I have pretty eclectic tastes when it comes to reading, although my fiction choices usually are mystery stories if I have a choice. However, for non-fiction, I am willing to consider a lot of different topics. One book that caught my eye was “100 Diagrams That Changed The World” by Scott Christianson.
The description was appealing — an idea or an idea represented by a picture, that the mere conception of it changed our understanding forever. Some of my interest is pedantic…I’ve often searched for ways to explain things simply to get the best explanation possible down in a format that can be grasped immediately by almost anyone. Some of my interest is more philosophical — how did the person come up with the idea, how was it they perceived something others didn’t?
Yet that’s not quite what the book is about. It is more “here’s an important image/drawing/graphic from an important part of history”. So cave drawings i.e. petroglyphs are amazing, but not quite what I’m looking for, nor is the Celtic triple spiral image that is dominant in Celtic culture.
I was gobsmacked though by a description of “Marshall Island Stick Navigation Charts” (pg. 19). According to the text, “as many as 4000 years ago, some human beings left Asia and voyaged in canoes over the vast Pacific Ocean to the islands of Micronesia”, and once there, they created primitive cartographic aides to help them navigate the new area.
Palm leaves, shells, and coconut fibre allowed them to map winds, variable water colours and the location of atolls. Pretty freaking cool. Learning about that was alone worth the price of the book, and I’m only on page 19. As I go, I’m going to point to some interesting other diagrams (in whatever form).
I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” and am now onto Chapter 3, “When Lives are Transformed.” It seems a bit odd to be three chapters in and just starting to talk about the “big” changes as opposed to change in general, but this chapter starts to hone in on the “quantum” or “transcendant” type of change where it rises to the level of true transformation – perhaps where you radically change not only how you see yourself, but also how you see the world.
It is perhaps cheating, but I like Kottler’s description itself:
…an emphasis on relatively significant and permanent modifications that have been internalized, resulting not only in altered beliefs and priorities, but also in new, more effective behaviour, as well as continued growth that may even take place at a cellular level in the brain.
Pretty heady stuff. But for me it is simpler – a significantly different way of thinking and behaving that is sustainable over time. It doesn’t have to be “permanent” in the sense that there won’t be backsliding, nor does it have to be fully internalized to the point of instinct. You may still have to consciously override your internal voices to say, “No, that’s not what I’m going to do today.” Alcoholics in a 12-step process are not saying they’ll never drink again; they’re saying they won’t drink today, day by day, and the days hopefully add up to never again. But it still requires the daily commitment to a change in behaviour.
While part of the chapter talks about people who have created new religious movements or new ways of global thinking as a result of formative events – unplanned, sudden, brief, vivid and intense, positive and long-lasting i.e. intense but positive traumas – the real benefit for me is a small section talking about maintaining momentum to change temporary change into long-term change.
For Kottler, there are often several conditions that must be met for the change to be sustainable:
The benefits/functions of the old way of doing things must have been disrupted and no longer “working” for the individual;
The choice to act like the old you has to be greatly reduced ineffectiveness or has a higher cost now i.e. again you need to find another way;
The underlying causes/triggers for the old behaviour are addressed through other means; and,
There was some meaning attached to the changes that permit the person to find some greater purpose to his or her life.
It’s a good list, but I think it can be simpler. You have to disrupt / cut the ties to the past way of doing things…the triggers have to be mitigated, the benefits have to be recognized as costs. And there needs to be a narrative for the person – a story to tell themselves – that clearly recognizes the old choices are not practical anymore and that they are making the change for a better version of their self for the future. A “change” story.
Kottler emphasizes this at the end of the chapter. While negative motivators (avoiding pain and other costs) and positive motivators (awareness, insight) help move you forward, it also helps to find ways to cement your change in identity as you redefine yourself in terms of the new behaviour. There is a lot of power to saying “I am x” and having the empowered choice to decide what X is. That could be “drunk” in the past and “recovering alcoholic” now. It could be less painful ones – shy, nervous, awkward. But those labels are one dimensional and reinforcing of your old behaviour. If you tell yourself that you’re awkward, you will avoid social situations, for instance. If you only tell yourself you’re overweight, you won’t see yourself as capable of doing a lot of things. And unless you see yourself in the “new” light too, you can’t sustain the momentum once you do make some changes.
For me, using my “goals” as a catalyst for change, part of my story is telling myself that “I am someone who can make changes in my life.” I can write, I can spend time with my son, I can learn a new hobby, etc. An act of empowerment built into the simple act of setting goals that starts with the belief that I can achieve those goals.
It works for me, not sure it will resonate with everyone. Does it resonate with you? What is your “I am …” statement?
So I mentioned previously that I was reading “Change” by Jeffrey Kottler (Jeffrey Kottler’s “Change” – Chapter 1), and the book is pretty dang good. Every chapter has these elements where I just go “wow”. While Chapter 1 dealt with defining change, and the general process to cement change, Chapter 2 talked about some of the challenges and obstacles that prevent change, compromising our efforts.
For Kottler, he believes that there is often one or more catalysts for change — natural life transitions (age, events), something is broken and needs fixing (but more importantly, that people recognize that it is broken and needs fixing — kind of like personal buy-in to the process), simple boredom trying to get out of a rut, achieving some specific reward, or more often when studying change, a personal crisis. Others he mentions later in the chapter include narratives (like a book or a story that inspires you), brush with mortality, facing a self-deceiving lie, changes in lifestyle, or simply solitude and the time to reflect. But even with those catalysts, Kottler argues that you may not move into the process of change:
Not being excited about change;
Willingness without knowledge of how;
Willingness but negativity (too much work);
Action highs (it feels good to change);
Backsliding;
Maintenance / embedding; and,
Completion (it’s part of you now).
So why don’t people change? Kottler argues that there are hidden benefits to the existing situation that stop you from changing. The “aggressive” personality who destroys relationships with their anger management issues but also likes being able to draw upon the strength and to hide behind it. Or they are just feeling too overwhelmed with the basics to try for anything better. But those benefits come at a cost, and in Kottler’s view, you only get those catalysts when you’re aware that the “hidden benefits” that resist change are less than the obvious costs of staying as you are now.
For me, the aggression example is pretty apt. I know I have a really bad temper, and it destroys everything around it. I used to kind of like giving it free rein, as it made me strong. Stone-cold if I needed to be. But when I went through my five years of “tadpole” status to figure out who I wanted to be, one of the things I chose to half-jettison was my temper. Technically, you can’t jettison it, which is why I said “half-jettison”. It’s still there, it’s still part of me, but I never let it out of its box. Not around people I care about, and generally never at all. Because I know what my triggers look like. I know that I can’t be having drama with loved ones, not like when I was growing up. If people are into drama, they are no longer part of my life. I just don’t allow it into my zone. And if a situation starts heading that way, I exit. I walk away. I know what buttons are part of me, and I know what triggers them. But mostly I know what happens if I let them get pushed too much to the point where my response is no longer a choice. My temper is a fight or flight mechanism, and when I can’t take flight, I will fight. And for me, that’s a scorched earth approach. I want the fight over quick, and the enemy destroyed with no chance of recovery. I will pick, instantly, the most hateful thing I can say, stick the knife in and twist it. Powerful words. Downright deadly, truth be told. But not who I want to be. I don’t want to say those things. Not now, not ever. I don’t want to say them, I don’t want to be responsible for them being said, I don’t want the devastation that they may cause. That’s not an exaggeration.
One time I was involved with someone, it was a confusing situation, and I needed to end it. I was hurt, I was confused, and I was angry. And she was wondering why I wasn’t more upset as we ended things. Looking back, I know that to handle the confusion, I had slipped past my point of no return and was in stone cold mode. And in that moment, I knew what I would / could say, but shouldn’t, and I said it anyway. Simply to hurt her. “Because you don’t mean that much to me.”
Not said in anger, not shouted, not in your face. That’s not how I roll when I’m in cold mode. I just deliver it like a matter-of-fact, totally believable, truth bomb designed to obliterate the person’s soul. It didn’t in this case, thankfully, perhaps because she didn’t really believe me, nor want to, but with the right person, it could have been devastating.
You are likely not convinced, and I don’t like to give too many personal examples that involve other people, not my place to tell their story. So let me give you a different example. Let’s assume I was outside myself, and I was targeting me. The easy target for me is my weight, but that would be too simplistic. A level up from that might be targeting my ego, but again, not really a heavy blow. Professionalism, abilities, whatever — none of those are going to be devastating. No, to be truly devastating, you have to target a vulnerability, an existing weakness that they are already worried about. For me, like most parents, I worry that I’m not a good enough father. That I don’t do enough with him, that I am not engaged enough. So if I was angry with me, that would be my target. A carefully delivered jab to suggest that Jacob would be better off with a better father. An insidious worm that feeds on existing doubt. Not delivered as an attack, but as if it was a nagging worry of mine about me. Attacks are defended, worries and cautions are hard to deflect. And so it would slip by the defenses and land heavily on my psyche. That’s what my temper gives me. A ruthless power that does not discriminate once launched.
I love the strength that came with that power, but all power corrupts, and you can’t wield that power without corruption. I love knowing I have it if needed, I hate knowing I have it at all. So I make sure I never wield it. Ever. I run every time now. It’s who I was before I was a tadpole, and it is who I used to be. Not who I choose to be now. But it was a bitch to defeat and control.
Because as I jettisoned the controls, I had to focus on new techniques to resolve things. I had to also accept that I could choose to leave and lose something — an argument, a fight — even though I knew I could stay and win. And I even choose to leave EARLY, long before the triggers happen, just to be safe. So I lose even more. In other cases, I simply had to cut certain people out of my life, because I couldn’t allow myself to continue to lose in those situations to them — they would just keep coming and sucking the life out of me, destroying what I’m trying to create. The only way to win that game is not to play.
But there were a wealth of things that were stopping me from changing, and it took me almost four years of psyche-bashing and rebuilding to get myself back together, to see a different path forward.
For Kottler, he argues heavily that much of the unwillingness to change is supported by rationalization — I’ll do it later, I can’t stick with it, maybe I don’t need to change it all — and it can be mitigated with greater awareness. He points out though that this won’t work for everyone, particularly those with personality types or even disorders that make them self-sabotaging or non-reflective emotionally. Hard to use self-awareness to help yourself if you’re not self-aware or the message you get isn’t accurate. Obviously, too, severe trauma will mess up your abilities to process, just as it affects all aspects of your life. Coping skills, and improvements to those skills, can help make you “more prepared” to accept the process of change, and Kottler has a long sub-section (pages 34-36) listing ways to help with coping. Things like:
Clearly identifying your values and goals;
Taking care of unfinished business first, so it doesn’t intrude;
Practicing and rehearsing, perhaps in smaller steps or trial runs;
Monitoring internal conditions that might trigger relapse (hunger, stress, etc.)
Figuring out ways to mentally bounce back when (not if!) a relapse happens along the journey; and,
Asking for help when you need it.
My favourite idea from the chapter though talks about false hopes and resolutions that fail (p 37). Basically that you are going to fail. It will happen. You will slip, you will backslide, you will relapse. And you’ll need to restart. With the corollary that not only is it difficult to “start” change, but also equally hard to maintain momentum. Think of all the people who start fitness goals on January 1st and the goal is dead before the month is out. One truth bomb that jumped out at me was:
People tend to overestimate their abilities and underestimate the amount of time and energy it takes to complete a task, especially one that is complex, intractable, and long-standing…It turns out that a number of myths are perpetuated by the self-help industry, that all it takes to change your life is good intentions, positive thinking, self-affirmations, grandiose expectations, and force of will. But as it turns out, it is precisely these illusions and myths that lead people to overestimate what is realistic and possible, dooming them to disappointment and discouragement.
“Just do it” is a nice slogan for Nike, but if you could “just do it”, you would have already done it. In my view, smaller, more attainable goals to start and a strong focus on restarting after a relapse are keys to remaining resilient in the face of the momentum challenge. I’ll close with another truth bomb.
There is no sense going after goals or making changes if, once you reach them, they don’t make much of a difference in the way you feel about yourself, your life, and where you are headed.
I love the quote but I think there is a missing nuance. I have some “goals” on my list, but they won’t do that change…they are more maintenance items to prevent backsliding on previous changes that I want to keep embedded in my life now. Not a big nuance, but one that is important for me to keep mindful of in my goal-setting.
My first e-reading device was a Palm Pilot. I had an early Palm III for a short while, a cast-off as I recall, and then I got one through work and it was the Tungsten. A beautiful device, and I tried everything on it, including reading an ebook. Something old, free, likely from the Gutenberg Project. It was neat, but not something to write home about. I killed my Tungsten in a freak accident at a hockey game involving a folding guest chair, a coat pocket, and a crunching sound as I sat back down after cheering for a goal. I still remember the feeling later that night when I went to put the Tungsten on charge and saw the destroyed screen. I eventually moved on somewhat reluctantly to a combined Palm Pilot / phone (a rudimentary smart phone) called the Treo, but it was far too small to read on and I never tried.
I was still a purist. I liked paper and I have the basement full of books to prove it. Successive moves in 1997 and 1998 didn’t kill that purity but three more in 2004, 2007, and 2011 did put a damper on my paper enthusiasm. I love my books, and if I had a place to put them out all on nice shelves, I would. But I don’t have a library like that, and honestly, I don’t want to use up the space in the house to do that. It’s just not worth it considering many tend to be “read once, shelve forever”. They are on storage shelves in the basement now, and my wife was mildly concerned about the previous rate of accumulation, but the real motivator for me to change showed up around the time of the last move.
I bought a Kindle 3 — not touchscreen, just side buttons and a keyboard, and only monochrome. Very much like the early Palm III if I’m honest. But the e-ink is glorious to read. I boost the font size a bit, not quite “large print”, but I’m getting older and I quite like the reduced strain. I confess that some print books have had such small type, I tossed them quickly back on the shelf and bought an e-version instead.
Since the K3, I have become a device-agnostic e-whore. I’ll read on anything, anywhere, anytime. A couple of times when I’ve wondered if I would like a series or not, I’ve even downloaded the first volume onto my desktop, particularly when there are sales or promos, and then read the entire thing on my main computer just because I got engrossed or my other devices were charging. Not often, but 2 or 3 times. I’ve read on the Tungsten, the K3, three different tablets, at least three different phones, a laptop and a netbook.
I know, I know, many of you might say, “Never! Paper or die!”. But that’s not the test for me, because I am all about the content. I like to lose myself in the story, and if the story is good, I don’t care what format it is. Podcast, TV show, movie, animated, live theatre, magazines, I don’t care. I want to get lost in the story.
In my most arrogant days, I think the e-book partially appeals to me because it is faster. I don’t just mean that I can order a book and download in seconds, which is a factor, but that I also can read faster. I can turn pages faster. You might not think that is significant, physically, but mentally for me it seems a lot like experiences with old typewriters and early word processors. The QWERTY layout that is popular for typing was designed to prevent people from going too fast — the keys would hit each other. So it had to be fast enough to make it worthwhile, but not too fast and crash. Early wordprocessing had the opposite challenge. If it took longer than about half a second (can’t remember the actual threshold now) for the character to appear on the screen after the key was pressed, typists would stop to see if it had gone through. Their brain processed the key press and needed to see the character appear right afterward or it would stop and wait for it to appear. For me, the K3 was perfect…I could turn the page fast enough that there was no chance of me “leaving the story”.
