Letters to My Kids

People rarely know nearly as much as they think they do.

One of the most negative aspects of our educational system is that it presumes to “know it all”. Every subject taught is presented from a single point of view and definitively stamped on every student that comes through. Conform to the mold and you’re rewarded. Your evaluation is how closely you conform to the model presented by a teacher.

There’s nothing wrong with learning from someone who understands a subject more fully. It’s something you should take advantage of. But the problem with taking advice is that it’s sometimes wrong. People make mistakes. People discover new things and broaden their horizons. And sometimes people are just too big for a particular mold.

I remember taking an introductory computer course when I was in high school. It was a subject that interested me and I read ahead in the book quite a ways. In class one day we were asked to write a program that required a lot of repetitive calculations. Since I had read ahead, I knew about looping and recursion. I turned in a program using these techniques that resulted in a smaller, more efficient package. I was told to do it over, because my program had to “fit the curriculum”. As I look back on it, I had probably read farther ahead than the teacher…

Question everything, children. Just because it’s been done the same way for ages or because everyone else seems to be doing it doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Murder has been around forever. So has slavery. Sexism. Addiction. Perversion. Hunger. Idiocy.

Most of our greatest inventors were simply people who were discontent with the way things were done. Most of the innovators and overachievers are people who were discontent with the status quo. The great entrepeneurs are the ones who look at a simple task and ask how it could be performed better.

But people in general like to be complacent. At one point in the 1800s, the patent office considered closing because it felt everything had been invented. Edison was run out of the phonograph business because he couldn’t get past the idea that people preferred it as an entertainment medium rather than a business tool.

Through life you will run into a lot of norms. People have been following the same formula for many years, but it’s not always the best path for everyone.

• Most of your friends will take an afterschool job in high school to make money. But you don’t have to. You could start your own business.
• Most of your friends will go to college and treat it just like high school, passing the classes they need to in order to get a sheepskin and hopefully a job. But you don’t have to. You could decide to start your own business and go just to pick up the classes you think you’ll need. If you want a degree and a job, you could work to develop contacts and associations that will land you a better job instead of just worrying about your social life.
• Your friends will tend to marry in groups – either just out of high school, just out of college, mid 30s, etc. depending on the people. But you shouldn’t get married just because it seems like everyone else is.
• Your friends may favor a particular drug or negative habit. But you shouldn’t do so just because they are. It might not be the smartest decision.

Don’t disdain good advice or educated people. Just understand that noone knows everything.

So do your research, understand your options and make the choice that’s best for you. Don’t take things at face value. Truly, you cannot judge a book by its cover.

Question everything. Then make your own choices.

Today I’m bringing you a suggestion near and dear to my heart – argument.

It’s one of the things I’m inclined to do. I have somewhat of a talent for debate and take just a little more pleasure from it than I should. It’s almost like a game or contest for me. I enjoy the interplay and strategy. Frankly, if there were no consequences, I would probably prefer a spirited argument over a friendly conversation.

I keep that nature in check, only letting it out in very tame forms of good-natured exchanges with friends if I can at all help it. I do this because arguing is a vice. It’s a bad habit. Maybe worse than physical addiction. Not because it’s in itself harmful – it’s actually very stimulating and educational. But because of the way most people react to it.

You can probably relate to a situation where friendly competition got pushed a bit too far. Maybe a friendly sport turns sour when both sides take the loss or the ribbing too personally. Or maybe a playful exchange of insults hits too close and tempers flare. At one point it was entertaining, but eventually egos came into play and you began to see your friend as adversary.

Arguments are like that for most people. And if they’re not habitual debaters, the personal feelings come into play very quickly. There’s no good way to judge when you’re getting close to “going too far”. One moment things are fine, the next you are facing off against an enemy. Different people have different lengths of fuses, and sensitivity can change from one day to the next. So that even your closest friends – the ones you know inside and out – can be misjudged innocently.

When your discussion is not about trivial matters or done as a game, sensitivity is even higher. You can injure feelings, create animosity and fracture relationships before you’re really aware that you’re being offensive. People own and embrace the positions they take in an argument. Out-debating them or proving yourself right is never a “win” – the loser’s pride is hurt and resentment is built.

But you face situations regularly in which you want to convince others of your point of view. Argument is necessary. So let me give you a few suggestions of how to press your point while keeping hostility out of the picture.

