"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol
There's a lot to be said for not fearing change, for relishing it as a way to go forward, and so on.
But not today. Today I'm announcing my own change. Zip on over to my author site, www.TheOtherStephenKing.com, for details, but here's the skinny: I changed my name.
Well, sort of. I changed the name that's featured on the front of my books, and I also changed the name readers will search for me at Ama--er, book-selling websites--under. Why? Well, mainly because I got tired of telling folks who couldn't find my books to search for my name and the book title, because if you don't, their search engines disregard the middle initial and find the guy who's been selling books for 40 years, and all 8 or 9 pages of his books.
That, and I like the sound of "TOSK." Been signing blog entries that-a-way for months now.
If you've already purchased a copy of one of my e-books, the cover image won't refresh to the new one; sorry. Let me know if you want and I'll send you a .jpg of the new one, or you can relish the old version as an itty-bitty bitmap of future-collectable pixels. Same with the paperbacks--cover doesn't refresh. And same deal--I'll be happy to send you a .jpg of the new cover.
So anyway--off I go, into the brave new world. Same writing, different name.
-TOSK
Whatcha think?
Friday, September 14, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
All that glitters is not gold
The long quote of the day:
"Moralizing, I observed, then, that 'all that glitters is not gold.' Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that." - Mark Twain, in Roughing It
How often do you underrate men of gold and glorify men of mica?
You know what I'm talking about. Every day, each of us chooses to involve a certain group of people in our lives. Granted, for some the group is big, while for others the group is small. Also granted, we don't always get to choose the group's membership--sometimes our bosses or our business chooses for us. Those "granted"s notwithstanding, each of us has a group of people from whom we obtain our pleasure of socializing, our feedback on all sorts of matters both business and pleasure-related, and, to a lesser or greater extent, part of our sense of self and self-worth.
Are these people, these mirrors through whom we see ourselves, men of gold or men of mica?
As I write this, of course, I'm having a hard time defining what a "man of gold" or a "man of mica" might look like. That's because there are so many different types of acquaintances. If you're in business you have your workers/partners, your advisors, and others. If you're a writer you have your beta readers, your other readers, the writers of the blogs you follow, the guy you've never met who just wrote a review of your book on Amazon, and so on. Each of these people holds a certain place in your world. Each is in a position to influence you, your thoughts, and your actions, if you allow it of them. And you do. We all do. It's human nature that we allow those around us into our heads and, sometimes, our hearts.
Bottom line, then: you're going to take something in, like it or not, from those with whom you surround yourself. Are you selecting your circle so that what you take in will give you an advantage? Or will it take advantage of you?
-TOSK
"Moralizing, I observed, then, that 'all that glitters is not gold.' Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that." - Mark Twain, in Roughing It
How often do you underrate men of gold and glorify men of mica?
You know what I'm talking about. Every day, each of us chooses to involve a certain group of people in our lives. Granted, for some the group is big, while for others the group is small. Also granted, we don't always get to choose the group's membership--sometimes our bosses or our business chooses for us. Those "granted"s notwithstanding, each of us has a group of people from whom we obtain our pleasure of socializing, our feedback on all sorts of matters both business and pleasure-related, and, to a lesser or greater extent, part of our sense of self and self-worth.
Are these people, these mirrors through whom we see ourselves, men of gold or men of mica?
As I write this, of course, I'm having a hard time defining what a "man of gold" or a "man of mica" might look like. That's because there are so many different types of acquaintances. If you're in business you have your workers/partners, your advisors, and others. If you're a writer you have your beta readers, your other readers, the writers of the blogs you follow, the guy you've never met who just wrote a review of your book on Amazon, and so on. Each of these people holds a certain place in your world. Each is in a position to influence you, your thoughts, and your actions, if you allow it of them. And you do. We all do. It's human nature that we allow those around us into our heads and, sometimes, our hearts.
Bottom line, then: you're going to take something in, like it or not, from those with whom you surround yourself. Are you selecting your circle so that what you take in will give you an advantage? Or will it take advantage of you?
-TOSK
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Education comes from within
"Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought." - Napoleon Hill
Today I suppose I'm meandering in a strange direction for a career college dean to take. "Education comes from within," Mr. Hill said. The rest of his quote sounds much like the sorta cliche comment you'll occasionally hear me toss out: "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."
So yeah--struggle, effort, and thought. Experience. Not college textbooks. Not sitting in the classroom. Not listening to vibrant lectures presented with detailed graphics. Strange direction for a college dean to go, indeed.
I suppose, though, that first I should clarify what I'm talking about when I use that word. The dictionary's not much help; Merriam-Webster defines education as the act of educating. Thanks, guys. And the verb "to educate" merely means to provide schooling for or to train. That shallowness of the definition is probably why the deeper meaning of the term has been confounding educators and legislators for decades. When I say that I'm in the business of educating, does that mean I ensure that students receive the skills and knowledge necessary to obtain employment, or that I work on more important concerns such as critical thinking, citizenship, and intellectual pursuit instead of delving into the mundane topics?
Yeah, that's a tough one. That question is gonna have to wait for a later post.
See, here's the thing. I've been conversing with employers for years, and believe it or not I've been listening for most of that. It started during my days at the Arizona Technology Incubator, when I listened to what the president of the company thought made good entrepreneurs and good team members for building a company. Later, as a senior IT instructor, I attended advisory councils for that program and listened to dozens of local employers talk about our grads' successes and shortcomings. Now, as a dean, I attend and run advisory councils for all programs.
You know what? The surprising thing, at least early on, wasn't what they were saying. It was that they were all saying the same thing.
