meaning

I'm pretty sure I would be willing to pay $100/hour for someone to listen to me complain about school, (the classes haven't exactly been my favorite part of college, to say the least) but Prof. Arvan is right in that we've spent a long time talking about motivation and school so far, and not a whole lot outside of that. There's also another reason that I don't want to go back to school in this post, and that's because I know exactly what I'd say in this post if I were going to. And that's because I've already said it a thousand times before.

I'd talk about my design as art class, and really just use it as a couple of pages of venting about the engineering curriculum. And not that that couldn't potentially have any value, but I've done it before, so in the spirit of using this blog to actually help me develop as I writer, I'm going to try something else.

But I'm not entirely should what that something else is going to be, so I'm going to stop here fore now and go think. (Of course, by the time you're actually reading this, there won't really be noticeable pause, but let's pretend...

--

I wrote this beginning Tuesday night, just before I headed off to Bible Study. Actually, technically it wasn't just before, because just before I headed off to Bible Study, I did a quick review of my notes for what we were going to talk about. I had to do this quick review of my notes because I was co-leading Bible Study that night, and, in fact, co-lead the Bible Study that I'm a part of most weeks.

This is actually pretty weird for me to talk about, because growing up I never went to church at all, and through most of high school I identified pretty strongly as an atheist. And here I am four years later leading a Bible Study. Most of my friends (excepting the ones I met at church...) don't even know that I spend any time there, let alone that I spent a couple extra hours a week that I could be "having fun" on picking out Bible passages and reading them carefully with my co-leaders and designing a lesson around them.

I can take a step back even further now, and admit that I'm not just a leader of this particular Bible Study, I actually was one of its founders. So I'm spending extra time a week on something that wouldn't even exist without my urging.

And I was thinking, as I was trying to come up with something that I'm intrinsically motivated to do, that this was a pretty strong example. It's not even always fun, at least in a traditional sense. A lot of the RSOs that I'm a part of, I pick and choose the places where I want to get involved. Designing posters? Yea, I'm up for that. Emailing everyone and their mother? Count me out. The weeks where I've got too much to do? I'm not attending RSO meetings, but I am still prepping for and leading Bible Study.

It's hard work, and it's something that, if I want to do right, I really can't half ass. I have learned a lot about the Bible, and a lot about my faith, and it's something that I keep coming back to even when I'm burnt out on learning and school.

I think my motivation comes from the belief that learning this stuff is actually beneficial to me, and having positive results on my life. Not in the sense that I'm getting A's in church, but in the sense of a deeper understanding of the universe (this sounds so corny even as I'm writing it...) that just plain makes me feel good.

--

I mean, is that what intrinsic motivation is? Something that you want to do just because it makes you feel good? I'm guessing that there's other components of it too, but I'm trying to think of an example where I do something that I don't have to do that doesn't make me feel good. I go above and beyond in classes when the learning feels like it matters, like I'm accomplishing something, I do the things in RSOs that I most enjoy... if that's the case, and we want to promote intrinsic motives for doing things, we've got to find a way to make them fun, and meaningful, and matter.

--

Short post, because I'm also working on getting my rough draft of my book review written up, and also because this was the hardest post to write for me yet.

"precis"

(In quotes because despite reading a couple of things online about what one of these is, I'm not sure that I've got it right. Also it's missing the accent over the 'e' because I'm too lazy to grab the correct character! And now, without further ado...)

I'm writing on The Tipping Point, because while I enjoyed the writing, I want to be critical about the content. I think it's really easy to write something that's all praise, really easy to write something that's entirely negative, and a lot harder to balance the two and give something an honest review. Not that I'm going to claim to be able to do that, but I'd like to try.

So, The Tipping Point. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. I think the review will come in four chunks, but that’s just an impression I have before I’ve even starting writing.

The first section is just going to be an introduction, with some quick thoughts about my overall reaction to the book and what it’s about in general. I’m going to try to be really careful to be neutral here, and talk about Gladwell’s relative strengths as a writer. I also hope to very briefly mention the stuff I won't be talking about in detail later on.

The second section I think will be about chapter two, though I may switch this and the section on chapter five after I’ve written them. We'll see. This is the section on Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen, and I'm planning on at least mentioning a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories category. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics, but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I hope in my review to be really clear on the point that I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from 7 or 8 datapoints.

Next section on the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. it feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it. Again, I'll do a brief summary of the chapter.

Finally, I want to conclude the review by hopefully drawing some conclusions between the special types of people and their impact on the groups talked about the later chapter. Probably another quick mention of my likes and dislikes of Gladwell if I don't feel like I'm beating a dead horse. Overall, I think I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.

