You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Looking for the magic that’ll rescue you from work

There’s no magic that’ll save you from having to do the work in life. There isn’t some significant alternative state to your life in which, once you enter it, you’re relieved of all the hard work and judgement of success. There’s no lottery win that’ll change everything. Even if you did win the lottery, you’d have learned nothing — it‘s not repeatable, and you can’t just do it again when you need to. What you need is the learning of repeatable or reproducible actions or processes. Otherwise it’s not you doing it — any success gained is not your success. Therefore, in order to achieve success, be prepared for a proportional amount of actual effort to put in. It’s not going to happen with no effort or work, but our response to the word “work” can vary according to what we mean by work.

In our minds, are we equating “work” to someone digging a ditch, laying railway tracks, banging metal in a workshop? Does a graphic designer do any work — you don’t hear any banging sounds, so is there any work happening? Does a photographer work — I’m remembering of course the days when there was such a thing as a professional photographer and their phone used to ring — people wondered, where’s the work in just pressing the shutter? Does a salesperson do any work — at least some days in a month, yes they probably do — their work is persuasion. Does marketing count as work? Some of it certainly does — a lot of their work is even a mystery to themselves, as you’ll discover in the world of social media marketing, but a lot of it is promotion, and if that work isn’t done, the product isn’t promoted.

There’s also no magic idea that is likely to occur to you that will change the world and make your fortune just by itself. There’s plenty of good ideas, but absolutely none that are self-propelled so that just simply having the idea is all that is required to happen. No good idea is so good that you can then sit back and reap the rewards without any further effort. All ideas require development and implementation, but further, they require promotion and persuasion, and those last two are usually much more work than the first two.

Unfortunately, a mediocre idea that has been thoroughly promoted to a critical mass of people, persuading them  that it is perhaps a better idea than it really is — stands every chance of succeeding. Whereas, an excellent idea that has not been promoted very much — only a few people around you even know it exists and most of them don’t understand the benefits properly — stands every chance of staying exactly where it is. This indicates the potency of promotion and persuasion and that they are stronger forces than a good idea alone. It might even be the case that with skilful and industrious promoting and persuading, you don’t even need an idea at all, just a process of work that can be exercised.

Varied providence of nations adjusts effects of agency upon success

Before I go further with this article, seeing as you’ve got past the title, I’d better define what I mean by “agency”. There are among other definitions, philosophical definitions of agency and sociological definitions of agency, but they both converge in the way that I would find useful for this conversation. They both imply the ability to take action, whereby the decision to take action and the direction or form in which this action is to take, is decided within the person we are referring to. The competing force is that of “structure”, and the structure within which the person operates acts among other things as a set of constraints or limitations, or even affords opportunities, most usually both.

For example, a school might have a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with another school, and this places limitations on the exercising of free will on the students (and teachers). If there are innate needs to rebel or act demonstratively the more constrained students might yet still exercise those needs, but they may be less practiced at them and therefore do it too well and too much. At a workplace, there might also be a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with other places to work. This, of course, places limitations on the happiness and sanity of the workers, who should not stand for this watered-down form of slavery, and should instead leave and find nicer jobs, leaving behind those out-of-date slave drivers to struggle by themselves. Or you might be employed in a nice place with a nice management, although hardly anyone actually is.

But what about whole countries or nations? They too have quite different structures, and it is interesting to see how the differences in nation state structures manifest in real differences in agency within the populace. Different countries have a different amount of “supplied” assistance or governance or rules that guide or constrain a person’s actions and behaviour. This could be seen to give rise to differences in agency as perceived by the nationals of various countries. Some nations try and place quite defined and delineated restrictions on behaviour and expression, and also on the level of detail of support, help or security. Variously, this could have an influence upon the collectiveness or individuality of the people of that nation.

In some countries, if you don’t have a job or income, you’re broke. In other countries, you might not be, you might have a layer of assistance. To give a tangible example, in some countries, there’s very clear definitions of where the road stops and the pavement begins, in other countries, there isn’t — the road just sort of “becomes” the pavement in a rough and ragged unfinished fashion. Does this mean that road safety is less? Perhaps not really, perhaps the responsibility of provision of safely acting shifts from the country or county into the individual. Some countries have a structure that is provident, which might substitute for action within the individual. Other countries simply don’t, which causes the individual to have to take action. However, the heroic success stories there that we would hear about can tend to mask the hidden failures that, if provided with help or support, could have demonstrated a difference. Is the structure that we find ourselves in more of an inadvertent ingredient in success than we usually consider?

