The goldfish who fiddled

I enjoy relating the tale of the violin virtuoso goldfish being asked her greatest skill. After a lifetime of practice she responds without thinking, oblivious to her most natural of talents – swimming and breathing under water. It was a tale that came to mind regularly during a period in which I was contemplating my career options and rebuilding my résumé. I found it hard to pick out my strengths – like trying to tickle oneself. It’s as if we have a blind spot to our own super powers; we need others to point them out to us.

On those occasions when I only had my own insight for company I had most success when approaching the problem indirectly. This oblique approach requires you to look not at the accomplishment itself but rather what caused the accomplishment to be. How had the goldfish become a virtuoso? Was it single-mindedness, incredible stamina, intensity of focus, a competitive spirit…? The ability to play the violin well is the end result but it’s not an ability in itself, at least not insofar as I define ‘ability.’ My oblique approach has clear limitations. It allows you to uncover skills you’ve tapped, but like the goldfish’s natural aquatic capabilities it ignores the ones we’ve neglected entirely.

It doesn’t help that it is in my nature to prize those things that require effort or sacrifice. When I have suffered in order to acquire them they have an exalted status in my ego’s temple of personal accomplishments. Anything I can do with my eyes closed doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and yet surely it’s those things that come most easily to me (and comparatively less to others) in which the greatest opportunities lie.

I’m surely not alone in this. We laud the rescuers, and rightly so, but less so the preventers. How often have you worked with people who have been praised for working crazy hours to fix a problem, sometimes with public reward, and how little praise is heaped on the person who works hard to make sure such a problem never happens in the first place. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but that doesn’t hold true when we look at the value we assign to effort.

To understand our strengths we could try looking to things we enjoy, but what we enjoy and what we’re good at aren’t the same thing. In his book, “Good to Great,” author Jim Collins suggests we look to the intersection of Opportunity, Passion and Talent to find our calling. (If you want to read more on this topic it is referenced in this medium article by Colin Robertson.) Clearly passion and talent are different things. Our goldfish may be talented at swimming but might not necessarily enjoy it, which is awful if you’re a goldfish. (Clearly there are limits to my analogy.)

We also need to look to what is facile for us. What do we find so easy to do that we don’t even have to think about it? And therein lies the conundrum, to bring into our thoughts that which comes to us so readily that it barely has to enter our mind in the first place. To resolve this we always come back to finding a friend, and preferably one who is not like us, because another goldfish is likely to have the same blind spot. There is insight as well as strength in diversity!

As I close out my thought process on this time in my life the value of diversity would seem both the right place to end, and an important one, but I can’t shake the image of a stream. I’m not sure why.

Finding your talent isn’t the end of the journey, it’s what we do with them and where that’s important. Michael Phelps is an incredible swimmer. It helps that his body almost seems to have been designed for his craft, but he still needed to dedicate time and attention, he needed to sacrifice. He found a trade that matched his natural aptitude and elevated it with, quite literally, Olympian effort.

Maybe this is why I keep circling back to the stream. We can spend a lot of time finding out we’re a great swimmer, but how does that then serve us if we spend all our talent and effort fighting the current? Heck, we might even be in the wrong river. It’s when all these things come together – talent, effort, the right part of the stream, in the right river – that everything aligns. We might even see a goldfish playing a violin.

In praise of consistency

A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Elle Boon

Finbarr Saunders is a character in a British comics known for finding double entendres in anything and everything. His most common response to any even remotely inappropriate phraseology is, “fnar fnar!” He was still going strong when I began my training as an accountant. My friends outside the profession would ask, “did you do any double entry today? Fnar fnar!” I guess I have accountancy training (and my friends) to thank for embedding in me the very British qualities of euphemism and school boy innuendo.

My accountancy training came with many such tangential lessons, many of which stemmed from the concepts and principles upon which accounting is founded. The consistency principle, for example, says that once you pick a way of accounting for something you should keep accounting for it in the same way, because then your numbers are comparable from period to period. Another way of looking at this is to consider how much easier it is to correct your mistake when you’ve been consistently wrong than when you’ve been acting like a Tasmanian devil on a diet of Red Bull and acid. Such lessons continued throughout my articles of apprenticeship and by the time I emerged as a qualified accountant – equipped with such super powers as innuendo, consistency, … and confirmation bias – I felt ready to take on the world.

Wherever I looked I found consistency to be a winning element. It’s a notion aided by my participation in endurance events. I deem consistency to be the single most important attribute of marathon training. You can’t start out with a ‘run-like-a-puppy’ mentality, going full beans before totally knackering yourself into a heap after a couple of miles. You need to sustain not only your energy but also your desire. You have a long way to last, and a measured approach is essential in acclimatizing your body to the demands it will experience. This is true as much in training as it is in the race, arguably more so. My best races have been preceded by consistency in training – nothing spectacular, just persistent and almost boringly predictable monotony. (I’m not selling this very well, am I?)

The times in which I have felt most stress were when consistency was absent, usually in people. Many of us have worked for difficult bosses. We may not like it but we can handle it, most of the time. However, when the person is a total ray of sunshine one moment, and a fire-breathing dragon the next, every day becomes like the box of chocolates referenced by Forrest Gump’s Mama. You never know what you’re going to get; the uncertainty is exhausting.

“Be water, my friend.”

Bruce Lee

Water brings me calm. When I conflate water and consistency I imagine tiny, regular, incessant drips of water slowly wearing away rock. Even something as soft as water, when coupled with consistency, has the power to shape the most obstinate of objects. Of course when Bruce Lee spoke about water he was referring to the power afforded by its lack of rigidity, and the importance of responding to one’s circumstances. Is there something rigid in consistency, even if it’s a gentle form of rigidity? Is consistency always the answer?

One of my other sources of inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, “The need for a rational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I’ve been processing his words for several days trying to understand what he meant my rational consistency. (I’m happy to hear the thoughts of wiser minds than mine on this.) As I chewed on the possibilities of irrational consistency and consistent irrationality I began to wonder if he was observing that consistency seems rational to us human creatures, that we cling to it too tightly, and for longer than it might serve us.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Oscar Wilde, or Benjamin Franklin, or Mark Twain… I’m still researching.

Here I am extolling the virtues of consistency, only to now doubt myself. We like to read articles that validate our world view but deep down we know the world is more complex than we care to admit. The words of a person with a strong sense of conviction can feel compelling. I’m no such a person. Consistency has its place, but so does inconsistency. Maybe, like evolution, we are best served by finding a consistent rhythm for ourselves, but randomly interrupting the groove with occasional and unexpected surges. Fnar fnar.

The lazy scaredy cat that is your brain

Have you ever been forced to change a password you use frequently only to enter the old password at the very next opportunity? You make a second attempt, doingso just as quickly as before, only to make exactly the same mistake again; it’s like your fingers have taken over without thinking. Only when you slow down do you get it right. When we do something over and over it becomes easier. I think of this process as carving ‘neural grooves,’ and it can be hard to get ourselves out of these grooves, especially those that run deep. It’s not impossible though. The wiring in our brains is malleable, and neuroplasticity allows us to carve new grooves. It just takes time and attention before they run as deep as our old habits.

These neural grooves help our brains save energy. Our brains are incredibly hungry little critters. Representing only about 2% of our body’s mass but consuming 20% of its energy they are looking for ways to save power. Just think of our our amazing capabilities as pattern recognition machines as an example.

“I didn’t leap to conclusions; I (just) took a small step and there conclusions were.”

~ Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Our pattern recognition super power manifests in unusual ways sometimes, such as when we look at clouds in the sky and see a dragon in their formation. If our brain sees most of a situation it can fill in the missing bits based on prior knowledge and save itself some effort. In the optical illusion of Kaniza’s triangle our eyes perceive two triangles but in reality there are no triangles, there are only incomplete lines and shapes. This need for closure means we can get into trouble when we make incorrect assumptions but for the most part the benefits outweigh the costs. Millions of years ago our pattern recognition super power and need for certainty served our mammal ancestors well: anything familiar was clearly safe (they had ‘still being alive’ as proof of that) but anything new might be a threat. Our mammal ancestors had to react quickly to threats – it might be the last thing they ever saw.

It’s curious how quickly and powerfully we respond to threats, and how long their effects last. Rewards, in contrast, give us a good feeling but their effects don’t hang around. If I complimented you on something you wrote or posted you may experience a warm but ephemeral glow; if I tell you your writing is juvenile and that you should seriously think of doing something you might actually be good at, your reaction will stay with you for a while. You may dwell on that emotion, feeding it, giving it life. Worse still, now I’ve put the thought in your head that I don’t like your writing, it can be hard to shake; our primal brains can find it hard to tell the difference between reality and imagination.

Put all this together. Change means new, and new could mean threat. We react powerfully to threats. The more rational parts of our brain know that changing to a new password, or having to wear a face mask (in 2020 and 2021) is not in the same life threatening category as a saber-toothed tiger, but the older and more primal parts of our wiring are still compelled to react the way they have for eons. If there are gaps in our knowledge our brain will fill in the missing pieces, but not always correctly. Anything we perceive as negative, regardless of whether it’s true, is magnified and can be hard to let go. Learning new ways requires us to expend energy, which our brains would prefer to avoid. In summary, change can be exhausting, at least until it becomes our new normal.

Be kind to yourself. Go slow. Take your time when building new neural grooves, and just blame your brain for being a lazy scaredy cat that craves certainty. I also suspect your writing is better than you fear.

The reluctant halo

Anyone watching Formula One live from Bahrain this past weekend will have been horrified to see Romain Grosjean’s Haas car plough into the barriers at over 100mph before ripping in two and bursting into flames. When I then saw Romain climb unassisted out of the broken, overturned car, which was still wedged in the barrier, and emerge from the inferno like some kind of fireproof super hero I was incredulous and relieved in equal measure. A device that was only introduced to the cars in 2018 is credited with saving his life.

The halo is a curved titanium bar that protects the driver’s head in the open-wheel cars of Formula One. When Romain Grosjean’s car pierced the barriers, a car with no halo would have almost certainly done something so awful to his exposed head that I can’t even bring myself to write it, and yet despite its myriad safety benefits the halo had a rocky reception.

Prior to its introduction some saw the halo breaking with tradition, some suggested it ruined the essence of racing, some thought it obstructed the driver’s vision. That was then but when we look at it today, the presenter and former racing driver Karun Chandock summed it up well during the Grand Prix broadcast when he said, we now see the halo and just think of it as part of the car. How often does something different meet initial resistance only for us, years later, to wonder what all the fuss was about? And how do we move faster through our natural resistance? These thoughts churned through my mind as I watched the race on Sunday morning and by Sunday evening I was offered a solution.

A CNN documentary featured the relationship between inmates at California’s Soledad State prison and the boys at a prep school. Jason Bryant was one of the inmates who helped develop the reading group with prisoners and school kids, and he helped build a program for his fellow inmates to provide financial support for a kid when both the boy’s parents suffered medical emergencies. The TV show presented a scene in which Jason was asking one boy his dream – making it to the NBA. Jason drew a line at the top of a sheet and boldly wrote down that dream. He turned and asked the boy to look back from that point, further down to the empty page, and he asked him what decisions, what actions, what sacrifices he would have made, in every moment, to realize that future in the NBA.

This is similar to an approach I’m following. For the past few months I have begun every day projecting myself three years into the future. I imagine my future self and ask what I might have experienced to help me achieve my goals, and I try to bring that future experience back into the present. If we are shaped by our past experiences, why not be shaped by experiences we have not yet endured?

What I’ve also found through this process is I’m less attached to things in the present that may not serve that future self. Attachment seems to be our hurdle. In my lifetime we have been attached to racing cars without halos, to restaurants with smoking sections, to driving without seatbelts, and in 2020 to faces without masks. We’re attached to our habits, to traditions, to the way things currently feel, ignoring the fact that traditions were once something new, that every habit began with a first action, and that what feels normal is merely an accumulation of consistency. Who new that we might solve our problem with a time machine, and we all have one. These time machines might one day help us save our own lives.