Being in the Moment

Yesterday, a client asked about how to “be in the moment.” She repeatedly finds herself “anywhere but” (in the moment), what with her constant worrying about the future, about things she cannot control, and about things she can control but about which she is doing nothing to address. The result is a lingering sense of anxiety, which if not treated somehow, we devolve into a sense of hopelessness.

How, then, to be “in the moment?” The answers are never simple, for the “moment” is forever moving past us into our histories as either well-lived, or not-so-well-lived, or wasted. Think of a train passing you by, one that has many cars attached to the locomotive. Each car represents the present moment. As it passes you by, it is gone and the next moment takes it place. How can we stay focused on a moving train? That is the question.

One immediate answer is mindfulness, an oft-misunderstood technique that involves simply closing your eyes and mindfully looking at all your thoughts at once. It is not mindlessness – not at all – but is, instead, an almost deliberate process of stopping in the moment and considering everything that is running through your brain. Everything. Mindlessness is impossible. We are, after all, thinking creatures.

In time, the most important things will float to the top.

In conjunction with mindfulness, one should then engage in thought-stopping. If a particular thought pattern floats to the top and is simply irrational on its face, we can literally and figuratively tell ourselves to “Stop!”  Think here of “letting go.” A particularly good video from Dr. Christian Conte speaks to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7C27dULXkg

So, back to my client and her desire to be more “in the moment.”

It reminded me of Gestalt Therapy, a therapeutic process developed many years ago by Dr. Fritz Perls.  I dug out my notes on this therapy and will list the Top Six Rules of Gestalt Therapy here:

    1. The Principle of the Now. This is nothing more or less than engaging with your thoughts and asking yourself these questions:
      1. What is your present awareness? Can you close your eyes and see your thoughts? I mean, can you actually see them? The answer is that you can. It will take practice. Let them flood your awareness and, viola! – you have your present awareness.
      2. What is happening now? This is all about understanding what led up to the present moment, to your present awareness. Look at triggers or what therapists call “antecedents” of behavior. What triggered the thought-racing? Was it something someone said or did? This is most relevant in the appreciation of road-rage.
      3. What is your “now”? Is your now simply an energy-depleting and ill-fated attempt to consistently move beyond the present moment in hopes of a better present moment? Remember that the past is important only insofar as it is being experienced NOW. And the future is merely hypothetical. Remember that! The future is merely hypothetical. As you imagine it, the future has about a 50/50 chance of turning out precisely as you want it.
      4. Am I engaging in “aboutism” thinking? In other words, am I thinking about things? The challenge is to think about how you are being in the moment. Are you anxious? Good. Focus on the anxiety and on where in your body the anxiety manifests. For me, it is often in my chest, or my stomach. Focus on those parts of your body and, soon, the aboutism will remit.
    2. Learn to Ask Questions. This is more for the therapist than the client, but it can work for the client who is trying to tackle racing thoughts, or what we might call “intrusive thoughts.” I never understood the latter – all thoughts are intrusive – but the upshot is that any series of thoughts can become intrusive in the sense that they pollute what would/could otherwise be a thorough enjoyment of the “now.”
      1. Good questions are a way of avoiding protracted conflict. They slow things down. They get us to focus on an answer rather than the conflict. Learn to ask questions of yourself.
      2. Consider how you might then reframe a question as a statement. For example, “why am I anxious,” can be reframed as “I am anxious for an as-yet-undetermined reason.” This happens in your mind and soon enough the mind is off trying to tackle the statement rather than the question. Remember that questions are often asked to get at a precise answer. A statement is, instead, something to be examined from the perspective of rationality versus irrationality.
    3. Gestalt Therapy is all about the dichotomy of “I and Thou.” What is that? Well, simply put, it is a challenge to consider the “other” in your conversations, either those with other people or with yourself. When we consider the Other in our conversations, we are, for the moment anyway, thinking less about ourselves and more about them (or thou). This can happen inside our own brains as well. When we extend “the alms of our own kindness” to ourselves, we are separating our thoughts from the rest of our being. They truly are separate, by the way. The brain is an interesting organ.

So, with that in mind, also consider these three objectives:

  1. Consider using “I” Language When Engaged in Overwhelming “IT” Language. The point is that we tend to play the victim far too often: “It did that to me, or it is doing this to me.” We externalize. Better to internalize and examine your own resulting feelings. For example, “I am anxietizing over this or that.” In the case of road rage, “I am choosing to rage over this.”
  2. Remember Perls’ Awareness Continuum. As said above, think about where anxiety manifests in your body. How do you experience anxiety? Focus on that part of the body. Truly focus on it. Experience it. Chances are, it will not kill you.
  3. One last thing – Avoid Gossiping. This applies to thought stopping as well. Often, our own thoughts can amount to a kind of self-gossip. Just like we do to others, we will often gossip about ourselves; e.g., I am a loser, I am incapable, etc. Stop the gossip. Deal with facts. Deal with rationality.
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F*ck You Money and The Story of Cincinnatus

 

 

 

 

 

From today’s Daily Stoic is this wonderful piece. I capture it here to remind me of the true value of Fuck-You Money. And, for some of my clients who, having accumulated all the money in the world, still want more and who have put off doing something meaningful with their time.

