Ray Ray > Recent Status Updates

Economists scratched their heads wondering how we in the 21st century would fill all our spare time once much of our work had been offloaded to robots. (At least half of that notion is still true, though now we are substantially less optimistic ... The 20th century forgot to ask an important question: who will own the robots?). Our material environment shapes us, but it will not save us.

Our bodies' highest order of intention is survival, so we don't heal to optimization, just to functionality.

plants Snake plant (sansevieria), Peace lillies, howea forsteriana, fiddle leaf figs, ficus

Instead, have awards that are abundant, with no limit. They pit your team against the world-either external competitors or nature. I like to call these man-versus-nature as opposed to man-versus-man awards.

Do you recognize your staff's achievements so long after the event that even they forget?

We did several things to reinforce these principles and make them real to the crew. For example, when we wrote awards or evaluations, we tried to couch behaviors in the language of these principles.

...anticipatory deliberate action. With the movements of watch standers indicating the next action they anticipate taking, they signal fellow team members and supervisors what they should be thinking about.

...we would set an objective of minimizing the time from casting off lines to having Santa Fe submerged and stable at 150 feet underwater. That forced the crew not to think in terms of disparate events...with all the discontinuities in personnel and equipment, but to think of sticking all those events together.

Embrace the inspectors

we worked hard on this issue of communication. It was for everyone. I would think out loud when I'd say, in general, here's where we need to be, and here's why. They would think out loud with worries, concerns, and thoughts.

when you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well.

It's ego...money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold onto it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves.

We were both distracted by the hustle of preparation, tasks that allowed for companionable silence.

"ensuring 'your child regularly spends time playing outside may help to reduce the risk of becoming short-sighted.'...because it is now believed that it is not books, screens or phones that are the most influential causes of myopia but that it is a byproduct of the fact that these things tend to be done indoors./Babies are all born long-sighted. As we grow, the eyeball changes shape like an auto focus on a camera..."

"The Victorian work ethic we have all inherited has a lot to answer for."

"The catastrophic realization that one's life has been wasted in useless toil for someone who has exploited you, destroyed your body, taken their profit and left you to starve is the single most dramatic moment of a working life."

"It also contains those two necessaries for any health book- advice that puts the onus for pathology on the individual, and a machine to help cure it."

William Morris...characterized the new class system as, "a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work which produces nothing, and the class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work which is often unproductive."

"You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them." - John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1853)

"'But it is not to be imagined that she lives up to her income. Few people of common prudence will do that; and whatever she saves, she will be able to dispose of.'"

"'I can have no pleasure while I see you in this state.' 'And you will never see me otherwise. Mine is a misery which nothing can do away.' 'You must not talk so, Marianne. Have you no comforts? no friends? Is your loss such as leaves no opening for consolation?'"