For a while now I have developed the ritual of TEDTuesday – taking time each Tuesday to watch and learn something on TED.com.
If you are new to TED.com – it is a platform for some of the most amazing explorers of knowledge and witnesses of humanity to share their knowledge, insights and experiences. Based on themed conferences and an annual general conference, TEDTalks are videos of public talks. I love TED for its purpose and for its diversity. If you have never watched a TEDTalk, I beg you – please – do so now!
So today I decided – over breakfast – to watch as many TEDTalks as I could during my breakfast time (about 30 minutes). I got out my Galaxy Note and launched the TED app and off I went. Without much thought about what I wanted to watch I just picked topics that vaguely interested me and something from Malcolm Gladwell – an author I really like learning from. So here goes…
#1 -Onora O’Neill: What we don’t understand about trust
[ted id=1829]
This talk seemed a little laboured, however Onora brought a lot of focus to the issue of trust and the misguided populism of some of the soundbytes that are regularly banded about by buzzwordists and politicians, for example ‘Gain trust’, ‘Rebuild trust’.
Trust is a big deal for me in my life and being worthy of the trust of people I am interested in having mutually positive relationships with is something I spend a lot of time and thought exploring. How do I communicate my trustworthiness to my wife, my kids , friends and my clients? Truth is, they each have their own set of operating rules to determine whether I have earned it.
I think Onora falls into the same trap of offering simple templates and more – though different – sound bytes. For example, she proposes that establishing trustworthiness is based on 3 things – ‘Competence, honesty and reliability’. It may do for certain people in certain contexts but not as a general rule. They are reasonable examples but not absolutes. My son who is nearly 5 years old might consider me trustworthy because I demonstrate sacrifice – that I forego other things to make time for him.
I enjoyed the talk but it was perfectly timed at 7 minutes – any more and I think she may have totally lost me. It left me with a lingering learning that asking people how you might earn their trust i.e. how you might be worthy of their trust – is the first activity one might do and then go from there.
My key learning: Trustworthiness is a more effective goal than trust. It is subjective and trying to understand what constitutes it in every relationship is a great place to start from.
#2 -Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory
[ted id=1826]
This impassioned and fascinating talk really opened my eyes and mind to the power of suggestibility – especially in when it is sustained and deliberate. The lessons Elizabeth shares and glimpses of what is possible throws up huge questions in my mind about the quality of our legal systems.
My imagination is pretty vivid and I often find myself questioning a memory that flashes in my head – did I dream it, imagine it or did it really happen? This is a conscious act. So far I have deliberately developed mental tools to cross validate my memories with other things to rule out whether that event was real or imagined. For example, I often ‘remember’ that I replied to someone’s email when in fact I haven’t. Typically I retrospect on this and find that I mentally composed the reply and did so visually – as though I typed it out. At some level, my brain registers this as a memory. Then I seek evidence (like checking my ‘Sent’ box to see whether it was right.
As a student of NLP and very keen on the way the mind works, I know how easy it is to affect someone’s behaviour through some pretty easy ‘tricks’ and although it is not something I do for ethical reasons, I know of practitioners that use these techniques in personal coaching work. The insight that the use of some of these techniques, like hypnosis and subliminal messaging, could tamper with people’s memories and unleash a chain of events that have lifelong consequences was very interesting.
It raises other questions in my mind – about film and fantasy work and advertising. Do they really understand the long term effects of such realism in film. I know there is research now into the effects of pornography on the brain and behaviour – how much of this effect is on memory? Perhaps certain content needs regulation – like dosage!
My key learning: Memory is far too open to suggestion to be reliable on its own. Even collectively it is dangerously unreliable (due to anchoring and suggestion). So finding evidence based thinking tools to cross validate it is both essential and offers a whole new world of potential innovation.
I like Malcolm – he is a fantastic story teller and I value his ability to get to the essence of something. Usually it is an essence no one else sees! Many ah-ha moments with his books.
Anyway, Malcolm retells the story of David vs Goliath really beautifully, taking us through the geography of the times and the geopolitical forces at play.
