Day-to-Day Swish

Are you a good host?

When folks are at your place, do you make them comfortable? Attend to their needs?

Hopefully you say things like, Make yourself at home! Do your thing! Mi casa es su casa! The idea is to both set them at ease and fuel a little excitement. Yes?

If you hear that your guests want to do a certain thing together, let’s say, play spin the bottle or cards or something, do you rummage through your stuff to find an empty bottle or deck of cards? Probably.

If they make a mess—let’s say, cause glass to shatter due to some silly mistake (serves you right)--do you assure them it’s okay, and find ways to simply and easily get things back under control? I’m sure.

Do you partake in the party itself, role modeling the ideal party guest? Hope so.

Essentially, the activities of the host make a big difference to a party’s success: mingling, smoothing the way, connecting people, anticipating and meeting their needs and wants, keeping things flowing, interesting, safe, and fun.

Now, here’s the point: I firmly believe that the above description of the good host is also the approach of a good leader. Not to say that this sums up the essence of leadership—no, that would require a discussion of vision and strategy—but when it comes to the day-to-day swish, for me, this is it.

So, here's the predictable question: as a leader, are you such a host?

Tying My Boot Laces, And Moving On

Academic philosophers wrestle over questions like What is beauty? What is truth? What is good? What is being? I must admit that as a student I enjoyed reading, thinking, and writing about these things.

In fact, I once firmly argued that there would never be a solid answer to any such philosophical questions.

And thanks to modern science, one philosophical question seems a lot closer to being put to rest: are mind and body separate things?

Scientists can pretty much show a link between a specific thought and a specific circuit in the brain. They can even evoke that thought by engaging that circuit. They can even look inside someone else’s brain and correctly indicate whether that person is having that thought.

Yup, they’re pretty much able to say it: the mind is not separate from the body. Subjective experience derives from physicality; it is nothing, in any tangible way, other than physiology.

However, the funny thing is that for serious philosophers of mind, the problem hasn’t gone away at all. They still say, “But my experience of me is still be separate; you can’t show me my experience of me”. And even if we could cut open their brain and hold a mirror just like in a dentist’s office so they could see what we’re looking at and say to them “look, there it is; that’s you right there," they would still say, “but that’s just the physical correlate, what about my sense of me!”

Ah. That’s the spirit.

And they would go on and on.

A mathematician and otherwise pretty all 'round smart guy named Godel came up with a mathematical proof that no mathematical system can prove itself. That, I think, is, at the least, a metaphor for why this particular wrestling match will never end.

“You can’t pick yourself up by your own bootstraps”, as others have said. The problem is built right into the limitations of our three-dimensions-plus-time consciousness. We can’t get out of the box, to see the box. Ever.

I love the notion put forth by Harvard Psychologist J.P. Mitchell, that mind is a set of “algorithms by which one set of physical actions is mapped onto a different set of physical actions by the brain.” I interpret this as a response to those philosophers, “you are a projection, just like the stuff on a movie screen is a projection.”

There is nobody up there. Let's just move on.