#like I said some inertia is important -- the challenge is to understand what we need to see to change our minds and *why*

[gofancyninjaworld]

I know you're not one for discussing power scaling that much, but what is your opinion on how reddit (general) constantly lowballs Genos, then consider weaker feats of other characters better than his own feats of strength? It just seems almost.... weird to me? It's like people hold a grudge against Genos for, existing, I guess? And when did this trend even start?

It's a long answer that is grounded in psychology. While the character himself is fictional and it's by no means a serious situation, nevertheless I've found the way people respond a surprisingly real-life object lesson.

As for the whole powerscaling thing that's become awfully popular, that's a purely fictional construct and is just froth. It's irritating as this is a story designed to frustrate attempts to make like-for-like comparisons and which tries to capture some of the complexity of actual conflict, but folk will have their fun. I think nothing of it. I think it's driven mostly by YouTubers who need to have something to engage their OPM viewers about day after day to stay monetised -- it's hard work. More power to them.

1. Anchoring Bias. One of the headaches of teaching people is that we don't actually learn that well from evidence. We need to check with our pre-existing impressions and beliefs before we'll accept it. All human beings do it, it gives us some degree of stability in our understanding of the world, but it easily goes too far. I don't know if you've ever watched Mythbusters, but in revisiting the episode of the lead balloon, Adam Savage said something I found extremely relevant: he said that there was no inertia in [Jamie's] ability to change his mind, praising the latter's quickness to change his mind in response to new information. [link to the whole segment]

As a group, Redditors have a very strong anchoring bias, a very high mental inertia if you will. You can see it in the way they get upset whenever something in the manga does not correspond to the webcomic, or doesn't happen in the way they thought it would. Oy vey. Characters too, impressions are anchored early and are very slow to shift. It's anchored in minds that Genos is a loser, and certainly when he started out he was pretty damn bad at what he did. Other characters are anchored as winners and their actions are read much more lightly. If mental gymnastics need to be taken to make new information 'fit' that anchor, they will be done. Like if Metal Bat were seen the same way that Genos is, the time he broke free of the chains Erimin and Destro had bound him in, you would have seen posts questioning the toughness of the chains and the quality of the binding. You know, 'just asking', the sort of thing that seems superficially critical in isolation... until you realise it's not asked of others.

2. Key Opinion Leaders. There may be half a million subscribers on Reddit, but functionally, there's only about 50 members who have a loud enough voice to sway the sub one way or the other. They're the Key Opinion Leaders. It's the case for *all* human groupings. Even scientific and medical fields have their KOLs and if you want something to be accepted, you need only persuade them and the rest fall largely in line.

3. The Halo Effect. A basic problem of human psychology is that if we have a positive impression of a person, we'll think everything they do is that bit better. And vice versa.

A character with a great halo is Bang. Who doesn't like a cool old dude with martial arts moves? And he's an awesome and likeable character. The positive light in which he's seen is all but independent of what can actually be observed about him, which is much less rosy. The fact that in a field where disciples are generally loyal and ex-masters are held in esteem for decades, he has few with any loyalty to him? He may be strong but so far, every time he's intervened to help Genos out of a situation the latter can't cope with, he hasn't so much gotten him out of the situation as joined him in the crap. You won't catch anyone calling him a jobber though (no hero should be called a jobber for the record).

If the halo changes, it's shocking how quickly a character's actions will be interpreted differently. Popular opinion was that Sweet Mask could do no right even if his critical stance on hero work being done right and seen to be done right was spot on. And now that he's a more sympathetic character, nothing he does can be wrong, even though he *is* a raging asshole at times, like a lot of the time. Both are bad takes.

The halo effect works against Genos. The whys don't matter, it's the fact of its existence that does. It means that no matter how well he is doing, his actions are always going to be seen more negatively than if other characters did the same thng. It's funny that since your post landed in my in box, we've had a manga chapter in which it's finally occurred to many that Genos is actually heroic. How long that will last and what effect if any it'll have in modulating folks' opinions of him we will just have to see.

Like I said, this is a fictional character and no harm is being done. It's just a fascinating object lesson in how you can have severe bias against someone without any explicit bigotry. Also the truth of 'give a dog a bad name and hang him.' It's also a salutatory reminder of why English (or other language of instruction) literature is such a valuable class. Because it encourages you to read and think about texts critically for both explicit and implicit meaning and once you learn to spot the patterns, you can see it better IRL.

[ganymedesclock]

Dead Cells and the weight of small lives pt.1 (about Prisoner)

NGL this is at least partially me saltposting about “I don’t really understand how people read the Prisoner’s dialogue and look at his thoughts and see someone who’s a total unrepentant asshole or the same person as the King” but it’s also commentating on an interesting pattern I observe in the game and its worldbuilding.

The setting of Dead Cells is, no two ways about it, a very unpleasant world. It is awash in death. The apocalyptic zombie plague of the Malaise is just the final nail in its coffin, leaving a handful of uninfected survivors on top of the literal heaps of corpses of the kingdom’s inquisition. A fountain of blood flows in the highest castle in the land. It’s grim. It’s horrible. We can hear someone get murdered through an unbreakable door.

The interesting thing is... what the game tells you to do with it, through the perspective of the main character.

For clarity: Prisoner is not here to save anyone. He is not a hero on a quest. He is- well- a prisoner. On discovering he has a kind of immortality, he begins using it to make his way through the island, learning painful lesson after painful lesson, returning, returning, and returning again trying to achieve some kind of change on this degrading looping time. But the fact that you’re not specifically out to save people is that... well... basically nobody’s in a position to be saved. As mentioned, there’s not a lot of survivors, and most of the ones there don’t need you- they’re doing on their own, and if that happens to not be enough, it tends to be enough very suddenly, where you can’t reach them or weren’t there at the time and are left a little shaken, because they were fine the last time you checked.

Also, half of said survivors are trying really hard to kill Prisoner.

Thus, if you’re used to games where objective 1 is to Save Everyone, Rid The Land Of Evil, Prisoner might seem shockingly callous, I suppose. The thing is, I consider myself the emotional equivalent of a glass frog- I’m very thin-skinned with bleak hopeless narratives.

And yet. There is something about Dead Cells’ universe that doesn’t seem like an attack on me. And I think that it’s what the game has to say about “small lives”. The lives that are considered unimportant in a crisis.

The Island in Dead Cells is ruled by a major hierarchy. This is obvious from jump- one of the first bits of lore text you are likely to ever get starting the game up is this one, for the Prisoners’ Quarters, the first area you start in:

In the social hierarchy of the island, there are the dogs, the rats, and just below them, the prisoners.

Prisoner is sometimes called “The Beheaded” by official detail, but he is called “Prisoner” specifically by one of the service NPCs you meet in the corridors- so one of the most consistent entities you talk to that’s not trying to kill you, who is always happy to see you with a sunny, “Well, hello, Mr. Prisoner, sir!”

He also starts the game in a prison cell, his headless state is made clear to us that it was the result of an execution rather than a war wound (there’s a chopping block and an obviously used axe in his cell with him) and his default equipment is a collar that was clearly once used to restrain him. So when the game pronounces this to you about the island’s hierarchy, Prisoner is not speaking abstractly about ‘those other poor sods’-

He’s talking about himself.

The hierarchy of the island is a specter that stalks you through almost every level of the game- through the massive prison complex which is littered with evidence and recounting of the guards toying with prisoners’ lives, of numbered corpses, a revolting sewer containing a shackled, corrupted monster that seems to have lived her entire life in this very same prison; to the astonishingly humble fishing hamlet that lies directly at the foot of the soaring grandeur of the Clock Tower and the even greater heights of High Peak Castle.

To the discrepancy between the teeming, crowded tombstones of the Graveyard, to the sprawling labyrinthine nature of the Forgotten Sepulchre- where a handful of tombs are presided over by entire walls of skulls that we’re helpfully told belonged to the heads of the delegations of high-ranking dignitaries- said delegations were butchered to attend their masters’ burials evermore.

Right away, this is thrown to us not as something we are outside of or transcend, but a slap in the face. The world tells us that our avatar in this game does not matter- that his face and voice do not matter and these things were taken from him by violence.

The thing is... Prisoner does not shut up. The game is full to bursting with his thoughts. He has so much to say that it’s jarring when we’re used to being alone with all his thoughts to meet another person and suddenly be reminded they hear nothing of what he’s saying, like a dramatic version of Garfield Minus Garfield.

Through revival, through cycles, the expectation of the gameplay is we are living the experience of Prisoner and what Prisoner’s experience is, is a one-man raging against a situation that’s telling him to shrivel up and die because he’s not important. It doesn’t want to be fair to him. It doesn’t want to be nice to him. It doesn’t care how much he’s hurting or if he doesn’t own a decent pair of shoes to his name, or if he doesn’t even have a name to speak of.

But Prisoner does not give up. He in fact does the opposite of giving up. After playing this game for a good while, I fired up some Hollow Knight and it really hit me like a truck that Prisoner spends most of the game tearing around near top speed, cartwheeling and sprinting and hauling up ledges and slamming down ledges. The pace of the game is fast, fast, fast, all intense, all in, and you’re encouraged to take risky gambles with an already precarious system like temporarily taking on one-hit-you’re-dead curses in exchange for more damage output or better loot.

The animated trailers make this even clearer. Prisoner gets his shit wrecked.

A lot.

At best, he can have some moments of feeling like an unstoppable god, but just about the time you start to get really worried for that cute little mushroom baby and their caretaker you are reassured that Prisoner’s reign of hubristic wrath comes to a hard stop thanks to inertia, and spikes.

And I will say more than many cinematic trailers, Motion Twin really did a remarkable job of matching this 1-to-1 with the actual experience of playing the game. I have even literally swaggered into a fight with the Giant much the same way Prisoner breaks out that cool spear flourish Moment Of Challenge only to immediately eat shit directly into his laser beam eyes, that I was not prepared for because he hadn’t used them last fight.

Prisoner is not valiant, triumphant, or wildly successful. His final bastion is skill and ingenuity.

This puts a really interesting spin on what I said before- that Prisoner is not here to save anybody, even himself.

Prisoner frankly does not have that kind of power.

There’s nobody in a vulnerable state you even have the option to choose to abandon. People live or die, and it’s really not up to you. There are a few deaths Prisoner takes into his own hands- the King and the Collector notably- but even those people, like... the King appears comatose by the time you reach him, and the Collector not only tries to kill you but is revived thanks to time strangeness- and another death that can happen, and is erased by the time looping- the unnamed sewer prisoner who wants you to go fetch the teleportation rune for him (ahem. he wants you to retrieve his rune, that definitely rightfully belongs to him) ostensibly to get out of jail but when you find his body, not only is he dead of a fate the rune wouldn’t have saved him from, but his objective, revealed, was that he was trying to get to a treasure chest he’d hidden earlier.

The one time it can really be said, outside of the boss fights or executing the King, that Prisoner really decides if someone lives or dies, is...

Mushroom Boi.

For the uninitiated, Mushroom Boi is a little summonable mushroom child that is equipped as a skill. Triggering the skill once will summon him. Triggering the skill while he’s already summoned will cause him to self-destruct, taking out enemies in the area and, by the game description, “violate your very soul”.

After this, you can without any consequence whatsoever summon him again, and blow this poor child up as much as you want. It does not really seem to slow him down any- but the game still, distinctly, frowns on it. You have a reward in the form of an achievement for keeping him with you without sacrifice, aforementioned crack about sacrificing him “violating your soul”, and, just, how can you be mad at this cute little guy? he has a tiny bow! He’s an extremely useful companion! Mechanically, you do not really hurt for want of the sacrifice ability if you summon him and then never touch that button again.

Given that Prisoner spends so much of the game alone with his thoughts, and the person who gives him access to Mushroom Boi, the Collector, has, to put it mildly, a long history of using and discarding people including implicitly children, there has to be some kind of implicit in-universe-source for the idea that you’d feel crushing guilt for detonating your son and boy like that, and the angle that makes the most sense is Prisoner.

So, Prisoner is someone who feels really guilty for painfully inconveniencing a summonable construct mushroom in a way that it does not seem to hold against him at all. At the same time, there’s really a shortage of ways that you can personally hurt anybody who’s not trying to kill you or being particularly exploitative (aforementioned teleportation rune sewer guy, who Prisoner goes as far as to flip off after he lunges and tries to either claw prisoner or grab the rune from him by force)

The most disrespectful Prisoner tends to be are to one of three categories of people:

Dead bodies that cannot feel or particularly care if he kicks them, that he usually kicks either specifically to loot or, as what seems to be some kind of weird bad idea where he plants his naked foot on a waterlogged corpse and then declares “ew” like what did you expect to happen actually

People who have one way or another tried to exploit him for their personal gain directly at his expense so he nearly gets murdered- or in FACT gets murdered- while they sit back and wait for him to succeed and bring them the reward.

Aforementioned people who are trying openly to kill him and even then he only flips off the Giant basically because the Giant flips him off first. This is kinder than I feel about the Giant. I like the Giant but I feel like someone with laser beam eyes that uses them like that deserves more than just one retaliatory middle finger.

And this meshes with other factors, but the post is long enough I’ll break off here.

[architectuul]

The Winner Of This Turbulent Time Will Be The City

With Mladen Jadrić, an architect teaching and practicing in Vienna, we discussed about influences behind his practice, needs for continuous experimentation and the importance of understanding the city as a collective project. 

WHA Welingergasse in Vienna by Jadric Architektur. | Photo: Pez Hejduk

You conduct planning, teaching and design activity with colleagues, students and clients from around the world. Considering that you studied and practiced architecture in Vienna since the early 1990s, would you say that the Viennese historical commitment to the development of affordable social housing influenced your worldview and your view of the architect’s role in the process of city-making?

Definitely, Glenn Murcutt was born in London but later became an Australian architect. He said once that you have to live somewhere for a long time before you are able to plan and design there. I would like to add that planning requires you to internalize and spiritually bond with certain things. What was different in the Viennese approach to planning than elsewhere in Europe? Despite many influential figures, in the last century Vienna was less a product of individual and more a product of collective design and collective spirit. The planning of the city is also a long-term democratic and transparent process that pursues long-term goals. Strategic decisions remain the responsibility of the city. The status of housing is seen as a basic human need and cannot only be regulated by the free market. The same is applies to water supply, public transportation, and public space. Today, the city with the highest quality of life worldwide largely owes its success to 100 years of continuity in designing and implementing affordable housing.

Last year, TU Vienna’s Academic Press published “At Home in Vienna: Studies of Exemplary Affordable Housing”, which you co-edited together with Dijana Alić, and in which your students have brought together a comparative analysis of 35 Viennese social housing projects built over a period of almost 100 years. The book is a great resource for anyone interested in the history of social housing. If you could choose one lesson a reader takes away from it, what would it be?

I think it would be Josef Frank and his spirit embodied by the Werkbund Housing Complex, where he broke with the idea of white modernism and advocated new pluralism in design. In his essay titled Accidentism, published 1958 in the Swedish Form Journal, he explained his perennial problem with proponents of mainstream architecture, beginning with Jugendstil and later with Modernism and the idea of the Universal Style. 

Werkbund Housing (1932) by Frank was a model housing scheme in Vienna. 

“What we need is variety and not stereotyped monumentality. None of us feels comfortable in an order that has been forced upon us, even if it has been doused in a sauce of beauty.” –  Josef Frank, “Accidentism”, originally published in Swedish in Form 54 (1958). | Photo via Svenskt Tenn

Instead of dogmatically following the rules, he proposed that “we should design our surroundings as if they originated by chance.” He refused to use the categories like beauty or style; the living room to him was rather a product of coincidence than of beauty or harmony. His criticism, including lamenting the absence of humor in architecture, can be read not only like his rejection of exclusivity of certain esthetic values but of all elements of totalitarian societies. His credo evolution, rather than revolution, is more relevant than ever.

In your introduction to “At Home in Vienna”, I found it especially interesting that you emphasized the importance of fruitful cooperation that existed between architects and housing cooperatives in the early days of Vienna’s social housing development, at the beginning of the XX century. What do you think about architects’ involvement with the communities they design for – or design with – today? 

