revision 2020

I've spent the past few days thinking back on 2020 and reflecting on the various things I've learned during this difficult year. It's been a long process and I'm still working out all the lessons but when I finally have my ideas sorted out I can assure you, dear reader, that you'll be the first to hear about them.

The one thing I'm ready to bring up now - which might be a better fit in the category of "things I confirmed", but let's not waste time with such distinctions - comes out of a conversation from around a week ago at a virtual happy hour with some colleagues. The topic came up (well, it was brought up) that I had a flip phone, and in the process of explaining myself I realized that the reason I have it is because I fear the way constant distraction might erode some of my best qualities - being fully present in the moment, remaining endlessly patient, and focusing for long periods. It brought me back to my high school days when I occasionally felt pressured to smoke, but I never gave in because I feared the effects on my lungs, which were my best assets as a student-athlete (I have smoked a few cigars, which appeal to me because you don't inhale the smoke, but it seems unlikely I'll ever smoke).

The analogy extends one more level, however, which is that just as it was challenging to explain my fear to a smoker - what do you mean, man, I can breathe just fine - it's equally difficult to make my point about distraction in 2020. It might just be the case now that as we approach almost a full decade of ubiquitous smart phone use in America (and a longer period of time for widespread internet access) the standard for being distracted by the digital world has fallen too far for me to have any meaningful concerns about the situation, at least relatively speaking. The challenging aspect is that I want to get the most out of myself - my time, my energy, and my thinking - which means being relatively less distracted compared to someone else has little value to me. I had a preliminary look at my 2020 reading list last week and I know my year-end tally will fall far short of years past, perhaps by as many as twenty books. Most people will look at that list and scoff, pointing out that I still read more than 99% of other people, but I'm not concerned about other people when I read books, and I have no interest in how well other people focus when it's time for me to pay attention.

The problem at the moment is that in 2020 my focus has slipped to the point where it's having an effect on my mood and, in some cases, on my physical health. The circumstances of the year have undoubtedly played a huge role (and I'm forgiving of myself, partly because keeping up with the news has been more relevant than ever in 2020). However, I think bringing 24/7 internet access back into my life was the primary contributor to the issue, and if I need to make one revision to my current daily routine it would involve committing to a more deliberate use of my computer. There's nothing new about this knowledge - I unplugged myself back in 2014 because it was the right thing to do - but as 2021 looms on the horizon I've accepted something we'll all need to admit, sooner or later, to ensure we can make more out of the coming year than we did the last; there's no returning to the good old days. The theme of 2021, or my best advice for it, is in some ways the same as it is in any year - we must incorporate the new while preserving the best of the old; it's the only way to get the most out of the year.

curtis jones, always with the ball

The emergence of Curtis Jones has been one of Liverpool's bright spots during a trying post-lockdown period. The nineteen-year old midfielder, a product of the club's youth academy, has acclimated so quickly to the first team that some (lunatics) have suggested manager Jurgen Klopp will have a selection headache when Thiago returns from injury - the details are wrong, but the gist of the idea is correct, and speaks to Jones's recent progress. Some will say that his rise came out of nowhere, though of course his record at youth level always suggested eventual success.

But I did realize just the other day that I missed a subtle but significant clue in a video which I highlighted on TOA just a few months ago (albeit for a different reason). In this clip from the Liverpool FC YouTube channel, Curtis joins the chat ninety and Klopp remarks "Curtis, always with the ball"; the manager actually sounds a little bored with his own observation. I wonder why? I think Curtis Jones showing up with the ball for a Zoom call wasn't an uncommon occurrence, and I bet it speaks to his determination as a player; outside observers have been surprised by his recent performances, but those used to seeing him - always with the ball - likely expected nothing less.

proper corona admin, vol 94 - vaccines, part 2 (mandates)

I was surprised to learn that my employer (a health care organization) was NOT mandating a COVID-19 vaccine for all employees. I acknowledge that this may reflect my opinion on the vaccine (I'll take a shot in both arms, please, and another one directly in my forehead) but I also raise this point in the context of my employer's broader vaccine strategy - when I signed my offer letter, I did so with an understanding that I would need to catch up on any missing immunizations, and also prove that I was free of tuberculosis, for which I'm vaccinated; each winter, the entire staff is administered a flu vaccine (1). In other words, what they say goes, and what they say roughly translates to "an extreme overabundance of caution".

A few days after my initial reaction, I realized that there was a logical explanation - shortage. I'm not going to collect the numbers, which vary across a range depending on the news source, but it seems that the rosiest estimate suggests all Americans will have access to a vaccine by the summer. If this feels like a long time, it is - long enough to encounter any number of obstacles regarding effectiveness, distribution, and production; in my mind, the end of 2021 is a more appropriate estimate for a fully vaccinated America.

Those guesses, entertaining though they may be, are beside the point. The current strategy of eradicating COVID-19 via vaccination is constrained by two basic facts - it requires enough doses to protect a huge proportion of the world, but we only have enough doses for a small percentage of the population. Those of us sitting around and jumping to conclusions about the pandemic - which is you and I, reader - might look at this situation and think about ways to rank-order every person in the world based on vaccine benefit, then administer shots in sequence. No matter the specific criteria of such a process, my colleagues - and particularly those on the front line - should be first in the queue. However, for now I think the economics of a shortage still carry more decision-making weight, so as long as there remain hundreds of millions of people considered "high risk" I expect organizations - and governments - to continue allowing the hesitant to step back in the line.

Footnotes

1) I looked up mortality rates to get a better sense of how my pre-employment tuberculosis testing reflects the risk implied in population-wide mortality rates. It seems that tuberculosis is around 0.2 deaths per 100K - by contrast, heart disease is eight hundred and eighteen times more deadly; the flu is eighty times more deadly.

The numbers for COVID-19 suggest a challenger for the top spot on the 2020 mortality table. This dataset gives 101 deaths per 100K, which would make it the third-leading cause of death in the USA if the rates from other causes held steady in 2020. Once again, if you don't consider the shortage my employer's flu vaccine mandate seems inconsistent with the decision to "strongly recommend" the COVID-19 vaccine.

a birthday of rest

I remember the last time my birthday fell on a Monday - December 28, 2015. I went into work like any other Monday, did nothing out of the ordinary, and listened to a lot of Courtney Barnett. It might have been nice to take a day off, but it was a fairly relaxed time of year; it almost seemed like a good idea to go into work and take care of a few things when I was less likely to be distracted. I also remember working on my birthday in 2018, which was a Friday. Again, nothing to report, except that it was among my better birthdays, or at least better celebrated, which might have had something to do with my colleagues, or that it was a Friday. Of course, being my birthday, it was also during the same time of the year as when it'd fallen on a Monday in 2015 - it was the slower period between Christmas and New Year, when being stuck at work is an opportunity to unstick some things that have been stuck at work.

This might be why I've never quite related to those who insist on taking a day off for their birthday - from my perspective, working on my birthday has never caused a problem for me, and sometimes it's even been productive. But this way of thinking has an unseen issue, which is that it treats rest as a secondary concern; my specific example about taking a birthday off reveals how I prioritized work considerations ahead of rest. I think this will soon change for me because I've learned something this year about rest, which is that rather than think of it as a value proposition - given everything else I do, how will I get the most out of my rest? - I should think of it as a primary objective - how can I get the best rest, even if it means forgetting about a few other things?

I think I have a lot left to understand about myself in this area - my revelation from earlier in the year that I respond better to four-day weekends than I do to entire weeks off has led me, literally, to where I am today (taking a day off on my birthday, creating a four-day weekend). The key, it seems, is that the casual clichés about rest - you should get a good night's rest, it's important to rest, and so on - are wrong in the way that they imply rest works in the same manner for everyone. The better approach is to think intentionally about resting properly, using insight and experience as a guide, because getting the most out of my rest means understanding what works best for me; there's no sense in resting on someone else's laurels, so to speak, when it comes to cultivating self-awareness about rest.

the challenge of real thinking

There's an unquestioned agreement that reading books is a productive way to spend time, which you notice in the peculiar criticism adults sometimes make of children - if a kid is called a couch potato, you can bet he's holding a remote control, not a book. This specific example goes away as you get older but we don't seem to overturn the conviction that reading a book is a smart activity - when I tell people I've almost read one thousand books since 2010, they assume it's reflective of a productive habit; nobody asks if I've just been rereading the Goosebumps series over and over. I don't raise this point to suggest I feel any differently, though, about the association of reading books to better intelligence. The other day, an innocent reference to reading books led me into an unplanned rant about bad thinking, a frothing tirade I capped off by declaring I couldn't trust anybody's judgment unless that person read at least one book per month. I've taken a few days to calm down, and now I'm ready to state TOA's official position on the matter - although the exact count of books is irrelevant, anyone interested in becoming a better thinker should be reading at least one page of a book every day.

