Don't Accept the Status Quo

Are You Afraid to Live?

Scott — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:10:36 +0000

Ever since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, “fear” has been a popular buzzword in American mainstream media. Newscasters and politicians generally use the word in relation to terrorism or violence; e.g., “we must not fear the enemy.” I’d like to focus on another enemy, one which causes more pain, destruction and fear than we’d like to think about. Our biggest enemy is not and never will be terrorism — our biggest enemy is the human mind.

Let’s define fear right here at the beginning. Paranoia. Distrust. “The terrorists are out to get us!” Obviously, that’s fear. Dread? Apprehension? Timidity? Those words are generally used in different contexts, but they’re basically synonyms of the same. Fear is a unique emotion, one which can interfere not only with other emotions (such as love), but also with rational thought — even in the most “thought-oriented” people. Take a moment to consider the areas of your life in which you feel held back. What situations are you avoiding? What thoughts don’t you want to think? What actions are you afraid to take (or not to take)? Look at these examples to get you started:

Choosing a college or other school
Confronting a friend or co-worker
Publishing a controversial opinion or research article
Switching jobs/careers
Starting a business
Entering or leaving a serious relationship
Letting go of the past
Questioning deep-seated beliefs (religious or otherwise)
Standing up for beliefs (religious or otherwise)
Delivering a speech or presentation

You could think of numerous scenarios, some more significant than others. You might even consider something as basic as shyness; anything which brings an emotional hesitation to your mind will work.

Are you uncomfortable yet? Do you feel trapped or restricted in some way? Fear does exactly that; it holds us back, sometimes with such force that we don’t even realize the extent to which we’re limiting ourselves. (This is not unlike the current situation in the United States, given the erosion of social freedom in response to a perceived terrorism threat.) But it gets worse. All examples that you or I could come up with — jobs, relationships, beliefs — are a part of life. Fear holds us back not only from [insert specific example here], but from life itself. “Living in fear” is an oxymoron. If we fear life itself, it’s not that we’re living in fear… we aren’t living at all.

You may be a certain age, but how many years have you lived? Confront the situations which have been bothering you and live your life the way it was meant to be lived — fearlessly.

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Seven Layers of Communication

Scott — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:03:46 +0000

I’d like to look at communication from a perspective which is probably unfamiliar to most readers. In my last article, I suggested that communication between people could be compared to that between digital devices. In the world of computer networking, the OSI model exists to provide an abstract description of various communication protocols. In simple terms, it’s a complete paradigm of how computers communicate; I’ll be turning it into a paradigm of how humans communicate. I won’t be explaining the OSI model in excruciating detail — that would be too technical for most readers — but I will be giving just enough details for you to understand the analogy.

The seven-layer OSI model essentially provides for a top-down/bottom-up description of how a “message” moves between a sender and a receiver. The layers are numbered as follows:

Physical

Data Link

Network

Transport

Session

Presentation

Application

When two devices communicate, the “sender” first generates a message in the Application layer which is processed and broken down until it reaches the Physical layer. At the Physical layer, the message is literally transmitted, bit by bit, to the “receiver.” The receiver then compiles the message and passes it up to its own Application layer.

As a simplistic example of this, think about your web browser. Your browser is an application. When you open it and surf to http://www.dontasq.com, one of the first actions your browser takes is to determine where you want to go (www.dontasq.com) and the protocol you want to use to communicate once you get there (HTTP). Most of this communication takes place “behind the scenes.” There are protocols in the other layers which determine, among other things, where dontasq.com is actually located and how to find it. The end result, however, is very visible — the web server (another application) at dontasq.com returns a page coded in HTML, which your web browser displays.

Enough technical mumbo-jumbo. Let’s use this to put a new perspective on human communication…

“Medium” (Physical)
The medium is pretty easy to understand — this is how a message literally travels from sender to receiver. When you say “Hello” to Jane, your mouth sends vibrations through the air which her ears pick up. Without a medium, no communication can ever take place.
Examples: Air, telephone, e-mail.
Failure: The call dies. A computer crashes. Someone puts on headphones.
How to prevent failure: Pretty much everything that’s described here. Just communicate!

