Mark Sigal's Blog - The Network Garden

Crazy Wisdom as Rome Burns

There is a Buddhist axiom about Crazy Wisdom.  When you are standing on the edge and staring into the abyss, the pain, confusion and fear that surrounds you can actually be the catalyst for clarity and understanding to emerge.

Discipline and directness take the place of devil-may-care, willy-nilly-ness, and a new set of muscles manifest; Suddenly, you are able to ‘carve’ new paths and reach heights that heretofore were unattainable.

I believe that now is a time for Crazy Wisdom – when Rome is seemingly burning, when the stakes that we hold most dear seem most tenuous, and when the road ahead is cloudy and as confusing as it has ever been.

Time to develop a clear personal narrative of who you are, what your unfair advantages are, what you have to offer and what you require/are looking for in return.

Time to commit to practicing consistency, clarity and grace under pressure.

Time to concentrate, breath deep, relax and then faithfully walk through the fire to get to the other side.

(Side note: watching Obama and McCain the other night in the third debate was akin to viewing the yin-yang picture of consistency, clarity and grace under pressure, as contrasted by the NOT example. There is much worth emulating in Obama's deeply reasoned approach.)

Related Links:

1. Read Crazy Wisdom (the book): I have been a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism for ~15 years, and consider my virtual guru to be the late, great teacher, Chogyam Trungpa. This book is part of a series of books taken from seminars, and the structure is very powerful.  Each chapter starts with an explanation of the concept by Trungpa himself so you get the "official" explanation of the construct being covered. Then, in the next section you have questions (from the seminar audience) and answers (from Trungpa) on the concepts presented so you get another dimension of understanding. And of course, as the reader, you make your own analysis. I have found such an approach to be a great way to triangulate on informationally rich concepts. Be forewarned, though. These are serious, conceptually dense readings that take dedication, concentration and a 'one chapter at a time' mental investment to meaningfully get through.
2. Hold a Picture in your Pocket:  Cognitive dissonance and manifesting change.
3. On Intellectual Honesty:  See things as they really are; act on that knowledge.
4. On Life as Art Poetic Truths & Getting Rich: Read the poem at the bottom of the post - it's a classic from the book referenced in the post.

Staring into the Abyss: What Really Matters

There is a Buddhist axiom about Crazy Wisdom. Sometimes from standing on the edge and staring into the abyss, there is a moment of clarity and understanding.

From this place, catharsis can occur, new muscles can flex and the bearer can find themselves able to carve wholly new paths that heretofore were sight unseen.

What brings me to this sensibility are two articles.  One, a post written by my friend, Om Malik (of GigaOM), codifying lessons learned in the past 90 days since his heart attack. 

The other, a recent article by Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is dying of pancreatic cancer.  The article summarizes his ‘final lecture’ about what really matters in life.

Hopefully, none of us will have to find ourselves on such a finite dead-end road before we get clarity on what matters to us most in life; but, with that perspective in mind, put yourself in Randy’s shoes for a moment, and consider what HE considers the indispensable truths of life. 

(The video from the lecture is below this summary, and a link to the full article is HERE.)

Always Have Fun
I came to an early realization. Each of us must make a decision, best captured in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh characters. Am I a fun-loving Tigger or a sad-sack Eeyore? It’s clear where I stand.

Dream Big
Give yourself permission to dream. Fuel your kids’ dreams too. Once in a while, that might even mean letting them stay up past their bedtimes.

Ask for What You Want
Ask. More often than you’d suspect, the answer you’ll get is, “Sure.”

Dare To Take a Risk
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted. And it can be the most valuable thing you have to offer.

Look for the Best In Everybody
I got this advice from Jon Snoddy, my hero at Disney Imagineering. “If you wait long enough,” he said, “people will surprise and impress you.” When you’re frustrated with people, when you’re angry, it may be because you haven’t given them enough time. Jon warned that this took great patience, even years. “In the end,” he said, “people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting. It will come out.”

