TIME GETS BETTER WITH AGE

Most of what I know came from others. I know this because my office is filled with little notebooks and scraps of paper bloated with words and phrase and expressions people have given me that I never wanted to forget, but I inevitably did. Until I stumble on them again they remain locked in these little tombs that fill my office.

I don’t recall the names of anyone who authored these phrases, probably because I never asked and I’m only guessing at their age. It seems when I find something truthful, I never want to know more. It’s like dating. You don’t necessarily want to meet the parents.

Here’s what you have told me:

I like my teacher because she cries when we sing "Silent Night". Age 5

I've learned that our dog doesn't want to eat my broccoli either. Age 7

I've learned that when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back. Age 9

I've learned that just when I get my room the way I like it, Mom makes me clean it up again. Age 12

I've learned that if you want to cheer yourself up, you should try cheering someone else up. Age 14

I've learned that although it's hard to admit it, I'm secretly glad my parents are strict with me. Age 15

I've learned that silent company is often more healing than words of advice. Age 24

I've learned that brushing my child's hair is one of life's great pleasures. Age 26

I've learned that wherever I go, the world's worst drivers have followed me there. Age 29

I've learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it. Age 30

I've learned that there are people who love you dearly but just don't know how to show it. Age 42

I've learned that you can make some one's day by simply sending them a little note. Age 44

I've learned that the greater a person's sense of guilt, the greater his or her need to cast blame on others. Age 46

I've learned that children and grandparents are natural allies. Age 47

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be different tomorrow. Age 48

I've learned that singing "Amazing Grace" can lift my spirits for hours. Age 49

I've learned that motel mattresses are better on the side away from the phone. Age 50

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. Age 51

I've learned that keeping a vegetable garden is worth a medicine cabinet full of pills. Age 52

I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die. Age 53

I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life. Age 58

I've learned that if you want to do something positive for your children, work to improve your marriage. Age 61

I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. Age 62

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back. Age 64

I've learned that if you pursue happiness, it will elude you. But if you focus on your family, the needs of others, your work, meeting new people,
and doing! The very best you can, happiness will find you. Age 65

I've learned that whenever I decide something with kindness, I usually make the right decision. Age 66

I've learned that everyone can use a laugh. Age 72

I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. Age 82

HIVING

My reflexes no longer fit the times. My fellow travelers enjoy the constant buzz of electronic proximity. They text; I talk. Like the dance of the bees, they share a hive mentality – the reflexes, the instincts, communication to everyone of everything about everybody at every moment.

In this ubiquity, are electronics changing a generation’s sense of self? Many of us older than forty worry about privacy, but not my fellow travelers. They have little appreciation of that concept. Identities blurring at the edges, they have become the great “us.”

The hive mentality is not only adolescent conformity – it’s corporate necessity. The electronic cacophony flatters every prodigy in a silver suit with the same delusional lie: you are the center of a great ever-changing universe. The heavens may wheel, but you remain fixed at the center of it all. What self-respecting spreadsheet wrestler would ever be caught dead sitting down for a cup of Joe without a Blackberry? Suppose the home office reached a decision while you were beyond reach? Suppose a critical email was sent while you were foolishly wasting time playing catch in the backyard with the kid next door, or reading a book or catching up on your writing? Hey, what the heck, people need lives but business needs productivity.

Social networking is the new training ground for all of this. How much more difficult is it being a knowledge worker in a cubical than having thousands of globally dispersed friends whose every mood, taste and activity is broadcast instantly and made public? And what, you old fogey, is so odd about it? Wouldn’t you rather have thousands of electronic friends than three that you actually had to talk to? Why reveal your heart, take risks, make mistakes and reveal your ambition when, with the click of a mouse, you can appear witty, clever and wise? The young man sitting next to me on the train today is telling his co-worker and everyone else who’s not wearing an I-Pod or talking to themselves, or is that an earpiece they’re wearing?, how his parents are divorced – what did risk, trust and intimacy get them, I wonder?

Anyway, every advance in technology raises another flag for me – somewhere between white and yellow on the Terror Alert scale – and technology, I think is not just changing habits or styles, it’s changing the nature of identity.

Go 4 it.

Buzz…buzz…buzz.

All is well in the hive.

