Success as Joy and Meaning

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Last week’s wisdom came in practical form from Gretchen Rubin. This week’s comes in more theoretical form from someone else, a guy named James B. Comey. 

“Let me start by defining what I mean by successful. I don’t mean making a lot of dough. A lot of successful people make a lot of dough, but a lot of people with dough are not successful the way I’ve defined it. Successful people are those who have lived lives of achievement - certainly - but also lives of joy and meaning. That’s what I mean by success.”  - James B. Comey

Now, James B. Comey is not a baker. So you can be sure that the dough he’s talking about is not the stuff you use to make pancakes and bread and cake. James B. Comey is a lawyer, the one time United States Deputy Attorney General, and the current director of the FBI. So the dough he’s talking about is the kind you see in suitcases opened in dark alleys and back rooms of strip clubs and anonymous hotel rooms. The paper kind. 

Nevertheless, his whole point is that success is NOT about money. So I don’t know why I’m focusing on it. Probably because I’m a lesser human than James B. Comey. I certainly have less dough than he. Although, according to Studies (with a capital-S), we really do need much less dough than we think to satisfy ourselves, and I know I have reached that level. It can be hard, though, to let go of the idea that money will be the answer. It’s a bit like sugar in that you have some and you want more and more. 

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But listen to James B. Comey’s wisdom on how to live a life of joy and meaning. I know I have. I think he’s onto something. There are five attributes of successful people that help them live those lives.  And they are all things we can develop.

1. Emotional intelligence
2. Judgement 
3. Effective communication
4. Dare to Be Dumb
5. Reputation is a Brick Mansion

Let’s look at them a little more closely.

Emotional Intelligence. Reams of writing exists on this topic, but it boils down to this. Emotional intelligence is “seeing ourselves and feeling what others feel.” Empathy is its root. And you can develop empathy by being a good listener. “So listen 1000 times; think 100 times; speak once.”

Judgement. By judgement, Comey means, “how to think about what you’re doing and learn from it.” It comes from developing emotional intelligence, from thinking about experiences, from love, from getting enough sleep, and from stepping away from your routine. Sharpening the saw , as Stephen Covey said. 

Effective Communication. This means thinking about what you want to say, but also about how you want to say it - and also to remember that your audience is probably only halfway willing to attend to your words, so you’ve got to grab ‘em. Comey says, “The goal of the speaker is to stop the listener from getting away.”

Wait! Come back, Readers! I’m almost done!

Dare to be Dumb.  That means what it seems like it means. Don’t be afraid to ask if you don’t get something. Assume that if you don’t understand something, many other people also don’t understand it and will be glad you asked. Now, I did this once. I think it was in 8th grade, at my new fancy prep school, where I asked what the term “Parts of Speech” meant. I’ll be honest. I felt like an ass. And in fact, I ended up in the teacher’s office after class, because actually everyone else in the class already knew the term. Fortunately, I proved that I knew the parts of speech - I just didn’t know they were called “parts of speech,” and everything progressed from there. Downhill. But whatever. Dare to be dumb, people, even if every ounce of your pride tells you not to take that dare. “Have the confidence to be humble,” says Comey. It took me a few years after that 8th grade experience, but I got there again.

Reputation is a brick mansion. I like this one a lot. According to Comey, most people think of reputation as a mansion, “built one room at a time.” Instead, it is built a brick at a time. “Every human encounter is a brick.” So you want to make sure each brick is solid. That builds a solid reputation. 

I think it’s good advice. What about you?

A Conversation with Gretchen Rubin on Success & Happiness

Four years ago, a friend sent me The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin, author of several books, blogger at her popular blog, and co-star with her sister of the podcast Happier. I was going through a rotten time in my life, feeling like a failure, and the book took me by surprise. It inspired me to apply Gretchen’s idea of studying happiness to the question of how I could redefine success. I began reading up on the topic and blogging about it. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit with Gretchen Rubin  - in person - and ask her about success.

The New York Times described Gretchen Rubin as “the queen of self-help.” That’s a darn good moniker. I myself think of her as “the Martha Stewart of happiness.” Like Martha with her practical advice to create the Good Life, Gretchen tackles practical ways to create the happy one. But she’s a lot wonkier, i.e., more intellectual, than Martha. I had the good luck to review her latest book, Better Than Before, which is all about habits and how they contribute to or detract from happiness. She’s great at illuminating home truths we take for granted – for example, if something is easy to do we are more likely to do it.

However, her particular genius is breaking down complex ideas into practical, useful tips. She eschews deep introspection. We couldn’t be more different. If I have a genius, it’s for existing in a state of conflict or ambivalence, and examining all facets of it. Then making fun of myself.

What is success? What makes you feel successful? And how can you tweak the definition so that you can feel successful even if you actually, well, fail? These are the questions that led me to the small office at Politics and Prose Bookstore in my hometown, Washington, DC, sitting at a round table with the Queen of Self Help. She was generous with her time and her enthusiasm*, and offered some interesting ideas for me to consider, which I am now passing along to you, Readers.

Although before I get to the good stuff, let me just come right out and say this. I learned the hard way the first rule of interviewing, which is as follows:

Shut up so your interviewee can talk.

Okay, I’m no expert, so I don’t know if this is the first rule, but it should be. I tell you this after listening to the recording of my conversation with Gretchen Rubin. She talked, she responded, but oh my, so did I. Yes, I was aware, even as it happened, that she was drawing ME out, and yet still I talked on. Was I afraid of silence? Maybe that was it. Maybe that she herself was interested in probing ME was gratifying. That probably contributed to my blathering. Nevertheless, our conversation was revealing.

5 Tibetans

By J. Lunau (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Readers, things are looking good. I’ve got my chakras spinning in the right direction. They’re
opening up. Life force is flowing through me. I’m going to live forever.

No, seriously, I do have my chakras spinning in the right direction. I didn’t know they spun, but apparently they do. Counter-clockwise. That’s right. I know this because down the Twitter feed one day came a link to a video on the 5 Tibetan Rites, and I followed that link to YouTube, where I wasted – spent – a good amount of time watching people performing these "rites", also known as exercises, and giving some countermanding advice, one to the other. Spin clockwise. Spin counter-clockwise. Palms up - no, down. Do everything quickly.  Do everything slowly. There are many opinions. Of course, Dr. Oz is in on it. But still, I gleaned that my chakras need to spin for me to be eternally youthful, at least until the moment I am no longer.

Then I went to Pilates and asked my fabulous teacher if he knew about the 5 Tibetans. I could tell he would be into it, because along with Pilates, he practices yoga and meditates. And now he has me  implementing what he learned at a class on the Alexander Method. He's the kind of person who exercises while watching TV. That would not fly in my house, let me tell you. The husband would not be happy. Anyway, Brian hadn’t heard about them, but assured me he would look it up. Maybe this week, we’ll incorporate some spinning work into our Reformer stuff.

I won’t go into the whole 5 Tibetans, I’ll let you look them up, just like Brian. Suffice it to say that they come to us via some American who encountered an Englishman who traveled to Tibet in the early 1900s and met a lama (not a llama, a lama), so you can see that this information comes directly from The Source. Anyway, apparently this lama offered to show the English gent a yoga routine that only takes a few minutes but will allow you to live forever. Or at least very healthily until you are dead. The lama was unmentionably old, apparently, possibly Abrahamic in his age. But very youthful.

I have incorporated the 5 Tibetans into my morning routine. An abundance of caution, or superstition, or that awful feeling you get when you get a chain letter or email has led me to it. Don't pass up this chance for eternal youthfulness until you are dead or you'll be sorry. And dead.

So, now, after my sun salutations and my physical therapy stretches - because I don’t want to break the chain, the Seinfeld chain, of successive days I’ve done sun salutations - I spin counterclockwise and so on.  And I feel great (except for the few recent days when I felt sick and had a fever, but never mind). And my hair isn't grey.

The 5 Tibetans remind me of a move from Masunaga's Zen Imagery Exercises. What are those, you say? Well, back in the 1990s, one of my roommates dated a modern dancer and this dancer had a teacher who introduced her to these exercises that were supposed to get the chi flowing through all your meridians and guarantee eternal life and so on. Or at least get your chi flowing. I did those for awhile, and then life went on. The chi flowed. However, my back gave out, due to my repetitive stress injury from my boring data entry job, my roommate broke up with the dancer, and the dancer moved on. Where are you, Joy? 

What is the point here, you wonder? Well, I torment my family with these words of wisdom, "It is almost always better to exercise." Regular exercise has been part of my life forever. And that is my point, Readers. Exercise is elemental to success. 

Cool the Hot, Heat the Cool: Successful Self-Control

So, with thoughts of riots in Baltimore and conflicting reports of how they started and who was doing what violent and out of control thing, let me return to good old white guy Walter Mischel and his book The Marshmallow Test.

The test, as I have mentioned before, became misconstrued in the popular news as a definitive test. That is, people assumed that if a four-year-old could delay gratification long enough to win two marshmallows instead of one, that determined something fundamental about their self-control. The assumption was that self-control was of a fixed nature, probably genetically determined. Reams of anxiety built up around this question of delaying long enough to get into Harvard versus turning out to be a total wastrel – or perhaps, “thug,” a word that is getting much attention these days.

But it was not so. Mischel devoted his life to studying this marshmallow effect in various permutations, and he realized early on that self-control is something that can develop. It is not fixed. (Shades of good old Carol Dweck, one of his colleagues) And therefore, it can be taught. Self-control depends on executive function, and executive function can be developed. In short, Mischel learned that it is never too late to build up self-control.

So. While some four year olds might have an advantage with a marshmallow, that advantage might be more about being raised in an environment that is safe, consistent, and leads the child to trust the adult who says, this thing looks pretty good, but if you wait a while, you can have something even better. Children raised in middle class or higher homes, for the most part. Children raised in much more stressful and unsteady environments have a much harder time, not because there is something intrinsically less developed about their brains, but because their brains are overtrained to react quickly. Why is this?  

Psychologists talk about the brain having two systems. System 1 is impulsive (hot) and System 2 is more rational (cool). System 1 is related to that good old lizard brain, the part of the brain keyed to survival. The fight or flight system of arousal is part of System 1. System 1 is very attuned to stress, and stress, what Mischel calls “toxic stress”, is rampant amongst, for example, poor black children from violent neighborhoods….Remind you of anything in the news lately? These kids might just have a bit more trouble understanding that the adult who promises two marshmallows later is actually going to deliver. For these kids, it makes much more sense to just go for that one marshmallow that exists right now.

The fundamental principal of self-control is “cool the now, heat the later.” So cool the now, heat the later means to cool down System 1 long enough that System 2 can activate. This is difficult, because the hot system is all about now. Gimme now. Me want cookie. We tend to discount rewards that are delayed, even if we know, rationally, that they are good for us. Like going to the gym. We know without doubt that the future rewards of going to the gym are great – better health. But overcoming the immediate reward of relaxing, or not putting all the sweat and effort into your day, make the future reward seem much smaller than it actually is. Self-control is about reversing our natural tendency to make the later reward seem more appealing. It’s about using our Executive Function to help us make choices, rather than acting on impulse.

So how do you cool the now and heat the later? You have to exercise that Prefrontal Cortex and develop Executive Function. In general, relieving stress helps. So, you know, providing for the basic needs of every human would go a long way toward setting up people for success. For those already provided basic needs, reducing stress through exercise, solid supportive relationships, and – wait for it, even 84-year-old white guy Walter Mischel advocates this – meditation and mindfulness. Also therapy helps.

There are also specific strategies that build self-control.

• Distraction. (If I don’t look at the cookies, they won’t tempt me.)

• If-Then Implementation Plans. (If I am polite to others, then they will be polite to me.) (Usually.)

• Precommitment strategy. This is related to If-Then plans. (To help you quit smoking, you promise someone that if you smoke a cigarette, they will automatically send a check to a cause you despise – say, the NRA).

• Cognitive Reappraisal (That drink may seem like a treat, but imagine what it’s doing to your liver – picture yourself with end-stage cirrhosis, and it won’t seem like such good idea.)

If all these strategies seem draconian, and you’d just like to eat a damn marshmallow, I leave you with this:

 …. A life lived with too much delay of gratification can be as sad as one without enough of it. The biggest challenge for all of us – not just for the child – may be to figure out when to wait for more marshmallows and when to ring the bell and enjoy them. But unless we learn to develop the ability to wait, we don’t have that choice.
                                                - Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test.

Revisiting Old Haunts and Themes

Here’s what’s happening right now. The husband is scraping pumpkins with his fingernails. Why? Why, because we were so lame and laggard about buying pumpkins that the only ones he could find were painted. Consequently, he is scraping off the paint, in preparation for carving them. And I am watching. I mean, after handing him a scrubby and a steel wool pad to try. I’m not completely unhelpful, just ultimately so.

Last weekend was a long weekend for us. It kicked off Thursday morning, when one of us, I’m not saying which one, because it would be cruel, microwaved the butter. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that this was special, European (French) butter, imported in an aluminum foil wrapper. As A. A. Milne might have written, this person “did like a little bit of butter for [his or her] bread.” And wanted it softened. Didn’t remember, at the unseemly hour of before school began, that metal and microwaves don’t mix. The result was a noticeable pop, and a ball of flames inside the thousand-year-old microwave we’ve moved six times.

As is so often the case, especially with people, nothing seemed wrong with the microwave when you looked at it. However, mid-morning, when I wanted to reheat my coffee – I know, yuck, reheated coffee; what kind of connoisseur am I? Answer – no kind – the defects became apparent.

I’m liking this damaged people, damaged microwave analogy. I could really run with it. But is it what I want to get into? The point is, if there is a point, that once you get to know even those microwaves that look fully functional, those microwaves with deluxe features, even those combination convection oven-microwave ovens, their defects become apparent. So while you’re busy crossing the street to avoid those microwaves that are shouting obscenities and weaving in your path, the ones that usually cause the most trouble are those ones that short circuit from the inside. If you don’t unplug them, they’ll burn down your house.

Dark.

Anyhoo. Off we went to Boston, to visit colleges and friends. The trip to Boston was a success on several levels. One important one was that we all survived the weekend at our friends’ house without having any horrible intestinal illnesses.  I was kinda anxious about descending upon our friends A & T for the weekend, since we are four, and they are two. And the bathroom is one. But the real anxiety was the traumatic stress I suffered the last time we four stayed with A & T. To wit, the current 11^th grader was then in preschool and her sister was still sleeping in a Pack ‘n Play; some time in the late evening, the preschooler commenced vomiting, which she continued doing every forty-five minutes or less until we managed to load ourselves into our car and head back out the Mass Turnpike at 7:30 in the morning.

I have never recovered from this terrible experience. The guilt of inflicting ourselves on our friends. The whole thing was just, you know, yucky.

So I had residual apprehension about the four of us going there again, even though, mirabile dictu, this didn’t cause our friendship to end, even though A & T remained undeterred in their decision not to have children. Perhaps this episode underscored for them the rightness of this choice. I can’t say. What I can say is that, while since then, I have slept under their roof and they under ours, this particular sleeping arrangement had not occurred in the intervening twelve or thirteen years. 

Now, we have cancelled out the past, with a successful visit, during which nothing untoward happened, unless you consider the children observing the adults acting like, uh, children, children who drink lots of beer, untoward. 

All of this dwelling on the dark and negative, Readers, has a point. The point is that sometimes negative thinking can lead to success. I was reminded of this by a recent piece in the NYTimes, “The Problem With Positive Thinking.” This piece reminded me of two things I’ve learned. One, that an idea worth writing about once is worth writing about repeatedly. It’s worth revisiting, like Boston.  Or your fears. This is good news, don’t you think? I do. Two, this idea that “the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook,” has often prevented me from feeling like I can succeed. You see, I have a bit of a problem with the cultivation and doggedness of optimism. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that I am, at heart, an optimist. And I may, indeed be. However, I am learning that this buried nugget of optimism is not what my closest and dearest friends associate with me. It may be too well-buried.

For example, just this weekend, gathered ‘round the dining room table with our friends, spurred by a glass or two of Italian wine, I remarked that I think I’m fairly optimistic.

“You are?” One of my so-called friends said, in an insulting tone of incredulity.

I said, “Well, it’s true that the husband and I often have different reactions to the same stimulus.” Well, those weren’t my exact words. Who can recall exactly what one says when one is drinking Italian wine? More or less, I said that for example, when I see our dog lying with his head on his paws, I’m filled with a terrible feeling that he’s bored and unstimulated. “Look at that poor, miserable doggie,” I’ll say, and feel that I have to do something to make him feel better. The husband, on the other hand, comes into the room, looks at the dog in the same pose and says, “Look at how happy he looks.” Then he goes off to play the piano, or do a crossword puzzle, without a nagging feeling of guilt and failure.

I have felt much shame about that negative tendency in myself, thinking it has doomed me to failure. However, the beauty of this article was that it revisited this idea and declared it untrue. It turns out that positive thinking can cause a person to relax , to lose energy, and therefore to lose motivation.

Now, this idea isn’t actually new. Two of my favorite psychologists, Carol Dweck and Heidi Grant Halvorsen, PhD, her onetime protégé, are big into how your mindset affects your ability to achieve success. HGH, PhD, in particular, has examined the ways that accepting your tendency towards pessimism can help you attain success. In other words, if you’re going to be a negative thinker, use that to your advantage, by figuring out what obstacles may interfere with you reaching your goal, and how to overcome them.

According to this new article in the NYTimes, the best approach to a goal is twofold, a technique called “mental contrasting.” In mental contrasting, you balance positive and negative thinking. You envision a positive outcome; but you also consider the potential obstacles. You are, in short, hopeful, but also realistic. I think I’m that. Maybe. After my morning affirmations.

One key to the success of mental contrasting as a tool, however, is that you must be going for “reasonable, potentially attainable wishes.”

Hmmmm. How the heck are we to know what’s reasonable and potentially attainable for us? Beats me. I guess that’s another article. C’mon, NYTimes, help me out!

By the way, I lasted five days without a microwave. Three of those days we were out of town.

Nap Your Way to Success. Or Death.

First off, I would like to thank my Aunt and Uncle Wisdom for urging me to take Prednisone. My poison ivy is waning. My cold and sore throat are now gone. And despite my father’s suggestion that I share a photograph of the disgusting skin on my arm where the rash used to be, I’m going to pass. Once again, I’m proving there are limits to my exhibitionism.

