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Steve Jobs: The Übermensch

// October 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // Business, News, Philosophy, Technology

“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?  All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of the great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?  What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment”. ~Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra

That is how I would describe Steve Jobs. The Man who always strives to overcome himself, to overcome its limitations. The Man who inspires by simply being himself, and doing what he does. A Man that simply cannot be overshadowed. The Man whose creations do not only inspire by the virtue of their creation but by awe to their potential. The Super-Man…

I could not have written it better:

“I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live.  Thus seeks he his own down-going.  I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going”. ~Nietzsche

I love him… I will miss him… Rest in peace!

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”

The illusion of scarcity. How our survival instinct might lead to the end of our survival.

// July 28th, 2011 // No Comments » // Environment, Philosophy

One of the greatest dilemmas for the human mind is that believing we control it makes us feel, in fact, more in control. It gives us “accountability”, everything that happens to us is a result of our choices…

This belief is deeply integrated into our teachings. It starts with the bible and the story of Eden: how the first man and woman ate the forbidden fruit and came to know right from wrong! The education system is structured accordingly, reinforcing the same message that there is a very precise correct answer to every question, and a specific correct behavior for every setting. Your grades, your acceptance, even the love given to you depends on your capability to recognize what is considered to be correct.

Therefore we are trained to believe that the more failures you have in life, lesser are your grades, credits or social status and therefore more you stay “behind”. The more you stay behind the less you are “accepted”, the less you are loved. The less you feel loved the more you fear not to be loved. The more the fear, deeper the pain. Deeper the pain, stronger the anger. Longer the anger, faster the depletion of emotional and physical resources, fear of death and finally domestication…

Domestication of animals is something that hunter gatherers have been doing since 20.000 years, starting during the ice-age. Through the ages they have perfected the techniques and have been able to rule over herds with very little or no effort whatsoever. The key to domestication has always been the exploitation of the survival instinct. Once the animal believes he has no other chances of survival but to yield, it “brakes”, so by means of restriction of freedom, inflicted pain, fear, hunger, and little treats humans ruled over animals. This process has a name in psychology:  “Operant Conditioning” (heard of Pavlov’s dog?)

Operant Conditioning: A process of behavior modification in which a subject is encouraged to behave in a desired manner through positive or negative reinforcement, so that the subject comes to associate the pleasure or displeasure of the reinforcement with the behavior.

Some very twisted mind, down the road successfully tested the same methods on his fellow humans. Our society is running on a curriculum built by a very experienced animal trainer and this is why it works to the perfection:

Many philosophers, psychologists and now scholars of the inner workings of the mind believe that we have two very distinctively separate minds. Our conscious mind and our unconscious mind. Two allegories that I have read in a book recently described this to me with an unprecedented clarity (The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt). One was the Chariot Allegory of Plato where the mind is a chariot trailed by two horses. One of the horses, the white one, is depicted as the moral impulse, or positive passions of our unconscious mind while the other horse (black) represents our irrational passions, appetites or better our ego. The charioteer represents our rational mind, trying to control the chariot and especially the black horse with the help of the white horse. An incredibly insightful addition to this allegory by the author that cracked me up is the presence of a third character, our conscience, represented by the charioteer’s father sitting in the back constantly nagging him of everything he did or was doing wrong.

A more elegant, simpler allegory presented by the author was that our unconscious mind is an elephant, and our rational mind is a little rider on top and that it would be absurd to even think that the rider could lead the elephant by force.

In both allegories and in many cases of laboratory experiment and research it is clear that most of our choices are made by our unconscious mind, the animal. And there is one circuit that shuts everything else down, throws the rider off or barely allows him to grab onto something and ride along: the survival instinct.

And by tapping into this circuit, by building an illusion of scarcity, scarcity of love, scarcity of resources, scarcity of belonging, scarcity of happiness man inflicted man with fear, and that is how man ruled over man.

The animal trainer, is the charioteer that let the white horse loose, left the reins to the black horse and then threw his father to the wolves to sit back and relax…

Led by man with no father (conscience), no white horse (righteousness) and no reins (rationality) humanity is on a crash course with the survival instinct of a bigger being: Mother Nature!

The problem is that now that circuit is shorted and our survival lies in our capability in resolving a paradox (which by definition is a paradox in itself): only by letting go of our fear of death, by accepting it, by shutting down our survival instinct we will be able to survive…

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”

Why we build? The dangerous mind of an engineer in love

// March 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Business, Philosophy, Technology

It is very inspiring to see that year after year we see huge improvements in durability, design, efficiency and overall quality in almost every area of our consumer lives.

Be it a building, a service or a simple tool, everything that you can buy or utilize has been improved in many ways. Interestingly enough while the main driver of the improvement seems to be the economy and what they call the ‘free markets’, when you look closely you will see that the real visionaries, the paradigm changers, the pioneers of advancement never did this for the money. They did earn a lot of it, but it was only an end result never the goal.

It all starts in how we look at things. There are people that look and remain in awe and get intimidated, there are people that look and do not get it so they stone what they see either in malice or jealousy, there are people that look and try to copy but never quite get it right and always stay behind… There are many kind of people, that look but do not see. And then there are this other people, the people who see something and they immediately try to think on how it could be done better. They see every problem as a challenge, an opportunity to evolve…

This is why, this is how we create. This is why regardless of our economy, regardless of any political regime or regulation, evolution will never stop.

Mark Zuckerberg commented on the movie “the Social Network” by saying:

“They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”

I do not only agree completely but think that it is more then liking, it is a crave, it is “love” to build… the same crave and love that created the Universe, after all whatever or whoever created the Universe, into the face of Darwin, was clearly an “Engineer in love”!

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”

Sustainable Life

// February 26th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Environment, Philosophy

Meet your savior :

Sustainable: a method of harvesting or utilizing a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged

This is what nature and its circle of life teaches us. This is the only way that life was always supposed to be. This is how we should create, this is how we should consume.

It is a pity that the human intellect, so amazingly bright and resourceful is so easily blinded or better numbed by abundance and is inclined to see the truth only when faced with an imminent danger or even worse, after the complete loss of what was once abundant.

This behavior is so common among humans that I am starting to think that this has to be a genetic trait. The common sense points more to a global brain washing conspiracy plotted by the ones in power several centuries ago but it is more painful to accept that we all could be unconsciously controlled so easily. Apparently we tend to prefer to believe a lie if told masterfully then face the cold truth.

It is the blue pill, red pill paradox depicted in Matrix. Cipher misses the taste of a juicy steak that he eats in the Matrix even if he knows it is not real. So if given the choice, knowing what the truth is, how many really would have taken the red pill? My guess is not many…

The truth is that it is a simple mathematical fact that resources are finite. In a friendship, if you continue to be the one taking from it, the friend will eventually have nothing to give anymore. In business if you are the employer and continue to be demanding of your employees without giving them equal value in experience or compensation, they will eventually quit, steal or not perform anymore. If you are the employee and you continue to slack and not perform what is expected of you in exchange for a fair compensation, eventually you will be fired and hardly find a better job. If you spend more then you have, you will have eventually people at your door taking all that you have, including your liberties…

These are fairly simple concepts that most of us understand and try to act accordingly although we still fail miserably most of the times. The fact that in ANY relationship be it material or emotional the amount of resources are always finite is not something that we want be reminded of. I believe the reason for this is that it is pretty scary and limiting! It is like having an accountant on your shoulders 24/7, and not only for money matters but in every action you take, fuck that!

There is a bigger problem though in how the ones that are aware of this major issue are trying to make people change. Imminent danger, fear of loss, legislation, peer pressure, emotional manipulation are not sustainable methods in themselves to change this behavior. The majority of people have not enough courage to face the truth when left alone. They will all eventually fade away and turn back to be their usual denial.

There is only one way to accept all this and make a change: to understand that we are all one. The minute we internalize the fact that each and every cell of the universe is weaved together as a single dna and that there is no self, we can start and act accordingly. History tells us that this kind of unison is more likely to happen only after we face a major loss. I wish this weren’t true, but believing the opposite would be to create simply another kind of Matrix…

What we need at the core is to find better ways to teach as many people as possible what it really means to feel as one, to act as one, because if there is only one thing that is unsustainable is believing we are apart!

The resources of the world being depleted, crime, poverty, are only symptoms, and you cannot fight an illness by attacking the symptoms, you can only snooze the discomfort..

And that is the last thing we should want to do…

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”

Building Momentum: The excruciating wait

// January 21st, 2011 // No Comments » // Business, Philosophy

It is one of the most difficult times in business. You have done the hard part of building something great and now is in the wild, getting some traction.

You are not nearly done though and as one part of you wants to build more, you need to have focus on germinating the first seedlings, grow your first fruits and do your first harvest so that you can have better knowledge of your current production quality and optimize it for the second round.

Now while building and optimizing you realize you are growing and your maintenance needs are increasing exponentially. You can’t do it all yourself anymore. You need more people, and you need the best, which are always very hard to find.

As you gain more traction you realize this energy building up at the core of your venture. It is like a shining globe radiating spikes of light in every direction but you know that it is not ready to let loose.

This is a point of no return, you either need to feed it for it to grow or it will die away. On the other hand it is so fragile that you also need to build a structure to contain it. It can self implode or disperse in the air if you don’t…

And you just know that if you succeed, one day this energy will be stable and big enough that it will start feeding itself and will not need to be contained anymore. Until then, the wait is excruciating.

That gentle rumbling sound of the vibrations emitted from the sphere, like the heartbeats of a baby in an incubator: relaxing and horrifying at the same time…

Like every caring father, I need to tend to it with patience, love, care and faith… I am sure it will grow to become this incredible creature!

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”

Open Letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt

// November 16th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Business, Philosophy, Technology

Dear Eric,

It is only with respect and awe that I can express my appreciation in regards to all the various technological improvements that you brought into our lives in a way that is changing the way we live in a very fundamental way. I am so glad to see that you are not limiting yourself to the internet, but that you are bringing your problem solving skills to areas that many wouldn’t even dare challenge.

While most of the focus on the mobile market is about the competition you have against Apple, I clearly understand that for you Android is simply a platform enabling you to bring the innovation you have done for the web to our daily lives in a more personal and intimate way. Given the mobile OS options already in the market were not nearly robust enough for your standards and the iOS being closed your only option was to build your own. I can also understand your focus on reach over standardization. But I think you have tip toed your way around the question about OS fragmentation.

You are saying that applications will work seamlessly across all android devices but you know that this is simply not true. As long as you distribute the OS as open source and allow mobile device makers to modify it to their likes, fragmentation is inescapable. I believe that this will eventually frustrate developers AND users that will not find the same experience or application support from device to device.

I am a big advocate for open source but Android is a Google brand and it carries the weight of big expectations. I do believe that forcing certain standards and limitations on what mobile hardware developers can modify and still call their system Android would at least allow users to make their choices in a more informed manner. Only making the Android brand an approved by Google stamp can give you the platform you are dreaming about and therefore I would suggest you control at least the use of it. By allowing every piece of cheap hardware junk ride on the Android wave, you are not only jeopardizing the trust that the users have on your brand but you are also allowing opportunist approaches to defraud the end consumer which has no idea on how to judge hardware quality and therefore finds refuge in seeing your logo on it for his economical decision.

I am not suggesting closing the usage of the Android OS source itself, but to limit the use of the brand Android. or “based on Android”. This implies that you build an approval process based on various quality criteria (software AND hardware) before allowing anybody to put your logo on their devices.

You also mentioned that society sociopolitical views are limiting the development of technology in many ways. Wasn’t this always the case ? Didn’t the same fear try to stop many geniuses throughout history? When you said that is not google’s job to decide what is acceptable by society not only you betrayed me, but you have betrayed science and humanity! When did society know what was acceptable? During the inquisition? Galileo? Newton? Einstein? Tesla?

It IS Google’s job to decide what SHOULD be acceptable for society and fight for it! If any of the big innovators ever approached society the way you had, we would never be where we are today. We owe, YOU owe them everything you are today just because they said NO to what society thought was acceptable and forced them to open their eyes.

Please reconsider your position. You are in a place where you really can make a big difference, use every bit of that power to push society for the better.

Best Regards

Sadok Kohen
“In truth, without deceit, certain and most veritable”