Editor’s Note
There were many stand-out insights that I drew from the wide-ranging interview between John Cutler and Shreyas Doshi that was published on July 13th, 2021, but the part of the interview that stood out most to me was how Shreyas effortlessly drew on frameworks he developed himself in each of his responses. Examples of these frameworks include “defaults at work”, the 4 stages of maturity as a manager, certainty theatrics, 5 domains of PM expertise (tactics, processes, principles, frameworks & mindset), analytics vs. creative intelligence, and many more.
One of the frameworks that most resonated with me was actually offered by John Cutler: Gap-thinking vs. Present-thinking. The framework was offered in the context of business management - “standard consulting is all about the gap. What’s the current thing? Exactly where do we need to go? How are we going to get across that particular gap?”, while present-thinking is about truly understanding what is going on with your business today. How are your customers using your product? Where are the points of leverage? Etc. - but this framework extends far beyond business affairs.
There is this beautiful book by Dorothy Cheney, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of the Social Mind, that starts out with an absolutely glorious summary, “any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons”. As I reflected on this passage, I felt a slightly amended statement could be written about humans, “any way you look at it, most of the problems and successes of humans can be expressed in two words: other humans”.
Our instinct to mimic the patterns of other humans lies at the secret to our success. Without other humans to mimic, we wouldn’t know how to tame fire, cook food, build shelter, find sources of clean water, defend ourselves, etc. Without other humans to cooperate with, we wouldn’t be able to create societies, enjoy art, build technologies, etc. But this very same instinct is also the source of most of our problems.
Through our models, we engage in gap thinking: What’s our current situation and where do we need to go? What kind of house do we want to move into? Vacation do we want to go on? Mate, we want to meet? The promotion we want to achieve? Similar to a business setting this type of gap-thinking isn’t an absolute negative. In fact it is a prerequisite for progress, but it also creates a mental model of dissatisfaction that most of our thinking lives inside.
I’ve been harping on this point for weeks, but from different angles because I think it is absolutely vital to understand how our social and cultural order emerges. And why that emergent order is intertwingled with our dissatisfaction. To repeat what I said above “any way you look at it, most of the problems and successes of humans can be expressed in two words: other humans”. And these problems and successes are only growing with the erasure of time and distance brought forth by the internet.
For most of human history, the models at our disposal were our family, the “village chief” and maybe a few other members of our tribe. As society has “advanced”, so have our models. Exploration, migration, cities, travel, television, the internet - each of these advancements have given us new models to mimic - new shoulders to stand on. But each of those advancements has also presented new gaps to fill. Our current era of Twitter VCs, influencers, and creators pulls us in a million different directions. Everywhere you look there are new models to mimic, new gaps to close. What’s a baboon to do?
As someone who succumbs to this type of gap thinking on an hourly basis, I’m probably the last person you should be listening to, but I do have some advice. An article came out some months ago about our online experiences and how, as we infinitely scroll through newsfeeds or swipe through stories, it is incumbent upon on all of us to ask ourselves “What is this?” “How does this work?” “Why is this there?” By understanding the purpose of each part of the online experience, the incentives for it being there, we can begin to free ourselves from it’s clutches and have a more authentic experience online.
This act of mindfulness, of asking “what is this?” “who are my models?””why are they models?”, is a form of present-thinking. By switching your mindset from gap-thinking to present-thinking, from dissatisfaction to curiosity, whether about the tools you use or the models you choose, you can begin to reframe your relationship with your online life.
Anyways, that is my fortune cookie for the week. The rest of this episode introduces Emma Jean-Thackray’s debut LP Yellow, explores how cool and wu-wei may be one and the same through the lens of Matthew McConaughey’s memoir Greenlights, and recommends some great articles to read this weekend. Finally, I end this episode with a selection of Black and White photographs from New York City. An aesthetic that I strangely love.
Thanks so much for reading and drop me a line if you'd go out for a glass of wine!
