Month: December 2012

This video (hat tip) is about bodybuilder Kai Greene. Here is what Kai has to say about Bodybuilding…

A lot of bobybuilders go off track right here… I’m going to show you how it’s done… [first] you get yourself some Tupperware.

The point, as Kai drives home again and again and again is that he needs to eat every two hours every day. In order to do that he needs to always have food on him. In order to do that he has to cook it. Every day. To do that… well, let’s let Kai explain what it means to do that:

[you need to be able to] get up, cook you meals, pack them, have them with you and follow thorugh with eating them every two or three hours.

I’m not talking about focusing on how many grams of [protein, carbs, fat]… what I’m focusing on here is the development of character which speaks to your ability to follow through and start to string together days of efficient action on the very basic level.

…to have your food with you every day all day, in order for you to be able to eat on time and allows you to stay in an anabolic state. Now you start talking about the things that scientifically that can suppost cellular growth and muslce repair.

But if you are still working without the strength of character, without the ability to follow through, then all that complex converstaion about those sciences will mean very very little, will mean nothing to you.

…No one should stay over you: did you eat, are you on top of your schedule. Are you staying true to your path?

At the end of the day it’s just not important to everybody else. And if it’s more important to other people than it is you then there’s a large part of your better potential that will. not. be. tapped.

There’s often little that surprises in ‘inspirational’ videos: hero overcomes odds with hard work and perseverance and wins. The reality of high performance is of course that it demands an extraordinary tolerance of routine.

Put another way, I believe that success comes from an ability to do the shit that nobody else wants to do. Or refuses to learn how to do. Or thinks they can’t learn to do. But here’s the secret: apply time to most any problem and it will relent. Eventually. For problems with really juicy rewards, it takes longer than most people would tolerate.

That’s drive. It ain’t romantic. It is slow and really, truly, boring. Numbingly boring.

I find this idea… glorious.

My favorite blog is Marginal Revolution, written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (both economists at George Mason University and the latter a Canadian!). Today they put out a list of their most popular posts of 2012, which contains a lot of great stuff. I’ll quote a few and paste a few awesome graphs below.

A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit ends with the money quote:

Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a tax on bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.

A simple theory of why so many smart young people go into finance, law, and consulting. A short piece; do read it.

Cowen goes at Robert Solow with both barrels in Robert Solow on Hayek and Friedman and MPS. Try this:

You can consider this essay a highly selective, error-laden, and disappointing account of a topic which could in fact use more serious scrutiny….

And Solow wonders why the Mont Pelerin Society and monetarism were needed. Solow should have started his piece with a sentence like “Milton Friedman was not right about everything, but most of his criticisms of my earlier views have been upheld by subsequent economic theory and practice….”

In Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires, we don’t even need quotes. We only need the graphs:

All in all, a great year from some of the best in the blogging biz.

“Yeah, we’re loaded,” the player said, exhaling after Detroit (4-8) lost its fourth consecutive game and third by four points or less. “But we have a couple of guys who don’t understand what it takes to win. Just making a couple of plays and thinking that makes you great … sometimes you want to just shake some of these guys and say, ‘Don’t you get it?'”

Anybody in particular?

“Ndamukong [Suh] would be first.”

More here.

Ever made a good point in a meeting? Answered a tough question in class? What did you do for the next few minutes? Sat around replaying your brilliance in your own mind is what, probably.

It’s common to view team situations as status competitions. Forget the goal for a sec, do they think I’m smart? Aren’t I the best looking person here? That joke I just made got a laugh, I bet everyone is thinking of how funny I am.

This focus on minutiae of individual interaction is incredibly destructive from a teamwork standpoint. It interrupts the most important characteristic of high performance: achieving ‘flow’. Flow is the mental state of perfect focus on the task at hand.

A lot of this has to do with how you define success. When am I allowed to gloat a bit, even privately? Selfishness notwithstanding, this can be a difficult thing to figure out. Here is a quote paraphrasing one of my favorite books in the world, The Mental ABCs of Pitching, I think about all the time:

Dorfman once approached Greg Maddux after a game and asked him how it went. Maddux said simply: “Fifty out of 73.” He’d thrown 73 pitches and executed 50. Nothing else was relevant.

We don’t know whether the Braves won that game. We don’t know how many strikeouts Maddux got or how many home runs were scored on him. There’s a beautiful purity to this evaluation: it strips away everything that Maddux doesn’t control. And Maddux doesn’t celebrate after a single well-thrown ball, like Suh is accused of doing. It is through the aggregation of successful execution that he succeeds.

But this also shows me that Greg Maddux isn’t a leader. A leader takes it upon himself to tackle, in addition to his own extremely difficult job, the hardest problem of all: collective performance.

Training, motivation, culture. Leadership is a separate skill, perhaps independent from individual performance. That’s why we have coaches and managers who can specialize in it.

But stars, like Greg Maddux and like Ndamukong Suh, have a special power: their individual achievements grant them very high status. Status that draws people to them, that grants them influence over others. High status makes leadership easier, probably, but still devilishly hard.

And for some, the gift of influence comes with an obligation to use it. This is the frustration from teammates who see the potential in Suh. And lament its waste.

All from *Thinking Fast and Slow*, these are on loss aversion, perhaps one of the most powerful forces in the universe:

If Tiger Woods had managed to putt as well for birdies as he did for par, his average tournament score would have improved by by one stroke and his earnings by almost $1m per season.

This made me think of the fiscal cliff debate:

Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanding pie.

This made me think of entitlement reform generally, which includes things like subsidies for farmers or any other entrenched interest group:

As initially conceived, plans for reform almost always produce many winners and some losers while achieving an overall improvement. If the affected parties have any political influence, however, potential losers will be more active and determined than political winners, the outcome will be biased in their favor and inevitably more expensive and less effective than initially planned.

More quotes and thoughts to follow in this, perhaps. It’s a truly amazing book. I pair it with *Guns, Germs and Steel* and say that anyone who wants to consider him/herself educated should read and think about both. Carefully.

I can’t really think of any others on that list for me.

Booze.

I didn’t realize Microsoft patented the Holodeck. Neat.

More here.

 

I spent five hours with Bill Russell last week and thought of Kobe Bryant twice and only twice. One time, we were discussing a revelation from Russell’s extraordinary biography, Second Wind, that Russell scouted the Celtics after joining them in 1956. Why would you scout your own teammates? What does that even mean? Russell wanted to play to their strengths and cover their weaknesses, which you can’t do without figuring out exactly what those strengths and weaknesses were. So he studied them. He studied them during practices, shooting drills, scrimmages, even those rare moments when Red Auerbach rested him during games. He built a mental filing cabinet that stored everything they could and couldn’t do, then determined how to boost them accordingly. It was HIS job to make THEM better. That’s what he believed.

That’s from this excellent article by Bill Simmons (this post is one of many I wanted to write on it). Here’s some more:

…But if you think of Russell as a genius — which he was — it might make more sense. Here’s an example: A few years ago, Russell’s wife² searched his name on eBay and found someone selling a DVD of one of Russell’s college games. She bought the DVD and surprised him with it. They started watching the game: San Francisco (Russell’s team) and Oregon State.³ Bill Russell could rattle off every play before it happened. Not a few of the plays. Not half of the plays. Every play. For a random college game that happened in 1955.

“I can’t do that anymore,” Russell said last week. “I’m older now. If you showed me an old game now, I couldn’t remember every play, just most of them.”

I think there are two interpretations of Russell’s genius, which I agree is genius. First, you could imagine him as having a photographic memory, which is what I think Simmons is getting at and Russell is kinda going along with.

For another interpretation, let’s go back to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

Your brain is composed of two modes of thought: System One and System Two. System Two is the conscious part, the part that does most of what we think of as “thinking” like math and poetry and deliberate learning.

System One is the unconscious part. This is what is at work when a chess master predicts a match outcome with a single glance or when a nurse evaluates a patient’s condition by walking through a room. Years and years and thousands of hours of using System Two on these problems creates a vast catalog of experience. This experience is mostly unseen; you don’t remember it all consciously, but your System One can access it at extraordinary speeds, compare the situation in front of you to it and give your gut a… feeling.

That’s what I think Russell was actually doing when watching that video. Think of the first quote: he scouted his own teammates. He knew their game intimately. He probably wasn’t so much consciously remembering each play as evaluating each play. Knowing what he knew of the players and himself he could predict how the plays *should* play out and typically did. There would be times when something unexpected happened and those memories probably stuck out more prominently, but mostly it was just immersing himself in the System One routine again.

So I’d say, in this case, his genius is the 99% kind.

“Geodon?” I say.

Bryan Googles it. “It’s for symptoms of schizophrenia,” he reads, “so it’s an anti-psychotic agent, I guess.”

“Did you get it from somebody with schizophrenia?” I ask.

“No, I got it from a doctor,” Bryan says. And this is when Bryan tells me the other way he acquires many of his drugs. He sometimes visits psychiatrists, tells them about the art project, and asks them for “samples of some pain pill or sedative I’ve never tried. I say, ‘Can you write me a prescription for just one so I can do my drawing?’ And I take my book with me and show them my art project. And they always give me some crazy, crazy anti-psychotic pill instead.”

“They never give you what you ask for?”

“Never,. Always something way worse.”

“Even though they know you aren’t psychotic,” I say, confused.

“They think I am,” he says.

“And are you?” I say.

“I don’t think I am,” he says.

That’s artist Bryan Saunders. Here’s more. Here are fifty of his  self-portraits, which he paints every other day on different drugs.

3. I am struck by the way genius seems to come in small clusters. Read Eric Kandel about Vienna or George Dyson about the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s and 1940s. In the latter case, it seems as though much of the genius originally was concentrated in a part of the Jewish community in Budapest. So, my hypothesis is that having one high school with 5 really bright students produces more geniuses than five high schools with one bright student each. Together, the bright students are more competitive and also learn from one another. The same would be true for tennis players or artists–people with talent will be pushed to higher levels by being around other people with talent. According to this hypothesis, the decline of Jewish genius might come from the dispersion of the population of bright Jewish students, instead of a high concentration at particular high schools in Vienna, Budapest, or New York.

That’s Arnold Kling.

Want to be a genius? Find the smartest people around and try to beat them.