You know the typical mantras:  “Look to the horizon.  Don’t let anything stand in your way.  Be the little engine that could.  Get up and go. Get those blues and doubts right outta your head.”

What do they all imply?  All you need is positive, positive, and more positive.

They’re wrong.

No, I’m not Scrooge.  No, “bah, humbug” here.  I’m here to make your learning and performance more effective.  Hyper-positivity can harm your learning, your success, and your judgment, and here is how.

Let’s start with the sunny side mafia’s approach:  Any hole in your life, question, grief, or frustration keeps you down.  Simply let go of these and replace them (overwhelm them really) with positivity, more energy, more spunk, more effort, more intervention…

…til you succeed or crash and wonder if any of this is worth it.

Not smart.

Bright-siding

Journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich calls this popular and sometimes dangerous myth “bright-siding.”  You see it everywhere—in schools, churches, and medicine.

“Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where… the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current [ongoing] economic crisis.”

Especially if you try the extreme forms of “bright-siding”, I will bet that you are among a vast majority of people who are either crashing or muddling along, who feel embarrassed that this “sure-fire” attitude approach is not working and who tell almost no one about their failures and struggles.

The reason for the silence is simple.  In this approach, if your positivity doesn’t work, there is something wrong with you.  You weren’t positive enough.  You didn’t really believe.  You weren’t positive in the right way.  Or maybe you were just plain stupid or disabled or “not right for this.” Not only “what you were doing” was a failure, but “you” were a failure.  Who is going to broadcast that?

Well, you are not inadequate, stupid, disabled, or wrong.  You are misinformed. Hyper-positivity prevents you from engaging the very things you need to learn in order to succeed—the things that aren’t working.  It’s like a drug you take in higher and higher doses to mask the symptoms of some problem while failing to address the underlying root.

If you get in a war between your will and underlying reality, reality will win.  The secret is not to cover over uncomfortable realities with happiness juice, but in the opposite—opening up those uncomfortable realities, frustrations, and needs, to see where they come from and see what makes them tick.  In fact, those struggles can even become opportunities.

Okay, how are we going to turn struggles into opportunities?

How does the alternative work?

I will regress for just a second and admit that relentless positivity is strongly preferable to relentless negativity.  But there is a much better option than “cynical do-nothing” or “chirpy optimist”.

How about a balanced, clear-eyed approach, concentrating not so much on your sunny attitude, but what you are doing and whether it’s working?  Learning, success, and judgment are skills.  They are not just events that happen.  They involve you, but are not solely determined by you. Yes, they do take self-knowledge, character, and commitment, what Ehrenreich calls, “existential clarity and courage.”

This alternative approach, we’ll call it “committed experimentation” accepts the value of frustration and failure in pointing the way to success.  Secondly committed experimentation evaluates 1) Effectiveness, 2) Sustainability, and 3) Value, as a way to optimize business development.

I will first show the value of frustration to developing a successful business.  Secondly, I will use the example of the U.S. housing market and my own experience in developing an online business to demonstrate how to evaluate effectiveness, sustainability, and value as skills.

The first is part is easy.  Look into any list of successful entrepreneurs, and you will find abundant examples of those who took a frustration, turned it around, and converted it into a source of profit or improvement of the world.

“At his fist startup, an e-commerce operation, Ben Milne got ‘really really pissed off about interchange fees.’ So he did something about it by starting Dwolla, a cheap way to send or receive cash online or through your phone. The company now processes between $30 and $50 million per month in transactions.” (Inc.com, “Meet the 30 under 30: Class of 2012”)

The other two elements that often drive innovation and successful entrepreneurialism are personal interest and public need.  Really, two out of three key elements to developing a successful product or service are based on some lack that you fill, a negative that you turn into a positive.

So… if you have a driving passion, experience a frustration others share, or can identify an unmet public need, you are qualified to attempt a business and to learn the skills of committed experimentation.

Committed experimentation

Effectiveness

Effectiveness means making your actions count to their maximum.  It also means ensuring that the different parts of your life and business work together well.  If you have a product launch with a malfunctioning payment button, obviously you are not being effective.

