Erich Stauffer

Category: Pop Culture

  • The Room of Requirement: Why Hidden Spaces Appear in Stories, Organizations, and Real Life

    The Room of Requirement: Why Hidden Spaces Appear in Stories, Organizations, and Real Life

    In Harry Potter, the Room of Requirement is one of the most powerful ideas in the entire series – not because it’s magical, but because it’s true.

    The room appears only when it’s genuinely needed.
    It takes the shape of whatever solves the immediate problem.
    And it exists outside official authority, yet quietly makes survival possible.

    It doesn’t show up because the school planned well.
    It shows up because the institution failed to provide something essential.

    That pattern turns out to be everywhere – in movies, in organizations, and in real life.

    The Room of Requirement in Harry Potter

    At Hogwarts, students don’t use the Room of Requirement because they’re rebellious or sneaky.

    They use it because:

    • the curriculum doesn’t prepare them for real danger
    • authority figures are constrained, compromised, or absent
    • open discussion would expose vulnerability or incompetence

    Dumbledore doesn’t officially sanction it.
    Umbridge would destroy it instantly.
    Yet without it, the students would be helpless.

    The Room exists because truth, practice, and preparation needed somewhere to live.

    The Rooms in The Goonies

    In The Goonies, the kids don’t operate from city hall, the police station, or their parents’ living rooms.

    They operate from:

    • basements
    • tunnels
    • hidden pirate ships
    • off-the-map spaces adults don’t control

    Why?

    Because the official system has already decided:

    • their homes are expendable
    • their voices don’t matter
    • efficiency matters more than people

    So they build their own operating space – informal, risky, collaborative – and save what the system was willing to lose.

    That’s not childish fantasy.
    That’s an accurate model of how under-supported groups survive.

    Rooms of Requirement in real organizations

    This isn’t just storytelling. It happens in real companies all the time.

    First example: inventing leadership when it isn’t allowed

    At one agency I worked at, there was a clear need for a function the company didn’t want to formally support. The work still needed to happen — so a small group of us created a private space where we could:

    • talk honestly about how to run projects
    • share what actually worked with developers
    • cross-pollinate ideas without fear

    It worked extremely well.

    Morale improved.
    Outcomes improved.
    Leadership emerged naturally.

    Eventually, the space grew visible enough that someone tried to expose it to management. Leadership shut it down.

    Not because it was wrong – but because it proved something uncomfortable:

    The organization worked better when truth had a place to exist.

    The Room of Requirement returns

    Years later, the same pattern reappeared.

    Public discourse about how to do work was constrained – not maliciously, but structurally. Visibility was risky. Admitting uncertainty was punished. Narrative control mattered more than shared understanding.

    So intelligence routed itself sideways again.

    A private Slack channel emerged – half jokingly called a “Room of Requirement.” Inside it:

    • communication was fluid
    • people shared real practices
    • leadership happened without titles
    • morale went up

    No rebellion.
    No gossip.
    Just people solving the problems the formal system couldn’t acknowledge.

    And once again, it worked.

    The uncomfortable lesson across all of this

    Rooms of Requirement don’t appear because people want to hide.

    They appear because:

    • a critical function exists
    • the system won’t name it
    • the work still has to happen

    When that gap opens, one of two things occurs:

    • reality degrades openly
    • or intelligence moves underground

    Most organizations choose the second – at least for a while.

    What Rooms of Requirement are actually good for

    Used well, these spaces can:

    • preserve morale in rigid systems
    • allow learning without exposure
    • prototype better operating models
    • help people lead before they’re allowed to

    They are:

    • relief valves, not replacements
    • labs, not final answers
    • bridges, not destinations

    They buy time.
    They keep things alive.
    They prevent collapse while everyone pretends nothing is wrong.

    A practical recommendation

    Rooms of Requirement are most useful when they are:

    • small
    • voluntary
    • clearly informal
    • focused on learning, not power
    • treated as temporary scaffolding

    They should help people think, connect, and survive – not carry the entire structure on their backs.

    When they become load-bearing, something else needs to change.

    Closing thought

    Every time a Room of Requirement appears — in fiction or in life — it’s telling you the same thing:

    There is a truth this system cannot yet afford to see.

    The room isn’t the problem.
    The room is the signal.

    And learning how to read that signal – without confusing it for the solution – might be one of the most important leadership skills there is.

  • Downtown: The Musical

    This jukebox musical is a playlist on Spotify. I’ve weaved a story out of the following pop songs. It’s something I do for fun. This particular musical is a response to Uptown: The Musical. At the bottom of this post are links to other rock musicals I’ve done in the same way.

    [Act I]

    1. Downtown by Macklemore –
    2. Trouble by Iggy Azalea –
    3. Want to Want Me by Jason DeRulo –

    [Act II]

     

    If you like this, you might also like:

  • Uptown Funk: The Musical

    Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (definitely the first song): Father is a pimp at the top of his game, walking through uptown to great fanfare

    Love You by The Free Design: A baby is sang to by family over time, 10 years pass over the course of the song

    One Man Can Change The World by Big Sean, Kanye West, and John Legend: Father sings to his son.

    FourFiveSeconds by Rihanna, Kanye West, and Paul McCartney: Father is in a low part of his life and the neighborhood has gone downhilll around them.

    See You Again (feat. Charlie Puth) by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth: Father sings to his son and then leaves him. 10 years go by.

    Where Are U Now by Jack U, Skrillex, Diplo, and Justin Bieber: Son sings to his father, who never came back.

    I Bet My Life by Imagine Dragons

    Lose It (In the End) by Mark Ronson and The Business Intl (definitely the last song)

     

  • The Adjacent Possible

    In Cal Newport’s book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, of which Haden’s article is about, Cal talks about the “adjacent possible”, which is:

    A term taken from the science writer Steven Johnson, who took it from Stuart Kauffman, that helps explain the origins of innovation. Johnson notes that the next big ides in any field are typically found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The key observation is that you have to get to the cutting edge of a field before its adjacent possible – and the innovations it contains – becomes visible.

    I felt this book was a good example of that for me because I was just about to write something similar. It seems this is possible because Cal and I both have similar reading habits and a desire to find out how to do what we love. This book builds on principals from Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Derek Sivers, Daniel Pink, and Reid Hoffman. I will admit that I was a believer in the “passion mindset” and although I thought I was a hard worker, I tended to avoid the mental strain Cal talks about that’s so important to deliberately practice in order to build career capital (these are two terms Cal introduces). This book really does a good job of turning the passion mindset on it’s head while giving you solid, practical advice about how to get the things you want in a job: control/autonomy. The bad news is that it takes a long time, will hurt, and requires a lot of work.

    Talk about CIV and UFO Defense

    CIV Tech Tree

    XCOM UFO Defense Research

    I’m on the cusp of formulating a new way to think about intelligence

    I’m thinking about this in terms of a presentation, rather than a blog post, but the general idea is that one way to measure intelligence is a person or system’s ability to cross-reference ideas.

    Logic Puzzles

    When you were a child, you may have been asked to fill out simple logic puzzles in math class. They were simple rows and columns and a couple of sentences, which you had to fill in using logic.

    Imagine if all ideas in the world occupied both all of the columns and all of the rows in a giant logic puzzle and the more ideas are learned, the more columns and rows are added to this puzzle. It is from this idea that I present the following stories.

    The Rosetta Stone

    Despite being discovered in 1799 by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt, it wasn’t until 1822 that a man named Champollion was able to decode the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script.

    He was only able to do this by cross-referencing not just the Ancient Greek, but also Ancient Coptic and other hieroglyphs found at that time. It was this cross-language connections that ultimately helped decrypt the language.

    The First Web App

    In 1995 Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, wanted to write an e-commerce application, but didn’t want to write it for Windows. After seeing an advertisement for Netscape, he had an idea to try running his Unix application in a browser.

    In order for Graham to create Viaweb as the first web app, Netscape, the World Wide Web, the Internet, and Unix all had to be in place first. It was from these technologies that allowed The Adjacent Possible to occur.

    The Adjacent Possible

    Innovation in any field are typically found right beyond the current cutting edge, in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas. The cutting edge has to exist in a field before its adjacent possible – and the innovations it contains – becomes visible.

    This explains why things like the discovery of oxygen or DNA occur at the same time around the world because the tools available to do so become available. However, the existence of technology is not enough, the person has to have the intelligence to connect the pieces together.

    The Wright Brothers

    By the time The Wright Brothers started working on powered flight, “flight” by gliders was already a thing. The problem was not ‘lift’ – the mechanics of that were known. The problem was in maintaining flight and controlling the aircraft.

    Because The Wright Brothers were avid tinkers and ran a bicycle shop, they were able to apply ideas from how a bicycle maneuvers through space and recent developments from lightweight aluminum engines to overcome powered flight.

    What is Intelligence?

    The ability to cross-reference ideas requires both the knowledge of the ideas and the ability to recall and compare those ideas to each other. The ability to do this as a human generally requires expert domain knowledge or the cross-pollination of ideas across domains in a more holistic view, but some level of depth is required in at least one domain.

    Compare this to a computer program that could be programmed to compare ideas at a massive scale. Every time a new paper is published or a new gadget is created, the ‘rows’ and ‘columns’ get bigger and every previous idea can now be compared. The results from a computer program doing this task in a holistic way may result in ideas and outcomes that a human would never come to on their own.

    Uploaded on Apr 14, 2008
    Lawrence Barsalou PhD Emory University. The human conceptual system contains categorical knowledge that supports online processing (perception, categorization, inference, action) and offline processing (memory, language, thought). Semantic memory, the dominant theory of the conceptual system, typically portrays it as modular, amodal, abstractive, and static. Alternatively, the conceptual system can be viewed as non-modular, modal, situated, and dynamic. According to this latter perspective, the conceptual system is non-modular and modal because it shares representational mechanisms with modality-specific systems in the brain, such as vision, action, and emotion. On a given occasion, modality-specific information about a category’s members is reenacted in relevant modality-specific systems to represent it conceptually. Furthermore, these simulations are situated, preparing the conceptualizer for situated action with the category. Not only do these situated simulations represent the target category, they also represent background settings, actions, and mental states, thereby placing the conceptualizer in the simulation, prepared for goal pursuit. Because the optimal conceptualization of a category varies across different courses of situated action, category representations vary dynamically and are not static. Furthermore, different situations engage different neural systems dynamically when representing a category. Under some circumstances, the linguistic system plays a more central role than simulation, whereas under other circumstances, simulation is more central. Thus, the concept for a category appears to be a widely distributed circuit in the brain that includes modality-specific and linguistic representations, integrated by association areas. Across situations, these circuits become realized dynamically in diverse forms to provide the knowledge needed for cognitive processing. Behavioral and neural evidence is presented to support this view.

    If you like this, you might like How to Work a Life of Purpose.

  • Pixar’s Soul – Themes and Reflections

    Rather than be specific, which I couldn’t be without re-watching the movie and taking notes, I’ll give you a summary of what happened and make comments along the way.

    The main character is a part-time band teacher in a middle school. The movie opens with him getting promoted to full-time work. He immediately feels let down because he really wants to be a full-time jazz musician. I felt that as I’ve often had to compromise on ‘my dreams’ for ‘a job’. And that is part of the central theme of this movie, which I’ll come back to later.

    However, as luck would have it, the main character gets a phone call from one of his former students who is in a band with a famous jazz musician and needs someone like him to fill in for someone who recently left the band. He ends up getting the gig, but dies shortly afterwards. The main character is now in the afterlife and very upset that ‘he finally got what he wanted and then it was taken away’ so he escapes to the ‘before life’ where souls are born. We have now seen a second aspect of the central theme, which is ‘for the fish to recognize water’, in other words, a misplaced search for something you already have.

    In the ‘before life’, the main character is matched with a soul who hasn’t been able to graduate to earth because they are never satisfied (a kind of opposite twin of the main character). The rules are that you have to get a spark of something you like in the ‘before life’ before you’re allowed to go to earth. The characters mistakenly believe that this is their ‘purpose’ in life and without having it or achieving it, then their life is meaningless. The main character believes their life is meaningless despite people like his students telling them they helped improve their lives. I felt that.

    The soul’s name is 22, which is the day of my birthday. I took this personally. 22 was never satisfied with anything. Nothing excited him. He had seen everything and tried everything and nothing moved the needle for him (or her). However, along the way, after being mentored by all of the great minds in history, 22 had become very intelligent, but not necessarily wise (intelligence applied). I felt that too because I’ve often spent a lot of time learning, but never really finding what I want to do in life.

    Eventually they figure out a way to escape to earth where the new soul learns about things on earth and realizes…I’m not quite sure….something about ‘living itself’ or ‘life itself’ or ‘the act of learning how to live’ is that soul’s spark. They like to learn, not necessarily do. And once learned, they like to tell other people about what they’ve learned, but not necessarily as a teacher, but as an unintentional mentor. I felt that, too. The fact that I’m sharing this with you right now shows that I’m like that. It’s why I used to blog and vlog.

    Eventually they learn, like the fish looking for the ocean, that each person doesn’t have a pre-destined purpose. The barber wanted to become a veterinarian, but he needed money sooner to pay for his daughter being born, so he became a barber. People who know him think he was born to be a barber because he is so good at it. The barber says he has found joy in being a barber despite it not being what he wanted. He realizes that he is still able to help people and in doing so, help himself. That is the theme of this movie – to realize that what you have and what you are doing is your purpose and you are having an impact. Realize what you do have and the impact you are making and think less about what you don’t. That thing you’re searching for…you already have it.

    And that’s also the theme of books like The Alchemist who goes on a grand journey for treasure that ultimately leads him back to a treasure under the house where he started. Or the idea of “diamonds in your own backyard”, a famous sermon repeated over the years about a farmer who sold his farm to go looking for treasure only to later realize his farm had a natural abundance of diamonds.

  • Will Ready Player One Ever Become a Real Game?

    Ready Player One Game

    Ready Player One is a book written by Ernest Cline in 2011. On March 30, 2018, the feature length film will debut in movie theaters, but will there ever be a real virtual reality game like the one found in Ready Player One?

    In the novel, The OASIS is a virtual universe, containing thousands of worlds. It functions both as an Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) and as a virtual society, complete with OASIS currency.

    Imaging if Facebook came out with an Oculus-Enabled Facebook where people could meet, interact, learn, work, and play online instead of in real life (IRL). That’s basically what The OASIS is, but could it ever actually be made?

    Simulation games from stock trading to The Sims have been popular ever since computers became popular, but so far Virtual Reality (VR) has been out of the reach of what technology could handle. But that may be changing.

    Computers are getting smaller and faster every few years, but also there has been increased effort in understanding how the brain interprets visual information which is critical for how VR environments work.

    Hardware and software is being developed that will allow intensely real-like environments that VR provides. The brain is incredibly adaptable and can easily assimilate into an environment that is initially foreign.

    People have long been fascinated with existential ideas about what makes reality real and what it means to live inside a simulation. As we move closer to this new world of VR games and lifestyle, we’re about to find out.

  • Minecraft

    One of the most popular computer games right now is Minecraft, a game that allows you to create, edit, and explore worlds by digging, transforming, and creating new things out of basic materials like wood, stone, and metal.

    I started playing Minecraft on November 27, 2011. Two days later I noted, “I bought it specifically to dig holes and play with flowing water. The zombies really scare me so I started playing in creative mode. However, there is something not as fun when there are no limitations. And I was disappointed in whatever physics logic is used to control water flow. When water is released by digging next to it, it flows for a little while and then stops. It doesn’t flood wherever it can like real water would.”

    Minecraft

    Recently James Altucher wrote about the value of play in The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastery. He had recently interviewed Robert Greene, author of Mastery, on his podcast, The James Altucher Show.

    On February 18, 2014 I was driving to work and heard The Foundation’s podcast, “Learning to Play and Boosting Productivity – with Charlie Hoehn”. In it, Charlie talked about how he discovered the power of play. One thing that struck me is how both James – in his post about Mastery – and Charlie, in his book Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety ask the reader to “List everything you enjoyed doing [before, when you were young]”.

    When I first heard the question, I didn’t know the answer. All I could think about was how I really didn’t like playing traditional sports. But the second time I heard the question, it’s as if my mind was prepared for the answer and I started to think about all of the time I spent going out into the woods and creating spaces for myself. I called them “forts” because I didn’t have a better word for them at the time, but they were just private, open spaces where I could go to get away.

    When I was young I created these types of spaces in urban environments under bridges, in my backyard, at summer camps I worked at, and at colleges I attended. In high school I watched The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995) – a movie about a map maker who comes to measure a mountain – just to learn more about maps and mountains. It turns out it was all a ruse to get us to watch Hugh Grant fall in love for two hours.

    Minecraft Cartoons

    Back in January of 2012 I decided I’d try my hand at making some Minecraft comics and then point you to some that other people have done. I’m no Oatmeal or XKCD, but I wanted to share regardless. This was my first attempt.

    Mapreneurs
    Mapreneurs

    Objectionable Physics
    Objectionable Physics

    Mineworld Problems
    Mineworld Problems

    Here’s some Minecraft cartoons that other people have done:

    Minecraft Cartoon creepghastcartoon minetoons

  • Flight in the Bible

    2 Samuel 22:7-20 – The Lord Flies, Blazes Bolts of Lightning

    “In my distress I called to the Lord;
        I called out to my God.
    From his temple he heard my voice;
        my cry came to his ears.
    8 The earth trembled and quaked,
        the foundations of the heavens[c] shook;
        they trembled because he was angry.
    9 Smoke rose from his nostrils;
        consuming fire came from his mouth,
        burning coals blazed out of it.
    10 He parted the heavens and came down;
        dark clouds were under his feet.
    11 He mounted the cherubim and flew;
        he soared[d] on the wings of the wind.
    12 He made darkness his canopy around him—
        the dark[e] rain clouds of the sky.
    13 Out of the brightness of his presence
        bolts of lightning blazed forth.
    14 The Lord thundered from heaven;
        the voice of the Most High resounded.
    15 He shot his arrows and scattered the enemy,
        with great bolts of lightning he routed them.
    16 The valleys of the sea were exposed
        and the foundations of the earth laid bare
    at the rebuke of the Lord,
        at the blast of breath from his nostrils.

    17 “He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
        he drew me out of deep waters.
    18 He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
        from my foes, who were too strong for me.
    19 They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
        but the Lord was my support.
    20 He brought me out into a spacious place;
        he rescued me because he delighted in me.

  • Review of All You Need is Kill

    I was 13 years old in 1993 when Groundhog Day was released in theaters. 5 years later, I started writing a looping screenplay of my own called “Breeze Way”. In 2009, Hiroshi Sakurazaka published All You Need is Kill, a looping war action drama, which was released as Edge of Tomorrow in 2014.

    I was so excited when I first saw the trailer. I was like, “Yes, Groundhog Day meets War of the Worlds – starring Tom Cruise!”, but when I found out it was based on a book, I was like, “I can’t wait, I’m just going to read it.” I ended up reading it in one evening and found it very riveting. The ending of the book is much different than the movie, but I won’t ruin it here. There are no spoilers in this post.

    Quotes from All You Need is Kill

    The book is, at times, more insightful than the movie (emphasis mine):

    What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don’t coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?“

    This one covers talent vs. deliberate practice and self improvement:

    I didn’t possess any extraordinary talents that set me apart from my peers. I was just a soldier. There were things I could do, and things I couldn’t. If I practiced, in time I could change some of those things I couldn’t do into things I could.”

    There are some technical explanations for how the looping is happening, which the author, Sakurazaka, attempts to explain and wrap up the story, but I found them a little bit of a stretch. However, it’s much more of an explanation than what you get from Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day.

    The ‘Science’ from All You Need is Kill

    In the book, the alien fighters use “tachyons”, theoretical particles that can travel faster than the speed of light, to travel backwards in time. Tachyons were also used in Watchmen (2009) where Dr. Manhattan’s ability to see into the future is blocked by tachyons generated by Adrian Veidt. In All You Need is Kill (2009), alien terraformers use tachyon pulses to send information back to themselves to win a battle.

    Tachyons Research in Reality

    In 2012 the Higgs Boson particle was confirmed, which is a particle in “tachyon condensation” meaning it is in a quantum field with “imaginary mass” (whatever that means). In 2011, before the Higgs Boson particle was confirmed, scientists theorized that Higgs “singlets” may be traveling back in time and sabotaging the discovery. I guess that wasn’t happening since they were able to discover it eventually, but who knows?