Study is the renewing of our mind as fasting is to our bodies.  The discipline of study is necessary to become a deeper person.  

Study is a discipline because it requires energy, persistence, and learnable skills.  We love the modern fantasy that we could simply “plug in” and download knowledge and expertise.  Perhaps someday data transfer directly into our brains will be feasible.  But I’m skeptical that this will generate knowledge and expertise.  We already know the act of study, the hard work of absorbing and using information, shapes our neural connections.  Study transforms our brain at a cellular level and we benefit from the meta effects of this process. 

Study is not just formal schooling, or reading books, or apprenticeship learning a craft.  Study is fundamentally about paying attention, making observations, questioning, testing ideas, pulling together threads across time and space, seeking understanding and insights that help one another live better. We certainly pursue what intrigues us and we examine everything that touches our sphere of influence.  We study both people we admire and people who disgust us. We study the natural world of creation, and we study what our fellow humans have created.  We study the past as we build the future while walking in amazement in the present.

We study ourselves and other people.  Self-reflection is a hallmark of being truly human; it is unclear if any other animal in creation studies itself.  We’re created as intensely social creatures, so we consciously study other people.  There is great wisdom in being able to discern intentions and motivations that drive behaviors, whether conscious or unconscious. 

Many of us were required to read one of Shakespeare’s plays in school, likely Romeo and Juliet.  Did your eyeballs pass over the page, or did you actually read it?  Did you read it well enough to temporarily remember enough to pass a test?  Did you read it and ponder it and think about how the story speaks to all kinds of inter-family conflicts?  If you read it as a teenager and then in your 40’s, how much more did you recognize and grasp about the patterns of relationships and the angst of love?   Only the read-reflect-reread work makes you a deeper person.                        

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I won’t sugar-coat this for you: Study is about leaning into the old, the new and the difficult to find wisdom. I have friends and colleagues who consider reading old and hard books impossibly difficult. One asked if there is a GetAbstract summary for Plato and Aristotle.  (I don’t think he was kidding.)  

Here’s good news: Genuine wisdom comes in finite amounts that you can absorb. You can get your head around it because it simultaneously grounds you.  You have the time to both absorb wisdom and act upon it.  The requirement: shut all the noise off.  Connect with deep people, whether dead authors, distant, or in personal touch.  Study is an investment to generates rewards over time.

Becoming a deep person requires selective input, emphasizing wisdom and truth.  

We’re awash in data and information.  We’re spending a big fraction of our waking hours interacting with electronic screens. Chances are good that you’re enduring multiple firehoses of media negativity and confusion.  The people generating this brew are savvy and intentional, but they’re not deep.  They benefit at your expense when you’re confused, distracted, and undiscerning.

Nearly everyone reading this newsletter lives in a world of abundance.  We have more food and stuff than we need, and more than is good for us.  Self-control is a difficult-to-gain strength.

This is where we apply the discipline of fasting. 

(Right now at least a few of my readers will agree with my friend Bob: “Ack! Can’t I just give money instead of fasting?”)

Fasting from food builds our self-control and tempers our physical appetites. Deep people develop and refine self-control. The ancients didn’t need to know about dopamine resets and autophagy to recognize the health benefits of fasting.  Intermittent fasting is popular today to better manage our body weight. I consider that the side benefit of fasting, not the primary aim. 

Fasting from news or social media will also help you break the addictive power of media.  It’s frankly unpleasant at first, and you’ll need to ignore the little voice that says you’re missing out.  After a short while you’ll have much more clarity.  When you come back to media you’ll sense the difference between useful information and noise.

Fasting from easy abundance (automated tools, convenient foods for cooking, book summaries, Google searches instead of memorization, and dare I say ChatGPT essay writing) reinforces thinking.  I could write at length about the dangers to individuals and societies when we don’t think. Thinking is hard work and necessary work for thriving.  This kind of fasting also prepares us to be better craftsman and leaders, too.  We intuitively know the superior value of hand-made, hand-written, and in-person, right?

Anyone can become a deep person, or at least a deeper person, because it is a journey. We make significant progress without ever “arriving.” Deep people aren’t manufactured, they’re formed.

