Every so often, a metaphor supremely descriptive of the current Zeitgeist unexpectedly bubbles up from divers sources all at once. The current one is the concept of the tipping point, popularized by a book of that title published in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."
Conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have applied the metaphor to the recent 2010 elections. A cogent article by James Gannon summarized this idea nicely in The American Spectator. It is probably only a matter of time before it is applied as well to the unexpectedly nascent Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.
There might be a larger scope to the concept, though. I've been giving a lot of thought to the broad sweep of change that has occurred in our society in the past few years. While not as sever as the Great Depression, we call it the Great Recession--but it is no more limited to economic machinations, as it is limited to the vagaries of political football.
I confess I haven't gotten my head around it yet. I can only speak to my poor singleton's perception of it. A few surrealistic motifs of my youth come to mind. The rapid, precipitous changes in social economic and political structures I call the Wave of Mutilation.
As to causes and mechanics of the tectonic changes we've seen, I can't help going back to a memory from graduate school, when in the engineering library I found a curiously titled book: Catastrophe Theory. In short, this is the study of how built structures fail. The most interesting thing I discovered about such failures is that almost always, the integrity of the structure holds within normal variances until stress brings it to a catastrophic and irreversible failure point.
In other words, things look peachy until they suddenly go pear-shaped.
Several years ago I replaced the idea of "resolutions" with "principles." So rather than saying I have this or that goal, which is often thwarted, and at the end of the year I feel even more worthless than the previous year, I generally commit to changing my daily or weekly habits and attitudes according to key guiding priciples, and then evaluate my progress at the end of the year. To Hell with New Year's resolutions, I say!
Now, this is not to say that goals aren't useful--but only if you break them down into discrete tasks and focus on executing the plan. This is because plans "gang aft aglay." In other words, I tend to measure success by performance on the whole process--how adaptive and resourceful was I?
Here were the guiding principles I set for 2010:
Stop following paths to nowhere and behaviors that don't meet your needs. For example, work toward getting a job in a new career path, whatever it may be, though it may be tempting to take a nice gig that you're comfortable with.
Identify essential or blocking tasks and follow through on each until done.
Focus on real experiences toward real goals in the real world.
I've cut way down on TV viewing. I've set limits on time online, and replaced it with more book reading and writing ON PAPER. Usually the low-tech approach is more rooted in the real world. Recently I've decided not walk around plugged into my MP3 player--it renders you essentially deaf, and puts you in what self-defense experts term "condition white," a lack of awareness that renders you vulnerable to accidents or assault.
So, what are my new priciples for 2011? In addition to the above, which are ongoing, I'm working toward these:
Plan weekly, prepare daily.
Learn how to think and act entrepreneurially; don't think like a consumer. That is, the mindset with which we're unremittingly programmed, that buying stuff will solve all our problems and make us feel better about ourselves.
With respect to writing projects, act rather than plan.
That last item merits some discussion. Blogging over the past two years has been much more rewarding than I expected. It has given me a chance to experiment with my ideas, and how to form content as well as the medium (design and images). Why does it work? For one thing, it's a low pressure situation--you write only little at a time--and over time you learn what works and what doesn't. It teaches another valuable lesson that you can take to other ventures--what I call the Amazon approach vs the Microsoft approach.
In the old days, software companies developed a product and tested it iteratively until they were reasonably certain that it worked. After remaining bugs were documented as "features," it was copied onto media such as floppy disk, or later, CD-ROM. This gave rise to phrases such as "burning the golden bits onto disk" as if the disk were some sacred calendar chiseled in stone.
But Microsoft still uses this model for products distrbuted via the Web. If the product or service isn't perfect, the entire process has to be re-evaluated until they can work out the problems, and usually several features are cut in order to make the deadline. Any improvements that developers come up with during this cycle must be pushed off until the next release. In other words, the product can only be as good as the original plan, which often goes back a few years. An apropos marketing slogan might be "Here's last year's technology today."
By comparison, if Amazon puts a widget on their website, and the widget isn't popular, or doesn't work as expected, or they think of something better the next day, they simply pull it or replace it. They absolutely do not worry about "publicly testing" a feature, because people expect the Web (like Life) to be constantly changing.
This was an immense revelation to me, and I've learned that I can effectively apply it to ongoing efforts in Life.
