I’ve been having a productive time, up the mountain. I’ve achieved things at work, blogged regularly, sent out Technically Speaking with Chiu-Ki, made some progress on The Dark Place that is my personal inbox, I feel fit and healthy.
I’ve achieved this by skiing for two hours weekday mornings (longer at the weekends) – hard, so it’s good exercise, and the fresh air and freedom from devices clears my head. Then I work until I go to sleep. I could advocate for mountain life – and it’s good, I hope I can do it again next year – but actually that rests on the same things that most “productivity advice” does, just more blatantly.
Money. It’s quite expensive to live in a mountain village during the ski season. But a lot of things that show up in productivity advice cost money: separate workspaces, daily yoga classes, a diet of solent.
Control over schedule. I shifted my hours to work 12-9 most days. This, by the way, isn’t sustainable – working weird hours is not good for various things, including my social life. But I could do it here because I love to ski. Not everyone’s job is that flexible (by time, let alone by location). There’s also a social cost because it makes it hard to have friends who live on more “normal” schedules. You get to be more “productive” because “no-one is around” and that probably comes with some downsides, too.
Some specialised skill. Firstly, a flexible job is normally the result of some specialisation. Secondly, and less obviously, I already knew how to ski well and had all the equipment. It would have been much harder for someone who didn’t already ski well to come live up here and learn to ski in a couple of hours every morning. They’d have a harder time coordinating ski lessons, and working to a schedule (I can make it top to bottom in 8 minutes and I have done that in order to make it in in time). They’d have to stay within a smaller area and get stuck in the crowds. They’d be more exhausted by it, and more likely to hurt themselves.
General good health. Most productivity advice comes with a suggestion of exercise that is infeasible for people with chronic or temporary but severe health conditions. There was a period when I injured my knee so badly I could barely walk for about three months. Firstly, the gym felt like a far off dream, and if I went at all, lasted very little time and left me feeling bad about myself. Secondly, just the basics of life like getting to uni or the grocery store were really painful and left me exhausted, not to mention the time I spent in physio.
Lack of dependents. To be able to live this selfishly requires that no-one depends on you. There’s a reason the bizarre productivity advice I find on the internet is never written by women with kids. I can eat cereal and yogurt to save time for lunch or dinner every day or at some approximation of a mealtime that coincides with a gap in my schedule and feeling hungry, and no-one else has to deal with that. I don’t have to be back home by a certain time, or pause what I’m doing to pay someone else attention.
If the prerequisite for productivity advice being useful is having control, being selfish, healthy, specialised, and unconcerned about money… well that’s not useful to everyone. Or even that many people at all.
I had one of those days last week. I woke up later than I wanted to, and it took me a while to get moving. Then just as I was getting started, I realized that I had to deal with some insurance thing, which was – of course – a complete pain.
Eventually, I was out on the mountain on my skis, but the crowds were out in force by then. But I made my way to this part of the mountain I hadn’t been to before, and found this beautiful red run and a chair lift without much of a queue, and skied it again, and again, and again. I went all the way to the other side of Grandvalira, ate lunch, and came back. It ended up being a really good – albeit exhausting – day.
I like to think that I am some kind of Super Cate. That I bounce out of bed every morning and Achieve All The Things. This is true… maybe 60% of the time. Long haul flights, my cycle, getting sick… all derail it regularly. As do things that are well within my control such as, dehydration, forgetting to eat, exercising a lot, not exercising enough (and then not sleeping).
So a lot of the time, I can’t live up to my own expectations, and my own idea of myself… and I spend too much of that time beating myself up. For not being able to just shake off whatever it is, for not having done a better job at Life the previous day.
I feel like I’ve been confronting the difference between Super Cate and Cate a lot since I came to live up this mountain and ski. I used to be a ski instructor – something I was proud of, because (amongst other reasons) I didn’t learn to ski until I was 20. But I last skiied properly in New Zealand, because a couple of hours at the world’s longest indoor ski slope in Dubai doesn’t count. So when I arrived I was super anxious, and out of practise. I’ve been getting better (deliberate practise and a great instructor) but I’m just not as much of a daredevil as I was at 22. I’ve had about six concussions since then (most of them skiing, although there was that time a TV fell on my head), not to mention badly injuring my shoulder and my knee. I’ve been hit, badly, whilst skiing, twice. When I’m on the slopes (and there aren’t too many people around), I feel like I’m flying again, but the act of getting geared up for it is a complete PITA. I know two-three runs in I’ll be super happy, but that can take an hour to get to. It’s not a very immediate reward.