I mean, I wouldn't have assumed that an accountant and an entrepreneur and an information technologist and a medical assistant and a construction manager would share the same keys to success. It's not intuitive. But they do. Everybody requires skills, of course, and those skills are different as you go from one field to another. Skills are also trainable, and the reason that many practitioners of higher education turn their noses up at mere skills is that people can, in fact, often learn them through on-the-job training.
Knowledge, too, is vital for success, and I differentiate that from skills because I'm talking cognitive gain rather than psychomotor gain. Skills are about doing things; knowledge is about understanding why things are done the way they are. In a medical assisting classroom, a skill is taking blood pressure, while knowledge is understanding why you put the stethoscope head where you do. For an IT person, a skill is knowing how to delete your boss's user account; knowledge is understanding why you probably shouldn't do it.
That leads, then, to the similarities between the requirements for success in the fields, which I was fascinated to find were usually more important in senior managers' minds than the differences. They're also dang hard to teach in a classroom. Yes, I'm talking about "soft skills," which are, in the above examples, the ability to talk to the patient and explain why you're wrapping something around his arm and squeezing it tight, or the ability to discuss account management concerns with users who really only want to be able to get to their e-mail and files.
We educators and managers often talk about "soft skills," but where do we learn them? Communication is a biggie, for example, but most programs at career colleges don't have a course called "communication." Granted, some of ours boast a course titled Communications, but students rarely learn how to actually communicate in that course; instead, they learn the fundamentals of rhetoric and other heady theoretical stuff that does you no good when staring down a toddler who's destined to receive a shot in the butt. That's why we career college educators often have to approach soft skills obliquely, sometimes even tricking the students into learning them.
All that said, then, what is it that really makes a difference between succeeding or not? Is it having an appropriate skill level? Is it obtaining a certain amount of knowledge--after all, they (whoever "they" is) are always telling us that knowledge is power! Or is it the soft skills helping you get through life's tough situations?
Frankly, I think none of the three, my meaning being what Napoleon Hill was getting at in the words I quoted above. Granted, all of the three are (usually) necessary in order to make success a possibility. It's just that they're the kickoff, not the touchdown (there--can't have a success talk without a sports analogy). In other words, they're the start line.
The finish line is what I've been talking to my students about at orientation and then later on in a success-themed class they all take, but I'm never sure how many of them really get it. I speak of skills and everyone nods--it's what they're there for, after all. Then I speak of knowledge, and they wince, knowing that I'm talking about such enthralling topics as Anatomy & Physiology. Then I discuss the soft skills and receive some grudging nods. Sure, okay. But when I talk about personality traits that lead to success, I often get a lot of blank stares.
Into the bucket I call "traits" I lump things like professionalism and reliability, because that's really where I want my students to focus, but that container also includes things like stick-tuitiveness and sound decision-making. That's the stuff that makes for a success story, no matter which story you read. And it's stuff that, as Mr. Hill points out, you gain through experience, through life, through struggling and pressing through. The May 2012 issue of Entrepreneur magazine held an opinion piece that made a strong case for would-be entrepreneurs right out of school to start off by working for someone else. In the July 2011 Fiscal Times there is a similar article--different author, same point. Young people aren't as prepared to succeed as older ones who've been through the battlegrounds and fought the good fight a few times (and there's my war analogy--I'm batting a thousand today!).
It's not that young people can't succeed. The business world--and the writing world--are alive with success stories of young Mark Zuckerbergs and Amanda Hockings. It's just that they're the exception rather than the rule, and for a good reason.
On a related (believe it or not) note, I never did learn to play the guitar. When I was younger, I received one as a present because I'd been telling everybody that was what I wanted. It's easier and cooler to whip out a guitar than a trumpet to play a song in most social gatherings, you see. But then I started trying to learn to play the darn thing, and--well, it hurt. It's supposed to, apparently. In order to play guitar you have to build up small calluses on your fingertips that allow you to grip the strings, I was told. Building calluses requires pain, though. It requires frequent abrasion to the skin. Learning the guitar wasn't important enough to me to go through the pain, so I didn't.
Success in life is like that. You have to build up mental, emotional, and psychological calluses that will shape your interactions with other people--not in a "callous" way, but rather in an experienced and thoughtful way.
So. All that said, if you're going through some of life's pains right now, rejoice! You're building up the calluses of success. Soon enough you'll be scoring the touchdowns of success while taking the hills of the business world.
-TOSK
Today I suppose I'm meandering in a strange direction for a career college dean to take. "Education comes from within," Mr. Hill said. The rest of his quote sounds much like the sorta cliche comment you'll occasionally hear me toss out: "experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."
So yeah--struggle, effort, and thought. Experience. Not college textbooks. Not sitting in the classroom. Not listening to vibrant lectures presented with detailed graphics. Strange direction for a college dean to go, indeed.
I suppose, though, that first I should clarify what I'm talking about when I use that word. The dictionary's not much help; Merriam-Webster defines education as the act of educating. Thanks, guys. And the verb "to educate" merely means to provide schooling for or to train. That shallowness of the definition is probably why the deeper meaning of the term has been confounding educators and legislators for decades. When I say that I'm in the business of educating, does that mean I ensure that students receive the skills and knowledge necessary to obtain employment, or that I work on more important concerns such as critical thinking, citizenship, and intellectual pursuit instead of delving into the mundane topics?
Yeah, that's a tough one. That question is gonna have to wait for a later post.
See, here's the thing. I've been conversing with employers for years, and believe it or not I've been listening for most of that. It started during my days at the Arizona Technology Incubator, when I listened to what the president of the company thought made good entrepreneurs and good team members for building a company. Later, as a senior IT instructor, I attended advisory councils for that program and listened to dozens of local employers talk about our grads' successes and shortcomings. Now, as a dean, I attend and run advisory councils for all programs.
You know what? The surprising thing, at least early on, wasn't what they were saying. It was that they were all saying the same thing.
I mean, I wouldn't have assumed that an accountant and an entrepreneur and an information technologist and a medical assistant and a construction manager would share the same keys to success. It's not intuitive. But they do. Everybody requires skills, of course, and those skills are different as you go from one field to another. Skills are also trainable, and the reason that many practitioners of higher education turn their noses up at mere skills is that people can, in fact, often learn them through on-the-job training.
Knowledge, too, is vital for success, and I differentiate that from skills because I'm talking cognitive gain rather than psychomotor gain. Skills are about doing things; knowledge is about understanding why things are done the way they are. In a medical assisting classroom, a skill is taking blood pressure, while knowledge is understanding why you put the stethoscope head where you do. For an IT person, a skill is knowing how to delete your boss's user account; knowledge is understanding why you probably shouldn't do it.
That leads, then, to the similarities between the requirements for success in the fields, which I was fascinated to find were usually more important in senior managers' minds than the differences. They're also dang hard to teach in a classroom. Yes, I'm talking about "soft skills," which are, in the above examples, the ability to talk to the patient and explain why you're wrapping something around his arm and squeezing it tight, or the ability to discuss account management concerns with users who really only want to be able to get to their e-mail and files.
We educators and managers often talk about "soft skills," but where do we learn them? Communication is a biggie, for example, but most programs at career colleges don't have a course called "communication." Granted, some of ours boast a course titled Communications, but students rarely learn how to actually communicate in that course; instead, they learn the fundamentals of rhetoric and other heady theoretical stuff that does you no good when staring down a toddler who's destined to receive a shot in the butt. That's why we career college educators often have to approach soft skills obliquely, sometimes even tricking the students into learning them.
All that said, then, what is it that really makes a difference between succeeding or not? Is it having an appropriate skill level? Is it obtaining a certain amount of knowledge--after all, they (whoever "they" is) are always telling us that knowledge is power! Or is it the soft skills helping you get through life's tough situations?
Frankly, I think none of the three, my meaning being what Napoleon Hill was getting at in the words I quoted above. Granted, all of the three are (usually) necessary in order to make success a possibility. It's just that they're the kickoff, not the touchdown (there--can't have a success talk without a sports analogy). In other words, they're the start line.
The finish line is what I've been talking to my students about at orientation and then later on in a success-themed class they all take, but I'm never sure how many of them really get it. I speak of skills and everyone nods--it's what they're there for, after all. Then I speak of knowledge, and they wince, knowing that I'm talking about such enthralling topics as Anatomy & Physiology. Then I discuss the soft skills and receive some grudging nods. Sure, okay. But when I talk about personality traits that lead to success, I often get a lot of blank stares.
Into the bucket I call "traits" I lump things like professionalism and reliability, because that's really where I want my students to focus, but that container also includes things like stick-tuitiveness and sound decision-making. That's the stuff that makes for a success story, no matter which story you read. And it's stuff that, as Mr. Hill points out, you gain through experience, through life, through struggling and pressing through. The May 2012 issue of Entrepreneur magazine held an opinion piece that made a strong case for would-be entrepreneurs right out of school to start off by working for someone else. In the July 2011 Fiscal Times there is a similar article--different author, same point. Young people aren't as prepared to succeed as older ones who've been through the battlegrounds and fought the good fight a few times (and there's my war analogy--I'm batting a thousand today!).
It's not that young people can't succeed. The business world--and the writing world--are alive with success stories of young Mark Zuckerbergs and Amanda Hockings. It's just that they're the exception rather than the rule, and for a good reason.
On a related (believe it or not) note, I never did learn to play the guitar. When I was younger, I received one as a present because I'd been telling everybody that was what I wanted. It's easier and cooler to whip out a guitar than a trumpet to play a song in most social gatherings, you see. But then I started trying to learn to play the darn thing, and--well, it hurt. It's supposed to, apparently. In order to play guitar you have to build up small calluses on your fingertips that allow you to grip the strings, I was told. Building calluses requires pain, though. It requires frequent abrasion to the skin. Learning the guitar wasn't important enough to me to go through the pain, so I didn't.
Success in life is like that. You have to build up mental, emotional, and psychological calluses that will shape your interactions with other people--not in a "callous" way, but rather in an experienced and thoughtful way.
So. All that said, if you're going through some of life's pains right now, rejoice! You're building up the calluses of success. Soon enough you'll be scoring the touchdowns of success while taking the hills of the business world.
-TOSK
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
It's good to not be perfect
"Let's be honest. There's not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings." - Bob Parsons
Hey, I've done business with GoDaddy, the Internet registrar, before. That experience proved Bob Parsons, its founder, one hundred percent correct in the quotation above.
That said, I stuck with GoDaddy through my years of running an ISP from my home. Registered dozens of domains with them. Why? As imperfect as they were in some ways, they provided what I needed: low-cost domain registration that worked just fine. My author-related domains aren't registered through them now, but that's primarily because a friend recommended a different company while I was bringing them up. Know what? The company I'm with now is imperfect.
Writing is the same way. I've commented before on the horrors of finding continuity and grammatical errors in works by none less than the great Marion Zimmer Bradley. Stephen King (the other one, of course), for all of his campaigning against adverbs, sprouts one or two rather frequently throughout his books. In my own writing, I've spent minutes--hours, even--looking at passages, wondering whether it would be perfect if I left a phrase where it was or moved it over by a few words.
At the end of the effort? It really doesn't matter.
Have you ever heard the Charley Pride version of the song Kaw-liga? He starts off talking about adding the song (originally written and recorded by Hank Williams Sr.) to his album, and says "I put one verse where maybe it don't suppose [sic] to be." Imperfect, that is. Number one on the charts, it was, regardless. But then again, it told a good story, despite (or perhaps because of?) its imperfections.
If you're a storyteller, then you need to tell stories. Period. Stop worrying over whether or not they're perfect. Too many people sit and look at the first page of their first novel, worrying over whether or not it'll be great. I'll settle that now--it won't be. First drafts stink. So settle in and write. And then revise. Make it as good as it can be, but don't worry about perfection.
-TOSK
Hey, I've done business with GoDaddy, the Internet registrar, before. That experience proved Bob Parsons, its founder, one hundred percent correct in the quotation above.
That said, I stuck with GoDaddy through my years of running an ISP from my home. Registered dozens of domains with them. Why? As imperfect as they were in some ways, they provided what I needed: low-cost domain registration that worked just fine. My author-related domains aren't registered through them now, but that's primarily because a friend recommended a different company while I was bringing them up. Know what? The company I'm with now is imperfect.
Writing is the same way. I've commented before on the horrors of finding continuity and grammatical errors in works by none less than the great Marion Zimmer Bradley. Stephen King (the other one, of course), for all of his campaigning against adverbs, sprouts one or two rather frequently throughout his books. In my own writing, I've spent minutes--hours, even--looking at passages, wondering whether it would be perfect if I left a phrase where it was or moved it over by a few words.
At the end of the effort? It really doesn't matter.
Have you ever heard the Charley Pride version of the song Kaw-liga? He starts off talking about adding the song (originally written and recorded by Hank Williams Sr.) to his album, and says "I put one verse where maybe it don't suppose [sic] to be." Imperfect, that is. Number one on the charts, it was, regardless. But then again, it told a good story, despite (or perhaps because of?) its imperfections.
If you're a storyteller, then you need to tell stories. Period. Stop worrying over whether or not they're perfect. Too many people sit and look at the first page of their first novel, worrying over whether or not it'll be great. I'll settle that now--it won't be. First drafts stink. So settle in and write. And then revise. Make it as good as it can be, but don't worry about perfection.
-TOSK
Monday, September 10, 2012
Keep on keepin' on
"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." - Dale Carnegie
There are times in everyone's life--everyone who seeks to achieve, anyway--when the smart thing to do is to give up and move to another endeavor. As Mr. Carnegie points out above, those are the times when you really have to look deep inside. Are you quitting something that really has no hope, or are you quitting something because it's easier to do so than it is to continue pressing toward your goal, useless though the effort may seem?
Take writing, for example. Creating a novel takes months, and all you have while you're doing it is a dream of things to come. "I'm writing a book" has nearly become a punch line rather than a statement, and that's really no surprise because the challenges involved in creating a literary object that large are quite nearly impossible. You reach a point where there's really just no hope that you're going to finish it. But you'll find that if you press on, suddenly--poof, it's done.
Then the really hard part begins. There are two paths to go down, one involving attempting to beg, cajole, and/or wheedle your way into a traditional publisher's lineup, and another involving publishing it yourself. Door number two is deceptive, as just past it are a whole lot of learning curves you must climb before you can relax and sit to watch nobody buy your book. Still, I think most people turn to the first option--well, first. It's easier, or at least it seems so, to pour your heart and soul into a single-page letter and send it to people who very likely will never, ever respond, than it is to beat your head against the concepts involved in formatting and designing and self-publishing. And the simple brutal truth is that most first-time authors who get a yes, which is a small percentage of the whole, get it on, say, the 60th attempt (with The Help) or later.
Sixty attempts! And yet The Help won several awards. And then there's the tragic story of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote a couple of novels that were rejected over and over. Famously, he decided it wasn't worth trying any longer and ended his own life. His mother, though, was unconvinced and kept trying--for ten years. Finally the novel came to the attention of the right person, and A Confederacy of Dunces was published. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Then there's the Path B that I mentioned earlier--self-publishing. All rosy and yes-filled, right? Nope. At first, nobody but your immediate family wants to buy your book, and most of them probably aren't going to read it anyway. So you keep trying and trying, and you continue watching the sales figures stay very small. Some people get lucky, just like some people win the lottery, but most people end up watching this multi-month project sit and fester in Amazon's shelf-graveyard. There are some successes, granted, among self-published authors, but they're the ones who understand that it takes time, and it takes patience. Konrath reports that it took him twenty years. Twenty years! You have to march boldly right up to the point where any sane person would quit, and then keep on marching.
Writers aren't the only ones who have to do that. Many, if not most, successful entrepreneurs have similar stories to share, regardless of the industry they're in. The founding father of the college where I got my start in academia, in fact, told the story several times of having to cover payroll from his own retirement account. And that's not that unusual. Any sane person would've quit, but they didn't. They kept at it.
And that's the secret. When you feel like it's time to quit, that just might be life's way of seeing if you're really devoted to it, and when you don't quit you become one of the people Carnegie was talking about.
-TOSK
There are times in everyone's life--everyone who seeks to achieve, anyway--when the smart thing to do is to give up and move to another endeavor. As Mr. Carnegie points out above, those are the times when you really have to look deep inside. Are you quitting something that really has no hope, or are you quitting something because it's easier to do so than it is to continue pressing toward your goal, useless though the effort may seem?
Take writing, for example. Creating a novel takes months, and all you have while you're doing it is a dream of things to come. "I'm writing a book" has nearly become a punch line rather than a statement, and that's really no surprise because the challenges involved in creating a literary object that large are quite nearly impossible. You reach a point where there's really just no hope that you're going to finish it. But you'll find that if you press on, suddenly--poof, it's done.
Then the really hard part begins. There are two paths to go down, one involving attempting to beg, cajole, and/or wheedle your way into a traditional publisher's lineup, and another involving publishing it yourself. Door number two is deceptive, as just past it are a whole lot of learning curves you must climb before you can relax and sit to watch nobody buy your book. Still, I think most people turn to the first option--well, first. It's easier, or at least it seems so, to pour your heart and soul into a single-page letter and send it to people who very likely will never, ever respond, than it is to beat your head against the concepts involved in formatting and designing and self-publishing. And the simple brutal truth is that most first-time authors who get a yes, which is a small percentage of the whole, get it on, say, the 60th attempt (with The Help) or later.
Sixty attempts! And yet The Help won several awards. And then there's the tragic story of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote a couple of novels that were rejected over and over. Famously, he decided it wasn't worth trying any longer and ended his own life. His mother, though, was unconvinced and kept trying--for ten years. Finally the novel came to the attention of the right person, and A Confederacy of Dunces was published. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Then there's the Path B that I mentioned earlier--self-publishing. All rosy and yes-filled, right? Nope. At first, nobody but your immediate family wants to buy your book, and most of them probably aren't going to read it anyway. So you keep trying and trying, and you continue watching the sales figures stay very small. Some people get lucky, just like some people win the lottery, but most people end up watching this multi-month project sit and fester in Amazon's shelf-graveyard. There are some successes, granted, among self-published authors, but they're the ones who understand that it takes time, and it takes patience. Konrath reports that it took him twenty years. Twenty years! You have to march boldly right up to the point where any sane person would quit, and then keep on marching.
Writers aren't the only ones who have to do that. Many, if not most, successful entrepreneurs have similar stories to share, regardless of the industry they're in. The founding father of the college where I got my start in academia, in fact, told the story several times of having to cover payroll from his own retirement account. And that's not that unusual. Any sane person would've quit, but they didn't. They kept at it.
And that's the secret. When you feel like it's time to quit, that just might be life's way of seeing if you're really devoted to it, and when you don't quit you become one of the people Carnegie was talking about.
-TOSK
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Give 'em What They Want
"When red haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn." - Mark Twain
You know, when I can't find a quote that has anything to do with the topic at hand, I quote Mr. Twain, because he was smart regardless of topic.
That said, I frequently find myself replying to Rachelle Gardner's posts over at her blog. Often her posts and the others' responses get me to thinking, and often my own responses get me to thinking more. Then, when I find myself writing an entire blog post in response, I decide to come on over here to make the point instead.
Anyway, her most recent topic is "Give Them What They Want," author style. Ms. Gardner recently ran a series of guest posts for which people were invited to pitch ideas. Some succeeded, clearly; she ran a brilliant series. But she also pointed out how others had failed. It wasn't necessarily that the ideas were bad; instead, it was that the pitchers didn't follow directions well enough for her to determine the appropriateness of the article pitched. Some pitches were too long, others too short, and some lacked the necessary ingredients for her to make valid assessments.
Ms. Gardner had a responsibility, in this instance, to choose her submission requirement wording carefully to insure that she'd be able to judge which entries were best for her audience. Moving this into my world, teachers likewise have a responsibility to choose our assignment wording carefully to insure that we'll be able to assess the student's grasp of the topic at hand. Still, over the years I've seen the same errors that frustrated her. "Design Layer 3 of a statewide data network that will provide e-mail, internet, intranet, and document storage services to..." means something specific. I don't expect anybody who's not a senior IT student to get what it means, but take it from me that drawing a picture of the state with pretty little lines between all the cities I mention doesn't cut it. Neither does submitting something that is an identical duplicate to someone else's; after all, I said "design" not "copy a design."
I see teacher applications miss the mark nearly every day as well. Granted, I don't choose the wording carefully on the applications; somebody up at the Mother Ship, likely a feline human resources director as displayed in the funny comic strip, instead waved his magic wand over a computer and poof! Out came an application. Oh, most of the information is useful. Some isn't. Doesn't matter. When I see somebody leave stuff out, whether it's useful or not, the omission tells me something specific about that potential employee. And no, it's not a good something.
Likewise, I actually maintain a file of silly stuff I've seen on real-life teacher resumes. I've had applicants tell me they're looking for an operations management job (on the faculty? really?). Or that they're looking for a great career--at one of my competitors. Or that they love "snoboarding" or "gosspell music." Again, that tells me something, and usually not what the applicant wants to tell me.
We're in the process of applying for a renewal of our grant of accreditation. It's not something I'd call particularly fun, but it's not altogether too rough of a process either. The accreditor sends a document with a bunch of questions, and you answer them and send it back. Here's the hard part--you have to give 'em what they want. If, for example, they ask how the curriculum was developed, they want you to describe the process you use to develop the curriculum so that they can tell whether you follow a rational process or toss a bunch of course names into a box and pull a certain number out till you get a set that's long enough. If they ask about how the library collection supports the curriculum, they don't want a memoir of the librarian's life. Specific questions merit specific answers.
This theme plays out through a great many areas of our lives. Sometimes it's best to just--well, give 'em what they want.
- TOSK
You know, when I can't find a quote that has anything to do with the topic at hand, I quote Mr. Twain, because he was smart regardless of topic.
That said, I frequently find myself replying to Rachelle Gardner's posts over at her blog. Often her posts and the others' responses get me to thinking, and often my own responses get me to thinking more. Then, when I find myself writing an entire blog post in response, I decide to come on over here to make the point instead.
Anyway, her most recent topic is "Give Them What They Want," author style. Ms. Gardner recently ran a series of guest posts for which people were invited to pitch ideas. Some succeeded, clearly; she ran a brilliant series. But she also pointed out how others had failed. It wasn't necessarily that the ideas were bad; instead, it was that the pitchers didn't follow directions well enough for her to determine the appropriateness of the article pitched. Some pitches were too long, others too short, and some lacked the necessary ingredients for her to make valid assessments.
