To be healthy humans, we need a reset button too. But we need lots of reset buttons, small, medium and large. We need to hit the small reset button a couple times every day, the medium button a few times per year, and the big reset button… well that’s the interesting one.

The small reset button can be anything. It’s the little breaks we offer ourselves every day and it can be anything. For me it can be a workout, some chocolate, a movie, a cup of tea and a book, lunch with a friend, or any of those little things we do just to have a little break. They do a couple of things for us. They give us some rest and set us up to tackle the challenges we have ahead of us. They can also be the things that give us meaning – lunch with a friend, movie with my wife, some volunteer work. It can be about creating a little space to be human and feel alive. No matter how much we love or hate our work, it’s essential to hit the small reset button a few times every day just to take stock. The musican Jimmy Buffet said, at 26:52 in this video: “Somehow I was lucky enough to get my thumb on the pulse of some people’s idea that they needed a little vacation every day of their lives.” That’s what the little reset button is. A little vacation every day of your life.

The medium reset button is the least interesting of the three. It’s like the small button, just more — the vacations we take, the visits home to family, that special concert we go to, things like that. It’s the least interesting not because I dislike vacations and concerts, but because the medium reset button is the one that people tend to spend the most time thinking and talking about. The ever-so-important small reset button is often unconscious or for too many people, absent entirely. It goes underappreciated while they think about the medium reset button. The BIG BUTTON is the one you think about languidly on the beach during a medium reset, but then the margarita wears off (I have Jimmy Buffet on the mind) and you get back to “reality.”

The BIG reset button is something that only comes along once in a while for most of us. It can be an extended sabbatical off from the same job, or it can be working eighty hours per week at two jobs while making a transition to something totally different. I’ve done the eight-month leave of absence to bum around, but it was really just a long version of the medium button. It was an extra long vacation, nothing more. Fantastic, but not a big reset. Neither it’s purpose nor it’s effect was the big reset. The big reset comes along, sometimes when you expect and sometimes when you don’t. Many people think they want to hit the BIG BUTTON but can’t. The opportunities for the big reset are actually plentiful, but we run from it screaming most of the time. I certainly have. If it isn’t scary, it’s probably not the BIG BUTTON.

I’ve hit the BIG BUTTON a couple of times. When I went to grad school or moved to Switzerland, those were major transitions, but not the BIG RESET. Mentally I was already there. Those were transitions from one thing to the other, without killing the power switch. The big resets were more open-ended and sometimes way smaller events to outside observers. I drove out of my programming job at MITRE with no idea what I would do with my future (aside from finish college in the short term, but not in computer science), but the greatest feeling of exhiliration imagineable. After college, I went to Alaska to work the fish processing plants because it was as far away from home as I could get without needing a work visa and it was as far away from Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, blah blah blah university culture. That particular adventure was less about hitting my own reset button than it was about hitting everyone else’s. After graduating with various honors and such, people kept implying that I was supposed to continue on that path. I had never cared excessively about grades in college. I was just passionate and so I got good grades. Though it wasn’t true, I’m sure, to my 22 year-old mind it seemed to me that I needed to reset everyone’s expectations about what I would do. So I went and worked the fish processing plants and delivered pizzas until people quit asking what I was really going to do with my life. Now I’m probably less susceptible to outside influence, but then I felt like I needed everyone to know that I was going to do what I wanted to do, not what they wanted me to do (and I must say, my parents were NOT part of the problem; they were the rare adults in my life who didn’t really care what I did as long as I was happy and making some contribution, whether that was cleaning fish or saving the world).

Most recently, after 20 years as a historian, I hit the BIG button and spent the summer as a National Park Ranger. Again, less dramatic than moving to a new country or embarking on my doctoral studies, but it was consciously aimed at hitting a button, though I wasn’t sure ahead of time whether or not it would be the BIG BUTTON. It was a great job, but mostly I’ve only had great jobs over the past twenty years. So it was less of a dream job for me than for other people (and in any case, I don’t dream about jobs!). But it was a huge reset. My historian job involves day after day alone in a room with just a computer. I can easily go three or four days and talk to nobody but my wife if I don’t make a solid effort. That might be fine for an introvert, but I genuinely like people. I rarely meet someone I dislike. As a ranger, it was out with the public all day long (less nature, more public than most people think). On average, I would spent about three hours per day talking to crowds, a total of 100–200 people per day. And then I spent a lot more time talking to people singly or in small groups. I spent almost no time with a computer and little time truly alone. And I realized that the solitary life of a scholar is not really my strength, I realized I’m actually a good public speaker, that I have the ability to inform entertain and occasionally even move people. A lot of friends said “Of course. You knew that before you started obviously.” But no, I did not. That was not how I saw myself. It is now. I’m a different person than before not because I’ve changed so much, but because I see myself differently. I set it up to go back to my old job after the ranger season, but one of the fundamental characteristics of the BIG BUTTON is that there is no going back. The big button changes you, so the job might be the same, but you are not.

