Archives for posts with tag: Books
« Older Entries

Rude is in the eye of the beholder

February 12, 10 //
6

Quite a while back, Scott (aka @nametagscott) tweeted the following words of wisdom: It’s not the traffic that stresses you out, it is your reaction to traffic that stresses you out. I’d like to modify that just a bit and say:

It’s not rudeness of others that stresses you out, it is your reaction to what you think is rudeness that stresses you out.

Are you a presenter who gets stressed out – or pissed off – when you see people paying more attention to their electronic gadgets than to what you are saying?  Olivia Mitchell provides some insight to this in her article How to Handle a Texting Audience with an answer to the question, “Is it rude?”

Rude is in the mind of the beholder. Rude to you, not rude to them. To label a behavior as rude is to make a negative judgement about it, and that judgement will seep through in the way that you come across.

Your audience are adults. If their behavior is not distracting or annoying other people in the audience it’s up to them whether they pay attention or not, and how they pay attention.

Her advice: “If you want their attention, be more interesting than their cellphones.” It’s you, not them, that makes the difference.

As the parent of an autistic son, I’ve found myself in more than one situation where someone has become stressed about my son’s “rude” behavior. Of course, he’s not being rude, he’s just being himself. But people expect certain things from other people, and when they don’t get it they get upset.

In his new book Linchpin, Seth Godin addresses the question in a couple of short sections. In the one titled Teaching Fire a Lesson, Seth writes:

Fire is hot. That’s what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at the fire doesn’t do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won’t be hot next time is certainly not time well spent.

Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it’s not human. But human beings are similar, in that they’re not going to change any time soon either.

And yet, many (most?) people in organizations handle their interactions as though they are in charge of teaching people a lesson. We make policies and are vindictive and focus on the past because we worry that if we don’t, someone will get away with it.

It doesn’t do any good to get mad at fire, and it’s not any more useful to get mad at autistics, or anyone, who annoys you. As Seth writes in the section Annoyed at Intent:

If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions, too.

I have been as guilty of all of these things as anyone else through the years, and I’m working to improve (though I still get way too annoyed in traffic). Whenever I start to find myself getting annoyed, I take a deep breath and step back from the situation for just a moment to figure out what it is that is really bothering me.

Try it. You’ll be amazed at how much it helps.

Expertise, opportunity, and legacy are key to success (a review of “Outliers”)

February 10, 10 //
3


I had been meaning to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Successever since it was first published just over a year ago. Since a lot of the discussion of the book focused on the “10,000 hour rule” for achieving expertise, or mastery, it seemed a perfect fit for my interests. I’m still surprised that it took this long for me to get to it, but I have to say I’m glad that I waited. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I think I appreciate its message better now than I would have if I had read it a year ago.

My first impression on reading the book was along the lines of, “Wait a minute. This book isn’t about mastery.” True, Gladwell talks about the hard work that goes into becoming an expert in a given trade or profession, and includes this expertise as a prerequisite for achieving success. What comes out, or at least what I got out of it is: mastery is required, but not sufficient, to achieve success. (For the purposes of this review, I’ll leave a discussion of what constitutes success to another day.) Mastery is just one part of success, according to Gladwell, the other two being opportunity – and taking advantage of it – and legacy (your cultural background).

Of course, both opportunity and legacy definitely have an impact on your ability and desire to achieve mastery in a given topic.  Gladwell goes through a wide variety of examples of real people, showing these principles in action, including:

  • Bill Gates had an early interest in computers, and because of his cultural environment had the opportunity to use a nearly unlimited amount of free computer access at a time when that access was prohibitively expensive for everyone, much less a teenager.
  • A study of Canadian junior hockey players showed that because of the of the structure of seasons and age cut off dates,  those born early in the year were more likely to have success. He applies this same process to Jewish lawyers in New York and other groups.
  • In a chapter titled “Rice paddies and math tests”, Gladwell explores how the differences in agriculture between Asia and the US have contributed to the differences in education systems and the conventional wisdom (you could say stereotype) that “Asian kids are good at math.”
  • And more…

I enjoyed this book. I’m not sure I learned anything new in terms of “facts”, but I did come away with an understanding of a different way of looking at the stories of the people around me, successful or not. After reading the epilogue, in which Gladwell tells his family story applying the concepts in Outliers, I can’t help but look at every situation now and wonder, “What’s the real story behind how that person got to where they are?”

It has also encouraged me to look at my own past, to better understand my legacy and the opportunities that I’ve had along the way. And my future, to wonder what unique opportunity that my generation has been given and what I will have made of it when the time comes to look back on my life.

You should write a book

January 29, 10 //
5

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Pink when he spoke at a lunch event here in St. Louis. While we were eating lunch waiting for the main event, my friend Gene said to me, “You should write a book.”  Like many people I know, my initial reaction was along the lines of, “Yeah, sure. What would I write about?” And yet…

Over the weekend I gave the idea a bit more thought. Also like many people, I’ve often thought about maybe writing a book, and Gene’s suggestion got me thinking about it again. There are actually many things I could write about: parenting, autism, leadership, systems engineering, FIRST robotics, trampoline and tumbling.

And then the resistance – my lizard brain – showed up. “But that sure is a lot of hard work.” “You don’t even have 100 subscribers to your blog, who would buy a book by you?” “You think you know enough about these topics, but do you really?” “You’ve indulged the idea, now let it go and let’s get back to what we were doing before.”

By the end of the weekend, I’m sad to admit, the resistance had all but defeated me. All I had were the remnants of a very basic mind map to show I had been thinking about it at all. And then Seth Godin told me why I should write a book:

If you’ve never written a non-fiction book, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to. It organizes your thoughts. It’s a big project worthy of your attention.

…and…

If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen…. A book is a physical souvenir, a concrete instantiation of your ideas in a physical object, something that gives your ideas substance and allows them to travel.

A lot of ideas that bounce around in my head, and many of them get published here on the blog. Many more of them are notes and sketches in the many notebooks I’ve accumulated over the years.

Most of these are ideas for change that I want to get across to people, to maybe change their minds about how they view autism and those who are autistic or to show gym owners and team parents how they can run a trampoline and tumbling meet that people will still be talking about years later. I have pages and pages of ideas on how to spread the work and word of FIRST, to get our kids interested in how they can use science, technology, and engineering to change the world for the better.

So, I guess what I’m saying is I’m going to write a book. I’m just not sure yet what I want to write first. Thank goodness for mind maps to help me sort through all the possibilities. Once I have my topic, I’ll set a ship date and get to work.

Being ready to die, he was more likely to live

January 28, 10 //
0

Last night I attended my first kendo class. As a beginner, I felt clumsy and awkward as I tried to coordinate my footwork, proper holding of the shinai, and basic overhead strikes. And awed as I watched the senior members of the club do some free sparring toward the end of class. I am looking forward to continued training and learning this very cool art.

Kendo – the way of the sword – is a martial art based on kenjutsu, the traditional Japanese swordmanship practiced by the samurai.  As a sport, kendo obviously has taken away the lethal aspects of the art, but the spirit of the art remains. Success in kendo competition requires much the same commitment as that required by the samurai. George Leonard describes this commitment in his book Way of Aikido, The: Life Lessons from an American Sensei:

Long and arduous training contributed to the samurai’s presence and clarity in combat, but there was also another key factor: The samurai had to be totally free of considerations. If, for example, he was to think, “Why didn’t I have my sword sharpened?” or “I should have settled my debt with Takeda-san,” the break in ki would be fatal. The ultimate consideration is one’s own death. For the thought “I might die” to creep into his consciousness would mean sure death. That’s why the samurai was trained from earliest childhood to go into battle with no thought of either life or death. Being ready to die, he was more likely to live.

Having just read Seth Godin’s Linchpin, I can’t help seeing many parallels between the training of the samurai and what Seth is urging us to do in our own lives. For example, to be “free of considerations” is to keep the “lizard brain” at bay. Focusing on doing our work, on sharing our art, without regards to any rewards – though far from “being ready to die” – allows us to perform at out best. As Seth says in Linchpin:

The reason you might choose to embrace the artist within you now is that this is the path to (cue the ironic music) security. When it is time for layoffs, the safest job belongs to the artist, the linchpin, the one who can’t be easily outsourced or replaced.

Are you “ready to die” as you set out to change the world?

Uncertainty is far more challenging

January 27, 10 //
1

In How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov discusses the challenges of solving “puzzles”:

Knowing a solution is at hand is a huge advantage; it’s like not having a “none of the above” option. Anyone with reasonable competence and adequate resources can solve a puzzle when it is presented as something to be solved. We can skip the subtle evaluations and move directly to plugging in possible solutions until we hit upon a promising one. Uncertainty is far more challenging. Instead of immediately looking for solutions to the crisis, we have to maintain a constant state of asking, “Is there a crisis forming?”

This is the future work. As Harold Jarche mentions in his recent post A Linchpin Culture (in which he discusses Seth Godin’s latest book):

The work that we will be paid for is the difficult, innovative, one of a kind, creative stuff…. We will be facing more complexity and chaos in our work. There are fewer easy answers, easy jobs with good pay, or simple ways to keep a job for life.

Solving a puzzle that you know has a solution may require knowledge, but it is knowledge that already exists. Figuring out if there is a solution to a problem, or even if there is a problem at all, requires the manipulation of existing knowledge, the gathering of new knowledge / information, and the creation of something new.

In other words, it requires art.

« Older Entries

Creative Commons License
Brett's Waste Blog by G. Brett Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at blog.gbrettmiller.com.