I've had to deal with a knee-ligament injury which forced out of playing football (soccer). More recently I tried freestyling and was getting moderately comfortable and better at it. However, a few months later, while trying to perform a trick I clumsily fell down and hurt the same knee.
Couldn't walk straight for 4 weeks.
I've watched and played football since I was 5 years old, and choosing to not play the sport and pick another, the decision to make was more overcast than sunny.
I don't know about a silver lining, but decisions like this if made by ascribing different shades of grey (British English) to each alternative, is a good way to go about it, I think.
I can choose to continue playing football and risk injury. If I get injured I don't know the severity of it, and that to me seems like a darker shade of grey.
I can choose a different sport, a non-contact one like running and work towards running long distance, and I've always been a fan of OCR and Trail running. But these sports are also risky as I can get my knee-injured again, and this decision although not completely dark in it's shade of grey is one that still instills doubt.
So, I am going to choose cycling and swimming as sports that are safer and are lower in risk in comparison to other sports. This decision seems a little lighter in it's shade of grey.
I loved playing football because it made me stop feeling self-conscious.
And if I choose running or any sport that can increase the risk of injury, I would be self-conscious and stop enjoying the sport.
So choosing a sport like cycling or swimming enables me to have an opportunity to get better at it and experience that feeling of losing myself in it, while knowing that my knee in comparison to other forms of sports is much safer in this.
I'll still miss playing football, but I think this is one way to miss it less and not sulk anymore.
Thanks for sharing this, Kiran. I like that use of “shades of grey” as a sort of holistic metric for visualizing the relative net worth of different options for you, all things considered.
Great idea. At the moment I am straddling between my exciting high potential business and my 6 year old son (who has special needs), oscillating between being the hyper focused builder I was pre-parent days, and being an in tune and present dad.
I think there’s a similar idea to ‘leaden mean’ in the ‘4 burner theory’; you have 4 major value groups: career, family, friends and health. The idea is that in order to be great in one area of your life, another needs to be traded off, and in order to be exceptional, two need to be traded.
I have naturally always dwelled in two and sometimes three burners, but almost never all four. Now I am trying to figure out if it’s possible to combine ‘burners’ but there’s a fine line between ‘high level straddling’ and a committed pivot; especially when the stakes are high and one has momentum in a certain field.
Staying in a relationship you're not really sure of and then being but not really being with the other person. Being alone is good, being really together is great, but being half in a relationship is destructive.
On a separate note, I was raised in Polish at home, and was also confronted with the question of raising my children in another language.
Speaking Polish in French-Canadian Québec made no sense to me, and I abandoned the language soon after I left home. However, it was definitely imprinted in my brain, and a visit in Poland many years later brought back some of it. I can't say if it was good or bad for me, though it was definitely good for my brother, who went on to speak over a dozen languages in his life.
As for my own children, I noticed that they learned interchangeably French and English at home as toddlers, but picked one language (English) when they started to learn syntax. Evidently, the rules are different and they made the choice of learning one rather than both. My oldest son went to French-speaking high school and now speaks it decently. He also draws some pride from it, as it contributes to his identity.
None of my children speak Polish - I didn't teach them - but they both know their family history and draw an enormous pride and sense of identity from this.
Too often, I am asked to chose between unsatisfying options. Over the years, I have developed a practice of choosing one option and not turning back, accepting whatever comes without regret.
In our imperfect world, the options offered to us are usually less than ideal, so let's pick one and find satisfaction in doing it well.
Interesting idea. Personal example in a work context: small team has two ideas for product direction. Both can be nominally built on top of existing infrastructure, but low overlap because completely different target customer profile, etc.
Leaden mean: spend effort kinda-sorta-trying to work on both at the same time.
When I was a manager in Google's search engineering organization, the then SVP of search used to call it the "spread the butter" problem. We would come up with so many worthy feature development and improvement projects that there was a constant temptation to give each one a small amount of engineering time-- which would mean that none of them ever made real, fast progress. Like butter spread over too much bread, if you recall Bilbo's line from the Fellowship of the Ring. :) He viewed it as the heart of his job to constantly identify and refine the very top priorities for the organization and make sure they had plenty of people focused on them, no matter what else he had to say no to.
To resolve two equally valid but competing priorities, it may be necessary to contextualize both in terms of whole life and try to remove the stigma of sacrifice as a component. An objective professional presented me with this dichotomy - to choose a primary value among two competing priorities and I was able to find they were complementary, not irreconcilable, but that is likely the exception.
