Finding a new path

Seeing that I started this blog because I thought it would be interesting to record how I went about achieving my New Year's resolutions, it should be about time for me to comment on my 2011 progress and update the banner at the top of the blog with my 2012 aspirations. I have no plans to write a post with a detailed update on whether or not I bought any new books in 2011 (I didn't) or whether or not I look better naked (my wife and I agree that I do). Whether or not I can check off a particular goal before moving on to the next batch belittles what I was trying to accomplish with the resolutions in the first place.

Merely moving onto this year's goals after reviewing last year's entirely skips delving into whether my original motivation for choosing a particular goal was advanced. So I look better naked. Why did I want to look better naked in the first place? Getting more fit would improve my health, but there were elements of vanity and male pride involved as well. I wanted my wife to see me and think about how sexy I looked. I didn't want to look like the other schlubs walking around the neighborhood pool. Plenty of people start off the new year wanting to lose weight, but my choice to write about achieving a particular goal took all the soul and spirit out of writing about the process.

I wrote 80 post last years. Early in the year, I basically wrote about my thinking on various topics with plenty of references to myself through excessive use of the personal pronoun I. By the end of the year I had dropped the personal pronouns for a more general presentation (this was a conscious and deliberate action). I was trying to emulate other blogs. Part of this was just to see if I could do it. Writing from the personal perspective has always been my default writing style when I'm thinking about something. Could I drop that style for something less self-referential? I feel that I managed to do that switch reasonably well, but I don't really like writing blog posts that have the flavor of a textbook.

I've also recently found that there are numerous blogs focusing on the kinds of things that I've been writing about for the last couple of months. Taking risks, pushing your limits, the kinds of actions you should take to reach expert levels of performance, these are very popular topics in leadership and self-improvement blogs. Despite the wealth of general advice on what research has found results in achievement, I haven't found much that actually puts these recommendations to the test (The Dan Plan being a notable exception). I read an ebook last week that was long on tips for overcoming the primitive fears that inhibit deviating from our safe and routine behaviors, but the entire thing felt empty. It was a good pep talk. Nothing more.

I think my recent posts have been in that vein. I've been emulating other writers while writing about topics that are addressed in many other places on the web while offering little more than a dry musing that is really little more than a pep talk. The emotional resonance that The Edge has for me is lost when I don't put the idea in a context of action and application. It's actually pretty easy to write about The Edge as an idea, but it's much more complicated to convey how central The Edge is to a complex web of associations and motivations in my pursuit of something beyond mediocrity.

As easy is the fastest way to an empty mediocrity, I'm going to use this blog to share more than ideas. I'm going to share my efforts to make academic ideas live. Rather than merely write about the skills of disruptive innovators, I'm going to put them into action and see what happens. What does it mean to have a bias against the status quo and how does that manifest itself in somebody's professional life? How will following the advice of Tony Schwartz or some other expert impact my performance? These are not going to be mere experiments for the sake of experimentation. They are going to be purposeful steps in the pursuit of something UNREASONABLE.

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