I'm moving to joshuaspodek.com.

Please check it out there. Hopefully there won't be many hiccups in the process. I may play around with the design. There may be some dead links. I'll do my best to get it stable quickly.

If you accept mainstream ideas of creativity, then your understanding of creativity is holding you back from creating things and being creative. Mainstream views on creativity sell books, movies, magazines, and so forth. They sell over-romanticized myths that, while entertaining, undermine your ability to create things and solve problems.

Let's start with two contradictions to lay bare the counterproductivity in mainstream views.

First, mainstream views value creative, original, so-called outside-the-box thinking, but when push comes to shove, we don't value it in practice. To illustrate, say you have a problem you don't know how to solve. You need someone else to create a solution. It could be anything -- a leaky sink, a managerial issue at work, what to make for dinner, a musical score you want to write. You ask two people for help. One says

I have the most amazing idea. No one has ever thought of it before. Totally outside the box. Completely original. It will blow your mind.

The other says,

I'm experienced in this area. I've solved exactly this problem a hundred times before. The solution I use has worked every single time. It's tried and true.

Mainstream views romanticize the first one, but when the solution matters, you choose the second one. That's why you hire experienced people for high-level jobs and not school children. That's why people with experience are always compensated better than people without it: they know what has worked before and the implement it.

Second, borrowing from Janson's History of Art, consider Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe:
It's widely recognized as one of the great works of western art, I believe safe to call creative. Here's what's interesting. The composition seems to have been strongly influenced by this detail from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) after a drawing by Raphael.

The Worst problem In The World is two people with different standards who don't realize their standards differ evaluating each other and acting on their evaluation.

This is not hyperbole. Think of a recent news headline involving conflict. It was probably a variation of The Worst Problem In The World. Many significant conflicts in the world are either solvable or are variations of The Worst Problem In The World. Many major conflicts  in your life with other people are probably also variations on The Worst Problem In The World.

Here's an example: person A is vegetarian and believes eating meat is cruel; person B eats meat and believes people should be free to eat what they want.

A's standard is cruelty. B's is freedom. When A evaluates B, A will find B cruel. If A acts on his or her judgment, B will feel accused of cruelty, which is not even an issue for B. B will find A judgmental, opposed to or ignorant of B's standard (freedom), and will be motivated to retaliate.

If B acts on his or her judgment, B will find A intolerant (opposed to freedom), which is not even an issue for A. A will find B judgmental, opposed to or ignorant of A's standard (cruelty), and will be motivated to retaliate.

Neither can be proved wrong because neither accepts the other's standards. Therefore each will increasingly consider him or herself right and the other wrong, increasingly polarizing the issue.

If their conflict escalates and can find no other common ground, typically each will dig into their positions more strongly, compile evidence supporting his or her case, attack the other personally, consider the other person crazy, and do other things to polarize the conflict. They will feel motivation to be violent and may act on it.

You can change the behavior and belief to any number of topics and the pattern of interaction between the two will be the same because the system is the same. In politics you see it in debates on abortion, gun control, border disputes, tax policy, and so on. In religion you see it in religious debates, religious wars, schisms, and so on. In relationships you see it in the whole men from Mars women from Venus difference, fights -- particularly when one "just doesn't understand" the other, feelings of neglect, cheating, and so on.

When two people have the same standards and disagree, they just refer to the standards, debate, and come to agreement. If they know they have different standards they agree to disagree. They don't have The Worst Problem In The World. They may have problems, but they have paths to resolution. Sometimes -- for example, in the case of access to a scarce resource like food -- both parties may resort to force, but if they both agree on that path to resolve the conflict, it won't linger.

TWPITW™ is different. When they don't agree on standards and have conflicting behavior -- and don't realize they disagree, that is, they believe they have the same standards -- they have no way of coming to agreement and assume the other is crazy, has malevolent intent, both, or worse. And they have no way of resolving the conflict.

For example, many European colonial powers fought border wars in what is now the United States. All agreed fighting was the way to resolve the conflict. Those battles were not The Worst Problem In The World: once they ended, they were rarely brought up again. By comparison, the United States' Civil War had two sets of standards not agreed on by the two sides -- slavery and self-determination -- so it was in instance of The Worst Problem In The World. That war ended, but the conflict remains.

Conflict based on The Worst Problem In The World can last for thousands of years, can destroy relationships, and can make people incredibly bitter. People who can't find ways to resolve conflict through mutually agreed on standards -- that is, those in the midst of The Worst Problem In The World -- will find themselves motivated to use force, insults, passive aggression, and so on. Many act on that motivation.

