Blessed by the Potato

I had been off, away from the blog, working on a third edition of the Value of Simple (mostly struggling with how much I could excoriate certain robo-advisors for not listening to me before it became libel), and it’s been going very slowly. Instead, I accidentally wrote an entirely different book on, of all things, Curling.

How do you accidentally write a book??

Well, I ran a development league at the curling club. The idea was that we’d have a mix of experienced curlers and lot of new curlers, and it would be a home for those fresh out of our learn-to-curl programs. As part of that, I wrote a weekly email with a development tip to send around. And you know me, that wasn’t a short tip like “line up to the target before you get into the hack”, no, it was pages and pages with diagrams.

So by the end of the year I joked that if it felt like they had read a book from me, they weren’t too far off, all together those emails were almost book length. So of course a few people chip in with “you should make it an actual book!”

And, well, here we are.

What’s it called?

Curling for Beginners and Improvers. In a bold, highly unusual step for me, the branding and title are actually very descriptive of the book’s scope and target audience.

What is it about?

Curling! It’s a how-to guide (I seem to be building a specialty in that field) with a big focus on helping relatively new players. It was written in the first place as a supplement and extension to our 4-week learn to curl program, so includes the basics like how you deliver a stone, along with some discussion of common errors and why we do things the way we do. It includes a discussion of the theories behind directional sweeping, and a very light touch on strategy.

I know that the directional sweeping stuff in particular is something that is missing from the market — there are no books covering it yet, and even on YouTube there are precious few resources to help get newbies up to speed on the topic.

When is it coming out?

The release date is set for Oct 16th, to line up with the start of the curling season. With all of the tragedies of the last year, I had to squeeze all of the slack out of the publication timeline so there is a small chance the print edition may get pushed back if there’s a hiccup in the process (I’m expecting the ARCs to arrive any day now, and if there are mis-prints and I have to start over with the printer that will add delays). But e-books are finalized and available for pre-order, and I expect pre-orders for print editions to open up around Oct 1.

How does it compare to other books/resources out there?

I know I’m a bit of a weirdo when it comes to writing/publishing in that I do an environmental scan to make sure I’m actually filling a need and not just piling one more book out into the world (which if I ever decide to write fiction I will have to get all the way over), but I was surprised at how few curling books are out there. I know it’s a niche sport and all, but given how many dividend investing books are out there, I was surprised…

Anyway, What’s Your Call? only came out two years ago, and is entirely devoted to strategy. So I kept the strategy section fairly light and focused on the club-level, first-time skip.

Curling: Steps to Success would be the most similar competitor — that one and mine are both basically books on how to curl. It came out just before the directional sweeping effect was discovered, so doesn’t have anything about that in there. It’s a bit of a different voice — I’m more focused on the casual player/newbie, while Sean Turriff has more of a focus on turning you into a competitive player (so more on teambuilding and drills to do, mental performance issues, less time on the basics). Mine has more Star Trek references, which really is what people come to a curling book for is it not? His has more drills to use in practice sessions. Overall I think if you finished mine and wanted even more with a different voice (hearing/reading the same information different ways does help it sink in more) I would say that’s a good one to get next.

Curling for Dummies has the recognizable “for Dummies” branding, but is ancient (don’t be fooled by the 2020 release date that Amazon shows, it’s just a reprinting of the 2001 edition). It has a lot of non-how-to content that still holds up that I don’t bother getting into (like how the ice is maintained and where granite comes from), but the descriptions of the equipment and methods are (a lot, a little, respectively) out of date now. They do cover the no-lift delivery at least, but the idea of how to line up hadn’t quite matured to where we are today (it was still close enough to the transition from the old backswing delivery). The sweeping section teaches sweeping on a slider, which is how I learned but generally discouraged for beginners now.

Curl to Win is also out of date (it says it was published in 2009 but feels even older than Curling for Dummies, with Russ Howard’s anachronistic-even-for-the-time promotion of the backswing delivery, and anyway looks like it’s out of print now). I didn’t manage to finish Coleman’s books, which were more autobiography than guide (at least as far as I made it).

And that’s about it. It’s a pretty small field for books, which I was surprised by when people told me there was a need for such a book after I made the joke about the weekly emails. Even if my Curling for Beginners and Improvers and the other books on the market had perfectly overlapping scopes, there would probably still be room for it just to hear the info in different voices and approaches.

Of course the scopes aren’t perfectly overlapping: most of the other books also seem to split their focus on helping someone totally new to the sport while also including “become a champion!” type aspirational sections (and right in the title of some). I don’t know if that helps sell books, and maybe I’m missing out by limiting my focus. The simple fact is that I’ve taught hundreds of people in various learn to curl sessions, clinics, and special events, but coached/played zero national champions, so it’s simply not in my wheelhouse to talk about anything other than getting started in the sport and then getting a little better at the recreational level.

There are a bunch of non-book resources, too. Jamie Sinclair’s YouTube channel is terrific (if not quite structured for a start-from-scratch viewer — an advantage books still have). Matt Bean has a well-structured online course available. Both of those offer videos which can really complement written descriptions well, so be sure to check them out, too. For strategy, there’s resources like Chess on Ice.

Interesting, I’ve never heard of this “Curling” that you speak of.

The book is also for you. Curling is a sport that I love, and I try to share my joy in it with the reader, and help bring you along. It’s so inclusive because you can have multiple generations playing together in a single game, which also means it’s a sport that can keep you active for life. It meets you where your abilities and passions are: you can have people putting their all into it with incredible physical effort that spikes even an elite athlete’s heart rate to the top of their range, alongside people who are just trying to focus on the strategy aspect and keep their exercise to nothing more intense than a light walk.

Most importantly, the Canadian winters fly by when you’re curling every week.

I’m sold, where can I preorder it?

I will update this post when more options become available. For now, the e-book is available for pre-order at ~all of the major e-book retailers. And many of them are offering a pre-order discount! You can also pre-order a print copy through my Value of Simple store (yes, set up for a totally different book) — note that those can only be shipped within Canada, but if you want it signed I can do that (though honestly, defacing the book like that will probably only decrease its value).

Pre-order the e-book from Amazon Canada or Amazon US (rest of the world should get taken to their country from the US link) if you have a Kindle reader.

Pre-order the e-book from Rakuten Kobo, Google Play, or Smashwords, Apple, or many other retailers if you have a Kobo, android tablet, or other device that you don’t want to go to Amazon for.

Should I sign up for curling now?

Yes! Most clubs are accepting registrations for new members right now (September, if you’re reading this later), go ahead and sign up if you’re interested in curling, take their learn-to-curl clinic, and the book will come out in time to help supplement those on-ice lessons. Or just sign up and hope with the book and some YouTube videos you’ll figure it out in time. It’s fun.

I see you have a “blog” section on the site for the book. Are you transitioning into a curling blogger?

No, that’s to put up a few posts talking about the book and the writing process, and to act as an “errata” section for any errors or changes that may be needed (e.g., if an academic study in the future debunks one of the competing theories on directional sweeping, that’s where the update will go). I’ve got a few little teaser posts scheduled leading up to the book’s release, including one talking about the behind-the-scenes editorial decisions and the scope I decided the book should have.

So for example, Curling for Dummies is roughly twice as long as Curling for Beginners and Improvers. It’s not because CfD has that much more information on how to curl — I haven’t done a quantitative word count comparison but I’d estimate it’s actually got a little less on delivery and a lot less on sweeping. It’s because CfD’s scope includes so much extra stuff that I thought was unnecessary: a history of the sport (yawn), a description of how curling ice is made and maintained (cool, but not something the average player needs or likely wants to know — the equivalent of including a chapter on Zambonis in a book on hockey or a chapter on lawnmowers in a book on golf), a bunch of “top 10” lists, most of which aged like milk, a section on becoming a coach yourself… you quickly get a lot of pages that, IMHO, weren’t relevant to the core purpose of the book. Anyway, discussing those decisions is that post.

I plan to put up some bonus content (e.g., a chapter that I cut that I was really on the fence about keeping in there), a bit more behind-the-scenes info, and then the page will be mostly a static sales page for the book.

Seriously now, how do you accidentally write a book? Like, how exactly did this go from a bunch of emails to a coherent book?

