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“Blank” Something Different

In thinking over my previous post on breaking a funk and reclaiming my rightful mojo, I knew some action needed to be taken outside of… well… just writing a post about it.  While writing is certainly a form of action, it’s often more the declaration of desire than the actual exercise of change and movement.  I don’t believe this diminishes the importance of the writing, but it certainly clarifies in the grand scheme of change, improvement and all the other goodies this blog seeks to focus upon.

So what kinds of actions will be on tap for our intrepid blogger?  Well, a few notions (nothing overly radical) designed to break me out of my routine if nothing else.  Why is this important?  I see it basically this way:

If you are in a funk or a rut, you are clearly following a path of well-worn grooves that you’ve created for yourself.  It’s a routine and while it’s clearly not a good routine, it’s likely become comfortable nonetheless.  Therefore, to at least begin that critical process of being released from the funk, change is needed.  It can be a change in venue or perspective or habit, but until action of some kind that is just plain different takes places, you are working from a very difficult spot to free yourself from the rut.

A few short term plans to shake things up:

  1. Move something different.  I plan on making a bit of a resvision to my current exercise/training plan.  I really do enjoy the lifting scheme I use (Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1), but I have been doing it for quite a while now.  I have had great success with it, so instead of scrapping it all together, I am using his brand new 5/3/1 for Football to give myself a shot in the arm.  It’s not going to be a wholesale change in what I do, but then again, I don’t want it to be here because this has at least been going well (God forbid).
  2. See something different.  Sometimes you just need to just pause and take in in some visual inspiration at a museum and it’s been a while since I’ve gone new-britain-museum-of-american-art to a museum to soak up a little art.  It really is one of those things I always enjoy when I do it, but then I never do it often enough and then eventually catch myself think, “Huh… haven’t really been to a museum in a while…”  I always find it funny that I have several activities I really like to do, but then I never do them all that often.  They just seem to slip my mind so effortlessly.  But late Saturday morning will be spent at the New Britain Museum of American Art taking in what they have to offer.  It’s not a museum I have been to before, but I’ve heard excellent things about it.  My hope is that a little exposure to creative works will provide a jolt to my own creative juices.  I plan on having a post all about this experience on Saturday or early Sunday.
  3. Think something different.  In a sense, I will likely get this from #2, but I know that in order make a change, my mental approach needs to vary and adapt.  As I’ve written about before, I sometimes can be someone more-than-a-little leery of change… but I can also feel very invigorated by it.  If it’s self-created change, it tends to feel a little bit better because I can at least give myself that momentary illusion of control in the situation.  But in order to think differently, I might need to vary up my reading list.  This can be magazines, blogs, books and all of that good and wonderful written material the world has to offer… but I need something outside of my comfort zone.  I’m not 100% sure of where that is just yet , so I am open to some good and useful suggestions, i.e. while a book on acetylene welding techniques is certainly different… umm… that might be a little TOO different.
  4. Deal something different.  I’ve also decided I might make a deal with myself as a bit of motivation.  My home computer is seriously on the wane and I’ve been thinking of a replacement.  I’ve got a little money tucked away in some savings and I plan on hanging onto it… but I am also considering picking up a MacBook Pro whenever Apple decides to launch their newest version (which is allegedly soon, but who knows what decisions will be made by High Priest Steve and friends).  The deal would be if I do it, then this blog has to become a daily minimum.  In fact, I am thinking about waking up 45 minutes to an hour earlier each day and trying to use a bit of a morning energy to crank out a post or two.  This may be precisely the change I need, so stay tuned.

Time to stretch a bit out of the comfort zone and see what the end result may be.  Stay tuned for the mayhem to follow.

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Re-Mojofication

Mojo.  An absolute fantastic word that is truly difficult to define.  You could go with what our good friends at Merriam-Webster and say it is:

a magic spell, hex, or charm; broadly : magical power <works his mojo on the tennis court>

That’s pretty good… not great, but a fairly solid B on the grading scale of life.

I tend to think of mojo more from the Dr. Evil definition from Austin Powers:

Austin Powers always defeats me because he has mojo… The libido . The life force. The essence. The right stuff . What the French call a certain I-don’t-know-what.

Granted that seems rather vague, but the vagueness is the beauty of it all in the end.  Mojo is the juice that gets you going and excited about life.  It’s passion, but with a bit of a funky twist.

Mojo has been on my mind of late, mostly because I have had a loss of it for a variety of reasons.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not exactly all-world when it comes to dealing with change, but despite that fact, life has given me a bit of it over the last year or so.  Funny how life works like that – you would think it would just listen to my wise counsel on how things would go, but apparently not.  Slowly but surely, I woke up to find myself just not quite feeling it… and that’s really the problem with losing your mojo.  It’s not as if you are struck by a blinding white light like Saul on the road to Damascus, but it’s more of a slow creep that nibbles away bit by bit when you lose your vigilance.

Heck, a prime example of my mojo loss was this very blog that means quite a bit to me.  I had to go back and look at it today to see when my last update occurred… February 28th.  Yeesh.  But I was just not feeling the inspiration or the muse to make this blog happen… so today, I decided “Aww screw this” and sat down to write the words you read this very moment.

But let me be crystal clear in my view of the loss of mojo… it doesn’t happen because of what life does to you.  Not at all.  It happens because of how you respond to what life throws at you.dwight-gooden(2)

For instance, let’s say life went all circa 1985 Doc Gooden on you by throwing you a  major curveball – the kind that no one alive is going to be able to deal with well.  Break-up.  Job loss.  Illness of a loved one.  Those things are certainly going to drop you in your tracks for sure and any of those scenarios takes a lot of time, effort, patience and faith to pull through.  In that sense, no one on earth should expect someone dealing with anything like that to immediately bounce up and say, “Well dagnabbit all!  Life is all about how I respond and not allowing anything to be done to me!  I think I’ll go watch Mary Poppins and whistle a happy tune!”

But at some point in that coping process, it becomes a lot less about whatever happened and all about how you respond to it.  For bigger life changes, that period is longer and you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not bouncing back like a damn superball.  You cannot be low forever.  You cannot mourn for an eternity.  You cannot go all Brian Wilson and lock yourself away in your house for years while wearing a bathrobe as your fashion statement on a daily basis.

Which is why I love this Nike commercial so much:

Because it’s about at least pushing yourself to see how quick you’re gonna get up.

As always, the words I write in this blog do not come from a place where I am sitting idly back and pronouncing forth how I think everyone else should live because I have it all figured out.  I write this because it is equally a challenge to myself to do more, to be better and… in this case… to reclaim my mojo.  I just hope detailing some elements of my own personal fight gives hope or insight or even just a sliver of amusement to those who read this.

So to end it all, I give you the example of Sylvester Stallone.  No, seriously.  While Sly makes for a very easy target these days, it helps to think back to his earliest days before he was a big star.  Why?  Because in spite of everything he faced and all the hurdles in his way, he kept his mojo working against a Fat Bastard world that was seeking to sap it all from him.  Listen as Tony Robbins tells the story of Rocky:

Mojo – use it or lose it, people.  It’s far easier to keep than to reclaim.  I let it slip and now I’m working hard to get it back.

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.

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Having A “Screw You” Plan

I am but a few mere days away from paying off a credit card that I have had a balance on for a little bit and, needless to say, I’m pretty excited about it.  The first reason is that my good friends at Capital One decided to pop my rate up about 10% over the Summer (a fact which I only just noticed recently).  Thanks guys!  It’s been a pleasure being a good customer with excellent credit all these years… now I will never, ever use your damn card again.  Good times!

The second reason I’m excited is that credit card debt is one of those ugly lodestones of life that limits your freedom.  It just sits there building up interest if you don’t pay it off and half the time it’s for a bunch of things you had to have at some given moment and can’t even remember now.  But getting rid of it?  Or getting rid of any burdensome debt?  It’s absolutely liberating and let’s you devote more time and financial resources to perhaps the nicest piece of potential freedom out there:

The “Screw You” plan.

Screw-you-guys-im-going-home-102108-1While I am no financial whiz, there is inherent and obvious value in having money set aside in case it all goes down.  Job loss, layoffs, some financial disaster, absolutely loathing your job like it’s a Pauly Shore movie and so on.  It’s part of the common financial advice to have 3 to 6 months worth of funds saved up to protected yourself from some utter financial disaster that can sneak up on you.

Very few people (me included) are part of that very smart club of people with that kind of financial cushion… and before you think I am going into some kind of dry as three day old toast discussion about the fiscal responsibility, T-bills and saving your pennies, I want to get back to my initial premise… plain and simple freedom.

Can you imagine how differently you may approach your life if you knew you had 6 months of expenses sitting cozily in savings?  Maybe you wouldn’t stick around at that job you loathe with every fiber of your being.  Maybe you would be a little more comfortable in your own skin when you walked into the office because while your job is important, it’s not as if you were always on the verge of being completely destitute in the event of something going wrong.

Just that basically ability to be able to say “Screw it…”  Can you even picture it?  I can’t… at least not yet.

The value in this is not about hating where you are in life at all.  While I am working through a few personal bumps in my own road right now, I generally have been very blessed with a wonderful family, excellent friends, good health and a very good job.

However, life changes rapidly and having a plan B in your back pocket is not a bad thing at all.  In fact, your plan B might allow you to live your plan A a little more boldly than you would have otherwise.  My current plan B is something I contemplate a bit from time-to-time and usually takes the form of transforming my personal home gym and love of fitness into a full-on business if I had to (or maybe even just because I wanted to).  Just knowing I could do that as an option gives me a little more peace of mind.

And I don’t know about you, but just some simple peace of mind is worth it’s weight in gold.  Granted, I have no idea how to weigh it, so a little assistance would be appreciated.

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Fight the Fear

I like to be fairly regimented with the training schedule I keep and do my best not to skip days because of some lousy excuse I came up with on the fly.  Missed sessions (I try never to call it “work outs” because that tends to sound more random and unplanned) have a cumulative effect and it really pays to sometimes have what a lot of coaches call a “punch the clock” sort of session.  It may not be great, but it’s always better than a complete miss.

However, there are also certain sessions I might delay for a few reasons.  One is that I might just be completely wiped from lack of sleep, stress or poor eating.  The second (which is closely tied to the first) is that for a lifting session where I know I need to dig down deep, I want to be sure I have as many factors as possible in my favor.

Why?

Because for those sessions, I am fighting a fear of failure.

Perfect example is shown in the video below:

Watching my final “work” set of deadlifts, there probably does not appear to be anything all that unusual with the moments leading up to my initiating the lift.  I walk past the camera… get some chalk on my hands… mark my shirt with some chalk (I will explain that some other time)… set up for the lift… hit a particular part of the song I am listening to and boom!  Go time.

What you don’t see is how incredibly keyed up and anxious I am as I step up to the bar… how my stomach is completely fluttering and I am wondering if the exertion of the lift will make me throw up half way through.

A sane person would likely ask, “Umm… I thought you worked out and lifted and all that because you enjoyed it.  That doesn’t sound like something too enjoyable.”

Not a totally unfair point, but the reason I get so keyed up is that part of what makes weight training so meaningful to me is the chance to face that fear of failure and go at it head on.  I don’t always win in these fights, but the effort of doing so is worthwhile in its own right.

And when I do win the fight?  When I know my best before was deadlifting 400 lbs for 10 reps and today I did it for 11?  That brief moment of exuberance punctuated by my personal war cry kind of carries me through the day.  It’s amazing… and that, my friends, is serious fun.  That’s why I will be doing this for the rest of my life.

Fighting the fear can be fun… and lead to alliterations (but that is a different kind of fun entirely).

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Two Roads Merged in New England

My daily commute to work is always a bit of an interesting experience and often a lesson in human behavior, as I’m sure it is for just about anyone who needs to take to the highways to reach their place of employment.  There is one spot in particular that tends to draw the greatest opportunity for analysis of my fellow rat-racers.

I travel up an in-state route that ends near Hartford before merging into Interstate 84 where I then go on my merry way to work.  Near the end of that route, there are several off-ramps and the one most people are seeking is the 2nd from the left to go to Interstate 84, just like me.  The far left lane is for people seeking to go right into downtown Hartford.

Well, that I-84 lane tends to back up with more people than the other lanes.  So guess what happens?  You can see this coming right?  People will swoop into that far left lane with next-to-zero traffic and then at the last minute, re-merge into the I-84 lane, effectively bypassing the line.

My friends, I can assure you that the level of obscene gestures, steering wheel pounding and horn blaring that occurs is quite the visual treat.  People completely lose their minds when that lone maverick comes flying into that lane at the last second instead of dutifully waiting in line with the rest of us.  And in the interest of full disclosure, I too have been one of those “AWWW COME ON!” yellers who have been cut in front of.  It’s a natural reaction.

This morning when one of the maverick mergers jumped the line the umpteenth time, it made me think a little bit.  What pray tell?  Why, I’m ever-so-glad you asked!  OK, you didn’t really and I basically forced you to ask by reading that, but it’s my damn blog, skippy.  Pipe down.

First, I really don’t understand why the 2 minutes of saved commute time to so incredibly important to the maverick mergers.  Honestly.  You truly don’t get anywhere that much faster anyway and you’ve just succeeded in pissing off a whole trail of strangers for no good reason.Traffic Jam

Second, the level of reaction that people give to these maverick mergers (and again, I have been guilty of this before for sure) is also pretty puzzling when you get right down to it.  While someone may have broken some great unwritten rule about properly waiting your turn, is the level of aggravation and stress hormones subsequently pumping through your veins worth it?  I mean, your commute was probably slowed by what?  10 seconds?  And then you start off your morning completely bent out of shape for some goober you’ve never met and really has no impact on your life except for his wanton disregard of the highway line merge “rules”.

For me, the moral of the story is that on both sides of this unhappy tale, there’s a lot of needless stress and agita.  My goal going forward is to care a little bit less about someone cutting me off at the last second to merge after not waiting in line.  Buddy, if you need to get going into work in that much of a rush, be my guest.

Me?  I’m just going to enjoy my quiet drive, watch the commuting humanity and hope for the occasional blog post inspiration.  Heck, where do you think this one came from?

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Confessions of an Educational Mercenary

With each passing year, I gain a greater appreciation for education, learning, reading and all of the food for the mind that is available in the world.  I often say that if I hit Powerball tomorrow, I would definitely like to go back and get another degree in something for the pure pleasure of learning without the worry or concern of the grades that went with it.  Well, after taking at least a year to not do much of anything besides play golf, lift, read, travel and further cement my plans to assert my rightful claim as heir to the Polish monarchy (Hey, just because that was several posts ago doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about it).

A big pile of knowledge Thinking back on my time in college, I was an utter educational mercenary.  I was completely fixated on getting into the best law school possible, so my grades were everything.  I only skipped a single class in my entire college career… and that was so I had more time to study for another class.  I was completely disciplined in my approach to school and studying and it paid off well when I graduated magna cum laude (missing summa cum laude by the difference of a single B+ being an A-) and never getting worse than a A- from 2nd semester of freshman year on.

I don’t mention any of this to brag or to shout “Ooh!  Ooh!  Look at me!  Love me!  LOOOOOVE ME!”… although you should both (a) look at me on account of the fact I am so easy on the eyes and (b) love me because I am just one loveable son of a gun.  No, I bring this fact up to show where my focus resided – the number.  The grade.  Pure and simple.  This was my target and I would do all I could (ethically) to hit it.  Heck, I can remember taking a Latin class and I had certain portions of the Miles Gloriousus so completely memorized that when I had to translate it for a test, all I needed to see was the first 3 words of the passage and I could just write out the next 3 lines without looking back at the Latin.  But what I did I get out of that poem after the fact?  Hmm… probably very little.

While this numbers fixation certainly helped in in achieving my purpose and I am proud of all I put into reaching that goal, there is one element of it that I do wonder about occasionally on a clear Summer night as I enjoy a cold adult beverage on my patio: If I never worried about my grades and was only focused on true learning, what would have been the result?  Would I have gotten better grades?  Worse?  Would I have better absorbed topics I would carry with me to this day?

I do still carry some of the things I learned in college with me to this day and I certainly learned quite a bit from the professors who really were able to bring new and fascinating concepts to life.  This happened quite a bit in my philosophy classes, truth be told and I’m glad those lessons still stick with me and shape the way I think for I am far better off for having had those experiences.

Today I am seeking to give myself another shot at learning for learning’s sake, mostly through what I choose to read and such.  Ideally I would like to set up my own little personal educational curriculum to round myself out in areas of interest to me where I am not as strong as I would like to be (fine art jumps most readily to mind).  Yes, those damn Jesuits got their hooks into me deep in college and there’s no going back now from my obsession with developing the whole person.  In a way, this entire blog is proof of that.

The mercenary is retired… long live the reborn learner.

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You Are What You Think

Like most people who get together with school friends they don’t get the chance to see often enough, I often like to ask “Hey, who else have you kept in touch with?  How are they doing?”  I was catching up in just such a fashion not too long ago with a very good friend from law school.  Our conversation then basically became a catching-up session within a catching-up session.  Umm… huh?  Read on.

I asked him if he ran into anyone from law school and he mentioned he had recently run into a woman we both knew from school.  He said it was pretty funny because she said to him,

You know, I will never forget something Kevin said in law school.  A bunch of us were talking about what you look for in someone else when dating and I said I preferred dating men who were smarter than me.  And Kevin says, “Well, that would never work for me… I don’t know anyone smarter than I am.”

My buddy and I agreed that this story was absolutely fantastic… but partially because I 100% remember that conversation and that’s not at all what I said. HA!

University of Connecticut School of Law What I actually said was that my view of people in law school was that I never viewed my classmates as being smarter than me.  Sounds just as bad, doesn’t it?  Ahh, but what is missing is the second half of my statement and this is absolutely critical:

I didn’t think I was the necessarily THE smartest, but I refused to operate on the assumption that anyone was smarter than me.  They might have been better at some things, but I was also better at other things and so I would put myself on par with anyone.

I’m a fairly humble person, so nothing about this is being arrogant or cocky… rather, it’s a notion that in life, if you walk around thinking everyone is better than you or smarter than you or whatever… guess what?  They definitely will be.  You have just voluntarily placed yourself smack-dab in the middle of a foregone conclusion or self-fulfilling prophecy.

The converse is that while thinking you are just as good as anyone else doesn’t mean you automatically will be, at a minimum you’ve given yourself a fighting chance if nothing else.  So why close yourself off before you even get started?  That always struck me as an awful way of thinking.

Be bold and don’t sell yourself short.  That’s how paragons of good-looks like myself get by… obviously.

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One Thing At A Time

One of my favorite blogs is Lifehacker, a site devoted to all kinds of ways to do things a little smarter and essentially “hack” your life, whether it is cool software, better ways to get organized, design your office or even exercise.

So today they had a post about how to build a stand for your cardio equipment so you can mount your laptop to it.  They link over to a snazzy YouTube video that demonstrates how.

*sigh*

OK, as you might see in the comments section of the post, I am not a big fan of any of this approach.  Why?multitasking

I cannot imagine you are providing any real focus or intensity or effort in any kind  of exercise activity where you are using your damn laptop at the same time.  Now, some people in the comments counter that this is meant more for a situation where you are doing work first and getting in the extra benefit of some extra exercise at the same time.  To that I would counter, you are probably not all that focused on your work then.

So to put a fine point on it: I really dislike multitasking.  I think it’s just an inherently flawed concept where we feel that we can get some kind of good product as the end result of a scattered level of attention and focus.  Personally, I know when I try to accomplish 3 things at once at work, I end up with 3 mediocre results… and umm, no one wants that.  Certainly not me.

And what about in your fitness?  I think that some steady-state cardio has its place, but generally, if you are talking on your phone or… for the love of God… working on your laptop while exercising?  My mind is boggled right now at how that can be of much benefit.

OK, OK… I can hear people saying “Well it’s better than nothing…” but so is doing 3 toe touches and call it a “stretching routine” when compared to just sitting on your butt all day long.  It’s not exactly setting the bar too high, wouldn’t you say?

I think this is why I am enjoying the new focus in my own training/lifting/conditioning program right now because I am trying to whittle away all the extraneous stuff I don’t need so I can be committed to doing the essentials and doing them well.  Not only is it a hell of a lot more enjoyable, it’s actually more productive too.

A perfect example is how I shun pretty much any kind of “regular” cardio these days.  You know the kind… shuffling into the gym, setting up on an elliptical or treadmill and slogging through 30 mind numbing minutes where I walk out feeling maybe a little bit better than when I came in.  Ehh.

My solution? Intervals or this lovely little thing called the Tabata protocol which is 4 minutes of fun.  Yes, you read that right… 4 minutes.  How does it work?  Very simple, really.  Pick your exercise (and not anything will do mind you) to perform.  In this case we will go with a piece of cardio equipment – a stationary bike.  You will do 20 seconds as hard as you possibly can.  All out.  Then go light for 10 seconds.  Repeat 8 times total.  That’s it.  It’s not easy, believe me.  The science behind it is not about burning calories while you exercise because it would be very small for 4 minutes… however, you have basically amped up your fat burning furnace, so to speak, for hours afterwards.  Hard work, focus and incredibly efficiency.  Gotta love it… seriously.  You HAVE to.  There’s no choice in the matter, so stop trying to debate me.

So I am begging you… pleading with you… but not groveling (seriously, even aspiring bloggers desperate for more readers have to have SOME limits, my friends)… knuckle down and do one thing at a time.  You might even find you do that one thing really well.  Crazy talk, I know, but that’s just the kind of nutty guy I am.

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Coloring Outside the Lines

Whenever I see a little kid doing some coloring, I always smile when I see what kind of wild creation they come up with in their coloring books.  It’s often a bunch of crazy colors, none of which match and rarely are they able to stay within the lines.  I know it was like this with my nephews when I would see their bursts of Crayola-inspired artistry.crayons_full

But then when they reach a certain age (and I’m not sure exactly what age that is), I  think I fall into the same pattern of behavior as everyone else… admonishing them (gently mind you) that they need to start coloring inside the lines or they need to pick the “right” colors for their drawings.  It’s like my brain just cannot quite process a drawing by (for example) a 9 year old where they just can’t seem to stay neatly within the black-and-white pictures they are given.  I reason, “The pictures would look better and more life-like if they stay in the lines and pick appropriate colors!  I mean, cows aren’t green, for the love of God.”

Well, a friend/colleague/blog reader, Heidi, sent along a quote to me that really struck me about the above kind of thinking I (and lots and lots of other people) get snagged into:

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
– Alan Kneightly

Boom.  Headshot.

What a perfect little snapshot on what creativity should mean to each and every one of us.  I’m not going to go off on some rant about nurturing children or proper parenting techniques because (1) I’m not qualified having no kids of my own and (2) that’s just patronizing.  What I do want to say is that for myself, I really need to think a little more about how I view “coloring outside the lines” generally speaking, especially with my nephews.

Pencil mug from Sam In the end, does it really matter if my nephew, Sam, likes drawing all over the place or using the color red for… well… mostly everything (as is demonstrated by this pencil mug he did for me a few Christmases ago)?  Hardly.  I just wonder about the subtle effect of always forcing people into smaller and smaller boxes, hence smaller and smaller ways of thinking about things.  Would Sam be driven down a path of complete anarchy and chaos if he was never “corrected” to use different colors or try to be neat?  I kind of doubt it, but I do think that if he (or any kid) were to be constantly boxed in, they might not quite be to their creative potential as they should.

And I don’t mean anything about all of us needing to be artists and such, but I believe it to be a fact of modern life that creativity tends to be constantly stifled.  It’s like the old line of corporations wanting people to think outside the box, but then always putting them inside physical boxes (cubes) to do their work.  What is gained in neatly partitioned work spaces and potential floor plan efficiency may very well be lost in new ways of thinking.

My own remedy for my own potential stifling attitude (whether for others or myself) is twofold: (1) This blog.  I cannot even begin to say how liberating it is to do this and to write freely about topics of interest to me.  (2) Read The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron.  I’ve had this book come highly recommended as a great read on unlocking your own inner creativity and letting it breath a little more.  I began reading a sample of it on my Kindle (so handy) and please do not be dissuaded by the title – it’s something anyone can find value in, not just artists.

Maybe I will even color my next chart for work outside the lines… if I could just bend that damn PowerPoint to my will…

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Seeing More and Understanding Less

mtg_bw

If you know me well, you would know I am a big fan of the writing of Malcolm  Gladwell.  He just has a knack for writing about topics that endlessly fascinate me, even if I never thought about many of them ever before.  Today I was sitting contentedly at Five Guys snarfing down some cheeseburger deliciousness and reading Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures.  This differs from his other books in that it is a collection of his writings for the New Yorker.

There is a particularly good chapter that is about how we advance in technological imaging (from GPS-guided bombs to MRI/mammography machines), but these advances do not always equate into clearer understanding.  It’s the notion that just because you have a better way of taking pictures does not fully correlate into better understanding what is in those pictures.

The example in question that struck me today was about radiologists who are trying to find malignant tumors as part of mammograms.  We are continuously developing better imaging technology that shows more on the scans… but this does not necessarily mean the radiologists are simply able to better find the cancer.  This is most notable in cases of DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) which is extremely tricky to pick up on a scan.  The line that struck me was as follows:

Would taking a better picture solve the problem?  Not really, because the problem is that we don’t know for sure what we’re seeing, and as pictures have become better we have put ourselves in a position where we see more and more things that we don’t know how to interpret.

That last line is the one that stopped me mid-bite of my burger… umm, which if you know me, you know is a big deal.  I love me some cheeseburger, people.  Love it.  That’s an incredibly profound observation – we have put ourselves in a position where we see more and more things we don’t know how to interpret.

Isn’t that where we are finding ourselves more and more these days generally?  It’s not just the highly-skilled radiologists who face more and more data they can do less and less with.  Our modern world and the “Information Age” puts massive amount of information at our fingertips, but even the mighty Google cannot always come to the rescue to give us only what we need when we need it.  Or maybe Google can find us data we need, but even that is so voluminous that it’s difficult to make something meaningful out of it.

What I wonder if this – Have we reached a point in society where the rate of data/information collection is increasing at a rate beyond what we can make use of?  Personally, it feels that way to me.  I think this is less about some kind of limitations of the human mind to sort complex data as much as having the time or tools to whittle down the increasing mountains of information at our disposal.  Admittedly, I have a very high opinion on the potential of the human brain, so I am naturally going to lean towards believing the mind can handle a ton, but there does need to be something manageable from which to work.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this?  I think simply that it’s dangerous to put too much faith in the arrogance of more information.  Without step-change increases in how to work through that information, all you are doing is burying yourself in heaps of confusion.  It’s an important lesson for all of us in Corporate America for sure where data is king and decisions are rarely (if ever) made on “gut feel”.  We must stay vigilant to avoid the cockiness or, dare I even say, hubris that can come from thinking that we know everything because we have more to sift through.

The other takeaway?  Good cheeseburgers combined with good books sometimes equals a (hopefully) good piece of blogging… but I leave that up to you.