Covey's Lighthouse as a Symbol of Transition Rather Than Permanence

I used to work for Covey Leadership Center. Stephen Covey liked lighthouses. For him they were a symbol of stability. The lighthouse would faithfully stand there warning ships to stay away from the rocks, from danger.

For me, a lighthouse is instead a symbol of transition. It's not that people on boats can't come up to land. In fact, getting onto land is probably the whole purpose of the trip they've made by sea. The lighthouse instead of warning them to stay away signals that it's time for a transition. The lesson is, what has brought you this far won't work for the next stage of your travel. You'll have to get out of your ship and into a train or car or even onto your own two feet. You have options but the ship isn't one of them. You've reached land now and can't expect to float over this next bit.

This is what happens when you leave behind childhood for your teen years, when you leave the single life behind for the married life, become a parent ... well, so many transitions require us to get outside of ourselves and enter into something different, to become someone else.

Lighthouses aren't secrets. It's almost cliche to talk about how a life changes when you become a parent, or a grad student for instance. It's not hard to see a lighthouse. But the message of the lighthouse is not always so clear. Lighthouses don't warn you back to sea. They simply say that a transition is coming and you need to pay closer attention than you have. You even have your choice of new vessels; there are a variety of choices about how to navigate this new surface. You have a variety of choices but the vessel you've been in up until now is not one of them. Who you've been is no longer an option.

The Voice in Your Head - Or Why It's Difficult to Live Your Life as an Experiment

In keeping with the Welcome to the New Year! posts, I'd like to build on the notion of living your life as an experiment. Before delving into that, I'm going to argue that it is difficult to conduct your life as an experiment when you don't get data on reality - or perhaps more accurately, when all the data you get is so heavily narrated that it scarcely breaks through.

Your access to reality is obscured by the running commentary of the voice in your head. You have likely experienced reality only rarely since you’ve been about two years old. Babies are all possibility and potential. They can learn any language, assimilate any culture, or manifest about any personality. They learn more rapidly than a lecture hall full of students. As we age, the voice in our head matures and bombards us with questions, criticisms, commentary and meaning. It reaches particular conclusions and begins to filter out reality that doesn’t support those conclusions. As we age, our way of being is more prescribed, less malleable, and more defined. Why? I’d argue that it has nothing to do with the host of possibilities in the world around us. Reality has not changed. The voice in our head has changed. Or, rather, the voice in our head has increasingly taken the place of reality.

This may sound abstract, obtuse, or even odd. It might be all that, but it also aligns pretty well with research on cognition, on how the mind works.

It is true that you perceive the world around you, processing what comes in from your senses in the way of sounds, sights, and tastes. You are aware enough of the world outside of your head that you can drive down the street and safely stay off of people’s lawns. So how could the voice in your head really change your perception of reality? It can do this because the flow of data from the world to your senses is a fraction of the flow of information from your consciousness to your senses. Let me explain.

Research indicates that we process incoming sensations in layers. If something is before you, for instance, the brain first processes a blur of white, a crude shape. It next matches that color and shape to a database of shapes and determines it is a flower. At the next level of processing it determines that the flower is actually an orchid. Next, you determine that an orchid would please your Grandmother but not be particularly effective if you wanted to signal romantic interest. And then you start to think about relationships and the failure you had the last time you tried to turn a friendship into a romance, and how mortified you were that you were rejected. And suddenly you don’t see the orchid at all – you are lost in the ugly memory of rejection, of failed love and the voice in your head may even go so far as to conclude that you have no hope for romance. All of this because you saw an orchid. Your consciousness is informed by the flower – but it is filled even more with the memories, feelings, and conclusions that the flower triggered.

“The neurotic person distorts reality, makes demands upon it, imposes premature conceptualizations upon it, is afraid of the unknown and of novelty, is too much determined by his interpersonal needs to be a good reporter of reality, is too easily frightened, is too eager for other people’s approval, etc. It may be expected that as a culture improves, thereby improving the health of all its citizens, truth seeking should improve.”
- Abraham Maslow

There “are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down [from higher to lower levels of the brain] as there are carrying it up [from lower levels to higher levels].”[1] The implication is that what we perceive does impact our consciousness, but that the impact of our consciousness on what we perceive is even greater. We have a mental construct that interprets a confusing set of data, making sense of it and calling that reality. Do you perceive orchids or rejection?

One well known but rarely reported fact of consciousness is this: “every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits in order to arrive at the special state known as consciousness.” “A million times more bits enter our heads than consciousness perceives.” [2] Your perception of reality is, at best, filtered. Worse, and all too commonly, it is distorted.

If you have ever seen a hypnotist at work, you know that our senses can be overridden by suggestion, by consciousness. Have you ever considered that a state of hypnosis might be closer to your normal state than simply perceiving reality for what it is?

So, why don’t we embrace reality? One reason is that we are simply compelled to make meaning, to assign interpretation, and make judgments. That’s what it means to be human. Another reason is that reality can seem overwhelming, the facts can seem too harsh. We retreat from accomplishment, which lives in the domain of reality, into reason, which lives in our mind. More specifically, we retreat from accomplishment and goals into reasons why we can’t accomplish our goals. Consider the possibility that you can’t face facts without faith that those facts are not a prison but are, rather, stepping stones. Reality is abuzz with possibilities. It is only the voice in your head that has already defined and bounded your life.


[1] Sandra Blakeslee, “Hypnosis gains respect, helps to see brain work: Those susceptible to suggestion see change in ‘truth,’” New York Times News Service, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Thursday, November 24, 2005, A25.
[2] Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (New York: Penguin, 1999) p. 125 – 6.