If you were to buy a house, effectiveness would be demonstrated by due diligence.  Sure, a particular house may be your “dream home,” but double checking for hidden clauses, hidden flaws, financing terms, etc., will help ensure your home is livable and within your means after the emotional rush fades.

Effectiveness would also mean that you make a clear comparison between buying and renting and decide which is a better choice depending upon your life goals and economic fundamentals (not your “positivity”).

For my budding online business, Citizen Zeus, being effective means ensuring that the opt-in box is working for email subscribers, that my pages are functioning, that my business plans and descriptions make sense, that my posts are compellingly written and addressing some kind of need in a language that the audience can relate to.

Effectiveness also means continually developing. I get feedback from my mentor, Tea, and from others, and I adjust to make my product, plan, and execution more on-target.

A lot of people list “time management” as the prime barrier to their effectiveness, but I suspect that time management is a symptom of the underlying “design management” problem.  When you have something broad-ranging and complex as an online business, you need to do more than plot out your time.  You need to design it, which is hard when you are starting out even if you have a checklist.

In order to design effectively you need to have sustainability and value in mind…

Sustainability

Where is your emotional meltdown point?  For me it’s pretty low when it comes to technical details (though I am getting better as I learn).  I really enjoy writing, creating, and analyzing, and I have little tolerance for one snag after another in getting a working website going.  I have slightly more patience for marketing experimentation and development, and I have a very high capacity and set-point for the demands of engaging clients and providing a direct service of high value.

Sustainable for me means spending more time on the content side of the business.  As a solopreneur, pride and practicality dictate that I learn the working basics of website administration and marketing and develop these skills.  But that is not where the real value lies in terms of what I offer others.  Nor is it my strength.

Sustainability also means income.  If I want to develop a decent income I need to spend the greatest time in where I provide value for others and leverage that value into getting greater help in those aspects of my business that do not produce value for others.

Doing a self-inventory and identifying where you do and do not provide value for others might make sense in developing a sustainable business.  You have to be rigorously honest.   If you are not providing enough value, you have to change something up.  Your business is not sustainable.

Let’s use the housing market example again.  It should have been easy to hone in on just a few simple indicators to confirm that housing prices were completely  unsustainable.  1) People were being issued loans for 10x their salaries instead of 3x, 2) income was flat or falling in real dollars for over a decade, 3) people were being given no-money down loans (meaning they had no real collateral), 4) housing prices had jumped percentage-wise way above even previous bubbles, 5) buying a house cost 3x per month more than what it cost to rent the same house.

And yet most people said, “Housing can only go up.”  There is that relentless hyper-positivity again getting people into serious trouble by encouraging them to confuse “dream” with sheer, irrational “fantasy.”  Ultimately, for a housing market or a business to be fundamentally sustainable, it has to align with a demanding (but character-building) process more than a warm-fuzzy thought.

Value

Value in business is relative.  Value is basically what you are willing to pay. If I asked everyone interested in starting an online business or simply a website, “How much would you be willing to pay to have an attractive, user-friendly, smoothly functioning website,” I would get vastly different answers, depending upon the person, their resources, and their intention.

A functioning website has a very high value to me.  I do the concept, design, and layout (because I am the one conceiving of the business), and I do what I can to activate the framework and template/theme, understand how to manage a dashboard, and work on details, etc.

I make a 100-200 dollars/hour in my consulting, so my stubbornness in trying to work up my email subscriber box myself, did not make sense from a value standpoint.  Tim Gary from Mindcue was able to get it formatted and functioning and upload a whole host of security features in an hour, which costs me a reasonable $75. This was well worth it:  My frustration threshold on hashing out details is low, and my price ceiling for my time is fairly high.

For most people (myself included), maximum value lies somewhere in the middle between having someone do everything for you, and doing it all yourself. You need to draw that scale out and see where you sit on it, and make decisions accordingly.

You can buy a “fully loaded” new house in the suburbs (and pay a lot for it), you could build one from scratch with your own hands, or you could find one with “good bones” in a good location that may require a little fixing up but will be in quality surroundings and have good resale value.