My most bitter breakup was over an argument about where to go on vacation. Of course it wasn’t really about that, or so I concluded once the hurt (and frankly, amusement) faded. It was about his need to be seen a certain way, and my inability to bolster that self image.
I think that the gap between who you like to think you are, and who you actually are, is a hard place to be. It’s not something you can ask other people to do for you, or fix for you – you have to do the work yourself. When I’m not being Super Cate, the way it highlights my inadequacies… I hate it. But those days are also when I see most clearly what I need to do to be the kind of human I aspire to be. If I can stop beating myself up, I might just make progress instead.
The days when Super Cate bounces out of bed and goes hurtling around the mountain and then Achieves All The Digital Things are awesome, and energizing, and invigorating. But the days when Human Cate is not feeling it, does it anyway, and ends up having a good time before collapsing on a heap on the sofa… well Human Cate worked harder for it. I’m prouder of her.
I used to be a ski instructor. Back when I was in grad school. Weekdays I would write code, academic papers, and teach first year programming. And at the weekend I would be out in the fresh air, teaching people, mostly kids, to ski.
One of the interesting things as an instructor, of anything really, is the process people go through as they learn. I didn’t actually learn to ski myself until I was 22, so I remembered the learning curve, and how hard and scary it had been. That empathy served me as an instructor.
As we gain expertise, we go deeper. I’m sure you can think of an example in whatever technology or part of the API you’ve been learning recently. So the beginner skier, their goal is something like “how to get down this hill without hurting myself”, and the expert skier is working on a specific part of a specific turn.
The other thing that changes, is perspective. The beginner skier is very focused on the front of their skis, and almost nothing else. They are scared to look further, but it’s not much of a view.
The expert skier, they consider the whole hill. You have to, right, if you have 10 kids following you in a line. Or if you’re going 30k down a standard hill, not having that perspective is a quick way to ski into a tree and die. Olympians hit up to 95 miles per hour.
We’ve got to do the same thing when we think about mobile. We can take a broader perspective and take in the whole view. We’ll build better apps if we consider the fuller context of the user experience.
The User
The User and Your App
If you don’t ski, or don’t ski much, you might think there’s plenty going on for the skier. You’ve got poles, and gloves, and a helmet, and goggles, and don’t forget the skis. it’s super-cold, windy and sun gets in your eyes. That would seem like plenty to juggle, yet skiers are pulling out their mobile phones like everyone else. I personally like to take videos.
And that should not seem too ridiculous to us. Take a look at this…
I love this video. Often when we bring an existing product to mobile, we ask, “how do we get this to fit”, and sometimes, “what can we leave out”. Capital One have approached their banking app from the perspective of – how does someone do their banking on the go? How do we enable them?
One of the most interesting changes is the login. Logging in on any online banking system tends to be pretty unpleasant, right? It’s for “security”, where security seems to be defined as “the most unpleasant user experience your user will tolerate”. Capital One, instead of taking the standard unpleasant banking login and shoving it onto a smaller screen, took the login we are familiar with on mobile – the swipe – and built it into their app. Now that might even work on a ski slope.
The way we evaluate usability on mobile is so contrived, at a table, in a room, focused on nothing else. How often do you actually see people use their phones like that? Being chased by bulls is a little extreme, a little gimmicky, but the question, “how usable is it one handed with the whole world going on around you?” is a question worth asking.
The User Making Decisions
When I lived in Sydney, a friend and I had a routine. On Thursday evenings we would hit the gym and eat at the mall – mall food in Australia is amazing. We had a conversation at some point, about whether we should be doing more exciting things of a Thursday evening and her response stays with me. She said, “By Thursday evening, I have made so many decisions that if I don’t have an evening off, there will be no decisions left for tomorrow.”
Decision making is exhausting, right? I don’t think I could count the number of decisions I make in a day. The thought of trying to do so makes me want to take a nap. I’m seeing more and more advocates of removing decisions, how you’ll be happier and more effective if you focus on habits.
Part of the problem, when we make decisions, is that we want to have all the information – we believe in choice. The more choice, the better. But more choice overwhelms us. If you’ve ever got to a big mountain and skiied the same run over and over again, you know what I’m talking about.
The original example of this is the Jam Study conducted by Sheena Iyengar (she has two great TED talks). The experiment went so: customers in a grocery store were offered a choice of jams to sample, and given a discount coupon should they wish to buy. When there was a bigger selection of jam to sample, more people tried the jam. But more people bought jam when there was a smaller number of jams to sample.
