teaching oneself

if you know me well, you’ve heard me complain about my inability to teach people things.

Often people will say something to the effect of:  “oh, can you teach me to sew?”  and my response, due to several failed attempts is-  “um, I’m not very good at teaching, but if you are really interested, feel free to stop by and I’ll tell you about how I learned.”

really, I’ll tell you about how I taught myself.  and why.

The thing that propels me to learn a subject is this sort of inner excitement.  It has no practical basis.  I just get excited and fascinated by the internal workings of clothing construction and sewing techniques.  It’s the pleasure of doing, experiencing, that gave me the motivation to spend years and years teaching myself how.

You see this everywhere in people who love what they do-  in cooking.  technology.  writing.  it’s a deep pleasure in the process of experiencing it.

and if you don’t have that internal drive to experience the process, how can you really learn it?

for instance:  I, at one time, thought I wanted to learn to program.  After spending a little time on it, I realized I don’t love the process of being ultra-logical and staring at a screen.  So I modified it:  maybe I really just want to have control over my own website.  learning html and css went much more quickly than actual programming languages, and I got the end result I wanted.

However, I do love the process of sewing.  Just touching fabric.  cutting it, making pretty seams or raw edges, turning it into various folded mysterious shapes.  making patterns that sculpt around the body.  I love every moment of it, even when it’s frustrating or exhausting. I miss it if I stop for a week or more.  Somehow, this activity aligns with something internal to me, makes me feel good.

I don’t even see the point of trying to learn something if the process isn’t enjoyable.  If it is enjoyable, you’ll spend your free time practicing.  if it’s not, it will just be a chore, something that gets in the way of finding that thing you really love.

Two years ago I got really into learning languages.  It does the same thing for me as sewing did 15 or 20 years ago.  Makes my left brain busy and thus quiet. Fascinates me for hours.  Compels me to go back day after day. Fills countless notebooks with practice.

So it comes down to this:  why learn something at all if it doesn’t fit some personal internal fascination and fulfill it?   if you *think* you want to learn to sew, but really just want some cool clothes you can’t find in stores, recognize that and find a tailor.  You’ll get what you want more quickly.

journals

for the most part, this is how I write journals:  in languages I don’t know.  For some reason, it works for me.  I sit with the computer open to an online dictionary, translate the words I don’t know, and write whatever I’d like to write regardless of how complex the concept is.

it does two things:  teaches me some sorts of language to tell stories-  “first I did this, then I did that, and tomorrow I’m really excited to go to…” and it also familiarizes vocabulary that is relevant to my life.

One bad habit it reinforces is using english grammar habits in another language, or just guessing at the correct grammar.

I can’t actually speak either language:  but were I to spend a few weeks in thailand or an arabic speaking place, I’d have a head start on reading and writing.

morality? honesty?

I’m a skeptic about the idea of morality in interpersonal relationships.  I think the only conceptual approach that actually works is honesty.  And it’s only possible to be honest if you know where you’re at and what you can handle.

here’s how I’d break it down:

I’m absolutely not a moral relativist.  (haha, see that.  I’m a moral absolutist.)  the moral absolutes:  those are infringing on others’ freedom.  everything else is up for grabs and is situationally determined, little more than personal or cultural preferences.  It’s obfuscating to frame it as morality.

we have all the fuzzy stuff:  kindness, cruelty, openness, boundaries, honesty, white lies, real lies etc.  Most people will actually conceptualize those elements as moral issues. and that’s where the trouble starts.

The most difficult relationship I’ve ever had was with a man who was hung up on the idea of morality. He had these rigid ideas about right and wrong, and they were applied to everything I did, from the clothes I wore to the substances I consumed to the way I spent money and the friends I had. The white t-shirt, the orange mini cooper, the health food-  all those were ‘immoral’ to him. (it would take a while to explain why, and this isn’t a good forum.  but you can see how subjective and relative the concept of morality becomes if we allow it to be diluted.  Those things-  they are better described as preferences-  he would have felt safer with a girlfriend who wore baggy clothes, drove a ten year old honda civic, and ate french fries.)

So it’s what I’d call judgmental, outward focused, false morality.  Throwing stones in glass houses kind of thing.  It’s much easier to spot.

but there’s a spectrum.  False morality can be passive, instead of active.  Subjectively focused, self-focused.  This shows up, in the short term as “I won’t tell my friend/ partner/ boyfriend/ girlfriend the WHOLE truth, because it might hurt their feelings. Or they might leave me.”

In the long term, passivity like this is nothing more than emotional repression, poor communication or lying, depending on what the truth was.

As painful as the truth might be, it’s better than feeling like a friend was deliberately dishonest.  We easily forgive and trust again with people who are immediate, open and able to explain where they are at.

trying to do ‘right’ leads to falseness, honesty leads to emotional intimacy.

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I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few weeks, and then was set off again reading this article on moral relativism at nytimes this morning.

In the big world, I’m staunchly a moral absolutist.

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You know, I should give credit to:  I learned about honesty in relationships from Young, who reminds me at least every couple of days that everything would be easier if I’d just be more direct with people. I keep trying, but it’s a process.

energetic debts

been thinking lots about friendships and other types of relationships lately.

it’s clear in any relationship there is a give and take-  and it’s really an energetic thing.

You can imagine it concretely in terms of money.  Perhaps there’s a friendship where two people hang out frequently, and one person always pays.  All other things being equal.  The friend who’s always paying, even when it’s done with absolutely no expectation of anything in return, will start to feel the energetic drain.  And the one who never pays-  they’ll feel the energetic debt.

This energetic imbalance isn’t actually about the money.  It could be in the form of favors,  never being on time, imbalanced sex, always being in crisis, etc.  relationships that have imbalances in one area and otherwise work- they work because of a balancing out elsewhere.

And actually, generosity-  on the part of the giver-  really doesn’t matter.  The imbalance is there, both people can feel it, and someone is not going to be able to take it.  Nobody likes to feel emotionally drained, nobody likes to feel energetic debt.

I rarely ask people for favors.  I’ll only ask for something-  and it’s usually just a shoulder to cry on, nothing in the practical sense-  from people I’m very, very close to.  I’m averse to asking for or taking favors because the energetic sense of debt weighs so heavily for me. This goes for being on the debtor side of any emotional transaction, actually. And the only people I’ll get into that position with I trust deeply.

I know, because I see it all around me, most people don’t even FEEL the energetic debts they have accumulated.

and this ties into self-awareness, self-honesty.  True, deep friendships don’t happen when there is a glossing over of feelings; a subtle manipulation/ ignoring of truths in order to try to make things prettier. My deepest, realest relationships aren’t pretty-  but they are real.

I spent this afternoon talking with someone a decade younger than me about relationships.  (I’m using the term in the non-romantic sense-  because we all have dozens of relationships.  Some are deep and real, some are superficial, most are in-between.)  We were talking about how hard it is to lose friends, and about how, while it doesn’t get easier, it does get quicker.  We get better at ascertaining depth, level of feeling, mutuality, and honesty in our relationships, and hopefully, ultimately, can make better choices about what’s real and what’s not.

pretty isn’t real.  usually.

reality

freedom: the real thing, not the political term, has nothing to do with circumstance.  it’s a feeling, the same as non-attachment in the eastern terminology-  it’s a recognition of how what we do both simultaneously matters and does not matter.

I’m very attracted to people who have some form of this freedom.  We all are actually, they are an attractive type-  since they embody what we all want.  It has nothing to do with money.  I’ve seen the freest people without a cent, but clearly with some sort of connection to- to the flow, to the divine.  To actual consciousness.

And when one has this sort of freedom, money is almost irrelevant.  This sort of freedom-  there almost needs to be a different word for it so it doesn’t get confused with the circumstantial, political type of freedom-  is what we are really all seeking through politics, through love, through sex, through money.  All those things can be distractions.  not that they are necessarily distractions, but they can be.

take love. in one form, it’s about wanting and longing and never quite getting.  In another form, it’s about connection and making something more. In the realest form, love is just acceptance and appreciation of what is, no need to have or get or change.

I’m not quite sure how to describe this freedom.  I’ve been mesmerized by the concept since I was in my early adult years and first started to understand what it is.  For some reason, I’m not even able to articulate it, even though I’ve experienced it.

When I was 22 this strange thing happened:  one day, I realized that my emotions were a choice.  but it was a realization in the broader sense of the term-  I actually realized it.  And quite suddenly, I was freed of all the internal garbage and gargle and stuff that hinders most of us all the time.  consequently, I was very blissfully happy.

here’s the bizarre part-  this state of joy went on for six months.

I’ve heard of other people having something like this happen-  like the woman who had a stroke that shut off her left brain, or people who meditate a lot.  My left brain was still fully functional, it just didn’t bother me at all except when I needed to use it.

We’ve all had moments of this-  something slips, and the temporary realization occurs, and the freedom-state-of-mind is achieved.  It might be only a couple seconds, but anyone can recognize that.  Sometimes it happens through connection with another person, and the fabric of our conceptual rendering of the world is torn or just pulled away.  and the realer world emerges, just for moments, maybe hours.

So how did that state of joy-  which I was fully conscious of at the time, aware of the rarity and strangeness, unsure of how to explain to others what was going on-  how did that slide away?  I don’t know.
It left a permanent impression-  this awareness of the possibility.

business advice- from other people

(primarily, from my dad.  but there are some other ideas in here that he didn’t come up with.)