The small reset button gives you some breathing room, it makes your bad situations palatable and, ideally lets you see your good situations. It helps keep you comfortable.

The BIG BUTTON makes you uncomfortable. It’s the one you hit when you are too comfortable, when your creativity and productivity have stagnated on the cushy couch of your mind, when you’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and it doesn’t do it for you anymore, when the challenges of the past have become the routine tasks of today. The BIG BUTTON takes you out of the comfort zone, teaches you about who you are, shows you new strengths and weaknesses, shows you your potential, for good or ill. It isn’t a breather on the path, it’s the fork in the road, the resets that divide your life into before and after. It’s the Phoenix Button.

When is the last time you hit the reset button, large or small? What did it do for you?

[And this is for Mark and Ping, who just dropped everything in the professional careers, sold the house, moved to Taiwan. There's no going back from hitting the Phoenix Button]

When hippies rioted in Yosemite and the Park Service was looking for ways to keep them out of the parks, Hartzog went to investigate the situation. Arriving in the park, he put on old clothes and went out to the hippy campsite and just sat around the fire for several hours listening. He held an all-Valley meeting the next day and invited all questions. He then completely revamped how the parks were run, splitting the rangers into law enforcement and interpreters (who interpret nature and history, not languages), hiring new interpreters and tasking them with creating programs for young people. Hartzog had the vision to realize that a strategy that hinged on excluding young people would end in the utter destruction of the parks over time. So rather than focusing on keeping hippies out of the park, he focused on getting them in. In doing so, one might say he literally saved the parks.

I’ve always loved the riot story, but I found one I might like even more in his autobiography and illustrates his free-wheeling leadership.

The National Park Service had the most educated, talented, innovative cadre of people I have ever known — in or out of government…. I wanted to turn them loose. I told the regional director that I thought the handbooks which, for the most part, told you how to do your job were stifling our field people. They disagreed; so I appointed a committee of them to look at the situation and make recommendations. Soon, the committee reported the handbooks were needed to insure uniformity. That did it!

My objective was not uniformity, but creativity and productivity. I abolished fifty-six volumes of handbooks, including the three I had written, and substituted instead objectives, goals, program and personal performance standards. Man-o-life did I catch hell, one would have though I had repudiated the King James version of the Holy Scriptures!
——Hartzog, p. 152—53.

It’s yet another example of how he didn’t enter the debate, he didn’t even reframe the debate. He threw the debate out, opened things up to personal initiative, unleashed that talent. Hartzog himself, before becoming director of the Park Service, passed the bar and became a lawyer despite never attending college let alone law school. And then went on to be accepted to the bar of the Supreme Court. It’s no surprise that he was willing to ride a bit free and wild and was willing to encourage those in his agency to do the same.

I certainly don’t see anyone like that in Park Service, probably not in all of government today. I wonder though how Hartzog would be taking on the challenges of today. I think it’s safe to say he’d be making people a lot more uncomfortable, but a lot more engaged.

However, I think everyone should start an interview podcast. I’ve always loved listening to interviews on NPR (especially Fresh Air), but it always seemed like something that only a journalist with a radio show could do. Then I stumbled across Andrew Warner doing interviews over at Mixergy. Great interviews, in fact, with people like Derrick Sivers (founder of CD Baby), Tim Ferris (Four Hour Work Week), and some guy who got lost in the Amazon and had to dig deep to survive and get out. Great stuff and, with Andrew’s podcasting advice and encouragement, I decided to interview people I care about. He mostly interviews entrepeneurs. I interview skiers or, more precisely, people who make it their mission to help others ski better (instructors, coaches, trainers).

I’ve only done four interviews, but it’s been great: You learn stuff, you help people establish themselves as experts, the kind of people worth interviewing, you provide useful information or at least I hope so, and you make some fun connections or reconnections (it’s a good excuse to call up an old friend or someone you admire but otherwise would never call).

