Bearing this photo in mind, you’ll note that I didn’t call it The Impressive Physique Project.

• What it is: a shirtless photo of myself, every day.
• The point: social reinforcement for my efforts to get myself into killer condition.
• The context: I’m going to turn 40 twenty-two months from now, I’ve never had a six-pack in my life, . . . and I want to achieve the latter before I achieve the former.

Please, no digs in the comments. But if you’re interested to track my progress, you can see the Flickr stream for these photos by clicking here.

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Related posts:

• It Begins Here, Again.
• Exposed.

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Probably not for me . . .

[This is one of those things that you write once so you can refer people to it over and over. If you’re not interested in my academic history or future, feel free to pass this one by — especially because it’s quite long.]

You’ll have guessed the punchline of this story from its title: it’s likely that I’ll never finish the Ph.D. in United States history that I started in 2004 at the University of Texas. This post explains why. (And don’t worry — it’s a story with a happy ending.)

What I Was Thinking When I Started

From the time that I was a boy, I always assumed that I would be “Dr. Walker.” Through about the 8th or 9th grade, I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. In my imagination, I was always a fancy specialist with a fancy label, like “otolaryngologist.” (The word virus was strong in me, even in those days.) By the time I got to college — and for the entire time that I was in college, and for many years after — I always assumed that I would earn a Ph.D. and become a professor.

At the risk of immodesty: I have the chops. I took an honors history degree — on a full academic scholarship — from UT in 1994, won a Rotary scholarship that took me to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland for my master’s degree, and later made excellent marks in the first year of the academic master’s degree program at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In all of those programs, I thrived in the seminar room and, when given the chance, enjoyed teaching. Given my professional training in expository writing and my experience in journalism, written work was my strongest suit.

It was writing, in fact, that brought me back into the fold of academia. I had left it after St. Andrews because my wife had educational goals of her own that were better served in the States, and I had left it again after my first year at Union when she and I confronted the hard realities of raising a newborn while paying New York City rents.

Even when I was out of school, my interest in history, and in intellectual pursuits more generally, remained intact. I read a lot, and I began to find outlets for my writing online and offline. Around 1999 I began to compile a real clipbook, starting with book reviews for the Austin Chronicle and the late, great online magazine Blue Ear.

My reviews for the Chron led to features, and in 2002 I finally landed a cover article with my profile of the Austin historian H. W. Brands. (He goes by Bill.) Bill and I sat down at Kerbey Lane Cafe on South Lamar late in the summer of that year to talk about his new book, his career as a writer, and his thoughts on the possibilities of a U.S. invasion of Iraq. (His main academic specialty is the history of U.S. foreign relations.) We had friends in common, became friends ourselves, and stayed in touch.

Sometime in the second half of 2003, I hatched the idea of returning to graduate work under Bill’s direction. At the time, he was still teaching at Texas A&M, where he had been a professor for many years even though he lived in Austin. (For those of you unaware, it’s a two-hour commute between Austin and College Station.) I asked him if he was in the market for new graduate students in the history of foreign relations; he said that he was, and added that he always liked taking on students who already knew how to write.

And so the Longhorn applied to become an Aggie.

How my Ph.D. Program Treated Me

Great, actually. In fact, I could hardly have asked for better. With Brands’s introduction, A&M welcomed me with open arms. I remember traveling there in the autumn of 2003 and being impressed by the personal qualities of the faculty members I met, and by their apparent interest in bringing me into the department. Once I applied, the department not only admitted me to the program, but awarded me a sizeable fellowship to cover my costs.

And then a funny thing happened: The University of Texas gave Bill a job. This new position at UT, besides offering him an endowed professorship and so on, allowed him to live and teach in the same city for the first time in many years, while also returning him to Garrison Hall, where he had earned his own Ph.D. under the great scholar Robert Divine.

With Bill leading the way, alma mater held the door open for me, and it led to two rich years of intellectual work. I took courses or conversed with a slew of fine scholar-teachers, including some from my undergraduate days (e.g., Michael Stoff and Wm. Roger Louis) and several others I met for the first time (especially Mark Lawrence, the other foreign-relations historian on the staff). I learned a great deal, made many friends among the students, faculty, and staff, and got my first regular exposure to teaching duties as a teaching assistant for Brands and others. I finished my coursework in four semesters — a full-time pace — even though I was still working 25 hours per week at my professional job for Hoover’s.

What Happened along the Way

What happened was that I made two key mistakes — imperceptible to me then, but clear as day in hindsight:

1. I shifted primarily to T.A. work instead of preparation for my comprehensive exams. This wasn’t by design, just a routine that I fell into. The extra money from T.A.-ing was handy, even after I upped my hours slightly at Hoover’s; meanwhile, the nature of preparation for comps is such that the work tends to expand — or contract — to fill whatever time is given to it.

I did compile all of my reading lists, met with my professors, and began to do the reading for comps. But I spent more time grading papers, meeting with my undergraduate students, shuttling back and forth between Hoover’s and UT, and . . .

2. . . . working on outside projects. The fact that I could write — and that I didn’t mind picking up some extra money on the side – led me to take on writing-related “icing” projects when I should have been concentrating on the cake itself. I won’t belabor the topic here, but in summary I worked on conference papers, a Texas A&M research project, and an institutional history for a professional association in the petroleum industry — all of which were fun, all of which played into my chosen scholarly field, but all of which diverted time and energy away from getting to, and finishing, the dissertation phase of the Ph.D.

Along the way, I also started taking on bigger duties (and better pay) at Hoover’s, and even started to build a little bit of a reputation as a marketer and social media professional. (Who knew that would happen?) At some point, it made no sense financially to keep T.A.-ing rather than working full-time for the company, which, I see now, increased my sense of detachment from the workings of the History department and my own degree plan.

At some point, the Big Goal — writing books — became more important to me than having the Ph.D. sheepskin. The books aren’t there yet (believe me, they’re coming), but that sense of priority abides.

Sunk Costs vs. Half a Bridge

One of the great cognitive biases that humans face is an obsession with what economists call “sunk costs.” When a nickel falls out of your pocket and into a sewer grate, that’s a sunk cost: the money is gone, regardless of how its loss makes you feel. When a baseball team gives a huge guaranteed contract to a slugger who promptly loses the ability to hit, that’s a sunk cost: the team must pay out the contract regardless of the player’s level of play, and regardless of how the management feels about the money they spent.

Our fascination with sunk costs means that we will often make poor decisions when they are in play, working from emotion rather than any logical calculation about well-being. This is what leads a corporate manager, for example, to keep giving breaks to an employee who isn’t working out. It’s tempting to want to force that hiring decision to work out, rather than taking a cold look at what’s happening now and making appropriate adjustments. It’s the same for that baseball team with the fading slugger: they’re likely to keep trotting him out there, under the non-logic that “we’re paying him all this money, so he has to play.” No, you’re paying him all that money one way or the other; now your job is to win games with the players you have; if he’s not the best player at his position now — regardless of pay — then he should sit on the bench.

The common outcome with sunk costs is that we throw good money — or time, or other resources — after bad.

The counter-argument, also common in the corporate world, is “don’t build half a bridge.” It means that, for certain projects, you must go all the way through to the finish line to extract any value from what you’ve invested. A 100%-complete bridge provides 100% utility, but a 99%-complete bridge provides 0% utility. In the same way, a half-completed corporate re-organization or half-written software program might be worse than none. Once you put in enough work, you must go on to completion.

As it stands now, I regard my Ph.D. as a sunk cost, not half a bridge. Some friends have suggested that I ought to finish the degree “just to have it,” and indeed I grant the logic that having all of a Ph.D. would be worth more emotionally than having only half of one.

And yet the bridge ought to connect you to a shore you want to reach. Which brings me to . . .

Clear Objectives

Clarity that emerges from experience is a valuable thing. Having seen academia from both the inside and the outside, I can tell you that the very best reason to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities is so that you can pursue a career as a college professor. That can be a great career to pursue, but it’s not the career that I want to pursue — at least not anymore.

There are several reasons for this. Here are three big ones:

1. I already earn a higher salary than I would as a professor, and it’s not likely that my academic earnings would catch up within . . . oh, the next ten or fifteen years, easily.
2. Many academics spend a long time trying to find a happy, stable place to raise a family. Lots of freshly minted Ph.D.’s go through a multi-year string of fellowships and temporary teaching posts — which can take them all over the country — before they settle into the tenure-track post that finally allows them to put down roots. The way life has worked out for us, though, my little family is already well-rooted and stable right here in Austin: all of us have good friends here, we live in a comfortable neighborhood, the kids are ensconced in good schools, and so on. So why uproot all of that to take less pay and inferior jobs en route to a maybe/could-be/someday setting that we hope would match the one we already enjoy? This isn’t to say that we’ll never, ever move, but rather that the prospect of moving around so much repels me at this point.
3. I like all the separate aspects of being an academic, but I find that I can’t effectively juggle teaching + writing + research + mentoring + administration. I seem to lack that ability to shift gears smoothly and still get everything done.

This line of thinking brings me back to a wise thing that Bill said before I ever applied to Texas A&M: If I want to be a professor, get a Ph.D, but if I want to write books, . . . write books. At the time, I thought I did want to be a professor — what with the job security, the exposure to energetic young students, and all that — while writing books. Now I realize that I just want to write books.

There’s a fourth reason – a big one — that has become clear to me as I pondered this decision: my wife has her own career ambitions that aren’t well served by my taking however many more years to finish my degree. One of the things that every committed couple must face is the challenge of finding the right mix of my stuff AND the other person’s stuff. Jack’s ambitions and Jill’s ambitions. Her feelings and his feelings.

The AND-ness of it is the important part. If you’re not working toward that in a marriage, you’re doing it wrong. And I’d hate to do it wrong on behalf of a project — however wonderful and meaningful in its way — in which I no longer believe wholeheartedly.

What I Would Do Differently If I Were Starting Today

I’d follow one of two options — either of which I recommend to you if you’re considering Ph.D. work yourself:

1. Punch straight through. Do your coursework full-time, like I did, but then give yourself tight deadlines for everything else, too — comprehensive exams, language exams, the dissertation, everything. Do the highest-quality job of everything that you can, and by all means take advantage of your best opportunities to write articles, give papers, and whatnot along the way — but obsess yourself with bringing the degree to a conclusion on a short timetable.
2. Lay out a soup-to-nuts part-time plan that accommodates salaried work, family obligations, and whatever else, and then just chip away at it methodically. It’s okay if it takes even ten years to finish the degree — so long as you make regular progress. My big mistake came when I stopped making regular progress on my list of degree requirements.

Where I Am Now

Pretty happy, thank you. Sure, I wish I had my Ph.D. in hand, but not enough to undergo the major life upheaval that it would take at this point to make that happen. Right now, I’d much rather build my corporate career — and, frankly, my family’s bankroll — while writing books on the side. However long that takes is fine by me, because I’m working toward what I really want to be doing.

Now, I might return to academic work at some point, but only if the logistics for everything else — money, books, my wife’s career, family — happen to fall into place. I had fun doing scholarly work, I’m good at the various parts of it, and maybe in the future things will come together so that I can write my books and have that Ph.D. Nice work if you can get it — but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Meanwhile, I’m inhaling deeply from the crisp mountain air where my mind lives now. While stopping work on the Ph.D. did sting, more than just a little bit, that sting has worn off. More importantly, it has been replaced by the wonderful feeling that comes when you embark upon your real work.

So, that’s why I’ll probably never finish my Ph.D. The comment section is open: if you’d like to encourage me in my new path, please know that I will be grateful for any words of support. If you have questions or would like clarification on anything, fire away and I’ll do my best to answer cogently. However . . . if, by chance, you have arguments for why I should go ahead and finish the degree anyway, please, with all due respect, keep them to yourself.

Fair enough?

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(Image by Eric Colton, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

My verdict on my physique & overall fitness: meh.

To give myself credit:

• I’m 38 and, at 5′10″, I’ve kept my weight between 155 and 168 since I filled out as a junior in high school — with the exception of the second half of last year, when I intentionally went 10 pounds above the top end of that range by lifting weights and eating so as to put on more muscle. (You can see the results of that program, such as they were, via this link.)
• I just started a new job with a steep learning curve and a longer commute from home, so my time is more constrained than it was.
• The kids are out of school and out of camp, which again affects the time I have available for working out.
• I’ve been working out a little bit anyway.

To avoid giving excuses:

• So what?

The fact is, I haven’t been making the time to get in the shape I want to be in, whether that means lifting weights, walking in the cool of the morning, prepping healthy lunches in advance, or what have you.

So I’m publicizing my quest to do something better. The point isn’t to complain about where I am — because where I am is okay — but to make myself accountable for achieving something more-than-okay. For those of you who are interested in helping out with this, I’m asking you to help keep me accountable — and to help encourage my progress — via this blog.

I look to many sources of inspiration, but one I came back across this week is Dave Tate, who has been documenting his own progress in reshaping his body on the site for his company, EliteFTS. My outcomes will be very different from Dave’s, since (a) he’s a champion powerlifter, (b) fitness is his livelihood, (c) our physical frames are very different, (d) I’m never going to use nutritional supplements to the degree that he does, and, most importantly (e) my goals are different from his.

What are my goals? That will be the topic of my next fitness post, so stay tuned . . . 

Expect more, soon.

Meantime, how’s by you?

Just some of the reasons I’m stoked:

• BreakingPoint is a small(ish), fast-paced company that will provide me with daily opportunities to expand my business skills.
• The job description might have been written specifically with me in mind. Besides drawing heavily on my writing skills, the role will build on the chops I laid down as a marketer and social media pro over the past three years at Hoover’s. And even though I don’t already have specific grounding in the network security hardware business, I’ll be able to draw on the seven prior years that I spent in Hoover’s editorial department, when I covered hard-core tech like semiconductors and scientific instrumentation.
• I get to work alongside my good friend Kyle Flaherty. [Cue Troy McClure voice from The Simpsons . . . ] You may remember Kyle from his role as my co-panelist in this year’s South by Southwest Interactive session on sports metaphors. [End Troy McClure voice.] I know I’ll learn a lot from Kyle, as well as from our boss Pam O’Neal, whom I’ve already known for a couple of years in Austin’s social media circles.
• Kyle and I talk a lot with each other about fitness, but now we’ll get to work out together regularly. (He tells me that this was the aspect of my hire that made him most skittish, but that’s only because he knows I will CRUSH him.)

It’s bittersweet to leave Hoover’s after ten (!) years. Besides being the place where I’ve had the longest job tenure — I worked there longer than I lived in my boyhood hometown — Hoover’s is also where I learned the most about business, as both an analyst and practitioner, and where I made the most good friends in business.

I’m particularly grateful that Hoover’s gave me three starts in my career: as a full-time writer, as a marketer, and as a social media practitioner. I’m also pleased to say that I worked for ten years there without ever reporting to a bad manager, which sounds like some kind of miracle unless you’ve been inside Hoover’s walls and grasped its tradition as a workplace where people treat each other like human beings.

Oh, and in case anyone’s curious, it was purely my decision to leave Hoover’s. I was ready for something new, the opportunity at BreakingPoint opened up at a perfect time, . . . and the rest is history. I’m glad I worked on — and in some cases built — the ground floor of Hoover’s social media efforts, and I look forward to seeing how the company grows in years to come.

So, the short version: cool new job, nifty people and product, starts Wednesday, woo-hoo!

Comments? 

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

–Henry David Thoreau

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(Photo by HDC Photography, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

My buddy Chris Brogan said this on Facebook:

Oh formletters. I do love you. Thanks, “friends” who use form letters. I love you all. (And any time my company’s done it on my behalf, forget me, too.) We’re all putting on robot pants.

To my ear, it echoes a line of thought he just espoused on his blog:

So why jump [from an airplane]?

Because I’m afraid. Afraid enough.

I’m afraid of lots of minor things in life: confrontation, my own faults, not working hard enough, things like that. You know what tackling a big fear is going to do to those small fears?

Either way, it’s about freeing yourself from your mental habits. The robot-pants thing we could file under the headings of “Shake It Up” or “Think for Yourself.” But combined with the skydiving thing, I’d put it under a rubric I call . . .

Counter-Aversion

If you have aversions to drinking yourself into a stupor or cheating on your spouse or running your car off the road, keep those.

But your aversion to taking the necessary risks to build your career? Or to pursue your dreams? Or to make yourself vulnerable to someone you love? Or to admit that you’re wrong? Or to make the phone call you’ve been dreading?

Chuck ‘em.

In fact, go out of your way to chuck ‘em. Violate your sacred boundaries. Rush to do the thing you know you need to do, before your defenses can kick in . . . and before you’re ready.

“Ready” may never come. So just launch ahead without it.

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(Image by GogDog, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Sadly, I think they stopped making TRS-80’s — like the one I had on my desk as a teenager — 25+ years ago.

Seriously, my old IBM ThinkPad is on its last legs, wheezing along stoically but not really getting things done in a way you’d want it to. It’s time for me to shop around for something newer / shinier / faster / better. And so I turn to you, my willing thralls crowdsourcing audience, for advice on what to buy.

Purchasing criteria:

• It must be a laptop — and smaller is better.
• This will be my primary computer away from my company office, so it has to be a warhorse.
• Less than $1,200, and ideally less than $1,000.
• I’m not a gamer, don’t watch movies on my computer, and don’t use any graphically intense apps like Photoshop, so it need not be fancy from a graphics card / memory standpoint.
• Open to buying a Mac, but I’ve been using PCs for a long time & have my methods down cold.
• Primary uses: writing (mostly in Word), blogging, e-mail, light spreadsheets, lots of Twitter (using Air apps), often running two browsers at a time.
• Open to used / refurbished, or would buy new if it’s worth it.

I’ve been very happy with my ThinkPad, and would consider getting a new one — but I’d like to hear as many good suggestions as I can get.

Your thoughts, O technophiles?

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(Photo by Jeff Kubina.)

May wasn’t nearly as successful as April for me in terms of exercise, but toward the end of the month I did get into a good groove with this circuit workout:

• Legs A — 3 sets of leg presses (typically 15 x 180#, 15 x 270#, 15 x 360#)
• Chest A — 3 sets of 15 dips
• Back A — 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps on a lat pull machine
  ~
• Legs B — 3 sets of 15 per side box steps @ 24″
• Chest B — 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps dumbbell incline bench press
• Back B — either 3 sets of bent-over dumbbell rows, or just repeat Back A

I do all the “A” sets in rotation, boom-boom-boom, then do all the “B” sets in rotation. When I’m cooking, I can do all of this in less than 25 minutes.

Advantages of this approach:

• There’s a cardio / endurance element to go along with the resistance element. By the time you get a couple of rotations into this, your heart is really pumping.
• By extension, there seems to be a greater fat-burning effect to it — at least if the fit of my waistbands and the image that greets me in the mirror are any indication.
• It doesn’t take long. This is vital, given how hectic my work / life schedule has been lately.
• It doesn’t require planning. I actually enjoy it when I can sit down and futz with workout schedules that accommodate fancy split routines — back and biceps on Tuesday, chest and triceps on Wednesday, legs on Friday, etc. — but the hecticity* just referenced has been keeping me from executing such a fancy routine. Whole-body workouts like this are simple: if you didn’t exercise yesterday, do this routine; if you did this routine yesterday and have time for the gym today, do cardio and core work. Simple.

[* Yes, I did just coin “hecticity.” Please use it with my compliments.]

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(Image by Eric McGregor.)

Remember a little while back, when I wrote this?

Needed: an app for matchmaking.

Well, someone went and built it, and it runs off of Facebook. It’s called Thread.

Looks kinda cool.

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(Image by CHRIS230***, used under a BY-NC-SA license.)