It’s January 2nd.
Two days too late for reflective writing about the year past.
One day too late for goals and promises to be left unfulfilled.
Today, is the beginning of tomorrow. Just another day.
Because it’s just another day today is a perfect time to begin quiet habits. The habits which are unheralded. The habits you do, not because you should do them—but the habits that exist because they are you.
Today is a perfect day for quiet habits, and this reflection is but a manifestation of my own quiet habit. The habit of writing.
I’m a firm believer that once you truly believe something, once you believe it with your full conviction, in effect, once you’ve decided—you are forever changed. I’m not a huge fan of the rapper Big Sean—but I find myself drawn to his album I Decided. I’ve listened a time or eighteen and keep coming back to it because of its singulartheme—what happens when a protagonist, with the benefit of the future—changes the past.
If instead of being visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Pasts, Present and Future—what if we could invite the future to ourselves? What lessons does it bring for us.
The best device I’ve found for visiting the knowledge of the future is experience, reflection, and writing.
Writers bring to life vivid futures, that don’t exist. We know the miserly Scrooge even more completely than we know Henry Ford; through the power of story.
So today being January 2, today is a great time for me to draw in lesson’s from my future and take inventory of what gifts it desires from me.
One thing is clear, my future wants me to be a writer.
It’s been drawing at me for the past three years. For various reasons, my writing and my reading habits have fallen out of routine this past December (more on that a different day); but over the past three years I’ve both felt a persistent call to write—and a complete absence of anything worth saying.
It’s like my own voice was buried under layers and layers of quarry and rubble. I felt the call to excavate it like a siren’s song.
But every time I went searching, the call grew fainter—as if I was searching in the wrong location.
I was. My voice was not to be found on the keyboard. It was not to be found with the pen.
It was to be found in reading, reflection, meditation—and living life in alignment with my purpose.
Through this journey I discovered three truths:
- My old style of writing, which I won’t make any attempts to describe, no longer fits. I’ve out grown it, it’s a style for a different era a different me.
- My old format of writing, blog posts and essays—are no longer me.
I’ve found the call to write more durable. More artistic, more complete.
I believe it also entails writing like these essays—but only on the journey to completing something more complex; and even then, it will most often represents my thoughts about thinking, as opposed to the thinking itself.
- I want to sit with a topic in more depth—for a longer period of time.
Here I’m interested in two different works.
First is Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is 25 years old. And top to bottom it would be as artistically fresh and interesting today as it was 25 years ago. And yet Lauryn continues to sit with the work. When I saw Lauryn Hill in concert with Nas, each song was completely reworked as a production, sound and flavor and as different as it was, each song was as good or better reworked. Lauryn re-worked her own classics, and made classics.
Sitting with a work, or a theme—again and again and making something new is meditative and creates meaning in and of itself. In addition to Ms. Hill, other creatives from Warhol, to Jay-Z and Kanye West have found genius through repetition1. What happens when you don’t just stop at your first take? Can you find your voice, keep your voice, and create new meaning by exploring the same vein again and again.
Second is Nassim Taleb and the Incerto series. Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game are each notable works for one author—but that run from a single author is profound. Each represents a complete thought, built on each other. Chasing the thread, with vigor is powerful. And while Nassim is not the only author to do so, his approach and insistence on his own voice resonates with me in a way that Robert Carl’s The Power Broker also resonates with me.
The work itself is genius—but I find that the habits and beliefs behind creating such a work also have much to teach. Finding a single vein, and exploring it until the vein runs dry—this is my guide as a writer.
My ideas first appear as wisps of insights, or problems that reappear as swiftly as they are shooed away. And here I’ve been wrestling with the problem of the Quantum Mirror for sometime.
You’ve experienced the Quantum Mirror in your day to day—anytime you engage with purported intellectuals. These intellectuals, I recently discovered are really logical positivists in another name. They believe that all good questions are measurable—and all questions which cannot be measured are wastes of time.
In short, intellectuals reduce the human experience to what works well with the logic machine and this practice, and I am of the belief that this practice is net harmful to the individual and society. However the belief that all things of valuable are measurable—or by extension are knowable, is a problem I call the Quantum Mirror Problem.
I encountered the idea of the Quantum Mirror in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. In it, the protagonist is having a conversation with his adversary—where he discovers his adversary is actually looking to build a machine which is omniscient.
“Wait, wait just a moment! I think what you describe – this entirely impossible device, may I add – which will, through some method I cannot begin to guess at, explode our understanding of the universe and create a theory of everything capable of answering every question starting with how and finishing up with the far more difficult why, this…miraculous device, is nothing more and nothing less than a do-it-yourself deity. You want to build yourself a machine for omnipotence, Vincent? You want to make yourself God?”
“Not me, God, not me…”
“To know all that is, all that was, all that could be—”
“The purpose of science! A gun is only a gun, it’s men who misuse it…”
“That’s all right then. Bring on omnipotence for the human race!”
“‘God’ is such a weighted term…”
“You’re right, call it a quantum mirror and no one will even begin to suspect the scale of your ambition.”
North, Claire. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Little, Brown Book Group, London, 2014, p. 209,
The zeitgeist of the moment is guided by the belief of the quantum mirror—which is that they can through some impossible tech know all—and if they simply hand over more and more decision making to this quantum mirror, or more specifically those who purport to wield it, all will be well.
The irony is that their pursuit has an obvious blind spot, a machine can only answer what is knowable—it only leads to hubris when it comes to the unknowable.
This blindspot, the consequences and thought leaders failure to acknowledge its existence is my research thesis. I’ll explore it across five domains (to be refined with time):
- Faith and Christianity
- Personal practice
- Reasoning and decision making—individual and group
- Business, specifically product strategy
- Society and culture
I look forward to sharing more with you as I excavate my own ideas in these realms, using the sculpting tools of experience, reading, prayers and meditation.
- The American Mozart, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/american-mozart/308931/ ↩︎
Mikal-El 
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