Why we dropped the Claw from OmegaClaw (Mind over hands!!), and why this is the moment for a lot more people to start raising their own AI helpers... https://t.co/rz3hWmj1Nv
«The Black Hole» is an international prize winner short film that offers a portrait of temptation and greed from a genuinely sci-fi point of view.
[🎞️ Olly Williams and Phil Sansom]
Suicide.
I'm choosing to be deliberately blunt and provocative in this post because it's necessary. Government, charities, football clubs are all pushing water up a hill in highlighting what is undoubtedly a major health crisis.
You take a rope.
You put it up in a garage or a tree nearby or far away.
You're thinking about every loved one you'll leave behind as you put that rope around your neck.
Then you drop.
Some are decapitated.
Some aren't.
All are found by someone who has a lifetime of trauma that will never leave them.
A son.
A daughter.
A brother.
A sister.
A mother.
A father.
I know 2 men who hung themselves.
One was found by his Mom.
One was found by his brother.
Neither have recovered fully. 20 and 30 years on.
A life sentence for people who were already worrying, terrified their loved one may do something.
So just visualise the above and ask, "is there another way"?
A segway for a moment.
I do a few Q&A's every year. Tales of yesterday with a 99% male audience of my age group.
After the stories and fun, my last question back to the audience is..
"Hands up if you struggle with a mental health issue".
Nobody ever puts a hand up. Despite 1 in every 3 of 500 attendees statistically struggling.
"Ah, nobody, that's fucking brilliant! Well I do! ". I then graphically tell people, stunned into silence about how a rope around my neck in the middle of nowhere jolted me to go home and cry like a baby to my Mom.
After the Q&A has finished, something always happens. I'll be chatting to a few guys, saying bye and one by one, men will come over and whisper " I struggle".
Or my mailbox the next day will have 30 emails from guys, their partners or kids saying " Dad/Uncle /Brother was there last night and what you said hit them hard".
And that's how some people realise that it's time to speak to a pal or family member or even rant to me in an email. It works, I often get a follow up email a year or 6 later saying that they took responsibility for their suicidal feelings and are now flying.
Humans are programmed to want to live, to have families and to keep the species growing and thriving. So for a human to want to short circuit that desire isn't normal, and it should never be spoken of as normal. It's the ultimate red flag.
If you suspect your mate, Dad, Brother, Uncle is struggling mentally, they deserve your intervention.
They deserve a " are you OK, please tell me what's up".
They deserve an opportunity to get past wanting to hang a rope over a tree or in a garage and slowly struggle until they die and you find them.
If you've been there and trust me I have plenty, then you'll know that text out of the blue, or a footie mate or one of your kids asking jow you are can open the curtains to some sunshine.
Because when suicide is your only answer, the room is already dark, and you can't see a way out.
So please, fucking pretty please, ask that husband, Dad, Uncle, Cousin, footie pal TODAY how they are.
You may be shocked what comes back but extremely glad that you asked.
For those who struggle, you're not alone.
In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest.
Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, & Reebok were all selling more shoes.
So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest.
The winner was
A corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield.
"Two days after the competition," he said, "I wasn't even asked—I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike."
As he got to work on his first official shoe design, he thought about a building he had studied in architecture school: The Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The Centre Pompidou is an inside-out building, meaning that the structural, mechanical, and circulation systems are all exposed.
“That building,” Tinker said, “was describing what it was to the people of Paris. And I thought, ‘Well why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.’”
So Tinker designed an inside-out shoe:
The Air Max 1.
The Air Max 1 was a massive success, and it steered Nike's design direction from then on.
"To this day," Tinker says, "Phil Knight says I saved Nike."
Takeaway 1:
Had he not studied that building in Paris, Tinker says, he couldn’t have created the Air Max.
Creativity, he says, is a function of the “library in your head."
“When you sit down to create something...what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.”
Takeaway 2:
Tinker Hatfield went to architecture school and then he was a corporate architect for 4.5 years. Then, literally overnight, he became one of the best shoe designers in the world.
This makes me think of a counter-intuitive discovery made by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1904.
Before Spearman, the natural assumption was that the more you specialize in one thing, the worse you’ll be at other things.
Instead, Spearman discovered "the positive manifold" phenomenon.
He found that different abilities tend to be positively correlated. That the expertise gained through specialization is transferrable. That the cognitive and creative abilities cultivated as an architect could positively correlate with being a shoe designer.
- - -
"Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in." — Robert Greene
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