WHAT MICHAEL PHELPS CAN TEACH US ABOUT WRITING SUCCESS

Today's Business-2-Community website has an article on strategies to reach one's goals: Achieving Goals: Five Important Lessons from Michael Phelps. We all know Phelps is the world's greatest swimmer and arguably the world's greatest athlete. What this article focuses on is how he got there, and how we can all follow his example to plan out a strategy for achieving our own goals, whether they're in the pool, at work, or at the keyboard writing a novel, poem, essay, or other masterpiece.

 

Michael Phelps with his 2012 Olympic Gold Medals

The five lessons are:

 

1. Prepare for Success

2. Do Not Be Afraid to Announce Your Goals Publically
3. Work With Your Strengths and Weaknesses, Accentuating the Positives
4. Assemble a Team To Support You in Pursuing Your Goals
5. Never Give Up

Phelps began implementing these lessons as soon as he hit the pool at age 7. He prepared for his eventual success by putting in long, hard hours in the pool and in the gym. He didn't look for short cuts and he didn't settle for just being the best in his club, state, region, or in the U.S. He didn't settle for less than his goal and he put in all the years of work that entails. He announced his intentions publicly, setting himself up for spectacular failures and ridicule if he didn't continue to prepare and work to improve his weaknesses and enhance his strengths. Forget peer pressure. By announcing his intentions to "three-peat" or win the most golds in a single Olympics, or any of his other seemingly brash announcements, Phelps put the pressure on himself to not end up looking foolish. What great motivation that is!

 

Phelps also made sure he had a support team that was able to bring out the best in him, overcome the worst, and help him achieve his goals. That didn't mean surrounding himself with sycophants and cheerleaders. He stayed with the coach that pushed him, even when they butted heads, because he knew he needed discipline, not back patting. His friend and teammate Ryan Lochte was a threat to his standing and to his public announcements of his intentions. He used that competition to fuel his drive. And he had his mother's love, support, encouragement,. I'm sure some mornings, that included nagging him to get out of bed,  making sure he didn't give up because he was tired, sore, or just not feeling motivated that day, and in other ways, doing things that mothers do, even when we find them unpleasant (thanks, moms!) Most of all, no matter the obstacles, no matter the whispered wonderings if he still had "it" in him, Michael Phelps never quit, never gave up until he achieved all of his swimming goals.

As writers, we can apply these lessons, and emulate the role model Phelps provides, in our own endeavors.

Prepare for success. We have to work on our craft always. We can and should continue to improve, learn more, try new things, all with our eye on the ultimate prize of publishing works we're proud of, not just publishing for the sake of publishing. That means we have to plan out a multi-year, multi-decade strategy. We have to expect and learn from failure, from rejection. Great swimmers are made through years of practice and from losing a few races along the way. So are great writers. Very few of us can sit down at the computer and pump out a complete, finished, well-written novel on our first try. Be prepared to shove the first two or three attempts in a drawer, never to see the light of day again (unless of course it's to remind ourselves, molnths and years later, how far we've come!)

Don't be afraid to announce our goals publicly. Those first tenuous steps at sharing our work or our ambition to become a writer with other people are difficult. Will our friends and family mock us? Will they think we're crazy? How will we respond when someone asks, "What have you written?" and we have nothing but dozens of unpublished stories on our hard drives? But announcing our goals publicly, boldly stating, "I want to be a writer, poet, novelist," is the first step in turning our dream into a reality. "I want to write a novel, so first I have to practice, hone my skills, and make the time to write." Only then can we firmly plot out our next steps and move forward with our plan. Without this public announcement, we will have a difficult time building the support team needed and committing to the work and the sacrifices ahead as we pursue our dreams.

Work with our strengths and weaknesses, accentuating the positives. Knowing our weaknesses as writers helps us to overcome those. The critical point in this statement, however, is "accentuate the positives." Maybe it's something in the writer's psyche, but we do seem to focus on our weaknesses, wallow in them, fret over them, and often, let them silence us. We have to learn to see those weaknesses and address them, but then see through them to our strengths, and embrace and be emboldened by those. Vivid imagination? Use it. Traumatic childhood? Use it. Love affair with words? Embrace it. Accentuating the positives can get us through those rough days when we wonder why we're sitting at the computer, staring at an empty screen, or deleting pages and pages of sub-par work from the day before. We don't do those things because we can't write, we do those things because we know we can write better.

Assemble a team to support you in pursuing your goals. Using Phelps, or any outstanding athlete as an example, consider who has to be on your team. Yes, it's important to have a few cheerleaders around to help when morale sinks, but it's even more important to have a demanding coach who will bring out the best in us and give us an honest assessment of what we need to work on. Find a writing coach or partner in a local or online writing group, or take some classes. Find an editor who is both brutally honest and encouraging, as needed. Depending on your goals, your team might include an agent, a publisher, or magazine editors. And don't forget to include teammates--others who are going through what you are, who understand what it means to lock yourself in your room and give free rein to the voices in your head.  The Internet Writing Workshop is a great place to find all of these and start building a support team.

Finally, never give up. Critiquers will rip our work apart. Rejections will come. Each time we write something, we'll think we're at the top of our game. Until we read it a few weeks or months later. As I learned working in sales, a goal isn't a place to stop, it's a place to start. Once we've achieved our initial goal, it's time to up the ante. Try harder, shoot for more. If we get rejections, we'll improve what we wrote. If we get published, we'll write something even better next time. We'll never give up.

Sadly, we won't be able to follow Phelps's 12,000 calorie/day diet as we pursue our sedentary sport of writing, but at least we can follow his lessons for swimming success to achieve our own writing goals.

Write on!
 

 

Everything You Wanted to Know About Barnacles, But Were Afraid to Ask (or, How I Came to be a Marine Scientist)

I'm often asked why I became a marine scientist. I come from upstate New York--farm country. We have lakes, ponds, creeks, rivers. No ocean. While there's not really a single answer, I could give the standard, boiler-plate: Jacques Cousteau, family vacations at the shore, my love of the outdoors, being a swimmer. But the truth is it was barnacles that really captured my interest.

True confessions, I spent much more of my college career socializing (a euphemism for drinking) than studying. There are many lectures, indeed, many semesters that are a bit hazy in my mind, not due to the 30-intervening years, but due to the hangover I had during those classes. But, I remember barnacles from zoology class. This was while I was still at SUNY Binghamton, still a vague "maybe-sort of something in biology" major who hadn't decided what to do with my life.

I was probably half-dozing, sleeping off a hangover, or planning that night's activities, when the professor said something that caught my attention and has stuck with me to this day.

A barnacle's penis can reach up to ten-times its body length.

The barnacle penis is a modified cirrus

Wait. It gets better.

 

The barnacle penis has transverse and longitudinal muscles.

That means it can extend, contract, and move left, right, around in circles, any old way!

I'll admit, that is a really strange thing to focus on, but I did. I paid attention to the rest of that lecture. More surprising, I went home and read the chapter on arthropods, and particularly, crustaceans.

What I learned stayed with me. Not only are barnacles the John Holmes of the invertebrate world...hell, of the WHOLE animal kingdom, but they're pretty darn interesting for little buggers that stay latched on to one place for their whole lives.

Barnacles are hermaphroditic--they're he/shes with both male and female parts. They can self-fertilize, but usually don't. With a penis that's 10-times your body length, you can reach out and touch your nearest (or not so near) neighbor pretty easily, and your neighbor can reciprocate.

After fertilization, the eggs develop inside the adult's shell and, when ready, are released into the water. Ready means the eggs have developed into nauplii larvae (barnacle infancy), a traveling-with-the-currents, feeding, growing stage. The nauplius has a simple eye spot, so can detect light and shadows, antennae to sense the environment, and swims (or more appropriately, steers, since the currents would overpower any swimming they did) using setae (hair-like projections) as oars. The barnacle spends about 6 months as a nauplius, molting to grow, as do all arthropods. At the last molt before adulthood, it will undergo metamorphosis into a cyprid larva (adolescence).

The cyprid stage is really messed up, in a fascinating way. Cyprid larvae don't eat. At all. And barnacles can spend anywhere from days to 6 or 7 weeks in this stage.

The cyprid larvae's job is to find a place to settle down. This isn't a decision to be made lightly. Barnacles are sessile: once they settle down, it's forever.

Cyprid larva

The perfect forever home for a barnacles is on a hard surface; one with some pits and grooves to snuggle into so it can't be easily wiped off. Somewhere with room to grow, but with some neighbors, too (to take advantage of that long, dexterous penis); some of its own kind to associate with...just not too close or crowded.  And food should be readily available. 
 

Food comes from the same place as enemies or predators, from the water.  Live high enough above the water line and the aquatic predators can't reach you, but too high and neither can the food. Then there's a whole other set of terretrial predators that can get you. And the sunlight up high can be pretty harsh, beating down on you during the day when the tide is out. The cyprid larvae has to balance all of these considerations when seeking its permanent home.

Once it's found a suitable location, the cyprid settles down. It has a short period when it can crawl around, use its antennae to make sure it this is where it wants to spend the rest of its life, and the do the deed.

The larva places its head down on the spot it selected and uses an adhesive gland located near its antennae to release a cementing substance. The decision is now final and irrevocable. The cyprid larva is permanently glued to this spot. Now, the barnacle undergoes one last metamorphosis into adulthood.

The newly cemented-in-place barnacle undergoes many changes so it can be more efficient in its sedentary adult life. It secretes calcareous plates around its soft body for protection from predators, desiccation, and wave action. The eyespot that detected light/dark serves no purpose. Maintaining a photoreceptor is a waste of energy, so adult barnacles lose their “eye.”

Adult acorn barnacle

The larval swimming appendages (setae) also become unnecessary. The swim appendages turn into "cirri" or feeding legs.  These "new-" (or modified old-) appendages provide the scientific name given to barnacles‑‑Cirripedia. In Latin, that means hairy feet.  Their hairy feet wave in the water above their shell, catching small organisms. So, really, the barnacle spends its whole adult life doing a handstand and kicking food into its mouth.

As in most arthropods, the appendages, or cirri, become highly specialized. Some of the cirri are used for feeding, some are for grasping, and then there's that one special one that captured my interest: the reproductive cirri, aka, the penis. I've since found that my professor's claim of "10 times it's body length" may have been a bit of an exaggeration. It's more typically "only" seven times the animal's length. Still no slouch in the endowment department (see photo above). 

Once a barnacle’s metamorphosis to adulthood is complete, he/she can extend this impressive appendage in a neighborly‑barnacle sort of way to any old neighbor at all (within about a 7-barnacle-length circumference) and get on with important business:  passing on its genetic material to a new generation. And while this is going on with any given barnacle, chances are that one of its neighbors is doing the same thing back to it, creating a cirri‑connected, hermaphroditic, totally sessile, intertidal mass‑orgy.

Fascinating, isn't it? There are thousands more stories of life in the sea, all equally interesting.

Is it any wonder why I became a marine scientist?