Effective leadership, I believe, has to understand other voices, even those it disagrees with. The War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City lets you see the U.S. from a perspective you won’t see in the U.S. The museum portrays the U.S. as a militaristic, bullying, violent, imperialistic aggressor that supported an unpopular, violent puppet regime and lost.

How much of that you agree with or not, and how much you discount as propaganda, is up to you. But at least some people agree with it, and not just in the Vietnamese government. It’s hard to look at the effects of agent orange that make your skin crawl or to read quotes by belligerent American politicians or soldiers (“we’ll bomb them into the stone age”) or to see then-state-of-the-art, expensive weaponry juxtaposed by thousand-year-old rice farming communities and not ask why we were there, or why we committed so deeply. Could we not have won an upper hand more peacefully?

I found the museum powerful. To the extent it downplays its violence or support from Russia and China, it does so more subtly than North Korea (not hard to do).

In any case, I took pictures of some of the posters from around the world expressing support for North Vietnam. How well they represent the global feeling then, you’ll have to ask a historian. I’m putting them here because I found their message and designs powerful.

I also include a few pictures of the large weapons they displayed, like the fighter jets and tanks, now sitting in the yard like rusted out sports cars on the blocks in front yards in the U.S., only parked amid palm trees in the occasional monsoon rain instead. I think they were once forefront weaponry, designed to kill “communists” — who won, resulting in what appears to me widespread capitalism. Our bailout and monopoly laden economy has its advantages but could still learn from theirs.

I also included one (of many) heart-breaking image and quote by a photographer of one of the soldiers’ killings. Even those barbaric acts didn’t register as strongly, at least with me, of the displays of the use of agent orange and other dioxin-laced weapons, produced by Monsanto and Dow. The results on people are gut-wrenching. I didn’t have the heart to take those pictures. It seems the U.S. government knew the effects, but as far as I could tell, the enemy kept hiding in the trees so they had to kill the trees. Vietnam otherwise looks like a tropical paradise.

Sorry about all the reflections. I tried to get rid of them, but the museum lighting made them unavoidable. I hope you don’t mind I made the pictures too big for the page layout (at least on my computer), but I wanted to show them bigger. Hovering the mouse over the pictures pauses the slideshow and clicking on the little dots below the pictures lets you jump to specific pictures.

Rule number one about leaders from guru (and my professor) is they ship. They get the job done.

Nobody whose paycheck doesn’t originate with fossil fuels or fundamentalist religion believes we are heading in a healthy direction for our environment. But we all respond to incentives and the incentives of our system — huge roads, low density suburbs, huge subsidies for fossil fuels, no costs to pollute, etc — promote pollution, producing CO2, and so on.

Governments write and enforce the laws forming most of these systems. As long as governments aren’t changing the systems to reflect what people want, they aren’t leading. As long as the media is reporting controversy — which sells copy — where there is overwhelming consensus (outside of people paid from fossil fuels), they aren’t leading either.

In fairness, who among us above a certain age, upon hearing global warming predictions, has not thought something like:

The temperature is going to rise by how much? Hmm… that doesn’t seem like that much. What does that mean to me? The sea level will rise how much? Holy cow, that affects me. Uh oh, but by when? 2100? How old will I be then? Oh, I’ll be dead by then. Whew, I dodged a bullet there!

I can tell you, no one in Congress, the White House, or the board room of any company will live to see this change. Yet they are deciding what will happen.

They are not shipping. That is, they aren’t creating the change an increasing majority wants. Calling them “leaders” misuses the term. I don’t blame them. Like anyone, they’re responding to their incentives, and they will die well before the sea levels rise. They expect their wealth will protect their children. It might, for a while.

Filling the leadership vacuum

Enter the kids in this Atlantic article, “An Inconvenient Lawsuit: Teenagers Take Global Warming to the Courts,” who are “suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. … to do more to prevent the risks of climate change.”

