Monthly Archives: February 2016

February 28, 2016 · 9:59 pm

Obstacles

The Obstacle is the Way

This week I decided to take a look back at The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday, which serves as a modern introduction to Stoic philosophy. Using a variety of famous figures from more recent history as well as more recent historical events, Holiday explains how we can use Stoic philosophy to deal with the obstacles that we encounter in our lives. One of the main sources of inspiration for the book is of course the famous Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations. On dealing with obstacles, Marcus said in Meditations:

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it–turns it to its purpose, incorporates it into itself–so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

When nature encounters an obstacle it does not allow the obstacle to stop it, instead nature keeps pushing and working until it has found a way around, or through, the obstacle. This is perhaps best expressed through the metaphor of flowing water. When water encounters an obstacle, it does not stop, it eventually either finds a way around the obstacle, forces its way though it, or just drags the obstacle along with it, it does not allow the obstacle to stop it from proceeding for long. We should therefore attempt to be like the flowing water, not allowing obstacles to get in our way and simply just continue on in whatever course we can possibly follow.

In our own lives we will frequently encounter obstacles, and it is up to us to determine how we will face it, will be give up at the first sign of difficulty, or rise to the challenge and find a way past. One of the main tenants of Stoicism is being grateful, or expressing gratitude, for everything that happens to us, regardless of whether we actually wanted it to happen or not. On this point Holiday said:

It’s a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lie within adversities. We know that in overcoming them, we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered. There is little reason to delay these feelings. To begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best, when we could have felt that in advance because it was inevitable.

Often after something bad has happened to us, when we reflect back on it later, after having gotten past our initial reactions to it, dealt with it as best we could, and gained some perspective, we can find that ultimately there is a positive takeaway from what happened. As we were forced to find a way to deal with what happened. In the moment we are generally so occupied dealing with what is going on that we cannot take a step back and look at the event in a larger context and see how it might benefit us, only hindsight can really show us how we were able to grow and adapt because of it. If we try to keep in mind as bad things are happening, that when it is all over, we will emerge as a better and stronger person, it can help to keep us going and give us the strength to face the challenge before us.

Early in The Obstacle is the Way Holiday quotes from Marcus Aurelius in Meditations in which Marcus gives a concise explanation of how it is that we deal with, and benefit from obstacles when he says:

Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.
The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.

When faced with an obstacle we are forced to adapt, obviously we cannot continue in the direction that we were going and must change our approach. When we think that something has stopped us from proceeding, it really has not, if we are determined, we can continue on, it may just takes us longer to get where we were going now, as we have to find an alternate course.

Life is nothing but a continuing series of obstacles, each time we think that we have made it past and are in the clear, another one arises to block our path, or as Holiday put it towards the end of The Obstacle is the Way:

One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles.
On the contrary, the more you accomplish, the more things will stand in your way. There are always more obstacles, bigger challenges. You’re always fighting uphill. Get used to it and train accordingly.

After we have faced an obstacle and have grown and adapted from the challenge, instead of getting easier, things will tend to only get harder. As we have proven ourselves facing smaller obstacles, we will be presented with greater challenges, which will only have more, and larger obstacles for us to face. This is good for us, as the obstacles help to keep us busy and our life remains interesting. As frustrating and discouraging as it can be at times as we struggle to surmount the obstacle in front of us, consider how boring life would be if we were never challenged.

There will always be obstacles in life, that we cannot control, what we can control is our reaction to the obstacles that life presents us. Do we get frustrated and complain and ask why life is being so unfair to us, or do we take on the obstacle and find a way past it, and use it as an opportunity to grow. We will never reach the end of the obstacles, as long as we continue living, all that we can do, is accept that we will encounter obstacles along the way, and attempt to prepare ourselves to handle them as they come along.

