Daniel Jeffries's Blog, page 2

Hacking Your Health

So you decided to change your diet? Good for you. Now you just have to figure out what to eat and that’s where the problems start.

Unfortunately, there is all kinds of bad advice out there. If you’re not careful you’ll wind up no better off then when you started. Should we eat meat or is it bad for us? How about red meat? What about wheat? Are potatoes good for me? Pretty soon you are so far down the rabbit hole, reading competing philosophies and you’re more confused then ever. So let’s see if we can use our minds to cut through the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and get as close as possible to the truth.

We’ll start by clearing out some types of thinking that will absolutely lead you down the wrong path as you explore diet and health.  Here they are:

– Thinking there is a perfect diet for everyone

– Believing that if you can cut out one category of food you’ll be fine

– Imagining that mankind can make something better than nature, when it comes to food

If you hold any of the following beliefs, I encourage you to re-examine them thoroughly.  Let’s take a look at why.

First off, there is no perfect diet. Anyone who tells you that is misguided or selling something.  What works for one person may not work for another.  That’s because the human body is incredibly complex.  We have over 100 trillion cells in our body, three trillion nerve cells, 60,000 miles of blood vessels and that’s mere a fraction of it’s complexity.  We simply don’t understand everything there is to know about the body.  Not even close.  A number of different ways of eating have proven successful over the eons we’ve lived on this little blue dot. Heavy meat, little to no meta, lots of starch, not much starch, seafood and everything in between have made up the centerpiece of diets for countless different cultures.  And yet if we look closely, we can find some common denominators that make a good start.  What we can’t do is create the absolute perfect list that works for everyone.

Let’s take something as seemingly simple as whether starches are good or bad.  We have an enzyme in our saliva called Amalyse that starts the process of breaking down starches into sugars that our body can use for energy.   But not all humans have the same amount of that enzyme.  Some of us only have two copies of the genes that code for the enzyme, AMY1, and some of us have fifteen copies of it.   While we don’t fully understand all the aspects of how starch is broken down in the body, we do know that there is a lot of variation.  While we have to be very careful drawing too many conclusions from a single study, what I want to illustrate is simple:  how humans process food is not uniform.   Not even at the most basic level, like how we deal with a lot of starch.

In other words, I may tolerate lots of starch fine and you may not.  As such, you’d do well to keep them to a minimum where I can eat them or vice versa.  Another person may deal with wheat easily, but if you have celiac disease or gluten intolerance, it doesn’t matter if whole grains are good or bad, they are bad for you.  This brings us to a crucial point: listen to your own body.  Life is a perfect feedback loop.  If you listen carefully, your body tells you everything you need to know.  If you’re getting headaches, getting sick regularly, have patchy/blotchy skin, feel bloated, need three or four cups of coffee a day and still feel tired, are carrying too much weight, these are not little insignificant problems, they are serious warning signs that you are headed in the wrong direction when it comes to your health.  Your body is trying to tell you something.  Just because a particular food is on the World’s Healthiest Foods list doesn’t mean much if it makes you sick. Pay attention to what your body is saying.  It is all connected.

A perfect example for me is wheat.  There is a lot of controversy around whether it’s good for you are not.  Paleo dieters hate it and vegetarian diet adherents think it’s perfectly fine.  However, after I changed my diet, I started examining every food I ate to see if it would effect little things like my acne.  I’ve had acne for pretty much all my life.  It’s diminished considerably as I’ve gotten older, mostly confined to my body, but when I was young I had it bad and went on the very powerful drug Accutane, twice.  It’s no longer on the market because it had some bad side effects.  Nobody told me my American diet was the problem.  In fact, the doctors told me there was little to no connection.  Don’t eat any sugar or don’t eat this and that, they said.  It didn’t make any difference.  I can tell you I eat plenty of sugar in low Glicemic index fruits now and it did not make me break out worse.  In fact, as started to change my diet, my body acne started to disappear.  I recently saw a dermatologist again and asked her if anything had changed in those studies.  Have we found any link between food and acne?  No she said.  And yet I was discovering through my own experimentation that there absolutely is a connection.  Yet despite my positive changes, my acne didn’t fully disappear.  Then I noticed when I ate wheat, even the good 100% whole grain from Whole Foods, I would get a flare up again.  Cut it out and it disappeared.  Eat it again, back it comes.  Little changes can make all the difference.

Now the reason many people don’t think food effects acne is because they are looking for one food.  If I just cut this out, they think, I’ll be ok.  You won’t be.  I can tell you that if I kept eating potato chips and deep fried chicken and burgers and cut out wheat it would not make a damn bit of difference.  And yet when I made positive changes across the board, that one change made a huge difference.  We can’t see the problem because the problem is everything we are consuming.  Until we change that, nothing changes.

Our second example of thinking that will lead you astray is believing that carving out one category of foods will make you healthy, as we saw above.  It may make a difference, after you have changed your diet across the board, but until you do that, it absolutely will not.  Of course, the exception is if you actually have a disease related to a particular food or an allergy.  If you don’t the picture becomes a lot murkier.  Here is a list of enemies in various popular diets:

Sugars
Fruit
Fats
Fish
Meat
Wheat
Dairy
Starchy vegetables

Notice a trend there?  Other than non-starchy vegetables, that’s pretty much everything you can possibly eat!

If all of these things are really bad for us then the Universe is a horrific designer.  In other words, almost everything you can possibly consume is deadly or will make you sick.  That doesn’t stand up to even the most basic consideration.  What kind of ecosystem evolves in such a way that it is hostile to all the life it supports?  Answer: none.  There are ecosystems that are hostile to life in the galaxy, as well as some on Earth, like deserts, but they all share one thing in common: there is practically nothing alive there.  Ecosystems that are teaming with life evolved to support the creatures that live in it.  Otherwise the Universe sucks at its job.

All of these things cannot possibly be bad for us.  It really is as simple as that.

Cutting out one of these things does not make you healthy.

What we eat does not exist in a vacuum.  Simply eating right is not good enough.  Instead people are much better off focusing on the essential cluster of good habits that give you the best statistical chance at longevity:

Limiting alcohol and drug consumption
Not smoking
Exercising
Getting good sleep
Eating in moderation
Eating a balanced meal

These factors in combination show up again and again in just about every type of study ever conducted on health and longevity.  In other words, attempting to isolate one of these factors as more important than the others is fool’s game that leads nowhere.  Only by doing all of these things do we have a chance at beating disease processes and living a long life where we can still take care of ourselves at an old age.  If any one of these are out of whack you are doing untold damage to your system.

After changing my diet, my eyeballs are not bloodshot, my skin is no longer puffy, my belly is gone, my left leg that was feeling sluggish and desensitized has almost its full feeling back, I get angry/frustrated/tired a LOT less, etc.  I can tell you that eating a steady diet of grass fed burgers with some vegetables sprinkled in ocassionally, will not make this change.  I know because I tried it.  Looking back I shake my head at my stupidity.  Whenever everyone around you is insane, you begin to think that’s the way it is.  Everyone has acne, everyone has a belly, everyone’s skin is puffy, so it must be normal.  It’s not.  It’s really not.

Our third example of thinking that will lead you down the wrong path is believing that we can make something better than mother nature when it comes to food.  As a SF writer, it’s safe to say I am pretty bullish on the long term beneficial effects of technology.  As soon as we understand a compound to be beneficial, like vitamin C, we isolate it and put it in powder form.  The problem is that these substances don’t exist in isolation in the foods we consume.  A whole constellation of proteins, enzymes, sugars and all kinds of substances we don’t even have names for exist in our foods.  They don’t act by themselves.  They act in concert with everything else, changing how things get absorbed, processed, expressed and much, much more.

For example cacao leaves have a naturally occurring amount of cocaine in them.  For thousands of years native peoples at high altitudes in Peru munched on, getting small burst of energy that helped them live at high altitudes where the think oxygen is murder on the body’s systems.  It had little to no long term effect on their health.  But when we isolated the compound, boosted it by hundreds of percent in potency and snorted it the effect was disastrous.  Addiction, overdoes, rapidly declining mental cognition and health.  The compounds in the cacao leaves that limit and balance the cocaine are essential.  Separating them is the problem.

Why don’t fragrances isolated from flowers smell the same as real flowers?  Because they are not the same thing.  You cannot cut apart a flower to find its essence.  In the same way, vitamins and minerals taken in pill form don’t effect us in the same way as nutrition derived from the foods we eat.  Even worse are the synthetic versions of these molecules that we whip up in a lab, believing they will somehow make it much better and more powerful.  Sometimes the fact that biology limits the power of a particular nutrient through complementary or antagonistic processes in our food is a good thing.

In other words, you can head over to the local muscle building super store and come out with fifty ten gallon jugs of various powders, pastes and pills and end up not the least bit healthier.  A person who never exercises, eats deep fried, fatty foods constantly and pounds energy drinks all day will still end up very, very sick.  And yet, if that same person switches to nutrient rich whole foods and drops the energy drinks and processed sugar, their health will improve dramatically in as little as a few months.

And that’s not even to mention the fact that most lab created powders/pills contain other elements that you can’t pronounce in order to aid in the process of isolating them.  Need a little magnesium sterate in your diet?  How about some cellulose?  How about some vegetable stearic acid.  Don’t worry.  They’re all inert.  Right?  I mean we’ve never been wrong about stuff like that before, right?

All this tells you that vitamins in isolation are not what we think they are, so leave the supplements at the store.  Get your vitamins from food as much as possible.  A little supplementation to give you some balance probably won’t hurt, now and again, but just know it is not the same thing as getting it from mother nature.  When my eyes hurt after a marathon session of staring at the my backlit compute screen all day I took some turmeric pills to help fight the inflammation.  Used pills as a targeted choice but don’t expect miracles.  I also spent the rest of the day munching on some carrots and some vitamin C rich foods to help relieve the pressure on my eyes.

It’s also worth noting that I am not a fan of messing with our food supply through gene splicing.  When it comes to Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) we simply don’t understand the effects of what we are doing, so it’s best to avoid GMOs all together.  Having worked in Information Technology for so long, I’ve seen a few thousands lines of code lead to bugs and crashes in a near constant stream.  When we start jacking with genetic code, which is infinitely more complex, we are playing with fire.    When corporations insert selfish agendas into the genome, such as plants that product sterile offspring so that customers have to buy them again from the company, that’s about as short sighted and stupid as anything I have ever heard and humans have a long history of doing stupid things.  Even though, contrary to popular believe Monsanto sacked the sterile offspring in 1999 due to public outcry, the fact that they even thought this was a good idea points to a diseased way of thinking about the world, that does not take into consideration the collective effects of one’s actions on people’s health and the health of the planet.  Maybe we don’t produce sterile offspring anymore, but instead we put pesticides INSIDE the plant itself.  It was bad enough to think that we might suffer from residual effects of pesticides simply sprayed on our foods.  How do you think your body will react when that poison is now interwoven into the very essence of the tomato?

I’ll add one more thing that didn’t make the list. It’s not bad thinking, but it is a potentially negative phase in your journey to better health.  I call it the “evangelical phase.” This is the one where you can’t shut up about your new diet to anyone, nag your friends and lovers about what they eat and in general view everyone around you as an idiot who needs to wake up.  This type of thinking does not help you or the people you love. I am super guilty of this one.  Unless you are a nutritionist, food blogger, exercise guru or trainer you are best off keeping your new found eating discoveries to yourself.  Take a gentle approach with people, especially loved ones.  Remember you were in the same spot not long ago.   As soon as you feel yourself becoming the food Nazi and describing in exhaustive detail why your wife shouldn’t eat this or that thing, you are in trouble.  Get over this unhelpful phase fast and let your own results speak for themselves.  If people ask you about it, great.  If not, keep quiet.

Okay, so now that I’ve spent a bunch of time on how not to think about food, let’s see if we can figure out how we should think about it.

As you start to dig into your diet and lifestyle, its very easy to get lost on the road to good health. Once you realize you shouldn’t eat the Standard American Diet ( the appropriately nicknamed S.A.D diet ) that doesn’t mean you are out of the woods. The rabbit hole of health can lead you to belief systems that are just as negative as the ones that kept you eating burgers, fries, pizza and ice cream on a daily basis.

The biggest problem in understanding what is good for us is our belief systems.  You believe that you “like” certain foods and “hate” other ones, without realizing that your tastes evolved over time and are fluid.  After all, I don’t eat Kraft Mac and Cheese anymore, but I ate a lot of it as a kid.  My tastes changed.  When you start to eat the right foods, your taste will change too.  If you never touched a vegetable, after a few weeks of a plant heavy diet, you’ll suddenly find yourself craving a delicious juice smoothy, or a pile of Kale, when once you once craved yet another burger.  You’ll smell the sickening, fatty reek of dead, burnt foods in a fast-food restaurant and wonder how you hell you ever interpreted that smell signal as inviting.  The body adapts and when you get the right foods it will alter you tastes to encourage you to continue to feed it correctly.

Our belief systems hold us back.  They distort what we see.  There is objective reality and what you believe. Objective reality is real. What you believe only exists in your mind.

Only where objective reality and beliefs overlap are beliefs correct, otherwise they are wrong.  So drop the notions you have in your head and see what is actually right in front of you.

One of the best ways I’ve found to figure out what I should and shouldn’t eat is by comparing the various diets that are out there.  What do they agree on?  Where do they disagree?  Do a majority support Salmon while decrying non-whole wheat?  Let’s look.

We’ll take the following diets: Mediterranean, Pescetarian, Paleo/Primal, DASH and Lacto-Vegetarian.

Here’s what makes the bad list on all these diets:

Heavily processed foods
Refined flower
Refined sugars
Deep fried foods ( in anything but serious moderation)
Lab produced anything – aka any ingredient you can’t pronounce
Chemical preservatives
Industrially processed vegetable oils
De-natured foods
GMO foods
Overindulgence in alcohol
Overindulgence in drugs
Overindulgence in stimulants like caffeine
High glycemic fruits
Large amounts of red meat

What makes the bad list on most of these diets?

Dairy
White potatoes

It’s also worth noting that some of these diets are vehemently against certain types of food that most of the others diets deem healthy.  Foods that fit that category are:

Wheat
Rice
Dairy
Meat
Red meat

Let’s put those in the “controversial” category for now and come back to them.

Now what do all the diets agree are good foods to eat?

All non-starchy vegetables, especially green vegetables
Tubers
Low-glycemic fruit
Emphasis on whole foods

What do they mostly agree on?

Olive oil
Seafood
Lean meat
Legumes
Whole grain
Sweet potatoes and other colorful potatoes
Nuts and berries

OK, now we’ve finally got a base to start from, something to build on.  I am going to go with majority rules here and include everything on the “maybe” list.  While this type of thinking could reasonably be called a logical fallacy (just because everyone believes something does not make it true), I have to have some way to eliminate things from my list, so I might as well go with the collective wisdom of everyone who as ever bothered to spend time studying the problem of health and nutrition.  This is not an example of us polling every Tom, Dick and Harry on the street and asking for their diet suggestions.  These five diets I’ve highlighted represent the distilled, collective wisdom of anyone who has ever written on the subject of diet.  If that’s wrong we have pretty much no hope of ever figuring it out, so we might as well give up now (hint: not a good idea).

So a healthy diet is very likely to include all or most of these things: nuts and berries, leafy green vegetables, fish, low GI fruit, olive oil, lean meats and legumes.  Now we are getting somewhere.

Let’s get back to the things they can’t agree on.

Animal fats
High fat dairy
Red meat
Lacto-Vegetarians vehemently oppose any meat, fish or dairy.
Paleo/Primal advocates oppose all grains like wheat and rice, as well as legumes like black beans, while piling on the animal fats.

These foods are polarizing to say the least. Paleo/Primal diets emphasize meats and vegetables. Lacto-vegetarian adherents forgo all animal products as dangerous and deadly. Who’s right? How can two diets that are totally opposite in their belief systems achieve good results for people?

The answer lays with our earlier discussion of objective reality and our belief systems. Where our belief systems don’t line up with reality they are wrong.  Simple as that. Here’s why:

Objective reality is what actually happens in the real world.  I might believe that I can eat fried foods every day, never eat a vegetable and smoke three packs a minute with no problems but life will happily teach me the error of my ways as I collapse in a heart attack in my thirties. What happens is the truth.  What IS, is the truth.  What we believe is of no consequence.

Vegetarians believe all meat eating will kill you. And yet for thousands and thousands of generations people have eaten meat and lived long healthy lives.  So it simply cannot be true that all meat and fish are bad for you or else all civilization would be dying in their forties for most of our history.

On the other hand, Paleo/Primal folks believe meats are absolutely crucial and that everything we’ve ever been told about fat is a lie.  And yet if you never exercise and think you can consume vast quantities of animal fats you are out of your mind.  Paleo/Primal diets are founded on the idea that we were actively in pursuit of our food for the majority of human existence, aka hunter/gathers.  As such we need to stay active in order to process those fats properly.  That tells you that fats by themselves are not the foundation of good health unless we combine them with lots of exercise to burn them up.

I’ll also note the tendency of Paleo cookbooks, of which I’ve own several, have a tendency to emphasize bacon, red meat and fat to an almost fetishistic degree.  Overemphasizing red meats when numerous scientific evidence exists questioning that assumption is a really bad idea.

So what can we take from the controversial list?  Your best bet: moderation.

As Aristotle and my father taught me “balance is best in all things.”  Actually Aristotle said “moderation is best in all things” but close enough.

So to sum up:

Make vegetables the foundation of your diet
Feel free to enjoy fruits, nuts and berries but stick to mostly low GI fruits
Dig into that tasty fish
And keep the meats lean and in moderation
And whatever you do:

Avoid pretty much anything that comes in a box with a convenient packaging.

That should get you going on the road to radiant health and longevity.  Adjust as you go.  Pay attention to what your body is telling you.  Trust your own results.  Experiment.  Keep learning and you will have managed to re-learn what we knew for thousands of generations but somehow forgot in our modern, technologically advanced and supposedly “superior” society.

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The Most Important Decisions You’ll Ever Make

The single most important decisions you’ll ever make in life are how you eat and whether you exercise. And yet most people never actually make these decisions at all. They get made by default. That’s how it was for me. Then I decided to change something. You can too.

Let’s start with exercise. You can get by with regular exercise and an okay diet but without exercise, a good diet almost doesn’t matter.  As my hero Jack Lalanne says “the single biggest killer in life is inactivity.”  It’s amazing that society has developed to the point we’re at now, where many people work sitting down instead of doing back breaking labor for a pittance. That’s a good thing but it’s lead to a downward spiral in health and fitness. The side effect of that is various “rich world” diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.  But I think you’ve got a good chance to beat them.  And it starts with exercise.

When people live to a ripe out age without getting sick, people”they must have good genes.” This is an excuse to continue doing nothing in their own lives. Genes do play a factor, but unless you have a genetic disease (statistically highly unlikely) you’re much better off assuming you have genes that work just fine. After all, thousands and thousands of generations lead up to you. Your genes are survivor’s genes or you wouldn’t be here right now. Just assume your genes are fine and get to exercising and eating right. If you’re wrong there was nothing you could do about it anyway. We can’t control for genes. What we can control is our own effort and dedication.

Now you’re probably thinking “I hate the gym” or “exercise equipment is expensive” or some other attempt to stay right where you are now. You don’t need a gym. You don’t need special equipment. Exercise is simple. Just go outside. Walk. Run around. If you live in a warm climate: swim. If you do want to invest in a little equipment, get a heavy bag for the back yard. Hit it repeatedly. Come back the next day and do it again. If you don’t want to go outside, get yourself a gel mat for the floor. $25 bucks.  You can do push ups, sits up, jumping jacks and a million other exercises. You don’t even have to do it in one block of time. You can do it while watching TV with the spouse, or in five minute bursts throughout the day like I do when I am busy. You’d be surprised about what you can do with just your body weight. Check out all these body weight exercises at Fitloop. They have videos of every single one.  Of course, there’s a sub-Reddit if you want to learn more.  You don’t need weights or an expensive elliptical machine. You just need your own body and the floor.

To be clear, I’m not slamming in gym. Maybe you like the social aspect of it or it motivates you?  Great.  Go there.  If you have the money and want a machine, get it.  But don’t let money be a barrier.  The universe gave you the great outdoors, as well as gravity.  That’s all you need.

How often should you exercise? Most experts say at least 3 or 4 times a week. If you do that, be proud of yourself. If you are starting out, that’s a great place to get to, especially if you’ve stayed sedentary your whole life.  But I challenge you to do it every day. The body just works better when we move more often. Again, keep it simple and you can work out every day without injury. Remember, it can be in five minute bursts, or while watching TV.  Don’t go nuts with this.  You will miss days from time to time, because of special occasions, but keep them to a minimum.  Don’t let “just this one time” become an every day excuse.  Pretty soon “this one time” adds up to weeks or months of inactivity .

Your body needs three types of exercise:

– Cardio

– Resistance or Weight training (body weight absolutely counts here, does not need to be free weights or machines)

– Stretching

All of them are essential as you age. If you’re skipping one in favor of the other, stop it. You want all three.  It won’t help if you’re strong but can’t bend over.  It won’t help if you can reach something off the top shelf if your grip is so weak you drop it.  Use the three to vary up what you do, so you don’t get bored. Some days might just be stretching. The next you might do some jumping squats and push-ups. The next you do cardio. Personally, I like cardio the most. That’s something you can absolutely do every day. Stretch a bit and then go. Lift a bit and then walk.

The point is to get started. No matter how old you are, or how late you got going, you can make improvement fast. You’ll be surprised at how fast your body repairs itself. Maybe you’re so used to needing three cups of coffee a day while still dragging through your work, that you don’t even realize this is NOT your natural state. When I drink a single cup of tea now, I am wired. I used to drink three and still feel like my feet were stuck in mud. Our body is a remarkable machine.  After only a month or so, that changed happened.

Let’s get to diet now.  Sometimes it seems like nothing in life is more confusing than a good diet.  Let’s be honest, much of the diet industry is filled with charlatans and fools.  There is no end to insane advice.  You meet some young raw foodie, or someone who claims wheat is poison or that you can cut out some single substance like sugar or saturated fat and voila, perfect health.  This is BS.  First of all cutting one substance out of your life, such as fat or sugar, or dropping carbs or meat or whatever will not save you.  Your body needs fats.  It needs sugar.  People are omnivores.  They can eat anything and process it.  The key to everything is balance.

If you go vegetarian and eat lots of salt, that’s not going to work.  If you eat just meat and vegetables and pile on the red meat every day, good luck.  You can pretend to yourself that you’re healthy but you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

Sometimes when people start to figure out how to eat right, they go nuts.  They learn that avocado’s are “healthy fats” and coconut and cacao are healthy and they start piling it all together and suddenly the have 2000 calories of saturated fat for the day.  You see saturated fat is not the problem, it’s being out of balance.  When you aren’t working out and eating too much and eating the wrong things, that creates a perfect storm where you body goes crazy trying to deal with the sinking ship.  It’s all these things in combination that is the problem.  Cutting one thing out of your diet and expecting health is ludicrous.  Even worse, so much of the “conventional wisdom” we grow up with like “saturated fat is bad” and “watch out for that sugar” is not so wise after all.  The science doesn’t back it up.  I won’t spend too much time here talking about why, but if you’re interested read Death by Food Pyramid and the author explains it all in exhausting depth.  She goes back to the original studies and looks at the data.  She reads the papers.  She even starts off with a quick one chapter refresher course on critical thinking, always a good sign.

A little critical thinking goes a long way here.  If you don’t know what critical thinking is, take a class.  It will be the best one you ever took in your life.  Let’s take an example of how critical thinking helps you eliminate useless information.  Take Atkins.  His low carb diet swept onto the scene, heralded as a miracle for the modern age.  Atkins died of a heart attack in his 70‘s.  That’s all I need to know his diet doesn’t work.  Either he didn’t follow it because it was too hard it didn’t work.  There is no other possibility.  In one stroke I have cut down the amount I have to read or learn about.  Now my man Jack Lalanne on the other hand?  He lived until 96, was never sick and wrote a book when he was 95.  In it, there’s a picture of Jack doing fingertip push-ups in his eighties. It struck me that a man who lived that long, still doing feats of strength at eighty, probably knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t work, when it comes to longevity.  I don’t need to look a heck of a lot further.  And neither do you.  It’s all pretty simple actually, when it comes right down to it.

How simple?  Check out this video of Jack from his show discussing the “secret of happiness.”

Let’s ask ourselves a question here.   Do you even know how you came to eat the way you eat? Have you ever thought about it? Did you receive your diet as a hand me down from your parents? Did it come to you from the fat and grease laden school lunch cafeteria? Did you simply pick whatever tasted good and go with that? Most people learn to eat whatever appears in front of them in life and never think about it at all. They just think “well this is what I like” never realizing they were trained to like those foods by circumstances and their upbringing.

More often than not, we continue eating what we grew up on, whether our parents knew the slightest thing about healthy food or not. The truth is, unless you’re lucky, your parents probably didn’t know a damn thing about what was good for you. My parents have come a long way in terms of how they eat these days, but growing up they had no idea. How could they? They were kids themselves, only in their early twenties. They fed me powdered mac and cheese, juice boxes, sugar laden jams on white bread, fried chicken, burgers, pizza, cheese steaks. Every once in awhile mom probably fed you a salad but could you even see the leaves under that gallon of thousand-island dressing? Probably not. In other words, even the damn salads you had didn’t amount to much nutrition for your growing body.

I don’t spend much time worrying about the past. It’s gone. The decisions you make now are the most important, starting today. You don’t have to eat the way you were taught. All it takes is a little reflection. The truth is we already know the things we should be eating. If I asked you to name the four most important foods, could you do it?If you said:

fruits
vegetables
lean meats (optional but good)
fish

Congrats, you’re right. If I told you name the worst way to prepare food what would you say? Fried, right? You see you already know what you should be eating and how to cook things. So why aren’t you? Let’s take a little time to explore.

I’ve been guilty of poor eating for so long I can’t remember. Every once in awhile I would go on a health kick, but rarely. To a certain degree I got lucky when it came to sugars. Like a bazillion other kids from the sixties and seventies I was diagnosed with “hyperactivity” a bogus disease that amounted to keeping kids under better control. The plus side of this spurious diagnosis was it decreased my processed sugar intake a great deal. My parents didn’t want me bouncing off the walls. But even though I wasn’t gobbling Snickers at a young age, if you grew up in the sixties, seventies and eighties you probably couldn’t escape sugar in almost anything. Bought some crackers? Sugar added. Got some fruit juice? Sugar added. Cereal. Lots of sugar added.

I grew up eating the wrong things. I never thought about it. So what changed for me?

I went to the doctor and was told that my blood pressure had gone “borderline.” I didn’t want to find out what was beyond that border so I changed. It’s really as simple as that. Change is not a gradual thing. All that lead up, hemming and hawing, wishing you were eating better but not actually doing it, is not actually part of the change process. It’s part of our internal denial and procrastination process. When real change happens, it happens all at once. You’ve had enough.

So I started reading, trying to figure out what the best method of eating was. I used an engineer’s approach, looking to eliminate as many diets as possible, without having to read them all.  The key is to figure out who’s telling the truth out there and who has a second agenda.

Life is really simple in many ways. We make it complicated. The truth is always right there in front of us. Jack is an inspiration because he figured it out before anyone else. He was telling people to work out and eat whole foods in the 1930’s. He had to contend with doctors who believed smoking was good for you, that working out could cause heart attacks and that you’d end up muscle bound and lose all of your flexibility. That’s a lot of peer pressure to withstand but he did. He advocated fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats and fish before anyone even knew what that meant.

