Month: December 2023

It’s been a long year, even if it has zipped by quickly.  We’re already busy getting ready for Christmas and family time.  People at work are obviously weary and ready for an ending break.  We naturally start to wonder about next year.  I noticed that The Economist magazine has again published their thick annual forecast issue.   Pundits will soon make many predictions.

We are better using the word ‘anticipate’ rather than predict because predicting specific events is outside our capacity.  We can reasonably study trends and patterns and anticipate probabilities.

I anticipate 2024 to be a year of chaos.  Presidential election years generally amplify distress.  Inflation may be slowing but prices remain high.  Expect continued debates about major policy direction (with concomitant blame shifting), made even more contentious by large populations of ill-informed and mal-informed citizens.  Already there are multiple active wars and tense conflicts threatening to become wars.  Significant government leadership changes will happen in some countries.  The ag world is more uncertain going into 2024, which affects food availability and pricing.  Manufacturing bases are shifting away from China.  The uneven technology advances drive uncomfortable changes.  These are macro factors; you can add in your personal situation factors from family, health, job, and local community issues.

Maybe 2024 will be only slightly more chaotic than some other years.   I anticipate that 2028-2035 may be more difficult still, because of financial factors which can’t be deferred.

Francis Schaeffer’s great question remains helpful: “How then shall we live?”

2024 will present many opportunities to grow through adversity.  A section of forest near our house burned in a brushfire less than 3 months ago.  Scorched tree trunks. All the vines and low shrubs and palmettoes were reduced to ash.  Yet every plant with an extensive root structure immediately began growing again, pushing greenery up through the ash layer.  There’s one lesson for living through chaos:  Develop deep roots.

I anticipate new opportunities to focus on what’s valuable.  The most valuable thing I wear every day is my wedding ring.  It cost $40 in 1987, which was a lot of money when we were grad students. There isn’t much gold in it.  The ring is precious to me because it’s from my beloved and represents all the goodness of God’s gifts to me through her.  Witnessing chaotic times gives us stark comparisons to understand what is ultimately valuable and what will pass away.

Jesus gives his disciples an interesting command, helpful in chaotic times: “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with each other.” (Mark 9:50, NIV)  “Have salt” – preservative, flavorful, necessary for life – “among yourselves” – not hidden, not hoarded, but in fellowship.  Saltiness supports peace in the community.  No bland living!  Connect this with Jesus’ commentary in the next chapter:  whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. (Mark 10:43-44, NIV)  Mutual humility and service are a bulwark against chaos.  Don’t go alone against chaos.

Chaotic environments often make us hurried.  Hurried people make more mistakes, stumble, and misinterpret events.  John Wooden, the iconic UCLA basketball coach, trained his players in quickness without hurry.  There’s a subtle distinction there.  Quickness is valuable, hurry leads to trouble.  Quickness is conditioning under control, like gentleness is strength under control.  Conditioning is both mental and physical.  Staving off the effects of chaos in our personal lives will require quickness of mind and spirit.  These must be developed over time; preparation counts more, because we cannot summon quickness in the moment of crisis.

Chaos consumes resources but returns little worthwhile.  Chaos therefore leaves less for the wise to use – time, energy, material.  Chaos amplifies the normal friction of everyday life in a universe built on entropy principles.  [Sidebar:  Read Warfighting for the best explanation of friction and uncertainty.]  Therefore, countering chaos requires us to be more efficient with the resources remaining to us.  We must become maximizers of what we have, wasting no time grumbling about what we lack.  In physiological terms, we want a good VO2 max with an efficient running stride.

Something encouraging to remember:  Many of the greatest companies and most influential people in history began in times of chaos.  You can choose to be the person who runs towards the opportunities created amidst chaos. 

I’m speaking abstractly about chaos and countering chaos.  Ponder what I’ve written here and consider how it applies to your situation.  It might shape your private goals in 2024.  

One of the touted benefits of AI tools like Microsoft CoPilot (this kind of tech will be ubiquitous soon) is the ability to summarize information so you don’t have to read as much.  “Summarize this email.”  “Summarize this document.”  “Give the pertinent points and action items from these meeting notes.”

I study many book summaries.  Generous reviewers on Amazon.com will summarize the key points of a book.  You can quickly get the gist of the author’s intent and style.  It’s a great gauge to deciding whether the book is worth reading.

Be mindful of the limits of summaries and abstracts.  CoPilot is unlikely to spot tone and small points in email messages that should speak strongly to you, because you have human context and information outside of the email itself.  The word ‘abstract’ comes to English from Latin and means “to pull away from.”  You’re dropping significant information volume to create an abstract – and a significant fraction of what’s dropped might be significant to you. 

Also, don’t underestimate the intellect-strengthening aspect of reading full works.  Exercising your mind pays dividends.  Reading and pondering the full Shakespeare play will transform you more than cribbing from the Cliff’s Notes summary and commentary. 

Use summaries and abstracts for their limited utility without depending upon them as a full substitute.

Personal story:

I was 11, not quite 12, when my Boy Scout troop backpacked a 70-mile section on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah National Park. I think my backpack weighed almost 30 pounds – and I weighed about 90lbs dripping wet.  We were wet, loads of rain and humidity and mud, mud, mud.  Type 2 fun for sure, and I loved it.  Well, mostly.

It was physically tough.  I was sensitive to the teasing from the older boys.  A couple of times I was glad it was pouring rain because I was crying a bit.  I wasn’t homesick but exhausted. I slept hard every night.  (One night our tent was pitched on a slope, and I woke up in the morning about 3 yards downhill from the door in a wet sleeping bag.) The trail was a sloppy mess; the only good thing about being smeared with mud was that the bugs couldn’t bite you there.  We grumbled.

I remember one of adults would overhear our grumbling and ask “Duck or chicken?” The older boys would go silent at this.  I worked up the nerve to ask what he meant.  He told me “A duck has oils in its feathers and water slides right off.  A chicken doesn’t, and will squawk if there are even a few drops of rain.  Decide how you’ll respond when things happen you can’t control.  It’s up to you.”

“Duck or chicken?” is a good leadership mantra.

A mentor of mine sketched out something like this:

Problems abound – but you can’t do something about some of them.  We have agency, so make choices about what we’re doing.

A massive amount of human energy is wasted in the lower left quadrant.  Endless whining, complaining, bitter recriminations about problems we can’t do anything about.  Dwelling here amplifies anxiety.  It makes for great social media action because plenty of people will happily be a cry-baby with you. 

Trying to do something about a problem that you cannot do anything about wastes your life.  (Note: there are grand problem spaces where people have ideas about solutions and are trying to solve them.  That’s not a waste.  That’s how great leaps of progress happen.)

Once you realize you can’t do something about a problem (at least not now), don’t waste even 2 more seconds in those lower two quadrants.

The challenge in the upper left quadrant is the wisdom and intelligence to distinguish priority-setting from procrastination and sheer laziness. 

Invest your best energies in the upper right quadrant.  That’s the leadership path to success.

I think I’m like most people in this:  I kinda dread the start of intense exercising, and for the first few minutes I think “This hurts, why am I doing this?”.  Afterwards I feel great, with a strong sense of accomplishment. 

The same is true of tackling unpleasant-but-necessary tasks.  Especially tasks that are new or I’m not good at (yet). 

When I eat healthier, I’m still a little hungry at the end of the day.  

I’m currently working on a training plan for my thought process.  The inner dialogue centers on “This is what progress feels like.” 

If ai is artificial intelligence, what’s real intelligence?  Relational intelligence as a social creature, swimming in culture, a profound mix of rational and emotional, capable of both deduction and induction.  None of our digital tools today are capable of inductive reasoning.

Humans appear to operate on two internal ‘computation’ systems.  Daniel Kahneman popularized this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.  We’re capable of ‘gut’ responses and mental leaps, very quickly, but we can’t articulate how this intuition works.  These fast responses are not always correct, though we like to celebrate the times we got it right.  We also have slower, measured calculation and analysis capability.  We can work through problems and issues.  We can explain how we arrived at our conclusions.

I appreciate this concept (which is not original to me): 

The ai tools are akin to our gut response – fast, often correct but not always, and no one can explain exactly how the result happened.

Therefore, you and I should use ai tools the same way we handle our gut responses when making decisions.  How reversible is the decision if we’re wrong?  What is the cost of being wrong?  Be especially wary of making irreversible, high-cost decisions solely based on a gut response.  If you’re going to gamble, at least have a reasoned component to your gamble.