What metric really matters to the store owner here? The buying of jam.
So we build systems to make user decision making more efficient. In the UK, the insurance industry is completely commoditized, and customers have no brand loyalty, so insurance sales mostly take place through “aggregators”. You put in your information into one system, and you get quotes back from many different insurers, and then you choose the best.
Right? Wrong. Now instead of putting their information into multiple insurance sites, users put their information into multiple aggregator sites, each of which generates a multitude of quotes. And then they compare between them.
But do aggregators make the decision less overwhelming? Or now, instead of picking between a couple of options for a couple of insurers, the users picks between tens of options on a couple of aggregators instead.
Distraction, decision fatigue… I think they relate to this current trend we see for curation. Newsletters are more and more prevalent – (a friend and I have one, check out techspeak.email), Maria Popova has turned Brainpickings into a business. And last year Product Hunt raised $6.1 million. It’s a curated list. Remember when Yahoo was a curated list? But algorithms won out. Now curation is coming around again. At the end of the day, users want people they trust to create trails for them, the whole mountain is just too overwhelming.
The User in Love
For me, and this comes back to a talk I gave last year (Distractedly Intimate), the biggest difference on mobile is how users feel about their phones. Most people love their phones, and many people hate, or fear their computers. I don’t know if any of you have been on an online dating site recently, but pretty much everyone seems to say they can’t live without their phone, the computer mostly doesn’t get a mention.
As developers, I feel that we failed humans with the computer. We created things, that stress them out, confuse them. The joy of developing on mobile is freedom from that history. Not quite the same freedom as a deserted mountain early in the morning, but pretty close.
But this freedom comes, I think, with an obligation, not to mess it up again. And also imposes it’s own limitations – the phone is for fun, and for pleasure, and personal, so the top paid apps are games and lately health apps.
That personal nature exacerbates some problems, and how users feel about certain things, including privacy. When apps demand too many permissions it feels much more intrusive, almost a violation. I know people who won’t put Facebook apps on their phones because of it, remember the person describing Uber for Android as “literally malware” which went viral but was apparently inaccurate. People uninstalled Twitter because they started checking to see what apps are installed on your phone to improve advertising.
I think what we see here is the result of three things. Firstly, ad click through rates are lower on mobile so companies need better data for better targeting. Secondly, poor communication around permissioning on the OS, like many things, worse on Android. And thirdly people being more protective of the device they love.
The World
The World Around You
We want to log everything that is going on in our app, right? But how often do we see someone just on a mobile device? It’s what we use as we go about in the world. In effect, we are logging the position of the tips of the user’s skis, without the context of the slope they are on. Logging is only part of the story of what’s happening. We log what users do, not is what is going on in the world around them.
Maybe we log that they triggered shake to send feedback and cancelled it – this happens for me with Google Maps every time I get in and out of my car.
Maybe we log that send failed because of lack of internet connection – maybe because the user got in an elevator, or is on a train travelling in and out of service. We don’t know.
Maybe we log that a timeout happened on the form they were filling in – perhaps Covert Affairs got particularly dramatic.
We don’t really know what is happening. On the computer we could be reasonably confident that they were sitting still, and either had, or didn’t have, internet. And now our user could be anywhere, doing anything. They could be being chased by a bull. They could be on the chair lift. It’s pretty likely that they are watching TV. And the world around them – the quality of service, the lighting, the movement, affects the experience they have with our product.
The World is Exciting
This leads us to distraction. By this point, I bet most of you have checked your phone, maybe email? Maybe Twitter? Maybe you’ve responded to something important. Maybe you’ve been clearing out your inbox.
I was mostly shocked by how long this took. Let me tell you how I work out. I get my cardio on the elliptical. With me I take my iPad, and at least one cellphone, normally both (I carry an iPhone and an Android phone).
So I would have estimated mobile to be way above TV, based on an assumption that TV means also being on mobile, but being on mobile does not also mean watching TV.
Did you know that texting whilst driving is more dangerous than driving drunk? That’s the cognitive overhead of multitasking.
On mobile, your users are multitasking. This means: your users are effectively drunk. There’s a reason why you’re not supposed to drive (or ski!) drunk – it reduces reaction time.
The World and Other Humans
I’ve got used to skiing alone, basically because I would sooner ski solo than ski slowly. But there are few things better than a great ski companion – someone who can keep up with you, push you to go a that bit faster, brave that scary run, pick up your poles when you wipe out.
