Art can take any shape, I don’t think art is limited to the 6 arts Hegel could think off, or seven, if you count cinema. Art is in anything that is done with great skill and taste. For me art can be in movement. Hegel calls the 4th art as being dance. Dance is movement. Why shouldn’t a masterful and effortless ski run shouldn’t be called art.

If you ask me art is trying really hard to be exclusive and markets itself wrong. Art is in any object or movement done expertly and with great energy and feeling, anything that makes you want to be better, do better, or moves you in any other way. The definition of art is not far off: “Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect”.

Many professional athletes are more showman than anything else. Many amateur athletes do sport to feel better about themselves, their body, their actions. I’m part of this last group.So, to my eye, these guys are artist in the purest form.

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Many times I found myself walking around at the beginning of this or that conference, noticing this and that person, but without paying too much attention to somebody in particular. There is a sea of strangers, some of which are organizers, some are speakers, some are attendants, but if they are not wearing a badge around their neck, they are all the same. Everybody is looking for the cookies and tea, everybody is searching for people they know and a place to sit.

And then the conference starts. One of these people stands up, goes to the podium and gives her speech. At that point all changes. If I’m particularly interested in the topic and am impressed by the deeds and actions the speaker is talking about, that person changes, morphs, my perspective about her changes, she’s no longer yet another cookie and tea hunter, she turns into THE cookie and tea hunter that ran a marathon* at the North Pole, launched that popular comics series, funded that ingenious startup.

Actions change perception, they give character and personality, they make you stand up from the crowd, they make you different. I don’t know of any more powerful personal branding / marketing instrument, if we want to label it, than one’s actions.

Talk is cheap so go do something that will define you, that will take you out of the crowd, at least for those people who count and you care about.

* One of the people that morphed before my eyes was Andrei Rosu, who’s story I had the pleasure to see at TEDx Bucharest, this October. Below it’s his simple and yet incredible story.

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A few months ago I stumbled on the clip below, in which a few guys were practicing some sort of a new sport of walking on water. Truth be told, they got me! I thought it was real and so did some very smart people I talked to about it.

But guess again, it turns out it was a marketing hoax, a very succesful marketing hoax, bust still a hoax. Here is the how to of the clip and an explanation to why it worked, if you listen carefully.

If you watched the clip you might have heard one of the guys saying: “Somebody mailed us how they can get to 10 steps, they only got to 5 steps”. Well, if you can do 5 steps, there is a grain of truths in it.

And that’s the secret. All good legends have a kernel of solid, verifiable facts in it. That’s how you tell a story, that’s how you make a great lie.

Oh, yeah, I forgot, they don’t call it lies anymore, it’s called a successful marketing viral campaign.

Post inspired by this.

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As a reader of kottke.org I came across a series of clips from guys jumping over and under all kind of obstacles with such an ease that astonishes me and leaves me thinking that most of us forgot how to use our bodies and what powerful machines we control. Kottke calls the following 3 clips as parkour. I wouldn’t go that far, but since I’ve heard about them on his blog, I’m keeping the parkour theme.

Watch, be amazed, weep for how out of shape you are, get off your ass and go to something about it.

Parkour on rollerblades

Parkour on a skateboard

Parkour on a bicycle

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In marathons and most any other endurance race there is such a thing as The Wall, or the moment where your source of carbohydrates runs out. Basically when you run out of energy and you start dragging your feet.

Any athlete can tell you that it’s very important to do carbo-loading before the race day, to store as many carbs as you can, for the big day. More you have – more energy you have. However, the sad truth is that the amount you can actually store is limited by your weight, age, and the amount you eat through that precious resource (your miles per gallon) is given by how much fuel your (un)trained body uses with every step.

Experienced athletes have found their limits and know how much carbs to take in, how fast to run, not to burn out, how to hidrate, and so on, basically, they know all the tricks in the book to avoid the dreaded Wall.

