These Difficult Times

October 07, 2008

Bad Times Aren't Always Bad For Your Health

According to this article at the NY Times, your health — counterintuitively — might improve during difficult times. Why? Because you might have more time on your hands and feel less rushed. Who benefits? According to the article, children may benefit because parents are more likely to invest their time in taking kids to the doctor, breast-feeding, cooking food at home, and simply spending more time on them. The health of adults also rises during economic busts, but only if you’re employed and have housing. If you’re broke or homeless, expect your health to decline because you may find it more difficult to prevent your health from deteriorating.

Posted by Rob at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2008

The Pain of Difficult Times

A reminder from your friendly, neighborhood self-help guru:

Life during "difficult times" isn't always as painful as we imagine.

The pain you may feel is actually the shock of your priorities shifting — and the higher the priorities you must shift around, the more painful it gets to shift them.

Posted by Rob at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

Huang Chunsai & Medical Burdens

What good can we glean from medical burdens? Is there any kind of value buried inside suffering? If so, what is this value and do we need to actually suffer to gain it?

Many people — myself included — are harassed by an array of relatively small medical irritants. The general public in western societies, however, enjoys such a high level of base comfort that an interesting dynamic occurs whenever medical problems arise. We become myopic: we see small medical problems as big ones, and we over-react.

On the flipside of over-reacting to medical issues, there’s the danger of under-reacting. What are the dangers of this? Sometimes a small medical problem grows and spirals out of control, accumulating into something much worse. Need an example? Meet Huang Chunsai, a Chinese man who survived a record tumour surgery. The tumors afflicting him since he was a boy presumably must have started out relatively small and grown slowly, slowly enough to not impel medical action. Or, more likely, his family was too poor to afford it. But as the years went by, the tumor grew and grew to the point where he had problems walking and was too embarrassed to leave his house.

Is there a moral to this story? I think there are several, but here’s one: Medical burdens must be watched very carefully and respected for what they are — Chances for a medicinal problem to fly out of control and become literally and metaphysically a huge burden, as it was for Huang Chunsai.

Small medical burdens, such as those Ms Chunsai’s started out as being, can accumulate over time and must be periodically eliminated, just as river bed silt must be dredged from the delta of a busy river.

But, is there beauty in Mr Chunsai and his plight? If so, where is it and how can we appreciate this?

Posted by Rob at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2007

Headline We Wish We’d See: Dick Cheney

Ahh, there it is. I've been waiting to see proof of Dick Cheney’s pact with Satan. The Headline-We Wish-We-Saw was "Cheney Dive-bombed By Bird; Expensive Suit Bespeckled."

Posted by Rob at 10:53 PM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2007

Fifteen Headlines We’d Like To See & The Ones We’ll Probably See

DATE	HEADLINES WE’D LIKE TO SEE	HEADLINES WE’LL PROBABLY SEE
Aug 2007	Electric Car Back By Popular Demand	The Long Arm of Air Pollution: Smog Alerts in Bermuda
Feb 2008	Concerns Over Health of President Unrelenting, VP Slips Into Coma	Cheney Fourth Triple By-Pass Recovery 100%
Dec 2008	War Averted In Iran, Peace Treaty Imminent	Chaos Reigning In Tehran, Explosions Mar Diplomatic Mission
Feb 2009	Scandal At Halliburton, Industrial Espionage Exposes Far-Reaching Corruption	Defense Industry Profits Hit All-Time High
Oct 2009	Criminalists Now ID Serial Killers Before They Commit	Psychologists & Law Enforcement Concerned By New Class of Super Criminals
Nov 2009	National Debt Halved	US Treasury Defaults On National Debt!
Sept 2009	Korean Electric Car Sales Smashing Expectations, Car Industry Experts Baffled	New Mileage Bill Neutered By Congress
Oct 2009	Red Tides Fading, Scientists Perplexed	Freak Hurricane Smears Oil Slick Across Gulf Stream
Jun 2009	Brazilian Forests Recovering Quickly, Study	Dust Bowl Forms In Amazon Basin! Clouds Seen As Far As West Africa
Apr 2011	Social Sec Uprisings On College Campuses Down From One Year Ago	Department of Social Security Declares Insolvency
Mar 2012	High-Speed Passenger Train, On Track, Under Budget	American's Endless Infatuation With The Automobile
Nov 2015	Lose Weight The MIT Way: Sophomores Develop Anti-Gravity Device	U.S. High School Students Place Thirtieth In World-Wide Science Tests
Feb 2016	Anti-Gravity Slingshot Fails At Launch, Inventor Still Optimistic	Obesity Rates Over 50% In U.S. Elementary Schools
Mar 2017	Autism Cure Developer Wins Nobel Prize	The Mysteries of Autism, Cases On The Rise
Jun 2018	HealthCare Industry Crisis Unravelling, Proponents of National System Gaining Favor: Poll	HMO System Bullet-proofed By Legislation

The Trend of Upward Difficulty

Yea, these headlines are a little pessimistic. But if the trends we see today continue into next week, next year, next decade, we're in for rough times, difficult times. What can we do now to proactively dampen the power of these problems? How can we see the low tide, evacuate the shore, and prepare—before the tsunami strikes?

