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Zero-004

ZPURPOSE - ZPAST - FCBIO

Session: 77 Minutes

Both Eyes Open:
I saw yesterday that both the "Wake Up Call" section and "Theo's Corner" need changing, and they need changing because a few of my core ideas have fundamentally changed in the opening few days. This is a good thing because it means that "Zero" is working, for it is sole purpose is two-fold, firstly to kick-start the new day and secondly to serve as closure to a decade long online journey. "Wake Up Call" was a connection to the One Dlog of 2004. It also connected to my admiration of the work of Marshall McLuhan, who suggested among other things, the value of probing, of using aphorisms and axioms and look at the artist, because it is the artist (he suggested) that often picks up on or is clued into major shifts in the winds of change).

Theo's Corner was relating how theology and religion is built into our life, with or without our own conviction or belief. I could go on to discuss how a 1956 ammendment turned "In God We Trust" into the national motto of the US, how the Martin Luther's 95 Theses inspired the Cluetrain Manifesto or even question how the coaching and some who go through the HR door is unambivalent about entertaining new age ideas - but yesterday I asked the most important question of all which SO WHAT? If I can't answer the So What? question then it is not process but simply more dogma. So that is the first lesson here - respect all faiths but don't push it up other people's throats. Secondly, McLuhan's aphoristic approach does work, but one has to think like McLuhan and there lies the problem, only a handful of people actually do - so why pursue something that is best done at the personal level and is otherwise open to considerable misunderstanding.

Having already formulated in my mind what I wanted to express in Theo's Corner, I will continue with that today and then on Monday switch this section over to "Inspiration Point". People like McLuhan talked about the Tetrad, of which one aspect is what is retrieved. One of those things McLuhan touched on was the retrieval of the "tribe" mindset and the issues "identity" being things that we must probe and examine in the "electric age". So if I know that, then again, why do I end up preaching rather than probing.

So "Both Eyes Open" is how I should begin my day, not "Wake Up Call" - and especially when the skills of meditation I need should be focused solely on my business and future work plans, rather than abstract aphorisms or axioms. What I have remind myself is that stuff which goes beyond the point of self-reflection and that can't meet the SO WHAT? Test, needs to be taken out. This meant to be a practical journey of practical change, and the biggest irony of trying to be awake to the world is dealing with matters such as sleep, and this I did do so at Po Bronson's site. I don't like waking up at 5am in the morning but it is a part of the new way forward for me, this is what I committed to, but not out of blind allegiance. This path must keep moving me from awareness to intelligence - and not just into the motherly arms of a felt loyalty.

The Host:
I will take the opportunity to thank Kevin for making a connection. The only connection to "My contacts" that I am making directly is to Lynne D. Johnson. People are welcome to connect, but connection isn't my personal priority, finishing off the last 1/10th of this online journey is and then beyond that, it is settling into a life, which both is about watching all my kids come of age and working with my business partners to develop an organization that fits our own values and which represents what should be the best years of our life.

The Infomating Gadfly:
Oh Yeon Oh 2004 talk at the Berkman Center is worth a revisiting, especially in light of how the US political process is shaping up in 2008 in comparison to the conversations about the South Korean political process in 2002. He is the founder of one of the first notable citizen media sites OhMyNews. He visited the Berkman center in 2004, and though Business Week in 2006 questioned the economic viability of OhMyNews and could not make a link with the US 2004 elections, that isn't true today, for six years after the Korean experience, this election cycle is beginning to see an amazing influence of the web on the political process. I remember a young Korean called Change1 setting up a home page at GoingOn. Nobody came to his page and I guess he had abandoned it thinking no one would, but two weeks later I wrote a piece there, but what Chang1 did not notice is that this one posting attracted over 4600 views - and I know where those came from intuitively - that must have been the OhMyNews crowd.

Da kine Media:
The one thing that I must always remain alert to my own life is not to become superficial. That does not mean that I come to the world as some serious dewd, but at the personal level that I do retain some semblance of seriousness, balanced by character development. The two best video's I have seen that portray superficial culture at all of its glorious nothingness are one's by Sound Garden and by the very forthright and straight to the point - Alanis Morrisette. This is not a jab at what others believe but a reminder to me of always getting back to the basics.

Theo's Corner (to be replaced by Inspiration Point on Monday):
Martin Luther's great act was pinning of the 95 theses on a church door. This was also the inspiration point for the 1999 writing of the Cluetrain Manifesto. With its under-current theme that markets are conversations, the manifesto portrayed a calling to corporations that traditional boundaries will increasingly fail to keep out the human voice because of the emergence of human voice liberated by newly emerging intereactive technologies.

This manifesto was basically annoucing the coming tsunami of change in the way we communicate and work. It was a great privilege for me to be a signer of that manifesto in 1999, before the Cluetrain rebels sealed it for prosperity. I remember at the time the sheer intensity that it unleashed and this led to a topica list, where the Cluetrain discussion continued for several years.

When I signed this I was totally out of depths and barely comprehending at any level what I was actually reading. I just grit my teeth and jumped into the Cluetrain topica community, but I was pleasantly surprised that fellow Manifesto signers treated me with utmost respect, and I realize they did so because I was talking in the language of the Cluetrain, in a human voice. Instinct knew that this manifesto was about freedom but over time I came to realize the sheer brilliance of the statement "markets are conversations".

A lot has change shortly after that, for one thing, Brand You was launched by Tom Peters - which completely changed the trajectory of my online journey and create an urge in me to express myself as a "brand", which has it happens has stuck around with me to this day.

Thankfully Martin Luther didn't really think about what this meant to his "brand-you" before stepping up to the Church at Wittenberg, for if he had, first of all, the bishops would have accepted it has a survey-form solicitation instead of ignoring it and thus reducing its idea virus power, secondly the 95 Theses would never have been written because Martin Luther's brand consultants would have never agreed on the wordsmithing; and finally he would never have personally agreed to their tag line "Staying Alive after a Ninety-Five Jive".

Web 0.0 Picks:
An increasingly important subject area for me is economics and how economists think. It is true that I have reservations about disconnected nature of economics to actual human life, for one cannot measure the world by models but by existence itself. Yet it is also true for me that economists provide a kind of thinking that does keep rational discourse and critical thinking on the map - in a world where we must also equally develop the capacity to think like Daniel Pink suggests, with our right brain.

Two sites that caught my attention last year are AGORAPHILIA and PURPLE MOTES . The latter is created by Dennis Galbi, who interested me simply because the level his thoughts are expressed at was great observing and also his use of blog carnivals to channel viewpoints. I have overrun my alloted time for Zero today but today at least I feel like I have got back on track, rather than the lost soul that spent 74 minutes yesterday wondering what the heck it is I think I am doing.

