Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

Here’s how to make the most of it.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Arthur C. Brooks for the July 2019 issue of the The Atlantic. It is his work, not mine. I reproduce it here for posterity and my own reference. ]

“It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.”

I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but couldn’t help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams—perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

At the end of the flight, as the lights switched on, I finally got a look at the desolate man. I was shocked. I recognized him—he was, and still is, world-famous. Then in his mid‑80s, he was beloved as a hero for his courage, patriotism, and accomplishments many decades ago.

As he walked up the aisle of the plane behind me, other passengers greeted him with veneration. Standing at the door of the cockpit, the pilot stopped him and said, “Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy.” The older man—apparently wishing for death just a few minutes earlier—beamed with pride at the recognition of his past glories.


For selfish reasons, I couldn’t get the cognitive dissonance of that scene out of my mind. It was the summer of 2015, shortly after my 51st birthday. I was not world-famous like the man on the plane, but my professional life was going very well. I was the president of a flourishing Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. I had written some best-selling books. People came to my speeches. My columns were published in The New York Times.

But I had started to wonder:

Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops?

Though these questions were personal, I decided to approach them as the social scientist I am, treating them as a research project. It felt unnatural—like a surgeon taking out his own appendix. But I plunged ahead, and for the past four years, I have been on a quest to figure out how to turn my eventual professional decline from a matter of dread into an opportunity for progress.

Here’s what I’ve found.

The field of “happiness studies” has boomed over the past two decades, and a consensus has developed about well-being as we advance through life. In The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution scholar, and an Atlantic contributing editor, reviews the strong evidence suggesting that the happiness of most adults declines through their 30s and 40s, then bottoms out in their early 50s. Nothing about this pattern is set in stone, of course. But the data seem eerily consistent with my experience: My 40s and early 50s were not an especially happy period of my life, notwithstanding my professional fortunes.

So, what can people expect after that, based on the data? The news is mixed. Almost all studies of happiness over the life span show that, in wealthier countries, most people’s contentment starts to increase again in their 50s, until age 70 or so. That is where things get less predictable, however. After 70, some people stay steady in happiness; others get happier until death. Others—men in particular—see their happiness plummet. Indeed, depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75.

This last group would seem to include the hero on the plane. A few researchers have looked at this cohort to understand what drives their unhappiness. It is, in a word, irrelevance. In 2007, a team of academic researchers at UCLA and Princeton analyzed data on more than 1,000 older adults. Their findings, published in the Journal of Gerontology, showed that senior citizens who rarely or never “felt useful” were nearly three times as likely as those who frequently felt useful to develop a mild disability, and were more than three times as likely to have died during the course of the study.

One might think that gifted and accomplished people, such as the man on the plane, would be less susceptible than others to this sense of irrelevance; after all, accomplishment is a well-documented source of happiness. If current accomplishment brings happiness, then shouldn’t the memory of that accomplishment provide some happiness as well?

Maybe not. Though the literature on this question is sparse, giftedness and achievements early in life do not appear to provide an insurance policy against suffering later on.

In 1999, Carole Holahan and Charles Holahan, psychologists at the University of Texas, published an influential paper in The International Journal of Aging and Human Development that looked at hundreds of older adults who early in life had been identified as highly gifted. The Holahans’ conclusion: “Learning at a younger age of membership in a study of intellectual giftedness was related to … less favorable psychological well-being at age eighty.”

This study may simply be showing that it’s hard to live up to high expectations, and that telling your kid she is a genius is not necessarily good parenting. (The Holahans surmise that the children identified as gifted might have made intellectual ability more central to their self-appraisal, creating “unrealistic expectations for success” and causing them to fail to “take into account the many other life influences on success and recognition.”) However, abundant evidence suggests that the waning of ability in people of high accomplishment is especially brutal psychologically. Consider professional athletes, many of whom struggle profoundly after their sports career ends. Tragic examples abound, involving depression, addiction, or suicide; unhappiness in retired athletes may even be the norm, at least temporarily. A study published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology in 2003, which charted the life satisfaction of former Olympic athletes, found that they generally struggled with a low sense of personal control when they first stopped competing.

Recently, I asked Dominique Dawes, a former Olympic gold-medal gymnast, how normal life felt after competing and winning at the highest levels. She told me that she is happy, but that the adjustment wasn’t easy—and still isn’t, even though she won her last Olympic medal in 2000. “My Olympic self would ruin my marriage and leave my kids feeling inadequate,” she told me, because it is so demanding and hard driving. “Living life as if every day is an Olympics only makes those around me miserable.”

Why might former elite performers have such a hard time? No academic research has yet proved this, but I strongly suspect that the memory of remarkable ability, if that is the source of one’s self-worth, might, for some, provide an invidious contrast to a later, less remarkable life. “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,” Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former Formula 1 race-car driver, once wrote. “For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success.”

Call it The Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation: the idea that the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige. Problems related to achieving professional success might appear to be a pretty good species of problem to have; even raising this issue risks seeming precious. But if you reach professional heights and are deeply invested in being high up, you can suffer mightily when you inevitably fall. That’s the man on the plane. Maybe that will be you, too. And, without significant intervention, I suspect it will be me.

The Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation can help explain the many cases of people who have done work of world-historical significance yet wind up feeling like failures. Take Charles Darwin, who was just 22 when he set out on his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831. Returning at 27, he was celebrated throughout Europe for his discoveries in botany and zoology, and for his early theories of evolution. Over the next 30 years, Darwin took enormous pride in sitting atop the celebrity-scientist pecking order, developing his theories, and publishing them as books and essays—the most famous being On the Origin of Species, in 1859.

But as Darwin progressed into his 50s, he stagnated; he hit a wall in his research. At the same time, an Austrian monk by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered what Darwin needed to continue his work: the theory of genetic inheritance. Unfortunately, Mendel’s work was published in an obscure academic journal and Darwin never saw it—and in any case, Darwin did not have the mathematical ability to understand it. From then on, he made little progress. Depressed in his later years, he wrote to a close friend, “I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy.”

Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the world had passed him by, and he had become irrelevant. That could have been Darwin on the plane behind me that night.

It also could have been a younger version of me, because I have had precocious experience with professional decline.

As a child, I had just one goal: to be the world’s greatest French-horn player. I worked at it slavishly, practicing hours a day, seeking out the best teachers, and playing in any ensemble I could find. I had pictures of famous horn players on my bedroom wall for inspiration. And for a while, I thought my dream might come true. At 19, I left college to take a job playing professionally in a touring chamber-music ensemble. My plan was to keep rising through the classical-music ranks, joining a top symphony orchestra in a few years or maybe even becoming a soloist—the most exalted job a classical musician can hold.

But then, in my early 20s, a strange thing happened: I started getting worse. To this day, I have no idea why. My technique began to suffer, and I had no explanation for it. Nothing helped. I visited great teachers and practiced more, but I couldn’t get back to where I had been. Pieces that had been easy to play became hard; pieces that had been hard became impossible.

Perhaps the worst moment in my young but flailing career came at age 22, when I was performing at Carnegie Hall. While delivering a short speech about the music I was about to play, I stepped forward, lost my footing, and fell off the stage into the audience. On the way home from the concert, I mused darkly that the experience was surely a message from God.

But I sputtered along for nine more years. I took a position in the City Orchestra of Barcelona, where I increased my practicing but my playing gradually deteriorated. Eventually I found a job teaching at a small music conservatory in Florida, hoping for a magical turnaround that never materialized. Realizing that maybe I ought to hedge my bets, I went back to college via distance learning, and earned my bachelor’s degree shortly before my 30th birthday. I secretly continued my studies at night, earning a master’s degree in economics a year later. Finally, I had to admit defeat: I was never going to turn around my faltering musical career. So, at 31 I gave up, abandoning my musical aspirations entirely, to pursue a doctorate in public policy.

Life goes on, right? Sort of. After finishing my studies, I became a university professor, a job I enjoyed. But I still thought every day about my beloved first vocation. Even now, I regularly dream that I am onstage, and wake to remember that my childhood aspirations are now only phantasms.

I am lucky to have accepted my decline at a young enough age that I could redirect my life into a new line of work. Still, to this day, the sting of that early decline makes these words difficult to write. I vowed to myself that it wouldn’t ever happen again.

Will it happen again? In some professions, early decline is inescapable. No one expects an Olympic athlete to remain competitive until age 60. But in many physically nondemanding occupations, we implicitly reject the inevitability of decline before very old age. Sure, our quads and hamstrings may weaken a little as we age. But as long as we retain our marbles, our quality of work as a writer, lawyer, executive, or entrepreneur should remain high up to the very end, right? Many people think so. I recently met a man a bit older than I am who told me he planned to “push it until the wheels came off.” In effect, he planned to stay at the very top of his game by any means necessary, and then keel over.

But the odds are he won’t be able to. The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.

According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success, and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So, if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.

The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field. Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, has spent years studying when people are most likely to make prizewinning scientific discoveries and develop key inventions. His findings can be summarized by this little ditty:

Age is, of course, a fever chill
that every physicist must fear.
He’s better dead than living still
when once he’s past his thirtieth year.

The author of those gloomy lines? Paul Dirac, a winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Dirac overstates the point, but only a little. Looking at major inventors and No bel winners going back more than a century, Jones has found that the most common age for producing a magnum opus is the late 30s. He has shown that the likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one’s 20s and 30s and then declines through one’s 40s, 50s, and 60s. Are there outliers? Of course. But the likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20—almost nonexistent.

Much of literary achievement follows a similar pattern. Simonton has shown that poets peak in their early 40s. Novelists generally take a little longer. When Martin Hill Ortiz, a poet and novelist, collected data on New York Times fiction best sellers from 1960 to 2015, he found that authors were likeliest to reach the No. 1 spot in their 40s and 50s. Despite the famous productivity of a few novelists well into old age, Ortiz shows a steep drop-off in the chance of writing a best seller after the age of 70. (Some nonfiction writers—especially historians—peak later, as we shall see in a minute.)

Entrepreneurs peak and decline earlier, on average. After earning fame and fortune in their 20s, many tech entrepreneurs are in creative decline by age 30. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review reported that founders of enterprises valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists tend to cluster in the 20-to-34 age range. Subsequent research has found that the clustering might be slightly later, but all studies in this area have found that the majority of successful start-ups have founders under age 50.

This research concerns people at the very top of professions that are atypical. But the basic finding appears to apply more broadly. Scholars at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research studied a wide variety of jobs and found considerable susceptibility to age-related decline in fields ranging from policing to nursing. Other research has found that the best-performing home-plate umpires in Major League Baseball have 18 years less experience and are 23 years younger than the worst-performing umpires (who are 56.1 years old, on average). Among air traffic controllers, the age-related decline is so sharp—and the potential consequences of decline-related errors so dire—that the mandatory retirement age is 56.

In sum, if your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities—the kind of profession most college graduates occupy—noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine.

Sorry.

If decline not only is inevitable but also happens earlier than most of us expect, what should we do when it comes for us?

Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”

But some people have managed their declines well. Consider the case of Johann Sebastian Bach. Born in 1685 to a long line of prominent musicians in central Germany, Bach quickly distinguished himself as a musical genius. In his 65 years, he published more than 1,000 compositions for all the available instrumentations of his day.

Early in his career, Bach was considered an astoundingly gifted organist and improviser. Commissions rolled in; royalty sought him out; young composers emulated his style. He enjoyed real prestige.

But it didn’t last—in no small part because his career was overtaken by musical trends ushered in by, among others, his own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, known as C.P.E. to the generations that followed. The fifth of Bach’s 20 children, C.P.E. exhibited the musical gifts his father had. He mastered the baroque idiom, but he was more fascinated with a new “classical” style of music, which was taking Europe by storm. As classical music displaced baroque, C.P.E.’s prestige boomed while his father’s music became passé.

Bach easily could have become embittered, like Darwin. Instead, he chose to redesign his life, moving from innovator to instructor. He spent a good deal of his last 10 years writing The Art of Fugue, not a famous or popular work in his time, but one intended to teach the techniques of the baroque to his children and students—and, as unlikely as it seemed at the time, to any future generations that might be interested. In his later years, he lived a quieter life as a teacher and a family man.

What’s the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respected.

The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.

How does one do that?

A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.

Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.

Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets—highly fluid in their creativity—tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians—who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge—don’t reach this milestone until about 60.

Here’s a practical lesson we can extract from all this: No matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life.

Like what? As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65—more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he’d ever considered retiring. He laughed and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically.

Our dean might have chuckled ruefully at this—college administrators complain that research productivity among tenured faculty drops off significantly in the last decades of their career. Older professors take up budget slots that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to do cutting-edge research. But perhaps therein lies an opportunity: If older faculty members can shift the balance of their work from research to teaching without loss of professional prestige, younger faculty members can take on more research.

Patterns like this match what I’ve seen as the head of a think tank full of scholars of all ages. There are many exceptions, but the most profound insights tend to come from those in their 30s and early 40s. The best synthesizers and explainers of complicated ideas—that is, the best teachers—tend to be in their mid-60s or older, some of them well into their 80s.

That older people, with their stores of wisdom, should be the most successful teachers seems almost cosmically right. No matter what our profession, as we age, we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way.

A few years ago, I saw a cartoon of a man on his deathbed saying, “I wish I’d bought more crap.” It has always amazed me that many wealthy people keep working to increase their wealth, amassing far more money than they could possibly spend or even usefully bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. Many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in pecuniary terms, he explained, so they stay on the hamster wheel, year after year. They believe that at some point, they will finally accumulate enough to feel truly successful, happy, and therefore ready to die.

This is a mistake, and not a benign one. Most Eastern philosophy warns that focusing on acquisition leads to attachment and vanity, which derail the search for happiness by obscuring one’s essential nature. As we grow older, we shouldn’t acquire more, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, peace.

At some point, writing one more book will not add to my life satisfaction; it will merely stave off the end of my book-writing career. The canvas of my life will have another brushstroke that, if I am being forthright, others will barely notice, and will certainly not appreciate very much. The same will be true for most other markers of my success.

What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.

And that self is … who, exactly?

Last year, the search for an answer to this question took me deep into the South Indian countryside, to a town called Palakkad, near the border between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I was there to meet the guru Sri Nochur Venkataraman, known as Acharya (“Teacher”) to his disciples. Acharya is a quiet, humble man dedicated to helping people attain enlightenment; he has no interest in Western techies looking for fresh start-up ideas or burnouts trying to escape the religious traditions they were raised in. Satisfied that I was neither of those things, he agreed to talk with me.

I told him my conundrum: Many people of achievement suffer as they age, because they lose their abilities, gained over many years of hard work. Is this suffering inescapable, like a cosmic joke on the proud? Or is there a loophole somewhere—a way around the suffering?

Acharya answered elliptically, explaining an ancient Hindu teaching about the stages of life, or ashramas. The first is Brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is Grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and creates a family. In this second stage, the philosophers find one of life’s most common traps: People become attached to earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.

The antidote to these worldly temptations is Vanaprastha, the third ashrama, whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “retiring” and “into the forest.” This is the stage, usually starting around age 50, in which we purposefully focus less on professional ambition, and become more and more devoted to spirituality, service, and wisdom. This doesn’t mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50—something few people can afford to do—only that your life goals should adjust.

Vanaprastha is a time for study and training for the last stage of life, Sannyasa, which should be totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men would leave their family in old age, take holy vows, and spend the rest of their life at the feet of masters, praying and studying. Even if sitting in a cave at age 75 isn’t your ambition, the point should still be clear: As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success in order to focus on more transcendentally important things.

I told Acharya the story about the man on the plane. He listened carefully and thought for a minute. “He failed to leave Grihastha,” he told me. “He was addicted to the rewards of the world.” He explained that the man’s self-worth was probably still anchored in the memories of professional successes many years earlier, his ongoing recognition purely derivative of long-lost skills. Any glory today was a mere shadow of past glories. Meanwhile, he’d completely skipped the spiritual development of Vanaprastha, and was now missing out on the bliss of Sannyasa.

There is a message in this for those of us suffering from the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation. Say you are a hard-charging, type-A lawyer, executive, entrepreneur, or—hypothetically, of course—president of a think tank. From early adulthood to middle age, your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits—by your fluid intelligence—you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. But the wisdom of Hindu philosophy—and indeed the wisdom of many philosophical traditions—suggests that you should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you’re at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones.

When the New York times columnist David Brooks talks about the difference between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues,” he’s effectively putting the ashramas in a practical context. Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in He was kind and deeply spiritual, not He made senior vice president at an astonishingly young age and had a lot of frequent-flier miles.

You won’t be around to hear the eulogy, but the point Brooks makes is that we live the most fulfilling life—especially once we reach midlife—by pursuing the virtues that are most meaningful to us.

I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death—a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if death will never come by denying any degradation in my résumé virtues. This denial is destructive, because it leads me to ignore the eulogy virtues that bring me the greatest joy.

The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely.

How can I overcome this tendency? The Buddha recommends, of all things, corpse meditation: Many Theravada Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka display photos of corpses in various states of decomposition for the monks to contemplate. “This body, too,” students are taught to say about their own body, “such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate.” At first this seems morbid. But its logic is grounded in psychological principles—and it’s not an exclusively Eastern idea. “To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us,” Michel de Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, “let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.”

Psychologists call this desensitization, in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seem ordinary, prosaic, not scary. And for death, it works. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as those of the people actually facing death—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a concrete reality closing in.

For most people, actively contemplating our demise so that it is present and real (rather than avoiding the thought of it via the mindless pursuit of worldly success) can make death less frightening; embracing death reminds us that everything is temporary and can make each day of life more meaningful.

“Death destroys a man,” E. M. Forster wrote, but “the idea of Death saves him.”

Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. Accepting the natural cadence of our abilities sets up the possibility of transcendence, because it allows the shifting of attention to higher spiritual and life priorities.

But such a shift demands more than mere platitudes. I embarked on my research with the goal of producing a tangible road map to guide me during the remaining years of my life.

This has yielded four specific commitments.

  1. JUMP

The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible. The key is to enjoy accomplishments for what they are in the moment, and to walk away perhaps before I am completely ready—but on my own terms.

So: I’ve resigned my job as president of the American Enterprise Institute, effective right about the time this essay is published. While I have not detected deterioration in my performance, it was only a matter of time. Like many executive positions, the job is heavily reliant on fluid intelligence. Also, I wanted freedom from the consuming responsibilities of that job, to have time for more spiritual pursuits. In truth, this decision wasn’t entirely about me. I love my institution and have seen many others like it suffer when a chief executive lingered too long.

Leaving something you love can feel a bit like a part of you is dying. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept called bardo, which is a state of existence between death and rebirth— “like a moment when you step toward the edge of a precipice,” as a famous Buddhist teacher puts it. I am letting go of a professional life that answers the question Who am I?

I am extremely fortunate to have the means and opportunity to be able to walk away from a job. Many people cannot afford to do that. But you don’t necessarily have to quit your job; what’s important is striving to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards—power, fame and status, money—even if you continue to work or advance a career. The real trick is walking into the next stage of life, Vanaprastha, to conduct the study and training that prepare us for fulfillment in life’s final stage.

  1. SERVE

Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. This is not easy for me; I am a naturally egotistical person. But I have to face the fact that the costs of catering to selfishness are ruinous—and I now work every day to fight this tendency.

Fortunately, an effort to serve others can play to our strengths as we age. Remember, people whose work focuses on teaching or mentorship, broadly defined, peak later in life. I am thus moving to a phase in my career in which I can dedicate myself fully to sharing ideas in service of others, primarily by teaching at a university. My hope is that my most fruitful years lie ahead.

  1. WORSHIP

Because I’ve talked a lot about various religious and spiritual traditions—and emphasized the pitfalls of overinvestment in career success—readers might naturally conclude that I am making a Manichaean separation between the worlds of worship and work and suggesting that the emphasis be on worship. That is not my intention. I do strongly recommend that each person explore his or her spiritual self—I plan to dedicate a good part of the rest of my life to the practice of my own faith, Roman Catholicism. But this is not incompatible with work; on the contrary, if we can detach ourselves from worldly attachments and redirect our efforts toward the enrichment and teaching of others, work itself can become a transcendental pursuit.

“The aim and final end of all music,” Bach once said, “should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Whatever your metaphysical convictions, refreshment of the soul can be the aim of your work, like Bach’s.

Bach finished each of his manuscripts with the words Soli Deo gloria— “Glory to God alone.” He failed, however, to write these words on his last manuscript, “Contrapunctus 14,” from The Art of Fugue, which abruptly stops mid-measure. His son C.P.E. added these words to the score: “Über dieser Fuge … ist der Verfasser gestorben” (“At this point in the fugue … the composer died”). Bach’s life and work merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. This is my aspiration.

  1. CONNECT

Throughout this essay, I have focused on the effect that the waning of my work prowess will have on my happiness. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness—not just in later years but across the life span—is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one’s relationships. Pushing work out of its position of preeminence—sooner rather than later—to make space for deeper relationships can provide a bulwark against the angst of professional decline.

Dedicating more time to relationships, and less to work, is not inconsistent with continued achievement. “He is like a tree planted by streams of water,” the Book of Psalms says of the righteous person, “yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does.” Think of an aspen tree. To live a life of extraordinary accomplishment is—like the tree—to grow alone, reach majestic heights alone, and die alone. Right?

Wrong.

The aspen tree is an excellent metaphor for a successful person—but not, it turns out, for its solitary majesty. Above the ground, it may appear solitary. Yet each individual tree is part of an enormous root system, which is together one plant. In fact, an aspen is one of the largest living organisms in the world; a single grove in Utah, called Pando, spans 106 acres, and weighs an estimated 13 million pounds.

The secret to bearing my decline—to enjoying it—is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.

When I talk about this personal research project I’ve been pursuing, people usually ask: Whatever happened to the hero on the plane?

I think about him a lot. He’s still famous, popping up in the news from time to time. Early on, when I saw a story about him, I would feel a flash of something like pity—which I now realize was really only a refracted sense of terror about my own future. Poor guy really meant I’m screwed.

But as my grasp of the principles laid out in this essay has deepened, my fear has declined proportionately. My feeling toward the man on the plane is now one of gratitude for what he taught me. I hope that he can find the peace and joy he is inadvertently helping me attain.


ARTHUR C. BROOKS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks.

 

Posted in Counseling Concepts, Death, General Musings, People (in general), Positive Mental Attitude | 2 Comments

How to Pick the “Right” Boss

I have lifted the following words from a recent Harvard Business Review article. It scratched an itch for me, given the long string of great bosses I had in my business career. A long string that was marred by one terrible boss.  There is therefore no question in my mind that one of the greatest predictors of happiness at work is one’s relationship with “the boss.”  I have lived that statement.

Students coming out of our MBA Program at UW have, by and large, never had a boss. They go from their undergraduate degree straight into the MBA program.  They tend to look upon rigorous graduate classes as a proxy for a tough boss. Not so.

It can be hard to assess whether you and your prospective boss are the right fit. Especially since in an interview you’re working hard to demonstrate why she should hire you. But it’s important to evaluate her as well!  What sorts of questions should you ask to understand her management style?  Should you try to talk with other people she manages? Are there red flags you should watch out for?

What the Experts Say

“The primary reason people leave a job is because of either a mismatch in culture or a boss who drives them up the wall,” says John Lees, author of How To Get a Job You Love.  My one experience with a terrible boss proved the rule: I left Microsoft shortly after my one and only run-in with “Michael” and decided after 25 years, I didn’t need to put up with such crap.

Of course, you’ll never know exactly what it will be like to work for your potential boss until you have the job — and in some cases you might not even meet your manager until your first day — but you should gather as much information as possible in advance. And it’s not just negative impressions or red flags you should be on the lookout for.  “You must understand the person as she is,” says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a senior adviser at global executive search firm Egon Zehnder and author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who.  “Failing to realize someone is a terrific boss is a very costly mistake, perhaps even more costly than failing to realize someone is a bad boss,” he says.  Terrific jobs — and managers — are hard to find.  Read on for tips on how to discern between the good managers and the bad.

Know what you’re looking for

The first step is to do some thinking about what you want and don’t want in a boss.  According to Fernández-Aráoz, there are three minimal conditions that must be met.  Is this an honest person, offering you a sustainable job for which you have something unique to contribute?  You might also spend some time visualizing the kind of relationship you want.  Are you looking for someone who will stand back and let you run with your work?  Or are you hoping for someone who can be an involved mentor?  This will give you some criteria against which to evaluate your potential manager when you’re in the interview.

Trust your instincts

It’s also important to check in with yourself throughout the process.  Being laser-focused on getting the job can sometimes cloud your judgment.  After each step, ask yourself whether this is the job you want and the manager you want to work for.  Did you get a good feeling from the person?  Is she someone you can imagine going to with problems?  Or someone you could have a difficult conversation with?  When the stakes are high, it’s best to trust yourself.  “Usually people say something like, ‘I should have known,’ because there are those small things that lead to a gut feeling we often ignore,” says Lees.

Be on the lookout for clues in the way you’re treated by your potential manager.  Of course, he doesn’t have total control over the process (likely HR runs it), but observe how you’re handled as a candidate, from the quality of the information the manager gives you to the way he looks after you when you arrive for the interview.

