The document discusses various topics including business, happiness, problems versus issues, anxieties, human herd behavior, the randomness of history, elephants in the room representing large systemic issues, hybrid systems integrating humans and technology, rolling out solutions to systemic problems, and the value of paradoxes in revealing misunderstandings. The author advocates focusing on meaningful systemic issues rather than just contained ideas, and sees value in paradoxes to challenge conventional thinking and progress human understanding.

1. ON ELEPHANTS
AND OTHER CONTEMPLATIONS
CHARLES SORENSSON
CTSORENSSON@GMAIL.COM
JAN. 22, 2019
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2. NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY
• Making business and money enables, but does not equal, ‘life’.
• ‘Good Life’ should be a prerequisite to great business, but is not.***
• The fastest 400 m is run by 4 runners, each running alone.
• Businesses fail often; worse, many that survive do not deliver to promise.
• Humans tend to make bad but easy ‘obvious’ decisions.
• If history were repeatable, in some histories our flag would be different.
• Providers come and go, society’s problems tend to stay.
• Wisdom is being robust enough that you still deliver during hard times.
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*** Thankfully, because the Jack Ma / WTO initiative will empower people around the
world into eCommerce, most of whom definitively do not have ‘great lives’.

3. IT IS NOT ABOUT MAKING MONEY
• If you help enough people, the money comes (usually after poverty).
• You can make money, but there is no guarantee the people will come.
• Money has value – it lets you leave when you get boxed in a corner.
• You can do a one-off project because it is ‘easy’ – but what then?
• It is better to have a slice of a big pie than go hungry.
• Great thinkers think alike, but not like the person on the street.
• Many great thinkers live on the street.
• Vision is not just seeing and imagining – it is blind (faith).
• Impetus to fix a big problem comes from the problem being big.
• To a large extent, most problems are a construct of our habitual mind.
• Big problems (issues) are about justice, empowerment and resources.
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4. ON HAPPINESS
• Humans generally do not pursue happiness, they pursue escape.
• Happiness in society is an artifact of social status: the closer you are the top, the
happier you ‘must be’.
• Except that, those at the top are often unhappy.
• Social status feeds the same brain structure (striatum) that money does.
• Deeper happiness may be about purpose: finding and pursuing.
• And the inevitable chaos and serendipity – a lot of both.
• Gratitude, being grateful for small things – allows happiness.
• As does forgiving yourself.
• Doing less generally is more.
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5. PROBLEMS ARE NOT WORTH WORRYING ABOUT
• Not finding the car keys is a problem.
• The dog tracking mud in is a problem.
• Spilling your coffee on the rug is a problem.
• Not finding an ingredient in the pantry is a problem.
• Realizing you did not study enough for an exam is a problem.
• Losing a button is a problem.
• Missing the bus is a problem.
• Going fishing – and not catching a fish – is a problem.
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6. ISSUES ARE WORTH WORRYING ABOUT
• Losing the car keys is an issue.
• The floor always being dirty is an issue.
• Not being able to remove the stain from your rug is an issue.
• Not finding time to cook good food is an issue.
• Taking the wrong course is an issue.
• Not looking the way you want to look is an issue.
• Not getting to work on time is an issue.
• Not going fishing is an issue.
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7. ANXIETIES ARE ABOUT CONTROL AND SECURITY
• Anxious about ‘finding love’.
• Anxious about being ‘safe’.
• Anxious about losing social status or wealth (which our brains equate).
• Anxious about making an important ‘dumb mistake’ (which even happens, or
especially happens, to geniuses – some are not avoidable).
• Anxiety is a psychological state that assumes ‘a good person has control of their life
and future’. But this assumption is false; nobody has control of the future. The way
to tame anxiety is to build quiet confidence. The way to build quiet confidence is to
survive through difficulty – and recognize that you can probably do it again when
you have to. Some people have reason to be anxious (e.g. I may get caught and
sent to jail) but most do not.
