Category Archives: 7 Hard Problems

7 Hard Problems

Cabinet of Curiosities: “Freedom Road”

While I was looking at “Black Reconstruction”, I was reminded of a novel about Reconstruction written by Howard Fast called “Freedom Road”.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read FR.  But the gloss I received about it years ago was that it dramatized the attempts of a multi-racial commune to set up in post-Civil-War South Carolina.

Howard Fast was a bit of a Leftie, and served 3 months in jail during the McCarthy era for not “naming names”.  In jail he began his best-known work, Spartacus, the movie of which, with Kirk Douglas,  was a fixture of my youth.

I finally did purchase a copy recently, and it’s sitting on the list of things to be read.  But the couple of dips I took into the book (I almost always look at the end of the book, for reasons I’m not going to go into now; I also looked at the beginning and another place) looked like well-written, good story, page-turner.

Googling the book this morning, I realized that it was made into a TV mini-series in the ’70’s, starring, of all people, Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson.  Seems like that mini-series might be worth a gander for the TV-oriented.

7 Hard Problems

Main Job for Work and Learning, week of October 28

I’ve got an ambitious goal for this week: vomitout the chapter in 7Hard on “Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”.   This is the first substantive chapter of the book — after the (hopefully) engaging introductory section — and it raises some themes, like the sorry history of the 20th Century with respect to justice, human rights, and welfare, which persist through several of the Laws.

I’m looking over the outline, which I wrote over the month of October, which will guide this process, and I’m sorry to say I’m a little disappointed with the quality of the guidance it’s going to give to the next phase.

If you’ve ever worked on a multi-stage “knowledge worker” kind of project — a software release, a big report, etc., I’m sure you know the drill: optimize for making the current phase look good.  In this case, I was racing to check off the todo-list item “finish outline” and, frankly, I cut corners to do so.  For example, there’s a bullet in the outline for WEALTH (as we’ll call the chapter this week) saying “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  That’s great, and I kind of sort of know what to say about it, but it’s the minimum possible placeholder for that part of the outline.  The sad thing is that the outline is chock-full of minimum possible placeholders.  Sigh.

In any case, I sort of know what I want to say, which is good, so I’m going to get on with it.

In addition, I have a target of opportunity this week.  I got Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois (BR) out of the library and I’ve got three weeks to read it and get it back.

(My algorithm for a book is 1) try to get it out of the library 2) try to get it used 3) get it new.  I could eventually spring for this book, but let’s see how the race to read it goes.  It’s not bad to have a forcing function on reading a book.  Focuses the attention.)

BR is a classic of U.S. history.  DuBois was the first scholar to claim that Reconstruction — the post Civil-War period where Union troops  were occupying the South and enforcing an interim government — was not a disaster of Yankee greed coupled with Southern progressive incompetence — but was actually a success which was ended by the premature de-occupation of the South before the work could be finished.

I believe it’s impossible to understand the history of the U.S. without understanding slavery and white supremacy, which continue to vex us today.  DuBois is an essential reading on the road to understanding those issues.

BR is related to WEALTH, as it is related to other sections in the book.  I can’t pretend that it “belongs” in this week’s workload, but it isn’t utterly out of place.

I’ve been doing the main Deep Work in the morning, which means fitting in things like reading BR in the afternoon, not my sharpest time for reading.  I’ll need something to keep me from nodding out.

I’ll keep you posted on progress on the writing, and the reading.

 

7 Hard Problems, Platform

How The Work Went This Week

It’s Thursday, which in my week is the conclusion of the Deep Work sprint for the week, and time to sum up how things went.

The main goal this week was to vomitout a part of my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems'”.

Good news:

  1. I did vomitout the “Right Person” section.  It’s just a vomitout so far ( and therefore not ready for prime time), so I’m going to hold it back for the moment, but I did do it.
  2. I got a lot of good ideas about more general platform stuff, like how to work with an online group of followers that’s small.  The basic scheme is to always add value to the crewe even you can’t deliver much value from having a big network.  I think I can add value to people who follow me by doing some of the things I’ve done in the past that have invited engagement: talking about what I’m thinking about, talking deeply about PIM issues and PIM technologies, and generally trying to be interesting to my virtual committee here on line.

Things didn’t go as well in a couple of other areas:

  1. TED Talks.  I’m still not sure I understand how to use them as part of my work.  I think it’d be a kick to do a TED talk, and it might make a big difference to me, but it’s also a lot of effort and maybe that effort should just be poured into the book.
  2. Finish Althusser.  I made progress, but didn’t read much this week and didn’t finish “Lenin and Philosophy”.  I got bogged down in a sub-dither about whether or not I had to read Hegel, and progress forward ground to a halt.
  3. Finishing the Jungian shrink book “Finding Meaning…”.    I did finish it, but there was something very unsatisfying about this book.  Partly has to do with what I’ll call the repetitive vagueness of his prose.  Jung is a bit vague from time to time, but never repetitive and always interesting.  Serves me right for accepting a stand-in for the man himself.  I’m going to move forward by reading a couple of things of Jung’s: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, and a Modern Library collection, “The Basic Writings of CG Jung.”  I’ve read them before, so I may bag it if it seems like I’m not getting anything new out of the exercise.

