I went out to Colorado last weekend to help my folks paint their house, something that sounded strange to my coworkers, and perhaps sounds strange to anyone who doesn’t know my family. Us Hendrens have long had something of a moral imperative to produce almost incessantly–something I figured was a kind of midwest work ethic on steroids. Oddly enough, on the flight out I happened to be reading “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius and one of his admonitions from the first book was “moreover, to endure labour, nor to need many things; when I have anything to do, to do it myself rather than by others…” So I guess it didn’t start in Minnesota, although we are also Italian.

For anyone who has spent a fair amount of time painting, or really performing manual labor of any type, you know that one enters into a state where the body becomes autonomous and the mind is freed to wander without tending to the physical. In my 48 hours there, I had a sort of ongoing dialogue about the metrics of performance. For instance, I painted houses through my high school summers so I knew we were doing a professional-level job as far as quality was concerned. It’s just that real pro’s might have done it 5% quicker. Or perhaps they would have done it 3% better (or XX% worse, as I’ve often seen with professionals for whom time literally equates to money).

That got me thinking about the professions with the smallest of margins: think race car drivers or downhill skiers. For those people, milliseconds separate victory from defeat. I wonder in those cases if natural talent more often accounts for the difference, or perhaps it is duration/intensity of training. Though most likely it is a combination of both with a strong dose of luck, something too infrequently mentioned in our assumed meritocracy. Anyhow, we got the job done, and it was back on the plane. I knew I hadn’t come to any real conclusions in any of my meandering, but they were interesting things to ponder, to perhaps pursue more later. Marcus had one more thing to say on the matter, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”