Particularly the Involvement of architects like Adolf Loos in the Settlement Movement (Siedlerbewegung) is highly interesting because of cooperation based on three elements: the settlers, who are the laborers at the same time; the City of Vienna that provides necessary construction material and enables the whole process through its very pragmatic approach to the Movement; and architects who provide their know-how. Today, architects and their know-how are again part of the complex planning process of self-participation projects and very popular independent housing cooperatives (so called “Baugruppen”). The preparation and planning processes take much longer than the usual housing projects and mediation is essential. Involvement of architects is welcome and encouraged, whenever possible. Many communities not only in Vienna but also in smaller towns across Austria, would welcome a common platform where architects would  be active as consultants and advisors, if possible. The Austrian Chamber of Architects is currently trying to install such formal and informal platforms all around Austria.

Heuberg residential area was in 1920s built in cooperation between the settlers, the City of Vienna and architects. “As members of cooperatives, settlers committed themselves to work on the construction site and workshops for brick and window production for a certain number of hours. Architects like Loos, who was also Chief Architect of the city’s settlement commission, and Frank made an important cultural contribution to ensuring the success and quality of these quarters.”  | Photo via  At Home in Vienna

How do teaching and planning activities feed into each other in your practice? 

Teaching means permanent learning – it is essential for my work and permanent education. Interaction with my students is about ongoing sharing of knowledge, experiences, and ideas. It is common for my design studios to be organized like ideas factories, where brainstorming generates many new ideas. In the past two decades, we have created an interesting network not only in Europe, but also in Asia, Australia and South America. Recently, I initiated collaboration on a new book with experts from four continents.

In one of your interviews, you said how students must “learn to learn from reality”. What is the reality young architects are facing today? What are the most important questions they should try to answer?

We are living in the world of contradictory realities. At present, we are facing one of the biggest challenges after World War II, a pandemic we haven’t witnessed since 1918. I just came back from Australia and wrote an article about a conflict between science and politics preceding the recent bushfires. Too much precious time for decisive and extensive action had been wasted because of political inertia and slow response to the climate change. We saw a similar mindset and patterns emerging in our countries before coronavirus hit Europe like a tsunami.  Some strange attitudes to the crisis, to put it mildly. We in Austria can consider ourselves lucky but we are not alone in Europe. At the end of the day, solidarity and courage must prevail over selfishness and fear.

“Teaching means permanent learning”. | Photo via Jadric Architektur

Vienna is getting ready for the International Building Exhibition 2022. What do you see as the main advantage or disadvantage in searching for new social housing models through this format? 

Measured on a global scale, IBA is a very solid platform for housing projects. But, and that has little to do with sentimentality, in the 1990s people dared to do more. IBA was actually a platform for avantgarde innovation in residential construction. People were not afraid of experimenting. I’m missing the intensity of architectural discourses that were taking place in Europe at the time. I’m missing the freshness of platforms like EUROPAN, which was overrun by new pragmatism. Maybe the time is right for a new start?

Hangzhou from plans to construction. | Photo via Jadric Architektur

In recent years you have been doing extensive work in Asia, which you presented at the exhibition “OPUS ASIAE: Contributions to contemporary architecture in Asia.” How did the experience of working in Asian cities influence your architecture? 

Our office has developed projects ranging from visions for new urban areas to strategic planning for community building through social housing, locations for art, public space, infrastructure projects, and exhibitions. Most of the designs are the result of open competitions. In our projects for Chinese, Korean and Japanese cities, we delivered many ideas for far-reaching changes in many Asian urban and rural areas. Cities are currently growing and provoking global urban, social and political changes. The final winner of this turbulent time will be the city again, in the end. It sounds like a provocative vision of the future, but based on all available data, the world will be dominated by megacities. In this context, the planning of socially just, environmentally friendly, and smart cities is becoming an increasingly complex goal.

Room Vertical District from the OPUS ASIAE exhibition in Polo Museale del Lazio (2019). With the accompanying book, it is a collection of projects made for Asian cities in the last five years. | Photo via Jadric Architektur

Jadric Architektur and their Korean Partner “1990uao” (Yoon Geun Ju) are chosen to realize the Seoul Photographic Art Museum after winning an international Design Competition. | Photo via Jadric Architektur Towards the end of 2019, Jadric Architektur won an international Design Competition for the Seoul Photographic Art Museum – congratulations! Apart from working on this realization, what else is your practice currently preparing? 

At the present, we are like many companies around the globe affected by the current pandemic. Surprisingly, we are working rather efficiently from home offices. However, we have had to put plans for workshops and exhibitions on hold. The most important thing right now for all of us is to survive these difficult times in terms of health and economy. I also have to congratulate my colleagues in our professional association, the Chamber of Architects and Engineers, for their unselfish daily voluntary assistance to other colleagues. This is very motivating and encouraging.

Mladen Jadric is the founder and principal of Jadric Architektur. He has been teaching at the TU Wien - Faculty of Architecture and Planning and has gained extensive experience as a visiting professor in Europe, USA, Asia, Australia, and South America. His works were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, M.I.T. Cooper Union and Roger Williams University, Alvar Aalto University in Helsinki, Architectural Biennale in Venice, the World Architectural Triennial in Tokyo, Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urban Planning and Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan. He has been awarded with the State Prize for Experimental Architecture, Karl Scheffel Prize and Schorsch Prize for housing by the City of Vienna as well as with the Grand Prize by the Mayor of Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea. He is chairman of the architectural section in “Künstlerhaus”, the oldest association of artists and architects in Austria and a deputy chairman of the architectural section with the Chamber of Civil Engineers of Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland. --- by Sonja Dragovic

[marriagemyth]

How To Act When A Man Walks Away From You

  Individual connections are complex as well as when love assumptions come into play it is possible to experience the complication of not recognizing the other's behavior. In particular scenarios, there is a risk of falling into the mental block effect walking around as well as around a problem without locating a clear-cut solution. What to do when a man leaves you? Why does a man leave without stating anything? This is among those circumstances that can produce dissatisfaction if the expectations that you had placed because individual made you believe in a reciprocated passion. 

What to do when a man suddenly leaves

Some individuals wonder what they can do to change his perspective, however, what is really important in this scenario is to keep internal peace and harmony. Real learning of psychological knowledge lies in finding out to live these sorts of situations approving that, sometimes, these points happen. However, if you feed ideas that do not lead you to a concrete reaction, however just lead you to the point of pitying yourself, after that you feed the mental hook. Where did I fail?  Why is he acting to me by doing this? Does a guy in love leave? What can I do to make this adjustment?  Why does a man stay away from a lady he likes?  Why does the very same point always occur to me?  If you understand this kind of assuming or with other comparable ideas, it is convenient that you break with this inertia to generate a brand-new type of different thoughts. As an example, if that man has relocated away from you, check out that situation from a positive point of view. Via his activities, he offers you clear information regarding him in relation to you Do not come under the self-deception of believing that this distance really conceals the shyness of a person crazy. There are several feasible analyses of a situation, nonetheless, in this sort of case, do not obtain carried away by the subjectivity of exactly how you would certainly like points to be. Make a loyal analysis of the facts. That guy has averted from you. This is truth information. What to do when a guy ignores you. If you are experiencing this scenario, you may be questioning: when a guy leaves, what should I do? If a man walks away from you, you can provide on your own some time to keep attempting to get his attention. Right here are 4 tips to follow if you do not understand exactly how to act when a man relocates far from you: 1. Recognizing that this is a time that you are offering yourself the margin to attempt to conquer that individual, make a decision with which you are mosting likely to feel good and calm not just in this present moment, however likewise, when six months have passed. Act in the method you see fit, focusing on the heart and factor. Discover the balance between both planes. 2. Take the initiative. By doing this, based upon the action of the various other person, you can declare a lot more in the idea that he has relocated away or, as a matter of fact, you might observe a various reaction. When doubtful, taking the campaign is a good idea since it helps you clarify yourself with visible data. 3. Dose your messages. If that individual intends to contact you, they will certainly do so by themselves effort. The persistence can create the contrary effect to the wanted one, better distancing the various other person yet, mostly, the insistence is unfavorable since it fuels your very own anxiousness for the response. As well as the psychological discomfort because of the number of unanswered messages rises since the indifference in this instance is a lot more noticeable. 4. If you have any inquiries that you would like to make clear with him, after that deal with the discussion. For instance, if both of you were already more certain, nonetheless, there has actually been an unanticipated spin in the script of this story, a spin that you don't comprehend, then encounter this pending conversation if you assume this will certainly give you satisfaction. The suggestions in what to do if a connection goes cold can likewise aid you.

What not to do when a guy is walking away

It is just as crucial to understand exactly how to act when a guy leaves you, as what not to do. en Sometimes it is challenging to recognize specifically how to act in this kind of scenario. Because instance, you can begin by bearing in mind what you need to stay clear of: 1. Remaining at home watching the hrs go by awaiting the phone to ring. Immobilize your social life, stop your friendship plans and also your dedications due to this mindset that raises your sadness, your feeling of failing and your pain. 2. Believe that you have lost the love of your life. In the world, there are various people and even if you feel by doing this currently, after a while, you will look at the scenario from a various perspective. 3. Live pending your social networks. Knowing information of his present life does not enable you to shut this stage due to the fact that you are continuously in contact with facets of his life, based upon hypotheses that you make about his magazines. This is a great time to break the web link online. 4. Escape yourself. The worst thing you can do when a guy bows out you is to do the same to on your own. That is, boycott your well-being through a lack of confidence. 5. Deceiving yourself right into believing that you can be her buddy as if that is not mosting likely to influence you in an unfavorable means. Discover reasons to communicate. 6. Feed an animosity as well as animosity towards that individual. Perhaps you, too, can keep in mind a moment in your biography in which you distanced yourself from a person you had an interest in initially. The wish for retribution is damaging in this kind of scenario, regardless of how unfair you think about the suffering endured. What to do when a man leaves you? Keep composing one of the most gorgeous romance: your life.

Why does a guy leave?

Why do men leave? There are lots of reasons individuals distance themselves from each various other. A few of the most common causes are: - Lack of interest. - Unresolved anger or conflict. - Transforming top priorities. - Anxiety of commitment. Nevertheless, each person and each partnership is unique and also to understand the true reason a man is away from you, you need to ask him.

Why does a man walk away without saying anything?

Individuals can walk away for lots of factors, however why do not they claim anything? Sometimes men leave without claiming anything. This circumstance can take place for numerous factors: He has doubts: it may be that the man is not clear about what he wants or what he really feels and also does not know exactly how to share his uncertainty to you. Not prepared: the man may not prepare to have a discussion about the relationship, possibly he does not have the experience or the capability to feel safe having individual and psychological discussions, probably it is tough for him to discuss his feelings. He does not know exactly how to handle the circumstance: it may likewise be that the man does not wish to create you emotional damage and does not know how to reveal his thoughts without that occurring. Does not give importance: another factor might be that the man does not give the very same value as you to the relationship. You have not analyzed the circumstance appropriately: ultimately, it ought to be mentioned that there is an opportunity that the man has clarified in his very own way his purpose to escape you and also you have not interpreted the message appropriately.

Does a male in love leave?

The state of infatuation generates the sensation of emotion as well as wellness, prompting a great wish for the business of the person with whom one has actually fallen in love. An individual in love, as a whole, would certainly not bow out the person with whom he is in love. Nonetheless, there may be stronger reasons to leave than the infatuation itself. Everyone is various and also each scenario is distinct.

Why does a male seek you and after that vanish?

When a male seeks your business for certain periods of time and after that leaves, he may not ensure what he desires, he may not look for to preserve the sort of connection that you anticipate.

Why does a male leave after having sex

Each person is different as well as can additionally alter their perspective on partnerships depending on the life period in which they are. There is the possibility of running into individuals that do not pursue the same objective as us.

Why does a male leave after making love? Possibly you have met a male whose rate of interest is to delight in a sex-related encounter without ultimately keeping a psychological connection. If that's additionally your interest, fantastic! If it is not what you are searching for, you ought to examine the connection of the relationship. The important point in these situations is to be clear and also subject the assumptions we have around the partnership to check that they work with those of the other person. You have to be clear as well as explain what you are looking for currently. It can additionally be a man who leaves after making love due to the fact that said sex-related encounter has not been adequate for multiple reasons. It is essential to recognize that it does not need to be your fault or your duty. Also understand that we can not alter the means others act, if they do rule out transforming it. One more important facet to recognize is that an individual is not a bad person for not seeking a loving connection. It is feasible to enjoy sexual encounters as long as they are enjoyed by the people who take part in them, in addition to the reality that genuineness and also regard are the basis of these.

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[truemedian]

Zhang Yiming, Co-Founder of TikTok Parent Company ByteDance, Steps Down as CEO

Zhang Yiming, co-founder of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, announced Wednesday that he is stepping down as the company’s CEO. In a memo to employees published online, Zhang said his decision stems in part from the fact that ���I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people. Similarly, I’m not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and daydreaming about what may be possible.” Zhang said that Liang Rubo, a co-founder of ByteDance and current head of the company’s human resources division, will take over as CEO. Zhang also serves as ByteDance chairman, but did not address in his letter whether he will remain in that role. He did explain however that “After handing over my role as C.E.O., and removing myself from the responsibilities of daily management, I will have the space to explore long-term strategies, organizational culture and social responsibility, with a more objective perspective on the company.” The move comes three weeks after ByteDance subsidiary TikTok named ByteDance CFO Shouzi Chew as its new CEO. Read Zhang’s full memo to employees below: Recently, several colleagues have asked me why I haven’t updated my OKRs. Frankly, I feel I did not achieve as much as I had hoped to on my previous objectives in the areas of new strategic opportunities, organizational management, and social responsibility. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to better drive real long-term breakthroughs, which cannot simply rely on steady, but incremental, progress. After several months of thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that transitioning out of the role of CEO, with all of the related day-to-day responsibilities, would enable me to have greater impact on longer-term initiatives. Let me explain how I came to this conclusion. Our success over the last nine years has been predicated upon our ability to innovate at just the right moment in the development of the industry. Notably, this has included applying machine learning to mobile and video products. Between graduating from college and starting ByteDance, I spent a lot of time thinking and learning about challenges like effectively disseminating information, using technology to improve products, and approaching the development of a company, much like one would a product: through constant re-evaluation, adjustment, and iteration. That period of profound thinking and ideation helped lay the groundwork for ByteDance. With our business growing well, it is time to think about how we can, not simply scale, but make innovative, meaningful, long-term progress towards our mission to “Inspire Creativity, Enrich life.” Innovation and success are rooted in years of exploring and imagining what is possible. However, few people have real insight into the future, preferring to model on current and past achievements. People are amazed by the success of electric cars, but they forget that Tesla is 18 years old and first experimented with laptop batteries to power its vehicles. People know about Apple’s software management tool HomeBrew, but few realize that computer geeks were discussing the Apple I in the HomeBrew Club in the 1970s. Virtual reality, life science, and scientific computation are playing a bigger role in people’s lives as technology brings ever-greater impact to society. This type of progress requires us to break through the inertia, and to keep exploring. At our 7th anniversary, I shared a line from Alice in Wonderland: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” I like to think about possibilities that are still just that: possibilities. For a long time, I’ve put my online status as “Daydreaming.” What I mean isn’t that I’m zoning out, but rather that I’m thinking about possibilities that people might think are just fantasy. In the past three years, many things that seemed like fantasies have, in fact, become reality. Yet I worry that I am still relying too much on the ideas I had before starting the company, and haven’t challenged myself by updating those concepts. As an example, before 2017, I spent a lot of time keeping track of developments in machine learning. However, since then, while I do my best to bookmark technical articles online, I haven’t had the time to make much progress digging into the area. During technology meetings, this sometimes means I actually struggle to keep up with the discussion. Three years ago, I spoke with some entrepreneurs about the challenges of scaling a business. I said that often when companies mature and expand, many fall into the trap of the CEO becoming overly central — listening to presentations, handling approvals, and making decisions reactively. This leads to an over-reliance on existing ideas already in the company, and results in knowledge structures being slow to iterate. In order to avoid this trap, I gradually came to a decision over the last six months to take on a new role at ByteDance. I believe I can best challenge the limits of what the company can achieve over the next decade, and drive innovation, by drawing on my strengths of highly-focused learning, systematic thought, and a willingness to attempt new things. I also believe that giving back to society is an important piece of this, and we have already made some headway, exploring new initiatives in education, brain disease research and digitizing ancient books. Having been involved in some of these myself, I hope to do more by contributing my own ideas and helping deliver new solutions. At the same time, there are still many things that we need to improve, and I think someone else can better drive progress through areas like improved daily management. The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people. Similarly, I’m not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and daydreaming about what may be possible. In March, I began discussing with a small group the possibility of having Rubo, the co-founder of ByteDance, taking over as CEO, and leveraging his strengths in management, organization, and social engagement. The team was understanding and supported the idea. Rubo previously helped me found another company, so we have worked together closely for many years. As many of you know, Rubo has taken on numerous critical roles at ByteDance at different times, including head of R&D, Lark and Efficiency Engineering, and most recently, Human Resources and Management, as we’ve scaled up at an incredible rate globally. Since Day 1, Rubo has been an invaluable partner — completing my coding for new systems, buying and installing servers, and developing key recruitment and corporate policies and management systems, among a list of contributions too long to enumerate. Over the next six months we will work side by side to ensure the smoothest possible transition, and I know you will all also support him. A few years ago, I posted on social media: “The meaning of travel lies in switching time and space, which helps you observe others’ lives in a new environment as a stranger, and reflect on yourself and your life with a detached eye.” After handing over my role as CEO, and removing myself from the responsibilities of daily management, I will have the space to explore long-term strategies, organizational culture and social responsibility, with a more objective perspective on the company. In our 2012 business plan, I told the team that the most rewarding thing about building a company is being able to enjoy the journey together. I look forward to this new phase and continuing our voyage together! Read More Read the full article