But on the flip-side, there is hidden value to the problems that will arise. The obstacles we'll face will be incredible opportunities for growth and rare chances to display a strength of character of awe-inspiring depth. These moments will be history-making, decade-defining times. If difficulties like these are theoretically valuable, what lessons can we learn from them? Will we use these obstacles? Or will they use us? Who among us will be there to leap up to the cockpit, grab the tiller, and steer?

Posted by Rob at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2007

Subway Riders Bond (briefly) About Working With You Is Killing Me

I’d like to share with you an interesting experience I had on the downtown IRT express train this morning.

Yeah, I’ll admit it. I’m a biblio-voyeur. I’m nosy when it comes to what books and magazines people read on the subways. Well, there sat a woman reading quietly on the train, and I immediately noted that she seemed much more involved in her book than most readers seem to be, so I peered down to see what she was reading, and, sure enough, it was the paperback version of “Working With You Is Killing Me.”

I thought to myself, hmh! I know a thing or two about this book. I looked at her again, and I could see she was reading voraciously—Whoa!—and that she was weally diving into it, and that she had just started it.

Normally when strangers are reading, I leave them alone, but since I knew this book back-to-front, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bother her about it, so I begged her pardon and asked if I could interrupt her to ask a few questions.

“Excuse me, but I’m familiar with this book and an acquaintance of the authors, and I’m curious, where did you see this book? I mean, how did you find out about it?”

She immediately smiled at me in an un-NewYorkery way and said “Oh, from these,” and she pointed toward the overhead subway car advertisements.”I saw the ad and, you know, it kinda just grabbed me. This title, it’s just so—you know, it’s perfect.”

“Wow, “ I nodded, “it does do that.” I told her I liked this book a lot right off the bat too.

“You know,” she said, “I went to three different bookstores before I found it. It’s out of stock everywhere.”

“You went to three different stores to get this book?”

“Yeah, I went all over the place—to a Borders in Westchester, and two Barnes & Nobles, but I found it. The clerk said I was the third person to ask about it that day.”

This amazed me. There aren’t many books these days that impel readers to travel so far out of their way to find a book.

“It really got me,” she continued, “ you know, the stuff about bad bosses. Ugh, I have the worst boss, total micro-manager. It’s awful.”

“Sorry. Yeah, I know the type. Well,” pointing at the book, “I hope you enjoy it. I found it to be an extremely useful thing to read.”

I handed her my business card and told her if she liked this book, she might also like my website, and we shook hands and parted ways.

Kind of random, eh? But that’s New York for ya!

What This Means

This interaction answers a question that I’ve been wondering about for a little while: Do books still matter? And if so, how much, what with Hollywood, the internet, MTV, massive multiplayer online games, and the sixty bazillion cable channels available to distract us. Don’t we have enough stimulation?

I have come to believe that—far beyond the shadow of any doubt—books still retain an incredible magnitude of cultural, social, and intellectual power. That power may be overshadowed by the enormous appeal of all these other available options, but I can’t think of many other $10 purchases that a person would go such lengths to get. This nice woman behaved as though this book was more than a book, as though she was buying a complex computer system, or seeking a good medical surgeon—that’s the level of mental exertion she put into finding this book. What does this mean? That some books, many books, are still an incredible value, even for ten bucks, and that customers are willing to go to incredible distances to buy the ones that help them overcome difficulties, and that they remain the central delivery system for complex conceptual tools that readers lack and crave.

Take that, cable companies!

Posted by Rob at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2007

The First Phone Call of the Morning

The following conversation happened at 9:50 AM yesterday.

ROB Tekserve Pro-Video-Post. This is Rob.

CUSTOMER Yeah, umm, I bought a, umm, Lacie, umm, umm, DVD burner yesterday and, umm, iDVD don’t see it.

Okay, deep breath. I have to brace this guy right off the bat for the reality that he might be in for more trouble than he actually sees right now.

