Murphy’s Laws of Combat, Part 1

When I first saw these as a private in 1998 the effects were more immediate in my military career than they were in the rest of my life. Within a couple years, however, they began to gain relevance in other aspects of my life.

· If the enemy is in range, so are you.

Simple and stark geometry dictates that if an enemy can hit you with something that can cause harm to you, so can you, and vice versa. More practically, vulnerability often holds with it the same geometry: If someone is vulnerable to you, then there is a likelihood that the reciprocal exists.

· Incoming fire has the right of way.

I’ve heard this put another way in a Demotivators poster: Don’t stand between the competitive jerk and their goals.

· Don't look conspicuous, it draws fire.

If you’re trying not to be spotted, blend in. This also has a strong correlation with “appearing busy.”

· There is always a way, and it usually doesn't work.

Lack of proper preparation or a poorly-placed opportunity can beget bad luck: With enough preparation, bad luck doesn’t exist.

· The problem with the easy way out is that it has already been mined.

Laying a minefield is a military concept called counter-mobility: Maneuvering the enemy through avenues that are more advantageous to you than him or her. In life the easy way is often fraught with problems that are not found in taking the more difficult way.

· Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo

This one goes well with the above law about not looking conspicuous: Attacking takes energy and effort, and if you position yourself in such a way to not be worth being attacked, this can hedge against undesirable things happening.

· Professionals are predictable, it's the amateurs that are dangerous.

I love this one; it is so very useful. Professionals are often well-trained or well-experienced and typically follow stricter regimens in their approach than everyone else. They are often rational, linear and logical in their thinking, and swift and effective in their execution. Amateurs, on the other hand, are typically not this way.

· The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions:

1. When you're ready for them.

2. When you're not ready for them.

Life happens no matter if you’re prepared for it or not, so why don’t follow the Boy Scout motto and “always be prepared.”

· Teamwork is essential, it gives them someone else to shoot at.

There is power and, from the cynical perspective, increased survivability in groups.

· If you can't remember, then the claymore IS pointed at you.

A claymore is a deadly anti-personnel mine that can ruin your day pretty quickly. If you can’t remember how you did something, sometimes it is best to just presume that you need to take another look at it.

· The enemy diversion you have been ignoring will be the main attack.

Learning to devote your awareness to the entire world surrounding you or to the minute details therein may mean the difference between success and failure.

· A "sucking chest wound" is nature's way of telling you to slow down.

For those who aren’t familiar with the realities of battlefield medicine the “sucking chest wound” is the kind that you don’t want to have because the “sucking” part is the pressure compartment in your lungs being unpressurized. Life, just like combat, give us signals to speed up, slow down, and to continue moving forward. Learn to notice the signs and how to manage them before they turn into your very own “sucking chest wound.”

· If your attack is going well, then it's an ambush.

Never underestimate the odds of the situation besting you: Increased knowledge and skills allows you to adapt abilities to circumstances. Not doing so can lead to an “ambush.”

· Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you.

People don’t like being uncomfortable; if you draw uncomfortable situations, people will have a tendency to be irritated with you.

· Anything you do can get you shot, including nothing.

Apathy is not a virtue, but don’t let everyday life know that.

· If you build yourself a bunker that's tough for the enemy to get into quickly, then you won't be able to get out of it quickly either.

This bears a strong resemblance to “if the enemy is in range, so are you” axiom. Just like you don’t want to corner a wild animal in a situation that you can’t get out of, either, always have an escape route.

· Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself.

In the Army, and the other services I imagine, there is a tendency to take on “battle buddies,” the proverbial “guy you share the foxhole with.” In those metaphorical situations where you find yourself with a companion on the frontlines if they are braver than you are, you could end up in a losing battle.

· If you're short of everything but the enemy, you're in a combat zone.

Have you ever heard that quip about the “calm before the storm?” There is an eerie silence in a combat zone before the “fog of war” and the chaos of battle hits.

· Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.

Sometimes the tools that you use are not worth the sum of their parts: Their value is only readily known when you’re using them. If they fail you, you’d better find a way to adapt…quickly.

· Friendly fire isn't.

Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance: People are often too apathetic than to actually exert the energy to be truly vindictive, but they both can have the same affect.

· Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never stay awake when you can sleep.

Use your time wisely, find efficiencies and be effective in everything that you do.

· The most dangerous thing in the world is a second lieutenant with a map and a compass.

Second lieutenant is the rank of a newly-minted commissioned officer. An old wisdom tells that the young rattlesnake is apt to use more venom in an attack than his older counterpart. Remember when you first started your first job, or any other job that you loved? You were probably filled with a fire, a zealousness that could serve to get you into trouble, left unchecked. That’s why second lieutenants get a seasoned non-commissioned officer, a sergeant first class, to help guide his or her actions.

· There is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.

There is a scene in an old war movie, I think it is the Green Berets, where an old veteran sergeant major tells a bunch of younger troops that a battle was imminent and that they had better start praying to whichever god they believed in. Given the right mix of circumstances and enough danger, people need something to believe in—even if that spirituality is a lack thereof, it is replaced with something that the person will believe in.

· A grenade with a seven second fuse will always burn down in four seconds.

Don’t count on what the user’s manual, instructions, specifications, or technical documentation says that the equipment can or will do. There is something said amongst information technology professionals: Bugs and such in programs are cynically referred to as “undocumented features.” Don’t underestimate your circumstances by letting such “undocumented features” sneak up on you.

Submit to your favorite social bookmarking site!

Monkey Mondays: Monkey School

Jujitsu Marketing: XM and Sirius Radio.

XM had a bad month in May due to a number of issues from outages to censoring. To a populous accustomed to not paying for radio—whose content is regulated by the federal government—paying for premium radio meant that they could now get uncensored content delivered to them. However, following a stunt from shock jock radio hosts Opie and Anthony the couple was censored for a period of time. I’m not necessarily a fan of such content, but as many as 500,000 subscribers—1/16 of XM’s subscriber base—must be fan enough to drop the service because of XM’s seeming hypocrisy on the matter.

What is a competitor to do?

Sirius jumps in, in wonderfully prompt jujitsu-esque fashion and reminds satellite radio subscribers that they have what the disgruntled XM subscribers want. Filling an unmet need or desire of a competitor’s customers can only lead to one thing: Profit.

Memorial Day 2007

I am a lover of movies depicting military history: Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. At any rate, history tends to repeat itself. This weekend, in Memorial Day spirit, I was watching The Green Berets. The movie recalls the experiences of a Green Beret Detachment dispatched to Vietnam with a naysayer journalist embedded in the team. With overtones of today’s current situation, the media has painted an entirely different picture than what exists in the lives of our fighting men and women in a combat zone.

Prussian General Karl von Clauswitz, in his magnus opus On War, wrote “War is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means.” Regardless of what one thinks of the civilian leadership of the military, wars are fought and won by the soldiers in them: Squads of 8-16 personnel through corps of 20,000-40,000 personnel are made up mostly of soldiers in the rank of staff sergeant (E-6) and below that work towards the end of winning.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 2

Everyone (well, most everyone) interacts with other people on a daily basis. When we interact with people the new information allows us the opportunity to deal with the many differences that might exist between how we perceive the world and how the world really is. As individuals that belong to social groups, communities, and other such groups of individuals, we tend to develop shared worldviews based on individuals in the group placing and communicating value on similar objects. These shared views of the world create the environmental construct in which our individual constructs evolve. Things such as the laws we observe, virtues we share with others, and the morals of our communities are the manifestations of groups of worldviews. Because we share, respect, and value the worldviews of the social groups which we reference, we live our lives, in a manner of speaking, in accordance to the social reference group whose collective worldview is most aligned with our own.

Conflicts arise, however, when we add personal meanings to the collective worldview. Because 10 different people will interpret the world through their personality filters in 10 different ways people will be apt to create different construct meanings as part of the greater morality construct. In this sense, worldview meanings will not always translate—and often do not always perfectly translate—into the worldview meaning of the social reference group. In this environment where the fusion of individual and group beliefs is non-existent conflict becomes highly probable: We’ll start seeing conflicts not only between individuals in specific groups, but also between different groups. These groups of interactions are, in the more common vernacular, as relationships.

Relationships allow us to seek awareness in our patterns of thinking: The comparison of our closely held beliefs through emotions and concepts with the events that are transpiring in our interactions, our relationships. Which beliefs, concepts, and values are reflected in our behaviors? Each of these behaviors that reflect our beliefs, concepts, and values are partly caused by our interactions with our environment and partly the manifestation of our genetics.

Throughout our past we learn and evolve an understanding of how to be from the framework which we are working in at that time: This is why awareness is a key leadership trait at all levels—from self-awareness to awareness of one’s environment—if one’s perceptions are broad and understanding of circumstances deep, an individual can seize this epiphany of conditioning and make the most of one’s evolution. We go through this constant process, being most apt and searching for it in our youth, to fulfill the need to search for meaning in oneself and the world around them. If the past has had a dominant “punishment model,” the search for meaning created mechanisms for defense within the construct; in a nurturing atmosphere, self-expression becomes dominant. At any rate, the experiences of your past manifest themselves as the patterns of your today. The earlier that these experiences shape your construct, the stronger the tendencies and patterns become…the more inertia they have…and the more energy is require to overcome them.

The patterns that we use throughout our daily lives embody the truths in our world: We interpret, process, and mold the world to meet our specifications, our worldview. Conflicts in relationships are simply two worldviews that lack congruence with one another. In his book “Ways of Worldmaking” Nelson Goodman says: “Not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.” In other words, the truths of each individual differ, but the reconciliation of our truth from someone else’s is infamously indistinct.

The logical conclusion for all of this is that we should strive for three things: Heightened self-awareness, a deeper understanding of our relationships, and a thoughtful understanding the individuals in our relationships.

A Model for Interpersonal Interactions, Part 1

Each person is but the sum of their experiences, or so we are told. Every experience which you have, every interaction which you make leaves you changed (unless we’ve been desensitized of it). Deep inside we have conscious awareness, unconscious unawareness, and everything in between that forms the construct of the person we are, the fabric of our being.

An individual construct, however complex, can be deduced to series of areas that combine in special ways:

Ontological component: The study of being and what constitutes objective and subjective existence, and what it means to exist.

Theological component: A particular system or school of religious or spiritual beliefs and teachings.

Cosmological component: The study of the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe.

Axiological component: The study of values and value judgments.

Epistemological component: The study of what is meant by "knowledge". What does it mean to "know" something as opposed to merely having an opinion?

Ethical component: The principles of right and wrong that are accepted by an individual or a social group.

Take 10 different people and ask them, for instance, “What constitutes your objective and subjective existence and what does it mean to exist,” or…if you didn’t want to be so long-winded, one could simply ask “what is the meaning of life for you?” You would likely get 10 different answers. Because things like the theological, cosmological, and ethical components have a tendency to be more discrete in nature (“What are your theological beliefs?” “I’m Lutheran” or “what is your belief about the structure, origin, and evolution of the universe?” “The standard model of cosmology, thank you very much!”). Ethics tend to vary between social groups, societies, and civilizations: What is an accepted belief in Western Philosophy, for example, isn’t necessarily something that one would find in Eastern Philosophy: The paradigms between cultures vary in context and, therefore, meaning.