• Don’t resent the disagreement. Just because they don’t agree with you doesn’t mean they diminish you as a person. Be grateful for having a new opinion to mull over. None of us knows it all; you may learn something valuable. If you honestly want to understand their point of view, it will come across in your demeanor and make the whole process easier.
• Remain calm. Raising your voice is just an open invitation for them to raise theirs. It becomes a game of trumping that no one wins.
• Listen. Seek to understand. Don’t spend the time the other person is talking rehearsing your rebuttal. You may agree more than you think. Learn to listen to not only what they’re saying, but to their perspective. You may understand the motivation behind their disagreement and find the real disagreement behind a front.
• Don’t struggle for superiority. Don’t attempt to prove you’re more intelligent, more sophisticated, more educated, etc. An argument is not about proving you’re the best, it’s about solving a problem. Get it through your head that the object of the exchange is not to come out on top.
• Admitting your own errors makes it easier for others to admit theirs. Humility will breed the same on the other side.
• Praise when offered sincerely will ease the exchange.
• Understand that “agreeing to disagree” is a valid outcome. If you just can’t make headway, you can always leave it as “well I still believe my perspective, but you’ve given me some things to think about.”

A great deal of this advice is based in Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. A great book on basic relationships, if you have the time to read it. It’s worth your while.

It’s OK to be a beginner.

Ego plays a huge role in our lives, often to our detriment. One of its strangest tendencies is to convince us that the only the top performers are worth watching – that somehow the world expects us to be experts in our particular chosen disciplines. We somehow believe the world cocks an eyebrow at our endeavors and says “Amaze me, or you’re just wasting my time”.

You’ll see it more frequently as you grow older. Little by little the demands of ego win out over our own curiosity. We tend to dwell on past glories and root ourselves in the things we’ve had previous success in. We get so caught up in the idea of performance that branching out to new things seems overly risky. And we continue to follow the same paths, run the same plays. We figure we’re too old to take up a new sport. We’re too entrenched to begin a new career. We have too many financial responsibilities to take on a new endeavor.

But there are a couple of important things to keep in mind:

• You never know what you’ll be great at. You’ll never know if you will find something really rewarding unless you attempt it first. Just because you’ve never shown aptitude for something in the past doesn’t mean the potential isn’t there. Try new things. If something seems interesting, get into it enough to learn the basics. If it seems worthwhile, pursue it. If not, drop it. At the least you’ll have a future topic of conversation with people who enjoy it.
  
• Everyone was a beginner sometime. It’s OK to really stink when you take on something new. I would guess that Michael Jordan did not hit his first attempt at a basketball shot. No one comes out of the gate as an expert. You are expected to start at a beginner level. Just because your first drawing looks like a modified stick man doesn’t mean that you have no potential. Very few people have a “natural” talent. It’s grown – directly or indirectly – over a long span of time.
• Life is not a race. You’re really only in competition with yourself. Some of the greatest contributors to society hit their peaks later in life. And quite a few hit it at an early age. In the end, you only have to meet your own timeline. If you want to start a business as a teenager, or take up rock guitar as a retiree, who’s to judge? If it fulfils you and you find yourself passionate about it, denying yourself the pleasure is the only bad approach.

I spent a lot of time in my teens attempting to learn to sketch and paint, with less than stellar results. It just never went anywhere for me. When I got into digital art, I found I had some degree of talent. My brain is just better wired for trial and error approaches, and the cheapskate in me always felt guilty about “wasting” materials. When I switched to computer based drawing and the waste factor was removed, I got fairly good at it. But I never would have known that without attempting it.

A college friend of mine that went into the medical profession decided to take up knitting on a whim to keep his hands busy during breaks. He was a bit self conscious about it, being a guy investing himself in a stereotypical “girl’s” pastime, but he always was drawn to the patterns in them. It turns out he got really good at it and it became a very enjoyable pastime. He says now that it’s done wonders for him in keeping his hands flexible.

The first time I attempted to use chopsticks it was quite amusing. I simply didn’t have the dexterity and little idea of the proper technique. But it looked like a cool skill, so I persisted. And got quite talented at it. I really appreciate that skill these days because I love eating with wooden implements. With my head so full of dental fillings, a metal fork leaves a metallic taste with every bite. Being able to use a set of chopsticks really enhances a meal, particularly some of my favorite Asian dishes.

A mind IS a terrible thing to waste.

It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that know neither victory nor defeat. –
Theodore Roosevelt

Some great advice that I’ll leave as is.

Forwarded to you by someone who has sometimes been in the arena, many times more in the stands, but always aware of where the credit’s due.

