Pop Philosophy

The Power of Perpendicular Thinking

Do you know why we have a 40 hour work week? The answer might shock you. Its origins date to the Industrial Revolution (not the Internet Revolution - the industrial one). Back in the middle of the 18th century, it was common for people to work 10 to 12 hours, 6 days a week. After almost a century of effort by organized labor to coalesce around a common, acceptable work standard, the US Congress ultimately passed the Fair Labor Act of 1938 and formalized our current work week. 

 

Tim Ferriss famously upended this concept with his book and 'lifestyle design' manifesto, The Four Hour Work Week. In it, he pointed out how anachronistic this concept of 'work' was in light of our contemporary, always-connected knowledge economy. He went further, remarking that all of the 'common sense rules' of the real world are actually "a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions." But he must have been exaggerating, right? Surely this was an example of argument-by-anecdote, and that most - if not almost all - of what we're told, taught or too terrified to question is really true ... isn't it? Let me answer that question with another question ...

Have you ever wondered why we take summer vacations? Because we needed our kids to help plough corn fields. 

The practice is an outdated legacy of the agrarian economy. Summer vacations were not originally 'vacations' at all. They were meant to allow farmers' children (a critical part of the work force at the time) to pitch in during harvest season. Small family farming began to recede in the 19th century - around the time the Industrial Revolution began, and the 40 hour work week took hold - and yet we continue to live with the legacy of both a decade into the 21st century.

This isn't just a quaint custom that we've preserved past its' sell-by date, either. As Time Magazine pointed out in a cover story this past August, The Case Against Summer Vacation: 

"when American students are competing with children around the world, who are in many cases spending 4 weeks longer in school a year, larking through summer is a luxury we can't afford. What's more, for many children - especially children of low-income families - summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation ... Dull summers take a steep toll, as researchers have been documenting for more than a century. Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year."

 

 

It's called the 'summer slide', and its most pernicious impact is that the problem it creates compounds year after year. By ninth grade, "summer learning loss could be blamed for two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups." Whereas the 40 hour week is merely an inconvenience foisted on an unsuspecting workforce, the unintended consequences of summer vacation are bad at best, and a key driver of social inequality at worst. 

Noticing a pattern here? The institutions that form the heart of of our day to day existence - working 9 to 5, weekends off, summer vacations - are actually throwbacks to other times, anachronisms from other centuries. What we regard as the benign realities of life are actually harmful, outdated societal habits. 

You might be tempted to dismiss this as cantankerous post-modernism, but people have been warning us about this for some time now. A century and half ago, Oscar Wilde pithily summed up what could be the proto-philosophy behind this thinking when he dryly pointed out that "everything popular is wrong."  From across the Atlantic, his contemporary Mark Twain added, as if he were nodding in assent: "When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." 

The 40 hour work week and the summer vacation are examples of what some people call the 'QWERTY Effect' (named after the curious reason why most Anglo-saxon keyboards have letters that spell out Q-W-E-R-T-Y in the upper left-hand corner). In the era when people wrote on typewriters with keys (look at the picture below to see what they look like, digital natives!), the mechanics of the earliest machines were very delicate.  In fact, the main design challenge was to prevent users from typing too quickly and jamming the type-bars together. In 1873, Christopher Latham Sholes managed to slow down the speed at which people could type by laying out the keys in one of the least efficient ways possible, and the QWERTY layout was born. Fast forward almost 150 years, and the keyboard on which I'm typing (should I write 'keying'?) this post on still maintains the QWERTY layout (even though there's no type-bar or ribbon to be found anywhere).

The QWERTY keyboard has become a metaphor for practices that persist well past their point of relevance, and for the power of high switching costs (an economic term quantifying the resistance to change) in preserving outmoded but deeply ingrained activities. When I realized that so many aspects of my life - from how I work to how I type - were based on old habits, I began to wonder what else we've been conditioned to accept as 'fact' without critically assessing it first. It was then that I discovered the power of what I've come to call 'Perpendicular Thinking'.

In geometry, a perpendicular line is one that meets another at a perfect, 90 degree right angle. Aside from the association with the word 'right' (as in correct, not conservative!), I describe the approach this way because we need to develop the reflex of coming at any commonly-held practice from an angle - and preferably one of professional scepticism.

Let me be clear: I'm not advocating blind, contrarian opposition. Indeed, this would be as short-sighted as taking what's given to us as a given. Instead, I believe that we owe to ourselves to question what we're told, investigate if it's still true, and make a personal, conscious determination about whether or not we choose to embrace or reject it.

Perpendicular Thinking is not about adopting conspiracy theories, either. I don't believe that we are being misled by unseen Masters of the Universe. Rather, this is more likely a convergence of two intellectual sins: sloth and inertia. We are too lazy to question what we are told, and too hidebound by tradition to change the way we've always done things. But while there is no secret 'star chamber' pulling society's strings, we are still being negligent if we don't examine what we're being sold. We owe it to ourselves to question conventional wisdom; and once you do so, one can't help but realize that we're surrounded by 'truths' that are not actually true. Let's look at just 3 examples of modern myths: you must buy, not rent; the secret to success is to work harder; and it is possible to do two things at once (well).

1) Renting v. Owning

Consider the axiom that you should own property. For generations, people were taught that owning one's home was the epitome of the American Dream. This irrationally exuberant (to borrow Alan Greenspan's colourful phrase) idea spread elsewhere - as far away as Iceland and Ireland, we learned later - and a worldwide property bubble ensued. The Great Recession of 2008 brought real estate values crashing down, and with it the now clearly foolish idea that everyone should strive to have their own suburban McMansions. 

But we should have realized this sooner; as early as 2005, The Economist had written an editorial (a leader, in their parlance) arguing that, even in the midst of the boom, renting was a more sensible option for most people. The reasons were simple: a renter got more house for their money, and they had the flexibility to deal with changing economic circumstances and job opportunities by being mobile (a fact that would prove critical after many lost their jobs 3 years later). The argument, while cogent and compelling, ran counter to the prevailing 'wisdom' of the moment, and few followed The Economist's sage advice. Five years on, another magazine, Time (a consistently contrarian weekly, it seems) ran a different cover story entitled: "Rethinking Homeownership: Why owning a home may no longer make economic sense." If only we had been paying attention ....

2) Less is More

In 1906, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered a fascinating 'power law' of life: that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The Pareto Principle, or the 80 | 20 Rule, as it's more commonly known, has proved to apply to everything from profits (80% of a company's profits come from 20% of its' customers) to personal style (20% of your clothes will be worn 80% of the time) . Richard Koch even wrote an entire book on the idea, methodically enumerating the dozens of applications - and implications - of this concept.

What makes this a particularly 'perpendicular' idea is its counterintuitive message that less is indeed more. In an era where people foolishly boast about 80 hour work weeks (forget 4 hour ones!), the underlying message is that we ought to live to work. The power of the Pareto Principle lies in the revelation that we need to work smarter, not harder, in order to succeed. Applying the 80 | 20 Rule to all aspects of your life will revolutionize the way you approach problems, even as it reverses one of our society's central scripts.

3) The Multitasking Myth

Modern life has left us with many misconceptions, perhaps the most pernicious being the conceit that we can do many things at once. This stems from our increasingly symbiotic relationship with computers, and the tendency to converge their functionality with ours. As their processing power increased year after year, computers gained the ability to run multiple programs concurrently. However, while our machines were getting more powerful, our minds were not. Humans, alas, don't benefit from regular hardware upgrades. Nevertheless, we have come to believe that we can operate as efficiently as our devices do, and the result is the myth of multitasking.

Don't let its' benign moniker fool you: multitasking is to the millennial generation what marijuana was to the sixties generation. It is the defining - and destructive - opiate of its time, and it is responsible for far more than some jumbled e-mails or errors on an excel spreadsheet. First, while we believe that we are getting more done in less time by balancing three things at once, research tells another story. Studies demonstrate that when we are 'multitasking', we aren't actually performing each activity concurrently (as PCs do) but rather toggling from task to task. Each attention change brings switching costs (there's that word again), which ultimately means that it take more time to do multiple things simultaneously than it would to do them sequentially (one after the other). In other words, multitasking is not more efficient than single-tasking; the activities take longer and, unsurprisingly, are more prone to error.

 

It gets worse. Multitasking is actually a life-threatening habit :texting while driving is more dangerous than drunk drinking (Studies reveal that a person who is texting while driving at the speed of 35 mph will cover 25 ft before bringing the car to complete halt as compared to a distance of 4 ft which a drunk driver would cover at the same speed). 

Finally, multitasking is even adversely rewiring our minds. Don't believe me? Read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and you'll be more frightened by reality than you were by 'Paranormal Activity 2'. Carr's book is a cri de coeur on how technology is transforming us - for the worse. We are losing our ability to concentrate and luxuriate in deep reading, opting instead for what Tim Ferriss calls the cocaine pellet dispenser of digital distractions. We contemplate much less; we skim and scan more. Worst of all, our brains are being scrambled by the very practices that we adopt to keep up with the frenetic pace of modern life. Multitasking is yet another big lie we tell ourselves, but - much like the 'summer slide' - the consequences are compounding in our minds every day.

 

Perpendicular Thinking is part of my personal Pop Philosophy

Perhaps now you understand why it's so important to 'be perpendicular'? I have definitely tried to embrace this philosophical approach. In fact, looking back on my life so far, I've noticed that I've often followed - for better and for worse - my own north star in both actions and thoughts. Indeed, I was perpendicular before I discovered perpendicularity.

I left Montreal right after graduating university to pursue an adventure in politics in Washington, DC - as the only Canadian on Capitol Hill, no less - at a time when most of my friends were still clinging to the safe harbour of home. Then, 6 years into a reasonably successful career as a Congressional Press Secretary, I pivoted out of politics and into business school - but in London, England for good measure. I spent the next decade in media and telecommunications, half in Europe and half in North America, before making my latest transition into consulting, speaking and writing. My career path has not been haphazard, but it certainly hasn't followed the linear direction that some of my friends' trajectories have - either in geography or in profession - either. The road I've taken has had its fair share of right angle turns along the way.

