This meme is not new – we all know that invention is usually evolutionary, more like the aleatory, methodical process of natural selection than the “Eureka!” shouting epiphany of intelligent design (Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From is insightful on this point). We exaggerate the impact of individual geniuses, without whom we like to think the world would be profoundly different, for two reasons, as far as I can tell: Because it makes for better stories, and because we want to elevate human agency, we want to believe in our individual power to bend the world with the force of our will.

We are not wrong, it’s an extraordinary time for innovation, and individuals can have profound impact. But at the same time I think wildly successful people have an obligation to say: “Yes I worked my tail off, and no, I am no dummy, but it’s also true that I got really really lucky.”

I have gotten lucky, and I am working hard to get luckier still.  Clearly Success = some combination of hard work, intelligence (more the ability to learn incrementally from experience than some kind of mystical genius) and luck. The first two are requirements for admission, and you have to keep at it until you find the third. Older and wiser people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are more likely to acknowledge the role of luck in their success – both of then have spoken about it eloquently — and Malcolm Gladwell did a good job of describing the luck factor in Outliers. Bo Peabody came clean in his thoughtful book, Lucky or Smart. But it remains wildly under-recognized, in my opinion.

Why does this matter? It matters because if people think innovation happens because of the actions of Isolated Geniuses, they draw the wrong conclusions about their own potential and how innovation happens. It’s easy to draw the wrong lessons from hyperbolized success stories. You could conclude, for instance, that when brought into a new social media startup, you should stall, rip off the idea, and go it alone (Zuckerberg). Or that true visionaries scream at developers and designers, tell them their products are shit, and storm out of the room (Jobs). Needless to say there is much that we can learn from Jobs and Zuckerberg, two brilliant innovators — some if it is useful and broadly applicable, the rest historically specific and potentially misleading.

I am about half way through the Jobs biography (its been temporarily displaced by Thinking Fast and Slow due to my AMPs syndrome), and I think Isaacson deserves enormous credit for keeping the extraordinary story of Steve Jobs tethered to the ground. If there ever were a case that individuals can be overpowering forces on history, lead-weighted billiard balls that profoundly alter the picture, Jobs is right up there with Einstein and Hitler among the strongest cases. He achieved extraordinary success not once but thrice with Apple 1.0, Pixar, and Apple 2.0, and he was a wildly original rogue force.

The problem, however, with Jobs as an example, is that what has worked for Apple is very nearly the inverse of what works more broadly online. The idea of locking people in sealed chambers for years at a time to develop products incompatible with other standards, without any feedback from users, is pretty much the antithesis of the best way to navigate the emergent connected, social-media-accelerated world, in my opinion.

My guess is that if you were to plop Steve Jobs in various places and times in history – the precisely same Steve Jobs with his peculiar psychological blend of brilliance, iconoclasm, and a borderline sado-masochistic stinginess with warmth and affirmation (arbuably a result of his fraught relationship with having been put up for adoption, according to many of his intimates) – in 9 out of 10 cases he would not have been a business success. He would have been, as Steve himself said, a broke poet in Paris (a career path I think of warmly, by the way). It’s not easy to be successful in business if you are uncollaborative, egotistical, disinclined to give others credit, and very nearly completely blind to the obstacles. Indeed, you are highly likely to fail with that disposition, it’s a low probability approach, but if you succeed, you have a shot at doing so on a large scale, in a memorable way. And thank goodness Steve Jobs did so — as many of you know, I am among the faithful when it comes to Apple products, and believe a forceful personality was necessary in this case to elevate design in the anarchic world of technology.This is what’s missing from so many of the success stories that surround us, in vivid Technicolor: data on probability. It’s a classic case of availability bias, and in the Gladwellian era of business journalism, we are ever more focused on celebration of individual stories, often selecting for the anomalous.

My personal reality distortion field is a case of optimism, and I believe there is mounting evidence that the business environment is changing in ways that increasingly favor the kind, generous business leader.  “Nice guy” business leaders still fire people who don’t perform and make hard decisions, but they consider it their job to create warm supportive environments with opportunities for growth. The Barry Diller approach, which Steve Jobs was also susceptible to, is going the way of the hammered dulcimer. There are three reasons for this:

1)   The importance of attracting talent – the best people are less and less willing to deal with hot-headed leaders, because every year it’s getting easier to start companies or change jobs if you have desirable skills.