I call this leadership. Their goals look far-fetched, but they will have an effect. If they don’t reach their goals, they’ll learn enough for the next group to get farther. And so on until they motivate the government to respond to their interests over those of fossil fuels.

What worked with clean air, clean water, and tobacco and may work with labeling food may work here. We have a nanny state today, coddling and over-protecting Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto. How about removing that coddling and creating some transparency?

Leading counterproductive “leaders”

My North Korea posts explore how government rulers often have incentives to polarize others and overstate threats, actions which increase the chance of war and certainly create fear and antipathy.

My experience in North Korea, experiencing how well people get along when they meet in contrast to how our “leaders” are trying to motivate us, showed me that if we want peace, waiting for government won’t do it. Too many in the government benefit too much from moving away from peace.

What works

People have to lead their governments. Historically I see it happening this way more than in reverse, from ping-pong helping open relations with China to a letter from a ten-year-old girl helping thaw relations with Russia to Rosa Parks to too many examples to list. I mean, how long had people opposed slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation?

These students suing the government aren’t crazy. If anyone is, it’s anyone waiting for others with little incentive to act for them. The Atlantic article highlights the difference in motivations by age (global warming often polls as the least important issue for voters today, all over 18).

While the adults continue their argument, Loorz says kids his age are much more worried about climate change than many of their parents might imagine. Indeed, one British survey found that children between the ages of 11 and 14 worry more about climate change (74 percent) than about their homework (64 percent). “I used to play a lot of video games, and goof off, and get sent to the office at school,” he said. “But once I realized it was my generation that was going to be the first to really be affected by climate change, I made up my mind to do something about it.“

Does “barbaric” overstate things? I used to consider myself tolerant of smoke in bars and clubs. Actually, I still do, but I don’t see any way someone can smoke without potentially annoying everyone else there. I didn’t support banning smoking in restaurants and bars that much, but after habitualizing myself to smoke-free bars, clubs, and restaurants, smoky bars and clubs are horrible. Smokey restaurants seem barely acceptable any more.

Younger readers will probably have a hard time imagining that airplanes not only used to allow smoking, they merely designated the back few rows to half of the plane for smoking. Can you conceive that people somehow entertained the fantasy that smoke didn’t move past some imaginary line between the smoking and non-smoking section? Obviously the entire plane became a smoking section. No matter how much smokers want to not smoke, once one or two of them light up, the smoke makes everyone else want to. So you’d get a plane full of smoke.

China has done some amazing things with its public spaces, some superior to what New York has. Which I probably prefer to what the rest of the U.S. has (for some reason I think of public transportation first).

But they haven’t banned smoke in restaurants. But even smoky restaurants I can take when the cultures differ so much.

I’m writing this post because of an experience way worse than a restaurant full of smoke, at least for me. I got stuck in a smoker hotel room last night. I was the only one in the room and I didn’t register it strongly when I first entered the room, having been around smokers all day. But the effect of being in a room where everything emanated smoke — it didn’t take long for me to start feeling sick. And don’t get me wrong, I’d been hanging around smokers smoking all day.

Yeah, I find smoking in a way that forces your smoke on others barbaric. And the room last night shocked me about how smoke can invade your space.

Culture shock

People tend to think of culture shock happening when they visit a new place. But new things don’t shock you as much because you expect the change.

I find culture shock happens after you’ve acclimatized yourself to what was once a new environment and you return home. Your idea of normal changed and old things that once seemed normal now seem weird.

I call that culture shock, which is what I felt experiencing smokey environments after acclimatizing myself to relatively fresh air.

A couple questions people asked me recently got me to figure it out. If your questions are reasonably similar, read on.

Typical life questions

“Which job should I take?”

“Should we become boyfriend and girlfriend?”

A couple friends asked me these questions lately. You probably have similar questions. “What major should I pick,” “should I get a new apartment,” “what should I do for vacation,” and so on. The questions affect many parts of your life for a long time, but they don’t have clear answers.

