The Pleasure IS Hard Work, Not the Outcome
I had two conversations that inspired me to make this blog post. Last night I had a lengthy conversation about some career opportunities that I may or may not have down the line in addition to various topics that always creep into our late-night conversations, and today I had a short talk with another close friend of mine that I don't see all that often. What came up in both conversations is the fact that I like to work hard on difficult to solve problems, mostly related to baseball. The first person shares this love for hard work with me, though in a different realm - so we commiserate easily about that. The second person does not, however - he's incredibly frustrated at his job where he busts his ass and has little energy afterwards to pursue opportunities that he likes to do.
My second friend told me today that he's very proud of me. Knowing that he probably wasn't referring to my newborn son, I asked him: "Proud of what?" He said: "You pursue your dreams, and this opportunity that you're involved with now seems like a dream opportunity finally come to life due to all your hard work!"
I reflected for a bit, and it made sense why he was burnt out from hard work at his day job and frustrated with some aspects of his life. (He is generally a very positive and happy person, lest I make it sound like he's always negative.) I told him: "Achieving the goals and ends I have for myself are the least important part of my life. I take great pleasure in the hard work I do to pursue these goals that I have - I do not expect to be content when I reach these mid-term goals that I have for myself." He responded that he wished he had energy to pursue some of the goals he had but that his day job sucked much of the life out of him, and I told him: "Your day job is what it is. Leave it there. My day job often frustrates me due to its complexity, but at the end of the day, we are both employed, earning a pretty good salary, and if this is what we fall back on, then that's pretty good. Cherish the fact that you will have the opportunity to work hard on projects you love. Whether or not they bear fruit is meaningless."
I give my Introduction to Political Science professor (in junior college) a lot of credit for enlightening me to process-oriented concepts; a life philosophy that was ironed out by studying sabermetrics and the Moneyball revolution.
My first friend put it very succinctly: "The opportunity to put in hours and hours of hard work on something that has meaning to you is a very rare opportunity in the world."
When I summed all this up for my second friend, he seemed to understand. I hope he is able to find peace and the time to find the same opportunity that I've been given, for it is the greatest gift that I have in my life.
WiiMote, Motion Plus, Accelerometers, Gyroscopes, Baseball Pitching, and What it All Means
I am working on a much larger post (and page, and even separate website) to detail my work with modeling baseball biomechanics, but I made a post that I want to catalog here on my blog for sharing and archival purposes. This was originally written on a messageboard, so if the formatting is off, I apologize.
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Here's a great video about accelerometers and gyroscopes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19W-MG-whE
What do I really care about when I'm using the Wii parts? Well, to build a fully functioning Inertial Mass Unit (IMU) to get 1:1 motion capture/control, I need to do what they demonstrate above. However, this is very complicated and requires 6 DOF. The degrees of freedom are:
Moving up and down (heaving)
Moving left and right (swaying)
Moving forward and backward (surging)
Tilting forward and backward (pitching)
Turning left and right (yawing)
Tilting side to side (rolling)
I really only care about what the forearm is doing in relation to the elbow; this eliminates the first three DOF. Fortunately for me, the first 3 DOF are handled by accelerometers and the last 3 DOF are handled by gyroscopes. What matters the most is tracking:
-Humeral internal rotation velocity rate of change (pitch)
-Forearm pronation/supination rate of change (roll)
And to a lesser extent:
-Ulnar/radial degrees of flexion rate of change (yaw)
So the next step is synchronizing what I see on high-speed two-dimensional frontal plane (side view) video and what I get from the gyroscopes. By doing this, I can nearly eliminate the need to have a four or five high-speed camera system that uses Direct Linear Transformation to recreate a three-dimensional model of a pitcher. This is awesome, because DLT is both ****ing ridiculously time intensive as well as somewhat expensive due to the need for 4+ high-speed cameras ($150 each minimum with current consumer technology) and the software to handle it ($50, but it's very bare bones).
It's cool to be the guy doing the most to push low-cost / DIY biomechanical analysis of amateur athletics, but it also means I have no peer groups to work with. The Internet helps, but very few people are working with this kind of technology to produce the stuff I want to make. It's both exciting to be a pioneer in a field and incredibly frustrating because I have no formal education in physics or mechanical engineering, so I need to read pretty much everything I can get my hands on to understand it all.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it's a bit terrifying that I could very well be wasting a lot of my time from an application/technology standpoint. If this product is so good (and I believe it is), then it already should exist given that the underlying technologies have been around for some time, though it can be said that it's only been affordable since the Wii and smartphones have given rise to cheap small consumer electronics for accelerometers and gyroscopes - not very long. But there's no proven market for what I want to sell, and it will never be huge.
