Buffett’s Fourth Law of Motion: Your Behavior; “Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases”

Buffett’s Fourth Law of Motion: Your Behavior

Posted on January 26, 2014

Ben Carlson

“The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.” – Benjamin Graham

One of the best performing mutual funds of the past decade is the Fairholme Fund, which is run by portfolio manager Bruce Berkowitz. The ten year annual return on the fund outpaces the S&P 500 by nearly 4% a year.

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How does the inner experience of faith differ from popular perceptions of religion?

Alone, Yet Not Alone

JAN. 27, 2014

David Brooks

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young. When secular or mostly secular people are asked by researchers to give their impression of the devoutly faithful, whether Jewish, Christian or other, the words that come up commonly include “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned” and “out of touch.”

It’s not surprising. There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. …To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.

She had an idyllic childhood in a Protestant sect prone to black-or-white dichotomies. But when she was in her 20s, life’s tragedies and complexities inevitably mounted, and she experienced a gradual erosion of certainty.

She began reading her way through the books on the Barnes & Noble Great Books shelf, trying to cover the ones she missed by not going to college. She loved George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” and was taken by Tolstoy. “He didn’t have an easy time encountering himself,” she says, sympathetically. “I was reading my way from darkness into paradox.”

She also began reading theology. She’d never read anything written before 1835. She went back to Augustine (whose phrases show up in her lyrics) and the early church fathers. Denominationally, she went backward in time. She became Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Catholic: “I was ready to be an atheist. I was going to be a Catholic or an atheist. “

She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe any of this, but the church always brings me back. …I don’t think Jesus wants to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”

Her lyrics dwell in the parts of Christianity she doesn’t understand. “I don’t want people to think I’ve had an easy time.” She still fights the tendency to go to extremes. “If I’d have been an atheist I’d have been the most obnoxious, Dawkins-loving atheist. I wouldn’t have been like Christopher Hitchens.”

Her life, like all lives, is unexpected, complex and unique. Her music provides a clearer outward display of how many inwardly experience God.

If you are a secular person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the world:

“It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”

‘Purpose’ is the preachy new CEO buzzword

January 27, 2014 1:42 pm

‘Purpose’ is the preachy new CEO buzzword

By Andrew Hill

Leaders need a good explanation when reality clashes with values to which staff are committed

When Ellen Kullman, chief executive of DuPont, asked a contract worker on the production line making Kevlar, the fibre used in bulletproof vests, what he was doing, she got an unexpected response: “We’re saving lives.”

The comment underlined her conviction that a sense of purpose was far more effective at hiring, motivating and keeping staff than any corporate brand, vision or mission statement.

She was not the only chief executive at the World Economic Forum last week to use the term “purpose”, as business slowly battles to restore public trust. In making any company more resilient, “the most important thing is to focus on purpose,” said Brian Moynihan, who is wrestling Bank of America into post-crisis shape. “You have to be a purpose-driven organisation,” added Mark Weinberger, head of EY, one of the Big Four professional services groups.

But even chief executives differ on precisely what purpose is. If it cannot be expressed easily, I doubt they will make it stick. Yet if it can be boiled down to a general single sentence, to fit the many mundane tasks a company and its staff have to perform, I wonder how it differs from the much-derided, meaningless mission statement (Acme Widget: Meeting the Unmet Needs of Customers Everywhere).

One difference is that whereas chief executives (particularly new chief executives) can change missions and visions on a whim, purpose is far harder to shape. That is an advantage – if you can harness your company to your younger employees’ search for meaning at work, you will gain their loyalty – but also a pitfall. For one thing, as young employees grow up, their reasons for going to work will change. For another, as Asia experts at Davos reminded me, in some faster-growing markets such as China, the imperative for workers to make money easily trumps purpose. If the Kevlar worker had responded “I’m earning a decent wage to feed my family”, would it have meant he was any less motivated to do a good job?

Another reason that purpose is double-edged is that it gives off a whiff of the sacred. But a purpose that sanctifies work can also quickly become sanctimonious. Precisely because purpose is important to workers and customers, they will be quick to punish executives who appear to diverge from its path. When academics Sandra Cha and Amy Edmondson studied a maverick advertising agency with a charismatic leader a few years ago, they were surprised to discover that the same employees who had joined the company for its idealistic set of values were highly critical of its boss because they believed he was not living up to them. One reason was that the staff were interpreting the group’s purpose slightly differently – and more broadly – than the chief executive intended; the researchers called it “value expansion”.

One lesson is that even if purpose is more powerful than the old motivational methods, CEOs need a good explanation to hand when corporate reality clashes with the high-sounding values to which their staff are committed.

Facing such challenges, some chief executives must be tempted to return to simple pursuit of profit, or to assume that merely making good products well is sufficient. But such an attitude will not narrow the trust gap between business and the public. Unreliable products and services will undermine confidence in companies but customers and staff want companies to live up to higher standards of behaviour, too.

Dov Seidman, a consultant and advocate of “principled performance”, points toJohnson & Johnson

’s 70-year-old “credo” as a model. It states that the healthcare company’s first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses, patients, mothers and fathers who use its products and concludes: “When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should earn a fair return.” He is suspicious of companies that use purpose for marketing or recruitment. “I want to know who is doing it to make money, and who is doing it because it is who they are,” he says.

As Ms Kullman points out: “We had a vision and a mission and nobody understood what they were.” But the appearance of purpose in Davos-speak is a warning to executives that it could suffer the same fate, hollowed of meaning by a combination of overuse, abuse, breach of corporate promise and general cynicism.

Man Jumps To His Death From JPMorgan London Headquarters

Man Jumps To His Death From JPMorgan London Headquarters

Tyler Durden on 01/28/2014 07:48 -0500

Early this morning, at JPM’s 33 story high London Headquarters located at 25 Bank Street in Canary Wharf, a 39 year-old man jumped to his death after falling onto a 9th floor roof. The police, who were called to the scene at 8:02 this morning, said they are not treating the death as suspicious and no arrests have been made, suggesting the death was indeed a suicide.  London Ambulance Service and London Air Ambulance attended but they could not save the man.

Bloomberg quotes Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan in London who said that “We are reviewing a very sad incident at 25 Bank Street this morning.”  The building and the surrounding area is “currently secure,” she said.

From Bloomberg:

The 11-year-old skyscraper is 33 stories high, according to building-data provider Emporis. It was formerly the European headquarters of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2008. 

The bank declined to identify the deceased person or say whether they worked for JPMorgan. The police are waiting for “formal identification,” they said in an e-mailed statement.

London24, which also notes that this is the second high profile banking death within just a few days after Deutsche bank announced its former executive William Broeksmit 58, was found dead in his home on Sunday, caught some tweets describing the incident:

Is this just the first of many banker suicides, if indeed this was a suicide?

7 RULES FOR SELLING IN A WORLD THAT HAS ENOUGH STUFF

7 RULES FOR SELLING IN A WORLD THAT HAS ENOUGH STUFF

BY JAMES WALLMAN

Author James Wallman says having too much stuff–or “stuffocation”–is the defining problem of our generation. Materialism is dead; experientialism is where it’s at. Here are seven ways that brands can meet this changing consumer tide.

There was a time when big was beautiful, more was better, and greed was good. If that time had a heyday, it was the 1980s. If it had a hero, it was Gordon Gekko. And if it had a big, important name, it was materialism.

Although Gekko and his shouting, his suspenders, and his love of more, feel out of place today, there was an era when, as Gekko might have said, it made a whole lotta sense. That era was the 20th century, the age which made sense of the counterintuitive idea that if we wanted to have more, we had to spend more.

The idea had first been floated hundreds of years before, in fact, by an Englishman called Bernard Mandeville. In his 1715 satire the Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, Mandeville wrote about a group of prosperous bees who lived, so the story went, a life of luxury and ease. But after grumblings that their lifestyle lacked virtue, they turned away from their fraud and greed and extravagance, to a new life of simplicity and honesty and temperance. You might think that would be a good idea. But, as the fable showed, if the bees gave up their vices, especially their greedy, high-spending ways, that would be the end of their easy, luxurious life as well.

The same logic that had worked for the bees in Mandeville’s fable also made perfect sense in the 20th century. If people spent more, they would create a virtuous circle: more jobs, more wages, and higher standards of living for us all. It all hinged, as you can see, on people like you and me acting like high-spending, materialistic bees who thought greed was good, and more was better.

And it worked. Materialism delivered improvements in standards of living that were unprecedented in human history, giving us all washing machines, TVs, indoor toilets, cheap clothes, and a zillion other consumer gadgets and other knickknacks.

And back then, boy, was it easy to sell stuff. In the 20th century, the major challenge for marketers was less persuading people to buy, and more getting enough goods to the right place at the right time. “All you had to do back then was turn on the tap of advertising,” Kevin Allen, who worked for McCann, Interpublic, Lowe, and Rudolf Giuliani, once told me. “And then get the goods to market.”

But then, around the time the 20th became the 21st century, something happened. Or, rather, lots of things did. And they have all added up to what I think is the defining problem of our generation, a problem I call “stuffocation”.

Stuffocation is that feeling you get when you look in your wardrobe and it’s bursting with clothes but you can’t find a thing to wear, when you have to fight through piles of stuff you don’t use to find the thing you need, and when someone goes to give you something and your gut reaction isn’t “thank you”, but “what on earth makes you think I could possibly want or need that pointless piece of stuff”? Instead of thinking of more in positive terms, like we used to, we now think more means more hassle, more to manage, and more to think about. In our busy, cluttered lives, more is no longer better. It is worse.

After conducting the most comprehensive study into daily life ever conducted, the Los Angeles-based Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) decided that we are living in “the most materially rich society in global history, with light-years more possessions per average family than any preceding society.” As a result, they concluded, we are at a point of “material saturation,” we are coping with “extraordinary clutter,” and, as individuals and as a society, we are facing a “clutter crisis.”

Are you tired of the push to accumulate more? Would you be happier if you had fewer things than you have now? If you’re not sure, take the Stuffocation Quiz

to find out.

So, why have so many of us had enough of stuff? Why isn’t materialism working anymore? If you ask a different expert, you’ll get a different emphasis.

A political scientist would tell you we’re not so bothered about stuff because we’ve grown up in a stable society; we’ve climbed the first stage of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and we’ve become less interested in basic, material concerns. An environmentalist will tell you we’ve had enough of stuff because we’re worried about our impact on the planet. A philosopher might say we’ve had enough because of the status anxiety that comes materialistic consumerism. A psychologist might chip in that we’ve had enough because materialism has given us affluenza: that mass production and mass consumption has led to mass depression. And a technologist might agree with all of the above, but say the real reason we’re shifting away from stuff is simply because we can: why have a car when you can use ZipCar or Uber?

And what do I, a seasoned trend forecaster, think? Social media is changing things. Not only is it changing how we communicate, it is changing how we present ourselves and signify status.

In the 20th century, the best way to indicate your status was with the BMW on your drive, the Breitling watch on your wrist, or the Prada handbag on your arm. But, unless you made a point of telling them, no one would know that you had been to a concert, away for the weekend, or to this month’s restaurant of the moment. What you owned was a much better way of expressing your identity and your status than what you did. Social media has turned this 20th-century truth on its head.

Now, only a relative few will see your car or your handbag. But with all your friends, fans, and followers on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Facebook, many more will know that you’re at SXSW, on a chairlift in Tahoe, or you’ve just completed a Tough Mudder course. That means experiences are now more visible. They’re better than material goods at expressing your identity, and more likely to contribute to your status.

None of these reasons for stuffocation are blips that will be here one year, gone the next. They’re all observable, observed, long-term trends. Instead of blips, they are insistent storm waves that will keep crashing again and again against our mainstream, materialistic culture. That’s why the problem of stuffocation will be the defining problem of the 21st century.

So, what does stuffocation mean for you? And what does it mean for your business?

Let’s begin with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean the end of consumerism. If we still want a life of luxury and ease (and we do, right?) we all need to play our part as high-spending bees.

And it doesn’t mean the end of material stuff. We’re not all about to become ascetics, head for the hills, and go live naked in caves. (Even if that could be fun. For a weekend.) We are still flesh and blood, in-real-life humans. We will still need and use shoes, bags, clothes, cars, and cell phones. But as we increasingly respond to stuffocation, we will consume far less material things.

I don’t think that this change will happen overnight. This is long-term cultural change. It is as significant as the shift our ancestors made when they gave up thrifty ways to become wasteful consumers in the 20th century–and that took a good half-century or so to really take hold. From the perspective of later historians, this change will be seen as revolution, but from ours, living it every day, it will feel much more like evolution.

THE 7 SILVER BULLETS FOR SELLING TO THE NEW CONSUMER

So don’t tear up your business plan, and let go of your legacy infrastructure–just yet. Instead, the first thing you should do is understand the new consumer, who is becoming ever less materialist, and, I believe, ever more “experientialist”. That is, because of stuffocation, instead of looking for status, identity, happiness, and meaning in material things–stuff–people are increasingly finding those things in experiences instead.

Understanding that is key, because, armed with that insight, you’re ready to re-tool your modus operandi for the 21st century. Here are seven silver bullets for connecting with, and selling to, the new experientialist consumer.

HAVE AN APPLE-SHAPED BRUTAL FOCUS ON EXPERIENCE

In some ways, Apple is an old school, 20th-century behemoth. It’s a hardware manufacturer. It makes a lot of material stuff. But Apple has become the world’s leading brand because of its ruthlessly brutal focus on experience. It makes everything pleasant: from the stores to the moment you open the box. “Not only do the guys at Apple make sure their products are products people love to use,” says Joe Pine, co-author with Jim Gilmore of seminal book The Experience Economy. “They even think about the packaging, about the ‘box opening experience’, so even that is unique and engaging.”

TOUCH PEOPLE

Touch people–not in a way that’ll get you in trouble, of course, but in the way Pine and Gilmore advised in The Experience Economy. Make every interaction between your brand and your audience touch them “on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level.” This is the difference, I think, between staying with a service-economy brand like Four Seasons–great, friendly, service–and experience-economy brands like The Standard, Grupo Habita, or Ace Hotels, which put their energy into curating and creating events and moments that stay with you.

GIVE PEOPLE STORIES THEY CAN’T HELP BUT SHARE

Touching people is all well and good, but make sure the experiences you give people are the sort of thing people can’t wait to share. A key feature of every event by London-based Bompas & Parr–where you might be playing crazy golf on the roof of London department store Selfridges, or eating pig’s ears soup while watching The Holy Mountain in a former Masonic lodge–is that they are designed to give people social currency. “Everyone is an auto-biographer nowadays, it’s like everyone is actively writing their own biography all the time,” co-founder Sam Bompas told me. “So stories are becoming even more important. In the ’80s, people wanted a fast car. Now they want a good story to tell.”

CARE SO MUCH IT HURTS

Patagonia’s new Worn Wear campaign is a great way to show how important it is to sell stories not stuff. But the brand’s Common ThreadsPartnership with eBay, is, in my opinion, an even better reaction to the problem of stuffocation. It was launched with the company’s founder, Yvon Chouinard asking people “to not buy something if they don’t need it.” That is a radical, revolutionary statement. It is the antithesis of the “more is better” idea of materialism. And yet, offering to hurt your own profits in support of something bigger is the sort of thing that makes sense in this time of stuffocation. (As it turned out, it also helped the company make more money.)

DO A DISAPPEARING ACT

Ditch as much of the material aspect of your brand altogether. Sportswear brand Puma did this when its designers made a bag that, rather than add to the clutter in your home, or the guilt you get when you throw it out, just disappears. Put the Clever Little Shopper bag in hot water for three minutes and it harmlessly dissolves, so you can pour it safely down the drain.

PUSH COLLABORATIVE, NOT CONSPICUOUS, CONSUMPTION

Take lessons from the rise of Spotify, Zipcar, and Airbnb, and from what is variously called the sharing economy, collaborative consumption, and the shift from ownership to access. They are all, in my view, versions of what Buckminster Fuller called “ephemeralization”–the idea of getting more experience from less physical stuff. Put ephemeralization at the heart of what you do: reduce your material inputs and costs, while increasing the experiential outputs and benefits. While you are about it, you will not only reduce your planetary impact, you may also create conversation and community.

ASK ARISTOTLE

You can slavishly follow each of the above, and still come up with average ideas. The ultimate place to find inspiration to connect with people, I think, is in the most fundamental human question of all–the question Aristotle asked in the Nicomachean Ethics almost two and a half thousand years ago. The question every one of us, as individuals, parents, policy-makers, and marketers should ask: how should you, and I, and the rest of society, live in order to be happy?

In the 20th century, as we progressed from scarcity to abundance, the answer was materialism. Then, people found happiness, status, identity, and meaning in material things. Now, in this time of abundance and so much stuff we are feeling stuffocation, the answer is what I call “experientialism.” Now, people are looking for happiness, status, identity, and meaning in experiences instead.

If you, and the start-up, business, and brands you work for, can help people find those things through experiences rather than stuff, you are more likely to connect with them, and sell to them.

James Wallman is a trend forecaster, author, and speaker. His new book,Stuffocation, is available from Amazon.com.

