Utilizing Human Adobe

Adobe is not just a computer application for reading .pdf files. It’s a building material. Most of us learned this some time between 2nd and 5th grade. We learned that people out west, including various native tribes and white settlers, made huts out of the earthen material.

A quick wiki search reveals that adobe is used all around the world. Humans, of course, prefer shelter from the elements to un-shelter from the elements, and, being resourceful, use whatever is available to create their shelter. We know that humans can and have done many impressive things in construction. Homo sapiens has become so good at building things that outside observers might be tempted to call us homo constructus. We’ve mastered many methods of constructing in the physical world, but I believe that we could use more practice refining our methods of building up our societal organizations, of building up individuals’ skills and confidence, and in education.

Progress is not simple, but great progress starts with simple steps founded on simple logic. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as common sense (we teach children many of the “common” things that they know), but I do believe in trying to keep things simple. Using comparative logic, let’s look at what it’s like to build in the physical world. If you asked someone to build you something, would you ask said constructor to use materials that he or she cannot acquire? Certainly not. Subsequently, would you expect the individual to use the materials available as well as possible? Certain-ly. Comparing structural practices of organizations, it seems that we use pillar mentality and pleas from authority (“trust me, I know what I’m doing”) to try to increase the functionality of our organizations and to teach. I propose an approach of asking ourselves “What materials are available?”, “How do they work best?”, and then using them accordingly. For example, if I’m working with a barbershop chorus and I find that a particular singer does something really well, like, let’s say, he’s good at singing lightly and freely at E4 (the E in the top space in tenor clef), I might say to him, “Hey, I’ve noticed you doing that really well in the past. This song needs more of that feel. Could you use a little more air support and sing that note louder? You could carry us in that song.”

Therefore, I suggest a protocol of finding the tool, figuring out how it works if necessary (in my hypothetical scenario, this would be encouraging the singer to feel good about his tool so that he keeps it), and then inviting him to use it well at the appropriate time. It really is quite simple. A chorus director can build a good sound by finding quality “material” and making use of it, tweaking the material when necessary. If we want to build up individuals, and build up organizations, we simply need to do like the members of our construction and home improvement community and use what we have and improve it over time.

Fighting Perfectionism

As a barbershopper and encourager of vocal musicians everywhere, I’m trying to bring people into the world of singing, into our organizations. I face a major challenge because people are just not gathering in groups these days. I hear a number of explanations as to why it’s hard to get people to do this. It’s easy to blame television, blame sporting events, or blame popular entertainment in general. I’ve fallen prey to this blame-game as well, but I now have a different answer. I don’t blame television. I blame perfectionism.

Let’s define perfectionism as the belief that entities and humans should always be perfect, and only take action if they can be perfect, and that only perfection is worth our time. To illustrate my point by showing the opposite of perfectionism, take the reality TV scene. You know what it’s doing? It’s exploiting what I believe is an innate human desire to be human. People can listen to a CD if they want music to sound perfect, they can watch rom-coms if they want to see people who look perfect, but humans feel more connected to people who are like them, that is, flawed and passionate.

There’s a darker, more sinister side to perfectionism, but, before I get there, let me be clear on something. I don’t have a problem with the notion of perfection itself. After all, perfection is a beautiful idea, and we could have another discussion about what perfection is. For now, let’s proceed with the idea that perfection means effective and flawless. Anyway, when it comes to perfection, I find that we humans are often afraid to pursue it simply because we think that there’s something wrong with us because we aren’t perfect. We should understand that there’s nothing wrong with not being perfect.

So, on that note, we go back to what it’s like to be a recruiter.