Ask questions, but tread lightly

You can often get a sense of your potential manager by asking probing questions, but be careful how you phrase them.  “People say an interview is a two-way process,” Lees says.  “In practice, that doesn’t work very well.”  The interviewer might misinterpret multiple questions about his management approach as disinterest in the job.  Fernández-Aráoz agrees: “What you should not do is ask direct questions, like ‘Tell me about your leadership style,’” he says.  Not only could this signal hesitancy on your part, but it’s unlikely to get you an honest answer, because your interviewer is in selling mode.  Instead, ask questions that will help your potential manager visualize you actually doing the job.  “What will I do on a day-to-day basis?”  “How will I learn?”  Phrasing your questions as if you already have the job will help the hiring manager create a mental picture of you in the role.

At the same time, you can watch how she responds.  “Look for her willingness to engage in dialogue, rather than asking you pre-established questions,” says Fernández-Aráoz.  “Think of it like rehearsing a collaborative working session with your future boss. ” If she’s willing to engage with you during the interview, she’ll likely engage with you in a working relationship.  After (and only after) you’ve built rapport, ask questions that will elicit her expectations for the person filling the position, and any potential downsides of the job.

Do your homework

One of the greatest mistakes you can make is failing to do your due diligence.  Don’t go into a job with your eyes closed.  “It can be a shock to people. They find out the culture is too formal, or pressurized, or there’s too much solitude for their taste,” Lees explains.  “You should know that before committing.”  Prepare for the interview by gathering as much intel as you can.  “You might find information that raises red flags, or information about the interviewer’s interests, which will allow you connect with the other person,” says Fernández-Aráoz.

Do a Google search on your potential manager.  Check out his online profiles, as well as those of people who used to work for him.  “LinkedIn profiles can tell you a lot about a person’s interests and relationships,” says Fernández-Aráoz.  Do people under him tend to leave the organization quickly or stay a long time?  “Low retention and high turnover rates are a clear indicator of problems,” says Lees.  If you find people who have left, try reaching out to them and ask what it was like to work for that manager.  You’d be surprised how many people are willing to respond to inquiries and share their experiences working for a manager, particularly if they had an especially positive — or negative — experience.

Meet the colleagues

“Perhaps the best approach is to ask to get to know a few of your future colleagues,” says Fernández-Aráoz.  Talk with people who would share the same boss and ask what it’s like to work for her — both what they enjoy and what they find challenging.  Don’t insist beyond what is appropriate, however.  There may be reasons, like confidentiality, that prevent such conversations.

After you’re offered a position, ask to spend a half-day with the company and your future team.  “Chatting about what work is like brings about huge amounts of incidental information,” says Lees.  The hiring manager is likely to see it as a sign of commitment and motivation, and you’ll get the chance to interact with your colleagues and get a feel for the day-to-day environment and how your potential boss influences it.

Principles to Remember

Do:

  • Pay attention to how the manager treats you throughout the interview process
  • Research the manager, and if possible find former employees to ask for their perspective
  • Request to spend a half-day at the organization so you can interact with your potential colleagues and boss

Don’t:

  • Ignore your gut instincts about the manager as you go through the interview process
  • Ask direct questions about leadership style — you’re unlikely to get an honest answer, and they might signal that you don’t want the job
  • Neglect to look up your potential boss’s social media profiles

 

Case Study #1: Don’t ignore the red flags

In 2010, Joe Franzen was searching for a position as a software developer. He went through several interviews for two different positions with a large health care company.  During a one-on-one interview, he noticed his potential manager read from a list of prewritten questions.  “Software development is anything but standard. When your potential manager reads from a list of standardized questions, it sends a signal the work will be treated the same way,” Joe said.  Later on in the interview process, Joe also noticed the manager and other panel members, including several other people higher in the chain of command, tried to assert dominance over him throughout the interview.  The panel members asked questions that began with “When you’re told” or “When your manager tells you,” which gave Joe the impression he would be an expendable resource at best.  “It’s a creative role; there’s a need for structure, but you don’t want to be looked down upon,” he said.

  • Joe took the position when it was offered and soon discovered that he should’ve paid more attention to those red flags. It turned out to be one of the most mundane positions he ever held. “It was cubicle work, I wasn’t challenged, and I wasn’t happy,” he said.
  • The experience led him to quit and create his own company. Now on the other side of the fence, he creates a relaxed, conversational atmosphere and engages in a two-way dialogue to make sure candidates know exactly what kind of manager he’ll be.

Case Study #2: Do your homework

Stephanie Jones (not her real name) was looking for a new job after spending two years out of the workforce to be with her newborn.  She wanted to work in an entirely new field for her: social media.  She hadn’t been searching for very long when she found the perfect opportunity with a national marketing company.

  • At the end of her first interview, she felt uneasy. Although she had performed well, her potential boss hadn’t answered an important question.  “When I asked him about the previous person in the position, he glossed over his response,” says Stephanie.  “I brushed it off because the next day I was offered a second interview.”
  • The second interview went off without any red flags, but afterward Stephanie decided to do some research. She searched for employees of the company using LinkedIn.  After a little digging, she noticed a couple of former employees had short tenures in the same department she was hoping to work in.  Stephanie sent messages to all three, and one of them responded.  “It turns out this manager was a nightmare to work for,” she says.  “Although he was hard on everyone in general, he had a tendency to be harder on women than men.”

When a company representative called to offer her the job a week later, she had to decline. Although it was a hard decision, it paid off. “I now do contract work for the same company. I’ve been working with the company for about three years now, and in that time, the position I initially applied for has been vacated and filled at least once a year,” she says.

Posted in General Musings | 1 Comment

Hope and Change: The 2020 Edition

This appeared in today’s City Journal and has been sent around via Twitter. It captures my thinking during these stupid times. It was written by Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. I will be posting this to my Blog before (a) my blog is taken down for not being “woke” enough (yes, apparently hosting services are now going around and checking), (b) it is censored by the Gods of Twitter and lost forever, and (c) my voice, come November, is completely drowned out (I am gasping for air as it is). At present, I am disgusted by what is happening in my country.

No, wait. I must admit that my sense now is that it is no longer “my” country as I might have otherwise defined it, as an abiding sense of common purpose and project. I feel absolutely no affinity with at least half the populace who are now fully in favor of dismantling a system that was the only hope for the world. I carry no common cause with the placard-carrying “protesters” even here in Little Old Laramie, much less the rioters in the bigger cities. I cannot comprehend the building rhetoric around “defunding the police” that (not surprisingly) Hillary Clinton and others have co-opted. I am beyond flummoxed that a mere utterance of “all lives matter” would get me shunned, if not unemployed (witness the NBC Sportscaster who suffered that fate). I have witnessed an addled citizenry of sheeple who blithely gave up their civil liberties in the face of a bad cold (COVID19).

No, this is not the country I grew up in.

So here it is. He wrote …

Last week, in the aftermath of the national fury that has erupted, and continues, over the apparent killing by a Minneapolis police officer of a black man, George Floyd, while he was being taken into custody, a letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans.

We write to you today as leaders of this university,” the letter begins, “to express first deep sadness, but also anger, regarding the racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of black people every day.

It continues:

The sadness comes from knowing that this is not a mere moment for our country. This is historical, lasting and persistent. Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour. Black people continue to live in fear for themselves, their children and their communities, at times in fear of the very systems and structures that are supposed to be in place to ensure safety and justice.

I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. I’m happy now to share it as well with City Journal’s readership.

Dear ____:

I was disturbed by the letter from Brown’s senior administration. It was obviously the product of a committee—Professors XX and YY, or someone of similar sensibility, wrote a manifesto, to which the president and senior administrative leadership have dutifully affixed their names.

I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”

And just what truths are these? Well, the main one is this, that racial domination and “white supremacy” define our national existence even now, a century and a half after the end of slavery.

I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling.

Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?

They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.”

Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story?

They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity?

Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis?

We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly?

Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics*. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?

[Russo Note: what he is saying here is simply that, come November, we must “change” out from a Republican President to a Democrat. In other words, Brown University is now “in the tank” for a Dem President. Well, we went through “hope and change” with Obama (a black man) for 8 years. What “change” did he effect?]

I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges (read: students, who might otherwise burn down building). The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who in lockstep signed this manifesto remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.

What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.”

Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.

My bottom line: I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.

Sincerely,

Glenn

 

 

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Hope and Change: The 2020 Edition

Musings on The Art of Journaling in a COVID19 World – Success as a Function of Documented Failure

I have been absent from my blog for over a month, principally because the shift from face-to-face teaching to online instruction sapped so much of my time. I’m sure we all have stories to tell about how The China Virus has impacted our lives. Here in Wyoming, the impact has been what you might expect: minimal.  While stores were closed (except for Walmart, of course) and we could not get our hair cut (Cindy did mine after a time), life pretty much carried on as normal. The cold winter turned to spring and, like someone threw a switch, we had clear skies and warm temperatures. Time for gardening.

But also a time to reflect upon the importance of journaling. This “crisis” (and it seems we go from crisis to crisis, don’t we?) reminds us that history is not over. Not by a long shot. And history is often best told by individuals writing in their dairies and journals.

Perhaps more than that, is the idea that success is often the result of “documented failure.”

By this I mean that failure, once properly understood and documented in your notes is likely not to be repeated.

If we define success as the absence of failure (and I am not signing up for that just yet), then your notes, your diary, your journal entries, can be the perfect place to set down a reminder of what went wrong. Later, in quieter times, you will learn then to document all that went right and why.

Are you able to sit quietly and reflect?

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal pointed out that, “all of humanity’s problems come from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He did not mean sitting quietly in front of a laptop responding to emails, by the way. No, he meant sitting alone, in a quiet place, and making room for “structured reflection.”

The very best way to engage in structured reflection is by keeping a journal.

I have kept journals for most of my life. Even as a child I was encouraged to keep notes. For example, I still have the journals I kept about my first car, a 1966 Ford Mustang. I wrote about what went wrong, what was going right, the mileage, the oil changes, the little things I did to prolong its life. For example, I know that it turned 100,000 miles during a cross-country road trip in the Canadian Rockies. I kept journals in my undergraduate years (sadly, many of those were lost) and then in various management roles. I can look back on them, with the fulness of time, and wonder “what was I so worried about? It all turned out ok.”

To that end, consider the research that is showing how replaying events in our minds is essential to learning. While the brain record and holds what takes place in the moment, the learning from what one has gone through happens after the fact during periods of quiet reflection. And in those times you can ask yourself, “what was important and what lessons can I draw?”

Management 101

When we slow things down and reflect, we can be more creative about solving seemingly inscrutable problems. In the management literature, there is something call the “second solution method.” Here’s what it entails: If a group of employees is struggling to come up with solutions to a tough problem, brainstorm with them and identify a list of possible solutions (no matter how “far out there” they may be). Then, take a break. A quiet break.

Upon returning ask, “what else occurs to you?” Inevitably, this simple question results in 50% more solutions, often of even higher quality!

A journal, ladies and gentlemen, is an effective, efficient, private way to take a similar break.

Some thoughts about how and what to record: 

  • Your journal should be a record not only of what happened, but how you reacted emotionally. Writing things down brings clarity, and puts everything into perspective.
  • I highly recommend using a writing prompt. For example, I will often prompt myself into journaling by asking, “what things happened today that will matter in 100 years?” Often the answer is “nothing,” and I will say so, but then go on to talk about everything else.
  • Think of journaling as a kind of “mental rehearsal” for what is about to happen in your life. Script out what you might say and what might be said to you. Diaries are great places to think through those BHAGs of life (big and hairy, audacious goals). Test your logic.
  • Journal as quickly as you can. Capture those “in the moment” emotions and logic. Waiting more than 24 hours will mean lost details and fuzzy emotions.
  • In each entry, ask “why” five times. Answer each why and think of the next why as a kind of Socratic peeling of the onion.
  • Be sure to record the lessons learned. Always. What would you do again, not do again, and why?
  • Avoid using an iPad or a PC-based journaling application. Why? Because they don’t slow you down. Besides which, we know that handwriting  results in far better comprehension and clarity. Remember what Paul Theroux has said: “The speed with which I write with pen and paper seems to be the speed with which my imagination finds the best words.” Research seems to confirm this: Brain scans show that handwriting engages more sections of the brain than typing and it’s easier to remember something once you’re written it down on paper.” If you must use an app, then be sure to slow down.
  • Never be afraid to relive something you’d rather just forget. It may be unpleasant, but I guarantee it will bring clarity.

Journaling during this COVID Crisis creates a contemporary record. It will be something that outlives you. It will become, in a word, history.

Try it.

Posted in Blogging, Business, General Musings, Positive Mental Attitude | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Musings on The Art of Journaling in a COVID19 World – Success as a Function of Documented Failure

Protecting Your Brand: What the Chinese Communists have Discovered (NOT)

The Chinese government has sought to influence news sites around the globe that the COVID19 virus is decidedly not of Chinese origins.  They are clearly afraid of the damage being done to their “brand.”

Let’s face it: a brand, once diminished can take years to recover. No one understands that more than the Chinese government.  Turns out, Commies are often the best marketers there are. Bernie Sanders anyone?

Brands, however, are the cumulative positive reputation built over years of consistent (not perfect, just consistent) delivery of what is expected.  To wit, McDonald’s is successful because virtually every time you order a Big Mac, it is virtually always of the same construction, taste, look, and feel. Coca Cola too.  An Apple product. Read about Suzuki’s problems from years ago, or Audi’s.  I could go on.

Like Audi, Suzuki, Coke, and others, solid brands are quick to fall on their swords when problems arise.  Case in point: The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.  Ryder Truck Rentals, whose once-ubiquitous “yellow trucks” could be seen on every street and highway in the land, was sadly the delivery vehicle for mass destruction. They were no more responsible for that horror than I was.  But the yellow truck became synonymous with it in short order. What did Ryder do? Instead of blathering on about innocence and coincidence, they changed the color of their trucks.

Or “New Coke” from the 1980s. Once it was clear that “new” Coke was a failure, the Coca Cola Company dropped it like a hot-potato and moved on. They didn’t flap their gums about unfairness and hurt feelings.

But not the Chicoms. They want to somehow convince the world that their brand is still intact, despite the existence of so-called “wet markets” and utterly filthy inner-cities (I have been there. I know).  And I am surprised that something like the China Virus hasn’t popped up before this. Maybe it has, for along with being great marketers, the Chinese Communists are delightfully good at repression.

Anyway, they took issue with a recent article in the Daily Telegraph. What follows is the Telegraph’s response. I loved it!

Beijing Officially Disapproves

By Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph

April 4, 2020

The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, who took issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis.

What follows is a point-by-point response to the Consulate General and China’s communist dictatorship (Editor’s Note: the Chinese Consulate’s critiques are indented and italicized):

The Chicoms begin with this:

Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.

The Telegraph begins their responses with this:  If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.

Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.

Sure it does.  How “professional- and science-based” was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?

The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19.”

The World Health Organization also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its “Goodwill Ambassador” and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself.”  The World Health Organization does a lot of stupid stuff.

So what is the real motive behind your attempt to repeatedly link the virus to China and even stating that the novel coronavirus was “Made in China”?

Our motive is accuracy. That’s why we don’t say that it was “Made in Panama.”

The people of Wuhan made a huge effort and personal sacrifice to stop the spread of the epidemic.

Yep. Wuhan’s Dr Li Wenliang indeed made a huge effort to warn people about the coronavirus outbreak.  Then, as The New York Times reported, “In early January, he was called in by both medical officials and the police, and forced to sign a statement denouncing his warning as an unfounded and illegal rumor.”  And now he’s dead, so that was a “personal sacrifice” covered as well. (See below for more about “denunciation statements”).

Nevertheless, in order to capture attention and gain more internet hits, you called Wuhan the “Zombieland” and Wuhan seafood market the “bat market.” How low can you go?

Bat is a word. Bat is an animal.  In Wuhan, it’s the name of a restaurant.

The effectiveness of China’s epidemic prevention and control has fully underlined the people-centered philosophy of the Communist Party of China and the strong advantages of the Chinese system.

In 2018, Amnesty International reported that China executed more citizens than the rest of the world combined. Please tell us more about your “people-centered philosophy” and how many bullets it requires.

Instead of admitting and facing facts, the articles in your newspaper have wantonly attacked and smeared the CPC and the Chinese government with vicious language.

And yet we haven’t been jailed or shot! By golly, where’s the justice in that?

Is your judgement based on the well-being of the people or do you have an ideological prejudice?

We will admit to an ideological prejudice against deadly tyranny. It’s a tragic failing on our part.

Since 3 January, China has been updating the WHO and the international community in a timely and transparent manner.

Really? On January 14, following 11 days of “timely and transparent” updates, the WHO broadcast this ridiculous Chinese misinformation, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.”  Really? Come on.

The epidemic is spreading rapidly around the globe, and China is doing its utmost to support other severely affected countries.

Thousands of Chinese-made coronavirus testing kits and medical masks exported to Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands turned out to be “below standard or defective,” according to the BBC.  And the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) this week reported that more than 800,000 masks have been seized by Australian Border Force officers after the masks were “found to be counterfeit or otherwise faulty.” Thanks for all your help, guys.

Virus respects no borders.

Why, then, did China close its own borders on March 28 – even while claiming victory over the spread of coronavirus?

You have repeatedly questioned the WHO’s positive assessment of China’s epidemic prevention and control, but surely you know that the WHO is the most authoritative international organization in global public health, with more than 190 members including Australia?

Keep an eye on that number, sunshine. [Editor’s Note: I do hope that the US withdraws from this absolutely useless organization. Just today, several US Senators called for the resignation of WHO’s CEO.]

In disregard of the authoritative information provided by China and the WHO’s professional opinions, you instead quoted several so-called “strategic analysts…”  Were you aware that the institution where these people work have been exposed as long accepting financial support from the US government … ?

The US last year contributed nearly $900 million to the sacred WHO. Your point, sir?

Your recent coverage on the epidemic in China are exaggerated, full of irresponsible rumors and highly politicized.

Naughty us.  Please send an official Dr Li Wenliang “unfounded and illegal rumor denunciation statement” so we can sign it and be on our way.

Posted in Death, General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Protecting Your Brand: What the Chinese Communists have Discovered (NOT)

For Every Bad, There is a Worse

My mother who is now 91 years of age came of age during the tail end of the Great Depression. We have much to learn from her and others of the Greatest Generation. If this COVID19 thing persists, I have no doubt but what we will have “socially distanced” ourselves into another Great Depression, perhaps even worse than the last one.  It is entirely possible.  Economies just don’t shut down for two or three months without consequence.

So, I asked her and some of her friends for some tips, some ideas on what it will take to get through the next one. Here’s a review of those ideas:

  1. “Waste not, want not.” This came up time and time again. My mother remembers her mom and dad taking in boarders, often filling the house with more than 3 families. Plenty of kids had what she called “sticky fingers.” In other words, plenty of have-nots eyeing the haves. Consequently, she learned early on to not leave stuff laying around, and to use and then re-use what she did have. In many ways, members of her generation were the true environmentalists. Trash heaps were combed over for useful scraps of metal and wood. And, they threw precious little back into the heap. I suppose we should heed this advice now; but still I wonder “why now?” when resourcefulness and squeezing every last ounce out of everything we pay for ought to be the rule.
  2. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Roosevelt’s words resonated at a visceral level for the children, the adolescents, but especially the adults of the Great Depression. That certain feeling of despair could surely have been on everyone’s minds. But he managed to remind people that sitting around waiting to die was hardly the right way to respond, and certainly not the American Way. Instead, he implored Americans to remember, at base, that the American economy is made up of hard working people anxious to do just that: WORK. Find something to do. We are coming into summer. There are plenty of things to do.
  3. “Have a Garden!” Another one of those pearls that came up over and over again. Whether it was a backyard raised bed, or an urban subsistence garden, or the community patch, people in the Great Depression grew their own foods. By some accounts, one city in the Midwest by the mid-1930s had something like 25,000 gardens. It isn’t that hard. As Michael Bloomberg sarcastically said, “all a farmer has to do is throw some seeds down and water them.” Of course, it is WAY more than that, but the point is that self-reliance is a virtue. We all have it in us.
  4. “Pay cash.” Actually, what they said worked for them in the Great Depression was to avoid debt. Not that there was much credit to be had. But the smart ones avoided debt. And they worked the barter system like nobody’s business.  They traded, they were wheelers and dealers. And to this day they have avoided credit cards.
  5. “Relocate, if you must.” My mother and her family moved several times in the 1930s. They moved to where the jobs were. We need to think the same way. Some parts of the country will fare better than others. Be prepared. Again, self-reliance.
  6. “Know the power of positive thinking.” Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, was conceived of and, shall we say, gestated, during the Great Depression. I suspect much of what he wrote came from what he learned in much the same way that I have, by talking to “survivors.” The point is that positive thinking is its own reward. Even without work, with but scraps of bread to eat, if one can remain positive then one can rise above. And then to do that with others, in community, will ennoble all of us.
  7. “Be a saver, not a spender, and learn how to shop.” This goes back to what I gathered for No. 4 above, but it is different. It embodies the whole process of thinking ahead, of preparing and then shopping for the best deal you can get. Leave no stone un-turned in the hunt for a better deal. Know the prices of things. Comparison shop. Window shop and dream, but then put a plan to that dream.
  8. “Think of ways to make money.” Whether it be mowing lawns or, from my mother’s memories of the farmers of wind-swept Nebraska and South Dakota, learning how to grow a new crop or to start a business on the side, there are endless ways to make money. And since cash is king, take only cash. Know your talents and how they might be “scaled” into other opportunities. Put simply: THINK.
  9. “Keep the family and the community together.” My mom can distinctly remember the days when her dad, my grandpa, didn’t have enough money for groceries. And how the local grocer extended short-term credit, knowing all the while that my granddad was anything but lazy. You see, they lived in a community and they knew each other. And later, when the tide was turned, my granddad was quick to reward the grocer with extra business. We see that now, during the COVID19 lock-downs, how people are tipping the delivery boy extra because they know him and know that this business might be all he has today. Teach your family members those values. Be kind to your local community.
  10. Relating to No. 6 above, “Even though I knew I could lose everything, I wasn’t afraid,” she said. Fear wasn’t useful. Yes, it had its evolutionary roots – fear can keep us alive – but taken to an extreme, fear will only hobble us and get in the way of all the above Be not afraid.

As the great Thomas Hardy once wrote…

“and yet, to every bad there is a worse.”

Posted in General Musings, Normal Vincent Peale, Positive Mental Attitude, State of the Nation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Corona Virus (the “China Virus”) – Socialism’s Best Marketing Plan to Date

As I watch from the sidelines the gridiron back and forth on all-things-Corona, I am reminded that we are beyond the apex of “government owes me everything” -type thinking. It is now embedded in the genes of our youth. Players on the field seem downright pissed off that our government didn’t stress hand-washing before all this living hell broke out, that it didn’t have millions of test kits at the ready, that it hasn’t moved fast enough to ensure RV’s in Walmart parking lots or drive-thru testing at your local Walgreens. It’s almost as if we have forgotten that the world is made up of 7 billion individuals, and not just a series of powerful state institutions. The triumph of the Nanny State writ large.

This of course plays right into the Socialists’ hands. Indeed, the China Virus is a marketing plan that they didn’t think of but are goddamned glad came along.

In the Socialist’s mind, nothing is greater, more omnipotent, more plenipotentiary than the State™.  (I think that The Bern is similarly trademarked). Not even a god, or to my mind, The God. Nothing. And to the extent that Socialism lives what it preaches, nothing is great than the individual. Nothing. Not even God.

The trouble has been and will continue to be the diminution of the individual inside of the Socialist State. These idiots, these “useful idiots” we call Berners, or “The Squad” (AOC, et. al.), don’t get it and never will. They are sucked in by the promise of a worker’s paradise. Like work has ever been, and never will be, anything other than “work.” It is spelled w-o-r-k and not p-l-a-y. They don’t get, largely because they haven’t been taught history, that they will become slaves to the State™.

I’d rather be a slave to my God.

This paragraph from a recent National Review article sums up my thinking:

Religion not only offers answers to the most powerful, definitive, and ultimate questions of human existence and purpose. It anchors individuals in a particular authoritative tradition defined by doctrinal orthodoxy and refined through multi-generational practice. People released from these bonds are capable of believing anything. Thus, socialism has returned at the same time as climate apocalypticism, transhuman and transgender ideology, anti-vaccination movements, Antisemitism, conspiracies, and ethnonationalism. In this climate of relativism and revisionism, where the most outlandish theories are a Google search away, both Marxism and Utopian socialism seem credible. Nothing is too absurd.

In the end, it is as it should be. No civilization has lasted as long as ours. It was only a matter of time.

I’m actually kinda glad that, at age 63, I’m on the way out.

Have a Corona Day.

Posted in Blogging, Death, General Musings, People (in general), People in general, State of the Nation | 1 Comment

Take Note of This: Handwriting is Better for Memory!

With the advent of the 2018 iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil, taking notes on my iPad has never been easier, nor more paper-like. I am a proud member of the Paperless Movement and the work of Dr. Tom Solid. His research on the various apps and accessories for paperless note-taking is absolutely superb and I urge you to check it out.

Suffice it to say, I am hooked.

This, coming from a guy who for 45 years has carried a paper planner around with him every waking hour. In the 1980s, I graduated to using the then-new Franklin Quest® line of daily planners for calendaring and note-taking. When I was living overseas and couldn’t get ahold of Franklin (now, Franklin Covey™) supplies, I would invest in nice leather bound journal books. They made and continue to make nice looking books in my library.

