Grant Rickles the Serenity

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

Rick Reilly’s advice for Tiger Woods is a joke. Here’s the gist of it:

New Normal #3: Try a little tenderness.

Take some time with people. Phil Mickelson signs for 20 minutes after every round, Tuesday or Sunday, first place or 100th. On a good month, you do 20 minutes. Try it once. You might like it. Your every moment on a golf course doesn’t have to be Elvis being rushed out of the Hilton. Take some time with people. Say hello. Stand on 18 once and watch a guy finish, then shake his hand. It’s not going to kill you.

New Normal #4: Enough with the emperor act.

Climb down from this ivory tower you live in. Introduce a little transparency into your life. Give an interview once in a while that isn’t being timed by your agent standing in the corner. Tweet more than once a month.

New Normal #5: Spread it around a little.

Look, everybody knows you’re the cheapest guy on tour. Some people are sure your wallet is sewn shut. I know a car valet in L.A. that you’ve stiffed so many times, he feels like he’s full of embalming fluid. The last time he saw you, he stood in front of the car door, making small talk until you made with a fiver. Don’t be like that. Drop some coin. You’ll be surprised how it improves your disposition. Karma does exist, you know.

Middle agers know they’re aging due to a growing list of aches, pains, and miscellaneous physical maladies. I take better than normal care of myself, exercise regularly, eat well, help old ladies across the street, and go to church when it’s not sunny outside. But I’m just as aware of the aging process because of changes in my thinking.

For example, I used to think people could, with concerted effort, change aspects of their personalities. Mean guy could become nicer, superficial woman more substantive, impatient person more relaxed, angry person more caring, self-centered guy more selfless.

Not anymore. Sure someone can drop weight or stop drinking, but some people are just mean, superficial, impatient, angry, and self-centered. Have been for a long time and will continue to be.

Earth to Double R. Just like my personality and yours, Tiger’s is never going to change.

“I got away from my Buddhism.” Yeah, you think?

Did you see Darren Clarke signing autographs on the WAY to the FIRST tee on Sunday afternoon at Royal St. George’s?! Did you hear Rory McElroy after the US Open say he “couldn’t wait” to join his friends at home in Northern Ireland to celebrate. Genuine, personable dudes. Tiger is not likable, just phenomenally talented at golf.

Since all is fair in advice giving, here’s some for R squared:

New Normal #1: Learn how to accept people’s flawed personalities. Save your breath about how you want them to change.

New Normal #2: When an athlete acts reprehensibly, do what most elementary students learn to do during recess in first grade, ignore them. So the guy fired his caddy. He hasn’t won in a long time, isn’t playing currently, and isn’t really deserving of your media spotlight.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s hope for Tiger because you’ve fundamentally changed your personality. Religious conversion, counseling breakthrough, whatever. Total personal makeover. The comment section is open. Do tell. I would love to be proved wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

Happy Interdependence Day

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

If someone said to me that I could only read one person for the next ten years, Atul Gawande would be among my finalists.

His May 26, 2011 New Yorker essay, Cowboys and Pit Crews, is the transcript of his recent commencement address at Harvard’s Medical School. As always, it’s insightful and important.

Here’s an excerpt:

The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—
emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in
their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard
work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one’s workshop,
loaning a bed and nurses for a patient’s convalescence, maybe an operating room with a
few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the
cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing
autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to
designing medicine accordingly. But you can’t hold all the information in your head any
longer, and you can’t master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient’s back
pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the
treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don’t even know what it
means to “protocol” the MRI.

Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was
a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were
involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so
on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full time equivalents. By the end of the 1990s, it was
more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of
patient care. We’re all specialists now—even primary care doctors. A structure that
prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty
achieving great care.

The problem according to Gawande is “We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.”

In my field, teacher education, we train, hire, and pay teachers to be cowboys. But students need pit crews. Increasingly, the world of work require employees to function as team members.

Older docs, Gawande points out, don’t like the changes because they miss their autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency.

Just like those older docs, I dislike the forced teaming that’s increasingly required of me. For pit crews to work, Gawande argues, “you must cultivate certain skills which are uncommon in practice and not often taught.”

The problem at my workplace is everyone else dislikes the forced teaming at least as much as me. And we’re lacking the skills Gawande alludes to. Given that increasing interdependence is a reality, it behooves us to first identify and then cultivate the “certain skills which are uncommon in practice“. To do that, we can either wait, probably for a really long time, for formal leadership to take the initiative, or we can, as I propose, take the bull by the horns ourselves.

First, a trusting, caring work culture must be created where all the team members are willing to talk openly and honestly about whatever misgivings they have about proposed group projects. Too often some of my colleagues choose not to participate in planning meetings, and then, as soon as the meeting is over, vent to one or two people about the direction of the conversation in the privacy of their offices. The technical term for this is passive-aggressive bullshit.

