Josh Allred's Blog

Waking up tomorrow knowing exactly how your day will go, to be able to predict it with extreme accuracy would be a curse.

Yet, many of the choices we make are to seek out this safety net of reliability, predictability, and certainty.

We can’t see the future. No one has a crystal ball. But we can also settle down, fly low, avoid controversy, sit in the back row, slip by with no one noticing, count the days until the weekend, have someone tell us what to do next–and then what?

Well, you might not know for sure what will happen, but you can sort of predict with high accuracy what will happen next:

“Day-to-day” stuff. Nothing exciting. To-do lists.

How many times have your sat down and written out a list of things to do and then watched it disappear as you check them off?

A self prophecy.

Some can claim that they are not fooled by the media but are then sucked in by their Facebook algorithm. That 9/11 was an inside job but were relieved when Osama Bin-Laden was killed. Claim to not be racist but sympathize with anti-Semitic tropes. Believe Princess Diana was murdered but is still alive today.

We are so busy constructing our own realities that we ignore the objective one. All of us. Without exception. We all believe we are rational actors. That each of us is right. And when things don’t work out, we think that external forces must be in play–preserving our egos and natural sense of self.

Here’s the point for today’s lesson: When is the last time you changed your mind about something you hold to be true? When have you been persuadable? Knowing what you know now about something, can you/will you pivot? The things we hold sacred, did you find it yourself or were you taught those things from someone you trusted? Does the scientific community agree with your assessment? If not, why not? Why do scientist believe what they believe?

Legendary screenwriter William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” We are still constantly evolving and learning more each day. What was true yesterday may not be true now. You can go test Newton’s laws of gravity and it held up for a long time until a few holes were discovered. Which then led to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s a process of better understanding, not a finish line. For better or worst, we don’t have all the answers to some of life’s most important questions.

Read one book on a subject and you will be above average in understanding a subject. Read 10 and you can be an expert. Read 100 and you can be a world expert. The problem is that most people won’t read more than one book a year after college. That’s it. If you have not read even one book on the topic, how then can you claim to understand how something works?

You can’t.

But no one wants to seem ignorant among their peers. Status roles are in play. So, we have to trust experts. The world is too complicated not to. You can’t possibly be a mechanic, an engineer, a doctor, a microbiologist, a programmer, and the head of IT. The problem is picking the right experts to follow. The good news is they have never been so many to find.

I have found particularly with subjects like history it is more difficult to understand why things happen the more you study. The world is just too vast and complicated. Bigger than anyone us to fully understand. Unexpected things happen. People make emotional, irrational decisions not logical ones. When people claim to know the answer, they simply are dumbing things down because they are looking through the world in one lens.

It’s much easier to believe in a Covid lab leak theory because after all there is a lab conveniently built in Wuhan where it was originally detected. Simple to understand. It’s much more difficult to understand the science of virology and epidemiology. It could take ten years of studying before any of it could make sense. (By the way, Wuhan’s lab was built there precisely because they have had previous outbreaks there, at least that is what they want us to believe, right?)

/rant

Every decision begins because of a constraint. An invisible line, a boundary that we must then decide what to do with.

Some of these constraints can be geographic, biological, economic, medical, social…yet despite the boundaries, humans find a way to create room in these.

Unexpected things happen. “Luck” or “chance” enters the arena.

Boundaries are not the enemy. The lack of vision is.

A common predicament people face: Should I be proven right or do the right thing?

We can’t have both. Either we feed the ego or forgo it.

However, when examing these decisions, hindsight is much more difficult to understand than we think. If something doesn’t work out we just say we would have made a different decision. Perhaps, we even have an Option B we should have bet on. It’s easy to be a critic once the decision is made. But every decision is a crossroad. The next turn is unknown with so many different paths to take.

We can easily pick apart our decisions later of how they happened. But we don’t think enough about why these things happen. The more we open up to explore, the more difficult it is to understand.

Hindsight is more of a fallacy than we realize. We can’t possibly know how people or the environment will react when acted upon. Learn what you can from the past but don’t expect desired outcomes to just show up because different decisions are made.

Take for example the Roman Empire. Some of the key factors why the Roman Empire collapsed was a combination of economic crisis, barbarian attacks, farming issues from exhausted soil due to over-cultivation, inequality between the rich and the poor, detachment of local elites from public life, and economic recession as a result of overreliance on slave labor. Keep in mind that 21% of the world’s population was under Roman rule at the height of their power.