There’s a great quote from Douglas Crockford in Coders at Work; he talks about how computers used to be social because a group of people shared a computer and an email address. There was a community around it. And then we moved to the personal computer, and computers became anti-social. Now we move back to them being social, because we’re humans! Social is normal. And nowhere is that more true than the phone.
What does this mean? It means your app is going to get interrupted by the ding ding ding of text messages, and twitter notifications, and email.
It also means that social is a normal part of mobile interaction, and sharing what you’re doing is standard. We’ve bastardised the meaning of the word social in this industry, and it’s come to mean “one person broadcasting channel” but that is not what I mean. If I’m booking a holiday with a friend, I want to show them what I’m looking at. If someone is being annoying I’ll be discussing it privately. Pulling out a phone and showing things to people we are with is normal.
The System
The System is Broken
One of the things about being a ski instructor, is you ski like a pro and like a beginner. When the day is over, you can carve it up down the hill. When you’re teaching, you ski at the level you want the student to aim for. It sounds simple to do a snow plough, right? You just make a pizza. But it’s actually much more work. You’re working against the mountain, against the snow. When you work with the physics of the skis, the shape of the mountain, it’s much less exhausting.
We know, that someone learning is working way harder than we are. That thing that took us 2 minutes, they had to look 6 things up and now it’s only nearly done. But also we do this to ourselves – when we do that “easy” hack, we pay for it later. When we focus on a sensible structure, on documentation, onboarding and subsequent changes become easier. We work with our system, instead of against it.
Skis used to be straight, but then in 1988 we got the side cut, the parabolic ski. As a result, people could ski even faster than before, because the new ski allowed you to accelerate through the turn. But a whole new way of skiing had to evolve as a result – a wider stance, and a lower centre of gravity.
Now, our mobile apps have become bigger and more complicated. This is really a whole other rant, but as our mobile apps become more complicated we have to evolve our infrastructure and processes with them.
For a long time on iOS, people barely wrote unit tests. And Android appeared to be untestable by design.
And I still find things. Like, I was using the G+ app recently (I know, strange behaviour), and I tried to open the locations tab, and it just… crashed. Which to me is a sign that there’s not a UI automation test just like, checking every single view controller loads. That should be a bare minimum.
Or the Twitter for Android app. I tried to take a picture of my passport and a cup of tea at the airport, and I carefully cropped it and added a filter to make it less generic.
And it discarded my edits. I had a couple of goes and had to just post an image that in no way reflected my limited talent with aesthetics.
And I just asked the world, futilely, how do you not have a unit test for that? Why?
The System is Tired
I went to Bali in 2013. Not to ski, obviously, but to do yoga! And earlier this year I went to Easter Island. Both these places are incredibly beautiful. But the internet was terrible. And all the apps on my phone, that are written with this expectation that I have high speed network all the time… they just stopped working. Twitter, especially with inline images, became basically unusable. G+ with even more images wouldn’t even load. Living with a poor data connection is like a ski resort without a snow-making machine. That used to be possible, but isn’t any more (thanks, global warming!)
When I travel within Europe, I used to use my Android phone and “restrict background data” to get by on the meagre data allowance O2 gave me. But last year in Scandinavia, I discovered that doesn’t work anymore – most of the apps don’t work without background data. For a while I was collecting nano SIM cards everywhere I went, now I finally have a SIM card that works in 17 countries.
I’m sure the majority of the time it has incrementally improved the experience. But it’s really not improved the experience when I travel, which is an important use case for me.
And let’s talk about battery life. I’ve started carrying around two cellphones and an external battery. That has become a new normal for me.
It’s easy to pass this off as an Operating System problem. And it is. But if someone’s battery is dead, they won’t be using your app. If they notice your app is draining the battery, they’ll delete it.
The System Has Many Pieces
Mobile is a systems problem. To get down this mountain, we’ve got to look at the whole mountain, not just the tips of our skis.
We talk about it though, like it’s form factor. And when we talk about “beyond mobile” we talk, mostly, about wearables. About smart watches and Google Glass. We wouldn’t talk about “beyond skiing” and fixate on goggles and helmets.
I wear two, sometimes 3 activity trackers, but no smart watch, and now that I no longer work for Google I can admit that there are few things I want less than a notifications bar attached to my face. Distraction is a far bigger problem for me than turn around response time on Twitter or whatever.
