Piling Up Dots

I’ve come to hold the view that life is about piling up dots … piling up building blocks, including connectable anchoring and reference points … that can, over time, be connected, rearranged as necessary, and fleshed out to create the life, Dreams and Destiny we will ultimately own. 

The dots may include pixilated data, knowledge, information, understanding, wisdom, attitudes, habits, relationships, values and principles.  These dots create a matrix of a virtual YOU. 

“Mining” for dots is a life-long enterprise.  First and most of all, it involves engagement – with people, accessible media, teachers and coaches, as well as social and cultural norms and nuances.  [Perhaps not so much Facebook, Twitter, soap operas and late night TV!]  It involves experience as well as at least a rudimentary knowledge of both history and current events.  Context is important; the WHY and HOW and WHERE STUFF FITS and HOW IT GOT THERE matters. 

Acquisition of tools and skills – along with expertise in using them – for “mining” and connecting the dots – is critical.  The more dots we have at our command and the more things to which we can say “There was NOTHING TO IT”, the better capacitized we will be for the duration. 

Executive functions of Visioning, Validating and Vectoring are important in determining where to mine, what to keep, what to discard, what to defer, what goes where, what “dot matrix” relationships are emerging, and where and how to add value.

Sometimes “holes” in the matrix appear … like when an opportunity is lost, when things don’t fit, or rejections pile up.  Unexpected opportunities and synergies may ALSO appear.  Thus, where we end up may be a considerable distance from where we started out or thought we were going, such as:  

 Not all dots are the same denomination.  Some are durable indefinitely (that can be both good news and bad news!).  Some are perishable.  Some are toxic.  Some are large.  Some are small.  Some are only virtual.  Some promise more than they deliver. Some are like Teflon – they stick to nothing.  And some are like glue. 

Finally, a collection of dots may not be pretty on the “cutting room floor” or on the back of a finely woven tapestry.  But a critical mass of high quality dots tied together with an acute sense of purpose will yield a unique work of art with both intrinsic and extrinsic value that can turn out to be priceless.  

 

“Life is made up of … small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.”

Anna Quindlen

A Short Guide to a Happy Life 

Finishing Thought: Pile up more dots and less gray cement!  And don’t just settle for “Dippin’ Dots” and low hanging fruit; go for deep water and deep earth gems.  While mining for DOTS, particularly seek out those “Points of Light” dots that resonate with broad spectrum generative and regenerative power … and don’t shy away from connecting them with others.  Quartermaster

 

Genes, Greens, Grit and Gummy Bears

If you’ve made it past birth, early development, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school and high school with no major glitches and relatively unscathed by major medical maladies, you’re probably endowed with a fairly decent set of genes. 

The real question is:

What have you DONE with what you’ve got? 

Behavioral scientists have long debated whether one’s genes or the “environment” have the greater influence on behavior-indexed human development outcomes.  Here’s one summation:   

“Complex mixes of genetic and environmental factors influence all behavior, without exception. The environment also influences genetic expression, without altering the DNA itself, in the process called epigenesis. So the two are thoroughly intertwined, and it makes little sense to ask whether a personality trait or behavior pattern is ‘nature or nurture.’ It is almost always both.”  http://www.intropsych.com/ch10_development/there_is_no_versus.html  

The key lesson here is that, whatever blueprint you’ve been given, it’s only a nuts and bolts underlayment for whatever you can build on top of it.   

If you have the blueprint of a chicken without wings,

you still may be able to develop legs [eat your “greens” and get with the “grit”]

that will let you run like the wind! 

However, the underside of the story is that we can do a great deal of damage to both the blueprint and overall outcomes either by dereliction of duty [“gummy bears”] in cultivating the possibilities our DNA provides, or by exposing it to a hostile/corrosive/detrimental environment.   

One learns a lot about life from a look at extreme circumstances.  Cancer is a disease that has taught us a lot about early development and aging as well as about the fundamental genetic blueprint and the dreaded disease, itself. 

“Approximately 40.4 percent of men and women will be diagnosed with [at least one of] all cancer sites at some point during their lifetime.”  [http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html] 

And it doesn’t all come from a “faulty” blueprint:

• Smoking causes about 30 percent of all U.S. deaths from cancer.
• Poor diet, physical inactivity, and overweight/obesity may account for about 25–30 percent … of the major cancers in the United States.
• 40 to 50 percent of Americans who live to age 65 will have non-melanoma [cancers] at least once [related to sun exposure] …
  http://progressreport.cancer.gov/doc_detail.asp?pid=1&did=2011&chid=101&coid=1011&mid=

 But cancer isn’t the only malady promoted by the superimposition of an unfavorable environment:   

“According to the World Health Organization, 13 million deaths annually and nearly a quarter of all disease worldwide - including 33 percent of illnesses in children under age five - are due to environmental causes that could be avoided or prevented.”  http://www.cdc.gov/sustainability/lifestyle/index.htm  

So the issue here is how many different ways we can personally sabotage our innate gift of possibilities – compromised as that gift may be – to even further short-change our truest Destiny.   

Now on to equally unnerving matters ...  

Precisely how much damage we inflict on the brain by negligence or corrosive engagement is anybody’s conjecture.  But it’s pretty certain that the brain functions poorly if not deftly and deliberately “primed” and “conditioned” for advanced processing.  It wasn’t long after computers first appeared before the observation “Garbage in, garbage out” became overwhelmingly evident.  

Actually it was evident centuries ago in the Roman Empire, as the Latin phrase suggests: 

“mali principia malus finis”

[“from a bad beginning, a bad ending”] 

However, it’s not just what data is embedded in the old squash that matters.  Perhaps even more important is our overall “inclination” ... what are we most likely to DO with what we’ve got, and what are we most likely to do first next?  What underlying assumptions, expectations and driving forces govern our thinking and doing? 

“The most important thing is not so much where we are

but in which direction we are heading.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes 

With time, the outcomes become less directly associated with our imprinted DNA than with our acquired RNA – “Rational Neural Activity”.  Our ability to develop, evaluate, rigorously challenge and creatively expand neural inputs, prevent/avoid or eliminate those that could prove detrimental, and discard unproductive, false or degenerative holdings is our main armament against meltdown and mediocrity.  

Respect your GENES, expose yourself to as many GREENS as possible, exhibit some GRIT in choosing the best inputs and pursuing them with all due intentionality, and avoid the GUMMY BEARS that offer no redeeming virtues.  Quartermaster

Matriculation Failure

You may be astonished, as I have been, to learn that the failure rate beyond high school and beyond college is much greater than it is in matriculation through those institutions.  Endless studies point out how much trouble there is with formal education today … with great numbers of high school students not being college-ready and college students not being job-ready.  But it happens to be small potatoes compared to the trouble people have in navigating the “real” world once they get OUT of a structured learning environment and into the DOING environment. 

For reference, add up the following numbers:

• People who are unemployed and who may be “unemployable”
• People filling positions for which they are not qualified
• People who simply show up for work and reluctantly do what they’re asked or told
• People “advanced” to positions where they do not impede progress
• People who get “passed over” for promotions
• People “stuck” in jobs they do not like
• People who “don’t fit” the job or organization
• People who outright get fired
• People whose jobs are downsized
• People whose positions are eliminated in “reorganizations”

Of course, many of these may be the same people!  However, add to this total the number of people who merely dream and whose dreams are never realized … who don’t win the Power Ball Jackpot … whose “ship” never comes in, etc., and the numbers become staggering.  

We don’t generally label such things as “failure” … maybe merely as “unlucky” … sometimes as “unfair”.  But it certainly takes the stuffing out of Dreams and possibilities.  

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper”.

T. S. Eliot 

Paradoxically, those who eventually realize outstanding success are not unacquainted with failure.  It’s not all “favoritism” or “cheating”.   

What’s going on here?   

The formulations for success and failure are complex.  What eventually “works” is often the serendipitous culmination of a whole lot of unsuccessful, best-guess “shots in the dark”.  However, we know a considerable amount about what doesn’t work, and failure to continue our matriculation is one of those things.  Continuing advancement is an inextricable part of “The Deal” between us and our Destiny; the drive to achieve the best future we can envision doesn’t stop once the doors to formal education close behind us.  That’s only the beginning!

For many, it may not so much matter whether they won or lost, if they were at least “In the game” enough to win some. 

But for those who would like to win more, we need to go “out of our way” in advancing ourselves – through preparation … through life-long education … through training … through accepting increased responsibility … through the demonstration of “ownership” … through constantly resetting our assumptions, expectations and dependencies.   Unfortunately, a great number of folks quit pushing as soon as the first opportunity comes along.  Zig Ziglar famously told about the unfortunate lad who lasted only 3 weeks in his first venture: “He stopped looking for work as soon as he got a job!” 

For better or worse is the way the world works.  “For Better” actually looks a lot like “worse” (i.e., “harder”) in the making, but its rewards are ultimately much more certain and indelible.  And “Worse” looks a lot like “better” (at least “easier”) in the short run – because it requires nothing of any consequence; but it’s unconscionably harder in the main, and its rewards are lousy. 

Choose better!   

“A lot more people than necessary are leading lives that are a lot more difficult than necessary: some because they only ever had poor choices; some because they only ever made poor choices; some because they simply didn’t know any better; and some because they simply ‘couldn’t be bothered’.”   Quartermaster