Resolutions, schmresolutions?

Many years ago, before my teaching days (and before I had even planned on becoming a teacher), I worked at Waterstone’s bookshop in Belfast in the run-up to the Christmas period (and I was sorely tempted to stay on permanently – that might have been the best job I’ve ever had and my not-so-secret dream is still to run my own bookshop one day, but alas…). After the Christmas holidays I remember having to put out books for the section entitled ‘New Year, New You!’ These books were downright appalling in terms of cringeworthiness: your usual mélange of self-help gurus proffering up advice about positive thinking, happiness, getting into shape, eating more healthily, acupuncture, meditation, the Kama Sutra, being a calmer person, not kicking puppies, etc, etc.

In some ways I’ve mellowed out over the years and in others I’m just as much of a grouch as I always have been. But I’ve never really liked the idea of your more standard run-of-the-mill resolutions, the kind that everyone says they’re going to do at the start of January only for them to blow up in their face when they’re onto their 5^th slice of cheesecake on some miserably rainy cold February afternoon having already given up on their gym membership, telling themselves ‘oh sod it, next year I’ll do it!’

This is why, over the past few years, even though I’ve crapped on about the same damn resolutions (read less, keep things simple, chill out, be less anti-social, overcome my misanthropy, practise mindfulness, drink fewer martinis) that never bear any fruit, by far my most successful one has been to drink my coffee black, with no sugar. Actually, that one is only 75% successful – though I do almost always take my coffee black, I use a tiny bit of sugar (but much less than before) and I do slip up and every now and again go for a flat white, cappuccino or turmeric ginger latte. Hey, no one is infallible, right?

Although I’ve toyed with ideas like perfecting my approach to soft-boiled eggs, being less passive-aggressive and more tolerant towards idiocy, tomfoolery and people who lack self-awareness, and watching less sport, I’ve come to accept that none of these are going to work. If anything, I may take my griping, cynicism and negativity to a new level – deep down, nothing is going to change my curmudgeonly cantankerousness, so why fight it? If anything, I ought to take this and really embrace it.

The point is this: go for small, achievable resolutions. And forget goals – to hell with goals! Instead, go for habits. That’s what the experts say anyway.

With that in mind, I’m going to contradict what I’ve just said and say, for my main resolution, that I want to post 52 times this year. Yes, that’s right: a once-a-week pace. That’s probably somewhat ambitious considering I posted a whopping once last year (and it was only a week ago), and I risk losing my readership by mid-February when people get tired of me turgidly whingeing ad infinitum about who-knows-what. But let’s see how long I can keep this up.

(Disclaimer: let me contradict myself again – die-hard, loyal readers – all two of you - may remember a post from a few years back where I said that, being a teacher working on a Sept-June academic timetable, I tended to make resolutions in September and not January. If you remember that, forget it! If you don’t remember it, then great, just delete this little paragraph from your mind.)

Resolution number two may or may not have something to do with this: being able to remember what you read. I’ve given up saying that I should read less, I can’t help myself, but I could do a better job of being more focused with my reading. I tend to read 4-5 books at a time, depending on how alert I am, my mood, the time of day. In between and amongst all that, I read way too many articles and I have often played with the idea of avoiding news for a year and only reading books. I know it’s not the most original idea, but it is tempting.

Speaking of books, I got through around 50 last year (snob alert!), give or take a couple, and because so many people ask (really, they do, and you know who you are!), here were just a few of my highlights (and lowlights) – I’m not going to post my entire reading list like Obama, don’t worry:

The great:

And yet… Christopher Hitchens

The Devil’s Financial Dictionary Jason Zweig

Black Swan Green  David Mitchell

Poor Charlie’s Almanack: the Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger

Memories from Moscow to the Black Sea  Teffi

Birdsong  Sebastian Faulks

The Broken Road  Paddy Leigh Fermor

Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk  Peter Bernstein

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave

There’s always time for re-reading a few of the classics: (Schopenhauer: ‘Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.’)

A Hero of Our Time  Lermontov

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking  Oliver Burkeman

Yevgeny Onegin  Pushkin

The Aleph and other stories Borges

Age of Empire  Eric Hobsbawm

And some so-called ‘classics’ that left me totally cold and empty:

Fahrenheit 451

Brave New World

The Road  Cormac McCarthy

(If you’re just dying to get my full reading list (ha ha), feel free to email me, though I can’t promise a timely answer.)

Speaking of Charlie Munger, I swear that the world would be a better place if more people read some of his stuff. For a brief primer at some of his wisdom, have a look here: Charlie Munger on Getting Rich,Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More.

And here are Munger’s 3 main pieces of advice for dealing with life’s challenges:

1. Have low expectations (you see, this fits right into my idea of achievable resolutions)

2. Have a sense of humour

3. Surround yourself with the love of friends of family

And speaking of Jason Zweig, who is one of the best financial writers around, I stumbled upon his resolutions the other day. I wouldn’t normally give a toss about someone else’s resolutions, but when it’s a well-respected, wise financial writer, I figured it was worth listening to what he had to say. If you’re interested in all of his, feel free to look, but my favourites were:

1. Get home 15 minutes earlier. It will make you 15 minutes more efficient the next day. (I love this – I’m going to go back to work next week and say to my students, ‘okay, everyone, class is finishing 15 minutes earlier today…and every day, happy new year!’ I’m sure my bosses will love that)

2. Stop walking with your phone in your hand all the time. Look up and see how strange and beautiful the world is. (oh yes, please! And may all of who do this burn in hell!)

3. Never try to get other people to change their minds without first trying to understand why they think the way they do. Never do that without being open to the possibility that the mind that might need to change the most could be your own. (alright, no sarcastic comments on this one – this is just damn good)

4. Try to take your work more seriously, and yourself less seriously. (considering I don’t take myself seriously at all, I’ll aim for the other half!)

5. Befriend someone at least 20 years younger than you, and someone at least 20 years older than you. Each of you will make the other smarter and better. (This is easily my favourite, and I can’t wait to see my wife’s reaction when I say to her ‘honey, hope you don’t mind, but I’m following Jason Zweig’s advice on resolutions, and I’ll be home a bit late today because I’m sharing a bottle of wine with one of my 20-year old students’.)

If you’ve already got a resolution or two, great. If you don’t bother with them at all, fine. If you want to think of a resolution and aren’t sure exactly what, then hopefully I (and those I’ve linked to above) have given you a few ideas.

Last resolution: get back to basics and regain your edge. Or, in other words, if you used to be really good at something but seem to have lost it, and this is bothering you, then rediscover your edge or go back and try to recapture what made you so good at something in the first place.

Let me again refer back to some of my die-hard, loyal readers. Back in 2013, I started a weekly [American] football gambling competition between my wife (then girlfriend) and cat. I’ve talked about this numerous times and in numerous posts, starting with this one from Dec 2013:

I swear, this time it’s different (or, this time I mean it

The first half of that post gets into a couple of the themes I’ve mentioned here: being more focused with reading, not being so distracted, keeping things simple, being more chilled out/lazy. If you scroll down to just above point #4, starting with ‘But wait, before I go – a brief diatribe about investing, monkeys, American football, gambling and my cat’, you will see the origins of this little game we have, all stemming from those experiments with monkeys firing darts at a bunch of balloons on the wall representing companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google, General Electric, Macy's, Intel, Cisco, etc and doing better investing their money than so-called financial managers.

In my last post, I linked back to Bye bye 2014, hello 2015, and if you scroll down to the bottom of that, you will come to 'A football gambling update' where you can see more.

And in this post, from January 2015, I wrote this:

Speaking of things which don’t make sense

And finally, the long awaited denouement of a season of football gambling and battling Olya and the cat. You will recall that last year, the cat prevailed. This year, with only one game remaining, Olya has beaten us both. Two years running, and I can’t do better than my fiancée and a cat in picking friggin’ football games. Back in the late 90s when I was betting on games regularly I was hitting on close to ¾ of my picks. These days, I’m around 50%.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Which prompted my good pal Jeffrey to comment: ‘How dare you impugn the cat!?’

How dare I, indeed! I’m now about to impugn the cat and my wife!

This little competition of ours has gone on for 5 years. In 2013, the cat won. In 2014, Olya won. I finally managed to eke out a win in 2015. In the 2016 season, it came down to the Super Bowl, and Olya managed to beat me again, by 1 lousy game (she went 50-38 to my 49-39). So, heading into this season, our 5^th, I had won once, the cat had won once, and Olya had won twice. At this point I have to remind you that my gambling on games started back in late 1998, in the days where I would pore over the newspaper to do my research and actually had to phone a bookie (okay, I never had my own bookie, but my colleague Kevin did, and I did it through him). For 3-4 years, I was doing great, right around the 70% mark – needless to say, the bookie was never happy, but I always got paid. I then gave it up when I left for Edinburgh in 2002 and I never really got into doing it online, until discovering it a few years ago.

So basically, just to pull even with my non-football knowing wife (who, to be fair, knows much more now than she used to), I had to win this year. And I didn’t just want to win, but I wanted to win big-time. I wanted to rediscover my edge. Bear in mind that I watch football closely, I listen to endless podcasts about this, I waste my time reading analyses of gambling odds – in short, I put in the damn research! Olya’s reasoning goes like this: ‘oh, it’s Bengals by 6 over the Seahawks? Where are they playing, Bengals-land or Seahawks-land? Okay, I choose Bengals.’ And for the cat, we put down 2 treats, one representing each team and she chooses. I mean, if this whole experiment, along with the monkey dart throwing experiment with the stock market, doesn’t prove that gambling and investing all come down to pure, rotten luck and has nothing to do with expertise, I don’t know what else does.

As this season rolled along, things weren’t looking good for me. Every lucky break went against me and in Olya’s favour. I don’t want to get into the arcane details of this, but we’re talking the flukiest of fluky last-minute plays that swung things in her favour. Such was my despair that I wrote an email to Cousin Sal (Jimmy Kimmel’s cousin, who along with Bill Simmons has been doing a gambling podcast for the past 20-odd years where they guess the gambling lines for NFL games and make a few picks, and whose podcast ‘Against all Odds’ has been the most downloaded on iTunes over the past few months – and no, I wasn’t asked to plug it for him, like he needs my help!) asking for his advice and he suggested that I should cheat! He even had an idea or two for me as well - as if I would ever stoop so low and do such a horrid thing, though the thought did briefly cross my mind.

I did in fact resist the urge to cheat, and this is what it has all come down to. With the regular season over, and the playoffs starting today, here are the standings:

Me: 49-53

Cat: 50-52

Olya: 59-43

Let’s do the maths: there are 11 games left in this season. Olya is 10 games ahead of me. My only chance of winning at this point is to throw all my strategy out the window and just wait for her to make her picks, then go against them, hoping she goes 0-11 and I go 11-0. I’m desperate at this point, and I can hardly believe that, in all likelihood and barring an unforeseen miracle, she’s going to win for the 3^rd season out of 5. This is humbling and deeply embarrassing, to say the least.

Even worse is that I may lose to the damn cat…again!

So yes, Jeffrey, I am impugning the cat, as well as my wife. But, really, it’s nothing personal. I’m just bitter.

Here’s to positivity in 2018!