Make Time for What Matters
Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.

Let Kids Be Themselves
My job is to help my kids foster a joy for life and develop the tools to fulfill their own wishes. My wishes for them are very exact and, given that I won’t be there, I want to be clear: Kids, don’t try to figure out what I wanted you to become. I want you to become what you want to become. And I want you to feel as if I am there with you, whatever path you choose.

UPDATE (July 25, 2008): Randy Pausch passed away today.  Say a prayer for his family, and hope that he is in a better place.

Demonstration Logic

My Bikram yoga teacher recently said something worth noodling on as she was giving guidance on a yoga pose. 

She said that we should treat every pose as if we are giving a demonstration.

The point here is not to show off, be a phony, assert superiority or any such drama but rather, to practice what you preach with specificity, zeal and precision. 

This also recognizes the existence of group energy and how by striving to perform at a high level, you encourage others to do the same.

It hearkens me back to a great article that I once read about Ron Popeil of Ronco.  This is a guy that has built a number of products that have become part of our culture, in the process generating billions of dollars of sales. 

Part of his 'unfair advantage' is that he has always treated product MARKETING and product DEVELOPMENT as part of the same animal such that when it gets to the point of the actual infomercial, both the STEAK and the SIZZLE portions of the demonstration are synchronized from product to demo and back.

Can you think of any areas where there might be goodness if you embraced demonstration mindset?

The Internet is a blind five-year-old

A friend of mine specializes in the black art known as search engine optimization (SEO), as well as its sibling, search engine marketing (SEM).  He has a great analog for thinking about search engines and Internet marketing that I will call the “blind five-year-old” axiom.

Basically, he equates search engines to blind five-year-olds, which is to say that you need to tell them 3-4 times what you want them to do using simple, distinct, consistent terms, and you need to recognize that because they are blind, they don’t care about pictures.

More to the point, since the goodness of optimizing yourself for the blind five-year-old that is the search engine results in “free” organic search returns (versus “paid” keyword search returns via search engine marketing campaigns), unless you have an unlimited marketing budget, in many respects your primary audience is the search engine – not your human end consumer - since SEO is the cheapest lead generation strategy available to you online. 

This reality heavily instructs the type of content that you have on your web site, how information bits are structured and presented there, and equally important, your viral marketing efforts.

It is admittedly paradoxical to refer to a search engine as a ‘primary audience’ when ostensibly one of the greatest virtues of the Internet is about empowering the individual and niche interests via long tail, narrowcasting, one-to-one marketing, social networking building and wisdom-of-crowds methodologies. 

The ‘paradox’ topic as well as the best practices and outcome goals for SEO/SEM is for a different post, however.

This post is focused on the metaphor of the blind five-year-old and how embracing it changes the definition of the situation in thinking about your personal and/or professional communications and messaging imperatives.

What brought me home to this point was a book that I am reading right now called, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” 

The book posits that sticky concepts are ones that are simple to the point of being stripped to their very core without being reduced to meaningless sound bite. 

Put another way, they do not confuse the tail with the dog or needlessly get sidetracked in describing the tail, other dog parts or dog-ness.

They rigorously focus on finding the ‘lead,’ or first sentence, that compels you to pay attention to the proverbial dog and more importantly, respond accordingly.

How do they do this? Beyond simplicity, they present something unexpected to the audience with a narrative that is concrete, delivered from credible sources, imbued with emotional value and which can readily be packaged up and spread via story-telling vehicles.

Simple and logical in concept, but like any discipline takes clear outcome goals, lots of trial-and-error and attention to detail to make actually work.

I am admittedly pre-disposed to a book espousing such concepts, being a student of Memetics (see “Virus of the Mind”), Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of mavens, connectors and salespeople in “The Tipping Point” and the power of identifying/preserving the core in building companies that stand the test of time (see “Built to Last”).