Ms. Gardner had a responsibility, in this instance, to choose her submission requirement wording carefully to insure that she'd be able to judge which entries were best for her audience. Moving this into my world, teachers likewise have a responsibility to choose our assignment wording carefully to insure that we'll be able to assess the student's grasp of the topic at hand. Still, over the years I've seen the same errors that frustrated her. "Design Layer 3 of a statewide data network that will provide e-mail, internet, intranet, and document storage services to..." means something specific. I don't expect anybody who's not a senior IT student to get what it means, but take it from me that drawing a picture of the state with pretty little lines between all the cities I mention doesn't cut it. Neither does submitting something that is an identical duplicate to someone else's; after all, I said "design" not "copy a design."
I see teacher applications miss the mark nearly every day as well. Granted, I don't choose the wording carefully on the applications; somebody up at the Mother Ship, likely a feline human resources director as displayed in the funny comic strip, instead waved his magic wand over a computer and poof! Out came an application. Oh, most of the information is useful. Some isn't. Doesn't matter. When I see somebody leave stuff out, whether it's useful or not, the omission tells me something specific about that potential employee. And no, it's not a good something.
Likewise, I actually maintain a file of silly stuff I've seen on real-life teacher resumes. I've had applicants tell me they're looking for an operations management job (on the faculty? really?). Or that they're looking for a great career--at one of my competitors. Or that they love "snoboarding" or "gosspell music." Again, that tells me something, and usually not what the applicant wants to tell me.
We're in the process of applying for a renewal of our grant of accreditation. It's not something I'd call particularly fun, but it's not altogether too rough of a process either. The accreditor sends a document with a bunch of questions, and you answer them and send it back. Here's the hard part--you have to give 'em what they want. If, for example, they ask how the curriculum was developed, they want you to describe the process you use to develop the curriculum so that they can tell whether you follow a rational process or toss a bunch of course names into a box and pull a certain number out till you get a set that's long enough. If they ask about how the library collection supports the curriculum, they don't want a memoir of the librarian's life. Specific questions merit specific answers.
This theme plays out through a great many areas of our lives. Sometimes it's best to just--well, give 'em what they want.
- TOSK
Friday, August 10, 2012
Two Lessons About Goal-Setting
"A goal without a plan is just a wish." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." - Louis Pasteur
Goal-setting is a funny exercise. It's also a tough thing to teach people. Now, you wouldn't probably expect someone who's made his living for 1/3 of his life educating people to say that anything is really that tough to teach. But setting goals is, mainly because it's a skosh tougher than people think it should be.
Let's get the first part out of the way--well, first. Goals should be SMART:
Problem is, most people only get through SMA. Take writers, ferinstance:
"What's your goal, Writer A?"
"750 words per day."
"Writer B?"
"1000 words per day."
"Writer C?"
"2000 words per day."
"Wow. Writer D?"
"Three pages per day."
"What size pages?"
"You know--normal."
"Normal as in Word default eight and a half by eleven, or normal as in trade paperback?"
"Word, silly."
See? Specific, measurable, and for most writers, attainable.
But then you ask deeper questions: "Why 2000 words per day? What does that mean? How many paragraphs is it? How many scenes?" It usually boils down to a number they thought sounded cool, or else a number they read somewhere. Stephen King, for example, suggests 2000 words per day because that gives you a 180,000-word novel in ninety days. That sounds reasonable at first, but on second look you realize that it presupposes that you're writing a 180,000-word novel--I haven't--and that you're interested in completing it in three months--I've never been. After all, novels are novels when the story is done being told, not when you hit a certain word count.
Granted, I still run with 2000 words per day because it feels good, but that doesn't qualify as SMART. Eh, bite me; it works.
Lest we think poorly of writers, though, I must point out that I've also had a hard time getting subordinate managers at work, in every program I've supervised, at every campus I've inhabited, to set SMART goals. SMA, they get. RT, not so much. And sometimes the A isn't really there either. To wit:
"What's your retention goal for the year?"
"One hundred percent."
"Wow-wee! Why do you think you can get to one hundred percent, though? What will you do to make sure nobody moves or gets sick?"
"It's a goal. We don't expect to achieve it."
(head, meet desk)
"Okay, okay, ninety percent. We'll assume ten percent will get sick or move away."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"Why ten percent? Why not twelve? Or eight? How many did you have last year?"
"About (pick a number) percent."
"Why is this year going to be different?"
"Oh, it probably won't. I guess we'll go with that, then."
"And so out of the remaining people, you won't have anybody fail out? Are your courses that easy?"
...and so on....
It's like pulling teeth.
But it's trainable. At some point, after sufficient wrangling, you eventually end up with a set of goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Put them all together and add a few department-wide ones, and I have my own set of beautiful goals. And everybody's happy after we all ride off into the sunset, right?
Um, no.
There's a second lesson about goal-setting. It's better delivered as a vignette, though.
In a time long ago and a place far away, there was a young man who was contemplating his post-high-school choices....
Yeah, okay, we're talking about me. I was pretty well set on going to the Air Force Academy. I'd narrowed it down to USAFA or USMA, and chosen the Air Force based on the oh-so-important (at the time) fact that my uncle had retired from the Air Force. Hey, that was one of three differences I knew about, the other two being that one wore blue and the other green (though AF also wears green, and Army also wears blue, but that's a whole different level of complexity) and that one had airplanes (though the Army also has airplanes, it turns out, but again--complexity and all).
Anyway, I was headed into the middle of my senior year feeling pretty good. I had a physical fitness test ahead of me for West Point's admissions process, but that was pretty much a moot issue because I already had my Congressman's nomination to USAFA, my GPA was north of 3.90, my class academic rank out of several hundred was in the single digits, my SAT score was great, I managed to not get thrown out of the pool in water polo and the swim team for two whole seasons of each, and I'd served or was serving as drum major of the band, editor of the school paper, student council member, and for some really bizarre reason, an officer in the Key Club (end of junior year: "Sure, I'll do it. What kind of keys, though?"). My resume was just plain hot.
Or so I thought.
Problem is, the Air Force Academy desired that a large majority of the class I wanted to enter must be pilot-qualified. I, meanwhile, could see perfectly well as long as I had my optical devices mounted on the bridge of my nose. My vision, then, put me into a category in which my resume would've probably needed to include "son of Ares" to get in.
I didn't. They said no.
All of a sudden, that physical fitness test for West Point was much more important. I still had Plan C--Air Force ROTC scholarship to UCLA--to fall back on, but that option didn't meet my primary goal, which was getting out from under the protective umbrella that my mother's roof represented. I wasn't worried, though; I was a swimmer, and I was in pretty good shape. West Point wanted me, after all. The only problem? The first event was pull-ups. Now, I'd never done a pull-up in my life. For one thing, I was, as I already said, in pretty darn good shape, and besides, the situation had never presented itself in which I had any reason at all to hoist my chin over some random bar. Clamber up onto the bar, sure. But not hoist my chin over it. Who does that, anyway?
I'll never forget that day. Pull-ups aren't like push-ups, where you're one of a set of backs that is heaving up and away from the floor. No, on a pull-up test you're hanging there in plain sight of everybody, body dangling like a Christmas ornament. You can't fake a pull-up. Just can't do it.
Oh, and by the way, the movement also uses shoulder muscles almost exclusively to begin, while swimming builds lats and pects (back and chest) mostly.
Of all things, I had to follow a guy who'd been a gymnast for years and did his first thirty (ish) pull-ups all the way to his waist. He hopped down gracefully, and I took his spot. Grabbed the bar, and--hung there.
"You can begin now," the guy grading the event said. But see, I'd already begun. There was this little internal struggle happening, with my brain saying "pull, shoulders," and my shoulders firing back "I am pulling, asshole." What it must've looked like, though, was me hanging there making silly faces at the guy doing the grading.
So I finished the day and went home. Once I'd mustered up the courage I called my liaison officer--the West Point graduate who was in charge of helping me get in--and gave him the depressing news that I would probably be a UCLA student the next fall since they didn't require pull-ups to get in.
"Oh, but you get another shot," he said. Remember the scene from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, at the archery contest when they refer to the script, cheer, and say, "Robin gets another shot!" It felt like that. In six weeks was another test, and if I passed it then they'd just chalk the previous episode up to--um, something.
I set a goal then. Ten pull-ups, six weeks. SMART, definitely. But here's the second lesson: I didn't just say "my goal is ten pull-ups at the end of six weeks." No, I internalized it. I made it a part of who I was, what I did. I talked to people about how to get there, and then for the next six weeks, every day, I walked to the elementary school on the corner. Nothing in my life for that six weeks was more important than my work toward that goal. It wasn't easy; I started climbing to the bar and lowering my chin slowly. Then I got to where I could do a regular pull-up, and followed it by climbing up and lowering my chin. Then I got to where I could do two. And then, well, so on.
Six weeks later I did eleven pull-ups on the test. It was a pass--not a spectacular one, but a pass nonetheless. And as I found out later, that was what got me into the academy. There are a lot of people with good grades. There are a lot of people who are on student councils or who get selected to lead the band or the student newspaper. There are a lot of people with SAT scores in the stratosphere. But there aren't a lot of people who're willing to do what it takes to go from zero pull-ups to eleven in six weeks.
That's what a goal should be, then. Sure, it must be SMART. But that's just the beginning. You can write SMART goals all day long, but if they're just something you talk about in your quarterly meetings, you're missing the most important part. To be an effective goal, it has to be accepted, assimilated, made a part of who you are and what you do.
That is where excellence comes from.
-TOSK
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." - Louis Pasteur
Goal-setting is a funny exercise. It's also a tough thing to teach people. Now, you wouldn't probably expect someone who's made his living for 1/3 of his life educating people to say that anything is really that tough to teach. But setting goals is, mainly because it's a skosh tougher than people think it should be.
Let's get the first part out of the way--well, first. Goals should be SMART:
- S pecific
- M easurable
- A ttainable
- R elevant
- T imely
Problem is, most people only get through SMA. Take writers, ferinstance:
"What's your goal, Writer A?"
"750 words per day."
"Writer B?"
"1000 words per day."
"Writer C?"
"2000 words per day."
"Wow. Writer D?"
"Three pages per day."
"What size pages?"
"You know--normal."
"Normal as in Word default eight and a half by eleven, or normal as in trade paperback?"
"Word, silly."
See? Specific, measurable, and for most writers, attainable.
But then you ask deeper questions: "Why 2000 words per day? What does that mean? How many paragraphs is it? How many scenes?" It usually boils down to a number they thought sounded cool, or else a number they read somewhere. Stephen King, for example, suggests 2000 words per day because that gives you a 180,000-word novel in ninety days. That sounds reasonable at first, but on second look you realize that it presupposes that you're writing a 180,000-word novel--I haven't--and that you're interested in completing it in three months--I've never been. After all, novels are novels when the story is done being told, not when you hit a certain word count.
Granted, I still run with 2000 words per day because it feels good, but that doesn't qualify as SMART. Eh, bite me; it works.
Lest we think poorly of writers, though, I must point out that I've also had a hard time getting subordinate managers at work, in every program I've supervised, at every campus I've inhabited, to set SMART goals. SMA, they get. RT, not so much. And sometimes the A isn't really there either. To wit:
"What's your retention goal for the year?"
"One hundred percent."
"Wow-wee! Why do you think you can get to one hundred percent, though? What will you do to make sure nobody moves or gets sick?"
"It's a goal. We don't expect to achieve it."
(head, meet desk)
"Okay, okay, ninety percent. We'll assume ten percent will get sick or move away."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"Why ten percent? Why not twelve? Or eight? How many did you have last year?"
"About (pick a number) percent."
"Why is this year going to be different?"
"Oh, it probably won't. I guess we'll go with that, then."
"And so out of the remaining people, you won't have anybody fail out? Are your courses that easy?"
...and so on....
It's like pulling teeth.
But it's trainable. At some point, after sufficient wrangling, you eventually end up with a set of goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Put them all together and add a few department-wide ones, and I have my own set of beautiful goals. And everybody's happy after we all ride off into the sunset, right?
Um, no.
There's a second lesson about goal-setting. It's better delivered as a vignette, though.
In a time long ago and a place far away, there was a young man who was contemplating his post-high-school choices....
Yeah, okay, we're talking about me. I was pretty well set on going to the Air Force Academy. I'd narrowed it down to USAFA or USMA, and chosen the Air Force based on the oh-so-important (at the time) fact that my uncle had retired from the Air Force. Hey, that was one of three differences I knew about, the other two being that one wore blue and the other green (though AF also wears green, and Army also wears blue, but that's a whole different level of complexity) and that one had airplanes (though the Army also has airplanes, it turns out, but again--complexity and all).
Anyway, I was headed into the middle of my senior year feeling pretty good. I had a physical fitness test ahead of me for West Point's admissions process, but that was pretty much a moot issue because I already had my Congressman's nomination to USAFA, my GPA was north of 3.90, my class academic rank out of several hundred was in the single digits, my SAT score was great, I managed to not get thrown out of the pool in water polo and the swim team for two whole seasons of each, and I'd served or was serving as drum major of the band, editor of the school paper, student council member, and for some really bizarre reason, an officer in the Key Club (end of junior year: "Sure, I'll do it. What kind of keys, though?"). My resume was just plain hot.
Or so I thought.
Problem is, the Air Force Academy desired that a large majority of the class I wanted to enter must be pilot-qualified. I, meanwhile, could see perfectly well as long as I had my optical devices mounted on the bridge of my nose. My vision, then, put me into a category in which my resume would've probably needed to include "son of Ares" to get in.
I didn't. They said no.
All of a sudden, that physical fitness test for West Point was much more important. I still had Plan C--Air Force ROTC scholarship to UCLA--to fall back on, but that option didn't meet my primary goal, which was getting out from under the protective umbrella that my mother's roof represented. I wasn't worried, though; I was a swimmer, and I was in pretty good shape. West Point wanted me, after all. The only problem? The first event was pull-ups. Now, I'd never done a pull-up in my life. For one thing, I was, as I already said, in pretty darn good shape, and besides, the situation had never presented itself in which I had any reason at all to hoist my chin over some random bar. Clamber up onto the bar, sure. But not hoist my chin over it. Who does that, anyway?
I'll never forget that day. Pull-ups aren't like push-ups, where you're one of a set of backs that is heaving up and away from the floor. No, on a pull-up test you're hanging there in plain sight of everybody, body dangling like a Christmas ornament. You can't fake a pull-up. Just can't do it.
Oh, and by the way, the movement also uses shoulder muscles almost exclusively to begin, while swimming builds lats and pects (back and chest) mostly.
Of all things, I had to follow a guy who'd been a gymnast for years and did his first thirty (ish) pull-ups all the way to his waist. He hopped down gracefully, and I took his spot. Grabbed the bar, and--hung there.
"You can begin now," the guy grading the event said. But see, I'd already begun. There was this little internal struggle happening, with my brain saying "pull, shoulders," and my shoulders firing back "I am pulling, asshole." What it must've looked like, though, was me hanging there making silly faces at the guy doing the grading.
So I finished the day and went home. Once I'd mustered up the courage I called my liaison officer--the West Point graduate who was in charge of helping me get in--and gave him the depressing news that I would probably be a UCLA student the next fall since they didn't require pull-ups to get in.
"Oh, but you get another shot," he said. Remember the scene from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, at the archery contest when they refer to the script, cheer, and say, "Robin gets another shot!" It felt like that. In six weeks was another test, and if I passed it then they'd just chalk the previous episode up to--um, something.
I set a goal then. Ten pull-ups, six weeks. SMART, definitely. But here's the second lesson: I didn't just say "my goal is ten pull-ups at the end of six weeks." No, I internalized it. I made it a part of who I was, what I did. I talked to people about how to get there, and then for the next six weeks, every day, I walked to the elementary school on the corner. Nothing in my life for that six weeks was more important than my work toward that goal. It wasn't easy; I started climbing to the bar and lowering my chin slowly. Then I got to where I could do a regular pull-up, and followed it by climbing up and lowering my chin. Then I got to where I could do two. And then, well, so on.
Six weeks later I did eleven pull-ups on the test. It was a pass--not a spectacular one, but a pass nonetheless. And as I found out later, that was what got me into the academy. There are a lot of people with good grades. There are a lot of people who are on student councils or who get selected to lead the band or the student newspaper. There are a lot of people with SAT scores in the stratosphere. But there aren't a lot of people who're willing to do what it takes to go from zero pull-ups to eleven in six weeks.
That's what a goal should be, then. Sure, it must be SMART. But that's just the beginning. You can write SMART goals all day long, but if they're just something you talk about in your quarterly meetings, you're missing the most important part. To be an effective goal, it has to be accepted, assimilated, made a part of who you are and what you do.
That is where excellence comes from.
-TOSK
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