RWL #285
self-improvement through data - are you really?
Greetings from the LHH! I made my longest trip to do an intern site visit this past Thursday - 202 miles from UNH to Derby, CT - to visit a student doing an internship at Griffin Faculty Physicians, part of the Griffin Health System. I really enjoy doing these visits because I get to see the students excited about applying what they have learned. I especially enjoy these visits when I get to go to a new facility and meet a new preceptor - I always learn something new about the industry. I had a chance to talk with the preceptor about how Griffin, as a relatively small health system anchored by a small community hospital, responded to COVID. As it turns out they leaned into being part of the state’s COVID response, setting up testing and later immunization sites. So while their normal business went down, they offset the normal operating losses by strategically shifting their resources. It was a great story. As a bonus to the trip, I was able to crash with a high school friend I hadn’t seen in several years and catch up. It was a lot of windshield time, but for good use. Next week I have three trips to Boston and the Boston area, but after that trip I will be in the home stretch.
So last week I talked how I had been trying to quantify some self-improvement projects, and bragged a bit about the reading habit I had been trying to instill. Building off of Atomic Habits, I tried to build a set of small daily goals that were easy to accomplish. That worked really well for the reading habit, and it also has worked really well for my work out routine - I have successfully disciplined myself to do a regular regime of cardio and weight training. I can count on one hand the number of days I have missed this year where I did not get at least 30 minutes of deliberate exercise. So that has been really great, but not everything has worked out so well.
One of the key areas I have failed that I really wanted to improve was my research efforts. As a professor we are evaluated on three things: teaching, service, and research. I love teaching (many of you who read this are former students, so I think you know that), so this is easy for me to work hard on. Service is a broad basket that includes anything you are doing to improve the program, the university, the discipline (e.g., being a reviewer for an academic journal), or for industry. I especially enjoy working with industry - I am now on the local boards of three professional associations and a nonprofit. These relationships help me develop opportunities for my students and connect the Department to industry in more meaningful ways. My teaching and service complement each other very nicely, and it’s hard to really draw a hard line between them. For example, is this newsletter service or teaching? Is my driving three hours to check on a student teaching or service? It’s muddy and I like it that way. But research has always been my weak leg. I did enough of it to get tenure, but I look at colleagues around me who are much more successful than me at producing papers for academic journals and I am a bit envious. They seem to be publishing a constant flow and I muck around for a long time and produce much less. One of my professors from my PHD program who was a prolific producer of articles and books used to say to our class, “The secret is ass-to-chair!” In other words, if you want to publish, you have to put in the time working on your research. So one of the goals I set this year was to make sure I spent at least five hours each week working on research. This is a reasonable goal given I am supposed to spend about ⅓ of my time working on research. In fact, it should be double that amount of time, or maybe more. In the spirit of setting easy goals, I set a low bar for success. And I failed consistently to even meet that low bar. So that really forces me to face the question: how much do I really want to be successful as a researcher? The answer appears to be, not that much.
In my experience, there are a lot of people who talk about wanting to be successful in some field and often express grievance about the fact that they are not, putting the blame on other people, or “the system”, or whatever else. But if you watch them, you can see they aren’t really putting in the effort to be successful - in whatever the endeavor is. Luck and talent of course play a big part, but ass-to-chair (or ass-to-whatever is relevant) is also really important. It’s easy to talk about wanting something, it’s much harder to work toward something. Data helps us get honest with ourselves. In the Laura Venderkam video I shared a while back about how to take control of your time, she skeptically asks people who say they are working more than 60 hours each week, “but are you really?” (Watch the video again - it’s totally worth it.) The point being that we often lie to ourselves about how hard (or productively) we are actually working.
A decline in research is a common behavior in academia - especially post-tenure. People who were good at research pre-tenure tend to keep cranking out papers; people who published just enough pre-tenure tend to find other things to occupy their time post-tenure. The good researchers get a lot of positive feedback from the process of research, the mediocre researchers usually have other activities (teaching, service) that give them positive feedback and lean into those instead. I really don’t want to be “one of those” professors. That’s why I set this goal for myself. And now, facing the data, I have to admit I have been acting like “one of those” - who talks a good game, but does not put in the effort. I’ll drive 202 miles to talk to a student, but I won’t make time in my schedule to do the work I need to be doing.
