“Pride goeth before the fall.”

Over the weekend, I read the first section of Ray Dalio’s original “Principles” document (summarized here and available as a book here), and finally finished C.J. Chivers’s shattering book The Fighters. Dalio talks about being relentlessly honest about weaknesses and finding ways to get around them. In two especially memorable formulations, he says that “Pain + Reflection = Progress” and “problems are opportunities that are screaming at you.” And Chivers, at the end of his book, recounts one wounded Navy corpsman saying to another that each got “hit in [his] vanity:” both suffered grievous injury to parts of their bodies that were previously points of pride.

I’ve had an opportunity screaming at me for a little while now, and I wouldn’t listen until it finally hit me in the vanity. Specifically, in order to make sure I finally took the hint, it made clear to me that I would have to choose between two ideas of professionalism I usually hold equally dearly: competence and mission completion. I like to be good at my job, and I hate to quit. On this one, I needed to finally face up to the idea that I needed to make a careful choice between non-competence and not quitting.

If you’re the star running back, it makes sense to keep saying “give me the ball.” But not if you’re the left tackle. Everyone appreciates what you do, but no one expects you to demand the ball play after play until you turn yourself into a running back. That’s silly, and borderline selfish. But that doesn’t stop most of us from doing it from time to time. And most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it — until we take a hit in the vanity that we can’t ignore.

Pride comes. Man falls. The key, as every guru has known forever, is not the probability of falling but the quality of choosing to get back up.

Dr. King famously told us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It’s tempting to fixate on the second half of the sentence, to place our faith in the bend, and above all the surety of justice. But what do we do when what we observe in the world is so obviously at odds with what we want to believe about how the universe works?

The hard truth is that the arc of the moral universe is long. Really long. Justice may not appear in our own time — and, even if it does, the best we can do today will someday look primitive. Not everyone gets to see the mountaintop; fewer still get to go there.

In an extraordinary remembrance and celebration of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Arnold Eisen talks about what it means to live on the long arc, doing our best to bend it even as we know we’ll never reach the promised land:

You know, there are certain things that are beyond our reach even if we’re commanded to try and achieve them. Our lives, as the rabbi said long ago, are too short. I mean, the day is long and the work is great and we’re not commanded to finish the work, but neither are we allowed to desist from it. That’s one of my favorite passages from the Talmud and I think one of Heschel’s.

The shortest route to cynicism is to assume that our efforts will finish the work. As soon as it becomes clear that we have been commanded to work toward a goal we cannot reach, the temptation is to throw down our tools, throw up our hands, and say we don’t care: after all, if we can’t finish the work, what’s the point?

The point, as the great friends and teachers King and Heschel knew, is not to finish but rather to begin, to resist the temptation to desist, and, when we do desist — as, from time to time, we all do — to begin again. And again. And still again.

We might never get to see the end, but, if we choose to conspire on the universe’s behalf, we might be able to catch a glimpse around the bend.

Yesterday’s post raised the question of learning to learn in public: if the practices are just as public (and subject to criticism) as the games, how can we make the mistakes we need to make in practice in order to be better when it really matters?

If you’re human like the rest of us, that means you’re learning all the time: making mistakes, adjusting, and trying to do better next time. Beyond the tired but useful bromides about being gentle on people and hard on ideas, how can we start making schools and workplaces truly safe for learning?

Here are a few ideas. Consider them ground rules for today’s dojo, where everything is public — which makes effective learning more important than ever:

• Decide what matters and what doesn’t. Does this work need to be graded? If so, by whom, and what does that grade mean?
• Be relentlessly clear about the purpose of your enterprise. Is the purpose of school to compete for GPA, or to produce people with the courage and wisdom to raise their hands, risk an idea, and lead their peers?
• Be equally alert to the implicit assumptions of the culture you’re building or tolerating: if it’s not OK to be wrong around here, what would make it OK for a manager in (or product of) this organization to admit error and say it’s time to move on?
• Think very carefully about whether and when to reward effort versus output.
• If you’re in a position of power — whether you’re a teacher by title or you just think a peer is wrong — be prepared to act courageously and compassionately, if you need to act at all.
• When you do correct someone, be prepared to make every reasonable effort to publicly defend their effort, if not their conclusion.
• If you’re offended, get curious, not defensive.
• If you don’t think we’re talking about anything of substance, give us something substantial to talk about.

For a lot of organizations — including many organizations dedicated to teaching and learning — this isn’t the usual way. But that begs the question: what is the usual way designed to achieve, and are we satisfied with the results we’re getting?

The context has changed. It’s time to change the culture, and change the rules.

As Tom Friedman has been saying for years, “private is over.”

He’s mostly referring to — and most people associate that idea with — what we used to think of as personal life: the kinds of activities that used to be what you did with your friends that the whole world didn’t need to know about, and which now make up the bulk of our social media feeds.

But what if we apply this same idea to learning?

Logically, the idea of learning implies a process of being wrong at first, and hopefully less so over time. But when our culture seems to demand that everyone be right all the time, and that we be judged on what we’ve done lately, how are we supposed to take the risks required to learn anything? Why not just parrot what all the other micropundits are saying — or even just keep our mouths closed?

Good schools used to be the original “safe spaces:” a place where real-world consequences weren’t denied, but were intentionally suspended somewhat. The idea was that it was better to make a mistake in school, where the worst you’d suffer was a bad grade, than on the job, where mistakes could be really costly. Train in the dojo, where the losses don’t “really” count, so you don’t have to lose a real fight.

But when we insist on keeping score everywhere, all the time, we lose the safe-to-be-unsafe character that made the schoolhouse special. A bad grade used to mean you had to be reprocessed for compliance; now, an opinion you hazard in class (or, heaven forbid, in writing) might follow you forever. You might learn and evolve, but it won’t.

When that becomes our model of reality, it seems we’ve got two choices: one is to allow the culture to keep demanding that we see all the practices as well as the games, and indulge our desire to play head coach of everyone else’s life. The other is to learn to calmly separate the mistakes that matter from the ones that make us better.

Choose one path and we’ll never learn. Choose the other, and we stand a chance of learning to learn in public.

Job-seekers, especially early in their careers, often find it difficult to talk about themselves.

Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom on elevator pitching or formatting an introductory email or cover letter doesn’t really help. Too often, we demand that people who are already feeling out of their element develop and memorize a little script, wait in line to talk to The Person, and then gulp, shake hands, and just push play on the script.

But what if that’s backwards? The person who’s uncomfortable talking about himself has to do that, while the person who’s just finished talking on stage has to listen. And your little pitch is supposed to somehow be identical in form to all the rest, yet also distinct enough to stand out in memory. Unlikely.

The thing about the elevator (or the intro email, or the post-keynote handshake) is that it doesn’t automatically give you permission to talk about you. It gives you the opportunity to get that permission. That’s what those 15–30 seconds are really about. And the way to do that isn’t to deliver a broadside about you. It’s to start a conversation the other person wants to continue about a topic they care about.

The easiest way to do that is to ask a question, identify a problem, or make a connection. If you have another 30 seconds, you can tell a little story, too. In any case, the point is not to recite your resume, but rather to position yourself as someone worth working with.

The next time you meet your dream employer, the choice is yours: are you going to recite your resume and hope, hope, hope it’s somehow going to be more memorable than all the rest, or will you be creative enough to start a conversation so that they ask you to follow up?

Remember, what you choose to talk about in this situation and how you choose to talk about it will tell a lot about who and how you are. And unless your dream employer’s dream employee tells a slightly more polished version of the same story as everybody else, or is already too comfortable talking about himself, it might pay to tell a different story about who you are by talking about something else.

Our culture is going through a fraught, difficult, and long-overdue conversation about privilege now. That’s no secret, and it’s likely to go on for a while.

It seems there are at least three ways of participating in that conversation. One is to point out the ways in which other people are privileged. Another is to point out one’s own privileges. And another is to ask the really hard questions: what responsibilities do my privileges entail, and how well am I fulfilling them?

We’re all a part of this conversation, since we’re all part of this complicated culture with all of its wabi-sabi. And we’re each able to choose how we’re going to participate: we can choose what to say, to whom, with what aim.

If you start out looking for people more prejudiced than you, you’ll never run out of examples. There will always be someone more privileged to point to. And relative privilege can be worth pointing out from time to time.

But I wonder if a more interesting and challenging question might be to ask what difference we can make with the privilege we have, however large or small. Or to ask what difference a very privileged person might be able to make if only she could see things our way — and then to ask how she might be helped to see with new eyes.

This is not to deny the hurt, nor to say it’s fair or just to ask people to put in yet more excruciating “emotional labor” or years of waiting in order to change their circumstance. But it is to say that if we want to change the culture, we might have to change how we show up in the conversation.

After all, everyone has a voice. It’s up to each of us to decide whether we’re going to focus on relative privilege or responsibly, generously, helpfully using the power we already have.

In the interest of transparency, here’s what I expect:

• Writing shorter will make it possible to write more often.
• Writing more often will approach (and optimally become) daily.
• Writing daily will become habit.
• Writing as a habit will train my powers of observation and writing.

All of my previous blogs started long and got longer, then stopped when I could not regularly summon the energy to explain the universe in a couple thousand words.

It wasn’t wasted effort: all that writing made all my writing better. But it was mostly catharsis for me and useful to nobody else.

There’s a saying in medical education that the way to learn a new procedure is to “see one, do one, teach one.” In starting this blog, at this length, with this (relative lack of) focus, I hope to create a quick intellectual fitness routine along those lines: noticing, connecting, explaining.

If a pattern or patterns emerge that could be the subject of longer, more focused work, that would be great. If not, I’ll at least be able to indulge my desire to comment on whatever comes to mind.

At the end of the day, Cicero’s advice to aspiring writers might be the truest motivation of all: “If you want to be a writer, write!”

Cheers to a new adventure.

The public doesn’t understand what most professionals do.

That’s a big part of what it means to be a member of many professions. Not many people know what all the little switches and dials in the cockpit do. Not many can handle a scalpel. Not many can manage investments.

Fewer still probably even want to do any of those things.

Knowing this, professions (and professionals) tend to build up lots of symbols and signals to show themselves worthy of sustained public trust. They have uniforms, licenses, Hippocratic oaths.

These symbols embody a shared understanding that’s really important to how our society functions: the rest of us say to the various professions, “We don’t understand what you do and we probably never will, but we need you to do your work — and, most of all, we need to be able to trust you to do this work we need and do not understand.”

Whatever symbols or credentials come to define a profession, the fact remains that they are emblems not of the professionals’ superiority but rather of the public’s trust. When professions (or professionals) lose their way, they hide shoddy work behind symbols of trust, and insist that the rest of us couldn’t possibly understand.

It’s true: we might not understand the buttons, the scalpel, the ticker. But it doesn’t take a lot of technical understanding to know a breach of trust or a bunker mentality when we see it.

Uh-oh. Something’s wrong, and a few people (or a few hundred) are counting on you for information right this second. How are you going to talk to them?

The first rule, yes, is to “always be cool on the radio.” You’re in control of what you say and how you say it, even when things are out of control.

Most people understand this, even if we don’t always sound as cool as we’d like to under pressure. Some people, however, over-learn this lesson — and instead of sounding like the very much in control pilot of Southwest 1380, they sound like the airline industry at its worst: “We regret to inform you that nothing is going to plan, and we do remind you that none of this is under our control.”

It’s amazing how leaders in crisis so often speak in a passive, Latinate, verb-free vocabulary that utterly fails to convince or satisfy the audience. (This is even more the case when they read statements prepared by somebody else, which too often sound neither sincere nor even like themselves.)

Calm counts for a lot in crisis communications, but clarity and compassion count, too. As the airlines never seem to learn, most people might not understand the complexity of your business or your challenge, but they can almost always cut through a compound-complex obfuscation. In the long run, taking responsibility costs a lot less in time, money, and trust than verbally distancing yourself from the problem.

Next time something goes wrong, compose yourself, compose your thoughts, and compose your message. And if it sounds like a “pre-boarding” announcement  or a “last and final call,” revise it before you touch the microphone.

After all, you’re still in control. And everyone listening knows that.

Pilots have a saying: “always be cool on the radio.”

It’s drilled deep into the culture from the very beginning of training, and the meaning is clear: no matter how out of control things feel, the push-to-talk button is always under your control, and you’d better be in control every time you touch it.

I think about this a lot, particularly in the context of crisis communications (including public debates) within on-the-ground organizations. And I think there are at least three things we could learn from aviation conventions:

First, be in control of what you transmit publicly. You can say what you want over the closed-circuit intercom, but every radio transmission from “good day” to “mayday” should be calmly professional. As most of us have learned the hard way at one point or another, what you text your co-workers is much different that what you put in the company-wide email.

Second, know and follow convention — even when you improvise within the form. All calls start the same way: “Recipient, this is caller. Here’s my information.” All get a readback to ensure understanding: “Caller, recipient: I copy your information and request you do this next.” And, in one of my favorite conventions, all end with “good day:” the airline industry’s equivalent of the military’s crisper but colder “out.” Like jazz, the shared format keeps everyone together yet also allows some artistic license: some pilots go to great lengths to convey the other meaning of “cool” on the radio, with well-practiced cadences that leave no doubt that the speaker flies really big jets (or wants to sound like he does).

Third, professional courtesy isn’t mutually exclusive of critique or directness. If you listen to the controllers at busy airports, you’ll hear them get frustrated and bossy like anyone else — and yet they’ll almost never fail to address people as “sir” or “ma’am,” or to end with the “good day” signifier, even when they’re essentially yelling at them. Think about the last time you or someone you know either failed to speak up when something was going wrong or really did yell at someone without the equivalent of a “good day” to remind them that, at the end of the day, you’re both on the same team.

Beyond specifics, though, the really powerful lesson in “always be cool on the radio” is that it takes and makes a culture. Pilots can summon superhuman cool under crisis because they know there will be cultural consequences if they don’t, and each person who keeps her cool under pressure adds to the community standard.

Every time you communicate, it’s worth asking:

• Who’s going to hear this?
• What’s the accepted format for what I have to say? How will I deliver my message in a way that’s both instantly understandable (thanks to convention) and recognizably personal (thanks to a little improvisation)?
• What are they going to learn from what I say, and what are they going to learn from how I say it?