I wonder if there were Romans who thought their empire would never fall? And I also wonder which ones were sounding the alarms? Were they just laughed at? (Remember not too long ago there were many that truly believed the Titanic was unsinkable.)

It wasn’t just the Roman Empire either. You also have Persian Empire, Han Dynasty, Mongols, Spanish…every great empire has fallen in human history. So, what makes us so special? Because we have more technology? Because we have history to learn from? All true. But knowledge is not enough. How you apply the lesson learned is everything.

Perhaps it was gradual before it was sudden. Difficult to see in the future but easy when it was on our doorstep. How many of us today ignore or scoff at the warnings of climate change or destabilization of democracy? Maybe the problem with these great empires was they just didn’t pay attention. After all, it is difficult to see what is happening around the corner when we are so focused on our next TikTok video.

Axioms are statements that establish self-evident truths.

When people are discussing religion, politics, sex, human rights…we must have a starting point for our train of thought.

This starting line must be something both parties must agree upon. If two plus two doesn’t equal four then you are going to have a hard time discussing imaginary numbers.

If you are going to change someone’s mind then you must find something in common first.

Emotional labor was first coined in 1983 by Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart.

Today, it is often used to mean the invisible tasks that are done (particularly by women) that go unnoticed, unappreciated.

The original definition, however, was bringing the right feelings to a job. In other words, bringing emotional labor to make connections. To delight someone when you are not in the mood. It is the chef who at the moment doesn’t want to make moussaka but does it with care and love anyway because that’s what the customer ordered. It’s the flight attendant that extends a helping hand to a first-time flyer. It’s the person at the DMV who carries a calming presence in a stressful situation.

It’s a choice. To show up and be passionate about your work, regardless of what the work is. The best jobs in the world still involve work that we would prefer to skip. What then will you do when you don’t want to be there?

That posture, I believe, carries over into other facets of our lives. Are you a passionate person or are you waiting to find work you can be passionate about?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – This one may already be my book of the year. An incredible look at human history and easily digestible.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – A short story will get you thinking deeply about the systems that take advantage of people. You can read it in 10 minutes then spend the next 10 hours in a daze.

The Wizard and the Prophet – A remarkable book that had me switching both sides. Sometimes I think technology is going to be the solution to the problems that lay ahead and, at the same time, I feel a pull that we need to return to a more sustainable model. Every problem has a solution otherwise it would be a situation.

On Anarchism – Anarchy is not the western definition we have been indoctrinated to believe. Rather, any person or structure that exercises authority over someone must be intensely scrutinized. And if that system cannot be justified we must replace it with something more just.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Humans are more easily duped into believing things we cannot see and instead of putting their faith in what we can test. Everyone has faith, where then do you choose to put yours?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century – A very demanding book. The old adage that, “It takes money to make money” is true for a reason. This book proves why so many can’t get ahead regardless of the number of hours one works. Without business, financial, or real estate capital, it is very difficult to see upward mobility. I would recommend an audiobook for this one (if you can find it). The last 60 pages or so are really eye-opening and tie it all together.

Why We Sleep – Another good choice for audio. I get tired just listening to it (in a good way). If we are not prioritizing sleep we are robbing ourselves from a higher quality of life.

Once you put yourself in a slot, it’s difficult to get yourself out.

You tell yourself you lack the experience, you don’t have enough education, you are not good enough at your craft. And it’s easy to point to thousands that can do it better.

You’re now stuck, precisely because of the boundaries you have set. Indeed, the invincible forces of the status quo are persistent in crushing our dreams.

How then, does one stick out when everyone seems to be the same?

Create a whole new category. One for yourself. One where you can be the best in the world at. It’s not easy. I’m not pretending it is. But it’s worth it to be the best at something small and obscure. A meaningful specific rather than a wandering generality.

A friend once told me, “The right explanation is often the simplest one.”

I think there is some truth to this.

That often times we are working so hard for the outside world to fit our narrow worldview, we do mental gymnastics to make sense of things. Creating drama or making something way more complicated or worse lying to ourselves instead of seeing the world as it really is.

The world, the universe is complex. The systems we have created are a reflection of this. It’s hard work to do the math to make sense of it all. So, instead, we create hoops to jump through. Sometimes these shortcuts can be really useful so we don’t cripple our abilities to make decisions. It can also make things way more complicated rather than seeing what is right in front of their nose all along.