How to make scary decisions; If you want to operate outside your comfort zone, get comfortable being uncomfortable

How to make scary decisions

January 28, 2014

Kate Jones

If you want to operate outside your comfort zone, get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Rebecca Butler saw plenty of scary decisions ahead of her when she decided to open her own business.

The former proposals manager had spent years working in the corporate world and the idea of leaving such a comfortable environment seemed risky.

“There’s a lot of tough decisions to make, but the main one was getting the courage to put myself out there,” she says.

Like any entrepreneur, the possibility of failure loomed over every decision Butler made. But the Melbourne businesswoman found a gap in the lucrative children’s market and wasn’t going to leave it open.

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“It’s really quite nerve-racking to take your idea, develop it and then put it out there for possible failure,” Butler says.

“There’s a quote I heard, ‘Get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable’ which sounds cheesy, but is very true.”

Butler and her husband put their personal savings plus two years of Butler’s time into Littleville.com.au – an ecommerce platform for small businesses to sell children’s, baby and maternity products.

The site launched just five weeks ago and so far, despite further daunting decisions still to come, Butler says it’s all been worthwhile.

Anyone who has taken the leap of faith to start their own business has pushed themselves through a series of difficult decisions.

But Mat Jacobson from online business and management education provider Ducere says it’s all a matter of having the right attitude.

“If you are approaching a decision as a scary one, you’re not approaching it with the right mindset,” he says.

“The decision to venture out and build a business shouldn’t be scary, particularly if the alternative is working for a multinational corporation where you have no control and are at the whim of other people’s decisions.”

The mere thought of disaster is enough to turn budding entrepreneurs away from their business dreams.

Jacobson believes this is because failure in the business world is judged more harshly in Australia than other countries.

“People shouldn’t be scared to try, but the issue of not succeeding with a start-up is an unfortunate characteristic of Australian culture,” he says.

“In the US, it’s viewed as a learning experience.”

Having a mentor to help work through the tough calls is a great way to feel less daunted by difficult decisions, he says.

“A mentor acts as a sounding board and can provide good advice because they are impartial and don’t have a vested interest in the business – just a vested interest in you succeeding,” Jacobson says.

Firing an employee ranks high on the list of daunting decisions for business owners.

It usually comes down to a matter of performance or cost, but whatever the reason it’s an incredibly hard call for any business owner to make.

For those employing a small group of staff, it can be a particularly emotional decision and one that may take longer to consider than most business arrangements.

Firing someone was the hardest business decision Dianna Butterworth, who runs women’s cufflink retailer Miss Links, has made.

“I’ve had to move people on from the business and it’s never easy letting people go, especially when times are tough economically,” she says.

“It’s probably the worst thing I’ve had to do in my career.”

Butterworth says she summoned the courage to give a worker their marching orders by reminding herself to put her business first.

But even then it’s a last resort option, she says.

“I always give people all the resources and training they need before deciding their performance isn’t adequate for the role,”

“It’s not easy especially when emotions can come into play, but if you’ve looked at all the other options in trying to get the best out of the person and to get the job done, and there’s still capability issues and cultural issues, then the only thing is to let them go and find someone who can better fill the position.”

The toughest choices can often be the best choices. While these should not be made in haste, it never pays to agonise on a complicated decision.

Jacobson says strong business leaders know how to move fast.

“The worst thing in business is people who cannot make a decision,” he says.

“If you take a long time to make a decision you’re business will be stunted and everything will slow down.

“Realise that you are going to make mistakes but try to move at a rate faster than your competitors and you should be right about 80 per cent of the time.”

Scientific Thinking in Business

Scientific Thinking in Business

More than technology, businesses need the scientific method.

By Duncan J. Watts on January 22, 2014

Scientific thinking can help businesses torn between data and gut instincts.

Throughout history, innovations in instrumentation—the microscope, the telescope, and the cyclotron—have repeatedly revolutionized science by improving scientists’ ability to measure the natural world. Now, with human behavior increasingly reliant on digital platforms like the Web and mobile apps, technology is effectively “instrumenting” the social world as well. The resulting deluge of data has revolutionary implications not only for social science but also for business decision making.

As enthusiasm for “big data” grows, skeptics warn that overreliance on data has pitfalls. Data may be biased and is almost always incomplete. It can lead decision makers to ignore information that is harder to obtain, or make them feel more certain than they should. The risk is that in managing what we have measured, we miss what really matters—as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did in relying too much on his infamous body count, and as bankers did prior to the 2007–2009 financial crisis in relying too much on flawedquantitative models

.

Many of the most consequential decisions offer only one opportunity to succeed.

The skeptics are right that uncritical reliance on data alone can be problematic. But so is overreliance on intuition or ideology. For every Robert McNamara, there is a Ron Johnson, the CEO whose disastrous tenure as the head of JC Penney was characterized by his dismissing data and evidence in favor of instincts. For every flawed statistical model, there is a flawed ideology whose inflexibility leads to disastrous results.

So if data is unreliable and so is intuition, what is a responsible decision maker supposed to do? While there is no correct answer to this question—the world is too complicated for any one recipe to apply—I believe that leaders across a wide range of contexts could benefit from a scientific mind-set toward decision making.

A scientific mind-set takes as its inspiration the scientific method, which at its core is a recipe for learning about the world in a systematic, replicable way: start with some general question based on your experience; form a hypothesis that would resolve the puzzle and that also generates a testable prediction; gather data to test your prediction; and finally, evaluate your hypothesis relative to competing hypotheses.

The scientific method is largely responsible for the astonishing increase in our understanding of the natural world over the past few centuries. Yet it has been slow to enter the worlds of politics, business, policy, and marketing, where our prodigious intuition for human behavior can always generate explanations for why people do what they do or how to make them do something different. Because these explanations are so plausible, our natural tendency is to want to act on them without further ado. But if we have learned one thing from science, it is that the most plausible explanation is not necessarily correct. Adopting a scientific approach to decision making requires us to test our hypotheses with data.

While data is essential for scientific decision making, theory, intuition, and imagination remain important as well—to generate hypotheses in the first place, to devise creative tests of the hypotheses that we have, and to interpret the data that we collect. Data and theory, in other words, are the yin and yang of the scientific method—theory frames the right questions, while data answers the questions that have been asked. Emphasizing either at the expense of the other can lead to serious mistakes.

Also important is experimentation, which doesn’t mean “trying new things” or “being creative” but quite specifically the use of controlled experiments to tease out causal effects. In business, most of what we observe is correlation—we do X and Y happens—but often what we want to know is whether or not X caused Y. How many additional units of your new product did your advertising campaign cause consumers to buy? Will expanded health insurance coverage cause medical costs to increase or decline? Simply observing the outcome of a particular choice does not answer causal questions like these: we need to observe the difference between choices.

Replicating the conditions of a controlled experiment is often difficult or impossible in business or policy settings, but increasingly it is being done in “field experiments,” where treatments are randomly assigned to different individuals or communities. For example, MIT’s Poverty Action Lab has conducted over 400 field experiments to better understand aid delivery, while economists have used such experiments to measure the impact of online advertising.

Although field experiments are not an invention of the Internet era—randomized trials have been the gold standard of medical research for decades—digital technology has made them far easier to implement. Thus, as companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon increasingly reap performance benefits from data science and experimentation, scientific decision making will become more pervasive.

Nevertheless, there are limits to how scientific decision makers can be. Unlike scientists, who have the luxury of withholding judgment until sufficient evidence has accumulated, policy makers or business leaders generally have to act in a state of partial ignorance. Strategic calls have to be made, policies implemented, reward or blame assigned. No matter how rigorously one tries to base one’s decisions on evidence, some guesswork will be required.

Exacerbating this problem is that many of the most consequential decisions offer only one opportunity to succeed. One cannot go to war with half of Iraq and not the other just to see which policy works out better. Likewise, one cannot reorganize the company in several different ways and then choose the best. The result is that we may never know which good plans failed and which bad plans worked.

Even here, though, the scientific method is instructive, not for eliciting answers but rather for highlighting the limits of what can be known. We can’t help asking why Apple became so successful, or what caused the last financial crisis, or why “Gangnam Style” was the most viral video of all time. Nor can we stop ourselves from coming up with plausible answers. But in cases where we cannot test our hypothesis many times, the scientific method teaches us not to infer too much from any one outcome. Sometimes the only true answer is that we just do not know.

Some people find this conclusion depressing, but a scientific mind should always remain skeptical of what it knows. Be skeptical of data by all means, but also be skeptical of plausible explanations, conventional wisdom, inspiring ideologies, compelling anecdotes, and most of all your own intuition. The result should be neither total paralysis nor a slavish adherence to data, nor should it in any way exclude creativity or imagination. Rather, it should lead us to a more rational, evidence-based world.

Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and author ofEverything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us.

In Praise of Depth; “We don’t need more bits and bytes of information. What we need instead is more wisdom, insight, understanding and discernment – less quantity, higher quality; less breadth and more depth.”

JANUARY 17, 2014, 12:41 PM  12 Comments

In Praise of Depth

By TONY SCHWARTZ

Many years ago, I realized that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. This year, instead, I created a ritual. A resolution is a hope and a prayer. A ritual is a highly specific behavior done at a precise time, so that it becomes automatic over time.

My ritual is to read 25 pages each day of a book that advances my knowledge in the work I do, and 25 pages a day of a literary classic. The first I’m doing at lunchtime, and the second as soon as I get home from work.

When I returned to my office after New Year’s Day, I had a community meeting with my co-workers so we could reconnect. One of the questions each of us answered was the personal challenge we intended to take on in the new year. Before I said anything, four people on our team mentioned their desire to read more this year, and more substantively.

I’m craving more depth in my life, and so are they. My strong suspicion is that it’s because we’re drowning in so much trivia — a tsunami of texts and tweets, instant messages and Gchat; Facebook posts and bookmarked websites we mindlessly cruise; and multiple Google searches to get answers to the endless, often useless questions that happen to pop into our overcrowded minds.

The hunger we’re all feeling is for instant gratification. It’s not unlike the siren call of a fragrant chocolate chip cookie — or, for that matter, the allure of any drug that promises a frisson of pleasure.

But the dopamine squirts we get from these drugs are short-lived. They mostly prompt a craving for more — a compulsion to match the initial buzz by upping the ante in the face of diminishing returns. What we chase through our digital devices is instant connection and information. What we get is no more nutritious or enduringly satisfying than a sugary dessert.

We don’t need more bits and bytes of information, or more frequent updates about each other’s modest daily accomplishments. What we need instead is more wisdom, insight, understanding and discernment — less quantity, higher quality; less breadth and more depth.

I have a Twitter account, because I’ve reluctantly accepted that it’s part of marketing a modern business. But I don’t tweet very often, I rarely read other tweets and I’ve never read one that stayed with me for more than a moment. Nearly the same is true of my relationship to Facebook. I do succumb to both, but they mostly leave me feeling empty and distracted. I often wonder if the costs are worth the benefits.

The reality is that we each have limited working memories, meaning we can only retain a certain amount of new information in our minds at any given time. If we’re forever flooding the brain with new facts, other information necessarily gets crowded out before it’s been retained in our long-term memory. If you selectively reduce what you’re taking in, then you can hold on to more of what you really want to remember.

Over the holidays, I couldn’t resist seeing “The Wolf of Wall Street” — precisely because it sounded so seductively over the top. Within 30 minutes, I felt saturated by its pointless, numbing excess. Even so (and embarrassingly), it took me 90 minutes — half the movie – to finally get up and leave. I avoided “12 Years a Slave” for weeks because I knew it would be difficult and disturbing to watch. But once I was there, I found it utterly mesmerizing. The movie has stayed with me for weeks, and I feel deepened and enriched by it.

One of the most frequent complaints I hear at all levels in companies is about priorities. The tyranny of the urgent crowds out the work in our lives that requires more time and reflection, but has the potential to generate more long-term value. Relentless demands make it impossible for many of us to stop what we’re doing long enough to decide what most deserves our attention.

Going deeper does mean forgoing immediate gratification more often, taking time to reflect and making more conscious choices. It also requires the capacity to focus in a more absorbed and sustained way, which takes practice and commitment in a world of infinite distractions.

I’ve got nothing against simple pleasures. I love chocolate. I still watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” I read celebrity profiles in magazines. I’m just arguing against them as a steady diet and in favor of doing the more important and valuable work first, and the trivial stuff later.

Taking on a long and challenging book may not provide the instant pleasure I derive from scarfing down a big bowl of Ben and Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. But it does make me feel instantly better about myself. And once I’m reading Dickens, or Faulkner, or the history of psychoanalysis, the experience is more nourishing and lasting than most of what I do, most of the time.

Daniel Kahneman’s Favorite Approach For Making Better Decisions

Daniel Kahneman’s Favorite Approach For Making Better Decisions

January 23, 2014 by Shane Parrish

Bob Sutton’s new book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, contains an interesting section towards the end on looking back from the future, which talks about “a mind trick that goads and guides people to act on what they know and, in turn, amplifies their odds of success.”

We build on Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman’s favorite approach for making better decisions. This may sound weird, but it’s a form of imaginary time travel.

It’s called the premortem. And, while it may be Kahneman’s favorite, he didn’t come up with it. A fellow by the name of Gary Klein invented the premortem technique.

A premortem works something like this. When you’re on the verge of making a decision, not just any decision but a big decision, you call a meeting. At the meeting you ask each member of your team to imagine that it’s a year later.

Split them into two groups. Have one group imagine that the effort was an unmitigated disaster. Have the other pretend it was a roaring success. Ask each member to work independently and generate reasons, or better yet, write a story, about why the success or failure occurred. Instruct them to be as detailed as possible, and, as Klein emphasizes, to identify causes that they wouldn’t usually mention “for fear of being impolite.” Next, have each person in the “failure” group read their list or story aloud, and record and collate the reasons. Repeat this process with the “success” group. Finally use the reasons from both groups to strengthen your … plan. If you uncover overwhelming and impassible roadblocks, then go back to the drawing board.

Premortems encourage people to use “prospective hindsight,” or, more accurately, to talk in “future perfect tense.” Instead of thinking, “we will devote the next six months to implementing a new HR software initiative,” for example, we travel to the future and think “we have devoted six months to implementing a new HR software package.”

You imagine that a concrete success or failure has occurred and look “back from the future” to tell a story about the causes.

Pretending that a success or failure has already occurred—and looking back and inventing the details of why it happened—seems almost absurdly simple. Yet renowned scholars including Kahneman, Klein, and Karl Weick supply compelling logic and evidence that this approach generates better decisions, predictions, and plans. Their work suggests several reasons why. …

1. This approach helps people overcome blind spots.

As … upcoming events become more distant, people develop more grandiose and vague plans and overlook the nitty-gritty daily details required to achieve their long-term goals.

2. This approach helps people bridge short-term and long-term thinking

Weick argues that this shift is effective, in part, because it is far easier to imagine the detailed causes of a single outcome than to imagine multiple outcomes and try to explain why each may have occurred. Beyond that, analyzing a single event as if it has already occurred rather than pretending it might occur makes it seem more concrete and likely to actually happen, which motivates people to devote more attention to explaining it.

3. Looking back dampens excessive optimism.

As Kahneman and other researchers show, most people overestimate the chances that good things will happen to them and underestimate the odds that they will face failures, delays, and setbacks. Kahneman adds that “in general, organizations really don’t like pessimists” and that when naysayers raise risks and drawbacks, they are viewed as “almost disloyal.”

Max Bazerman, a Harvard professor, believes that we’re less prone to irrational optimism when we predict the fate of projects that are not our own. For example, when it comes to friends’ home renovation projects, most people estimate the costs will run 25 to 50 percent over budget. When it comes to our projects however, they will be “completed on time and near the project costs.”

4. A premortem challenges the illusion of consensus.
Most times not everyone on a team agrees with the course of action. Even when you have enough cognitive diversity in the room, people still keep their mouths shut because people in power tend to reward people who agree with them while punishing those who have the courage to speak up with a dissenting view.

The resulting corrosive conformity is evident when people don’t raise private doubts, known risks, and inconvenient facts. In contrast, as Klein explains, a premortem can create a competition where members feel accountable for raising obstacles that others haven’t. “The whole dynamic changes from trying to avoid anything that might disrupt harmony to trying to surface potential problems.”

An FBI Agent Reveals 5 Steps To Gaining Anyone’s Trust

An FBI Agent Reveals 5 Steps To Gaining Anyone’s Trust

January 20, 2014 by Shane Parrish

I had an opportunity to ask Robin Dreeke a few questions. Robin is in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s elite Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program and the author of It’s Not All About Me.

Robin combines science and years of work in the field to offer practical tips to build rapport and establish trust. In this brief interview he discusses building relationships, how to approach someone you don’t know and ask for a favor, and the keys to establishing trust.

A lot of people are interested in strengthening and furthering relationships. How can people do this?

This is the most important aspect of everything we do in life. I’m going to give some light science behind each of my answers but to me it just explains the subjective simple explanations behind naturally great trusting relationships.

Both anecdotal (evidence) as well as science supports the fact that the greatest happiness is found in positive social interactions and relationships. The simplest answer to this is to “make it all about them.” Our brain rewards us chemically when we are able to talk and share our own views, priorities, and goals with others… long term, short term, etc. Our brain also rewards us when we are unconditionally accepted for who we are as a human being without judgement.

