Author Archives: David Truss

Kindness really matters

I wrote about a kind act yesterday, and today I got this image as a Facebook memory:

I believe that kindness can be contagious, it can become memidemic (my word for a positive epidemic). Kindness resonates, it has a frequency that when put out in the world will be picked up by others nearby. Just like a tuning fork of the same frequency will start to vibrate if another tuning fork, similarly tuned, is vibrating nearby, so too does kindness resonate.

Choose kindness today. Even if the kindness is not returned, know that it will resonate and you will be contributing in making the world a better place.

Kindness of strangers

I have a small magnetic wallet at the back of my phone. It holds 4 cards snugly. After work finished, I took my work Mastercard and one other card out, with intentions of replacing them. But before I did, the two remaining cards fell out. I didn’t notice until the end of a busy day where I had been on a long walk and at a shopping mall as well as work and home.

The missing cards were my Visa and my Driver’s license. I quickly put my card on hold, freezing it from use, and started the hunt. I retraced my steps that day and couldn’t find them. Then I was contacted by a postal worker, who found my cards and returned them to my mailbox. He then found me and my wife on Facebook and messaged us both.

I’ve thanked him in a message, but haven’t had communication back yet to find out where they were found.**

There are always reports about scammers, theft, and violence that make the news. It’s just nice to know there are good, kind, thoughtful people out in the world.

____

** Update, he found them in a mailbox near the trail I walked. So it was two good people: the first who put them in the mailbox, and the mail carrier who delivered them to my house!

Waves crashing

I did a quick search to see if I’d shared this story before. I found The ocean calls me and Ocean waves, but not the following, so I’ll contribute further to my stories of the ocean’s grasp on me.

—–

My first decade was spent living a five minute walk from the beach. From that distance, the ocean was a constant sound in the distance. I can only describe the sound with oxymoronic phrases: a dull roar or a gentle rumble. There was no distinct sound of individual waves, only the ever-present whispering thunder. In fact, I often wouldn’t even hear it unless I listened for it, since it was so constant it was as if it wasn’t there.

I remember a couple times when we rented a beach house just steps away from the ocean. I used to love lying in bed and hearing the individual waves crash against the shore. This was a treat. Each crash anew, almost but not quite the same as the last. I enjoyed the sound the waves make as they recede off the beach, followed by the crash of the next wave.

I would fight sleep to listen longer. That’s the memory that sticks with me, being lulled to sleep by the soothing sounds while simultaneously desiring to stay awake… to hear more waves crashing, and receding off of the beach.

To this day I long for the sound of waves crashing. I use this sound as the backdrop to my guided meditation. I am drawn to the beach while others prefer to be poolside. The ocean calls me, and I am happier when close to the vast horizon behind a rumbling shoreline.

All you can eat

We are at a resort and food is included as part of our package. Last night’s dinner was in a market-style restaurant with individual food court like restaurants. I started with a Thia chicken crepe, then had a couple small rolls of sushi, then a small spinach & shrimp salad. That was enough for me. I’ve never been big on dessert, and if I was the meal would have been too much.

It would be so easy to overeat in a place like this. It can be enjoyably gluttonous. The idea is to think in moderation when surrounded by abundance. Not an easy task. Convince yourself to enjoy and stop when full, rather than feel restricted. It’s not fun being in the land of plenty and forcing restraint… so the trick is to make delicious choices, just less of them.

A buffet breakfast can be a delicious omelette, bacon, and some fresh fruit. What about sausages? Pancakes? Dessert? Those are the wrong questions. How was the omelette? Delicious! Sometimes less is more. More healthy, more friendly to your heart and your waste line. Moderation is easier with the right mindset… I’m not restricting myself, I’m eating wonderful meals that aren’t so big that I’m going to feel awful later, either physically or emotionally.

It’s not about all I can eat, it’s about making delicious choices. They don’t all have to be healthy choices, as long as I’m not stuffing my face and my belly… and I’m not intentionally undermining myself with bad choices. Moderation doesn’t need to be a dirty word, it’s a smart word, a word that allows choices and freedom, free from gluttony.