Nowadays we’re lucky. Doctors are a lot better informed. There are numerous diets that can feed your body precisely what it needs for peak performance, backed up by science. If you’re curious check out the DASH Diet or the Mayo Clinic diets. They don’t have flashy websites and celebrities endorsing them, they just work. We have so much information available to us and yet we don’t use it. When Jack was starting out, doctors said working out would give you a heart attack or make you muscle bound.  But he kept going, thank God, and doctors got smarter and so did we.  Today, there’s not a doctor on the planet except maybe Dr. Nick from the Simpson’s who thinks that smoking it good for you and that working out will give you a heart attack.

All the info you need is out there. You just need to start “Googling.” Or just save yourself the trouble and read Jack’s book. This doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t need to read everything on the planet and make this a two-year search. The evidence is there. Today we know what’s good for us.

We know all of this but so often we don’t listen? Why is that? For every person it’s slightly different, but it all boils down to one basic pattern: we’re asleep. We are not conscious, not paying attention to what is happening. We are not listening to the warning signs. The body has a remarkable early warning system. You just have to listen to it.

The signs were there for me: mood swings, lack of energy, crashing, feeling tired after I ate, no desire to get out of bed in the morning, escapism, drinking heavily. Probably the biggest warning sign as to whether you ate good food or poison is whether you feel tired after you ate. Think about that for second. How often do you crash after lunch? Listen carefully to this: if you get tired after you eat, then you did not eat right. It really is that simple. So let’s figure out why.

Food is our energy source. It should charge you up and get you ready for the rest of the challenges in your day. Unfortunately, too many people, myself included for a long time, assumed that getting tired after a meal was natural. “My body needs to digest,” I thought. Well yeah, but what’s really happened is your body is working overtime to clear toxins, while struggling to digest what little nutrition it can from the dead and desiccated food you gave it. It’s like a car in the red line. Your body is a machine. It breaks down with wear and tear. When you feed it the wrong foods, it has to work that much harder and it wears down that much faster. Even worse, the food you feed it, is the fuel it needs to do that work, so if you give it foods that have close to zero nutritional value, your body is constantly tired while it does its job, because it’s running on empty, despite you stuffing it with a cheese-steak and gravy slathered fries. Sure you ate a lot and you feel “full” but your body can’t use any of the material you just gave it to work with, so it’s basically starving. You might as well eat the cardboard the pizza came in, because it’s about as nutritious as that slice of greasy pie.

We have a remarkable capacity for denial. We can tell ourselves we’re fat because our father was fat. No,  you’re fat because you ate the same unhealthy foods your father ate that made him fat. It’s our own choices that define us.

Until you realize that, you can’t change. It starts with acceptance of the truth. Take off your clothes. Look in the mirror. Let it all hang out, don’t suck in that gut. Are you happy with what you see? Can you do better? What will it take to make that change?

I spent a good deal of my life eating garbage. Not literal garbage from the trashcan, but foods that amount to garbage. Mostly it’s because I didn’t think it was all that important. This is largely due to a trick of the way the body works. Our body is the most advanced machine on the planet, but it has one fatal flaw. On the plus side, it’s self-regulating, largely self-repairing and its user manual is built right into the program. But on the negative side it can survive on terrible food without showing a lot of damage immediately. You might think that’s a good thing but I don’t. I consider it a design flaw. If you program a computer wrong, or set a configuration file incorrectly, it simply doesn’t work. It won’t even start. If you pour mud into your car, then you can’t drive anywhere. And yet if you put McDonalds into your body, you keep right on going. What a remarkable machine that can even manage to find some level of nutrients from poisons, toxins and desiccated unhealthy fuel and manage to live for thirty or forty years.

The good news about your body’s fatal flaw is that life gives us a lot of second chances. For whatever reason we don’t always listen to the truth right away. Like the ancient Indian masters used to say, “first I hear the truth, then I hear it again and then I hear it ten thousands times and then I get it.”

Life gives you second chances, right up until it doesn’t.

After that heart attack or cancer or hip replacement surgery, then it is probably too late. If you’ve already gone through that, you’re still better off making the switch, but with any luck people wake up and realize the warnings before it has to come to that. Like I said life is a perfect feedback loop and that heart attack is part of it. A heart attack says, you weren’t listening before, are you listening now?

The complex machine that is our body will run on McDonalds and 10 cans of Coke a day.

But that doesn’t mean you should run it that way.

The universe gave us all free choice. That means we are free to mistreat our body, eat poorly, never work out for as long as we can.

But we’re also free not to do that.

Once you start listening to your body, the decision is not really that hard at all.

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Why Bungie Will Never Fix Destiny

A few months after its launch, Destiny remains the worlds hottest game, with more than 3.2 million people playing daily. Now that a flood of new games is finally coming to the market like Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Farcry and others, those numbers may drop.  Like many reviewers I hated it initially and then found myself playing it non-stop anyway. At first I couldn’t understand why.  As an author, I’m a story guy.  A game without a good story usually has a chance somewhere below zero of hooking me.  And yet, weeks after playing through the non-existent Destiny story I still kept logging on, playing the game like it was a job, and I couldn’t really understand why. This was generic SF drivel about darkness, some space magic and the end of the world, even if it looked beautiful, much like a hot car show model, great to look at but not a lot of depth. I became obsessed with the Crucible and running advanced missions with friends. The mechanics of the game are absolutely perfect. If that were the end of the story it wouldn’t really be a problem. I realized that I actually liked the game a lot but a sick, uneasy feeling still swirled beneath the surface. I finally realized what was happening:

It’s designed to be addicting in the worst possible way.

Everything that people hope that Bungie will fix is never getting fixed. Skill based loot drops?  Not coming.  A fix for the horrible, endless, repetitive grind to get loot.? Never happening.  Why?  It’s by design.

The entire game is nothing but an endless time trap so they can sell you more DLC. That’s why people are playing three or four hours a day, not because it’s fun. Bungie has said that they want Destiny to last ten years. That’s ten years of your life. Ten. They only way to keep people playing that long is to make it frustratingly addicting. You’ve got to keep people locked in. A dark heart beats at the center of this game. This is the land of the Lotus eaters in the Odyssey, a place where you’re lulled into a dull stupor and you wake up years later wondering where the time went.

Like the Forbes author, I am glad I have no idea how to access the amount of times I’ve played the game. It’s a lot over the last few weeks, sometimes four or five hours a day at a clip. But as I unhook from the game for good, to get back to doing more interesting things with my life, I count myself lucky that I got off light. To think that anyone would be grinding purple crap for ten years is utterly depressing. The problem with addiction is that it always starts out fun but quickly becomes a drag that you feel like you have to do. I don’t want to feel like I have to play any game.

Destiny cynically manipulates Game Theory to make the game super addicting. Whether they did this unconsciously or consciously I can’t say, but it feels like a conscious decision. How do they do that? Basically it’s a giant casino without money. You keep playing and playing but you never get anything. The house always wins. When you do get something it is usually fool’s gold that keeps you playing some more. That’s why people complain that you can spend six hours straight playing the game and come away with nothing to show for it, no new armor, no new weapons, and no additional levels. It’s supposed to take a very, very long time to get anything. That’s why they shuttered the loot cave. It breaks the game in favor of the casino player and not the house. This is the same reason they don’t want you counting cards in Vegas. It tips the odds to something fair.

You see you don’t really want to run around the same boards endlessly collecting crap so you can get to the fun stuff. But you have to. You want new armor or weapons? Great, but it’s random, NOT skill based. It will never be skilled based. The drops of good stuff are incredibly infrequent and that’s deliberate. You have to keep playing to get it. In this casino you spend time, not money. Well, later you’ll spend money too, when they hit you with DLC, but right now you need to spend a ridiculous amount of time to get anything that matters. Worse, when you get it, you now have to spend endless time upgrading it.

Let’s take an example. I finally got an exotic bounty the other day. I chose the bounty that guarantees me the shotgun, “Invective,” a powerful weapon that killed me a number of times in the Crucible. How do you get that guaranteed bounty? It’s random but people have already figured out it is not totally random; it is based on how much time you’ve wasted already. You have about a zero percent chance of logging in on day one and getting that bounty. That’s not random, that’s manipulation.

Now that you finally get it, you have a bunch of  very long steps. Ironically those steps are called “a dubious task,” a name that unconsciously betrays the entire philosophy of the game. The first step is to play through five strike missions without dying. This does not incentivize you to have fun, by picking the most challenging mission. It incentivizes you to pick the easiest and most boring mission so you can guarantee success. Then repeat that five times at a minimum. If you happen to eat it on the mission, oh well, time to start over. If the game were really about fun, it would find ways to induce you to have some fun, but it doesn’t do that. It encourages you to waste time. Even worse, if you do die, you are incentivized to quit on your teammates running the mission, so you can start over. Or you feel guilt for doing it and stick it out, even though it has no benefit to you. That’s called a “double bind,” when a person gets two bad choices and both of them cause you to lose.

So let’s say you get that great new gun. Awesome. Except now it has some serious limitations. It has upgrades too. Without those upgrades it has bad drawbacks like horrible recoil. That means you have to do what? You guessed it, grind some more. Do some more of the same boring missions again and again. You have to collect various materials and shards, some of which require big endless runs that don’t even guarantee success. Oh you ran through that incredibly challenging boss mission and beat him with a team of friends? Great. Drops are still random, so you received nothing for your effort. You did not get an Ascendant shard or a Strange Coin to buy things from Xur, instead you were given a crappy green gun to break down for weapons parts. Just like playing the slots in the casino, you always lose.

Every single thing that matters in the game takes an absurd amount of time to complete. To be clear, there are parts of it that are incredibly fun, as my post on dominating the Crucible shows. The problem is, you need to do other horribly un-fun things repeatedly to really enjoy the fun bits. You’ve got to grind and grind and grind the same mindless tasks and missions over and over again to get better gear, so you can perform better. Even to “buy” better gear, you have to grind to a certain level. Worse, by the time you get up enough points to buy that shiny new stuff, you’ve probably already found better stuff, making the entire exercise pointless. There’s a deep and disgusting cynicism that lies at that heart of Destiny.

Leveling up is not about leveling up just your characters, it’s a series of endless leveling steps. Want to buy armor from the Vanguard representative? Awesome, just go grind her missions to level up your “Vanguard” rating. Want to buy some great weapons for the Crucible? First grind some money through endless wandering and then grind a thousand games of the Crucible to get your “Crucible Marks.” Oh and by the way, it’s actually two levels you need to achieve in the Crucible. There is the Crucible level, which moves up slower and slower as you get higher and higher. You need to get to level three to even be allowed to buy anything. And you need marks to spend as money on those weapons. You can’t use the other money you already have, called glimmer. That is for other stuff. Except oops, those marks are capped, so I’ve been stuck at two hundred even though I should have a lot more. Why am I capped? So that I can’t buy too much stuff when I finally get my Crucible level high enough. Once I get one thing, I get to start all over and get more points that costs me more time.

As I said, there are a lot of fun things about the game. It looks great, plays beautifully and the teamwork and PvP aspects work wonderfully. It is just that the rest of the game is deliberately designed to promote a lot of endless repetitive work to do the fun parts, a lot like life. The problem is, that if I am going to spend my time running around like a jackass collecting crap, I’m going to do it in real life that gets me real money, not in some game. I understand why Bungie did this and they shouldn’t be prevented from doing it, but they should pay a horrible price. Market forces should work against them. All the time and effort they spent building their beautiful time-suck should amount to nothing just like Destiny does for everyone who plays it. I seriously hope the game’s community collapses and the developers are forced to look back and realize they wasted a lot of time creating something that is not fun. Maybe next time they won’t take such a cynical approach. I seriously hope that their millions of players wake up, like I did and abandon the game in droves. Maybe then Bungie will go back to creating wonderful games like Halo that had a fantastic story, memorable characters and incredible set piece battles. In other words, they should create something rewarding again.

Instead they made a cynical game that deserves people’s wrath. This is basically Candy Crush or Farmville with fancy graphics.

Once people finally realize what’s happening they’ll leave Destiny’s vapid world for greener pastures.

Death to Destiny.

Nobody will miss you when you’re gone.

 

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Dominate the Crucible in Destiny

For years I have always sucked at Player vs Player (PvP) matches on first person shooters (FPS) and Halo creator Bungie’s new game Destiny was no exception. I got slaughtered in the Crucible just like I always did in other games. Except this time I decided to do something about it. I’d had it with losing. So, I started asking questions. What am I doing wrong? How can I fix it? Posts on the Internet didn’t help much so I had to figure it out myself. And I did. I went from finishing at the bottom of the leaders boards with consistently pathetic 0.25 to 0.5 Kill/Death Ratios (KDs) to finishing at or near the top with average KDs over 1.0 and as high as 3.5 in just a few weeks. How did I do it?

It all started with work on my new book. The first draft of my new SF war novel, The Jasmine Wars, suffered from a series of poorly written battles: long, drawn out repetitive sequences that essentially came down to “kick in the door and shoot everything” or “run like hell from an overwhelming defeat.” I needed to improve them dramatically during the second draft so I set out to learn more about strategy, tactics, and military history with a fierce dedication. I’ve studied the history of battles with books like 100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present, as well as comprehensive strategic overviews like Strategy: A History and 33 Strategies of War. I’ve gotten obsessed with the game of Go, amassing an arsenal of books, some of my favorites sporting incredible Japanese war paintings on the covers like Get Strong and Invading and Get Strong at Tesuji.

So what does all this have to do with Destiny you want to know?

The key to winning at Destiny PvP (and in life) is strategy and tactics. Without them you’re just a guy like I was running around like a chicken with his head cut off, getting yourself killed repeatedly. Not fun. But once you understand how to study a situation for advantages you can change your fate and that means you can get better.

After studying the game, I came up with a series of concepts that will help you dramatically improve your game that I call, Buddha’s Maxims, named for my handle in the game.

How does a person get better? It all starts with questions. Question everything. I already gave you the two most important questions: What am I doing wrong? How do I fix it? But a better one is: what are the other guys doing better than me? That last one is absolutely crucial. You can’t figure it all out on your own so the best way to learn is to find people better than you and play with them. That takes us to our first lesson for getting better at Destiny:

Make friends.