Both of these concepts are genetically coded in each of us (to varying degrees) because of our ancient survival instincts (ego-centrism) as well as our need to belong to groups or a tribe (tribal mentality for survival and resources). When you put these simple concepts together the answer is simple to understand, but oftentimes difficult to execute…. Speak in terms of the other person’s interests and priorities and then validate them, their choices, and who they are non-judgmentally. Some people do this naturally, for the rest of us you can build this skill and it eventually becomes second nature.

Trust is a foundation to most situations in life. How can we develop trust? What are the keys?

I can only answer from my own background and experience because trust is a very difficult thing to measure and define and each individual’s definition can vary and our brain takes in much more than verbal information when determining trust. For me and what I teach I start with what I said in question one. Trust first starts with a relationship where the other person’s brain is rewarding them for the engagement with you by doing what I outlined above.

Part two of my trust process is to understand the other person’s goals and keeping their goals and priorities on the top of my list of goals and priorities. By making the other person’s goals and priorities yours, trust will develop. Over time (some people faster than others) a need to reciprocate the kindness and relationship will build. In other words, trust is built faster and stronger when there is no personal agenda.

What’s the best way to approach someone you don’t know and ask them for a favor?

Using sympathy and seeking help is always the best. If you can wrap the help / favor you are looking for around a priority and interest of the individual you are engaging, the odds of success increase. Add social proof (i.e., others around you helping already or signed a petition etc.) and you increase it even more. Again, focus on how you can ask a favor while getting their brain to reward them for doing so.

What are some strategies to build rapport while giving a talk, presentation, or interview?

Ego Suspension / self-deprecating humor… Make it all about them! How is the information you are chatting about going to benefit them? Talk about the great strengths and skills they each have already and that all you hope to do is to have them understand their strengths even better and be able to pass them on to others more effectively if they want to. Validate every question and opinion non-judgmentally. If you don’t happen to agree, simply ask “that’s a fascinating / insightful/ thoughtful opinion… would you mind helping me understand how you came up with it?” Again, their brain will reward them on multiple levels for this.

I suspect you spend a lot of time trying to figure out if people are manipulating you or the situation? Can you talk about this? How can you tell when people are attempting to manipulate you?

I’ll start by saying I don’t like the word manipulate. The word tends to objectify people and removes the human being from the equation. When people feel they are objects, trust will not be built. I tend to not think of anyone trying to manipulate me but at times a very self-serving agenda becomes evident. This is what manipulation generally is…. a self-serving agenda where the other person feels used with no reciprocity. When I notice that there may be an overabundance of a self-serving agenda (manipulation) I don’t judge the person negatively. I try to explore two areas in order to understand them better. (go back to my first answers here… this process begins to build a relationship and trust :)) I try to understand what their objective is and why that is their objective. What are they trying to achieve, etc. I will also attempt to understand why they felt a certain way of communicating with me would be effective for them in the situation. I tend to ask questions to help them think about how they might be more successful in their objectives using other methods… such as I outlined above. In other words, help them achieve whatever objective with me they had…. because wasn’t that their goal after all? 🙂 See… keep it always coming back to them.

If you had to give a crash course in building a relationship with someone, what are the top 5 things people need to do? What carries the bulk of the freight so-to-speak?

1) Learn… about their priorities, goals, and objectives.
2) Place… theirs ahead of yours
3) Allow them to talk…. suspend your own need to talk.
4) Seek their thoughts and opinions.
5) Ego suspension!!! Validate them unconditionally and non-judgmentally for who they are as a human being.

If you haven’t already, check out Robin’s Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport With Anyone.

Why nations fail?

2014-01-27 17:12

Why nations fail?

Nam Sang-so
“Everything flows, nothing stands still. There is nothing permanent except change. Change is the only constant.” These are the abstract quotes of Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe.
The world after the 16th century was dominated by European nations. Spain and Portugal in their ocean-cruising eras shared the world but soon they had to concede the hegemony to the sailors of England and Holland and dropped out of the race.
Why, because they remained unchanged.
England, which had first succeeded in the Industrial Revolution and obtained the most industrial power in the 18th and 19th centuries, now stands behind the late starters of Germany and the United States because the country refused to change.
The most notable case of a rise and fall may be that of China. Until the mid-15th century, the country was a technically and culturally advanced nation. Under the Ming Dynasty, China enjoyed a golden age, developing one of the strongest navies in the world along with a rich and prosperous economy.
In the early 20th century, however, China went downhill and was considered an underdeveloped country. Since World War II, however, China has undergone major changes and advanced economically and practically, thus antagonizing the United States thanks to Deng Xiaoping’s reform into a market economy.
Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty? Is it culture, or the geography? The answer is “no,” according to James Robinson the author of “Why Nations Fail.” None of these factors is either definitive or destiny.
Otherwise, how can we explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo and Sierra Leone are mired in poverty and violence? Robinson conclusively shows that it is manmade political and economic institutions that underlie economic success.
Korea, to take just one of the most fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on Earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The South forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The country kept changing to adapt to the changing world. Sadly, the people of the North have endured decades of famine and political repression, with no end in sight because the country’s leadership does not want to change.
Every living thing has a limited lifecycle. In order to thrive in a changing environment, the living matter relies on the basics of survival of the fittest. The next generation must be somewhat different from the current one by inserting heterogeneous genes into it. Pure blood alone cannot meet the demands of a transforming environment.
So it’s clear, as Heraclitus said in 535 B.C., that diversity or multiculturalism is the answer to survival. China’s rise and fall impresses upon us that a nation’s fate won’t be determined by its economic or technical power alone. The country had lacked variations and yet it seems to still refuse to diversify the people.
South Korea, very fortunately, long ago abandoned any effort to remain a homogeneous nation and welcomes immigrants, following in the footsteps of the U.S. ― the strongest nation not because of its economic or military powers, but its power of diversity.  America won’t fail; nor will South Korea.
The writer is a retired architect. His email address issangsonam@gmail.com

A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans

A Wonderfully Simple Heuristic to Recognize Charlatans

January 22, 2014 by Shane Parrish

“For the Arab scholar and religious leader Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation), keeping one’s distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.”

The idea of inversion isn’t new.

While we can learn a lot from what successful people do in the mornings, as Nassim Taleb points out, we can learn a lot from what failed people do before breakfast too.

.@farnamstreet You get more info from “What failed People Do Before Breakfast” than “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast”

— Nassim N. Taleb (@nntaleb) January 21, 2014

Inversion is actually one of the most powerful mental models in our arsenal. Not only does inversion help us innovate but it also helps us deal with uncertainty.

“It is in the nature of things,” says Charlie Munger, “that many hard problems are best solved when they are addressed backward.”

Sometimes we can’t articulate what we want. Sometimes we don’t know. Sometimes there is so much uncertainty that the best approach is to attempt to avoid certain outcomes rather than attempt to guide towards the ones we desire. In short, we don’t always know what we want but we know what we don’t want.

Avoiding stupidity is often easier than seeking brilliance.

The “apophatic,” writes Nassim Taleb in Antifragile, “focuses on what cannot be said directly in words, from the greek apophasis (saying no, or mentioning without meaning).”

The method began as an avoidance of direct description, leading to a focus on negative description, what is called in Latin via negativa, the negative way, after theological traditions, particularly in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Via negativa does not try to express what God is— leave that to the primitive brand of contemporary thinkers and philosophasters with scientistic tendencies. It just lists what God is not and proceeds by the process of elimination.

Statues are carved by subtraction.

Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly how he carved the statue of David, largely considered the masterpiece of all masterpieces. His answer was: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

Where Is the Charlatan?

Recall that the interventionista focuses on positive action—doing. Just like positive definitions, we saw that acts of commission are respected and glorified by our primitive minds and lead to, say, naive government interventions that end in disaster, followed by generalized complaints about naive government interventions, as these, it is now accepted, end in disaster, followed by more naive government interventions. Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission.

…

I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.).

We learn the most from the negative.

[I]n practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

Skill doesn’t always win.

In anything requiring a combination of skill and luck the most skillful don’t always win. That’s one of the key messages of Michael Mauboussin’s book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing. This is hard for us to swallow because we intuitively feel that if you are successful you have skill for the same reasons that if the outcome is good we think you made a good decision. We can’t predict whether a person who has skills will succeed but Taleb argues that we can “pretty much predict” that a person without skills will eventually have their luck run out.

Subtractive Knowledge
Taleb argues that the greatest “and most robust contribution to knowledge consists in removing what we think is wrong—subtractive epistemology.” He continues that “we know a lot more about what is wrong than what is right.” What does not work, that is negative knowledge, is more robust than positive knowledge. This is because it’s a lot easier for something we know to fail than it is for something we know that isn’t so to succeed.

There is a whole book on the half-life of what we consider to be ‘knowledge or fact’ called The Half-Life of Facts. Basically, because of our partial understanding of the world, which is constantly evolving, we believe things that are not true. That’s not the only reason that we believe things that are not true but it’s a big one.

The thing is we’re not so smart. If I’ve only seen white swans, saying “all swans are white” may be accurate given my limited view of the world but we can never be sure that there are no black swans until we’ve seen everything.

Or as Taleb puts it: “since one small observation can disprove a statement, while millions can hardly confirm it, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation.”

Most people attribute this philosophical argument to Karl Popper but Taleb dug up some evidence that it goes back to the “skeptical-empirical” medical schools of the post classical era in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Being antifragile isn’t about what you do, but rather what you avoid. Avoid fragility. Avoid stupidity. Don’t be the sucker. …

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less Hardcover

by Robert I. Sutton  (Author) , Huggy Rao

(Author)

In Scaling Up Excellence, bestselling author Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: scaling up farther, faster, and more effectively as a program or an organization creates a larger footprint.  Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance,  to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices.  Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries – including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare — Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization.  They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between “Buddhism” versus “Catholicism” — whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands.  They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people — rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past.  They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.
Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge.  It  is destined to become the standard bearer in the field. Read more of this post

Writing Is Thinking

Writing Is Thinking

by SALLY KERRIGAN January 14, 2014Published in Community, Writing • 20 Comments

Writing is intimidating. There’s this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you’re pulling out your own intestines.

But you’re not a writer, so this isn’t your problem, right? Well, the thing is, writing is not some mystic art. It’s a practical skill—particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with. When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has.

Done well, it means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise.

No one’s born with this skill, though. We hear routinely from people who say they’d love to write for A List Apart or start blogging, but don’t know where to start. They feel unfocused and overwhelmed by the task. If this is beginning to sound like you, read on—because I’m going to walk you through how writing works, and how you can get better at it.

BUT WRITING SUCKS.

I mean, yeah. But I’m not asking you to write pages of flourishing prose in one sitting. (Hint: nobody does that, anyway. I’ll get to that.) I’m asking that you start with thinking. I suspect, if you’re a reader, you’re already a thinker—which means you’re halfway there. Really. Because writing—that first leap into taking your idea and making it a Thing People Read—isn’t really about wording. It’s about thinking. And if you can tell the difference between an article that knows what it’s about and one that exists purely to sell ad space, then you’re pretty good at that already.

Think about the things you had to look up on the internet just to figure out how to do your current job. Or maybe those things aren’t even on the internet—you learned from direct experience. You should write that stuff down, because when you connect your ideas into a written piece, you give voice and direction to something that otherwise just rattles around in the form of entrenched habits and beliefs—a resigned “that’s just the way we’ve always done it around here.”

Choosing the words to describe your work means you’re doing it on purpose. You’re going on the record as someone who thinks about why they do what they do, and understands how each decision affects the results. And developing this knack for critical thinking will also make you better at what you do.

Starting with something messy

Thinking: check. Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a different day altogether. Just think about what you’re trying to say, and jot the main ideas down. If you’re not sure how to finish a sentence, abandon it halfway through. If you want to write extensively about one particular idea but your mind’s moving too quickly to flesh it all out, paraphrase for now and move on to the next big point.

When the words aren’t forthcoming, stick to paraphrasing. That’s all outlining really is: paraphrasing what you’d actually like to write about. Worst-case scenario here is that you’ll end up with a lot of open questions you’d like to answer. “More research needed” is an open door, not a reason to stop writing.

If you’re anything like me, the end result of this first step is going to look a little like an outline interspersed with rants and probably a few side notes about errands you realized you need to run this afternoon. It is laughably far from something you’d share with anyone.

In other words, it’s a rough draft.

With this, you have formally started writing. It doesn’t look pretty, does it? And it won’t until the very end. But this is an essential part of the process. Have a look at what you’ve got. You may have to cut through a lot of the ranting (and certainly the grocery list) to get to it, but somewhere in there is the heart of your idea, the takeaway that you want your readers to have. Find it.

Coming to your point

Imagine you’re showing a neighbor around your house before you go on vacation. Even if you spend an hour yakking about lasagna recipes, or the weather, or the latest gossip about your other neighbors, you’ll probably sum up the key points: the houseplants are here, the gas and water shutoff are there, and the cat food is under the sink.

Your rough draft is the yakking. You want to get to the cat food: your thesis. By the time your neighbor shows up and you’re out of cell phone range, the week-old gossip will be a lot less important than the cat food. Start with your main takeaway idea, and state it as clearly as you can in the early part of your draft. This is what you hope your readers will remember, and it’s what will organize and guide the rest of your piece.

For example, take this very article. I hope you’re enjoying the read so far, but the reason it’s really appearing here in A List Apart is not because I’m so terribly witty and insightful. It’s because I want to strip away the magic of good writing and explain the actual, learnable, non-mystical work that goes into it. I want you to come away from it thinking, “If writing is really mostly about thinking rather than wording, I could totally give this writing thing a try.” That’s the cat food.

I started outlining with this in mind, using very literal and awkward phrasing like, “Writing is a teachable/learnable skill that people should learn about more.” The good phrasing comes later, but you can see the glimmer of an idea there.

BUT I DON’T REALLY HAVE AN ARGUMENT. I JUST HAVE THIS ANECDOTE TO SHARE.

Most how-to documentation is just formalized anecdote. This is how we learn. Here is the thesis statement for nearly all training documentation out there: “This is what’s worked so far to attain this particular goal and will probably work for you, too.” That’s an argument! It’s hidden underneath just about all the advice that’s out there (including this article): “Here’s what worked for me when I wanted to accomplish [task].” It’s definitely worth writing down—consider how many Google searches are typically answered by precisely this kind of information.

Personal anecdote is hugely helpful, especially in a fast-changing field like web design and development. To turn your piece from a meandering narrative into something more substantial, though, here are a few things to think about.

First of all, why did this excerpt from your experience stand out to you, personally? Was this the moment something clicked for you regarding your work?

Secondly, why do you think things turned out the way they did? Were you surprised? Do you do things differently now as a result? When you spell this out, it’s the difference between journaling for yourself and writing for an audience.

Finally, is this something others in your line of work are prone to miss? Is it a rookie error, or something more like an industry-wide oversight? If you’ve tried to search online for similar opinions, do you get a lot of misinformation? Or is the good information simply not in a place where others in your field are likely to see it?

Supporting your readers

As an editor, I usually come in around this phase. This is also the point where you’re no longer writing for yourself and are instead truly writing for an audience. You may have had a loose theme you wanted to explore in your first draft, but at this point, we need to start thinking about your readers. Thanks to your rough draft, you’ve got a better idea of the central point of your article. Maybe there are even a few readers out there who will read that pithy summary and immediately agree with you.

But most people will need more explanation, or even some convincing, to come around to your point of view. This is where your supporting arguments come in.

The phrase “supporting arguments” probably recalls a few five-paragraph-essay-fueled nightmares for you, and I won’t pretend it isn’t a pain to dig back into your draft’s structure to work out strong organization. But supporting your main point isn’t something you do just for the invisible essay-graders out there. You do it for your readers—the ones who live outside your own brain and don’t benefit from shared neural connections.

A supporting argument, in short, adds weight and legitimacy to your main point by showing how it applies in related situations. Go back to your main takeaway statement, and imagine that a skeptical reader replies with, “Why?” Why is that claim true? Why does it matter? Or, better yet, “What does that do for me?” Sometimes you’ll need to show hard data. Other times, just fleshing out a good example will help your readers follow along. (The latter is the approach I’ve taken.) You don’t need to intimidate people with your brilliance here; it’s really more of a conversation than a debate.

How many supporting arguments are enough? Basically, you want to get to the point where the unaddressed “Why?” questions from your imagined skeptics are outside the scope of your topic. (“Why should I write?” Because it’s good for your work. “Why is it good for my work?” Because it helps you work more purposefully. “Why should I work more purposefully?” …Maybe talk to your boss or your therapist about that last one.)

NO THANKS, HAVING READERS SOUNDS HARSH AND SCARY.

It’s easy to see these “why” questions and imagine some kind of antagonistic mob. Most readers aren’t in this mode, though; more often, they’re simply distracted, and need reminders of what you were just saying—imagine someone with half an eye on a football game or one hand on an unruly toddler.

You want to be a friend to your readers here, in the sense that you want to respect their time and attention. Except in rare literary circles, there’s no good reason to make your readers work hard just to understand what you’re trying to say. Each supporting argument or illustrative example you include needs to connect clearly back to your main point; the whole thing is moot if your readers trail off before getting to the cat food.

Sometimes when I begin outlining, I make these cognitive ties overly literal so that it’s easier for me to keep track of where my own brain is going (e.g., “Explain why a clear organizational structure makes it easier for readers to keep their attention on your writing”), and later I’ll flesh out the language and section transitions to feel a little more natural (e.g., this section).

This is an ongoing part of the process, too. Once you start showing other people your drafts, a good question to ask at every stage is, “Did you get lost anywhere?” This is one of the few questions people are likely to answer honestly, since they’ll often believe “getting lost” is something that reflects on their reading comprehension and not your written organization. (Think again!)

And if someone does get lost? That doesn’t mean your argument is a lost cause; it probably just needs more coaxing out of the coils of your brain.

Getting to “good” writing

At this point you have the structure of a solid essay. In the editing world, this is pretty far along the path to publication; most of what remains here are line edits to improve word choice and sentence structure.

This is also where, unfortunately, word nerds get a little intimidating with their fervor. (Disclaimer: I am one of these people. Don’t take it personally. We live for these things.) This isn’t likely to be the stage that will break your essay. You’ve already put in the hard work by establishing the structure.

At this point, you’ll clarify meaning in meandering phrases, or perhaps reorder paragraphs to keep the narrative momentum running smoothly. It is decidedly different work from the writing you did earlier—sometimes more satisfying (it feels wonderful to get a sentence to really sing), but also with more hang-ups (instead of breezing along, now’s the moment when you really do have to make sure your grammatical tenses are all lined up). Here at ALA, we’re pretty rigorous about this stage, and generally get right into the article with our authors. Every publication has its own style, though; many newspaper editors are even more hands-on in the interest of maintaining a consistent voice, while a less formal blog might give each contributor a lot of room to allow individual personality to shine through.

Even when you’re not writing for a publication with its own editorial staff, this is a good point in the process to bring in as many fresh readers as you can. They’ll trip up on all those oddly phrased sentences, repeated words, or misspellings you’ve skimmed past countless times. And at the end of the day, if a typo slips through, or the grammar isn’t quite perfect, it doesn’t make you less of a communicator—which is really what this whole exercise was about.

I’ve encountered a number of people with good ideas who happen to hate the process of writing. I get it—even for people who write regularly, it can be a frustrating process. (By the time this makes it through copyediting and onto the site, you will be reading the ninth version of this article.)

But the payoff is so, so worth it. Wherever you are on your professional path, whether you have years of experience or a fresh outlook to share, writing your ideas down gives you a particular new ownership over what you do. It examines all the “whys” of the job, turning entrenched habits into intentional actions. It equips you with the communication skills to sell yourself and your work to bosses and clients.

This is what crafting purposefulness looks like. We need more of it on the web, just as you need it in your life. Not just wording, but thinking. Not just noise, but signal. Put your ideas out there. We’d love to hear them.

The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results Paperback

The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results Paperback

by Tom Morris (Author)

Tom Morris’s exuberant seminars and presentations to business leaders have taken the commanding heights of corporate America by storm and his books on philosophy for businesspeople have sold millions. Dr. Morris shows how the ideas of Stoic Philosophy – which emphasizes goals like gaining command of one’s passions and achieving indifference to pain and distress – are completely up-to-date in their relevance to the practical issues people confront in the 21st century.
Divided into three sections Dr. Morris sympathetically relates the life and intellectual achievements of the three leading Stoics: the slave Epictetus, the lawyer Seneca, and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. From the bottom of society, to the upwardly mobile middle, and all the way to the top, these thinkers saw life deeply.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Dr. Morris returns philosophy’s focus from abstractions to the everyday problems of how to live life.” — Star News, August 15, 2004

About the Author

Tom Morris is the former Notre Dame philosophy professor whose classes became a campus legend and whose nationwide speaking engagements have electrified the audiences of corporate America. Continuing in his mission to bring philosophical wisdom into the trenches of everyday life, he shows how ideas of Stoic Philosophy – which emphasizes goals like gaining command of one’s passions and achieving indifference to pain and distress – are completely up to date in their relevance to the practical issues people confront in the 21st century.

The 18-year-old who sold his start-up to Yahoo for an estimated $30m talks to Jonathan Ford about the business of skim-reading and being a time-poor teenager

January 24, 2014 4:41 pm

Lunch with the FT: Nick D’Aloisio

By Jonathan Ford

The 18-year-old who sold his start-up to Yahoo for an estimated $30m talks to Jonathan Ford about the business of skim-reading and being a time-poor teenager

Iam sitting in a restaurant in south London listening to a teenager telling me why he doesn’t read newspapers.

“I read traditional media on Twitter,”Nick D’Aloisio

explains. “Like, I won’t go to FT.com and read off there, but if on Twitter someone shared an interesting FT thing, then I’ll read that.”

It is not that news is boring, he hastens to reassure me, perhaps noticing that I am wincing slightly. There just isn’t the time.

To illustrate the problem, D’Aloisio tells me how some time ago he took a subscription to the Economist, hoping to absorb the magazine’s content by downloading its weekly podcast: “I thought, I am going to try and be intelligent here by listening to the Economist every week.”

It didn’t work. “It’s five hours if you want to listen to everything,” he says, his eyes widening. D’Aloisio tried downloading the shorter summary and even listening to it in bed before going to sleep. In the end he dropped it. “I didn’t have time in the day. I just couldn’t interact with it.”

D’Aloisio does read deeply into things when they intrigue or excite him. When he picked up George Orwell, for instance, he decided he had to read everything that Orwell had ever written.

It’s the same story when he consumes media: “So if I am interested in tech and someone has done a scoop on some tech founder, I want to read every inch of that article and then I want more.” As for the rest, he has a simple solution: “I just skim-read.”

People talk about the “fire-hose” of information that has been unleashed by the internet, and how it is changing reading habits. D’Aloisio has thought about these shifts more deeply than most. The tousle-haired 18-year-old has spent the past few years devising software that aims to let you sip from the flow without being drenched with information.

Skim-reading isn’t just his preference; it is his business.

Last year, D’Aloisio came to public attention when at the age of 17 he sold his start-up, Summly, to Yahoo for an estimated $30m (of which he is thought to have raked in more than a third). With backing from a glittering array of investors, including the Chinese billionaire Li Ka-shing and the British comedian Stephen Fry, he designed a piece of software that compressed long slabs of text into a few summarising sentences.

Seen as a killer app in a world in which an increasing number of people surf the web on their mobile phones, Summly attracted huge interest and quickly gained about 1m users before being snapped up by the US internet giant. D’Aloisio now works for Yahooimproving Summly and developing new applications involving similar technology.

He communicates daily by Skype with his 10-strong team of software engineers, flying out to Silicon Valley to see them one week in every four. Earlier this month he was on stage with Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas launching Yahoo News Digest, an app that gives users summaries of the latest top stories twice a day.

D’Aloisio believes summaries are a way to bring to new media one of the more satisfying attributes of the old. “It’s the ability to get to the end and then you’re done,” he says. This sense of “completion” has been lost in cyber space. “The problem with the internet is that you can never finish an infinite stream.”

. . .

Surveying his schedule, it is easy to see why D’Aloisio is always pressed for time. As well as work, he is in his final year at school. We meet at the Light House, a restaurant just around the corner from King’s College School, the public school he sporadically attends in Wimbledon where he is studying for A-levels in maths, further maths and philosophy.

Although on an extended “sabbatical” from full-time education, he has continued with his studies, working mainly in the evenings and going into school for occasional guidance. It helps, D’Aloisio says, that he is studying maths because it’s a subject in which he can tutor himself. “I’ll go into school to make sure that I am doing the right stuff or do a test; it’s fun.”

At home, he preserves a veneer of normality. He still goes on family holidays, wears school uniform whenever he pops into King’s, and has a girlfriend who pre-dates his business success.

It can sometimes seem an attenuated version of teenagerdom, D’Aloisio admits: “My girlfriend can be quite angry because I am never able to chill out for a day and just do nothing. There’s always a hundred things I am doing.”

And while skipping lessons must be every schoolboy’s dream, it has sometimes been disorientating. “One minute I’d be in this frame of mind: I’m missing out on school, I should be there. I’m very nervous. Then I’d think, this is an amazing opportunity, what am I thinking? I should run with it.”

He hasn’t touched the capital he received from the acquisition and pays most of his Yahoo salary into a savings account. It is not a high salary, he insists: “I mean, your pay is linked to experience. I am only 18 and this is my first job.” Anyway, he doesn’t need much money other than “to pay for dinner or whatever or get a cab somewhere”. Could he buy a Ferrari? “Not unless I save for multiple years.” Do his parents charge him rent? “They don’t – they should! I probably couldn’t afford it!”

We have been havering over our menus and the waitress finally descends, forcing us to take decisions. D’Aloisio opts for pumpkin soup to start while I go for a blue cheese, pear, walnut and beetroot salad. For the main course he chooses the belly pork while I have the pheasant. I offer him a glass of wine (D’Aloisio turned 18 last November) but he declines, preferring a Diet Coke. I have a glass of house Rioja.

Most of us would, I suspect, struggle with the discipline necessary to juggle the commitments D’Aloisio has taken on. But he has always been good at setting himself goals and (more impressively) sticking to them. Born in Australia, he moved to Britain at the age of seven. Academically gifted, he did well at school and won the top scholarship to King’s. By then he was a keen self-taught programmer.

The young D’Aloisio would devote himself to building apps during his school holidays – often staying up half the night to do so. “I would spend six weeks developing an app and launching it,” he recalls.

The waitress is waiting to take away our plates. My salad is long gone but D’Aloisio is still stirring his fast-cooling soup. I find myself unconsciously slipping into the role of parent: “Come on, finish your starter,” I chide.

Right from the beginning, D’Aloisio didn’t just want to build programs, he wanted to sell them. The first app he got Apple to market in its store made £79 on its launch day. “Yes, I thought, there’s definitely something in this. It gave me the appetite to do more. Each time I did a new app, I set myself a new task or a new challenge and it slowly developed.”

From simple games – an early effort was a treadmill for hands called “Finger Mill” – he moved on to more complex software. Before long he was playing around with summarisation technology – the germ of the time-saving idea that became Summly.

It was schoolwork that first led D’Aloisio to think there was a need for applications that could summarise text. “I had this experience when I was revising for exams,” he explains. “There is all this information on Google and Bing, but to find it you have to go in and out of the links on the results pages. It’s hard to determine what is relevant until you click through. That’s pretty inefficient, so I thought that if you could take the URL and show almost like a précis, it would give you a sense of whether you wanted to click on [the link].”

Building an app to do this was no simple task, however. D’Aloisio had to learn about natural language processing – how to break words down into “morphemes”, or their smallest comprehensible linguistic units, and then to write algorithms that categorised them in ways that teased out meaning.

His intellectual voracity helped him get to grips with some of the issues. “Language, algorithms, design and all that stuff, I have always loved learning – it’s my favourite thing,” he avers. But inquisitive nerdiness could only carry him so far. The first prototypes of Summly, then called Trimit, did not work well. It proved impossible to compress articles into mere tweets. And even when the summaries were expanded, they frequently did not make sense.

Pulling out his mobile phone, D’Aloisio shows me an early version of Trimit. He pastes in a story about last year’s financial crisis in Cyprus, which is basically about the banks shutting and people queueing at cashpoints. There is a paragraph low down – almost an aside – which quotes the Ministry of Defence saying there should be no effect on the British military bases on the island. But when the summary comes up, it’s gibberish. The software thinks it’s a story about the 3,000-strong British garrison.

How has it got the story back to front, I ask. “This was very primitive when I did it,” says D’Aloisio. “But basically it tries to evaluate a sentence on a number of different variants. Like the length of a sentence, what it contains, how many real nouns.” It turns out that the algorithm has simply sniffed out the sentence with the highest number of positive matches and made it the subject: “Cyprus, Ministry, Defence – that’s three proper nouns which is quite high for one sentence. It also contains the number 3,000, which is a statistic.”

Such glitches were only cleared up after the launch of Trimit in 2011 when, in spite of its shortcomings, the app attracted the interest of Horizon Ventures, an investment company owned by Li Ka-shing. A team from Hong Kong came to London, met D’Aloisio and his parents (“I had to tell them I couldn’t meet between 9 and 5 because I was at school”), and stumped up $300,000 in what D’Aloisio calls a “philanthropic decision”. All of a sudden, he was no longer a schoolboy programming from his bedroom; he was an entrepreneur backed by some of the shrewdest tech investors on the planet.

As I start my pheasant and D’Aloisio picks at his pork, I wonder how he coped with the switch. Horizon’s cash allowed him to hire some serious programming talent, including Inderjeet Mani, an artificial intelligence expert who is now head of R&D at Yahoo Labs. How easy was it to manage his new, much older, employees? “I wouldn’t ever be like ‘do this or that’,” he says, cautiously. “I didn’t have the guts and it would have been far too precocious.”

. . .

Instead of trying to dominate everything, D’Aloisio explains, he focused on one bit of the project: design. “That was the area I wanted to have full control over: the designers I worked with, the programmers I worked with.”

I now idolise polymaths, people like da Vinci … their genius lay in piecing things together

As for the rest, D’Aloisio quickly realised that he didn’t have to understand everything about the underlying technology. “I would try as long as possible to keep up with the team, but there would come a point when I didn’t understand the code, the AI thing or whatever. That was fine because I discovered that actually you don’t need to know everything, you just need to know enough.”

Rather like giving up the Economist podcast, this epiphany came as a sort of liberation. “The best thing is that I now idolise polymaths, people like da Vinci and Michelangelo,” he says. “They weren’t just engineers, they were artists and scientists, mathematicians and philosophers. They weren’t even experts in their own domain. Their genius lay in piecing things together.”

We are now on coffee and I ask D’Aloisio about his next moves. Summly’s success has, after all, left him with an unusual dilemma. Should he stay with Yahoo and pursue a tech career or revert to normal adolescence and go to university?

“I need more data,” he says. “I need to see what happens at Yahoo in the next 12 months in terms of what I am going to be working on. I also need to finalise what universities and why.”

But if he does take a degree, he says he would most like to read philosophy and politics. “I am more interested in political theory and the philosophy of that than anything else.” He doesn’t even rule out combining university with Yahoo. “I don’t regard the two as mutually exclusive,” he says.

In the meantime, there is no let up for D’Aloisio, not even in the school holidays. When I ask him if he plans to spend some time just chilling out over the break, he simply looks blank: “I wish. My God, I would love two weeks of nothing.”

Jonathan Ford is the FT’s chief leader writer

——————————————-

The Light House

75-77 Ridgway London SW19 4ST

Pumpkin, butter bean and ruby chard soup £5.75

Stichelton, walnut, pear and beetroot salad £7.50

Roast pheasant, red cabbage and turnip gratin £16.50

Roast pork belly, neeps and garlic greens £15.95

Still water x 2 £7.00

Rioja Montesc 2010 £8.00

Diet Coke £2.95

Latte £2.50

Filter coffee £2.25

Total (incl service) £76.95

Steve Jobs’ First Demonstration of the Mac, Unseen Since 1984, Is The ‘Stuff Of Tech-History Legend’

Steve Jobs’ First Demonstration of the Mac, Unseen Since 1984, Is The ‘Stuff Of Tech-History Legend’

CAROLINE MOSS 

JAN. 26, 2014, 8:50 AM 10,082

It’s been 30 years since Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s Mac, and Time has obtained never-before-seen footage of the entire 1984 presentation of the computer.

Time reports,

This presentation, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on January 24, is the stuff of tech-history legend. What’s not so well remembered: Jobs did it all twice, in less than a week. Six days after unveiling the Mac at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., he performed his show all over again at the monthly general meeting of the Boston Computer Society. His host, Jonathan Rotenberg, was a 20-year-old student at Brown University who’d co-founded the BCS in 1977 at the age of 13.

Now, all 90 minutes of the presentation at BCS are available for the first time in their entirety since they were shot on January 30, 1984.

http://techland.time.com/2014/01/25/steve-jobs-mac/

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life Hardcover

The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life Hardcover

by Steve Leveen  (Author)

“Perfect for all of us who can never get enough time with good books. It not only urges us to indulge deeply and often, it shows us how.”-Myra Hart, professor, Harvard Business School

“Readers and want-to-be readers will be encouraged by the advice to read more, more widely and more systematically.”-Michael Keller, university librarian, Stanford University

“An ideal gift for both sporadic and relentless readers.”-James Mustich Jr., publisher of A Common Reader

“A worthy addition to even the most well-stocked personal library.”-Ross King, author of Michelangelo & The Pope’s Ceiling

Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else’s reading list. Unless a book is good for you, you won’t connect with it and gain from it. Just as no one can tell you how to lead your life, no one can tell you what to read for your life.

How do readers find more time to read? In The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, Steve Leveen offers both inspiration and practical advice for bibliophiles on how to get more books in their life and more life from their books.

