Three to Read: Self-Improvement Edition

Yes, the New Year is well underway and right now, most of the world has taken a New Year's Resolution or two and without any sort of scientific measure, my guess is that a fair number of people are approaching the two-three week mark and that commitment that was felt at the start of the month is beginning to wane.

Now, don't feel bad.  Part of the problem with New Year's resolutions, whether they are a matter of losing weight, or working out, or cleaning you house, budget or what ever, is that doing anything new over the long term takes a while to build the habit.  So here are some tips for helping you do that:

First, Make your Commitment Public
First from Stever Robbins, the Get It Done Guy on Quick and Dirty Tips.  The first thing to do is don't call them resolutions, call them commitments.  Next, this tip I love:

Now it's your turn. Once you've found your driving passions, find someone you trust and respect. Make them a promise about the steps you'll take to reach your passions more directly than you're doing now. You needn’t make a total life change, just promise to take the first few steps with limits in place to keep you safe. Then put your promise in writing and sign it. You'll feel your entire being start to gear up to make it happen.

It is the publicness of the commitment that may be the key to making the "resolution" stick.  You are free to put down below to put one of your New Year's Commitment, but it doesn't have to be put on the interwebs, maybe making the commitment to your significant other or a good friend.  

Make Steady Consistent Progress to Achieve Your Goal

Most of the resolutions people make have no mechanism of measurement, i.e. lose weight, or work out more, don't cut it.  so I am going to assume that you are smart enough to know that you have to be able to measure your progress at the end.  So what is next?  Well, Brett and Kate McKay of the Art of Manliness (if you are a man or know a man, this is a fraking BRILLIANT website that you should check out), have a question:  What is your 20 Mile March?  In other words, what is your daily task that you will do to achieve your goal, no matter what is happening, whether you are having a good day or a bad day.

The McKays talk about a book called Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen (I have not read the book myself, but I have read Good to Great by Collins and thought it a brilliant read, so Great by Choice is high on my "to read" list).  Collins and Hansen and the McKays discuss the race between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole.  Amundsen succeeded where Scott did not because Amundsen developed a plan and methodically stuck to the plan, no matter what the conditions were.  This is not to say that Scott didn't haave a plan, only that Amundsen's success was, according to Collins and Hansen, the product of methodical adherence to the plan, even with the days were good.  

Collins and Hansen took the phrase 20 Mile March from a man who methodically walked 20 miles a day in an effort to walk across the United States.  The man walked 20 miles no matter what the weather conditions, rather than walking 40-50 miles a day in good weather and only a few miles or no miles when the weather was bad.  Similarly, Amundsen's team went 15 miles a day, no more on the good days, and no less on bad days.  

The lesson from the cross-country walker and Roald Amundsen is clear, stead progress will achieve the goal faster than spurts of huge success followed by no progress.  So develop a plan, with clear interim goals and every day make progress toward that goal.  For help, here is a list of seven attributes of a good plan that you should consider:

1. Clear performance markers
2. Self-imposed constraints
3. Appropriate to the individual
4. Largely within your control
5. A proper time frame -- long enough to manage, yet short enough to have teeth
6. Designed and self-imposed by the individual
7. Achieved with high consistency

Of course none of these attributes is "magical" but a plan built around these principles will yield success far more often than failure, consideration of all seven attributes is key to success.

Resolutions Crash on the Shores of Failed Habit Formation
The most fundamental reason why resolutions fail has little to do with the actual resolution (in most cases--a resolution to build a rocket to the moon in the next year is not practical).  Rather most New Year's Resolutions fail because we do not allow enough time or make enough of an effort to build the new habit.  

If you Google how long it takes to form a new habit, you will get an answer of anywhere between 21 days and 28 days.  Well, that may be possible, if the habit is something simple, but in reality, our New Year's resolutions are rarely simple and the require the creation of new neural pathways so that the effort to achieve a resolution becomes a habit (a good habit obviously).  Jeremy Dean, author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits, in 2009 briefly highlighted a study out of England which suggested that habits can take as few as 18 days to form and as many as 254 days.  However, the key finding is that it takes on average 66 days for a new habit to become ingrained in our neural pathways and become automatic behavior.  

So now that we are at about the three week stage (21 days), on average you will need another 45 days (or over six weeks) to keep building that habit until it become a truly automatic habit.  The study found that early repetition is key to forming the habit.

So whether your habit to lose weight (the most common among New Year's Resolution) takes the form of eating healthier foods, eating less or working out (second most common resolution), the fact is it could take almost 8 months to form that habit.  Which is why the development of a plan, and a consistent, measurable effort every day is key to making your Resolutions Come true.



I don't mean to be a downer, truly I don't.  So for all of you out there who made a resolution, feel free to share it below.  I would love to hear about it.  Tell me your goal and your deadline.  

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Check out my soccer blog at Nutmegs and Stepovers

Three to Read--Higher Education Edition

Last month, my oldest child turned 11, that means in seven years she will be making a decision about going to college and which college to attend.  Considering that eight years ago, just after her birthday, we were in London and that seems like just yesterday, higher education is starting to creep in to my mind (not to mention the difficulty of paying for said higher education--scholarships anyone?).  So, here are a few higher education related stories:

The Cost Driver Behind that Big Tuition Bill--Administrators!
Tuition continues to rise, outstripping inflation in most cases, despite efforts by some states to institute tuition freezes and the like.  What is driving those costs--administrative bloat perhaps?  Benjamin Ginsburg at Minding the Campus talks about wasteful administrators.  First the history:

Today's great universities were created by faculty who-contrary to the myth of the impractical professor-often turned out to be excellent entrepreneurs and managers.  Over the last several decades, however, America's universities have been taken over by a burgeoning class of administrators and staffers determined to transform colleges into top-heavy organizations run by inept bureaucrats. 

To professors, the purpose of the university is education and research, and the institution is a means of accomplishing these ends.  To the professional deanlets and deanlings, though, the means has become the end.  Teaching and research have been relegated to vehicles for generating revenue by attracting customers to what administrators view as a business-an emporium that under the management of the deanlets may be peddling increasingly shoddy goods. 

Next, an example of the problem:

One typical example of administrative bloat and its consequences was illustrated by the American Association of University Professors and featured in a 2012 report by John Hechinger of Bloomberg News.  Between 2001 and 2010, the number of tenure and tenure-track faculty at Purdue, of one of America's great land grant universities, increased 12 percent while the number of graduate teaching assistants actually declined by 26 percent.  Student enrollments in this decade increased by about 5 percent. 

During the same period, though, the number of administrators employed by the university increased by an astonishing 58 percent and resident tuition rose from just under $1400 to nearly $9000 per year in a pattern that appears highly correlated with administrative growth.  One $172,000 per year associate vice provost had been hired to oversee the work of committees charged with considering a change in the academic calendar-a change that had not yet even been approved.  Since the average Purdue graduate leaves school with about $27,000 in debt, the salary of this functionary is equivalent to the education loans of six students.
           
This new administrator blithely told the Bloomberg reporter, "My job is to make sure these seven or eight committees are aware of what's going on in the other committees."  At the same school, the chief marketing officer earns $253,000 and the chief diversity officer $198,000 per year.  The marketing officer spent $500,000 to "rebrand" the university, developing the slogan, "We are Purdue. Makers, all. What we make moves the world forward."  Very catchy, indeed!  Perhaps the marketing department could develop a slogan that would help explain to parents and students why they must take on more and more debt to pay the salaries of ever-growing hordes of administrative parasites. 

A statistical model and a solution:

A recent paper by two respected economists, Robert Martin and R. Carter Hill, shows that the fiscally optimal ratio of administrators to faculty at research universities is one full-time administrator for every three faculty.    Deviations from this ratio produced significantly higher costs per student.  The unfortunate reality as Martin and Hill found is that the ratio has almost been reversed--2 administrators to one faculty.  Martin and Hill's findings suggest, moreover, that about two-thirds of the growth in higher education costs between 1987 and 2008 can be attributed to the rise of administrative power during this period.

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I would suggest-and I fully recognize the mischievous nature of this suggestion--that university, and perhaps other non-profit boards as well, should be subject to the requirements of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act from which they are currently exempt.  For most schools, this would entail enhanced Board accountability for administrative actions, the creation of an independent audit committee, an organizational procedure for the protection of whistle blowers, a formal process for the identification and selection of new board members and a strengthening of conflict of interest rules.          

I believe that if Board members were legally more accountable for administrative conduct they would be more cautious about whom they hired to manage the university and would also pay closer attention to what those individuals did once appointed. Perhaps if they were held to account, Boards would be careful not to turn over their campuses to the high-handed and profligate presidents who seem all too common in the world of higher education.  Indeed, in order to avoid trouble, Boards might even find it useful to fully consult the faculty on matters of administrative hiring and retention.

Read the whole thing.

Social Education for Professionals
I do not find it surprising that too many of our recent college graduates have no idea how to navigate even the most basic challenges of the work world.  I have seen for myself some of the most basic failings, such as recent graduates and near graduates coming to interviews in wholly inappropriate attire, inability to talk about even the most recent news in a small talk environment, or new hires who consider office hours to be an "optional" concern.  Part of the problem is that these young people never learned them at home (a fact of life that will be addressed in my household).  So colleges are offering optional "etiquette" courses:

More than a third of managers think their youngest hires act less professionally than their predecessors, according to a national survey by the Center for Professional Excellence at York College in Pennsylvania. 

“A good resume and a degree only gets you to the table,” says Matthew Randall, the center’s director. “Professional behaviors are what gets you a job. And what colleges are trying to do is help these students develop the behaviors that employers want.”

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And it’s not just communicating that appears to challenge this latest group of college students. It’s mingling, networking, handling conflict, eating—even dressing.

“Students don’t really know what’s meant by professional dress, whether it’s a young lady wearing a skirt that’s way too short or a young man whose pants aren’t really tailored,” says MIT’s Hamlett. “Most students just roll out of bed in whatever it is they want to wear. There’s this ‘come as you are’ about being a college student.”

Colleges blame in part an entitlement mentality of the millennial generation raised by helicopter parents hovering so much, but certainly the art of face to face communication and social aptitude are disappearing.  





College Preparation Gap?
Of greater concern to many college professors and education thinkers is the lack of preparation among high school students for college.  Check out the infographic about preparation conducted by Hobson's.

Some key take-aways:

• 92% of high school students say they are going to college, but only 68% actually enroll and fewer still graduate within 6 years of matriculation.
• More than 2 out of 3 students (69%) were very concerned or extremely concerned about their academic preparation for college.  Which is not surprising since....
• 1 out of every 2 new students in two year colleges are placed in remedial classes.  Among new enrollees of four year colleges, 1 in 5 find themselves in remedial classes.  Student concerns about preparedness are not unfounded.

So there is room for criticism in our secondary education system as well.

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Check out my soccer blog at Nutmegs and Stepovers