[fiteyes]

Doing Things Slowly in a Fast World The entire following blog post was initially written as a private email to a friend of mine. I decided to share it here. I grew up doing fast things in a fast way. I raced motorcycles -- and I have always loved anything fast. But I also tried to accomplish the maximum possible number of things each day and I always pushed myself to do things quicker or more efficiently. Then I developed glaucoma. As I have gotten to know myself more intimately (thanks in part to self-tonometry) I have realized that I actually like to take my time. I enjoy doing things in a non-rushed manner. You could even say that I enjoy being slow! (Something I never would have admitted to myself in my days of racing, even in my most private thoughts.) Even today, I still have great admiration for people who do things quickly, as if this is an inherently superior way of being. But I now know that I like to take my time doing things. I still enjoy efficiency. But sometimes it is more efficient to delay the next project's start and finish what was started rather than have to terminate it due to an artificial deadline and then pick it up again at a later time. I like going deep into things (whether discussions, research, or building software) and having the time to do it well. And I have found that sometimes I even enjoy doing something in a completely inefficient manner (saying that still sounds sacrilegious). Sometimes I enjoy just plain being slow! (What have I just said! My gosh!) Actually, slowness is a Kapha tendency. Honoring one's tendencies -- without letting them become imbalanced -- seems to be a valid strategy for healing. Exercise is good for Kapha people in part because it gets us going, prevents us from stagnating and getting taken over by inertia. However, keeping Kapha balanced is a much different thing from trying to deny one's Kapha tendencies and act like a vata or pitta person. When I realized these things about myself, I stopped trying to consult with clients for at least 8 hours per day, for example. I started leaving big gaps between my appointments. This cut way back on my stress and dramatically increased my enjoyment. I think this decision and other related decisions are important to my strategy of protecting my vision. This decision has certainly been a benefit to my overall health and happiness. I think one of the worst things I did was deny my desire to take my time. For most of my life, I forced myself to operate in jobs and in situations that demanded doing things as fast as https://bit.ly/2ZfvdV3 wife is the opposite of me in this regard. She does not like to spend much time on any one thing. She doesn't care about understanding something in detail, and it is virtually impossible for her to do deep research. But it also makes her an ideal fit for many modern workplaces. Bosses see her as someone who gets things done. Indeed, I also greatly admire this quality of hers. (And few bosses really care about doing things any better than she does them anyway, but now I'm getting off-topic.) However, it is clear to both my wife and I that her (lack of depth + quickness) and my (depth + slowness) are complimentary. Neither is inherently better than the other, but modern society tries to force everyone into the mode my wife operates in. Even in areas where depth has traditionally been the most valued trait, CEO's have (for example) compelled employees to follow a model that emphasizes speed above all else, right?A person who doesn't fit well in a corporate culture that demands we do as much as possible as fast as possible, will, at some point, have to face a hard truth. The lack of congruence here is almost guaranteed to result in the development of the disease. Often people never make the connection between dis-ease and disease, but my experience tells me that the correlation is nearly 1.0. [EDIT: a correlation of 1.0 means loosely that the relationship is nearly 100% aligned.) I had to accept the fact that leaving time between clients (so that, if an occasional Thursday session needs to run longer, for example, I can go with that and enjoy it) would reduce my potential and actual income. In the beginning, my old ideas about being productive, successful, etc. dominated the messages from my own body. I endured dis-ease. Eventually, I did listen to my body -- but my first reaction was that I wanted to quit consulting and go back to my previous job. Eventually, I just learned to really listen, to pay attention to what was right in front of me. When I gave up my concepts about "success" I found that I could easily do this consulting and be comfortable. But at the time it was a difficult decision. Choosing to be "less successful" goes against everything society wants us to do/be. Society rewards/honors those who destroy their health to achieve some material gains, right? As Eckhart Tolle points out, when we are on our death beds, we may finally see the folly of this way of living. Tim Ferris calls it the deferred life plan. One can learn mental discipline and psychological techniques for dealing with stress in the workplace. But when one is in a job that is against one's nature, it makes mastering the other eminent psychological skills we've discussed seem trivial. I do not feel that simply adjusting, as challenging as that would be, is sufficient to let me accomplish my goals of protecting my vision and improving my vision. I need to be in a situation where I feel totally right all the time. Where I live with comfort (the total opposite of dis-ease) in my physiology 24 hours a day. No matter what worldly success may be achieved by conforming to society's ideals of success if doing so is against one's nature and takes one out of one's comfort zone, real success and real happiness will never ever be achieved. Nothing but misery, disease, and suffering will come from that strategy. The beauty of self-tonometry is that we can quantify and test these ideas. In my case, I see a near-perfect long term correlation between dis-ease in my body and elevated intraocular pressure. As a postscript, I would like to add that even after I made this decision to honor my enjoyment of working more slowly, I still retained a tendency to want to do things fast and to do more in less time. For example, I have the habit of walking in the evenings. It is good for my eyes. Until more recently, I tried to walk fast. I felt like I needed to get the benefits of physical exercise (even though I was walking primarily for my mind and my eyes). That immediately led to the idea that the more miles I walked in my given hour of time, the better I was doing. Soon I discovered that my walks did not always lower my IOP. Eventually, I tried the idea of walking slowly. (Slowly I started applying the concept of being true to myself to all areas of my life.) At first, walking slowly was actually psychologically painful. I felt that I was wasting my time. Eventually, I learned to let myself do it and I found that I could consistently produce lower IOP by walking slower. My best walking is when I turn off my thinking brain and just walk as slow and as relaxed as I feel like walking. When I give up on the idea of making it into a productive exercise, I get a much lower IOP. Moral of the story: slower is better. ;) Want to learn more? JOIN THE COMMUNITY! https://bit.ly/3ag4Q7L

[lewepstein]

The Challenges of Dealing With Depression, Part 2

Beyond the more conventional and clinical treatments available for depression, there are a number of tools and techniques that come to us from other  disciplines and practices.  And since depression can be viewed as both an illness and a condition that affects body, mind and spirit, it may be helpful to apply a multimodal approach to healing.  I am not recommending self-help as the best approach - in fact a therapeutic relationship may be an essential part of healing for some - but the following suggestions and practices may be a useful supplement to other therapeutic work:

A good place to begin examining depression is by taking a close look at  our relationships.  It is impossible to overstate the positive impact of having satisfying, intimate relationships, strong family connections and a network of close friends with whom we share the narrative of our lives.  If we are suffering from low mood and other depressive symptoms, exploring what is going on in our marriages and our families can be a valuable starting point.  We are used to thinking that depression exists within an individual, but that is often only a part-truth.  The symptoms of lethargy, low self esteem and fatigue, among others are often present and  clearly reported by the person who is labeled, “depressed,”  What may be less apparent is that marriages and entire families can also be depressed.  This may be due to life circumstances, emotional distance, or a lack of participation by a partner or parent that leaves a relationship or an entire family depleted of positive involvement and energy.  When any of us spend time with an unhappy couple it is impossible not to feel their gloom.  The fact that one family member is manifesting the symptoms of depression and has become the “identified patient” may only mean that he or she has  become the symptom bearer for the system.  This is one  reason to consider couple’s counselling, or a family systems approach to therapy.  It provides another lens through which we can understand depression.

When it comes to doing individual work on depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be an effective approach.  It has a well documented track record for treating depression and the behavioral part of the work may be a good starting point.  The symptoms of low energy and fatigue that are so often a part of the experience of depression can make it difficult to mobilize one’s self to move or to act.  But activity and movement can be effective antidotes to low energy and the inertia that tends to set in.  Efforts that push against the feelings of lethargy can generate the very energy that is needed to jumpstart one’s engine. Simple tasks are good to complete.  Aerobic activities may be even better. It has been said that where the feet go, the mind and heart will follow.  There are also specific Yoga positions and breathing exercises that many have found helpful and that have been documented as effective measures in several studies. The Yoga texts I recommend that have specific chapters and poses for anxiety and depression are: Yoga for Wellness, Gary Kraftsow and Yoga,The Path to Holistic Health; B.K.S. Iyengar.

Depressed mood is often accompanied by depressive thoughts.  The cognitive work in dealing with depression has much to do with the expression: “Don’t believe everything that you think.”  This is a good general aphorism but strongly applies to thinking while depressed.   Depressive thinking is often shrouded in pessimism which is both a part of the depressive state of mind but also something that perpetuates negative thinking and low mood, creating a downward spiral.  Our thinking and our awareness of where our thoughts can take us is central to the process of healing and change.  If we are able to both accept all of our thoughts as they arise as “just thoughts,” while simultaneously disputing and challenging the veracity of the one’s that are depressive and often not true, then we are using our mind to change our mood.  For a deeper understanding about how to confront helpless, hopeless and worthless thinking, “The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression'' by William Knaus, 2nd edition, is an excellent resource. https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Behavioral-Workbook-Depression-Step/dp/1608823806

Along with our specific thoughts, our broader appraisals and perceptions about what is occurring within us and around us are crucial aspects of emotional health and healing.   Compare the overgeneralization, “Life is meaningless,” with the more nuanced appraisal:  “Life feels meaningless now, but this feeling will pass. It always does.”  Being aware of brittle and black or white appraisals can help introduce people to new perspectives that are especially important when depressed.  Viewing a depressed time of life as a “stack of photos,”-  a period that is both nuanced and variable over the course of a day or a week rather than a solid and unchanging mass of darkness and gloom can generate hope rather than a sense of hopelessness.  The mind can take us on many journeys, but it is important to understand that our perceptions - the ways that we interpret our emotions and experiences -are actually choices that we make and are subject to our conscious control.  

When we are feeling depressed our biology often feels off.  Fatigue and lethargy may accompany increased irritability.  Some have no appetite while others overeat.  Some experience insomnia while others oversleep.

A  key principle in dealing with these depressive sensations and body/mind states has to do with accepting the physical experience without attaching our own “storyline” to what is happening - in other words separating thoughts from sensations.  If we do not catastrophize or make other negative interpretations about what is going on within, the cycle between depressive sensations and depressive thinking tends to abate.  Accepting our sensations without our “add-ons'' helps to challenge what has been called our “emotional reasoning”- assuming that our negative emotions reflect the way things really are.   Acceptance of uncomfortable sensations can also increase our “distress tolerance,” our capacity to be OK even while we are experiencing a low period. We may be experiencing “the blahs,” but we don’t have to give it any additional meaning or power.

“Perfectionism” is clinging to standards that do not allow us to feel “good enough.”  It is tied to the emotional states of fear, anger and depression.  The self talk of someone who is  perfectionistic often includes words like “should” and “must.”  Self worth and self acceptance are often casualties of these perceptions along with positive mood and manageable anxiety.  At the core of perfectionism is usually a harsh “inner critic” - often the voice of a parent or other early authority figure that has become blended with the self.  Work on perfectionism can involve examining one’s “contingent sense of worth,” - feeling valued based mostly on one’s performance. The antidote to a contingent sense of worth is  becoming more aware of one’s  “inherent worth.” -  valuing one’s self unconditionally.  Albert Ellis, one of the leaders in the field of cognitive therapy viewed what he called, “unconditional self acceptance” as the antidote to both perfectionism and depressive tendencies.  Changing from the type of thinking that insists things turn out a certain way, to a more “preferential outlook” - “This is how I prefer things will turn out,” - can be  useful in dealing with one’s  “inner critic.”  There are many good books on overcoming perfectionism.  Stephen Guise’s, “How To Be an Imperfectionist” is top rated and Brene Brown’s, “I Thought it Was Just Me,” explores the connections between perfectionism and shame.

Trauma can be a major component in depression because of the ways that trauma engenders a sense of helplessness.   Trauma is often the result of situations and life events in which our regular mechanism of fight and flight have been overwhelmed or rendered ineffective.  Some of this occurs below the level of our thinking mind.  There are parts of the nervous system that may be left “frozen” and in a state of collapse.   Complex emotional traumas from childhood may require body/mind treatments that go beyond the scope of this article.   The inability to simply be present and the lack of a sense of agency in one’s life are often due to the tug of the past on trauma victims that will not allow them to live mindfully in the present moment.  The very high levels of anxiety and panic that are  connected to trauma can exceed our “window of tolerance” which can leave us feeling immobilized and depressed.  “The Body Keeps The Score,” by Bessel Van Der Kolk is a good introductory work on the healing of trauma. https://www.besselvanderkolk.com Peter Levine’s  “In An Unspoken Voice,” is an authoritative exploration of  the mind/body connection in the treatment of trauma.  https://www.somaticexperiencing.com

If trauma exerts a force that pulls us out of the present moment, it is precisely this capacity - to remain mindfully in the present and engage in the  practice of meditation that has proven helpful in the treatment of both trauma and depression.  MRI studies have shown that.. “experienced meditators were much more efficient than non-meditating control groups at dropping extraneous thoughts and focusing on the matters at hand when they were bombarded by stimuli…..the simple practice of focusing attention through meditation may help patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions characterized by rumination.”   When we focus on each breath and gently say to ourselves “just thinking” as thoughts arise in our minds, the acceptance of our sensations and the transient nature of our thoughts can become a healing balm.  A comprehensive and methodical gateway into practicing mediation is Sharon Salzberg’s, “True Happiness.”  It is a compendium of wisdom that intersects with the principles of CBT.https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/real-happiness-book/

Perhaps the best healing balm for all of our thoughts and behaviors that may be contributing to and perpetuating depression is our ability to do what psychologist and author Rick Hanson calls “taking in the good.” In his masterwork, “Hardwiring Happiness,”  Hanson combines brain science with Buddhist philosophy to offer a cutting edge method of healing that challenges readers to use their minds to change their brains.  His mental  “exercises,”  have to do with peace, contentment and connection and over time can create a neurological framework that allows gratitude, gladness and personal empowerment to flourish. https://www.rickhanson.net/books/hardwiring-happiness/

Sometimes, the simplest answers to what seems like life’s most complicated emotional problems can be the best.

In the website: The...wisdom...of...the...shamans,  there is a quote by Gabriella Roth:

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: When did you stop dancing?  When did you stop singing?  When did you stop being enchanted by stories?  When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?

.      

[hottmessexpresss]

Fever.

Back problems.

These mothafuckin'Kids.

