I hate having the wind taken out of my sails like that! It is such an anti-climax after the hard work that I had been putting in. What caused this sudden turn in the weather at my back? I finished one of the big projects – got it all signed off – and next thing I know my voice had given out and a hacking cough has appeared out of nowhere. This morning I delivered the baby to the nursery and then came home and slept (in between coughing fits).

All of which goes to show that the idea that working more than 40 hours a week is counter productive is quite correct – I worked almost eighty hours of overtime in the course of three weeks last month. And now that the big hurdles are cleared and the adrenalin levels begin to lower, what do you suppose has happened to my productivity?

I’ve perked up mightly over the course of the afternoon though, after the long if slightly fitful snooze I awoke with a headache and more lethargy. A dose from our paracetamol stash didn’t shift the headache, and although I felt more rested I still felt weak. It then occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything recognizable as exercise in the course of this huge long work marathon, so I dragged myself out of the house and onto my bike. A half hour of pedal pumping later I was feeling much better. A coffee and a relax then the half hour run back home and I was feeling positively human again.

Before starting the ride proper, I nipped up to the local bike shop and their air pump to get my tires nicely hard and ready for the road. I realized that this is exactly what has been missing in the past few weeks; not taking the time to pump up my tires has meant that all that hard work was an even harder slog than it perhaps needed to be.

So it’s back to the office tomorrow, but I’ll be a little late getting in because I’ll be taking the scenic route on my bike. Getting my body fit enough to support my mind again. Putting a bit more air back into my tires.

Today at 14:46 I stood under the Alta screen at the East Exit of Shinjuku station. It was a beautiful spring day, fresh and sunny, just like last year.  When I hurried past there on my way home last year, the crowds were watching the first of the waves strike. Today we were watching the Emperor and various dignitaries at the National Gallery leading a minute of silence.

While today, and that minute especially, was full of sorrow, it also feels like perhaps we have passed the worst of it and that the deepest of the pain is beginning to dissipate. I hope that’s also true for the families whose lives were devasted by the tsunami. Today my wife and baby were with me, so our tears were chiefly for those families that were sundered forever.

The waters today have cleansed, not destroyed.

The storm has passed, and we’re gonna be OK.

So the game, which can be played whenever you are walking through your neigbourhood or city’s streets, is designed to build confidence in making eye contact and give you an amazing new perspective into the lives of the people milling past you who would otherwise  be just another ghostly pair of shoes.

The Rules

The rules are simple:

• As you walk along, make sure you are wearing an open, friendly expression on your face.
• When you are about four paces from someone you are about to pass, look them in the eyes.
• Note that this does not mean a lazer gaze that will melt a hole clear through the back of their skull; eye contact means looking at each eye in turn taking in the brow and bridge of the nose as you pass gently between.
• Whatever the reaction is, enjoy it.
• If they return your gaze, do not flinch away. Smile.

Four paces is plenty of time to exchange a glance and a smile and to get a fleeting but meaningful glimpse behind the masks that people usually wear.

Sometimes.

Playing the game for the past couple of weeks has made feel much more confident about making eye contact. In fact, it has simply made me feel more confident all of the time. Now that I’m over the initial hurdles, I’m beginning to wonder why I was so shy about this before – this is a behaviour I have known I needed to improve for a long time but never before looked the problem in the eye.

The Results

The common reactions I have had are perhaps easy to guess, ranging from the studied avoidance of meeting my gaze to the quick refocussing from me to the horizon beyond, pretending that no contact happened at all or that I am in fact invisible. I don’t think this is because I am a terrifying looking, foreign apparition -  sometimes in this city I really can feel not only invisible but as if my invisibility somehow extends out from around me to at least the next nearest seat on the train. It’s not that often noted phenomenon at work this time (and the game can in fact be a powerful way to bust straight through that ‘normal’ invisibility barrier). The fact is that almost no one ever looks at anyone else in the eye at all. They aren’t avoiding my gaze, they are avoiding everyone’s gaze.

It’s understandable, you pass so many strangers everyday in a big city that it’s impossible to let every one of them affect you, to become more than a face in the crowd – the experience could be overwhelming. Sadly it is all too short a step from there to devoting your full attention to your phone, your comic or someone else’s shoes and none what-so-ever to the people around you.

