tales of two cities – road (rage) rules

I was biking home a couple weeks ago from Fenway Park when I was reminded of just how little we need to know before becoming convinced that we are right. It was bumper to bumper Sunday night traffic thanks to the end of the Liverpool - Sevilla friendly at the hallowed baseball stadium and the congestion was threatening the bike lane on Comm Ave. Now, usually this stretch of road is a solid bet for chaos regardless of traffic level – there are always concerns about parked cars, valet drivers, and rideshare passengers finding their way into the bike lane as they see (themselves) fit. However, for the most part I can see these threats coming far enough in advance to (usually) swerve, (sometimes) yell, or (rarely) stop.

The only unpredictable threat comes from the left (doesn’t it always) in the form of a driver sliding out of a driving lane and into the bike space. On this trip, it happened a few car lengths ahead of the stoplight – a beige minivan started drifting over in front of me. In these situations, I usually try to continue moving forward so long as I do not risk my safety. If I can get an understanding of the driver’s intentions and a clear view of the surrounding traffic, I'll try going around on the left, but otherwise I'll roll slowly behind the car until the lane clears. Sometimes, I just stop behind the car.

In this particular case, the car started drifting when I was about level with the back bumper so my options were reduced. I had no view of the blinker, no opportunity to see if I had a cyclist behind me, and no space to angle my wheel left to drift behind the car. I also knew I was in the blind spot, a fact I learned the hard way the one time I had been hit by a (glacially) turning car. Sensing imminent danger, I reached into my bag of safety moves - I extended my left hand out over the handlebars and tapped on the sliding door with my open palm when the car was about a foot away from the front wheel. This did the trick – the car straightened out, and I soon pulled up at the red light.

The minivan pulled up alongside me. It was just one guy in the car and he had just lost all interest in the phone on his dashboard. He introduced himself by screaming about hitting his car, then starting yelling a string of threats and expletives. I asked him if he wanted to call the police and ask them if I was wrong, a suggestion to which he responded by yelling “FUCK YOU!” over and over again, each shout growing with intensity, until his tanned skin had turned a deep shade of sunburn. It occurred to me that if he had a heart attack and died on the spot I might end up in front of a judge lecturing me about the intricacies of manslaughter charges so I resisted the urge to do my best Last Samurai impersonation (I have enjoyed our… conversation) and pedaled through the intersection when the light turned green.

Now, this delightful exchange was a little unusual even by my standards but the basic premise isn’t uncommon. In Cambridge, some lights don’t turn change until the sensor notes a biker and a driver loudly exchanging their views on how the other party was wrong. It led me to do something I should have done four years ago – research the commonwealth’s bike laws. This would bring some clarity to what I admit was my opinion rather than my knowledge about the rules on the road. Was a bike lane off limits to cars in the same way as a sidewalk... or was it like the right lane on a two-lane road? Were those folks who biked past on Central Square’s sidewalks petty criminals... or just hopeless losers? It was time to find out.

I looked up information and came up with the following useful links:

• A compilation of links to various bike laws from Mass.gov
• A six-page excerpt from the Massachusetts driver's manual about bicycle rights
• The rules listed on Cambridge's city website
• The rules listed on Boston's city website
• The rules listed by Massbike.org (sounds official, no?)

The full laws make for interesting reading. On the whole, it seems the law favors bikes every time. My conclusion suggests a possible rule of thumb for all drivers – when in doubt, yield to the bike. However, I found plenty in the laws that suggest most bikers could learn a bit from reviewing those links.

As always, the law is a better guide than my filtered thoughts, but I pulled together some highlights below for those interested in only a cursory glance.

Thanks for reading.

Tim

Cars get it wrong...

Bikes can use the full driving lane even if there is a bike lane available.

Bikes can pass on the right within a travel lane.

Bikes can move to the front of an intersection at a stop light.

Cars must give three feet of clearance when passing.

Cars cannot stop or park in the bike lane (Boston city website).

Bikes get it wrong...

Bikes have to stop at red lights (and stop signs, and for pedestrians in crosswalks).

Riders must keep at least one hand on the handlebars at all times.

Bikes on the sidewalk cannot travel above a walking speed.

Bikes can ride side by side as long as they do not block passing traffic.

leftovers #2 – gridiron genius (team building interview questions)

In Gridiron Genius, Michael Lombardi repeatedly references a Marcus Aurelius quote anytime the topic turns to a leader’s role in organizing a team - the secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. My favorite example of this quote in action came when Lombardi lists the questions he recommends asking any head coach candidate. His list is around two hundred questions long and covers everything from the philosophy of the offense to how the jersey numbers are assigned. Or, to put it another way, Lombardi’s questions ask candidates to describe how they would organize the non-obvious for a football team.

Here is what I consider the best of the questions:

-What are the mandatory lifts in the off-season conditioning program?
-How will you develop the players on the practice squad?
-How does the travel plan change for a Monday Night Football game on the road?
-Once the coordinators are hired, who is in charge of hiring the position coaches?
-How do you handle rehab for injured players during the off-season?
-When setting the depth chart, do you reward practice or games?

I then took those football questions and tried to generalize them to fit the kinds of interviews I might conduct one day:

-What do you demand your team do outside of work to improve its skills?
-How do you see the role of entry-level employees? How do you improve them?
-How does your process change during periods of high or intense workload?
-How do you make decisions about the work you delegate?
-How do you reintegrate team members who are returning from leave?
-How do you decide to change someone’s responsibilities? Do you consider performance or potential?

On first glance, these questions look pretty good. However, I must remember that the best questions avoid hypothetical phrasing – what would you do gives the candidate license to say anything yet imparts no useful information to me beyond whether I liked the sound of the answer. I should add that the best way to avoid a hypothetical question is to ask a specific question about past behavior. So, I gave those questions another look with the goal of phrasing the question so that a candidate could explain why or describe how he or she approached a similar problem in the past.

Here are the results:

-Describe how your past teams have improved their skills on their own. What was your role in this process? Explain why you chose not to emphasize developing these skills during the workday.

-Describe how an entry-level employee from a past team improved under your leadership. What was your role in this process? As this person improved, how did his or her role in the team evolve?

-Describe how your routine changed during a period of high or intense workload and explain why you chose to sacrifice those aspects of the routine.

-Describe how you’ve delegated work in the past and explain why you chose those functions ahead of the responsibilities you retained for yourself.

-Describe how you've integrated returning members back into the team.

-Describe how you’ve changed someone’s responsibilities in the past. Was the decision based on performance or potential? Explain why.

I feel a little more comfortable with the revised questions and I’m sure an interview built around those questions would lead to some useful insights about a candidate. My guess is that in the future I will have a bank of well-phrased questions similar to the above for certain types of interviews. I could then use those questions to dig into a candidate’s resume – for example, a note about mentoring junior associates might lead me to ask the question from above about how entry-level team members improved under the candidate’s leadership.

I’m unsure, though, if such questions are better than my default method of simply opening up a resume and going from top to bottom, applying the describe how or explain why framework to each and every line item. The resume forms a significant portion of the candidate’s best attempt to get the job, after all, so I worry that asking questions outside the resume takes me away from a strengths-focused approach to the hiring process.

december reread – notes lookback (threads, and summaries)

Threads (original notes from November 2017)

Of my seven rereads from December, Threads had the least variation in notes files. This is understandable given that the gap between readings was the shortest among my seven rereads – just over one year. I was surprised to see that my second set of notes had shrunk in comparison to the original, however, for it had seemed based on my comparisons thus far that my notes – like any good bureaucratic process – were expanding without limit.

I identified two factors that caused my notes file to shrink after my second read. The first reason is that I learned a lot from Threads in 2017 and wrote these observations into my notes. I learned, for example, that what Americans call duct tape is known in the UK as ‘gaffer tape’. I could hardly be expected to learn this again just a year later and therefore skipped writing it down.

The second reason is that much of my notes from 2017 described conclusions while in 2018 the focus shifted toward reasons. This suggests that perhaps I expanded on thoughts from 2017 in my 2018 notes and in theory this would increase the size of my more recent notes. In practice, though, I found that some of my 2017 observations did not require added explanation and these were the thoughts that disappeared in my 2018 notes file.

Last but not least...

Norwegian Wood
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimmage
100 Years of Solitude

Let’s bring my lookbacks to a close by highlight the three books notable for the lack of original reading notes. This sounds about right – I vaguely recall that it wasn’t until sometime early in 2017 that I first kept notes for fiction and I read all of these works prior to that start date.

I considered using the original TOA posts as a substitute for a notes file. However, when I looked up any mentions of these books from the TOA archives, I was disappointed to find almost no mention of them beyond their inclusion on a ‘here is what I read recently’ list or two. The closest thing to insight was my comment that ‘if you can read, you can cook’ was among the better quips from Colorless Tsukuru (this thought did not make it into my most recent notes from the book). Let’s hope for more interesting reflections when my reading reviews for these books – and all of my December rereads – finally come around in the next few days.

leftovers – the running dynasties (part v)

This post covered the general outline of my current workout plan without venturing into any of the specifics so I thought I would take a moment today to cover the details.

