Book Review-Write for Your Life By Anna Quindlen

It isn't very often that one gets to have a conversation very famous author. Of course, I didn't actually have that conversation with Anna Quindlen, but I feel like that I did as I read her latest book Write for Your Life.

The book is out of the ordinary because it is Anna Quindlen way of motivating people to write about things that we don't usually think is so important. She is very convincing in making the case that those very things that we don’t feel are important may end up being very important. The very first example she uses is Anne Frank.  A young girl who’s diaries documents her life, and trivialities of living, but also describes to us her life as lived in hiding from the Nazis. Anna Quindlen made sure we understood the importance of us, the future, having the documentation of life as it existed for the Jews who were in hiding from the Germans through the eyes of a young girl. That explanation packed a particularly powerful punch for me.

We don't take our writing  very seriously. We think that what we have to say is not important enough to be scribbled down., that our scribblings would not be interesting enough to be passed on. Her entire book is trying to convince us that what we do, how we do it, the result of what we did, and the importance of what we say is not up to us judge. Indeed, it is up to posterity to judge the writing. Of course, what we write has to be honest and we have to dig deep into our hearts and minds in order to be genuine and detailed.

She gives some very strong argument and uses real life examples to make us think about writing. In addition, she writes about what our writing should mean to us. How our writing would help us in our daily lives. She writes about journaling; she talks about letter writing — a lost art in this day and age.

She tells us about the medical training process and how they have made doctors writing down their daily experiences a regular part of the training. This practice helps the doctors to process the experiences that they are facing. She emphasizes that this writing is not frivolous, this writing is not just done for the sake of writing, this writing helps these doctors as they process life and death situations and maintain their mental health.

She also delves into the technical parts of writing, the structures and rules that scares the living daylights out of your average writer, i.e., someone like me. She delved a bit into poetry — something that most people are definitely afraid of attempting — mainly because there are  so many structures and constraints to deal with. It is rare for an average person who think they can writes to feel completely comfortable unless they felt capable at dealing with the  technical issues.

The beauty of the short book is that she discusses all of this not as a naggy English teacher, she writes about it as a practitioner who is revealing our misconceptions about writing and defanging our fears slowly but comfortingly. The fact that we were having a conversation with her, the very accomplished and credentialed writer made me feel comforted about my own writing.

The book is a short one, but it is one that I will revisit repeatedly. This little book has and will inspire me. We shall see how my own writing experiment progresses,  but as of right now she's convinced me to do that write.

One deliberate but interesting feature of the book is that she added lined pages at the end of the book so that the readers could scribbled down notes at the end. It is a sneaky way of encouraging the reader to do that very thing that the title suggests: Write for Your Life.

I found this book interesting, entertaining, and inspirational. I hope I live up to Anna Quindlen expectations.

Ruminations-Old Ways Vs New Ways

https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-giants-coaching-staff-11651493931?mod=e2fb

This article was posted on a volleyball coaches’ group as an example of what the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball is doing in putting together a coaching staff, thinking outside the usual boundaries of credentials and skillsets that were the unchallenged constraints of what the coaches need to have under their belts. The diversity of the staff and the courage that it took for this manager to hire these people for his staff is laudable and long overdue.

The article had also made a statement ascribing the Giants recent successes  to this group of coaches and their diversity in backgrounds, skillsets, and knowledge. Someone in the group disagreed with that assessment, as do I, but for a different reason. I don’t believe that the coaches have had enough time with the team to say definitively that their successes are directly caused by their  influences. I am not saying that they had no impact, I am saying that conclusions should not be inferred from the immediate results.  It is once again the very human to draw the  conclusion that correlation is causation.  We all know that is false, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The diversity addressed in the article does not just mean the usual definition of diversity: by race and gender. Diversity in this case means that the coaches for the San Francisco Giants are diverse in their baseball and intellectual background.  Much staff are players who never made it into the major leagues, which is contrary to the baseball hiring practices, they played at a level well below the Major League level. They had coaches whose previous professions were not strictly athletic, which gives them a different perspective regarding the context of the everyday decisions that needed to be made. It is interesting that one of the coaches is a Japanese player who worked for many years as a bullpen catcher in the major leagues because he was not skilled or athletic enough to make it a player; it is interesting because it is a baseball truism that the bullpen catcher usually makes the best managers because they're the ones that must observe the game from a most fundamental level. They have the investment in time and are passionate about the game to invest themselves into understanding the ins and outs of the game.

The original person who disagreed with the inference that  the recent success of the Giants are due to the non-traditional backgrounds of the coaching staff used the argument that because the LA Dodgers are the class of that division, and the efficacy of the Giants’ hiring philosophy cannot be celebrated until the Giants have overtaken the Dodgers. He argues that winning and losing should determine whether the hiring philosophy is worthy.  He goes further in saying that the successes of the Dodgers are based on traditional ways of building a strong farm system by spending money and paying for great players. His point is well taken, but no one ever said that the Giants were not doing that. He did not really address the merits of a diversified coaching staff. It was a head fake.

Many successful leaders and coaches have preached the mantra that you have to surround yourself with the best people and you need these people to speak truth to power, to disagree with the leader and be allowed an opportunity to sway the leader.  This is not to say that chaos and discord needs to be introduced within the organization; what is needed is people who are willing to challenge rote thinking and the status quo, to stir the pot, to make decision makers examine their assumptions, logical fallacies, and internal biases.

This disagreement is a matter of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

There are obvious advantages to staying with the known, everyone in the organization knows what is expected of them and any dissent can be resolved or tamped down quickly because the decision making becomes procedural and immediate rather than be conceptual, exploratory, speculative, and time consuming. A typical argument in defending the status quo is that everything new is not necessarily always good, that there is a reason for the traditional and procedural, and it is ill advised to throw out the baby with the bath water.

When someone employs that tact, they are saying by inference that the jury is still out. But they go deeper by eliciting the skepticism that comes with that line of thought which lightly insinuates that the old way is the best way. Which is a dead giveaway to a leadership in a rut. One that is dying a slow death internally,

The subject of the impact of a diverse coaching staff does not and should not be judged by only considering strict wins and losses. It should be judged by the human factor: the amount of player and team development and how that impacts player production; how invested are those players in their team and organization — so much so that they are producing above and beyond their ceilings. The hiring philosophy should be judged upon the return on what the organization had invested. It appears that the players are happy, and they are buying into the what the coaches are saying, which is more than half the battle.  They are producing on the field as well, perhaps not as much as some would like as a litmus test.

On the other hand, having a diverse staff is a welcoming change but just making the change does not naturally infer that the new philosophy is going to pay off 100%. I remember one day while I was working in corporate America that one of the human resources person addressed a room full of middle aged engineers; saying, without any apology, that all the old engineers should be fired and replaced with new and inexperienced engineers straight out of school because the young engineers are more creative, more willing to change what doesn't work, they are more aggressive, and  they have the newer ideas. What happened was that the new engineers became the old engineers within a few years, bought into the corporate ways within a few years and became stalwarts of the old ways in a few years.  Indeed, all the experience that had resided with the older engineers were lost and now needed to be rediscovered. So new is not necessarily better and old is not necessarily better.

A key fallacy that we all readily employ is to view this situation through the prism of a dichotomy, of a win/loss end game. There is much intelligence that are embedded  in the old because there's value in it;  there is much intelligence that are embedded  the new because there is value in it. The question is:  how to integrate the two views and resolve the surface incongruencies between the two sides and overcome the  either/or mindset.  How can the sides achieve win/win?

The real magic is finding a way to leverage, combine, integrate, mix, and blend the new and the old: intelligently leverage the diverse coaching staff and what they bring to the table with what we assume to be tried and true. I am an optimist in this regard, I believe that it is possible to diversify the composition of coaching staffs, challenge the mythology of the tried and true while also retaining the embedded wisdom inherent in the procedural and time honored. Playing the either/or game is silly and counterproductive; most importantly it does not serve the team or the individual athletes at all.

The first thing that needs to be of course is to stop being so defensive and start thinking critically, fully acknowledging our individual fallacies and bias.