leftovers - the bias spotlight on the dumb smart trade (qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods)

A final thought here that spans the previous two posts. It occurred to me that one issue in evaluating someone like Smart is how his best qualities as a basketball player are not easily measured by the sport's conventional data analysis methods. This means comparisons against players with more easily measured skills will never quite reach the apples-to-apples standard. In a sense, when you evaluate a player like Marcus Smart you actually need to evaluate your evaluation methods before you can reach a meaningful conclusion about the player.

This obviously makes little sense so let's try a metaphor of measuring students. A common method is using a letter grade for each course, which is then translated to a cumulative GPA. If you have one student with a 3.6 GPA and another with a 3.3 GPA, the scores offer a strong suggestion of the better student. But what if the 3.3 GPA student also took one class per semester pass/fail? All of a sudden, you need to evaluate the evaluation method - how does the pass/fail detail influence the overall evaluation of the student? I see players like Smart as the equivalent of the 3.3 GPA student with a handful of "pass" grades where we know "pass" puts him at the top of the cohort. How do you compare him to a player whose top attributes are supported with clear data (essentially, the equivalent of a 3.6 GPA) yet we know that despite having identical "pass" grades those should carry less weight than Smart's?

The right answer here is probably that you can't make a meaningful comparison, at least with data alone. The wisest course of action would be to reduce the importance of data in the decision. However, I think the data analytics mentality encourages pushing on rather than stepping back, and this insistence is where the method approaches one of its shortcomings. What if we came up with a way to measure hustle, or dedication, or leadership, with more precision than pass/fail? Why can't we translate pass/fail grades into a GPA-type score? These are reasonable questions and their implied directions deserve some consideration. However, there is a point where some factors should be acknowledged as inherently qualitative, and it's a major mistake to treat these as quantitative just because you've devised a method for assigning a numeric value. In other words, what I consider the biggest failure in the data analytics mentality is the inability to recognize situations where quantitative data is essentially meaningless because a qualitative method was used to create that data (1).

If you always push forward and try to refine the data such that the numbers will have the last word then you become a bit like the drunkard refusing to search outside the visibility of the street light. What gets lost in the absurdity of the drunkard's tale is a subtle commentary on ideology - by standing under the light, the drunkard demonstrates his conviction that without lighting he will never locate the keys. This means other approaches that do not fit within the ideology - such as a thorough retracing of steps - are dismissed out of hand. Likewise, being data-driven has its benefits as long as the data itself remains a reliable source of unbiased information. But if you don't have a way to include other evaluation styles in your decisions, then you allow a certain bias to infiltrate your evaluations - you will tend to prefer options whose strongest qualities just so happen to be the most easily measurable. If this is the way you make data-driven decisions then what you have is an ideology, not a methodology, and you will find that rather than eliminating bias you are simply trading one form of it for another.

Footnotes

1. TOA was well-reviewed, 4 stars out of 5 

I notice this problem during your average corporate performance review, where a manager will be asked to evaluate a team member using a numerical scale of 1-5 for essentially subjective skills such as "communication" or "empathy" or "wastes company time writing TOA". There are some aspects of these (or any) skills where a numerical measurement would be appropriate, but I don't think anyone will convince me that an overall evaluation distilled into a single number would have any meaningful value whatsoever, particularly if that number is used to make comparisons against peers in discussions regarding recognition, bonuses, or promotions.

the bias spotlight

Imagine walking home at night, down the long and darkened street leading up to your door. Repetition has fostered familiarity but you're never completely comfortable on this road - narrow or poorly maintained sidewalks that occasionally blend into a dirt shoulder, cars zipping past both too fast and too close, streetlights spaced far enough apart such that they emphasize rather than reduce the darkness. It's always a relief to make it home.

As you reach for your keys, you sense something isn't right. You try one pocket, then another - no phone. You look into your backpack even though you know your phone always goes into your front right pants pocket. Automatically you turn around and head back to the road, literally retracing steps while your mind replays the night's events. You remember putting your phone back into the pocket after dinner, then you went to the bar for a last drink. Did you have it at the bar? You think so. It's likely that the phone fell onto the road during the walk. Plus, if the phone was at the restaurant or bar then someone else is going to find it. The best option here might be to ask a neighbor to call your phone but it seems too late to bother acquaintances. You consider asking a friend to help, but you can't reach them without a phone and none live within walking distance. You decide to spend a few minutes looking for it on the road just in case you can spot it right away.

But back on the road, the issue is immediately obvious - visibility. The streetlights offer pitiful cones of light which are swallowed up into the black hole of night. You aren't sure you have a flashlight at home so you decide to try your luck around the streetlights. The visibility is good in these areas so you'll find the phone if it fell under one of these lights. But in the end, it's a futile exercise. The reality is that the darkness on this road, even just alongside the street, covers much more ground than the light. You make one last attempt, standing deliberately in the dark hoping that your eyes will adjust enough to pick out fallen rectangular shapes, but you give up after a couple of minutes. The only remaining option is to crawl, so that's what you do - you crawl into bed, hoping it doesn't rain before the dawn.

******

I'm not the biggest fan of using carefully curated parables to make a point. But I've found the above coming to mind recently as I've worked through a number of TOA posts. It's based on an anecdote that I believe is known as the "Streetlight effect", which must be its official name since there is a Wikipedia entry for it [citation needed]. It's sometimes told as an anecdote about a drunkard looking for lost keys. In this version, though he knows they were lost on the darkened side of a street he ends up looking on the other side. When asked to explain why he's on the wrong side, he remarks - this side has lighting.

I originally heard the example in the context of economics, perhaps as much as a decade ago. My understanding is that the economists are trying to make a point about the availability of information, which often creates a form of bias by dictating that they only look for answers where there is available data (economics is known as a social science but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a data science, especially if you are unaware of the definition for data science). To put it another way, the fact that some information is more visible than others is an especially dangerous form of bias because you'll assign greater weight to the available information.

These are all reasonable points. And yet, embedding such in these kinds of stories tend to create their own problem. When a lesson is contained in such an easily digestible form, I fear it creates a false sense of understanding. The specific issue is how stories sometimes sand away the subtleties in order to establish universality. The problem is that since the drunkard's error is presented in a somewhat ridiculous context, most of us hear the story and feel that we already know not to make such a foolish error. For most, I think the story serves more as a reinforcement or a reminder than a new lesson - we'd have to be drunk to do that! It never occurs to us that with some further thinking we can ask more important questions about the story. In real life, is it always so obvious which side of the metaphorical street is lit and which side is dark? Curious students who wish to maximize their learning from the story would consider how to make this determination within the areas of investigation they encounter in the future.

And yet, there is still something else that is missing. Is the only important thing to know which side of the steet is lit? I've had this feeling with me while working on another post, which I'm hoping to finish in the coming days. It's about Jeremy Lin and the way his career intersected with the stereotype of Asian athletes being unathletic. Here's one detail I plan to include in the final version. Speaking about the scouting reports ahead of the 2010 NBA draft, Lin once said - me and John Wall were the fastest people in the draft, but he was 'athletic' and I was 'deceptively athletic.' This isn't another example of an athlete making his own case, which of course has a long history of being slightly favorable to their cause. Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Houston Rockets, said a few years later that the team's pre-draft scouting model suggested Lin was the 15th-best player in the draft. On draft night, the athletic Wall went with the first overall pick and the deceptively athletic Lin, after sixty total selections, went undrafted.

We'll have to recalibrate the anecdote a small bit here - this is like if the drunkard got himself a powerful flashlight, then decided that the suddenly visible keys represented something else, like a soda can, maybe, or someone else's keys. And who could rule out the possibility of a hopeful mirage at the end of a tough night? Regardless, the outcome is the same, the drunkard doesn't find his keys, but I suppose it imparts a different lesson to us. What can I say about those who, despite seeing the "unathletic" player zip past their opponents, fail to relabel the player? What can we learn when a general manager, in possession of a scouting tool which offered to illuminate the darkened street, decided he would rather stand under the streetlights with his twenty-nine peers? We say what we need is a perfectly lit street on a cloudless, sunny day, but we should remember that we'll need something more for those who just refuse to see.

the dumb smart trade

A few days ago I sat down with a plan to write about the Marcus Smart trade. It seemed like a straightforward task. I had spent the prior couple of days digesting the deal, which sent Smart to Memphis in exchange for Kristaps Porzingis, and I had reached my conclusions. Sometimes with TOA I've found that writing is more like transcribing, particularly in cases like this one where the topic had been on my mind, so I thought I'd have something written and posted within an hour. Naturally, I got stuck about as soon as I started writing.