Now, it’s time for breakfast!

Crossing the street for you

Going back 25 years ago, I was in teacher’s college and did almost every project with two friends I met in the program, Andrew and JP. I was literally sandwiched between them sitting at 5’9 when both of the are well over 6’… and JP was the presentation opener, with a wicked sense of humour, while Andrew was the closer with intelligent and relevant ties to the curriculum and reading, all of which he had always done. So, once again I was stuck (comfortably) in the middle.

One day we were having lunch and planning an upcoming presentation when JP said, out of the blue, “Dave, I’d cross the street for you.”

“What?”

“Some people you see walking on the opposite side of the street, and you wave at them as they go by. And some people you take the time to cross the street and greet them. I’d cross the street for you.”

That’s a fond memory about friendship that I thought of this morning. There are probably a lot of quotes like the following but I’m on an airplane without wifi so I’ll take liberty to word a common idea and try to put my own twist on it:

It’s easy to be a good friend when times are easy, it’s a true friendship when times are hard and yet helping your friend out is not hard.

That’s the measure. It’s not about it being hard for you… if the friend is going through hard times you aren’t holding up a measuring stick to see how hard it is to help. There is a willingness to go to hard places without quantifying the effort… the friend is worth it.

You aren’t just crossing the street for them, you are going back the other way just to be with them.

The shiny object

“Highly focused people do not leave their options open. They select their priorities and are comfortable ignoring the rest. If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.” ~ James Clear

I call it squirrel brain with a hat tip to the dog in the animated movie ‘Up!’. He has a collar that allows him to talk, but that doesn’t matter once he sees a squirrel… the distraction is too great.

It’s that scattered sense of paying attention to the closest shiny object, the new distraction, the most recent email, the interruption, the grumble of your tummy. Sometimes it’s a needed break, but most times it’s a distraction. It’s inefficient and ultimately ineffective.

“If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.”

Sometime you need to put blinders on, and intentionally block or reduce the distractions. You need to resist the urge to get the newest distraction done before moving on. The shinier new thing that popped up can wait. The notification can stay unread, and the ‘to do’ list should be just that one thing that needs to be focused on, and nothing else until this one priority is completed.

Focus is not easy to maintain, but productivity soars when focus is given and distractions are left behind. Although sometimes the trick is realizing what really is the distraction. When I used to spend 15 minutes looking for an image to go with my blog post, that was 15 minutes that I wasn’t writing or meditating, or working out. Was the image essential enough to take that much time? Probably not. But at least I did it after writing… unlike today when I broke my writing stride to find the image above of the dog from Up!

I’m definitely a work in progress with my attention and distractions. The trick is to recognize priorities and reduce distractions that detract from those priorities. And like with most advice, this is much easier said than done.

Not a question of first or rare or distant

When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Summer vacation

Three more days of work and then I’m off on holidays!

I’m only home for 10 days this summer. I have 3 very different trips planned, each with their own benefits. I’ll be staying at a resort, I’ll be camping in a trailer, and I’ll be visiting my mom. That’s over a month away from home, with a couple less-than-a-week gaps.

I’m excited about all 3 trips, and I know I’ll come back to work well rested. I also wish that I had a few more days to enjoy at home. It’s weird. I’m not complaining, and I wouldn’t want to shorten any of the trips, I just also wish I could spend a bit more time holidaying from the comfort of my house.

I say this is weird because I’m not really a homebody. I enjoy travel, and I’m not overly attached to my bed. Part of me is nomadic, and I can feel pretty at home away from home, even sleeping on a couch at my mom’s place. Maybe it’s our recent renovation, my home feels so much more comfortable now.

Regardless, I have a fantastic summer planned, and I haven’t looked forward to a summer this much in a long time. This school year kicked me in the butt, mostly but not only because of my health. I missed a lot of the year and felt like I was always catching up, always rushing things I am usually on top of, and even dropping things that I don’t usually drop.

I couldn’t pick a better year to jam pack with holidays. Sun and fun, rest and relaxation, and family… all squeezed into an amazing summer that happens to be mostly away from home.