Conversations come in different flavours

People start and engage in conversation on the Internet, just as they also  do in real life. Different conversations have different reasons, of course, but they also have different styles. These flavours or methods of going in the desired direction can affect the content of the conversation by biasing it. The conversation will progress using positive or negative, constructive or destructive expression. If the reason for the conversation is predominantly an exercise in purely the style of the conversation, it would be fair to say that it will feature   no actual productive outcome at the destination. There’s no end product — because in those cases that simply isn’t the reason to have the conversation.

I would suggest developing an alertness for ‘where this conversation is going’ both online and in real life, in terms of not only the outcome or reason for the communication, but also for the style. It might be helpful to remove yourself from the situations in which a certain kind of communication is evidently of a destructive and negative style, as you’re sure to have more productive things to be doing at that particular time.

If you have to be present, you don’t have to participate. If you have to participate, try and steer or shift the focus around to make the purpose of the time spent more positive and generative if you can. Perhaps you could draw to the attention of the other participants that what’s going on is unconstructive and unhelpful — you’ll have to play that by ear. Online, it is easy to get swept into posts on forums that degenerate into absurd displays of ego protection in the guise of expertise, or even plain immature negativity. In real life, you’ll also notice the differences in styles of meetings, gatherings, in business and in more relaxed scenarios. Spot those unconstructive style differences early, and if you can, abandon the endeavour — there’s no requirement to be part of such a waste of time and energy.

Have more sex and get more money

Have I got your attention? Good. Getting other people’s attention is what propels most of the Internet. Actually, all of the Internet. There’d be nothing on the Internet at all otherwise. And elsewhere in the real world there’d be no advertising; no books written; no films made; no music recorded; no photographs taken; no television programmes; no news journalism; no paintings; no labour strikes and no terrorism. I want your attention because, well, not just the warm and cosy feeling of gratification and validation, which is the most direct immediate result, but also via a more circuitous route of increasing the probability of being able to offer something of value to you, and thus increasing the risk of being rewarded appropriately in the long run.

One of the interesting things about the unintuitive nature of our networking relationships is not only that the quantity of connections follows a scale-free power-law progression, but also that the type of relationships matter somewhat too. In real life, our interpersonal networking tends to take two dominant directions — business or friendship relationships. Business relationships are often about provider / client differentials. Sometimes they’re about equal relationships, in which one side provides something that the other side is lacking in, and vice-versa — basically, acting as contra-operating provider / client relationships. Friendship relationships are complicated. There are several initial condition situations, and several strategy choices to run the relationship by.

The initial conditions may begin in the playground as “best friends” learning that people offer value and we can consume that value — but within a fairly innocent and basic notion of transactional value. As we grow up, we experience romance, which modifies our idea of value. Into adulthood, some get the hang of how those relationships can impact our social effect. We experience the extrinsic value of having a partner, that the relationship itself can have an effect on your network fitness. Hence, some people even collect relationships. Others may observe other’s relationships and hanker after similar situations without easily achieving anywhere near as many followers.

Perhaps more traction to escalate ones network fitness is gained through personal relationships than what we term as business relationships. This is not to say that one should attempt to have sex with as many partners as possible in order to widen one’s connections. One only has to look at cultures which consider baby mothers and absent fathers to be the norm. Those involved in such highly connected networks are not necessarily enjoying a high powered state of business success. It’s often quite the contrary, with more mouths to feed, limitations placed upon times and places, and consequently not accessing a rich range of rational choices for progress — like dragging an anchor.

Very often a partner is supportive and will believe in you when times are bleak. It’s tempting to think that if one partner in a relationship supplies such a lot of help, then why not simply increase the amount of relationships? However, the stability of one single relationship for a longer term may prove more valuable than the immediate benefits of a highly varied relationship scene, if for no other reason than long-term reputation. But this shouldn’t prevent being promiscuous in other associations that are not romantic. Perhaps the best way forward in business is having learned a lot about the value of interpersonal relationships, to go full circle and return to being a bit more like we were in the playground again, with networks of multiple “best friends” innocently evaluated by reputation, loyalty, and support.

What shape is your network? You’re wrong

What shape is your network? Do networks have shapes? People seem to think so. They’re referred to as “topologies” and you see the same sort of mentality in organisational charts. Similarly, your organisation’s org chart is lying to you. A blatant lie. It draws a picture — a graph of arrows and nodes, or vertices and edges — people believe it, yet it’s wrong. The topology of most organisations is a top-down hierarchy, in which the power is centred at the top and commands are passed down through levels of control and authority lower and lower reaching the workers at the bottom. On the “factory floor” or the “sales force” or “front line”. Whichever analogy describes best the people who spend all their time doing the applied work and none of their time commanding (or “managing”) subordinates. This is still a dominant topology for many organisations other than the very young startups, which pretend to be flat and equal, and the very trendy, which pretend to be informally mixed up and organically interconnected and equal, man. However, if you draw out the org chart of any organisation, it is a deceptive lie. Your org chart is lying to you.

