The Greyhound trip from Chicago to NYC takes a minimum of 19 hours, so I figured it would worthwhile to look into competing with them. Besides, Greyhound is lame: their website sucks, most of their buses don’t offer WiFi, and traveling with them is generally a creepy experience. On my last trip between Chicago and Iowa City, my seatmate was taking his initial ride home from prison. So I made a fun website, http://www.nyc-chicago-bus.com, and started doing some research.

Unfortunately, running an actual bus is expensive. You have to pay for fuel, tolls, insurance, taxes, bus rental [or buying & refurbishing a bus], driver wages (2 drivers for the NYC-Chicago trip because Department of Transportation laws limit consecutive driving hours), cleaning crew, WiFi, etc.

Now check out http://www.nyc-chicago-bus.com/competition.html – you’ll notice that you can get a JetBlue flight for $69.70 that takes only two hours. Hm…

Is there still customer interest? Yes, some. I spent $15 on an AdWords campaign, resulting in about 19 additional signups on the website out of 50 clicks (not bad). The Facebook Page I made, although it ranks #10 in the SERP for “NYC Chicago Bus”, has 36 fans, though 19 of them know me personally. One random website visitor called me up on my cell and urged me to get it up and running ASAP.

Meh –  running just one bus line could be profitable, but it’d be like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a very important book. Unfortunately, the author’s style leaves much to be desired; I’d call it sandpapery, pretentious, avuncular, sarcastic, unsexy, erudite. But it’s so brilliant that none of that matters…

EXPLICITLY NERDY STUFF

Taleb’s main point is that we suck at predicting the future. We cannot be 100% sure of ANYTHING that will happen.

Social scientists (e.g. economists) model the world with Gaussian curves – normal distributions – however, Taleb argues that this practice is fundamentally fucked because in the real world, the “outliers” (“Black Swans”… most swans are white) account for the vast majority of long-term changes and therefore cannot be discounted. I always intuited that something was up with these suspect curves, and am glad to have the explicit explanation! Taleb classifies the wider class of errors in which models of games do not truly reflect real-life situations as the “Ludic fallacy”.

Although Black Swans appear to be random, that’s only appearances. There’s no such thing as random. Taleb articulates it perfectly when he says that the appearance of randomness simply results from lack of information!

Small variables can have a huge impact; the world is also chaotic and non-linear, making modeling the future a real bitch (incidentally, I was reading Chaos by James Gleick when my friend Matthew interjected and demanded I read The Black Swan). But look: Taleb says we’re also way too arrogant (he calls this “epistemic arrogance”) when we ascribe causality as much as we do. He says we have no idea why things happened in the past the way they did – we have no way of verifying our hypotheses by experimenting against equal set of conditions in the future. Taleb brings back old-school skepticism and empiricism, and thinks that proofs by induction are impossible in the real world. Instead, we must rely on proofs by counter-example (contradiction), using negative space in order to shape our understanding.

In my opinion, this means that the only way to know if you really understand something is if you can repeat results in the future.

Examples of Black Swans: any stock market crash; most world wars; scientists believing formula equivalently healthy to breast milk; the Internet; Twitter; YouTube.

PRACTICAL LESSONS

Sure, Black Swans seem to come out of nowhere, but they can be both positive and negative. We want to minimize our exposure to negative swans but maximize our exposure to positive swans. In the stock market, NNT favors a highly aggressive-highly conservative strategy. This might mean that we should avoid blue chips (that could be easily disrupted by a Black Swan (BS) stock market crash), and instead put the majority of our money into treasury bills, and a little bit into high-risk bets that could blow big (like a Biotech company that could stumble upon a blockbuster drug). The startup seed fund YCombinator is a magnet for Black Swans: they invest a little bit of money into a many startups, hoping to have randomly included the next Google in their portfolio.

I adopt a similar strategy when it comes to my own entrepreneurship: over the past 5 years, I have started at least six significant web application projects. Out of these, four were essentially failures, one was a success (acquisition), and one I am currently working on (though we’re “pivoting”). It’s incredibly difficult to perceive what will be succeed and what won’t; the only way to find out is to put it out there and see how people vote with their attention and wallets.

One more thing I’d like to share: Taleb also admonishes against the “narrative fallacy”, which is our tendency to describe chaotic and complicated events with cohesive stories. He believes that when we do so, we over-emphasize details of little importance and neglect bits that actually had a salient impact. Unfortunately, narrative stories provide a “schema” and enhance understanding as well as encoding of memory, and narratives are more likely to spread because they are so digestible. Just as you can tweak the viral loop for internet properties by trying to make it easy for people to spread your content (adding in an invitation widget), I wonder how you can prepackage your stories to make them more readily digestible by the human mind and increase the likelihood of a meme. Perhaps I should read Made To Stick by Chip Heath.

Anyway, if you want to delve into greater depth on these ideas, check out The Black Swan by Taleb. (N.B. I would call him pretentious if he weren’t so damned accomplished. He made a fortune by betting against the swans in various financial crises; he was close enough with Benoit Mandelbrot to call him up at 2am; etc.) If you want to see how we are bad at predicting our own happiness, you can read my review of Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert. If you want a more thorough overview of fallacious thinking, I highly endorse the very awesome and very readable Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

I’ll follow-up with a post “Making A Black Swan Trap”, complete with blueprints.

There’s a lot of buzz about how ridiculous it is that people are waiting in 10 hours to get Apple’s new iPhone. How lucky for me that I have just recently been reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Also, I’ve now discussed and read him enough that I can finally spell his name without having to look it up. Let’s first talk about some important ideas that he offers.

Even though civilization has been getting increasingly advanced, we aren’t getting any happier. People spend their lives working for a future, and when it arrives, they say WAIT A MINUTE – what happened to the LIFE I was supposed to be living? Surely this couldn’t be ALL THERE IS? So some of them turn to drugs and alcohol in response to their frustration. I know I did for a long time – and probably will continue to do so in the future, from time to time. Others become spiritual seekers, going through Landmark Education, spending years in monasteries, attending personal development workshops by Steve Pavlina, changing their name and growing their hair out and doing Yoga. They attempt to apply eastern teachings that made sense thousands of years ago to help them deal with the bullshit circumstance of modern America.

So what do we do if we want to be happy?? We’re kind of FUCKED, aren’t we?

Sort of.