"Free food tastes better," someone said to me. It rang true. I immediately added the corollary "free alcohol tastes better too."

I thought it resonated with me because I was a graduate student for so long. Then I noticed something at a fancy gallery opening with art selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Normally galleries serve wine, sometimes another alcohol if they have a sponsor. At this opening they were serving cans of Budweiser and everyone -- rich people and social elites -- was drinking it. I'm sure some people love the taste of it, but I'm more sure if these people were at a fancy bar paying for their drinks not a single one of them would order Budweiser.

Yet there they were, happily drinking it, and not ironically.

Free food and alcohol taste better. You don't have to be a poor graduate student to indulge.

Focusing on the positive is great. If it works for you, you can do better.

When something brings you emotional reward, here are two things you can do more than just focusing on it to bring more reward into your life: overindulging in reward and sharing the reward.

Overindulging in reward means if your manager pats you on the back and you feel good about it, find a way to feel great about it. If you finished a project and you'd normally feel great for a day about it, find a way to feel great about it for a week.

Overindulging in reward achieves two things. First, reward motivates similar behavior. Bluntly, you will be training yourself to do things you find rewarding. In the long run that means creating an overall lifestyle based on things you like.

Second, since it feels better than average and sometimes you feel worse than average, overindulging lets you parcel out some of the feelings you like to tide you over when you are feeling things you don't like. If today you overindulge in satisfaction, tomorrow, if you get hit with disappointment, you can bring back some of the satisfaction.

Sharing reward means if you get a role in the play you auditioned for, don't keep it to yourself. Tell everyone you did. If you find you love scuba diving, tell everyone how much you love it. Sharing doesn't mean bragging. It's just sharing what brought about feelings you like.

Sharing in reward does two things too. First, it helps you overindulge. Second, by telling people what brings you reward, you motivate them to share those things with you. If you tell everyone you love scuba diving, people who love scuba diving will be more attracted to you. People who could talk to you about scuba diving or something else will preferentially tell you about scuba diving because they know you like it.

People associate and share with you what you share with them. If you're the miserable person at work, they'll share misery with you. If you're the fun person, they'll share fun. If you get work done, they'll share getting things done. No one views you as just one thing, so they'll average what they see.

If you don't deliberately share what's rewarding, they'll still average what they see, only it will be whatever they happen to see, not what you choose to share. Why not choose deliberately?

The converse is also true. If you love going to parties but you share how miserable you are at work, you won't be invited to as many parties. You probably will instead attract other people who are miserable at work and hear how miserable they are. If you talk about the fun you had at parties, you'll be invited to more parties.

Do you feel if you don't deal with difficult things you're denying or avoiding reality? Does that bring you down or make you feel irresponsible? Does that compel you to do things you don't want to? Here's how to make sure you don't. After a conversation last night, my friend said she looked at enjoying life in a whole new way for the better.

Let's start with an analogy. On a corner of Manhattan, dozens of people may pass you in a minute. You could stop and talk to any one of them. It's so diverse, one might be a student, another a dancer, athlete, lawyer, CEO, model, housewife, and so on. If you began a conversation with any about his or her life, you'd get a different view of the city.

You can make New York whatever kind of city you want among  the communities within it you choose to connect to. Personally, I've seen New York as a student city, and entrepreneurial city, an athlete city, an art city, and so on.

All these New Yorks exist simultaneously in parallel, partly interacting, partly independent. You can choose to pick any one and ignore any others. You could know only students and no entrepreneurs, or whatever. Who you bring into your environment doesn't change that the others are all there, you just aren't interacting with them.

Life is more diverse than New York. It has more people and opportunities to connect to. You can choose to interact with any person or act on any of the myriad opportunities you can find.

Not only can you choose to spend time with any one, you have to choose to spend time with some and necessarily have to decline to spend time with the rest. You can live a student life, athlete life, dancer life, singer life, fun life, miserable life, any combination ... whatever you can make of it.

Likewise, any person is more complex than you can observe and process at once. You can observe and connect with any part of anyone else you want. Anyone has the capacity for curiosity, calm, ambition, and so on. It's up to you to choose what part of a person in your life you want to connect with. If you choose to argue with that person, you're choosing not to connect with other parts. You don't and can't connect with everything.

