Creativity (once again)

November 20, 2014November 21, 2014 / Paul Manson / Leave a comment

While I was “between continents” a couple of weeks ago, I chanced upon a speech by John Cleese on the subject of “Creativity”. It was quite an old video of a presentation to a Video Arts audience, and unfortunately it no longer seems to be publicly available (due to a copyright dispute?) But the audio and transcript can still be found here. [Note: it’s not the only presentation by Cleese on this topic, but I think it’s the most interesting version].

Cleese, in his inimitable style, makes a number of useful points about the creative process. But the one that stuck out, for me, was the importance of “subconscious persistence”: of continuing to work on a problem subconsciously, after you’d come up with the first (or second, or even third) viable solution.

Cleese noted that some of his Monty Python colleagues, whom he regarded as more innately talented comedians than himself, would nevertheless write routines that lacked the spark of his writing.

They were good. They just weren’t great.

He attributed the difference to his colleagues’ tendency to find a solution and to then move on to the next problem, whereas he would continue to roll the problem around in his subconscious mind, polishing and refining the solution it until it shone. Until it made the creative leap from Good, to Great.

The difference is clear, and it’s probably one of the definitive separators between art and science; in science, there’s a clinically correct answer to most problems, and that solution usually looks just fine without being anything special; sparkle or shine is not a requirement. In art, on the other hand, there’s no definitive solution to any problem, but some solutions just look “right”; their intrinsic greatness shines through. And I can see how Cleese’s “subconscious persistence” gets you from Good, to Great.

Cleese admits that he sometimes took longer to complete some routines than his colleagues, but that the difference wasn’t significant over the long haul; most of his “extra” creative work was conducted in parallel, in his subconscious. And no comedian has ever been honoured (or remembered) for writing slightly faster than his or her peers. What’s remembered is the work that took the leap of quality; the work that made it across the line to greatness. The rest dies away, forgotten by everyone but the author.

Now this could be interpreted as a license to procrastinate, but it’s not (I loathe procrastination). The key is to keep up your momentum, moving consciously on to the next problem or opportunity, while continuing to subconsciously polish and refine your art until it shines. To use a sailing metaphor, you need to keep up your boat-speed, adjusting course subtly and continuously in response to changes in the wind and sea. At any moment you’ll likely be a few points off the perfect line, but you’re able to rapidly respond to the ever-changing environment. That’s infinitely better than sitting dead in the water, trying to calculate the perfect course before heading off. Take that approach, and you’ll never get anywhere.

Are these contradictory statements? Perhaps, but they represent the inherent conflict in real art, between progress and perfection.

So shine on … and hurry up about it!

Where are all the Mad Scientists?

August 20, 2014August 26, 2014 / Paul Manson / Leave a comment

As a long-time GPS geek, I was interested to discover that it’s the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act.

This amazing UK Act of Parliament, passed in July 1714, authorised a generous prize for the person who “found the longitude”. Back then it was easy enough to compute a ship’s latitude by observing the sun’s altitude at midday. But longitude could only be computed by dead reckoning, and there was no reliable way to reliably track your course and speed over a long voyage. The rapid expansion of global maritime trade, coupled with a few notable shipwrecks resulting from navigation failure, led to the establishment of the Longitude Prize in the last days of Queen Anne’s reign:

“The Discovery of the Longitude is of such Consequence to Great Britain for the safety of the Navy and Merchant Ships as well as for the improvement of Trade that for want thereof many Ships have been retarded in their voyages, and many lost…” [and there will be a Longitude Prize] “for such person or persons as shall discover the Longitude.”

The prize was a doozy: £20,000 cash, or roughly equivalent to £2.5M in today’s money.

Not surprisingly, this attracted plenty of nutters, as well as some scientifically sensible ideas. The brightest minds of the age lent themselves to the problem, including Sir Isaac Newton (who was then the President of the Royal Society, as well as a member of the Board of Longitude, responsible for judging proposals and awarding the Longitude Prize).

Most attempts to solve the Longitude puzzle focused on the need for precise, reliable shipboard clocks to replace the iterative, error-prone dead reckoning method with an absolute, time-and-observation method. But some of the nuttier left-field ideas included a hinged observation platform atop a ship’s mast, and a global network of moored “beacon” vessels, each firing rockets to provide a visual time synchronisation signals for any vessels that happened to be nearby.

There were small prize disbursements made to various people for partial solutions to the puzzle, but the largest was to John Harrison who – in 1773 – was finally rewarded for his 4th generation maritime watch, named “H4”. This watch was shown to keep precise time during a journey from Portsmouth to Barbados, allowing accurate navigation to within the 30 mile tolerance set by the Longitude Act.

These days, with GPS, longitude is no harder to compute than latitude, and it’s difficult to comprehend the days when the best-equipped expeditions of the richest Empire on the planet really didn’t know where on earth they were. I’ve always thought it a pleasant serendipity that GPS relies on very precise atomic clocks to measure the distances travelled by satellite radio signals, just as the historic solution to the Longitude puzzle relied on precise maritime clocks to measure the difference between shipboard time and the time at the vessel’s home port.

This week, in Oxford, there was an excellent public lecture by Dr Richard Dunn of the Royal Maritime Museum, titled “Longitude Found”. There is also a commemorative exhibition (“Ships, Clocks and Stars”) running at the Museum in Greenwich through to the end of the year. Highly recommended for all those who like to think they know where they are …

So the Longitude Act was that rarest of things: a legal statute that actually achieved something useful and new. Hoping to replicate that success, the British Government is funding a new “Longitude Prize” to solve one of today’s intractable problems: how to overcome antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.

But it seems this new prize (£10M) hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention as its predecessor.Where are all the nutters with their wild ideas today? Where are all the mad scientists? Details can be found at http://www.longitudeprize.org.

[Picture credits: all Wikipedia Commons]

Churchill (Again)

August 5, 2014August 5, 2014 / Paul Manson / Leave a comment

It has been something of a Churchillian month for me. I seem to keep stumbling across the guy’s tracks:

Two weeks ago, we visited Chartwell again. We arrived late in the day (courtesy of the M25 traffic) which was a blessing in disguise, as we were the last people through the house and could linger in each room undisturbed, just soaking up the atmosphere.
Last week, we happened across the spot (it’s a kind of temple … the guy had style!) in Blenheim Park where Churchill proposed to Clementine in 1908. They were to remain married for 57 years, until his death in 1965.
Today, my morning run took me past the village church at Bladon, where all the Spencer-Churchills are buried, so I called in to pay my respects.

The thing that keeps striking me about Churchill’s life is how much of a struggle it was. It would be easy to think that he came from a privileged background and that he somehow lived a more charmed life than the rest of us. Easy, but wrong.

Despite being remembered as one of the most successful leaders of the 20^th century, Churchill’s career was punctuated by failures. These days, it seems a politician’s life is over with their first mistake; a single black mark ends their career. [Which is presumably why so many of our current leaders are faceless bureaucrats who continue to climb the ladder because they never take a stand on anything. But that’s a story for another day …]

It’s true that the world of politics is more transparent than it used to be, thanks to the internet and television. But Churchill’s failures were hardly the kind of small stuff that might be swept under the carpet by well-connected friends. I’m thinking of the Gallipoli campaign in particular, where he failed on an epic scale. Yet each time he picked himself up, drew what lessons he could from his failure, and then strode forward once more.

So it seems to me that Churchill’s distinguishing mark was his spine, his grit and his driving sense of destiny.

There’s learning here for us all. The best learning opportunity of our lives is when we encounter failure and have to make a choice:

We can treat that failure as evidence of an inherent character flaw within us; something of which we should feel ashamed, or evidence that a whole area of life needs to be feared and avoided;
Or we can treat each failure as a growth opportunity, from which we can emerge stronger, better-equipped to take on the next challenge that comes our way.

Churchill wrote frequently about the need to struggle, to persist in the face of opposition and to pick oneself up and march on after a failure:

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

“This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”

“I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

And now a quote from me (channelling Winston):

“Anything worth doing carries the risk of failure. And every failure is a learning opportunity. The only true failure in life is not to have tried.”

Youth Unemployment

April 30, 2014May 5, 2014 / Paul Manson / Leave a comment

<Originally a Facebook post – 14 April 2014 >

For nearly a year now, I’ve been thinking seriously about a specific social issue. That it’s taken me a year probably speaks volumes about my limited mental agility. But it also happens to be one of those thorny issues has been left to languish in the “too hard” basket by our political leaders.This – to me – is the one issue that sits above all the others that clamour for political attention. But if ignored, it’s also the one issue that has the potential to utterly destroy the current social/political structure in which we live.

That issue? Youth Unemployment.

Even as I write these words, they sound boring … your eyes probably glazed over at the mere mention. But I see this as by far the biggest threat to Western Civilization. Or to look at it more positively, the biggest potential opportunity for this Generation to improve the lives of the people who will be the next occupants of this planet: our children’s children.

And when I say “the biggest threat”, it may be already too late for some countries, where a whole generation of young people have already spent enough time unemployed that they are unlikely to ever be “employable” in the usual sense of the word.

Youth Unemployment is an issue in practically every country (developed or emerging). But it is a far more serious problem in some countries than in others, and the political classes seem utterly blind to the risks. In most of the countries with which I have first-hand experience (New Zealand, the UK, the US), the rate of unemployment for young people is higher than for the population as a whole. Even in countries like New Zealand, where overall unemployment is relatively low (5%), youth unemployment is around 15%. Sadly, in countries like France, Spain, Italy and Greece, the rate of unemployment for young people is radically higher than it is for the (already too high) population at large. This is where the issue morphs from being just one social ill among many, to being an absolute existential crisis for society.

For 25% of young French people to be unemployed is terrible. But in Italy it’s even worse, at 35%. I can almost comprehend what that must be like, but I can’t even begin to imagine how 55% of young Spaniards and nearly 60% of young Greeks lack employment. It doesn’t seem real. But unless the statisticians are lying, it has been that way for years. And that terrifies me, frankly. You can’t just dismiss people as lacking spine or motivation when more than half of them lack a job.

Unemployment is corrosive enough in small doses. In the recent recession, many people had the experience of a few weeks or months between jobs. But for people who come out of school or university and never, ever get a real job, the impact is crippling. Many employed people moan about their boss or their work, but even they can acknowledge the self-respect and the financial independence their job gives them. When a substantial proportion of society has never felt that self-respect, never enjoyed even a moment of financial security, and never had any prospect of improvement, corrosion turns to poison.

Why the political classes think this is acceptable is beyond me. Even if they don’t care about the next generation, you would think they would see the writing on the wall in the shape of the next election. And if not the next one, then definitely the one after that. Because the day is fast approaching when enough disillusioned young people will take power into their own hands, whether at the polling booth or by violent protest. Why wouldn’t they? What do they have to lose?

I’m not particularly a fan of Russell Brand. His recent social commentary has – for me – been tainted by his personal hypocrisy. But I have no doubt he is right when he points out that the (largely young) people who feel let down by the system will eventually vote – or act – to destroy it. Young people who are unemployed for any period of time have no vested interest in sustaining the structure of society they live in. Why should they? Society has failed and betrayed them.

Politicians have relied for years on the tenet that younger and poorer people are less inclined to vote. Which is why they’ve continued to pander to the greed and insecurity of those with the most to lose if the current system changes (and who therefore vote en mass). But that voting dynamic is already changing, and could turn on a dime if people coalesce around a timely spark. In countries like Greece and Italy, new political parties are already tapping into the growing disillusionment with establishment politics. It’s easy to imagine a “flash-mob”-style campaign, wrapped around an issue like Youth Unemployment, putting one of those parties into power with a mandate to change the system from the ground up. Would they know what to do? Possibly not. Would that stop them dismantling the current system? Hell no!

Of course there’s a limit to what Governments can do to reduce Youth Unemployment. Governments, despite what Monsieur Hollande might think, cannot sustainably create useful jobs. But they can at least get out of the way by removing barriers to job creation. And they can resist the temptation to protect at all costs the wealth of the older, voting classes, at the expense of the young.

Why do I feel this social issue transcends all the others? Because the solutions to most other social ills rely on the next generation paying for the current generation’s future healthcare, pensions and infrastructure. All the concerns du jour like how to pay for the NHS or how to ensure that people can retire with dignity are predicated on the next generation’s willingness to pay for the promises made today (or last week, or last year). Remove that one presumption and the system implodes like the Ponzi scheme that it is.

If enough of that next generation is deprived of a decent income, they clearly cannot play their part in sustaining the system as it exists today. But much more importantly, if they are denied the right to their own dignity, security and independence they simply won’t want to sustain the system. They will happily bring it down if they think there’s the slightest chance that whatever replaces it will treat them a little better.

There it is: Youth Unemployment. It still sounds boring, but for some reason it’s important to me.

I’ve never really felt like I “owned” a specific social issue before. I don’t really feel like I chose this one … it just seems to have chosen me.

What do I intend to do about Youth Unemployment on a Global scale? I really don’t know. But somehow I do know that it’s my job to do something about it.

Any Suggestions? …