A lot of people in this huge city must be terribly lonely.

The actual hit rate of establishing eye contact has therefore been relatively low, but my timing has been improving so there is a bit of uptick there. The actual met gazes, however, have included some fairly deep communication. One or two could merit a post on their own.

Salarymen have the lowest hit rate overall, but the older guys are far more likely to engage for that fleeting moment and what I see most often in their eyes is a sort of tiredness, not exactly like exhaustion but also not quite like relaxation. One of the younger Salarymen I did catch had a gaze of unadulterated hatred, I actually felt a little sick before he broke his stare and fired it up at the office building he was heading into leaving me with the impression that, although my intrusion into his personal space had irked him, what he hated was not me but his own Salarlyman life. Poor bastard.

Girls are easy. Young women go to extraordinary lengths to make men notice their eyes; magnifying contact lenses, inches of mascara, spectacle frames with no glass. What’s often lacking, sadly,  is anything more interesting than “Ooh! Is this foriegn guy finding me cute?” to be read in there. The exceptions are therefore all the more rewarding; a young Office Lady in the classic all black skirt suit was lost in thought before she caught my eye and suddenly snapped her full attention and obvious intelligence on to me. I was for a moment the most interesting thing that happened in her day – I was examined with a great level of curiosity, and I wonder if I’m in a japanese blog post about it somewhere – I’d dearly like to know more about what she was thinking about.

I can’t name you any outstanding wins from the standard young-men category. Many guys seem to be experts at the change-of-focus and tuning-you-out-of-their-world trick. The exceptions happen in Koenji and other wee towns where punks or other counter culture folks live and in all these cases what I feel is a lot of I’m totally chilled – about you, about me, about the world around me. Funily enought, most of the older ladies I have caught also have this same easy-going zen-like state going on.

Finally, there are the old samurai.

I often hear how some people are full of Bushido spirit or are trying to follow the samurai path. In all too many cases this seems largely like a good excuse to be a dick to anyone you do not like. And they do not like foreigners because they have no concept of the way of Bushido. Or something.
I am not now talking about those chaps. I am talking about true possessors of the Bushido spirit – the real remainants of the old samurai.

This has been the most surprising and exciting find of playing the game. These guys are well hidden – this man did not look like he was well off, in fact a single meal or a missed night’s sleep and he could be mistaken for homeless. I am not totally certain if I made a mistake in assessing him as *not* homeless.
But what a gaze! Like a sharpened katana, but still wrapped in silk. Dangerous and beautiful but hidden under a soft sheath that could be discared in a second and brought to bear. My mouth actually fell open – it felt like a thousand candle searchlight had been cast across my soul. It was so intense and so unearthly a look I was being held with that I stopped in my tracks.

Back when I studied Tai Chi, one of the movements in the form is the glance, where you simply cast your eye to a new position. My teacher said that even the glance was a weapon that could be used to injure an opponent, such was the power of a true master. This was not bullshit.

And with that look I learned two things: I can indeed look my own shyness in the eye and learn not to flinch. I have many years of study in this game ahead of me to ever feel that I have truely mastered the art of eye contact.
With a small smile, the master of the game released me and continued on down the street.

The short version of these two arguments are:
  - Fermi Paradox: Given how many habitable planets there are in the Galaxy and how long they’ve been about… where the hell are all the aliens? They should have over run the place with von Neumann probes already!
  - Simulation Argument: Given that it will become possible in the future to simulate not just individuals but whole populations, it is significantly more probable that we are ancestor simulations being run by our future prodigy rather than real world residents who will first develop that technology.

So SA’s answer to FP is simply: You are a Sim. The simulation does not include the aliens.

I never really got into playing The Sims, but I’ve watched friends gleefully torture the innocent bundles of pixels – taking away the ladder to the pool while they are in it and hiding the doors before setting the house on fire were  two of the more cruel and effective ways of killing off a Sim that had become boring and wasn’t fullfilling their basic reason d’etre: to entertain the god behind the keyboard.