One of the most enduring and inspiring figures in all of Roman history is Cincinnatus, after whom the city of Cincinnati is named. Called to save Rome in 458 BC from the Aequians and the Sabines, he is made temporary dictator and granted extraordinary war time powers. Yet after he leads the army to a victory and saves his country, he seeks not to return to rule Rome but to tend to his farm. It is said that this example partly inspired George Washington not to actively seek executive power after the Revolutionary War, and then after becoming president, to leave after two terms. It is also, of course, the plot of Maximus’s character in the movie Gladiator.

And yes, while Cincinnatus’s story is a stunning display of self-discipline and self-awareness, it is equally true that many of us foolishly live out a much more self-indulgent and delusional version of this story. We tell ourselves that we’re getting a job on Wall Street, but that it’s only temporary. After I make my fortune, then I’ll become a third-grade teacher or do philanthropic work. We sign on for this project or that one, not because we think it’s good, but because we tell ourselves it will give us the freedom we seek down the road. One for me, one for them. Or we enroll in law school or go for that MBA because we think it will give us more options. I’m never going to be a lawyer, but a law degree can’t hurt.

It’s remarkable how few people end up on their metaphorical farm though, isn’t it? We take the dictatorial powers—the money, the prestige, the couple extra years of school—but when it comes time to do what we told ourselves we were always going to do … well, that never seems to happen. It’s like what David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson has said: People go to Silicon Valley to earn “fuck-you money” and then nobody ends up saying “Fuck you!”

If you look beyond a specific amount, fuck-you money can be a state of mind. One that you can acquire well in advance of the corresponding bank account. One that’s founded mostly on a personal confidence that even if most of the material trappings went away, you’d still be happier for standing your ground.  Yes, talk about privilege. There are certainly many people who choose to bow their head not for their own sake, but for the sake of those that depend on them. That’s a noble retreat.

Rome needed Cincinnatus. It was a life and death situation. For most of us? Not so much. And life is short. So, if you want to be a writer, start writing (don’t tell yourself you have to finish something else first). If you want to help people, start helping people (don’t tell yourself you have to get rich first). If you want to be this or that, well, start—don’t chase another degree.

Because you never know if you’ll get another chance.

As Don Conte has said repeatedly (and as was repeated by his son, Christian, one of the best teachers I ever had):

This is not your practice life. It is the only one you will ever get.

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Hope and Change – the 2018 Edition

Perhaps there is hope and change after all.  God knows we didn’t have it from 2008-2016, no matter how much was promised.

Turns out, unsubstantiated claims of sexual abuse – indeed, the mere allegation of same – will not win you five million dollars. Or, so I would like to believe.

This story appeared in today’s The Wrap, a Hollywood-based blog of entertainment news. To wit …

A $5 million lawsuit brought against Russell Simmons by aspiring filmmaker Jennifer Jarosik was dismissed today, according to court papers filed Wednesday and obtained by The Wrap.

According to court documents, the suit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that it cannot be filed again at a later date.

“Mr. Simmons is hereby dismissed with prejudice from this action in its entirety including all claims asserted by Ms. Jarosik in the operative complaint,” the court papers read. “The Parties shall bear their own attorney’s fees and costs in this matter.”

Jarosik, an aspiring documentary producer, filed suit against Simmons in January, saying that Simmons raped Jarosik at his Los Angeles home in August 2016. Jarosik sued for sexual assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

Simmons denied the accusations, and in a court filing earlier this month his legal team said that Jarosik suffered from “untreated mental issues.”

“In various court proceedings over the past six years, Ms. Jarosik has been found by a court: (1) to have a ‘propensity to exaggerate’; (2) to suffer from ‘untreated mental health issues,’ and (3) to be ‘unfit to properly parent’ her young son,” Simmons’ answer to Jarosik’s complaint reads. “Those very same qualities are evident in Ms. Jarosik’s Complaint, which is filled with lies against Mr. Simmons, who has only ever tried to help her. Mr. Simmons has never had non-consensual sex with Ms. Jarosik or anyone else.”

Me too? Perhaps it should read, “Me Maybe, if I have the right lawyer.”

