No Map. No Guide. No Limits.

A friend of mine–an entrepreneur who pitched aeronautical engineering to become a philosophy grad student, pitched philosophy for medicine, and finally pitched medicine to make wine–says that when his kinds are worried about risking some new adventure or endeavor, he tells them, “Leap, and the net will appear.”
He’s certainly a poster child for the success of that approach. And there’s a lot to be said for just closing your eyes and making the leap. I say that in part because the actual leap, from known and comfortable to unknown and uncertain, is the hardest part of starting any new adventure or endeavor. And, of course, because once you’re off the cliff edge, you’re awfully motivated to figure out how to build a pair of wings before you hit the ground.
But there’s sometimes a fine line between bravery and recklessness. If you are a single parent with three kids depending on you for food, clothing, shelter and healthcare, perhaps abruptly up and quitting your day job to start over again as an actor–unless you have some other kind of income at your disposal-is a bit more reckless than brave.
Granted, that’s a bit of an extreme example. But the question it raises is real. If you’re thinking of trying a new path, job, or career, how do you decide when … and if … you should leap? It’s a tough question, because there’s no guaranteed right answer. That’s why those decisions and moves are called risky. Obviously, it helps to think possible options through ahead of time. Ask yourself, Do I have the skills and experience necessary to try this? Do I have any connections or possible clients/employers out there? Can I financially afford the risk? And, of course, the bottom line question at the end of the day … “What will I regret more? If I do this and fail, or if I don’t do this? Because in the end, nobody else can weigh out the potential risks and benefits for you. You can’t decide that a move is right. You have to decide if it’s right for you.
So I always find it interesting to talk to and read about people who’ve made those leaps, to see how they came to that choice. Take, for example, Tom Magliozzi, known to most people as half of the “Click and Clack” team of NPR’s “Car Talk.” Tom died two weeks ago, at the age of 77, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. But in addition to the basic facts, the obituary I read included part of a commencement speech the brothers had given at their college alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (or MIT), in 1999.
In the speech, Tom talked about how he’d gone from engineering to car maintenance, tracing the choice back to a “defining moment” he had on the way to work one morning. As the obituary put it, “Tom described driving on Route 128 to his job in Foxboro, Mass, in a little MG that ‘weighed about 50 pounds,’ when a semi-truck cut him off. Afterward, he thought about how pathetic it would have been if he had died having ‘spent all my life, that I can remember at least, going to this job, living a life of quiet desperation. So I pulled up into the parking lot, walked in to my boss’s office and quit on the spot.'”
The article went on to say that Tom’s little brother Ray chimed in at that point in the speech and quipped, “‘Most people would have bought a bigger car.'”
Most people would have bought a bigger car. But for some reason, that near-brush with death tilted the balance of risk and reward so conclusively in favor of making the leap that Tom Magliozzi quit his job on the spot and started a car repair shop. My guess is that Tom already knew his passion was working on cars, not working as a chemical engineer in some big corporation. The almost-accident just reminded him that he didn’t have forever, or 10 lives, to waste on a path that wasn’t fun or fulfilling. I’d also wager that the choice Tom thought he was making was not to give up engineering for a radio career, but giving up a career as a chemical engineer to be a car mechanic.
By the way, for anyone who’s curious, the brothers did not leap immediately to fame and fortune. When Tom quit his job, the brothers started a do-it-yourself car repair shop in Cambridge, MA that evolved into a conventional repair shop called the “Good News Garage.” But when a local NPR station interviewed the brothers one day, their banter and humor so impressed the producers that they were invited to appear on a national radio show to talk about cars … a segment that evolved, eventually, into “Car Talk,” which ran for 35 years (and which NPR is still airing by re-running taped shows). Note to all potential leapers: when Car Talk debuted, Tom Magliozzi was 40 years old.
A second “leap” story that crossed my desk this week still has an unfinished ending. [click to continue…]

I was interviewing an air show pilot this past summer–one of the better known ones, who’s been around in the business for a long time. That’s impressive, because the fatality rate in that line of work is a lot higher than average. So surviving to fly another day is a significant part of the challenge.
This particular pilot is getting toward the end of his career. There is a point, he said, when you simply can’t keep fit enough, or keep up that level of abuse and strain on your body, to be safe and skilled enough to stay in the game. That’s true of any professional athlete, of course–pilots just get another couple of decades beyond football, basketball and baseball players before they hit that wall.
Not surprisingly, however, as his air show career is nearing its end, he’s taken up other physical adventure challenges. Mountain hiking/climbing. Scuba diving. Sports that are still physically demanding, and contain enough risk to require complete attention while engaging in them, but are less grueling than the high-G, Olympic-level training required of an air show performer.
I say it’s not surprising, because while I stress often on this site that adventure comes in many forms–physical, emotional, professional, and personal–all adventure is not alike. It can all be educational, because any kind of adventure involves some degree of uncertainty; of stepping outside your comfort zone and figuring out a path in an uncharted territory. And there are certain kinds of rewards that come from undertaking any kind of adventure. Figure out how to raise a kid as a single parent (or raise a kid, period), find a way to keep the bills paid when steady work isn’t available, start a business, climb a difficult mountain, learn to fly an aerobatic routine, or learn how to follow your own voice and stand up for something you believe in, and you will come through the other side feeling stronger and more capable.
But all those adventures do not offer the same kind of experience. And if more people get excited about the prospect of flying, diving, or climbing a mountain than raising a kid as a single parent, there’s a reason for that. A couple of reasons, actually. [click to continue…]

There has been a lot of press, recently, arguing what the point of a college education is supposed to be. The debate seems to have been sparked by the publication of a book titled Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, by a former English professor named William Deresiewicz.

While education per se is not really something I talk about on this site, and I haven’t read Deresiewicz’s book, the concepts of passion and of crafting a meaningful life are topics very germane to the idea of No Map. No Guide. No Limits. But first, a little background on the debate:

Deresiewicz, it appears, believes that a higher education is too focused on achievement and performance, at the cost of “smothering students’ souls,” as a New Yorker article put it. Deresiewicz believes that college should be a time when students “stand outside the world for a few years,” and engage in the job of “soul-making.”

Standing in opposition to that idea is the counter-idea that the point of college is some combination of two goals. The first is “teaching knowledge” (a viewpoint, The New Yorker said, espoused by UC Vice-Chancellor Robert Nisbet in a 1971 book titled The Degradation of the Academic Dogma). The second, according to a New York Times column by David Brooks, is teaching students how to think, and think critically, a viewpoint articulated by Harvard Professor Stephen Pinker, in response to Deresiewicz’s book.

David Brooks summarized the different viewpoints as “three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).” And The New Yorker article criticized Deresiewicz’s position for being “distinctly middle class”:

“Deresiewicz suggests that someone who grew up poor should be at least as eager to turn down the lucrative consulting job and take a risky road as anybody else. ‘If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less,’ he counsels. ‘That is itself a kind of freedom.’ The advice seems cheap. When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of ‘moral imagination’ may be at play.”

Ah. Now we are in No Map. No Guide. No Limits. territory. After all, I spend an inordinate amount of time pondering questions of where voice, passion, and fulfillment come from, how to find them, how important they are, and how and when anyone should make the call to leave a more predictable or secure path and try something riskier but potentially more “fulfilling.”

So where do I stand on this debate? Strangely enough, the question of what a college education is for is one I’ve given a lot of thought to, and we’ve talked about in our household a lot, recently, because I have two stepsons currently trying to decide whether or not a college education is worth it. [click to continue…]

In my last post, about the lessons and accomplishments of Maya Angelou’s life, I said she was “a reminder of the power of simply being yourself.”  And while flipping through some back issues of the New York Times this past weekend (part of why I still get a print paper– it’s easier to browse issues you didn’t get to read in real-time), I came across some interesting scientific support for that idea.

The article was titled, “So You’re Not Desirable,” and it discussed the results of a study by University of Texas researchers published in the May 2014 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study looked at what people found most appealing in a potential partner or mate. As might be expected, the study confirmed that when it came to first impressions, people had the same basic ideals in terms of what constituted qualities like physical attractiveness, charisma and potential for success, and rated the same types of individuals high or low in terms of how appealing they seemed as a potential mate. (The study called this “high mate value,” versus “low mate value.”)

However, the researchers also looked at how people rated potential mates on those same qualities (physical attractiveness, vitality, warmth, potential for success, and “even the ability to provide a satisfying romantic relationship”) over time, as people in the study got to know each other. And after three months, the “uniqueness” of any given person trumped those initial “consensus” evaluations in all categories. In other words, the people who were more conventionally attractive physically–those most likely to appear in fashion ads or movies–were rated more appealing initially. But over time, the people who were considered the most attractive were the ones who stood out as unique, authentic individuals. And those results were backed up by a second study that asked 350 heterosexual individuals to evaluate people in their well-known circle of friends and lovers for those same “appealing” characteristics.

We are loved, in other words, not for how close to the ideal we hit, but for those unique imperfections and traits that nobody else in the world has; those things that set us apart from the cookie-cutter, movie-image, Madison-Avenue ideal.
While this is encouraging news for anyone who doesn’t fit the Madison-Avenue ideal, the significance of these results goes far beyond love life encouragement. [click to continue…]

Maya Angelou, who died this week at the age of 86, was a woman who understood a great many things. She understood what it was to be the victim of violence, racism, and discrimination. She understood what it was to scrape for survival. She understood the fear–and the freedom–of starting out alone on unknown, uncharted paths. She understood the double-edged sword of love and loss, and the immutable laws of life’s costs and trade-offs. The one time I heard her speak in person, she was 72 years old and walking with a cane due to a hip injury. She apologized for her slow gait, noting, wryly, that “old age is not for sissies.”

But Maya Angelou also understood something essential to any person wishing to know the joy of a passion-guided journey or life path: the power and importance of voice. Not just words, although she was a master of those, as well. But voice itself; the outward expression of each person’s inner and most authentic truths, beliefs, knowledge, passions, dreams, desires, and self.

When Angelou was 7 or 8 years old, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Unlike many young girls who are sexually assaulted, she found the courage to speak up about it and testified against the man in court. After he was convicted, he was beaten to death by a mob outraged by the attack. Horrified that her words had led to a man’s death, Angelou literally did not speak for five years after the trial. But she eventually came to terms with the potential consequences of speaking out, and she came to embrace the power of her own, unique, and multifaceted voice.

Why does that matter? Because you can’t find your passion, or passions, without first finding that voice. It’s what tells you that this, and not that, is what’s really you; what you care about most, fear most, wish for most, and feel authentic passion for pursuing, even if the road leading there is long, rough, and lonely. And passion is the fire that fuels the conviction and endurance that turns the seemingly impossible into something both possible and real. [click to continue…]

So, I had two other topics I was going to write a post on today – thoughts about some of the costs of adventure. But I got a piece of news in my in-box last night that’s pushed those topics aside for today.

Bill Dana, a retired NASA aeronautical engineer and test pilot (or research pilot, as they proudly call themselves) died yesterday. He didn’t die in a plane crash; he was 83, and he’d been ill for some time. But his passing still makes me sad, for I have lost a kindred spirit in the world.

Ever since Tom Wolfe wrote The Right Stuff about those early Air Force test pilots who broke the sound barrier and went on to command the first missions into space, the American public has had a rather glamorized, Hollywood cowboy image of those dashing, daring young men who pushed our boundaries in flight and space outward.

The truth, which I have gleaned from many, many, many hours of interviewing at least the NASA pilots who were involved in those programs, is that cowboys were few and far between among their ranks. Oh, they all loved to fly. Even the NASA pilots were, almost exclusively, pulled from the military’s ranks. That’s where they got the skills and experience they needed to fly all those supersonic and unproven aircraft designs.

But there’s a difference between an adrenaline junkie and a thoughtful adventurer, and the pilots who flew the early X planes, like Bill Dana–and Neil Armstrong, and Milt Thompson, and Scott Crossfield–were almost all thoughtful adventurers. Most explorers who take on serious adventure challenges are. They have to be, if they want to survive the process. It’s easy to skydive or bungee jump with little thought, these days, and just enjoy the adrenaline rush. But if you’re the first person to see if those things actually work or if they’re going to plunge you to your death, it behooves you to think through all the components and risk factors very, very carefully. More so if you’re doing something like attempting to reach the South Pole, fly Mach 2, reach space, or fly an unpowered bathtub back from the edges of it safely for the first time.

I mention the bathtub because among his many achievements, Bill Dana actually did something pretty close to that. [click to continue…]

I‘m actually writing this on an airplane, en route to New Zealand. So I hope I’m not tempting the gods by writing about how valuable diversions can be. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about the costs and benefits of being thrown off course, recently.

I’ve written before about the benefits of traveling unmarked or unexpected terrain, regardless of whether or not it’s your choice to make the side trip. But there are diversions, and then there are diversions.

Right now, for example, I’m choosing to divert myself away from my normal life for a couple of weeks to go back and visit the people I lived with in New Zealand when I was 20 … and finally, three decades later, actually visit the 90-mile beach that inspired me to run away to New Zealand in the first place.

While all that sounds wonderful, I sometimes find it very difficult, in the midst of a busy life, to tear myself away from all that “needs” to be done and pursue a diversion of “unproductive” travel or downtime. But I also know that it’s often when I just walk away, and do something completely unrelated to the work projects piled up on my desk, or even do nothing at all for a significant stretch of time, that my mind clears enough to see creative solutions that can elude me for days, weeks, or months, sitting at my desk. Especially if I remove myself long enough, and far enough, that I have to let go of all the household items and family responsibilities that normally scream for my attention. There is a reason Anne Morrow Lindbergh used to retreat to a cottage on a beach for 5 weeks by herself,  every year, just to think and write. She simply couldn’t get the mind space for creative insight in the midst of raising five children.

If that’s true, it’s because creativity is a non-linear and often unpredictable process that requires space and time to ripen. As Timothy Egan wrote in a recent New York Times column called “Creativity vs. Quants” creativity requires “messiness, magic serendipity and insanity,” as well as a mind that has been “taught…to misbehave.” All that requires a bit of space and time–not just because it’s a crazy, messy kind of process, but also because having more room makes your mind more receptive to hearing, seeing, and recognizing creative ideas, answers, or ways of looking at things when those notions cross your path. What’s more, consciously diverting out of your normal routine increases the possibility that you will encounter new inputs, some of which may inspire the “aha!” answer you’d been looking for. [click to continue…]

I have a friend who is constantly saying that life is about compromise. I’ve never felt that “compromise” was the right term, because it implies that we all end up somewhere in the middle. Which, of course, we don’t. There would be no gold medal Olympic athletes (I use this particular example because the winter games start in just a couple of days) if we all ended up in just some okay “middle” ground.

On the other hand, I believe very strongly that life is very much about trade-offs. Assuming that you have enough natural talent in a sport, there’s no reason you can’t pursue Olympic greatness. There will, however, be trade-offs and costs involved in that decision. What you can’t be is a gold medal Olympic athlete and–simultaneously— an ideally well-rounded Renaissance person, fluent in several languages, art, philosophy, and science, with a 4.0 grade point average and a diverse and vibrant social life. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so much energy and “will” (as an Army officer friend of mine says) in the human body, and if you’re going to devote the time and energy required to be the best in the world at any particular sport, that means less of those things are left for anything else.

Yes, you can get better, at least to some degree, at your time management skills. But that’s nudging the needle, not changing the equation. And all the self-help books that tell you different are selling something. Because the law of trade-offs permeates not only issues of time and energy management, but all kinds of goals, choices, or approaches to life.

Take, for example, two recent articles I came across. One, in the January 19^th issue of the New York Times Magazine, was called “Breathing in vs. Spacing Out.”

The article began by listing the benefits of “mindfulness” training and practice; how researchers have found that even 12 minutes of meditation, or “mindful” focusing practice, a day helped Marine soldiers keep their attention and working memory stable, even under stress. It did the same for undergraduate students, improving their performance on graduate school entrance exams. Indeed, another research team did MRI scans on subjects who practiced meditative mindfulness on a regular basis and found that it enhanced the efficiency and integrity of a region of the brain that plays a significant role in rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving. The practice worked, the article’s author concluded, because by emphasizing a focus on the here and now, it trained the mind to stay on task and avoid distraction.

All good, right? We all should sign up!

Well … if what we want is to stay on task and avoid distraction, then yes. But a couple of paragraphs later, the author notes that this mindfulness can also have “unwanted side effects.” It turns out that “raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations [e.g. wandering] could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies.” [click to continue…]

Thanksgiving! One of the few times a year societal pressure actually encourages us to slow down and be in the moment–if only for a moment–and consider all we have to be thankful for. The two go hand in hand, of course–the slowing down/being in the moment, and having thoughts of what you’re thankful for–because it’s impossible to truly feel, let alone savor, an awareness of gratitude if you’re running around frantic or overloaded, focused on external action, and racing madly toward that next work deadline.
So I suppose the first thing we all should be thankful for is that we have at least this one day a year when we’re actually supposed to stop, take a deep breath, look around us, and search out those “gratitude moments” (or whatever affirmation coaches now call them), but what used to called, simply, blessings. Finding those rays of sunshine in our lives, even if they’re few, that help to balance out the rest. And then, letting that feeling of gratitude dwell undisturbed in the air, and in our hearts, for at least a short while.
In order to do that, of course, you do need to turn off the football games for a least a few minutes (aka the Thanksgiving scene in the movie The Blind Side). Because you can’t be in the moment in any contemplative way, and be distracted, all at the same time.
City dwellers have always had to work at keeping distractions at bay, because there’s constantly so much going past your senses. A recent New Yorker article quoted an essay published by Siegfried Kracauer in 1924 that bemoaned how urban dwellers “are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they no longer know where their head is.” Kracauer also noted that the constant distractions that bombarded city dwellers made them apt to develop a “blasé attitude” (which, by the way, goes a long way toward explaining New Yorkers and the famous “New York attitude”).
Constant distractions are no longer just a problem for city dwellers, of course. In an age of constant connectivity and and digital entertainment, everyone with a smartphone (or tablet, or video/computer game capability) can stay pretty effectively distracted–and, in Kracauer’s opinion, disconnected from that grounding sense and knowledge of “where their head is”–almost 24/7.
Kracauer’s solution to this problem of lost centers and ennui was an embrace of what he called “radical boredom”–that is, consciously closing the shades and the doors to shut out all the distractions, and practicing the art of simply being alone, in silence, with yourself.  The point wasn’t just to be bored; it was to allow yourself, as Evgeny Morozov, the author of the New Yorker article put it, “to peek at a different temporal universe, to develop alternative explanations of our predicaments, and even to dare to dream of different futures.”
It is, in a sense, the same advice offered by everyone from monks to meditation instructors: to find your center, close out distracting noise and listen within for the gems of peace, thought, imagination, or inspiration that might lie there. [click to continue…]