There’s something about using the word Second Brain that doesn’t jive with me fully though. It feels limiting in some way. To me, it’s more like you’re creating a Second Self or a Reflected Self that helps you reveal your True Self.
For now though, I’ll probably keep using Second Brain to describe this, as it has taken on a life of its own, become more and more know.
I’m realizing that going forward, Be Real Creative will become my business site, articulating the overarching vision of how I wish to simply help others by revealing their unique and authentic leadership of their identity through creativity. Even this falls into alignment, as I’ve always seen myself metaphorically as a Bard. But instead of telling heroic tales of others, I’m helping others to reveal the heroic (aka leadership) aspects of themselves on their own.
And Nollind Whachell, as this website entity, will become a living example of a web-based Second Brain.
The “Ladder of Inference”. I get it now in a whole new way. We typically envision it as something we climb up but it is also something we climb down as well. In fact, climbing down with it is its primary mode because it builds an mental environment (aka worldview) we can step down and immerse ourselves within.
But later, when we are trying to go beyond this worldview, we also need to learn to step out of it, breaking it down through creative destruction, so that we can rebuild another ladder that helps us immerse ourselves within something much, much deeper than what we’re seeing now.
Yesterday something happened that kind of woke me up to something that had been staring me in the face for the longest time but I was effectively blind to it because I was so immersed within it subjectively. In effect, until I stepped back from what I was so immersed within and looked at it objectively, I couldn’t see what I was actually doing.
You see for the longest time, I’ve been trying to align aspects of my life and bring them together. If you think about it in terms of trying to live your life creatively, it’s about avoiding making decisions where you’re thinking, I need to do this OR that. I must choose one OR the other. With creativity, you don’t have to do that. You can say, actually I can do this AND that.
What I’m talking about here isn’t multitasking or doing many different things in the your life at the same time, to the point that you become overloaded and exhausted. What I’m talking about here is aligning previously different aspects of your life into one thing that achieves them all at once, so that you simplify the complexity of your life, allowing you to live it more fully.
The aspects of my life that I’m trying to align are my past with my present. My past involves games, computers, the Web, and communities. My present is focused on creativity, social innovation, the Future of Work, allowing personal, organizational, and societal development and growth to occur.
Within the last month, I realized that play was the thing that linked my past to my present, as play was the cornerstone of the communities I helped build online around video games but play, in a much broader sense, is also the cornerstone of creativity, innovation, and The Future of Work.
But today, I realized this didn’t go far enough. Why? Because I still envisioned two divided aspects of my life. One focused on helping people with “Simplifying Technology” and the other “Clarifying Identity”. What I’m realizing today is that both can be achieved at once. In effect, one can “clarify their identity” by using “technology that simplifies” their life.
What I’m talking about here is what I’ve referred to in the past as my Memex, or more commonly called an external brain or Second Brain. For myself, it is PDF converted books and articles that I’ve read that I’ve highlighted progressively and annotated with my own thoughts. This allows me to then easily search them as personal knowledge database, easily finding and remember things that would be difficult to remember just using my own brain.
What I realized today though was that I was creating and using a second brain long before I even realized I was doing so. What I’m talking about is this website itself. It is a simpler version of a second brain. One perhaps not with the right structure to optimize it fully for such but one nevertheless. And if you think about it, it makes sense. This is why most people have noted time and again at how blogging has been highly effective in their development, be it with building relationships, their career, or both.
So what I’m getting at here is the answer to the question I’ve been asking myself for decades, “What work can I do that expresses myself fully, encapsulating my experiences, development, and knowledge of my entire life?” This is it. Best of all, the approach is profoundly simple and basic (i.e. setting up a website to express yourself) but the results from it are profoundly complex and rich (i.e. clarifying your identity, your passion, your purpose, etc), as it allows you to understand yourself at a deeper level than you could possibly imagine.
Even other things I’ve been working upon suddenly make sense within this newer context. For example, I’ve been racking my brain for years, trying to figure out what the next generation of a résumé would look like and function like. Well a Second Brain is it. It not only tells you who you are but where you’ve been and where you’re going. It relays the greatest questions of your life that are your “quests” you’re actively involved in (as projects).
Suddenly a lot of things makes sense to me now. I know what I must do. They are things that I’ve talked about doing in the past but wasn’t sure if they were the right things to do (as they would take a lot of work). Now I know they will be worth the effort and work involved.
In time, all will be revealed, emerging gracefully from within the present.
