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 also chose to go to the best school that I got into, that would challenge and simulate me to my limits.  I chose a studious 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 the  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, direct complex thoughts, achieve goals and generally see the world as engineers.  It was like going to the gym for our brains, every day for two years, to excel at what they call the Executive Functions and Critical Thinking. 

We learned to break big problems down into well-defined and solvable 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.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.

I imagine that this is why pre-meds take Organic, Inorganic, Bio-Chemistry,  and Anatomy to teach them to memorize and derive.  Or why they make it hard on intern and resident doctors, working 48-hour shifts so don’t they miss interesting cases and provide 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 difficult  profession that requires courage, tenacity, and flexibility.  They all make it hard on purpose.  So we can make the good little life choices that define our destiny.

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 and learn.  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 more holistic Hydrology and Hydraulics, Water Resources and Fluid Mechanics, since there is not much water out west, it is important there and the skiing is better. 

You can get undergraduate and graduate degrees in hydrology but it is not as math oriented and technical.  I chose the hard way, inadvertently, to 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, for better or worse,  instead of generally and organically deterministic.  I might look at a million different probabilities of the worst or most likely flood instead of a standard cookbook 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 business and personnel management since everything comes down to people and money. 

Our biggest hydrology problems now involve the dearth of water for the Great Salt Lake, the Colorado River, California, groundwater aquifers,  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 is critical, like climate change and predictive model results, historical precedents and water 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 critical thinking to resolve. 

We are done with the low hanging fruit and are now left with the hard issues and hard solutions.  We procrastinate constantly until these issues become critical (or a fabricated matter of national security) and are worth the emergency, reactive, political capital it will take to address them.  We have chosen hard, as we usually do, and it will be hard to solve, and taxing on a lot of the participants.  

Look to our diversity of expertise and experience and look past our separate cubby holes and self-absorbed silos.  Stay in your lane with what you know, but see the entire road for what really is and what can be.  The solutions will not be easy or simple, unbiased or fair.  They will be complicated and complex, difficult and hard or else they will be unfair, unfinished and unreasonable. 

 When in doubt, Choose Hard.