ROB Oh, iDVD needs to be a relatively current version to “see” Firewire external DVD burners. An older version won’t see them. Is your version older than two or three years?

CUSTOMER Oh. Okay I got it, umm, hooked up by USB.

ROB Hmmm. Try plugging in with a Firewire cable.

I knew at this point that he wasn’t out of the woods yet. So I continued…

ROB Keep in mind though, that you might have other obstacles to overcome. Yeah, you might still have to buy a new version of iLife.

CUSTOMER Oh really? Damn!

ROB And that means you might have to buy the new operating system too, for that to work. What operating system do you have?

CUSTOMER But, I told the girl I spoke to that yesterday, man! Yo! They scammin’ me. Why they gotta do that?

ROB Sir, I’m only trying to tell you —

CUSTOMER I buy all my stuff from Tekserve, man. I expect better service that this.

ROB Well, we try to protect our customers as best we can. I’m only trying to advise you to expect other obstacles. I’m trying to—

CUSTOMER And now you’re givin’ me this!

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir.

CUSTOMER Why I can’t get no muthah-f#ckin help?

ROB Don’t raise your voice, sir—

CUSTOMER And don’tchoo hang up on me neither.

I wasn’t sure how to react to that one.

CUSTOMER I’ll come down there and wait for yo ass!

A chill went down my spine.

ROB DO NOT threaten me, sir.

CUSTOMER Suck mah di@k, you a faggit. Whatcho name? Umm, Rob? Oh yeah! Rob!

Great. He remembered my name.

ROB That’s right. My name is Rob.

CUSTOMER Suck my di@k, you faggit! You muthah-fu@kin faggit!

—Click—

What can be learned from an interaction like this? This interaction started by this customer being stymied by a seemingly small and innocent technical problem. Presumably, his goal was to make a DVD, but he was thwarted by obstacles to this goal. When I delivered to him the (possible, but not inevitable) bad news, he was swept into a maelstrom of anger.

I later found out that this customer called back in an attempt to talk to the salesperson he’d spoken to yesterday. She wasn’t in yet, luckily, and our receptionist told him this. Upon hearing this the customer hurled insults at our receptionist, calling him a “fucking white-protected faggit.”

Analysis

Note how the customer’s mind flip-flopped. His posturing did a one-eighty. Within the span of thirty seconds, he went from, at first, total submissiveness &mdash with all the uncertain umms &mdash to felonious menacing. You can see the state this man in, as we began our phone call, how close he was to the edge, so easily tippable into rage.

Several difficult customer-types are thrown into the mix here. First, there’s the Crazy Train. That’s an obvious part of this equation. (Umm, cuckoo!) But what may not be so obvious to you is what’s underlying this interaction: the victim mentality. Buried deep inside this man is the Helpless Child. But in this case, it’s not the standard variety of Helpless Child: this is the Rage-aholic Thug Variant, the one that thinks throwing his weight around, threatening people, and insulting them is how to GTD. It didn’t work.

This customer was a truly twisted mutant of different difficult customer types. Really, an interesting case, when you think about it. He was a bundle of all the neuroses of the victimized Helpless Child, mixed together with the insanity of a Crazy Train, and baked into a soufflé of personality disorders, cursewords, and threats, a bundle that’s a little bit too common these days.

Could I have defused this difficult customer? I wonder about this. I don't think I could have because he couldn’t be reasoned with. And furthermore, would this man accept responsibility for his actions, for the fact that he bought something willingly? How could I have defused this situation? I could have bent over backwards and waved my “magic wand,” as we say, to fix his problem. But after what he said what he did? Um, no.

My Reaction

Let me share with you how I reacted. My first instinct was actually to call this guy back and try to find out what the problem actually was, which I never even had a chance to do, and solve it. But after reconsidering this, I decided to take another action: I typed up everything I could remember that’d been spoken, and then showed this transcript to anyone else I thought might interact with this guy, should he come into the store. Transcribing the conversation helped to me cool off a lot, which reminds me: What does WWYIKM say? It says “Unhook with a business tool.” When I transcribed the conversation, I was executing an excellent form of by-the-numbers unhooking procedure. It made me feel a lot better.

In terms of celebrating this difficulty, well, it was a learning experience. I learned that my coworkers were very kind and supportive about being threatened, and that there wasn’t much I could've done to mitigate this situation from going out of control the way it did. So, my friends were all behind me — after all, this could have happened to any one of us. And management has summarily “fired” this customer, told him to never shop at Tekserve again. But what else can I learn? I guess I can be proud I didn’t freak out too badly. I’m ambivalent about not responding to this guy with more anger, more insults in response, but this really isn’t my style at all and probably not a good idea anyway.