The end? I'm not sure how accurate this will end up being, I guess I'm one of those people who usually doesn't do a whole lot of planning and just sort of sits down and lets the words fall onto the page, but it is definitely nice that it's not two days before the whole review is due when I'm sitting down to think about it for the first time at all.

truth

I'm not sure that I'm doing a good job with these reflections.

They're certainly not helping my find my own personal style, though I think that's less a matter of me doing something wrong, and more a matter of me having had a blog for approximately forever, and spending a long time developing the voice that I currently write in.

As a side note, I had someone outside of class read one of my posts, and they made a couple of comments to me about my writing, which I'll share now because maybe they're somewhat relevant to the topic. First comment: While a lot of the stuff I write is generally true, it does tend to contain a lot of "facts" that aren't actually facts. I guess that's sort of a hard distinction, but what he meant (and something I'll readily admit to) is that while I don't make up things to sway an opinion or alter the point of a story, I will be liberal with the details. In some cases being more specific than my memory actually allows (Nope, no real clue when exactly the D.A.R.E. officer came to my classroom) or leaving out pieces of the story that I don't feel are relevant (the friend in the last post was actually a conglomeration of numerous people I've known over the years and still know). I know why I do it, and it's generally a style thing, an attempt to keep a narrative flowing or sometimes just get it started.

That said, it's a little weird. Not that not being 100% honest in writing is weird. But (and this is the second thing that was pointed out to me) my writing is rather personal. I'm writing in an "academic" setting, for a grade, to be read by a professor who's going to judge me, and I'm incredibly informal. I tell a bunch of stories, and sometimes I swear, I break lots of standard "writing rules" and it feels to me more like a conversation between friends than a class assignment. I'm being personal, and open, and honest, and yet I'm not, in some ways.

I'm hiding behind the little edits that make me sound a lot wittier and help my stories flow. I don't say "like" or "uh..." nearly enough to make this journal sound anything like what actually talking to me would. But that's my style. Outwardly incredibly informal and personal, but with a high degree of internal editing to make it so. (If I'm being honest, I wanted to end that, "make it sound so good.")

Anyway, after that incredibly long side note that might actually make up the bulk of this post... I've had a style for awhile. And partly it's as personal as it is because I started developing it writing fiction, and only modified it slightly to adapt to personal journal writing, and while maybe it isn't appropriate for professional papers, I think it works here and I'm not too motivated to change it. So I wouldn't say that this blog is helping me develop my style, though I would say that it's generally fun to write.

As for helping me connect to the ideas in class, here's where I'm not sure. On one hand, I'm definitely writing about things that relate to class. On the other hand, I feel like a lot of what I do is just say the things that I wish I had the time to say in class or said in class, but wish I said better. And in that sense, I'm not really connecting a whole lot, I'm just spewing more and more of my own ideas, and not necessarily incorporating others. Which, while incredibly easy for me to write, maybe isn't always the point.

So here's where I'm going to try an experiment. For the next couple of posts, I'm going to talk about and argue for something that I'm not really sure I believe. Maybe it'll be something someone says in class that makes me stop and go, "What?" Maybe it'll just be the exact opposite of something I vehemently believe. I'm hoping that I'll be able to write in a way that still sounds like me, while incorporating ideas that are definitely not my own. Certainly, I'm not always right, and hopefully this will keep me a little more open-minded.

It's not going to do anything about that "writing really personally but not being completely honest" thing, but that's why I'm talking about it. I do hope that it improves my critical and higher-level thinking skills, and really, while I love entertaining readers, that's what this blog is for.

why should i?

In high school, I had a really good friend who never seemed particularly happy with her life. Something was always wrong, she always had something to cry about. After a couple months (or maybe a year or two) of hearing her stories day after day, some of her mutual friends and I got together and wondered if there was anything we could do to help her out besides just listening. We were realizing that it wasn't that life hated her... she just hated life. Her boyfriend at the time finally suggested that she start seeing a therapist, which she reluctantly agreed to. Her parents got involved and found someone who their insurance covered a few sessions with, and we were all very hopeful that maybe our friend would some new light in her life.

She proceeded to spend the rest of high school doing what we liked to call, "Wasting her parent's money once a week for fifty minutes hanging out in her therapist's office and talking about jack shit as far as we were all concerned."

Something would get her down over the weekend, and she'd call her boyfriend to cry, and then he'd be "insensitive" and suggest that (since he honestly had no idea what to do anymore) she talk to her therapist about it, and she'd get mad at him and call me. Then I'd spend hours on the phone or in her room comforting her, but mostly gently trying to convince her that maybe her therapist really was the person that she should be talking to about all this. It never happened. She was perfectly content opening up to me about anything and everything in her life, but refused to even approach any mildly serious subject with her therapist.

I had many theories as to why over the years. The therapist lady was a stranger, my friend had no reason to trust her, my friend was afraid that something would get back to her parents and they'd be mad, confronting your demons is scary... At the time I couldn't really comprehend it. I was always a talker, still am. I've shocked a number of people with how open I'm willing to be. It's rare that I've met a person that I'm not willing to answer any question that they might pose.

It was probably not until I started working at a real job that I cared about that I was finally in a position where maybe I started understanding. (I say maybe because we've drifted since high school, and I'm not going to pretend I can read minds, especially of people I'm no longer in touch with.) But maybe. Because I kept coming up with ideas that I thought were great, or at least interesting, and while I shared them with the other interns that I worked with, I was terrified to say anything to my boss. I'd go home from the office and make dinner with my roommate, and have a million thoughts about the project I was on, and the two of us got really excited about the possibilities. I even jotted down exactly what I wanted to say because I'm notoriously bad at remembering things even a couple of hours later. And I'd walk into a meeting with my manager the next morning, and say... nothing.

The guy was a stranger, and we hadn't really built up a lot of trust, I was afraid that something I'd say would be stupid and my manager would be disappointed, or laugh at me, and confronting the unknown was terrifying!

I think that sharing something always has a potential risk. You might be embarrassed, it might get back to exactly the one person you never wanted to know, someone might think less of you, you make yourself or the other person uncomfortable... there's any number of reasons not to share things.

There's also any number of reasons to share things: you might make an awesome connection, come up with the greatest idea ever, become a superstar, tell someone exactly what they need to hear, inject some excitement into your day, or maybe just earn your two points for participation that day.

Like any choice, opening up has got upsides and downsides. If someone's not opening up, it's probably because the negatives are outweighing the positives. If sharing has risks, and you've got absolutely no incentive to do so, they why would you? I'm not trying to argue that humans are perfectly rational, logical human beings, but subconsciously, at any point, we either want to do something because it seems like a good idea, or we don't want to do it, because it seems like a bad one. If I'm encountering resistance in a conversation, it's because we've gone from "This conversation is a good idea" to "This conversation is no longer a good idea."

Now, I can't tell you what particular downsides a person is focusing on when that switch happens, but I can tell you that if I think the conversation is important, I'm going to try to give them an incentive to keep talking, or possibly try to take away some risk. Maybe that means sharing something myself to build some trust. Or the ever popular, "I promise I won't laugh." In a class, I think this often means tying a student's grade to how often they open their mouth.

I finally started speaking up more at work when I got some feedback that my manager expected me to be a bit more proactive instead of just doing what I was told. He gave me a subtle incentive for communicating. It did nothing to take away the risks I was seeing, but it did add a reason to change my current behavior if I wanted to keep my job. In my friend's case, that never happened. We remained willing to listen to her problems, her boyfriend stayed with her despite their disagreements, and, while she wasn't happy, she wasn't unhappy enough that the risks outweighed the potential benefits.

Finally, to give credit where credit is due, I would like to end this by thanking my fiance for a wonderful conversation we had over dinner at Steak and Shake that led to some of the ideas in this post. It turned out much better than my original idea of complaining for some hundreds of characters about how I couldn't answer this question, because how I get people to open up in conversation and what I did when I sensed resistance was different with every person and every conversation and depended on our relationship and history, and my current read of the situation, and how was I supposed to say anything interesting because all I knew about the topic for sure was "It depends."

i also don't floss

This post has been sitting in my head for a couple of days, after I started developing the ideas in it after last Monday's class. I've talked to six or seven friends about what I'm going to say, trying to clarify my ideas and get some other opinions. I've generally found people nodding their heads and agreeing, but we haven't come to any consensus that I'm able to write up in a nice, neat little package. I don't know why I'm telling you this, besides that I like writing to be transparent, and that it's the only thing I knew well enough to get this post started. So, be forewarned. I'm writing about ideas that aren't clear in my head, and I'm not sure how well I'm going to get them across. The topic may well be something I address again later in the semester though, so I'm less worried...

--

Growing up, the D.A.R.E. program was a standard part of our education. Nestled between math and reading on alternate Thursdays, Officer Ralph paid us a visit. I couldn't tell you what D.A.R.E. actually stands for, but I can tell you the message that was drilled into my head over years and years: Drugs are bad. Don't take them.

It was the same message about smoking. Don't do it. And drinking and driving. Don't do it. A slightly different version about eating your veggies (do it lots!) and wearing a helmet while biking (do it always!). But certainly there were a lot of things that we all got told a million times growing up.