I need to get into theory to explain it better.

I’ve been talking a lot about the ego here on this blog. And Csikszentmihalyi presented some ideas that really enhanced my understanding of it. (how funny, because enhancement is such a dualistic notion, but fuck it, let’s get real, I’m not enlightened yet). Here’s how I currently understand the ego:

Hopefully my drawing skills will improve once I finish the Ekman book on microexpressions

We have an ego/self-image that revolves around a set of goals getting completed. Therefore, the ego almost always lives in the past or the future, not the present moment. The ego constantly filters attention for things that are in line with its beliefs. Our experience, which is shaped by attention, then either satisfies the desires of the ego, or it fails to satisfy the desires of the ego. If it succeeds – then we win and experience an incredible high. If not, however, we are filled with pain. Horrible suffering.

Typically, we are not actually in control over our ego and goals. They are set for us by society and social conditioning. This is either our cultural context or our life history. In communist Russia, the ego goals might be to work in the factory in service to the state. Unfortunately, this is a really shitty goal because it does not provide opportunity for happiness (goals of the state aren’t aligned with personal biological drives; Emile Durkheim would call this anomie). And the work provided doesn’t encourage flow. More on flow in a second, though, because there’s something I want to address first: a comment on Hacker News.

Apart from the developers [who lined up to buy the iPhone because it gives them a competitive business advantage], does it hint at a certain emptiness in those people’s lives?

Yes, it does, but it’s unfair to single them out as a group. They are simply satisfying a certain identity criterion: if they have the phone, it works into their ego self image of somebody who has the phone; they are part of their tribe. The exact same game is played by people who drink alcohol and then enjoy the ritual of complaining about their hangovers the next morning. So how do we form these ego images? By the psychological principle of shaping.

Shaping: when little bits of behavior are rewarded over time, chained together to create entirely new complex behavior, ultimately evoked through the LAW OF EFFECT [behavior that leads to pleasure is encouraged, behavior that leads to pain is discouraged].

Gross oversimplification, but tell me it’s not accurate: You’re a successful young adult. You go to the bars and try to hang out with one group of people with lots of cultural capital, but you get snubbed. You hang out more with the Geeks, they accept you, technology is valued in their subculture, so if you want to be popular in your group you try to make sure you are excellent with technology. This might include making sure you are one of the first to get the iPhone. Social acceptance yields elevated dopamine in the striatum, an area of the brain largely responsible for reward and motivation.

OK, OK- so we’re all slaves to our arbitrary self-image/identity. Different self-images might be evaluated as more desirable than others depending on the external rewards that they deliver and the ease of facilitating validation of self-image. For example, a self-image of a healthy athlete might be good because it would motivate you to exercise and therefore extend your life, but a self-image of a beautiful person might be bad because unless you’re actually beautiful you’re not going to get any external validation and you’re going to be living an awful life filled with rationalizations; either way, getting old will be a real bitch, too.

The biggest problem with reliance on self-image to be happy is that most self-images require external validation and your level of happiness is going to be a sinusoidal rollercoaster depending on how the unpredictable chaotic environment is treating you. So what SHOULD you do, practically speaking? Try to give yourself a self-image of something motivated by things that you CAN control, such as taking action. Make friends with people who support and validate this new identity.  Try to find self-esteem by grounding yourself in reality – something that the vast majority of people simply don’t do. How can one find this elusive self-esteem? A partial answer is to control the thoughts that go into your head.

All day long we are bombarded by inaccurate thoughts and judgments, and they make us unhappy. If they’re irrational, they’re distorted by the ego. Correcting irrationalities helps destroy the ego. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.” Wow, wise, but a lot easier said than done.. our minds are entrenched with strong neural wirings of thoughts we’ve had on automatic repeat for years. I’m currently working on a FREE WEB APP to help you combat automatic negative thoughts and change the contents of your mind and therefore your reality. I’m devoting a lot of effort to this because I think this is something that can actually improve our lives. In psychiatry, it is known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and has been demonstrated equally effective as LEXAPRO in treating depression. Of course, I will post it to this blog when it is ready.

But let’s get back to FLOW because there’s a lot to talk about. Remember how I said yes- we’re kind of fucked if we want to be happy – that’s not entirely true. There are things we can do; we can find pleasure and we can find enjoyment.

PLEASURE is anything that satisfies our basic human needs. This comprises eating, drinking, sex, and sleeping.

ENJOYMENT comes from the practice of a well-rehearsed skill. The skill could be anything from tennis to basketball to programming to business dealmaking to walking to looking around to listening to music. You see so many people who want to make a change in their lives, but can’t. Somebody on Hacker News recently said he wanted to work with water, but can’t stop being a programmer because he enjoys it so much. He’s addicted to the flow states.

The state of FLOW, also known as being in the zone, occurs when your level of skill meets an appropriate challenge. When you are in FLOW you are firing on all cylinders; you achieve incredible performance, feel great, and forget your sense of “self”.

Did you know that the human mind can only process about 7 discrete pieces of information at any given moment? If you want to promote encoding/enhanced memory recall/high task performance, then you should disable your “background tasks” and give something your full attention. If you’re trying to listen to someone and 1/7 of your resources are involved in thinking about what you want for lunch, then you aren’t going to be dedicated fully to listening to them and your conversational performance will suffer. Stress is another thing that eats up mental resources, though I’m not sure how, exactly – I can’t quite model it by saying “stress eats up 2/7 of your 7 resources.” Also relevant: when we become more proficient (skilled) at something, deciphering it takes fewer resources. So if I am a chess expert and I look at a chess board, I am going to be able to notice more things, because I “chunk” different pieces into memory. Something that costs you 3 bits might only cost me 1 bit.

So complete absorption leads to flow, that great feeling, because all your resources are dedicated to it: the task is precisely challenging enough to engage all of your resources, and nothing more. Since all of your resources are engaged in the task at hand, you no longer feel self-conscious because there’s no “bit” available to mull over your ego or self-image.

Flow also creates an ordering of your consciousness. Since you have no ego, your thinking is more logical. Ordering of consciousness is intrinsically pleasant because it is similar to a state of self-esteem. Also, every time you experience flow, you become more complex as a person: you become more differentiated (because you are more skilled) yet also more integrated (because flow leads to loss of “self”.)

Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that S.M.A.R.T. goals can lead to flow. For more information, see this post on the what makes games fun.

