evidence : mackenzian

September 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

When good doesn’t want to be great

When I first heard Maya Angelou teaching Oprah Winfrey, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” I said amen with the rest of the viewers.

Believe them! They know themselves much better than you do.” —Maya Angelou

Just as Winfrey said, though, it’s a lesson that can be easy to affirm and challenging to apply.

People and organizations set the level they’re willing to operate at. And in both subtle and unsubtle ways, we all let others know what our level is.

A corollary to this principle is that sometimes what’s good doesn’t want to become great, and we don’t necessarily gain by trying to cajole it into wanting to.

Jim Collins‘ From Good to Great was one of the standout business management books of the mid-2000s. It highlighted eleven companies that had by then significantly outperformed their competitors for a decade and a half. Collins argued that they achieved this success metric by focusing on their most profitable skills, ensuring that their team included the right people playing the right roles, and facing up to “the brutal facts of [their] current reality, whatever they might be.”

Whether we’re in the personal sphere or doing business, we have to allow facts to supersede our preconceptions and shape the decisions we make. We can’t approach our own greatness, whatever that means for us, unless we allow that.

And that means “confronting the facts” and believing others when they declare who and what they are, even and especially if the facts are unpleasant.

September 8, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Error by anecdote

Close-up of old wrapped letters, a fountain pen, and black ink. — Photo: Joanna Kosinska

Maybe you’ve heard this one:

How many legs does a spider have? Eight? Do you really know? I mean have you counted them? In 300 B.C. Aristotle said that spiders had six legs and was classified as an insect. All the world believed him, until finally in the 1400s somebody actually counted and saw they had not six, but eight legs. Aristotle must have been widely respected for no one to question him for 1,700 years. I am sure he was right about a lot of things, but not this time. Finally, somebody counted the legs for themselves instead of just taking Aristotle’s word for it.” —William Earnhardt

Great, right?

Except that—as far as I can tell in a day—Aristotle didn’t claim that spiders had six legs. He did mention spiders quite a bit in his writings on nature. But I couldn’t find anything at all about spider legs, only modern people talking about spider legs and crediting Aristotle for a mistake easy to resolve with observation.

Why didn’t Earnhardt question this story? Perhaps because he’s not alone in telling it. UNESCO’s geologists and evangelists alike have spread this anecdote over the years, and it seems incredibly resistant to correction.¹

Twenty-three hundred years ago, Aristotle wrote about some legs: the legs of a particular species of fly. Arachnids aren’t insects, but, like insects, are part of the arthropod family.

How many legs does [Ephemeroptera] have? Well, it is standing on four, because the forelegs are specialised simply to hold onto the female during mating in flight (the sole task of the adult mayfly). Aristotle, who counts legs based on their functionality, is in fact correct, if that is the kind of species he was observing. We say it has six legs because the forelegs are homologous with the hindlegs. He said four because the forelegs aren’t used for walking.” —John S. Wilkins

It’s fascinating how easy it is to lean on short, slick stories that reinforce our ideas about the world or about authorities we’re skeptical of. It’s easy to trust our favorite writers when they pass those stories along, to take the anecdotes for granted because of the function they serve.

But do as Earnhardt says (and not as he does): observe, fact-check, and investigate, even and especially when a story satisfies your assumptions.

There’s no reason to let a good anecdote get between you and the truth.

If you have a direct citation for Aristotle’s writings that would clear up this conundrum for me, please let me know!

1. The article by B. Lukács appears to have been written in a non-English language and later translated.

[Back to text: ◄]

July 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Wisdom requires action

At the Justice Conference in Chicago last month, local minister Rev. Harvey Carey provoked peals of laughter from attendees when he talked about people going from conference to conference, writing great ideas in their notebooks, going home mountain-top high, and then never applying those insights to their lives or work.

I laughed too, in the key of “What do you know about my life”?

In December last year, as part of my year-end audit, I banned myself from conference travel and business training—books, webinars, and web-courses—until I had recovered from FY 2015 and was practicing principles I’d already learned.

So I tracked Creating Change 2016 from a distance, sent goodwill to my peers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, kept busy working locally, and bought nothing.

My bank account loved me for it. And I created room to rest, digest, and build/rebuild in ways that make sense for me.

Graphic and web branding specialist Brittany Melton (@xobritdear) advises early-stage freelancers and professional bloggers to do likewise: let aggressive marketing pass them by, and not over-invest in supplemental training during any period when they need to focus instead on implementing core practices. It’s core practices that will sustain us long term.

When we instead over-consume resources, we risk talking about doing, talking about planning, planning to do, planning to plan, and building up an amazing stockpile of planners; we meet with world-changers and are so inspired by their speech and example, but somehow we close the book, course, or conference, and routine life never changes.

This is such a waste of good resources, and there are better ways to operate. In an article on expressive and other regular forms of writing, Gregory Ciotti shares the psychological case for consistent action:

In both emotional intelligence and in hard sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively. Writing helps eliminate ‘it sounded good in my head’ by forcing your hand; brains forgive fuzzy abstractions, prose does not. —Gregory Ciotti, July 15, 2016

So

Audit yourself. We’re in the third quarter of the year now. More importantly for me, whatever your schedule is, I’m in the third quarter of my year. I still have projects open that I thought I’d have completed in April. I have two proposals hanging in the ether. And there are eight books in various states of partly-read on my desk right now.

Regaining balance in the midst of a non-stop schedule has two equally essential parts: (1) insisting on stops and pauses and Sabbaths and weekends, so that life is no longer non-stop; and (2) committing to steady action that can clear commitments in a reasonable time.

Learn to force your own hand. I organized and took classes at a week-long intensive this time last month, and wrote my insights down immediately. I didn’t want to wait a month or more; I wanted to receive, evaluate, digest, and implement.

Because I know what it can be like. “So excited” becomes “Woah, look at all these emails I missed” and “Let me catch up with that” becomes “Remember that class? Great, distant memory.”

Wisdom requires more of us. Honor what you’re learning by doing something with it.