Today's transmission is about synergies.
Today we are writing for family founders. Today's thought is, abstractly, how you can often reap multiples of benefit from an investment in family concept if you double and redouble down on it. More concretely, today's thought is about follow through and making the most of what you do by committing to overlapping and mutually reinforcing family concepts.
It may seem like many of our transmissions are an experiment. How can we take down-home old-timey stuff that 90% of everyone loves and intellectualize them into complete inaccessibility? Hey, stop agreeing quite so vigorously! There's a reason for it. Steader readers are smart. We figure that if we show you not just the practical stuff we are doing but the principles behind it, you will apply those principles in new and clever ways we never even thought of. We are not just showing off our successful family enterprises. We want you to succeed in yours, in your own unique way.
How the Cultural Sausage is Actually made
It will help if we first take a little detour through cultural creation. Culture creation shares something in common with magic and mana in fantasy stories, or the Force in Star Wars. In those stories, mana fuels magic. The greater the mana, the greater the magic.
Where does mana come from? That depends on who is telling the story. Maybe its blood sacrifice. But usually, like the Force, its just a mysterious something that pervades the universe. The "mana" for making culture, on the other hand, is quite specific.
Why should you care? Because creating and sustaining a family concept or a family identity is simply creating culture on the family scale.
So what is the cultural mana that fuels cultural creation? It comes from inner qualities like charisma, gravitas, authority, and sincere personal commitment; and from outward expenditures of time and effort. You invest your authority and time and effort before hand by explaining what this thing is you are going to be doing and why, you all invest time and effort into it by doing it, you invest your authority and time and effort afterwards by remembering it in stories, and then you invest more time and effort by repeating it. This is how the magic of family culture is made.
You can also use the mana already deposited in existing cultural concepts. If your family puts out flags on the 4th, the significance the larger culture puts into this taps in to what you are doing. This is why we suggest that high value concepts for family identity are practices that the culture approves of but doesn't always do. When you invest in these practices, you are able to leverage your investment by "borrowing" from the mana that the culture at large has already invested in the concept while still maintaining family distinctiveness.
In fact, you have just participated in such a borrowing. By analogizing cultural creation to mana and magic, and to investment and borrowing, we are able to use some of the culture's mana invested the fantasy genre and in financial investment to help solidify your understanding. We could have also talked about tech trees in a video game if we weren’t already approaching critical nerd mass.
Synergies
With that groundwork laid, we can return to the transmission topic. Synergies are when you invest in family concepts that are related. Your investments in one will slop over to the other, and vice versa. Both concepts can "borrow" from the other.
Let's put it simply. Let's say grilling is one of your family concepts. The outdoors, enjoying your lawn, meat, eating together . . . its a good concept. Don't let the memes dissuade you. You invest an hour per day for a week of your time and effort and authority into it, and you get back ... whatever the unit of cultural creation is. Since we've been talking magic and mana, lets call it a milliGandalf. You get back a milliGandalf of family culture.
Let's figure out how to use that existing milliGandalf to cheat by using synergies.
In a way, continuing to grill the next week is an example of synergies: week 2 will give you more than just an additional milliGandalf for grilling because you receive some of the benefits of the week before. Call it +1.5 milliGandalfs.
Synergies, though, are more properly a property of two related activities, not the same activity repeated in time. To explain how synergies can benefit you, let's return to your grill. Let's say you decide to invest an hour a day for a week into something else besides grilling. You could do reading to your children. The overlap would be small though maybe there is some overlap at a really high level of abstraction where both activities are an example of "family togetherness." Given that small but real overlap, the reading gives you 1.1 milliGandalfs. Oh, but what if you happen to be reading about a cool family that grills? Now its 1.4 mG. (Investing in customized or bespoke family literature is wildly underrated). Or what if you spend that time not reading. Instead you spend it raising animals, butchering them, and then using them on the grill? Now it’s 2 mG or even more!
NOTE: we love our autist readers, don't we folks, which is nearly all our readers, so at this point we will explain where these numbers came from. We made them up.
Cultural investments are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Grilling in week 50 is not going to monotonically increase your family's commitment to grilling or your sense of family identity. At some point these investments stop being additive and become purely maintenance investments. They counter entropic deterioration of the concept rather than enhancing it. Synergistic concepts not only make the best use of your time now, they sidestep the diminution to a degree.
Let’s hit two real life examples.
Roses
We were visiting back home. At church, an old family friend brought in an arrangement of roses and larkspur, or possibly delphinium, to sit by th epulpit. She does this many Sundays. I am aware of at least one adult daughter who has caught the “rose” bug from her mother and does the same.
We know that primary production is not just about food. It should also be beauty. Roses, for instance, and other flowers. Each to their own. Roses in particular seem to be one of those things that can just hook people.
It could be as simple as just buying flowers a lot. We know a man who really stands out by often wearing a bud in his boutonniere, because his father did.
But more profit is had in growing them, especially with the children being involved. Let’s break it down as a family concept. Don’t lose sight of the goal: a robust family concept that can perpetuate.
1. Growing the flowers. All the benefits of being outside, engaging with nature, getting the little hands dirty, dealing with failure, experiencing success.
2. Social reinforcement. Visitors will mention your flowers. If you have enough of them, passersby will literally stop to compliment you. There is plenty of general social reinforcement to flowers, from flower shops to art and entertainment. The sweet spot of family identity is practices that are highly distinctive from most but that are highly socially reinforced. Growing flowers is not highly distinctive but is at least a little bit distinctive since most people cannot be bothered. On the other hand, it is highly socially reinforced.
3. Felt reward. Good family identity practices have a lot of felt reward. This is obvious with flowers. They look pretty and smell nice.
That’s the basics. With a little effort, you can add synergy.
1. Flower arranging. Cut flowers, bring them inside. It gives the home a sense of craft and skill and beauty, and has synergies with growing the flowers if you do grow them. Flower arranging is one of those things that even the most non-nerdy people can obsess with, but its hard to go wrong on the very basic level of just sticking some flowers in a container where the stems have access to water. Done on a regular basis, this practice has the benefits of ritual while also highlighting—calling your family’s attention to—the flowers growing outside and the seasons.
2. Share the flower arrangements. Bringing flower arrangements to church, neighbors, etc. is amping up the social validation.
3. Connect with the old ladies who do roses. There will be madly skilled flower gardeners in your area. They will probably coo over your kids and generally be a great connection to make.
4. Sell the flowers. Kids selling flowers is box office at a farmers’ market.
Getting into flowers isn’t for everyone. Could they be for you? Or your wife?
If so, consider the synergies of having bees. Growing flowers could be more practical than you think ...
Cherries
Steader report: Here's my steader weekend. A bunch of us met at my dad's place for cherry picking and cherry eating. We came home with about 5 gallons. We'll freeze them if the kids leave us any!
There was more. A lot more. Here is the whole sequence laid out for you. The steader principle being applied is in parentheses.
Dad gets a job near a cherry orchard, family picks cherries (Organic development).
Later, acquire property and plant cherry trees. (Nature, out of doors, future orientation, experienced success and failure)
Observe and maintain the growing trees (nature, out of doors, seasons, rhythm, experienced success and failure)
Pick cherries (harvest, felt reward, primary production, nature, out of doors)
Better yet, tell your grown children when the cherries are coming on so they can converge with their own children at the old place. (Extended family, family continuity, generations, family succession, harvest, primary production, nature, out of doors, extended values)
Sing old songs--Can she bake a cherry pie. Reminisce--do you remember pitting in the basement . . . (music, stories, social reinforcement, overt reinforcement, family identity)
Eat cherries. Freeze cherries for that crystallized tangy crunch. Make and eat cherry hand pies using an egg-heavy bread dough. (Primary production, reward, household, synergy (with baking))
(Synergies with family concepts of baking, dairy, and thrift store shopping from the plate)
Take pics, write in journal, put pics on family site (stories, memories, overt reinforcement)
Ask grandchildren how many trees grandpa is going to have to plant so there's enough for their kids when they come back with families of their own (overt reinforcement, natalism, future orientation, goal orientation, family continuity, family succession, generations, sense of place)
Though not part of this particular sequence, you could easily add
Sell cherries or baked goods (entrepeneurship, household, social reinforcement*) (*People buying family products is social proof of the value of the product and therefore of your family.)
Any one of these is worth doing by itself. Even the less obvious ones. If your family thing were planting cherry trees, if you were the Johnny Cherry Seedling of families, and you helped all your neighbors plant trees while giving them a full nerd platter of information about different varieties and soils, that would be great. Or if your family had lots of cherry decorations even though you bought your fruit at the store, also great.
But even better when these things are layered together for synergy.
What are you already doing? What could you add to it that would mutually reinforce? Gotta rack up those milliGandalfs
Today’s Steader is extremely applicable to other levels of culture and organizations: neighborhoods, congregations, fraternal organizations, companies, countries. How many companies pick a corporate culture target based on a list that sounds good and not on what the executives actually have the “mana” to install and that can mutually reinforce?