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8. HUMANS ARE HERD FOLLOWERS
• To become a genuinely original person, it helps not to be a normal, socially active,
news-reading person; just be aware this is a tough occupation.
• Being surrounded by the herd, not wandering off on your lonesome where the
lions are, tends to ensure herd-think or tribal-think.
• There is little evidence the leader of the herd knows more than you do.
It is chilling to think that those who manage institutional funds do not really know
much more than retail investors about future markets.
• Media is about getting your attention – the how often doesn’t much matter to us
(though it matters a lot to some unsuccessful ethical journalists).
• “Speculative Contagion” – Nobel Prize Economist Robert Shiller.
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9. HISTORY IS MORE RANDOM THAN WE LIKE
• The concept of ‘karma’ (from good comes good) applies to families (loving parents
beget loving children, sexual predators beget the same) but it does not apply to
history.
• In each moment in time, i.e. right now, systems are exposed to chaotic “butterfly
effects”. Human behavior, especially propagated through the real time impact of
global digital media, continuously ‘bubbles’.
• Any explanation of “why” of historical events rolled out the way they did, except
over long time frames (think Civil Rights), is unlikely to be correct. History could
have unrolled differently – without a logical reason.
• Humans feel a need to try to explain everything in hindsight – studies prove such
explanations are rarely correct. This need to narrate reflects anxiety – our driving
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10. ON ELEPHANTS
• The hairiest systematic problems, the ‘elephants in the room’, hide in plain sight.
• Elephants are systems or frameworks that help us understand how society (our
world) works. Which is easier to imagine, electric cars or no cars at all?
• When we go looking for problems to solve, we look within systems, we do not
look at systems.
• We also assume, maybe mostly correctly, that systems tend not change over
timeframes as short as one’s career.
• Who do we revere the most, the creator of the lightbulb or the electric grid? Who
is talked about the most?
• Moore’s Law (chip speeds) and scientific discovery ‘limits’ the progression of all
digital systems – which is to say, almost no limits.
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11. HYBRID SYSTEMS
• Traditionally, humans were viewed as entirely separate from animals. But most of our DNA
and physiology is shared. The microbes in our bodies outnumber our human cells.
• Robots used to be hard, scary bits of metal. Robots can be soft and mushy.
• Right now, people are testing to see if quantum behavior applies to organisms as big as
microbes – or larger.
• There is no sharp discontinuity between the human and digital worlds; by most accounts,
they are coalescing.
• The day is rapidly coming when the best human decisions will be made by machines
(artificial intelligence).
• Soil is increasingly viewed, not as clay particles, but as webs of life.
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12. ROLLING OUT AN ELEPHANT
• There are ideas that are contained – and thus attractive for business investment.
Note: solving an idea may be predicated on the system they lie in (e.g. a better gas
pump).
• There are contained ideas that are fertile – they birth better ideas, to be replaced
by better ideas, ad infinitum. This notion has the advantage that you can focus on
one idea at a time.
• Then there are issues–in-systems. In practical terms, someone wishing to create-
deliver a new system may, pragmatically, wish to start with a profitable system
component and, leveraging the resultant cashflow, add new components until a
new system organically emerges. One benefit is that people will not notice you are
creating a system.
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13. THE VALUE OF A GOOD PARADOX
• The best strategy finds optimal solutions to meaningful paradoxes.
• Some paradoxes reflect systematic misunderstandings or gaps in human
knowledge/understanding about how the real world works.
• The smugness of humans who ‘know things’ gets in the way of societal
progress, and of seeing the value in a good paradox. Nobel Prize Winner
physicist Niels Bohr was famous for recognizing the immense value of finding
a useful paradox. Einstein and other physicists sensed truth in paradox; this
probably motivated their research over years or decades.
• Paradox thinking may be one of the more effective ways to get off the
treadmill of conventional thinking habits. Though mystical, it is not mystical,
it is simply a kind of truth we cannot yet rationalize.
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