Mediocrity

For all my championing of excellence, I said something in a conversation yesterday that made me come up short. A friend was telling me of the effort and will he was putting into a particular topic, and how determined he was to ensure that all turned out as right as it could be. To this noble sentiment I gave a callous response. You would be surprised, I told him, how far mediocrity would get you.

The fact is that this is a stunning concession on my side. I, who spent all those posts espousing stronger values of determination, focus, ambition and planning am back to putting forward the cause of mediocrity? The reason I do this is because even in the context of mediocrity I find that most people are unwilling to put in the necessary effort. Take attending university. The mediocre minimum is to turn up on time, to classes whilst having done the reading. Sit there and pay attention, try to answer between two and three questions that are asked of the class by the teacher, the earlier the question is asked the better, for earlier questions tend to be easier ones, and you will be astonished how far this will carry you. You become instantly part of the cream of the crop. Teachers will say good things of you, people will peg you as one of the clever people and consider your words of special worth. It might make you uncool though, it’s never been trendy to be smart.

Sadly this represents too onerous a demand on many who attend. They want to hide in the back, to create a notional attendance, too afraid of not knowing or being made to look stupid or even worse too apathetic. Surely even if you do not know guessing in a class will make a tremendous step forward. Is it really hard to do this? Turn up, bluff your way through a question, and journey on through the day having made your small contribution. If you do even this, you will make a great impact on people that you pass through on your day. Reliability, a bit of information and a point of view will be more then enough to make you look like a genius.

True genius is transcendent, it is rare, exceptional and usually simple. Most people don't understand how to do it and are forced to live on in anonymity. Genius is a collection of simple habits that fake most of its attributes, and I assure you, you can get away with it. The fact is that most people around us don’t understand it and have no exposure to it. They take it to be something they can deal with, and therefore even the simulation of it will gain you all the accolades of it. And more crucially I believe, by taking on the habits and styling of it, you inculcate in you the ability to do it.

Looking and Finding

When they were friendly games of chess, I used to say often to my most favoured Opponent, that he had eyes, but he did not see. It was a favourite metaphor of mine for those moments when to the opponent the game looked inscrutable, where a move revealed neither rhyme nor reason. It appeared almost a casual move, nonchalantly taken to move a piece from one benign position into another, but in chess, as in life, not many moves are actually made with such iron nerve so as to leave them possessing and yet unpossessed of meaning. To understand why a certain thing has happened, you must know its functioning, its fit and how these tie together. It is the true difference between seeing and knowing.

If you have ever read the great fictional detectives they exemplify this quality. They treat nothing as trivial or transient; they pay attention to the world and understand the meaning and significance of every gesture. This is an attribute that I find increasingly abstracted from many people who wonder through life today. We're too used to things just working, and expect too much from too little investment. If it stops working, well everyone is too busy to repair it, or find time to have a poke and prod at the issue to see what can be done to resolve it? No, now there must be an expert, his services determined either necessary or unnecessary, and the item disposed of or retained. There is no decision to invest time in discovering what can be done and perhaps applying our own ingenuity to the problem. People will persist in what they do, they will look and gaze on the majesty of the solved problem, but will never dare look at it unsolved. It is to be palmed off on another, who may use whatever tools he will. We're not bothered with this understanding malarky.

I find this distressing because in my life I have always considered myself a practical problem solver. I enjoyed the challenge of lateral thinking, to have a go at working around the obstacle that confronted me.

What is more interesting is that I feel we're heading this way in an age when the information you need is getting ever more easily accessible. Google, the Delphian Oracle of our Times, can bring answers to all questions if you would but supplicate before it a coherent question. If you would spend 15 minutes learning how to put in tags into a search engine, to cohere the difference between an 'AND' operator and an 'OR' operator in a search engine. To add and subtract terms and refine the search, you too would find all the information that I find, and so often seem to have to find for you.

A lot of information, of the power of knowledge, is to know where to find what you need. You have to know how to look, and increasingly I feel people do not know how to look. Such trends can only be sad, that people feel so un-empowered by knowledge that they will not go out of their way to acquire it, even when it might be useful, must surely be a disappointment.