Martec’s Law in education

In “Martec’s Law: the greatest management challenge of the 21st century” author Scott Brinker states:

“Three years ago, I described a conundrum that I dubbed Martec’s Law:

Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.

As shown in the graph [below], we know that technology changes at an exponential rate. This is the phenomenon of Moore’s Law— and, more broadly, Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. But we also know that human organizations don’t change that quickly. Changes in behavior and culture take time. There are only so many changes in people, processes, and technology that an organization can productively absorb at once — at least without a major disruption.

So approximately speaking, organizations change at a logarithmic rate — much slower than exponential technological change.

In my opinion, Martec’s Law encapsulates the greatest management challenge of the 21st century: how do we manage relatively slow-changing organizations in a rapidly changing technological environment? It is a hard problem.”

I think this is something significant to consider in education. Schools tend to change quite slowly. It takes a very long time to change curriculum. Textbooks are a sunk cost on a fixed learning tool. Technology costs money and there are limited funds. And access to technology needs to be safe, and keep student information private.

Training is also a challenge. When a new technology is added to an organization, many employees get on-the-job training to learn how to use the technology appropriately. Often between 25-40% of the cost of a new tool could be put into training. That doesn’t happen in education. Teachers are in front of students daily; The technology itself tends to be 90%+ of the funding cost; and teachers get limited training and professional development.

Martec’s Law: “Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically,” is exaggerated in education making adaptation to technology much slower. To appropriately integrate new technology requires systems thinking about how to scale.

I used to think that fearless ‘techie’ teachers, the innovators and early adopters, were the ones who really move education forward. I still see how they play an important role, but they transform classrooms not schools, much less districts. Now I see the value of district-wide initiatives where every teacher is given a minimal amount of access and training… in the same tools. Because tech support can’t be sustained when every teacher wants full access (cost and support) to the newest shiny technologies.

Large organizations with rich budgets only advance logarithmically while technology advances exponentially, so to expect schools to do the same on more limited, government funds is hardly realistic. Yes we need the outliers who will try new tools and share their knowledge, but we also need system wide support and training, on tools that are safe and educationally sound.

This is getting harder because technology today is less about purchasing tools and more about subscriptions. A single overhead projector can last a decade with a bulb change or two. A laptop can last 4 years. But a subscription to a tool that teachers become dependent on will have a yearly cost to it. And if that tool isn’t supported at the district level, then that leads to frustrations for educational leaders, teachers, and students alike.

Schools are not about kids having access to all the newest tech tools, they are places where kids learn to think critically and creatively, and to effectively use the tools available to them. Providing access to technology equitably requires sunk costs in tools, and subscriptions, with some training and support. Recognizing that the newest tech will almost always be out of reach for schools doesn’t mean they are falling behind, when even large high-budget organizations have difficulty keeping up. Rather, it’s districts and schools with vision about how to move forward as an entire organization that will keep up as technology exponentially changes.

Side trips

I went on a hike with my youngest today. We were headed to a falls that we never made it to. But we didn’t care that we missed it. On the way we passed a bridge over a small creek, and I’d explored that creek before. So, we went off the beaten path and took a little side trip.

There was a small path, we weren’t trail blazing, but it is not a main path, and quite secluded.

The side trip was the best part of the hike. That’s often the case. The unexpected detour, the restaurant off the main strip, or the unscheduled stop become the highlight.

It’s the same thing in education. You start a lesson. A kid asks a question and you venture way off your plan, but everyone is engaged and the learning is rich.

The important thing is that you create the conditions for the side trips to happen. You have a plan, but it’s not cast in stone. You have an agenda but you leave room for opportunities to arise. You explore, question, and follow your curiosity.

After our side trip we took the harder route that takes us to a lower falls then a steep climb to the upper falls. We saw the lower one, then didn’t realize we had higher to go for the high falls when we met the path downhill. 10 minutes later we realized our mistake but had to head home so my daughter could make her afternoon plans.

It didn’t matter. The rest of the hike was a fun father/daughter trek. The main falls will be explored another day, and the side trip became the main quest.