Life, the Universe and Everything

I've changed my blog name again. I realized I really like the "private world" meme and plan to expand on it at length and that "privateworld.com" was just a way better domain name than "mark.jeftovic.net".

I also ditched the "Under the Radar" caption because I found out awhile back that there is another tech blog that calls itself that. So after some consideration I've gone with "Exile From the Herd" because it follows on some thinking I've been doing about the very rough division of all people into three groups:

1. The Herd If you're aware of it, you do not want to be in it. This is the vast majority of the population who live in a comatose dreamworld, delegate their thinking to others and will happily follow their next door neighbour or somebody they perceive to be "in charge" off the edge of a cliff if they think everybody else is doing it.
   
   
2. Predators These guys love the herd because they prey on them. For the most part it's like shooting fish in a barrel or clubbing baby seals to death. Amoral, easy and lucrative. Predators can be found in many guises: televangalists, snake-oil salesmen, cult leaders and all politicians are predators. If everybody got smart, these guys would all be hung from meathooks. An informed citizenry is the bane of the predator's existance.
   
   
3. Sovereign Individuals These are people who have separated themselves from the herd and have built up suitable defenses around themselves to be largely free from predation. Predators for the most part leave these guys alone and move onto easier pastures. Sovereign Individuals don't care who thinks they're in charge of what. All that matters is that they can run their own lives. For the most part, they write their own tickets and mind their own business.
   

I of course aspire to the third group. It is largely an ideal and can only be progressed toward but never truly attained.

In thinking on this I also came up with another one of my silly "socialist, conservative, libertarian" jokes because the three groups align very roughly along those definitions.

Question: What happens when a libertarian, a conservative and a socialist witness a fisherman overturning his boat on a lake?

Answer: The libertarian tries to help the guy. The conservative pontificates that the fisherman needs to take responsibility for his own life circumstances and the socialist argues that the fisherman suffers from an unfair disadvantage compared to people on shore and suggests we should all jump into the lake to make everybody even.

Anyway, this is more or less a test post, people subscribed via the old URL RSS feed should still see posts, and new subscribers should end up under the new URL.

I've been pondering a post for sometime about the pure implausibility of capital-C Conspiracies. The one's where everything under the sun is orchestrated and executed by a behind-the-scenes power block "at the top" THAT CONTROLS EVERYTHING.

Bear in mind that everything is relative: One man's knitting circle is another's shadowy cabal.

Whether it was Alfred Pike meticulously planning three world wars over two hundred years ago, William Guy Carr's Luciferian-Communist conspiracy which engineered every siginificant event of the 20-th century, or even David Icke's "we really do live in a Matrix controlled by lizards" fantasy, there was an obvious impossibility to it that I was having a hard time articulating.

The elevator in my office building hasn't been working since last week. I meant to do this yesterday but today I finally called building management to report it. It turned out nobody else had done so. I overheard a lot of people in the halls complaining about it, but none of them actually did anything about it, even if it only required the most innocuous of actions to set a remedy in motion. So eventually, I did something about it. What's the difference between me and everybody else? About ±10% I figure.

That means most of the time I'll go an extra 10% over the crowd, one extra mile out of ten, or maybe my exasperation threshold is 10% lower than everyone else's.

Over a lifetime, this not only adds up, it compounds. The Daily Reckoning crew often point out that "Life is won or lost at the margins". What separates successful people from the mob isn't one or two mind blowing qualities nobody can compete with, like an IQ of 192 or a trust fund the size of a third-world GDP. It's the margins, consistantly going just a little bit further, being a little bit more thorough, acting just a little bit sooner, most of the time, over time.

These little differences feedback into each other and as I said, compound. After a few years you notice the person who goes the extra 10% is a little ahead of his peers. He may be self-employed while the others are working up the corporate ladder. She may own her condo outright while the rest are chisling away at 10% down mortgages. At this point it still looks like little things and subtle differences.

Fast forward a decade, or more. The picture changes dramatically and the consistant margin player (not to be confused with the consistantly marginal player) seems light-years ahead of the pack. "Why are they so lucky?" People around them wonder. "Goddamn horseshoe shoved up his ass I tell ya. What's on TV? Pass me the cheesies, why is the remote way over there?"



I probably didn't invent this expression, so I apologize to whomever I picked it up from

Overnight Sensations are often 20 years in the making.

