It’s been two months since Anne and I brought home our new puppy, Toby, and the dog I once wrote was “a terror to leave alone in his crate” and “stubbornly resistant to peeing outside” is unrecognizable. He’s house trained and very much at home in his crate. He walks loyally by my side, responds to commands and – as of this week – is finally putting the retriever in golden retriever. He’s been awesome to have in the family and a part of me is kicking myself for waiting so long to get him.
Before we even we got Toby, I knew I would take on the bulk of his training. I found the logic and simplicity appealing – when a dog does X, do Y – and it seemed to require consistency, not skill – something I could easily provide. As Brian Kilcommons writes in Good Owners, Great Dogs:
“To train your dog effectively, you have to be consistent. If you say the same command in the same order in the same way all the time, your dog will learn quickly.
“Consistency extends to your actions as well. If you correct him for mouthing you one minute and are playing wrestlemania the next, how is he supposed to know what you want?”
That has largely turned out to be true. Dog training, just like race training, is a game of disciplined repetition over gradually increasing levels of difficulty. Start with 3 miles and end with 26. Start with 10 feet of recall and end with 100. Eventually, just like your body will learn to use new muscles, the dog will learn to follow new commands.
What makes consistency critical is the absence of context. I have no way of explaining to Toby why I let him jump on one person but not another; no way of explaining why he can only chew my old socks, not my new ones. We don’t speak the same language. Instead, my choice is black and white. Allow him to jump or don’t. Allow him to eat socks or don’t. There’s no wiggle room.
What Toby’s training has required me to do is follow the great advice of General James Mattis: “Know what you will stand for and, more important, what you won’t stand for. State your flat-ass rules and stick to them.” My rules are the outcomes I’d like to see in a well-trained dog, and if I can’t stick to them I can’t expect Toby to either.
Mattis’s advice, as far as I know, was intended for humans, not dogs. And he’s not alone in reminding us the importance of establishing and sticking to a set of personal rules. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said that “life without a design is erratic,” and “as soon as one is in place, principles become necessary.” Benjamin Franklin had thirteen virtues – temperance, frugality and sincerity among them – that he used to help him develop a strong character. The author Angela Duckworth says that “closing the gap between who we want to be – which is our values – and what we do in our daily life, is one of the big projects of living.”
We all know what it feels like when these things are out of whack. I never cancel plans except for all those times when I decide last minute I’d rather stay home. I’m never late except for all those times when something I need to do pops up last minute. Eventually, as I wrote in Warning: Labels, “we’ve cast enough votes in one direction that other people start to apply our labels for us. Show up late to dinner with friends enough times, and be Always Late.”
In each case, what we do is provide context. There’s a rule we claim to follow but something happens to let us off the hook. For me, this past weekend, it was a delayed F train. I had planned to volunteer at The Meatloaf Kitchen, but after a late start and disrupted commute, I bailed. Good reasons not to go, maybe, but the other volunteers knew none of that. All they saw is a Saturday where I didn’t show up; a Saturday where my commitment to the organization fell short.
It’s hard not to waver from our stated values and rules. The people I quoted are masters of this domain – exactly who you’d expect to have good alignment between what they say and what they do. Mattis is a retired four-star Marine general; Duckworth is the preeminent expert on grit research; Franklin is one of the most accomplished men in U.S. history; and Seneca is a foundational voice in Stoic philosophy. It’s not so easy for the rest of us.
One framework to make it easier comes straight from dog training: Take the context out of it. A species barrier keeps me from justifying myself to Toby – what if a similar barrier existed elsewhere? What if I acted as though the only thing people could see were my actions?
Of course, when you take a step back, how most of the world sees us is by our actions only. There’s not much difference between snapping at Toby and snapping at a coworker – neither knows why it happened, just that it did happen, and both are liable to be wary of me the next time I come around. Inconsistency in my actions with others breeds just as much confusion and distrust as it does with my dog.
The older I get, the clearer it becomes that Duckworth is right: Defining my values and living by them is the primary challenge in life. I’m by no means there yet, but my experience with Toby has been helpful. In the early days, it was frustrating to keep my training hat on at all times. It was exhausting knowing each of my actions mattered. But now it’s comforting. The guesswork is gone, and I’m left with that simplified system I read so much about: consistency and repetition.
There’s a lot to learn from that.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
Leading Leaders – Robert Glazer
“When companies evaluate their managers based on their individual or team metrics, while overlooking their leadership capabilities, they can easily miss poor management, or even toxic leadership.”
How I Lost $150K in a Day – Jack Raines
“You’re not going to become a millionaire by trading. Statistically, it’s just not going to happen. I mean sure, one of you might. But the other 4,400 won’t. Now that I’ve been out of the arena for several months, I have a much clearer perspective.”
Expertise vs. Attitude – Seth Godin
“The actual differentiator in just about every job is attitude. From plumbers to carpenters to radiologists to pharmacists, someone with extraordinary soft skills (honesty, commitment, compassion, resilience, enrollment in the journey, empathy, willingness to be coached… the real skills that we actually care about) is going to outperform.”