2)   Customers are more and more informed, and they like supporting companies that are forces for good.  Obnoxious leaders breed obnoxious companies, and the cost of alienating even a very small subset of the population has gotten lot higher.

3)   Industries are increasingly non-zero sum, and consequently businesses with more collaborative cultures outcompete those with less collaborative ones. This is category dependent, of course – Amazon’s winner-take-all approach may be well adapted to the low margin e-commerce environment.

All in, I believe that the highest probability paths to success and happiness — two conditions, it should be noted, that are often uncorrelated – are not well exemplified by Jobs or Zuckerberg. Ruthlessness born of misanthropy or alienation has propelled business leaders for generations in zero sum game industries, but it’s increasingly ill-adapted to the modern world, and from a happiness perspective, you don’t want to be that guy. This was one of the more surprising take aways from the Jobs biography – he seems remarkably discontent, all things considered. He treated us customers a lot better than he did the people immediately around him, and the latter is what sets the table for life satisfaction.

As Steven Covey said years ago, helping others succeed may not always be the fastest way to succeed, but it never fails.  It’s not the Jobsian way, but if you only have one life to live it’s the higher probability path.

It was also freeing — nostalgia is the original ball and chain, and I knew none of the material was world-changing — but it smarted. I had forgotten at the time that one trunk stuffed with old papers that I had intended to bring to storage was still in a corner in our office. I have thought about this trunk quite a bit since I re-discovered it six months ago, but I haven’t had the time, and more critically the emotional energy, to address it. I have quietly kindled hope that it might contain a stash of old writings and photographs of some significance to me, and as that hope has risen so too has a proportional fear that it’s filled with nothing but worthless old bills. So I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it. This despite the fact that the trunk has been sitting in the middle of the reception area in our office, staring me down every day.

Today, Sunday, I came in to the office and summoned the strength to crack it open. I was overwhelmed by the contents: dozens of old photos including one of my beloved old Kawasaki 450 LTD ; copies of Mondo 2000, an early 90s magazine about technology that some of you will remember; files of book reviews and whimsical essays I wrote for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette during my Little Rock years (which I never thought I would see again, published pre-internet); a pamphlet about “how to get on-line (sic) with E-World and the Internet!” — Apple’s ill-fated answer to AOL in the early 90s; a flyer for a mail order t-shirt company I had started called Wordwear (which taught me the important lesson that my taste is not universal); a big stack of letters from Jack Murnighan and Leif Ueland in their post-college years; a book proposal which would be picked up by a new york agent (very exciting at the time), but would not result in a book contract; two binders of college writings; a dorky invitation to a going away party I threw when I moved from Little Rock to New York (see below); a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for the mac; and a photo of me as a child in my father’s lap, among other things.

Among this sundry detritus of my hapless 20s, I just found a handwritten note on a random piece of paper about the state of my relationship with the lovely but ultimately incompatible woman with whom I was living at the time. The note is dated November 18, 1993, which was, extraordinarily, 17 years ago (I was about 25). I am changing the name to protect the innocent:

“I sometimes feel that Z and my relationship has terminal problems. I get depressed, feel vulnerable, and then feel more in love with Z than ever. I have a solitary side of me that is not simply a form of solace in the absence of love, as it appeared to me during long years living in the absence of love: it is a relishing of our human condition that will always be with me. And I have a carefree, social side that is constitutionally autonomous. And I also have a powerful need to love and be loved exclusively. I do not think these facets of my personality are incompatible with one another, but they require a soulmate who does not feel that these other parts of my life are competition — a soulmate who shares these qualities.

“I think Z does share these qualities but nonetheless sees them as competition (mine anyway) for our love. And I do not know whether or not this can change.“

I think this was a long winded way of saying that I needed to find a woman who was willing to give me room for my sometimes solitary relationship with myself, and my appetite for social shenanigans. It’s wonderful to read this years later realizing that I have found, married, and had three children with such a woman.

My favorite line from the above, which of course I have no recollection of having written, is this one — “I have a  solitary side of me that is not simply a form of solace in the absence  of love, as it appeared to me during long years living in the absence of  love … ” Apparently I thought, before I had fully experienced a loving relationship with a woman, that my relationship with myself was a consolation prize. It’s nice to learn otherwise.

a few pieces of dorky detritus from my 20s follows …

The glass half-empty view is that editors are obsolescent – they are giant pandas in a receding bamboo forest.  As the supply of editors outstrips the demand for them, the cost of the service of editing declines. New York is bursting at the seams with wildly talented editors who are under-employed, or about to be.

Many denizens of the print world seem oddly calm, like violinists on the deck of the Titanic, whether because they honestly believe the ipad will save the business model, or because they don’t think there is anything they can do about it. But panic, frankly, is the more rational response. The value of traditional editing skills is collapsing, and the new skillset in demand is evolving quickly. Editors have a tough choice right now: take a pay cut and learn the new skills, or go the way of the hammered dulcimer.

Why is demand for traditional editing skills going away? Three reasons:

1)   We have far better data with which to judge the success of writing than we used to, and this data is available to everyone. Traffic, engagement data, and social media success provide a much clearer picture of the effectiveness of a piece of writing than the opinion of a single editor. Refining one’s writing style based on this feedback loop is the best editing process available.  We’ve already learned quite a bit from this iterative process – we’ve learned that most readers prefer the raw, opinionated, sometimes emotional voice of a blog post — or an article written like a blog post – to the objective, painstakingly rendered linguistic object that is a finely edited article. The evidence suggests that a portion of what editors have done in the past – removing bias, encouraging a measured consistent tone – makes writing less engaging to most readers.

2)   The length of an article or post has become relatively unimportant. Space is free, and it really doesn’t matter whether or not readers finish articles — we need users to engage with what they read, comment on it, and then continue to interact with the website in other ways. Therefore, the age old challenge of honing, trimming and sanding articles until they are the perfect size to slide into precisely shaped slots in newspapers and magazines is of diminishing value. The importance of the title and the lede – the first several sentences in a story – remains paramount, but if a writer chooses to prattle on for an extra page, and the reader finds something else on the site more interesting, the cost to the publication is low. The correct mentality is one of managing abundance, as people say, rather than scarcity.

3)   Abundance – the long tail — is necessary to win online, and it is impossible to produce abundance with intensive editorial process. It’s prohibitively expensive. So it’s necessary to develop another skill: the ability to coach teams of people who create an abundance of content, and help teach them how to do three things: (1) read the data to figure out what works from a voice and style perspective, and (2) use the various levers of google trends, facebook, twitter, stumble, and so on to understand what readers are interested in, and (3) push content out to the places where those readers are looking for it, packaged in a way that enables it to succeed in that environment.

The old craft of editing isn’t going away completely, of course. Carpenters still make rocking chairs by hand, and there will clearly always be high value segments of the market where the cost of a full editorial rolfing makes economic sense. Indeed, parenting is a high value ad category, and we continue to do traditional editing in a number of sections throughout Babble.com. But it remains the case that traditional editing is shrinking as a percentage of the whole. If you want to be on the right end of the demand curve, you are going to have to develop some new skills.

THE RISE OF THE CONTENT PRODUCER

The glass half full view is not quite so grim: the role of the editor is evolving dramatically – so dramatically, in fact, that perhaps they should be called something entirely different. The brilliant and prescient Sean Mills, who runs Nerve.com out of the same office as Babble, is talking about calling new Nerve editors “content producers,” which may be more apt.

Editors have historically had two jobs: finding interesting material, and making it better. Next generation editors, if we still call them editors, will do two things: identify great content creators, and help them package and distribute their content in a way that is mutually beneficial. The relative value of the brands of content creators is ascendant, and publishers need to think more like coaches who are also business partners. (I have a number of additional thoughts about this that I am going to put together in a post titled “unsolicited advice for the New York Times.”)

UPDATE: I just had an interesting conversation with Sarah Bryden Brown, Babble’s VP Content, in which she made the case that the new data available to editors makes possible a more effective, hybrid form of editing, informed by both traditional editorial principles and the new science of audience engagement. She makes a great point — even if an increasingly small minority of the total content produced is editing by a third party, the quality of that editing is arguably better if informed by the old art and the new science.

Where can you learn these new skills? There are a handful of online content companies that are doing this well. Huffington Post, NYMag.com and Gawker Media have all figured out how to innovate and scale. Babble, our website for moms, has grown rapidly in our first three years to more than 4 million uniques, passing parenting sites run by Disney, Viacom, Meredith, and other old media companies in size.

In the next year we believe we will more than double traffic and revenue, and our approach to content, described above, is critical to our momentum. If current trends continue, we will be the market leader in the parenting category within 24 months. I don’t mean to be overconfident here, you never know, but we are certainly helped by the fact that our competitors are, for the most part, doing things the old fashioned way.

We have an amazing team of editors  – did I say editors? content producers — who are responsible for the phenomenal performance we have seen in the last year, and we are looking for more … we have a lot of work to do. If you are interested, please email a cover letter and resume to jobs@babble.com.

We are thrilled to announce the birth of our third boy, Rye Griscom — Rye Frederic Volkman Griscom. He was born last Tuesday, October 5th, at 8:36 a.m. He weighed 8 pounds and .4 ounces, and he had not only ten fingers and ten toes, but also ten names until very close to his departure on Saturday. We are utterly elated, needless to say … we had our first breakfast this morning as a family of five, and the house felt full, fully full, in a way it hasn’t before. And of course we are sobered by the certain knowledge that with three boys under roof, we are in for it.

Here, for your amusement and edification, is a photo documentary of the grisly and beautiful series of events:

Alisa not lifting heavy objects the night before delivery.

Mr. Bubble, the family patron saint, who makes getting clean almost as much fun as getting dirty, looked over the birth of Rye much as he did the births of our first two sons.

before

Even the third time around, despite the relative sterility of the c-section experience, we were dewy-eyed fools.

Collecting our little Russian doll complete with antibiotic eye ointment.

Demonstrating his usefulness, Rye put on his game face wednesday morning for a thorough plundering of the spoils of the New York Presbyterian breakfast cart.

The incomparable softness of baby skull peach fuzz.

This photo renders me all blubbery and verklempt. I think Declan is taking in the exciting implications of a 100% increase in the population of his constituency.

Leaving Saturday morning, outnumbered.

The piece describes Seth Priebatch’s impressively maniacal evangelism on behalf of scvngr.com, a company that seeks “to build a game layer on top of the world.” It’s an interesting, grandiose business mission, which is what we expect of internet startups – non-grandiose missions aren’t worth putting up on the wall.

David Segal, the author of this piece (beautifully executed, David), says,

“The hypomanic temperament is, of course, not limited to entrepreneurs. It’s found in politics (Theodore Roosevelt) the military (George S. Patton), Hollywood (the studio head David O. Selznick) and virtually any field where outsize risks yield enormous rewards.  But the business world has contributed more than its share of hypomanics, particularly the abusive, ornery kind. The most colorful of the breed was arguably Henry Ford.”

He goes on to talk about Steve Jobs as an archetypal case.

A simpler phrase for hypomania might be “high octane, reality-proof optimism” – you have to have a certain measure of this succeed as an entrepreneur. Meanwhile, a large dose of this condition makes it nearly impossible to be an effective operator – reality must pierce the semi-permeable boundary of one’s optimism if you are to generate somewhat realistic time projections, which is in turn a pre-requisite for somewhat competent manage of a team. Which is why successful companies are, more often than not, handed off from one personality type to the next at some point in the growth process.

This article fortified a belief I have had for some time now, which is that all the most common forms of “mental illnesses,” in their mild forms, confer advantages as well as disadvantages. Brains come in flavors – some of us are more anxious, some more manic, some more depressive, some more distractible – and these different flavors have been evolutionarily selected for over time because they enable success in different environments.

This is an emergent view – see the great “Science of Success” article in the Altantic last December – but it’s a radical deviation from the convention thinking of what we call, inappropriately, “the mental health profession.” The conventional assumption is that there is a single optimal type of human brain / personality, which we call “normal,” which is the right kind. Any significant deviation from that “normal” brain — which functions as a kind of Copernican sun around which mental illness rotates — is a mental disorder, a neurosis or psychosis that makes its host less functional. (SIDE NOTE: I have great respect for the mental health profession, even though I think it needs to be renamed – my mother is psychoanalyst, and she is an articulate and nuanced spokesperson for the conventional view). I would like to offer a different metaphor – just as there is no one optimal body type, but rather many body types that offer advantages for different sporting events, there is also no single optimal brain, or personality. There is certainly such a thing as a “well rounded” brain or personality that can do a lot of things well, just as there is a body type that can do a lot of sports well. But the best are specialists. Swimming selects for people with long trunks (they float better) and large feet and hands (for better propulsion). Sprinters are stouter with bulkier mucles (which have a higher percentage of fast twitch fibers) and marathon runners are lighter with endurance focused muscles (more slow twitch fibers) and massive cardio capacity relative to body weight. The ideal squash player, I have heard it said, would have short, muscular legs (for rapid acceleration) and long arms (for court coverage).

The many different mental challenges we face select for a similar variation in thinking styles / personality types /brains. What are the most successful among them? Here, it’s interesting to consult the National Institute of Mental Health’s overview of mental disorders. The NIMH website says that 26.2 percent of American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. Presumably there are far more with mild cases that do not seek help, and a far higher percentage that suffer from a mental disorder, as they say, in the course of their lives. Could evolution really have screwed up this badly? Here are the most common mental disorders:

• Mood disorders (Depression, bipolar disorder, hypomania, et al) – 9.5% of the population
• Anxiety disorders (obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks, various phobias) – 18.1% of the population
• ADHD  — 4.1% of the population
• Personality disorders – antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic, paranoid – 9.1% of the population

The New York Times article effectively described the advantages of mild mania – more energy, more focus, more optimism. Of course these benefits come with liabilities, which is why, from a game theory perspective, it makes sense that we are not all manic. And of course I recognize that the people who suffer from the extreme forms of all these conditions do indeed suffer and need help – please understand I am talking here about the functional majority of the population, not the small minority that cannot function.

ADHD is associated with creativity – it encourages swift movement between different subjects, which makes it easier to scan for interesting relationships, and ADHD is also associated with hyperfocus once the individual seizes on something that attracts their attention. A disproportionate number of people with ADHD are over-achievers, and, I suspect, a disproportionate number are also underachievers. I wouldn’t be surprised if ADHD and hypomania sometimes afflict the same individual.

I suspect that people with mild anxiety disorders, such as mild phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder, can be unusually good at detecting danger, and unusually good at persistent execution and attention to detail. Every successful business needs people in this spectrum – people hypersensitive to very small problems, who can hunt down deviations in spreadsheets, or errant zeros and ones. Who better to open hundreds of franchises across the country with unerring attention to detail, or perform other important, repetitive tasks precisely, than someone “suffering from” a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder?

My point here is that any group of people – a society, a business, a tribe in the ancestral savanna – benefits from having a range of personality types. I learned early on that if I only hired people like me, my business would fail. I think the comparison between a modern small business trying to adapt to rapid technology change and a tribe of a few hundred people on the African savanna 100,000 years ago is actually quite relevant. In both cases groups comprised of people with different kinds of brain specialization are likely to outcompete those comprised of a single personality type.

Every group needs a range of specialists – people great at thinking up new ideas and then obsessing on them until they are perfect; people great at executing a vision in a systematic, consistent format and leading a team; anxious people who wake up in the middle of the night worrying about competing groups or threats that haven’t emerged in years. These varying, complimentary (albeit not always chummy) personality types are all highly valuable to the collective.

Alisa, my lovely, nearly perfect wife, sometimes jokingly calls herself “the watchtower woman.” If she hears a faint sound in the middle of the night she bolts upright. She periodically gets migranes which make her so sensitive to sounds and light that she has to sit in a silent dark room with a towel over her head. She has an extraordinary ability to contemplate every possible danger — not just physical danger but a broader, sophisticated risk analysis — that could beset our family. If you know her, you might not have guessed this; she is very outgoing and adventurous and at ease the vast majority of the time. But she is genetically (and culturally … I agree with you Mr. Shenk;)  wired to be a sentinal – as she puts it, the watchtower woman.

I think I have a mild case of ADHD (more on this come in a later post). Much as Alisa likes to think of her mild anxieties in the context of the positive function they perform for the group, I like to think of my ADHD  as AMPs – Absent Minded Professor Sydrome. I enjoy the advantages of the way my brain works, even as I take small steps (daily exercise, obsessive self-management systems) to mitigate the disadvantages.

It’s reasonable to ask why this matters. Mild mental disorders are not as stigmatized as they once were — references to one’s therapist have been fashionable in New York since the 1970s. Having said that, we are not quite at the point at which you can comfortably say that you have mild obsessive compulsive disorder or ADHD or hypomania in a job interview. But we should be headed in that direction. We are each better able to manage our thinking styles — to build on our strengths and compensate for our weaknesses — if we gladly own them. We are more likely to own them, even if they are called neuroses or psychoses, if we understand their benefits. And we are better able to appreciate the different (yes sometimes annoying) thinking styles of other people if we appreciate that the group, in the end, benefits.

My view is that youth, at it’s core, is the condition of not knowing what you are up against. This confers both advantages and disadvantages — I would wager that younger entrepreneurs are more likely to fail, but they are also more likely to create disruptive technologies. Younger people have less data to work with and consequently a poorer understanding of the odds, which means they are far more likely to hurdle themselves with full force in directions that are longshots. There is also the obvious advantage of being closer to new behaviors that are emerging in younger generations that will become prevalent over time. This can also be a disadvantage, because many early markets are inadequately mature to support businesses, but with persistence, in periods of rapid change like this one,  this extra visibility is a great asset.

I am 42, and will be turning 43 later this month. I have only recently identified youth as a condition from which I am recovering. I feel appreciative both of what I am giving up and growing into. We are doing a lot of hiring at Babble right now — we will have grown the team from about 18 to 30 this year. When I am interviewing people, I am always conscious of the trade off between hunger and experience. It’s great to get people in that sweet spot when they have learned enough to be effectual, but they still have something to prove. I consider myself in that sweet spot — I have never been more hungry to succeed, I don’t know exactly what I am doing but I am systematically figuring it out, and the fact that I have a couple young kids at home makes me both more tenacious and more careful than I was fifteen years ago.

On the other hand, I am less willing than I once was to take long odds and go without a salary to turn the world upside down. That’s a privilege that I enjoyed fifteen years ago but didn’t recognize as an endemic, life-stage advantage. That’s the trick, I think — to recognize the advantages of your phase of life, and play to your strength. Now, deep in my early-middle-age (thank you, Fred Wilson, for calling 50 the beginning of middle age), I am working to re-earn that privilege. Youth, the second time around anyway, is expensive.

This is among the things that amaze me about childhood, both how present fear is, in random little things, and how unashamed kids are in expressing their fear, at least in the early years. I have a vague recollection of being afraid of Dr. Seuss books, and Where the Wild Things Are. Declan and Grey tell us all the time about what scares them, and it’s almost like a physiological description, like an itch or a chill. Are you cold? Yes, a little. Are you afraid of dogs? Yes, even small ones.

It’s a reminder that the shame we all feel around our fears is socially inflicted, and there is a time before it arrives. But fear is still fear, with or without shame, and it’s clear in Declan’s straddle that he is enjoying the distinctive big boy satisfaction of watching it recede.

We start with a basic sea wall / tidal pool moat / main wall construction.

As soon as our prayers to the wave gods are rewarded, we commence dribbling.

Please note that while it may look otherwise, no actual child labor was employed in the construction of this tidal pool dribble castle sand boat. Declan’s role was purely supervisory. (Note:  Declan broke his right arm a few weeks ago, and has a rubber thing over the cast protecting it from sand and water. Mercifully, he has no idea it makes his arm look like a giant crab claw.)

The completed moat and rino-style dribbles help repel would be invaders from all sides.

Because this is an American Sand Boat, it comes with not one but two cup holders, as well as a toy shelf. The green suntan lotion in the middle is the ignition button.

For a glorious 10-15 minutes, the TPDCSB accomplishes one it’s covert missions, which is to let the construction foreman read a magazine while the captain and his lieutenant install a much needed staircase for egress to the lifeboats, if that becomes necessary.

The sea begins her merciless ravaging.

Declan, who prefers to be the protagonist of merciless ravaging, gets in on the action.

The sea rejoins.

She hath no mercy … this is a close up from the shot above, all taken with the iphone 4, incidentally. It’s now the only camera I use … love the crisp detail in this sea ravaging action shot.

This amorphous crater, good for little other than upending lovers strolling in the moonlight, is all future generations of beach goers will have to deduce what took place here.

Jennifer concludes on a faintly optimistic note, saying that other studies have shown that people are more likely to regret things they haven’t done rather than those they have. She says in the final two sentences,

It’s a lovely magic trick of the memory, this gilding of hard times. Perhaps it’s just the necessary alchemy we need to keep the species going. But for parents, this sleight of the mind and spell on the heart is the very definition of enchantment.

The take away is that parents are alternately deeply frustrated and happily deluded. Though the article was beautifully written and executed – I love Jennifer’s work — the last few paragraphs struck me as inadequate. Both the studies and the analysis are missing a piece of the essence of what it means to be a parent.

My view is that there are a finite number of intense human experiences that we have access to, and having children is at the top of this list. Comfort is abundant and has low scarcity value for those of us lucky enough to live in the first world; powerful, novel human experiences, on the other hand, are increasingly scarce as we get older, and disproportionately valuable:

The truth is that we get too good at life, and we need to be humbled again. We may lose a big chunk of our adult lives to the repetitive maintenance of children; we may lose time to think novel thoughts and enjoy those of others; we may drink less wine and smell more poop, and we surely spend less time in a serene state of equipoise, but there is a payoff in raw human experience that is not measured in the studies. A life with incrementally rising average happiness can get stale, predictable. Novelty, not of scenery but of experience, is harder to come by than average happiness, and consequently has more scarcity value. In the trials of parenthood, we are resubmitted to the work-a-day, stomach-clenching highs and lows of childhood, to the shriek-worthy revelation that is a paper airplane’s first launch or the betrayal of a parent’s departure. We are damned lucky to have all this, even if, in moments, it almost kills us.

There is little doubt that raising kids is no cake walk. For me the single most challenging piece of this is the absence of time. Time to experience loneliness, which for me is an important part of the spectrum of experience, the phase that makes it possible to fully digest and process life; time to watch and take in the experiences of others, time to create things (which in my case involves aspirations to write more, although I hope some day to have time to play music, paint and experiment with photography, and so on).

One commenter, “Mom of two,” disagreed:

I mostly agree with this article, except for the idea that we lose out on creative expression when we have kids. Without my daughters, I doubt very much that I would sing, dress up, finger paint, mold clay, or pretend I’m a shark in a backyard pool as I do with them. It’s a different kind of creative expression than the measured practicing of a piano or ‘chainsaw sculpting’ you might think of, but I actually think it opens me up to other kinds of creativity when they’ve gone to bed.

the joy of Lego

I love this, she makes a great point. Getting on your hands and knees and getting in the head space of kids, which I enjoy enormously for relatively short periods of time, opens you up creatively, not unlike all the wacky “bark like a dog” exercises they make you do in improv class.

In my case, and I have to think for many parents, the problem is simply access to time – between work and family time, reading a novel is a luxury, and pulling out the canvas and oil paints that I have had in storage for eight years and never touched is totally out of the question. Having read David Shenk’s Genius in All of Us and Gladwell’s Outliers recently, I do think there is something to this 10,000 hour idea — that it takes a certain amount of time to gain mastery of anything, and once you do you enjoy a virtuous cycle of affirmation and more practice, all of which makes possible a level of creative expression that is not possible without the base level skills.

I discussed this with David (Shenk) over a drink some months ago, and he seemed to think that part of why a disproportionate number of extraordinary acts of creation and discovery (the writing of important novels, scientific breakthroughs, and so on) happen before people have kids is not that we get stupider, but that it becomes harder to sustain the level of focus, and the time commitment, necessary to gain new levels of mastery.

I like to think there is a way to engage passionately in various pursuits and while being a non-negligent parent, maybe even a reasonably good one. Lord knows many of the greatest artists, businesspeople, thinkers and scientists have been lousy parents, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s a zero sum game. I like to think giving your kids an example of a parent who deeply enjoy what they do is a gift of sorts. And I like Mom of Two’s point that these two identities can inform one another.