Decisions

Once we make a decision, we have all kinds of ways and tools at our disposal to bolster our decision. When my next door neighbor traded in his older, frequently vandalized automobile for a hybrid, he suddenly began behaving oddly, for him, anyway. He started having conversations with me about carbon imprinting, and saying things like, “You must be getting tired of going to the Gulf station so often? How much is a gallon of gas, today? And, boy those big cars do take up a lot of room on the streets, don’t they? Imagine if a smaller car ever got hit by one of those things, it would cause enormous damage to the other party. I’d hate to have to live with that on my conscience.”

Of course, everything he said was absolutely true. Climate change and the environment are worthy of everyone’s attention, devotion and dollars. It’s also possible that with two small children sitting in the back seat, safety is a concern and it would be a better for everyone if we all drove smaller cars. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. His behavior, expressed and manifested in his spending a lot of money on a new hybrid car and in dropping hints to others to do the same, was, I suspected, a way to wear a badge of good citizenship and his way of reducing the dissonance he felt over buying on what he used to refer to as “just a car.”

The need to reduce dissonance is increased by the irrevocability of the decision. Some evidence for the power of irrevocability comes from an unlikely place: a race track. You see, a race track or a lottery office is the perfect place to watch and study irrevocably because once you place your bets, you can’t go back and tell the nice lady behind the counter you changed you mind. If you ask someone how certain they are that their horse was going to win, the bettor who already placed his bets is far more certain than the next person standing in line. As most of us know, nothing has really changed for the person who placed their bets from the person who has yet to place their bets except for the finality of placing the bet. People are more certain they are right about something they just did if they can’t undo it.
Understanding how dissonance works has many practical applications. For example, the more costly a decision, in terms of time, money, effort or inconvenience, and the more irrevocable its consequences, the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the good things about the choice made. Therefore, if you’re in business and you want to know how your competitor is gaining market share or introducing and supporting a new product line with a seemingly endless supply of good fortune, great consultants and ideas, or you’re about to make a big purchase, or make an important decision – like having an operation, or purchasing a stock, or buying a house – don’t ask someone who has just done it. That person or company or resource will be highly motivated to convince you that it is the right thing to do. If you want advice on what product to buy, what doctor to visit, what new product innovation consultant to embrace, ask someone who is still gathering information and is still open-minded. If you want to know if a program will help you, don’t ask for references or read testimonials: get the data from controlled experiments.

No one is immune from the need to reduce dissonance. Think about anger. Some people, even psychologists, believe in the benefits of catharsis: venting as a way to get rid of anger. The belief is that a physical adjustment – shouting or punching a heavy bag – will make you feel better afterwards. In fact, it can do nothing but make you feel worse. Research has found that when people vent their feelings aggressively they raise their blood pressure, release adrenaline and actually, make themselves feel even more angry.

That’s why choices like venting, and, or passive forms of aggression like shunning, silencing and scape-goating are more likely to backfire when a person commits an aggressive act against another person directly, or gets others to do their bidding. When you do anything that harms another person – gets them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or literally, punch them out – a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you just did.

This is the underlying dynamic in play for so many concerned grade and high schools teachers and parents who are trying to embrace bullying. When you, as part of group of cohorts, taunt and bully someone weaker and you’re heart is not really in it, in order to reduce the dissonance, you try to convince yourself that the other person is neither nice nor innocent. Once you start down this path, the likelihood of you beating up on the same person the next time you see or even hear them is greater. Why? Because self-justification, the lie we tell ourselves, makes us want to believe that we are smart and rational individuals that we are good people and good people would not do unkind things, therefore because I’m doing an unkind thing the other person must be a jerk, or I wouldn’t be doing this.

The opposite is also true. Our generous acts can create a spiral of benevolence and compassion, especially when it is done on a whim. After all, “why would I ever do something nice for a jerk? He must be okay and a pretty nice person because I’m being nice to him and giving him a break.”

Dissonance is powerful and bothersome. It is especially painful when an important element of our self concept is threatened and when we do something that is inconsistent with our views of ourselves.

Every dot, every dash

This morning, a neighbor catches me in the driveway and says, “No matter whenever I come home, or whenever I leave for work early in the morning, I often see the light on in your office?”

“So,” I say.

“So, how come? You can’t be working all the time. Why don’t you take some time off and smell the roses.”

“Well, my reading, writing and drawing are my roses.”

He shrugs in puzzlement and starts walking away, then stops as if he were going to ask me another question, but he doesn’t. He just shakes his head and walks to his home.