Another fundamental problem is people commit well in advance to being at certain places at certain times to help the team out in specific ways, only to say they can’t make it once the date draws near. Sometimes they work with the team to reschedule, other times they don’t. When a few people aren’t dependable and don’t pull their weight, conscientious team members become bitter about having to do more than their fair share of the work.

Bitterness builds, trust is eroded, teamwork suffers, and people’s negative associations with teaming harden.

Then the question is whether we should press pause and revisit people’s past frustrations in an effort to get to the bottom of why some people are resentful. Like a troubled couple that refuses to enlist the help of a counselor, the answer is always no, “If we just do the work, people’s frustrations will subside.” But they don’t, instead, they build.

Until trusting, caring communication becomes a group norm, my three team essentials—1) actively participate in team planning; 2) show up when you say you’re going to and do what you’ve committed to; and 3) at least try to have a sense of humor—won’t make a bit of difference.

Palinism

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

A few Friday nights ago, David Brooks no doubt scored serious points with NewsHour listeners when he said, “Every second we spend talking about Sarah Palin is a second of our lives we’ll never get back.”

Catchy soundbite, but he was wrong.

We need to talk more about what her parochial, nostalgic, oddly vague and exclusionary worldview means for not just our national politics, but education reform.

Palinism the ideology—a set of conservative political beliefs that rests upon a parochial, nostalgic, vague, exclusionary interpretation of U.S. history—is far more pernicious than her easy to make fun of media personality.

Palinism is a litmus test. If we continue to think of students first and foremost as future workers and consumers, and not citizens, its influence will spread and some of its adherents will win elections. Absent a nuanced sense of our nation’s unblemished history and an appreciation for what a vibrant democracy requires of its citizens, our young people will increasingly opt for glossy, symbolic style at the expense of gritty, grounded substance.

Recently, just for David Brooks and you, I sacrificed 197 seconds of my life watching SarahPac, a brilliant marketing video of Sarah’s bus tour of the U.S. Actually, now I’ve sacrificed over 15 minutes since I’ve watched it five times.

It’s fascinating on several levels. Exercise your citizenship and watch it.

Notice the following:

• In the midst of the hundreds of people that appear in the commercial, there’s one black veteran. Palinism borrows from a recent Modern Family sketch, “White is right.”

• The phrases “restore what’s right,” “restore the good,” and “we need a fundamental restoration” repeat throughout.

• “Founding” and “foundation” also repeat throughout. It’s like a news station repeating the phrase “fair and balanced” over and over. Maybe, if the populace is half asleep, hypnosis works.

• Painfully vague catch phrases are sprinkled throughout including, “be in touch with our nation’s history,” “so we can learn from it,” “move forward,” “all that is good about America,” “effect positive change,” and “America is the exceptional nation.” The classic hallmark of a really bad first year college essay.

Absent a critical nuanced understanding of U.S. history, government, and foreign policy, the videos sophisticated mix of traditional American symbols, music, and vague repetitive narrative would probably work wonders on large percentages of today’s secondary school students.

An older woman near the end gushes about Palin’s “courage and strength” and concludes, “she has it all.”

If we continue to preach the math and science gospel and mindlessly apply business principles to schooling, our youth might conclude the next Sarah Palin and the one after her have it all.

In which case Palin’s videographers might just win the battle of ideas.

Somethingotherverted

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

I’m neither introverted nor extroverted. I’m somethingotherverted. Someone on the outside looking in would probably label me introverted.

I prefer solitude to crowds. Give me a quiet dock on a still lake over a Disneyland pass any day of the week. On a Friday night, I’ll pass on the concert in the park for popcorn, the NewsHour, and something interesting to read. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The stories motherdear could tell about my dad’s propensity for quiet nights at home.

Long story short, I lack social energy. But the ironic thing is, when cajoled to attend the concert in the park, I almost always enjoy myself. And often I see people I know and rally, asking questions, catching up, making people chuckle. If you were to eavesdrop on me at the concert in the park, you might even conclude I’m extroverted. That’s why the conventional sociability continuum doesn’t quite cut it.

Some of my close friends are surprised when I half-jokingly describe myself as anti-social because my socialness is most evident in small groups. I greatly prefer dinner parties with a few close friends to large fiestas where I don’t know many people. At fiesta gigante the GalPal, a conventional extrovert, will walk right up to you and introduce herself. Especially if you look like you might not know anyone else. In contrast, when I’m looking at you I’m thinking, “What a sadsack.” That’s okay though because once she ditches me, you’ll be thinking the same thing about me. Kharma.

My somethingothervertedness is evident in my professional life too. I’m guilty of keeping a very low profile in the office and on campus, but I’m alive in the classroom, enjoying my interactions with students very much.

I’m fortunate the GalPal sometimes nudges me out of my self-imposed solitude. She used to try to drag me to events which often caused me to be even more resistant. She’s become more understanding, meaning more sensitive and subtle.

Then again, our 25th anniversary is around the corner. A quarter-century should be long enough to figure out our extrovertedness and somethingothervertedness.

What are you?

We’re All Lance Armstrong

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

We’re greatly influenced by—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively—those we associate closest with in our work lives and our private lives.

I found Tyler Hamilton’s 60 Minutes interview fascinating from more of a social science perspective than a moral one. Hamilton’s and Armstrong’s performance enhancing drug use is an interesting social-psych case study. At some point, probably decades ago, performance enhancing drug use reached a tipping point where a majority of cyclists said, “Screw it, I’m in.”

From that point forward, anyone with Hamilton’s and Armstrong’s physical tools and off the charts competitive drive probably had very little problem rationalizing it with the same mindset that regularly trips up thousands of young people every year, “Everyone’s doing it.”

It’s the same phenomenon we sometimes see on the freeway when it’s turned into a parking lot as a result of a bad accident. One person eventually decides the risk-reward is worth it, so they pull out from the far right lane onto the shoulder and take off into the horizon. Then, a second person. Then, a third. I can either sit and reflect on my moral superiority or get home at the same time as them, but not both.

Given the work culture of his chosen profession, I almost find Armstrong a sympathetic figure. To have “just said no” he would have either had to have found something else to do with his life or settle in as a second-tier domestique stuffing water bottles down his back.

Almost a sympathetic figure because through his repeated, robotic denials, he wants everyone to believe he’s special. He’s the only one who stayed in his lane, but somehow still arrived home before everyone else. That’s how good he was.

It’s as this point, Armstrong turns into a fascinating psychological case study. In one respect, we’re all Lance Armstrong in the sense that everyone one of us maintains public personas, revealing less than the truth about ourselves to the larger world. Of course the difference with Lance is the degree of duplicity.

He must wake up at night worried about what the federal grand jury’s findings might do to his athletic legacy, his future marketing potential and income, and donations to his foundation.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t ever expect him to come clean, just doesn’t seem he’s nearly introspective enough. And that’s too bad, because I’d gain some respect for him if he did. Of course, my acceptance and approval are meaningless compared to the rewards of self acceptance.

We’re all Tiger Woods Now

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

Remember how the 1992 “Dream Team” waltzed through the Olympic basketball competition on their way to their gold medal? Fast forward to 2004 when the US lost three times and settled for bronze. Fast forward some more to today. A Sports Illustrated mock NBA draft shows five of the first eight teams taking international players.

What about golf? There are four U.S. players among the top ten, and with Woods dropping fast, that will probably be three soon.

Tennis? The top U.S. player, Mardy Fish, is ranked #10, Roddick is #11, and then you have to scroll down to #26 before finding another American.

Soccer? FIFA has the U.S. ranked 22nd in the world.

The marathon? The first 14 are East African and 65 of the top 100 are Kenyan.

Long distance triathlon? Linsey Corbin, from Montana, is ranked 7th, the only American woman in the top 10. Timothy O’Donnell is tied for tenth among the men.

The most recent international test scores (NAEP) were recently published. In math and reading, U.S. students are in the middle of the pack among students from OECD countries. In science, back of the pack.

People suffering from acute “greatestcountryintheworldhysteria” will look hard to find different competitions we’re winning (personal debt, football by default since hardly anyone else plays it, health care inflation, gun ownership, fossil fuel usage, military spending). While their parochial heads are buried in the sand, more and more of the world supersedes us in classrooms and on athletic fields.

We’re all Tiger Woods now. The rest of the world isn’t the least bit intimidated. All young international students and athletes want is the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with us.

The Satisfaction Treadmill

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

I’m a third of the way into William B. Irvine’s excellent book, “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”. Irvine “plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.”

The first “Stoic psychological technique” is negative visualization or regularly contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. There are several reasons to practice negative visualization, but the main one is “We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.” Psychologists refer to this as hedonic adaptation. We experience hedonic adaptation when we make consumer purchases, in our careers, and in our relationships. Irvine writes, “As a result of the adaptation process, people find themselves on a satisfaction treadmill.”

He adds: One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get. And because we have probably failed to take such steps in the past, there are doubtless many things in our life to which we have adapted, things that we once dreamed of having but that we now take for granted, including, perhaps, our spouse, our children, our house, our car, and our job. This means that besides finding a way to forestall the adaptation process, we need to find a way to reverse it. . . . The Stoics thought they had an answer to this question. They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would.

Irvine goes on to contrast two fathers–one who periodically reflects on his child’s mortality and the second who refuses to entertain such gloomy thoughts. The second father assumes his child will outlive him and that she will always be around for him to enjoy. The first father, he concludes, will almost certainly be more attentive and loving than the second.

So far, I’m down with modern Stoicism. Even though I’m probably more contemplative than the average bear, the notion of a satisfaction treadmill resonants with me. I take things for granted that I know I shouldn’t, especially my health; my family’s health; my material well-being; my work; and a promising future. I experience wake-up calls—the literal phone call of my father’s sudden death tops that list, the death of a neighbor’s child from leukemia, stories of cyclists getting hit and killed, and more subtle nudges like illness, and job loss and home foreclosure stories.

My take-away from the chapter on negative visualization is to be much more intentional about reflecting on the bad things that can, and in many cases ultimately will, happen to me. Stop depending on being surprised by late night emergency phone calls, and instead, make time every day or week to reflect on losing the things I most value—my family’s health, my marriage, my health, our friends, our home.

And, of course, my faithful Pressing Pause readers.

Cry Freedom

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

I was running with a friend one early morning recently when he started complaining about the gradual, seemingly inevitable, decline of freedom in the U.S. It takes a whole village, government intrusion, I’ve heard it all before, but this time I snapped.

“FOR EXAMPLE?” “Well, making fast food restaurants list the calorie count for every item on their menus.” “Wow, that is egregious, giving consumers more information to make better decisions. Maybe we should go into grocery stores and remove the same nutritional information from all the canned goods and other items. What else?” “Forcing people to wear helmets.”

I guess he’s correct, if by freedom we mean more specifically the right to eat crap without knowing it and the right to crack our heads open when we fall off our bicycles and motorcycles.

Then over breakfast, I kicked on National Public Radio and listened to Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera’s story. Nabagesera has just been awarded an international human rights award for fighting for LGBT rights in Uganda where homosexuality is illegal. Earlier this year, her closest colleague, David Kato, was killed, most people believe, for being openly gay.

And then we have the stirring examples of Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemenis, and Syrian democracy protestors willing to die so that their fellow citizens might have the right to assemble, vote, and speak freely.

The U.S. is imperfect, but thanks to our constitution, we can assemble, vote, and speak freely about our right to eat crappy food and crack our heads open. And we can choose where and how to live, work, worship, and raise our children. We can criticize our elected officials without fear of reprisal and we can tweet and blog until our heart’s content.

Maybe Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly should lead an Arab Awakening tour abroad so that my right wing nutter friend and his friends can better appreciate the freedom they seemingly take for granted.

A Paradoxical, Pervasive Prejudice

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

Most people want to be far wealthier, but dislike the wealthy.

What do you know about the wealthy? Do you know many well-to-do people? Know enough, well enough, to generalize about them?

Like old age, the notion of “wealth” is of course relative. Since 1970, Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy has conducted several studies of the wealthy. Mostly recently, they asked 165 households with at least $25 million in assets to write freely about how prosperity has shaped their lives and those of their children. Their average net worth was $78m, with two being billionaires.

The results of the study are not yet public, but The Atlantic was granted access to portions of the research which form the basis of Graeme Wood’s April essay titled, “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich“.

Fascinating read. The bottom line, to paraphrase Woods, the respondents turn out to be a generally dissatisfied lot, whose money has contributed to deep anxieties including a sense of isolation, worries about work and love, and fears for their children.

A few excerpts:

• A vast body of psychological evidence shows that the pleasures of consumption wear off through time and depend heavily on one’s frame of evidence. Most of us, for instance occasionally spoil ourselves with outbursts of deliberate and perhaps excessive consumption: a fancy spa treatment, dinner at an expensive restaurant, a shopping spree. In the case of the very wealthy, such forms of consumption can become so commonplace as to lose all psychological benefit: constant luxury is, in a sense, no luxury at all.

• Among other woes, the survey respondents report feeling that they have lost the right to complain about anything, for fear of sounding—or being—ungrateful.

• The poor-little-rich-kid retort is so obvious—and seemingly so sensible—that the rich themselves often internalize it, and as a result become uncomfortable in their interactions with the non-wealthy. Once people cross a certain financial threshold, they have a tendency to hang out with one another, to enjoy the company of other people who know that money relieves some burdens but not others.

Interesting how clearly the poor-little-rich-kid retort shapes the comments at the end of Wood’s essay.

Our church has recently updated its “welcoming” statement which reads: We welcome all people—the poor and the rich; the young and the old; people who are single, married, blessed, divorced, separated, partnered, or widowed; people of all abilities; people of all sexual orientations and gender identities; and people of all nations and ethnic backgrounds.

Some probably assume the rich may not need as warm a welcome as the other referenced people and groups. But Boston College’s “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth” study suggests they do.

Understanding, care, and empathy shouldn’t be rationed out as zero-sum qualities.