Choose Hard

 

When I was a kid I went to grammar school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic, to play well with others on teams and to define myself individually.  Basically, we were taught how to learn process and retain.  It was a lark and I underperformed, but I knew it could not last.  In time I must put aside my childish ways.  So, I rejected the easy, local pinhead-public high school and regional social-coed catholic school for a macho-male prep school in The City, where I learned how to think and study hard, compete casually with my peers and socialize successfully with the opposite sex. 

For college I chose to go to the hardest school that I got into, out west, that would challenge and simulate me to my limits.  I chose a hard Engineering major so I could get a good job after 4 years in transportation or water.  It was brutal and Calculus intensive for the first few years to weed out the interlopers and ineligibles and uncommitted and undeserving. 

Little did I know that they were not just teaching integers and integrals but exercising the Prefrontal cortex lobe of our brains to be problem solvers, think critically, direct complex thoughts, achieve goals and generally see the world like engineers.  It was like going to a gym for our brains, every day for two years, to excel at what they call the Executive Functions. 

We learned to break big problems down into well-defined small ones by considering what data we had, what equations we needed, what variables we could rationally exclude and what ones we could guess at with reasonable error averaging and bracketing.  We identified what assumptions were sensitive and needed more work or data and what were the risk probabilities, consequences and costs of our analysis.

I imagine that this is why pre-meds take Organic, Inorganic and Bio-Chemistry,  and Anatomy to teach them to memorize.  Or make it hard on intern and resident doctors, working 48-hour shifts so don’t miss cases and continuity of care and so they can think on their feet if they are tired or distracted.

Or why lawyers are scared to death, worked to death and bored to death with the Socratic Method in Law School to train them in pressurized analytical and critical thinking and for the hard profession that requires courage, tenacity, and flexibility.  They make it hard on purpose.

When I got out of school I felt that I didn’t know anything about being an engineer but I had confidence that I knew how to think.  I took this training into Traffic Engineering in The City but didn’t like living where there is traffic.  So I moved out west and studied Hydrology and Hydraulics, Water Resources and Fluid Mechanics, since there is not much water there and It is important. 

You can get an undergraduate and graduate degrees in hydrology but it is not as math oriented and technical.  I chose the hard way, inadvertently, to get there and see the world differently than some of my colleagues who have not had the frontal lobe exercise that I have enjoyed. 

I tend to look at things more specifically numerically and probabilistic instead of generally and organically, deterministic.  I might look at the probabilities of the worst or most likely flood instead of a 100-year flood or rainfall.  I might model upstream backwater hydraulics affects in rivers rather than hydrological downstream capacities or depth.  I may create regressions from past event data to predict future probabilities rather than physically based, hypothetical variables to estimate flood peaks and volumes.  I might create a pipe network analysis to determine system interactions based on pressure, flow, velocity and head instead of static pipe capacity based on area and velocity. 

There is no judgement or value given to either view since we need diversity in thought and perspective, but I wonder if my efforts would have been better spent studying more geology, business, economics, politics, environment, biology, chemistry or computers.  A more well-rounded view of water quality could be helpful or management since everything comes down to people and money. 

Our biggest problems now involve the dearth of water for the Great Salt Lake, the Colorado River, California or any place experiencing unsustainable growth and use.  These problems are complex and involve surface and groundwater conjunctive use, politically opposed stakeholders and economically competitive shareholders.  Communication of the issues, like climate change and predictive model results, historical precedents and rights as well as artificial boundaries of basins, states and countries.  The nuance and essence of these issues are not just an engineering issue and take all aspects of thinking to resolve. 

We are done with the low hanging fruit and are now left with the hard issues and hard solutions.  We procrastinate until these issues become critical and are worth the emergency reactive political capital it will take to address them.  We have chosen hard, as we usually do, and I will be hard to solve and hard on a lot of the participants.  Look to our diversity of expertise and experience and past our separate cubby holes and self-absorbed silos.  Stay in your lane with what you know,  but see the entire road for what it really is and can be.  The solutions cannot be easy, simple and fair and must be complicated, complex and hard or else they will be unfair, unfinished and unreasonable .  Choose Hard.