Do You Have Grit?

What’s something you did as a kid that was strange?

[Note: Audio is best played at 1.25x…OpenAI’s TTS defaults to a speed that almost sounds like the voice is on Quaaludes…]

Deep Dive Summary

---

Nothing bothers me more than being behind on a committed timeframe or deadline. It just gnaws at me. I mention this because I said this would be a monthly newsletter and August seemed to get away from me. No excuses, but I was really, really busy with a few unexpected matters. As we approached the end of the month, I had planned on detailing the results of a N-of-1 experiment which I expect will demonstrate a significant lowering of LDL, not with a pharmaceutical, but with good old fashioned Psyllium husk The real stuff, not the processed Metamucil stuff our grandparents used to use. My at-home finger sticks showed a great downward trend on LDL with Psyllium, but I have been waiting on the results to verify with venous draws with function health. Among other things, I had a third-party dependency on my planned August post which is often the cause for most scheduling slippages. Enough of the excuses, but please accept this short place-holder question in the meantime: Do You Have Grit?

---

Listening to a recent MFM podcast, I heard the mention of an interesting interview question - “What’s something you did as a kid that was considered strange?” I have heard Y-combinator and McKinsey have questions like this in their screening processes. I think questions like these are largely to assess grit, since if as a kid you still did your own thing despite (or in spite of) adolescent peer pressure, you’re likely going to be more predisposed to doing this as an adult.

For me - two things come to mind - one physical and one mental: Fence walking and coding without a hard drive.

Fence Walking

When I was in fourth grade, we moved to Long Grove, IL. For those not familiar, Long Grove is a “rural burb” northwest of Chicago. This was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it was a great place to play outside. We were also far enough from others to have many a night of those midnight and beyond music jams during high school (at the other end of our house of course). To this day, those experiences at the Long Grove house were hugely formative for me especially for present day hobbies.

Our property was also big enough to let our two big German Shepherds run outside without a leash. Even today, I can’t possibly own a dog with present day leash laws. It’s just too cruel in my opinion. Also, nothing is more wrong in my mind than to have to follow your dog with a plastic bag and pickup their poop. I often chuckle on walks when I see dogs looking back at their owners with looks in their eyes that to me clearly say, “that’s right bitch, pickup my sh…t.” But I digress.

It was also a curse living in the “sticks” because we lived “far” from others. It wasn’t really that far, maybe a few miles, but just enough to struggle to get into carpools for activities or events. If I wanted to play a sport, I had to figure out how to get to most if not all the practices and games. Also, having closest neighbors 1/2 a mile or more away inhibited things like trick-or-treating, which Kirsten, Lili and Hannah know why I have never enjoyed Halloween.

You would think the carpool challenge would be the grit-inducing thing, but it was actually more from activities like “fence-walking.” We had ~7 acres, a small pond which didn’t quite classify as a lake, and horses. The backyard was at least 5-6 of those acres and had a perimeter fence. When we got rid of the horses (which also built a bit of grit when the barn was 100+ yards from the house and I had to shovel a path during the worse snow storms), I later had to cut that massive lawn. Even with a driving mower, it often took most the day. We used to joke that we could hear the grass grow and once you finished cutting, you had to start over again the next day. Hmm, definitely a common theme during those Long Grove years.

To a kid always looking for new challenges, having 5-acres of property with a fence simply called for trying to walk the full perimeter on the top board. It wasn’t quite like climbing Everest, but when you’re 8 years-old (I started school early) and 50-60 pounds soaking-wet, each fall was quite the experience - especially those that went into the forest. Fortunately, there were posts every 8-10 feet or so, so there were opportunities to stabilize. Doesn’t sound too tough, but my gritty-little self made it a game that if (and when) I fell, I had to pick my often bruised, cut-up self and go back to the starting point and start all over from the beginning.

I often spent hours at a time walking, falling, resetting. Rinse-and-repeat. Nothing was more painful than being a few posts away from the starting-point, or worse yet, at the post before the starting point, wiping-out and having to start again. It literally took months over a couple summers before I could achieve the feat.

So much was learned during that time aside from the obvious: It’s critical to maintain balance, keep momentum moving forward, pause and rest only when you really need to, etc. Other life lessons included: keep looking forward, always important to set mini-goals en route towards larger ones, be ready to fall and have to start again, and most importantly: when you’re about to reach a goal, pretend you still have a way to go (i.e. move the goal-post) and only celebrate the big accomplishment AFTER you have achieved it. The probability of failing just before achieving a big goal is much higher if you are focusing on the finish line.

Coding Without A Hard-Drive

On the more mental side of grit (though arguably even physical grit involves mental grit), I was early into programming. That in itself should tell you something. This was late 70’s, early 80’s. Not many of us nerds around then. I wasn’t one of those Heathkit or Commodore kids (those keyboards drove me nuts), but I did have an early RadioShack TRS-80. Keep in mind, this was YEARS before Gates - who was in his 20’s - negotiated with IBM that big deal to bring DOS to the IBM PC. It was even before floppy disks were readily available, let alone hard-drives. For those who remember, the only way we had to save our programs (written in BASIC) was via a cassette recorder. CSAVE and CLOAD - i.e. cassette save and cassette load - became the bane of my existence since >70% of the time after a CSAVE, the CLOAD would fail! Looking back, wouldn’t it have been nice to have a “CLOAD?” which would have tested if the save was successful WITHOUT blasting away the code you had written? Maybe this functionality became available, but I think in the beginning a CLOAD would always wipe what you had in memory regardless of a successful restore.

Anyway, I used to write thousands of lines of code for many hours, CSAVE it and get some rest and pick-up the next day or so. Some days I would leave the machine powered on over night knowing the CSAVE/CLOAD failure rate, but it never failed someone in the house would turn the machine off…

With a 70+% CLOAD failure rate, I often had to start from scratch - not unlike falling off the fence and start again. Suffice it to say, it definitely improved my coding skills. But unlike fence walking, which I stopped after achieving that goal, I have been coding for almost a half-century. I’ve literally written millions of lines of code across several different languages (often combining multiple languages) and to this day I save very frequently. Saving along the way is a bit like those fence posts that I so depended on during those grit-building fence-walking year(s).

---

Because August was crazy busy, we didn’t have time to coordinate many music mixes. So for a clip, I pulled from the recent archives. TimD, JesseH (that gum chewing and playing guitar thing is awesome…), AlanW, and I went for it with “Comfortably Numb.” I tend not to be a fan of long guitar solos, but these guys were on fire that night. The Comfortably Numb tune is also fitting giving the subject matter of this post. Funny - the last time I played this was back in Long Grove music porch era (circa 1983-4). Not sure though, those “jams” often involved a bit of drinking and other stuff. Nobody drove of course. Everyone spent the night, we had plenty of room:

---