His recommendations are disarmingly refreshing, as when he advises when not to read a book and why not to feel guilty if you missed reading all those classics in school. He helps readers reorganize their bookshelves into a Library of Candidates that they actively build and a Living Library of books read with enthusiasm, and he emphasizes the value of creating a Bookography, or annotated list of your reading life. Separate chapters are devoted to the power of audio books and the merits of reading groups.

The author himself admits he came “late to the bookshelf,” making this charming little guide all the more convincing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Some people need self-help books on relationships, others need them for work. Leveen’s self-help book is for the person who needs help in becoming a reader, whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak. In a gentle, coaxing style, Leveen offers standard self-help advice: he counsels moderation. You don’t need to be a marathon reader to be well-read—no one can read everything; and you’re okay—even if a so-called classic doesn’t appeal to you. Call books beckoning to you “candidates for your attention,” rather than the more obligatory-sounding “reading list.” Leveen is against ad hoc reading decisions and in favor of lists—which will seem too bad to readers who know the joys of serendipity. He is an advocate of audiobooks, especially unabridged editions, and devotes an entire chapter to “Reading with Your Ears.” In the end, there’s probably nothing like reading a great book to make someone love reading—but perhaps Leveen’s gentle encouragement can help. (May 2) 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

A pleasant and mindful celebration of the art of reading that many will appreciate…recommended for all public libraries. — Library Journal March 15, 2005
A practical handbook…distilled into easy-to-digest prose. — The New York Times Book Review, July 10, 2005
All most people need to get started on what can be the truly mind-altering experience of reading. — thecelebritycafe.comOctober 14, 2005
For the person who needs help in becoming a reader, whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak. — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY – February 28, 2005
How to read more and like it? Steve Leveen’s delivery of the gourmet fast food of reading. — Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2005
Just what the book lover with too little time needs to put his or her reading house in order. — Friends of Libraries USA Vol. 28, Issue 1 February 2005
Leveen proposes a strategy for falling, and staying, in “book love.” There’s no daunting recommended reading in Leveen’s “Little Guide.” — The Boston Globe, June 4, 2005
The Little Guide may just inspire you to dust off the tomes on your own shelf. — U.S. Airways Attache Magazine September 2005

The Other Kind of Inequality The decline of American social egalitarianism is more worrisome than differences in how much people earn

The Other Kind of Inequality

The decline of American social egalitarianism is more worrisome than differences in how much people earn.

MICKEY KAUS

Jan. 26, 2014 5:15 p.m. ET

The problem with the Democrats’ new war on inequality (“the defining challenge of our time,” says President Obama ) is that there are two kinds of growing inequality—and the Democrats are attacking the wrong one.

When I started writing about income inequality in the 1980s, I expected to make a reassuring argument that incomes weren’t growing unequal. That article couldn’t be written. An unceasing barrage of data described an income scale that was pulling apart like taffy. The rich were getting richer faster than anyone else. But even within skill levels or professions—including journalism—the stars were making big money and everyone else was stuck or in decline.

This pulling apart has continued for more than three decades, through Republican and Democratic presidencies, including Mr. Obama’s. It seems to be driven largely by deep tectonic forces within the economy: global trade, which has devalued the labor of unskilled Americans, and technology, which has replaced labor with machines while empowering (and rewarding) those with skills.

Harsh Truth No. 1: Democrats aren’t proposing anything that comes close to reversing this three-decade trend. They got nothin’, as the comedians say. Raising the minimum wage may be a good idea, but it affects a sliver of the labor market. It’s not going to stop the top 10% from taking home 50% of the nation’s income, or 51%. The same goes for extending unemployment compensation. Even the tax increases fought for by Mr. Obama are a blip. On paper they might cut the incomes of the very richest Americans by 6%—until the rich find ways to avoid them.

If Democrats are going to get voters to play along they should maybe give them at least an idea of what they propose to do and how it will achieve their goal—without toxic side effects. A better plan is to ask why we care about economic inequality anyway. If the poor and middle class were getting steadily richer, would it matter that the rich are getting richer much faster?

There’s some confusion among egalitarians on this score. Many argue that inequality per se hampers growth, though the academic support for this theory is soft. Others argue that it hampers mobility, though if skills are now more important to getting ahead that in itself will hamper mobility, whatever the level of inequality.

Harsh Truth No. 2: If it’s not enough for everyone to work hard—if you now have to be smart enough to learn—only some people will make that jump.

When we think honestly about why we really hate growing inequality, I suspect it won’t boil down to economics but to sentiments. No, we don’t want to “punish success”—the typical Democratic disclaimer. But we do want to make sure the rich don’t start feeling they’re better than the rest of us—a peril dramatized, most recently, in the “Wolf of Wall Street” and its seemingly endless scenes of humiliation and rank-pulling.

“Whether we come from poverty or wealth,” President Reagan said, “we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough. We must be equal in the eyes of each other.” Worry about this social equality lies at the root of our worry about economic equality.

Social equality—”equality of respect,” as economist Noah Smith puts it—is harder to measure than money inequality. But the good news is that if social equality is what we’re after, there may be ways to achieve it that don’t involve a doomed crusade to reverse the tides of purely economic inequality. As Reagan’s quote suggests, achieving a rough social equality in the midst of vivid economic contrast has been something America’s historically been good at, at least until recently.

We can, for example, honor the universal virtue of work by making it the prerequisite for government benefits wherever possible. There’s a reason Social Security checks are respectable and politically untouchable—unlike food stamps, they only go to Americans who’ve worked.

We can also pursue social equality directly, through institutions that mix people from all income levels together, under conditions of equal status—institutions like the draft, for example, or national service. Do we remember the 1950s as a halcyon egalitarian era because the rich weren’t rich—or because rich and poor had served together in World War II?

The draft isn’t coming back anytime soon. But the great social egalitarian hope—mine, anyway—was that Mr. Obama’s health plan might perform a similar function, offering the poor and middle class the same care, in the same hospitals, with the same doctors—and the same respect—that the affluent get (much as Medicare already does).

The tragedy is that the Democrats readily abandoned this goal. In order to save money and extend maximum coverage and subsidy to the maximum number of the uninsured, Democrats signed off on a system in which affluent Americans sign up for totally different medical networks than people who have less to spend, while the poorest get shunted to Medicaid and the richest bail completely into a private world of concierge medicine.

It’s not easy to imagine a modern medical system that would make Americans feel less like equals, even if they get subsidized. But it is still more likely that ObamaCare

can be changed so that the nation’s health-care system will reinforce social equality than that the tax-and-transfer system will produce economic equality.

Social egalitarians always will be tempted or bullied to abandon their real goal for a more concrete, economistic type of equality—the green-eyeshade fairness of “tax progressivity,” Gini coefficients and income quintiles. Democrats have already sacrificed their biggest recent legislative achievement—and best hope of preserving social equality—chasing after the shallow democracy of what is, after all, only money. They shouldn’t make that their template for the future.

Mr. Kaus is the author of “The End of Equality” (Basic Books, 1992). He blogs for The Daily Caller.

Invention and Reinvention: The Evolution of San Diego’s Innovation Economy

Invention and Reinvention: The Evolution of San Diego’s Innovation Economy (Innovation and Technology in the World E) Paperback

Formerly prosperous cities across the United States, struggling to keep up with an increasingly global economy and the continued decline of post-war industries like manufacturing, face the issue of how to adapt to today’s knowledge economy. In Invention and Reinvention, authors Mary Walshok and Abraham Shragge chronicle San Diego’s transformation from a small West Coast settlement to a booming military metropolis and then to a successful innovation hub. This instructive story of a second-tier city that transformed its core economic identity can serve as a rich case and a model for similar regions.
Stressing the role that cultural values and social dynamics played in its transition, the authors discern five distinct, recurring factors upon which San Diego capitalized at key junctures in its economic growth. San Diego—though not always a star city—has been able to repurpose its assets and realign its economic development strategies continuously in order to sustain prosperity. Chronicling over a century of adaptation, this book offers a lively and penetrating tale of how one city reinvented itself to meet the demands of today’s economy, lighting the way for others.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Throughout my career in public office, I was conscious of the need for a good history about the dynamic south west corner of our state. Mary Walshok and Abe Shragge have captured a century and a half of San Diego history in a book that will ring true for anyone who has been engaged in its political and economic evolution over the last fifty years.”—Pete Wilson, Former California State Assemblyman, Mayor of San Diego, U.S. Senator, and Governor of California

“This is an important, pioneering book that contributes to our unique understanding of how one place, San Diego, has achieved what most places want: the capacity to evolve and meet the challenges of a constantly changing global economic environment. Walshok and Shragge help us understand why some places thrive while others wiither.”—David B. Audretsch, Indiana University and Author of The Entrepreneurial Society

“The San Diego region has long deserved a really comprehensive history of how its economy emerged from a primarily military and defense contracting town into one of the leading innovation regions in America. This book describes that journey and contains a number of insights that will be extremely useful to other regions that are trying to reinvent themselves.”—Richard Florida, Author of The Rise of the Creative Class, Director, Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto and the Creative Class Group

“San Diego has a unique history in terms of its long relationship with the federal government, and especially the military, which this book captures superbly. Especially relevant is the discussion of the role that the research institutions on the Torrey Pines Mesa played in the transformation of the region’s economy. A wonderfully engaging book for anyone interested in trying to realize the social and economic benefits of basic research.”—Richard C. Atkinson, President Emeritus, University of California and Director, National Science Foundation 1977–1980

“Having been an early faculty member at the UCSD School of Medicine, a founder of Hybritech, and an investor in many of San Diego’s biotech companies, I am impressed with how well this book captures the dynamics shaping San Diego’s emergence as a world class science hub.”—Ivor Royston, Founding Managing Partner, Forward Ventures and Founder, Hybritech

About the Author

Mary Lindenstein Walshok is Associate Vice Chancellor of Public Programs, Dean of University Extension, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Blue Collar Women, Knowledge Without Boundaries, Closing America’s Job Gap, and co-editor of Creating Competitiveness. She is also a co-founder of CONNECT, a renowned innovation cluster development organization. Abraham J. Shragge received his Ph.D. in Modern United States History from the University of California, San Diego. He is a curator of the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center in Balboa Park and Coordinator of the San Diego Ex-Prisoners of War Oral History Project. Shragge is currently a Visiting Professor at the Korea Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management.

Wisconsin’s Ice Caves Are Open For The First Time In Years, And They Look Incredible

Wisconsin’s Ice Caves Are Open For The First Time In Years, And They Look Incredible

CATIE LEARY, MOTHER NATURE NETWORK
JAN. 24, 2014, 4:21 PM 7,403 3

stpaulgirl/Flickr

You can thank the polar vortex for this one.

After being off-limits for five consecutive winters for safety reasons, the stunning ice caves of the Apostle Islands National Seashore in Lake Superior are officially open for seasonal gawking.

The 21-island park located off the coast of the northern tip of Wisconsin is a well-known summer kayaking destination that attracts visitors with colorful, winding caves and rock formations that protrude and dip along the water line.

stpaulgirl/Flickr

In the winter, the seashore takes on an entirely different quality. As frigid weather takes its toll on the Midwest, massive stalagmites and stalactites form along the islands’ striated geology. Inside the caves, lake water freezes into smooth, icy floors that are as clear as a sheet of glass.

Visitors can reach the caves by walking about a mile across the frozen surface of the lake — when the ice is thick enough, that is.

stpaulgirl/Flickr

Park officials monitor the ice conditions carefully, and the last time the ice was thick enough to venture safely out onto the frozen lake was in 2009. Luckily, after the past several weeks of Arctic-like weather, Lake Superior is now iced over enough to allow safe passage from the mainland to the caves.

For up-to-date information on the condition of the ice, be sure to check out Sea Caves Watch, which provides real-time webcam images and weather forecast information.

Unable to visit the frosty sea caves this winter? Here’s a visual taste of what you’ll be missing.

stpaulgirl/Flickr

stpaulgirl/Flickr

stpaulgirl/Flickr

25 American Classics Everyone Should Read At Least Once In Their Lifetime

25 American Classics Everyone Should Read At Least Once In Their Lifetime

MEGAN WILLETT

JAN. 24, 2014, 2:56 PM 154,844 14

Not all of us paid attention in high school English class, but that doesn’t mean the assigned books weren’t worth reading (or re-reading).

And maybe it’s finally time to enjoy “The Grapes of Wrath” and other classics, instead of just the CliffsNotes version.

Miriam Tuliao, assistant director of central collection development at the New York Public Library, helped us create a list of 25 American classics everyone should read.

From John Steinbeck’s masterpiece to Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road,” these 25 titles are worth your time (listed here in alphabetical order).

Do you think another book belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments.

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is the heartwarming coming-of-age story of the young and idealistic Francie Nolan as she grows up in the slums of Williamsburg during the early 20th century.

An avid reader and lover of penny candy, Francie is a sweet and lovable narrator who must also face the horrors of life — battling sexual assault, extreme loneliness, and lost love — in an effort to survive (and prosper) despite her environment.

Buy the book here »

“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

Considered to be one of the great American novels, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” follows Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer as they travel along the Mississippi River and through the 19th century antebellum South with a freed slave named Jim.

It was the first book written in vernacular English, and though it’s frequently challenged for use in the U.S. public school system’s curriculum due to racial stereotypes and frequent slurs, many modern academics argue the book is an attack on racism.

Buy the book here »

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

The lengthy “Atlas Shrugged” is set in a fictional dystopian United States where all the world’s movers and shakers have abandoned society, leaving the world and the remaining people in a state of flux.

No matter your opinion on the underlying concept of the book — that capitalism is goodness itself — Ayn Rand’s philosophical book is considered by many to be her magnum opus and one need not agree with her to appreciate it.

Buy the book here »

“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin

One of the most boundary-pushing and feminist novels of its era, Kate Chopin tells the story of a Louisiana housewife who loses herself in an extramarital affair and yearns for independence from her husband and children.

Originally thought too provocative by the 19th century critics who panned the book, Chopin’s realism, depiction of female sexuality and questioning of societal expectations in “The Awakening” is why it remains a moving novel to this day.

Buy the book here »

“The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson” by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was a true master of the English language, but she went largely unrecognized during her own time due to her idiosyncratic punctuation, capitalization, and vocabulary.

Though an introvert and recluse, Dickinson had a profound understanding of the human condition, and was able to write with a knowledge that one would not expect from a woman who later in life refused to leave her room. Today, she is known as one of the greatest poets in history with a corpus of nearly 1,800 poems.

Buy a collection of her work here »

“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

In this Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award for Fiction-winner, Walker paints the horrifying yet realistic account of a young black woman named Celie who faces disturbing abuse — both physical, mental, and incestuous — at the hands of the men in her life.

“The Color Purple” is set in the southern U.S. in the ’30s, and follows Celie as she learns how to survive and let go of the past after discovering that she is somebody worth loving.

Buy the book here »

“The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

From the same Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote “Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible” is another of Arthur Miller’s plays about the Salem witch trials of the 17th century.

It hit the stage in 1953, and was thought to be an attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-Communist fervor and “witch hunts” of Communists in 1950s America. And though not entirely accurate, the play remains a timeless story of how intolerance and hysteria can tear a community apart.

Buy the book here »

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

“Fahrenheit 451” is set in a dystopian future where literature (and all original thought) is on the brink of extinction.

Guy Montag is a fireman whose job is to burn printed books as well as the houses where they’re hidden. But when his wife commits suicide and a young neighbor who introduced him to reading disappears, Guy begins hoarding books in his own home.

Buy the book here »

“The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales” by Edgar Allan Poe

Suspense writing gets no better than with Edgar Allen Poe’s tome of Gothic tales, and the “House of Usher and Other Collected Works” is a testament to that.

From the “Tell-Tale Heart” to the Sherlock Holmes-esque “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe is a master at building to a story’s climax with palpable emotions — terror, love, sadness — that feel undeniably real to readers.

Buy the book here »

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck

Winner of the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Nobel Prize, John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” during and about the Great Depression that seized America in the 1930s.

The story follows a family of poor tenant farmers as they’re driven away from their Oklahoma home, and journey through the Dust Bowl toward California. But all of their hopes for redemption are slowly wiped out as they battle hunger, lack of employment, and death.

Buy the book here »

“The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” tells the story of class hierarchies in America through Lily Bart, a woman who sabotages all her possible opportunities for a wealthy marriage in the hopes of marrying for love, but refuses to marry for love because she is unable to give up her love of money.

Through a series of rumors and gossip, Lily slowly loses the esteem of her social circle, until she dies poor and alone. It was a stark illustration of the Gilded Age Wharton knew so well, and it remains profoundly tragic.

Buy the book here »

“How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis

New York’s 19th century industrial workers lived in squalid, cramped tenement buildings. So journalist Jacob A. Riis made it his mission to show the American upper- and middle-class the dangerous conditions the poor faced every day with graphic descriptions, sketches, statistics, and his photographs.

Not only did “How the Other Half Lives” inspire tangible change to the Lower East Side’s schools, sweatshops and buildings, but it was also the basis for future “muckraking” journalism.

Buy the book here »

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” is a powerful American classic that tells of her struggles growing up during the Great Depression, and the abuse she suffered.

The memoir follows Angelou during her youth as she survives soul-crushing racism, a brutal sexual assault, and finally her hard-won independence as she becomes a young woman. Her poetic prose continues to influence and inspire generations today.

