Alexandersmap

    Category: Learning

    • Growth at the Point of Resistance

      “I have seen many people in diverse fields take some version of the process-first philosophy and transform it into an excuse for never putting themselves on the line or pretending not to care…
      As adults, we have to take responsibility for ourselves and nurture a healthy, liberated mind-set. We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose…
      Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.”
      – Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning

      I’ve been sitting on Waitzkin’s book for a long time, and finally started reading it when I’d chewed through other Kindle downloads.  When I read in poor lighting or when walking on the treadmill the iPad app and Kindle offer the most flexibility to get it done (I’m just not going to wear reading glasses on a treadmill, thank you). So Waitzkin’s book has lurked in the Cloud for a couple of years, pushed back by other, sexier books. And that’s a shame because it’s brilliant. But so it goes, we’re here now; front of the line. Here’s your cue Josh!

      “Disappointment is a part of the road to greatness.” – Josh Waitzkin

      There comes a point in your life, hopefully, when you re-commit to learning. Your ego is pushed aside a bit and you start telling yourself the truth – I don’t know this and I’d like to learn more about it. And you wade into the deep end, knowing you’ll have setback and will get overwhelmed and perhaps humiliated, but at the very least humbled. I’m humbled learning French. I’m humbled realizing a bathtub installation isn’t as easy as I’d hoped as I look at a tub longer than the advertised rough opening space. I’m humbled when a customer asks what version of Transport Layer Protocol we use. If life has reinforced anything for me, it’s that “I don’t know, let me find out” is the best answer.

      It’s easy to spot a bullshit artist. They seem to gravitate to the spotlight. And enough people fall in line behind them that they might run a company, a church or be President. They’ll say what you want to hear, boost your own ego and collect you time, money or vote. It’s a lot harder to recognize that maybe you don’t have the world all figured out and then have the initiative and humility to go figure out where the truth lies. Right now I’m a long way from fluent French, but closer than I was last year.  Right now I haven’t won a Nobel Prize in Literature, but I’m a better writer than I was last year at this time and light years ahead of a decade ago.

      I woke up this morning thinking about a bathtub drain. Mind you, this isn’t a typical first thought of the day for me, but I recognized in the clarity of early morning that I need to drop in the tub, I can’t just slide it in, and that changes everything. Damn. More work. But with the realization came the solution, and I know it will turn out okay. I reached a point of resistance with this tub, came up with one not-so-great solution that ultimately won’t work, and eventually found the answer somewhere between REM sleep and lying awake in the darkness.

      The great thing about being alive right now is having all the information you need a click away. The problem with being alive right now is the flood of bad information, distracting nonsense and conspiracy theories out there. A little focus goes a long way in all things. I’ll never be a master carpenter or professional plumber, but I’ll get this tub in with a little help here and there. I may always sound like French is a second language for me, but eventually I’ll figure out enough to find out where the bathroom is and hold a basic conversation.  I may not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I’m learning a lot about myself through the writing, and hey, someone has to win it, right?  Stretch goals are inherently stretch you, just don’t go too thin in that stretch.  Know your limitations, but by all means test them. You never know until you try.

    • Basketball and Icarus

      “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew…
      I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
      – Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying

      Last night I watched the last regular season basketball game of my son’s career. With four teams bunched up in the standings with the same conference record at the start of the game, there was a lot to play for, the winner of this game would move on to the playoffs, the loser would go home.  A similar reality was playing out in gyms in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine.  This was the end of some players’ triumph.

      As a parent you think maybe your kid will make the travel basketball team.  If they have some skills you think they may make their High School team, and play AAU ball on a team with good coaching.  And in the back of your mind you calculate the odds of your kid playing in college.  For the record, the odds of a High School basketball player playing in an NCAA college basketball program – that’s Division I, II and III, is 3.4%.  So for the thousands of kids playing basketball and rising through the ranks, only a very small percentage actually play in college.  Crazy small odds when you think of it.

      For my son, basketball was an obvious choice.  He’s always been a head taller than everyone else, he’s always been athletic and he’s very “coachable”.  He’s never been the leading scorer on any team after Middle School, but has always been a leader on the court and a strong defensive presence.  I’m slightly biased, but the team seems better when he’s on the court most of the time.  He had one hurdle that limited him; he had a tendency to pass up shots and open lanes and pass the ball instead.  In a game that’s played more and more at the perimeter, centers are less prioritized than they once were on the offensive end.  But put him on the defensive end and watch him shine.  He’s in the top five in blocks in the conference playing a third of the minutes of the others on the list.

