Seeping Matter

A couple of weeks ago I challenged blog and Twitter followers and Facebook friends to a pushup challenge.  After having read Stephen R. Covey’s declaration that “very few [people] can [do twenty pushups]” I was having a hard time believing that one, so I decided to collaborate with you, my reader audience, in a scientific experiment to see how well that statement applies to us.

Nineteen of you participated in the Facebook survey or told me  your results directly.  That wasn’t the kind of participation I was hoping for, but we’ll go with that anyway.

Here’s what we found out:

• The lowest number of pushups done by any participant was 10.
• The highest number of pushups done by any participant was 45.
• The median number of pushups done was 25.
• The average number of pushups done was 27.

It seems like a pretty even distribution.  Look at the chart below and you can see further evidence of this.  There’s not a lot of clumping at any given point, rather a fairly steady upward slope from 10 to 45.

If Covey’s assertion were true I would have expected one or both of the following:

• If not a clumping of people reporting results at around 5 pushups, at least a couple of respondents at that level
• A non-linear progression from the bottom toward the top

As it stands, the data appears to be a fairly representative sample, but one that doesn’t match Covey’s assertion at all.  Perhaps a number of people took the challenge and had results in the 3-8 range, but were not willing to post their results in the survey.  Or perhaps my circle of friends is abnormally fit (sorry, I don’t find that likely).  Or perhaps the people who frequent Covey seminars tend to be atypically unfit.

One final piece of interesting information.  We conducted this experiment at work.  Most of the guys on the team were good sports and dropped down to do their pushups in front of everybody.  On our team I know we have some people who are fairly fit and active, and some who are not (me).  We also have some young, energetic guys and some who are in the latter half of their life (me again).  Being young and being someone who exercises regularly seemed to help drive the number of pushups higher, which is really no big surprise.  However, the upper end of the scale was not populated exclusively by fit, young, exercising-types.  Furthermore, I know of some people who work out pretty regularly who slotted into the bottom half of the scale.

So it seems that exercising alone isn’t the only thing involved here.  Some might suggest genetics, which perhaps has something to do with it.  But I know of one case in these results where one guy outperformed a younger sibling, and in this case the younger sibling is the one who regularly exercises while the older one does not.  What about weight?  Weight is certainly a factor, but some of the people who put up high numbers are not exactly petite.

Truthfully, I would have to say some of the hardest results to explain were my own.  I managed 40 pushups, which frankly was no surprise to me — I’ve been able to do 40 pushups, give or take, for years now, and I pretty much figured that was par for the course.  I guess it is a bit better than average.  But I don’t work out regularly even though I know I need to, I’m not exactly svelte (let’s just say I’m more than just a smidgin over 200), and 40 years old.  Go figure.

Anyway, thanks for participating.  Look for another one coming up.

So after my last post on Alabama I thought I’d do a bit of research to see how Nick Saban creates such a great team.  After a bit of poking around I found it.

Within the next month or two, Coach Saban will start recruiting new football players to take an athletic scholarship and come to play for the Crimson Tide.  Come springtime, the returning players will start playing spring football.  Then comes training in the summertime in preparation for the football season which starts in September.

So it all begins with recruiting and retaining the very best.  Alabama plays in the SEC West, whose top three teams are currently ranked in the top five in the entire country.  The SEC East is no slouch either, with teams like Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia to consider.  Alabama must get the very best, train the hardest, and gel the strongest to achieve their goal of being a national champion.  Even one mistake might cost them a title.

All that’s no big secret.  The secret is at the other end of the season, when the games are all played and the trophies hoisted.

After the last game is played and all the players who are going pro have declared themselves eligible for the draft, Saban pulls all his assistant coaches and coordinators into a room.  Once there, he requires the coaches to rank all of the remaining players in each class (Junior, Sophomore, etc.) from best to worst.  A great debate ensues.  The special teams coach might argue with the quarterback coach as to whether the punter is a higher performer than the backup quarterback.  Or the offensive line coach might try to convince the defensive secondary coach that the right guard is more valuable than the strong safety.

And thus it goes, for hours or even days, until every player on the team in each class is ranked with respect to his teammates.  Once the players are ranked, Saban then terminates the scholarships of the bottom 20% of the players, who are welcome to try to walk-on the following year or transfer to a different school and play for a different team.  Saban then repeats this procedure with the assistant coaches and coordinators.  He meticulously considers each coach and tries to decide if the linebacker coach is a better performer than the wide receiver coach.  Once this is done, those in the bottom 10% are fired; the next lowest 10% are given a pay cut, and only the top 20% are given a pay raise.

