Join The International League of Creative Minds!

Mountain Shores LogoA few weeks ago, during covert communications between the UK and Germany, The International League of Creative Minds was formed.

Up until now this information has been Classified and on a Need to Know Basis only. The mainstream media were not informed, nor were the Whitehouse.

Information will continue to be transmitted at irregular intervals via the iTunes and Stitcher frequency bandwave. The League highly recommends that you subscribe to one of these methods in order to receive audio transmissions via your mobile computing device.

All roads lead to our base of operations mountain shores (dot) net where you can begin your initiation into the League.

This is only the beginning.

Link: Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

In order to be more productive, I decided to relax and let Tony Schwarz write this article for me:

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

This is essential reading. Lots of studies pointing to the advantages of idleness, for example:

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

Go read the whole thing!

Life and Business Lessons from Colombian Street Vendors (3): What A Burger Flipper Taught Me About Expectations

What do you expect when you go to a fast-food joint?

A) A filled belly.
B) Quick service.
C) Low price.
D) A tasty meal.
E) All of the above.

We’ll find out in this post of my “Life and Business Lessons from Colombian Street Vendors” series!

Burgers for Dromologists

“You think McDonald’s is fast? Brace yourself. I’ll take you to the fastest hamburger joint in the world”, Omar told us. A friend and I were visiting him in his home town of Bucaramanga. We had spent the evening drinking and exploring the area. After much walking around, hunger had become an issue – and Omar knew where to take us.

In Colombia, fast food works a bit different than in the US. While chains like McDonald’s exist and are quite popular, they aren’t the first choice when hunger strikes. Instead, most people prefer to support their local micro business on the street. They are normally closer to your home, less expensive, and the quality is better. A place like that was exactly what Omar had in mind.

The hamburger stand was located near one of Bucaramanga’s uncountable parks. It was a comparatively dark corner, but there was still quite a bit of movement. As we got there, we saw several taxis drive by. The cabbies would exchange a few words with the employees, get their burgers, and move on. Apart from us, some two dozen people hung around, apparently enjoying their meals.

Once we were placing our orders with the cashier, a second employee immediately got busy in the background. We ordered three different menus, featuring several special requests. (“Make that double cheese and no onions.”) To our surprise, we hadn’t even reached for our wallets when the burgers were ready.

I’ll be free to admit that I’m a bit of a naive person at times. But I’m not that naive!

I know how this stuff works!

Woe betide you, astute burger flipper, if I encounter onions on my burger!

…

But the employees were just smiling knowingly, happy to prove me wrong: Not only had the chef managed to serve all our meals exactly as ordered, they were also neatly packed in aluminium foil. What’s more, the price was incredibly cheap and the size of the menu large enough to satisfy a truck driver after pulling an all-nighter.

Alas, where there’s light, there’s shadow.

While the Colombians might not be well-known for their cuisine, their street food has a certain fame among deep-fry connoisseurs and grease enthusiasts. Unfortunately, I’ve definitely had many better burgers in Colombia than the one in Bucaramanga. While it was passable, I probably wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t been a little drunk. (Ahem.)

So how does it come that the place still had so many regular customers?

The obvious reason is, of course, that we don’t expect a filled belly and quick service and a low price and an extremely tasty meal at the same time when we grab fast food. Indeed, quality isn’t the main consideration for a place that caters drunk partygoers and taxi drivers that are short on both time and money.

But, as obvious as this is, how often do we – as aspiring entrepreneurs – try to please everybody, to be 100% perfect in all areas?

And how often does this prevent us from actually starting to make an offer, to put our goods out there – because the task just seems too big! Or, if we get started, how often does it lead to mediocricy in all areas?

I think here lies the main lesson from the burger flipper: You cannot be a jack of all trades if you want to be perfect. But you don’t need to, either.

Lessons Learnt for Life and Business

  • Life is compromise: Most probably, you won’t get flawless and obliging service, great quality, and an extremely low price at the same time. As a customer, you wouldn’t expect this, either.
  • So it’s all about expectations: A customer who isn’t stupid will be aware of the compromise he’s making – no need to freak out.
  • There is a place in the world for “quick and dirty”. I’d rather not take it, but I can understand it: Some people don’t really care about quality. ((See also the first part of this series.)) They just want something that’s quick, inexpensive and “good enough”. (And they want to be sure there’s no onion on it if they don’t like onion.)
  • That said: If you underdeliver, your customer won’t return. He may not even pay his bill, and rightly so.
  • So decide on your most important areas, focus on them, and deliver!
  • One last thing: If you overdeliver on the expectations you set, you’re gold. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is exactly what the burger flipper in Bucaramanga did: He wasn’t just cheap and “good enough”, he was also friendly and extremely fast. As long as he continues to do that, he’ll always have a working business.

