Author: Howard Lieberman

As a former Apple engineer, I have found myself having to defend an unintuitive yet apparently very wise practice called cannibalizing our product line. The basic premise is the past is always going to be consumed by the future.  Our old products will be made obsolete by new products entering into the market. This can result in a lot of obsolete inventory everywhere in the supply chain pipeline which is not a particularly profitable way to conduct business but was also considered simply a cost of doing business. 

At Apple eventually, the thought occurred, that if a company could cannibalize its own product line then we would know when it was coming and plan for it thereby saving a ton of money by reducing inventory and WIP (work in progress). In fact, it gives one a competitive advantage which is now well understood in tech industries.

Have you ever considered this is not only true about products but could apply to much more? It could apply to processes and even relationships, including one’s relationship with themselves. The new You obsoletes the old You.  

Yes, we all tell stories constructed mostly of memories but sometimes also containing wishful thinking. Sometimes these are stories we tell ourselves and sometimes they are stories we tell others but the recounting of memories does alter them. Apparently, your memory is like the telephone game, where people take turns whispering a message into the ear of the next person in line? By the time the last person speaks it out loud, the message has radically changed. It’s been altered with each retelling. Similarly, each time you recall an event, your brain distorts it. Research supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS1025697 and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health grant T32 NS047987 supports this.

It is now clear that we are cannibalizing our own past, simply recalling it. This happens involuntarily with no effort on our part. As I am approaching my seventieth year, and have told my stories to myself and others, I can not help but wonder how much of what I think happened actually happened the way I currently recall it. I guess this is simply a cost of doing the business of living for we are not the same person today as we were years ago. When we reread a book or watch a movie or listen to a piece of music from our past, we can not help bringing our present selves to the occasion, and therefore the possibility of a new interpretation.  If you are a particularly creative and imaginative person does this mean your recollections are somewhat more suspect? Or is this an opportunity?  

If this can be a constructive act for businesses, I can not help but wonder if it could also be a constructive approach to bettering ourselves. As it does seem clear that our past is going to be cannibalized by our future, could this be done in such a way as to better our future not through deliberate exaggeration or self-aggrandizement but by consciously somewhat altering our past to support our present?  How can we tell if we are telling ourselves stories that are true? Or at least mostly true? 

Very long-term relationships are extremely helpful here. Of course, when reminiscing with people you have known for a long time you will discover differences in your recollections of circumstances. These differences can be quite large or fairly tiny.  But if you have a good fortune as I do of many long-term relationships it is possible to reconstruct a perhaps more accurate story about your shared past(s).  Journaling can also be a useful reference to return to.

As an Involuntary Innovator and therefore a creative outlier, I can not help but to think it is not only a business that can consciously cannibalize its past but so can people. I have not yet determined what to do with this awareness but since blogging is like journaling the understanding of this insight can be tracked and I intend to do so, for we are involuntarily altering our pasts in the retelling of our stories simply by recalling a memory.  

It can be difficult to know what has actually occurred, making our stories a bit suspect, but at least we can be aware that there is a range from affirmation recall to having some external evidence of the way things were. 

What is more important is how you want things to be in the future and how can one constructively and consciously make use of a story, while being mindful of potential flaws in our recollections. 

Everyone tells stories. We have to because the amount of life impinging upon us is to great to absorb and stories allow us to focus on a subset of reality in order to be able to process it. Stories are not only how we communicate with each other but also how we communicate with ourselves.

Stories combine context and knowledge in an experiential data reduced digestible packages which sometimes become passable batons to permit us to communicate with each other over space and time as movies, operas, paintings and symphonies. And they usually have a beginning, middle and end again to make them digestible but reality is less linear and less predictable and less digestible than this. 

Reality is decidedly not linear, it is nonlinear and we all carry with us multiple endings, beginnings and middles to choose from. Is this the same as a multiverse? Or parallel universes? Probably because we need to reduce the complexity of the real world in order to process it for one thing is certain, the universe we live in is quite dimensionally vast and it is also dynamically adapting as are we and everything in our universe (or universes).

In fact often times differences of option come from looking at the same reality from more than one perspective. Some people are better than others at tolerating ambiguity (diversity?). Some people feel threatened or confused by too many options but they too have a legitimate point for there are those who are too comfortable with ambiguity and too uncertain of where they are in their worlds which can make it difficult to properly adapt too circumstances.

This is why stories are so important. They are a means of convergence on shared realities. They may be wrong or incorrect depending on which perspective is the reference. But in order for a society to operate there do have to be some shared stories, just as for each of us to operate we have to tell ourselves stories which are fairly consistent or we would be all over the place never converging upon realities that are useful to us because they can not be operated upon or within.

Think about it.

What stories are you telling yourself? And your friends? And your neighbors? And you poling places?

Remember although stories are powerful and necessary they may or may not be true. And they may or may not be true at some points in time but true at other points in time.

If you are a creative outlier, you may have stories that are not mainstream and that may get you in trouble. Be conscious of the stories you tel others and the stories you tell yourselves and remember stories do have a context within which they live. They are not absolute for they, like the universe are constantly adapting tot eh dimensions they are taking into account. 