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When The Birds Attack

This piece, in the Wall Street Journal, is simply too good not to post here (with all due attribution to the Journal and the piece’s author, Mr. Kevin D. Williamson).  It sums up so much of what I have been writing about these past few weeks and months, about how our society has perfected character assassination by means of social media.

In this piece he also give voice to the entirety of the abortion debate, in a way that I never could.  I am reminded of what Ronald Reagan used to say: “Abortion is not for the public square. It cannot be decided. It is like a baby that cannot be cut in half. There can never be a compromise.  Leave it a private matter.”

Anyway, here is the piece:

When the Twitter Mob Came for Me

In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.

“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”

My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.

The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece.

No. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”

Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated—to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public—I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d meant to point out and mock.

Let’s not equivocate: Abortion isn’t littering or securities fraud or driving 57 in a 55-mph zone.

If it isn’t homicide, then it’s no more morally significant than getting a tooth pulled. If it isn’t homicide, then there’s no real argument for prohibiting it.

If it is homicide, then we need to discuss more seriously what should be done to put an end to it. For all the chatter today about diversity of viewpoint and the need for open discourse, there aren’t very many people on the pro-choice side, in my experience, who are ready to talk candidly about the reality of abortion.

Which brings us back to that event at South by Southwest, where the Atlantic was sponsoring a panel about marginalized points of view and diversity in journalism. The panelists, all Atlantic writers and editors, argued that the cultural and economic decks are stacked against feminists and advocates of minority interests. They made this argument under the prestigious, high-profile auspices of South by Southwest and their own magazine, hosted by a feminist group called the Female Quotient, which enjoys the patronage of Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and Deloitte.

We should all be so marginalized.

If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorship from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.

The event itself was revealing, not for the predictable banalities uttered on stage but for the offstage observations coming from the master of ceremonies: my new boss. Mr. Goldberg in private sometimes takes an amusingly ironic view of the pieties of P.C. culture. After giving the opening remarks, he joked about inflicting upon me the “wokiest” thing I’d ever suffered through and said that he himself was “insufficiently intersectional” for the event. He had a good laugh.

I couldn’t share so easily in his humor.

Mr. Goldberg knows something about the power of the Twitter mob. A Jewish liberal with some hawkish foreign-policy views and a clear-eyed understanding of the problems associated with the poorly assimilated Muslim minority communities in Europe, he has been labeled everything from a perpetrator of crimes against humanity (he served in the Israeli military as a young man) to an “Islamophobe” to the intellectual author of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived war in Iraq.

But he underestimated the energy with which that mob would pursue someone like me. Mr. Goldberg sits atop one of the most celebrated magazines in our country’s history, and before that he was a star at the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. He can survive the occasional heresy.

I’m an unassimilated conservative from Lubbock, Texas. Much of my career for the past 20-odd years has consisted of writing pieces that tell people things they don’t want to hear. My angry critics on the left think I’m a right-wing monster; my angry critics on the right don’t like the fact that I’ve reported extensively from Trump country and haven’t thought very highly of what I’ve seen. If I’d been hired for a new job at some conservative outlet, you can be sure there would have been talk about how I pray each night for the death of the white working class.

But this time, the tsunami came from the left, as I’d predicted.

On March 22, the Atlantic announced that it had hired me and three others as contributors to its new section “for ideas, opinions and commentary.” In no time, the abortion-rights group Naral was organizing protests against me, demanding that I not be permitted to publish in the Atlantic. Activists claimed, dishonestly, that I wanted to see every fourth woman in the country lynched (it is estimated that 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion by the age of 45). Opinion pieces denouncing me appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and other publications.

The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy.

Did I think I was being portrayed accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions. (In preparing this account, I have confirmed my recollection of what Mr. Goldberg said with Mr. Goldberg himself.)

Instead of interviewing the subject of their pieces, they scanned my thousands of articles and found the tidbits that seemed most likely to provoke. I was half-amused by progressive activists’ claims to have “uncovered” things that were, after all, published. Goodness knows there’s lots to choose from: I have unpopular and contrarian views about what we used to call sex-reassignment surgery and are now expected to call “gender-confirmation surgery,” and I have argued that the much-remarked upon epidemic of sexual assault on American college campuses does not in fact exist (check the numbers).

But no, I didn’t call an African-American child a “monkey,” and, as should be clear by now, I’m not eager to be any sort of executioner. I am one of what I suspect is a very small number of American journalists to have seen a hanging (a lynching in India), and that kind of violence is worth taking seriously.

