Tag Archives: EOP

Being Amused by the Accelereality Comedy of Errors

Volume 2, Issue 12

Have you experienced being in a meeting where someone shoots down your idea dismissively and then presents a longwindedly crude expression of the same idea, without seeing that it is the same idea?

Have you pitched something to a company that is so clearly what they need, and then have them take a pass based on the strength of frozen ritual processes that no one believes can ever be changed?

Impossibility thinking, dream state management, “Earth must be God’s sitcom channel”, and other amusingly cynical thoughts pass through my head as I encounter these events daily. Still, I remain ever hopeful that in time the race will learn to use its prefrontal cortex, and see how the psychotechnology techniques such as those of the Human Effectiveness Institute do push back against the tide of information overload, i.e. Acceleritis, which causes the pandemic EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) exhibited in these funny behaviors.

It’s healthy and pragmatically useful to take these things as amusing rather than become frustrated by them since that negative emotion brings us down to the EOP level. If Observer state and Flow state are the objective and the answer, then the sense of humor is a major ally in the game. Humor and perspective are closely related, which is why comedians are actually philosopher/poets who express profound truths in an artistic and therefore pleasantly diverting form that cleanses the emotions of negativity or sublimates the negativity to a less harmful species of it.

The prefrontal cortex is a radical evolution. Once it was empowered by seeable (written) language starting about 6000 years ago — a mere eyeblink in human history — this triggered an acceleration process that manifests as a fall from grace, a submersion in self-dwarfing pettyism, a loss of the sense of connectedness to divinity and our numinous birthright. Acceleritis as we call it. Written 2190-2070 BC, much earlier in the accelerating information overload period we are still living in, the Lamentations of Ipou-our recall the spiritual culture that Egypt had already lost by that time.

Prior to the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the Nag Hammadi library was found in Upper Egypt in 1945. Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls appear to be early drafts of the Old Testament, the Nag Hammadi scrolls contain what appear to be early drafts of the New Testament. One muses that the wars perennially fought over the Holy Land might have something to do with the findings of these materials — which cast such revealing light on our early Western spiritual beginnings. Not exactly a grail, the scrolls near Nag Hammadi were found in a large jar. The aspect I find particularly interesting about them is the many writers who groped to explain why, if there is God, the world has gone so wrong. These explanations are all variations on a theme of error-ridden/evil early offspring of the original Spirit creator, bad demiurge gods/archons aka the Devil. The early Christian church edited out these heresies (while retaining Satan) probably wisely as they are so negative and paranoia inducing. Also, the far simpler and perhaps more logical explanation is information overload and the time it takes for information-processing beings to learn to manage their own internal resources after such a powerful mutation (evolution of the prefrontal cortex) and its cascading effects.

The most important work each of us does is the work we do on ourselves, which the Human Effectiveness Institute calls psychotechnology — the broader field containing Buddhism, psychoanalysis, Zen, and a host of other specific methodologies springing up in different regions of the world. Psychotechnology is what propels us out of the Acceleritis-driven EOP state. Many of us, with the coming of maturity, reach a permanent equilibrium in the Observer state that allows us to laugh at ourselves and to appreciate the humor in the challenging, maddening conditions of our historical period. Jews call this being a mensch. This is definitely a hopeful sign, of which many abound all around us. Perhaps in a millennium or two, we will emerge from Acceleritis on a global basis — or maybe we are even closer. What can we do to (at least begin to) make it happen in our own time?

Best to all,

Bill

The Force Is Conscious

Go for Flow in Your Métier First

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Volume 2, Issue 7

Valuable lessons from two great scientists — one of the mind, the other of marketing

The Human Effectiveness Institute defines Flow as the state of autotelic perfect action. It is a brain/mind state where all parts of you are in synch, and is now popularly known as the Zone. “Autotelic” means you are doing the action for its own sake, not for its outcome, and it feels to you as if it is doing itself, because you are going with the flow (“automaticity”). This however is different from your robotic Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) state where you run off at the mouth, for example, without all your mental/intuitive gears meshing and thus you constantly undo yourself.

A subtle state indeed. Most people can remember having at least one experience of being in the Zone, but are not quick to agree that one can learn to spend more time in Flow. Most people consider it something accessible to top athletes, musicians, artists and other performers, but to no one else. The Institute’s mission is to change that perception.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, coined the term “Flow” and has written the definitive books about the phenomenon. His theories were developed while working to successfully improve the performance of the school’s lacrosse team. He created the accompanying schematic,

presented a few years back at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference, which shows that you are not going to get into Flow unless you are doing something in which you are already highly skilled. Flow happens when high skill and high challenge meet.

This means that to truly train yourself to attain Flow more often, you need to practice it within your own personal métier — the thing you do best.

For those of my readers who work somewhere in the broad field of marketing, I recommend Al Achenbaum’s new book. This will be a way for you to practice your skills at an even higher level, by absorbing the 1500 pages of lessons that must be the single most valuable treasure trove of marketing learning in existence, given where Al has been and what he has accomplished.