And therein lies the problem: For me, the act of “looking back” conveys a neat and tidy sense of history, my own personal history. I can (and regularly do) look back at “this date in history” as a means of reminding myself how far I have come (and perhaps still have to go). This is not so easy with an iPad, not only because it wasn’t around 45 years ago, but also because of storage limitations, battery life, etc. More on that in a moment.

Regardless of whether you write onto good old-fashioned paper, or into an iPad, research suggests that that hand-to-brain connection is by design the best way to remember the important things in life. While each person has her own preferred method for writing notes and to-do lists, your brain holds onto information better after you’ve written it down. That’s a pretty good incentive for going old-school with a paper journal or day planner, or new-school with an Apple iPad and a Pencil™.

Your Brain Loves Pen and Paper

Turns out that when you type on a keyboard, you use your fine motor skills in a much more limited way than when you write by hand. Using a pen and paper conveys a far deeper sensory experience than touching a keyboard. As you’re crafting each handwritten letter, more dexterity is required to write with a pen than is required by a keyboard.

And that dexterity actually affects different circuits in your brain! (see Note 1) Handwriting’s combination of motor skills, the connection of fingers to fine print, that certain “touch sensation,” along with the visual perception required to anticipate the next letter, the next space, the end of the line, and so forth, actually reinforces the natural learning process.

Simply put, your memory of handwritten words is tied to the movements required to make each letter. This might be what helps the memory of what we’ve written hang around in our brains a bit longer. Conversely, the act of keyboarding activates fewer areas of the brain. The calculus involved means that the faster we type, the faster we forget. Isn’t that odd? And isn’t it counter-intuitive?

Yes on both counts.

Think for a moment about how humans first evolved the ability to read and write. The process was highly connected to physical touch as, for thousands of years, handwriting involved chiseling symbols into rock or pressing them into clay. Our minds and bodies are primed for this kind of physical interaction with the world. Typing on a keyboard, sadly, is a far cry from our prehistoric beginnings and the process of creating the shape of each individual letter by hand.

When you write by hand, you actually give our so-called encoding processes a “leg-up” (see Note 2).  Encoding is all about sending information to your brain’s hippocampus, at which point a decision is made to either store information in long-term memory, or to let it go. If you write something by hand, all that complex sensory information increases the chances the knowledge will be stored for later. It almost as if — because it simply took so long to write — that the brain defaults to keeping it around.

That said, writing everything down onto paper (or, as we shall see, into Notability™ on your iPad) would get exhausting. Most of us, after all, are smart enough to remember a large number of things written down or not.

“Clutter is as Clutter does” (to paraphrase Forrest Gump), so I try to strike a balance between writing things down versus relying on my natural smarts. Too many lists, too many notes, and we incite a kind of existential anxiety, right? So, and to that end, I limit myself to the following:

  • First of all, and like a lot of you, I keep what I call a TooDue™ List. Lately, I have begun (with Dr. Solid’s help) keeping my TooDues on my iPad using the app, Notability. I use my Apple Pencil and enter my TooDues into a note using “check boxes” supplied by the app. I can go back and check them off when done. Talk about self-satisfying effort!  Of course, you can use paper for this, but I fear losing that particular piece of paper. On the iPad it would be rare event to lose it, given how my notes there are backed up to the cloud. Alternatively, you can use Apple’s Notes app, which has the same check-box functionality, but why use more than one app? Clutter is as Clutter does.
  • Next, I have a list of short-, near-, and long-term goals, none of which are particularly weighty but they’re important to me nonetheless. I think of them as “Life TooDues.” Same checkbox approach, but in this instance I prioritize them. Candidly, having a written list of things I want to accomplish makes them feel more real, and prioritizes them in my cranial cavity.
  • For work, within Notability, I have various “subjects” divided by category. For example, and because I am a life coach and executive mentor, I keep client notes in separate subjects and onto different individual notes by date and time of a session. Because I am also a student, so to speak, I keep class notes on yet other note pages within subjects. If I listen to a podcast or watch a show to learn something, I take notes, especially if I’m trying to learn something new. Even just writing down a few essential words and ideas can seriously improve your understanding. And, it’s a great way to ensure the information sticks.
  • A long time ago, I created a Letting Go Journal and keep it inside of Notability. This is my advice for all my clients and it puts them one step closer to a good night’s sleep. (see Note 3). The process is simple: decide what might keep you up and night and write it down. I guarantee it will be there in the morning. Better yet, 60% of the time I forgot why I was worrying about it. Therefore, stop worrying, write it into this journal, and let-it-go.
  • And, finally, like many people, I keep a diary, a journal of my thoughts. Again, they go into my iPad, but occasionally they will go into a Franklin Covey planner book too. It is the story of my life and looking back at these entries a year from now, or ten years from now, reminds me of how far I’ve come (and perhaps how little time I have left).

A Word of Caution

When you type your notes, it’s easy to include more information than you need.  Because handwriting takes longer, it forces you to think critically about what’s really worth jotting down.

This process of critical thinking can boost your memory even further. Learn to write down only what you need and then get back to the act of listening.

For My College Students

College students who take notes by hand remember the information far, far better than those who don’t. That’s because, as was mentioned above, writing by hand is always slower than typing (see Note 4).  Students who hand-write notes can’t write nearly as fast as a lecturer speaks, so they have to distill the information and make wise choices about what to write. This gives them a better working knowledge of the subject—even if they never look at their notes again. Sadly, those who type their notes might be engaging in something akin to a transcription process, rather than processing the information into their own words.

Check Your Notes

When you hand-write important notes, you often find you remember them without ever reading them again. However, another benefit of this tactic is that the information is always right there when you need it. And reading handwritten text involves more parts of your brain than reading typed text. So, rereading your notes can also boost your memory. Handwriting a few of your notes is so fast and easy, you’ve nothing to lose by giving it a try.

Paper or iPad?

Research is surely on-going, but at this point I see no difference between writing with a pencil or pen on good old paper versus writing into an iPad app using an Apple Pencil (or the Logitech Crayon®, which by the way, is a terrific alternative). The sensory faculties in use are the same and the results are just as long-lasting in terms of retention. And, so, to that end I have broken my rule of no technology in the classroom and now permit my students to use an iPad with Apple Pencil (or whatever the Android equivalent may be).

My iPad Pro (2018) model has remarkably long battery life, is linked to my iCloud account, and has yet to fail me. Handwriting on the iPad is remarkably similar to writing writing on paper (especially if you have the Paperlike screen protector) (see Note 5). It’s encrypted, so it’s safe, and by virtue of password protection is virtually useless to anyone else. I have gotten over what was the essential risk of using technology in this fashion. Therefore …

Take note of this advice: Take handwritten notes. You’re life will be much improved!

Note 1:

https://www.uis.no/research-and-phd-studies/research-areas/school-and-learning/learning-environment/better-learning-through-handwriting-article29782-8869.html?articleID=29782&categoryID=8869

Note 2:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2018/04/15/neuroscience-explains-why-you-need-to-write-down-your-goals-if-you-actually-want-to-achieve-them/#65fe2e107905

Note 3:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/sleep-helps-learning-memory-201202154265

Note 4:

https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer2014OnTakingNotesByHand.pdf

Note 5:

For years and because of my time at Microsoft, I was committed to using their Surface Pro line of tablets. They market what they call the Surface Pen with the tablet and it is ok, but not great. There is an annoying lag between when you set the pen to the screen and begin to write. Not good. The iPad Pro, on the other hand, has remarkably fast interaction between pencil and screen. I am not sure about other models of iPads, inasmuch as they use a different processor. Go with the Pro.

Posted in Business, Classroom Management, List Making, Paperless Movement, Software Review | Comments Off on Take Note of This: Handwriting is Better for Memory!

Neglected Emotionally as a Child? It May have Impacted Your Ability to Self-Discipline

Many, many people struggle with self-discipline in many, many different ways and for many, many different reasons. As examples, do you struggle with:

  • Poor eating habits?
  • Over-drinking?
  • Overspending?
  • Getting yourself to exercise?
  • Wasting time?
  • Keeping a clean and organized house?
  • Making yourself do things that are boring or uninteresting?

Do you sometimes feel like you have no control over your own choices or actions in certain areas of your life? If so, rest assured that you are in the good company of countless others who feel the same way. Release the load of procrastination. You’ll feel better.

This article, originally posted by Dr. Jonice Webb, posted at Psych Central, has some good tips.

Most of those who struggle simply assume they are lazy or weak or defective in some way, but when you believe any of these things about yourself you are walking down a one-way street to nowhere.

Feeling defective makes you believe in yourself even less which makes you struggle even more. Feeling weak makes you hopeless and helpless to solve the problem, setting up an endless cycle of pain.

The reality is that almost no one who contends with self-control is doing so because they are weak or defective. Truth be told, I have often found the real cause of these problems to be Childhood Emotional Neglect or CEN.

Childhood Emotional Neglect happens when your parents fail to respond enough to your needs and feelings as they raise you.

“What could this possibly have to do with self-discipline?” you might ask. Here is the answer.

Self-discipline problems boil down to one simple mechanism that’s the foundation for it all. It’s the ability to make yourself do things you don’t want to do and to stop yourself from doing things you shouldn’t do.

We humans are not born with our “mechanism” fully functioning and developed. Instead, it is developed by our parents as they raise us.

When your mother calls you in from playing with your neighborhood friends because it’s dinnertime or bedtime, she is teaching you an important skill. She’s teaching you that some things must be done, even if you don’t feel like it.

When your dad gives you the weekly chore of cutting the grass and then follows up in a loving but firm way to make sure you do it, he’s teaching you how to make yourself do something you don’t want to do and he’s teaching you the rewards of that.

When your parents make sure you brush your teeth twice a day, when they say no to dessert, when they set aside and enforce “homework hour” every day after school because you’ve been slacking on homework, when they continue to love you but set your curfew earlier as a consequence of thoughtlessly breaking it; all of these parental actions and responses are internalized by you, the child.

All of these loving and attentive actions of your parents, when done with enough emotional scaffolding, and love — in other words, the opposite of Childhood Emotional Neglect – literally program your brain. They set up neural pathways that you can use all your life to make yourself do things you don’t want to do and stop yourself from doing what you should not do.

Now, here’s another very important thing. When all of this happens as it should in your childhood, you not only internalize the ability to make yourself do things and to stop yourself from doing things, you internalize your parents’ voices, which later, in your adulthood, become your own.

Unfortunately, the opposite of everything we just discussed is also true. If you grow up in an emotionally neglectful home and do not receive enough of this emotionally attuned structure and discipline, you will emerge into adulthood without enough of the neural pathways you need. It’s not that you have none of these neural pathways. It’s just that you do not have enough.

Is This All My Parents’ Fault?

Nope. All parents have their own personal struggles. Many grew up in emotionally neglectful homes themselves. Most parents do their best (not all, for sure)  and give their children what they have to give. But sadly, in many cases of Emotional Neglect, the parents can’t give you what they did not have themselves: emotional “tuning,” structure, and discipline.

Another side of this to consider in all of this is you.

I hope that realizing that you are not defective takes you out of that destructive loop of self-blame. I hope now that you see that your parents failed you in this way it will free you up to think in new ways. I hope that understanding the underlying mechanism of self-discipline will inspire you.

For what? For taking responsibility for this problem now. For building your own neural pathways. For change.

In the words of Jordan B. Peterson, “pick up a load.” Stop deferring. Carry your share. It will actually feel lighter than you anticipated!

It is never too late. As an adult, you can essentially re-parent yourself by rewiring your own brain. You can do it by using a remarkably simple but amazingly effective rewiring program I am sharing directly from my book Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect.

The Three Things Practice for Building Your Self-Discipline

In this skill-building exercise, you will be wiring your brain with the hardware that’s essential to have in order to be able to make yourself do what you don’t want to do and vice-versa. To take full advantage of its power, you absolutely must do it every single day.

Three times, every single day, make yourself do something you don’t want to do; or stop yourself from doing something you shouldn’t do.

It’s best to choose small, doable items that do not feel overwhelming. The size of the item does not matter, it’s the act of overriding what you want that programs your brain.

Three times. Without exception. Every single day. And don’t just do them, write them down.

To help you get a feel for this, I’ll give you some examples of Three Things that have worked for others:

Examples of Things to Make Yourself Do: Face-washing, bill-paying, exercise, floor-sweeping, shoe-tying, phone-calling, dish-washing or task-starting.

Examples of Things to Stop Yourself From Doing: eating a piece of chocolate devil’s food cake, buying a pretty necklace online, having that one more drink when out with friends, or skipping class.

Try to do this program regularly. If you slip, start right back up again. If you keep at it, you’ll notice that it will become easier and easier for you to self-regulate, manage your impulses and complete unrewarding but necessary tasks. Your self-discipline will build and grow and eventually become an active, hard-wired part of who you are.

Three things. Every day. You can do it.

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on Neglected Emotionally as a Child? It May have Impacted Your Ability to Self-Discipline

Get out of the Comparison Trap!

Comparing ourselves to others is a direct path to unhappiness. Sadly, doing so is commonplace. Even people at the pinnacle of attainment do this.

There’s always someone else who makes more money, drives a fancier car, lives in a bigger house, or commands more acclaim. It is rare to find people who are satisfied with what they have, who they know, how they are living, and where they are heading, regardless of their circumstances.

Social media only makes this tendency worse because everyone else seems to be doing well all of the time. The photos seem to declare, “Here I am having splendid experiences, while you live your boring life.” We are irked by what we perceive as other people’s advantages over us, what they have that we don’t, what they can do that we can’t. Such comparisons merge into a continual drag on the spirit.

I am reminded of the “optics problem” that is the bane of the super- and nouveau- rich. They seem to think it’s OK to post pictures of themselves in private jets and fancy yachts. Don’t they realize what they are doing? They only perpetuate the myth that everyone can have what they have. Not true now. Never has been. Moreover, one would think they’d try to hide their wealth for fear of theft. For fear of jealousy. For fear of the comparison trap. For the simple moral of avoiding conspicuous consumption.

In most social contexts, our vulnerabilities remain hidden from each other while our assets are on display. Almost everyone is doing this preening and concealing. Rationally, we know that each of us has some kind of struggle, but do we really believe this? In the dark of the night, we twist and turn as our own inadequacies grow larger in our estimation, and other people’s lives seem steeped in more ease than we have ever known.

In the daily drama at my bird feeder, I watch the tiny birds fly off as soon as a bigger bird arrives. Relativity in size and strength, as well as an incessant competition for resources, are fundamental features of nature. Is our compulsion to compare ourselves to others in our bones?

Yet the tiny birds don’t seem especially perturbed when they give way; they just wait in nearby bushes and return to the feeder after the bigger birds leave. They resume pecking at the suet or gathering up the seeds, with no sign of ruminating over issues of fairness.

The discontent is ours. We can’t all be big birds, yet we use our large brains to generate ever more complex miseries for ourselves.

After we have eaten our fill, do we leave for others what we don’t need? The gleanings of our fields and orchards are not kept available for those lacking their own, as so-called “primitive” societies have always done and the birds do without thinking. In our current society, we gobble up and sequester as many resources as we can, because the drive to fend for ourselves has become ceaseless.

We have lost any notion of enough.

What’s the use of all this hoarding and pretense? We all have to die someday. Physical frailty is the great equalizer, no matter what we do.

The Buddhists remind us that all accumulation ends in dispersal. The Tenth Commandment warns us against the tumult of yearning for what others possess. I have been at the bedside of people with abundant wealth and those with nothing, and I have seen no differences in their last breaths.

“I’m not better than anyone, and no one’s better than me.” This is what one man concluded after surviving the Holocaust in Nazi Europe. The only standard he came to value was decent conduct. A keen judge of people, he had a third-grade education and never worried about status: “A professor isn’t better than a bricklayer. The bricklayer might give you a drink of water when you pass him on the road, while the professor turns his back.”

We don’t have to try to stand out or accomplish more than someone else or make it look like we have everything figured out. The trick is to notice this reflex, name it, and watch it pass through us every time it comes up.

This resembles the liberation that arises through the monastic practice of sitting in a bare, cell-like room without adornment. Leonard Cohen did this intermittently during the last decades of his life. He found serenity in relinquishing the adulation of the stage, of being an international star, and making himself into a little bird.

Something good happens when we catch ourselves doing comparisons and call a halt to it. We create an interlude of relief where we let ourselves be. The depth of the relief is instructive. From a shift in perspective, our disparagement of ourselves goes away; our gnawing insecurities relax, at least for an afternoon.

We see what flimsy stuff all this is made of—a bunch of habitual thoughts rushing in when our mood is low, and our guard is down. We can decide to summon the stance of refusal as a daily practice, actively opposing the pressures around us and getting out of the comparison trap.

 

Posted in Blogging, Counseling Concepts, General Musings, Positive Mental Attitude | 2 Comments