How these various components interact comprise the objective versus subjective within the individual. Objective things are those that can be proven by fact, whereas subjective matters are often interpreted by the individual to fit into their individual world. The sum of accumulated learning goes through the “filters” of the individual—the ontology, theology, cosmology, axiology, epistemology, and ethics filters. Each person’s perception of the world is unique in that how they pass new information through these filters to change something.

Worldviews, supported by personal values, are a framework for interacting with others: More on that in the next post.

Personality and Intelligence: A Brief Contrast and Comparison

Personality: The complex of all the attributes--behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental--that characterize a unique individual; "their different reactions reflected their very different personalities"; "it is his nature to help others"

Intelligence: The ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience.

Many people have been conditioned to think that one of the above can be changed while the other is concrete for life. The ability to comprehend and apply lessons to one’s experiences to their benefit and the benefit of others is something that is not constant: This is a reason why intelligence quotient tests can be used as a metric of change in intelligence. Given a specific demographic the knowledge, skills, and the ability to apply them to a series of problems is charted across peers in that demographic. As we grow older we may learn more or we may learn less, but at any rate maturity tends to bring with it increased judiciousness and a changing attitude towards risk.

By contrast, personality is the underlying construct to intelligence: Just like an operating system controls the functions of a computer or the framework of a house determines how large the house can be or where walls, rooms, and doors can go, personality instructs how we learn and how our intellect interacts with the rest of the world. Just as new information can change our intelligence if we are receptive to it—just as it is that a house can have an addition added or rooms taken away—what is to say that personality, the underlying construct of who we are, cannot be just as malleable?

Research by developmental psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford University suggests that this is, in fact, the case. An article recently published in Newsweek overviews the old way of thinking and the empirical data that suggests otherwise:

“The old thinking was that our personality—the sum total of our human qualities—was an inherited legacy, fixed at birth and unchanging through life. So we had adventurous people and timid people; competitive Type As and laid-back Type Bs; conscientious, truthful types and—well, scoundrels and liars.”

Instead:

“The new thinking is that these traits are not fixed but in flux, and there are many ideas about why personality might change. Dweck's theory is that our beliefs about ourselves and the world—our "self theories," in the jargon—are a powerful influence on who we become in life. In other words, our own lay theories about personality and aptitude actually shape our character.”

Years ago when I was in a special leadership development course we were taught that “People see the world how they want to see it.” This correlates strongly with the adage that “someone convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.” My friend Rick once counseled me with the following advice: Whenever we have problems with someone it behooves us to look inside. It stands to reason, then, that the best way to change our world and how we interact with it is to look inside and change our worldview.

In Dr. Dweck’s research hundreds of pre-teens were given a standard IQ test. Most of them scored “OK” on the test but different groups were praised differently on the test: Some were praised for their natural talent (“What a great score! You're so smart!”), while others were praised for their hard work (“What a great score! You must have worked very hard!”). The first message was crafted to convey people’s abilities as a fixed personal asset and the second message meant to convey a person’s abilities as something that can be changed.

As they say, “the proof is in the pudding:” Where results are the things that matter, the children who were told that they were smart were less apt to expose themselves to more circumstances that would possibly offer evidence to themselves that would take away this worldview, this perception, that they had. The pre-teens that were told that they had worked hard, however, were more apt to expose themselves to new challenges more because it allowed them the opportunity for growth.

To prove the point, the pre-teens were subsequently given very difficult problems to solve. When they failed, the children that were told that they were “so smart” saw it as a blow to their self-worth. Those that were told that they had worked “very hard” just “dug in more.”

The story gets better.

After all the testing Dr. Dweck gave the kids the opportunity write down their thoughts about the test, leaving a space to record their grade on the test under the auspices that it would be for those that took the test in the future. Those that scored badly inflated their test scores in order to improve their own self-perception of their own self-worth. In other words they justified their actions by lying to themselves in order to make themselves feel better instead of expending the effort to actually do better.

In the end the research has proven that undesirable personality traits need not be permanent or be allowed to affect our lives for the worse: As long as we don’t allow our self-perceptions to be negative and look at problems as opportunities, exerting enough good old-fashioned effort, each of us should be able to overcome anything in our path.

Of Mankind

"Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain."

Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince"

Don't allow yourself to be generalized into this statement. Be someone else.

Murphy's Lesser-Known Laws

If you are reading this then there is a good chance that you came here seeking pearls of wisdom by which to enrich your life. Today I will present something slightly different than the usual fare: They say that variety is the “spice of life,” so let’s look at some long-held common wisdom and pick it apart to see what makes it truly tick.

Murphy's Lesser-Known Laws

1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

A good friend of mine, Rick, should like this one because it is reminiscent of a quote of which he is fond. If you can look smarter than you might sound, reconsider saying anything.

2. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.

Thinking quickly is sometimes something people are born with. The rest of us learn how to think more quickly.

3. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.

In other words, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. When confronted with an opportunity, use the best tool for the job.

4. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.

When you’re not attributing to malice what you can attribute to ignorance, people tend to have dumb luck in the face of foolproof methods which you have implemented.

5. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.