I suspect there are more people than you’d expect who say, “Thank goodness, it’s Monday.” Although no one ever admits it in the lunch room, few people see changes in their employment – either through retirement, downsizing, layoffs, recessions, or as our President refers to our economic state as “in a period of uncertainty,” as an opportunity to work harder at what we love. No meetings, no memos, no retreats, no reorganizations, no stakeholders, shareholders or pot-bellied leftovers from the previous leadership team can be very freeing.

Today, I drafted half of this newsletter, read it and punched delete. If I’m bored, you’ll be bored as well. I started on another topic and again was bored. Delete again.

This did not depress or worry me. This is an essential part of any creative process. Each deleted page was an instructive failure and it led me to this page.

Artists have to draw to discover what they have to see and then how to see it. I realize that I do not see then draw, but I see by drawing. Writing is the same. My pencils show me what I didn’t see. It’s hard to explain this willingness to let go of things. It can kill something in my discoveries if I “hold onto things;” I have too much sentiment. It’s not surprising to me the French call falling in love “tomber amoureux.” It’s an illness. That’s not exactly sentimentality, but it has to do with irrational preference. It’s has to do with the idea that when you find something very moving, you want to find out less about it. It’s like falling in love you don’t want to meet the parents.

Letting go is not abandoning something dear to me, more it’s wanting to develop something unknown to me, even though I am also be aware of the horrible things I have done in the process.

It’s a strange thing, but I usually start by considering how the picture I draw or the story or opinion I write will deal with things, with the paper, the charcoal and subject and the manner in which I want to work. I find it profound and far more difficult than writing a strategic marketing plan or an academic paper. As a side note, scholars and academics can’t bear the idea that people of great talent can do things unlike anything else they have ever done, or will ever do again.

I continue to work at my crafts when there is no apparent economic prizes at the end not because it is easy but because I find answers that need questions, contradictions that need a problem.

Many of my business colleagues and I are offered, at one time or another, a new assignment or promotion by superiors who say, “We think you can do a good job.” My answer is always the same, “Thank you. I know I can do a good job.” However in my mind I always continue to say, “But I will also keep on writing and drawing because I don’t know if I can do it.”

The great Japanese artist Katsuskika Hokusai lived by these words:

“I have drawn since I was 6. All that I have made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73, I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, stones and other things. At 90, I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything – every dot, every dash – will live.”

Enjoy your day.

Snow Shows

Our storied moxie is on the wane.

We’re supposed to be known for our hardiness, for the way we embrace the elements with stoicism and even a touch of pride.

We’re New Englanders.

And we’re just a bunch of crybabies when our technologies – cell phones, GPS’s, all-wheel drive conveniences are put on pause and a winter storm – a storm that set no records, came as no surprise and delivered the kind of light and dry snow that is driveway shovler’s dream. But the fact is, once you get used to conveniences, even the mildest inconvenience becomes an epic tale of deprivation. Our threshold is so diminished our vision of a disaster is a slow commute or frightening moment when we could not be connected to our cell phones.

We’ve gone soft.

We’re looking for something to afraid of. You’ve got to watch what you eat, watch what you say and who you say it to. You can’t get out of your car anymore to make a phone call because it’s inconvenient and someone, somewhere suggested that it’s not safe and you could get killed by a passing car or a terrorist climbing out of a manhole and stealing all your credit cards which you electronically entered into your Blackberry that you keep tied around your waist like a hall pass.

We’re teetering on the edge of a manic explosion, and we’re right over the edge when the temperature drops, the skies darken and the first flake touches the ground. For all its wonders, technology has never lived up to its promise of making us smarter. It only makes our oversensitivity faster.

I myself am not fond of snow. I am, however, find snow days quite pleasing. It’s a chance to hunker-down and that’s what people should do in a storm.

It’s a matter of attitude.

People amble around in the streets, sometimes in an airport or train station, socializing. Kids go sledding.

Our hardiness in New England is over exaggerated. Like everywhere else, we over-react because no one is really from around here anymore and with more and more data coming to us from more and more sources, information is no longer comforting or able to help us gain our balance or strength against smallest and slightest of storms.

During the next snow storm, why not turn off your computer, unplug your television and put your cell phone in the closet then go outside and shovel your sidewalk with your neighbor who you haven’t seen since Labor Day.