Having my views misrepresented is familiar territory for me. In 2014, I got a call from a friend who was disturbed by my public support for Donald Sterling, the owner of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, who had gotten himself into trouble for some racist remarks. I had, at that time, never heard of Mr. Sterling, but there was a quote from me right there on Twitter: “‘Looks like the antiracist gestapo are already lacing up their jackboots for Donald Sterling,’ National Review’s Kevin Williamson commented.”

I mention that one mainly because I know the source of it: It was invented by Matt Bruenig, a left-wing blogger and lawyer formerly associated with the progressive think tank Demos and a contributor to, among other publications, the Atlantic. That quote was not a distortion; it was not “taken out of context” or anything of the sort. It was a pure fabrication. (Mr. Bruenig says that the quote, produced in its entirety above, was intended as “satire.”)

You can find other tweets attributed to me that are pure invention. And while the claims against me during the course of the Atlantic fiasco were not created ex nihilo, the distortions and exaggerations represent a similar kind of intellectual dishonesty: indifference to the facts of the case in the service of narrow ideological goals.

It is easy to misrepresent and exaggerate views that are controversial to begin with. I have argued for years that the current U.S. model of capital punishment is defective and that the practice ought to be tightly restricted or eliminated entirely. I also have argued that if we are to have capital punishment, then it should be carried out by means that are forthrightly violent—firing squad, hanging, etc.—rather than the current pseudo-clinical method of lethal injection. We should always be honest about what it is we are doing, and the involvement of the medical profession in the willful imposition of death is a perversion of its creed, whether in the matter of abortion or in the matter of executing criminals.

Whatever you think of my views on this issue, I’d suggest that they’re more interesting than hearing someone repeat the same shopworn talking points on capital punishment for the thousandth time. The editors of the Atlantic thought so, too, until the mob started doing their thinking for them.

The Atlantic has often welcomed controversial writers. The magazine’s best-known contributor today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the nation’s foremost writer on race. He came in for criticism after writing, in his book “Between the World and Me,” that the first responders on 9/11 were “not human” to him, that he had come to regard such uniformed figures as menaces. I don’t share his view, but if that’s what he thought at the time, then I’m glad he wrote it. He could have pretended to have had thoughts and feelings other than the ones he did—but the truth is usually more interesting, and it is always more useful.

The late Christopher Hitchens was another frequent contributor to the Atlantic. He was routinely denounced by people on the left for his harshly critical views of Islam. He complained of the war in Afghanistan that “the death toll is not nearly high enough,” described the Jewish scriptures as “evil and mad” and directed shameful vitriol at Mother Teresa. Hitchens routinely and gleefully gave occasion for offense—and he was one of the invaluable essayists of our time.

“Yes,” Mr. Goldberg said when I reminded him of this precedent. “But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”

And that, of course, is what this whole episode was really about. No one is very much interested in my actual views on abortion and capital punishment—I am hardly a household name. Anyone genuinely interested in my views would have done what journalists do and inquired about them. It isn’t hard to do.

I’m working on a piece right now touching on the way that my fellow conservatives sometimes misrepresent the views of the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Mr. Krugman is not the left-wing radical of the right-wing imagination but a moderately liberal Democrat with more traditional views on trade than the Trump administration; his critique of Republican tax policy is fundamentally a conservative one. I think Mr. Krugman would say that’s a fair accounting of his views. I am confident of this because I asked him, and he said so.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god.  Jealous and kind of stupid.

Mr. Williamson is a former writer and editor at National Review. The foregoing was his piece. Russo claims no ownership whatsoever.

 

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Stop Reading!

This was published in today’s Daily Stoic and I thought it too good not to re-post here on my Blog. It isn’t my work (duh) but it is my general orientation toward picking, and picking up, the books I read. 

From both Seneca and Marcus we see a fairly remarkable admonition: Stop reading.

“Throw away your books,” says Marcus Aurelius.

Seneca tells Lucilius to stop chasing new titles and to stop, “gorging yourself on new books.”

For philosophers, this seems like strange advice. Isn’t the whole point of the pursuit of wisdom to read as much as you can?

Nope. Not to the Stoic!

Because to the Stoic, anything done to excess is a vice, and that includes the consuming of books. Seneca and Marcus didn’t have newspapers and blogs, of course, but they would have put them under the same category. Reading wasn’t something to be done for its own sake—or to appear informed or wise—but to actually create real wisdom. It was designed to make us better. Practically. Immediately.

So today when you feel yourself picking up your phone to scan the headlines on MSNBC or Fox News, stop. Same goes for the impulse to pull up Audible and listen to another audio book on 2x speed. Unless you can complete this sentence: This information will make me better because  __________________,  don’t bother.

And, before you start feeling stupid for not being familiar with some obscure French thinker that all your friends are talking about, ask: Would there by something I could do with their theories? Would it matter to my life? 