Where to begin? The logical starting point felt like examining the trade from a tactical perspective. I'm admittedly not the city's most dedicated Celtics fan, tuning in pretty much exclusively during the playoffs, but combining my experience as a college basketball player with the forty or so games I've seen over the past couple of years gives me enough of a foundation to offer reasonable insights. It struck me that last season the Celtics seemed to have three main areas for improvement - offensive consistency, passing, and late-game defense against elite perimeter players. This trade doesn't seem to help the team in any of those areas. But the problem with this approach is that such analysis is, for the most part, nonsense. There's no real way to prove your point. The best you can do is put your bets down now, so to speak, on what you think will happen, then see the results during the season. But even then, whatever happens next spring will just be one outcome out of many possibilities, and luck often plays enough of a factor to render most analysis inconclusive. There is also the more basic reality that so many things could still change between now and then (such as another trade). In other words, to write about this trade means I'll have to write knowingly about what I don't know (a definition I'm sure will be familiar to longtime readers). I'll leave this esteemed task to the paid professionals.

I guess this means I should write about what I do know. I know that when you are leading a team there are certain qualities you just can't teach, and that the only way to build them into the team is to have team members set the example for others. Smart's toughness, hustle, and intelligence are hardly unique qualities but the combination of these in one player might be a different story. These are also qualities that represent areas for improvement at a team level. Crucially, losing these qualities in a team is hard to notice until they deteriorate beyond the point of repair, so I worry that the team may now be on a trajectory for these qualities to become significant enough weaknesses such that they offset any technical improvement from making the trade. I also know that teams require a certain unity to overcome obstacles, and although this is an intangible quality I think from observation the Celtics had the right level of togetherness in these past two seasons. Due to their extended playoff runs, the Celtics have basically played an extra half-season of basketball over the past two years (and sacrificed two months of off-season rest to do so). Therefore, one obvious consideration for this year is burnout. Does this trade strengthen the team's ability to stick together throughout the long grind of making another attempt at a championship? Something tells me that Smart's leadership as a proven veteran leader in the team will be missed in the exact moment when it's needed the most.

But the thing I can't get past is how back when I used to play basketball it was a nightmare to play against a guy like Smart. When I lined up against an opponent like Smart, I knew he was going to make the game as difficult for me as possible, and that it would take everything I had to compete against him. I don't know enough about Porzingis to say if he's the same type of opponent but my suspicion is that rival players would prefer to play against Porzingis rather than Smart. What I am talking about here regards NBA players so I understand a comparison to my modest experience is a bit of a stretch. It's possible that being a professional basketball player means these kinds of considerations are left for those like me, the obnoxious combination of Division 3 never-was and internet "writer". And yet, if I'm reminded of anything during the NBA playoffs it's that elite performance is as much mental as it is physical. In the playoffs, athletes who might hit one hundred shots in a row during practice suddenly find themselves unable to string together consecutive baskets. Others who are comfortable taking the initiative during the regular season start passing it to the next guy when the consequence of defeat is elimination. There is a certain mental edge that a player needs to have in order to thrive under pressure and you often don't know if they have it until you put them into these games. If my goal was to win the championship, I would collect as many guys as possible who had the mental edge, then do everything in my power to keep those players. Smart, for all his shortcomings, had the mental edge, so it worries me that the Celtics traded him for a player with no history of the same. 

The title of this post hints at how I feel but it's actually not a great representation - the puns write themselves on TOA and as usual I couldn't help myself. The people who made this decision have forgotten more about basketball than I'll ever know so I don't raise my objections with full conviction. I mostly wanted to write them down just so I have something to look back on a year from now. But the reality is that mistakes are made all the time. In the case of this trade there is the obvious point that Memphis, a championship contender just like the Celtics, identified Smart as a way to help them reach their goal. Around here the talk is about how the trade impacts the Celtics but in terms of evaluating the trade it might help to think about what Memphis got in the deal. What I think is that Memphis prioritized certain qualities at the expense of others, then identified Smart as one player who fit their priorities. On the other hand, the Celtics prioritized different qualities and acquired them in the trade. My hunch is that Memphis acquired the qualities that matter far more in determining a championship team. These are the qualities that can override the technical advantages of basketball skill or team tactics that the Celtics gained from the trade. Time will offer its own verdict on the trade so perhaps the only thing left to do now is to wait and see, but as far as my reaction is concerned I'm less optimistic today than I was two weeks ago regarding the Celtics winning next year's championship.

blog-like substances

One of the unofficial rules for TOA is that I no longer post BLS - "blog-like substances". By this, I mean the kind of thing that pops to mind as soon as you find out someone writes their own blog (a reaction further exacerbated in my case because I can't offer anything resembling a focus, topic, or theme for TOA). One example of such a post would be the standard play-by-play account of recent life events ("I went to this thing over the weekend...") leading to some kind of epiphany ("...which made me realize that...") but of course plenty other things qualify as BLS.

Longtime readers will recall that this aversion to BLS was hardly the standard in the good old days. Who remembers the day I wrote about Ricky Rubio? I assume this detail surprises nobody. This type of writing is a natural entry point for any aspiring writer, who separates blog from personal diary by the razor-thin margin of an unregulated "publish" button. For me, the early days were always more about writing than the writing, or any notion of being a writer, so pretty much anything I finished got published. Those TOA posts were always a bit too chummy with the audience, detailing critical news such as my attendance at irrelevant local events or offering earnest "analysis" of books that no one outside the author's hostages had ever been motivated to finish. Like most bloggers, I slowly shifted away from these posts in a bid to demonstrate my increasing seriousness toward Writing. If I ever found myself wandering back toward BLS - notably with "Tales of Two Cities", also with "Proper Corona Admin" - then I built a framework I could use to connect the mundane to the significant.

And yet, why not get back to my roots every once in a while, maybe have a look around the old stomping grounds? I went to a standup show over the weekend where the comic talked about the strange realization that you could still be anonymous despite being on TV, then transitioned into a story about how he was anticipating a trip back to his hometown just for the recognition. I think we can all benefit from something like that every once in a while. They say not to forget where you came from but perhaps the better advice would be to remind yourself every once in a while. It might be especially important for those who can relate to my current state, where I am trying to write some challenging things yet finding the difficulty level discourages the consistent effort required of good writing. Over seven years ago, I posted something I wrote about tipping. If you'd told me then about some of the stuff I'd be trying to write now, I probably would have converted TOA to a podcast.

Endnotes

All that said, I suppose it's obvious by now that I'm currently working on a classic serving of BLS. Why else would I write this post now? The upcoming post, hopefully coming sometime this week to an email inbox near you, will fall neatly into the esteemed category "unnecessary analysis of recent sports news by an unqualified writer". In other words, for a day TOA will be twice as good as ESPN.

how to be a good parent

It's feasible that the best book I'll ever write was something I could have published a decade ago. I had this idea at the time to write about parenting. The book was going to have a stupid title like How to Be a Good Parent or something equally arrogant. The plan was to write one chapter with two words - "be around" - and that would be the end, no footnotes, no photos, no charts or graphs. You could probably have finished it in one sitting. It would have cost $27.99, but the paperback would have been cheaper.

In hindsight it was probably for the best that I kept the manuscript (if you will) to myself. Books promising instruction tend to suffer from a blindness to their own arrogance and this condition would undoubtedly have plagued the presumptive NYT #1 bestseller How to Be a Good Parent. If you combine this tendency with my own long-term residency at Arrogant House, you have a recipe for one of those unfortunate public reputations - the kind that pops up anytime you google someone's name. In all seriousness, the books that claim to offer some kind of recipe for success often fail to clarify that success is a mountain with many trails. For each and every one of us there is a unique route to the summit, so blindly following some nonsense published by a half-assed blogger probably is more likely than not to send us down (up?) the wrong path. Most importantly, I must also acknowledge that How to Be a Good Parent would be a major disservice to all those great parents out there who are unable to be around as much as they would like. This fact alone is enough reason for me to have no regrets about tossing my book idea into the rubbish bin.

And yet, there is something to be said for just being around. I've had a chance to see many of my friends become parents over the past few years. The one clear conclusion from watching them navigate this new life responsibility is that they have absolutely no clue what they are doing. The more subtle observation is that they are around, and just the fact of being around is more than enough to make them great parents. For me, it's like watching history repeat itself. My own parents did their best with me but that doesn't mean they were perfect. But my parents were always around, and that's why I say I had great parents.

leftovers | the business bro confirms leech therapy

There is one last connecting thread among this post's examples that might resonate better with you, dear reader - the difficulty in executing a passive rather than active intervention. This is a question that goes beyond the ultimately mundane matter of whether we are always working in the smartest possible way - it's a fundamental question of how our behavior builds into a sense of identity and whether doing (seemingly) nothing sufficiently reinforces this feeling.

Although the challenges specific to a doctor, a project manager, or a marketing director may bear little resemblance to one another, there is the shared difficulty of standing by and doing nothing in an area where your interventions prove expertise or authority. What kind of doctor keeps their job if they prescribe no treatments? Who would hire a project manager with an aversion to sending follow up emails? Where can I find a marketing team actively seeking the evidence that their campaigns have the same effect as a blank space? Maybe the deepest wisdom of all is that in prescribing leech therapy yesterday's doctors revealed something armchair experts like me are too eager to forget - in an uncertain world where progress often means two steps forward and one step back, the only thing we know when we don't know is that you have to keep moving.

the business bro confirms leech therapy

A friend once described the fundamental challenge in his marketing director role as the problem of "you never know for sure if it worked". He meant this in the specific way that fields such as statistics define causation, which sets a standard for knowing the effect of an intervention on the outcome. His organization ran campaigns in a way that failed to meet the definition, so they never knew the extent to which their results were caused by their decisions, if at all. One particularly helpful example he used referenced advertising during the Olympics. If his firm wished to determine the effect of their campaign in a statistically viable way, they would have first needed to randomly divide their audience into two groups so that one would see ads while the other would not, then they could compare differences in the groups' behavior to determine the effect of the ads.

Some of you may be familiar with this process by other terms, names, or labels - a randomized control trial, for example, or A/B testing. In their respective fields these are the gold standards for determining causation, which in more conversational terms means knowing for sure that one thing did in fact lead to another. It's rare to hear anyone dismiss the power of this approach when discussed in the abstract - clearly, if you had an idea for progressing toward a goal then you would want to know whether your idea worked. But I have noticed lately that a lot of people lose this conviction when it comes time to put the concept into practice. An obvious issue is that implementing this approach may have practical obstacles. One thing my friend pointed out was that no one he worked with would have agreed to omit certain major markets, which meant the randomization necessary for clean results was no longer possible. Yet my feeling remains that in most cases understanding and implementing this style of thinking would do a great deal to make us all better in our work.

One area where I've thought more about this lately comes whenever I get follow up reminders from certain pushy colleagues. These situations often have something to do with an urgent request or an upcoming deadline, like "hey, can I get an update on this?", that sort of thing. I don't find these very useful, often just creating extra work for me in the sense of having to stop working to meet the deadline in order to send a response, but I don't have any hope that things will ever change with these colleagues. My reasoning is along the lines of the above logic. As far as I can tell, they don't have any sort of system for isolating the effect of a follow up on the outcome. Therefore, every time they follow up, there are only two potential results - either everything works out, which strengthens the belief that following up is the right idea, or it doesn't work out, which I guess leaves things open to interpretation regarding the effect of the follow up. My suspicion is that the common interpretation in the latter case is not "I wonder if following up has any effect" but rather "I should have followed up more often". It makes a strange sort of sense because they're missing a critical data point for considering another conclusion - the example where they did no follow up yet everything worked out - but the more fundamental issue is that since they likely fully believe following up is the right thing, they'll never create the conditions for collecting that missing data point which might prove them wrong.

Maybe the right concept to invoke today isn't the randomized control trial or A/B testing but rather confirmation bias, the tendency to misevaluate evidence by assigning greater weight to instances that support rather than refute your theory. The cure for confirmation bias is actually quite simple, at least in explanation - you have to look for evidence that proves you wrong. I think the challenge for most of us is that we default toward seeking proof of being right rather than ruling out the ways we could be wrong. Confirmation bias plays right into this tendency. For my friend, his marketing department never looked for instances where consumer behavior was the same regardless of whether those consumers were exposed to a campaign; my colleagues don't seem capable of tossing a coin to decide whether they should hit send on a follow up email.

Obviously, none of this is going to be solved due to a quickly scribbled TOA post. Part of the issue is that I fear we miss opportunities to learn about confirmation bias, instead learning or emphasizing different lessons from situations where I would argue for the relevance of confirmation bias. Many readers may have learned that doctors once used leeches as a way to cure sick patients, with my understanding being that the medical theory back then suggested leeches could suck out the diseased blood. This anecdote was always taught to me with the air of "oh, look at how far we've come since those days" and it's indeed true that medicine has advanced many centuries past its dependence on leeches. But this style of teaching only improves my ability to win trivia contests while failing to explore the broader lessons that might apply in the present day. The effective teaching style would point out that this is an example of how confirmation bias enabled the advancement of incompetence, then offer me a way to identify confirmation bias for myself so that I don't fall into the trap of repeating someone else's mistakes.

In the leech example the problem was that the doctors, accepting the theory regarding leeches, never realized some patients would have healed regardless of the intervention, which allowed them to view each recovery as further evidence confirming the leech theory. My colleagues, always ready to send a follow up, never know if the recipient would have completed the job regardless. My friend's firm poured endless resources into campaigns that may have had no true effect on consumer behavior. If we are to learn anything from these examples, it's that knowing whether one thing truly leads to another can be a far more complicated question than it might seem at first glance. So what's the right approach? Knowing whether something worked, for sure, is a very high bar, and perhaps it's not always realistic to aspire to such a lofty standard. But it's frighteningly easy to settle, looking strictly for evidence that our first instinct was right. Maybe the best way is to reframe the idea of what it means to be right - not accumulating evidence in our favor but instead ruling out the ways we could be wrong, methodically and consistently, until being right is the only remaining possibility.

spring training, again

Hello, reader! Assuming you're still there, of course. It's been a while, and you can't keep the car running forever.

TOA is in a familiar place, an increasingly common one over the past two years - I return with an explanation for my absence and a loosely defined plan for the future, though of course we know I'll stick to the course for a few weeks before suddenly dropping away again. I recently heard someone say that history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it rhymes. I wonder if this person is a subscriber (or perhaps I should say, was a subscriber).

But here I am, back again, with enough on my mind to give it another go. As the cobwebs fall from my fingers and befriend the months-old dust caking my keyboard, I find myself pondering where to begin. A few developments on topics familiar to longtime readers are crying out for new writing - thoughts on reading, racism, and work (I wanted to write "overwork" here but the Business Bro mocked me). There have also been some odd developments that may interest you, bored reader - I had a post taken down, for example, and I finally took a COVID test (just in time for the end of the emergency declaration). I could also revisit that folder ominously labelled "drafts" - half-written posts based on quarter-baked ideas, their unfulfilled promise undermined by the fact that this folder reminds me how so much of what I try ends in failure. Do I dare write another sentence about running?

Those thoughts - for me to clarify into writing so that you readers can suffer - are for another day. Today is just the first day back, a feeling that may be familiar to all from your school days ("how was your summer?") where you attend classes like normal but without the expectation of performance. I admit that despite hating the fact of returning here with increasing frequency I've come to enjoy the simple pleasure of easing back into the flow of writing. And like with any fresh start, optimism induces an unexplainable amnesia - the C+ student aspires for the honor roll, the career minor leaguer dreams of the big leagues, the hiker looks to the summit and says this time, this time, I'll keep going.

introducing one minute TOA... but i compress

The first improv comedy show I ever saw illustrated the power of compression. The first skit lasted two minutes, then was followed by the same skit done in one minute, which was followed by the same skit done in thirty seconds, and so on. I think you get the idea. The process meant the initial two-minute scene with conversation, jokes, and movement was reduced to a final one-second scene where everyone looked at each other, then fell to the ground in unison.

I worry that this anecdote recommends the extreme application, so I'll clarify - if I were asked about the right level of compression for a two-minute scene, then I'd probably land on somewhere between fifteen and thirty seconds. I think that's how it should work in most cases - distilling down as far as possible might feel like a certain type of accomplishment, but I think the optimal compression would be something just above the bare minimum. I think this is an important point because I feel compression is an underrated tool across a wide range of pursuits - learning, comedy, and packing a suitcase are just a few examples that come to mind. It's an especially critical skill in communication, and I often find myself introducing this concept when I sense it may help another person improve their message. For example, last week I was helping a colleague write an email about an unusual and somewhat challenging problem. I read through the ten or so sentences in the first draft, then asked - if you had to replace this draft with only one sentence, what would you say? We took that one sentence, lightly edited, and made it the first sentence of the email. From there, it became obvious which parts of the first draft could be reduced or deleted, and in the end we sent out a short and sweet message, around four sentences long, where the main idea was clearly stated at the top of the email.

The idea of reducing everything to its smallest possible size has shades of a buzzword, perhaps coined by a malfunctioning ChatGPS deep in the bowels of the TedTalks-LinkedIndustrial Complex, but I think it's still worth making the effort just to see if you get anywhere with it. I know sometimes it's better to practice than to preach, so I'm happy to demonstrate my own commitment to the cause by trying a TOA version of this idea - "One Minute TOA". The point is to take some of my posts and compress them down to what I consider its point - most likely the idea, lesson, or conclusion I hoped to share with the reader. I'm not sure which posts I'll pick for these compressions but I suspect they'll likely be the ones best-received by readers or those that I worry might have lost its message in the mess of my writing.

What will such an exercise look like? Well, we can start with the post so far as an example. Here's the "One Minute TOA" of the above:

Compression helps with comprehension, whether that regards something in existence or yet to be created, and with improved comprehension we stand a better chance of finding the next step in our specific project, situation, or communication.

What I'm looking forward to the most about "One Minute TOA" is the likelihood that it will reveal where I actually don't understand my own work. I shared a few weeks ago that one unanticipated challenge of TOA is how writing about a topic sets a higher standard for writing about the same topic again (this sentence, I suppose, is another "One Minute TOA"). This is because the first post would cover my simplest thinking on the subject, which in turn leaves subsequent writing for dealing with the more challenging considerations. However, it's easy to assume writing proves comprehension, or that previously writing about a topic ensures I understood it at that time. The catch is that recognizing such flaws in my own work isn't easy if I just reread it. The task of compression takes this a step further, forcing me to state the essence of the work, so if I'm unable to do so then I'll know that the post was about a topic which requires additional thinking.

reading clearout - august 2022

Hi readers, here's my reading summary from August.

As promised last time, I'll note the books that made it to my 2022 book of the year shortlist. Only one made it from the group below - It's OK That You're Not OK. Let's start there.

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine

There's a line from Devine's website that reads like an explanation for this book - most of what passes for grief support is less than useful. It's OK That You're Not OK expands on that thought from a variety of angles - outlining the problems of common grieving advice; establishing her personal philosophy toward grieving, which is rooted in both personal experience and professional expertise; and sharing practical guidance for those carrying their grief. In addition to writing this excellent work, Devine also leads Refuge In Grief, linked above, which is like a real-time manifestation of the book in terms of its support, guidance, and education for the grieving. I plan to write more about this book in the near future.

The Other Ones by Dave Housley

Housley's novel wins on premise alone - what happens in an office when some coworkers split a giant prize from their lottery pool? The focus of this book is only partially on the winners, with most of the attention given to those who remain behind - the "other ones". I enjoyed the read and would recommend it to anyone who is intrigued by the premise, but for me it was more really good rather than great, limited perhaps by my feeling that The Other Ones never quite escaped light reading territory.

Marathon by Hal Higdon

Marathon A to Z by Hal Higdon

I picked out these two books a few days after registering for my first marathon. The two titles differ mostly in their structure - Marathon is a traditionally designed full guide for runners while Marathon A to Z is a collection of short reminders and insights (somewhat resembling the structure of a daily page-a-day calendar). My choice of author is no accident - I relied on Higdon's website throughout the training process, reaching the finish line after following a combination of Novice 1 and Novice 2 (with a touch of Intermediate 1).

Oddly enough, the most applicable note to me was possibly the first one I took down from the book - a good excuse for marathon training is the way it focuses the mind in an activity I already do. This basically described my exact situation - I notice around ten weeks before the race that my mileage logs were roughly aligned to one of his training plans, so I signed up for a race and committed to the training plan for the next couple of months. The programs all have a basic "step back to move up" structure where the weekly mileage (and longest run) increase for a couple of weeks, then drop down slightly for one week before repeating the pattern. Over the eighteen weeks of the beginner's program, I built up to a longest run of twenty miles to cap off a forty-mile week. I avoided doing hills or speedwork so that I could focus entirely on increasing distance, again per Higdon's recommendation. I also followed his advice to take walking breaks during the race, strolling through each water station for around a hundred steps or so. I think the race went well. I finished in 4:27 at a steady ten minute per mile pace (with some moderate discomfort slowing me down over the last four miles or so) and felt good enough afterward to enjoy a day out in Portland. This last point may owe some kudos as well to the author - I remembered that he recommended staying on your feet for a short while after the race, so I did that instead of laying down on the grass.

I'm tempted to keep going, writing up a full recap of every interesting training detail I learned from these two books, but I actually don't think it would be of much general interest. If you are training and want to know these things, just reach out to me or get a hold of these books.

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

Akpan's short story collection, which sets all of its stories in Africa, is in some ways the opposite of the previously mentioned The Other Ones - I might have thought more of this one had it managed somehow to find moments where it escaped heavy reading territory. Of course, this could be a small challenge given the subject matter in each work, so perhaps my point is that the stories might have benefited from a slightly different start or end point. One thought that comes to mind here is that two of the stories were unusually long, suggesting the possibility that a novel rather than the short form might have worked better for telling select stories.

I didn't have a strong recollection of my reading experience, but I just reviewed summaries for each work and found that these brought me immediately back into the world of his stories. I think this speaks to Akpan's skill and the quality of the work. I have not seen many collections quite like this one so I can offer my approval to anyone who is seeking something a little different for their next read. 

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy by Emmanuel Acho

Acho, who I vaguely recall from his helmet football career, wrote this book as a follow up to his video series "Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man". The book's slightly altered title reveals his intent to write for a younger target audience than he had for his videos (or book of the same name as the videos). I'm not much of an expert on the matter of a book being a good fit for children, but given how easily this read I think Acho accomplished his goal.

The lingering question for me is where this book fits in the larger context of educational material on systemic racism. This book had very little new information for me, a reader with some familiarity on the topic. I don't think that's a problem necessarily - the obvious point is that I'm an adult, so this book isn't for me. But speaking more generally, I feel some books work best as the equivalent of introductory material, helping those who still need answers to their basic questions about racism, and perhaps this book set (and met) that goal for itself. My understanding is that Acho sees his work as helping those on the fringes come around on these ideas, and I agree with his sense that this is a critical aspect of society's work in addressing systemic racism. But my challenge is that I'm not sure a white person who reads this book will understand its introductory aspect, which I worry will reinforce an issue I notice with increasing regularity - a white person, having just read a book (or even an essay or column), thinks about the matter for a few additional minutes before concluding that they now know everything they need to know about it. On a journey where this book represents the opening stages, I fear a certain type of reader will confuse it with the finish line.

the news or the editorials

There seems to be a point where even the most open-minded person begins refusing to consider new possibilities, mimicking a rising bureaucrat in a totalitarian regime. I was trying to understand this unexpected observation - by definition, after all, an open-minded person is willing to consider new possibilities - and over time I worked out the crucial role of fact in the matter of dissent. Essentially, I think whenever some idea achieves a level of certainty that it can be stated as fact, then it means there is little remaining possibility of dissent against the idea.

This recently worked its way to the top of my mind over a few months of routine conversations with my new manager. My initial read on him was that he possessed an open mind, or at least had some qualities consistent with an open-minded person. This was supported by our work together on a hiring round, where he navigated new information throughout the process of helping me reach a decision on a candidate. But in the ensuing months the evidence accumulated in the other direction. At one point I was ready to conclude that he just didn't handle dissent very well, which makes us a perfect match - dissent is my standard mode of operation. It's a good thing I didn't completely overhaul my style at that point since I eventually realized I was wrong regarding his ability to handle dissent. I began to notice a certain pattern in our interactions - I would raise some point challenging the status quo, then he would either extend or shut down the conversation. What I understood after many such interactions was that the difference in his two reactions was rooted in whether he saw the initial situation as based on fact or opinion. My suggestions on matters related to process improvement or headcount changes, for example, went nowhere - he saw those as areas where we had an established way of doing things. But my comments on situations such as interpersonal dynamics always gained a foothold because he saw interaction among colleagues as an area appropriate for a fluid interpretation.

When I look back on other areas of my life, I can see a similar pattern in the way others have reacted to my dissent. If I dissented against an idea regarded as opinion, then the recipient was much more open to further discussion than they were had I dissented against an idea regarded as fact. To put it another way, it seems that opinions are easier to challenge because opinions could be right, whereas challenging facts is tougher because facts are right. Knowing whether someone else sees a situation as built on fact or opinion therefore is a critical part of the dissent process. My approach these days is first determining whether the other party's information on a topic is coming from the equivalent of the news or the editorials, then altering my approach as necessary. If the latter, then life is easy - I just have to express myself. In the case of the former, I actually have to step back and challenge the conviction about the facts, which forces me to keep my opinion out of sight during the initial skirmish.

Of course, I know that what I see in others is often just a reflection of myself. This is probably why I'm so convinced about this point - I know from experience that when others challenge what I see as a fact,  then I'm unlikely to consider the new possibility. My tolerance for dissent seems to come down to how much ambiguity I feel can exist within the status quo, with the degree of ambiguity correlating to my openness for dissent. If I feel that something is a fact about the world, then hearing a new perspective comes off to me as a direct challenge and it leads to a negative reaction - either defensiveness or shutting down, by which I mean I refuse to take in the new information. But these things never happen when the point is made about an idea I regard as an opinion, where I have no difficulty considering a new angle or contemplating the possibility that I might benefit from revising my previous thinking.

The major consequence of this pattern is in the role played by the person who hears the initial dissent. This person plays a potentially crucial part in the lifecycle of a dissenting idea. Much like how an editor helps polish a piece of writing, the first person to hear the dissent has the power reshape the idea into a more palatable form. But if this first person sees the situation as one built on facts rather than opinions, then there is a strong possibility that the dissent will be rendered dead upon arrival, eliminating all possibility for iteration or feedback. The reality here is a discouraging one for us amateur dissenters - the likelihood our dissenting ideas being entertained is a function of how much the initial audience accepted the status quo prior to our dissent. Despite my quip earlier that I try my best to determine if the other is informed by "the news or the editorials", in practice there are certain situations where it will be impossible to make such a determination. The fact is that no matter how much someone claims to value good ideas based on strong thinking, it seems that no thinking is strong enough to sustain an intellectual challenge against someone who sees the situation as already settled by fact.

If the world is less interested in thinking than the thinkers would have us think, what is left to do? The solution that works for me bears some resemblance to an earlier point. I suggested earlier that the difference of fact and opinion is how fact is considered right whereas opinion could be right. There is a similar sort of difference that can help the dissenter's mentality - rather than worry about convincing others that you are right, focus instead on making them consider the possibility of having been wrong. I think this is the only way for a dissenter to productively initiate a conversation where the other party is firmly rooted in the comfort of the status quo. The silly analogy here is a hypothetical scenario where I determine the sky is purple. I suspect in my younger days I would have tried to convince others that the sky was purple, but now I see that the wiser approach is to get others to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong about the sky being blue. I think of this as like establishing the prerequisite condition - you can't convince anybody until they are open to being convinced.

leftovers - the point of seeking advice (experience, part 2)

I mentioned a few days ago how I considered a diminishing reliance on expertise as one signal that inexperience was giving way to experience. More specifically, I suggested that expertise reassures inexperienced people more so than it does experienced people. For me, the inexperienced person relies on expertise as a stamp of approval because they are otherwise unable to evaluate the quality of content. On the other hand, becoming experienced means being comfortable making such evaluations for yourself, which means you can identify good advice whether it comes from an expert or from some less qualified person in your life.

I could have paused at another point in the post to highlight a second feature of experience - consistency. I wanted to return to it today to reinforce this point. Another way to mark the shift from inexperienced to experienced is by evaluating the level of consistency. This is particularly relevant in areas where the inexperienced may sometimes produce the same quality of results as those with much more experience. If you focus on carefully chosen examples, it may seem that inexperienced people are just as capable as their experienced counterparts. However, the difference from my perspective is always revealed by the level of consistency. The failure to recognize that consistency matters is the most common mistake I notice when inexperienced people evaluate themselves. They fixate on the one or two isolated moments when they excelled, giving those examples greater weight than the many others where they failed to reach the same lofty heights, and as a result their self-perception falls badly out of synch with outsiders whose evaluations give greater weight to the full range of outcomes.

the point of seeking advice

A few days ago I posted my thoughts on some advice I'd seen recently about hosting dinner parties. However, I think there is also something long-winded about all of those details. I wonder if simply understanding the goal would make the specifics obvious to most planners. Would a host committed to the guest experience need a reminder regarding the danger of making everyone wait several hours for food? The suggestion regarding wine, which is meant to protect against the possibility of running out of alcohol, is the kind of detail that is second nature to partying college students. Speaking more generally, part of me always suspects that relying on specific recommendations betrays a failure to understand the broader objective. If so much of any advice might occur naturally to those who understand the larger goal, then it raises the question - instead of getting into the details, why not just help people learn the main goal?

I think one possibility is that helping people understand the goal doesn't mean they can create a plan for executing the goal. It would be like telling someone to climb a mountain without giving them any instruction for locating the right trail. To return to the context of the dinner party, I think some hosts already know that they are supposed to offer a good guest experience yet can't translate that goal into concrete ways to improve the guest experience. For them, understanding the larger goal doesn't help because they can't define all the little steps that are necessary for reaching the goal. When I think about not just dinner parties but any situation where a host had some responsibility for creating a good guest experience, I struggle to come up with examples of someone acting in bad faith - that is, a host who didn't accept the responsibility of creating a good experience. From my perspective, pretty much every host tries to make a good experience for the guests. However, I also know that merely trying was no guarantee of a good outcome - the hosts with bad outcomes tried, too. My conclusion is that a lot of people are out there hosting with a bit of a blind spot in terms of understanding what it means to create a good guest experience.

I guess that leads me to my real advice for hosting dinner parties, which despite my prior post is in some ways the only thing I actually consider good advice regarding this topic:

Don't assume you are good at hosting dinner parties, or for that matter good at anything

I'll remind you again that I have no experience at hosting. Despite that shortcoming, I'm more than comfortable offering this advice. Something I've noticed about people who do things well is that they are always trying to get better at the things they already do well. Why would hosting a dinner party be an exception? One way to get better is demonstrated by the existence of the previous post - find strong reading materials and write down the stuff you want to remember. I've read a lot of books over the years with this exact idea in mind, building my knowledge and wisdom through each new reading experience. 

But another way that I've found helpful is to ask people what they know about the skill. My perspective on this method has shifted over time. When I was younger, I felt that research, studying, and reading were the best ways to improve my abilities. As one example, when I first became a manager at work I taught myself the job by reading dozens of books. But a few months ago when I started onboarding our first new team member since the transition to remote work, I decided to contact around twenty or thirty people and ask them for advice. I don't think I would have considered this approach in the past - instead, I would have looked for reading materials from the experts. I think if I had to host a dinner party tonight I would do something along those lines, perhaps contacting my guests and asking them what would make for a good party. In my mind this speaks to what differentiates inexperience from experience. The inexperienced person seeks out expert materials because they have no idea what constitutes good advice, so expertise reassures them regarding the quality of the advice. The experienced person trusts themselves to evaluate the quality of all advice, so they are comfortable collecting input from a wide range of sources before identifying the best and most relevant of that advice. 

This approach tends to produce a couple of interesting results. First, you get some useful advice in the form of reminders, which helps you improve your consistency in considering all the obvious details. You also get some input into process adjustments, which generally means small corrections at a detail level about the things you already know or do. The most helpful type of response might be the surprises, since these tend to be the things you would never have considered on your own. Some may surprise you with their definition of a good dinner party, helping you incorporate their different perspectives into your planning, while others may offer useful personal details such as certain dietary restrictions or preferences. In fact, surprise might be the most underrated feature of good advice - unsurprising advice seems redundant because you might have thought of it on your own, but surprising advice is priceless because you could have gone the rest of your life without considering it.

The biggest surprise of all takes a little longer to come around, usually well after the end of the dinner party - since you asked them for advice, your guests will remember that you are the sort of person who wants to get better. This applies in any situation where you ask someone for their advice - the fact of being asked subtly changes their perception of you. Over time, this new perspective also changes how they interact with you. It might mean that they continue offering you suggestions related to your original question, or maybe they take a generalized approach and simply share interesting information for your benefit. The key is that since they now know you want to get better, there is a higher possibility that they will seek you out when they think of a way for you to get better. It's also possible that they seek you out for advice. The whole thing ends up being a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle, defined by a mutual interest in coaching and learning from each other, and such cycles are among the most significant reasons why certain types of people seem to be constantly improving their skills, capabilities, or knowledge. Establishing this type of relationship with others is unlikely to be the reason why you initially sought out the advice, but I do think it's why you should always seek out advice.

leftovers - reading clearout, may 2022 (hosting a dinner party)

Hi folks, part one of a faux two-parter today, which is how I describe it when each section can stand as its own post. The next post (part two) will immediately follow in a few days. Thanks for reading!

*****

The highest concentration of my notes from Jessica Pan's Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come (a May 2022 read I briefly reviewed in December) came from the few pages where she described hosting a dinner party. This was such a foreign concept to me that the chapter essentially became an unofficial crash-course tutorial on hosting. Recognizing that I might someday need to know some of this, I read carefully while scribbling down as many helpful reminders as possible.

For my fellow hopeless hosts, here are my best insights:

A good playlist is important

I think the idea here is to make sure guests can feel comfortable just relaxing in silence while also offering them something to which they can give their shared attention. If you don't like music, I suppose an alternative is to print out copies of your favorite TOA posts and leave them scattered around your house.

(I'll add as Special Bonus Advice that it would be my recommendation to turn off the TV. It's far too stimulating and some guests may be unable to fully engage with the party while the TV is on. Of course, I remind you that I'm no expert on hosting, or TV for that matter.)

The food should be as prepared as possible 

The thought is to have time for your guests, which is a minor challenge when you spend three hours alone in the kitchen. This obviously doesn't apply in setups where one can be in the kitchen without separating from the guests, such as in an open-concept or a small apartment, but it may still be helpful to have this reminder in mind just so you make yourself engage with guests from your spot in the kitchen area.

Pan's lists specifics that fit her idea of "prepared food" - cold appetizers, a cheese board (one hard, one soft, one blue) and a slow-cooked meal. She adds that dessert shouldn't be too fancy. I'll note that if I ever host a dinner party I'll be sure to walk the tightrope between "dinner party" and "potluck", which by design would increase the availability of fully prepared food.

Some essential preparation for a large number of guests - dishwashing soap, foil, and extra bottles of wine

These items proactively address the shortages that can arise when you suddenly increase the number of people you have over to your house. The specific items that fit this definition might differ by host. If I had to reword this tip in my own words, I would say to stock up on the household items you tend to ignore until they run out because these are the items that won't have the spares you might suddenly need during the party.

Work out connections among guests so that you have ways of introducing unknown people to each other (honorable mention - have some stories ready in case a conversation falls flat)

I think this final point is somewhat obvious, but I wanted to include it at the end because it suggests a connecting thread for today - basically, since your goal as the host is to ensure your guests have the best possible experience you need to do everything you can to create a great experience. Ideally the guests can organically connect with each other, but a host taking on a more active social role can also facilitate a nice experience for everyone. When you reexamine the above with this idea in mind, you can see the way each specific recommendation connects back to the larger goal.

Good luck with your party!

leftovers - recollections of my nonexistence (authentic expression)

Perhaps the most compelling note I took from Rebecca Solnit's Recollections of My Nonexistence (a book I summarized briefly back in December) explained how monstrous people are sometimes nothing more than those who adhere to the norms of the time, never questioning their training in how to think, feel, or notice. I could undoubtedly reflect on this idea and add my own thoughts as it regards the origins of monstrous people, but I'm actually more intrigued by the possibility of considering the inverse - what does it mean when someone who never questions that training ends up becoming not monstrous but average, just another among the scores of acquaintances who pass through the eternal mystery of your life?

A few other notes I took from this book offer an initial (and for today, a final) direction. Solnit comments that language can be protective more so than expressive, especially for those younger or inexperienced people who try out difference voices in the process of finding their own - imitating others is their way of hiding a lack of knowledge or perspective. She makes similar points about busy speech (protects a speaker who has nothing of value to say), cleverness (the speaker sounds so smart it hides their avoidance of self-expression), or anger (the speaker buries feelings such as fear, hurt, or sadness in the process of focusing outside themselves). Her point that it takes great courage to speak from the heart ties together these observations. Our training, imposed on us by the so-called norms of our time and forever reinforcing those norms, embeds the need for protection to such an extent that it almost feels instinctive to keep the locks tight whenever the heart knocks on our door. In these moments only courage allows us to answer the call, but our training doesn't equip us to do so.

What happens to the majority of us who never question the way we are taught to think, feel, or notice? At best, you'll live someone else's life, and that's not such a bad thing - so many great lives have been lived, are being lived, that aspiring to those standards will be fulfilling in some way or another. But I don't think it's possible to live your own life. I think living your own life starts with the courage to open that door so you can express yourself with the authenticity that is unique to you. I think living your own life means stepping outside so that you can see if the life only you can live is waiting somewhere over the horizon. I think living your own life means recognizing that the only thing you're protecting yourself from is the thing you might say if you let yourself speak, and the thing you might do if you let yourself listen.

reading clearout - july 2022

Hi folks, thoughts below on my reading from July 2022. However, before I get into the books just a quick comment on two small process changes.

First, I'm going to open each clearout post with a note on whether any book from the month made it to my book of the year shortlist. What does that mean? Reader, there is no method to this madness, but I'll try to explain - if a book appears on the shortlist then you'll know it's among my top ten to fifteen books from the year. Although I won't go so far as to say a book on the shortlist is a recommendation, I'll admit that (for now) it's the closest I'll ever get to suggesting reading material.

Second, I'm going to continue tightening up these summary posts. As longtime readers know, the quest for TOA efficiency is an ongoing and never-ending endeavor. I'm not quite at the point where I'm willing to just say "I read it and it was fine" - I still think it's useful for me to come up with some reflection on each reading experience - but the other side of this argument is that each additional word I write about a book is one less word I write for something original. (Stay tuned for more developments on this utterly fascinating situation.)

OK, without further admin - here's my reading from July 2022, none of which made it onto my 2022 book of the year shortlist.

High Risk by Chavi Eve Karkowsky

Karkowsky details the many aspects of pregnancy and childbirth in this wide-ranging book. Many of the chapters are organized around stories from her career as a high-risk pregnancy doctor. I think this book is a good fit for a reader seeking information on the topic, but please note that it doesn't quite read with the same ease which might be anticipated by those whose previous medical reading has centered around popular bestsellers.

Nothing specifically from High Risk has stayed with me over the past few months but I did find a couple of nuggets to highlight from my reading notes. First was the possibility that people who wish to talk about something years later may still be processing the grief, fear, or anger of that incident. The desire to discuss could be partly explained by having been unprepared for the emotions faced during that experience. In some ways this note (which I feel also applies outside the specific context of the book) describes why Karkowsky wrote it - to prepare people for some of the potential complications of pregnancy and to help them from being emotionally blindsided. I also noted the commentary connecting treatment with publicly-funded healthcare - when taxpayer dollars are closely connected to the medical system, the care someone receives can be thought of as a net gain for everyone in the sense that a healthy person is likelier to make a larger contribution to future tax revenue.

Grand Union by Zadie Smith

I believe Grand Union was Smith's first short story collection. Though I didn't think of it as highly as I've done with short fiction by other authors, I suspect I'll still seek out more of her work in the future. I think anyone who has previously enjoyed Smith's work will like Grand Union, but from scanning reviews it doesn't seem like it was anyone's personal favorite. From these twenty or so stories, I marked "For The King" as a reread.

As usual with short fiction, my reading notes are a scattering of one-line insights into the meaning of life. I pulled out two to highlight here - first, that one of the costs of racism is distraction by the way it forces people to stop and justify their existence, over and over again, to those who are free to continue unimpeded with their lives; second, that people can seem brave when they just don't recognize the risk.

The Winter Father by Andre Dubus

At some point during the pandemic I decided I would reread all of Dubus's short fiction, which in hindsight was an excellent yet somewhat time-consuming decision. The Winter Father is the second of three collected volumes spanning his full career, containing work previously published in The Times Are Never So Bad and Finding a Girl in America. I noted the stories "The Winter Father" and "A Father's Story" for future rereads.

Longtime TOA readers will know that I've previously had much to say about his work, so perhaps there is nothing I can add today that would influence your interest in reading his stories. But for those unfamiliar to these parts, perhaps a refresher will be helpful. You should know that Dubus tends to write on the long side of short fiction (some of these works are appropriately classified as novellas). His stories generally center isolated, middle-aged men who might defend their worldviews as being "a product of the times", but most of these protagonists recognize deep down that such words walk the fine line between explanation and excuse. Much like how Haruki Murakami's characters inevitably find themselves in a jazz bar, Dubus's subjects regularly cast their shadows over the Merrimack. Somehow, all of these details are the hallmarks of a master at work, whose writing illustrates the world as it is experienced by one person and leaves the reader with a slightly richer understanding of other lives.

The First-Time Manager by Loren B. Belker, Jim McCormick, and Gary S. Topchik

This was the rare book that I checked out of the library after noticing it on a shelf. I almost never make such an impulsive "purchase" - I usually look for a bit of information online to get a sense of the work before placing it on my reserve list. I believe the official reason I chose The First-Time Manager, first published in 1978 and described by Amazon as "a true management classic", was because someone in my team had been recently promoted into a managerial role. I thought this was potentially a good recommendation to help her prepare for the transition, but since I hadn't read it myself I knew I should give it a try first.

Of course, in life there are official reasons and then there are real reasons. The real reason I checked out this book is that I've been toying with the idea of writing a book. My idea is to help people who are taking on managerial responsibilities for the first time. For me, one consideration in this process is to get a sense of the competition, so when I saw this book I also saw it as a good place to start assessing the options currently available in this area. Let's just get straight to the outcomes - I thought overall this was a decent read containing some helpful advice, but I didn't recommend this book to my team member and I think I can write a much better book myself.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Roll your eyes if you must but by now we should know that I'll never pass up a chance to put a title like Then We Came to the End as the final section of a post.

Ferris's 2007 novel intrigued me for the clever gimmick of it being written in the first-person plural, describing the experience of a downsizing office through the collective eyes of its remaining employees. I think I enjoyed this book slightly more than the average reader, which might be more a reflection of how my work experiences made this book relatable to me. I don't think anyone will consider this a literary classic but I can recommend it as a light read for winding down before bedtime.

how to deviate from structure

The point of structure is to enforce the inconvenient option. This is the one conclusion I reached from reading Lisa Zeidner's Who Says?, a book I mentioned in last week's June 2022 summary. There was a note from my reading which made a similar point in the context of writing fiction (it's a lengthy note so hang in there with me) - departures from POV structure should serve a specific purpose, ensuring that the author is responding to the needs of the story rather than merely catering to convenience. I'm sure there is plenty more to be said on this point as it relates to writing fiction, but I figure I'd be better off sticking to my lane and commenting instead on its broader application.

Most of the things we do have at least a semblance of structure, whether that be in a routine, a process, or even just a mentality. There is a simple logic in adding structure - defining the sequence, rhythm, or reasoning for certain steps increases the likelihood of the desired outcome. You'd think this would be enough to ensure a full commitment to the structure but, alas, as inevitably as night follows dusk, those pesky deviations eventually come around to disrupt the structure. One thing I notice whenever I find myself drifting away from structure is echoed in Zeidner's point about fiction - convenience. Structure is constantly challenged by the convenience of doing things another way - you plan your morning around waking up early, but it's convenient to hit the snooze; you designate the time after lunch for working on long-term projects, but it's convenient to check email; you bring back groceries for your meal plan, but it's convenient to order delivery. If you put this idea into reverse, you see that inconvenience drives the necessity of structure. When things are inconvenient there is always the chance that we choose to do something else, so the structure helps us stick to the plan. The things required of us to reach any goal often include a host of inconvenient tasks or responsibilities. With structure, we gain a helping hand in committing to the inconvenient, which we see both initially as well as over time - at first structure commits us to the inconvenient steps, then it serves as a deterrent against the allure of the more convenient alternatives that eventually come along.

Let's return momentarily to Zeidner's point. For a fiction writer, perhaps an upcoming scene feels too challenging to write in the existing POV. Making the effort to stick with the original POV is inconvenient, so the author craters to convenience and shifts perspective to simplify the work. You may suspect that I believe such a decision is unambiguously poor, but that's not exactly how I see it. What I like about Zeidner's note is her refusal to dismiss such a decision out of hand, and this is also my perspective - absolutes should be avoided (most of the time). The question becomes how to identify those rare moments where we know to break an ironclad rule, a question which is complicated by the tendency to create such rules with a finality that offers no consideration of deviation. In Zeidner's note from Who Says?, she offers "the need of the story" as the prevailing consideration - it's OK to make the shift if it serves the story. What is left unstated here is an assumption obvious to fiction writers - all decisions regarding form and structure are made to serve the need of the story. Translating this example into a broader framework suggests that we can deviate from the structures in our lives so long as we keep in mind what we'd hoped our structures enabled in the first place, evaluating potential deviations to ensure they continue to serve that original need.

Of course, examples tend to fall short of being perfect comparisons to everyday life. With Zeidner's point, the challenge for me is how she refers to a decision which is often made while the original draft is still in progress. By contrast, in the everyday context we rarely work with anything at such an early stage of creation. The main distinction that comes to mind is between creation and replication - the writer in Zeidner's example requires structure to create the draft while in everyday situations structure more likely helps us replicate a previously achieved outcome. This means we must understand that the lessons on structure come with the caveat that using a structure for creation is different from using it for replication. One difference that immediately comes to mind is that for the creator structure discourages shortcuts while for the replicator it protects against incompletion. I suppose it's easy enough to understand the former - for the creator, there's always an opportunity in revision to notice errors and strengthen the final product. The latter is a bit more of a stretch to me. Since structure exists to get something done, why deviate from it in any way given how this puts the outcome at risk?

The fact that abandoning structure puts the outcome at risk sounds alarming enough to ensure commitment to the process, but from both observation as well as personal experience I know this isn't strictly the case. I think what's going on most of the time is that some aspect of the structure, initially unknown to (or unacknowledged by) those involved, makes the entire thing unsustainable. The decision to indulge convenience is the first hint of an unsustainable feature in the structure, implying that it's not strong enough to enforce the inconvenient option on the way to completing a goal. I suspect at this point that most people resort to a natural response - calling on their willpower to bring them back on course. Using willpower might work, but leaving it at willpower alone overlooks the lesson from that first hint. If your workout plan is structured around waking up early and then one morning you decide to skip the workout to sleep in, the logical response would be to analyze the situation and determine that the root cause of the issue was being too tired in the morning to get out of bed. If you instead decide that tomorrow you are going to try twice as hard to get out of bed, then maybe you'll get up or maybe you won't but either way the structure will carry that design flaw for as long as you do nothing about it.

The way to solve the issue would be to improve your rest so that you can wake up in the morning without being tempted to sleep in. This style of thinking is the only truthful way to deviate from structure, using real-life feedback to identify where you are struggling with commitment to the inconvenient steps in the plan and then adjusting appropriately to address the root cause. The reason this is difficult is because it requires a significant degree of honest self-reflection, which I don't think is a quality we possess in abundance. Far too often, we instead remain loyal to our original plan and try to force ourselves to stick with it through sheer willpower. The problem with this approach is that it throws away the moment where you could have learned, regardless of your initial good intent, that your plan remained prone to the temptations of convenience. If you accept my premise that structure exists to enforce the inconvenient steps toward a goal, then you can see why such moments should never be ignored. When it comes to structure, each moment where we consider a convenient alternative is like a drop of water coming through the roof during the rain - nothing about the situation will permanently improve without taking some kind of action.

As usual, writing about any problem makes the difficult sound absurdly simple - analyze the problem! identify the root cause!! make the necessary changes!!! The way we navigate each day, which of course is driven by the sometimes unstoppable force known as human nature, is rarely influenced by such a simple set of rational commands. We are, for better or for worse, creatures of convenience, so perhaps the truth of the matter is that I should just drop it, admitting that no structure can overcome destiny. But I still think it's worth thinking about structure - why we need it, how it fails, and what to do when it requires repair. It's worth thinking about how to make ourselves more likely to do the inconvenient things. The fact is that we don't always have the strength to turn away from convenience, which means we don't have the strength do the things we want to do, to take the steps we need to take, to reach the goals we hope to reach. Structure is one of the things we can use to borrow this strength when it is lacking within us so that we can serve the most important consideration of all - to live the life we wish to live.

reading clearout - june 2022

Hi reader, happy current year! Hope all is well in 2023 so far.

Here are some notes on my reading from June 2022.

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

Longtime readers may recall that I previously wrote about Oyamada's The Factory, placing that work on my 2021 books of the year shortlist. I didn't feel as strongly about The Hole, which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2013 (for those unfamiliar with Japanese literature, this is a prize that I believe is named after an Akutagawa, much like how the Nobel Peace Prize is named after a Peace). My recollection of this book is the expert way Oyamada sets the mood for the reader, leaving me fully immersed in the protagonist's feeling of being trapped by circumstance in her strange new surroundings. For those wondering about my recommendation, I suggest giving it an initial try - it's a short book, so if you can manage its strangeness then getting to the end of this decorated work should be no issue.

Who Says? by Lisa Zeidner

In this thorough work, Zeidner guides the reader through point of view in fiction. It was a solid book but perhaps too technical for me, which could just as much be a reflection on me as on the book (I suspect this book is best suited for fiction writers, either beginners or those who need to brush up on their fundamentals). However, I did feel that reading Who Says? made me a marginally better reader, particularly in the ways it helped me recognize specific structural techniques that mark strong writing. A helpful example is in one of my notes from the book - scene compression, which is implied by the extent to which an author reveals background information through exposition, is one of the ways great writers differ from good writers.

There were two details regarding the book's topic that jumped out to me during my notes review. First, for details such as rolled eyes a writer should ask - does the reader need to see this? - then consider whether rewriting away from default omniscience is an appropriate objective for revision. Zeidner also comments that the third-person perspective operates best when the desired effect is like that of a reveal, helping limit the exhibitionist feeling that might emerge were this done in the first-person. Who Says? also made a few interesting remarks that had nothing to do with point of view. As one example, Zeidner points out that the difference in literary and commercial fiction is the extent to which details resembling stage instructions appear in the work, likely a result of how literary fiction strikes anything that isn't valuable to the story. She also remarks that fiction is superior to a movie whenever the story must break into a character's mind, making a book the preferred way to tell stories about mood or motive.

What Are the Chances? by Barbara Blatchley

Blatchley's book promises to explain why people believe in luck, which she does by focusing mainly on history and brain science. These two areas are not exactly among my main interests, so for me What Are the Chances? wasn't the greatest reading experience. (It also probably didn't help that I brought some familiarity on the topic of luck with me to the reading.) The main premise of the book is that human minds are deeply ingrained with the idea that events have causes, so we naturally seek explanations for what happens in our lives. This may lead us to fear the unknown, a category in which Blatchley also includes randomness, so our ability to see false patterns or conjure up unlikely explanations is partly a result of trying to control this fear.

One note caught my eye while reviewing - the Clever Hans effect. This refers to a sensational story from the early 1900s about a horse who seemed capable of performing arithmetic. Eventually, researchers determined that the horse was reading the body language of the trainer, who was subtly giving off cues regarding the correct answer. I believe it's included in this book as an example of why we should remain skeptical of unlikely explanations, but I think there is a lot more to be said about it due to the possible applications in all kinds of fields. For today, I'll note that this story rings true to me from those instances when a household pet seemed to intuit that I was about to leave despite my not having made any indication of an imminent departure.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

Longtime TOA readers will know that I count Klosterman among my favorite authors. Those familiar with his work will assume, rightfully so, that he brings a necessary balance to my favorites list, with his presence contrasting with those of the more rigorous or literary authors (perhaps best exemplified by The Nineties being listed on the Goodreads "2022 Best Humor" nominee list). However, Klosterman has a unique approach to his writing that I see as its own form of seriousness, even if the results won't seem very serious to the average observer. I suppose what I mean is that regardless of whether the topic itself is serious, he always seems to approach those topics seriously, and I think this style leads to his writing being more interesting than logic would dictate. The Nineties, about the 1990s, is a good example of this in action - he didn't set out to write a comprehensive hindsight analysis of the decade, as perhaps a serious historian would, but rather tried to capture how it felt to live through it at the time, which to me seems like a goal that would require its own brand of serious thinking.

It's not a perfect style and the book did have some flaws but I could forgive some of the shortcomings due to his refreshing approach toward the subject. For me, it was interesting to encounter lifestyle details that I'm sure are on the verge of being lost to common memory, with a notable example being the way landlines controlled their owners. I wouldn't go so far as to say it resembled an addiction, but at a time where so many worry about smartphone dependency it makes for a pleasant diversion to think about the complicated relationship we've always had with our phones. I also had never considered the way audio formats influenced records for album sales - many longtime music fans repurchased vinyl favorites for use with their CD players. The note that the rise of rap made it possible for people to hold an anti-police perspective even if they'd never had a meaningful interaction with police themselves made some sense to me from experience - the music was popular among my teenaged peers, with whom I grew up in the type of town entirely unacknowledged by the genre. However, I am left wondering if an aside expanding on the idea could have been the best part of the book given how this specific trend has only accelerated in the ensuing decades. To close with a comment on an occasional TOA topic, I thought it was fascinating that some Gallup polls regarding the 2000 election didn't include climate change among its top sixteen issues.

the toa 2022 review - top ten most read, part five (#5, #3, #2, #1)

Hi reader, here's the fifth and final part of the 2022 top ten recap. I know I'm supposed to say something like "last but not least" in these situations, however in this case that sentiment may not fully apply due to how I broke out the substantial reflections into their own posts. In other words, this, the last section, may also indeed be the least interesting of the reflections. Complain if you'd like, just remember this is free.

In any case, thanks for reading in 2022, and hopefully we have more satisfying conclusions ahead of us in 2023.

#5 | "Presentation and Public Appearance" (May 11, 2019)

I have absolutely no idea what caused readers in 2022 to pick out this 2019 post (it's almost 100% certain that folks randomly stumbled onto it while cruising the information superhighway). Still, it's kind of interesting to reread one of the older-style TOA reading reviews. This post, riffing on a comment from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game, reinforces an important reminder for our current "fast casual" information era - some ideas are too complex to be fully understood from just a couple of bullet points, so beware anytime you are promised comprehension without being asked to make the necessary investment of mental energy.

#4 | "Who Woke The Business Bro?" (July 9)

This one was covered separately a few days ago.

#3 | "It's Just Not The Time To Not Say" (July 3)

#2 | "The Final Schedule" (July 6)

This pair was presented together back in July, with the connecting thread being that I was essentially publishing excuses for slowing down with my TOA pace. Who knew a three-month break was just around the corner?

The first post was definitely a bit of an outlier on this list in the sense that it feels more like a blog post than anything else (let's call it a BLS - "blog-like substance"). The unfocused nature of a BLS meant I buried the main point under a cascade of syllables, so let's just restate it here - the best time to write something is when there is no choice but to write it. For those loyal readers who aren't writers, this can apply in other contexts - the best time to say something is when there is no choice but to say it.

The second post, noted as a leftover to the first post, had a little more to it thanks to my observation regarding why I was struggling to find topics - having already written about so many things over the years, I either had to think of new ideas or return to previously discussed themes. The problem with the latter is that given my view of writing as one way to think, the level of thinking for anything I had previously written about would therefore need to be much more rigorous than in the past. To put it another way, if I need to think more about a topic than I did in the past, then it would also be tougher to write about, which would have some obvious slowdown effects on my posting schedule.

#1 | "The Annual Misremembering" (July 12)

There are a couple of problems with rereading my own work. First, most of the older posts have an obvious flaw or two, which means rereading is often interrupted by a sudden urge to unlock the post and start revising it. The second problem is that I've posted so many things over seven years that I don't really remember any of it, which means rereading can also lead to these intense bouts of self-flagellation where I question why I ever thought it wise to put my words onto a public space.

Neither of those two applies to this post, however - you could say it's a bit of a unicorn. I just reread it, and I have no urge to make any edits. I also enjoyed reading it, almost as if it were some kind of fresh work from another writer thanks to the fact that I didn't recall so much as a word from six months ago. If this is going to represent my writing from 2022, then it's just fine with me.

the toa 2022 review - top ten most read, part four (#4)

Hi reader, we're going to skip #5 for today and move straight to my reflections on the fourth most-read post from 2022.

#4 | "Who Woke The Business Bro?" (July 9)

There's not much I can add that is specifically related to this post. It's a short piece with an obvious point, though I suppose whether the point is obvious or not depends on how clearly you've thought about this topic. I can also note that there is an element of a "TOA special" here in the way it's crafted to give any type of reader an angle for disagreement (or maybe I should say - it doesn't finish where it started, another TOA hallmark). But I'm not feeling compelled to add to any of the above today.

Maybe the only real observation I can make about this post is that it's a good example of why I don't share TOA with my current colleagues. I've been involved in my organization's DEI group since late 2019. It's been a good experience despite slow progress, but for the most part I've been able to maintain my commitment and stick with the process. The past year or so (at the time of the post, it would have been a few months) was a turning point for me. I think my patience gave way to frustration far more easily than it did in the first two years, with a consistent source of this feeling stemming from those who prioritized learning ahead of working toward the organization's stated goals. I can partner with anyone who values learning, in fact I am more than willing to play some role in contributing to their learning process, but in this specific context I've started to feel that the "learning process" operates a lot like a small child's "eating process" - waiting around until someone more experienced serves a highly curated, easily digestible nugget at just the right time. Would you like to try a carrot, even if it's a little uncomfortable? No, of course not, since eating includes only the things you are comfortable eating. Would you like to tell me you're hungry? No, I should just know, to spare you the vulnerability of admitting you need my help.

But there is another angle, which goes back to something I mentioned in the original post. Despite my frustrations maybe what's happening is actually the right thing, and I'm simply failing to accept my role in the next step of the process. I suppose it's reasonable that I should help others continue the learning process that they began in June 2020, and that they should define this process rather than me. OK, I can entertain that idea. But if this is the case, then shouldn't reality be reflected in the paycheck? Schools pay the teachers, not the students. At perhaps the most basic level this is what DEI in the workplace is all about - recognizing, valuing, and compensating people for the work produced through their skills and experience, which in the DEI context often refers to such that have traditionally escaped acknowledgment. In an organization such as mine, there is a strong emphasis placed on having the qualifications to further DEI work, but no reward for those already in the team who are furthering DEI work. If we need to start somewhere, why not with those who are helping their colleagues develop and apply these skills to the work? I think as long as paychecks make no recognition of the ongoing work in the present, then it won't be possible to accomplish the goals set for the future.