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?

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.

Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!

The difference between achievement and success

What is achievement?

Achievement is where you push your envelope of potential, your boundary of potential, your horizon of potential, beyond what you thought you were capable of. However, it’s not just about putting in more effort — more hours worked or units processed. What counts more is how we have recognised problems, designed a specification for a solution, identified a solution that fits, and proceeded to implement it. A hole in the ground is a problem, we need to know the shape and size of the hole (the specification) and what to fill that hole in with (the solution), and then actually fill it in (the implementation).

In that case, what is success?

Success is where you are rewarded for promoting the transactional value of the product of your achievement to the market. A product of an achievement that reaches one person and offers value that benefits them is rewarded. The same product from the same achievement reaching a hundred people and offering value that benefits those, is also rewarded. However, each of those hundred people in turn might also be connected to another hundred, and each of those to another hundred, and so on. Consequently, the transactional response for the value you offer becomes your scale-free reward of network fitness. In other words, it comes back to you multiplied — and that’s how we do that.

People are our product

I can see why social media is so compelling for most. We have a kind of herd instinct — well, it’s certainly not a true herd instinct in the sense of cattle, but we are fairly gregarious, us humans. It’s almost like our instinct to return to a group for security is being triggered all the time. It rewards us in the same way each time we are exposed to it, and when we aren’t we are reminded of the feeling. We have a kind of itch inside that prompts us, whenever there isn’t any overtly engaging conscious stimulation, to turn around and catch up with what the herd is doing. In past times, this may have involved going down the pub or similar venue. Going to a church or something like that. Going to the beach or a park or somewhere that affords “promenading”. The phone or tablet we carry is a constantly alluring gateway to get back to the crowd again for our regular hit of validation.

Even in shopping centres and tube stations, people standing on the right on the up escalator will simply look at the people standing on the right riding the down escalator, and vice versa. We like to look at each other, be with each other and discern differences in each other. We get a lot of pleasure from just looking at another human being — it’s obviously of value. There are even entire magazines devoted to looking at people. And television programmes. And films in the cinema. We value other people, their presence and existence makes us feel good.

In fact, that is precisely the point we should be taking to heart and embodying as the core of our businesses and products and endeavours — that people are effectively the product. People are our product. All of us. We are our product. We make stuff, for other people. We do stuff, for other people. We fix stuff and say stuff and squeeze stuff and show stuff — all for other people. People are who we connect to in our social networks, people are our societies. Our product is effectively nothing but people.

We offer value to each other — or at least, we should if we want to be successful, and we can measure our success by the connections we are rewarded with, and how influential we become within our networks. Maybe in addition there’s some kind of transactional reward involved, featuring temporally decoupled representational stored effort tokens, or maybe not. But that isn’t the main point. The value we gain is that of connectivity and agency within the network. If we offer value we may be rewarded with connectivity that affords network  fitness. One person connects to us, if they like what we offer, good, but if they don't they can pass the connection on to another and if they pass the connection on and so on, this builds our influence and allows our reach to extend. One person passing the good word on to another is how reputations are built, and the reputation stays or persists much longer than any set of connections in your network. We’re not really building networks, then. We’re really building reputations, and the way that we do this is by using the network as a substrate upon which our reputation grows.

What is a network? Scale-free networks

Previously I mentioned Preferential Attachment (the “rich get richer” phenomenon of some networks) which explains why popular nodes in a network become highly connected, and are highly connected because they are popular, and are popular because they are highly connected, etc. We see this on the Internet as things either go viral or things basically don’t move at all, plummeting to obscurity and beyond! It happens with people, some of us are highly connected, some are effectively islands, and most have just the average amount of connections. However, we may be connected to highly connected people on social networks, such as the Fry, the GaGa, the Kutcher types. Those superstars tweet it all and get retweeted by so many followers to their followers in turn, and the cycle is thus reinforced.

However, we could be being fooled here, as the size of the connected population is huge. Our intuition is that one follower may be fairly easy to gain, two followers must be twice that much work, ten followers, ten times that time and effort. A hundred thousand followers must take more than a lifetime to achieve!

How old are you? More than likely somewhere in the range of 20s to 70s, with a few outliers outside of this range. It’s rare to encounter someone older than 100, it is predicted that the first 150 year old person has already been born. Maybe. Maybe in the distant past a person did reach 150 but nobody wrote it down. Maybe H5N1 will mutate into human to human transmissible form soon and wipe out two thirds of the worlds overpopulation. Who knows? The point is, we’re used to a certain range of ages, and to find someone over a century is unusual. We never encounter a person over a thousand years old. Or a hundred thousand years old. We never encounter a person taller than the tallest building. We never encounter a person several thousand times more intelligent than average. What about strength? What about shouting loudest? What about jumping highest?

These parameters are kind of within “human scale”. We’re used to thinking about a kind of tangible scale, expecting measurements to fall within certain familiar boundaries, and applying a linearity to these dimensions. A ten year old took ten years to get there, a thirty year old, three times that much! I dug a hole 1 metre deep in a day, in ten days it was 10 metres deep. And so on.

However, in some networks, we experience an alternative dimensionality of Scale-Free networks. These are networks in which certain dimensions might have a mean of a certain value but it’s easy to find a few instances of crazy escalation up into the sky. That’d be like walking around and seeing most people about the age of a human, but now and then meeting someone that was around in the Cretaceous era. This is a scale-invariant situation — there’s no human scale to it any more. The results might be said to follow a power law distribution or Pareto distribution. Superstars getting insane amounts of connections in social networking while the rest of us will never get beyond a few thousand (or a few, in many cases). The spread of the World Wide Web and the quantity of websites on it. The relative growth of wealth of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, compared to the growth in earning power of all those in the same class as those people at school.

Most people work in a job and get paid. The job requires a certain amount of work as the input, and in a fair situation, it pays somewhat under what you’re worth as a reward. Therefore we’re used to thinking about income in a way that has a linear relationship. I do a certain amount of work in a week, I get paid a certain amount of money in a week. Sounds fair? That’s how it is. So how is it we have examples of super-rich billionaires? Do they do vastly more work than you and I? I’ve only got 24 hours in a day, and so have they, so how do they get a hundred thousand times more work done than I can? It’s not fair. Why can’t we go to our boss and ask for a pay rise, of a hundred thousand times what we’re getting now? Sounds fair? Sounds fair to me.

How do new ideas happen?

Have you ever had a new idea? Happens all the time? Used to happen more? Been happening more lately? What do you do with new ideas? Do you remember them? Forget them? Do you think you’ll remember them and then end up forgetting them? Do you write them down in a notepad or something like that, or on your phone or tablet?

Idea management is a complex process, and it doesn’t come easily. With a little discipline and attention the ideas can be captured during the brief period that they’re resting on your shoulder, before they fly off again to be forgotten forever.

But what about the nature and mechanism of innovation itself? How does innovation occur in the first place? The structure of innovation is rarely neat and tidy, and rarely in whole units of what one might consider to be an innovation. Anything new that has been thought of has almost certainly not been thought of in one entire chunk of innovating. Starting from a clean slate and ending up with a fully formed idea ready to implement. Oh no, not like that. Maybe in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t happen like that in reality anyway.

In most cases, a person coming up with what others might classify as an innovation have been exposed to the problem space for some time. Working in the world of that particular problem. Struggling with defining what the problem is, how big it is, what it is, what it isn’t, what it should be or could be or must be. The problem’s territory or world is what I might term the problem space, in which the innovator resides, often for some time, and the solution is the eventual target. In other words, things rarely happen overnight. They might seem like it from the outside, but to the person innovating, they’ve probably been within the problem space for years, even before they realised that there’s even a problem to solve.

The other interesting structural characteristic of innovation is that, again, it doesn’t occur as a whole unit, it almost always consists of mostly stuff that you already knew, or stuff you already have, or stuff that is already in place. The moment of inspiration isn’t to have the entire idea from scratch, the moment of inspiration is more usually to suddenly realise that what you already have, already know and already did can fit together in a way that you simply hadn’t seen before. A new arrangement. An arrangement that allows an advantage or solves a problem or enables something further to happen. You look around, there’s nothing magically novel that wasn’t there a minute ago, except yes there is - a new configuration, a new way of putting it together, a new way of utilising or processing or perceiving it all. You had what was necessary all along.

In fact, it’s even more surprising than that. Not only did the innovation spend a long while cooking in the problem space before it surfaces, and not only did the innovation consist of a new way of looking at what you already have, but in most cases, the solution that’s staring you in the face isn’t even a new one. Chances are, you’ve even had this idea before. Several times over, in fact. You had it, forgot it, later you had it again under a new configuration, forgot it again, and so on. Finally, it persists and at the moment of insight you suddenly see it for the value it really offers. (This time you write it down). That’s insight. It’s called insight because it points in. A sight that points inward. Inward at what you already know, already have and already do. The realisation of a sudden clarity in sight. Yet, you had it all along!

Ian Tindale’s ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

This is the youtube promo for my book ‘Success in Seven Parts’ on Amazon. ASIN: B00LJJCLIA

Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon UK
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon ’Straya
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon India
Success in Seven Parts by Ian Tindale at Amazon US

…and the other Amazons too.

What do you read Kindle books on? I myself don’t own a Kindle. I read Kindle books on the official Kindle app on my iPad, on my Android tablet and phone, and when I had a Nokia 920 for a while, the Windows Phone Kindle app. Does anyone read Kindle books on their Mac or Pc? Laptop? Desktop? It’d be interesting to know if anyone does. I merely assume all Kindle consumption occurs on tablets, phones or actual Kindles, but all mobile devices. Post a reply if you do it on a laptop or desktop, let me know.

Success In Seven Parts — the blog

This is the launch post of the “Success In Seven Parts” blog. It accompanies my “Success In Seven Parts” series of motivational speaking talks. Are you interested in the process of achievement? The “Success In Seven Parts” pilot is up on youtube now: