Conscious Savings

A habit is a choice made normal.

This story is from Jerome Weidman, with no known copyright info. Thanks to Akshar Smriti for posting it. Re-Posted for formatting.

When I was a very young man, just beginning to make my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a distinguished New York philanthropist. After dinner our hostess led us to an enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in, and my eyes beheld two unnerving sights: servants were arranging small gilt chairs in long, neat rows; and up front, leaning against the wall, were musical instruments. Apparently I was in for an evening of Chamber music.

I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone deaf. Only with great effort can I carry the simplest tune, and serious music was to me no more than an arrangement of noises. So I did what I always did when trapped: I sat down and when the music started I fixed my face in what I hoped was an expression of intelligent appreciation, closed my ears from the inside and submerged myself in my own completely irrelevant thoughts.

After a while, becoming aware that the people around me were applauding, I concluded it was safe to unplug my ears. At once I heard a gentle but surprisingly penetrating voice on my right.

“You are fond of Bach?” the voice said.

I knew as much about Bach as I know about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most famous faces in the world, with the renowned shock of untidy white hair and the ever-present pipe between the teeth. I was sitting next to Albert Einstein.

“Well,” I said uncomfortably, and hesitated. I had been asked a casual question. All I had to do was be I equally casual in my reply. But I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small.

“I don’t know anything about Bach,” I said awkwardly. “I’ve never heard any of his music.”

A look of perplexed astonishment washed across Einstein’s mobile face.

“You have never heard Bach?”

He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”

A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come with me?”

He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it.

Resolutely he led me upstairs. He obviously knew the house well. On the floor above he opened the door into a book-lined study, drew me in and shut the door.

“Now,” he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you have felt this way about music?”

“All my life,” I said, feeling awful. “I wish you would go back downstairs and listen, Dr. Einstein. The fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t matter.”

He shook his head and scowled, as though I had introduced an irrelevance.

“Tell me, please,” he said. “Is there any kind of music that you do like?”

“Well,” I answered, “I like songs that have words, and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”

He smiled and nodded, obviously pleased. “You can give me an example, perhaps?”

“Well,” I ventured, “almost anything by Bing Crosby.”

He nodded again, briskly. “Good!”

He went to a corner of the room, opened a phonograph and started pulling out records. I watched him uneasily. At last he beamed. “Ah!” he said.

He put the record on and in a moment the study was filled with the relaxed, lilting strains of Bing Crosby’s “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” Einstein beamed at me and kept time with the stem of his pipe. After three or four phrases he stopped the phonograph.

“Now,” he said. “Will you tell me, please, what you have just heard?”

The simplest answer seemed to be to sing the lines. I did just that, trying desperately to stay on tune and keep my voice from cracking. The expression on Einstein’s face was like the sunrise.

“You see!” he cried with delight when I finished. “You do have an ear!”

I mumbled something about this being one of my favorite songs, something I had heard hundreds of times, so that it didn’t really prove anything.

“Nonsense!” said Einstein. “It proves everything! Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in school? Suppose, at your very first contact with numbers, your teacher had ordered you to work out a problem in, say, long division or fractions. Could you have done so?”

“No, of course not.”

“Precisely!” Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipestem. “It would have been impossible and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your mind to long division and fractions. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division and fractions.”

The pipestem went up and out in another wave.

“But on your first day no teacher would be so foolish. He would start you with elementary things – then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems, he would lead you up to long division and to fractions.”

“So it is with music.” Einstein picked up the Bing Crosby record. “This simple, charming little song is like simple addition or subtraction. You have mastered it. Now we go on to something more complicated.”

He found another record and set it going. The golden voice of John McCormack singing “The Trumpeter” filled the room. After a few lines Einstein stopped the record.

“So!” he said. “You will sing that back to me, please?”

I did – with a good deal of self-consciousness but with, for me, a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of my father as he listened to me deliver the valedictory address at my high school graduation.

“Excellent!” Einstein remarked when I finished. “Wonderful! Now this!”

“This” proved to be Caruso in what was to me a completely unrecognizable fragment from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” Nevertheless, I managed to reproduce an approximation of the sounds the famous tenor had made. Einstein beamed his approval.

Caruso was followed by at least a dozen others. I could not shake my feeling of awe over the way this great man, into whose company I had been thrown by chance, was completely preoccupied by what we were doing, as though I were his sole concern.

We came at last to recordings of music without words, which I was instructed to reproduce by humming. When I reached for a high note, Einstein’s mouth opened and his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close enough, for he suddenly turned off the phonograph.

“Now, young man,” he said, putting his arm through mine. “We are ready for Bach!”

As we returned to our seats in the drawing room, the players were tuning up for a new selection. Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat on the knee.

