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I’ve gotten some random pings from folks lately asking:

• What happened to that crazy lifestyle eating change you were on? Are you still doing that?
• Have any New Year’s Resolutions?

Good questions both. One quick note, I usually do 5 New Year’s Resolutions every year, but I don’t call them that because it sounds like they’re afterthoughts and the word ‘resolution’ now has a loaded connotation of ‘IMPENDING COMPLETE FAILURE COMING MOMENTARILY’.

Instead, I usually call them ’simplifying principles’ because they’re things I’d really like to actively focus on this year and they’re meant to simplify my life, not add some additional thing I won’t remember to do. Before I get to those…

The Eating Thing

If you’ll remember, last year I attempted (mostly successfully) to undo 26 years of awful eating habits and prepare myself for the distinct eventuality that the next 30 years of my life are going to consist of: 1) working a lot, and 2) a gradually slowing metabolism. Let’s be very clear about this: I know of (maybe) five Asian males over the age of 35 who are not noticeably overweight. That’s it. If you’re Asian and your Dad is not overweight, then I’ll take your word for it and add him to the list, though he’s probably already one of the five.

With that backdrop, and because I often like to pit myself in games of will power against myself, I spent some time reading up on “What does eating healthy really MEAN?” last year and then attempted to live by that for 12 months. The results were largely good and I think the number of meals I strayed was probably less than 30.

This year I’ve made one slight adjustment to the approach, which I don’t think will make a material difference in practice, but I think will make an enormous difference in my personal mental state when driving by an In-n-Out. And that leads me to the five simplifying principles (of course non-work-related):

1. Eat healthy (as defined in 2008), with the exception that for every week in which I work out 3+ times, I get one free meal to eat whatever I want. Hopefully for all parties involved, that will be 52 weeks.
2. Write a short story. This was originally “Write more,” but in the name of setting actionable, measurable principles. Regardless, “Write more” is baked into this.
3. Read and thoughtfully review at least 12 books
4. Visit at least one new foreign country
5. Launch a couple (at least 2) useful, interesting sites

I would have added a sixth and a seventh (”Tailgate at least 10 times” and “Lower the beer to other beverages ratio”), but a) they seemed to work directly against one another, b) the seventh is pretty much covered by my #1, and c) I just really wasn’t ready to commit to seven different principles.

Let’s all have a solid 2009, people.

Last week I came upon an article by William Deresiewicz, a Yale Associate Professor of English, entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” In it, Deresiewicz puts forth his theory that elite universities are disadvantaging their students and alumni. In particular, he identifies what he perceives as five generalized disadvantages of an elite education:

1. Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”
2. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.
3. Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.
4. Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.
5. There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

It is certainly a critical article, and it is one that immediately drew a sharp reaction from me. After all, who wants to be labeled as, essentially, an elitist who skirts by in life? Assuming Deresiewicz would consider Stanford “an elite institution,” I (and all of my friends from school) just got slapped in the face by a man who has never met us, much less spoken to us.

Though to be clear, if he has trouble finding anything to say to a plumber with a Boston accent and a Red Sox cap, he would probably have trouble finding anything to say to me also. I can think of at least ten one-liners to rag on the Red Sox immediately (”Damn, how hard is it for your team to catch the fucking DEVIL RAYS?” or, as Stoops suggested, “It’s a good thing we both hate the Yankees.”).

Yes, I understand that his criticism is technically of the institutions themselves, but it’s a bit like we were all sprayed by stray bullets from the drive-by.

However, I would be lying if I categorically denounced the entire article. When I look closely, within his shockingly elitist examples, there is some truth. Let’s take a look:

Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”

I’ve probably covered this already, but I consider this point to be a complete fucking joke. I didn’t go to Yale (and maybe Stanford’s just not as stuffy of a place), but I have a feeling this is more an issue with the individual than the institution. As Phil put it in an email, “What I find comical is that he expects to be able to relate, and then blames his education and collegiate institutions for his deficiency.”

It’s unfortunate that Deresiewicz opens his article with this particular point, because I feel like the absurdity of it really discolors his other arguments and observations. Perhaps his inability to converse with ‘people not like him’ is more a reflection of another of his points – not all intelligence plays well in the classroom.

Frankly, socially intelligent individuals (many of whom I know endured these apparent ‘Elite Educational Prisons’) are capable of talking to any human about, literally, any topic. Are we to believe that attending an elite institution removes your ability to enjoy sports, music, movies, news, and every other potential topic of conversation that is shared commonly between large portions of the population? I think they’re allowed to listen to rap music at Yale.

I don’t even know what “people not like me” means – are these people who are lacking vital organs that I have? The whole point is crazy.

An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

It’s hard to deny the (at least half-) truth of this statement. I was witness to this fact while I worked at Google. In case you were not aware, Google likes to hire Ivy League and Stanford graduates in all of its departments, including departments where the primary job function is answering customer support emails from users/advertisers/publishers. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard the phrase “I’m/we’re over-qualified…” from such coworkers while I worked at Google, as if such work was simply beneath them.

That’s not an indictment of those employees, or even Google, but rather just an observation that there is a significant sense of self-worth inculcated by an elite education. I’m not positive that I view this sense of self-worth to be truly a disadvantage, save for (the fairly plentiful) occasions when it extends to arrogance.

Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.

I don’t imagine anyone would argue the presence of some level of grade inflation at elite institutions. Yet the generalization that all elite educations reward mediocrity seems overdone. And certainly Deresiewicz’s contention that all students of elite institutions expect that to be able to turn their work in late with no repercussions is absurd, at least at Stanford. I have no insight into Yale or Columbia.

I don’t remember ever hearing any of my friends talk about how they’d just run that paper over a day late. But I certainly do remember the eerie glow of rows of monitors at Sweet Hall at 3 in the morning, or working in the lab trying to debug that damn microprocessor implementation before it was due in a few hours at 9am.

The truth is that I would have been really fucking embarrassed to act as Deresiewicz describes. I think all of my friends would have also.

Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.

Agreed (for 90+% of the Stanford graduates that I know). I can’t even really begin to argue with this point, as I’ve commented to numerous folks that temptation for security and fear of failure manifest themselves in my own psyche. After all, this temptation is the same reason that Google continues to be able to stock its customer service teams with Harvard/Stanford/Princeton/Yale graduates who end up incredibly conflicted due to their strong sense of self-worth.

For many Asian-Americans, I would add that parental influences often play an even more significant part than their elite educations. As an example, trying to explain to my own mother why I would leave a company like Google or go play poker for a living is somewhere between comical and impossible.

There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

I’m extremely conflicted on Deresiewicz’s last “disadvantage.” His contention is that because elite institutions (and their students) have become increasingly focused on jumping the hurdles to reach a diploma (and subsequently the secure life), the students ignore true ‘intellectualism’. He describes the intellectual life as focus on “The Big Questions” and large visions. In doing so, he also takes a side swipe at all technical fields, which he paints as part of the evil commercialization of elite instititutions:

Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

There is some level of truth to his overarching point (I certainly did jump through the right sequence of hoops to graduate at school), however one can’t help but read his argument and wonder if he is just profoundly biased. After all, has Bill Gates led this “intellectual life”? Has Steve Jobs? And if they have not, is that because they haven’t focused on ‘The Big Questions?’ Or is it because their ‘Big Questions’ aren’t about understanding Kierkegaard or examining Faulkner’s inner motivations?

If, as Deresiewicz says, “Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas,” then how is it that ‘an infrastructure to serve an essentially infinite number bytes of information to small boxes in every home in the world over the fucking air’ not an idea?

The beauty of living in the Silicon Valley is that you see, meet, read about, and see the work of countless individuals who are passionate about ideas every day. For some (not all) of them, elite educations were four+ years spent building a foundation to just enable them to be passionate about ideas. And that seems like fairly decent work by our best universities, even by Deresiewicz’s own definition of why they exist.

A friend of my brother sent over an email asking for some advice on picking a blogging host/platform. He sent it to me because I’m a ‘blogger’, even though I consider myself to be nothing of the sort .

I’m just a guy who likes to write words in a semi-public place, which is something I’ve been doing since a couple of years into college. Back then I was using some crazy little site called xanga, which (for those of you that don’t know) was/is basically an online frat party for asian people… kidding… only slightly. It was/is really a livejournal for asian people.

Back then I didn’t consider myself to be any kind of a ‘blogger’ and I certainly don’t today. To me the term ‘blogger’ really only refers to online writers who use a blogging platform to write and are actively trying to procure a larger readership. In other words, they have journalistic and/or commercial intent. Me? I just like to type about a wide variety of things that have little connection to one another besides being interesting to me.

What would I do differently if I was to be a ‘blogger’? Read more

david halberstam passed away today, literally miles from where i live and work. as a sports fan and someone who loves writing, i can’t help but feel his death very deeply.

my first exposure to halberstam was almost 8 years. i remember, in 1999 during espn’s sportscentury series, seeing this delicate man, speaking softly and clearly about numerous athletes, many too old for me to ever have seen in-person. as a huge sports fan, i couldn’t help but soak up his words. he was a brilliant writer and a real sports fan.

i’ll never forget his piece that he wrote for page 2 during the AI/Lakers nba finals several years ago (edit: here it is!). it was a fantastically honest and open examination of not only iverson, but also halberstam himself, written with the depth of someone who was not only intensely insightful, but also a true lover of sport

more than how great his writing was though, what i’ll always thank him for was being one of those folks who made it OK to be intellectual and a sports fan. it sounds strange, but i always felt that these games that we watch and love were looked at as trivial, meaningless fun by some people. that they didn’t matter. that sports (and sportswriting) were for the lowest common denominator. that i was less of a scholar for loving them so much. for those who felt this way, we (sports fans) always had david halberstam. a true journalist, a tremendous writer, a gentleman, an intellectual, and a loving sports fan.

reading his writing always made me proud to love sports.

maybe the best site i’ve ever seen in my life: noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com

mark cuban’s a very passionate guy. so passionate that he likes to blow lots of things out of proportion and personally attack people. i once called him out for being a a huge hypocrite as he overreacted to the knicks-nuggets incident and he responded to my comment with an email that started with the words: “You are wrong,” following that up with a terribly lame justification for why he wasn’t a huge hypocrite. something about how he was referring to multi-player actions not single-player actions. i guess if one of your players is doing something wrong, then it’s NOT management’s responsibility, but if more than one takes action than it is? anyhow…

today he posted an entry in his blog ripping dwyane wade for taking a shot at dirk nowitzki (who, honestly, has been the definition of a sore loser after the finals last year). let’s look at his comments in full:

I hope Dwayne Wade was misquoted in an article today in the Miami Herald. I know the Herald has issues with accuracy and they are still probably looking for the boat I dont own in Miami, but according to the Herald, and i have a hard time thinking even the Herald could get this quote wrong, Wade said the following:

DIG AT DIRK

After the Heat practiced Thursday at Quicken Loans Arena, Wade was asked if he believes players are ultimately remembered for what they do at the end of games.

Wade, who usually is selective and subtle with his criticisms of opposing players, took the opportunity to take a jab at Dallas’ Dirk Nowitzki, who has failed to give the Heat credit for beating the Mavericks in the Finals last season.

”At the end of the day,” Wade said, “you’re remembered for what you did at the end. . . . I think that’s the reason — Dirk says they gave us the championship last year, but he’s the reason they lost the championship, because he wasn’t the leader that he’s supposed to be in the closing moments. That’s because of great defense by us, but also he wasn’t assertive enough as a leader’s supposed to be.”

up to here i was seeing cuban’s point. that is quite the directed quote at cuban’s player. to be fair, dirk has been very un-complimentary about losing in the championship last year. he has repeatedly said that they “gave” the heat the finals, which is generally considered “a bitch move” in the sports world. that being said, wade knows better than to make comments like that. surely he’s unhappy that dirk is being a huge bitch, but you know what? when you have the ring, nothing else should really matter, should it? it’s a little like getting a promotion at work and being bitter that the one guy you didn’t get along with is talking smack about you while he works in the mailroom (note to mailroom workers everywhere, i didn’t mean anything by that). anyhow, back to mr. cuban, because this is when he really “takes the gloves off”:

Say what ? Is this the DWade of some of the lamest , boring commercials known to man ? Commercials that are singlehandedly responsible for selling more commercial skipping Tivos than anything else on TV ?

um, what? i don’t really know that people dislike wade’s commercials that much. in fact, most people really like that “fall seven times” spot, even though it doesn’t make any sense (aside: i’ve had several 15-minute conversations about this commercial. if you only fall seven times, why would you have to get up eight times? is the eighth symbolic of “getting up” for a dunk? i don’t know. i need to know these things.). but even if the commercials are boring, what in the world does that have to do with anything? besides just making cuban look like an angry 10 year-old child.

Dwayne I don’t blame you for not looking at tapes of the finals. You obviously didn’t. You would have seen your unbelievable skills and some other unbelievable elements that if I could discuss honestly here I would get fined for.

clearly here cuban is referring to what mavs coaches, players, and fans think was bad officiating during the finals. so you think the refs treated you badly: GET OVER IT. the most annoying thing in sports (and the thing that gets people more angry than anything) is the team that loses and continues crying. people hated it when the colts did this years ago. people hated it when the seahawks did it last season. the truth is that at the end of the day, if you lose, you don’t get to say anything. don’t be a sore loser. grow up.

years ago, there was a guy named michael jordan and he got a lot of calls also. he was more aggressive than other players and eventually refs started giving him the benefit of the doubt because he was, oh, the greatest player ever. but you know what’s funny? you NEVER heard the utah jazz (who played against mike in his last two championships) bitch and moan about it. probably because stockton, malone, hornacek, and the boys were all class acts on the court. maybe the mavs need to take some “how to lose with class” courses.

You are right, endings are remembered. And the ending of 3 of the games of the Finals will be remembered alongside Game 6 of the King vs Lakers Conf Finals a few years ago.

um, unfortunately not mr. cuban. everyone else besides mavs fans have already forgotten what happened, besides the heat winning the series and wade hitting big shots. sorry, that’s just the truth. actually, most people probably don’t even remember that.

I guess you have earned the right to criticize Dirk with an obvious display of your own leadership skills.

I know Shaq appreciates your leadership as well. He called out your team a few weeks ago saying it was “embarassing’. Great leadership DWade. Your coach sat players for being fat. I guess you couldnt lead them away from the buffet.

You are an amazing player Dwayne. I love watching you shoot free throws.

once again, exhibit W of mr. cuban and the mavs as incredibly sore losers

What you know about Dirk’s leadership skills is non existent.

let me just break up mr. cuban’s string of personal attacks by noting that TERRIBLY written sentence. sorry, that was just KILLING me. back to personal attacks!

You don’t have a clue. Your ability to evaluate leadership skills….well you obviously have an overinflated value of your own. Did you take business classes at Marquette ?

this one is my absolute FAVORITE comment because it is SO ridiculous and irrelevant.

Now we know why Charles won’t put you in his 5.

And Im pissed for one more reason. Im going to have to miss our next game against the Heat on Feb 22. A previous engagement. I guess its just a missed opportunity to bring a local business class to the game and try to let them interview you about your leadership skills.

if we were in a writing class, this would be a great example of a horribly-written response to a question/comment. he completely failed to refute the commenter’s opinion by presenting opposing evidence, and then he went off in a direction that was completely orthogonal to the whole topic (”dirk’s not a good leader? well… well… you’re a huge jerk! YOU’RE not a leader!”). clearly mr. cuban has an inability to detach his own personal emotions from objective reasoning. does that make him a good owner? i don’t know. does it make him look like a huge ass? probably. a few weeks ago i wrote about how the patriots fans are making other fans hate the patriots by acting like completely morons. today, i would say that mr. cuban is making other fans hate the mavericks by posting on his blog like a 10 year-old with an 11 year-old’s writing skills.

i officially hate the mavericks now.