“Language” (Data Link)
In the digital world, one of the responsibilities of the Data Link layer is to negotiate how to use a given medium. In some ways, human language does the same thing — it dictates the syllables we should transmit through the air, or the symbols we should form with our hands. Written language dictates the shapes we should draw on paper (or “paper,” in the electronic sense). Without language, a message cannot be understood. It may be sent with a very specific meaning, but the receiver won’t be able to decode that meaning.
Examples: English. Sign language. Body language, conscious or unconscious.
Failure: Most often, a language failure would occur due to… well, two people speaking different languages (or a very primitive language, in the case of babies). “Language” might be defined as a way of understanding such that certain brain disorders would be included.
How to prevent failure: Educate yourself! Learn a new language.

“Identification” (Network)
On the Internet, every computer may be uniquely identified in several different ways, such as by an IP address or a MAC address. People are no different; your name, facial features, and phone number are all a part of your identification. Just as a computer can’t send a message to a non-existent computer, a person can’t communicate (at least not meaningfully) with nothingness. When we have something to say, we also have someone in mind to whom we want to say it. This is not to say that we can’t communicate with someone we don’t recognize — but we always need a target for our message, whether it’s a stranger on the street or JohnDoe123 in a chat room.
Examples: Scott Helvick. “That girl in the blue shirt.” 555-555-5555.
Failure: A phone number or e-mail address out of service. False identification, i.e. being fooled into communicating with someone who wasn’t your intended target. (In the digital world, this is known as a man-in-the-middle attack.)
How to prevent failure: In the real world, the best way to ensure that you’re really talking with your intended target is to choose a medium which allows for the best identification — usually face-to-face. A sticky note left on someone’s door is never a safe way to tell your darkest secrets.

“Greeting” (Transport)
The Transport layer is responsible for facilitating “end-to-end” communication. On the Internet, this means that it’s assuming that dontasq.com has already been found; we merely need to connect to it and start a “session.” In human terms, we want to start a conversation, and the first step to doing that is to send a greeting. Can a conversation begin without a greeting? Yes, just as some computer networking protocols will allow data transmission without an established connection (we call these connectionless protocols). But it’s likely to cause some confusion at first — people are generally connection-oriented, meaning that they like their “hellos” and “goodbyes.”
Examples: “Bonjour!” Waving. Tapping someone on the shoulder.
Failure: The dreaded silent treatment. Trying to converse with someone without getting their attention first, resulting in, “Were you talking to me?”
How to prevent failure: Use basic mannerisms. On the phone, state your name before beginning to talk. In person, observe someone’s body language to make sure that they’re paying attention to you. On an instant messaging client, don’t expect a reply from someone whose status is “Away.”

“Conversation” (Session)
A conversation is pretty self-explanatory; at this layer, our meaningful messages are transmitted back and forth. Once a session is established, there’s usually no need to re-open it — that’s why we don’t need to say “hello” every other word. The OSI model even provides for features like error correction (”Sorry, can you repeat that?”) and graceful closure (”I love you!” “I love you, too!” *kiss kiss*).
Examples: Anything and everything, but usually restricted to current events, gossip, and endless complaining.
Failure: The session somehow becomes interrupted or disconnects prematurely. One party has to leave quickly or stomps away in a fury. Someone isn’t paying attention, causing a lot of “errors” in transmissions.
How to prevent failure: This topic alone is worthy of multiple articles. Above all, pay attention and practice good listening skills. If necessary, don’t be afraid to (assertively) ask your conversation partner to pay more attention.

