Action Figure Daniel

Category: Essays

  • A Time With “Zero”

    They told me it would be the same, I did not believe them.

    They told me that I would not be able to tell the difference, I could.

    They told me that I would love it, I did not.

    The only reason why I got the innocent looking “zero” was because they were out of the normal, “some” mouth wash. The bottle claimed it did the same thing but with no alcohol and thus was less intense.

    I carefully noted during my first use of the “zero” version that the liquid had a dubious creamy texture to it. It made me seriously question the cleansing power of the purportedly marvelous mouth wash. Could it really be as good while feeling like my mouth was being in a protective coat that “some” did not leave?

    Perhaps I told myself, perhaps.

    Maybe, the creamy feeling was like a wax coat that protects a car from damage. Maybe, the film would help keep the bad stuff from eating my teeth.

    Maybe, but I was still doubtful.

    Eventually the store got the old kind of mouth wash back in. I was tempted to buy a new bottle, but what would I do with the partially used old one? Pour it down the drain? I could hardly stand the waste, especially since I was already a quarter of the way into the bottle. “I can manage to finish this off,” I told myself.

    Thus entered the self deception; no longer were they trying to convince me of anything, instead, I was doing all the convincing. It tasted the same as the other mouth wash. It did its job better than the old mouth wash. I did not need to feel the nasty burn of the alcohol. I was good with the protective coat that felt like a thin film of mucus embalming my mouth every morning. It was all good, every last bit of it.

    As I inducted “zero” into my routine, I am sure they thought they had me. I even thought it was a glorious new feeling. I need not fear breathing into a roadside breathalyzer (not that I ever have before). I need not fear suspicious looks when I breathed too hard (no, I would still worry about if my breath smelled good or not). This, the “zero” was the good stuff in life. I had it, I used it and I loved it.

    As the days moved on, I noticed that the bottle was slowly being depleted. While I delayed the question as long as I could, I knew I would eventually have to face it: would I replace the “zero” with “zero” or with the real stuff? I did not want to have to decide, not yet. “Zero” was so good to me; I did not want to kick it to the curb.

    Though there was still a gentle nagging of disbelieve in the back of my mind: was it really as good? If it was, why did it take so long to get “zero” to market? Is the thicker, creamy “zero” fluid really just as good as the original? Why had they not switched all of their products to it?

    Compounding these questions was the fact that I did not care enough to actually research any of them. This is, after all, mouth wash, not investment funds or a substantial enough purchase that mattered enough that I could justify spending some time, any time, doing some research in the differences between “zero” and “some.”

    I found that the fateful day was approaching quickly: the day I would run out of “zero.” Projections indicated that I would run out sometime mid week and thus I would need to buy a new bottle in the next round of shopping lest I be caught empty handed.

    The final decision was not as hard as I thought it would be. My heart jumped when I saw the “some,” mouth wash sitting casually next to the “zero.” My hand grabbed a bottle of “some” without thinking. I knew that I would not be using the new bottle for a few days so I thought little of it. “It is virtually the same thing anyway,” I tried to tell myself, “no need to rush into the new bottle.”

    The projections were correct, it was on a mid week morning that I ran out of “zero.” This meant that it was after dinner that evening that the “some” was busted out. I was curious about how I would take the original mouth wash. What if I hated it? What if “zero” really had been all it was supposed to be, and more? What if I missed the protective film?

    I gave close attention to the sensations in my mouth as I tilted my head back and poured the liquid in. The difference was immediate: it was as if “some” (the original) was a light, thin fluid flowing in between every bud on my tongue and to every nook and cranny in my mouth. Where “zero” had feared to go, “some” did not care, in fact it cleansed with the fiery vengeance that only alcohol can bring. I had forgotten the burn, but as my eyes welled up with tears I began to remember. As I swished the liquid in my mouth, it felt so incredibly thin and agile, liked it wanted to go everywhere and get to everything, something that “zero” had been too timid to do. Even the burn felt good, not that I am a masochist, but there is a comfort in feeling that something is actually working instead of just hoping it is working, something “zero” made me take on faith.

    As I spit the liquid into the sink I noticed that the film left by “zero” was not there. Instead, I was left with a clean, invigorated feeling mouth, as if my very pores had been cleansed. In the end, they were all wrong: “zero” was no substitute for the real thing.

