What I’ve Learned So Far

I once read a great quote from Pat Riley — he of the five NBA titles as a head coach — in which Riley said that his goal was to help his players get one percent better each day throughout a season. One percent.

It doesn’t sound like much, and indeed it’s a modest goal that would seem to be more about easy attainability than about world-class ambition. Until, that is, you start thinking about compounding.

Several times before, I’ve referred to Richard Hamming’s great talk about getting the most out of your career. One of the key concepts in the talk is the idea of compounding — using today’s gains to build on yesterday’s, not arithmetically but geometrically or logarithmically. (This, by the way, is also a key aspect of Anders Ericsson’s research on “deliberate practice,” which I’ve discussed on my professional blog.)

Doing the math

I was curious to know what sort of gains you’d see if you legitimately improved by one percent each day at a given thing. Clearly, it wouldn’t be possible to be so precise with many endeavors, e.g. painting pictures or learning to be your own bicycle mechanic. You could tell you were getting better over time, and maybe even day by day, but you’d have a hard time putting numbers to it.

But let’s pretend that whatever thing you want to do well is quantifiable, and that on Day Zero you start with 100 units of Goodness in the domain you’re improving.

0 = 100
1 = 101
2 = 102
3 = 103
4 = 104
5 = 105
. . .

At first, one-percent-daily improvement makes it look like you’d need nearly 100 days to double your acumen — which could be less than inspiring if you’re pursuing a new activity at which you suck, and at which you will merely suck less when you double your performance.

Eventually, though, you start to see a little headway:

25 = 128
30 = 135
35 = 142
40 = 149
. . .

Then the ol’ mathematics starts to kick in, and the quantities start to get stunning:

100 = 270
150 = 445
200 = 732
250 = 1,203
. . .

And so on. If you kept this up every day for a year, on day 365 you’d boast 3,778 units of Goodness — that is, you’d be nearly 38 times as good as when you started. At the end of two years, you’d have nearly 143,000 units of Goodness. A body can remove a lot of suckitude that way.

Sure, there’s such a thing as diminishing returns. Sure, most of us will need to take days off now and again. Feel free to adjust these numbers any way you care to. The point still stands: the work doesn’t just pile up over time — it multiplies.

How are you compounding your personal gains?
What could you do to get one percent better each day?

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No big revelation here, just a reminder: sometimes we ponder and ponder a thing, massage it in our minds, think about it six ways from Sunday, and generally make it into a big, hairy deal . . . only to find that it’s just not that hard in the actual doing.

Cases in point:

• Some form of regular exercise. I’m not talking about training for the Ironman. Getting out for a daily walk — even in the heat of a Texas summer — just isn’t that hard. If it’s too hot, get up earlier, or go out later, or walk in a mall or office building that’s air-conditioned. Or do bicycle kicks in your living room. Or swim. yesterday, I saw a guy who evidently has some sort of degenerative neuromuscular condition jogging . . . in the hottest part of the day. Virtually always, there’s something you could be doing.
• Saving money. Few Americans save enough, and as a people we have a negative savings rate. Yet virtually everyone who reads blogs has some discretionary income that they could sock away using a gew not-especially-clever strategies.
• Artistic creation. If you have plain paper and a cheap ballpoint, you can work on your drawing ability every single day — or at many different odd moments of every day. The tools you need to write that novel you suspect lurks within you? A spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil will work just fine.
• Alternate transportation. A couple of weeks ago, I took the bus to work all week, and it was virtually effortless — even enjoyable. Yesterday I fixed the flat tire on my bicycle and went for a little ride. No big deal.
• That Big, Looming Project you’ve been avoiding. Whether it’s cleaning out your garage, finishing your degree (note to self!), or whatever, it’s probably not quite as bad, not quite as hard, as you’ve been making it out to be. Time to dive in and find out.

One book that might help you with this is Mindset, by Professor Carol Dweck. (Find out more about it here.) Dweck’s research shows that our mindsets — which mostly fall into “fixed” (i.e. inflexible, set-in-stone) or “growth” (i.e. focused on possibilities and learning) categories — determine much about our approaches to life and its challenges.

To put it more bluntly, if you want your life to be a sucking mire of self-judgment and personal stagnation, then by all means keep following the same old patterns of stewing on your problems without taking action. But if you want your life to get better, turn down the self-criticism and the over-thinking, and turn up your appetite for learning and growth.

Hey, BIG problems like clinical depression, alcoholism and other addictions, chronic overspending, or a lifetime of poor self-image won’t be wished away in a moment, or remedied entirely by tackling the mess in the garage.

But tackling the mess in the garage won’t hurt, either, and for those of us who don’t have really debilitating issues to grapple with, hitting the mess in the garage (or the love handles, the unbalanced finances, etc.) at the point of contact may be our only effective way of building momentum.

Your turn: tell me something that you’ve done that you dreaded in prospect, but that wasn’t nearly so bad or so difficult once you got into it.
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(Photo by Jason Gulledge.)

I’ll share with you one of my pet theories. Ready? Here goes:

In this society we are entirely too afraid of death, and therefore too aversive about giving it any thought.

Let me rush to say that we wouldn’t benefit from a young-Morrissey-like fascination with death — much less from suicidal tendencies or excessively morbid imaginations.

But we would benefit from a more candid understanding that, on this earth at least, we are mortal. That means our days are numbered. That means we shouldn’t waste time, but instead live richly across the days we do have.

All of us have reminders that life can be unexpectedly short. Cancer, accidents, wars — the world is full of forces personal and impersonal that can cut short our time here. We’re right to stop these forces wherever we can, and to live for as many days as we can. But however many days we have, it’s important to make them count.

I’ve been thinking about this much more lately, ever since I stumbled across the 37 Days blog and met its author, Patti Digh. The blog’s title comes from Patti’s experience caring for her stepfather, who died 37 days after he was diagnosed with cancer. Her focus is clear from the blog’s tagline: “What would you be doing today if you only had 37 days to live?” I encourage you to visit the blog, read what she has to say, and think your own thoughts about how you would live out your last few weeks on earth — if you knew that they were your last few weeks.

(By the way, I intend to review Patti’s new book for my professional blog as soon as I receive the review copy her publisher is sending me.)

Okay, so what about the very un-37-like number listed in the title of this post?

That number is one rough estimate of how many days I personally can expect to live before dying of natural causes. It’s the sum derived when I subtract my current age in days (13,198) from the average number of days (31,070) that my four grandparents lived.

I’m fortunate that all of my grandparents lived past 75, and that three of them lived past 86. Given advances in nutrition and medicine, I hope to outlive them all by a wide margin. To be honest, I hope to live — hale and alert — past 110.

There’s good news and bad news about these expectations. The good news is, heck, I’ve got lots of time. The bad news is that the illusion that we have lots of time leads leads so many of us to waste so many of our days. This is why Patti evokes such great responses when she gets people thinking about how much life they’d like to compress into their few remaining days.

17,872 days seems like a lot, until you consider that surely plenty of them will be spent doing chores, earning a living, stuck in airports, sitting in the doctor’s office, waiting in traffic. Plenty of them will feature enough headaches that no Big Work will be done. Plenty of them will, or at least could, center around the kind of dithering that it’s all too easy to embrace when we don’t value our days fully.

How many days does that leave over? How many ways could we leave a mark on the world — make an impact for the forces of good — in those days?

Maybe it’s still a large number, but it requires focus to use that number. It requires focus to make sure that the number of days spent in housekeeping or wage-earning or small-timing doesn’t turn into “all of them.”

So very quickly, it seems, a big number can turn small.

My twenties, seen in the rearview mirror, seemed to go by like a shot. The first half of my thirties, even faster. My kids are sprouting up into adolescents before my eyes. Now I’m old enough to be President (not that I’d take the job), and nearly as old as Kipling was when he won the Nobel Prize. I’ll be 40 before you know it.

Then 50.

Then 60.

Then . . . well, there are no guarantees, are there?

Whether you’ve got 17,872 days left, or 37, or three — live today, friends.

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(Image by lydurs.)

Robert J. Sawyer is, according to many in the know, Canada’s top science-fiction novelist. He’s been writing more than 25 years now, and more than a decade ago he reprised Robert Heinlein’s five rules for writers, adding a sixth of his own.

1. You Must Write.
2. Finish What You Start.
3. You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order.
4. You Must Put Your Story on the Market.
5. You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold.
6. Start Working on Something Else.

Particular interesting to me is Sawyer’s idea — highly accurate, from my experience — that each of these guidelines will cut the potential audience of writers in half. Out of hundred would-be writers, fifty won’t write regularly, twenty-five more won’t finish what they start, and so on.

It’s a sobering observation, and one well worth pondering if you mean to write seriously.
Read Sawyer’s whole commentary here.

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Related posts:

• Neil Gaiman explains Terry Pratchett’s writing success.
• My entire advice for writers.

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What’re you lookin’ at?

An experiment I’m going to try:

1. Cut the daily intake of information to a bare minimum: work and personal e-mails that need answering, the business news I need so I can write my professional blog, and little else. Almost all of this will be accomplished sitting at my desk at work.
2. Work steadily through the piles of articles, books, lists, magazines, clippings, notes, sketches, charts, newsletters, graphs, folders, maps, outlines, correspondence, journals, drafts, notebooks, government documents, calendars, photocopies, receipts, index cards, and other detritus that clutter my desk, my files, my bookcases, and my laptop’s hard drive.
3. Repeat Step 2 until the decks are well and truly clear.
4. Record my observations on the results for your edification.

My prediction is that calibrating “a bare minimum” for Step 1 will take a lot of effort, not from a technical standpoint so much as an emotional standpoint. My habits around blog-reading and the like are well-engrained, and I get a lot of daily social interaction — along with a flood of information — via Twitter. The valves on those particular bitpipes are likely to be rusted in the open position.

My hope is that this will let me draw closer, with each passing day, to my large goals, including

• earning my Ph.D.;
• establishing my bloggerish benevolent hegemony; and
• writing books.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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(Image by Bludgeoner86.)

Back in December, I talked some nonsense about trying not to write 8,000 tweets (i.e. the short messages one sends via Twitter) in the coming year.

Current tweet total for yours truly: 8,194.

Two things:

1. I’ve gotten a lot more out of Twitter than I ever expected I would, and it hasn’t all been fun, games, and procrastinatory self-indulgence. Among other things, Twitter has been useful for introducing me to many influential / nifty people involved in social media, and it’s also helped my blogging considerably, both by giving me new ideas to blog about, and by giving me an excellent outlet for soliciting feedback for (and outright promotion of) my work.

2. After a debauched madcap period of super-high usage, I’ve tapered off my Twitter intensity, as shown in this month-by-month graph from TweetStats.

That is all.

Before he threw U.S. presidential politics into an uproar in 2000, someone once wrote of Ralph Nader that calling him “a consumer advocate” was like calling Joe DiMaggio “an outfielder”: correct in a limited sense, but hardly explanatory.

Whatever you think of him, Ralph Nader’s real career is as . . . Ralph Nader. Joe DiMaggio wasn’t just the centerfielder for the Yankees, and wasn’t “just” a Hall of Famer, because he was JOE DIMAGGIO.

I’ve come across three very different standout performers who have talked about the desirability of turning yourself into your very own category:

• Shaquille O’Neal said that you don’t just want to be the best at what you do, you want to get to the point where you’re the only one who even does what you do. (I’m paraphrasing.)
• Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia said about the same thing: “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”
• In this Wired magazine interview, legendary computer scientist Bill Joy said: “I try to work on things that won’t happen unless I do them.”

These men’s success at doing this is evident. Shaquille O’Neal isn’t just a Hall of Fame-caliber basketball center — he’s SHAQ. Jerry Garcia wasn’t just the frontman for a rock band — he was JERRY GARCIA, and his band was more of a cultural phenomenon than a musical act. Bill Joy, within the realms of computer science or Silicon Valley business, needs no introduction whatsoever — he’s just BILL JOY.

Most of us will never be as rich, as famous, or as obviously successful as these three men (or Joe DiMaggio or Ralph Nader, for that matter). But the principle still holds: we should try to develop what’s within us to the point that what we do and who we are are synonymous — and cherished by those who know us.

In other words, when someone comes across something thorny and says, “This is a job for [Your Name Here]” or “I want to see what [Your Name Here] does about this” — THAT’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

Oh, and one more thing. It’s quite possible that Shaq never actually said this. To no avail, I’ve looked high and low around the Interwebs trying to find the quote, which I’m sure I read at some point. But you know what? I’m going with it anyway, for two reasons:

1. I can totally imagine Shaq mumbling it out with that mixture of gravity and take-it-or-leave-it attitude that he has; and
2. Jerry Garcia and Bill Joy are slightly inferior to Shaquille on this score because they need two words — a first and a last name — to identify them. Shaq needs four letters.

So there you go. How are you doing on The Shaq Test?

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(Photo by Anthony Mumphrey.)

It was emotionally exhausting, and I didn’t even have a particular favorite.

My wife and I were making giddy exclamations of “Oh!” and “Sheez!” and “Good grief!” as both men rifled returns and winners this way and that.

Federer wasn’t the sniper we knew from a couple of years ago. Nadal was playing at an extraordinarily high level, but there were many chances for Federer to gain himself some daylight with one of his patented, unhittable chalk-dusting shots . . . but he kept hitting into the tape of the net, or six inches wide of true.

Nadal has ratcheted his game up tremendously. When he first came on the scene, with the biceps etc., I wondered if he would be the embodiment of tennis machismo. I was very wrong about that.

Both men played with incredible heart.

In sum: probably the best tennis match I’ve ever watched.

If you find yourself using a wood chisel for an odd job around the house — say, I don’t know, to shave down the top of a door that sticks in its jamb — be sure your non-tool-wielding hand is even farther from the business end of the chisel than you think is reasonably necessary.

Then move it even farther away.

That is all.

Starting ten years ago now, I worked for 18 months in the School of Architecture at UT. During that time, I dug out all kinds of interesting books from the UT library, some of which I was even able to read at my desk during lulls in the day. When I look back over the ledger where I write down the titles of books I read, I’m pleased to see what a varied diet I had in those days.

All of this comes to mind because I rediscovered a photocopy I made of the first two essays in W. H. Auden’s prose collection, The Dyer’s Hand. The pieces are titled “Reading” and “Writing,” and while they contain a few bits of nonsense along the way, they’re full of provocative observations about literature and the roles of poet and critic in the society.

Both essays are composed using freestanding paragraphs, many of them quite short, to express Auden’s judgments on many facets of reading and writing. Not all of these deserve quoting, but Auden’s acuity and the structure of the pieces mean that the essays are full of little gems.

From “READING”:

As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”

The one thing I most emphatically do not ask of a critic is that he tell me what I *ought* to approve of or condemn. I have no objection to his telling me what works and authors he likes and dislikes; indeed, it is useful to know this for, from his expressed preferences about works which I have read, I learn how likely I am to agree or disagree with his verdicts on works which I have not. But let him not dare to lay down the law to me. The responsibility for what I choose to read is mine, and nobody else on earth can do it for me.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit, and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

There is one evil that concerns literature which should never be passed over in silence but be continually publicly attacked, and that is corruption of the language, for writers cannot invent their own language and are dependent upon the language they inherit so that, if it be corrupt, they must be corrupted.

From “WRITING”:

When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook.

What makes it difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.

The integrity of a writer is more threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious convictions, than by appeals to his cupidity. It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but, unlike the rest of us, he does not build one.

Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.

“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret police, not the poets.

As for the nonsense mentioned above, I note this:

Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no “shop” to talk. Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting cases, about experiences, that is to say, related to their professional interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.

The last clause of this paragraph is true, but the rest is not merely inaccurate but ridiculous. I don’t know Auden’s biography well enough to say whether he personally was awkward in social settings, but as a group writers are notorious for talking shop. True, they don’t sit around unpacking all the details of their latest literary efforts; most writers view this as an ideal way to gum up their productive works. But put two writers together at a cocktail party and watch them go on about what things of theirs are coming to press, what they’re working on now, and what they just signed a contract to write; impossible or ideal editors and agents; the horror story or stroke of luck lately experienced by an absent writer; their own desire someday to finally write X; and so on. While they don’t usually lay out the chapter or stanza structure of their current efforts, you can barely shut them up about the profession of writing, and I have no idea what would have led Auden to think otherwise.

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(Image via Wordcarving.)