I’ve been lucky this way-  I was brought up to understand how healthy small businesses function and to respect them.  (even though I personally choose to not-really-run-a-business. )

I made a list of many of the major points that seem to matter, both to individuals within a company and the company as a whole.  I’ve never worked/ had much insight into what larger public companies are like-  so most of this applies to smaller, entrepreneurial, privately held entities.

1. failure is fine.  An entrepreneur needs to try many different things (sometimes at once)  and recognize that more than half will fail.  But, the one(s) that succeed cover those failures and then some.

2. fiscal responsibility is your responsibility.  When we put money into the stock market, we’re accepting that it’s a risk.  Everyone knows markets go up and down, though over the long term-  decades we’re talking-  they’ve gone up.  But it’s still a risk.  If you are putting your money into the markets, you, personally, are assuming that risk.  Don’t do it unless your comfortable with it. (by the way, my savings are invested as conservatively as possible.)  It’s much safer to risk money on things you can control.

3. understand your business finances.  If you are running a truly tiny 1-5 person business, do the bookkeeping yourself, at least for a while.  Basic accounting principles for a small business are highly accessible. And hire an accountant for taxes.

4. listen more than you speak. skilled people know their own skills and aren’t afraid to ask questions or admit what they don’t know. ask questions.

5. always be teaching someone how to do your job. and you’ll always have a job. the entrepreneur who doesn’t delegate doesn’t succeed.

6. always hold your cards close to your vest.  understand what is important to keep as a trade secret, and what is important to say to pique the interest of others.

7. assume that NDAs and contracts are basically unenforceable. patents, copyright, and trademarks are very difficult and expensive to enforce.  Unless you want to spend your life embroiled in litigation, take all these things with a grain of salt.  they aren’t where the value is.  trademarks are less important than URLs these days.

8. don’t cling to IP;  it’s much less important than doing something.  without the business, it generally has no value. execution has value.

9. understand where the value in your business is.  if it can’t be sold and nobody will buy it, there’s no value.  don’t delude yourself into thinking that you’ve created value because you’ve designed a brand or picked out some colors.  there is no business value if someone won’t pay for it, and there is no business value if you can’t be removed from the equation….  this means, of course, that a small business run in the artisanal style I run mine has NO VALUE as a business.  I’m fine with that, obviously.

10. press coverage tends to sell less product than you’d expect. good product sells product.

11. “Good enough”   aka “The perfect is the enemy of good.”  i.e.:  if you are focused on perfection, you’ll never complete anything.  This is really a problem in technology companies, where engineers, trained to perfect things, will perfect and add to a product until you are over budget.

12. charisma hides many personality flaws.  be careful hiring charismatic people.

13. real world training and experience is infinitely more important than schooling.  the first few months of your first real job will be spent training the schooling out of you.

14. it should be obvious, but treat your customers well.  Don’t surprise them with overcharges or unexpected invoices.  But keep track of if a customer is worth it to you.  It’s not profitable to make everyone happy.  Choose to work with the customers that are profitable, and kindly close accounts with those who aren’t.

15. employees need to add value to the company.  The company can’t survive with large numbers of people who aren’t helping in the creation of revenues that are significantly more than their salaries.  It might seem opaque to many who have only been in the employee seat, but having an employee generally costs twice as much as their salary, when health care, taxes, and training are figured in.  This means that employees really need to be able to generate/ assist in generating multiples of their salary.

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I could probably expand all these points to several pages apiece, but since this post has been drumming around my head for over a year now, I’m just publishing it as is.  Maybe it will get expanded later.

how much to learn a word?

I’ll pay a cent. (actually, realistically, I’d pay a lot more. I mean, a decent-you-can-get-by-on-this vocabulary is only a few thousand words. plus grammar, argh)

I listen to deutsch welle in french and german at the store- which prompts the tourists to ask me if I’m american. ( I’ve been tempted to claim I don’t speak english well.)

when I first started listening to deutsch welle en francais, about a month ago, it sounded significantly faster than the german. I actually had the thought- ‘huh, french must be spoken at a higher speed or something.’ – now, of course, it sounds the same speed…

one thing I’m observing: vowels and Ls make it tougher to learn a word. any word that is just vowels, or vowels and an L or two- forget it. they just won’t stick. I still don’t know the arabic word for family.  too many vowels.

(the bottom one is yiddish, i.e. german in another alphabet. you can see how much less fluid my handwriting is as the list goes down.)

an observation about learning multiple languages at once: it’s the basic words, the yes, no, and, pronouns, etc that seem the hardest to keep straight while speaking. My mom and I have been having conversation afternoons-  she speaks french and german fluently.  I would like to start speaking french; my german is sufficient for communication.  So, we’re attempting to speak together in french, but I can only understand the language-  can’t really produce it.  Consequently, there’s a lot of switching to german, or accidental interjections of german words-  to the point where I’d notice we’d be speaking in german, but I kept using “oui” or “eiwa” (egyptian arabic for yes).  She’d be speaking in german, but using ‘l’homme’ instead of ‘der mann’.

