Mastery

Malcolm Gladwell famously stated it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. This has been debunked over and over again by various experts. You can’t reduce growth and development to a formula: 10,000 hours = Mastery! How you spend each hour is the key.

I’m reminded of story I heard from my tai chi instructor:

A student of tai chi isn’t making any progress. The teacher asks him, “Have you practiced?”

The student replies, “I’ve practiced 100 hours since our last class.”

The teacher asks, “What do you do when you practice?”

“I do the form.”

“Do you pay attention to how you’re applying the principles?”

“No.”

“Do you actively seek out pockets of tension in your body and try to let it go?”

“No.”

The teacher tells the student, “You have not practiced 100 hours. You practiced one hour, 100 times.”

Intent and attention drive development. Even 10,000 hours will only add up to mastery if you spend those hours the right way. This brings me back to something I’ve posted about before: our cultural beliefs about time. “Time equals money!” is a frequent declaration, and it implies that we should reduce time spent in order to maximize profit.

But the key to quality is attention and care. Attention and care require an investment of time. 10,000 hours is a lot of time!

It’s also true that “haste makes waste.” Things done quickly are usually not done well.

In the end, my conviction is that quality matters most. Quality requires an investment of time. Things take as long as they take, if you want them done well. Stop worrying about time. What matters, what brings value to our endeavors, is intent, attention, and care.

Diversity Means Survival

I was perusing Bluesky recently, and saw a post about the newly discovered Neanderthal animal fat processing site:

This was my reply to it:

This got me thinking in a different way about the value of diversity.

We know that Neanderthal was as smart, maybe smarter, than us, and engaged in similar methods of thinking. And yet, they died out at the end of the last ice age and we didn’t. Why is that?

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Sometimes Our Job Is Hard

Several years ago, I worked for a nonprofit that did event-based fundraising. We purchased a new all-in-one software service that ran both the back-end fundraising and participant database, and our front-end event website, where participants could have a profile page and accept online donations. Because it was an all-in-one package, the way you configured each end affected how the other end functioned. Changes to any part of the system caused ripples to other parts. My job was to set up and configure the software, and provide tech support to participants.

The back-end database wasn’t easy to use: overly complicated, nonintuitive workflows. A colleague who worked in the accounting department, and who only interfaced with the back-end database, came to me with a list of things she hoped I could reconfigure to improve the workflow. I looked at the list and realized these changes would alter the participant front-end in ways that would make it much harder for people to use.

So I said no.

My colleague agreed when I showed her what the impact would be. We couldn’t make it harder for participants and donors in order to make our jobs easier. Better we deal with the difficulty than them.

I think about this whenever we look for ways to make our jobs easier. It’s totally fine to want to make our jobs easier, but there are going to be ripples that affect other people, either customers or colleagues. We need to be aware of how our workflows affect someone else’s, especially if we make their job more difficult in order to make ours easier. We need to consider whether that’s really what’s best for customers and the organization, and not just whether it’s best for ourselves.

Sometimes our job is just going to be hard.

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Efficiency Is A Terrible Goal

In a recent discussion, a group of us were talking through options for using LLMs to make some our work tasks more efficient. I made the comment that I don’t believe efficiency is the correct goal for us to focus on. This statement set some of my colleagues aback. Modern American work culture is so steeped in the ideal of efficiency, it seems tantamount to sacrilege to suggest we shouldn’t value it the way we do.

I want to take some time here to unpack this belief. There are good reasons why I feel this way, but I also need to caution myself against dismissing the very real values that efficiency can bring.

Let’s start with a trite phrase: “Time is money.”

This phrase never sat quite right with me. It feels more correct to say, “Time is value.” On the face of it, these seem like they should be the same statement: money is intended as a measure of value, after all. But something interesting happens when you delve deeper into them.

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There Are More Important Things than Being Right

There’s been an inordinate amount of ink spilled online about all the things that are wrong with online culture. Indeed, it’s one of the most popular subjects of online discourse. There are many ways the online culture we’ve created is toxic and amplifies the worst aspects of our nature. There are many factors which cause online toxicity, but the one I tend notice most is how so many people are obsessed with being right. And with making sure everyone knows it.

I keep seeing posts from the subreddit AITA. They show up on Twitter, Buzzfeed, lots of different places. They bother me. They’re emblematic of our need to prove ourselves right. Every AITA post is essentially someone asking for people to tell them they’re right. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, really, so why does it bother me?

Here’s a good example:

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Assume Better

A Selfish Reason for Choosing Compassion

I was driving to work the other day, in typical morning rush hour traffic, and another driver was being far too fast and aggressive: weaving through traffic, riding bumpers, cutting people off. When they cut in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes which almost caused me to be rear-ended, I got mad. This driver was being a jerk: selfish, road hog, inconsiderate, dangerous. Why do they think they have more right to the road than any of the rest of us?

This morning, the same thing: overly aggressive driver, going too fast, riding bumpers, cutting people off. But this time, I saw the look on the driver’s face as they passed me:

Weeping. Sadness. Panic.

They were clearly in the midst of some kind of emergency. This person had a reason they needed to get somewhere quickly. They weren’t just being selfish and inconsiderate. Their need for the road actually was more important than mine.

This doesn’t excuse the dangerous driving: that was still a problem for the rest of us. But instead of getting angry, I felt empathy. I had compassion for this driver. I wondered what they faced and hoped they could get where they needed to be on time, without causing an accident.

In my first example, when I got angry at the other driver, it left me in a bad mood. My hackles rose, I was geared up for conflict with no way to resolve it. I got to work feeling on edge, in a negative headspace. This was not a useful way for me to start my day. It didn’t help me do my work.

This morning, when I felt compassion and sympathy for the other driver, it left me in a much better headspace. Compassion is a far more useful emotion to bring into the public service work I do.

The reality is neither driver will ever know how I reacted to them, nor how my reactions affected my mood. My reactions have no impact on them whatsoever. But the ways I react in these circumstances has a profound effect on me. When I assumed the other driver was selfish and inconsiderate, it affected me in a very negative way. When I assumed more positively about the other driver, it made my day better.

This got me thinking about how we make assumptions.

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I Think I Should Get Rid of My Books

I’m thinking about getting rid of most of my books. I’ve been considering this idea for some time now. I look at my bookshelves at home and wonder what good all these books are doing. I’m never going to reread the overwhelming majority of them. There are some books I own that I’ve never read and I really don’t think I ever will at this point. They’re just sitting there.

What good is a book that’s not being used? *

How much good could my books do if I gave them away? Organizations like library friends’ groups could use them to fundraise. Used bookstores could put them into the hands of people who’ll actually read them. Various social support agencies are always looking for reading material for their clients.

It starts to feel selfish of me to hoard books that I’m not reading. That, in all likelihood, I’ll never read again.

It’s worth examining why I collected all my books in the first place.

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Pandemic: Stress, Anxiety, Fear & Uncertainty

It’s 7:30 a.m. on a weekday and I’ve been awake for half an hour. My phone dings with a new text message: A staff member reporting they’re sick and won’t be in today. So begins the scramble to find last minute coverage for their shift.

This used to happen maybe once or twice a month, a few times a year.

It happens multiple times a month now, sometimes multiple times in a single week. Some have symptoms or a positive test and need to quarantine, some are waiting for test results, some are simply worried about a possible exposure and don’t want to risk exposing coworkers. Scheduling has become incredibly unpredictable and coverage is stretched thin.

It’s gotten to the point that I wake up every morning with a low-key dread sitting in my stomach, waiting for my phone to ding. I have a visceral anxious reaction every time it does.

I didn’t used to have this reaction.

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Moral Certainty vs. Practical Action

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this: Moral certainty is easy. Practical action is hard and almost always requires some degree of compromise.

Here are two principles of public librarianship which underlie our work:

Public libraries have a mandate to provide materials that represent multiple perspectives on a range of issues and subjects, especially to reflect the various viewpoints of members of the library’s community.
Public libraries are trusted sources of reliable, authoritative information. We vet information sources to be sure we offer good info to our patrons.

What happens when these two principles stand in direct contradiction with each other? What do you do when you can’t fulfill both of these principles?

As Neil Gaiman said, “Google will bring you back … a hundred thousand answers. A librarian will bring you back the right one.” There’s been a great deal of talk these past few years about the role libraries can play in fighting the spread of misinformation and promoting information literacy.

But we have people in our communities who hold to ideas and perspectives that are incorrect, at least when assessed by standards of information literacy and authority. These people expect to come into their library—which their tax dollars help fund—and find materials which reflect their beliefs.

How do you balance that?

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Ditch the Small Talk

When I was younger, I was very much one of those people who hated small talk. I’m a strong introvert and I was painfully shy as a child. Small talk was too much social effort for something I considered trivial and unimportant. If I had to interact with people, I would much prefer to share deep meaningful conversation than chat about nothing. Deep meaningful conversation is worth the energy; small talk costs too much for something with no substance.

I reconsidered my stance on small talk as I got older. For one thing, I grew less shy and less frightened by the prospect of interacting with strangers. But, too, I realized it’s a matter of respect. I have to earn the right to know someone’s deepest thoughts and feelings. That’s not a level of intimacy I can demand from anyone. You have to earn a person’s trust first and that takes time. It requires an investment of attention and care. Relationships matter more than any single conversation, and I need to do the work to build a relationship so someone will know they’re safe to share more meaningful things with me.

Small talk is how people start to establish that sense of safety with each other. It’s how people feel each other out without too much risk to start. It’s the first step on a path to earn someone’s trust.

But then I read this article:

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