Practical Useful

I’ve been doing a lot of interesting reading recently in a bid to continue improving how I go about living my life. There has been a fair amount of pay-off from the changes I’ve been making over the past couple of years, between marriage, a baby and of course the move to Japan!

Among the various sources of inspiration and advice I’ve been following is the excellent blog of Sebastian Marshall, a most fascinating chap who is pursuing the goal of becoming the most skilled strategist of our era. A lofty goal, but one I have little doubt he can achieve. I had a most interesting discussion with him on Skype last week about Eastern vs Western mentality and business practice that was illuminating.

Sebastian encourages his readers to make contact with him and many good articles and pieces have come out of that, so I decided I should also step out of the shadows and get in touch, hence the reason I ended up having a call with him. His review of what I’d written in my email was very positive too, so positive in fact that he decided to publish it on his blog.

In that article I mention a few items I have been reading and would like to give a slightly broader review and pointers on each of them…

Less Wrong

The home of modern rationality on the internet, currently powered by community submissions but founded on the bedrock of the writings of Eliezer Yudkowski. The barrier to entry on this site is steep as there is a lot of material to consume in the “Sequences“. I got my teeth into them properly only after I got Sony’s eBook reader and grabbed the eBook editions of them. I recommend this route as the material is much better read in an armchair than at a desk.

Eliezer’s day job is to try and make an AI, a rational friendly one that wont accidentally turn us into paperclips. In order to explain why this is a problem we should be concerned about, he discovered he’d first have to explain rationality and biases… out of this has come a very large body of work on how modern scientific methods, rationality and philosophy should work. His “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” is also very good fun.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Most “self-help books” serve their purpose by making you feel less bad about whatever item it is you need self-help for at the point of purchase. After that they tend to either gather dust or the contents turn out to be significantly less illuminating than the cover suggested or the barriers to completing the suggestions are way too high. You are therefore quite right to think that “self-help books” are largely to be avoided.

GTD is not one of those.

The principal of keeping your goals, projects and tasks written down in nice simple lists is, of course, obvious. But you have no idea just how effective it can be until you take a careful look at how to go about doing it and making sure you use the right tools.

How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

I guess people feel that this book sounds kind of creepy, seedy, or otherwise the kind of thing only an oily, souless, used car salesman would want to read so that he can get better at manipulating people. I certainly had that impression before I finally got around to picking it up and reading it.

The language is 1920s tub-thumping style, which is actually quite endearing after you get over the hurdle of taking it seriously. Certainly there is plenty of information in there your stereotyped used car salesman would like but that doesn’t mean that it is not equally applicable to anyone in any walk of life whose job, and the jobs of everyone they touch, wouldn’t be made better by interacting more effectively. The secrets aren’t all that deep and mostly boil down to “be excellent to one another”. If you want to make friends and influence people, the book genuinely recommends that you go out of your way to be friendly and helpful… not so seedy after all really!

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa

The Samurai era is as close to modern Japan and informs its thinking in much the same way as the Wild West is to Americans. Musahi is a great fun, quasi-historical and epic romp through that world that is thoughroughly enjoyable and informative.

By Wednesday last week it was clear that there was no one else available to make the journey to Seoul and help our partner there give a demo of our Workforce Optimization suite to a new potential big client. This did give me a great opportunity to catch up with the same guys who worked with me on our last big WFM project; the one that took me to Brazil for a week and gave me almost two months without sleep. This time though working with them would give me the chance to catch back up on a night’s sleep away from the baby!

I was not totally keen to go, I admit, as my Mum is in town visiting and it is still worrying to be separated for any length of time from Wife and New Baby after recent events, but needs must. As it turned out, the guys didn’t really need my help at all, other than to demonstrate that we care enough about this deal to send me along and show we are keen on supporting our partners.

Some quick notes on my thoughts on South Korea after this my third visit…

The Japanese say that Koreans have Italian hearts, meaning that they are warm and romantic, that is certainly true – the welcome I receive there is always huge – but they have a work ethic and drive that defy’s belief to go with it.
Everything in South Korea revolves around business, in the newspaper you will find important business page articles in the main news section and every other item will mentions the potential business impacts of any story if there are any. These guys care deeply about growing their economy and are focusing all their energy on it.

There is a large amount of fear and ignorance (among otherwise very bright people) about the situation in Japan – many seem quite convinced that the food is radiocative and Tokyo is not a safe place to be. Curiously, the disaster is always referred to as the “earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster”. This is slightly distressing to me, as a much more accurate description would be “earthquake and tsunami disaster (and accompanying, distracting Fukushima accident)”. I doubt though that SK is unique in seeing it the other way around… the media drive to play on people’s fears about nuclear power to sell papers is surely still as strong elsewhere. I think I convinced one guy at least to put his plans for a Tokyo trip back in place, with a promise of some guided tour time and the assurance that I think it is safe enough to live here with my two month old child!

Lastly, on my “night off”, I awoke twice out of dreams. Once I was dreaming of an aftershock and the other I was dreaming of changing baby’s nappy. There seems to be no escape, even in the arms of Morpheus!

Life goes on.

The needle keeps getting bounced out of the groove by the aftershocks and a little bit of the old music repeats – a gulp of fear and a glance around the environment to check you are in a survivable area in case the shock gets big. Luckily these aftershocks are now fewer, further between and not nearly so strong; apart from the mag 7 one the other week (the long predicted large aftershock) which left the nerves a little more rattled.

Meanwhile the catalogue of errors and judgement mistakes that TEPCO executives have made over the past few years as well as over the first few days of the accident begins to trickle out and the official accident level has been raised to 7 – the same as Chernobyl. But despite all this, I think my faith in the fundamental safety of the plant was completely justified. It is still not “a Chernobyl”, nor could it ever be one, and no one is going to die as a result of it. Not even in twenty years of cancer.

Life goes on in Tokyo and is basically unchanged, but my eyes have been widened not just by the terror of my own brief experience, but more by being on the periphery of a genuine disaster. The real one, not the media fantasy one.

Life in Tohoku, meanwhile, goes on but will never be the same ever again. Hopefully soon we will stop counting the dead and start paying proper attention to the living, stranded among the ruins of their own lives and desperately in need of aid. If you haven’t read Tracey and Dee’s account of their first trip to help, please do – but be warned you will need the tissue box to hand, I well up just thinking about it.

The broken lives and lost towns and villages, the videos of schools swept away by the flood, the pictures of the tangled remains of roads, homes, cars and fishing boats dashed against each other… all of it has left wounds not just on the landscape but on the people. Especially those who are left bereft, but also on me too.

So what can I do? There is a helplessness in the face of the scale of this that makes action difficult. Donate, donate and donate again to the relief efforts and encourage others to do the same and lend whatever support one can to the brave souls charging out to volunteer with the relief efforts directly. Encourage others to do the same. Which brings me to the real point of this post: #quakebook.

Out of that desperation was born an idea, in the shower of Our man In Abiko. Germinated on Twitter and assembled with a speed and tenacity that defies belief. The very creation of the thing was a joy to watch, as it unfolded before our eyes 149 characters at a time, and the final result is incredible. This is not just some charity book. The works in here are touching and empathic, they will transport you through those dark moments of horror and back into hope for the future of this beautiful nation.

What can you do to help? Well you can buy a little slice of hope and beauty amid the darkness and every penny will go to the Japan Red Cross. Every penny will help.

So go download a Kindle reader for the device of your choice and buy #quakebook (US Amazon or UK Amazon).

This is one of the little aftershocks of March 11th that makes my heart leap with joy, not fear.