When is good enough good enough?

The following is a lengthy quote from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

"Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport [triathlon]. If pain weren't involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such and investment of time and energy? It's precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive - or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself."

Pushing past the pain inherent in an endurance competition presents a clear opportunity to test ourselves against a barrier, to see if we have what it takes to overcome a challenge that pushes us out to the very edge of our physical limitations. Exceeding that barrier, including the hours required to prepare for the competition, is the closest we can get to metamorphosis.

But opportunities for transformation, improvement, reaching new levels of accomplishment are not limited to physical competition. Accepting that a task will be painful, be it the physical pain of an endurance competition or the uncomfortable awkwardness of approaching a stranger, and choosing to do it anyway induce countless subtle alterations in who we are and what we can achieve.

The opportunities to test our limits and discover what we can achieve are boundless.

Talent is a myth. Genetic limitations are a myth. We choose how far we go, how high we climb. We decide when good enough is good enough.

Two reviews are up

I've posted the first two reviews from the Pitchfork top 50. They are for Youth Lagoon and Wild Flag.My user name on Amazon is Hbar. I've also changed my handle from phdboost to Hbar on this blog. It seemed time for a change.

There is a strong element of discovery in this experiment. Discovering new bands, new types of music, new ways to listen to and think about music, and new ways to express and describe the experience of listening to music. I've already experienced some of that in the first two reviews. With 48 more to go, I should be a regular Columbus by the time this is all wrapped up.

Update: I've also posted a review for Toro Y Moi.

Reviewing the Pitchfork Top 50

Pitchfork released their list of the top 50 albums of the year last week. I've come across some really good bands by checking out the site a couple of times a week, but I don't do much more than skim the reviews. Every review reads like the mid-term paper of some earnest college underclassman trying to impress the professor. References to underground bands from the '90s don't help me much when I've never even heard of the band being mentioned, much less have any familiarity with that band's sound.

The best way to find out if the band is any good is to listen to it myself. If an experiment is the best way to learn, opening myself to new experiences, even something as small as listening to a new band on my drive in to work, is the best way to broaden my sense of what's interesting, new, and beautiful. Given that I have issues with how these new bands are discussed by the professionals at Pitchfork, I figured that maybe I should stop criticizing and start writing a few reviews myself. To that end, I am going to listen to and write reviews for Pitchfork's top 50. I'm not giving myself a timeline, but I'm going to work my way through the entire list. It will be good practice for developing grit.

My plan is to write each review without relying on references to other bands to give an idea of how a particular band sounds. I'm going to try and focus on the images and emotions each album evokes while I'm listening to it. You won't need to have spent the last few years listening to every bootleg that's been posted online to get an idea of an act's sound. The album and the review will be as self-contained as I can make it. My writing on this blog or the documents I prepare at work do not require much in the way of description. Description will be the entire point of these album reviews.

I'm not going to post all of my reviews in this blog. I'm going to put them up over at Amazon, but I will put add a link to this post every time I put up a review.

Body Blows

Success is a choice. External circumstances determine the challenges that must be overcome, but whether or not you achieve a goal or reach elite status is ultimately up to you. Focus. Effort. Grit. A willingness to go to The Edge. Of course the process will be unpleasant. Change is uncomfortable.

Change, at least improvement, will also require NOT doing things that sound like, fun, interesting projects. True mastery only seems to happen when you dedicate your best energy to achieving a single aspiration. A commitment to excellence is a choice to limit. It's a decision to willingly perform unreasonable actions in pursuit of an unreasonable achievement. 

Big achievements are built on the consistent choice to pursue the goal. Day after day after day after day...

Specialist or Generalist?

Exceptional performance requires prolonged commitment to a particular activity to the exclusion of other pursuits. As such, the well-rounded strategy is only effective if standard performance is adequate for the task at hand. Where is standard performance adequate? Standard performance is fine in endeavors where there is no meaningful competition. Professional athletes, professional musicians, leading surgeons, there is considerable competition for elite status in these professions. There is also considerable specialization. Musicians only play one instrument and doctors specialize in a few different surgeries.

Standard performance is frequently adequate in the huge swathes of management that populate large organizations. This makes sense as management is best performed by generalists. A middle manager takes care of his staff, the projects assigned to his group, helps chart the strategy of the group, and may work to acquire some new technology. Those are activities that require being good a several skills but not excellent at any one of them. As a successful career is usually associated with promotions up the ranks of management, companies tend to encourage promising employees to pursue a variety of projects that will expose them to a number of different functions within the company.

In effect, companies discourage excellence and superior performance in employees because the prolonged effort in one area that is required for exceptional performance will never be encouraged or promoted. There is too much risk associated with focusing on a single skill. Broadening a skill set, either at the individual or corporate level, minimizes exposure to the risk that a highly refined skill will not be needed as a company evolves. A broader skill set is also more useful in that a number of tasks can be handled adequately by one person rather than having one person who is very good at one or two tasks.

The choice is not whether to be a specialist or a generalist. The question is whether to compete in a field where elite status requires developing a highly refined (and thereby rare) skill or whether to work in a position that accepts good enough in a range of skills.

Be Unreasonable

Reasonable = Safe, expected, normal = What everybody else does = straight line to mediocrity
Unreasonable = risky, strange, extreme, obsessive = Who does that? = Exceptional