MAYA: The Shape of Progression

MAYA: The Shape of Progression

You’ve read the first three articles, hopefully. You now have a mild introduction to Paradox and how the idea of evaluating anything as either/or, non-binary, or “both/and” is not new. In fact it’s old, Plato and Socrates kind of old.

The second and third articles touched on how paradox helps shape the way you take in the information and content of your life. How scratching your head at a confounding problem or idea isn’t the worst reaction when in fact it’s preferable and way better than relying on a “the way we’ve always done it” kind of thinking.

Perhaps you’ve even surmised, “Okay, I get it, there is some gray out in the world. What do I do next?”

Glad you asked.

Before we get too far ahead, let’s first put a nice bow on these first three articles so we can officially move onto the last two as part of this “Opening Series”.

I work from the belief of some cognitive psychologists that we take in information via a process called “Information Processing Theory”. Developed by cognitive behavioral psychologists primarily in the late 1960’s (John William Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin with their ‘Multi-Store Model’ and then later in the 70’s and into the 2000’s with more and more research on this model of human information processing).

The basic idea is that we aren’t just stimulus-response machines. We don’t just walk around with canned responses to every stimulant in the jungle. We are also capable of taking in information and saving or categorizing it in complex ways that create novel or familiar neurological pathways of both intaking information and stimulus-responses.

How convenient is that?

As I see it, which his important for this entire newsletter, when you encounter new or novel (or familiar) input, stimuli, or information you can basically encode it in three ways:

1. You know exactly what the information is and you like it.

2. You know exactly what the information is and you don’t like it.

3. You don’t know what the information is.

In the first three articles before this one, I laid out how the ‘Paradox’ is basically what #3 is.

I also laid out the groundwork for how not understanding something isn’t that bad.

That also means then that I’ve laid out a new understanding for numbers #1 and #2 because if you agree there is paradox, then even if a stimulus has a #1 response for you, acknowledging paradox exists means a #2 (lol #2) exists for someone else to the same exact stimuli.

And vice versa.

That duality could then mean (if you believe like I do) that all information or inputs could be categorized as paradoxical or “unknown” no matter how certain or uncertain you are about them.

So, what now? What does this imply? What is fact? What is truth? What is scientific law? What is the dominion of the gods? Will my brain explode if I continue?

No, your brain won’t explode (while your eyes might cross) when we continue, but for a second let’s table those thoughts because I am going to take a few future newsletters to tackle those questions and let’s instead focus on what you might decide to do if you were in a brand new foreign city and wanted to know: where should you grab something to eat?

The Alchemy of Action

“Ring, a ding, a ling” goes the door as I enter.

A familiar “hello” to a foreign visitor is a welcome sign, even an auditory one like bells against metal. The smells, however, are not. That’s not to say the smells are off putting or bad, no it’s the opposite, they’re exquisite. My brain fires randomly at these aromas wafting through the air. The smells entering my nostrils fire a mix of memory’s that don’t make sense and the resulting uncomfortability is welcome. If not downright mouth watering.

I just don’t know why.

I feel like I’ve been here before but I’m in a foreign country, in a brand new cafe, eating a brand new food genre I’ve never tried before.

But somehow - this is familiar. I’m hungry, and confused. It’s both/and.

I look up at my culinary guide who has brought me here, and says, this is Doner Kebab, it’s just like ‘Chipotle’ but for Turkish food.

When you think of a place you really like, and you imagine how you’d describe that place to someone who has never been, what words do you use? Do you engage in a meandering, long-winded, multi-word, many-sentence attempt at describing the “thing”? Or do you use words that can quickly cut down the confusion and get exactly to the heart of “this place is” that is familiar?

If you have, you’re engaging in what Raymond Loewy, legendary Industrial Designer of the 1960’s, calls “MAYA”. It’s an acronym meaning: Most. Advanced. Yet. Acceptable. This is the subject of this episode of the opening series of Both/And, and it’s also a fundamental part of picking up the pieces of your intuition and creating action.

A Shell, A Glass Bottle, and an Airplane

If you’ve never heard of Raymond Loewy, you’ve 100% seen his work. Loewy is one of the 20th century’s greatest designers and what he’s created is still viewable and relevant to this day. Most notably, he’s directly responsible for the aesthetics of Air Force One, the Coca-Cola glass bottle and the Shell (oil) logo as well as many other famous icons of the 60’s and beyond.

But it’s how he went about designing these icons of American culture that deserves our attention for today. Perhaps, it’s actually his most important creation.

When it came to evaluating what to create, and for who, and how to go about doing that, he used a process he called “MAYA” which is an acronym for:

Most

Advanced

Yet

Acceptable

In short, Loewy believed that “Consumers are torn between a curiosity about new things and a fear of anything too new.” and it was with this in mind that he’d set about creating and doing. He always evaluated the tension between competing odds or interests of a product he was creating, he’s attributed for this quote stating this very phenomenon “to sell something surprising, make it familiar; to sell something familiar, make it surprising.”

In 1932, Loewy met with the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad because he had a different, more radical vision of locomotives. He saw bullets and aerodynamic visions when it came to locomotives. At the time these trains were still stuck in the past. They all looked like “Thomas the Train”.

His first designs were met with skepticism, the executives were stuck in the fear of the “too new”.

So he traveled hundreds of miles on Pennsylvania Railroad trains, testing air turbulence with engineers and interviewing crew members about the shortage of toilets. He also studied how people lived and how machines worked. This research helped him to design locomotives that were both beautiful and functional.

Loewy's suggestion of covering the bulk of the locomotive in a single futuristic looking, slee-steel plate was revolutionary in the 1930s and he eventually motivated the executives to accept his design. In his own words, “repeated exposure of railroad people to this kind of advanced, unexpected stuff had a beneficial effect. It gradually conditioned them to accept more progressive designs.”

Shortly after, his design became standard for all locomotives of the 1930’s.

What was once too advanced had become acceptable, and what was once acceptable has today become the “futuristic” unremarkable standard.

Go MAYA Yourself

When I was in that Turkish Doner Kebab restaurant years ago, right before I placed my order in broken Deutsch, I recognized MAYA without knowing what it was.

I thought of this place like Chipotle and ordered as such. I didn’t try to order alone as a native Turkish person, or German citizen - I acted from the familiar because it was obvious I was trying something advanced or new.

By the way, the food was amazing. Unreal good. In fact, I still dream (ya dream) about that moment randomly.

In the end, what I learned there was a lesson about trying new things but not new-new things when presented with something novel to me. I was able to both try something new and something familiar. That led me down a path to try other things that were each time a bit more unfamiliar.

The most important lesson of MAYA from Raymond Loewy’s perspective is a lesson in both/and. When presented with a problem that requires something new or “never-done-before” you have to keep all sides of the problem in mind to begin with.

If you justify your decisions or actions after you’ve already acted then you’ll fall into the same trap that either/or thinking presents. You’ll be tied to your actions or decisions regardless of whether you think they’re correct or not. You’ll eventually be back to where you started with the exact same unsolved problem staring you in the face.

If I kept it safe in that Doner-shop all those years ago, that would’ve meant ordering just simple Gyro meat alone and after I had eaten it, and enjoyed it, I would’ve told myself “I made the right decision”. Think about all I would’ve missed out on.

Keeping MAYA in mind the next time you are presented with a conundrum of life will also help you make sense of the inevitable bugs or blips or problems that arise as you go forward.

Because you’ll have understood the problem from both sides from the beginning, you’ll be in a better position to attribute future issues to one side or the other, again presenting you then with solutions that are MAYA.

None of this means easy.

None of this equals simple.

But what MAYA does mean is a way to make decisions without having to always feel tied to the perfect result.

And that’s acceptable by any standard.

In fact, it tastes pretty good.