The big idea (strategy)

Be ready for an October marathon

One common question I get about running is whether I’m ever going to run a marathon. My response up until the start of this year has always been ‘definitely not’. This was mostly because of my general disinterest in the event (and partly due to a notion that my ‘roll out of bed and run’ philosophy would eventually see me accidentally run twenty-six or so miles on some random Tuesday morning).

The mentality change I described in the fifth dynasty has altered my thinking and I suspect I will run a marathon sometime in the next decade. For now, I’m tailoring my running year toward a potential October marathon. This means my weekly mileage totals should progress steadily upward to the summit of a twenty-mile run sometime in mid September. If I can complete that distance without major setbacks, I’ll be marathon ready for October regardless of whether I’m scheduled for a race.

The rules of thumb (tactics)

The loose target of being ‘marathon ready’ in October helped me make certain otherwise arbitrary decisions about my workout plan. I’ve organized those thoughts into the following guidelines to help me recognize when I’m risking either stagnation or injury with my workout decisions.

Never do hard workouts on consecutive days

I determined that - elite athletes excluded - there is no need to run hard on consecutive days. My current weekly plan has three hard workouts, three easy workouts, and a full day off.

A hard workout means at least five miles of running, a ‘sprinterval’, or a basketball game

Let’s cover just the first portion for now – for me, any run shorter than five miles isn’t long enough to fatigue me but is a little too long for me to complete the run at a quickened pace. This puts me in a tough spot the next day because I feel good enough to run again yet know from experience that another similar run increases my risk of injury. I avoid this problem by making sure that I run far enough on the days I’ve scheduled for a hard workout.

‘Sprintervals’ – one per week

This is a combination of the word ‘sprint’ and ‘interval’. It refers to a workout I do once a week along the Charles River. I run a two and a half mile course, alternating slow jogging with bursts of speed. How fast is a burst of speed? I basically run just hard enough so that I lose my steady breathing rhythm – I then jog until I have my breathing settled again. It’s a good balance with my long runs because these workouts challenge a different set of muscles.

An easy workout means a bike ride, strength training, or a recovery run

First, I should note that these workouts are easy for me because of the intensity level. For another person, these might represent the bulk of the week’s exertions.

I'll explain the first portion now (the explanations for the other two are below). I consider bike rides an easy workout because I never pedal at top speed and never bike further than a few miles. I usually bike in the context of getting around for around fifteen to twenty minutes at a time and this simply isn’t enough work to tire me out. If I were interested in biking as a hard workout, I might bike for over two hours or find some way to pedal at near top speed (perhaps in a fashion similar to the ‘sprinterval’ described earlier).

Don’t force strength training

My basic strength workout involves only my body weight for resistance, takes about fifteen minutes to complete, and doesn’t require me to leave my apartment. Those factors all make it seem like I should do this routine as often as possible. However, since the workout targets specific areas where I’ve struggled in the past with pain or injury, I usually skip the workout on days when I feel fatigue, soreness, or tightness in those areas. It’s not a perfect solution because the workout is vital for injury prevention but my concern for elevating an ache or pain up to the level of an injury overrides the potential benefit.

Here's the current workout:

• Single leg calf raises (fifteen times on each leg)
• Slower on the descent
• Push-ups (between eight and ten)
• Regular grip, not too fast
• Squats (two sets of ten)
• First set with feet shoulder width apart, knee to ninety degrees
• Second set with ankles almost touching, full flexion
• Single leg calf raises (fifteen times on each leg)
• Push-ups (between eight and ten)
• Knuckle grip, not too fast
• Lunges (between eight and twelve on each leg)
• Step backward at forty-five degrees, bring rear knee up to opposite elbow
• Single leg deadlift (between eight and twelve on each leg)
• Move slowly, remember to hinge at the hip
• Plank (hold for about a minute)
• Alternate feet, suck in the stomach just above the belly button
• Glute bridge (between eight and twelve on each leg)
• Hold for a few seconds, then switch legs

Ideally, I do all nine exercises in a row, but I generally take a couple minutes break after doing three exercises (two total breaks during the workout).

What is a recovery run?

This is a short run at a very slow pace that happens around 12 to 24 hours after a hard workout. I usually do this run on the same 2.5-mile loop I use for the ‘sprinterval’ and, although I don’t calculate my pace, feel like I run at least a minute or two per mile slower than I do on my longer runs. The recovery run’s purported benefits include adding extra mileage to the week, helping improve efficiency by refining technique, and training the body to run in a fatigued state. The concept sounds dubious enough to me on its own but I gave it a try thanks to its popularity among elite runners. So far, I’ve really enjoyed the results, and I consider this to be the most important workout in my plan.

Ten percent over ten days

This math keeps my mileage growth rate in check by measuring my totals in ten-day chunks and limiting increases within a ten percent range. The catch is that I still measure everything in terms of weeks to help organize around the reality of my schedule. This means if I run twenty-one miles per week in the first ten days of a month (three miles per day over ten days) then ten days later I would aim for just over twenty-three miles per week (three and three-tenths miles per day over ten days).

I use ten days rather than one week because I know from experience that I’m more susceptible to injury than the average runner.

One mile or ten percent over max

This rule governs my longest run of the week – whatever the longest run I’ve done so far in the year, I don’t run any further than an extra mile or an additional ten percent. Again, this is due to learning from experience that larger increases elevate my risk for injury.

Biking and basketball count

I calculate rough ‘running equivalents’ for bike rides and basketball games. I use these equivalents to help me with the previous guidelines by estimating the toll these activities take on my legs. Ideally, this information will point out when I am at an elevated injury risk due to recent surges in activity and I can use the knowledge accordingly to plan an upcoming workout.

The specifics of these calculations differ by the activity. The bike rides are based on a strict formula – every twenty-eight minutes equals one mile of running (the formula being an educated guess I formed after reading up on various opinions about the matter and using some of my bike share data to determine how far and how fast I cycled for a given minute on a bike). The basketball equivalent is entirely based on feel – I simply assign three, four, or five miles to my log based on the intensity of the game and how fatigued I feel the next morning.

The Fibonacci rule

The Fibonacci sequence is a counting pattern where the previous two numbers are added together to determine the next number in the sequence. I use this as a rough guideline to limit my mileage when returning from short layoffs – the first ‘hard workout’ is two miles, the next one is three, the third is five, and so on until I’m back to my pre-layoff maximum. Again, although I may feel good enough to run ten miles after a few days off, I know from experience that a sudden return to big mileage puts me at risk of an injury.

Conclusion (outcome)

Although there is no such thing as an 'average week', here's one way all of the above comes together into a workout schedule:

• Sunday - recovery run
• Monday - OFF
• Tuesday - medium length run (hard workout)
• Wednesday - strength workout (plus one hour cycling)
• Thursday - sprinterval
• Friday - strength workout
• Saturday - long run

If I have a basketball game, it would usually fall on a Tuesday or Thursday. On these weeks, I skip the medium length run and do the sprinterval on the remaining open day. If I feel tired or sore on a strength workout day, I'll skip it, but I might compensate by doing the workout on Monday (assuming I feel fit for the workout on a Monday).

A final rule of thumb...

Take a break in January and February

My final thought brings together several factors to point out these winter months as a logical time for a short rest. The main concern is my feet as I’ve noticed in recent years that I am unable to keep them from freezing while running in Boston's coldest temperatures. In addition to being a significant health concern, it also takes the fun out of running. The unpredictable pattern of ice and snow also means weather can prevent me from running and, as you’ve seen above, scattered days off tend to disrupt my carefully planned workout schedule.

In recent years, this annual break has lasted for about two weeks. I’m looking to extend it to close to two months, however, just to give myself some time to possibly benefit from an extended period of time off. I’ll probably entertain myself throughout the break with some combination of basketball, swimming, and cold weather biking.

leftovers #5 – the 2018 december rereading list (arguments lingering over breakfast)

I skipped over some arguments for breakfast, both specific and general, in my most recent leftovers post that I thought I would examine in closer detail today.

First, one appealing aspect about the possible relationship between breakfast and jet lag is how although exposure to sunlight is a widely accepted factor in a regular sleep cycle, it seems to be insufficient in helping a traveler reset after crossing time zones. Outside of the broad categories of food and sunlight, there isn’t much that qualifies in terms of what enters the body, so if I felt that inputs mattered in the way the body functioned and it seemed that sunlight had little immediate effect on jetlag, then logically speaking the food I ate must have mattered a lot more.

A second thought I had about this relationship was how travelers in the Boston area often talk about how much easier they find it to fly west than east – at least in the context of avoiding jetlag. I thought this rule seemed arbitrary at best so I considered how the theory about breakfast and jetlag fit into this observation. I realized the key was how most seem to find it easier to wait a little while to eat versus forcing themselves to eat before ready (most diners will wait for a table at a restaurant, for example, while ‘not hungry’ is the most common reason I hear when someone refused to continue eating). Travelers who maintain a time-driven eating schedule while out west eat a little later compared to the local time of their home cities; when travelers go east, the same logic is reversed as people eat earlier compared to when they would eat back home. If the body does associate breakfast with wakeup, the experiences outlined by travelers supports the concept so long as you believe that people find it easier to stay in bed an extra hour until local breakfast time than they do rising before the early bird for that omelet and hash.

The third and final thought is a simple observation – it seems to me that most early risers who get out of bed each morning without apparent difficulty are the same zealots who talk about the importance of breakfast. Do they rise early because of breakfast or do they breakfast because they rose early? Like the chicken that lays those eventually scrambled eggs, I suppose at some point acknowledging that one comes from the other is enough – I’ll leave the details to the scientists, those brave men and women whose burdens of proof are a little more rigorous than my own standard of recalling what I did on a Thursday, once, and writing about it on this all-knowing space.

leftovers – gridiron genius (team building feedback loop)

My last post about Michael Lombardi’s Gridiron Genius explored team building. In particular, it looked at the way leaders should balance the twin challenges of finding candidates who will fit into today’s system with finding candidates who will encourage the system’s evolution. A major aspect of this process is knowing how to use feedback from the team building process to improve the process for the next hiring round.

A critical function of hiring feedback is to reveal when a process consistently dismisses strong candidates. The team that admits the errors of its ways and tweaks its hiring criteria to prevent recurrences of these mistakes is better positioned for the next hiring round. In some cases, simply changing the hiring process isn’t enough – by bringing in a new type of hire, the day-to-day operation of the team might need to change as well.

Not all hiring errors are related to the overall system. A hiring team that concludes its consistent dismissal of strong candidates has nothing to do with the system must take a closer look at how it analyzes candidates. I favor Lombardi’s approach of encouraging talent evaluators to discuss candidates solely in the context of the role they would fill for the team. The basic task, after all, is to find candidates who can perform a specific function.

If an evaluator carelessly dismisses a candidate, he or she should be reminded that the job isn’t about rejecting prospects. Instead, the evaluation should focus on looking for the best in a candidate. I think it works much better in the long run when the hiring team focuses on finding the best in a candidate rather than looking for weaknesses for two reasons. First, hiring someone who lacks weaknesses guarantees a new hire who will not make certain types of errors but says nothing about whether this person can perform the job. Second, hiring someone who has the strengths needed for the role puts the onus on the existing team to create the conditions required for the new hire to succeed. From my experience, I’d much prefer to bet on the existing team to help a new person rather than put all my chips on having hired the right person after just a few hours of exposure during the hiring process.

december reread – notes lookback (pachinko)

Pachinko (original notes from February 2017)

I was very interested to see how this exercise would play out with Pachinko for two reasons. First, of course, is the timing – I reread Pachinko within two years and I suspected I might discover my notes hadn’t changed much during the relatively short intervening period. The second reason was that I took the book very seriously the first time I read it and therefore thought about it a great deal. Given all this effort, I wondered if I had left myself with room for any fresh insight to note during my reread.

The difference in my notes was subtle but significant. I noticed that my first set of notes described the book with a very wide lens, focusing on larger structures such as industry, religion, or society. In short, these notes imply I read the book at arm’s length and suggest I interpreted Pachinko with a certain sense of inevitability as the characters acted out roles imposed on them by forces far beyond their control. My second set of notes differed in how it was based on the day-to-day activity of the book’s characters. These notes suggest that I saw agency, empowerment, and purpose where I had initially seen only destiny. To put it another way, I think in my reread I interpreted the story with greater empathy because I understood the alternatives to every decision and recognized the strain these choices placed on the characters.

Here’s an example – in the first set, I noted that ‘insurance is a way to make money from fear, loneliness, and chance’. It’s a thought that casts Pachinko’s poor, fearful, and lonely characters as inevitable pawns caught on the wealthy man’s chessboard. My second set expanded the thought – ‘insurance and gambling are chance industries driven by their customer’s fear and loneliness’. It’s undoubtedly the same concept as before but there is added nuance here because the note places insurance alongside the ostracized industry in which some of Pachinko’s main characters ‘choose’ to play prominent roles. The comparison underscores the constant tension felt throughout the book by the main characters between maintaining unity through their group identity and pursuing individual ambitions at the risk of isolation and exile from that group (1).

The price for insurance, like for a turn in the pachinko parlor, is set by whoever has the means to fund the payouts. These people do not sit alongside their customers and share their same concerns. Rather, they devise products that appeal to those whose fears are driven at least in part by isolation from a larger community. The courage required to walk away from these glittering offerings takes more than individual resolve – it requires the strength of a group, for if the group can walk away from the table then the owner loses the means to fund the game. It is this very form of strength that Pachinko’s main characters tried to maintain despite the many setbacks and challenges they faced throughout Min Jin Lee’s multi-generational epic.

Footnotes

1. Of course, the downside here is the size of the payout…

I thought this small change in my note about insurance demonstrated a larger shift in how I reread the book. I’m not sure exactly what caused me to read the book differently this time. One possibility is that in the intervening period I read another of Lee’s books, Free Food For Millionaires, and read about a system among the book’s Korean-American characters that resembled an unofficial form of insurance. In this system, each participant contributed a regular sum that was then aggregated and awarded to one member of the group in a regular rotation. This is a version of insurance with one exception – the unity of the group enables it to share the profit rather than send it to an outside administrator.

i read little panic so you don't have to

Little Panic by Amanda Stern (November 2018)

Little Panic was my most memorable reading experience in 2018. In particular, I’ve never been blown away by the first one hundred and fifty or so pages of a book. I understood before opening Amanda Stern’s work that I was in for something a little different than my standard reading experience but the force of her recollections about searing experiences with anxiety produced in me a rare mixture of powerful responses – empathy, understanding, and to a small but not insignificant degree, kinship.

This book was as hard to write about as it was at certain times to read. My goal was to convey some of my own emotions by selectively highlighting some of Stern's insights while also imparting some practical lessons for you, my cherished TOA readers, to keep in mind for when we all rise to the challenge of helping someone’s mental health. Frankly, this is an outcome I’m poorly equipped to achieve with my current set of skills and experiences. I hope the process of challenging myself through writing prepares me to someday rise to the occasion when my presence can help someone in a moment of need.

In terms of how I’ve put together my thoughts on Little Panic – over the next couple of weeks I’ll post four reflections. These cover themes I noticed as I reviewed my notes on the book – the effect of testing, how to express hurt, the impact of assumptions, and the role connection plays in healing. These general concepts taken together form Little Panic’s broader unifying concept – the cost of conforming to an outside expectation is always a portion of the self.

leftovers #4 – the 2018 december rereading list (the use of breakfast)

In my most recent leftover, I gave some added insight into why I decided to reduce my coffee consumption. Today, I’d like to do a similar breakdown for why I resumed eating breakfast on certain select occasions.

This change is unlike most of the changes I make to my routines. Usually, I make a change because the evidence is clear that the change would directly benefit me. With breakfast, the evidence isn’t there, and the result is that my changes more resemble self-experimentation than they do self-improvement. To keep myself on track through such a change, I have to pay very close attention to my experience and analyze my decisions so that I’m attributing outcomes to the correct inputs.

The breakfast idea formed slowly in my mind over the past few years as I read about the various research and studies being conducted about fasting. There is nothing I would call conclusive about the field (and given how long humans live, there probably will not be in my lifetime) but from what I’ve read I feel pretty confident about the following conclusions.

First, our body reacts anytime we eat a meal. This is built up from understanding that the body reacts anytime we consume specific food or drink. We have a good understanding of how certain consumption leads to certain results – drinking excess alcohol leads to drunkenness (I confirmed this myself so no need to thank me, science), consuming an allergen leads to sickness, and so on. Our understanding of the details weakens as we think more broadly but I feel the same concept holds as we discard the specific for the general – our body changes after a meal.

Second, our body adjusts to what we eat. Again, this general conclusion is built up from widely held understandings from a daily level. A good example is how people who regularly consume too much caffeine or alcohol react physically when they suddenly go without while those who abstain experience no symptoms throughout a sober life. Again, though the specifics are important, I feel that the general idea holds up as we think about meals instead of foods and lifetime health instead of daily responses and reactions.

Third, an extended fasting period is like hitting the reset button on the body’s regulatory systems. Hunger is a good example here – it’s designed to remind us about eating but hunger’s behavior during a fast is a little counter-intuitive. Basically, it seems that hunger levels rise and fall during a fast, an observation that I feel violates the general understanding that hunger rises continually over time until it reaches (and remains) at a peak level. It’s almost like the body gives up on being fed and turns its attention to using resources in other ways, only to return later with a greater and more urgent sense of hunger.

The hunger example makes a point about the relationship between food consumption and our body’s systems – a lot of what happens inside us operates differently when we change what we put into our bodies. This is why I was intrigued a number of years ago when I read about research into the relationship between food consumption and jet lag. One specific method asked travelers to fast for twenty-four hours before breaking the fast with a meal eaten at 9AM local time on the day before departure to their eventual destination. The idea was that jet lag might be overcome if the body was used to having a fast broken with a breakfast that matched up to the rhythm of local time.

I’m not sure what the result of the study was but I thought the idea lined up really well with what I accepted about how my body worked. I’ve always found that eating certain foods near bedtime would prevent me from falling asleep and that not every meal consumed in the morning hours was treated equally by my digestive system. I’ve recognized how the patterns and routines of my life would trigger a sense of hunger when I walked past a certain place or realized the clock was at a certain hour and I’ve known that a force more powerful than the incessant beeps from my alarm controls my sleep cycle. In short, I feel safe concluding that what goes into the body influences a lot about how the body operates and therefore the idea that the timing of breakfast mattered in some yet unproven way about jetlag immediately captured my imagination.

These wild thoughts, theories, and inferences were wandering around somewhere in my memory banks when I heard someone compare staying up too late at night to giving yourself jetlag. The comparison clicked right away for me and I instantly realized that I could run a self-experiment by making sure to eat anytime I was forcing myself awake after a late bedtime. The results are inconclusive, of course, as such experimental findings are always going to be, but I’ve found that the early meal has coincided with an improved ability to wake up naturally at the same time the ensuing day.

The toughest part of this method has not been waking up to eat the first early meal – who doesn’t like a little breakfast? – but abstaining from eating breakfast when I do finally get back on my desired sleep cycle. I suppose it goes back to one of my initial comments – the body adjusts to what it eats, and does so quickly, and despite the best intentions of my intellect that brute collaborator known as my stomach does nothing to make my return to a regular eating and sleeping schedule an easy, enjoyable, or comfortable one.

reading review - gridiron genius (team building)

Michael Lombardi’s Gridiron Genius examines leadership through his observations about the careers of a number of important figures in the NFL. One of the book’s consistent themes was the importance of team building, the process of identifying and signing the right players. Today we’ll look at a few of Lombardi’s insights into the process.

Lombardi’s guiding concept for team building is to never forget what details are of the greatest concern. In helmet football, these details are closely linked to the team’s playing system and dictate which specific skills or attributes are the most important to look for in a player. A leader must understand what types of players will fit into the system in order to accurately assess players. The team that signs players based on team-specific criteria will always outperform teams that sign players based on general criteria like college performance, physical attributes, or national prestige.

Lombardi suggests that the best fit for a system is a player who meets two conditions. First is whether the player’s abilities are maximized by the team’s intended playing style. The second characteristic is whether the player fuels the evolution of the system. I liked this observation because it speaks to a general truth about most teams – the challenges facing the team in the present are rarely the same as those that they will encounter in the future. The teams that cannot make adjustments to meet these new challenges often fail because the energy level within the group was not high enough to motivate the reluctant to learn a new playing style. The team building process must allow for some signings who are not just ideal contributors to the current system but also capable of energizing the team to meet the unpredictable demands of the future.

How should a team builder approach such a task? From my experience, a strong team should seek candidates who lack the system’s most easily taught skills yet have significant strengths elsewhere that the team might leverage in the future. This method allows a team to bring aboard high-potential new hires without overpaying for teachable skills. As the new hire becomes comfortable in the system, his or her unique strengths can be slowly integrated to help the system reach higher levels of performance.

A weaker team must seek candidates who can contribute immediately. In this situation, look for people who’ve taken initiative within structured environments, have a history of completing large workloads, or have overcome unusual obstacles on the way to their accomplishments. These characteristics all point to hires who might quickly outperform members of the existing team and this is important because in weaker teams the system’s evolution will grow not from variety but from the opportunities created by increased performance standards.

the running dynasties (part v)

Hi,

The loyal readers who persisted with me through the first four editions of this series must have been left wondering – but what happened next? The sharpest among you surely looked at the timelines involved and calculated an even better question – but what’s happening now?

Wait… what’s that?

Oh… so readers were not wondering?

I see… they were wondering… what’s the point?

Well, that's disappointing, but nothing to be done about it now. Whether you are interested or not, reader, today I’m back with the fifth and, for the foreseeable future, final installment of this running series.

The Fifth Running Dynasty: March 2019 – present

Start reason: Quite frankly, having nothing better to do
End reason: None officially - it remains ongoing. (However, based on personal history, the ending will surely be equal parts tragically avoidable, needlessly sensational... and soon.)

My fourth running dynasty ended in March 2018 with the clear conclusion that running as a form of all-encompassing self-care was both an unbalanced and unsustainable approach. I thought improving balance was the relatively simple half of the challenge. The key for over the past year or so has been finding mental and emotional substitutes for what in the past I had always resolved with a physical approach. I think I’ve made some big strides in this area recently but I’ll avoid those details for now.

The sustainable aspect was a much more complex task. This required a significant shift in my mentality because I needed to think differently about my training plan before I could implement sustainable changes to how I ran on a given day. For most of my life up until the start of this fifth dynasty, my thought process worked something like this:

• Find shoes
• Start running
• Once I no longer felt like it, stop running

Now, this ‘lace up the sneakers and run’ approach isn’t automatically a problem. There was a point in my past when it worked perfectly. It’s just that in 2018 I confirmed that it had become a problem. After a decade or so of going along with my stupid ideas, I guess my body finally gave up. It officially started last March when my feet convinced me to take a month off from any high-impact workouts. This trend continued through the year as my hamstring, hip, or knee rotated the responsibility of slowing me down a few miles into a run. Overall, my results in 2018 were perfectly acceptable from a general fitness perspective but the twenty miles a week that I built up to by the end of the year was a far cry from the plateaus I’d hit in the past.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and dismiss a given workout out of hand solely due to a mileage calculation. However, I am certainly willing to dismiss myself (and my twenty miles per week). To me, it’s a simple matter - if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do my best. As a runner, I can do better than twenty miles a week. Doing my best – it’s a mentality I try to apply to almost everything and given how important running is to me, it’s probably among the last activities where I’m interested in making compromises. However, my reduced 2018 mileage metrics hinted at underlying problems in my approach. When I considered my experiences from the year – dealing with foot pain, pulling up on long runs with a sore hamstring, or simply worrying throughout a workout about the possibility of a sudden injury – I admitted that my thoughtless approach from the past ten years had, finally and perhaps mercifully, run its course.

I started my rebuilding process in late February 2019 with a two-week hiatus from running. During this time, I admitted what I understood about running and tried to pinpoint the areas where I had previously filled gaps in my knowledge with belief, intuition, or self-serving opinion. I realized that although I knew a great deal about the process of running – the act of leaping from one foot to the other in the most efficient, symmetrical, and (I assure you) graceful way – I did not know enough about organizing individual workouts in the context of a broad training plan. A major breakthrough for me was researching the ‘recovery run’, an advanced concept used by elite (or experienced) runners to add extra mileage between hard workouts. I’ve found that applying these recovery runs into my routine has been a major success so far in 2019.

I also used the break to evaluate where my stubborn, willful blindness had convinced me to ignore the obvious distress signals coming from my body. I thought about when my recovery between workouts had left me insufficiently energized for my next run and collected the experiences shared by other runners to help me align my personal goals with the anatomy’s known limitations. I refocused my strength workout to help build up my known problem areas, figured out the right level of food I needed prior to a given workout, and drew up a thoughtful schedule that accounted for my various types of exercise.

It’s admittedly still early days for this fifth (and hopefully, final) running dynasty but so far the returns have been very encouraging. Although I cannot attribute the positive feeling to any single change I’ve described above, the overall picture is coming together. I know the balance is there because I’ve only run thus far in 2019 for no reasons other than fun and exercise. The sustainability is a little tougher to sort out because an injury could sneak up on me at any time but so far I’ve avoided the chronic aches and pains that plagued me for much of the past few years. In fact, I’m finding that in addition to better running performance, I also feel stronger in a number of other indirectly related areas – riding a bike, playing basketball, and simply walking.

This brings me to a final thought that addresses some of what I’ve hinted at so far. Running well as its own goal is ideal and as I referenced I want to do my best in an activity to which I devote a significant amount of time, effort, and thought. However, the more important aspect of exercise is finding a routine that sustains and enriches every aspect of my life. The current fifth dynasty is perhaps the first time where I’ve found such a routine. This is why I’ve suggested above that I hope this fifth dynasty is also my last, one that doesn’t end prematurely thanks to some self-inflicted obstacle but rather finds a natural ending when my desire to run finally runs out.

december reread – notes lookback (daily rituals)

Daily Rituals (original notes from July 2014)

My second notes comparison was for Daily Rituals, Mason Currey’s 2013 book about artists and their routines that I first read before I was regularly writing. My original notes focused exclusively on the difference in the two types of creative work highlighted by this book - the first type works in steady increments while the second type creates within furious bursts of activity. I don’t think that insight was necessarily wrong but it does seem a little lazy, a ‘this or that’ analysis I accepted to feign expert understanding of an indefinable process. This sort of unnecessary conclusion imposes a false duality on the creative process and, among other problems, rules out the possibility of an artist mixing approaches over the course of a project, career, or even lifetime. The issue I have with any false duality is the way it stops someone from thinking about the best approach by presenting a choice of ‘A’ or ‘B’ when the best way might be a thoughtful mix of ‘A’ and ‘B’.

The notes from my recent rereading focused on routines ahead of conclusions. The bulk of my observations described all aspects of routine and their many benefits, drawbacks, and variations. The striking difference here is practicality – the notes I took more recently could serve as an integral component of a larger blueprint for how to structure a writing schedule. I also see evidence of curiosity, both in the way I noted interesting facts of no larger relevance (Darwin feared his original ideas would be rejected by Victorian society) as well as approaches I know I dismiss, at least for my own practical purposes (Stavinksy thought headstands ‘cleared the head’ – I think headstands clear the immediate vicinity, and threaten to leave me hospitalized). The appearance of practicality and curiosity in my notes suggests my reading approach evolved from one easily convinced by appearances of certainty and expertise to a more open-minded search for elusive glimpses of insight that I can weave into the larger tapestry of my life.

the 2018 toa book award – preliminary round, part six

Today’s final elimination round is the closest thing I’ll do to ‘honorable mentions’ – these three candidates ultimately fell just shy of being among the six finalists.

Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (May 2018)

Whenever I ask someone for an explanation about anything, I expect a two-part response: first I get the reason, and then sometime later I get The Real Reason. My two experiences with May Sarton’s work is the reading equivalent of this phenomenon. Back in January 2017, I read Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep, and I nodded politely – the payoff came sixteen months later when I read Journal of a Solitude. It took great courage for Sarton to dive deep into her gloom, surface with this work, and present it to the world as evidence of victory against her inner war against the guerrilla forces of loneliness, depression, and solitude.

Parting thought: A planned lunch disrupts the rhythm of the day.

I feel a little silly pulling such a banal thought from among Sarton’s far more insightful words but this is the idea that I kept coming back to in the last year. As she notes, there is a natural rhythm to all work and in many cases rushing to the end only brings an incomplete or inconsequential result. The planned lunch is a great way to impose an arbitrary deadline on the day’s initial work and making sure I avoid such commitments has proven more productive for me than any other concept I’ve applied to my schedule.

Tribe by Sebastian Junger (August 2018)

Junger’s short book asks a simple question about modern society – if we have more than anyone else in history, why do we feel something is missing? The basic answer is that a decreased reliance on others for daily needs has left us with very little opportunity to build resilient communities based on their members regularly contributing to shared efforts. The result is that instead of valuing others for what they bring to the empty table, we demonize those who take away from the abundance. Our material prosperity is likely to only increase over time – this suggests that the challenge Junger explores will become more significant in the future.

Parting thought: A society that constantly underscores differences will eventually stop functioning correctly.

This idea suggests that a society’s strength is a direct result of the trust among its members. My experience suggests that people trust each other when they work together to achieve common goals and live by shared principles. If a person starts to see a neighbor as someone with different goals or principles, how much trust will there be in that neighborhood?

Sceptical Essays by Bertrand Russell (October 2018)

I was very impressed by this introduction to Russell’s work and emerged from my reading with a number of new perspectives. In fact, I was surprised to discover how many of Russell’s ideas remained with me these past few months. A number of these were timely despite this collection being published in 1928, including insights into economics, thoughts on machine automation, and theories about the role of government. However, for me his thoughts about education proved the most useful this year. The key is that anyone who teaches must remember that all students have a natural curiosity about the world. The teacher’s role is to find that instinct, awaken it, and protect it from making the many common mistakes that are inevitable in the enthusiasm of any self-guided learning process.

Parting thought: Opportunity and reinforcement are all parents offer their infants as they learn to speak.

As Russell himself notes, what more is required to promote learning at any age?

proper admin - july 2019, part three

Hi all,

I promise - this actually will be the last 'July' proper admin.

Podcast news

Speaking of Rapinoe, I liked her interview with Roger Bennett of the Men In Blazers.

In other pod news, I finally started listening to Deep Dive, a show put together by the English language Japan Times online newspaper. This episode about the bizarre but captivating reality TV show Terrace House is highly recommended.

I learned that longtime TOA favorite Michael Lombardi left The Ringer and started a new show called The GM Shuffle. Again, highly recommended, at least for helmet football fans.

Call Your Girlfriend had another good episode – this one featured Nora McInerny of Terrible, Thanks For Asking, and she spoke with Aminatou Sow about loss, grief, and the ways we might redefine moving on.

Finally, I learned that my all-time favorite show, The Football Ramble, intends to start daily podcasts in August. This sounds like good news on the surface but I’m actually worried that they are strangling the golden goose.

That’s fresh, coming from the guy who does daily TOA posts.

No comment.

Reading update

I haven’t chimed in with my current reading in a while so let’s have a quick glance at my straining bookshelf.

First, I mentioned in the July newsletter that I was eating a little differently. The catalyst was Intuitive Eating, a book I read because of a recommendation. This work has forced me to think very seriously about my approach to eating. The short version is that although I’ve developed many good habits, I could do a lot better in certain respects. One such area is listening to my satiety signals. My biggest underlying issue is a serious aversion to wasting food and this has led to a pattern of overeating at certain meals followed by a fasting period to balance out my indulgence. I was encouraged while dining out over the past few weeks when I saved food to take home instead of plowing the plate clean as I had done in the past. I’ve also done better to respond to hunger signals and I'm trying to follow a specific guideline from the book by going no more than five hours without eating. I am, for now, retaining one weekly fast period of 16-24 hours, but I may reconsider this as well if I sense a different approach would work better.

I’m also working through In The Shadow of Statues, a fascinating look into how one city’s mayor thought about its Confederate statues, and looking forward to Hannah Arendt’s Thinking Without a Banister. The most interesting book in terms of my reading process at the moment is The Moral Saying of Publius Syrus. This is essentially a list of sayings, around one thousand in all, and I’ve discovered that it is an ideal book to read for a minute or two every two weeks while I wait for the end of my biweekly laundry cycle.

Finally, I’m looking forward to reading Digital Minimalism, a book that came my way via multiple (OK, so two) trusted sources. Apparently Cal Newport works his way up to an ‘extreme’ application of the title concept – not having a smart phone. I haven’t seen a royalty check yet!

Anything else?

I realized one day while riding a bicycle that although the mathematics of human uniqueness are somewhat puzzling – with seven billion people eating and talking and farting about on our little blue planet, surely there is one other person around like me? – the reality of my experience is that the more I’ve gotten to know someone I initially perceived as similar to me, the more obvious our differences turned out to be in hindsight. What I’m wondering about today is whether this actually speaks to a fact about uniqueness or if it is simply another example of willing self-deception in the eternal, doomed struggle we endure in the lifelong search for kinship, understanding, and belonging.

Thanks for hanging in there during this admin-heavy month. I’ll be back in August, hopefully, with a little less to say.

leftovers - reading review - sceptical essays (riff off)

Hi,

One portion of these riff offs ended up turning into an extended rant about the future of capitalism. I thought it was better to handle the lengthy tirade in its own post – here it is, reader.

Socialism becomes feasible as monopolies develop in many industries because socialism tends to bring economic democracy wherever systems have lost the ability to regulate and encourage competition within markets.

Capitalism has two advantages over its direct competitors. First, its success in lifting billions of people out of poverty speaks for itself – no other method of social or economic organization has a remotely comparable track record. Second, the system has created permanent value for humanity by motivating inventors to create new technologies, medicines, and ideas that have propelled many societies upward from the drudgery, disease, and cruelty that defines almost all of human history. However, I don’t expect capitalism to stick around forever. To me, the system’s flaws are too obvious to ignore and I don’t think future societies will put up with them. The most significant of these flaws is the way capitalism’s winners are not compelled to alleviate the suffering of the system’s losers.

I think capitalism ends in one of two ways. The positive ending would involve the full eradication of poverty, disease, and conflict. This outcome would leave capitalism with nothing to accomplish and the system would gracefully cede the stage for the next act. I believe the trends are as positive as they have ever been. Poverty will be eradicated even if we do nothing more than wait for market forces to work while it is cheaper today for nations to buy enemies rather than wage wars of conquest against them. At this moment, I believe disease is the only open question, and given the nature of new diseases to step into the vacuums created by cures, the battle for new medicine may ultimately prove the strongest justification for maintaining a capitalist system. However, if we collective agreed that everyone had Enough and could conceive of a way to maintain the same level of current investment in disease research, I believe we could turn our focus to stabilize rather than demolish the hypothetical paradise I've just described in the above.

The negative ending is alluded to in my initial note – monopoly. This ending feels more likely to me because it is the fastest approaching natural equilibrium of the system. The system’s design flaw is the accumulation of wealth for the winners without a built-in redistribution mechanism to take care of the losers. This flaw is further emphasized when collective bouts of insanity lead communities, societies, and nations to reduce or eliminate the carefully constructed compensations, parachutes, and safety nets we've put in place for capitalism's losers. This form of madness is what allows billions to flow into research for rare disease cures while cheaper medical ‘innovations’ that would massively improve global health – like mosquito nets – remain lacking in areas of need.

To put it another way, if capitalism works out to something resembling a voting system where each dollar is worth one electoral vote, then we currently fall far short of the democratic ideal where each person gets the same say as another. The folks who need mosquito nets might win the popular vote but we cancer-fearing rich folks in the West prefer the electoral college. How long such a system can hold up is a compelling question. My bet is that in the same way democracies tend toward preserving the principle of one person having one vote, free societies built on a foundation of equality for all will tend toward limiting systems that give one person the power equivalent of multiple votes. The frustrating aspect here is that such a process will be slow. I suppose the bright side is that no matter how inevitable capitalism's vice-grip seems to be on the global economy, any individual committed to valuing others fairly and ensuring everyone gets their voice heard is making a small crack in the system's seemingly unshakable foundation.

reading review - gridiron genius

Gridiron Genuis by Michael Lombardi (November 2018)

Longtime TOA readers may recall how much I enjoy Michael Lombardi’s podcast appearances. The former NFL front office executive always brings a fresh perspective to the conversation, especially on his own ‘GM Street’ program within The Ringer NFL Show. When I learned early in 2018 that he was close to publishing a book, I immediately made reading it a priority and spent most of the next few months looking forward to its release.