Although Flow leads to happiness, it’s clear that American cultural values do not. Someone else on Hacker News commented:

Sure, [consumerism] is the way life is for many people, but … to think that Apple intentionally makes thousands of humans waste hours of their life doing something they hate.

The Apple marketing machine created a tribe, giving to the rise of superfans whose identity/self-image hinges on being one of the first to own a new product. I don’t know if it’s Apple you should really blame, though. You should blame our culture for allowing the media to manipulate us, brainwashing us, shaping the behavior to work jobs we hate so we can buy things so we can be happy. Media conditioning plays on our innate drives, associating positive possibilities (sex, social acceptance/popularity) with consumer products. Growing up in America gives you a certain set of engrained values that just DON’T WORK: they don’t order reality in an effective way (too much rationalization and cognitive dissonance, because if you really start to question things, you see that the system is fucked, and can no longer be a part of it) and they lead you towards a probably unhappy life, even if you do everything “right” (Ivy League college, high paying job, marriage, kids…etc. But watching TV, the #1 American pastime, is not real enjoyment because it is rarely a skillful activity!) However, even though the values are fucked, it’s much easier to just receive guidelines instead of having to think for yourself – that takes up so much energy.

It’s easy to just submit to the values of the state and consumerism; no thinking is involved, plus, everybody else is doing it, so something about it must be right [social proof]. Unfortunately, this does not work. Submitting to a religion can be helpful for a time (as they say it is the opiate of the masses); it can lead to a feeling of connectedness not unlike flow. Unfortunately, for the critical thinker, it is impossible to submit to a religion because religious doctrine creates too many logical conflicts and introduces too many opportunities for cognitive dissonance.

What to do to be happy and complex?? Try to practice skill in everything you do; when you do anything, give it your complete attention, and try to do it as best as you can. This even includes walking down the street. And I really recommend you read Flow.

Sorry for the downtime yesterday. I switched hosts from A Small Orange (whose service was awesome 4 years ago then became increasingly awful) to HostGator; hopefully they’ll be more reliable.

Reader John Bacon recently encouraged me to read Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and share my thoughts. The full text is available for free online, here. If you’d prefer to read it in paperback form, you can do that as well. The #1 message of the text is that the best investment we can make is in enabling education and research. For every 100,000 researchers we endow, Bucky believes that 1 of them will produce a breakthrough that justifies the expense of the other 99,999. Although we can typically come up with brilliant expensive solutions in times of crisis, it is much more prudent to take a “prevention not cure” approach.

Here are my notes:

• Bucky says we’re approaching a critical point where the earth will become either a utopia or a dystopia. Given that there are fewer % people living in poverty than ever, I’m inclined to hope for a utopic outcome.
• Paraphrasing: “When people get it, they no longer need someone else to tell them what to do”
• There is an advantage in critical thinking of you start out with a holistic concept and then drill down to individual components
• Comprehensive knowledge vs. Specialization of knowledge: the extinction of most species has actually come from overspecialization. I enjoy entrepreneurship because it allows me to engage in comprehensive learning without having to specialize too deeply. Specialization of knowledge/trade/skills actually inclines you towards slavery of some kind, because without seeing the bigger picture, you are forced to work for someone else and their agenda.
• I predict that readers who have enjoyed my posts on manipulation will especially enjoy this:

  Centuries ago, “Great Pirates” ruled the Earth. Because resources were so scattered, by building ships and going into the seas, they could amass great amounts of wealth by sailing around and exploiting the markets through trading rare resources. To ensure the GPs kept themselves in power, the GPs encouraged local strong-men to install themselves as king and prime minister in the remote trading locations. Kings were actually more like puppets whose ostentatious wealth and jewels were provided by the GPs in order to maintain their display of power. The first schools were set up in order to train people in specialized roles to help minister the country, reiterating the concept that specialization = slavery. Similarly, Leonardos and Michelangelos were commissioned to build scientific/defensive structures to ensure the maintenace of power. The entire bit on Pirates is fascinating and if there’s just one thing you read, read that. Just search for Great Pirate and start from there. Also see Realpolitik.

  • The advent of most technology relying on the Electromagnetic Spectrum led to the Pirates’ decline as they no longer could rely solely on their sensory prowess for dominance
• Einstein’s equation of e=mc² showed the physical mastered by the metaphysical. This is an important theme throughout Spaceship Earth; Bucky believes that with increasing powers of technology and science, the human intellect will be able to master the physical realm, like an advanced version of our discovery of the principles of leverage, and waterfalls as power sources, etc. The bible story of Loves and Fishes may have been foreshadowing our eventual mastery of the metaphysical realm
  • Although energy is finite (c.f. law of conservation of mass), the potential for metaphysical knowledge is infinite. Even though our resource wealth may be “spent” (and therefore not really spent, but converted into less immediately useful forms such as heat), every time we act we gain more knowledge. In this sense our knowledge is ever increasing; just like happiness, knowledge is not decreased by being shared; it only multiplies. Reminds me of Tony Hsieh’s policies on transparency.
    • I would like to relate this concept to David Hawkins’s “Levels of Consciousness” (practical manual). As we climb towards rationality, humans become happier and happier. If we climb even further, we reach enlightenment and godliness. This is when the physical and metaphysical truly connect.
• Fossil fuels are like batteries to jump-start our car (Earth is a “spaceship”, powered by the sun, with resources to keep itself humming [humans evolved; consciousness is evolving; through consciousness we can redirect energy and heal the earth and ourselves]).
• Possession is obsolete and burdensome. Travel has become easier than ever. Why buy when you can rent? Revolutionary firms such as Zipcar are fully embracing this sea change.
  • It made me think: why not create a new kind of sleeping-pod hotel where “rooms” are billed hourly or per sleep-cycle, and are specifically designed for optimal sleep? Use WakeMate-like devices to determine optimal wakeup time; white noise to promote falling asleep; optimal room temperature; etc.
    • Another business idea (inspired by the tales of Pirates) was to focus on overseas development to exploit international markets while we still can. I have already began to study how to do business in China. You can get VERY cheap and highly skilled labor overseas. Why not take advantage of it with a more long-term approach, setting up our own private schools of education, just like the King-pawns of yore did?