Thanks to Federico Racchi for the original image (from Uruguay, not Colombia!) shared under a CC-BY license. Cropped by me.

Link: Back online after a year without the internet

Here’s the story of a guy that leaves the internet for a year in order to solve all his problems:

“I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back.”

Surprisingly, it doesn’t work:

“As it turned out, a dozen letters a week could prove to be as overwhelming as a hundred emails a day. And that was the way it went in most aspects of my life. A good book took motivation to read, whether I had the internet as an alternative or not. Leaving the house to hang out with people took just as much courage as it ever did.

By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.”

This story is a great example of how a few blinded ideologists can distort our perception. Whether they sustain that the web is the ultimate evil or our last hope for salvation, we have to understand this: Their shrill voices are overrepresented in the media, simply because they are being quoted by anybody who needs an “expert” to support his case. Any case, really. But media exposure ≠ truth.

From a personal sovereignty perspective, this is a good lesson: We all should remember to do some good research before jumping to conclusions. Our own research, specifically. ((Also, a great reminder that life is seldom black-and-white. It’s the shades of grey that matter, not just in dubious bestselling book titles!))

[¶]

As for the web, I’d say it’s a task for each of us to learn how to use it wisely and in a self-directed manner. In recent months, I have made great experiences with blocking web access for several hours a day, especially in the morning. This allows me to focus on more important matters when starting the day.

Currently, I will normally be offline from 11pm to 11am, and then some hours during the day as well. SelfControl.app helps with this. As does living without a smartphone, as Milo correctly pointed out to me in Oslo.

Cutting it off altogether? No way! From the conclusions of the article quoted above:

But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.

Well said. And that’s by far the best reason to be here.

Paradoxes I Live By

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” –Niels Bohr

“Since the beginning of time, tricksters (the mythological origin of all clowns) have embraced life’s paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion — adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth.” –Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army

[¶]

David Foster Wallace had it right when he sustained that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”. Maybe this is because we normally prefer to talk about the weather or the latest gossip (a lack of practice), maybe because we get blinded by everything shiny and superficial (an lack of priorities), maybe it’s because we just don’t care enough (a lack of consciousness).

So when I tried to explain the whole point of The Friendly Anarchist redesign last year, I never felt content with the results. Even after struggling with the design and its implications for months, I had a hard time explaining the concept behind it. While it indeed was “an obvious, important reality” for me, I just couldn’t mold my thoughts and ideas into a coherent whole.

It was when the wonderful Mandy Steward asked me to participate in her #secretmessage project that this topic returned to my awareness – and that I finally understood what had stopped me last year. In recent months, I had gotten more and more attained to the idea that our existence, as such, is paradoxical. And that this isn’t a bad thing, but rather a platform from which we humans can operate.

So instead of trying to mold it all into a coherent whole, I decided to use that platform. To to scrap my perfectionism and take this opportunity to dive into the meaning of my work in a nonchalant and playful fashion. To start with Mandy’s art as a basis for what I’m trying to convey. And to take it from there. We’re bloggers, after all – which is probably the best position to be in when developing new ideas. ((The writing itself will be just as helpful as any input from the audience. Ignoring the chance to do so until now was probably quite stupid. I’m currently creating a plan on how to elaborate further on the preliminary statements shared in this post. The results shall be published on The Friendly Anarchist over a larger time span and will also result in a couple of books. It’s gonna be a long process, but by now I am sure that it’ll be more than worth it.))

Personal Sovereignty

Here’s the myth: Personal sovereignty means being completely autonomous, in need of no-one. According to this myth, all you require is a stronghold, a rifle and a large stock of canned ravioli. Good luck with that when an asteroid hits your neighborhood. Or even when a chemical plant upstream poisons “your” river or a coal-fired power station pollutes “your” air.

In reality, we’re interdependent on so many levels it seems ridiculous to even point it out. As Sartre noted, “man is free within a situation, not within a vacuum space”. Alasdair MacIntyre went a step further when he sustained that “it is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our flourishing.”

Even if you don’t agree with this, what’s the point of living alone in a cabin in the woods? First and foremost, personal sovereignty for me means getting to terms with the conditions we exist in and with the people around us, even if we don’t like all of them. And to enjoy the company and support of those we do like to the max.

So this is the first paradox: The Friendly Anarchist aims to help you understand and create a sovereign life while being well aware of the necessity (and beauty) of living and cooperating with others.

As an exercise, think about personal sovereignty as being able to get in control of the factors you can control, letting go of those you cannot control, and knowing the difference.

Interestingness!

The term interesting derives from the Latin inter-esse, that can be translated as being in between. It’s a brilliant shorthand for human existence: In anything we do, we exist in between.

Following Plato, philosophers have used the Greek term metaxy to describe something similar: Our lives happen neither entirely in time nor in eternity, but in a combination of the two; we’re only human beings in that we live, but will die at some point. Hence, we exist between life and death, between abundance and scarcity, between truth and deception, between order and chaos. If you have any doubts, just think about how even the greatest human order can be wiped out in seconds by a tiny tsunami or the asteroid I mentioned above.

If inter-estingness is the basis of our existence, it’s certainly a great basis for a blog. But there’s more to the term: Interest can be understood as the feeling that causes our attention to focus on a “thing”. An interest can also be something like a hobby, another worthy thing to write about. And then, there’s the notion of national interest and self-interest, where the topic of interestingness converges with that of personal sovereignty. And we’re still hardly scratching the surface of the topic here! ((For instance, indigenous tribes have pointed at how a standing human being connects the Earth with the skies, and the spiritual implications of this. They are not alone in this assessment: Our existence in-between immanence and transcendence is a topic that has fascinated philosophers for thousands of years.))

What this means for The Friendly Anarchist is that interestingness is a topic that’s best explored by looking at it from several angles. It also means that this blog still won’t be reduced to one single and specific niche. Instead, I’ll continue to operate happily in the in-between.

This is the second paradox: The Friendly Anarchist aims to be interesting (in the sense of entertaining) and to get you interested, but it is also well aware of the difficulties of analyzing our condition of living in between different modes of existence.

As an exercise, think about your own position in between different forces, influences and ideas. Enjoy the paradox. Most importantly, this isn’t just theory: Don’t keep your seatbelts fastened. Don’t remain seated. Get up and go out there. Live an interesting life!

(Un)Productivity

Idlers might be underrepresentated in the public sphere, but certainly not in the populace. The reason for this underrepresentaton is that idlers generally don’t care too much about fame and money. For most of them, seeking any of these two would simply mean too much work for too little reward. Idlers strive for their own definitions of success.

That said, they aren’t seeking idleness in order to avoid facing their lives. Idleness isn’t escapism, it is a “towards something”: “A movement to stop all movement. An invitation to fully be in the present moment. A moment to simply embrace life as it is.”

Most importantly, idlers don’t want to spend their lives doing exactly nothing. They merely want to avoid stupid work and mindless busy-ness. Real productivity, to large degree, means learning to choose wisely: On the one hand, we have to choose wisely in order to have enough time to relax. But on the other hand, remember this warning by philosopher Odo Marquard: “Even if you want to change just a few things, you have to leave most things untouched, or even the few things will fail that are indeed changeable.”

So this is the third paradox: The Friendly Anarchist is about the advantages of doing nothing, but it is also about the rewards of and the inner workings of mindful productivity.

As an exercise, start with being idle. Relax, take a deep breath, and think about whether a task at hand really is worth pursuing. If the answer is yes, learn to focus and to get it done as beautifully and as efficiently as possible.

[¶]

I started this post with a quote from David Foster Wallace, and I want to end it with one:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

The Friendly Anarchist is about the rewards and the wonders and the paradoxical beauty of these petty, unsexy ways.

About the Artwork

The artwork in this post is a #secretmessage created by the artist Mandy Steward aka Messy Canvas. If it stirs something in you, please use this 10% off coupon code in her Etsy store to let her create a personalized 5×5 secretmessage for you: FRIENDLYANARCHIST (valid until May 15).

Basically, Mandy will use words that you send to her and transform them into a colorful piece of art. Highly recommended!

Full disclosure: I got the illustration for free in exchange for sharing it with you here.