Adam's shared items
There are some significant misunderstandings about failure. A common one, similar to one we seem to have about death, is that if you don't plan for it, it won't happen.
All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.
Two habits that don't help:
- Getting good at avoiding blame and casting doubt
- Not signing up for visible and important projects
While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival or even promotion, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.
I think it's worth noting that my definition of failure does not include being unlucky enough to be involved in a project where random external events kept you from succeeding. That's the cost of showing up, not the definition of failure.
Identifying these random events, of course, is part of the art of doing ever better. Many of the things we'd like to blame as being out of our control are in fact avoidable or can be planned around.
Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:
- Whenever possible, take on specific projects.
- Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur.
- Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you.
- Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away.
- Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change.
- When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it.
If that list frightened you, you might be getting to the nub of the matter. If that list feels like the sort of thing you'd like your freelancers, employees or even bosses to adopt, then perhaps it's resonating as a plan going forward for you.
Last week’s Nature highlighted the sculptures of Alfred Keller (1902-1955), and the example, a model of the Brazilian treehopper Bocydium globulare, struck me as one of the weirdest animals I’ve ever seen:
Martin Kemp describes Keller’s work:
Keller was trained as a kunstschmied, an ‘art blacksmith’. From 1930 until his early death he was employed by the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History), painstakingly labouring over his recreations of insects and their larvae. Each took a year to complete. Keller worked first in plasticine, from which he cast a model in plaster. This plaster reference model he then recast in papier maché. Some details he added, cast in wax, with wings and bristles in celluloid and galalith (an early plastic material used in jewellery). Finally he coloured the surfaces, sometimes with additional gilding. The levels of patience and manual control Keller exercised were incredible. His fly, for example, boasts 2,653 bristles.
. . . Keller was a sculptor of monumental one-off portraits. Each model is a masterpiece, with no effort spared. It is difficult to see how such a skilled artisan could survive in today’s museums, with their emphasis on cost analysis. Keller’s exacting models may be things of the past, yet they are far from obsolete. Like the great habitat dioramas, they exercise a magnetic attraction.
The first thing a biologist does on seeing a model like this is think, “This can’t be real,” and resorts to some Googling. Sure enough, it’s a real insect. Here are two photos:
The second thing one asks is, “What the bloody hell is all that ornamentation on the thorax?” (Note that the “balls” on the antenna-like structure aren’t eyes, but simply spheres of chitin.) A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures (and the ones below) show the ornaments in both sexes. Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.” It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.
Note, though, that the ornament sports many bristles. If these are sensory bristles, and not just deterrents to predation or irritating spines, then the ornament may have an unknown tactile function.
Membracids, related to cicadas, are in the class Insecta (insects, of course), the order Hemiptera (“true bugs”) and the family Membracidae. Like aphids, which are also “true bugs,” adult and immature treehoppers feed on plant sap.
For a wonderful panoply of membracid photos, download this pdf file. Here are some of the images, showing that, as Kipling said, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu.” If Dali invented insects, they’d look like these.
The color and shape of this last one makes me suspect that it’s mimicking a wasp:
h/t: Matthew Cobb
So after having my mind well and truly away from the football universe now all things United have shut up shop for the season, I inexplicably missed the initial breaking news that Lord Triesman had displayed 'Old Fools Syndrome' and put England's 2018 bid at risk from a sporting version of Foot and Mouth disease.
Treisman's comments are clearly inflammable, and without any concrete foundations. But there he is..in the company of a beautiful former aide (who claims to have had..ahem..'relations' with the old boy) and he's bragging about the size of his football involvement...
'I'll chuck in a bit of bribery here, a bit of John Terry dirt there...she'll love a bit of IT!'
Yet another stupendous peer who thinks he flies well ABOVE the radar..somewhere up in the stratosphere.
As foolish as Lord Triesman has been and as loose as his tongue has acted, the bigger story to come out of this is our country's filthy addiction to the bile that our newspapers can scoop up and feed us. The fact that this case has come about because of pure entrapment and the fact that some slag has tried to further herself both financially and publicly, gives you a snapshot of what truly is the English Disease in modern day Britain. Not hooliganism. Not party boy footballers. But your everyday man and woman, that buys these tabloid rags and supports this ecosystem of destruction.
How can a major national news (and i use that word very lightly) paper attempt to destroy England's bid for the biggest footballing honour a nation can have just to sell a few extra copies? It wouldn't happen in other countries. You wouldn't see the Spanish printing information about the English that would scupper their bid. The Russains wouldn't allow their journalists to embarrass them with trash allegations that would make the world think their country is basically RUBBISH!
What makes a nation have so little respect for itself?
This is, and has been, a major problem for us all in England for as long as i can remember. A nation always content with second place and never quite believing that first was possible. I remember the day clearly when London got the Olympics. It was more of a feeling of "Excuse me old boy, are you sure that the Olympic committee has chosen dear old Blighty?" than "We are the best so stuff the rest of ya's!" And then people complain when us United fans have more allegiance to our team than we do with the national set up..Its bull like this that just turns you off.
I believe that people should stop buying these papers and turn them into dinosaurs. They contribute to a popular English myth that we are ALL a nation of filthmongers who feed off scandal and gossip of the most dirty order. I hate to believe that England's inhabitants are nothing more than a walking, talking tripe episode of Eastenders..all sensationalism and zero substance..Soap Opera culture, so to speak. Stories like this tarnish what the world thinks of us and leaves us as a globally social pariah. Is that what we want? Are The Sun, Mirror and Mail the commentators for our generation?.. telling the world that the English actually 'hate England!' If you are one of those that buys the tabloids 'for the sport section' then you need to stop today. You have the Internet now and there is no excuse for this as their was 10 years ago. Stop being apart of this problem and put these rags of hate back in their place.
There are good newspapers out there...go find them...
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