But the book is an engaging read, and being a fan of trying to boil things down to their core essence, take a picture of them and keep them in my proverbial front pocket, I will submit that you should wear the blind five-year-old axiom for a bit, and focus on defining your lead – be it your life purpose, career goals or unfair advantage that you bring to planet earth – and test out your core message repeatedly with the the blind five-year-old in mind.

The definition of a great man

Chuck Klosterman, writing in the Page 2 section of ESPN.com, has written a really interesting read analyzing why Phil Jackson, he of the many basketball championships, took on the mess that is the Los Angeles Lakers these days. 

Fundamentally, Klosterman argues that in order to become a great man, Phil Jackson must finally taste failure.

As a student of both sports metaphors and the pattern recognition of history, I found this a compelling read.

Here is an excerpt:

• As such, historical figures are remembered for the things they accomplish and the victories they win -- if life were a movie, the collection of those achievements would comprise the plot. But people are always defined by their greatest failure. You learn very little about a man's character from his success; truth exists only within adversity. And adversity is what Jackson needs to define himself as A Great Man; without it, he's just a tall dude from Williston High School who won a lot of games with a lot of talent.

Check out the full article HERE.

Fear, doubt and local max

Seth Godin has a nice post called, "Understanding Local Max," that does a good job of capturing the inherent peaks and valleys one must traverse to achieve breakout success. 

His timing is ironic because I was working on a short post about an axiom that coincides directly with what he is talking about. The axiom is: never confuse fear with doubt.

Why?  Fear can be a natural response to negotiating a treacherous climb. Absence of healthy fear, leads to not being prepared, which unfortunately often leads to death.

Doubt, on the other hand, is a formal belief that there may not be light at the end of the tunnel.

One is all about preparation (preparing the mind to work through fear, readying yourself to successfully negotiate the path).

The other is all about pragmatism (seeing things as they really are).

Never confuse fear with doubt, or vice versa.

Brain in the Jar

One of the things that keeps me connected to life and always striving for purpose, meaning and achievement is the self reminder that I/we have a finite amount of time on the planet as flesh and blood, and that time, once lost, is irreplaceable.

That awareness, like a splash of crisp water, awakens me and challenges me to not waste life. 

It challenges me to be a better husband, a better father, a more humble son and a truer friend.

It makes me want to realize and rise above my professional goals as an entrepreneur, an active investor and, hokey though it may sound, an artisan who is driven by ideals and optimism to build substantive businesses that matter.

On some level, I am also driven by fear.  Of sustainable mediocrity.  Of wasting days or weeks, or months, or ever finding myself on a path that is a dead end, or worse, no path at all.

As a student of buddhism and yoga, I am also cognizant of avoiding the traps of spiritual materialism, akin to the lead character in Philip K. Dick's, "The Man in The High Castle," for I have had friends that, while brilliant and enlightened, were basically glass vessels, nothing more than a brain in a jar, pontificating, understanding all, yet doing little to seize that moment that is NOW. 

As someone said to me many years back and has proven prophetic and true: you can't know what you don't know, and there is no substitute for doing, so if you want to get into a space, starting doing "something" in it.

This is one of those statements that is "obvious" and easy to dismiss in a second of knee jerk, so I would encourage you to wear if for a day or two as an article of faith in an area of your life where you feel unrealized and uncertain how to cross the line from concept and thought to flesh and doing.

It is my own personal recipe for manifesting and becoming, and it has carried me through two discrete careers, seven different startups, compassion, humilty and I believe/hope, a balanced life.

Water dripping on a stone...

Seth Godin has written a really nice post called, "Open Big" that captures the paradox between our thin-slicing, instant analysis culture and the snowball effects that play out in the online world.   

Netting it out: the conversational and cross-pollination models playing out in the blogosphere right now are very much akin to water dripping on a stone.  If you have a thesis that drives you and you are willing to work that thesis with discipline, substance and passion, maybe not overnight but over time, gravity will become your friend. That has been my experience time and again. 

Thus, stealing an analogy from one of my favorite books, "Built to Last," strive to be a clock builder, not a clock watcher.