 

 

In my intellectual journey, I've followed a similar path. Many of the ideas that have caught my eye or sprung from my imagination share the common gene of contrarian thinking. I've written about being alone together, the sex appeal of single moms, the significance of exits over entrances, the 'return' of history and the importance of making magnificent mistakes. Even the raison d'étre of this blog - to think seriously about not-so-serious things - is a manifestation of my penchant for perpendicularity.

Along the way, I've taken inspiration from a number of my friends who have had the courage to walk alone in one form or another. I think of my mate Hendo, who stepped away from a lucrative career trading derivatives to work for the World Wildlife Fund, or Ben, who started a new media company at a stage in life - just married, bambino on the way - when others are normally looking to join an established enterprise. I remember a pivotal talk with my great friend Mike Rodman, who told me that, after careful deliberation, he and his wife had decided that they weren't going to have children. It struck me that this was the first time that anyone in my circle had taken the other side of the parenthood argument. Mike's thoughtful, sincere and coherent position for not having kids was the first instance that a friend openly spoke of the 'heretical' idea of choosing not to found a family. I respect his decision, but I admire him even more for having the confidence to think on his own, and the courage to take the road less travelled.

 

 

Perpendicular thinking is not just useful as a philosophy of life, however. It can also be a sound business strategy. Henry Ford was fond of saying that if he had just listened to his customers, he would have produced a better horse and buggy. Ford realized that if you waited around for someone to ask for your product, you might be too late. Jeff Bezos understood this when he built Amazon in an age when bricks and mortars bookstores - and businesses - were the way people overwhelmingly shopped.  

Legendary investor Warren Buffett thinks much the same way. He points out that "to make big money in the investment world, you have to learn to think independently; to think independently, you need to be comfortable standing alone. I buy stocks when the lemmings are headed the other way." Buffett walks the walk, too: he bought into Berkshire Hathaway when no one wanted it; he bought into American Express when no one wanted it; he bought into the Washington Post Company when no one wanted it; and most recently, at the bottom of the recent Great Recession, he bought into Goldman Sachs when no one wanted it. He knows the time to buy a stock is when everyone else is selling it - not when everyone else is buying it.

Steve Jobs is cut from the same cloth. He looked at a music industry ravaged by piracy and not yet awash in MP3 players, married an easy, affordable (and oh by the way legal) digital music delivery system (iTunes) to an elegant, eminently portable and oh-so-cool device (iPod) and changed the game forever. As one of his ads famously advocated, Steve Jobs thought differently.

Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs all proved what business writer Alan Webber once noted: "Counterintuitive can be a great economic model." He should know, too: he went from being editor of the Harvard Business Review to reinventing the business magazine when he launched Fast Company in 1995. These men all parlayed perpendicular thinking into profits, but to reduce this to a novel commercial approach would be missing the point. We owe it ourselves to follow their lead, but also Mark Twain's and my friend Mike Rodman's as well. We need to become more comfortable about going against the grain.

 

 

Living a Perpendicular Life

 So what does this all mean for you? How can you adopt these principles and live a perpendicular life?

Too many of us are afraid to be ourselves, so we follow the crowd off the cliff. Robert F. Kennedy once observed: "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" I'm not usually one to disagree with a Kennedy, but I take issue with the predicate: not enough people go through life really asking 'why', in my opinion. That is at the heart of perpendicular thinking - to come at conventional wisdom obliquely, from an angle, and develop the habit of asking why, or why not? So let me leave you with some suggestions: 

Don't subcontract critical thinking to society. More often than not, conventional wisdom is more reliant on convention than sagacity.

Be consistently counterintuitive. Always stop and think when someone says that you're 'supposed' to do something. Are you buying a house because you really want to own, or because you've been told that it's what responsible, smart people do?

Flip the script. Learn from children (as Adora Svitak's delightful TED Talk wisely counsels). Make your mistakes magnificent, by focusing on understanding your own failures rather than trying to reverse-engineer others successes. Plan your exits as carefully as you do your entrances.

Be an innovator rather than a follower. It worked for Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs; what could it do for you?

Contemplate - perhaps even take - the road less travelled. It may turn out that you're the only one who knows what they're doing.

Be uncommon. Always try to be in a 'Category of One' in business and in life. A noted businessman and philosopher once said, "you want to be considered the only ones who do what you do." His name: Jerry Garcia. His achievement: turning The Grateful Dead into the most successful touring band of all-time.

Dare to be 'un' popular, in the Wildean sense of the term. Don't worry about what others are doing; worry about whether you're doing the right thing.

 

 

Finally, adopt the 'X-Files' approach to life: Trust no one and nothing. I wonder what QWERTY practices are you tolerating in your life? Find out. 

If you start to ask questions like this, you will be amazed by some of the answers. Make them part of your life philosophy, and tap into the power of perpendicular thinking. But don't just take my word for it ...

 

Aphorisms - Advice and Antidote for an Attention-Deficit-Addled Age

I am an aspiring aphorist. No, that doesn't mean that I'm afraid of florists or want to become a wrist specialist. An aphorist is someone who writes aphorisms. 

What is an aphorism, you ask? Many people don't recognize the word, yet an aphorism is one of those rare concepts in the English language that everyone knows what it is but no one knows what it's called.  

Thoroughly confused? I thought so. Let me try to do for aphorisms what they do for us, namely make a complicated idea both beautiful and simple. An aphorism is a profound but pithy phrase of wisdom, often perfectly put in a memorable sentence or two. They embody the Jesuits' maxim, so perfectly summed up in the epigram 'Precision of Thought, Economy of Expression'.

They can be both poetic and prosaic. Some people know them as adages, others as sayings. The more derisive among us might dismiss them as cliches and fortune cookie messages, while Zen monks recite them as koans and mantras. However you feel about aphorisms, the one undeniable reality is that they've been around as long as man has been able to think and speak (in that order). 

Socrates gave us one of history's first aphorisms when he noted - almost as a coda for future aphorists - that "the unexamined life is not worth living." That's essentially what aphorists do: they examine a particular aspect of life and distill it into a pointed or poignant phrase that captures - and delivers - an enormous amount of wisdom in a wonderfully economical way. 

As you've probably gathered by now, I love aphorisms (just for the record, it's pronounced Ah-Four-ISM). They appeal to my penchant for (pop) philosophical analysis, but also to my love of language. Aphorisms are examples of style and substance, form and function; They deliver more punch in a phrase than most writers do in a page. Aphorisms are to life's observers what the japanese haiku is to an aspiring poet: they represent the most challenging medium through which to express one's art. 

Aphorisms are also, quite accidentally, perhaps the perfect antidote to our current attention-deficit-addled age. This is because they have the unique capability of passing on profound lessons in incredibly concise doses. In an era characterized (and cursed) by six-second attention spans, aphorisms deliver valuable advice in energy-efficient vehicles. Twitter, IM and SMS are the most important media to this generation, and even these limited text technologies can be used to deliver these concise nuggets of wisdom. 

  George Bernard Shaw memorably wrote that "Youth is wasted on the young." Oscar Wilde - one of history's great aphorists - added: "I am not young enough to know everything." I couldn't agree with them more. As the recent film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button artfully demonstrated, life would make a lot more sense if we 'aged' in the other direction and got younger as we advanced in years. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard understood this intuitively when he noted wryly that "you understand life backward but you live life forward." 

I believe that today's younger generations have a tremendous amount to gain from studying these 'Ancients' through their aphorisms. In fact, these proverbs represent almost perfect nano-philosophies for the ADD Generation. What college student, blithely bingeing on pizza and beer at 3 am, would not benefit from Wilde's advice that they shouldn't take the power of their youth for granted? What twenty-something young professional, about to embark on an uncertain career trajectory, would not take some solace in Lao-Tzu's immortal adage that even "a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step"? 

In fact, the journey analogy is quite apt. Aphorisms provide you with a road map to life, giving you turn-by-turn directions to navigate around almost any obstacle. 

Have you recently lost a job as a result of the global economic crisis? You would do well to remember Epicurus's words that "a man is wealthy in proportion to the things he can do without." 

Perhaps you are a recent college graduate, looking for your first 'real' job, or even a mid-career professional contemplating a radical change in vocation? Then this proverb from Confucius will provide some sound advice to you: "find a job that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life." 

Maybe you're an anxious boyfriend, wracked with worry about whether your girl will cheat on you? Then this observation from Mark Twain can soothe your soul: "I have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened." 

Aphorisms don't just help you with the challenges that life throws at you; they can also teach you how to enjoy life itself. They don't always come inscribed on stone tablets or in musty old tomes, either. One of the simplest - but paradoxically most profound - pieces of wisdom I've ever received came from a lyric in a Sheryl Crow song, namely that "happiness is wanting what you have, not getting what you want". 

I come from a long line of aphorists. My grandfather penned one of the better (but alas least well-known) epigrams of his time when he used to sign his philosophical pamphlets with the tag line "Wealth, like health, should be at the expense of nobody." Later, his son, my Dad, the original 'Pop' Philosopher, eloquently observed one day, when talking about the difference between academics and political leaders, that unfortunately "thinkers rarely get the opportunity to do, and doers rarely get the opportunity to think." 

Not one to break with family tradition, I have also tried my hand at coining the pithy, philosophical phrase. For instance, friends have often heard me remark that "you have to have a Wednesday to have a Saturday", meaning that we have to suffer the difficult first in order to enjoy the sublime. Others have agreed with my observation that "relationships are like snowflakes; they look alike, but no two are identical." One of my former bosses like to quote my saying (probably unconsciously cribbed from someone else, no doubt) that "people prefer to edit rather than write". I appear to like to do both ... 

Clearly, my best days in this field are in front of me. Luckily, as someone once poetically observed, I feel like I have 'more tomorrows than yesterdays' right now. I may be wrong on that front, but I don't think I am on the other, larger point that these phrases deliver trenchant - and sometimes transcendental - truths that are perfectly suited for this era of Twitter attention spans. 

I wish that I had discovered aphorisms earlier in life. Armed with their wisdom, I might have saved myself from some sadness and instead followed Eleanor Roosevelt's sound advice to "learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself." After all, aphorisms are essentially attempts by their authors to pass on for free the hard-earned wisdom for which they paid dearly. Why not take them up on their generous offer? The price is right, and in the parlance of finance professionals - a group of people, if I ever met one, that would also benefit from studying aphorisms - the upside reward far outweighs the downside risk. 

I'm still only an aspiring aphorist. However, even if I never add my name to this most distinguished list, I'll have benefited from being in their company. As the French essayist (and extremely prolific aphorist in his own right) Montaigne eloquently once said, "I quote others only the better to express myself."

Welcome to the 21st Century

 

Decades and centuries don't tend to start on time. The 1960s arguably began in late November, 1963, on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. His assassination was the first in a series of tumultuous incidents that dominated that decade socially and politically. Similarly, the 20th Century probably started with a seemingly inconsequential event, when Henry Ford launched his Model T car in 1908 giving us both the assembly line and the automobile, and changing our world forever. 

I believe that history will record that the 21st Century actually began in the autumn of 2008. Two milestones, one economic and the other political, mark its' starting point. The first was the September Wall Street collapse, the after-effects of which we are still feeling. In the days and weeks after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell an almost apocalyptic 777 points, markets the world over roiled with volatility, Iceland declared bankruptcy and governments scrambled to nationalize their banks. Experts almost instantly recognized the new nature of this challenge. Harvey Pitt, a former SEC Chairman, pointed out last month that part of the problem lay in the fact that "we've got a 21st century financial services marketplace and a 19th century regulatory model." Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, characterized the chaos as a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami". All this confirmed the unprecedented scale and global scope of the storm, but also served notice that we were at an economic inflection point.

The financial crisis in turn affected the direction of another key contest. Barack Obama's election on Tuesday - widely credited, in part, to his calm reaction to those events - put an exclamation point on the start of a new century. One need only look at the emotional response to his victory to see why: a new US president has never elicited more interest and engaged more people across America and around the world. On those merits alone, it would have to be considered consequential. However, the true seismic impact of Obama's selection can be felt even more in its symbolism.

In some ways, Obama represents an idealized but contemporary reflection of the country he will soon lead. The Obama brand values of youth and cosmopolitanism find their echo in the real world. Today's America is being driven by younger and more multi-cultured influences. The 'Greatest Generation' of World War II, and the Baby Boomers who followed them, had produced every president since Eisenhower. On Tuesday, that torch was passed to a leader of a new generation, but also to a large swath of the electorate - the so-called Millennials - who voted for the very first time.  Young people weren't the only segment instrumental in putting Obama in the Oval Office: his support among African-Americans and Hispanics played an enormous role as well. Both these groups will grow in influence in the decades to come. By 2050, census projections indicate that the US will no longer be a predominantly white country. Yesterday's generational and ethnic minorities will become the governing majorities of tomorrow, and Obama's election anticipates that reality before it has actually happened.

 

Barack Obama represents America not only as it wants to be, but as it will be. The same can be said about the rest of the world, however. The US might be the first majority white country to elect a member of a visible minority as its' leader, but it will surely not be the last. As a result of globalization and population shifts, politicians of mixed ethnic identities will certainly surge into power and prominence in the coming years.

Famed science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote that "the future is already here. It's just not widely distributed yet." With the advent of the first global financial crisis and the election of the first multicultural American president, I believe that we have glimpsed the future and are simply waiting for it to become more commonplace. In that sense, then, we truly have turned the page on one era and have started something new.

Centuries don't begin on a calendar so much as they turn on inflection points in history. We experienced two such events this fall, and they signaled economic and political changes that will reverberate for decades to come around the world. Welcome to the 21st Century.

The Importance of Planning Exits rather than Entrances: Ending with the Beginning in Mind

I came across a thought-provoking Moet & Chandon advertisement recently (shocking, I know) where two impossibly glamourous young model-types are pictured leaving a limousine with a magnum of the eponymous champagne. The tag line reads: Turn an Exit into an Entrance. Be Fabulous.* 

It was the first time that I came across a perfect summation of the counter-intuitive philosophy that I've proselytized for years, namely that exits are often more important than entrances. 

Let me explain. People frequently go to great lengths to plan their entrances, but they almost never give thought to their exits. Perhaps this is driven by the belief that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. But what we often forget is that you never get a second chance to make a final impression, either. 

What makes the latter in some ways more critical than the former is that we are usually given opportunities, over time, to reinforce or - if need be - reverse the impact of an entrance. We are not afforded that luxury with our exits, however. Our last act is, in fact, the last word. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about endings. Perhaps it's because I experienced the passing of a loved one recently, and the reality of her being gone is still being absorbed. As someone put it well, I will never get over her departure, but I will start to get used to it. While she didn't get to completely stage manage her exit, she clearly had put a great deal of thought into the way she wanted to leave, as well as what she left behind. She understood that those final acts would serve as her adieu, and that those statements, both verbal and symbolic, would echo beyond her earthly lifetime. 

Unfortunately, many of us fail to have that foresight. Most of us forget the importance of the final frame. We focus almost exclusively on the opening credits in the scenes of life. The primacy of entrances over exits is a long-standing component of conventional wisdom, even if it is fundamentally ill-conceived. 

Nearly every aspect of public and private life, both past and present, reinforces this notion. In the political square, for example, elected officials have 'advance' people who arrive well before they do to map out, in meticulous detail, every aspect of their entrances. Presidents give Inaugural addresses every four years but rarely, if ever, make as much-ballyhooed farewell speeches. In the run-up to next year's presidential elections, we've been treated to a meticulously staged-managed declaration of candidacy by Barack Obama, but I doubt that we'll see a similar spectacle if he drops out of contention. 

History offers many of the same examples of this error. General Dwight David Eisenhower spent almost 3 years devising the amphibious D-Day invasion in Normandy - the opening of the Western front in World War II - but it fell to General George Marshall to cobble together his plan for the reconstruction of Europe in a few short months. Closer to today, US military commanders carefully choreographed the commencement of combat operations (the 'Shock and Awe' phase) in the recent Iraq war but failed to formulate so much as an outline of a strategy for the occupation afterwards. 

On a more personal level, people succumb to this same strategic misstep frequently as well. We fret over first dates but end entire relationships with something as desultory as a text message. We prepare fastidiously for an interview and dress to impress on our first day at a new office, but we quit jobs on a whim and slink out of a company, hoping not to have to honor our two weeks' notice. In an unintended irony, we labor over and spend lavishly on weddings, our introductions to married life, but leave both the details and the debt of our funerals largely unarticulated and unaccounted for. 

Indeed, there is an instinctive and, some might say, intellectual bias towards beginnings. Even the great Aristotle wrote over two Millennia ago that "well begun is half done." At the same time, however, we all probably intuitively suspect how important exits are to forming that last - and lasting - impression. 

But do we realize just how much weight those final moments carry? Probably not. Cognitive psychology is crystal clear on the subject, however. One of the most influential books I ever read, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, makes a powerful and impassioned argument about the 'tyranny' of too much choice. In building his very persuasive case, Dr. Schwartz introduces us to a psychological Power Law called the Peak | End Rule. First discovered by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the principle states that "what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This 'peak-end' rule is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt." Simply put, our entire recollection of an event, a period of time, a relationship or even a person can come down, in large measure, to how we felt at the zenith or nadir of the experience and especially at its' conclusion. 

Would it were that this was the only psychological force at play in making endings matter. The more we learn about how we think, the more it becomes apparent that perception and memory are fickle and partially false constructs. "Memories - especially memories of experiences - are notoriously unreliable. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs,", as Daniel Gilbert put it in his recent best-seller, Stumbling on Happiness. In some ways, this should not surprise us. The faithful representation of all that we've seen and felt would take up terabytes of a 'human hard drive'. How, as Gilbert asks, "do we cram that vast universe into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears?" The answer is that "the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory - at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads ... or a small set of of key features. Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quick reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory." 

What this means is that those 'snapshots' in our mind, the seemingly oh-so-vivid memories, should be more properly viewed as impressionist paintings rather than high-resolution photographs. What's more, as we have learned through the Peak | End Rule, exits shape and 'paint' those perceptions, and in turn they inform the interpretations that we mistake for memories. We "misremember the past", in effect, and exits have a direct influence on that process. 

Clearly, our emphasis on entrances is not serving our best interests. What can and should we do? Simple - we ought to put as much time and thought into our exits as we do our introductions. We should end with the beginning in mind. An exit is a passage, after all, from one state to another. We need to start by recognizing that every ending is actually an opening of sorts - the start of the period of time where memory and revisionism 'reweaves' the tapestry of events that just happened. Seen in this light, the end is really prologue to a perpetual epilogue, whereby the 'ending' we thought that we experienced is actually constantly being rewritten and reviewed. 

So how does one put this 'Exit-tential' philosophy into practice? First, you should focus on how you want the encounter you're ending to be remembered. I call this legacy thinking, and it should - to a greater or lesser extent - suffuse many aspects of your previously entrance-centered existence. When you prepare for your life's set pieces, ponder on how you can better dictate their perceived denouement. Approach each concluding stage - no matter how anodyne or seemingly small - the way presidents attack their final terms in office, obsessed with what historians will write of them. 

This probably all sounds highfalutin and hard to accomplish, but it's actually easier than you think. The next time you move on from a job, take the time to tie up all the loose ends and exit on a high note. When you terminate a relationship with a girlfriend, find the feelings to do it properly, respectfully and sensitively. As you leave a party, set aside a moment to say goodbye to everyone to whom you talked (and especially the hosts). 

To some, this might seem to be common decency and | or common sense. No argument from me there. However, these simple gestures are sadly infrequent in our increasingly ill-mannered world. Moreover, they represent small but significant steps towards a new level of thinking that factors in the epilogues to one's entrances. 

This approach can be applied at a very granular level. When you are leaving a place where you've just visited friends, give them a goodbye call from the airport before your flight boards and let them know how much you appreciated the time that you spent together. Try to close out cafe conversations with confidantes as you would write a conclusion to an essay, capturing key ideas and charting the date for the next chat. 

