Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went up the hill........

It was the second time around for both of them. Jack had previously attempted a hill with Judy. Jill's previous partner was John. Their previous and latest partnerships were those well known legal contracts known as 'marriage'. In many countries more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, often acrimonious and very costly (financially and emotionally), and yet the majority of those divorced get married again!

So why was it going to be different for Jack and Jill this time around? Well they were both older, wiser and had the benefit of knowing what went wrong with their respective previous marriages. Those previous marital experiences had followed similar patterns. When the honeymoon was over, the partnership developed and enjoyed many pleasurable times as well as some inevitable difficulties and obstacles. If the problems are difficult to solve, many couples give up there and then but that was not the case for Jack, Judy, Jill and John. Instead each couple went down the path of pursuing separate interests, initially unintentionally, for many years, united only by the roof over their heads as well as sharing meals, domestic chores and the basic cost of living. Only when Jack met Jill did the two sets of marital equilibria become unstable.

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water........

Yet most water collects in the valleys. Jack and Jill had got more than a modicum of brain cells between them so why weren't they aware of this basic physical fact? Were their aspirations unrealistic and could this have been a possible cause of their previous failed relationships?

Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after........

The stories of this event suggest that the water had been collected before the accident so at least part of the aspiration had been achieved. That said, it is highly likely that Jack and Jill were absolutely knackered after climbing the hill and then to be loaded up with a heavy bucket of water, little wonder there was a mishap waiting for them on the way back.

Metaphorically speaking, the 'hill' could be mortgage commitments, children, pressure of work, extended family........life's a bitch! It still doesn't explain why having seen it before, Jack and Jill still persisted in climbing yet another hill. Maybe there was a difference, circumstances had changed and climbing the hill was less of a necessity than in times gone by. They had got enough water stored for their basic needs and so the venture became a shared and enjoyable means of creating a challenge to keep their bodies and minds fit and healthy. In short, they enjoyed climbing the hill because it might be the last hill they would climb.

Anyone who has read my blogs and books will know that I am not inclined to write fiction but like all good invented stories, there is usually a heavy injection of fact!........Happy climbing!! :-)

The Psychology of Spending Money

Perhaps the title of this blog should be 'The Psychology of Spending or NOT Spending Money'. What fascinates me and has encouraged this short article is people's views on the rights and wrongs or parting with their hard-earned cash. But first let's get back to basics - what is money? Money is purely and simply a means of trading. In my opinion it is one of the best of inventions in the history of mankind. Imagine living in a cash-less society, where trading is by bartering - my horse for your cow, my eggs for your beetroot, my iPad for your ??!!**! However, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that money per se, the coins, notes, bank and credit card statements, have little material value. It is the trading ability that is valuable. So my iPad might be bought by you for £200, which I could use to buy a pair of spectacles. The second-hand iPad has been traded for new spectacles using a third party. This demonstrates the flexibility and power of money.

The psychology of transactions really interests me and in particular how people tend to focus on the financial values of expenditure and income rather than how to use money to satisfy their needs and wants. Let's look at typical behavioural patterns for three examples of monetary transactions - buying and selling property, paying for medical treatment and buying insurance cover.

If you've decided to down-size your property in order to realise some cash and perhaps travel to places where you've always wanted to go but could never afford it, well that should be a fairly simple monetary transaction. You might think your house is worth £250k, you only need property for say £150k and so after an estimated £10k expenses you might net £90k for your travels. The property market is declining and after having your house for sale for 6 months you decide to suspend looking for your next property until your sale has been confirmed. You have also suffered the disappointment of several prospective buyers' views of the value of your house being lower than your expectation. It looks as though you're not going to get more than £225k and after about a year on the market, a cash buyer offers £220k. The £30k drop becomes a major issue to you. Why should I drop my price? I don't need to move. The buyer's offer is insulting. Three years ago my neighbour's house went for £260k (the fact that the housing market has dropped around 15% in that timeframe doesn't enter into your thinking!). The psychology of the monetary transaction comes into play because the £30k reduction is the new issue rather than what you want to do with your life, i.e. reduce your living space and travel. The £30k could probably be easily recovered by a combination of getting a good deal for your next property because you are a cash buyer and searching for bargains in the travel market for your worldwide excursions.