And yet.

I don't know a single one of my friends who eats all their veggies, and probably half the people I see on campus don't wear bike helmets. Smoking, while on the decline, is still a prevalent practice. In 2006, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that 40% of traffic deaths were alcohol-related, and surveys suggest that nearly half of American adults have tried smoking marijuana, not even to speak of other drugs.

Why don't people do these things that they've been told for years are good for them? Why don't more people avoid practices that we've been told are dangerous? And why don't doctors wash their hands more frequently? Heck, why doesn't the general populace wash their hands more frequently? We're currently facing a potential swine flu epidemic, and while I sit here, I see seven students with their hands by their mouth, and another two wiping their noses. They've all had contact with the chairs and tables in the room, which I doubt have been sterilizing particularly recently, and I can't imagine that any of them will be rushing to the sinks as soon as class ends.

--

I wanted a concise conclusion about all these problems to put here. I wanted to tie all of them to a single common failing. Unfortunately, at that, I failed. So here's where it gets a bit more messy.

--

In general, I think a lot of systems are "broken". Not necessarily broken in the sense that they don't work at all. More "broken" in the sense that they're not designed correctly for the problems that they address. I said it in class and I'll say it again. I don't think we were asking the right questions about handwashing. Someone brought up that residents are expected to see up to 30 patients in an hour. Someone else mentioned that proper handwashing can take 5 minutes. Let's assume doctors are pros that have got this down to 1 minute. Washing their hands between every patient would reduce the amount of time doctors could see patients by one half. Another student in class mentioned that they had heard two percent of patients end up with serious infections in the hospital due to germs they caught there.

Tell a hospital administrator that their doctors can see one half of the patients they currently do, and you'll reduce the number of infections patients get by two percent. What are they going to say? It's a numbers game. If you told a university administrator that you could improve all the student's understanding of the material by 2% if you only accepted half the students, they'd laugh at you! It's numbers, and money talks. And I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but I just don't see a way around this fundamental issue. No matter how much you motivate a doctor, you've also suddenly got to motivate the hospital to spend twice as much on doctors to cover the same patients? Help me understand this.

Let's go back to some of the stuff I mentioned earlier. Eating your veggies. Ask anyone and they'll tell you that it's a good idea. Everyone will probably tell you that they should be eating more, in fact. There are signs in the grocery store telling me that I should eat five servings of fruits and veggies a day. It's not an education problem. I know I should. Why don't I? Again, at least for me, it's partly a "system" problem. I'm not uneducated, or even that unmotivated to eat veggies. I don't do it because it's not convenient and it's not cheap. I don't care how much you tell me that I should, white bread, peanut butter, ramen, and mac&cheese (Yes, I am trying to see how many posts I can mention my favorite food in) is a hell of a lot cheaper and lasts much longer than veggies. And that's why I don't eat them. Telling me how good they are for me doesn't solve either of the issues. Make them easy and make them cheap and yes, I'll eat them.

At least more often. Because I'm not telling the whole story here. There's the part of me that is human, and, as a human, has taste buds. Cupcakes win our over asparagus approximately every day of my life. I don't run to the vegetables section when I first walk in the grocery store. They're not fun or exciting and it's easy to forget them, and it's even easier to not make them on those occasions when they are sitting in my fridge. Why? I think part of it is the non-proximate cause problem that we talked about in class, coupled with the issue of incremental baditude (words, I like making them up). I can totally skip the carrots today, I'll eat them tomorrow, I feel perfectly fine, I'm a healthy young adult. Broccoli or french fries with my meal? I'll take the fries... after all, I'm out celebrating! I only do this... twice a week! I'll just take some carrots with my lunch tomorrow. Am I doing untold damage to my body?

That's the problem. It's untold.

I think the same thing goes a long way in explaining the lack of helmet and precedence of smoking and drunk driving. Activities that almost everyone agrees are hazardous, and yet many still do. I won't wear my helmet this one time. I'll only have one, I'm quitting tomorrow. I'm sure I'll be fine if I drive tonight. One-off events that, taken by themselves, probably have relatively low risks. Higher than not doing them, but they're certainly not like partaking in almost certain death. Will something happen eventually? Maybe. But probably not tonight.

Of course, while a somewhat understandable point of view, it's not a totally rational one. But then, I'm not convinced that humans are particularly rational creatures. We've got these emotion things, which cause feelings like pride and embarrassment. Desires that make us want to be cool and to desperately avoid being lame. Urges to escape stressful situations. In some ways, these dangerous risky behaviors play to our human nature. Wearing a bike helmet still isn't cool. Smoking still relieves stress. And being too drunk to get yourself home sucks.

