The Loudest Horn

Today is a parable of a too loud tuba. Every instrument in the orchestra has it's role. A loud horn can make everything else hard to hear

Very Good — Wisdom in our lives can pass in a flash. I think we all miss it at times b/c we are not paying attention. Today I’m going to share one of them that I didn’t let fly by.

During the 2010 soccer World Cup, the event was nearly ruined by the silly horns (vuvuzelas) every fan just had to have. The vuvuzela was a horrible and irritating sound. This is the loud horn. If you are a glutton for punishment, click here and listen.

Don’t Miss It You Will Regret It

Today’s post is a blast from the past and what I learned from it. I knew the right music from the start for today. For those who wade carefully with the music, today we get the story behind the music. It’s fun. Happy Independence Day!!! Today, the post is exactly 1776 words.

Promotion

How much time should I spend on Substack? There is a lot of talent. I could read more. I try to be thoughtful in balancing too much. I recently layered in some Newsletters worth spending my time on. This meant stepping back from some others. There are only 168 hours in the week and I love my sleep and hobbies. Adding some and removing others returned me to gratefulness. I try to mix in a book review as a partial post once per month as I did in “A Bridge to Biomimicry”. Each time I muse on a book I am reminded of the wonder of

SoNovelicious, Books & Reading & More Books

. If you are “bookish” (the author’s oft-used word), you cannot go wrong!

On With The Story

In the years leading up to the year 2000, humans did what is only possible perhaps with non-artificial intelligence (nAI). All sorts of intelligence are interesting to me. The year 2000 approach was accompanied by warnings of impending doom. A nice round number like 2000 is irresistible to the blob that sits on top of our brainstem. There are so many options for our consciousness engine to regurgitate in our heads and store for a brief moment in a location labeled “CURRENT FOCUS” in our heads:

• Sure we’ve been here a long time and mostly of little consequence. Maybe the year 2000 is the end of the world. It seems significant. Hmmm.

• I wonder if people got uppity in the year 1000? Maybe not so much since people were mostly illiterate like the previous 198,000 years of human history.

• Maybe we are looking at the wrong calendar and should pay attention to the Mayans. They have a cool countdown to Armageddon. Isn’t it interesting that most cultures explored and elevated such an idea? The only thing we seem to have in common is this blob on our brainstem. For the record, it is currently 5783 in the Hebrew calendar and 4719 in the Chinese calendar. I don’t remember people freaking out 719 years ago (Y4K) and hope we can keep our powder dry in 217 years (Y6K).

• The tendency to get caught up in numerology (and maybe even a conspiracy theory) is a repeating pattern for us. One of my hands-down hilarious movie references to such nonsense is the movie “There’s Something About Mary”. This one holds up well and I would call it “7’s the number!”.

Romulus, Dionysius Exiguus, and Ugo Boncompagni

Legend dates the founding of Rome in what we now refer to as -738 B.C.E. (Before the Christian Era). It was around 1250 years later, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus throws a dart at the calendar with an educated guess. He figures Jesus is born somewhere around -5 B.C.E. (I guess that makes 1995 the real Y2K! About 800 years later a pope, the former Ugo Boncompagni of Bologna decides Easter is drifting to an inconvenient time of the year so it is time to fix the calendar. This is my favorite calendar observation of all! Think how much of a dude you have to be to have the authority to make days disappear. Penn and Teller are in awe! Since currency had already been invented, the impact on mortgages and interest must have roiled the markets. In a tribute to being British, they were the contrarians who ignored the calendar adjustments. They came around in the 1700s amidst riots. I call it Brexit 1.0 — we know better, the sun never sets on our Empire, and an inch is a great unit of measure. All of this is to say don’t get uptight about the significance of a given year.

Back To Hindsight

I guess whatever we surmise as truth at any given moment is almost always wrong. I love the expression “Things are true until they are not”. At least for me, embracing the fluid framework of truth has brought serenity. This brings me to today’s title.

Horn Time

Just before the year 2000, I was working for a start-up company hoping to be an appealing acquisition. I was managing a project for the Treasury Department. Our collective focus was the manufacture of coins both circulating and collector stuff. The US Mint was like most operations. Once we attain comfort with how we do things, changing our approach is hard. Our business offered firms a chance to revisit how they did things. An opportunity to improve. An opportunity to put the strictures of the past in the rearview mirror.

It did not matter if you made collector coins, artificial hips, sinks, or Marvel mystery oil (all examples of our customers) — every single organization had a handful of sub-species of humans. Somewhere around my 37th year, I discovered the loud horn. Another firm involved in our project offered a consultant I enjoyed working with. He was from South Asia and had a calm presence to him. He was a great listener. When he did speak, it was beneficial to listen. The Mint was a quasi-government business with the upper management being political appointees. A “loud horn” in my soon-to-be new lexicon was a person who shouts instead of persuasion and desperately steals attention from others. On a break in a long meeting my new friend shared an expression of his Father:

It is an elegant version of a lawyerism : When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have the procedure on your side, argue the procedure. When you have neither, pound the table. The loud horn pounds the table. The loud horn is an absolutist. The loud horn believes all things are black and white. The loud horn is the character foil in all sorts of epic great films like Star Wars and LOTR. The loud horn has a brain that is ossified (today’s word) and can rarely be persuaded. The loud horn steals the attention from others. I recently unsubscribed from a rather entertaining Substack. I did it for fear of all the other things it was drowning out — I think the wonderful and often entertaining Substack is a loud horn. The loud horn CAN be memorable, they can be funny, they can be entertaining. What I know for sure is they are rarely worth keeping in your field of view. You will simply miss too much!!!

So What Is The Point

I am not in the habit, nor qualified to dole out advice on very many topics. We live in a weird age of contrarianism where expertise is different than followers or influencers. Expertise is a dirty word and we merrily accept everyone’s hot take. The arbiters of modernity constantly guide “You need to listen to both sides”. Sometimes one side is batshit crazy and everybody knows it. Where we get our information is more important than ever. What has worked for me on this journey of mind is to:

• Try not to become the loud horn. It is not appealing. It is not respectful. It substitutes volume for thoughtfulness.

• If you encounter a loud horn, distortion and losing yourself can soon follow. The loud horn is just a persuasion hack.

• We all might become loud horns at times. I imagine these are instances when we are not at our best. Some things to watch for

  • A person leans in and the volume increases

  • People start speaking faster and adopt run-on sentences on the road to word salad. When the words become unlikely to make sense, our brains are overflowing the buffer and the speaker has derailed.

  • Our primitive emotions take over. We get two brains (the primitive lizard hard-wired to our senses) and the frontal cortex built for contemplation. If you can, take a break and avoid decisions based on the noisemaker. Always remember “The loudest horn knows the fewest notes.”

  • Finally — while sometimes the loud horn might be funny and entertaining, it blocks the path to the road less traveled. For me, it is better to live without as it opens us to things we would otherwise miss.

  • For the record, the decision to unsubscribe is hard for me. Substack is a very nice place. I now imagine while the tuba was entertaining, I didn’t realize all the songbirds it drowned out.

Modern Mark

Having a Substack means I can share my opinion if I wish. The consequence might be an unsubscribe so I try to be careful. I hope today was merely food for thought. Don’t forget to vote — there’s an answer for everyone including those of you that studied the trombone. If I ever become a loud horn in this Newsletter, PLEASE let me know. We are all works in progress.

The Poll & Music

The One And Only Clarence Clemons

Clarence Clemons is a musician I wish I had seen at least one more time. The E Street Band is still a great event but Clarence left a large hole.

Here was the first performance by Springsteen of Jungleland after Clemons passed away. It was in Goteborg, Sweden back in 2012. Springsteen is sweat-soaked and probably has another two hours of performance in him. There’s a new horn man but they didn’t lay it all off on him. The new horn man is a nephew of Clarence and plays with the band now.

For those of you still here, I ended up in a Springsteen performance with his 89-year-old Mom. She is still alive at 98. Perhaps she is the secret to his endless energy. The DNA of the Springsteen family would be a good place to study longevity.