Contrast

Some thoughts on contrast:

In the world of fashion, I’m told it is a good rule to follow to wear one piece of clothing as the focus for your outfit. Make the focus piece obvious (colourful and/or patterned) and make all your other clothes darker and more plain in comparison. For example a brightly coloured, patterned shirt as the focus, and plain dark pants, jacket, and shoes to support. It is the contrast which makes it work. If it was all bright patterns, it would clash and likely not be pleasing to the eye. The same if it was all black. No contrast. Boring. Slightly morbid too!

The same thing happens in food. Eating a chocolate, washing it down with a sweet soda and an ice cream with syrup on top. It’s too much of a good thing. No contrast. Food manufacturers have figured out the perfect balance of salt, sugar, and fat to tease our senses. There needs to be a contrast in tastes, and in food types to satisfy truly.

The same with music and audio. A piece of music needs to have light and shade to work. A whole song of thrashing guitar solo after guitar solo is just too much and becomes very boring. Too much bass in the mix gives you a headache. Use light and shade to build up to a crescendo however, and it will raise the hairs on your neck.

Contrast is the way forward!

70% with control

I like to play squash. Probably the best advice I have been given is to only give 70% with each shot, and focus all that energy on cleanly hitting the ball. Do it properly at 70% rather than flying in and flailing around at 110% (which is my natural inclination!)

This is more than just a squash tactic. I am at my best when I am calmly dealing with what is in front of me. If I decide to go 110% and expend every ounce of energy in pursuit of one thing, i usually burn out pretty fast.

Life is a juggling act. Keep some energy in store. Keep your head and wits about you. Do things in the correct way.

Avoid inhuman work

Autopilots are inhuman. They take away all responsibility. All tension. This is great if you have to travel from A to B – a well defined path with a roadmap. Not so good if you have to build something great. Something that people need to relate to. Something that needs a response. That needs responsibility and effort.

Any great art comes with humanity built in. That means it has a tension built in. To be human is to be constantly in a state of tension. Light and shade. Contrast.

Think of any great story you have heard. The hero likely wasn’t all good. Similarly you could probably identify with the villain to an uncomfortable degree. If not, there is no tension and a boring lack of humanity.

Will it work out? Despite all the forces against us (think of gravity, atrophy, ageing) we can create wonderful art (think of blues music, Shakespeare, skyscrapers). But it will never happen without recognising the imperfect humanity in everyone. That should be step one.

Step two is turning off your phone and getting to work.

Quest love

I asked the owl in the woods how to lead a good life. He turned his head sideways, looked hard at my face and then said to find myself a quest. But what sort of quest? I asked. He held up seven feathers to me as he said this:

Overcome a monster. Pull the dragon out of the cave and stick your sword through its rotten heart.

Spin yourself some gold and grow your riches. Pull the levers of wealth in your favour to grow from nothing to luxuries beyond your dreams.

Discover a lost land. Leave your home and find another one somewhere far where the sky is a different colour.

Return a prodigal son. Come back home from the journey of a lifetime and see it with different eyes to the ones you left with.

Make people laugh. “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come”.

Make people cry. “To weep is to make less the depth of grief”.

Die a thousand times over and come back stronger than ever.

Chip away at the stone

It’s an old Aerosmith song – I’m pretty sure Steven Tyler is referring to wearing down a woman’s rebuttals, but I am using the phrase to refer to creativity and making something good.

There is no such thing as a fully formed masterpiece. It has to be worked on day in and day out over time. Some examples:

You can’t reap the true benefits from a healthy diet by merely throwing up after eating a Macdonalds. Or even by cutting down on the bad stuff for a week. It needs to be a sustained, long term effort to have any impact.

The Beatles honed their craft in Berlin for years before releasing a hit record.

Apple iterates on its software more times than I care to imagine.

Fear and desire

I can’t concentrate.

Irrational fears and desires are pushing at some primordial nerve. At any given time i want to:

eat
to sleep
to play computer games
to watch movies
to listen to music

But I also want/need to:

work
study
complete chores
spend time with my wife and children

How can i get rid of the noise and focus on the right thing at the right time? I have 2 suggestions today.

