Category Archives: Money Matters

Everything Free Day

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Two weeks ago Megan McArdle reviewed a few books on consumption. Early in the review she reveals she recently bought a $1,500 food processor. Who knew one could drop 1.5 large on a food processor?

The Saturday morning after Black Friday my betrothed filled me in on the L.A. shopper who pepper-sprayed several other X-box shopper-competitors before fleeing the scene. The good news is I don’t think anyone was trampled to death in Toys R’ Us this year. On Black Friday I subscribed to consumerreports.org in the a.m. and then spent a chunk of the p.m. shopping for new kitchen appliances at home in my pepper spray-free environment.

I spent part of Thanksgiving Day shopping too. Well, kind of. While watching Ndamukong Suh stomp on a Packer o-lineman, I blew through 90% of the 90 lbs. of newspaper ad inserts. Took everything the labradude had to drag that bad boy to the front door. Who knew Wal-Mart sells decent looking jeans for $10? And a decent Timex Ironman-brand watch for $10? Maybe they won’t stop stomping their suppliers until they can sell everything for $10 or less.

Remember the crazy shopping spree marketing prizes in the 70′s or 80′s? Some lucky winner would get an hour in a grocery store and they’d sprint up and down the aisle frantically loading a few baskets with a little of everything? And we’d watch imagining how much faster we’d go or how we’d be more strategic and target the most expensive goods that take up the least space.

What if Black Friday was “National Reduce Inventory” day and everything was free? Nothing sold out, no servers crashed, perfect availability. What would you have brought home? What about those you live with? Where/how would you have stored everything? How would those new possessions have changed your life? Would you be much happier?

At minimum, I would have ordered a few new kitchen appliances and brought home some of Costco’s most expensive vino, a new bicycle computer, and a McArdle food processor in a new Seal Gray 2012 Porsche 911. Initially at least, I would have been much happier. Among other ripple effects though, I’d have to work more hours to pay for more expensive car insurance and maintenance costs and over the course of a few weeks, months, and years, I probably wouldn’t be any happier at all.

I don’t assume what’s true for me is true for you, but I’m learning the things that make me happiest—friendship, good health, film, literature, exercising in natural settings, writing this blog, helping others—can’t be purchased in a store or ordered on-line. I could spend tons of time and energy shopping in stores and on-line at this time of year, brag about my good bargains, but not improve the quality of my life.

If there’s ever a time of the year for reflecting on this dynamic it’s now. The thrill of even great purchases quickly fades so invest time and energy in the people and things that bring lasting joy.

Related Graham Hill TED Talk titled “Less Stuff, More Happiness”.

Steve Jobs—A Life Well Lived?

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I enjoyed and recommend Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio. The overarching question it has left me with is what’s the best way to assess whether one’s living or lived a good life? And how best to define “good life”? Specifically, do professional successes trump the personal or vice versa? Do you most want to be remembered as an amazing chief executive, lawyer, teacher, trooper, counselor, sales manager, engineer, doc, pastor, carpenter, nurse, or as a caring and loving father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, neighbor, friend, citizen?

Everyone answers those questions somewhat differently in the way they live their lives. Jobs’s professional activities—he reinvented six separate industries—were clearly more important to him than his personal roles and identities—he was self absorbed, he was a distant father to his three daughters, and he rarely cared about anyone else’s feelings.

We seem to excuse people like Jobs—people at the very top of their field—for being what some readers of the book have described as a “self absorbed asshole”. Why is that? Is it because people at the very top of their fields tend to be extremely wealthy? Do we give the ultra rich a pass on being shitty parents or people?

Most of the time I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished throughout my thirty year teaching career, but in my own personal calculus of assessing whether I’m living a good life, I emphasize the personal. It’s most important to me that I be a good husband, father, friend. I can’t help but wonder though is that because I haven’t accomplished more professionally? Is my personal orientation an excuse for not being more ambitious and not working harder? Or do I emphasize the personal because I’m overcompensating for my dad’s explicit “professional accomplishment” orientation?

Jobs didn’t have the ideal balance, but I’m not sure I do either. More questions than answers.

And The Medium Sized Fish Eats The Small Fish

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I often get frustrated with the Michael Moore’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world because their ideological analyses slight endless economic, political, and cultural subtleties that require deeper thinking and more tentative conclusions.

