Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
What’s the best way to choose a mate? Here’s some good advice.
“Look over a sample of males and go for the one with the longest tail.”
Actually, that advice works really well for birds. Not so well for people. Scientists speculate that female birds might have had a preference for longer tailed males because those males could fly better. Long-tailed males then got a better deal. They were perceived as more attractive, therefore more able to find a mate and reproduce; therefore there were more of them around. It’s called a runaway process, as described eloquently by Gerd Gigerenzer in his book Gut Feelings. He points out that in decision-making one good reason can be enough. (“Does this milk smell bad?”)
What’s the best way to make a career choice?
Counting summer and college jobs, I have worked as a chef, a professional stapler in a pamphlet factory, a veterinarian’s assistant, a boat scraper, a mental hospital attendant, a newspaper reporter, a news producer and currently, a film director and blog writer.
How did I make those choices? Uh, it’s complicated. Important decisions are made not logically but from the gut.
by lightmatter, via Flickr
When you “decide” on a particular career path or to take a job, you often are following a series of chance events. (“I went to high school with this guy, and then he knew this guy, and then we met this guy at Burning Man and that guy hired me.”) In a study of 772 college and university students, nearly 70 percent reported that chance events influenced their career decisions. What we call “luck” is a big factor in how life and work unfold.
But what is luck, really? It breaks down to the ability to see opportunities when others don’t. Colleen Seifert, a psych professor at the University of Michigan, calls this predictive encoding. You imagine scenarios where intentions and desires might be fulfilled and in so doing encode your mind to recognize the opportunity when it comes up.
When opportunity knocks, you’re listening. You program yourself to receive the good stuff, and sure enough you do.
That means that you can grab on to the power of serendipity to make things go your way.
Changing your usual patterns also leads to opportunity. Richard Wiseman, a researcher who studies the psychology of chance, has shown that even taking a different way to work can change your perceptions and widen your horizons. This, I think, is what makes somebody like Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Never Eat Alone,” an effective networker. By becoming a professional extrovert and talking up everyone you meet, you see opportunity everywhere. Opportunity therefore is created.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
-Seneca, Roman philosopher
Some folks are trying to take the idea of a “hunch” and make it into a science – check out the addictive decision-making website hunch.com.
I still like to believe that I got my first job because I knew a guy who knew a guy who talked about the place with the thing and his sister, who was hot, recommended me.
But it would seem that luck is no accident and career paths are not random.
Subscribe in a reader
Twitter, sacred? Well, maybe. A recent blog by Stephen Dinan started the ball rolling for me by asking “When something is wildly successful, as Twitter now is, I often ask myself about its higher purpose. In other words, what might be the deeper meaning of Twitter?”
Could a string of 140 characters have a higher meaning?
In his blog, Dinan makes the case that Twitter is propagating new ideas at light speed, helping to create a new form of intimacy and allowing us to connect with our individuality while tracking global concerns.
Let’s break that down. There’s no doubt that ideas propelled at the speed of light are spreading faster than ever before. The concept of intimacy and “friendship” is also changing fast. By looking at my Blackberry I can learn what my friends thought of exploding stereotypes in Julie and Julia or exploding bodies in District 9. One friend is getting metal rods in his foot after a 80 mph racing kart crash. Ok, too much information. Point is, this kind of intimacy doesn’t involve face to face, more like face to screen. You can have involved relationships with people without ever meeting them.
Decline of civilization, ya think? Could be. But I think it’s more about people craving connection and being inventive about finding it where they can. I can’t find the town square of Los Angeles on my GPS; neither can anybody else. 
So we have to invent a town square. Mine turns out to be on a screen. Is that a strange place to find “what it’s all about?”
“I am glad I wasn’t there. I hate crowds. In a field? No in-door plumbing? My sister will tell you that camping, to me, has always meant a Holiday Inn. Music? I’m tone deaf.”
-Mathew Tombers
Tombers wrote that in a blog about Woodstock, the cultural touchstone that happened forty years ago this month. Like Tombers, I too would have stayed away, but only because I can’t deal with using a porta-potty while on acid. The iconic moment of Woodstock has come around again in a surprising way – this time instead of mud and music we have pixels and social progress.
As people seek connection on the Internet they are also trying to do work that matters. The two go together because the exchange of ideas is accelerating while we remain connected with hundreds if not thousands of people. Businesses are going green. People are looking at micro-financing to help the world’s poor. The shows I’m pitching in my company are about healing or consciousness or science and spirit. Ideas travel fast when they’re wired and there’s the sense that we’re all thinking the same thing: How can we do good?
As Lynne Twist writes in The Soul of Money, “The communications explosion has awakened our natural relatedness to one another and the awareness of the fact that we’re interconnected. It has also facilitated a truly global conversation on important issues that affect us all.”
A global conversation on Twitter? That’s technology helping us put a lot of consciousness into 140 characters.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
I was watching the waters of the Ganges flowing through the town of Rishikesh, India. I’d heard that the Sadhus, or holy men, said those words about the river to explain why the holy Ganges looked like a garbage dump. I must have been really enlightened that day, because with vision better than Superman’s I could see the E. coli, the hepatitis A, B and C, the typhoid and cholera and dysentery swirling downstream.
I was trekking a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. The only sign of life was an ink black beetle walking carefully on blue ice. My Super Vision was also working that day. 
I scanned the vastness all around, intoxicated with the way the ice ripped into the sky. I saw no disease of any kind, not a single speck of trash anywhere. That’s because if you bring trash there you also have to take it out. If the Argentine park rangers find that you’ve left any, they will unsheathe their ice axes, dig a grave for you and dump you in; I think that’s the rule, anyway. The ice is so clean that you can mix it with whiskey and drink it down, using it to jump start your heart so you are able to walk the trail back to the boat that circles icebergs, to the little bus bouncing on a gravel road, to your room where you will finally be warm again.
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
Was the voice of that holy man trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as “pure” perception? Sometimes your eyes don’t see what they’re seeing? Could I have been distracted by all the noise and chaos that is India?
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This is where science comes in handy. It can measure stuff, and researchers at Montana State University have concluded that the Ganges contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes.
“The Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.”
– Dr. Tim Ford, Montana State University
Scientists can also measure how fast glaciers are melting in Patagonia and elsewhere, documenting climate change. So you might conclude that human perception, filtered by memory and experience, won’t get you far when trying to prove anything. For example, if you come from a dirty place, India may look clean to you. If you come from a noisy place, Patagonia may seem unbearably still. Without objective measurement, you get into “everything is relative.” Messy business.
Spiritual folks will tell you that faith helps you experience the unseen. (“Is that the face of Jesus on my bathroom wall?”) For the science-minded, this notion is easy to dismiss. But this is tricky territory. Some scientists are doubting whether we can really measure anything objectively – that the consciousness of the investigator changes the outcome, for one thing.
When science meets spirit, when objective measurement meets faith, could it be that boundaries of both science and spirit are going to be changed?
That makes my mind spin, and thankfully I notice I’m over 500 words – but I will continue this thought in another blog. No matter what the Sadhu says, I’m not going in the Ganges.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