Buy the book here »

“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs

This slave narrative was an in-depth chronological account of Jacobs’s own life as a slave, documenting in particular the horrific sexual abuse that female slaves faced: rape, pressure to have sex at an early age, being forced to sell their children, and the relationship between female slaves and their mistresses.

Though “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” went relatively unnoticed at the time of its publication due to the outbreak of the Civil War, it reemerged in the 1970s and ’80s as an important historical account on the sexualization and rape of female slaves.

Buy the book here »

“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, “Invisible Man” is a masterpiece that explores what it means to be black in America, as it grapples with race relations and misguided activist groups in the United States.

The book follows the nameless narrator as he tries to escape racist stereotypes from both the white and black people whom he meets in an effort to find his true identity and make others see him how he sees himself.

Buy the book here »

“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair

U.S. journalist Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” to raise awareness for immigrants in America by making the squalor and harrowing working conditions of Chicago factory life incredibly vivid.

The book galvanized public opinion and led to a forced government investigation that eventually caused the passage of pure food laws. Today, it’s often referenced in response to poor working conditions and food safety laws.

Buy the book here »

“Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman

“Leaves of Grass” is a poetry collection that Walt Whitman spent his entire life revising and re-writing until his death. There are many versions of the book, from a small compilation of twelve poems to the final (gigantic) collection of 400 poems.

But all collections showcase Whitman’s staple free-verse poetry, which explores themes such as what it means to be an American, while still remaining accessible to modern readers.

Buy his deathbed collection here »

“Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane published “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” at his own expense, and at the time it was considered a major failure for the well-known novelist.

Today, it’s said to be one of the first examples of American realistic novels. It tells the story of Maggie, a pretty girl born into — and ultimately killed by — the New York City slums of the 19th century. Maggie’s tragic fate pays homage to the true grit of life inside the tenement buildings.

Buy the book here »

“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s unforgettable descriptions and truly original writing style soar in this novel about a pair of friends traveling across America.

A defining work of the postwar “Beat” culture, “On The Road” is both a physical and spiritual journey of the narrator who tries to find meaning in his life through his friends, lovers, and adventures around the U.S.

Buy the book here »

“The Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James

When the beautiful Isabel Archer is brought from America to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, she is expected to find a suitable match. But the stubborn Isabel almost immediately turns down two eligible suitors in a desire for independence.

However, the American heiress soon finds herself the target of a con by two American expatriates, and must struggle with a loveless marriage, cruelty, and intrigue in one of Henry James’ finest novels, “The Portrait of a Lady.”

Buy the book here »

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

“The Things They Carried” is the critically acclaimed collection of related stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, based in part on O’Brien’s own experiences.

A short-story collection, memoir, and novel wrapped into one, O’Brien takes his readers to the front lines with him, whether it’s trying to escape to Canada to avoid the draft, watching a friend die, or being welcomed home by people who have become strangers.

Buy the book here »

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the preeminent U.S. writers of the 20th century. She was a major player in the Harlem renaissance, known for mastering beautiful imagery and local dialect in her work.

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” is one of her best-known novels, following the life of Janie Crawford as she tries to discover herself through a series of marriages. The book is deeply moving as it confronts issues of female identity with the linguistic richness of 1930s Florida.

Buy the book here »

“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of local attorney Atticus Finch and his children Scout and Jem as they grow up in a community divided by — and defined by — racism.

Based on Harper Lee’s own hometown of Maycomb, Ala., Finch is asked to defend an African-American man accused of rape, which sends the small Southern town into a frenzy and launches Scout and Jem into the center of the conflict.

Buy the book here »

“Slaughterhouse-five” by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim is a man who has become unstuck in time after being abducted by aliens, specifically Tralfamadorians for their planet’s zoo. The book follows his capture, as well as his time as an American prisoner of war witnessing the firebombing of Dresden during World War II.

“Slaughterhouse-five” is a comically-dark novel that combines both fantasy and realism, and is one of Vonnegut’s most masterful works.

Buy the book here »

“Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” is an American masterpiece that is one man’s autobiographical attempt to find simplicity, self-reliance, and peace through solitude and nature.

Filled with allegorical metaphors and complex, insightful paragraphs, “Walden” shows what can happen when we strip life of its luxuries and go back to the “savage delight” of the wilderness.

What Drives Success? Culture pushes some groups to achieve. We can learn from them

What Drives Success?

By AMY CHUA and JED RUBENFELDJAN. 25, 2014

A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.

Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.

Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.

The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.

Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.

Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.

There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.

It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

Any individual, from any background, can have what we call this Triple Package of traits. But research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.

It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.

Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo” placed on earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia L. Bushman’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.” Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian “superiority complex.” At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they may be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.

That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.

A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

By contrast, white American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem. There’s an ocean of difference between “You’re amazing. Mommy and Daddy never want you to worry about a thing” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the family and end up a bum on the streets.” In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.

Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but never your education, so study harder. Newcomers and religious minorities may face derision or hostility. Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro’s takeover reported seeing signs reading “No dogs, no Cubans” on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear Mitt Romney’s clean-cut sons described as “creepy” in the media. In combination with a superiority complex, the feeling of being underestimated or scorned can be a powerful motivator.

Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age — or at least they did so when they were on the rise.

In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”

Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to. A culture producing, say, four high achievers out of 10 would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was one out of 20.

But this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.” Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).

A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history. To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it’s used by an outsider minority as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility, but ethnic pride or religious zeal can turn all too easily into intolerance of its own.

Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.

It’s not easy for minority groups in America to maintain a superiority complex. For most of its history, America did pretty much everything a country could to impose a narrative of inferiority on its nonwhite minorities and especially its black population. Over and over, African-Americans have fought back against this narrative, but its legacy persists.

Black America is of course no one thing: “not one or ten or ten thousand things,” as the poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander has written. There are black families in the United States occupying every possible socioeconomic position. But Sean “Diddy” Combs — rapper, record producer and entrepreneur — undoubtedly spoke for many when he said: “If you study black history, it’s just so negative, you know. It’s just like, O.K., we were slaves, and then we were whipped and sprayed with water hoses, and the civil rights movement, and we’re American gangsters. I get motivated for us to be seen in our brilliance.”

Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts, as Mr. Combs himself did. They can create narratives of pride that reject the master narratives of their society, or turn those narratives around. In any given family, an unusually strong parent, grandparent or even teacher can instill in children every one of the three crucial traits. It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.

But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating: They include slavery, systematic discrimination, schools that fail to teach, employers who won’t promote, single motherhood and the fact that roughly a third of young black men in this country are in jail, awaiting trial or on probation or parole. Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.

At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control. Researchers at the University of Rochester recently reran the famous marshmallow test with a new spin. Children initially subjected to a broken promise — adults promised them a new art set to play with, but never delivered — almost invariably “failed” the test (snatching the first marshmallow instead of waiting 15 minutes for a promised second). By contrast, when the adults followed through on their promise, most kids passed the test.

The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched. In these circumstances, it takes much more grit, more drive and perhaps a more exceptional individual to break out.

Of course a person born with the proverbial silver spoon can grow up to be wealthy without hard work, insecurity or discipline (although to the extent a group passes on its wealth that way, it’s likely to be headed for decline). In a society with increasing class rigidity, parental wealth obviously contributes to the success of the next generation.

But one reason groups with the cultural package we’ve described have such an advantage in the United States today lies in the very same factors that are shrinking opportunity for so many of America’s poor. Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.

THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.

The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit. It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.

Consider the story of Sonia Sotomayor, who was born to struggling Puerto Rican parents. Her father was an alcoholic, she writes in her moving autobiography, “My Beloved World,” and her mother’s “way of coping was to avoid being at home” with him. But Justice Sotomayor, who gave herself painful insulin shots for diabetes starting around age 8, was “blessed” with a “stubborn perseverance.” Not originally a top student, she did “something very unusual” in fifth grade, approaching one of the smartest girls in the class to “ask her how to study.” Soon she was getting top marks, and a few years later she applied to Princeton — though her guidance counselor recommended “Catholic colleges.”

The point of this example is not, “See, it’s easy to climb out of poverty in America.” On the contrary, Justice Sotomayor’s story illustrates just how extraordinary a person has to be to overcome the odds stacked against her.

But research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children. This supports those who, like the Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman, argue that education dollars for the underprivileged are best spent on early childhood intervention, beginning at preschool age, when kids are most formable.

The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.

Those who talk of America’s “decline” miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.

Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”

Agonizing Choices for Lives Saved by Miracle Drugs

Agonizing Choices for Lives Saved by Miracle Drugs

GEETA ANAND

Updated Jan. 24, 2014 10:33 p.m. ET

Megan’s mother, Aileen, lifts her into bed from her wheelchair after school. Lexey Swall for The Wall Street Journal;Seven months ago, Megan Crowley made a gutsy decision: to undergo a radical surgery to straighten out her spine, which has been crippled by Pompe disease. Photo: Lexey Swall

PRINCETON, N.J.—Sixteen-year-old Megan Crowley lay facedown on an operating table last June as her surgeon tried to straighten her spine, badly contorted by a genetic disease that nearly killed her as a little girl.

The doctor had warned Megan that she stood a 5% chance of dying from the risky surgery, but she eagerly chose it anyway. Her 15-year-old brother Patrick, stricken with the same rare disease, refused the procedure and awaited news of her at home.

In the operating room, an alarm suddenly blared: Megan’s nerve signals had flatlined, suggesting paralysis. “Megan, wiggle your toes!” her surgeon, David Roye, recalls yelling, waking her from anesthesia. She tried, to no effect.

Megan’s and Patrick’s choices are the kind of agonizing ones now confronting a generation of Americans like them whom biotech breakthroughs have kept alive—but haven’t fully cured.

The two have Pompe disease, which progressively weakens muscles. Until about a decade ago, heart failure killed most babies with Pompe within a few years.

The siblings’ fate turned in a remarkable family drama: Their father saved their lives by helping develop a drug that restored their hearts, a story told through several Wall Street Journal articles since 2001.

But the drug couldn’t stop Pompe (pronounced pom-pay) from degrading Megan’s muscles. By her freshman year at Princeton High School, she needed a respirator and wheelchair. She couldn’t speak clearly or smile. Her spine bent about 100 degrees.

Dr. Roye offered a risky and painful way to help Megan sit up like other kids. “I would drill screws into your vertebrae,” he told her, “and put rods in to anchor them to your ilium,” or hip bone.

Children like Megan and Patrick, having survived once-fatal rare diseases, often must decide again and again as they grow older whether to endure interventions for their diseases’ complications.

These procedures can bring a better or longer life. They also can be excruciating and, even when successful, can leave the patient waiting for breakthroughs for disabilities that remain.

Some patients decide intervention just isn’t worth the agony. Patrick also lives on a respirator with a bent back, and his muscles continue to degrade. But he refuses operations.

“No!” he screams when asked in an interview if he would consider spinal surgery.

“It’s been hard for us sometimes, and we’ve struggled with it,” says their father, John Crowley, of their choices. “But we’ve learned to accept that what makes sense for each kid is different,” he says. “We realize the risk-benefit for Patrick.”

Thousands with other once-fatal rare diseases confront lifetimes of such risk-benefit decisions. Hundreds in the U.S. with Fabry disease, which leaves patients with severe heart and kidney problems, are alive thanks to a treatment developed in 2003. But they face decisions about surgery for continued complications.

So do patients who previously would have died of Hurler-Scheie Syndrome and Hunter Syndrome. New treatments have saved lives, but patients often remain disfigured and suffer spinal compression. They confront difficult decisions about whether to undergo procedures such as spinal-fusion surgery.

People with Gaucher disease, which causes crippling bone pain, can live longer and with fewer symptoms thanks to biotech drugs first developed in 1991. But for some, the disease continues to turn their bones brittle, forcing them to decide whether to undergo painful joint surgery.

“They face an ongoing series of new challenges and unknowns that we never envisioned when we developed these therapies,” says Priya Kishnani, chief of medical genetics at Duke University Medical Center. “They’re alive and they want us to help them decide when enough is enough. Who am I to judge?”

Roughly 1,000 people are on a Pompe drug in the U.S. and face many of the choices Megan and Patrick do.

Megan, who turned 17 last month, was diagnosed with Pompe at age 1 in 1998. Tests revealed her body made a defective version of an enzyme that digests sugars in muscle cells. Those sugars built up, disrupting cell function.

Doctors diagnosed Patrick with Pompe a few months later. Mr. Crowley and his wife, Aileen, are healthy. But both carry a mutation in the same gene, giving their children a 25% chance of developing Pompe. Their eldest son, John Jr., 19, doesn’t have it.

In 1998, there was no treatment for Pompe. When doctors told Mr. Crowley the children had few years to live, he quit his job as a drug-company executive and started a biotech firm to seek a treatment.

He succeeded. In 2003, Megan and Patrick, then 6 and 5, began receiving the medicine their dad helped develop. It kept their hearts from failing.

But Pompe continued to weaken other muscles. During early elementary school, they were strong enough to sit up. Their spines started to sag by age 9. They “puddled” into their wheelchairs, Dr. Roye says.

As Megan’s body bent, her left lung compressed at age 11, making it harder to breathe and speak. Patrick suffered similar symptoms.

The siblings faced their disabilities differently. Despite her spine’s collapse, Megan whizzed around school in her hot-pink electric wheelchair. “She wants people to know she’s there,” says her homeroom teacher, Julie Dunham. “She bedazzles with her spirit and personality and her desire to achieve.”

Patrick, more sensitive to curious staring, shunned crowds and social events, retreating to his bedroom to play videogames when he could.

As the pair’s spines curved more, the risk of fracture increased. In 2011, doctors suggested surgery.

The parents balked at putting them through a procedure that wasn’t vital to survival. Anesthesia is risky for a child on a ventilator, and one with a degenerative muscle disease often doesn’t recover strength lost in surgery.

Megan changed their minds. Mr. Crowley in 2012 returned from a trip to find her room redone in pink-and-black wallpaper. He says he asked if she wanted to live with such garish colors.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “In a couple of years I’m outta here.”

“Where are you going?”

“College, of course.”

It sank in: Megan, who wasn’t supposed to live to elementary-school age, might go to college. Mr. Crowley says he envisioned her bent way over, wheeling to class on a far-off campus.

““They’re alive and they want us to help them decide when enough is enough. Who am I to judge?””

—Priya Kishnani, chief of medical genetics at Duke University Medical Center

“Nothing else makes her look deformed except for her spine,” he told his wife. “Maybe we should start thinking about the surgery.”

When Megan heard there was an operation that might let her sit straight, “it was like Everest,” says Andrew Condouris, her learning aide. “Once she knew it was there, she just had to do it.”

Patrick had the opposite reaction. “No, no, no, I’m good!” his parents say he shouted when asked if he would consider surgery.

In the summer of 2012, Megan’s parents took her to Dr. Roye, a specialist in straightening children’s spines at Columbia University Medical Center. He told Megan he thought he could achieve “about a 50% correction,” he says. “Think of the operation as giving you an internal brace to keep you from collapsing into your chair.”

Then, the warning: “There is a small chance you won’t survive the procedure.”

Megan didn’t speak as they drove home, turning up Katy Perry on her headphones, she says, to drown out emotions that swung from excitement at the prospect of sitting straight to terror about possibly dying.

In October, Megan wheeled to her dad as Sunday-night football played. “I’ve made my decision,” she told him.

Mr. Crowley says his stomach tightened. The possibility of losing her terrified him.

“I want to have my operation,” Megan told him.

“Why?”

“I don’t like the way I look and I don’t like the way I feel.”

It was the first he’d heard Megan complain about her appearance. That night in the kitchen, Megan laid out a schedule. She wanted her sweet-16 birthday party in December and her surgery the next June. She would recover for junior year.

As Megan’s birthday neared, she reserved the Westin Hotel ballroom and invited 200 guests. “This might also be my wedding,” Megan told her parents—in hopes, she says, that reminding them that marriage might not be in her future would persuade them to spend liberally.

On Dec. 15, 2012, in a bright-pink sequined dress, Megan wheeled into the ballroom to Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way.” She called guests forward as candles were lighted: friends, cousins, nurses, researchers who had treated her.

She called up her dad’s colleagues from Amicus Therapeutics, the firm he heads that develops Pompe drugs. “Thank you for all that you have done for so many and for the work you continue to do to make a better medicine for me and Patrick.”

Patrick gave a short speech, saying, “I love you, Megan.” When dancing started, he grew agitated, then tearful, as he did in loud places, his parents say. A nurse sped him home to his bedroom.

In the next months, as attention turned toward planning Megan’s surgery, her parents say they asked Patrick whether he wanted the procedure, looking to make him feel included.

The repartee became a family joke. A parent would say, “Patrick, do you want…,” and they would laugh as he shouted, “no!” before the parent could finish.

On June 18, Megan’s parents checked her into the hospital with three pink suitcases. In the first of two planned surgeries, Dr. Roye drove screws into several vertebrae and cut into some of the most deformed to reshape them. He drove six screws into her forehead to attach a carbon halo to later apply traction to stretch her back.

In her room after the eight-hour surgery, Megan was unrecognizable. Her face was swollen, and her arms and legs bruised from intravenous tubes. Her parents stayed up, administering painkillers.

Later, doctors attached 10-pound sandbags on pulleys to her halo to stretch her spine. She lay faceup in traction, stitches running down her back underneath her, for two agonizing weeks, her parents taking turns holding up an iPad showing movies.

During the second surgery, Dr. Roye anesthetized her and cut her back open again, attaching metal rods to her spine. He was pulling her spine straight when the nervous impulses stopped.

The warning alarm evoked a recurring nightmare for Dr. Roye, a dream in which he takes a child’s spine apart and can’t get it together again.

He ran through a checklist he wrote for crises. Temperature? Normal. Blood pressure? Normal. Screws? None had moved into her spinal canal.

But when he woke her, nerve signals didn’t appear. He had to undo whatever damage he’d done.

He began taking out the rods. With the last out, her impulses had returned.

When Megan woke again, she knew something was wrong. Her halo was still on. With a tube in her throat, she looked at her dad and then up at the halo, demanding an explanation with her eyes.

“Megan, you did great,” he told her. “Everything went well.”

The next evening, Mr. Crowley says he finally told her the surgery hadn’t gone well. If her spine wasn’t permanently damaged, she would need a third surgery.

“You lied to me, daddy,” she repeated, crying. “You told me all my life you’d never lie to me.”

Scans showed no damage, and Dr. Roye decided to try again. “No matter what, safety must be No. 1,” Mr. Crowley says he told Dr. Roye. “If we could just have her back the way she was, we’d be happy.”

On July 12, Megan was wheeled into the operating room. At 4 p.m., Dr. Roye reported the surgery was successful, straitening her spine enough so she could appear to be sitting up.

For Patrick, though, seeing Megan in the hospital “sealed the deal” against surgery, Mr. Crowley says. He was horrified to see her in traction, wounds oozing where screws held the halo. Patrick didn’t ask to visit again.

“He doesn’t like the way he looks,” Mr. Crowley says. “But knowing what Megan went through, there’s no way he would ever consider that surgery now.”

When Megan returned home after 32 days, she set a goal: By Sept. 7, she would recover enough to go wedding-dress shopping with her engaged cousin.

That day, in a black-leather skirt and high heels—sitting up straight—Megan wheeled into a Manhattan bridal store. Gowns and mirrors were everywhere. For the first time since surgery, Megan says, she forgot she was in pain.

School started two days later. During English, Megan’s back pain grew unbearable. She left the room to cry in the hallway. “Honey, let’s just go home,” her nurse said.

“No,” Megan replied, wheeling to the classroom.

“She’s like a typical teenager in many ways,” says Mr. Condouris, her aide. “But you also see an individual who is pushing herself out there—ambitious, driven, with a real sense of who she is and what she wants to do.”

Megan and Patrick probably face lifelong complications and will need constant nursing care unless new treatments can reverse the disease. Pompe experts say they don’t yet know what life expectancy is for patients on the new drug.

Mrs. Crowley says she finds it unbearably sad knowing how frustrated Patrick is by his inability to move. But she says they take comfort that he isn’t in pain most of the time and enjoys many daily activities.

Megan has lost most leg movement. Her bones are brittle. She can move her arms enough to type on her iPhone and operate her wheelchair but is likely to lose more strength unless new treatments are found.

Still, her father says, “she thinks there’s more therapies coming for her down the road, so there’s hope.”

In the fall, he took her to buy SAT-prep books. He asked: “Are you ready yet to go to Notre Dame?” his alma mater. Megan responded that socializing was her priority.

“Notre Dame doesn’t have sororities,” her mom told her later. Megan replied: “So maybe I’ll just have to go out there and start some.”

She asked Mrs. Crowley to look at her new school photos. In years past, she approached picture day with resignation, slumped so far that her shoulder was almost at head’s level.

This time, Megan says, she rolled to the photographer excitedly.

Mrs. Crowley looked at the photos. Megan still couldn’t smile, but otherwise looked like other kids, holding up her head. “They’re really nice,” she said.

“Order some more,” Megan said. “They’re awesome.”

甘露与净瓶的对话

甘露与净瓶的对话

《甘露与净瓶的对话》一书是吴若权从师圣严法师修行的笔记。

在这本书中，你会看到下列问题的答案：

爱就像洋葱，层层剥开，瓣瓣分明，如何可以不流泪？

婚姻到了濒临破裂时，该放弃吗？“不离婚”有何新解？

节制给予，也是一种付出？如何用“减法”提升亲密关系？

禅修的目的，不是为了能够得到什么，为何要禅修呢？

何谓“看破”？“看破”的真正意义，其实是很积极的吗？

“闭关”，就像婚姻？笼中之心，如何海阔天空？

“放下”和“放弃”，有何不同？

囚禁，也是一种自由？“自由”和“随心所欲”，有什么不一样？

极乐世界的入口，到底在哪里？

积善”和“还债”，两者有何关联？

伴侣相处，如何“结缘”而不“结怨”？

看似成功、光鲜的吴若权，为什么要到忧郁症门诊就医？

圣严法师：我与若权面对面的接触，就是这次的访谈了。我们谈的内容，不会涉及什么高深的佛理，而是一般人在生活上、心理上乃至生理上，可能会遭遇的阻碍、困顿、矛盾等各式各样的难题……

面对烦恼的处理，我的基本立场是“正面的解读，逆向的思考”。正面的解读，就是遇到任何问题，不要一来就视为负面的阻力，而要看成是一种砥砺的助缘。逆向的思考，是遇到顺心的事，不沾沾自喜、不得意忘形；遭逢挫折与不如意事，不气馁，也不垂头丧气；只要观念一转变，就能柳暗花明。

我满欢喜这本书的出版，但愿本书能对我们的华人社会有一些帮助。

吴若权：

圣严法师说：“很多的人都说，这一生太苦了，希望此生过完了，不要再来世间，因为实在太苦。但是，菩萨不怕苦，菩萨一次一次地再来，他宁可吃苦，愿意向众生学习。”初次在现场听到圣严法师说的这句话，令我非常动容。夜晚在耳机里重听录音设备播出这句话，一遍又一遍，我流下泪来。

回顾自己的前半生；也展望自己的后半生。如果可能，今夜或许会是个界线。曾经吃过很多苦的我，以为修行是为了解脱；如今我才知道，生命的归宿，其实是自己初发的愿心。

3图书目录编辑

圣严法师序：转念之后，柳暗花明

自序：净瓶常注甘露水

第1讲 认识自我

我是谁，我要往哪里去？

当“倾听自己心声”和“接受别人忠告”之间有落差时，如何找到智慧的力量？

找到自己之后，如何放下自己？从“自我”到“无我”，该如何转化？

第1课　成长，是往内在去探索自己，而不是向外去需索感官的满足第2课　努力朝向最适合自己的路去发展，但也需要天时、地利、人和的因缘具足

第3课　从探索兴趣开始发展自我，找出最适合自己的方向

第4课　接受天生的限制，改进自己的缺点，也是一种自信

第5课　大鸭、小鸭，各有各的发展，经过努力与磨练，小鸭也有变成大鸭的可能

第6课　以发展自我为目的，就能把“吃苦”当作“进补”

第7课　立定志向之后，就要坚定信念，绝不退转

第8课　志向愈大，挫折和诱惑就相对地变小

第9课　承担责任，完成使命，并非好大喜功，而是要分享梦想

第10课　找到生命的导师，效法成功的典范

第11课　善用危机感激发自我的力量，突破环境的障碍

第12课　利他的练习，可以从无我开始

第2讲 爱与亲密关系

“爱自己”和“爱他人”有冲突时该怎么办？

有时候，刻意吝惜，“不给”对方，也是一种“付出”？

爱， 必须是对等的付出吗？

第13课　慈悲，是爱的最高层次，足以跨越人心的藩篱，及于一切众生

第14课　真正的慈悲，是不分对象、没有条件的

第15课　亲密关系之中若含有控制的成分，就可能伤害彼此的爱

第16课　即使是亲情，也必须进化；父母学会放手，亲子之间的爱才能长久

第17课　教养子女之前，父母应该先教养自己

第18课　要解决欠缺安全感的问题，不是仰赖更多的亲密关系；而是建立信任

第19课　婚姻中的伴侣关系，不是嫁鸡随鸡，而是要照顾对方一辈子，彼此守护

第20课　爱不一定要有相对的回馈；真正的爱是无条件的、平等的付出

第21课　要尽力和自己建立最亲密的关系，有自信就不会恐惧不安

第22课　学会慈悲，松开心中的防线，拆除心中的城墙，才能得到真正的解脱

第23课　唯有慈悲，才能解决因为爱而引起的冲突

第24课　“放下”心中的包袱；但永远不“放弃”心中的理想和责任

第25课　善用“爱的减法”，让亲密关系更欢喜自在

第26课　真正的“看破”，并非彻底失望；而是体认世事都是虚幻的，不再执着

第27课　勇于承担别人惠予的付出，将来才有分享出去的能力

第3讲 孤独

如何尽情享受独处，“孤独”而不“孤僻”？

修行的路一定是孤独的吗？孤独，有助于修行？

如何善用孤独的处境，面对更真实的自己，活得更幸福？

第28课　善用孤独的力量，是成就自我很重要的修行

第29课　必须妥善处理内心的孤独，才能转化成为正面的力量

第30课　像潜水般跃入最深沉的孤独里，才能浮现出最真实的自我

第31课　有心、有愿，就会有定力，不会被外在环境干扰

第32课　与世隔绝，让自己孤独，对修行来说是必要的

第33课　随着因缘的路途前行，自己就是最好的知音

第34课　遭遇人际关系的挫折，要检讨自己；但不要否定自己

第35课　倘若自己的想法很先进、很独到，就必须多沟通，让别人充分了解

第36课　权势的孤独，并非因为位居高处，而是不当行使权力

第37课　用行动的热情，融化内心的孤独

第38课　共修，既可以鼓励自己，也可以约束自己

第39课　用慈悲的心，相互包容，双方才能得到共修的好处

第40课　每个人的生命价值判断不同，应该彼此尊重

第41课　化“被动的孤独”为“主动的孤独”，就不会感觉孤独了第42课　帮助孩子化解孤独的感受，是父母应尽的责任

第43课　修行自己，并非只是独善其身，而是以苍生为念，利益众生

第4讲 欲望与恐惧

内心所最渴求的，其实正是最害怕失去的吗？

“想要”和“需要”之间有标准界线吗？还是因人而异？

情欲，是可以驯服或提升的吗？

第44课　智者畏苦，但能够深刻体认别人的苦，却是慈悲心的开始

第45课　“害怕”与“讨厌”是一线之隔；去除“傲慢”，才能面对恐惧，展现自信

第46课　傻人有傻福，聪明的人也有聪明的好处，只要自己尽了自己的力量，就不必恐惧

第47课　满足私利的欲望，叫做“私欲”；成就公众的利益，叫做“愿心”

第48课　只要是为公共利益，不为私人，就不会患得患失

第49课　愿心，是来生来世、永生永世，都要继续再做下去的坚持

第50课　转念的时机，跟年龄没有绝对关系；而是要视个别的人生际遇或智慧开发而定

第51课　愈早转念愈幸福，因为转念之前，追求私欲的路程很辛苦

第52课　发愿心，要有自知之明，量力而为，才不会力不从心

第53课　只有“舍”，没有“得”的欲望，才能够连“烦恼”都舍下

第54课　“想要”，如果超过“需要”；“消费”，就会变成“浪费”

第55课　人之所以高贵，是气质、是品格，而不是珠光宝气的价值

第56课　性冲动，可以用心理来克服，也可以用生活来调剂

第57课　为公众利益而修行，以“愿”心而得“愿”力；但是，发了愿心，还需要正确的方法

第58课　用宽大与坚强，消除竞争的恐惧，唤醒更大的愿心

第59课　拿自己的专长，去服务别人，就会产生“利他”的思考

第5讲 自由；自在

修行，就是为了解脱吗？

“自由”和“随心所欲”又有什么差别？

在肩负重大“责任”或“使命”时，还有可能觉得自由、自在吗？

第60课　为了积极实践目标而分分秒秒把自己捆绑，是愚痴的事

第61课　要学会放轻松，不要做超过自己能力范围的工作

第62课　自由和放荡不同。前者，有目标；后者，没有目标

第63课　自由，并非不受规范；此刻若不受规范，将来可能更不自由

第64课　适时向别人说“不”，才能保住“自由”；不要为了迎合别人的期待而扭曲自己

第65课　自由的真谛是：所做的一切，都是出于本身自愿的选择

第66课　因为有自知之明，面对诱惑时，才能解脱

第67课　要先能够放下自我中心，才能得到更多自由

第68课　觉悟，来自前世累积的善根，也要靠后天努力修行

第69课　即使，修行没有开悟，还是可以对别人有所帮助

第70课　修行的目的，就是为了得到解脱

第71课　自由，是不受束缚；自在，则是自己做主，没有阻碍

第72课　利益众生积极的作为，不会因为行动受限而无法发挥

第73课　在家修行，不应该忽略对家庭应尽的本分

第74课　修行要持之以恒，最好的方式就是回到初发心

第75课　遵守戒律，出于自己的选择，就不会觉得苦，反而是一种快乐的解脱

第76课　世界和平，就是追求全体的自由自在

第6讲 挫折与勇气

如何面对生命中的困境与意外？

“放下”和“放弃”，有什么不同？

“坚强”、“逞强”、“顽强”有什么差异？第77课　多读书，多向专家请益，可以促使因缘成熟

第78课　落实“四它”：面对它、接受它、处理它、放下它，要从勇气开始

第79课　不要用因果论，去解释过去已经发生的事

第80课　坚持，是用理性去评估，而不是用意气或情绪

第81课　最大的勇气是放下自我，因此而得到开悟

第82课　不论碰到多大的困境，都要有耐性，相信时间都可以将它改变

第83课　忏悔是非常重要的修行方法，也是修行必备的条件

第84课　如果不知道要对谁忏悔，就对佛忏悔

第85课　忏悔最主要的作用，在于自我反省，因为改过而得到成长

第86课　忏悔以后，除了悔过之外，还要弥补对别人造成的伤害

第87课　犯错的人，需要忏悔；受伤的人，需要宽恕

第88课　宽恕，也是一种勇气的表现

第89课　受害者是菩萨，用肉身的痛苦教育社会大众

第90课　学会宽恕，才能真正打开心结

第91课　勇气，并非外在的剽悍或刚强，而是内在的强韧与坚毅

第92课　真正的勇气，并非蛮力；而是精进不懈的力量

第7讲 生命的归宿

人死后，去了哪里？向往西方极乐世界，会不会也是另一种贪欲？

“积善”和“还债”，两者有何关联？如何“结缘”而不“结怨”？

人生苦短，但不如意事又十常八九，如何安顿自己的心？

第93课　不追问过去，不妄想未来，只需把握当下

第94课　信仰，并非靠外在印证；而是内心的感应

第95课　神秘经验，跟个人的修行及缘分有关

第96课　极乐，是从烦恼中得解脱。每个解脱的人，都有机会成佛

第97课　相信往生的亲人，会继续他下一段的旅程，是安顿自己对生死牵挂最好的方式

第98课　超渡亡魂，是为了在往生路上助他一臂之力

第99课　消极还债；积极还愿。自己得解脱，奉献给别人

第100课　若想不到对方的“恩”，就用“愿”来替代。“愿”的力量，比“恩”更大

第101课　有宗教信仰的人，内心比较安定、知足

第102课　宗教的入门，是身体力行的实践，在努力实践的过程中，就能体会修行的好处

第103课　当亲友往生时，学习洞见生死的微妙，对自己而言，也是一个重生的开始

第104课　有宗教信仰，对生命的归宿才会有落实感。生离死别，虽然痛苦，却可以渐渐解脱

第105课　从积极面对死亡的态度中，可以重新审视自己生命的意义与价值

第106课　体认生命很脆弱，才能学会珍惜及尊重

第107课　真正的吃苦是勇于接受挑战，获得成长，而不是自寻烦恼

第108课　菩萨不怕苦，一次一次地重返人间，向众生学习

4编辑推荐编辑

适合你读，也适合送给您关怀的人，共同细细品味：

出版七十几本畅销作品的吴若权，数月来每周两次亲自访谈圣严法师，并以第一人称纪录对谈内容精华，汇整成为充满智慧与法喜的修行笔记。 一位常以文字滋润读者，一位总以佛法抚慰众生，两位艺术家在此交会，互相倾听。当作家透露自己因为父丧而倾向忧郁时，法师也道出自己的父亲是自杀离世。作家提出人生中避不开的迷惘与未知，法师则以一种法喜充满的慈悲心来轻轻解惑。书中并以两人各自的生命故事来串联，读来亲切，亦具深度。

全书涵括七大智慧讲义，分别是：“认识自己”“爱与亲密关系”“孤独”“恐惧与欲望”“自由、自在”“挫折与勇气”“生命的归宿”，你将感受如沐春风的心灵洗礼，更能从中获得期待已久的开示与答案。