1 – Understand your personality type. I took a personality questionnaire the other day from understandmyself.com – it delved into my responses to certain questions, assessing me under 5 big personality traits:

Agreeableness: Compassion and Politeness
Conscientiousness: Industriousness and Orderliness
Extraversion: Enthusiasm and Assertiveness
Neuroticism: Withdrawal and Volatility
Openness to Experience: Openness and Intellect

I have extreme elements which make up my personality (as does anyone) and this makes me want certain things, find some things easier than others and generally behave in certain ways. Of note in my assessment – I am non-assertive, withdrawn, extremely open and agreeable by nature – so I have plenty to work on and my fears and desires stem in some way from my innate nature.

2 – Understand our culture of gratification and pleasure at the expense of long term benefits. The lazy, primal part of our brain is being taken advantage of by the tech in our lives. Structure your life around managing this desire (ie. downtime from the tech), and the signal can more easily be heard among the noise.

Leaving a corporate job

Soul sucking, boring, dull, dreary and full of people in strange suits? Difficult to break away? In my experience (2 years away from the corporate world) you need to have a few bases covered to successfully leave a corporate job, but it’s no panacea… stress and hard work remain a constant.

Firstly you need to have something to move to. Don’t just leave without a supplementary income. I built up a small business on the sidelines while I spent my days at the corporate office. It grew into something sustainable over 2 years to the point that I could focus on it full time.

Second, get rid of debt. My wife and I went overseas and built up capital in a stronger foreign currency to pay off everything in South Africa before leaving the corporate world. It was probably the best idea we ever had. Debt will drown the best laid plans and entrepreneurial dreams.

Third, be realistic and do it for the right reasons. Chasing one’s passions is different to building a financially sustainable business model. I would love to be a writer or a music producer, but it wasn’t a clear business path for me compared to running a (admittedly boring) risk assessment business. My point is – the life away from the corporate world is not without stress or hard work – and it is not filled with pleasurable activity all day – this is not the aim. The aim is freedom to plan your own day, to answer to yourself and to reap the benefits of hard work. Most pleasure seeking is still on the sidelines even if you leave the corporate life. What I can do now is spend valuable time with my children each morning and evening without the overhanging pressure from a relative stranger back at HQ.

It’s worth it, but work is work no matter who you work for.

Meditation – a.k.a spirituality for the non-spiritual

I never had any religion or spirituality growing up. I also never felt a lack of moral grounding or sense of wonder at the world. However, I now realise that the most useful thing religion and its rituals can give you are mindfulness and focus. I have never been a particularly focused or driven person. Rather, I have tended to obsess over pleasurable activities like sport, music, video games, drinking and travel. I have also been an anxious person for a long time. Now I am grown up, I need to take control. Enter meditation.

At the core of my meditation practice is bringing my mind back in focus and back to the body and the breathing. It is this active moving of the mind’s focus to what is happening here and now which I believe can be life-changing.

Breaking out of the ruts and grooves in the mind is vital for any change to happen. Meditation can help. Staying present is vital to relief from anxiety. Meditation can help.

Once you start practicing meditation, you begin to look forward to the routine and you begin to miss it when you skip a day.

It helps with such basic skills, but these are skills we need to practice with all the stimulation and distraction in the world today.

Trawling for peers

If I follow you on Twitter, I have been trawling through your followers and people you follow with a feverish obsession!

You see, I just re-joined twitter after a long break. Although @chimpwithcans was posting my blog posts automatically, I was not using the service actively. Now I have started actively following and posting, I am trying to find the best people to follow. Trying to find peers.

I am not interested in how many followers a person has, but I am interested in whether they are my type of person. This is hard to measure though. It involves experimentation, dedication to reading posts, trying out following people who I think may be of interest. Dropping those who are not.

I think it could be worth it. Finding a peer group and working with them, intentionally and on a regular basis, would be a great thing to get out of social media.

Good if…

Drinking is good if you can stop after a couple.

Listening to podcasts is good if you have set a time and a place for regularly listening to them.

Technology is good if you use it, rather than it using you.

Exercise is good if you have had enough sleep and food to carry you through.

Relationships are good if you can look after yourself.

The internet is good if you create as well as consume.