Hopefully you choose based on your values and what emotional reward the choices bring about. You can choose to spend time on things that make you miserable, but you don't have to. Why would you? If it's unnecessary, you don't have to do it. If it's necessary, it doesn't have to cause misery -- only your (mis)understanding of it would.

Since you only live on Earth for a limited time, and since you can only observe and process so much given your limited senses and brainpower, you can never get to everything. Spending time with dancers isn't ignoring or denying lawyers. No one at the end of your life will say you spent too much time having fun or singing or dancing and therefore you have to balance it with doing taxes or washing dishes or being miserable.

Likewise, having fun or learning with someone isn't denying that he or she can be annoying or boring. You only have so much time with him or her.

I plan on experiencing as much as I can in life. I'm starting with the stuff and people I enjoy and learn from and I expect to die before getting to the miserable parts. I'm not losing sleep over missing the misery. They aren't my priorities and I don't have time.

The New York Times wrote yesterday about Eben Moglen, whom I wrote about recently.

"We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now," he said. "What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been."
...
If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

"It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse," Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading "subversive" material.

...
In response to Mr. Moglen's call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year have been building a decentralized social network called Diaspora.
...

"We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression," Mr. Moglen said. "Being connected works."

If anyone wants to help contribute, please let me know. We can make a difference.

Here's a model for you: think of a baby learning to walk.

No baby learns to walk right the first time. Not even the tenth time. So-called failure for them is not just figuratively painful, it looks physically painful. Yet babies learn to walk. They try and fail. And try and fail. And try and fail. For months they try and fail.

This model alone shows how poorly the popular use of the term failure describes that part of the learning process. Failure is inevitable. Failure teaches. Failure is what experience means. Babies build experience when they fall. That's how they learn to walk so well.

Can you imagine if after one fall a baby said, "Oh well, I tried my hardest. I just can't walk. I'm not the walking type."?

You were one of those babies. Not only did persistence pay off, your persistence paid off. That's how you learned to walk so well. You succeeded in the face of adversity.

I've written before how I like to read the results of the finishers of marathons I run, especially the last and oldest. From the publicly published information, it's the most inspiration you can get. I'm sure it barely scratches the surface of what some athletes overcome to finish, but I look for inspiration where I can. Since I registered for last year's New York City marathon lottery (but didn't get a number), I got the Road Runners Club's magazine with the times from last November's race.

Before starting at the last finishers I notice they list the wheelchair finishers after the runners. I didn't realize there were two divisions where I thought there was one -- wheelchair and handcycle, men's and women's for each. Only a few dozen competed in each. The winners in those divisions always have the fastest times of the whole race -- wheels help going down those hills, which I imagine they tear up. David Weir of Great Britain won the men's wheelchair division in 1:37:29. He was 31, which you'd think was around a peak age to win a marathon, but Masazumi Soejima of Japan was 2 seconds -- 2 seconds!! -- behind him and he was 40 years old. I imagine it was a duel at the end where they both finish unable to talk or function at anything but catching their breath, then hug at realizing how the other helped each to achieve what he never would have alone.

People who watch marathons, whether their first or after many times, routinely cry or choke up. The emotion on display is so raw it's hard to avoid catching it. The event takes such dedication, discipline, effort, focus, and practice -- yet is accessible to anyone. Seeing wheelchair athletes tends to evoke yet more emotions. I can imagine the scene as these two athletes sprinted across the line.

The winning woman in the wheelchair division, Tatyana McFadden of Maryland, was 45 years old -- more than five years older than me. She finished in 2:02:22, six minutes ahead of Christina Ripp of Colorado, fifteen years her junior!

Looking at the handcycle division... Holy cow! The men's winner, Dane Pilon of North Carolina, at 50 years old (!!) outsprinted Arkadiusz Skrzypinksi of Poland by 1 second, finishing at 1:21:23. As in women's wheelchair, DP was fifteen years older than AS. Can you imagine that finish? I wonder how close they were the whole race. Did one catch the other at the end, maybe to win from behind? Did one dominate the whole time, barely keeping his lead as a challenger approached? Were they neck and neck the whole race? I can't think of an unthrilling possibility.

Double wow! The women's handcycle winner was 62, Helene Hines of New York, in 2:02:16. The next after her was Minda Dentler of New York -- 30 years younger and seven minutes later.

Scanning the wheeled competitors, the youngest I see is a 20 year old man -- Neal Cabanting, from Washington DC. The oldest is a 78 year old woman, one Sister Mary Gladys from Connecticut, finishing in 6:20:39. She's double my age.