In recruiting others to join societies and clubs, I hear expressions like “you don’t want to hear me sing” and “I only sing in the shower.” I’ll save my thoughts on singing in the shower for another post, but let’s look at the underlying hesitance. Are people saying that they don’t want to sing? Or are they saying that they’re afraid of their own imperfection? It’s hard to know because everyone is different, but what we do know is that there is a hesitance. Some try to recruit to artistic activities like singing, dancing, and speaking in public by treating them as pillars to achieve: “Strive for this, for it is great and worthy of your time!” I don’t like the pillar mentality. I believe in people, and I’ve met my share, and I feel that I can see behind people’s eyes to read people saying, “I feel that I have greatness in me, deep down… If only someone would give me a chance." Many of these people never achieve greatness because they don’t “make opportunities for themselves”. I pity this mentality, and I believe that it is the fault of us leaders that so many people don’t achieve.

We in leadership positions fail when we don’t look for ways to put people in positions to succeed. If we wait for people to tell us that they want something, how much of their time and ours are we wasting when they could have already been succeeding? As a leader, I am fighting perfection by looking for imperfect people and trying to give them chances to pursue perfection. I do this because I find growth more exciting than elitism.

Together, I Can

Writing a blog is five jobs: producer, writer, editor, promoter, and webmaster. It’s strange how something that takes 3 minutes to read takes so much effort.

I find that understanding the five jobs helps me to stay positive and motivated. I’ve found that, for myself, the effectiveness of saying “Oh, just do it!” is not very high; I don’t get much done. I find that a clearer concept of what I’m actually doing, that is, the tasks of what, in the real world, are done by multiple people, helps to truly put myself in the focus mode of each position so that I adequately perform all of the duties necessary to run a successful blog.

These roles, presented in order of appearance, are:

Producer

I function as a producer in being the one who motivates the project and makes it happen. Without the producer in me saying, “Hey, get going! Put your computer in your bag; get down to the library because you know that you can’t get much done in your house most of the time. Look, I’ll put gas in the car if you’re low; it’s fine, stop freaking out. Look, I know that you have ideas, and you really feel that you want to write them down, which is why I’ve set everything up to make it all easier. You can do it. Now, go!” Then, after the writer and the editor have done their job, the producer comes back and says to the editor, ok, now… post it! What are you waiting for? It’s never going to be perfect. Give it to the webmaster! (see below).

Writer

When a person writes a blog, it’s the ideas that get the most attention; it’s the creativity and the delivery that get the attention. I write stuff from my head, my heart, and my guts (if I have enough to say what I truly want to say), and then cross my fingers and pass it along to the…

Editor

The editor does the job that doesn’t get the credit when all goes well; it’s a very thankless position. Yet, without the editor, many people will stop reading a blog or a newspaper. There are even people who won’t read content that isn’t edited effectively. (I admit that there is a Royals blog that I don’t read because, sometimes, the content has bad grammar or is just plain negative-sounding.)

Webmaster

The webmaster receives the content from the editor, previews what it’ll look like on the blog, and posts it. He might also look at the content again after publishing it, perhaps, if necessary, saying, hey, maybe you should look at this again, Mr. Editor.

Promoter

This guy has the work that requires nothing but the excitability of a lottery winner. He simply looks at the content, assumes that it’s cool, gets all stoked, and tries to think of a catchy way to get people to get people’s attention so that they’ll read the blog. On my blog, acting as the promoter, I tweet a tantalizing teaser (hopefully it’s tantalizing!) and then post the address of my blog. I’ve got my Twitter account linked to my Facebook account so that my friends know when I’ve posted. The promoter knows that it’s going to take a while for readership to increase; the promoter simply says to the other 4 guys… I’ll keep getting it out there, you just make sure that what I’ve got to post is good stuff!

Un-valuable Logic

I love Miguel Cabrera as a baseball player. Love him. Hate him because he plays for the Tigers, a rival of my team, the Royals, but I love him. He’s so strong, but he doesn’t try to do too much. Still, I’m mad that he won a certain award this year.

This is why I’m angry. The type of thinking that we try to train out of mental health clients, the type that we try to teach children in schools and young adults in colleges, is given complete credence by so many people when it comes to column-writing and story reporting. Bob Dutton, who is the Royals beat writer, voted for Miguel Cabrera for MVP when he should have voted for Mike Trout. He was going to vote for Mike Trout, and then changed his mind because players said that Miguel Cabrera was better, was, to use Dutton’s words, more “valuable.” Dutton is a beat reporter for the Kansas City Star. I write on a free blog site. Dutton keeps me abreast of goings-on within the world of the Royals. I appreciate his work, especially since he’s been following a terrible team for a long time. While I disagree with Dutton, I suppose that that this an argument that can be made: people who do a job know how hard a job it is. I disagree with Mr. Dutton, and even Tweeted him an argument against his logic, but that’s not my focus today.

My focus is on the logic of people who voted for Cabrera over Mike Trout because of very bad logic. It is against this type of logic that athletes are coached and mental health clients are counseled.

In life, people have stress issues if they worry about things that they can’t control. They have performance issues, as well. I work as an academic coach. I can’t sit and stress about what kind of day the young man had before he came to me. I can only do my best within the 45 minutes that I get to work with him. Lack of focus creates shoddy work. The same is true of athletes, and it’s especially true in baseball. The Royals had a pitcher named Zack Greinke who lives with social anxiety disorder. The Royals, at the time that Greinke was with them, had a very bad defense. Very bad. Zack was taught to only control what he can control, that is, how and where he throws the baseball, and how he plays defense if the ball is hit somewhere in his domain of responsibility. Zack is a freak athlete, anyway, but the increased focus that he found from not stressing about what would happen if the ball were hit to a bad defender who made a bad play, combined with his plan to focus on one pitch at t a time, resulted in an historic season, and he was justly awarded with the Cy Young Award, the award presented to the best pitcher in his league. Greinke was already capable of doing what he did. … The potential was always there. What changed was his focus. In order to focus, he had to clear his mind of negative thoughts.

Now, in baseball, we have three traditional stats that tell us if a hitter is having a good year: batting average (hits per at bat), home runs, and RBI (when one hits the baseball and someone scores (or if the bases are loaded and he draws a walk). If you lead the league in all of these categories, you have won the Triple Crown. Miguel Cabrera did that: .330/44 homers/139 RBI. He also scored 109 runs despite the fact that his principle job is to make sure that other people score… His winning the award is super cool…

Buuuuut… a guy named Mike Trout did this: .326/30/83, scoring 129 runs, in 21 fewer games – he drove in 83 runs despite the fact that that’s not his primary job; and, he stole 49 bases* (Cabrera stole 4). The thing is, Cabrera is a not a good defender. At his very best, he’s average. Trout, on the other hand, is a superb defensive outfielder. In summary, what Cabrera did hadn’t been done in 45 years. However, Trout’s combination of steals and homers has almost never been done. Yet, Miguel Cabrera won the league Most Valuable Player award. Now, to the crux of my temper on the matter:

*Steals are a decent measure of how well a guy uses his speed on the base paths.

It’s not that I have a problem with people voting for Cabrera. One could find an argument or two for him. I think that Dutton’s reasons - basing his vote on whom do other players think should win the award and whom would a manager want in the batter’s box with the game on the line – are weak. Still, they’re, at least, not logically problematic and adolescent. What I have a problem with is the voters who voted for Cabrera based on him winning the Triple Crown. Here’s why.

Just as a pitcher is told to only worry about what he can control, a hitter cannot control what happens to the ball after it leaves his bat, nor the actions of the other guys on the field towards retrieving the ball. He cannot control if a base runner falls down and doesn’t score; he can’t control if he gets a hit even if he hits a the ball super hard. He can’t even control if, in the event that he hits the ball really high and far, it goes over the wall. EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, a hitter doesn’t control where he hits in the lineup; he doesn’t control what managers think of him and whether they’d consider pitching to him in a key situation. RBI is a stat that measure s situations largely beyond the hitter’s control.

I am mad because this stuff is tolerated. I am mad because, in my opinion, we U.S. citizens need to grow up in our thinking and information-processing. This kind of reasoning is adolescent.

Seek and Ye Shall Find...

I often marvel at how marvelously successful people can act so humble. People like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jayhawks men’s basketball coach Bill Self, and a Royals pitcher named Joakim Soria just don’t seem to have big heads. Like, at all.

I think that humility comes from four main sources: competitive perspective – there are other people just as good or better at what one does; cosmic/religious perspective – to the greatness of a deity/size of the universe, one’s individual greatness is as nothing; the understanding that there’s always room for improvement – no one is perfect; and frequency of failure – successful people often fail far more frequently than so-called “failures.”

I’ve felt for a while that I’ll be able to move forward faster in my life if I find humility, so I’ve been searching for it, and I think that I’ve finally found it thanks to the fourth cause of humility – frequency of failure. I’m now an academic coach - what most people call a tutor – and, boy, have I found humility. Most days, even if I understand perfectly the subject matter that I’m teaching, I leave my sessions wondering if I’ve done even the slightest bit of good and wondering if I’ve communicated effectively. Sure, I’ve had a moment of triumph - I found out that one of my students got a B on his Spelling test when he hadn’t passed a single one to that point. Even so, doubts like the following constantly run through my head: “I have six students, and it’s about to be seven. I surely can’t feel that one success with one student means that I’m succeeding with them all. How do I know if I’m doing them any real good? Can’t the rate of improvement always be a little bit higher? Am I moving too fast?

The frequency of failure truly hits home as I practice piano daily. I focus on playing all the notes at the right times, try to balance the volume in both hands, yet I still make hundreds of little mistakes in the hour or so that I practice. Coaching academics gives me so much opportunity to fail. I think, then, that the success is in learning. Success is understanding that failure never has to stop motion. My communications instructor during college says, “Just work to post quality content. Do nothing more. Just try to post quality content.” So, that’s what I try to do with my blog, tweets, with anything that I post on Facebook, with any comment that I make on the radio, and what I do when I try to write songs.

In my efforts to post quality content, I fail so much. I could always say something a little bit better or find a clearer or briefer way to express my thoughts, but I have to fail. I have to fail before I can succeed; and, no matter how much I succeed, more failures wait to creep up and bite me. I was teaching voice lessons to a group of wonderful ladies. Yet, one by one, they dropped out. It’s most likely that they really have just gotten too busy, but I still can’t help but feel that if I’d made the product attractive enough that they’d have found time to continue. It’s not like we didn’t have fun, and they certainly produced more quality sound as we went along, and it’s not like they stopped lessons right after starting. If I ever get to teach voice lessons again, though, I’ve certainly learned what I’ll do differently, even if I never get to work with those ladies again. The loss of the opportunity feels like a very humbling failure.

Bamba Blindside

He didn’t even speak Spanish…

Last night, I saw a movie about Ritchie Valens. That Rock n’ Roll pioneer.

I’m not a rock star. Perhaps, I’ll never be. But, as a passionate music lover and semi-pro musician, hanging out with a couple of Mexican friends who love Ritchie’s music, I felt connected to “my roots.” I felt like I was learning about my history.

Why it hadn’t registered in my head that it was Ritchie Valens, the original “La Bamba” guy, was one of the people who died in Clear Lake, I’m not sure…

“The day the music died.”

Watching the movie, all that I knew from the exposition of the film, and from my friends, was that Ritchie was the “La Bamba” guy… but then, when the film showed a guy with glasses about to board a plane during a snowstorm, and a big fella who vaguely resembled a guy whom I vaguely remembered from a video clip of “Chantilly Lace” that I’d seen about 10 years ago, it suddenly hit me… and the moment of realization and shock pressed on me almost as if it had just happened…. Valens was getting on a plane with Buddy Holly… and the Big Bopper*… oh my lord… no… the day the music died…

*Note: Talk about “stealing black music.” Listen to “White Lightning” recorded by the Big Bopper. Just… wow.

