The Golden Mean

According to Aristotle, virtue lies in the mean between excess and deficiency. For instance, in terms of eating, virtuous eating lies between obesity and anorexia. It is really just common sense when you think about it.

For most people including myself, it is easier to live at the extremes. That is because extremism does not require prudence. You don't have to think about it. For instance, if you find yourself eating too much, you can do a ridiculous fad diet such as eating nothing but prunes. You lose a bunch of weight and then go back to eating burgers and gain the weight right back. Repeat ad infinitum.

You are the product of your habits. Almost anyone can make a temporary change and revolutionize their lives. But it rarely lasts. People slide into their old ways because their new ways are unsustainable. Will power can only take you so far. To make lasting change, you need the consistency that comes from habit.

People are impatient. They want change, and they want it now. It takes time to accumulate new habits. But the slow road is the certain road. Instead of a fad diet, eat a balanced diet. You won't lose weight fast, but you will lose it. It is a certainty. If you lose only a pound a week, you will have dropped 52 pounds by the end of a year.

The only real change comes from consistency, and consistency comes from moderation. You must find the mean between your excesses and your deficiencies and make those your life. This is where virtue comes from. Identify the mean, and the rest will take care of itself.

I have identified one golden mean in my life and that is concerning diet. I eat three meals a day and a snack. I always try to eat because this keeps me from getting hungry and making poor food choices. I then make the right food choices which boils down to cutting way back on fat and sugar. This means not eating burgers and fries or drinking sugary soft drinks. I eat grilled chicken instead of fried chicken. I use Splenda in my coffee. I drink water the rest of the time. The goal is merely to cut back on caloric intake by eliminating the calorie rich foods and beverages that are the staples of the American diet.

In terms of sleep, I am still working on this. This comes from the influence of my girlfriend who gets the proper eight hours per night. I couldn't help noticing she gets her stuff done while I get little done on my four hours per night. Now, I get 6 hours minimum per night. People who tell you they get by on four hours or less are lying. I've done that becoming a virtual zombie, and it kills your productivity. Things take twice as long because you are too fucking tired to move or think. Often, I end up wiping out on the couch which kills my schedule. That extra two hours of sleep saves me two hours each day as a result of fewer mistakes, so it pays for itself.

There are limits to what you can do. This doesn't mean you can't achieve a lot of things, but you are a human being. You have to eat and sleep. A frenetic lifestyle of overwork only leads to lower productivity and poor health. Accept your needs and live with them. The reality is that you end up achieving more. It seems paradoxical until you try it. Like the magic of compound interest, it adds up over time.

People are shortsighted. They overestimate what they can achieve in the short term but underestimate what they can do over the long haul. It is usually the young who fail to grasp this because they haven't lived long enough to appreciate the power of consistency. I know this has been an error of mine. But if you put in the effort day in and day out, you will be amazed at the results. A consistent small effort over time will add up to more than a haphazard string of willpower moments when you bust your ass in spurts followed by the pendulum swinging back to the other extreme.

I find my biggest challenge these days is simply identifying the mean. For instance, how many hours should you work each week? What is the excess and what is the deficiency? How much should you know? How many skills should you have? How many books should you read? As I said, the mean can be a difficult thing to grasp and figure out.

The mean also applies to your character traits. What is the proper level of anger? How much should you trust? How opinionated should you be? These are difficult as well.

I have also found that living by the mean often puts you into conflict with the wider society. For instance, everyone was very supportive of my healthy eating until I had to turn down the shit garbage they cook. Then, I was taking things to "an extreme." Or if I decide to not work more than 12 hours, I am a lazy piece of shit. I can tell you now that the mean for you cannot be defined by other people. They have an agenda which they expect you to serve, so you learn very quickly that virtue also requires selfishness. You have to take care of yourself first.

Another thing about the mean is that it can seem extreme at times when it really isn't. For instance, the ideal weekly mileage for a distance runner is between 100 and 140 miles per week. This seems staggering to consider, but it represents the sweet spot of training. Less than this will relegate you to averageness while more than this will put you on the disabled list. Everyone is different depending upon genetics and biomechanics, but this is what it takes to be a professional runner. For the rest of us, the benefits of fitness can be achieved with as little as 30 minutes of exercise per day.

There are many factors that go into determining the mean. Following the mean doesn't mean being an average person. These are dependant upon the goals you are pursuing and the resources you have available. For instance, Alicia Keys is both a gifted singer and a gifted student. But she found it difficult to attend college and also pursue her music career at the same time. So, she had to let one go for the sake of the other. Similarly, many working mothers put their careers on hold for a time in order to be good parents. The difficulty in choosing to do one thing well is also choosing not to do other things as well or even at all. This can be hard because it means limiting choices and options. But it can't be avoided. A champion bodybuilder can't also be a champion distance runner. They are incompatible.