Saban’s reasons are obvious, and every coach and player knows about this beforehand.  They know that they are competing with each other for their spot on the team, for the right to not be terminated at the end of the year.  They know that if they are to remain with the Crimson Tide, it will have to be at the expense of someone else on the team, and they will have to demonstrate higher individual performance than the others in order to stay.

What’s the result?  It’s obvious.  They abdicate their personal desires and goals and instead pull together to create a great, powerful, strong team, one without egos, one where team achievement is more important than personal achievement and personal stats are nothing compared to team victories.

Hmm.

Confused?  You should be.

Of course, I’m making all that up.  Whatever Saban does, it is surely not what I’ve just described.  After going through all the effort to recruit the very best he can get, after working so hard to get the very best coaching staff he can find, and after expending so much to get all these different people to work together and create a national championship winning team, why in the world would he get rid of some number of lower performers as a matter of policy?  Why would anyone compare the performance of two different people whose talents and abilities fit them for two completely distinct roles and insist that you have to decide which one is more valuable than the other?

Clearly you can’t build a strong team that way.  Surely no person trying hard to create a strong, high-performing organization would take such an approach, right?  I mean, come on.  It’s ridiculous.

Of all the football games I watched this year I would have to say that the National Championship game between Alabama and LSU was probably the one I most enjoyed, and not just because Alabama beat LSU, who I can’t stand.

Before I watched the game I thought of when they’d played earlier in the season.  I thought of what Alabama would have to do to win.  Victory would require excellent defense on every down.  They would need to avoid costly mistakes.  They would have to play consistently well on offense, find a passing attack, and prevent any big plays on special teams.  Winning was a good possibility — Alabama had outplayed LSU in the previous game, after all, even though they ended up losing in overtime — but dominating the game would require near-perfection.

Near-perfection is exactly what Alabama delivered.  It was truly inspiring to watch.  They played a complete team game, excellence in every single position, every player executing their own job to perfection.  The result was a group that together exceeded the sum of its parts.  As a team they did everything that needed to be done to achieve total victory.  Egos were left behind as players abdicated personal achievements for the good of what they could accomplish together.  It was one of the most complete and awe-inspiring football performances I’ve ever seen.

I’ve thought since about that type of a team performance.  How does an individual get a group of people to each put aside their selfish desires and execute in their role for the betterment of the group?  Most of us have seen what can happen when a group of individuals truly make a team, and many of us have even experienced it.  Yet we resist putting ourself aside for the good of the group — at work, in our community, in our church or neighborhood, or even in our families, instead preferring to wait for others to step up and make the sacrifice first.  While we wait, we know not only on what we are missing out, we also know that if everyone waits, the team will never truly form.

In Stephen R. Covey’s book “The 8th Habit” he describes an experiment he often conducts when he is teaching an audience.  On page 117 of my copy he writes,

“I invite a man who looks very strong and healthy to come up in front and do twenty straight-back push-ups.  If he is truly strong and practiced, he can do it fairly easily.  But very few can; even many who appear strong and healthy hardly make it past five or six.”

This statement really surprised me.  Is it really that uncommon for men to be able to do more than just a few pushups?

So I mentioned this to my wife Amber, and she said that I ought to do a survey to see how many people really can do.  Thus challenged, I created a simple survey on Facebook that I invite you to take.  I promise to never reveal any individual results (likely, Facebook won’t expose them anyway), but please take a bit of time to help me out.  Find a minute, one morning or just before you go to bed.  Don’t work your way into it, don’t practice for a month or anything.  Just drop down and see how many you can do, and then submit your results in the survey.

I’ll run the survey until the end of January and then summarize what we find with a post at the end of the month.

Again, here’s the link to the survey: here

And thus we bid farewell to another excellent season of college football.  True, Auburn didn’t have quite the season they had last year, but USU was much better despite choking in literally the final seconds of several key games (Auburn, BYU, Ohio).  Teams come and go, but the essence of college football remains:  Great passion, energetic players, trick plays, fake punts, blocked kicks, great defenses, long runs from scrimmage, and more.  The players are not quite so skilled as they are in the pros, so they make more mistakes, and I think that is what makes the games more interesting.  Yes, they can wn the game by making this 30-yard field goal with only 2 seconds left in the game, but this is college!  There really is a reasonable chance they will miss it!

