Transcript: 

My name is Shaun McMillan and this is the Best Class Ever. 

Strategies for Dealing with Uncertainty

Recently we have been learning about strategies to deal with uncertainty, the element of the unknown, chance, and the randomness of success and failure.

Media Rest

Learning new skills, training, solving difficult problems, and doing work that requires intense focus is not something you can just will yourself to do all day long all of the time. We can put in a good three to four hours each day, but any more than that and we quickly exhaust ourselves. Organisms need rest. So if you want to live a meaningful and productive life, then it would be a good idea to analyze and apply wisdom to how you live when you’re not working. So the question today is how should we go about resting and having fun?

Who here is not spending a significant amount of time consuming media? Let’s be really honest with ourselves. In her book, “Reality is Broken,” and related TED Talk, Game Designer Jane McGonigal found research that students today spend as much time consuming media as they do going to school. Playing games, watching movies, spending time on YouTube soaks up a significant portion of our time, even if we aren’t getting sucked down into endless rabbit holes on the internet. Now that people are stuck at home due to the recent Pandemic people may be binge watching entire seasons of television series even more than before. Critics mostly agree that the quality of writing in television has now surpassed that of films in this time that has been deemed, “The Golden Age of Television.” 

A Harvard professor who teaches a class called “Shakespeare & Politics” named Paul Cantor said in an interview that he believes the series Breaking Bad, written by Vince Gilligan, will stand the test of time to stand as a work of genius along the lines of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Now I am not recommending that you go and begin watching Breaking Bad. It’s very dark, and does not leave you with those cathartic happy endings that every Shakespeare comedy and more PG entertainment provides. Breaking Bad is really violent and cynical in tone, not so different from MacBeth or one of Shakespeare’s other tragedies. But that being said, the Old Testament is surprisingly filled with some fairly rated R content, but it feels significantly less stimulating when you are merely reading as opposed to seeing, hearing, and experiencing images of sex or violence on the screen. 

The Classics

Harold Bloom, one of the most respected literary critics and author of “How to Read & Why,” argues that we should be more judicious about what books we choose to read, and I think the same applies to what we watch. But the reasons he says we should be careful is NOT because of how extreme the sex and violence might be, but because there is a difference in the quality of the work. There is an endless amount of content out there, but there is an extremely limited amount of days, weeks, and years we have before we will die. If you only read one book a year, then you might not read more than 50 or so books in your lifetime. If you can fit every book you will ever read on two shelves of a book shelf, then it matters which books you choose to read. The same applies to movies and tv series. Harold Bloom says that our ability to think, the quality of our thoughts, and our ability to express ourselves depends greatly upon the quality of content that we consume. If we want to be high level people, we need to take in high quality content created by incredible authors or thinkers expressing well formulated arguments.

It’s just like something I heard when I was an art student. While studying animation a great animator visited our school. A fellow student asked him, “How do you get really good?” His response wasn’t very classy, but it was real. He said, “You want good shit? You have to eat well,” meaning to produce great art, you have to look at great art. 

It is not hard to figure out the difference between what is good and what is crap. Not only do we have critics, ratings, sales figures, and YouTube videos offering analysis, but we also have art, music, and literary masterpieces that have stood the test of time. These works may be older and seem less relevant, but if you do your research, you’ll often find that modern works are really just poor imitations of these older masterpieces. For example, one of the reasons there are so many gangster movies is because Godfather by Francis Ford Coppolla really was that good. If you only have time to watch one great gangster film, why waste your time watching a new one when it is only half as good as the original that it was inspired by? Why watch the worst Batman movies like the overly campy Batman Forever when you could be watching a film from the Dark Knight trilogy by one of today’s greatest directors, Christopher Nolan? His movies might not be the most recent to have come out, but they are far and away much better films. 