Ask yourself: how can I study with players that are better than me? I found a bunch of players while randomly adventuring and sent them friend requests. You should too. The more friends you have the more activities you can do. And as countless people have pointed out, the Vault of Glass, a six-person mega-raid, is the best content in the game. In other words, Bungie wants you to make friends, so do it. Don’t miss the good stuff. Even if you’re a friendless hermit, socialize. Message a few people. If they are shitheads you can always un-friend them and move on. I’ve met some folks on there that turned out to be crazy funny and lots of fun. So leap in headfirst and meet some people, wall followers and soloists.

From friends you will learn a whole lot. You’ll figure out the best routes to take on the board, the most devastating weapons to use, the key points to attack and defend, to name a few. That brings me to my second maxim:

Always be learning.

Take the approach that you can always get better. Let go of any pride and just admit you don’t know everything. Someone out there always has something to teach you. Accept that knowledge with gratitude and stay thankful.

As a quick aside: I met most of my friends farming the loot cave. Rest in Peace Loot Cave. It was fun farming that empty hole despite Bungie saying this was not how they intended the game to be played, before they shuttered it. I loved it. You see Bungie doesn’t want you to play that way because what they’ve built is a giant casino with no money. Instead of money, you spend time. Drops are random because they want to keep you locked in. The Loot Cave busted the game in favor of the people instead of the house. It let players’ power level, getting stacks of purple fast. Getting the top weapons and armor is hard because they want it to be hard. It’s by design. It’s an endless time trap so you buy DLC in the future. They don’t give you the best weapons based on skill. You can get to the top of the leader boards and it won’t mean a damn thing other than pride. You get nothing, while that bottom feeding chump gets a purple legendary weapon. Believe me, they want it that way.

They will not “fix” it because it is designed to sucker you into spending all your free time playing. Destiny’s “best” aspect is that it’s “addicting” just like a real casino. It even looks like a casino game when the loot pops out at the end of a match, as the two reward spots spin and spin while you wait like Pavlov’s dog to see if this one time you’ll actually get something that doesn’t suck. You keep losing so you keep coming back and maybe, just maybe that next time you’ll get a run of luck and get some good stuff. Congratulations, dear reader, you’ve been ”Game Theoried”. Nothing wrong with using a little Game Theory right back at them to cheat an unfair system that proves another maxim: “the house always wins.” All’s fair in love, war and video games. So find that rock to hide behind where the boss is too stupid to attack you and steal his high level loot!

Despite knowing this insidious design lurks beneath the surface of the game, a devil’s deal set to snare me into endless grinding, I wanted to get better at Destiny simply for the thrill of beating down my fellow man (virtually). I did it for my wounded pride and as “research” for my book. You’ll have to find your own reasons.

Now, back to getting good at PvP. What’s our next move? After making some friends and getting your mind right for learning you’ve reached the next most crucial step, Grasshopper:

Play a bunch of games and lose horribly.

That’s right. Lose a bunch of matches. Get in there and suck. Finish every game, no matter how bad you are doing. Stick with it. There is an old saying in Go: “to get good at Go lose 100 matches quickly.” In other words, get some experience. Realize that you can’t skip this step. It all boils down to practice. You will not step in and dominate on day one, even if you have a lot of experience with other shooters. You can’t learn without losing. As the old Aerosmith line from Dream On goes:

“You’ve got to lose to know how to win.”

Part of understanding strategy involves comprehending the rules of the system you are playing in, whether that system is a real life battlefield or a virtual time-suck. That means you have to look clearly and recognize the truth of what is in front of you. In other words:

See things as they are, not as you want them to be.

If you delude yourself that Destiny is just an innocent little game designed to help you have fun in your free time, you are mistaken. Understand the system and you can find weaknesses in it. To see clearly you must:

Make an honest assessment of your weaknesses.

This is not as easy at it sounds. First of all, it’s hard to admit you are not good at something. Our minds are designed to cover up our faults. We look for excuses, blame others, get mad, quit, walk away, accuse other people of cheating and rationalize that it’s just a stupid game anyway, who cares if I can do that, or that’s so cheap. Repeat this mantra with me a thousands times until it sinks in:

It’s not my controller. It’s me.

There is nothing “cheap” in the game. You’ll hear players complaining about this a lot after getting their asses kicked. Don’t listen. They’re making excuses and you are done with excuses. A better or smarter player is outclassing you. It is as simple as that. Accept it and figure out why. The controller did not suddenly stop responding. The network did not “lag.” Even if it did, it lagged for people on the other side too. Advantages from lag are completely random. A player may appear in front of you suddenly frozen or running into a wall and next time that’s you and the game starts up again and you’re dead. That’s too bad. These types of things are rare. If they’re really happening, then leave matchmaking and then come back to get routed to a different server. But never blame outside forces. Blame yourself.

You are not fast enough. You are not smart enough. So get smarter and get faster.

In other words, the lesson you learned in kindergarten remains true: practice makes perfect. Only practice can make you faster. You get better and better by training, by lining up that head shot again and again until you can pull it off while leaping and twisting around in mid air. I can’t make you faster, but I can help make you get smarter.

That comes through trial and error. If you make a mistake, then try something else. I saw an interview with a professional video game player and he said the key for him was to try different things over and over and over until he found the best one. Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Examine yourself. See what you did wrong when you fail. Do something different.

Most importantly if you find something that works, keep doing it, keep refining it. In other words:

Do whatever works.

There is no glory in dying on the battlefield. You’re just dead. Standing boldly in front of another player shooting it out is not tough. It’s stupid. Instead, fall back, circle around and hit him when he least expects it. Strategy is not about charging over the hill blindly and getting yourself killed because you weren’t looking or forgot to reload in the heat of battle.

Strategy is about understanding the best position and taking it. If I can hide behind a rock while the final monster mindlessly shoots into it, I’ve definitely found the best position to take him out. I’ll use it every time. That’s not cheap, that’s war. Let’s turn to a Sun Tzu maxim that must make any good list:

All warfare is deception.

One of my favorite techniques is to wait around the corner of a wall for someone to come, and then I fall back as soon as I see him, but instead of completely falling back, I rush forward and wait by the wall, so I can melee him. In other words, I want to catch the enemy off guard. I want to know where he is and not let him know where I am. I want to hit him when he least expects it. Hit them where they’re weak, not where they’re strong. A foolish player assaults a well-guarded position solo or with fewer numbers. Instead, see if you can shoot a few shots in and draw a player out, so your teammates can pick him off when he doesn’t have the help of his teammates. Let’s take an old Chinese warfare saying to heart here:

Enemy attacks, retreat. Enemy retreats, attack.

If a player comes at you strong, fall back. If he’s retreating, now is the time to attack, so get reloaded and get that grenade ready to make him suffer for running away. That’s war and that’s Destiny. Oh, you found a little spot nobody seems to have discovered for sniping? Great. Take it. That’s the whole point. It’s yours. Have fun blasting away at people who can barely shoot back at you. Un-level the playing field. That’s fun of the game. So do it.

When it really comes down to it, the fact is:

All strategy is finding exploits.

Military strategy is hacking life’s rules. Flanking people means hitting them from the side or from behind. Not exactly fair, but certainly effective. There is no “fair” in war. We can’t see out of the backs of our heads so it makes sense to attack people there. That’s exploiting a weakness in our own bio-design. Alexander the Great exploited the Persian’s traditional warfare style in the ancient world. Knowing that armies always lined up and fought it out toe-to-toe, he set his army up on a hill, so the Persians could see it and then he did not attack. He let them stay awake all night while he gave his troops a good night’s sleep and then he assaulted them the next night when they were exhausted. Playing by everyone else’s rules will get you killed. Finding creative ways to change the rules sets you on the path to victory.

Now let’s dig into some specific tactics that will make you a much better player. To start with, you can’t win if you don’t:

Use all of your tools.

What do I mean by this? Use your HUD. It’s filled with useful information, not available in real life. When you get killed, a banner in the upper right hand corner will tell you two things: Who killed you and what weapon they used. These are crucial pieces of information. If you keep getting killed by the same guy over and over, he’s probably good, so watch where he goes when he spawns on your team the next round or two. Send him a friend request. He might just accept and that will give you an opportunity to learn even more as you tag along and watch him up close.

That gun info is essential too. You will see the same guns show up over and over again. Those are the weapons you want. Any others are probably worthless in the Crucible or people would already use them. Yield to that hierarchy. Go for one of those guns. Use the wrong weapons and get killed. The best guns for story mode are not the best guns for Crucible.

Know your weapons.

“My rifle is my best friend. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Know them inside and out. Examine all of their perks. Understand them. Love them. Change them and change them again until you find the perfect combination of speed, strength and stability.

Perks matter. Don’t just assume that picking the next perk you unlocked is the best one. It’s not always. For example, for me, if a perk compromises stability I don’t want it. Some people deal well with recoil. I don’t. So get rid of perks that mess with your play style.

People love to go in there with their guns blazing and stand toe-to-toe with their foes. It’s fun to do that sometimes. Key word there: “sometimes.” But you don’t always need to go toe-to-toe. Instead, look to catch people at a disadvantage. Get the jump on them. In other words, do something we mentioned earlier that deserves its own maxim:

Flank people.

Flanking is when you circle back around and hit someone from the side or the from behind. You want to hit them from the side or the back. In fact, let’s get to an old Chinese military bandit leader saying here:

Almost all you need to know about warfare is “circling around.”

If you can shoot at someone who has an unprotected flank you have to take it. If you can work with your teammates, one or two can run an assault while others flank the enemy. This brutal fun almost always results in an awesome kill. In fact, it’s so exciting that you need to watch your breathing so you don’t shoot your gun wildly with excitement and miss, like I did on a number of occasions. Don’t be like I was. Flank people as often as possible.

When you find a strategic spot on the board, do your best to get there fast and take control of it early and often. It’s a major advantage. I can tell you that almost always, that spot will be the high ground. That brings us the next maxim:

Always take the high ground.

This tactic goes back to ancient times and still matters today. From the high ground you can see the field better and you can take people out faster. They have the disadvantage of shooting up at you, an awkward position. The high ground is almost always the good ground. Not always, but almost always. Find the best high ground on every board. That brings us to an important point:

Learn the maps.

You can’t play well without learning the maps. Once you’ve played them a lot you will know all their best spots. Understand what points are closest. Understand where the high ground stands and get to it early and often.

In Control and Iron Banner matches work to control the two closest points. Some articles I read suggested you might need to grab all three points regularly to win due to Bungie redesigns of this classic capture the flag update. It’s just not true.

In Control: you should either be defending your home point or assaulting the middle point.

If you are doing anything else: camping somewhere random or sneaking around, checking every direction, you are doing it wrong. Flood to the central point or defend your home point. The game wants you to constantly get to a spot where exciting battles ensue. That’s a good thing. So get to the fight quickly. Use your speeder to get there faster and take the best attack point. But before you rush off headlong in a fit of battle madness, remember this:

Stay with your team.

Aka always have a wingman. Stick to the herd. This gives you an essential advantage that goes back to antiquity:

Look to outnumber your opponent.

Outnumbering your opponent is always an advantage, even though it sometimes doesn’t work out. Two or three people storming an objective generally will win a battle against fewer opponents. It’s pure math. A single gun can only put out so much damage. If two or three come to bear on you, then you go down that much faster. To stay with your team you need to communicate and that makes the following true for this game and others:

Voice communication is king.

Stay in constant contact. The only people you can talk to in Destiny (as of now) are players you’re friends with currently. So link up with them by creating a fire team and you will stay on the same squad during matchmaking. The advantages of talking with even just one other player on your team so you can coordinate your actions are massive. If you can rustle up three to six players, then that is even better. Now you have a six-player team that can almost always dominate in Destiny PvP because even good players playing a pickup match where they can’t talk to their teammates are at a serious disadvantage. Use chat. Talk to your friends. “Need help at B. Three at B. I’m rushing A. Sniper on the roof across the alley.” This is how soldiers do it in real life and you should too.

Now it’s not that you can’t ever have solo objectives, but it’s not generally a good idea. However, sometimes you might just want to do it for the sheer fun of it. Ok. Here’s how. Make sure all of your weapons are stocked. Full clip, full grenade and full super, if possible and unload them all. This brings us to one of the worst mistakes you can make: forgetting to reload before engaging in a second firefight. This will get you killed almost every time, unless you stumbled across some other idiot who forgot to reload or take cover when injured.

Always remember to reload.

I can’t tell you how many times I forgot to reload. That’s such a rookie mistake. Embarrassing. I would take out one or two people and in a fit of battle madness rush to my next fight, without reloading. If you have to reload when the other guy is shooting at you in the open field you are dead.

Some movements will interrupt loading. Learn them and don’t do them. If you interrupt your reload, you’ll rush to an objective and get smoked like a newbie. Now if you get hurt, it’s time to get out of there.

If you are injured, then take cover.

If you are hurt, then fall back if you can. This is not always possible but try to do something anyway: leap; get behind a wall; get out of there. Just move. If you are caught in the open field, with no cover, better for you to unload and let it play out. Either both of you will die or one will kill the other. So unload on that punk with all you got. This is the fun of it.

So what weapons work best in Destiny? Currently, the following maxims are true though they may change as Bungie rebalances the game:

Autorifles are king in Destiny PvP. *

Ignore this maxim at your own peril. The best players will always discover the weapons with the most advantages. Yield to it and get good at them. Only go into the Crucible with your most maxed weapons, not the cool legendary you picked up cold on a new mission. You need time with your gun to learn its timing. You need to pick your perks carefully to fit your play style.

* Based on the Oct 14 2014 hotfix this still appears to be the case, even though they reduced the effectiveness of the auto rifles. When Bungie changes things, sometimes your strategy goes right out the window and you have to adjust.

There is one corollary to that above rule:

Shotguns are the second kings of Destiny PvP.

Sniper rifles follow this, but those are a specialized skill, best left to learning last unless you have lots of sniping experience in other games. If you see a Titan coming at you with full shields and a shotty, it is time to run. That’s one shot, one kill territory, my friend. Again, this may change when Bungie tweaks balancing, but I doubt it will change all that much. This rock, paper, scissors dynamic was around long before Destiny.

By the way, your quest for loot is holding you back in the crucible. Let go of purple fever. In fact, let’s make a rule out of this as well:

The best guns are not always purple or gold.

Purple is the color of legendary items and every top player wants purple or gold exotics, myself included. I saw one player describe why he kept hunting that loot by saying “right now I have two blue armors and it disgusts me. I’ve got to make them all purple.” Forget that. Look for the right stats. I can tell you that as of right now, one of the best guns in PvP is the Shingen-E, a lowly blue or “rare” rifle. I have this gun as one of my primaries. Also, can I just say, how great is that? A hidden gem of a blue gun should reward dedicated players who understand the mechanics of the game better than others.

You know what the worst part is? I had the Shingen-E for weeks, using it in PvE and leveling it up, because it was the best I had. I hated the gun and kept thinking, if I can only get that shiny new purple, all will be right with the world and I will really kick ass. Overlooking what you have for something in the future is the worst kind of blindness and one encouraged by Bungie’s casino system. The best gun might be right under your nose if you just have the eyes to see.

Don’t blindly look for the flashiest new thing. Examine the stats. Some purples have horrible modifiers. They’re worthless. You have fool’s gold. Put it in storage or dump it for parts and move on.

Now this is not to say you shouldn’t hunt for better gear. You should. Just don’t get blinded by it. And hunt smart. Farm new loot caves. Exploit never ending chest re-spawns. Use force multipliers to level faster. For example: use multiple characters to farm coins. You can share them between characters. Equip your best gun and max it as you farm. The game is designed to give you lots of coins at first and then slow down, like Bitcoin mining. So level up a few newbie characters by running the easy first ten levels and them dump them and give the coins to your primary character, so you can buy high level exotic armor from Xur of the Nine. Buy from that guy as often as you can. He shows up on GMT only a few days a week, so know his schedule. And yes, it is GMT, not PST or EST or some other places on the interwebs mistakenly reported in various forums. GMT.

Here are a couple of specifics for Control matches, my personal favorite and Bungie’s too since they made the limited time Iron Banner event a Control tournament.

Defend with strength. Attack with speed and stealth.

Here’s how to defend your home point. Make sure all of your attacks are filled. Lead with a grenade and when multiple people enter, hit them with your super. Finish the rest with your auto rifle. That’s defending.

When your rifle, grenade and super attack are filled, you can decide to camp at a control point. When you rush a cluster of enemies at a contested control point that is how to attack. Speed kills. Get in, hit them hard and get out. Both attack and defense have different characteristics that you have to get right or you’ll fail.

Oh, one quick note. In life we are trying not to die. I recommend you continue with this approach. In video games forget it. Dying is nothing in video games. So die often. In video games you should not use your player like he is a finite life form. He is not. He can die repeatedly. So don’t be afraid to go toe-to-toe sometime, when you dual it out to see who has the best aim. If you die, hurl a grenade just before you hit zero on your health and take him out with a post mortem. That leads to our next and one of my favorite maxims:

If you have to die, always take someone with you.

If I die, you die. If my health is low, I look to drop a grenade at the last second to take that bastard with me. See you in Hell, Guardian. The timing on this is tricky, but you’ll get it down.

Now I promised a big reward for those who made it to the end. That was a little game theory too. The promise of a big reward hooks the reader and keeps him going. Maybe you game “theoried” me and took advantage of the linear nature of prose and jumped right to the end? Good for you. You found an exploit, aka a strategy.

Here is the biggest lesson you need to learn in Destiny PvP. If you take nothing else from this article, take this:

There are two types of players: Ones who know how to use their motion trackers and ones who don’t.

If you don’t know how to use your motion tracker you do not know how to play Destiny. It is as simple as that. Without it, you absolutely cannot win at PvP. Period. No chance. You will die, over and over and over, like I did. Once you understand it, your KD ratio should shoot up in days.

The motion tracker will change warfare if it’s ever actually invented. It’s a staple of SF movies like Alien that found its way into books and video games. Its effect is dramatic.

Your motion tracker ALWAYS tells you where to aim.

Ignore it at your own peril. Ignore it and get killed over and over and over. With other more realistic shooters you may have to sneak around everywhere, paranoid you’ll get shot from any angle, just like in real life. Not in Destiny. You never have to worry about someone sneaking up on you if you pay attention to your motion tracker HUD at all times. Nobody can sneak up on you.

Here’s how to use it: you’re looking for the red mark on the motion tracker. It indicates an enemy and his general direction. Turn immediately to that direction and get your gun up where the intruder will most likely appear. It should be obvious, an open door or big entrance point or staircase. Get ready. Set you sights at neck or chest level, so your recoil will kick up towards the enemy’s head finishing him with a devastating headshot. As soon as he shows up, blast his ass.

One key point: Do NOT look down your sight all the time. It disables the motion tracker. Unless you have a perk that changes this fact, as some sniper rifles do, do not constantly look down your sight. When you have the gun lowered, the tracker remains in the upper left hand corner. You should spend nearly all of your time watching the motion tracker in the game. Do that and watch your game improve real fast. Mine did.

I’ll share a little story with you. It’s almost hilarious how I discovered the motion tracker. I kept thinking, why the hell do these damn people always seem to know where to shoot? It’s like they have a sixth sense. I shrugged it off to younger kids with faster reflexes. I spent the whole game creeping around, checking every angle and getting ambushed. Then I saw that little blinking thing up in the corner of my screen: my beloved motion tracker. Knowing how to use it changed everything.

The game is designed to funnel you to an objective. So do it. You even win a medal for it called Objectively Correct, a title that is not coincidental, which is designed to reinforce your desire, which is, you guessed it, more game theory. It rewards you for getting to the control points and killing the most enemies. The motion tracker aids in the funneling process. They want you to fight it out constantly, not sit back and camp. Get to it and get more points.

Bungie knows exactly what they are doing. They know how to make a good game. Their mechanics did not. Destiny may not revolutionize game play, like it was supposed to do, and the story might suck as numerous early reviews pointed out, but the mechanics of PvP are simply incredible. This is a finely tuned killing machine. And any game that can support this level of analysis is a highly advanced engine for fun and excitement. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and fight.

Play to win, Guardian.

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Why the Hong Kong Protests Will Probably End Badly

I admire the bravery of the Hong Kong people to stand up for their eroding rights, as the western tradition established by the British breaks down.  They’ve stood in the rain and lighting, protected by nothing but umbrellas, safety goggles and plastic bags tied around their eyes, as police hammered them with tear gas and pepper spray.  And they’re still there, even as the noose of authority starts to tighten around them. This year the Hong Kong people saw an unprecedented crack down on their way of life.  Freedom of the press disappeared as outspoken journalists got fired, jailed or viciously attacked by armed thugs in public.  Instead of a real election Beijing moved to make sure that only people they approve will come to power, establishing a board to approve all candidates and sparking the people to take to the streets in an “umbrella revolution.”  The real, everyday “people” not the sham, ersatz platitude “people” of communist propagandists don’t want a fake leader, someone chosen by ancient gerontocrats huddled in the power corridors of Beijing.  I hope they get it.  It’s just that the history of China doesn’t hold out much hope that they will.  Their drama is depressingly familiar, a pattern played out over and over and over in history both recent and distant.

The men who rule with an iron fist in mainland China can’t stand by and let this happen.  There’s too much at stake.  They can’t appear to look weak or lose face.  No matter how they strangle the internet with the Great Firewall of China, information always finds a way to sneak through, whether through Tor, mesh networks, VPNs or people traveling to Hong Kong from the mainland and returning with stories.  And worse, it just might give the mainland Chinese ideas, something they can’t allow. Already they’re drawing up plans to crush the protestors by any means necessary.  Today we saw a report in Reuters that a sophisticated state created malware program is working its way through protestor’s smart phones, stealing usernames, passwords and emails.  Quartz translated a comparison between an edict just issued to the Hong Kong protestors as well as the one issued right before the Tienanmen Square massacre and they look eerily similar.  In other words, the PRC is making a list and they’re checking it twice. The Chinese leaders see society as a whole, a unified organism.  Individuals are nothing but a disease to destroy or a healthy part of the whole, aka a compliant citizen, who won’t make waves.  Anything that disrupts harmony gets eliminated and they don’t care about public relations.  In the northern Mongolian dessert they’ve had a number of terrorist attacks and a full blown separatists movement that’s caused the PRC to respond with a brutal campaign of suppression.  Last week they jailed a prominent activist and scholar for life.  He’s known as a moderate, who supported Chinese rule, but in the looking glass reality of totalitarian governments, even moderates are cancers that needs to get burned out.

Chairman Mao once said “the people want freedom but we want socialism.” Mao was a master strategist, general and politician of the most ruthless type. He often used dialectics to make it hard to know where he stood and to give him plausible deniability.  If someone accused him later of saying something he could always say they misinterpreted his words.  But his statement about the desires of the people versus the needs of the powerful was one of his most unequivocal of his life. In essence he said “we don’t care what everyone wants, this is what we want.” In this one little sentence he proved that the communists, who’d come to power on the backs of “the people,” were exactly that same as all the other ruthless men who’d ruled China for three thousand years.  The dynasties and warlords never left China, they just transformed.  One of Mao’s generals said that the communist revolution cost 40 million lives and that it would require nothing less than that to take it from them. There is little doubt that the engines of power in Beijing churn as we speak, looking for a way to break the backs of the people.  It’s just a little more complicated this time, because Hong Kong represents a vital economic engine, essential to the whole, so they’re moving carefully, like a deadly serpent in the long grass.

The good news is the PRC has less options at their disposal on the island.  On the mainland they have total control of the media, the police and the army.  Hong Kong’s police used tear gas, but they haven’t shown themselves willing to open up with assault rifles.  They spent their whole lives in a system built on rule of law, checks and balances, and restraints to their authority, a vastly different prospect then the absolute authority of communist China’s People’s Armed Police.  If the people won’t go, the central government will find it hard to force those cops to gun down unarmed civilians.  They’ll need the army to do that, which means they’ll have to come across the water and people will know they’re coming.  The protestors have vowed not to back down.  Something has to give.

Like all totalitarian governments, the people in power only want one thing: power.  They don’t care about anyone but themselves.  They don’t care about anything but hanging on to their fleeting rule, by any means necessary. Anything that questions them, insults them, or lampoons them causes them to strike fast and strike hard.

The protestors have a major disadvantage.  They have no weapons.  Unlike the Communists rising up against the Nationalists they can’t turn to armed struggled to get their way.  Like it or not, Mao was right: “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”  The history of the world is almost universally of a small group of violent people exerting control on the rest of humanity. If you put one hundred people in a room, who gets their way?  The people willing to use violence.  One guy gathers up a few other monsters and enforces his will on the rest of the group.  Once the bullets start flying the protestors will either disperse or get mowed down but they’ll have no way to fight back.  Hong Kong inherited its gun control laws from British colonial fears of an armed populace and mainland China restricted guns almost as soon as they came to power, according to the Library of Congress, which keeps track of such things.  They didn’t want a counterrevolutionary movement.  If the protestors can’t get what they want by peaceful means, and there is little reason to think that they will, considering China’s history, then they have no other avenues to freedom.  Most people in the western world know all about the Tienanmen Square massacre in 1989, but not as many people know much about Falun Gung, a religious movement suppressed by the PRC.  It’s estimated that more than half of the people incarcerated in the Laogai “reform through labor” system, a brutal prison system notorious for its vicious torture, are Falun Gung political prisoners.  Most people think its because the communists fear superstition and religion but the main reason the PRC moved against the movement’s practitioners is because they held a massive protest for human rights.   Not long after, the government established the secretive 610 office to oversee their extermination.

My wife calls me a pessimist. I admit it.  But behind every cynic is an optimist.  I watched the Arab Spring turn into the Arab Winter.  I’ve looked back through the history books and wondered how we in America got so lucky, with a group of brilliant men who seized power through violence and then let it go.  The rarest personality on Earth is the man of violence who also believes in higher principals, who is willing to step back and let the people rule once they take control.  Almost every revolution in the history of man ended up with autocrats in power.  Mao promised democratic reform and rule of the people.  But when he got control he stripped his people of the very thing he promised, as is so often the case.  I really hope I am wrong this time and the Chinese people get what they want after so many thousands of years living under the knife.

The people of Hong Kong are standing up in the face of a coming whirlwind.  They’ll need more than umbrellas.

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Finding Root

More from my upcoming book on the spiritual aspects of writing:

***

One of the most crucial skills you’ll want to learn as an artist is what I call “finding root.” The term comes to us from the engineering world. “Root cause analysis” or RCA attempts to get to the bottom of a problem that causes other problems. In medicine, we’d call this treating the root cause and not the symptoms.

People have probably been performing root cause analysis since we crawled out of the muck, but it only developed as a systematic approach in the modern era, spurred by engineering disasters like the the Tay Bridge collapse in Scotland in the late 1800’s. The modern computer landscape developed the ideas even further. Troubleshooting without RCA in the tech world is literally impossible. Often a machine acts up and a sys-admin identifies what he thinks is the issue, only to have the machine continue to malfunction. The techie only found a secondary issue but he failed to find the real cause of his trouble and so his trouble persists. He found what’s called a “dependent issue.” A dependent issue links to the root problem, but fixing it only fixes that single issue and never the thing that’s causing the general breakdown.

The same tree of problems exists in fiction and in life. An abused woman may have any number of issues. She might have low self-esteem, live in fear of making mistakes, and feel shame as she covers up for her husband. If she concentrates on building her self-esteem through seminars, self-help books, socializing or pretty much any other method, her results will remain short lived. She might feel good for a time, but then her husband goes off and she’s back to feeling low again, all her hard work crumbling. She failed to find root. She has only addressed the symptom. All of the problems trace back to her abusive relationship. There’s only one solution to her real issue: leave the relationship. This is, of course, the hardest road to take or at least it appears so. The magic that powers the principle of finding root holds a special treasure. The hardest solution always proves to be the best panacea because it makes the problems go away. It makes them stop. When you treat the symptoms you remain perpetually sick, feeling better only to feel terrible again. In other words, the right solution gets you to an end point and the wrong solution keeps you trapped together.

Let’s take an example from my fiction. In my first book, the Scorpion Game, early drafts contained a very different villain then the multifaceted person you can empathize with, despite his horrible crimes. Instead of a person readers could relate to, I had an evilly grinning, card carrying villain. He even had a goddamn cane. Writing is always an iterative process. A book almost never comes out perfectly from the writer’s brain to the page. It’s possible that some non-fiction books work that way, but I’ve never seen it. Legend has it that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in a few weeks, on a long roll of paper in his typewriter, while hopped up on speed. It’s not true. Well, he was on drugs and there was a roll, but like all great books he had missteps, problems, re-writes.

Each iteration of your work, each re-write, winds you closer to root. You fix problems, but find you fixed the wrong ones as you work through draft after draft. My card carrying villain needed to drop his cane, stop grinning so goddamn much, stop saying stupid things to sound brilliantly evil, and stop kicking the dog just because it was fun. Eventually, I chipped away at the dependent problems, chasing his character to the base of its stem and ripping it out of the ground. To do this I kept asking questions: What traits make him a card-carrying psychopath of the Slasher movie variety? Make a list. How the hell do I get rid of them? Write them all down and get rid of them. What do I put in their place to make him more human, more real? Design those ideas, and then try them on paper. Fix them if they don’t work.

Root problems cause stories to fall apart fast, which means readers put the book down or deliver a bad review and maybe even tell their friends how much they hated it and that they shouldn’t waste their money. Not good. Root problems in fiction fall into the following categories:

– Characters that don’t work

– Plot arcs that fail to develop to their full conclusion

– Long, slow pacing

– Unoriginality

– Terrible dialogue

– Boring and uncompelling subject matter/premise

– And the number one root problem of all: not writing or not writing regularly

That’s not an exhaustive list, but any one of them means ruin for a book. Two is an absolute disaster that no book survives.  The last one deserves its own mention specifically. It’s the ultimate root problem. If you’re not writing, you are never able to solve any of the other challenges on that list. If you write only sporadically you won’t get very good and you won’t make a career of it. The world has a perfectly accurate feedback loop. If you don’t write, then your results are guaranteed failure.

Now, a very, very few books might still become popular missing one of these major elements. Dan Brown has made a hell of lot more money than I have with his writing, so who am I to tell him that his evil characters in the Da Vinci Code are card carrying, wooden cut outs of people? But the fact remains; characterization is not one of his strong points. Notice that he had most of the rest of the things on that list working for him: a compelling premise that teaches readers about a world they’ve never seen, originality, fast pace and sweeping plot arcs that come to a satisfying conclusion. But this is not about who sells the most books. We are concerned with only one thing here: becoming the best writers we can be. Fame and fortune will take care of themselves if you come up with a truly compelling, original book that readers love and tell their friends about, spurring a deluge of sales. It starts by writing a book. I can tell you that Dan Brown probably didn’t set out saying I don’t give a rat’s ass about characters, who the hell cares about that? He might have fallen short on that front, but the research and effort he put in are self-evident. Focus on what you can control. You can always get better at the Kung Fu of your art if you keep throwing punches every day.

All great writing is written on the razor’s edge. You write in the full consciousness of your death and the full consciousness of your coming apart at the seams. Nothing can last. Nothing lives forever. And yet there is a chance that if you can fly close enough to the sun you can come down with feathers from the divine and report on what you saw, something nobody at any other point in time has ever seen in just the way you have, because you have never existed before and never will again. This is the essence of writing, battling through the ultimate fear to the root of problems and pushing further and further, relentlessly climbing the mountain even when there is no hope you will make it to the top and your limbs and your mind and your soul fragment and fall apart and you can’t go on, but you do. This is when you have crossed over into the true source of creativity, a seething fire at the heart of all things, the Brahman force, zero energy, the center of the universe, a blinding light that cannot be contained and yet contains all things. This is where we are all going and where we all return to and like Prometheus you can sneak in and steal fire from the gods and use it to light a bonfire that people will see when you are long dead.

Or you can just go on fixing little problems and ignoring the real ones. The choice, as always, is yours.

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Self-awareness

This is the second early excerpt from my book on the spiritual aspects of writing.  It’s a little rough, but it’s coming along.

***

I cannot think of any trait more important to an artist than self-awareness. But what is self-awareness and how do you know if you have it?

First off, I don’t define self-awareness as the ability to recognize yourself as separate from other people, a distinct entity and consciousness with your own wants and desires.  Most folks define it that way.  Wikipedia cites the “mirror test” as an indicator of self-awareness.  A person looks in the mirror and says, “yup, that’s me.”  That’s limited at best.

In the book Strategy: A History, Lawrence Freedman writes that Jane Goodall saw gorillas as self-aware because they used deception and tactics, formed alliances and figured out how to maximize their own personal benefit, while working with other apes in their social network.  If we accept the popular understanding of the concept then we can describe those apes as self-aware.  But I don’t see them that way.  It’s not that they aren’t smart or can’t recognize themselves in a mirror, but being smart is not self-awareness.

You can be incredibly clever and not understand the most basic question of self: why?  Why do you do the things you do?  And can you change them?  Why do others do what they do?  Do the apes know that they know something or do they simply know how to do something?  Can they evolve their understanding?  More importantly, can they choose to evolve in a different direction and do something completely different, like leave the herd?

A chess computer can beat the greatest grandmasters, but it has no knowledge of what it’s doing.  It’s a mechanical process of brute force calculations.  It will never reflect on its situation and suddenly decide to play Go instead.  It may get better with software upgrades and hardware, but it will never know that it knows.

Most people on the planet at any given time in history function at this computer like level.  They run around, hunt for food and shelter, fight, make war, worship, start families, have pets and children, live, die but very few of them ever stop to ask the question; why?  Why am I doing this?  Do I need to keep doing this?  Is there a different way?  Why is it even important to have a family or a dog or to worship this God?

The reason is simple: they don’t even know they can.  People are programs.  And they can’t see beyond those programs.  They don’t even know that they are programs. They just function, create drama, buy things, eat, consume.  In other words, they’re very advanced computers, whose programmers designed them to acquire things, fight, screw, kill and love, but they do so with no understanding.  The Sims can do all of this in their simulated world, but we’d never describe them as self-aware.

The other reason they don’t is fear.  Fear defines most of our actions on this planet.  It traces our lives with its clawed fingers.  There’s a reason that some of the first people dictatorships look to kill off or “purge” are the intellectuals, people who question and expose the truth.  ISIS, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, just declared that children shouldn’t learn math or social studies.  All you can say about ISIS is that they’re people who are divorced from their purpose.  This is an extreme example of what lack of self-awareness does to a person.  In their own minds, they believe God wants them to live this Spartan life, that the entity that created this magnificent universe only wants us to partake of a tiny, gray sliver of it, devoid of free choice and color.  They believe they do His will and yet the true reasons they do what they do are much more basic.  What they’re really trying to do is cut off any path to self-awareness, any path that leads to questions about their legitimacy, anything that would make them turn inwards and realize that they are nothing but ants driven to attack other colonies, because they believe in a brutal version of God that doesn’t really exist except in their own minds.  In other words, they can’t look at themselves and assess themselves honestly and so they become destroyers instead of creators.

Dictatorships come to power through the systematic destruction of individuality and self-awareness, using brute force strategy and tactics to try and make everything uniform.  They often succeed for a time, devastating millions of lives, all because they could not wake up and see the mote in their own eye.  That quote from the good book is above all, about self-awareness.  Seeing the flaws in others but not yourself is the height of human delusion and so often delusion drives us.  You’re driven by delusion as well, a whole mess of ugly delusions whether you know it or not.  We all are.  We want nothing more than to go to sleep, to have no responsibility for our actions, to stay stuck right where we are, anything but look hard at ourselves and admit we’re weak and flawed and vulnerable.   It’s hard to look inside and realize you’re socially awkward, not very funny, can’t jump very high and that you may never get rich. Looking inside involves finding all the things you’re no good at and why.  Delusion involves lashing out and trying to force the world to conform.

You might think you’re beyond this, but I encourage you to look closer.  Our programmers are tricky.  Their code is so subtle that you can think you understand why, only to find that your reasons are just another layer of your programming that traps you and keeps you moving like an ant tracking a scent.  For instance, a person might feel that life is at its core suffering and look back on abuse from family or loved ones and cite that as the reason. A man who took “whuppings” as a child “thinks” it’s perfectly fine to do the same to his children.  I put thinking in quotations because all we’re really seeing in that case is a variable cited as a reason.  Boy was abused, grows up and abuses.  This is nothing but an if-then statement.  At no point did he wake up and say, but is the world really a wicked place?  Do I need to hit people?  Do I need to fight?  Is this just how it always is?  Is there any way out?

The only way to describe true self-awareness is when a person wakes up.  They stop suddenly.  They question everything.  Do I have to do this?  Why did my father do things this way?  Do I even care?  Do I want to be the way he was or my own man?  Why does anyone do it this way and how do I stop it?  It’s questions that start you down the path to the true understanding necessary to transcend everyday existence.  Questions followed by a willingness to follow the answers wherever they may lead.

People are afraid and so they aren’t willing to follow these questions because they sometimes lead to a scary place.  What would you do if you figured out that you were in the wrong career, married to the wrong person and living with children that you never really wanted?  If you were like most people, you’d give up.  You’d see yourself as a bad person.  You’d see fixing that situation as something impossible or wrong and stop asking why it’s wrong.  Or you may go a little deeper but declare your desires selfish and go right on back to sleep, sleep walking to your job, through your life and accepting something less than you deserve until one day a heart attack or a bus driver takes your life and you realize in your final instant that you have no more time to change.

The path of self-awareness requires mental toughness and the ability to keep going no matter what.  It involves looking into the abyss and fighting through it.  You have to go further, always further.  You have to ask the hard questions and then do something about it.

Further is the key word here. Self-awareness is not a final state that you arrive at; it’s a moving target. You may find that you understood your life only to wake up another day and realize you’ve deluded yourself for years and now you have another year of painful self-reflection. Or you may get things right for a time only to slip and find you need another round of self-examination to get yourself free again.

As a writer you have to ask and answer the question: Why do I want to write?  What’s the point of writing?  Does it matter if I’m successful?  Would I keep doing it anyway?  Do I have something to say or do I just want fame and fortune?  Everyone wants both of those things, whether they admit it or not.  Whatever your answer is it includes all kinds of reasons, many of them in conflict.  Self-awareness implies a willingness to accept contradictions. It’s not just about finding noble reasons to do something, it’s about understanding your less than noble and outright diabolical tendencies as well and coming to terms with them, using them even.

When you focus on your craft you have to ask tough questions.  Is what people are saying about my work true?  Am I in denial?  Am I good at plot, but not at characters?  Is that a permanent condition?  Too often the answer to that question is yes, when in reality it’s no.  You can study, get better, hone your skill.  You can play to your strengths but shore up your weaknesses through dedication and commitment to a lifetime of learning.  You can learn the mechanics of your craft through books and seminars, coupled with practice.  Keep looking hard at everything you do.  Read your work like someone else wrote it.  Would you still buy it?  What would you fix?  How?

What you can’t learn from books is self-understanding.  It does not come from books, teachers, religion, politicians, nation-states, TV, films, video-games, your friends and family.  It comes only from inside, from reflection.  You can do this a number of ways such as prayer, meditation, journaling answers to the question “who am I?” or long walks alone.  The key to all of them is alone.  This is not a group exercise.  It’s not a weekend retreat.  Forget going to some couples meditation or reading a book on the best way to do it.  The best way to do it is the simplest.  You don’t need chants or special music or an “enlightened” leader to guide you on the path to self-discovery.  You just sit by yourself and stay quiet for as long as you can stand.  You find answers by asking yourself hard questions and listening to the response inwardly.  This takes patience and time.  Your mind is peppered with all kinds of false reasons, that make a lot of sense but simply serve to keep you right where you are right now.  Your mind fears change.  It fears questions.  It fears the death of what you believe.  The path of self-discovery is littered with cherished belief systems that no longer matter.  It’s a process of peeling away all that is not you.

You’ll find no shortage of gurus, teachers, self-help books that purport to give you the answers.  They’re the most dangerous kind of people, because they believe wholeheartedly that they’ve found it and can share it with you.  But it’s not true.  Nobody can share their understanding.  They can share the product of that understanding and at their best they can inspire you to do similar internal work but they can’t share their inner understanding.  What we’re meant to learn in this short, crazy life is something that’s written special for each of us, something we can’t communicate directly to others once we find it.  We can only talk around it and reflect its light to the world.  Each of us was created with unique software designed to fulfill a single purpose and self-awareness is discovering and embracing that purpose.

I don’t write this book because I can give you my understanding.  I hope that I don’t contribute to the literature of delusion.  If you want to go to sleep, there are whole bookshelves of it. You’ll find many of them in the self-help section. You can learn visualization, do some magical thinking, meditate while breaking into yoga poses, chat in strange languages while standing on one finger, but you won’t get any closer to understanding who you are until you discard all that and see it for what it is: another layer of delusion, another layer of Maya, crafted by well meaning people who are still soundly asleep. 

What I want is to wake you up, to set you on a new path, one that may require a radical change.  I don’t want anyone to read this and think they’ve figured it all out, only to realize later it was complete nonsense.  That’s why I say kill reliance on external sources including me.  The best gurus are nothing more than a finger pointing to the moon.  But you have to go there.  No one can do it for you and reading about it is never, ever the same as doing it.  Self-awareness requires taking those long walks, crying to yourself, laughing like a lunatic when you discover something meant only for you at this precise moment in the never-ending symphony of life.  Wake up and realize that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. Will you? Or will your verse get written for you?

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Self Awareness

This is the second early excerpt from my book on the spiritual aspects of writing.  It’s a little rough, but it’s coming along.

I can think of no trait more important to an artist than self-awareness.  But what is self-awareness and how do you know if you have it?