And Waylon Jennings could’ve been on that plane. For those who follow me on Twitter*, you got a tease of this entry. To think how those guys, Waylon for example, used the time that they perhaps could’ve never had… If life isn’t random sometimes, explain to me how a coin toss gave us Waylon, Shooter, etc. Try to imagine country music history with out the name Jennings. Then try to imagine rock n’ roll history with more Ritchie Valens. Either result of the coin toss gives us a major plus, and a major sadness.

*Shameless plug: @mapnmusicman

Now, think of the music that we’ll never get to hear form Ritchie. He was a hell of a guitar player. We got Waylon. In a way, from now on, when I hear Waylon’s music, I feel like I’ll be hearing a piece of Ritchie, of Buddy Holly, of the Big Bopper.

I’d been wondering, off and on, about the mystique of things that will never be but could’ve been… what if Mickey Mantle (baseball reference, kids) hadn’t drunk away a good chunk of his health and gotten knee problems? What if Ritchie Valens hadn’t died? Now, I think that I understand… It seems that there’s a personal connection to the loss of the glorious things that could’ve been. We are all united in this loss. It always feels new and fresh. I could hardly get to sleep last night… the power of that realization, and to lose Ritchie, and the fact that there was a little miscommunication when one of my friends told me that the actor was still alive and I misheard him and thought that he meant that Ritchie was still alive… The death of the hope of seeing Ritchie somewhere in his old age crushed me, and thinking about all of the great music that he could’ve made… Perhaps he would’ve learned Spanish and, today, there’d be more blending of Mexican and White music. Perhaps he would’ve flamed out after a couple more hits… But, his guitar ability makes me think not. RIP Ritchie. To me, you just died. Thank you for the music.

Making Up Rules

Perhaps there isn’t a lot to say this time. My last project was to try to lessen my clutter. I did fairly well; I got rid of two grocery bag sizes of trash. I felt, at first, like the whole project was just moving too slowly. I felt like all that I was really doing was getting my junk count down to where it was when I moved from my old house. Let’s face it; one is always acquiring more junk. Advertising in the mail, pay stubs, bank receipts, for me things like sheet music, show programs. How does one decide what’s necessary and what isn’t? Well, for starters, some of my junk was from my financial advisor, so I called her and asked if some of those generic mail-outs were necessary to keep. She said no, so that got rid of a handful of booklets.

One thing that I have going for me at the moment is that I’m really starting to enjoy having floor space in my bedroom. Currently, the boxes of junk are in the living room, and I’m doing the sorting there. I feel much more creatively free with space in my bedroom. I feel more inclined to sit down at my keyboard and play… the reader will recall that one of my current intentions is to make playing the piano a daily part of my life. Which reminds me that I need to get some playing in before I leave to call the football game tonight. Fire pit time awaits me after I get back from the game, so I probably won’t do any playing tonight.

In any case, I feel pretty good about the progress that I’ve made. I think that, if I achieve my ends in this junk sorting project, I’ll reward myself with a carrot cake. Oh, yeah.

One of the things that I accomplished was clearing off the top of my roll-top desk (yes, I have one of those.) I put my CDs (yes, I have those) on little horizontal racks so that they’re properly displayed and the top of my roll-top looks much better. I could get accustomed to this improved organization.

The rule that I’m making up is that I’m going to extend this project. I feel that, though it’s good to not get stuck on one thing, it is good to see a project through. I feel that this project is probably the most important short-term one that I’ve undertaken to this point. It’s so important because it speaks to three larger issues: 1) overall organization of possessions, 2) future freedom, and 3) lessening of stress. To not have all that junk weighing me down will really help my stress levels. I’ve got a box of stuff to donate that’s already 1/8 full, and I still have 5 boxes to sort through. Well, really, it’s about 4, but it feels like more because some of those boxes are small. Some things have found places to belong, and the resultant organization is very pacifying.

Note: This article is written in the present tense from last Friday, when I intended to publish it.