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Historically a marquee was a large and often sumptuous tent. When I grew up, it was the big lit sign outside movie theaters and concert venue. In recent years we have heard of marquee customers, clients, accounts, assets, players, performers, and marquee environmental laws.  It has been used to mean several things including exceptionally popular, skilled, outstanding, flagship, the crown jewel, prized advantage or highly visible symbol of success. 

A recent exciting usage I am expanding upon here in today’s posting is Marquee Moments, which seems to imply moments of great importance, code for makes for a good headline.

To my mind, they can be more than a headline but an opportunity for change or pivoting based upon insights, newly revealed, discovered or invented. Or dare I say innovated? You knew that would be coming right?

Innovators tend to have many impactful professional moments. The first invention first shipped product, first funds raised, first time meeting a payroll, first time not meeting payroll, next revs of each rapidly follow early successes and first failures.  Some of these moments stand out head and shoulders above the others, referred to as Marquee Moments.

My First Marquee 

My first big one occurred on my first day of school in the schoolyard before classes began as a five-year-old casually asking some of the other kids what books they were reading and what they thought about them. This outreach garnered pretty much no response at all, so I asked a few other questions which generated a worse reaction. I was told to stop using big words because they made people feel stupid. Now as a first child the only conversations I had previously, were with my parents and relatives, so I was stunned and genuinely asked which words were the big ones. It only took a few more minutes before I determined I had better relate by being an athlete than a conversationalist.

This realization that I was not like most of the other kids in the schoolyard was a real shocker, and I am sure many of you have also encountered the mismatch between “normal” and “you.” On the other hand, I had many other things to read and think about as well as learning how to play stickball, dodgeball, punchball and to fight (this was Brooklyn in the 1950s).

Being all of five, I did not dwell on differences between me and the other kids much although it was crystal clear that I was operating using a different core logic than others, a fact reinforced every day. Having been surrounded by inventors, artists, musicians, and other marginalized deviants, it all came out in the wash, only recently resurfacing as the press describes the marquee moments presumably all of society and the nation are currently facing.

Much to my amazement, thinking creative people are baffled by what is going on outside of us. It is indeed an unusual time, even for one who grew up in the sixties where our agenda was to dismantle society and change the values so deviance could be tolerated and also celebrated. 

What is more distressing at this moment in time is the wave after wave of poor behavior and poor decision making, the people who think they are running the world are exhibiting, and I do not mean to limit this to the most elevated levels!  At this moment neither government, nor business, nor religion, nor do educators know what to do, how to do it or even to behave correctly.  In short, things feel like they are falling apart more than usual and I have never been a massive fan of authorities also as I became one.

It appears that we are reaching s super marquee moment where humanity is going to have to either take responsibility and learn how to collaborate or continue to be selfish and greedy and die out. The good news is we do have the opportunity to get our act together mostly due to the democratization of technology which has radically reduced so many barriers to change, the primary one of which is the ability to communicate. We have become a networked species where almost everyone on the planet has a supercomputer in their pocket that is not only super computationally powerful but also super connected in ways that are mind-blowing even for someone who helped invent them.

Seriously, folks, the time has come for us to get it together and that means to vote and to communicate and most of all to stop assuming that society has any idea at all how to manage itself. Our schools and governments are failing, and yes our businesses are making money but still disenfranchising the vast majority of the human race.  In short, this is as unsustainable as the dark ages were for a straightforward reason – thoughts, once thought,  cannot be unthought. Since there are now many millions of networked connected people who already have personally experienced how well collaboration works, those unwilling to work together will either have to kill the majority of the human race or get out of the way. 

In 2005 when I founded SVII the very first web page key message was Innovate or Die. This statement is far more true today than it was then. I have gone out of my way for these last thirteen years, not to be political, for I found it too divisive. Society seems to be seriously busted, and our democracy is in danger of failing. Also, our school systems are not teaching people what they need most in the world, how to learn. Increasing numbers of coaches and preachers are perverts. Our political leaders have no idea how to do anything other than be self-serving and are too insecure to have a real conversation and at least there is one thing we can still count on, many bosses and companies are still exploitative. 