Ben Rapoport takes Erin Wyner’s pulse as she runs on a treadmill to determine how many carbohydrates she should eat to run a successful marathon (NPR).

But us mortals don’t have that luxury… or didn’t… until now. Benjamin Rapoport, , claims he managed to figure out of formula that will help any of us to calculate how to run a marathon scientifically and to keep away from that wall.

I’ve originally heard about the story in Wired. But I recommend you to read the NPR article too.

And, if you have the stomach for it, read on the Benjamin Rapoport’s paper published in Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology.

Because his formula looks like a lot of mambo-jumbo to most people, me included, there is a nifty little online calculator, which Ben swears he will improve.

And there you go, now you have a way to calculate that you will burn out and hit the wall half way though the competition!

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Have you ever wondered why some people choose to push themselves to the very limit to climb a mountain, to risk everything to conquer a vertical rock face, to force their bodies to the very limit of human endurance in Iron Man competitions? If yes, you probably asked some of those persons – “But why”? And they told you something along the lines of  “For the feeling you get when you reach the summit, when you finish the race and because I can”? Well, I did, I also got the same answer and didn’t get it. “Because I can”, what kind of answer is that? And what feeling? I’ve tried, thanks to my brother, rock climbing and mounteneering but didn’t quite get the trhill. Rock climbing is not for me. However, thanks to the same crazy brother I got to take part in a mountain bike competition last week and I tell you, when I’ve crossed that finish line I got it! I finally did. Dead tired but I felt the rush of adrenaline or whatever that was. I felt that I did it because I could, I felt strong and I wanted more. And I challenge everybody to keep trying and do things that are interesting and a little crazy until, at least once in their lifetime, will get the rush and will get it, will understand why Everest was conquered and why people choose to run Iron Man triathlons. Go and search and do it!

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What stages do you have to go thru to become good at changing light bulbs? Sure, anybody can do it, also everybody can run but not all of us have what it takes to run a marathon and even less can win one! So what does it takes to be the best light bulb changer in the world?

People who find the will to become good at some sport surely learn a lot in the process. It dawned on me while trying to start jogging again that any new endeavor we undertake goes thru the same stages.

Stages of becoming good at something:
1. This is hard
2. This is not so hard
3. This is great, I’m learning so much!
4. Why am I not learning faster?
5. I’m good at this
6. I’m even better at this and I love it
7. Go to step 4.

Stage 1 always sucks. It sucks the first day at the gym, it sucks the first time you get on a pair of skies, it sucks the first time you try to write your first ‘hello world’ script. This is the stage when being motivated or having a great teacher or friend to push you really helps.

And then you get over it and you notice that it’s not so hard anymore. It’s quite easy! It’s great. You get to a point when you can really feel how you become better day by day.

Alas, nothing is eternal and undoubtedly you hit a point when any consequent improvement requires more and more effort. This is a stage when the boys get separated from the man. If you keep at it you get good at it, you progress and start really enjoying it and then you eventually realize that you’ve made a lot of progress and are now much better at it.

Everybody likes being good at something. My friend Para quotes his dad that his dream is: “to be the best in the world at something, be it digging holes, painting walls, changing light bulbs or writing code”. There is much wisdom in that wish. It’s the stage when it becomes really rewarding to have worked so hard to get there. You can feel it best when it comes to sports you do for fun, like cycling or skiing.

But can you be the best at something? Isn’t there always somebody who is better than you? The bottom line is that you can always become better than you are and you find yourself back at step 4 wondering why it takes so much effort to improve yourself. And the cycle goes on and on. There is no doubt that as long as you live you learn.

It takes real guts and determination to get past stage 1 and then past stage 4, again and again and again, and that’s why there are so few top athletes, really great musicians, truly great writers. It takes blood and sweat.

NOTE. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10.000 hour rule in his book Outliers. He says that to become good at something you have to do it for 10.000 hours. In his own words – see here. And I really recommend the book.

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