Four Realms of Discipline in a Standing Bow

For the past seven years, I have been a dedicated practitioner of Bikram Yoga.  This particular form of yoga is known as the "sweaty" yoga since the 90 minute class takes place in a 105 degree room.  The classes are physically and mentally demanding AND physically and mentally rewarding.  Opposite sides of the same coin. 

In the process, I have become not only more disciplined in my actions, but more persistently aware of the different realms that need to be managed in a given situation to accomplish my goals.

There are four realms which I am actively managing during every class, which also play out in real life.  They are: concentration, stamina, strength and flexibility.  In any given class, some, all or none of these attributes will working for me, requiring real-time adjustments.

Concentration refers to the ability to focus on the task at hand, casting out distractions and discursive thoughts.  When your heart is pounding a hundred miles an hour and your foot is ready to spasm on the single leg that you are standing, concentration is critical.

Stamina speaks to the ability to maintain a pose or series of poses for the duration without giving up or buckling.  Strength is the ability to provide the essential support needed to carry your weight in the first place.  Finally, flexibility is the wherewithal to extend, bend and/or contort into whatever shapes the pose requires.

Success in life and business are very much a by-product of working these realms in a disciplined fashion, knowing when an individual realm isn't working for you and making adjustments to compensate.

For example, as an entrepreneur there are times when I am surrounded by doubt, distractions and too many choices, and concentration is what provides the grounding to pursue the right path. 

Similarly, stamina is critical, for so much of success is predicated on staying the course and not giving up.  That said, at key points in the business, you must somehow find a way to pull yourself and your cohorts up the mountain, which takes a wellspring of strength.  And is there any question about the inter-linkage of flexibility and success as an entrepreneur?

Hold a Picture in Your Pocket

Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful psychological construct that works as follows: when your perceptions and behaviors are out of sync, either the perception has to change or you need to change your behavior.  Failure to do one or the other leads to angst and literal discomfort. 

As an example, consider the individual who talks about their need to lose weight while continuing to eat prodigious amounts of food.  From the moment the individual chooses to be cognizant that their actions (eating too much food) and perceptions (they are fat and need to loose weight) are dissonant, they will either need to change their diet or decide that maybe they aren’t so fat. 

This may seem paradoxical since we all know people who talk about changes they want to make in their lives, yet never seem to take the actions required to affect the change.  So why does cognitive dissonance not seem to work in these cases? 

The answer lies in maintaining continuous, discriminating awareness, or active cognition, of the changes you are trying to make.  Shining a light in terms of seeing things as they really are and taking a need to know when disconnects occur is the key delta between merely talking the talk and physically needing to walk the walk. 

The metaphor that I have for using cognitive dissonance to catalyze such personal growth and change is called, “Hold a Picture in Your Pocket.”  When you hold a picture in your pocket, you envision a picture that you are literally pulling out of your pocket all throughout the day that lists the primary areas of change that you are focused on working on.  By holding this picture and pulling it in front of you with regularity, your force cognition, which makes you aware of dissonances, which in turn creates discomfort, driving you to change the behavior.  Or, it forces you to acknowledge that you don’t really want to change.

I have used this approach for years and find it intuitive, easy to implement and very effective.  Give it a try with an area of your life where your desires and actions are out of whack.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

Read the full text of a truly excellent speech (by clicking HERE) on trusting karma, doing what you love and listening to your inner voice.  Three key excerpts (in his words -- not mine):

1. You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

2. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

3. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

"Become" by Becoming

Too often in life, we fall into the all or none syndrome.  In trying to find our purpose, achieve passion and maintain personal integrity we get stuck between doing “nothing” (while awaiting for some magical moment of clarity) and affirming the path that we happen to be on as our “destiny” -- irrespective of whether it actually is.

In this regard, life presents a paradox: Do you just start doing "something" on the premise that you will figure out the details in the end, or must you first begin with the end in mind, before setting forth on the path? 

The paradox is that the answer is "yes" -- you must simultaneously do "something" AND draw a "sketch" of the desired outcome to succeed in your goal.  Doing so even catalyzes a virtuous cycle that gets you there that much quicker. 

HERE'S WHY:

1. You can't know what you don't know: Sometimes, you just aren't sure what the "problem" is that you are solving.  In such instances, the best you can do is to cobble together a reasonable guess, and test the waters.  Central to this approach is accepting that the process is one of trial and error, where rapid refinement is the goal, akin to planting some seeds, seeing (discovering) what actually sprouts and amplifying the results in the next go around.

AND

2. There is just no substitute for actually doing: Actual experience renders all theories and contemplations insignificant.  You must jump in to experience the sensation of getting wet.

SO

3. If you want to get into a space, just start doing "something" in it: It is amazing and heartening how much is accomplished by taking those first steps.  Not only does it break the chicken/egg dilemma, but a lot of clarity is gained and momentum solves a lot of problems.

Mandala: There's Order and There's Chaos

I've got a philosophy derived from Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa that drives the way I live.

The philosophy can best be summed up as follows:

Phase One: Prepare the mind

1. Fearlessness: when you climb steep mountains, sometimes you get hurt. Nonetheless, you just have to keep climbing.
2. Optimism: because perception has a way of becoming reality.
3. Discipline: there is a concept of crazy wisdom, where the discernable method for confronting the insanity of life is to practice discriminating awareness, which is the essence of discipline.
4. Experience: for there is no substitute for actually DO-ing.

Phase Two: Build a path

1. Not "but"..."What if?"...Rather than finding imaginary roadblocks before getting on the road, begin with the end in mind and work backwards.
2. Idealism not cynicism: we've all been burned, disappointed and left at the altar. Nonetheless...
3. Aspirations: It is amazingly powerful when you actually declare what you aspire to in life versus just being wishy-washy and sitting on the fence. Serial entrepreneur Jim Clark once drew a distinction between chickens and pigs. One is engaged the other is fully committed.
4. Assertions: A VC friend suggested this to me and I have found it to be really effective. Come up with a set of extemporaneous statements of fact and the outcomes or accomplishments that will serve as their measuring stick. This exercise is a great level setter, a good clarity of thought driver and an effective internal bullshit barometer.
5. Externally communicate with consistency and clarity: Because you are not a brain in a jar, articulating your personal path is absolutely critical. People will either help you or get out of your way if they know exactly where you stand and what you are trying to accomplish.

When facing a fork in the road with respect to your path, try the following exercise:

• What am I good at (pick top 5)?
• What do I enjoy (pick top 5)?
• What do I want to accomplish in terms of personal outcomes (pick top 5)?
• Prioritize each list and then take the top two from each category and create a list of six items.
• Write three DIFFERENT scenarios in 1-3 paragraphs that spell out how you accomplished your path (doing what you are good at, what you enjoy, and getting to an outcome that you aspire to). The output will give you a pretty good sense of which forks will most like lead to your personal nirvana and what that nirvana looks like.

Phase Three: Create a straw man in your daily life

1. Be-See-Act: define your near term mandala* and carry it with you in your "front pocket" at all times. With that perspective in mind always be cognizant of the things you are doing to BE true to your self, SEE things as they really are and ACT on that knowledge.
2. Mental approach: Deity, Non-Duality, Bliss. To be a DEITY is to take full responsibility for living your life as the spiritual guide of your own existence.  To operate with NON-DUALITY is to interpret life as it really IS without relativity to other circumstances, emotions, ego, etc.  To act with BLISS is to view the road ahead of you as something fundamentally to be looked forward to, discovered and revealed. This requires a sort of crazy wisdom because when confronting unknown paths or direct challenges, keeping one's head and maintaining a bliss-filled perspective requires a conditioned mind.

