It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture as our days get consumed with minutiae that matter little in the greater scheme of things. So it’s good on occasion to remind ourselves of who we are, and what we represent – by virtue of simply being.
Each one of us, by standing today on this planet, has won the DNA lottery. We have each beaten overwhelming odds to have made it this far. We (and our preceding family members stretching back many thousands of years across the generations) has somehow avoided destruction. And the DNA that is at our core (our own individual genetic operating system, if you will) has survived, in spite of the overwhelming odds. Despite the innumerable occasions that could have wiped us out in a flash.
It’s good to remember that fact. You’re here because you’re a survivor. And it’s your turn to carry the load for those we’ll never meet in the future – but to whom we are today more responsible than ever.
As Richard Dawkins wrote in ‘Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder’:
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
When I was younger, so much younger than today, I started to learn the piano. It was a journey that was to last many years, just under a decade in fact, with daily practice being punctuated by the weekly ‘moment-of-truth’ at the piano teacher’s house. Whilst I can’t remember the precise age it started, I can certainly remember the stage in my life when I stopped. It was when I, like many other teenage boys the world over, discovered that playing the drums and electric guitar brought the promise of hitherto unimaginable excitement into the realm of musical performance for the first time.
Now, by that stage I’d already done pretty much all of the exams that you could do (on piano and clarinet) without going down the realms of being seriously committed. I felt that I was at the stage that my qualifications were now starting to clearly exceed my level of talent – so it was time to move on. But as a result, for those who noticed, I was, in the eyes of others ‘musical ‘. Not in a talented or unusual way. Just in a ‘able to play music’ sort of way. And it’s fascinating to look back on some of those interactions because only afterwards did I see that they had built a lens through which others now viewed me. Which is a powerful form of self–reinforcing truth by itself. Like everything, it’s usually easier, if a few people think that you can do something, to convince yourself that at least one of them might be correct.
And yet, what happened? As soon as the certificate from the final exam had hit the postbox, the commitment faded into the rearview mirror. I promptly stopped playing the piano. And only today do I realise that I’d never really played it for fun. Not really. Because it turned out that fun was actually playing a guitar solo in a dingy pub before an (admittedly sparse but enthusiastic – occasionally) audience. Fun in my eyes at that stage couldn’t defined by playing music from hundreds of years before whilst sitting facing a wall…
So I stopped playing – completely. Sure, I would feel the occasional pangs of regret that I couldn’t now walk up to a piano on occasion and knock out any more than a couple of memorised tunes. To this day, I don’t know why those two (incomplete) pieces in particular had lodged themselves in the depths of my memory for some reason, the connection between brain and fingers somehow delicately scarred into some part of my subconscious being. But I never thought I would go back.
Until this year when, all of a sudden, I did. I don’t know what triggered it. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was simply the fact that I started seeing pianos everywhere. Perhaps it was the travelling regularly through an increasing number of cold, draughty train stations across the country in which the recent trend has been to locate a public piano. Free to use, in the centre of cavernous buildings with amazing acoustics, I became fascinated with them and what they represent. Partly because the only hurdle for people to having a go appears to be one of ego – either they have too little to believe they have the right to command the centre of attention – or too much, which tends to lead to them making so many high-profile mistakes that it highlights a level of tone deafness in their lives that far exceeds the sphere of musical pursuits…
Anyway, whatever the reason, I started again. Of course it became very clear very quickly precisely how much I could still do: very little. For all those years of sustained practice to hit Grade 8, my fingers now resent even vaguely being associated with a mind that paradoxically had lost none of its ability to still read music. And yet – it’s fun. In a way that it’s never been. With total freedom of what to do and when, I find myself chipping away like a beginner as and when I have a spare moment, for one reason – and one reason alone. Because it’s fun – and I’m intrigued to know what happens.
After all, how long does it take those neural pathways to rebuild? How many weeds have grown over those good old habits from the past? Has my mind simply steamrollered over all the musical signposts of the past and cemented over the routes that out as the wildest country trails, gradually became busy thoroughfares and evolved by hard daily graft into motorways – before returning today to being invisible, impassable paths? I suspect so – but I’m curious to find out.
There are many things I can say about this experience. But as I approach the end of 2018, almost a year after I first picked it up (or more accurately, sat down) once again, there is one clear lesson that sticks in my mind from this ongoing experience.
Learning for the sake of passing exams is useful but dangerous.
But learning as a byproduct of a curiosity based on enjoyment is exponentially more powerful.
These aren’t groundbreaking notions. It’s the same theme I banged on about when I gave the speech at the awards ceremony for a local secondary school a couple of months ago (the closest that I will get to giving a commencement speech I suspect). But as I go through life, I can’t avoid becoming more and more convinced by fact that curiosity far from killed the cat. Quite the opposite. It gave it a reason to live.
I’ve been doing quite a few interviews and podcasts recently so I thought I’d share the newest one from this week here. It took place on the long-running SAFE Crossroads Podcast. It’s almost impossible to give a comprehensive view of the SAFE Network but this is a pretty general high-level overview around what’s going on if you’re interested.
And if I had to pick another favourite one from the past few months, I think it’s probably the Crypto Quest podcast that I did with Richard Messitt a few months back.
After doing crypto talks (in particular) for almost five years now, it’s only recently that I’ve started doing more podcasts. Part of that is due to the growth of podcasting as a genre so there’s more opportunities to speak to a wider number of people than you can ever get in a single room. But I have to say I really enjoy it. I find it far more pressure than giving a talk where you tend to have a structure (in your head at least) for the stories you want to tell. Whereas with an interview, you’re very much at the mercy of the interviewer – which can be challenging or, when it works, amazing.
Definitely feels like a new skill to learn that’s worth sticking in at and practicing – and one that makes me grateful for those who’ve rashly decided that I have something sufficiently interesting to share. Of course, they may revisit that opinion after the interview itself…
I avoid politics as far as possible. Not because the issues are unimportant (they’re not). But simply because there’s not enough time. At least for me to evolve from consume into thinking and doing the things that I feel need to be done. But even I have been aware of the small matter of a confidence vote in our nation’s Prime Minister this evening.
Confidence – it’s a funny word. In that case, it’s when 37% of your own team don’t want you around. But here’s another sentence that uses the word:
“The fact that central banks continue to hold onto their gold, and have even started increasing their reserves, testifies to the confidence they have in their own currencies in the long term”
That’s from Saifedean Ammous‘ fantastic book ‘The Bitcoin Standard‘. It’s without doubt one of the best books I’ve read this year. But it’s jam-packed with so many excellent statements about our current financial system that it’s taking me ages to get on to writing a proper blog post about it. One day.
In the meantime, I’d just go out and buy it if I was you.
There’s a common saying: if you want something done, give it to a busy person. And in my experience, both personally and in working with others, it seems to be true. Partly it’s because the most successful folk tend to be busy and therefore more efficient (by necessity) at building systems to avoid dropping the many balls they’re juggling. It’s a skill they have to practice every day – and like anything else, practice makes perfect.
But perhaps more counterintuitively, there’s another reason. The more reliable you are in hitting your deadlines, the more trust other people have in you. If you consistently prove that you get sh*t done – you’re a do-er, not just a talker – the result is that you’re likely to get far more opportunities coming your way.
Are successful people ever not busy?
But it’s a fine line. Keep on piling on the work and you risk getting overburdened and burnout. And there’s a difference between achieving what you want and just a ton of things.
Alan Lightman once wrote a book called ‘Einstein’s Dream’. It’s a collection of fictional stories that might have been told by the young Einstein during his many spare hours during his early career working as a patent clerk. In one story, people live forever. They are split into the Nows (who constantly learn, act and do things, eager to pack in as much as possible) and the Laters (who avoid rushing into, and therefore doing, anything much at all, because they have all the time in the world – so why start today?).
If you think about the way that you’re living your life today: are you approaching it as a Now or a Later? Because the most expensive resource that any of us has – by a long, long way – is our time. Material possessions, money, whatever – everything else can be earned or recovered when lost. But we’re still a long long way from being able to earn back even a small amount of any time that we’ve wasted.
Of course, as individuals, each of us values different things. But most of us aren’t clear on precisely what we want. So in the drive for success, we fill up our time with ‘busy’ work or improving our productivity. That’s rarely the answer though.
First, as Stephen Covey once wrote:-
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster”.
But it’s actually far worse than that. Because time is limited. And taking on more of the wrong kind of work just means that with every passing day, you’re not only using up more of the most valuable resource that you will ever possess but you’re also losing the benefit of time spent compounding progress on the work that you should have been carrying out in the first place.
Most of us are delusional. We live life like we’ll be around forever. Whereas it’s probably far better to approach life with the opposite attitude – that it could all be gone in an instant. So you might choose to go ahead and pile on all the work in the world in pursuit of success. But you’d better be damn sure that it’s bringing you closer to the things that you’re actually looking for.
As Charles Darwin put it:-
““A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.”
I was out speaking about the SAFE Network at The Cryptograph Meetup at Strathclyde Uni in Glasgow tonight, which was followed by the obligatory trip to the pub where we all know the real conversation always takes place. It’s very much a crypto-focused group and always enjoyable to be surrounded with others who want to talk about crytocurrency and decentralisation (as opposed to a more permissioned/corporate/consultancy blockchain focus, for example). Partly because it reminds me of the good old days – but also because, I don’t think I’ve ever been to one of those meetups over the past five years that had people who focused on those sorts of issues that hasn’t left me with some food for thought.
And tonight was no exception. In fact, it quite literally has left me with some food…for thought. Albeit totally unrelated to crypto…
Somehow I missed this piece of internet folklore when it originally started doing the rounds over the past. But in summary, there is an experiment that people have been carrying out where you take two identical jars of newly cooked rice. You label one something along the lines of ‘Thank You Rice’ and the other ‘Stupid Rice’. And now you keep them in their jars, apart from each other and you, er, speak to them every day (at least once a day) for a period of twenty days. To one you give encouragement and generally positive vibes. To the other, you hurl dog’s abuse and generally unleash the worst verbal assault you can imagine. Each day. (I’ll let you guess which one’s which….)
Now if, you’re like me, your initial thought is probably – this sounds utterly crazy. But the outcome is supposedly even weirder. After 20 days, the Thank You Rice should remain fresh and fine. As for the Stupid Rice? It should be overrun by fungus.
So on the train back from Glasgow, I made the decision. Every rational part of my being is saying that this can’t possibly work – that there must either be some clear scientific reason for the consistency of test results (which have apparently been replicated hundreds of times around the globe) or perhaps it’s just attributed to a normal random distribution of results where those whose results are in line with the predicted outcome are incentivised by the internet to share their amazing results, whilst those for whom the experiment is a let-down are motivated to shut up and keep it quiet (perhaps wishing to avoid being seen as stupid for doing it in the first place).
But then I came to a far more important realisation. Which was: I’d already started to search the internet for evidence that could disprove it (or, as an outside chance, prove it with a supporting explanation). Yet surely the answer was right there? Instead of going for a quick fix, why not just carry out the experiment itself? Why do we always tend to rely on the shortcut of simply searching for evidence produced by others and trusting those results?
Sure, part of the reason is because instinct says this can’t have any truth to it. And yet, by writing it publicly on my blog and committing to set loose the full extremes of the dictionary at both samples (by happy coincidence I was making rice this evening to accompany a spectacularly spicy lentil and sweet potato curry that I’d made), there’s no way of hiding from the fact that I’m doing it. And just as importantly, if it all turns out to be utter nonsense, then this post will serve as a reminder and a lesson to me. Not sure precisely what of, mind you, but I’ll figure that out over time when it becomes clear…
I’ll check back in around the New Year and let you know how it went.
I came across and interesting (old! 2017) Tweetstorm today about productivity that’s making me think. It’s worthwhile reading the whole thing here.
Basically, make sure every group project finishes with a specific deliverable. Common sense, but from experience that are many projects that just kind of gradually fade away for one reason or another after they get almost completed.
1/ I'm increasingly convinced that THE most important thing in productivity is to end every cycle with a clear milestone or deliverable
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Master Switch’ by Tim Wu. It’s a history of information empires, covering radio, telephone, satellite television and the internet. One of the recurring themes is the constant evolution in each case between open and closed, centralised and decentralised systems – something that Wu calls ‘The Cycle’.
So it was interesting to read the ‘Four Horsemen of Centralisation’ by Ali Yahya of a16z Crypto today. It’s a good companion piece to Vitalik’s ‘The Meaning of Decentralization’ from last year. He focuses on the fact that in practice, decentralisation comes down to a fairly simple question: how large the number of actors with power over the Network is. The bigger that number is, the less likely corrupting power can be wielded over such centralised actors. But it’s not as simple as saying a big number must be good. It also requires parties to be independent of each other plus those who do exercise power being broadly representative of the different stakeholders across the Network as a whole.
But who could these powerbrokers be? Yahya breaks it down into four memorable categories:-
The Gatekeeper
Any party that controls access to the network (letting newcomers join as miners, validators or similar). This is a crucial requirement for any network that claims to be censorship-resistant and permissionless. But is it perceived or actual freedom? Proof-of-Work systems might see centralised hashing power or restricted access to the best mining chips. And Proof-of-Stake systems might see a concentration of validators. In either case, it’s clear that there’s a powerful difference between permissionless and equal opportunity for involvement.
The Enforcers
Never to be underestimated, the enforcers are crucial for ensuring that rules are followed. They do this by running the code and centralisation is inevitable if they aren’t acting independently in a way that is a constant check on the actions of the others.
The Architect
Who controls governance (on-chain, off-chain) – and are they truly representative of the wider community on that network?
The Profiteer
These might be early founders, perhaps with significant token holdings, thought-leaders – put simply, those in a position of influence over the other three classes of participants.
There’s often an overlap between the four in many crypto-networks at present but then again, the lines are often blurry when discussing decentralisation in any event. As Yahya writes in the post:
In the end, the question that matters when thinking about decentralization is the following: ‘Who exactly do you have to trust to believe that your interactions with a network will be fair?’ The vision that underlies the crypto movement suggests that the answer to this question should be “nobody”.
So it’s not a precise science (despite some attempts to move further in that direction). But it’s an important concept, if only to ensure that we are all broadly talking about the same topics when decentralisation comes up – and to ensure that people aren’t glossing over certain areas amongst the marketing hype.
Friday quote of the day to ponder comes from E.O. Wilson, an American biologist, theorist, naturalist and author:-
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”
“We’re a mixed up and, in many ways, still archaic species in transition.”
Bonus fact: Wilson is seen as the world’s leading scientific expert on ants – so now you’re safe if anyone ever forces you at gunpoint to name a notable myrmecologist…
Why would you ever take part in consumer DNA testing?
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to know as much as anyone about some of my ancestry. To dig out any to date unknown skeletons in the generational closet. To learn more about that South American bloodline…
The combination of genetic data with other personal information can lead to unwanted consequences. And that’s before you even start thinking about how one of these startups could possibly be better placed to defend itself from hacks of your genetic records when much larger companies are incapable of doing so.
It’s not too fantastic a jump to move from here towards a requirement for job interview DNA testing that are used to identify recruits with the propensity to develop in certain ways (which doesn’t feel a million miles away from being arrested for pre-crimesa la Minority Report)