This book was Gridiron Genius and it was everything I’d anticipated. Lombardi uses his career as source material to dissect the methods of three former colleagues – Bill Walsh, Al Davis, and Bill Belichick. He distills the lessons and insights gleaned from these helmet football legends to form a comprehensive examination of how leadership determined success for these men and their teams.

For me, the book has proven an invaluable source of the strategies and tactics that have repeatedly formed the foundation of success in the NFL. As usual, I’ve tried to apply these concepts more broadly to the domains where I can find success. The result is a series of upcoming posts that will look at an aspect of Gridiron Genius in greater detail. Three of these dissect a specific aspect of leadership – team building, training, and consistency. The final post will focus on the book’s helmet football observations.

I’m looking forward to having these posts up on TOA over the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, I’ll leave you with a few scattered notes that didn’t fit into those aforementioned posts.

One up: Lombardi has a knack for cooking up interesting ways to express simple ideas. Many years ago, a sleep-deprived Lombardi came on Bill Simmons’s show and declared that the reeling Arizona Cardinals were never ‘the land of the free or the home of the brave, in terms of winning’. I’m not sure anyone, Lombardi included, understood what that meant, but I think it’s important for me to admit here that the quote remains to this day the most memorable thing I’ve ever heard on a podcast.

Gridiron Genius suffered from no shortage of such quips. Whether it was simply in restating common truisms – when everyone thinks alike, no one is really thinking – or in quoting obscure remarks from ancient philosophers – the secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious (Marcus Aurelius... maybe) – Lombardi’s ability to find memorable phrasing helped me link his many ideas to a handful of the book’s recurring themes.

One down: I thought the note that establishing communication outside of work is one way to improve communication inside of work was very insightful. From my experience, most companies do not know how to help their teams learn how to communicate outside of work. I think more companies should leverage this insight by emphasizing social interaction at the outset of any new work relationship.

Of course, individuals could simply take the initiative and work on this themselves. A possible limiting factor here is the concept of professionalism – colleagues often work up to the point of establishing a polite tolerance of each other in the name of being ‘professional’ but rarely go further. It’s probably the safest approach because knowing someone outside of work is a far messier process than knowing someone’s professional self. However, when a little extra effort to know someone on a personal level could mean significant improvement in workplace performance, I think we all owe it to our career aspirations to give this a fair shot.

Just saying: The core of Lombardi’s leadership philosophy is that success results from a perpetual cycle fueled by learning, application, and growth. His note that team builders must constantly find ways to link curiosity with improvement suggests a starting point for any leader; his comment that growth over time means discovering new ways to do the same things provides a clear benchmark for assessing progress within that cycle.

leftovers #3 – the 2018 december rereading list (drinking coffee)

I mentioned in the first leftover that I was reducing my coffee consumption in 2019. This struck some readers as odd so I thought I would quickly outline my thinking.

First, I realized around the start of the fall that drinking two to three cups of coffee each morning was the primary reason I’d stopped drinking tea. In general, I would prefer to drink more tea than coffee so I decided to slowly scale the coffee back and replace the caffeine content with an equivalent amount of tea. After a couple of months, I seemed to have adjusted and I was able to scale back on the tea. These days, I drink a cup of coffee and one or two cups of tea per day. This balance isn’t set in stone, but it’ll do for the short term.

Second, I learned that for most people a caffeine boost around three to four hours after waking is the best way to reach peak performance. I wanted to feel how this worked for me so I gave up the first cup of coffee I’d always drink right after waking up. So far, my experience backs up the science so I think I’ll stick with this coffee schedule on workdays (I’m still having my coffee early when I’m at home for the day).

Finally and perhaps most importantly for the long term, I wanted to have the option of quitting entirely if I decided coffee was doing more harm than good. My main concern at the moment is my digestion and I understand that coffee is not popular due to its anti-digestive qualities. I thought getting down to one cup would make a possible abandonment easier in the future.

Of course, I should note that I have no interest in making this permanent change – I like a good cup of coffee and would hate to give it up. But like most things, one cup is probably more than enough.

health insurance has a preexisting condition

A few years ago, I went out to a sushi restaurant with a friend. Somehow, we got to talking about insurance. This led to my inventing a parable right on the spot, one for today we’ll call ‘The Invention of Soy Sauce Insurance’. I don’t remember much about the story except that I received pretty good feedback about the story. Despite my shaky memory, let’s give a brief retelling a try.

The parable starts with two idiots ('The Two Idiots') coming into a sushi restaurant. The Two Idiots realize that although it serves great food, the restaurant poses a significant risk – soy sauce. If spilled, soy sauce can ruin any article of clothing. They ask to speak to the owner about this problem. The owner takes a look at the situation and crunches some numbers. He determines that in the history of the restaurant, one out of twenty diners spill soy sauce onto their clothing – a 5% risk rate. He estimates that each ensuing ‘repair’ costs around $20 on average. He proposes a solution – what if he charged each person an extra dollar under an agreement that if they spilled soy sauce onto their clothing he would present them with a $20 payout? The Two Idiots look at each other, briefly think about the math, and agree with the owner. They each hand the good man a dollar and sit down for their meal.

The premise for this parable now established, we could spend the rest of this post inventing various hypothetical scenarios and working out the ramifications for this ‘soy sauce insurance’ system. In fact, I suspect that is exactly what happened on the night I first invented this parable. For today, however, I want to skip ahead. Instead of talking about how such a system might thrive, I want to talk about how such a system might end. I think the key is a big buzzword in the current discussion about health insurance – the preexisting condition.

Let’s suppose one day The Two Idiots expand their number and start bringing a third friend. Their friend the slob (‘Their Friend The Slob’) is in his own right an esteemed gentleman – the first few times, he pays the $1 Soy Sauce Insurance charge for both of his dining companions. However, Their Friend The Slob has one problem – he simply cannot keep his shirt clean. After a few consecutive weeks of $20 Soy Sauce Insurance payouts to this new guest, our good man the restaurant owner retreats to his spreadsheets and crunches the numbers again.

The next time The Two Idiots return for dinner with Their Friend The Slob in tow, the owner emerges from the backroom, greets the diners at their table, and informs them of a new insurance policy. The owner explains that although insurance is a great thing for everyone because it helps people bear huge and sudden costs in the event of an unpredictable emergency, even the noblest interventions require a sustainable source of funding. Therefore, the owner sighs as he makes a pointed glance at Their Friend The Slob, he has no choice but to adjust the premium based on each person’s risk of spilling soy sauce. This means that starting today, The Two Idiots will continue paying $1 each to reflect a 5% chance of cashing in on the $20 policy. Their Friend The Slob, however, will pay $4 to reflect what recent events have shown is a 20% chance of cashing in on the $20 policy.

This announcement leads to immediate protest. What an outrage! The Two Idiots demand the owner look at Their Friend The Slob. Look at his hands! Sure enough, Their Friend The Slob has fingers with an unusual feature – angles. It’s no wonder he can’t go five meals without spilling soy sauce! Eventually, they relent, and the trio pays the premiums as charged. The meal concludes (no spills) but the diners go home with a proverbial bad taste in their mouths.

The next day, The Two Idiots pool their limited brainpower. Isn’t the new Soy Sauce Insurance premium a form of discrimination? They take the issue to their local government office and eventually find a bureaucrat who agrees with their perspective. After several hours of admin, he mails a form letter to the sushi restaurant. The owner reads the letter and rolls his eyes – bureaucrats…

One week later, the diners return to the sushi restaurant. This time, Their Friend The Slob is not with them. The owner greets the pair at the door and presents them with a new Soy Sauce Insurance policy. The city office had been on this case, the owners explains, and he decided that to maintain fairness to all diners he will now charge a flat rate of $2 for insurance. The owner proudly explains that this new policy accounts for the rising rate of insurance payouts without discriminating against diners with preexisting conditions. It costs more, he points out, but it is fair and it is sustainable, and that’s what counts! He barely contains his glee as he seats the diners and returns to the backroom.

The Two Idiots are puzzled throughout the meal. They are initially too hungry to have any interest in thinking hard about insurance. However, as the meal progresses, they slowly work out the numbers. Their risk is still 5% - therefore, one out of twenty times they will receive $20 in compensation for a spill. However, they are now paying $2 instead of $1, so every twenty trips they are spending $40 to buy $20 worth of insurance. What a ripoff!

The pair settles their tab and emerges into the cool summer night. The walk helps The Two Idiots connect their outrage to action. What if, they suppose, we simply saved up our money so that we could cover an unexpected $20 expense? The Two Idiots chatter with excitement. Great idea! This means we don’t need that overpriced insurance!

The next week, they enter the restaurant with Their Friend The Slob and make a stunning announcement – we, The Two Idiots, do not require Soy Sauce Insurance. The owner is left stunned by this revelation. He eventually gathers his composure and slinks back to his spreadsheet. What are my options, he wonders, as he begins calculating the ramifications of The Two Idiots and their most recent decision...

What, indeed, are his options? There are simply far too many to list, a near endless amount, but let's consider a few of the simpler or more intuitive ones. The owner could support the insurance policy via the menu by marginally raising prices across the board, a move that essentially passes the cost of using a dangerous ingredient directly to the customer. Or, he could start badgering his local lawmakers, demanding that new regulations - which we'll call, I don't know, an individual mandate - force all diners to buy Soy Sauce Insurance whenever they enter a sushi restaurant. He also could partner with local businesses, perhaps encouraging them to offer soy sauce insurance as part of employee compensation, and therefore have the cost of the policy effectively subsidized by employers. He might introduce complexity to the current system by lowering premiums while adding concepts such as deductibles and out of pocket maximums, each detail carefully considered so that low-risk diners end up paying far less than high-risk diners without arousing public suspicion of discriminatory pricing.

I’m not going to explore these options in any more detail, however, because each of these ends up violating one of two key principles of an insurance system – it’s funded through equal premiums or funded by an accepted version of discriminatory pricing. These two principles form the basic foundation of any sustainable insurance system. In the example I’ve outlined above, I stopped at the moment Soy Sauce Insurance failed - when the restaurant owner lost the lowest risk customers after imposing equal premiums. However, this moment was partly brought about because he also faced a backlash when he adjusted premiums to reflect risk. These two events combined spelled doom for this particular insurance system's ability to pay for itself.

There is a third challenge here that I didn't even bother to include because it complicated the numbers - wages. How much should someone earn for administering an insurance policy? In fact, we also haven’t considered administrative cost. The restaurant owner in this parable is in a business sense running the system out of the goodness of his heart – and all he got in return was public scorn!

But let’s return to the question I posed earlier in case you disagree that the Soy Sauce Insurance example is doomed. What are the restaurant owner’s options? The only sustainable answer is to charge $4 to the slob. This is the fairest way to account for the pattern of revenue and cost to the system. The way the math is arranged, since the slob spills 20% of the time, one out of five times he cashes in for a net $16 cost to the system while in the other four out of five cases a spill-free meal means a $4 contribution to the system ($16 total). In this setup, the system breaks even over the long term. There are many insurance systems that remain sustainable because of this math. Flood insurance at the top of a hill, for example, costs less than it does for an equally valued property sitting on a low-lying riverbank.

The difference with health insurance and flood insurance is that we seem to have reached a certain agreement that charging people based on their risk of using health care is not allowed, a sentiment seemingly based on a widely held belief that most health needs fall largely beyond individual control. This brings me back to my earlier idea about how the parable applies to our current discussion about the healthcare system and the ongoing debate about preexisting conditions. The short version is that if I have certain preexisting conditions, I’m more likely to cash in on my premium next year than those who do not have these conditions. An insurance system allowed to fund itself would consider these probabilities and charge me a higher premium. However, this violates the aforementioned agreement that health insurance premiums should remain identical regardless of preexisting conditions.

This is why I believe the private health insurance system in this country is doomed. The end is a matter of when, not if, and although I concede that when might be a very long time from now, if we all keep our heads and remain in collective agreement that charging different premiums based on preexisting conditions is morally abhorrent, the game is effectively over for private insurers. As long as this aversion to charging for preexisting conditions remains widely held by the taxpaying public, there is no way for health insurance to directly maintain sustainable balance sheets. I’m very confident this sentiment will hold up over the long-term. Even President Trump, in what I consider the highlight of his term, declared his opposition to charging for preexisting conditions. If he’s against this, who is going to favor it?

What I see happening today in the context of private health insurance is a variety of death rattles indicating the imminent end of a doomed system. Most of these rattles are manifestations of that second option I presented above – denied a system directly funded by equal premiums, insurers are finding ways to hide discriminatory pricing practices beneath layers of bureaucratic complexity. There are so many examples of these indirect mechanisms in place to keep private insurance afloat that, again, I feel there is too much to list. These mechanisms include but are not limited to bills full of ridiculous line items (I've heard $8 for a box of tissues), an overly complex system of rebates (such as for having a gym membership) that help insurers maintain positive cash flow, and an endless stream of new spending categories that only the unhealthiest are sure max out (HSAs, copays, deductibles, and so on) and therefore leave them on the hook for a much larger annual outlay than the average policyholder. If you break these numbers down and consider total spending by a subscriber over the lifetime of a policy, you see that people with preexisting conditions are essentially guaranteed to pay more than those without such conditions. We already know that public opinion is firmly against such charges made ahead of time – once our collective thinking expands beyond considering solely premiums, the backlash will pressure insurers to shelve these practices.

Give credit to those private insurers, I suppose, for finding new ways to stay in business. Sooner or later, though, the public will turn against their indirect methods for charging those with preexisting conditions. One common solution I hear pretty regularly in this regard is to simply expand public insurance, perhaps mimicking single-payer systems in other countries, and I think there is plenty of logic to the idea. The easy argument is that the largest pool of policyholders gives the insurer the best chance to spread risk – since the entire American public is the largest possible pool for any American insurer, the government would be best positioned to directly fund a health insurance system through premiums without charging so much that healthy individuals would be encouraged to opt out.

The subtler argument is that the government is also much better positioned to implement discriminatory pricing for health care than any private enterprise. In short, a government can discriminate with their pricing without facing the same backlash that would befall a private organization doing the exact same thing. This discrimination can be easily hidden under the guise of 'discouraging' harmful behavior through taxation. Take the example of lung cancer – the government could support health care expenses for treating this disease by allocating tax dollars from cigarette sales instead of increasing premiums for smokers. The healthcare premium paid by a smoker would be the same as for a nonsmoker but if you consider the amount paid in cigarette taxes the smoker ends up paying more into the total system. A similar structure could work for skin cancer – beachgoers might pay an additional tax for parking by the sea while sunscreen could be made exempt from all sales taxes. This structure would charge people for actions rather than genetics, a form of discriminatory pricing that I believe the public supports for any freely made decision.

The problem I’m having as I articulate my lofty future is the most important question of all – tomorrow sounds great, but what can we do today? As always, when a big idea sounds nice in theory, I struggle to reframe it into a series of steps an individual can take to help us all collectively move closer to the ideal. I think the key just goes back to the basic idea about preexisting conditions – as long as we remain adamant that charging differently based on these conditions goes against what we stand for as a society, we continue to chip away at the overpriced and underperforming system of private health insurance in this country.

the 2018 toa book award – preliminary round, part five

Hi folks,

Welcome to the penultimate elimination round for the 2018 TOA Book Award. I’ve done these rounds based on loose ‘themes’ but I report today that the center is no longer holding – I have no idea why anyone would group these two books together (though I suppose this could be considered its own theme in my particular clueless way).

I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October 2018)

I’ve always liked my fellow Tim’s work but I approached this essay collection with some trepidation. I’d always liked his writing because he seemed capable of exploring any topic with humor and insight; I feared that with a clearly defined topic, the work would fail to take advantage of his instinct for exploration and contemplation. As always, I was wrong, and his series of personal reflections on his various relationships with (mostly) women proved a valuable lesson for me – when you write about just one thing, it’s a ripe opportunity to write about everything.

Parting thought: A lack of reinforcement can quickly turn the desire for connection into its opposite.

This idea is a great reminder for me whenever I start an interaction. It doesn’t matter if the person is someone I’ve known forever or if it’s a person I’m meeting for the first time – it’s vital to be warm and responsive. This is surely not breaking news, reader, but this approach doesn’t come naturally to me and I therefore require reminders. Each moment in an interaction, from the initial greeting to the last word, is a reinforcement, and people shut down quickly in response to cold, negative, or merely indifferent responses.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (December 2018)

I’m not quite sure where I stand on this book. There is a lot going on here, perhaps to the point where I might suggest it was too short, but the other side of me suggests that perhaps it was too long given how not all of the story proved relevant to the main idea. Ultimately, it’s a story about what we lose in the aftermath of a traumatic event and the great courage it requires to face our fears, regrets, and vulnerabilities when we choose to reclaim ourselves.

Parting thought: In genetics, the law of selections tends to trump the dominance of genes.

It’s too easy to look at what goes against us and bemoan the Powers That Be. And without question, life is full of setbacks thanks to forces beyond our control. It’s vital in such moments to remember what remains within our control and to never forget that any prophecy is to a significant degree self-fulfilling.

where the walls don’t talk

I learned a couple of months ago that Ittoku was closing its Brighton location and relocating to a new space in Porter Square. I'm still unsure of the exact date but sometime soon Ittoku will live among a number of other Japanese restaurants at Porter Exchange. The news was a little surprising because I’d always lazily assumed Ittoku would remain in Brighton, possibly forever, serving its delightful plates of Japanese bar food to anyone who had the great fortune to discover the izakaya. Nothing is forever, I guess, but although I’ve learned that permanence is at best a salesperson’s buzzword, I still can't quite get used to change, like the way even spending an entire summer swimming every day never lessened the shock of that first moment when I jumped into the cold water.

Once I thought through the logic, I found the decision completely understandable. Ittoku is currently in a terrible location. This isn’t just another classic TOA cheap shot at Brighton. Getting to Ittoku is basically impossible. There is no available parking within a reasonable distance, a fact underscored by their longtime valet parking service. The bike ride could be a mountain stage in the Tour de France, the steep inclines being further complicated by the buses, cars, and pedestrians that seem intent on getting you killed before you reach your destination. The only ‘reliable’ public transportation is the Green Line’s B branch, a line that has made its name in the city with its unique combination of frequent delays, the slowest moving trains in the region, and the half dozen stops that service the BU campus.