The next example is paying for medical treatment. Some countries such as the UK have 'free' medical treatment through, in the case of the UK, a National Health Service (NHS). It's not really free because it is funded by taxation so everyone pays whether or not they 'enjoy' any benefits. Now you would think any citizen who loves life would regard their own well-being as a number one priority. But when that priority is put to the test, it's not always demonstrated to be number one! In the UK, for example, the 'free' NHS treatment is seen as a basic right and the idea of paying to get a faster service for a non-urgent but nevertheless uncomfortable condition, is, for many people, not an option to be considered. The NHS does not have an unlimited budget and has to prioritise its treatments. So, for example, heart surgery would be a high priority, the removal of a benign external cyst might be a medium priority and an in-growing toe nail could be at the tail end (or even the foot end!) of the priority list. If your cyst operation has an 18-week waiting list but you can get private surgery next week for, say, £3k, you might think to yourself, why should I pay? In fact it could be a very small price to pay compared with the cost over the year of the substances you might buy to abuse your body, like too much salt, fat, carbohydrate, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food....do I need to name more?! Also the essential food items are very often consumed in excess or even thrown out.

My final example is insurance cover - the 'peace of mind' expenditure. Let me start with an indisputable fact - insurance companies make money. This means that their income from people paying insurance premiums, less the amount they pay out in claims, less their operating expenses, leave them with a very large operating profit. Do some simple calculations for yourself. How much have you paid out, during your driving career, for car insurance and is that more than the total cost of your claims? How much have you paid out for house insurance and is that more than the total cost of your claims? How much have you paid for medical insurance and is that more than the total cost of your claims? For most people the answers will be YES, YES and YES. There will be some variations but the reason I am confident with my 'most people' prediction is because that's why the insurance industry is so profitable. In other words, life is not as risky as we are led to believe but our fear of the unknown causes us to view insurance as a worthwhile expenditure. Perhaps it would be better to accumulate your own funds for unforeseen circumstances.

So there you have it folks, our spending habits are very often irrational and maybe that's because money distorts our perception of what we are trying to achieve, which, in the previous examples, were a rewarding lifestyle, a healthy body and a balanced view towards what reserves we require for unknown circumstances.

Cause and Effect fooled me again!

I believe that over the years I have developed many of the skills of a systems thinker. What does that mean? Well basically I try to take a helicopter view of life, issues, problems, whatever. Looking at the relationships between issues as well as the detail of life's 'building blocks'. One of the attributes of a systems thinker is the ability to think beyond seemingly obvious cause and effect relationships and particularly not to jump to simplistic conclusions like, for example, A caused B, which caused C, which caused D. Therefore, A caused D - maybe! Life's relationships are rarely as simple as A, B, C and D. Cause and Effect are not always obvious. Here's a statement, which might not register immediately, but is very profound:

Correlation does not imply causation.

Correlation, the apparent dependency of two events, does not mean that one event caused the other to happen. Every morning at sunrise I hear a cockerel crowing and I also hear the Imam chanting a call to prayer from a nearby mosque. Does the cockerel crowing cause the Imam to chant? Unlikely. Does the Imam chanting cause the cockerel to crow? Also unlikely. Do either the Imam or the cockerel cause the sun to rise? IMPOSSIBLE? What is most likely is that the Imam's chant is timed to take place at sunrise and the transition from dark to light also stimulates the cockerel to crow.

Does the cockerel only crow at sunrise? I don't claim to be an expert on cockerels' habits but I'm sure I have heard cockerels crow at other times of day. Could the cockerel crow at midnight? Possibly. Would that cause the sun to rise? DEFINITELY NOT! So now I hope you have grasped the fact that correlation definitely doesn't imply causation BUT causation requires correlation.

