This is how I start finding time. This is my trial run for getting up at 5:15 one morning a week. I'm not ready to commit to this early rising just yet so I'm taking this early morning as a chance to experiment with how well I operate first thing in the morning. The vast majority of my optional activities, things like writing these posts, occur after 10 pm. Who knows how much the accumulated stress and debris of the day impact my ability to think and write clearly. I usually just sit and stare the screen before writing one of these things. That didn't happen this morning. Maybe that's progress.

Getting up early is one way for me to go beyond what is required of me (getting up early enough to make sure that my kid is on the bus) and taking another step closer to The Edge. It feels a little ponderous to use that capitalized The Edge, but I put that there to mark another of the limits that define my life. It's easy to accept the current routine, the prevailing status quo, as simply given and find ways to operate inside of that normalcy. That's a great way to ensure that you're acting very reasonably. Achieving something noteworthy in whatever world you occupy means going beyond the limits imposed on you by that world. It's about doing more that what is required and pushing the limits. It's about ignoring the limits and restrictions that people in that world place on themselves to find new ways to achieve. Finding a new direction, discovering something, requires acting different, breaking out of the prevailing and accepted to see the world in a new way.

It's more like following than leading...

My wife tells me I think too much. After thinking about that for a bit, it's not thinking that goes on in my head most of the time. A good deal of the things that come through my mind (and occasionally end up here) just pop in there on their own accord. these random thoughts are usually echoes of whatever I happen to be reading at the time. To illustrate what I mean, here's the course of my neural pyrotechnics over the last hour or so.

I've been reading a novel, Red Mars, that uses the colonization of Mars to explore human nature. While reading this book, it occurred to me that pushing against systems that want to return to some kind of equilibrium in order to prevent catastrophe will only result in greater catastrophe. It's kind of funny that I'm reading a book that is set in the future seeing that I read a review of a book that attempts to predict the future in a free issue of Science that was sent to my house with some marketing to join the AAAS. The book, 2052, is built on the expertise of all kinds of insiders and intellectual movers and shakers. That expert insight is supposed to make the book more credible or some such thing.

Having just read Antifragile, a book premised on the fact that prediction is pure fiction, I am primed to see this 2052 book as something comparable to Red Mars. Both books are works of fiction built on credible science and well within the bounds of reasonable thinking. Connecting one train of thought with Antifragile reminds me that fragile systems, according to Taleb, fail against the relentless grind of time. Fragile systems breakdown as the circumstances that led to their optimum state for growth and proliferation pass and new systems that are a better fit to the current arrangement of economic/social/political factors emerge. (We typically attribute this matching between circumstance and a particular business model to the visionary insight of one or two key managers, but it's usually just luck. That thought may be mine, or I could just be stealing from Taleb, although I sometimes felt like he was stealing from me.) Big bureaucratic systems with rigid rules and the big wigs at the top calling the shots fail quickly. Centralization is a predecessor for failure.

Where does this take me? If you want to predict the future, look for things that are emerging through the collected actions of a few loosely associated individuals. The fact that I can share my thoughts with the rest of world by writing a blog was not one person's vision. This platform emerged from the furious actions of a community racing to see what they could do with powerful new networks and users pushing the limits and boundaries of those networks. The visionary leaders, the idea that one person had an idea or could see where the future is going is simply post-action narrative built to make people feel like they have some kind of power over the randomness of our world.

I didn't sit down and try to arrive at this conclusion. It's just the random connecting of one thought with another. That actually reminds me of something that I read about in this book...

How to do Anything you want in one easy step!!

Plans for training for a half-marathon (or 5K, 10K, marathon) are all over the place. The allure of these guides to simplify what sounds so daunting, getting to a point where you can run for a couple of hours, brings to mind other guides with the allure of simplifying the complex. How to be creative, how to be a better leader, how to change your habits, how to lose weight, be a better lover, a better parent, cook like a gourmet, all in a few easy to follow steps. The simple steps offer reassurance that you too can master the complex and become an expert at some skill, all in a matter of a few days, a week or two tops.

All of these guides offer shortcuts, keys, plans, easy to follow instructions (or at least the illusion of easy to follow) to attain skills that can only be obtained through the consistent application of effort. With that in mind, here's my guide to mastering the skill that you want to have now:

1. Apply sustained effort. The more effort, the better. The more focused and conscious the effort, the better.

A 12 week plan to get in shape for a long run looks so inviting. A list of suggestions for how to improve your creativity has such intuitive appeal. Leadership and management feel so comfortable when summarized by a few bullet points. The easy presentation hides the hours and hours of sustained effort, the agony, setbacks, frustration, pain, irritation, sacrifice, required to turn those plans into real results.

Everyday. There is no shortcut.

Finding time

I ran the big Monument Avenue 10K today. This is the second year that I've run this massive race. My goal was to run it in less than 50 minutes, but I had a hunch that my fitness level just wasn't up to that pace. Rowing has been my primary workout for the last several months. Rowing has been great for my cardio fitness, but it does nothing to help me get stronger at running up hills. Even the slightest incline slows me way down. I ended up running the race 50 seconds slower than I ran it last year (51:54 this year, 51:04 last year). That puts me in the same wave that I was supposed to be in this year (I got to the race a little late due to some trouble finding a place to park). Assuming that I don't run faster in a different 10K at some point later this year, of course.

I'm running another 10K in a couple of weeks. This race, up in Ashland, has more challenging terrain, but the number of runners is much, much less. I ran both races in about the same time last year. We'll see how things turn out this year. I had big plans to really increase my running last year after these two races, but a case of plantar fascitis put the kibosh on that. My feet aren't bothering me anymore, but other things have prevented me from running as frequently as I was towards the end of last year. I haven't worked out during lunch for months. Other than Friday afternoons and the weekends, I don't really have any other time to run, unless I try to get my wife to give up a morning so I can run before my kids get up. I don't really relish that idea, but I want to become a stronger runner and improve my times. The only way I'm going to get that to happen is to get out and run as frequently as I possible can.

This isn't so much a question of having time to run, but making time to run. Time just isn't going to present itself. I have to find it. I want to find it because I'm tired of being stuck in the same place when it comes to my fitness. The rowing is making a difference, but I'm not lifting and I'm not running. I want to do more of those things. I want to maximize my ability to run fast now, while I still have time to improve. I'll never be as strong as I was in college. I'm never going to be able to lift as frequently as I did 15 years ago, but I can become a better runner. It's a challenge that I want to pursue. I just need to find the time...

Don't Fear the Fear

The root of my annoyance with different people, attitudes, and projects at work is fear. There's a time to play it safe, and there's a time to take a chance and do something a little different. I heard a high ranking person in my building say that our company's position is that we will not accept any risk. The possibility of failure must be zero or we will not proceed. He was referring to a very specific set of circumstances, but he might as well have been talking about the vast majority of the site. 

Fear of failure permeates the organization. At the first signs that a project may not turn out as planned, people start to find ways to cover their ass. We're a research organization. Research is a risky field. It's intellectual risk, nobody is putting their body on the line, but the psychological impact of trying something that could not work out as expected is not any less. 

New Role

I finally have the leadership role that I've been coveting for, well, I'm not really sure how long. The situation is a little more complicated than I would have liked for my first real crack at leading something bigger than a small project. I'm co-leading with a scientist from another group, a former manager is part of the team, and I'm working with a system that I understand from a distance but have never really had to delve into the details. A couple of important people in my building have a put their reputation, as well as the reputation of the site, on the line with this project. Failure is not an option.

There is no reason why we should fail. The science is new to us but it's a well-established field. There are publications galore about several important aspects of the technology. We just have to find a way to manage the complexity and make sure we stay focused on making progress and not get lost in all kinds of academic weeds. I see my role as shaping how the group thinks about the project. We constantly fall into a template for how work is expected to get done in the building. We need to stay out of that trap. We need to recognize when we have important observations and using all that established science to solve our problems. It's about making meaningful progress by thinking and using data rather than just running full speed ahead in hopes that something will work.

Keeping options open

My reactor stance is really all about keeping options open. Sticking to a highly detailed plan puts emphasis on where you are in relation to the plan rather than paying attention to the signals that your environment is sending to you. Every action prompts some kind of reaction. Watching those reactions is the best way to progress against a really challenging problem. Every reaction provides a little more information about what you're dealing with. The solution can usually be found in the accumulation of those little clues.

The underlying basis for this stance is my conviction that we don't really know all that much about what we're  dealing with in pretty much every area of modern life. My experience as a chemistry graduate student convinced me that our knowledge and understanding of the world is a faint shadow of what's really going on. We can never be sure of what's going on, so it's best to progress in a manner that maximizes your ability to respond to new information. Of course this has to be done in an aggressive enough manner that you actually prod whatever system you're working on reveal something about itself.