First off, I don’t define self awareness as the ability to recognize yourself as separate from other people, a distinct entity and consciousness with your own wants and desires.  Most folks define it that way.  Wikipedia cites the “mirror test” as an indicator self awareness.  A person looks in the mirror and says “yup, that’s me.”  That’s limited at best.

In the book Strategy: A History, Lawrence Freedman writes that Jane Goodall saw gorillas as self-aware because they used deception and tactics, formed alliances and figured out how to maximize their own personal benefit, while working with other apes in their social network.  If we accept the popular understanding of the concept then we can describe those apes as self aware.  But I don’t see them that way.  It’s not that they aren’t smart or can’t recognize themselves in a mirror, but being smart is not self-awareness.

You can be incredibly clever and not understand the most basic question of self: why?  Why do you do the things you do?  And can you change them?  Why do others do what they do?  Do the apes know that they know something or do they simply know how to do something?  Can they evolve their understanding?  More importantly, can they choose to evolve in a different direction and do something completely different, like leave the herd?

A chess computer can beat the greatest grandmasters, but it has no knowledge of what it’s doing.  It’s a mechanical process of brute force calculations.  It will never reflect on its situation and suddenly decide to play Go instead.  It may get better with software upgrades and hardware but it will never know that it knows.

Most people on the planet at any given time in history function at this computer like level.  They run around, hunt for food and shelter, fight, make war, worship, start families, have pets and children, live, die but very few of them ever stop to ask the question why?  Why am I doing this?  Do I need to keep doing this?  Is there a different way?  Why is it even important to have a family or a dog or to worship this God?

The reason is simple: they don’t even know they can.  People are programs.  And they can’t see beyond those programs.  They just function, create drama, buy things, eat, consume.  In other words, they’re very advanced computers, who’s programmers designed them to acquire things, fight, screw, kill and love, but they do so with no understanding.  The Sims can do all of this in their simulated world, but we’d never describe them as self aware.

The other reason they don’t is fear.  Fear defines most of our actions on this planet.  It traces our lives with its clawed fingers.  There’s a reason that some of the first people dictatorships look to kill off or “purge” are the intellectuals, people who question and expose the truth.  ISIS the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq just declared that children shouldn’t learn math or social studies.  They are people are divorced from their purpose.  This is an extreme example of what lack of self-awareness does to a person.  In their own minds they believe God wants them to live this Spartan life, that that the entity that created this magnificent universe only wants us to partake of a tiny, gray sliver of it, devoid of free choice and color.  They believe they do His will and yet the true reasons they do what they do are much more basic.  What they’re really trying to do is cut off is any path to self-awareness, any path that leads to questions about their legitimacy, anything that would make them turn inwards and realize that they are nothing but ants driven to attack other colonies, because they believe in a brutal version of God that doesn’t really exist except in their own minds.  In other words they can’t look at themselves and assess themselves honestly.

Dictatorships come to power through the systematic destruction of individuality and self-awareness, using brute force strategy and tactics to try and make everything uniform.  They often succeed for a time, devastating millions of lives, all because they could not wake up and see the mote in their own eye.  That quote from the good book is above all, about self awareness.  Seeing the flaws in others but not yourself is the height of human delusion and so often delusion drives us.  You’re driven by delusion as well, a whole mess of ugly delusions whether you know it or not.  We all are.  We want nothing more than to go to sleep, to have no responsibility for our actions, to stay stuck right where are, anything but look hard at ourselves and admit we’re weak and flawed and vulnerable.   It’s hard to look inside and realize you’re socially awkward, not very funny, can’t jump very high and that you may never get rich. Looking inside involves finding all the things you’re no good at and why.  Delusions involves lashing out and trying to force the world to conform.

You might think you’re beyond this but I encourage you to look closer.  Our programmers are tricky.  Their code is so subtle that you can think you understand why, only to find that your reasons are just another layer of your programming that traps you and keeps you moving like an ant tracking a scent.  For instance a person might feel that life is at its core suffering and look back on abuse from family or loved ones and cite that as the reason. A man who took “whuppings” as a child “thinks” it’s perfectly fine to do the same to his children.  I put thinking in quotations because all we’re really seeing in that case is a variable cited as a reason.  Boy was abused, grows up and abuses.  This is nothing but an if-then statement.  At no point did he wake up and say, but is the world really a wicked place?  Do I need to hit people?  Do I need to fight?  Is this just how it always is?  Is there any way out?

The only way to describe true self-awareness is when a person wakes up.  They stop suddenly.  The question everything.  Do I have to do this?  Why did my father do things this way?  Do I even care?  Do I want to be the way he was or my own man?  Why does anyone do it this way and how do I stop it?  It’s questions that start the true understanding necessary to transcend everyday existence.  Questions followed by a willingness to follow the answers wherever they may lead.

People are afraid and so they aren’t willing to follow these questions because they sometimes lead to a scary place.  What would you do if you figured out that you were in the wrong career, married to the wrong person and living with children that you never really wanted?  If you’re like most people, you’d give up.  You’d see yourself as a bad person.  You’d see fixing that situation as something impossible or wrong and stop asking why it’s wrong.  Or you may go a little deeper but declare your desires selfish and go right on back to sleep, sleep walking to your job, through your life and accepting something less than you deserve  until one day a heart attack or a bus driver takes you out and you realize that you have no more time to change in your final instant.

The path of self-awareness requires mental toughness and the ability to keep going no matter what.  It involves looking into the abyss and fighting through it.  You have to go further, always further.  You have to ask the hard questions and then doing something about it.

Further is the key word here.  Self-awareness is not a final state that you arrive at, it’s a moving target.  You may find that you understood your life only to wake up another day and realize you’ve deluded yourself for years and now you have another year of painful self-reflection.

As a writer you have to ask and answer the question: why do I want to write?  What’s the point of writing?  Does it matter if I’m successful?  Would I keep doing it anyway?  Do I have something to say or do I just want fame and fortune?  Everyone wants both of those things, whether they admit it or not.  Whatever your answer is it includes all kinds of reasons, many of them in conflict.  Self-awareness implies a willingness to accept contradictions. It’s not just about finding noble reasons to do something, its about understanding your less than noble and outright diabolical tendencies as well and coming to terms with them, using them even.

Self-awareness does not come from books, teachers, religion, politicians, nation-states, TV, films, video-games, your friends and family.  It comes only from inside, from reflection.  You can do this a number of ways such as prayer, meditation, journaling answers to the question “who am I?” or long walks alone.  The key to all of them is alone.  This is not a group exercise.  It’s not a weekend retreat.  Forget going to some couples meditation or reading a book on the best way to do it.  The best way to do it is the simplest.  You don’t need chants or special music or an “enlightened” leader to guide you on the path to self-discovery.  You just sit by yourself and stay quiet for as long as you can stand.  You find answers by asking yourself hard questions and listening to the response inwardly.  This takes patience and time.  You’re mind is peppered with all kinds of false reasons, that make a lot of sense but simply serve to keep you right where you are right now.  Your mind fears change.  It fears questions.  It fears the death of what you believe.  The path of self discovery is littered with cherished belief systems that no longer matter.  It’s a process of pealing away all that is not you.

You’ll find no shortage of gurus, teachers, self help books that purport to give you the answers.  They’re the most dangerous kind of people, because they believe wholeheartedly that they’ve found it and can share it with you.  But it’s not true.  Nobody can share their understanding.  They can share the product of that understanding and at their best they can inspire you to do similar internal work but they can’t share their inner understanding.  What we’re meant to learn in this short, crazy life is something that’s written special for each of us, something we can’t communicate it directly to others once we find it.  We can only talk around it reflect it’s light.  Each of us was created with unique software designed to fulfill a single purpose and self-awareness is discovering and embracing that purpose.

I don’t write this book because I can give you my understanding.  I hope that I don’t contribute to the literature of delusion.  There are whole bookshelves of it.  What I want is to wake you up, to set you on a new path, one that may require a radical change.  I don’t want anyone to read this and think they’ve figured it all out, only to realize later it was complete nonsense.  That’s why I say kill reliance on external sources including me.  The best gurus are nothing more than a finger pointing to the moon.  But you have to go there.  No one can do it for you and reading about it is never, ever the same as doing it.  Self awareness requires taking those long walks, crying to yourself, laughing like a lunatic when you discover something meant only for you at this precise moment in the never-ending symphony of life.  Wake up and realizes that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

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Interview with Author Graeme Ing

I had a chance to sit down and talk with author Graeme Ing, who just released his latest novel Necromancer. We spoke at length about writing, art and the state of publishing today.  Check out his responses to my questions below.

Q: You’ve got a new book out now. Tell us what it’s all about, with full spoilers, being sure to ruin all surprises for everyone. All right maybe no spoilers.

A: Necromancer is a dark fantasy that I hope will turn the Necromancer trope on its head. Its a first-person tale of a young necromancer trying to save his city against a primeval fire creature bent on destruction. My protagonist is cocky and sarcastic for sure, but he’s still a hero. In essence it’s a fantasy adventure full of ikky creatures (physical or otherwise), betrayals, a secret society, bizarre pacts and yes… some romance. I hope it will keep the reader guessing until the very end.

Q: What’s the governing principal underlying the magic of your world?

A: There are four disciplines of magic: Necromancy, Sorcery and two others that will remain a secret for later books. Magic is an innate ability, often genetic, and if you don’t have the spark within you then you can’t learn it. Powerful Guilds exist to train apprentices to develop this inner power and mold it into specific spells. Most of these spells are very immediate, “shoot from the hip” magic, employing simple gestures but rarely involving a spoken component. No stuffy old wizards chanting from dusty tomes here! I wanted the magic to be streetwise, more like combat magic. Necromancy targets the dead (or undead). The penalties for directing it at the living are severe, and touched upon within the book. Sorcery is the domain of the elusive Elik Magi, a Guild supposedly eradicated a hundred years prior. Theirs is elemental magic, shaping fire, water, lightning, etc. Why are the Elik Magi no more? That sinister tale is woven into the book, so now you have to read it, yes?

Q: What are some of the books that you loved as a child?

A: As a pre-teen I grew up on Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” and “Crystal Singer”, Sheri Tepper’s “True Game”, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, Fritz Leiber’s “Lankhmar” books. The Pern books are still my all-time favourite, but “The Hobbit”, “Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Rendezvous with Rama”, “Ringworld” all rank high on the list.

Q: What authors did you most try to emulate when you were first starting out?

A: When writing “Ocean of Dust” I channeled Anne McCaffrey, trying to capture the innocence of many of her characters, and the simple but rich style of her work. “Necromancer” pays homage to Steven Brust with a smidgeon of Leiber. When writing sci-fi I have to work hard not to emulate Heinlein or Larry Niven. I think my preference and inspiration comes most from the humbler, more adventurous style, rather than the dense political machinations of authors like Tolkien or George Martin.

Q: Talk a bit about what the indie publishing business is like right now.

A: That’s a complex question. Indie publishing has the lowest barrier to entry ever right now. Every retailer (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo) provides mature tools for formatting and publishing and there are numerous distributors that bridge the gap, such as SmashWords and Draft2Digital. In a single weekend you can format a paperback with cover and internal graphics to rival anything coming out of the large publishing houses, and you can produce an ebook for all formats in an afternoon. If anyone reading this fears the publishing process, don’t. That’s the least of your concerns. It’s free and there are thousands of editors and cover designers you can easily contract with.

The community of Indie authors expands every week and is extremely friendly and helpful. Most will share advice and we all promote each other’s books. It doesn’t feel like a competitive field at all. The Indie focus remains on the reader, to provide them with the best books we can write at a fraction of the cost of traditionally published books. It’s fun to interact directly with readers and hear what they like or don’t like. Everyone wins.

However, the largest challenge facing an Indie author today is discoverability. With over a million books on Amazon alone it is very hard to get noticed, very hard to make your own books stand out among so many. A few authors are lucky enough to hit a bestseller out of the gate and gain tens of thousands of readers of their debut book, but the reality for most of us is that it will take many books to work up to that level, gaining the interest of a couple of hundred or a thousand more readers with each book we write. This is a long tail game not a get-rich-quick scheme, but then becoming an author always was, long before the Indie scene.

Q: One of your strongest suits is character development. I can see every one of your main characters in all your books very clearly in my mind. I’m sure others see something different, but that’s often the sign of a great book. How do you go about creating characters? Walk us through the process.

A: Thanks. Normally I start with a bunch of ideas about physical appearance, attitude, mannerisms, some peculiar traits, and I let those ideas stew a while. My strongest vision is normally of the protagonist or antagonist, or both. In “Necromancer” for example, I pictured this cocky guy that had a sarcastic and overconfident attitude to life. Once I have such notes for my major and secondary characters I’ll embark on a series or organic exercises best described by the talented John Truby. What is the surface goal of each character – what do they want? What weaknesses do they start with? Tougher to pin down is their psychological need, which lies beneath the surface. How do I want them to have changed by the end of the book, because all characters must experience growth or change from beginning to end. I also use these goals and motivations in each scene to define what each character wants to happen. The best tension arises from opposing goals of course. Even then, I can nuance the scene. For example, instead of Lord Adder arguing with the King to force him to bend to the Lord’s demands, perhaps Lord Adder understands that the King is proud and so instead he subtly directs the conversation such that the King reaches the desired conclusion as if he himself had thought of it. Lord Adder wins but hasn’t embarrassed the King.

Once I have a stronger sense of each character, I then pit them against each other in a matrix. What does each character think of every other character? Are they opponents, allies, fake-allies, mentors, lovers? This is where the deep nuances appear. At this stage neat plot twists come to mind. Like in “Star Wars”, where Luke fights the epitome of evil, Darth Vader, only to find out he is his father. Consider how that changes things, both in their minds and the reader/viewer’s mind.

When you have organically “grown” a character, strange things happen during the writing of the book. This is what authors refer to as your characters having a mind of their own. A smart writer runs with this to see where it leads. Never force the plot. If I have built a character from his needs, goals, weaknesses and fears then his actions will be true to his character. Such deviations from the outlined plot make for some of the most rich and emotional scenes.

Q: Is there anything you wish you did different in life?

A: Pursued writing from an earlier age. I’ve been writing stories since my teens, off an on, but only got serious in my mid-forties. I wonder where I’d be now if I’d written and submitted to publishers all the way from my early twenties? Perhaps no closer to my writing dream. Regretting missed opportunities or wishing I’d lived life differently isn’t healthy. All I can do is shape the future, or as Gandalf said: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Q: If you ruled the world, talk about one thing you’d want to fix more than anything else.

A: Being over-judgmental. Perhaps this is solidly a first-world problem, but as a species it seems that we become more judgmental as time goes on, when we should be evolving toward the enlightenment that all people are different, we all serve a purpose and that because others do or think differently does not grant us the right to judge them. Who among us is perfect? Who among us has not made mistakes? This is the human condition and is what makes our world richer in depth and experience. Everywhere I go I see racism, elitism, fascism, one faction or group trying to dominate others. The media feeds upon it and perhaps is much to blame for it. I’m not saying that we should form a herd of cattle or that we shouldn’t offer opinions and critique, after all, I think we’d stagnate as a species if we didn’t. What I am saying is be tolerant, don’t overjudge, don’t persecute.

Q: Give us your top five movies of all time and tell us why.

A: Blade Runner – the quintessential pioneer of dystopian and cyberpunk. A grim and somehow unaging glimpse of a possible future and the pitfalls of technology. I’m a sucker for noire, harsh lighting and rain. The fusion of western and oriental culture led the way for many later books and movies. A total classic.

Lawrence of Arabia – my favourite of all the epic movies from the 50′s and 60′s. The scope and setting of this masterpiece is awe-inspiring. A clash of cultures set against the backdrop of The Great War, it is choc full of deep characters and their struggle for duty and honor.

Avatar – Apart from the technological masterpiece of James Cameron “filming within” the CGI world, this is every major plot woven into a movie that toyed with every emotion. There’s the disabled hero made whole in the other world, the gorgeous but seemingly unobtainable woman, stranger-in-a-strange-land, the destruction of nature by the “evil” mining corporation, the irony that the “primitive” natives are more enlightened than all of advanced humanity, hero gets the girl, taboo love, hero almost loses the girl… great movie.

Ice Cold in Alex – a simple, underrated, but treasure of a movie about a group of men trying to drive a truck across the deserts of North Africa during the Second World War. One of them is a German spy. The dynamic between the characters makes this movie, especially when they choose to forgive their sovereign allegiances to work together to survive the harsh environment.

Lord of The Rings – I dare you to find a better example of a fantasy movie(s). Jackson’s interpretation of the books, their cultures and settings, and the incredible special effects make this trilogy some of the best film-making ever. You are sucked into the screen, fighting orcs, travelling through Mordor, cringing in Shelob’s Lair, clapping at the victories. A perfect example of an emotional rollercoaster that never ceases no matter how many times you watch it/them.

Q: I know you’ve had a long time writing group. Talk a little about what that brings to your writing.

A: These guys and gals are my greatest critics… and support group. Invariably they will rip apart my first draft: Too predictable, shallow, slow, not enough tension… but it’s all done in the name of improving our craft and they constantly challenge me to dig deep, rewrite, make the plot and characters stronger, more exciting. My books are significantly better because of this group and I think I’d be lost without them, or at least some kind of group. It really helps to get different perspectives on my writing at an early stage, so that my stories are more polished when I put them into the hands of my beta readers. We don’t all write the same genre either, providing different viewpoints and approaches to writing. One person excels at feedback on big picture or story arcs, another on line editing, or cutting verbosity, etc. I recommend that every author finds a writing group they can trust.

Q: What do you think you can do better in your writing?

A: I think I have yet to capture that deep emotional resonance that makes the reader go “wow” after finishing the last page, that makes them run out and tell all their friends. I don’t even know how to achieve that. Perhaps no author does, perhaps a book sometimes takes on a life of its own. Is it plot, tension, characterization, setting? Yes. All of them, along with a spark of something magical. Readers… what do you think? Care to comment on what makes a book truly great?

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Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

Every since I set out to write my Chinese epic, the Jasmine Wars, I’ve wanted to use a modified version of a famous communist propaganda poster for the cover. You see it in the corner there on the left.  The communists used it in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, an ambitious attempt to open up and allow criticism of the Party after they’d cemented control following the Chinese Civil War.  The phrase came from a speech by Chairman Mao where he said “let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend.” Most historians feel that it was nothing but a cynical attempt to draw dissidents out into the open so they could annihilate them.  As the liberalization campaign collapsed, the communists responded as they usually did: with a brutal purge, executing prominent intellectuals and jailing 520,000 people in re-education camps known as “reform through labor” or Laogai.  Spotty record keeping in China at the time probably meant it was much, much higher, somewhere in the millions.  While its certainly easy to make the argument that Mao just wanted to “lure the snakes out of the hole” the reality was more nuanced and in many ways more sinister.

According to the definitive biography of Mao by Phillip Short, Mao: A Life, the Charmain truly hoped to wed “totalitarianism with democratic checks and balances.” It was his idea and he pushed it forward against great resistance in the upper echelon of the Party.  In a classic display of the Asian principal of Honne and Tatemae, the top cadres publicly agreed but privately grumbled.  Those are Japanese words but they have roots in many Asian societies.  Honne means a person’s true desires and feelings and Tatemae translates literally to “facade,” in other words it’s the face we show in public.  Most leaders in the Party at the time were hardened war veterans, who’d endured incredible hardships, such as the  Long March, part of the communists’ founding myth, where the Red army fled over 6000 miles on foot, an average of 17  miles a day through the mountains, for two years, fighting over two hundred battles and going from a force of hundreds of thousands down to 5000, a feat that no other modern army had every suffered.  These iron men favored discipline over intellectual debate.  Mao pressed forward anyway.

Nevertheless, most of the intellectuals of the time remained silent. They didn’t trust the communists and rightly so, having suffered numerous purges early, exemplified by the smearing and eventual execution of writer Wang Shiwei, along with millions upon millions of party leaders, police, intellectuals, students and peasants both during and after the Chinese Civil War against the Nationalists.  But slowly, slowly, the people opened up.  Criticisms of the Party became vitriolic.  Democracy leagues formed at the universities.  Students criticized the leaders for pretending to represent “the people” when in fact they were nothing but the feudal lords of old transmuted into a new form, an aristocracy separate from the people, with special treatment and privileges.  At first, Mao continued to encourage the dissent in public bu in private he began to express doubts with talk of pulling out the “poisonous weeds” of dissent.

Throughout his life, Mao used a principal he called “luring the enemy in deep” which he developed during the war.  It represented the crystallization of all his ideas in On Guerilla Warfare which he used to tremendous effect in battles throughout the long struggle against the Nationalists and the Japanese invasion in WWII.  In involved tricking the enemy to follow him with numerous retreats and feints, going one way and another, looping back around, all of it meant to tire out a conventional force, which he could then turn back on and assault when they were exhausted and depressed.  It’s easy to make the argument that he was simply using the technique again this time too, luring dissidents out into the open so he could slaughter them.  It’s hard to make that case that some of that wasn’t at work here.  Mao had a notorious instinct for rooting out enemies both real and perceived.  But as Wikipedia notes “Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui, suggested that the campaign was “a gamble, based on a calculation that genuine counterrevolutionaries were few, that rebels like Hu Feng had been permanently intimidated into silence, and that other intellectuals would follow Mao’s lead, speaking out only against the people and practices Mao himself most wanted to subject to reform.” Only when criticisms began shifting toward him personally did Mao move to suppress the Hundred Flowers movement and punish some of its participants.”

Phillip Short goes further, suggesting that Mao indeed hoped that he could let people talk freely.  He gave a speech saying “if you want to grow only [fragrant flowers] and not weeds, it can’t be done…To ban all weeds and stop them growing, is that possible?  The reality is that it is not.  They still grow.”  At the time, intellectuals dared to hope.  “Robert Loh, a Shangahi businessman, remembered ‘I was in a daze.  After Mao’s speech anything seemed possible.  For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to hope.’ But many remained wary.  As the Chinese proverb goes “a man bitten by a snake is afraid of a piece of rope.’”  And yet for years, Mao kept encouraging people to open up and speak freely.  This is not unlike the way the Party currently uses social media, allowing people to criticize leaders so they can keep tabs on them but censoring them if they try to organize.

More complex forces were at work.  The collectivization campaign, that nationalized all private industry after the war, wedding everything to the party, had decimated the rich and educated and crashed the economy.  They wiped out the landlords from the feudal era, killing them off in public show trials, condemning them for being capitalists, the poor peasants shooting, hanging or beating them to death.  The problem is, it’s pretty heard to build a society with no smart people, no engineers, no doctors, no teachers or students.  Mao needed to win those people back if he ever hoped to build a prosperous society.  Intellectuals are by nature critical.  As my greatest teacher, Mr. Dawson, taught me, “critical thinking” represents the essence of all education.

They say every cynic is an idealist.  At his core, Mao was certainly one.  In his younger days, he reacted to absolute horrors in his society.  The life of a Chinese person at the turn of the century echoed the way GRR Martin described medieval life: “nasty, brutish and short.”  In the early years he had the enthusiastic backing of the peasants, who eked out a pitiful existence, living their entire lives under the thumb of the “landlords,” who owned everything.  Landlords is a misnomer.  They were actually “feudal lords” who owned the lives of their peasants completely.  They used private military forces and police to crush dissent.  They often collected taxes of up to 90% decades in advance from their subjects.  Mao wanted to set them free, talking opening of democratic elections and working together.

Mao and soviets of old Russia railed against “capitalism” and “imperialism” because they saw its effects in the lives of the everyman, but these were not the capitalism we know today.  Rather we should better call it mercantilism and colonialism, brutal early offshoots of capitalism that still retained most of the power in the hands of the rich.  We could also call that a plutocracy.  And “imperialism” was really democratic countries like America propping up dictators the world over when it served our interests.  Protesting Americans today talk about the 1% and the 99% but the past shows us what that looked like in real life.  Back at the turn of the century and for thousands of years before that, the 1% owned everything and the peoples’ very lives were theirs to play with at a whim.  No middle class existed.  No concept of individual will or rights mattered to anyone in power at all.  Instead they killed and controlled as they saw fit.

Unfortunately, the war stripped Mao of much of his humanity, killing off at least four of his children and hardening him against anything human, especially weakness.  He also ended up discovering what every communist discovers: communism can only be installed and maintained with force.  It’s incompatible with the individualism of democracy, where everyone freely expresses their own ideas and determines their own destiny.  As Hayek noted in his famous book The Road to Serfdom, “socialism can’t be installed except by methods most socialists find repugnant,” in other words vicious violence and repression.  In a tacit admission of the truth Mao admitted the root of the problem was that “the peasants want freedom but we want socialism.”  In others, we’ll give it to them whether they want it or not.

It’s predictable that the Hundred Flowers Campaign eventually stalled and failed.  If there is one thing a dictator can’t stand it’s criticism.  When the students and his beloved peasants started calling for democracy and the attacks turned personal, Mao reacted the way he always did, with violence, launching the Anti-Rightist campaign.  The term loosely came to mean anyone who disagreed with Mao and whatever he wanted.  It’s ironic that on the surface the term means “right wing” but can also easily mean “someone who is right.”  Mao enjoyed teaching people who thought themselves right that “all power comes from the barrel of a gun.”  Robert Loh, the Shanghai businessman who dared to hope was thrown in jail for twenty years.  He final deathbed words were “never trust the communist party!” Dissent can’t be tolerated, because it turns the lens back on the the autocrats and forces them to acknowledge that they’re tyrants who thought themselves the champions of the people but who had in fact become the ultimate enemies of the people.  As one of my characters says of Mao in my book “you spent your whole life thinking you were on the side of the people and the truth is you were always the enemy of the people.  The worst part is that you didn’t know it.  The devil always thinks he’s God and that’s what makes him more dangerous.  Evil always thinks its good.”

Something even more disturbing lays hidden beneath the surface as we examine the secrets of the Mao era.  It demonstrates clearly a theory from my enlightenment days: belief systems cause more human pain and suffering on Earth than anything else.  The wild eyed communist idealists hoped that they could enshrine the better angels of our nature in steel.  They promised Utopia, but the problem with Utopia is that no two people can agree on what it really means.  Everyone has different ideas.  In the end all belief systems prove false.  Suddenly the Utopia falls apart because nobody can come to a consensus on what that perfect society looks like.  It inevitably comes to mean “one man’s ideal,” the powerful man who can force his ideas in through violence, and everyone who disagrees needs to die to protect that future that ends up further and further out of reach.  In the end, it never comes.  The ends don’t justify the means.  All you get is a lot of unnecessary death and suffering.

After years of war, Mao so believed his own ideas that he could not even conceive that when people were allowed to think for themselves that they would think what they wanted not what he wanted.  This is the flaw of all dictators, the mote in their eye.  They believe that people will come to their conclusions but it never works out that way.  Mao thought that when he exposed people to capitalism and western ideas that they’d naturally see it as a horror, just as he did.  He believed it was self evident.  Like all idealists he believed that if people just had a chance they would selflessly give up everything they had and work together.  But people are contradictions.  We want to help others and themselves.  We want to share but we also want private things.  And left to our own choices, people always want freedom, the freedom to determine their own lives, their own ideas and actions.

When you look closely, it’s easy to see the truth in life.  As Jesus said “by their fruit you will recognize them.”  Many scholars narrowly ascribe this to mean “false prophets” but it can easily be applied to any leader or person of power in history.  Never listen to what a man says.  Pay attention to what he does and more importantly focus on the results of those actions.  The contradictions in men come from what they say but the fruit of their actions always tells the truth.   If a man advocates freedom with his words but brutally suppresses those who disagree with him, the only truth is that he is a psychopath and an evil force in the world.  If a man promises Utopia but only delivers horror than he is a “false prophet” as Mao turned out to be, a man who helped a society throw off the yoke of an old regime, only to seize power himself and bring about something far, far worse.

The warlords and feudal masters never left China, they just transformed into something else.

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