RWL #207
Second Acts, Coach v Mentor, The Vaccine, and Matthew McConaughey
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire - FOB LHH! Twas the day after Christmas and all through the LHH we were feeling mighty rolly-polly after a few days of feasting. While we were not able to celebrate the way we have become accustomed since returning to NH, with extended family, we were still able to enjoy having our girls all at home with us - in a way it hearkened back to the many Christmases we celebrated far from family while I was in the Army. I found a phenomenal cinnamon bun recipe that I highly recommend - the only modification I made was to let the buns rise overnight so we could bake them Christmas morning.
This is my last newsletter of 2020, so I want to thank all of you for reading and for sharing your thoughts with me. I always enjoy hearing if one or more of the links spoke to you.
All my grades are in, so the fall semester is officially over. The remote learning, especially mixed remote learning, has been a challenge for creating community among the students, and for me to connect to them. I’m really bad with names and faces - it usually takes me till close to Thanksgiving to get everyone’s name down - but this semester I wouldn’t be able to recognize most of my students if they walked past me in a hallway. When they have been in front of me, they have been wearing masks, and when they are online, well, I’m usually lecturing and I don’t scroll through the screens to look at each of them. It’s something I’ll have to continue to work on, but now with the vaccine, hopefully that is close to over.
We got some additional snow early this week, so I took a photo walk through College Woods on the back side of UNH and took the above shot of the Oyster River with a crystal ball thrown in for fun.
I hope you’ve had a lovely holiday season so far. I look forward to writing to you in the New Year - only a few days away! Stay well and stay safe!
Read
What: The New Yorker, What If You Could Do It All Over?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/what-if-you-could-do-it-all-over
Why: I don’t think the title is appropriate to the article. It is more about possible selves, which I have been thinking about quite a bit lately. The article attempts to integrate a lot of interesting thoughts. Here are two passages:
The philosopher Charles Taylor, who has written much about the history of selfhood, has a theory about why we can’t just accept the way things are: he thinks that sometime toward the end of the eighteenth century two big trends in our self-understanding converged. We learned to think of ourselves as “deep” individuals, with hidden wellsprings of feeling and talent that we owed it to ourselves to find. At the same time, we came to see ourselves objectively—as somewhat interchangeable members of the same species and of a competitive mass society. Subjectivity and objectivity both grew more intense. We came to feel that our lives, pictured from the outside, failed to reflect the vibrancy within.
And
Part of the work of being a modern person seems to be dreaming of alternate lives in which you don’t have to dream of alternate lives. We long to stop longing, but we also wring purpose from that desire.
These two passages spoke to me. I know these tensions caused me a lot of distress in my earlier life, and maybe also gave me some of my drive. Passing into my 50s this year, I feel like maybe I am coming to terms with them. This seems an appropriate piece to contemplate at this time of year - making peace with the past as a year comes to a close, and looking forward hopefully to a new beginning.
**
What: ESPN OTL, Michael Jordan has not left the Building (from 2014)
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/Michael-Jordan/michael-jordan-not-left-building
Why: I finished reading Wright Thompson’s Pappyland last week and found it quite moving. It’s nominally about bourbon, but it’s really about fathers and sons and making something of yourself. It made me want to look at some of his other work, which is mostly profiling athletes. I came across this one of Michael Jordan which I realized I had read shortly after it came out, and used it for a journal club back when I was teaching for Army-Baylor. It has a similar theme to the New Yorker article above, but is a reflection on second acts. In this case, who Michael Jordan was becoming now that he was no longer Michael Jordan. Thompson chose to profile him the year he was turning 50. I liked this line: “He sees himself not as a gifted athlete but as someone who refused to lose.” The same drive that made him Michael Jordan now is a curse. He is quoted in the article: "It's an addiction. You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can't. If I could, then I could breathe."
I think there is something that whips us to achieve when we are young. At some point we all realize how that drive to achieve blinds us to so much else that is going on around us, whether we are successful or not:
The astonishing thing to him was how much he enjoyed this. "At 30 I was moving so fast," he says. "I never had time to think about all the things I was encountering, all the things I was touching. Now when I go back and find these things, it triggers so many different thoughts: God, I forgot about that. That's how fast we were moving. Now I can slow it down and hopefully remember what that meant. That's when I know I'm getting old."
I see in this profile of Jordan shadows of what I saw with many (though not all) of the general officers I knew when I was on active duty. I remember when I was a captain working at an Army hospital commanded by a female Army nurse general. For some reason her aide was out and I was asked to step in for a couple of days. It happened that she was preparing to retire and one of the things she asked me to do was proofread her retirement speech. I think I made a few very minor notes, but the one thing I remember was she had a line where she said when she came on active duty she set a goal of being the “best Army nurse”. I recommended she modify that to say “the best Army nurse she could be”, after all, how do you even measure if you are the best Army nurse? There is no objective standard for that. Needless to say the change was not made. To become a general in the Army, even now, is a significant feat. To become a female general in the Army in the 90’s was much more so. It takes a certain singular drive to accomplish certain things. That drive does not always make for people who are nice to be around. As the poet Marilyn Chin writes, “Lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency.”
**
Watch
What: Coach v Mentor
Why: So this is something different - I’m giving you two videos above, each about 4 minutes long. I’m preparing a lecture on creating a culture of mentorship for the ACHE annual meeting and I’ve been thinking about my operating definition of mentorship. One of the challenges when discussing mentorship is it means different things to different people. Older definitions of mentorship in the business literature, starting with Levinson and then Kram in the 80s defined mentoring as a combination of coaching and psychosocial support. But people who work as professional coaches argue that mentoring is something separate from coaching. So I’ve clipped these two videos that present different views of what mentoring and coaching are. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts as I continue to prepare.
**
Listen
What: a16z Podcast, The Machine That Made the Vaccine: Company, Platform, Innovation
Why: An interesting interview with the CEO of Moderna, one of the creators of one of the proven COVID-19 vaccines. Moderna is much smaller than its competitor in the COVID-19 vaccine space, Pfizer, but it has been working on the MRNA solution for years. This interview is interesting because, as the title implies, they talk about both the company and MRNA as a platform for innovation.
**
What: The Tim Ferriss Show, Matthew McConaughey — The Power of “No, Thank You,” Key Life Lessons, 30+ Years of Diary Notes, and The Art of Catching Greenlights (100 minutes)
https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/
Why: As I noted above, I am terrible with names and faces. This extends to movie and TV stars. My wife is always saying, “Oh, there’s a new show with X person in it!” and my response is “Who is X?” and she then lists the 10 movies or TV shows that I have watched, sitting next to her, with X in some starring role. But even I, in my ignorance, can pick out McConaughey. I wouldn’t have assigned McConaughey much depth of character based on his characters, but that is unfair. Anyone who succeeds in such a cut-throat, Lord-of-the-Flies industry like Hollywood has to have an unusual degree of perseverance and discipline (along with the luck of being born beautiful) - there are many corpses along the side of the trail that leads to the mountaintop McConaughey has climbed. This is a biographical interview, and McConaughey is humorous about his life, but very serious about his work. He presents himself as deeply reflective, and talks about some of his techniques for being reflective. The interview is worth considering even if you are not a fan (I did really enjoy The Gentlemen - but McConaughey was something of a straight man in that one - it was Hugh Grant and Collin Farrell who made that movie what is was). You can consider your own reflective practices and how committed you are to success in your chosen field.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)