What I’ve Learned So Far

A suggestion: Write down your Big Life Aims, then make your daily to-do list based off of them.

“Big Life Aims” has two slightly different meanings:

• The big things in life at which you’re aiming.
• The goals you have that will help you have a Big Life.

I think a lot of us feel frustration with our careers (or relationships, bodies, activities, achievements, etc.) to the degree that they fall short of what we imagine for ourselves in a “big” version of life.

So put it down on paper: what are the parts of your Big Life? How can you aim at them, fuel them, aid and abet them?

Make up your next to-do list with your Big Life Aims list sitting right beside it. Put things on the to-do list only if they’re compatible with the B.L.A. list.

What do you think? Workable?

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(Image by Lukas Vermeer, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Bear with a kneejerk reaction here, because I haven’t read the connected story, but this item from the New York Times home page gives me pause:

No, psychologists, it’s not an issue of whether Rorschach inkblots will be available online — but how you’ll operate when they’re online.

To repeat a simple concept: Not whether, but when.

The mighty wind of the Internet is a great leveling force, for both good and ill. But in too many cases, defenders of the status quo (lookin’ at you, RIAA) pretend that they can make that force go away, rather than dealing with it.

So far, the Internet is winning.

I encounter a lot of new people on Twitter. Some of them call themselves “guru,” either in their Twitter biography (”CRM and ERP guru . . .” etc.) or in their actual Twitter handle (@WhateverGuru etc.).

My own Twitter biography includes the phrase “social-media non-guru” — since I think a lot about social media but specifically reject the term “guru.”

Why?

In its original meaning, a guru was a religious teacher whose teachings were not to be questioned.

Unfortunately, some of the latter-day gurus (not just of social media, although one couldn’t be faulted for picking on them in particular) seem to hold the same view of themselves. Or, even if they don’t think their own judgments are unquestionable, they operate from the certitude that they know . . . and others don’t.
Expertise is worth celebrating, but I would rather reinforce the notion that I’m learning — not that I already have the answers.

So, no “guru” for me.

This advice is for people with uncommon or hard-to-spell or hard-to-pronounce names, or names that are common for both men and women. But first, a bit of setup . . .

I have the mixed blessing of a fairly common name: “Timothy” ranks 27th among the most common given names for male Americans, and “Walker” is #25 on the list of most common American surnames.

Upside: nobody ever misspells or mispronounces my name.

Downside: a lack of uniqueness, since I share the name with (among many others) a famous fashion photographer, a British journalist, a mayor in Alabama, and my dear ol’ Dad. The lack of uniqueness never bothers me, except that it would be easier for me to lay claim to online real estate if I had a name like, say, “Malcolm Gladwell” or “Seth Godin” or “Christian Bale.” (Admittedly, in the case of those particular names, talent and hard work helped a lot, too.)

All that said, my professional duties often put me in contact with people who have uncommon names, or whose names are common among both men and women.

My advice, in two easy points:

>> If people find your name hard to pronounce: Don’t expect people to get it right on the first try, and by all means don’t act as though you’ve been wronged if they miss it on the first try. Instead, use their mispronunciation as a chance to connect. Come up with an easy mnemonic, or give a little family history (”It’s a common name in Turkey, but uncommon here”), or say “My dear old Mom insisted on the Old English pronunciation,” or whatever fits the bill. Make it memorable.

What makes me say this: at the end of a talk I gave recently, a number of people from the audience were nice enough to wait to talk with me one-on-one. Many of them handed me business cards. One woman handed me a business card with the name “Meghan ——–.” As I usually do, I said the name out loud to her — it makes it likelier that I’ll remember her later. I pronounced it somewhere between “Meggan” and “May-gan,” which is how it’s pronounced by most of the Megan/Meghan’s I’ve ever known.

Her reply, with which one might have cut glass: “It’s MEE-gan.”

Although I pride myself on not taking offense easily, and on getting along with just about everyone, it’s startling how little warmth developed in the rest of our short conversation.

Now, I’m sure she’s had her name mispronounced all her life, and I’m sure it can be annoying to go through life bearing the correct pronunciation of a name that everybody else has bastardized. But wouldn’t your mid-20s be about the time when you should get over it? Or figure out how to take lemons and make lemonade? I would think so.

This is only the most recent instance of something I’ve run into several times over my career — when someone with an unusual name took umbrage that the world didn’t get it right on the first try. By contrast, I’ve had friends with very difficult names who used a clever approach or a little humor to turn an unusual name into an asset.