This whole process- of being able to understand a language but not speak it- mystifies me.

despite the description of arabic as one of the toughest languages for an english speaker to learn, and significantly harder than thai, I still feel like thai (and probably other asian languages) have more substantial differences from english than arabic.

For instance, when I first learned about classifiers in thai-  which I understand to be quite common in asian languages- it was such a foreign concept that it took a couple days to even wrap my mind around it. plus, you speak about yourself and others in the third person colloquially. plus, the tonal system is so different from western/ european languages. and, while thai has an alphabet, it’s a really complicated long one! (still my favorite alphabet. so pretty)

arabic doesn’t have any of this foreign-ess.  It has that hassley gender thing, but, you know, so do german and french.  and the arabic gendering is WAY LESS arbitrary that the euro-gendering. It’s actually predictable!!  the alphabet is a reasonable length.  and despite the wikipedia mention of the different arabic dialects being as different as german and dutch, I’m inclined to think that’s not true.  I’ve listened to lessons in moroccan, egyptian, omani, syrian, iraqi, and modern standard arabic now.  There are word preference differences, and pronunciation differences, and vowel differences, and some of the most basic words (like what, how, which) are different-  but it seems more like the difference between a deep texas accent and mine, than between german and dutch.

clearly, being immersed might cause me to think differently about how different they are…but I’ve listened to texans talking amongst themselves and caught maybe one out of seven words.

one more in the observation stream:  online dictionary resources for arabic-english are TERRIBLE.  Google translate for french and german works very, very well, even with quite idiomatic expressions.  But it’s terrible for arabic, and seems to be the best out there.  why?

introversion

here’s what being an introvert feels like:  loud, crowded environments make your skin crawl and uncomfortably increase the level of adrenaline in your body.

Making small talk hurts, in a synethesic kind of way. talking in general is dully uncomfortable, unless you know the other person very well.

even being around people you like, for several hours straight, is exhausting.

all of these elements are well documented.  I’m just thinking about it because of how it affects my business. and my social life, for that matter.

you know, when I describe it, introversion really does sound like a psychological illness, though I don’t believe it to be.

but you know, I like people!  it’s just the initial getting-to-know-you stage that is so uncomfortable.  Once we’re past that I’m a great friend, and usually quite interested in organizing dinners, coffee, or other stuff.

just not in loud places.

sometimes I think about moving to nyc and then remember every place is loud.

on values

I’ve often said, when describing my politics or values, that individual freedom is my most important. consequently, I believe in protecting individual freedoms of all types (safety, human rights, speech, etc – basically, one should be free to do anything that doesn’t infringe on another’s freedoms. )

I can see the desire for a sense of the collective, we do, of course, live in communities, and consequently, have shared goals.  It’s clear that the majority of people prefer living around others, and really, as a species, we’re physically not designed/evolved to be loners.

but I’m inclined to believe that when individual freedoms are protected, i.e. when all people in a community have a sense of their own freedom, then the community develops collective values.

and because I so strongly feel/believe in individual freedom, it seems gross and sick to want power over others, to govern them in any way.  even teaching and guidance are suspect.  it seems warped and unethical for any set of people to impose on another set of people rules governing their supposed collective good.

beyond that very basic protection of individual freedoms.

I also believe in morality, but that it can be only developed through individual choice. freedom.  any morality imposed from the outside, imposed by others, is clearly something else.  imposed morality isn’t morality.  morals are only chosen freely, otherwise they are obligations, rules, requirements.

from this you can extrapolate how I feel about, say, the extensive social services in our state. governments are run by people who don’t actually believe in individual freedom, and believe they can impose morality.

markets, on the other hand….

here’s why I’m thinking about this- it’s part of the framing-  and eventually reframing process.  deep down, having employees is about teaching, and about directing.  If you deeply feel that both can be problematic, clearly, having employees feels immoral, or at the very least, like a schism in values.

I’ve said, often, that I don’t know how to teach people.  I just realized today that there are two reasons so far-  the first is that I’ve always known how to teach myself, but the more hidden reason, and perhaps the one that makes it seem to distasteful to me, is that I, on some level, believe it infringes on the student’s freedom.

I’m inclined to soften this post somehow, wrap it up messily with a statement about how complex things really are, how, as a species, we’d never have gotten to this point without teaching and imposed rules and structures. all true, of course, and obvious. (we’d never have gotten to this point without any of the things that went before.)  I also believe in an evolution of values.  and that the only way to legitimate collective values is through individual freedoms.