Yearly Archives: 2011

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.

This Is Our Only Home

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I’m currently reading True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor. Subtitle: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy. Halfway through I’m depressed by the extent of our environmental problems, especially global warming, and our lack of resolve to reduce emissions. Here’s a December 2010, twenty-minute long global warming TED Talk by the always excellent Naomi Klein.

How To Get Your Child Talking About What’s Happening in School

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I could buy Norway if I had a dollar for every time I sat down at dinner and mindlessly asked, “How was school?” only to hear “good” or “fine.” Stimulating four word conversation.

The older the student the harder it is to squeeze any meaningful info from them about what happens between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Developmental psychologists say that’s as it should be. Elementary age children love having their parent(s) volunteer in their classroom. It’s a secondary students worst nightmare.

I know adolescents need some distance to become autonomous, independent peeps, but I still love the challenge of getting them to talk about their school day. Odds are I’ll never get the chance to interrogate prisoners of war. Here is some of what I’ve learned over the years.

The front “how was school” door is permanently locked. Tip-toe around to the side door and get way more specific. “What happened in Spanish today?” How did you do on your Math test?” What was Schaeffer up to today?” “What are you studying in history?” “Get your English paper back?” “Any interesting chemistry labs lately?” “What was the last film you saw?” “Anyone talk about Glee at lunch today?” “Who is going on the retreat this weekend?” “How’s Kaitlyn doing?” Is Noelle playing tennis this year?”

Notice that even those questions are of uneven quality. Ask my sixteen year old, “What happened in Spanish today?” and she’ll respond, “Nuthin’ really.” “How’s Kaitlyn doing?”? Rest assured, Kaitlyn is almost always “fine”. Instead, ask “what,” “if,” and “why” questions like these: What’s your favorite class these days? Why? If you only had to go to two classes which ones would you choose? Why? Whose your best teacher? Why? If you had to teach one of your subjects which one would you choose? Why? If you were the principal for the day, what’s one thing you’d change about your school? Why?

You can only ask specific questions if you’re engaged. If you’re on parenting auto pilot, forget the front, side, and back doors, no point really in even approaching the house. If you don’t know your child’s schedule, the names of their teachers, the names of the friends they eat lunch with, learn that stuff before going to sleep tonight.

There are exceptions to every rule. When inquiring about drinking and drugs, it’s often better to stay general because they won’t want to out any acquaintances or friends getting hammered. So I’ve found questions like “Much experimenting with marijuana going on?” or “Anyone you know get drunk lately?” yield more info than any “friend specific” drinking and drug-related ones.

At times the dinner table can be a conversation black hole. It’s the ultimate front door. Again, think side-door, back door, even windows. For example, I remember a few times, a decade or so ago, when Nineteen would ride her bike through the neighborhood while I ran. It was great, without realizing it probably, she talked continuously. Just now, Sixteen took the labradude for a pre-dinner walk. I should have joined her. Something about fresh air. Guaranteed I would have learned a lot more than I will at the dinner table.

Adolescents are living, breathing roller coasters, up one moment, down the next. Don’t press things when they don’t feel like talking. Give them a break and yourself. File away those brilliant, specific questions for later.

You don’t have to get any of these suggestions just right. Not even close. Your trying conveys care. Children peppered with questions often feign irritation, but deep down they always prefer being annoyed to being ignored.

If I Was President

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Put your hands in the air like you just don’t cair if you think I need some hair extensions, a guitar, single speed bike, and vid like this one. Why should Wyclef Jean be the only one to imagine being president?

My betrothed was thrilled to score a Thanksgiving dinner invite. Didn’t have to cook a turkey or interact too terribly much with the normal one. Early on one of the seven adults at the very nice dinner lamented that getting to the pool in the morning to swim was just “too complicated”. About every 45 minutes, no matter where we were in the conversation, we’d return to that theme usually in the form of my betrothed suggesting alternative activities to our unmotivated friend. For each suggested alternative she presented separate complexities. She was a reminder that it’s a lot easier not to exercise regularly.

It’s been almost four years since I shared ten suggestions on how to create an active lifestyle. Since you didn’t click on that link you won’t notice the overlap in what follows.

If I were president, I’d charm Congress into passing a law requiring every physically able adult to engage in an hour of cardiovascular activity before 8 a.m. Employers would have to push back early starts. Based on personal experience and a constant stream of research, one hour of exercise makes the remaining 15 lots better. Benefits include lower health costs, increased productivity, improved community, and increased well-being. Brisk uncomplicated walking, running, swimming, cycling, water aerobics, elliptical exercises, rowing, or any combination of those for sixty minutes.

I joked with our “too complicated” friend that Betrothed sleeps in her bathing suit to simplify her morning routine. The night before swim mornings I pack my backpack and toss my jammers where I get dressed in the morning. By wearing them under my pants, I save a good 45 seconds in the Y locker room. Too much info I know, but the larger point being . . .

1.) An efficient, successful morning exercise routine begins the night before. Organize your gear so you can almost sleep walk out the door in predawn darkness.

Other suggestions:

2) Gradually pull the plug earlier at night, turn off the tube, forget the foreplay, close the book, and go to bed early enough to compensate for the earlier start.

3) If going somewhere with lockers, consider renting one to simplify what you have to cart back and forth.

4) Start right outside your front door or make sure you can get to your gym within five minutes. I believe a lot of indoor exercisers would be surprised by how much more fun it is to be outside if they invested in some technical fitness duds and were forced to do it by say. . . El Presidente. Of course we’re spoiled in Olympia with excellent sidewalks, street lighting, and bike lanes.

5) Most important of all, find anyone similar in ability to exercise with. Mutual accountability + evolving friendships = much higher success rates.

This challenge is similar to decluttering—logical suggestions aren’t enough to tip the sedentary scale (pun intended). Unless our “too complicated” friend finds a training partner who she enjoys spending time with, suggestions 1-4 won’t make much difference. The conundrum is until a person is able to compare and contrast what it’s like to be out of shape and in shape, they’re unlikely to muster up the self-discipline to change their daily habits.

Try it. Pick something at least semi-enjoyable, invite a friend to enjoy you, and gradually build to one hour, six days a week, before the day starts in earnest. You won’t regret it.

For the serial sedentary among us, I’m going to hire the cast from a very good, but brutal movie Betrothed and I recently watched, Sin Nombre, to enforce the law. Better start now in case I’m elected on 11/6/12. Trust me, you don’t want those hombres knocking on your door asking what you’re still doing in your pajamas.

How to Blog

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One of the most important things I learned in the blogging webinar I recently participated in is that people don’t read blogs for good writing, they read them for help with specific things. So one day this week I wrote ten tentative “How to” type post titles that readers might find helpful. Lots are parenting and or teaching related. Look for me to start weaving some “How to” posts into the mix soon, starting with “How to Get Your Child to Talk About What’s Happening in School” on Wednesday, December 7th. Also know that for every “How to” post I publish there are several others I need someone to write for me. Here’s a sample:

• How to Get Your Children to Eat an Occasional Fruit or Veggie

• How To Get Your Child To Clean Up After Herself

• How to Free Your Children from The Grip of America’s Next Top Model

• The Secret to Raising Boys

• How to Sass-Proof Your Teen

• How to Get Your Child To Unplug From Facebook

• How To Turn Your Kids onto Non-fiction

• How To Get Your Child to Turn Off a Light In an Unoccupied Part of the House

• How to Teach Your Child To Turn Off the Shower

• How to Get Your Children to Wash a Car

• How to Get Your Children to Walk or Ride Their Bikes to School

• How to Get Your Teen to Sound Out Words Before Breakfast

Another worthwhile thing I learned is that posts shouldn’t exceed 600 words. My long ones tend towards 650 so I’m going to trim even more. Given my serious surplus of words here, it’s an especially good time to thank everyone for reading and sometimes commenting this year. And here’s a four-part 2012 favor. If you enjoy this blog, please bookmark it, forward a link to friends, comment sometime, and consider subscribing via email.

334 words. Can I carry the 266 over or is it a “use em’ or lose em'” thingy?

What We Can Learn From the Cain Train

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I know, I said I wasn’t going to follow Presidential politics for another ten months, but Cain Truth is one entertaining website, and I just can’t help myself. And I know I’m supposed to assume a person is innocent until proven guilty, but I just can’t help myself.

Dig this headline from the website, “Cain Attacked by Accuser; Will Not Stop His Effort to Renew America.” Here’s what that conjures up in my pea brain. The Hermanator is walking down Main Street, suit coat over his shoulder, touching  and healing struggling business owners while simultaneously pushing a steady stream of slowly approaching bimbos out of the way. The initial draft headline read, “This Week’s Skank Won’t Sidetrack the Cain Train from Fixing America.”

Cain is a heaven sent joke in response to all the peeps, like one of my friends, who thinks all of our political problems will disappear if we’d just elect a flesh and blood businessman.

From Slate.com: Cain initially called Ginger White’s claims “more false allegations.” But stopped short of accusing White of lying. Still, he nonetheless stressed that he had never had sex with her and that he did not consider their relationship to have constituted an affair.

Mrs. Cain Train is going to love that explanation.

If we’ve learned anything about the Cain Train, we’ve learned the more it talks, the further it goes off track. “At this point I’m just simply saying these things are going to come out and until we know what they are, then my attorney doesn’t know what to respond to.” The drip, drip, drip really is unfair to his attorney. If the women were more considerate, they’d do one large group presser. If you like gore, gather round, this is going to be a long, drawn out train wreck.

In the middle of rebutting the allegation, our Business Knight in Slimy Armor pivots. If you watch closely, you can see the wheels start turning in his big business brain. Damn, he suddenly realizes, after thirteen years maybe she’s got some evidence of our non-affair. Quoting again from Slate.com. . . the Republican did concede that the woman making the claim was “someone that I know who is an acquaintance that I thought was a friend.”

That’s what I hate about women, they just can’t keep non-affairs on the down-low. Asked if he had sex with the woman, Cain responded no twice. If you close your eyes, you can see a gaggle of Saturday Night Live writers excusing themselves from their dinner guests and sprinting to their respective laptops. The gift that keeps on giving.

Again, Slate.com. . . in a written statement Cain’s lawyer, Lin Wood, took a significantly different tack, suggesting that the issue was a private matter and that it was out of bounds in terms of what the media should be focused on. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Didn’t anyone from the RNC vet this guy? Have the “skeleton” talk with him? Granted, it would have been a long convo, but why do national politicians have to re-learn the Nixon take-away over and over, the coverup is always worse than the initial mistake/crime/non-affair.

If you are thinking of running for president sometime in the future, or just want to be a more authentic human being, ask yourself, “What would Herman do?” and then do the opposite.

If the King of Kapitalism really wanted to be President, he should have begun by talking honestly about his moral shortcomings and hoped that the electorate would have appreciated his honesty and separated his personal shortcomings from his political promise.

Coping With Narcissists

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Is it just me or is it seemingly impossible to get along with narcissists? Of course if you caught my betrothed after one of our spats, she’d say I’m a self-centered sad sack.

I’m three-quarters the way through Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and I can’t help but make connections between it and Whybrow’s American Mania.

Don’t know if I’ve ever been so conflicted about one person. There are at least three Steve Jobs—1) the counter-cultural Zen Buddhist, exquisite designer, artist-philosopher, modern Stoic, vegan; 2) the focused, driven, scarily perfectionist, extremely mercurial, control-freak, business genius; and 3) the sometimes cruel, heartless, empathy impaired human being.

Readers of the bio are probably most interested in Jobs 2, but I find the human nature/human being story far more interesting.

I need to finish the book and think some more about it before reconciling my schizophrenic thoughts. For now I can say Jobs 3, the uncaring, mean, empathy impaired knucklehead often repulses me. Which brings to mind Whybrow’s insights on empathy. He writes, “. . . the experience of intimacy and the stability of the attachments one has in early years ultimately shape our capacity to understand the feelings of others. Human empathy is largely a learned behavior, much as is language. . .”

So we’re not hardwired to care about others? Whybrow says empathic understanding results from “social anchors” or a “. . . wellspring of healthy families and the nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities. . .” In other words, immerse young children in caring families, schools, religious and civic organizations and they will follow the caring adults’ lead and end up empathetic young adults.

Could the fact that Jobs was adopted have compromised the stability of his attachments so much that he never “learned empathy” in the way he learned English? I wouldn’t think so because he was months old when adopted and his adopted parents were stable, supportive, and loving.

After deciding not to marry Jobs, one of the two women he was closest to in his life found a psychiatric manual, read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and concluded that Jobs embodied all of the symptoms. (Here’s hoping Betrothed never stumbles upon that.) She said, “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had strugled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see.” “I think the issue is empathy,” she added, “the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

I’m clueless as to the root causes of Jobs’s lack of empathy, but the larger, more important takeaway is that empathy is learned. Whybrow convincingly argues that empathy results from a “wellspring of healthy families and nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities.” Sadly, some families aren’t sufficiently healthy, nurturing, supportive, or economically stable enough to pass on empathetic understanding to the young in their charge.