You’ve probably succeeded at enough things at life that you’ll probably succeed at whatever job you take or whether you call yourselves boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever options you choose. Even if things fall apart, the world has plenty of jobs, girls, and guys. You can find others if you lose this one.

Still, you can never avoid things going awry. Unexpected things happen.

When you get life — when you understand how to make life work for you, as opposed to blowing in the breeze, hoping for the best — you can always make things work for you, even when they don’t go as planned. The more you get life, the better you can make things work for yourself. You never have to powerlessly hope for the best.

When you’re in control of your life, your choice of job or partner doesn’t determine whether your life will go well or not. It just determines the framework within which you make your life awesome. It will go awesome either way. You only choose the context.

How to look at big life questions

I suggest the important question is not should you take this or that job or make this person your partner but

Do I want to choose my life or let it be chosen for me, blowing in the breeze?

or, in other words,

Do I want to be the architect of my life or a passive observer?

What difference does this perspective make?

Deciding to make your life yours won’t make the challenges go away or make them easier. But it will be your life and your challenges. When things don’t go as expected, you will handle the situation because you know you created it. But you won’t complain because you knew the inevitability of the unexpected.

I find this perspective motivates answering the life questions more decisively and with less anxiety, increases your satisfaction with your choices, and motivates resolving, even attacking, whatever challenges follow. It focuses your attention on what you can do as opposed to hypothetical futures. That happens when you own something.

When you have the skills to make any part of you life contribute to its overall awesomeness — emotional intelligence, self-awareness, ability to lead yourself and others — then you have that choice. I can’t think of anything more valuable than developing those skills.

Again, whatever your choice, problems will come up. You’ll survive. Heck, even if you don’t get life, you’ll still live through your choices. You don’t have to sweat them. You only choose in what context.

I saw them as new age-y. For a long time, since I never knew a concrete definition of the term new age, though the Wikipedia page seems to describe it well, I substituted the words “feeble-minded” every time I heard the term. The substitution has never steered me wrong. I don’t mean to insult new age thinking. I just genuinely find it feeble-minded and any time I’ve found it otherwise, the difference hasn’t been meaningful.

I sometimes do yoga and meditate. I have long hair. People ask me to help motivate them and understand themselves better. You see these things in new age circles. But I think new age thinking has co-opted those things, and they existed long before new age did. I find it feeble-minded because it seems to love its impression of science without understanding it. I find it like fat people wearing workout clothes but not exercising.

In my experience science is an activity. Doing it is like doing sports, not watching them. I’ve observed new age to be about observing without doing.

I don’t like hearing about quantum-body-mind therapeutic touch, the infinite possibilities of things, and the wonderful possibilities that science enables from people who have never done experiments themselves. I find so much more beauty in nature from curiosity-driven experimentation than eternal optimism driven, uncritical infinite-consciousness.

Maybe this makes me intolerant or snobby. I don’t know. Still, I like my science based in experiment, skepticism, and criticism, not made into art to refine how it looks from how it works. It’s like over-processed white bread.

In other words, I prefer this, which I find rich with meaning and usefulness,

to this, which I find, shall we say, less meaningful or useful.

Although those new age symbols remind me of this, which I like a lot.

North Korea is amazing.

This trip surpassed our first in many ways, as before in ways we could never have predicted and, having experienced it, can’t explain, much as we’d like to. Everyone on the trip agreed, as happened with the first trip. You had to be there to feel it, but we’ll do our best to convey what we experienced, because at the root we communicated, shared experiences, increased understanding, and all the things that create peaceful interaction in all directions. (My travel-mates already started writing and posting pictures, mainly Joseph and Jordan.)

Most people in my group explained that seeing and experiencing the people and culture revealed how great the differences were between their expectations and observations. And how little they realized these preconceived notions. Realizations and revelations like this are the foundation of growing and learning.