Emotional happiness is the ultimate currency for the human being, and ethics is the path to the good life. For a person, this means happiness; for a business, this means profits. It seems that an effective path to a sustainable business in the modern competitive marketplace is through win-win-win behavior, and Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh provides an excellent recipe. Tony Hsieh is the CEO of the awesome online shoe store Zappos.com, which was sold to Amazon.com in 2009 for over $887 mm, and the book is one-part Tony Hsieh biography, one-part Zappos cultural record, one-part philosophy of happiness, one-part philosophy of corporate excellence. The book is excellent. I learned a lot of random things.

When Tony is talking about his personal history, he discusses his love for techno music, and it really resonated with me. Not because I like techno music – not really at all – but because he says that one of the most pleasurable feelings a human can have is to be in synchrony with the environment. With techno raves, as opposed to a club where one dances to be seen (and engage in all sorts of devious ulterior game-related motives), people dance to be together in a tribe; the DJ channels energy, and they move with it. Judgment is suspended. I thought that was nice. This is a metaphor setting the tone for the rest of the book: with Zappos, Tony and his team created a unified tribe.

I loved Tony’s take on business networking events. You know what I’m talking about – you bring a stack of business cards, you mingle, you exchange business cards with other people, trying to figure out how to engage in a profitable win-win business relationship. I really respected his sentiments on these sorts of events: he loathes them.

How often have you gone to a networking event and met someone with whom you really connected? I don’t think it has EVER happened to me. I have hundreds of cards that I’ve received from people, and all they do is take up space on my desk, waiting for me to take the initiative to throw them out. It’s not like everyone I’ve met at such events sucks – not the case at all – it’s just that I’ve rarely bridged a new acquaintance from one of these events to an enduring and successful enjoyable long-term business relationship.

Tony says that he prefers to cultivate friendships. He wants to do business with friends. And I am totally with him. In fact, I hate doing business with people with whom I wouldn’t socialize outside of the business arena. It feels forced and awkward. He says that by making friends, he makes a long term investment and indirectly accrues benefits from his extended social network. People do lots of things in the name of friendship that they wouldn’t in the name of a win-win business relationship.

Aristotle writes about this in the Nicomachean Ethics; he says that there are friendships of pleasure and friendships of utility, and there are friendships of the good. These friendships of the good are the highest and best sorts of friendships, and they are based on shared ethics – shared values. From personal experience, I can say that my best business relationships, and my most successful personal friendships, have all been based on shared values. Otherwise the friendship is corrupted, untrue, and easily destroyed when circumstances inevitably get shaky.

So, speaking of values, the book talks a LOT about Zappos’s culture and values, which Tony believes to be the most important factor in the company’s success. He learned from his first company, LinkExchange, that money and growth can readily corrupt an organizations, so he figured the way to ensure lasting success was to build a strong cultural imprint. While I could go on at length about Zappos’s culture and their ten core values, listed below, I would only like to go into detail about a few of them: the ones that personally resonated with me the most.

So I will especially elaborate on #1 and #2.

#1. Deliver WOW Through Service

After listing each value, Tony provides an extended description of the value, and an example of an employee’s embodiment of the value, which I truly loved and appreciated. As reader Dave Doolin has commented, “Theory is good. Practice is better. And harder. Way, way harder.” The concept behind Deliver WOW Through Service is easy enough to understand: surprise your customers and vendors with awesomely above-average results (for example, automatic upgrades to overnight delivery). Tony’s description of the principle exemplified, however, moved me to tears.

An employee describes how she decided to perform a random act of kindness for someone in line at a convenience store, paying for the items of a person in the checkout line behind her. When the customer was befuddled (most people have ulterior motives, why would someone be so nice?), she explained that it was not a random act of kindness, but rather a random act of “wow”-ness, and that it was part of her company’s DNA to act sweetly. This really moved me. The cashier, not even the direct recipient of the generosity, was so moved by this that she wrote down the Zappo’s name as well as the name of the awesome employee.

Tony believes that culture is the best form of PR. When your culture is strong, the positive externalities and good karma will eventually pay dividends over time. Actions speak louder than words, and the company, through the psychological principle of association, gets the opportunity to claim credit for all great actions of its employees. Zappos works hard to ensure that each experience a customer has with Zappos.com is a positive one. Therefore, customers will begin to associate happiness with Zappos, and Zappos further succeeds in delivering happiness. Emotionally anchored memories are more readily retrieved.

#2. Embrace and Drive Change

The great example of this principle in action was through a company-wide initiative encouraging daily 1% improvement. This results in annual improvements of 37x: 1.01^365 is approximately 37. In the book, it was illustrated through the principle of compound interest. But I immediately thought of how I could apply it to my personal life. What if I improved my diet by 1% every day? What if I increased by exercise weight by 1% daily? Unfortunately, I do not often work with such discrete units, but I recently started adding this jumprope to my morning basketball drills. I think increasing # of reps by 1% daily will make it very easy for me to improve my skip volume.

I think all of Zappos’s values are excellent – I myself would probably do well to align my actions with many of them. Of course, not all of them are appropriate for every business. But Patrick McKenzie of BingoCardCreator.com has famously embraced principle #6 and it doesn’t seem to have backfired on him. Of course, these values operate even better with synergy, too. I think they might have even been purposely calculated to mix well.

Random tidbit: another big lesson I learned was to never outsource your company’s core competency.

Finally, I would like to elaborate on one of the philosophies of happiness Tony presents. He says that if employees perceive control of their work life (remember, control is the opposite of learned helplessness, aka depression), they will be happy. This means they feel they are progressing in their careers, feel a sense of connectedness and belonging, and feel like their work has real meaning, contributing to a greater cause. It seems to have worked for them: Zappos has been consecutively voted one of FORTUNE Magazine’s Top 100 Employers to Work For. So how did they practically implement these high-level principles?

In order to make employees feel like they are progressing in their careers, they divided up major promotions into a series of mini-promotions that occur every six months. This is the application of the theory that I presented in this article on the psychology of what makes games fun! Things become game-like and therefore FUN when people have a sense of progressing toward predefined goals.

In order to foster a sense of connection and belonging, Zappos engages in a variety of tactics to make sure that coworkers get to know and like one another. Besides making sure that they only hire people whose personalities fit well within the company culture, and quizzing employees on how well they know their coworkers, they also make sure that the exits to each building are out of the way, forcing everyone to walk through common areas. This strategy worked famously well at Pixar, promoting interdepartmental cross-pollination, and the exact opposite of this strategy was the reason for the failure of my college dormitory: you weren’t forced to go through a common area and you weren’t forced to interact with anyone. Ah well, let’s try to stay positive and learn from the lessons of the successful.