Music

If you know me, you know that I am the person most unmusical. All through high school, the one person guaranteed to not know the latest hit or have heard the rock classic was me. I never felt that music fit in within my framework, that it worked at a level beyond my understanding, that it wasn't amiable to be fit into the routine of my life. And so I never felt the urge to listen to it. It was superfluous, a distraction and an unnecessary one, which impeded and added nothing to my daily life. My friends from time to time, suggested things to me and tried to get me interested in it, recommending bits and pieces to me. The only pieces I found some passing and peripheral interest was classical music, but even that could not keep me involved for more then perhaps an afternoon, or a few hours at a time. Music was Odd perhaps, but unnecessary, secondary and ignorable in the great scheme of things.

To a certain extent this is still my view today, but yet I cannot help but admit that as I write this that I'm listening to some. I sit here, and I close my eyes, and I feel seized by it. It has a power that transcends our mere ability to deal with the world. Music seizes the heart, and grasps the soul. It carries it places different and uncertain, it evokes and invokes something primordial in our composition that I think we have no idea how to explain or understand. There is a raw power in it. Power barely modulated by the instruments that contain it. Power transcendent and therefore dangerous. Sheer evocative Power.

I understand why I'm not keen on music. I cannot accept such a seizure on my soul. I have a fetish, that I should and am in control of my life, that I will not relinquish. My life, my control, my decisions. No influence that can do this will be permitted. I chose to bar this because I'm scared of what it does, and of how much power it has. What damage can it do? What power does it have over me and what are its effects? I would know before I would trust Franz Ferdinand, Mozart or anyone in between with so much influence over my life.

The other problem for me and music is that I see music as a mystical magical thing. I have not the intellectual framework to place it into, to dissect, to divide, and thence to analyse it. I have instead to accept: this is the music, this is how it's put together, it works, shut up and listen. I can't accept that. I lack the tools to dissect and analyse music, and for me this puts an end to my interest in it. If I can not understand it, then what is the use of attempts to harness it and put it to good use? It is not in my nature to accept things that just are, that are beyond my influence or control. I enjoy them only tangentially and then in brief bursts.

To give my life over to music in the way many of the modern world seem to be inclined, to have it on every day, as if life needed a sound track, does not appeal to me. It gives none of that quiet time that I so enjoy within myself, to hear and perhaps converse with the voice that dwells within my head, that has all the ideas and ties together all the loose ends with insight and verve. That voice does not feel compatible with the sheer transcendent power of music. He, as it were, gets lost in the din. And I like this little voice that keeps me company through so much of my life, that ensures that I am not truly alone, no matter where I am and what I find myself doing.

And in the end, I'm not sure I've made the right decision. I give up something transcendently powerful, for the fear of the power that it wields. Simultaneously I prefer to keep the company of the voice in my head. Hardly rational after all.

The Future is Analysis

In my current use of stumbleupon, that most excellent Firefox plug-in, I've had it for a while set exclusively on the news setting, in an effort to bounce around from information source to information source to discover what is going on. The selector hasn't quite worked like I think it would, instead it has been sending me off to op-ed pieces that are much more about analysing the news. This has been instructive and informative, especially in encouraging me to tie together trends that I had not previously connected, discovering new trends, and developing some links of my own between information. It's piecing together the underlying factors and truths that motivate what happens in the every day world. The long term trends are what explain so much of the short-term world.

In the modern world, what Thomas Friedmann calls "The Flat World" there is no more utility in being an information provider. The internet makes it so easy to find information and facts that there are thousands, probably millions of sources for each fact. Instead what the world needs more of are people who can synthesize these huge reams of information, and to tie them all together to make it coherent and understand the essence of the information. In a way, the news papers and web sites that will get good analystical columnists, who can look at the news day and see a trend, can see a wider picture then the current news story are the ones who will thrive and suceed. Those old papers focused on 'just the facts ma'am' will have a hard time in this world.

In a way this is going to be more and more true of the world that we all inhabit. Whatever infomation we require to do our job is available from hundreds of sources. I can access most modern cases from five or so different law reports, and almost all of them are available online. There is no difficulty in knowing what is precisely the law on a point, all that it requires is that you go and read it. But tying multiple cases together, understanding what is relevant and what is not, how to pick apart reasoning or to reinforce it, the skills that the reader brings to the facts, is what distinguishes them. I think this is of relevance in the real world of the job market that I'm going to be heading out into as well. A lot of people will have information and some rough idea of what is going on. What will be needed is more and more specialisation, it will become essential that you know everything about something in effect to becomes a really sucessful member of society. It's about what you know and how to deal with it in its technical context that counts the most. What value you can individually bring will become what is essential, some real traceable value add, that in the context of services must really be unique in some way to make this difference. The days of many anonymous workers are fading, and people who are stuck in that old paradigm are in trouble.