Oops. Two corrections.

An 18 year old man -- just a kid -- Charles Sweswn from Colombia finished in 2:09:26 in the handcycle division. An amazing early performance.

And an 80 year old woman from New York, Rosalie Ames finished handcycling in 4:28:31, ahead of over a dozen other handcyclers, men and women.

Folks, how is this not inspiring?

Okay, on to the runners.

Among the slower finishers I see a Joy Johnson, 83 years old from California, finishing in 8:04:59, with 26 others finishing behind her, ranging in age from 19 to 67 -- 16 to 64 years younger than her!

The next oldest I see are one 70 year old two or three minutes ahead of her and a few runners in their sixties.

My best time is a respectable 3:51, so let's jump forward and look around there. In particular, it's always nice to beat a round number like four hours. Three runners finished at 3:59:59 -- a 30, a 40, and a 60 year old. If I get to run this year I'll be forty, so there's all the inspiration I need to beat 4 hours.

With staggered starts, it's harder and harder to know your time. For those who don't know, you run with a chip on your shoe that checks when you pass chip readers. In particular, your finishing time doesn't include the time it takes to cross the starting line, which in New York City can take more than a quarter-hour. But the clock at the finish line only shows one time so you need a watch or a good head for math while running to know your time.

When I ran that 3:51 I think the race clock said something over four hours and I was sprinting just to beat four hours. I didn't realize I beat my personal best until they posted my official time. Who knows if these three runners knew they were just under 4 hours.

It's tempting to think they were shooting for great new times, but how much can you tell from just a name and a time? In some ways, the mystery is more intriguing. Did they sprint to beat a round number? Were they running in their tenth marathons and just enjoying themselves? Were they expecting to run sub-3 hour marathons and hurt themselves, barely able to finish? Even watching them finish -- perhaps hundreds per minute when they did -- you can only imagine their stories. They may have crossed the finish line half an hour apart from each other.

Meanwhile four runners crossed at 4:00:00 and another three at 4:00:01. Were they disappointed at just missing beating that round number? Ecstatic to do so well? Just enjoying themselves? Whatever you speculate, if it doesn't apply to them, it applies to one of the other tens of thousands of runners. Marathon runners are diverse in nearly every way you can imagine except one -- none of them shied away from the challenge of what others, and possibly they themselves before doing it, consider a superhuman feat.

I used to wonder why people considered finishing a marathon superhuman or impossible when the contrary evidence of tens of thousands of runners of every physical characteristic finishing in races around the world was overwhelming. Eventually I settled on the explanation that they held on to their belief contrary to overwhelming evidence to protect themselves.

I've written other posts on people not even trying to achieve their potential in some way. I don't understand such a life. Marathon running requires so little you aren't born with -- a pair of shoes, some socks, running shorts, time, and some space are all you need. I guess the wheeled athletes need a chair, which they must already have. I've run marathons next to blind runners, runners with crutches, and so on.

This issue of the magazine featured the Edison Pena, the Chilean miner stuck underground for 69 days, running up to six miles a day in the mine. Apparently when the New York Road Runner's Club heard about him they decided to invite him, perhaps to ride in a pace car or hold the finishing tape. He ran and walked -- finishing in 5:40:51.

Before the race he said about his training "I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, 'I can outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me.' And I did it."

"I wanted to show the world I could do it," he told reporters afterward. "I struggled with myself, with my own pain. But I made it to the finish line."

It's hard to imagine someone having less space than he had. Just goes to show you: one of the few things more confining than being trapped in a mine for 69 days is the confinement of a belief that you can't do it. Someone believing they can't do something they can and want to ... one of the saddest things I can think of.

Back to the other finishers, while flipping back to the runners around 3:00:00, I happened to notice a runner at 3:18:45 -- better than half an hour better than my best time -- one Andre Lacour of France finished... at 70 years old! That pace is just off a 7:30 mile, which is what I ran in college and graduate school when I would run laps of Central Park -- a mere six or twelve miles, less than a quarter or half of what this guy ran. So it's not hauling ass, but it's a great pace. Last year I think I ran a lap at his pace and it was punishing. His training must have been incredible.

