Jorge 0:00

When you're faced with conditions that you can't explain, or things that are changing too fast in unpredictable ways, you will latch onto your existing mental models in ways that might keep you from seeing the situation clearly.

0:21

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:32

Harry, it's good to see you again.

Harry 0:34

It's great to be here, Jorge. It's nice to see you as well.

Jorge 0:37

You were telling me earlier that it's a special day for you.

Harry 0:40

Yeah, today, on November eight, is what I call, my Survival Thrival Day. It's an annual celebration of having survived being effectively run over by a car when I was fifteen years old. I was on a bicycle and I was heading down a mountain road, Chautauqua Boulevard, specifically, in Pacific Palisades, heading down to the coast. And there was a driver in a four-door Chevrolet going up that road, and she veered into my lane and hit me head on. So I was pleaded into the bicycle. She took the bicycle and I went the other way. And so it resulted in a lot of broken bones and internal injuries. And ultimately, I ended up in a hospital for about six months and then got out in a body cast and took about two years to go through the whole healing process. But I celebrate today far more than I celebrate my birthday because not only did I survive and it's special for that reason, but I had some like tremendous insights and realizations in that experience. I had one of those crazy near death experiences. And you read about these things and you hear about 'em and you're like, "Nah, that can't be true." And I had one, so I can't really deny it. And I was there, all broken up, laying on the street. I didn't know where I was, and I saw the light, right? I saw this huge light. And I started heading toward the light. And and I was like making my way down the light, "Wondering wow, this is really weird," thinking to myself. And then I heard this booming voice say, "It's not your time." And I just snapped back into my body at that moment and then I could see myself from above and I could see all the people like looking over me, and I could see, I looked through my own eyes, I looked down at my hand, and I'm like, "Why are there chicken bones sticking outta my hand?" And I'm like, "Oh, those aren't chicken bones. Those are my bones." I'm like, "Ew!" And then, it, then I'm like, "How the heck did I get here? is this a bad dream?" I remember having all these thoughts. And I was like, "Okay, I, remember getting up and I had my Captain Crunch..." And then, I kinda walked through my day and then I remember, "Oh, I got on my bike after my guitar lesson and I went down Chautauqua and, oh shoot, I know what happened." And right at that moment, the cacophony of all the noise seeped in and I could hear the sirens now and I could hear all the voices, and all the people, and all of a sudden, the pain just rushed in. And it was like this incredible moment of I was back in my body as a human, broken up, lying on the middle, lying in the road, at night at five on a on t that I'd ridden up and down many times. And sirens blaring and people all over, apparently a school bus had passed and stopped with friends of mine on it, weirdly. But I survived. And it was a rough, it was a rough six months. It was a lot of pain medicine, number of surgeries and stuff like that. But I had these incredible realizations as part of that whole experience. So I picked something to read today to share on that subject. Weirdly, I didn't even make the connection 'cause I picked this reading weeks ago. But one of the things is when you're like a fifteen-year-old boy, like, you're invincible. And I wasn't invincible. So the first thing, the first kind of major realization, is that everything I know is not true. This sense of certainty that I have is completely false. And, out of that came this philosophy, part of my way of approaching the world, which is that certainty that felt sense that you're right is is an illusion and in fact it's the enemy of truth. And so, if you've ever worked closely with me, I know you've heard me say that, like somebody will say, "I'm certain!" And I'll look at them and I'll say, "Certainty's the enemy of truth." It's like Heisenberg, right? The closer you get right, the harder it is to tell how fast it's going or which way it's going or whatnot. And the better sense you have of how fast it's going, the worse the sense is that what the thing actually is. I don't remember what the details of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle are, but I've internalized them that way. And the other thing was this ego-disassembling experience of control and like having the sense of control completely dismantled. I mean, before the accident, I thought I had some semblance of control of things. And after years of processing and reflecting on the accident, I realized that control is a complete illusion. And it's just, a shroud in front of you. And, you can, think you have control of things, but I often say to people, "I just work here. I'm not in charge of what's going on." And yeah, sure I can, influence my local sphere around me, but I don't think of it as control at all.