Peter Whybrow, in his excellent book American Mania, explains Adam Smith’s work in ways few conservative free-market zealots probably understand. “Smith favored private ownership, with capital being locally rooted,” Whybrow writes. “He distrusted large institutions—be they government or corporate—as forces that foster greed, distorting and suppressing the dynamic market exchange and social intimacy that are essential to fair dealing.“

“As businesses merge and increase in size,” Whybrow contends, “and as manufacturing and services become geographically remote from each other, the behavioral contingencies essential to promoting social stability in a market-regulated society—close personal relationships, tightly knit communities, local capital investment, and so on—are quickly eroded.”

In other words, your less likely to exploit someone you know.

It’s in this context that I recently read Alpine Experience’s dead-tree newsletter that arrived old school in the mailbox. Alpine Experience is a local independent retailer that specializes in high quality outdoor gear of all sorts. If their website wasn’t so poorly designed I’d link to it. Here’s their slightly less bad Facebook page. I used to have an Alpine Experience t-shirt that said, “Friends don’t let friends shop at chain stores.” I shop at AE once a year when they have their annual sale. When their prices are marked down 30-40%, they almost seem normal.

I like their irreverent, personal newsletter, but I’m sure it’s probably more expensive to produce than they can afford. Inside this issue was an honest, interesting reflection on Olympia’s newish REI store’s impact on AE’s bottom line. The author, I think the store’s owner/manager, said the new REI is definitely impacting their bottom line. Admitted they’ve fallen behind projections and need to have a good winter. I really hope I’m wrong, but given REI’s economies of scale and vastly superior on-line presence, I anticipate AE going out of business.

REI is a large national chain, but its progressive business practices give it a positive, medium-sized, community-based essence. Like AE, it’s a groovy store. It has been voted one of the Top 100 businesses to work for the last 14 years in a row. Read more about its enlightened business practices here.

Recently I was cycling with an acquaintance, an independent architect who has fallen on hard times. He’s taken a job at REI to get by, working as a cashier 16 hours a week. We were discussing the AE-REI tug-of-war. He told me he needed glove liners shortly before getting the job and they were $20 bucks at AE and $7 at REI. Probably an exaggeration, but I suspect comparable products are often 30-50% more at AE. That would be a huge headwind to building a reliable customer base even in a good economy.

Back to Whybrow. REI is not a megacorporation that fosters greed, nor does it distort and suppress the dynamic market exchange and social intimacy that are essential to fair dealing. But it’s not as small nor as local as AE and it doesn’t share it’s long history.

What to make of this capitalist case study?

Personal Economic Balance

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First Born (FB) likes her Starbucks and thinks nothing of dropping 4 bills at Schultz’s stores. Last summer she capitalized on her selective private liberal arts education to secure a part-time job weeding a neighbor’s yard. Late summer, on the way to a concert in Portland, I asked, “Would you keep drinking Starbucks if each time after your last sip you had to immediately walk outside the store and weed for thirty minutes?”

The “probably not” look on her face was a thing of beauty. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope she’s learning the value of a dollar, or more specifically, four dollars.

Gears spinning in her head, and captive in the Japanese compact, I decided to launch into my “economic balance” talk which was so brilliant it deserves this larger audience.

The economic balance equation is a simple, three-parter: One’s hourly wage + one’s hours spent working – one’s purchases also known as expenses, overhead, or standard of living.

If a person make’s $10/hour and chooses to spend $4 for a Starbucks drink, then the cost was 30 minutes of work time (rounding and after taxes). For a therapist, plumber, or attorney making $100/hour, the same Starbucks costs 3 minutes of work time. I would not weed for 30 minutes for a extra hot, nonfat, grande green tea latte, but I would for three.

Let’s zoom in on each part.

1) Hourly wage. The challenge here is that in the U.S. in the last ten to twenty years the average person’s wages have fallen relative to (very low) inflation mostly as a result of amped up global economic competition. U.S. consumers buy inexpensive goods from China; to try to stay competitive, companies shift their manufacturing operations to distant places where their labor costs are greatly reduced; a lot of workers lose their jobs; margins shrink; and then new workers are offered some of the previous jobs at much less than their predecessors made.

