Telecommuting from my mountain hideaway, I’m blessed to be insulated from most biz-speak. I depend on my visits with my brother to tell me about the latest trends in useless business mumbo jumbo. As a former engineer and business strategist for HP and current executive leadership coach for HP, IDX and GE (he only works for companies that go by acronyms apparently) and now on his own, he hears a lot of it. Also, his in-laws are mostly real-estate agents, a profession that generally has a gluttonous appetite for devouring motivational speakers and such. So he’s virtually a certified expert on biz-speak mumbo jumbo.

Anyway, I was telling him something and he made some sarcastic response along the lines of "Yeah, 212!" I had no idea what this was until he explained to me the mathematically and scientifically challenged metaphor behind 212: The Extra Degree.

Motivational speakers tend to be mathematically challenged. The proper sports lingo requires that one give 110% or even 200% (100% psychological and 100% physical). Of course, anyone who tells you to give 110% is, ipso facto, full of crap or a very poor mathematician. Anyway, these people, who espouse the so-called 212 principle preach instead of the gospel of giving just a little bit more. They love to say things like you’ll see in the YouTube video such as:

• From 2000 to 2006, the average difference in PGA victories was 1.71 strokes.
• In the 2004 Olympics, the 200m freestyle swim had margin of victory of .43 seconds (hey, in 2008, some swim events had a margin of victory of .01 seconds).

The unreasoning goes like this. If you have some water on the stove and you start adding heat, you take it from room cold water right out of the tap to 211 degrees and pretty much nothing happens. But if you go just a little farther, to 212 degrees, there is a state change, the water boils, real action takes place, nothing is the same. That little change makes all the difference. So in your sport/life/business/blog you have to keep pushing because sometimes you’re at 211 degrees without really knowing it and if you can go just a bit farther, success, riches, sex and unlimited ice cream await you.

There is the minor problem that when you take water from 211 degrees to 212 degrees, in fact nothing changes under standard, idealized conditions (i.e. the thermodynamic equivalent of the frictionless surface used in mechanics). This then leads us into the major problem of taking water from 212 degrees in liquid form, to 212 degrees in vapor form. Since the latent heat of vaporization is roughly 540 calories per gram, depending on conditions, it turns out that the state change effect, which is "just a little farther", is in fact a hell of a lot of work. So to keep it all in metric, if the water out of your tap is 20 degrees, it takes 80 calories per gram to heat it to the boiling point. But, to actually get it to boil takes almost seven times the energy that it took to get it there. So you think you’re almost there, you’ve almost reached that pinnacle of unlimited ice cream, but whatever it took you to get where you are, you now have to be prepared to plow 6.75 times as much energy into it to achieve the state change.

In my experience as a historian, this pretty much correlates with what it really takes to push through to boiling and become one of the best at what you do. I read old manuscripts which can be very difficult to decipher. To get to the point where you can read 90% of the words and get the vague sense takes a couple of months. To be able to read 99% takes perhaps a year or two and you get the meaning right in 99.9% of the cases. To get to the point where you can decipher 99.9% of the words and are considered a leading expert and people come to you for help and advice seems to take some natural apptitude, dogged determination and over a decade of focussed effort. For most people it simply isn’t worth it to push form 211 to 212 degrees because of the massive amount of energy it takes to achieve state change.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Asymptotes

Put another way, excellence is asymptotic in my experience. An asymptote is a curve that approaches a line, but will never touch it. In other words, the trip from beginner to not bad goes pretty fast, the trip from not bad to damn good takes quite a while and the trip from damn good to perfect can’t be attained. Now, you might at this point say that I’m missing the point, that the metaphor works in that there’s a point where you break through and stand out from the crowd and magic happens. I understand that, but when you take into account the actual physics of boiling water, the metaphor makes a lot more sense.

I remember a great magician I used to like to watch on the streets. Someone came up to him and said "You’re really good." He said, "No, I’m great. Do you know the difference?" The difference is that it only took him 80 calories to be good. But long years of trial and practice, the investment of another 540 calories made him great. From incompetence to competence takes 80 calories. From competence to excellence takes 540 calories.

Marshall Goldsmith sees it altogether differently. He argues that it’s not that the amount of effort required for the state change is massively different, but that more of the same will typically not get you there at all. He’s the author of the top-selling success guide What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. To stay with the 212 metaphor, Goldsmith thinks that it actually takes different skills to make a huge leap like the one from liquid to gas than the skills it took to get you from cold to hot.

Reason has failed the 212ers not because of flawed logic but because of bad information with the consequence that they don’t know when to give up. They don’t know that they’ve become competent but have neither the drive nor the aptitude to become excellent. I’m not, by the way, saying I do. I sing the praise of mediocrity in most endeavours (alas, that’s another topic, but I am not being facetious). I only strive for excellence in a couple of areas and, through long practice and much suffering, I have perhaps arrived in one or two areas. Mostly, though, I accept mediocrity for the simple reason that I understand how many calories are required for a state change and I know that I can only pour those calories into a few things and I had better be damn sure they really matter. 540 calories hurts! And if Marshall Goldsmith is right, more won’t help anyway. What is required is different.

Is it worth it to try to make the water boil?

Before applying for research grants to fund my dissertation, I came across one of the most helpful pieces of advice that I’ve ever read. It can be applied beyond grant applications I’m sure, but I took this advice and nailed down a Fullbright and, even more difficult to get, a Châteaubriand. There’s a lot that goes into a good grant proposal, such as showing that you’ve done your background research, that you have thought through the feasibility of the whole thing, that you’ve demonstrated that you have the skills, knowledge and contacts to pull it off and that the grant itself is essential for doing so.

But then comes the question of why and the authors pointed out that this is a common stumbling block, though it never should be (that is, you might have trouble proving feasibility, because that’s the nature of fresh research, but you should never be at a loss as to why finding an answer would be worth it). I’ve since had a chance to read several grant proposals and surprisingly, this is often where the applications fail. It’s not uncommon to see applicants who give a reason for their study that is no reason at all. Exampe:

Reason: “This has never been done before”
Objection 1: Maybe that’s because it’s impossible.
Objection 2: Maybe because it’s uninteresting.

In any case, the fact that something has never been studied before doesn’t mean it should and certainly not that I should give you money to do it. Also, the reasons you want grant money are not necessarily the reasons you deserve grant money and you always need to know which is which.

Wordpress is pretty good off the shelf, but there are some things that are a bit annoying or sub-optimal. For the basics of getting the major kinks out, there are some excellent videos.

• Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, has a nice overview on how to make the most of Wordpress.
• Tubetorial series on Wordpress SEO.

Preparing to leave on a flight from Burlington, VT to Columbus, OH to see my wife I get online and find out my flight is delayed. So I show up at the airport an hour before my flight (a small airport and I have no bags to check, so this should be enough). I find that I can’t check in using the self-serve kiosk because it’s within 30 minutes of the scheduled departure time. The departure board, the automated phone system and website all know that the flight is still at least an hour a away, but the kiosk won’t take me because it’s within 30 minutes. Great. Why isn’t this database connected to all the other databases so that I can check in 30 minutes from the currently announced time of departure, rather than some schedule that slipped days ago?

So I go stand in line and about 40 minutes after my arrival at the airport, I get a ticket agent who says she won’t check me in because they can’t check anyone in within 20 minutes of departure. It is exactly 20 minutes from the announced departure time which, by the way, was moved up by 10 minutes since I checked the website 45 minutes earlier. Finally, after getting a bit hot, she called to “reopen” the gate and get me on the flight. As I gather my things, she yells “Run sir!” I am still gathering some stuff (this is a total of about 26 seconds by the way) and she yells “Sir! You have to run now!” So I run. I offend a woman by cutting in line a bit during the security check. I get there and the gate is closed. Why? Because the aircraft is not even in the airport yet!

We finally load and the gate closes at 5:55. It was 5:00 when she told me she would not allow me on the plane because it was within twenty minutes of departure. As it turns out, the flight wouldn’t even land at the airport until 5:30. Why isn’t the customer service terminal connected to a database that updates in real time or near real time? In an era when Wal-Mart can forecast, not just record, how much it will sell of any given item hour-by-hour through any given day, how can US Airways tell a customer that he doesn’t have time to get to the gate when the plane is still thirty minutes from landing (and again, this is a small airport and you can get to any gate in five minutes).

Then when I get there, I find that the 4:55 flight to La Guardia is now scheduled for 5:20. Of course it is 5:20 and the plane is nowhere to be seen. Whatever. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is that the 12:24 flight to La Guardia is scheduled to leave at 5:49 (I think they may also need a lesson in significant digits). I can’t describe how mad I would be to see the 4:55 flight leave before me if I were on the 12:24. But it gets better. When I get on the plane, approximately 1/3 of the seats are empty. Why didn’t they just fill it with people from the 12:24? I can only guess that it’s because once again their database is not up to the task and they didn’t have a count of seats available.

So then I get to La Guardia and things go reasonably smoothly to get on my next plane, despite delays. My boarding pass says that I’m in row 9D. The guy in front of me is in 5F. The only thing is, the plane only has three rows, labelled A, B and C. After everyone decides that the obvious solution is to take any seat, since this is obviously completely messed up, the flight attendant gets on the intercom to explain the seating situation. Row A is A, Row D is Row B and Row F is Row C. Makes perfect sense. Somewhere there was a software problem. Since that rule meant that everything mapped perfectly and there was no conflict between someone assigned to seat 9F and someone assigned to seat 9C, presumably the computer knew all along that there were only three rows, A, D and F of course.

Of course, all that data exists. It’s all available in some systems, but not in others. As a result, customers are mad and confused. Customer service reps are harried and yelled at. But that’s okay, because the airlines have so many customers and are making so much money, they can afford to piss off customers. Or maybe not.

I use Google Analytics to see how many people come to my sites and how they get there. It’s pretty amazing, but it has a couple of things that really annoy me: no full referrer data and it’s unfriendly to tabbed browsing.

So what's missing from Google Analytics? read on » »