"Do Work You Love and Starve"

Marty Nemko in Kiplinger:

If the personal growth industry had a motto, it would be "Follow your passion" or "Do what you love and the money will follow."

Sure, if your passion is a rare one, like entomology, or even a moderately common one like accounting, money may follow. But if you are like the many people whose passion is shared by half the continent -- for example, activist or performer -- you're in trouble. Millions of people are competing passionately with you for the small number of decent-paying jobs. That's the reason the word "starving" so often precedes "artist."

I agree with this, and even his concluding statement...

Perhaps the best career advice I can give you is to paraphrase singer Stephen Stills: If you can't do the work you love, love the work you do.

...but I think he is missing other important conclusions:

-- Above all, let your passion be creating value, not creating widgets.

-- Choose to pursue a passion -- or a combination of passions -- that produces considerable value and requires uncommon skills.

-- It's the journey, dude, not the destination.

-- Action precedes motivation. (™ Colin Marshall)

-- Balance dogged persistence with realism and modesty.

-- For some people, "starving" might be worth it.

Good writing (like any other skill) is a matter of character

So says William Zinsser: (Hat tip: The Door)

Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer. That’s a larger package–a matter of character. Golfing is more than keeping the left arm straight. Every good golfer is a complex engine that runs on ability, ego, determination, discipline, patience, confidence, and other qualities that are self-taught. So it is with writers and all creative artists. If their values are solid their work is likely to be solid.

It's a fascinating idea that I had not considered before. I mostly agree with it but I think we have to be careful not to take it too far and assume that being skilled implies having good character. Certain character traits are necessary to develop a skill, but those traits do not have to be virtues. Good writers can be confident, or they can be arrogant. They can be determined, or they can be ridiculously narrow-minded to the exclusion of worthier goals.

Put another way, developing skills probably requires certain character traits like confidence, determination, patience, and discipline if only because the process of becoming "good" takes such a long time, but the bands on those necessary traits are wide enough that we (the Western culture, at least) may or may not consider them virtues.

What is an emotion?

A slightly re-worked definition from Paul Ekman:

Emotion is a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something is happening to our welfare, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation.

I like this because it pulls a few important elements of emotions that used to be disconnected in my mind into a crisp and coherent definition.

My own extrapolation: The "purpose" of an emotion then (if you can call it that) is to either (1) enact physiological changes to prepare us to deal with informational intrusions, or to (2) provide feedback that some event did or could make us better or worse off.

[This is not (of course) to say that emotions always serve their purpose well.]

Play vs. Grit in Science

From E.O. Wilson's autobiography:

The people I find easiest to admire are those who concentrate all the courage and self-discipline they possess toward a single worthy goal: explorers, mountain climbers, ultramarathoners, military heroes, and very few scientists. Science is modern civilization’s highest achievement, but it has few heroes. Most is the felicitous result of bright minds at play. Tricksters of the arcane, devising clever experiments in the laboratory when in the mood, chroniclers of the elegant insight, travelers to seminars in Palo Alto and Heidelberg. For it is given unto you to be bright, and play is one of the most pleasurable of human activities, and all that is well and good; but for my own quite possibly perverse reasons I prefer those scientists who drive toward daunting goals with nerves steeled against failure and a readiness to accept pain, as much to test their own character as to participate in the scientific culture.

It is tough to know what is the right balance of grit vs. play in science or any other field for that matter.

I tend to think that the healthiest approach to self-discipline is to recognize that you don't have much. I'd suggest that the people who have the most self-discipline problems are those who believe that self-discipline is a strong force.

On the other hand, direction matters. If you are trying to resist something negative, probably best to avoid it as much as possible rather than trying to out-will it. But if you are trying to work toward something positive, then self-discipline is not a bad strategy because when you are pursuing something positive, it matters less if self-discipline occasionally fails (which is does and will) -- just re-group and try again later, no harm done. In that sense, I agree with E.O. that there are benefits to using grit toward positive goals like scientific achievement.

BUT I think it is really, really hard to stay focused toward a goal if there does not exist some element of curiosity / fun / enjoyment / play. That does not mean that everything you work on needs to be fun, but, on balance, your overall mental association with the project should be one that is enjoyable. At least that is the approach I take. I don't want to repeatedly spend my days on something that feels like a chore.

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One other quote from E.O.'s book that stuck with me (I think he was quoting someone else):

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

The problems of the world are fundamentally relationship problems

To paraphrase Jimmy V, if you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full 18 minute talk. Awesome job, Hugh.

An Appreciation of Ed Hochuli -- "Man of Many Words... Arms of Titanium"

My second favorite person in the NFL is neither a player nor a coach. He's a referee, and I affectionately refer to him as "The Hochster".

First, a video introduction:



I'd bet that he has a longer Wikipedia page than any other referee, and probably most coaches and players. His page has 13 sections and goes as far as describing the professions of his six kids.

I love what everyone else loves about Hochuli: He takes incredible care to describe to the football audience [with as many words as he needs to] exactly what just happened and his rationale for calling it the way he did; he signals the call with bodily exuberance (see photo immediately below); and he looks like a teddy bear with tanks for biceps.



Fittingly, Hochuli was born in the Beer and Dairy capital of the world (Milwaukee) in 1950. He went on to play linebacker at UTEP from 1969 to 1972 and earn his Juris Doctorate from the University of Arizona in 1976. In his day job, he is a partner in the Arizona law firm of Jones, Skelton and Hochuli, specializing in civil law.



I assumed before I did any web browsing that the Hochster would have a huge cult following on the web, and it's true that he has an exceptionally long Wikipedia page and many tribute videos on YouTube. But the activity on fan pages and blogs is disappointingly weak, at least what I can tell from Google.

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NFL referees, as a bunch, are strangely fascinating. While there are over 120 active NFL officials when you factor in the head linesman, the umpire, and the line, field, side, and back judges, through week 11 of the 2010 season, only 17 of these 120 officials stand in front of the camera and tell us what's going on. These are who we call the "referees", and probably more than any player or coach on the field, we see the faces and hear the voices of NFL referees, yet we generally know so little about them.

The best source I found for information on referees is football-refs.com. They have bios on all the active refs, keep crew schedules, and have discussions of rule changes and controversial calls.

It's especially interesting to learn about the day jobs of NFL officials. Although NFL referees can make anywhere from $20,000 to $75,000 per year according to a CNN article, almost all of them have completely unrelated jobs during the week. There are some lawyers like Hochuli, there is at least one police officer, and there is an entrepreneur and inventor. I think the NFL is missing a marketing opportunity by not revealing more about its crazy (striped) cats.

Blogger reading difficulty

Google's newly-offered advanced search feature tells you the reading level (basic, intermediate, or advanced) of search results. I believe the intended use is to allow you to tailor your search results to your research level, but you can also use it to tell you the reading level of an entire site (as I did for this blog in the image above). Just go to advanced search, and under reading level, select "annotate results with reading levels".

[Note to developers: It would be super cool if there was an app that looked at your browsing history and outputted for each domain the reading level (and personalities and such).]

I looked at the results for some of my favorite blogs (plus some other popular news sites for context) and the results are below. (For links to the blogs, see the sidebar or the post I linked to in the previous sentence.)



For this next chart, I created a "difficulty score" for each site ( = simply B%*1 + I%*2 + A%*3).


Thoughts/surprises/observations:

-- Someone should do this for scientific journals, too. (Here is a site that lists the top 10 academic journals by category.)

-- Well done, Google, on all these exciting new research tools. See also the Body Browser and the Books Ngram Viewer. Google is still not at Wikipedia level in my book, but I can see why others think so.

-- I see people around the Web treating higher reading difficulties as somehow better. I think they mistake reading difficulty with intelligence. They are definitely not the same. Scott Adams has the most intelligent blog I know, and it's easy reading. I'd even bet the correlation is pretty weak. Advanced words are often necessary to articulate difficult concepts, but difficult concepts do not necessarily imply intelligence (nor even correlate with intelligence).

-- I wonder how the algorithm works. I am sure it is much more sophisticated than this, but I wonder if it is some measure of the proportion of uncommon words. Depending on how it works, "advanced" may or may not be synonymous with "difficult" as I am treating it.

-- As I would expect, the funnier blogs are lower on the reading difficulty scale. It's damn hard (impossible?) to be funny if people cannot easily understand you.

-- The results are clearly imperfect. (ABC News is more difficult than the New Yorker?? Harrison and Brett's blogs are very readable -- Google probably just does not know them well. And while Robert tackles advanced concepts on his blog, he articulates them with eminent clarity.)

-- I was somewhat surprised to see that Wehr in the World is relatively low on the difficulty scale. It does not offend me. If I could mimic only one blog, it would be Scott Adams'. Like his blog, I want my words to be easily recognizable but the concepts surprising and enlightening. (Of course, I am not close to his level, but a boy can try.)

Best uses of my time this week

Writing, writing, writing. (Especially about start-ups.)

Productive conversation with the lady.

Reading Embracing the Wide Sky.

NOVA program on fractals.

Reading Is There Life After Birth?

Email to Grandma.

Browsing the Library of Congress maps collection. (Check out especially the Panoramic collection.)

Zach Galifianakis in Charlie Rose's Green Room.

This American Life's Last Man Standing episode.

Alain's Twitter stream, and in particular "Bad art might be defined as a series of unfortunate choices about what to show/explain and what to leave out."

Colin Marshall's post on flops.

Mike Birbiglia's most recent Moth Podcast.

Adding a Pandora station for "Music Aus Burundi".

Jo Ann Walter's photography.

Seth Robert's post on walking creating a thirst to learn.

7 minute podcast on the ethics of erasing memory.

How to think

If I met a random person and they asked for my advice on how best to improve their lives, my answer would require almost no thought.

Although probably the thing that has the largest effect on someone's quality of life is their spouse, the direction of the effect could go either way, and I wouldn't wish the task of finding a good spouse on my worst enemy.

Similarly, telling someone to find a rewarding career or hobby is like telling them to find peace and happiness. It’s not terribly practical advice.

I might recommend taking a day or a weekend in solitude with the sole purpose of figuring out what they want to do with themselves, but I have not tried that myself, so I am unable to judge whether it is likely to produce any lasting benefits.

In comparison to finding a good spouse, finding a rewarding career, or taking an existential weekend retreat, my advice might sound trite, but I assure you, if my own life is any reasonable proxy for what can improve others' lives, then you ought to be listening carefully.

I would advise them to take up three things: (1) notebooking, (2) writing/blogging, and (3) self-tracking.

To me, these are not hobbies as much as routines you do for good health, rather like brushing your teeth. You could call it mental flossing, but I think it would be better described as existential flossing. Maybe a better description yet would be thinking.

Yes, thinking.

Notebooking is paying attention to and capturing fleeting thoughts and feelings; writing is developing and exploring those thoughts; blogging is sharing them and receiving feedback (which is a critical part of the thinking process, I'd say); and self-tracking is big-picture reflecting.

Simply put, if you are not doing these things, then you are probably not thinking well enough.

I won't bore you (or me) by weighing the costs and benefits of each -- if you are dying for explanations of their utility, I can try to dig up some well-articulated pieces -- I will just say that, together, these routines have made me considerably more self-aware, interested, and interesting. And more than any other activities, they have shaped who I am today.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a set of things with a higher return on investment because what else would produce significant benefits with such a minimal investment of time or money?

I wish I knew why more people don't do any one of these things, let alone all three. If you have ideas or theories, please share.

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If a random person came to me seeking advice who already blogs, notebooks, and self-tracks, I don't know what advice I would give them. That’s where I am in my life right now -- trying to find the next answer. (Again, if you have ideas, don't hold 'em back!)

The proper use of our minds

In Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet concludes a chapter comparing cognitive styles with this passage:

Ultimately it is what we learn, more than how, that helps determine the shape of our lives and even the kind of people we become. For this reason, how we use our minds remains a personal choice we have to make. After all, what our brains help give us, more than anything else, is our own uniqueness and the myriad tastes and talents that emerge from it. What we do with them, and how, is part of the adventure of becoming ourselves -- a unique, personal process that we cannot shortcut, nor try to bend to the expectations of others.

Quite simply, no one way of thinking or learning is superior to another. Just as there is no single definition of the life well lived, there cannot be one of the mind well used. As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman put it: "You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be: it's their mistake, not my failing."

Science ≠ Truth-Seeking

A discussion underneath my arsenic thingy rant led to the observation that our judgements about the bounds and conditions necessary for life are expanding all the time -- that no discoveries serve to make the bands more narrow.

Xan left this gem in response (slightly re-worked):

We start out only dimly aware of the space of possible theories. When new data comes along, it makes us consider possible new theories that never even occurred to us before. And all along the way, our belief probabilities are calculated _as if_ we are currently pretty much aware of the entire space of theories.

There is a problem with treating science as equivalent to truth-seeking. Science is a fine tool for what it's trying to accomplish, but science is not rationalism.

If we want to believe things with the right level of confidence, we have to step outside of science and realize that the scientific method systematically promotes a very specific kind of output. Science does not peddle in counterfactuals for which there is no data. Science waits until it has a massive amount of data with a p-value of .000001, and then it makes strong statements that don't generalize outside of what it has data on. From this approach, we would _expect_ the kind of progression you have noticed. From the scientific perspective, as more datapoints become available, the space of theories-science-allows-itself-to-consider gets bigger.

Squibs

The ultimate goal for all humans is to have a better personal life and a better world. We only differ in how we think you get there. -Sheena Iyengar

I have decided that it is absolutely worth taking pains to introduce a variety of people into your life – a variety of perspectives, interpretations, heuristics, predictive models, and even preferences. Just be careful it’s not your spouse.

Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.

Deliberation is great if you want to increase confidence and agreement among the group, but not if you hope to increase the accuracy of your decision.

Deliberation most often fails because of information (“if most people think that, they’re probably right”) and social influence (fear of response being ridiculed).

Four big problems with group deliberation: 1. Amplifies errors, 2. Does not elicit info that their members have, 3. Cascade effects where the blind lead the blind, and 4. Group polarization.

Every abundance creates a new scarcity. With the abundance of ‘free’, the "attention economy" and "reputation economy" have risen in place of money as a currency. -Chris Anderson

All creation is war against cliché. –Colin Marshall

Science represents a rare balance of imagination and critical thinking that tells us whether a story that sounds good rises to the level of truth. (But science is not the same as truth-seeking. More on this soon...)

“If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.” –Daniel Gilbert

Note to self: Life is too short to spend it doing things that you wish would hurry up and end.

This whole arsenic organism thingy

I generally try to keep posts at least somewhat informative, but this is an exception. I have no idea how to interpret this arsenic-instead-of-phosphorus bacteria discovery (if you don't know what I'm talking about, Google will be happy to tell you), so I'll just write about my dumbfounded reactions instead.

Some of the things I have been reading describe the discovery as a "bombshell", something that "upends long-held assumptions about the basic building blocks of life".

Okay, but scientists, won't you please tell me what those assumptions are and what it means that they have been upended?

It is statements like these that drive me batty: "It is unlike every other lifeform on the planet - from the simplest plant to the most complex mammal."

Whoa! So it's like an alien, right? Something that comes from a different tree of life? That would indeed be bombshelltastic.

I cannot remember being more excited about a piece of news than I was at 2pm on Thursday. The sorts of discoveries that turn over worldviews and give one a sense of the boundless mystery surrounding us don't happen every decade.

Then trusty Dr. Krulwich, science-explainer extraordinaire, helps disambiguate the discovery:

Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon fed a little bacterium daily doses of the dread element, and the little guy slurped it up, chucked most of its phosphorous, and became an arsenic-creature. "It's a really nice story about adaptability of our life form," chemist Gerald Joyce told the New York Times.

Ugh. Punch in the gut. So the Discovery Of The Century is merely a "nice story" about OUR adaptability? I want to throw something.

[Note that I am still totally unclear on how to interpret this, I am only reacting to various news snippets at this point.]

This leaves me feeling like I have just been violated by a bunch of nerds in lab coats. Apparently what the scientists meant by "bombshell" and "revolutionary" is that an experimenter found something they didn't expect. Has science become that boring that we use words like "bombshell" to describe a surprise?

I should backtrack and say that it does seem pretty interesting and important that a lifeform is able to live off an element that up to now we thought was poison -- my beef at this point is mainly word choice. If I understand the discovery correctly (and let me remind you, that's a big "if"), this is more like discovering life that can live without the sun (which we've already discovered, by the way) than like discovering a lifeform that has a completely different structure than the DNA-based cellular structure present in every known creature, which I was hoping/expecting would be the case. And that hope/expectation is undoubtedly the reason behind my discontent.

I will conclude by saying that the best thing to come out of this shebang for me has been reading Krulwich's post, which explains the very real possibility that, under the right conditions, clouds (yes, clouds) could become intelligent living things.

A living thing, it is thought, needs to feed, grow, copy and evolve and persist. It needs some kind of shape. Clouds can do all that, says David Grinspoon. Though they look hazy and random here on Earth, they contain levels of order, they hold themselves together, they move around, they have routines. They can, in theory, produce increasingly complex forms of themselves.

Still the intellectual concept that bothers me more than any other is the inability to separate life from non-life. Xan has some interesting comments on the topic in the comments of this post.

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Update 12/5: Now there are questions about the findings.

There's been a lot of hype around the news of GFAJ-1, the microbe claimed to substitute arsenate for phosphate in its DNA. In the midst of all the excitement, one thing has been overlooked:

The claim is almost certainly wrong.

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If you made it this far, you may also be interested in this survey about life forms or this Q&A with ecologist Rob Dunn.

The Internet is Awesome, part 2340481

These videos (hat tip: Kottke) reminded me that the real power of photography is not in capturing moments but in presenting or connecting moments so that we see the world from a new perspective.

Grading anti-LeBron signs

Concept: “We hate LeBron James in several different ways.”

Execution: Pretty good. The stark and confrontational “I Hate LeBron James” really gets the point across, while “LeBum is a Lyin’ King” is definitely the best Disney-based Bron burn I’ve ever seen. That being said, it is kind of weird to see a “I Have Witnessed No Championships” in Philadephia. Even though it’s true, it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Rating (out of 10): 7.2




Concept: “I understand the comedic value of understatement.”

Execution: Oh yeah, this kid gets it. He knows that with all the hyperbolic, over-the-top, hate-filled signs that were sure to fill up the Q, his hastily-scrawled ode to subtlety would stick out. It did. This is the sign that the Internet would make, which is why this is the sign that the Internet loves. Well done, sir.

Rating (out of 10): 9.8


Both of these were nabbed from Trey Kerby's brilliant two part "Grading anti-LeBron signs" series -- Vol 1, Vol 2.

How to run a business in 4 sentences

Run the business like you can't sell it -- that it’s the only business that your family can own for the next 100 years. Don’t measure it by the earnings in the last quarter. Measure it by whether the moat around the business, what gives it competitive advantage over time, has widened or narrowed. If you keep doing that for 100 years, it’s going to work out very well.

Slightly re-worded advice from Warren Buffett.

(Hat tip, as usual: Mark Larson)

Receptiveness to feedback [survey results]

Thanks for your responses! Summary and observations below.



Observations/Surprises:

-- 4 out of 20 think they err in being too receptive to feedback, 12 out of 20 think they err in not being receptive enough, and the remaining 4 think they are about right.

-- Only 2 out of 20 said they crave feedback and go out of their way to find, and only two more said craving it and going out of your way to find it is ideal.

-- I won’t make any conclusions from this sample size, but there was a pretty high correlation between age and both ideal and actual approaches, meaning that older people in this sample tended to be less receptive to feedback.

-- Here are some comments I found especially interesting/insightful (in no particular order):

“I don't think feedback is very effective at providing advice, only in informing me of the gap between what I think of myself and what others think of me. Yet admittedly, I can't tell if I want to close that gap (be known for who I am) or widen it (be a mystery).”

“To me, [people who deserve to be listened to]=[people whose opinions carry informational content]=[people who could actually improve the quality of my beliefs if I listen to them]. In this sense, tautologically I should aspire to listen only to those people who deserve to be listened to...or more precisely, I should aspire to put the proper weight on everyone's opinion, from zero to a whole lot (and everything in between).

In practice though, I am hardly perfect at this. Some people I don't take seriously enough, even when I know I should. And other people really get to me even when they probably shouldn't. A squib comes to mind: it's important to know your audience so you know who to ignore...guess that one really stuck with me.”

“A common piece of advice for startups is: pay attention to feedback from customers because it will hone your product development? Is the same approach necessary for individuals and their "product?" ...which creates a side thought: is there something wrong with whoring yourself out to feedback? In other words, is the company, whose mission becomes altered by consumer wants, any less of a company than it would be if it just stayed on the original path? Same question for the individual.”

“I am a member of the Dogbert New Ruling Council. My title is "Minister of Intelligence Discrimination." I am duty-bound to filter-out (including not listening to) feedback that comes from disreputable sources (i.e., non-DNRC members).

Seriously, my approach is a little short of ideal, but I don't have time or energy (or patience) to take feedback from just anyone who offers it. I screen more because I have to.”

“I think I'm open to constructive criticism. More open to it that closed to it, but then I'm sure it's easy to think that about yourself. The exception is my parents. I find it hard to receive criticism from them, depending on the circumstances. Positive feedback from them is rare, so when it comes it means a lot.”

“I have never heard any evidence that feedback ever has negative effects, and it often has quite positive ones. However, when I think someone doesn't know as much about a topic as I do, I occasionally bristle (coming from a place of egocentrism) at potentially constructive criticism. Relative to being open to all feedback, and in fact seeking feedback from all, I see no benefits to this approach. For the meantime, my ego stands in the way of a more optimal mindset re: feedback.”