Three days ago, my son woke up sick. He had this look* on his face. An unsettled look. He looked me dead in the eyes, and he started to gag. My eyes widened with horror. My instincts kicked in, and I did what my dad would do when I was growing up. The only sure way to know you have reached another level of parenting: held out my hands cupped together held under his chin. A vomit catch-all, if you will. Maybe it's a kid instict too. He knew* what it meant and what to do. He played and was fine throughout the day. Thank god.

The NEXT day, I developed a decent fever. I felt like my body was ran over by an 18 wheeler. "Greaaaaaaaaaaat!" I thought to myself. I laid on the couch half dead in a pool of my own sweat staring at the clock. Is 7:00 too early for bedtime? My daughter ended up puking ONCE that evening, so i figured it was a 24 hour tummy bug. No other symptoms. No more vomit. Both kids seemed fine. I prayed that I would not fall ill, and that I**wouldn't be sick. Could you imagine? Being sick AND being the mom? Being the house chore manager? Being the post-op surgery home nurse? What the hell would that* be like? Well, my dad has always told me, God must have a sense of humor based on my life being like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm....and it was a god awful sense of humor, if that.

Yesterday, I was swiffer wet jetting a pool of urine on the floor. I shook my head, did my usual lecture on how only an animal would pee on the floor. How grayson wasn't an animal, and how pee goes INSIDE of the toilet. Not inside his construction cement truck (boys🙄😬). I bent over, and my life flashed before my eyes. BAM. I almost collapsed to the floor. I was sweating and writhing in pain. I couldn't muster up ENOUGH inertia to walk my body forward. My knees started to buckle, and immediate panic set in. Of all times for this to happen, with my luck-- it did (cue Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song). I am damn near 30 years old, and a Swiffer wet jet mop, along with a slight twist and bend movement, put me to the fuckin' floor. Meanwhile, J-Lo who is in her 50's is pole dancing and dancing at a top performance rate for a Superbowl half-time show. And again, here I am, in the same clothes as yesterday, my body getting over a fever, AND NOW pulled my back out of place. I was angry and upset that I have disabled myself.

Of course, Grayson and the baby caught wind of my sudden lack of movement and chaos ensued. Both hanging on my feet, whining and crying and fighting each other to be held. Every second ticked by slowly, as I completely winced and cursed in pain. I huddle by the cat tree. I try to stand and lean onto it and realized..I needed help. But who could help? How?

My husband was at work. Barely 2 weeks post-op from his shoulder replacement. I broke down in tears. My husband has just now been able to shower by himself. He's still in a sling and has very limited movement. What the hell am I going to do? With different parts of our bodies being out of commission, how* could we do this? I reluctantly called him. In tears, I waited 45 minutes before he got to the house. Before he arrived, with a little help from my Grayson, I was able to dress the baby. Grayson picked his clothes out, and got ready all by himself (I was shook). I waddle slowly to my bedroom and grab some socks and my Nike's. Grayson hauled ass into my room like always (because there isba child lock and it's forbidden) kneeled down and helped me put on my socks and shoes. I told him my back was hurting and he told me, "Don't worry mom. I'll fix it!" He lifted my shirt gently, and started to scratch my lower back. The tears were welling up. He got the baby clothes from her drawer (after one attempt), and sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to her as I changed her. I was overwhelmed with many emotions. I was in that moment, proud of Will and I's parenting and how my sweet and sour child, was being sweet and helpful to me.

Will arrives. He's stressed. I'm stressed. I keep apologizing over and over to him. I shove fruit snacks in my jacket. Will raises his voice at me to stop trying to put Grayson into his car seat. We are both frustrated. We are both not feeling it. I get to urgent care and wait for the doctor. He comes in after 10 minutes and says, "Oh? Are you striking a pose for a photo?" My hip is out and I'm leaning against the wall. I laughed. I explained what happened. He felt my hips and lower back. "Oh. Wow......you have HUGE knots all over the place...no wonder!" I held back tears. Then. This man turns to me and has THEE AUDACITY TO ASK ME** "Do you need a doctor's note for work?" I cracked a smile, but also wanted to strangle him right then and there. I explained my husband is two weeks post-op from shoulder replacement surgery, and that I have a 10 month old and a 3 year old at home, and all three are waiting in the car for me. He smiled and said, "I'd reccomend taking it easy, but that's not realistic is it?" He gave me a toradol shot, steroids for the inflammed muscles, muscle relaxers and T3. My anxiety sky-rocketed. I knew how Toradol made me tired. I knew how muscle relaxers obviously*** relax your muscles. T3 makes me groggy. How the fuck am I supposed to function on these AND take care of the kids?

So long gone are the days of being injured or sick and being able to sleep or "relax". So long gone are the days when no one else depended on you to be a fully functional adult during times of illness or injury.

My husband told me to go nap and relax my back. Though I was irriated by having to listen, and fight back the internal urge to pick up the toys on the ground, I obliged. Thinking back to a few months ago, my husband's sciatic caused him to be down and out from work for three days. I sat up in bed thinking of this. No offense to my husband; he works extremely hard and allows me the luxury of staying home with the kids. However, in this moment, I realized I wasn't able to experience the same "luxury" of taking three days off. Being a stay at home mom means, no days off. When youre sick, the world doesn't stop. Your toddlers certainly don't stop. So you, as the mom and house-manager, trudge through it. Because there is no other option or reason. Some are lucky to have family nearby that can cushion some of this blow. But unfortunately, that's not the case here. Instead, I facetimed my mom and cried to her, asking her to tell Grayson to be good for me. It worked (for a while).

I hate sometimes that these types of "problems" often come across as "complaining," but to me, just shows that a Mother's job never ends. We don't get to clock in, and clock out. We don't get paid lunch breaks. Often times I eat standing up, and pee with a rather curious audience (like when Grayson handed me toilet paper and told me to wipe my gina and did a horrendous digging motion with his hands). I don't get uninterrupted breaks. I don't physically see a paycheck deposited into my account.

This morning I woke up and before I got out of bed, I said a little prayer about being able to walk today. Thankfully, I can walk (at least). I made coffee, and waited for the monsters to wake up. I cooked them eggs and toast. I bribed grayson with a fruit snack to help get his sisters walker, and I slowly slowly lifted her in it. Getting her in and out of the crib has been a challenge. Babies want to be held and carried, and do not understand why* their mother isn't picking them up (torture).

I am realizing women are strong. Though I physically feel decrepid, I am appreciative of what women endure on a daily basis. Whether you work or stay home, being a mother is a 24/7 job that often goes without praise or recognition. Instead of binge watching Mad Men, or The Office (for the 56th time) posted up chillin' on meds, I am watching Paw Patrol while my kids nag and cry at my feet. "You should be THANKFUL. YOU HAVE THE BEST JOB IN THE ENTIRE WORLD....and an IMPORTANT ONE IF THAT." Well, Karen. Yes. Yes I do. I am "blessed" and "cursed" by this experience. I am** thankful. However, I am a human being. I am allowed to scowl and huff to myself, "this isn't fair!" While wanting to break down into tears. How dare I feel so selfish?

I am allowed to have bad days. Being a mom doesn't mean I am some bionic robot (though some days it definitely feels like it)

So here I am standing, slouched over the counter trying to rub a tennis ball into my lower back while my toddler screams, "THAT'S MY BAAAAAALLLLLLL MOM." All while my daughter also starts to scream (because her brother is screaming) I can't do anything but count to 10.

"Being a mom means having to choose between eating, showering, or sleeping. You can't do all three in one day" -unknown

Hug a mom, grandma or aunt today [or anyone that has raised you] and give yourself a pat on the back for being a bad ass super mom.

[designbygrace2019]

WK5: Secondary Research

I have completed a wide range of secondary research in order to give some context to my qualitative interviews. This helps me to understand what is happening in the world with sustainability, current trends and discourse and the scale of the problem. I also took this opportunity to further delve into the psychology behind behaviour and what can lead to sustainable behaviour change.

New Zealand Situation

Major sustainability/environmental issues in New Zealand

Climate change and Dairy

Climate change as well as plastic pollution are the issues that get the most media attention. In NZ we are in particular facing the challenge of emissions and environmental damage caused by dairy farming, the backbone of our economy. This issue demonstrates the complexity of sustainability which involves both economic and social issues as well as environmental. Other big emitters include transport, in Auckland alone it makes up 40% of our emissions. The Government have responded to climate change with the zero carbon bill as well as signing the Paris agreement and the council with the climate action framework. The Zero carbon bill will hold the government to account around emissions especially the target of carbon neutral by 2050. The Paris agreement was created by the United Nations also a creator of the sustainable development goal. Nations who have signed it have agreed to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees below pre - industrial levels. (Wright, 2017)

Soil Erosion

Another less talked about environmental issue within sustainability. It is basically when land erodes away and is caused by nature such as land slides, thunder storms, scree and steam banks. human actions such as deforestation, and land clearing for farming which left soil vulnerable to rain, frost and wind. Introduction of new species such as possums and stoats which trample and eat plants also speeds up soil erosion. The displaced soil shifts to flatter land or gets into waterways and the ocean causing more environmental damage. Because the nz economy is so reliant on agriculture and food is integral to life and survival soil erosion is a massive issue and very much relevant to sustainability. (Gregg, 2008)

Other relevant issues include the ecological/biodiversity crisis and over population.

Key figures and organisations in Sustainability in NZ include:

Politically:

Green Party Mp’s, in particular co-convenor James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change and Eugenie Sage -

Ministry for the Environment asos min for the environment.

Jacinda Ardern has also said that climate change will be her generations “nuclear free” moment. And released the wellbeing budget ain 2019. Which indicates a shift in thinking from being solely economy focused to include social and environmental considerations.

Business:

Sustainable Business Network

Carbon Coalition

Academic:

AUT has the Vice Chancellors Sustainability Task force (Which I am a part of as a student representative)

Community:

Many community groups have sprung up to address a wide range of sustainability issues including:

For the Love of Bees

Sustainable Coastlines

School Strike for Climate

Eco Matters

Green washing and token actions

This term describes organisations and companies who make false claims about the “environmental friendliness” of their products to increase sales. This i a threat to genuine sustainability as it lulls people into thinking they are making a difference or gives them license to consume more. It also create sceptics of organisations and companies who are genuinely sustainable. Token actions such as banning plastic bags whilst a positive step and important can also prevent further more meaningful action. Some people believe that by switching from plastic straws to metal, is all they need to do to be more sustainable. This can limit people from understanding sustainability at a depth and truly shifting their behaviour, lifestyle and ultimately worldview.

Overall this section of my research makes it very clear how important it is for the public to engage in these issues in order to force change.

Behaviour change

Trans theoretical model: includes six stages an individual must go through to change a particular behaviour - especially used for harmful behaviours and addictions. Stages are: 1. Pre-contemplation, 2. Contemplation, 3. Preparation, 4. Action, 5. Maintenance, 6. Termination. A approximate time is given to each stage 6 months i required to maintain the action before it becomes habitual and the individual is no longer tempted to regress into bad habits. Theory highlighted the need for time to think and mental processes before making big shifts in life style.

Behaviour Interventions: My research from design research last semester was all about how behaviour can be manipulated by the design of products. And sustainable sue of a product can be subtly prompted through design. For example a fridge can be designed so that it is easier for the user to organise and remember where things are kept. This prevents them from keeping the fridge door open and shuffling items when trying to locate something, reducing energy usage.

Motivating Sustainable Behaviours: This was an interesting report I read last semester, and have gone over again about the psychology of sustainable behaviour. Drivers of behaviour  were discussed. I learnt that new ideas in psychology include that decision making comes from two separate systems one is rational, deliberate and rules based the other is associative unconscious, sensory driven and impulsive. Sustainable behaviours do no generally appeal to the associative system, but strategies can be employed to make it so, or to drive the rules-based system to reject the associative systems gut/initial rejection of a sustainable behaviour.

Including:

Social proofing - when an individual believes that something is being done by those around them they are much more likely to engage in that behaviour too.

Breaking down Bystander Confusion or the inertia caused by confronting an overwhelming problem,

Emphasising intrinsic value or other benefits such as personal health etc.

Make information visible and accessible.

Encourage mindfulness/critical thinking.

Focus on making small changes and steps rather than being perfect.

(Manning, 2009)

References:

Gregg, P. (2008, November 24). Soil Erosiion and Conservation. Retrieved from teara: https://teara.govt.nz/en/soil-erosion-and-conservationWright, J. (2017).

Manning, C. (2009). Psychology of Sustainable Behaviours. Minnesota: Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.Climate change and agriculture: 

Understanding the biological greenhouse gases. Wellington: Parliament Commissioner For The Environment.

WK 5: Comparing Semester One Primary Research

Recap of most recent Insight Statements:

The future of my children and/or the next generation motivate me to do more

Sustainability is a broad and complex problem that can be difficult to comprehend and then difficult to act upon

Strong leadership from government and big organisations is required to make change

Busy lifestyle where I am trying to “get ahead” or keep up with the jones’s prevents me from taking positive action

sometimes I am sceptical of environmentally beneficial actions and this prevents me from acting

Communicating Sustainability in certain ways can make me feel either empowered or guilty”

Insight Statements from Semester one:

“role models in my life can encourage me and inform me to make sustainable choices”

“lack of time, money, and infrastructure or facilities that support sustainability are barriers to me taking sustainable actions.”

If I believe that government and business have greater responsibility for championing sustainable change than individuals I am less likely to engage in environmental/sustainability programs/volunteer events

a) Those that said government and businesses were most responsible for championing sustainable change reasoned that this was because these groups were the biggest polluters and/or had the most capacity to have impact on this issue. (4//8) Of the four that said govt was responsible ¾ were from the non community group. All of those that said businesses were responsible were from thee non-community group. b) Those that said the individuals were most responsible for championing sustainable change cited these reasons: (5/8) Out of this 5, 4 were from the community group.

“even if I am not aware of green washing, I will be conscious of the fact that not all “green” marketed or accredited businesses are necessarily authentic, truthful or accurate”

“If I cannot see the tangible benefit of what I am doing for the environment it makes the action less gratifying”

“some respondents located a particular area in sustainability that they were most interested in such as recycling, energy sources, community and wellbeing etc. and repeatedly made reference to these areas with their question answers”

many respondents identified frustration as a feeling they had towards sustainability in general. And said the lack of action from others was a reason for this.

Reflection

Consistencies between both groups included an awareness of green washing, the idea of leadership/role models. Lack of time and money being a barrier interestingly the more recent lot of interviewees who were older also mentioned lack of energy as a barrier to action. More acknowledgement that sustainability is a broad and complex problem came from the older group as well. Future of children as a reason to be more sustainable was emphasised more in the older group.

[owl-eyed-woman]

Attack on Titan Season 2 Episode Analysis - Episode 8 (Episode 33)

I should have known that this was coming. After such an action-heavy episode last week, this episode of down-time was practically inevitable. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat frustrated by the lack of concrete answers until the very end. Still, in lieu of this, this episode’s exploration of the socio-political context and the core relationship between Mikasa, Armin and Eren is definitely compelling, even if I spent most of the episode freaking out about Eren and Ymir.

The episode begins right where we left off, confirming Eren’s absolute defeat and abduction by Reiner and Bertholdt. With all the scouts flung away in the shockwave from the Colossal Titan’s impact, all resistance has been completely quashed. My god is it a bleak beginning!

This is perhaps the Scout Legion’s most comprehensive losses so far. In one fell swoop, every character is forced to start off from lowest of the low. This episode’s emotional journey, then, will focus on facing the seemingly inescapable hopelessness of their situation and rising above this despair to try and change their fate.

But before we can get to that, we first check in with the soldiers at home base who are anxiously awaiting any information.  

After several episodes of action and character development, this sudden return to Trost heralds a return to AOT’s socio-political commentary. While certainly not the main focus of AOT, political and social themes nonetheless form an integral part of this epic story and definitely warrant some consideration. Ultimately, AOT is about the way that humanity’s vices and selfishness can pose a greater threat to humanity’s survival than the titans. It only follows that these flaws are replicated in the structure and values of society as a whole.