  • Finding Yourself: Every Day

    (A continuation of Finding Yourself: The Journey of Self-Discovery)

    Bearing in mind that a life crisis is not about the most recent collection of experiences but about the expanse of small details processed previously, brings a moment of pause: if a life crisis is not resultant of a singular experience but from a myriad of previous experiences then perhaps instead of focusing on avoiding the singular we should focus on maintaining consistency in the myriad of choices we are confronted with every day. If we are able to shift our focus from avoiding the inevitable great tragedy to avoiding the hundreds, if not thousands, of minor choices that make the great tragedy inevitable then we can avoid the tragedy altogether.

    This process of maintenance will allow us to gradually expand our perceptions so that they become elastic and thus adaptive to whatever life has to throw at us. While elasticity may not be easy to maintain, modification of our personal mantras to include this adaptable line of thinking will improve our personal flexibility. Further improvement of our personal flexibility can be gained as we shift our living references from a vast collection of tracked items to a smaller, more streamlined collection of what is most important to us. That is, instead of trying to follow and maintain contact with a plethora of objects, emotions or persons, we can focus on tracking highly important overriding goals and purposes.

    Please allow a moment of clarification about the difference between “important” and “truly important,” most notably the use of the word “truly”: truly, used here, means: “in general alignment with the highest sense of truth as opposed to things that might seem true but really are not.” The distinction between the highest sense of truth and things that might seem to be, but are not, can be difficult to detect on the small, individual choice scale discussed earlier but when concerted effort is applied to distinguishing between the two an individual can often bring clarity to the choice of what is important and what is truly important. For example, after careful consideration one may determine that while money is important, housing is truly important. Or, that while food is important, closeness to family is truly important.

    The process of distinguishing between important and truly important items might seem trivial, but it is critical to reducing the number of life references one has to track. Instead of needing to track every possible venue of generating money, the important task, one can track the single need of housing, the truly important task. When the principle is applied broadly across a whole life, encompassing all life references, the resulting consolidation can lead to extreme simplification.

    As the number of life references is reduced so too can the effort used to track the references and the general overall cognitive processing power be reduced. Coupled with the reduction of references and the related liberation of processing power comes a freeing of the self from the mundane; instead of needing to figure out and understand a broad variety of things with exacting detail, one need only to understand a general concept and allow for the inherent flexibility in that concept to guide the decision making process.

    This ability to broaden the scope of focus while reducing the number of items and the related details needed to manage an experience is critical to the freeing of cognitive power for the processing and expansion of faculties. Remember that a life crisis is caused by our experiences outstripping and outpacing our current capabilities. The liberation of processing power means that one will have additional power with which to better handle the broad flood of experiences that would otherwise overwhelm and force the maintaining of a crisis management mode.

    Letting go of the mundane can be hard. We are trained from our earliest years to track, follow and monitor mundane tasks and they are presented as if they were of great worth. In many cases, indeed, in most cases, this is simply not true. Most things that we are taught to track are of little consequence. Most things we are taught to follow are simply illusions. Most things that we are taught to monitor and manmade rhythms, that while enchanting, offer little in the form of substance, especially substance of significance. Things that can be particularly hard to let go of include things that we worked hard to obtain, usually in the form of monetary reward for effort. The more expensive an item is the more care we usually give to the item. However, if the release of these burdening processes can be successfully accomplished, the mind will have added capacity to handle the new experiences of life and thus live life in a more enjoyable manner.

  • Finding Yourself: The Journey of Self-Discovery

    Shards from the shattered remains are strewed throughout the open space like a giant exploded glass bust. Indeed, the shards were from what could be called a bust, a carefully planned and designed sculpture that was to be the young man’s life. Now that sculpted bust is broken into a million tiny pieces and thrown to the edges of his known world (and for that matter beyond the edges, though he did now know anything existed beyond those edges so he could never go looking for them). Looking was not the first thing he wanted to, nor the second. Indeed, looking to pick up the broken pieces was not even on his list of things to do. Somewhere near the top was “Panic”, either before or after that (no one could tell for sure) was “Cry” which blurred into “Ask Why” like a bad cursive script.

    The young man, after waking up some time later—not just in the sense of getting out of bed in the morning, but actually waking from the nightmare he just survived—will look back at this experience not with fondness but with a strong respect for what happen and for the strength and courage he developed to survive it, it being part of his self-journey of discovery.

    This young man is not alone in his journey: many others, indeed most of us, at one point or another suffer a situation as he did, one that forces us to stop and assess where we are and where we are headed.

    I recently returned from a trip with this young man, a trip meant to allow him to shift his focus from the broken remains of his failed dreams to set new dreams in motion. It was a wonderful trip and I must admit that I enjoyed distracting myself from the realities I confront every day and, for just a moment, be able to soar wonderfully on a great adventure. While he was searching for himself, I took time to reflect on my own, similar searches and the great journey that has resulted. This trip with my friend was one of introspection and spontaneity which helped both of us to find parts of ourselves that we had grown out of touch with.

    As I looked back through my life and in particular the times that I dedicated to finding myself, I noticed a pattern or cycle of discovery. These cycles coincided with the disparate nature of my journey. While I do my best to balance my life out; life seems to oppose such balance and always finds a new way to throw me off and force my self-discovery anew. I have gone through many of these episodes throughout my life (and I think we all do): as a child, as a teenager and as a young adult. While each of these moments brought painful realizations, they also brought with them a new perspective that afforded me a grander view of my own existence.

    I think that the pain that drives the introspection comes because my then current frame of reference was breaking down. The realities that I had been living with no longer fit well with the experiences I was having. Ideally one would simply adjust their reality thus allowing them to adapt to the changing truths they are experiencing, but sometimes we are too stubborn to accept the changes and other times we simply choose to not to recognize what is before us.

    The pressure of continued exposure to the harsh clash between our reality and our perception erodes the integrity of our life, we are forced to choose to either rebuild our perceptions to better accommodate our reality or change our life to better accommodate our perception. For if we choose to do neither then the pressure will eventually destroy our life as we know it and force the change to occur. I call these moments a “life crisis”.

    During a life crisis, such as the young man experienced, we must begin to question everything that before that moment had been assumed true. Suddenly, everything is dubious until proven otherwise including and especially our own personal mantras that we had so carefully and painstakingly developed since our last life crisis to reassure us that are perceptions were as true to our life as can be and that our life was as true to reality as was desirable.

    This questioning is part of, and indeed critical to, the process of self-discovery because our perceptions and realities have grown too far out of sync with each other and the resulting discrepancies have grown so disparate that our life can no longer accommodate the two. This means that they must then be reconciled and rebuilt in order to allow life to continue in any form beyond the broken and shattered state it is currently in.

    Through the process of careful analysis we must identify the weaknesses of our previous framework that had been born of experience and had served us so well in order that we might build a new framework that can account for the new experiences our current reality is providing to us and build new perceptions that will allow us to interpret these realities without becoming so overwhelmed by the reconciliatory processing needed to otherwise justify our current framework that is built upon our pool of past experiences against that new experiences that we can no longer live life and compensate for reality.

    This means that the process of self-discovery—or rediscovery as the case may be—is less of a matter of distracting ourselves from reality and more of a matter of relearning reality in a liberated manner that allows us to build a new perceptional framework that we can use in the future. We must rebuild our old ways into new ones; we must relegate our old mantras to the past and create new ones; we must let go of our old life and begin anew.

    Perhaps the hardest part of this process for me personally is not the actual rebuilding but rather the process of recognizing and accepting that the framework that I carefully built upon year after year—the framework that I cared for, tended, mended and loved for so long—is no longer valid and thus needs to be retired with little recognition of the effort put into the framing. This conflict within me results in a period of self-denial in which I refuse to accept that my reality and perceptions are in conflict until the crisis is in full bloom and prevention is too late.

    During this period of defiance, I often find that the best way to defying the need to change out my framework is to simply deny that there is any conflict at all. Though not effective in the long term, denial of the current situation is a great short term solution. I find that I am not alone in such denial. Generally, we would rather deny than accept and this is perhaps the greatest flaw in our attempts to prevent the crisis from occurring. Such denial may even accelerate and enlarge the process. Perhaps, instead of denying anything is out of harmony, if we were to embrace that truth we could begin converting out old framework over to a new, workable frame that would allow us to preserve much of what we care most about and continue operating without shutting everything down and rebuilding from scratch.

    (I suggest this because much of the underlying issue of a life crisis seems to stem from current experiences that outstrip our current experiential pool while they occur so frequently that they outpace our ability to adapt to them. The simultaneous outstripping and outpacing overloads our cognitive processing capabilities which then causes us to turn off our emotional processor for a cool down time and then slowly rebuild our cognitive processing until we are again at full capacity, and perhaps even at a higher capacity, and are again able to handle the new experiences without being overwhelmed. The realization that our experiences are outstripping and outpacing what we were equipped to handle is never a comfortable realization—knowing that you are unable to process a current experience because you have built, for whatever reason, an inadequate frame of reference is tantamount to a slap on the face by life itself, something that with each increasing year we are supposed to be more adept at preventing—such a realization is ever humbling and can start us on the path of expanding our individual capabilities that will afford us greater processing capacity in the future.)

    Our strong desire to maintain our current framework may well be motivated out of fear. The entire experience may be so incredibly frightening because it is so rare and infrequent in our lives that we experience, in short succession, several experience of such substance (or a singular experience of massive intensity) that we cannot process them which results in feelings of vast helplessness. If so, it is in those very moments of feeling helpless that we must learn to discard our careful planning, put aside our personal desires and suspend our current believe system so that life itself can rewrite our course and redefine what we have known, or what we thought we have known, into a new reality, often a reality more in alignment with the overall scheme of the universe.

    In these moments we find that we can do nothing to adjust or alter what is happening. The time for our changing and altering, putting in our orders for future changes has come and gone and like the enormous stirrings within the granite earth, these changes are the culmination of all that we have done since the last great change. The changes have already happened; they just have not manifested themselves until this one moment.

  • The Storyteller

    This is an autobiographical essay in response to the ever so frequent question: what do you do at work?

    The warehouse, plain and bland, stands just off the road like a giant fortress. Like all good fortresses, it is not the outside that attracts visitors. Rather, it is the treasure that lies inside it. Outside, the warehouse looks drab with its towering light brown walls and black trimmings, the office door doesn’t help much: “Employees Only” the small placard warns those who would open the foreboding black door.

    On the other side of the door things change little. The interior walls are a lighter shade of brown, almost taupe, and while there is no decorative trim, the walls are mostly empty. In the office, the workers are chatting; sometimes on the phone, sometimes to each other. Such is the humble work place of Daniel. Although he often works from any of the company’s other four locations, this is his chosen sanctuary to work his wonders.

    Although the outside is bleak, the inside office is obviously better suited to his creative thinking. The chatter of the customer service representatives provide a gentle background noise and people to occasionally socialize with and bounce ideas off of. But it is the massive twenty foot white board that makes the office ideal. “This,” Daniel says referring to the white board, “this is the only white board we have that is big enough to unload my brain onto.” Currently the white board is covered with scribbles, notes and a mass of lines and boxes. He uses the white board to stage his “stories”.

    Isabel, the Customer Service Manager, refers to him as an “Information God”, a title that makes Daniel laugh—he prefers the title of “Storyteller”. Isabel tells of when he first set up the company’s Customer Service surveys. The Customer Service Office had been hoping, at best, for a spreadsheet that tallied the results and were worried mostly about the ease of gathering the data. Instead of the basic spreadsheet they requested, Daniel delivered what he calls “a beautifully matriculated masterpiece of storytelling.” The survey system provides a friendly entry system for collecting the survey information and a full set of graphs and charts to explain the results, none of which require any technical expertise. “Like any good story, the mechanics are there, but they’re hidden,” Daniel explains.

    This is how most of his “stories” work: they feature quick and easy access to the data through charts, graphs, buttons to automatically retrieve up-to-date data , and “smart, dumb” text—complex formulas that output different texts based on the data in the spreadsheet so the responses look smart, but really aren’t.

    The ease with which people can use his spreadsheets has made them popular in the company, but he says that people should thank his boss for that, not him. “I like a good graph or chart, but the real data is where the best stories are found,” he says, “it was my boss who insisted that I make the stories in the data easier to see.”

    He sits hunched over his meticulously clean desk. The wood surface has on it a grand total of five objects: his phone and keys, lying side by side on the left side on the desk, a laptop, a second monitor and a wireless mouse. While his physical desk is nearly empty, his two screens are not. The laptop is cluttered with his email and various informational pages and the second monitor, hooked up as an extension of the laptop, is filled with a massive spreadsheet. It is this very spreadsheet that he often thinks of when people ask him if he knows Microsoft Excel. “Know it,” he says, “I live in it.”

    While he might joke about his knowledge of Excel, compared to most people, he does live in it. And like a monk left to himself to delve into the depths of sacred works, he knows Excel extremely well. “I often laugh when people ask if Excel can do certain things,” he laughs at this thought. “I usually tell them, ‘just tell me what you want and I’ll make Excel do it for you’.”

    This particular day he is working on one of his most complex “stories”: the company payroll. The numerous windows displayed across his screens are all critical story elements. They are part of a massive revision that he recently released. He explains that each screen has a function and purpose, and while they all together may seem overwhelming, no one else ever sees them all together.

    While some might think it an incredible feat, to him it is little more than a documentary. “No one does all the work,” he explains. Some poor soul digs to find random statistics that will be quoted in the voice overs. Another poor soul does the preliminary location and people research. The lucky host goes out and shoots footage with the camera crew. Then yet another host of people come in to cut the footage together and scale the production to the correct level.

    Payroll, for him, is no different. The new version—called Blackfin after ocean tuna—has simple, little spreadsheets and databases that different departments enter in little bits of information. At payroll time a single, bright green button, labeled “Extract All”, is pressed and through Excel’s magic all the little spreadsheets and databases are rounded up and processed to the familiar, but ever changing, story of payroll.

    Later, after he is done patching the payroll file, he walks to the back of the warehouse and rummages through a mess of old parts. The parts were recently purchased as a lump-sum from a business that was closing. He’s not looking for anything in particular, but more just wants to get away. His excursions into the warehouse are usually fruitless themselves, but they allow Daniel to refocus his mind. “I never know what I’ll find back here,” he says. Moments later he coos, “Ooh, these belong in the IT room,” he says with an elevated pitch as he wraps a bundle of network cables around his neck. Obviously, he’s done this before.

    Satisfied with today’s find he heads back towards the office. He doesn’t get far before he stops again, this time to pick up a rolling office chair. “The guys keep stealing chairs from the office for their lunchroom,” he explains. Instead of pushing the chair to the office, he sits in it, grabs the arm rests, carefully aims the chair and then, with cables still dangling from his neck, gives a swift kick and sends himself hurtling down the aisle between dining chairs and bedroom mirrors. The noise of the rolling chair can be heard throughout the whole warehouse, just one example of his creative eccentric nature.

    Back in the office, after dropping off the cables and the chair, Daniel examines his white board. He crosses some items off the board, and then taps his marker against the board. The next item on his list is to put up a reminder about upcoming network changes. He sits back down at his desk and brings up the company intranet site; he considers the site to be one of his greatest stories. “Everyone in the company uses it every day,” he says with pride in his voice. He starts to tell the story of making the site such a success, and then pauses as he looks around the office. “I’ve never told them the secret of my success.” After a few seconds of typing, he reviews the reminder and with a satisfactory nod posts it online.

    Those secrets are some of his rarest stories. In fact, he boasts, no one person has heard them all, and he intends to keep it that way. “If anyone knew that all I do every day is tell stories,” Daniel says with a smile, “well, they might find a way to live without me.” With that, he goes back to work: reviewing data, looking for connections and recording the stories he finds.

  • The Curse of Assumed Common Goals

    I have a particularly fond memory of my younger brother (though, I must admit that my memories are not the clearest on this topic and I might have embellished parts). It was back when we were all younger. The family, all except my brother, was all gathered in the living room to watch a movie or some such. As we were enjoying our peace my brother came suddenly bursting into the room yelling, “I got it, I got it!” His entrance made such a shock that we all shifted our attached to him and the “it” he had “got”. My mother, in a caring tone, congratulated him and asked if she could see “it”. He was so proud he popped open his hand and showed her. To her great horror, and the family’s astonishment, there, lying in his tiny palm was my mother’s beta fish. It was beyond all help as my younger brother had, in his great excitement, neglected to handle the fish with care and it had been crushed to death while in transit from the upstairs bedroom (where the fish had no doubt been sleeping) down to the living room.

    Though there are many humorous spins and analogies that I could make with this story, there is one in particular that I wish to make: there can be grave danger in assumed common goals. My mother’s goal was to keep the fish alive while my brother thought the goal was to catch the pesky fish. In this case, the assumed common goal (that really was not common) led to the death of a fish, but in many cases the assumed common goals can lead to much greater problems.

    On some level we all know and understand this, but even in the most basic of assumptions we all too quickly dismiss this truth. Instead of soliciting our goals, we assume that everyone, or at least the people in the immediate vicinity of our lives, have the same basic beliefs. Then we are faced with shock, dismay or disappointment when we find out that what we thought was a universal goal was really only a personal goal.

    This curse of assumed common goals is pervasively around us in our daily endeavors and projects. Think of the last time you were driving with a young child in the car. Your primary goal was likely to travel safely and you likely assumed that everyone else on the road had the same goal. This was probably not the case. Instead, most people probably had a primary goal of getting to their destination quickly, or to find out where their friends are before they pass them.

    While driving safely on the road might not be every driver’s primary goal (though it should be) it is still a high goal for most drivers. A better illustration might be a work place venue: collaborating to reduce costs across the company. There are many ways to go about the process of reducing cost, but I will focus on two: by eliminating jobs and rearranging the company accordingly; and by streamlining processes and eliminating positions that are no longer needed. Both methods will result in the end reduction of overall costs for the company, but they each have very different focuses.

    The process of eliminating positions is one that is likely to have a primary goal of seeing what the company can live without. Do we need someone special to clean up, or can we convince other employees to do the work? Do we need someone to oversee these workers, or can we assign them to a different manager and expect less supervision? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like dieting with a very definite list of things that you can and cannot do without.

    Consider working under the assumption that the other departments in the company were also operating under this same paradigm. Imagine the shock and horror you would experience when you found out that another department was in fact binging instead of dieting. They have been spending money on projects that, in the dieting mind set, should have been cut. This horror is likely to come because the offending department is operating under a different way of reducing costs.

    The process of streamlining is one that is likely to have a primary goal of automating as much as possible. Is there any way to digitize this data without manually inputting it? Can we make this paperwork flow smoother so it takes less time? Can we create self-help forums for employees to handle basic issues by themselves? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like exercising with a list of practices that will allow you to stay trim without foregoing all of the good stuff.

    While both of these methods can produce the same desired results, reduced costs, they have very different methods of achieving those results along with different operational positions (the basis for which decision are made) and the end results that each gains. It is while considering these minor differences that the real differences between the common goals becomes pronounced and, as they continue, begin to clash.

    The elimination of positions (dieting) is operating from a position of retreat or withdrawal. It says, “We have overreached and done too much to possibly be able to maintain our position so we must cut back even if that means that we give up some good stuff.” It is a defensive reaction to the environment and sends a clear signal that the only way to survive is to cut back.

    The irony of these two styles is that both are equally valid expressions of the same goal, it is entirely possible for managers in both departments to do extensive work (even while working together) to reduce costs and only towards the end of the process realize that the other has been going about the process entirely differently than they have. The incorrect assumption of a common goal is not likely to bother the streamlining manager, but is likely to cause quite a stir for the eliminating manager because he has been sacrificing and “going without” for the benefit of the company only to find out that others have been enjoying themselves and still saving money simply by “exercising” a little.

    The two styles will clash dramatically when the cost savings proposals are put forth. The elimination position will present a plan that requires cut equal to the savings. It will present no long term incentive for taking action but will instead focus on how the cuts will benefit the company now. As operations improve, this position will insist that the eliminated workers are restored in order to keep up with the new demand.

    The streamlining position will present a radically different plan that requires upfront investment in order to improve systems. Upon the completion of the system improvements, efficiencies will be realized such that positions can be eliminated or reallocated. There is no short term incentive for taking action (in fact, spending money to make money is often considered a disincentive) but the plan will instead focus on bringing savings to the company in the long run. As operations improve, this position will not insist on a directly proportional increase of workers because the improved systems can handle more throughput with less workers.

    In the end, both managers will have put forth effort to reduce costs, both managers will have action plans that will save money for the company and both managers will be in alignment with the overarching company goal of reducing costs. They will, however, have plans that look nothing alike and the end results will be dramatically different all because they did not share the same common goal.