1作者简介编辑

吴若权，血型AB型，水瓶座。政治大学企管系毕业。现任多家企业营销顾问。他是各大书店排行榜上的常胜军，同时也是形象清新的热门媒体主持人及广告活动代言人。有着水瓶座的活跃聪明、企管人的敏锐精准，和创作者的细腻善感。浪漫与理性、认真与随性、柔软真心和诚恳热情，在他身上总能圆满调和，展现出精准细致的独特风采。吴若权认为：所谓的“正面思考”，并非认定人生只有阳光、没有阴暗，而是在阳光处尽情舒展身心，碰到阴暗时懂得安顿自己。比较重要的是：无论身处阳光里或阴暗中，不要忽略这一生的任务，不要忘记所为何来。生命的机缘，何其巧妙，吴若权适时得到圣严法师的首肯，接受对谈的请求，让他以提问的方式记录圣严法师的开示。这些疑问，有些是他本身碰到而无法解答的，有些则来自四周朋友的遭遇，其实就是每个人一生都会碰到的问题。现在，就邀请你一起进来聆听这一段故事，这一份奇缘。

励志格言大全

励志格言大全

1、有些事情不是难以做到才失去信心，而是因为失去信心才难以做到。

——肖乾旭《生活画语》（2003年十大金句之六）

2、每个人都有某些缺点，被骂没关系，因为这是进步的过程。

——针对儿子参选以来每天都会遭到对手的恶意攻击，马英九的母亲秦厚修如此回答

3、人生自有其沉浮，每个人都应该学会忍受生活中属于自己的一份悲伤，只有这样，你才能体会到什么叫做成功，什么叫做真正的幸福。

——李嘉诚

4、当我们不幸的时候，不能再好生忍受生活的时候，一棵树会对我们说：平静，平静，瞧着我！

——诺贝尔文学奖获得者赫尔曼·黑塞

5、我除了要按照我内心自然产生的愿望去生活之外，别无它求。

——诺贝尔文学奖获得者赫尔曼·黑塞

6、有信心不一定会赢，没有信心一定会输；有行动不一定会成功，没有行动一定会失败。

——《智慧语典》

7、心若改变，你的态度跟着改变；态度改变，你的习惯跟着改变；习惯改变，你的性格跟着改变；性格改变，你的人生跟着改变。

——《智慧语典》

8、杀人的不是逆境，而是遇到逆境时那种消沉烦躁的心情。

——英国伦敦塔原是囚禁政治犯的监牢。在一间囚室的石墙上，有位犯人刻下了这句励志的话

9、情人不老，我就不老。

——自信是一种魅力

10、要有一颗很热的心，一双冷若冰霜的眼，一双很勤劳的手，两条很忙的腿和一种很自由的心情。

——作家刘墉的自由生活

11、我想Kiss她，结果她说No。我跟她说，你就告诉别人你被一个中国男孩吻了。她说，不，他们会笑话我。这句话让我心里特别难过……

——2005年度国家最高科技奖两位得主之一的叶笃正先生是一位非常杰出的气象科学家。1945年的一天傍晚，留学美国的叶笃正送一个关系非常好的美国女孩去参加晚会，在车站时，女孩如此拒绝他的示爱。还有一次，叶笃正陪同学去芝加哥一个旅馆预订房子，柜台服务员却说：“我们没有中国房间。”此后，倍感愤怒和屈辱的叶笃正通过执著的努力让生命开放出非同一般的灿烂，以自己的强大压倒对手的狂妄

12、那些把失败看成是结局而不是过程的人，很少能见到成功的曙光。

——走过失败，就是成功

13、高薪并不是吸引人才的最重要原因，最重要的是让员工感到工作快乐。

——在“哈佛商业评论中文版”2003亚洲最佳雇主评比中，靳羽西化妆品有限公司当选中国最佳雇主第四名，公司总裁雷荣发如是说

14、嫉妒心强烈的人，无法从自己所拥有的东西中得到乐趣，只能由他人的幸福中获得痛苦。

——佚名

15、心理变，态度亦变；态度变，行为亦变；行为变，习惯亦变；习惯变，人格亦变；人格变，命运亦变。

——心理改变命运

16、心小了，所以小事就变大了；心变大了，所有的大事都变小了。

——正所谓宰相肚里能撑船

17、低头要有勇气，抬头要有底气。

——有“气”，啥事都能办

、虚荣有两种作用：一种是夸耀别人来贬低自己，另一种是夸耀自己来贬低别人。

——认识虚荣

18、快乐不仅在生活的终极目标远大理想那里，也在生活具体而微小的各种事项与进程之中。快乐不仅在于达到目标，也在于为达到目标而走过的全过程。

——王蒙

19、独身的状态人人可以经历，独立的心态则需要艰苦而自觉的修炼才可能达到。

——深圳知名女培训师朱俐

20、顺与不顺，在我看来，更多的是一种心态。

——被坊间称为“中国最年轻的美女副省长”的江西省副省长谢茹

21、总统拾掇俄罗斯，我拾掇克里姆林宫。

——在克里姆林宫工作了40年的清洁工波利雅认为，她和总统的职业相似

22、生活不能改变，我就改变，谁都不能改变我的好心情。

——王朔

23、我们在痛苦中奔跑，又在奔跑中超越痛苦。

——奔奔族（1975年-1985年出生的人）的心声，他们喜欢追求新鲜事物，对生活充满激情，同时追求不断进步、不断超越自我

24、要争取人心，就必须有一个宽宏大量的气度和一个既往不咎的政策，哪怕是装也要装得像回事。

——易中天

25、这个猜想的完成是国际数学界同行你一步我一步，共同做出来的。只是比较幸运，由我和曹怀东完成了临门一脚。

——中山大学教授、数学家朱熹平联袂旅美数学家曹怀东证明了七大世纪数学难题之一的庞加莱猜想。面对如潮的赞赏声，他如此评价自己

26、穷人戴钻石，人家以为是玻璃；富人戴玻璃，人家以为是钻石。

——台湾作家吴若权谈自信的重要性

27、毛毛问邓小平：“长征的时候你在干什么？”邓小平说：“跟着走。”

——《我的父亲邓小平》一书中的对话。“跟着走”便是坚持下来不掉队，便是认准了方向走到底，体现了邓小平伟人的胸怀和平和的心态

28、这种工作实在不适合人做，只适合马做。

——被问及如何应付每天长达17小时的工作时，马英九幽默作答

29、今天的阳光是为我洒的。

——电视节目主持人汪涵

30、如果你看到面前的阴影，那是因为你的背后有阳光！

——一网友如此解释“阴影”

31、我从没穿过名牌，没必要——我自己就是名牌。

——2005年度胡润百富榜上最大的黑马、位列第二的太平洋董事会主席严介和这样表达他的自信

32、毛毛虫所谓的末日，恰恰就是蝴蝶破茧而出充满阳光的时刻。

——献给悲观者的话

33、用感情看待这个世界一定是个悲剧，用理智看待这个世界就是个喜剧。

——理智与情感新论

34、所谓乐观，就像炉灶上的茶壶，屁股烧得红红的，却仍心情特好地吹口哨。

——网友唐伯猪对乐观的看法（励志名言  www.lz13.cn）

35、无论哪个行业，决定一个人是不是高手的根本因素都不是技术。技术到了一定的程度，大家都是一样的，能分出高下的是人的心——爱心、信心和责任心。

——整形外科博士陈焕然的美丽报告

36、使劲往上抛时，可以把球送上高处；狠狠往下砸时，同样可以把球送到高处。

——对别人的打击和取笑，应该正确对待

37、失之坦然，得之淡然，争其必然，顺其自然。

——对现在的人们很有教育意义的四个与“然”有关的词语

38、世界上没有快乐的地方，只有快乐的人。

——某网友的QQ签名，说明了一种好的心态远比所处的环境重要

39、什么是生活？生活就是一把锤子，把你的理想坛子一个个击碎。

——一项在线调查显示，71％的人认为“现实生活中充满了焦虑”

40、看着太阳你就把阴影甩在脑后了。

——父亲这样安慰高考落榜的儿子

41、看到别人愚蠢，就原谅自己愚蠢；看到自己愚蠢，就原谅别人愚蠢。

——法国学者布瑞南

42、一个人需要技巧和智慧，但最不能缺少的，是原则和信念。

——陆勇强

43、在真正的道德理念面前，你无须堵住别人的嘴，而是要面对自己的内心。

——摘自一网友博客

44、多思是优点，但多心则是缺点；怀疑并非全无必要，但猜疑则是越少越好；敏感是需要称赞的，但过分敏感则会使人脆弱。

——袁志发《我看人生》

45、偏见可以说是思想的放假。它是没有思想的人的家常日用，而是有思想的人的星期日娱乐。假如我们不能怀揣偏见，随时随地必须得客观公正、正经严肃，那就像造屋只有客厅，没有卧室，又好比在浴室里照镜子还得做出摄影机镜头前的姿态。

——钱钟书说偏见

46、真正感动人的，从来不是思想，而是年轻的勇气。

——许知远在《那些忧伤的年轻人》里写道

47、既然在出现问题时，哭不能解决问题，那为什么不笑呢？

——一个大学生这样处理求学和家庭中的难题

48、相信别人，放弃自己，这就是许多人失败的开始。

——连自己都放弃，谁能拯救你

49、100％只有自己的生活，就像100％的柠檬汁，令人反胃。

——著名作家王文华认为，人生的很多烦恼都是源于自我意识太强

50、习惯了郁闷的，只能延续郁闷；习惯了卑琐的，只能保持卑琐。

——余秋雨

51、人间天堂人人可进，不要高墙，不要禁卫，不要门票，也不要通报。只要你愿意朝着它抬腿迈步，你就进了。

——余秋雨

52、去爱吧，像不曾爱过一样；跳舞吧，像没有人观看一样；唱歌吧，像没有人聆听一样；生活吧，像每天都是末日一样；赚钱吧，像不是为了钱一样。

——一首诗中如此写道

53、如果情况不如意，我们总可以想办法加以改变。

——美国前财政部长阿济·泰勒·摩尔顿

54、把希望寄托在别人身上，你会感到无助；把希望寄托在自己身上，不会心乱如麻。

——带妹妹求学的贫困大学生洪战辉，如此诠释支持自己生活的动力

55、筋疲力尽的，往往不是要做的事情本身，而是患得患失的心态。

——心累重于身累

56、不敢生气的是懦夫，而不去生气的才是智者。

——一位智者的生活感悟

57、其实人类没有真正自由，少年时我们坐在课室里动弹不得，稍后又步入办公室，无论外头阳光多好，还得超时加班，有几个人可以真正做自己想做的事？

——亦舒《别人的女郎》

58、每天我都不断地刷新一项世界纪录，那就是我在世界上已经生活的天数。

——凡人也可以“破纪录”

59、有些人像我一样，天生有点傻，更多人是后天变傻的。

——好莱坞经典影片《阿甘正传》的一句台词

60、心态要常常保持年轻，头脑要常常保持老练。

——现代社会所需求的人才应该是这样的

Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence; Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks

Debunking the Myth of the 10,000-Hours Rule: What It Actually Takes to Reach Genius-Level Excellence

The question of what it takes to excel – to reach genius-level acumen at a chosen endeavor – has occupied psychologists for decades and philosophers for centuries. Groundbreaking research has pointed to “grit” as a better predictor of success than IQ, while psychologists have admonished against the dangers of slipping into autopilot in the quest for skill improvement. In recent years, one of the most persistent pop-psychology claims has been the myth of the “10,000-hour rule” – the idea that this is the amount of time one must invest in practice in order to reach meaningful success in any field. But in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (public library), celebrated psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, best-known for his influential 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, debunks the 10,000-hour mythology to reveal the more complex truth beneath the popular rule of thumb:

The “10,000-hour rule” – that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field – has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. The problem: it’s only half true. If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.

No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”

“You have to tweak the system by pushing,” he adds, “allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.”

The secret to continued improvement, it turns out, isn’t the amount of time invested but the quality of that time. It sounds simple and obvious enough, and yet so much of both our formal education and the informal ways in which we go about pursuing success in skill-based fields is built around the premise of sheer time investment. Instead, the factor Ericsson and other psychologists have identified as the main predictor of success is deliberate practice – persistent training to which you give your full concentration rather than just your time, often guided by a skilled expert, coach, or mentor. It’s a qualitative difference in how you pay attention, not a quantitative measure of clocking in the hours. Goleman writes:

Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference. For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists – the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours – Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.

Goleman identifies a second necessary element: a feedback loop that allows you to spot errors as they occur and correct them, much like ballet dancers use mirrors during practice. He writes:

Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks.

The feedback matters and the concentration does, too – not just the hours.

Additionally, the optimal kind of attention requires top-down focus. While daydreaming may have its creative benefits, in the context of deliberate practice it only dilutes the efficiency of the process. Goleman writes:

Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind’s processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing.

At least at first. But as you master how to execute the new routine, repeated practice transfers control of that skill from the top-down system for intentional focus to bottom-up circuits that eventually make its execution effortless. At that point you don’t need to think about it – you can do the routine well enough on automatic.

But this is where the amateurs and the experts diverge – too much automation, and you hit the “OK plateau,” ceasing to grow and stalling at proficiency level. If you’re going for genius, you need to continually shift away from autopilot and back into active, corrective attention:

Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training – whether in skiing or driving – people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.

The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau.

But even with the question of quality resolved, there’s still that of quantity: Just how much “deliberate practice” is enough? Focused attention, like willpower, is like a muscle and gets fatigued with exertion:

Ericsson finds world-class champions – whether weight-lifters, pianists, or a dog-sled team – tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into the training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session. Optimal practice maintains optimal concentration.

In the rest of Focus, Goleman goes on to explore how concepts like attention-chunking, emotional empathy, and system blindness influence the pursuit of excellence. Complement it with how grit predicts achievement and the science of the “winner effect.”

Lessons from the past – when fear drove nations to war

Lessons from the past – when fear drove nations to war

Sunday, January 26, 2014 – 08:50

Andreas Herberg-rothe For The Straits Times

The Straits Times

WITH the 100th anniversary of World War I this year in mind, the overarching task of policy in a globalised, multipolar world is to manage the rise of the Global South by avoiding great wars and the cancer of mass violence.

During her last visit to Beijing in September 2012, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton held a press conference in which she stated that the world would soon see, for the first time in history, that a rising power and an established power would not engage in a war. Of course her statement was related to China and the US.

Although I don’t think war between these nations is inevitable, I do think Mrs Clinton described the problem well.

No one wanted World War I to happen. Or, at least, no one wanted the kind of war that actually took place. The general assumption was that the conflict would be very limited. The Europeans who went to war assumed they would be home by Christmas 1914. We know now, of course, that World War I not only happened, but that it also resulted in the self-destruction of the European powers in two world wars.

For a long time Germany was blamed for the outbreak of World War I. The assumption was that the war was the result of the German desire to become a world power.

Without rejecting this approach completely, I think that the more disturbing interpretation has been given by Australian historian Christopher Clark in his characterisation of the European powers and their politicians before and during the war as “sleepwalkers”.

According to him, no one had any idea of the degree to which the violence would escalate.

World War II was different in that it was more deliberate – the result of the activities of Nazis in Germany. The outbreak of World War I, on the other hand, was the outcome of a traditional power struggle.

It included the rise of new great powers, an arms race, a pre-emptive strike by the Germans, perhaps even out of fear, and a policy of sleepwalking by the leading figures in Europe.

Above all, it showed how a failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near-genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe.

Some theoreticians have implied that we are witnessing a return to the Middle Ages with respect to international security. But in fact we are returning to a development that is structurally much more comparable to the pre-World War I period, especially in Asia.

Mrs Clinton has already compared the competition between China and the US with that of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens – authoritarian Sparta against democratic Athens. Athens, the strongest city- state in Greece before the war, was reduced to a state of near- complete subjection, while Sparta became established as the leading power.

World War II is not a good comparison because there is no totalitarian ideology in sight which could be compared with that of the Nazis. The Cold War does not provide an illuminating model for comparison either. There are not just two superpowers.

In Asia we have several actors to take into account apart from the US and China. These include India, Russia and Japan.

Following Mr Clark, it could be said, that at the heart of the causes of World War I was a lack of understanding about the real situation. European leaders failed to understand the turmoil in the Balkans, or comprehend the implications of the conflict between established and rising powers. They also failed to comprehend the capabilities of the military forces that would be unleashed.

Thucydides, the chronicler of the Peloponnesian War and one of the ancient world’s most important historians, sees the initial cause of this war in the growth of Athenian power: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.”

Unlike Plato, though, Thucydides argues that it was not the striving for power in itself, but rather fear of loss of power and, in the long term, fear of being oppressed, robbed of one’s freedom, and enslaved that caused the escalation leading to war.

In Thucydides’ account, fear was the cause of war on both sides. Sparta was afraid of the growth of Athenian power, and Athens was afraid of what might happen if it gave in to an escalating series of demands and threats, the end result of which could not be foreseen.

There are many structural similarities here between the pre-1914 period in Europe as well as the current conflicts in Asia. I don’t think that history is repeating itself entirely. But the resemblance is striking.

stopinion@sph.com.sg

The writer is a lecturer at the faculty of social and cultural studies at the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany.