Author Archives: David Truss

Doors of perception

We don’t see the world exactly as it is. We see the world through the spectrum of white light, and our eyes fill in the blank spot in our vision that is created by our optic nerve. Other animals can see in the ultraviolet spectrum. We can’t sense an earthquake tremor as quickly as birds. We can’t smell as well as our dogs, we can’t see in the dark as well as our cats. We appreciate different shades of colours that some animals can’t see. In fact, our culture and upbringing affects our appreciation of colours and our ability to distinguish colours from one another.

All this to say that we don’t see the world as it really is. Our senses are so powerful, yet they limit us. And that’s before our biases even creep in. Politics, religion, science, mind altering drugs, diet, confidence, insecurities, mood… so many things alter the way we see the world.

We don’t see the world as it is. We are quite literally delusional. Our perception of the world is one-of-a-kind, uniquely different than everyone else’s. This is useful to remember when we can’t come to a mutual understanding. When we disagree on a perspective, it isn’t just that we don’t see eye to eye, it’s also that we are seeing from different eyes.

Understanding this, we need to be more patient with each other. More open to different views. More appreciative about where others are coming from. Our perception of the world is different than others, and always will be… no matter how wide open we think our perceptual doors are.

Beginner eyes

Sometimes it’s hard to teach something when you are really knowledgeable about it. You don’t have the vantage point of a beginner, you can’t see the problem through their eyes. It becomes easy to presume they have knowledge that they don’t.

I shared this on Twitter and Facebook last week:

I was today years old when I realized… No, actually I still don’t have a clue what this sign is trying to say⁉️ 🤣

People with obvious knowledge of the area started to clarify whet it means for me. Very kind of them, but they missed the point.

I was driving with my wife to catch a ferry at Horseshoe Bay. This sign is on the way. To get to the ferry terminal the best thing you can do is stay on the highway. Any tourist or foreigner to this area would not think this is the case, seeing this sign. They would blow by this confusing sign at 80-100km an hour and wonder if they were missing a turnoff. No matter how helpful clarification may be, without prior knowledge this is a ridiculously confusing street sign.

This is a good example that demonstrates how when you know a lot about a complicated topic, it’s often hard to explain something to someone who knows very little about it. Assumptions of prior knowledge are easy to make. Eyes glaze over. Attention shifts away. Dialogue becomes monologue. Nothing is learned.

Asking clarifying questions helps… and that goes for both people. The beginner can ask what something means, or how something relates. The expert can ‘quiz’ the beginner. But I think the responsibility lies more on the expert to understand what is an appropriate level of explanation. And to do this well, an expert needs to appreciate the topic through a beginner’s eyes.

He who knows not…

I’ve seen this quote attributed as both a Persian and Chines proverb, and honestly don’t know its origins:

He who knows not, 
and knows not that he knows not,
is a fool; shun him.

He who knows not,
and knows that he knows not, 
is a student; Teach him.

He who knows,
and knows not that he knows,
is asleep; Wake him.

He who knows,
and knows that he knows,
is Wise; Follow him.

I wonder how many people are fools but think they are either students or wise? This seems to be a growing number. What’s interesting is how loud this group is:

Those that are asleep, they don’t know they have something valuable to share. Those that are students know that they have so much to learn before they share. Those that are wise know how futile it is to try to change a fool’s mind. That leaves the fools to profess what they ‘know’…

This is a paradox of the fool: the less they know the more they think they need to share what they know. And they have ways to get an audience.

The thing I most love about technology is the idea that we can find a community to connect to beyond our own geography. This is also a mechanism where fools can find other fools that believe the same bullshit they believe in. They find places to reinforce their stupidity and proselytize their ignorance. It has become easy to share bad ideas, to build an audience when the ideas shared are not deserving of that audience. We don’t shun the fools, we give them (digital) podiums, and in many cases their audiences are growing.

Today it seems that bad ideas spread easier than good ones. It’s easier for misinformation to go viral, and the boring truth does not spread. Worse yet, some of the bad ideas are not spread by fools, but by the hunt for clicks and advertising dollars. Clicks trump content, and stupidity prevails.

He who knows not, and knows not that he know not shares the most. And he who knows not, and knows not that he know not is more likely to believe the others who know not and know not they they know not… And we all get a bit more exposed to the stupidity. I think one of the most important skills of the future will be BS detection, because in the coming years, I think there will be a lot more of it dig through.

Pack your shovels.

If it’s important

I love this quote, “If it’s important, you’ll find  a way.  If not,  you’ll find an excuse.”

It’s similar to this Derek Sivers quote I recently shared,

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

Eight years ago I created an image for a presentation I was doing:

Here is the blog post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog about the slide and the presentation. The concept is simple: If something is important to you, you will find your way and if it’s not important enough, you’ll find reasons not to change. The greater the challenge to change, the more important it needs to be to find your way rather than finding an excuse.

A couple days later, I added two more images and shared them in a post: Leading Change – 3 Images

I think I used these three images in every presentation I did for the next few years. I wasn’t thinking about forced changes like the pandemic created, I was thinking about changes we want to create. I was thinking about the potential we envision, and how we fight the systems and habits that make excuses easier than change.

It’s easy to be a cheerleader for change. It’s much harder to spend the time removing barriers and working with the resistors of change to make it as important to them as it is to the rest of your team.

It can’t just be important to you.

Problemize the learning

Yesterday I heard Warren Woytuck from The Critical Thinking Consortium present at the ACE Conference. Here is one of his slides about problematizing a question:

Note how by adding value descriptors, by specifying the intention of the question, the question changes to one where students need to compare and contrast, to qualify, make judgements, and/or explain their answers. And more than that, students need to ask more questions to come to an answer.

To me, that’s the key to a problemizing a question… How can you change a question so that it provokes more questions? If you ask a question and either:

A) Google can answer it; or

B) You already know the answer students will come up with; or

C) All students come to the same conclusion…

Then you didn’t really pose a good problem. You didn’t promote critical thinking.

When your questions are problematized, students need to interact with the question in a more meaningful and engaged way.

Profit and greed

Watching the price of gas top $2.30 a litre and knowing that big oil companies are making billions in profit is maddening. Never waste a good crisis. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a company taking profits, but I really wonder where the world is headed when company shareholders care more about increasing profit than anything else.

I think too many people confuse democracy and capitalism. They think a free world should include unfettered opportunities for business and profit. But a model where corporate value is tied to how much returns shareholders can get for their investment is not designed to make the world better or more free. It’s designed to put more wealth into the hands of the rich, who can afford to buy stocks and shares in companies.

Greed is the underlying driver of such a system. Not democracy, not freedom, greed.

‘This approach isn’t as good for the environment, but it is more profitable.’

‘We could pay our employees a better living wage, but that would hurt our profits.’

‘If we lay people off and increase efficiency, we can meet our targets and get our bonuses.’

There are stories like this one, where a boss decided that every employee will get at least 70k a year, and the company is still thriving 5 years later. And there is a local company run by Paul Macdonald that donates 50% of corporate profits to charity.

But these stories are anomalies. They shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be a reason that the world we live in is driven by profit and greed. I hope to see more people doing what these guys are doing. They are earning a good living, and making the world around them better. That shouldn’t be a novel idea, it should be what drives us.

Master the art of showing up

The biggest change I’ve made to taking care of myself in the past few years is this:

“When determining the size or complexity of a new habit ask yourself, “What can I stick to—even on my worst day?”

Start there. Master the art of showing up. Then advance.” ~ James Clear

I’m not in the mood to work out today, but I’ll go get on my row machine for 10 minutes. That would be it, but I’m also going to run the weight club this morning and I’ll do a bit of weights. Then one of our students ends the session leading us through 15 minutes of yoga.

I could skip the row machine, I’ve got an excuse, I’m doing weight club. But how hard is it to do 10 minutes on the row machine listening to my audiobook? It’s faster than 20 minutes on the bicycle or treadmill. These are the minimums I allow myself. I know I can do these things even when I don’t want to. I know that I don’t have to go all out, I just have to put in the time. That’s what I can do on my worst day… I can go through the motions for 10 or 20 minutes.

Sometimes that’s all I really do… go through the motions. But more often than not, after planning to do just the minimum, I end up pushing myself just a little harder than expected. The plan is to show up, but I do more. That’s what happens when you master the art of showing up.

So just show up, and maybe you’ll do more. You just need to commit to showing up and doing the minimum, and being ok with when that’s all you do. Be happy with this low bar on your low days… and you’ll be amazed how often you achieve more.

Just do it… just show up!

A dad’s secret

I love this.

I saw this TikTok last night and it really warmed my heart. A dad kept a childhood secret from his kid until she was 32 and had her own kids. Her dad would take her and her siblings to the beach to go shell fishing, but would go to a souvenir shop first and buy pretty shells. Then he’d throw them in the ripples of waves to be found.

How did she finally find out all these years later? Because he started doing it for her kids, his grandkids. Here is the video.

I grew up on a tropical beach. I still remember the joy of finding a beautiful, unbroken shell. I wish I did this for my kids… and one day I hope to do this for my grandkids.

More rain

There hasn’t been a torrential rainfall, in fact it hasn’t rained hard in weeks. But the weather has been cold and damp and yet again it’s drizzling this morning. May has felt as cold and wet as February usually does.

I set up the pool last weekend, and at this point I think it will be a solid month before it’s warm enough to get in. I wore a turtle neck to school on Friday, and I’ll be wearing layers again today. It’s cold.

Part of the price of living in the Vancouver Lower Mainland is that November and February suck… days of endless rain and low temperatures. But May is usually amazing. Sometimes we get to June and it cools down, but May is a month I usually always look forward to. Not this year.

In my 20’s I ran away from Toronto because I hated the winters. Now in my 50’s I’m wondering why I chose to live near a rainforest? I think being born on a tropical island and spending my first decade there spoiled me. I just want to see a bit of sunshine for more than a couple hours at a time… and I really hope I don’t have to wait until July to get it.

Guess I’ll just keep taking my vitamin D pills and bundling up. Summer will get here… eventually.

Don’t share their names

It’s so senseless and sad. A radicalized idiot with a gun in Buffalo has taken the lives of innocent people.

I saw this response on TikTok, and the title of the post is ‘Don’t say their names’. I’ve said this before, and explained myself in a footnote:

*I referred to the person who murdered children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last Friday as ‘Idiot with a gun in Newtown’. It would be a whole other blog post to speak of how horrible our news media is at iconicizing (not sure if that’s a word) murdering, evil, or deeply disturbed people who commit violent acts. On this principle, I do not name this murderer here. I chose to convey him as a nameless ‘Idiot with a gun in Newtown’. If that offends you, sorry.

When someone like the idiot with a gun in Buffalo commits such a senseless act, part of their desire to follow through with this is to be known. They know that their manifesto will be shared. They know newscasters will peruse their Facebook and Instagram pages and put images of them on the news. They know their name and face will be mentioned and shared.

They don’t deserve the acknowledgment. They deserve to remain nameless. They don’t even deserve the image of their face to be shared. Idiots with guns, that’s what they should be known as. Idiots. Nothing more. Let anyone thinking of doing this in the future know that they will be forgotten. That’s what they deserve.