What makes it seem "overnight" are those margin plays, compounding for decades, 5% more dilligence here, 10% more elbow grease there, 7% more perserverance over there and a dash of extra tenacity all got together and exploded past critical mass at some point.

And the nice thing about it is anybody can put in an extra 10% anytime, anywhere. Do it all the time and you will come out ahead of the pack.

So the next time you ask you yourself "Why are they so lucky?", the answer is "Because you haven't built up a big balance of 'luck' in your own life".

But you can start now. The sooner you realize that you are the "somebody" in "somebody should...", your luck in life will abound.

I haven't blogged for quite some time. The longer I'm away from blogging, the harder it is to get back in because I feel a need to adequately write about all the events that transpired in the interim, those which kept me from writing. It's such a daunting task I put it off until I break down and usually dispense with the entire gap in once sentence:


I'm a daddy, I have baby daughter now.


Enough said.


Now that I'm a parent, I find myself marvelling at the twists and turns my life has taken to get me to this point. The point where I find myself looking into the 7-week old eyes of a newborn infant who flashes that dazzling smile of hers which simply floors me and thinking: there's a little baby soul in there, and that soul needs her daddy, and that's me.


Speaking of life's ironies and twists, I choose today to resume blogging because Bob Rae is expected to announce his candidacy for the federal liberal party. The man led the socialist NDP to a one-term government in Ontario which took the province from a surplus to about a 27 billion dollar deficit in 5 quick years wants to run the surplus running, federal debt-reducing libs. Man that's weird.


The other weird thing is when Rae was premier he wrote a little song called "We're in the Same Boat Now", a joyful ditty about multi-racial harmony, and submitted it to Sony Music for publication and was laughed at publicly.


Always the opportunist, I jumped on the situation and the heavy-metal band I was in at the time, Landslide, recorded a power-punk version of that song and released it to the media for a very fun, albeit short-lived, moment in the sun for our band. (We predictably distingrated shortly after that).


I still have 7" singles of our rendition of Bob Rae's song, and I recently managed to snag the landslide.ca domain name, so I think I will quickly throw a website up there and put the old Rae ditty and the other Landslide tunes up for posterity.

A lot of my blog entries reference Sieg, the Atavist and you may wonder "who is this guy?". He is not a peer, he's from a different generation than I am. More of a mentor, he gave me my first job in computing back in 1993.


His software company was getting near the end of the list in the phone book, and I was cold-calling them all looking for a job (and getting nowhere). He agreed to see me, and had in mind the task of porting his courier company's COBOL applications and data from an old Tandy microcomputer (with 8" floppy drives) to a shiney new 486 running SCO Xenix. Did I know anything about it? Nothing. "Sink or swim" were his parting words to me as he loaded me up with a stack of manuals and sent me on my way.


It was the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship (I hope for both of us). I spent many an afternoon in his office combing through source code, figuring out how stuff was supposed to work and Sieg would teach me about investments, economics and a crazy political theory he subscribed to which turned out to be Libertarianism. It sounded like workable anarchy to me and it made no sense (I was still pretty left-leaning in those days, having been a recent student, and when you're safely nuzzled away in an academic cacoon, you inevitably turn into a raving pinko. I'm probably still further to the left today than most capital L Libertarians if only for the simple fact that I haven't left Canada)




Sieg, pictured above at age four, came to Canada from Germany (as did my own mother), but I didn't know about his early life until I read his blog post about it today. The fact that his family spent their first winter in Canada living in a chicken coop in Alberta is a testament to the principles Sieg embodies: self-reliance and personal responsibility. Something we're woefully short of in today's world full of entitlements and reluctance to accept responsibility for one's own actions.


So quote Sieg:

I have never felt disadvantaged because of the less than perfect circumstances during some parts of my life. I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me or to help make things better. I learned that from the example of my parents. They just wanted to be left alone to succeed on their own. That is all I have ever wanted. Don't help. Just get the hell out of my way. Don't give me anything, but don't take from me what isn't yours either.

Amen to that.


This is not to say that people shouldn't help each other, and I don't think Sieg means to say that. I know this because several times over my life, he has come to my aid in one manner or another but I think the key point here was that at the time, I asked for his help.


Self reliance doesn't mean nobody co-operates and you let your fellow man starve to death or drown, but it does mean picking up the cards you are dealt and playing them.