Essentially, AOT’s society is built on a strict hierarchy of privilege and discrimination. AOT isn’t subtle about this either. These social and class divisions are explicitly literalised by the 3 walls that protect people from the titans. While the most powerful and privileged members of society live in relative safety within the centre of the wall, the poorest citizens live in regions like Trost that function as literal bait for the titans; they are purposefully put in harm’s way to protect more “valued” members of society. This is clearly a society that prioritises the rich and powerful, while exploiting the poor and powerless.

As we check in with Pixis and Erwin, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they have formed a type of alliance against the corrupt, authoritarian forces that control their society. How this alliance will play out, however, remains purposefully vague. Still, at this moment in time, there a palpable feeling of unrest in the air. So much has happened in the past few episodes that it’s surprisingly easy to forget that the Female Titan’s attack within the wall occurred only two days ago. Apart from the devastation and terror caused by such an unexpected attack, this has literally brought the war with the titans to the centre of the most privileged and insulated part of AOT’s society. In the wake of this upheaval, there is a sense that the interior’s short-sighted and selfish tyranny can no longer hold after reality has so strikingly intruded on their insulated lives.

Ultimately though, AOT is first and foremost a war story, so our primary engagement with issues of privilege, inequality and oppression needs to be based around the structure of the military as representative of this society. More specifically, we need to consider how this plays out between the Military Police and the Scout Legion. As the Military Police wait for orders within the safety of walls, a small group of them start to joke about the very pressing situation at hand, callously dismissing the threat posed by titans. Yes, they’re idiots, but this type of response is symptomatic of the corruption bred by the Military Police and enabled by this society’s values.

Fundamentally, the Military Police act as the law-enforcement, directly aligning them with the status quo. As the ultimate symbol of control and order, they enact the will of this tyrannical system and represent the dominance of these oppressive forces in this society.

Because their work as Military Police is almost entirely confined to the innermost sections of the walls, they are literally removed from the reality of the war. This insulated, privileged experience has allowed corruption and inertia to become endemic to the Military Police as a whole.

Furthermore, despite the fact that they hold the most political influence out of all of the military factions, they are, quite dangerously, the least equipped to truly challenge the titans. In this way, the Military Police demonstrate how a privileged, insular life enables humanity’s selfishness and ignorance and undermines our chance of survival and progress

So, of course, when the Military Police callously joke about the threat posed by titans, Levi responds scathingly, daring them to show some courage and put their lives on the line. This is more than just irritation on Levi’s part. This response is indicative of the deep antagonism between the Scout Legion and the Military Police due to fundamental ideological and political differences.

If the Military Police exist in the interior, insulated and ignorant, the Scout Legion exist on the margins and beyond, venturing out into the dangerous unknown. Their purpose is, quite literally, to propel humanity into the outside world, and they act as potent symbols of progress and innovation. The very nature of their task requires the Scout Legion to engage with the literal exterior of their society, in contrast to the centralised focus of the Military Police. This focus on the outside world, symbolically suggesting a focus on others rather than yourself, has naturally resulted in the Scout Legion valuing community, loyalty and selflessness. Ultimately, the values of the Scout Legion have the potential to fundamentally challenge the oppressive status quo.

In this way, the choice that many cadets face when entering the army symbolises the larger choice faced by this society as a whole. They can choose the Military Police, ensuring one’s own safety and privilege while also upholding a corrupt, oppressive system. Or they can choose the Scout Legion, putting one’s own life at risk but in doing so contributing to a progressive, positive force for change that can potentially challenge the inherently oppressive hegemony.  

But these political themes aren’t the main point of this episode. As we return to the top of wall, it becomes clear that this will be a much more intimate, focused episode. Ultimately, in the aftermath of Eren’s abduction, these socio-political questions pale in comparison to the emotional devastation of two very important characters, Mikasa and Armin.

AOT is about many things, but the heart of the show is almost certainly the relationship between Eren, Mikasa and Armin. On the surface, these three kids are all fairly simple, archetypal characters. This characterisation is elevated, however, when we consider their dynamic as a trio and the patterns of co-dependence and reliance they fall into.

In the wake of Eren’s abduction, Armin and Mikasa begin to consider exactly this, as they reflect on their relationship with Eren and just what it means for them. At this moment, we flashback to their childhood, an innocent, carefree time before tragedy destroyed their world forever. The conflicts are small, the stakes are low and no one’s life is in peril. How nice!

We’ve actually seen this kind of scene before; Eren impulsively tries to defend Armin from abusive bullies, so Armin and Mikasa are forced to defend him and perform damage control. So why does Armin remember this moment at such a dark time?

As we watch this flashback play out, it becomes clear that this scene functions as a character examination in microcosm, reiterating and reinforcing the essential foundation of who Eren, Armin and Mikasa are as people and as a trio. But more specifically, this flashbacks repositions this relationship through Mikasa and Armin’s point-of-view, revealing how they understand their relationship with Eren.  

Mikasa is the muscle of the group, using her physical prowess to diffuse the conflict at hand. She is cool and collected throughout but she is primarily concerned with keeping Eren safe. When Eren runs off without her though, Mikasa’s composure is replaced by intense distress. Even as children, Mikasa’s reliance on Eren seems to dangerously border on co-dependence.

Armin is the brains of the group - the literal voice of reason. Though he is physically inept, Armin excels intellectually, using his smarts to try and diffuse the situation, first fetching Mikasa and then trying to get Eren to see reason. However, Eren’s emotional, impulsive nature often limits Armin’s ability to calm him down, thus intensifying Armin’s guilt when Eren is put at risk because of him.

Eren is the spirit of the group, acting as its moral centre and emotional core. Even as a child, he is incredibly principled and idealistic, trying to impose justice and morality on the world around him, even if his ability to do so is incredibly limited. Because he lacks Mikasa natural fighting ability and self-preservation skills, as well as Armin’s analytical ability, he is intensely reliant on his friends to make up for his deficiencies. This reliance is complicated by the fact that Eren is incredibly independent and resentful of any attempt to help or control him.

In and of itself, this flashback could be seen as an entertaining digression. However, in the context of Eren’s defeat, this innocent memory is tainted by our awareness that this seemingly harmless dynamic of mutual dependence can become genuinely distressing or even damaging when lives are on the line. In the end, AOT paints a picture of a frankly one-sided relationship, where Mikasa and Armin try to help Eren, only to be rewarded with emotional distress and rejection when he inevitably slips out of their grasp.  

Though Mikasa and Armin care deeply about Eren and feel an immense responsibility to protect him, they always seem to be stuck chasing after him. This is partially due to the fact that outside forces constantly conspire to steal Eren away. But more importantly, Eren is the character who most clearly represents humankind’s desire for freedom; it is in his nature to push against those who would seek to contain him, even if those people are Armin and Mikasa who only wish to keep him safe.

What do you do when you can’t do anything for the person you love? When all you can do is try and fail to keep up? That’s honestly something really hard to deal with and I genuinely feel for Armin and Mikasa. In this agonising time, all they can do is wait.

In the wake of Eren’s abduction, Armin and Mikasa are forced to deal with the fact that they basically have no agency when it comes to protecting Eren. Instead, the choices that decide Eren’s fate are ultimately made by someone other themselves, with Armin and Mikasa forced to react rather than act and passively accept the hand they’ve been dealt.

Again, AOT characters must contend with their own powerless in the face of absolute despair. In the end, though years have passed since their carefree childhood, Mikasa, Eren and Armin are still just kids dealing with a horrific, life-or-death situation. They’re older and they’re stronger, but they’re still unable to truly effect change or protect those they care about.

So what can my precious children possibly do? Thankfully, in their darkest moment, Hannes appears with some nutritious military rations and some very sage advice. It’s time to break up this pity party.

Though Hannes may seem like a frivolous character with little to offer, this episode reminds us that he truly cares for and understands these kids. Hannes is in a similar situation, honestly. Like Mikasa and Armin, Hannes wants to keep these three safe from harm. His wisdom comes from the fact that he has learned to accept that this is ultimately out of his control.

You see, Hannes understands that Armin and Mikasa feel as if they have no agency over their current situation or Eren’s wellbeing in general. But he challenges this viewpoint, complicating their perception of themselves and Eren’s place in the group.

Essentially, by viewing themselves as passive and powerless, they are robbing themselves of their own agency. If they accept this perception of themselves, they are practically giving up any chance they have to change their situation. So in order to escape this self-fulfilling prophecy of disempowerment, they need to reconstruct themselves as active agents in this fight.

But more than this, Hannes realises that by constructing Eren as a passive object for them to pursue and keep safe, they have also robbed Eren of his own agency and denied his place as an actor in his own story. While Eren is frustrating in his recklessness, it’s important to recognise that he has always been able to handle himself in his own weird way. Yes, he is flawed and impulsive, but he is also strong, determined and inspiring. In the end, those qualities that make Eren so essential to Armin and Mikasa emotionally (and that so often endanger him) – his desire for freedom, his tenaciousness, his idealism – are precisely the qualities that will allow him to make it through any trial.

It’s the perfect pep talk for such a depressing situation. Hannes has successfully reminded Mikasa and Armin that their qualities in conjunction with Eren’s will keep all of them safe and ensure that they find peace and joy together.

The dynamic between Eren, Armin and Mikasa is in many ways emotionally draining and sometimes unhealthy but there is comfort and harmony in the equilibrium they’ve found between their very disparate personalities. Yes, they’ve got a lot of growing to do both separately and as a trio, but what matters the most, as cheesy as it sounds, is that they genuinely love and care for each other.  

So, with all this emotional turmoil resolved, Mikasa and Armin start to very, very angrily chomp down on their rations. No matter how bleak their situation seems, by continuing to eat, the most basic act of self-care and survival, they are making a stand against despair. In each angry bite, Armin and Mikasa are symbolically declaring their decision to never give up and somehow reclaim their place in this world, even if that just means ensuring their survival from one day to the next.

So yes, this episode is very light on plot, but nonetheless still compelling in its own right! Still, I am so, so pumped for the next episode.

[brinazzle]

8

Let’s review what we’ve learned so far. I’ve taken the position that there is no harder task for adults than changing our behavior. We are geniuses at coming up with reasons to avoid change. We make excuses. We rationalize. We harbor beliefs that trigger all manner of denial and resistance. As a result, we continually fail at becoming the person we want to be. One of our greatest instances of denial involves our relationship with our environment. We willfully ignore how profoundly the environment influences our behavior. In fact, the environment is a relentless triggering mechanism that, in an instant, can change us from saint to sinner, optimist to pessimist, model citizen to thug—and make us lose sight of who we’re trying to be. The good news is that the environment is not conducting a cloak-and-dagger operation. It’s out in the open, providing constant feedback to us. We’re often too distracted to hear what the environment is telling us. But in those moments when we’re dialed in and paying attention, the seemingly covert triggers that shape our behavior become apparent. The not-so-good news is that it’s hard to stay alert as we move from one environment to another. Our circumstances change from minute to minute, hour to hour—and we can’t always summon the ability or motivation to manage each situation as we would like. We mess up. We take one step forward, two steps back. Moreover, we have a bifurcated response to the environment in which we display two discrete personas I call “planner”and “doer.” The planner who wakes up in the morning with clear plans for the day is not the same person later in the day who has to execute those plans. Basic tools such as anticipating, avoiding, and adjusting to risky environments are a good place to start correcting this conflict between planner and doer in us. But they are Band-Aid solutions to immediate challenges; they don’t alter our behavior permanently. Now that I’ve outlined our frailties in the face of behavioral change and labeled us abject losers in our ongoing war with the environment, you may rightly ask, When do we get to the good stuff, the action points spelling out something meaningful to do? Not so fast. To understand a problem, you not only have to admit there is a problem; you also have to appreciate all your options. And with behavioral change, we have options. The graphic tool on the next page is one I’ve been using with clients for years. It illustrates the interchange of two dimensions we need to sort out before we can become the person we want to be: the Positive to Negative axis tracks the elements that either help us or hold us back. The Change to Keep axis tracks the elements that we determine to change or keep in the future. Thus, in pursuing any behavioral change we have four options: change or keep the positive elements, change or keep the negative. Thesethree • Creating represents the positive elements that we want to create in our future. • Preserving represents the positive elements that we want to keep in the future. • Eliminating represents the negative elements that we want to eliminate in the future. • Accepting represents the negative elements that we need to accept in the future. are the choices. Some are more dynamic, glamorous, and fun than others, but they’re equal in importance. And of them are more labor-intensive than we imagine. 



















1. Creating Creating is the glamorous poster child of behavioral change. When we imagine ourselves behaving better, we think of it as an exciting process of self-invention. We’re creating a “new me.” It’s appealing and seductive. We can be anyone we choose to be. The challenge is to do it by choice, not as a bystander. Are we creating ourselves, or wasting the opportunity and being created by external forces instead? Creating is not an option that comes automatically to even the smartest among us. When I was working with the CEO of a large European company six months before his mandatory retirement, I asked him, “What are you going to do when you leave?” “I have no idea,” he said. * “If you knew that your company was going to change completely in six months and have new customers, a new identity, would you plan for it?” I asked. “Of course,” he said. “It would be irresponsible not to.” “What’s more important? Your company or your life?” It was a rhetorical question. I was warning him that, stripped of his identity at the top of a sixty-thousand-employee organization, he was vulnerable to boredom, dislocation, depression. I’d seen it before in ex-CEOs who didn’t prepare well for their corporate exit. It would be “irresponsible” if he didn’t create a new identity for himself. I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. He’d been at the higher levels of corporate life for many years. He’d seen many peers get stranded or lost in so-called retirement. But he hadn’t considered applying this insight to himself. He was making the same mistakes the rest of us make. If we’re satisfied with our life—not necessarily happy or delighted that we’ve exceeded our wildest expectations, just satisfied—we yield to inertia. We continue doing what we’ve always done. If we’re dissatisfied, we may go to the other extreme, falling for any and every idea, never pursuing one idea long enough so that it takes root and actually shapes a recognizably new us. If you know people who flit from one faddish diet to the next—and never lose weight—you know the type. That’s chasing, not creating. As the chart indicates, creating spans a continuum from adding to inventing. Adding one new behavior is usually sufficient for already successful people. In my one-on-one coaching I’ve never had to help an executive completely overhaul his or her personality. Successful leaders don’t behave inappropriately across the board (if they did, they’d be unemployed). But they often behave inappropriately in one or two areas, which colors people’s perceptions of everything else they do. We always have a chance to create better behavior in ourselves—how we treat people, how we respond to our environment, what we permit to trigger our next action. All we need is the impulse to imagine a different us. 























2. Preserving Preserving sounds passive and mundane, but it’s a real choice. It requires soul-searching to figure out what serves us well, and discipline to refrain from abandoning it for something new and shiny and not necessarily better. We don’t practice preserving enough. Successful people, by definition, are doing a lot of things correctly, so they have a lot to preserve. But they also have a baseline urge that equates steady advancement with constant improvement. They’re geared to fight the status quo, not maintain it. When they face the choice of being good or getting even better, they instinctively opt for the latter—and risk losing some desirable qualities. In its sly way, preserving can be transformational. When my friend (and, full disclosure, one of my all-time heroes) Frances Hesselbein, whom Fortune magazine called “the best non-profit manager in America,” became CEO of the Girl Scouts of America in 1976, her mandate was to transform a hidebound organization with declining membership, a reliance on 120 volunteers for every paid staff member, and an anachronistic image that no longer applied to young girls. The urge to scrap everything and rebuild from the ground up would have been understandable. But Frances, who years earlier had volunteered with Troop 17 of the Girl Scouts in her hometown in Pennsylvania, knew that the organization had a lot worth preserving, not only its signature door-to-door cookie sales but its identity of being a moral guide for young women. She showed her staff and volunteers that it was more important than ever to reach out to girls, given the emerging threats of drugs and teen pregnancy. “Tradition with a future,” she called her radical combination of preserving and creating, which inspired the organization with new purpose. In her years as CEO, membership quadrupled and diversity tripled. A politician once told me, “The most thankless decision I make is the one that prevents something bad from happening, because I can never prove that I prevented something even worse.” Preserving is the same. We rarely get credit for not messing up a good thing. It’s a tactic that looks brilliant only in hindsight—and only to the individual doing the preserving. So we rarely ask ourselves, “What in my life is worth keeping?” The answer can save us a lot of time and energy. After all, preserving a valuable behavior means one less behavior we have to change. 


































