How I Learn

Value Choice Identity

Some time ago a friend asked me “How much is your day worth?” I didn’t have a good answer at hand. I could have mumbled something about how much I charge for a day of consulting, and there are some companies that even pay me this, but I am not primarily a consultant. I could have done a back calculation from my pay, but I make a lot of choices about how to spend my time that have no obvious financial measure. So I thought I would spend some time thinking about the choices I make each day. It is our choices, more than what we do for a living, what we consume, or where we live, that really say who we are, what we value and what our time is worth. And it comes down to time, as that is my scarcest resource.

A typical working day in Cambridge, MA

I spend a lot of time in Cambridge MA where LeveragePoint is based, so I thought I would start by looking at the kinds of choices I make in a typical working day. In Cambridge I actually stay in a room in the house of a very generous young family in Somerville MA: husband a musician and writer, wife a business leader, 5-year-old daughter, new baby.

Wake up between 4:30 and 5:30. First choices: stretch out or just get on with it; what to read first. I decide to spend half an hour stretching and doing core excercises about half the time. I know I should stretch every morning and that I feel better the rest of the day when I do. Why don’t I always stretch? Perhaps just too lazy or too distracted, or sometimes too rushed. I almost always begin the day by reading a few poems from whatever book of poetry I happen to be reading. At the moment, mid-October 2010, I am rereading Louis Zukofsky’s Complete Short Poetry (as Kenneth Rexroth said,  “crystal  cabinets full of air and angels.”

I go down to the kitchen between 5:30 and 6:00, make tea, read for a while. These days I generally eat plain yogurt with honey and read non-fiction. Most mornings I choose to wait until the five-year old shows up and we play a game (Goblet Gobblers usually, or Hang Man, and I have started to teach her Go Moku, which she beat me at this morning).

Around 7:30 I head out to work. I almost always cycle, so the main choice is whether I take the direct route (4 km) or the scenic route (15 km).  This is about a 50/50 split and the main driver is how nervous I am feeling about work – when I am worried I want to get to work right away. Thinking about this, I should probably take the long way in when I am worried, as the ride settles me and gives me time to think. I never listen to music on the bike.

At work, I shower, change and wake up my laptop. I check e-mail, tweet for my corporate and personal accounts, check my priorities for the week and organize my day. Work is pretty much meetings or calls, interlaced with e-mail, solid through to 5:30. Lunch, when eaten, is eaten at the desk. From 5:30 to 7:30 I read up on work-related themes, sometimes on-line, but if the thing I need to read is more than five pages I usually print it out (bad for my carbon footprint) and try to get some writing done. A couple of times a week I will go out for a drink (alone or with a colleague) or a dinner out. Those nights, or when it is raining, I take the direct route home (rain does not impact my morning choice). Some evenings, especially when the weather is fine, I will do a long looping ride up the Charles River, maybe 20 to 30 km and get home around 9:00. I have a snack – fruit usually – and read until I need to go to sleep. In the evening I usually go back to poetry or pick up whatever novel I am working through (at the moment it is Oe Kenzaburo’s The Changeling). Sometimes I read about art, history or philosophy instead of a novel. And recently, I have been addicted to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels (He started to write them about when I had just started university and he passed away this year. So by reading them in chronological order I get to relive the arc of my life to date.)

A typical weekend day in Vancouver, BC

I spend most of my time in our old house in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver. The house and garden always need work – fixing or cleaning, planting or weeding, but there is a lot happening these days in Vancouver so we like to get out as well.

Most weekends I am up by 6:00 AM. I think about stretching and by the time I finish thinking about it I am already doing something else.: usually deep in a book or listening to music. I will read or write from 6:00 to 9:00 and then at 9:00 AM I listen to the CBC’s programme on Canadian politics The House. I make breakfast for whoever is up while The House is on, usually some type of omelet with what ever we have in the fridge.

At 10:00 it is off for a bike ride and I have to choose a route and a bike. Most of the time I will take my Brodie, which has gears, and head out to UBC then on around to Sea Island for a ride of about 65 km. Once in a while I will venture up one of the local mountains, Cypress or Seymour, to test myself. Or if I am going to meet someone downtown I will take my Viva fixed gear, a present from my wife. The Viva has a track geometry and is edgy to ride.

In the afternoon it is either into the garden for a few hours or off for a walk or gallery stroll with my wife (depends in part on if it is raining or not, I don’t mind biking in the rain, but we seldom work too much in the garden or go for long walks if it is pouring). At some point we will need to do the daily shopping (we shop for food most days, and I have been known to sneak into a bookstore).

