Category Archives: advice

Coffee optimization

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When I started at YouTube a few years ago I encountered fancy coffee machines in the break rooms (or in Google parlance, “minikitchens”). At the touch of a button it would dispense a single serving’s worth of coffee beans from a hopper into its internal grinder, grind them up, add water from a supply line, and brew and serve a cup of hot coffee, all in seventy-four seconds. (I timed it.)

Occasionally a line would form of coffee addicts needing their fix. Most had the same routine: when one brew cycle was finished, the next person in line would place his or her cup in the machine and press the button. Seventy-four seconds later they’d withdraw their cup, add sugar, carry it over to the cooler, take out the half-and-half, and add that; then leave.

Doctoring the coffee after brewing added a good twenty or thirty seconds to the total coffee preparation time, a substantial increase over the time needed by the machine per se. But the machine’s user waits idly for seventy-four seconds; why not put that time to better use? After several months it dawned on me to change my routine. As soon as the previous user’s cycle ended, I pressed the start button without putting a cup in the machine. Instead, during the first thirty or so seconds of grind-and-brew time, I put sugar and half-and-half into my empty coffee cup, then placed it in the machine. By the time the machine was finished, I was all ready to go, about 25% faster than everyone else.

In hindsight it was an obvious optimization to make, and in an office full of bright, busy engineers I was surprised that I was the only one I had ever observed making it. I did occasionally get some appreciative glances from others on seeing my technique in action, and finally within the past year I’ve noticed my method catching on. It’s gratifying to be a trendsetter, but frustrating to be unacknowledged. At least I can tell you about it.

If you’re bullish and you know it

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The economy has been so bad for so long that public confidence in a recovery is low — half of what it was in (the economically unremarkable benchmark year) 1985. Without confidence in the economy, households have pared expenditures to the essentials, companies are delaying hiring and putting off investment in new lines of business, and banks are doing the bank equivalent of hiding their money under the mattress — all of which makes the economy bad, which produces low confidence, which makes the economy bad, etc., etc.

It’s one of the trickiest chicken-and-egg problems in the world. A good economy relies on confidence, and confidence relies on a good economy. In a very real way, confidence is the economy. How can we get back to a good economy if doing so requires confidence that the bad economy is preventing us from having?

You may not be surprised to hear that I have a modest suggestion: lie. I wrote once before that pretend confidence can lead to real confidence, and I don’t see why this situation is any different.

Starting immediately, work some offhand comments into your everyday conversation, to the effect that the economy is finally picking up steam. Mention, for instance, that you noticed a couple of long-empty office buildings have been leased, or that some unemployed Facebook friends finally found jobs just recently, or that you read somewhere that now’s the time to get that fancy new TV because sales are finally ramping up again and those big manufacturer discounts will be coming to an end. It won’t take much, because people are starving for good economic news and will devour morsels like these. And don’t worry that they’re not true. If enough of us start implementing this idea, pretty soon they will be.

Update, 8 October 2010: A week after I posted this, Planet Money ran a story about four economists who saved Brazil by — wait for it — getting everyone to lie.

(Canned vs. frozen) x (Corn vs. peas)

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Canned Frozen
Corn Yum Avoid
Peas Avoid Yum

So now you know.

Please please you

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Some time ago I was talking with a friend who was having woman trouble. “I can’t figure out how to make her happy,” he said. Immediately he added the disclaimer, “I know, I know, ‘everyone’s responsible for their own happiness.’”

That’s a bit of pop psychology from the Me generation that has passed into conventional wisdom, but I think it’s wrong. It’s just one step from there to “Greed is good,” and you know how I feel about that one.

So I said, “That’s bullshit. When I married Andrea, I made her happiness my job.” Not that she didn’t bear some of the responsibility herself, of course; nor was I abandoning my happiness for hers. But I’ll be damned if our marriage doesn’t mean that she gets my help being happy when she needs it, and vice versa. My friend’s palpable gratitude at hearing someone explode the old chestnut told me I was onto something.

Not to get too crunchy-granola, but how would the world be different if the conventional wisdom said, instead, “Everyone is responsible for each other’s happiness”?

Greatest hits: The Forum

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Prompted by a new article in Mother Jones about the Landmark Forum, my friend Spencer recalled my article on the same subject from my old website circa 1998. Here it is, resurrected for the 21st-century web.

The last line — “This remains the central mystery of my life” — no longer applies. It’s still a mystery, but not the central one of my life. That’s reserved for trying to figure out Sarah Palin supporters.

In December 1997, my close friend Steve, an admirably intelligent and level-headed person, announced that he was going to spend an entire three-day weekend at the Forum, a group awareness training seminar run by an outfit called Landmark Education. Cost: $325, and three solid days of his life.

We (that is, Steve’s friends) knew others who’d gone through the Forum in the past. A wave of Forum marketing swept the Carnegie Mellon campus back in the 1980′s. Those classmates who got caught up in it had been transformed into blissed-out zombies who smiled too much, were too understanding, were in touch with their inner whatevers, and went on and on endlessly about “I accept that” and “I’ve always <insert behavior here> but now I understand why I <insert behavior here>” and “I love you all” and so on. These were people who were adrift, who lacked competence in dealing with situations, who had unsatisfying connections to other people, and who generally were vulnerable to having their psyches manipulated. We knew that Steve was a paragon of competence, someone who always had a solid idea of what he thought about things and about people. What could he expect to get out of the Forum?

The ridicule came fast and furious. “Personally, knowing that I’m beyond the reach of profiteering New Age hucksters gives me all the empowerment, self-actualization, spiritual harmony, and inner quietude that I need,” I wrote. “$325? When you could spend all day masturbating for free?” wrote my friend Christian.

Steve promised he was going only for purposes of intellectual curiosity. His ex-girlfriend Carlyn was a Landmark enthusiast, and to Steve it was worth the money and the time to cut through the preconceptions and find out about it firsthand. When I learned his motivation, I provisionally withdrew my ridicule.

In researching Landmark prior to Steve’s Forum seminar, I learned that it is the current incarnation of est, the 1970′s touchy-feely self-help personality-deconstructing blissed-out zombie training which is related to Scientology. Landmark eschewed some of est’s more controversial practices, apparently in favor of wider marketability. Although Landmark denounces the more overt brainwashing techniques of est — including the confrontation, intimidation, and physiological stress that are also hallmarks of Scientology — I later learned that those methods are in fact still present in the Forum, they’re just toned down for subtlety. Unlike est, the Forum permits you bathroom breaks whenever necessary — but the long days sitting still in uncomfortable chairs under faintly buzzing fluorescent lights still induces physiological stress. The psychologically vicious personal attacks that est employed to make students admit their worldview needed fixing are replaced with a more insidious pressure to conform that comes from the Forum’s large group setting.

In the office on Monday morning, Steve assured us it had been worth every penny. In enthusiastic but frustratingly vague terms, he described what the experience had been like. We tried to nail him down on specifics beyond the simple logistics (lots of people seated together in a large room for many hours over three days), and Steve gamely answered our questions all day long, bringing his considerable powers of articulation to bear on the task of properly conveying what the Forum was all about. But each time we thought we understood him and tried to repeat our understanding back, he’d say, “No, that’s not exactly it.” I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of a pattern that continues to this day: no one who’s been through the Forum can satisfactorily describe it.

The best we could get out of him was this: for three days, the charismatic Forum leader energetically delivers a series of connected lectures on limiting factors in human nature — such things as making decisions based on the past rather than on the future one imagines, and failing to really listen when another person is speaking because one feels one already knows what will be said. A great deal of interaction with the audience is involved; the Forum leader challenges one person after another in Socratic fashion to relate short anecdotes about how the topic of the moment relates to his or her life. The multitude of viewpoints is thus delivered at such a pace as to trigger a kind of synergy in the minds of the audience, allowing them to have “breakthroughs” about what has been holding them back in their lives.

Steve admitted that the content per se is nothing more than one could get from a good background in philosophy, or even a good novel. But the unique aspect that made it so effective for him was the participation of so many different people offering so many different outlooks, which audience members mentally “try on” for size at a frenetic pace. He claimed to have had a number of useful breakthroughs. One of the exercises assigned during the few breaks in the Forum is to call someone with whom you have some unresolved issue, and resolve it in the forthright way taught in the class. Steve said this exercise helped him overcome a hurdle in one of his interpersonal relationships.