3. Eliminating Eliminating is our most liberating, therapeutic action—but we make it reluctantly. Like cleaning out an attic or garage, we never know if we’ll regret jettisoning a part of us. Maybe we’ll need it in the future. Maybe it’s the secret of our success. Maybe we like it too much. The most significant transformational moment in my career was an act of elimination. It wasn’t my idea. I was in my late thirties and doing well flying around the country giving the same talk about organizational behavior to companies. I was on a lucrative treadmill of preserving, but I needed my mentor Paul Hersey to point out the downside. “You’re too good at what you’re doing,” Hersey told me. “You’re making too much money selling your day rate to companies.” When someone tells me I’m “too good” my brain shifts into neutral—and I bask in the praise. But Hersey wasn’t done with me. “You’re not investing in your future,” he said. “You’re not researching and writing and coming up with new things to say. You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.” For some reason, that last sentence triggered a profound emotion in me. I respected Paul tremendously. And I knew he was right. In Peter Drucker’s words, I was “sacrificing the future on the altar of today.” I could see my future and it had some dark empty holes in it. I was too busy maintaining a comfortable life. At some point, I’d grow bored or disaffected, but it might happen too late in the game for me to do something about it. Unless I eliminated some of the busywork, I would never create something new for myself. Despite the immediate cut in pay, that’s the moment I stopped chasing my tail for a day rate and decided to follow a different path. I have always been thankful for Paul’s advice. We’re all experienced at eliminating the things that hurt us, especially when the benefits of doing so are immediate and certain. We will shed an unreliable friend who causes us grief, stop drinking caffeine because it makes us jittery, quit a stultifying job that ruins our day, stop a habit that might be killing us. When the consequence is extreme distress, we binge on elimination. The real test is sacrificing something we enjoy doing—say, micromanaging—that’s not ostensibly harming our career, that we believe may even be working for us (if not others). In these cases, we may ask ourselves, “What should I eliminate?” And come up with nothing. 




























4. Accepting CEOs tend to see three of the four elements in the wheel of change with great clarity when it applies to an organization. (If they can’t, they’re not CEO for long.) Creating is innovating, taking risks on new ventures, creating new profit centers within the company. Preserving is not losing sight of your core business. Eliminating is shutting down or selling off the businesses that no longer fit. Accepting is the rare bird in this aviary of change. Businesspeople, reluctant to admit any defeat, can’t help equating “acceptance” with “acquiescence.” I once sat in on a budget meeting with a CEO and his division heads. It was an energy company, highly regulated and subject to the whims of political and social tides. For five years, the tide had been going against various parts of the company. The vulnerable divisions hit their profit targets with shrewd cost cutting as revenue growth stalled, then shrank—a race-to-the-bottom strategy that never ends well. Six years into this decline, the division chiefs showed up again with rosy projections, assuming they could eke out profits with more cutting. Finally, the CEO had heard enough. He dismissively tossed the reports into the center of the conference table and said, “This meeting is over. When we reconvene in a week, I want a new plan from each of you based on one criterion: your business will vanish next year and it’s never coming back. I want to see projections that accept what’s staring us in the face.” Everyone in the room had access to the same data. But only the CEO read them with dispassionate clarity—and acceptance. In business we have an abundance of metrics—market share, quality scores, customer feedback—to help us achieve acceptance of a dire situation or the need for change. But our natural impulse is to think wishfully (that is, favor the optimal, discount the negative) rather than realistically. That impulse is even more egregious in interpersonal relationships. Instead of metrics, we rely on impressions, which are open to wide interpretation. We take in what we want to hear, but tune out the displeasing notes that we need to hear. When our immediate superior reviews our performance with six trenchant comments, one positive, five negative, our ears naturally give more weight to the positive comment. It’s easier to accept good news than bad. Some people even have trouble accepting a compliment. Have you ever said something nice about a friend’s attire, and your friend brushes it off with “Oh this? I haven’t worn it in years.” The correct response is “Thank you,” not attacking your judgment and kindness. Accepting is most valuable when we are powerless to make a difference. Yet our ineffectuality is precisely the condition we are most loath to accept. It triggers our finest moments of counterproductive behavior. • If our exquisite logic fails to persuade a colleague or spouse to take our position, we resort to shouting at them, or threatening them, or belittling them, as if that’s a more winning approach than accepting that reasonable people can disagree. • If our spouse calls us out on a minor domestic infraction (for example, leaving the refrigerator door open, being late to pick up the kids, forgetting to buy milk) and we are 100 percent guilty, we’ll dredge up an incident from the past when our spouse was at fault. We extend a pointless argument ad nauseam rather than say, “You’re right. I’m sorry.” • If our immediate superior rejects our proposal, we grumble to our direct reports about how shortsighted our manager is. If we reflect on it, I’d wager our episodes of nonacceptance trigger more bad behavior than the fallout from our creating, preserving, and eliminating combined. When I work on behavioral change with corporate teams, the wheel of change is one of the first exercises I use. With so many disparate voices on a team of four, six, or sometimes a dozen executives, it’s crucial to focus people on simple concepts that simplify the debate. Asking people, “What do we need to eliminate?” fosters agreement more swiftly than asking, “What’s wrong?” or “What don’t you like about your colleagues?” One form requires people to imagine a positive course of action (even when it involves elimination). The other triggers whining and complaining. When my client Alicia was promoted to head of human resources at a portfolio company of eight different businesses with a total of more than one hundred thousand employees, she was given a clear mandate to increase her office’s corporate stature. At many companies HR is solely an administrative responsibility—HR people are keepers of the employee handboo —with little influence over the company’s direction and strategy. Not so at Alicia’s company. With so many employees, the CEO knew that the decisions his head of human resources made could make or break the organization. The CEO told Alicia he was giving her a “seat at the table.” Her job was as important as head of sales or chief operating officer. He was counting on her not to waste the opportunity. I spent two intensive days with Alicia and her team as they developed their new “seat at the table” strategy. Using the wheel of change as her template, Alicia told the team they only had to make four decisions: choose one thing to create, preserve, eliminate, and accept. Here’s what they came up with:Creating: To ensure a smarter workforce across the company, particularly in their high-tech portfolio, the team focused on upgrading hiring standards. The new strategy would center on more aggressive recruiting at benchmark companies and top-tier universities. Preserving: The team spent nearly all day debating this. Everyone had a different answer to the tough question, “What’s worth keeping?” Eventually the group settled on a cultural issue. The division had always been a tight and cordial operation. Everyone talked freely with one another. There was little to no infighting. People would pitch in without being asked. The team said, “Let’s not lose that feeling, whatever we do.” It was a touching moment. Until the team made the choice, I don’t think they appreciated the uniquely pleasant environment they had created for themselves. Eliminating: This was Alicia’s suggestion. If we’re going to be spending more time promoting the company and traveling to colleges and conferences, that means less office time for the senior team. “We can’t be more strategic if we’re still administrating,” she told the group. They agreed to delegate more of the “old work” to subordinates. They even clocked their goal: 30 percent fewer hours per team member on paperwork. Accepting: Improving the company’s labor force wouldn’t happen overnight—or even in a year or two. They were playing a long game. And it wasn’t guaranteed that even if they did their job brilliantly they would get the proper credit for it. The line executives would think all gains were their doing. This was what they shrewdly came to accept: how long change takes and who gets the glory. That’s the simple beauty of the wheel. When we bluntly challenge ourselves to figure out what we can change and what we can’t, what to lose and what to keep, we often surprise ourselves with the bold simplicity of our answers. The wheel is equally useful one-on-one. Even if we’re alone in a dark and quiet room, intent on contemplating our future, we’re still being distracted by the competing voices mumbling and shouting inside our heads. Posing big-picture questions to ourselves crowds out the distracting voices and shuffles the niggling issues and daily nuisances that upset us to the back of the line, where they belong. There are no wrong or right answers here—as long as they’re honest. I recall my client Steve, a financial executive working in Manhattan but living across the Hudson River in New Jersey, answering this way: • Creating: “A shorter commute to work.” • Preserving: “The sanctity of my family.” • Eliminating: “My current commute to work.” • Accepting: “I’ll never get better at golf.” Commuting, family, and golf? That was a trio I hadn’t heard before. I thought Steve was being flip (although clearly he had issues with commuting). But as we discussed it, the rigor and integrity in his answers emerged—as well as the trigger to action. Yes, Steve hated the three hours a day he spent commuting between his suburban New Jersey home and his downtown Manhattan office. It ate into how much time he could spend with his wife and three children. His passion for golf was one reason he had settled in the suburbs; that’s where the courses were. But his answers revealed a shift in priorities, and they were more closely interconnected than I had assumed. Admitting golf’s diminished importance in his life—and accepting it—meant there was no reason to stay in the suburbs. He was free to return to Manhattan, where he could actually walk to work, thus creating a shorter commute, eliminating his misery, and not only preserving but increasing his time with his family. So he sold his big house, moved his family into a place ten minutes from his office, and started showing up at home most nights in time for dinner. He still had behavioral issues at work that we needed to address, but his life’s biggest headache had vanished. Good things happen when we ask ourselves what we need to create, preserve, eliminate, and accept—a test I suspect few of us ever self-administer. Discovering what really matters is a gift, not a burden. Accept it and see.  In examining why we don’t become the person we want to be, I realize that I’ve run through a laundry list of negative choices that make us sound like closed-minded drones resisting any opportunity to change. That’s okay. Negatives are inevitable when we address why we don’t do something. But there’s hope. Nadeem defused an imagined enemy by altering his behavior in public forums. Rennie became a better manager by carrying an index card. Stan reduced family friction by avoiding family meetings. These behavioral transformations didn’t happen overnight. Nadeem needed eighteen months to get the nod from his colleagues. Rennie still carries an index card to meetings. Stan complained for months about being shut out of “his” foundation before he could serenely accept his new family landscape. It’s true they had the benefit of an outside agency—namely me—pointing out the environment’s malign impact on their behavior. But that kind of insight, which explains why we act the way we do, can take us only so far. It illuminates our past more than the way forward. Executing the change we hold as a concrete image in our mind is a process. It requires vigilance and diligent self monitoring. It demands a devotion to rote repetition that we might initially dismiss as simplistic and undignified, even beneath us. More than anything, the process resuscitates an instinct that’s been drilled into us as tiny children but slowly dissipates as we learn to enjoy success and fear failure—the importance of trying. 

* I hear this so often, I shouldn’t be surprised anymore. But I am. It’s the main reason I host several “What are you going to do with the rest of your life” get-togethers at my home for my clients. They’re not thinking about it. They’re not in creation mode.

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Amy Radin on Disruptive Innovation: Part 2 of an interview by Bob Morris

Amy Radin is a recognized Fortune 100 Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer, adviser and investor, board member, and thought leader on how to deliver innovation for sustainable, business-changing impact. She has been at the forefront of rewiring brands for growth and now applies her expertise working with executives to reduce the uncertainty and realize the benefits of innovation. The Change Maker's Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation In Any Company (City Point Press, Fall 2018), Amy's first book, captures her field-tested experience as the top executive accountable for achieving innovation results under varied, complex and rapidly changing conditions.

Amy is a graduate of The Wharton School and Wesleyan University. She serves on the global board of the AICPA where she is advising on marketing strategy and the impact of technology and workforce disruption on accounting and financial advisory services. She established and sponsors an annual social impact fellowship at the NYU Stern Graduate School of Business, benefitting students, not-for-profits and government agencies in the New York City metro community for over a decade.

* * *

Insofar as change agency is concerned, you suggest in The Change Maker's Playbook that "what people do trumps what they say." Please explain.

I’ll share another story to explain this. Coming out of the financial crisis, a team I worked with wanted to understand how to help people get off the investing sidelines and back into actively managing their money for better returns. A lot of money was being parked in CD’s – really low-yields – but people were afraid to do anything else. They were acting against their own long-term interests, but attitudes about money are very emotionally based, and clearly the Financial Crisis was paralyzing.

We did a series of in-home interviews with individuals and couples to understand their current headset around money, and what was stopping them from taking a more active role to make better decisions with whatever savings or investable assets they had.

In each home we asked to see the “financial area” – the place where the household head paid bills, organized the family’s financial affairs, etc. We saw many different strategies – everything from highly organized binders on immaculate desks, to a shopping bag full of unopened statements, and mail in the corner of one family’s dining room.

Each approach reflected a different attitude about money, self-esteem, sense of security, optimism, and willingness to plan that told us a lot more than what would have been revealed in conversation at a focus group facility or in another impersonal environment.

Actions do speak louder than words. That’s why one piece of advice on user insight is to discount any answer to questions that start with “what would you do if…” It’s what people DO that is a great source of insight to figure out where a great innovation opportunity may be. Projecting what you would do is someplace between impossible and likely to be distorted.

"Sometimes only a crisis can illuminate discovery." Please explain.

I was a mediocre science student in high school, but I did understand and retain Newton’s first law – an object will remain in motion on its current path unless forced to change direction by something disruptive enough to interfere with that path.

Inertia tends to rule. Established companies, big and small, tend to favor continuity and are built to maintain things as they are. Often we don’t change course in business (let alone in life) unless something big happens that forces a change in direction. Unfortunately, that is often a crisis. Something happens that forces discontinuity, and an acceptance of the need to change, which then triggers a reluctant exploration of alternatives.

What are the most important dos and don'ts to keep in mind when embarking on the seeding process?

o Engage users, early and often. Sometimes we (in business) are too cautious about sharing raw ideas, and miss the fact that people love being asked their opinion. You just need to be clear that they are seeing something raw that may not work perfectly, or that is incomplete. Actually, people will be more likely to give you their opinion if you show them something that is obviously in a formative state. If a model or prototype looks too polished, they will be less likely to be critical, so waiting to "get it right" can backfire

o Identify through observation and other feedback the major user behaviors around your prototype and think through how each might affect your business model. This means not just the line items in the financials, but also assumptions about capabilities that might be required, new skill sets, policies, or even legal requirements. Use what you learn about user interactions during seeding to refine the business model assumptions, validate (or disprove) feasibility, and to lead you towards relevant metrics.

o One of the best ways to kill an innovation is to impose overly precise metrics, or metrics that may have been perfectly good in a legacy business but should not be assumed for something brand new. Hold back the temptation to make the financials look more precise than they really are. The way to manage the risks of not having firm numbers is to cycle through small and quick concept refinements with as limited investment as possible.

Please respond to these observations by Warren Buffett: "Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”

The change maker is someone who has values that drive them to want to serve people, not push products to make a buck, and who believes in the importance of meeting the broader needs of all stakeholders, not just shareholders. The moves I advocate in The Change Maker’s Playbook presume integrity, and could be distorted by someone who is not values based.

Were I to hire someone and then discover they lacked a strong inner core built on values, I would want them out -- as quickly as possible.

What are the most common misconceptions about the scaling process? What in fact is true?

The big miss when it is time to scale occurs there is reflection and action at what I call in the book the “green light moment.” The skills, team structure, and capabilities that worked to get you through seeking and seeding are probably insufficient to scale.

What has to change to deliver growth? Put those pieces into place, including the ones that have implications for the people who are already there. Some will be ready to move on to the new demands, others may have to acquire new skills or move on.  Management or investor expectations will change a lot the day you get the big check to scale, and the standards upon which you are judged will be different. Be ready for that.

What are the most daunting challenges for those who lead a great team?

Get out of their way. Your job is to make them successful—you work for them, not the other way around.

Please respond to these comments by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1984):  “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Toffler had it right well ahead of 2018. Everything is changing so rapidly that remaining a vibrant, engaged and active person of this world requires:

1. Being willing to let go of orthodoxies that not only no longer matter, but that can easily become blinders to new realities,

2.  Understanding and appreciating where the world is going, and the implications of change, and

3. Being willing to replace your own operating principles with ones that may be very different and even uncomfortable, but that the facts support.

I agree with John Kotter that "the most difficult challenge change agents face is changing how they think about change." Must those about to "seek, seed, and scale innovation" in their company think innovatively about how to do that? Please explain.

