There are 3 people who I wouldn’t necessarily call “mentors” but fit the bill because they are influential older people whom I admire and have changed the course of my life for the better. They are my college professor, my Dad’s childhood friend, and Mitch Altman.
I am not alone when I call him a mentor. He may not like the term, but he has inspired so people I would be very surprised if more than a few would call him such. As he likes to say “I convince a lot of people to quit their job.”
I am addicted to the game 2048. I played it when it first came out, and somehow it lodged itself in my head and won’t get unstuck. I’ll play it during meetings, watching TV, or anything that doesn’t require my full attention but requires me to sit still. It’s my digital fidget spinner.
2048 is a simple game. It’s a sliding tile puzzle game where you slide numbered tiles and they double as they combine. The goal is to get the 2048 tile. You can also keep playing after you won and get bigger and bigger numbers.
It was written in 2014 by Gabriele Cirulli1 in JavaScript and CSS. It’s open-source and it went viral as people started creating their own versions of the game. I wrote one called “50” as a tongue-and-cheek reference to 50 Shades of Gray. I thought it would be funny to make it to go though shades of gray instead of going from grey through red to yellow. Also, instead of doubling and going to 2048, it adds 5 every time and you win at 50.
So what have I learned from obsessively playing the same game for over 8 years? Glad you asked! I thought about it much deeper than one really ought to and came up with these life lessons:
I have a Bacon Number of 2.
What is a Bacon Number? Let’s back up.
There is a theory that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. It’s called the Six Handshakes Rule or Six Degrees of Separation. There’s no real science behind it, but it’s an accepted factoid and may as well be true.
Kevin Bacon is in a ton of movies. More than 65. He’s no Eric Roberts, who has been in over 400 movies, but he’s been in a lot. The idea is that all Hollywood actors have 6 or fewer degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.
For many years, I had a project called Just The Factoids. The idea was conceived as a conceptual art project to make art out of pure idea in text form. I drew inspiration from Jenny Holzer1, a conceptual artist who creates works of text in public, and L.M. Boyd2, a newspaper columnist who wrote articles that were lists of interesting and amusing trivia.
A “factoid” is a short fact that is probably true, but is not necessarily provable. I would collect these semi-substantiated facts and try to make them into a body of work using social media as my artistic media.
From 2017 to 2020, I posted a new factoid every day on Twitter. I posted over 1500 factoids and got a little over 1000 followers. I had a Facebook page, a blog, and Tumblr, and I even sold a couple of shirts with factoids printed on them.
I love infographics! I actually collect them in a folder on my hard drive. I have a chat room where my friends and I share them.
One of the great moments in history of infogaphics is the story of Florence Nightingale’s Coxcomb. She wasn’t the first to create an infographic, but she was arguably the first to use an infographic to change policy.
She included this graph in her report to the army to convince them of the effectiveness of sanitization in saving lives in the Crimerian war. She gave her innovative graph the name coxcomb. Luckily for us, she got some pushback from the army which convinced her to leak the image to the press. Otherwise we may have never known of this beautiful graph because it could’ve been a classifieds military secret.
The term came from miniature railroad enthusiasts at MIT. The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), formed in 1946, is still going at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the late 50s early 60s, “hacker culture” meant do-it-yourselfers who had a penchant for playing with technology. Today, a lot of people see it as a synonym for cyber-criminal. We have “white hat” hackers or security experts, “black hat” hackers, more akin to cyber-criminals, and “grey hat” hackers who sit somewhere in the middle.
There is a productivity concept that that’s been around since the 80s that you need to set SMART goals. In other words, goals that are:
Sounds great, doesn’t it? It’s bullshit.
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Flying. I have taken up paragliding. It is a wonderful but very difficult to learn sport. It is amazing being able to fly in the air with nothing but a wing above. It’s actually very quiet and relaxing once you are in the air. The hard part is “kiting” which is controlling your wing when you are on the ground.
I have done a lot of disparate things over the years, but the main way I have made my money is through teaching. I like to say that I am a teacher because it feeds my addiction to learning. It’s a cliché for a reason, but I find the best way to learn is to teach.
What follows are some lessons I’ve learned about teaching.
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Let’s start with a definition:
Cognitive Dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.
Oxford English Dictionary
Cognitive Dissonance is a very uncomfortable feeling. It hurts. It can cause a mental breakdown. It can shorten your life because of the stress it causes. But it can also be a force for good.
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