Introduction: Principles

When I graduated from college I believed that it would only be a matter of time before I became recognized for the quality and inspiration of my artistic works. I believed that the rest of the world was waiting for a glimpse of something new and challenging, and that once a few key people were exposed to the heat, the paper of the world would ignite and the flames would spread. And while that may in fact still be true, and indeed with the advent of social media even more tantalizingly possible, it hasn’t happened yet, and that was a number of years ago when I tried so hard to be heard.

Regardless of the outcome and the chapters yet to come in that story, what’s relevant is that it eventually, painfully, became obvious to me that in the meanwhile I’d need to find a source of income and tap into it. At first I tried part time work so I’d still have time to dedicate to my passions, but as time wore on I learned that there existed, at least for me, a cruel conundrum where regardless of how few hours of real-life job work I did, I could not use my remaining waking hours efficiently enough to progress as an artist.

And some part of me decided that I would work, and somehow make time, or maybe save up enough for short breaks between employments, and continue to contribute to the world of art in modest deliveries. The result was two decades or more of a fitful career path in the world of corporate employ. A path of mostly undirected growth, taking opportunities as they presented themselves as though they were logical choices, ultimately unguided by passion or desire to become something more successful in that world, but instead learning and adapting, and promoting those skills I possessed that I saw rewarded, and dimming down those bright parts of me that caused resistance in others.

It’s that process, that long road of observation, that has helped me develop a set of core principles which have preserved me. It’s these principles that help me understand the culture and oddity that is business. There are cycles and patterns that recur, and there is a cultural dogma that pervades all things business, that lead to the strange legitimacy of phrases like “it’s not personal, it’s business.” What on earth can people be thinking? At its worst, life during working hours seemed like a terrible amateur theater production with no director and no script.

Over time and with considerable rehearsal and repetition, I’ve observed, studied, and formalized a set of ideas that help: the Spectrum Theory; the Recursive Complexity Phenomenon; Language and Chaos Theories; Good Approximation; the Mechanics of Frustration; the Known Quantity; the Tree in the Forest metaphor, and variations of these as they apply to real world conditions.

I’ll refer to these often, and refine their definitions in use and reference. But here’s the quick outline that starts the fire:

The Spectrum Theory is an application of basic bell curve phenomenon to an unending universe – where we as humans tend to see black or white and a line between, it turns out that most everything tends to be distributed along a continuum. The closer you look at what is the line between one and the other, you find that our original notions become inadequate because things are just more complicated than that. As a general rule, It’s Always More Complicated; and things tend to recede away when we try to confine them to clear definitions (Recursive Complexity Phenomenon). But why do we persist? Because we’re wired that way; we look at things and form words that capture an essence of what we see, and those words work well enough to tame the world in the same way that a surfer rides a wave – not owning the wave, not breaking or stopping or affecting the wave, but riding and coexisting (Language and Chaos Theories). It’s this talent we have for approximation that allows us as humans to succeed to a reasonable extent (Good Approximation) and it also is responsible for our most terrible failures. It’s ultimately this human facility we have for forming concrete notions that give rise in us to expectations, which are the root of all frustration (Mechanics of Frustration). But in business and in life, we carry these expectations with us like the script of the unknown play, and it’s in the details where all of the friction occurs, yet we persist in believing that our own expectations must prevail regardless of the overwhelming evidence against imminent change. So we crash up against what has already proven itself to be a consistent irritation (the Known Quantity) and that leads us to the final principle: I can’t take responsibility for you hurting your nose against that tree over and over because it does not move. Are you trying to move through the forest?