Jorge 6:18

That's amazing. And I'm wondering if we should include like a trigger warning for folks because the story is so visceral, right? So shocking. You were describing the accident and I was here wincing. I'm glad you survived, obviously. And it feels like there are learnings to be had here. The story where my mind immediately went, and I think it has to do with control is a Brian Eno anecdote. Brian Eno had, an accident where I think he was crossing the street in London and he was hit by a cab and he ended up, bedridden as a result of that accident. And he had a friend come visit and gifted him a record of harp music. And this friend put on the record as they were leaving and after they left, Eno realized that one of the two channels in the stereo had failed and the volume was set much too low. So he couldn't really hear the music. All he could hear was like the twinkling of the harp. And on top of that, it was raining. And I might be reading into it, but I think this is what happened. After an initial struggle with the unsatisfying conditions of the music, he settled into the sound. And that is the genesis of ambient music. He had this realization that music could be... I think the way that he talks about it is music could serve a similar role to perfume, where it's kinda coloring the environment. If you decide to pay attention to it, it's interesting, but you can also let it just wash over you and then it also serves a function, right? but the decision to explore that as a possible space for music to inhabit came as a result of being bedridden and lacking the ability to control the conditions under which the music was being played back.

Harry 8:39

Whoa. That's amazing. And, so funny, you had mentioned Brian Eno because of course, my favorite song of all time is Spinning Away, a song that he and I think Cage did. I can't remember the title of the album, Upside Down or Inside Out or...

Jorge 8:55

John Cale.

Harry 8:57

Yeah. John Cale. Sorry, my brain just had a brain fart. Yeah, I love that. And I own it. I own the CD and I own the vinyl, and it was reissued. I bought a version of it before it was reissued, but yeah.

Jorge 9:13

We, didn't plan on this, but that is one of my favorite songs as well, to the point where I used to have the lyrics to that song printed and tacked on a board in my office.

Harry 9:26

No way.

Jorge 9:27

Yeah.

Harry 9:28

Unbelievable.

Jorge 9:30

Maybe we should be playing that for your November 8th being reborn celebration because it's a good song for that too. We won't get into it, but you mentioned that you have a reading to share with us. I'm really curious about that.

Harry 9:47

Yeah, totally. And I didn't do my homework, so I don't remember the author because I didn't look it up, but we'll have to, we'll have to add that in. But I won't tell you what the book is until after I'm done, in the spirit of what you did to me last time. And it's not too long, here it goes. "The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the horseless carriage to which people reverted when confronted with unprecedented facts of the automobile. "The tragic illustration is the encounter between the indigenous people and the first Spanish conquerors when the Tainos" I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right "of the pre-Columbian Caribbean islands, first laid eye on the sweating, bearded Spanish soldiers trudging across the sand and their brocade and armor, how could they possibly have recognized the meaning and portent of that moment? Unable to imagine their own destruction, they'd reckon that those strange creatures were gods and welcomed them with intricate rituals of hospitality. "This is how the unprecedented reliably confounds understanding. Existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by turning the unprecedented into extensions of the past. This contributes to the normalization of the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb. "On a stormy night, some years ago, our home was struck by lightning, and I learned a powerful lesson in the comprehension defying power of an unprecedented. Within moments of the strike, thick black smoke drifted up the staircase and from the lower level of the house and toward the living room. As we mobilized and called the fire department, I believe that I had just a minute or two to do something useful before rushing out to join the family. "First, I ran upstairs and closed all the bedroom doors to protect them from smoke damage. Next, I tore back downstairs into the living room where I gathered up all of our family photo albums as I could carry them outside on a covered porch for safety. The smoke was just about to reach me, when the fire marshal arrived to grab me by the shoulder and yank me out the door. We stood in the driving rain, where to my astonishment we watched the house explode in flames. "I learned many things from the fire, but amongst the most important was the unrecognizability of the unprecedented. In that early phase of the crisis, I could imagine our home scarred by smoke damage, but I could not imagine its disappearance. I grasped what was happening through the lens of past experience, envisioning a distressing but ultimately manageable detour that would lead back to the status quo. Unable to distinguish the unprecedented, all I could do was to close doors to rooms that would no longer exist and seek safety on a porch that was faded to vanish. I was blind to the conditions that were unprecedented in my experience."

Jorge 13:06

Wow, that is really heavy. What is the book?

Harry 13:11

So the book is Surveillance Capitalism, and I'll have to look up the author and I'm just embarrassed to say I didn't prioritize that before we started our call. I got distracted in other things. But weirdly, this book was referred to me by Dennis Allison, who invited me to dinner with Brian Eno.

Jorge 13:33

Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I think the name is Shoshana Zuboff, the name of the author. And I have to say, I have not read Surveillance Capitalism. It is on my reading pile. But this is really interesting. What drew you to that particular passage in that book?

Harry 13:54

You know, we hear the term "unprecedented" bandied about in all sorts of contexts. And I think it's one of those words that people just generally don't actually know what it means or how to think about it. And when I read this passage, I realized that neither did I and that the idea that the unprecedented effectively eclipses our understanding because the only way... I mean, by definition, the only way to understand what we're observing or what we're experiencing is through lenses of the past and patterns of the past, that we don't have a way of making of sense-making, of making meaning out of what we're experiencing and therefore we're likely to fall prey to limitations of whatever experience or metaphor or patterns or structures that we're relying on to try to understand what's going on.

Jorge 14:52

You know, in information architecture, one of the founding maxims is this statement by Richard Saul Wurman that you only understand something relative to something you already understand. And I've always taken that to mean that we construct our mental models of the world based on things we already know. Let's think back, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he made the point to say that it was a mobile phone, an internet communicator, and a music player, right? He was trying to position this new device by relating it to things that were already part of people's daily lives. I've always taken that maxim to be about constructing mental models. But what you're saying here, which I think is a corollary to that, is that the opposite is also true. When you're faced with conditions that you can't explain, or things that are changing too fast in unpredictable ways, you will latch onto your existing mental models in ways that might keep you from seeing the situation clearly.

Harry 16:05

That's exactly right. And I think that's the... just serendipitously, I think that hearkens back to the story that I told earlier, right? There was just no way for me to make sense of the experience that I was having. And even more so going forward, everything was different. And so I celebrate today this Survival Day, I call it, as a way of, honoring that complete dislocation of understanding from before to after. It's described, there are two, from two different fields. There are ways of maybe thinking about it. One is as a Fermi level energy transition, state change between electrons in an atom or something like that, where the difference in energy levels between electrons, when something goes from one state to another, there's no going back. And another is through educational development levels or childhood development levels when kids are born and then as they grow and develop, they go through these developmental levels that are at least based on what we understand today, relatively predictable. But the thing is, you can't imagine the new developmental level and you can't comprehend the one you were in before, but you make sense of each new developmental level through the lens, largely unconscious of the patterns and things that you've learned from the previous one. And so this idea of celebrating for me what amounts to a type of birthday is a way of honoring the complete unknowability of that transitional state and recognizing that I can't understand where I came from and I can't know where I'm going.

Jorge 17:58

I think we're not in Kansas anymore, right?

Harry 18:01

Yeah.

Jorge 18:03

It's... that's a little bit of what you're describing here. And the very visceral image of you looking at your hands and thinking that you were looking at chicken bones because you had never experienced seeing your own bones outside of your body, right?

Harry 18:27

Yeah. Weird.

Jorge 18:28

It's, "We're not in Kansas anymore."

Harry 18:31

Yeah, totally.

Jorge 18:33

You know, an idea that comes to mind and, I was hoping to actually read this text in one of our conversations, but since we're talking about it now, I might just bring it up, is this notion of beginner's mind that is talked about in Buddhism, right? And by beginner's mind, he means someone who is not an expert, someone who is just getting started, let's say in a craft, like you're learning to paint with water colors, right? You're going to make a lot of what we call rookie mistakes, which is a way of saying you're exploring the possibility space of that medium somehow. And Suzuki talks about the beginner's mind, the kind of mindset that you have when you're approaching a problem without mental models, in contrast to what he calls the expert mind. And he says that in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few. And both the reading and the story you told contained traumatic events that forced individuals, one of those individuals being you, to reckon with the fact that the things that had worked for you up to now were no longer useful for making skillful predictions about what to do next or for acting skillfully.

Harry 19:58

Yeah.

Jorge 19:59

And implicit in what you're saying here is that there is value in being able to detach yourself from this expert's mind, from this set of beliefs, particularly if you're facing some kind of unprecedented situation like the ones that you've described. And now to turn it to practical things that our listeners might do without having to incur in some traumatic experience, to gain the benefits of beginner's mind. Is there something that maybe you've learned that could help folks do that?

