After redesigning s-a and Cyan Pictures‘ website, I set out on the next logical step: revamping the Paradigm Blue site as well. The problem, however, is that, while Cyan Arts is remarkably well defined and moving steadily towards its eventual full incarnation, Sapphire Holdings and the Indigo Foundation have perpetually been much less sharply conceptualized, being mainly ever-evolving catch-alls for the miscellany of other work in which I’m involved: the entrepreneurship book, sitting on the boards of various start-ups, real estate ventures with my younger brother, consulting with nonprofits, a few science- and technology-related books I’ve been outlining, etc., etc.

Though I feel like I’m finally coming to a strong understanding of how Sapphire and Indigo will operate (as should be reflected in the coming-soon new version of the PB site), the thinking I’ve been doing has also inadvertently stirred up any number of related issues that normally lie dormant at the back of my brain. This weekend’s politics post, for example, was one result. Here’s another:

Sometimes, when back in Palo Alto, I’ll run into one of Stanford’s Deans of Admissions, who I’ve known for some time.

“So,” he’ll ask, “when are you coming to Stanford B-school?”

My unvarying reply: “As soon as you have my students ready.”

Which is to say, while I’d conceivably be happy to teach at a business school at some point in the future (having, already, been a guest speaker at nearly a dozen), I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to strap on a backpack and head to such a school as a student myself.

At the same time, one part of my mind, a little tiny voice way at the back, thinks it would be great fun to go back and get a PhD – not in business or film or computer science or any other area closely related to what I do know, but in complexity theory. Because, for all of my life, I’ve been excited by top-down problem solving – seeing new connections between divergent fields – and by questions of emergence and chaos – how very complicated, unpredictable behaviors can stem from players following remarkably simple rules – the two ideas that complexity most deeply delves.

In part, I love thinking about complexity theory because it pushes me to the edge of my cognitive abilities. We’re tremendously poor at seeing big pictures, at mentally working through the large-scale, compound interactions of very small parts. It’s the sort of thinking that makes my brain hurt, and it’s thinking I always have to push myself to do more often.

In college, I did a lot of that thinking, as most of my studies revolved around cognition, around trying to understand how the mind works. My senior thesis, for example, explored the question of what makes music sound good, of why air vibrations and synaptic impulses can make our subjective selves experience such profound emotional shifts. The project was a wild goose chase, tracing through themes in mathematics, physiology, neuroscience, acoustics, linguistics, philosophy, and a slew of other fields, and I enjoyed the process immensely. Still, I was never truly pleased with the result – the sixty or so pages I put together raised for me more questions than they answered, and I’ve always considered one day revisiting the topic for a more thorough analysis.

But as much as I love theory, I’m even more smitten with action. Which is why I doubt I’ll ever go head-first into the world of academia – too many great ideas are born and die in a vacuum, without ever making their way out to impact the real world. Still, I actively try and keep mind-stretching ideas in front of me – at the moment, I’m both re-reading Hofstadter’s excellent Gˆdel, Escher, Bach and working my way through an excellent online collection of neuroscience lectures.

Certainly, I do so because I like those subjects, because I like having to think hard. But also, I do it because I’m sure there’s some way to help such hard thinking osmote across to my daily, more action-based pursuits.