Richard Bravman: The B Side

Catching Up

Sunday afternoon, late, dusk. Time for a bit of catch-up on the past week's goings on, (during which I did more living than blogging). I'll do it summary style this time:

Next phase of career coming into focus. Most likely trajectory will find me rejoining old friends on a new mission, to help lead the transformation of a grand old company into a compelling new one. On final approach; ETA two or three weeks.

Visit through NYC terrific...

Began with crafty cab driver whose very purpose for living was to gain a car's length advantage over adversaries at every possible opening, real or imagined. Drivers of vehicles many times our size were left cowering.

Continued as we checked into favorite UES haunt, to hearty greetings, personal touches and postcard   views.

Warmed further by smiles of mutual recognition exchanged with a piano man of long acquaintance.
 

Have a listen...

01 I've Got A Crush On You

Further still by the visit of fellow with whom I shared a very noisy foxhole during the SBL campaign, and by the sage advice he shared.

Further yet as we retired to a magical place to wine, dine and be entertained by a showman more people should know.
 

After good byes, a nightcap with accompaniment by the evening's third entertainer.

 

Pause for sleep.

Morning brought coffee, fresh berries and the NYT, all blessedly late.

Haircut and shave (indulgence, served over the good natured banter of 40 year veteran barbers of Italian descent), then productive conference call.

Upside of being "in transition": you can find yourself DONE at 11:45. I was.

Walked uptown, bought a couple of books. Downtown, some tea, a couple of tea sets (for east coast digs).

After channeling The Thin Man for a bit, decided to take my camera for a walk in the Park. Results were satisfying.

 

Piano man again. Gave him one of two books I purchased (the one about Pops). He gave it back, asking for dedication. I complied.

Dinner at another "local". Al Roker and guest just off to my left. (Saw Matt Lauer earlier.) Season's first truffles (over scrambled eggs).

Secured rented transportation on Thanksgiving morn, and headed east, bulging with luggage.

Met at former family estate by young man who, in my estimation, is the best son a father could have.

 
 

TDay Dinner with all the fixings at a golf club that gets it right every year, (and where I may actually get to play a round next year!)

Son's TDay+ party provisioned by mom. Off he went by sea and land, into enemy territory (MA).

Saturday: up early, bio-reading, tea. A bit of seaside photojournalism.   Meeting with a small, talented team looking to turn adversity (being laid off) into opportunity (a promising start-up idea). I may have helped, a little.

Woke early again today. Rose quietly, tip-toeing so as not to wake Ellie.  Descending stairs, noticed I must have left lights on last night. No. Ellie was sipping coffee, watching old movie.

More tea.

Browsed online instantiations of old media (there really IS a way forward; don't they see it?). Came across article on HDR photography. Bought HDR software (impulse indulgence). As it downloaded, received Google Wave invite. What to do? One tab for each, I multi-tasked for an hour or so.

Still early, I asked Ellie if she would like a road trip. Nods later, off we went. Sag Harbor. The American Hotel. Bloody Mary, Paté, Lobster BLT, HDR experiments..... double espresso, home.

That's pretty much it. Later.

  

Finding Your Next 'Eureka' Moment - WSJ.com

Want to invent the next iPod? Then don't try too hard. We may be able to train our minds to be better at generating ideas, according to recent thinking on how we think, and often the best way to foster a brilliant idea is not to push it.

Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman used to visit a topless bar, sip a soda and scribble quantum mechanics on a napkin. Einstein's theory of special relativity came after he imagined himself a child riding on a beam of light.

And Greg Swartz, director of innovation at the golf company Ping, says he has come up with 36 ideas for better tees and loftier drives by looking at the stars. After immersing himself in his subject matter, he'll go to his backyard at night and let his mind settle into what he calls a "hyper state" when it is firing on all cylinders. He says it's as if he can almost feel the rush of gamma rays that are said to emanate from the right hemisphere when an idea is born.

Brain scans have revealed that when you think you're not thinking, your unconscious mind may be doing wind sprints searching for a perfect solution. As a result, answers sometimes seem to appear out of nowhere. In reality, that "nowhere" is beneath your consciousness. In studies, these out-of-the-blue insights are more frequently associated with novel, creative solutions than those derived from concentrating hard, according to cognitive neuroscientist Mark Jung-Beeman, of Northwestern University.

via online.wsj.com

I agree with this insight entirely. The mind is complex, and its workings are not intuitively revealed through simple introspection. According to at least one credible theory, our conscious thoughts are post-facto "explanations" that our left, verbal, brain invents so as to provide a rational narrative explaining what our left, creative / emotion-driven brain, has already decided to do or worked out as a solution to a problem within an entirely different cognitive framework.

I'm reading Edward Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" at the moment. It's rich with content and possible application that initiates multiple threads of thought. I find myself pausing, literally putting the book down every page or two, just to allow those thoughts time and space to percolate. Only a small fraction of them have bubbled up to the surface of conscious awareness. Many others are down there, brewing, likely to pop up when I least expect them.

Want to bring your best, yet-to-surface thoughts up to where they can do some good? Here are some ideas I've found to work:

1. Change of venue: Get up, get out, put yourself in a different setting. Listening to the Dead's Truckin' right now, I'm reminded of the time in my senior year at SUNY Stony Brook when, after a whole day and evening struggling to debug the compiler I had designed, I said, "That's it" (or something to that effect), got up, walked across campus to James Pub, and ordered a pitcher. Truckin' Sample
   
   Sometime later, somewhere in the middle of the third serial playing of Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), loud, the solution to my problem popped up, out of nowhere. I was thinking about the young lady across the room, not software.
2. Draw it out: I often use mind mapping software to sketch out my ideas. By doing so, I'm sure that my left brain gets engaged in ways it wouldn't if I only used words (although outlining also works well for me in the case of problems where the broad idea is already at hand). I like MindManager.
3. Collaborate: Sometimes your best thinking is done alone, but often the creative interplay that happens when you brainstorm with others brings out ideas that otherwise would not emerge.