Engineering

Something I’m experimenting with… consciously slowing my thoughts and speech — for a couple of reasons or occasions:

• In the late evening, close to bedtime I slow my speaking and slow my thinking to prepare for sleep. I don’t mean zoning out, I mean just slowing down thinking and speech — and thus breath as well. It also is nice and helpful to sit in front of a fire, or turn the lighting more yellow/red, or turn the lights off or down. Very relaxing and leads naturally into sleepiness.

• In the early morning before stuff kicks off, and at spots later in the day, slowing thinking helps to bring me back down from the stressy speed of full on work or life. Again, this is not stopping thinking or zoning out. Keep at it, but slow down. There’s a quality improvement here in thinking too, when done a bit more slowly. And it feels great.

New Normal (RadioLab podcast)

Stories around the possibility of change — temporary and permanent. Listen in the player below or see the website above.

Operant Conditioning Chamber aka Skinner Box (Wikipedia)

Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions.

Wikipedia

Roblox sounds awful for young kids (twitter thread by @Arumi_kai)

It appears that many all-ages games have dodgy content and programming. Not really surprising, but it is easy for parents to just assume that somebody is actually trying to moderate content. Doesn’t look like moderation is fit for purpose.

Wikipedia: Incompatible_Timesharing_System

Computer operating system built by MIT AI Lab – notable for interesting principles of openness, collaborative approach, development of hacker culture. For example; adding a available-to-anybody system command to crash the computer to help take away the temptation of hackers trying to find a way to crash the system. Led to emerging early programming hacker culture and principles, and ideas around free and open source software.

Zen and the art of Radiotelegraphy

Ebook by ham operator Carlo Consoli, IK0YGJ. I think this is the best description of why and how to learn to use Morse Code for telegraph and radio communications. Suggests meditation before periods of practice.

PiDP-8/I – Hardware emulation of digital PDP-8 including front panel

Includes a front panel with proper switches and blinking lights.

Wikipedia: Small is Beautiful

On recommendation of a dear friend; I’ve started reading this. This is a 1970s perspective on why capitalism doesn’t respect natural capital, seeing it as income to be spent.

RSA: Regenerative Futures

https://ethique.co.uk/blogs/regeneration/what-is-regenerative-business

Washington Post opinion: Americans are choosing to be alone. Here’s why we should reverse that.

Seems that people are spending more time along since the pandemic — but there was already a trend in that direction

Wikipedia: Spoon Theory

A way to describe how to budget personal energy — used in the context of managing chronic fatigue or long COVID.

I said I’d have a go at the How and Why of narrowboat life. This is a bit of that.

I discovered narrowboats when living in London in the 1990s. Wandering around Maida Vale and Camden, the canal is just there. I’ve always enjoyed, no, loved, anything to do with boats. I grew up sailing dinghies in the ocean, and seem to fall in love with any boat or yacht I can get my hands on.

Back a couple of years, I got to try out narrowboating for about six months over winter. And I loved it.

Narrowboating – living aboard, is a very Elemental way to live. By that I mean — close to the elements: Water, Air, Fire, Earth. Hot and cold are close. Off grid. A walk to the car if you even have one close. Birds: ducks, geese, swans everywhere. The canals are rich with life and often seem like nature corridors through urban places.

As a life, it is less safe (in the way that my home is afloat, and like any boat, could sink), and more engaged. It is less easy to hide in a nice warm house and binge Netflix. There’s more agency here. That sometimes looks like logistics (ie. carrying stuff from place to place) but that’s not so bad for somebody who works in front of a laptop. I need that physical stuff.

Now, let’s talk about Engineering. I’m an Engineer. I like making things and solving engineering problems: Electrics, mechanical stuff, batteries, engines, solar panels — all materials I like to work with. Boats are great for this stuff. There’s always something that needs work or a problem to solve.

Adventure. I need some adventure in my life. What’s around the next bend in the canal? Where will I stop for the night? Like hiking, but I’m taking my home with me. I like maps, mapping, finding places, exploring.

Yes, adventure, but not in an Indiana Jones kind of way. The pace of things here on the canals is slow. Narrowboats move slowly (about walking pace). Locks take time to fill and empty. Filling with water takes time. Opening and closing lock gates is a constant lesson in applying energy carefully. Moving a 57foot many-ton steel boat needs to be done with patience and care.

I like this life. It sure isn’t for everyone. For me, it is just right.

As truth lies bleeding on the floor
the greedy grasp evermore

I sense disquiet in my friends, in me:
What to believe? what to do?

Silence, disbelief, despair, and then:
Feet flat on the earth
Standing Strong in life
With hearty common sense
These are my truths for now:

• Most people mean well;
• Conspiracies are hard to organise; and even harder to keep secret
• Others may be careless, less often cruel
• I’d rather talk than turn away in silence
• I trust my instincts, my body, my heart

And here is my weakness:
I believe all will be well.
What if it isn’t this time?

I’ve been trying to write something; some sort of retrospective of 2021. I’m struggling with it. So when I work out what I want to say, I’ll put that here. In the meantime, here are some things to be getting on with – giving some hints on where my thinking has been so far:

• A podcast that really, really does a good job at looking at truth, surveillance capitalism, and democracy; and why Facebook is basically pretty evil: Facebook & Unheeded Advice (with Roger McNamee and Joyce Vance)
• A little and powerful book: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snider.

What if we put our own pleasure higher up the list – instead of at the end of the long days of work, or as a reward for toil? Julia Paulette Hollenbery asks, and elegantly and practically answers this in her new book “The Healing Power of Pleasure: Seven Medicines for Rediscovering the Innate Joy of Being”.

This is a poetic and kind book made from a life of learning and experience. It brings together science, spiritual tradition, embodiment and philosophy — many many references and ideas, into a pleasure and body-centered way of being.

It was a joyful read for me. As I read, I enjoyed feeling the connections come together — practices I knew, ideas I believed, ways I’d learned to help myself — converging into something bigger. Pleasure as a birthright, a force, a way into my body, a way into relationships, a way to see the world.

Julia starts with Mess — the way we are in the world around us, right now, then proceeds through the seven “medicines” we can use to shift ourselves and our world in the direction of pleasure. Each “medicine” can be seen as an antidote for the crazy disconnected way we all seem to live . There are practical exercises for each medicine to bring home the ideas, maybe to adopt as personal practices for bringing out the pleasure in life.

I like this book a lot. It champions our right to pleasure. It gives practical ways in. It does this in a gentle, inspiring and poetic way. It reminds me of all those wise things I ought to remember about how to enjoyably take care of me.

The Healing Power of Pleasure is available here or ask for it in your bookshop.

I moved to live on a narrowboat full time from late March 2021. That involved packing up a house-load of things — some had to go, some to a storage container, and a few things onto the boat.

Why a narrowboat? I’ve been wanting try the narrowboating life for 20 something years. I had a taste for about six months over the winter of 2019-2020 and even with the cold of winter and a beautiful but not ideal boat, I was hooked on this life. I’ll dig into the Why of Narrowboating in a separate note.

Sometimes things work out the way you want them to. I spent most of 2020 and early 2021 looking for the right boat. That mostly meant browsing Apollo Duck and the boat broker websites and falling (temporarily) in love with boats that sold to somebody else before I was prepared to buy. Narrowboats have become very popular during COVID times, prices are up and the supply of boats for sale was and continues to be very limited.

Finally ready to buy, the right boat showed up and as the barriers to owning her dropped away smoothly, I ended up falling in love with, and then actually buying the narrowboat Caparina from ABNB.

That’s the beginning of the story. I’ll write more of the Why and How in later posts.

Mediation. That’s a thing you do where you sit cross-legged, straighten your back, and clear your mind. Well yes, that’s the idea we start with.

I remember starting out meditating, and it was hard to see beyond that. Hidden behind that structure of sitting there was a real aim — this thing we do in meditation we want to happen in our daily lives. Over time new ideas are revealed… I can meditate while walking, I can meditate lying flat on my back on my bed, at the bus stop, on the bus.

That concentration of form and approach is needed at the beginning. Once we get it a bit, we can keep that awareness, mindfulness, and take it more into daily life. And this idea is neither radical nor that interesting — this is moving from conscious incompetence through conscious competence to unconscious competence.

Okay, so the point of writing this is to explain a bit where I’ve gone with coaching. The metaphor above holds true, it seems to me. I started out in that “let’s sit down and do an hours coaching” and I’m now much more in the “How do I take this coaching behaviour into my normal day job, where I’m a somewhat technical senior manager working with a lot of people?” kind of direction.

So what am I taking from my coaching into my day-to-day work? Some thoughts:

1. There are many opportunities for high-quality 1:1 talks with people, especially working virtually. We don’t have to try and find private spaces in a busy office. This helps.
2. Good open questions really matter. It is easy to get stuck in confirmatory questions – they are useful for building a shared idea, but don’t get to where people really are. Good questions are an invitation to get the full story, the full experience, not to just get something that confirms that we’re all “okay”. Good open questions take time and space. I have to be able to handle the answers, hold that space. Good senior management is all about holding the space anyway.
3. My position matters. In all my interactions, on a video call, in person, whatever, I need to hold you in high regard, I need to see you and want you to grow, become, succeed. Basically these are Carl Rogers’ Core Conditions: empathy, authenticity, unconditional positive regard. Straight from coaching.
4. I need to see and hold the bigger picture. Beyond the tasks, we are all beautifully flawed humans, doing what we can given what we’ve got. Business is a vast collaborative multi-player game. It is a team sport. I want to “win” and have fun doing it — with others. I try and share this view with others.