If the answer to any of this is “No,” then please don’t feel guilty about skipping it.

There’s plenty of wisdom already inside you. My goodness – we read so much every day as it is: emails, billboards, Apple’s Terms and Condition, textbooks for a class you’re taking, etc., etc.

It’s not always about more. Sometimes it’s about meditating on and making the most of what you already have.

So, don’t read more.

Do more.

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Me Too – the End of America As I Knew It

Last fall, in the United States, a friend of mine was the target of a nasty letter, one that has not been shared with him, asserting all manner of improprieties. It was sent by a group of nurses and doctors at a local hospital to a Dean of Students at a major rural university in the United States. My friend only knows of the letter because the Dean of Students convened a Star Chamber to investigate, one of whose members is a friend of my friend. Otherwise, he would never have known.

The Dean of Students reacted by assuming the letter’s accusations were true and proceeded to launch a full scale investigation of my friend – again, without involving him – in accordance with the dictates of the now-official judicial process known as #Me Too.

If you have been following the news, then you know how Harvey Weinstein, no angel to begin with, got caught up in the dragnet of Me Too and is now bankrupt and facing criminal charges. My friend got caught up too.

The accusations of my friend were, on their face, troubling: The letter asserted that he trafficked in young women, engaged in pornography surfing, and abused his position as an adjunct member of the faculty of that university. They did not come close to the Weinstein laundry list, but no matter: That the letter was signed by medical doctors gave it heft and importance in this era of #MeToo.

The response, on its face, is troubling.

Gone is the notion of due process. Gone is the notion of being able to confront one’s accusers. Gone is presumption of innocence. Gone is what used to be known as a statute of limitations. Gone is any sense of balance. Gone is America as I knew it, in this era of Me Too.

Here’s the thing: the accusations spelled out in the letter simply weren’t true. Period.

But in today’s America, in this era of #MeToo, one can assert all manner of crimes without having to answer for their accuracy. The mere accusation is enough to ruin a life and a career.

Sexual abuse is wrong on so many levels. But so is salacious gossip and character assassination. Why two wrongs now make a right is beyond me.

But that is life in America in the Me Too era.

The matter has since dried up and blown away. The hot snapping coals of what was once a burning fire are now cold and quiet. But the damage to reputation lasts. No one had to answer for their baseless accusations. More importantly, no one had to report findings. It was all conducted behind a cloak of secrecy that Russia’s Putin would be proud of.

Wanna kill a person’s career? Wanna damage a presidency? Wanna permanently damage a reputation? Wanna dream up something that might have happened 50 years ago? Write a letter asserting sexual impropriety. Don’t call the cops. Just put it on Twitter and watch the world erupt.

A recent article put up by the AP reported what one prominent editor in America, Jann Wenner, had to say about it all.  In an interview with The Associated Press, the Rolling Stone publisher said he feels that mere accusations of sexual impropriety are threatening careers, many times without corroboration, with people losing their jobs over some of the most harmless bullshit things.

Honestly, I do believe it’s a bit of a witch hunt. It’s difficult to get due process because there’s no real place to adjudicate it, to defend oneself, except in court, which takes forever.

There’s some truth to it, but it does not fit into anything illegal, immoral, or unethical. All you can say is no, not me too, and wait.

 

 

Life in the #MeToo era.  Life in Amerika. 

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Wanna Make an Impact? Grab a Broom!

Rick Rigsby delivered perhaps the most watched commencement speech ever given, perhaps more so than even David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech.

You can watch it here. And please pay special attention to his admonition that to lead, to make an impact, to really make a difference, is to shrink your ego. Think about that.

And remember this from my list of 100+ things I learned in business:

Good leadership is servant leadership. Find out what your people need in order to be successful and then go get it for them. Then … stay out of their way. And, no matter your station in life, never ever fail to sweep the floors in your organization. Fly coach. Take the subway, not the limousine.

Very motivating stuff, to be sure. Hard to implement until you reach a kind of rock bottom.

Thoughts?

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Somehow I Managed (Part Five): 100+ Things I Learned in Business

This is Part Five, the last in a five part series, on what I learned in 25+ years in business. You can see Part One here, Part Two here, Part Three here, and Part Four here.

I will also have a separate post here at www.jvrusso.com with all 110 items.

Remember, to understand my title, Somehow I Managed, you have to have known about Michael Scott, Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Played by Steve Carell, Michael Scott was something of an unorthodox manager (to say the least). The title of his book is Somehow I Manage, although he never published it. Watch the series and you will understand more.

My book, should I ever get around to writing it, will be entitled Somehow I Managed. That extra d at the end will get me around copyright problems (I hope).