The thing I have done after reflecting on the first six months performance measurements is removed a bunch of other personal goals. I’m keeping the reading (which is both personal and professional), and the workouts (because I’m over 50 and need that), but I’m dropping a bunch of other goals in favor of focusing on upping my game (or my ass-to-chair time, as it were) on research. When I talk about research, I don’t want to hear my inner Laura Venderkam saying, “but are you really?” I don’t want to be “one of those” professors.
So a question for you - do you have something that you know you want to improve? Have you created easy-to-meet daily and weekly goals that will move you toward that improvement? Or do you talk about how hard you are working toward this performance improvement, but you aren’t actually taking meaningful steps? (but are you really?) Let me challenge you to pick one thing you want to improve, and pick something you can do each day to move you toward that improvement. Then track it for a month. And see if you are really putting in the effort, and if not, why not?
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
Read
What: Bloomberg, Brain-Computer Interface Startup Implants First Device in US Patient
Why: I’ve posted about this before, specifically the work being done by Elon Musk’s Neurolink company. The incredible value this sort of innovation could bring, first to people with physical disabilities, but eventually to even healthy people would be game changing. It’s the kind of innovation that could change everything. Imagine if you had a spinal cord injury that kept you from being able to walk, but a brain interface could allow you to control a robotic exoskeleton that would allow you to walk again. Or in the longer run, imagine applications that would allow people to control your car by thought rather than using a steering wheel and pedals? I find this innovation one that would have the potential for radical social and economic transformation along the lines of electricity. We’ll see!
What: Astral Codex 10, What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
Why: Scott Alexander is respected amongst the intellectuals I follow for going to the data (my theme in the introduction). This is a good example.
I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period.
I understand this is the opposite of what lots of other people are saying, but I think they are wrong.
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Watch
What: Big Think, Tal Ben-Shahar, Don’t chase happiness. Become antifragile (7 min)
Why: Quick shot on the (indirect) pursuit of happiness. I really like how he incorporates Taleb’s Antifragile, one of my favorite books.
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Listen
What: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish, Marshall Goldsmith: The Essentials Of Leadership (97 min)
https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/marshall-goldsmith/
Why: Very interesting interview with a world-renowned leadership coach. Goldsmith is asked, are leaders born or made? His answer - every leader he has ever coached was born. This is such a great answer. Of course we all have gifts of various sorts and degree, but we are all capable of learning to be better leaders. We all start somewhere - what is admirable is not where you start, but how far you go.
**
What: Quillette Podcast: Understanding Wokeness as a Make-Work Strategy for the Privileged Class
Why: I have a visceral revulsion against Marxism given the profound number of men, women, and children who have been murdered by supplicants to the philosophy, but this Marxist offered an some interesting insight.
First, he clarified for me something I had always wrestled with, the division of the world into labor and capital. This dichotomy just didn’t seem to describe the world I know. But Marx was writing at a time when capitalists tended to be entrepreneurs using their own money. The corporations were primitive, without much by way of a managerial structure. There were the owners and the workers. Today, as this podcast points out, we have a managerial class and a class of largely faceless investors for most of our large corporations. Today capitalists have been divided into those who provide the capital and those who run the business. Labor is more specialized, too, with much larger quantities of human capital so the line dividing management and labor is much less clear as well.
In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, published in 1942, Schumpeter sees a future where businesses would be run by a managerial class and entrepreneurs would largely disappear. While we still have a large number of founders in the United States, most of the large corporations are not run by founders. Schumpeter argues that the removal of the founder from management creates a conservative, perhaps self-serving managerial class. This is what Kyeune seems to be talking about in this interview.
I teach future would-be managers. Very few of my students indicate they hope to be founders. I wouldn’t be a good teacher for a would-be founder since I’ve spent my whole career as part of the managerial class. One of the questions Kyeune brings up is, are we educating too many people for the managerial class? In other words, do we have too many people going to college? I think the answer is yes, as I’ve said in previous RWLs.
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