And of course, the Zappos mission is to deliver happiness. What greater cause could there be than that?

The book concludes with an epigram attributed to Buddha:

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.

What a great sentiment. Trade creates wealth. In order for you or your business to succeed, it’s really not necessary for others to fail. Embrace some of the open and positive standards exemplified by Zappos and you and your business can flourish.

(In case it wasn’t obvious, I completely endorse Delivering Happiness. You can get it on Amazon here.)

I was never really huge into Wu-Tang Clan, but I respected their importance in the context of hip hop, and I really enjoy a few of the singles from solo group members: Da Rockwilder, Liquid Swords, CherChez La Ghost are all favorite tunes. So when I saw RZA’s The Tao of Wu at my local Barnes & Noble, I gave it a chance.

The book was fun. I enjoyed reading lurid “hood” tales [one other book about the "hood" that I really recommend is Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist mentioned in Freakonomics], it was a cool perk to have better understanding of some of the Wu-Tang Clan’s lyrics, and I loved receiving spiritual reminders (the book has “Tao” in the title…). The most important spiritual reminder for me was that happiness is not something you get to in Heaven, or wherever – heaven is a place on earth. Happiness is to be experienced now; you can’t get to happiness in the future. This is one of those spiritual concepts that made no sense at all to me when I first considered it; however, with continued effort, I am beginning to grasp it.

So I enjoyed the window into RZA’s mind and loved the juicy historic details. But I do have a criticism.

In order to be a great rapper, it’s important to have excellent free association skills as well as creative instincts. This means that when you think of a phrase, you can easily think of related words, or rhyming words, or match the phrase with respect to meter. On the one hand, this enables RZA’s lyrics, but also serves as an excellent propensity towards… imaginative storytelling.

RZA is a big fan of the Five-Percent Nation of Islam, whose principles seem interesting and useful, but also heavily involved with numerology. My point: RZA is too creative in his explanation of the Supreme Mathematics and Twelve Jewels of Islam. It’s really unfair of me to dismiss the principles without investing the time to learn more – after all, the principles all sound pretty good to me on a superficial level. Furthermore, an extremely smart dude, Ken Wilber, has observed that nobody is smart enough to be 100% wrong. But the numerological justifications for the rationale of the Five-Percent Nation’s belief system seem ad-hoc and not systematized, and I feel that this distracts from their message. I only bring this up because The Mathematics and Jewels play such a big part in the book. But know that RZA is open-minded and his spiritual outlook also borrows from Christianity and Buddhism.

If, and only if, you’re a hip hop fan, I would definitely recommend The Tao of Wu. It’s a book that I think a lot of people would be motivated to read due to its relevance to their personal interests and the popular culture, which makes it a great avenue for teaching spiritual wisdom. It would be the perfect gift for any rap enthusiast.

Some of you know that I built HipHopGoblin, a hip hop website dedicated to the discovery of hot new underground tracks. One Twitter fan called it “the hood Pandora”. I took it down because it was costing me money (songs were hosted on Amazon S3) and not making me money, but it’s currently being revitalized as an open source project due to fan loyalty. If you would like to get involved with that, please email hiphopgoblin@googlegroups.com.

Doors of Perception is the kind of book that I would have liked in freshman year of high school, maybe, when I was reading Alice in Wonderland to try to hunt for drug references so I would feel more badass when I listened to Jefferson Airplane. Anyway, Doors of Perception is about Huxley’s experience during a controlled mescalin trip.

Huxley’s writing is boring. It sucks. He manages to convey some good ideas but there’s no singular insight. Maybe I’m just jaded from reading too much, but I was wholly unimpressed. Nonetheless, he does say some things worth repeating here:

• Religion is the opiate of the masses, yet for a lot of people, church doesn’t cut it. The vast majority of religion is fakeness and doesn’t calm people down. Instead they go to alcohol.
• The normal ego, albeit a great tool for survival, is unpleasant and often makes us lose sight of the forest for the trees (a favorite expression of one of my former college drug buddies); it’s a “valve” that filters perception and reality. It filters out the truth that we are part of a great connected whole and instead causes us to focus on mundane desire. (In Buddhism, Dukkha = suffering = desire)
• Great quote: “To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.” Remember, if you want to manipulate someone, you should give them compliments highly tailored to their ideal self.
• He says that being on “mescalin (sic)” is like reaching an egoless state in which one realizes enlightenment (i.e. gets zen koans) and has no wants and therefore, no motivation to do anything
• After his trip is complete, he talks of how his return to normal state of mind was simultaneously comforting and unsatisfactory. Which got me to thinking…

What are some practical things we can do to reach that egoless state without drugs?

1. Exercise
2. Meditation
3. Showering (which is a form of meditation in its own way)
4. Sex
5. Taking a nap
6. Not eating, or eating lightly
7. Forgiveness
8. Being around someone who is egoless
9. Performing a challenging task that requires use of well-honed skills (Flow to be written about eventually)

In my opinion, the ego comes into play when we feel bad or wounded, and we try to invent reasons to rationalize our pain. Then we filter reality to perceive something in alignment with such rationalizations, rather than seeing for what it actually is. It is the hypothesis of Aldous Huxley that in the psychologically normal individual, mescaline creates good feelings; after all, it is a phenethylamine, in the same chemical family as dopamine. Therefore, no need for rationalizations. Would love for an experienced pharmacologist to chime in on this discussion if you’re there.

Eventually I’ll do a post on Jung’s essay on synchronicity (I have to read it first…). That will be a good time to talk about my first mushroom trip, when I became obsessed with the eponymous Police album.

Hope I didn’t offend too many hipsters who hold this text as a sacred tome.

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey is a surprisingly brilliant, wise and lucid book, only incidentally about tennis. It’s about anyone improving any skill and I found it so apt and appropriate; I wish I found it earlier!

It’s going to be a privilege to guide you through my notes and reflections.

Gallwey starts off by talking about learning. He says that conscious learning is a very difficult thing – instead, as humans, we are naturally mimetic learners: we imitate others. It is very very difficult to instruct someone on how to do a skill, but it is easier to show them and let them try to naturally copy you. Our brains are wired for this. This is fundamental: if you want to learn a new skill, you’re going to be much better off watching a video than reading instructions.

In order to really explain this, I need to talk about another concept which I haven’t mentioned for a while – sorry, spirituality enthusiasts – the ego! If you are not your ego, then what are you? Eckhart Tolle might define you as being your attention; David Hawkins might say your ego is your self whereas you are your Self. But Gallwey instead constructs a model of Self 1 and Self 2, and I found it superbly accessible. I will try to do it justice.

Your Self 1 is your “teller”, your Self 2 is your “doer.” In tennis, it is Self 1 who gives racket instructions, saying “Okay, now follow through from low to high” but it is Self 2 who actually performs the action. Self 1 is your mind or ego wheras Self 2 is your real Self and body.

Self 1 is the person who constantly gives you instructions in real-time. Since I don’t actually play tennis, I’ll use basketball as an example. It’s when bark instructions at myself like, “watch his hands!” or reminding myself to jump before I shoot, correcting for a shot that fell short last time, that I involve Self 1. It’s when I praise myself for a clean shot, or try to get too cocky, that I involve Self 1. It’s when I criticize myself that I involve Self 1.

Back to learning: when we are given verbal instruction, it is to Self 1, but when we see a well-practiced skill in action, learning occurs through Self 2, the body. Self 1 is not useful at all for learning! In fact, all it does is interfere with the process. Every time I “involve Self 1″ I am more likely to commit an error! You may notice that when you are “in the zone”, all thoughts disappear. This is because you are acting through Self 2, trusting it, and therefore have no need for Self 1 and its thoughts. When “in the zone”, you excel so well because you are acting from your place of real knowledge: the body. (By the way, even though Self 2 is preferable, Gallwey comforts us by noting Self 2 is always there – we just choose to leave)

This two-self model has a lot of fun practical implications for kicking ass in real life.

First, if you want to fuck with your opponent, you should try to engage his Self 1. If your opponent is doing particularly well that day, ask him if he can tell you what he is doing. By consciously articulating it, he is engaging in Self 1 and detracts from Self 2′s ability to perform naturally. Although this is a tennis-specific tip, another thing that Gallwey suggests is standing very close to the service line when returning a serve; by forcing yourself away from the baseline, you are giving yourself less room for error and are more forced to rely on your Self 2 instincts. Furthermore, your opponent may feel that you are insulting his serve and feel the need to punish you (Self 1), increasing the likelihood of an error. The book has many tips like this, including ways in which we psych ourselves out of the zone.

A more important and general, practical application regards improving our skills. With this model, what do we do next?

1. Observe. The mere act of observing your form as it is now will likely lead to improvements. Indeed, the mere act of not trying to change it will allow you to see it as it actually is. You will notice if you are doing things in a blatantly poor or sloppy way. Also, observe the form of a pro whose abilities you want to mimic.
2. Feel/image. Picture yourself performing the skill in such a way that yield a precise desired outcome. Get it perfect a couple times in a row. Take note of how it feels, and also of any other relevant sensory details: what kind of sound the wind makes, what sound the  ball makes when it hits, etc. If you picture it in your mind and you don’t actually achieve the desired outcome in your mind, keep rehearsing it mentally until you are able to do so perfectly.
3. Trust & Allow. Execute the skill, and trust yourself (your Self 2!) that you will be able to complete it faithfully. If you do not succeed, do not despair; have faith in the process.
4. Observe. Observe the new outcome; observe your new performance. Also, once again observe the perfect performance, in the name of mimicry. In essence, repeat step 1.

From personal experience, I can concur this is a crystallization of the best way to enhance and improve skill.

From a theoretical perspective, such as the “Law of Attraction”, the idea is to set your intention and let the chips fall where they may. This is an extremely liberating mindset, eliminating performance anxiety: all you have control over is whether or not you set the intention and whether you bring the effort. You can’t have anxiety over a process over which you have control.

Gallwey recommends bringing as much attention to the process as possible, and staying in the moment. A few notes about this, because this book really enhanced my understanding of the concept of “the now“. When we are in the moment, things are literally lighter. This is not necessarily religious, but actually very physical. Our attention is focused on our environment and therefore our eyes are more open, taking in as much from our surroundings as possible. Because our eyes are open, we take in more light. (Convenient that I just read a book on body language, it’s nice how things converge.)

If we notice that our ego (Self 1) begins to flare up, such as after missing a bad shot or even doing exceptionally well, Gallwey advises we turn our attention to our breath. This doesn’t mean breathing intently, deeply, or anything like that – though those may be good practices, maybe. It just means observing but not interfering with the automatic process of breathing. This is especially useful between points, when we tend to automatically start fantasizing about the future consequences of the outcome of the next point.

From extensive personal experience, Gallwey also talks about the best ways to teach someone, which is by asking questions that encourage them to pay better attention to their own habits and processes. This makes me think of one of my favorite collections of Zen stories and koans. It also makes me think of how many of the greatest teachers of real philosophy - Socrates, Buddha – teach lessons not directly, but indirectly, through negative space. This may be a way to evoke learning through Self 2 without invoking Self 1! I used to think that I might have a gift for explicitly articulating all the wise teachings that are so annoyingly taught indirectly. Maybe that would only interfere with the learning process, though. Or maybe with more practice, I can paint the brushstrokes outlining the negative space more clearly. We’ll see.

(I want to do some exploration on the science of guiding people towards epiphanies; as we know, you can never win an argument. The only thing you can do is maybe point them in a direction where they realize something for themselves, but they will probably only be motivated to go in that direction if they can explicitly see that it is in their short-term best self interest at the time being.)

More practical stuff: Gallwey also elucidates the best way to correct a habit. Habits are useful in that they produce results. Instead of trying to change an old habit, we should just figure out what new result we want, and then create a NEW habit that guides us to the new result. Much more practical.

At the end, the book veers more into the psychological realm. It actually explicitly mentions Transactional Analysis, a VERY interesting topic. It talks about the three types of sports “games”: those who are playing to be Good (either to look good, winning admiration from others; to play for perfection, resisting that to be human is imperfect; to compete, in order to be better than other people and receive admiration and control); those who play for social reasons (to make or keep friends); and those who play for health or fun (enjoyment of the game). I definitely recognized a lot of myself playing the Good-o game, as well as the social reasons (taking up video games I don’t enjoy so I can meld socially).