Mostly I think wearables are cool. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Mobile is just part of a multi-device world. People move between devices as they go about their day.
I still go to websites via twitter on my laptop, and click on links others have shared that open mobile sites, which aren’t great on my laptop. Or worse on my phone, I open links others have shared from desktop, which don’t or barely load on mobile. We’re not doing great supporting these transitions, yet. The skier doesn’t live on the slope. The user doesn’t, usually, live on one and only one device.
We see this especially with shopping, conversion rates on phones are lower and if you’ve tried to pay for something on a mobile lately maybe you think you know why, because it’s often terrible. But actually when we drill into patterns of behaviour in shopping we see people browsing on mobile during the day, earlier on their phones, and then later converting on their tablets, or on desktop.
So people say “mobile isn’t important, people don’t convert” but that depends what you mean by “convert”. Do they mean people don’t enter their credit card information at the same rate? Sure. But if they mean people don’t see things on their phone and decide to buy them – no.
Takeaways
I do think it’s possible for us to get a more complete picture of a mobile system and let it guide us down the mountain – a much better path than just following the skis. In fact, while beginner skiers look at the tips of their skis, the pros watch the back of your skis to see what’s really going on.
So here are some things you pros can be looking for when you’re trying to take a systems view of your mobile user:
More extreme UX evaluation: Can people use your app with one hand whilst moving?
Remove decisions: Consider the experience of decision making, not just information presentation. Every time you ask the user for information, they have to decide whether they want to give it to you.
Design for affection: Users love their phones, and that relationship is stronger than their relationship with your app.
Log early, log often: It’s your best bet for knowing what is going on, but recognize that it is only a partial story.
Design for distraction: Allow users to resume easily, expect partial, intermittent, attention.
To be human is to be social: Social doesn’t mean broadcasting, it means communicating with other humans.
More complex systems require more complex testing: The later you leave it, the harder this gets.
Don’t hurt The Precious: Consider the experience in extreme conditions.
Embrace a multi-device world: Make transitions smooth.
In 1988, there was a revolution in the ski industry. Previously, skis had been straight-edged and the skier controlled them through force and incline. The new shaped skis were parabolic, with a side-cut edge that caused the ski to turn when introduced to the snow. Pressure causes the ski to bend: more pressure, more bend, tighter turns.
The whole way of skiing changed as a result. The stance got wider, the centre of gravity, lower. The turn became a way to accelerate, rather than a way to stop.
But the French wouldn’t let a little thing like physics get in their way. They adopted the parabolic skis but continued to ski upright, legs close together, weight slightly back, cigarette and/or cellphone optional. They still managed to achieve impressive speeds – to even qualify as a ski instructor in France, you need to pass the “Test Technique” skiing within a percentage of the time of a professional skier – but they ski like no one else in the world.
When talking about innovation, we often see what I call “The French Ski Problem,” the risk of focusing on novelty without application, rather than incremental improvements somewhere more widely applicable.
If you are an innovator in the ski industry, you could make:
Improvements to parabolic skiing: Useful to everyone.
Improvements to straight ski technique on parabolic skis: Useful only in France.
Improvements to straight ski skiing: Not useful anywhere.
To which you might ask, who is worrying about (2) or (3), and the answer in skiing is: I have no idea. But in Software, (1) are human problems, (3) are made up engineer problems, and (2) is the nebulous space in between – often real solutions, to niche problems.
(3) is infrastructure with no human benefit, because nothing actually wins out on technical superiority (e.g. that test framework that nobody actually uses). (2) is infrastructure with human benefit, that allows for better speed, or increased stability (e.g. Twitter’s move of their infrastructure, it’s been a long time since I saw the Fail Whale). And (1) addresses the pain points of real humans, allows them to do their jobs better, live richer lives (e.g. the invention of the smartphone). This is where we connect people to the people they love, even when they are thousands of miles apart. Where we make sense of huge quantities of data, so that they can make better decisions, or have improved medical care. Where we create platforms that allow people different and novel ways to make a living.
My main point here is impact. A small incremental improvement of (1), is vastly more impactful than anything done at (2), let alone (3).
A question to ask is, are we building infrastructure, or are we building a product (1)? If we’re building infrastructure, does it enable the product (2), or are we just… building infrastructure (3)?
Real innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it comes from solving problems. There’s a reason why incredible earthquake preparedness innovation comes out of New Zealand, that mobile innovation is brightest in the developing world (where cellphones are often people’s primary, or only device), and Silicon Valley is an endless source of products for rich young men.
