Software developer, sailor, engineer: Scott Davis’s 'Surf the Seesaw' probes life’s strange waves
Once an analytics innovator, Davis returns from a five-year sabbatical with thoughtful essays on balance, beauty, and life's meaning
Scott Davis, the inventor of the great but short-lived analytics tool Lyza, has written a book of reflections titled Surf the Seesaw, Unconventional Essays on Balance, Beauty and Meaning in Life.
For me and a crowd of other fans from the data analytics world, the path to Surf starts with Lyza. It had a simple assumption at its core, that people will trust data to the degree it’s trusted by others they know. Imagine also that it was loved by the few who used it. That tool, named Lyza, launched only a few years after Tableau and seemed to be another heroic disrupter. It was the brainchild of Denver developer Scott Davis, whose research, vision, and money brought it to market.
Yet for all its promise, Lyza died. It just didn’t sell, and Davis had to shut it down.
I had found Lyza’s concept intriguing and refreshingly different from most other analytics tools. Davis said things like this: “The conversation is what’s really valuable.” He talked about enabling discovery using a kind of roving and seeking. It rang true.
But now 15 years later, he’s produced something that’s also notable for its path to discovery. It’s a book of thoughtful challenges for those who may describe themselves as he does, as a “person becoming.” Who isn’t?
After Lyza, he left on a sabbatical that was to be six months. It lasted five years. He got on his boat and sailed, settled on an island for a while, remarried, and eventually came back where he was before, near Denver, Colorado. Surf the Seesaw is composed largely of a long series of conversations with himself as he hiked over trails west of Denver.
He explains that the book “is not a comprehensive set of blueprints for the system of life.”
If such a set of blueprints could exist, this book … would be the equivalent of a wine-stained napkin on which someone had sketched a few shapes and perhaps a proportion or two. In other words, while I am confident that the book points roughly to a useful model of reality, I have certainly left the vast majority of work to the reader.
His voice is different from today’s usual variety of coaches, gurus, self-help writers, and proselytizers. Here’s how he describes what he’s good at: “I can do some valuable things, for example, but they run toward spatial reasoning, decision engineering, user experience design, rhetoric, and basically any activity in, on, under, around, or near water.” He wanders from chapter to chapter and topic to topic and seems to assume that the reader will navigate. Even the title poses a tricky path from “surf” to “seesaw.”
This is one paragraph among many that I happen to find tasty meat for thought. I read it at a moment I had a particular scenario in mind.
As I have written elsewhere on the topic of Optionality, a great starting point for strategy in this world of Big Changes is admitting that you do not know everything and accepting that you will often be wrong. This bit of humility will allow you to pay the higher apparent price of Optionality, because you will see that it is not the efficiency of a strategy under the ideal scenario that matters, rather its effectiveness through the inevitable Big Surprises.
Other pieces seem to have been left unrefined, as if he couldn’t resolve all the interesting tangents.
The second tactic for mitigating the effects of power asymmetries is (cue the archers) more-progressive taxation. Often power asymmetry is solely due to a quirk of history or the market economy that bestows upon someone mind-boggling wealth as a result of the temporal intersection of a particular differential skill and a particularly widespread preference. There are several problems with mind-boggling wealth, but the most important for this discussion is portability: extreme wealth converts context-specific power (based upon distinctive skill) into context-independent power. As we have already discussed, the movement of power asymmetry out of its domain of differential advantage is harmful to both the individual and the community.
That is, more-progressive taxation would mitigate overweening estimations among the wealthy of their own wisdom and intelligence, and thus reduce harm to individuals and the community.
The book’s good heart and good sense shows through after a few pages. These are qualities especially useful for anyone rethinking life as it’s been and life as it could be, whether they’re old and retired, or embroiled in mid-life crises, and just about any teenager contemplating love and career.
Scott Davis doesn’t sound like another Tich Naht Han, Brené Brown, or Stephen Covey. Instead, Davis sounds like the sailor, sojourner, entrepreneur, and engineer he is. Only an engineer would render life’s quandaries as the confluence of surfing and sailing, as he seems to in the title. To the standard trio of Buddhist philosophy, psychotherapy, and common sense, Davis adds humanistic engineering and experimentation.
Wow, Ted! What a delight to see my book covered on Datadoodle. Thank you for the generous words. I am glad Surf the Seesaw inspired you.
For any of your readers interested in the book, it’s on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Surf-Seesaw-Unconventional-Balance-Meaning/dp/B0C12D3J76/
Great Ted…