>> If you’re a man with a name common among women (Dana), a woman with a name common among men (Fred), or someone with a name common among both women and men (Kelly, Cory, Shawn): unless you have a specific reason to leave people in the dark about your sex, do your correspondents a favor and make it easy for them to figure out whether you’re male or female. Put “Mr. Cary Smith” or “Ms. Kendall Davis” in your e-mail signature, for instance. Find some revealing way to refer to yourself (”a guy trying to make a difference in this field” or “I’m like a big sister”) in correspondence. Include a clear picture in your Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / blog profile. Or something.

What makes me say this: more and more, I “meet” people in business settings for the first time online — on Twitter, via e-mail, or what-have-you. Now, I don’t care whether Person X is a man or a woman, but I’d like us both to be spared the embarrassment of my identifying him or her the wrong way.

The moral of this story boils down to two old platitudes:

• Make the most of the hand you’ve been dealt.
• You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.

What do you think — is this reasonable?

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(Photo by ~BostonBill~, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

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.

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

I loved to watch Tony Gwynn hit, and it was clear early on that we were watching a hitter who was historically good at hitting for a high average.

But for all his ebullience, intelligence, and skill, he was a deeply flawed player, and by the end of his career he was so hefty that his frequent absences from the Padres lineup came as no surprise.

I’m thinking about all of this because of a bookmark I just ran across — one I’ve had lying around for a long time — for a 2004 Baseball Prospectus roundtable about Ichiro Suzuki’s (successful) pursuit of the single-season hits record.

The discussion includes a key quote from Gary Huckabay, whom I have the pleasure of knowing slightly:

Discipline isn’t manifested through compulsive and repetitive execution of those tasks which you enjoy, like cage time and video study. It’s manifested through the diligent repetition of those tasks you don’t like–in the case of Mr. Gwynn, cardio workouts, weightlifting and proper nutrition–so that you’re in a position to perform the entirety of your required task set at the highest possible level. The final years of Gwynn’s career were a pathetic waste, plagued by excessive fragility and impaired defense, primarily because of miserable conditioning.

It’s a thought worth transferring to other fields. We all know people who obsess over the things that appeal to them, but don’t tackle the set of challenges required to achieve their best. Gwynn ended his career with more than 3,100 hits, but given his Olympian skill at hitting and how long he played, even such a big number seems hollow.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess how I’m applying this lesson to myself.

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(Photo by Brian Wallace, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

You could read a lot on personal organization without finding anything as simple and effective as this list from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits:

Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life

Don’t let the 72-ness of it mislead you — it takes five minutes to read. If you struggle with staying organized (ahem), I recommend bookmarking the post or printing it out and consulting it regularly.

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(Photo Wee Keat Chin.)

He covers the Royals and other, happier subjects for the Kansas City Star and for Sports Illustrated. He may be the best sportswriter working today.

A good place to start would be this post he wrote the other day:

Life’s Not Fair (Royals Edition)

The follow-up to it is pretty good, too, though for preference I’d take this lovely post about Raul Ibanez, or this wonderful SI column about the Roddick-Federer final at Wimbledon.

If you care about sports at all, my advice is to climb aboard the Posnanksi train now.

As I mentioned a little while back, I’ve been wanting to spruce up the look around here. Now I’ve actually started tinkering with things.

My HTML skills — much less when we delve into CSS — are minimal, so I’m taking a conservative approach, making tiny changes one by one. This also gets me around the problem of wanting to figure out everything before I do anything. (”Baby steps all the way” is a good mantra for me.)

So, you can expect a little bit of sawdust around here for some time to come. I welcome your feedback, and by all means please do tell me if you find that anything’s broken.

Next up: figuring out how to underline links in the body of blog posts, while leaving all other links (in the sidebar etc.) alone.

Update: that’s done, more or less. And as you’ll see (unless you’re reading this in RSS, I guess), I’ve also swapped the body and sidebar between right and left, plus widened the body column a bit. Probably that’s tinkering enough for one day, especially given all the other things I want to do today.

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(Photo of James Watt’s tools by Mia Ridge, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

I don’t know whether I have ADD. I’ve been reading the excellent Delivered from Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, and I see a lot of myself in their description of ADDers . . . but then, I’m also not like a lot of the ADD cases they describe.

(If your Tim Walker radar is set to “Stalker,” you’ll recall that I liked Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy enough that I reviewed it not once but twice.)

Anyway, whether I technically have ADD doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is to use my brain better than I have been. Which leads me to the simple insight foreshadowed in the heading of this post:

I need to work in shorter timeframes.

Distractions kill me. Giant multi-part projects stymie me, even though, as you’ll recall, my career ambition is to write books. (Irony much?) But I can crank out great work when I can do it quickly and then switch to something else.

Or, to quote one of the great lines from the Rocky oeuvre, “Stick, and move.”

What do you do to improve your work output?

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(Photo by Arturo Donate.)