* Definition: Mandala: The mandala is usually a symbolic representation which depicts the qualities of the Enlightened Mind in harmonious relationship with one another. A mandala may also be used to represent the path of spiritual development. In the West the term is also used to refer to the "personal world" in which one lives, the various elements of the mandala being the activities and interests in which one engages the most important being at the centre of the mandala, and the least important at the periphery. Depicting one's personal mandala in pictorial form can give one a good indication of the state of one's spiritual life.

The Miracle of Life: Presenting Gabriel Sigal

Time to update my profile.  Meet my new son and check out the photo album that shares the (short) story of his birth:

http://thenetworkgarden.com/photos/birth_of_gabriel

Bikram Yoga: Sweating in a 105 Degree Room

Over seven years ago, I began a discipline that has made me feel better physically and mentally than anything I’d previously done in my life.  Not only did this discipline, called Bikram Yoga, enable me to release the chronic aches and pains I’d spent years trying to ignore, but also it bestowed upon me a kind dexterity I couldn’t have previously even imagined ascertaining.  From this dexterity, has come a level of mental acuity that has empowered me to confront and overcome my fears, and pursue my life goals with the focus, strength and staying power needed to tackle any roadblocks. 

That being said, I must admit that when I was first invited to attend a Bikram Yoga class, images of people dressed in flowing robes meditating in a sleep-like state came to mind.  To be blunt, my “new age" detector went off.  To my surprise, while this yoga does indeed have calming, meditational qualities to it, there is nothing sleep-like about it.  In fact, in Bikram Yoga you are exercising what is known as “active mediation.”  In active meditation, your eyes are always open, and there are only two states your mind occupies: getting into and maintaining a physical pose, known as asana, and “not being in a pose,” known as savasana. 

A Bikram Yoga class consists of two sets each of 26 different poses which you orient your body into and out of — and broken into a standing series and a floor series —  over the course of 90 minutes (in a classroom setting with an instructor).  Many of the poses are incredibly challenging to get into, and, especially for a newcomer, exhausting to maintain for the duration of the pose.

The incredible beauty of the series is that each pose logically builds upon its predecessor, and all of the poses in the series are reflective upon one another, working up over the course of the series to three separate crescendo poses — the Half Moon, the Triangle, and the Camel, also known as the healer of the spine.  The entire series repairs, revitalizes and rejuvenates the heart, the lungs, the internal organs, the spine and all major bones and muscles, and as such, the order of the poses in a class never changes. 

Adding to the magnificence of the series is the addition of heat (the room is heated to 105 degrees) to exponentially increase the impact of the yoga.  People generally wear bathing suits, and are dripping wet by the end of class.  For the most part, drinking water is not even allowed during class. While on some level this may sound like perpetrating a hate crime against yourself, and indeed there are many times that “ego mind” is whining, “I’m tired, I’m sweating, I’m thirsty,” the truth of the matter is that within a few classes, your body dramatically adapts to the conditions.  Your flexibility, strength and stamina magnify, you start realizing the benefits of full lung capacity breathing, you begin to learn how to control your heartbeat and breathing rates, and out of necessity, the distractions of the outside world fade into the distance.

This is not meant to imply that it ever gets easy.  Some days are more challenging than others.  Some poses evoke more aches than others, but in the words of my yoga teacher, “I'm okay with that.”  Every class is both a tremendous life gift that you’re giving to yourself and a gentle reminder that nothing worth having in life is ever free.  Then again, it's just "practice," and my worst days in class are better than any days that I don’t show up.  That awareness has increased my level of humility and made me more compassionate not only to others but to myself as well. 

But, I think that the real secret of this yoga is that it has given me a mechanism that I can use for the rest of my life for creating virtuous cycles where form can flow from my thoughts, and vice-versa.  Enriched with that capability, I increasingly have the courage to hold a higher picture of myself, and the wherewithal to pursue my life path with incredible deliberateness, decisiveness, and directness.  And for that, I feel quite lucky.

There is not much that I am comfortable proselytizing about.  This is an exception.  For a directory of Bikram Yoga schools, click here.