We've been watching a lot of TV recently. If one is going to watch a large amount of television, traditionally one has been forced to do one of two things: abandon all sense of propriety and dignity, and watch an enormous amount of pap, or spend an inordinate amount of time and effort doing research with the TV guide, in order to catch decent programs. Thus goes the world.
Until the advent of the internet, of course. Along with so many other things, (ie. shopping, letter-writing, research,) the internet has come to the rescue, and shown us a better way. Now the internet allows us to spend hours and hours each day watching only those programs we want to see, one after the other after the other.
We used to try and stream the shows we wanted, watching them right off the internet without downloading them to the computer. As poor neophytes, (and I mean poor in the financial sense, since anyone with a good internet connection is in a very real sense rich,) we endured a lot of buffering . . . waiting . . . loading . . . and were grateful for the opportunity to see shows we loved in our own living room, in our own language, half-way around the world.
Then two things happened - first, a site called Megavideo gobbled up most of our shows, and demanded money, or it would arbitrarily shut you off at 2 / 5 / 7 / 15 /you name it minutes, and give notice that you had watched 72 minutes of video today, now kindly cough up. Considering the arbitrary nature of the shut off, and how many of our favorite shows were now monopolized by Megavideo, it was time to figure out something new. Like reading more. Or doing the dishes. Or talking to our techno-geek friend, Sara.
Sara had long been babbling about "Torrents." Bit Torrents, that is. She told us about it numerous times, but honestly, it just sounded too bloody complicated. She even got us to install a program on our computer, and I watched a few BBC documentaries, but after a bit of complication, I just kind of forgot about it. Unfortunately, "too technical, too complicated," are frequently the words that emerge from my mouth right before I give up on something.
But recently, for a reason I do not recall, I opened up the program again, (it had sat idle for months,) and FOLLOWED HER DIRECTIONS. I knew it wouldn't work any more this time than it had the previous times, but it did. And it turned out to be as simple as she had said.
Torrents (for the few of you who might still be as ignorant as I, and since this blog is only read by my friends, and considering we are talking about technology, I suppose that means the majority of you,) allow you to download tiny chunks of the program you want from multiple computers. Thus, you can work with anywhere from one to thousands of computers at the same time, pulling little bits of the program from each as they come available. When you are done, they begin pulling the program from your computer, to supply the other people who might wish to watch it.
This allows me, instead of trying to download one, or two episodes of a program, and waiting endlessly for them to load or buffer, to simply download a whole season, (or three) plus a movie, (or two) and a few individual episodes (or seven) all at the same time, then save them for as long as I want before I watch them. You can see what such capabilities might lead to.
Fortunately, as I often tell my students, the intellectual content of an encounter is not determined by the information presented by the opposite party, but by the intellectual tools present in your toolbox to analyze, dissect, and make comparisons and evaluations with the information on offer. In other words, an intellectual watching a dog show will come away with exceedingly valuable insights into human nature, anthropomorphism and the relations between man and animal at their most useless, while having been highly entertained for hours, whereas a retard listening to a lecture on string theory still walks away with strings of drool on his vest and visions of cheetos.
(Or so I tell myself, anyway. The caveat above may simply be what I use to justify some of the dreadful pap I end up watching.)
The shows which have caught my attention most are The West Wing, The Tudors, House, Pushing Daisies, etc. But the one's that stick in my craw are the reality shows. I have become sadly interested in two reality shows - The Amazing Race, and The Ultimate Fighter. Both of these shows appeal to me for the same reason - they are isolated laboratories of success and failure. You watch as people succeed and fail at tasks, and attempt to identify what the characteristics are that accompany success, and what characteristics correlate with failure. Well, I do, at any rate. And then I spend the next hour flagellating myself for all the areas I fall short.
In The Amazing Race, the concept is more or less that of a planet-sized scavenger hunt, with the last team (or pair, rather,) to get all their clues, and complete all their tasks for that leg of the race eliminated. The winning team receives a million dollars. Every episode you get to see HOW people mess up - the decisions that cost them time, the catastrophic moment of inattention that takes them from first to last place in a matter of seconds. You also often see things decided by luck of the draw - who chose a taxi driver who had no idea where he was going and got lost.
The Ultimate Fighter, on the other hand, is very concentrated, and unified, both in location and task. They bring in 16 mixed martial arts fighters, and have the coaches, (professional fighters themselves) choose teams after a few days of observation. From there, they live and train together for 8 (?) weeks, and periodically fight. The tournament goes on until the winners in each weight class fight in a televised event, for a $100,000 contract.
Standard TV schlock, I know. But what so fascinates me about it is trying to draw inferences about the nature of success from the actual success and failure I observe, and what I have seen is this.
1. Intensity. Those who succeed in these environments have a desire and drive that often stands out above the rest. They push harder for longer, striving not just to better someone else, but often for the sheer sake of pushing themselves as hard as they can. It sometimes seems that they like to rev their own engines as fast as they can, whether or not they are racing with somebody else.
2. Focus. This quality stands out most in its absence. Those who fail have too many things going on in their minds, have 3 competing strategies at once, and are worried about petty things when they need to be focused on the task in front of them. The successful, on the other hand, seem to approach the training or the task with a clearer mind. They don't seem to have as many voices competing in the background for their attention, which allows them to completely focus themselves, their physical and mental energies, on pushing fast and hard.
3. Attention to detail. It seems that winners have the ability to notice things that others do not. Sometimes these details are explicit - right in front of you, spelled out on the paper, and the loser is the one who doesn't see it. At other times the critical details are surrounded by a host of similar looking options. Those who will be successful are sometimes capable of picking out the proper information from the mass, but more often are successful because they are able to develop a more efficient method of dealing with and processing the mass of information, and thereby arrive at the answer more quickly. Other times they are unaware they should be looking for any information, or that critical information even exists. Yet the successful manage to notice it anyway.
4. Positivity. Of course, you do see occasional despair, and frustration, but on the whole the successful contestants seem to remain more positive, more encouraging and cheerful than the others. This result is their lives and relationships manifest less bickering and squabbling, less under-cutting, and more encouragement and cheering on.
5. Consistency. No doubt what one did last night, or over the past couple of weeks, has a dramatic impact on one's ability to function at the top of one's game this morning. However, of greater import is what one did all last year, and the year before that. The positive attitudes, and the intensity that seem to accompany a champion are not things that can be generated over night. No doubt all the contestants believe they are trying - but giving your all is something you have to learn how to do. Everyone feels as though they are trying - it is those who have tried hard, and then harder, and then harder, and then given a bit more, (and then vomited,) and then got back up and did it again, THOSE are the ones who truly understand. And such understanding can only come as the result of consistent effort.
When I look at these qualities, I see how far I have to go to be a person whose life is characterized by winning qualities. And yet, if I have identified them, surely I am one step closer to being the person I need to be. At least I know how to get there, and that might make all the difference. But first I'd have to get off my ass and stop watching so much TV.