Bucky's Story - Living Life as an Experiment

In 1927, a 32 year-old man stood on the edge of Lake Michigan, ready to throw himself into the freezing waters. He was bankrupt, the result of his third business failure in a row. He’d been drinking heavily and was grief stricken over the death of his first child. He didn’t know how he would support his wife and newborn daughter. At that moment, his life seemed like a pattern of failures to him. Before the bankruptcies, years earlier, he’d been expelled from Harvard during his freshman year and never did complete his degree.

But fortunately, in this moment of drunken grief, Buckminster Fuller had the presence of mind to make an extraordinary decision. He realized that he was about to throw his life away and decided that if he was contemplating that, why not take half a step back and do something unorthodox. Rather than throw his life away, why not throw away his old notions of goals and achievement? He decided to turn his life into an experiment – an experiment to see how much difference one ordinary person could make. [1]

The difference that Fuller’s life made has yet to be fully understood or felt. He was a pioneer of ecological thinking and sustainability – balancing economic and environmental needs. His influence spreads as a growing number of people adopt the thinking that he helped to introduce. Although he never did complete his degree at Harvard, Fuller was awarded 44 honorary doctoral degrees, granted 25 US patents, and authored 28 books.

When Buckminster Fuller turned his life into an experiment (many called him Bucky, but he referred to himself as Guinea Pig B), he created the conditions for an extraordinary life. Perhaps best of all, his failures were feedback for an experiment, not a reflection of who he was, not something to take personally, not a reason to jump. Turning his life into an experiment gave him the best of both worlds: he ended his life even more accomplished than someone driven to achieve to prove something and remained more sanguine than someone who avoided risks altogether.

The modern world was born when scientists during the Enlightenment began testing hypotheses and conducting experiments rather than blindly quoting Aristotle or church authorities. The modern world – its science, technology, and even social institutions and practices – has emerged from the application of the empirical method to objective reality. Planning, or theorizing, followed by doing, studying the results and then adapting the plan or theory is the cycle of progress.

Consider the possibility that you could apply the empirical method to your personal, subjective reality. It’s possible that you will find similar breakthroughs in your own life if you make your development the product of intentional experiments rather blind adherence to advice from Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, the motivational thinker de jour or worse, the voice in your head that insists on narrating your life, the voice that we often mistake for reality.

[1] See http://architecture.about.com/library/bl-fuller.htm and http://www.bfi.org/introduction_to_bmf.htm for quick biographies of Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1895 to 1983.

Cash Flow, a Career & a Calling

I think that an inordinate amount of grief is caused because of confusion between cash flow, a career, and a calling. All three represent very real needs and all three can be ignored - for awhile.

It still amazes me that our school system can keep children in class for 12 years and not bother to teach cash flow. It's my opinion that failure to understand this is the cause of a host of problems. A bill for property tax or car insurance or car repair suddenly comes at you, seemingly from nowhere, and that flush feeling you had just last month is suddenly and abruptly taken from you. You go from a feeling of financial relief to a feeling of dread. Why? You had no decent mechanism for seeing these things in advance. Cash flow is also key to building wealth. The person who resorts to financing a purchase with a credit card and subsequently pays it down at 18% over a period of, say, 3 years is going to have much less wealth accumulated than the person who waits 3 years to make that same purchase, accruing interest at, say, 8%. People who pretend that cash flow doesn't matter usually have a safety net of some kind and foist onto others their needs for money.

A career is different from cash flow. Probably the simplest example of the difference between the two is this: a 19 year-old who subordinates his career to cash flow will drop out of college in order to stay out of debt. His career will be set aside as he works a job in order to meet the demands of cash flow. He's being responsible, in a sense, and should be applauded for his good intentions. But he's being irrational, sacrificing a career path that could make his pressing cash flow problems fairly insignificant in about five to ten years. Ideally, a career represents the intersection between three things: what he's good at, what he does well, and what there is demand for - what someone would pay for. It does little good to ignore any one of these three because to do so is unstable - it's like sitting on a two-legged stool. Properly done, a career addresses the demands of cash flow. That is, the very real demands of cash flow will be met when career needs are properly addressed. Initially, however, the demands of a career conflict with the demands of cash flow.

Finally, we come to a calling. This is not merely a ringing in the ears. This is to career what career is to cash flow. What distinguishes it from a career is that it may well represent something that you don't do well and something for which there may be little obvious demand but it is something that seems inescapably fascinating, unavoidably alluring. Buckminster Fuller said that your purpose is to do what obviously (to you) needs to be done that no one else is doing. You may not be great at this, but this is what you need to do. Just as the need for cash flow seems to conflict with the needs of a career, so does the need for a career seem to conflict with the needs of a calling. Perhaps the way this most obviously shows up is when people take assignments or jobs within their career that preclude them putting their creative energies into anything other than work. The good news is that they make a little more than others; the bad news is that they never get time to reflect or define something bigger, something that feeds the soul. In Po Bronson's book What Should I Do With My Life, he quotes Sidney Ross who says, “The moral is to not set yourself goals which don’t leave you any freedom to maneuver.” Just as a college kid accumulating debt may seem to be sacrificing too much to his working class friends, so might a career guy passing on promotional opportunities seem to be sacrificing too much to his peers who think that a calling is just for professional actors or singers.

I'm of the opinion that you should only marry a person if you can't live without them. A calling seems to me similiar. If you can't pull yourself away from this thing, you need to do what you can to feed it, explore it, and somehow work it into your life. The important thing to remember is that even though each of these - cash flow, career, and calling - needs to be met, you want to subordinate them in the proper order. Don't be afraid to sacrifice the demands of cash flow for your career and don't be afraid to sacrifice the demands of your career for your calling.

The bad news is that this takes a long time to all work out. The great news is that you have your entire life in which to do so. And really, what else were you going to do with your life?