Why You Should Read, Not Just Watch Films

To take this idea a little further, most great films were inspired by even greater old books. There is a reason that the Bible has been the number one best selling piece of literature after all these years. Those stories really have stood the test of time, and they really are that good. Just read 1st & 2nd Samuel, which are the stories of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon. I promise you will not find a more compelling amount of love, sex, violence, and political intrigue. And because it also provides insight into how God felt about these gripping dramas, that makes it as meaningful as it is entertaining.

Are Books Better Than New Media?

As a game designer I am not AS biased against new media as a typical parent might be. Unlike your parents I hesitate to completely disregard your time spent playing games as a total waste of time. I have created multiple educational games myself and I do recognize their potential to be meaningful experiences. But just like watching films, or reading books, it matters which games, movies, and books we choose. Time is limited and not all content is equal. And even if the content is really deep, well written, and deeply meaningful, I wonder if we really gain as much from them if we only consume them for the cathartic feeling they leave us with and fail to stop and think about the themes or take away from them the lessons that could change our thinking, reflect on our weaknesses, or inspire us to take on even more challenges in life. 

Movie Night | Book Club Sharing

For that reason I suggest that after you watch a great film, play a great game, or read a great book, you bring it up with a friend and talk about it. Share those great ideas, dig a little deeper. Discuss the moral dilemmas raised by the creators. Discuss the paradox of two totally opposite ideas being entirely valid while mutually contradictory. For example, if you watch Back to the Future, any one of the Terminator films, X-men Days of Future Past, or, a film by Christopher Nolan like Interstellar, Dunkirk, or Tenet, why wouldn’t you take the time to discuss about the concept of time in all of its beautiful complications? Or at the very least do a search on YouTube and find someone doing analysis of your favorite story to see if there are even more mind blowing ideas that you didn’t think of. 

For me, I find these conversations so compelling that it makes me want to join or start a movie night or book club. If there is enough interest perhaps I will create an online group where we can recommend and discuss all of the great content out there. 

Warning

Technology is quickly changing the social dynamics of society, and one distinct difference between this generation and every generation in the past is that only now has it become possible for people to be entertained twenty-four hours a day. It is hard to imagine now, but when I was a child you had to watch a show at the time it appeared. If you missed it, you missed it. Your only second chance at seeing the episode was if the show got into the weekly rotation of reruns. And even then you had to catch the rurun when it happened to air. There was no binge watching, no internet video channels, and no readily available personalized feeds of constant new content. 

Quality:Quantity Ratio

These feeds and ever changing home page thumbnail galleries create the impression that there is an endless amount of content, and basically there is, but there is not an endless amount of GOOD content. Once you get through the content that it benefits you to consume, the ratio of quality to quantity quickly falls off. It may be a slippery slope, but most of us can tell that once we start flicking our thumb and endlessly scrolling we have gone beyond the point of it being good for us. A little bit of media each day can be very meaningful. But it really does not take very long to consume the most useful content. 

Fooled by Randomness Again

The problem is that transition from useful to useless is gradual, and the random element of not knowing what will appear next in the list feeds on our brain’s desire for novelty. It’s a manipulation of our neurological need to explore. 

Mobile devices also fall into this category. You can get some really great use out of a mobile device. But there is a point at which you are no longer using the phone to save time, but it feels more like the phone is using you to waste time.

A Fight You Cannot Win

It makes me feel dumb to know that a little device or some computer algorithm is outsmarting me. But remember that it’s not you versus your phone. It is you versus an entire campus of the world’s smartest well-paid engineers working in collaboration with the entire world’s competing content creators. Of course you are going to lose this fight. The only way to NOT be addicted to media consumption is to set some limits before you open yourself up to it. 

Addictive Consumption

But how much is too much? I think it’s different for each person and different at each stage of your life, but I think we can think of it like alcohol. It might be legal, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous. Like a character said in Ken Kessey’s famous story, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In it, the main character, named Chief ,says about his father’s alcohol addiction, “Pretty soon he weren’t sucking from the bottle no more. Each time he put the bottle to his lips, it was sucking out of him.” In the same way, watch as much as is good for you, but no more. Set a limit before you start, and stop once you reach your own personal limit. And one more rule while I’m on my didactic soap box of condescending advice, make sure to do your critical work first and then reward yourself afterwards with passive media consumption, instead of using it to postpone the work that intimidates you. The more you procrastinate, the more intimidating that work becomes. But the power of positive feedback loops is a subject for a later lesson. 