A lot of this must appear absurd, and on some level I can see why. However, we all recognize that when an event or experience is well-ended we appreciate the difference. When rock god Bono departs the stage after a live concert, he and U2 have fine-tuned their finales so well that they simultaneously satisfy their audience with at least one encore, while still leaving them wanting more. When Jerry Seinfeld concludes a comedy set, he does so as the words - and the raucous laughter - of his last great joke linger in the air. Jacqueline Kennedy understood this reality, even in her moment of maximum grief. She carefully choreographed her husband and assassinated president John F. Kennedy's state funeral, down to the last decisive detail of having the coffin, draped with the Stars and Stripes, laying on a gun carriage drawn by six grey horses while a black riderless horse pranced along behind. That iconic image, along with that of the slain leader's casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, simultaneously served to give the country ceremonial closure while cementing JFK's Camelot legacy. Of course, Mrs. Kennedy was simply taking a page from ancient history and the Egyptians in particular, who perfected the glorious goodbye with their elaborate tombs and pyramids to honor their fallen pharaohs. 

These, then, are examples of graceful and well-considered exits. There are others. Some industries and disciplines incorporate this thinking into their orthodoxy. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists talk about having 'exit strategies' for their companies and investments. The language of theatre, too, has included the idea of 'exit, stage right' in its vernacular. Presidents, as well, are preoccupied by perpetuity and often engage in a flurry of activity towards the ends of their tenures in order to shape their legacies. 

As mere mortals, maybe we don't need to ponder our place in history. But we ought to turn a wider-angle lens on life, look beyond our natural bias towards beginnings and plan the postscripts to our experiences. We need to stumble through fewer emergency exits, and compose more carefully crafted epilogues. 

What makes an excellent exit, in my opinion? First, one must wrap up loose ends, putting a period at the end of the metaphorical sentence. Second, one should leave a lasting and positive impression, so that their lingering thought of you is ultimately a flattering but not fleeting one. Finally, a perfect postscript brings with it classy closure. Endings matter, and the sooner we realize this and respond accordingly the better off we'll be. 

Even ostensibly 'final' exits aren't really final, though (Funerals aren't the last time you find yourself thinking of someone, for instance). They are more properly viewed as transitions rather than finales. In some ways, every end is a beginning. It's the start of the period that follows the one you just concluded. Endings always seem to be followed by epilogues, which then serve as prologues themselves. Today, more than ever, everything seems to be cyclical, if not circular. 

This philosophical fatalism should not numb one to the importance of leaving a mark when you leave, though. Instead, it should embolden you to compose every conclusion with a coda, so that you don't leave up to chance the legacy you're about to create. If Stephen Covey made famous the mantra to "begin with the end in mind" as one of his sacrosanct Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I'd like to add (and perhaps memorialize) an eighth:"end with the beginning in mind". Keep an eye on your personal postscript. Practice legacy thinking, but start today. Don't just leave - depart. Don't just end - climax. Don't just stop - culminate. Conclude with a crescendo, not with a clunk. Take time to formulate your final impression. 

I'll leave you to ponder these provocative words from Mary, Queen of Scots, perhaps the original 'Exit Strategist', as they sum up rather succinctly my sentiments and put an elegant, if figurative, period on this peroration: "In my end is my beginning." The End. (or is it?)

The return of History

I was having lunch in a Persian restaurant in London with my Nigerian friend Obi the other day when I had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn't a realization about globalization, though by the opening line of my post it could very well have been. Rather, a lightning bolt struck when Obi described to me the qualities he looked for in potential recruits for the unusual investment firm in which he is a partner. His company is "the largest - and sometimes only - foreign portfolio investor in many of the markets of sub-Saharan Africa." Obi and his colleagues spend their time analyzing corporate, economic and political information in that area of the world, in the hopes that this will help them make money for their clients. 

I should point out at this juncture that Obi is not your normal investment analyst or fund manager. Far from being maniacally focused on making money, he is more of a Renaissance man of rare ability and kaleidoscopic interests. Obi is a medical doctor who can extemporize for hours about politics - from the sub-Saharan variety to Britain and America's arcane political systems - who discovered a zeal for corporate finance while doing an MBA at London Business School. We met there, and I've enjoyed his company tremendously - and been enlightened by his broad ranging insights - ever since. 

While he and I chatted over lunch that day, I asked him what types of people he sought out to join his firm. After all, few people had his rare combination of medical, business and geopolitical knowledge; surely, there weren't many other 'Obis' out there to snap up for the company. Given that, I expected him to say that they hired either people familiar with Africa and its' public companies to whom they could teach corporate finance skills, or clever manipulators of the Black-Scholes options pricing model (an abstruse corporate finance tool) who could be instructed in the ways of the Saharan continent. To my great surprise, Obi responded that while both financial analysis abilities and knowledge in African affairs were valued assets in a potential recruit, the most critical requirement for him was an appreciation for ... history. 

I was astounded, and it must have been apparent by my reaction since Obi went on to explain why. It all made perfect sense after he did, too. In a nutshell, the landscape of public companies in Africa today resemble, in an approximate sense, the state of corporate America at the beginning of the 20th century. The uber-corporations that stand astride the globe today began the last century as family-owned companies started in small towns (such as Sam Walton's Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart). As they grew into the behemoths they have become, they passed through predictable - and well documented - stages of development and growth. As Obi pointed out, looking at Africa in 2007 is not unlike looking at America in 1907. Consequently, predicting the commercial 'future' in Africa - identifying the right companies and industries in which to invest - has a lot more to do with history and less to do with finance or, to a certain extent, local realities. Obi punctuated his point by adding matter-of-factly, "face it, Ion: there is very little today that is actually new." Cue the lightning bolt here ... 