I’d like to look into the probabilities of this, but I know this: When you’re faced with too much information, you tend to choose the wrong one. In circumstances as such you should “use your heart.” What tends otherwise is that you will over-analyze, panic, or both: Neither allows for a good probability for a good decision.

6. The things that come to those who wait will be the things left by those who got there first.

Boldness! Speed! Simplicity!

7. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat all day, drinking beer.

What can I say about this? There are people out there that work only to live and will choose laziness above productivity and contribution to society.

8. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in a dark room.

…And my shins can prove it.

9. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.

…This is what is wrong with the American tax system. When you get enough wealth people will tend to attack you in some way or another and you’ll be targeted to redistribute that wealth to others that aren’t motivated enough to make the wealth themselves.

10. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Although it is a bit cynical…justice through the judgment of your “peers” has its benefits…and it’s drawbacks.

Cynical

“Today don't look so bad, compared to tomorrow
if time is all we have, then we're living on borrowed”
—Extreme “Cynical”

Once upon a time there was a group of philosophers that clung to the belief that virtue was the only necessity and was entirely sufficient to be happy. They believed in this philosophy to a fault: Neglecting everything else that would further their perfection of a virtuous existence. They neglected everything from their own personal hygiene and their family obligations to society. Nearly naked and devoid of provisions, a Greek by the name of Diogenes traveled the land and frivolously enjoyed the sun and the beaches, gathering thousands of people to listen to him sarcastically talk about society. Alexander the Great curiously sought him out, Diogenes suggesting that he renounce his conquests. Alexander, however, was apt to decline because he firmly believed that his destiny had already been written. Diogenes belonged to a group that history would recall as the cynics. In fact, Diogenes had the symbol of the cynic placed onto his tombstone.

Alexander the Great, mind you, conquered most of the known world by the time he turned 30.

Would you rather be a cynic or a conqueror? Are you satisfied with the habits of Diogenes and the cynics or molding and shaping your own world?

I once recall reading a piece on reducing the amount of cynicism in your life by reducing one’s hostility. It started by asking oneself the question “My philosophy in life is based on:” The follow-up question was then “Are these beliefs irrational? If they are, which rational beliefs could replace them?” You would then make a table whereas alongside the left-hand side there would be a list of those beliefs and along the right-hand side would be the replacement beliefs: Left side irrational, right side rational (this would also be a great exercise for individuals exhibiting maladaptive behaviors). Of course, the entire point of this exercise is to see the logical substitution of the rational version of irrational “cynical” beliefs then integrate the new belief system into one’s emotional responses. Changing your emotional responses, in turn, changes your behaviors and thus how you fundamentally interact with the world. The key to this sort of behavioral modification, as I’m sure it is with others, is internal motivation and/or finding some method of reinforcing behaviors when one begins to “slip.”

Of course, if you continue to feel the effects of this cynicism and hostility via tried and true warning signs:

· People seeking your companionship or advice infrequently

· Feeling of lacking motivation or desire for personal growth, wellness, and success

· You hurt other people’s feelings and don’t understand why they’re hurt

These are just an indicative few, but if they begin to manifest themselves again, the results of the technique need to be re-applied. I’ve often heard that habit is what you call something after you’ve done it 21 times: An average to be certain, but the underlying thought is that each person will develop a pattern after doing something so many times: Force of habit begotten by the momentum of having done the routine so many times…inertia makes it more difficult to stop a pattern of behavior unless sufficient energy is applied and there is enough self awareness to guide a person along.

Overcoming cynicism is not easy, but success is the manifestation of sacrifice and perseverance. If you can become truly motivated enough to be the person that you want to be then you needn’t let anyone stand in your way.

Monkey Mondays: Death Wish

Signs

“People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck: Just a happy turn of chance. I'm sure the people in Group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in very suspicious way. For them, the situation isn't fifty-fifty. Could be bad, could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear.”
—Mel Gibson’s character Father Graham Hess from the movie “Signs”

Sometimes things happen which are particularly poignant to the current events in our lives. After having not seen it for many years it was a welcome contribution to the wisdom which helped reveal thoughts and feelings that I was having about some things in particular.

Which group are you in? For the longest time I’ve been in “there-is-no-such-thing-as-coincidence” group, but sometimes there are series of events in a person’s life, patterns, that offer a person the opportunity to change their mind. What if a person’s life lacks those things to give her confidence, to give him faith? What if there is no reason to have these things? When the absence of anything meaningful in a person’s life leaves them as an empty shell of their former selves, what is there to be, what is there to do, what is there to strive to?

About 15 years ago I started my foray into journaling, analyzing my thoughts and feelings against the benchmark of everything happening around me. In that turbulent world, this activity brought me solace. In these years with the advent of the technologies that allow information to be a ubiquitous feature in anyone’s life that desires it I am able to pass on those things which I have learned over the years: Philosophies that I have thought about at great lengths, pearls of truth which have been presented to me, everything forged in the fire of the meandering path of my own life across half the world and to meet many thousands of people.

“Some people are probably thinking that this is the end of the world,” Remarks the younger Merrill Hess.

“That’s true.” The older Graham Hess replies.

“Do you think it could be?”

“Yes”

“How could you say that?” Merrill is visibly taken aback.

“That wasn’t the answer that you wanted?”

Losing your faith is the quickest road to cynicism. In the above exchange, M Night Shyamahan accurately portrays the man, whose job it once was to be the most faithful, losing his faith: All that he is, that which once defined him. The death of his wife shattered this paradigm making him lose the balance between faith and reason. There are multiple paragraphs here that can be applied dealing with the process of loss or change through the stages of grieving, but that is not the scope of this entry. He tries to comfort Merrill by stating the quote with which this blog entry began. At the end of the greater exchange:

“I’m a miracle man. Those lights are a miracle,” Merrill mentioned.