A while back, an emphasis of my life was articulating the importance of understanding how we evolve in stages of development and how creativity helps us transition & transform between these stages.
What’s becoming apparent to me now is articulating how our passion & purpose become quantifiable at a certain stage, allowing us to become much more fluid beings, able to flexibly adapt not just to a new way of working but a new way of living on a daily basis.
This is why I see so many people misinterpreting The Future of Work as just learning and transitioning to a new job. It’s not. Or you could say it is…but requiring the ability to do so on a daily basis, where you have no idea what your “job” will from moment to moment.
This is what it means when people say we are letting go of the rigidity in the past with regards to work and even learning…and why the capacity to “learn how to learn” will be essential within an unknown & uncertain world.
This is why the stability to live in such a rapidly changing, fluid world won’t come from new job skills so much as it will instead come from you “Connecting” up your entire life & finding a deep sense of meaning that will stabilize it intrinsically, rather than extrinsically.
Like a surfer mastering how to surf larger and larger waves, we will all need to find our “center” to be able to balance and align ourselves from within, so we can ride out & even enjoy the big waves of change rising before us, truly feeling alive doing so.
Wow! It appears that Sonos may be launching some additional speaker products later this year. One notable product appears to be a portable speaker that has both a Wifi speaker mode (connecting normally to a Sonos system) and a Bluetooth mode (for direct connection to any mobile device). The only product that I’ve seen close to this is a Libratone ZIPP 2 Speaker. That Sonos themselves are creating something similar is pretty amazing.
Update: The Sonos Move speaker has been released. Sounds great but for $499 in Canada, which is basically the same price as a Sonos Beam speaker, that’s way too expensive. I’d rather spend the money on another Sonos Beam, as they sound amazing.
WPTavern is reporting that Automattic has acquired Tumblr.
To say this is surprising is an understatement. The question of “Why?” comes up next. It seems obvious that Automattic is not doing this as a money making venture but more about trying to keep a passionate community alive, as the fans of Tumblr are definitely that.
The next thing that seems surprising is that Automattic will rebuild the backend using WordPress but maintain the front end functionality and appearance of it. While you’re at Automattic, why not bring the same microblogging functionality over to WordPress itself? This is something I’ve been wanting for a long time, basically the best aspects of both platforms combined together.
Post Formats, created long ago, were supposed to provide this but never took off. Many people said they didn’t see the need for them but obviously there is a huge user base out there who do love their simple functionality for microblogging. Still people today say we don’t need them because we have Gutenberg Blocks now but blocks don’t restyle the entire post to match the context of it (ie micropost vs long form post).
Article Embedding is another thing that Tumblr has that WordPress needs desperately across its entire platform to enable true microblogging. While WordPress does allow for the “embedding” of articles using the Embed Block, it is severely limited and doesn’t working universally with any site URL, which makes it pointless to even use. WordPress needs true article embedding built in its core, like what larger social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have, to seriously compete with them and make WordPress more than just a long form platform.
“Play, by definition, is self-controlled and self-directed, it is the self-directed aspect of play that gives it its educative power.”
In an ever increasingly and rapidly changing world, more and more of us are feeling like we have lost a sense of control of our lives. Peter Gray’s 2014 TED Talk reveals how children today are feeling the same way, primarily because of The Decline of Play. By reintegrating play back into our daily lives though, not only can children benefit from this, but I believe we all can. We just need to redefine play in a much bigger context, just as we are redefining working and learning within a larger context as well.
Peter begins by recognizing the fundamental nature of play and how integral it is to our lives.
From a religious perspective, we might say that play is God’s gift that makes life on Earth worthwhile.
Now, here’s the sad news, here’s really what I am here to talk about. Over the last 50 to 60 years, we have been gradually taking that gift away. Over this period of time, there has been a continuous erosion in children’s freedom and opportunity to play, to really play, to play freely.
And he reveals how an essential aspect of play for learning is its self-directed nature, which mirrors how autonomy is seen as an essential aspect of The Future of Work.
Play, by definition, is self-controlled and self-directed, it’s the self-directed aspect of play that gives it its educative power.
More importantly though, Peter reveals how critical this is in creating a sense of control of one’s life, rather than feeling tossed around uncontrollably by circumstances which can often lead to anxiety and depression.
