Humility

There's a TL;DR at the end, but it'll make more sense if you read the whole thing.

I was just wondering what actually I liked about that one former classmate of mine. There are charismatic people, and they're easy to like; he wasn't particularly charismatic. Studies have shown that attractive people rate as more likeable too, and there are lots of dynamics that go into that; but he wasn't particularly attractive. Passionate about his favourite topics, but you'd never hear about it unless you poked and prodded him to talk. You know that thing where passion draws admirers? Yeah, it requires that a person is visibly enthusiastic. By any measure, he shouldn't have been so magnetic as a person, and yet he was.

On a long plane ride, I figured it out. In a word, this former classmate had humility. I know, we've all heard a lot about humility. So I'm going to talk about my classmate instead. We'll say his name is John, because I don't want to keep on typing "former classmate".

Now John, he had pretty good grades when I knew him. More because he was the most hardworking person I've ever seen than because of his (actually solidly above-average) native intelligence.  Participated in - was on the committee of - a number of extracurricular activities, and won accolades there too. Amazingly responsible person.

And that's all really fantastic, it is, but I'm just filling in some background, here. Let's get to the real point of this essay.

Remember how I mentioned that you had to poke and prod him to talk? He honestly enjoyed listening to you talk about what was important to you. Or at least he gave that impression, and based on what I know of him, it's the complete truth. When you were talking and he was listening, you were the most important thing in his world.

I'm sure we've all known people who seem that way. They listen, and they sympathise or agree or even offer a story of their own. And they never talk about anything that's important to them, because there is actually nothing that is so important to them as being in agreement with the group and gasp being the speaker of the moment opens you up to people disagreeing with you.

That wasn't John at all. If he disagreed with you, you'd know it. Polite to a fault, taking pains to ensure that you knew his problem was with your statement and not with you as a person. But he'd never agree with anything that he didn't actually agree with, and he'd listen respectfully to your issue with his statement but never give in to pressure (persuasion, of course, was always an option). And of course, once you managed to get him talking, well, you could almost see him light up. He'd get right into it.

In short, he was equally comfortable with listening and talking. Which is a lot rarer than most people realise, I think. Because to be a good listener, you have to be able to put a lid on your own issues and focus on the other person. The less you're concerned with what they think of you and how you're going to respond wittily and etc, the more you can be concerned with what they're actually talking about. And let's be honest, if your self-worth is tied to how well others look upon you, that right there is something to work on in therapy. Instead, perhaps you could accept that you are yourself regardless of what they think of you: this frees you up to actually pay attention to them as a person and what they are saying.

And to be a good talker, you have to have some level of assurance that you know what you're talking about, and that it's worth talking about. The less you're concerned with gaining people's approval with your words, the more freedom you have to truly speak your mind. Now please note that this is not license to go around talking shit at people, even if you think it's true. It just means you judge your words by some other standard than "will it gain audience approval".

I'm going to go off on a minor, but very important, tangent here. You can be the most self-assured speaker in the world and still be completely wrong. Public speaking ability doesn't necessarily have to have any causative relationship at all with quality or truthfulness of content.

Getting back to the point. My old classmate John could talk all day about something he was passionate about. But he didn't need to talk about it: he knew that his worth as a person didn't depend on whether people were listening to you talk. He could listen, really listen, because he knew that interpersonal interaction isn't a zero-sum game. Focusing on another person doesn't make you any less of a person yourself. Definition of humility, right there, and the only way to actually reach it is complete self-assurance. Don't you just love it when life throws you a paradox like that?

TL;DR Perfect humility requires perfect confidence.

There's actually a very important related point, which is "what is your self-assurance based on?" For John it was God. God loves us all the same, as individuals, regardless of how bad or wrong or insecure we are. I reckon that's a pretty solid backing for his level of confidence. Whether or not you believe the same, it's probably a good idea to spend some thought on what your confidence is founded on.

Book recommendations: Magic

Magic 2.0 series by Scott Meyer
Wizardry series by Rick Cook
Broken Crescent by S. Andrew Swann

There are likely more, but these are the ones relevant to the post.

Also bonus game recommendation: Path of Exile

Calling

Fair warning, this post is written in a context of Christianity.

So there was this one sermon I listened to by one pastor. And what he said was basically, you do one important thing in life and that's it, that's what you were born for, everything before that was just preparing you for it or leading up to it. (And though he didn't say this part, the corollary is obvious: everything you do after it is irrelevant because you've already done what you were put on earth to do.) His specific example was Abraham and his chosen "defining moment" for him was Isaac on Mt Moriah.

I think this is a steaming pile of [censored] [censored] [censored].

It's undeniable that some things you do are going to be more important than other things, and one of them is going to be top of the pile. But look, if you say that Abraham's "calling" was to almost-sacrifice Isaac, with all the attendant symbolism, then you trivialise and invalidate everything else he did both before and after.

Not to mention the other two problems with this thought process, when we try to apply it to real life. One, real life contains a whole lot of people who get born, live, and die without ever achieving anything on the same scale as the people who make it into history books. What's the calling of an average person, if calling is defined as the one single task they were born to do? How can anyone tell?

And two, which is much more important. Thinking in this way causes us to constantly be looking for our One Ring Thing. Constantly questioning ourselves. What if-? How do I know-? What the hell am I doing all this hard stuff for if it's just practice for one moment of glory, and what the hell am I supposed to do with myself after that, assuming I can even tell when I did it?

Huh. I'm swearing, which usually means it's time to move on to the next bit.

Instead of that system, I propose this one: calling is in the small things in life. It's in refilling your flatmate's empty glass of water, it's in giving your buddy a ride to the airport, it's in doing your best to provide tech support to the frustrated young lady on the other end of the line. There are good works prepared beforehand that we may walk in them; we have many opportunities each day to love God and love our neighbour.

Where you go is not the point here. Most people don't get a specific request to go to a less developed country and do churchy stuff there. And for good reason too, the world wouldn't run without its technicians, pilots, etc. Wouldn't even run all that well without fast food employees, and most definitely not without cleaners.

If God wants to put you in a more traditional missions setting, believe me, you'll know it. But that doesn't make missionaries any more important than any other person of the church. Whether you're there or here, you do your work (ministry related or otherwise) as doing it for God. You act towards others with love and you be a Christian, because that's what we're called to do. Yes, this includes sharing your faith with gentleness and respect. Calling is in the little things. If you do a big one too, hooray for you, it's in his records and you'll be appropriately rewarded in the end. But there is meaning in everything you do, because whatever you do, you do for the glory of God. That's what we were put here for. Not to do one big glorious thing (and spend our lives looking over our shoulders and wondering if we pulled it off), but to live our lives and do the little things according to our beliefs, in a manner we would not be ashamed of.

(You think it's hard to be called to missions? Doing missions is nothing compared to doing life.)

Magic

Dr. Richard Bartle, or maybe that should be Professor, gets a lot of things right.

That said, one of the things he believes is that this world is not designed. As a designer of multiple highly-successful game worlds himself, I reckon he generally knows what he's talking about, so please understand that I do not say this lightly: I believe he's wrong in this particular instance.

I strongly suggest you read that link anyway. It's very enlightening. But I'll summarise: the general argument is that our reality sucks and why didn't the designer throw out the bits that sucked?

I'll deal with the more common variants of this argument first, and get back to Dr. Bartle's later. Let me emphasise that these are not things he says. It's things I hear occasionally from other people. One, you can't blame a designer for shitty things people do to other people, that's not how free will works. Two, I agree things like weather and natural disasters suck, but those are effects of an underlying system and I suggest you go look up how this world would be like if those systems weren't in effect. I, personally, prefer this alternative.

Actually, that second part does apply to some of what the good doctor said. He even admits that Reality is superbly engineered - just doesn't extrapolate that to the rest of the systems in place, most of which produce those "sucky" side effects he talks about. The way everything works together, I don't think any human could design that, and if you started picking out the bits that sucked and marking them for removal, that'd be exactly equivalent to coding exceptions in one of the fundamental ways this world works: the law of consequences following actions. Not to mention the effects it'd have on everything else in the system.

But look - it doesn't really matter that no-one from this world would play a virtual world that was designed to be exactly like this one. No-one from the World of Warcraft actually wants to be there, either, and the only reason they are is because they don't have the capacity to make decisions (and they lack the framework to be able to commit suicide. Not that suicide would matter when a new copy is instantly spawned anyway...) The considerations are quite a lot different when you're designing a world that people live (and die) in vs. one that people go to play in. And for goodness' sake, if you're even thinking about suicide, don't do it, talk to someone first. This world has permadeath.

I'm going to appear to go off in a different direction, bear with me, you'll see where this is going if you finish reading it. 

I read a lot of fantasy books and play a lot of games. So do a lot of people. It seems that the human interest in magic (not necessarily the gathering!) is pretty powerful. Maybe we can blame Tolkien for that. But in any case - have you ever looked at your computer or smartphone recently? Really looked? That thing is doing scary feats of calculation and communication. We don't really know how they work, but we can tell them to do what we want them to do. This is starting to sound an awful lot like magic. In the way that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (thank you Clarke), and sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (thank you Sir Terry), and there really should be more books that treat magic that way.

Here's another thing. The magic in a lot of those books, the fantasy worlds in which a lot of people immerse themselves by choice? Any development of new spells or magic in general tends to be hand-waved, if it's even mentioned, and with good (usually plot-related) reason too. Magic is largely a static system: this is what we've got, it's been passed down from the ancients and we've forgotten a good bit of it, you use what you're given and no way to improve on it. And in games, it makes sense, because who's going to code a system with that much potential for breakage, and who's able to code a system with that much potential for expansion?

But we, in Reality, are developing new technology all the time. And nobody even finds this unusual. Magic, I remind you, is "the way things work" in books and games. Out here in Reality, we call that Science and we poke and prod at it, we understand it and then we use it. I don't know about you, but I like that better than the alternative with "real" magic.

Looks like we've been given magic after all. And more than that, we've been given the keys to magic. (And, if you're religious, the bugs will be ironed out in the next patch. What's not to love?)

Props to the guy who designed it all. I know I couldn't.