Back in junior high school when I was unknowingly suffocating from living a double-layered monolithic life in a Japanese (layer 1) suburban (layer 2) area, I was thunderstruck during the sociology class by reading in the textbook about the mythical diverse culture that existed somewhere in the land of Far West called the U.S. According to the short blurb, a dream-like society was starting to emerge where people with different skin colors, cultures, and beliefs could co-exist without trying to assimilate each other. It was the 80s, you know.

I thought: How wonderful it would be to live in a world without peer pressure, where you don’t have to live according to unwritten rules? Of course back then I couldn’t articulate my desire this clearly (if I could have, I wouldn’t have stayed in Japan for long), but the idea that I might be able to find a place where I would not feel constrained stuck with me, eventually leading me to settle into Taiwan at the beginning of the new millennium.

I have associated myself with nomads: people who do not belong to where they should belong. It was a great feeling to find a perfect niche in the world, almost free from the constraints of group-mentality tribes (Yes my view is skewed and unfair. Let’s move on.) But lately, I have started to have a deja vü sensation: I have been surrounding myself with the same type of people all the time. The difference between the past and present is that this time, I am one of them.

I listed twenty most-frequently contacted friends online and offline, and none of them belong to the “majority” in the traditional sense. Or in other words, I cannot describe any of my friends in a stereotypical way, such as “American-born Chinese doctor,” “expatriate housewife,” or “marketing manager in an international firm.” My friends are (mix any three from the following list): Actor/designer/dancer/engineer/Buddhist/Chinese medicine doctor/photographer/martial arts instructor/yoga teacher/poet/painter/English teacher. As for me, I am a Japanese guy working in a Taiwanese company writing English manuals and practicing Tibetan Buddhism.

It looks like I am in a community with diverse backgrounds and philosophies. But maybe it is not. Members of my “tribe” do have a huge common ground: We do not belong to the majority and we are proud of it. And that unspoken pact both unites us and repels people who live according to the unimaginative “accepted standards.” I fear that instead of mingling with various types of people, we have been isolating ourselves from folks who do not share core identities. And I think the same attitude applies to other “tribes” too.

I think this is happening because thanks to the Net, we can effectively blind ourselves from the existence of people who do not share ideas with us. In this paper titled Internet Islands: The rise of digital fortresses and the end of the Digital Republic, the Internet is helping us getting disconnected as well as connected. We will soon be living in isolated digital fortresses feuding with each other, instead of enjoying a unified world society that was once promised. Here is a quote from the paper.

The Internet of 2010, a care-free childhood where you could go nearly anywhere and do nearly anything is no more. The unitary Internet is a memory, replaced by Internet Islands protected by government-run agencies and closely-allied corporate empires.

The technology is always neutral—it can be used both ways. And sadly, grouping with like-minded people is easier than reaching out to strangers. I can already see the influence of the Internet as a tool for isolation. On-demand streaming videos saves (prevents) us from receiving information that are irrelevant to our current interests. Google news feeds us customized views of the world as we want. Facebook accelerates the pace of uniting like-minded people.

These conditions might apply only to residents of a large city (Taipei in my case). But the fact is, half of the world’s population is living in the city as of now and the number of urban tribes is only growing, making digital isolation a global movement.

When I was in Japan I used to think I would choke myself because that society was so homogeneous. Am I (or are we) getting back to square one?

A while ago, a serial entrepreneur/writer Penelope Trunk wrote a piece on TechCrunch about why few women begin a startup. (Note: here, "startup" means a type of company, usually a technology company, aimed at dominating the world, like Google/Facebook/Amazon. It is different from family business or freelancing.) She says women are not wired toward making companies bigger because their desire to have children gets in the way.

Women are under real pressure to have kids, though. They have a biological clock. So women who are the typical age of entrepreneurs—25—need to be looking for someone to mate with. Think about it. If you want to have kids before you’re 35—when your biological clock explodes—then you need to start when you’re 30, allowing for one miscarriage, which is more probable than most young people think. If you need to start having kids when you’re 30, you probably need to meet the guy you’re going to marry by the time you’re 27, so you can date for a year, get married, and live together for a year before kids. If you need to meet that guy by 27, you are very distracted during your prime startup time.

A reply was soon posted from Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic and a frequent TechCrunch contributor. He debunks Penelope's account with an abundance of data, saying many women with children have succeeded in startups, while other successful entrepreneurs have chosen not to have children.

My research team systematically analyzed the backgrounds of 652 startup founders in the tech industry. We looked not just at the narrow slice of tech companies that gets featured most often on TechCrunch, but at the broader universe—those that economists, professors, and the general public would call high-technology companies. And then we studied the backgrounds of a sample of 549 company founders of companies in 12 industries that grow as fast as those in technology, and are equally important to the U.S. economy. Our research focused on “successful” startups—those that had made it out of the garage, had employees, and were actually generating revenue.

