Eric Tian

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our attention, and never before has our attention been so violently fought over.

Even now, as I am typing this, and as you are perhaps reading this, my attention is stretched and fatigued, pulled in an infinite amount of directions. This is a suboptimal state to be in.

As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in Several Short Sentences About Writing:

“But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.”

A beautiful reminder.

Credits: Austin Kleon

Red team-Blue team is a military exercise where a group plays the role of a competitor and tries to break into their own defences or structures. In cybersecurity for instance, a group of software engineers may try to hack their way past a firewall they created to gain unauthorised access to assets. This attacking group is the red team, and the defence is the blue team.

There are various goals of this exercise, including the promotion of creative thinking and problem solving, but the primary benefit of red team-blue team is to find out if there are any holes in one’s defence and to fix them correspondingly.

Why Dostoyevsky is so good

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pouring over Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Upon reflection, I’ve realised that one of the reasons why these classics are so compelling is Dostoyevsky’s use of the red team mentality.

In a debate, it’s easy to utilise the strawman fallacy, where one oversimplifies an opponent’s stance to make it easier to attack. In doing so, one makes their own arguments look better – but ultimately, it is a disingenuous form of arguing as the point is often misrepresented.

The highest and most difficult form of arguing is when you take your opponent’s argument and make it as strong as possible (a so-called iron man argument) and still defeat it. This method requires much more understanding of the other side and skill to pull off.

What Dostoyevsky does so well in his novels is he makes the “other side” of his contention as brutally strong as possible, and still defeats it. In Crime and Punishment, the main character of Raskolnikov has every possible reason to murder. He is poor, charming law student and has the potential to do much good. On the other hand, his pawnbroker is a rude, dishonest rich woman who is generally disliked by everybody. Her murder is made as defensible as possible.

But when Raskolnikov commits the murder and spirals into chaos, Dostoyevsky’s point is made in its fullest force -that even though a crime may seem utilitarian or defensible, one’s punishment for a crime is the moral burden itself, and this is irrespective of whether the killing was “right” by any standards. If the murder was portrayed as disgusting to begin with, the same effect could never have been made, for a reader could argue that some murders can be justified. But not here.

Generally speaking, the red team mentality can be seen as an appraisal. If you think you have a strong idea, try putting everything you have to tear it down, and see if it withstands the test. If the red team wins, then you’ve seen its flaws and can work to improve it.

But if the red team fails, despite making the strongest effort possible, then you know you have a strong idea.

One of my favourite games growing up was RuneScape. It’s a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), meaning you control a character that can interact with other characters in the same, enormous world.

RuneScape was great because there was so much you could do. You could embark a story quest that gave you rewards, kill monsters to become stronger, or level other skills like woodcutting or fishing for quality-of-life.

If you play RuneScape, there is always something to be done. Your account isn’t one big pot boiling to a singular goal – there are always little pots bubbling in the background.

The impossible question

One of the most difficult questions to answer is “what do you do?” because it’s impossible for anyone to give a complete answer. Everyone does something; it could be as basic as brushing your teeth, or something unusual like running a marathon.

What people usually mean by “what do you do?” is “what’s the thing you write when a form asks you for your profession?” which is nowhere near the same thing.

Yet in a way, this question is helpful because it reminds us that we are not one-dimensional creatures.

We all have pots bubbling in the background; skills that we have started learning but yet to master. Ideas waiting to emerge and characteristics evolving into something new.

Do not neglect these pots.