Next, they talk about how much fun they had. Granted, our group had some rad individuals — people who will have fun, learn, and grow anywhere they go no matter what they do, and infect others with the same spirit. But North Koreans are amazing. You can’t imagine the feelings of warmth, curiosity, sharing, and fun they exuded. How much they wanted to learn about us and share.

Tell me if you see it differently, but I find it hard to look at these kids and think “axis of evil.”

Wait until you see the videos! (I’m in China now, which blocks YouTube, the dorks, so you’ll have to wait until I return to post videos)

If you had seen or experienced how much fun we all had discovering each other’s cultures — I hope you do — I guarantee you’d see the world differently. A common thread you’ll read in my posts on North Korea will be the difference between a country’s “leader’s” interests — which often include polarization and overstating how much another country threatens yours — and the regular people’s — which often include just talking, trading, or playing games.

High-fiving North Korean soldiers

We didn’t have fun interactions only with kids. I shook hands with North Korean soldiers. I shook hands with whole crowds of North Korean soldiers, all of us laughing and joking. I high-fived whole crowds of North Korean soldiers. Sorry, you’ll have to wait until I get the pictures and video of it from my travel-mates before I post it (assuming they got footage. You tend to forget photography when you’re having so much fun, finding out the people your government told you to fear the most are human beings too, just like everyone else).

It seems language barriers don’t matter much when everyone is smiling enough. And you know what? It’s not that hard to smile and get others to smile with you, no matter who.

Forgetting you’re supposed to fear someone gets pretty easy too when you’re having fun with them. Actually, you start questioning who wants you to fear them and why.

If you’re starting to think I’m forgetting some duty to my country to hold them as an enemy, consider this — many of them have never seen an American before at all. Their propaganda about us is even stronger than ours about them. Through my group, they’re learning to befriend us even more than we are with them.

How about this North Korean soldier we flagged down while he was biking some flowers to someone? Did you ever expect to see an American shaking hands with a North Korean soldier with flowers with a smile like that?!

Anyway, usually I separate my North Korea posts from my main blog page. I’m including this one as the first from April’s visit.

Also, my group

A lot of advice VCs give entrepreneurs seems to me versions of “make my job easier,” like how to write a great business plan, how to pitch, etc. In this case, I see him asking entrepreneurs to improve the signal-to-noise ratio so he can have an easier time funding companies. Nothing wrong with trying to make your life easier, but he makes the article look like he’s helping the entrepreneur, when he’s writing it to help himself, discouraging some would-be entrepreneurs who might love starting a company even if it didn’t make a VC money. For an entrepreneur who makes their business their life, leading the company may be its own reward, making his advice meaningless, since he’ll call it a success only if it generates a return on investment.

At the very least, I’d appreciate the article more if he specified “Think twice before starting a company that might seek venture capital funding.” Most entrepreneurs I know never approach VCs. Did he forget few companies involve technology at all? His advice doesn’t apply to them. Well, except that thinking twice is obviously good advice to anyone, but his reasons for it.

Entrepreneurship is far greater than starting tech companies looking for VC. I’d be wary of an investor who didn’t realize he put himself in such a bubble. With all that name-dropping, you can see how social bubbles can contribute to investment bubbles.

If you love starting companies and you have an idea whose time is now, you’ll find a way to start your company. If you don’t need venture capital, hopefully you won’t hear his advice in the first place, or will realize it doesn’t apply to you. Even if you do want VC, if your firm eventually dies but you loved doing it and it helps you do better on your next one, it seems to me you’ve succeeded.

I read other posts at that venture capitalist’s site. The next most recent one he wrote did the same thing — giving “advice” to make his job easier. One by another guy at the same firm did the same thing too.

Strangely, both use the phrase “a lot of ink has been spilled over…” They also keep reusing their teammates description of what they are looking for, from a post which ends with the biggest “advice” to make his job easier (also spelling “prove” “proove” in one of the main points): “So to all you who are entrepreneurial equivalent of Tom Brady… the #199 draft pick, not the famous one of today… please give me a call when you start your first company.” Please make my job easier!

There is so much more to starting companies than getting venture capital. I used to live in that bubble, having started my first business in the late 90s, thinking the VC route was the only way to start a company.

I’ve since realized how much more variety there is in starting companies. I wrote recently about how much entrepreneurship I saw on the streets of Vietnam, where the number of businesses per mile on the streets far surpasses what you see on the streets of New York.

I’ve also since realized how much more joy you can create for yourself in starting companies when you do it for the right reasons for yourself — for me, loving what my company does and the people I work with. If you have to jump through a venture capitalist’s hoops, you have to, and, of  course, making their job easier will help you and them. But few companies need their funding, and finding ones that make your job easier may help you more, if you start one of them.

As for venture capitalists, by all means, I don’t see any problem with advising entrepreneurs how to make your job easier, especially if it helps make their lives better too, but I wouldn’t imply you’re just helping them. I’d write a post, “How to make my job easier (to help you)” or something like that. But then keep in mind, you’re probably helping them make every investor’s job easier, which lowers your value.

You’ll probably help yourself most by figuring out how to make their jobs easier. How can you help them?

People who don’t know about carbon emissions, flows, and balance confuse simple ideas with each other. For example, some talk about how volcanoes and cows digestive systems produce tons of carbon and wonder why we should bother changing our practice.

When you understand amounts and flows, you don’t confuse unimportant effects for important ones, like business people who learn not to be penny wise and pound foolish.

Below is a representation of where carbon is on the Earth. It’s not exactly a balance sheet, though over time the total numbers have to add up. I find this representation interesting. I didn’t know how much was in the ocean. Please read the book for his assumptions and where he gets his numbers.

The text of the book I talked about yesterday and the day before, Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, explains the time scales on which carbon can flow into and out of different places. For example, carbon can’t reach the huge sink of the deep ocean except through the surface waters, which circulate into deep waters over thousand-year time scales, meaning we don’t know how to access most of the planet’s carbon and potential carbon sinks on time scales relevant to us.

Understanding overall amounts helps, but flows help us understand our impact most. The image below shows the main net flows for the atmosphere. In particular, our burning fossil fuels moves carbon into the atmosphere faster than nature can move that carbon into the ocean. Moreover, that net rate is significant — over one percent — relative to the amount in the atmosphere.

A business person who saw over one percent of their cash moving from one part of the firm to another would learn what was happening and the consequences. A successful business person would, that is. Someone who didn’t would not likely stay in business long.

I find the above representations help me understand quantitatively what we’re doing to our environment. In the case of carbon, I don’t think you can understand the situation even qualitatively without understanding the above.

Again, I recommend the book for many more representations and to understand the environment and our impact on it better.

I didn’t have much (any?) business experience when I co-founded my first company. I couldn’t read a balance sheet or know accounting. My science background taught me to understand general and broad patterns, which don’t suffice for running a company. Either the check clears or it doesn’t. Business school taught me how to manage cash — accounting, keeping and reading balance sheets, profits and losses, cash flows, and so on.

Many people understand how we affect our environment worse than I understood how to understand a business. In other words, they just know information but not how to make sense of it.

Accounting and balancing flows are exactly what you need to understand the environment and our effect on it. The book I talked about yesterday, Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, represented how we use energy and release CO2 with graphic representations of balance sheets.

Making a balance sheet allows and forces you to compare apples to apples. The author points out countless sources measures things differently, so he puts everything in one set of units. Instead of dollars, as accounting would use, he uses kilowatt-hours per day per person. He explains what the unit means and how he came up with the numbers he uses.