I think so. I want to “really” fix my time management issue but I don’t want to spend the time or put in the effort that it takes to do it (because there are so many other things I also want to do that brings me joy), as opposed to “not focusing on trying to fix it”, rather, using some compensatory techniques to manage it and coming to terms with it because “your flaws matter more than you think”.
You mean *your flaws matter less than you think :D
I don't see any inherent problem with trying to compensate for the time management issue in small ways vs making a whole campaign of it; where it might become a "leaden mean" type of situation is if you're implementing some compensatory strategy in a way that ends up putting a burden on you without actually solving your problem at all (e.g., because you don't have a consistent way of putting it into practice, so you forget to use it half the time and then end up beating yourself up about it drill-sergeant-style). In that case, the solution might still NOT be to spend more time and energy on the time management issue, but rather to abandon your current compensatory strategy and try a new one that consistently puts a hard stop on you (e.g., having an admin person on your team literally come into your office and end your appointment for you when the time is up, or whatever the case may be :) ).
Not exactly the same, but reminds me of a helpful idea I encountered some years ago, that you should have one good reason for taking on a particular goal, and multiple wishy-washy reasons do NOT add up to one good reason. I think the intersection with the leaden mean is, for instance, if you identify your one good reason to study art and your one good reason to study psychology, they are likely pointing down divergent paths. Or in the corporate world where I used to work, my team would be stuck having to deliver on multiple projects competing for the same scarce resources and attention, to the detriment of all, where the reasons for keeping each project going were of varying real importance but given equal weight so that nothing ever got cut.
This makes more sense to me if rather than a linear mean we think of multidimensional means.
If we put this notion into the physical world and imagine your values as part of a physical object - then your central purpose could be that which is in the center of your values. From a physical perspective the central purpose can balance your values. However - for physical objects the center of mass may not be part of the object (think of a ring - its center is in the middle where there is no actual mass - you cannot balance a ring on its center of mass unless what you are balancing it on is larger than the ring).
...I like the idea. Not identical but reminded me of a saying that you can't cross a 20 foot chasm with 2X10 foot jumps.
Thank you for the question :)
I've had to deal with a knee-ligament injury which forced out of playing football (soccer). More recently I tried freestyling and was getting moderately comfortable and better at it. However, a few months later, while trying to perform a trick I clumsily fell down and hurt the same knee.
Couldn't walk straight for 4 weeks.
I've watched and played football since I was 5 years old, and choosing to not play the sport and pick another, the decision to make was more overcast than sunny.
I don't know about a silver lining, but decisions like this if made by ascribing different shades of grey (British English) to each alternative, is a good way to go about it, I think.
I can choose to continue playing football and risk injury. If I get injured I don't know the severity of it, and that to me seems like a darker shade of grey.
I can choose a different sport, a non-contact one like running and work towards running long distance, and I've always been a fan of OCR and Trail running. But these sports are also risky as I can get my knee-injured again, and this decision although not completely dark in it's shade of grey is one that still instills doubt.
So, I am going to choose cycling and swimming as sports that are safer and are lower in risk in comparison to other sports. This decision seems a little lighter in it's shade of grey.
I loved playing football because it made me stop feeling self-conscious.
And if I choose running or any sport that can increase the risk of injury, I would be self-conscious and stop enjoying the sport.
So choosing a sport like cycling or swimming enables me to have an opportunity to get better at it and experience that feeling of losing myself in it, while knowing that my knee in comparison to other forms of sports is much safer in this.
I'll still miss playing football, but I think this is one way to miss it less and not sulk anymore.
Thanks for sharing this, Kiran. I like that use of “shades of grey” as a sort of holistic metric for visualizing the relative net worth of different options for you, all things considered.
Thank you, Dr. Gena. :)
Yes, I was loosely basing it on opportunity cost and wanting a happy outcome in an either-or situation. But you've defined it better.
Great idea. At the moment I am straddling between my exciting high potential business and my 6 year old son (who has special needs), oscillating between being the hyper focused builder I was pre-parent days, and being an in tune and present dad.
I think there’s a similar idea to ‘leaden mean’ in the ‘4 burner theory’; you have 4 major value groups: career, family, friends and health. The idea is that in order to be great in one area of your life, another needs to be traded off, and in order to be exceptional, two need to be traded.
I have naturally always dwelled in two and sometimes three burners, but almost never all four. Now I am trying to figure out if it’s possible to combine ‘burners’ but there’s a fine line between ‘high level straddling’ and a committed pivot; especially when the stakes are high and one has momentum in a certain field.
Staying in a relationship you're not really sure of and then being but not really being with the other person. Being alone is good, being really together is great, but being half in a relationship is destructive.
Yes! This is probably the most common case I’ve seen 😌
On a separate note, I was raised in Polish at home, and was also confronted with the question of raising my children in another language.
Speaking Polish in French-Canadian Québec made no sense to me, and I abandoned the language soon after I left home. However, it was definitely imprinted in my brain, and a visit in Poland many years later brought back some of it. I can't say if it was good or bad for me, though it was definitely good for my brother, who went on to speak over a dozen languages in his life.
As for my own children, I noticed that they learned interchangeably French and English at home as toddlers, but picked one language (English) when they started to learn syntax. Evidently, the rules are different and they made the choice of learning one rather than both. My oldest son went to French-speaking high school and now speaks it decently. He also draws some pride from it, as it contributes to his identity.
None of my children speak Polish - I didn't teach them - but they both know their family history and draw an enormous pride and sense of identity from this.
Too often, I am asked to chose between unsatisfying options. Over the years, I have developed a practice of choosing one option and not turning back, accepting whatever comes without regret.
In our imperfect world, the options offered to us are usually less than ideal, so let's pick one and find satisfaction in doing it well.
Interesting idea. Personal example in a work context: small team has two ideas for product direction. Both can be nominally built on top of existing infrastructure, but low overlap because completely different target customer profile, etc.
Leaden mean: spend effort kinda-sorta-trying to work on both at the same time.
When I was a manager in Google's search engineering organization, the then SVP of search used to call it the "spread the butter" problem. We would come up with so many worthy feature development and improvement projects that there was a constant temptation to give each one a small amount of engineering time-- which would mean that none of them ever made real, fast progress. Like butter spread over too much bread, if you recall Bilbo's line from the Fellowship of the Ring. :) He viewed it as the heart of his job to constantly identify and refine the very top priorities for the organization and make sure they had plenty of people focused on them, no matter what else he had to say no to.
To resolve two equally valid but competing priorities, it may be necessary to contextualize both in terms of whole life and try to remove the stigma of sacrifice as a component. An objective professional presented me with this dichotomy - to choose a primary value among two competing priorities and I was able to find they were complementary, not irreconcilable, but that is likely the exception.
I think so. I want to “really” fix my time management issue but I don’t want to spend the time or put in the effort that it takes to do it (because there are so many other things I also want to do that brings me joy), as opposed to “not focusing on trying to fix it”, rather, using some compensatory techniques to manage it and coming to terms with it because “your flaws matter more than you think”.
It has a “drill Sargent” flavor to it.
You mean *your flaws matter less than you think :D
I don't see any inherent problem with trying to compensate for the time management issue in small ways vs making a whole campaign of it; where it might become a "leaden mean" type of situation is if you're implementing some compensatory strategy in a way that ends up putting a burden on you without actually solving your problem at all (e.g., because you don't have a consistent way of putting it into practice, so you forget to use it half the time and then end up beating yourself up about it drill-sergeant-style). In that case, the solution might still NOT be to spend more time and energy on the time management issue, but rather to abandon your current compensatory strategy and try a new one that consistently puts a hard stop on you (e.g., having an admin person on your team literally come into your office and end your appointment for you when the time is up, or whatever the case may be :) ).
Not exactly the same, but reminds me of a helpful idea I encountered some years ago, that you should have one good reason for taking on a particular goal, and multiple wishy-washy reasons do NOT add up to one good reason. I think the intersection with the leaden mean is, for instance, if you identify your one good reason to study art and your one good reason to study psychology, they are likely pointing down divergent paths. Or in the corporate world where I used to work, my team would be stuck having to deliver on multiple projects competing for the same scarce resources and attention, to the detriment of all, where the reasons for keeping each project going were of varying real importance but given equal weight so that nothing ever got cut.
Huh- I think that’s a great connection, actually!
Disatisficing?
You also included an existing term in your post, “half-assing.” You won’t get sh*t done half-assing.
This makes more sense to me if rather than a linear mean we think of multidimensional means.
If we put this notion into the physical world and imagine your values as part of a physical object - then your central purpose could be that which is in the center of your values. From a physical perspective the central purpose can balance your values. However - for physical objects the center of mass may not be part of the object (think of a ring - its center is in the middle where there is no actual mass - you cannot balance a ring on its center of mass unless what you are balancing it on is larger than the ring).