Educating us on the risks gives us more tools in our rational arsenal. Maybe gives us a better idea of how probability plays out over time. But it's never going to make me less human. It's not going to make me richer. It's not going to give me more time in the day, and it's not going to make the world fair.

I don't know what the solutions to any of these problems are, but I do think that as problem-solvers and change-makers, we need to be considering the system that led to the problem as a whole, right down to the very nature of people as imperfect human beings.

introduction

This isn't the first time I've appeared in the blogosphere.

I think I started my first online diary when I was around thirteen, and I really hope I've deleted all trace of those early writings. I went back and reread most of what I'd written sometime before I headed off to college, and it was incredibly embarassing. Part of it was the subject matter... lots of fights with my mom, boys I had crushes on. But the biggest thing was the online voice I'd developed for myself. I knew everything back then, and everything I wrote was clearly the most important thing anyone had ever written. I tried to make posts about macaroni and cheese sound eloquent, and was so proud of myself when I came up with alliterative and rhyming subject lines. I also wrote absolutely awful poetry.

In short, I sounded like a thirteen-year-old, and that was mildly unbearable.

I spent a lot of time after that tirelessly revising every post I wrote, trying to make sure that nothing I wrote would ever embarass the future me. (By the way, that failed miserably.)

I love pretty much everything that I publish, and can't stand it a couple of weeks later. Sometimes when I'm particularly clever, I'll still be proud of a post a year later. That's about the limit. Maybe someday my online voice will stop changing and I'll be able to read my older posts without cringing.

Anyway, I've never really stopped writing, though the blog posts became less and less frequent as I actually had things to do besides wax poetic about what I was eating. (For reference, I do still love mac & cheese.) Now it's time for a new blog, and here I am, back at the customary intro post.

It's not actually the same this time though, because this blog is somewhat compulsory. I don't mean to apply any of the negative connotations, just stating a fact. I'm writing because I have to. Usually this does horrible things for my writing, so we'll see. I will admit that this isn't flowing particularly smoothly, and I keep stopping to revise. Oh well.

Anyway, compulsory. For a class called, "Designing for Effective Change". (I hate the periods/quotation mark issue. I tend to care less about what's technically correct and more about what looks good. That's actually my opinion on a lot of things, I'm sure it'll come up again later.) It's a class that I've frequently been telling people I'm utterly excited about, but fail miserably at competently describing.

It'll certainly be different than most of my classes. I started at the University of Illinois as a Bioengineering major, thinking I wanted to do something with genetics. After a couple of years, I knew that was definitely not what I actually wanted to do. I'd also been taking some Computer Science classes, and had helped a CS organization run a conference, which I totally loved, and decided maybe what I wanted to do was Computer Science, so I added it as a second major. (I was wrong, I just loved conference planning.)

I've got one more semester left, and I've finally figured out what I actually wanted to do the whole time. A major in oraganization/psychology/graphic design/technology. Too late to change majors, but for the most part I've found a job I love as a program manager at tech company, so that's a plus. To give some insight as to what that means, my projects over the past couple of summers have included a lot of research, coming up with new feature ideas, specification writing, scheduling, working with software developers, meeting with various other teams across the company, and other things that would sound a lot more exciting if I could actually mention any specifics.

I think I am most excited about this class because the final project is about curriculum reform, and I think the Engineering curriculum at this school is, across the board, pretty miserable and does a terrible job of preparing our graduates for anything besides sitting in a corner and doing calculations. I'd be afraid to let them talk to customers, talk to their teammates, design a project, heck, design anything. I'm hoping this class lets me do cool things that aren't boring. Also it lets me fit in all the classes I need to graduate with both my majors and honors, so that was another thing it had going for it.

But mostly I'm just really excited to talk about people and groups and change. Less excited to talk about any of Malcolm Gladwell's books. I think he'd make a terrific fiction writer, but his non-fiction kind of scares me, and I hope we don't consider him an authority figure on any subject. He seems to just come up with an interesting opinion on a subject and find a couple of studies that support his opinion. I'm not sure I actually disagree with him, but I haven't yet seen him present a solid, concrete, scientific argument that could convince me. Also, he gets some basic biology facts wrong, which bugs me a lot. I'd like to suggest this article as required reading to accompany his books: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/books/18kaku.html

Finally, a disclaimer. My current online voice is pretty sarcastic and a bit biting, which I'm sure has become obvious by now. I'm also quite open and honest. Qualities I'm sure I'll be proud of for at least another couple of weeks.