A couple of years ago, I decided to quit coaching high school Cross Country. I felt like I was the only person who cared about the program. The students didn’t show up half the time. We finished perpetually last in every meet. I had lost the joy, so I quit.
Later that year, as Winter approached, I found myself with another nagging injury from my running routine. I started doing research online to find a miracle cure for what ailed me. In the process, I came across the POSE method of running. As I studied this new way to run, I discovered this funky shoe called the Vibram Five Fingers. I immediately knew I had to have a pair. I fell in love with them the first time I put them on my feet. Now, two years later, they’re riding the leading edge of a revolution in running. It seems a lot of research lately is showing that high tech running shoes are leading to more injuries than they are preventing. As a result, the running shoe companies are racing to market with a lower tech shoe designed to mimic running barefoot. Nike, the inventor of the high tech shoe, leads the pack with its Free line of shoes.
I completely changed my running form and have been running injury free for nearly two years — something I have not done for more than a decade prior. Along the way, I discovered that more people cared about the Cross Country program than just me. My runners stopped me in the hallway to tell me they missed me. I’ll be back on the sidelines this Fall, and I’ll be teaching a different running form, but my runners will still wear shoes.
I’ve just listened to three speakers talk about “Building Buzz for your Online Brand” at Techpoint’s New Economy New Rules presentation. The last speaker was Pat Coyle, a local online marketing expert. He said two things that stuck with me. First, he talked about the personal nature of social media. He said you lose the personal touch if you try to roll it up into something big, you lose the personal touch.
Pat’s comment that really hit me was when he said we need to remember that you are more than your job and you should share yourself online. I realized that’s what this blog is for. My goal is to have a forum where I can talk about things that are, for some reason, important to me. In the process, people can begin to decide if they like me or not.
Of course, there is the alterior motive of trying to get business from this opening of my soul. In the end, companies don’t buy anything, people do. All things being equal(and they usually aren’t), peopl buy from people they know and like. I certainly prefer to have staff that I like. The same holds for my customers. I want to work with people that I like and that like me too.
I just finished reading Play by Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan. some of the best information I get from reading inxolves reminding me of things I already knew. That’s the case with this book. We all played as a natural part of our childhood, then we grew up and eschewed play. We feel that adults should be serious. No! We should not let the child inside of us wither and rot.
The reminder has been good for me. I’m enjoying my weekly golf in the Port-to-Port and Friends league. I’ve stopped fretting about my play and am just playing. Amazingly my scores are better too. The same is true of my bike riding. Cycling was my first love. I returned to riding a couple of years ago. But I went at it like a scientist: cadence, speed, distance, time, heart rate. These things turn the fun into work. Now I just ride. I still carry the bike computer to gather that data, but I don’t sweat it while I ride.
Playing makes everything more fun. Even the stuff that doesn’t seem like it can be.
My wife and I were awakened in the middle of the night on Sunday by a loud noise coming from downstairs. We didn’t hear any further sounds so we just went back to sleep. At least we tried to go back to sleep while we lay there listening for additional noises for about an hour. In the morning, we discovered that someone had thrown a large clay pot thru our garage window, shattering the double pane glass and scattering shards all over the garage.
We cleaned it up and considered it to be a random act of vandalism. On Monday night, we were awakened again by noises from downstairs. This time we jumped out of bed and rushed downstairs to see that someone had shot out the windows next to our front door. Two nights in a row means we’re targets to us. We called the police and reported the whole thing. Who knows what will come of that.
Last night, after two nights of restless sleep, I woke at 2:00 AM in anticipation of another nightly visit. We were spared last night. Hopefully, our tormenter has moved on to terrorize someone else. As I sit here now, three days without restful sleep, I feel like I’m on the verge of insanity. I can’t hold a thought. My attention wanders. I need some rest.
I find it amazing that in only three days I went from a normal, rationally functioning individual to a mental wreck. I have enough awareness to know that I’m not functioning properly but not enough to get it together.
The air conditioner in my office died yesterday. We spent today sitting in the dark as the temperature outside climbed past 90 and inside I to the 80s. We all made the best of it but it struck me how accustomed to A/C I have become. I grew up in a house without A/C, attended a school without it, and drove a car without it.
The thought that A/C had become so expected everywhere I go made me think about the other things I take for granted, like running water and electricity and even the Internet. I’ve become incredibly soft without knowing it.
Then the real thought hit me. I take my loved ones for granted far too often. My mother is 84 years old. I act as if she’ll always be there. I need to cherish my te with her. I love my wife dearly, and I don’t even know when I stopped doing the little things for her like opening doors and rubbing her feet at night. My fat lazy dog is that way because I don’t take time to walk her any more.
I’ve got to go say thanks to some people (and pet Gracie).
Google has a Chief Economist. His name is Hal Varian. He’s on leave from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and School of Information. It’s an interesting idea for a corporation to have a chief economist, but it’s going to become as commonplace as having a CFO. The Internet has done a tremendous amount to make transactions more transparent. Every one of us has access to such a mountain of data that there is little we cannot discover, IF we knew where to look for it, and IF we could understand what it really means. As Varian puts it, Data is cheap. The dificult part is having the analytical ability to make use of that data. Thus, the growing need for economists in corporations. Governments have had chief economists for a long time and today, more than half of the world’s largest economies are corporations, not nations.
Take this trend and combine it with the “off the beaten path” work of economists like Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and suddenly economics seems like a good educational choice to recommend to your college bound children. How long until one of TV’s cop shows gets replaced with a number crunching economist. Wait, that’s been done, sort of.
I watched a Marc Singer documentary called Dark Days yesterday. It told the story of people who lived in the subway tunnels of New York. The film profiles several of the residents amd discloses a little about how they came to be living underground, or at least how they recall having come to live underground. A large number of them were habitual crack smokers.
Toward the end of the movie armed police go into the subway to deliver eviction notices. The crew wasn’t allowed to film that part. Afterward, a homeless agency takes up the cause of the undergrounders and they reach a settlement that gets them all into rennovated Section 8 apartments.
The whole thing was interesting and, for the most part, presented objectively. My cynicism comes in the serendipitous timing of the police raid and eviction. When some of these people had lived in these tunnels for nearly two decades with no legal system intervention, it seems odd that all of this would happen just at the end of the filming. It’s like scripted reality TV.
In my world, life is crazy enough that it doesn’t need someone choreographing additional craziness. How about yours?
If you haven’t experienced this yet, you soon will:
You’re in a restaurant and you notice a group of teenagers sitting at a table quietly tapping away on their cell phones when suddenly they all burst out laughing. They’re sending text messages (I still try to avoid turning text into a verb) to one another instead of just opening their mouths and talking. Afterall, they are right there together!
Now imagine as your smart phone (or other portable computing device) gets smarter. It already knows where it is at any moment so it can make location specific decisions. What if it also knew enough about you to order your coffee for you as you approached your local Starbuck’s? Or if it could remind you of the name of the person approaching you along with a tidbit about how you know him? What if it monitored your vital statistics and scheduled doctors visits and vacations based on your physical condition?
No one can deny that computer technology has changed our society. Most would find it difficult to say that it isn’t going to continue to change us. That’s not really a new thing. Technology has always transformed the way our society operates. Primitive tools helped us move from gatherers to hunters. More advanced tools helped us move to farming, then to trades, then to factories, and so on. The notable thing about the Information Technology effect is the rate at which this change is occurring. The fax machine was patented in the 1950s. It didn’t reach it’s heyday until the 1980s. The first iPhone debuted in 2007 and people who own them are a bit embarrassed to let others know they’re still using “that old thing.”
The rate of change has even created some noticeable differences in the way people who grew up in the wired world compared to their older counterparts, according to cognitive scientists. What does it mean? Who knows. It does mean that we’re changing in real, measurable ways. Don’t worry though, we’ll still be human.
I’m going back to coaching Cross Country this Fall. I took a year off because I didn’t feel fulfilled by the experience. What a crock! I loved coaching. I didn’t like the crap that surrounded coaching like coordinating transportation, or raising money, or trying to get parents to come to meets. I didn’t think my runners enjoyed themselves all that much, but I found out that they took great pride in their ability to stick it out. I told them at our last sports banquet that they were tougher than me because they took longer to finish the race than I would have been able to do.
People ask me when I tell them that I’m going to coach, “How do you find time to do all the stuff you do?” My answer is simple. You find the time to do the things that are important to you. I don’t say, but I often think, “It appears that watching TV is the most important thing in your life.”
I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s just that we all seem to have become extremely soft. We aren’t willing to put in a little effort unless we have some guarantee of incredible success. It doesn’t work like that in the real world. We have to be willing to sacrifice a little in order to have a chance to succeed. Somewhere along the line, parents stopped teaching that to their children.
This rant was brought to you by a day spent in the doctor’s office.
I’ve been working on a couple of business plans recently. One is for a disaster recovery center that would augment the Pertingo® Computer Support Services that my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing company provides. The other is for a new service we call Online Presence Management. Now I’m a story teller, so the narrative parts of the plan come easy for me. I can explain how the world will be better from these new businesses and services having come into being in a way that is simple to understand. Then I come to the financial projections. Every business plan I’ve seen shows a revenue projection that rises steadily to the right. Most have the expected hockey stick shape where, if the business can just make it to the flex point, it turns into a veritable money machine.
I wrestle with the projections now because I don’t for a minute believe that either of these new ideas will become an incredibly large enterprise. It took a long time for me to come to grips with the notion that Port-to-Port Consulting wasn’t going to become a conglomerate of some sort. American business literature tells us that we’re failures if we don’t keep growing and growing and growing. I no longer buy that crap. Look around. Most businesses you know are not constantly growing. They’re humming along at a size that works for the business owners.
If we stop telling the lie that a business must continually grow larger in order to survive, we might have more entrepreneurs out there. Both of the business plans I’m writing are for small businesses that will remain forever small. The disaster recovery center is space limited. We’re using the extra space in our building, which we bought when we were going to expand to rule computer outsourcing in central Indiana. The other has potential to become incredibly large, but in reality, it’s in a low barrier-to-entry market. It won’t get enormous because there will always be hoards of competitors.
That’s all right. In fact, that’s the whole idea. If I can get these two things going, they will contribute to the overall collection of enterprises that provide my standard of living. I’ll have fun doing them. We’ll create new jobs and provide a useful service to our community. Why can’t I be happy with that?
I coached Cross Country at the Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School for three years when it first opened. I had a small group of runners who could barely cover the 400 meters to the first stop light from the school without walking. In fact, I agreed to coach after seeing them in their first race of the season. Every single member of the team was walking before the pack reached the first turn from the starting line.
I worked with these students over three years. Every one of them got better. None got really good, but they all improved. Alas, after three years of effort, I started feeling sorry for myself. Why did I put so much effort into this when no one seemed to care. I didn’t get support from the parents. One father dropped his son off only minutes before the start of a race and asked me when he should come back to get him. I told him the whole thing will be over in less than 30 minutes and asked him to just stay and see his son run. He promised to return in 30 minutes instead.
I didn’t get support from the school. Since we are a Charter School, I got some resistance from the Athletic Directors who coordinate meet schedules. The kids didn’t seem very interested in the whole thing. I decided that I was wasting my time, so I quit.
Last Fall was the first season that I didn’t coach. Suddenly, I realized that coaching had been incredibly important to me. Even though I had come up with all of these reasons why it was stupid for me to contine, I found that not coaching was not nearly as much fun as dealing with the headaches. Even though our success was minimal, by stopwatch standards, each of my runners impacted me, and I guess I impacted some of them as well. We’ll all be different people because of the time we spent running together.
I signed up to coach again this Fall. I can’t wait!
I’m a little over half way thru Play by Stuart Brown and Chris Vaughan. In it, they make the case for continuing to play into adulthood like we did as children. It takes so little to get me interested in playing around so this book was written for me to justify my behavior. One of the things that always brings out the child in me is to sit with a pile of crayons — they must be authentic Crayola — and draw. I don’t draw very well, but the act zooms me back to preschool and kindergarten when nobody cared if they could draw or not. We just did it.
So, on a whim, I hauled my wife off to the store to buy a box of crayons for each of my staff members. I’ll present them at next week’s staff meeting and we’ll all have some fun. First we drove to Office Depot. No Crayola crayons there. Next we travelled to the local party supply store. Strike two. By now, Susie is getting into the excitement of the hunt. So much so that she suggests WalMart, a store she utterly refuses to enter. Don’t ask me why.
We go in. She mumbles about the Greeter not greeting us. We find the boxes of eight Crayola crayons in the toy section and pick up enough for everybody, along with some of that paper that looks like unused newsprint. Got to have something made for crayons. Standard printer paper won’t do. As we’re headed to checkout, Suz sidetracks into the office supply aisle because that’s where she would have expected to find crayons. And she did! The same selection as the toy section PLUS an enormous telescoping tray with 150 colors and a built-in sharpener. Had to get that too.
Now we go to checkout and are surprised to find a bunch of self-check lanes. I loathe the self-check lane so we walk up to a live cashier who is doing nothing while people are queued up for the self-checks. Joy (I checked her nametag) listens as I complain that I don’t want to use the sticking self-check. She quickly picks up on the festive mood we’ve created on our crayon hunt and joins in. After helping me with the credit card thingy — She didn’t want me to be stressed about having to do it myself — Joy looked at me and said, “Since you have been such a good customer, I want to give you a little something to remind you of your visit to WalMart.”
I’m getting ready to put one of those Smiley face stickers on my chest and wear it for the rest of the day when she says, “We like to call it… a receipt!” Susie and I laughed all the way home. Joy didn’t do anything unusual except to make some fun where she saw the chance to do it. I’ll bet Susie even forgot about the negilgent Greeter.
I’m always following the new stuff that pops up on the Internet. Usually I don’t see the big wow in things and have to wait until someone smarter than me shows it to me. I still haven’t found out why so many people are on Twitter (or how Twitter can ever make money). I recently found a site called Twine that is pretty cool for gathering information. It’s just a play on social bookmarking, but it has more appeal to me than sites like Digg or Delicious. Anyway, thru one of the Twines I follow, I got this link to an upcoming Google offering called Wave. This is a killer product, and I don’t need someone smarter than me to tell me. Check out the demo:
Zack Lynch has a book coming out in July in which he describes what he calls the next epoch or revolution in human development. We’ve lived thru the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age to get to the curent Information Age. Lynch claims the follow-on will be the Neuro Revolution, which will transform the way we work, live, and play.
You know I’m on board with this idea. The things we learn about brain function and cognition each day makes our previously existing knowledge seem juvenile. If the laboratory experiments of today bear just a few useful concepts, it will radically change the way we do things. A lot of this stuff is going to challenge some deeply and strongly held beliefs that many of us hold dear, including our views on religion, sex, wealth, and love.
I don’t know anything about Zack Lynch, except that he wrote this soon to be published book. If there’s a Kindle version, I’ll be reading it. If not, I’ll wait to hear what others of you have to say about it before I go technologically back to paper for my book reading. In the meantime, I’ll keep following what’s going on in cognitive science and letting you know when I find out things that you probably won’t believe about the way your mind works.
A recent study reported by Scientific American discusses the concept of Embodied Cognition. Essentially, the researchers concluded that people make hand gestures while talking not solely for the purpose of their audience. In many instances, gesturing while talking helps the speaker perform cognitive tasks more efficiently. This is yet another example of how little we know about how our brains work. Nothing about this result would have been intuitive — not even to someone like me who cannot talk without his hands.
As many of you know, I spend a great deal of time reading and experimenting with brain function concepts. I can still start an argument with most people my age by saying that you are NOT born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have, or you don’t really use just ten percent of your brain’s capacity. These “facts” were so drilled into us when we were going thru school that their belief is held with religious fervor by many. This is just the tip of the pile of incorrect information we’ve been told about our big brains. I keep reading because researchers learn something new nearly every day. Oftentimes, the new refutes previous beliefs. That’s why I try to create my own experiments to see if I can reproduce the effect on myself. Now I realize that my self-experimentation doesn’t prove or disprove the research, but it makes me feel more or less confident in the result when I see how it plays out on me.
This gesture thing holds true for sure. I do a lot of public speaking. When asked to speak to a group, I usually prepare by thinking about the topic and all that I know about it until right before I have to speak. I mean that literally. It’s not unusual to see me jotting notes as I’m being introduced.
The most often made comment about my speaking style as I went through Toastmasters was that my hands seem to be in constant motion and that the gestures don’t always add to the presentation. Now I know that my hand gestures are a part of the way I recall all of the information I’ve accumulated while pondering my topic. I use my hands to make me sound smarter. I’ll have to start explaining that the motions aren’t for my listeners. Maybe then it will be easier for me to let go.
I’ve been working on a couple of business plans recently. One is for a disaster recovery center that would augment the Pertingo® Computer Support Services that my 
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