“There you go.” Graham replies.

“Which type are you?” The younger Hess asks his older brother.

“Do you feel comforted?”

After a brief moment of process and analysis, “yeah, I do.”

“Then what does it matter?” Graham finishes.

Although the underlying character of the man—the honor and the staunch values to which he holds—he had no faith but still saw to it that he could offer comfort when he had nothing to offer.

Loss can do seemingly crazy things to a person, those things that in the mind of this person are not crazy: They are just par for the course.

People are the way that people are: Those things which I discuss in greater detail in the broader scope of this blog, largely because it is what interests me.

Instead of allowing humanity to degrade into a large group of self-centered narcissistic buffoons, go out and prove the greater trend wrong today.

More Than Words

“What would you do if my heart was torn in two?
More than words to show you feel that your love for me is real
What would you say if I took those words away?
Then you couldn't make things new just by saying "I love you"”
—Extreme, “More Than Words”

General George S. Patton took command of the Third U.S. Army in March of 1944, just prior to the quickest and most successful military advance that history has ever known. To commemorate his acquisition of command of this fine organization he gave a couple of speeches. The most famous is the one directed at the privates and non-commissioned officers of the unit. A lesser-known version, however, was given to his headquarters staff. Before reading the short excerpt, please know that it contains mild coarse language:

“You are here to fight. This is an active theater of war. Ahead of you lies battle. That means just one thing. You can't afford to be a goddamned fool, because, in battle, fools mean dead men. It is inevitable for men to be killed and wounded in battle. But there is no reason why such losses should be increased because of the incompetence and carelessness of some stupid son-of-a-bitch. I don't tolerate such men on my staff.”

I’ve long equated the intricacies of combat with those of life. We each have our objectives and we need to employ strategy and tactics to reach those objectives. Modern management theory has taken cues from the practice of management and leadership in the most stressful environment that a person can undertake, in fact.

As an avid student of military history and effective leadership, I have studied a lot of Patton over the years. He understood many of the basic principles of effective leadership:

· Results should be the only measure of success

· The level of potential risk is directly proportional to the level of potential reward.

· Perseverance

Ideally you will have a method to determine the results of your actions and how successful your tactics and strategies have been. Use feedback to adjust your tactics and strategy.

Risk begets reward. There is rarely reward without sacrifice. Ideally you will be intelligent, artful, and graceful in your approach. As in picking locks, however, sometimes the best method is with a sledgehammer and explosives. Or, as I’m fond of saying—if all other methods don’t work, use the brute force approach.

Finally, perseverance: If at first you don’t succeed—try, try again. The man that invented rubber tires, the man that Goodyear Tire is named after, spent most of his life until he succeeded in his goal of creating the right rubber for the job of being part of a tire. The reward: Arguably the most recognizable name in the business of tires.

In the end it is only a function of “just how badly do you want success?”

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

…Does it make a sound?

I was first confronted with a new way to answer this question when emailing a “pen pal” Lutheran pastor when I was in school, in the years before the Internet had graphics and bulletin board systems ruled the bandwidth. We were discussing the wonderful world of quantum physics where the laws of the physics of Newton and Galileo break down and take a different shape; where the ultimate rules that govern the universe underneath it all are manifested.

So, does it make a sound?

Not if anyone is there to hear it, to see it, to perceive it. If no one is there to perceive the tree, it doesn’t exist. If no one is there to perceive the forest, it doesn’t exist.

I’ve found over the years that this can be used as an analogy for human interaction. People are usually very apt to “talk the talk,” but without a perception of that talk manifesting itself into actions…it doesn’t exist. “Talk the talk, but not able to walk the walk.” Anything internal to you has no effect on anything or anyone but you unless you express it externally. In other words: Thoughts and feelings that are not perceived by the world mean nothing to it.

How to effectively express these thoughts and feelings to the rest of the world? This often requires insight, thoughtfulness, and creativity. “Fortune favors the bold,” I often find myself saying to myself when interacting with people, “and I hope that you do, too.” In 1936 a well-known motivator of a man known to the world as Dale Carnegie wrote his magnificent piece of work How to Win Friends and Influence People in which he described a list of tenets in dealing with other people. A select few of these I list below:

1. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

One of my degrees is in marketing. To this end, I fully understand the importance of self-marketing. Every action in which you partake, every word which you utter, each non-verbal communication which escapes you helps to paint a picture of the world’s perception of you. Some people are more observant than others, but that aside: People interpret everything you communicate in one form or another based on their biases, prejudices, and worldview. To arouse an eager want in an individual it is critical that you know the person: Their wants, needs, and desires, implementing bold actions that make an impression in line with their worldview. This is the third technique that Carnegie offers in successfully dealing with people.

2. Make the other person feel important—doing so sincerely.

This is the last of six suggestions that Carnegie asserts to the end of influencing people to like you. Making someone feel important is always creative, always different, always renewed and fresh and alive. I have always believed—always—that personal achievement, on a secure foundation of integrity and honesty, is a paramount trait: Especially to the end to making the world a better place. I have realized that a person does these things to the end of feeling important. People want to feel important, feel like they belong. “Sometimes someone comes into our lives and touches us in a very special way,” I once read: Sincerely seeing to this in another person is the quickest route in which have the other person feel that you are important to them.

Breakaway

“Grew up in a small town, and when the rain would fall down
I'd just stare out my window dreaming of what could be
And if I'd end up happy, I would pray”
—Kelly Clarkson, “Breakaway”

There was a sharp chill in the air, the crispness of the weather matched only by the silent sanctity of the world. Stars filled the sky, but only the footsteps beneath me could break the news to me: I was leaving this place for another, on a grand journey.

While driving my car through the winding corridor that left Custer State Park for the nearby highway I heard this very song on the radio for the first time. I’ve always looked at it as an omen for things to come. Rarely does circumstance meet with providence in such a fashion as to properly narrate your life with a meaningful song or lyric. This was one of those days.

As the following days passed and I passed through a number of states I heard the song played more times. Sometimes a change in geography is ripe for a change of mind, a change of paradigm, a change of your life: To “breakaway” from one existence and move into another.

Sometimes, though, it doesn’t require something so dramatic. Change is a funny thing: Everyone I know will often recite about it “change is the only constant” or some variation thereof. Change can be good and it can be bad, but regardless of the positivity or negativity of it, it is often the only consistent thing that can be relied upon.

A leader facilitates change, driven by the momentum created by the energy of teams. A leader takes the role of the change agent and change warrior. They fight for the change, minimizing the destruction that can be caused in its wake by transforming. Anyone can perform a transaction: A discrete exchange of things of value. Leaders, on the other hand, prefer transformation over transactions such that there is a distinct qualitative change, a change in fundamental relationships.

Sometimes change is necessary to counteract the forces of entropy. True transformational change takes a certain amount of energy: By this account it is perfect to apply to a situation in which we’re worried about the constant degradation of energy in the system, seeking to bring it to oblivion.

Proper change is meant to move an organization forward, to move everyone forward—including yourself—so to that end, go out and initiate a positive change in the world today.

The Wonderful, Whacky, Crazy Misadventures of Windows

Double your drive space. Delete Windows.

…Let me tell you: I’m about to. I currently have my computer booting on a 150 GB Raptor hard drive. This required me to move my Windows Vista and Windows XP Pro partitions onto partitions on the new drive, using the eventual method of reinstalling everything from the operating system to the suite of programs I use. A fun experience if you’re a someone like me, perhaps. It was still stressing, very stressing.

I’m down to one or two programs wanting to give me blue screens of death which I hope to solve by the weekend and image the partitions and……voila, I’ll be past my phase of wanting to delete Windows.

More of the usual stuff tomorrow.

In the Search of Change: Are People Static or Dynamic?

A question that tends to repeat itself every so often is the debate between people that think that people change and the ones that think that, fundamentally, people do not change.

Who is right, who is wrong?

Once upon a professional lifetime I worked as a Resolutions Support Consultant, or quasi-supervisor/analyst, with a major wireless firm. The team that I belonged to was an elite group of former floor representatives in the receivables management department: When you want to pay a bill, particularly when it is past due, these are the agents to whom a person speaks. Resolutions, on the other hand, was the team that these agents turn to for technical, protocol, and procedural guidance as well as to pass on escalated callers. I have several an earlier blog post about this period in my life. Despite all this fun in handling escalated callers in suspenseful situations, we were also subject matter experts in the field of wireless phone customer service and receivables management policies and procedures and all that jazz.

There were rules in “Res:” Written rules that dictated how we could behave on escalated calls, how far we could bend, how systems worked, etc. There were also, unwritten rules: The ones that you are bound to out of a sense of honor and respect for the position. Those of us serving on the team didn’t always agree with one another. The culture that predominated was one that emphasized “go ahead and prove me wrong, because that gives us both an opportunity for growth.” Substantiating and disproving matters became part of the everyday marching orders. By virtue of our position we were just right. In reality, we weren’t necessarily always right…but as a team we were.

Say, for instance, I am speaking with a customer who has asked the floor representative to speak to a supervisor regarding a misunderstanding (which, generally, is what most conflicts are about). While speaking to the customer I validate their concerns and listen to their particular situation. I proceed to advise the customer that, despite their special circumstances, policy prohibits me from offering an exception. The customer interprets this as me taking a hard line and requests another supervisor. This first tier escalation turns into a second tier escalation. I continue by asking the customer to hold while I contact another supervisor, dial back into the Resolutions queue and get the next available Resolutions Consultant. I inform them about the basics of the caller and then warm transfer the call. What could happen from here is that the second tier escalation turns into an opportunity for the customer to be offered an exception. Likely, what happened, is that new information surfaced that changed the situation enough to warrant a different behavior be expressed.

In life the same sort of situation happens: We change our behaviors based on new information made available to us. We take in new information, process it and (perhaps) do a risk-reward assessment. Based on our interpretation of the new information we will change our behavior or personality, thus changing how we interact with our environment.

Again: New information changes our behaviors. It can, therefore, affect our personality. Our behaviors also shape our environment. Information that changes, however, isn’t always something that is welcome to the recipient. Often, information that conflicts with that which we believe in any degree is resisted. Information that reinforces is more easily accepted. In order to get the most benefit from new information one must be receptive of it and not outright resist it based on our prejudices and biases.

Monkey Mondays

Not all monkeys are good. There is an evil one out there.

Life Lessons from Battlemaster

3. Read the instructions. Yes, there are arguably multiple sources for “instructions” for real life…but they do exist, myriad forms as they may be. Stephen Covey, in his landmark piece Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, poses an axiom to sharpen the saw or to sharpen the axe. Long story short, essentially: Learning what you need to know before you do it—Reading the instructions—is extremely important.

Battlemaster: Life Lessons

I have long held the belief that Battlemaster is not just a part of a person’s life, but it is a way of life. Within itself, this game can teach a person many, if not all, of the things that what we can learn on our way through life. In and of itself, it is a macrocosm of what is, what was, and what could be of a person’s life.

BattleMaster is a team-oriented browsergame merging strategy and roleplaying. It is set in a low-fantasy middle-ages world and players take the role of nobles and lords.

BattleMaster is a light-weight game that can be played alongside your other activities. Although you can delve deeply into it and spend more time on it, about 15 minutes per day are enough for regular play, and 5 will do if you are in a hurry.

BattleMaster is also a game under active development. New features are being added and gameplay and balance are constantly tweaked to improve the game further. You can talk directly to the developers on the mailing list.

So, without further ado, the first addition to this ongoing list:

1. Put simply, in the often-quoted words of the 17^TH century British poet: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.” The very fabric of the game is rooted deeply in the traditions of the middle ages: The “clans” or larger social team units of the game and therefore have their social rankings and caste systems. However, all play their respective roles in a larger well-oiled machine towards the end of making their respective realm work properly.

In society, as in Battlemaster, we are “wired” at our most fundamental levels to be part of a community. From the earliest stories of civilizations, this has been the rule, not the exception. Several studies have been done that prove that the more an individual places themselves in social situations, the more “emotional capital” that they deposit with others, thus increasing their chances at a betterment of their situation.

And, since I missed a post last evening I will throw in another:

2. The universe tends to unfold as it should. Good deeds, in enough frequency, do not go unnoticed; as does the opposite of this: Do bad things, and sooner or later they will catch up with you. In Battlemaster recognition often goes to the active noble that practices good judgment and contributes to the greater whole. For those that take away too much from it, however, they will—sooner or later—find themselves paying the price for their actions.

Another Funny

Monkey Mondays: Trunk Monkey

Most people, on a daily basis, go to work to earn just enough to support their lifestyle: What comes over and above that is for fun. I’ve heard the “going to work” part referred to as one’s “rice bowl” while the other I like to refer to as pie.

Don’t just work for the rice, strive for the pie!

Monkey Mondays: Code Monkey

The wonderful, the famous: Code Monkey!

It's a song. It's an affectionate term for a programmer. It's a cultural icon of monkey-loving geeks everywhere!

Thermodynamics and the Degradation of Society, Part 1

“A lost horizon in an ocean of flames.”
—Def Leppard, “Desert Song”

Remember back to when you were younger, playing with your friends. When you were in constant contact or communication with them your bonds strengthened and you grew closer. In a sense, you became second nature to each other. The same could, perhaps, be applied to your first girlfriend or boyfriend or such. On the other hand, when you were out of contact for enough time things had a tendency to decay: You were not so much as in-sync as you were before; what was second nature now becomes a glimmer of a sense of what once was. You grow out of touch, what synergies existed because of what you had now lack the true functionality of what could be.

Physics is the study of the relationship between matter and energy. Thermodynamics is the study of energetic interactions or the lack thereof. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, over time, a system will gradually grow more into disarray. When a system is being formed if there are any chaotic elements involved, those chaotic elements will only grow more prevalent throughout the life of that system. The only way to avoid complete systemic entropy is for the addition of energy to take place.

Energy, to the physicist, is anything ranging the continuum from heat to electricity; from the grand force of gravity to the strong nuclear force that holds the stuff that comprises us together. Energy, to you and I can be anything from effort to affection. Remarks that build confidence to those that seek malice. There are multiple types and factors involved with these kinds of energies that we use to interact with the world in everyday life. We could do something evolutionary: A task performed with a degree of competence, confidence, etc. We could, on the other hand, do something revolutionary: Not something that is a simple degree of effort and task-oriented, but seeks to be transformational to the end being sought. Additionally, this can be positive or negative. Things that are positive in nature will add positive energy to the system at hand; while negative things done will add to the chaos of the system in the same way that entropy seeks the complete disruption of it.

This Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems: A sense of the Galilean approach to physics shining through—simplification for the sake of simplification. The lives we live are rarely in a closed system unto themselves, rather they are open to the context of the environment surrounding it. Energy can be exchanged or events and situations otherwise influenced by the goings-on of the systems surrounding it. In other words, our lives are often directly influenced by our environment and indirectly influenced by those situations and environments around us. This is why context is always very important in, well, anything.

Now, for the bigger picture: Laziness and apathy are things that breed chaos. Have you ever wondered why Patton was such a great general? His famous adage that “something done now is better than something perfect tomorrow” goes to this end. By doing nothing in this moment and waiting for another for your plan or execution to be perfect you risk the system growing more entropic than you could handle or that could fit into your plan’s parameters.

Consider this a multi-part entry. More to follow.

Self-Efficacy

“Play the game—You know you can't quit until it's won,
Soldier on—Only you can do what must be done”
—John Parr, “St. Elmo’s Fire”

When you are confronted with a task, what is your paradigm: Do you view a potentially difficult task as something to avoid or something to be overcome? How you have learned and continue to learn new tasks is not solely done through the effects of your own actions: Instead, humans being the social creatures that they are, we learn through coding information that we see modeled in our everyday lives. New information has greatly become democratized in the world of today: Much more so than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Our ability to take in this information and apply it towards our success has not increased along with the availability of the information, however.

Social learning has pre-requisites: Many of them being tied closely to the communication model of sender-message-receiver with their associated barriers. While many environmental factors can cause a person to be less apt to take in new information en route to success, there is—as is nearly always the case—at least one thing able to overcome any barrier to success.