I take comfort in the fact that I already have the eating and sleeping things figured out. These really won't change for me unless I decide to enter the Tour de France or something. The rest will take some time to figure out, but I am getting there. My next step is to figure out how much work is enough to keep my workaholic status while also maintaining my relationships and my three hobbies. A topic for another post.

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Thank You India

Thank you India, what you have done for world cricket can never be paid back, and Australia and England better get use to it.

Don't get me wrong, Australia is the Number One Cricket Nation in the world and deserves to be.

But England use to rule the roost, when it came to cricket, they called the shots for decade after decade and every other country had to fall into line. The came the "ME" decade of the 80's and Kerry Packer and it was Australia's turn to be the King of the World, Australia bought in tens of Millions of Dollars into the Game and despite Australia not being at its peak in the 80's they had the biggest say in the running of the game.

But what happened to touring teams going to Australia was disgusting, an Australian Player could sledge and sledge and sledge, but if an opposition player wanted to sledge back, well it just wasn't cricket.

Then the Umpiring seem to be getting worse and worse, and the mistakes just happened to fall in the Home teams favor, and that didn't changed with Neutral umpires either.

The Blackcaps were always put up in Hotels that just happened to be next to construction sites, during one Test the keys to the New Zealand dressing Room just happened to be lost and because cricket is a gentleman's game, teams such as NewZealand had to just grin and bear it.

Well all this has changed, Thanks to India, and Pay TV, a country that has a Billion People who citizens are signing up and paying to watch their National game. Their cricket board is now earning more money than the rest of the test playing Nations put together.

Another reason is the Players on the Field have not decided to take any more BS when Playing in Australia, if an Australian Player is going to sledge, an Indian player will sledge back, if a Umpire makes a dreadful mistake on the field that favors Aussie, the Indians will question it, India are finally fighting fire with fire like no other team has before, if New Zealand, West Indies, Pakistan, England, South Africa, Sri Lanka follows suit, well Australia is going to be on the end of a lot more series losses, that happens when there is an even playing field.

Thank You India.

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Blue and White?

To say this is an interesting time for the field of Sports Law is a bit of an understatement.

Now we learn Major League Baseball in its never-ending quest to taint its own product has been sending investigators out into the south to inquire whether neighbors and acquaintances of umpires know whether the men in blue have ever donned the white robes of the KKK.

This is so wrong on so many levels. As someone who watched 150 odd games last season, I can attest that at no time did I ever think any umpiring decision was racially motivated. Could the powers that be have seen anything else that could have led them to suspect such foul play?

And why just southern umpires? Does Baseball believe an umpire from Kentucky is more likely to be a racist than an umpire from Massachusetts? As Lamell McMorris, a spokesman for the World Umpires Association, aptly put it: “To try to link our umpires to the Ku Klux Klan is highly offensive. It is essentially defaming the umpires in their communities by conducting a very strange and poorly executed investigation. It resembles kind of secret police in some kind of despotic nation.”

The main offense here, as I have repeated often in this forum, is treating those in major league sports differently than the way we treat those in any other profession or the way we would ever want to be treated ourselves. Whether it is subjecting them to blood and urine tests, creating a system where entry level employees have no say in where or for whom they will work, prosecuting them for crimes which would otherwise go unprosecuted, or conducting highly offensive background checks in their neighborhoods, those in professional sports seem not only to receive tremendous compensation for their excellence but to pay plenty for it.

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Arlen Specter Kicks His Dog

The New York Times reports that Sen. Arlen Specter wants NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain and justify the league's destruction of the videotapes that the New England Patriots took of opponents' sideline signals, a violation of league rules that resulted in fines and a loss of a draft pick earlier this year. Goodell responded to numerous questions about the tapes and Specter during his pre-Super Bowl press conference today. In The Times story, Specter dropped the line that the underlying conduct is never as important as the cover-up. The basis for congressional interest is, as always, the league's antitrust exemption.

Now, I admittedly do not think much of congressional investigations, not because I do not think oversight is important, but because I think the modern Congress does it so poorly. And I really have no use for congressional investigations of professional sports, which make committee members look petty and uninformed, as well as incompetent. But beyond that, it seems there is a more pressing example of videotape destruction that is far more important in the great scheme of things and far more deserving of congressional attention. But Specter knows that any serious attempt to investigate the destruction of the CIA tapes will run smack into a White House and CIA stonewall and cries of national security, executive privilege, and classified information.

Not to go all pop psych on you, but: Specter is acting as the legislative equivalent of the small, weak kid in the schoolyard being picked on by a bigger, stronger kid and unable to fight back, at least not without getting badly beaten up. So he turns around and finds someone even smaller and weaker who he can beat up--usually the family dog.

Cross-posted at PrawfsBlawg

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Tulane Law School's "February Madness" Tournament

A special congratulations to College of William and Mary for winning this year's prestigious Mardi Gras National Sports Law Moot Court Competition, which is sponsored by Tulane and held in New Orleans each year during Mardi Gras. Today was the last day of the three-day competition, which fielded 36 teams. The issue was whether players have a right of publicity in their names and statistics used by fantasy league operators. The "final four" consisted of Florida Coastal, West Virginia, William and Mary, and Wisconsin. William and Mary then beat Wisconsin in the championship round. Iowa came in first place for best brief award, and Florida Coastal was awarded second place best brief. Congratulations to all the students who participated in this year's competition and put in countless hours of dedicated hard work preparing for it.

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10th Circuit: Paralympics are not entitled to same support as Olympics

Alan Milstein of Blog Justice and our blog passes along a note that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has affirmed a district court's dismissal of a claim by a group of Paralympic athletes against the United States Olympic Committee ("USOC"), which is the federally-chartered and taxpayer-funded corporation that has exclusive jurisdiction over U.S. participation in three athletic competitions: the Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, and the Pan American Games.

The Paralympic players contended that the USOC offers services and benefits to Olympic team members that they do not offer to Paralympic team members, and their failure to offer those services and benefits was discriminatory under the American with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs conducted by Federal agencies, in programs receiving Federal financial assistance, in Federal employment, and in the employment practices of Federal contractors). The court rejected the claims, finding a lack of statutory support. For more, check out the opinion.

For a related post, see Geoff's recent post "The Thorny and Challenging Issue of Disabled Track and Field Athletes."

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Reversion to the Mean

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--ARISTOTLE

I used to torment an ex-girlfriend with a concept called "reversion to the mean." Reversion to the mean is a concept in statistics where at some point things change back to what they are on average following a series of unusual outliers. The recent implosion in the housing market is one such example of this. The same thing would apply to coin flipping. You can't flip heads forever unless you have a two headed coin.

I apply the same concept to dating. Most people put their best foot forward when they get into a relationship and then devolve from there. This is why we think it is foolish to marry someone after only 24 hours. You need a bigger representative sample to make an assessment.

I try to put my worst foot forward in a relationship. This might seem foolish, but I'd rather a woman think the worst of me and surprise her later. I don't like disappointing people, so I try to hedge by lowering expectations. I can't say I have ever pulled this off as I find women have expectations regardless which you are almost certain not to meet.

As for women, I come in with low expectations, and they have always met them. I know the initial pleasantness of the first encounters will devolve into a mean of low grade misery and will remain there. It takes too much energy to fake it forever.

You can never judge a woman or a man until you know their mean. You must witness their highs, their lows, and their in-betweens. After this, you can make up your mind. I find the extreme events to be tolerable because they are brief and temporary. It is the grind of the mundane that is the real test.

The ex-girlfriend I mentioned was pretty bad. She tried hard but a few outliers could not overcome the mean of abusiveness, drunkeness, and drug abuse that emerged later. I had to walk on this.

I wonder where my own mean is. I know I am not a substance abuser, and I like to work a lot and make money. I am also outspoken in my character and personality and personal beliefs. I overgeneralize. I am ambitious, but I am also a loser. I am also wary to the point of paranoia of getting fucked over. My view of life is generally positive, but my view of human nature is tinged with the negative. I am a nice guy with a streak of meanness in him.

This way of thinking may be analytical, but every level of society employs it to some extent. This is why we have 90 day periods for new employees. This is why we have driving records and credit records and police records. The measure of a person's character is what they are on average.

People do change and adopt a new mean. You are the product of your habits. Drunks can sober up and remain so for decades often becoming obnoxious in their disdain for those who choose to drink. Prisoners can leave prison and turn their lives around. Losers can become winners. But the truth remains. You can change in a day but don't expect everyone to be credulous over it. This takes time. A new mean must emerge.

I know in my own life that I am striving to attain a new mean which I call the next level. They are centered on personal habits. My goals are generally character driven. Running a marathon and finishing it matters less to me than running consistently each day for a lifetime. I wish to work more and better. I want to quit being so disorganized in my life. I figure if I can do that then the achievements will come naturally from that.

I will have more on this when I discuss the Golden Mean. But I judge people by what they are on average. It takes more than a bad day or a bad remark from someone to change my judgment of somebody. I prefer to wait and see. I also know that it is always within me to change people's opinion of me. It just takes time and consistency.

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