WISDOM – Page 3 – Tim O'Hare

Stumblings #2

Here are five more random things I thought I would write about:

1) ‘Follow Your Curiosity’
There’s a slightly odd website that I browse fairly regularly called ‘The Art of Manliness‘ which describes itself as ‘a blog about growing up well, aimed at men and their unique challenges and interests’. Some of the blog posts are interesting and fun – about fitness, personal effectiveness etc. – and some are just downright odd – like one on how to survive falling through the ice (such as might happen if you are out ice fishing on a frozen lake somewhere – as you do…). I’ve started listening to the AoM podcast and in one recent episode (AoM podcast #95 ‘Follow Your Curiosity’ with Brian Koppelman) I was struck by two particular things. First, I liked the idea that in life you should not seek to follow your passion, but, rather, you should follow your curiosity. Secondly, I liked a comment that was expressed along the line of ‘Don’t be bound by the assumptions you made yesterday. You can change them’.

2) Frank Chimero and his new newsletter
I keep track of the internet writings of a few particular creative types. In each case, at some point, I have stumbled upon something they wrote that struck a chord in my head and, as a result, added them to my list of people to keep an eye on for more snippets of interest, wisdom and inspiration. On this list is a designer called Frank Chimero. I don’t remember now what it was that he wrote to catch my eye, but since then he’s posted more material that I have enjoyed and so I have continue to follow him. Somehow I have managed to get to sign up for his new weekly email newsletter ‘Frank’s Findings’ – oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a link to this on his website but you can get to see it at tinyletter.com. It has only been running for three weeks but already there has been a great mix of quirky content that I have enjoyed browsing (and if I am honest, it helped to inspire me to start these Stumblings posts on this blog).

3) Am I a scientist?
Although I work as an academic and am, nominally, some kind of marine scientist, it is fair to say that for much of my career I have focussed almost entirely on teaching, management, student recruitment and course leadership. This has meant that the extent to which I have been involved in scientific research in my field of expertise has been pretty limited at times. Sometimes this doesn’t really bother me, but at other times it leaves me with a feeling that I am not a proper academic and don’t have any very strong link to my subject area. Things have improved a bit recently, thanks largely to prompting and support from a particular colleague. A short while back I kind of sat up one day and asked myself the question ‘Am I a scientist?’. The answer was a sort of yes and a sort of no. I ought to be and, nominally, I am, but the thought struck me that if I am actually a scientist then some days I need to go to work and just be a scientist and not try to be a scientist at the same time as being all the other things my job demands me to be. The result was the idea that I would try to have ‘science days’ when I can go to work and ignore all of the other demands on me (like emails from students, requests for help from colleagues) and just be a scientist. I tried it once and it worked brilliantly. I tried it a second time and something really urgent cropped up that wrecked my plan. I suppose the jury is out on whether this little piece of sleight of mind works or not, but I suspect it might and I am going to try to keep hold of the idea.

4) Boyhood
I went to see the film Boyhood in the summer with my younger daughter and it totally blew me away. It is the best film I have ever seen and I came out of the cinema thinking I could (and wanted to) watch it again and again. I am not going to go into detail here. I just want to report that I loved this film; I loved the message, the acting, some of the music, the idea behind it, the fact that the writer/director Richard Linklatter thinks the way he does. I loved everything about it. I mention it here because it has just come out on DVD and I watched it again. It’s still brilliant. I still love everything about it. If you haven’t seen it, get hold of a copy and watch it. If, after watching it, you say something like ‘oh but nothing happened’ (as one person I know did) then all I can say is …, well, actually I don’t think I can put what I would say to you on a public forum!

5) Kurt Wallander/Henning Mankell
I like reading crime fiction but it is quite a while since I read one of Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels. I started reading ‘The Man Who Smiled’ recently (I think this is the fourth Wallander novel) and it’s simply great. It’s so nice to slip straight back into a character and get completely hooked by a story.

Stumblings #1

This is the first of what may, or may not, become a series of posts in which I write about five things I stumbled upon in the last week or so. These ‘things’ might be anything: a book I read, a film I watched, something I created, a piece of insight gained. I have no idea whether I will be able to sustain this, what it will become in the future or whether anyone will find it interesting, but if nothing else, I intend to enjoy recognising the five things I stumble upon each week and recording them in this way. Here goes:

1) Accidental Creative Podcasts
I came across the Accidental Creative website a while back and read the first book by it’s author, Todd Henry, towards the back end of last year. Accidental Creative is aimed at ‘creatives’, taking a wide definition of this word along the lines of ‘someone whose work entails them creating value on a regular basis’. I really enjoyed the book and found a lot within it that resonated with my struggles to remain productive and creative. More recently, I started listening to the Accidental Creative Podcast and my decision to include this entry in my Stumblings is specifically inspired by a podcast on ‘Procrastinating on Purpose’ that I listened to on the way home from work one day last week. The basic idea of PoPing is that you should decide what to do at any point based not simply on whether tasks are urgent or important (classic time management approach) but also whether they are significant. Like most ideas of this type, it’s all just common sense really, in this case that it is a really good idea to deliberately spend time doing things that enable you to be more productive in the future (such as developing skills, laying foundations, scoping a project) and that to do this you have to deliberately put off until later other tasks that you could do now but don’t have to. The danger is that you simply do the tasks you can do now, create an illusion that you have been productive but then not enable yourself to work ‘better’ in the future. Anyway, I include the AC Podcasts here not for that specific episode but just as something that I think is generally seeming to have some value for me.

2) Tchaikovsky Symphonies
I grew up to classical music and always had a particular liking for Tchaikovsky. But in recent years (actually more like the last 30 years) I haven’t found time for myself to listen to classical music so much. A couple of weeks ago I went to see the film Birdman with my younger daughter and Tchaikovsky’s music features quite heavily in the soundtrack (a great choice for the film because, for me at least, T’s music is laced with strain, yearning and a feeling of desperation). Subsequently, I decided to listen to T’s later symphonies (surely his best works) and this reminded me how much I liked them and how great they are. As a child I was always most taken by the 5th Symphony, but I have to say that from this recent re-listening, the 4th Symphony is the one that did it for me this time. The music in the first movement seemed to reach right inside me, rip out my heart and then wink mockingly at me. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose!

3) Regular Running
This year (well since 2nd January actually) I have been running every day, if only for a mile sometimes. I suspect I will write more about this in the future but, for now, I just wanted to record that there seems to be something different that happens to both your body and your mind when you run daily rather than just running a few times each week. Physically, I can start to see my body re-shaping itself which is interesting. Mentally, I find I am far more ‘level’, quicker to focus on tasks at hand and generally more positive. It’s well known that running induces chemical changes in your body but I hadn’t expected to notice such a difference in my response between running often and running daily. Of course, it might just be me feeling something because I want to feel it. We’ll see.

4) Action v Inaction
This is a simple one. I was musing about diving in and doing something versus thinking about doing something later and the following words popped into my head: “The brief moment for action is inevitably followed by a lifetime of opportunities for inaction”.

5) Whiplash
I went to see this film with my wife and younger daughter. All I want to say is that it is brilliant. I like films that are about something rather than simply a story. Whiplash is about what is and isn’t acceptable when trying to foster genius. It almost forces you to agree with some really unacceptable behaviour on the part of a teacher/mentor. Brilliant acting, brilliant filming, brilliantly playful, brilliantly thought-provoking. Watch it.

If you don’t do it now you have to do it later

I got stuck at work today. I was supposed to have a meeting lasting the whole morning but, unprecedentedly, it was all done and dusted in about an hour. Now usually a meeting finishing early would be a cause for celebration, providing a whole chunk of unexpected bonus time in which to do something useful. But alas, today I just couldn’t get started on any of the multitude of tasks that were waiting for my attention – marking projects, filling out my Performance Development Review form, revising some degree course web-pages to name the three most urgent.

I do tend to suffer from difficulty getting started at times, experiencing a complete lack of motivation despite having limited time and unlimited tasks, and it can be a real problem. I have tried to analyse why my motivation gets stuck sometimes but there is no real pattern to when things go wrong – it just appears out of nowhere. But a significant part of the problem is that the tasks awaiting me are just somewhat boring and have little direct value for me personally. They are just tedious tasks that need to be done that I don’t really want to do and so sometimes, I simply don’t.

In the end, after a period of frustration, I did get going, and partly this was because I told myself that I would have to do the tasks sometime so it might as well be now. The answers to problems of this type are invariably obvious and simple but it helps to remind yourself of them sometimes, which us why I grabbed a post-it-note, scribbled a few words on it and stuck it on my phone as a constant visible reminder for future times I feel myself getting stuck.

Chance favours the prepared mind

Listening to last week’s Scientific American podcast I was particularly struck by a quote that was mentioned in one of the reports. In the podcast the quote was given as “chance favours the prepared mind” and attibuted to Louis Pasteur but looking it up online it seems that the original quote was more along the lines of “In the field of observation, chance favours the prepared mind”. This longer quote reflects Pasteur’s work as an scientist and rings true in my mind, but the shorter quote has more wider applicability as a statement of the familiar idea that “we make our own luck”. Anyway, I liked the quote and I certainly believe it to be true so I thought I’d lay it down as an entry on this site.

Empathy games

Reading yesterday’s The Times newspaper (actually it was the glossy magazine that comes with the newspaper on Saturday and never has anything worth reading in it…) I was taken by the following quote from author Rose Tremain:

“On Tube journeys I try to imagine the thoughts of the people I feel most afraid of. After four or five stops they morph into ordinary citizens. I’d encourage people to play this kind of empathy game as often as possible.”

It was part of a short interview in which she talks about the need to listen to everybody, however young or old, because listening to people is the best way to have interesting questions to ask. She also describes how as she has grown older she has stopped asking herself “What makes me happy?” and started asking herself “What gives my life meaning instead?”. The result is that she has become far happier. Simple, but profound…

Good companies don’t need fancy adverts

What a weekend… This isn’t a pleasant story.

A couple of weeks ago we started to get bad smells around our house. These weren’t the normal, temporary bad smells that arise from time to time (you know what I mean), they were all-pervading sewerage smells that increased in intensity over a number of days to the point where there was nothing for it but to call in a drain clearing company (because we were in a hurry and without any other means to select who we called we plumped for a big, well-known national one ending in “Rod”). I wasn’t at home at the time but evidently when the man-hole cover was raised the entire space beneath it was, how shall I put this delicately,… full. I am led to believe that it was quite a struggle, but eventually the blockage was cleared and we got back to some kind of normality.

However, a week later the smells started to return and, feeling brave, I decided to open up the man-hole cover myself to do a quick check. There was some stray material, but it didn’t look too bad until I ran some water down the pipes and watched as the level slowly rose and having risen, stayed risen. Uh oh, I thought, and because it was Saturday evening and we couldn’t risk the level continuing to increase overnight and through Sunday we called “Rod” back. One and a half hours after Rod arrived the blockage remained and the gully was full of filthy, smelly water. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the gully, similarly foul stuff was beginning to bubble up through the slate tile-covered concrete floor of our utility area. At this point, after a quick phone consultation with the boss, Rod decided there was nothing more he could do, advised us to phone our insurance company and withouth much further ado vanished.

At this point I’m going to cut the long story short. This morning (Sunday) we ended up with the boss of a local drainage company coming round (coincidentally he lives opposite and knows some friends of ours). He cleared the blockage in a couple of minutes, removed a considerable amount of material from the pipes, carried out a camera inspection and discovered damage to the underground pipes which we now have to get fixed – a job that will entail digging down through our concrete floor to find the broken part and make the mend. It’s bad news but at least we seem to have stumbled on a great drain clearing company and the nature of the problem is such that, for the time being at least, we’re free of blockages.

The funny thing is that looking in the Yellow Pages, our new-found local company is one of the ones that hardly has an advert, whereas Rod’s company has a huge, flashy advert. There’s clearly a lesson here – good companies don’t need fancy adverts…