Saturday, March 29, 2014

A gauge of my fitness level

This morning was an annual 10K that's a fairly big deal around here. I ran it for the third time. I'm happy with my time, I kept pushing when I wanted to quit and feel like I ran the best time that I'm capable of at the moment, but it frustrates me that my time gets slower every year I run this thing. I've lost about a minute a year. I was thinking about this as I was walking through the rain back to my car. Other than getting older, what is the difference between this year and those other years?

That first year, I was going to the gym and running fairly regularly. I would go during my lunch and run at least one day a week. I may have gone twice some weeks. I would also run on the gym treadmills over the weekend. I had a trip for work that derailed my training right before the race, but I was pretty well prepared. I didn't run all that regularly before last year's race. I can no longer take a couple of hours to go to the gym during lunch, but I was trying to do the March rowing challenge last year. The challenge is to row at least 5000 m for 25 days of March. I missed it by a couple of days when I had to focus on getting some stuff finished for one of my MBA classes in the middle of the month, but all of those meters gave me enough fitness to get through the 10K. School messed up my training again this year. I was up late doing school work enough that I missed quite a few morning workouts. The cold weather kept me inside rather than getting out and running. An injury to my calf just as I was starting to pick up on my training also put me a month behind. I just wasn't as well prepared as I would have liked.

Some of that is circumstances, but I'm sure I could have done more to make sure I got my training in despite work, school, and other obligations. I saw a guy I work with in the starting corral. When I looked up his time, I saw that he beat me by about 5 minutes. We're comparable in size, and he's a few years younger than I am. So why did he get the better time. He runs at lunch almost every day. He's fanatical about it. Cold doesn't stop him. He goes out every day and gets in his miles. He pays a bigger price than I do to improve his fitness. A couple of neighbors beat me by an even bigger margin. Again, they're out there every day putting in the miles. Injury, school, and the weather are just excuses. I could have worked harder to get my body ready to run this year.

If I'm serious about getting in better shape, it's going to take more than one or two workouts a week. I need to be up and running every Monday and Thursday. On days I'm not up running, I need to be up and riding the bike. Saturday needs to be my longer run. Nothing crazy. Maybe an hour of running the neighborhood roads. The weather is turning. I won't be able to use the cold as an excuse for much longer. If I'm serious about wanting to get my 10K time under 50 minutes, I need to do the work to make that happen.

Friday, March 28, 2014

What gets me eager to get to work?

Problem solving and creating something. Or maybe it's problem solving as a creative process. Problem solving, at least the way that I go about doing it, requires knowing how all the various pieces are connected, what are they doing, why are things arranged in this way and not in a different order. Diving into a murky situation and figuring out what's really going on so I can see order where others see chaos. It's not knowing one thing really well, but knowing enough about a lot of things to see how they relate to one another and how to use those connections to fix a broken piece. 

That's my Big Project. That's the common thread that links all the activities that I find easy to pursue. This blog, my side projects at work, reading connect because they give me a chance to work on a problem and express my understanding in these blog entries, a presentation at a technical meeting, or some other entity that I can send out into the world. Even working on different aspects of the my personal life became much easier when I accepted the truth of the situation and started really digging into my behavior and what was driving me to do things that kept hurting my wife. It became a problem to be solved. 

My bouncing from topic to topic is essential for who I interact and deal with the world. I was fortunate to find a subject, chemistry, that allowed me to go deep while getting a graduate degree, but is relevant to so many different technical problems that I could pursue my penchant to flit from subject to subject as my interests jump from problem to problem. I can't pick some pick out there goal to work on because I'm motivated by solving problems. That's not entirely true. I want to figure out the best way to lead an R&D group and have that group interact effectively with the non-technical functions in the business. That's the problem that fuels my MBA studies. It's not career progression. It's figuring out how my R&D activities fit into the context of the company. 

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

What is your Big Project?

So I'm not the only person trying to figure out the best way to use my spare hours. Leo has chosen his Big Project. My last entry was my first effort to figure out what my Big Project should be. I don't know what prompted somebody else's decision to focus his energies on one project, but I can point to what got me thinking about a better way for me to focus my own efforts. If you take a look at my reading list, you'll see a book called Breaking BUD/S. That book offers all kinds of tips about making it into the Navy SEAL teams, but that's just one application of the strategy at the core of the book. If you want to make the teams, then you should make every effort to achieve that goal. Figure out why you want it, and do everything you can to make it real.

The book also has a not so subtle subtext that failure to make every preparation, to do the things that you know you need to do to succeed, is simply a sign that you didn't want it enough. Talk is worthless. Preparation is an indication of your desire to achieve a very difficult goal. If you didn't do the things that are necessary to make it happen, that means that you didn't want it enough. Simply saying that you want it isn't enough. Talk is easy. Making it happen is the hard part.

I looked back over my entries from the very beginning of this blog before I picked up Breaking BUD/S. I looked at where I was then and thought about where I am now. I've progressed in my career, I've read plenty of books, and I'm a better husband and father than I was four years ago. I still weight pretty much the same. My fitness is better, and I'm definitely stronger. But my gut persists. That's one thing that I was trying to take care of four years ago that I've made little progress against. That must mean that I don't really want to lose the weight. Or, probably more accurately, I value the pleasures of consumption more than I desire the effects of not consuming.

My progress against other professional and personal goals against my failure to lose weight (although I have to confess that I consider not gaining weight a win) as a sign that I may be doing what needs to get done to achieve my goals. I've managed to keep working on my MBA because I want the career opportunities that may come with improved management skills. It's easy to lose sight of my desire to lose the gut when I'm faced with delicious food. Keeping the goal in mind may be the best remedy to staying on track. And not forcing it. That's a lesson I'm trying to learn. Make the myriad of small things that you need to do to achieve a goal an integral part of your life. Make them automatic.

Perhaps that's my Big Project. Rebuilding my routines to get me where I want to be physically.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Career prey selection

My second to last class at Marist is finally over. The last class won't start until the fall semester. That leaves me with several months to do something other than write inane essays. I have regained the choice of how I use my time. What will I do with it? Well, that's really a question of what I want. There are lots of ways to address this question of what I want. I've pondered this in any number of ways, but I don't think I've ever just stopped and looked at the data. What have I done in the past couple of years and what do those activities say about my desires?

Structured learning has claimed quite a bit of my time. MBA classes have taken a huge chunk of my intellectual and emotional energy. I was having an email conversation with a classmate about the program last night. He felt like the class that I just finished was the only one that he really challenged him. I get the sense that he feels cheated by the lack of rigor in the program. I don't know what he hoped to get out of the program, but I'm not so sure that he got it. I have never really stopped to think about how much I've given to this program. It was something I did on a bit of a lark. I never really considered the opportunity costs. What could I have been doing rather than doing stuff for my classes? I stopped working out at night. That's the biggest thing that I gave up to do my MBA. Have I gotten what I wanted out of the program? I think I have. I just wanted to get a better sense of what people meant when they talked about running the company. I see things much differently than I did four years ago. But that still doesn't answer the question of what my commitment to this program says about what I want to achieve in my career and life.

I viewed this whole online MBA as a bit of experiment when I started the program. Unlike my friend, who needed it to become a professional engineer, I did not have a specific reason to purse a business degree. I've found a number of ways to apply it to my career since I've been working through the program, but there is still no specific reason why I'm doing it. I feel like I got what I wanted when I could analyze Pfizer's financial statements. That's wasn't always true though. That's just my post-course rationalization. My original plan didn't even include the class where I analyzed the financial statement. I was originally going for a leadership concentration. I'm dancing around the obvious here. I wanted the degree to advance my career. I can't help but notice that my interest in the program has slipped now that my career has advanced. Was this whole MBA just a subconscious ploy to get my management to think of me as something other than a lab rat? Maybe the classes did help in shifting my focus from the lab to the business. It's hard to say as I can't relive the last four years without pursuing the degree to see what would happen.

So I guess I've spent time doing something that I hoped would benefit my career. I have ambitions to do more. That's not a huge surprise. I've never questioned that I wanted to do more. I just don't have an ultimate position in mind. I've always been oriented up the career ladder, but I don't really know where I want that ladder to end. Not having that ultimate end in mind has made planning on how to spend my time more amorphous. The MBA was good in that it keep me busy working up the career ladder without requiring me to know just what I was aiming for. Now that I have greater say over how I spend my time, I need to pick a target. I don't like to drift. I may not be much of a pursuit hunter, but I am a hunter. I just ambush rather than pursue. I can't develop the skills I'll next to capture that next opportunity if I don't know what I'm working for. I guess it's time to pick a career objective. It doesn't have to be optimal. It just needs to be something for me to focus on.