Question Everything

Question Everything

If you are a Heretic, that is what you do right?

Some people are afraid that questioning destroys things. It doesn't destroy... It changes.

Questioning always changes things even if, after questioning you still agree with the original premise, you change it slightly. You cannot help but see the thing in question in a new light a new framework of thinking, because you questioned it.


And frameworks of thinking are contagious.

Your own Private Hackathon

Hacking: Disrupting things made for the masses so they work for the individual.

My company recently had a Hackathon which is a two day marathon of engineers working on their own ideas. I get excited about this because hacking seems to me to be an ideal Heretic's tool. 

Fluxite: Try it yourself: Find every day things made for the masses and in your mind break apart the function of the object and repurpose it for something that serves your heretical plans.

Hack an object

Example: Stapler as catapult

Hack a System

Example: This was created in PowerPoint

Hack a process:

Example: Modified GTD Process: Defer, Delete, Deconstruct, Delegate, Do

Hack an Idea:

Example: Socrates statement "All that I know is that I know nothing" can be reinterpreted to be seen as giving us the freedom to recreate our reality.

Programmers: Creating Something from Nothing

Open a text editor, the programmer's tool, and look at that wide open space. Programmers create something from nothingness. They start by setting up variables which are empty containers made of thin air, that can be filled and emptied again and again with whatever you want. They query the world in the form of "If this is the case, then do this, else do that." With this simple instruction they can branch off the well worn path into the deep dark of the forests of new ideas. they create loops that go around like a carousel, each time grabbing for a new ring. They build beast-like procedures that they feed parameters and milk for results. All this in the service of solving problems, and the singular goal of making things just a little bit better.

Learn to program: Codeacademy

Programming for kids: Scratch

Meaning Making: an Ongoing Practice

We ignore whatever we can't make meaning out of. If you want to really see what is around you in the world, you need to practice making more meaning. But don't go to where there is already meaning. Don't go to where things are known. Find the empty places. Allow yourself to be in the state of not knowing. That is where you will learn to make meaning. This is why you need to look at Dada Art and listen to experimental music and watch performance art. You need to walk around at dusk where you can't quite see where you are going. You need to create programming code or spreadsheets that don't solve any problem. You need to immerse yourself in a language you don't speak. The world is built again and again by meaning makers. You need to be one of them.

Dada at MoMA:

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2006/dada/index_f.html

Experimental Music at Epitonic

http://epitonic.com/#/genres/experimental/

10 Contemporary Performance Artists You Should Know

http://flavorwire.com/227915/10-contemporary-performance-artists-you-should-know

I Want to Dance in my Blindspots

I want to dance in my blindspots
and step off the edge of my established patterns.
I want to reach below the surface, see behind the mirror, 
and push on the boundaries of reason.
All the clever platitudes and warnings of impropriety
are like confetti to me now, swirling in the vacuum of mindless repetition.
I step out of the costume, the uniform the straightjacket
into the crisp air and bright light of ideas that question everything 
and the irreplaceable joy of knowing that you don't know.

Real Life Heretic: Marcin Jakubowski

Here is someone who is going to change the world by taking action on an idea and sharing the results. The idea is that people are not reliant on the current commercial distribution system for getting the tools they need to build sustainable communities. They can take advantage of the open source and maker culture to produce their own tools.



I first heard about this idea from Chase Randell who I wrote about in a previous post. What is interesting about these people is that they acted on their ideas first instead of waiting for permission OR an audience.

Redefining the Game

If you were to do your job perfectly, wouldn't you put yourself out of a job?

Let's play around with this idea. Get some friends to help you out. Go play a game of soccer (football) and pretend you are the Six Million Dollar Man. Each player will act as if they are in slow motion but you will go faster and make a goal. If you  keep this up, you will quickly end the game. There will be no point in playing again. Here you are the best player but there is no game to play. 

You can try to avert this problem by protecting the existence of your job.

Play the same game but this time refuse to  score a goal and simply run circles around the other players. It may seem like you can succeed this way but the game will end soon in this scenario as well.

If your job can't be to protect your job then maybe the goal is to continually redefine your job.

This time let's turn this into an Infinite Game called Abstractjamball (My Performance Art Troupe in the eighties did this prior to Watterson's Calvinball) Pass the ball from player to player and who ever has possession of the ball makes different rules.

What effect would continually redefining your job have. Scary? More scary than becoming irrelevant? What would it look like, how would you draw a new line around what you are responsible for and how would you transform the final product? Can you imagine doing this kind of transformation indefinitely?

Heretics Need to be Inspired to Action

It can be discouraging sometimes, being a heretic. It is the nature of the business. 

To stay on track you need to be inspired to action. There are people who will tell you that you are doing everything wrong and people who will tell you that everything is going to be great. What you really need is someone to tell you what you need to find in yourself to move forward and what is at stake. 

Here are some bloggers who do this regularly and some of their best articles on the subject.

Chris Brogan: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/start-your-own-whatever/

Julien Smith: http://inoveryourhead.net/the-12-phases-of-a-successful-project/

Umair Haque: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2013/01/how_to_have_a_year_that_matter.html

Chris Guillebeau: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3x5/changing-the-system/

Problems are...

Problems are conflicts between what you want and what you perceive. The solution is often to redefine them both.

Taking a Leap

In Stephen Downes' article about what you really need to learn, he covers predicting consequences of actions first. He uses the example of wanting to jump across a rock chasm. The culture of "The Secret" recommends visualizing success. That can be very helpful, however, you also need to visualize the consequences of failure and predict its probability. 

If I don't succeed in jumping the chasm, I will fall to my death. Given the consequences, it would be a good idea to get more info on the probability of failure. 

Can you jump the same distance on flat ground? You can use the Visor Trick (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080506011320AA85ldX) to measure the same distance on the flat ground to the side of you. Jump the distance a sufficient number of times. Now decide whether it's worth trying.

The opposite situation can also be examined. You want to go into the ocean in the Florida Keys but you are afraid of sharks. You imagine yourself in the water and the lifeguard signals that there is a shark and you see yourself simply getting out of the water. 

Just to be sure you look at the probability of shark attacks in the Florida Keys compared to traffic fatalities: 18 non-fatal attacks in over 100 years. 19 car fatalities in Monroe County (Florida Keys) in 2011.

Fluxite

Think of a time when you had a failure that you could have avoided if you had thought it through. Think of a time when you didn't do something you wanted to do because you assumed that it was likely to fail when it probably wasn't.

The Tack

When you are sailing against the wind, you pick a spot on the landscape to head for. That is not your final destination but you still focus on getting there. Then just when you are almost there and you know you can take advantage of the new angle of the wind, you change direction and head for a new point on the shore.

Solving a problem can work the same way. A good technique is to picture a solution and focus on achieving it. However you can't always know how that solution is going to work out. It is OK to change the picture when you get to a better vantage point. The technique still works even if you don't stick with one image. The solution evolves but the focus remains the same. In this way you can navigate to where you want to be.

Year One

It has been a year since Heretic's Toolbox began. It is a mysterious evolving and unpredictable thing. Thanks for being a part of it.

Problem Solving Time Traveller

We humans use our temporal lobe to time travel. We use our imagination to work backward through our memories or forward through our predictions. This is valuable for problem solving. The more we understand our memories, the better predictions we make. The more we understand our desired future outcomes the better decisions we make in the present.

Think about a problem you have. Tell yourself the story of how it came about and see if you see underlying patterns. Your memory may not always be accurate, but your storytelling speaks to your present needs. Imagine a future where the problem is solved. What does it look like? Now step back from that future state to the present and think about the steps you will need to take to get there.

Driving Problems