We have to hope that our Ancestor Sims playing descendants are bound by some sort of moral, legally enforced, code that remembers these Simms are concious entities that deserve some basic rights.

Now assume for a moment that this is true and we are indeed Sims living in a grand archaeological reconstruction of our era, painstakingly built by trawling through our flickr pictures, Facebook posts, blog entries and random musings on Twitter. Imagine that the digital trail that you are leaving when you search for stuff in The Google is in fact what is being used to reconstruct your life – it is not a trail you are leaving, it is a trail that is being followed.

That significantly re-frames the question about what you should do about your digital privacy in a whole new light. It’s not just Evil Marketers or Crypto-Anarchist Hacktivist ID Thieves you need to protect your information from… it’s also your great, great(^n) grand child. But on the flip side, if a good deal of what goes on in my life is guided by the whim of that descendent, is it not a better idea to give them as much rich, good content to work with as you can?

My father’s cousin has recently turned up a photograph of my Great, Great, Grandfather and his family. It is fascinating to see and spot the family resemblances and so on, but the amount we can hope to really know about them is only what can be dug out of official records or from dusty memories of people that met one of the children in the photo when they themselves were a child.

Future geneologists are not going to have this problem. In fact they are likely going to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. (Hello future descendants, I hope you are enjoying this!) What better way to experience an ancestors life than to re-simulate it and see for yourself what happened?

Therefore it is probably in your best interests to pour out as much information about yourself as at all possible into digital reconds of one form or another and to try your damnest to do stuff that is interesting. If it works out well, you might find that even more interesting things start to happen as your descendents have more material to add to the reconstruction of your universe. If it doesn’t work… well, don’t get into any swimming pools you don’t think you could climb out of if the ladder mysteriously disappeared.

As you’d expect from a project that was so tightly framed, there are some rough edges to the completed work, but these are not so jarring as the ones that spoiled my enjoyment of How to be the Luckiest Person Alive. This book may have been churned out in about a week, but in that week a designer and an editor were working hard on adding value to the collection of essays gleaned from the blog.

The main rough edge issues are repitition of some sections and also many of the essays were in response to emailed questions or previous discussions and they have not been properly re-framed to take that into account. It’s not hard to see where this is the case and backfill a little yourself, but does leave you feeling that one more week of editing could have made a big difference.

The overall structure, however, is well defined, and the selection of works used is excellent and they flow well together – this is where the majority of the editing time has gone and it has paid off.

We open with covering the principles by which Sebastian tries to live, the thinking behind them as well as ideas about how to think and when to think. What does it mean to act tactically or strategically or even philosphically and when should each be applied when navigating towards our goals?

This neatly links to a section on growth that takes a hard look at how to analyze your own habits, track them and incrementally change them for the better; greatness is something you do, not something you are – and this section is all about the personal growth required to build great things through the lense of how Sebastian has tried to do it.

Finally the book concludes with a section on action, covering the gritty detail of some of the methods explained in the section on principles and expanded and referenced in the section on growth. The actual secret sauce of these are quite simple to boil down:
  - Track what you do
  - Treat everyone well
  - Demand to be treated well yourself

What makes them compelling is the narrative of how Sebastian has applied these himself and where it has taken him.

What sets Sebastian’s work apart from other titles in the same sort of field, is that he does not pretend that aiming for the level of success he has already achieved nor the higher realms he has set his eyes on is in any way easy. Quite the opposite, as it opens with him crying on a station platform in the realization that he will never have a quiet suburban life, that he can’t.

I had read the majority of the contents of this book before on the blog, but this really is a well thought out collection of the work following both a personal journey toward and shining a light back down the path for others to follow. If they dare.

This is not your normal self help book or how-to on entrepreneurship or what have you, the title Ikigai means something like “reason for being” or “purpose” and it is very much a manifesto that fits its title.

I have been an avid reader of his blog for some time now. He is prolific, occasionally produces profoundly insightful gems and has pushed the line so far out on how much honesty one can put into bloging it is amazing. There are a great many blogs by and for wannabe entrepreneurs out there, the ones that standout are not those that claim to purvey fullproof get-rich methods so much as those that discuss their failures as openly as they discuss their successes. James’ blog is stunning in his discussions about and deep honesty in portraying his failings, and yet he is a slightly socially reclusive geek who has made the occasional multi-million dollar success. The journeys from crashed out, penniless failures back to success and happiness, by following his Daily Practice , are entertaining rides indeed.

