The Best Advice I’ve Received

Introduction

The final page of this month’s Southwest Magazine is a column called “One Question.” The question—“What’s the best advice you’ve received?”—was directed toward Hilary Duff.  Her reply ran 73 words, of which 62 had just one syllable.  Including this sentence I’m already at 52 words, with only 29 one-syllable words.  This is why Hilary Duff gets to be published in a magazine and I don’t.  Perhaps it helps that she’s an attractive actress whose photo deserves to take up 3/4 of the page.

Since I can’t be an attractive actress or published writer, I’ve decided to comfort myself by answering the One Question myself, but better.  “Better” in this context means “more words, bigger words, and no photo.”  If that’s not enough to keep you reading, here’s another hook:  I didn’t even follow the advice I’m about to cite.

The advice

The best advice I ever received was, “You don’t need to go to college.”  I did go to college, and I would advise each and every high school kid to attend college if he possibly can.  So why do I appreciate this advice?

Let’s back up and look at the mindset I had when I received this guidance.  It was the 1980s and I was a teenager in Boulder, Colorado (where everybody was middle-class or higher, well-educated, and white).  The conventional wisdom was that if you went to college you would get a white-collar job and be happy and successful.  Oh, and we were generally encouraged to attend the best college we could.

Contrast this to the mindset of what appears to be the typical teenager today in my kids’ demographic (Albany, California; middle class or higher; well-educated; white or Asian).  The conventional wisdom here is, “If you ever get a single B in high school you will never get into a decent college and you will have NO FUTURE, and by the way, grades aren’t enough so you should be taking at least four or five AP classes and also doing all kinds of extracurricular activities that will look good on your application, but no matter what you do you’re probably doomed and will never go to a top college and you’ll never achieve the standard of living your parents now provide for you, you miserable wretch.”

Okay, that’s not entirely fair.  I don’t think our current crop of teens uses the word “wretch.”

The matter of perspective

As a teenager, I appreciated the odd “skip college” advice because it opened the door, just a crack, for an alternative point of view.  Of course it helped that this point of view came from a successful person.  Obviously if a homeless dude gave me that advice, it wouldn’t mean a thing.  But by “successful” I don’t just mean “has a nice house in Boulder and some cool toys like an actual Model-T Ford that actually runs, an actual NASA space suit, a cool working jukebox, a working parking meter, and an immaculate 1950s Pontiac 8 car with fins and chrome and an in-line 8-cylinder engine so the hood goes on for days.”  By “successful” I also mean “has a really wild career that he obviously loves.”

The person dispensing this advice was Michael Aisner, who at that time was the director of the Coors International Bicycle Classic, which was the biggest, most important cycling stage race ever held in this country (and which to date has never been surpassed).  I’m going to throw in a caveat here:  I won’t put words in Mike’s mouth and claim that he’d still give this advice today (though I suspect he would), and I’ll add that he wouldn’t necessarily have given this advice to just anybody (though I suspect I wasn’t a special case).

I got to know Mike because I worked as a volunteer for his race—not just when it was going on, but year-round at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado—“the race office,” as we all called it.  I wouldn’t say I worked as an intern, though I suppose that’s what I was, because at that time I’d never heard the word “intern,” and had no idea that volunteering your time at a company would “look good on your college application.”  If you’d asked me at the time what this job would do for my college prospects, I’d probably have  just shrugged, or said, “I guess it slightly damages my college prospects since I’m so distracted from my schoolwork.”  I volunteered at the race office because it was a cool place to hang, and there were great people there, and I would get to use a computer, and figured I’d learn a lot.

My perspective going into that job was thus fairly compatible with Mike’s.  He just took it up a notch by suggesting that if you like to work, and you are surrounded by great people, and you learn a lot, and you just keep that up, you’ll eventually start getting paid, and will go on to have a fulfilling career, and it would be pointless to halt this progress in its tracks to go sit in lecture halls for four years and incur a bunch of debt.

A couple of paradoxes

Here are a couple of paradoxes introduced by what I’ve written so far.

First, Mike himself did go to college.  (Did he graduate?  I’m not sure … when I asked him he laughed and said, “Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that?”)  The point is, he’s had this great and diverse career history based on his ability to execute, not his formal education.  Working in his office, which had no walls and no cubicles, I got to hear him in action, mostly on the phone, and probably learned more about business than if I’d studied it in college.  (I’m tempted to apologize here to any business majors who might be reading this, but who am I kidding?)

The second paradox is that I didn’t follow Mike’s advice—I did go to college.  I ignored his advice for two reasons.  One, I didn’t have the balls to believe what he was telling me.  I felt in my very bones that without a college degree, I’d never amount to anything, no matter how inspiring his example was. (I’m still glad I have that degree, even though my most important mentor, in my current career, dropped out of college because he couldn’t bear to leave a great internship at the end of the summer.)

The second reason I went to college is that even then, I loved literature and I loved writing.  Studying English for four years under brilliant professors was something I wanted to do for its own sake.  I recognized even at the time that this was a departure from the typical results-oriented mindset that would have me studying engineering or business.  I was prepared to accept that my major wouldn’t automatically lead to good career prospects.

Why Mike’s advice was so good

What made Mike’s advice so good is that it conveyed a simple but evasive message:  there are many paths to success.  This is true even with conventional notions of success (e.g., big money, big house, cool toys, respect and prestige).  I’ll concede that college is probably more important to one’s prospects than it was a generation ago, but Mike’s basic idea still holds true:  the path everybody assumes is mandatory—that is, Perfect grades à AP classes à extracurriculars à great college à great career à happy life—isn’t the only path, never was, and never will be.  While I didn’t follow Mike’s specific advice, his overall message may have emboldened me to choose the major I wanted, and worry about my prospects later.

I try to pass along this wider perspective to my daughter Alexa, who’s in high school now, but she won’t listen.  After all, my cred as an alternate-path happy person is ruined because I graduated summa cum laude from a great college.  Nor does it seem to matter that I took an alternate path to get there:  my high school grades weren’t good enough for Berkeley, so I went to UC Santa Barbara for a couple years and transferred in later.  She counters that it’s harder to get into good colleges now, and you practically have to have perfect grades even to get into UCSB.  (I have no idea if this is true.)

The problem, I think, is her peer group.  These are high-achieving nerds (a lot like I was at that age, except higher-achieving and more socially comfortable, because nerds are cool now).  But evidently somebody is feeding them doom-and-gloom scenarios involving the necessity of perfect grades, the importance of AP courses and extracurriculars, and the implication that any deviation leads to being a hopeless miserable wretch.

Why should this be?  In general, the parents in my community don’t preach this perfection-or-else paradigm.  A number of my fellow parents went to non-elite colleges and more than a few like to laugh about what screw-ups they were in high school.  That said, the parents of some of Alexa’s friends came here from other countries, had to work really hard and make serious sacrifices to get here, and never had the luxury of growing up in Boulder and just assuming everything would work out fine.  I can’t fault their perspective, but I also can’t compete with it, because it’s easier to apply pressure than to remove it.

The best advice I can give

One of the great things about Hilary Duff’s column is that, in just 73 words, she not only passed along her mother’s advice (“do as much as you can in one day”), but turned it on its head with contrapuntal advice of her own (“I’ve learned the importance of stillness”).  So I’ll try my hand at dispensing advice, too.

The best advice I can give is “Take on a hobby that is fun but competitive.”  The point of this hobby isn’t to “look good on a college application,” but to learn how to stare failure in the face instead of trying to avoid it all the time.  As a recovering bike racer, I’ve had to accept failure hundreds of times, which has really sweetened the deal on those rare occasions I’ve managed to succeed.  The pressure here comes from within, not from some rule of thumb like toeing the line and keeping your school transcript in order.

This isn’t to say I don’t accidentally put pressure on my kid.  For example, I inadvertently added to her stress in the moments before her very first mountain bike race, by the very act of trying to help her relax.  It was a cold and rainy morning, and the race course—highly technical to begin with—had turned to mud.  Figuring this alone was a lot for any kid to take on by itself, not to mention the head-to-head competition, I casually said, “The important thing is just to hang in there and try to finish.”

Who know this simple statement was like lobbing a grenade into Alexa’s pre-race psyche?  Here is her own eloquent description of this exchange, taken from her race report: 

My dad looked about as nervous as I felt, and mentioned offhandedly that his goal was for me not to drop out.  This was worrisome for a number of reasons:  a) my dad clearly wasn’t super confident about my abilities, and b) it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I could drop out.  The fact that I was [now] aware it was a possibility made it seem likely, and I was suddenly convinced that I would be possessed by forces beyond my control, forces that are less stubbornly competitive and ambitious than I am, and these would cause me to quit.

Of course she did finish, and placed higher than I think either of us expected, and she even took it upon herself to write a self-deprecatingly funny essay about it all.  I’m cheered to see that her embrace of the “perfect-transcript-or-NO-FUTURE!” ethos hasn’t turned her into a complete CV-building, book-pounding drone.

Again with the alternate perspective

I suspect that, whatever success my daughter ultimately has in cycling, it won’t end up on her college application, and I applaud that—it means she’s doing this for its own sake, as I had.  Meanwhile, this pursuit will give my daughter something more important than bragging rights:  the all-important opportunity to fail at something without the world ending.  She will drop out of races, and will lose races, and she will get the kind of results that don’t earn an A—but none of this will besmirch any written transcript.  Moreover, as Alexa races her bike over the next four years she will realize that the traditional path toward sporting excellence—which is something like The right parents à big talent à big drive à small victories à big victories à big glory—isn’t the only one, and that alternatives exist, such as Wrong parents à embarrassing mediocrity à fighting spirit à venom à big drive à technical mastery à cunning à small victories à moral victories à ability to eat a pile of tri-tip the size of a human head and still hear people say, “I wish I had your metabolism.”

And maybe, just maybe, that accumulation of experience will give her some peace and help establish the radical idea that there are many paths to take, and an alternative path can still lead you to the success you sought, or perhaps to an alternative success you hadn’t even thought of.  This process may ultimately have the same effect as Mike Aisner’s radical, incendiary words—“You don’t have to go to college”—and their subtext, “Dive in, do something you love, do it for its own sake, do it well, and you’ll be fine.”

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The Importance of Goals - Debunked!

Introduction

I’m often reminded how important it is to make goals.  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, etc.  But I don’t buy this.  I’m not trying to say long-term goals are bad, or worthless … just that they may be overrated.  So:  maybe you haven’t achieved your goals in the past?  Or can’t think of any now?  I say don’t worry about it. 

The case for goal-setting

I googled “importance of goals” and here are some highlights of the sites I found.  (I’ve selected these from the first page of hits.)

From LIVESTRONG:  “The effects of setting goals can empower a person to believe in the outcome and maintain a positive attitude while in the process of achieving that goal. A seemingly large feat can be broken down into specific manageable steps.”

A site called Personal Excellence starts with a quote from Bill Copeland.   (Have you heard of him?  I haven’t.)  He says:  “The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”  This site goes on to describe the “six reasons why setting goals is so important:”

• Gives clarity on your end vision
• Drives you forward
• Gives you laser focus
• Makes you accountable
• Be the best you can be
• Live your best life

The final site I checked out wields its advice like a bludgeon:  “If you don’t have a goal today, you’re just like a lost sheep and you are dangling in nowhere.  You wake up everyday without purposes or reasons.  You live your life meaningless and you will waste your life…  However, with a clear goal in your mind, it will direct you in the right direction.  This is why successful people are able to achieve what they want lightning fast.”

Some semantic housekeeping

The “running up and down the field and never score” platitude is clever, but really doesn’t apply here.  Scoring in a game isn’t a goal per se, it’s the fundamental point of the activity.  We need to differentiate between an immediate result that we seek vs. a lofty, distant vision of where we’d like to end up.  Scoring in a football game means being in the moment, which is very different from vowing to make it into the NFL one day.

For the same reason, achieving what you want “lightning fast” cannot possibly refer to the kind of goal that makes a life worthwhile.  In the context of this post, and the wider context of goal-setting advice, I’m talking about long-term goals requiring organization, stepping stones, feedback, and such.