That is the topic of another blog post on the new site.

In brief, I made the joke about my emails being so long that I had basically forced everyone to read something close to a book by the end of the year. And some people encouraged me to make it an actual book.

Even with a lot of words written, it was a bunch of tip-of-the-week things — I had a few that chained together more coherently for a broader topic, but before it could become a book nearly all of it needed to be restructured and anchored to some coherent order. Plus some of it was stuff specific to our curling club (like how to find a spare, information about our other leagues, etc.), which didn’t make sense to keep. I had to create a detailed outline of everything I’d want a book for new and developing curlers to learn.

Oh, and I had to do it fast — that joke was in my end of season message, so if I wanted to shoot any photos on ice, I had to get to it ASAP before the ice was all gone. The original emails had a bunch of good-enough-for-an-email pictures and illustrations, including pictures I may not have had copyright to, a bunch of figures mocked up by freehanding in MS Paint (one of which I kept in the book because it was cute and to be able to show where this all started). So I worked feverishly, got an outline hammered out, then listed all the photos and poses I might possibly need for every chapter, then got to shooting with Alexis, the book’s official photographer (and it’s partly her fault — I asked her if trying to turn all the tips into a book was a dumb idea and she was actually supportive so she got dragged into the project).

In the end, we had a bunch of new photos and I created many new figures (or re-made them but cleaner). The tips had to be extensively re-written, and a bunch of new ones added — just under half of the word count is new stuff that was missing from the original set of tips. Once the ice was out I spent the early summer writing and re-writing (and thankfully finished before the serial tragedies started hitting).

This is a surprisingly hard post to write (I’m also clearly out of practice on the blogging front), so let’s resort to the Q&A format:

Hey Potato, what’s up?

In The Big C 2: Revenge of the C I let you know that my dad’s cancer is back. Now I’m going to take some time off work (planning for 1 year) to spend time with him while I can, and also to take care of Blueberry and give her other grandparents a bit of a break. Today was my last day at work!

This is mostly a personal finance blog — how did you swing a year off work?

I have money saved, so I’m not worried about feeding myself or paying the rent during the year itself. It will mean pushing off retirement by a few years for one year being out of the workforce (lost compounding, spending more than saving, etc., will mean roughly pushing things back by ~3-4 years for taking a year now) but I actually haven’t done a huge, detailed projection. Indeed, I made the decision without really doing much of anything in the way of formal planning — it just felt right (after several weeks of hemming and hawing and sleeping on it), and I knew I could swing it, which I suppose is the point of all the previous planning and saving and investing. In the end, I wrote up a little one-page summary of the plan and implications, and that was that. My emergency fund will cover a year off, especially if I can pick up a few freelance gigs along the way.

So are you available for projects? Can I hire you?

Possibly! I know it’s not going to take 24-7 to take care of my family, so I will be looking to do some work, but only part-time (not being able to swing full-time with a commute is the reason I had to step back from the day job in the first place). However, I don’t know how cool the ol’ HR department will be cutting a cheque to an independent contractor who’s on leave, which means no grant-writing or other consulting for co-workers. Personal finance projects/writing/doing DIY investment workshops/lunch’n’learns, editing (it’s been a while since I’ve had a novel to edit, NaNoWriMo authors…), or science writing for others should be fine. Hit me up here if you’re interested.

What else will you do with your time?

Some have suggested using that time to learn something new or get a certification — pick up my CFP (which has a practical requirement, so it would require some commitment to switching jobs or picking up a more robust side gig), or get a MD or RN ’cause I spend so much of my time taking care of sick people anyway. I am getting dangerously close to having spent more time in the real world than grad school, so maybe it’s time to go back to learning and test-writing just to make sure I’ll never have a normal work-study balance in my lifetime.

I might also use my non-caregiving time to write another PF book — I’ve had an idea poking around for over a year now, but I’m getting more negative on the idea as I go along, and may have to just let it die. But hey, it is NaNoWriMo, so maybe some fiction…

However, other than a few random thoughts I absolutely have no plan. I figured all that could wait until I was actually off work to figure it out.

Isn’t it scary just leaving the workforce for a while with no plan of what you’ll do and no income stream coming in?

Well it is now. But that’s also why I managed to actually make a decision with no real analysis/spreadsheets/pro-con lists/waffling blog posts — I was just too burned out to go through my usual over-thinking routine. So at the moment I’m too tired to be scared.

Following my dad’s surgery for the big C, the standard of care is to give 12 cycles of chemotherapy to kill any cancerous cells that may be out there and help prevent the cancer from spreading or coming back. He had chemo just over a decade ago, and it is not a fun time, so he was a bit apprehensive at the notion before meeting the medical oncologist. But the oncologist laid out the plan and the stats and he said that it made sense and agreed to do it.

About a week after his first cycle the worst of the effects were hitting him hard, and he was done. No more chemo, no thank you. Making life miserable now for a chance at some extra years when you’re like, 80, is a bad deal and why would he have ever agreed to do it?

I went over the next day, made some soup, he started to feel better, and we went through some literature together. He agreed that a declaration that chemo was over may have been hasty, and went back for his second cycle yesterday.

That chemo causes nausea surprises no one. This was a known trade-off going in, but once he was actually experiencing these highly unpleasant side effects he was ready to quit.

You don’t want to be rewriting your plan while your head is in the toilet. On top of just feeling awful, there may be some chemo brain that makes it extra hard to make a good long-term decision.

But even beyond chemo, that’s a generalizable lesson. We’ve seen it often enough in investing: the midst of a market crash is not the time to re-evaluate your risk tolerance — you were aware that there were risks to investing and accepted those risks when deciding on your asset allocation in the first place.

The story also underscores the need to write things down. And not just the result of the plan: we didn’t need to write down that he’d be going to chemo every other week for 12 weeks, we needed to write down how he came to that decision. That there would be nausea, and that it would be temporary, and it would be worth it because the survival stats said so. Because it’s while he’s feeling that moment of doubt and urge to quit that he needs to be reminded of why he’s putting himself through this.

In case you’re not familiar with the commencement speech/excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman describes South Sea Cargo Cults following WWII: “During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.” So it has the superficial form, but of course the form is not what’s important, and without the core functions, it doesn’t work.

A recent post on doing laundry got me thinking about cargo cult adulting.

After I graduated and got a real job, my dad bought me a bunch of nice grown-up work shirts. They’re the kind of thing you have to take to the dry cleaners, or be very fiddly with about washing at home. And of course, they had to be ironed.

So, there I am*, sleep-deprived and busy as hell, watching my baby girl play in the playpen while I futz about with this scorching-hot hunk of metal. And she starts to fuss and wants out to crawl around on the floor and play with her daddy and eat all the dirt, but it’s not safe. This unstable burn hazard and relic of Victorian values is not even really safe for me to be handling in my current state. And even then, I ended up missing part of my shirt, going into work with a wrinkly arm the next day**.

I did not enjoy ironing. I had better things to do with my time, but what could I do, it was part of being grown-up and having stable employment. Then the epiphany: screw that noise. Ironing shirts didn’t make me an adult, being a good dad to my kid was my biggest ticket to adulthood, and she didn’t want me to be ironing my shirts. Wearing shirts that needed ironing (and actually ironing them) was just a symptom of someone else’s adulthood. Besides, it was 2012 (or 2013) and wrinkle-free fabrics existed in the world. Once Wayfare bought me a few wrinkle-free shirts, that was it for ironing.

Now I have a very simple laundry procedure: everything goes in together in one bunch.

If it can’t handle cold/normal followed by tumble dry low, I don’t want it. There’s no room for primadonna fabrics in my world, so if someone gives me a gift of clothes and it can’t deal with how I manage laundry, it just goes in the donate pile. I’ve ruined a few pairs of really superficially nice wool pants, and I have zero regrets. It wasn’t meant to be, anyway***. For the ones with sufficient warning labels (or only slightly scarred by my treatment), maybe Diabetes Canada can find someone who has that kind of time.

Of course there’s an even bigger source of cargo-cult adulting: buying real estate. Just today Rob Carrick has an anecdote in the Globe of one young adult living at home, hoping to save enough to buy a house at the expense of renting, being independent, and “[getting] on with the next phase of [her] life.”