Though there is a large body of knowledge about how to form crowds and masses, what I’m interested in here is forming individuals.  Here are the basic realities for forming individuals:

·         Everything has the potential to form us because humans are inherently imitators and emulators. 

·         Not everything forms us well.

·         Our choices and behaviors influence what forms us.

·         Formation is ongoing and not final; what has been formed can be reformed.

We are individually and collectively a product of our formation.  What we’ve experienced and learned from family, peers, friends, schooling, churches, organizations, media of all kinds, entertainment, hobbies, sports, wars, and more shape us.  We’re inescapably swimming in the multigenerational cultures we live in even if we’re swimming differently than others.  Every generation absorbs and learns. Formation is not static.  You are not the same person you were at 12, 18, or 30, or yesterday.

(I’m assuming here that we have common agreement that there is good and evil, that love and morality matter, that there is more than power, more than the material world.  Formation still matters if you disagree – but logically there is no point to pursuing the journey to become a deep person.)

What works against good formation? There are modern conceits like these:

·         “I’m already good enough.  I don’t need to improve.”  This is usually followed with “It’s those people.”

·         Modern people are automatically smarter and better than everyone who came before us.  We have evolved beyond those primitive ignoramuses.

·         “I can be the <noun> without doing the <verb>.”  Examples: I can be fit without consistent exercise, I can be good without self-discipline and sacrifice, etc.

·         There’s nothing wrong with being double-minded and living a duality (good & deep in some areas, wicked and shallow in others).  

·         “I’ll have more time later.”

Hmmm… perhaps none of these conceits are modern.

Today there are passionate advocates and critics about our schools, our media, entertainment, censorship narratives, and political perspectives.  Why?  These are means of forming people.  We might not articulate the “formation” part.  What you and I are exposed to (or not) has enormous consequences in how we think, feel, and interpret the world. 

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When we go deeper in the ocean or the earth, it becomes darker and darker.  When we pursue depth as a person we are growing brighter and see more light.  We become more aware than ever.  There is a terrific line from the movie “Joe Versus the Volcano”: “My father says that almost the whole world is asleep.  Everyone you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”  I think the key word there is ‘amazement.’  Not everyone is truly asleep.  Everyone truly awake is amazed. That’s what greater light brings forward.

Perhaps one way to describe a deep person is that they’re increasingly well-grounded in light.

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The Apostle Paul gave the Romans the paradigm to becoming a deep person (emphasis mine):

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:1-2)

The paradigm (whether you’re Christian or religious or not) is two-fold:

First, actively put your body in a place of sacrifice that you may be formed well.

Second, fight the default messages of shallowness by renewing your mind with narratives consistent with becoming a deep person.

This is conscious, planned, diligent, ongoing work.  No one becomes a deeper person passively, by osmosis, or through random sleepwalking.  It requires bodily work – it’s not purely a mental matter.  It requires shaping our minds – shaping the body is insufficient.  This makes sense because philosophy and biology concur that we’re body and mind together.

The journey to becoming a deep person has everything to do with voluntary and cooperative formation.  You must push your will towards a collection of behaviors and chosen environments to maximize your deep formation and minimize your shallow formation.

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I published a book last year about influencing the next ten generations. You have far more influence potential than the “shallow” world wants you to know.

I believe my calling now is to enroll others in the great journey to becoming deep people.  It’s easy to criticize shallow people, but this only leads to more shallow relationships. Instead, observe the power in a positive example.  Deep people somehow catalyze an inner conversation where a person says to herself, “I want to be like that person.”  Inspiration (literally, breathing in the spirit) creates the attractive pull into the journey of depth.  Isn’t this why we honor the great people of history? They inspire us to become more like them.  

We speak sloppily about “time management.”  You can certainly make decisions based on a time factor.  You can choose how to watch time.  But the idea that you can manage time is a bit silly.  Try telling time “Do this, not that.”  Or “Change the consequences of your motion.” Try giving time feedback on what happened.

Maybe I should start a side hustle selling bumper stickers that say, “Time happens.”

What you can (and must) do is manage yourself and other people working with you.  You can make choices based on your energy level.  You can take actions which shape your energy level. You can direct and redirect your focus.  You can give specific directions related to time. 