It took a two year, and still continuing pandemic but it has finally become mainstream to teleconference. It took over a 100 years to become so easy inexpensive and routine to become commonplace.

Apart from saving time and money to communicate which are fantastic benefits, there is an even great outcome. Historically, the majority of meaningful human relationships have evolved and been maintained between people who lived and worked near each other. This is no longer the only way to generate a critical mass of people excited by an idea.

We can now much more easily choose to spend time with those whose ideas seem to feel relevant to us. New relationships now also form between people who have never “met” each other in-person. People can now work together for years never experiencing each others physical presence.

This is potentially extremely important to the creative outliers who often have a hard time finding likeminded companions to co-create products, projects, processes, prototypes and programs. We can now solve problems or simply hang out with people all over the world. Work groups and classes almost effortlessly span time zones.

I myself recently completed a New York City based composition class, where the majority of the participants did not live in NYC nor in the same time zone. Raj was in Poland and Germany, Maretha was in the San Francisco Berkley area, Kimberly was in Hawaii and Seattle, James was in Colorado and Russia, Robert was in New Jersey and Vermont, Ray our Juilliard professor was in NYC, and I was on the New York side of the Berkshires. We were spread across twelve time zones. Lifelong friendships now can and do form across the globe. Our extremes would require 19 hours $1000 flights.

Humanity has transcended geographic proximity!

What does this mean for SVII? It means it is time to expand from our regional roots in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road to become international and virtual. Stay tuned.

There are many ways to tell a story. There is the voice of authority presumed to accurate due to being confirmed by the illustrious they or them. He, she, or they said. And how often was the reporter/storyteller actually present. This voice is not one that takes as much responsibility for accuracy as the first person. And in this case, there is still the choice of past or present tense where the writer invites the reader to accompany them back in time to more directly experience what happened or at least to what they think happened.

And here is the problem in all storytelling and in every type of writing for even reporting is storytelling. No “fact” is ever published or increasingly even uttered without consideration of the optics or way it will be perceived. Many of our role models are increasingly more concerned with optics than factual accuracy. Annual reports are like giant commercials. The news seems designed to inflame or do whatever it takes to gain attention. Advertising is the largest business model even for new tech companies. It is getting challenging to access the accuracy of anything heard or read. Even photographs are more often photoshop airbrushed to look fantastic but not necessarily honest. Pitch correction technology has become so ubiquitous that everyone seemingly can sing or play perfectly. And people who do not look or sound as wonderful as the artificially enhanced depictions they are deluged with, are increasingly afraid to be alive and real for they can not compare to the unreality which has become standard. Our politicians and increasing our judges are owned by our businessmen just as much as our artists are owned by publicists. Reputation manipulation is regular business and now governance practice.

For me and most of the people I know, it has become incredibly difficult to know what the truth is in many situations. Although this is dangerous, there are plenty of honest and accurate situations, and they are the ones where we are personally present and can witness with our own eyes and ears and process with our own brains precisely what we are experiencing. This is the first person present tense and perhaps not coincidently it seems at least to me to be becoming the voice of the newest hottest branch of writing called Creative Nonfiction.

Nonfiction has traditionally been factual, authoritative, dry and therefore usually not as emotionally engaging as fiction unless of course, the facts are incredible which is sometimes the case. Creative Nonfiction seems to be the practice of increasing the emotional content of nonfiction by utilizing the literary devices of fiction. This is not an entirely new practice. Remember Ayn Rand, a philosopher who wrote many nonfiction books but achieved fame through her novels, which embodied her philosophies in the acts and personalities of her characters.
Perhaps memoirs told in the artist person are more honest if not the most accurate sources of information. My Mac’s dictionary defines memoirs as a historical account or biography is written from personal knowledge or special sources, with the synonyms: account, history, record, chronicle, narrative, story, portrayal, depiction, sketch, portrait, profile, biography, monograph or essay on an academic subject.

At least when one writes a memoir, it is usually in the first person, and presumably, the writer was there witnessing hopefully in their right mind, what was happening in their life. Could they be lying? Sure, but at least as the author they are taking responsibility for what they wrote, unlike most of the information coming to us these days.

If you were to write a memoir where you depicted someone as a jerk but their family members voiced their difference of opinion that this person, let’s call him uncle John, was a real gem and wonderful human being. You as the author could just say, that is not my recollection of John, as to me, he was a jerk. And no one could sue you for libel for it was your opinion which you are entitled to.

Well, if you were able to round up more people who knew John than perhaps it would be possible to tell if John was a Jerk or a Gem. Or maybe the only existing photo of John was photo-shopped, into an airbrushed perfection of a super kindly soul. Or maybe John was really good at faking wonderfulness. We can never know.

But increasingly I am going to look for first-person narratives where the author takes reasonability for what they say. Perhaps this is another reason why so many memoirs are written by people many years after their exciting experiences, with the first one being they were too busy living them to be writing.

Most memoirs may fall under the heading of Creative Nonfiction, so if you now have the time and the inclination to write your memoir and take reasonability for what you say for after all it is a subset of your personal recollections, and you had better write them down before you forget or enhance the details too much.