Super-Serendipity June 29, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in Pontification.Tags: philosophy, super-serendipity
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I was at the Sunday market, downing Juanita’s ridiculously fantastic tamales with Magno (short for magnificent), a retired teacher who inspires one to think.
Our conversation turned to the philosophical and the basic question of serendipity and chance arose. What follows is my treatise on the matter.
The are mountains of cliches (which of course are true, or they wouldn’t have achieve the status of cliche): opportunity knocks, success comes to those who seek it, planets are lined up, don’t rest on your laurels, and so on. These are the most true basic framework of laws when contemplating the meaning of life, so I think any theory of everything must permit these truisms to exist within it.
My theory is one of super-serendipity. The idea that there are combinations of times and places where things are incredibly perfect for some other thing to happen. Taking the omnipotent view, there are millions of these coincidental happening occurring at each moment. Taking the personal view, they don’t happen too often, but I think they happen more often than most people recognize.
In the great world of complex systems, serendipity is a reality and is defined as the occurrence of a mathematically significant event. If we think of a large family of complex mathematical formulas which were randomly defined, those which result in a prime number, for example, would exhibit mathematical serendipity. Out of a family of trillions of formulas, only say, a million are super-elegant and therefore super-serendipity has struck. These are your lotto winners. A hundred times more events than that are merely serendipitous, like finding a great friend, and the remainder is just noise. The key here is that serendipity is a reality, and given any level of complexity, is certain to exist in a system. The real problem is, how does one make sure that he, as an individual, is the one to experience this serendipity and super-serendipity, and not some other lucky chap?
Well, if the above mathematical matrix of trillions of random formulas and were our world, it is just a matter of being someone that checks the values on as many times as possible. You must get out there and get in the way of lots of happenings before you find one that is serendipitous or super-serendipitous. You must be consistent, and willing to try a lot of mundane things to find the ones that shine. Interestingly, this process, over a fairly short period of a few months, should overturn unheard-of serendipity. It is just a matter of the mechanisms of this world. But so many people are daunted by this effort, that they don’t bother to look and they develop the excuse that chance is at hand, and there is nothing they can do to affect chance. Bullshit. This isn’t a casino, the house isn’t rigged to win. Its a non-biased complex system. The more you play, the more it will pay.
Then why are there those people that play a great many hands and still turn up fruitless? Because they don’t really believe and they aren’t open to opportunity when it knocks. You can go through the effort of trying a great many things and getting involved in a great many happenings, but many people don’t capitalize on serendipity when it strikes because they don’t trust that it is real. It’s too good to be true.
So you must not only be persistent and put yourself out there, a lot, but you must be ready and willing to recognize and act on and believe in serendipity.
But that is only part one of a two part story. Once you are on a path of aligned planets, because of the nature of this system I describe, those particular planets won’t be aligned for long. You must keep hunting, and never rest on your laurels. As long as you hunt and are open to new and unforeseen serendipities, your success will continue.
Interestingly, science is confirming the existence of statistical harmony in the formation of super-string theory, but for now, I will just ask you to believe that science backs this up as opposed to penning yet more paragraphs as proof.
So what does this mean for you? You absolutely can make unrealistic success happen all by your own initiative. They key is that you cannot predict or control what serendipities you will happen across, you can only control your willingness to embrace them as they come along. Be driven to constantly look for new serendipities, and never settling for less than that. Only then can the world be your oyster.
Fear of Truth February 25, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in Business, Pontification.Tags: Perserverance, Truth
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In my weekend rest, I was reading “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene on the subject of String Theory as a Unified Theory of everything. He is a great writer and I highly recommend this book. It will entertain and engage you. But my post actually doesn’t have anything to do with the book except for the fact that there is a wonderful quote on page 108: “The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.” Cheers to you, Mr. Greene!
Before reading it, I was actually contemplating this very issue today. As an entrepreneur, and as an entrepreneur about to go off to a trade-show in my highly competitive healthcare revenue cycle industry, I am well aware of the fact that there is always something I don’t know, and that there might always be someone else out there ready to trump me. It is probably the scariest thing for me, to go find the truth in life beyond the theories. And yet, it is the most relentless pursuit of my professional existence.
So why is the truth so scary? Well, because things always sound good in your head. But bump them up against the real world and there is absolutely nothing you can do about the result. You can only learn, adapt, and make hay. So many people stop short of learning the truth because, deep down, they don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but not if that bliss drives you into destruction!
And that, I think, is the final definition of progress. Pushing on things that you have to do, but don’t want to. Be it getting the sell to the closing decision maker, measuring your product against a competitor, or inviting a third party auditor in to criticize everything you do. All of these acts yield truth and must be pursued no matter how painful.
Welcome to the real world.
Surrounded by Greatness February 15, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in Business, Pontification.1 comment so far
What strikes me each day is the utter greatness that is in the people of this world, and what awes me is that the greater I become, the people around me seem twice greater still. Said another way, the more I learn, the more I realize what others have within them that I do not. What is realization to me is humdrum knowledge to another, and I find that incredibly cool.
Today I interacted with greatness. We were talking with a customer about some new magic we had created to straighten the winding roads of the hospital revenue cycle. Well, what was big to us was but a kernel to him, and truthfully, he was able to take that magic and belittle it with a ten-fold embellishment that struck us hard with “aha!” So what does that make our role? A catalyst. There is a lot of value to being a catalyst. But my point is that this experience took what was conclusion within myself and turned it into the realization of a new, even greater, conclusion. This happens to me every day. I live each day feeling good about what I know, but every day I come home with a heck of a lot more than I started with and that is due directly to the influence of those who are around me.
I must admit that my luck is unsurpassed in being surrounded by great people. They are my family, my partners, my friends, my employees, my investors, my advisers, and my clients. Every day I learn more about myself, enabling me to see in them ever more to draw upon, and ever more to be in awe of. That isn’t to say that I am not confident in who I am and what I know, because confidence has always been a prominent part of my persona. But looking back, I can’t believe I was arrogant enough to be so confident, considering the good company I was in.
Corny you say? Get to know the people I know. Then you won’t think so.
The Data Currency February 6, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in Business, Pontification, web3.0.Tags: Analysis, Data Warehouse, Google, web2.0, web3.0
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They say, “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Ever more so, data is the gold of our world today.
There is wild power that can be derived from data. Just look at Google’s discovery that probability-based deduction is more efficient at language translation than knowledge-based lexical and syntactic analysis. That means that Google has so much data, and so much computing power to crunch it, it is faster to simply compare translated texts to each other than it is to bother figuring out what the text means or how it is structured!
If data is gold, than those who have gold are banks. Banks only take a portion of the gold in exchange for holding and transacting the gold. A fine business, but the lion’s share of the market value is still in the gold, not the bank. The gold only realizes its value when someone spends it to create something new and useful.
Having tons of data at your disposal is certainly a path to money, and I know that is obvious to most of you. But what is not always understood is that the real value lies in the rationalization of that data more than in the data itself. In the Google example, it isn’t having all the books lying around in different languages that created the value; it is the resulting language algorithm that means something.
When you analyze data, you spend it to create new information and a method to act on it. At Benchmark, we spend data to drive work more efficiently to hospital administrators. This allows hospitals get more of the money that they are owed, thanks to information gleaned from data taken from all over the revenue cycle. At Bank of America, the data is spent to understand what kind of risk they can take on a person applying for a loan (at least, that was how they did it before sub-prime).
So many of the Web2.0 and Web3.0 companies are about becoming banks of data… or databanks… old term, new times. Yes, I know, you get advertising revenues from having lots of people, and advertisers can mine their use statistics to arrive at a CPM value. But that is merely a smidgeon of that data’s earning potential! Mass databanks coupled with ergonomic knowledge systems will resolve serious world issues and drive the final nail into the coffin for information inefficiency and guess-work, regardless of the scale of question to be answered.
Of course, such a utopia will never be fully realized, but we are on the verge of a prototype. Mass storage with Internet accessibility, the concept of (but as yet poor implementation of) semantic web, Google’s indexing of pages, and the ever-more-open architecture of the social-network infrastructure all lay the groundwork for a knowledge revolution.
It is exciting, but few seem to fully grasp the implications. Well, I know one thing for sure: healthcare will be one of the first to demonstrate this great power, so long as I continue to have something to do with it 
String of Luck February 5, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in My Life, Pontification.Tags: Larry Niven, Luck, Ringworld, Science Fiction, Spirituality
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My wife and I were out on the town Saturday night with another couple (Rob and Carissa) with whom we recently became friends. With the racket of dueling pianos ricocheting about our heads and the uneven haze brought on by far too many diet cokes in our stomachs, Rob and I managed to connect on a spiritual level. Well, sort of.
There is a fantastic book written in 1970 called Ringworld, by Larry Niven. In this book, aliens (known as “puppeteers” because they meddle in human kind and have two heads) have introduced a breeding lottery for the population control of humans. This lottery implies that to have children is a lucky thing, and the aliens’ theory was that a family composed of a string of lottery winners, say 5 generations, would be unnaturally lucky.
There is a far away “planet” that the cowardly puppeteers want to travel to that is actually a man-made ring around a sun, with a circumference roughly equal to Earth’s own orbit. For the dangerous journey, they select an old wise human, a battle ready yet tame-enough-to-be-civil alien called “Speaker to Animals” and the luckiest of all humans, a girl named Tila. Tila was born of this string of luck and also had no experience with unlucky events in her life.
The bottom line is that this girl was so lucky that it was her luck that drove the aliens to pick her, then to crash the ship, and then to take her to a town on the Ringworld where she finds her only true love. The girl was so lucky that she found her love at the expense of everyone else. Her luck was hers and nobody else’s. This brings us to Rob and me.
Rob insists, and I believe him, that he is unnaturally lucky. In fact, he is apparently famous for getting parking spaces that are impossibly perfect during impossible times. He will say, “I will get the spot closest to the entrance to the ballpark, even though we are late.” Everyone in the car will hear this, and sure enough, he drives right into the spot he fully expected to get!
I am the same. Ask my friend Seth G. At poker one night (Texas Hold ‘Em), he was out and I was in. I am known (though less-so than the great Cliff Boro) for winning on luck and hitting big on the river. I told Seth that I play with heart and that is a good bet. He didn’t buy it. So, I was dealt two hearts and knew for sure I would hit a flush. I leaned over to Seth and said, “This will be a flush, and I will bet as such.” The flop? A heart, and spade and a club. I bet the table, drawing them out still on a flush of hearts. The turn, a heart. I bet more, drawing the table out further. Big pot now! And the river? You guessed it, a heart. I knew all along.
So, I am lucky, Rob is lucky. Is Cliff lucky? No. Crazy, reckless at poker, a workaholic and a saint to everyone. But I don’t think Cliff is lucky as in this innate string of luck. Sorry Cliff. This string of luck is about foreseeing the positive outcome… and about that foresight almost never being wrong. This doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen to me, but it does mean that if I feel something is good, it will be.
I know, I know. Probability doesn’t permit this. You can get 20 heads in a row, and the probability of the next flip hitting heads is still 50/50. But I have a long and storied history proving the opposite, and so does Rob, proving to me that some other physical string of “luck” is tied to some of us that is a matter of fact, not a matter of unbridled statistics.
So, do you have it? You’d know if you do.
Honesty in Business, Honesty in Life February 2, 2008
Posted by Tyson McDowell in Pontification.Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, web2.0, web3.0
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I was just at the Connect CEO Strategy forum today and presenting was Mitch Thrower of Active.com fame. Now, I am a Connect Springboardgraduate, and have found them to be incredible (we are now funded, can’t say they didn’t do their job), so I trust them implicitly when they say that something will be worth my while. But, who the heck is Mitch Thrower? Mitch, if you’re reading this, your reputation didn’t precede you with me… boy was I surprised.
His presentation was fantastic. I walked away with my mind spinning. The talk was about Web2.0 and Web3.0 implications to my life as a CEO, and I haven’t been presented to by anyone who has engaged me so well.
The topic is interesting because I, at 25, am part of ”this” generation of kids that grew up with MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin and so on. Many of the group were not of this generation. So when Mitch posed the questions “how do I control my on-line identity” and “what kind of policy must a company enlist to limit it’s exposure through employee sites” and so on, my natural answer was… nothing. Others in the room were obviously worried.
In this world, all of our choices are exposed, and memorialized in fully index search history. I, for one, see that as an opportunity. I love that people can “get” who I am very quickly by interacting with my on-line self. I appreciate that everything I do can be known by anyone, and so I just live my life with the expectation that everyone knows.
You know what, it makes me an honest man. And honest doesn’t mean you don’t do what you want to do. It means you do what you want to do, but back that up! Someone might call you on that little airshow you did over your partner’s ranch, or laugh at your picture that was taken at that party when men dressed as women and vice-versa. But it doesn’t matter. Saying “that is me and I stand behind who I am” brings credibility and personality to you, and therefore trust is established.
In the “old days” people would hide who they are, whereas now, not unlike due diligence on each-other, who you are is out in the naked open. The result? You end up not doing business or becoming friends with those that don’t pass your personal diligence. It isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it makes you happier!
To me the moral is, with this new-fangled web thing roaring on scene at full tilt, embrace the fact that you will be exposed fully and forever. Just be honest with who you are in every action that you do, and all things recorded about you, in aggregate, will invariably reflect that honest you. Then, simply, be happy with who you are and wear your skin well. All will be okay.
