Stay on Offense Climb Mountains

Attacking Adversity

Go Hiking But Have A Plan B

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As I write this I am wearing a leg brace. This last Tuesday I had knee surgery. Hiking starts in March and I think I should be good to go by then, but if for some reason I am not then I will need a Plan B.

If you can afford it get Stem Cell therapy or at least investigate before you do what I did. It is my understanding you can get Stem Cell therapy for about $6,000 a knee. Insurance does not pay for it so that was not an option for me.

No Hike. Then What?

If the result of this knee surgery means hiking is in my rear window it’s ok. I know I will be able to walk because I can do that even with the leg brace. But there is no way to tell at this point. My first option would be to do what I did when they closed the trails during the Pandemic shut down. Walk. A lot.

However, this experience got me thinking what if I could really barely walk or something else happened to me physically. I mean what could possibly happen physically to an almost eighty year old man? What would I do? Well, I play guitar so I would play guitar. I write. So I would write more. I like to read so I would read more. That would be my Plan B.

Trust and Belief

The thing is I don’t want to have to use Plan B. I want to hike starting March 2023. Lots of people say they are going to go with me up some of these mountains and I don’t want to disappoint them.

Recently, I heard a motivational speaker say that one of the important things you need when facing any adversity is trust and belief. Trust that it will all work out for the best and belief that it will. That is what I am counting on. But you don’t have to wait for me to get better. Go hiking!

Bookish Weapon Number Sixty-Eight

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Daniel H. Pink has written a book called, “The Power of Regret.” If you are like me, I bet you didn’t think there was anything good about regret. I think we are right if regret is isolated.

Pink argues that you can use regret to make your future and present life better. That made sense to me. Frank Sinatra acknowledged regret in “My Way,” He sang that he had a few, but they didn’t seem to bother him much. Maybe he knew what Pink has discovered.

Studies

For those of you who are data lovers, Pink has more than enough studies and experiments to satisfy you.

One I thought was particularly interesting had to do with Optimizers and Satisfiers. Researchers fund that people who maximized for everything were less happy and had significantly more depression that the ones that satisfied themselves. An optimizer had to have the very best choice. The satisfiers were just that. The maximizers had more sensitivity to regret.

Foundation Regrets

Pink tells us there are four primary types of regrets and the first one is foundation regret. These are major regrets. Not making good financial decisions. For example, not saving enough for retirement which is just overspending and under saving.

It could be in the realm of education. Maybe you don’t go for the advanced degree or you left school early. It could also involve your health. Maybe you haven’t taken are of yourself.

Boldness Regrets

These are the chances we never took. Pink says, “What haunts us is the inaction itself.” You had a chance to travel the world, but you turned it down. Maybe you didn’t even enter that contest. You know, the one that could have shined a light on your talent.

One of my own regrets in this area was not taking a promotion early in my sales career. It involved moving to another state and I convinced myself it was better for my family if I said no.

Moral Regrets

You cheated on your spouse. You cheated on a test. As Pink says, …”the realm in which they occur…is less significant than the act itself.

The other thing we do is rationalize these moral infractions so we don’t always notice them right away. It might be years later before they grab us around the neck.

Connection Regrets

Pink says, “Our actions give our lives direction. But other people give those lives purpose. A massive number of human regrets stem from our failure to recognize and honor this principle.

Personally, I can include divorce here. Maybe you just never pursued the woman you really loved. I suppose the could be a boldness regret, but connection as well.

Regret Optimization Framework

As I mentioned above Pink’s book helps you use regret to get better. This framework helps you do that. Pink explains, “The Regret Optimization Framework holds that we should devote time and effort to anticipate the four core regrets: foundation regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets, and connection regrets. But anticipating regrets outside these four categories is usually not worthwhile.” (Boldness mine)

So ask yourself if you are dealing with one of the big four. If you are not then “satisfice.”This is the word Pink uses to describer the actions of satisfiers mentioned above.

Get the book for all the other goodness!

Go Hiking But Just Don’t Fall

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The possibility of failure is always in the back of my mind when I am in the mountains. My balance has become worse over the years.

Still, that should not prevent you from hiking. It is like anything in life. It requires courage. To accept that you might fall, but that you can learn from past experiences to help prevent it.

Face Plants

I have done many face plants. There are several that I recall well, but the one that stands out from all the rest is falling down Pebble Creek on Rainier. It was before I began wearing Microspikes on the mountain. It was steep and all ice. My legs went out from under me and I tumbled a hundred feet into the rocks cutting my legs and my head. I was lucky that an EMT was on his way up the mountain and he bandaged me up and told me to get to a hospital.

Getting fired from a job is a face plant. I have been actually fired a couple of times. One was when I was selling stamps. You carried this 35-pound briefcase full of rubber stamps door to door. I was horrible at it. Most recently I was fired from a wholesale pharmaceutical company. These failures, just like face plants on the mountain, teach you something each time. I learned the importance of Micorspikes from my Rainier fall and learned about weaknesses I needed to strengthen after being fired. In sales of course, typically you are fired for not meeting your numbers. I have worked for over thirty different sales organizations. Most of the time I was either the number one representative or close to the top. A lot of job changes were companies going out of business or me just deciding I could do better elsewhere.

Breaking Something

Falling can also lead to actually breaking something. Once I cracked a couple vertebra after landing on my back and on another occasion I cracked a rib. These kinds of things go with the territory when you are someone like me who has never been very athletic. I also have repeatedly broken expensive trekking poles.

You can break things in life as well. I broke two marriages and many bank accounts. But once again you learn and grow. Then with some luck, things got a little better.

So get out there and go hiking!

Bookish Weapon Number Thirty-One

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Nassim Taleb wrote a book you really need for your arsenal. It will definitely help you stay on offense. The title is “Antifragile” and the subtitle “Things That Gain From Disorder.” If you read any of Taleb’s books you better put your thinking cap on. This one doesn’t contain formulas, only some graphs. It still makes you think.

If you don’t do deadlifts on a regular basis you will after you read this book. Why? Because they make you “antifragile” or as others might say, “hard to kill.”

A Definition

Taleb explains why he chose a “neologism.” It was because “there is no simple noncompound word in the Oxford English Dictionary the expresses the point of reverse fragility. For the idea of antifragility is not part of our consciousness-but, luckily, it is part of our ancestral behavior, our biological apparatus, and ubiquitous property of every system that has survived.”

With that Taleb begins his book. He uses some big words. That is why I put quotes around neologism. It is a word most of us need to lookup. However, in spite of the erudite nature of his work, it is useful stuff.

This book is over four-hundred pages so I will only be picking a few outstanding ideas from it. You really need to read the whole thing to become convinced.

Life, Death, and Mistakes

Chapter four of Taleb’s book is titled, “What Kills Me Makes Others Stronger.” He discusses many things. Here is a typical statement, “If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely.” Think about that. He says reinsurance companies do well after they take a hit from some catastrophe.

Taleb says “…my definition of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.”

Then he states that “what does not kill me kills others.” He sites Nietzsche when he says, “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” Then he says it could also mean, “what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others, but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone. In other words, I passed an exit exam.”

Later when discussing randomness he says, “This is the central illusion of life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing-and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.” He goes on to say that “plumbers, dentists, tailors, etc have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan.” However, employees can just get a call from HR and their income goes to zero. “Employees risks are hidden.” Two things about that. First, if you are scratching your head and asking, “What is a Black Swan,” then you need to read his book “The Black Swan.” Second, everyone who works for someone else should re-read this paragraph.

“The Turkey Problem”

This gem alone is worth the price of the book, but I am going to reproduce it here and then promise there are more like it.

“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then comes the day when it is really not a very good idea to be a turkey. So with the butcher surprising it, the turkey will have a revision of belief-right when its confidence in the statement the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and “it is very quiet” and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey. This example builds on an adaptation of a metaphor by Bertrand Russell. The key here is that such a surprise will be a Black Swan event; but just for the turkey, not the butcher.”

He goes on to say, “We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.

“So our mission in life becomes simply “how not to be a turkey,” or, if possible, how to be a turkey in reverse- antifragile, that is. Not being a turkey starts with figuring out the difference between true and manufactured stability.”

Other Insights

There are many other insights in this book. For instance, he discusses size and says, “In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts your times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.”

Another Talebism is that things that have been around a very long time will probably still be around when you are gone. He applies this idea to many areas of life.

Then being comfortable is not good. It makes you fragile.

Complex systems are risky and he says, “humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tons to create life).”

Medicine. He says because not all doctors are sophisticated you shouldn’t go to the doctor often. “…it is a serious error to infer that if we live longer because of medicine, all medical treatments make us live longer.”

Exercise. “..walking effortlessly, any a pace below the stress level, can have some benefits-or, as I speculate, is necessary for humans, perhaps as necessary as sleep, which at some point modernity could not rationalize and tried to reduce.”

The concept of “skin in the game” is well associated with Taleb. If you are a salesman for a company and don’t make a sale it impacts your income. You have skin in the game. So your opinion of sales means something. This is why he doesn’t like academics in general because none of them have skin in the game.

Marketing. “Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one.” That is really something to think about.

And finally, he says, “The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risk.”

Bookish Weapon Number Twenty-Three

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Do you want to make better decisions and respond appropriately in more situations? Then this Elizabeth Stanley’s book, “Widen the Window,” is for you. It is a weapon you need in your arsenal.

This is a 400-page book so to pick one idea is pretty much impossible. So I won’t do that. I am going to give you the basics.

Basic Knowledge

Stanley asks that you read the first part of the book before reading her “solutions.” This makes sense because you need to be motivated to use what she suggests. She developed a course called MMFT or for short M-Fit and the book is mostly about the scientific and intellectual concepts that undergird this course. With that in mind, let’s continue.

She says that her “…window of tolerance to stress arousal was adaptively wired in response to my early social environment. It was narrowed during exposure to prolonged stress and trauma without adequate recovery.” Stanley had a tough childhood and then had more difficult times in the military which she discusses in the book.

We have two brains. The survival brain and the thinking brain is what Stanley calls them. They usually fight. It is not good when they fight with each other. The “thinking brain” engages in top-down processing which includes cognitive responses to things. It memorizes and learns stuff. Got it? The “survival brain” is “bottom-up processing.” “One of the survival brain’s most important functions is neuroception, an unconscious process of rapidly scanning the internal and external environment for opportunities/safety/pleasure and threats/danger/pain.” Its memory and learning system is “implicit.”

One of her main coping strategies was “suck it up and move on.” Some people have addictions or adrenaline-seeking behavior, disordered eating and a whole host of other things like isolation. She says these dynamics affect all of us and …they’re shared by anyone who fails to recalibrate their mind-body system after a distressing or traumatic event, such as a flood, car accident, or loss of a job or loved one. They are also shared by anyone who habitually over tenses their mind-body system during prolonged stress without adequate recovery, such as crashing to meet a deadline or working long hours over an extended period without some days off.”

Our childhood affects how wide our window is and works as a negative stressor as an adult. Even in daily life. She cautions that “By understanding how stress and trauma are a continuum, we can see how we might devalue things that are extremely stressful for the survival brain but “not that bad” to the thinking brain.” But, “…the survival brain believes the traumatic event was never complete.”

You might have a mind-body system that unconsciously craves a crisis. That’s not good

There is a lot more basic knowledge, but this gives you a decent look.

The Fix

Stanley wants us “to use our biology in a new way. By systematically training our attention, we can widen the window within which our thinking brain and survival brain work together cooperatively.”

She gives us two exercises to do. The first one, called the “Contact Point Exercise,” involves sitting in a chair and getting a sense of how it feels, how it supports your body and then you notice all the contact points of the chair with your body. You scan your body for tightness or tension. See if the tension shifts. Then you bring the sensation back to physical contact with the chair and she says to pay attention to three areas: 1) between your legs, butt, and lower back and the chair; 2) between your feet and the ground and 3) where your hands are touching your legs or each other. Then pick one point where you feel most contact. Then direct and sustain your attention at that point. Just like meditation, if your attention wonders ring it back. Then after 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes notice your whole body and notice if anything has changed. Higher energy? Less or more tension? That’s the first exercise in a nutshell.

The second exercise she calls “Grounding and Release,” which is a lot like the first. Get yourself into a chair, bring your attention to your symptoms of stress activation (she has a whole list f these in the book). Pay attention to the physical sensations. Once you notice that you are “activated.” Then notice that contact point again with the chair. Keep your focus on the contact point until you feel release from the stress or “activation.”

The idea with this second exercise is to “…let the thinking brain be the survival brain’s ally, by disengaging attention from the stress activation and redirecting the attention towards stimuli that will facilitate the survival brain neurocepting safety.

Rest Of The Book

The rest of the book is more or less typical self-help information. It is interesting, but not as crucial as the above.

Bookish Weapon Number Fourteen

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Today’s Bookish Weapon is from Ray Dalio’s book, Principles. It is arguably one of the best business books in print. Dalio’s biography is stunning. A billionaire investor and hedge fund manager. He knows how to make anything more successful. I am going to look at his take on making decisions, but I highly recommend you read the whole book.

Decisions – Broadly Speaking

So you need to make a decision about something. Something important. How do you ego about it from Dalio’s perspective. He says, “Know that coming up with the right questions and asking other smart people what they think is as important as having all the answers.”

So ask some smart people what they think. Get someone else’s perspective. This is always good advice.

Process

There is a two step process second for making decisions says Ray. First take in all the information especially apposing views. Second, decide!

He says that, “You are looking for the best answer not simply the best answer you can come up with yourself.” Find people that have been successful over time and ask them.

Always plan for worse case scenarios as much as possible. The old 2 is one and 1 is none.

Upper Level and Lower Level

You need to understand what level your conversation is on. If it is about a sub-point then that is a lower level conversation. If it is a main point, that is upper level, and he says, “decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be across levels.”

He slices it for sure. He is very detailed in his decision making. He says that most people focus on the lower level points and make decisions based on them and those decisions are inferior.

Bets and Probability

“Make your decisions as expected value calculations. Think of every decision as a bet. Reward times probability of occurring is greater than penalty times probability of occurring.” The book gets into more detail so read it.

He also points out that it is “Not always best to bet on what’s more probable. The best choices are ones that have more pros than cons, not the ones that have no cons.”

Consequences

Have you considered all the consequences of your decision? Dalio says you must consider second and third level consequences. So look at how this decision will impact you in three years. Who will it impact and what will be the consequences for them in three, five, the years. Go deep! Most people only look at first level consequences, so don’t be like most people.