Barack Obama : : Change We Can Believe In | Sam Graham-Felsen's Blog: "A More Perfect Union"
Thank you, Barack Obama, for believing enough in the American people to actually tackle a complex subject and discuss it with nuance, depth and honesty. I want to see more of this kind of talk from our leaders and I hope that both you and Hillary can elevate the next several weeks of campaigning by continuing the behavior exhibited here.
I'm of the belief that this idea of self is always in flux. This last weekend, I ran my first marathon and changed a piece of my self in a meaningful way. This post is about examining my conception of self and one of the tactics that I apply to create change in my life.
Shortly before my 10th birthday, I started taking Tae Kwon Do (TKD). From day one I was hooked. Being shorter or smaller didn't matter. I was fast, I learned quickly, I liked to fight. I was good at it, immediately.
A few months later, my family adopted a cat. Aside from fish, I'd never really had a pet and taking that cat in really opened my eyes to how attached one can get to an animal. We named her Aintabelle (the opposite of Isabelle..super dorky) and I quickly became her favorite.
As coincidence would have it, I have pretty severe pet allergies. We didn't really know it at the time, but when we took in the cat, I inflamed the asthma that was latent in my lungs.
So there I was, 10 years old, passionate about this new sport I'd started, in love with a new cat friend we'd adopted and wheezing. A LOT. Life seemed really unfair to me at the time.
Despite the asthma, I managed to keep practicing TKD. I loved it so much that I fought through the asthma. It'd flare up, but I managed it.
At home, as we figured the allergies out, I had to stop playing with the cat so much (it was hard, I'd usually just stop when my eyes got too red..) and she couldn't go in my room at all. It wasn't perfect, but combined with the inhalers, the allergy meds and the modified diet my parents put together for the cat, we kept it going all throughout my teens.
It was allergy-induced and although exercise exacerbated it, I could make it through in certain situations. I loved TKD so much (perhaps because I'd tried it before having to deal with asthma-attack laden lungs) that I figured out a way to get through. I got stronger and stronger every class and it actually made me more fit. I had to work 20% harder than everyone else, but I didn't care. It meant that I had more gas in the tank when I was finishing matches (my specialty became winning in the final round). I did what I had to do, because I wanted it, just that badly.
PE and school sports however, were another matter. When cross-country and track and field came around, I tried to compete, like I did for all of our sports. I ran a bit but didn't really enjoy it. It was torture, running while having lungs that were not terribly efficient and seeing other kids go so much faster with much less work. It demoralized me.
At school I became the kid with asthma, who couldn't run when you had to run in PE or who would, but was slow and had the inhaler. That was me. From time to time, I'd feel great and run well, but most of the time, I was slow, it was painful and I hated it.
Meanwhile, at TKD I was a different person entirely. I matured, I competed, I did well and it was a virtuous cycle of reinforcement. Day after day, month after month, I developed an idea of who I was in my TKD uniform: I was a competitor, a winner, an instructor, a coach. A leader. More than anything, Tae Kwon Do taught me how to lead when I was a teenager.. it was incredible.
I think that while my asthma is much more prone to flaring up when I'm running (particularly uphill) what really occurred was that asthma became more than just a physical ailment that impeded my performance. It became something that formed my sense of self. Thinking about that for a few moments is, for me, really enlightening.:
The way in which I saw the world, the opportunities available to me, the possibilities in life.. all of the options in my head became affected by a physical affliction.
I got it in my head that I wanted to be good at TKD. That I could prove myself through it - that martial arts, unlike other sports, were a place where the fact that I was smaller, smarter and not white didn't matter. They might even be assets. My frame of reference, at TKD, gave me the ability to envision great success, despite asthma.
I decided that I could and would be good at TKD and with hard work and practice, I was right.
As I met with more success in TKD, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. I'd prepare myself for the competitions and then, day of, I was often less interested in winning the competition than just getting it over with. Many times, I only really invested myself in winning when I thought I had something to prove to others. There was the match where the kid was double my size (no joke - I weighed 50+lbs, he weighed 98 lbs), or the numerous times when I sparred the adults in class and I'd destroy them for taking it easy on me. More often than not, I was motivated to prove others wrong.
I remember two distinct moments of clarity on this point:
- The first occurred when I was preparing for the state championships my senior year of high school. I was at this point, the favorite. I'd won the past 3 or 4 years and I'd actually competed nationally a number of times. It was a strange feeling, being the favorite. I took training easier. I didn't push myself to fight the bigger, tougher opponents in my classes. My friend Rocky had argued with me, saying that if I forced myself to run, I'd be in even better shape and would be able to not just finish the fights strong, but to finish the tournament strong. Fighting 4 or 5 9-minute bouts was devastatingly tiring. He was right. I didn't care. I ran once and stopped.
- The second occurred at the high school graduation party my parents threw me. My master came to the party. At this point, he'd been part of my life for 9 years. I was his 3rd student. He cared for me quite a bit. He made me who I am, in some ways. He talked with my parents about the fact that he was disappointed that I was leaving the state and couldn't continue to train with him for Nationals and the Olympic Games. I heard about this later from my parents and the overriding thought in my head was, "That sounds like too much work."
I'd looked to prove other people wrong with TKD in the first place and followed that pattern by looking to others for motivation to get better at TKD. Progress, after a while, became a series of spurts, rather than steadily occurring change. I've learned that this approach doesn't tend to work well in the long run. We have to create and maintain the habits that define us. It requires continuous investment and repetition, that's why it is, in fact, habitual. My habits take work, regularly.
So, one of the habits that I care a great deal about is that of self-motivation.
When no one has expectations of you or they already think that you're doing well, you can often coast and make excuses if you don't live up to expectations. The reality of the world that I live in is that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of work to just tread water. In personal and professional life, being average to above-average doesn't seem to be challenging. Of course, this is contextual, so I understand that I exist in a privileged class. I might rephrase this and say: coasting, in life, appears to be the norm.
I think that in some ways, this reflects upon how much we want to be seen as "nice" people. In the world that I live in, very few people are truly honest in their evaluations of one another. They bottle problems up, they hold back with suggestions, they get scared to give praise. While this is polite, it also makes it much less likely that we can look to others for motivation. One of the reasons that I have this blog is to solicit feedback and motivation from my friends. Only a few of you choose to :)
I don't think that this is terrible. It does, however, explain why I'm more likely to give you feedback and try to offer praise. I have had to learn that I can't rely upon you for motivation.
Over the past several years, I've taken up running. It started off slowly - 10 and 15 minutes on the treadmill at the gym. Jogging really slowly with friends. Introducing myself to the idea of enjoying running, not hating it. I found something amazing happened once I started running outside in San Francisco: I got happier.
It really was as simple as that. One day I started running down to the Marina and along the water and after that I couldn't stop. It's just that beautiful, calming and energizing for me. I've always loved the water and running along it made me appreciate running and San Francisco far more than ever before.
As I ran, I got healthier, I got happier and I taught myself self-motivation.
At first, when I started running regularly, I found myself looking at how others were doing in order to find a reason to push myself a little harder. I was falling back on the habits I'd developed in TKD. But I realized it and sought to change it.
Now, when I run, I play mind games with myself. Sometimes I see someone running faster and see if I can keep up with them to test if I'm taking it too easily. I see how much of a song I can make it through at a dead sprint at the end of my run (I was up to half a song or ~2 1/2 mins). In short, I learned to focus inside for my running motivation and increased performance.
I made myself start running the bridge, to see if I could do it.
I could.
I took the US Half Marathon course map and did it, the day before the race, to see if I could do it.
I could.
I started training with Allison for the LA marathon, to see if I could get my mileage up quickly.
I could.
3 weeks after Allison said that she was going to do the marathon, I knew I was in. I wanted to see if I could prove that my past self could be changed. I wanted to see if I could grow far beyond the asthma attacks of my youth to complete a marathon.
Which brings me back to the title of this post, "Proving your self wrong". As much as it was important for me to build myself up and enter the race, feeling as if I could do the marathon, that's not the whole story.
Many of us know and believe that being positive is a great thing, that it helps us push forward in life. But many of us forget that along the way, we reach points where we feel as if we CAN'T do anything. In those moments, many of us vow to avoid those can't determinations again. We don't push through.
I was twittering, leading up to the marathon and during it, because I wanted to document some of my thinking for myself (and anyone else who was interested). In mile 20 of the race, I twittered:
"Mile 20. I can do this. I can do this."
I didn't twitter however, that at mile 23 of the marathon, I KNEW that I couldn't finish. I felt it in my legs. They were done. Too tired. I'd gone out too fast, shouldn't have separated from my partner at mile 12 and it was far hotter than I was used to. My head told me something:
I wasn't going to be able to finish.
And so, what I want people to remember is that sometimes, it's not that you're lacking a positive outlook. It's that you need to prove yourself wrong. If you want something out of life but think you've objectively determined that you can't have it... you're probably right.
But what if you're wrong?
In my first job after college, I was an "I-banker" at Deutsche Bank and my first Associate, Campo, used to repeat over and over again the above mantra.
I always found it rather ironic, given that my experiences subsequently taught me that banking is a pretty short-sighted profession that prefers to sprint on the backs of its employees. Day after day, week after week, the "fire drills" of the profession burn out most of the employees and the major method of keeping employees is by buying their time at ever-increasing rates.
I believe that we're constantly building and growing what it means to be "me". Our actions, our words, our choices - they provide us with a body of work that makes up the idea of self. I'd say that from the age of about 5, I understood at a very deep level that what I do today provides the idea of who I am tomorrow - to myself, to my friends, to my parents (the specific story involves Big Wheels, the park and McDonald's..).
One of the challenges that comes with this perspective on life is that I'm ALWAYS looking ahead, thinking about what's coming up, where I want to be going and how I should get there. It's similar to what happens as I finish my run by heading up Fillmore St. - I look up to see if there are obstacles/people that I'm going to have to adjust for and I make sure to adjust so that I don't have to suddenly change my pace or gait.
However, if all that I'm focused on is UP the hill, I forget that there are things at my feet, these steps, that I have to negotiate on my way up the hill. If I forget to watch what's directly in front of me enough, I'll NEVER make it up the hill to the obstacles in the distance.
This is a tradeoff that all of us are faced with in our lives. The question is an everpresent undercurrent every single time we make a choice: "Will you think about just right now or are you thinking about tomorrow, the next day and 5 years from now?". We answer it with our actions, our words, our perspectives, our self-measurements.. our lives. Some of us ONLY live in the moment. Others among us only live in the IMAGINED possibilities.
Over the past several years this question has consumed me. Again and again, I've looked at this question, turned it over in my head and wondered to myself, "How I can know if I should be thinking about the long term or the short term right now?"
It was only this past year that I successfully addressed it.
The problems of perception are myriad, but one of the hardest is accepting the fact that your view of the world disallows you from seeing ALL possible angles. I've come to accept that no matter what, I always see the sprint through a marathoner's eyes. I always view the short term choices through the prism of my long term goals.
I'm never going to see the world as others who think only about the short term think. I can only hope to know enough about the steps in front of me that I successfully navigate them and save myself from falling on my face. I'll leave the bulk of the responsibilities to those who think about the short term. My talents lie in the long term and it is there where I'll do my best work.
I feel like I'm finally ready for this marathon. See you at the finish line.
Wow, the past few days have seen a noticeable increase in traffic here, which says to me that some of you subscribers are more actively engaged and are maybe even passing on my posts to friends of yours. Thanks!
A quick shout out to a few folks who've been commenting:
Valeria - for always taking the time to comment when I link to you. Very impressive. Mark - I always appreciate that you take the time to leave a quick note when you like something. Thanks bud. Jim - Wow. Awesome comment on my "Go Fail Yourself" post. Between the comments from you and Ben on that post, that has to be one of my personal favorite posts so far. Ian - For sharing your little javascript code on my "Proactive Discovery" post. Amazingly, you were the only one to contribute something there :)
Web Worker Daily brings us back to the point of networking: remembering that it's not just a series of transactions is important.
Fred Wilson hits on something near and dear to my heart - he's unsure of where this is going and about the difference between what users want and what developers will seek out. I believe that I have a very good idea of where it should go. Let's talk Fred.
He also links to Dave Winer, who gets provocative in Fred's comments (Scott Rafer also adds in his useful pragmatic view). I think that he's right on here - real platforms look different from Facebook F8, folks.
Jason Calacanis's post which spins the discussion around and essentially asks, "Does this stuff have any substance?" He also continues on in a second post, lightly touching on something that I think is being left under-discussed: the younger generations are being raised, at least in the U.S., with the expectation that they have to market themselves.
Proving that he really is a portal, Scoble also points me over to new stuff coming out of Plaxo. I'm hoping to make it to Lunchaxo tomorrow, to see what's going on.
The NY Times does a piece on how the businesses who create networks impact real-life relationships in significant and negative ways.
Ok, I'm realizing this could be a bit of overload for people, so I'm going to stop now. As promised, I'm working on a more coherent piece that will hopefully pull these things together better.
Traditionally, I'm a "workaholic", I suppose.
I'm the type of person who pushes, pushes, pushes. I don't sleep much, I want to be good at everything and I have a really strong sense of responsibility and commitment. I work at being as good as I can be at everything that I do.
What I've learned over the years though, is that sometimes, by wanting to do well at everything, I forget to do well at making time for myself. I forget to stop and spend time really thinking about how I can direct my energies most effectively and in the best alignment with my goals.
Although I've been getting better at doing that, it's time that I allocate more of my time to that endeavor. I'm down in San Diego visiting friends for a few days for just this reason: to disconnect and be more proactive about thinking through where I'm going and what I want to do. You can expect to see more of that in my posts in the coming weeks/months and hopefully, you'll also see some more progress being made on how I'm chasing after the things that I want out of life.
How about you folks - how good are you at making time for yourself? How do you choose to do it?
By way of my friend Damon's blog comes this amazing video of a home crowd at a basketball game. It's incredible to watch how into the game they are and the lack of social fear.
That's right, social fear. Maybe you should think about that for a moment. Do you have social fear? Are you afraid of being yourself in public?
The digitization of our lives is happening. Whether it's Flickr, YouTube, your blog or whatever's coming next, we're becoming more digitally entwined. That scares people. A ton. But it's also good, because you can share these experiences. Watch this video and then think about it like this:
- Imagine that you go to school here and you're trying to tell a friend who doesn't go there about your freshman year. You're telling them how cohesive the student body is, how tied together everyone feels and how much they love basketball. Your friend listens intently, but they don't "get" it. Not just with your words.
- You send them this video.
Then what happens? Maybe your friend picks up the phone and calls you with 5 questions about your school. Maybe they want to transfer there. Or think you should leave.
But, all of a sudden, they've gotten to experience your life more intimately than ever before.
Isn't that what we're really seeking with this stuff? The ability to more fully share who we are, what we think, what we do? Aren't we really try to share the experiences of our lives?
I think so.
You tell me. Tell me what you want out of blogs, flickr, youtube, twitter etc. I'm dying to know.
Remember when you were young and everything was new to you? When you didn't know what the word in the book you were reading aloud from was? When you mispronounced it and you might have felt a little silly, but mostly, you just wanted to know how to say it and what it meant?
Do you remember that feeling?
It wasn't that bad was it?
Do you currently fail enough? Do you put yourself in enough situations to fail?
I came across this short post at Futurelab about failure a bit ago that reinforces a belief that I hold strongly:
Expecting failure and embracing chance hold the key to success in business.
AND
The companies that are most able to explore and innovate - something akin to random [biological] mutation - and then rapidly and flexibly adapt when an innovation succeeds or fails, will do best.
Now, let's think about that for a moment, shall we? I think that this is saying that if you're not adept at dealing with change and failure, then you're not going to do as well as those who are more capable. In business, but in life as well, I believe this to be true:
Are you not working enough at putting yourself into situations where you can fail?
Are you not taking enough risks?
Are you not seeking that which you are truly hopeful about, because the possibility of failure is so disappointing as to be avoided?
(Scroll down to skip ahead to iPhone goodies if you'd like)
The constant innovation around content creation and distribution tools means that peer marketing communications are, along with every other type of communication, expanding rapidly. This isn't a new phenomenon, it's just something that's being accelerated by the technologies employed. Which is not to underestimate the impacts of that acceleration, but rather, to say that I dislike it when people frame this as something that is brand new and novel. It's not, get over it.
"Advertising's New Reality" - Aside from the unfortunate title, this is a pretty thoughtful piece about the fact that consumers are assisting in the creation of advertising and importantly, do so willingly because it fits with their interests and existing activities. I believe that thoughtful marketers have always understood that involving consumers in the process of creating, marketing and revising their products/services but now, more marketers are waking up to that fact. The really exciting thing is that it's getting easier to connect with consumers in order to accomplish this.
"Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" - This lengthy but entertaining piece (like my blog posts right :)?) focuses on one innovative musician who's using peer communications and the new tools at his disposal to create and grow an audience (it's not easy though, it takes a ton of work). An example of the great stuff to discover in this article (bolding mine):
Coulton’s fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent gig, half of the audience members (!!) I spoke to had originally come across his music via one of these fan-made videos.
"Critical Mass: Everyone listens to Walt Mossberg" - For those of you who don't read the Journal regularly, you might not be aware that Mossberg's considered to be one of the best consumer technology writers out there. This piece by Ken Auletta (an excellent writer in his own right, I really enjoyed Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way
If it works as I envision it, this column . . . would be the voice, the champion, of the individual person actually faced with buying and using the core hi-tech devices—the customer whom industry calls the "end user".
Yep, I, along with every other blogger, must mention the iPhone. But I mention it as an extension of the article about Walt Mossberg. The video below is his video review of the iPhone (from the larger print review). The review is basically a ringing endorsement of the phone. For those who make it to the end of the video, they'll see the drawbacks of the AT&T exclusivity (certainly limiting) and the EDGE network (very slow for data), but most people won't need to get that far to buy in.
This video and review will sell a LOT of iPhones, mark my words. As someone who has successfully achieved his goal (quoted above) of being the voice of the "end user", Mossberg has gained an amazing amount of influence. Although the hype around the phone is astronomical, there are still many taking the "wait and see" approach. Mossberg's review does something that no amount of corporate advertising can do: it convinces you that you don't need to wait and see.
It already convinced Jason Calacanis
Did it convince you?
I believe in compromise.
I don't believe in settling.
People often confuse these two statements. I hear people using them interchangeably, but they're not the same.
Compromise is about ideas in conflict coming together to create a workable and beneficial amalgamation, hopefully one that increases harmony, reaches a balance and combines efforts. 
Wikipedia says, "In arguments, compromise is a concept of finding agreement through communication, through a mutual acceptance of terms—often involving variations from an original goal or desire." As with the concept of Yin-Yang, opposing forces can also be complementary and achieve a balance. A balance that is in movement, keeping one another in check. Compromise is healthy, sustainable and central to the process of growth and development.
Settling is about stopping. Settling is the process of coming to a stop. Bodies in motion coming to rest. When people misuse settling as a term that is interchangeable with compromise, what they're really saying is that it's time to give up. Time to come to a rest and stop debating, stop working towards a better solution, stop improving what exists today. Whether you're settling for a relationship partner, or settling for a job or settling for who you are, don't kid yourself: you're not compromising. Rather than giving some of your ideas to a shared conception of the way forward, you're pulling back from the conversation and refusing to struggle to be part of the better future that can exist.
There is no way forward when you settle. There is only here. Here is not good enough.
Are you settling or compromising?
Last week I wrote about graduation, my sister and finding your passion, in order to really unleash your "inner honor student", as I put it.
As is often the case, once my mind gets working on something, I find that I pay more attention to the world and look for examples/counter-examples etc in my daily life. It turns out that "finding your passion" appears to be a rather popular meme in the blogosphere at the moment, because I came across a number of posts that were talking about passion in a similar manner. I didn't go looking for validation, but I guess I found some :)
Most emboldening, however, was footage from the conversation between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the "D" conference. Below is the final segment of their talk, where they took audience questions and if you forward to the 8:50 mark, you'll see them answer a question by talking about loving what they do. Jobs, in particular, talks about it really eloquently.
By the way, I highly recommend checking out the entire video, if you're interested. These are two of the greatest minds in technology and their interaction, respect for one another and viewpoints are, for me, really quite inspiring to watch. You can find the comprehensive coverage at the All Things D site, here.
Also, given that one of the above-mentioned posts about passion that I came across was Drew Meyers' riff on the same topic, I thought I'd link to his post as well.
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