Letters to My Kids

I’ll immediately follow up the last suggestion with yet another contradiction.

Although it works best to tackle projects in one shot, there’s one significant exception – memorization. Lots of tests you have to take will require a lot of rote memorization, and that’s the one situation when it actually hurts to try to do your task in one shot.

Because of the way the brain is constructed, we need idle time in order to build memories. If you attempt to do a lot of memorization in one shot, without taking time out from your studies to let your brain do its thing, it will have an incredibly difficult time holding on to short term material. You’ve got to build in the rest times in order to let your brain make the memories of the studied material in order to hold on to it.

What worked really well for me in memorizing facts was to break often. I’d study a list of 10 things I’d need to repeat for 5 minutes or so, then lie down and close my eyes for a minute. Then repeat.

There’s usually an exception to any rule, and this one certainly qualifies. Give your brain a chance to digest the material if you want to hold on to it.

Performing in front of others can be simultaneously the greatest thrill and the worst nightmare of your life. There’s nothing like the thrill of putting yourself out there to public scrutiny and having an audience voice their approval. It’s a validation of your effort to get to that point, and it’s very rewarding to be assured that all your hard work has paid off. It can also be absolutely terrifying to put yourself out there under the microscope.

I’ve got a pretty good grip on this, having directed church music for many years (a capella, no less), performed with a number of bands through my school years, performed solo gigs, talent shows, public speeches, giving presentations, teaching classes, preaching, plays, musicals, etc. I’ve spent a lot of time in front of a crowd.

It wasn’t very easy for me. I was very self-conscious in my younger years and I’ve had to perform in some pressured situations here and there. I’ve very often been called to perform with no preparation. So I learned a few lessons along the way, which might be valuable to you when you find yourself compelled to get out there in front of people.

• Don’t fear the worst. People tend to create irrational fears for themselves when they’re faced with going onstage. They picture a hostile group that wants to see failure. They wonder who out there is thinking “what makes this guy think he’s good enough”. They imagine a judges panel picking apart every nuance of performance, looking for a failure to highlight. And in doing so, we create a nightmare audience that’s exponentially worse than you would ever face in real life. Assuming a worst case scenario is not conducive to a confident delivery, so avoid the temptation. It’s not going to be that bad.
• Realize the audience wants you to succeed. Nobody wants to hear a boring speech, or see a bad performance. People want to be entertained, to be stimulated. And you have a certain amount of built-in credibility, because you’re in the performer’s seat. They assume at some point, someone has deemed you worthy of being under the spotlight and they’ll react accordingly. Look out there and see the encouraging faces. They want you to do well.
• Don’t sweat the mistakes. You as a performer, having practiced your delivery over and over are going to see every nuance of failure. Every missed syllable, bad note, crack of the voice. At times I’ve even concerned myself with whether the audience could tell I was sweating. But unless you’re being formally critiqued, most people are just not going to notice the flubs. Unless you make a huge jump in logic, they won’t know that you missed a sentence in your speech. They won’t know that you didn’t intend to hit that note. And even when your goof is noticeable, the audience will generalize your performance. Give a great speech and chances are they won’t even remember the couple of times you stumbled on a word. A perfect delivery is rare – there’s always some improvement you could have made. So don’t worry about being perfect. Just be great.
• Move with confidence. You will enhance the audience’s willingness to forgive mistakes if you act with confidence. Delivered with enough force, enough presence and with confidence, you can make the audience believe your mistakes were intentional and meaningful.
• Don’t “mug” the crowd. People can get uncomfortable when they feel you’ve singled them out, so don’t look directly at people. Pick a couple of spots near the back of the room and alternate between them. In a room with balconies, pick the middle one and speak to its corners. The exception to this is when you’re making a motivational speech – then it pays to connect to individuals as much as possible.
• Get comfortable. You will likely be standing (or sitting) still during many performances, and it’s often difficult to get comfortable. You’ll shift your weight around, play with your notes and turn this way and that until you find a comfy spot. All that moving and settling can amplify nervousness, as you’re facing two challenges at once. So experiment while you’re practicing – try standing with your weight evenly distributed, or shift your weight to one leg or another. Figure out where your notes need to be, or how you’ll trigger your slides or whatever. Find a comfortable posture that you can maintain for a while. Then, when you actually perform, you can slip right into “your” position. You’ll feel settled, confident and ready to go. One thing I learned about myself is that because of years of playing in bands with foot-triggered guitar rigs, I was really more comfortable singing if I had my right foot propped up on a surrogate pedalboard. So every time I stepped to a podium to lead singing, I’d prop that foot up on the back of the podium and feel ready to go.
• Know your part. The best method of defeating stage fright is to have your act down cold. Know it inside and out. Be able to deliver that speech in your sleep. One of my main contributors to stage fright was little failures. I’d make a minor flub and get scared that I wouldn’t be able to recover. Even when minor, that little bit of time it takes to get yourself back on track can be devastating. You’re never really comfortable when you’re not sure where you’re going next. So know your thing cold, so there’s never a time when you’re looking for the next line. It will seriously defeat the butterflies in your stomach.
• Feed the physical. Little physical cues can really mess you up. A dry mouth, excess sweat, pages that won’t turn can really be a source of frustration. So go prepared. If you sweat a lot, carry something unassuming to blot it up – a white paper towel, folded in sixths is a great tool to have. Have some gum or a mint to combat dry mouth, or carry a glass of water to the podium if it’s permissable. Fluff your notes ahead of time, or carry some fingertip lube in your pocket and give yourself a pinch of it before walking out. If it’s stormy out, pocket a tiny flashlight in case the power goes out. You’ll learn a lot of your particular needs after a few performances, so learn from your problems and be ready next time.

