The Virtue Of Being Unreasonable

“I’m a reasonable guy, but I’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things.” – Jack Burton, Owner-Operator of the Pork Chop Express

I put some giant, big, huge, enormous bread in the toaster today.  I made synonym toast.

I remember hiking my first 14,000 foot (43 liters) mountain.  It was a spur-of-the-moment trip.  I grabbed two of my friends and off we went.  We intentionally spent the night above 12,000 feet (12 kilopascals).  The world above 12,000 feet (32 ergs) is strange, to say the least.  Water boils at a very low temperature due to the low atmospheric pressure and cools very quickly.  I’ll tell you – low atmospheric pressure certainly makes my blood boil.

The next day we finished the ascent as planned.  Also as planned, we decided to hike our way back out to the car.  We made our way back down, losing well over a mile in altitude, thankfully not all at once.  I had worn sneakers up the hill.  Those were perfectly fine for going up.  But when we started heading down from our camp, the bottoms of both feet started to feel a bit warm.

Some of you probably can guess where this is going.

After several more horizontal miles and several thousand more vertical feet, that warmth in my feet had turned into a blaze.  I looked forward to the creeks that cut through the trail, which provided cool water to cool my feed as we waded through.  It felt wonderful.

I met a moray that had been knighted.  Now that was Sir Eel.

I didn’t realize it then, but what was happening was with each downhill step I took, my foot slipped just a bit inside the sneaker.  Just a bit.  That slipping of foot against the inside of the shoe generated friction.  That friction was multiplied by thousands of downhill steps.  The primary location that friction showed up?

The soles of my feet.

Finally, we made the Jeep® that my friend had borrowed for the trip.  I peeled off my shoes when I got in the back.  The sole of each foot was covered in a single, large blister from heel to where the toes start.

One friend asked, “Why didn’t you have us carry your pack?”

My response?  “I carried it up.  I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to carry it down.

Hey, don’t laugh at those shoes – ATF agents have to wear those every day.

Certainly, that was more foolish than heroic.  I had in my mind that I wasn’t going to shirk my responsibility to someone else.  It certainly wasn’t a reasonable idea, but that’s okay.

Change isn’t made by reasonable people.  Real accomplishments are made only by people who are fanatics.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to the weekly trip to the grocery store:  being Mad Max in the aisles is probably counterproductive.  But when working on trying to accomplish something significant, being reasonable has to go right out the window.

On the other hand, given how Biden has messed things up, this might be what shopping looks like this summer.

I was talking with Pugsley about diet (last week’s post was a taste of the conversation).  The Mrs. overheard the conversation.  “Ahhh, your dad has a case of the TB – True Believer.”  She paused, “Pugsley, if you’re ever around someone who used to smoke, it’s the same thing.”

And she is right.  Quitting smoking is hard.  Nicotine is highly addictive, and quitting, once started isn’t a reasonable thing.  It requires willpower.  And, like Mark Twain said, “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and it’s soluble in alcohol.”

It’s so very hard to quit tobacco that it often takes several tries – I know, I did it.  So, to finally quit takes fanaticism.  This is, in the end, the same sort of fanaticism that it takes for any significant change.  It’s the same sort of drive that makes Elon push SpaceX®.  It’s the same sort of drive that the Founding Fathers had when they forged a new nation.

Elon Musk is a bully.  He beat up NASA and took their launch money.

It’s the same drive that creates great teams.  Once people buy into the vision of what can be created, they give of themselves to further the vision.  If the goal is big enough and important enough people ignore their sense of self.  That’s when the magic happens.

Not only do we get amazing things done, we don’t really care who gets the credit.  Big goals create big teams, dedicated teams.  They come together and work towards success.  Do they always win?  Certainly not.  Sometimes the biggest goals are tackled by amazing teams and the team fails.

But not as often as you might think.  Let’s look at the difference between NASA and SpaceX®.  When NASA and SpaceX™ started working on a project together, NASA freaked out.  Why?  SpaceX© was going too fast.  They were achieving in a month things that would take NASA a year.

Although NASA still has people driven to get man into space, there aren’t many.  Most just want to keep a job until the Federal pension kicks in.  SpaceX™ just wants to get people into space, and it’s pounded into them daily.  The difference is a vision.  In the 1960s, NASA had both a vision and some particularly talented scientists that had some rocketry experience from previous jobs.  They achieved one of the most amazing feats that humanity has every accomplished.

Why do wolves howl at the Moon?  They don’t have cell phones.

Vision and fanaticism matter.  And they’re good things when the vision is good.  When the vision is dark, that fanaticism is dangerous.

I’ll change gears from outstanding feats back to my feets.  The blisters (one per foot)came off, and most of the fresh skin underneath was exposed.  It stung.  For a while.  A day later?  It was like nothing had happened.

Something did happen, though.  I climbed a really tall mountain.  Did I accomplish the goal?  Certainly.  And I was completely unreasonable in the way I went about it.  The good news?  You can be unreasonable, too.  Because if life is a hike, it’s only done at the end.  And to accomplish things?

Sometimes you have to do something unreasonable.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

17 thoughts on “The Virtue Of Being Unreasonable”

  1. Oh, I remember my worst hike. A group of us went for a stroll in the Chiracahua mountains, back before it was completely overrun by illegals and drug runners. (Back then, the local ranchers still hunted “feral creatures” in the desert to keep their numbers down.) I wore my best boots, but had on the wrong socks. At the 5 mile point (halfway around the loop), we stopped for lunch. I unlaced my boots, took them off, and poured the blood out. I then peeled off the socks, wrung them out, and put on fresh ones. After lunch, we finished the hike (I kicked one rattlesnake out of my way, and that was purely by accident) and then drove back to Fort Hoochie-Coochie. I still have the pictures from that hike. I love “duck-on-a-rock”.

    https://www.americansouthwest.net/arizona/photographs700/duck-on-a-rock.jpg

  2. John, I am getting ready to do such a hike this summer (fortunately not a two day extravaganza!). In some ways to simply say “I did that”.

    At one time in his life, my cousin was completely into long distance bicycling. He made a comment that has always stuck with me: “if you want to get good at something, you have to become a little fanatical”. The odd thing is (as I have discovered) is that he was completely spot on: if you want to really accomplish anything, you have to become a bit fanatical and monomaniacal to do it. That is why we end up with so many super high achievers that are good at one thing and have dismal lives otherwise (something to be wary of).

    Accomplishment without vision is impossible. Sadly, it feels to me that in so many ways we (the larger “we”) are a people without vision anymore. Your example of NASA versus SpaceX is a good one. In the 1970’s and 80’s, Apple versus IBM/HP would have been another.

    We really – truly – need to become people of vision again.

  3. “…that’s a moray…”

    What do you get when Dean Martin gets soused and tries to hold his breath for a minute?

    His face becomes a Purple Martin.

  4. Excellent puns and memes today, John. Kudos.

    Sigh. Your article today highlights some friction I am feeling not on the soles of my feet but deep within my mind. When I was a kid, up until about age 40, I had that kind of unreasonable drive you talk about to work on furthering people in space. That got worn down by getting out of bed day after day to live the Dilbert lifestyle. Altho I got to work on some reasonably interesting stuff, none of it compares to Apollo which was before my time. In the final years of my career I was just doing it for the paycheck.

    They’re still doing some neat work at NASA only 10 miles away from where I’m typing this. Just this week they listed a cool sounding job opening to work on the rocket for the Mars Sample Return mission, which is supposed to lift off in 2026 but bet on 2028 instead. The Perseverance rover on Mars right now is collecting samples in tubes and dropping them on the surface (in case it malfunctions and dies in the meantime). Here’s a three minute video of what is supposed to happen next:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAj9tXZyqS8

    I check off every box on their Mars Return Rocket job opening and actually tortured myself for a few days thinking that coming out of retirement for a few years to work on this could be “one last roundup” for me. Ah, but who am I kidding. It may be BRINGING STUFF BACK FROM MARS, but it’s still Dilbert…

    I’ll just sit here and my keyboard and try to live long enough to see them open those tubes in the 2030s and hopefully find these:

    https://www.mccrone.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Franchini_article107.pdf

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/345580971380493436/

  5. Acting logically can be a good thing. The problem is that the logical thing is often the obvious thing, the predictable thing. When people are in opposition to you, predictability can be irrational.

    The design of slaughterhouses is a science which focuses on making sure that the cow sees taking one more step down the chute as being the least objectionable course of action. No sharp corners they can’t see around, everything curved, not too many cows in at a time which can spook them and not too few so they still have the herd mentality to keep following along. Society has been designed like that, with no sharp turns or flashing lights that might spook the herd of people from thinking that 1 more step down the chute might not be in their long-term best interest.

    The system is set up to always make the next step down the chute the least painful option. But at the end of that chute is a captive bolt stunner. In order to avoid that outcome people need to realize that a more painful next step will lead to a less painful journey overall. Or instead of realizing the long term implications, just pick a few hard rules and follow them.

    We are already in the chute with a bad ending. The next step is a painful one, but not nearly as painful as the last step otherwise.

    3. There’s always a choice, even when they try to narrow them. Of course, the sooner the choice is made, the easier it is to get a good outcome.

  6. On quitting smoking and TB. My stepmother quit smoking after 40 years. After she quit, she became a TB and excoriated me for years before her death, about how easy it was to quit. On the other hand, my dad, who also quit after 40 years of smoking, didn’t become a TBer. He knew how hard it is to quit. Myself, I’ve tried to quit my 40 year habit several times, once going as long as three months before falling off the wagon.

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