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February 21, 2016 · 10:02 pm

Music

The Song Machine

This week I decided to read something a bit different, The Song Machine by John Seabrook, which details how many of the most recent biggest hit songs came into being and the effects that changing technology has had on the music business. Early in the book Seabrook asks a question, that very rarely gets asked, because the answer seems like it should be obvious, he asks:

Who are the hit makers? They are enormously influential culture shapers–the Spielbergs and Lucases of our national headphones–and yet they are mostly anonymous. Directors of films are public figures, but the people behind pop songs remain in the shadows, taking aliases, by necessity if not by choice, in order to preserve the illusion that the singer is the author of the song.

It’s generally common knowledge that most major artists these days, at least in pop music, although other genres as well, do not write their own songs. What is less commonly known is that there are generally a small handful of people behind most of the biggest hits that dominate the charts.

While it is nice to picture an artist working away and carefully, painstakingly, crafting the lyrics to a song, the reality is quite a bit different. Lyrics, often by many different writers, are swapped between songs to find something that fits the music. There are even different specializations in which certain people write only specific parts of songs, such as verses or choruses. Although it is disappointing to shatter the illusion, it is also hard to argue with the results, at least in terms of producing hits.

As technology has shifted the importance of a hit single has only grown. Whereas previously a hit single was generally all that was needed to drive album sales, the shift to an iTunes model meant you no longer had to buy the album to get the single. Meaning artists need to put out singles more frequently to continue driving sales, further increasing the importance of hits. Now the shift towards steaming is causing a new shakeup in the music business, as people no longer even need to buy the hit single.

One of the main ways in which a song becomes a hit is through repetition. Pop stations typically play the same few songs in a heavy rotation, ensuring maximum exposure whenever we might happen to tune in. There is a biological reason why repetition works so well, and how upon subsequent listens, a song will typically grow on us. Seabrook quotes from another book to explain this:

But why does hearing a song over and over again make us like it? In her 2014 book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, Elizabeth Margulis, who is the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, explores this topic. She explains, “When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” The songs in heavy rotation are “executing our volition after the fact.” The imagined participation encouraged by familiar music, she adds, is experienced by many people as highly pleasurable, since it mimics a kind of social communion.

This reason not only explains how a song gets to be a hit, but why we continue to want to hear the same older songs years or even decades later, beyond just for a sense of nostalgia. Beyond just entertainment, music has the power to bring back memories of good times we have had, or to comfort us when we are upset. It’s often when we are sad or want to reminisce that we can turn to our old favorites and get a warm feeling as we commune with the music.

Music can also be highly integrated into our memory, just hearing a song can cause us to remember where we were or what we were doing when we first heard it and even after years without hearing a song we can often still recall the lyrics, without even trying, when we finally do hear it.

While thinking about music and the effects it can have on us, I was reminded of a famous music lover, Thomas Jefferson, and what his biographer, Jon Meacham had to say about his love of music in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power:

As always, music was Jefferson’s ally. To him singing or the playing of the violin or the pianoforte was more than entertainment, more than the means of passing the hours when time grew heavy. Music, rather, offered a window into a man’s soul–or into a woman’s.

Jefferson did not just enjoy listening to music, but also played it as well. At that time of course if one wanted to hear music frequently you either had to learn how to play it yourself, or know someone else that could, making it much more important and common for someone to be able to play at least one musical instrument.

At one point in the book, Meacham quotes some advice which Jefferson gave to his daughter, a beautiful statement, comparing each person that we might meet to a slightly flawed piece of music, which we should still value greatly, despite its, or their, flaws.

He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. “Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,” Jefferson wrote in July 1790. “All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.”

Music can deeply affect us, shaping our taste, style, even who we choose as our friends. Given the important role music can play in our lives, having an understanding of how it is made, and who is actually creating it can be interesting, although perhaps it’s better to just sit back and enjoy the music.

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February 14, 2016 · 9:52 pm

Memory

Moonwalking with Einstein

This week I read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, the story of how he went from a regular journalist, to U.S. Memory Champion in one year. Because who wouldn’t like to be able to remember more? In addition to the story of his journey to being champion, he also describes the methods which he used to train his memory to be able to recall things such as the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards or a string of random digits.

The book opens with a concise summary of the problems most of us face with our memories on a daily basis, which Foer put as:

Every day there seems to be more to remember: more names, more passwords, more appointments. With a memory like Ben Pridmore’s, I imagined, life would be quantitatively different–and better. Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. Most just goes in one ear and out the other. If the point of reading were simply to retain knowledge, it would probably be the single least efficient activity I engage in. I can spend a half dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about. All those facts and anecdotes, even the stuff interesting enough to be worth underlining, have a habit of briefly making an impression on me and then disappearing into who knows where. There are books on my shelf that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.

If it weren’t for the notes I’d underlined and copied down, I’d never be able to remember what I found interesting in a book, even just a few weeks after having read it. We spend so much time reading a book, knowing all along that we will soon forget most of what we have read, it can become quite frustrating at times, having such a constrained and limited memory.

Of course the main reason for reading the book was to find out how he’d managed to improve his memory so much. It ultimately comes down to being able to convert information into images, which can then be stored in a “memory palace.” The human brain is much better at remembering spaces and images than text or numbers, so by converting them into images, we can make them much easier to remember.

One quote that really struck me was in regards to the importance of memory to learning, beyond just the ability to recall facts. Foer said:

The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

When we first starting learning about a new subject it can be difficult, as there is so much that we don’t know, it can quickly become confusing. After time though, as we get past the beginning and work through the basics, things will tend to become easier as we make more connections between what we already know and what we are learning. The trick then, is to persevere through the early difficulties, and to acquire a foundation upon which to build.

I was reminded of what Danial Kahneman had to say about memory in Thinking, Fast and Slow. First he illustrated how our memory, or at least our knowledge that our memory will likely forget what we are currently seeing or doing can affect the way in which we live our lives. Kahneman said:

The frenetic picture taking of many tourists suggests that storing memories is often an important goal, which shapes both the plans for the vacation and the experience of it. The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed. Pictures may be useful to the remembering self–though we rarely look at them for very long, or as often as we expected, or even at all–but picture taking is not necessarily the best way for the tourist’s experiencing self to enjoy a view.

Often when we are out seeing the world or trying something new a good part of our attention is focused upon capturing and recording what we are doing and seeing, rather than focusing our full attention on actually enjoying and savoring the experience, all, at least partly, because we do not trust our memory to be able to adequately recall the moment later.

We are often so focused on how easily we forget things, that we fail to appreciate how good our memory often is and how critical it is to our ability to live our life. Kahneman reminds us of the role that memory plays in the acquisition of skills by saying:

Memory also holds the vast repertory of skills we have acquired in a lifetime of practice, which automatically produce adequate solutions to challenges as they arise, from walking around a large stone on the path to averting the incipient outburst of a customer. The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions. When these conditions are fulfilled, skill eventually develops, and the intuitive judgments and choices that quickly come to mind will mostly be accurate. All this is the work of System 1, which means it occurs automatically and fast. A marker of skilled performance is the ability to deal with vast amounts of information swiftly and efficiently.

If it weren’t for memory we would not be able to acquire even the most basic skills which allow us to function as human beings. It is through practicing our skills that we find the small changes which we must make in order to improve, which our memory then allows us to recall the next time we go to use that skill and to thereby increase our performance.

While we’ll likely never be able to recall everything we would like to be able to, there is one easy way in which we can attempt to better recall our life and that which we find worth trying to remember. By making a deliberate effort to focus on what we are doing, and being mindful of it, it makes it much more likely that we will be able to remember it later, because we can’t remember that which we don’t pay attention to.

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February 7, 2016 · 9:24 pm

Adventure

Shadow Divers

In one’s life there are many ways of obtaining a sense of joy, satisfaction and accomplishment, one of which is adventure. Adventures allow us to get away from the stresses of everyday life and do something both fun and challenging. They give us a real feeling of being alive. While contemplating the importance of adventure in one’s life I was reminded of some tales of real adventures I’d recently read. The first of which was Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson, the story of a quest to identify a sunken German U-Boat found off the coast of New Jersey, where no such boats were supposed to be.

