One of the hardest ideas to get across to my pasture management clients, those who hire me to teach them how to make their pastures as nice as mine, is that you must manage them as if they were good pastures even when they aren't yet good. You set up the system and stick to it even if you have nothing but bare dirt and weeds. They all want to do something grand, some massive change to create good pasture, and then begin good management.

Their way can work but it's expensive and most often temporary. Usually they fail to do the necessary management, not really believing that it is important, and soon have nasty pastures again. Since they didn't create good pastures with good management they don't appreciate the power of the practice.

I understand the problem, the desire to make massive change in one swell foop and begin a new life. Playing "small ball", sticking to the knitting, walking the talk and such are not exciting and can be a real test of patience and character. You'll feel and look like an idiot at first - managing your scraggly pastures as if they were forage heaven for livestock - and if the magic doesn't happen and a year later you still have a mess you'll never live it down. Your buddies will laugh at you for years and years.

You may not be very interested in the details of how and why this works for pastures but the ideas generalize a bit. They apply to other activities that you may care about.

I’m not especially fair-minded by nature. I have to struggle against temper, a quick tongue, an instinct to mock. Some of the long-windedness here is my way of guarding against those inclinations, getting myself to inhabit the obligations I’ve set for my public self, my scholarly self. . .

I don’t see folks trying to reach for something better, something different, trying to imagine and practice how we will debate and teach and write in some better kind of academic culture. That’s really what I’m trying to do in this blog, more than anything else: to try, even when it is against my nature, to constrain myself to what that better practice might be.

The similarity may not leap off the page for you but he's saying the same thing, advocating the same approach, but for an exceedingly different task. I say proceed as if you had good pastures - doing all the things that must be done to maintain and improve them - and in less time than you imagine you will in fact have good pastures as well as a system in place to keep them good. He's saying practice debate and teaching as if you were in some better kind of academic culture. The result will be a better academic culture achieved bit by bit, person by person, and day by day. What's more it will be more resilient, less likely to subsequently degenerate into some new, or even the same old, dysfunctional state.

Not everyone can do this. That's no crime or sin but one might be better off doing some other sort of work that rewards a "home run" mentality, a visceral need for drama and risk, spectacular failure as well as success. The trick is to know the difference and act in ways appropriate to the task at hand.