Or the domestic version. States experience massive budget debts as a result of recession, increased unemployment outlays, accelerating health care and higher education inflation, and unsustainable pension promises to public employees. Educators in Washington State get their pay reduced and the state is still $2b in the hole. Few people make $100/hour, most are much closer to $10.

2) Hours spent working. Unemployment is high as is underemployment and economists expect that to remain the case for the foreseeable future. Record numbers of unemployed have quit looking for work and don’t show up in the 9.1%, and for 20-24 year olds, unemployment is 15+%. The double whammy income challenge—how to increase one’s average hourly wage and hour’s spent working in a sputtering economy? Add in the 2007-2008 bursting of the housing bubble and it’s a triple whammy since many people owe tens of thousands more on their homes than they’re now worth.

Which leads to, 3) take your pick—expenses, overhead, or standard of living—the key variable in many, many people falling even further out of economic balance. Workers can’t throw a switch and increase their pay or their opportunities to work additional hours because the changes in the global and national economy are beyond their individual control. Those changes are not temporal either, they’re long-term and systemic. We live in a new economic reality of intensified competition from all over the globe. Don’t listen to politicians who want you to believe we’re special. We’re not.

Often there’s a debilitating time lag between workers’ lower wages, reduced hours, and accustomed standard of living.

Seneca said, “. . . the man who adapts himself to his slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little sum, is the truly rich man.” My 21st Century adaptation, “The person who adapts to making less money and learns to enjoy a less materialistic life, is the truly rich person.” Our expenses are the part of the equation we have the most control over. Worth repeating. Our expenses are the part of the equation we have the most control over. That means we have to do a better job of distinguishing between the few things we need and the neverending number of things we want.

One example. While it’s increasingly vogue to argue otherwise, many contend a college education is a necessity, but attending one that charges $50k+/year is obviously not. Due to a mix of factors—including off-the-charts economic anxiety, age-old social status concerns, and slick higher education marketing campaigns—too many high school seniors enroll in colleges that are more expensive than their families can realistically afford. As a result, many twenty-two year olds, whether they make it to graduation or not, end up deeply in debt. Some authors, comparing them to indentured slaves, are referring to them as “indentured students”.

If a young person’s scholarships, merit aid, personal and family savings, and part-time work can’t cover the cost of their preferred college, they should choose a more affordable path. If you’re a parent being asked to extend yourself beyond what’s possible, it’s okay to say, “Can’t afford it.” The double economic whammy will be challenging enough, why make it a debt-ridden triple one?

Stoic Insights on Materialism

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Stoics knew, in Irvine’s words, that luxurious living only whets one’s appetite for even more luxury. Exhibit A, the GalPal and I need hotel upgrades now. Consequently, they practiced poverty or voluntary discomfort—whether fasting, sleeping on the ground, or purposely not dressing warmly for cold weather—to harden themselves against misfortunes that might befall them in the future. They did this to extend their comfort zone, reduce their anxiety about future possible discomforts, and better appreciate what they already had. They also sometimes gave up pleasurable experiences because they knew pleasure seekers lose some self-control and end up serving multiple masters. Having written about this exact thing before reading Irvine means I’m well suited to modern-day Stoicism.

Even ancient Stoics knew that maintaining luxuries takes a lot of time. Musonius argued that luxurious living must be completely avoided, but Seneca said it was okay to acquire wealth as long as one doesn’t harm others to obtain it. He also argued it was acceptable to enjoy wealth as long as one was careful not to cling to it. Most Stoic teachers advocated simultaneously enjoying and being indifferent to the things wealth makes possible. Seneca and Marcus thought it was possible to live in a palace without being corrupted. Similarly, Buddha said, “He that cleaves to wealth had better cast it away than allow his heart to be poisoned by it, but he who does not cleave to wealth, and possessing riches, uses them rightly, will be a blessing unto his fellows.”

Seneca said “life’s necessities are cheap and easily accessible” and “the man who adapts himself to his slender means and makes himself wealthy on a little sum, is the truly rich man.” Socrates said “we should eat to live, not live to eat” and dress to protect our bodies and not impress others. We should favor simple housing and furnishings too.

Seneca, Marcus, and Buddha would have supported the non-consumerist, simple living, social justice orientation of the Occupy Wall Streeters. On the other hand, they would have rejected their knee-jerk antipathy towards the well-to-do.

Marriage Red Flag

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My nomination for a SLP personal finance journalism award—given to the author of a particularly succinct, lucid, and provocative personal finance article. From Rachel Emma Silverman in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/11):

If you care too much about money, your marriage may suffer.

A new study by scholars at Brigham Young University and Provo, Utah and William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J.. looked at more than 1,700 married couples across the U.S. to determine how their attitudes toward money affected their marriages.

Couples who said money wasn’t important to them scored about 10% to 15% better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than couples where both or one spouse were materialistic.

Also, couples in which both partners said they valued lots of money—about 20% of the couples in the study—fared worse than couples who were mismatched and just had one materialist in the marriage.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” says Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

In the study, published recently in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, participants completed a questionnaire which evaluated their relationship and asked, among other things, how much they value “having money and lots of things.”

Dr. Carroll says the research team had expected that disparate couples, those with different ways of viewing money, would have worse relationships. They found, though, that it was “materialism itself that’s creating much of the difficulty,” even when couples have plenty of money, he says.

Materialism might cause spouses to make poor financial decisions, such as overspending and running up debt, which can strain relationships. What’s more, materialistic spouses may pay less attention to their relationships and give their marriage lower priority than other concerns.

In other words, marry someone who values “having money and lots of things” at your own risk.

Seigels—You Disgust Me

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Subtitle: Thank goodness for Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

A friend, in his early 40′s, was dating a multimillionaire C.E.O. He bragged to me that her kids didn’t even have to put their dishes in the dishwasher because that’s what the live-in maid was for. The full-time maid, he explained, enabled the mom and school-aged children to spend more quality time together. I’m calling bullshit.

I used to show some of my students an excellent education documentary about three third grade classrooms—one in the US, one in Germany, and one in Japan. There were no janitors at the Japanese school because educators there believe that students benefit from cleaning the school themselves at the end of each day. “Cleaning,” one school director explained, “creates a kind and gentle spirit.”

Over the years, I’ve noticed that my young adult and adult students who grew up on farms in Montana and eastern Washington are especially hard workers.

Many college bound high school students, following their Type-A parents’ lead, are excused from household chores on account of homework, after school sports, and related college application padding activities.

Ron’s Rule: Any adolescent that’s too busy to put her own dishes in the dishwasher and help around the house in a few different ways every week is too busy. This is what I’m talkin’ about.

My advice. Let the help go, slow down, and give your kids a chance of creating not just a kind and gentle spirit, but genuine respect for maids, janitors, dishwashers, and other manual laborers. The cost of excusing our young people from cleaning their toilets, making their beds, and doing their dishes is a debilitating arrogance.

Which takes us to the Siegels of Orlando, FL. Remember: italics means I’m quoting, underlined text denotes sarcasm, and everything else is my normal, slightly less-sarcastic voice.

Excerpts from a 10/22/11 Wall Street Journal article by Robert Frank. Adapted from “The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust,” by Crown Business:

The Siegels’ dream home, called “Versailles,” after its French inspiration, is still a work in progress. Its steel-and-wood frame rises from the tropical suburbs of Orlando, Fla., like a skeleton from the Jurassic age of real estate. Ms. Siegel shows off the future bowling alley, indoor relaxing pools, five kitchens, 23 bathrooms, 13 bedrooms, two elevators, two movie theaters (one for kids and one for adults, each modeled after a French opera theater), 20-car garage and wine cellar built for 20,000 bottles. 

At 90,000 square feet, the Siegels’ Versailles is believed to be the largest private home in America. The Siegels’ home is so big that they bought 10 Segways to get around—one for each of their eight children. After touring the house, Ms. Siegel walks out to the deck, with its Olympic-size pool, future rock grotto, three hot tubs and 80-foot waterfall overlooking Lake Butler. Her eyes well up with tears.

I’m tearing up in sadness for you Jacqueline.

Versailles was supposed to be done by now. The Siegels were supposed to be living their dream life—throwing charity balls and getting spa treatments downstairs after a long flight on their Gulfstream.

I have a dream to one day throw charity balls, get spa treatments at home, and own a Gulfstream. That’s some inspiring shit.

The home was the culmination of David Siegel’s Horatio Alger story, from TV repairman to chief executive and owner of America’s largest time-share company, Westgate Resorts, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and $200 million in profits.