The location of the wreck was originally given to Bill Nagle, one of the pioneers of wreck diving, who dove to depths nobody had been to before and was the first to explore many wrecks.

Nagle pushed deeper. Diving below 200 feet, he began doing things scientists didn’t fully understand, going places recreational divers had never been. When he penetrated a shipwreck at these depths, he was often among the first to see the vessel since it had gone down, the first to open the purser’s safe since it had been closed, the first to look at these men since they had been lost at sea. But this also meant that Nagle was on his own. He had no maps drawn by earlier divers. Had someone visited these wrecks before, he might have told Nagle, “Don’t brush against that outboard beam in the galley–the thing moved when I swam by, and the whole room might cave in and bury you if you do.” Nagle had to discover all this by himself. It is one thing, wreck divers will tell you, to slither in near-total darkness through a shipwreck’s twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of swirling silt and collapsing structure. It is another to do so without knowing that someone did it before you and lived.

With no guide to follow every dive was an adventure for Nagle, with the strong possibility that he would not come back up.

One of the divers Nagle brought with him to find out what was at a set of coordinates he was given, was John Chatterton. Chatterton had also been breaking ground in wreck diving, going deeper, and into seemingly inaccessible places before anyone else.

For the next three years, Chatterton owned the Doria. He penetrated into third class, second class, the first-class galley–all groundbreaking achievements that for years many had thought impossible. In a sport famous for hoarding, he gave away priceless Doria artifacts, asking fellow divers, “How many teacups does one guy need?” He gained a reputation as one of the best shipwreck divers on the East Coast; some said he might be among the best in the world. One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

Like Nagle, Chatterton pushed the limits of what seemed possible, and unlike many other wreck divers, did it not for the treasure he could get, but more for the adventure of going where no one else could.

Switching to the opposite end of the adventure spectrum, I also recently read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer an account of disaster at the top of Mount Everest. While attempting to reach the summit an unexpected storm came in, forcing many to fight their way back to camp, and ultimately killing five climbers.

Early in the book Krakauer gives a summary of the values of the climbing community. For them climbing is less about just getting to the top and more about the way in which one gets there, taking the most difficult paths.

And climbing provided a sense of community as well. To become a climber was to join a self-contained, rabidly idealistic society, largely unnoticed and surprisingly uncorrupted by the world at large. The culture of ascent was characterized by intense competition and undiluted machismo, but for the most part, its constituents were concerned with impressing only one another. Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. Nobody was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware.

Deliberately choosing to take the more challenging path results in a greater adventure as you face the greater challenges encountered along the way, and a greater sense of accomplishment when you do finally make it to the top. As we complete each adventurous task we set for ourselves, repeating the same feat over again can quickly become boring, so we must then look for new mountains to climb, or new ways of climbing the same mountain, to maintain the same sense of adventure.

The slopes of Everest did not lack for dreamers in the spring of 1996; the credentials of many who’d come to climb the mountain were as thin as mine, or thinner. When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world’s highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as thought half the population at Base Camp was clinically delusional. But perhaps this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.

For most, the only reason for wanting to climb Mount Everest, is simply because it’s there, it’s a challenge to be faced, and conquered. Just getting to the top is liable to be the greatest adventure of one’s lifetime, assuming, of course, that you also make it back down.

To face the biggest challenges in life, even when we know that the odds are against us is what makes for the greatest adventures. Although, for most people, simply doing something new and different is enough to qualify as an adventure, even if others have done it before us.

Just getting out of the house and exploring where we live could be considered an adventure. Or trying a new sport. There are opportunities everywhere to create our own adventures and really live our lives, we just need to look for them and see the potential in the areas that surround us.

While we can’t all necessarily dive deeper or climber higher, finding someway to squeeze a sense of adventure into your life is what makes life worth living. Adventures are an opportunity to learn about yourself, who you are, and what your limits are, and the chance to push yourself to, and beyond them.

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