Category Philosophy

The very wide field of philosophy

Leadership

Geir Isene 14 Comments

It’s so prevalent that it is taken for granted – the need for management, for leadership.

I believe the reason why people would need a boss… is because they had a boss. And having a boss dulls your ability to think for yourself, your initiative takes a hit and your creativity gets blunted. Management normally inspires indecision and dependence on management – simply because everyone wants to be valuable. A manager wants to be valuable as a manager. Hence he manages. And through that managing, he directs and motivates. And the people underneath him directs less and self-motivate less.

A few days ago I attended a meeting where the boss insisted that “everyone needs a boss“. I disagreed of course, leading to a moment of confusion. I rocked a fixed idea. Such “obvious” foundations are seldom challenged and often simply accepted without any questioning.

Your skills increase with practice, and your skills decrease with lack of practice. Having a boss that tells you what to do decreases your decision skills. Having a boss that motivates you decreases your self-motivation skills. And that is on a good day. It becomes even worse if you have a bad boss.

management

But I would maintain that no boss is better than a good boss. Which is why my goal as a father is that when my children reach the age of 18, they would never again need a boss.

The silver bullet

Geir Isene 7 Comments

It never ceases to amaze how simple it is to get me up from a down. I may trick myself to think that there are other methods that will get my zest back if I lost it. Sometimes I think I have to regain something lost, to do more interesting stuff, listen more to music or take a walk, start painting or something entirely different. But while all of these are good things to do, they are always trumped by this one thing: Get shit done.

If I feel down on energy or just plain old sad, all I need to do is start getting things done and woosh… the mood’s back up.

The funny thing is that whenever I do feel down, it’s so damn easy to start think there are other ways. When I then get up and start doing stuff and I regain my spirit of play, I get reminded that this truly is the silver bullet that slays the werewolf. Get shit done.

And the shittier the better. Doing the stuff that nags me the most has the most potential to get me laughing when done. Procrastinating by doing less shitty things may get me a bit up. But it never gets me sufficiently up. Facing the biggest pains of bad conscience or incessant nagging, and doing those actions are what really counts. This is the key to get more done in life.

Just a note to self, this is.

keep-calm-and-get-shit-done-29

Why the complexity?

Geir Isene 20 Comments

First, the Marshmallow Challenge:

Then one could wonder:

Why do people get in to all kinds of unnecessary bureaucracy and complexity?

Why not simply this?

GSD-LRN

Because of fear of failure.

Why?

Because they can’t handle failure well.

Why?

Because lack of training in handling failures.

Why?

Because of early lack of failures.

Why?

Because of early rap for failures made.

Why?

Because parent’s fear of failure.

And so it goes.

But how to break this vicious cycle of inherited fear of failure?

You help remove the person’s fear of failure by helping him fail more. And then you coach him to like his failures because he understands that there is great potential in there for learning.

Today’s motto: “Challenge. Fail fast, fail often. Learn.”

Perception of time

Geir Isene 52 Comments

When you are young, a year seems like an eternity. As you get older, the years passes almost without notice. Except when something dramatic happens – like a near death car accident. Then time crawls and you feel like Neo in The Matrix.

The perception of time depends on the rate of change and your proximity to the change. If change happens fast in Syria, it will hardly impact your perception of time. If the change happens to your body, like in that car accident, your perception of time is greatly affected.

You can feel time slowing down by getting in gear and doing a lot. Create lots of results, and you will get more out of life. But you can do even better.

You can effectively “slow down” time by facilitate change within yourself. If you allow your viewpoints to change and develop rapidly, you will get back the notion that a year feels like an eternity.

neo

A liability of perfection is that trifles become important

Geir Isene 15 Comments

While this is obvious when competing at a world class level, it is perhaps not so obvious in daily life.

When one is competing at the top in a sport, one is nearing perfection. Polishing of details will make the difference between a gold medal and a botched run. The details, even trifles, rise in importance.

And so it is with every life lived. If one gets to a point of polishing a comfortable life to perfection, trifles starts gaining importance. A detail out of place can become upsetting. Even the smallest setbacks can cause great upsets. And that is when you should wreck havoc to the status quo; Quit your job, move to another country, get horse, or a divorce, sail around the world, get involved in serious charity work, help people in the slums, do something crazy to make life less nitpicky. Because perfection has a few liabilities. And this is one of them.

details

What describes a successful person?