“Just allow yourself to listen,” he whispered. “That is all.”

It wasn’t really all, of course. Without the effort he had just poured out for a total stranger I would never have heard, as I did that night for the first time in my life, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire of it. Because I never listen to it alone. I am sitting beside a small, round man with a shock of untidy white hair, a dead pipe clamped between his teeth, and eyes that contain in their extraordinary warmth all the wonder of the world.

When the concert was finished I added my genuine applause to that of the others.

Suddenly our hostess confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein,” she said with an icy glare at me, “that you missed so much of the performance.”

Einstein and I came hastily to our feet. “I am sorry, too,” he said. “My young friend here and I, however, were engaged in the greatest activity of which man is capable.”

She looked puzzled. “Really?” she said. “And what is that?”

Einstein smiled and put his arm across my shoulders. And he uttered ten words that – for at least one person who is in his endless debt – are his epitaph:

“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”

– story by Jerome Weidman

So what do you think? Have I gone over the deep end thinking that cancer is a curable dis-ease?

Sustainability in a nutshell means that what is done now can be done by future generations. Example, driving around in petroleum powered vehicles is not very sustainable since there is a limit on how much petroleum can be extracted from the ground. Building wind turbines to power a city is fairly sustainable since the wind is less likely to be consumed than the oil? Make sense?

The last message I wrote was in response to a new friend who gave a speech about a number of related topics, most having to do with exploitation for profit. While I am for profit that is gained ethically there are a number of organizations that have very gray definitions of ethics if any, and some that would state simply that ethics interfere with maximum profit and thus must be banished from the marketplace. The majority of organizations and business owners seem to fall into a middle area, where long term effects of current actions are ignored. Not due to mal-intent so much as ignorance. Thus my comments to the speech offered by Reverend Higgens to be shared with the congregation were, be aware. Be aware that every dollar you spend is a vote. A vote that encourages the practices used to produce whatever you buy. While this may seem like common sense upon reading, I would ask you to stop and think about the last time you went shopping. Do you know where half of the things you purchased where manufactured?

I hope that I haven’t jumped around to much, and if I’m getting to abstract please let me know, I have been studying business and sustainability directly and indirectly for many years and have only recently begun writing in any depth and find that taking the time to distill my words helps to clarify my thinking.

So what do you think?

This past Sunday I enjoyed a talk from a Reverend Hutchinson regarding Fair Trade, the WTO and related topics, as you may know this is an issue where I’ve completed a fair amount of research and performed a tiny bit of action. He did an excellent job of uncovering the surface in a short time which is difficult to do in this topic area. I’m interested in who would like to further the discussion via the internet, email for now though I could setup a mailing list / web-site if the group grows large enough.

If you are interested please reply with a brief introduction regarding your background, what your first exposure to the need for social justice & environmental reform, what you would like to contribute and what you would like to receive from the group? If you would like more information without sharing your email address with others please let me know and I’ll be sure to Blind Carbon Copy you on future emails.

As for me, my mother is a science teacher and I grew up with a significant amount of information just on the edge of my awareness. Though my true wakeup call came around September 11, 2001 when I saw a great number of things that just didn’t quite add up, long story short I read a book called the Emperor Wear’s No Clothes which discusses the history of Hemp and it’s potential for sustainable development, then joined an activist group seeking Drug Law reform and began to see the interconnectedness of a great variety of groups and ideas. I like many others began feeling angry and betrayed, only to recognize that in my ignorance I was helping to fuel the growth of a movement that supported and was largely based upon exploitation at every available level. My favorite title for this movement thus far is “Fundamentalist Free Market Capitalism”.

I must say that I also believe that Free Market Capitalism has the potential for tremendous good, and over the years have come to recognize myself as a capitalist. The distinction in my mind is the externalization of costs, big phrase that in a nutshell means forcing cost onto the shoulders of others. Another way to think of this is to look at the difference between the “price” of something and the “cost” of something. For example, a $0.50 bar of chocolate from the grocery store checkout line has a much lower price than a $2.00 Organic Fair Trade bar of chocolate. Yet the $2.00 bar of chocolate may cost less, it is organic and thus does not use pesticides in it’s production, so it is less likely to cause you future dis-ease, less likely to contribute to local fresh water supplies becoming poisoned. It is fair trade so it is less likely to have been planted and harvested by children under the age of 12 and probably was grown by a farmer who is able to support their family and have enough income left over to invest in improving their farm and their community. That is just one example, though it does set the stage for the idea that price does not reflect cost.

This is obviously not a simple cut and dry issue else it would not be an issue, many who are most aware of these issues are those in relatively low income brackets. I was the stereotype of a broke activist living on a couch when many of my seeds were being planted and fed with great soil. The side effect of this is that when you do not think you can afford to pay the extra price for organic and/or fair trade then you are more likely to put up some blinders and perhaps decide that you are powerless to do anything and simply move toward the herd of low prices at any cost.

So I’ve rambled on enough for this morning, suffice to say that I hope this group grows large enough to splinter off other groups exponentially. I look forward to hearing any additional thoughts, comments, feedback, complaints, criticisms, etc… So long as you are thinking and preferably cultivating your own consciousness.

The opportunity for creation is growing. What is your creation, what do you create for you? Is it in your work, writing, performance, skills, connections with others, or many|some other place(s) entirely? Recently I started creating a web application to help teachers. This is one area I create, others are my own improvement, and helping others to improve their creations, and themselves.

If you are not creating for yourself I highly recommend it. If you don’t know what you want to create start looking in whatever way feels right to you. Most people I have met are creative, not in exactly the same way, individual mixes of skills and interests, allowing for wide ranges of expression. The great age we live in there are probably 10-100+ people talking about something you are interested in that are connected to the web right now. Care to start looking for the conversation? Perhaps start your own? Build a new way for people to have a conversation, in real time, and|or through shared current archives. The distance from you to me, one to many, and many to one is shrinking in many ways. The resistance to be able to find your passion and run with it is only as difficult to verge as you wish to make it.

Got to thinking about this while listening to Charles Leadbeater from a TED conference in 2005 below.

What do you think?

A man was lost while driving through the country. As he tried to reach for the map, he accidentally drove off the road into a ditch. Though he wasn’t injured, his car was stuck deep in the mud. So the man walked to a nearby farm to ask for help.

“Warwick can get you out of that ditch,” said the farmer, pointing to an old mule standing in a field. The man looked at the decrepit old mule and looked at the farmer who just stood there repeating, “Yep, old Warwick can do the job.” The man figured he had nothing to lose. The two men and the mule made their way back to the ditch. The farmer hitched the mule to the car. With a snap of the reins, he shouted,

“Pull, Fred! Pull, Jack! Pull, Ted! Pull, Warwick!” And the mule pulled that car right out of the ditch.

The man was amazed. He thanked the farmer, patted the mule, and asked, “Why did you call out all of those names before you called Warwick?”

The farmer grinned and said, “Old Warwick is just about blind. As long as he believes he’s part of a team, he doesn’t mind pulling.”

I recently finished listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers - The Story of Success <Audio Edition> (yes I listen to a majority of the books I peruse, topic for another time). Which has already changed my life. I cannot remember a time when I have felt luckier for the random luck in my life, especially in my earlier years. It has truly acted as a humbling experience, in a truly positive way.

The Story of Success begins by searching out some of the most successful people in the world and finding a pattern than links them all together. World class performers within their field, some of whom managed to create new records and/or shape parts of our society in valuable ways. The common thread began with a magic number 10,000 hours. Ten thousand hours of practice is the difference between a beginner, and a true world class expert. Whether your a software programmer, violin player, lawyer or in another field entirely. If you stick in 10,000 hours of real work into your passion you can become one of the greats.

This may not seem like such a big number when you first think about it, 10 years at 40 hours a week and your there. The big differences between those that find a hobby and get good, and those that become great. While Malcolm wrote about several other topics in the book, this one hit me the hardest. Imagine working in a field for that long and not loving what you do. What a terrible waste.

If you find a task that you love to do and pick it up right now, you could likely be earning an income from it in 6 months to a year. If you were lucky enough to find something that you love when you were young, and have an environment where that skill could be nurtured what do you think you can accomplish?

If you want to become a great writer, start writing, a great artis(t|an) start creating. Nothing short of practice is going to take you from beginner to mediocre, and from there to greatness.

For approximately 1 month I attempted to sleep for 2 hours per day 30 minutes at a time spaced out over the course of a day. The results became somewhat interesting:

The first week I was amazed at how much I could accomplish with all the extra time and noticed minimal drawbacks. This was the period I had the most doubts about, as I was told that the first week is a transition phase when your body will begin to switch to a 30 minute REM cycle.

The 2nd week I began to notice my mind felt foggy if I space out nap too long, and began to establish a pattern. I chose 5:30-6 and 1:30-2 am and pm as my nap times and continued to see very high gains. I began to meditate and do yoga multiple times per day often before and after a nap to increase the net rest. It was near day 11 that I began to dream during my nap times and noticed a boost in my overall energy for several days. This is also the time when I felt a shift in my brain, the area near my pineal gland (very forefront of your brain in between your eyes and above the brow) began to feel warmer drawing focus to my frontal lobe. My overall character began to shift including significantly more creative energy, trying new behaviors became a fun game. Oddly enough during this period my memory became sharper during the late morning and early afternoon, not a general shift though things I felt were important remain crystal clear to this day. I am unsure of how this related to the change in my frontal lobe though I feel there is a correlation.