Harry 20:41

I would say, and I'm learning this right as we speak, so this is... I'll make it real, that in every moment, there's a degree of unprecedented. And the question to some extent is: how much is unprecedented? And so the idea is that to consciously apply the beginner's mind is to maintain an awareness that there may be an infinitesimally small amount of the unprecedented in every moment, but there is some. And can you keep in mind the accordion or elastic nature of this unprecedented, of the degree of the unprecedented, to always maintain a sense of curiosity, some degree of curiosity in a state where it is highly repetitive, highly historically based, where, the situation is almost a template of what's happened in the past, the, degree of curiosity you need is probably significantly lower. But in a situation that is even remotely novel or the context is new, that degree of curiosity needs to be much higher. And in the more extreme sense in a situation that is truly unprecedented, that is to say, where the percentage of what is not, what you're not able to draw from previous experience in a direct way to inform the present to predict the future, that sense of curiosity needs to be very high.

Jorge 22:36

You're talking about assessing the degree of unprecedented-ness. I don't know if that's correct English, right? But how does one do that? It feels to me like there is a Dunning Kruger thing built into this in that, almost by definition, if the situation is unprecedented, you are not a good judge of what is going on, and the degree to which it is unprecedented. This person watches smoke coming out of the house and they are not a good judge about what's gonna happen next, right? And rather than turning the knob on their curiosity, what they do know is that there's some urgency in the situation. And in there being urgency, they resort to the things that have worked for them in the past: going up and locking the doors. Are there ways to foster curiosity under these conditions of uncertainty where you're not even a good judge of how much uncertainty there is?

Harry 23:38

I think there are probably some rules of thumb. And I'm making this up as I go. So I would say, in the example from the reading with the house, it's one thing to say, "Oh, I've seen a fire before, and if there's smoke, there's fire." It's another thing to say, "When was the last time my house was hit by lightning?" And if you say, "Oh, never," that's a pretty strong signal for you don't necessarily know what's coming, right? I have no experience with this as an event, versus I see a fire on my stove and I recognize that this has happened before. I've gotta snuff it out, not with water, right? I've gotta snuff it out either with something, I need to cover it with something that's not flammable, or I need to get a fire extinguisher or baking soda or something, right? Those are situations where I have some personal experience and some training in taking the observational facts and converting them to decisions and behavior. So I think there's a rule of thumb there, which is when you can say, "I've experienced this directly and I've experienced once or many times, and I am either informed or well-trained about how to respond to this." That is a low unprecedented circumstance. Versus, "Okay, I think I know what's going on." An assumption is an uncritically held belief. I have assumptions about it. If you ask yourself, "Do I really know what's going on here? Has this ever happened to me before?" When the answer is no, the natural, the most effective response is detach and get curious.

Jorge 25:25

I am gonna read that back to you because I think that there's something really important and valuable there. I'm hearing two things. One is being attuned... somehow like being attuned to your gut in that I would imagine that the first reaction there is, "Uh oh, that's not right." Lightning strike followed by black smoke is one of those, uh oh moments, right? So that's one thing, just being, being open to this kind of gut level reaction that maybe you can't quite comprehend at an intellectual level, but that, something is not right. And the other thing that I heard there is having the wherewithal to get your analytical mind to acknowledge that the causal sequence that you've just witnessed is not something that you have witnessed before, not in the same way. And to try to bring it home to folks, because I would expect that there's a lot of situations in business where this kind of thing happens, where your gut goes, "Oh, that can't be good," right? And then you immediately start looking for explanations in ways that you understand perhaps at the expense of what is actually in front of your eyes.

Harry 26:52

This so vividly reminds me of an experience I had driving on Highway 17. Robert Montoye, who's an executive at IBM, I think at research, was the lead chip designer at Hal Computer Systems. And I worked at Hal Computer Systems in Campbell, California. And we were driving on Highway 17 and we heard this big bang and saw what looked like an accident in front of us. But in the oncoming lanes, there's a cement divider, so that the three lanes on our side and the two lanes on the other, not likely there was gonna be anything bad that happened. But shortly after that big bang, a semi tire, a truck wheel, big, tall, bounced across the oncoming lanes, over the cement divider, bounced right in front of our car and then kept going, and then went off the road. And without missing a beat, Robert turned to me and said, "I've not encountered this before." And I was just like dumbstruck at both the experience of it and the presence of his reaction. I, probably haven't thought of that experience since 1992 when it happened.