Geir Isene 109 Comments

What are the qualities needed to be successful?

  1. What qualities are absolutely mandatory for success in any given field?
  2. What qualities are usually needed or would normally contribute to success?

I’d like your input on these two questions. I hope for a good brainstorming 🙂

Geir_Tirill

What describes a person?

Geir Isene 32 Comments

Resilience, happy, cooking, meek, sad, archery, personality, love, decision, feel, character, intelligence. Words that describe how a person is, what a person can do, or what characteristics, abilities or skills a person has.

I’m writing an article classifying various human descriptors. I’d like to ask you for help to extend the above list – not by furnishing mere synonyms, but by actually extending the list.

Thanks 🙂

What I want, I don’t have. What I have, I don’t want.

Geir Isene 195 Comments

I suspect the reason people are longing for calmness, mindfulness, Nirvana, Paradise or inner peace is that they don’t have just that. I know I wanted this. And I know that as I got more and more inner peace and harmony, I started to wish for more adventure.

inner-peace

Like the athlete who works so hard to win a race. Sweat pouring, muscles aching. She so want to get to the finish line, and most of all get that gold medal and reap the award for those thousands of hours of training. And then she does. Excitement and glory and that total satisfaction turns into a harmony and bliss that is hard to fathom. But not for long. Staying in the bliss gets boring. Working toward it is the real deal. That is the drive, the purpose.

There is no day without the night, no pleasure without pain and no high without the low. A valley is marked by surrounding mountains. And winning is appreciated when it occurs occasionally.

I strongly suspect L. Ron Hubbard was right when he said that the optimum situation and emotional level is at games.

night-day

Is the universe infinite?

Geir Isene 342 Comments

I have been returning to this question lately – and I see three possible answers:

  1. The universe is finite
  2. The universe is infinite
  3. The universe is “infinitely finite”

hubble

Option 1 introduces an “edge problem” where the particles at the end of the universe will have interacting forces on only one side. If this option is true, the universe started out as point-like Big Bang, satisfying the requirements for a Black Hole.

If Option 2 is true, the universe has always been infinite since nothing can go from finite to infinite (or vice versa). It started out as infinitely large and very dense at the Big Bang, satisfying the requirements for a Black Hole at all areas of space.

Option 3 would be similar to moving on Earth’s surface – if you move straight in one direction, you eventually circle the Earth and end up where you started. The universe could be a 3 dimensional space residing in a higher dimensional space – if you travel in one direction, you would never reach an edge. Instead you can end up back where you started (given that the higher dimensional space is a uniform “sphere”). The universe could have started out as a small 4D+ space.

I can’t for the moment see other options. Please pitch in with your own views.

One question that often pop up with an infinite universe is this: “If the universe is infinite, would everything that can happen be bound to happen – and an infinitely amount of times?”. The usual answer when you Google this is “Yes.” The answer is the same for “If you throw a dice an infinite number of times, must you eventually roll a six? Must you in fact roll an infinite number of sixes?”

While it may be intuitively correct to answer “yes” to these questions, the answer is in fact wrong. Here’s why:

Consider the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, …

There are infinitely many of them … so 2 must show up more than once, right? Manifestly wrong.

But say we are talking about states of matter in a finite region. This would be modeled by using finitely many numbers, 1, 2, 3, say, and making an infinite list.

1, 2, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, …

You say 2 must appear again … but it doesn’t. If you have finitely many states and infinitely many trials, all you can say for sure is that at least one state must reappear infinitely many times. But any particular state, such as the state that defines “you” or a pink elephant or a galaxy; might appear zero, one, 47, or infinitely many times.

It’s amazing how many otherwise smart people are fooled into thinking that “in an infinite universe, everything must happen.” This is manifestly false.

So even in an infinite universe, a chance of something specific happening is undecided. This is related to the equation

\frac{\infty}{\infty}

which is mathematically undecided.

The question of whether the universe is finite, infinite or something else poses some interesting questions. And perhaps some interesting answers may arise.