Benjamin Franklin, Kelly Ripa, and Me

So, I’m not going to pussyfoot: Since the election, one of my sphincters has relaxed. I'm not going to say which one. There are several, and none of them bears too much scrutiny. And anyway, I am still vigilant. Uptight, even. But, a smidge less than I was. Of course, life has brought other challenges, as it is wont to do, and they are not helpful in the relaxation arena. Things are precarious, as they always are, but a little less discouraging than they were.

When there’s so much news, personal and political, to occupy my brain, and when this news seems to require constant vigilance, it’s hard to get anything done but worry, perseverate, and mull. Usually at three a.m.

It’s important, this mulling, perseverating, and worrying. It’s apparently essential, according to my psyche, to aid in holding up the world and the people in it whom I love. If I were to relax, the whole thing might implode.

This is called magical thinking. FYI.

In times like these, thinking about Benjamin Franklin may be instructive. I recently spent a whole day on Benj F with my college students. An entire eighty minutes to cover his career.

Ample time, don’t you think?

Oh, you don’t? Well, neither do I. But that was all the time I had to point out some of the ways and reasons Benjamin Franklin’s legacy lives two hundred twenty-eight years after his death.
To that end, my students watched an hour biography of BF and read selections from his writings and we talked about how many different things he did and accomplished. The lesson being that  I am truly inadequate. That is my takeaway. IF Ben Franklin was successful because of his rigorous discipline, habits of mind, and efficient use of every fruggin moment of his day, then, then.

Well, I don’t exactly know what my point is, except that then I ought to understand exactly why it is that Benj F is known over centuries and across borders and I

am
not.

Oh, sure, it’s too soon to tell. Kind of you to say, Readers, but based on output alone, I am well behind on benchmarks for sustainable, world-wide, century-spanning success. I don’t think I even want that. The good news is that I, secular Jewish denizen of New York State, a woman with Buddhist tendencies and low-self-esteem, along with millions of others, am happy to look to his life for tips on achieving success.

So, once again, life lessons from Ben Franklin. He exemplifies using the scaffolding of success very nicely.

One, permission—Ben Franklin permitted himself to try new things. From the get-go, he gave himself permission. He permitted himself to pull out of his apprenticeship with his brother the printer, to move to a different city (Philadelphia from Boston), to impregnate a woman and then to take on his child born out of wedlock; to experiment with oil and water, with electricity, with stoves, with ocean currents; to take on various posts, found a university, a library, a fire department, to write anonymous letters and publish an almanack— the list goes on. The man did so much. From inventing a flexible urinary catheter to editing Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the declaration of independence (and making it more pithy). Permission.

Two, goals. The guy was goal-oriented. And his goals were always growing and changing, challenging and yet not impossible, ranging from personal development, such as his plan to achieve moral perfection, to trying to convince the British parliament to allow the Colonies to have a voting representative, he set goals.

Three, help from others. From inspiration for his project for self-improvement, which he took from Cotton Mather, who apparently was all for that sort of self-work, to sharing ideas with the gentlemen in his regular mastermind group he called the Junto, to serendipitous connections with government officials who wrote letters for him, BF relied on help from others to accomplish his goals and succeed. He helped others, too. Indeed, he wrote that asking others for favors endears you to them, probably because it allows them to feel that they are beneficent and also powerful, at least powerful enough to help you.

Four, centering activity. He spent time in contemplation, sometimes at religious services, focusing his attention on what he intended to do.

Five, managing the mind by various strategies. First of all, he was an auto-didact. Second of all, he believed in continual self-improvement by developing the virtues he thought most essential to being a good person in the world. He set intentions to focus his mind and work —every morning he asked himself, “What good shall I do today?” and every evening he asked, “What good did I do today?” which speaks to the final, and also perhaps the fundamental plank in the scaffolding of success

Six, basing his work on deep values and purpose. BF believed his role in society was to be of service. Public service was a deep value he held, and that value fueled his sense of purpose and buoyed his energy when he might have retired, but instead worked on the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Lasting success depends on knowing your deep values and purpose and aligning your life with them. They may change over time, but keying action to purpose and values keeps motivation strong.

Here’s a phrase I hate: At the end of the day. Everyone says it. At the end of the day. At the end of the day, I am not Ben Franklin. My motivation is shot. I’m not using every moment to express my intellectual curiosity. I’m eating almonds and watching TV, scrolling Twitter and Facebook and sometimes Instagram. Correcting essays and fielding emails from students who didn’t plan far enough ahead to get the reading material due for the next class and who think they have reasonable excuses.

I don’t even have gout.

Off to teach, gout-free. For now.

Here’s more good news, though. My guilty pleasure, watching “Live with Kelly and Ryan” came through. Just this morning, I leaped up from reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (any students who may read this, yes, you will be assigned chapter one very, very soon), when I realized Kelly and Ryan were on. Kelly was wearing a lovely dress, a print—prints are in, people. I turned it on a little late, thanks to Annie Dillard, but just in time to hear Kelly offer some wisdom, which I now offer to you. If you’re feeling bad about not being Benjamin Franklin level great—and I do get down on myself about that, from time to time—remember that, as Kelly put it, “Greatness at any level isn’t probable, which is why we should be fine, just fine, with the way we are.”

Perhaps the most I can get done during sphincter-tightening times is the minimum requirements: the teaching, which is engrossing and demanding; the perseverating, which comes unbidden; and the relaxing and thinking about print dresses, which comes naturally.

