Sunday, October 8, 2017

Captured thoughts

Many a thought has congealed in my brain over the last few months.  And any conclusive insight is worthy of an essay, explaining the context, the new information, the logic, and therefore the conclusion, all packaged in an analogy to act as the sugar which helps the medicine go down.

But I've not felt prolific enough to sit down at the keyboard and develop these records of progress and instead, off they go, some forgotten, some put into regular use, some stumbled upon and rediscovered and rearranged without me remarking on the remarkable.

So let me capture a few of these thoughts here, while the coffee is still warm and the brain is fresh; perhaps for future development or simply to know that I've had them and wonder at some future date whence they came and where they went and how I could have been so undeveloped in my thinking to have considered them novel or insightful in the first place.  For the world is not so complex; there is nothing new; an much more can be achieved by applying time-tested principals than trying to develop new ones.

Linear thinking

We are all so skilled at multi tasking, at noting the squirrels that interrupt our thought processes, and gathering fleeting ideas and noting them before they scatter just out of reach that we think brainstorming and mind mapping are the way to think. They are but and early stage of thinking.  We are proposing ideas, identifying avenues, coming up with hypotheses.  We are dealing in potentials.  This can be active, it can be group or individual, it can be done while performing a separate task,* but these establish boundaries, identify goals and obstacles. 

Thinking is the processing of the obstacles and the boundaries through which we must travel to achieve our goal.  And there's nothing so amazing as sitting down with a pen and paper to process.  Linear thinking.  Start writing and work your way through without chasing a distracting squirrel.  Give yourself fifteen minutes, half an hour, and you'll be amazed at what you can come up with.  Most problems can be solved with short bursts of hard thinking on a single process.  The pen (or the keyboard or the state-machine drawing) has the ability to focus and distill the random thinking and the processing into a cohesive narrative.

Friendship

I was asked by one of the younger Toadrollers how one makes friends.  My first thought was that I don't have any, how can I advise? 

But that isn't true.  What I don't have is any I pal around with, clubs I belong to, families that the Toadroller family visits or vacations with.  Between family and career, I have enough excuse in the world not to pursue a good buddy.  When the time is right, such buddies will appear.  Perhaps (and most likely) through a common hobby or pursuit- golf, motorcycles, what have you.  For now, relationships come from the families of childrens' friends, mentors, and my brothers in arms in business with whom I've been through battles and with whom I've shared the toasts of victory and defeat.

Dear friends are the result of such shared engagements of the past.  Who, by chance, was on the same floor in a dorm?  Who was your lab partner?  Who else had a shared interest in a project?   Time and reflection and occasional communications celebrate the relationship, if for no better reason than nostalgia.  Good times, indeed.  The battles you fight today become the memories tomorrow.  Enjoy that journey along the way and you'll have a friend for all times.

Learning to compete

When the eldest Toadroller visited a few months ago, we played pool and golf.  Though I am by all measurements a competitive person, I don't compete to win.  He pointed this out over a game of eight ball.  He had no idea the impact it had on me.

I like to think my passive aggressive, sarcastic, and competitive nature was honed through an adolescence in the northeast, a near-Boston culture where survival was based on being, well, a dick to people without them really knowing it.  Plant a little time-bomb of an insult and, should the victim think about it in the future, they'll realize they were bettered.  Can I blame it on jerky rich kids?  It's as good an excuse as any, but the passive-aggressive nature remains.

I like to think that I temper this in competition.  I compete to prove to the other that I can beat them, but choose not to.  Call it strutting or showing off, but I will compete to just below the level of my competition, with my excuse being that I could have won if I chose to, so that's as good as a victory.

What an ego.

The truth is that people really aren't impressed that I could have beat them.  They probably never even give it a second thought.  The truth is that I'm not good enough to win and have never made the next level or applied the focus in the moment necessary to win.  With that insight, I started to recognize the things I wasn't doing, and the things I had to do in order to win.  And focused on eliminating mistakes and incorporating the tactics to bring about my result. 

In the world of billiards, it has been ball control and shot selection for the next shot.  Which choice will lead me to a better result?  No shot attempts without knowing what the next shot will be.  From there you learn how the ball reacts to the target ball, the carom off the bumper, power and touch.  In golf, it has been concentration, information gathering, wedge play, and focusing on the putts.  And eliminating carelessness to avoid scores greater than a bogey.  My last four rounds have been in the low 80s, with 38s on both sides of the 18.  Improvement is there, and I just seem to know how to focus. I make the right decisions.  I execute the right shots.  This feeds itself and improves my score.

For what it's worth, winning here is not meant to be a defeat at the cost of the loser, but winning as a success and completion, achievement of a goal and process.

Giving up

At a recent team meeting, we had a keynote speaker who had climbed Everest and had jogged across Canada for a charity cause.  He naturally took his experiences and related them as analogies to the business world, insights to professionalism, etc.

One of the insights he discovered and related to us was that when you're at your limits, when your whole body and mind are asking you to give up, you'll discover that you can take one more step.  You don't have to stop.  It's those who persist who break through and succeed.  It's the extra 1% that makes all the difference.

My peers and I looked at each other and marveled in the epiphany that there was an option to give up.  We're a group of type A's who had never considered abandoning something. 

It reminded me of comedian John Mulaney's story of playing as a bench-warmer on the basketball team for five years. At the annual awards ceremony a speaker extolled the virtues of the athletic programs because "without them, the alternative is kids turning to drugs and alcohol."  For Mulaney, it was the first time he'd heard there was an alternative.  He decided that he "would become the best at that."

* Over the weekend I polished the old A8 and reminisced about how much I've enjoyed the car.  Yes, I waxed nostalgic.