It’s very hard, maybe impossible, to do new “whats” with old “hows.” Take a big, established company with shareholder commitments. The organization, processes, and policies are all geared to predictably turning the crank to produce goods or services and deliver promised returns. That’s fine for those goals, but that “how” can kill innovation, which by its very nature disrupts the continuity of a predictable business.

Much of my time and effort in corporate innovation roles was spent rethinking the “how’s” and clearing old how’s out of the way so the team could implement ways of getting things done aligned with the execution requirements of innovation.

One component of change that requires rigorous reconsideration is the notion of failure. It’s easier to accept in theory the notion that to achieve a big breakthrough will require many failures along the way, but we do not live in a society or operate in a business environment where failure is embraced.

In your opinion, which of the material you provide in The Change Maker's Playbook will be most valuable to those now preparing for a career in business or who have only recently embarked on one? Please explain.

The whole notion of what a career path looks like now is entirely different from even a few years ago.  People will have many careers, and education will be an ongoing, everyday process, not something that ends with formal schooling. Interestingly, I’ve been asked to speak on the theme of being the change maker of your career and your life.  The points that are resonating in these talks are:

o Figuring out your purpose, pursuing it with passion, having an impact. Be persistent through the highs and lows of a world full of ambiguity, complexity and unpredictability that will be frustrating and defeating if you aren’t doing something that aligns with what matters to you.

o Being expert in ways that play to your talents, but recognizing that the change maker is not one person – it’s a composite of many people who come together collaboratively to form a team.  So build your collaboration muscle, whether it is while accomplishing a business goal or building and sustaining a strong network of personal and professional relationships.

o Being adaptable, and open to the opportunities that may happen not in any planned way, but as a result of serendipity.

To first-time supervisors? Please explain.

o You are working for your team, not the other way around. Your job is now to make others successful. That means hiring a diverse group of people who don’t just bring functional skills, but also contribute leadership capability.

o Building and sustaining a culture where people are clear on the purpose, find meaning in their work, believe they can have an impact, and have a sufficient sense of psychological safety to take risks.

o Being open and constructive about providing feedback, and encouraging everyone to be willing to seek help from others. Be able to accept bad news as data, and add value as a problem solver so no one hesitates to come to you with the truth, including when things go awry.

To C-level executives? Please explain.

The C-suite has unique responsibilities to set the stage for the change makers in their organization:

o Be clear on the purpose of the brand, how it connects to those you want to serve and what needs you want to fulfill.

o Walk the talk on culture, especially providing that psychological safety net and work that has meaning. You are a unique and visible role model whose behavior will influence how everyone else behaves.

o Establish metrics that are suited to innovation, which may mean stepping back from the metrics by which you have traditionally managed your business and assessed results, and convincing the board that this is the right thing to do. Remember that if something is truly innovative, looking backwards for results standards may be self-defeating.

To the owner/CEOs of small-to-midsize companies? Please explain.

Resourcefulness is so critical, and keeping a high standard on talent -- seeking people who have diverse skills and experiences, are committed to the company’s purpose, collaborate, and have demonstrated adaptability and an ability to thrive under changing circumstances.

* * *

Amy cordially invites you to check out the resources at www.AmyRadin.com where visitors can find these free resources:

o An excerpt from The Change Maker’s Playbook

o The Seek, Seed, Scale infographic

o Sign up for my monthly e-newsletter

Visitors can also take the Change Maker’s Quiz and receive immediate feedback on their strengths and needs as innovators.

Here is a direct link to Part 1 of my interview of Amy.

  from personivt2c http://employeeengagement.ning.com/xn/detail/1986438:BlogPost:201738 via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Navigating Aging focuses on medical issues and advice associated with aging and end-of-life care, helping America’s 45 million seniors and their families navigate the health care system.

To contact Judith Graham with a question or comment, click here.

DENVER — Pauline Jeffery had let things slide since her husband died. Her bedroom was a mess. Her bathroom was disorganized. She often tripped over rugs in her living and dining room.

“I was depressed and doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself,” said the 85-year-old Denver resident.

But Jeffery’s inertia faded when she joined a program for frail low-income seniors: Community Aging in Place — Advancing Better Living for Elders (CAPABLE). Over the course of several months last year, an occupational therapist visited Jeffery and discussed issues she wanted to address. A handyman installed a new carpet. A visiting nurse gave her the feeling of being looked after.

In short order, Jeffery organized her bedroom, cleaned up her bathroom and began to feel more upbeat. “There’s a lot of people like myself that just need a push and somebody to make them feel like they’re worth something,” she said. “What they did for me, it got me motivated.”

New research shows that CAPABLE provides considerable help to vulnerable seniors who have trouble with “activities of daily living” — taking a shower or a bath, getting dressed, transferring in and out of bed, using the toilet or moving around easily at home. Over the course of five months, participants in the program experienced 30 percent fewer difficulties with such activities, according to a randomized clinical trial — the gold standard of research — published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“If someone found a drug that reduced disability in older adults by 30 percent, we’d be hearing about it on TV constantly,” said John Haaga, director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging, which provided funding for the research.

Positive findings are especially notable given the population that was studied: 300 poor or near-poor older adults, nearly 90 percent women, over 80 percent black, with an average age of 75 and multiple chronic medical conditions such as heart disease, arthritis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. While about 1 in 3 older adults in the U.S. need help with one or more daily activities, rates of disability and related health care costs are higher in this challenged population.

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Half of the older adults in the trial received the CAPABLE intervention, which includes six visits by an occupational therapist, four visits by a registered nurse, and home repair and modification services worth up to $1,300. The control group received 10 visits of equal length from a research assistant and were encouraged to use the internet, listen to music, play board games or reminisce about the past, among other activities.

Both groups experienced improvements at five months, but older adults who participated in CAPABLE realized substantially greater benefits. Eighty-two percent strongly agreed that the program made their life easier and their home safer. Nearly 80 percent said it enabled them to live at home and increased their confidence in managing daily challenges.

Sarah Szanton, who developed CAPABLE and directs the Center for Innovative Care in Aging at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, attributes positive results to several program elements. Instead of telling an older adult what’s wrong with them, a mainstay of medical practice, CAPABLE staff ask older adults what they’d like to be able to do but can’t do now.

Seniors often say they want to cook meals for themselves, make their beds, use the stairs, get out of the house more easily, walk around without pain or go to church.

The focus then turns to finding practical solutions. For someone who wants to cook but whose legs are weak, that could mean cutting vegetables while sitting down before standing up at the stove. A bed may need to be lifted on risers and a grab bar positioned between the mattress and box spring so a person can push herself up to a standing position more easily. Or, a nurse may need to go over medications and recommend potential changes to a person’s primary care doctor.

“Why does it work? Because we’re guided by what people want, and in order to get better, you have to want to get better: It has to be important to you,” said Amanda Goodenow, program manager for CAPABLE at the Colorado Visiting Nurse Association, the agency that assisted Jeffery. In Colorado, CAPABLE has been funded by a local foundation and Habitat for Humanity, which supports the program in six markets.

Hattie Ashby, 90, who has lived in the same two-story house in Aurora, a city adjacent to Denver, for 43 years, told Goodenow last summer that she wanted to get up and down the stairs more easily and walk around outside the house. Ashby has high blood pressure and COPD.

“They gave me a walker and made arrangements for me to put my oxygen tank on it so I could go to the mall,” she said, recalling some of what the CAPABLE staff did. “They fixed the wall in my bathroom and put something I could hold onto to get in and out of my bathtub. And going up and down my stairs, they put another rail on the wall where I would be able to hold onto.”

“It is a remarkable service for a senior citizen to be encouraged, to be helped, to be supported that way,” Ashby said.

It also turns out to be a cost-effective investment. For every dollar spent on CAPABLE, nearly $10 in combined savings accrues to Medicare and Medicaid, largely because of hospitalizations and nursing home placements that are prevented, research by Szanton and others has shown. (Many CAPABLE participants are eligible for both government health insurance programs because of their low incomes.) The average program cost per person is $2,825, far below the average $7,441 monthly cost of a semiprivate room in a nursing home in 2018.

With a new grant of nearly $3 million from the Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation, Szanton is turning her attention to expanding CAPABLE across the country. Currently, the program is available at 26 locations in 12 states, and Medicaid programs in Massachusetts and Michigan have adopted a version of it for some members. A major challenge is securing funding, since public and private insurers don’t typically pay for these kinds of services. So far, foundation and grant funding has been a major source of support.

Szanton hopes to persuade Medicare Advantage plans, which cover about 19 million Medicare recipients and can now offer an array of nonmedical benefits to members, to adopt CAPABLE. Also, Johns Hopkins and Stanford Medicine have submitted a proposal to have traditional Medicare offer the program as a bundled package of services. Accountable care organizations, groups of hospitals and physicians that assume financial risk for the health of their patients, are also interested, given the potential benefits and cost savings.

Another priority will be looking at how to extend CAPABLE’s impact over time. Since benefits diminished over a 12-month period in the just-published clinical trial, additional program elements — phone calls, extra visits and follow-up assessments — will probably be needed, said Dr. Kenneth Covinsky, a professor of geriatrics at the University of California-San Francisco and co-author of an editorial on CAPABLE that accompanied the study.

He’s bullish on CAPABLE’s prospects. “As clinicians, when we see older patients with conditions we can’t reverse, we need to understand we haven’t run out of things we can do,” Covinsky said. “Referring patients to a program like CAPABLE is something that could make a big difference.”

We’re eager to hear from readers about questions you’d like answered, problems you’ve been having with your care and advice you need in dealing with the health care system. Visit khn.org/columnists to submit your requests or tips.

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Frail Seniors Find Ways To Live Independently

[babbleuk]

5 questions for… Electric Cloud

As I am working on a DevOps report at the moment, I’m speaking to a lot (and I mean a lot) of companies involved in and around the space. Each, in my experience so far, is looking to address some of the key IT delivery challenges of our time – namely, how to deliver services and applications at a pace that keeps up with the rate of technology change?

One such organisation is Electric Cloud. I spoke to Sam Fell, VP of Marketing, to understand how the company sees its customers’ main challenges, and what it is doing to address them – not least, the complexity of working at enterprise scale.

  Where did Electric Cloud come from, what need did it set out to deal with?

Electric Cloud has been automating and accelerating software delivery since 2002, from code check-in to production release. Our founders looked to solve a huge bottleneck, to address how development teams’ agile pace of software delivery and new technology adoption has outstripped the ability of operations teams to keep up. This cadence and skills mismatch limits the business, can jeopardize transformation efforts, putting teams in a constant state of what we call “release anxiety.”

The main challenges we see are:

The ability to predictably deploy any application to any environment at any scale they want.

The ability to manage release pipelines and dependencies across multiple teams, point tools, and infrastructures.

A comprehensive, but simple way to plan, schedule, and track releases across its lifecycle

In consequence, we developed an Adaptive Release Orchestration platform called ElectricFlow to help organizations like E*TRADE, HPE, Huawei, Intel and Lockheed Martin confidently release new applications and adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business, with the analytics and insight to measure, track, and improve their results along the way.

Where’s the ‘market for DevOps’ going, from a customer perspective?

Nearly every industry now is taking notice of, or participating in the DevOps space – from FinServ and government to retail and entertainment – nearly every market, across nearly all geographies are recognizing DevOps as a way forward. The technology sector is still on the forefront, but you’d be surprised how quickly industries like transportation are catching up.

One thing we find invaluable is learning what critical factors are helping our customers drive their own businesses forward. A theme we hear over and over is how to adapt to business needs on a continuous basis.

But, there is an inherent dichotomy to how companies are expected to achieve the business goals set by leadership. For example, the need to implement fast and adapt to their changing environment easily – including support for new technologies like microservices and serverless. The challenge is, how to do this reliably and efficiently – to shift practices like security left and not create more technology debt or outages in the process.

Complexity is inevitable and the focus needs to be on how to adapt. Ways that we know work in addressing this complexity are:

Organizations that learn how to fix themselves will ultimately be high performers in the end – resiliency is the child of adaptability (credit: Rob England).

Companies that automate what humans aren’t good at – mundane, repeatable tasks that don’t require creativity – are ultimately set-up for success. Keep people engaged on high-value tasks with a focus on creating high-performance for themselves.

Organizations that continuously scrutinize their value streams, and align the business to the value stream, will be more successful than the competition. Improvements in one value stream may well create bottlenecks in others.

Companies that measure impact and outcomes, not just activities, will gain context into how ideas can transform into business value metrics such as customer satisfaction.

Understanding that there is no “one way” to solve a problem. If companies empower their teams to learn fast, the above may very well take care of itself.

What’s the USP for Electric Cloud in a pretty crowded space?

Electric Cloud sees the rise in DevOps and modern software delivery methods as an opportunity to emphasize the fact that collaboration, visibility and auditability are key pillars to ensuring fast delivery works for everyone involved. Eliminating silos and reducing management overhead is easier said than done, but with a scalable, secure and unified platform – anything is possible.

We’re proud to say we’re the only provider of a centralized platform that can provide all of the following in one simple package:

model-based automation techniques to replace brittle scripting with reusable abstract models;

process-as-code through a Groovy-based domain specific language (DSL) to onboard apps quickly so they are versionable, testable, reusable and refactorable;

a self-service library of best practice automation techniques for consistency across the organization;

a vast amount of plugins and integrations to support enterprise governance of any tool your company uses;

Role-based access control, approval tracking for every change in the pipeline;

An impenetrable Agent-based architecture to support communications for scalability, fault tolerance and security.

And all at enterprise scale, with our ability to enable unlimited clustering architecture and efficient processing for high availability and low-latency of concurrent deployments.

How does Electric Cloud play nice, and where does it see its most important integrations?

Every company’s software delivery process is unique, and touches many different tools, integrations and environments. We provide centralized management and visibility of the entire software delivery pipeline – whatever these might be – to improve developer productivity, streamline operations and increase efficiency.

To that end, Electric Cloud works with the most popular tools and infrastructure on the planet and allows our customers to add a layer of automation and governance to the tools they already use. You can find a list of our plugins, here.

I’m also interested to know more about (Dev)SecOps, and I would say PrivOps but the name is taken!

We definitely think securing the pipeline, and the application, is very important in software production.  We have been talking about it a lot recently — you may find these resources helpful:

We recently held an episode of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) to dive into how DevSecOps help teams “shift left,” and build security and quality into the process by making EVERYONE responsible for security at every stage. http://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/05/c9d9-podcast-e87-devsecops/

Prior to that, we held a webinar with John Willis – an Electric Cloud advisor, co-author of the “DevOps Handbook” with Gene Kim, and expert at security and DevOps. You can view the webinar here.

We also participated in the RSA DevOps Connect event. At the show, we took a quick booth survey and the results may (or may not) surprise you…: http://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/04/security-needs-to-shift-left-too/

  My take: Moving beyond the principle

The challenges that DevOps set out to address are not new: indeed, they are perhaps as old as technology delivery itself. Ultimately, while we talk about removal of barriers, greater automation and so on, the ultimate goal is how to deliver complexity at scale. Some, who we might call ‘platform natives’, may never have had to run through the mud of corporate and infrastructure inertia and may wonder what all the fuss is about; for others, the challenges may appear insurmountable.

Vendors in the crowded DevOps space may have cut their teeth working for the former, platform-based group, who use containers as a default and who see serverless models as a logical extension of their keep-it-simple infrastructure approach. Many, if not all see enterprise environments as both the biggest opportunity and the greater challenge. Whoever can cut the Gordian knot of enterprise convolution stands to take the greatest prize.

Will it be Electric Cloud? To my mind, the astonishing number of vendor players in this space is a symptom of how quickly it has grown to date, creating a situation ripe for massive consolidation – though it is difficult to see any enterprise software vendor that is actively looking to become ‘the one’: consider IBM’s outsourcing of Rational and HPE’s divestiture of its own software business to Microfocus as examples of companies running in the opposite direction.

