The Past Catches Up

I guess you could call this a nostalgia fest, of sorts.

As a kid, I used to be enthralled by a series of cheap little books that Santa used to drop down the chimney in batches every Christmas.  I knew them as 'project books'.  Here's the full catalogue:

They were published around 1970, and I still have a few sitting on a shelf.  They were a huge drain on my time back then.

They were exclusive to Woolworth and Woolco, but apparently published by the Milk Marketing Board, believe it or not:

And, with glorious hindsight, that must have been true.  This one is especially ironic:

Job Done

The Walpurgis '50@50' challenge, before and after...

Before

After

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Focus

“For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.”
~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Fiend

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rimee of the Ancient Mariner

Progress

From a piece originally written in May 2003.  I doubt much has changed.

There seems to have been a debate raging in school physical education for many years.  In one camp, kids should play competitive sports; they love to do this, and it prepares them for the competitive real world, as well as teaching them sporting values - 'sportsmanship'.  The critics say that the less athletic children lose out, which is, to a point, true.

In the other camp, kids play contrived, essentially non-competitive games.  Everybody gets and equal turn with the ball.  Critics say this is pathetic, and is sheltering kids from the reality of adult life.  Also largely true.

I remember when I was a kid, and I'm going back to primary school age here, what would happen whenever a football showed up in the playground.  Two kids would put an arm around each other and start walking around each other in a small circle shouting "All join on for FOOT-ball!" repeatedly.  As more kids joined both ends of this slowly rotating line it would get bigger and louder, and eventually most of the boys in the playground would have joined on (the girls were segregated in a different area, practicing their incomprehensible dark arts, like 'hopscotch').  At this stage there could be forty kids or more in the line.

Having reached critical mass, the line would stop rotating, and the two original instigators, who were now de facto team captains, would start picking their teams.  The process was on the face of it fairly harsh, but no one at all seemed to mind.  Captain A would pick a player, then Captain B, and so on until everyone in the line, including the no-hopers who could barely kick a ball, had been allocated to a team.  If no goalkeepers volunteered, the 'floating goalie' contingency was invoked, and the game would commence.  It would continue until the bell sounded for start of lessons.

It seems to me that the kids had solved at least some of the problems which routinely fox adults.  The teams were uniquely well balanced, due to the process of selection.  Inclusion was voluntary, not coercive, but absolutely anyone who joined the line would play, without being given a hard time, so most kids enthusiastically joined in irrespective of talent.  The game was very definitely competitive, but because the identity of a team evaporated with the bell, the result of each game was largely irrelevant.

Which is kind of interesting, but not really a comprehensive solution to the school PE problem I guess.

I grew up in an era when more-or-less the be all and end all of school PE was sports of some kind.  In other words, there was no actual physical education at all.  If you were already reasonably good at running or football you did okay, otherwise you hated it, and in either case your learned absolutely nothing sustainable (apart from the mechanics of the sport in question).  You did not learn about the paramount importance of taking responsibility for your own physical condition, the satisfaction of improving and developing your own capabilities and the near total irrelevance of comparing those capabilities with someone else's.

The most vital single factor in physical development and personal satisfaction is progression, preferably steady and consistent progress.  When I was at school, if a kid could run the four-mile cross country in such-and-such a time, and you couldn't even run it at all, then he could run and you couldn't and that was that.  No one told you what I didn't learn until my twenties - that if you can only jog a quarter of a mile without stopping, that's okay as long as you come back tomorrow and add a hundred yards or so.  And that after a few years of this you, you useless no-hoper, will be running marathons.

And that this principle applies to virtually everything - running faster, running further, doing lots of press ups, lifting heavy weights. Just about the only important thing that a PE teacher could teach you I was never taught in god knows how many years of schooling.

I hope it's different nowadays.  That would be progress.

He Wishes For The Cloth Of Heaven

By William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams.

The Origin of Spatt G'dan Chukk

A couple of years ago I participated for a while in 'play-by-post' D&D - basically a form of collaborative storytelling with a complicated game layer on top (or beneath).  The game I was in petered out when the dungeon master had to take a sabbatical, but I was fond of my character, so here for posterity is the origin of Spatt G'dan Chukk...

"Spatt G'dan Chukk is a scar-cheeked dwarven fighter, freebooting vagabond and veteran of the Bactari Exsurrection, where with some gusto he had kneecapped over twenty of his taller Varellian foes with his swirling warhammer before the distraction of a boot lost to the mud gave an opportunistic half orc the chance to land a heavily gauntleted fist squarely on top of his helmet, simultaneously breaking his nose and jamming it over his eyes. Undaunted, Spatt had charged his adversary, oblivious to the fact that the malodorous meat loaf had already gone down in a welter of quarrels, and the resulting misadventure pitched the dwarf head first into a ditch where he spent the rest of the battle sleeping peacefully. Of the four hundred militiamen and irregulars who had turned out to face down the cynical land-grab that morning, only two dozen survived to kick the Baron's (by then) naked arse in the direction of the Fell Marsh, and each eyed the dazed looking miniature myrmidon with some suspicion as he waddled over from the steaming carnage at the long-vacated east end of the battlefield. ButSpatt had survived the letter of the battle, whether or not he'd bested the spirit of it, and a liberal smattering of beer-sodden embellishments sown amongst the ale houses of the Southern Palatine were sufficient to etch his name in history, to the extent that it would give him a head start in securing any reasonable commission that took his fancy.

Spatt's father had been the legendary dwarf rogue Bax'n Ab Chukk, who met his untimely demise attempting an
ill thought through cesspit excursion when Spatt was still learning to dress and bevel bassalt. The size of the rogue's accumulated haul was the stuff of fevered speculation, but since Spatt was the Seventh Son of his industrious father's Ninth True Love, his dividend was likely to be meager, even if any would-be Executor had actually been able to locate Ab Chukk's estate in the first place.

Spatt's powers of concentration were not high, and having never mastered the art of abating an adoquin abutment he decided at the tender age of 40 to sign up with The King's Own Overground Legion, Seventh Cohort, 3rd Cave Group. A grumpy but productive apprenticeship ensued, ending in an unfortunate misunderstanding over the contents of the Cave Group Commander's back pack, whereupon Spatt found himself abandoned a hundred leagues from home, and deeply mistrustful of any animal able to convey him back there before his beard turned grey.

And so, armed only with his genetic predisposition to larceny and a crude, low altitude competence with hafted weapons, Spatt Waz Bax'n Ab G'dan Chukk set off to make his fortune in this world, or any other that took his fancy..."

The Mountain is defined by its Summit

Without a doubt my favorite book during my lifetime so far, despite its many faults, has been Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.  No contest.  I found it on a book rack on holiday in Morecambe with my parents in the 1970's, and was mesmerised from the first page.

At one point the protagonist, a version of the author himself, is hiking up a mountain with his son, who in due

course gives up the climb, upset with himself.  The author attributes the problem to what he calls 'ego climbing', something the son has picked up from the Boy Scouts - climbing to achieve the goal of reaching the peak.  Pirsig instead draws attention to the climb itself, and the enjoyment of the details along the way - the grass, the geology, the exertions of your own body.  The things we should notice.  We should be enjoying the mountain sides, and our journeys up them, however arduous, he implies.

But, he goes on to say, it is the summit which defines the mountain sides, so up we go.

This has been such an important and universally applicable observation throughout my life that I'm inclined to make a plaque of it.  There is no doubt that establishing 'goals', in business, sport or hobbies demonstrably leads to better performance (whether or not said goals are hit, and provided that they are well framed so as to avoid unpleasant side-effects).  The curious thing for me though is that this is true even though the goals themselves don't really stand scrutiny, and aren't even that important in themselves.  It's just that they provide a sort of structure for a life well lived, and for activities which are meaningful.  In the moment.

I'm reminded of this now because for the last three months I've been training for an event I've dubbed '50 at 50'.  It's my fiftieth year, and as a sort of tenuous link I decided to have a go at getting through fifty rounds of sparring, in this case in historical European martial arts, in a single day.  And having decided to do that, it was a short step to use this as a vehicle for fund raising for a couple of charities which resonate with me.

Now I thoroughly enjoy sparring, and I thoroughly enjoy working with historical European martial systems, but trying to get through fifty full contact, full speed rounds is hair-brained at best, and the whole idea not only has no cosmic significance, it has no significance at all.  There's certainly no medal at the end of it.  A pizza perhaps.

But the reality is that over the last three months I've progressively trained harder than I otherwise would have by an order of magnitude, that I've thoroughly enjoyed and been completely engaged by the weight lifting, the distance running, the drilling, the sparring, the sprinting and the dietary, er, moderation.  And I feel great, and that's a reinforcing factor.

Apart from the physical improvement, I've learned a lot that I otherwise probably wouldn't have accessed, especially from other people who've offered up their knowledge and experience.  Sport science and biological energy systems, left-ventricular hypertrophy and oxygen transport, VO2, 16th Century German longsword, 19th Century English sabre, performance psychology, the quotations of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to "man up you puff", not to forget my groin guard, presence and flow, and, especially, the power of a well applied daruma doll.

I'm looking forward to the event now, 27th April, the last Sunday before Walpurgisnacht, but if it didn't happen I'd have lost nothing and gained a lot.

And all because the mountain is defined by the summit.

Inauguration

A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote, drank a fair bit of Bodega Stratus wine over a fabulous lunch in the Plaza of the Princessa Yaiza, and that afternoon set up The Strategy Exchange (now www.thestrategyexchange.co.uk/blog) as my first blogging venture.  I found that the blog format, the 21st Century version of Montaigne's conception of the 'essay', bridged the gap between my compulsion to write stuff and my lack of sufficient discipline actually to tackle a book.  I've written a lot of first chapters over the years.

In time The Strategy Exchange morphed from being my blog into being a business, and though the blog survives it leaves me with a gap in two respects.  Firstly, there's a lot of stuff which is part of what I am, and which I'd like to write about, that simply wouldn't be appropriate for what has become a corporate site.  And secondly, people are actually reading The Strategy Exchange Blog.

So The Xris Project came into being as a place for me to capture thoughts and such about the rest of me.  It's an artificial division of course.  The strategist that enjoys hacking business models and the conditions for competitive advantage is the same strategist that enjoys chess and martial arts.  The strategist that mines the worlds of technology, economics, politics, social science and (especially) the overlaps between them for 'drivers of change' that apply to corporate and business contingent strategic planning is the same strategist that mines these fields just for the hell of it.

But over time The Strategy Exchange has necessarily become, if not more 'formal', maybe a bit more limited in scope.  Certainly less useful (as originally intended) as a dustbin for all the stuff on 'the cutting room floor', to quote my friend, facilitator and strategic planner, Adrian Nixon.

So The Xris Project is my 'other place'.  A bit more relaxed, broader in scope.  I've described it as a thematic journal because I'm intending to blog about stuff that comes to me in the flow of life, but I've never been one to journal mechanically, on a temporal basis.

In particular, it's not really a blog that is intended to be read.  I'm not sure who would read it.  Maybe the wonders of tagging will make some specific themes of interest to specific people, I don't know.  I'll try and pay attention to this.  But why someone who is interested in the conditioning of alactic energy systems would also have an interest in quantum computing or 15th Century German fencing manuals is beyond me.  And that, of course, includes myself.

Xris, by the way, is more or less the Greek spelling of my name.  I find that it's more useful than 'chris' when hunting for unused user names...