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Meritocracy: A Fine, But Mythological, Idea

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I love the idea of a meritocracy! It’s a glorious myth that makes a wonderful story. But if you look at how resources, wealth, prestige, etc. get distributed, it’s very hard to make a case for meritocracy.

It’s no surprise we believe in meritocracy. We spend our entire first 18-25 conscious years in school. School is a true meritocracy. The more you work at mastering the material, the more you earn good grades. I don’t know about you, but school was the last meritocracy I had the privilege to enjoy.

At my very first job out of college, I was told, “You do the best job of anyone here, but you’re too young to be making any more money.” Sadly, I persisted in thinking that doing a good job was the way to get what I wanted out of life. I still think that way in my gut, even though I continue to see little evidence of it.

Many very successful people talk a lot about meritocracy and how they just worked hard to succeed. That’s all fine and good, but they’re looking at only their own story. They’re not looking at the vast majority of people in the world who work very, very hard, and don’t get rewarded nearly as well. I’ve also noticed that the people who are highly successful/rewarded/prestigious have a tremendously powerful psychological vested interest in believing in and trumpeting the idea of meritocracy. Otherwise they would have to confront the idea that maybe they don’t deserve all that money/power/fame, and it simply came to them because they were born to the right parents, or were in the right place at the right time.

In capitalism, we give the bulk of the value created by an enterprise to the owners. It’s far better to own 50% of the equity in a successful company that you left 6 months after founding it than to work your ass off for 12 years making that same company a success, but working on salary. What matters as far as material reward isn’t the work/merit, but the capital and ownership structure. (That’s a true story, by the way. The company founder never worked again. The employees, while doing reasonably well, are still working at the same or other companies to earn their daily bread.)

If you want to do a good job, by all means, do it. Personally, I like to be proud of my work, and I strive to do the very best. But don’t confuse that with getting what you want. When you’re designing your life, remember that producing good work may be something you do for the psychic and self-esteem rewards. When you’re going after other rewards, say, money, be as clear-headed as you can about what will help you reach that result. Hard work and skill may not have anything to do with living the kind of life you want.

“I could never do that…”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my doing a reading of my one-man musical in New York City. A friend of mine said, “That sounds incredible! I could never do something like that.” I agree! I think so, too. The last two years have been spent thinking the same thing. It’s been scary! I’ve felt like a total fake. I can’t reliably find my starting note, and I was working with people who perform, act, and write professional musical theater. People half my age have five times my talent, and already are establishing themselves on Broadway.

Indeed, the thought came often, “I could never do something like that.” But oddly, I didn’t let it stop me. It wasn’t courage. It wasn’t determination. It wasn’t drive. It was the simple realizing that it didn’t matter. If I truly couldn’t do it, I’d fail, and I’d have the perfect excuse: no reasonable person would have expected me to succeed. And if I could, then I’d have learned something.

What are you not doing because you believe “I could never do something like that?” How can you take the first step anyway, knowing it’s foolish, and a waste of time and effort? If you fail, big deal, you find out you were right. But what would it be worth to you to succeed?

There’s only one way to find out…

Keep the Big Picture When Making Life Choices

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Keeping The Big Picture Will Lead to Better Life Choices

They’re considering eliminating over 100 bus routes in Boston to save money. You see, the public transit is considered a separate profit center. That means it has to pay for itself through the money it raises. In order to balance its budget, it must drastically reduce service.

The problem is that public transportation is part of a larger system. If it becomes too expensive, or the serviced drops too much, people will buy cars. Probably cheap cars. In addition to pollution, that will cause much more wear and tear on the highways, not to mention more congestion in an already highly-congested city. Let’s not even consider what it will do to the parking situation.

From the perspective of the community, the public transportation system isn’t just a standalone business. It also reduces the burden on other costly parts of the community. But since the subway doesn’t get any monetary credit for reducing congestion or roadway wear-and-tear, those positive effects aren’t reflected in the decision to eliminate the bus routes.

Your Life is a Community

You can think of your life as being an entire community, made up of projects and activities chosen to meet your needs. When we want to improve our lives, we find a need that isn’t getting met and try to focus on improving that part of our life in isolation.

For example, we may decide we need to get in better shape, so we begin working out regularly. But that much working out takes time, and we may not realize we’re taking the time away from socializing—which also fills an important need. Considering our needs in isolation can lead us to make decisions that may be good for the individual need, but not so great for our overall life.

Consider Your Whole Life When Choosing Action

When considering how to improve your life, don’t just consider one need or shortfall. Make a full map of the things that are important to you, and consider the overall balance of how you’re getting your needs met in each area. Then when you decide it’s time to improve an area, search for ways to improve that won’t detract from other areas of your life. When you decide to exercise, if you know socializing is also important to you, you can be on the lookout from day one for social ways to exercise. This can lead you to uncover entirely different approaches to getting your needs met. For example, signing up for team sports instead of choosing a solitary exercise program.

Fear + Excitement: A Powerful Combination

As those of you who follow me on Facebook or Google Plus know, this week I went to New York to perform a reading of the one-man musical I have been co-writing. Being the main character, this meant my singing and acting was to be the center of attention for about an hour. By the way, I’ve only once sung a solo as part of a performance, and it was part of a cabaret theater class, where I was just one of many. As the date approached, I found myself getting increasingly scared and excited.

Scared all by itself is rarely a sign that you should run into a situation with open arms. We fear things when they are unknown and we believe there’s a chance we will get hurt physically, emotionally, or socially if we move forward. We might be wrong, but we might also be right. Listening to your fear is a Good Thing.

Excitement by itself just means we want to do something. We think it will nurture us or be fun or do something good for us. It is easy to fall into a habit of doing the same things over and over, just for the excitement. As the ladies who lunch might put it, “Sky-diving _again_? Really, Bernice, you’re getting so predictable.”

The combination of fear and excitement is a golden opportunity. The excitement tells you there’s something compelling. The fear tells you you’re moving outside your comfort zone. You’re growing and stretching yourself.

When you find this combination, take note! Use the fear to find possible pitfalls and start taking action to minimize them. If you’re afraid you can’t sing, that’s a sign that a few voice lessons may be in order.

And this is where the excitement comes in. It’s easy to say “too much trouble” or “I’m tone deaf. It’s genetic.” Tap into your excitement to take the voice lessons anyway. And keep with it until you start going for the thing that inspires you with such fear-citement.

The day before my reading, I came down with a nasty stomach flu that would have been a perfect excuse to give in to my fear and back down. After all, my friends in the audience would surely understand.

But even as I was contemplating it, I knew it wouldn’t happen. Because my excitement was saying “once you’ve done this, you’ll have performed in a show that you friggin’ co-wrote! How fabulous is that?!?!”

The show went on. And I sang. And for the most part, I sang well (apparently the couple of grimace-worthy moments went largely unnoticed except for *my* grimaces!). And it didn’t hurt! In fact, it felt good.

And now that I’ve taken that step, I can take another. Next reading, I want to step up and give a grimace-free performance. I want to nail all the harmonies, bring the character to life, and … Well, take over the world with my zombie army. Because otherwise, how will I get all the Oreo ice cream cake?

What’s your one-man show? What’s the thing you’ve been excited about, but perhaps not quite excited enough I overcome your fear? Consider this a nudge. Take the first step. Listen to the fear, address its concerns as best you can, and take the first step. Excitement plus fear–it’s your key to getting the most out of life.

Learning to learn: How to get better at what you do

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I’ve been reading the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. In it, he describes the kind of deliberate practice you have to do to get good at something. This is extremely important! If you’re doing anything new with a learning curve, you can vastly accelerate that learning curve with the right kind of practice.

I’m learning to sight-sing (sing directly from a musical score) despite playing no instruments and having no musical background. Not only do I have to learn to sing, but I must learn to read music, to hear pitches, to match pitches, etc. It’s a very difficult learning curve for me, at a time in my life when I’m many years away from the last time I tried to learn an entire skill set from scratch. Here’s how I’m using deliberate practice to accelerate my learning.

First of all, I have to deal with the fact that sight-singing is skill-based. No amount of intellectual understanding can help me get it any faster. I need to drill. I drill every day. It is very clear that daily drilling separated by sleep cycles builds capability. There’s a measurable improvement every day in my skills. That’s neat. It’s frustrating only because there doesn’t seem to be any shortcut. The results only show up when I put in practice time during the day with sleep in between.

When I notice a chronic problem in my practice, I design an exercise for that particular problem. For example, there are certain intervals I just can’t remember. So I plunked out little made-up songs (with words and imagery) 30-seconds long on my keyboard that emphasized the troublesome intervals. Then I listen to them for 20 minutes each day until my brain starts to memorize them.

Learning to sing intervals is trickier because I have no outside source of feedback to know if I’m doing it right. Often, I’m not. To the extent possible, I use a piano for feedback. I sing slowly with a piano keyboard, and concentrate on listening to the external sound of the keyboard and of my voice, rather than my internal imagination of what the note *should* sound like. I’m gradually becoming able to sing most intervals.

One intermediary skill in learning to sing intervals has been to explicitly develop comfort singing a note when it sounds dissonant. If a note is playing and I’m supposed to sing a major 7th above it, I have to hold that note even if it sounds a bit jarring to my ear. So paradoxically, I’ve had to develop the skill of singing a note even when my ear tells me it’s out of tune. Because it’s in tune, it’s just a dissonant harmony.

My next step is to work on stretching the range where I can hear and sing intervals. I’ve discovered that I’m essentially tone deaf below G. I never noticed before, but I can’t even tell which notes are higher or lower in that part of the keyboard. Unfortunately, drilling that one seems to require an external keyboard. For reasons I don’t understand, my iPod keyboard doesn’t produce the same confusion that an external keyboard does. When I get my hands on the right equipment, my next set of self-drills will all be around developing that part of my range.

Next time you are learning something new, don’t just practice; practice deliberately. Design exercises to stretch yourself where you’re having trouble. You’ll find if you stick with it, it’s possible to learn much more quickly than you ever though possible. (And no, it doesn’t feel any easier. You just make faster progress through the uncomfortable parts.)

Income Inquality

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I just watched this TED talk on income inequality. It speaks for itself. Very powerful result. On a whole host of general measurements of social well-being, it is income inequality, not average levels of income that drive social problems. Wow. This has huge public policy implications, which I suspect will go largely unheeded in a society where many politicians are little more than hired representatives of anonymous rich people. (Thank you, Supreme Court, for ratifying the existence of the Super-PAC.)

Why I Like Paper

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A reader wrote in:

I read your suggestion about the 3×5 pad and it sucks! That’s because I hate paper and pen note-taking. I want something that I can carry with me anywhere on my handheld and which will also prompt me, just like a personal assistant, not something which will load me with the extra work of transcribing to a master list! As if I am not burdened enough already! Look, I need something to help me gain lost time each day. Something to boost my productivity and tidily organise my intended activities in a manner that enables me to take action on them!

My reply:

The reason I like paper is that the transcribing *forces me* to confront whether or not a particular task is important enough to copy by hand. If it isn’t, that’s a sign that it probably isn’t important enough to keep on my list. The key to freeing up time, ultimately, is saying “No” to commitments and then vigorously protecting the time you’ve freed up.

If time is getting lost, you need to stop doing the things that you define as “losing” it. Smartphones are often big time losers. Yes, the phone is a fun toy, and yes it can do cool stuff, but measured *in terms of my getting my important work done* (as opposed to my unimportant, imagined work), it’s probably doesn’t make me that much more productive.

The problem is that it speeds up some things, but it slows down others. For example, I type about 1/3 the speed on my smartphone as I do on my desktop. I may find it convenient to respond to email on my smartphone, but it’s actually making me *less* productive. And even if I could answer email at the same rate, the moment I click on a link and spend 5 minutes web browsing or playing a game, any email productivity gains get lost as I waste time goofing off.

If you’re brave enough, try keeping a log for a couple of days. Note what you get done on your smartphone and what you get done at your desk, and how much time each takes. You may find your smartphone boosts your productivity. Or you may find it doesn’t. For looking up phone numbers and addresses, my smartphone is awesome. But does it really save time? I used to clip someone’s business card into my rolodex and I’d memorize it after 2-3 calls. Now I have to retype or scan-plus-double-check each card to get it into my address book (or pay someone to do it, which means earning the money to pay them). And then I *always* have to look them up, because I no longer memorize.

Assuming I make 5-6 calls a day, am I really more productive with an electronic address book when you take all that into account? I suspect yes, but I probably save a few minutes a month, *not* hours.

In short, I like paper because it forces me to think. I like technology because it’s fun and sometimes convenient. But I never assume that paper is automatically bad, nor do I assume technology is good. Like any tool, test it out and be careful that adopting a new, faster tool in one area doesn’t slow you down in another.

Don’t Read This!

Hey! I told you not to read this! You expect real content during the holidays? Regardless of your religion, this time of year is a great excuse to spend time with people you love. Go work less and do more. And by “do,” I mean play, love live, laugh. If you love your family, go hang out with them. If you love your friends, give them a call and invite them over to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000. Or if you like solitude, hang out and read a good book.

I’m going to be kicking off 2012 by returning more closely to my coaching roots. You’ll hear more as the time approaches.

See you in 2012,

Stever

Use Social Media to Trumpet Your *Real* Awesomeness!

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“Thousands of people just like you are sharing, right now!” says a social media site. Then, I suppose, my sharing would be utterly redundant. And my following their streams would be an exercise in narcissistic boredom. Is this *really* the pinnacle of human technological achievement?

I share a lot on social media because it’s part of my job. I have a very popular podcast that offers what I hope is a unique perspective with content that ranges from heard-it-a-thousand-time-before to novel and new. I work very hard to provoke thought, either by refuting some conventional wisdom I believe is wrong, or by asking provocative questions that stimulate a conversation.

If “thousands of people just like [me] are sharing,” then my sharing adds nothing, so why bother? A far better message is, “go get off social media and do something fascinating, intriguing, exciting, and wild! Then come back and share when you have something unique to share.”

Let me pose a challenge: if you spend time on social media sharing the book you’re reading, or which ice cream parlor you’ve stopped at for a cone, stop it. Use that same time to daydream a challenge to undertake, a mystery to solve, or an adventure to create. Then go do it. And then share that on social media. Not only will you attract a larger audience, but you’ll have a life worth broadcasting as a role model.