Anyway, items 1-100 appeared in the first four parts. To finish things off, here in Part Five, I offer you these last ten things I have learned.

  1. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up your present. Get over it. The past cannot be re-drawn. It is gone forever. Today is a new day.
  2. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?” Unless, of course, it’s another bad tattoo or eye-lid piercing (see below).
  3. Let go of thinking you are somehow damaged. Without question, you matter, and the world needs you just as you are. If you act from a place of damage, you will DO damage.
  4. Work on your business not in it. If you find yourself working IN your business, then you are too deep in the minutiae to make a difference. Work ON your business. And believe it or not, that can happen on a beach somewhere, far away from the maddening crowds. Another reason to take a vacation.
  5. You have enough tattoos. Seriously, you don’t need any more. Put the money in the bank or buy real estate. They are a distraction and a silly waste of money. For those that you already have, try and hide them. You do not want anything to draw someone’s eyes away from yours or from what you are trying to say to them.
  6. You have enough piercings. Seriously, these too are a silly waste of money. And they are a distraction. I find it hilarious that they have to be removed in order to brush one’s teeth. And then removed again when amongst polite company. If you must have them, put them where the sun don’t shine (unless you intend on going bear-midriff to your next job interview).
  7. Yield. Need I say more? Don’t force your way in. Yield.
  8. Learn to say, “thank you for your business,” rather than, “have a nice day.” Your customers deserve a great big thank you for spending their money with you. Train your employees to do the same. Saying, “Have a nice day,” to someone who has just spent their week’s pay on groceries at your store, could not be any more banal if you tried.
  9. Manage your time, for time is the stuff of life. All the time you will ever have has been given to you. There is no more. Do not squander it. This is NOT a practice life. It is the only life you will ever have.
  10. And, finally, know this: YOU.ARE.NOT.THE.CENTER.OF.THE.UNIVERSE. There has always been, and always will be, someone better looking than you, richer than you, thinner than you, harder working than you. And there has always been, and always will be, someone far less good looking that you, poorer than you, fatter than you, lazier than you. Consider yourself blessedly, blissfully, forever smack dab in the middle.

And there you go! 110 Things I Have Learned. Not always the easy way, mind you, but learnt just the same.

Many thanks for stopping by!

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Somehow I Managed (Part Four): 100+ Things I Learned in Business

This is Part Four of a five part series on what I learned in 25+ years in business. You can see Part One here, Part Two here and Part Three here.

Once again, to understand my title, Somehow I Managed, you have to have known about Michael Scott, Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, PA. Played by Steve Carell, Michael Scott was something of an unorthodox manager (to say the least). The title of his book is Somehow I Manage, although he never published it. Watch the series and you will understand more.

Items 1-76 appeared in the first three parts. To bring us up to 100, here are the next 24!

  1. Avoid vanity walls. Keep your office layout simple. Keep it “all business.” I have a Doctorate, but you won’t find the diploma in my office, nor my two Master’s degrees and a BBA. There – now you know. I don’t need to remind people.
  2. And while I’m talking about simplicity, follow the lead of the US government. There are very simple rules for determining what size office a certain pay grade will receive. Nothing more and nothing less. The Director of the FBI’s office is only three times as big as the lowly street agent’s office. Think of how that alone telegraphs the notion of the “flat organization.” Office size and penis length are inversely related. Remember that.
  3. The great economist, Milton Friedman, once said, “The business of business is business.” End of story. The business of business is NOT to change the world, no matter what Steve Jobs thought. You can save the world by engaging in a business that meets customer demand. Period. I doubt the iPhone saved the world but it sure as hell met customer demand, and quite well.
  4. The triple bottom line is a fad. Candidly, I don’t even know what it means, and, remember, I have an MBA and teach in a College of Business! I do the politically correct thing and “teach” the idea of a TBL. But what do I really believe? Answer: There is only one bottom line and you know what it is. If budgeting for social good is what you do, then good on you, but you cannot help society if you don’t make a profit.
  5. Find an untapped market segment. Define it if you must. Dream it up, if that works. Remember: they still make buggy-whips.
  6. Join a professional development group. I think here of TEC in Australia, and Vistage in the US. If there isn’t one in your hometown, form one. Figure it out.
  7. Don’t use your Inbox as a pending file. Answer correspondence quickly. “Touch it once,” as they say. In-Box Zero™ is a wonderful goal.
  8. Buy a typewriter. Color inside the lines. Learn to write in cursive. Use a straight-edge. Practice Perfect Grammar.  How you write matters almost as much as what you write. The medium is the message.
  9. Empower every single employee. From the janitor to the Executive Vice President, they all should have a way to make a difference. If you treat them as dispensable, they will act as dispensable. If you treat them as children they will act as children. Worst of all, they’ll steal from you.
  10. I so disagree with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook. Huge headquarter buildings are like office size, and similar as well to that inverse relationship I spoke of above (Office Size/HQ Building Size and penis length are inversely related). Keep things simple and humble. Think here of Warren Buffet and his home in Omaha.
  11. Never have a business unit bigger than 160 employees. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s books to know why.
  12. Want a corporate jet? Fine. It can be cost-justified in so many ways. But remember what I said about always flying coach. Bill Gates was the last of the high-tech-tycoons to get one. And Warren Buffet doesn’t even own one (although he owns an entire company dedicated to flying private). Yes, he owns an entire airline, but my guess is that he doesn’t care how any one of them is outfitted. It’s all about the cost savings to him.
  13. Honor processes. Follow the process at least once, then decide how to break it and come up with something new, something more efficient. And do that publicly. Don’t hide. Don’t engage in sabotage of a process, or in any sort of undermining. You aren’t that kind of person. And ALWAYS come up with alternative. Don’t engage in only deconstruction. Build things up.
  14. Bad processes cannot be saved by throwing technology at the problem. If you have a bad process in your organization, fix it, but not by throwing technology at it. That is the hobgoblin of little minds. Instead, chart the process on the back of a napkin and work to find its weak points. Use a white board. Talk to people. Don’t assume that more technology can ever fix a bad process. And avoid consultants.
  15. You have all the consultants you need, right there on your own payroll. Outside consultants are two-armed bandits. There’s an old joke and it goes like this:A classified ad was placed that read, “Wanted: CEO needs a one-armed consultant, with a social sciences degree and five years of experience.”  The man who won the job asked, “I understand most of the qualifications you required, but why ‘one armed’?”  The CEO answered, “I have had many consultants, and I am tired of hearing with each advice the phrase ‘on the other hand’.”Ask your own people what they would do to fix a problem. After all, they’re the ones who helped create it (you too).
  16. Keep a paper calendar. When you make an appointment, write it down. You can always enter it into your organization’s scheduling program later. This way, your complete calendar is in front of you always. And paper doesn’t need batteries.
  17. Buy a flip-phone. Go low-tech. They can text as well as an iPhone or a Galaxy. A flip-phone doesn’t have you looking down all the time. Remember, looking up and forward is where you should be looking, not down at your crotch.
  18. Avoid the Tyranny of the Word “or” and invest all you got in the Genius of the Word “and.” At every turn, strike the word “or” from your vocabulary. It has a nasty habit of sticking to the phrase, Either Or. Things are never so stark that there is only one choice, this way or the highway. Think “and” instead. See the comment above about not being your organization’s “no man” and work to be the “yes and…” man.
  19. Take vacations and turn off the phone. If you are indispensable, then the problem can wait on your return from holiday. Sharpen the saw, recharge your batteries, regroup. This can only happen if you … turn off the phone.
  20. Carry a notebook wherever you go. Yes, a plain paper, spiral bound notebook into which you jot down ideas, into which you capture what others have had to say, and within which you plan. Thomas Jefferson called it his Commonplace Book. And it wasn’t an iPad, but … paper.
  21. Don’t be afraid to exit a business. Nothing lasts forever and no matter how much fun you’re having with your existing line of business, never be afraid to sell it and get out. And generally, that decision gets made long before the product peaks on its life cycle.
  22. Never email the guy in the next cubicle. Get up and walk over and talk to him.
  23. Steven Covey, he of 7 Habits fame, has a wonderful video (you can find it on YouTube) about how to focus first on the big rocks of life. Many of us start and end our days with the small rocks, the inconsequential stuff, and then wonder why the big rocks aren’t being attended to. Watch the video. Identify your big rocks. Put them into your day first, then fill around them with the smaller rocks. One of the biggest rocks ought to be self-care. Focus on the big rocks.
  24. Robert Eliot wrote: “Rule No. 1? don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule No. 2? It’s all small stuff.” The lesson?  Focus not on the small stuff. More than that, there is this lesson: if you cannot fight or you cannot flee, then flow. Focus instead on the big rocks.

So, whadya think? I’d love to hear from you. And stay tuned for Part Five!

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Somehow I Managed (Part Three): 100+ Things I Learned in Business

This is Part Three of a Five Part series on what I learned in 25+ years in business. You can see Part One here and Part Two here.

To understand the title, you have to have known about Michael Scott, Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, PA. Played by Steve Carell, Michael Scott was something of an unorthodox manager (to say the least). The title of his book is Somehow I Manage, although he never published it. Watch the series and you will understand more.

Items 1-51 appeared in the first two parts. Here are the next 25 or so!

