Personal essays
Necessary but perhaps not sufficient
So close
Bang.
The starters pistol begins a race and the runners stand up out of their crouch and begin to move with efficiency, grace, and beauty that look nothing like the the way I look when I run.
The pack soon divide into those who look likely to win and those who don’t stand a chance.
It’s like the feeling you get when watching NBA players stand next to each other. You begin to think of some of them as short because the others are clearly taller. But any of those short ones are at least half a foot taller than I am. None of them are short.
The ones falling behind in that race aren’t slow. They’re faster than any runner except for the handful who are beginning to separate ahead of them.
And this olympics there was a race where the first four runners crossed the finish line with less time between the first and last than it took for you to read the word “Bang.”
It was so close that we had to learn that you don’t win when any part of your body crosses the finish line. Indeed, one of the runner’s feet clearly crossed before any other and he didn’t win.
It’s the collar bone that needs to cross first.
Horses win by a nose. People win by a collar bone.
Effort
Teller, of Penn and Teller, says that one of the secrets of magic is that the magician has worked harder to create and perform a trick than you can imagine. You’re looking for reasonable ways that they did that thing - they used unreasonable ways.
But there are also bad magicians that work their butt’s off.
Work is what we call a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Sure, we hear about the olympic athlete who just decided, what the heck I can do this and then they did it and ended up medaling.
But that’s the exception.
It’s more typical that an athlete has been working at their event for years and years making great sacrifices.
And most of them - you’ve never heard of.
It’s not because they didn’t medal at the olympics. It’s that they didn’t even qualify. They didn’t even make the pool of people who would have a chance of making the final team.
They’ve been getting up early to work out, eating ridiculous diets, and recovering from injuries and didn’t come within a continent of achieving their dreams.
The Keynote
I recently saw a video of a keynote I gave a couple of months ago on the south coast of England.
On a clear day we could literally look out the back of the building where the conference was held and look across the English Channel and see France.
I’d been there fifty years earlier while my family was in England for a year and I began the talk by musing about things I learned then and my journey to where I am now still learning new things.
I used to give a fair amount of keynotes. Conferences would bring me in to share stories and hopefully inspire the attendees near the beginning or the end of a conference.
As I aged there was a tension. Older people are supposed to give more talks like that but I wanted to make sure that my peers and people who might employ me knew that I could still master technical topics. I wanted them to know I could still learn new things and write code.
So it had been a while since I’d created my last keynote, and man was I stressing out about it.
The organizer asked me for a title and a quick description so I gave him one.
At that point I didn’t really know what the talk would be about. I knew it had to match what I’d told him but I had no idea what it was really about.
So I began to write the slides and it began to come together.
It took me more than two weeks to write the one hour talk. And then I put it away for a week. And then I changed some part of it every day for the next two weeks. I was making changes up until the morning that I gave the talk.
I watched the video. It looks like I’m just talking and telling stories. If I didn’t have slides that accompanied my talk, you may have thought I was making it up on the spot.
A lot of effort goes into giving a talk like that. Maybe there were one hundred people in the room.
I spent more than an hour a person on that talk.
The finish line
Bang.
That time between first place and fourth places in that race.
In that span one person got gold, one silver, one bronze, and one nothing.
Three “almosts”.
Three with medals one with nothing.
Each of these athletes entered an event that lasted seconds.
How much did they put in to getting there?
Think of the athletes who didn’t medal, who didn’t qualify, who didn’t make it on to their national team and how much they put into not even getting there.
During my keynote I talked about my PhD and the years I put in to getting it.
I don’t do Mathematics any more.
When I first stopped and moved on to other things, I was often asked if I regretted the years and years I put into this thing I don’t do any more.
I don’t.
It’s part of what made me me.
While you are working on one thing and focused on the race you’re running, you sometimes don’t see all of the things you are gaining along the way.
Medal or no medal.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 228. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe