Trailhead: Anne Helen Peterson. "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation". Buzzfeed News (2019-01-05).

It's late so I won't give this the full treatment. It's a long article, and one I'd heard of and wanted to read.

The immediate reaction is: I had never thought of the useless and incessant drive to optimize tasks and habits and hobbies at home? It's always there—not even necessarily in the back of my mind but the front, because I plan every day. It exacts a toll and it's not clear that it's useful for anything. Forget useful—it's not clear that useful is itself useful at home, at least as far as self-tasks go.

I am a believer, in spite of experience and evidence, that form follows function. A thing should work well, and that is more important than how it looks. Every day something happens to disprove that, but still I row against the current. I'm not proud of it necessarily, it's just a habit.

The most common failure mode for me goes like this: I spend quite a bit of time designing something (good), then building it (good), then tweaking it to make it work (good), then I forget to clean up the environment or the thing itself and it looks like a minor disaster (bad)—even if the thing itself works like a dream.

That impression a person gets when they see or hear or smell something before they can touch it or taste it colors the rest of the experience. Build some shelves but leave the room a mess because you'll get that part tomorrow? You'll have to answer for that—not just the mess, but maybe some questions about the efficacy of the perfectly good shelves. Build some shelves but move the mess into a different room and you'll get that part tomorrow? You're a hero who makes the best shelves. Perhaps the best solution yet is to build the thing and clean the mess, but not every project fits neatly in the space of time before the rest of the world—or at least the part of the world that matters—sees the results.

Previous: All models are wrong (2021-08-18)

Although we know that "all models are wrong, but some are useful", that only handles the question of why a model can't do everything right. Right? A hurricane model might be able to get windspeed, precipitation, future track in 24 hours, future track in 2 weeks—but everything? No. We want the models to step right up, and give us everything, but each model is tuned to do some things well because each individual problem to solve in a model in the whole damned mess of problems is complicated enough on its own.

So "all models are wrong" is for the naysayers. It could just as easily be used for the True Believers—the ones who think there is such thing as a complete model of a problem if you just reach for it. A model isn't supposed to be right—"right" as in 100% correct about everything. But useful analysis often gets stopped in the quixotic search for a model that does it all.

Actually, maybe it's not a quixotic search, but a search for a holy grail. I always think of this exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever someone gets wrapped up too tight in overtuning a model.

Camelot!

Camelot!

Camelot!

It's only a model.

Shhh!

This fall semester I'm taking two half-semester classes at Wash U: FIN 532 Investment Theory, then FIN 532B Data Analytics for Investments. I don't have any particular love for either class, nor for the topic, but I wanted to take a more analytical class after taking softer classes (negotiation, change management, power and politics) all year. So I'll hang out with the quantitative kids this semester, especially since I picked one of the sections with the MS Finance students, who are predominantly plugging in from China. Maybe I'll learn some topic-specific Chinese as well.

The topic-disinterest is itself a form of interest. It's like a negative light shone on the things that I don't know much about because I would typically only learn something about the things I'm interested in. It's a kind of interest in filling in the gaps. I don't want to spend too much of my time forcing myself to learn things I don't care about, but as a general rule it's useful to do it sometimes.

I'm down to 16.5 credit hours remaining, and this will cover 3 of them. At this point in the year, I'm just trying to grind through—Mule Time, maybe you've heard of it—so 3 credit hours is enough. Also it's the limit of what the home office will sponsor for the year, so why not shuffle the remaining hours to next year.

Previous: 100 days of planks (2021-02-27)

I suppose, now, that I could have started a daily habit of something more useful 281 days ago, but here we are. Core strength is good, although with a slouchy posture it does lose some of its efficacy. Today, after ratcheting up the time—every day increase 5 seconds, every Monday back it off to 5 seconds longer than the previous Monday, every day increase 5 seconds, and so on and so on—I got up to doing 6 (continuous) minutes of planks. It's not a meaningful accomplishment except in Bro Land, but I have a timeshare there so it's OK for me to celebrate.

Months ago, this daily habit was something that I was latching on to just to get through the days/weeks/months of the pandemic that had just smashed themselves into an indistinguishable mass, like a loaf of sliced bread dropped in the sink. Having something that needed to be done Daily kept the world—the small world, the local world, the one inside my head—in order. Now I accept the daily as useful that gets done in order to keep the streak alive—something I neither look forward to nor think about, something I just know I need to do before I go to bed. It's in a gray area between the habit serving me and me serving the habit, but it doesn't take much time, and the payoff is good for the effort, so it seems like a no-brainer.

Habits are compound interest. Put something in, keep putting something in, take more out later. The opposite is true as well, but the debt accumulates, and the collector comes some day, ready or not.

There are a million forms of this advice—and none of them good—but: choose your habits well. Get something out of them for yourself. Get something out of them for someone else. Avoid the ones that rack up debts—debts in dollars, debts in liver cells, whatever. There's no sense getting to the end of the world—the one in your head—with a pristine machine, but there's even less sense dulling the blade if you want to make something with it.

So there I was, shuffling through articles that I hadn't read yet in Instapaper. Up comes an edition of Oliver Burkeman's The Imperfectionist newsletter: "Dailyish". In it he links to an interview he did with Jerry Seinfeld in 2014 for The Guardian: "Jerry Seinfeld on how to be funny without sex and swearing". In that article I discovered that there was an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee that had Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks in it. I practically ran to find the remote control so that I could pull it up on Netflix.

I love Mel Brooks. For good or ill, he's been a big inspiration to me, mainly through Spaceballs and Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Those are the finished works, but his interviews are even better—they're kinetic, maniacal. Even at 80-something in the show above, he's still jumping out of his chair and running for the door to give the full measure of slapstick to his jokes.

The best interview is his 1975 in Playboy—you can read it here, not there.

PLAYBOY: What’s so special about your comedy?

BROOKS (snatching up the receiver as the phone rings): This is Mel Brooks. We want 73 party hats, 400 balloons, a cake for 125 and any of the girls that are available in those costumes you sent up before. Thank you! (Slams the receiver down) You were saying?

I don't know if "aspire" is the right word here. We'll make it work. That sort of immediate reaction to whatever is immediately available, and then taking off at a dead run in whichever direction is there to go, careening off whatever is there to careen off, knowing that he can run and jump off whatever he wants to and stick the landing—maybe not stick the landing, but a landing—that's what I try to do. It's not polished, but it is practice. That kind of full throttle will run you directly into a wall if you don't know how to drive. Move and move and move and see what works and feed it back into the system and keep moving.

I don't work well without a bit of pressure. I'm not sure if that's healthy or not. When there are more stakes riding on something, or when the probability of failure is a bit high—it's easier to concentrate, to sift out the useful work from the useless work.

It's like when the going is smooth, or if there is little pressure, I'm some kind of nebula of free-floating particles that might have the same mass as a planet or star, the same potential for order and purpose, but none of the strength. It's all there but it doesn't come together. Under pressure something forms out of that shapelessness.

I don't know if the better approach is to be able to meet all challenges vigorously—the great and the small alike—or if my approach is etched in, a well-worn groove that has always been there and will always be waiting for me when I need it.

I prefer pressure—sometimes, not all the time—because of the calmness it brings. Inside my head is a giant soundboard, like in a recording study, and when the time is right, I can lean over and turn down channels, one by one, until only the crystal sound of what needs to be done is left. I don't want to tune out so much all the time—life is in all that noise—but there's that feeling when the channels fade out, a closed-eye pursed-lip puff of air, a weight being lifted, then a breath in, eyes open, and stride out into the field.

While writing the newsletter on Monday, I made a reference to impressionist art—which I didn't know that much about other than what was in a few faded images in a drawer in a spare room in my mind, so I had to go digging for some clever-sounding words to back myself up. As it happened—as it always happens—the search for one specific thing turned into a meander among many things, no end goal in mind after the initial goal was reached. Link upon link upon link. That's the way the minutes go.

I did land on something interesting: Salon des Refusés. (Wikipedia, etc.) The very short version is: in 1863, a number of artists had their work rejected for an annual art competition held by the French government and managed by conservative judges with an interest in maintaining the Right Kind of Art. So they protested, and the emperor organized a second show to mollify them: Salon des Refusés—the exhibition of rejects.

Here's a paper (that I haven't read yet but have queued up) that explains the exhibition's affect on the trajectory of art: Boime, Albert. "The salon des refusés and the evolution of modern art". Art quarterly 32 (1969): 411-426.

I don't know much about painting. I'm not terribly interested in it, though I'll give it a go in a gallery if I've got time and space to blank my mind and stare. I don't like to cruise by walls and walls of paintings. Let me have a few minutes with one. Thank you for coming to my TED talk about art.

What I do know is that the idea of displaying rejected work in its own show—a well done, unironic show—sounds like a fine idea for (a) finding work that shouldn't have been rejected in the first place, (b) laughing at the bad, and (c) sifting interesting ideas and approaches from the semi-bad. A terrible drawing might have the germ of an idea that didn't develop, but in the right environment or care transforms into something amazing.

Strip out the things you want, and bury the rest. Test your luck, test your skill, and if it doesn't work out, exhibit the rejects. ("I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself down through the generations. Westward the wagons, across the sands of time until we - ah, look at me. I'm ramblin' again.")