Author Archives: David Truss

Half empty

I remember this really funny card my aunt once gave her son, my cousin. He had a spell of bad luck that included being robbed at gun point at work, his parked car being hit and run, and then after being repaired the car was vandalized a day later. The card was a picture of a giraffe’s head looking up. It said something like, ‘When life gets you down, remember to look up…’ and inside the card it said, ‘It will probably rain down your nostrils’.

Things got better for my cousin. He really just had a string of bad luck all at once, and it didn’t take long for him to turn things around. He isn’t someone who acts like a victim, he doesn’t expect bad things to happen to him. But we all know people who do expect things to go wrong, who believe the world conspires against them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine how hard it is to live a life where your glass is always half empty. The system is out to get you. You feel picked on, and you ‘know’ that you are always being treated unfairly. How hard would life be? How bitter would you get?

It reminds me of Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, except that he is passively expecting the worse. When people live glass half empty lives, the glass gets emptier, and the responses to anything bad get more and more bitter. It becomes easy to see and believe conspiracy theories because everything conspires against you.

“The system is corrupt, it is designed to keep me down. We are all victims of the system.”

What a hard life to live. I wonder what it would take to change a person like this so that they don’t see the world as undermining and targeting them? What kind of event or experience would change this person? What would it take to help fill their glass a little? Or would they just empty it to where they expect it to be?

Alien life over eons of time

I’m listening to a book where the earth is invaded then the aliens that defended earth start recruiting our troops to fight in low level intergalactic wars. This book got me thinking about the chances of meeting aliens and I thought about how time is the major factor preventing this.

I’m not just thinking about how any intelligent life form would likely be hundreds or thousands of light years away. I’m thinking about time since the universe began. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The earth has missed 2/3rds of all existence. Even then Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000 years or 0.0044% of the earth’s existence. And we’ve had just over 100 years of radio transmissions, that’s about 0.0000022% of the earth’s existence. (That’s 0.00000074% of the existence of the universe,)

Now when you look at 100 years over the span of the life of the universe, it becomes evident that entire civilizations could have survived for 5 thousands years and could have died off 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, or 50 million, or 500 million, or 5 billion years ago, great distances from us, and we’d never know.

Let’s say intelligent life is abundant in the universe, giving us a great opportunity to meet aliens. And let’s say that life didn’t start for the first 3.5 billion years of universe development. That still leaves 10 billion years of inelegant life. There could be 1,000 civilizations that existed and died and each one could have missed the birth of another civilization by a million years.

Let’s face it, we are developing technologies that make it unlikely that we will survive another 2,000 years. In less than 100 years high school students will have the technological know how, and the tools, to build a deadly virus or a deadly bomb that could set our civilization back hundreds of years. I give humanity a 50/50 chance of getting through the next 200 years.

I’m willing to bet that even if there were thousands of intelligent civilizations across the universe most space travel ready civilizations wouldn’t make it to 2,000 years. So forgetting the vast expanse of the Milky Way and the universe beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that any close enough for contact aliens are even around now… They are probably either long destroyed, or they are in their version of the dinosaur age, still millions of years from developing to where we are, much less to the point of light speed travel.

So following this train of thought, it’s likely that intelligent life is/has been abundant in the universe, and yet we are very much alone.

You build habits on your bad days

I touched on this in my post, Just show up:

We live in a society now where there is so much pressure to do well; to be your best; to shine. It’s not easy. But sometimes the message doesn’t have to be ‘you are awesome’, ‘you have so much potential’, or ‘push yourself’. Sometimes the message of ‘just show up’ is all we need to hear.

  • Don’t plan an hour workout, just show up at the gym.

  • Don’t worry about how much you have to do, just start.

I’d like to expand on this idea a bit. When you ‘really really don’t want to go’ to the gym or start your workout, you still need to go. You don’t need to do anything amazing, you just need to get started and know that you are doing something good.

Not going is a slippery slope to a bad habit. If you decide not to go or get started when you ‘really really don’t want to’, that makes it easier to not go when you ‘really don’t want to’. And that makes it easier not to go when you ‘kinda don’t want to’… and so it becomes easier to break the habit.

It’s easy to maintain a habit when you are having good days, it’s the bad days that are the problem. It’s the bad days that break the pattern, or that solidify your commitment. Doing the hard work on the tough days are what keep good habits going.

Some days you’ve got to play your ‘B’ game rather than your ‘A’ game. An excuse that you are not up to your ‘A’ game is not a good enough reason to not show up. On the contrary, your ‘A’ game gets better when you do the work even on your bad days

You can’t pick 7

The next time you ask someone to rate something out of 10, tell them they can’t pick 7. Seven doesn’t give you enough information. If it’s an eight, it’s desirable; If it’s a six, it’s not. Seven may or may not be worth it.

So instead of letting the person come back to you with an un-definitive 7/10, force them to bump it up to worthy or bump it down to un-worthwhile.

Not sure if this is helpful? Then let me ask you: On a scale of 1 to 10, what’s this advice worth to you? … and of course, you can’t pick 7!

Enough is enough

I invite everyone to write a letter to the news editors and producers of their favourite newspaper and newscasts, and feel free to borrow freely from what I share below:

An Open Letter to News Editors:

You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t quote a Nazi manifesto and share their message. You wouldn’t promote hateful messages of racism. You wouldn’t incite a riot. Yet day after day, year after year you promote gun violence and mass shootings. You contribute to them. You incite them. You shoulder part of the responsibility. Shame on you for perpetuating the problem.

There are decades of research that suggest publicizing mass shootings and suicides lead to more of each. This is a known fact. We know that publicizing high profile shooters will often lead to more shootings. Yet last week media outlets across North America shared detailed information about a killer in Buffalo who committed a senseless act of violence. Five years from now no one outside of Buffalo will remember the victims names, but there will be an unwell person in North Carolina, Florida, Washington, Nevada, or Philadelphia that will know the killer’s name… will have read his manifesto… will have saved photos of this evil person… all of which you shared, all of which you made possible.

What you are doing is unconscionable!

Remove the details of the murderer in the Buffalo story from your headlines, and it is unlikely that the school shooting in Uvalde Texas would have happened yesterday. That’s right, it happened because of you and your media colleagues. Because of you. You didn’t pull the trigger, but you are partially to blame.

And when I go to news articles about the Uvalde massacre, I see the killer’s name. I know where he worked, I can learn all about his life. What you are actually doing is inciting a similar incident. You are inviting it. You are partially responsible for it. You, the editors of newspapers, the producers of television news, you hold some of the blame for Uvalde. Shame on you.

Stop printing the killers name. Stop sharing their words. Stop sharing images of them. Stop profiling them. Stop the cycle of contributing to the problem. To continue is to be complicit. You are complicit, you are an accomplice to murder.

You can help break the cycle.

—–

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.