It reminds me of an epiphany I once had: if you really enjoy something for pure reasons, you would do it by yourself. (This is one reason why I stopped smoking and playing video games. I don’t enjoy the solo practice of those activities.) If the description of these “games” is of interest to you, I highly recommend you check out Games People Play by Eric Berne and look deeper into Transactional Analysis.

The book concludes with a philosophical look at competition. If we play and enjoy best when we use Self 2, then what is the point of competing? Isn’t it aggressive and therefore anti-cooperative? I found his answer to be particularly insightful and edifying. We value a competitive opponent because it encourages us to push our skills to new heights. When we are faced with difficult obstacles and become stressed, if we instead “eat” that stress and use it to leverage our focus and energy to new heights, we enjoy a greater experience of our true nature, self, and skills, and we know ourselves deeper.

I really recommend The Inner Game of Tennis and you can get it on Amazon here. Caveat emptor:  if you don’t know anything about tennis, you will likely become somewhat frustrated by the book. But if you have even the most basic understanding of it (e.g., distinguish between forehand, backhand, and serve), then it will be great, even if you don’t like tennis.

This is a very personal entry.

Let me explain what my perspective on eating meat was before I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I reasoned that eating meat was bad because of the harm to the environment. I reasoned that eating meat was bad because of the harm to my health (yes, you can get an abundance of protein and vitamin B12 from other sources, and enjoy lower risks for heart disease and cancer, amongst other benefits). I reasoned that eating meat was wrong because I didn’t need to in order to survive. I reasoned that eating meat was wrong because it wasn’t fair to subject other beings to pain in order for some short-lived personal benefit (yes, many animals clearly experience pain, suffering, and anxiety). To eat animals goes against everything I believe in, which is maximum sustainable happiness for maximum beings.

But I still ate meat. Why?

The secret answer is that I was embarrassed by my vegan ideals, and I was ashamed of my big heart. I didn’t think it becoming for a man to exhibit such emotional compassion. If you’re a true ruthless, dominant master, why deny yourself the taste and convenience of meat? To refrain would be to exhibit compassion-based weakness, for you are not serving yourself or your group. To ground your decision-making, let alone emotional wellbeing, on the feelings of another is – pathetic.

This was a very private understanding that I kept to myself.

In order to embody my barbarian ideals, I pretended to not care about others’ feelings, adopting a persona not unlike Tucker Max, endeavoring to attain social success. I knew that the American culture idolized such ideals of dominance. I attended a university notorious for producing investment bankers and neoliberal megalomaniacs, and I pretended to major in Economics. I even bought The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green and studied it in earnest.

Was my act successful? No. Privately, I felt guilty and apologetic. I was often socially exposed, as well, for being incongruent to my core; indeed, I was once aptly labeled “the worst kind of douchebag”. I eventually realized the error of my ways and slowly began to repent, making shifts in my persona, and apologizing to people whom I had wronged.

Even though I began to make the shift to celebrating my compassionate core, I still publicly ridiculed vegans. I remember that earlier this year, Steve Pavlina posted a video of workers killing baby chicks at a hatchery, comparing the workers to Nazis. I got involved in a lengthy discussion on his Facebook page, rationalizing that to eat meat is okay because of the benefit provided to humans. Being of Jewish heritage (though not religiously or particularly culturally observant), and insecure about weakness, Nazi comparisons were at that point a sensitive issue for me. I declared that the comparison to Nazis was outrageous and egregious, and then I probably said something like this, filled with self-righteous indignation:

“I’d rather some animals not have to suffer, but it is nothing compared to the suffering of hungry HUMAN BEINGS.”

Now I realize that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and I am sorry for misleading anybody whom I may have influenced. Several people friended me on Facebook after I made those public comments: it’s evidently a common enough perspective.

The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of human beings no longer need meat to thrive. The only people who are hungry are the shareholders of the CAFOs (“factory farms”). Human health and satiety are not motivations for them – they are motivated by profit. If you want to live your life in maximal service to yourself, then I encourage you to eat meat. But if you are not a true sociopath, and you realize that you would be emotionally better off by serving others, then you cannot possibly ever eat CAFO meat again and honestly maintain a sense of integrity. I am telling you now: by eating CAFO meat, you are directly contributing to systematic suffering on a scale far worse than Nazi Germany. This isn’t an exaggeration; the number of animals tortured each year in service to the CAFO profit motive far exceeds the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it is easy to rationalize that animals don’t feel pain, or that the pain they feel doesn’t matter, but it is just a lie that we are telling to ourselves, signifying nothing.

I can’t lie to myself. Knowing what I know, I can’t eat meat.

So, the last book I read was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and I implore you to read it. It is available for $14.29 on Amazon, here.

My most recent read was What Every Body Is Saying, a body-language manual written by former FBI agent Joe Navarro. Joe teamed up with a psychologist to write his book, which was awesome for me because it made the book that much more accessible as I was able to understand the principles within the context of a mental framework I’ve already established (And one that I’m endeavoring to impart upon this blog’s readership): the limbic system/amygdala is really important in understanding human behavior. The neocortex/”thinking brain” is layered on top of the limbic system, and although it can modulate the limbic system, the signals from the limbic system affect our behavior immediately in real-time; any modifications to the automatically externalized signals sent by the limbic system are either consciously directed or subconsciously directed from the depths of our thinking-minds.

This is really, really important. If we want to have a good understanding of body language, and really learn it, then we must understand the theory before we dive into the juicy practical examples. So, here is a quick refresher:

What is the Limbic System? What is the Neocortex? What is the difference between the Limbic System and the Neocortex?

The human brain evolved over a long time. The worm fish, c. elegans, is the animal with the fewest number of neurons: 302; this should give you some perspective on our humble origins. Of course, some creatures like sponges have 0 neurons, but you get my point, neural architecture can be very simple. Through the course of evolution, animals developed the brain stem, which regulates things like breathing, status and aggression; this part is called the “reptilian brain”  (or “lizard brain” in Seth Godin terms) and is attributed to a phylogenetic advancement made by reptiles.