I couldn't resist looking him up. I just typed "andre lacour marathon" and it turns out he was the French champion in marathons in 1969, two years before I was born. He trains with a 60 year old. In 2007, he was third in his age group for marathons worldwide. If I read the French of this other article right, he won his age group at 60 in 2000. I think it also says he was a physicist. But that article says the New York City marathon begins in Brooklyn, not Staten Island, so can we trust it?

Now let's zip to the beginning. The winning man, Gebre Gebremarium of Ethiopia, was 26, young to be on the world stage. His time of 2:08:14 meant he averaged faster than five minute miles for the course. I've never run close to a single five minute mile. I'd wager few people ever have. He averaged twenty six of them in a row over big hills and suspension bridges with big climbs. To anyone but a trained sprinter, that's hauling ass. For a long time.

Six minutes after him came a 38 year old, a mere one year younger than me. Then at 2:24:03 came a 40 year old Mexican man. I plan to enter the lottery this year, which would put me at 40 years old. I don't plan to try to finish within an hour of his time. My priorities just aren't the same. But I would like to think about qualifying for Boston. At forty, I would need to run in 3:20 -- thirty minutes faster than my best. I'd need to train more than I ever have (well, when I ran during ultimate seasons I trained more total, but mostly for ultimate, and then I had tournaments within a week before the marathon, which could not have helped my times).

Well, would you look at that. I just realized they separate the listings by sex. Makes sense, but I didn't notice it because there are so many. So the 3:59:59 times were just one sex. The top finishers were just the men.

I've been writing and inspiring myself for a few hours already, though I love browsing through these times, imagining stories for each runner, finding inspiration. Every finisher's story is remarkable -- whether the race was easy for him or her or the biggest challenge he or she has ever overcome. If it's easy, what made it easy, because I guarantee it wasn't that he or she could just get up and run it. A marathon measures not so much innate ability as training. No one can finish a marathon without significant training. So for runners for whom finishing was easy, I can only imagine they loved the training. Many calories burned and much sweat, but relatively less emotional effort required. That's my style of training.

Or was it life-changingly hard? Well, those are the stories we all imagine. Those are the stories that inspire us. If we can endure a grueling marathon, how easily will we be able to handle comparative trivialities like a micromanaging boss or meddlesome roommate?

Before closing, I'll note a separate piece the magazine had for the oldest finisher this year, 90 year old Jon Mendes of Manhattan, who ran and walked for a just-over 9 hour finish. He trains with an 80 year old kid and ran with that guy and his 18 year old grandson. It was his twelfth New York City marathon.

"You've got to have goals in life or you wither away," he told the New York Times. "It's no disgrace to fail, only not to try."

Typical e-book readers today have a few gigabytes of memory, enabling holding thousands of books.

Where did the choice for this amount of memory come from? Am I missing something? What is the value of holding that many books? Even if you were trapped on a desert island you would die before finishing reading them, leaving aside the issue of recharging the battery.

On the face of it you could say you never know when you might want to read a given book, so why not have it available. Many books are available for free, presumably everything in the public domain that someone has taken the time to convert.

How does having all those books available improve your life? Alternatively, if you had 5,000 books available to you and then you lost all of them, or even half, do you think your life would be worse or do you think you'd recover? I'll bet anyone and everyone could recover from the loss. By corollary they wouldn't gain much emotional reward from the gain in the first place.

I'll also bet people who have more than a few dozen books have read a lot of first chapters of those books, fewer second chapters, and almost no complete books. For them, for all the value they place on books, what does it say about their content if they don't finish what the author wrote?

You could say the vendors have to find ways to differentiate themselves and offer greater value for their particular product over competitors, but they communicate a weird message by implying value in the number of books a reader can hold. It implies any one book is not that valuable or else why would you want or need so many other. It implies collections are more valuable than books -- like they are a commodity, as opposed to individual works to be read and reread.

If you want to improve your life, like most I agree books are a great way to do so for all the obvious reasons -- you access others' thoughts and ideas, expand your horizons, learn, and so on. If you expect to improve your life by getting more than a few dozen books, I suspect you misunderstand both what brings emotional reward and the value of a book. I suggest it makes sense to ignore much of the message vendors signal about their own product in evaluating it for its contribution to your life.

I used to think I might be spoiled by having a free public library across the street from my building, but I've come to realize by any measure of volume of media I can think of, we have more than we can do with it. The perspective that thousands of books has value devalues not just individual books, but the ability to enjoy oneself without any outside stimulation (outside of whatever environment you find yourself at any time).

We live in a world of so much media, the more relevant issue to me is not how much more we can get but how much less.