When I was a rookie at Grey, Al and his estimable right hand at the time (another luminary, Russ Haley) were moving the industry away from sole reliance on judging the value of an ad based on its memorability. They introduced the difficult new concept of attitude shift into a field that at the time was as auteur-dominated by creatives as Hollywood, and therefore just as hard to present science to. Yet they succeeded, with help from FCB’s Frank Gromer and his Study of Brand XL, which established that attitude shifts actually preceded buying changes (the only extant copy I know of is the one I donated to Ed Papazian’s library).

Back in those days Grey had assembled a brain trust of Al Achenbaum, Russ Haley, and Betty Coumbe on the research side, and on the media side Hal Miller, Larry Deckinger, Howard Kamin, Helen Johnston, and Norm Hecht — and me at the bottom of the food chain. These incredible mentors encouraged me to roam the halls at 5AM reading from all the unlocked files on the 11^th floor at 445 Park — like a monk in the Alexandrine Library. This is how I absorbed Al’s teaching, as well as that of other luminaries. Plus Hal had his personal training program for two lucky pups, one of whom was me.

Al’s book is called (“and may I say, not in a shy way”*) Marketing Lessons From a Living Legend and is available from BarnesandNoble.com on their eBook platform, the Nook. Al is truly one of the all-time original Mad Men and he will help your quest for Flow even if you’re not in marketing but have an interest in how scientists have improved that art.

Best to all,

Bill

*From the song “I Did It My Way”.

The Total Ineffectiveness of Negative Moods

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Volume 2, Issue 4

Our motivations are the original rock that starts an avalanche. Motivations turn into goals, and then cascade into emotions that flare negative or positive when events/people are perceived to interfere with or enable us in reaching our goals. This all happens whether we are aware of any of it or not.

When we are in a state of negative emotion our capabilities are reduced. Brainpower is being distracted away from effective action clarity. The very thing that caused our negative emotion guffaws in triumph at our helpless self-attack, which leaves the irritant unscathed. The very thing we need most when the negative alarm goes off is to turn off the alarm and use all our brainpower effectively. So from the standpoint of adult commonsense logic, our indulgence of wallowing in negativity for more than an instant is totally unjustifiable and indefensible — in a word, ineffective.

People say they have no control over negative emotions. This is the archetypal self-fulfilling prophecy. If you refuse to give up control to your own habituated robot circuitry and instead fight it (the true meaning of jihad) eventually you win and then you feel very good forever after that. This is called Enlightenment. Think of it over-simplistically as gaining control of your own castle, your own motivations, goals, emotions, and everything else that is you.

What is a man?

What has he got?

If not himself, then he has not.

— Excerpt from the lyrics of My Way, sung by Frank Sinatra

Once you have that control it is easier to give up control to the Flow state, where things seem to be doing themselves spontaneously and perfectly while we watch as observers from the inside. This often has the appearance to outside observers of you performing so perfectly that you even seem to know what other people are going to do next. Your motivations-goals-emotions-ideas-actions system is performing as a whole in Flow state, which is why the actions are so perfect. This is where you eventually get by rejecting negativity and getting down to solving whatever is the cause of your negative emotion.

I hypothesize that our being trained to cry for rescue in infancy sets up a circuit that sublimates into the same thing on more invisible levels throughout life. Parenting around this would be a good idea, for example by soothingly reminding the infant every time he/she cries that it is more effective to call for us more pleasantly, perhaps even musically, and we will come just as fast. Then we have to remember to pay off that promise ardently so as to reinforce the non-anguish appeal over the rescue me syndrome. I see all negativity as coming from this rescue me circuit. It is a construct that helps me overcome it.

Any construct that works to gain control of habitual counterproductive programming is a useful tool. A more extreme version is my imagining that an alien spy is the source of the negativity — it is not coming from the true me. Such constructs appear to resonate with the animal parts of ourselves or perhaps at the cellular level of consciousness and certainly with the oldest parts of our brain including the limbic system. At any rate negativity deflates in the presence of such mental toolware, which emerges from imagination in the marketplace of the inner mind. Imagination is a great source of energy and leads to clarity.

The Human Effectiveness Institute offers such toolware but we achieve our own highest success when we inspire individuals to get into the game of creating their own toolware in response to their own observed moments of EOP and their own observing of what works to overcome it.

To return to our first point, motivations are the base of your being, so it is good to start there as you re-inspect your “SELF” from these perhaps new points of view offered here. What are your motivations and why? What are the goals that serve these motivations? What is helping you reach those goals? What is impeding you? What do these insights imply in terms of action decisions?

In the absence of protracted negativity — using it just as an appreciated alarm system — enjoyment of life is the natural levity remaining once the weights have been lifted. Let’s levitate into levity!

Best to all,

Bill