Yet today, Versailles sits half-finished and up for sale. The privately owned Westgate Resorts was battered by the 2008 credit crunch and real-estate crash. It had about $1 billion in debt—much of it co-signed by the Siegels.

The banks that had loans on Versailles gave the Siegels an ultimatum: Either pay off the loans or sell the house. So it’s now on the market for $75 million, or $100 million if the buyer wants it finished.

Today the Siegels have to make do in their current 26,000-square-foot mansion.

Before 2008, Mr. Siegel’s company, Westgate, was earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the family. The Siegels poured $50 million into Versailles, which seemed reasonable at the time. When friends asked David why he wanted to build the largest home in America, he had a simple answer: “Because I can.”

“I was cocky and I didn’t care what the house would cost because I couldn’t spend all the money I was making,” Mr. Siegel says.

Plus two points for honesty, minus twenty for volunteering to share all these details in a national newspaper. No sense of embarrassment. Stupefying.

Ms. Siegel has started a nonprofit called ThriftMart, a mega thrift-store that sells donated clothes—many from her own closet—and other items for $1.

That would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

She (Jacqueline) does miss the Gulfstream. After they defaulted on the $8 million jet loan, the banks seized the plane. The Siegels can use it only occasionally, with the banks’ permission.

Recently, the family boarded a commercial flight for a vacation, making for some confusion. One of the kids looked around the crowded cabin and asked, “Mom, what are all these strangers doing on our plane?”

What a legacy—eight f-ed up kids.

Fraud Antennae

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By comparison, we’re a very strange family. We almost never talk to and never text with Away At College Daught (AACD). We Skype on Sunday nights. Typically, six days without any contact. I understand if you want to tar and feather us.

So it was quite surprising when AACD called mid-morning, mid-week recently. Someone had just called her from her bank and said they needed her debit card number because they were having problems with their network. She gave it to the caller. And immediately realized she’d been duped. Her mom told her to immediately call the bank and everything would be okay. She did and it was, but her experience begs an important question. How do we form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of us? More succinctly, how do we develop fraud antennae? The more desperate people’s economic lives become, the more critical it is we develop fraud-detection skills and sensibilities.

I told AACD’s younger sissy the debit card story as a precautionary tale and explained to her surprise that there are people in the world who wake up every morning trying to figure out better ways to steal elderly people’s life savings.

Bernie Madoff, besides offering regular 20% returns, was supposed to be pretty charming. Nicholas Cosmo probably was too. A minnow compared to Madoff, Cosmo only defrauded 4,000 investors out of $195m. Or consider David Dutcher’s experience. Here’s a teaser to get you to read the entire LA Times article:

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. “We had a lot in common,” he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports. They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as “yummy.” ”It felt a lot like Christmas,” said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair. The women fiddled with Dutcher’s tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. The brunet unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. “I am way over my head with these girls,” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been out dating in a while.”

Apparently Dutcher’s Christmases are different than mine, but I digress. “Sharon” had been hired by Dutcher’s ex-wife. The night ended much worse than Dutcher imagined—with his arrest for driving under the influence by a cop working with Sharon and Dutcher’s ex. The age-old honey trap* with some crooked soccer moms and cops thrown in for good measure.

The crooked uniformed cop, an admittedly extreme example of fraud, brings to mind the uniformed Norwegian killer who every adult on the island somewhat understandably, albeit tragically, assumed was legit.

Dutcher simply needed to stop staring at the cleavage long enough to ask himself if what he was experiencing was so far out of the ordinary that maybe he had been set up. This is what I’m going to call the “so far out of the ordinary/too good to be true test” and maybe that’s the answer to my question. Then again, a lot of very smart and successful people didn’t think that Madoff’s promised 20% investment returns in a wildly fluctuating, but mostly down market were too good to be true so how can I expect D-squared to have applied the test?

More importantly, how do we guard against more subtle attempts at fraud, like the stream of fake emails or phone calls seeking debit card numbers? And how do we teach young people to form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of them?

Experience is the best teacher. AACD is less naive as a result of that phone call, panic, and quick trip to the bank. But what kind of curriculum, dinner conversations, and other resources might help young people be proactive in detecting and thwarting the fraudsters in our midst? More simply, how do we teach them things may not be as they appear?

