SELF in Aguilar CO

■ Act 'As-If'
■ Do the 'hard-thing'
■ Seek out what's missing
■ Practice 'in-advance'
■ Endure, Persevere, Out-last, Look-back

Discuss Preparation

This is uncured apple smoked bacon bits. Don't give up an opportunity to do the hard thing. You remember this little trick cutting off the end of the egg carton? Well, I do that even if I have a big refrigerator and I'm not traveling. Why? It's my mindset of acting 'as if'.

Doing the hard thing can often mean making a decent meal even when you're gonna sit down and eat it alone. Prepare your mind and your habits no matter what your situation is or how modest your means are. Develop your habits in advance - that's p 'reparation' right? You'll be ready when the opportunity arrives.

Preparation means: "the action or process of making something ready for use or service or of getting ready for some occasion, test, or duty"

Preparation oftentimes includes a bunch of failures. It means numerous times not knowing exactly what you're going to say until you say it. Preparation means starting now and here acting 'as-if'. It means doing the work figuring out the solution in-route not always knowing where you're going but putting in the effort and dealing with distractions - like heaters coming on. Preparation means to put in the effort in advance of the outcome you want. You've been watching me do it which means you can mimic me to find your scotomas. Take your strengths assessment to find out how you offend people and what's holding you back. Discover where your obstacles are in advance of arriving at your goal. You've learned by watching me pivot.

We're going to show you over the next few episodes some very interesting things because maybe we've failed four prior times to acquire an Airstream but we're packing 'as-if'.

We're talking about preparation. Creating the life you want in advance of the evidence. You won't see the spectacular view until you break out of the clouds near the top.  

This is a view of the land that we have made a full-price offer on. It's a national historic/scenic area here the Columbia River Gorge. I'm quite familiar with hard work commitment and disappointment. Three years ago we made an offer on a piece of land. I worked hard at clearing the land to do the topography.

The driveway's going through here off of the main road from either direction. It will pass through here and down around the corner. Today I'm going to plot all of this land so I've got an x y and z so I can lay up all of the architecture to take it to the planning and building department to be sure that they would allow us to build what we wanted on the land. As it turns out for many factors beyond our control we did not build on that land and it was a good thing because now the land we're looking at is pretty incredible and allows us to do far more of what we had envisioned.

I shared in an earlier section of volume one that Angelina and I like to play board games. We love to refine our critical thinking skills.

Before I share with you the preparations we're now making I'd like you to understand the foundation of our decision and efforts. To do that I have to tell you a bit of a story

I grew up about five or six miles out of a small town called Placerville in the Sierra Mountain foothills in California. Both of my parents worked. I took care of my stepbrother and stepsister most of the time - like all summer when I wasn't in school. I didn't have transportation. Fortunately, we had a bookmobile - a bus converted to carry literature rather than students. I was able to foster my education by devouring everything I could find on the shelves of that bookmobile.

Fast forward to today - the bookmobile is now on your mobile device. You have access to the internet. You don't rely on the choices of a librarian for your education and your development of critical thinking skills. Aha, there's a scotoma in there. It used to be that libraries had main stacks full of science and history and biographies. I was addicted to the science stuff but would also read a bit from history or biographies.

The bookmobile would come out with a selection of topics delivered to my driveway. Other kids across the county would have a different van or a different bus. They might get a different selection from the library stacks. Their world view would become slightly different than mine. They could have had access to a very similar proportion of material but I believe it would be opposed left and right depending on what I was reading at home. The physical books were limited in number, so anything I checked out for the week was not available to others.

Today this bias is done by algorithms based on attention and profits delivering bread and circuses. It's quite a shift from what I experienced. We don't see things the way they are - we see things the way we are. Today we have a dramatic issue with confirmation bias by filtered results and recommended streams limiting access to the full information.

Here's the evidence of my point. Google has nine data centers in North America. You would think if you go to google search you see what's on the internet. It's not true. Google can only index four percent (only 4%) of what's on the internet. That means that you're not seeing 96% of the information. Almost everything online is not accessible. Google is acting as the librarian of the digital library on your chessboard. When you browse or 'surf' you are still limited by the Google or Facebook bookmobile. Today your web browser or social media app prepares your choices by limiting your view based on the values they determine, not the ones you want to discover or reinforce.

Here's how it gets skewed. I would go out to that bookmobile at the end of my driveway and I would ask that driver; "do you have any more of the Danny Dunn series - the science books for young boys?" he would say no  I brought you all of them.

That's not exactly accurate. I learned that there were many more books in the series than those that came each week. The other editions were out in other bookmobiles so I didn't get to see them because they were checked out. So he would say; "how about if I see what I can find you since you've already read these. Next week I'll bring you some of the others.

I learned that the selection of books I would get each week was based on the driver asking a librarian who went to see what was in the stacks. If my feedback to the driver made an impression, and they passed along my interest, then the librarian would dig deeper for me.

Today algorithms do that for us. The scotoma is that we don't get an accurate view of the world. We see what is interpreted through multiple machine learning algorithms -  little black boxes - meaning your world view is going to be substantially different than others. That's because of click bias and your geo-location, attention span, and vulnerability to recommendations and search results.

Google and the other social media platforms are companies, not public utilities or services. They have to consider what is profitable to be kept in their servers. 96% of it doesn't make it. Only the smallest percentage is in your digital bookmobile. On top of this bias is that they are recording all of your activity with their app or search service. When you click on things that they offer, they give you a little more of that topical bent or information flavor.

Take note of this on the real estate of your search results page or your youtube search results. You have recommended things in the right sidebar right and at the top or bottom. The more you click, the more they want you to stay in their platform so they serve up things similar. It's called confirmation bias. They are giving you a narrower worldview than you deserve. You don't get to ask for the bookmobile driver's favor. You choose what's on their menu. You don't go out looking for what the world might have in store for you. You don't get to play with all the pieces on the board. Today private enterprise is doing the social engineering.

"In China, they have state-run media. In America we have media run state." ⁽¹⁾

When you do your p.reparation be aware that bias dictates search results. Digital recommenders want you to stick with them so they will build search results based on popularity. The results might be precise but they're probably not accurate. A physical limitation of 4% cannot reflect the way it is so you end up in a walled garden where you believe your point of view is correct. We're not seeing the whole picture so we become polarized. That's what we have going on in our country today.

That's a lot to get to the point: confirmation bias narrows your worldview. Be aware that your browser and the recommenders are not serving up everything. They have limited real estate just like a bookmobile. Practice asking better questions. Look for what they're not saying. It's worth thinking about.