Here is a potential power balance sheet the UK could attempt (he’s British) if it wanted to exist only on renewables based on his assumptions. The left side, in red, roughly accounts for UK power use. The right side, in green, roughly accounts for renewable power the UK could generate domestically. He explains what each block means and where he gets his numbers in its own chapter.

You can see it doesn’t balance, implying the UK would need to cut consumption, import renewables, continue to rely on non-renewables, something else, or some combination. (He used loose assumptions for renewables, allowing many requiring costs I wouldn’t consider politically feasible and technological advances I wouldn’t think we could count on. So I think he overestimates the size of the right column, but I find it improves the book.)

Business people know the importance of laying out columns of numbers, accounting for them, and requiring businesses to balance columns that need to balance. If they don’t, you know the managers don’t know what they’re talking about. Though I’m sure balance sheets like the above exist in many places, I’ve never seen this representation before, nor one as effective despite its shortcomings, meaning I’ve never seen as meaningful a conversation about power use.

For example, many people talk about using solar and wind power, but I’ve never seen their potentials compared to needs — overall and relative to each other. These charts show their relative values in context.

With such a representation, as a society, we can talk effectively about shifting to renewables. Until then, we’re like a business that can’t balance its balance sheet, or even read one. Or know what one is.

We’ll bounce checks, in other words, without information organized like the above charts.

Incidentally, he modified the balance sheet based on various groups’ protests to new renewables, like people not wanting windmills nearby or visible from beaches. It implies if we don’t learn to implement and accept some new ways of doing things, we’ll have a hard time weaning ourselves from fossil fuels.

Food for thought.

Or you know after you get out of the pool and your ears have water in them? Imagine you heard like that for your whole life and suddenly they cleared and you could hear properly.

Or you’ve been wearing gloves and for the first time you take them off and feel something directly.

That feeling of experiencing something clearly instead of vaguely and indirectly is what reading the book Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air is like. Like the Do The Math blog I’ve been enjoying and praising, a Cal Tech educated physicist wrote it. This author, David MacKay, has researched and taught physics at Cambridge since 1992. He works as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change 80% of full time and at Cambridge the other 20%.

Why do I love his book?

His book is about “numbers, not adjectives,” as he put it.

Debate about climate, peak oil, pollution, sustainability, and related topics currently treats their subjects vaguely — saying switching to this fuel will have a big effect or recycling that will have a huge effect and the like, without quantifying things. Or if they quantify them, not in a way that you can compare things.

For example, can we live on solar power alone? Or wind power? How much energy can we get from tides and waves? Will planting trees get enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to reverse global warming?

Despite my physics background and deep caring about the environment, I didn’t know how to answer these questions. I didn’t even know where to look without risking an unknown amount of time looking. And if I did find the answers, I wouldn’t know a context to put them in.

MacKay set to answer these questions, put them in a context to make them meaningful, and put them in terms you could compare them. The context he chose was the broad question, can the United Kingdom covert to living entirely on renewables.

Did the author succeed?

MacKay did exactly what he aimed to do. He organized the matter, researched the relevant topics, cited his sources, showed his calculations, presented what he found clearly, understandably, and humorously.

According to Wikipedia (emphasis mine)

In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production without fossil fuels called Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air. MacKay used £10,000 of his own money to publish the book, and the initial print run of 5,000 sold within days. The book received praise from The Economist^[19], The Guardian^[18], and Bill Gates, who called it “one of the best books on energy that has been written.”

As a scientists, I’m sure he’d be the first to say his answers have error bars, but the big picture is overwhelmingly clear. Anyone who wants to refine the answers can. With the full context, anyone fixing some little part will contribute to greater understanding, not just spitting into the wind.

Like I said, reading this book is like putting on a pair of glasses after being nearsighted and seeing blurry your whole life.

I recommend this book without reservation. Especially if you have children you’d like to have a chance at a healthy life in a healthy world.

Oh, did I mention he made it available for free from his website? Yes, the book has equations, data, and graphs. Nature is like that — mathematics explains it like nothing else does.