Now let's move on to a recent example of correlation and therefore cause and effect, playing games with me. Every morning I charge my two phones, a BlackBerry and a Nokia. They don't always need it but rather than get caught with a flat battery I developed this daily routine, which I rarely forget to do, rather like cleaning my teeth. Earlier this week I went through my charging routine, first plugging the BlackBerry in to charge and automatically looking at the face of the phone to note the little icon signifying the phone was accepting a charge. Then I followed the same procedure for the Nokia. I first plugged it in to charge, looked at the face of the phone and there was no icon, it apparently wasn't charging! Without pausing for a period of rational thinking to explore the possible cause and effect scenarios, my mind went into auto! The charger must be defective so I will go into the town and buy a replacement. Should I buy a branded Nokia device or a cheaper alternative? If, say, the Nokia product cost 20% more than the alternative brand but would have twice the life, then the Nokia route would be preferable. In the meantime, my wife, Sandie, also has a Nokia phone, a different model to mine but the charger might be compatible, in which case I would borrow it as an interim solution. I left my chargers and went to see my wife, but before I could explain the problem she informed me we had just had a power cut! In the period of time between plugging in the BlackBerry and noting it was charging and plugging in the Nokia and noting it wasn't charging, the mains electricity supply had been cut - ELEKTRİK YOK as we say in Turkish!

Now you might be sympathetic towards me thinking it's a fair assumption that the charger wasn't working but I can assure you I do not deserve your sympathy. In the area where we live, the probability of a power cut is far greater than the probability of a Nokia charger failing. So the fact that the phone didn't indicate it was charging correlated with the charger being plugged into the mains should not, on that occasion, imply the charger was defective. I can wax eloquently on the virtues of systems thinking, the danger of using linear models for a non-linear world and the nuances of correlation and causation but........life's a bitch!

Sweet Memories

Since I met my lovely wife in 2002, I have created a new photo computer file for each year that we have been together and I will continue to do so, hopefully for many more years to come. The ten-year photographic record has seen three generations of digital camera including my latest DSLR. My photography is getting more ambitious, the latest shots include birds of prey, swallows swooping for refreshment from our pool and a gecko stalking a small bug. I have been an 'on and off' amateur photographer for the past 40 years, but technology has made the task much easier now than when I acquired a 35mm film SLR camera in the 1970s. That said, having an eye for a good shot is a skill that does not always come naturally (my wife is much better at it than me) and my engineering background sometimes encourages me to become too seduced with the technicalities of photography (ISO, aperture, speed, etc) rather than the picture I want to capture!

I have never shared my photos beyond close friends and family. I am not one for uploading thousands of photos on to Facebook probably because even prior to the digital revolution, I was bored to tears by other peoples' photos. I can remember 35mm slide shows round at friends' homes, the lights went out and shortly afterwards someone nudged me when I started snoring!

Despite the wealth of technology that we now enjoy, there is no doubt in my mind that there is no man-made wizardry that can match the human brain with its integrated memory. Memories are interesting and the data storage capacity of the brain is phenomenal but the retrieval process is not always as efficient as a modern search engine like Google. I am often frustrated by my 'senior moments' forgetting recent events, faces, names or even the pin number of one of my credit cards. On the other hand, I can remember childhood events with clarity. For example, my parents moved house in north London when I was three years old. The garden was overgrown and my father used a scythe to cut the grass. I fell on it and still have a faint scar on my knee to prove it. I have no problem retrieving that memory from my grey matter. Memories are not just visual, as we all know it is easy to memorise taste and other sensations. So I can re-live the sensation of eating a toffee apple, even though I haven't had one for years - decades in fact!

Sharing memories with others is interesting because the memory has to be communicated as a story in words and the recipient will use his or her imagination to create a picture, if indeed he or she is interested! So the 'copying' from one brain to another is not as precise as, for example, sharing photographs on Facebook. However, it is the lack of precision that, in my opinion, makes memories so exciting compared with photographic records. Our brains can fool us into remembering what we want, or maybe don't want, to see - like the heat haze in the desert that transforms dry sand into a refreshing lake. False images can be retained and passed on to others as 'facts', very often spreading negative thoughts like unwanted viruses or conversely, creating enthusiasm in a discontented society.

