"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

--George Bernard Shaw

(Written in April 2013)

It's tough to get to 60 years old and realize that you have never finished that process of creating yourself.  That is, you realize that, as lucky as you have been, as many chances as you have had, you have never taken that one chance and run with it.  Or shot for the moon.  Or gone for broke.  Or followed your heart.

And there are all kinds of reasons not to. 

There are the easy ones, like needing to pay the rent, or the mortgage.  Like needing to provide for a family.  Like needing to just pay off that car loan, or complete that last project, or get one more promotion...all of which may be good things to do, responsible things to do, important goals to achieve. 

There are the tougher ones, like choosing to leave a dead-end job without something better, like persisting in a consulting role when you're not finding the kinds of engagements that you're really looking for.  

All of these things may make a lot of sense if your goal is to "find yourself."  But you can only "find" yourself when you are lost. 

When you know who you are, what you want, what you dream about, you're not lost.  You may be afraid...to go through the uncertainty of an acting career, or the grind of a professional baseball career, or the setbacks of teaching.  To take the risks involved in saying, "This is who I am," in case those you care about don't get it.  You may be uncertain, which leads to that same fear.  You may even have failed at these things in the past.  But if you know who you are, you understand that failure needs to be temporary.

Failure has only one value:  as a learning experience.  If you know who you are, what you want, and what you dream about, you must welcome failure at it, because failure is high-value coaching:  it forces you to think about why - about what worked, and what didn't.  It allows you to consider adjustments, refocuses, improvements.  It can make you better at being your best.

Can you fail gracefully at 60?  Can you ever fail gracefully?  Does it matter?

Go for it.

When measurement interferes with performance...

School systems have many reasons to measure student performance, and the No Child Left Behind legislation of a couple of decades ago provided even more. Measuring is one of the basic requirements for improvement: if I don't know how I did, I can't say whether it was better, worse, or the same as in the past. There's no doubt that measurement serves a critical role.

The process of learning, though, requires more than just pre- and post- measures. By definition, it requires a process.  Regardless of the subject matter involved, this process must occur somewhere in the brain, or at least in the peripheral nervous system. The point of this post: change in neuronal activity or function, not measurement, is at the heart of learning.

Can measurement support learning?  Absolutely:  done appropriately and judiciously, measurement can provide the confirmation that the learner is heading in the right direction.  Measurement can provide a clue as to how close the learner is to the desired achievement.  These are good things; but they are not learning.

What else can measurement do?  Unfortunately, measuring excessively, or in a threatening manner, can get in the way of learning processes. For example, setting up a process in which learners are striving for the "right answer" can be detrimental to real learning. Excessive measures, or measurement done for high stakes, are two ways to create this excessive focus on the answer, often to the exclusion of the learning. This is not a new idea.  Is there anyone older than 12 in this society who has not experienced both excessive and threatening forms of measurement? And in this society, we do not limit the consequences to stars and pats on the back.  The consequences for measures of personal performance that fall short of expectations are anything but pleasant.

Unfortunately, these uses of measurement can inhibit learning, and as a result, limit the ability to improve performance.

George H. W. Bush - The American Experience

I voted for Dukakis in 1988, like a good Democrat. I did not like Bush - apparently I never gave him a chance.

Perhaps I never knew that his term as head of the CIA in the 1970s was in response to a call for help to "clean up" the agency.

If he had not been a Republican, if he had not been sandwiched between the desolations of the Reagan administration and the economic success of the Clinton Administration, would we not have noticed how much he accomplished in a single term? Think about these actions:

• His development of relationships and maintaining phone contact with leaders in the US and all over the world
• His acceptance of the role of helping Reagan get elected, as distasteful as it was to him personally.
• The fall of the Berlin wall, due mostly to his relationship with Gorbachev
• The passage of the ADA (Americans with Disability Act)
• The success of Desert Shield, then Desert Storm, through careful development of coalitions, then the good judgment to stop at the Iraqi border.
• The budget deal - which may well have set up the Clinton Administration for its economic success (including the acceptance of a tax increase, despite our having "read his lips.")

I don't think I ever before appreciated how much we as Americans owe this man for his constant eye on what was most important for the country, and steady hand to make good long-term decisions - even (or perhaps especially) in situations in which he had to accept the blame for going back on his political promises (..."read my lips...").