Evan Fife

Tag: Favorite Reads

  • Being Effectually Minded

    Goal Induced Blindness from Farnam Street

    Uncertainty is one of our least favorite conditions, we hate the feeling of not knowing what to do, and we dislike the frustration that comes from not having anything to really do. It leads us to believe that those who are successful are because they had the right goals from the beginning and were able to develop the skills necessary to execute perfectly on those goals. A successful entrepreneur was successful because their idea was so good and their drive was so intense that nothing could stop them from the success that they wanted. The truth is that the key to success is adaptability, or what Oliver Burkeman calls being “effectually minded”.

    Essentially, an effectually minded person has two main characteristics, they care about finding a goal that matches their abilities and they practice positive catastrophizing. Rather than finding a goal or an idea and doing everything that they can to become the person or build the relationships to reach a certain goal, they take the abilities and knowledge that they already have and find a goal or an idea that can be achieved using that. Rather than looking at (or ignoring) what they lack in the face of a lofty goal, they take what they have and find a goal or problems that can be solved.

    The other half is what the Stoics call positive catastrophizing, which is a lot sunnier than it sounds. While a lot of the time we might think of the end goal and the rewards that will come with it, an effectually minded person will instead choose to think about the cost. Instead of asking themselves how big the payoff will be at every step, they ask themselves the cost of failure for each action. Which allows them to realize that often the cost of failure is much less than catastrophic.

  • The Boys in the Boat

    Daniel James Brown

    This is a book about character, connection, and how they interact to create greatness. It tells the story of the 1936 American olympic 8 man crew, and how they grew into one of the greatest crews that has ever rowed. As the book follows the life of the number 2 oar, Joe Rantz, we gain a window into the character of the boys that rowed as they became men.

    I wasn’t expecting this book to be so philosophical, but I appreciated the quotes about character given or inspired by George Pocock. Brown does a fantastic job of illustrating role of physical and mental strength needed to achieve greatness in athletics. From the beginning, the Pocock liked the boys in the boat:

    And it wasn’t just their physical prowess. He liked the character of these particular freshmen. The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out-of-doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, aded up to a to of potential in a crew, particularly if that crewe got a chance to row in the East. (page 94)

    Their rough lives gave them the strength, the predisposition, to succeed physically, but it was their character, and the bonds that forged as a result of their goodness, that gave them the opportunity to be great. I don’t know if they recognized the significance of their efforts initially, but it was clear that they knew the gravity of what they were attempting to undertake. They started racing for their school, progressed to racing for the west, and ended racing for their nation, and everything that she stands for. And they almost shrank in front of this challenge:

    All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended tto row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know–what he wouldn’t in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men–was that every boy in the boat felt exactlly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in teh boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and tht at he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen

    In the end, it was this desire, the desire to be one with their crew mates, that brought them to victory. Buy surrendering themselves to the whole, rowing with abandon, and giving everything they had, they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. While we probably won’t ever row in an olympic level crew, we can still learn from the examples of their characters and heed the call to greatness.

    Get the Boys on the Boat on Amazon