The mind doesn't need adjustment to capture an event. The equivalents of ISO, aperture and speed are all taken care of for is. So I can vividly recall the swallows swooping into my pool but to capture the event photographically was time-consuming and challenging, involving the use of a high-quality telephoto lens and multi-shot photography.

Technology is fantastic and I'm a bit of a geek, but I never lose sight of the fact that the human ability to memorise and recall masses of events beats any competitive hardware and software processing solutions.......but will I remember writing this article in five years time?.......Maybe!

Do you know what you are drinking?

I like this argument put forward by Richard Dawkins:

The biologist Lewis Wolpert calculates 'that there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea'. Since all water on the planet cycles through the sea, it would seem to follow that every time you drink a glass of water, the odds are good that something of what you are drinking has passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell.

If I knew then what I know now.

I don't know if it's a symptom of approaching life's twilight years, but I do seem to spend some of my spare thinking time reflecting on my history. It's amazing how much I can recall from the dim and distant past, for example the names of friends at primary school and yet I very often forget what I did last week! The functioning of the brain and in particularly it's memory, is fascinating and will perhaps feature in a future blog but on this occasion I want to share some of my past experiences and in particular the application of that well-worn phrase, 'If I knew then what I know now.'

OK, you might be thinking this is just a 'with the benefit of hindsight' feature but that is not my intention. Closer to the mark would probably be 'growing older and wiser', but again I don't want that to be the sole message retained by the readers. I am only just coming to grips with the complexity of life and understanding some of the previously-missing pieces of life's jig saw puzzle. So yes, I am wiser now than I was, say, forty years ago and my current knowledge base should mean that I am better-equipped to deal with some of the challenges that I faced in my youth, but I don't have the energy now to tackle some of the key issues of yesteryear that moulded my journey through life. It's the determination of life's journey that really does interest me because it is affected by every choice, every action, right or wrong. Who is to judge the correctness of our actions, what is right, what is wrong, what is the truth? We are where we are because of the decisions that we took, over which we had varying degrees of control, and because of the decisions of others, over which we had varying degrees of influence, and a whole host of day-to-day evolutionary events, over which we have absolutely no control or influence. Against this background of chaotic uncertainty, why do I think the past could have benefited from me knowing then what I know now?

At this point I am going to extol the virtues of systems thinking, which I can best describe by John Muir's quote: "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world". So systems thinking is all about interconnectivity. Interconnection not just in space but also in time. Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline, said: "Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space". I believe this truism is very often ignored at all ages but is most likely, through experience, to be appreciated in later years. Certainly that is true in my case and how I wish my systemic thinking could have played a prominent part on my earlier years, in family, social and business affairs.

Clearly there is more to systems thinking than understanding the complexities of cause and effect, but when I look back at some of my bad decisions, a common thread of impulsiveness, quick fix, instant gratification....etc, seems to run through some of my bad 'life choices'. That said, and this is where I am in danger of contradicting the entirety of this blog thus far, I am perfectly happy with my lot. I want for no more emotionally or materially and I am where I am because of all my past good and bad decisions! So what could have been different? Well maybe I might have got to my current paradise quicker! Who knows, I could explore a plethora of hypotheses until the cows come home.

At the beginning of this blog I said I would share some of my experiences. Well here's a couple, one from the world of business and another from my social life.

In the commercial world, those who run businesses are driven by the 'bottom line', doing everything possible to maximise short-term profitability, often at the expense of longer-term performance. 'If I knew then....' I wouldn't have succumbed to short-term pressures unless I could reconcile in my own mind there were no other adverse ramifications, in time or space. Who knows what impact that would have had on my career, but I still believe it is wrong to do things you know are wrong.

