RWL #262

do the verb, the noun follows

Feb 12, 2022

Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Can I tell you how much fun I am having this semester? I’m having a lot of fun! I’m teaching an introductory finance class to our juniors and I feel like many of them are grooving on it because they see the relevance of the basic principles to their personal lives as well as to their future professional lives. I am also teaching our pre-practicum to prepare the juniors (same group) for their internships. They have just started applying and I am so excited to see where they land! As you know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, I’ve been building the internship program through COVID and I feel like this is the year we will really reap the fruit of our labors. But the most fun I am having is actually teaching a freshman-level course called “United States Health Care Systems”. I have about 47 students and they are of all levels and from many different majors. (This course fulfills a social science gen ed requirement.) Since it is a survey of healthcare in the US, its history, and where it is now, I get to draw on history, philosophy, economics, political science, and of course my own personal experience as a healthcare leader. It is sooo much fun. With a course like this, I really feel like I am a jazz performer. I go in with a loose script and I just start improvising and pulling on all the strings to help the students see both how complex the field is, but also how so many things interconnect. And ultimately, I want them to be able to take that same lens and turn it on the rest of society. I am posting the lectures to YouTube in case you are interested. I’ve been fighting with the sound, but I think I finally have it down as of the Ch 3, lecture 2 video. The other videos you can hear but … well there are issues of various sorts. Check out the videos here if you are interested. I’ll be posting future videos there as well.

OK - so last week I talked about how I had read Clear’s Atomic Habits and how I decided the central passage of the book was:

New identities require new evidence. If you keep casting the same votes you’ve always cast, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always had. If nothing changes, nothing is going to change. It is a simple two-step process:
Decide the type of person you want to be.
Prove it to yourself with small wins.

So in that spirit, at the beginning of the year I set nine (9) weekly goals that I have been tracking since the second week of ‘22. I know, starting in the second week is lame, but I was (figuratively) hung over from the daily art project from last year and really didn’t know what I wanted to do this year until I had time for my head to clear. So I have just finished Week 5 of my quantified year and it’s going pretty well. I will share all the goals with you soon, as well as my tracking process, but I wanted to talk about the process a bit this week first.

As I noted in RWL #256, I realized that the daily art was probably a mistake pretty early in ‘21. The reason it was a mistake was that I was investing more effort than was warranted given the value I placed on the project for myself. As envisioned, the project was only supposed to take 15 minutes per day, but in reality it often to an hour or more each day. Furthermore, it expanded to occupy much more of my attention than was warranted as well. Having a rigid, you must do this every single day or you are a failure in the eyes of God and all small children everywhere rule created an unproductive amount of stress. The project lost its spark of joy for me fairly quickly, which was sad because I received a lot of generous support from friends and followers. I didn’t want to let you/them down, either, by missing days or quitting. So I ground on, even though by the end it was pure grit to get through.

Now there is something to be said for pure grit. In fact there is a lot to say for pure grit. Not enough is said about pure grit these days. Pure grit used to be an American staple. Who cares about your feelings. Keep grinding away. The road to accomplishing Important things often doesn’t feel good in the process. It’s only through the retrospectascope that they feel good. The Army experience is all about that. How much of a burden can you carry? You know what? It sucks now, but you will look back through the retrospectascope and feel pride about what you have accomplished, even if in the present what you are doing is sheer misery.

I know there is a literature on grit, and not all of it is positive. But I do think you can train yourself to have more grit, and grit is often what gets things done. It used to be called character, that carrying of a 120 pound ruck sack and not complaining.

But…

While it’s indeed important to cultivate a character that has a large reserve of grit, I don’t think all of life should be approached as a ruck march slogging through a pre-dawn rain. So this year I have designed weekly goals that support a variety of priorities - creative, personal, and professional. For example, one of the goals is to do at least one photo shoot each week. I realized how much I missed photography last year, but just couldn’t justify the additional time to work on photography when I was working on art every day. As a result, I did very little photography. Photography is something that is really important to me. I have been shooting regularly since 2009 when I bought my first DSLR and I’ve invested a lot of time in learning how to make good images. One of my identities is I am a photographer. Going with the Atomic Habits idea, I decided I was a photographer a long time ago, and I had been proving it to myself by regularly working on my craft. But then I let it drop off. So now I’m bringing it back. And photography really brings me joy. The photo above I made because I saw how the sun through the window was creating this cool shadow composition. Having the goal of shooting at least once a week has made me pay more attention again, and pushed me to keep my camera handy for such moments. It feels really good.

This year I am also making a commitment to work on my poetry writing and performing. This is another one of my identities - I am a poet. But to be honest, I haven’t been proving that to myself by doing it. So that is another commitment - to write something each week, and perform it. This one has not been going as well this year so far. But I’m hoping to get back into the groove of it.

So those are two of the nine things I am working on. Smaller goals with more flexibility and less self-flagellation if I miss the goal. The purpose is to give just enough push to do the thing without being miserable. A little grit, but more grace. One becomes a photographer by doing photography; one becomes a poet by writing poetry. You can be a bad photographer or a bad poet, but if you do the thing, you are still a photographer, you are still a poet. And from there you can improve.

If you want to be a thing, you have to do the verb. More about this project next week.

And now, on to the links!

Read

What: The Drift, What Was the TED Talk? | Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting"

https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/

Why: I remember sometime around 2012 when I first discovered TED talks, I was listening to one in my kitchen while I was cooking dinner and my wife came in and said, “Are you listening to one of those TED Talks again?” WHen I said yes, her response was something like, “I could tell just from the way the guy was talking.”

TED Talks have become a cliche. But I reference them all the time here in this newsletter, so when I saw this article, I felt obligated to read it, because they feel cliche to me, too, but not just for the style. From the article:

I like to call this fusion “the inspiresting.” Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism. Politically, the inspiresting performs a certain kind of progressivism, as it is concerned with making the world a better place, however vaguely.

And yet... I still like them. I mean, some of them exhaust me and some are not interesting or inspiring, they are just insipid. The TED talk style of presenting is a cultural way of speaking. If you listen to a clip of a news cast from the 80’s, you will hear just how much our speaking styles have evolved (vocal fry!) Sometimes you want to be inspired - and it’s easy to turn to TED to get that dose. Just choose carefully.

The piece is worth reading. It has a Marxian, critical theory feel to it, because in the end it’s all about power. From the conclusion:

TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy.

What: The World in Data, What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Why: Answer: Solar, hydropower, wind, and nuclear.

In my mind, I’m not a climate denier or climate skeptic. I don’t have the education to “do the research”. All I can do is listen to various authorities and try to sort it out a bit in my head. I hear a lot of shouting (the world seems to have paid a lot of attention to a child from Sweden and basked in her shouting at them), and a lot of doomsaying that climate change is a crisis, and imminent. And yet, when I look at what countries are actually doing, and what activists are demanding, I do not feel they are serious.

As an example, Green activists in Germany forced the country to shut down its nuclear power plants and shift to gas. Gas is better than coal or oil, but is still a fossil fuel, and the result of shifting to gas is 1) to increase the amount of emissions in Germany and 2) to make Germany strategically vulnerable to Russia.

Most arguments in the US that I hear call for shifting directly to solar and wind. But solar and wind are unreliable sources of power. Solar does not generate power at night and wind does not produce power consistently. Some day when we figure out our battery storage at scale, that might not be a problem. But the solution today is to turn on fossil fuel power plants to supplement renewables. Turning power plants on and off pollutes more than just letting them run continuously.

Nuclear plants have zero emissions. As the study linked above shows, they are incredibly safe. There have been a few eye-catching tragedies (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima), but compared to the recorded effects of fossil fuel plants and fossil fuel emissions, nuclear is safe, full stop.

Furthermore, all of the nuclear waste ever produced in the United States could fit in a football field-sized space, 10 feet deep, according to the US government. And that is using technology from the 50’s and 60’s. Today’s nuclear technology is far better, and generates far less waste. Also, renewables like solar must be constructed with rare earths, which come from only a few places on the planet, most of them not well governed, and as a result they are not responsibly mined.

If the world is really at the cusp of calamity, my question is, why have we stopped building nuclear power plants? Nuclear power is clean, safe, and predictable. Let’s clean up the environment with technology we know works, while continuing to invest in solar and wind for the long term.

So when I consider this situation, I find a contradiction. People who say that climate change is imminent and the threat is existential, are also adamantly opposed to nuclear power. They want massive investments in solar and wind. I think that is fine and good, if the problem was decades in the future. If the problem is imminent, nuclear technology is proven to work right now. And it is clean and safe (in case you missed that before). So if the challenge is imminent, shouldn’t we be building nuclear power plants as fast as we can to get to zero emissions as fast as we can?

So why aren’t greens demanding more nuclear power right now if climate disaster is imminent? We have a technology that works, that is safe and clean, and that could eliminate air pollution from all advanced economies immediately.

OK, dear readers - tell me. What am I missing?

Flourishing in the World

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