Many behaviors described as goals are what I prefer to think of as “practices.”  For example, I mentioned in a recent post that I seek to blog four times a month.  But that’s not really a goal; it’s a practice—that is, an ongoing activity carried out with specific, immediate results in mind.  (A true blogging goal would be more like “become rich and famous” or “have my best posts published as a book.”)

Problems with goal-setting

Here’s  a quick list of the issues I have with goal-setting: 

• Too much focus can keep you from highly productive dabbling.  How can we discover what activities we really love without experimenting?
• If life balance is a key to happiness—which I happen to believe it is—couldn’t laser-like focus on a specific long-term goal be a bit problematic?  You might ask this of the child of a workaholic, who wishes his parent would exchange that laser for a lamp or some nice area lighting.
• Our ability to set meaningful goals can be limited by our imagination, which is in turn limited by our life experience.  What if we set the wrong goals?
• Goal setting doesn’t necessarily “give clarity on end vision.”  Often the extent of what we can achieve isn’t clear until we’ve done it. 
• The people in our lives are important to our happiness – but who those people are, and what we mean to them, isn’t really under our control.  Close friendships, harmony with our siblings and parents, and starting a family of one’s own aren’t the stuff of stated goals and specific step-by-step planning.  (The philosopher Martin Buber has much to say about treating people as opportunities.)
• Many goals cannot be met by one person acting alone, and yet for most of us, who aren’t managers or quarterbacks or platoon leaders, it’s all but impossible to charter a course for others that is aligned with our own goals.  It’s just as likely we’ll (help to) achieve great things by attaching ourselves, or being attached, to some larger goal we didn’t think up.
• Not having a specific goal is often equated with laziness or inactivity, which I think is inaccurate.  A solid work ethic can thrive with or without a specific expectation of what the hard work may eventually lead to.  This approach may provide particularly fertile ground for taking advantage of unexpected opportunities.
• The proponents of goal-setting seem to assume that all goals are achieved.  What happens when a long-term goal is not achieved (perhaps due to its having been unrealistic in the first place)?  According to a study by two “leading researchers in the field of subjective well-being” cited in an AARP survey, “happiness may [hit] bottom in midlife because people come to terms with failed dreams.”

A couple other voices

For decades I’ve assumed that I’m alone in eschewing goal-setting.  And yet, I don’t often see real-life examples of its benefits.  So before embarking on this exploration, I chatted about it with a couple of persons close to me.

First, I asked my sixth-grade daughter if she has set any goals lately.  (I know, she’s a little young to be looked to as a guru on such matters, but I do consider her a powerful individual.)  She described how, on the first day of school, her teacher had each student draw two lines across a post-it to divide it into quarters, and then had them write down a goal in each, to be achieved (or at least attempted) by the end of the school year.  He assigned four categories:  school, extra-curricular, family, and planet.  Alexa wrote “straight As,” “first stand in violin,” “fight less with my sister,” and “recycle more,” respectively.

I challenged her on the first goal.  “Is that really a goal?” I asked.  She conceded that getting good grades was more like an expectation.  “Right,” I said.  “I expect you to get straight As just like I expect water to come out when I turn on the faucet.”  (No, I’m not like a Tiger Mother; as I’ve described in another post I’m the kind of touchy-feely, modern, sensitive parent who only wants his kids to do their best.  It’s just that my daughter has already demonstrated that if she does her best, she gets As, which means if she doesn’t continue to get As, she’s probably not doing her best.)

“Now, is fighting less with your sister really a goal?” I went on.  (This is more of a practice, in my book.)  “Not really a goal … maybe more like just behaving better,” she replied.  I asked if she recycled every recyclable item she could already, and she rolled her eyes.  “Yeah, but what else was I going to put?” she asked.

I moved on to the “first stand in violin” goal.  After she explained what this meant (I still don’t understand it completely), I said, “That sounds like a good, solid, challenging goal for this year.”  She said, “Well, it actually doesn’t have that much to do with my playing.”  She described how her friend, a first violinist whom she’s assigned to sit next to, is vying for first stand, and if this friend makes it, my daughter will simply ride her coattails (according to the standard seating practice of the orchestra).  Other than hoping her friend succeeds, and continuing to practice her own playing, she contends, she doesn’t have much influence on her fate.  So this goal , too, doesn’t quite fit the classic goal-setting model.

It didn’t seem Alexa had taken this assignment all that seriously—but who am I to judge her?  I asked if she thought the goal-setting exercise was valuable.  She replied, “Well, it took up some time that we’d otherwise have spent doing math, so, yeah…”

My wife hasn’t historically talked much about whether she sets goals, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t.  So I asked her if she puts much importance on goal-setting.  After a pause, she replied, “I’m aware that many people have done it to good effect.”

My first goal-setting failure

In first grade, we did a big unit on careers.  Various parents came in to talk about theirs.  (Oddly, the only one I remember well was a long-haul truck driver.)  Then we kids had to decide what we were going to be when we grew up, and draw a picture of ourselves on the job.  The year before, my brother Max had chosen “ambulance driver,” mainly (I believed then, and continue to believe) because he thought he could draw a pretty cool picture of an ambulance.  My parents were pleased at his choice and made a nice fuss over him.

When it was my turn, I thought about the project for about thirty seconds before deciding I could probably draw a TV set, and that it would be fun to draw a TV showroom with not only a few TVs in it, but also a big picture window, out of which you could see the street and a cyclist riding by.  I thought it would be a nice challenge to draw this well enough for the window not just to look like another TV.  So I chose the career goal of TV salesman.

I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that anybody would take this goal seriously.  My teacher kind of snorted and didn’t say much, while lavishing praise on the students who chose lofty, important careers like firefighter and doctor.  When my parents saw the picture and essay, they were disgusted at my lack of ambition, and it showed.  (In my family, you weren’t even allowed to watch TV.  My dad hid the cord and removed the knobs from the TV set to keep us from watching it, so when we found a replacement cord and used needle-nosed pliers to operate the set, we’d get these huge electric shocks.)

I tried to explain myself, but couldn’t articulate my position.  It was as though, at age six, I’d signed a contract and my future was set in stone.  So all that this goal achieved was to make me feel bad about myself, and make my parents feel bad about me (and perhaps feel bad about themselves).  All this, just because I followed my natural inclination, which was to work hard on the present activity and let the future take care of itself.  As it turns out, I’ve never really abandoned this approach, and yet I don’t actually sell TVs for a living today.  And I think it’s worth pointing out that the field I work in now didn’t even exist in 1975 when TV-Gate went down.

My college goal vacuum

In college I chose English as a major.  This isn’t the same thing as setting a goal, really:  you have to declare something, after all.  But a college major and a career goal can be interrelated.  Choosing English is different than going for something practical like Engineering, which naturally (or, at least, supposedly) equips you for a specific career.  With my choice I was making a statement:  that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I didn’t care what prospects my major may or may not present me with.

This bothered some people.  It bothered my dad, for example.  And it led to people bothering me.  “English?” they’d say.  “What are you going to do with that?”  I got so sick of hearing that.  You know who didn’t ask me that?  The companies that ultimately hired me. 

I did get to ask this kind of question, though, in the late ‘90s when I was interviewing a candidate for a job where I worked.  Perusing his résumé, I said, “Double major in Philosophy and Political Science, huh?  What makes you think that will serve you in an engineering job?”  (I was half-joking, but also seeing how well he did under pressure.)  He replied, “Well, it’ll make me a more interesting colleague.”  Right answer!  We’ve been working together for over fifteen years now.

What if I’d created a long-term career goal and then, with laser focus, selected a major that would help get me there?  Would that have given me “clarity on the end vision”?  Probably not, given the way industries have changed since my college days.  But I might have decided English wasn’t a “safe” major, and done something else—and that would be a shame, because I enjoyed my liberal arts education and am glad I got it. 

Extracurricular goal vacuum

In college, I rode for the cycling team.  I had never had any long-term goals in bike racing; I just rode and raced as much as my schedule would allow, got what coaching I could, and suffered a lot. I certainly never expected to be recognized for my overall efforts in the sport.  I was taken by surprise, therefore, when I won the UC Santa Barbara Club Sports Top Scholar Athlete award.  I didn’t even know there was such an award.  Had I known about it, and had I set a goal of winning it, would I have behaved any differently?  No:  getting good grades and racing my bike were standard practices for me, not a means to any end.

The next year, our team won the gold medal in the National Championship Team Time Trial event.  I guess I could retroactively pretend that this had been an achievement years in the making.  But really, it wasn’t.  Sure, when we headed to Nationals we were aiming to win, but TTT victory wasn’t a goal we’d written on a piece of paper at the beginning of the season and worked out a strategy to fulfill.  Nationals wasn’t really different than any other TTT that we’d ever ridden.  It’s a race, and the whole team goes all-out the whole time, just like every other team.

What’s more, winning that championship wasn’t a goal I could have achieved by any standard methodology.  It was built, in fact, on failure:  I’d wanted to attend UC Berkeley as a freshman, but they didn’t take me.  (I later transferred there.)  If I’d made it to Berkeley as a freshman, I wouldn’t have been on that winning UCSB team.  Another happenstance that led to that victory was that a new student transferred to UCSB that year, seemingly from out of nowhere, and ended up being one of our strongest guys.  Sure, we helped him learn the ropes, and when we realized how good a TTT team we were, we practiced more at it, but our victory was really more an opportunity we exploited than a perfectly executed plan based on the collective long-term goal of the five of us.  (In fact, we didn’t even select the fifth rider until the week before the race.)

I think it’s important to note that it took me five years of losing bike races before I got any decent results.  If anything, setting big goals year by year would have been a demoralizing endeavor.  Had I set a goal to win a race, I probably would have set my horizon at two or three years tops, and then been let down when I failed.  The success I ultimately had has a lot to do with my approach, which was to do the best I could, keep at it, and hope for the best, year after year.  It’s easier to be patient, I think, when you’re not officially failing in your goals.

Career goals

More than seventeen years ago I interviewed extensively for the job I still have.  I’d started out interviewing for one position, and failed to get it, but was asked if I’d consider a totally different position that the company thought would better suit me.  That was just fine, since I hadn’t had a specific goal in the first place, other than to work for this particular company.  So when it came time for the man who would be my boss to ask the classic interview question—“Where do you see yourself in five years?”—I was in a bit of a bind.

Probably no employer wants to hear that you have no goals and just hope to drift rudderless through your career.  And yet, what could I tell this guy?  Since they’d changed up the very position I was applying for, I couldn’t exactly pretend that everything was unfolding according to my master plan.  So I just answered as honestly as I could:  “Five years out, I see myself still working here, working really hard, doing stuff that’s far cooler than anything I can currently imagine.”  To my great relief, my future boss replied, “I like that answer.  I’ve always hated this question—I don’t believe that most people have any idea where there career is going, especially in this industry.”  (If you’re curious what I do for a living, click here.)

Family goals

If the phrase “family goals” causes you to snort or snicker, good.  Given how complicated family life is, it would be kind of amazing if everybody could agree on any goal, much less cooperate to fulfill it.  I’m not saying families are lame or anything; on the contrary, my greatest satisfaction comes from mine.  It’s just that having this rich family life doesn’t represent the achievement of any goal I could ever have set.

Sure, I always hoped to get married, and hoped to have kids, but there’s no step-by-step plan for such major life scenarios.  (Okay, some cultures still have arranged marriages, but not ours; meanwhile, successful pregnancy either happens or it doesn’t.)  When I first met the woman who eventually became my wife, I didn’t think, “I will make you mine!”  I didn’t run home and write on a piece of paper, “I will get this woman to become my wife and bear me children!”  And when she and I were dating, I didn’t solicit feedback on my progress.  What would that even sound like?  “So … are you starting to think I’m marriage material?  And do you think you’re fertile?”

Just to recap…

Again, I’m not telling you not to set big goals and strive to achieve them.  Maybe I’d have a better and/or more important life if I did this myself.  What I am saying is that if, like me, you’ve gone through life ignoring all the conventional goal-setting wisdom, and this has bothered you, perhaps you can stop worrying.  My philosophy has been something like “Okay, life, I’ll throw everything I’ve got at you, and in return … well, surprise me.”  That’s worked out okay so far.