And this isn’t some article assignment he had to go terribly far to find: it’s a story I’ve heard dozens of times in recent years. Real estate’s too expensive and out of reach, but people can’t [won’t] move out/have kids/really become adults without a house they can mortgage.

Now there’s a bit of a political brou-ha-ha in Ontario over the sex ed curriculum. Apparently we’re still using the 1998 one. Well, I graduated in 1998, so I don’t know what exactly is in that iteration — I was subjected to the one even older than that — but from listening to some millennials whine about how they have to buy before they can have kids, but the market’s too expensive to buy, so therefore they can’t have kids… well, I can only conclude that there’s something deeply misleading about how you use property deeds in there. As someone who has taken a university-level biology class and is a father, let me reassure you that there’s eggs and sperm and sleep deprivation and inordinate amounts of patience, but at no point does the legal ownership of land or structures factor into reproduction.

Anyway, there will be lots of adjustments from previous generations. Maybe you won’t have a single job that you use interchangeably with the word career — the gig economy is a monster and it’s coming for us all. Maybe you won’t own the roof over you head, or a car. Maybe you will have more monthly bills as Netflix and cell phones weren’t a thing for your parents. Maybe you won’t spend half your weekend on lawncare (or maybe you’ll spend more as you turn your little patch of dirt into an apocalypse-ready source of calories and essential fatty acids).

You are**** an adult and you get to decide what that means. You don’t necessarily need the same trappings and signifiers of adulthood that your parents had. And they won’t make you an adult any more than coconut headphones could call down a C-47. Don’t make yourself feel like you’ve put your life on hold for something that doesn’t even matter in the end.

In conclusion, screw ironing. Long live the wrinkle-free workshirt!

* – This is like 6 years ago, so it is safe to assume that this anecdote has been heavily embellished by time if not my story-telling.

**** – Unless you’re not. It’s the internet, after all.

There are a lot of things in the world to potentially research. Even just restricting the conversation to investing, there are a lot of potential avenues to put your money to work. However, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything.

I was on Tom’s podcast recently, and he threw me some questions on bitcoin and peer-to-peer lending. Things like this pop up from time to time, and I usually do have something to say. But just because I have an opinion and want to talk about it doesn’t mean it’s a strong opinion, or that you should go off and waste some time doing a bunch of research.

There’s a difference between having an opinion for the purposes of a discussion or entertainment, and an opinion for guiding your investment decisions. I’m not trying to talk you out of ranting about bitcoin or whatever individual stock is in the news or whatever you like to talk about at parties. But just because some new option is there doesn’t mean you have to give it full due diligence and a careful pro/con decision process to determine if it belongs in your portfolio.

Sure, bitcoin went up however many gagillion percent through to the end of 2017, but it just as easily could have gone another way — that doesn’t mean you have to start researching bitcoin or every potential growth story in the future now. If you missed out on the crypto craze, you’re probably still doing just fine on your trajectory to retirement (and if you jumped in late last year you probably regret it at this point).

And almost all the stuff on TV and in the paper on investing, all the different styles and strategies and specific companies — most of that is just discussion and entertainment. It’s very hard not to talk about something when someone else wants to talk about it. That goes double when there’s a camera on you. Engaging in a discussion on some potential investment is not a pointer that you should be researching this stuff or taking the opinion seriously. Often guests on BNN have opinions on stocks they do not own, to reinforce that point.

Buffett had this concept of the “too hard pile” — he didn’t have to come to a buy or sell decision on every stock, if it turned out it was too complex or outside his circle of competence he could just shelve it and move on to the next opportunity. Sometimes in a conversation someone may give you a forced choice “which one would you pick? OK, but if you could only take one with you when you’re stranded on a desert island…” but real life rarely does in the same way. And it’s ok to say that you don’t know and don’t care to waste the time trying to decide.

Focusing on the essential building blocks — your savings rate, fees, risk tolerance — is what will help you meet your goals. Debating the blockchain flowchart can make for good conversation, learning about new things can be fun, but that doesn’t mean you have to seriously consider how much of your portfolio to put in whatever the obsession of the week is.