Blast from the Past:
In October 2002 I had concluded what I thought was a "4 Year Journey". What I had was a 4 year plan but what I got to discover is that emergent thinking trumps plans - which sits at the heart of any continous improvement effort - which should be, I can't explain today because if I have done this right, it will be all different by tomorrow. That does not mean that our life becomes one of continous speed, because learning does not work that way. Looking back at this 2002 entry at FC, it still contains echoes to what it is I am doing today:

From: Ma.rk
To: 1998-2002

From the beginning I saw my participation with Fast Company a 4 year affair. In 2000 I wrote in a post called READ THE MAGAZINE that outlined some of my thinking and there are other postings in the LEARNING CONFERENCE that talk of my experimentation in this arena.

That 4 year period is nearly up, and these final flurries of thoughts are a way to cap things off. I am pretty thankful that no one at FC pulled the plug on Fasttalk Forums while I was using them.

The only question that matters right now is

What have I really achieved after 4 years on these forums and has it fundamentally changed me as a person?

The ultimate achievement after 4 years apart from being a part of a profitable business created in this very same room I am typing this, is the creation of a proprietory personal management/philosophical system. An iterative process that is now personal to me and which provides a creative tool as well as a benchmark/guiding tool. That particular system which is my "SF" System works for me because it has been designed by me for me. It is probably way beyond the comprehension of most people so it adds nothing to share it with others who merely have a passing interest.

How these forums changed me as a person?

By allowing me to paint my thoughts, splash them here and there and provide me the time, space and opportunity to study those very thoughts and to question my own words via the resulting ripples. There has been some key learning above all being my tendency to figurativley punch ideas in the nose and then wonder why that nose bled. More than that I am one of the few people who never gave up on the new economy idea, it is the new economy that gave up on the new economy - from where I sit and view the world, things are very different to 1998 - my way of life is different, the way I interact in work processes is different. I don't need someone tell me that there is no new economy when I am sitting in the middle of it, involved in it day by day and watching it's emerging and iterative creation.

As for what I call myself on these boards, It does not really matter one iota whether I am "MARK ZORRO" or MA.RK. What matters is the nature of the idea, the beauty and ugliness of self-examination, the simplicity, the incorrectness, the validity, the power or irrelevance of the idea. It was never about wrong or right, good or bad answers. It was never about mere opinions, it was about that examination (and occassionally apology when it went past the limits of individual tolerance).

I supported these forums in my own way, maybe I lived by my own rules, maybe I got under people skins when I did, maybe I pissed off people who were so busy into examining what I was writing that they forget their responsibility to themselves. I have always made it clear on these boards that this is an experimentation. Not to prove anything to you. A 4 year journey. My journey to which you are a temporary witness. The latter style I adopted of having a MEMO style ie TO: and FROM: - this was my way of saying that it is an impersonal response, not a personal one. No one ever sends an organizational memo to their spouse, friend or family.

What I had was a four year plan. It has been four years. I have advanced, I have grown. When I began these forums, Fast Company put forth a description of the kind of person that they said might show up in it. They had high hopes for some electricity to occur, some fireworks, some great original thinking, some enlightenment and of course a variety of different thinkers - as well as to create a new form of community. I delivered in that respect, a lot of my ideas came free spirited from my own thinking, not some textbook, not a rehash of someone elses words - mine, no one can say that it was not original, they can call it boring, they can call it confusing, they can even call it simple, that's all fine, it is the study of what my words mean that had the most powerful impact in the last 4 years,

Would my life be different if there was not an FC Forum or I had not picked up a yellow covered magaine in the Spring of 1998. For sure. A spark occurred then, a possibility awakened in my mind that I could change, that here was this Webber and Taylor guy that had some spunk and juice about them to put this novel kind of magazine out. It turned out that Seth Godin shoiwed me that someone had my number. His presentation at a CRM conference explained how FC caught a particular segment and got them hooked. I never saw myself as someone who swam with the pack. How the heck did FC manage to fish me out. The pleasure here is to see me throw myself back in the water, from whence, like a Salmon returning to where I once came.

Of course there were some unfortunate moments, none more so particular than the aardvark who sent me the most crass marketing type letter for my FC subscription renewal. I just had to throw that back in his face. I knew then that the subscription people outsourced on the sales side of the magazine had no understanding of customer relationship management. In that instance the customer spoke.

Good tidings and thank you FC for the past 4 years.

M.

Not for Video
Not for Audio
Not for Comment
Not for Fashion
Not forever…but to reach Zero

04:54 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Zero-003

ZPURPOSE - ZPAST - FCBIO

Session Time: 74 Minutes

Wake Up Call:

Not a single orbiting satellite has to date detected the existence of international boundaries on the Planet Earth

Writing a good blog is secondary to creating value in a sales funnel, writing orders consciousness but it is consciousness which must improve the order

Hunters do not understand farmers; and hunter and farmer will not understand the 21st Century while they remain locked up by cities

The Host:
Elizabeth Spiers article is something that I am sympathetic with but though she simply scratches the surface of human choice here she wisely leaves the reader to decide for themselves. There are huge things that I never learned in a business book which totally change the way I view business.

One's life experience sometimes leaves them stuck in the formative, but if we are able to make sense of the world, be responsible for our own thoughts and discover that what we are doing is grossly underachieving, then any source of material can be transformed into wisdom, from the act of chewing on gum to reading the deepest thinkers in the pantheon of great thinkers

I learned from my online process because my neurons and synapses were simply waiting for me to wake up. We are all handicapped in some skill or ability and that is why diversity is so important, but if we have the capacity to think beyond the fad, to recognize the stark difference between elitism and education, between narcissism and self-love, and between cowardice and adversity - it will be because we invested the time to do so.

What Elizabeth cannot convey to those who don't understand time this way, is that this is what gives a fad its temporary gratification or feeling of futile accomplishment - but when we do not know how to walk, have no idea where to go or have never experienced the joy of thinking out our own thoughts without painted guilt or self-inflicted damage, then the bookshelves provide toys to play with, experiences to pass time away and words that when repeated make one feel inspired to feel knowledgeable and filled with a narcotic certainty. I think Clint Eastwood said best here, "a man's gotta know his limitations"...

The Infomating Gadfly:
In a world where people and groups increasingly organize to view us through information flows via a database, where EXTRACT, TRANSFORM, LOAD are becoming more natural expression in an increasingly interconnected universe, I cannot coordinate or engage without creating my own. In that regard the relational database I have personally found easiest to create my own personal systems around is called Commence RM available from the Commence Corporation.

I have never tried to use its full capacity, but simply learned how to construct simple databases, which then with the power of my imagination have become neat ways for me to create my own personal knowledge management system. For many people, who are digital immigrants, the technology alone maybe intimidating, but I asked myself a simple question - if the commercial world needs a database to figure out us, why cannot we use our own database to figure out it.

Da kine Media:
I think one of my great strengths is that no sooner as I am overwhelmed, that I find a path out. If it was a clever or mature path, then I would not have need to write this - but sometimes there are moments when the realization is that one is beating a dead horse (not that horses should be beaten in the literal world) and at those moments I can turn on this Daniel Powter song and accept that life will bring with it, every now and again, a bad day. We all have them and we don't necessarily have to learn from them, just simply accept that from time to time, they happen.

Theo's Corner:
Steve Job's 2005 commencement speech three part speech covers connecting the dots and two views of dealing with adversity. I find this speech confirms my own view of human thinking. I split into three phases. 1. Formative (thinking like a child) 2. Fixed (literal or linear thinking) 3. Flexible (flexible or dynamic thinking.).

Formative thinking is as if we never grew up, avoided learning from adversity, had our decisions made for us and/or lived in a playboy world with mommy and daddy's money. It is a life that feels free but isn't and there is nothing streetwise about such an existence, it is sterile, it seeks to explain life in terms of avoidance and simplistic terms. Fixed thinking is the kind of thinking that Joseph Campbell talked about where people concretize symbols, it is rule based thinking, it may also be extremely fact based thinking. It is the thinking of the follower rather than the genuine leader which generally is summed up by the popular refrain "living the same year of your life over and over again" or as expressed in the movie "groundhog day".

It explains why people can fall under the spell of dictatorial authority, accept the industrial age as "normal" and use violence as a means of settling dispute or argument. Finally there is thinking expressed in Steve Job's commencement speech. This is pure flexible thinking. It is not formative like a child being taught what is right and what is wrong and that act of brain maturation through natural growth, it is the ability to look at life with total flexibility. When Job's talks about connecting the dots backwards, it is flexible thinking that makes that experience productive, when he says in his second story that he was lucky - fixed thinkers believe him and quote him as verbatim, but flexible thinkers recognize that none of this was luck, IMHO Steve Job's didn't navigate around his life's most challenging moments, he went through them.

A fixed thinker would in the same situation be crushed by these problems and would justifiably refer to their life as "unlucky". Finally the last paragraph of Steve Job's speech shows that his talk is not some delusional justification of his past, when he talks about not being trapped by dogma or living someone else's life. That kind of thinking comes naturally to me, so I don't really make a big song and dance about what he has said, but for a fixed thinker, it is the stuff that you worship.

For flexible one, it sometimes pays to "worship" such a speech, only if it keeps the "fixed" thinker and the "formative" thinker feeling respected that their voice has been heard. Sometimes the most flexible thing a flexible thinker can do is saying nothing at all, but above all when Steve Job's receives applause, personally for him it is an applause is an application pause, for the fixed thinker, it is simply delirium and for the formative thinker, one more thing to worship. Anyway, that as much as I can make up without seeking expert opinion about this.

Web 0.0 Picks:
I will never attain the ability to write computer code, I should never construct buildings for a living and certainly not sit in an air-traffic control room watching a radar screen full of planes. There are some things that are best left to others. Just because we can't do something, does not mean that we cannot learn in our own way from other people's environments.

In the case of environmentalism which is the most visceral environment of all, I find it interesting to examine how people different from me think. Colin Beaven calls himself NO IMPACT MAN and I love the tagline he uses at the top of his blog, here I see someone who not only is interested in the broad issues of environment but who is shaping this into a worthy living.

Green thinking therefore isn't about destruction, IMHO its about living a life that knows its own waste. In that regard the way I have taken such a lengthy amount of time to think things out is in one regard a waste - but that an true environmentalist would be able to figure out how to improve the total system, rather than their own plot of land.

At a wider view, I find GREENEDIA a useful site that aggregates this community and makes visible a broader array of what is currently happening within it. Personally I think environmentalism is an intelligence that can be learned through practical living, but to simply create an academic textbook or nomenculture out of it is the very waste environmentalists seek to stop us from producing.

Neither of these two sites are academic but they are enough to make me recognize that my writing today is me being lazy - when at the core of green thinking is ensuring that our thinking remains smart.

Blast from the Past: "The 12 Commands"
I wrote the "The 12 Commands" at AO on 31st July 2005. What I see today is a rant against political correctness that actually does not serve me in anyway. What I see in this writing is the hypocritical, for today it is about looking at ones own self in the mirror - not pointing the finger of judgement at others. It is still somewhat of a sticking point in my own development, but having read through this again, it reinforces the need to raise the bar on my own thinking. This may have been written 3 years ago, and by constantly writing stuff out, many things have become innate that were not in 2005 - but it's personal relevance to me is still self-development. Is the world going to change one inch because I knew back then what my own "don't's" where - I don't think so. My tiny inch of the world is going to change for the better when I figure out fully, what my DO's are. To find those, I can now turn this writing into rhetorical questions and continue to make self-reflection a productive process rather than a diatribe:

Either treat this as a salvo as a futile attempt to create an alternative to the life destroying political correct crowd or a piece that soulfully gravitates to combine with the DNA of your funnybone. If this is the former than this is my humble prescription for a hipper kind of social standard which one can call Street Language Correctness for the Uber-Globally Orientated.

The 12 Modern Commands

01. Don't develop perversions and expect people not to notice.

02. Don't sound profound about things you only picked up the week before

03. Don't showboat your money if living beyond means causes depression

04. Don't become overtly hypocritcial about hypocrites unless you are divine

05. Don't subscribe to humanitarian causes with a hidden motivation

06. Don't kill dreams and things that don't need killing

07. Don't live up your past if your future isn't interesting

08. Don't believe those who say nice people finish last

09. Don't turn funerals into chat shows about death and tragedy

10. Don't use foul language when silence is more effective

11. Don't be a jerk unless you are professionally qualified to become one

12. Don't worry about love not received, you can always ask for more

Follow these simple commands and in time you also will join fellow global-urbanizers who have dental plans with overseas dentists, who can afford tickets for space travel and think garages made of translucent solar vehicle-recharging plastic are cool. By following these commands the only thing you are guaranteed is building street cred inside a gated community. The whole point of modern commands is the world you personally create, with our modern technology we can discover what monks are doing on mountains, for they no longer rely solely on meditation for their minds to reach new outer dimensions of inner life, especially now they have cell phones.

Modern commands are based on a choice to do or not to do, so I ponder like an ancient monk whether the precept of "Know Thyself" still has relevance to future knowledge creation and consumption? Or is choice no longer a choice but experiences that ingrain inate commands that switch to the autopilot of common sense, for can the future of modern commands be eventually transformed by "To Forget Thyself"?

M.

Not for Video
Not for Audio
Not for Comment
Not for Fashion
Not forever…but to reach Zero

05:59 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Zero-002

ZPURPOSE - ZPAST - FCBIO

Session Time: 41 Minutes

Wake Up Call:

A great designer makes his design comprehensible

Improve management of all transition points

Focus on being grounded when abstraction becomes easy to do

The Host:
FC are asking about a comparison between AOL and Facebook. I think it is the wrong comparison. An acronym should be compared with an acronym and a venerated verb should be compared to a venerated verb. In the case of verbs, Facebook should be compared with Google. The world's most successful acronym is IBM. What did IBM do that AOL didn't? Two clues point the way. First Thomas J. Watson produced shaped IBM with a mantra called THINK. Then when IBM stopped thinking, Lou Gerstner rode into town and aligned IBM back to its customer and removed the fat of unnecessary corporate planning. To remain big one needs to keep one's head and know where one's heart is - guts on their own are not enough.

The Infomating Gadfly:
One of these days I will come around to using Flickr. I think it helps to either be 17 or 67 or have a love of photography, to use this service. As a visual person Flickr does not enhance my visualness but what it does do is make more people see the world as I have always done, and that's good. One day I will use Flickr but retirement is still a long way off and I will wait for that day to come.

Da kine Media:
Douglas Adams produced a smart, funny but most of all perceptive piece of writing when he wrote Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I especially like the idea of the three spaceships, of which one carries the useless third of Earth - long before Dilbert made the obvious, obvious - Douglas Adams made great observations about the human condition wrapped up in a creative and imaginative humour.

Theo's Corner:
Google's "Don't be Evil" mantra is something that has made me curious. Why would a 21st Century minded company choose the idea of good and evil as it's philosophical outlook. Surely "Quality of Life" is the appropriate mantra for the 21st Century. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that Google and Facebook are actually following the oldest traits of human-kind. Both require migration in order to grow and this migration is fully reflected in eyeballs. Yet for me a 21st Century company isn't based on migration as its core growth engine, it is an entrepreneurial mindset.

Web 0.0 Picks:
One of the most challenging concepts on the web is the future. If Alvin Toffler was the future guy in the 20th Century, then Ray Kurzweil is the future guy of the 21st Century. From George Orwell's observations we get the notion of an Orwellian future. The same could be said about Kurzweil, that he paints a "Kurzwellian future". Yet there are two voices who are important IMHO to understanding technological change in our century - and that continuum is between those who asked us to look at technology as personal understanding viz Marshall McLuhan, all the way to the other continuum where Ray Kurzweil tells us what is coming down the pipeline and asks us all to prepare for it. This future outlook is further explored by the Singularity Institute. The interesting thing for me about transhumanist approach is that it contradicts our youth culture mindset today. What is the logical point of longevity other than we need human's to live longer to use their experiences for mankind's development - the idea that we simply need to live longer because we are afraid of death makes no sense - the end is the end for all - but giving life purpose and meaning is the key to what being human means. So then why don't we value experience - why do we still lust for youthful exhuberance?

Blast from the Past: "10 Things Technology Won't Do"
I wrote this ditty at AO in April 2004. It is still enjoyable for me to read, but my senses today ask me how this helps me at the level of my own service to society - yet it is always good to muse, for from musing comes the habits of invention and with purpose, invention can become innovation.

It won’t invent an implantable lie detector for politicians with optional add-on upgrades
that translates partisan speech into yes and no answers.

It won’t invent a foolproof way to win the National Lottery of Happiness and Leisure.

It won’t stop human beings from making human size mistakes.

It won’t count the votes of the largest political block in America – the non-voter.

It won’t create a hypeless media free of doggy wagging and champagne dizzy PR people.

It won’t globalize the planet Mars or create a McDonald’s franchise on Venus.

It won’t stop reality seekers from searching for reality on Reality TV.

It won’t prevent the birth of people who believe exploitation is an ancestral birthright.

It won’t create a new version of the “Matrix” when the “Visual Society” replaces the social network.

And

It won’t hold back the independence of one voice, the imagination of a human mind
and the intelligence of a complete relationship

M.

Not for Video
Not for Audio
Not for Comment
Not for Fashion
Not forever…but to reach Zero

05:50 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Zero-001

ZERO PURPOSE - ZPAST - FCBIO

This mornings Zero Process Time: 42 Minutes

Wake Up Call:

What do I mean by "learning" if this is a never-ending journey?

Discover the intelligent spot between weak-minded thoughts and high minded attitude

Each hour of my life is my own when I am the owner of attitude and thoughts

The Host:
Be respectful of their home, I am a guest here, so be a guest. Focus on the merit, on aspects such as Yves Chouinard and his concept of the "Slow Company" - don't be enamored by titles by resonance. Good to see Tim Ferriss being mentioned, I enjoyed, I was pleasantly surprised by the creative dynamism of his site when I visited it last year.

The Infomating Gadfly:
Vlingo is kind of interesting - this whole idea of voice recognition and adapting to it means developing a new kind of skill. It is relatively easy for me to think and type - there is an innate relationship, flow and connection that has been built between my fingers and my mind - but I don't have the same autonomic capacity when dictating. Dictation requires a totally different mindset than hand-mind reflection.

Da kine Media:
John Mayer's song "Say" has been banging at my mind ever since "Man in a Womb" came to an abrupt end - I can credit it for leading me to this particular journey. Yet I cannot forget that the underlying flow is still that which is in found in Bob Seger's Roll me Way. Is that something one grows out of or one accepts -

Theo's Corner:
How do I give theology a human name other than focusing on how media and environment has absorbed and processed it. The great thing about the word "theology" is that it can be a compass to look at a world that so many are afraid of looking at, never mind understanding. Yet its everywhere, this Martin Luther King Jr. opinion piece in yesterday's NYTimes is a casing point. It reminded me that MLK was a preacher first before he was the "light" others see him as. Hope does not come from following lights, it comes from studying and absorbing what is intelligent in any human being. It is not right to become a blind follower or see light in others. We must find our own, we must learn to shine to create a life - not to be seen. We learn most when we teach not when we sit in pews waving designer t-shirts and identifying with life at the most superficial level. Then I guess that is what is intriguing about looking at theo, we only notice it if we open our eyes.

Web 0.0 Picks:
The lesson I learned early on is that one learns more from learning from people who are different to ourselves. I have two blogs in my system that I have filed under "Bohemians", but that is not an insult, it simply says the ways portrayed in the respective blogs are not ones I am familiar with. The first is PROTEINOS - who didn't catch my eye because of their design faculty but because they started their own journey in 1998, a year that I now closely identify with. Then there is ERRANT AESTHETE, it is equisite but still beyond me. I have a practical nature, but what this site shows me is that the pathway to elegance is one of appreciation - that is a long road for me, but at least now I have chosen to be on it.

Blast from the Past: 10 Personal Time Laws from a Time Guru
I wrote the "Time Guru" posting at AO in September 2003. I wasn't suggesting that I am a "Time Guru" but this is how the words flowed from my mind at that time. Consquently I did find a "Time Guru" worthy of being called a "Time Guru" in David Allen and "Getting Things Done" is a text that still sits on my office desk today. I have come so far in terms of my attitude and approach to time, that now I look back at this and it looks so mechanical and naive - but that is what taking a journey should teach, to see ourselves in the learning curve - and not simply as we would wish others to see us (brand).

What follows are some of the examples that have come from my life and how I manage my time.

1. Manage technology wisely rather than let technology manage you
2. Make time parameters explicit for when you get in and when you get out
3. Know thy brain and how it processes information
4. Take personal responsibility for being alive.
5. Have a back up plan
6. Fill in the 10 to 20 minute waiting periods with something relaxing or profound
7. Recognize that an average of 30% of your day will go to waste and that is normal
8. Notice the minutes that you say you don’t have
9. Throw things away, and file things on a “wash and work” basis
10. Do your job not everybody else’s. Address the situation if you’re not doing yours.

Examples/FootNotes to Time Laws
1. Utilize the simplist technology available not the one with the greatest number of bells and whistles. Don’t forget that paper is just as useful as your PDA. Also appreciate that clarity and efficiency takes time to do in order to save time and no technology solution can make up for a failure to plan or take personal account or inventory of your own activity.

2. Let people know when you have to leave and don’t get expect sympathy for your time choices. If you don’t set time parameters expect frequent time overruns.

3. Understand how the brain retains information. It can process more in a shorter time frame ie 30 minutes. Take the breaks, eat right because you wouldn't treat your car the way most people treat their mind and body. Understand that people process one main idea at a time and most absorb information through the eyes more efficiently than they do through their ears. Also have fun, the things that upset us are usually trivial pursuits and we don't spend much time the things that will one day upset us.

4.It is your life and how you choose to live depends on the philosophy you bring to it. Bring a negative, overworked life that has no philosophical or foundational base and expect nasty things to happen. The body and mind respects positive approaches to life, that ability to lookahead and know what you want out of the life. Learn to see the productive side of everything unless your lawyer would instruct you not to.

5.There will be many occasions when the thing you wanted to do are either cancelled or changed by circumstance. We create contingencies in our financial life by taking out insurance, there should be contingencies for what we are going to do when we things don’t go to plan or we encounter the unexpected.

6.Utilize wait states. Instead of getting frustrated standing in a queue or waiting for an appointment, find a physical exercise or a mental exercise to do – use the dead time more creatively not necessarily more productively.

7.Lose the perfectionism, train your mind to look for the gold not the left over ore in any interaction or situation. Efficiency is not 100% and can never be 100% unless you are looking to burn out and die young. Be an enterprise martial artist rather than a clock-watcher or an efficiency freak.

8.Remember when you said you didn’t have time in the morning as you rushed out or when you couldn’t find that passport for a umpteenth time so prepare the day before. When you tell your spouse that you don’t have a minute to waste, then reflect the same way when you get into a meeting which overruns by an hour due to inefficient habits. (That’s 60 times the minutes you told your spouse you didn’t have).

9.Don’t get lost in the clutter. It is a poor philosophy that says that clutter is a lifestyle. Discipline doesn’t come by snapping fingers, it comes by a constant attention to what should be thrown away, what should be filed and what is important and what is not. Remember people can be clutter just as much as reports can be, so determine your priority. A "Wash & Work" basis follows the same principle as dishes in a kitchen, leave them pile up and you've got a whole lot of mess to handle. As a corrolary don't spend time tidying up things that don't need tidying up - it is all about knowing what is important.

10.Constantly firefighting? Constantly tearing your hair out about all the things that are out of control. Ask yourself if you are contributing to the problem. Do a time log, and at the end of the week look back and see how and why you spent your time and then align it with the expectations you agreed with your boss. Is there a gap or is their alignment?

These are just some of my time laws that I utilize in my life. I am not saying that you should copy me but I suggest that you create your own time laws because only you know the context and circumstances of your own life.

Enjoy your day.

M.

Not for Video
Not for Audio
Not for Comment
Not for Fashion
Not forever…but to reach Zero

08:32 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

FC Bio

Bio

[Mark Twain wasn't Mark Twain, Mark Zorro isn't Mark Zorro]

Mark Zorro was a pseudonym that I used on-line since my on-line expressions have always been of an experimental/exploration for self-development purpose only. The name "Mark" is not an identity, it comprises of Ma.rk which are the first two letters of my meatspace name and the last two letters of my meatspace name. Zorro is much like Twain - a pseudonym but unlike Mark Twain, my pseudonym does not lust for such fame. Mark Twain died as Mark Twain rather than who he wanted the world to recognize himself as viz Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

In that regard I roll my eyes when people today talk about using "real names" - if that is the case, then first get rid of the pseudonym "Mark Twain"from the lexicon of great literature and secondly be the person one is on the inside rather than the brand that most people exhibit on the outside. Mark Zorro was a repudiation of the very desire that Mark Twain had for fame and while I support the process of branding, I detest the process of brand you. One can brand cattle, one can brand a great societal enterprise, product or service, but do not brand a human being - the masks we already wear in society seems like a thick skin, but poke through that mask to the person underneath and one will mostly find a a hollow interior.

Being a consumate professional does not mean a cosmetic makeover, it means the essential character of work is greater than the parading of a human identity, IMHO we are all here on this planet to serve something greater than ourselves. In my case it my kids, and then concentric rings of priorities that radiate out from that.

I started a personal journey in 1998 and like most I too was composed of a hollow interior. This journey has for the most part filled that void (that we all have). It has given me awareness, but this journey has not given me intelligence. For that, I must go within and cast away the sometimes distractive quicksand of the attention economy, and in so focusing on what my life purposereally should be, discover this existence in private centered around the twin flows of abundance and authority, both of which are a product of living character based and purpose based life.

Mark Twain definitely wasn't Mark Twain and Mark Zorro is a personal reminder not to become another "Mark Twain". One can learn from Mark Twain's genius, but more so from the lessons of man so consumed by his own fame. I think there is incredible stuff happening online, but what is the point of creating a cyber-paradise or digital garden - if it simply becomes an island of technology - we worship the immaterial rather than the authentic.

At least that is what my heart is telling me and the heart does not argue, the mind does. Argument is to prior centuries what humility and forgiveness is to the 21st Century - this is the new mindset, this is IMHO what constitutes a 21st Century mind. The world as it is today is programmed on the ideas of the past and the ideas of the past insist that everybody elses business is our business, that is what modern media and the electric age fuels, but that is not the authentic pathway I feel "intelligence" is - and living an "intelligent" life is the next discovery point of my own life journey.

Mihaly Csikszentmihayli said it best in his book "Flow"

"Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully
little) out of writing, it's considered to be a waste of time. It is
taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in
versification unless he receives a check to show for it. And unless one
has great talent, it is indeed useless to write hoping to achieve great
profit or fame. But it is never a waste of time to write for intrinsic
reasons" Quote from Page 131

Further in the chapter he also warns about the perils of flow as an addiction, and equally my own writings are merely intrinsic while I try to ensure that the process of turning off or disconnecting to remain independent, fresh and psychologically healthy, is as much as the pursuit of any intrinsic writing should be. While most of my online writings have vanished online, the core of intrinsic writing isn't what is left, but what is added or let go.

My single most focus of going online is exploration and in a world that is full of opportunity to discover so much, we cannot be occupied by our tiny little selves, instead my personal occupation here is solely to learn that which shapes me into a better human being. Anything more or less than that is a waste of exploration for my own life purpose.

M.

PS Thank you to the FC team for clearing up that annoying CATCHPA spam message. I look forward to lurk and read the excellent material provided here at FC for the remainder of the year, but my goal this year was to remain offline for the remainder of the year. I have always been a champion of hearing new voices and prefer to be the voice of the lurker.

AMMENDMENT 7th April 2008: The Spam Filter keeps activating on my longer posts - when I posted Zero-000, it was activated again - is there anyway of the team marking approved member postings as "NOT SPAM".  Would be greatly appreciated - it is very annoying to navigate this message, especially since ZERO is all about beginning my day with a new frame of mind. 

10:46 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

21

Abort: http://www.fastcompany.com/profile-blog/man-womb

Lynne, I tried. I did try but this isn't working, I do not fit in with your current demographic and there is no point in trying to do something just for the sake of doing it. I have not discontinued the idea of MAN IN A WOMB, but I am going to do it offline on my own database. I can't express what all that is inside of me and I don't want to keep two sets of books, that is not an enterpreneurial attitude.

Also in the last few days your CATCHPA spam system has been treating me like some low life spammer and I can't keep putting those codes in without feeling like a spammer. If the system is responding in this way then I must follow and respect what it is the system is saying. That my behaviour is unacceptable under the algorithm that content is measured by - and I certainly don't want to be ruled by a machine - I want to the master of my technology.

My earlier instincts at AlwaysOn were right, that I should not participate online this year, that I should sit this year out. I wish you all the best with your platform, I have tried it out, it does it work, it is an excellent platform but it is geared to market what is more HR than creative and even if it reaches the creative market, there are creative people who are zen like and appreciate the qualities I bring and then there creatives who live in ancient savage garden and the only way I deal with those people in the offline world is one to one basis, not on a group basis.

In the ideal world Fast Company and Inc Magazine would be two sides of the same magazine, one side representating the creative and turn the magazine over, the other side the entrepreneurial and then the respective websites become lightening rods for both audiences, but such a magazine would represent a metaphor for the right brain and left brain - it will still keep its respective domains just as the human brain does, but the community will act like a giant corpus callosum - the community wouldn't just a collection of the INC 1000, it will be a best of both worlds and united front towards transformation and change.

As for Man in a Womb, the idea was good, but this is not the right environment, this is an environment that has to grow, has to be nurtured. You have people like Kevin and yourself, you are good people, maybe you need to express that, maybe you don't, but you are going to grow for the better and it is like Kate Flaim and her website, making the human, human.

As for the 21, it was a longshot but the idea was simple BEING BORN AGAIN. No not Christian dogma being expressed, though I see no problem with internalizing spiritual wisdoms as a part of my growing process, but BORN AGAIN aspect of MAN IN A WOMB, was a celebration of daughters 21st Birthday on December 20th and this journey was meant to trace that nine months before the birth of my first child, I can still undertake that journey on my own but this too far a personal a journey to make online. She is a beautiful young women today and I love my daughter very much, I am proud of her.

That level of personal intensity that I have, that I treasure, the fact that I don't make a great separation between my personal and my professional existence - that my life is one great big wholesome ball of harmony and truth.

I wish you guys and the people working for Manseuto Ventures well, this is a tough decision but its the right one, I am still going to tune in and see what you guys are doing, but you are going to go further with me not being here than you are, than with the values my own life represents.

Thank You.

M.

02:44 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Candor

9th Day: http://www.fastcompany.com/profile-blog/man-womb

Using our senses

Day 8 of Man in a Womb

Since beginning Man in a Womb, I have done fairly well with my terrible habit of working into the early hours. 2 late nights out of 9 is not bad since I began writing this - and compared to what I was doing before this womblog, that is a massive improvement - but what counts is that I have not still broken the habit - and it is a terrible habit.

Worse still it is fueled by people who admire this trait. I have never viewed it as an admirable habit but I still do it anyway - simply put, I wish people today would take a leaf from Mohammed Ali and Howard Cosell to "tell it like it is". Candor is a missing ingredient in business life and it is chiefly the only antidote I know to political correctness.

Prejudice is about being afraid of people who are different to you. Politically correct people by this very yardstick are prejudiced people. They make rules which are meant to be intelligent but often produce the exact opposite effect. Candor does not mean being rude, it means being honest, upfront and forthright. If a person upsets you, candor can have a form of political correctness in that one can say with assertiveness "I would like to tell you that what you did upset me". Candor therefore cannot exist in a vacuum without an interest in the other person.

I have seen people who do not communicate simply because candor is missing from their lives. They would invariably equate candor with agression or bullying. To develop candor we need to ask the question "what will happen if I say this". Will the world end simply because of how we interpreted the other persons communication.

We talk about innovative life and then we engage something that people do not generally understand, we can start to see the continuum from cold silence to the worst kinds of human hate. Why do human beings have such a problem with people who are different to them? It is as if familiarity means preservation of a certain way of life and anything that challenges that way of life is spat out like some virus. Yet candor isn't a virus, not among genuinely intelligent people.

Candor is neither a synonym for disrespect. So much of what is courted as disrespect is simply awful communication skills. We all have awful communication skills, so why not simply accept that as a cause rather than walk through life and fail to appreciate the diversity of human souls, for we learn most in life by recognizing people who are different from us.

Awful communication skills isn't simply sole cause, lack of sleep - which funnily enough I am supremely qualified to talk about now, dulls our senses. In the very poor choice of trying to extend a human day by cutting into ones sleep, we do not merge with sharper senses. Candor needs absolute clarity and clarity is going to take a nosedive, when one is treating communication as a rationed time thing as much as treating sleep as that inconvenience that one has to do.

Of all the thoughts that can emerge in my head, tonight it was the theme of candor. That is quite ironic - how can I possibly become an expert on straight talk if I tolerate my own ill discipline of staying up this late into a day. Candor above all requires a disciplined mind, otherwise it can set off the fire of emotion and emotion is not a synonym for heart. I need to therefore establish some personal candor of my own about the quality of my sleep and that means when I wake up I need to first read through tonights scripting again - and this time I hope I will begin a new day with a transformed attitude. Otherwise I need to keep meditating on this until my resolve is resolute and this unnecessary habit is broken. It is time to start appreciating the art of relaxation - rather than fuel this late night thinking or schedule work so it eats up the clock so late at night.

If I can't listen to my own truths, candor as a personal social skill can wait, until that is I have resolved this particular personal truth about my own sleep habit.

M.

05:51 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Poetry

8th Day: http://www.fastcompany.com/profile-blog/man-womb

Kevin's Amniocentesis

BIG - HUGE - BIGGER

Day 7 of Man in a Womb

What I write here should not be picking coral from the sea for when so picked, all one will find is white coral and not the amazing colour that would once be the coral's own life. We love being scientific, we seek to be poetic yet invariably we end up existing in a life that is far more irrational then we would care to admit. I personally think carnal centered life that is driven around fame or money is a vastly different reward scenario than abundance and authority - the first mindset is one of a scampering rat, the latter is more divine. Why do we have a term for the rat race unless we have significantly lost the ownership of our own attention. If I open up my medicine cabinet and find hardly anything there, am I living a better life than a medicated togetherness? While this is introspection at what point do I become a narc?

When I look at what I was writing a decade ago and compare it to today, I recognize that I have lost a level of poetic naturalness. It is was there in early pieces at the beginning of 1998 and then I got more and more dragged into the dotcom magazine view of the world and so I began to meander and pick up and play with the stuff that only mattered for a blogrolling minute rather than a liferolling decade. Far too often it is distraction which stops me short of reaching that depth. Distractions which are common place are the ones we never really consider as our thieves. Even the Bible talks about how the thief can come in the night and rob our destiny, but we don't need to know this text for us to understand that there is an earthly meaning to this truth. If the Christians are right how do you spend an eternity and if the Hindu's are right, one soul improved by last householder, have fun next person in the chain of life rebirth, that is my attitude - I am not right now focusing on gurudom, I want to live my life right here, right now. Like King Canute I can order the attention sea to go forth back but it proves absolutely nothing, if all I end up doing is to drown. What drowns is opportunity cost and lost attention or the life that should have been but now just is.

Once I wrote a beautiful story in my school and my teacher was so blown away he asked me to read it to the class, but then he told me that he wanted me to read out my next great story out to the class - I rebelliously hashed out 36 pages of such utter nonsense that human rights laws should have been duly enforced to ensure that I could never give a reading of it; and he halted the painful proceedings about the fourth pages into the tiresome said reading, he actually believed that the magic he had seen in my writing would appear at his beck and call, for his gift was there to teach me, not marry his ego to my attention. Instead of building on a poetic moment that came with flow, his enthusiasm for my art forced the issue and I reacted likewise. If only I had been writing a womblog then, then my second story would have been close to a masterpiece rather than spewed out as a protest that both embarassed him and wasted a brief 10 minutes of a classroom life - for if I had written a womblgo back then, I would have begun the same day with a new psychic intent. The womblog therefore isn't just a horizontal flow, it has a vertical flow that can trigger and set up the start of a brand new day. I am not going to find the quality of the day ahead in a book, it has be made, it is to be shaped and executed - all of this is within me before bit by bit I forfeit this.

The world is Picasso when it should be Matisse. Picasso drew with his mind but his mind's principal target was Matisse, but Matisse painted with his heart and so he was original and he didn't care for Picasso's ego for achieving public greatness, he focused on his art and IMHO he was the greater between the two. Picasso simply consumed those who lived around him, taking their lives and turning them into paint strokes. He required his ego to fuel his desire and competition with Matisse, but Matisse was a quieter personality, a far more intelligent one - so the world is not to be trusted, it often heaps praise on idols, not the true hearts, we can see that in one minute with Matisse, a painter who had a sacred heart rather than a carnal mind. Most of us are still like that today because we were not taught how to write with our hearts and can become inhibited living in a world full of people who write with their minds, and we quickly and easily can lose any art. What did our industrial age education system do to us that we cannot ultimately cannot undo with a focused free will?

My best writing comes when I write with my heart but just like my ability to paint it has withered without use, I have over the last decade lost the poetry of my flow. There are times when I can see a faint resemblance to the potential that I realize exists within me, but having ceased to cultivate that core, this is why I need to enable concentration practice now. The same may be true for others, but I am not and will not be responsible for ownership of attention of others. When I rekindle this flow as an innate part of my ability rather than an isolated effort, I expect it to crossover into all aspects of my life choice and life voice. That is theory right now, for the only thing that matters to me is the evidence of personal practice not the showmanship of it. If I talk of theft yesterday, it is because the world does not have an attention deficit problem, it has an attention accumulation problem. We don't take time to come from our deepest core, we grab from each other and improve the known, while leaving undiscovered at the mercy of our collective attention span that which we never found out, in the carnal world, it's like leaving money on the table, are anyone of us unsure that we have never done that. We create better software this way but we don't create better lives.

We are more concerned about identity theft that might take our physical possessions from us, than we are of the daily theft of our imagination. We might wonder what John Lennon would have given us if he had not been shot but think less about what he would have personally given to be still alive. The answers to that is self-evident on his last album Double Fantasy - Sean, not simply getting off the merry-go-round or more watching of the wheels - Lennon died with an album that suggested he had begun to find his life and not more media. At the very time he got comfortable some lunatic decided that aura is something you can steal - are we a John Lennon tragedy waiting to happen or are we clued in to his swansong on Double Fantasy?

Today I write manufactured, thoughtful and directed - yet there were days in the last few days when the words began to roll out just like Mihalyi Csiksentimalyi suggested in his book flow. How does anyone reading any previous single page relate to the optimal experience within it - unless they experienced that experience themselves - who cares about what I wrote, the plot is lost if the moment of writing is lost, for this is where the greatest benefit acrues, not in the stream of new content or product which is simply one more addition to an ocean full of information and entertainment.

I know when I am not thinking fully with my heart because I take forever to write; simply going back and forth, editing, trying to make things fit rather than letting them flow - all of those things that just seem to fall into place when my fingers type with furious flow and my head is facing upwards with my eyes in a trance like state. If my heart impure then I am open to conviction, if my heart becomes pure, I must learn a brutal life lesson from John Lennon. There is no or little risk in writing that which is thoughtful rather than that which is heartful, but occassionally a line or two occasionally flies out, before thought shines another red light on the red heart and tells the heart to do its basic rhythm job and to forget about the flow. My english teacher began to control my thoughts when he should have taught me how I could turn my own thoughts into creating a life - they didn't teach that at school back then and they sure don't teach that school today, it is the same piss pot - people who talk about change rather than become what Gandhi said - to be the change you want to see in the world - and if people are left alone, people can learn to trust who they are, then all the resources in the world become a heaven and not an idlyic prison.

