Tim Harford on Success and Failure

It would not be an understatement to say that failure and success have been two key concepts that have defined my life. I know that some of the greatest opportunities for learning in my past have come about from big problems that I have faced and failed to solve effectively. Similarly, the greatest successes have not been arrived at easily and triumphantly but with struggles and stumbles. I have grown and become stronger and more insightful through both the failures and successes. 

I have not always known this though. When I am in the middle of learning and failing, it does not feel good. I do not like myself very much, and it always seems like a very big deal. My self-worth is on the table every single time. This is not only the case with the failures, but also with the successes, because the successes generally are the final outcome of a series of little failures, negotiations, and little successes -- never the glorious final "perfect" endpoint that I imagined. Sometimes the successes come about from making a second or third attempt to find a solution where I have previously failed. The successes are usually coloured by the failures, relationship dramas, and compromises that led up to them. 

Therefore, I was pleased to come across this talk by Tim Harford, economist, in which he addresses in a very straightforward and accessible way strategies for how to fail constructively rather than being beating yourself up over them. If you never fail, then you are not setting hard enough challenges for yourself. 

I have always feared wasting my life. I have always been motivated to make a difference to the world in some small way. This means that I have had to take risks, and with risk-taking failure is more likely. I ask myself, is the pain of sometimes failing worse than the consequence of living a narrow life because of choosing the safe path? If I am to have the courage to fail, it is helpful to have some strategies for acknowledging, coping with, and learning from the failures.

http://bigthink.com/videos/fail-constructively-with-tim-harford

Life Path Dilemma

Imagine that one day you wake up and discover that you are in the wrong job. It is an epiphany. Suddenly you realize why every Monday morning feels so bleak, why every Sunday afternoon your mood progressively blackens and you end up staying up way too late trying to squeeze a little more time out of the weekend. The arguments that run through your mind -- that you work with wonderful people, that the work you do is a useful contribution, that several improvements in the organization have been accomplished in part by your hard work, that you made a commitment to this job and can't back out now -- seem hollow in the face of your emotions. Anger. Despair. Resentment. 

You counsel yourself to put your head down and keep working. You repress the angry helpless feelings, and focus in on the specific projects at hand. You nudge, mentor, meet, plan, and present, crossing off tasks until you are able to push another project through to completion. And meanwhile new tasks and projects prolipherate like weeds. Yesterday's finished project is barely noticed; now the urgent refrain is about projects W, X, and Y. Why aren't they finished yet?

Working, working, working, and you are another year older, and then another year, and then a decade goes by. What a naive thought to think it could be otherwise. Life ain't a bed of roses. It's about working and pulling your weight. They don't pay you the big bucks to sit around. Who ever said work was fun?

But wait! The question is not about working in this job or not working at all. It's not either/or. There are many ways to contribute to the world, and multiple paths to a good life. Although it is typical, once you become part of an organization, to embrace the beliefs of that organizational culture, it does not mean that organizational culture must become your destiny. 

You have one life, one finite stretch of time on this earth to invent yourself, to flourish, and to find a path on the twisted roads of time. The best you that you can be is the person who will give the most to your community and to the world. Whipping the tired, unwilling workhorse through another tiresome day of never ending tasks is not likely to be the way to your best contribution. 

Perhaps you are doing good work and perhaps you have made some useful contributions, but if your passion isn't in it, if it doesn't make your heart sing, then it isn't the right place for you right now. 

By you, I mean me. Dear colleagues, who are surprised and wondering at the suddenness of of it all, please know that for me it wasn't sudden at all. The knowledge was growing in my heart for a long time that I had wandered into the wrong tangled forest. It has taken me a long time to recognize that I needed to act upon my epiphany and make a change. 

I do not regret my years in this job. I have learned so much, and worked with some great people. But now it is time for me to invent another path, and to work and live with joy and passion.

Between Structure and Freedom

This morning as I was colouring in my adult colouring book, surrounded by soggy kleenexes*, I began to reflect on creativity. Specifically, I was thinking about some of the conditions that give rise to creative thought processes and creative acts.

As a child, I always loved colouring books. I especially loved ones with elaborate adventure pictures, fairy tales, pirates, or Ancient Greece. I remember once for my younger brother's birthday party, my mother bought colouring books, one for each party guest, and hid them around the house. At the word "go," the object was to race around the house looking for the hidden prizes. Each child would keep the colouring book he or she found, then help with the search until everyone had a prize. Prior to the books being hidden, I had inspected them and discovered that there was a very appealing Hercules colouring book. I really wanted to find that particular one. During the game, I ran from room to room finding all of the colouring books. (I was the oldest child present, and also I had a pretty good idea of potential hiding places in our house.) As I found each colouring book, I gave it to one of the party guests, and just kept looking until I found Hercules. My mother was quite exasperated with me for ruining the treasure hunt. "I should have just given you that colouring book to begin with," she said. 

At some point a couple of decades ago, early childhood educators began to frown upon colouring books. Supposedly, they ruined children's creativity and discouraged them from drawing. It was thought to be so much better for children to create images from their own imagination. 

This, to my mind, is a misinterpretation of the research findings of the 1980's and '90's on discovery learning. Unfortunately this incorrect understanding was applied across a number of subject areas and teaching practices, to the detriment of a generation of students. 

Discovery learning is the notion that students are more likely to be engaged in and passionate about learning if they have the opportunity to figure things out for themselves and to use their insights in practical applications. So, to use a mathematical example, children can discover for themselves the relationship between multiplication and division by realizing that just as three groups of four makes twelve, twelve items can be grouped into three sets of four. This mathematical relationship is more likely to be meaningful to them when they discover it than if they are taught the times tables by rote memorization. A practical application, such as figuring out how to share twelve jelly beans equally between three friends helps to anchor the understanding. I very much agree with approaches to teaching that incorporate opportunities for student discovery.

Where the pendulum swung too far, however, is that some educators illogically concluded that if discovery approaches were good for learning, then all aspects of structure, memorization, and routine were bad. Out the window went grammar, spelling, mathematical formulas, and colouring books. In came new math textbooks that frustrated a generation of students and their parents by expecting children to guess mathematical theories and principles discovered by mathematicians over the past two centuries by scrutizing colourful diagrams, answering word problems, and responding to open ended questions. As a parent helping my kids with math homework, I remember asking the air angrily, "why can't your textbook just tell you the order of operations rather than trying to make you guess the rule?" 

I want to bring this post from my grumpy diatribe on teaching methods back to creativity. What I am going to postulate is that creative thought and creative action exist in the sweet spot between structure and freedom. Too much rote copying and stultifying routine smothers the creative spark. Too much structure cages a person within convention and does not grant permission to innovate. 

On the other hand, too much freedom paradoxically both overwhelms one with too much choice and simultaneously starves the mind because it has nothing to work with. Too much choice -- every artist and writer has been there, I'm sure. What medium should I use? Oils, acrylics, pastels? What size canvas, and will it be canvas board, stretched linen, or a gessoed panel? What colours, what topic, what style of painting? This paralysis can be addressed by learning and applying a few basic techniques. Start by sketching a few thumbnails of the scene to figure out the composition, then do a simple drawing on your canvas. Begin the painting by doing a light wash with transparent colours and solvent, working top to bottom, to block in the main shapes. The wash can be monochromatic to establish the values. Or it can be a pale version of the the local colours that you plan to end up with, or use their complementary colours. Once you have mastered those techniques, you can add new techniques or approaches to your toolbox. You have conquered the terror of the hugeness of endless possibility by doing something. 