Non-Fiction

So far we have been talking about fiction and storytelling. But I think it is even easier to see the benefit of reading non-fiction. If you want to be successful in life, there is no better way to get ahead than to learn from the wisdom of others. The Bible is great for ancient wisdom, but it’s also good to learn what more contemporary academics have to say about economics, behavioral psychology, business, happiness science, or to research more specifically about your own personal interests, hobbies, or sport. Non-fiction books are great for the exact reason that I brought up in a recent lesson. These books allow you to quickly learn what took an expert years of research to compile. If you do this on a repeated basis it really enriches your world, activates your curiosity, and provides you a multitude of ways to have interesting conversations with intelligent people. It makes life endlessly fascinating. 

The Convenience of Learning Through Audio Books, Podcasts, & YouTube

But perhaps you, like most people, just don’t have time to sit and read books. Don’t worry, if you speak English then you are in luck. At this moment in time one of the greatest evolutions in learning is taking place. With the advent of internet video, audio books, and podcasts it is now becoming possible to learn through listening the same way that people traditionally learned through reading. Reading is still faster, but listening is far more convenient. 

Some of the greatest university professors have recorded lectures on fascinating subjects posted at full length on YouTube or in podcasts. There is a genre of YouTube videos I call video essays, that combine visuals and audio to make a book’s worth of content into illustrated, animated 10 minute videos. 

Some of the most compelling stories I have ever heard came from popular Podcasts like Radiolab, This American Life, and Revisionist History. Planet Money gave me a critical understanding of how global economics really work at the macro and micro level, in a way that any poor loser could understand. 

I love listening to interviews of extremely articulate academics speaking about controversial topics. If you’ve seen the interview of Canada’s most notorious academic Jordan Peterson by European journalist Cathy Newman, then you know that an interview can be as exciting as a boxing match. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the world of podcasts and video essays, feel free to visit my website where I’ll be posting a how to guide for the uninitiated.

The 20/80 rule. Exploring the other 80%.

And now let’s bring this full circle to a learning strategy for dealing with uncertainty. We spoke before about spending 20% of your most productive time to get 80% of your work done, so then how should you spend the rest of your time or the least productive time when you are too tired to actively engage in hard work? 

Rest and exploration. 

By rest I don’t mean sleep although that is also important. For me, rest means both recreation, exploration, and play. And for reasons that I am about to explain, exploration is absolutely critical. Watching movies, playing games, and reading books can be a very meaningful way to passively spend your time when you have the least amount of energy. 

Exploration is critical to long-term production, because the strategies that are working for you now might not work so well in the future. Those tried and true strategies might be producing nearly 80% for you now, but it will likely prove insufficient as the landscape changes. You still need to find the next big idea. Finding just the right person, the right book, or interesting ideas from public speakers, authors, or entertainment might take a lot of time and lead mostly nowhere. But eventually you will find a valuable new idea and useful creative endeavor that could lead to your next great breakthrough.

Maybe it is not so meaningless after all. But here are some suggestions to make it even more  meaningful

1. Go back and read the classics. They are timeless, often surprisingly entertaining, and make you into a better thinker. 
2. Take the time to reflect on what you learn from your favorite media. Discuss those ideas with friends. 
3. Set a limit to how much you consume. Use it to make your self better, instead of letting it use you. 
4. If you don’t have time to read, then listen. Subscribe to educational channels on YouTube or through podcasts.

If you would like to see my own personal recommendations for movies, books, podcasts, and YouTube channels then I am posting some lists at www.BestClassEver.org. And if you have some great movies or YouTube channels that you would like to recommend, please post a comment on this video or on the site. I would love to hear your feedback.