Using the Scaffolding to Deal with Distraction

Current events are inconveniencing me, Readers. They are preventing me from splashing happily in my bath. They are keeping me from focusing with laser-like concentration on the frivolous, like the new makeup I bought Monday, after attending my high school reunion. 

Why after and not before, you might ask? Well, you might, except I’m not writing about it, due to my obsession with current events. 

Yeah, current events are jamming me up. I have to keep refreshing my Twitter feed because the conspiracy types are really getting me wound up. And the ones who are convinced we’ve become an autocracy on the way to full dictatorship are amping me up, too. Then I have to check in with Fox News to see what they’re saying, and then over to the failing New York Times and the Washington Post. It’s exhausting. All this energy expended in the mistaken, neurotic obsession, in the magical thinking that somehow, if I stay on top of new developments I will prevent something even more terrible from happening, or perhaps even solve our problems. 

All of which leads me to this grand point. Handling distraction - or not - is key to success. The latest news is today’s distraction. Tomorrow it might be something else. Please let it be something else, like buying makeup after my high school reunion, which was Monday’s distraction. That’s a much more relaxing distraction than worrying about the firing of the head of the FBI. 

Luckily, my scaffolding of success helped me out here. That is the point of the scaffolding. It helps you build success by providing you a structure to support yourself while doing so. 

Specifically, my like-minded others helped me out. We had our monthly conference call today. At the outset, my friend C (as in, we met in college) said to E and me that we could not discuss the elephant in the room, otherwise it would take up our whole time. But E and I both admitted that the elephant in the room had been gobbling up our attention. While we agreed not to talk about specifics, I suggested that discussing how to handle distraction seemed like a good topic. 

C responded that she had, in fact, not been distracted by this latest development. And indeed, when we three summarized our activities viz-a-vis our goals set at the end of our last conversation, of the three of us, only C had fully accomplished hers. Her secret to success? Simple. She had decided to stay focused with pockets of productivity. And the secret to those pockets of productivity was that she committed to using her better energy - during the day - for her work, and saving her checking in on the news for the evening. 

Talking to my like-minded others got me focused on my work today, and helped me resolve to use my better energy for my work, too. Talking to my like-minded others, a.k.a. my loving mirrors, helped me activate another plank in my scaffolding of success: getting centered. Talking about using energy wisely reminded me that focusing on what I can actually do, as opposed to things about which I can do nothing, is the best approach to life. Worrying about what I cannot control is unhelpful. As Stephen Covey states in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, your circle of influence is smaller than your circle of concern, but is contained within it. I have provided a handy graphic for you in the photo below. Yes, I realize the text is flipped. That's a technical by-product of using my laptop camera. The point is the concentric circles. By focusing on what I can do, I can, over time, expand my circle of influence within my circle of concern. This does not mean withdrawing from current events, however. It just means allocating time appropriately. Making calls to my government representatives can happen in my low-energy periods. Meanwhile, I can focus my better energy on my work. Starting tomorrow, of course. Now, I have to check the news. 

I'm your loving mirror, Readers. That's why the writing is wackbirds.

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Stuck in the Middle

Hello,  Readers, 

The MIL alerted me to an article in Sunday’s failing NY Times by Henry Alford, who writes amusing pieces on social manners and such. It’s called, “I’m Not Okay. And Neither Are You,”*  and it’s about a budding genre of anti-self-help books. These books tell you that your existential despair is real and you might as well stop trying so hard to feel better, be better, look better, and that aiming for success or happiness is dumb. The title, by the way, in case you haven't kept an eye on the self-help genre for decades as I have, refers to a famous one from the groovy year of 1967 called, I'm Ok - You're Ok, by one Thomas Anthony Harris.

I found this article reassuring because one of the interesting aspects of trying to sell my book proposal has been the various potential ways editors would like to see my material packaged. And I have tried to comply. I have tried prescriptive steps to success (failed at that.) I have tried straight memoir ( failed at that.) The closest my book has come to getting picked up was the most recent editor, who worked with me while I tried sample chapters swinging from traditional how-to-be successful to a more personal approach. She declined the project, ultimately, as I have mentioned. It feels important to mention it again today because I’m in a shame spiral over a faux pas I committed, which led to a result that made me mad; this led to an email written in anger - always, always, always let those sit for at least 24 hours, Readers; 2 hours is not enough, no matter how many high-handed sentences you craft and delete - which led to further shame, which led to me publicly reminding you of my frustrating and so far unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher for my book, as a way to publicly further shame myself.

That was a long sentence, but pretty well constructed, I think. 

Anyway, my point, and I do have one, is that one of the criticisms this most recent, tantalizing editor had was that from my writing it seems as if I am “still in the middle of it”, meaning still struggling with the definition of success. 

Of course I am! I am in the middle of it, because my feelings about me and success are cyclic.That’s one of the lessons I have learned. I have a system - a scaffolding, if you will - that keeps me going or gets me up and running again, and it works pretty well for awhile. Then it breaks down. That’s the nature of things. Why does it break down? Besides the inevitable entropy factor? Because carving a definition of success that goes against the seemingly immutable one I developed over a childhood and young adulthood in my East Coast Liberal bubble is friggin’ hard. And because to do so, I had to put aside some values that I thought were most important to me, that society told me were the most important, to find the ones that mean the most to me. 

Of course I’m still in the middle of it. How could it be otherwise when to feel successful as a mom, without a separate income and as a writer without a continual stepladder of specific achievements related to a career that are observable to the outside world means going against the predominant values of my culture? I will always be in the middle of it. That’s the truth. It remains a struggle because those values are still there within me, as well as around me. When things go well in my current situation, I feel successful. When I hit a glitch, I don’t. Sometimes this means I cycle through these feelings in a day, sometimes I’m coasting and then dragging for weeks. But my system, my scaffolding, works regardless. 

That’s my big takeaway. Just keep going. Be present, do the mindset priming, keep up with your community of like-minded others, evaluate your values, and set goals. As the stepmother used to say, with a sigh, when asked how she was doing, “Well, I’m still putting one foot in front of another.” It’s kind of an anti-self-help message, isn’t it? Admitting you’re always going to be in the midst. Life is not a linear projection always heading upward and onward. As Danish professor Svend Brinkmann is quoted in Alford’s failing NY Times article, “the idea of ‘progress’ is only a few hundred years old — and is, in fact, destructive.” 

Of late I have been taking my advice. I am writing a draft of the whole book right now. Rather than shop the proposal and shape the sample chapters to various editor's wishes, I'm writing the book I would want to read. (I hope.) It’s going slowly and I’m forcing myself to move forward in it without rereading or revising any of it, so I have no idea whether it’s going well. But I’m hoping that if I just get it done, I’ll find a publisher for it. I’m grateful to Henry Alford for pointing out that there may be a genre for my book after all. 

*(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/style/anti-self-help-books.html)

Annals of Success: Be an Anteambulo

Hello. Happy Friday. Welcome to today’s blog post, a disjointed reaction to, well, life. 

Just the other day I listened to a podcast of “This American Life” all about coincidences. People love coincidences. They make great stories. Coincidentally, the library notified me that a book I had requested had arrived. I had no memory of ordering this book, called Ego is the Enemy, but when I picked it up I saw mention of Eleanor Roosevelt and recalled I was looking for a book with some case studies of successful people. The book is by Ryan Holiday, who used to be the head of American Apparel and now has some kind of creative advisory company. And he lives on a ranch. And he’s about twelve.  And his hair is just so. And appropriately, the book’s cover sports a marble bust, headless. Y’know, because it is egoless. Also because he loves a good Greek or Roman term. There were several, which I offer to you. Anteambulo. Euthymia. Sympatheia. I'll get to those. 

What tidbits can I learn from this book, I thought to myself. And what can I sarcastically skewer for my readers? And also what can I offer them, besides the chance to pass judgment on a book - or accept its great advice, potentially - without having to read all two hundred-twenty-six pages of it. 

So I haven’t yet finished the book, but his main idea is that ego keeps you from real, sustained success. It’s better to keep a student’s mindset - you always have more to learn. Okay, sounds good. And be an anteambulo. What is this anteambulo, you ask, Readers? It's a Roman term. An anteambulo was an artist slash writer with a patron. Ah, the glory days of Roma, when wealthy patrons took on artists and supported them - housed, fed, clothed them - so they could create. In return, the artist was expected to perform tasks for the patron. One of these was anteambulo, which means “one who clears the path.” The anteambulo walked in front of his patron, “making way, communicating messages, and generally making the patron’s life easier.” 

Anteambulo. Who knew? I thought under the patronage system the artist just got time to create for free, all expenses paid - so, more than free. But no. No such thing as a free lunch or a free patron. 

Holiday’s point is that to succeed, one should be in effect an anteambulo for whomever is one’s boss. He scolds The Youth of Today for lacking humility and expecting to be treated as special and important right from the moment they begin a job, for lacking a work ethic, and on and on. I could do without the scolding, because I doubt it’s true. But what he says about being the person who clears the way, the person who makes her boss look good, the person who is willing to focus and work without worrying whether she gets full credit immediately being key to success reminded me of Adam Grant’s philosophy of givers and takers. 

Like Grant, Holiday says the most successful people are givers. Although Adam Grant says that while the most successful people are the givers, the least successful are also givers. So too much headless, egoless way-clearing can go wrong. Both of them are talking about people who manage to achieve goals and sustain them and the rest of their lives, too, as opposed to the spectacular successes who then undo their achievements in spectacular ways. Howard Hughes is one example. Apparently he was really a disaster. The only money he managed to keep was the money he amassed from the businesses his father started - which he left alone because they bored him. 

Holiday’s message is to keep focused on what is important and not to give way to entitlement, control-seeking, or paranoia. Those are symptoms of ego and they take you down. People can get to be very successful by “raw power and force of will.” Those things unchecked, however, can cause them to destroy their success. To sustain success requires returning to the more humble, head-down, purpose-focused approach to life. 

So I think about my life. Am I an anteambulo? Perhaps that is my role in my little family. As the mother. I don't do a lot of literal sweeping, but figuratively, I sweep and clear the path for everyone. If so, I would have to say that sometimes the anteambulo’s work is all-consuming and the art creation slackens. But after reading this book, I think perhaps the creative work lags more due to lack of euthymia, or sense of purpose or path and a little too much ego. I suffer from almost all the evils Holiday lists: envy, fear, desire. These things do indeed get in the way and they are indeed all about me, me, me, and they do obscure my purpose sometimes. 

To proceed ego-free, know your values. Yes, that plank in the scaffolding of success comes up in this book, too. Ryan says, “‘Man is pushed by drives, Viktor Frankl observed. ‘But he is pulled by values.’ Without the right values, success is brief.” Without the right values, success is brief.

Without the right values, according to Holiday, ego takes over, leading to paranoia, control-seeking, aka being a control freak, and entitlement, all of which blind you to your own mistakes and prevent you from correcting course with input from others when needed. He offers anecdotes about all kinds of prominent successes who went on to destroy their lives, from Ulysses S. Grant to Nixon to the the maker of the Delorean. And he offers a few counter-examples of people who managed to avoid the ego trap, such as General Sherman and Katherine Graham of the Washington Post. 