Why specifically a book, though? Why not just words, organized into sentences and paragraphs, regardless of whether they form part of a book? It's all reading, which I've heard (or is it read?) that we collectively do more of than any other cohort of people that's ever lived on this planet. The internet enabled the creation of an effectively infinite supply of reading material, some of it good (and the rest found on TOA); technologies such as the smart phone have unlocked, accelerated, and simplified access to these sources. People today also communicate far more frequently in print, using texts and emails to create a constant stream of reading material for and about each other; we are all readers, whether we crack open a book or not. But in my mind, these other reading materials are not appropriate substitutes for a book, at least in the sense of their capacity to improve thinking.

The book's biggest advantage for cultivating thinking is the way it empowers a reader to ignore certain impulses encouraged by other mediums. This may sound like a direct shot at the hyperlink, and it's certainly in mind - if I start to disagree (or simply become bored) with a digital article, I can just click to something else. But without intending to invite a relative comparison, this was also true of the newspaper age, when a reader could always switch to one of the other columns, or learn to skip troublesome sections (1) (2). The book solves for this issue by committing the reader to battle through distractions, and the reader becomes more likely to reap the rewards for sticking to the task. This may also make for better listeners, and more patient ones, because books condition readers to slog through the conversational torrent of related but uninteresting remarks, which seems to seek out good listeners like a mosquito picks out sweaty forearms. If people asked me for advice about how to have better conversations with those holding different views from them, I'd start by recommending a book or two that their opponents might agree with as preparation for enduring the task, because in the midst of a conversation there is no option to click over to a more agreeable person.

The way a book disarms weapons of mass distraction is central to the way I think about thinking. Despite the various expressions attesting to the phenomenon, I'm not so sure it's possible to interrupt a thought - it's either completed, or it dies on the spot. Even if I'm wrong about this detail, I know I find nothing more destructive to my thought process than a series of stops and starts; May Sarton thought the surest way ruin a productive morning was to make lunch plans. The problem with thinking, I think, is that it doesn't timebox, which means it can't be slotted neatly into a half-hour on a calendar; thinking rarely stops at a convenient place to pick up later just to accommodate a demand on your time. It seems to me that the only way to have a valuable thought is to make as much time as life allows for thinking, with the dedicated portions of the day being as distraction-free as possible.

The points I've made so far - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time - are starting to look like a list of necessary ingredients for clear thinking. The way a book engages with a reader unintentionally emphasizes these qualities, which is partly why I champion the book as a tool for improving thinking. But it's also true that this isn't a quality exclusive to books - hyperlinked articles can be printed on paper, sterilizing the viral quality of internet reading, while intentional choices can expose anyone to new perspectives or competing points of view. This is why I think the next feature might be the most relevant, as it's almost unique to the form - reading a book teaches the reader to assess information in the context of the issue at its core.

A book, in other words, is a multi-faceted explanation of a central concept. This isn't something readers will understand if most of their information about a topic comes from scattered sources, who will at best produce tangentially related reading materials; the worst-case scenario for these readers is a series of non-sequiturs as the browser moves from link to link, opening one short work after another. The challenge created by this structure is the lack of direction regarding the hierarchy of information - is the current idea a fundamental concept, or merely a supporting player? A report describing the isolated side effects experienced by one among many thousand vaccine volunteers could be a warning alarm for skeptics, or a triumphant data point for those who expected many more problems; the referral, whether via hyperlink or otherwise, often offers little context for the fact and even less clarity regarding its overall relevance to any number of ongoing discussions. The same detail presented in a book, whether it be in support or opposition to a vaccine, would show in plain terms how the fact stitches itself into a broader pattern of observations that support a conclusion, and this gives the reader the tools for reaching an appropriate interpretation. Without these tools, the result is the commonly observed occurrence of people trying to fit each and every new piece of information into an existing worldview, which is often centered around an arbitrarily chosen foundational concept that might never be more than a supporting footnote in a meticulously crafted book.

The way a book can narrow its many pages down to a central focus is reminiscent of a distinction made in leadership thinking - is something urgent or important (3)? The book, by encouraging a hierarchy of ideas to form naturally around the main pillar, reinforces the role of weight, nuance, and relevance in terms of understanding the world; a book is, in other words, capable of making a distinction between what's important and what's not. On the other hand, the reading that happens outside the book is rarely positioned for this task because it must always present itself as urgent - URGENT - in order to attract enough notice to ensure its own survival, which is threatened by the daily avalanche of new content generated in the digital age; the rare news that's (merely) important might fall to the wayside if it does not attract fresh attention. A person who can't make the time for reading books seems to drift toward becoming interruption-driven, forever pulled downstream by the relentless undertow of urgency, and I fear in the long-term this has a corrosive effect on the capacity for making the distinction between urgent and important. The interruption-driven live on the fuel of urgency, but with each shared link or recounted tale they move imperceptibly closer to the fate of the malfunctioning smoke detector, whose constant urgency renders its dependents incapable of divining the life-saving alarm.

If these complaints sound vaguely familiar to you, reader, I can offer a potentially clarifying analogy - what I'm getting at is the equivalent of how a real conversation differs from small talk. The disorienting effect of jumping back and forth from one short article to another is a lot like that mental exhaustion you get at the end of a day consumed by small talk; good luck synthesizing all the chatter into a common theme. Small talk is an easy target - I don't know anyone who claims to enjoy it (though I can think of one or two who, with a dash of honesty, might sing a different tune). And yet, despite a generally low approval rating, small talk seems a permanent feature of the human experience, and one of many explanations for this is safety - in small talk, nobody gets hurt. This is because small talk is unchallenging, which means there is no possibility of harm; a real conversation means a challenge, particularly in the sense of someone's beliefs or assumptions, and this leaves one or both parties exposed to harm in a way that's not possible when commenting on the weather.

This criteria of challenge is why my comparison to small talk might be more appropriate than initially meets the eye. The challenge presented by all forms of reading share a surface similarity because any sentence or paragraph has the capacity to challenge a reader, but unlike with the short form a book challenges thinking in a way that is almost impossible to dismiss out of hand - it's the difference between the deliberation and the verdict. An article, study, or video only has enough time to suggest a different outcome (and can therefore be conveniently forgotten if another piece with a more agreeable conclusion is located) but the questions raised in a book can dig into the full thought process, which invite serious grappling before a reader can consider moving on. This is especially true for me when I object to something in a book that I've entirely agreed with up to that point, or from an author with whom I generally share a perspective - the process of comprehending and sorting out the contradiction can help me reach a new understanding, but if I remain in flat opposition I've likely done so having seen the author's full reasoning, which protects me from a knee-jerk reaction to something presented out of context. It's always good to have a starting point, but for me real thinking starts at the challenge, which I use in a way familiar to those who have some experience writing - the challenge of real writing is rewriting, and the challenge of real thinking is rethinking.

This is why I felt compelled to revisit my rant from a few days ago and attempt to work out exactly what I meant when I made my arbitrary proclamation. I knew I was broadly in agreement with my idea, but it seemed like there were some little contradictions and blind spots I needed to review before I could proceed with something as strong as "I can't trust thinking from a non-reader". As you know, I've scaled down my original stance to reach a more moderate position - always read a little bit from a book every day - but this doesn't mean I've tossed aside the question of trust that was at the heart of the initial outburst. Trust, I think, is the unacknowledged engine that powers the way we share, accept, and expand new thinking - if we trust someone, we give more value to their thinking - but it's unclear how the way someone thinks should influence the amount of trust we place in that person. When I work through the steps I've outlined for clear thinking - minimizing distractions, committing to the task, staying patient, and protecting blocks of unbroken time; evaluating information around a core idea; challenging yourself to rethink - I see a framework for the kind of thinking I trust, and as I've described I feel that reading books is a sure way to build these skills. The shared quality among these steps is that there is no room anywhere for the chattering masses, which makes sense because thinking is an individual's responsibility; groupthink is a marketing label for not thinking, and what I can't trust is someone who thinks not thinking is thinking just because someone else thinks the same thing.

Footnotes

1) By "relative comparison", I mean the kind of objection that would compare the newspaper to the hyperlink as a way of dispelling the idea that a newspaper is an example of distracted reading. I don't think for a second that the newspaper is more (or equally) distracting as a hyperlink, but that doesn't mean it joins the book among the ranks of undistracted reading materials. Imagine if the opening paragraph of a book ended with "continued on PAGE 37", which you'd find after flipping through scores of advertisements, photos, and opening paragraphs for other books? The newspaper, much like a hyperlinked article, creates an illusion of distraction-free reading, but this doesn't become clear until you think about how a book would need to be redesigned in order to resemble the newspaper.

2) This may have also had an effect on the decisions made by writers and editors. Imagine if you knew readers always had the option to flip to the comics the second they became disinterested in finishing your column? I would tone it down, at least a little bit, if I understood that the sanctuary of some orange rodent armed with thought bubbles was always ready to welcome those offended anytime I challenged their assumptions.

But it could go the other way as well - I know my readers on TOA can always jump ship, so maybe I compensate by coming in stronger with my point. Who knows? If I knew, this thought wouldn't be tucked into a footnote.

3) Of course, as it is with many examples of "leadership thinking", the adjective is hardly necessary - finding this difference is an important result of thinking, whether it be in a leadership context or not.

Endnote

Here's an "alternate" ending - it was actually the last paragraph through all the drafts - that I ended up removing in the final revision because I liked the ending of (what was then) the penultimate paragraph:

"When I share ideas with someone who doesn't have the skills gained from reading books (which is the assumption I'll make anytime I share ideas with someone who doesn't read books) it's not a question of whether I can trust that person's thinking, since it's impossible when someone gets their reading material through a daily gatekeeper, or from the top rankings of a popularity algorithm - it's a question of when I can trust, because the moment is surely in the future, which will come not after someone's started thinking, but after they've returned to think again. Trusting someone's thinking when that person doesn't read is like trying to offer revisions for an absent student's writing assignment - if the thinking process hasn't even started, then surely there isn't much opportunity for rethinking, as you would expect from a mind that's never been made up."

leftovers - cold opening presents (podcasts)

Yesterday's post grew from an observation that many podcasts start by following the same terrible script - a spoken intro, then a grating theme song, and finally some "how are you" banter among the hosts before settling into the main program. In the worst-case scenario, an advertisement fights its way into the mix.

But as I wrote the post, I understood that the podcast is a great example of when cold opens aren't appropriate. Podcasts are a passive medium so there is no need to "grab" the audience - a creator can assume the listener will commit at least half an hour to a new show, and judge the entirety of the experience to assess the episode. This doesn't mean there's no room for improvement at the start, but it's just not as important for a podcast to take advantage of the cold open.

cold opening presents

Everyone knows a pick-up line is nonsense, but it's the thought that counts, and the less thinking the better - in a certain situation, the conversation is going to happen, or not, and the pick-up line is the "fastest route from A-to-Z" method for figuring it out; street fundraisers seem to apply the same concept ("hey, do you care about starving kids?"). But I don't see this logic applied in many other situations, where the common practice seems to involve adhering strictly to the organization of a five-paragraph essay - introduction, support, conclusion. To put it another way, we don't seem to make much use of the cold open (which might explain why most of us never end up on SNL).

Priya Parker made a specific reference to this question of cold opens in The Art of Gathering, which I've written about a few times on TOA. Parker's suggestion is to use cold opens as a way to strengthen gatherings, with her specific recommendation that the opening is never the right time for logistics - use those first moments instead to connect guests with the purpose of the gathering. This is good advice, but perhaps best reserved for a future when gatherings - or pick-up lines, for that matter - are no longer counted among potential public health violations. Until that happy day, I'm trying to find ways to bring the logic of cold opens into the slow and steady reality of COVID-19.

One specific area I'm working on is right here on TOA - using cold opens in my writing. There's a peculiar problem a writer encounters when the only thing in sight is a blank page, or in my case a white screen with the blinking vertical line - you are overcome by a sudden madness to explain yourself, which leads to famous opening lines such as:

"I read a pretty interesting comment Wayne Rooney made about Sir Alex Ferguson, his manager while at Manchester United (longtime readers may recall I wrote about Ferguson's book at this time last year)."

The above is the opener from this post. I actually thought the post was pretty good, but that first sentence is a bit of a shocker - and I wrote it just two months ago! Honestly, it reads like an excuse, or maybe an apology - I'm sorry, but I'm going to write 500 more words about Manchester United. I'm not sure how I'd rewrite it, but I'd likely consider a way to link the first line to what I was going to say rather than what I was going to write.

I don't think I'm necessarily making progress toward "cold opening" my writing (and it's not always an appropriate tactic) but I know I'll improve soon enough; the nice thing about writing is that once you have a tactical idea in mind, it's hard to do anything except improve - each recurrence of the problem will stand out in the first draft the way a fresh coffee stain broadcasts itself from the collar of a white shirt, or a Manchester United crest sullies a clean jersey. I thought it was a good sign that I revised the first paragraph of last Sunday's essay to open with what I had initially crammed into a footnote - the original opening line was more or less a thesis statement on the misuse of "competitive" in the workplace, but I think it worked better to use a story where I end up becoming the butt of a running joke. It's possible that I'll realize the key to writing a good opening is akin to the advice I followed for writing a good ending - when an ending appears, grab it; I may need to write until I see the beginning, then start.

There is less I can present to the non-writer in my loyal crowd - and on Christmas Day, the occasion of all gift-giving occasions! Is it possible to make any other use of the cold open? I'd suggest, perhaps inappropriately, that today offers a hint - a Christmas gift is a special idea, but there's something a little five-paragraphs about the whole thing, right? The wrapping paper, the pile under the tree, the hints exchanged throughout the fall (or the outright swap of wish lists) - you might as well hire one of Santa's elves, hand him a bugle, and ask him to play a few notes before the ceremony of a Christmas morning; the whole process is overwhelming, and makes it hard to appreciate someone's generosity. So maybe, in the spirit of the cold open, 2021 can be an opportunity for thinking about presenting a gift in a slightly different way, or at a different time, where the pageantry of tradition can be put aside to help giver and receiver connect with the meaning of a gift; it's the thought that counts, and the more thinking the better.

reading eve

I'm in the process of reviewing Erosion, a book I opened with high expectations that ultimately rewarded my confidence; I chose the latter expression with care. The book started slowly - I often closed the work and turned to something different each time I finished an essay. However, I never gave serious consideration to stopping, and after some fits and starts I ended up finding a groove that brought me through the second half of the book at a much faster rate than the first.

I mention this because I think my experience adds an unusual but important perspective to common reading advice - you should give up on a book if it doesn't grab you from the start. I don't disagree with it at all, in fact I think this is great advice because I suspect a lot of people stick with dull books for too long, which is both a waste of time and a possible deterrent to future reading, but I also worry about those great works that are tossed aside because of a few sluggish pages at the beginning. My suggestion for those who like to sample the early pages before committing is to add a small research element first - just a few minutes should be enough time to get a sense of the book before you start - because from my experience books with uncommonly positive receptions tend to live up to the billing, but accolades don't insure against a slow start. It's a bit like having to look at a resume before bringing candidates in for interviews - if you have a good sense of underlying qualifications, you'll make better assessments of what you see once you start the actual process.

leftovers #2 - moneyball joe flacco (rule changes)

The pass interference penalty in helmet football is one of the saddest facts about the sport, and that's saying something if you know anything about the game. This is allegedly a macho-man sport, defined by the physicality, determination, and toughness of its players, and for the most part these qualities are on display throughout the contest. But if the football is in the air... don't you dare touch anyone... or the wide receiver will throw a temper tantrum on the field (and in the digital age, follow up on social media as well). 

Why not revise the rule so that the passing game is governed by the same rules that apply to linemen? Pushing, shoving, anything except holding - and don't forget this would go both ways, meaning it wouldn't strictly benefit defenders. I'm not here to guarantee it would improve the sport, but I'd like to see it given a trial at some point - there's no need for helmet football to reserve a specific portion of its rulebook to sanction physicality that is common to the basketball court, soccer field, or local tourist trap.

reading review - the oblivion seekers

Longtime readers may recognize this work, which I read and reviewed back in 2018. I highlighted "Outside" and "Criminal" at the time as my favorite pieces and those were once again among my top choices; I also added "Achoura" and "Penciled Notes" after this rereading. I've included brief comments about these chapters in my book notes alongside the usual list of insights and observations. 

The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt (December 2019)

The theme in this short collection - to the extent that these loosely connected vignettes can be said to have such a focus - is a meditation on justice. Eberhardt examines this idea in the context of organizing society by right, suggesting for example that bread should belong first to the hungry, but she also sees the issue from a human perspective, pointing out the pain of having to ask for or claim the things we feel are due to us; once again, her note that the illiterate are still expected to follow written law comes to mind (1). There are also occasional complaints in The Oblivion Seekers about the injustice of the general human condition, such as how a disease of old age means the cure offers no relief to the patient - again, I felt the sense of deep resignation at being forced into accepting the outsized punishment for living beyond one's allotted time and space.

My sense is that the overwhelming injustice in the world can have a debilitating effect on certain types of people because it puts them in the position of being able to do little more than offer feeble acknowledgements of the situation. Gradually, the future starts to look a lot like the past, and the promise of life fades into indifference. Eberhardt's legacy reads something like a tragic struggle against this destiny (posthumously, she is viewed as an advocate of decolonization) and it suggests an optimistic interpretation of a work like The Oblivion Seekers - those feeble acknowledgements, if made with authenticity and regularity from the roots of the soul, have the potential to change the world.

Footnotes

1) Readers curious about why I returned so quickly to this book may wish to return to this post, where I described the process that led me to include The Oblivion Seekers on my rereading list last December. For those interested, the story I misremembered as being in The Prophet was "Criminal".

leftovers #2 - the art of gathering (square tables)

The Art of Gathering was light on advice for the casual get-together, but I did note a couple of ideas that may be of interest for contexts outside the business world. The most interesting comment was that tables should be arranged to prevent "leak"; four people should sit in a square, never in two rows. I also liked the recommendation to create mutually helpful dynamics, with one specific tactic being a prohibition against self-service at the dining table - either have people serve each other, or put one person in charge of each item on the table.

the business bro's competitive myth

One of the legendary stories about me (if you will indulge me for a moment) goes back to my early days managing a team at my first job. One day, I walked into a team meeting and essentially accused three of my most competitive people of being uncompetitive. This went over about as well as gifting a globe to a flat earth conspiracy theorist, but on the bright side it's made for a pretty good story - let's just say I think I've been asked "Hey Tim, do you think I'm competitive?" more than a couple of times over the past few years (1). The outrage was a good response at the time (and, I think, the teasing callback is a good response now) because one of the great Business Bro virtues is competition - we want to be competitors, forever winners with our ideas, grit, and culture; we want to join competitive teams, and define our successes as a result of a competitive mentality. Simply put, we all want to be winners, but how can you win, in any sense of the word, without being competitive? The question for leaders, for Business Bros of all levels, is how to find that competitive spirit and harness it to lead the team, competitively, to victory.

On that day a few years ago, I had realized after some time that my team had a problem with competitiveness, though it wasn't strictly a lack of the quality that was the problem. I first noticed this after I started interacting with the team more often outside of work, where I was surprised to see highly and almost pointlessly competitive individuals emerge from their daily nine-to-five hibernation. Whenever I spent time with them in casual settings, I always sensed the will to win simmering under the surface, with the most competitive of the group seeming to suffer from an allergy to losing - it was like they had wagered their entire existence on the outcome of any game, and would therefore commit all of their energy and determination to achieving victory at the dart board, Skee-ball machine, or bar trivia night. The team was full of unique individuals but this burning desire to win was one of the few consistent qualities among them, clear to anyone at any time with one exception - in the workplace. When the bright lights of the office came on, it was like the stage was suddenly just a little too intimidating for them to dive fully into the competitive possibilities of their roles.

I didn't consider this a huge issue, but I was a little curious about the phenomenon. What happened at work that scared away competitiveness? What made this innate characteristic disappear in these team members? My limited personal experience helped me relate to the situation - I'd spent most of my first year and a half simply trying to fit in, a process that inadvertently stifled most of my personal strengths; I didn't even try to teach myself programming until year three. There is a particular pressure on new employees - and especially on young or inexperienced ones - to try and perform in accordance to a perception regarding their employer's wishes. Without explicitly being taught, I figured out that it's not advisable to challenge people's assumptions, or at least all of them at once, but this was the inevitable result if I tried things outside the expectation (2). My group was young, which suggested this was a factor - if the organization discouraged competitiveness, the last place to expect open defiance would be in the rookie class.

The organization's stance toward competitiveness was obvious to me from how the CEO described our roster. The company line - we'd hear it every few months or so - reinforced how our "talented" group of employees was central to our success; we hired "talented" people who played to win. This never resonated with me, which at the time I thought was specifically because I had a healthy dose of blue-collar thinking, and I didn't regard "talented" as a positive descriptor; our high school basketball team took pride in the slogan "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard", printing it on our t-shirts, and perhaps this conditioned me to sniff out talented people so I could zip past them when they inevitably became complacent. In my mind, "being talented" wasn't a job quality, it was a coping mechanism that losers relied on to console themselves when I beat them. If our CEO was talking about how "talented" we were, in my mind he was essentially turning us into a passive group, and setting us up for failure.

But even as I rolled my eyes each time our CEO made these proclamations about our "talented" team, I was starting to see the flaws in my mentality and becoming better at expressing the thinking underlying my objections. My fundamental protest to the word was rooted in the effect it had on people; the talented person could thrive as long as complacency was kept at bay, but complacency is a fairly standard feature whenever it's hard to measure success, which is the case for most office environments. The problem in my team, which I'd initially hypothesized was an inability to apply their skills in a workplace context, was actually more of a question about reference points - who were they competing against? At the day-to-day level in almost every business, this is never clear, which is a big reason why most organizations work hard to set goals and create accountability; it's an admission that we can only compete against ourselves. It's easy to be competitive when the scores are announced at the end of each round (or stock prices prominently displayed on a blinking ticker board) but learning to push the person in the mirror to a higher standard every day is a different matter; self-competition is the inevitable conclusion of an evolving competitive mentality.

Our company was no different in this regard and set goals as part of a performance improvement process. This presented a fresh set of questions for me, namely the concern that I'd never responded to goals. My opposition to goals isn't as strong (or strongly held) as my reaction to being called "talented", but it does share some similarities. The most significant parallel was the way it was rooted in experience - I'd done perfectly fine by simply trying to get a little better each day and saw no need to invent measurements and timelines to market the process; the first year I read over eighty books, I learned of it the next year, when I went back and counted - at no point had I announced an annual target.

I was open to the possibility that others might respond better to external signposts like goals, but I only seemed to notice instances of team members using outside benchmarks to their own detriment. A common occurrence was the noticeable way energy levels would drop anytime we encountered an immovable obstacle that took us off the trajectory for meeting a goal - rather than attack the challenge with a renewed effort, it felt like an inevitable heaviness settled into our thinking and discouraged a second effort. There were also those instances where someone settled for an inferior performance by justifying it against the benchmark of a lesser colleague, a problem so pervasive that our president once asked me to help out in another department's training because he thought the trainer (who had just announced his resignation) would set an abysmally low standard - his own - while onboarding his replacements.

At the root of the problem was a widespread belief that the organization was simply incapable of meaningful change, a founding myth reinforced by the old guard who told one too many stories of false dawns promising change and innovation - the inevitable arc of these failures had convinced us that the status quo was a permanent feature of the organization. This is a hard, serious problem that most people encounter throughout their careers, and there is no easy solution. However, in my mind the first step toward progress is dispelling the notion that unless things are visibly changing, things are never going to change - the best way to instill this belief is directing the emphasis of the competitive spirit inward, toward the self, which is always the starting point in any change process, and encouraging a mentality that measures an individual's growth against a personal, internal reference point.

I'd like to say that, armed with this ever-accumulating insight, I marched around the office and instilled a sense of internal motivation in each and every person over whom I had even the tiniest influence. It certainly feels about the time for it in this essay, at least by the terms of the "problem-struggle-insight-solution" storytelling model favored by all those chattering Business Bros whenever they share an anecdote from the front lines. I will admit that I did try one or two things in a group context - including that cringe-worthy story at the top - but I learned quickly from the initial stumbles and refocused my efforts to individual meetings, where I could speak more plainly about struggles, challenges, and opportunities specific to each person (2). The change, like any lasting transformation, was a grinding process full of starts and stops, but I like to think shifting the competitive mentality from an external to internal focus had a lasting effect, both for the organization and for individual careers.

******

The idea of competitiveness is a healthy one when understood in all its diversity. The obvious kind is the one we see, which anyone can talk about - the will to win, the fiery attitude, the desire and passion and energy coming together in the most visible way on the journey to victory. This is the competitiveness that sees sprinters blast off with the starting pistol, running as hard as possible to the finish until they collapse dramatically in a spent mess after winning the race; we know it because we see it in all forms of competition. But the less obvious version escapes most novices, most likely because it's never visible - it's the form of competitiveness where you study, train, and commit to a winning lifestyle, so that when the starting pistol goes off you are one of the runners with a chance. It's competing at midnight, when you review it one last time; it's competing at the grocery store, when you break a cycle and step toward nutrition; it's competing in the mirror, when you call out your own lies and rebuild from the exposed truth.

The thing that makes success isn't the competitiveness of wanting to beat opponents when you see them at the race - it's the competitiveness to beat them when you don't see them; it's competing in each of those long, lonely hours of preparation, which are a prerequisite to reaching your potential on the big day. The reality is that most people, whether they see themselves as competitive or not, don't have this understanding and don't compete with their habits, routines, and lifestyles; leadership means taking responsibility for instilling this mentality and setting people on the path that will take them to their full potential.

Footnotes

1) The problem with being a manager is that you don't really remember the things you say to your team - for me, the recall period lasts around fifteen minutes - but your team will somehow corral each and every syllable that flees your pompous lips. Actually, I should revise that - your team will forget all the smart things you say, but if anything dumb gets out there prepare for total recall.

There's another similar story (which I will not write about, beyond this footnote) a couple of folks from this team like to tell about the day I (apparently) asked a new hire "does a tree ever stop giving shade"? I believe this happened, but don't ask me about it.

2) This changed for me as I got older - I realized how the downside was essentially a small investment that, despite sometimes flopping, would pay off handsomely in the long-term. This doesn't necessarily make it an easier process, but it was helpful perspective for me anytime I came to that thin line between cog and contributor.

Of course, for young people - as I was in those first couple of years after college - this isn't a realistic way to think about the world. The big problem is that first jobs are almost always "cog" situations - the employee accepts a job despite being mostly the same as the other candidates. In these roles, there just isn't much room for defying expectations. I'd tentatively suggest traditional first jobs are a good idea for young people committed to being part of a certain industry, but for anyone else it might not be worth the hassle - better off trying to find a "contributor" situation, where value isn't so closely aligned with fulfilling a job description.

stopping new year's resolutions

The average person can get a recommendation about anything, from anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Do this! Eat that! Read this! But I'm realizing as I get older that such recommendations are often just another example of talk being cheap. I'm curious if the quality of advice in my life would improve if I limited recommendations to negative comments - don't do this! Don't eat that! Don't read this! People don't seem to know what they like, but they definitely know what they hate; it doesn't guarantee good advice, but it improves the odds.

So, what's my great advice for today? Well, in the past I've said - don't make New Year's Resolutions - but that won't work, will it? So let's try it a little differently - make a list of things to stop doing. We don't really know what will work, but we know what's wrong.

leftovers - moneyball joe flacco (businessman sense)

If I were forced to write a column in the style of "Donald Trump's election revealed ___ about the American electorate", I would most likely fill in the blank with something like "an inability to identify a good businessman" (1). I drifted toward this idea at the end of "Moneyball Joe Flacco", wondering if the efficiency fetish that is built into free-market thinking has come at this irretrievable cost, but I stayed away from it after deciding that, much like my other Big Ideas, this one likely applied to few rather than most, at best.

Still, there is something to think about in the discarded idea. If a big chain moves into a community and wipes out a few of the smaller businesses, those business owners move on to something else. Even if the new businesses create enough new jobs to offset the first-order economic effect - perhaps they are able to employ some of those aforementioned (now former) owners - the result of centralizing the economy around the big-money winners surely has some slow-moving, long-lasting consequence. At the very least, it decreases the diversity of business owners from a strictly mathematical perspective - instead of a cohort of small business owners who are embedded in the local community, there is the one person in charge of the big business who often sits in some far-flung headquarters; the neighbor who might have otherwise been an entrepreneur becomes a middle manager. Over time, the average American - who makes up a majority of the electorate - is going to reinforce a certain idea of what a successful business person looks like, acts like, talks like, simply by association with the sort of person who they see "succeeding" in their own community, who they never actually see in the community; he's on TV.

Footnotes

1) I generally disagree out of hand with this type of statement - I tend to think most of these so-called "revelations" were obvious to anyone who thought carefully about the issue prior to the "revealing" event; I include the thought presented in this essay among them.

reading review - i shall not hate

Izzeldin Abuelaish's autobiographical work was written shortly after three of his daughters were killed by Israeli shells during the Gaza War - a tragedy the Palestinian doctor described live on-air for Israeli television audiences. The book, as I noted back in September, goes into significant detail about his life and career leading up to that moment; it is nothing short of an incredible tale, and I Shall Not Hate is worthy of its many accolades. Abuelaish has not written any books since this first publication but he continues to write new chapters in his life story through his work with the Daughters for Life Foundation, which he established in memory of his daughters.

I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish (September 2020)

As mentioned, I felt I Shall Not Hate was a remarkable story but it was in hindsight a little light on the kinds of insights I enjoy highlighting in TOA reading reviews. There are commentaries on anger, forgiveness, poverty, problem-solving, and human nature scattered throughout my book notes, but these do not represent its essence - rather, this work is simply a thorough account of how a life's journey has informed the author's unexpected, inspiring worldview. Abuelaish's perspective is perhaps best summarized in his thought that medicine has a humanitarian role whenever caring is given the same emphasis as curing, or in the insight that healthcare is one tool to improve relations among groups of people for the way ensuring equal access is a swift way to break down barriers.

TOA Rating: Three stethoscopes out of four.

proper corona admin, vol 93 - vaccines (leftovers - cribsheet)

Emily Oster included a few comments about vaccines in Cribsheet that I thought might be of interest given the current state of world affairs. First, she notes that vaccination rates tend to go down in areas with more education, indirectly addressing a perception about the types of people who oppose them. This may be due to the origin of the anti-vaccination movement, which she traces to a deliberately misleading paper published by a since-discredited doctor - the purpose of the work was to build a case for a lawsuit against manufacturers, but to me it seems the effect was to rubber-stamp a fringe idea. The government may have unwittingly lent credibility to these (and similar) theories when they protected companies from vaccine-related lawsuits - some felt this was an admission that errors were commonplace.

A good way to frame the opposing point of view is to note that although side effects from approved vaccines are exceedingly rare, the possibility of vaccine harm generally far outweighs the known debilitations of the disease. In the case of COVID, the death toll should speak for itself, but there are also concerns about the long-term effects on respiratory function for its survivors that should contextualize any downside effects of a vaccine. It's also important to note that the most significant problems - catastrophic side effects, if you will - are often observed in the first few weeks of a vaccine being administered; we're past this mark for most of the COVID vaccines currently under trial (1).

But the best argument for a vaccine is one Oster presents in her book - there are people restricted by disease or immune deficiencies who cannot get vaccinated. When I hear it like this, I recognize that my own apprehension about a fast-tracked vaccine isn't particularly relevant in the context of how I see a certain obligation healthy people have to their less fortunate peers. It's vital for each of us to think individually - there is no other way to think, really - but with rare exceptions, it's critical to remember that our thinking should always take a backseat to communal action.

Footnotes

1) I pulled this note from How to Vaccinate the World, a BBC podcast series hosted by longtime TOA favorite Tim Harford. I'd recommend it to anyone who is currently wasting time scouring news sites for vaccine information.

reading review - eating the sun

This collection of short meditations, each accompanied by the author's illustrations, explores various scientific phenomena that contextualize the just-enough space we occupy in a vast, unknowable universe. I learned plenty from this book - for example, that in 1582 the ten days spanning October 5 through October 14 were skipped to bring the new Gregorian calendar close to a "perfect" year - but for the most part Eating the Sun makes the reader reflect, quietly, about the wonders in the world around us; I've pulled my favorite such thoughts into my book notes.

Eating the Sun by Ella Frances Sanders (November 2019)

Longtime readers will recognize Sanders as the author of Lost In Translation, a book I've written about several (hundred) times over the short history of TOA. Eating the Sun has enough similarities, mostly in the way it focuses on the observable aspects of each topic, but Sanders also takes a few opportunities to inject her own perspective into the writing - one example is the note that despite some people being wrong about the Earth being perfectly flat while others were wrong about it being perfectly spherical, the people who see these groups as being equally wrong are perhaps the most wrong of all. This idea isn't necessarily "right" - in fact, you may think it's the most wrong of all - but it's vital because it speaks to the larger perspective of science and progress, and therefore life; we move from understanding to understanding, using one as the foundation for the next, while relying on the sheer wonder of existence to keep us open to the only certainty about life - we were wrong before, and we'll be wrong again.

In a broader sense, what I liked most about this book was the way it highlighted the details of scientific law without losing sight of the underlying theory that powered the work. The drawback of science is the way it always gives us a slightly different answer than we'd expected from the question - having asked why, we learn about what, when, where, and how. The thrill of discovery is an intoxicating experience, and can sometimes distract us from the original purpose, but at the end it all comes back to that first question - why? Eating the Sun is one attempt to tie all the answers back to that first question.

TOA Rating: Three calendars out of four.

fear and desperation

I've learned that it's almost impossible to reason with someone who is afraid or desperate. This led me to an odd possibility - does this explanation help someone accept another person's political views? Is the way to understand a Trump supporter a question of recognizing a sense of desperation, much in the same way that person might understand me by relating to my fear?

The problem is that this is almost an attack on democracy; the concept, perhaps illusory, is that empowered voters exercise free will to direct the course of government. But can someone ruled by fear or desperation live up to such a standard? The extent to which parties already leverage fear and desperation keeps power concentrated in the crumbling pillars of the status quo; I worry - no, I fear - that any goodwill effort to expose these feelings may only serve to further undermine a buckling institution.

proper corona admin, vol 92 - how long

It's 7:37 on a Saturday night, and not just any Saturday night - I'm talking about yesterday, assuming of course that you are reading this today, as in the day I've published it. If it seems unusual to you that I'm writing so close to the posting day, well, I'm in an unusual position, dear reader - I have nothing. This isn't for a lack of effort - I've been working out my thoughts on certain aspects of comedy, inspired by two of Dave Chappelle's 2020 performances - but for whatever reason I wasn't able to get it quite ready for the small-time primetime of TOA Sunday. So, here we are.

The silver lining is that I have a golden opportunity to answer one of my most common TOA-related questions - how long does it take to write a post? The question, well-intended though it might be, suffers from the common error that a simple question merits a simple answer, at least in process terms - shouldn't I be able to assign each minute of these endless days to some task, the entire allocation rounding out to an even twenty-four hours, then report the exact proportion of TOA time? The problem is that nothing is ever so straightforward - even this post, which I've claimed started at 7:37 (twelve minutes ago) was preceded by some thinking beforehand, which occurred as I separated salmon from the baking sheet. So did I really start at 7:37, or was it a few minutes earlier? You don't need to ask me; it's up to you.

The challenge for determining any duration, whether it be for writing or anything else, always comes back to the question of what we actually mean when we ask - how long? Do you want to know how long I've been typing, how long I've been thinking, or is it something else? The catch is, when I'm asked this question - how long? - the only thing I'm sure of is that my answer doesn't matter. The process of writing, I'd argue, should at least acknowledge that some part of the work is already done before the first word finds its place on the page, but this is hardly the universal perspective - it doesn't square up with the way I perceive most people think about duration, which is rooted almost entirely in a protagonist's definition of action. If you aren't sure what I mean, spend some time tomorrow (safely) asking people how long the pandemic has lasted - you'll almost certainly get a starting point centric to the first disruption in that person's "normal life". If you follow up and ask about the possible ending, you'll likely notice a similar loyalty to the standard of "normal life" built into the response; the pandemic will end when "normal life" has resumed. The way we think about how long, despite the occasional token effort to do otherwise, seems unlikely to move away from this construction that places each individual on the center stage of his or her life, where any attempt at introspection is framed by a series of actions or interactions; the inner life and all its components - hopes, dreams, expectations - play at best a bit-part role.

This fully understandable approach to life is what I fear holds us back from reaching our potential - by defining experience within the sequence of encounters with the world around us, we become unknowingly limited by the chance and circumstance of our surroundings while neglecting the unique perspective of essence and presence. Is it possible that the difficult situation created by the pandemic - where almost all of us are entirely powerless as individuals to make a meaningful difference to these overwhelming circumstances - is partly exacerbated by our insistence on explaining ourselves in terms of an actor playing the starring role in life's eternal drama, which leaves no room for the life of the mind? I'd say, as I noted above, that this might be a problem worth the difficult task of honest self-reflection because it gives us the capability of separating what's happened to us from what's happened because of us; we can look forward in the same way and thrive in the reality of the moment. For some of us, it will become clear that the pandemic started well before March 2020, perhaps by as much as months or even years, thanks to a commitment to certain routines, identities, or delusions that plotted us on the isolating path of self-imposed exile; for others, we'll see the situation was over almost as soon as it began, the new requirements of pandemic life proving the ripest opportunity to welcome a new pet, explore a new hobby, or rewrite the final chapter in long-lost connections and relationships.

How long do I think the pandemic will last? The possible answers are endless. I'm tempted to say it will last as long as this post - it will last until it ends, taking up all the time it needs. It could be that the pandemic will end when everyone is vaccinated, or when enough people are vaccinated, or when all the vaccines are gone. It's possible it might end, then return, in a part two that some would insist was really still a part of the original pandemic. But the real answer is that I'm not sure why you'd ask me, since you'll probably disagree with any and all of my answers. How long does anything last when our hearts and minds are at the center stage of everything? You'll certainly disagree with my real answer, which is that I think it ended a couple of weeks ago, at the exact moment I let go of some unhealthy ideas. Maybe the best answer is just what you need to hear - you don't need to ask me; it's up to you.

Endnote

It's 8:07 now - five minutes of proofreading, five more for some basic admin, and that should do the trick. Maybe I should call this post "Forty", though of course it'd have nothing to do with the time.

Endnote #2

With apologies, I came back for a little more editing, which expanded into some serious renovations. Just remember, reader, whatever I say about how long it takes to write these, multiply the answer by 1.5.

proper corona admin, vol 91 - second place theory (leftovers - the art of gathering)

One of Priya Parker's best recommendations in The Art of Gathering is to use environment changes, and she lists various ways in which this tactic is helpful - switching rooms, for example, can be a subtle, soft last call, providing guests an opening to exit without pressuring those who are staying. This speaks to a broader idea that the size of the room is critical for the gathering's success - it's so important that organizers should improvise if necessary to harness this effect, such as by deputizing everyday objects to serve as makeshift barriers that enclose a meeting space.

I've thought about similar ideas for over a decade. In college, I cooked up an idea I called "second place theory" - interesting things happen in a second place. It's not a special idea - bar crawls have leaned on this concept for all of history, and many wedding celebrations take the party through multiple rooms. The interesting consequence is that this tactic, although helpful in the moment, is more useful for memory - we seem to remember an event better if it happens in multiple segments across many sublocations. Tim Harford made the same point this summer in a (memorable) opinion piece for The Financial Times, suggesting that the days of COVID-induced lockdowns tended to blur together because most of us limited ourselves to the home environment. As this pandemic drags on, I've started to notice that more people are settling into that kind of routine in their version of COVID life. This is perfectly logical - the pandemic disrupted routines in every sense of the word, so it's natural that we instinctively sought out new habits and patterns around which to orient this bizarre life. But is this a healthy tendency?

What's suggested in Harford's column or Parker's book is a partial refutation, expressed in terms of a hidden cost - the benefit of any activity is risked whenever it's tied to a specific location or environment. The thing I couldn't articulate about second place theory all those years ago was that it applied far beyond the context of a night out. I'm remembering now that I rarely studied in the same place for more than two or three weeks in a row - I wonder if I recognized that part of my academic success was taking advantage of the cognitive strengths Harford cites in his column, or the trends Parker noticed over the course of her career as a gathering facilitator. Keeping in mind the ever-present caveat that I'm no expert, I'll offer a suggestion to anyone struggling with the drudgery of the current situation, or growing weary of the sensation that the days are blurring together - the first place to look for a solution is likely a second place, even if it means facing a different wall in your room as you work or taking your daily walk on the other side of the street; interesting things happen in a second place.

leftovers #2 - it's better than it looks

The concept from It's Better Than It Looks that best exemplified Gregg Easterbrook's style was a comment that in some cases buying a country would have been cheaper than attacking it with a military. Perfectly logical, but totally implausible - who would you buy it from?

The idea that computer models can only produce conclusions baked into the program was one that I thought about constantly in the year after reading this book. Advances in computing may limit the strength of this statement in the future to "mostly true" but in 2020 it's probably a good enough rule of thumb. I'll add that most people who build models predicting the future aren't good enough at it - I don't mention this dismissively, but rather as a reminder that predicting the future is almost impossible; predictions made in 1980 about life today likely didn't account for the internet.

reading review - cribsheet

Let's have a closer look today at Cribsheet, a book I mentioned in passing back in May in a context tangentially related to the main idea of this work, which is how to use data to inform the parenting of young children. It's not to be confused with a "how-to" guide, however, for despite the occasional straightforward remark like "data says swaddling improves sleep", the difficulty of collecting reliable data for all parenting scenarios prevents the existence of such a book - how do you track cause and effect for incidents like "baby cried"? The most important thing, as Oster hints throughout, is to understand the quality of the data before incorporating it into a decision, which is a point that reemerges constantly within my book notes.

Cribsheet by Emily Oster (February 2020)

The biggest obstacle to having high-quality data in this (or any) field that studies human behavior is that the cause and effect relationship is often confounded by underlying differences that define people's choices. For example, studying the effect of a stay-at-home parent on a child's development is complicated by the ways such a household is fundamentally different from one where both parents work full-time. It's a similar challenge to understand the effect of TV, as homes with a TV differ from those without. The problem with studying various parenting techniques under controlled conditions is that parents cannot be forced into applying any methods with their kids, which means researchers have no choice but to allow subjects to determine their own degree of involvement and commitment to the study; the fact of choice always has an immeasurable bias in the result. The same applies in any study where a control group is recruited, or participants must self-report their findings - again, the decisions made by the participants compromise the standards of the randomized control study.

This does not rule out the possibility of gleaning productive insights from data analysis. One specific recommendation I loved was to rely on distribution information about infant weight loss to better contextualize what might otherwise be alarming changes in those first few days. It speaks to the power of disaggregated data to help people relate across their differences - in this case, parents redefine their standard for "alarming weight loss" so that they can care for their infants. Disaggregation is a regular theme in Cribsheet, appearing in sections about breastfeeding (locations with poor water supplies should always encourage breastfeeding, since alternatives would involve direct use of that water) or reading (children who are read to don't see additional gains in other areas like math when compared to those who were not read to yet received a similar amount of attention, suggesting something specifically important about reading).

The ideas I'm likely to remember best are those I'd categorize as informed hunches, which seem to come not from the data but rather the wisdom of the aggregated experiences across a countless number of parents - that consistency is a critical factor in sleep training, for example, or that interactive reading (asking open-ended questions as you go) is a productive way to read to children. I also liked the note that repeated exposure is a helpful way to get children used to new foods as well as the observation that discussion rarely improves a child's behavior. Of course, as I look over these one last time, I'm struck by an odd realization - these all apply to adults, in varying degrees; perhaps we can all benefit in some ways from Cribsheet, regardless of our parenting status. 

TOA Rating: Three cribs out of four.

reading review - the lottery and other stories

As I noted last month, I picked up this Shirley Jackson collection after Benjamin Dreyer's effusive praise of her in Dreyer's English. The title story was one among many that I reread from this work - others included "The Renegade", "After You, My Dear Alphonse", and "The Dummy"; the best of all in my opinion was "Seven Types of Ambiguity".

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson (September 2020)

Not much in my book notes from this one, though browse as much as you'd like; no rush, they'll be there next time.

The general bit of insight I liked the most was that people isolated together by chance tend to interact with a certain version of friendliness - if you require a demonstration, stop by for a visit and wait until I run into a neighbor. But such easily distilled commentaries are rare occurrences in these stories, which for the most part are nothing more than wonderfully-told stories; you are forgiven for wondering why I'm bothering to highlight this fact, but sometimes I forget that sort of thing in my quest to learn something from everything.

TOA Rating: Three dots out of four.

For you trivia buffs out there, the date of the lottery is June 27 - join me for a round of Keno.

reading review - the art of gathering

I can't imagine worse timing for reading this book than during August of The Great Corona Lockdown, when the only gathering I'd seen in months was a bunch of people crowding around a bagpiper on Beacon Hill. A few months later, I understand that there could have been a method to my reading madness - disruption is often the first indicator of opportunity, and I can't think of a more disruptive catalyst in the context of gatherings than the pandemic. When life finally returns to normal we will surely gather together once again, but the time spent in near-isolation will have undone many of our habits and assumptions about how we define success for a gathering - it's an opportunity to rebuild rather than restart, and those with a clear vision will play a critical role in helping their organizations, communities, and social circles get the most out of the time they spend together.

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (August 2020)

Parker is a professional facilitator whose career involves helping clients create meaningful gatherings. Her main idea in The Art of Gathering is that most of us gather without thinking too deeply about it, preferring instead to rely on templates, routines, and norms rather than confronting an important question - why are we gathering? The book generally reads like an informal how-to for us imitators interested in raising this question with our gatherings. I enjoyed the way Parker guided us through her philosophy, liberally supporting her ideas with examples from her career, and I felt that this book would be especially helpful for anyone tasked with designing a gathering in a business setting, though of course her lessons are broadly applicable.

One common consequence of organizing the gathering before defining its purpose is a meeting defined by process, which guarantees nothing about achieving an objective. I'm sure almost anyone can relate to this thought from personal experience, particularly with recurring meetings and their highly predictable processes; Parker regularly notes that routines often become the enemy of great gatherings (1). The advised approach is to instead establish a clear purpose that you can use as a benchmark to ruthlessly reject any idea that doesn't bring the gathering closer to achieving its objective. Parker offers various tactics to help readers translate this idea into action, but perhaps the most immediately helpful is her broad guideline for determining meeting size based on the objective - eight to twelve for a lively and inclusive discussion (with new blood, if possible, for its invigorating effect on conversation) but slightly fewer if a decision is necessary.

Some of her broader recommendations will prove invaluable in all kinds of contexts. Parker encourages asking speakers to share experiences rather than ideas to help the audience better connect with them, reminding her readers that a good story is never just about what happened, but also about the protagonist's decision. I liked her observation about Barack Obama's technique of sometimes taking questions from a young audience in alternating fashion - boy, girl, boy, and so on - to ensure participation wasn't limited by the social pressures that discourage girls from speaking up in public; this method can be tactfully refitted by a leader in any type of gathering. I also want to highlight Parker's advice to never start or end a gathering with logistical details - it throws away critical opportunities to connect people to the purpose of the gathering. This also speaks to an observation she made about groups in general - the weakest link is never in an individual, but rather in a connection between two members; a facilitator who accepts this reality should have no trouble understanding the importance of constantly seeking ways to connect participants to purpose of the gathering, and thus to each other.

TOA Rating: Three agendas out of four.

Readers interested in what I identified as the most helpful recommendations may enjoy poking through my book notes.

Footnotes

1. Changing culture often means changing routines...

This leads her to make an interesting observation about the role of the recurring meeting during a period of cultural change. An adjustment to the roster, timing, or length of a regular gathering may seem like a small difference on the surface, but the underlying effect is to reinforce the mentality that any and all routines should be given greater scrutiny.

the immortal shadow of death

Why do artists seem to lose something intangible in their work as they get older? I used to write it off as a physical issue until I saw U2 perform in 2018 - certain high notes proved elusive and there was less raw power in comparison to the videos I'd seen of past performances, but they still put on a great show. The new stuff, though, was hard to get excited about, and it's impossible to envision any of their post-2010 albums being considered above average (or should I say median?) by their lofty standards. Age seems to matter but there's more to the drop-off than the physical concern.

A note from U2 by U2 got me thinking about this once again. I wrote down that turning thirty is a kind of turning point for many people - they recognize that their immortality is in the past (I think Bono said it). Reader, I can confirm this notion (1). A constant sense of danger has a certain diminishing effect on life, like going from being the star to a supporting actor halfway through the play. I imagine a sense of immortality makes it easier for an artist to put his or her life through a pencil, paintbrush, or amplifier - if you don't feel at risk, you take more risks. But once you see the shadow of death, it's hard to ignore it, which makes it so difficult to throw yourself into something unrelated. It's no coincidence to me that the best U2 songs of the past decade are the few that seem to deal in some way with these inevitable accumulations of loss, but maybe it's just me; I'm getting older, too.

Endnotes / Footnotes

0) "Boring Bono" was the original title for this one but I soon realized being interesting is different from being interested.

1) This happened for me at around twenty-six, I think, which was really bad timing, but that's another matter. 

moneyball joe flacco

I've liked sports since I was a little boy but not all aspects of those childhood games remain noticeable in today's contests. This is mostly due to a new way of thinking about sports, often summarized as the Moneyball approach, and the transformation it has led in the strategy of baseball, basketball, and soccer; helmet football will almost certainly follow in the footsteps of these other sports, with an emphasis on data-driven analysis likely to be at the forefront of the movement. This would be consistent with the main emphasis of the Moneyball approach thus far as it has always used data as the first step in a comprehensive overhaul of a given sport's thinking, often in terms of player value - basketball teams began coveting outside shooting to maximize the return on good shot selection whereas the catalyst for baseball's shift was a reinterpretation of on-base percentage. If helmet football is to use Moneyball thinking in broadly the same manner as its predecessors, then I expect a similar process will establish a new hierarchy of metrics which will be used to reassess the value of players and strategies.

The metric that ends up being the most valued in the future will have certain characteristics. It will likely focus on scoring rather than defense, because - as the pioneers of these methods have taught us - it's almost always far easier to measure offensive production. I expect it will be hiding in plain sight today, like on-base percentage did in baseball, because the process of convincing skeptics is always eased when the new idea is simple and intuitive - an extension of an existing worldview. It would also need to be the clear cause for any positive effect, as a new intervention tangled with multiple potential causes is nearly impossible to award with sole credit. The immediate idea that came to mind for football was what I'll call "chunk plays", those that cover at least thirty yards, because these are effectively scoring plays - a team in its own half moves into field goal range while a team in its opponent's half will almost surely score a touchdown. But this is already mostly captured by existing metrics - air yards, yards before contact, even just total yards - so any movement centered around this approach would have to leverage a currently uncredited contributor to "chunk plays". I did some thinking about this until I settled on a possible candidate - the skill of forcing defensive pass interference calls on long passes. This candidate makes some sense to me because the penalty is punished in the most lopsided possible way - it's a spot foul, meaning the ball advances to the point of the infraction. A penalty thirty yards downfield, therefore, means a thirty-yard penalty, which pales in contrast to the fifteen-yard penalty for the sport's other major infractions, including delivering an illegal hit to the head. A player with a known ability to draw these interference calls - generating a "chunk play" each time - could become the poster boy for a new way of thinking about helmet football.