“Formatting” (Presentation)
Whereas the first five layers dealt primarily with connecting and beginning a conversation, the Presentation layer actually deals with message contents. Think about receiving a present, opening it, and deciding what to do with it. Formatting is what determines the difference between “man eating tofu” and “man-eating tofu.” What this layer does not deal with is whether the message actually makes sense in the current conversation. We don’t particularly care whether the conversation jumps from weather to tofu to Britney’s latest oopsies, as long as we can understand each individual message. In other words, we care about content, but not meaning (that’s the next layer).
Examples: “Alice went to Six Flags.” “Scott writes great articles!” “My keyboad is boken!”
Failure: Ambiguity or poor grammar. Anything that causes the message itself to be jumbled or not completely “decoded.”
How to prevent failure: Proofread, proofread, proofread. Make sure you understand all of the subtle nuances of the language you’re using — especially if you’re talking to me.

“Thought” (Application)
This is the layer of critical thinking, the layer where messages are both created and understood in their complete context. If you try to move a conversation from weather to tofu to Britney, any intelligent person will call you out on it right here. Thought is a layer of abstraction. Messages are created, but only in a sense of meaning — the Presentation layer is where phrases are formed.
Examples: “Hello!” “Oh, hey, what’s going on? You seem out of breath…” “Yeah! I just escaped from a mountain of man-eating tofu!”
Failure: You or your conversation partner obsessively changed the subject to a point of confusion. Many failures will be due to some form of ignorance; for example, a foreign tourist not completely understanding your cultural reference. You could also consider certain brain disorders, such as amnesia.
How to prevent failure: This is another topic worthy of multiple articles. Practice communication skills and be careful with cultural references or inside jokes.

Can the OSI model be applied to animal communication as well as to that of humans? I believe so. Animals won’t have a wide array of contexts to “discuss,” nor will their languages have strict grammatical requirements, but we could probably strip off the top two or three layers and apply the model just the same.

Communication is both an art and a science; regardless of the perspective from which we view it, communication is vital and it could never hurt to brush up on our skills — especially when dealing with introverts.

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Communication: The Lifeblood of Relationships

Scott — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:49:40 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you’re in charge of a group of ten people. Your job is to get these ten people to do something useful together. The catch, however, is that nobody (including you) is allowed to communicate in any form — speech, signing, text messaging… — with anyone else. Try to make a list of all of the extraordinary things you could do. Launch a rocket? Highly doubtful. Write a book? My intuition says no. Plan a movie night? Good luck. If you come up with anything more complex than a “teamwork exercise” your kids might do at summer camp, I’ll be impressed.

The obvious point here is that communication is absolutely essential in both the professional and personal realms of our daily lives.

Even some non-living things need to communicate. For example, before you were able to read this post, your computer had to contact a web server and request the information. The server then had to oblige and send that information back. In the technology world, one of the most basic forms of digital communication is known as a “ping.” A ping is used by one device to check the status of another; think of it as a computer shouting “Hello?” to another computer. Normally, the other computer responds (”Hello!”) within milliseconds, indicating that it is “alive.”

In human terms, when we “ping” a friend or a neighbor, we hope for a quick response. If we try to start a conversation with a friend who is responding slowly (for example, an instant messaging conversation with several minutes between messages), we might conclude that our friend is very busy, maybe with other conversations. It’s also possible that he may not respond at all. In the technology world, there are several potential causes for this, but nearly all of them are reasons for concern. Our friend may, for some reason, be ignoring us. He may have lost his ability to communicate. He may even be dead!

Just look at what happens when there is any simple communication failure between two people (never mind a larger group). As a very simple example, take a sender (Person A) and a receiver (Person B). In an ideal situation, A sends a message to B; B then responds with another message acknowledging the receipt of the first message. This is, in fact, exactly how most digital communication works — Person B now has the required information, and Person A knows that it doesn’t need to be sent again. There are several different ways this communication could fail — A doesn’t send the message, B doesn’t listen to the message, B doesn’t send the acknowledgment, A doesn’t listen to the acknowledgment… but regardless of how it fails, there will be consequences ranging from inefficiency (if A feels the need to repeat his message over and over) to potential catastrophe (if B doesn’t have information that she needs).