Another of the exercises is a transparent marketing ploy. Upon returning to real life on the Monday morning after a Forum seminar, the Forum “graduate” is supposed to recruit a number of friends and relatives — a number that the graduate commits to on Sunday night while in the full flush of having completed the Forum — to return with him or her to a Tuesday night wrap-up session. Since most grads’ heads are in too much of a whirl right after the Forum, part of the Tuesday night session’s purpose is to educate their loved ones about what they just underwent with a minimum of excited babbling. Another (openly acknowledged) purpose is to try to sign up new students, and to persuade the old students to sign up for advanced courses. Still another purpose is to top off the weekend’s indoctrination after the grad has had a chance to internalize some of the ideas.

Steve asked me to attend. I didn’t want to; my skepticism about the Forum was not assuaged by Steve’s incoherent enthusiasm. But he persisted, and my enormous respect for Steve made me conclude that there had to be something to it that I was failing to see. For his sake, I broke an earlier Tuesday night engagement and went with Steve.

When we arrived, a little early, we milled about talking to people Steve had met during the course. One fetchingly attired woman declared to Steve, after he complimented her appearance, that before the course, she would never have gone out so daringly dressed. But the course had allowed her to overcome some self-esteem problems she had, and she was able to say “what the hell.”

Good for her, I thought, but self-esteem has never been one of my problems. I felt my preconceptions about the Forum strengthening, not the least reason for which was the blinding sea of beaming Stepford smiles on the faces of the many Forum volunteers ushering people around and handing out literature. Their ultra-friendly demeanors were clearly meant to put people like me at ease, but had exactly the opposite effect. Nevertheless, I reminded myself that responsible skepticism implies being open-minded, and I renewed my resolve to be so.

We took our seats in an auditorium filled with Forum grads and their many “guests,” some three hundred people in all. For a few minutes Steve left me alone while he went to find Leslie, his other guest for the evening.

Distinguishing me by my non-Forum-grad name tag, a fresh grad named Kerry sat down next to me and immediately struck up a conversation. He told me how wonderful he found the Forum to be, and I confessed my skepticism. My problem, I said, is that the things the Forum supposedly encourages one to do — examine one’s behaviors, understand one’s motivations, “inquire” into what it “means to be human” — are all things that I taught myself to do long ago, with perfectly satisfying results. No doubt others who are less introspective than I could derive many benefits from learning such mental disciplines, but as for me, it felt redundant. Kerry assured me that he’d felt just the way I did before the Forum began.

Steve showed up with Leslie around the same time that the session began. The Forum leader, Jack Schrop, a extremely magnetic middle-aged man who was a Navy SEAL commander in Vietnam (and with whom Steve was unabashedly impressed), took the stage and welcomed us. He said a few words about Landmark and the Forum, made a bit of a sales pitch, then invited some of the new grads to take the microphone to describe any breakthroughs they’d had since finishing the course on Sunday night.

Hands shot up all over the room. Jack picked out five or six speakers at a time, three or four times overall. The speakers took turns addressing the auditorium for a few minutes apiece. Most of them credited the Forum for their newfound ability to address such a large group, which before the course they wouldn’t have had the self-confidence to do. (I have no problems speaking in front of large groups, I thought to myself, further convincing myself that the Forum was probably not for me.)

Some of the breakthroughs reported by the new grads were more interesting. One man said the Forum helped him finally sever his ties with some old drug-dealing buddies. A woman described breaking through a twenty-year impasse in her relationship with her mother. One shy, introverted systems analyst found himself gabbing to everyone in sight when he went to work Monday morning. A man who’d been avoiding a difficult issue with a close friend finally aired it, ending the friendship but giving him closure. And on and on.

Jack interjected various comments throughout the unrehearsed testimonials. He explained how he got involved with the Forum, acknowledged the concerns of those (like me) who found the shining happy people of the Forum to be a little creepy and disconcerting, and sprinkled some Forum philosophy here and there. “We promise breakthroughs,” he said. “We offer the design principles of humanity,” he also said. “We don’t solve your individual problems; you do that.”

At one point, he offered a sample pithy Forum insight “for free”: “If you’re afraid that people think a certain thing about you — if they stop talking when you walk by an open office door — don’t worry: they do. They think the same things about you that you think about them. So what? That’s all.”