Who is connected to who? The traditional and expected way of viewing this is by authority. Who can issue commands to who, who can sack or promote who, who pays who. Another way of viewing the situation is by who influences who, and viewed this way the connection graph looks totally different. Some people in an organisation are not influential at all. Even at the top. There are people at the top of an organisation that few even recognise as working there, most people don’t attach their name to their face, and what function they perform is a mystery. If they have any influence at all, it’s a generally vague ‘fear’ experienced from a distance instilled by association with certain offices that most people don’t go near. Apart from that quiet background-level impression, they have no specific influence at all. You can almost ignore those people. Without them, life would not be detectably different. However, your organisation’s traditional-style org chart is simply a map of fear — that’s all it is.

Then you have people at the top who everybody knows — their name, their aim, their personality — and although any interaction with them is definitely one-sided (they own the company, or can sack you, or promote you) it is at least reassuringly predictable and not such a mystery. You kind of know where you stand with those people, you know enough about them to transact usefully. They’ve publicised or made known all of the necessary information about themselves over the course of time as a social investment. However, it may often prove to be that the most influential people in an organisation, and therefore, where the most dynamic transactional value activity in the network takes place, is not at the top. It’s elsewhere, and could be anywhere — it doesn’t relate to your accepted org chart at all. We’re beginning to glimpse a different network graph altogether.

There are popular nodes in a network, and these become even more popular because they offer the richest connections to the most other nodes in one easy action. The people that everyone knows, the gossips through who all traffic travels. The people who act as interfaces between all the departmental networks in the organisational environment. Not just the hubs within the departments, but the circuses that connect the different departments and even the outside world.

Who sees everybody in the organisation? Who interacts with everybody? Not just a casual “hello” and “goodbye” but a useful transaction offering value, that bridges domains. Who are the circuses? These are often also the influencers. If they get a new type of phone, or wear a new fashion item, or use a new app, ride a new type of bike, or read a new book, or shop online through a certain site, or have their hair in a certain way, soon a few more people align themselves with these choices. Many people within and connected to the organisation gain value from these people who influence, and they afford credibility and reputation to these influential highly connected circuses. However, you won’t see any of that on an org chart. Essentially, if you’re an owner or founder or some other chief of an organisation and you think you’re the boss because you’re in the top area of your org chart, there’s a fair chance you’re wrong. Your  org chart is actually a map of fear, and it’s been lying to you all along.

Your morsels of value

What do I mean by network value? In a network, the popular nodes become even more popular, according to a “rich get richer” fashion known as “Preferential Attachment”. Previously I have used the example of the London Underground, although that is not a particularly good example in terms of dynamics, because the popular stations are interchanges. There is very little occasion for a new interchange to suddenly pop up at a station that hitherto was not an interchange. New stations don’t materialise that often, so the whole analogy proves a bit slow to visualise in action.

The network value of a vertex in a network, which is rewarded by affordability of opportunity to increase connections in a scale-free manner, is itself a complex parameter. What do I mean by value? Up to now, we’ve just been assuming we mean that we offer something, perhaps something unique or perhaps something appreciated or liked or funny or thoughtful or provoking or some other appealing lure. If a node in a network produces something no other node does, and if as coincidence would have it, other nodes in a network actually appreciate that product, then that’s what we’ve been imagining what I mean by “value” within a network. But this is quite subjective.

Lots of nodes, sorry, people, produce and present to the network more or less nothing. When they do, it might be of low importance such as mentioning that their cat rolled over. Or it might be something derived that they are simply passing on, like a retweet or a pasted-in motivational quote. Motivational quotes are a freely utilised currency. As far as I’m aware, Henry Ford, Bob Marley and Thomas Edison don’t actually have twitter or facebook accounts, what with the inconvenience of being dead and all that. Yet much of what they ever said in their lives is passed around freely. Not only as a way of cheering people up (or ‘motivating’ them), but packaging it as a kind of “you got that good feeling from me” emotional transaction.

As I say, a node that produces is not always offering value to the network. In a work environment, if someone farts, the value of their unique production is generally not appreciated or liked, nor does it give everyone else a good feeling. So you see, it’s subjective. What we consider value is often measured and quantified in terms of a qualitative effect on us. The more happy it makes us, the more value we assign to that direct contact on the network that packaged their output into tiny little morsels, nibble after nibble. We afford network fitness to them as a reward. But only if we calculate that they offer value to us, and this is purely in terms of how good it makes us feel at the time. It’s all very much instant gratification, there’s almost nothing long-term about this, and it doesn’t correlate with any true usefulness of the information, just how sweet it tastes to us.