Best of Books #56

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Hi Reader,

I just moved to New York City and started a new job at Figma. If you’re around NYC, it’d be great to connect. I’m excited to share three great reads with you this month:

​Truth by Hector Macdonald

I’ve tended to experience difficulty buying into one-sided truths and stories. With my work in marketing, writing, and editing, I’m well aware that every storyteller or leader has a goal that they are trying to achieve; while I pay attention to the stories, I’m also trying to understand the interest and incentive that goes into what each person is trying to say. In this book, Hector Macdonald shares his research on the stories that make up our realities, which he calls competing truths. These stories end up shaping both our perspectives, as well as very real imagined realities like money, government, and policy. He also shares some fascinating anecdotes about how a misunderstanding of facts often leads to unexpected results.

Quotes:

On partial truths: A set of partial truths and misunderstood numbers were strung together in a story without the right context, changing both the desirability of a foodstuff and the morality of eating it. As we will discover, partial truths, numbers, stories, context, desirability and morality are just some of the elements used by experienced communicators in all walks of life to shape reality by presenting a particular view of the world. In this case, the journalists and bloggers steering consumers away from quinoa were doing it for the noblest of reasons: they were genuinely concerned for the welfare of an impoverished people suddenly exposed to the tempestuous winds of global trade. We will encounter plenty of cases where politicians, marketers, activists and even civil servants have shaped reality with far less benevolent intentions.

On competing truths: There are many sides to every story. To put the old saying another way, there is usually more than one truth to be drawn from any set of facts. We learn this from an early age: every junior debater and errant schoolchild knows how to pick the truths that best support their case. But we may not appreciate how much flexibility these different truths offer communicators. In many cases, there are a variety of genuinely – perhaps even equally – legitimate ways of describing a person, event, thing or policy.

I call them ‘competing truths’.

On mindset: A mindset is a set of beliefs, ideas and opinions that we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Our mindsets determine how we think about things and how we choose to act….This is a form of confirmation bias: we tend to be more receptive to new truths that fit with our existing mindsets, and resistant to those that challenge our entrenched views.

On reality: ‘Our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe,’ wrote Walter Lippmann, one of the twentieth century’s great political journalists and an expert user of competing truths. ‘They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine’ (my emphasis). What others report contributes to our perceived reality. But because we act on the basis of our perceptions, what others report also impacts objective reality.

Competing truths shape reality.

On honesty: Despite the obvious factual omissions and the highly selective focus, few would suggest that George VI was misrepresenting the situation. He was voicing a set of truths that were perfectly chosen to steady an empire and prepare his people for war. More information would not have been more honest – it would have merely diluted the message.
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​On application: So competing truths can be used constructively. Responsible marketers address different messages to different consumer segments, focusing on the product benefits that are most relevant to each segment. Doctors tell their patients the medical facts they need to know to manage their condition, without burdening them with complex details of cell biology or pharmacology. Social justice advocates, environmental campaigners, clerics, public health authorities and leaders of all kinds have to select the right competing truth to win hearts and minds and so achieve their important goals.

​Platonic by Marisa G. Franco, PhD

Friendship is a very precious part of my life. I’ve lived, traveled, and often relied on friends. As time moves forward and I move around the world and make outside commitments, I’ve found it often challenging to initiate new friendships and to maintain old ones. This book was super helpful in deciphering some of the emotions I experienced, and to suggest ways of communicating or expressing myself to build richer, deeper, friendships. I particularly found the insights on attachment styles and security very fascinating, and could understand the people in my life—and myself—in a deeper way.

Quotes:

On growth through connection: What the group revealed about the impact of connection is the basis of this book: connection affects who we are, and who we are affects how we connect. When we have felt connected, we’ve grown. We’ve become more open, more empathic, bolder. When we have felt disconnected, we’ve withered. We’ve become closed off, judgmental, or distant in acts of self-protection. Our personalities, alongside the way we show up as friends, then, are shaped by our past—we feel lovable because someone loved us well. We are prickly because someone hasn’t loved us enough.