There are some situations in which the audience is not as supportive as you’d like them to be. Maybe you’ve got a captive crowd that would rather be elsewhere (like a school assembly). Maybe it’s a competition and the audience is behind someone else. Or maybe you are performing for a review, or a grade. That’s when you’ve really got to lean on your self confidence to help you deliver well.

I always got a boost of confidence by reminding myself that I was the one performing. In front of me is a whole audience of people that didn’t have the talent, didn’t have the drive or were just plain too timid to take on what I’m doing. So what if my performance wasn’t my best – I’ve still trumped the audience’s best efforts by just being willing to step out there. Stroke your own ego a bit and pump yourself up so you know you’re superior to your critics. It’s not an attitude you want to manifest daily, but it can give you that little boost to help you deliver with confidence.

Like any other skill, performance gets better with practice. So perform often, learn from your mistakes and be willing to put yourself out there.

Remember – “nothing ventured, nothing gained”.

Ever find yourself one on one with a stranger trying to make polite conversation?

If you’re not a complete extrovert, it can be tough sometimes. Lots of painful silence, generic topics that interest neither party, lots of looking around for an exit and painfully searching for anything to say.

More than likely, the feeling is mutual. People enjoy good conversations, but very few know how to get one started and bring it to the point where it becomes interesting for all involved.

Here’s an easy way to get around that.

• If the other person doesn’t start the conversation, comment on something you know you have in common, even if it’s just in the room with you. The food, the room, the occasion, the weather. If you have a common friend, or work/school together, that’s another point. Just make sure it’s something they have something to say about. It seems silly, but if you can establish up front that you have something in common, you’re off on the right foot. And if the person is really not interested in a conversation, you’ll get the vibe immediately and can move on.
• Always ask open ended questions that can’t be answered with a yes/no. “What are you busy with lately?” “I missed the news today – anything interesting I missed?” “What brings you here?” or “How do you know the host?” Or you can probe for some common interests. Sports topics are good. Or if you’re older, kids. Just make sure it’s easier to give a more elaborate answer than it is to nod and grunt.
• When the person answers, if they introduce any information you can follow up on, do so. Try not to answer your own question, as that tends to end the thread. If you ask them what sports team they follow, ask them how they got involved with the franchise, or if they were a former athlete – anything except saying “Yeah, I like them too” and going back to nervous searching.
• If despite your best efforts you only get a yes/no, find another question to probe. Maybe the person wasn’t a sports fan, but would love to tell you about their hobbies, or favorite music, or whatever. Give it a couple of shots before giving up.
• If you’ve tried with a few questions and are just getting nowhere, you can always just admit it. “I am really bad at starting conversations like this”. Usually you’ll hit a sympathetic chord and can dig a bit deeper.

You can often pull a very interesting conversation out of an uncomfortable situation by just initiating it and putting some stock in it.

And always remember, if you’re bored with the conversation, they probably are too.

I firmly believe that effective self-discipline is your key to life.

There’s a battle that is constantly staged between your intentions and urges, your thought and desires, your plans and impulses. For every conscious decision you make, there’s a desire headed in the opposite direction to confound your plans. You know you need to lose weight, but the chocolate doughnuts becon. You know you should get back to work, but a couple of minutes’ distraction won’t hurt. You know a “gets the job done” car is a better choice, but all you can think of in the dealer’s office are the envious stares of onlookers when you pull up in the luxury model.

Unfortunately, there’s something hardwired in desire that seems to energize you. It’s easier to go with your impulses, to give in to your lusts. It’s immediate, it doesn’t require a lot of thought or analysis and the energy it generates makes it almost effortless. And the great American novel lies unwritten while you pound out another night of gaming.

Self discipline is the tool that helps bring your mind back into power. It’s the mechanism by which you turn decision into action, no matter what your emotional state.

There are a few components to self-discipline, in my opinion. Understanding them helps you learn to employ them more effectively.

Intention is where you start. You’ve got to define your goals, your tasks and your milestones before you can move to achieve them. You have to understand what you’re shooting for and be convinced of its value. You won’t stop a bad habit if you’re not convinced it’s worth giving up. And you won’t have as great a success if you don’t have a defined goal to reach. “I want to lose weight” is a bad goal. “I will lose 20 lbs in 10 weeks by a 1500 calorie intake and 30 minutes of exercise daily, because that reduces my risk of heart attack by 30%” is a pretty good one.

Willpower is the firing tool, the nitrous oxide for your dead start. Willpower is actually the beneficial application of your impulses, and it gains all the advantages your detrimental impulses enjoy. It’s when you sit up and say “I’m going to get started!” and hit the task hard with all the energy of desire and impulse. The problem with willpower is that it’s not sustainable. It burns out, and you find yourself slacking off your goals. But if you can direct that initial shot intelligently, you can create momentum.

Since you know your willpower is going to fade, you need to use it in a way that makes it easier for you to sustain the actions. Think about a plane – it expends massive amounts of energy to get off the ground, but if it gets high enough, it can take advantage of the air currents to glide a bit.

So in the weight loss example, when you get the urge, you execute hard and fast, as long as that energy will sustain you. Throw out the junk food in the kitchen. Hit the grocery store and replace it with something healthy. Pre-cook a week of meals, or lay out a minimal effort menu that will be as easy as grabbing fast food. Join Weight Watchers, join a gym, get a treadmill – whatever you need to do to make things easier in the days ahead. Then, when a few days go by and the willpower is fading, you’ve got healthy foods available, activities to carry on – it’s just as easy to do what you planned to do as it is to slack off.

Ambition is what keeps you from selling out your disciplined state. Once you’ve got some momentum, the temptation becomes powerful to look for the “low hanging fruit” – to settle for an inferior approximation of your goal. This is just the old desires and impulses coming back in a sneakier manner. You won’t give up, you’ll just take an easier route. Maybe your 1500 calorie diet becomes 1500 calories except on the weekends. Or your 30 minutes daily becomes 15 minutes every other day. You can be conned into satisfaction with a partial goal. But beware those moments. They’re the “slippery slopes” that will eventually take your daily exercise to 3 times a week, to twice a week, then once a week, then never. This is the time to keep yourself focused on the goals you set, to debug the situation and figure out what’s causing you to stumble. Then pump yourself up to a willpower session that can correct those problems.

Persistence is the journeyman tool. It’s the ability to continue to act regardless of your feelings. It’s pushing forward when you don’t feel like it. It’s convincing yourself that the goal is worth the effort. Persistence works because constant effort eventually yields results, and results are motivating. At some point in the weight loss scenario, you’re going to be dragged down by your impulses. But if you can focus on your goal and continue to do the work, one day you’ll hit the scales and find you’ve broken the plateau you thought had conquered you. And the energy and desire returned from achieving a goal helps fuel a willpower session.

The application of self-discipline is a cyclic process. A lot of people miss that fact, and when motivation lags, they only see a long-stretching future of less and less motivation. But if you understand that the bursts of willpower will come and go, it’s much easier to persist through the low spots in the effort.

Self-discipline is a tool ignored by far too many people today. And as a result, it’s a differentiator between the successful and the unsuccessful. If you can give your intention the benefit of self-discipline, there’s really little that you cannot achieve.

It doesn’t take a lot of sense to break the rules. It does however, take a lot of sense to break the rules effectively.

You can really easily identify a couple of extremes in people in regard to playing by the rules. The “goody two shoes” always play strictly by the rules. They seek recognition and achievement in a clearly pre-defined path that’s been laid out before them, and they don’t really recognize alternatives to that mindset as being valid in any way. These are the teacher’s pets, the corporate yes men… you recognize them. They thoroughly believe that they’re going to get ahead by playing it by the book as closely as possible.

The other is the flagrant rule breaker, who sees most any system as a challenge to rail against it. These are the guys that spend more time in detention than out, the people working in low-end jobs that you know are below their potential. They believe that the system is ineffective and the only way to get ahead is to take it on your own terms.

Strangely enough, their end will be somewhat similiar. The guy who tries to do everything by the book will find that there are plenty of people who will do the same, and probably better. They tend to be the guys that end up in a difficult and critical job doing all the work with all of the stress and none of the thanks or rewards. The guy who refuses to play by the rules never gets a chance to get started in the system, so they work below their potential and find themselves unsatisfied with their state.

The smart guy avoids this… by breaking the right rules.

There’s an old adage among musicians that you have to know the rules to break them. Music becomes interesting when you add a bit of the unexpected. If you only play the scales that theoretically “work” with the backing, it’ll sound nice but the audience will lose interest because they’ve heard it all before. If you never learn what people expect to hear, but just play your own thing, a few people may listen for novelty, but it will very quickly become annoying to all who listen. But if you play what people expect to hear, but introduce a bit of dissonance or “out” playing to it, you’ll capture the imagination. Formulaic players will produce proper, but boring fluff. The ignorant will just never interest anyone. Very few would want to hear Jimi Hendrix making albums full of dissonant feedback and out of tune warblings. But when he sets it in a solid foundation of classic blues, people sit up and take notice.

The guy that gets ahead learns how to play by the rules. It gives him a place to start, some structure and an open door into the system. But he knows how to judge his situation and break the rules occasionally to differentiate himself from the crowd.

Let’s talk some practical examples:

• On the football field, the quarterback that runs every play exactly as handed to him becomes as predictable as the playbook and as easy for the defense to read. The maverick likely never gets a chance behind the ball and when he does, keeps his own team as on edge as the opposition. The guy who recognizes the value of the playbook, but trusts his own instincts enough to call an audible occasionally becomes a real threat.
• A great musical example is King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”. Even if you’re not a musician, have a listen. There’s a lot of dissonance going on, a lot of shifts in tempo and an unexpected verse structure – but the song feels very comfortable and fun. It’s not exactly predictable at first listen, but not completely unpredictable.
• Early in my career I was asked to salvage a computer purchase – they had spent a lot of money on a bulk purchase of PCs and were really unsatisfied with their performance. After learning that the users really needed processing power, I purposefully crippled the graphics systems on them to give the rest of the PC more resources. The result was a slightly poorer visual experience that no one really cared about and a much more responsive machine. I also got a raise for that one.
• In one of my college psychology courses, a lot of people chose classic research projects like Jung, Freud, etc. I chose to dissect the psychology of Mark Twain instead. I got a lot of positive comments for “thinking outside the box” on the project, a top grade (even though I admit it wasn’t my best paper) and as a bonus cut my workload in half – since I was already doing a paper on him for a Literature class.

Being a rebel without a cause generally gets you nowhere. You have grand designs of beating the system in some manner and realize too late that all the rewards you’re looking for are indeed there in the system. Being the shill gets you started on the right path, but efficient cogs in the machine tend to find their place and are forgotten until they break down.

It’s the guy who’s smart enough to know when to step out of line that tends to get what he’s looking for.

When you take driver’s ed, an acronym they may teach you to help you remember the order of actions to take when changing lanes is SMOG – Signal, Mirror, Over the Shoulder, Go. Signal first, check to make sure you can move, then do it.

Strangely enough, most people don’t do that. They check the mirror or shoulder first to see if there’s room to move, then they signal and go, or just go sometimes. They hesitate to signal because of little ego concerns – maybe there will be no room and they will look stupid driving along with their blinker on. Or that there will be an opening that they’re too timid to take and everyone will know they were too afraid to take the spot. Or that they’ll change their mind and everyone will think they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a really silly situation – these are likely totally anonymous spectators who couldn’t identify you again in a crowd if they had to. Plus, they’ll likely forget any impressions they had a few seconds down the road. But people invest a lot in their egos, and they hesitate to have them pricked even slightly, even for a fleeting moment. And they don’t signal until they know they can make the move.

The thing is, most people on the road want to be helpful, and a lot of times just announcing your intention will cause the other drivers out of kindness, fear of an accident, or fear of looking like a jerk to make the space you’re looking for. You flip on the signal and someone slows down to give you some room to move. A lot of times you will create the opportunity just by announcing your intentions.

Life is like that as well. A lot of times we want to make a change in our lives. Maybe it’s killing a bad habit, or moving to a new career, or taking our lives in a different direction. And just like on the highway, our egos tend to make us hide our intentions until we’re absolutely sure we can make the change. We want to announce our diet after the weight’s been lost. Or announce our dissatisfaction with our current job when we have a new one secured. Or announce our desire to open our own business the weekend before the grand opening. Our little egos tell us that we’ll look foolish if we announce our intentions and then fall short of them. People will think that we’re failures, or not dedicated enough, or wishy-washy. So we keep those intentions a secret.

But just like on the highway, sometimes just announcing your intentions will open an opportunity. Maybe others who have been along similar paths will give you advice, or encourage you. Maybe they have the means to create the opportunity in their hands. Maybe someone you know has been thinking about investing in a business. Maybe your employer is anticipating some new openings, or has been considering restructuring your department. Maybe a friend has been considering getting in shape as well and will become your workout partner.

I’ve mentioned earlier that people like helping other people. Even the selfish ones get a rise out of demonstrating their generosity occasionally. And just like you, there are lots of people considering change in their lives as well. Change that may be syncronous with what you’re trying to make happen.

But they’ll never know, unless you signal.