Of course, he was right, and not just about history's applicability to business but to all aspects of life. Every generation tends to think - often through an intoxicating combination of naivete and self-absorption - that the challenges they face are completely unique and unparalleled. While most people concede the existence of historical antecedents, few actually accept the proposition that progress is more of a wheel than a line - that when we experience change it is more often than not as a repetition of history rather than a completely new story. 

Take globalization, for example. Authors have written reams about the impact of this 'new' phenemenon. One of my favorite authors, Thomas Friedman, wrote two excellent tomes on the subject, The Lexus and The Olive Tree and the more recent The World is Flat. Both books gained renown for performing the literary equivalent of capturing the lightning of globalization in a bottle. Friedman - and authors like him - have done much to help the lay person understand globalization, but they have also contributed to the common misperception that somehow this is a new development. Globalization - even as we know it - has been a rising tide of change at least since Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the architect of Mercantilism, imported Venetian glass and Flemish tapestries to France in the mid 17th century. Some more imaginative historians trace its' roots all the way back to the Mongol Empire and the cross-continental capital and culture flows that stemmed from the Silk Road trade. Regardless of its' actual starting point, globalization is neither new nor a particularly revolutionary phenemenon. However, the concept is often denuded from proper historical context and portrayed in the media today as both unfamiliar and unprecedented. 

The vast majority of 'analysis' about the Internet is another example of a-historical hyperbole. Don't get me wrong: I'm obviously not one of those deluded souls who believes that the Internet is a passing fad. However, I do submit that the changes wrought by the Internet are both more familiar and less fantastical than the conventional wisdom would have us believe. The Economist's recent survey on the Internet and new media (here) correctly put the Internet 'revolution' in perspective. Far from rejecting its' legitimacy as a revolutionary force, the survey made the point that we've experienced such a revolution before and that this one would follow a similar pattern. The magazine likened the Internet's arrival to the emergence of moveable type in the middle 15th century, an era where a new technology democratized knowledge (the Gutenberg Bible), "turbo-charged an information age" (The Renaissance) and set in motion forces that would reverberate centuries later (the modern ubiquity of mass media). 

What The Economist did was to root a contemporary event or phenomenon into proper historical context. In effect, it subjected the Long Tail to the Long View, and in so doing gave us a critical and much-needed perspective on the present. As both the examples of globalization and the Internet show, what society perceives - and anoints - as new and never-before-seen is often neither. What too frequently is lacking is the intellectual reflex and rigor to look at the 'new' through the prism of the 'old'. Society would benefit, it seems to me, if more futurists acted as archeologists and the past informed more of our knowledge of the present. 

Fortunately, History has been staging a bit of a comeback lately. With many of the complex conundrums that confound us today - from terrorism and the degradation of the environment to the war in Iraq - people appear to be turning to history to help make sense of it all. Little by little, historical perspectives weave their way into the public discourse on our modern maladies. Al-Qaeda is less and less seen as a terror cell that came to life on 9/11, but more properly put into context as a movement that arose from the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and catalyzed again by the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia at the end of the first Gulf War. The phenomenon of global warming was catapulted into the public consciousness by Al Gore's powerful documentary An Inconvenient Truth because it demonstrated that the Earth's temperatures were rising at a rate unseen in human history. The civil unrest in Iraq was once viewed as either the death throws of a recently-toppled totalitarian regime or the desperate final match strikes of a foreign-backed insurgency seeking to enflame the country. Today, it is seen through the prism of a millenia-old schism in Islam between Sunni and Shi'a - the contemporary boiling-over of a sectarian struggle that simmered for decades under Saddam's iron rule. 

Even self-avowed anti-historians and current affairs columnists are looking to the past for answers now. The famously anti-intellectual George W. Bush was recently reading, at Henry Kissinger's suggestion, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, about France's experiences in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algeria in the mid 1950s, to help frame his foreign policy towards Iraq. In a stark illustration of how 'hip' historical analysis has become, New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof recently reached as far back as Virgil and the travails of Thucydides to offer the appropriate historical analogy to W's Iraq adventure. 

History, like the height of hem lines, comes in and out of fashion. After all, it wasn't that long ago (1989) that Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the 'The End of History'. George Will more recently mused sardonically about the Fukuyaman viewpoint - and the atypical period of peace, progress and prosperity that spawned it - as our collective 'vacation from history.' That holiday ended abruptly, on or about September 11, 2001. Thereafter, the world faced sufficiently chilling and complex challenges that we have increasingly turned to history for context, comfort and courses of action. This is as it should be. George Santayana's famous dictum that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is as true today as it was a century ago when it was written. These days, however, his aphorism could be updated to say that those who do not listen to the past are condemned to misunderstand the present. Simply put, yesterday gives us perspective on today and a chance at properly explaining tomorrow. After all, as my friend Obi put it so well, there is very little that is truly new anymore ...