Over the course of my career thus far, I’ve spent enough on corporate legal bills to put an entire law firm’s children through college.
As I continue to dump dollars into legal costs – papering new deals, putting old ones to bed – I’ve started to think there should be some sort of law school equivalent of life experience credits.
Because if time working on contracts counted as sufficient prerequisite, I’m pretty sure I could by now totally ace the bar exam equivalent of the GED.
Perhaps due to my hacker roots, for more than a decade I’ve organized my life in a collection of text files. But when it comes to actually executing, I’ve discovered I’m far more productive working off a printed-out version of my Today.txt to-do list than I am with the same list on-screen.
For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my *Beautiful Mind* mode).
For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.
About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of [Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens](http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Mate-Point-Guard-Assorted-8404452Pp/dp/B002R5AEIY/ref=sr_1_12?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1335062836&sr=1-12) to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.
A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.
I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched [Dobbin Clothing](http://www.dobbinclothing.com). (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other-colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.
Kermit was right.
A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.
Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.
Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.
In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.
I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.
And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.
Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.
And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.
But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.
A few days ago, skimming through the always excellent Ask Metafilter, I stumbled across a great post asking about America’s quirks as seen by foreigners.
A slew of international readers weighed in, listing the number of American flags in non-civic setting, the giant portion sizes, that cigarettes are sold at drug stores with news agents and tobacconist shops nowhere to be seen.
And then, one said: paper toilet seat covers.
And I thought: paper toilet seat covers?!? Certainly, we must not be the only country using them. The very idea of pooping sans-paper struck me viscerally as below barbaric. Were all of these foreign people raised by wolves?
But a bit of cursory Googling confirmed the usual; we’re the ones who are really the barbarians here. Toilet seats, it seems, are actually far cleaner than faucets, door handles, toilet paper rolls, even office desks and workstations. And, further, it’s essentially impossible to catch anything from a toilet seat, regardless of germ content. From the Mayo Clinic and the CDC on down, the consensus was clear: the seat covers are an odd Americanism, a placebo at best.
(Also discovered in that Googling: women’s bathrooms apparently have twice as many germs as men’s, and men, who get the bum rap for supposedly carelessly peeing on toilet seats, are actually much less likely to do so; we lift the seat when peeing, whereas germaphobic women apparently pop a high squat hovering over the seat and pee all over the place. The fairer sex indeed.)
Of course, I’m not alone in my faith in the power of the toilet seat cover. A USA Today poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans erroneously believe diseases can be transmitted by sitting on toilet seats. Which is why, perhaps, even armed with the knowledge that I’m accomplishing nothing by doing so, in the days since discovering this all, I’ve continued to paper up – I just also feel vaguely guilty and foolish for doing so. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Even decades before I started CrossFit NYC, I was deeply fascinated by fitness. I’d read textbooks, medical journals, any fitness websites I could find. From the anaerobic pathway to Zatsiorsky’s power output formulae, I consumed it all.
Nutrition, though: not so much. I read up enough to become a very early Paleo Diet convert, have kept up sufficiently to field the odd question from gym members or from family and friends. But after even fairly cursory amounts of nutrition reading, I inevitably find my eyes glazing, resort to a fast skim of the balance of the text. I’d like to know more about nutrition; I just don’t want to put in the work.
About six months ago, I discovered Paul Jaminet’s excellent book, The Perfect Health Diet. It is, by far, the best diet and nutrition book I’ve found. (It’s also perhaps the best researched; each page is about half text and half footnote.) And I discovered his equally smart and thoughtful blog, which synthesizes cutting-edge information through a lens of deep domain expertise and common sense.
And, in short, I realized that I could save a lot of time and angst by just making Paul my outboard nutrition brain. Here was a generally brilliant guy, who already knew much more about the field than I did, and who was following new developments far more closely than I could make myself. So why not just piggyback on his erudition, and simply agree with whatever he concluded?
More recently, I’ve been thinking that I might similarly be able to offload some of my political and economics brain. Reading and watching more of Fareed Zakaria, I’ve found myself being impressed by, and agreeing with, virtually everything he says. Sure, I continue to consume political and economic books, articles and podcasts. But the world is a big and complicated place. And I simply can’t keep up, in depth, on all fronts, with somebody who spends more time and energy – and has for decades – on a given subject than I do.
I’ve been kicking the idea around in general: if I want to be a well-versed generalist, but also believe that I accomplish more when I focus on less, can I square the circle by outsourcing more and more of my less-critical thinking to an array of outboard brains?
I often hear from people that theirs is a ‘relationship business’, and that it therefore isn’t really susceptible to the influence of technology.
In my experience, there are two different types of businesses that are driven mainly by relationship: commodity businesses – where any choice is as good as any other – and businesses with terrible data – where people have no idea if any choice is better than any other.
In commodity businesses, perhaps that makes sense. If you’re buying crates of #10 envelopes – all roughly the same in terms of quality or price – you might as well buy from the guy with whom you’d like to have expense account drinks.
But in data-less businesses, the situation is far less sensible. A restaurateur stocks a given liquor due to relationship only because he can’t quantify whether his customers would more likely purchase a different drink, in a way that would yield better profits, customer satisfaction, or other ROI.
And, indeed, in the majority of professional or creative businesses – from medicine and law, to music, film, publishing, and fashion – where so many decisions are ‘relationship-driven’, I strongly, strongly suspect things fall into that second, less sensible, data-less relationship category. Decision-guiding data has already started showing up increasingly in those worlds; as the data trickle turns to flood over the next five years, those industries will start looking very different than they do today.
Over the past two decades, I’ve largely stuck with Old Spice deodorant, though I’ve been less loyal to specific scents:
There’s an excellent story in a recent edition of Tampa’s St. Petersburg Times, about Dan McLaughlin, a guy who’s decided to take up golf.
Or, rather, a guy who’s decided to really take up golf. Despite having never played before, he’s set his sights on a slot in the PGA tour. His plan is simple: practice golf for 10,000 hours over the next six years. (That’s six hours a day, six days a week, for those without a calculator.)
It’s a great, albeit clearly insane, experiment, that puts to test an academic theory popularized most recently by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: that becoming truly excellent at something requires less talent and natural skill, and more a willingness to put in about 10,000 hours of hard, focused work.
If that theory is right, by the end of six years, Dan should be one hell of a scratch golfer. If not, then perhaps some of the research on expertise is bound back to the drawing board, and Dan is clearly headed back to a real job.
Either way, I’m curious to see how this pans out, so I’ll be following along at his blog, www.thedanplan.com. But I’ll also be giving some real thought to where the 10,000 hours idea might apply to my own life.
Because, at some basic level, much as I’m impressed with Dan’s commitment and focus, I’m also pretty sure I wouldn’t want to spend six years of my life devoted to nothing other than being a better golfer.
What I’m less clear on is, what would I devote six years to? And, similarly, where have I already been chalking up serious practice hours?
There’s trumpet playing, for example, which I’ve been doing regularly since the age of nine, and where I’ve, by napkin calculation, amassed about half of the expert count, weighing in somewhere near 5,000 hours total.
But there, too, I’m not (and don’t want to be) a full-time professional trumpet player. I do consider myself a full-time entrepreneur, however. Though, on that front, I’m not sure my daily work really qualifies as hard, focused practicing of entrepreneurship. In the world of practice research, that would be ‘deliberate practice’, which roughly boils down to:
1. Focusing on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Setting specific goals.
3. Getting good, prompt feedback, and using it.
So I’ve been thinking about how I might make my work more deliberately practiceful. About what other areas of interest might warrant 10,000 hours of focus. And, finally, about how, as I’m certainly unwilling to put in 10,000 hours of practice on it, I’ll likely always be terrible at golf.
The Washington Post reports that a handful of colleges recently dropped the ubiquitous dining hall tray, and found that wasted food decreased by as much as 25-30% as a result.
An excellent result from so small a change, and one that makes intuitive sense: without a tray to pile upon, the amount of food people can carry apparently much better matches the amount they can actually eat.
But that glosses over an interesting question: why do people take more than they want to eat, even if they can carry it? Because, it turns out, they have no idea how much they want. Research has increasingly shown that, across the board, we’re terrible at assessing up front what’s going to make us happy at some point later, even if that just means determining how much food will make us feel pleasantly full fifteen minutes from now.
And, I think, it glosses over a second, even more interesting issue: we hugely underestimate the degree to which our tools affect our behavior. While scientists may not have previously researched trays, they’ve repeatedly researched plates, demonstrating, for example, that manipulating the size of plate on which we serve food changes the amount of that food we eat before feeling full; smaller plates lead to eating smaller portions, though with people thinking they’ve actually eaten more.
Of course, it isn’t just dinner plates and dining hall trays. Indeed, nearly all of modern life seems to operate at the same juncture of manufactured stuff and unclear self-assessment; thus, we make things, which in turn re-make us. Which is to say, we create technology (say, a plate) to assist us with an ill-understood instinctive behavior (eating food), and then find that the technology has led to unexpected consequences in the very behavior itself (how much of the food we eat).
For the behavior of communication, we’ve at least long acknowledged that we’re shaped by our tools – it’s been more than 45 years since McLuhan pointed out that the medium is the message. But as more of our life becomes mediated by technology – how we share with friends, how we find our mates – the effect becomes exponentially greater. We’ve thrown ourselves into this crazy experiment without much thought, and we plow ahead, increasingly unthinkingly, shaped by our tools, unable to self-assess or future-predict, each brand new day.
There’s a lot of research behind the idea that we measure how well we’re doing in life not by absolute measures, but by relative ones.
Most people would (perhaps obviously) choose to earn $75,000 over $50,000, all else being equal.
Yet change that choice to be between earning $50,000 while your friends and colleagues earn $40,000, or earning $75,000 while your friends and family earn $100,000, and the popular option flips. Most people choose to earn less overall, rather than to earn more overall while still earning less than those around them.
Evolutionarily, we’re wired to look for our standing within a group. We determine how we’re doing by checking how well we compare.
And that, I think, is the danger of Twitter.
Most people’s average days are, well, pretty average. Yet within any given day, at least one relatively interesting thing is likely to happen. That’s the part people tweet about:
“I’m at [fill in the blank interesting place]!”
“Just ran into [fill in the blank important person]!”
“OMG! I love [trendy thing]!”
Basically, you get the highlight reel of all your acquaintances’ lives, 140 characters at a time. All of whom, extrapolating from there, seem to spend their entire lives attending parties, being fabulous, and generally living very well.
But, like in reality TV, the trick is in the editing. You live the entirety of your life (the highs, middles, and lows), and only read about their lives’ peaks.
So, rather than let Twitter depress you with comparison-driven angst, consider a thought experiment I personally enjoy: Tweets that your friends should publish if they were trying to reflect the full balance of their lives, but probably never will:
“Still working on [busywork related to current mind-numbing project]!”
“Eating a tub of Haagen Dazs alone on the couch while watching TV again!”
“Holy crap, I just had really explosive diarrhea, and boy did it burn!”