What I’m Listening To
I’ve been waiting for this album for 3 years now. In 2018, Emma Jean released Ley Lines - a true showcase of her talents. From the horns to the choir, to the drums, to the rest, everything was written, produced, laid down and mixed by her, ultimately resulting in one of my favorite records of the year.
Since then, she has released a slew of fire remixes, but still no full-length LP. And now with Yellow, we are finally blessed with a work that defies genre boundaries yet still holds deep roots in jazz. A cavalcade of brass and strings, choral segments, and ecstatic chants meld together joyously with elements of 70s jazz fusion, psychedelia, P-Funk, and Alice Coltrane-Esque spirituality to culminate in a sound that pushes the UK jazz scene’s renaissance of late to even greater possibilities.
However complex and ambitious the tracks, her voice, and words are at the center of them, unaffected and direct, so despite the destruction of the genre going on in the background, the foreground of the album renders itself like a singer-songwriter record.
On first listen, it is in fact this tension between soulful singing and Bitches Brew-style flourishes paired Freddie Hubbard-style modalism that lets this album stand out on its own. It is also this tension that makes Yellow’s place in my long-time rotation somewhat unknown. I tend to steer away from vocals in jazz, but many of the tracks on Yellow have a disco-like quality to them. A quality that screams “remix me”. So whether or not I listen to the full-length on repeat, I’m sure I’ll be hearing the songs on Yellow for a long time.
Examine whether Yellow should be in your rotation here.
What I’m Reading
The story of Butcher Ding comes from a book called Zhuangzi, an important work of Daoist philosophy, and one that is principally concerned with a value known as wu-wei, or effortless action.
In this story, Butcher Ding has been called upon to play his part in a traditional religious ceremony - an ox is to be sacrificed. Butcher Ding is up to the task, dismembering the massive animal with effortless grace. Ding’s body and blade move in such perfect harmony that a seemingly mundane task is turned into an artistic performance.
When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now—now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My senses and conscious awareness have shut down and my spiritual desires take me away. I follow the Heavenly pattern of the ox, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my motions to the fixed structure of the ox. In this way, I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
The result is that Butcher Ding is not so much cutting up the ox as releasing its constituent parts, letting the razor-sharp edge of his cleaver move through the spaces between the bones and ligaments without encountering the slightest resistance. The butcher describes it as such:
A skilled butcher has to change his cleaver once a year, because he cuts; an ordinary butcher has to change his cleaver once a month, because he hacks. As for me, I have been using this particular cleaver for ninetime years now, and have cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet its edge is still as sharp as when it first came off the whestone. Between the joints of the ox there is space, and the edge of the blade has no thickness; if you use that which has no thickness to pass through gaps where this is space, it’s no problem, there’s plenty of room to let you cleaver play. That’s why, after nineteen years, the edge of my blade looks like it just came from the whetstone.
Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey’s “unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction” is about moving through life as the Butcher’s cleaver moves through the ox. Most of us are ordinary butchers, hacking through life by imitating others’ desires. These desires often manifest themselves as red lights. A few of us are skilled butchers, climbing the ladder of life by acquiring skills and techniques. But what Butcher Ding and Matthew McConaughey have discovered is that there is a different way to live your life, the way of the Dao. Or as McConaughey describes it “if you know-how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights”.
“A green light is an affirmation, setting yourself up for success,” he says. “A greenlight can be as simple as putting your coffee in the coffee filter before you go to bed so tomorrow morning all you've got to do is push the button.”
In Trying Not To Try, Edward Slinderland describes people who are in wu-wei as having de (duh):
People who are in wu-wei have de typically translated as “virtue,” “power,” or “charismatic power.” de is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei. de comes in handy in a variety of ways. For rulers and others involved in political life, de has a powerful, seemingly magical effect on those around them, allowing them to spread political order in an instantaneous fashion. They don’t have to issue threats or offer rewards, because people simply want to obey them… If you have de, people like you, trust you, and are relaxed around you.
If this too sounds familiar, it might be because it sounds like precisely what David Foster Wallace described in what’s easily the best definition of leadership ever articulated.
We’re drawn to people who have de (duh), Slingerland argues, because we inherently trust the automatic, unconscious mind due to a simple fact from the psychology of trust — because spontaneity is hard to fake, we intuit that spontaneous people are authentic and thus trustworthy.
And it is this spontaneity, this effortless action, that manifests itself today as the word “cool”. Cool is neither pure non-conformism - many people do not conform to the norms of society and are sanctioned for it - nor pure excellence - many technically proficient individuals would hardly be thought of as cool, but it does manifest itself at the intersection of the two. It manifests itself in the confidence in one’s own ability to subvert the norms of the field. And we feel - and are attracted to - that confidence. The ability to subvert is the signal!
This confidence is on display throughout Greenlights. When describing how he ad-libbed his now infamous line of “alright, alright, alright” as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused (his first-ever acting role), McConaughey talks about how he just thought about the sweet car he was driving, how his passenger had a bag of fine herb and how they were passing by a squad of beautiful women and out came “alright, alright, alright”. If you’re still struggling to understand what being in wu-wei looks like, that anecdote is it - effortless spontaneity.
And so, as I continued to listen to Greenlights, I had a bit of an epiphany about cool. Although today we consider many of the coolest people in history to be at the top of their field (e.g. Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan), being at the top of your field is not a pre-requisite for being cool. Instead, cool is the confidence to be spontaneous. It is experienced in the confidence to subvert expectations. Cool is wu-wei. Cool is Greenlights.
Regardless of whether you are ready to take Matthew McConaughey on as a spiritual adviser, the audiobook is a great listen for a long road trip. Narrating the account in his now-famous Texas accent, Matthew McConaughey is an excellent storyteller taking the reader through his childhood, a misadventure in Australia as a teenager, his start in acting, a European motorcycle trip meant to help get him out of his head, wrestling African tribesmen along the Nile, taking peyote in the Amazon and the making of Dallas Buyers Club. In each of these stories, like a modern Zhuangzi, McConaughey passes down wisdom of how to find The Way.
Listen to Greenlights here.
Worth Your Time
Storytelling (Brains Podcast) - Jason Silva and Tim Urban of Wait But Why join the podcast for a discussion on storytelling, the difference between poetry and journalism, how powerful communicators let anyone feel emotional synchronicity, and how to strategically withhold information in order to keep a story going.
What defines a meme? (Smithsonian Magazine) - Author James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood; Chaos: Making a New Science) explores how information can behave like genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve.
On the same wavelength (Aeon) - Hayden Keeis, a philosopher researching issues in philosophy of mind and language, writes about how the urge to align our minds and emotions with those we care for, whether they are near or far, makes our species unique.
One Billion Machines (Saul Griffith) - What will it take to decarbonize? We need to replace one billion machines, most of them in our homes. This post offers a breakdown.
Wildfires in Californnia (II): some solutions (Nintil) - A generative list of potential solutions to the West’s devastating wildfire problems broken down into: early detection, prevention and reducing the spread of fire.
Fusion & Magic (Lapham’s Quarterly) - Technology has created marvels that become everyday. Could those marvels be enough to save us from climate change?
How the Harp Got Hip (New York Times) - For centuries the harp has been lodged in the domain of “serious” music — a niche instrument, perhaps dusted off for weddings and bottomless mimosa brunches. This article explores how the harp finally got hip.
A Culture That Can’t Be Contained… or Housed (Varyer) - Marquita K. Harris explores Black rollerskate culture.
Today’s Special
There is something about the way New York feels when it is captured on film that strongly resonates with me. Armed with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Jeff Rothstein has been chronicling New York City's streets for many decades. He considers himself an urban observer, capturing the city's environment, and most of all, those fleeting moments that will soon disappear into thin air. Below is a selection of some of my favorite Jeff Rothstein pics. You can find the rest of his work here.