You would think, reading this blog, perhaps, that I don’t like extremes. Nothing could be further from the truth. I could tell Mr. Joel¹Or is it Dr. Joel now? – I do know why I go to extremes.

It is fun.

Oh I know, the advice I give is all about moderation and planning. I think using the skills of systems engineering to analyze and dissect a situation so that I have the advantage is a gift. It is a gift I like. It is a gift I sometimes, I suppose, abuse.

However, as much as I like extremes, recently I went for a walk²The best way, in my opinion, to have a think. to consider why I find extremes important. Not just exciting, but important.

It is all very nice, in fact I think it is crucial, to try to husband your resources and live within your means. This applies to money, but also emotions and goals. Slow and steady wins the race³Although, if you knew me in my cross country days, you would know that philosophy NEVER won me a race. I had fun though. But that is another story.. I believe, and I certainly preach, that appreciating resources and being thoughtful how you use them will bring you a more bountiful life.

But.

That isn’t all there is to the story.

It would be easy to say that extremes are there just for exciting occasions. An extravagant gift at a wedding. A celebration of a milestone birthday. A night of fine wine and too much food to celebrate an accomplishment. Those extremes are ones I think our society honors.

Instead of husbanding extremes for looking behind me, I think extremes are the sparks that push me to new places. Only with too much momentum do I have a hope of reaching a goal which my current resources say are out of reach. Remember that job I hated doing and wanted to find a place as a dishwasher? Well, that would have been one extreme, but I went a different direction. I took a job across the country and packed up my family⁴Ok. Ok. The company packed up my family. That was a nice benefit. twelve years ago and entered a situation I knew nothing about. Taking a job totally oblivious to the pitfalls that awaited me was extreme.

It changed my life. It changed the trajectory and momentum behind me. It led to quite a few tears on my part, but I finally stopped looking to move on to the next adventurous place and found enough adventures here⁵Mostly. I would go to the extreme of moving to Iceland were it an option.

There is another side to extremes that appeals to me. Binary thinking can be easier than picking a place on a spectrum. And binary choices generally represent two extremes. Never and Always. If I never drank too much, I would always be sober. If I never acted selfishly, then no one else would either. If I always looked before I leapt, I would never get bruised. Wouldn’t that be awesome if it were true?

It’s not.

Two of the fallacies of binary thinking are so attractive. First, if I can keep my own behavior⁶And everyone else’s behavior within a binary bound, we can predict outcomes for the world. Never. Always. These are extremes we employ to avoid extremes that may lead to the unknown. Second, it is so easy when considering a binary to add a tri-state⁷It happens more often in engineering than you may think!. Adding a middle state seems like it is just the between for the two extremes. I am just adding a little more detail. But this middle state ends up being non-linear. It weakens the two extremes and goes outside a nice linear relationship with absolutes.

Sometimes.

The spark is always going to push you outside the bounds of the Venn Diagram universe where things are predictable. I know I crave that from time to time, and I suspect that craving this is human nature. I can’t see technology advancing, in history or the future, without someone asking the question: Why not? That question, and its answer, continues to change the world around us as well as our interior landscape. It isn’t just that humans seek novelty, it is the new and novel that pushes us to grow. In adding a middle state, I am weakening the extremes and changing my design space.

There are a lot of subtle references to Ecclesiastes in here, but there was a lot of wisdom thousands of years ago when it was written. The model is still true – a time for every purpose under Heaven⁸Even some purposes that hadn’t been thought of.. As we enter the holiday season⁹A time of extremes, I am going to think about Always and Never. And Sometimes. Because considering that the extremes are not absolutes – that is an extreme of its own.