All of this drips with pertinence these days, but time will have to bear out the truth of these assertions in regards to the Orange One. 

Another plank in the scaffolding he touches on is focusing on the present. That means staying focused on the purpose of the work - being anteambulo as well as creator. It also means taking time to center yourself by putting yourself in perspective. “Meditate on the immensity” of the universe, or the ocean or the mountains or sky. Something that reminds you that you are a small person compared to the vastness of the world. 

I don’t really have a problem with that. Okay, that’s actually an untruth. I do have a problem with that. Those moments when I realize how very, very insignificant my one little self is in the whole shebang - history, the world, the universe, you name it - are the moments that could go either way for me. One way would be Ryan Holiday’s way, the way of feeling sympatheia (more Greek philosophy for you), or connected to the cosmos in an uplifting way; the other is to become overwhelmed by my own insignificance and inevitable erasure from existence and fall into existential despair.

I suppose Ryan Holiday would point out that the fear comes from grasping on to ego. If you can let go of the need to prove your importance to yourself or anybody else, I guess it becomes a lot easier to keep going forward, no matter what happens.

So I said it was a coincidence that this book I had forgotten about ordering arrived at the library. It wasn’t much of a coincidence, after all. It was more serendipitous. It arrived at a good moment, provided distraction when I needed it, and revealed a message that could not help but make me - and I hope you, Readers - feel reassured. Even though the flamboyant and seemingly successful among us cause us distress, history usually takes care of them. Until then, we do our work, we clear the way for a better future, and we remember that proceeding with purpose is the way to success. 

It Takes More Than a Dollar to Save a Dollar

So. I bought these new boots a couple of months ago. Just this week, I finally got around to buying some of that waterproofing spray for them. At the shoe establishment - a national chain - DSW - I found not one but two kinds of waterproofing spray. One can was large and fat and cost $5.99. One can was slender and shorter and cost $12.99.

 “What’s the difference?” I asked the cashier, who was both tall and slender, and he said, “That one’s better. It lasts longer.” 

Which one do you think he pointed out?  That’s right, the more expensive one. So I picked it up. Yes, I was about to buy it. But then something broke through in my brain. A little voice inside me doubted. A little voice inside me said, Hope, don't fall for the fake news. So I picked up the cheaper spray and read the label. No warning about reapplying frequently or anything like that. Just a cocktail of noxious chemicals. Just like the ones the more expensive bottle promised to spray into the air. 

Reader, I bought it. I bought the cheaper spray. There's lesson in there for all of us. Something along the lines of how much harder it is to save a dollar than to spend one. That’s because it takes more than a dollar to save a dollar. Unless you’re a kid who gets an allowance. But to earn enough money to save a dollar can take a lot of money. So don’t waste it. Something like that. 

In other news -

It’s hard, but I’m breaking my social media habit. Things got a bit too compulsive with me and Twitter over the last couple of weeks. I got into a thing with a couple of trolls. This led to a long conversation with a conservative man that caused me to spend a lot of time researching facts to combat his fake news take on things. In the end, the conversation was overtaking my brain, and while the arguing and the research were helpful to me because they forced me to express myself clearly - not to mention to read the news closely - ultimately, it was a waste of time. He went his way, I went mine. Nobody changes anybody's mind unless they're ready to change. And I decided I need to get off Twitter. 

One of things this guy said was that he read a couple of my blog pieces. After he read a couple of my blog posts, he said he recommended I call what I’m defining something other than success. According to him, I’m not talking about success as much as I’m talking about love or something else. He pointed me to some guy with some theory about levels of love. I ignored it, because he was being very unloving about immigrants and I was busy sending him links to Pew Research articles. 

I suppose this guy was trying to be helpful. I suppose he meant it as a nice gesture, but I couldn’t help thinking that this guy totally missed the point. If I call what I’m defining something other than success then I’m no longer redefining success. Now, he was a commercial real estate developer, which means - and I here stereotype freely - that he has that traditional, old-school, money+ power +prestige definition of success. You know, the one that was crushing me until I figured out a way to feel successful without those things. At least some of the time. But I do see what he means. 

I’ve certainly thought about the issue. Am I actually really talking about success, or am I talking about improving quality of life, or creating meaning or happiness? Well, I’m talking about all of those things. But I am also talking about success. As in, a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of purposefulness, a methodology for pursuing goals and a system of living that contributes to all of those things. And here’s the thing. Even if I’m a canary in the coal mine of the dark and murky future, I know it’s more important than ever to sing my little song. 

So. Let’s tawk, Readers, about the key to success of having like-minded others who act as loving mirrors for you. I mentioned this in passing last week, when talking about Adam Grant and how he focuses on collaboration and other skills that lead to the greatest success. Collaboration is actually different than having loving mirrors. Collaboration means working together towards a common goal. Cultivating like-minded others means accepting help from others to help you reach your goal, and doing that for others in return. 

One thing that works quite often is establishing a regular gathering of these like-minded others. Entrepreneurs do this. Benjamin Franklin did this. Napoleon Hill recommended (men) start Mastermind groups. As I’ve mentioned, I have a monthly conference call with a couple of like-minded women. We have been meeting over the fiber optic cables for over five years now. Each of us has her individual goals, and we report on them to one another, offer each other support, suggestions, pep-talks, or ideas as needed. As you know, I’ve been through ups and downs. Well, we all have. 

Today, our conversation started out down. We were all down. But by the end, we were all up and inspired. My friend C (as in, Met Her in College), said, after a few minutes of rumination on current events, that we have to make sure we take care of ourselves and continue to work towards our goals. We cannot allow ourselves to become demoralized and immobilized. We have to strengthen ourselves so that we can come back strong. This was heartening and inspirational. 

But we are more than inspired. We are successful! Take E. She started out with an idea she wasn’t sure how she wanted to develop. Over the past five years, she tried writing a book, had an agent, lost the agent, gave up on the book, considered a podcast, felt discouraged, started a website, hosted a gathering based on her project, and from that gathering got the idea of a new way to work with her material. She’s turning it into a stage production with help from people she met at the gathering she hosted because of the idea she had five years ago. In between, there were times when she wanted to give up her project entirely, but we, her loving mirrors, convinced her it was important and worthwhile to pursue. And now she feels she has the right format for her idea, and she has a director and an actor and writer to help her bring it into production. 

That is the value of meeting with a group of like-minded others. They act as loving mirrors who reflect your possibilities back at you, give you courage when you lack it, and show you a better you. 

I call that inspiring. 

Give and Take by Adam Grant

Readers, the husband thought my last post was super-depressing. That came as a shock. I had thought I had managed to convey something positive by taking us back to classical values. Well. I am moving on. I don’t want to depress the husband. Also my father told me to. Specifically, he said, you are not alone in being upset, but we all have to move on. After he said that, he also said, “It’s a little bit like building a bridge over the river while the banks are eroding.” This might not sound like the most positive statement. It might actually sound like a pretty depressing assessment of the current situation. But then I took a broader view of things. That’s life, after all, isn’t it? Building a bridge over the river while the banks erode? I mean that’s just life. Or exercise and the race against decrepitude. 

Oy, that’s depressing, too. Hell. I was trying to be funny. 

Anyway, I am not going political this week at all. Instead, I am relating the following items.

Item: This text message exchange happened (during the middle of a school day)

9th Grader: What’s Nai-Nai’s number? Everyone’s texting their grandparents.

Me (after sending the number): Why are they?

9th Grader: We’re talking about Confucianism. 

Which I found very sweet, very funny, and a possibly appropriate use of technology during Global History Class.

Item: After talking to my dad, I picked up a book about success and managed to get engrossed in it. I moved on. So that’s what I’m writing about today. Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, by Adam Grant. 

Adam Grant, who should not be confused with Adam Ant, the New Romantic musician of the 1980s with a flair for a ruffled shirt and a flowered lappet, is a professor of Organizational Psychology at Wharton School of Business. He has some interesting things to say about success.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2771/4366687322_97bdacf601_b.jpg

First of all, he says there are three kinds of people. Now, a lot of people say there are two kinds of people, and then they tell you what kinds. They are the kind of people who do something, and the kind of people who do not do it. Well, Adam Grant not Ant says there are three kinds of people - and then he tells you what kinds. Which means he is not one of those kinds of people who say there are two kinds of people. He's the other kind. 

Anyhoo, those three kinds are these:

• Givers- give more than take
• Takers- bend reciprocity in their favor (take more than give)
• Matchers - operate on principle of fairness and try to preserve equal balance of giving and getting.

Okay, if you're at all like me, already you want to know which type is the best type to be. You want to quiz yourself and skew the answers so that you'll come out as that type. Well, I'll get there in a sec. (Think Polonius - "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." Then remember that Polonius is a fool.) Now, Grant’s talking about the business realm, as are so many writers about success. In the personal realm, he says most people are givers. But the business realm is where many people look when they think about success. So I ran with it. These three types are styles of interaction in the work world. All three types can succeed, says Grant. However, givers are special. They tend to be at both the very bottom and the very top of the “success ladder.” Matchers and takers tend to “land in the middle.”  He then goes on to explain his theory, with lots of anecdotes about famous givers and takers. For example, Kenneth Lay of Enron. Big taker. Frank Lloyd Wright? Also a taker. Famous givers? Jack Welch of General Electric. Abraham Lincoln. But a lot of very successful givers remain in the shadows, not known outside their fields, because of their natural style - to give freely of their time, of their help, of their ideas, and to not worry about repayment. Eventually they do get repaid, big time, but they tend to be a little more shadowed. He mentions George Meyer, who was a major shaper of “The Simpsons” television show, and several others with very interesting careers as engineers, venture capitalists, and researchers. 

Key to success for givers? Knowing when to receive help and always being open to repaying it later. Not keeping score when helping someone, because you never know when they might help you out later. And - networking really, really well, so when they do need help, they can attract the most talented helpers, who come willingly to their teams. 

Speaking of teams, these givers are universally team players. They are not concerned with being the one who gets all the credit. They put the good of the project above all else. By behaving in this way, others who work with them don’t feel competitive with them. They gain “idiosyncrasy credits,” which apparently is a real term - positive impressions generated in a person by the generous behavior of an individual towards a team. The giver exhibits “expedition behavior,” a term coined by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) to define the best mountaineering practices: “putting the group’s goals and mission first, and showing the same amount of concern for others as you do for yourself.” 

Underlying givers’ success, says Grant, is a fact about success that gets overlooked. That fact is that success always involves team effort. Even though the public tends to look at achievement as a solo act, all achievement comes from group effort. That's what made Grant choose relational style as a defining characteristic of success. So, people who can motivate a team to put the mission ahead of themselves are bound to do better work than people who are either concerned with making themselves appear to be the best, or with keeping everything even-Steven. Grant goes into the ways in which teams help one another succeed. It sounds a lot like my success scaffolding plank of like-minded others. Givers tend to recognize and expect high potential and achievement from others - and they get it. This is acting like a loving mirror, reflecting at their team members what they believe they can achieve and by doing so, empowering them to achieve it. 

So. Be a giver. But - there's always a but - there are two kinds of givers. Selfless and otherish. There are the successful givers, who are mega-successful. And there are the unsuccessful givers, who are failures.

Here's the good news. The givers who fail, fail because they are too selfless and burn out. Sadly for them, because they're just trying to be really nice. And nice guys apparently do finish last. Luckily, they also finish first. And they get to enjoy themselves. That's because the givers who succeed are self-interested as well as giving. They are called otherish. They're motived by two engines, the engine of self-concern and the engine of advancing others' goals. That's the kind you want to be. 

Food for thought. 

Aristotle, Buddha, Success

Confession: I saw “Hamilton” after Thanksgiving. Like everyone else, I was blown away by it. Of course, I’ve been steeped in the soundtrack for a year, thanks to my kids, so I was able to follow the lyrics  - and they are terrific lyrics. Ahead of time, I was worried that the show might be an anticlimax, but I have to say, it was better than expected. It was great. But I’m not here to add yet another rave review to the pile. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius, no doubt - and like the most successful geniuses, he has a team of like-minded others, also known as collaborators, to work with and to egg him on to success. But I don’t really want to talk about that right now, either. 

Here’s the thing I want to say. Before I saw“Hamilton,” just the soundtrack made me cry a little - his life cut short by that duel with Aaron Burr, his potential wasted - but watching it in our current political climate, I cried a lot. Of course a show about the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and ideals and sacrifice is bound to stir up patriotism. Well, mine was stirred. It may have fallen out of fashion, patriotism, but I have a deep well of it. So comparing the heroism and bravado of what went into founding a country with the country we have today led me to some sorry, sad tears. What we have now, Trump and his merry band of bankrupters, is an embarrassment. I’m pretty sure the country will survive; but it will take a lot of time and collective recalibrating of ideals to make it flourish. 

Speaking of ideals brings me to the magazine I bought recently, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. I bought it because I was waiting in line at the Honest Weight Food Coop and it was that or a homeopathic tablet for relieving anxiety. Anxiety? Who’s feeling anxious? 

Anyway, the cover article was about living an authentic life, which reminds me of another plank in my scaffolding of success: live according to what you value. But the article that most interested me was about the intermingling of Buddhist and Western ethics in our culture. Ethics, if I recall correctly, being a code of behavior. "Principles of right conduct," says my American Heritage Dictionary. Heady stuff, I know, but bear with me. Western ethics equals Aristotelian, according to the author of this article. Let’s not debate the guy (and yes, the author is a guy, bien sur, c’mom, womens, let’s get heard more MORE more. But I digress) let’s grant him that, even if it's reductionist. He’s talking about Aristotle’s eudaimonia, or human flourishing, the principle of living so that one expresses and develops oneself to the fullest potential. This is apparently Aristotle’s Good. Kind of like a Martha Stewart Good Thing, in the ethical realm as opposed to in the household management realm. I’m up for it. Or down for it. Yes, more down. I’ve been feeling kind of down. Which is repetitive, but it does tie into my theme.

As I was saying, the article says “the general Aristotelian notion that a life dedicated to the cultivation of virtue and the contemplation of wisdom is the best and happiest kind of human life is one that has been readily transplanted into Buddhism.” Western ethics have infused into Buddhist ethics so that we have replaced the ideal of living in a manner that will lead to “surcease” of suffering and the end of reincarnation with the ideal of eudaimonia, or human flourishing. In other words, the Aristotelian idea of human flourishing is an idea “so pervasive in Western culture that Westerners are often unaware of its source.” 

Indeed. I thought it was Buddhist. But it was Aristotle, brought to me by a bunch of Jewish seekers who went to India in the late 1960s to study Buddhism and returned to awaken the masses in America. Everything old is new again and old again and circuitous again. But never mind. One thing I definitely value is eudaimonia. 

Another point of the article is that for Westerners - and for many, if not most, Easterners - the Buddhist ideal of attaining nirvana and ending the cycle of rebirth and suffering doesn’t stand up to modern science and other influences. This essential of the Eastern strand of Buddhism just doesn’t work for we cynics. We are not used to living in a caste society where our roles are defined for life. We are not accustomed to resignation about this life and to therefore work on our selves to prepare to come back in the next life as something a little more evolved on the spectrum of life. We are not into delayed gratification if the delay is of multiple lifetimes. Nope, that is definitely not Western. We are focused on this life. And many of us, whether we practice Buddhism or another kind of self-improvement, hope to achieve a quintessential Western ideal. Human flourishing. And we all assume that we all agree that the flourishing of all humans is the goal. 

Or at least we did, until we realized the Conservative movement has steadily, over the last thirty years, while we were improving ourselves, swept us all up into a giant burlap bag, and with this election, pulled tight and knotted the drawstring over our heads. We are now like a bunch of kittens stuck in a sack about to be heaved over the railing and drowned in the river of life by a bunch of white dudes who have apparently didn't agree with us that human flourishing is the greatest good. 

So maybe we need  to start believing in rebirth and so on. Because maybe there’s not much we can fix about this life. 

Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. Did that last paragraph skew too bleak? I’m trying to move away from politics. Politics, after all, is the rearranging of the deck chairs on the ship of state. It’s the trajectory of the ship we need to think about most. 

So what constitutes human flourishing? This is the big question. We keep thinking flourishing depends on ever-increasing piles of money. Yet we are proved wrong about that again and again. We do need enough money to feel like we’re flourishing, but it’s not as much as we think, and there are other things we need to flourish. We need to feel like we are helping others. We need to feel part of a community. We need to have ways to center ourselves. We need to have purpose. We need external supports, which is where government and community come in handy. We also, as a psychologist I recently spoke to said, need to do the inner work to improve our lives. 

And also, we need to call our elected representatives and let them know what we think about those deck chairs, and we need to try to arrange them so that everyone can have a good seat. 

Scaffolding of Success: Centering. And Death.

Oh Readers, my GR interview is almost ready, but not quite. I am waiting for the best place to put it for maximum exposure. In the meantime, let me enrich you with a little example of my success scaffolding in action. 

One of the planks of my scaffolding of success is mindfulness. I’m actually going to change that to centering. Centering is one of the planks in the scaffolding of success. Not everyone likes meditation, but everyone likes some kind of centering activity that tamps you down when you want to fly out of your skin and brings you back to a more peaceful place. Yoga, exercise, singing, a walk outside, and prayer are other examples of centering. Well, centering came into play this week. 

You see, I fell down the black hole of pondering death. Why? Well, why not? Or - because I had to have this tiny skin cancer removed and it triggered - trigger-warning - fear of death. Although, come to think of it, there’ve been other triggers around here of late. Last week something bad happened to a neighbor, something involving an ambulance. One of the children? One of the parents? I don’t know, because I don’t know the neighbors. They are pretty new in the neighborhood. I left them a note, but I haven't heard a thing. The situation makes me a little sick.  

Okay, so I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve earned it. People I loved and depended on have died, more than one of them. But especially my mother. I’ll admit it freely, her death did a number on me. I’m what they call "anxiously attached” to the people I love. This is basic attachment theory. Just ask my sister the psychoanalyst. Or trust me. I read three volumes by John Bowlby on attachment theory when I was working at Widener Library. It wasn’t part of the job. The job was data entry; but the perks were grand. All kinds of books filtered past my desk. Some of them stuck around for awhile. For example, the works of Bowlby (1907-1990), known for his Attachment Theory. So you can trust me when I say I’m anxiously attached. 

And one of the things I’m anxiously attached to is, well, life. So when I get a little something that needs to come off, suddenly, I am under a cloud of imminent death. I try to remember the wise words of high school acquaintance Victor Tolken (Class of 1981? 1982?) who said, “When I’m dead, I won’t care.” This gave me the most blessed moment of release from my anxiety (which was plaguing me even back then, in high school). Yes, right, I thought. I’ll be gone and I won’t care. So it’s the dying I fear, not the actual death. This sustained me for a good while. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have tried some of the things I tried in college. Ahem. 

Of course this calculus changes when I consider my progeny. I may have f-d them up. I will cop to a certainty that I have indeed f-d them up in some way or another, just by being a fallible human. But if I die before they grow up, I will have f-d them up in an irremediable manner. I cannot do that. So now, unfortunately, it is both the dying and the being dead I fear. Victor, where are you? 

My point is, despite joking to the husband that I had to go to the plastic surgeon on Monday to get my throat slit, and then making disparaging remarks about being trussed up by the legs and turned upside down over a bucket - so I would be kosher, at least, I was kind of wound up through the weekend and into the plastic surgeon’s office. 

Let me take a few words to recognize that I am one lucky person, having only to worry about a little skin thing, and that I am fully aware that right now there are people facing much worse problems and much more immediate threat of death. I know this. And now you know I know this. Nevertheless, this is what I was dealing with.

The thing about the anxiety was this. There it was, inside of me, consuming me. A big ball of it, expanding and crushing me. I wanted to take it out. I wanted to give it to someone else. I wanted to hand my big ball of anxiety to someone else - okay, to the husband (poor husband) - and for the someone else to say everything was going to be alright. But the thing was, everyone had already said it was going to be alright. There has not been a single doctor who has said anything other than that this little skin thing needs to come out and then it will be all gone. So there was some other thing going on. 

The other thing was that just as death comes for the archbishop, death comes for us all. Maybe not now, in this little skin cancer, but definitely at some time. That’s the real problem. The problem of death. It’s the kind of thing Buddhist monks meditate on, sitting in graveyards and outside of charnel houses; but I am not a Buddhist monk. I’m not even a Buddhist. I’m kind of an atheist JewBu. This means I get all of the neuroses and none of the reassurance, in other words. There is, sadly, no one to hand over this particular anxiety to. Because no one can solve it.

Fortunately, the last time I saw her, my friend Jo made me a beautiful necklace that is also a set of mala beads.  

She is amazing, isn’t she? 

She also made these earrings: 

Anyway, I’m not really a talisman sort of person, but I wore the necklace to the plastic surgeon’s office, and I held it in my hand while he numbed my neck and prepared to kosher me. The beads helped me remember that I am a person who meditates. This means that I am a person who sets aside a particular amount of time several days a week to sit on a cushion and try to pay attention to my breath. To try and to fail and to try again. That is what I mean by meditation. 

So I did that while the doctor removed the little skin cancer and stitched me up. I noticed my heart felt crushed and pained with anxiety and beat rapidly in response. This added another layer of anxiety about my heart exploding. I reminded myself that anxiety is just an emotion, and just because I feel it, doesn’t mean there is anything more to the feeling than that it is there. I reminded myself that behind the cloud of anxiety was clear sky. The anxiety would pass. It didn’t pass then, Readers, but at least I was able to see around the edges of it. Pema Chodron would be proud of me. Then the doctor applied a bandage and brought me a hand mirror. The gigantic slit I’d been picturing was a small thing, hidden behind a steristrip. Then I got dressed and left. I still have to wait another week for the stitches to come out and the pathology report, but I feel much better. 

This is the scaffolding of success supporting me. 

Revisiting Values and the Scaffolding of Success

Values. One of the supports of the scaffolding of success is knowing your values and living in accord with them. I could take you through the reasons why, but just trust me. Whenever you talk to or read experts about success, happiness, and the meaning of life, they always bring the subject around to knowing your values. After all, everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Doing work that has meaning, feeling like you have a purpose, being able to get into flow depends on zeroing in on what is important to you.

At the end of October, we went to visit our friends in Boston. You know the weekend, the one when we left the Senior home alone with strict instructions not to let anyone drunk in our house. (Except us, of course.) But no drunk teens, due to liability issues. I was feeling okay about leaving her alone, if okay means heart palpitations and inability to sleep coupled with the constant feeling of needing to pee. In my secret heart, I felt we owed it to her to leave her alone at least once before she goes to college.

I was fine, even after, while walking Milo, encountering my neighbor, who recounted the times her children attended parties that destroyed homes while unsuspecting parents were out of town. Even after she told me that one night she actually got “that call you never want to get, the police calling to say your child is en route to the hospital with alcohol poisoning.” 

Yeah, anyway, blithely off to Boston we went, to visit our Yankee friends. These guys are Yankees through and through. Meaning that they keep the thermostat at 56 F and return well-worn items to L.L. Bean for replacement because of their lifetime guarantee. In honor of our visit, they said they were willing to break their rule of never bumping up the heat voluntarily until after Nov. 1 and they would do so for us, if it got really cold. I felt like a wuss knowing they looked upon us that way, as needing more heat. Which I do. It is true. I keep the heat at 66 during the day and bump it up to 68 regularly. 

So anyway, off we went. I tucked the book I had to read for an assignment into my bag, even though the husband mocked me for thinking we would have time to read. It was an interesting book, up my bowling alley as they say, a self-help book. I can’t say the title, since I reviewed it, for actual money, and it has not yet come out. It was all about how tapping into your true values makes you happier and more successful and helps improve the world. Just the kind of self-help stuff my Yankee friends would never read, let alone think. 

I tried out this idea as we huddled around their kitchen table, cupping our hands over our glasses of whiskey for warmth. I told them I was reading a pre-publication copy of a book about figuring out your values and learning to live in accord with them. This book talked about how it can be difficult to determine what you actually value, as opposed to what you feel you should value. Check. I have had that problem. 

My Yankee friend looked at me like I’d, I don’t know, turned the heat up to 70. Wouldn’t you just automatically do the stuff that was important to you? She wanted to know. 

Nothing like a Yankee to reduce a self-help book to cinders. It was as if, when I began to describe this book to them, immediately the idea in it seemed to disintegrate.

Basically, my Yankee friends couldn’t conceive how anyone would need to discover his or her values. They would just know them. Furthermore, they would just live in accord with them. Or, if they weren’t totally in accord with them, due to the need to pay bills - a common situation among most people - then they would accept that and move on. What’s the namby-pamby big deal about finding your values? That was the gist of the conversation.

Readers, I felt about the size of a lemon seed after this. I symbolically had to semi-raise my hand sheepishly and say that I, personally, had found it very hard to settle on my actual true values. Which is probably because I’m not a gritty, hardy Yankee. 

And yet, they are right, to a degree. We all make our choices and spend our time, and therefore we must value what we do. Indeed,I have come to see that despite my internal conflicts over should and should not, I have managed to live, after all, doing the things I want to do. At least as far as they are in my control. 

But for example, say you have a kid who is into soccer and you are not into soccer. Well, then you have to go to all these soccer games and stand around and try to keep your eye on the ball and recognize one ponytailed preteen from another - can you tell I speak here from experience? - well, then in that situation, you are doing something you don’t value. You might even consider it a waste of time. However, if I brought my Yankee friend’s clarity of thought to the situation, perhaps I could look at it a different way. Maybe I am doing exactly what I value, because what I value most is supporting my child. Therefore, wasting my time and being bored out of my mind and utterly unable to tell one ponytail from another across the field is actually living in accord with my values. So I need to get over myself. 

Now, say you have two children, or three, or more. For each child, presumably, you find yourself weaving various strands of obligation into a nice potholder of life. You’re going to games, performances, and meetings relating to your children, but you feel you have forgotten what you value, or you’re not sure anymore. Because what you value gets buried under the day-to-day stuff you do. 

potholders of life
c/o Creative Commons Google Images

So, with a tip of the hat to my Yankee friend, I have to say that in this situation, you can actually get confused about what you value. Do you value supporting your child in her endeavors? Or was it rooting for the team to win that game and engaging in fisticuffs with other over-invested parents? 

I guess a lot of my life is like that. What I want or prioritize day-to-day and hour-to-hour can be in conflict; but what I do incrementally, over time, speaks to my underlying priorities - and those are my true values. 

Or do I have it backwards? Do I do exactly what I value every day, being a SAHM and a writer (which means at times a procrastinator, a do-nothinger, a daydreamer, and a slob) but still feel like I should (SHOULD) be doing something else: having a more well-defined profession with a salary and benefits and hours and special work clothes. 

So I guess what I’m saying is that I admire my Yankee friend’s certainty; but I am equally certain that it’s all too easy to lose track of what you value and wonder what it is.