Those are the obvious benefits, but there are effects that I hadn’t expected. You start to hear how you speak. I do the interview, and then go back to edit. When I edit, I um learn, you know, the uh obvious — I and all my guests love filler words. But there’s more. I realize that I have a very non-linear way of speaking that takes away from my effectiveness as a speaker and makes me harder to follow. For example, I might say something like this: "When someone is doing deadlifts. Let’s say you have someone who wants to get strong for skiing and they’re looking for a good exercise and decide to try deadlifts…." And then of course, pepper it with ums and you knows.

So what? Lots of people speak that way, right? I feel like after only four interviews, it’s changing the way I speak very subtly. When you write anything of importance, you do a rough draft and at least one edit. The more you do that, the better your rough drafts become and the better your final drafts become. We don’t typically have any similar feedback loop for conversation. In fact, in my experience, we tend to avoid that feedback loop. I always hated listening to myself on recordings and I know many people feel the same way about themselves. And my friends, mercifully, do not critique my conversation. So again, there’s no feedback loop. Editing your interviews provides the feedback loop.

I’m not sure it will change the way I speak, but I think it will for two simple reasons. First, just knowing how I speak is huge. Second, when someone speaks directly, clearly and effectively, it takes a lot less work to edit. And since I prefer to avoid work, it’s an incentive to try to get better at my rough draft instead of trying to fix it in the editing stage. Of course you can’t always fix audio in the editing. And video? Forget it.

We’ll see where it ends, but if you are thinking there’s a topic you want to write about, consider doing interviews instead. So far, it’s been an interesting experiment for me and worth the time invested.

If you have an interview show, tell me about it in the comments or through the contact form and I’ll list you here with the anchor text of your choosing to give you a boost from the search engines.

Interview podcasts I listen to regularly include

• Mixergy — Andrew Warner interviews entrepeneurs and people of interest to entrepeneurs. Some great stuff.
• In the Trenches — Mike Robertson interviews top strength coaches. These are the top guys in the business, the ones that train elite athletes and the podcast is packed with good info, though also a fair bit of jargon. If you don’t know what RDLs are, it can be a bit hard to follow (RDL = Romanian Deadlift).

In physics, power is work per unit time. Knowledge increases efficiency, but it doesn’t do anything all by itself. If I have only knowledge, nothing great happens. But as I increase my knowledge, I add a little more length to the pry bar. If I have enough pertinent knowledge, I have a huge bar. Perhaps with that lever and enough effort and persistence and courage, I can move the world. But with just a big lever, nothing happens. You have to put some umph into that lever and give it direction.

There is a general bias in academic culture to focus on the fact that one of the things we learn through research is to be skeptical, at least in our fields of expertise. Andrew Pettegrew, a noted Reformation scholar set me straight though. We were at dinner and I started out a story by saying "You’ll never believe this." He interrupted me and said "I’m a scholar. I’m trained to believe the unbelievable." I don’t even remember what story I told, whether it dealt with my research or with something that had happened to me that afternoon, but his comment taught me what was hands down the single most important thing I learned in graduate school.

When I thought about it, I realized that is the more powerful and important skill that we learn through research. It’s not to have our bullshit detectors out constantly. Rather, it’s that we do research and testing and when the testing shows us something unbelievable, we don’t reject it because common sense tells us it isn’t so. We might need a second round of research and testing, more data, better controls. But in the end, it’s not our common sense and skepticism that allows us to think new things in new ways. Those are merely the obstacles that keep us from think foolish things in foolish ways, but nothing interesting, great or innovative ever comes from them.

Uncommon sense, backed with data, lies behind every idea worth propagating.

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 and current executive leadership, he hears a lot of it. 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. In essence, it goes like this. People muddle along trying to improve, not knowing how close they are to being truly excellent and achieving breakthrough, but they are at 211 degrees. Often they don’t realize that 212 degrees, and massive state change, is just around the corner. If they would push just a little bit more, they would achieve true excellence.

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 implication being that these people who came in second were on the very brink of excellence, but they didn’t give that last one degree to get there. The problem is that this is based on a fundamental understanding of the asymptotic nature of excellence. Yes, of course, many people give up just shy of their goal, when it was well within reach. What I have seen more often, however, is people who are very good and pour time, energy and money into becoming excellent, feeling like they are so close, they are at 211 and they need to just push on a little longer to get to 212. Unfortunately, they sacrifice their health, marriage and other things and yet don’t get there. Why not? Because as I said (and we’ll get back to this), excellence is asymptotic. This is fundamental.

I don’t want to discourage people and tell themnot to achieve their best and strive for excellence. I just want people to understand what they are up against when striving for excellence. And I think the 212 thesis, as espoused is a poor metaphor. Boiling water, however, still makes a good, perhaps great metaphor for understanding what it’s going to take to shave that tiny margin between you and Numero Uno, be it Michael Phelps, Lance Armstrong, Google, or Federal Express.

As for 212, 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 with the physics there and I think that the metaphor is even better, indeed much better, if you take the physics of boiling more seriously. 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, 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 it is with excellence. That last little bit between Tony Rominger and Miguel Indurain, a tiny difference that dominated cycling for several years, turned out to be insurmountable for Rominger because though there was only one degree between him and Indurain, it would have taken 540 calories per gram to get there, and Rominger didn’t have those 540 calories.  I admired Rominger for the dedication he put into it and he would never have been able to live with himself if he hadn’t given it his all, but it is important to know what one is up against.

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 99.99% 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 a decade of focussed effort. If this is what you want more than anything else, then sure, pour yourself into it and see if you can make the cut, see if you have those 540 calories per gram to break through to the top ranks.

But we can only do that in perhaps one area in our lives. Maybe two. For most people, in most areas, 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 really fast. The trip from not bad to damn good takes quite a while. The trip from damn good to the best takes luck, aptititude and 540 calories per gram. The trip from the best to perfect can’t be attained short of divine intervention.

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, and I do not disagree. All I’m saying is that the temperature increase is not as good a metaphor for becoming the best as the metaphor of the energy required. When you take into account the actual physics of boiling water, the metaphor makes a lot more sense. Not that I care about the metaphor. I care about people understanding what it takes to really break through. The 212 people would have you believe that if you’ve gone from 112 to 211, you’re almost there and you only need to throw another one percent at it and you’ll be there. I would have you believe that it will take little effort to get from being the billionth best skier in the world to being the one hundred thousandth best, but to go from there to the thousandth best is going to be hard. And from the thousandth best to a top 100 skier is not going to happen, even though the difference between a billion and a thousand is a lot more than the difference between a thousand and a hundred. But because excellence is asymptotic, that move from 212 and water to 212 and vapor, the move from good to great, is all-consuming in most areas of life and most of us will, if we’re lucky, fight that battle successfully in one or two areas in our entire lives.

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.

Seth Godin offers what I see as a much more compelling metaphor, that of The Dip in his book The Dip: A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick). According to Seth, we start something and make rapid progress and get amped up and excited because progress is clear and evident. It’s motivating and encouraging. But then we reach the end of the easy part of the learning curve and we settle into the workaday grind of taking our idea or dream to fruition. At this stage we struggle and the end seems to get further away rather than closer. This is The Dip. At this point, we are faced with a choice: give up or push on.And here’s where I think Seth makes a lot more sense than the 212ers. Seth thinks both paths are reasonable. You have to decide whether or not you’re in The Dip and if you keep pushing through, you’ll bring your dreams to fruition, or you’re in the Cul-De-Sac and you need to cut your losses and move on.

If you aren’t ready to give what it takes (that is, the 540 calories per gram), you’re better off quitting. We only have so much energy and we can’t be the best at everything. Seth says it’s simply wrong to say winners never quit and quitters never win. Rather, those who know when to quit and when to push on will become the big winners. Those who always quit when the going gets tough will never win. But those who never quit when the going gets tough may occasionally have a big win, but they will likely also dissipate much of their lives’ energy driving deeper into the Cul-De-Sacs. The key is knowing when to quit and when not to.

And this is the issue I have with the whole 212 thing. It basically falls into the “winners never quit” model and that’s just plain wrong. The problem with the 212ers is not flawed logic but bad information with the consequence that they don’t know when to give up. They don’t know that they’ve become competent, but they do not know whether they are in The Dip or The Cul-de-Sac.

I sing the praise of mediocrity in most endeavours (alas, that’s another topic, but I am not being facetious), not because I believe people should be mediocre. Rather, I believe they should be excellent, but they need to realize that they have only enough energy for excellence at one or two things, and it is to those things they should give their 540 calories. In other areas, we should strive for mediocrity, not to be mediocre, but to husband our energy for those few projects where we will, where we must, achieve excellence. 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?