Of course, human beings aren’t perfect. We’re forgetful. We’re “busy.” Our friends/neighbors/significant others/co-workers also have ways of visually checking that our lack of communication isn’t due to an untimely demise. Computers aren’t so privileged; when a neighbor stops communicating, our friend Mac has no choice but to phone its human operator. (”Hey, PC isn’t responding, and I’m getting a little worried. Somebody should go make sure that it hasn’t blue screened again…”) Conversations in the digital world generally involve more transmitted messages and a bit of extra information, but the upside is that both parties have all of the information all of the time. There’s no confusion about your co-worker’s status. Using the example of the last paragraph, what happens if Person B leaves town for a week and forgets to denote this in her voice mail? You can imagine Person A’s reaction… “Hey, Person B, did you get my message? Just checking, please call me back ASAP.” … “Person B, are you there? Is your phone broken? Have you forgotten about those TPS reports? I need them yesterday!” … “YOU’RE FIRED! Just kidding, Person B, I only wanted to get your attention since you’re so busy surfing dontasq.com again…”

Communicate. Listen. Enjoy life. Countless books have been written on various communication skills, but those books deal with subtleties like eye contact, body language, and e-mail etiquette. Before you can worry about any of those subtleties, you’ve got to take that first step and just do it! In my next article, I’ll touch on some of those finer points and aim to give you a whole new look at what goes on when people communicate on multiple levels. Until next time!

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Pride

Scott — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:50:40 +0000

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but wisdom is with the humble.” -Proverbs 11:2
(...)
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Failure

Scott — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:01:47 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I combed through the Don’tASQ archives, removing several old testing and other “junk” posts. (Which posts? It doesn’t matter — you never read them. ) That’s when I came across this unfinished series titled “Making the Change”. It was supposed to be a five-part series; I’d written three of them before I decided that I could no longer continue. My heart simply wasn’t in it, and the quality of my writing was starting to deteriorate — something that I refuse to allow in anything I publish. In short, I failed. I’d set the expectation that I would deliver a product to my readers, but that product ended up only 60% completed. Where I come from, that’s a D-.

But I didn’t delete these posts. I didn’t try to cover up my mistakes, didn’t attempt to sweep them under the rug and hope Google didn’t cache them. Why not? Because I believe in honesty and genuineness. The Internet is a medium which tends to make us believe (falsely) that we can retract our words effortlessly and without consequence. If Blurblog posts were handwritten letters, would we be able to undeliver them? If they were spoken words, could we take them back?

By admitting our failures — regardless of their nature — and letting go of the past, we encourage mutual trust and free ourselves to focus on doing better next time. As far as Making the Change… if even one person is helped by my unfinished series, then I don’t consider it a failure at all.

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Commitment

Scott — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:40:33 +0000

People are like Play-Doh — they come in many colors and can be molded into just about anything imaginable. But people, like Play-Doh, have limitations. (...)
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Happiness is a Choice

Scott — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:59:24 +0000

You want to be happy. I want to be happy. Everybody wants to be happy. Maybe you’re already happy, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be a little more happy, would it? If you don’t think you want to be happy, you’re probably in denial. (...)
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Letting Go of the Past

Scott — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:28:02 +0000

If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t… it never was.

I cannot tell a lie — I hate that quote. (...)
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Words of Love

Scott — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:34:20 +0000

A few nights ago, I sat down to write my annual SMILE Day post. I usually make it pretty light, poking fun of the holiday in some way, but this time I was torn between a couple of moods. I wasn’t sure whether to go with a humorous “X Reasons It’s Great to be Single” post or to write a more serious post about what it means to love others unconditionally (whether single or not). In my infinite wisdom, I decided to attempt to combine these two moods…(...)
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Making the Change, Step 3: Gather

Scott — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:00:52 +0000

You’re reading the second part of a five-part series. Be sure to read the others:

Making the Change, Step 1: Identify

Making the Change, Step 2: Plan

The first step in the gathering process is to determine (from your plan) what types of people you need, to determine which roles need to be filled and how quickly, and to compile a list of potential candidates for those roles. You’ll also want to know how much funding you need (preferably from a budget, which should also be in your plan).

Rosalie’s situation, for example, should be pretty straightforward to understand. It may be a good idea to find a workout partner for Saturday mornings, but that’s probably optional at this point. She’s already got one partner on board for the week, and that should be all the extra human resources she’ll need — assuming her infant’s babysitter won’t mind taking on a few extra hours each week.

Chuck’s situation may be a bit more difficult. Obviously, he will probably end up hiring Munnee Mann on the HR side, but what about budgeting? The Frictionless Whatchamacallit will cost money. Advertising will cost money. Plummeting stocks will cost money. That money has to come from somewhere. In the case of a business, it’s probably not so much a matter of “gathering” as “allocating,” but its importance shouldn’t be underrated.

Emma’s scenario will be particularly challenging simply because of the complexities involved. It would be simple for her to launch her program at just one shelter… but you didn’t think she was going to stop there, did you? Emma’s goal is to expand this program — or one similar to it — around the world. To increase literacy at, say, one thousand homeless shelters, Emma will likely need tens of thousands of volunteers… and millions of dollars in books. And there are probably more than one thousand homeless shelters in the world. And Emma wants to improve on a lot more than just literacy. (What? I didn’t tell you that? Oops.)

Sooner or later, you’re going to have to talk to people. People, first of all, need to be motivated. They need to have all of their questions answered, and they need to trust you. It also helps if they trust the initiative, but most people will choose an uncertain proposition with a person they trust over a well-known proposition with someone they barely know — guaranteed. You’re probably going to have to answer the five W’s and How (see why we’ve done all of this planning?), and be prepared for rejection — it’s going to happen sooner or later, no matter how great you think your pitch is. Some guy on the street once said that at least 50% of people will reject a change even if it is provably beneficial for all parties involved. I don’t know that the figure is as high as 50%, but there’s certainly a grain of truth there. Now, add in the fact that you may very well be asking people you’ve never met to contribute time and/or money to your cause. And people who have money tend to be less willing to give it up. Needless to say, you’ll have your work cut out for you!

In any case, you either want people, or you want their money — sometimes both. You, for one, need to be truly committed to the cause. Any lack of passion will be seen as a lack of faith in your own plan, which of course won’t go well. It would also be wise to establish some credibility with the person you’re talking to, especially if it’s someone you don’t already know. What do you know about this problem, and what makes you think you’re the right person to change it? Find a way to identify with and relate to the person from which you’re asking for assistance — in other words, customize your delivery from person to person. Throw in things you know they will respond to, particularly if you know them well.

Impersonal Donations

What will make a faceless person want to donate to your cause? Use the same principles relevant to a face-to-face encounter, but take out the face-to-face part. Let’s say that we’ve created a website to promote our plan to change the world. (Sound familiar? ) While the medium may be different, the concepts are the same. Keep it simple and compelling. Expressing your devotion to the cause through a written medium may be difficult, but I believe that it can be done. Spend some time (maybe even a full page) explaining why your change is important. A person reading your website will have the same questions as someone you’ve spoken to in person or on the telephone. Who are you to solve this problem? (And later on) How do you plan to accomplish this?

Repeat Step 2

When all is said and done, you’re going to realize that the gathering process didn’t go quite like you expected (for better or for worse), and you may need to modify your plan. This is just fine — because it was designed to be dynamic, right? As you add contributors, some of whom may not agree with every part of the plan, that plan may also need to be tweaked.

We’ve identified the change. We’ve planned for the change. We’ve gathered resources in preparation for bringing forth the change. If we’re really ambitious, we’ve even planned again. Who’da thunk that change could be so complicated? Lights, camera…

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Don't Accept the Status Quo

Are You Afraid to Live?

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Seven Layers of Communication

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Communication: The Lifeblood of Relationships

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Pride

Failure

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Commitment

Happiness is a Choice

Letting Go of the Past

Words of Love

Making the Change, Step 3: Gather

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