Kyle's Files: Using Leverage, Tarantino's Violence in Context, #nudes
Passages from High Output Management and Cinema Speculation
Thanks for coming. I’ll leave you to it 😘
1. Tweets’n’Things™
"My day always ends when I'm tired and ready to go home, not when I'm done. I am never done.” - Andrew Grove, High Output Management
“How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are but assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.” - Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility
“The ability to tell the difference between those who desire to seek the truth and those who don't is the most important skill in the world.” - Luke Burgis, Twitter
“To make something regular that was once irregular is a fundamental production principle, and that's how you should try to handle the interruptions that plague you.” - Andrew Grove, High Output Management
"A lot of nonsense is talked about the brain and its ability to explain this and that. People got terribly excited a while ago when they found what they took to be the ‘neural circuitry’ that lights up when you fall in love. So? What did they expect? That your brain would be a blank when you fell in love? Something lights up in my brain when I eat a cheese sandwich. It doesn't taste of cheddar. We were being asked to believe palpable nonsense: that love was ‘nothing but’ an overexcitement in the ventral pallidum. However it never was, nor ever will be. Enough of this nothing-buttery." - Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
“…rest is when you’re not associating your self-worth with what you have to do next.” - Lawrence Yeo, The Riddle of Rest
“Thy love afar is spite at home.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The real malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
2. Quentin Tarantino’s Mom’s Philosophy of Violence in Movies
Reading through Quentin Tarantino’s first non-fiction book, Cinema Speculation, is a lot of fun. The first chapter is an autobiographical look at all the movies he went to with his mom, Connie, and her partners. As a kid, Connie would take him to all sorts of movies most kids weren’t allowed to see. While Tarantino loved the movies, he also enjoyed getting caught up in the energy of an audience:
…while I really enjoyed MASH, part of the delight I had watching it was sitting in a cinema full of adults laughing hysterically, all getting off on their own naughtiness.
He even sums up his career trying to recreate a time when one of his mom’s boyfriends took him to a theater in a part of town he’d never been to before:
To one degree or another I've spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972.
While most parents would probably still balk at the films he was allowed to see at a young age, Connie’s reasoning for allowing it gets at an important truth that is becoming more relevant with our landscape of fractured narratives: terrible things are more bearable when we have a believable explanation or reason for them. I’ll quote his reflection at length so you can get a better sense of the the book’s style (you can also get the gist skimming the bold):
Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was.
At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it.
She said, "Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie's not going to hurt you.”
Right fucking on, Connie!
After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn't mean I didn't like the movie.
When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it.
Scorpio's inhumanity was beyond the beyond. All the better for Harry to blast him with the most powerful handgun in the world.
Yes, it was disturbing to see a woman in hysterical agony being dragged through the street and whipped by the villagers after she'd been condemned for being a witch in the Vincent Price movie Cry of the Banshee, which I saw on a double feature with the great Spanish horror film The House That Screamed. What a great night!
Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. Whether it was James Caan being machine-gunned to death at the toll booth, or Moe Greene being shot in the eye in The Godfather. That guy cut in half by the airplane propeller in Catch-22. Stacy Keach's wild ride on the side of the car in The New Centurions. Or Don Stroud shooting himself in the face with a tommy gun in Bloody Mama. But just listing grotesque moments—out of context of the movies they were in—isn't entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother's point of view—that she later explained to me—was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story.
However, one of the earlier sequences I saw that genuinely disturbed me was when Vanessa Redgrave, as Isadora Duncan, was strangled by her scarf getting caught in the wheel of a roadster in Isadora. I guess I was so affected by that ending because I was so utterly bored by everything that preceded it.
At one point, she didn’t want him to see a particular movie and when he asked why, she said:
"Well, Quentin, it's very violent. Not that I necessarily have a problem with that. But you wouldn't understand what the story was about. So since you wouldn't understand the context in which the violence was taking place, you would just be watching violence for violence's sake. And that I don't want you to do."