Animals later developed the “limbic” brain (limbic is latin for curved, which is the shape of the neural regions) system, which serves by providing emotions and a sense of reward. This is why it’s sometimes called the emotional brain. The limbic system or limbic brain is sometimes called the mammalian brain, but that’s a misnomer. Modern research suggests that the common ancestor of lizards and mammals had a limbic system.

Finally, awesome beasts that they are, mammals developed the top layer of their brains – the neocortex or “thinking brain”. The neocortex is where we plan things in the long-term and where we think thoughts. However, unless you’re an extremely enlightened individual and have made a daily practice of meditation for a very long time, your thoughts will be almost exclusively driven by impulses sent by your limbic system.

I’d like to interrupt this fact-filled paragraph with a fun picture of whales and a fun fact:

Fun fact: Whales, mammals that they are, utilize their neocortex well. They teach, learn, cooperate, scheme, and grieve. Yes, whales scheme. And they live to be up to 70 years old. Take that in combination with the idea that most communication is non-verbal (to be discussed in another article…), it prompts some interesting questions about harmony and the ethics of zoo (for another article).

Okay, now that we’ve established that the brain is layered, and most of our emotions come from the limbic brain, we learn a new fun fact: our body is intimately linked to the emotional signals sent by our limbic brain. The limbic brain happens to be in charge of the “fight or flight” response, and our body reacts instantly to the signals sent by the amygdala. It turns out “fight or flight” is a misnomer as well, though: “fight, flight, or freeze” might be more accurate. Fight foes, flee from predators, and freeze to avoid detection by enemies.

Got the theory? Proceed. Confused by the theory? Ask a question in the comments, and I’ll edit the post to explain better.

OK, time to dig in. As I see it, there are three important principles in understanding body language:

Principle #1 Since we are emotionally motivated, and all our behavior is rationalized (remember, the limbic system is underneath the neocortex), our bodies are compelled to advance toward objects of interest and avert our gaze/bodies from objects of disinterest.
Principle #2 When we experience negative emotions (stress), we engage in soothing behaviors.
Principle #3 The better we feel, the lighter we are; the worse we feel, the heavier we are.

Elaboration of Principle #1, Approach & Aversion

If our limbic system tells us that we don’t like something, we’re going to want to flee. Therefore, our feet will orient in the direction away from the offending object. However, if we like something, our feet will orient in the direction towards the desirable object.

(For the purposes of this discussion, humans and objects might as well be considered interchangeable, though to the brain, I think that we actually treat things that we perceive to be alive, differently. This explains why the Roomba was such a successful product; people bonded with it due to its lifelike characteristics. You might recall the humorous clip from Arrested Development where Buster feeds a cheese poof to a Roomba, sighing empathetically, “ohh, you’re hungry.”)

Anyway, back to the feet: This is huge! If we really like someone, we’re going to orient our feet towards them; if we are feigning social politeness, we are going to twist our waist & twist our facial expression but not reorient the direction of the feet. And if we really don’t like, we’re going to turn our back, so we can get away. (There are other reasons for back-turning as well; a high status animal [e.g. a dog, a human] may turn his back to a group, signalling that he is not threatened by the group, doesn’t perceive them as a threat, and their (body) language is not germane to his intentions).

Indeed, ex-agent Joe Navarro says that the feet are the best tell for reading someone’s emotions, and I think this is a brilliant insight. With practice, we can mask our facial expressions; e.g. we’re trained by our parents to make friendly smiles at people we don’t like. (though we can’t mask microexpressions – a post on those soon as Ekman’s book is on my to-read list) However, it’s really rare to be able to mask your feet movements. Bouncy feet mean that you’re excited (though bouncy legs are more likely a form of soothing); feet oriented differently from your torso suggest that what you’re communicating is not really what you feel.

Even though our feet play a principle role, and are one of the best honest indicators of body language, there’s one more thing I’d like to address: when addressing an object that we like, we will try to expose ourselves to it as much as possible. This means orienting our feet to it, stepping closer to it, opening our eyes/dilating our pupils so we can see more of it..  conversely, when we don’t like something as much or it makes us uncomfortable, we may fold our arms across our chest, or subconsciously build a barrier between us and the object (such as by buttoning a jacket, or placing an object in between us and the offensive stimulus). One other thing: the interplay between cognitive sensation/perception of experience, and body language, is FASCINATING. If you are made uncomfortable by something, you may put on a jacket in order to create a barrier, but you may then rationalize that “you’re just cold”. By the way, if you want a more detailed inventory of body language behaviors, get the Navarro book (the one I read) or the Pease book (another one I own, but have yet to read); this post is more inclined towards theory.

Elaboration of Principle #2, Soothing

When we experience stress, we subconsciously try to get rid of it as soon as possible. This manifests itself in a number of behaviors that we employe to “soothe” ourself: touching the face, touching the front or back of our neck, “wiping” our hands on our legs, shaking our legs, licking our lips, rubbing our hands together, smoking weed, drinking alcohol, eating food, smoking a cigarette. When someone engages in a soothing behavior, you can bet that they just experienced a spike of stress. Although the present moment environmental stimuli generate most of emotions experienced, our neocortex can and does modulate emotion, so their stressful spike may have been caused by a thought completely unrelated to the situation at hand. (If we want to stop overeating or quit smoking, we may wish to try to restructure our life to reduce the amount of stress and negative emotions created so we have less to soothe.)

Elaboration of Principle #3, Gravity

When we are happy, we will sit upright, we will wave our hands animatedly, we will extend our arms to the sky, we will skip. When we are sad, we are more likely to be hunched over, small, with arms dragging, folded across the chest. Indeed, it’s as if when we are sad gravity weighs on our body, and when we’re happy we are lighter than air and our appendages can’t help but float up. A finger raised to the sky indicates positive emotions, a finger pointing towards the floor indicates negative emotions.

Why is this? If we are happy, our limbic system is telling us that there are no potential threats in the environment; we can be animated and we will not have to risk being seen by predators or foes. We can draw attention to ourselves without fear. The converse is true as well. When we are sad, we want to remain small and non-threatening.

I’ll leave you with one piece of advice. Be careful when reading people. You can use clusters of body language clues to elucidate intentions, but be careful. You don’t want to be Larry David.

This is one in a series of ZacharyBurt.com posts on emotions and body language. Look forward to future posts about group emotions, mimicing/isopraxy, social norms, and microexpressions. The main book I drew from for this article is What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro.