About a week back, I helped decorate the tree at my parents house. It is the same tree my family has had since 1991, and it is aging pretty well. I did notice it was shorter and a little more see-through than I recall — yet I still love to look at a Christmas tree on these long winter nights. It has to look a very certain way, though. I’m extremely particular about the type of lights: I can see the 60Hz flicker of LEDs (if you can’t see the flicker, try looking at them out of the corner of your eye) so I’m a staunch supporter of incandescent lights, the bigger the better. The fact that I notice, dwell on, respond to, take pride in getting these details right, things like color temperature, replacement bulbs, wattages, things that seem insignificant to most — I used to think that was a part of me to minimize, to downplay, to somehow outgrow.
But I love that stuff. I love the details.
Dentistry is a job that rewards extreme attention to detail: just ask anyone who casts gold about getting stone expansion right. Or any dentist who has bonded with a 5th generation system and not paid enough attention to dentinal moisture. I delight in mounting casts and checking their articulation with shimstock — I love thinking through how to build in negative error into restorations, I love how you can refine a tooth prep with different grits of diamonds. I love this stuff. The other day I popped on a rubber dam, preparing to do a quadrant of restorations, and I realized that I was in my happy place. How lucky I am!
So the turning point in accepting my detail-dwelling was reading the essay Hypercritical by John Siracusa, a famously particular software developer and technology writer:
But my scrutiny was not limited to my own artwork or the
products of multinational conglomerates. Oh no, it
extended to everything I encountered. This pasta is
slightly over-cooked. The top of that door frame is not
level. Some paint from that wall got onto the ceiling.
Text displayed in 9-point Monaco exhibits a recurring
one-pixel spacing anomaly in this operating system. Ahem.
…
But much worse than that, it means that everything you
ever create appears to you as an accumulation of defeats.
“Here’s where I gave up trying to get that part right and
moved on to the next part.” Because at every turn, it’s
apparent to you exactly how poorly executed your
work-in-progress is, and how far short it will inevitably
fall when completed. But surrender you must, at each step
of the process, because the alternative is to never
complete anything—or to never start at all.
Sircausa was describing exactly my life — and yet I had never ever ever had anyone at all to talk with this about, and suddenly here was somebody articulating my own personality back to me, more eloquently than I was able. So, he goes on to point out the value of this critical eye, and of course he’s right. The dearth of those so honed in on details makes them rare and their contributions valuable — as long as they figure out a way not to drive everyone around them insane.
I read a poem called “Pushing the Dead Chevy” in this week’s issue of the New Yorker and I realize that, more and more, I believe in an intensely bright, pinpoint core inside of us, unsullied by the difficulties, failures, and harm from the outside world. It’s a nice thought, enchanting even, but I don’t know how much about people it actually explains.
Do we act selfishly out of a desire to guard that last, unspoiled bit of ourselves? Or does it endure despite our selfishness? Does everyone possess such a core? What happens if that light goes out?
I know of no way to cut through the layers of artifice everyone erects around the shining core of their true selves; as an introvert who would far rather talk with someone I’ve just met about their worst fear than their résumé, of course I wish I knew how to get through to that true person at the center. It is enough, though, to simply remember the core inside that other person. A person who may be trying harder than ever to hide it at this moment, but doing more than usual to reveal it. If only you remember it is there.
My father grew up in Rochester, Minnesota when it was considered the best place in the United States to grow up. Anchored by IBM, his neighborhood thrived during post-war prosperity; neighbors got together to make a pool — he recalls them pulling their lawn hoses out to it to fill it at the beginning of the season. Summer afternoons gave way to late nights of playing and inventing every game. Similarly, my mom grew up running about a safe and happy neighborhood, caring for the wild cats who befriended her and her siblings, driving Honda dirt bikes fixed up by her father in the field across the road from where they lived. Come to think of it, I don’t know as many stories as I’d like from my parent’s childhood.
But I can tell you about my childhood: it was the best any kid had anywhere and I would do anything, sacrifice everything for my kids to experience something similar.