The most amusing side effect of this change would be the hindsight effect on how players from the past and present are assessed by future generations. Take Joe Flacco, for example, a successful quarterback who despite his enormous contract was never quite considered an equal among the other elite players at his position. One of his unusual strengths is drawing pass interference penalties on long passes (and you can dig out some good stuff online where others highlight this skill, particularly ahead of the 2015 AFC Divisional Round against New England). Flacco, it seems, was always among the league leaders in this undervalued metric, but he doesn't seem to have spawned any imitators in the way that Michael Vick did with his rushing skills from the position. Is the future a place where Canton, Ohio is renamed after Moneyball Joe Flacco? Will JaMarcus Russell's career be described as a failure of tactics by the revisionist historians? Could the NFC East degenerate (further) into weekly clashes featuring hours of attempts to recreate Sergio Aguero's incredible touchdown catch against the Bills? If helmet football strategists reevaluate the role of defensive pass interference in generating "chunk plays", it seems possible, if not entirely plausible.

My speculation is not my wish. A helmet football game, already barely watchable when contested among the lower lights of the NFL, would be a weekly tragedy if it descended into a series of long passes heaved back and forth from end zone to end zone - it would look something like mascots firing souvenirs into the crowd with their t-shirt cannons, but without the excitement. My dystopian vision is based on the hypothetical Moneyball endorsement of pass interference creating "chunk plays", where the offense knows the analytics have concluded that the potential of a penalty call more than offsets the risk of a turnover, which on a long pass isn't much different than a punt anyway. The only catch - and it might be the only catch - is that such a shift in the sport would likely see me join the masses who are smart enough to tune in only for the Super Bowl; the teams, having improved their own chances of winning a given game, would have unwittingly conspired to make the game not worth winning at all.

My wish is something different - a sport that emphasizes the strategic possibilities of involving all eleven players on each play. It might mean three quarterbacks are on the field as often as just one, which would represent an evolution on simmering trends being tentatively stirred by teams such as the New Orleans Saints (and their Taysom Hill experiment). If helmet football is going to change, I'd much prefer this direction, as it would retain and perhaps enhance the best quality of the sport - the way discipline, selflessness, and commitment among teammates demonstrates the possibilities when people work together for a shared goal. I admit that I am no prophet, possessing neither the vision nor the conviction to predict the more likely of these futures, but I have a hunch based on how we use numbers today - we'll move forward with what we call the data-driven approach, but ignore that not all things are easily measured; we'll speak of the gains without stopping to think about the incalculable that is always lost in these equations. Those who have endured the stupefying process of replay review at the end of NBA games or the utterly disorienting ceremony preferred by soccer's VAR will understand my trepidation - in the name of progress, we often regress.

The Moneyball approach, in short, is about efficiency, which I use in a very broad sense, like the way a business owner describes how recent initiatives have increased productivity while decreasing cost; teams with a Moneyball approach are finding ways to hire undervalued players, which gives them a higher return for their salary dollars, increasing efficiency. The issue is that I can extend the business analogy, and I feel I am right to do so, because teams becoming more efficient is having an effect on the sporting event in the same way businesses becoming more efficient is having an effect on the local economy - eventually, all the charming neighborhood storefronts, those "hole in the wall" or "mom and pop" shops that subtly defined the essence of a place, are replaced by one familiar brand or another, who despite being called "chains" seem to have a limited capacity for bringing communities together; it's something I think of anytime I lip-synch the cashiers at the grocery store, who of course have little choice but to read from the corporate script if they wish to keep their jobs.

It's unfair in a sense to blame individual companies for doing everything in their power to win but when the effects of widespread self-interest harm the greater good, it should be like a maiden baking voyage being interrupted by the smoke alarm - "A" for effort, but time for plan B. Unfortunately, the response among governing bodies worldwide is like the equivalent of taking out the batteries to disable the warning device, or just willfully ignoring any unwelcome sounds - they will sit dutifully on their hands while the communities they claim to serve go up in smoke. It's not surprising that sports leagues seem to have imitated the world in which they play their games - teams are doing all they can to win while the leaders in their respective leagues do nothing to offset the negative effect on the product. An NBA game these days will see long stretches of ten people jogging disinterestedly back and forth, pausing every few seconds to change direction at the moment one of the players launches the ball at the hoop from twenty-eight feet away - this is, as you know, the most efficient strategy. But is the result worth two and half hours of my time, or all the money it costs to attend a game? And the NBA suggests diehard fans watch their teams do this up to one hundred times a year!

The lasting legacy of "Moneyball" thinking may not be the way teams innovated decades-old baseball strategies or reevaluated the worth of specific basketball skills - it may be that the custodians entrusted with caring for these sports sat passively on the sidelines while their games slowly drifted toward the abyss, first by becoming boring, then irrelevant; the inevitable extinction will be a relief. The great wonder, as noted above, is that I am still somewhat surprised despite understanding that sports is always a mirror of the society where it plays its games. The legacy of competitors weaponizing efficiency to conquer market share is the untold story of the American economy, and American life - it's untold because we all know it, and because we wake each day to write the next chapter; the retelling would be inefficient. There are locals in every community who talk wistfully about going to the butcher, then the florist, who is of course on the way to the grocer, these tasks concluding just in time to meet the arriving milkman at the front door; I complete a day's errands in about five minutes at Whole Foods, and return home to clamber over a fresh obstacle course of delivery boxes in the foyer. The benefit of efficiency advancements is obvious, as I suspect is true to anyone who remembers the good old days of wasting their time and money, but we've lost something in the exchange; we'll continue to overpay for efficiency as long as we insist the only evidence of value is measurement, and that the only ball in the game of life is made of money.

the mixture of truth and lies

I remember the first analysis I ever heard about the internet - "a mixture of truth and lies" (1). I understood it to mean - on the internet, people will tell the truth or tell lies. This seemed to be a generally accepted rule of thumb for the first decade or so of the technology's widespread use. The concept failed to account for something important, though - oftentimes truth, or at least something widely accepted as true, becomes a lie in the light of new information. The internet seems poorly designed for handling such cases - it's not like there is a special task force taking down webpages as soon as their contents are disproven.

Of course, it's not so simple. There is a gray area where concepts like free speech lurk in the shadows, and I believe leading tech companies reflect a widely shared caution for making the distinction between opinions and lies; Twitter was lauded recently for flagging certain posts with tentative labels, which I read along the lines of "this Tweet, potentially, has some information which is disputed, by some, for possibly being a bit misleading, we think, maybe" (2). But my mockery aside, it might be our best option in the present - with the notable exception of futuristic sites like Wikipedia, which maintains a front of being an encyclopedia by actively culling outdated information, the internet remains more like a photo album than a Christmas card (3).

There are serious ways to further explore this situation but I'd rather consider the way I came to this idea, which was through a much more mundane example - I learned recently that coffee, which I always understood to be a diuretic, was in fact about as hydrating as water. I believed differently for a long time, perhaps close to three decades, but a few unofficial experiments proved the hypothesis - I replaced coffee with water yet saw no change to my morning routine (4). I confirmed my result like any good millennial - I went to Google - where I saw that although the diuretic effect exists, its impact is mild at best and not at all relevant in terms of hydration levels. But I also found plenty of articles making different arguments which led me to a realization - there's (probably) no one out there actively lying about this, but there are plenty of folks who are still mistaken, and many more who had their say years ago when this belief was possibly more commonly accepted; it's not hard to find lies on the internet, but it might be impossible to find a liar.

Footnotes

1) It was from an Animorphs book - #16. This is where I'm supposed to say something like "don't ask me how I remember that" but the truth is that, like anything else, I remember it because it was memorable.

2) I'm tempted to test the algorithm with something like - "Fact: the sky is green" - just to see if Twitter would flag it with something more strongly worded, like - "THIS IS A FUCKING LIE".

3) In the good old days, tomorrow's newspaper could always reset the world by exercising veto power over yesterday's paper. These days, I can write a post declaring "IT'S SATURDAY" and it will remain online for a while, and presumably forever, which gives my eternal audience, depending on the day they read it, a six in seven chance of concluding I'm a liar.

4) In hindsight, it didn't help that I set myself up to be fooled - I always drink coffee early in the day, which made it seem like it was forcing bathroom trips, but as noted above drinking water instead of coffee didn't change my habits. The embarrassing aspect of this revelation is that I should know better - timing is the most common confounding variable but I never applied my academic understanding to the real world.