RWL #258
thinking about weaknesses and deciding where to be mediocre
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! OMG - it is sooo cold! We woke up to zero degrees fahrenheit this morning. I don’t want to go outside - I just want to sit by the fire. Earlier this week I decamped from my usual office space at the LHH and set up a temporary operating base in the den in front of the fire. I’ll probably do it again today.
Last week I talked about the strengths portion of the personal SWOT analysis . It’s fun to think about your strengths. But it’s necessary to also think about your weaknesses. Remember, strengths and weaknesses are meant to be internal examinations. We’re not looking at advantages and disadvantages presented by your environment, we’re looking at ourselves. So questions for personal weaknesses include things like, What do I really not like doing? What do I always avoid? What have I failed at? But also, what limitations do I have - in terms of family obligations, or financial obligations. If you have a young family, or a child with a disability, or you have to care for an elderly parent, those are limitations. If you have very high debt for whatever reason - maybe school debt, house debt, hopefully not consumer debt - then you are going to be limited in your choices.
Some weaknesses pass with time - children get older and more self-sufficient. Some weaknesses can be worked on - like debt. Some weaknesses can also be worked on by putting in an effort to grow. Some weaknesses are worth putting a great deal of effort into if the hamper your life. Mental health challenges are a good example. You might need to build a life around those challenges.
While I was pursuing tenure, I gave a lot of thought to my strengths and weaknesses. I came to UNH with a strong track record in teaching and service, but I had done little to establish myself as a researcher, and to make matters worse, my research was in history of political economy, which is at best tangential to the focus of my current department. So coming to UNH, I felt my teaching was a strength, and my research was a weakness. I had to have some success in my research, and I pushed hard to do so, but it cost me a lot. Teaching and service came much more naturally to me, and that is where my real contributions to my department were and continue to be. I thought about my approach like a battlefield commander - you shore up as best you can your weak points, and you shape the battle as much as possible to fight from your strengths. Likewise, I put enough effort into my weaknesses to satisfice, and poured most of my efforts where I was strong. As Gail Golden talks about, success requires making choices. You have to choose where you will be just mediocre so that you can reserve your real efforts for where you want to excel. If you have a weakness, you can’t let it sink you, but you probably will never be great. So just shoot for mediocre where you are weak, and save your effort for where you are strong.
So now make a list of your weaknesses, and where you are going to accept mediocrity. Let’s talk about opportunities and threats next time!
And now, on to the links!
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Read
What: Psychology Today, Experience: Kind vs. Wicked, Learning the right lessons to improve decisions
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experience-studio/202007/experience-kind-vs-wicked
Why: This is a really important concept that I think I first read about in Cowen’s Average is Over, but it also plays an important role in books like Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. It’s a short piece - but the idea is there are relatively few environments where the rules are clear and consistent. Sports and games are examples. In real life, the rules change constantly, and we have to constantly adapt. When the rules are constant, we can optimize and learn from experience. When the rules change constantly, lessons we learned yesterday may not apply today. So instead we need to develop general skills (see the Range in listen below).
**
What: Three Dimensional Mentorship
Why: A couple of months ago I wrote a series of RWLs talking about mentorship. I refined my thoughts a bit and wrote this very short article on LinkedIn that I think is the best distillation I have done so far. It also appears in the NNE HFMA newsletter this month.
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What: American Economic Review, Claudia Golden, A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_aeapress_2014_1.pdf
Why: This is an academic paper in the top economics journal in the world, so it’s not light reading. However, it is very accessible. You can skip over some of the statistical tests and graphs and still understand the arguments.
The paper addresses the wage gap between men and women in the United States. This gap has been narrowing since the 60’s, but still remains. What Golden finds is that a large portion of the gap can be explained by drilling down into occupations. She shows that some occupations, such as pharmacy, have linear earnings with hours worked. A pharmacist can work full time - i.e., five eight-hour shifts - and earn a standard rate, or they can work two eight-hour shifts and earn the same hourly rate, but have less total income. The point is there is no wage gap based on hours worked. Someone who works 16 hours per week likely earns the same hourly wage as someone who works 60 hours per week. The amount pharmacists earn is linearly related to the number of hours they work, with wage as the slope. So total earnings looks like this:
She then contrasts this with people who work in management, where physical presence is considered necessary. In this case, there is convexity to wages based on the number of hours worked - which means if you agree to work longer hours, you earn more per hour worked.
What you can see is in fields like management, if you work fewer hours, your wages will be low, so when you multiply low wages x low hours, you have low total wages. But if you work long hours, you can earn higher wages, so then you have higher total wages compared to fields like pharmacy for the same number of hours.
Golden’s argument is women tend to have breaks in work, or have periods in their career where they value working fewer hours, usually for child rearing. Women who work in fields like pharmacy, where there are no excess returns to increased number of hours, earn the same hourly wage as men. However, women who work in general business fields will likely earn less per hour than men in the same field if they work fewer hours.
Some fields penalize flexible hours, some do not. Adjusting for this penalty explains much of the remaining gender gap in wages.
So that’s an explainer for the article. It’s still worth reading if you have the time.
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Watch
What: Maurice Ashley, Working backward to solve problems (6 min)
Why: Wisdom from a chess grandmaster on how to reason backward to solve a problem. He has some fun mental puzzles. This is generally a short, fun talk.
**
Listen
What: Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz, Range: David Epstein (62 min)
Why: I have not read Epstein’s Range, but I think I will add it to my list (it’s a long list, so I probably won’t get there for a while). Epstein offers up several thoughts worth reflecting on:
People who become elite performers in any field more often than not go through a period of sampling different fields and different aspects of different fields. E.g., great athletes try a wide range of sports before settling on the one that will make them famous. Epstein argues that the sampling experience creates a “scaffolding” that helps the elite performer bring a unique approach to the task. He gives examples of athletes and musicians, but my personal philosophy is that this applies across the board, and I think he agrees. This is the value of a liberal education.
He makes a strong case for genetics - i.e., not all of us are cut out to be olympic swimmers, no matter how hard we work. There are some people who are born with genes that will allow them to excel. Finding the activity where you are a best fit ties back to (1) above - wide sampling.
Also he takes the dark side of genetics, which I also agree with - even if you find the thing you are best suited for, you may not have the genetic gifts to be elite. That’s a bit depressing - but he then argues that most people underestimate how much progress they can make by deliberate (coached) practice. So that is a hopeful note for the rest of us.
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 week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate 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
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso