If you can measure it, you might fix it
Keith
If this is your first visit, I suggest starting from the earliest article. Unless you enjoy stories that start in the middle and you plan to loop back for the rest later. In which case, carry on!
When I graduated from High School, I followed Jon to the UW. Not a good way to choose a college, I don’t recommend it. But it worked out ok. It probably illustrates that we worry way too much about where kids will go to college. It probably doesn’t matter all that much. (But of course you should still choose UW Madison, obviously.)
People think that you need to choose a college for particular academic reasons, or a “good fit” or whatnot. What I will say, looking back, is that none of that matters. Any decent accredited college is pretty much like another. The way I know this is that after many years of swearing up and down that I would never go to the University of Wisconsin because that’s where everybody went, I went there, had a great time, and got a world-class education. It was big, and impersonal, just as you’d expect. But I had a crush on Jon, so I followed him there.
When I showed up at Sellery Hall with my parents on the morning of move-in day, we parked exactly where Jon and our friend Steve, then “Badger Buddies,” told us to. The moment the dorm opened, they swarmed out with two rolling laundry bins, unloaded the car, got the elevator in the basement up to the second floor, and had everything into my room before my parents or I even realized what was happening. That’s a hallmark of competence, by the way, figuring out the sneakiest efficiencies.
It’s not line-jumping if you finish your business before anyone else even realizes business can be done. I try always to do that. I learned that early and made use of it in college. In a school as big as the UW, you can take a straight line ordinary list of classes to get the credits you need. Or you can do not-that. You can read the whole catalog, find interesting seminars on strange topics, and fill requirements with “Dramatic Literature: Evil, Bad, and Naughtiness” by getting into it with the help of an upperclassman friend registering for it early and then dropping it just before your turn to add classes. (That totally was line-jumping, and something colleges quickly learned to prevent, but those automated systems were new when I was in school, and full of loopholes.)
So I diligently worked my way through a Bachelor of Science degree at the University I swore I’d never go to. Quickly realized that Physics wasn’t the fun I thought it was in high school. It’s basically just useful math. So I switched to an English degree (yes, l have a B.S. in English Literature. You could probably tell by my writing. Weird right?) I took a lot of science and every other fun class I could find that fit a degree requirement, and a few that didn’t. I learned that my flat tuition rate entitled me to take as few as twelve or as many as eighteen credits. I know a bargain when I see one. If it costs the same amount for twelve or eighteen, obviously eighteen is the better deal. So I took a LOT of classes. Still finished in four years somehow. More, I think, because I delighted in fitting classes into schedules and making all of the credits work out perfectly. I loved gaming the system. And it would have broken my schedule-loving heart to do anything other than finish precisely on time.
It would be hard to list the many competent people I met in college. But I will introduce you to a few. (You saw a name up in the subtitle and are probably glancing at your watch wondering if I’ll ever get to him. Yes.) My first and second years I lived in the Arts & Sciences Honors House, Detling House, in Sellery Hall. That was a short-lived experiment in what is now common in dorms, housing people of particular interests together in “living learning communities.” I’m guessing (from the fact that they killed our beloved Honors House) that the UW considered it an abject failure. The number of drop-outs, eight-year-plan students, miscreants, and hijinks that would have felt at home in an 80’s sitcom may have contributed to their evaluation. But from the perspective of the residents, it was an unalloyed good. We had the best college years, and bonded like we’d bathed in Gorilla Glue (or Gorrilla Glue maybe. Inside joke.)
While this motley crew exhibited nothing-like-competence (or, arguably, “misdirected competence”) a lot of the time, I would argue that everyone on Detling was competent in some ways. Everyone was surely quite competent at academics (though with varying willingness to commit to it), and less competent at what we now call “executive functioning.” We had no perceptible structure or contact with the Honors Program at all that I can recall. Which in hindsight seems weird. Let’s put most of our prize students into a dorm together and then ignore them and hope for the best. Good plan UW. Fortunately Universities have learned a lot since then and those sorts of houses work better now.
Heaven help our poor Housefellows. The one on Detling my Freshman year wasn’t even an Honors student herself if I recall correctly. She did her best though with her assortment of undiagnosed Autistic people, introverts, unsocialized oddballs, people who never had to study a day in their lives (some of whom suddenly had to learn, and others who skated through college as well), on top of the usual co-ed dorm college shenanigans. Melanie deserved sainthood. But I don’t think they award that to RAs.
It was on Detling that I learned about specialization. We were all good at particular things (some people were good at many things). And Detling as an organism was outstanding at distributing tasks to accomplish goals. Weird goals. Goals that might have no real purpose. Kind-of “goal-less” goals really. (I expect the throne made of empty aluminum cans is still kicking around UW Housing storage rooms to this day, or maybe it evolved and appeared on that one “throne” show.) But anyway, about the people.
Finding the person who knows someone, or has a car, or can help with a particular class, or who knows a part of campus intimately, or who will be the earliest person on the floor to register...that’s a skill, and one that a group can have and share. Competent people know how to get things done, regardless of who needs to do the work. Competent groups muddle through by distributing tasks.
As you might expect, Detling was thick with geeks, and most of them technology geeks. I was not much of a computer person when I started college. I had one, and used it to write papers or play a game or two, but I wasn’t “into” computers at all at the time. (Arguably I’ve never been “into” computers in spite of my almost three decades doing IT work of many kinds.) Detling changed me from “meh computers” to “fine, computers then.”
Having “friends” who came in, copied the hard drive and trash icons on your early Macintosh, pasted them on your desktop, then selected and copied them again, and again, until your entire screen is filled with hard drive and trash icons to the point where you cannot find the originals...well you have a choice at that point. Either you up-skill quickly and give as good as you get, or you throw away the computer and pick up a few stone tablets and a chisel.
I participated in one adventure to change a friend’s Windows color scheme to all black (black text, black backgrounds, black icons, black everything). Another “friend” found the system settings backup floppy disk and changed the colors there too. I was not the one who waited until a friend went to work immediately after unboxing a new Mac, and set the machine to record audio. Which it dutifully did for hours. And hard-drives being a tad on the smallish side back then…that filled every byte of free space. If you know anything about deleting files…then you know you have to have a bit of space free to do it. Again, that one was not me, though I might have been nearby not preventing it either.
After a year of that sort of thing, when my friend Ed, an older Detlingite, got a new campus job, he kindly pipelined me right into his old one doing tech support at the Health Sciences Library. Which set me up for a career.
Ok, I did say I’d tell you more about the Detlingites. Folks who were good at making things happen, very driven individuals. I don’t know that any of us then was what I’m describing as “Competent.” None of us was the whole package. But a couple of these folks are that now, and even then you could see it coming. I’d like to start with one of those, Keith. (Owner of the audio-filled Mac.)
Keith is Competent now because his defining trait is self-improvement. Keith believes in measuring things, but particularly himself. He sees a goal, sets it, identifies a methodology, defines metrics, and then scrupulously records data points and takes action until that goal is achieved. I strongly suspect that Keith never stops measuring something once he starts. Take Keith’s personal health and fitness goals, for example. In college, Keith (like most of us) wasn’t exactly what you would call “careful” about diet and exercise. Sometime after college, his health became a priority, which meant it was a focus, which meant that he investigated options, picked things to measure, and began rigorous activities around health improvement and maintenance.
This was long before Fitbit or other wearables. Keith loves technology, but he achieves goals with or without tools to make that easier. Keith succeeded. He’s probably in better shape on every important metric of health than many of my professionally-health-conscious friends are. I don’t mean four or five normal metrics, I mean at least a dozen sophisticated and well-researched metrics. Because Keith is thoroughly versed in measuring exactly the right things, knowing that what you measure is what you can change. Thirty years on he’s got better fitness than most college students.
That’s one example of self-improvement as Competence skill. Keith has been in IT for his entire career, and has done a lot of things with it, but if I had to describe what his life’s work is, I would call it project management. He might have other words. He’s a Technophile yes. A Futurephile even. But his true “gifts” (I call them gifts, but he has employed them as skills in ways that remediate his weaknesses. Just because something comes naturally doesn’t mean it’s not also an area of focus and achievement) are those things that put someone in the top 1% of well-organized. In the past twenty years I would be gobsmacked to learn that anything in Keith’s sphere of control has “fallen through the cracks.” There are no cracks perceivable to observers in Keith’s area of effect.
There are aspects of that that I’ll describe with other examples, but the one I’d like to focus on is actually that idea of organization. That’s what sticks out when I think of Keith. Nothing important is ever haphazard with him. It’s difficult to pick that apart from being goal-driven (which Keith is) or meticulous (so meticulous), but it is a precise skill of its own.
I can say with certainty that “organization” takes many forms. That’s a skill I claim as my own as well. But I don’t keep things organized with at all the same techniques Keith does. Keith is “inbox Zero,” 6-Sigma belted, framework-adherent, everything-in-its-place organized. Whereas I posted a gleeful picture on Facebook when my phone’s unread email notification bubble hit 200K, and I’ve never met a framework or management fad that I couldn’t laugh at. Organization comes in many forms. But the fact of being organized, and passionate about the importance of it, is the skill Keith highlights. Competent people keep track of the important things. Competent people are Organized. Keith is the most organized person I know. And Keith grew that skill.
Let me skip back to when I first knew Keith. He had only hints of what he would someday become. He was what I would call “particular” then. Despite brilliance and keen academic skill, Keith wasn’t initially as successful with college as he might have been if he’d been the disciplined organizational wizard he is now. But Keith isn’t one to leave a personal flaw in place. My take is that when he didn’t meet his own academic expectations he set about remedying that. He found that being organized (keeping track of requirements, prioritizing work, and focusing on priorities to achieve them,) could be used to supplement areas of weakness (like the discipline he was not alone among college students in lacking). Keith takes a systematic approach to analyzing a deficit, measuring it in every particular, tracking it, seeking methods to overcome it, and eventually turning it into a reliable skill, if not an actual strength. Discipline is one of those areas for him. He overshot that mark by a few light years.
This is what competent people do to become Competent people. “Oh, success requires X? Ok, then I will become competent at X.” Eventually they have A through Z competencies and then they’ve basically evolved into this force-multiplier I’m describing to you. These are the people who can pick up almost anything and figure it out, gather a team, make something successful, bring people along, bring out the best in others...all of these skills. Somewhere there’s a “you know that person” we all have met, but along the spectrum to that are some impressive people, which Keith has always been. Organization for Keith is a fundamental skill from his “starter kit” that he built up to mastery, and it’s helped him to acquire others he lacked.
If you think about the old “people never change” saw, Keith is proof positive that people do. People do and can. I think it’s possible to acquire most or all of the skills these articles describe. Want to be Competent? Maybe inventory your competencies, decide if you agree with the list I’m building, and if you do, start working on the gaps. Or work your own set! Follow Keith’s example. Pick a goal, find a way to build to it, pick some metrics, and buckle down.