Jorge 28:25

That's amazing. And I think that we might be giving listeners shivers talking about all these traffic accidents. But lets, try to bring it to a close at a practical place. In hearing you describe that story yeah, that was my initial reaction was to say, "Wow, that takes a lot of presence of mind to almost get into such a..." That would be a devastating accident as well. And having the presence of mind to formulate that question is something that I suspect is a mix of both kind of an innate character, but also it might be something that can be trained. And, I don't know if you have any, any recommendations for folks to maybe get... I think you talked about getting your ego out of the equation. And again, short of being in an actual life-threatening situation, what can folks do to gain the presence of mind. to inhabit that kind of space? Maybe, something that you got from your life altering experience at fifteen.

Harry 29:43

Practically speaking, the trick is to detach. That's the first trick. And I follow the instructions of one of my mentors who says, "If you want to detach, just quickly picture yourself as if you're looking at the top of your own head. Can you see the top of your own head?" that practice immediately removes you being associated from your own emotions. You can't look at the top of your own head with your imagination and be associated in your emotions at the same time, according to him. And I have found that to be true. And so when I need to pop out of a situation and see it from above, so to speak, that's the practice that I engage in. If you want to take that further, it's martial arts training of any sort. Aikido is what I trained in, and not well enough to do anything. Certainly the only person I'm gonna hurt is myself. And then, if I were to channel Jocko Willink or Leif Babin from the Extreme Ownership camp, they have an online course in how to detach. It's eighty bucks or something. It's like a practices for... I have not taken the course, I'm intending to because I'm fascinated with that kind of stuff. But, I think those are three practical things you can do.

Jorge 31:00

Those are great. I'm gonna, I'm gonna add a couple. But first, I'm gonna riff on what you said about seeing yourself from the top of your head. What immediately came to mind there is that folks who are perhaps a bit younger than you and I who grew up with first person shooter video games might be at an advantage here, because one of the moves you can do there is you can switch from the first person view to this behind the head view, right? So may, maybe, keep that in mind that you can do that. IRL, right? Like you, you can't like envision yourself, from the third person point of view. The one thing that I will suggest there is establishing a meditation practice. There are apps that can help you. I use and recommend the Waking Up app, but there are others,

Harry 31:50

Me too, I use Waking Up.

Jorge 31:52

I do twenty minutes every morning. It's the first thing I do every day before I start my day. And part of the idea there, there's nothing mystical or "spiritual" about it. What it really is is an exercise in observing the workings of the mind, Like we're so caught up, particularly those of us who work in the let's call them like the knowledge professions, we tend to live so much in our head and we have this ongoing chatter. And I find meditation useful as a way to step back from that and remind myself even the word "myself" is questionable in this context, right? but just take a step back and experience consciousness at a baseline level. I can't say that I can do this effectively. It's a practice, right? Like it's called practice for a reason. But I have found that useful, and, just very specifically ways in which I found it useful. I used to be very reactive when something went wrong. And I fortunately haven't had anything as traumatic as the experience as you described happen to me, but I have had, obviously accidents, I've had arguments with my spouse, or getting upset at my kids or whatever, right? And the meditation practice has helped me become more aware of what's happening with my system. I'll also say this, I recorded a conversation in my other podcast, in The Informed Life with my friend Hans Krueger, who has been studying this phenomenon for a long time, particularly from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. And that episode of the show has pointers to ways of doing this as well. So my point is I find meditation useful. There are lots of practices in that space that I think can help with this as well.

Harry 34:06

Yeah, I love the Waking Up app. I'm terrible from the point of view of doing it every day, but I do find the practice helps reinforce that sense of my ability to look at things from the outside.

Jorge 34:20

Harry, this has been awesome. Catching up with you is always fun, and especially on this special date for you. Do you have a name for it?

Harry 34:28

I just call it Survival Day. Yeah.

Jorge 34:32

Well, happy Survival Day to you, my friend.

Harry 34:34

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Narrator 34:41

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.