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Finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii...That's right, finally got one after 3 months of solid searching.
Its amazing how long it took along with the price I had to pay in getting it with like 7 other games for the bundle package. Sons of @%#@#'s couldn't sell it separately so I had to buy it in a damn monster pack. Other than that, its another distraction that I have yet to find time for. This semester is going to be hard as hell.
The Supers are among us. Saturday in Costco they were apparent everywhere mingling with us ordinary folks.
BLINKER BOY – You sat in your powder blue minivan tending your liver spots waiting for someone to move their car out of a prime spot. There wasn’t anyone even walking to a car in that lane, but you know that time and numbers are on your side. You’re also savvy enough to know that if you let another car pass, they may get to a spot first. So you block. And you wait. In the middle. Staking out that lane as yours and creating havoc behind you. Left blinker on if someone walks down the left side of the row, quickly switching to right blinker if they cross. Hazards if they change rows in the middle. I was the guy who lured you to the end of the row by pretending to unlock the silver Acura, only to walk away when you got close. The people you were blocking thanked me.
THERMODYNAMICS GIRL. You demonstrate that energy input in the form of food, minus energy expended in the form of exercise yields energy stored in the form of lard. I passed you repeatedly over the hour I was in the store. Certainly you could’ve found SOMETHING to buy after all this time. Then, I see. It’s not a shopping trip, it’s a free lunch. And that’s not a cart. It’s a walker. You heave your enormous, flabby arms and boobs over the edge of the cart and lean on it as you make your glacial progress from free sample to free sample. You use your cart/walker like a bulldozer in your quest to reach the Holy Grail; a Dixie Cup of Rock Star Energy Drink. The lady in the hairnet becomes your own personal drive-thru. I particularly liked how you asked if there were other flavors to try and took one for the road. The BBQ meatballs were a whole two aisles away.
ROUNDABOUT MAN. You parked yourself and your cart in the middle of the intersection of two shopping aisles strategically angled so as to occupy as much physical space as possible. While you forced traffic to direct itself in circles around you like a bunch of badly dressed Renaults circling the Arc de Triumph you were licking (tongue hanging out LICKING!) the inside of a spent paper cup full of Chicken Creamy Supreme. The look of confusion you gave when I told you to get the f%$^* out of the way was made funnier by the leftover cream sauce in your scraggly mustache.
THE SCREAMING EAGLES. The most lethal bunch in the store, led by a person to whom conscience and self-awareness are weaknesses to be exploited in others. She enters the store like a normal mom with three kids. Once inside, the disguise is removed, goggles flip down and she stares unwaveringly at her attack plan disguised as a shopping list. With trained efficiency, her cadre of small, fast and determined fighter escorts fan out alongside where they make sorties to various end-caps, sample stations and electronics displays. While docked with the mother ship, they effectively block passers and send other shoppers diving down the snack row for safety. They dive in and out of crowds knocking people and products over and come out unscathed, holding bags of Chicken Wings and Jalapeno Poppers. The most promising disciple is named Godzilla, for his ability to scatter Asian women with his stomping, screaming temper tantrums.
THE STROLLER Your name is a reference to the speed of your progress which resembles nothing so much as a nice little stroll on a sunny spring day in the garden. Determined to make your fellow shoppers slow down and smell the roses you set the speed limit for whichever aisle you’re in. It’s like following a school bus down a two lane road. I tried a bit of method acting and matched your pace, just to see what goes through the mind of someone so utterly lacking in ambition and purpose. All I could envision is how little I wanted to finish and be forced to go home to the gold and green shag carpeted, wood paneled house that smells like yesterday’s Depends.
And my favorite – SUPERBOWL CONSUMER MAN! You were disguised in gray Champion sweats and a football jersey (making a triumphant homecoming to their place of purchase). Your tan Velcro Rockports were the sole give-away to the fact that you haven’t strung together three running steps since Ike died. An off-brand 42 inch flat screen TV was parked on the big flat dolly with no company other than an enormous log of Velveeta cheese-flavored-food-product. You would have blended in nicely if you hadn’t decided to take your entire purchase with you through the line to get a Polish dog and Diet Coke. Or was it a Chicken Bake, you man of mystery you? You were clearly proud of your purchase because you talked about it loudly the entire time. And if we needed a reminder that you’re a big spender, you banged the evidence against our shins and plowed into tables as you strutted through the concession pushing inaccurately with one hand and one elbow while filling your grill with the other.
What It Takes to Be Great
Fortune on CNNMoney.com
By Geoffrey Colvin
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard workWhat makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.
Well, folks, it's not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don't exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that's demanding and painful.
Go to CNNMoney.com to see what kind of manager you are.
manager quizBuffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.
Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."
To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.
The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.
Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.
No substitute for hard work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.
So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?
Practice makes perfect
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.
Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."
Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance. The skeptics
Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?
Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.
Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.
Real-world examples
All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.
Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)
In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.
The business side
The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.
Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.
Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.
Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
Adopting a new mindset
Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.
Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.
Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.
Be the ball
Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.
Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.
That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.
The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."
The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.
Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.
In tribute to an older thread characterizing college students, I have decided to extend it into the world of working out. In this thread you will find just about 99% of the people that you'll encounter in an everyday workout at your local gym.
THE MASSIVE BODY BUILDER:
These men are generally too repulsive to look at for very long at all. They are so juiced up on anabolic steroids that their veins appear to be escaping their body, not to mention they are probably wearing a shirt that exposes every bit of their injected glory. You will know immediately that one of these guys is in the gym when you walk in, since they are making a loud, painful sound that sets your' first thought to seeing them try and pick up a large truck, but really they are in the middle of their 7th set of bicep curls with the 85 pound dumbell. Care to avoid these gentlemen? Not a problem. These guys spend the majority of their life in the free-weights, squats, and dead lift section, as these are the essentials to their brick wall of a body. 0% visibility is best achieved in cardio. The body builder is so unconcerned with burning fat and calories that he won't give a treadmill a second glance.
THE UNDER-DEVELOPED PUNK:
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have these poor excuses for gym goers. If you see them once, you will rarely see them again as they will fail at just about everything they try. This person is wearing clothing completely inappropriate to put your body through stress in and is mainly concerned with appearance. They will have on baggy cargo shots, skateboard punk shoes, an incorrectly worn hat, and a baggy shirt generally with a hardcore band or a typical brandname like Billabong on it. If you watch carefully, they won't do anything. They're so skinny and weak that they will pick up random excercises for unmeasured amounts of time and move on when the bone in their elbow gets tired. Sometimes they might come with a friend who IS in shape for compensation. They will spend 45 to 230 minutes at the straight bench press and call it a day. They will strut to every station as well.
THE SOCIALIZING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS:
Usually football players fill this role who are off season. They all get together and stand around a straight bench with a shit load of weight on it and talk. They may get 1 or 2 sets done but only with help and only of 8 reps because that's how their retarded football coach has brainwashed them into things. Then you have the cheerleaders. These girls will purposely wear skimpy clothing for attention and come in packs of 2 to 4. They will accompany eachother upstairs and commence a cardio workout for exactly 4 and a half minutes until they leave again. They will only use 2 stations, the elipticals and the stationary sit down bicycles (not the actual stationary bikes, but the ones that don't do anything for you and have enough room to bake cookies on). Both of these two groups will spend the majority of their time in loud self contained conversation until they have satisfied their personal gym effect quota and all leave to go drink.
THE DESPERATE OLD GUYS:
The prime of their life has come and gone for these men, but they are still determined to make those biceps grow and that chest puff out. They will be very hard working, and often stop to talk to someone who was with them in Vietnam or another old gym goer. These men love the cable exercises. The stabilization effect along with the safety of them is right up their alley. They would get more done than anyone else if they weren't spending half their time going to get paper towels to clean up their puddles of sweat. Next to the boby builder, you will see this guy in the gym the most.
THE CONTENT HOUSEWIFE:
These women are at the gym quite often and their workout is probably fit into a weekly schedule. They spend the majority of their visit in cardio, the stretching mats, or the extra-light freeweight section. Do NOT make eye contact with them, as they will glare back at you under the suspicion that you are visually criticizing them. They seem pleased with their work outs 100% of the time and top each one off with a 15 minute flat line no resistance course on the slide step machine while reading a cooking magazine.
THE TOP HEAVY BUISNESS EXECTUTIVE:
These guys are the CEOs and Presidents of their huge companies that retreat to the gym to pump dailey stress out through effort and delay seeing their money leech of a wife for another 2 hours. They focus on solely upper body strength as well, leaving their chicken legs to cower under the well worked chest and arms. Usually clad in a longsleeve or tight plain T-shirt, but still with their bluetooth attached, they will work extremely efficiently and longer than most others then drive away in their Jag or Mercedes.
KIDS ON STEROIDS:
Although not nearly as common as the socializing high school students or the massive body builder, you still find one of these at any gym. This kid gave up a long time ago on the natural methods of attracting women. He has instead turned to unhealthy hours in the weightroom and anabolic supplements to speed up the explosion of his appendeges. Usually considered an ass hole since he will try to show off by spending a lot of time on bench and very heavy bicep and tricep curls.
It's easy to spot these kids since theyre wearing an Abercrombie or a FOX Motorsports shirt that is clearly too small for them. For advanced warning, look for their souped up Jetta or Civic in the parking lot with an innapropriate sticker on the back windshield.
MOST EVERYONE ESLE:
Anyone else you might see is most likely too common to be listed under one of our categories. Sure you're going to find the occasional crazy person or a ballet dancer or something, but generally just people trying to get into shape. If you can really think of another category that applies to all gyms around the country, then please share it with us.