Fortunately, I see this as an awesome opportunity to learn about science and to contribute - however marginally - to the field. Science and technology are two wholly separate disciplines, and as Richard Feynman famously said about his work: "I do things for the pleasure of finding things out."
Understand the Axis You Compete On
A corollary to "Focus on What Matters," understanding the axis you compete on is an important trait in any good entrepreneur. The inability to focus on the competitive edge that justifies your product or service's end cost has sunk many organizations in the critical stages of their development. I've seen this time and time again and have been guilty of it myself on more than one occasion!
We live in an increasingly more specialized society and economy - we no longer want a Virtual Private Server; we want an unmanaged VPS under $20/month running Fedora Core located in Dallas with 5 IP addresses and partial physical access through a ticketing system. We're not interested in hiring programmers/developers - we want a developer who specializes in MySQL design/administration, thorough understanding of Rails 3, and experience with Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.
The failure to compete on an axis with a low barrier to entry is what ruins most small business ideas. However, for those small businesses that get off the ground and start competing in their niche, they eventually start to think bigger - and why not? There's nothing wrong with future planning for an entrepreneur; it is the hallmark of a smart businessman. The smart entrepreneur has an exit strategy and a general - if not malleable - 3-year plan for his organization.
But don't confuse this future planning with the generalization of your niche; this is the death knell for most organizations that get too ambitious. Most small businesses dominate because they have low overhead, smart planning, patient executives, and most of all - completely rule their niche and everything that connects to it!
Example of the Failure to Understand the Relevant Axis of Competition
An organization I did some consulting for that fell for this trap: The small business was in the black year after year and experienced phenomenal growth because they were smart enough (and lucky enough) to pick an unexplored niche that would eventually blossom. Throughout the process, they accumulated a lot of technical debt even though the extent of the technology involved posting data from a web form to a database and manipulating that data on the back end for marketing/financial purposes. The response to the growing technical debt wasn't to simplify the process, but rather to expand and try and compete on the Axis of Technology.
But this was a huge mistake - the company competed on the Axis of Marketing and had a large economic First Mover advantage. Remember, the entire extent of the technical interactions of the company involved posting data from a web form, storing it into a database, and manipulating said data. Marketing specialists tracked SEO-related data and made projections from these posts and sales people used the data to show off the dominance of the company in this small industry. To make such a huge paradigm shift in an attempt to compete on the Axis of Technology made no sense - the company did not succeed because of its superior technology department, but rather because of the first mover advantage and a solid foundation of sales/marketing.
They ported their technology to a more complicated and expensive platform, changing the base language everything was programmed in, and completely overhauled the existing database, requiring a giant migration of the data to the new schema. They hired all new developers and executive staff to oversee the change, leaving the Sales and Marketing departments in the dust - making huge promises that could never be met due to the technical debt that had accumulated and the problems that would invariably crop up as a result of trying to migrate millions of rows of poorly laid-out data into a brand new invented schema.
The organization was able to make these changes because they promised the moon to the business units - unification of tools, better access to data, and faster reports!
It didn't happen: The migration was an enormous failure, the implementation of a more complicated programming foundation flopped, the tools became worse, and sales have been steadily dropping while company morale plunged.
Due to the fractured database structure, the organization now maintains a legacy database and a post-migration database - both of which have differing schemas and do not blend whatsoever. Their products exist on two platforms and all new employees must learn two separate systems, both of which have rapid changes inflicted on them due to exponentially-increasing technical debt.
All of this happened because the organization failed to understand what axis it competed on, and tried to get too fancy. In this age of specialization, right-pricing, and cheap outsourced labor, you simply cannot afford to make these types of mistakes and hope to remain relevant - or even solvent - in today's economy.
Me
Wisdom
Latest Driveline Baseball Posts
- Andrew McNally: The 39-year old who won’t give up on his dream (THT Article)
- How High-Speed Pitching Video Can Alter an Athlete’s Training Program: External/Internal Rotation
- Guest Blog: Preventing Chronic Lower Back Pain in Baseball Players
- Bad Swing Coaching – Pushing Hands to the Ball / Extension Through the Ball
- Pitching Mechanics Myths: Chin to Target, Release Ball Closer to the Plate
Kyle’s Hardball Times Articles
- The 39-year-old who won’t give up on his dream
- Fastball mechanics: The hardest and softest throwers
- Jason Vargas, the twist, and the intent to throw hard
- How baseball failed Steve Delabar
- A pitcher breaking the mold
My Stuff
- Advanced Baseball Injury Database
- Driveline Athletics
- Driveline Baseball
- ML Splits
- My GitHub Profile
- My LinkedIn Profile
- My Stack Overflow Profile