The Circular Reference

File under Understanding the Problem

In November of 2010, the American Psychological Association published their annual report titled Stress in America that paints a grim picture of stress in our lives. Their key overarching finding was:

‘As the U.S. economy continues to struggle for the third year, findings from the 2010 Stress in America survey paint a picture of an overstressed nation. Feeling the effects of prolonged financial and other recession-related difficulties, Americans are struggling to balance work and home life and make time to engage in healthy behaviors, with stress not only taking a toll on their personal physical health, but also affecting the emotional and physical well-being of their families.”

So what are we so stressed about anyway? Not surprisingly the report quantifies these 10 significant stressors in our lives: Money, Work, the Economy, Family responsibilities, Relationships, Personal Health Concerns, Housing costs, Job Stability, Family health problems, and Personal Safety.

We even tend to not understand how our stress affects others. 69% of parents said their stress had little to no impact on their children, yet 91% of kids responded being fully aware of their parents stress levels.

But where does this stress come from? Everywhere - television, marketing, guidance counselors, your Boss, the gym, little league, college admissions, talent shows, and on and on.

One of the major findings of the report was that “…lacking willpower was cited as a barrier to adopting healthy behaviors when lifestyle changes were recommended by a health care provider. Yet the majority believes willpower can be learned as well as improved, if they only had more energy and confidence.”

Talk about a circular reference! Basically that’s saying that you could achieve change if you could only increase your willpower. And you can increase your willpower if you only had more energy and confidence. And you can increase your energy and confidence if you could only change a particular aspect of your life. Ridiculous! It’s that logic that keeps us spinning our wheels in a constant battle against stress.

Song of the Day
So i think i'm late to the Gotye party, but this song is stuck in my head.  In honor of alternative-pop crossovers, the song of the day is Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know" featuring Kimbra.

The Book Review

File under Understanding the Problem

Last post I gave a quote from a favorite book of mine – The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow.

Mlodinow, a professor of Randomness (that’s right…it’s actually a specialty) at Caltech, eloquently describes how random events pervade our lives and more importantly how we interpret random events as having statistical significance and thus importance.

He provides evidence that historic sporting achievements such as Roger Maris’ home run record, and Joe Dimaggio’s hit streak were entirely expected, and if they didn’t do it, someone else would have. He also shows that top Wall Street fund managers have no more expertise than Atlantic City craps players; that the game show “Let’s Make a Deal” is an intellectual puzzle; and that OJ Simpson’s defense attorney’s used statistical misdirection to achieve acquittal.

As I sit here and watch game 2 of the NBA Finals between the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat (Go Mavs), I’m reminded of a paragraph from Mlodinow’s Wall Street Journal Column:

“In sports, the championship contenders are usually pretty evenly matched. But in baseball, even if one assumes that the better team has a lopsided 55/45 edge over the inferior one, the lesser team will win the seven-game World Series 40% of the time. That might seem counterintuitive, but you can look at it as follows. If you play a best-of-one game series, then, by our assumption, the lesser team will win 45% of the time. Playing a longer series will cut down that probability. The problem is that playing a seven-game series only cuts it down to 40%, which isn’t cutting it down by much. What if you demand that the lesser team win no more than 5% of the time—a constraint called statistical significance? The World Series would have to be the best of 269 games, and probably draw an audience the size of that for Olympic curling. Swap baseball for marketing, and you find a mistake often made by marketing departments: assuming that the results of small focus groups reflect a trend in the general population.”

In other words, the sample size has to be so large as to make any inference on significance relevant. How often do we tie importance or make decisions based on little to no information or understanding of a situation?

A lot, and we’ll talk about that next.

Song of the Day
I heard this song for the first time yesterday and I think I have a new favorite band. So sit back, throw on your over-the-ear headphones, and watch a sunset. In honor of the Mavs’ improbable come-from-behind win in game 2, the song of the day is Hudson Bell’s Slow Burn.