To summarize, Penelope Trunk told the truth* and Vivek Wadhwa counter-argued it with fact. I don't know who is right. Certainly I am inclined to believe Penelope Trunk's story more because she's been there and done that, and also because she is a master of persuasion (one of the most important characteristics of a serial entrepreneur). But in the end, maybe both are right, despite the disagreement. It is because they are talking about different subjects.

Penelope Trunk explores why women are not inclined to begin startups, while Vivek Wadhwa data highlights how many women have already done so. If we live in a perfect world where we don't have to do something we are not especially willing to do, then Vivek Wadhwa beautifully refuted Penelope Trunk's argument. Well, welcome to the real world; most of us work long hours, eat obsessively and break commitments to a long-time relationships. The connection between goal and action is always fuzzy. Sometimes it doesn't exist.

• Q: Why are women not initiating startups?

• A: There are many women founders in startups.

The reply might be correct, but answers a different question.

I remember a similar discussion regarding Microsoft's position in the technology world. Paul Graham, a venture capitalist and writer, wrote an article titled Microsoft is dead a few years ago. Don Dodge at Microsoft's Emerging Business Team (at that time) passionately retorted that it wasn't at all. Paul Graham then clarified the issue.

When I wrote that Microsoft was dead, I didn't mean it literally. I couldn't have. Companies aren't alive, so they can't die.

In fact "Microsoft is Dead" was what we in the trade call a metaphor. I meant something else. Over the last couple days there has been some disagreement about what I meant. Some people who were scandalized by the essay convinced themselves I meant something rather stupid: that Microsoft is about to go out of business. This they diligently refuted.

Paul Graham said Microsoft was dead as the leading influencer, and Don Dodge argued that Microsoft was alive because it made tons of money. Again they were both right, but again they were talking about different issues.

Here are the similarities between the two cases:

• The main argument was controversial (Women don't join startups, Microsoft is dead)
• The counterargument was equally passionate (replying by posting a full article)
• The counterargument did not actually…argue (it talked about a different subject)

Why did the replies miss the point? They are both from extremely smart people with tons of credibility. But they still counter-argued the main issue indirectly. I guess they did so because they were afraid of the original article's influence. They knew the original argument was correct, and more important, real. They had to counter-argue, despite having insufficient ammunitions on their side. (From my editor: Or perhaps they read the article and interpreted it according to some pre-existing hot button, thus missing the article’s actual point.)

So I think it was fear that drove these two people to post full-length article with many pieces of pseudo-evidence to back up their claim. And of course, their attempts backfired and gave more attention to the original topic. I personally came to read both original stories from links in the discussion threads. I remembered, and was even inclined to believe, the original point. Not so much the counterargument.

On the flip side, we can apply this lessons of missed-counterargument-as-a-sign-of-anxiety to our own discussions. If someone passionately argues with you on an agenda but (slightly) missing the point, you know you are hitting the bull's eye.

*Maybe it was just HER truth. But isn't it always THE truth?

Let me just begin by saying that there are two sides to every story. And this is my side, the right one.

http://www.youtube.com/e/KNbPnqyvItk  

I used to define art only as a creative activity and as a counterpart to design. The following had for years been my definition of art and design:

• If you create something because you simply want to or have to, you are making a piece of art.
• If you have a purpose more important than your creative impulse, you are making a piece of design.

But these points were refuted very easily by my friend:

1. The great composers, Mozart, Bach, Chopin, etc., were all great artists. Nobody calls them designers.
2. Yet they were all "designing" music, composing tunes that cater to the taste of their patrons.

He was right. My beautiful theory crumbled in seconds–not because he found faulty logic but because he simply pointed out what I knew–but was trying to suppress. I stopped thinking about what art is, resorting to the cop-out statement "Art is something you cannot define." It also felt silly to think about art while not making some of my own.

Some months later, a hint about the solution to the mystery came unexpectedly.

I have been attending a monthly event called Red Room, held in a beautiful studio in the center of Taipei. Red Room is an event without events. You go there, stand up in the front, and express yourself. Some read their poems. Some sing. Some dance. Some share their blogs (yours truly). When you are not in the front, you become part of the happy audience. Most of the "performers" are not professional; some have never before stood up in front of an audience.  It is a place to appreciate how unique and interesting each of us is.

One night, as I was expecting to hear a song, the performer asked the audience to sing with her. She sang the introduction, followed by the audience singing the bridge. Music-wise, the result was–to be honest–completely out of tune. But as a good Red Roomer, I stayed there, making sure my smile didn’t change into a burst of laughter, and sang with the others. There we were, 50 of us, singing in cacophony but in unison.

During the second verse, a weird sensation was occurring inside me. Instead of sheer amusement, a genuine feeling of joy was appearing, followed by a shade of sadness. Yes, I was getting happy and sad singing that song. Happy because the out-of-tune singing was turning into a song in its own right–I never thought one could do that with a Björk song– and I was taking pride in the fact that I was in it. It was as if I was creating something that I didn't know I was capable of. And I was sad because I knew that moment wouldn't last long. In fact, it was going to disappear in a matter of minutes.

The whole experience had nothing to do with the quality of the performance, which was anything but "professional" as in established markets. It just resonated with my mind, something buried deep within my memories. Maybe it was about my early memory of singing in front of the classmates in embarrassment because I was totally missing the tune and my friends were all laughing at me. Maybe I could finally allow myself to sing something out loud without trying to make it "smooth." Who knows.

After that incident, I knew I wouldn't see group singing–including karaoke–in the same way again. It just changed how I perceive singing. I realized that all I had in my mind, up until then, was that “singing” was to follow the original song pitch-perfect. The idea of morphing a song into something else just didn't exist for me.

It finally dawned on me that art is about changing how we perceive. Perceive what? The world, in a fixed way. Art does not reside merely in the artists, nor their works. Art is something that we perceive: a chemical reaction. In other words, the audience creates the art, and the artist is someone who catalyzes the change through his or her own unique perception. I don't know if this is the correct definition of art. But does it matter? It works for me.

Now I might have solved the dilemma about the great composers: their music, without exception, has the power to change how we perceive the world. Who cares, then, if they made their music for their patrons, or "sold out" in current term? Their works all–work.

P.S. If you want to experience the fluid nature of our perception and reality, this movie shows it in a brilliantly weird way: Waking Life, recommended by my editor Sherry Lamoreaux.

http://www.youtube.com/e/uk2DeTet98o  

I spent the Chinese new year holidays underground. It was a Buddhist retreat, but instead of staying high up on a mountain or out there on a beach, we spent nearly a whole week inside a facility.

What do we do in a retreat? It's not like we collectively sit in the dark, hoping for an epiphany to arrive. (We already do that in our cubicles during daytime, don't we?) We remain active: We read sutras, recite mantras, and meditate on a set schedule. In other words, we repeat our usual workday—using our holidays.

Therefore initially I took the retreat as a great opportunity…to push my patience beyond limits. Result: By the end of the retreat I was daydreaming about…continuing the retreat for a month or even longer. I wanted more of it, with pleasure. Had I totally gone "in my head"?

Maybe. Or not. What I experienced toward the end of the retreat, the result that motivated me to push further, was the joy of doing without expecting. Before the retreat, I thought I loved doing things. I was known (still I am) to be effective, completing one task after another in 30-minute chunks. Indeed, I love the rhythm and the sense of accomplishment.

But that wasn’t “doing.” That was “completing.” The moment I finished one task (or even before completing it), my attention shifted to the next task, as if I were in a rush to keep the momentum while the sense of victory lasted. Most of the time I barely remembered what the previous task was about.

To be fair, I kept the same old attitude until halfway into the retreat, scoring numbers and measuring time. But after the initial excitement got wiped out, I had to cope with the never-endingness of the retreat, such as meditating every day, which by definition had no goal. At one point I thought work life feels better; at least I have different sets of assignments each day.

To cheer me up, I decided to relax. Not “try” to relax – just decided that I was already relaxing and enjoying the retreat. So I put the goals and numbers aside, and just allowed myself to do what I was doing without thinking about the outcome.

And then I finally started enjoying what I did. During tai-qi, I could feel a tingling sensation running up my whole body and then receding like a tide. When reading classical books, what used to be a string of Chinese sentences in isolation started to form a coherent story. And I could finally see that my task-completion mentality left little room for embracing what I really do in the moment.

I wondered how I could have missed the joy of doing without the completion pressure before; I should have enjoyed that sensation during the Sunday afternoon doodling. The truth is, I was still carrying the task-oriented attitude during my free time. I might wake up at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon and order pizza while watching a video and then take a nap and wake up and go to 7-11 and munch banana-chocolate ice cream while watching another video and then sleep, and I would still be counting the number of accomplishments. I would agonize if I do not meet the two movies/scoop of ice creams/hours of sleep “quotas.”

These revelations might not have occurred if it weren’t for the mindful repetitiveness I had endured. Conclusion? Being in the retreat works at all stages. The initial activities kick your body into active mode; later stages help you question your motivations and (if you endure them) reward you with insights you weren’t aware of before.

P.S. What a coincidence EWCP, the group I am in, is holding a retreat event in Taipei from April 29–May1. It is a 3-day retreat—how short—but will be done out in the sun, in the beautiful Yao-Ming Shan.