Around 6:00 I will generally start to cook. Slowly at first, putting in anything that needs time, and doing some prep while I drink wine and read a few more pages of a book. Around 7:00 people begin arriving and organizing for dinner (we generally have dinner guests, usually friends of our kids, but often a variety).  By 8:00 we are usually eating and drinking, by 10:00 the people who did not help cook are washing dishes, and most people are either heading out for their Saturday evening, or crashing in the living room to watch a movie and to watch me fall asleep on the floor. Around 2:00 AM someone usually sends me up to sleep in my bed.

So what do I value?

Looking at my choices, I wonder how many are due to habit and how many are based on necessity. The choice to cycle every day while in Cambridge has become a habit, but it took some effort to make it a habit. I believe I work because it is the right thing to do, “a day of no working is a day of no eating,” I enjoy it, and I owe it to my family, but why I work and why I have chosen to work is a topic for another day.

My days have value to me in that I am

• Working with people
• Being with family, friends and kids
• Reading and writing, sharing what I read and write
• Spending time on the bike, in the garden, out on walks
• Cooking for people

And I hope these have value for others.

Applying Strengths

Over the years I have learned that I do well by focusing on what I do best. It took me a long time to learn this. Like many people, I spent years struggling to succeed by overcoming my numerous shortcomings - I prefer to begin things rather than to conclude them, I am not detail oriented, I have strong spatial pattern recognition but only average temporal pattern recognition and so on. Oh yes, I have terrible hand-efe coordination, but excellent balance and well beond average lung capacity. These days, I try to lead teams where other people make up for my weaknesses and I can concentrate on what I do best.

The first time I became aware of the philosophy that one should know what one does well and then do that was from management guru Peter Drucker (there is really no better word for this wonderful man). Drucker was a banker early in his life and then a journalist. He was not particularly successful at either profession and it was not until he honed in on the study of management that he was able to make a real contribution to human thought and activity. For much of his life Drucker kept a record of major decisions he had made and would review these decisions periodically to see what the outcomes had been. One of the decisions he repeatedly went back to and reinforced was the move from working in organizations to studying them.

This idea has been popularized in books by Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues, such as Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book is based on many years of research by Gallup which has developed a test instrument called Strengthsfinder to help people discover and understand their own strengths. I tend to be skeptical about such survey driven instruments, I have studied test design and generally find tests of this sort easy to game. But then, as the goal is to better understand myself, the only person who who would lose by gaming this system would be me! So I have used it several times in good faith, and I have also encouraged people who work with me and my family to use it give them a frame of reference for their own life decisions. And I have found it helps a great deal to get a bearing on ones own strengths and to understand those of the people around you.

On my last run through (I plan to do this again using the new version at some point this year) my strengths were as follows:

• Strategic
• Achievement
• Ideation
• Input
• Learning

These come as no surpise to people who know me.

I have been working to understand these strengths for several years now and have developed my own interpretations of what they mean to me.

Strategic: I look for patterns, long-term patterns, and the points in the pattern that have the potential for change.

Achievement: I am competitive and want to win. And I want what I win to have some significance, at least in my own eyes and for my immediate circle. Ideally, I want what I do to have some impact for the better.

Ideation: Ideas matter, generating them, sharing them, investigating them and seeing them become real.

Input: High bandwidth absorption and processing of large amounts of information, sorting them, and sending them back out. (How else to see larger patterns? Someone with different strengths might say through contemplation and deep thought.)

Learning: Well, I am trying to understand learning more deeply in this blog!

I have found these strengths apply pretty generally to how I live my life. Take cycling. Over the past few years I have become a hardcore urban commuter cyclist (through downtown Boston, up and down the Charles River for some extra distance, and over into Cambridge MA where I work). And I am working up to longer distances, I rode a century (160 KM) on my fixed gear last year and want to do a one-day ride of at least 200 KM (again on my fixie) this year. I am learning as much as I can about bicycles and cycling, from the design of the bike to the biophysics of performance and endurance (learning and input). I ride hard, don't like to be passed, and always try to go a bit longer and a bit harder (achievement). I plan my rides both daily and over the course of the year, trying to design rides that have a good rhythm and that explore the physical structure of Eastern Massachusetts (strategic). And I enjoy talking to my friends about their ideas and experiences of cycling and looking for better ways to hydrate or to build stamina and strength--interval training anyone?(ideation).

So over the course of this blog, I will be turning these strengths in on themselves, and using them to better understand how people learn, how it shapes their lives and communities, and how it contributes to a more connected society (connected into longer patterns of time and space, connected across cultures, and connections between people).