52. Learn to understand and how to motivate others.  Find their currency and know that most of the time it isn’t about money. It is about satisfaction and of being a part of something bigger than themselves. Remember these words: “If you want to build a ship, do not drum up people to gather wood, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

53. If in business or even in a governmental organization, understand your contract, your mission, your responsibilities – perfectly.  If it is a contract you are tasked with managing, then keep a bound copy close at hand. Mark it up. Test your knowledge. Manage your performance against the contract as if you owned the business.

54. Plan, plan, plan. Failure to plan, is planning to fail. Then … follow the Plan.  If you don’t know the Plan, you cannot follow it. Ask. Then follow.

55. Eliminate clutter. If it isn’t used, throw it away. This is a mental process as much as it is a physical process. Avoid mental clutter. Cut to the heart of every matter and discard the waste.

56. If it ain’t broke, break it anyway and see what happens. Bump into power buttons. Go forth and fail. To profit from your mistakes, you have to get out and make some. In other words, do something, anything, and worry about failure another time.

57. Challenge the status quo, but with aplomb and class. Someone once said, “Learn the rules well, so you know how to break them properly.”

58. Understand your mandate! WHY did you get hired? WHY you and not someone else? What about YOUR background and experiences did your boss want brought to bear on her organization? What changes are you expected to make?  Understand your mandate clearly. Check back with your boss frequently. Ask for guidance. Ask for a weekly check-up. Whatever it takes for you to understand your mandate.  Ask, “am I the employee you thought you hired?”

59. Stay Humble! The old saying goes like this: “If you are the smartest guy in the room, you’re in wrong room.” Remember that.  You may think you’re the second coming, you may think you are precisely what the organization needs, but … stay humble. Yes, you were hired because your background and experience fit the bill, but until you prove yourself, and prove it with the resources you are given (plus those you argue effectively for), you are on probation. Arrive early and stay late. Work hard. And here’s something else to consider: write your boss a resignation letter. Do not date it. Tell her that she can execute it at any time. It will blow her away.

60. Develop colleagues, not friends. Have a life away from work. Avoid too much socializing with colleagues. Remember, they are NOT your friends. See the next point.

61. Remember, a company is not a family. Family is where you can go, and they must let you in. Not so an enterprise. It exists for itself (although this is lass true for networking and mentoring organizations, by the way, which can be like family given the intimacy).

62. In all the work that you do, make damn sure that you are adding to your experience set. You took the job because it offered something you did not have before. Ask, therefore, “What skills am I leveraging in this new position? What skills do I hope to gain?

63. Read about Strengths Finding. Take the Gallup assessment. Know your top five strengths. Remind yourself everyday what they are and why they rose to the top. Live them.

64. Develop your team and it will develop you. As you rise in the ranks, find your replacement. Mentor your staff. Coach, don’t manage. Lead, don’t supervise. Macro-manage – avoid micro-managing at every turn.

65. Join a book club.

66. Have a hobby that takes your mind in another direction other than what you do day in and day out. Mine are trains and gardening.

67. Follow the 12-Steps even if you never had a drink or took a drug in your life. We are ALL in recovery from something. Remember this maxim, “There are only two kinds of people in the world, those with issues and … the dead.”

68. Don’t bend over dollars to pick up dimes. Spend your own money and do not worry about reimbursement from the company. If the company doesn’t supply pencils, go out and buy your own. Need a computer and the company doesn’t have it in the budget? Go out and buy your own.

69. Watch David Foster Wallace’s This is Water over and over again. Adjust your default settings.

70. Don’t fish from the company pier. Find a woman or a man outside of the company. Go home to a sanctuary that has nothing to do with work.

71. Don’t demand of others what you don’t demand of yourself. Give away your time and money. Do pro bono work. Set an example for others to follow but don’t expect miracles.

72. Quit Facebook. Today. Quickly. It is a time-suck of galactic proportion. And for Christ’s sake, don’t require your customers to sign up with Facebook to view your marketing. All you’re doing is enriching Jeff Zuckerberg and forcing an extra step on your customer. Stop it.

73. Stay on LinkedIn. I say this, not because I am a Microsoft Alum, but because it works and is a wonderful place to network.

74. Learn statistics. Stop avoiding them. Understand the standard deviation and data distribution. Engage in statistical analysis.

75. Budget. This is related to having a plan but is a sub-set. A plan is of everything. A budget is of the money. Remember that cash is king, and free cash flow is like, well, like whatever is above a king.  Understand the statement of cash flows for your organization and have one created monthly.

76. You must know your budget. Make sure everyone that reports to you knows their’s. Again: They too must know their budget. Go old-school: make them memorize it.

Thoughts about Part Three? I’d love to hear from you!

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