If expecting narcissists to someday be nicer or less self-centered is like expecting blind people to someday see, the best way to cope with them is to stop expecting them to return personal interest and care with similar curiosity and kindness. Far easier said then done.

Narcissus admiring himself shortly before his first triathlon

2011 Seattle Half Marathon by the Numbers

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 .1
7:07 7:05 7:06 7:34 7:04 7:11 7:34 6:51 7:00 7:02 6:55 6:54 :43
7:24 14:31 21:36 28:42 36:16 43:20 50:31 58:05 1:04.56 1:11.56 1:18.52 1:25.53 1:32.47 1:33.30

52     degrees

6       ounces of Tillamook Vanilla Bean yogurt consumed pre-race

5       times I’ve been faster

136   seconds behind 2009 time

4       pieces of pumpkin and apple pie consumed in preceding days

3       pounds gained in preceding days

1       woman who changed out out of wet top next to me post race, posthaste

How to Increase Your Living Space Without Spending a Dollar

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By decluttering of course.

Jane E. Brody reviews a new book by Robin Zasio titled “The Hoarder in You: How To Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life.” Brody says it’s the best self-help work she’s read in her 46 years as a health and science writer. That should help sales.

After that endorsement, I was disappointed by Zasio’s advice, which I’d describe as decluttering orthodoxy based on Brody’s highlights.

Here’s the gist of it. If you’re familiar with the decluttering literature skip ahead a paragraph. 1A) Tackle just one project at a time—a closet, garage, room, dresser drawer, file cabinet—and stick with it until it’s done. 1B) To create positive momentum, work from the easiest project to the most challenging. 2) Schedule time for decluttering—an hour a weekday or weekend day for example—until done. 3A) Use three containers labelled “Keep,” “Donate,” and “Discard”. 3B) Brody adds her own advice here. To force yourself to decide among the three, be careful not to add a fourth “Undecided” container.

Simple, huh? So why do I predict, six months after finishing Zasio’s book, that the majority of her readers will still live clutter-riddled lives? Because no matter how faithfully one implements that logical plan, there’s still a cultural, even spiritual element to our tendency to buy far more than we need.

Every day, all day, we’re subjected to a one-two punch of extremely sophisticated and ubiquitous advertising that plays on our insecurities and to what sociologists refer to as “relative deprivation” or wanting what others wealthier (or more in debt) than us have. Regardless of whether we have the three containers labelled correctly, we want what we see advertised and and we want what our next-door neighbors have. Until we figure out how to resist those two things, our “stuff” will continue to overwhelm us.

I’m not immune to the one-two punch. I owned a Porsche once, an incredible machine, but I sold it (at a loss of course) because I felt self-conscious in it. Weird, I know. Most Porsche owners want you looking at them at the light or getting out of it at the restaurant. I was the opposite. I didn’t like pulling into the church or school parking lot. Insufficient swagger I guess. But then after reading Irvine, and getting fired up about Stoicism, I learned Stoics aren’t supposed to care about what others think of them. There’s something to work on. With that in mind, maybe I should give it another shot. The new 2012 911 looks damn nice. An exercise in applied Stoicism?

Xmas 12?

Think Legacy not Longevity

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I think it was my ten year high school reunion somewhere in Orange County, California where I reconnected with one of my best friends from the 6th or 7th grade. At the start of junior high we were tight. I learned to ski on trips to Big Bear with his family and I spent a memorable week backpacking with them in the Sierras. He was a stud, a good running back and hurdler who gave both up for surfing and partying which he also excelled at. In high school, I was his designated driver.

Must have been the drugs, because at 28, he was pretty whacked out. Despite not looking especially healthy, he pigeoned-holed me and was going on and on about living to something like 125. I should have humored him and told him I was really looking forward to our 100th reunion. Pills; 1,000 calories a day; filtered carrot juice, can’t remember all the bullshit stuff he thought would get him to triple digits.

Granted, my childhood friend is more extreme than normal, but most of us don’t like thinking about dying. Many people spend lots of energy trying to delay it as long as possible.

In hindsight, I wish I had encouraged him to think legacy not longevity. It’s not the length of our lives, but the quality of them. Whether 40, 60, or 80, do you leave your world—whether it’s your family, the places you worked, the physical environment, or your community—better off?

I have to credit Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania, for this reminder. This sentence of his stopped me dead in my tracks. Pun intended:

In a collective denial of aging. . .we employ all available technologies to simulate youth, misunderstanding that the secret to immortality lies not in the individual but in the society we leave behind.

I can’t express it any more clearly than that.