The Warthog

File under Understanding the Problem

“A lot of what happens to us – success in our careers, investments, and in our life decisions, both major and minor – is as much the result of random factors as the result of skill, preparedness, and hard work.” – Leonard Mlodinow The Drunkard’s Walk

I’m going to start a few posts on the concept of randomness in our lives and how, despite our best efforts, it has as much an effect on our lives as our conscious decisions, yet we tend to neglect it.

I’ll start by telling the story of a not so bright senior in high school (it’s me by the way). My senior year, in addition to applying for colleges, I applied for military scholarships through ROTC. I always felt drawn to the military and thought if I could get them to pay for college, well then, bonus. For some reason I was always enamored by the Army ground support aircraft, the A-10 warthog.

Source

In hopes of flying it someday, I applied for the Army ROTC scholarship and I figured I would apply for the Navy scholarship as well, as a back-up. Fortunately, I got the Army scholarship and set off to school in Florida with my sights set on one day taking to the air in the A-10. It wasn’t until halfway through my sophomore year that I realized that I hadn’t seen or heard any mention of the A-10 in the army arsenal in the past year and a half. Upon inquiring with our instructors they looked at me with a puzzled look on their faces and responded that it was an Air Force airplane. I applied for the wrong scholarship. To this day I’m not sure why I thought it was the other way around.

Now at this time I had already grown to love my school and the Army and I wasn’t really upset in the least because I still saw benefits and good things for my future. But had I known it was an Air Force plane from the beginning and applied for the Air Force ROTC scholarship and NOT gotten it, I’m not so sure I would have had the same reaction. I would have been devastated - my future in shambles.

I think the latter instance is how we react when it appears our happiness is tied to one outcome; when success can only be achieved through one endstate. But think of all the random events that have directed your life one way or another when there was no obvious outcome determined. Your life would certainly be different, but would it be any less successful, or would you be any less happy?

I’m sure you’ve all thought of this before. What if you had a different roommate in college, or were assigned to a different dorm? Or what if you turned left instead of right? How different would your life be? In each case there is no obvious difference to your choices at that instant, yet the outcome could be wildly different. There are many more of those decisions everyday than ones where we understand the outcome and yet we get extremely upset when the latter decisions “don’t go our way.”

The Daily Antidote
You turn random events into successful outcomes every day. Do the same thing with events that don’t seem to go your way, and quit worrying about them.

The Song of the Day
In honor of a song played at 87% of all college parties in the late 80's and early 90's, the song of the day is a live version of the Violent Femmes’ Kiss Off.

The Disclaimer

No, but it may be more fun.


All kidding aside, this blog is not intended to be a polemic for the slacker in each of us.  I would never encourage anyone not to follow their dreams, or not to stay late at work to improve a presentation, or not to study each night for three weeks for a final exam.  And in no way do I encourage passive, Blutarski-esque laziness, or advocate a world where we don’t keep score, or have winners and losers. The difference, as we will see, is in how we tread the fine line between laziness and proactive management of our effort-to-success ratio.  For I am acutely aware that if no one strived to be an astronaut, we would still stare at the moon each night wondering what could be (or what it's made of).  My hope is the readers of this blog take a look at their lives and ask “When is ‘Good’, good enough?"

Song of the Day
In honor of "Do you mind if we dance with yo dates?", the song of the day is the Isley Brothers' "Shout". as performed by Otis Day and the Knights (by the way, the greatest wedding song of all time, hands down, no question, end of discussion).

Have a great weekend!!

The 6 Habits

So after all of the intro stuff I’ve posted thus far, we’re finally here at the take-away practices from this blog. I call them the Six Habits for Marginally Effective (yet Happy) People.  So here they are, in particular order:


1. Meet Yourself – Our effort is derived from our understanding of our own capabilities. By understanding our capabilities and limitations we can better align our efforts to what we have the capacity to achieve.

2. Set the Bar Low (and Barely Exceed the Bar) – Our effort is based on the need to meet other’s expectations. By committing to less we can actually ultimately please others (and ourselves) more.

3. Get a Smaller Plate – Our effort is based on our productivity-derived self-worth. By understanding that being busy does not equal being productive we can make sure the activities we do support the endstate.

4. Procrastinate – Our effort is based on our time management skills. By understanding the time required to complete a task we are freed from over analyzing, thinking, and stressing about the outcome.

5. Avoid the Machine – Our effort is based on our susceptibility to the allure of the perfect state. By understanding why we succumb to the self-help machine we can be much happier with the state we’re in.

6. Cage the Rage – Effort is based on our emotional state in achieving success. By understanding how “failure” affects us emotionally, we can reduce the stress we feel when perceiving certain outcomes.

The rest of the posts from here on out will be stories and examples that show the benefit of perfecting these habits. And I sincerely hope other’s share their examples as well. Next up: The Disclaimer.

But first, the…

Song of the Day
In honor of the passing of the legendary blues and boogie-woogie piano player, Pinetop Perkins, the song of the day is Pinetop Perkins’ “Mojo Workin’.”  Stick around if you can through the whole song, or at least check out around the 2 minute mark.  It's pretty amazing to see someone in their 90's jam.

The Effort

So right now we're working through the basis of the 'perfect' antidote philosophy and so far we've briefly talked about averageness and the realities of achieving success, and now we come to the effort we expend to achieve those goals.

First of all, we'll define Effort as the physical, mental, or emotional expenditure required to do work or achieve something. Effort may also encompass our physical reactions to certain factors such as stress of failure, or time pressures. All to achieve a certain level of success.

Let's call that success, "Greatness,"  which we'll define as an ideal state of being in regards to any aspect of your life. It is a completely self-defined state. However, in each case it is the ideal ultimate state, whether in your career, hobbies, relationships, beauty, self-worth, whatever. Examples may include a perfect beach body, promotion at work, the perfect relationship, a .400 batting average, acing the final exam, or the perfect recital.

The effort to achieve that may take many forms. Whether it's stress at work, time studying, pleasing others, or emotions in response to failure or negative situations, we all expend effort every day.  So before we can begin thinking about what drives us to achieve greatness, what the problems associated with our ambition are, and how we can begin to change or reduce our effort, we need to understand the six components from which our effort is derived:

- Our understanding of our own capabilities
- Our need to meet others’ expectations
- Our productivity-derived self-worth
- Our time management skills
- Our susceptibility to the allure of the perfect state
- Our emotional state in achieving success

Now it starts to get fun, because next up are the 6 Habit's of Marginally Effective (yet happy) People.

 Song of the Day
In honor of the pressure to expend effort every day, and in honor of great songs in great movies, the song of the day is Queen's "Under Pressure".

The Endstate, Part 2

As a young Army Lieutenant in an aviation unit I made the mistake of telling the aviation Battalion Commander that we needed two Blackhawk helicopters for the upcoming mission. At which point he efficiently told me that was incorrect. What I really needed was to move 22 people from one point to another. THAT was the goal. The means by which that would happen would be based on multiple factors, none of which included my “expert” opinion. Since then I have been careful to distinguish ‘means’ from the goal. But I see a lot of the confusion of the two when we spend effort that has nothing to do with what our ultimate goal is, and that brings us to core thought #2:

2. If “success” is achieved, most often the rewards don’t equate to the amount of effort expended.

We’re always told that hard work and perseverance is the gold standard for success, when in reality it may only give us the experience of working hard and persevering. The core thought results from two things: We may not have understood the endstate to begin with and couldn’t figure out the actual effort required to achieve it, or it wasn’t the endstate we wanted anyway. In either case we incorrectly understood what we truly wanted. We confused the effort with the endstate, and the means we think we wanted, may not be the easiest, nor the most effective way to achieve our goals.

We’ll share lots of different examples of this, but in each case our goal will be to lower the effort to success ratio and we’ll talk about that next.

Song of the Day

In honor of the NCAA Basketball Tournament (the Big Dance), and the full moon being closest to the earth on its elliptical orbit since 1983 tonight, the song of the day is a live version of Van Morrison’s "Moondance". Check out moonrise around 7:30 pm in the mid-atlantic.

Intro: The Endstate-Part 1

I've been in grad school for a long time. In fact, it feels like I'm on the seven year plan. A lot of people go to school for seven years, you may say. Yes, but those people are called doctors.*

A couple of years ago in class, our professor went over the answers to our mid-terms having passed out the graded exams. As the class was dismissed there was one student who approached the professor and began vehemently disagreeing with her grade. She was obviously distressed having put in a lot of time studying, yet having not achieved her goals. She left the room without resolution and was clearly spending emotional effort. There were most likely internal and external forces that defined her endstate success by that grade.

I hoped that someday she would have perspective on her situation and she would see that the grade would have much less effect on her future than many other factors. But that didn’t change her immediate feeling of effort not equating to success. I walked away thinking that we often don't understand the endstate we're striving for, and it led me to two core thoughts. The first being:

1. Despite considerable effort, “success” may never be achieved.

First of all, we don't have to define "success" too stringently. We can just call it any desired endstate to which we commit effort. And this core thought is a result of so many different things: we may not truly understand what it takes to achieve the endstate, we may not have the capabilities to achieve the endstate, or there are other random factors in our lives that prevent achievement. In any case, we often struggle without understanding why we're not succeeding, why we don't escape the bounds of our current state.

Source

Think of a mountain with “Good” at the bottom and “Great” at the top. To achieve greatness you must exert effort to roll a boulder up the mountain. Only by getting the boulder all the way to the top do you achieve your desired outcome, at great effort nonetheless. Anything short of that, no matter the effort expended, the boulder rolls back to the bottom, or back to a state of “Good.” Like the Greek myth of Sisyphus, we are condemned to an eternity of rolling the boulder uphill over and over again only to have it roll back to “Good” every time. Or like the Coyote who never gets the Roadrunner despite great effort. Pick your analogy.

We'll talk about the second core thought in the next post.

*The first person to comment with the name of the movie the line above is from will receive a free Sisyphus “That’s How I Roll” T-shirt (should you actually want one). For the record that's not me in the picture.

Song of the Day

In honor of rolling a stone and the pressure of ideal, perfect states, the song of the day is The Rolling Stone’s “Mother’s Little Helper.”

Jack Squat

In this, the inaugural post of Your 'Perfect' Antidote, i realize it's impossible to explain my entire philosophy in a few short paragraphs.  So I won't even try.  I will only harken back to a pop-culture clip from many years ago to set us along our journey.




Those are harsh words from easily the worst fictional motivational speaker of all time and yet it’s funny because the thought rings a certain truth to us.   The “what do you want to be when you grow up” questions asked of us as children were always answered with the loftiest of goals – a doctor, astronaut, president, professional sports player, etc.  Yet only a miniscule percentage of us achieve the pinnacle of those professions much less any profession.  So what happened?  Why in the years between such proclamations and professional reality did most of us ‘Fail’ to achieve greatness?  Did we not try hard enough?  Did we not want it badly enough?  Of course we did.  The answer is that is wasn’t meant to happen.  Not in a predestined sort of way, but in that we are all different.  We have different capabilities and limitations, different life circumstances, and a host of seen and unseen influences that shape our future achievements and potential.  And this goes for every aspect of our lives, not just professional, but in relationships, health and fitness, appearance, and intelligence too. Just as most of us do not reach the pinnacle of our career fields, most of us are not the most thoughtful spouses or friends, we do not have movie star looks, we have high blood pressure, or food goes straight to our hips.  The point is, most of us are average in just about everything we do or are.

So what you ask? If we're all average, why do you need a guide to 'achieve' averageness?

Because we all spend an unbelievable amount of time and considerable effort to not be average, yet we all still are.  And we'll spend the rest of our time figuring out why that is.  Along the way we'll learn about what that effort looks like, tips and tools for reducing that effort, and we'll share our experiences in our quest for averageness.

 Plus there will be lots of random information.  So let's kick it off with the Song of the Day.  


Song of the Day
In honor of reducing emotional effort, we'll start with a favorite - Modest Mouse's 'Float On'. Because we'll all be ok, even if things end up a bit too heavy.