On virtuous cycles: When we feel accepted and loved, it helps us develop certain qualities that lead us to continue to connect better (the rich get richer, as they say).

On mindset: They include initiative, vulnerability, authenticity, productive anger, generosity, and affection. These traits protect friendship through its life cycle. Initiative ignites friendship, while authenticity, productive anger, and vulnerability all sustain it by permitting us to show up as our full selves. Generosity and affection deepen friendships by verifying to friends just how much we love them. These practices strike a balance by allowing us to express our inner truth, while we create space to welcome our friend’s.

On attachment theory and friendship: What is the distinguishing quality of the super friends? It’s security. According to attachment theory—the theory that changed Gillath’s life and career forever—secure attachment is one of three major attachment styles, outlined as follows:

1. Secure attachment. Secure people assume they are worthy of love, and others can be trusted to give it to them. This belief becomes an unconscious template that trickles into all their relationships, leading them to give others the benefit of the doubt, open up, ask for what they need, support others, assume others like them, and achieve intimacy.
2. Anxious attachment. People who are anxiously attached assume others will abandon them. To keep themselves from being abandoned, they act clingily, are overly self-sacrificing to accommodate others, or plunge into intimacy too rapidly.
3. Avoidant attachment. Avoidantly attached people are similarly afraid others will abandon them. But instead of clinging to avoid this outcome, they keep others at a distance. Intimacy signals, to them, that they could be hurt, so they push others away, eschew vulnerability, and leave relationships prematurely.

We develop our attachment styles based on our early relationships with our caregivers (though Gillath’s research has also found our genes play a role). If our caregivers were warm and validating, we become secure. If they were, instead, unresponsive, cold, rejecting, or intrusive—if they bark at us to stop crying when we’re sad, neglect us when we want to play, or hit us when we accidentally drop our Cheerios, then we develop insecure attachment, wherein we see the world as treacherous, believing others are bound to abandon or mistreat us. To protect against the mistreatment we reason we’ll endure, we act either anxiously or avoidantly. There’s also disorganized attachment, which describes people who flip between these two styles in more extreme ways.

On ambiguity: Attachment is what we project onto ambiguity in relationships, and our relationships are rife with ambiguity. It’s the “gut feeling” we use to deduce what’s really going on. And this gut feeling is driven not by a cool assessment of events but by the collapsing of time, the superimposition of the past onto the present.

On stress: Though we have a primary attachment, attachment is a spectrum rather than a category. It’s common for people to exhibit more insecure attachment patterns when stressed. For example, I scored highest on secure, but higher on avoidance than I typically do. I’ve been so busy (working a full-time job and writing this book), which limits my resources to provide emotional support for others. After working so much, I just want to barricade the door, splay on the couch, and watch trashy and dramatic television.

​American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

“It's easy to become anything you wish...So long as you're willing to forfeit your soul,” a Chinese herbalist wisely says to the protagonist of this graphic novel. This book contains three plots, interweaving ancient eastern mythology with modern media and lived experiences of Chinese American diaspora. I highly recommend it.

The details in the story are super relevant and precise; Gene Luen Yang conveys the brutality, the compromises, and the emotions that are so very much a part of the Chinese American experience.

I first read this several years ago, and recently watched the Disney Plus adaptation of the story. Both resonated with me at a very deep emotional level; some moments were incredibly painful to get through, others were very freeing and powerful to see. Since it’s a graphic novel, I won’t be including excerpts.

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My co-workers and I traveled to San Francisco to attend Figma’s Config. Here’s a live blog I wrote with my co-worker Jenny Xie, who recently launched her novel Holding Pattern.

If you appreciate this newsletter, one of the ways you can support it is to buy my book Creative Doing. (Also available in print.)

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I hope that some of these passages unlock the hidden doors of your mind. Maybe some will serve as catalysts for change. And remember, they’re signposts. It’s up to you whether you want to apply them or not. Reply to this and let me know which quotes or books resonate with you, what you think of the newsletter, and if there’s anything I can support you with.

Herbert

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