Second off, I’ve been binging on the - what shall I call it? - the Self-Care, the Maintenance, and it’s got to stop. Physical therapy, regular therapy, facials, waxing, hair cuts, Pilates. A massage. I’m living like a millionaire, which I’m not. I have so many appointments I hardly have a free day anymore. Mix in the repairs for the screen door that the dog barreled through last week, the sprinkler system, the need to locate an orange-and-black bandanna for the 11^th grader’s school spirit day and so on, and there’s no time. So I’m dialing it back. Especially since I have to take a nap almost every morning. I think that’s due to the Prednisone, which keeps me awake at night. By the morning, it has worn off, so once I take care of the morning duties – lunches, breakfasts, carpools, dog feeding, and so one, I have to snooze.

  

So let’s talk about naps, Readers. Do you nap? I am a long time napper. I have never felt any guilt about napping. Okay, why do I even bother to write that? For heaven’s sake, I feel guilt about everything I do that seems unproductive, and napping tops the list. Let’s be real.

What I should have said was I never felt anything else besides guilt about napping, at least not until recently. I read an article in the NYTimes about nappers being more likely to die in the next bunch of years than non-nappers. After that, I saw a couple more mentions of the negative correlations between napping and mortality. I tried to ignore them, because what good does it do me to wish all my naps unnapped? However, ignoring links to mortality doesn't come easily to me. Therefore, now I have guilt and FEAR about napping. Why else would I need so much Self Care?

The good news is that there have been at least as many recent articles about the benefits of napping. Napping, staring-off-into-space, and vacationing (if you can afford that) improve creativity, stimulate creativity. In fact, apparently if we all "set aside time for naps and contemplation, we will be in a more powerful position to start solving some of the world’s big problems.” (NYTimes 8/10/14 SR5)

So this created a quandary. Nap and die or repair the world? Is it really one or the other? I did a search on “napping and early death,” and discovered this: study. (http://www.newser.com/story/185252/napping-linked-to-early-death-study.html.) The article's upshot is that people who nap for more than one hour a day seem to have a higher chance of mortality in a certain number of years, for various possible reasons. HOWEVER, those who nap for less than an hour show no increase. Well, Thanks God, as my sister the psychoanalyst has begun to say. You see, I’m a power napper. Twenty minutes on the couch leave me better than new.  

And this whole nap equals death thing is, empirically speaking, a crock. I mean, my father is a napper. He’s the king of the power nap. I have a strong memory, dating back at least four decades, of him napping on the couch with one foot on the floor. He’s 89 now, and still snoozling.

In defense of my nap habit, I offer that information. I also offer the rationale that sitting down to write something creative when you’re really tired is mighty hard. It's almost as hard as sitting down to do deadly boring work like data entry; which, I know from experience, is a strong soporific. I believe if I look closely I can still see indentations in my cheeks from many power naps I took during my days as a library assistant at the Mothership* Library.

Finally, I also recently read a tidbit about the so-called caffeine nap. I thought I was the only one who experienced this phenomenon; namely, falling into a nice snooze directly upon finishing a cup of coffee. It seems I am not the only one. The caffeine nap seems to be a thing. The article offered a neurobiochemical explanation for why, which I will paraphrase, probably incorrectly - but who's to know? Apparently, a short nap clears some kind of gunk from the synapses and makes room for something else to glom onto them, something that makes you more alert. And for some miraculous reason, caffeine helps the brain clear the gunk from the synapses along with the napping. So sip and nap, my friends. 

The key to a power nap is that foot on the floor, or an equivalent - a keyboard, or a semi-full bladder - something that doesn't let you get too comfortable. That is some self care I can afford - and you can, too. 

*That's Widener Library, Harvard University.

8 Things I Took Away from My Weekend with Oprah and 1 I Did Not

There she is, from the plebe seats.

Monday. Returned late last night from my Oprah weekend in Washington. To find nothing had changed. Literally. The freshly folded clean towels were still sitting on the coffee table, along with an empty glass and an opened but empty padded envelope that were there when I left. The clean laundry I’d folded and carried upstairs was still in the basket, no longer folded. Etc.

Ok, to be fair, I must say that there were groceries. But there were also piles of unwashed laundry, the stuff that usually gets done because I either do it, or tell someone else to do it. Why is this? Because I’m the mother. And I was away. Did I leave the offspring to fend for themselves? No, I did not. The husband was there. So there’s pizza wrapped up in the fridge. Ok, shut up. Stop complaining. My point here is really not that the husband didn’t do the chores. It’s that the husband didn’t do the chores. But in a different way. He took the kids on a hike, for example. He took advantage of the good weather and did something fun. Ain’t that the way with dads? The result is that I go away and return to semi-disaster, and the kids don’t even miss me.

Krikey.

Maybe I should be grateful. I was talking to someone who told me that when her kids were little, and she went away, they would punish her when she returned. They would act out, refuse to speak to her, misbehave. Anything to let her know they were not happy.

Weds. Both children have had emotional breakdowns over different topics, birds among them. So perhaps they are punishing me after all.

But I digress. I guess it’s not a digression, since I haven’t even gotten to the topic yet. It’s a delay. I delay. I withhold.

Okay, Readers, yes, I went to Oprah’s The Life You Want traveling revival event in Washington last weekend. How did it happen? Groupon, through a friend of a friend, and a “what the hell” moment. Most anyone I told that I was going to Oprah’s The Life You Want reacted with disbelief and ridicule. Yes, ridicule. You thought you were veiling it, friends. It was unveiled. But whatever. I went in an anthropological mood. And, since you won’t admit you’d like to know what I learned, I’ll give you a few highlights. Because I am transformed and enlightened now, and am no longer petty.

1. Oprah: Put on your oxygen mask first. Also, airlines tell you to do this. They mean it literally.

2. Elizabeth Gilbert: Listen for the whispers of your calling/quest.  Slow down so you can hear. And when you hear it, you’ll feel afraid, but don’t make your fear precious. It doesn’t need special handling. It’s just fear. Everyone has it.

3. Mark Nepo: There’s a Sioux saying that the longest journey is from your head to your heart.

This one resonated so much with me while I was in the arena; but when I related it to someone who wasn’t there, she asked, “What does that mean? How do you do it?”

 Damned if I know. It’s pretty typical of my moments of inspiration that when I examine them more closely, their impact dissipates, like a hologram, maybe.

4. Soul Cycle: Change your body, change your mind, change your life. We had a 15 minute aerobic exercise session in our arena seats, and it was a great reminder of how fun it is to move to loud music, pump your arms, and scream.

5. Oprah: you are the master of your life. Create a vision of what you need and want, and put it out There. If you’re clear about it, the universe will give you back clarity. This, by the way, is another hologrammatic saying, I find. Or a tautology. Yes, I think that’s it.

6. Iyanla Vanzant: Friends tell you what you might not wanna hear. Life is your friend. Life teaches you lessons all the time. Have a spiritual practice – praise life, be grateful for it. And drink something that looks like champagne in front of a large arena crowd, ‘cuz they like it that you’re rich. Manage to be also homey and comfy sounding.

7. Also Oprah: Make a paradigm shift in your thoughts, because what you say and think is who you are. For example, go from “I’m tired” to “I’m waiting on my second wind.”

8. The whole event was like a 19^th century revival meeting with Oprah as the preacher. She travels around and offers spiritual uplift. People get carried away by the group feeling. The language was incantatory, repetitive, and spiritual, although mostly religiously nonspecific.

Oprah is one hard-working woman.

Dots of light from cool wristbands we all got with our tickets

After the Oprah event, I spent much wonderful, close time hugging and playing with my niece and nephew. Real quality time having my eyeball and my tongue photographed on my sister-the-psychoanalyst’s phone, reading aloud, heads together. Stuff like that. Stuff you love. Until you discover that they have lice.

Then we all spent several hours with Janice, of Lice Happens, while she checked us for nits and critters and did her delousing. I was declared free of lice, and headed home. And now I have a nasty cold.

Connecting to Success

Empty Kong

Hi, Readers. I don’t know how it is in your neck of the woods, but up here we’ve come to the end of the first full week back in school after winter vacation. After lapsing into my preferred sleep schedule of approximately 11:30 pm to 7:30 am for two weeks, shoehorning myself back into the necessity of rising at 6 am has produced predictable results. I’m tired. I have insomnia. And because I’m tired and have insomnia, I’m also worrying about whether I have, say, a small arterial dissection that will cause me to collapse while driving children to or from an event from a bleed into my brain. You know, that kind of thing. Perks of being married to a neurologist…. I know just enough – and not enough at all.

I just returned home from purchasing tickets to the middle school musical. Advance ticket sales, don’t you know. The 6^th grader is in the chorus as a jungle animal. I’m supposed to do make-up for the show, but naturlich we have schedule conflicts. The 10^th grader has to go to NYC for several auditions for summer ballet programs and of course they conflict with the middle school musical and its dress rehearsal. But not to worry. Perhaps that arterial dissection will take care of everything.

Anyhoo, as I was saying, I just returned home. There I discovered the dog licking peanut butter off of the side of a cabinet and from a wide swath of kitchen floor. The 10^th grader was supposed to give him his Kong with said peanut butter before she left for dance. The question is, how did it get from the Kong onto the cabinet? Did she hurl it? The Kong I mean? These are mysteries awaiting clarification.

Otherwise, all my news comes from the media, and only a little bit of it relates to success. Today is the 10^th anniversary of Spalding Gray’s disappearance that turned out to be his death by suicide. I used to love Spalding Gray. He was so funny and original. I saw him in San Francisco. I had a fever, but I went anyway. Sorry audience members on whom I breathed. He was an inspiration to me. I thought perhaps I had a way to tell something autobiographical, too. Perhaps on stage. I took some improv classes. Then I decided it wasn’t such a good idea to become too worshipful of or fascinated by people who are depressive and neurotic. On edge. Obsessive. Narcissistic, perhaps. People who are involved in their own problems. Who are open about them. Who turn pain into humor.

On a totally different subject, did anyone else read that piece in the Style section of the New York Times on Martha Stewart’s beauty regimen? That lady has been to jail and back. She’s got some stunning self -confidence. Or something. Not sure what. Maybe it’s another c-word. Shut up, I mean cahones, Readers! No, I guess she doesn’t have those. But I think my sister-in-law may be right, I ought to start getting facials. Martha’s been doing it for forty-five years. I just use my tube of prescription retin-A cream. And sunscreen. I don’t have to worry about putting a sunhat over my riding helmet, as Martha does, since I don’t ride. Not since old Taffy, at sleepover camp. There’s a terrific picture of me with a glorious Morgan. I’m in my glory, too: gold granny glasses, braids, braces, and a t-shirt with bottle caps on it. The horse was a marvel. I never rode her. She was too lively. I preferred Taffy. Aptly named. Or she grew to embody her name, as some people do. She was twenty-eight and so slow she wouldn’t even take a step unless you showed her the switch.

No, I’m no equestrian.

Are you still reading? Well here’s a little bit on success. Yesterday I went to NIA class at the Y. After class I fell into conversation with the instructor, who’s a friend. We were standing outside the locker room when another friend came out of the locker room. So the three of us stood around for a good while chatting. I felt happy and knitted in to a community when I left the building and headed into the cold for my car. 

On the radio someone was talking about research on nostalgia. Apparently, research shows that nostalgia creates feelings of connection to others and that connection to others promotes self- esteem.  How serendipitous. I was a living example. Yes, I thought, connection to others does promote self-esteem. And self-esteem is key to feeling successful. I'm distinguishing between feeling successful and appearing successful, which can be two different things. I’m not saying you’ll never achieve anything, self-esteem or no. Plenty of people who are empty inside try to make themselves feel better by becoming public achievers. However, if you don’t feel you have value as a being, then no amount of achievement is going to penetrate and make you feel good.

There are a couple of distressing implications of this new report. For one - apparently - it suggests that if you have a sense of connection to others, and therefore healthy self-esteem, then who needs achievements? You can revise your novel for twenty years, or keep writing those stories that you file away in a drawer and it doesn’t matter. ‘Cuz you have fwends. Furthermore, if all you need to feel you have connection to others is to delve into nostalgia, then who needs actual friends? You can just pull out those old yearbooks and remember the people you used to know.

Dear me. I seem to have unraveled something positive.

Ahem.

But let me not shy away from Spalding Gray and my fascination with miserable wretches. My love affair with the messed up and depressed. Eventually I realized that hooking myself to these folks in pursuit of a creative identity was a dead end. I grew wary. Much as I admire his honest and humorous self expression, I don’t want to be like Spalding. A person who couldn’t take comfort in his connections. He made me feel connected to him; but he had trouble connecting to others. He was successful in art, but not in life. That’s not a trade off I want to make.

To-Do Lists and Stairway to Paradise

I feel mired this week. I just can’t seem to get anything done. The to-do list keeps splintering into ever more branches.  Our drying rack broke, necessitating a boring, stupid errand to replace it, but a simple one. You would think. But there doesn’t seem to exist a replacement for it. I went to Lowe’s, but the racks there were too small. So I went to Walmart, and I found one, except all the boxes were open or dented; plus, it needed assembly. Nevertheless, I selected the least-dented box and I traipsed the miles of registers to find one open and discovered the only open ones were at the farthest point from the door near which I’d parked and they all had several people in line. For some reason, I hadn’t taken a cart when I entered the emporium, so I was carrying this box. All that traveling and carrying gave me time to think, and what I thought was that I had no interest in buying a box of aluminum rods that would have to be assembled. The result would undoubtedly be a rickety, poor replacement for the fantastic, most perfectest laundry drying rack ever created. Except that it broke, so it wasn’t perfect. But it was closer to perfect than the dented box of aluminum rods in my arms, and also, come to think of it, less broken than that, too. After all, last I saw it, my broken drying rack was mostly assembled. So I left the box and marathoned my way back across the store and went home. Energy and time expended, job still undone.

The week has been like that.

Add to that my new normal sleep pattern, which seems to be a decent night’s sleep on alternate nights, interwoven with total wide awake insomnia on the other nights. Thank you, perimenopause.

Then there was the realization that I’ve been operating as chauffeur without the full schedule of events for the 10^th grader’s ballet because we were out of town for a particular meeting at which a particular list of events was distributed; and because the parent who is in charge of distributing updates and information via email is a little bit distracted this year because her child is applying to college. So I had to scramble for information and rides and then ask for the missing list. Which I have yet to input into my electronic calendar or my marvelous new planner made out of paper. Then there was an email listing exactly sixty three trillion and seven soccer practices, which I have yet to input. That’s for the 6^th grader. Who also just auditioned for the school musical and now will have to check the website every day for those practices. Do I need to reschedule French horn lessons?

There was more. So much more. Yet nothing accomplished. Kind of like the government, if you think about it. And kind of like a government employee, I was working without pay.

But you don’t come here to read my complaints, Readers. I’m aware that my life is good. Despite these periods of churning and frustration, things are okay. Sure, I’d like a little more consistent sleep. Sure, I’d like never to step foot in Walmart again.  Sure, I’d like to publish a book and earn some money. Sure, I understand the latter is not contingent upon the former. I do have a spiffy new planner that has lots of list-making space. I'll start by updating my to-do list. And if I’ve learned anything about life on this journey to perimenopause, it’s that when I feel mired and unproductive, making a list is a first step towards feeling better. A list is like a ladder, if you think about it. So before you can put foot to rung, you’ve got to have a ladder. After that, it’s just one foot in front of the other.

Did I manage something profound? No? Well, I tried. Listen to Rufus. He's more entertaining than I.

Look, It's Me, With Wrinkles (But Who's Vain?) in the Huffington Post!

I'd be falling short in the department of self-promotion if I failed to mention that I have a new post in the Huffington Post. It's in their new Third Metric Section, which is devoted to redefining success to include more than just money and power. Not to worry, success does still include those two things; but it's the sustainable feeling of success we're after, and as all too many a morality tale has shown, you can have money and power and still not feel successful.

So here's the link:
Sustainable Success Lessons From Billy Jean King

If the post seems familiar, then good - that must mean you follow my blog, and I thank you! Because it's my last post, which I submitted to the Huff Post for approval last week. Sometimes, they don't approve my posts. For instance, my post on Borgen was a no go. Maybe it was too political? I don't know.

In any case, I'm thrilled to be published in the Huffington Post again!

5 Secrets of Success Illustrated by Billy Jean King

In 1973, when Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, I was an overexcited nine year old, more thrilled by the phrases “male chauvinist pig” and “battle of the sexes” than by the symbolism of the match. Nevertheless, the match imprinted on my brain as part of the general consciousness-raising that was going on in 1970s U.S. culture. Billy Jean King and Free To Be You and Me represented Women’s Lib to me. Forty years later, it turns out Billy Jean King (BJK) is an excellent example for me – for us – once again, this time of success redefined as extending beyond money and power.

She’s been in the news again lately, because it’s the fortieth anniversary of that famous tennis match, as well as of the founding of what became the Women’s Tennis Association, and of equal prize money awards for men and women at the U.S. Open, all things in which BJK was instrumental. She’s been interviewed in print, on radio, and on film, and her life story reads like a primer on success. So let’s look at what she can teach us.

First, there’s BJK the player of tennis. For starters, she won twenty Wimbledon trophies in singles and doubles, so that’s pretty great. In talking about how she prepared for a match, she said she used a lot of visualization. She would visualize all the things that could go wrong, and then she would visualize how she would handle them. She would think about all the elements that were out of her control, and then visualize how she would handle those.

During play, she would set practical, specific goals like returning a serve into a specific part of the court. She would picture where she wanted the ball to go as she hit it. Aside from her visualization, she focused on her side of the net, not on her opponent, on standing up tall, and on letting go of mistakes. She focused on the present. Key, she said, was to forget about the past and the future, and to focus only on what was happening in that moment. Voilá, much money and power eventually arrived.

Then there’s BJK off the court. This is where the story gets interesting. While she loved the game, and was a fierce competitor, she saw tennis as a platform. It was not the only thing that mattered to her. In fact, part of why tennis success mattered to her was that it provided her a way to promote the cause she most believed in: equality. She said, “I knew as a youngster I wanted to be No. 1 in tennis. I knew by 12 my platform would be tennis, but my real life was going to be wrapped around equality and social justice. I felt like I had a tremendous sense of destiny.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/2013/09/10/billie-jean-king-40th-anniversary-battle-of-the-sexes-bobby-riggs/2792861/)

Towards those ideals, BJK organized the first women’s tennis league, lobbied for sponsors, and worked hard to establish equal prize money for men and women and equal treatment on tennis tours.

Regarding that infamous match with Bobby Riggs, BJK says she never intended to play him, but then he played another top female player, Margaret Cort, and beat her. After that, BJK felt that she had to play him and she had to win. Why? Because she was working so hard to bring respect to the Women’s Tennis Association, which she helped found, and because Title IX had just passed, and she thought the cause of women’s lib and equality would be hurt if she didn’t. So this is significant because it shows her life’s work was in alignment with deep personal values linked to improving the world.

How did she accomplish so much? Did she arrive fully formed on a clam shell? Was she just a fluke, a tennis genius, a born leader? Certainly genetics came into play. But also, she had help. First, from parents who encouraged her athleticism. Later, when she became a leader among tennis players, her husband encouraged her to set up the women’s league. The common trope of success is “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” but this trope is a myth. Look behind – or beside – anyone with sustained, meaningful success and you will find that champions have champions urging them on.

Billy Jean King is a great role model for a sustainable, holistic definition of success that includes more than money and power. She pursued greatness on the court in service of her ideals, not just to win. Once she retired from professional play, she channeled her passion into a new, but related path, behind the scenes. She started co-ed World Team Tennis “the day she retired.” Professional team members include Venus Williams and Andy Roddick. It’s a place for amateurs and professionals to train, and BJK believes that having participants and spectators – families – children – experience men and women playing together teaches a broader lesson about equality.

Does she have power and money? Yes, you bet. But if power and money were the only important metrics to her, she could have quit long ago. Instead, she risked it all when she was outed as a lesbian in the early 1980s, and decided to open up about it. The result was that she lost all of her sponsorships. However, she continued to work towards her goals, recouped her money, and created a legacy as a fighter for social justice.

Laura Vanderkam, Ben Franklin, Mornings & Me

Right after I finished Laura Vanderkam’s What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast I think I went on a tear. Is that a thing you say? Went on a tear? I got in a mood. A bad mood. Why? A combination of things.  My professional life is stalled. (Here I resisted enclosing professional in quotation marks to indicate irony.) School starting. Owning a teenager. (“You don’t own me,” “Yes I do, until you are Of Age.”*) That sort of thing.

Into that blah mental field fell Laura Vanderkam’s book, about which I have two brief overarching comments. 

1. The short answer to the question, “What do the most successful people do before breakfast?” is –a heck of a lot more than I. 
2. This book should be on your avoid list if you are afraid of contemplating your mortality. Because if there’s one thing this book made me aware of in an uncomfortable way, it is the finite number of minutes we have. Period.

Which is why I went on a tear. A bender. An irritability bender, to be specific. Nothing as fun as an actual bender. Just a bender of being totally annoyed with my family, especially with the husband, for doing anything other than making the absolute most of every available moment to do something productive and meaningful. So, the sight of his neck bent over his phone – highly irritating. The children enjoying the last days of summer indoors, drawing on the white board– aggravating. Aggravating is really the wrong word, as we all learned when we practiced for the SAT, but still, it is perfect in its misused definition for my feeling. Although, come to think of it, perhaps my new dictionary now contains this definition of the word aggravate, since many people use it to mean annoy. 

I just checked. Yes, now this usage of the word is accepted. Sorry, Dad.

Anyhoo, reading in Vanderkam’s book, for example, that a week has 168 hours, that a weekend (from 6 pm Friday to 6 am Monday) has 60, and that “You have fewer than one thousand Saturdays with each child in your care before he or she is grown up,” grabbed my attention. That doesn’t sound like a lot of hours, especially to person like me who needs her free time. And there’s this passage:

If you’ve got young kids, it doesn’t take long to realize that there won’t be many Christmas seasons when the little ones will race downstairs in the morning to see what Santa brought. They won’t always be eaeger to bake with you…Eventually they won’t care if you don’t put up a giant tree or go caroling or make hot chocolate. They’ll allow you to beg off making a snowman because you’re tired. But there are only a few winters – and only a few days each winter – that your children will ask to make snowmen with you. Someday, perhaps, you will be staring at the snow from the too-simple room of a hospital or nursing home, dreaming of the days when making snowmen with your children was an option.

Kill me now. I mean, how many times have I opted out of a kid activity for a little sanity-making mommy time? Instead, I should have been soldiering on saying, “Screw downtime. The kids will be gone before you know it, so wait until then. You’ll have nothing but downtime.” Or, as my friend Phil used to say, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” He is doing that now, poor soul, and I am glad of every minute he stayed awake for me. So you can see why coming upon the husband hunched over his smartphone playing a game makes me bonkers. Make it worthwhile, mister, or don’t do it at all!

But I digress, Readers. You want to know what successful people – the most successful people - do before breakfast. Well, look, I think you can pretty much guess it.

1. They go to bed early and get up early. We’re talking 5 or 6 a.m. Six am is pushing it. Put it this way, if you awake after dawn you’ve overslept. 
2. They do things that require undivided attention and willpower, but that are still appealing. LV says they use this time for things that are “important but not urgent.” Exercise. Meditation. Planning for work. Writing. The willpower thing is key. Willpower is limited. Science has proved it. Science has also proved that, like any kind of energy, it depletes through overuse. But you can also strengthen it through practice. Thus, the best time to do things requiring willpower is in the morning, because your willpower is fresh then. Later in the day, if you’ve depleted your energy on urgent tasks, you will find it hard to motivate yourself to take on the important but not urgent ones.

There’s  a lot more in this book. The book is a combination of three e-books and it covers what the most successful people do before breakfast, on the weekends, and at work. And while it did drive me to despair – in combination with several other non-related things – I found it interesting. I might even have picked up a tip or two.

Would you now like to know what I do before breakfast? Just for comparison? If I haven’t had insomnia? Which reminds me that this book assumes people just go to sleep at their nice and early Benjamin Franklin bedtimes, and wake up rested and refreshed, just like the peddler in Caps for Sale. There’s nary a mention of insomnia. I guess the most successful people don’t have it. Or they take a pill – although this option is missing from the book.

Anyhoo, I awake to the sound of the husband’s alarm. I pull myself from sleep by thinking of things I’m grateful for. Sometimes these thoughts are more coherent than others. Sometimes they blend into dreams. Next, I do fifteen minutes of yoga, so I won’t crack in half, then stumble downstairs and drink a large glass of water. Donna Karan does this too, I was delighted to learn. The water drinking, I mean. She didn’t mention the stumbling. I make eggs for the 10^th grader, and lunches for both kids and the husband. I feed the dog in the manner prescribed by the $140 dollar per consultation dog trainer: To wit, I sprinkle his kibble on the lawn so that he can stimulate and satisfy his prey drive by working for his food. I check my email and the annoying Facebook while he does this. Then I call him in and dry off his paws. I drive the 6^th grader to school some mornings. Some mornings she gets a ride from the neighbors. Then I eat breakfast.

Then I nap. Which only proves the obvious point: I am not one of the most successful people. But I get the job done.

 *These quotation marks do not indicate any actual conversation between my teenager and me.

Arugula, Stoves, Sedaris, Success

FYI: One burner doesn't work....

Hello. Have we all been enjoying our arugula? C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Up and down the East Coast, which is where I've been, we've all taken a new interest in that particular leafy green, because we’ve all read that article in the paper about nutrient levels in leafy greens, and the most nutrient-filled is, yep, you know it, arugula. So don’t even pretend to have always loved it, just tuck into your arugula salads. I recommend a citrus twist. Yum. Just don’t think about that other news item  about how that final spritz of water that perks up our arugula before it arrives on the grocery store shelf contains, more often than it should, E. Coli and Campylobacter bacteria.

Anyhoo. I’ve been away, enjoying my arugula salad and otherwise vacationing. Since we last communicated, Readers, the husband, the 11-year-old, and I journeyed to pick up the 14-year-old from her ballet intensive. At least I think we picked up the 14 year old, although she appears to be a clone of the 14-year-old, a little taller, and a little tweaked, attitude-wise. But we persevered to the beach, and managed to close our garage door when we left the neighborhood. We're all getting used to one another again. Family dynamics have changed. 

Which seems like a good segueway to David Sedaris. Now, I’ve read a lot of definitions of success over the past two years, and I was not expecting anything about that topic from David Sedaris, but there I was, reading his latest book, when I came across something new. David and his boyfriend are driving around Australia with a friend, Pat, who invites them to picture a four burner stove on which one burner represents family, one friends, one health, and one work. To be successful, she says, you have to “cut off one of your burners. And to be really successful, you have to cut off two.”

So they each name the burner they've cut. David says it was friends, though he wasn’t proud of it, and also health, and his partner Hugh says it was work, which makes sense since he must travel around with David to David’s speaking engagements and therefore not have time for his own work; and their friend, a businesswoman with several homes and cars and what to David looks like success says family and health.

What do we think of this? This is so old school. This stove is a pot-bellied one and the analogy is, too. I mean, c’mon. What a narrow definition of success that is. One that excludes maintaining health and human connections. What would Arianna Huffington say about it? Where’s that Third Metric? Although, honestly, we all fear that David’s friend Pat is right – and by we I mean I – that to manifest material success requires singlemindedness, and that singlemindedness requires cutting out those pesky distractions like taking care of your body and meaningful connections to other people, related to you by blood, affection, or both. And vice-versa. Pat’s definition is what landed me in trouble, so feh – I reject it! Maybe we need to let a few things simmer on low while we bring others to the boil; but cutting off a whole burner? Bad idea.

When I started this success blog, I’d done that. I’d cut out work. Yes, yes, I was working – I was being a full time mom – but I wasn’t developing my professional self. I don’t want to wade into the quagmire of seeming to suggest motherhood isn’t work, which necessitates high boots and a tromp though the grasslands of apologia. Motherhood certainly is work, and it certainly should be compensated somehow, by respect, by social security benefits, by family leave policies, etc. That’s a whole different story. My point - and I think I do have one - is that, like many stay at home moms (SAHMs), I identifed myself as something else, too. Something related to a profession. While I was being a SAHM, I was also supposedly a writer, but I wasn’t really, because being a mother of young children is a full time job. So, for large swathes of time, I turned off that work burner.

Did it make me a better, more successful person in those other areas (burners?) No, I don’t think so. In fact, ironically, while that burner was off, it was the only thing that seemed to matter to me. Work. Profession. Earning money. I couldn’t stop thinking how I wasn’t doing any of it, and how much of a failure this made me. It wasn’t as if I focused better on those other burners. No, I focused on that one, and felt that lack of success there meant I was a failure everywhere.

This was a rawther counterproductive and downright miserable cycle of despair in which to find myself, and so I began to look for a better definition. I also began to look for some paying work. But the instant I turned on that work burner, I felt better. No, that’s wrong. First I felt really shitty, and I floundered around looking for jobs and so on, so really, the first time I obtained some paying work related to my profession, I felt better. A lot better. A billion percent better. It didn’t take much. It didn’t take the career coming to a boil. It just took a little bit, a simmer, if you will, and everything started to improve.

So my new view of success is much more holistic than Pat’s. Carrying on with the stove analogy, you want to be an Aga, or a Viking, or whatever. The idea is to get all the burners working. 

Frankly, I don’t think David subscribes to Pat's theory, either. For one, he points out that his friend Pat “seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.” For another, while he says that he cut off the friends burner, there he is, riding around the Australian bush with his friend. But I’m not going to speak for him. I don’t know what he’s like, really. Antisocial, reclusive, peevish? His sandbox is the nexis of humor and pain, his medium is memoir: We know he’s got problems. Which brings us to the next burner, family. He ends his essay with a painful memory of a senseless power play between his 11 year old self and his father, which ended with him turning off the family burner. But then over time he realized that “without them, I was nothing.” It’s not a heartwarming realization, though. It's more a recognition of how connected we remain to family, even when we’re grown and evolved and fully therapized and can move thousands of miles away. There’s a note of resignation, or perhaps defiance, when he says, “Cut off your family, and how would you know who you are? Cut them off in order to gain success, and how could that success be measured? What would it possibly mean?” With a suggestion or implication or another tendril-like tenuous gesture that you need family, if only to measure how far you’ve come, how different you are from them.

Anyway, somehow, that family burner has to stay on, too.  I write this after returning from a week’s vacation with my sister the psychoanalyst and her family, for a couple days of which our father joined us.

But back to the burners. Yeah, I think the goal is really to keep them all going. As I mentioned, some may need to be turned to simmer for awhile while others come to the boil, but you need them all. As someone’s granny said, “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”

You can eat your arugula and have success, too! In fact, you must.