If given the choice, I would not clone myself at all. You know what the world needs? The world needs more sunshine and rainbows. You know what the world does not need? More of me.

There’s already 60 lbs. more of me than 18 months ago, and now you’re asking me to double that? That catastrophic failure speaks more to my emotional state over the past year and a half than anything, and I’m still not quite sure how to fix it. But if you cloned me, would you really want to have to watch that happen twice? That would not only dangerously overload the floor of my condo, but also dangerously deplete the food supply in this local area. Soon, my fat ass would slowly waddle elsewhere in search of food, spreading like an enormous, slow locust that will eventually consume all.

Of course, if I did clone myself, I’d probably just end up jealous of the other clone. He’d go to work while I stayed home and worked on the novel, and he’s suddenly have this massive breakthrough at work that garnered him fame and fortune, leading him to a private island in the Bahamas that I’m not allowed to visit. Meanwhile, my “novel time” would have instead been consumed by pissing away the time listening to baseball and watching Netflix, so I’d end up destitute and desperate as the work money from my other half dried up. No, that would cause to many problems.

Maybe I could work in cooperation with my clone, but that poses other problems. I don’t think I’d like working with me. I think I’d drive me crazy, which would lead to resentment. And since I’d naturally live with my clone things would get really awkward, and eventually, I’d snap and throw the clone out of the window. Or would it have been the clone that threw me out of the window?

Lastly, there’s the significant risk of creating an evil clone. Evil me would be a lot like regular me, with the exception of being evil. But the good news is that he’d still be lazy, inconsistent, and socially inept, so the amount of evil he’d actually commit would be limited. But eventually, I’d be stuck in the middle of a battle between the NCFB (National Clone Enforcement Bureau) and my evil clone, in which they’re demanding it be terminated with extreme prejudice. And by “stuck in the middle,” I mean, “too busy lamenting decisions I made 10 years ago instead of paying attention to and bettering my current lot in life.”

So I think it’s pretty clear: A clone is a terrible idea.

It’s pretty telling that I took a hiatus from both Faces of New Eden and this blog, without announcement, just because I got busy, and no one actually seemed to notice. There were no emails wondering if I was okay, where I’d gone, and if I’d be back to writing pointless musings. There was no external pressure to continue pursuing my goal of making at least a post daily.

It’s clear that I was providing nothing to no one. In many ways, it’s an apt metaphor for my life. When I finally depart this mortal coil, there may be a few tears and kind words said, but will I really leave anything behind? Is my legacy even worth a second look? Or will a few weeks heal any disruption, and life will continue, unabated and unchanged?

Of course, the ironic part is that no one will see this post, either.

Today I learned while doing my morning “did Buzz Williams leave Marquette” Google search…

Only Duke spends more than Marquette each season on the sport. And that is because Mike Krzyzewski, the most successful coach in the history of the game, earns about $4.7 million a year. But Marquette spends more per scholarship basketball athlete than any school in America. Per year, Marquette invests about $286,000 in each of its basketball players.

The Golden Eagles’ practice facility, the Al McGuire Center, is among the finest in the country. The team plays in an NBA facility and, as a member of the new Big East, is about to reap the benefits of a long-term Fox TV contract that will pay the conference $500 million.

For the record, the Big East TV deal is $500M over 12 years.
That’s just a shade over $4M per school per year.
For, essentially, just men’s basketball.

I’m going to be incredibly :sadpanda: when Buzz leaves Marquette. He solidified my support of him on February 25, 2012 after a game at West Virginia. If you Google it, you’ll be overwhelmed by the results of Buzz dancing at midcourt, nearly causing a riot in Morgantown. That the narrative of that day has become, “Buzz Williams is disrespectful,” and that couldn’t be further from the truth. This was a man who was truly elated. And when he realized he’d erred, truly penitent, rather than the standard, “I’m sorry if you were offended.” You see, the day was about more than just basketball.

The ESPN broadcast opened up with the breaking news that three Marquette starters would be suspended for the first half of the game for violating team rules, while a fourth would sit the second half for the same reason.