I grew up in Woodbury, Minnesota when it was one of the fastest growing towns in the United States. Such building and developing gives any place a palpable sense of optimism. All eyes turn to the future, no decay to overcome but simply dreams to realize. Yet, this was only the backdrop. Like my parents, I whiled away my days outside. Summer looms large in my recollections of childhood. Basketball games to 100, by ones and twos. Kick the can. Pick-up football behind John & Steve’s house. Street hockey in front of Matt’s. Making funny videos at Nils’. Richard, with a pint-size golf course made with neighbors in backyards. Justin’s house perched on a hill, with an awesome classic car in the garage, awaiting a restoration I dreamt of watching. Some truly great sledding hills. My mind wanders the halls of memory, picking up and examining extracted essences of experiences: birthday parties, sunburns, passing the house of a crush, running trails, goofing off on tennis courts, mosquitoes trapped in sweat, playing until you couldn’t see the basketball anymore, and that funny feeling of summer loafing when your friends were gone on vacation and you made plans for when they returned. Kool Aid. Trying to keep the summer alive by playing after school before homework on those warm September evenings.
As Mykala reminds me, I grew up with a truly exceptional group of friends. They gave my youth a shape and a substance and a completely safe place, something I can never lose and for which I am ever grateful. May my children have the same.
Few articles I read, only about one a year, get saved on my computer. These are articles describing an invaluable overarching idea, a critique of our modern world so potent that I want to reference it so I don’t forget it and can incorporate it into my own life planning. The following is one of those articles.
The decline in opportunity to play has also been
accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in
narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the
late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative
samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability
and tendency to see from another person’s point of view
and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism
refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of
concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally
with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism
are exactly what we would expect to see in children who
have little opportunity to play socially. Children can’t
learn these social skills and values in school, because
school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting.
School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children
there are not free to quit when others fail to respect
their needs and wishes.
The article describes how, since about the 1960s, kids have been getting more schoolwork so that schools reach performance goals set by standardized tests. This takes away time where kids can learn empathy at play. As a result, you get less creative kids:
One line of evidence comes from the results of a battery
of measures of creativity — called the Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking (TTCT) — collected from normative
samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to
12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee
Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William
and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and
reported that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly
after, and have continued to decline ever since.
…
Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and
colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the
University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are
the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world
achievements. They are better predictors than IQ,
high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve
the most.
From reading the article, I learned about “question tags”, where an assertion is given a clause that promotes discussion if the conversational partner disagrees. For example, I’ve noticed that patients are more relaxed when I say “Is it OK if I take a look?” (a question) rather than “I’ll take a look” (a pronouncement). We both know I am about to set their chair back, and the expectations of the whole interaction are that I will take a look, but giving the person the power to veto is a powerful psychological path to consensus. I could refine this further by fully combining statement and question tag with something like: “Let’s take a look, okay?” I tried “shall we” here, but it felt so different from how I talk, that I threw it away. The “okay” tag is even a little confrontational for me (I know, I know).
You think these details sound hopelessly minor, but such subtle changes are the entire difference between someone being comfortable and upset with you. I’m reminded of this bit about crafting jokes in a recent profile of Jerry Seinfeld for The New York Magazine:
Developing jokes as glacially as he does, Seinfeld says,
allows for breakthroughs he wouldn’t reach otherwise. He
gave me an example. “I had a joke: ‘Marriage is a bit of a
chess game, except the board is made of flowing water and
the pieces are made of smoke,’ ” he said. “This is a good
joke, I love it, I’ve spent years on it. There’s a little
hitch: ‘The board is made of flowing water.’ I’d always
lose the audience there. Flowing water? What does he mean?
And repeating ‘made of’ was hurting things. So how can I
say ‘the board is made of flowing water’ without saying
‘made of’? A very small problem, but I could hear the
confusion. A laugh to me is not a laugh. I see it, like at
Caltech when they look at the tectonic plates. If I’m in
the dark up there and I can just listen, I know exactly
what’s going on. I know exactly when their attention has
moved off me a little.
“So,” he continued, “I was obsessed with figuring that
out. The way I figure it out is I try different things,
night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point,
or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me
three years, I’ll wait.” Finally, in late August, during a
performance, the cricket cage snapped into place. “The
breakthrough was doing this”— Seinfeld traced a square in
the air with his fingers, drawing the board. “Now I can
just say, ‘The board is flowing water,’ and do this, and
they get it. A board that was made of flowing water was
too much data. Here, I’m doing some of the work for you.
So now I’m starting to get applause on it, after years of
work. They don’t think about it. They just laugh.”
True communication, whether to a patient or to an audience member, hinges upon sweating those details. Everything in our friendships, marriages, even in business, revolves around talking with the ones around us, making ourselves understood, and making others feel that they are understood. Play teaches that, and as this article clearly shows, school can not.
Been trying a new workout technique lately, which can be described with the following words: go faster, waste less time. I’ve decreased my time by 30%, which amounts to 2 hours 18 minutes time savings per week. This has been in collaboration with Mykala, who had the original idea long ago. The thing that I had a hard time with is the mental state you have to be in to push yourself constantly for an entire workout. Since I’m lifting weights, I’m constantly resting but now trying to shorten that rest time. It isn’t a treadmill, where your pace is essentially enforced. Rather, it is like running intervals for your entire workout. Every workout. I’m getting used to it, the time-savings are tremendous, and I think I get a better workout.
So the reduction in time per workout has been from 2 hours+ to 90 minutes. The record so far is 85 minutes, and I’ve been averaging 90-95 minutes. Since I haven’t done one of these workout write-ups in a while (oh my god it has been 10 years since I did one… where did THAT time go?), here’s the workout, which essentially consists of a bunch of supersets, where while one muscle group is resting, you do another (unrelated) group with as short a break as possible between.
First, a key:
BP bench press
LRCU compound leg-raise & chin-up
LRS leg-raises w/static half chin-up
MP military press
HSP hand-stand push-up
RDR lying rear delt raise
FDR front delt dumbbell raise
WD weighted dip
CC chair bicep curl
IC incline bicep curl
WCU weighted chin-up
S squat (w/calf, tibialis raise)
SCR Cybex seated calf raise
SP Cybex squat press
PLC Cybex prone leg curl
LE Cybex leg extension
Commas separate sets, lines separate exercises, arrows mean rests during a set. Weights in pounds, bodyweight where unspecified:
Warmup: 10 45° down angle push-ups BP 45×10, 135×5, 155×5, 225×3→2→2 LRCU×10 BP 225×2 LRS×10 BP 185×5→2→2 LRS×9 BP 185×5→2→2 LRCU×8 BP 195×5→2 LRS×8 CC 40×17 BP 205×3→2→2 LRS×8 CC 55×7 BP 205×3→2→2
(30 min) LRCU×7 MP 85×10 BP 205×4 MP 105×6 LRS×9 MP 115×6 LRS×8 MP 115×6 IC 45×9 WCU 45×9 FDR 45×8 MP 135×10 LRCU×7→LRS×3 IC 45×9 WD 100×14, 0×4 LRS×10 FDR 45×5 MP 135×6, 135×4
S 225×18 WD 100×14, 0×4 LRS×9 FDR 45×12
S 225×11
(60 min) SP 450×11, 450×4 LRS×8 RDR 45×15 SCR 180×12 HSP×14 SCR 180×8 RDR 45×10 SP 450×10 PLC 130×15, 150×5 LE 190×12, 205×4, 215×4 SP 540×11, 540×4 LRS×7 RDR 45×11 SCR 180×12 HSP×14 SCR 180×8 RDR 45×9 SP 540×10 PLC 130×11, 150×5 LE 190×12, 205×4 LRCU×10 LE 215×4 PLC 150×4
Looks positively cryptic in that format, but it is really straight forward. I have no idea what it will look like in 10 years, but I do hope to continue exercising. What have I learned lifting? Precor’s Icarian line are the best benches by such a large margin it isn’t even worth considering others. Iron Grip dumbbells and barbells are better than getting rust on you and your clothes. Air piston resistance machines were a short experiment and didn’t work well. Find what works for you: the difference between joint injury and health is less than half an inch or a few degrees. Never EVER hyperextend and think twice before fully extending with heavy weights. Going in 3 times a week and cheating slightly on form is better than going in once and getting your form perfect. When bench pressing, never rest your feet any lower than your back, and it is best to have them up in the air. The lower you go on squats, the higher your chance of getting injured—if you’re in it for the long term and not for show, go just low enough to build the strength and joint stability you need.
Sometimes you go into to work and it turns out you didn’t work that day so you scoot back home and open the windows to let the cool fall air in and crawl into bed next to your lovely wife and your fuzzy little orange cat keeps watch out the window and the light gently rises over the hill on which you live and a thought drifts lazily up from your subconscious, through your limbic systems, past your prefrontal cortex, right out through the crown of your head: life is perfect.