In my social life, selfishness and short-term gratification have been my major vices coupled with being too easily influenced by others. The student excesses of boozing, smoking and partying (but never drugs) went on far too long, way beyond college days, and had a negative impact on some social and family relationships in my mid-life years. 'If I knew then....' I would have questioned my social habits much earlier and tried to live a more balanced and altruistic life. We share this planet with billions of humans and other species so for a balanced society we surely can't always put ourselves first.

So that's it guys, I don't know what my hypothetical different life would have done for me or others and I'm more than happy with what I've got. But I'm hopefully not at the end of the road yet and so maybe I can practice what I preach in the concluding chapters of Alan's biography!

Blueprints and Recipes - the Clock and the Cake

I have a clock and I want to know how it works because there's always been an enquiring mind in me. So I take it to pieces and lay all the component parts on the table. I ought to add that it's quite an old clock with cogs and springs, all powered by a wind-up mechanism. I sit and ponder what has been revealed and establish a mental model of how the wound spring drives the second, minute and hour hands, through a series of gears, to provide a picture of time.

So that was an interesting exercise but the whole is worth more to me than the sum of the parts and having increased my knowledge base, I'm now keen to reassemble the clock - but how?! Well I might have remembered how the parts fitted together, perhaps even taken notes. Alternatively the original manufacturer of the clock might be able to provide me with a blueprint for the clock, which would list all the components and explain how they fit together. The point is that it is possible to take the clock to pieces, find out how it works and then reassemble it. The reassembly can be achieved with the original blueprint or indeed it is possible to create a new blueprint by recording the component parts and the steps needed to reconstruct the clock.

Now let's look at a completely different scenario. A friend provides me with a sample of his freshly baked carrot cake, which I decide to try shortly afterwards with a cup of coffee on my balcony. The sun is shining, I feel relaxed and ready to sample my newly acquired culinary delight.......delicious!!!! I'm not a professional cook but I do like to dabble and this carrot cake is simply the best I have ever tasted, so I'm keen to reproduce it, but how? I decide to ask my friend for the recipe and he obliges. There's no reason why he shouldn't really because the recipe is contained within a well known cook book so it's well and truly in the public domain. I haven't completely finished my friend's carrot cake and I reserve a bit to compare with my own creation when available. I bake my cake, do the comparison and guess what.........there's a difference! My friend's cake is definitely tastier than mine.

Unlike the clock, it is impossible to take the cake to pieces and establish exactly how it was made. I used a recipe but a recipe is NOT a blueprint and the difference between a clock and a cake is the difference between complicated and complex. I collect my freshly-made loaf of bread from a local bakery every morning. It's warm, delicious but always slightly different! The shape, texture and hardness of the crust all show variations from day to day. I am sure my friend would admit to his carrot cakes varying to some degree each time he makes one. On the other hand, the clock will always be the same each time I disassemble and reassemble it provided that I follow the blueprint. So the difference between the clock and the cake is not only complicated vs complex but also certainty vs probability. I will talk more about certainties and probabilities in a future blog.

Life is full of blueprints and recipes and from my experience, we all too often confuse a recipe for a blueprint. In other words we assume that a particular course of action will lead to a certain (rather than a probable) outcome. Let me give you an example - The Miracle Diet, a blueprint for successfully losing weight. There are loads of them on the market! So you weigh-in, collect your special dietary pack and pay a hefty fee for all this 'expert' advice. Maybe things go well initially and you lose a few kilos but one year later you're back to square one. Body weight is a function of a number of variables including input (food) and output (exercise). But it is a complex, rather than complicated, matter and I defy anyone to understand it fully and to be able to predict individual outcomes to dietary plans. The plan itself is a recipe not a blueprint.

I could cite many examples of recipes that are presented as blueprints in life, including politics, financial services, personal well-being, macro economics, sport........to name but a few. Interestingly, rarely are blueprints misrepresented as recipes. So if ever you are asked the question 'What's the difference between a clock and a cake?', you'll know it's not the lead-in to a joke!........or is it?