Mental states are a vital part of the learning process: Intrinsic factors such as self-motivation, self-discipline, and a sense of—you guessed it—self efficacy all contribute to a person being in the proper paradigm to take away ample return from their learning activities.

Adults, for the most part, are experiential learners: We learn with a kinesthetic approach as opposed to visual or auditory. In most adults this not only contributes to the usefulness of a skill set, it also helps with retention and continued motivation: When you are successful at something, your proclivity at being successful increases: Success begets success.

Success is all about the behaviors that we have and how they converge with our environment. The relationship between individual, behavior, and environment are all intertwined in an interdependent yet causal interaction with one another: Each can have a bearing on any of the others in the triad. The individual can affect the behavior can affect the environment can affect the individual or the environment can affect the behavior or any other combination therein, for example.

The trick is to take charge and make the individual have more bearing on all else instead of allowing the individual to be controlled by all else.

So, the next time you see that task that you’ve been dreading think of it in terms of personal growth and having a high amount of internal drive with the end in sight.

Relationships

“He said look behind your own soul And the person that you’ll see
Just might remind you of me”

—Collin Raye, “Not That Different”

Sometimes the bonds that tie people together and simultaneously separate them aren’t that much at all. While logic dictates the metrics of our relationships, emotions will offer an additional valuation or devaluation to the mix; said another way: We may size a person up…but our hearts determine the risk we’re willing to take.

Look back over the years at interpersonal relationships you’ve had with others: Friends, acquaintances, loved ones, so on and so forth. What has made them tick? Which things made stronger the bonds of friendship and love or otherwise weakened the ties that bind us together?

I travel much for my work. This allows me to listen to many podcasts and music, and to do much thinking. Often a particular song or notion will bring to forefront a thought of the past: A person, a feeling, an episodic extent of my past which lingers much like the pain of a broken heart. Lately my thoughts have been in many places ranging from my previous successes and failures to the relationships that I have had with people. By contrast, those that I have today are much fewer than I’ve had in the past, for one reason or another. They’ve said that a tree that moves much lacks deep roots: Perhaps my roots in my current community haven’t grown too deep. I made new acquaintances rarely, friends even less these days. This is more an issue with lack of opportunity, less lack of ability.

Psychologists have a chapter in text books about the struggles that one will face in different decades, different stages, of their life. In the twenties the grand struggle seems to be between acceptance and aversion. How does this fit in with the risk that a person will take?

Risk is a function weighed by metrics but decided by the heart…certainly this is some sort of oddity. Risk management is a science of numbers, not feelings. Feelings, also, can lead to irrational decisions: Impulsive and maladaptive. Impulsive decisions can rely on faulty intelligence received or bad assumptions made.

One of my current areas of study is decision-making theory: What is the “just the right” amount of intelligence and/or assumptions that need to be made in order to make a decision that is the right one? Diminishing returns are quickly realized when trying to receive perfect information to make the perfect decision, and the practical making of decisions “in the field” requires less time than is allowable for perceptually sufficient intelligence in order to make a sufficient decision. I feel that, in the end, conditioning will need to be done to the individual wanting to learn the method for expedient decision making because the most efficient way for it to work will be in an instinctual basis.

On another note, perhaps the person that doesn’t perceive risk properly, it could be said, likes to feel the pain of poor decisions or maladaptive practices in decision making. All other explanations escape me at this time.

A Kind of Magic

“One dream…one soul…one prize one goal
…One golden glance of what should be
Its a kind of magic
One shaft of light that shows the way, no mortal man can win this day
It’s a kind of magic”
—Queen, “A Kind of Magic”

In the ebb and flow of everyday life, people can often lose sight of the goal. A study I recall seeing some years back indicated that the most successful leaders in the business world believed that they had a distinct calling, a destined purpose, and that drove them to succeed in a world where others could not.

All my life, free choice aside, I have felt that I’ve a purpose about me: A destiny. Life is a story that unfolds at whichever pace that you allow it, complete with chapters and climaxes. If you are willing to take the time to step back from the everyday monotony that is life you may find the opportunity to read between the lines, in the absence of life just coming out and telling you things. Sometimes life will come right out and tell you something, sometimes it will be more subtle. Once upon a time, while on a tour in Honduras, I had a chaplain—a lieutenant colonel that was a Vietnam-era medic in the Special Forces—approach me (although he was my superior, we was very friendly and we had become good acquaintances) and inform me that I was destined for great things. At the ripe age of 18 I was partly naïve to the full depth of what he was saying, partly stupefied with the notion of what he was saying, and partly feeling happy because it affirmed something deep inside of me.

Have you ever asked yourself what kind of story your life will be? Could it be a tragedy, a love story, or an epic? Will stories be told about your ill exploits, or will people recall your good repute that you have with the community? One thing I’ve learned lately is that it is never too late in your life to make yours the story that you’ve always longed it would be. Focus and effort will beget competence, further begetting confidence in your abilities in shaping the environment around you. The trick: Work on those things that are directly within your influence and that area of influence will grow, given time.

Life is the content that fills the chapters of our lives. Some sentences are simple prose, some dialogue can be profound, and there may be plot twists that boggle the mind: But in the end it is the story that we have woven to fit our personality and how we interact with the world around us is ultimately the one that we’ve chosen to live, the one that we’ve approved to be published, and the one that we’ve written.

Let tomorrow be the first day of the rest of your life written however you’d like it.

Monkey Kick.

A monkey, a ball, and a tropical island. A fun little Flash game to help you pass the time by.