What I’ve Learned So Far

A quotation from Samuel Johnson:

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sir, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt ‘em both.

The lesson — I can tell you from painful experience — applies just as well to deciding between two projects to do, or two stories to write.

Yes, it helps to learn arithmetic before you essay calculus. Sometimes a sensible order from one project to the next is obvious.

But in many cases, even an arbitrary decision, and even a flawed arbitrary decision, would be superior to putting the decision off while “your backside is bare.”

Just go.

~

(Photo by Heather Williams, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

Way leads on to way.

You spend money on A, which means you have less for B. You spend time with Jack, which gives you less time for Jill. Climb a mountain, or sail the ocean? Dickens or Trollope? Betty or Veronica? Life is full of choices, and each choice branches into subsequent ones, infinitely.

No need to fret about it. Dickens and Trollope are both good. Betty and Veronica are both pretty. And the interlacing of paths is what makes life interesting.

But it is worth it to stick to a trail when you have someplace particular to go. Many of us, naturalized to the Internet, think nothing of skipping from thought to thought or task to task, without often enough enduring a full, complex thought or doing a whole, meaningful task uninterrupted. (For more on that, you might want to read my review of Ned Hallowell’s Crazybusy.)

Since I work in marketing and social media — and even more so because of my outside projects — I am forever branching from path to path. Doing so, in fact, is in the nature of Twitter, Facebook, and so on.

My challenge, then, is to do my work, but to do it in ways that don’t make me crazy. Or, in other words, to follow forks in the path because of key decisions, not out of reflex or distraction. My frequent inability to achieve that is why I write so much about organization and focus and so on. It’s also why I cautioned you the other day not to let me drone on about it.

My goal is to write about it not at all because I’m too busy with other, better things — the actual landscape one meets along the paths of life — rather than dwelling on my tendency to hop from one path to the other.

I’ll tell you how it goes. Or maybe, if it goes very well, I won’t.

~

(Image by pfly, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

Here’s another in my series of reactions to Pope John XXIII’s daily decalogue:

8. Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.

Goethe’s motto was “Ohne hast, ohne rast,” which translates, “Without haste, without rest.” It’s as good an idea as I’ve ever come across for getting your work done steadily. Too often we rush into things headlong when we ought to pause and think, or else we tarry overlong when we ought to forge ahead. Pope John’s words and Goethe’s caution us against both of these unwise courses.

Decisions require some degree of bravery. Etymology tells us that “Decide” shares a root with “excise” and “incise” and “concise” and “scissors.” The common theme is “cutting,” and decision implies cutting off some options; often, hard decisions are hard because they imply cutting off options that might be appealing, or because we must guess which option will turn out the best even though we lack good information.

Yet this is no reason not to take a decision. In truth, we are deciding all the time — even when we are deciding subconsciously to fool ourselves that we can put off making a decision forever. It requires self-possession to break free from this type of self-delusion. But no one said that growing up would be easy.

The problem with much self-help advice — a problem I’ve abetted, no doubt, with some of the glib advice I’ve given here — is that it portrays personal change as easy, and portrays the answers to life’s deep problems as easy. While it’s true that many who suffer could take simple steps to suffer less, I think it’s also true that Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled was so popular in part because of the candor in its opening line: “Life is hard.”

Life doesn’t always have to be hard, and not all parts of life are hard at all. But the truth is, reshaping your behavior IS work — work that neuroscientists can track with their scans, and work we understand intuitively when we consider the emotional and physical strains we feel when we make big changes.

But we have the ability to work ahead steadily, with an explicit plan or an implicit one. We have the ability to keep ourselves moving forward, not in a hurry but not dragging our feet either. We can acknowledge that life is sometimes hard, and that changing our lives for the better will sometimes bring discomfort. Sometimes we will backslide. Sometime our plans will fall through. But we can still decide to deal with these realities as if they are not the end of the world, and as if we deserve to live better today than we did yesterday — even when it’s hard.

~

Previously in this series:

• “Without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.”
• “I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.”
• “I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy.”
• “I will adapt to circumstances.”
• “Good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.”
• “I will do one good deed …”
• “I will do at least one thing I do not like doing.”

~

Your work all fits in one workflow . . . whether you admit it or not.

You have one diet of the words you read, one diet of the food you eat, one diet of the thoughts you think.

You have one body of work.

Push all the buttons you want, trick yourself as much as you feel you need to, jump around if it hides the pain . . . still it remains one big life that you’re living.

~~~

“Action expresses priorities.”

–Gandhi

~~~

My suggestion: put everything in one big pile — either literally or by writing it all down in one place — and then go after it with a blowtorch. If it’s in the bottom half of your life, get rid of it as quickly as you can. Then take what’s left and discard the bottom half of that. With what remains, focus on the things that give you the greatest joy and the greatest prosperity, however defined. Remember that you have one crack at this life, and that when you’re old and frail, you’ll look back on your choices now with gratitude or with regret. Chose your actions now so that you can feel gratitude then.

And don’t fool yourself that you can compartmentalize the different areas of your life. You’re living a life to be proud of, or you’re not. Choose accordingly.

For context, read this NYT article:

The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes

. . . We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.

Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has studied this and related issues for decades.

“Studies with children and adults show that a large percentage cannot tolerate mistakes or setbacks,” she said. In particular, those who believe that intelligence is fixed and cannot change tend to avoid taking chances that may lead to errors.

As an aside, Dweck’s research, and particularly the book Mindset, has been the frikkin’ mother lode for reporters doing think-pieces on education, business, etc. For that matter, I’ve used it in a lecture at UT. Good, good stuff — and very important work.

The majority of those praised for being smart chose the simple task, while 90 percent of those commended for trying hard selected the more difficult one.

The difference was surprising, Professor Dweck said, especially because it came from one sentence of praise.

Now compound this with years and years of typical schooling. It’s enough to make me want to copy my many friends who homeschool.

As we get older, many of us invest a great deal in being right. When things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we focus on flagellating ourselves, blaming someone else or covering it up. Or we rationalize it by saying others make even more mistakes.

What we do not want to do, most of the time, is learn from the experience.

In other words, we don’t grow up. It’s sad how much I see this in all the different milieux in which I move — academics, business, social contacts, etc.

Those in the fixed mind-set chose to compare themselves with students who had performed worse, as opposed to those Professor Dweck refers to as in “the growth mind-set,” who more frequently chose to learn by looking at those who had performed better.

This reminds me of something I once read from Neil Peart in an interview. (Sorry, can’t find it online right now.) He said that when he would hear the great drummers — I think he mentioned Bonham — it would inspire him to go home and work harder on his drumming. Contrast this with the attitude of many I’ve known who despair at ever getting better when they hear/see/read/experience the work of one of the greats.

“We get fixated on achievement,” [Rutgers management professor Stanley Gully] said, but, “everyone is talking about the need to innovate. If you already know the answer, it’s not learning. In most personal and business contexts, if you avoid the error, you avoid the learning process.”

So go make some constructive mistakes!

Haven’t even read any of this yet, but I’m putting it in my “daily” Firefox bookmarks folder so it will open alongside Gmail etc. — that way I can read one or two of these each day.

Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies

This stuff fascinates me, and it’s come to fascinate me more as I’ve learned more about (1) the history of U.S. (and other countries’) foreign policy, and (2) the mechanisms of big business.  Just because an institutional edifice is big-’n'-scary doesn’t mean the institution operates rationally.

But maybe that’s just the coffee talking.

*pauses to reflect*

*looks around the room, sniffs air*

No, actually, it does seem to be time to take over the world.  In a benevolent sort of hegemony, you understand.

Join me, won’t you?

“To know and not to act is not to know.”

—Traditional Chinese proverb

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* This one comes from regular reader and interesting guy Mark Larson, who quotes it from Don DeLillo’s book Cosmopolis. I’ll quote its context in the book as Mark quoted it to me. Mark explains that this conversation comes between a high-flying investor and his financial advisor “during a rather knife-edge financial atmosphere”.

The stronger the yen became, the more money he needed to pay back the loan. He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher…

“The wise course would be to back down, stand off. You are being advised to do this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But there’s something you know. You know the yen can’t go any higher. And if you know something and don’t act upon it, then you didn’t know it in the first place. There is a piece of Chinese wisdom,” she said. “To know and not to act is not to know.”

I’ve heard this saying any number of times, and in fact I’ve used it myself with smart friends who might change their own narratives if they can be persuaded that they’re acting ignorant instead of intelligent. It is so painful to see anyone — myself very much included — know what’s better to do, but then eschew it for reasons of pride or self-delusion. I believe that this apothegm can be a great astringent for self-delusion: taken seriously, it forces us to consider what we do know, and how well or ill our actions comport with our knowledge.

DePodesta is a baseball executive, one of the brightest in the business, who was Billy Beane’s right-hand man in Oakland and then the general manager of the Dodgers. DePodesta has challenged the old-school ways of baseball management, relying instead on better uses of information to make better decisions.

Several years ago he gave a talk, “The Genesis, Implementation, and Management of New Systems”, to a group of management/financial types. The original version is no longer available from Credit Suisse First Boston, but finally I found a copy of it. The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to highlight these two passages:

• I was in Las Vegas for a weekend playing blackjack. A person at the table to my right had 17 and said they wanted a hit. The whole table stopped and even the dealer asked if he was sure he wanted a hit. Finally he said he wanted a hit. The dealer deals the card and of course it was a four. What did the dealer say? “Nice hit.” But I’m thinking, you’re kidding me. It was a terrible hit. Even though it ended up working out, it wasn’t a good decision.

Being humans, we’re prone to focusing too much on accidental outcomes. Sometimes we choose the right course of action but then reject our own good choice because it happened not to work out this one time — even if only because of external forces beyond our control. Or we follow the course of the dumb blackjack player, making a horrible decision that works out only coincidentally, but congratulating ourselves for making a good call. Lightning sometimes strikes, for good or ill; we should try to separate out “lightning effects” from the predictable outcomes of actions.

• Being innovative doesn’t mean searching for upgrades over inefficient systems. It means searching for entirely new ways of doing things. We don’t spend a lot of energy tweaking current systems that are inefficient.

This gets back to the thing I quoted yesterday about doing things “not just a bit better, but a step-function better.” All too often, we cling to our old ways of doing things, as much as anything because we’d like to justify the effort we’ve put into them and the emotional attachment we have for them. We do this even when it should be clear that we’d be better off scrapping the old ways and starting fresh. It’s hard to face that reality, especially when it involves existing relationships, entrenched habits, or other beloved totems of our lives.

If you read back through my recent posts (okay, not the ones about comic books), it will likely be clear that I’m in the mode of recasting a lot of my own behaviors. What I’ve done so far has netted me plenty of good things, and I can hardly complain about my life. But what I’ve done so far hasn’t netted me many of the great things that I’d like to achieve. So it’s time for a serious, clear-the-decks review.

One entrenched habit of mine that I’m rooting out is what I call “planoodling” — the sort of planning that doesn’t get progressively better and more refined, but that just keeps going round and round in circles. I’ve got reams of this stuff in my files, but I’m culling it every day, throwing out great chunks of roto-thinking that so far hasn’t got me where I want to go.

What about you? Any beloved-but-useless totems you’d like to own up to?

That’s the advice of Tom Peters. Mind you, he was trained as an engineer and he has lots and lots of thoughts about how to do things better, in business and in other settings. But strategic planning? Not so much. He quotes Michael Bloomberg:

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

That’s a big chunk of what made Bloomberg his fortune. It’s the same thing that made Winston Churchill’s career so scintillating, for better and for worse: he was beholden to the “bias for action” that Peters has been preaching for 25+ years.

Are you planning on maybe-someday-somehow doing something . . . or are you doing something?