I have left a story many times with books, particularly at the end of chapters, simply from the time it takes to manually turn the page, complete with all the sensory input that goes with it. I can feel myself stopping even for a split-second and pulling myself briefly out of the story. With the e-ink, the refresh is almost instantaneous. I am a very fast reader, and that matters to me because I read so fast.
For example, one time I was reading the novelization of one of the Spiderman movies. I finished it in just under 2 hours, about the same length of time as the movie runs. It was like watching it spool on the screen before me, just like a movie, only it was just my imagination. A totally immersive experience. Oddly enough though, that one was on paper.
But I’ve had it happen while reading e-books a lot more often — I just zip along at lightning speed. Which makes up for an odd fact — I can’t skim read on my Kindle. If I’m trying to digest some non-fiction stuff really fast for work, for example, I know how to skim read / almost-speed-read to get through the salient facts. Relax my eyes, focus on the top half of the text line, skip words that are often long adjectives, focus on verbs and nouns. I can’t do it for long texts, maybe a few pages before I start to gloss over.
But sometimes when I’m reading a novel in paper, and the author for some reason decides to drop two pages of exposition or description into an active scene, my brain goes on auto-pilot skimming forward a paragraph or two until the action starts again. It happens, particularly with new release debut authors. Yet I can’t do it on the e-ink devices or even tablets or phones. Just not the right font, I think, or maybe I just don’t see enough of the text before I have to skip to the next screen. Either way, it doesn’t work. But the speed of screen refreshes is way faster than turning pages in a paper book and keeps me reading.
The last six years with the Kindle match the statistical profile of many an e-book reader with a new device. It starts off hot and heavy — one of Amazon’s busiest download days in recent years has been Christmas day itself or Boxing Day…people with new Kindles or other devices have them all charged and ready to go, and they start downloading books for the first time.
In 2011, one of the biggest “unique features” of Amazon was the daily deals on e-books. Lots of authors putting books on promo for four or five days at a time, often for 99 cents, or just as often, many giving away book 1 of a series for free. Kind of like drug dealers giving samples to hook clients. And there was a cottage industry that was born with it…e-zines that advertised the deals. Now the market is flooded, which might sound like a good thing, but really is just info overload.
Yet myself, like many an avid reader, couldn’t say no to free books. A free guidebook for Web HTML? Sure, I’ll take that. I do webpages. A new mystery novel with a librarian as the detective? Sign me up and I’ll download right now. Cool. A new series of basic guides to a variety of topics from property law to biology, from world history to a Korean cookbook? Sure, it’s free, I’ll DL it. And I did. Over the last five years, about 850 books from Amazon. I estimate I probably bought maybe 50-75 of those, almost all except 2 or 3 were deeply discounted, and the rest were freebies. Why did I download them? Cuz they were free, and it was like crack to a reader. And they don’t take up space in my house. If I don’t want it, I’ll delete it. Maybe it will be good, and I am a voracious reader for any subject matter.
I also made the mistake of reading about the Gutenberg Project. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is basically an old book preservation project run as crowd-sourcing for books that are past their copyright period and long out of print. Lots of countries have different copyright periods, so one country might have 25 years, another 50, another 75, etc. Beyond that period, except where copyrights have been extended by other legal means, the books are now in the public domain. Of course, they didn’t have e-books 50 years ago, which means someone scans the old book and uploads it. Often they have sophisticated scanners that can scan whole books at once, even turning pages, and save as a PDF-like file.
