My parents were in town last weekend, babysitting my nephew. One of those evenings, after my mother had read about a dozen children’s books to put him to bed, she pointed out something I’d never previously considered. While most of the near-universal children’s book themes – numbers and letters, say – are the building blocks of future learning, there’s another classic that makes much less sense: animal noises.

Indeed, while there are literally thousands of books on Amazon that cover the topic, unless you’re one of the less than half a percent of Americans who will one day work farming animals, I’m totally unclear on the purpose that knowledge serves later in life. What, exactly, are children meant to take away from it? As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed, “all the brute animals have the vowel sounds; only man can utter consonants.”

In my entire life, I’ve probably bowled less than twenty games; when I do, I’m pretty happy just to score above 100. So I was exceedingly impressed when I recently discovered this video, in which a dude breaks a world record by bowling a perfect game in under 90 seconds, using all the lanes in the alley in rapid succession:

It made me think of, nearly twenty years ago, planning a bowling holiday party for my first company. Though I showed up believing the open bar would be the main draw, my colleagues began to arrive toting their own monogrammed balls and shoes, and I quickly realized things were about to get ugly. I went home that night wondering: should I spend at least some time learning to bowl, at least to the point that I’m no longer a horrific embarrassment?

The same thing happens whenever I (rather infrequently) play pool, a game that I can geometrically crush in my mind, yet that somehow goes badly awry when actual cue makes contact with real-life ball. And, similarly, whenever I end up having to draw something in public, the picture of a dog in my mind’s eye devolving into a squiggly, misshapen cow-creature when committed to whiteboard or page.

At various times, I’ve given thought to getting, if not good, then at least decent at any of those pursuits, too. Much like I’ve considered studying chess (something I feel like I’d be good at, even if the half-dozen games over the course of my life don’t precisely back that up), learning to ride a motorcycle, or just figuring out how to do that ‘loud whistle with your fingers in your mouth’ thing.

But, in the end, I’ve inevitably concluded that, at this point in my life, I already have a full weekly schedule. So it’s not a question of whether I’d like to be good at golf; it’s a question of whether I’d like that more than some other equally time-intensive commitment that’s already on my roster.

It reminds me a bit of the well-trafficked story about the advice Warren Buffett gave to his personal pilot, Mike Flint. Flint asked for career advice, so Buffett suggested they draw up together a list of Flint’s top 25 goals. Then he had Flint circle the top five goals on that list.

Flint told Buffett he’d get to work on those five right away.

“But what about the ones you didn’t circle?” Buffett asked.

“Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second,” Flint replied. “They’re still important, so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

So, in short, no learning Chinese, getting a flying license, or anything else. I feel good enough about my own ‘top five’ that I can reliably stick with my plan. But I do still, now and again, come across a crazy video of a crack bowler on the Internet, and pine for the chance to somehow do it all. As I recently quoted Tolkien: “I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”

Eight years ago, I blogged about having terrible spring allergies in NYC, and about how, because I never had them in my California youth (I suspect due to arboreal differences between the coasts), I got caught off guard each year when allergy season hit.

Now a full twenty years into East Coast life, I still completely forget about my spring allergies, and it still takes me a few days of sniffling, sneezing, and eye-itching to remember, oh wait, I’m not dying, I’m just allergic to the world.

This time, however, at least I was ready, having socked away meds last spring in preparation. And while Zyrtec is somewhat effective for me, Nasonex is basically a miracle. So good, in fact, that I can completely forget I even have allergies, as long as I’m using the two together.

Which, I suppose, is just going to perpetuate my longer-term forgetfulness. Perhaps I need to put a note in my calendar for March 20th, 2018: SPRING IS HERE, YOU MORON, AND YOU’RE ALLERGIC TO IT.

“Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that means ‘a reason for being.’ Everyone, according to Japanese culture, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. Such a search is important to the cultural belief that discovering one’s ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life.”
– Wikipedia

I’ve been contemplating this related Venn diagram for the past week, and have found it well worth the time:

As I’ve mentioned before, over the past year, I’ve been testing out workout programming from a number of sources I respect, to see what good ideas and inspiration I can gather for Composite’s programming. After each stretch of trying someone else’s programming, I then spend a month or so doing programming I lay out for myself, incorporating what I’ve learned.

Looking back at my logs over the past year, a clear pattern emerges: when I’m following someone else’s programming, my compliance is very high, and I make it to the gym with great regularity; when I’m following my own, I start getting lax, taking days off, and routinely need ten or twelve days to cycle through what I’d laid out as workouts for a single week.

Given that I’m a compulsive self-tracker, that led me to look at other spheres of my life. And, indeed, when it comes to playing the trumpet, for example, I tend to practice more regularly and rigorously if I’m getting assignments from a teacher, rather than laying out (often very similar) sessions for myself.

In large part, I suspect the trumpet teacher effect is due to accountability: if I have to come back and play in front of someone, I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I’m more likely to get down to work. But, interestingly, that same effect holds even if the teacher is virtual, doesn’t know I exist.

When I first picked up the meditation habit, for example, I was using the great Headspace app. Over time, feeling more comfortable with things, I shifted to doing vipasana sessions on my own with a timer. And, there too, I found that my morning meditations were getting shorter, sometimes getting skipped entirely. So I went back to Headspace, and started following one of the app’s thirty-day cycles. Lo and behold, I was suddenly back to longer sessions, and hitting them almost every day.

I’m not sure entirely why that’s the case, though I do have a theory: when someone tells me what to do, I don’t have to think much about the reasoning behind what I’m told; I can simply assume that there’s method to the madness. So, when the time comes, my ‘doing self’ can just focus on the doing. Whereas when I’ve laid the work out for myself, I end up facing it as both my ‘doing self’ and my ‘assigning self.’ While the first is willing to get to it, the second can give me all kinds of reasons why I don’t need to, can rationalize a way out.

So, with that in mind, I’ve been giving new thought to other kinds of ‘bosses’ that might be useful in my life – business coach, relationship coach, financial advisor, etc. In the past, I’ve been dubious of the value that those people might provide, reasoning that I’d often be able to come to the same conclusions myself as they were likely to hand out. But now, I’m beginning to think that the value comes from that handing, rather than the conclusions themselves. I suspect there might be value in finding more people and places where I can have someone outside my own head just tell me what to do.