My bowl picks started off slow but I ended up doing pretty well:

• Famous Idaho Potato Bowl - I picked USU to win this one.  At the end I wondered, will we see early-season USU who choked in the close games, or late-season USU that pulled out victory after close victory to qualify for a bowl berth?  Sadly, it was early-season USU.  0-1
• Maaco Las Vegas Bowl – I said Boise State would walk all over ASU but it wasn’t nearly that close.  1-1
• Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl – I picked Cal over Texas but this one shanked to the right.  1-2
• Champs Sports Bowl – I said Florida State would win, and I must admit they had me pretty concerned most of the game.  But in the end they managed to overcome a 14 point deficit to win.  2-2
• Valero Alamo Bowl – This game was one that you should not have missed, and if you did, you need to find it someday on ESPN Classics and watch it again.  Heck, watch it again even if you did see it.  It was a load of fun.  As the announcer said, the first team to 67 points wins, and I correctly picked that Baylor would be that team.  3-2
• Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl – Life goes much easier for you in Utah County if you pick BYU, especially when they pull it off.  4-2
• Insight Bowl – I picked Iowa because every time I pick against them, they win.  I guess Iowa just is trying to spite me with a loss to Oklahoma, or something.  4-3
• Hyundai Sun Bowl – Utah had me pretty nervous when they were down 14 in the 4th quarter, but watching them come back to beat a really good Georgia Tech team was quite gratifying, and also felt a little bit like vindication for their selection to join the PAC-12.  5-3
• Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl – I said Illinois would win because UCLA reeks.  Well, UCLA still reeks.  6-3
• Chick-fil-A Bowl – Of course Auburn won this one.  I think their comeback win over USU proved that they are a pretty strong team, and they are in the SEC, after all.  7-3
• Ticketcity Bowl – Apparently Houston is as good as we all thought they might be.  Or Penn State is still being punished for their grievous sins.  Or both.  8-3
• Outback Bowl – Honestly, Georgia is not the best team in the SEC East this year, but they did better than I thought.  Still, it wasn’t enough to hold off Michigan State, although it took three overtimes to finally decide this one.  9-3
• Capital One Bowl – South Carolina is just too athletic for Nebraska pretty-boys like Taylor Martinez.  And I must say to Bo Pellini, your furious tirade on the sidelines and the disdain with which you treat the reports does not win you fans.  I was happy to see South Carolina win.  10-3
• Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl – One of my favorite holiday traditions is when Ohio State goes south and gets trounced by Florida, which of course happened again this year.  Next year might be tough.  Can I continue to hate Ohio State once Urban Meyer is the coach there?  Hmm.  11-3
• Rose Bowl – This was another excellent game, and I have to say that Oregon’s helmets were freaking awesome.  I picked Oregon because of their helmets, subconsciously.  12-3
• Tostitos Fiesta Bowl – Yet again, the Fiesta Bowl left me kicking myself for not just driving down to Tempe to attend it.  One of these years I will do just that.  Anyway, Oklahoma State kept me wondering all game long, but they finally pulled this one out in overtime, the only time they had the lead in the entire game.  13-3
• Allstate Sugar Bowl – Up to this point I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and thinking maybe I should apply for a job with ESPN as an analyst.  I missed this pick though, having thought that Michigan’s comeback season wasn’t sufficient to beat Virginia Tech.  A strong Michigan is good for college football all around, so I’ll take it.  13-4
• Discover Orange Bowl – I was right that Clemson has superior athletes, but they are also excellent at collapsing into a shivering blob of mistake after costly mistake.  By the time they’d weathered the storm, West Virginia had scored 35 unanswered points and the game was over with 25 minutes left to play.  13-5
• AT&T Cotton Bowl – As I implied, it seems people dismiss Arkansas because they finished third in their division.  But they finished third to the #1 and #2 teams in the country.  Arkansas proved they are for real.  14-5
• Allstate BCS Championship – I threatened rebellion if LSU won.  Apparently someone wants me to be a good boy.  Alabama won in convincing, dominating fashion in one of the best-played, most complete total team effort victories I’ve ever seen.  More on this later.  15-5
• Knudsen-B-Gon Toilet Bowl – North Dakota Culinary & Drama College completely dominated this game in every way, although to be fair, Akron forgot which direction they were supposed to go to score on about half of the plays.  16-5

So, if you discount the gimme, fake-bowl, I still ended up with a record of 15-5, or an accuracy record of 75%.  That’s a little better than random, wouldn’t you say?

Okay, it was lucky.  I’m still gonna gloat.

The wife of a good friend of mine is a very accomplished song writer, which, as anyone who knows me well can confirm, is a talent I greatly admire.  I can play the piano pretty well and can also create something resembling music on the guitar, but writing songs is a completely different matter altogether.  My uncle once wrote a song you have never heard called “Natalie” that I thought was pretty awesome.  So if it is awesome to write a good song that nobody has heard, how much more admirable to write good songs that lots of people hear and like.

My friend told me that she’d told him about the difference between writing popular music and just writing what you feel.  She even has taught people about this before, that if you want to write music for yourself that’s one thing, but the way to achieve success as a musician is to follow a prescribed formula which is proven to create music that will be mainstream and popular.  I don’t blame her for teaching this because I think she’s identified a sad truth:  It is much easier to be mainstream.

Amber and I were waiting for some sandwiches the other day at Jimmy John’s when Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son” came playing over the radio in the store.  As I was complimenting the staff at the store for playing such an excellent radio station, I got to thinking about that song.  When you consider the rhythm of that song, the beat of the main riff or the bridge, or even the way Steve Walsh wails “Don’t you cry no mo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-o-o-o-oo-oore!!!” after the last chorus, you would have to agree that this song is anything BUT mainstream.  It is unique and one-of-a-kind, and truly epic.

I commented to Amber, “Consider the risk involved in the way he sings the last part of that song.  There is no holding back.  There is no halfway.  He’s putting everything out there, singing that with all the energy of his soul.  He’s completely opening himself to criticism and ridicule for singing that part that way.  And that’s what makes the song so awesome.”

I wondered since how this applies to life.  How many of us intentionally live mainstream lives just trying to fit in and not cause any issues, instead of taking the risk to be epic?  How many times do we just go along with the flow, trying to be just like everyone else, making low-risk, low-return choices instead of putting ourselves out there and seeing what our lives could really be like?

Some ways to do this:

• Blog – and say what you really think
• Write a book
• Take a day trip
• Redecorate
• Play an instrument
• Learn a new skill or hobby
• Make a movie
• Take your kids on an adventure
• Do almost anything besides watching TV

Call me a humbug but I have a hard time getting into a lot of holiday music.  Some holiday songs, like “O Holy Night,” I absolutely love and would enjoy them any time of the year.  But some of the other stuff I have a hard time with and it usually takes me clear until about Christmastime until I’m feeling it; of course, by then it is about time to put the Christmas music away for another 11 months.

I tried to remedy this problem one year by buying Twisted Sister’s “A Twisted Christmas” album, but it honestly didn’t help much.  Frankly this album sounds like something they just threw together one afternoon, much like most other Christmas albums.

Some holiday songs sound like they were recorded after a few too many mugs of adult-style eggnog.  For example, I wouldn’t want the guy who sings “It’s A Marshmallow World” driving me home after a Christmas party:

Izzza marshmallow worl dinna winner,
Wenda sno comesta cubuda groun,
uh, duh duh day, blah blah blah blah ay,
I wayfer idda holear roun!

Some make sense for us Mormons but not so much for others.  One is “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” clearly written to be sung at tithing settlement which occurs at the end of the year at Christmastime:

Good tithings we bring to you and your kin,
Good tithings for Christmas and a happy new year!

Here, “kin” pretty obviously means “counselors” and possibly also “financial clerk.”

This is also the song my sister infamously sung at high volume in my father’s ear all the way home from Heber one Christmas season, in the following completely ironic manner:

WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
AND A HAPPY NEW EAR!!!!!

Some songs simply don’t make any sense to me at all, like this one (as best I can tell these lyrics are correct):

Frosting the snowman is a jolly happy goal,

But the plain fact is the stuff won’t stick, and your snowman will just fall apart anyway if you try it, and it really doesn’t taste that good anyway, because if your snowman is anything like mine there’s a bunch of sticks and grass packed into the snow anyway, so there’s really no point in it.

Perhaps the best example I can think of this is the holiday classic “All The Dang Signs.”  They sing this all the time at New Years and even at the end of that holiday classic (and one of my favorite movies), “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  But nobody really knows the lyrics, which go like this:

Should all the quaintens be for naught
And never brought to mines?
Should all the quaintens be for naught
And all the dang signs?
Yes all the dang signs, my friend,
For all the dang signs,
We’ll spend a cup and kind of cheer
For all the dang signs.

Anyway, happy and prosperous 2012 everyone.