I watched the 50 year anniversary of Saturday Night Live yesterday night. Satire has this way of disassociating me from my mind and entering this realm of existence where everything is up for grabs. I love that good satire encourages me to uncontrollably laugh out loud, smile, and remember that it’s absurd to give anything in life more energy than it’s worth.I laughed out loud most listening to Eddie Murphy impersonate Tracy Morgan impersonate Steve Harvey.
Your enjoyment may not rise to my enjoyment. You may not find yourself re-winding Eddie’s bits just to watch him plot his path to breaking his cast mates. That’s okay. That moment is my salve, not yours. And you will have your own ideas of what’s funny and what’s not. We can all afford to spend more time enjoying things we find silly, stupid, absurd, and a total waste of time. Memo to self: nothing is so important than finding an opportunity to laugh

How many “Jurassic Park” off shoot movies are in existence now? You know what, don’t answer. I’ll make it easy for you: “too many.”How many times have jazz musicians played “Cold Duck Time” or a Byrd tune on a gig? “Too many.”How many times have I repeated the same ideas… probably the same! I am concerned about the stagnation of artists. And I am concerned because good artists typically operate the margin. They’re at the edges of culture pushing it forward. Producing another dinosaur movie does not give us new stories or mediums to tell stories in, it’s giving us the past. In a meta way, perhaps we’re stuck in a form of creative “amber” and our creative DNA needs to be chiseled out, cloned, and let loose in a new, hopefully not lawsuit inducing, way.To help me, I try to collect different inputs. I yearn for different types of music to try, I like to read different kinds of books, I subscribe to blogs and podcasts of thinkers I hope I’ll disagree with, and I’ll entertain odd and contrarian thoughts. I use those inputs to hopefully find new ideas or ways to look at my life. Artists aren’t the only ones that need heterodox inputs. Non-artists too. You need a variety of inputs. You need new music, new books, new movies, new writing, new news… things that will give different perspective to consider… even perspectives vastly different than your own. Travel to new places is a powerful tool to make that happen . When I pass on, I don’t believe I’ll pass on with much in the way of physical things or money. Instead, I believe I’ll likely leave behind my writings (for the AIs), my ideas, and hopefully interesting stories passed down.

I do my best to communicate in a clear and direct fashion. I value active voice. I value tight sentences. I value communicating value. I apply learning from the past — be mindful of making claims without evidence, quantify my ignorance, and lead with the big idea. I am aware that I have still have a ways to go — more to learn, more to mess up, and more to experience.Except bad listeners. They scare me. A bad listener is one that speaks and thinks with confidence. They hear and they respond, but they do not listen. If you ask this person to speak back what they heard you say, they will communicate back the total opposite what you meant — confidently. You will wonder if you were truly clear. And that wonder you have, that will spiral out of control. You will ask yourself over and over again how you might have been clearer. You will examine what you said 100 times over. You will go from a “belief” about your ideas to a “think”. You will lose your confidence in your ideas. People accused me of being a bad listener before. And they were right to do so. I’ve been that person who needed to win at all costs, even if I must make you question yourself to win. And those mistakes cost me, and life is right to have taught me that lesson. And because I never want to be that person again, I am hyper aware of doing all I can to be an effective communicator. You can imagine how much anxiety I unnecessarily create for myself as a result of bad listeners. Listening is sometimes thought of as an art. I disagree. Listening is a basic skill. My kindergarten diploma says I have a masters in the kinder arts which includes listening. Listening is something we humans have done since our inception — we have ears after all. The skill should not be hard… especially if kids can do it.Listening is not only a primal sense that some have, it’s a desire. And when listening is a “desire” then it is no longer a sense but an invitation to connect with other humans or things. The desire to engage in that kind of listening requires energy, time, and capacity. All the resources that are often perceived to be in short supply. Bad listeners do not demonstrate a desire to listen. Good listeners demonstrate a desire to listen, and if they can’t, they say so. You must have a desire to connect with others in order to listen.And you must listen if you desire to speak.

The piano just got a make over. The tuner came in, adjusted the action, and now the piano plays like a brand new instrument. I barely recognize her.The piano tuner showed me that the piano may not have been configured correctly out of the factory. The old set up required more effort and energy to get the sound I wanted from it. I speculate that contributed to my sound — I am an aggressive player. I notice that after the reset, a lot less energy is required to make something beautiful and productive. Interestingly….A good sleep felt similar. 9.5 hours and I didn’t even recognize myself today from the previous day. The sleep help me understand that a contributing factor to my sleeplessness could have been stress from the work day. I put in more effort and energy into a thing that didn’t deserve it. As a result, I experienced inefficient rest. I don’t believe the piano and sleep are one in the same. What connects the two is efficient use of energy. Waste is a natural byproduct of energy transformation. As with most things, it’s better to create waste in a sustainable and beautiful manner.

The body is tired, it wants to sleep.The mind knows it’s time to sleep. Yet there’s some type of invisible hand stopping me.A kind of energy that keeps saying “not yet.” An energy that gives me the ability to stand up and walk around as if it’s time to wake up. But, immediately reminds me it’s time to sleep. And so I go to bed…Only for that energy to come back and say, “not yet.”

The central limit theorem is a fundamental concept in statistics. The theorem explains why many real-world distributions of things often look like a bell curve — the standard normal. And the standard normal, the bell curve, is seen almost everywhere in nature. You see it in physics, information theory, pictures of people, landscapes, medical tests, my school grades, EVERYWHERE! It’s worth pointing out that not everything follows a normal distribution. There are power laws, fractal patterns — snowflakes, or other non-normal distributions. But this isn’t a math blog or a statistics post. This is about how an interesting concept helps me understand some aspects of my own reality…. And that makes me think, well, since most things fall into that pattern, it seems fair to say that most things are within some distribution of “normalcy”. And if that’s fair to say, then I believe it’s also fair to say that some of the most interesting experiences are at the margins or the far end of the distributions… that’s probably where you can find my thoughts most of the time. Most things that happen are within a few standard deviations of some type of expected normal. Outliers and edges are to be feared or advanced towards — your mileage may vary.

It’s been my experience at work that productivity is sought at the cost of random acts of laughter.We should have more laughter and randomness, but not planned.I love the surprise element of humor. Good humor defies expectation. It leads you down one path and denies you the ending you wanted to tell and shows you something better or more real. I suppose that’s a matter of taste. Perhaps, my more universal thought is, try to take yourself a bit less seriously — a little (appropriately timed) laughter always helps… sometimes.

I don’t have a college degree. And, I’ve achieved quite a bit of success without one. Besides my attitude, I believe (with reasonable confidence) that a Jesuit education gave me key tools. I am not especially religious. I’ve given some critique on the Catholic church in a previous post. However, there are elements of the education that make it valuable. And, transferable.Jesuits practice what’s called Spiritual Exercises, based on Ignatian spirituality. The first principles of these exercises are secularized below:We are created for something bigger than ourselves.We have everything we need within us to make that something bigger than ourselves.With what we have, we must do all we can for what we are made to do. We must rid ourselves of that which does not help us achieve that end.Ultimately, the only thing that matters is what helps us serve others.Compliment the first principles with the Ratio Studiorum — the Jesuit guide for education. The Ratio prioritizes philosophy, logic, rhetoric — very Aristotle — and later science, mathematics, and other subjects that help the student engage with the world as it is not as it is hoped to be — very Machiavellian. And in this way, I believe this is why the education is so potent. To see and know yourself as an agent of great change, to see the world as it is and not as you hoped it would be, and to have the intellectual capacity to engage in that world and make your impact. To distill it down even more: develop your mind, develop your eyes, become fearless, and take chances. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

I’m noticing the overwhelm re-surfacing. A feeling that there’s some kind of weight, pressure, or heaviness upon me.I usually experience it around this time. And I typically find pulling back and getting outside to be perfect antidotes. Let’s see if this season turns around better and faster for me. I remind myself: slow and steady.

If you took a statistics course in your life, you might know that a flip of a coin does not yield heads or tails 50% of the time until you’ve flipped a coin ~9,604 times (assuming a 1% margin of error). That’s insane. Let’s assume you flip a coin twice. One flip yields heads and the other tails. Suppose someone says that you’ll flip heads 50% of the time based on what your two flips. Well that’s wrong. If you figure out the standard error, you’ll discover that yes, a person might flip heads 50% of the time — plus or minus 69.4%. That 69.4% represents a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Why care about any of this? Because it’s probably worth increasing skepticism towards claims and allowing for margin of error. And that’s advisable because not accounting for the margin of error and being skeptical for sake of skepticism may cause you to reject useful claims and ideas. At the same time, I do not suggest you reject the things you see. I try not to invalidate my own experiences. Instead, I try to interpret what I see through a lens of likelihood. A silly example: “How certain am I that the person cut me off in traffic just to get under my skin?” You would need to survey the driver who cut you off and a thousand plus more drivers to become reasonably certain. Instead, I prefer to quantify my ignorance: “I’m not even 5% certain that was the cause, I am 100% certain that it’s on me to get over it.”Model your ignorance with confidence…. more or less of the time.