However the market opportunity remains significant, despite the elusivity of the prize. I have no doubt that the next couple of years will see considerable industry consolidation, and who knows at this stage which brands, models and so on will pervade. I very much doubt that the industry will go ‘full serverless’ any time soon, for a raft of reasons (think: IoT, SDN, data, state, plus everything we don’t know about yet), but remain optimistic that automation and orchestration will deliver on their potential, enabling and enabled by practices such as DevOps.

Now I shall get back on with my report!

  from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2018/06/21/5-questions-for-electric-cloud/

[clarenceomoore]

5 questions for… Electric Cloud

As I am working on a DevOps report at the moment, I’m speaking to a lot (and I mean a lot) of companies involved in and around the space. Each, in my experience so far, is looking to address some of the key IT delivery challenges of our time – namely, how to deliver services and applications at a pace that keeps up with the rate of technology change?

One such organisation is Electric Cloud. I spoke to Sam Fell, VP of Marketing, to understand how the company sees its customers’ main challenges, and what it is doing to address them – not least, the complexity of working at enterprise scale.

  Where did Electric Cloud come from, what need did it set out to deal with?

Electric Cloud has been automating and accelerating software delivery since 2002, from code check-in to production release. Our founders looked to solve a huge bottleneck, to address how development teams’ agile pace of software delivery and new technology adoption has outstripped the ability of operations teams to keep up. This cadence and skills mismatch limits the business, can jeopardize transformation efforts, putting teams in a constant state of what we call “release anxiety.”

The main challenges we see are:

The ability to predictably deploy any application to any environment at any scale they want.

The ability to manage release pipelines and dependencies across multiple teams, point tools, and infrastructures.

A comprehensive, but simple way to plan, schedule, and track releases across its lifecycle

In consequence, we developed an Adaptive Release Orchestration platform called ElectricFlow to help organizations like E*TRADE, HPE, Huawei, Intel and Lockheed Martin confidently release new applications and adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business, with the analytics and insight to measure, track, and improve their results along the way.

Where’s the ‘market for DevOps’ going, from a customer perspective?

Nearly every industry now is taking notice of, or participating in the DevOps space – from FinServ and government to retail and entertainment – nearly every market, across nearly all geographies are recognizing DevOps as a way forward. The technology sector is still on the forefront, but you’d be surprised how quickly industries like transportation are catching up.

One thing we find invaluable is learning what critical factors are helping our customers drive their own businesses forward. A theme we hear over and over is how to adapt to business needs on a continuous basis.

But, there is an inherent dichotomy to how companies are expected to achieve the business goals set by leadership. For example, the need to implement fast and adapt to their changing environment easily – including support for new technologies like microservices and serverless. The challenge is, how to do this reliably and efficiently – to shift practices like security left and not create more technology debt or outages in the process.

Complexity is inevitable and the focus needs to be on how to adapt. Ways that we know work in addressing this complexity are:

Organizations that learn how to fix themselves will ultimately be high performers in the end – resiliency is the child of adaptability (credit: Rob England).

Companies that automate what humans aren’t good at – mundane, repeatable tasks that don’t require creativity – are ultimately set-up for success. Keep people engaged on high-value tasks with a focus on creating high-performance for themselves.

Organizations that continuously scrutinize their value streams, and align the business to the value stream, will be more successful than the competition. Improvements in one value stream may well create bottlenecks in others.

Companies that measure impact and outcomes, not just activities, will gain context into how ideas can transform into business value metrics such as customer satisfaction.

Understanding that there is no “one way” to solve a problem. If companies empower their teams to learn fast, the above may very well take care of itself.

What’s the USP for Electric Cloud in a pretty crowded space?

Electric Cloud sees the rise in DevOps and modern software delivery methods as an opportunity to emphasize the fact that collaboration, visibility and auditability are key pillars to ensuring fast delivery works for everyone involved. Eliminating silos and reducing management overhead is easier said than done, but with a scalable, secure and unified platform – anything is possible.

We’re proud to say we’re the only provider of a centralized platform that can provide all of the following in one simple package:

model-based automation techniques to replace brittle scripting with reusable abstract models;

process-as-code through a Groovy-based domain specific language (DSL) to onboard apps quickly so they are versionable, testable, reusable and refactorable;

a self-service library of best practice automation techniques for consistency across the organization;

a vast amount of plugins and integrations to support enterprise governance of any tool your company uses;

Role-based access control, approval tracking for every change in the pipeline;

An impenetrable Agent-based architecture to support communications for scalability, fault tolerance and security.

And all at enterprise scale, with our ability to enable unlimited clustering architecture and efficient processing for high availability and low-latency of concurrent deployments.

How does Electric Cloud play nice, and where does it see its most important integrations?

Every company’s software delivery process is unique, and touches many different tools, integrations and environments. We provide centralized management and visibility of the entire software delivery pipeline – whatever these might be – to improve developer productivity, streamline operations and increase efficiency.

To that end, Electric Cloud works with the most popular tools and infrastructure on the planet and allows our customers to add a layer of automation and governance to the tools they already use. You can find a list of our plugins, here.

I’m also interested to know more about (Dev)SecOps, and I would say PrivOps but the name is taken!

We definitely think securing the pipeline, and the application, is very important in software production.  We have been talking about it a lot recently — you may find these resources helpful:

We recently held an episode of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) to dive into how DevSecOps help teams “shift left,” and build security and quality into the process by making EVERYONE responsible for security at every stage. http://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/05/c9d9-podcast-e87-devsecops/

Prior to that, we held a webinar with John Willis – an Electric Cloud advisor, co-author of the “DevOps Handbook” with Gene Kim, and expert at security and DevOps. You can view the webinar here.

We also participated in the RSA DevOps Connect event. At the show, we took a quick booth survey and the results may (or may not) surprise you…: http://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/04/security-needs-to-shift-left-too/

  My take: Moving beyond the principle

The challenges that DevOps set out to address are not new: indeed, they are perhaps as old as technology delivery itself. Ultimately, while we talk about removal of barriers, greater automation and so on, the ultimate goal is how to deliver complexity at scale. Some, who we might call ‘platform natives’, may never have had to run through the mud of corporate and infrastructure inertia and may wonder what all the fuss is about; for others, the challenges may appear insurmountable.

Vendors in the crowded DevOps space may have cut their teeth working for the former, platform-based group, who use containers as a default and who see serverless models as a logical extension of their keep-it-simple infrastructure approach. Many, if not all see enterprise environments as both the biggest opportunity and the greater challenge. Whoever can cut the Gordian knot of enterprise convolution stands to take the greatest prize.

Will it be Electric Cloud? To my mind, the astonishing number of vendor players in this space is a symptom of how quickly it has grown to date, creating a situation ripe for massive consolidation – though it is difficult to see any enterprise software vendor that is actively looking to become ‘the one’: consider IBM’s outsourcing of Rational and HPE’s divestiture of its own software business to Microfocus as examples of companies running in the opposite direction.

However the market opportunity remains significant, despite the elusivity of the prize. I have no doubt that the next couple of years will see considerable industry consolidation, and who knows at this stage which brands, models and so on will pervade. I very much doubt that the industry will go ‘full serverless’ any time soon, for a raft of reasons (think: IoT, SDN, data, state, plus everything we don’t know about yet), but remain optimistic that automation and orchestration will deliver on their potential, enabling and enabled by practices such as DevOps.

Now I shall get back on with my report!

[topicprinter]

Yesterday night I wrote this "article", and it was more of a "passion of the moment" type action than a well thought out articles. But I think it really capture a less talked about element that I love about working in a startups and a very good reason for people that are stuck in corporate jobs to at least try startup life for a few months.It's a bit more "personal" than most postings I've seen here, going into examples and making heavy use of analogies and personal experience, but I'm hoping the message may resonate with some of the people here and I could get some feedback on the subject.The original article can be found here: http://localhost:18080/#!/blog/10As by the rules, the article's content (formatted for reddit ), Is included here:If there's one thing that I vehemently love it's being useful. It can seem like a strange thing to enjoy, when you write it down, but I think it's something I share with many people. I'd go as far as to say that finding something that you are useful for, is the subconscious goal for most humans throughout human history.It's probably the most influential subconscious goals we have besides mating and feeding and staying alive.How I caught a glimpse of the Feedback loopIt follows from this, that I despised university. If people asked me why I despised university I would critique things like the grading system that rewards conformity and forced memorization rather than creativity and thinking, academic nepotism and funds being directed at research for political reasons. Whilst I do think all those things are true, that's not why I really hated university.My repulsion was of an amygdaloid nature, I knew I disliked university the same way I knew I liked a kiss, the same way I knew I was starving, or anxious or afraid. I disliked university because I felt useless, I felt that none of my efforts were of use to anyone, or at least, I had no way of knowing if they were useful. Back then I didn't understand that, at least not on a conscious level, but now I am almost certain of that fact.So, I did what most young and marginally talented people do when they felt useless, I found a job. Lo and behold, I really liked working, but I didn't really understand why. Nowadays, I've come to realize I liked working because I finally had a system of reference for how useful I was, albeit a very rough one.I had certain problems I needed to solve and at the end of the month, assuming I wasn't fired or demoted, I could conclude I had somewhat achieved what was needed of me. On top of that, I had colleagues who, being in the same team as me and risking the same fate if the team's work failed, praise my successes and critiqued my mistakes. This is in stark contrast to a university environment, where your "worth" comes from simply being there, from paying a tuition fee, either directly or indirectly, through stipends (for the university) from the government or other organizations. I finally had a feedback loop, my work would enter into one end of it and out the other end would come a review. It was a shitty feedback loop and I had not idea it had a name, but it was there and it was making me happy.The problem with the feedback loop in large companiesSo I moved through several position, to find what I liked doing. Going from working with infrastructure, to "researching" new platforms, to integrating machine learning algorithms into projects, to finding "state-of-the-art" methods to process and analyze large amounts of data. Until recently, I thought I enjoyed changing companies and positions because I was working on more challenging projects, working with technologies I was more interested in and making more money.But that's not the main reason why I found satisfaction with my "career progression". That reason, was that I was progressively moving to smaller companies and smaller teams. That's because the smaller your team and company is, the more your contributions will matter. The more your contributions will matter, the more feedback you will receive.A corporation that has thousands of employees is designed to be as unaffected as possible by the actions of a single individual. After all, if you have thousands of people working for you, and any single one of them fucking up could seriously affect the bottom line, you're public company won't last for too long. This type of design also means no single individual can be the key to success, it has to be a collaborative effort on a very large scale.I would finish a project and months down the line, it would just sit there, waiting for a "block" to be taken out of the way by another team.There are things I've built that I've gotten feedback for, quite literally, more than a year after I was done with them. I could hardly think of any non-malicious course of action I could take, that would significantly harm the company's success, nor could I think of a single plan that I could execute in order to bring our products to a new high. Even if my whole team was no board with a plan, we could hardly affect anything without going into tons of politics, waiting on a ton of people to do their part and crossing our fingers, hoping our vision will take root in all the departments needed to achieve it. This was not due to lack of internal influence, after all, the CTO of the company was part of this team, it was simply because companies have a certain inertia and the larger the company is, the stronger that inertia will be.That inertia is one of the reasons why startups exists, and it has many effects, one indirect effect is the inability to get fast, well directed and conclusive feedback. In a situation where it can take a year to release a product, it's impact will be felt a year after you're done with it. Slow feedback wasn't only bad because it slowed down my improvement, but also because it's addressed to a different person that the one who needs that feedback.The mistakes I make today aren't the mistakes I will make tomorrow, because they come from a different mindset, from a slightly different "me". But, unless I have a fast enough feedback loop to make me aware of those mistakes, that mindset progression will be built upon lack of knowledge of my past incompetence.The other problem with the feedback loop of large entities, is that it's full of noise. It's full o noise because it's hard to attribute responsibility and blame and it's full of noise because our brains will try to ignore certain parts of it.Since the feedback is often collective, it's about "what the team did" or "what the company did", it's very hard to understand you influence as an individual upon that. Our subconscious is always hard at work trying to trick us into diminishing or boasting the role we played to make a particular thing happen. When a feedback loop is not directed at us, but at a larger whole, our subconsciousness will pick the parts that it like and roll with them, the rest, the rest are the ones directed at "the rest of the team".Why I love startupsA clean(er) feedback loopSo I moved into startups, initially in a 10 people company and than in a 4 people company. I hold the twisted role of 'guy that writes the code for the backend' and 'guy that handles the infrastructure and security' and 'guy that designs the flow of data and the machine learning algorithms and query APIs that use said data'. It's the largest volume of work I've had to do in my life. Yet, despite life dealing me a band hand as far as personal matters are concerned, I've never felt happier, more free and at peace with myself than I do now.That's because I finally have a feedback loop that's as clean from noise and I can hope for it to be. I am not a replaceable cog in a machine, me being part of the company has radically changed things and me leaving the company would radically change things. I get feedback about my work, real, honest, cutting feedback, in a matter of hours or days, not months, or years... or never. And this should feel scary, but it feels fun and liberating, whatever I do I know I will learn the extent of my aptitude or my inability almost as soon as I'm done. Which is great, because it not only means I can fix things faster, it also means I can improve myself as an individualPart 1: Learning your own worthThis type of environment can be the host to a very important analysis, that of your own self worth. There's this expeditious feedback loop that allows your to understand the cost and benefit of your actions in a much clearer way. On top of that, you can't really blame your mistakes on anyone or diminish the part you played in the process.Eliminating those external factors is important for evaluating your own self worth, since many of us suffer from egomania and self-forgetfulness. Even worse, we suffer from both of them at the same time, your memory may give you too much credit for X and too little credit for Y. Not because you deserve the credit for X or haven't contributed to Y, but because of deeply nested subconscious reasons that you can't even comprehend. So to better estimate your self worth, you have to eliminate those biases, which is much easier when there's none else to blame and none else to praise. Further more, doing so is therapeutic, admitting to your mistakes and understanding your limitations, is probably the oldest form of psychotherapy known to man.Knowing your limits and your own worth, in a certain field or when solving a certain problem, isn't just a matter of tweaking your ego. It's a metric that you can use in order to understand what you need to learn and how you need to learn. It's also the first step of approaching a problem that is currently beyond you, being able to understand that a problem is currently beyond you. The better you are at articulating what you can't do, the closer you get to knowing how to do it. After all, learning how to do something, is just a matter of making all the right mistakes.Part 2: Building conscientiousnessThe other amazing thing about working in a startup is that it help you build conscientiousness. Since your actions are suddenly of great import for the whole, you start putting more thought into them and into how they can and have gone wrong. Again, as with understanding your self worth, that feedback loops helps a lot here. If you leave a bug in a piece of logic ,when working with a large entity, you may never find about it or you may find about it years after the fact. If all your mistakes will surface sooner rather than later, that can serve as a way for you to understand them and think about ways of avoiding them.We live in an environment where, due to this lack of real feedback, it's hard for people to understand how careful they should be when doing various tasks. And this can not only lead to lacking vigilance, but it can also lead to being over-vigilant. Whilst the "moves fast and breaks things" guy can sometimes be bad, it's by far not the worst archetype of someone that lacks proper conscientiousness. The worst are the people that always think they are treading on thin ice, since they like to assume the worst and the lack of positive feedback encourages this tendency. Building your conscientiousness doesn't always mean being more careful, it means understanding when you should be careful and how you should be careful.Again, none of us are likely to always fall on one side of the scale or another. Sometimes we are too careful and sometimes we are too reckless. Being careful is, in a way, the ability to detect that a problem falls into a particular category of problems that defy reasoning within the given conditions. On the other hand, you will be confident in your ability to understand when a problem is easy to reason about or solve and shouldn't cause you much worry.So, should I work in a startup ?Maybe, maybe not. What you should really do is find a good way of getting feedback for you work. A magic loop, with you somewhere in it, crunching out results, formulas, code or anything else, and getting feedback from the other side, resulting in you crunching out a better version of whatever you did before... in order to send it forward to be critiqued and tested again.Having this feedback loop has really helped me, not only become better at what I do, but also understand myself better. I managed to find this wonderful loop by joining startups, but that's not to say there aren't other ways to find one or create one. However, if you can't procure a quality a feedback loop but feel like you dearly need one, I think you are in the majority of people and I think that you should try doing a bit of work in a startup.