These problems all stem from Ittoku being located next to nothing. One of Brighton’s only appealing features is the ease of wandering from one block to the next, relying on the naked eye to pick out an interesting bar or restaurant that had gone unnoticed during prior internet searches. For a night out in Brighton, the best itinerary is itinerant lest the advantages of rootlessness go wasted. This does not apply to Ittoku given the lack of any destination within a reasonable walk of the storefront. I suppose this point is reinforced by how its nearest Hubway docks – er, I mean Blue Bike docks – remain stuck at the outer edges of the ever-expanding bike share system. The only thing harder than finding Ittoku is finding home from Ittoku.

Porter Square solves for each and every problem I outlined above. In Porter, Ittoku will be easier to access, will be in a neighborhood with higher foot traffic, and will likely attract more drop-ins from the popular eateries with which it will soon share a mailing address. History perhaps supplies the only possible objection. My brother has smartly pointed out that the new location is ‘cursed’, a theory based on two and a half decades of carefully observing one idea after another fail in the same location, but I know history guarantees nothing except for change. The same concern was once raised about Stats, a bar just a few blocks over from my first Boston apartment. I still remember how whispers about the past faded away once Stats established its credentials within those cursed walls as the most popular bar in the neighborhood.

So yes, curses notwithstanding I found the relocation decision entirely understandable. And yet, despite how sensible I thought the move would be from a business perspective, something felt wrong to me. If I am to be fully honest, I just didn't like the idea of Ittoku moving out. I noticed this feeling on the first couple of visits I made to Ittoku after I learned about the relocation. There was something missing that I hadn't considered about the relocation and this was bothering me during these visits. As I looked around the familiar interior and thought about which decorations from these walls would make it to the new home in Porter, I tried in vain to put my finger on exactly what I was experiencing.

About a month or so later, I was wandering around Boston as I do from time to time and thinking about the future. The big question on my mind was moving and whether starting over was a reasonable idea. At the time, I was primarily concerned about being thorough with the process because the last thing I wanted to do was to make a hurried decision. I figured having a better job opportunity than what I could muster in Boston was a good start and so I’d started browsing openings from a shortlist of cities I determined might be a good fit for me. Of course, the other half of it was that if I’d honestly applied the criteria I’d used to draw up my shortlist, the best fit was Boston, and Boston boasted plenty of opportunity. Was I already where I was trying to go? Things were, you could say, delicately poised, and it wasn’t clear whether I was looking for a good reason to stay or a good reason to leave.

It was in this period of contemplation that I realized how there wasn't a single place in the area where I held solely positive associations. This doesn’t mean I had no happy memories – it just means that everything around me was heavy, weighed down by a delicate balance of remembered joys and sorrows. It was never clear to me on a given day how these scales might tip. One evening, I might have enjoyed a stroll down the picturesque Charles Street. The next day, the same trip might remind me of feeling completely alone for the first time in my life as I walked home after visiting my mom in hospice. Another day might see me take in a beautiful morning as I crossed the Mass Ave bridge on bike or foot. And yet, the same path sometimes reminded me of how I’d once dragged myself across the bridge, dead inside after losing my job. This process seemed to play out anywhere I went, each location housing its own blend of reminders about the ups and downs I had accumulated over nearly a decade of calling the same city home.

One day, I recognized that there was one exception, one place where I’d managed to keep the walls unadorned with my negativity, and that place was Ittoku. I just cannot associate a bad memory with the restaurant. Every single guest I’ve introduced to the place has loved it. I’ve celebrated more important occasions there in the past four years than I have in every other local restaurant combined. I’ve dined there countless times to catch up with old friends and I’ve gotten to know new people there who have since become important parts of my life. Even the very idea for TOA was hatched at a table in the bar area!

I admit my surprise that Ittoku has made it so long without my associating it with a single bad memory. I’ve been going for just over four years and this period of my life has been no picnic. The first time I went to Ittoku was right around the end of June 2015 when my dad, brother, and I were spending a lot of time with my mom while she was hospitalized at Brigham and Women’s hospital. We were just in that swerve lane between continuing treatment and starting hospice care and I was overcome with an urge to write down as much as possible in a journal. One of its first entries is written on the back of a Yelp review about Ittoku that I had printed out on June 29. I remember my mom’s tired reaction to my report about the restaurant, a perfectly understandable response given how her cancer had limited her meals over the prior three months to only the smallest morsels of food. Mom never improved enough in hospice to have a meal with me at Ittoku. It was a lost opportunity because I know she would have very much enjoyed the izakaya.

However, in an entirely unanticipated development, her never having set foot inside the restaurant must have protected me from experiencing any difficult feelings of loss or grief when I went there after her death. Given that Ittoku is a Japanese restaurant, I suppose this lack of association seems somewhat unlikely, but since my mom rarely cooked the food that I've enjoyed at Ittoku, their menu items don't remind me of her dishes. There have been some close calls over the past four years, moments where it seemed likely that I was about to force an association, but events conspired to stop me in my tracks. A few months after her death, for example, Japanese cousins swung through Boston for a day to visit her grave - we surely would have gone out to dinner but their early train to New York meant we didn't have enough time for a trip to the inaccessible Ittoku. And then there were those clumsy attempts on the anniversary of her death, July 12, to go to Ittoku for dinner - each time, the restaurant was inexplicably closed for some form of routine maintenance.

In a city I was increasingly recognizing for its lack of solely positive spaces, I saw Ittoku as a hypothesis that the future can have no obligation to the past. Their humble walls always checked certain feelings at the door so that I could peacefully enjoy the next couple of hours without carrying the weight of memory. It is difficult to overstate the magic of the place. Each time I went to Ittoku, the safety, comfort, and anticipation I felt was a lot like being a little kid again, coming home from a summer day at the pool and having my mom ask me if I wanted anything to eat.

I suppose there is something appropriate about Ittoku moving, out of all places, to Porter Square. Porter was the first place I remember going to in Boston after moving here from Japan. We traveled there by train to find specific grocery items like natto, browse the catalog in the nearby Japanese bookstore, and, most importantly, eat lunch at Sapporo Ramen. For most of my childhood years, my mom chaperoned us on these trips made during school vacations or special weekends. Porter Square is home to enough personal history that my adult experiences at Sapporo Ramen have been essentially the opposite of those at Ittoku - the food is poignantly familiar, the routine of the place transports me across decades, and the memories of lunch there with my mom remain vivid after all these years.

And yet, I go back, and I go back often, diving headfirst into a mixture of emotions each time. I've gone to Sapporo Ramen with friends and family on my birthday and I've gone alone to think over important decisions. I don't go back seeking the same sense of protection that I know from Ittoku. Rather, I return with a broadening understanding that it's important to go to places where recollections are easily stirred and the ghosts of the past bring fleeting insights to questions about the future. It doesn't matter that these ghosts have no new information - they only exist in my memory, after all, and their wisdom remains limited by my recall. What's important is that the past represents a vital part of who I am and reminding myself of my experiences ensures I don't leave my values behind when I think about my next move.

Ittoku may have demonstrated to me the joy of a future that unfolds without obligation to the past but this doesn't mean every good future starts by blocking out unwanted thoughts or feelings. The protection offered by walls sometimes comes at the expense of keeping you locked inside. If you can't confront what's happening, you can't start the process of moving forward. The trick is to find resilience so that you can focus on what to do next when the protection you've always relied on isn't sufficient to block everything out. With resilience, we can dive in and move forward even if it shocks us at first. I recognized this in my mixed feelings about Boston - even though I struggled to find places where my happy recollections weren't cancelled out by some negative memory, the fact that I've continued living here and walking the same streets where I once struggled has real meaning. It isn't so much about being happy where I live, it's more about knowing that I live in a place where I can bounce back, and I know I can do so again because I've already done it. It's about having roots in a place where if I get cut down, I know I can grow again because the foundation I need is there for me.

It's too bad that Ittoku is moving out of a home that I've come to share and love over the past four years. I'm not sure I'll have that same feeling of protection and comfort in another place for quite some time but I know I've been taught well to embrace this relatively trivial change. The first thing we all learn from our mothers is how to crave that feeling of protection and comfort because it's fundamental to thriving as we learn about our place in the world. I suppose eventually the first thing we fear is losing this feeling as we move out of familiar surroundings and explore the possibilities beyond our protective walls. Our mothers teach us about this one, too, by showing us the resilience needed to move forward through uncertainty and reminding us that we always stay connected to what we've shared and loved. One day, we are faced with perhaps the toughest challenge of all, a loss encompassed by the disappearance of a lifelong teacher, and it's all we can do to keep tabs on the past until the searing memories can be looked at again with unprotected eyes. Eventually, we teach ourselves that meaning in events, things, and places is really a matter of how we think, feel, and talk about them. When the walls talk, it's only a selective echo of our own thoughts, our own words, and our own memories. When the walls talk, it's time to talk back, and create new meaning so that the past informs a better future. All things come and go, even the walls that once made a home, but the one thing we can't lose is home as long as we remember that home is anyplace we find to share and love our roots.