During week 3 I began to get sloppy in taking my scheduled naps, and began to notice a decline in my mental clarity. While once my attention was engaged this was minimal, switching my focus involved a short delay, my overall awareness also began to decline, rather easy to ignore as the decline was quite minor though over time increasing steadily.

By week 4 my frontal lobe felt quite hot without end, my theory is that switching sleeping patterns as often as I was by not following my scheduled routine closely. During this time I was able to hallucinate at will, staring at any objects with texture my mind would form patterns until shapes emerged, if I held my attention the shapes would respond to my intent and seem to dance, flat objects seemed to have tremendous depth in these states.

This was accompanied with a noticeable delay in time required to shift my attention. I began to revert to a more introverted state spending more time writing code at a computer and less time with people. Part of this was due to the increased work load I had taken and partially because  holding my focus still, seemed both easier and more efficient.

During week 5 I began to sleep longer periods during my afternoon nap, by this time I had all the classic signs of sleep deprivation. While I had not truly planned out how I would handle polyphasic sleep from the beginning I had considered it a short term method of accomplishing a greater work load without the need to sacrifice time with my family.

I chose to force myself to keep the shorter daylight naps and adopted what became a 2-5 hour sleep cycle in the early-mid morning. At this point I largely stopped using any type of alarm clock and felt my mental clarity return. After a few weeks of these longer periods of sleep my frontal lobe no longer felt significantly warmer though a tipping point was reached, and I now find access to greater creative output and adoption/implementation of new ideas.

Over time I have become significantly less structured in my sleeping patterns, though I do continue to take 2-4 short naps per day with a 2-5 hour sleep cycle at night/morning.

This post was inspired by a chat with another programmer I have been working rather grueling hours with for a couple of weeks now; having noticed that I regularly send out email at 3:30am with testing reports he asked:

jonathan: so, what exactly is your sleep schedule?

Alvin: I like to take lots of short naps and sleep a little in the early morning, a few hours anyway

jonathan: do you just have really short sleep cycles?

Alvin: not anymore, if I stopped having that longer rest period I would though that lead to burnout
more of a lieing down quiet meditation, often I’ll stretch or roll a ball/socket under my foot [reflexology reasons] for a few minutes before I lay down, the relaxation acts as a recharge

At this point I feel that my cycles are quite sustainable, I do not use an alarm clock though I do have a young daughter that occasionally acts as on. If I add it up I would say that I average 4-5 hours per 24 sleeping and find that significant enough to maintain a high level of mental clarity and physical alertness.

The greatest advantage I find to this style is the increased quiet time that I am alert. I work from home, having large blocks of time when I am the only one awake allows for blocks of intense concentration on a daily basis. For anyone who is a fan of GTD you likely recognize the power of having several blocks of uninterrupted time on a daily basis.

I will write more on this topic, came up with a title for a moment “Polyphasic Sleeping Raw Foodist Entrepreneur”. Say that 5 times fast.

I recently noticed a short discussion on taxes, how there are far to many of them, and the common man is paying a growing percentage in relation to total income which is remaining relatively stagnant in comparison to real wages. While those in the upper income brackets have watched their yearly incomes soar to new heights. While I do not judge the circumstances, I do find myself thinking of news from abroad referring to Japanese CEO’s and executives averaging 15x an average workers salary, US CEO’s making 200x median average, and London banker execs threatening to sue if denied multi-billion dollar bonuses while their banks call out a need for “government ” assistance.

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This one strikes a cord that I see as a part of the natural evolution of the industrial model. Luckily we are in the beginning of a shift to an information based economy. Which means that new rules are sprouting up, and wealth does not require the old ones to be created. Still there are vast systems in place with long term momentum behind them that seem to value resources more than life. A method that that brought tremendous advances, primarily through competition.

The only certainty is that the rules are changing, 50 years ago the rules were completely different. 50 years before that the world was completely different. Pointing fingers is a simple method of focusing on poor models rather than imagining better ones. Examples of “taxes” on income, education, and water quality are easy to spot just to name a few. What is not so easy to see is the longterm wide view. This is also a trend that is seems to be changing.

Perhaps an early onset skeptic I have noticed that things are likely to become much worse before they get better. In the long run much happier lives with those able to adapt quickly thriving. In the mean time many are losing the ch[oi|an]ce, often not knowing/learning how.

Personally I feel this is a wonderful time to start and support businesses that resonate with your vision of a better world. Share thoughts and generate greater discussions on ways to improve, individually, culturally, and any other ways that are not in agreement.

So what is your big idea(s)?