Unreasonable

This is what happens when you go to The Edge (as told by the narrator of an old judo documentary that you can see here):

This is unreasonable [doing 600-1000 push-ups a day], we know that, but it pushes us beyond a physical limit [The Edge], to another place, way outside or way inside. I don’t know where exactly, but I’ve been there.

Unreasonable, obsessive, excessive. That what it takes to push past physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries.

Cultural experience

The mystery to how people exist in "their own world" is quickly solved when you realize that culture is not a monolithic, all encompassing entity that dominates our life from birth. All of us experience the dominant culture uniquely. We ultimately experience a culture of our own creation. When we decide how to spend our time, we're forming the culture that forms us. Study or hang out on the street? Play a sport or do theatre? Work in an office or work outside? Big corporation or small business? TV or radio? Novel or the internet? Passive reception or active creation? Each of those choices ends up providing the raw material that creates each individual's world.

Spend all of your time doing the same things that everybody else does and you'll be pulling from a common cultural experience. You will all exist in the same world. Spend your time pursing something a little less expected and you'll end up existing in a different world. Your expectations will change, you won't share assumptions, and you won't simply shrug your shoulders and meekly apologize when something you create is dismissed by some faction of the culture.

Mass culture is an anachronism. Your creation does not have to appeal to the broad mass of a culture. Reaching that little niche that resonates with your vision does not require millions of dollars or a team of marketers. That resonance is valuable and special. We no longer need to settle for adequate or mildly amusing. Each of us is free to spend our time seeking creations that provide significant emotional meaning.  Finding that resonance is a special experience. The resonance is what matters. The dismissals are just meaningless background noise.

                          

The Edge revisited

The Edge demands acceptance. Open yourself to the experience and feel the pain. Ignoring it, distracting yourself from it, those tricks will not work. Acknowledge the pain and keep going. Don't hide. Face it.

There's more to The Edge than pushing beyond perceived physical limits. We face barriers in every aspect of our life. We face the edge every time we encounter a situation that makes us want to retreat to a comfort zone. Tolerating ambiguity or overcoming the lizard brain draws on the same resiliency and grit marshaled to get through that last mile or finish that last rep.

That resiliency is built on a firm belief in your ability to achieve the goal. Assertive boldness grows from a willingness to calmly confront and accept fear. 

Enchantment

This is a very good way to spend an hour. (The presentation can be found here).

Relationships matter, connecting to one another is what makes us human. It's the foundation of who we are.

Shared Sources

Creativity and leadership spring from the same source. Leaders emerge when one brave soul ventures forth and offers a plan of action. Follow me, I know the way. Choosing to follow that path is an implicit acceptance of the leader's vision.

Creativity is the physical manifestation of a vision. Making this vision a physical reality opens the visionary to judgement. Like the strong leader, a talented creator's sense of worth and accomplishment does not derive from the views of others. The compulsion to endure the creative process wells up from deep down in the creator's soul.

There is no manual for creativity. There are countless guides and suggestions on how to be creative available online, but the only way to be creative is to create something. There is no manual for leadership either. The only way to demonstrate leadership is to lead.

Act boldly to make your vision a reality.

Seeds of a mission

I've pondered the similarities between chemistry thinking and design thinking in previous posts, so it should come as no surprise that I heard echoes of chemistry thinking in reading Hugh McCracken's contention that design thinking is significant to the future of business. McCracken holds up design thinking as effective training to deal with messy data and ambiguous problems. A good chemist is equally adept at handling problems that require novel analysis and creative insight. Of course, designers are trained to think of themselves as creative people with the capacity to solve a multitude of problems. Chemists are trained to apply their skills to narrow research problems.

If businesses, well, organizations in general, are going to need people who can handle messy, nonlinear problems, chemistry departments or R&D groups should be the first place recruiters look when trying to find people with these skills. They don't do this now because they're not aware of this capacity in good chemists. The real tragedy is that most good chemists don't recognize this capacity in themselves. Chemistry skills can be applied in to business problems just as easily as they can be applied to research programs. Research programs actually provide a fantastic avenue to develop those thinking skills.

Too many people focus on the laboratory skills that they develop in graduate school. The real training comes in thinking about data, asking questions and designing experiments to solve those problems, and developing a data based explanation and interpretation of the research problem. I can't think of many business challenges that could be any messier than that.

Chemistry departments are focused on developing the next generation of people to work in chemistry departments. Why aren't they geared toward developing leaders? Chemistry is the ideal training ground for creative thinking that can be used to effectively understand and solve complicated problems. What can I do to get other chemists to realize their potential as the big problem solvers we need to resolve the complex challenges of the future (and now)?

Leadership Theory

Leaders are people whose conception of themselves is absolutely independent of opinion. They never seek approval, thereby never implicitly acknowledging the superiority of others. They have no need to be liked, so they act in the manner that is most consistent with their conception of the best course of action rather than complying with the will of majority. They have no hesitation to express an opinion or be the first to act because they have no fear of being judged inferior for having the "wrong" answer.

People will follow an individual who loves himself unconditionally. Somebody who is bold and assertive and gets what needs to get done done. All while being completely at ease in his skin. Constant external validation is unnecessary.

These traits are rare (and good leaders are rare) because most of us are inherently followers by nature. We follow the bold because they are usually the first to state a course of action. For those of us who may have the disposition to become a strong leader, contemporary culture, with its emphasis on compliance, encourages and shapes followership. 

Leaders don't emerge because they were motivated by the rewards of leadership. Individuals who boldly seek their desires become leaders.

How I lost 60 pounds, Part II

6) Enjoy what I really enjoy without going over the top. There are some things that I just can't keep out of my diet. Rather than keep fighting to avoid things like beer or chips and salsa, I limit how much of them I eat.

7) Embrace incremental progress. A digital scale with a tenths place makes a huge difference. Ten pounds is lot of weight to lose. It's much easier to stay motivated when I see the weight coming off slowly but steadily. I just have to keep reminding myself that it's a long process. Any step in the right direction makes it that much easier to focus on the process rather than getting caught up in how many pounds I have left to lose. Monitoring my weight also provides regular feedback on whether I'm eating right and moving around enough. I recently dropped from about 220 to a little under 210. I've been floating around this weight for about a month. I've been eating too much to get any lighter. I also know that I haven't been eating enough to start putting weight back on.

8) Pay attention to, but don't obsess over, the numbers. By numbers, I mean calories and weight. While it's nice to see changes in my weight, I started this whole process with a concern about my health. I talked to my doctor about what I should target as my ideal weight. He told me that if I'm exercising regularly and eating right, my weight will settle on a point that is best for me. Trying to achieve a weight to get a good BMI or some other arbitrary target doesn't make any sense to him. As for calories, I don't count them excessively. I try to have a general idea about how many calories I eat, but I don't try to keep a regular record or anything like that.

9) Make smart choices. There are ways to make not so healthy foods into something a little more nutritious. When we order pizza, my wife and I will get light cheese (that's less of the regular cheese, not a cheese that is made with something to reduce the fat content) and only vegetable toppings (no sausage or pepperoni). I tend to stick with chicken when we eat out. I don't put cheese in my chili or eat some of a cracker with each bite. I don't get any ridiculously large portions. I also try to ask myself if I'm really hungry or do I just feel like eating.

10) Find motivation in as many places as possible with no thought to what others may think about that motivation. One of the biggest things that got me to seriously consider the health implications of my weight was the potential for impotence. Vanity is a good motivator too. I'm not ashamed to check myself out in a mirror. Seeing progress is a big motivator. I also got some motivation from some blood work that suggested that I could develop some heart problems later in life if I don't start doing something about my cholesterol levels now. That was actually the impetus for the 10 pound drop I mentioned in point 7.

How I lost 60 pounds, Part 1

I ran into several people who haven't seen me for a few years at a conference last week. They each commented on how different I look. My beard is one aspect of the new look, but the 60 or so pounds that I've dropped since I finished grad school have also changed my appearance. The reminders of what I used to look like got me thinking about how my lifestyle has changed since I weighed 265 (give or take a few pounds). So what did I do to lose 60 pounds?

1) I decided from the beginning that losing weight would be about changing my lifestyle. I wouldn't try any programs, gimmick diets, or weight lose products. Living healthy was the goal. Losing weight was just an outcome of the process.

2) I stopped eating to the point of nausea. Burrito night was the first time that I recognized that I was eating far more than I needed to on a regular basis. I was pretty full after 1 burrito, but I would eat a second one anyway. I would frequently be forcing down the last few bites. Fortunately, I recognized the lunacy of eating to the point of feeling sick. I started paying attention to whether I wanted to eat because I was hungry or just felt like eating.

3) Cut way back on eating out, both sit down and fast food restaurants. I started trying to lose weight when my wife was trying to get pregnant with our first child. (He's about to turn six to give you an idea of how long I've been following these steps.) One of the first things we did to pursue a healthier lifestyle was to cut back on eating out. At my heaviest I had fast food for lunch EVERY day of the work week. I went back and forth between Taco Bell and Wendy's. We would eat out for dinner almost every night of the week too. The dinners out were eliminated first. Now we go out to eat once, maybe twice a week. Young kids make it harder to go out to eat too.

It took me a long time to stop eating out for lunch everyday. I pack a lunch these days. It's pretty much the same thing day after day. I have a Clif bar (I buy the big multi-pack at CostCo), a bag of Veggie Chips (again, big box at CostCo), an apple (always organic, see next point), and a banana. I mix up the different kinds of Clif Bars to give me some variety. The Veggie Chips come in three varieties so that keeps things from getting stale too. When I do go out to lunch, I go to a local grocery store that has a salad bar. I get a big salad, some soup (nothing cream based), and a bagel. My other option is usually Chipotle.

4) More meals with ingredients from the produce section, fewer processed foods. I pay more attention to the quality of what I eat more than the calorie content. When I was at my fattest, if I didn't eat at a restaurant, my meal probably came from a box. All of the crap they put in that processed food could not have been helping my ample waist line. My wife's decision to get healthy has had a huge impact on my health. When she started eating better, I was an eager convert to her new meals.It really helped that Trader Joe's and Whole Foods opened up nearby right when we were starting to focus on the quality of our food. We eat as much organic produce as possible, especially if the skin is consumed. I don't worry about getting organic bananas, but I ALWAYS get organic apples. I love breakfast cereal, but I always buy the organic brands over General Mills (although I eat Cheerios almost every day, it's good for the cholesterol) or other national brands that run commercials during kids shows. (It was very hard to pass on Count Chocula over Halloween.) Sure it costs more to buy organic (our local Kroger has a great organic section so that helps us limit big trips to Whole Paycheck), but we look at it as an investment in our health.

5) Keep moving. I go to the gym three days a week, but I try to find as many ways to stay moving as possible. Just walking around beats just sitting around. I take my kids outside to play, we take family walks, and hit the playgrounds in our neighborhood. My desk is way in an extreme corner of the building. That gives me plenty of opportunity to walk around to check on the progress of a project or just get ice from a cafeteria. I sometimes walk through the basement to give me an extra set of stairs to climb (my desk is on the third floor).

I'll list five more lifestyle changes that have helped me drop 60 pounds in the next post.

A rare opportunity

For all that I grouse about working for a giant corporation, being part of an organization with vast resources does have its occasional perks. I experienced one of those perks this morning. I attended the inaugural presentation of a series of presentations from outside experts. As with most things innovation related, I was skeptical, but I'm also not one to pass on the opportunity to listen to an expert describe their work. The presentation was by Juan Enriquez. I had never heard of him, but I am familiar with one of his pet projects. He's part of the team that developed the first artificial organism.

The talk was excellent. He's presented at TED a few times, and his presentation skills reflect this level of experience. He's also very convincing. I've never really bought into the hype around the potential of artificial organisms, but he almost managed to level my doubts with his well designed slides and fascinating arguments about the role of codes in our technology. I held on though, and managed to craft a fairly intelligent question. I'm not usually one to ask questions in this type of forum, but when would I ever have another opportunity to directly address a leader in biotechnology and genomics?

We viewed the presentation over an internet broadcast so I had to get on the mic and pose my question through a camera. The presentation was heavy on how the genetic code can be used to achieve tremendous breakthroughs with significant wealth creation. Understand the code and create wealth was one of the major themes of the presentation. He also spent a good chunk of the talk on the role of information flow through through networks. The genetic code is a linear and relatively simple system that creates a highly nonlinear and complex network. In creating an organism to produce fuel or medicines, the linear genetic code would need to changed, but how would that change impact the networks that form as a consequence of genetic information?

He didn't really answer my question, but his response implicitly acknowledged the premise of my question. He talked about the redundancy of biological systems and the challenge of building up knowledge from the genetic to the systems level. Making an organism do our bidding is far more complex than simply manipulating a few lines of genetic code. In accepting that challenge, Enriquez views this complexity as an opportunity to develop radically new technologies. Where I see the complexity of life as a mystery that will thwart our attempts to bend it to our will, he sees the opportunity available to somebody willing to dedicate themselves to the challenge.

In thinking about his talk and my challenge to his premise, I realized that much of what I've been yearning for over the last year or so is the opportunity to work on a big problem. I'm not looking for more little puzzles that will yield some insights with a few simple experiments, but I need something that will require concerted, focused effort for decades. I want to test my skills against a big, hairy, audacious problem. I need it. I will never be the scientist and leader that I am capable of becoming if I don't pursue answers to the Big Questions.

My classes insist on staying relevant

I have very little motivation to keep working on my MBA classes, but despite my best efforts to convince myself that they're a waste of my time, I keep bumping into ideas and concepts that change how I think about what I do at work (and, more importantly, what I would like to do more of as I start preparing for an academic position).

The idea of product-orientation versus market-orientation is a good example of how class material modifies how I view my work-self. My group's resources are focused on delivering our primary output, data. Data is our product. If I had been challenged to define my role in the organization a couple of weeks ago, it would have been something along the lines of generating and interpreting data to solve complex product development problems. My statement would have revealed a product-orientation.

When I read about the ramifications of shifting from a product-orientation to a market-orientation, I started thinking more about my work in terms of a market rather than a process. I started with data, of course, and thought about how I use data. I use data to solve problems. In solving these problems, I always discover little nuggets of insight that could be applied to any number of situations. Those nuggets represent new knowledge. The shift from this product-orientation (I solve product development problems) to a market-orientation (I generate knowledge) expands the potential of my role from dealing with a few technical problems to a virtually unlimited sphere of influence.

Focusing on solving problems requires me to sit around and wait for a problem to appear. It's passive. Generating knowledge implies an active pursuit. It requires aggressive action and bold thinking. Freed from the requirement that there be a problem to solve, the only limit on generating knowledge is my imagination and what the company is willing to support. It doesn't even have to be technical. How can we become more creative in our approach to product development? What is the best organization for an R&D organization like ours? How do we define the value that deliver to the division? A product-orientation obscures these questions, but they reveal themselves when you think about generating knowledge.