* When I was a teacher at an international school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia back when Al Gore was inventing the internet, the US embassy folks invited my male colleagues and me to the embassy for a meeting where they cautioned us about beautiful Ethiopian women known to seduce American men in the hope of weaseling their way out of the country. Even showed a film with case studies on how it was done. This had one effect on my friends and me. We were more excited than normal to go clubbing the next weekend. Alas, I regret I was never a victim of the honey trap. :)

House Hunters International on HGTV

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Love it.

Or I should say “really like it” since moms always says, “You can’t love something that can’t love you back.”

Each tightly packed episode is a thirty minute long travel/house hunting fix. A person, couple, or family chooses among three residences in some foreign country. Recently, while watching a college football game, I caught most of two episodes*. The first was about a British man and an American woman who met in Orange County, California. They were moving to England. Immune to our recession apparently, he needed a large garage for his cars and she needed a dance studio.

The second couple, an Irish man and an American woman moving from Chicago to Ireland, had two small girls. Appears as if Euro men are stealing our women, but I digress. Their Chicago house had a small yard “where every time the girls kicked the ball it hit the wall”. He wanted at least an acre which they eventually found a few minutes from where he grew up.

A few times in the episode he implied his girls needed a large yard, but I couldn’t help but think he was projecting his past on their present. We all do that to some degree don’t we? Recreate our childhoods for our own children in some form—whether tangibly in terms of the house and neighborhood environment or intangibly in terms of norms, expectations, ethos?

Did the toddlers really “need” a soccer pitch-sized backyard? Would their lives turn out much differently with a small yard or if they found a house near a public park? All I could think of was how much of his time and money he was going to have to spend maintaining his giant patch of grass. To each is own.

Dear HGTV network. How about a show with the same format, but focusing on minimalists proactively embracing our new economic realities by looking for smaller yards, less space, less clutter, lower energy costs? People convinced that some cliches, like “less is more,” might just be true.

House Hunters Downsizing. Or Downsizing House Hunters. Either way, I’d watch it during college football commercials.

• This requires deft remote controlling. And I’m the deftest. Which brings to mind the best sports story from the last month. A 97-year-old man who wanted to watch a Milwaukee Brewers playoff game called 911 to report someone had stolen his remote control. According to the Greenfield police report: The man called 911 to report someone had stolen his remote control from his residence in the 9300 block of West Howard Avenue prior to 8 p.m. Sept. 26. The remote control was found after police responded, so the man was able to watch the Brewers game.

Coaching’s Costs and Benefits

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My Atul Gwande bro-mance or man-crush continues to build steam. He begins his most recent New Yorker essay explaining he’s been a surgeon for eight years and. . . for the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

He points out that top athletes and singers have coaches and asks whether you should too. He asks the question in the context of his own story of contacting his mentor from med school, a well-known highly respected doc, to see if he’d be willing to observe him in surgery and offer suggestions. I recommend the whole essay, but long story short, Gwande breaks through his plateau as a result of his mentor’s objective, insightful, detailed feedback.

Mid-point in the essay, Gwande explains how teacher-to-teacher coaching is one of the most promising reforms being implemented in some school districts.

He also acknowledges that many of his fellow docs and many teachers probably aren’t quite secure enough to open themselves up to pointed constructive criticism.

But he fails to mention another at least equally significant hurdle, sufficient money to compensate experts for their coaching time. School districts have to release coaches from their own classrooms meaning substitutes have to be paid for or everyone has to teach larger classes. And I can’t believe he expects teachers, lawyers, dentists, and other professionals making far less than professional athletes or elite singers to pay for coaching out-of-pocket. It’s unclear how financially strapped school districts and hospitals are supposed to add in coaching costs.

If only I had a magical “financial resource” wand. Now that I’m in better touch with my stubborn, self-defeating self-sufficiency, I see areas in my life where I could benefit from coaching.

In late August the personal trainers in mom’s swanky FL health club were doing some intriguing exercises with their clients. Made me want to toss medicine balls and run around with giant rubberbands around my ankles. And I’m sure I could benefit from swimming, running, cycling, triathlon coaching. Listening/marital bliss coaching. Cooking/nutrition coaching. Gardening coaching. Bicycle maintenance coaching. Golf coaching. Social media coaching. Parenting coaching. Writing coaching.

You get the drift.