You could pay Jon Morrow to get you 10,000 email subscribers for your website for $10,000 dollars, you could hustle for every subscriber yourself using only free information products, or you could buy the best low-cost guides or take a couple of reasonably prices e-courses and learn how to do it.

Conclusion

There is a relationship between positivity and production.  If you generally get up from bed and feel good about yourself and your day, if you are able to affirm your path, embrace your work, and develop healthy relationships, you will do a lot better than the neighborhood sourpuss.  I can pretty much guarantee it.

The right frame of mind does matter.  However, the right frame of action probably matters more.  There are a lot of well-intended projects that go nowhere.

Getting into the right frame of mind and action is largely an individual thing.  There aren’t good blanket formulas.  For instance, I find it effective to go on a cathartic rant about how screwed up everything is as a way to get it out of my system and settle my mind on what needs to be done in place of a screwed up system.

I’ll spout off on the completely irrational and unaccountable nature of the global economy or swear under my breath at the lack of consistency and connectivity in different internet applications.  Then I get to work.

What is it that gets you best to the core of what you do?  What kinds of strategies do you use to get there?  How do you improve your effectiveness, sustainability, and value?  Leave a comment to share with the community.

 

“The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts.  Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt… My wish would be to tell, not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them as they are.” – Alan Watts, The Book, p. 19-20

This is an essay about what learning can be, not what it “should” or “ought” be.  I have been in education reform for over 20 years, and I can say with some authority that forcing education to change has been spectacularly unsuccessful.

If examined carefully, successful social change in other areas, like social and economic justice, happened more as a result of “pull” (not push) by conscience-driven groups or cultural creatives who demonstrated a different way and refused to abide by conventional rules.

Likewise, the success of present and future learning relies almost wholly on the pull of creative engagement, the “can” do of conviction, invention, and idealism meeting the problem-solving spirit.

The problem with “should” is simply this: “Should” has its roots in systems of thinking that have failed significantly enough on the practical level for us to distrust its assumptions on the concept and value level.

… And assumptions mean everything to success.

‘Grid’ Knowledge and ‘Spaghetti’ Knowledge

 “You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed.  The basic things is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.” – Alan Watts, The Book, p. 20.

The ego in learning and life is a box among other boxes.  Knowledge created from an ego framework, what I call “grid” knowledge, can only add and rearrange boxes, it cannot transform its fundamental assumptions and therefore the nature of learning.

That is why reform continually fails.  What looks different is essentially a variation on a failed assumption theme.  “The learning code” has remained the same.

It is time to transform the learning code and therefore the learning possibilities that spring from the learning code.  We need to follow learning back to its DNA, the malleable primal pallet of what is possible to learn, and find new ways to express our learning genes.

Basically it boils down to this, we are re-emerging into an organic, integrated, oral “spaghetti” knowledge world, but we still have the habits of a mechanistic/industrial, discrete, linear “grid” knowledge world.

“Grid” knowledge rests on resisting change and establishing order, “stability,” and authority through accepting and imposing certain forms of knowledge as the foundation of legitimate thought.  Then it “builds” subsequent knowledge from that.  Grid knowledge says, “Been there, done that… Now let’s build more on it.”

The inductive “spaghetti” knowledge world is actually quite a bit like our own brains.  Everything is interconnected.  Memory and thought is held in changeable, flexible, orientations and relationships that grow and reorient in tune with our experience.  Spaghetti knowledge is provisional, always experimenting and looking for more coherent and effective ways to organize itself over the lifespan.

In ways we need both “spaghetti” and “grid” knowledge, as a way to buffer possible excesses, too much change or too much stasis.

Here is the problem though:  We are collectively addicted to grid knowledge.  We’ve let it take over and run our lives for us, and now it is literally and figuratively killing us.

Just look at societies, bureaucracies, and institutions—departments, rules, standards, roles, classes, castes, prejudices, stereotypes, hierarchies, specialties.  So much is assumed and automated for the purposes of an almost mindless industrial-like production.