There is also a thinking with the guts and we call being professional, it provides us the power to remove the waste and eek out the essence for highly productive applications. This is how great authors shape great novels - from a mass of material refined and refined and refined until the guts of thinking carve out a distinct masterpiece. I don't need to show my guts online for this is not being written for a consumer or a mass market, it is written so I can reach or rekindle something deeper into myself and maybe find something I did not think I had. I am not using a pseudonym to hide, just as Ma.rk 7:24 wasn't about hiding. Thinking with guts is for my clients because they pay for execution of answers and working innovations, not just arts or smarts. Who am I telling all of this to other than myself and if the outside world think there is something here of value. Mihalyi is right, this stuff can't sit inside of one, it has to be written out and then you have honest material from which to base the decisions of one's own attention.

I have never been a great book reader and MAN IN A WOMB is the mechanism that is meant to support me to change the way I absorb and relate to information. Yet I continue to allow the offline interuption and the online interuption to play havoc with my concentration. This havoc is also a challenge that has to be overcome. The poetic isn't some Rumi inspired poetic ability, the poetic is a way of thinking which is superior to the mechanical. I continue to foster a mechanical mind because I considerably taught myself these very fatal flaws over the span of the last decade. Yes I became more aware as a person as any active or involved individual would, but I also learned to focus on everything and nothing. A poetic mind is an awe-inspiring mind - a mind which recognizes the value of mind thinking, heart thinking and gut thinking and more importantly combine all that thinking to make ones life live and dance rather than simply work & play.

If I cannot achieve this concentration ability throughout and by the end of the year, I will have failed not just in finding more honest words but my very own life. Right now I begin to think that it is not a feasible proposition to go a full 270 days - not the with what his happening in that black box called my private life but the ideal is to finish up on December 20th with a posting called 21. I am not trying to write a 280 page poem, I am trying to discover a more poetic life.

If I have to write the posting "21" before that given day, it will signal the abortion of MAN IN A WOMB but I can't blame the cause of that will be failure of others to comprehend that what I am doing, it will be a personal resignation that the world is far to big for me. "The MAN" in the title of the blog does not mean a man, it is the first three letters of my name and it means mind, and note that "Mark Zorro" is simply the name of a process, not an identity. The rest of the letters of my name mean victory. If I don't achieve that victory over the mind here, I won't have the opportunity to do so again - not unless I want to kiss goodbye to a highly promising future. The last paragraph isn't really for my attention, it is for Kevin, an honest barefoot doctor whose surgical ability is his personal skill not mine, but Kevin cannot be my teacher here, my attention must singularly serve that purpose. The fact that I can still be so easily sidetracked is my chief takeaway today if not an immediate concern. Life is not a vaudeville act, it is does not comprise of provocation to awaken society, it requires provocation to wake up one's own self.

M.

05:54 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Culturecounter

7th Day: http://www.fastcompany.com/profile-blog/man-womb

Missing Napkins

Use of "Dweeb" word is WRONG

Simplicity & Elegance

Inside-Out & Outside-In Innovation

Olympics

HR Smorgasboard

The Meaning of Loyalty

A Leader Personified

Day 6 of Man in a Womb

In the 20th Century I would declare that I am not a machine, in the 21st Century I should declare that I am not code. When one's world consists of millions of lines of code, the best way to improve that code is to have as many eyes paying attention to that code, but a human life isn't program code - it might operate like program code but the code of life which is DNA is nothing like the mechanical code that enables me to think out aloud on my laptop machine today.

Why should I abandon the awareness that we are still an attachment of our machines rather than in full command of our own faculties. We cannot be fully in command so long as we are driven by memes. Where does the word memes come from other than the mechanical world, and it was a hard nosed scientist who came up with the term and that to refute the need for spiritual reasoning. So long as we have programmed people we have the possibility of violence and war - the name of our program isn't software but personal identity.

For me the metaphor for privacy is underwear. The so called modern thinkers of our new world who want all things to be open, do have an idea of what naked is, and why shouldn't they - nakedness is a prime trait of a tribal mindset. Where yesterday we had capitalists and reformers, today we have marketers and sociologists - all four are as value destructive as each other, especially when they forget that the bedrock of entreprenurial thinking are the people that buy, not the products they create - and none of them are humble enough to think their individual professions secondary to the human race.

Some say that privacy does not exist, but underwear does and I like wearing it, I don't want to leave home without it, nor do I want to walk around in society solely in my underwear just to prove that I do need it. Most of all I don't want to see naked people unless I am taking part in the act of procreation and having counted the number of kids I already have, I realize what the Kabbalist say that a 47 year old man do is preserve ones essence, rather than pretend that a middle aged man is still a teenager.

I come here to think, to ponder, to probe and to question my own life and I ask others that they do the same, so how can I have followers, when my tribe is about saying whatever you want to say so you can try to understand it yourself. The only way of doing that is to write it out but we live in an online culture that wasn't created in the 21st Century. The fathers of this culture were educated in the 1960's - so we have a 20th Century mindset, driving 21st Century thinking. Nobody wants to see that, because everybody is too busy getting into everybody elses pants.

The more I think out aloud, the more this social stupidity reveals itself. So what can the children of the counter-culture produce today than culturecounters - algorithmic machines that can measure, scan, copy, search, tabulate and store virtually an unlimitless amount of variation. We have become that variation and for such a simple thinker like me, living in my little own world, not wanting to be troubled by outsiders - how do we become that variation and then still put out a battle cry for life balance?

It is totally twisted. We therefore no longer live in a world of trust anymore, because we can't even trust ourselves - and we especially know that we can't trust anybody else when the kids of our age need a machine to calculate a reputation score. I wonder what my reputation score is, I I know what I want it to be - a big fat ZERO with a a great big sign saying "bugger off and leave me alone" but narcs don't bugger off, they only come back for more - only the lost keep looking in life, the very few people who have actually found something, spend a lifetime building a life that is worthwhile. What kind of people can be lost in our world other than narcs.

Oh yes, narcs. The prize of our modern media - the breeding of a million hours of mind-distracting communication and the need for MY tribal identity and MY thingy and MY expression and MY or MY or MY or MY until we look in the mirror and discover the most horriblest creation of the information age - the narcissist. I think McLuhan said it best - the word narcissism is a derivative of the word narcotic. Marshall McLuhan had the potion dead on, the narcosis is increasing everyday where so many our publishing themselves. The way out as McLuhan foretold wasn't publishing, it was probing and understanding change.

Yet even most of us don't have the measure or intelligence todo that and therefore being a wanderer in this world is a perfectly legitimate life choice in this world - for it is not upto me to tell other people what to do, but more so it isn't upto other people to tell me what