Thanks to Alice and Linda who helped with this post.
All too short weekend of skiing in Queenstown! We skied at Cadrona (terrible visibility, but pretty nice conditions otherwise), Remarkables (nice, I got a ski lesson which was really good), and I went solo to Coronet (too icy) because the boys were too tired.
I’ve wanted to ski in New Zealand for as long as I can remember, part of my goal to ski on every content. It’s different from resorts I’ve been to in Europe, and even Japan – no ski in ski out, but drives of 30 minutes to over an hour. On the up side, Queenstown felt more like a small town than a resort, and there were some cool arty shops that I really liked. But still, I much prefer rolling out of bed and onto the hill!
New Zealand was, as ever, stunning, and having finally discovered the panorama feature on the iPhone camera, I took a bunch.
On a Monday nights lately, I’m buzzed from skiing. I actually committed to something – an 8-week long, twice a week, race training program.
This is massive for me, as having taken a trip a month for very nearly two years, it seemed like I had lost the ability to commit to anything. And that was a problem, because it was making me unhappy. I was a strung out, nervous wreck, from travelling too much, having a stressful job (I love my job, I do, but I don’t just hang out in a micro-kitchen with breaks to take the slide all day. I work really hard).
And, I was making myself more unhappy by considering not just what I wanted, but what other people thought or felt.
So, something terrible happens and I think I don’t get to be as upset as the person who is closer to it, so I better pull myself together. It doesn’t work like that – people express their “upsetness” in different ways.
People say “oh you’re so lucky, I’d love to travel that much”, or (more annoyingly) “oh, I don’t get bothered by planes and jetlag myself, I just love it” (when they rarely go anywhere) and I feel guilty, or, angry. Because going to live somewhere for at least a month? That’s cool. Vacation? Bring it. Going to work somewhere else is often just a different commute. A different commute somewhere you don’t have a gym membership. Luckily I know people most of the places I go, but before my friend moved to NYC it kinda sucked – it’s a cool city, love it during the day, but don’t really want to or feel safe exploring it after dark, alone.
And then there’s the whole, if you’re not 100% happy all the time you should give up working for the man and become an entrepreneur thing. Which, much as I admire and support my entrepreneurial friends, is not me right now. I’m not interested in having my own company. The even more irrational flipside is, I 100% don’t want to start a company, and therefore I must be 100% happy all the time. Even if I’m not. That was getting me in a tizzy. And, the thing is, I think if you love your job you’re not going to be 100% happy all the time. Because things are never going to be 100% perfect. The raspberry panda liquorice that was so delicious, is never seen again. Product managers do their thing. Really smart people are often the most frustrating to work with. I get the highs – the raspberry liquorice, the shipping something an unimaginable number of people use, the incredible learning, the rush when you demo… and highs come with lows. I have that kind of temperament – when I’m delighted, I’m delighted. When I’m frustrated, I’m pissed. It’s easy never to get frustrated with your job if you don’t really care about it. I do, so anything less than amazing bothers me. There’s not much that’s less than amazing, but enough that from time to time I get really frustrated.
Anyway, I tell myself, all the time, that nothing changes unless you make it change. And so I took a vacation, and skiied and spa’d and relaxed. And then I came back, started working out at the new gym, upped my trainer to twice a week, and registered for race training.
Here’s the big difference – at the weekend, I do whatever it is I want to do. The weekend just gone I drove to the US with a couple of friends to buy cherry coke, and then on the Sunday I did bootcamp, 90 mins cardio, spin, and went swimming. Yes, I effectively spent the whole day at the gym – I have time to do that again now. The weekend before, on the Saturday I did spin, an hours cardio, and went swimming, and on the Sunday I did spin, 2 hours skiing, 80 mins cardio, and hot yoga. That one was pretty much a whole weekend of physical activity, interspersed with meals at my favorite restaurants in town. Awesome.
It feels like last year, every weekend I was either, on a plane, lying down because I was exhausted from taking a plane, or organizing myself because I was about to get on another sodding plane. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And the change in my energy, my stress levels… it’s dramatic.
Anyway, I guess what I learned from all this is to stop looking at how happy or sad other people are and berate myself for imagined ingratitude… and just make time for the things that make me happy. My idea of an ideal Sunday isn’t everyones… but that is 100% OK.
I love Penelope Trunk‘s blog. She’s not afraid to write about her life. And sometimes that’s positive, but the most interesting and hilarious and insightful posts are always about a negative – some way in which she screwed up, something she found difficult, relationships – that ended.