The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself. – Washington Allston
Focus on competition has always been a formula for mediocrity. – Daniel Burrus

Competition is a wonderful thing. There’s no greater motivational or performance-enhancing tool. You will never give as much of yourself to preparation as you will to competing in a contest. You will stretch your body just a little more in a game than in practice. You will put up a little more weight on the bench when you’re lifting with a group of friends. You will work a little longer and exercise your brain more thoroughly when you’re put on a parallel task at work. You will turn on a little more charm with that special someone if you know someone else has an eye on them. We’re simply wired in a “survival of the fittest” mentality, and nothing gets us going faster than seeing someone that’s looking a little fitter to our side.

That kind of mentality translates to life in general, as well. Competition is the tool that keeps us from mediocrity. It’s what drives us to achieve our potential. But you need to choose the right competitor.

The only suitable competition is yourself. Your past achievements. Your demonstrated capacity. You are the only person worth outdoing.

You see a lot of people that miss that fact. They believe they’re competing with their peers, their neighbors, their friends, the people around them. These are the kids that have to have the starting slots on the team, or who’ll die if they’re not cheerleaders. These are the college students who need to act out in such as way that they’ll be seen as bigger risk takers. These are the people of all ages who have a need to own the nicest clothes, the most expensive car, the biggest salary, the biggest home or the most prestigious title.

What’s the problem with this kind of competition? It falls short in two areas:

• There’s always someone better out there. It’s a common occurance for people who were Big Fish in high school to hit college and experience depression because they’re in a larger environment and no longer the smartest/wealthiest/coolest/most athletic kid on the block. Lots of college sports stars quickly find they can’t handle pro sports because they’re not used to that level of competition. You never really succeed when you compete against those around you, because when you move to the next level, you find you’re just at the bottom rung of a taller ladder. Goal achievement is critical to motivation – no one wants to keep playing if they’re always losing.
• When you believe you’re the best, you stagnate. If you do happen to reach the pinnacles of your particular devotion, or if you choose to stay in a smaller pond so you can be the Big Fish, there’s little motivation to change. You tend to sit still and lose what advantage you have. Meanwhile, those below you are moving toward your vantage point and disdaining you for not going farther.

Competing with yourself is the only guaranteed challenge and the only path worth pursuing. When you set your past performance as the competition, you ensure that you do your best. You don’t let the headstart someone else gets discourage you from making your own play. You don’t allow yourself to plateau at the level of your peers. You don’t run out of motivation to compete, because there’s always a higher level to go to. And you put yourself in a fair contest, where you have more than a good shot at succeeding.

And most importantly, you set your own goals instead of letting other people set them for you.

Don’t you want your destiny to be your own choice?

When you find yourself trying to solve a problem, combat writer’s block or just looking to stir a little creativity into something you’re doing, it’s not uncommon to hit a point where you feel you just aren’t making progress. Maybe all the art you make looks the same. Maybe you’ve pounded the fundamentals of a free throw but just aren’t getting better. Maybe you’re trying to improve an existing process and you just can’t see how it could change for the better.

Preset methods of doing things are wonderful, particularly when the mold has been cast by an expert. But when pouring yourself in the mold is not giving you the desired result, it’s time to break it.

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt formalized a method of jogging the mind they called the Oblique Strategies. In its commercial implementation, they were a deck of cards, with simple “out of the box” strategies to adopt or consider when you found yourself stuck. They’re basically a series of statements that encourage you to think out of the norm. So when you’ve butted your head against a problem and the regular approach is getting you nowhere, you draw a card which prompts you “don’t forget that you COULD approach it with this attitude”.

Many of them are quite abstract, and it takes a bit of brainpower to understand how you can apply them to a particular situation. And using them effectively takes a bit of balance. It’s not a fortune cookie – just because you draw “Abandon desire” doesn’t mean you necessarily must for this application. But at the same time, you want to give the suggestion a fair shot. If you simply rifle through the deck until you find one that you think will work, you’re just pouring the deck into your old mold along with yourself.

Here’s an example. Suppose I’m trying to perfect my free throws and seem to be getting nowhere. I pull out my deck and draw “Cut a vital connection”. I think a bit and it seems I have a ritual of putting my toes just behind the line and dribbling twice. That’s my “setup”, and I always do it. So I sever that connection by dismantling the ritual – going straight for the shot instead of the ritual. Maybe that changes the way I grip the ball and I come to understand something more about my shot. In a couple of days I still feel stuck and draw “Magnify the most difficult details”. I think a bit and realize that I’m quite disconnected and relaxed during the warmup and post shot. So I focus on the load, aim and release. Soon I understand I’m comfortable with the load, so I spend some time just working on the aim, then maybe the release. And maybe I discover that my problem is that I get flustered with the aim, so I just wing that tiny part. Actually, I did find that out – true story.

I’m not suggesting it’s a end-all solution to your stalemates, but it can be an effective tool for getting past them. In the end, a card from the deck is just a reminder that you’re human, and you have a lot of talents and opportunities to exploit if you can avoid getting stuck in a rut.

Maybe they’ll work for you. Here’s a list of some of the cards from the first 3 editions:

• Abandon desire
• Abandon normal instructions
• Accept advice
• Adding on
• A line has two sides
• Always the first steps
• Ask people to work against their better judgement
• Ask your body
• Be dirty
• Be extravagant
• Be less critical
• Breathe more deeply
• Bridges -build -burn
• Change ambiguities to specifics
• Change nothing and continue consistently
• Change specifics to ambiguities
• Consider transitions
• Courage!
• Cut a vital connection
• Decorate, decorate
• Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing
• Discard an axiom
• Disciplined self-indulgence
• Discover your formulas and abandon them
• Display your talent
• Distort time
• Do nothing for as long as possible
• Don’t avoid what is easy
• Don’t break the silence
• Don’t stress one thing more than another
• Do something boring
• Do something sudden, destructive and unpredictable
• Do the last thing first
• Do the words need changing?
• Emphasize differences
• Emphasize the flaws
• Faced with a choice, do both (from Dieter Rot)
• Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
• Give the game away
• Give way to your worst impulse
• Go outside. Shut the door.
• Go to an extreme, come part way back
• How would someone else do it?
• How would you have done it?
• In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly
• Is it finished?
• Is something missing?
• Is the style right?
• It is simply a matter or work
• Just carry on
• Listen to the quiet voice
• Look at the order in which you do things
• Magnify the most difficult details
• Make it more sensual
• Make what’s perfect more human
• Move towards the unimportant
• Not building a wall; making a brick
• Once the search has begun, something will be found
• Only a part, not the whole
• Only one element of each kind
• Openly resist change
• Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard
• Question the heroic
• Remember quiet evenings
• Remove a restriction
• Repetition is a form of change
• Retrace your steps
• Reverse
• Simple Subtraction
• Slow preparation, fast execution
• State the problem as clearly as possible
• Take a break
• Take away the important parts
• The inconsistency principle
• The most easily forgotten thing is the most important
• Think – inside the work -outside the work
• Tidy up
• Try faking it (from Stewart Brand)
• Turn it upside down
• Use an old idea
• Use cliches
• Use filters
• Use something nearby as a model
• Use `unqualified’ people
• Use your own ideas
• Voice your suspicions
• Water
• What context would look right?
• What is the simplest solution?
• What mistakes did you make last time?
• What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?
• What were you really thinking about just now?
• What wouldn’t you do?
• What would your closest friend do?
• When is it for?
• Where is the edge?
• Which parts can be grouped?
• Work at a different speed
• Would anyone want it?
• Your mistake was a hidden intention

If we’d known we were going to be The Beatles, we’d have tried harder.” – George Harrison

Life is full of ups and downs. Sometimes you hit the mark and your attempts are wildly successful. Sometimes you fail horribly. Sometimes an idea puts you ahead of the crowd, sometimes behind. Most of the time you hit somewhere in the middle.

The thing is, you rarely know which attempts are going to be hits or misses when you’re taking them on.

It’s a standard cliche’ you’ll often hear in one permutation or another “da Vinci didn’t know when he was painting Mona Lisa that it would be “the” Mona Lisa. You can take educated guesses, but you can never be sure if your efforts are going to soar or dive.

A lot of people take a pessimistic approach to this truism and as a result, never return their best efforts. “Why put the work into this; it’s just going to fail”. I think that’s completely the wrong frame of mind and guaranteed to keep you in the valleys. Yes, your attempts could fail. They could also turn out to be the next Mona Lisa.

Since you never really know, I think the best practice is to always do your best. You’ll hear that phrase pushed at you over and over as a character virtue, but aside from making you a better person, it has very practical benefits. When your effort does fly high, it flies as high as it possibly can.

Lets try to put it in some practical terms and compare the efforts/results.

Assume the effort in front of you is a test at school. You’re already going to study until you feel like you are comfortable with the material – that’s the mediocre effort. Your best effort is probably just an hour or two more working outside of the box – doing extra example problems, or reading correlary material, or coming up with a scheme to make things easily memorizable. If you put in the extra effort and it gets you a perfect score, you get benefits the mediocre score doesn’t carry. Your overall grade is boosted. If you do it regularly, you get recognized as a bright person. Although they’re supposed to be impartial, you’ll find in the real world you’ll get more leeway from a teacher when they think you’re smart. You’ll be given the benefit of the doubt on future tests if your answer is debatable. It also buys you a lot more leeway with your parents. High GPAs get into college easier and get more financial aid. This in itself can add up to thousands of dollars in interest you won’t have to repay on a school loan – and means parents have more mad money to pass along since they’re not choking in helping you through school. Comparatively, the worst case scenario means your extra work didn’t pay off, and you lost a couple of hours of TV or videogames. Which makes more sense?

Now assume you’re in the working world and your task is to create a presentation for an average, everyday project. Putting in the extra effort would probably mean a few extra hours of rehearsing, doing research beyond the norm, gathering opinions on the material, etc. Although you may never expect this information to be useful beyond its initial purpose, you never know when a particular aspect of business comes into focus. It just may be your presentation that gets reiterated to upper management or even a board of directors. You will be looked on more favorably for promotion and your net worth goes up in the eyes of people with influence. You may be given more of a stake in the effort because you appear to be so familiar with the effort. If your first instinct was correct and this goes nowhere special, at the least you’ll be regarded as someone who is meticulous and focused on the details. If you impress no one else, you will at least raise your net worth in front of those who do see the presentation. So there’s really no downside, just differing levels of upside.

Maybe this letter will make a difference in your life, maybe not. But I put the extra time into trying to make it as meaningful as possible, because it has the potential to really take you places. And I think the extra time is a valuable investment when I consider what it could enable you to achieve.

How about you?

A learned man once went to a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher explained, the learned man would frequently interrupt him with remarks like, “Oh, yes, we have that too….” and so on. Finally the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, and then kept pouring until the cup overflowed. “Enough!” the learned man once more interrupted. “No more can go into the cup!” “Indeed, I see,” answered the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty the cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?” – as told by Bruce Lee

A lot of the trouble we create for ourselves comes from assuming that we know best. Not being willing to admit what we don’t know. Not being able to admit that we’re weak in a particular area. Not accepting that we’re not completely self-actualized and ready to present ourselves to the world as a shining example of man’s potential.

No one admits this, of course. We will all superficially admit our shortcomings or make self-depreciating remarks as a joke. But when we’re put to the test, we show our true colors. We will nod heads in agreement when we don’t understand the concept. We will laugh at the joke we don’t get. We will assume we know exactly how the person across the table feels. We will see our motivations in other people. We will snub the talented superstar and secretly woodshed what we’ve seen demonstrated.

I used to go to guitar clinics at a local music store in my high school days. I would spend the hour’s demonstration salivating at the possibilities of playing like the instructor, then join all the “cool” kids who walked away saying “he wasn’t that good – I can do that”. Then I’d thrash in my bedroom working out a half baked approximation of what I’d seen. I could have walked up to the guy and asked him to explain a little better. I could have asked him what kind of practice regimen he followed to develop that skill. I could have asked where he thinks that skill was best applied. But my cup was already full of myself. I spent the time reassuring myself that I was as good as anybody and I could probably do it as well as him as soon as I got back to my own guitar. And as a result, the pro was doing clinics while I was working out something that sounded sort of like it if I told you ahead of time what I was about to play.

So many feel threatened by rapid life changes, demonstrated mastery or a slick presentation that we let valuable opportunities to learn pass us by.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a time to rely on your own judgment, a time to work out your own methodology. But it’s always a better one if you’ve got correlating experience in the back of your head. If you’re improving on something you’ve already digested. Building on someone else’s foundation.

Learn to admit that you don’t have it all together. And learn from those who teach around you every day.

No matter where you go, what you do or where you plan to spend your time, keep some means of capturing your ideas.

This can be as simple as a pocketable notepad and pencil, a voice recorder, an electronic assistant of some kind, or any combination of the sort. Keep something by your bedside as well.

The best ideas always seem to come when we’re out of our standard element. At the time, they seem so noteworthy that you don’t anticipate forgetting them. But you usually do, once you’re back in a familiar setting.

Capture them as you come to them.