So I was hoping that the book would be a collection of work cropped from the gem posts, taking a chronological route through his journeys to frame the value he espouses in his Daily Practice which he swears is the key to becoming and remaining happy and successful.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t do that. The material is in a scattergun pattern and contains way too many of his “List of…” type posts. Those work in a blog post, not in a book. The editing seems to simply have been pasting material straight from the blog into a Word template and a search/replace of “blog” for “book” and “post” for “chapter”. This is a real shame, because many of the best pieces are in there, but instead of being a platform for delivering more of the wheat with less of the chaff it just looks a bit amateur.

As an interesting collection of work from his blog, it’s certainly a good introduction, but it can only be read as a selection of blog posts, not as a book.

My disappointment in the work had put me off getting his newer book, however I re-skimmed the whole of this one again before writing up this review and was reminded that, when he is on form, James’ work can be amazing to read… so I have just shelled out the 99c for the follow up work “I Was Blind but Now I See” in the hope that he has learned the lessons from this attempt and made a more serious attempt at planning, designing and editing a book this time around. A review will follow in due course.

Unsurprisingly, these projects have produced a fairly mixed bag of results, from the hastily and poorly constructed gathering of old posts with little thought to structure to the hastily but rather better constructed and themed gathering of old posts to a demonstration of the state of the art for this kind of project.

The lessons to be learned are clear:

• You still need a good editor.
• This model of publishing is very fast and direct.
• The technical barriers to entry are diminishing fast – it’s much like the early blogosphere.
• Building an audience on a blog and then selling them your book is a fairly workable model.
• Working too fast will have a severe impact on quality.
• You still need a good editor.
• Good design of your product matters. This is true of all products, of course, but it’s too easy to accept the default templates where a little time and money will make a big difference.
• You still need a good editor.

The books in question are (in order) “How to be the Luckiest  Person Alive” by James Altucher, “Ikigai” by Sebastian Marshall and “Mindfire” by Scott Berkun and I plan to review each of them more fully in upcoming posts.

I think that there is a tendancy to sneer at the idea of self publishing authors – it has for a long time been the laughing stock of the publishing industry and was synonymous with failed authors. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco sets the narritive around a small publisher who makes a tidy living out of exploiting SPAs and some of the lunatic fringe of that pool become the downfall of the men who considered themselves such literary giants. I doubt that the rise of self publishing was really what Eco had in mind for his theme rather than the a sly joke about intellectuals overcoming their fear of creating rather than just criticising and curating, but it is an interesting portrait of how the scene is normally characterized.

That was before Amazon.

That was before the internet made niche audiences reachable in a way that was previously impossible. If you are a world expert on the mating habits of newts, your book can not be published under the old model – you can try academic publishing or forget it; there just aren’t enough people out there interested in Newts… Except that’s not entirely true, with an educated population measured in billions a tiny tiny fraction is still many thousands of readers. You just need a way to reach them and a print on demand or usable eBook system. We have entered an age where we have both.

So are these books aimed at niche audiences? Perhaps, I read these guy’s blogs because I am interested in how succesful people work, how they fail and how they improve. I’m interested in how to operate better in the business world: How do you get the space to be creative? How do you gain the skills to drive projects that will really deliver something useful to the world? How do you live, work and grow in these spaces without drowning in bullshit HR or management buzz words about work/life balance? I guess that is a fairly narrow niche.

This does not mean that I’ve resumed blogging because I plan to eventually sell a book! I have no idea what niche exactly my blog is aimed at, which is exactly why it is doomed to be read forever only by a few people I know. Rather it’s because something I’ve learned from these three books is that there comes a point in time where you have to stop just consuming and start producing too. I think I’ll have more to say about that topic in the future too.

So should you buy and read these? Wait for the full reviews, but the short answers are; “it’s only 99 cents so why not”, “yes” and “definitely”.

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.

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!

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.