We currently produce enough food to feed the planet and enough energy to power the earth. So what is the problem? Simple, the deep hole in the soul of the zero-sum game folks, who derive power stealing it from others cannot be filled up by consumption, nor acquisition of power. There is nothing external that will ever solve their issues of existential angst. Life and happiness are an inside job and now more than ever no one should be depending on anyone outside making their life work. The loyalty of employees toward their employers and vice-a-versa is now gone. Marriage is not doing that great either. If people do not work on themselves and work on getting along, they will be leaving a world for their kids not worth having.

Let’s begin by making out clear by voting that we are unwilling to accept this atrocious behavior on the part of our leadership. And if that does not work quickly enough to save humanity, then let us hack and drive the techno-illiterate vampires back into the dark ages. If small cells of terrorists can take on large governments, it should not be too difficult to hack the businesses and properties of those who are screwing up the world. They are already demonstrating just how impotent they are, why not merely destroy their ability to do business. No violence is needed. No bombs. No anthrax. As an example say there was a particular unresponsive insecure hotel owner, how hard could it be to entirely digitally overwhelm their enterprise’s ability to function?

Engineers and scientists gave all countries their roads, highways, hospitals, and infrastructure both analog and digital. They can be taken back or just not repaired when they fail due to poor maintenance and greed.

The pen has already proven to be mightier than the sword. The internet is merely a turbocharged pen. Communication and Information is power. Engineers could join with Hollywood, Hollywood, Netflix, Hulu and the networks who are producing plenty of content calling people on their stuff.  

By the way, I doubt very much that the group of people who want to use the clock back to the good old days will ever read a word a person like me writes. There is a message to deliver to them when you encounter them in life as we do have to work together.  Time travel to the past is not possible, for it no longer exists. The world has moved on.  Additionally, the people who want to go back do not have the skills to recreate or to create, and we will not help them to do it. Let’s see how far they get without medicine, communications or computers. 

If Congress will not do it job and continues this travesty of irresponsible behavior, let us fire them!

If a fake unauthorized by the democratic process Supreme Court tries to go backward to work to undo decades of progress made toward a collaborative civilization, lets just technologically shut them down. How hard would it be to shut down a handful of individuals determined to drive humanity backward? I bet they could not write a single line of code or fix their cars, or debug their phones or computers. 

Sorry for the anger but I have been patient for many years and saw instead of progress a de-evolution and have no intentions of supporting an attempt to return to a dream which is not a reality and to even possible. The disenfranchised population that is terrified of learning new skills and jobs and becoming part of the future understandably wants to go back to something they understand. Unfortunately even though I get why they want to go backward it is not possible so they are ongoing to merely die unhappy unless they change their expectations and learn how to be a new person who is after all the job of all of us – to learn how to grow and improve and be better than we were.  

It is quite narrow-minded to attempt to force upon the world which is ready to move ahead, a minority decision desire to go backward. 

Directivity is the property of being directional. It can be a measure of radiation and of sensitivity. For example, an omnidirectional sound source or broadcast antenna would radiate equally in all directions. Or conversely, a microphone or radio receiver can be extraordinarily directional and only sense inputs from a narrow direction. This fundamental parameter in physic could also be applied to people.

Some people are only sensitive to a very narrow set of stimuli and others to everything around them. Some also broadcast indiscriminately, and others narrowcast precise information to a very few people. In fact, some bombastic people only emit and do not receive at all. And other timid, introverted individuals barely utter a peep.

It is interesting to me a search for the word Directivity yields a large number of scientific definitions, discussions, articles and even derivative terms such as Directivity Factor and Directivity Index. It appears physicists are more interested in the spatial distribution of energy and directional sensitivity, not to mention just how sensitive receivers are or how efficient radiators are.

The communication industry has other words for targeting advertising or trolling for feedback, so the concept is not alien nor is it strictly quantitative. I am sure there are statistics applied to all manner of communication inputs and outputs covering a multitude of variables of interest such as market size and receptivity.

I am thinking of a different application of the same word to psychology and philosophy where curiously, I have not so far seen it show up although I can imagine great value in attempting to characterize the directionality of our feelings and thoughts. Perhaps this territory seems to be too dangerous to wander in to, or maybe not potentially fruitful enough but for me personally, I sometimes feel like a speaker or a microphone or an antenna and am very aware of how energy can be focused or squandered to archive specific targeted goals or diffuse outcomes.

As this is a brand new thought less than an hour old, it may seem premature to attempt to write or post anything, but for some reason, I feel compelled to raise the issue. Perhaps to protect me from the deluge of inputs into my system from within and from without? Or maybe alternatively to help to prioritize and focus in a more beam-like manner my own personal energetic emissions and application of energy.

There seems to be an infinite number of concepts, paths, and ramifications to explore human directivity instead of the directivity of nonliving physical entities. But for today I am satisfied to raise the possibility of the topic merely.

At the beginning of every day, it is possible to perform a set of activities to get ready for the day. This morning practice can become somewhat automatic, especially for people who follow some sort of routine, sleeping in the same bed every night and going to the same job every morning at the same time. Not everyone is this well defined. Creators and innovators sometimes radically change the way they spend their time from day to day, in part because they may have the freedom to do so and in part because it is their natural proclivity to do so.

This extreme desire for degrees of freedom manifest by many creative people can get in the way of productivity which has caused some highly prolific creators and innovators to invent routines of behaviors they would like to automate or habituate. In some circles, this may be called a Morning Practice and in others a Habit Loop. Indeed, there are many more possible names, but the principle is the same.

If one can identify an excellent behavior, it is worth making it somewhat automatic to increase the likelihood of it occurring by reducing the overhead associated with performing the said behavior to as little as possible. For some lucky souls, their daily work is so enjoyable as to feel like play. In fact, the primary activities of musicians and athletes they are paid to perform are called play, not work. And the “work” they do on the way to “playing” is often called “warming up.” They have to get in the right zone, sometimes called flow, to function at the highest levels. I call this wearing up period ramping and regard it as an on-ramp to the main activities I need to dedicate the majority of the day to. Since I think about many different topics all of the time, I have found it to be useful to get in the zone of the activities I need to be performing at the current point in life where I find myself.

In my case, I ramp up in three domains, the physical, musical and keynoting areas. I swim some laps to get my body ready to be physical, I write some music to stay prepared to go further in that primary domain of composing and orchestrating. I also work a bit on activities related to my keynoting which generally include writing about some insight and posting to my blog, after proofreading and light editing. I try to gets all of this done before my workday begins at 9 or 10. My ramping is specific to the domain I primarily operate within, being a concertizing keynoter, someone who combines music and public speaking. These both require physical strength and energy hence the morning laps in the pool, and if that is not possible, I jump on a rowing machine called an Erg to do the equivalent warmup. Therefore to Play, I first Ramp on weekdays.

Additionally, there is something else I do before Ramping and Playing, which I call Calibrating or Cal for short. The calibration is a more generalized activity to get ready for life, not specifically focused on being a concertizing keynoter. I call this activity getting into SOR or a state of readiness. As my brain functions in three very different modalities, I exercise them all every morning not just during the “Play Week.” The three modes are characterized by Notes, Words, and Diagrams and they use entirely different parts of the brain (or at least of my mind).

The Notes are dealt with by something I call Morning Music which consists of playing some instrument or singing for long enough to connect my unconscious, waking emotional state to be ready to communicate more intellectually. This can take as little as five or as long as 90 minutes depending upon my psychological turbulence and how tired I may be from inadequate rest. Since this feels really terrific, I sometimes do it for a lot longer than necessary as it part of my identity too play music. You might wonder what the difference between this and the ramping music and the more focused playing music later in the day is. The main differentiator is this Morning Music is not about anything other than changing my psychological state. It is not about composing, preparing for a concert, recording, editing, mastering or posting. It is merely about having a special relationship with sound where I can create and modify a universe I want to live in. It is not work, it is not warming up. It is merely being and in some ways my most natural function, the thing I was born to do. All I can say is it works better for me than meditating, praying, eating, exercise, nature and yes even sex or lovemaking. It is a primary way for me to relate to the universe and make myself whole by directly tactually managing acoustical energy in a conceptually abstract manner at a very high level. It is private, personal and can be at times a source of musical ideas as well. And I have been productively doing it for years.

The second part utilizing Words which are more literal and linear than music is an exercise I call Jam Journaling desired to get me into a state of flow, that is not as purely psychological and emotional as the Notes within the Morning Music but is slightly more cerebral and intellectual. A more bounded exercise this activity is measured regarding total words, total minutes and words per minute which indicate flow state.

The third part I call modified KanBan Diagramming is a mechanism I employ to perform what I call Just-In-Time Scoping and Planning. Diagramming reveals structural and temporal dependencies are permitting one to refine just what is going to do and what order they intend to do it in. This diagramming uses yet another part of the brain which differs from the musical and the verbal. It adds the perspective of zooming out to observe much at the same time, which belong to a set of tools and practices, I refer to as Complexity Processing.

This triple calibration or TriCal as I call it is a compelling way to get emotionally, intellectually and logistically centered in relatively not very much time. It also seems to work no matter what my state of mind or body and can generally be completed within under an hour although occasionally has lasted as long as two or three hours if there was both the need and the time as on the weekend.

This combination of TriCal, TriRamp, and TriPlay make for an incredibly powerful way for me to get things done, and to be calm, centered and prioritized at the same time. The short phrase Cal, Ramp and Play also serves to remind me that my life work is really Play, that to Play you can get warmed up moving through an on-Ramp, and that to be ready to Ramp it is a good idea first to be Calibrated.

 

One of the more recent books on the topic was written by Greg McKeown and he raises three questions worth passing along as very useful especially to innovators. I am paraphrasing not quoting here but it should be pretty close.  Here are Greg’s three questions that are part of his process.

What do you have a passion for?  What do you have a talent for?   What will make a difference?

Innovators notice many things, are curious about many of them, and come up with large numbers of ideas all of which can make for a noisy existence cluttered by an excess of focal points, vantage points, and perspectives. This is why we helicopter around so much, as Malcolm an early SVII member puts it. Just because we can helicopter around, does not necessarily mean that we should, even though it is fun, it is not always productive, which is where the three questions mentioned above seem to be useful. Over time we may have the passion for a relatively large number of topics or fields but integrate over a long time constant to see what rises above the rest. 

I have been passionate about trying to understand why sound in general and music, in particular, have such a profound upon many people, including me. This led to decades of study and eventually professional work in the areas of acoustics, signal processing, psychophysics, music theory, composition, production, reproduction, and most recently orchestration. My life has been littered with science, engineering and music books, papers and instruments. I still do not have a single conclusive answer but do have many ideas about the topic and am still learning several degrees and careers later.

Now the second question do I have a talent for it? This is a little more complicated because according to who? But perhaps writing, performing and recording and releasing a number of musical pieces counts in some way even if they have not and may never change the world. And contributing technologically to digital pianos and computer sound systems may also qualify as I did earn a living doing these at Apple, Bose and other places. 

The third question having to do with making a difference or having some sort of impact is also somewhat subjective but having publicly performed over a thousand times and having influenced products used by millions implies some sort of traction.  Now here is the interesting part, fifty years after heading down this path of music and technology I am still reading, thinking and listening about both, still performing and still attempting to harness or invent technology to lower the overhead for musical creative expression.

In several decades one does not likely have a single career and I am no exception. Having worked in industry, government, and education, I am still passionate about the same topics, and still, wonder if I have enough talent or impact. I do not need to have answers or impact or fame or fortune form these activities – I still like them and still do them and they still function as priorities.  I had not thought to qualify these as organizing priorities, in a long time until beginning to listen to Greg McKeown’s book on Essentialism.

So thanks, Greg – you reminded me to ask important questions which help me to be clear about my priorities, reduce the noise, and focus my energy.