An Eagle named Andrew

Andrew, my younger brother, has decided not only to become an Eagle Scout before he turns 14 but also to try to earn every single merit badge (not necessarily before he turns 14). I know of a couple of other people who tried something like this and succeeded. One was Howard W. Hunter, who later became a prophet for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints, and another was Sam Walton, who went on to found Walmart and Sam’s Club. Andrew has agreed to update this post with a comment each time he earns a new merit badge. He will put the name of the merit badge, his current total number of badges, and the date that he passed it off with a counselor. He is standing here beside me as I write this blog and has helped craft the content.

Andrew has already earned the following merit badges:

Pets, Scholarship, and Music.

That means he only has about 140 more to go.

On being frugal

I am known in my family as a penny-pincher, and properly so. Having a large family with Gina staying at home while I’ve been going to graduate school may have been impossible without a bit of frugality. We have had 5 children across these 8 years and I’ve been going to school for 7 of the 8 and Gina has only worked during 1 of them. We have thrived financially and always had more than enough because we have been blessed and because we have been frugal.

I want to take a bit of time, though, and discuss what being frugal is and what it isn’t in the best way that I can. Rather than discuss things in the abstract I would like to try and express my feelings on frugality by example. We can call this game “is this action frugal?” Here goes:

Going without cable TV. Yes. You are going without something that is not a need and may not even improve your life. In doing so you are saving time and money.

Taking sugar packets from a restaurant. No. This is stealing. Besides, the frugal family wouldn’t be eating at the restaurant.

Buying something on sale. It depends. If it fills a need or will clearly bless your family then yes, buying it for the best honest price you can find is frugal. If it doesn’t then you are not being frugal.

Accepting help from WICK. No. This is not being frugal, this is getting your food in one of the most inefficient ways there are. You don’t pay the price but other people do. This is not frugality, it is parasiticism. This doesn’t mean that no one should accept WICK. It is better to accept help than to let your family suffer. It does mean that no one can claim to be frugal when they do so.

Relying on state health care. No. For the most part, see my thoughts on WICK.

Bickering over the price of a good. No. Frugality is most concerned with which things to buy. It is not concerned so much with trying to get more benefit from a transaction than the person on the other side.

Biking instead of getting an extra car. Yes! You have cut down on needs and waste rather than merely cutting down on money spent. This decision should pay off many times over.

Foregoing health insurance. No. Frugality is about maintaining independence and lowering the costs associated with existance by keeping your wants and needs in check.  Although foregoing health insurance may be a reasonable gamble when the numbers are large, doing so leaves you open to large financial risk and therefore defeats one of the goals of frugality.

Process vs. Product

Two groups were taught to make pottery in a classroom setting. One group was graded on volume. They had to throw a certain number of pieces over the course of the class. A second group was graded on perfection. They had to produce a beautiful piece of work.

Which group produced better potters? The group that focused on volume produced far better potters.

I had the chance to play a bit of Frisbee with the kids during our trip out to Durango. As it turned out the kids are young enough and inexperienced enough in this domain that it took some coaxing. By experimentation I found that if I wanted them to learn I had to be careful what I said. When I focused on praising throws based on quality the kid would give up pretty quickly. The kids started learning best when after each attempt I made no judgement at all but rather said “Okay, try again.”

I hope that the kids will learn that approach to little failures. I hope that with each attempt that didn’t quite work they will hear in their minds an immediate “Okay, try again.”

Effective policies

About a week ago I went to a toxic waste handling training session at LANL. It was called “Live Waste Management.” A lot of people at LANL deal with a lot of toxic things and it is up to them to handle them correctly. At the same time it is up to the lab to make sure that they do handle them correctly. For my experiments, for example, I will be working with elemental mercury and with some fairly nasty organic dies. When they get old or impure, how should I dispose of them? First, I don’t put them in the trash. Second, I don’t let them evaporate or put them down the sink. For some chemicals the effects of that type of behavior are horrible. (Some chemicals will kill all of the bacteria that are in our sewer treatment plants to process normal wastes. One person can put down the whole system by pouring the wrong things down the drain.)

So nasty chemicals aren’t disposed of in the normal ways. Rather they go through processes that can depend on the particular chemical. But at the lab and in practice I will only have to deal with one part of the process: I just put them in a designated container, and that container is set up before I ever begin my experiment. Anyway, the class was 4 hours long and we learned all kinds of things about different chemicals and classifications of chemicals and materials. It was pretty interesting. But at the end the instructor, who is a policy maker at the lab, said something that made me take notice. He said, “the key to getting people to follow rules and regulations is to make it easier for them to follow those rules than for them to not to follow them.“

It felt good to hear those words because they meant that the policy makers weren’t out to change me but rather to change circumstances so that I would naturally do the things best for the lab and for the environment. And implicit in the statement was a promise that they would try to make following the necessary procedures as hassle free as possible.

Hearing that quote helped me make a good decision a couple of days later. Usually I shower in our kids bathroom. It’s right next to the hot water heater and gets the best flow of hot water and you don’t have to wait for it to heat up. I like to shave right after I shower and to do that I fill the sink partly up with hot water. Well, the kids have been fascinated with the sink and have ruined the drain so that it won’t stay shut unless you put a band around it to hold it up. I had put a hair elastic there several times and it had been removed several times. So this time I was stuck again in the bathroom with the water hot and ready but with the drain not working. I was naked and still a little wet and I didn’t want to have to search around the house to get ready to shave. Because that wasn’t the first time that had happened to me I was more bugged than I might have been. I felt betrayed and stuck and frustrated and I was mad. I was ready to teach everyone in the house the important policy of not removing the hair elastic that I kept putting in place.

Luckily, somehow I remembered what I had learned about trying to change systems rather than people. After I finished shaving I put the little hair elastic that I had managed to find up on a window sill. The kids can’t reach it and Gina can’t see it and I don’t think I’ll ever be stuck again without a working drain. More importantly, I don’t have to teach or enforce a ridiculous rule and can therefore focus on more important things like don’t kill each other.

So there is a neat little lesson that I learned about effective policies.

What will you do after school?

People ask me that a lot, which is pretty normal. What is a bit more surprising is that the same people ask me that question many times. It makes me feel like I can’t communicate. Anyway, the answer hasn’t changed now for a few years. The first few paragraphs are probably bad blogging style; they are important to me, but they will probably bore you, the reader. If you want specifics then tough luck. But the most specific part is the last paragraph.  Anyway, here is what I want to do.

First, I want to be learning for the rest of my life. I want to learn about all kinds of things. I want to learn how people work, how groups of people work, what is right and what is wrong. I want to learn how the world works from math to physics to chemistry to biology. I want to understand the limits of knowledge given limited experience. I want to learn how to build things. I want to understand technology and computer science, the nature of truth and information. I want to know how to grow a beautiful garden and write beautiful code and raise a happy, healthy child.

 

Second, I want to build and do for the rest of my life. I want to write a beautiful book or two of fiction. I want to write some music that I can be proud of and some poetry. I want to grow a garden worth growing. I want to make a website worth making and a company worth putting on the planet. I want to build up the people around me. I want to build a great, happy, and enduring family.

 

Third, I want to do these things as a part of a team of people I can respect and honor and laugh with and enjoy. I would love to maintain ties with universities for the rest of my life, particularly with BYU, which I love like it is a part of my family. I love interacting with my wife and children, parents, siblings and in-laws, my cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. I love being a part of a ward and serving in it. I love walking through this amazing life with my wife at my side.

 

Fourth, I want to know that what I create is good and is worth pouring a life into. I have been lost in mathematics and I have been lost in many a book and I’ve been lost in various sports. There is a time for things that are beautiful just for themselves. That is to say, there is a time for play. But in the end, I can’t make any of these things into a core for my life. They are healthy snacks but for me they can’t be the core. For my primary task it will be necessary to do something that I can believe in as a cause, as a service to humanity.

 

Fifth, I hope to make my own destiny. While I hope to be tied to a university and to my family and to great institutions for the rest of my life, I am also seeking to do so as an independent entity. While I would like to be learning and creating and contributing for the rest of my life, I hope that I can do these things not by asking for funds from the government or from lenders or from corporations or nonprofits. I hope that I can do these things supported by my own labor and creativity. I hope that I will be able to measure what I produce partly in the fact that people will happily pay for it. I hope to avoid for most of my life questions of whether I am giving adequate value to my employer and focus forever on trying to give more than adequate value to users of my services and to team mates.

 

“I thought he was going to say what he wanted to do when he grew up!” For now all those hopes boil down into a simple plan and set of actions. I hope to complete my PhD over the next couple of years while working for Los Alamos. In the meantime I am giving an hour a day toward becoming financially independent, meaning self-supporting rather than dependant on a job for income.  At the end of my PhD I am planning on going forward full time on this endeavor. What is the endeavor? I am trying to build a service that I can believe in whose first revenue will come before December 21^st, 2007. Details will unfold over time.