Too little structure provides the mind too little to work with to achieve productive creativity. Think about the advice often given to writers: if you want to be a good writer, then read, read, read. The books that others have written provide the would-be writer content, structure, and instruction. The knowledge gleaned from books (and experience) allows us to build complex mental models of the social, emotional, historical world. Our own unique questions and ideas naturally emerge the more rich and complex our knowledge base becomes. Pursuing those ideas in thought, writing, or through art yields creativity. 

Reading also immerses us in language, and over time helps us to develop deep linguistic knowledge and appreciation for the nuances of language. By studying texts, we can learn how other writers write. In a beautifully written novel, I can observe how the author has drawn her characters, how dialogue captures the reader and moves the action along, and how those little particulars like the pottery bowl full of agates make the story feel real. The novel, or rather many novels, function as a writing course for a novel writer. 

The structure of our mental models provides a platform for creative thought and action. We build the structures of our minds by observing and experiencing the physical and knowledge structures surrounding us. The slippages, the tensions, and the mismatches inspire creative problem solving as long as each of us is allowed to have or chooses to have the freedom of agency to act and think.

As a final note, I want to point out that studying and observing, although necessary, is not enough. A creative person must also do. Read, read, read, but also write, write, write. Colour your colouring book, but also draw and paint, and try something wild like covering the floor with canvas cloth and flinging paint all around it. Active making, designing, and problem solving are the gifts of freedom. 

*I have a nasty head cold. I initially wrote soggy tissues but that brought to mind gory images of body parts, so I have used instead the product placement name kleenex that now functions as the common noun for tissue. 

Crutches Be Gone!

There they are, the crutches and air boot cast that have been my constant companions for more than four months. They have been dumped unceremoniously in the corner of the front hall, soon to be relegated to the dusty storage room. My metatarsal fracture has healed.

I saw the surgeon on January 19, two and a half weeks ago. The X-ray showed that the fracture line was no longer visible; it finally had healed. As I have written before, I stepped in a pothole, turned my left foot, and fractured my fifth metatarsal bone on September 12. From then until December 17, I was in an air cast and on crutches with no weight bearing -- three months. For the final month, I was allowed to walk in the air cast bearing weight. 

I am now having to learn to walk all over again. My brain does not remember how to walk. Also, after four months of carrying my weight on my right leg only, and then limping lop-sidedly in the cast, my muscles of the left leg have wasted away. The situation has not been helped by the hours each evening and weekend that I spent on the couch with my foot up, trying to get it to heal. The left foot hurts quite a lot when I put weight on it. 

I have been going to physiotherapy. I have lost range of motion in my toes and ankle. My plantar fascia is very tight and painful, and my arch is falling. The weakened muscles are not supporting my knee and ankle properly. I likely have some adhesions in the complex architecture of the foot.

It was such a strange sensation when I took the cast off and tried to walk. I found that I couldn't balance properly and wanted to carry all my weight on my right leg. My left foot felt like a block that couldn't bend, and I could only take little tiny steps on the left side. My walking was extremely slow and I had to consciously think about every single step -- how to swing my leg, put the foot down, bend it, and weight it equally. 

People who know me will remember that I am usually a person who person who zips, races, and rushes about at top speed. I have always been athletic, and have taken for granted my ability to balance, bend, turn on a dime, climb, run, scramble up a steep embankment, and walk over rough ground. Right now I don't have these capabilities. I can walk, very slowly, indoors in hallways, or outdoors on flat smooth sidewalks. Stepping over a curb, an angled surface, or a branch, or walking around a bit of snow or ice requires consideration and conscious effort. I have acquired some sympathy for elderly people and other people with mobility limitations who walk so very slowly, now that I have experienced it myself. 

But every day my ability to walk improves. Four days after I was allowed to walk without the cast, I went shopping at the mall, wearing shoes. I took one crutch with me for balance and to relieve the weight on the left a little. I didn't walk very far -- just around a department store and a little way down the main hallway of the mall. I was on an excursion to buy slippers, as I found it too painful to walk around the house in bare feet, as I usually do. 

Now I have worked up to outdoor walking, little by little extending the distance. Last weekend, I did two walks around the neighbourhood with Rob, 1.3 and 1.9 kilometres in length. On Thursday, I walked down the hill to a meeting in a distant building and back. My phone app told me that it was 3.1 km round trip, but I think it was incorrect because I have measured that distance before. I think that it was probably more like 2.4 km round trip.

I have been wearing my hiking boots or my sturdy Keen walking shoes to work. They provide good support and a sense of security if the parking lot and sidewalks are icy. I am sure that they look a little incongruous with my dress pants, blouses and blazers. 

Today Rob and I are going to go for a walk in the park. There are extreme wind gusts. But the sun is shining and I am so excited to be able to get out and walk outdoors again. 

The Tyranny of Productivity

Recently, I had to step back from some of my duties at work in order to spend time on the couch with my foot up so that a fractured bone could heal. The experience has led me to take a hard look at the kind of life I am living, and how work has almost completely taken over my life.

The first observation is that when I broke the bone in my foot, I did not at first make any adjustments to my work schedule at all, except to attend doctor's appointments every few weeks and one cast-fitting appointment. I did have to change my means of mobility, hopping on crutches with a cast on my foot, and getting a special parking pass to park closer to my office and to buildings where meetings were held. Whenever possible, I did change the location of meetings to be closer to my office. But, remarkably, it did not even cross my mind to take days off work, or to cut back on my hours. I continued on working my eleven- and twelve-hour days, exhausted and in pain.

Looking back on it, it seems clear that my priorities were all wrong. How could I have been so oblivious to my body's needs and to my own health? How could I have been so focused on my obligations and projects at work that I looked at the broken foot as a temporary and annoying nuisance that hopefully would go away soon and in the meantime I tried to get on with things the best I could? I assumed that the bone would heal all by itself, on schedule, without any assistance from me. 

Productivity is a hard taskmaster. And administration, perhaps especially in academic institutions, demands devotion of all of one's time to the pursuit of productivity. In the academic culture of overwork, there is always too much to do, and multiple competing tasks. It is common to triage, completing those most urgent and important things first, and deferring, delegating, or neglecting those that cannot be addressed in the time available. Because of the excessive number of things to be done and the guilt one feels for not completing promised acts, work time becomes stretchy. The work day stretches to accommodate work demands, via earlier starts ("breakfast meetings"), staying later (in my case often to 8 or 9 at night), by holding evening events, by working on weekends, or by working through holidays. 

After awhile, you don't even remember who you are. You become your title, a working machine. Your body is just something you stuff food into so you have energy to work. It is something you exercise so that you can keep going at your work rather than breaking down, akin to doing regular car maintenance. Weekends are periods to refresh your mind so you can get back at it on Monday with renewed vigour, or else brief interludes into which you try to pack your whole (non-working) life.

But, if I am honest with myself, my excessive working is not completely the fault of my workplace. I was having a conversation with my daughter recently about my struggle to reduce my long hours so that my foot could heal (this was after I had been told by the doctor at the seventh week post-injury that the X-rays showed that the fracture was not healing). She said, "Oh Mom, you have always been a work-a-holic." She reminded me about my previous job and the one before that, and the long hours I have always worked, and the way I always have been wrapped up in work. 

It is true. I throw myself into my work. I always have done so. Even as a child at school, I turned every assignment into a gigantic project. I would comb the library, reading everything about the topic that I could get my hands on, design elaborate experiments and analyses, and write really long, illustrated reports. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. 

For the most part, I have had the kind of work that I could throw myself into. My work has involved creative problem solving and design, reading, learning, relationship building, mentoring, teaching, and writing. These are all things that I enjoy doing, that I am good at, and that can make a useful contribution to society.

I have tended to look at productivity as a good thing, something to aspire to and to keep me on track. Many of the things that I have accomplished in my career and in my life are because I have had my sights focused on particular outcomes and I have persisted to achieve those outcomes. I have been a productive member of the organization and of society. 

But too much of a good thing can become a bad thing. This is what has happened with me in my current job. The balance is all out of whack. I have been working too many hours for too long, and my body, health, creativity, and life have suffered. Probably my work has suffered too. The research shows that excessive work actually leads to lower productivity. Exhausted people are not at their best, cognitively. Putting one's head down to get the job done negatively impacts relationship-building and team work, which are central to the success of projects in an organization (not to mention to one's enjoyment of being a member of that workplace). Being too focused on task productivity does not allow time for contemplation. Reflection and time to muse are necessary for visioning and creativity, and excellent leadership is visionary and creative.

Paradoxically, in order to be a good leader, I need to spend less time working and I need to be less of a slave to productivity. In order to thrive as a human being, and to be healthy, I need to spend a lot less time working. 

I have known this for decades. Sometimes I have managed to do a better job of restricting work demands on my time, and letting work take its place as just one of the elements in my life, not the dominant one that has precedence over everything else. But I am my own worst enemy, because whenever I manage to get work trimmed down to size, I start saying yes to new projects, or I start looking around for new challenges. 

Now that my foot has healed and I am on the path of learning to walk again, I have resolved that I am going to keep work in its place and keep my work hours down. I am beginning the process of tiptoeing toward retirement. I will still throw myself into projects, both work-related and those long deferred creative art and writing projects that are waiting for me. But I am also going to spend time with my grandkids and Rob. I am going to travel and paint. I am going to putter in the garden and daydream. Never again will I chain myself to the kind of work that obliterates me. 

A List: After Susan Sontag

I have been reading Maria Popova's wonderful collection of quotations from writers on writing. You can find it at Brain Pickings. I have read most of these writers, and also several of the books on writing that she quotes from. This morning, I was reading some of Popova's nuggets on list-making as a writing starter activity, and I came across an excerpt from Susan Sontag's As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (a book that I haven't yet read) - her list of "things I like" and "things I don't like." It has inspired me to create my own similar list.

Things I Like:

Coffee, pine trees, our cat Oliver, lady bugs, snow, cheese blintzes, 100 recipe chicken cookbook, red wine, baby clothes, towels, marble, reflections on water, pebbles, mountains, paint, garden soil, new ice, dancing, watermelon, pens, pads of paper, Thai food, fields, hoar frost, yellow, the pattern tree branches make against the sky, pancakes, lists, the letter o, collections of objects, the Gulf Islands, purple violets, The Passing Cloud, K.D. Lang's cover of Hallelujah, cheese, Margaret Atwood, black tea, wood grain, leaves in autumn, butterscotch, words, terriers, rayon fabric, Tsimshian and Haida art, my family, brie. 

Things I Don'Like:

Sewing, green pepper, volley ball, intravenous needles, gore in movies, post-modern art, bullying, perfume, Stephen Harper's Canada, makeup, suicide, maggots, cigarettes, public toilets, undercooked chicken, hospitals, caraway seed, medical procedures on eyeballs, rose hip tea, vomit, foam pillows, nylon, being called a lady or a girl, scotch, frostbite, firearms, gold coloured cars, wire worms, amputations, wet socks, cluttered counters, anime art, haggis, torn medial meniscus, television, grey or beige shirts, litter, dried oolichan, gum recession, hairspray, the smell of diesel, going to work Monday morning, greasy hair, dog poop revealed by melting snow in the spring.

Things I Like:

Good writing of any genre, October, British Columbia, raspberry jam, Rob, cherry blossoms, walking, chocolate cake, magnolia trees, my friends, the Group of Seven, grandchildren, long hair, food columns, jazz singers, alpine areas, pear trees, log houses, pottery, art blogs, blues music, backcountry skiing, kisses, margins, finishing a project, ideas, quilts, swimming in lakes, the camper, language, wild flowers, kayaks, research, cycling, wilderness trails, fly fishing, beets, turquoise, folk art, the angle of the light, beads, view from an airplane window, a wood fire, Haida Gwaii, trees, Mom's shortbread.

The Mind Thinks It's a Body

Today I was at the the ski shop buying skis and boots for my son for Christmas. My son was with me, of course, to choose the boots and have them fitted, and to choose the skis, bindings, and poles that he wanted. He has been an avid boarder for the past twelve years, and now is excited to get back into skiing again. Rob, who has researched all the hot ski gear in every category, also was present providing his insights.

Buying ski gear is not something that you walk in and do in a few minutes. We actually started yesterday evening, and spent nearly two hours with the ski shop guy, Steve, choosing the right boot. Then we came back again today to have the boots heat molded, and to pick out the rest of the equipment. During the hours we spent at the ski store, we were surrounded by ski stuff and ski talk. We swapped skiing stories with Steve, talked about technique and ski design, reminisced about skiing in the old days, and drooled over all the beautiful new powder skis, ski clothes, goggles, etc., surrounding us. The experience was a mini-immersion into ski life and served as a powerful impetus to get out on the slopes. 

However, I am on crutches, with a broken bone in my foot. I fractured the fifth metatarsal thirteen weeks ago, and it has been very slow to heal. It is healing, but oh so slowly. I am in an air cast, mostly non-weight-bearing, and am allowed to put limited weight on the heel only. Unfortunately for me, I am not likely to be out on the ski hill any time soon. Realistically, my next step once I can start to weight bear is to learn to walk again. 

Yet in the ski store today, my mind seemed oblivious to the facts of the matter. I could see so clearly in my mind the mountain where we usually ski - the runs on the Huckleberry chair, the Chutes in whiteout conditions, the traverse across the top of the bowl on the Red chair, and the way you can peek over the edge in one place to the sheer drop of the cliff to the left of the traverse. I can see the ski lodge, with red cheeked skiers at the picnic benches, peeling off their snowy touques and gloves, and parents down on their knees helping little kids to get their ski boots on or off. Hot chocolate with rum, and the terrible greasy burgers that cost an arm and a leg. In my mind I am there now, clomping in my ski boots, exhilarated from the last run.

In my mind, I am skiing that difficult ridge run under the Red chair, and I am swooping and turning with confidence, not stiffening up or having to stop every couple of turns to catch my breath. It is not just remembering. Rather, it is as if my crutches and current mobility limitations are irrelevant. I could be there on the slopes tomorrow, skiing just the way I always have. 

The mind thinks it's a body. I can ski, regardless of my present frailties, lack of fitness, or aging. And because I have visualized it so clearly in my mind, year after year when I go out to the hill, I can ski. I think I actually have continued to improve my skills, even though I no longer have the same courage, stamina, or flexibility of my youth. The stubborn, insistent mind has shaped the capabilities of the body. 

Yet sometimes it works the other way. The body teaches the mind. Really, when you rip down the slope between the trees in deep powder in the back country, your mind simply does not have time to consider and coordinate each physical component of the process turn after turn. The body takes over and does what the mind cannot as you float and dip into each turn, a rhythm that the mind chases to keep up with. "Turn here, and here," your mind instructs, but your knees and edges and arms have already completed that turn and are onto the next. It is beautiful and coordinated. You are flying effortlessly like a bird. The mind is a nagging old woman that you have tuned out. And later when you arrive at the bottom, your mind is incredulous, and replays the run over and over again trying to understand, feel it again, and tap into that flow. 

Many have written about the notion of a mind-body connection. But how it works remains a mystery. It is something that we all experience, and seldom even notice or remark upon. We take it for granted that our minds will bring our bodies to situations and then step back and let the body take over. Somehow those times when we are fully in our bodies seem to also be those moments when we are most intensely alive. And when we are not out there on the slopes, or paddling the kayak, or hiking over a scree slope, the mind is practicing for us so that when we go out on our next adventure, our bodies are already tuned up and ready for it.