ACTION NEEDED | confirm email subscription (repeat of June 28 post)

Hello - if you saw this post on Monday, no need to respond - everything below the line is a repeat.

Since I did create the impression of a new post, here's an oldie that I'm sure was on the verge of forever disappearing into the great void of the information superhighway.

******

Hi reader,

I have good news and bad news (it's the same news) - starting as soon as July 1, this automatic email feature will no longer be supported by TOA's RSS management service. I've been experimenting a little in June and I think I have a decent solution for loyal readers.

If you want to continue seeing email notifications for new posts, do one of the following:

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• Do nothing - you'll stop getting these emails in a few days, and you can go back to enjoying your empty existence

In case you are wondering, there is no need to formally unsubscribe from the current email subscription.

My apologies for the sudden reader admin! Hopefully, it's a smooth transition for all interested readers.

Thanks for reading (and responding)!

leftovers #3 - it doesn't have to be crazy at work (managerial tactics)

There is something that's come up across a couple of my previous posts about It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - it's not so much that the leadership directs the staff, but rather that they set the culture which influences the organization. The authors give a memorable example - the best way for the boss to encourage vacations isn't to say "take vacations", it's to just take vacations. It's a reality that often escapes anyone with power - until trust is earned, the team will follow examples rather than follow instructions. 

Despite not strictly being a managerial book, they also mention a couple of insights that I thought would be helpful for any manager. The point that most stories are learned in pieces resonated with me - you get the gist from an email, pull in a couple more details from a conversation, and overhear a bit of gossip in a meeting. This means that a well-informed manager is reflective of someone who is constantly gathering information. They also add that the time to switch from collecting information to asking questions is when the time is right to act on the answer. I liked the reminder that the best type of question focuses on the specific - rather than asking "how can we do better?", ask "how can we help you do X?"

To put it another way, a good manager finds ways to collect information and acts on it at the appropriate time. This is best accomplished with a proactive approach. The worst idea of all is to remind the team that "the door is always open", implying that its the team's responsibility to share information. The intention is good, but it's rare for employees to storm into the manager's office with a long list of new issues. (This restraint could be for completely plausible reasons, such as being too busy with the work to take advantage of the open door policy.) This will limit the scope of collected information to whatever the team sees as relevant, which neglects any perspective unique to the manager. If the door is open, then walk through it and take the initiative with the team!

ACTION NEEDED | confirm email subscription

Hi reader,

I have good news and bad news (it's the same news) - starting as soon as July 1, this automatic email feature will no longer be supported by TOA's RSS management service. I've been experimenting a little in June and I think I have a decent solution for loyal readers.

If you want to continue seeing email notifications for new posts, do one of the following:

• If you are reading this post over email...
• Reply to the email and confirm you'd like to continue receiving emails via subscription

• If you are reading this post on the website...
• Send an email to "admin@trueonaverage.com" and confirm you'd like to sign up for an email subscription (it's FREE, folks)

• If your idea of a funny joke is to sign someone else up for TOA...
• Send their email address to "admin@trueonaverage.com" (makes for a great gift)

• If TOA is an unwanted pestilence in your otherwise idyllic life...
• Do nothing - you'll stop getting these emails in a few days, and you can go back to enjoying your empty existence

In case you are wondering, there is no need to formally unsubscribe from the current email subscription.

My apologies for the sudden reader admin! Hopefully, it's a smooth transition for all interested readers.

Thanks for reading (and responding)!

the mandela effect

I've always been fascinated by the concept of the Mandela effect, which I mentioned in this bizarre 2018 post. For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, it refers to a certain form of collective misremembering, and the effect is named for the fact of those who shared the belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. There is no interesting backstory to further explain this situation - it's simply what they remembered about his death, which happened two-plus decades after he was released from prison.

It leads to a logical question - what makes it possible for so many people to mistakenly remember the same event? Surely, if so many people believe one thing, it's not possible for this to be a coincidence? It's as if a mysterious force has descended onto the planet, infecting our minds one unsuspecting victim at a time, until a necessary critical mass makes it impossible to ignore the illness. But I've been giving this question a bit more thought lately, and I'm starting to think that if you consider the way memory works, then the answer is likely quite mundane.

There are three components to my conclusion. First, as time passes most people seem prone to slowly misremember anything. There is plenty of research that demonstrates this effect, which I often find described as a consequence of storytelling - each time we recall a memory, it's as if we retrieve the moment from storage to relive the moment in conversation or in our own minds, then we restore it for future reference. The problem is that in reliving the memory we subtly alter it, intentionally or otherwise, and it's these changing details that accumulate over time to distinguish the recollection from the original. I've also seen this effect compared to a game of telephone, where an original message is whispered from one person to another until the message iterates into a related but clearly different version of itself. 

The second component is the sheer impossibility of using memory to keep track of everything happening in our lives. I am in front of this laptop, half past three on a humid Saturday afternoon, and I cannot tell you with any precision what I was doing exactly twenty-four hours ago (unless "working" suffices as a response). I believe Nelson Mandela is one of the noteworthy world figures in my lifetime, but I don't expect anyone to carve out space in their own minds to store away the easily searchable facts about his life. What I am saying is not that I understand why people believe Mandela died in the 1980s, but rather that I would understand if someone had no clue about his death. This brings me to my point - whenever I'm not exactly sure about a memory detail, I will consider deferring to someone else; we must help each other remember certain things. It's not hard to imagine a person with a hazy recollection of Mandela's death being prone to misinformation, particularly in the days before everyone had Google on their phones.

The final factor here is scale, particularly in the context of the human race. Reader, we are approaching eight billion people, a figure some project we will reach by 2030. The idea that someone might learn the wrong information from someone else in the way I described above is admittedly a rare hypothetical, but even if it applies to just one in a million people then there will be thousands of cases. I don't toss this number around by accident - the Wikipedia entry suggests the same. It's a lot like how the lottery works, I suppose, in that each time I lose someone else has won. And all along, I live with the truth - I will never win, even though I'm just like the winners. On this crowded little planet there are just enough people to make anything plausible, and there are almost always thousands of people doing just about any inconceivable thing (except reading TOA). We forget these facts at our own risk, introducing the possibility that certain mundane realities about our existence will seem far more incomprehensible at first sight due to the simple fact that we forget our small place within the huge context of the human race.

My fascination with the Mandela effect, after I thought about it, proved to be nothing more than a passing curiosity. Like most things that once caught my attention, there was far less than met the eye about the phenomenon. It's important to remember that we humans are far from perfect, and that most of what we do is made up as we go along. If we put our minds to it, perhaps we could keep things just the way they are, but it's more important to find ways to tell and retell our stories until we can make the future a better place. It's more important to find ways to work together, to forgive each other for our mistakes and find ways to help each other repair past errors, to fill in the gaps when we don't understand, because with so many of us on this planet even the smallest detail can grow into something out of our control. To do otherwise, I suspect, would put us at-risk of repeating certain age-old mistakes - seeking truth rather than what's right, conflating justice with vengeance, forgetting to forgive. I think Mandela's effect, what made his greatness, is that he understood this - we are flawed beings, doing our best to live our stories, stories that we can hardly understand even as they unfold in front of us. He understood that we rely on each other, more so than we ever acknowledge, to keep from forgetting the most important thing - the only way to move toward a better future, where it's possible to win without someone else having to lose, is to move together.

leftovers - intuitive eating (dieting mentality)

Intuitive Eating delivers its message against the dieting mentality by breaking down the science behind rebound weight gain. Most bodies respond to caloric restriction by slowing metabolism and increasing food cravings. This combination will be familiar to those who've felt lethargic before a meal while becoming preoccupied with food. What is less obvious is how the body is also increasing both its tendency to fat creation and its efficiency of calorie burn, two outcomes that run directly counter to the dieter's goals. Finally, they note that the initial weight loss often follows a certain "low-hanging fruit" logic - muscle and water weight are generally the first to go, being easiest to lose, but the weight that comes back is fat, which is the easiest to gain. This process means the rebound from a diet returns the body in weight terms to a pre-diet level while altering the composition to reduce the likelihood of future dieting success.

These physical mechanisms are accompanied by an eroding relationship with food. The principles described by Intuitive Eating outline a healthy lifestyle built on the premise that keeping in touch with satiety signals is a prerequisite to cultivating this relationship. A dieter loses touch with these cues because the process becomes entirely driven by thought - what, when, and how to eat - instead of being driven by the body's hunger mechanism. I don’t pretend that I've thus far revealed much new information, if at all - I think even the most committed dieters are familiar with the generally accepted truth that dieting usually doesn’t work, at least in the long-term. And yet, dieting remains ubiquitous, perhaps due to the allure of short-term thinking. The fact gets into the obvious question of why dieting is such a powerful idea. The authors don't dig too far into this question, perhaps feeling that the methods they describe mostly address the matter, but in my mind one disappointment of the book is the way it merely offers an alternative to dieting rather than a meditation on its appeal.

I am willing to offer some guesses. One possibility is that the dieter's relationship with food may feel oppressive, perhaps due to the command-obey structure a dieter accepts about food, which frames those unwanted deviations from the diet as miniature rebellions against the holy decrees of Atkins, paleo, or Weight Watchers. The oppression may also manifest from the way certain products are engineered or marketed to the public, introducing an addictive aspect to eating. These oppressive elements make the drastic action of a diet more appealing than the long-term approach advocated by Intuitive Eating. A related possibility is the role of emotional control - exerting authority over food can be a substitute for the lack of control in a separate area, with the authors citing the way food is often tied closely with emotion to support this claim. There may also be a simpler cost-benefit mechanism involved - why not try a diet for a short time, then switch to the Intuitive Eating approach later? After all, if the diet works then the problem is solved, but if it doesn't work there is plenty of time to work on rebuilding the relationship with food; life is long, and there are always second chances.

As I look over those possibilities, it occurs to me that although I've listed a few decent explanations - characteristics which may broadly apply across the aggregate of all dieters - I haven't really approached anything resembling the appeal of dieting for any individual. Perhaps I am approaching the question from the wrong perspective, or seeking an explanation that doesn't exist. It could be that the right question is not so much the appeal of dieting, but rather its opposite - what makes dieting unappealing to certain people? I think at the core of the answer would be acceptance - those who accept themselves as they are, to me, seem highly unlikely to jump into the next fad diet. There is something of a cycle in this logic - society reinforces certain messages that harm our self-image, which in turn normalize activities like dieting, making outcasts of those who are not actively working toward a specified body ideal while recirculating the notion that the body must always work toward a specific ideal. Is self-acceptance possible in such an environment? It seems like a daunting task, but it's critical because it also happens to be the way to break the cycle - the necessary change is one where people demonstrate acceptance to each other, acknowledging the fundamental absurdity of the dieting mentality, but there is no way to accept others without first cultivating an honest acceptance of the self.

proper corona admin, vol 103 - the science, the problem with following

I often hear about the importance of STEM education - science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - but I'm not sure I can explain the official consensus on why this is a crucial component of education. I suppose part of the challenge for me is my worldview, which is based on having a strong background in these subjects - TOA says, since I studied STEM, of course it's important! To put it another way, I haven't bothered to understand the reasoning because I never required a reason; I take the importance of STEM as a given.

The pandemic experience has reinforced another fact I've long taken for granted, this time concerning the attitude of my fellow Bostonians as well as our immediate neighbors - when it comes to certain questions, we find the experts and follow their science. I've found that this has been a reliable approach throughout much of the pandemic, providing an appropriate basis for educated guesswork on top of a solid foundation of necessary public health guidelines. Again, as I noted above regarding STEM, this is not something I've given much thought; I've always taken for granted the concept of following the science.

But as case numbers dropped over the past couple of months, I've sensed a bit of a wobble in how this is translating into policy. A friend who lives in a nearby town summed it up when he recounted a heated public debate (over Zoom, of course) in which local officials were accused of "inventing their own science". I think there is a good point here - the CDC's springtime recommendation to rollback restrictions for outdoor settings was based not just on the accumulating data regarding the effect of vaccinations but also the long-suspected safety of being outdoors. And yet, in this particular town, the outdoor mask mandate remained in place longer than perhaps any other municipality in the commonwealth.

I sense something of a contradiction. This town is the type of place that I assume would value STEM education, but this recent anecdote suggests that it may also be a place where following the science proved to be a better fit for bumper stickers rather than governing principles. As I thought about this over the past couple of weeks, I realized that much of the problem here is the way I framed the situation. There is a temptation to suggest that the officials were indeed "inventing their own science", but I think they would argue that the matter was more about a dispute over interpreting the science rather than a challenge to the premise of following the science. You could say that the science is hard to follow, but the more precise summary is that the science is never certain, leaving room for interpretation. In a sense, what the situation exposes is a handful of nuances that are being glossed over in a rush to choose sides, with the most important of these being a tendency to conflate science and certainty, particularly whenever we invoke the idea of following the science.

The problem is that when we talk about following the science in the abstract, we do so with the conviction that a certain combination of elements such as intellect, data, and methodology will point us to the right answer for a given question, but in reality we often have to reach a conclusion before the science can reveal the correct answer. The problem is that when town officials commit to following the science, we dismiss the absurdity of describing policy with buzzwords. The problem is that when you think about it, following the science is the easy answer to hard questions, or perhaps the vague answer to precise questions, based on some incredible fantasy that the right answer will always reveal itself just in time, like assuming that the mythical bridge will appear the moment we realize we need to cross it. If it were so easy to follow the science, everyone would do it.

When I put my STEM background in the context of the past fifteen months, I realize that my education was in some ways insufficient preparation for following the science because the coursework was always grounded into a foundation of certainty. Even subjects such as probability - which is in some ways the elementary study of uncertainty - imposed the illusion of certainty through principles such as confidence intervals and p-values. My hazy recollection is that STEM education kept uncertainty out of sight and out of mind until I reached college, and even then it was quite unusual to acknowledge that most of our study operated within a certain margin of error. It may be wise to consider the importance of developing a more intricate curriculum for working with uncertainty, which could address certain common problems - if we are too hasty to impose needless certainty, we risk moving forward with careless assumptions, which are often discovered amidst the rubble of previously inconceivable accidents; if we do not learn how to reach a conclusion despite incomplete information, we risk freezing at the moment of necessary decision, which may explain the prevalence of status quo bias. Somewhere between those two examples is perhaps the most important skill of all - knowing how to incorporate new information into an existing framework of uncertainty, which is the logical progression of going from following the science to leading the science.

One of the many lessons of this pandemic will be the way it reinforced an obvious fact of life - there is only the certainty of uncertainty. The question of how we deal with ambiguity is in some ways the question that has always defined our lives, with the pandemic bringing this fact to new prominence. There is no doubt to me that STEM education is among the most important aspects of ensuring the public can meet this challenge - as I said, I take its importance as a given - because the application of knowledge is often the first step toward dealing with life's various unknowns. But I am curious about how students will learn the complimentary skills to supplement STEM's technical foundation, particularly in terms of leading through uncertainty. There is only so much value in knowing how to build a bridge, and of course there is little purpose to it if no one goes to the other side. The past year has shown once again that the problem facing science is not about how to best apply its accumulated knowledge, but rather how to move us forward in the face of its perpetual uncertainties. It seems that even the best and brightest in the field, who were able to cook up a vaccine for a disease that didn't exist two years ago, have no answers for seemingly simpler questions like "how can we get this town to understand that there is never going to be enough certainty to ensure perfect health after the end of its outdoor mask mandate?"

Some suggest that our scientific knowledge doubles every decade or so, which is a hopeful observation - the seemingly catastrophic problems on the horizon may have solutions that exceed the reach of today's feeble imaginations. But it's not so hard to imagine a future where we have the solution yet don't use it; I think the scientists have proven a hypothesis or two about certain problems, but the problems persist. It sometimes feels like I am encountering daily variants on the age-old joke - have you heard the one about the country that turned off its brain? It's the one where cigarette companies stay in business, or where elected officials spend their time making it harder to vote. It's the one where people can shoot each other because a bunch of slaveowners once wrote that owning a gun was one of the ten rights. It's not so hard to imagine crashing into a wall some can see from today, thirty years away; the situation would be familiar to me for its resemblance to all I know, the present. It would be a lingering symptom of a society suffering from a peculiar ailment - a preference to follow rather than lead, to value any instruction expired or otherwise that excuses us from the burden of generating a single original thought. It's as if we are collectively unable to see where we are going because we're squinting at yesterday's instructions, remaining loyal to yesterday's ideas, preferring the certainty of the past to the questions of the future. We want to cross bridges when we get there, but we haven't accepted that the bridge won't be there unless we start building. It's as if we forgot that sitting at the world's steering wheel means we need to set the bar a little higher than merely being followers. It's time to have a look around so we can see where we are, figure out where we are going, and commit to leading the way.

leftovers #2 - it doesn't have to be crazy at work (interruptions, meetings)

I've written a couple of recent posts about It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, but it turns out I have a handful of other comments about the book. Let's have a look today at interruptions, which follows closely from the theme of the first leftover, time management. The authors reference interruptions in two ways - the first is the spontaneous sort such as a colleague dropping by (or these days, using chat tools) and the second is the lazily scheduled meeting. The shared consequence of these disruptions is the way they can slice up otherwise unbroken blocks of time. This is a particularly dangerous phenomenon for anyone who requires unbroken time to complete meaningful work. I suppose it could be compared to a baker constantly pulling the bread in and out of the oven, but unlike with bread - if it was baked incorrectly, we can taste the difference - with work it's often unclear in retrospect if the product would have improved with a more focused approach.

There is little, it seems, that can be done by the constantly interrupted individual, and the authors seem to agree - their solutions are at the leadership level of an organization. One possibility is to implement an office hours policy, which would allow each employee to set fixed hours for ad-hoc questions. Another option is to precisely define the necessary conditions for calling a meeting. If possible, the culture should encourage replacing a meeting with a written update or summary, particularly if the topic at hand is more along the lines of delivering news rather than completing work. As noted in the past on TOA, there are two good times for a meeting. The first is when it's unclear how the work will get done; the purpose is to make a decision. The second is to discuss issues that do not come up naturally during the workweek, which I feel requires the unstructured nature of a recurring conversation.

reading review - intuitive eating

At long last, after a handful of prior mentions on TOA I have finally pulled together a reading review (or two) for Intuitive Eating, a June 2019 read. The premise of the book is that healthy eating is a matter of honoring hunger by respecting the body's signals. It's a very simple idea, and one that on the surface appears to lack any new information, but for some reason the message in book form allowed it to finally resonate with me. This fact suggests that there is more than meets the eye about this book, which somehow convinced me to change my mind yet again regarding the best approach to nutrition and, more broadly speaking, the way I listened to my body.

Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch (June 2019)

My response to Intuitive Eating may simply have been due to the fact of a job, whose generous food and drink options had influenced certain eating habits  - I would have oatmeal in mid-morning, a snack or two in the afternoon, and a beer in the company kitchen at the end of the day. The formation of these habits was a surprise to me - I would have told you before taking the job that I was immune to such nonsense - but perhaps being under the influence of these routines left me open to the book's emphasis on recognizing and responding to hunger signals. There is more than just workplace habits that can take us out of a healthy eating mindset. Factors such as time of the day, social occasion, or mere boredom are all familiar to me as causal events for eating decisions. Intuitive Eating stresses the importance of finding a way to access our body's signals in these situations, taking a moment to honestly assess our hunger before making a decision about eating.

The book also discusses the danger of allowing certain health guidelines to become their own form of restriction. I think this point underscores one of the book's themes - Intuitive Eating suggests that the dieting mentality is a constant threat to any healthy relationship with food. Even if we are guided by the principles of health food, a diet is a diet, which means we as eaters are choosing to follow orders rather than listen to our body's signals. The way the authors see it, we are naturally equipped to instinctively make healthy decisions, which means rejecting the premises of the dieting mentality - eating specific foods, dining at preset times, earning the right to indulge after exercise, and so on.

This anti-dieting message, which I may cover in more detail in a later post, is likely the aspect of the book that will generate the most resistance among reluctant readers. I think it's critical to keep in mind that researchers rarely support the claims of most diets. Intuitive Eating patiently explains the harm people do to themselves through dieting, noting the ways the mind and body are altered by the constant state of low-grade starvation "achieved" in dieting. The book convinced me to shelve my intermittent fasting routine, a decision that created certain inconsistencies with my previous praise for the method, but I've been happy with the results. I find that occasional short fasts are helpful, but nothing more (and that's assuming I've both overindulged the night before and woke up with no interest in eating breakfast). The difference in how I saw it before I read Intuitive Eating is this critical distinction - these days, I turn to my body instead of my brain to make my eating decisions, and I feel it's making a difference for me in terms of how I relate to food.

I have noticed the way this pattern of thinking has appeared in other parts of my life. Longtime TOA readers will know of my running habit, which has always been defined by mileage rather than sanity. I suspect that applying the principles of Intuitive Eating at the table prepared me to make intelligent decisions while out for a run - when to cut it short, when to take a day off, and so on. It may have also influenced my decision to sit on the floor - the way my legs felt after sitting on the couch or in a chair suggested that my seating accommodations were at the root of certain issues. There is no doubt that I am in a better position today to identify anxiety responses in my body, which in the past I may have ascribed to other causes such as fatigue, indigestion, or illness. I understand why some will suggest that the main idea of this book - listen to your body's signals - seems almost too simple to merit a book, but my recommendation is to give it a try and see if it can have an effect on your thinking.

TOA Rating: Three cravings out of four.

leftovers - hire like you just beat cancer (relative advantages)

I was doing a little TOA "spring cleaning" a few weeks ago, which mostly involved going through forgotten drafts and determining if any were worth posting this year. For the most part, the drafts proved to be evidence of a certain truism about putting ideas on hold - if the thought is only good enough to be shelved "for later", then it suggests the idea isn't very good. To put it another way, the exercise left my virtual trash bin overflowing with the directionless pomposity of first-draft, first-year TOA.

I'm not sure what shared quality defines the salvaged pieces. Perhaps it could be the simple fact of a remaining connection to my current life, as is the case with today's leftover thoughts from this September 2017 post, which summarized the effect of Hire Like You Just Beat Cancer on the way I thought about my responsibilities as a hiring manager (1). It's still relevant, for example, to make sure my questions rule out hypothetical answers, or to remind myself that it's OK to add another interview round if I remain unsure about a set of candidates. I also liked the thought about the connection between performance assessment and hiring, which implies to me that an organization can improve its hiring results indirectly by improving its performance evaluations (2).

The leftover thought I discovered last week noted that I should write a follow-up about recruiters - it's a good idea to use recruiters if you suspect the in-house effort will not lend you an advantage in the hiring market. I think the thought might be more helpful in reverse - if you want to gain an advantage in the hiring market, invest in the in-house recruiting team. The proliferation of recruiting firms suggests that too many organizations do not feel they can gain a sufficient advantage in the hiring market, though of course I recognize that such a blanket generalization fails to account for the enormous nuance that defines the hiring process.

This thought extends beyond just recruiting. If you are hiring a third-party for contractor work, the rush of seeking out the best option can make us forget that any competitor in the field can hire for the same result. The effect in the medium-term can be a collective cost increase without necessarily resulting in a relative gain. A silly but helpful metaphor is to think about a town's bars all debuting a new draft beer on the same night - more costly for each establishment while doing nothing to influence the relative decision-making of a potential customer.

Footnotes / endnotes

0) Leftovers? Rewinds? I'm confused...

I label a post as a leftover if it follows from the original without necessarily requiring a reread. If I think it's worth going back and reading an old post, I'll call it a rewind.

1) Granted, it's a small sample size...

I read this book so long ago that I actually don't have any notes (though I imagine I weaved some of the thoughts into the manual I use ahead of conducting an interview). I went back to Goodreads to see if anyone else had posted their thoughts and was pleasantly surprised to see a 4.5 rating, which is unusually high for the site (most books seem to land between a 3.5 and 3.7).

1a) Rule #1 - don't break any laws

The sole review of the book cited the potential legal ramifications of following certain strategies described in the book. It raises a great point, and at the very least the above rating seems inflated by the lack of awareness of this concern among the other reviewers.

However, as a hiring manager it's important to remember that transgressions are not excused by clever observations such as "well, this book I read once, with a 4.5 Goodreads rating, it told me to ask this question". The hiring manager is ultimately responsible for knowing the laws and steering the team clear of any violations. My recommendation for books like this is the same as my basic recommendation anytime someone is reading for knowledge - try to learn two or three things from each book, then discard the rest. In the case of Hire Like You Just Beat Cancer, the original post from 2017 highlighted a handful of things I learned and applied to my work, none of which put me in any danger of creating a legal problem for me or my team.

2) The two-way street

This thought raises a question - what are some obvious ways to improve evaluations? The original post suggests an intriguing option - given the finding that some interviewers give harsher evaluations just before lunch, the organization could standardize the time of day managers must use for this task. It could apply a similar line of thinking to interviewing - for a given position, all interviews must take place between certain hours to ensure that these biological factors are not influencing the process.

I'm also reminded here of how I used this information when I was looking for a job (and continue to do, in the context of scheduling any kind of meeting where I may be evaluated in some way) - my request was always for the 1 PM interview. I don't necessarily disagree with the objection that I am gaming the system in some way with this tactic, but in my defense it's a direct result of the way I try to account for every possible factor - if this isn't being captured in the assessment, then at least I'm being indirectly recognized by subtly manipulating the evaluator via my scheduling preferences.

leftovers - it doesn't have to be crazy at work (time management)

I mentioned in my initial post about It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work that the broad message of the book centered on the maintenance work necessary to run a calm company. One of the most important skills they discussed was time management, particularly in the context of the growth-related issues I mentioned last time. The authors suggest that learning how to "say no" is the core skill for good time management because it allows you to constantly refine the best use of the forty hours in each week. They also mention some useful tactics - one example is discouraging Friday deadlines, which may lead to rushed work while potentially forcing teams to work over the weekend if any errors are noticed after releasing the final product. The best deadline, I think, finds the balance of coaxing high-quality work while leaving enough time to work out any last-minute issues.

Experienced workers may note that in some organizations the above considerations are often outside the staff's control. This observation highlights the important role an organization's leadership plays in terms of setting the culture. One consideration is how work ethic is defined within a company - if it's associated with time spent on the job, then the top employees will focus their efforts on accumulating hours. I've learned from my experience that poor design within an organization will often override the clear thinking of most employees - the "whatever it takes" mentality, for example, may have a time and place, but it will never help the team improve their time management skills. Speaking broadly, if the culture of an organization discourages employees from determining the best use of their time, then the employees won't make the best use of their time, making the eventual result somewhat inevitable - the organization will find itself unable to make the best use of its time.

leftovers - the polite something to do (polite advice)

The amusing fact of last Sunday's post is how far the final product drifted from the original idea - there is actually no trace of the genesis anywhere in the essay. My starting point was around four months ago when Charles Barkley appeared on The Bill Simmons Podcast. At about the 26:30 mark, Barkley tells a story about Moses Malone, crediting him as "the most important person in my basketball career". He describes a moment in his rookie year when Malone told him that "you're fat and you're lazy... you're lazy because you're fat" and details the way this conversation became a turning point in his career. The catch, which started the thinking that led to Sunday's post, is what Barkley adds at the end of the story - "I'm proud of myself for listening to him... I'm glad I was smart enough to listen to Moses." He then finishes with a point that a lot of athletes in a similar position to him failed because even though they heard the same advice, they ignored it. 

There is an obvious trace of last week's thoughts in this story - throughout his rookie year, somewhere deep down Barkley believed that he was a great player, and he was willing to do everything necessary to prove himself, including listening to Moses Malone. There is no doubt that this conviction is at the core of any success. The challenge for me as I wrote the post was how to reconcile that last comment, which came off to me not necessarily as arrogant, but as somewhat mistaken regarding the mechanisms behind good advice. Surely, Moses was not the first person to make the point to Barkley. I suspected that the missing piece of Barkley's thinking had to do with overrating the importance of what was said relative to when and how - both the moment and the method of giving advice can be more important than the advice itself. The lingering question following that podcast was why Moses waited until that moment to make his point, or why Barkley waited until that moment to finally accept the advice, but because these considerations took my writing away from the central idea of the eventual post, I cut the thought about Barkley after the first draft.

The topic remained on hold for a few weeks, then I stumbled across two key inspirations - Antonio Conte's dedication to himself and "Something To Do" from Zadie Smith's Intimations. It struck me that arrogance might be the best word to describe the conviction that drives success. The key is to direct this inward, avoiding the superiority complex associated with looking down on others. If we cannot be arrogant enough to try and beat our best, how can we get any better? I liked the way these two examples contained the argument because they seemed to clarify the opposite ends of an otherwise convoluted point - without politeness, Conte's self-dedication framed his arrogance in a negative light, while I concluded from Smith's essay that too much politeness could smother the arrogance necessary for self-improvement. 

What would happen if we changed a detail or two in those examples? Let's start with Conte - suppose everyone associated with Italian soccer believed in him throughout the season. Wouldn't this have made him more polite? I bet his comments last month would have given more credit to his team, which would suggest to others that he was open to accepting help. This would lead observers to offer him more help in the future, which would help him become an even better manager. There is a similar story with the proverbial average Joe who took up a new hobby during the pandemic - suppose he framed it not as "something to do", but as the first step toward achieving mastery of a new craft. I'm not sure what I'd make of a friend suddenly trying to become the greatest baker in world history, but I'd certainly be more likely to tell him if his brownies tasted like chalk. I think, in other words, that if these details were changed, we would all be better off because both Conte and the average Joe would be closer to fulfilling their full potential.

It's staggering to think that the biggest threat to success might be related to politeness - too much or too little, in the wrong moment, could permanently stunt our growth. So how do we know the right timing? I think Barkley's story is instructive. The two players had moved past the point of politeness, their shared recognition being that remaining polite in the moment would sell Barkley short, and this enabled the conversation. Barkley thought it mattered that he listened to Moses, but it may have been more important that Moses knew Barkley wanted to be great; if we are too polite to state our ambition, others won't feel compelled to offer their assistance. And to his credit, Moses told him exactly what he needed to hear; if we are too polite to give others the right support, then we stunt their growth. It becomes a bit of a cycle - the smothered ambition hides the need for support, then the lack of support extinguishes the ambition. Over time, I suspect the buried ambition emerges in unexpected outbursts against others, and these moments of lashing out refuel the cycle by giving them new reason to withhold guidance. The key may be to find a way to use politeness with discretion - relying on it to keep the peace when others aren't ready for the truth, then putting it aside in the key moment when politeness would sell someone short. The key is that using politeness with discretion is the only way we can help each other reach our full potential.

reading clearout - june 2021

Hi,

A few thoughts on books I will not cover in a full review.

The Illustrated Book of Sayings by Ella Frances Sanders (December 2019)

Longtime readers are surely groaning at the latest reference to Sanders, whose Lost In Translation has been the subject of several (hundred) thousand words on TOA. The Illustrated Book of Sayings is a related project, demonstrating the full range of language with its collection of various expressions from around the world. There are certain expressions that I wished were commonplace in English, and perhaps I am guilty as charged for borrowing the Polish saying "not my circus, not my monkeys" in the few weeks after completing this reading. The rewarding aspect of this work is the way it invited me to look at stale expressions, buzzwords, and clichés not as prompts for eye-rolling, but as opportunities for invention. There was, after all, someone in Tibet who first pointed out the phenomenon of giving green answers to blue questions. Why not follow the example and try to add my own colorful contribution to the world of expression? In the meantime, here is my review after my 2018 reading, which lists out a handful of the selections in this book.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (September 2019)

I think it was in a John O'Donohue book where I read that grief is the place where no one can find you, a place for which there is no map. In some ways this book is Didion's effort to chart the territory, but The Year of Magical Thinking is far from a universal guide. It is like Didion herself notes - grief is different for everyone, which means readers are unlikely to find themselves reflected back to them from these pages. The connection is subtler, like deja vu, seeing through Didion's eyes what I think has flashed past my own - the expression on a face weeks after a loss, the unstable way the grieving express themselves, the confusion after those unforgettable moments of forgetfulness. There is much more, I'm sure, but what matters will differ by reader; what I noted is here.

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (January 2021)

I have to open by noting that I thought this was an effective book. The core of The Coaching Habit is a series of seven questions designed to open up productive workplace discussions, and for the most part I thought the framework could be helpful for any reader. If you are interested, I suppose you can check out my book notes. The challenge for me with this work is an unstated assumption - the tools are intended for a certain type of relationship. I often discover this reality within these types of books. The nature of the conversations these managerial books promise to their readers is the kind that happens naturally among colleagues with a strong working relationship. I'm undecided if the best remedy for a stiff, formal, or distant relationship is to absorb the techniques described in works such as The Coaching Habit. Wouldn't it be better to build the relationship instead?

the toa newsletter - june 2021

After a few months - a year? - of no actual news, May came at me with a forgotten novelty that left the little TOA news desk wobbling on its cobwebbed legs. In hindsight, the past year was a lot like waiting an hour for a bus, then having three pull to the curb at the same time.

It's left me with too much to do, so let's sort through it all with a classic Proper Admin.

Mask mandate senioritis?

We left off last month with initial reactions to Massachusetts relaxing its statewide mask mandate, which had been in place since May 6, 2020. I wondered a couple of times these past few weeks if the decision would prove to be a proverbial "slippery slope" moment for the state, perhaps the start of a local descent into the national pandemic senioritis I had read about this spring, but from my observation this wasn't quite the case. For the most part, the people I encountered seemed to be masked in alignment with the relaxed order, with my guess being that around 75% of people were masked in regularly trafficked areas (this number dropped to 25% in open spaces).

My approach has been to keep some kind of covering on wherever there was less than six feet on one side - like a sidewalk - while going with the relaxed approach in wider spaces - like walking through the park. It seems like a sizable portion of others have adopted a similar practice. The biggest difference I've noticed from last spring is the interpretation of "impossible to social distance". Last year, the average person coming down the sidewalk seemed quite optimistic about this concept, often pulling up his or her (but usually his) mask just as we passed each other, but this past month more people seemed to prefer the simpler approach of remaining masked even if most of their journey would pass without close contact with a fellow pedestrian.

To go back to the idea I mentioned above - I concluded in May that the broad comparison relating relaxed measures to senioritis, although amusing, was generally off the mark. What I've noticed in the way folks are emerging from restrictions is markedly more tentative than the carefree "job done, why bother" mentality that defines senioritis. I'd say a better comparison is the process of waking up in a crowded house - the early birds tip-toeing about, failing to keep the space perfectly quiet despite knowing others are still asleep, the decibels rising one by one until the late risers come around, begrudgingly, to the idea of a new day.

Zoom...

Reopening has moved along much faster than I'd anticipated. I'm wondering if the accelerated pace explains why quite a few folks seem confused regarding their approach to rediscovering normal, like the way rushing through a familiar task leaves even seasoned experts prone to amateur errors. I think it's always helpful in these potentially overwhelming moments to think back to core principles and reorient around the basics.

One consistent number that keeps coming back to me is ten thousand. This is what Dr. Fauci seems to think is a reasonable target for the pandemic response - get the count of new cases down to ten thousand, nationally, per day, then start loosening restrictions. He said something to this effect last year, said it again over the winter, and has been repeating it throughout the spring. If I translate 10K into the Massachusetts population, I get two hundred and ten cases per day. These numbers work for me - once Massachusetts, over a seven-day running average, gets its new case count below 210 per day, I'll start feeling confident about getting out and about in the spirit of 2019.

...fatigue

One of the defining features of my New Normal has been the shift in my social life - I am now doing nothing during the week, whereas in the Good Old Days I tried to keep myself occupied from Monday to Thursday night. I don't see an issue with this - some may argue its long overdue - but there have been some noticeable repercussions. The most important change has involved social fatigue. I've found myself lately waking up on weekend mornings completely wiped out. Initially, I rounded up the usual suspects for further investigation - sleep, alcohol, exercise, overwork - but I didn't notice a particular pattern implicating any of these as the guilty party. After a few reunions and catchups, I realized the culprit was likely that defining characteristic of the introvert-extrovert divide.

As usual, I don't see this kind of revelation as a problem - it's actually quite nice to continue learning about myself. The important thing is to incorporate the new information into my decisions. The key in the coming months will be to acknowledge social fatigue on certain weekend mornings so that I don't waste hours forcing myself into writing when I understand the impossibility of the task. There is also some opportunity I must explore on weekdays - having once made early morning writing impossible for myself, I had ruled it out as an option during the pandemic, but I am recognizing now that it may be a good moment to reconsider the pre-pandemic conclusion.

Some proper admin...

Due to some Google admin, I will need to make some adjustments to the email subscription method. Stay tuned! Worst-case scenario is that we'll have to go old-school for a few days, though of course I'm sure I can avoid this outcome.

Thanks for reading, see you in June!