Then the crowdsourcing comes in — anyone can join, read a page of some book, and “fix” the optical character recognition. Because of font issues, the computer might read a “the” as “be”…so you see on your screen the JPG or PDF version side-by-side with a raw text box that shows what the computer thinks is the right text. You read the image, adjust any of the text that needs to be adjusted (like a copy-editor or proofer) and say “save”. That puts that page into a larger quality control process where a Level 2 editor looks at the page and reads your text and approves it or not. Once you have “proven” reliable in your edits, you too can become a Level 2 editor or be given a harder book or your edits might even bypass Level 2 and go straight to Level 3. Level 3 looks at things like a compiled text where your page 1 and someone else’s page 2, and someone else’s page 3 are all merged together into pages 1-3. Depending on the project in each country, there may be one person at the end who reads the whole book and makes sure there are no obvious errors. Just reading it, not comparing it to the original text. Some of the edits are consistency issues…for example, did you capitalize a word that the book didn’t because you think it should be capitalized whereas someone else was literal? And when it is done and added to the inventory, any user who finds an error can flag it for an update.
You don’t have to be an editor to look at completed books though, it was just how I got sucked in. I loved the idea, partly as I worked in a library when I was in university, and the idea of books being lost to the ages is somewhat horrifying, matched with the beautiful, low-cost, crowd-sourcing of preservation by simple readers instead of a large bureaucracy. Even if you do get involved, it isn’t necessarily time-consuming. Sure, like any “hobby”, there are dedicated nutjobs where it becomes their life. But you can edit for a few minutes any time you have free space in your calendar.
And then the unthinkable happened. I discovered that they had their ENTIRE collection downloadable as DVD copies. 1000s of books on disk with a simple download. I resisted for awhile. Browsing. Being selective. There’s a lot of stuff in there I’ll never read. And then one day, for no apparent trigger, I cracked. I just downloaded the whole collection and put it in Calibre.
You would think that was enough. And it generally has been. An e-book overdose to scare me straight. But it’s been made worse by bad cyber management on my desktop. Because of some computer problems over the years, a lot of files that I have on my machine have gotten duplicated into multiple directories. For example, a collection of photos from a trip might have been saved as 2012 – Newfoundland and another copy, backed up on another disk, said Newfoundland – 2012. Not knowing which was the “good” set, I saved both for future “clean-up” and rationalization.
E-book files suffered the same fate. Multiple times. Plus I didn’t exactly know how to organize my library very well in Calibre (an e-book library management program). So I would import collection X into one library with a separate library in another. But I’d only get so far and then get sidetracked with other priorities. Which would mean I had a partially sorted library, often with 2 or 3 copies of the same file. Add in multiple e-book formats one time where I stupidly told it to create a PDF, EPUB and a MOBI copy of everything, and my library went crazy. Keeping them all as separate entries in the library.
As part of my goals for the year, I decided I wanted to read more and part of that required me to create a better set-up for Calibre with my libraries. And I discovered the clean-up problem was far worse than I imagined:
67,293 files
53.5 GB of space
25,469 titles
Ook.
I suspect that at least 75% of the 25K titles are actually duplicates or format variations under separate listings, so that leaves me with 6000 or so actual titles. Deleting Gutenberg stuff takes me down at least two thirds of that, so 2000 or so titles of itnerest, with about 1200 being non-fiction titles that are possibly throw-aways. Call it 800 titles to actually process, of which about half are ones that are basically free replacements for titles I have in paper.
So I have about 400 titles to be read that are half-way decent, possibly in three formats – EPUB, Mobi, PDF, and possibly, AZW (Amazon format).
Okay, that’s still quite the addiction. Not rehab country just yet, but still. 🙂 My goal is to have the library vastly cleaned up by June. I just have to find ways within Calibre to better eliminate duplicate titles that just happen to have separate formats or even the same file.
Plum’s got her latest assignment, no problem. She just has to bring in Ranger, a suspect in the death of a wanna-be gangster, the son of an arms dealer.
What I Liked
As with most things Plum, there’s a lot going on … Grandma has moved in, she gets stuck babysitting a wild dog, and there’s a killer running around who likes Stephanie. Plus we get to see an old high school pal, Moon Man, who is frequently fun since the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floors.
What I Didn’t Like
The whole sub-story with gun-runners and missing money, and Ranger being “wanted”, gets a little ridiculous after a while.