This makes me think of ideas like Nietzsche’s, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” In The Fablemans, Steven Spielberg depicts his mom returning to a mantra of “Everything happens for a reason” when she feels particularly out of control. It helps contextualize challenging events, giving her some sense of order where she was only experiencing chaos. I think this mechanism of good narratives helping to process difficult images and experiences is an underappreciated benefit we get from fiction.
3. High Output Everything
In 1983, Andrew Grove wrote High Output Management while avoiding thinking too much about how scary shifts in the tech industry were going to impact Intel (according to himself in his next book, Only the Paranoid Survive). In the first 70 pages he seems to have planted the seeds for a hundred productivity books to follow. Here I’m going to pull a few ideas he covers in his chapter on managerial leverage, which he considers extremely important:
A manager's output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage. Clearly the key to high output means being sensitive to the leverage of what you do during the day.
Grove says managers can increase their productivity in three ways:
1. Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work.
2. Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities.
3. Shifting the mix of a manager's activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage.
Most new managers default to focusing on #1 until some pain point that forces them to think more about leverage. Grove describes three ways managers achieve leverage:
When many people are affected by one manager.
When a person's activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager's brief, well-focused set of words or actions.
When a large group's work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of knowledge or information.
He points out that leverage cuts both ways, saying that visibly depressed or waffling managers can have “unlimited negative leverage”:
…waffling, when a manager puts off a decision that will affect the work of other people. In effect, the lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization.
Both the depressed and the waffling manager can have virtually unlimited negative leverage.
The chapter is packed with great advice, like this bit where he sums up books like The One Thing and Essentialism:
The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.
He suggests that we lower the leverage of delegating to the degree we rely on specificity rather than shared understanding. He suggests batching tasks and time-blocking:
Forecasting and planning your time around key events are literally like running an efficient factory.
Time blocking involves your calendar, which Grove has two rules for:
1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities.
2. You should say "no" at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.
He even has advice for saying “no”:
It is important to say "no" earlier rather than later because we've learned that to wait until something reaches a higher value stage and then abort due to lack of capacity means losing more money and time.
He believes that an important function of saying “no” is to keep slack in our schedules. Not running at 110%, but making sure we leave some capacity open for surprises.
His thoughts on managing systems and the importance of not constantly reinventing the wheel point to an important, difficult balance:
As we become more consistent, we should also remember that the value of an administrative procedure is contained not in formal statements but in the real thinking that led to its establishment. This means that even as we try to standardize what we do, we should continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.
He even warns us of the dangers of context switching:
…we should try to make our managerial work take on the characteristics of a factory, not a job shop. Accordingly, we should do everything we can to prevent little stops and starts in our day as well as interruptions brought on by big emergencies.
And the importance of deep work:
…instead of going into hiding, a manager can hang a sign on his door that says, "I am doing individual work. Please don't interrupt me unless it really can't wait until 2:00." Then hold an open office hour, and be completely receptive to anybody who wants to see you
High Output Management is a classic and still popular for a reason: it provides more value page than just about any modern book in the genre.
Miscellany
I cracked up at this SNL ad for GE Big Boy Appliances
Leo Fender didn’t play guitar, but did play the sax.
A great video exploring the philosophy of The Lord of the Rings at Like Stories of Old.
Taleb’s essay “On Christianity” was fascinating. “For the notion of epistemic belief is entirely modern —and the gold standard Justified True Belief is not free of problems[11]. The term pisteuo in Greek means trust, translated into credere in Latin (linked to credit, as in a commercial transaction) and even in English, belief did not originally really mean belief, but something more related to beloved.[12] Amen means fidelity and trust in all Semitic languages.”
This article got me journaling again: “…writing is fundamentally an organizational system. Keeping a journal, according to Dr. Pennebaker, helps to organize an event in our mind, and make sense of trauma. When we do that, our working memory improves, since our brains are freed from the enormously taxing job of processing that experience, and we sleep better.”
Krampus definitely seems worse than coal:
Some of the images I got from Lensa AI reminded me of one of my favorite South Park scenes.