At one point, Jack Schrop asked all the guests to turn to their respective hosts and ask two questions: “Do you want me to enroll in the Forum?” and “Why?” Leslie and I did as instructed, asking Steve the two questions, and Steve replied “Yes” and “Because I think you’ll derive benefits from it,” which he briefly described in terms we’d already been discussing.

I told him that I was increasingly eager to be persuaded, but so far, no go. I repeated to him the business about how I’m already introspective, how I already solve my own problems in ways that sound like what the Forum people are talking about, and so on. I also assured him that, as skeptical as I was about the Forum, I was at least as skeptical about my own claims of being so well-adjusted. In other words, I was open to the possibility that I don’t cope with my problems as well as I think I do. Open to the possibility, but not convinced of it.

Apart from that, I said, there was the matter of not having a spare $325 to throw around.

Eventually, Jack Schrop announced that the guests would be divided into four smaller groups and led into separate rooms (to hear the Forum marketing pitch), while the new grads attended a special session of their own. But first, interested guests were invited to sign up for future Forum sessions, with the $325 tuition payable on the spot (of which all but $50 was refundable). A large handful of guests did sign up; then we broke up into the smaller group sessions.

The leader of my group was a distressingly enthusiastic fellow named Curt. He began by reiterating much of what Jack had said, particularly that the Forum promises “breakthroughs,” especially in the areas of “power” and “freedom.” Then he painted some scenarios that most people can probably identify with (not me, though). For example, he asked how many people felt their boss at work limits their self-expression? Dozens of hands went up. Who felt that they let life happen to them instead of making it happen? Again, dozens. Who ever made a New Year’s resolution they didn’t keep? Etc.

Curt explained that most of us allow our futures to be determined by our pasts; we get stuck in behavioral ruts that, after a while, we don’t question or revise. What Forum helps you to do, he said, is to take your past out of your future and put it into the past where it belongs. That leaves nothing in your future, which is as it should be; the future is what you make it.

This message all sounded fine to me, even if the setting and the messenger were a little off-putting, but again, it was nothing that I hadn’t already discovered from years of learning, living, and reflecting. As he kept talking about more and more of the same kinds of things, I began to feel pretty impressed with myself; was I the only one who had discovered these “secrets” for himself?

The session with Curt was highly interactive, with guests asking questions or responding to prompting by Curt. He worked the group well; after not much time had passed, several of the guests began spouting the kind of psychobabble that they believed was expected in response to his prompts. For example, while discussing one guest’s predisposition toward failure in many aspects of his life, Curt uncovered some detail of that guest’s self-destructive habits. When he asked why the guest didn’t simply discard that detail from his life, the guest obliged with, “It helps me maintain my self-image as a failure.” Whenever someone played into Curt’s hand in this way, he responded with a smarmy, “Yes! Thank you! Fabulous!”

We took a break and milled about for a bit. Interested guests again were invited to register for future Forum sessions, and at least half the room signed up on the spot. Meanwhile, Curt singled me out and struck up a conversation, no doubt sensing that I was a holdout. I explained my skepticism to him in much the same way I explained it to Kerry and to Steve. Curt deflected my objections by pointing out that only by taking the course could I discover whether I could derive any benefit from it.

I had other concerns, though. “Lots of people seem to act pretty cultish about the Forum, frankly,” I said. “When I have revelatory insights into myself, I don’t give the credit to the latest book I’ve read or to any other one thing; the credit belongs to me, the sum of all of my experiences. But Forum grads can’t stop talking about how it’s the Forum, not themselves, that changed their lives.”

Curt said that some participants’ cultishness about the Forum was a problem, because it was off-putting to others, but he said that I seemed to have the right attitude about it and he hoped I’d consider signing up.

The small group session continued in the same vein for a little while longer, then the evening was over.

I did not sign up to take the course.

A few days later, Steve announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he would be attending the “advanced course,” the next step in Landmark’s curriculum (and twice as expensive as the Forum). The astonishment came from the fact that Steve had earlier said he would not take any other Landmark courses, now that he’d had the firsthand Forum experience he was after.

“It’s brainwashing!” we declared. “Can’t you see? You’d resolved not to give them any more of your money. Now you’re going to do it in spite of yourself.” Steve insisted he’d made the decision on his own because he expected to get more out of it than he put into it.

He returned from that course with a detailed personal agenda based on what he’d learned about “commitment.” He was through with caffeine and tobacco, he said. And he vowed to put an end to his absent-mindedness with the help of a pocket calendar, in which he thenceforth religiously inscribed even the tiniest appointments and duties.

(Steve’s absent-mindedness about sometimes very important things is well-known among his friends. On more than one occasion, for instance, he’s left people stranded, waiting for a lift from him that he’d promised and then completely forgotten about. A regrettable character flaw, but that didn’t detract from his charm. Paradoxically, it added to it.)

In his capacity as president of Zanshin, Steve’s Landmark training appeared to have some beneficial effects. Repeatedly he kept us moving forward by asserting total disinterest in the past — in why or how we had made some error or failed to meet some deadline. All that interested him was what we had in mind for the future. This was a liberating way to think.

On the other hand, Steve started to become more involved with Landmark. He began volunteering for administrative tasks surrounding the Forum and other Landmark activities. He took more courses. He trained to produce seminars of his own.

This started to become distasteful to some of the rest of us. “Doesn’t it bother you that a lucrative for-profit company is exploiting your uncompensated volunteer labor (and that of thousands of others)?” No, said Steve. He continued to believe he was getting more out of it than he was putting in, learning useful skills and making valuable new contacts.

Well, it bothered us, and discussion with Steve about Landmark-related matters tapered off. He continued to give time and money to Landmark, while the rest of us would sometimes discuss our frustration and worry — and confusion about what Steve thought he could be getting out of it. After all, once the blush of the first few months had worn off, Steve was back on cigarettes and coffee, and was occasionally committing appalling acts of absent-mindedness.

Steve continued trying to recruit others in our circle, and one of our friends, Pat, actually attended a Forum seminar — returning completely unimpressed. In an agony of puzzlement about the thrall in which Landmark held Steve — as undeceivable a fellow as any I know — I attended another Tuesday night session with him and with fellow skeptic Greg, this one with a slightly different agenda from the first Tuesday night session I went to. Greg and I felt we got a good understanding of the Forum, but were unmoved.

This remains the central mystery of my life.

Citizen George

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Recently on the “parents” e-mail list at work, someone asked whether Hearst Castle would make a good trip for a 12-year-old, or whether they’d find it boring. Here’s what I wrote in response about how I’d make Hearst Castle interesting to a pre-teen.

Once upon a time there was a young filmmaker named George Lucas. Everyone thought he was a little weird, but one day he had a great idea. No one believed it could work, and he nearly killed himself making it a reality, but in the end he had Star Wars and he changed the world, and made himself rich.

What could he do with all his money? He could build a mecca for rebel filmmakers, that’s what, away from the suits and the beancounters of L.A. And so George began building Skywalker Ranch. But it was expensive, and he needed more money, so he hired some folks to make a new Star Wars movie. He hired some other folks to license Star Wars merchandise. And he hired still more folks to sell his splendid movie-production services to other filmmakers. He grew richer and richer, and built Skywalker Ranch bigger and bigger.

By now many years had passed. George Lucas was no longer young. His wife had left him. His friends, the other rebel filmmakers he’d hoped to bring into his fold, were scattered to the four winds, starting their own companies, making their own success. What could he do?

George could think of only one answer: get richer still. Build his empire bigger yet. He made more Star Wars movies! He took over the Presidio! He marketed cartoonish violence with no coherent story logic to young children! And he grew even more wealthy, but no less alone and unfulfilled. And he had become the very type of corporate executive whose influence he once sought to escape.

Some dark night in his cavernous mansion he will whisper the nickname of his beloved childhood hot rod, which no one will be around to hear, and expire.

William Randolph Hearst? He was the George Lucas of his day.

Update [15 June 2009]: George Lucas’ design for new building is twin of Hearst Castle centerpiece. Whoa.

Son of Superpest

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As I’ve written before, my mom once adopted the nickname Superpest for her ability to wheedle conciliatory goods and services from large corporations that had failed or wronged her in one way or another. Her secret weapon: dogged reasonableness.

Early last year I took the plunge and got a big plasma Philips TV for the living room. Between that and my DTS sound system I was in home-cinema heaven! But after a few months I noticed an intermittent problem: when turning on the TV, sometimes the display was distorted in one of a couple different ways.

Wrong Right
Wrong Right

Sometimes there was no picture at all. Turning the screen off, waiting a few seconds, and turning it on again usually fixed the problem. Sometimes a second power-cycle was necessary.

The problem only happened a few times per month and so was extremely hard to diagnose. A succession of authorized repair centers variously (a) tried and failed, (b) pretended, and (c) refused to fix it. Over and over again, I directed appeals to Philips, only to be referred to another local service center, who would eventually send me back to Philips, which would assign me a new case number and the cycle would repeat. Add in several unanswered phone calls and letters and you can see how this stretched into more than a year.

Finally I sent them this letter:

To whom it may concern,

Eighteen months ago I purchased a Philips plasma TV. For the past twelve months I have been trying to get a defect in that TV repaired. The lengthy saga of those attempts involves incompetence, unresponsiveness, and evasiveness among a variety of authorized service centers, along with miscommunication, misunderstandings, and other less outlandish obstacles. A detailed chronology is enclosed.

A few weeks ago a technician from C—-’s TV visited my house to inspect the unit. His opinion was that it could not be repaired. For one thing, the problem is very hard to reproduce. It happens only two or three times a month. For another thing, if he went with his guess and replaced the circuit board that he suspected was the culprit, any replacement he might try would come refurbished from Philips, not new, and would be likely to have its own quirks. He didn’t want to see me trade one minor problem for another possibly worse one.

He had a point. The problem I’m dealing with is minor: occasionally when I turn on the TV, the display is garbled or blank, but I can fix it by turning the TV off and on once or twice. He said that, if I’m lucky, the problem isn’t a circuit board at all but is due to bad grounding. His parting suggestion was that if I observe the problem again, I should try fiddling with the wires and the connections and rapping on the components in the path between the TV and ground.

Since his visit I have observed the problem two more times, and I followed his advice, but to no avail. The problem persisted until I power-cycled the TV. I despaired of launching yet another go-round with Philips customer service seeking some sort of resolution to this problem, certain that I’d end up chasing my tail once again. But then I had an idea:

I can live with having to power-cycle my TV two or three times a month. My main concern is that the problem will worsen somehow, to the point where my ability to enjoy the TV is substantially degraded. Maybe one day I won’t be able to fix the problem by turning the TV off and on. Maybe one day the screen will remain persistently a little garbled.

So here is my proposal to you. As long as the problem remains an occasional minor annoyance, I will live with it and leave you guys alone; however, if it should significantly worsen, then even if it is out of warranty you will replace the TV with a new, comparable unit and a new warranty at no cost to me, since the problem has existed since the TV was under warranty and remains unaddressed despite my own best efforts.

If this proposal is acceptable to you, I would appreciate a written acknowledgment, however I will also consider a lack of response (within two weeks of your receipt of this letter) to be an acceptance of this proposal. On the other hand, if this proposal is not acceptable to you, I must unhappily resume my efforts to get this problem resolved and insist that you take new steps to remedy it.

Sincerely, etc.

Two weeks passed and I heard nothing. Another couple of weeks later I got a call from Philips: “Your replacement TV is on its way.” Yesterday it was delivered and installed.

Yay! Chalk one up for dogged reasonableness (and for maintaining a detailed chronology of phone calls, repair visits, and so on). The moral of this story is that customer service costs money, and eventually it’ll impact their bottom line less just to give in to your reasonable demands. Or kill you, but for big-screen-TV-peace-of-mind that was a risk I was willing to take.

Writing advice

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My young cousin Matt is applying to college and I was enlisted to help edit his admissions essay. In the process of doing so I came up with these pieces of (debatable) wisdom about how to write well.

If I had to give just one piece of overriding advice for writing well, it’s this: place yourself into your readers’ shoes. Imagine what they’re thinking while they’re reading your words. Anticipate their questions, their confusion, and their boredom, and then prevent them ever feeling those things.

If you then allowed me to give a second piece of advice, it would be to liken a newly written essay to a block of marble. Somewhere in there is a beautiful sculpture waiting to come out; your job is to remove the extraneous bits that are hiding it. As the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Often the hardest part of writing is looking at a great sentence you’ve composed, full of well-chosen words, and realizing it contributes nothing other than to show off how flashy you can be. You’ve got to rip those out without mercy.

As you then ran screaming from my attempts to give a third piece of advice, I would shout after you, “When you pile too much into one sentence, it’s easy to get bogged down in trying to untangle its twisty, complicated structure, when the better remedy is so simple: just break it up into two sentences! Matt! Maaaaaatt!”

There is no end zone

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[This post is participating in Strange Culture's Dads In Media blog-a-thon.]

Some time ago I wrote,

The movie [...] teaches that worry is an inextricable part of parenthood, which is a comfort in a way. Thanks to Finding Nemo, when I encounter a worrying situation in my role as a father, I cope a little better. I know that it goes with the territory, that it’s universal, and that there’s a right way to deal with it.

An even more potent touchstone for teaching us to accept the worries of parenthood is Parenthood, the 1989 film by Ron Howard, and its central point is nicely summed up in a scene between Frank Buckman (Jason Robards) and his son Gil (Steve Martin). Frank has learned that his black-sheep son, Larry, is in deep trouble with the mob. While ostensibly asking Gil’s advice about whether to help Larry pay off his gambling debt, Frank’s really coming to terms with the hardest truth about having children: no matter how long you and your children live, if you love them, you never stop worrying about them.

Just earlier in the film, Gil had a fantasy in which his troubled young son Kevin grows up to be confident, successful, and happy, praising his dad in his valedictory address at college. Fantasy-Gil reveled in a job well done. Now here is Gil’s father with the dismal news that:

There is no end zone. You never cross the goal line, spike the ball and do your touchdown dance. Never.

And yet for all the worrying about children (of all ages) that occupies the film’s many parents, the message of the movie is a positive one: that lifelong worry is a small price to pay for the profound joys of parenthood. This too is summed up neatly in a scene where Grandma interrupts Gil’s obsessive fretting with a seemingly irrelevant story.

Vitamin C

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Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, a cult classic, was published in 1992 and set in a mildly dystopian not-too-distant-future. (One that reality grows increasingly to resemble bit by bit.) In the story, it becomes the goal of some characters to capture and analyze a sample of a new street narcotic called “Snow Crash.” But distribution of Snow Crash is so tightly controlled that when a user buys a hit from a dealer, it comes in a dispenser with a ten-second timer, already counting down. The user is obliged to inhale it on the spot, or watch it spray uselessly into the air when the timer reaches zero. Posing as a buyer, Y.T. receives her hit and, rather than inhale it, tosses it straight up into the air. A flying machine zips in overhead, catches it, flash-freezes it in liquid helium, and disappears with it. Other devices facilitate Y.T.’s escape from the dealer’s lair. The security expert behind the operation, Mr. Ng, later says, “We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed.”

I know how he feels. On Monday I started my new job, as a software engineer for Google, a plum position for someone like me that (despite the vast size of Google’s engineering organization) is notoriously hard to get. It was the culmination of a job-hunt process in which I was fortunate enough to have more than one Silicon Valley technology giant vying for my services, and as a result, I’m riding a confidence high.

When you have successes like that under your belt, it’s easy to be confident. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: to succeed in the first place, you need confidence to try things worth succeeding at.

This is something that has been weighing on my mind and Andrea’s for a while, at least since our last meeting with Jonah’s kindergarten teacher. She told us that he has the capacity to be a class leader and lacks only the confidence to step up to some challenging tasks, to stop following the pack. This critique rang true; we’d observed in Jonah a tendency when trying new things to expect he’d be unable to do them. This despite our encouragement and his obvious competence.

Where can you get the confidence you need to achieve your first successes?

Understanding this catch-22, my dad sought to instill confidence in me and my sister from a very young age. He referred to it as “vitamin C” and frequently touted its magical power to make the difficult easy. The way to have confidence, he told us again and again, was to be sure ahead of time that you could do whatever it was you were trying to do — hit a softball, ride a bike, flip a pancake. Before trying something tricky, focus your mind. See yourself accomplishing it. Then do it. If you fail, it’s not because you can’t do it — obviously, since other people can do it, so why not you? It’s only because you didn’t use enough vitamin C. Try again, and focus harder on feeling confident.

This approach worked on me and my sister, after a fashion. We grew up feeling confident and we were therefore adequately bold in the choices we made (which is, after all, the very purpose of confidence). Much later in life, though — after I had developed real confidence — I recognized my childhood version of that feeling for what it really was: bravado, the insubstantial cousin of confidence, insubstantial because it’s unfounded.

Bravado does some of the work of true confidence, but it fails you when you need it most. Worse, whereas a surfeit of confidence makes a person calm, cool, and collected, an excess of bravado produces arrogance. For I had learned that “Vitamin C” meant being sure you could do anything, and if deep down you really aren’t, then how can you convince yourself that you are — other than to tell everyone how capable you are? Other than to brag, that is.

So how did I finally develop “real” confidence? By the passage of time, mainly, during which I racked up meaningful successes once in a while, developing my skills and developing my self to the point where I’m finally satsified with who I am and what I can do. Many years ago I would have claimed to be satisfied, but I would have been wrong, and here’s how I know: I no longer feel like I have something to prove all the time. When I was younger I did, boy howdy did I.

So now I’m in a serene confidence zone, which is great for me, but what about Jonah? He’s only six. He hasn’t had decades to develop his skills or his personality. We’re back to our main question: Where can you get the confidence you need to achieve your first successes?

Until this past Sunday, I had a gimmicky answer to that question: to get real confidence, act as if you have it to begin with. Just as pretending to laugh can lead to real laughter, pretending to be confident can get you through tricky situations, producing real confidence.

For example: when I started college, I didn’t know a soul in Pittsburgh. For the first several days I was desperately lonely until finally I’d had enough of that and decided to do something about it. Spying a group of fellow freshmen chatting together — complete strangers — I pretended confidence, strode over, broke into their conversation, and made them my friends. Lifelong friends in some cases, as it turned out.

So the pretend-confidence thing worked for me on that occasion, and on a number of others. With pretend confidence I was able to accumulate enough successes to form a foundation for real confidence. And until Sunday, that’s the advice I gave whenever the subject arose of how to become confident.

But then on Sunday I saw something that made me change my mind. I had decided it was time for Jonah finally to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike. (I wrote many months ago that he already had, but it turned out to be a false alarm.) Andrea and I took him and Archer to the empty schoolyard and began giving cycling instruction. Archer lost interest pretty quickly, but Jonah gamely tried several times to balance the bike, standing on one pedal while kicking off the ground with the other foot, as if riding a scooter. He was getting visibly better, his kicking foot staying off the ground for longer and longer intervals, when he declared he was tired and would do more next time. He unbuckled his helmet.

At this point, Andrea channeled her high school self and began cheerleading. She encouraged him so insistently and so, well, cheerily that he could not resist — he refastened his helmet and did another circuit of the schoolyard, this time a little better than before. Again he told us he was done and again Andrea cheered him on to another lap, and another, and another. Finally she persuaded him to try sitting down while pedaling and letting me let go of the bike — and away he went, a little wobbly but undeniably riding a two-wheeled bike entirely on his own!

Jonah lost all trace of tiredness. He rode around and around the schoolyard with the biggest possible smile on his face, so drunk with accomplishment that when he fell and scraped up his legs, or when he rode his bike straight into a wall, he wasn’t deterred even a little bit. He just wanted to keep riding. And that’s when something about the past few months clicked into place for me:

In the time since our parent-teacher conference, Jonah has learned to read ever-more challenging books and to write a paragraph-long “book report” each week; he has started taking piano and karate lessons; and he has cultivated a new and better group of friends than the ones he had before. Each of these developments was accompanied by more or less whining from Jonah about being unable to do this or that, but these protests fell on unsympathetic ears as Andrea and I insisted that he not only could, but he must. And because we compelled him, he saw again and again that his protests were false: with a little work he could figure out a sentence full of long words on his own, he could find the right notes in a tricky piano exercise, he could learn to ride a bike in a single afternoon. And now Jonah is visibly more confident than he was just a short time ago.

So now I think the premise with which I started this article is wrong. To succeed in the first place, you don’t necessarily need confidence to try things worth succeeding at. Just as good is having someone loving, persistent, and occasionally merciless driving you to discover for yourself the amazing things you can do.