My dad used to tell me that the way to understand a situation is to follow the money and follow the power.  This works well but doesn’t always explain people’s behaviors.

You can broaden this into systems analysis by asking “Who is incentivized/disincentivized to behave how?”  Money and power are a subset of all kinds of incentives.  The story we want to tell ourselves (or want others to believe about us) is an incentive – as I wrote before, people die for ideas.  The desire to either fit in or stand out is an incentive.  Vengeance and fear work as incentives.  The common thread of most atrocities in the 20^th century was a powerful conviction that God did not see the perpetrators or hold them to account.  Interpersonal and social cohesion operates with incentives and disincentives, too.

Fundamental: If you want to change a system you must adjust the incentives.  Half the challenge is that the people with power to change a system benefit from the current incentive structure! 

Consider a complex system like healthcare in the US.  It’s incredibly difficult to change because at least four major participants in the system have learned how to optimize it for their own interests.  (Sadly, patients are not one of these four.)  I’m surprised that a high-leverage proposal from years ago – offer individuals the same tax break on insurance we grant corporations – is systematically rejected, but I shouldn’t be.

Consider legislative bodies.  Even the highest character individuals with noble ambitions are usually overwhelmed by the incentive structure of the political system.  Disincentives against greed and corruption have weakened in my lifetime.  Lies are first tolerated, then celebrated. This is a deep echo from the decline of the Roman republic, and Greek and Babylonian history before that.

You can probably think of other examples with larger and smaller scopes.  Education and school administration. Regulatory oversight. Industries dominated by a small number of players. Religious denominations. Voluntary associations.

We trend towards perverse incentives.  Left unchecked and unchallenged, we create the conditions for Caesars.  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves…”

Candid admission about our world right now:  We’re floundering in problems that won’t be solved with only more intelligence or technology.  All the great steps forward in human existence can be traced back to deep people.  We need a critical number of deep people – just one or two won’t suffice.

Being shallow is the default state and what we tend towards without training and sustained effort. Shallow people have these characteristics:

• Immaturity
• Arrogance
• Narcissism
• Close-minded ideology
• Easily bored, easily distracted
• Despise everything in the past
• Think dreams come true without work
• Fearful of others, always go with the crowd
• Cynicism, pessimism
• Advance themselves by putting others down
• Celebrity-seeking
• Babblers who like to hear themselves talk

You don’t need a Ph.D. in history or sociology to appreciate that shallow people have done enormous damage to others.

In contrast, the characteristics of a deep person include:

• Extensive knowledge on particular subjects
• Broad knowledge about many disciplines
• Sense of history and perspective that can be applied to current situations
• Patient listeners
• Go out and make things happen; not passive
• Mature, self-disciplined
• Pursue excellence in their craft
• “Basically wise”; others consistently seek out their wisdom
• Realists with optimism, not pessimist fueling cynicism
• Enjoyable to be around. They have an ability to mentor and coach others well.
• Good humored
• Profoundly love others
• Ability to express complex ideas and ask very good questions
• Not drawn into pettiness and squabbles
• Trustworthy to lead or advise in complex situations
• Gracious in serving others and generous in sharing
• Love learning and the process of inquiry
• Express gratitude
• Unafraid to be alone and stand alone
• Humble about themselves
• Unhurried with people
• Seem to be directed by higher consciousness and calling
• Courageous, especially when their opinion/perspective is not popular
• Shaped by life experiences without being a victim
• Embrace mystery and ambiguity as part of life’s experience
• Respect the transcendent
• Not always the “smartest” from academic view, but recognized for intelligence and wisdom
• Willing to ask and explore uncomfortable questions
• Have something worthwhile to say.  This applies even to those who need to think aloud with others.
• Use gifts and experiences as investment material to produce even higher value
• Not sleepwalking when the world is in turmoil and needs help
• Think long-term and really long-term; not hobbled by “Now” mentality
• Detached from ’empty’ rewards

(Anything you would add to this list?)

We like to be around these people, right?  We can wish for more of them in our lives.  Most important: You and I can become a deep person. I believe that anyone can become a deep person, or at least a deeper person, because it is a journey. We make significant progress without ever “arriving.” Deep people aren’t manufactured, they’re formed.  (More on this in the future.)

