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.

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. 

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.

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.

Play the game

Reality has no interest in your ideals. Telling yourself that a situation fits some preconceived ideal all the while ignoring signs that it is actually something quite different is the shortcut to failure. Events are not contingent on your emotional well-being. Look at things as they are and react accordingly. React accordingly simply means to do something that reflects the reality that you face rather embarking on some kind of quixotic quest to right some perceived injustice. 

That's enough of writing in a general way that people can apply to their own situation. I need to exorcise stuff that's been happening to me, which will require me to write in a specific way that directly relates to my experience. If my issues only cast a faint light on whatever crisis you're dealing with at the moment, I hope my story offers enough light to help you see a solution.

I spent the first few weeks as a team leader trying to figure out a way to reshape my little piece of the organization into my preferred form. I struggled with how to balance my ideal situation with what the organization expected from me. I fixated on how to realize visions that I've been having for years as some distinct entity rather than recognizing the reality of my situation. A conversation with somebody who has already trod this path and is very aware how to exploit the reality of the organizational situation for his own ends snapped me out of my overemphasis on my ideal. I was primed for this reorientation. The 15-20 minutes of reading The Generals and listening to lectures about the British mistakes in the Revolutionary War made me aware of the dangers of choosing the image of reality that makes us comfortable over the recognition of reality as it is. Ignoring facts is not an effective leadership strategy.

Success requires working within the system. My wife always tells me to play the game. That's excellent advice. My leadership has no concern for my ideal reality. They only care about their reality. I can't ignore that. I can like a candidate and advocate for her, but I can also recognize that a particular role may not be the best fit for her skills and ambitions. I may want to get more people like her into the organization, but acknowledging that she may fit better in a different role is more effective than railing against what I may think of as poor decision making by other people on the team. I shouldn't try to get everybody to see things my way all the time. It's more about getting people to see that my way of looking at things is very well aligned with what they want to accomplish. That's how I need to play the game. 

Find the moment

The secret to moving forward is letting go. Granted, what exactly we need to let go of in order to move forward isn't always so clear, but making progress, getting closer to our limits, isn't about pushing harder or exerting our will. It's not so much about pushing against the external, but letting go of our need to control the external. Fighting against the pain of a long run is a lost cause. You can't make the pain go away (other than stopping of course). You can only accept the pain as part of your moment. It's what exists. Nothing more and nothing less. It's not good or bad, it's not a sign of your shortcoming or evidence of your weakness. It's not that kid who bullied you in school or that girl who you couldn't work up the nerve to talk to. It's not your failure. It's not pleasant, but it's not damaging your body. You can live with it. You just have to accept it.

Let go your conscious self. Drop your self image. Don't try to defend yourself from pain, especially the emotional kind of pain. Live it. Feel it. Let go what gives it control over you and move on. Get one step closer to what you want to become. To become something different than you are now, you have to let go of what you were when you were younger and what you are now. Change is a choice. Choose to let go.

Fellow travelers

I came across another interesting entry in the vast do what you want and screw the corporate gig, it's just making you a miserable, consumerist clone genre of self-help books tonight. This is the book. I've never heard of this guy, but I guess he's yet another blogger turned author trying to turn his life experience into a lucrative gig. This type of writing (which I have to confess that I consume on an all too regular basis) is plentiful and popular. I can't help but associate this combination with workout and diet books. All of this writing and reading (well, buying anyway), is an attempt to fool ourselves that we're making progress against some long standing goal while we're really just standing around doing the same old thing.

Sure, I can read this guy's book (it's short, I'll finish it tomorrow), but what impact will that have on my life? So maybe I can tell myself a slightly different version of the story that I've been telling myself for the last handful of years. How will yet another book urging me to turn my back on society's expectations alter my current course? Is that really the point of reading the book in the first place? Is it about changing my course or just finding reinforcement that what I've been doing all along is not crazy and destined for failure?

I'm not this miserable sap who's floating around waiting for life to hand me that perfect thing that I've always wanted. I know you have to go out there and get what you want. You need to get a sense for what you need and figure out the best way to go get it. You need to look at what holds you back and do what you can to fight against those tendencies. I just bought a jacket. I've been saying for years that I wanted a jacket that would keep me warm when it got really cold. Instead of going out and finding that jacket, I just kept using the same jackets that I've been using year after year. I think they were both Christmas presents from my mom. Rather than going out and getting what I wanted, I've been making due with what I already had. That's not really taking action. It's drifting. So I bought a jacket tonight. And rather than getting the same old safe black and gray one, I bought the blue and gray one. Yes, I know that's crazy, but you know how I like to live on The Edge.

So maybe the point of reading yet another book about following your inner voice is not so much about changing my path. For somebody who struggled with listening to his own wants and needs for far too long, it's good to have a voice reassuring me that doing what I want is the right thing. There is no reason why I should mold my life to satisfy everybody else's needs. I really only need to do what is best for me and the people that I love. So I'm not a social person who needs to have people over all the time. That's just me. I'm not inferior to others because I'm different. I'm simply being me. The pressures to conform are so strong. It's hard to fight against them. I had to come up with some story about being like Radiohead to get myself to follow my judgement as a new manager. The pull of doing things the way they've always been done were so strong. That well worn path looked so comforting. But that's not me. I need to find my own path. It still doesn't hurt to come across somebody seeking their own path every now and then.