Then he shares his opinions – some backed up by various bits of research – about how David was really not an underdog and simply fought Goliath on his own terms. In the end all of it was circumstantial and personally I thought it was reasonable. For example, Goliath could have been suffering from acromegaly – which many people suffering from gigantism also tend to suffer. This could have caused him to be visually impaired and may have contributed to David’s victory.
My key learning: Aside from all the biblical blah blah, I took from the subtexts some really powerful messages about adversity and some of the challenges of competition and some lessons that I can directly apply to my startup journey. For example – focus on my strengths. Also to play by my rules – not the rules of my opponent or competition. Also, weirdly, in place of competition, collaborate. Work with the weakness of my partner for my gain. This is also something that resonates really strongly from my Aikido practice.
What have you learnt from these TED talks? I really would love to know and share. Go ahead, drop me a comment or tweet me your thoughts.
I have been blogging off and on for about nine or ten years and I seem to have accumulated quite a few posts in that time.
In the early days, I focused on human rights issues, military interventions and the games governments play. In recent times – with the Syrian crisis – I wondered how I might get some of my older but still very relevant posts out on my twitter timeline for my followers to read. More importantly, how to do this without flooding my timeline or creating more work for myself. More work is bad, mmmkay. I have 3 tools I want to share with you that made this problem go away and best of all are easy to use and free!
Tweetily – something to tweet old posts
So I searched the WordPress plugin world and found Tweetily by Flavio Martins (who you may know as the totally awesome customer experience guru). I don’t know whether Flavio actually wrote the plugin but it has his name on it. Anyway, I installed it and it worked great. With very little effort – less than 10 minutes – I was able to get all my old posts tweeted on a basic schedule – yay!
Basically you tell Tweetily which posts to exclude by category, the minimum age of posts to include and how often to tweet and away you go. It also has a nifty little feature that lets you prefix the tweets with some free flow text. This is the critical feature that makes this whole setup work.
Buffer – something to spread out your tweeting
But hang on – I also use the super-easy Buffer app to schedule my tweets, this could pose a problem. Buffer – for those not in the know – is a super-easy app that lets you schedule your tweets so that you don’t flood your timeline, but more importantly , you can optimise when you send tweets for maximum reach. Buffer also does Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and app.net.
I don’t really want another thing posting to Twitter – that might flood my timeline or need more management!
BufferDM – the bridge between Buffer and Tweetily
Then I remembered BufferDM – a happy little utility app I wrote to help me add to my buffer account by a twitter DM. Let me explain.
My ideas for tweets come to me in floods, before Buffer I just let that flood flow – not good! I pissed a few people off and they unfollowed me. That sort of tweet-diarrhea stinks.
Buffer made a huge difference for me, but it was still tedious to go to the website or even the mobile app. Typically I just use the Twitter for Mac client. So I wrote a little app that I could tweet a DM to and it would put it into my buffer on BufferApp. I didn’t need to use any other clients and the only decision I have to make was whether to prefix my tweet with a ‘d bufferdm’ or not – I could keep my flow without the flooding. Happy!!
Back to Tweetily. After a few days of using Tweetily I was a little dissatisfied with the timing conflicts of old blog posts and my other tweets from Buffer, but by getting Tweetily to tweet my post as a DM to BufferDM which then puts it nicely into my Buffer queue.
I did this simply by setting my prefix text to ‘d bufferdm’ in the Tweetily config.
Now Tweetily handles the figuring out of which old posts to tweet and Buffer does what it does best and sends them out in a very optimised way. BufferDM is the pipe that makes it all sing.
I am also noticing a generally increasing readership and a lot more conversations (that I love) on Twitter. When I have the data to prove this, I’ll share.
So if you have some old posts you want to tweet without killing your timeline, try this setup and let me know how it goes.
I meet many people who struggle with ideas for a startup – at least for one they would be ready to take a risk to explore.
Thankfully this is not a problem I have. There is no shortage of ideas nor of the capability to generate ideas. Neither do I have a huge aversion to risk – I try to fail cheaply and try to learn as fast as I can.
My biggest problem is finding customers. Not customers to buy a finished product that I have spent thousands of pounds and countless hours building – I don’t often get that far. What I struggle to find are early adopters to test the ideas on for real – meaning that they actually have the problem I am trying to solve and would be willing to pay for the solution.
Early customers may not stick with your product all the way through, but the early feedback they can give is invaluable – at least this is what I hope. Without early customers helping to validate my assumptions, my real risk aversion kicks in and I will stop working on the idea. The lack of feedback may, itself, be valuable feedback!
There may be lots of reasons why early customers are hard to find, but some reasons are more reasonable indicators of the viability of the idea than others. My main reason is fear of what I perceive selling to be, crossed with impatience.
My Definition of Selling (and marketing)
My operating definition of ‘selling’ is this:
Selling is the art of persuading someone to exchange something they have – that you want – for something you have.
Interestingly, my definition of ‘marketing’ is:
Marketing is the art of persuading someone to want what you have to sell.
In my mind, selling and marketing share the same process – persuasion- and differ only by goal.
To me customer development is a form of selling. One where I’m trying to persuade someone with valuable insight into how their business works and real world needs to exchange their insight, time and money with me for the chance to have those needs met through my development of a product/service. Once I ‘sell’ them on the idea – then I can do surveys, usability testing, A/B testing blah, blah, blah. But if they don’t ‘buy’ – I got nothing!
My Name is Mike and I’m Afraid of Selling
I love people, I love talking with people and listening. I love hearing about the problems they have and I have learnt to not jump in with solutions. However, when I think that what I need to do is ‘sell’, my brain goes into lockdown. I find every possible reason not to ‘sell’. I procrastinate, dive into distractions and otherwise avoid this activity.
My perception is that selling is a black art that I am unqualified to do and this ‘inferiority’ complex haunts me. This means I constantly second guess myself in a way I don’t do when I code or when I coach. It also means I over-analyse what possible response to my approaches will be (and overwhelmingly I conclude they will be negative, hostile or both). Inevitably I never do anything.
To make matters worse, the people I want to contact are busy people. They aren’t sitting around waiting for my call. So, often their responses are delayed and this plays into my fears.
Frankly I’m stuck at this point. I think I understand where my current problem lies. Once I can get to speak with a potential early customer, I’m fine. All my skills kick in and mostly I can persuade them to try what I am offering – if they have a glimmer of the problem I am trying to solve.
My problem – when I zoom into it, is in generating leads. Getting folk interested enough to get to speak with them. This is where the art is the blackest for me. This is where I need help.
Do I have to be good at the approach?
My gut answer is that early customers are key to building businesses – at least using a lean startup/customer development approach. So generating leads would seem a fundamental skill that every founder should have. So now, I am operating on the basis that I have to go from ‘crap’ to ‘good enough’.
When I have wanted to improve at things in the past, I have often hired someone with the skills I wanted to improve and I then paired with them doing some real work. It was slow for me and them, but the learning was incredible. It cut out a lot of the noise and the outcome was awesome.
That is what I intend to do this time. This worked for understanding SEO and learning Ruby on Rails. So I am exploring hiring someone to help with customer development who I can pair with. More on this soon – in the meantime if you know someone I should be talking to , ping me!
Do you have a fear of selling? I’d love to hear your experiences – maybe something you have learnt can help me, maybe vice versa. Either way – let’s not suffer in alone.
8am in my sleepy village of Pinos del Valle, nestled in the mountains overlooking the Lecrin Valley opposite the amazing Las Alpujarras in Andalusia, Spain.
I’m a solo founder. I’m working on the startups to the right —>
I work from home in Pinos del Valle in Andalusia, Spain. There are 2 bars and almost no other tech entrepreneurs and most of my time is spent online – coding, research, emailing, reading, twitter or customer development – pretty much all online.
Isolation Sucks!
I love many things about being a solo founder – having my ideas and running with them and the freedom that comes with only having my own feelings to contend with.
I hate the isolation I sometimes feel, not having people in the same situation as me to have conversations with, share ideas and otherwise be sociable.
Let’s Lounge!
Are you a solo founder or solo worker, freelancer, sole proprietor or generally work without the comfort of a team?
Do you feel the same sense of isolation? Let’s do something about it. Here is a little experiment to see if it makes things better.
I’ll set up a team room on Sqwiggle for 10 days – a lounge of sorts. In the lounge:
Video is always on – you’ll see everyone else.
You can set your mode to ‘Busy’ – you’ll still be seen but no one will disturb you.
