Archive for November, 2008

How Far Can You Push Yourself?

Bryant November 28th, 2008

I once heard someone say that if you are always succeeding then maybe you are not setting your sights high enough. I think that’s true. In order to really be satisfied in life, we need to continually push ourselves to the limit.

I’m often asked why I would ever want to attempt to run the 26.2 miles of the Disney Marathon in Jan. Much of the reason for me, is seeing how far I can push myself. I never thought I’d be able to run a marathon, but as I train more and more, I find myself getting closer and closer to achieving that goal.

There’s something so powerful about learning to quiet that inner voice that says “you can’t”. By continually pushing to our perceived limits and beyond, we see what we are truly capable of.

Sometimes that will mean failure, but failure is okay as long as you learn something from it, and that brings you one step closer to the eventual goal. I’ve long hard runs (17 mile +) lately that have felt like a failure. I had to start walking on some of them, and had no energy left for the last few miles.

But I’m trying to learn from these failures. Did I not eat enough? Should I be trying to zone out more? Do I need a fresh route to run on? One of my favorite sayings is

Keep failing until you succeed

At the end of the day, the training runs are just a tool to get me up to speed for the marathon. Better to run out of energy on a training run and learn from it than running out of energy on the marathon.

I think everyone needs something to truly throw themselves into in order to be happy — Something that uses their best skills and is a stretch for them to succeed at. We grow by continually stretching ourselves.

I love how Theodore Roosevelt advocated the “Strenuous Life” and lived it himself. He was always looking for the next challenge to push him physical and mentally.

I’m currently reading The River of Doubt which chronicles the dangerous South American exploration he went on later in his life after he lost the presidency. Even when he was older and his political career complete, he was still pushing himself into amazingly difficult situations requiring great amounts of stamina and strength.

He never rested on his laurels and nor should we.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
— Charles Kingsley

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Can you Fix Someone?

Bryant November 22nd, 2008

Everyone is broken in some way — No one is perfect. But when people keep making the same mistakes whose solution seems obvious to you, there is a natural tendency to want to help and fix them. Can you fix someone?

Some people seem to bring trouble upon themselves by getting into bad situations or making poor decisions repeatedly. To them, the world seems chaotic, and they wonder why they have so many problems. To you, it seems obvious how they got into the situation, and you feel that if they just did a few things differently they could be on the track to success.

Maybe they’re struggling with drugs or other kinds of addiction. They don’t see the addiction that is destroying their life, but it is plain to everyone else. Should you try an intervention?

Maybe they are in a destructive relationship and they just don’t see what impact the other person is having on them. Maybe the person struggling is an old friend of yours, a relative, or even a spouse. It’s tempting to want to step in and fix this person, but should you?

My Story

In college, I had a good friend who I (and others) felt was entering an unhealthy relationship. All the signs were there, and it seemed obvious to us. So a couple of us staged an intervention where we basically said that we didn’t think this relationship was right for him and named specific reasons. We felt like we had a duty to tell our friend how we saw it, but it resulted in losing that friend forever because he chose the relationship over us. Did we do the right thing or should we have minded our own business, and just remained friends?

When to Intervene

The answer is that there are a handful of cases where intervention is necessary:

  • Physical or Emotional Danger: When the person is physically or emotionally endangering themselves or another.
  • Long-Term Mistakes: When the person is about to take an action that will have a long-term negative impact on their life.

So there are times to intervene, but you have to be ready for the consequences. You may intervene and try to fix this person, and the only result is that they never talk to you again.

Or you might fix this person for a month only to see them fall back into their old habits the next month. Worse, their negative destructive behavior or attitude could spread to you. There is no guarantee that your intervention will work, but if any of above cases our true, you cannot let the situation continue without at least considering doing something.

Benefits of Failure

Before doing anything, don’t forget that there can be great benefits by letting someone fail and pick themselves back up. Individual failure can often lead to success and confidence as long as people learn something from it and are not fatally hurt in the long term.

People that are continually taken care of often don’t learn to stand on their own two feet and become dependent on others. With each little individual success, people become a stronger person and more in control of their lives.

The Path Forward

So, if you are in a situation where you are considering trying to fix someone here are some options:

  • Do Nothing: Sometimes the best answer is to stay out of the situation and let the person conquer their own demons.
  • Incremental Progress: It is great if you can structure an environment where someone can fix themselves, by starting with small victories and building on them each day. That way they can see incremental success and create a positive feedback loop.
  • Community: Community groups can sometimes be the best way for someone to get help. There is an addiction support group for everything imaginable and the internet makes these groups easier to find. Also, don’t forget your local church or place of worship. Amazing things have happened when people get plugged into the right church community, pastoral support and relationship with God.
  • Professional Therapy: If it is beyond what you can do on your own and you have the financial means, professional cognitive therapists are trained to stop destructive behavior by helping people think differently and rewiring them to be more positive. Many studies have validated their benefits and success rates.

Also, in all of your high-mindedness of trying to fix this person, don’t forget about fixing yourself….

Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

-Marva Collins, Educator

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Why You Should Limit Yourself

Bryant November 14th, 2008

I recently heard about a study where they presented an entire box of chocolates in front of people and told them to eat as many as they wanted. When presented with this choice, the average person ate one piece of chocolate. But when the people were presented with only six chocolates and told to eat as many as they wanted, the average person ate three pieces. What can we learn from this?

First of all it shows that too many choices can overwhelm people. We live in a world of nearly infinite choices. Consider the bookstore (assuming you still shop at the bookstore). You can find multiple books on nearly any niche topic. In fact, because of the amount of books out there, bookstores have begun to create little islands highlighting specific books to help focus your attention. It’s been proven to help boost sales because it limits the choices.

You would think all of this choice would be a good thing, but in fact it causes stress in many people. Let’s say that you want to buy a digital camera and you are one of those people who want to get the best one for your money.

When digital cameras first came out, you did not have a lot of choices. Only a few companies made them and they very expensive. Now that they are everywhere you have to struggle through finding the “best” one. You have to research the different brands and compare matrices of features to get the right one for the right price. Once you find the right one, then you have to pick the best place to buy it from.

All of these choices explain why searching and organization of information is so important in this day and age. With such a large amount of choices we need a system to help us find and sort through them. This is why Google has become one of the hottest companies because it provides such a valuable service.

The same principle of limiting yourself applies when trying to get tasks accomplished. If I have a list of twelve things to do for the day, I find that I’m much less productive than if I only have three.

When I only have three, I will get them done, but if they’re twelve things to do then it’s much harder to even start. The list seems too big and I’m not sure which task to focus on first, and even if I get through five of them I still don’t have a sense of accomplishment at the end because I have seven uncompleted tasks. You are much better to limit yourself to just the three most important tasks for the day.

The same holds true of big goals. I try to set about three big goals to focus on for the year. Much more than that and I find that I’m not able to make steady progress towards them because I’m spread too thin.

To do more, limit yourself.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

-Albert Einstein

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Why You Need to Focus on Output Over Input

Bryant November 6th, 2008

Have you made a dent in the universe yet? If not, maybe it’s because you’re focusing too much on input rather than output.

For many years, I spent my time focusing on input. I would read as many books as possible and learn as much about computer programming and other topics as I could. I would watch documentaries in an ever-expanding effort to increase my knowledge. I would run and play tennis to increase my physical skills, but I never entered any races or tournaments.

I would practice art and guitar, but always copying other people’s pieces. I wasn’t generating anything new or original. In other words, I wasn’t having an impact beyond myself. If I was to die after reading all those books and learning all those skills, who would know or care?

In order to really have an impact on the world around me, I needed to translate all that I’ve learned and turn it into something new and unique that can provide value to others.

If you look back through history, the people that are remembered are those that focused on output. They wrote books to spread the knowledge they learned (Newton, Einstein, Descartes). They entered contests and broke records (Armstrong, Bannister, Owens). They built companies that created innovative products to make the world a better place (Edison, Ford, Jobs).

These people certainly spent time on learning and input, but output was their primary concern. As Jim Collins describes in Built to Last, they had a “bias for action.” They didn’t just sit around learning and waiting to learn everything. Instead, they took action and jumped into the arena:

A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

-George Patton

As for myself, I’m trying to focus on output in the following ways:

  • I’ve entered tennis tournaments and marathons to actually use the skills that I’ve learned to try and achieve tough goals.
  • I’m using my computer skills and to build great products.
  • I’ve started this blog to share any great ideas that I have or learn.

How will you focus on output?

We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?

-Steve Jobs

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Where Did that Hour Go?

Bryant November 2nd, 2008

With daylight savings time ending and most of North America “losing an hour” this weekend, I thought it would be fun to look at time and how it can fluctuate more than we think….

At first glance, time is a pretty boring topic. It plods on in a linear fashion pretty much oblivious to what we do. We all have the same amount of hours in the day and it’s more about how you use those hours…right?

But what if time didn’t behave in the simple way we think it does? What if one hour for me was actually different than one hour for you? In fact, that is possible!

That’s exactly what Einstein discovered in his special theory of relativity. As someone gets closer to the speed of light, time is warped and travels slower for them. Rather than going into all the physics (which I don’t understand myself) I think the twin paradox provides the best example of this theory:

In physics, the twin paradox is a thought experiment in Special Relativity, in which a person who makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket will return home to find he or she has aged less than an identical twin who stayed on Earth. This result appears puzzling, since the situation seems symmetrical, as the latter twin can be considered to have done the travelling with respect to the former. Hence it is called a “paradox”. In fact, there is no contradiction and the apparent paradox is explained within the framework of relativity theory, that only one twin has undergone acceleration and deceleration, thus differentiating the two cases.

-Wikipedia, Twin Paradox

At first, it sounds like something out of Star Trek. The idea that time slows down at high speeds must be ludicrous and could never be proven. Well, the very next sentence of the above quote is:

The effect has been verified experimentally using precise measurements of clocks flown in aeroplanes.

Believe it or not, Einstein’s theory on this (like many of his other ones) has actually proven to be true in real tests. So time is not as solid and boring as we think it is. It can bend and fluctuate based on the speed someone is traveling. Who knows what practical use this knowledge will provide, but it makes you wonder in what other ways time could be different than we think.

One of the best books to come out and explore this topic is Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. Lightman’s book wonders what Einstein must have been dreaming about when he came up with his theories on time and wonders what time might be like on other worlds. Each chapter is an exploration of those fantasy worlds. Here is a selection of my favorites:

  • The Groundhog’s World: In this world time repeats on itself endlessly, but people do not know they will live their life over. And they have already lived the same life millions of times. Every perfect first kiss has already been performed many times by the same two people. They also don’t know that every mistake they make has been made already. Nothing is new or has not already happened once.
  • The Highlander’s World: In this world scientists discovered that time flows slower further from the Earth. So everyone begins to build houses as high in the air as possible. In fact, it becomes a status symbol to have the highest house in the neighborhood. Mountains become the wealthy suburbs and only the poor ived on the flat earth. Ironically, the thin air of the mountains makes the people living there prematurely frail.
  • The Ender’s World: In this world, time will end at a fixed point and everyone knows when it is. One year before the end all the schools are closed. Why learn for the future when there will not be one? One month before the end, people stop working and reconnect with old friends and family. One day before the end, they spend all of their remaining money in savings doing everything that they’ve ever wanted to do. One hour before the end, everyone goes outside, holds hands and closes their eyes awaiting their shared fate.

We think we know what time is like, but Einstein proved that it’s not as obvious as we think. So on this weekend when we lose an hour, consider what life would be like if time was just a little different?

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

-Einstein

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