems to require.

Some righteous outrage is warranted if you are wrongly accused. Some anger is certainly justified when accusations are distorted into parody. But unequivocal denials require more. Their nature almost demands that outrage at your challengers never waivers.

It can reveal more than we intend to those who are trying to keep an open mind and understand what really happened. What I saw were hours of defiance on Thursday, a reminder of Queen Gertrude’s comment in Hamlet that: “Thou dost protest too much, me thinks.” That is, too much reptile and too little rational judge if there really is nothing to your fall from grace.

In that initial “moment of truth,” when you first hear what you’re accused of, you don’t think of anything other than “protect myself,” “protect the queen,” protect everything that it’s taken me all these years to build. Unfortunately, I’ve had those moments and never thought once that I had an option other than to “go down swinging” if I have to, because everything I hold dear seemed to be at stake.

Somebody needed to tell me that I had an option, so maybe/hopefully I would remember the next time that while there are instincts hell-bent on defense inside of me, there is higher order biology inside me too.

It’s a pathway from instinct to emotion and onto thinking that I need to be reminded about. I can step back from the precipice and say: “I don’t have to start my denials right away, my ego is not so fragile that a searching moment or two is impossible.”

It’s a pause we almost never take, but could always take, if we thought about it beforehand, before someone confronts us again about a time when our pants were down.

Maybe I could respond not selfishly but with generosity towards myself (given the terrible costs of defending my perfection) and towards others (who say they’ve been damaged by far less flattering parts of me).

It’s hard to respond generously when you can’t see the option in the heat of the moment. You have to think about other ways forward long before your instincts take over, and too many of us never do.

This post was adapted from my September 30, 2018 newsletter.

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

Facing Risks, Finding Control

How Stepping Back and Really Noticing Can Change Everything

A Fateful Choice in the Seconds After You’re Accused

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