We can talk to each other, chat and share stuff. We can talk about anything – tech/sport/politics/religion around as though we were around the coffee machine/water cooler/pub!
Generally get on with whatever we are doing.
Interested?
Fill out the form below and I’ll check you out. If you meet my very simple criteria, I’ll send you a free invite to the ‘lounge’. I’ll only be sending out 10 invites a day, so please let me know if you have any preferences on days. I will not share your email or other details with anyone else. Ever.
My simple criteria:
You should be an independent solo professional (startups, freelancer or some kind of sole proprietor). You’ll need to have a link to your startup, website or LinkedIn page that I can go check out.
Please tell me something about yourself – so we can have stuff to talk about. I’m not knowingly going to choose people who don’t want to be sociable!
I have been tip toeing around this in my head. I thought I knew why, but actually I think I’m as much a victim of my own preconceptions as anyone! So basically I’m zeroing what I know. Please help me understand.
So here is my question. I am saddened by this situation and angry too. Mostly I am curious.
Why are women paid less than their male counterparts doing the same work?
There is lots written on this here, here and here.
I want to understand it and then I want to help destroy the system that supports it. I have two daughters and the thought that they may be discriminated against because of their gender – or any reason really – boils my blood.
I rarely publish the feel-good emails that circulate amongst family members, but this one was a gem. Who doesn’t love cute baby chimps!?
A mother chimpanzee who lived in a Zoo died recently and one of the Zoo employees took her baby chimp home to care for it. It never crossed his mind that his dog, who had recently given birth would adopt the chimp and raise it with her pups. Judging by the look on her face at times, she is not quite sure why this particular offspring has hands to grab her with, but all the same, this strange little “pup” which has joined her litter has brought out in her – AND her real family – for all the world to see – a portrait of exactly what unconditional love is all about.
Even as you sit in judgement of my colour, my clothing, the way I walk, how I talk, of my tattoos and my piercings. I wonder.
Even as you deny my humanness and create for me a false history of menace and incivility from your dim view of something I said or didn’t say. I wonder.
I wonder why your world is so small when your mind is capable of endless curiosity
Even as you condemn me for loving someone just like me, or for not loving someone just like you. I wonder.
Even as you deny my freedoms when recognising them makes you no less free. I wonder.
Even as you commit crimes against my person, my name and against truth. I wonder.
I wonder what crime was committed against you to turn your heart so cold when it seeks only to dance in the beautiful warmth of fellowship.
I wonder who judged you the way you judge me. Who didn’t love you the way I want you to love me?
I wonder all these things and and I am sad.
I wrote this in a moment of deep empathy for all of those who are the victims of the judgement of others – from Oprah to emos. From muslims to orthodox jews.
I often get to work with teams trying to ‘do’ Scrum and after about 100+ teams, I can confidently say one fundamental issue comes up again and again as a key stumbling block to how effective these teams are. In this post I’ll tell you what it is and 5 steps to addressing it. The rest is up to you.
So the fundamental issue is this:
The Scrum team does not understand the nature and type of work they are doing and so are not self-organising around it effectively.
This post might help your team if you suffer any or all of the following symptoms.
You don’t have a product backlog
You have a product backlog full of much more than items adding direct value to the product
You have a Product Owner who is struggling to navigating the crap that found its way into their backlog
Your development team is screaming that they often do not have enough work to keep some of their members busy during a sprint
You are delaying sprint starts and/or extending sprints to absorb the impact of hidden work and compromised capability
Your team is having Sprint Zeros like they were 2-for-1 at the supermarket
You are doing analysis sprints, design sprints… and so on
If you have these problems here is what I suggest you do:
#1. Understand the work you are doing:
Specifically, understand the work in terms of time and value.
First and foremost, let’s look at value:
Direct value – work to implement features or fixes that people will pay for or have paid for. I group non-critical bugs and enhancements and such like under ‘fixes’.
Capability value – work to add things that increase your capability to deliver or remove/refactor the things that are reducing your capability to deliver.
That is it. If any work does not fall into either value type, it is waste – do not do it.
This product elaboration picture illustrates this a little better:
Direct value are the green and reddish-orange items (basically that stack is your product backlog on its side) and the capability value items are the things you know you did, that narrow ‘your development team capability’ aperture or the things you know you can do, that will widen it.
Next, consider time:
Past – this is usually work to improve capability value by addressing stuff you put on the never-never. This includes known hacks, fudges, crappy code you added that “TODO” on, shoddy design, smelly tests, no tests , all those outdated comments that everyone spends an hour wading through only to find they aren’t relevant, those manual tasks you thought you would only ever have to do that one time and then you actually do them several times a day and they are long and boring. Basically anything that affects your ability to sprint effectively. This is not an exhaustive list.
Present – the ‘READY’ items that your team comprehensively knows enough about to be confident enough to commit to deliver in a sprint. Deliver as in ‘DONE” – meeting a Definition of Done that your team and your Product Owner agree is a consistently achieved level of goodness. For example it meets the conditions of acceptance, it hasn’t broken any existing value , the code is clean and generally efficient etc.
Near Future – items from the backlog for upcoming sprints that you need to create knowledge for now – basically the next reddish-orange items. If you don’t know why you should be doing this, allow me to elucidate.
See the product elaboration picture above? Basically if you don’t do work on elaboration now, your team will arrive at a future sprint planning with big reddish-orange items that won’t fit. Except you will need to commit because your management will be screaming at you and you will be too chicken shit to say no. So you’ll pretend they are green and ‘ready’ and ‘commit’ to them knowing fully well there is little hope of them getting ‘DONE’. Of course you’ll try your best, you’ll work hard when you should have worked smart. You’ll cut corners and more than likely build crap and increase your tech debt., further reducing the capability of your team.
FYI: Typically most ‘past’ work affects capability and most ‘present’ and ‘near future’ work is around direct value. Also the Product Owner owns the Product Backlog and the development team owns the Capability list.
So now that you know what to look for, you’re ready for the next step.
#2. Make work visible
Now go gather work. People are clearly busy – raid the backlog, declare a ‘hidden work’ amnesty, collate it all and make it big and visible. I prefer using post-its in the first instance. Put it all on a big wall.
Bring stuff from the product backlog, get the programmers to ante up their secret side projects, encourage testers to confess all the work they end up doing that no one gives them any credit for. Ask the rest of the organisation what others are doing that you secretly depend on every sprint but no one acknowledges.
Take the view that any work that isn’t on the list doesn’t get done – simple as that.
Invite ideas for capability work (you might need to first talk about what capabilities you need though – so do that). It might be training or having a consultant in to give an injection of skills, it might be building up specific expert knowledge. Whatever it is, get it , write it down and make it visible.
None of the lists of items is locked down – that would be denying emergence and is a recipe for undoing your improvements. Resist the temptation to get Gestapo on it. Instead, consider just making it absolutely visible and develop a cadence of reviewing it regularly.
One thing though – when you have your capability value items list up – go round and make everyone swear on the life of something precious to them that they won’t knowingly add anything that constitutes any kind of debt without stopping the line and getting everyone to agree to it. That is not to say you are going never have any more, only that you all knowingly accept to do so.
With all the work visible and normalised – you’ve removed all the duplicates and everyone is clear what each post it represents, you can move on to the next step.
#3. Prioritise the work
The Product Owner should already have the backlog items prioritised by business value anyway – if not – they need to do that. Everyone can help with that, but ultimately it is their call. The immediate goal for this is to have a backlog is at least prioritised for the next 2 sprints. At this point, you need to make a clear distinction about what is ‘ready’ and what is ‘not ready’ for a sprint.
Next, prioritise the capability value items based on how much you all generally believe they might enhance your ability to deliver over time – the stuff that will speed it up now at the top and the less impactful stuff further down the list. Crappy code that rarely gets touched – whilst crappy – might hold little value for tackling now. But don’t worry, they are on the list and will get done.
So now, all the work is in an ordered state, you are ready for step 4 – making time to do it.
#4. Make time to do the work every sprint
Now you need to figure out how you’re going to spend the time to do each type of valuable work. I recommend you do some of each type every sprint. The basic idea is, every sprint, to do a combination of now work (ready items off the backlog), elaboration (non ready , near future items , again from the product backlog) and capability improvement work. FYI – only the ‘now’ work – ready items off the product backlog count as your sprint commitment.
Without this you are going to get screwed. One or both of the following things will happen:
You will run out of ready items to work on for later sprints and return to that place where your sprints are crap, nothing gets delivered, you work long hours just to create the knowledge you needed to have to even consider committing to anything.
You keep delaying the capabilities improvements until everyone would rather drink arsenic than touch the code and you are delivering far less that you ever did. Frustration and mistrust is growing and most likely your team is shrinking because people just got fed up and found a different job.
Without getting bogged down in numbers, I suggest you start with 70/20/10 and adapt. This means figure out the time you have for the sprint and then:
Spend 70% of it working on the items you committed to get DONE in the sprint. Clearly you will need to adjust your sprint commitment too – so DO NOT commit to items based on 100% of your time and then work like the clappers to get them done in 70% of the time. That is just nuts.
Spend 20% of it working on elaborating near future ‘not ready’ work (this covers every knowledge creating task that enables your team to be able to commit to doing the near future work in sprints like UX analysis, exploring test cases, reviewing with customers, tech spikes and all that kind of stuff).
Spend 10% of it working on the capability improvements. You might only get to start them – when you are in sprint planning try to find ways to dissect the large capability improvement items into things that you can complete in a sprint to minimise branching issues and gates in the code to separate large refactoring.
The fact of the matter is, with the type of work you have to, you have to invest to do it. You will end up paying one way or another.
#5. Retrospect
The preceding 4 steps are hard to do and sustain, but are essential. At your retrospectives remember to acknowledge that you got this far and celebrate too. Then seek ways to improve. Check your percentages – are they still working for you? Evaluate your capability now, are you getting the benefit you expected to get? How are people feeling about being more open with the work they previously had as covert ops?
Pay attention to what the ways the work is requiring you to self organise. Are you learning and amplifying that learning? Is everyone helping out the best way they can?
The larger the development team capability grows, that more strain on your Product Owner to make enough backlog to sustain the development team. Is it time to slow the elaboration? Or maybe the team needs to help by doing more.
Lots of ideas – but the key is to retrospect effectively. Please do so with care, respect and openness.
Great you got this far – well done! Now go do it for real and let me know how you get on.
Gratitude
I am profoundly grateful to all the teams I have worked with who been the experimental jets for this learning. Also all the wonderful agile practitioners who I have known and whose ideas have mingled with mine. The product elaboration funnel is inspired by the work of Jeff Patton– who rocks in so many ways. Please check out his site and say I said ‘Hi’.
Earlier today, I watched a Ted talk by Alain de Botton and one of the points he was making was that Western civilization has become more individualistic and this might have something to do with how we view the attribution and responsibility for ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Combining what Alain was exploring, in part, with my own long running musings yielded something profound for me. That is what I want to share with you.
FYI: This is not about religion. It is about the beliefs that we each operate on when we are on the edge – about to fall or to fly. When I mention Christians or Muslims I simply do so to describe the fundamental belief – not the structures of their religion. So chillax with the fatwas and threats of Hellish damnation.
Life is hard, it has always been and probably always will be. Hardships can be big and all-encompassing – something we face collectively like a meteor striking the Earth or a global epidemic. More typically, there are the personal hardships that we face as individuals or in small groups – friends, families etc.
Hardship could come from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis that bring hardship swiftly and on a mass scale. There are the hardships that we do to ourselves – wars, genocide, persecution of the different. They might be hardships as a result of the way we collectively choose to live – economic poverty, hunger, unemployment and so on. They also include personal hardships like depression , low self esteem and so on.
One of life’s primary sources of hardship is uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen and that scares us.
Whilst hardship is perpetual, it is also ever-changing. In the middle ages in the western world, ‘hard’ was plague and sanitation, peonage and deeply laborious work.
As we make advancements in medicine and technology, ‘hard’ again is redefined – at least for some of the world. We hear things like ‘first world problems’ – my phone battery only lasts a few hours, I have full fat milk in my latte when I asked for soya!
Hardships are relative in time and between people. Some things that were hard – like infant mortality in 1800s are much less a problem in the 2000s. Yet where you might consider a chipped nail to be ‘devastating’, another person’s ‘devastating’ is losing both their legs.
As we advance ways to make life easier, we seem to create new ways for life to be hard.
Even when we can explain what we previously could not, the wonder remains and is even more wondrous. The joy and wonder of life also operates across the grandest scales – like the endlessness of Space – to the smallest – like an ant being able to lift several times its own body weight. From the chaotic formation of new islands from volcanic activity in the Pacific to how, in an instant, smelling your favorite food from your childhood can transform sadness into delight.
The wonders of our natural world, of Space and the diversity all around us are truly breathtaking. How do we explain them? Our advances in knowledge and technology help us not only to seek answers to old questions, they help us discover new things to be wondrous and curious about. Yet more remains inexplicable.
Our timeless need
So in the middle of this mash-up of hardship and wonder is Homo sapiens – the human. However you believe we got here is irrelevant at this point. We are here.
The human is a sentient being. We are capable of perceiving and feeling things around us. We are generally well adapted to converting those perceptions into emotions and reacting accordingly.
Our ability to feel may also be the single biggest contributor to our timeless need.
Life’s hardships and wonder can generate such powerful emotions in each of us. We act on those emotions – we kiss, we kill , we flee , we fight and we sometimes do nothing. Each action generating more to be perceived and more emotions generated in us and in others. These emotions can be so powerful they could be life changing or life ending.
They can be so overwhelming that the person feels they cannot contain it, it is too much and it is greater than them. For example, imagine your entire family being wiped out by volcanic eruption, suddenly and violently. How do you cope with that? Or watching your loved ones systematically cataloged and slaughtered by other people who believe you not to be human. Even imagining it is almost impossible.
I remember seeing each of my children being born and the feeling is a little overwhelming.
I can explain how a child is conceived, how they grow in the womb of the mother and how gestation works. I understand the chemical reactions that occur to help that baby emerge into the world. Yet none of that prepared me for the feeling of being overpowered by love and humility as this little life was placed in my arms.
What would happen if, at that moment, that life was denied – how can any new parent even comprehend that?
There are things that are bigger than our ability to emotionally process them. Our timeless need is that, whether through hardship or wondrous joy, life provides things that we are powerless to comprehend but need to make some sense of, lest the emotion destroys us.
And this is where God comes in.
Explaining God
Before I go any further and to help us both understand what I am talking about, it is useful for me to define what the word ‘God’ means for me:
God is that non-human power that transcends everything around me and who sees all, knows all that ever was and ever will be. This power is also invested with justice against all that I consider unjust but am powerless to bring to account
And what are the properties of God?
God is all good because there is inexplicable goodness in life.
God is just and all-powerful because there is such senseless injustice in the world that we are emotionally overwhelmed by and yet are individually powerless to make ‘right’.
God is all-knowing because life is uncertain and implicitly we know there are things we cannot yet know – we just don’t know what we don’t know.
God is kind because there is unbelievable cruelty in life and it happens to us and the people we love.
God is fair because there is such inequality in life. There are natural variations in people’s circumstances that result in hardships. There the inequalities that result in the way we choose to live – hunger and poverty in the midst of such financial wealth. The ethnic and social caste systems that seek to institutionalize these variations.
In some religions, God is entirely the positive and to explain the negative, another deity is required – like Satan in Christianity. In others, both hardships and wonders are the faces of the same power.
My friends who actively practice their religion – Christians, Muslims, Buddhists etc simultaneously amaze and inspire me with their faith.
They tell me their belief provides a framework to put all of the emotions they cannot deal with in context. The wonder of life is God’s doing and the hardships – wherever they come from – are a test to help them grow as people and closer to God.
God is both the giver (birth). Infertility is a test and in any case it is God’s will. God is the taker (death) – so even as you grieve it might help to think there is a higher ,albeit unknown, purpose to why you have lost your loved one.
My Buddhist friends tell me that to be closer to God we should disassociate from those perceptions – a sort of emotional protection. Having the discipline to detach what you perceive from the emotion that you generate from it is the road to Godliness. Developing that discipline is the lifelong practice that we must commit to.
Hinduism diversifies things a little – there is one God that is manifested in several other deities that address particular aspects of powerlessness. Vishnu is the protector and the preserver who is our source of sustenance to endure. Shiva is the God of annihilation , the destroyer and the enforcer of justice and more than 330 million other deities serve as a means of making sense of the various permutations of collective and personal powerlessness. Hinduism really extends the specialisation of deity along the same lines of Greek and Roman classic beliefs.
Regardless of how many Gods we have – the purpose is pretty much the same, make sense of what is beyond our personal comprehension.
Yet what happens when we do not have a belief in God that we operate on?
This is what really triggered it for me in Alain de Botton’s TED talk. Botton asserts that in Western societies, we have removed God from the core of our beliefs and focused more on individual and collective responsibility. We rely on Science to offer the answers more than ascribing the unknown to God.
We seek evidence and not simply invest in faith. The outcomes of personal success or failure are attributed to the individual more than the plan of a God.
This is new or at least it has been so long since it was the norm that is might as well be new. Not even communism had this effect. In communism the collective had the answers, personal ambition and therefore personal success or failure were much less relevant. In theory anyway.
Yet the timeless needs still remain. The hardships are still there, so are the joys and the wonders. In the absence of God, who are we supposed to pin our powerlessness on?
Where we cannot rationally take responsibility for something – like the death of a parent from a terminal disease, we simply absorb it.
We put it in a box and bury it. Some might become philosophical about it – another mechanism to try to make sense of powerlessness – but ultimately the emotion is locked away. Ask anyone who has lost a beloved parent to go back to that box and explore its contents – especially without a framework of God – and observe how raw and powerful the emotion is, triggered by the memory of their loss.
Sometimes absorbing it causes huge emotional problems – breakdowns, deep depression – that lead to ever more self-destructive behavior.
What of the things that we can somehow see our responsibility in? Like being the survivor of a terrible fatal accident or accidentally causing the death of child?
Where a God framework might serve to blunt that emotion by saying “you are human, you can fail, it’s God’s will”, a godless person has no such shelter. The full perception is there. Most people can rationalize it and remove some of the potency of the sense of responsibility and emotions associated with. Others cannot and they get depressed, might seek self harm maybe even suicide. Could this help explain the rising incidents of depression in Western societies?
My friend – a Catholic priest – tells me that when he is in the confessional, it is fundamentally about helping the other person forgive themselves so they can move beyond the powerlessness.
Fundamentally, I believe Man created the concept of God. We invested the antidotes for all we are powerless against into that concept – kindness, forgiveness , justice, certainty, strength, immortality and eternal well-being.
What might happen if we took these virtues back and invested them in ourselves? What might happen if we were each kinder to ourselves, were more forgiving of ourselves and others or that we were able to eradicate the causes of avoidable powerlessness?
Why I wrote this
I wrote this because we are complex beings living in a complex world. We are making it more complex by our actions. I wrote this because I want us to make things simpler for ourselves so we can focus more of our abilities on addressing the complexities around us.
I wrote this because being in the uncharted territory of Godlessness is not the same as being lost and I want us to seize this opportunity to be kinder and more humane to each other. To evolve to become closer and more connected as human beings. I believe we can do it – we don’t need God, we need the virtues of God.
I wrote this because I want us to begin to focus more on tackling the causes of powerlessness and not simply fight the often explosive consequences of it – like religious radicalism that ends up in massacre and mayhem or mass revolts that trigger further repression.
I wrote this because whilst religion provides mechanisms of human connections to each other – fellowship and a sense of community – and a powerful sense of personal connection to God, it also invites other behaviors that promote new hardships. Judgement and condemnation of others and the easy abuse of position by the administrators of that religion. I want the good bits and frankly, none of the other stuff.
I wrote this because the institutionalization of God – religion – has long caused and continues to cause more conflict than it resolves. We are fighting about whose hose is better even as the fire threatens to burn us all. I want the divisions to stop. I want us to see that we have fundamentally the same needs, challenged by the same forces and we are unbelievably more powerful together than as we fight these ineffective ideological battle.
Finally I wrote this because I want the next young Mike Sutton who is wandering the internet confused about feeling outside the mainstream and dissatisfied with religions he sampled and the beliefs he explored – including atheism – to have something to read that offers an understandable and reasonable account of a different, kinder, more empowering and more human perspective.
