Sustainable Excellence

Young kids get signed up for a lot of different things - swimming, ice hockey, dance, soccer, music, choir & so on - all at the same time. If you can avoid over-programming, there is something to be said for variety of lacing up the skates one day, and sliding on the ballerina slippers the next. It helps a child find where their interest and skills lie. They learn the rules of different games, which makes them better spectators. And a lot of it is just plain fun.

But before long - and it seems like it starts a lot earlier in life now - a young person has to decide whether they're serious about something or not. There are travel teams but no house leagues for older kids. The work involved is more complex, which means more daily practice time and more time with coaches to develop skills. In a relatively short period of time, a little time commitment to several things becomes a big time commitment to just a few.

Of course, it's a highly competitive world: mechanical skills needs to develop much sooner and advance more rapidly. Or so we're told. But the fact is the vast majority of these kids ain't going on to professional careers in arts or athletics. Few are going to get scholarships, meaning most won't stick with any of this beyond high school. So if life expectancy is north of 70 years, why are we pushing them to specialize when they're little more than 10% through?

Cynically, I suspect no small amount of this has to do with the extra-curricular providers shaking out more revenue. The kids don't just take a music lesson, they join an orchestra and sign up for a music theory class. They don't just have a soccer practice and game, they have weekly clinics. Revenue per participant goes up, with only a minor uptick in the cost of selling, providing and collecting for these additional services. Take it to the bank, baby.

Now, there is a big difference between running round a pitch every Saturday and being a soccer player, or pulling a bow across some strings and being a violinist. It's important for a child to not only recognize the difference between good and great, but to appreciate what one must do to become great at something. But at a young age, they're only just beginning to learn what a commitment to excellence means. They're too young to make a life commitment to something. And it's pointless to take an outsized performance at a young age too seriously: how many people dominate a position in sport all through their lives?

Mechanical skills are important - poor execution leads to frustration or embarassment and will drive somebody away from wanting to do something. But sustainable excellence requires more than just skills: it takes timing, commitment, maturity, passion and joy. Helping a child find what they're passionate about, something from which they can derive great joy, puts them on a path of self-sustainable discovery. Does greater skill lead to greater joy? Probably not as much as joy motivates somebody to become more skilled.

A child for a while, a father forever

I'll be her father forever. She'll always be my daughter, but she'll be a child for only a few more years.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

Forever 40+

Pop culture would have us pine for our late teens and early twenties. And why not? At that age we have few obligations, maximum potential, and we've yet to do anything to screw up the rest of our lives. Halcyon days, indeed.

Or perhaps not. We give a lot of attention to the "few obligations and maximum potential" and not nearly enough to the "do nothing to screw up the rest of our life." All told, this period offers far less upside (e.g., graduating university) than downside (e.g., DUI, drug abuse, pregnancy, etc.) Worse still, the upside from this period - high grade point average or career internships - evaporates pretty quickly once we enter the world of responsibility and career. That means success during our teens and early twenties is measured not by major achievement, but by how little baggage we accumulate.

For all the hype, what happens during this period is pedestrian, not epic. Not exactly the stuff of Homeric ballad.

We achieve our greatest accomplishments and define our legacy in the years that follow. We would do better to idolize our later years to be the culmination of some noble Opus, rather than to wax bucolic on a fleeting period of youthful circumstantial narcissism. Much better to be perpetually looking ahead to our next achievement than to be caught up in the fantasy of idyllic - and often faulty - reminisces.

When the world gives you lemons...

... stick a galvanized nail in one end, copper wire in the other, and make a battery. It's a great way to learn about chemical energy and electricity.

Having powered a Cinderella-themed clock for 2+ months now, my daughter and I don't look at potatoes, oranges and other high-acid fruit and veg as we once did.

The phenomenon is interesting to us now, both as something fun to do and as an exhibit for the school science fair. But maybe there will be a long-term impact of this. First hand experience with fundamental science may very well affect how she forms theses and arguments. I can't help but hope that in a few years this experiment will be a point of reference to each of us in engaging debates over the viability of using food for fuel (e.g., raising corn for ethanol).

Cinderella will keep track of time until that happens. Provided, of course, we keep the lemons coming.

Blinding Her with Science

I try to bring back gifts for my daughter that reflect the places I visit, particularly when I'm returning from abroad: the Z is for Zamboni book from Toronto, traditional Swiss clothing from Zürich, contemporary Indian dress from Pune, the Paris Hide and Seek book. I hope they help her connect with the places I go, especially when she can't go with me.

All too often, I do my gift buying on my way to the gate, making a quick shop at one of the ubiquitous souvenir shops at Gare du Nord, La Guardia, SFO, BRU, YYC or any other point of departure. Trouble is, after a few trips to the same destination, it becomes clear the merchandise doesn't change all that often. She's got every variety of London t-shirt from LHR, and Nasa t-shirt from IAH. There seems to be a never-ending variety of keychains for any given destination, but as electronic locks are making keys anachronisms she'll never have that many keys. They're also harder to repurpose into something useful: outgrown t-shirts make good raw materials for quilts and stuffed bears, whereas keychains become cumbersome bling.

On those trips where I am able to carve out a little time, and especially as she gets older, I'm trying to find things that pique her interest particularly after I go back on the road. Harrods has a large selection of science-themed toys, such as robots, circuits, hovercraft, and dirigibles. Foyles sells The Daring Book for Girls, a fantastic book that has all kinds of great ideas in it: how to make a zipline, how to make a lemon-powered clock. All these things do a great job explaining how things work. They're also good at inciting action, be it assembling circuits to build a recording device, or learning how to write in code. Perhaps they also engender independence, and kindle a sense of adventure as well.

Even when I'm away, hopefully I can still help her learn. About nature, and physics, and maybe a little about herself.

Come Fly with Me

Having been away for so long, and having been delayed getting home due to the UK airport closures, every interaction with my daughter has become an event in itself. I don't just arrive back home, I bring presents. We don't just spend a day together, we fly to Seattle for dinner. We don't just build the Lego Architecture Landmark kits, we have to make a visit each building on which they're modeled and then buy them there. We don't just have a fat evening, we make a chocolate fondue and watch Bugs Bunny cartoons for hours on end.

There's a high correlation between absence and fondness of heart. But it doesn't take long before the key correlation changes to "sight" relative to "mind" - as in, "out of" each in a 1:1 ratio.

Our over-programmed interaction is a reaction to this change. Part of it is, I want to give her exposure to how I live - travel, meetings, uncertainty - so that we can establish a common ground with each other. But I'm also applying the paddles, optimistically to accelerate, pessimistically to restart, the heartbeat of the relationship.

Just as prolonged absence isn't sustainable, neither is hyper-programmed interaction. For one thing, the world beckons, and both school and work start up again in just a few days and the mindless-industrial complex will impose its rhythm on us. For another, a fully programmed existence hits a limit: the next episode is twice as adventerous but half as thrilling as the last.

Restarting is not so simple, but our hearts are commited. We're becoming reacquainted and re-integrated into each others lives, and our interaction is gradually becoming a matter of mundane routine as opposed to celebratory exception.

I'm back on the road again, all too soon, but hopefully at a more sustainable pace. This time round, rather than needing to find a way back to "mundane routine" from "celebratory exception", I'm going to try to find the exceptional ground of "celebratory routine".

Every Generation Gets Its Own Technology

Mainframes and minis had been around for quite some time when personal computers came around in the late 1970s. The mainframe people looked at the PC through the lens of the mainframe, and saw all that the PC couldn't do.  But the PC people didn't focus on what a micro couldn't do, they looked on what the micro could do. And in the process, we created solutions to problems that mainframes just weren't suited to do.  So much creative energy, determination, and economic motivation was brought to bear on the PC that it only took 15 years or so for the commercially available microcomputer to go from office toy to dominant office technology.

Today, the winds of change are blowin' at hurricane force.  Mobile technology is maturing rapidly.  At the moment, it's replacing large segments of what we've relied on PCs to do.  But the exciting bit about mobile technology isn't replacing things that we already do.  Just as PCs became the dominant technology by doing entirely new things, mobile will enable us to do entirely new things.  

I was fortunate to grow up during the birth and rise of the PC, and make a career largely linked to their evolution. It made for exciting times, particularly the early days: the hardware advanced quickly, the application software improved by leaps and bounds each year, programming languages came and went, entirely new tech segments sprang up and in some cases died out just as fast.  But best of all, businesses made dramatic changes to how they operated and what they did in response to this affordable, and increasingly powerful, technology.  PC technology has become a bit stale of late, but it's on a 30 year run, and it's been pretty good.

Technology is constantly being re-invented, which means it can liberate just as much as it binds.  Microcomputers gave my generation the opportunity to invent an entirely new computing paradigm that was free of the restrictions of what came before it.  Mobile gives my daughter's generation the opportunity to do the same.  Here's hoping she's one of those who pushes the boundaries to overthrow the concepts and limitations imposed by the microcomputer order.

Or better yet, that she's one of those who defines the technology beyond "mobile".