We’ve also seen a decline of the young people’s sense that they have control over their own lives. There is a questionnaire called the internal-external locus of control scale. There is a version of this for children, as well as for adults. It’s been given since about 1960. Ever since it’s been given, we have seen a decline, a continuous decline, in children’s and young adults’ sense that they have control over their own lives. They have more and more of a sense that their lives are controlled by fate, by circumstance, by other people’s decisions.
Now this is significant in terms of the relationship between anxiety and depression because one thing clinical psychologists know very well is that not having an internal sense of control sets you up for anxiety and depression.
Most importantly of all though, in learning to take control of our lives, we’re learning to be creative and innovative, not only solving our own problems but also learning to be empathetic in seeing other points of view.
Play is where children learn that they are in control of their life, it’s really the only place they are in control of their own life. When we take that away, we don’t give them the chance to learn how to control their own life.
Play is where they learn to solve their own problems and learn therefore that the world is not so scary after all. Play is where they experience joy and they learn the world is not so depressing after all.
Play is where they learn to get along with peers and see from others’ points of view, and practice empathy, and get over narcissism. Play is by definition creative and innovative.
In his closing comments, similar to how research on The Future of Work is revealing how we need to go beyond just “work, work work”, so too does Peter reveal how schooling needs to go beyond just “learning, learning, learning”, micromanaging every second of our free time towards it.
And perhaps, most of all, we need to be brave enough to stand up against the continuous clamor for more schooling. Our children don’t need more school. They need less school. Maybe they need better school, but they don’t need more school.
So it’s not so much about playing with LEGO bricks more often but rather playing, experimenting, and socialstructing our lives in a new way from the basic “building blocks” of it. In effect, we don’t have to play the existing “game”, becoming the things we’ve conventionally been told and expected to become. We can let go of these old, outdated beliefs and “play a new game”, one where we are more in direct control of our lives and our choices which resonates more clearly with our true selves, at which point our work becomes play, as Richard Barrett notes below.
You will know when you are operating from this level of consciousness because there will be nothing else to do. You will not want to “retire” because that would stop your life from having any meaning. There will be no division between work and the rest of your life. What you considered before as your work now becomes play.
Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching
Featured image by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash
I’ve collected a lot of articles over the years, annotated them immensely, added my own notes, and have written posts on what I’ve learnt from my research in the process.
Recently I’ve realized that I’ve collected these things as “proof”. So I can show people them and say, “See! My intuitions are real. I’m not crazy. I’m not just making stuff up. There’s something here. Don’t you see it!?”
More and more I’m beginning to see this larger pattern that is impeding both myself and others. A pattern that I’ve been seeing arising for more than five years.
It is a need to be trusted before one trusts oneself.
It is a need to be believed before one believes oneself.
Leadership isn’t about waiting for followers to trust and believe in you before you “courageously” lead them. It’s about courageously leading yourself, trusting yourself, and believing in yourself. Or put another way, it’s about “following (your) Self”, the real you deep within.
More and more I’ve read from other evolved travellers that there is no difference between this “inside & outside” of ourselves. When we align with who we truly are, this separation disappears.
More and more I’m realizing now that there is no separation between this “known & unknown” of ourselves as well. Rather there is an intentional blindness which creates this illusion of an unknown. Yet in truth we see ourselves. We always see our true selves.
I have seen my true self throughout the years. I feel I know it now. Yet my difficulty is not in finding the words, as I always believed, but in finding the courage to express my truth.
This is why I’ve had to walk around my truth peripherally, not focusing on it directly.
Like a wild animal within my wilderness, I approach it calmly, peripherally, so as to not to startle it. I don’t force my way towards it directly but wander around it, letting it get comfortable with me. Letting it come to me instead. Letting its curiousity naturally pull it.
In effect, instead of closing the space to reach my True Self, I broaden the space of my Self to invite it. Like the wide, opening expanse of a whole new world for it to play within and explore freely. The space beckons it, calls to it, creating a cause to explore.
I am what I’ve always been, am, and will be, regardless of what I thought I knew and what I thought I didn’t know. I see my entire life enfolded. It is not a question of making it happen but instead a simple act of just letting it happen.
Do I have the courage to let go and step out of my own way, opening & holding space for my True Self to naturally emerge, letting my entire enfolded life unfold?
I don’t need to “do” anything.
I just need to “be”.
Going beyond resumes, beyond jobs, and beyond bosses.
Back at the turn of the millennium in 2000, my life was having a turning point itself. I was working at a job that was definitely the peak experience of my conventional life so far, I was a Senior Web Developer for a local web firm whose clients included notable video game publishers like Sierra Studios, Activision, and Konami. I was effectively at the top of my world, a world which would come crashing down a year later, as the company I worked for imploded along with many others during the Dot.com Bomb period.