We live in an age of exponential technology advancements — exciting and a bit scary, too. We cannot assume everything new is good and helpful.

Neil Postman’s questions for a new technology (from his lecture On Culture’s Surrender to Technology) are a useful framework:

1. What is the problem to which technology claims to be a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?

4. Which people and institutions will be most harmed?

5. What changes in language are being promoted?

6. What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?

7. What alternative media might be made from a technology?

Leaders and managers use all kinds of indicators to assess a situation and trends.  Probably a hundred decent books have been written about management by KPIs.  

The deepest thing to understand about indicators is that they’re a signal from systems and systems of systems — so pay attention to whether an indicator is a leading or a lagging indicator relative to the outcome you’re focused upon.  Rain is a lagging indicator of atmospheric moisture and temperature, but a leading indicator for plant growth. 

You can be badly fooled by confusing leading and lagging.  

Highly recommended books I’ve read in recent months:

Failure of Nerve (Edwin Friedman)

The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Mattias Desmet)

How to Grow Old (Cicero)

The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis)

Beowulf (Tolkien translation)

Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker)

Trust is a precious component of good relationships.  It’s easy to recognize, more difficult to precisely define, and takes diligence to foster.  

I suggest that trust is a complex function of competence and character, intersecting with the people’s prior experiences.  Math form:   

Trust = f(competence, character) | (prior experiences)

Here are some facts about trust, true at interpersonal levels, organization levels, and more:

1. Relationship trust accelerates working effectiveness by reducing friction and doubts.  Trust is valuable in ways that can’t be fully captured in a spreadsheet. 

2. You can only operate on trust indirectly; it’s an emergent property in relationships.  You can’t command someone to trust you or trust you more. 

3. A person’s self-narratives are not easily shifted or changed. 

4. Trust is much more complex than a display of sincerity or authenticity.  Sincerity is not a measure of truth.  Authenticity is not a measurement of competence (e.g., people can be authentic jerks and nincompoops).  People are not easy to fool, and those who do get fooled will never trust again. 

5. Withdrawals from the “trust account” require many deposits to come back to even.

 
6. When trust is low, people rightly expect compensation.  They could want more money, more favors, a higher interest rate, perks, a future promise, etc., but something must be provided to compensate for low trust. 

Given these facts, looking at the landscape of collapsing trust in public institutions larger and smaller, what can we do?  So much depends on specifics, so I can only speak generally.

First, avoid an impulsive response. The simplistic answer is to point fingers, retreat away from engagement at all as if avoiding a moral contaminant, and demand every institution be broken down. Institutions, like biological systems, have a way of slowly declining until there is a rapid final collapse.  They can linger at some level for a long time, gasping for breath and relevance. Tearing them down before the final collapse requires violence or at least the threat of violence. As Shakespeare had King Lear say, “That way lies madness.” Believing “It will be different this time” is ignoring the weight of historical examples.

There can be institutions which simply need to be ended and discarded.  Slavery. Human trafficking. Maybe drug cartels?  This requires collective will and significant sustained power (with at least the threat of violence) because many people benefit from the existing institution.

Changing an institution that has lost trust occurs stepwise. Forgiveness is necessary when people have been wronged, and then there must be justice.  (Deep sidebar topic: Without forgiveness, you’re seeking vengeance rather than justice.) Justice often requires removing people from positions of authority in an institution.  We must examine people, processes and practices, and how the institution fits into the larger world. You nearly always need people from ‘outside’ the institution to accomplish this.

Replacing corrupt institution leadership and practices that destroyed trust requires deep people who can do the hard and heroic work of re-establishing trust.  This is a long, difficult journey.  Success demands someone called to this challenge, because the obstacles and slog will chew up anyone else.

We can also build new institutions that serve a similar purpose alongside the old institution.  Fresh starts don’t have the same trust problems even though they have fresh problems.  We can deconstruct why the old institutions failed and put in guardrails against those specific points of failure.  A somewhat parallel institution can carry forward when the old institution finally unravels.

In all cases, we’re going to need sustained wisdom.