“More and more, faster, better.”  It has gotten so absurd that we have hyper-competitive kindergarten selection processes for elite schools in the U.S. and globally.

The evolution of the world into greater complexity and interconnectedness is outstripping the ability of our individual and collective egos to manage.  So ego is doubling down by trying harder, imposing harder, and asserting ever more strongly maladaptive values, methods, and ways.

Reform will not do the trick.  We need transformation.

How Might We Learn to Transform?

What are the “grid” assumptions we must challenge, and what might the “spaghetti” knowledge alternatives look like?

The overarching “grid” assumption is one of separate beings whose benefits are maximized through material attainment and serving either the self or some exterior authority.  It is a philosophy of zero-sum, win-lose, either-or finiteness.  Hence “the grid” sees competition as a kind of natural law.

The overarching “spaghetti” assumption is one of being intertwined, what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.”  Beings either win together or lose together depending upon their ability to optimize their connections in an aware way.  This mentality tends to focus on non-material benefits like close community and creative opportunity and sees collaboration as the facilitator.

Here, to consider in broad terms, are some of the past failed assumptions and new possibilities to accelerate creative learning transformation beyond conventional education, economy, community, politics, and spirituality.

Education: Grid: Education is for training (especially for a job), reproducing and expanding old knowledge and structures.  Assessment is about graded answers to someone else’s questions.  Problem: Now we have colleges graduating too many job applicants, and students who can’t think for themselves and don’t know how to create their own paths. Spaghetti: Maybe schools could be community-based and embedded in the world, where learners can initiate engagement and collaboration on actual problems and opportunities they experience in their community and within themselves.

Economy: Grid: Enlightened self-interest: “Everyone works for themselves and their families and it will all work out.”  Acquisition drives achievement and advancement.  Problem: We are running out of natural resources and fewer and fewer powerful individuals are stacking the economic deck in their favor. Spaghetti: Local economies, globally-linked, can produce non-material and material benefits that benefit the community and can be exchanged with other communities.  Contribution becomes more important than achievement.

Community: Grid: Community is mostly a container for the family, a place where people of similar background and interests can live together separately, so each is in his or her proper place.  Problem: We have unprecedented mixing, interethnic and cultural marriages, job mobility, social media, and so on making “community” no longer a box or space but a kind of market bazaar.  Spaghetti: Community can be a potential place for fulfilling friendship and cultural exchange.

Politics: Grid: People are elected to represent the “interests” of their constituents. Through haggling and maneuvering some kind of compromise is worked out where all sacrifice some and benefit some.  Problem: This simply does not describe current politics.  Extreme elements are pulling parties away from acknowledgement of the values of others.  Compromise is being replaced by gridlock all over the world.  Spaghetti:  Grass-roots coalitions can be formed across dividing line over areas of broad agreement.  Different approaches can be tried, for instance, to reduce unwanted pregnancy, rather than focusing on the contentious after-the-fact issue of abortion.

Spirituality: Grid: Everyone has their own religion and denomination or can choose “none of the above”.  Freedom to worship is institutional in nature.  Problem: Churches are losing membership in droves.  Young people do not agree with the hyper-engaged bigotry (against gay people, immigrant, poor, black) evident in some churches, and they are bored by the ritualistic format of others.   There appears to be no effective place for moral formation and spiritual leadership that is current with the needs of emerging generations.  Spaghetti: As shown within the huge explosion of people that define themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” opportunities are arising to deinstitutionalize religious experience and create actual, active communities of worship tied to shared spiritual conviction and informed (but not dictated) by tradition.

Conclusion

This list or essay is not complete.  It is provisional and quite broad at this point.  It is suggestive.  This essay is meant to promote consideration and engagement with new premises, directions, and experiments in learning applied to all areas and sectors of life. We are building our plane as we are flying and we will be experiencing in real time what it means to be connected and knowing.

In other words, we will be the fork and the spaghetti.

Now, I need you to continue the conversation.  Sign up on Citizen Zeus and send me an email at: zeus@citizenzeus.com to contribute your own insights and questions.  Which of these areas resonates most with you?  Which areas have I missed?  What insights came to you as you read?

It seems like such a simple question, “Who are you?”  Yet you’ve almost certainly been taught to answer it wrong.  School, family, community, and nation tell you, “You are what you should be.”

You are told that you are your role, your function for others, your bottom line, your possessions.  You are taught that you are everything but that massively inconvenient, gnawing “must” that emerges from your deepest intuitions.

Erika Napoletano outed this dirty little contradiction in a July 28, 2012 RiffRaft event in Sacramento.  This is backwards she asserted.  You are what you “must” be not what you “should” be. You are that ache you cannot escape in your quietest moment.  You are that thing you are trying to cover with a manic haze of drama, activity, and procrastination.

With a combination of gratefulness, vulnerability, and strip-it-to-the-bone savvy, the inspiring redhead, went on to include a whole host of personal examples evoking the triumphs and tragedies that befall those willing to commit to their must.

This turned out to be not only an engaging take on personal authenticity, but a valuable catalyst for decision-making as well.  Returning to and committing to your must, centers you and clarifies what you may best offer others.  When building the foundation of your website, your “must” may be the key issue.

“This could be your first blog post,” offered Tea Silvestre, aka The Word Chef. I had agreed to serve as curricular advisor to Prosperity’s Kitchen, and she was helping me build a rock solid website around my “must.”

I had been scattered, trying to decide which of my diverse interests should guide my website:  I have joy and experience around accelerated, creative, non-conventional education.  I have an abiding interest in mystic spirituality.   I have also developed a sizable web following with guest posts on alternative approaches to the present economy.

What “should” I do?  The conventional path would have been to leverage name recognition and exposure from my economics readership into marketing a full-scale book on the topic. But does this drive me long term?

Ultimately, my economics articles are about learning to change something that doesn’t work and creating effective alternatives.  One way I do this is by exposing the inner workings of corrupted economics, and presenting better, more promising and fulfilling community-connected directions.

What “must” I do? Tea Silvestre helped me understand that each of my interests are connected with transformative new ways to learn, based upon a different philosophy, including different purposes, different methods, which serve different people and environments.  Once I embrace my “must,” I am able to use my uniqueness as a strength to serve other unique learners cast aside by generic social conventions.

Aha. So “new learning” is what drives me. I have my kernel. Now I have to crack it open.

I have agreed to walk through Tea’s “Find Your Secret Sauce” sequence, come up with goals, and develop questions as an adaptive experiment practicing my own creative learning principles.  Guided by Tea’s know-how and Secret Sauce course I will be able to articulate and connect my philosophy, purposes, methods, audiences, and webpage design.

It is not always the easiest process, identifying what you “must” be, committing to it, and offering it to the world, but what other choice do you have?  You could squelch yourself, be what others expect you to be, and get screwed in the end with a layoff, a pay cut, an unfunded pension, or just plain, good ole death.

There’s never been a better time to be who you are.  When society loses its commitments to you, then you have to step up.  You must commit to you.

So the lesson is clear: Quit trying to be a good little boy or girl, dammit.  Daddy ain’t delivering. Pin down your bliss, commit to its implementation, and get down to business.

Are you waiting for permission, or some expert to set you straight before you embrace your mission?  What stories do you have, what fears, what bumps in the road have you experienced in trying to strike off on your own?  What people have helped you?

The ground is moving underneath online business and social media.  If you want to be relevant in a few years, listen up!

We all know how fast technologies can develop, but few people are paying attention to the meta trends in human growth, that which technology serves.  Answer correctly where human growth is going and you can get a very good idea what will fulfill people’s needs a few years, or even months, down the line.

So where are things going and how can online businesses stay one step ahead of the game?

Right now, niche marketing is all the rage.  Businesses accustomed to mass selling are being tuned out by a savvier younger generations wanting experiences and products tailored to their tastes. So businesses are seeking web wunderkinds like Erika Napoletano, Scott Stratten, and Chris Brogan to guide them on how to bring the “human touch,” establish “trust,” and provide a product that can appeal to a core group of committed consumers.

Many of these successful webpreneurs started in early to mid-2000’s, learned the ropes, and got a name as social media was taking off and revenues were soaring.  Now a flood of aspiring entrepreneurs are following, just as expected revenue growth from internet publishing and broadcasting is expected to sharply decline (like Facebook’s stock price).

Is this all a bubble?  Where lies the future of the web?  In one word: Learning.  The driving force in commerce and conversation on the internet is moving from mass selling to niche marketing to interactive learning.

You have to be out in front of the human wave to catch it.  Otherwise services or products you offer turn obsolete.  Let’s demonstrate how learning as an “experience product” grows naturally from the trends we see now.

The Past (Mass Selling– The era of the “big box brand”): Once businesses could get you to pay big bucks to advertise their product.  Coca-Cola and Benetton shirts were not cheap, but they helped you become popular.  “Cool conformity” was the mantra.  Mass consumption was the rule.  Doubts about your identity?  Corporations could sell you the answer and help you fit in.  They called the shots.  You let them choose for you.

The Present (Niche Marketing– The era of the “indie brand”): Boom, technology exploded and became “the thing” along with the nerds that understood technology.   The sexy geek came of age, along with post-modern irony, hipsterism, alternative music, and cultural experimentation.  Now folks cherish “awesome individuality” and customized consumption.  “I choose what works for me to show my distinctness, not to fit in.”

The Future (Interactive Learning– The era of “everyone is a brand”): Business is about exchange, usually between producer and consumer.  What, however, would happen if everyone starts to produce?  What if “sales” rested upon helping others produce and share better? Call the new motto “ecstatic sharing.”  Value is moving toward richer and richer exchange.

The evolution of marketing is the evolution of who tells the story.  Once it was the big, top-down guys who told the story and we consumed their story.  Now it is bloggers who best voice what is on our minds and in our hearts.  We half-live our stories by connecting to their authentic style, creativity, and ballsiness.  Tomorrow, each of us will directly create and share our own stories.

The future of business is in helping others tell their story, find and apply their talents, and learn new things in increasingly accelerated, customized, simple, and systematic ways.  In short, the future belongs to those who can help others on their human quest.  When everyone has something to offer, those that command the market are those that best help others to develop what they offer  .

 

So we are kicking off The Zeus Experiment. (There, see that, I already inserted a hyperlink with html code… baby steps, baby steps.) I am interested in creating not only an attractive, manageable site, but a real online business helping others transform their lives by transforming the way they learn.  And I am willing to walk my talk. I will be the public proverbial guinea pig in transfoming my own learning in unfamiliar territory. From the initial intro to The Zeus Experiment:

Like many of you trying to develop a web business, I’m smart and motivated, but completely bewildered by the flood of options out there. What can I really do with all the random apps, free content, and webinars thrown at me online all day long?

(Okay, don’t be too impressed with the above text box.  I swiped the html code and just inserted my quote.  But fake it until you make it right?)

I am comfortable with using social media on the front end, but much less versed on how to design, produce, and manage the technical and business strategy and layouts on the back end.   It’s a learned craft skill to assemble what you need, leave out what you don’t, and make progress.

I want a platform for my powerful content, a “product” place to showcase what I can do for others, and eventually an advice and  community forum.  You can’t do that very successfully without knowing how to manage a website and develop an email subscriber list.

I started doing this because I’ve written some very successful guest posts on new ways to understand debt and debt forgiveness. (This article had over 27,000 reads on one site alone).  I realized people are looking for new ways to learn about the economy… and education, and spirituality, and a host of other areas. Current approaches are simply not working.

But I didn’t have a way to channel this desire, because I did not have a website the could receive and focus this desire in such a way that I might serve it with my own abilities.

So now I am working with Tea Silvestre, aka The Word Chef (who also happens to be a “web wizard”) to develop an understanding of what I have to offer and how I can begin to link and develop lasting relationship with an audience to address their needs, make a living, and improve the world.

Wish me luck. This is going to be fun… and quite a ride.