Fast forward to today and this experience, this ending, was a catalyst in waking me up to what was wrong with the way work worked. Yet almost two decades have past in which I’ve read books from The Cluetrain Manifesto to Reinventing Organizations and it feels like not much has changed locally where I live. In Vancouver, while there are probably more “socially aware and conscious” companies, they pretty much work internally like any other conventional company out there in the mainstream work world. In effect, the greatest social change and innovation needed today, the way companies work and operate internally, hasn’t changed at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I realize that transforming a company, just as much as transforming individuals, is a radically difficult thing to do. But here’s the thing that perplexes me. Why aren’t newer companies, newer startups, striving to let go of the past and step into the future, working in a new way from the very start of their inception, as it’s much easier to do with a new company. I mean Vancouver has hosted both the TED Talks and the BIL Conferences with tremendous success in the past. Lately though, this exuberant energy around changing the way work works feels like it has fizzled out. Again changing the world, even just changing your world, is a radically complex thing to do.
I’ve been pondering this for a while, wondering why this momentum seems to have disappeared and a single keyword keeps revealing itself to me. Immersion. Or lack there of. Simple put, we are not immersing ourselves within the New World we talk about and wish to live within because we are still immersing ourselves within the Old World. Therefore, no matter how much you wish to be within this New World, you will never get there if you don’t let go of and step out of the conventional Old World. What I’m talking about here specifically are the social artifacts that form the cornerstones of our Old World which symbolically represent the governing beliefs that hold it up.
Governing beliefs, which form the basis for other beliefs, are the most difficult to change, because they are tied to personal identity and feelings of self-worth. You can’t change your governing beliefs without changing yourself.
Dave Gray
Why we need to change these cornerstones is because they define our identity. So if we want to transform ourselves and our identity to work in new ways, we need to change these cornerstones. Think of them like the corners of a portal to our New World. Once we create them all and they can align and interact with one another, we can create a stable and sustainable portal to our New World, allowing us to not only step within it but fully stay within it.
The cornerstones of our Old World, our old identity, are evident once spoken. They are resumes, jobs, and bosses. Until these are replaced by new cornerstones, we won’t be able to fully step into this New World and into our new identities, allowing us to communicate and operate in a new way. They key thing to realize though is that in going beyond resumes, beyond jobs, and beyond bosses, our new cornerstones need to not only go beyond them in scope but also include and integrate them within this broader scope.
The whole emphasis here is that we are not discarding our old identity completely but are instead broadening and redefining it as a whole. In doing so, it gives us the creative capacity to handle greater complexity which is essential for this New World emerging. That said though, the experience still feels earth shattering. The you that you think is you has to die metaphorically, so the you that is truly you can be born (which mirrors Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey). But again by having these new cornerstones, we can create a solid stable footing and identity within this New World, so we can finally let go of the Old World.
Going beyond bosses to me is probably the easiest to articulate right now because it has been covered in so many books like Reinventing Organizations. Within an organizational capacity, leadership gets distributed collectively. So it doesn’t go away but instead transforms into something more. But that said, the greatest challenge here is how individuals deal with this. You have to intrinsically take leadership of your own life and create your own path, rather than extrinsically just fitting into society and waiting to be told what to do.
Going beyond jobs isn’t something covered as much. Many people think the Future of Work is new things within an old context (i.e. new types of jobs). It’s not. It’s old things within a new context. In effect, we need to work in radically different new ways, letting go of social artifacts that now limit us rather than empower us. Luckily books like Reinventing Organizations do touch upon this, loosely explaining how Teal organizations go beyond job titles and job descriptions.
To truly understand our contexts, we need to pull ourselves out of the classroom and immerse ourselves in the context, take action based on growing understanding of the context, and then learn even more as we reflect on the impact that we’ve achieved.
John Hagel
Going beyond resumes really isn’t covered by anyone, as far as my research has found. Yet to me this is a cornerstone that if changed could create a domino effect, helping to change the other ones more easily. That’s because right now, resumes and jobs form a bridge from which conventional work is achieved today, with a boss being the gatekeeper standing in the middle of that bridge. So if we can go beyond resumes, looking at the individual in a much greater, complex, and creative way, we have the opportunity to build a new bridge to this New World, one with much greater potential and possibilities for everyone.