      He grew up playing ball in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts.  The Merrimack Valley is a mix of tough city kids and suburban kids.  When you play in the Merrimack Valley you quickly grow a thick skin or you fade away.  I’ve watched a lot of wild college games with hostile home crowds, but I’d put an Andover-Central Catholic or Lawrence-Lowell game up against most college games for level of intensity and the passion of the crowd.  Basketball players are either baked or burned in this environment, and college coaches know it.  Recruiters started talking to my son and many other players during fall league games at “The Barn” in North Andover during fall ball games, and would pop up at games throughout the rest of the season.  College recruiting is a game in itself, and you feel both honored and at times bewildered by the experience.  Where’s the best fit?  Will he actually play there or are they stacking players?

      The best advice we ever heard was to choose the college first and the program second.  If your child doesn’t love the school, they won’t want to stay there.  If they don’t love the program they can still stay at the school and get a degree.  When you get a school they love with a program they like, playing with teammates they love, that’s the best scenario. And that’s where we found ourselves over the last four years.  It carried our son through major injuries and a change in playing philosophy in the program that emphasized shooters on the perimeter over big guys in the paint.  He loved his school, loved his teammates, and respected the program and stuck with it.  No regrets.  His last two points on his home court were an emphatic put-back dunk, his first dunk after two years of building his ankle strength back up.  His last dunk was on this basket two years earlier when a player came down on him as he grabbed a defensive rebound. He wouldn’t play again for a long time, and wouldn’t dunk again until this, his last home game. It came with exactly one minute left on the clock, and it was the perfect cap on those last two years of struggle.  It’s a grainy screen shot from the game video, but I love it because it shows him in flight, near the end of his own journey in this game.

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      For any basketball player to be playing college basketball at any level is a triumph.  A very small number will move on to the NBA or to coaching, but this is the end for almost every one of them.  It’s the culmination of years of playing and learning, injuries and setbacks, making teams and not making other teams, growing as people and learning important life skills like time management and mutual respect and unselfishness and risk-taking.  As with every game, it gets harder as you grow with it, but you do grow with it.  And as a parent I’ve grown with it too.

      And so we found ourselves in a gym in Maine on Senior night for the team we were playing against.  They were ahead of us in the standings walking in, but both teams knew that the winner wrote their ticket in, the loser had to hope others lost for them to move forward.  As it happened those other teams won their games while our teams played each other, setting up the win or go home scenario.  Parents watched scores on their phones, knowing more than the players did.  But the players knew the stakes.  I found myself drawn to a guard from the other team as the clock ticked down and our team holding a tenuous lead in the game.  Tears were in his eyes, and he’d pull his jersey up to wipe them away.  His coach, seeing his emotion, shouted at him to be ready for the ball should he get one more shot to win it.  That chance disappeared as time ran out on the game and the regular season.  One team moving on to the playoffs, one team at the end of their triumph. But surely a triumph for all of them, being here, playing this game at this level.

    • French Lessons

      I’m currently learning French using Duolingo. I’ve dabbled in the language before, but dabbled is the key word: never fully committing to learning French… until now. Novice level? Oui. I’m 49 days into a streak of Duolingo French lessons, trying to spend a minimum of 20 minutes on it every day. Sure, I won’t be on the French lecture circuit anytime soon, but those 20 minutes add up over time (100 minutes or 16+ hours) and I can see progress. Repetition penetrates the dullest of minds, and slowly I see it making a difference. As with reading I catch the bug and wanted to jump into Spanish, Portuguese and German too, but I’m holding them all at bay and focusing on incremental improvement in French. You master nothing when you’re distracted by everything.

      Learning as an adult requires an open mind, patience with yourself, discipline and a good sense of humor. It’s become another part of my daily habit routine, admittedly not at the level of immersion but good enough to move forward in a busy stack of days. Duolingo is a better version of a game on your phone; some days I’m clicking right along getting everything right, some days it’s a struggle, but every day I learn something new. Perhaps I’ll book a trip to Quebec City or Paris as both incentive and reward for sticking with it if I start to slow my pace, but for now 20 minutes a day seems to be moving me along the path to fluency à la vitesse d’un escargot.

      I read the book Atomic Habits just over a year ago, and it’s remained hugely influential for me. Habit formation is either conscious or unconscious, but we all have them. I’ve removed some bad habits, unfortunately kept a few I need to separate myself from, and added some great habits that offer tremendous upside to my life. I’d count my Duolingo sessions as a great habit addition, just as reading more and writing every day have been. Novice level for sure, but I’m keeping the streak alive and we’ll see how it goes. French, un pas après l’autre….

      “L’attention est le début de la dévotion (Attention is the beginning of devotion.)” – Mary Oliver

    • The Sorting of Stuff

      “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

      We’re all built on the stuff of those who came before us. We inherit the good and the bad stuff, and become who we are based on how we sort it out. Some sort it out quickly, some never quite get there. We’re all a work in progress.

      Whenever I feel a little tapped out on the writing, I fill the bucket back up by reading more, or getting outside. It’s no secret, really, every creative person says this. They say it because it’s true. I don’t believe in writers block, I believe in closed-mindedness, distraction, laziness and apathy. Those are the Four Horsemen I struggle with, and the best way to shake free of their grip is to move the body and move the mind. I have curiosity, patience, persistence, and empathy in my favor, if I just feed them.

      Reading and then quoting Emerson sparks the imagination, which in turn primes the writing pump. The writing in turn is a sorter of stuff, stuff like the quotations that I picked up from my ancestors, stuff like an antagonist when I was 13 who had some twisted quotations in his own life manifested in targeting fellow students, stuff like the picked up pieces from reading and encounters with people over decade after decade on this planet.

      There are other stuff sorters. I’ve sorted a whole lot of stuff walking. Steps stacked on top of each other sort stuff as well as anything I know of. Maybe you meditate, or go to therapy, or talk to a close friend about your own darkest stuff, and that’s good. Everyone should sort their stuff in their own way. Mine is walking and writing. That’s my quotation from my ancestors I suppose, all gift wrapped in a baby blanket. God knows it could’ve been a lot worse.

      Here’s the scary part: I’m passing my own quotations on to the next generation, mixing sorted and unsorted stuff alike into my marriage, parenthood, and the relationships I have with friends and coworkers and siblings and random strangers and blog readers. I feel compelled to sort as best I can in the time I have. We’re all wading through the muck in our own way. Sort it out or get stuck in it. Pass on the best quotations and try to leave the worst behind.

      The world is full of loud people sorting their stuff out in public. The people who have sorted things out a bit better in their lives tend to avoid that kind of look at me spotlight. Which makes the world seem quite mad if you look around at all the screamers, zealots and provokers prodding for your attention. I’m inclined to tune out the noise, seek out the well-sorted souls and build my house of quotations from better material. A foundation built in muck will only sink. Climb to the higher, more solid ground, look around at the better view, and set your foundation there. If nothing else it makes for more stable ground for those who follow you to build on.

    • Measuring Out Life in Coffee Spoons

      “Do I dare
      Disturb the universe?
      In a minute there is time
      For decisions and revisions which a
      minute will reverse.

      For I have known them all already,
      known them all:—
      Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
      I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
      I know the voices dying with a dying fall
      Beneath the music from a farther room.
      So how should I presume?” – T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

      I wonder if I would have enjoyed the company of T.S. Eliot.  I’m fairly sure I’d have hit it off with Mary Oliver, and with Robert Frost, but I don’t always click with old T.S.  But this poem, one of his most famous, offers that bold question; Do I dare disturb the universe?  and I smile, for I too feel like I’ve measured out my life with coffee spoons. Maybe there’s more to T.S. than I originally thought. The better question would be whether he’d enjoy my company? That has to be earned too: Want to be in the conversation? Have something to say.

      To write publicly is to answer the call.  Whether the universe chooses to pay attention or not is another story, but in chipping away at it one small measure at a time, we see more, and put more out there to be seen, we get better. Roosevelt’s man in the arena comes to mind. Be on the field doing it. Nothing else matters. Is there futility in the work? Perhaps, but the work offers its own path in the universe. I write knowing there’s so much more to it than this. This is showing up, it’s not poking the bear and disturbing the universe. Provocation requires more skin in the game. Blood and sweat mixing in the dirt. There’s more to do.

    • Excellence Is The Next Five Minutes

      “Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!” – Tom Peters

      “It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.” – James Clear

      “The work is quite feasible, and is the only thing in our power. . . . Let go of the past. We must only begin. Believe me and you will see.” – Epictetus

      It’s easy to get bogged down in strategy and planning. It’s a form of busywork that makes you feel productive even when you aren’t really moving forward. I’ve struggled with this over the years, and it’s fair to say I still haven’t mastered time. Then again, who ever does? But focusing on the action needed right now, with an eye towards maintaining our overall course, makes a lot of sense.

      Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. The point isn’t to master time, just to win the next five minutes. What we do now matters more than what we do tomorrow. Setting a course is important; we all need to know where the we’re going or what’s the point? But right behind that is meaningful action. The Tom Peters quote is a favorite call to action because it reminds us of the urgency of now. Peters’ quote pairs well with James Clear’s work, and both quotes would be very familiar to stoics like Epictetus. Ultimately we all build off the legacy of those who came before, and hope to leave something meaningful for those who come after.

      I’m posting late today, watching the sun dropping in the west while I write instead of feeling it rise behind me as the morning progresses. I wanted to sit on this post awhile, feeling there’s more to say. There’s always more you can say, and always more to improve upon, isn’t there? But you also need to ship when it’s time to ship, a necessary call to action that keeps us from sitting on our work. And so it is that I’ve checked a few boxes today knowing I could’ve done more but generally happy with what I’ve done with the time I’ve been given today. Let’s call that a small win (and, always, work to go a step further if I’m blessed with the gift of tomorrow).

    • Seeing the World for the First (?) Time

      “Our awareness has been stretched wider than ever in history, but often at the cost of taking away a lifetime of experiences.” – Seth Godin

      “We were the first humans who would never see something for the first time.” – Gillian Flynn

      Both of these appeared in my feed within minutes of each other this morning, in turn each pointing out the world we live in being smaller than ever before, and casting a neon glow on a topic I should explore before the muse carries it on to the next writer. Candidly I’m itching to return to writing more local history, but it’ll have to wait a bit longer. I’d be a fool to turn a cold shoulder on the muse, wouldn’t I?

      Godin laments the cost of awareness in our world of YouTube, Instagram, streaming media and, yes, travel blogging. We tend to know about things just by casually dipping our ladle into the stream of information flying past us in all directions. But sipping from the ladle isn’t immersive exploration of new places and ideas. It’s the Cliff Notes, not War and Peace. As Godin writes, there’s no excuse for being uninformed, but there’s also no good reason for being inexperienced.

      Flynn laments that media often offers a better picture of the world than going there and seeing it does. I’d say she’s partially right in that we cheat ourselves of the wonder of the new having seen it before we get there. But I disagree that the experience is better through media or that we don’t experience something substantively better being there versus seeing it on a screen. I can look out the window and see snow, or I can walk outside and understand snow.

      The crew of Fayaway are in Saba at the moment. It was nothing for me to pull up a video of people hiking up the mountain they hiked up, see the massive leaves they saw and the same view out to St. Kitts that they sent me in a text message. But a YouTube video is a very small sample of the experience they had of talking to locals, feeling the heat, getting out of breath climbing to the summit, and the exhilaration of reaching the summit and catching a first glimpse of the panoramic vista. That is their experience of a lifetime, while I’m simply aware of what it generally looked like for them after watching a YouTube video.

      The world is smaller than ever, and we’re blessed to experience the wonders of it without the cost of earning it in money, risk, sweat equity and sacrifice. But experience on a screen isn’t experiencing life, it just eliminates the surprise of knowing what’s around the corner when you can Google street view so much of this world. Surprise can be good, and surprise can be very bad. Maybe the answer is to use all this technology to mitigate the impact of the bad while minimizing the reduction of the other.

      Maybe VR will bring us closer than we’d ever imagine in the next few years. There’s enormous value in practicing on the flight simulator to get it right before you fly the Boeing 777 overseas, but you still need to get experience on the real thing after that before they load passengers on with you. Likewise, seeing what the Google street view was prior to pulling out of Edinburgh in a rental car made me more comfortable when I did it. It didn’t simulate the tactile oddness of the left hand shift instead of the right or the adrenaline rush of the first roundabout going the opposite way, but it eliminated sensory overload having seen a bit of it already.

      Humans are meant to move, and to interact and react to the world around them. Media is getting exponentially better at recreating this experience, but that doesn’t make it experience. The answer is to get out and be a part of the world, not just watch it through someone else’s lens.

    • Something More

      “…I don’t believe

      only to the edge
      of what my eyes actually see
      in the kindness of the morning,
      do you?

      And my life,
      which is my body surely,
      is also something more—
      isn’t yours?”
      – Mary Oliver, from The Pinewoods

      Reading this, I thought of the familiar analogy of a stone dropped in a still pond and the ripples it creates. We aren’t our bodies but a sum of the actions and interactions we have with it over our time in it. The more we learn, the more we offer to the world, the bigger our ripple.  I think of people in my own life who offer a pretty large ripple, and I hope I’m doing the same. Mary Oliver offered an example of a tsunami with her work, and this excerpt from The Pinewoods demonstrates her keen awareness of her own something more.

      I think of living a larger life as well.  Something more involves more, and more meaningful, contribution over time. Acquired skills and knowledge enable a greater contribution.  Something more also means showing up and doing work that matters.  It’s the unseen, uncredited things you do for your family, friends or complete strangers that make a small or sometimes significant difference.  And it’s sacrificing the immediate gratification for the long term vision in daily actions.  What is your contribution?  What are you offering the world in this moment?  And how can you improve today?  I ask myself these questions every day, and sometimes I have the answer readily at hand.  Other days it’s more evasive.  But I do believe being present is a large part of the answer.

      My life, which is my body surely, is also something more – isn’t yours?  I’m watching people I care about age in different ways.  The body aging is a natural, if not always welcome, condition of being alive longer.  Something more when your older seems to be either left in your legacy of previous contributions or in your ongoing contribution.  As long as the mind is sharp, there’s no reason for contribution to stop.  If Stephen Hawking can leave such an incredible wave across the pond for centuries after learning he had a slow moving form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, then why shouldn’t someone who has full speech and much better, if slower than it once was, mobility not contribute as well?  I’m not elderly yet, but I’ll be damned if I just sit in the corner watching Wheel of Fortune when I get there.  I’ll be moving at a modified version of full speed as long as the mind and body allow, and if the body doesn’t allow, then my writing might accelerate even more.

      Don’t believe only to the edge of what your eyes actually see.

    • Find The Gap

      When you bob around on the Tube in London you’re constantly reminded to “mind the gap”. It’s so frequently stated (at every stop) that it’s become a meme. The gap of course is the space between the train and the platform, which can be hazardous if you aren’t watching where you’re walking, ie: minding the gap. Reading an article in Harvard Business Review earlier this week, I read this twist on that phrase, which struck me as profound:

      “Jon Buchan, the director of London-based Charm Offensive, a creator of innovative cold emailing campaigns, applies [Stef] Curry’s disruptive basketball strategy to business: “Find a gap,” Buchan writes. “A chink in the armor. What is nobody else doing? Why is nobody else doing it? Would it be beneficial to get good at it? If so, try it.” … Figuring out what no one else is doing, and then doing it well, offers the greatest possibility of success, rapid acceleration, and hyper-growth.” – Whitney Johnson, “Reinvigorate Your Career by Taking the Right Kind of Risk”, Harvard Business Review

      Finding the gap, what nobody else is doing, certainly applies in business, and every progressive, forward-looking company continually pokes and prods their market looking for the gaps. Find a need, fill it and differentiate from the crowd. This is blue ocean versus red ocean territory, where a little elbow room offers room to grow something special. It lets you leverage your company’s strengths without getting nipped at by the sharks.

      Finding the gap, I believe, is about being aware, focused, open-minded, decisive, courageous and determined. Developing better writing skills (combined with the consistency of effort in doing it every day), reading with purpose, seeing more customers, listening and observing with focus and earnestly working for a higher purpose, I believe, give you the necessary gap radar skills. Combined it seems to adds up to a formula for both figuring out what no one else is doing, and then doing it well. Because doing it well… that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Don’t just find the gap, fill it with value.

    • Dancing on the Line

      I travel a lot, and stay in many hotel rooms along the way.  My primary request when staying anywhere is to get a quiet room.  That means rooms that aren’t next to the elevators, the ice machine or in high traffic areas.  Ideally I won’t have a door that connects to another room.  So it’s disappointing when I get a neighbor who shouts profanities and talks to himself insanely in the room next to mine.  Last night was one of those nights, which meant I was considering wearing earplugs to sleep.  If I’ve learned anything from years of travel, it’s to be prepared for just about anything.  Insane people who talk to themselves are one of those life experiences I try to avoid, but sometimes you find yourself with just two thin doors between you and the crazy train. Luckily he quieted down and I slept peacefully (after confirming the door was bolted anyway).

      This morning I’m walking the loop around the hotel with three days of information and thousands of calories to digest. Morning walks help with both, and information transforms into checklists of things to do, areas to improve upon, people to meet with, things to learn more about and timelines to do it all. I normally follow the GTD process of writing things down to get them out of your head, but not having a notepad on the walk the jumble of thoughts become keywords to trigger memories instead. I’ll write it down later… knowing I need to do it before those words become a puzzle of my own mind. It reminded me of the wild rambling profanity of the guy next door. Maybe he just needed to get things out of his own head too. He does it his way, I do it mine. Just a thin door separating two approaches to sorting life’s complexities.

      One of the themes of my week has been walking the thin line between order and chaos. Exemplified by the yin and yang symbol, it’s the curving line between the black and white symbols that make up the whole. We all dip into both sides, but aim to dance along that line if possible. My hotel neighbor seemed to be a bit too far into chaos last night, while I was dancing the line pretty well this morning after my walk. We all trip now and then. Just get up, brush yourself off, get back on the line and keep dancing.