So, a good week for the Work, a good first outing for the “blog every day” scheme.

Tomorrow’s blog is “Hack of the Week”, another (I hope!) regular feature of some cool tech- or Life- hack I think might be newsworthy and interesting.

Let me know what you liked or didn’t like, want more of or less of.

7 Hard Problems, Platform

Readings so far on “Why I’m the right person to write 7 Hard Things”

I started on this problem by reading:

  1. Books and articles on how to give a TED talk (and a tiny bit about why)
  2. Books and articles about building an online platform, particularly for a writer or “thought leader” (not my favorite phrase although it is exact).
  3. Articles about measuring my online platform

It was easy to come up with a fair amount of reading on both topics, but it was pretty low-grade ore.

I was looking for things that were thoughtful and told me stuff I didn’t already know.

One article stood out:

“How to Launch Your Digital Platform”, by Harvard Business Review.  An older article (2015?) but good advice, particularly further along in the article.  My online platform has seen better days (like when I was an investor), so I was quite interested in suggestions about how to manage small numbers of users.  The trick there, it seems, is to give them something of value even though they don’t experience the grand Network Effect.

Here’s a little schematic from the article which summarizes some of the interesting points.

Let me know if you’ve seen anything good on platforms, measurement, or TED.

7 Hard Problems, Lifehacking

Themes for work and learning, week of Oct 21

I’ve decided to reboot my “themes for study and learning” blogs, with a couple of twists:

  1. Weekly instead of Monthly.  I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with the monthly themes; they were too diffuse and too easy to put off.  A weekly rhythm is more actionable?
  2. The Theme is tied to my weekly main goal.

So this week the main goal is vomitout a section for my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems.”

Perhaps some context is in order.

I’ve decided to get serious this fall about a book project I’ve blogged about in the past: “7 Hard Problems”, a book about solving a bevy of difficult personal and societal problems — the contradiction between individual wealth and the common wealth, for example, or global vs. local.  You can read the one-pager if you like.

The first order of business was to finish the one-pager, which I did early in the summer.   This fall I’m trying to put together a book proposal.  I’ve got an outline and a fair amount of sample material, so it’s time to work on other sections of the book proposal.

I’ve put off working on what I call the braggables section of the proposal — how many followers I have, how peerless my insights are, why any publisher would be foolish to refuse me — because I have a hard time bragging about myself, but it is time to put it off no longer.

So I’m starting this week with an easier braggable section, something about why I’m the right person to write this book.

That’s the work theme for the week.  I’m going to slog away at it Monday through Thursday.

Part of slogging away is reading some stuff about publicity, about self-promotion, and about platforms online and off-.  So I’ll be digging into the publishing/TED talk/platform/persona literature this week, starting with stuff about how to do TED talks and how they help the publicity effort.  If you have suggestions in this area, please comment.

In addition to working away at the theme, I’m continuing my reading for the book itself.  I’ve been reading Lenin and Philosophy (or, rather, re-reading it, since I read it many years ago under circumstances I explain in “7 Hard”).  There’s a handsome new edition out now with a generous preface by Frederic Jameson.  So that’s reading objective #2 for the week: finish Althusser.

Finally, I’m wrapping up a book I’ve been reading before bed, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life…” by James Hollis, a Jungian shrink.  I’ve been reading about a book a week on the topic of “what the hell to do with myself in ‘retirement'”, and picked this one because I’ve always had a soft spot for Jung and because it was recommended by another book I read in this area.  Hollis has taken much more than a week to finish, partly because his style is a little ponderous, but partly because it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep at the end of a day.

So that’s it.  This week, trying to set out why I’m the right person to write “7 Hard Problems”.

I’ll sum up how things went on Thursday.

 

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity

Antiquity 3: Reading “Rubicon”

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I’m almost done with Tom Holland’s “Rubicon”.  Close enough to the end — we are at the point of Caesar’s showy campaigns in Gaul and the collapse of his first Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus — to see how the stories are going to work out.

I know now how to a break the spirit of a citizen of the Roman Republic: pour shit on his head.  Or, more to the point, exile him from Rome.  The latter was apparently enough to break the spirit of Cicero, who goes from “pretty square guy” to “mouthpiece for Pompey and Caesar” after just a bit of exile.

(I’m being flip.  How would any of us react to exile, forced separation from our families, the country that gave us life and defines us, etc. etc.?  Not well.)

But a lot of the work of destroying the Roman Republic wasn’t done by threats or blows or exile alone but by the ceaseless slow work of corruption.  Holland tells us the same story a dozen times: a member of the Roman Senate is scared by threats and then seduced by a lucrative governorship or proconsul stint.  He forgets his civic virtues (or, worse, re-imagines his civic virtues to consist of the very things he is doing to betray them).

A pretty potent parable.  Makes me think our Republic doesn’t have much of a chance.

 

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity

Antiquity 2: The Death of the Roman Republic

(Lest anyone think I’m being systematic here, I’m not.  I jumped to the “Death of the Roman Republic” because, of the twenty books I have on deck to read (about antiquity and other topics) “Rubicon” called out to me to be read.)

So it is not hard to find parallels between the collapse of the Roman Republic in 27 BC and the potential collapse of the American Republic in the era of Trump.

What a book like “Rubicon” (by Tom Holland) does is to frame the establishment of the Roman Empire (which is what happened in 27) with:

  1. The story of the ~100 years which preceded 27
  2. Some themes which the author posits about the Roman Republic — the tension between competitiveness and civic-mindedness, for example — which made the Romans unable to save their democracy
  3. The massive corruption ensuing from the colonies and their corrosive effect on Roman politics and elites.

Americans, too, have been corrupted by our Empire, although our corruption takes a different form than the “loot and slaves” of the Romans.  We are probably in graver danger from the power of super-national corporations that can move capital and jobs rapidly from less complaisant geographies of the world to more complaisant ones.

Just about halfway through “Rubicon”, to be followed by Mary Beard’s SPQR and then — if it doesn’t put me to sleep — “The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire”, by M. Rostovtzeff.  If you know some better sources, please let me know.

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity, Modern European Thought

Antiquity 1: The End of the Middle Ages

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I cleverly avoided studying “Western Civ” in both high school and college.  A pity, because, although I had studied it in grade school — and thought a grade-school course was enough — it wasn’t.  It would have behooved me to have a go at either Exeter or Harvard, where I would have gotten a world-class exposure.

Instead I’m coming back to it late(r) in life, now in my sixties, and having to play catch-up.  The downside of doing so is that I may not have enough time.  The upside is that I’m a better steward of my time and more in touch with my purposes.

My purpose is 1) to get a hold on how “the modern era” (the era of science, humanism, liberal democracy) arose out of the seemingly unpromising Middle Ages and 2) to figure out and savor exactly what was stunning about what they thought back in antiquity.

(I’m aware that “the Middle Ages” is a catch-all term for 1000 years of history — from, say, the Fall of Rome to 1500 — of wildly varying character.  That topic is also grist for the mill: you see why I’m worried about time?)

So, I’ve read “The Swerve”, by Stephen Greenblatt, and I’m in the midst of “Rubicon”, by Tom Holland and “The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox”, by Stephen Jay Gould (posthumous).

Gould makes the case that the transition from “the Middle Ages” to “the Scientific Revolution” was not a simple struggle between science and dogma but rather a two-step process (at least!), consisting of:

  1. Humanism in revolt against Dogma: in this phase the humanists looked to “Antiquity” (Greece and Rome) for new wisdom that had been forgotten/suppressed by the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christendom.  Both Greenblatt and Gould make the case that there was both forgetting and suppressing.
  2. Science in revolt against Humanism: Humanism, the reverence from the Ancient, became a dogma in its own right, and science-oriented thinkers in Europe (and, in time, America) touted the virtue of direct observation over reverence for the past.

Greenblatt provides lots of supporting detail which seems to support this point of view.  He is, however, after a different quarry: he wants to emphasize:

  1. What a near thing it was that we ever recovered Lucretius’ Epicurean masterpiece “On the Nature of Things”
  2. How vile the Christianity of the 1500’s was
  3. What had to happen in order for the science-based order to come into being.

These to me represent a more complicated point of view than I’ve been accustomed to, but for historians I’m sure it’s a glib oversimplification.  At any rate, that’s what some reviewers said per the Wikipedia article on Greenblatt’s book.  I’ll take it as my working theory for the time being.

So: 1) there is Truth beyond The Church and 2) Seek Truth from skeptical theories about Nature.

I want to read Lucretius now, of course, but first I want to find out more about Rome (and then probably about Greece).

7 Hard Problems

Themes for study and learning in February

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve done this!  I had no idea, and although, of course, the other stuff I’ve been doing has been boundlessly important, I’m sorry to have let this one go.

So, themes for study in February:

  1. Future of Work.  This is robots, guaranteed annual income, future of labor, AI, etc.
  2. Antiquity.  I’m interested in the glory that was Greece (and Rome :-)), why it got hammered, and what we can learn about classicism, faith, science, curiosity, paganism, etc.
  3. Morning Routines.  I’m trying (yet again) to “Kaizen” my morning routine, so I’ll be looking at stuff like Tim Ferris’ “Tools of Titans”, Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals”, etc.