The tagline is “advice at the intersection of work and life”. I don’t know about you, but that’s where I need it. How do I balance work and life? How do I deal with people I dislike, or dislike me? How do I lead an interesting life?
I’ve had a great few months professionally, but it all starts a little over 6 months ago. One Thursday morning I cracked and broke up with and evicted my then-boyfriend. All I wrote at the time was that I’d failed.
Here’s the thing, for a couple of months before that I had been living with someone who had checked out emotionally and had just remained physically because, I don’t know. It was easier, and cheaper for him. And I tried to fix it, because that’s what I do. Time is invested. Future is planned. Don’t diverge from the path. Things will get better if X and Y and Z change. Whether they do or don’t, it doesn’t.
Sometimes I would yell or cry that I didn’t even feel like he liked me but mostly I thought I didn’t deserve any better than the criticism that was levelled at me – I worked too much, I didn’t work enough on what was important, I was too career focussed, I was too emotional, I shouldn’t dislike this person, I shouldn’t be upset about that.
The door slams. I go swimming. And the biggest thing I feel? Relief. Breathe out. I’m alone. Mostly I was just numb and exhausted. I watched a lot of TV. Of course I cried, and of course I rationalized that maybe it was that living together was too stressful. We tried to date but that ended after an argument representative of so many others we’d had. One of his friends being inappropriate. Me being unreasonable and overly-emotional (apparently). Done.
Of course this is a vast oversimplification, and it goes without saying that I have my own faults.
It took 2 months to get his crap out of my apartment. I spent my birthday on a plane and all I wanted was to come home to an apartment that was just mine. I didn’t. He wished me happy birthday via Facebook and via text. And I arrived to find his stuff there, in my space, where I desperately didn’t want it to be.
An email showed up with a list of my faults. I was trying to focus on my internship and instead there’s a phone call at 11 at night and I’m in tears. He apologizes, but it doesn’t take the sting out of what was written. Including, when I’d bought him skis for his birthday I had been trying to buy his affection. They were the most beautiful skis, too long for me (the difficulty of getting high end skis if you’re female and not tall is another sad story I’ll tell another time) but I’d demo’d them and loved them and thought I would get to ski them. I didn’t. He comes to collect them and I joke – half serious – that I thought I was getting a refund. He says “I apologized for that” and takes them.
Our belongings were separate but our finances were entwined and that was more work. Eventually I got my own Canadian credit card and had my phone in my name. I was free. The last time I saw him he asked if I wanted to have dinner and I said, “I don’t really see us being friends”. I was done.
It’s telling what friends say post-breakup. This time was a new record in people who hadn’t liked my ex. I came across an article about emotional abuse and realized that there were elements of that, that I’d just come to think I deserved.
I avoided our mutual friends, joking that he’d got them and I’d got the apartment. It was easier than I thought it would be, mostly because of the awesome people who I met in EB.
But also because of my friend who I went to Seattle to see for my birthday, just over a month after we broke up. I was a wreck, completely unconfident and pathetically grateful that he would buy me a coffee (let alone dinner) and find me amusing and worth talking too. He sat me down and finished my resume with me and convinced me to let him put it in to a company that I hadn’t even allowed myself to dream of working for.
And then there was Maggie. Occasionally I would tell her things my ex had said to me and she would look at me and say, “Cate, why did you put up with that?”. Between the two of them, they gave me the pieces and I put myself back together. I was productive. I was effective. I was loving my job. I was optimistic about what was next. I was back in the gym, enjoying it, and starting to get over my injuries and back to normal. Now, I have a workout schedule that I would have struggled with pre-kneecap-dislocation. I am insanely excited about my next adventure. I’m stressed, sure, but pretty happy.
I write this because, it’s time. Because it seems right to share that despite everything I do and everything I’m apparently capable of, I let one person annihilate my self-esteem to way below my usual level of low-level-inadequacy-driving-me-forward.
I found out recently that he’s dating someone new. In fact, the passive aggressive I wrote about ages ago. When I found out I laughed for about 15 minutes. There are a number of reasons as to why I found it so hilarious, but mostly it’s because that group of people – when you don’t think they can get more dysfunctional, they do. I’d been thinking that the best revenge is a life well lived, but after that realized that sometimes people create their own poetic justice, and that’s gravy.
And then, I started thinking about the skis. And whilst I don’t care who my ex is sleeping with, the thought of those beautiful skis out with the guy who annihilated my self esteem, and the woman who made me question my sanity – who thinks she’s all that on the slopes and “teaches” hapless beginners, whilst stemming her turns which she makes entirely with her ass… seems like a tragedy.
Of course, the real tragedy is the time and energy I spent on both these people. The amount I allowed them to affect me. I’m fixating on the skis because they are a physical thing that I let him walk away with, that I didn’t hide them as I wanted to because I was so paranoid about being reasonable. The chipping away at my self-esteem is an intangible thing that I can’t quantify. It’s the thing I’m truly upset about.
Walking through the grocery store I saw trashy magazines depicting the latest gossip about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. Since that Oprah show and with the Scientology nonsense it’s always about how Cruise is crazy and controlling. I don’t read these magazines and I have no idea what’s being said, but I do notice that Holmes is less awesome since she got with Cruise. In fact I had a friend, who was really really cool when she was single, but would always be like whoever she was dating. She’s now married and lives in suburbia. I don’t know what happened to all the dreams of living abroad and doing amazing things.
Here’s the thing, I let someone make me less awesome. I didn’t even notice it was happening. And when my friend and I looked at each other the other day and said, “dating sucks. What is the point?” This is what I was thinking: I don’t ever want to let anyone make me less awesome again. And I’m scared to be out there, in case they do.
I read this great article on Study Hacks recently, it’s called Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do and is part of a series he’s doing. In one, he was looking for people who love what they do and I marked it to come back to because that’s me – I love what I do.
Then I came back to the article, and realized that it wasn’t. Grad school has been getting me down, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and a failure at basically everything I do. I’ve given up responding to email. In fact, a lot of the time I’ve stopped even reading it. I’ve been exploring this in my posts about progress and re-equilibrating the balance of my life.
Then, two things happened. The first is that on Sunday I had an hour an a half improving an 11 year old’s skiing. Note – improving, not teaching. Note – not a 4 year old. We skied as much as possible, and I gave her tips on the lift. It was fun! Sunday ski instructing had become this obligation around my neck, a reason why I can’t plan anything at the weekend. I’d started to wonder if I’d fallen out of love with skiing. But that lesson made me realize that I’d just wasn’t in love with teaching 4-year-olds. Which is not surprising!
Late that night (or early the following morning), I submitted my first paper. And this weight lifted, and graduation seemed that much closer. Because now I just have to write one more paper and finish this course I’m taking and I can be done!
Perspective is so important. From the point of view of teaching 4-year-olds, ski instructing is (to me) not fun. From the alternative perspective, it’s awesome. Taking that one step towards graduation of submitting my first paper, makes the end seem so much closer.
Although I’ve given a lot of free ski lessons since I qualified, to people displaying various degrees of talent and attention to instruction… yesterday was the first time people paid for my advice.
I’m still kind of shocked that it’s worth anything, given that I couldn’t ski until I was 21.
But, now I have my level 2. And that feeling gradually went away. First the little English girl, who was very sweet and whose dad was watching the whole time. He started off a little annoyed (there had been a mix-up and her lesson had started late) but by the end of the hour he was thanking me saying her improvement had been amazing.
Yay!
Next up, I ended up with two little girls, sisters. They were pretty good skiers already so we went up the mountain. Apart from an incident at the chairlift (next time we’re going slower and all getting on together) and one of them getting stuck in a hole and having to be lifted out… it was all good.
Finally, I had a little French girl, first time on skis. She was super cute, but a little scared so at first what we did was she’d slide down a little and I’d catch her. And I was allowed progressively further away, as she learned to slow down and eventually stop by herself. But even as I’m holding her up, and my lower back is howling with pain, she’s pointing to the big lifts and asking if we can go up, and if she can go up with daddy!
Credit: flickr / Damon Duncan
By the end of the day, 3pm, I was exhausted. But all in? A pretty good day and a great break from doing what I normally do.
It didn’t start off that well though. I was supposed to have a group in the morning, and the woman in charge told me to be there at 10:20. I was, but I should have been there for 10, so they were gone. I felt terrible, and horribly embarrassed that I’d screwed up and got the time wrong – honestly I wanted to burst into tears and go home… until she later apologized and said she’d realized it was her who’d mixed things up. Oh the relief!
First days – really hard. First days somewhere completely different? Even harder. No computer to hide behind! But so worth it. Teaching a child in French – big hurdle for me. Made it!
How was your weekend?
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