Benching Darius Johnson-Odom, Junior Cadougan and Vander Blue individually would send a statement on its own, but suspending 55 percent of your offense at the same time in a hostile environment is just short of a death wish.

In a profession predicated on wins and losses, it takes some major stones for a coach to sacrifice a potential victory to teach his players a lesson. It should also be noted that Buzz has not hesitated to rule with an iron fist before either, suspending Johnson-Odom and Cadougan a game each for other team violations earlier in the season.

If the act itself didn’t impress you, close your eyes and listen to his reasoning — or for those of you reading the print version, pretend to close your eyes and read his quote as he spoke to Bill Raftery after the game.

“No matter our success, no matter our failure, I’m doing a disservice to our kids if I don’t hold them accountable. My responsibility has to be bigger than winning or losing, it has to be about the rest of their life. The rest of their life as humans, as future fathers, as future husbands, and I think that is my responsibility, and I think that is one of the reasons I have been blessed with this opportunity, and I think I am doing the program, and the institution a disservice if I don’t hold them to what I think is right.”

Despite what I try to project sometimes, I’m an old school bleeding heart, and that hits me right in that bloody mess. Listen, I get that college athletics is mostly a sham. I get that it’s a factory for schools and equipment suppliers to make a shitload of money on the backs of kids who usually can’t do anything about the situation. I get that when you boil it down to its dark, hateful essence that college athletics is about getting boosters to write checks, to get asses in seats, and to get merchandise off the shelves. The welfare of 18-21 year old men and women is a meaningless variable in the equation.

Is much of what I wrote hyperbole? Probably. But if that’s hyperbole, than this is truth: Men like Buzz Williams give me hope. Not hope for a radical change in the landscape of college athletics, where it somehow magically embraces again the principles of sport over competition, amateurism over commercialism, and compassion over pragmatism. It’s probably not too much hyperbole to say that’s never going to happen. There are too many dollars in the hands of too many people to make that happen.

Read my statement again: Men like Buzz Williams give me hope. In that one moment, in a hostile environment, in a critical Big East basketball game in the waning days of the 2011-2012 season, in a profession where success is fleeting and failure becomes a millstone around your neck, he showed me how to stand on your principles, no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the popular opinion. We should all be so brave as to stand up for our principles and teachings, no matter what.

I previously wrote about how I kind of broke Myers-Briggs when I took it as part of my curriculum at Marquette. The greater problem in these cases is one that’s endemic to every single personality test out there.

In the Matrix, a confused Neo asks why he has hair when he returns to the computer simulation after being released from his machine-induced bondage. It’s explained that it’s a form of “residual self image,” in that your default appearance is shaped by what you think you should look like. And that’s probably a good enough mechanic, because no one wanted to watch an emaciated, blind, bald Keanu Reeves fumble through the remaining hour of the movie.

This is the same problem you have with personality tests. One of the most striking examples came at a former employer, whose bright idea was to have everyone in the department take personality evaluation. The evaluation itself—Strengths Finder—was a vile, horrible thing: A single-use book that basically said, “if you’re not good at it, you shouldn’t do it,” and then proceeded to horoscope-level vague descriptions of the 26 possible “strengths” to find your top 5 through a one-time-only quiz.

Even more shocking were the results.

When I take a personality quiz, I try to answer honestly. This probably actually hurts me. I’m never going to say I’m a 10/10 on the things I’m good at, because that would imply I can’t further improve. And if you can’t improve, you’re dead.

But even I fall prey to the specter that haunts any personality test, and the one that popped out clear as day during the reveal of our results of Strengths Finder. When you fill out a personality test, you aren’t answering as you are. You’re answering as who you perceive yourself to be and who you want yourself to be. You might be the nicest person in the office, but if you think you need to be stern and cold toward subordinates in order to succeed, that will leak its way into your personality test results.

How do you fix this? In a self-administered test, it’s practically impossible. You’re always going to have that “residual self image” tinting your results. One suggestion I had for Strengths Finder, though it was impossible due to the absurd single-use nature of the book, was to have someone else fill out the test, answering the questions as they would know you would react. It’s a dangerous thing, especially if you’re filling one out for a manager, but if done confidently, and with a strong enough system in place to interpret and compare results, the differences between “what you think you are” and “what your employees think you are” would be quite educational.

This, of course, assumes a competent and robust 360 review system in place, which, as I’ve found, is mostly a myth. Lots of places will give lip service to 360 reviews. Lots of places will say that they encourage feedback from all levels and that they have “open doors” on all HR concerns and suggestions. This, of course, in practice, is complete and utter bullshit. No matter what the window dressing is, it takes a special organization, organically built and infused from top to bottom with the right people and philosophy, to pull this off.

So instead, we’re stuck with the flawed system and will continue to use it. Awkward and callous executives will continue to self-identify as charismatic and innovative leaders, those who question will continue to look for jobs, and we all will continue to put too much stock in labels.

I had a rough start with The Facebook. I signed up, milled about for a long time, and didn’t really use it. I didn’t get it. I was part of that gapped generation that didn’t really communicate via MySpace, and when Facebook became available to the masses, I wasn’t in the first wave. In that way, I was much like my parents when I handed them a GPS device. Why would they need a computer to tell them where to go when they could just as “easily” go to the town’s Chamber of Commerce and get a map?

My current use of Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, and to a different extent these pages, represents the new method of communicating, and I have to say, I like it. It’s both asynchronous and ignoreable. The stories and events that I focus on are the stories and events that I’m choosing to focus on, not required to by communication or force. Those items that I choose to not see are likewise chosen by me.

One of the biggest challenges for people today is being able to filter information. That maturation of the Internet, outside of the social networks, even, has created a situation where, for the first time in recorded human history, our capability to retrieve information is greater than our capability to process and learn information. Being able to rapidly find and filter knowledge is becoming a more important skill than the ability to absorb that knowledge.

One of the reasons my parents, for example, quit The Facebook was because they were unable to conquer the News Feed. Without the knowledge and experience to filter out undesired noise, they lost sight of the signal, and, in time, the value of the network. My News Feed, by contrast, is quite lean. Systematic purges of undesired content has left me with a feed containing a very high signal-to-noise ratio, allowing me to quickly get updated and move on to a new task.

I’m certainly not a professional user of these services: I don’t expect anyone to actually read my content. Any eyes that peruse my output are a bonus above the base expectation of “none.” I’m making no money, gathering no support, and building nothing. One might decide to pour a bunch of meaning and metaphor into that last revelation.

It’s strange, because I’m having that exact feeling of Deja Vu right now. Let’s just say that a whole bunch of things I took care of yesterday have to be done again.

I’m not angry about this, however. It’s really just a fact of the profession that I’m in. Very rarely are things “done in one” as the common parlance goes. Instead, it’s an iterative process, one in which flaws are found, those flaws are fixed, and further flaws are found.

One of the early lessons that I learned in this job, and one that I try to translate into my eveeryday life, is the definition of “done.” If you strive for perfection, you’ll not only go crazy, but you’ll also never succeed. You will continually find errors. You’ll continually find improvement opportunities. You’ll continually find little things that can be ever-so=-slightly better. And at the end of the process, you’ll have spent way too much time and money and effort on something for minimal payout.

One of the fundamental lessons of economics is marginal return. For an input of +X effort, you’ll get +Y output. That’s the case here, too. Resources, in this case time and money (and sanity), are limited. So it’s very important that we understand what “done looks like” and get to that point. That’s typically a conflux of meeting our goals and declining marginal return.

When projects go bad, as they’re wont to do with leadership that’s inexperienced or incompetent, one of the fundamental causes is the scope of the project. By defining the scope in too broad of terms, the leadership fails to establish goals. As such, we’ll continue working hard, chewing project time and money, to reach a pinnacle that, while laudable, is horribly inefficient.