Bits & Bytes — by Elazar Aslan

By Elazar Aslan

It was my last interview for a senior marketing position with this Fortune 100 company. I needed to meet with the CEO for his final nod. The only issue I had was that I’m a Marketing person, he a real techie. I knew enough, though, to try to learn his language and not try to teach him mine. So I brushed up on my WANs and LANs and bits and bytes. It turned out to be a very good idea. The bulk of our conversation centered around where we thought technology would take us as a society; not a bad bridge for a Marketing guy and a techie CEO. However, we also got into the bits and bytes. We even talked about how improvements in DPI (dots per inch) will allow technology to do even more amazing things. In retrospect, we were both pretty prescient. More importantly, I did not, as in previous circumstances, snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. In other words, he gave me the nod.

I got the job and the experience was fun and valuable while it lasted. What was much more lasting though, was the burst of synapses that occurred in my brain after the interview. I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike making my way home to Manhattan. There, somewhere between exits 15 and 16, my whole perspective transformed. It was truly like a mind warp. It’s as if I was looking at the Escher print of the Young Woman and the Old Hag. All I had been able to see in the picture throughout my life was the Old Hag. Then all of a sudden, literally with a blink of an eye, all I can see in the same picture was a Young Woman. The pixels shifted from background to foreground.

You probably know what pixels are (thank God I learned about them for my interview). Pixels are the tiny dots that make up a picture. This is the same for most transmitted pictures we see, regardless of the medium. For example, if you got very close to the TV, you’ll see that it is made up of dots of different colors. If you look at a newspaper very closely, you’ll see that words and pictures are just different clusters of dots. I remember my first real experience with this concept. I was on a print press check for my first corporate job, where I was making sure that the printer was actually printing our new cereal boxes the right way, colors and all. At some point while his crew was preparing the job for printing, he brought a loop over for me. The only other time I had seen a loop, those small magnifying glasses, was at a jeweler. The printer put the loop over the picture of the boy we spent two months casting and photographing for the front of our cereal box. Wow! It was just dots of four different colors—blue, yellow, red, and black (or CYMK as I came to learn). I became more keenly aware of this in all media. However, it took almost a decade for me to put the ‘loop’ over my life.

After my interview with the CEO and our discussions over the “dots”, my sense of how life works and who I am, flipped. Prior to passing Exit 15, I thought that my life was about taking a blank canvas and painting it with my life’s achievements. By my twenties, I still wasn’t sure exactly what the picture would look like, but I had a good idea of what kind of picture I wanted to paint. Frankly, it wasn’t such an unusual picture—a successful career, a beautiful and gracious wife and a bunch of wonderful children bonding as we traveled the globe. To finish the painting “on time”, I started to even think of the timetable and the order I needed to paint my masterpiece. In that quest, I developed a very strong set of likes and dislikes. After all, I was on a mission. If you or an event didn’t fit my picture, I couldn’t put too much energy into you or it. I think most people can understand that logic. In fact, if something or someone were to spoil my painting, I would get very mad; also an understandable feeling. I believe I was a gentle and caring person, but everyone had their own canvas to paint, and I was busy coloring in mine. I started to take my painting very seriously. I began to get specific about what colors I needed, what colors didn’t belong, and how much of what needed to go where, to turn my canvas into a picture-perfect masterpiece. I had a vision of what such a masterpiece should look like. I began to despise greens and really became attached to blues, but I had a strong feeling about most all colors and their hues.

After Exit 16, everything was topsy-turvy. I realized that in truth, I had no control over the final design. Life will give me what life wants to give me. I could not really choose what colors were in my palate, but I could choose the quality of those colors. In other words, the final picture on my canvas is not my design, contrary to any delusion I would like to hold. However, the quality of the pixels and the resolution is all mine to determine. The more Dots Per Inch, the greater the resolution; the cleaner each dot, the higher the quality.

In that moment, I began the process of letting go of any outcome. I surrendered my drive to determine the final picture. My job now is to make sure that each pixel had the highest quality and the picture had the best resolution possible.

* * *

Shifting roles and responsibilities with the Universe was a major transformation for me. Letting go of results and focusing on process took a lot of faith. But it was also freeing. To let go of trying to control something that was not controllable and focus on something that I could actually affect—this moment—was relieving.

In other words, if my life was the completed picture, how fine were the dots that defined it? Did I understand my life in decades? Years? Days? How about moments? Now that’s HDTV. If I make sure that each moment is of the highest quality of presence, integrity and generosity, then I can trust the final picture to be one that puts a beautiful smile on my face, regardless of the design.

I have come to believe that my canvas is large enough to hold all the colors. And if there is a pixel that is a little fuzzy or lacking quality, then that is where my work lies – and only there.