Other Factors

I never got to find out several things: (1) What this guy was, in fact, attempting to accomplish: Burn a video DVD? Back up data? I’ll never know. How do I feel about that? Not too bad. (2) What version of iDVD software did he have? Nope, don’t give a crap now. The saddest part of this interaction is that his software was probably up-to-date and he only needed to plug in the Firewire cable to get going. Instead, all he succeeded in doing was getting blacklisted at a store he likes and getting two-hundred, friendly, Mac-savvy people to hate his guts.

Posted by Rob at 11:27 PM | Comments (3)

January 21, 2007

Working With You Is Killing Me: A Book Review

Introduction

We suffer from a variety of difficulties in life today, but the trickiest difficulty is also the simplest — other people. It seems the clever technology we’ve invented over the past ten-thousand years doesn’t stop other people from irritating us, particularly those who you sit next to in your office for forty hours a week. Aside from the health of you and your family, what factor of daily life could possibly be as important as the people surrounding you at work, many of whom drive you insane? Not one can supercede this paramount factor. At work, it’s crucial you collaborate with other people successfully, yet we possess little technology directly aiding us in doing so psychologically.

About a year ago, I came across a new development in this issue — a book called Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself From Emotional Traps At Work (or WWYIKM) which you can learn more about here.

Its authors, business strategist Kathi Elster and psychologist Katherine Crowley, wrote it to present many of the personal dynamics which cause you to go crazy. They identify several different profile types of crazy-makers commonly found in our workplaces, and this book could easily have been named Handling Difficult People. WWYIKM covers a timeless topic and was helpful enough for me to share with you now my thoughts on it.

What This Book Accomplishes: It Presents a New and Useful Metaphor

WWYIKM identifies a social dynamic everyone feels at one time or another: being so upset, furious, and enraged you can’t even think. To identify this wretched situation and its various manifestations, Elster and Crowley present a metaphor of extreme utility:

• being hooked

The metaphor of “being hooked” forms the meat of the book. This is the engine around which they build a complex and thorough coping system. The techniques and tools presented by the authors spring forth in bold relief after identifying this phenomena.

Being Hooked

Far and away the most important idea proposed within WWYIKM is the metaphor of “the hook.” This metaphor contains the image of another person actually hooking you with a big fishing hook and dragging you around. When you become “hooked” by someone, it means you’ve dropped your guard and become unhinged. This image tells you you’ve lost control of yourself.

The mere mention of this phenomena of hooking is helpful. It articulates this universal sensation — somebody driving you nuts — in a language which poetically rings true. I am an aficionado of metaphors, and from this nice one stems my effusive admiration for their work. To me, Elster and Crowley’s acts of inventing and presenting this new and powerful metaphor is a huge achievement. Once the metaphor for hooking is available, we can articulate ways to unhook. How do you unhook yourself? WWYIKM presents details of four steps for this:

1. Unhook physically
2. Unhook mentally
3. Unhook verbally
4. Unhook with a business tool

Elster and Crowley are very thorough in explaining the different methods of unhooking from difficult situations. But when situations get really bad and you emotionally go beyond the point where the basic unhooking techniques function, you’ve entered another worse stage of distress — the ledge.

The Ledge

When you repeatedly become hooked by the various hookers in your workplace, you may enter a deeper state of distress which Elster and Crowley call “the Ledge.” (Note: this metaphor isn’t discussed in WWYIKM. I attended a lively book reading they did at a nearby Barnes & Noble during which they prominently mentioned “the ledge” metaphor. This, too, fascinates me.)

The metaphor contains the image where you actually stand on the window ledge of a high building or the ledge of a cliff, ready to commit suicide. What an incredible image! Here’s how it works: An event triggers you to become furious and upset so you cease to function properly and go “on the ledge.” This ledge identifies a state of deep emotional distress where, metaphorically speaking, you become suicidal. Then if you can defuse the difficulty, you may talk yourself “off the ledge” or bring yourself “down from the ledge,” where you return to normal, back to your state of functioning properly.

WWYIKM lays down a well-rounded system for how to prevent being hooked in the first place, what actions you can take when you get hooked, and how to talk yourself off the ledge.

WWYIKM Covers a Broad Area

Elster and Crowley’s book covers an incredible expanse of territory. It highlights the importance of boundaries. It discusses how we define them and how to use them as protection at work. Also discussed are critical descriptions of the various difficult types of people, or archetypes. In this area, Elster and Crowley are very thorough and present a complete round-up of the different difficult characters you’ll encounter on your travels.

Of particular importance in WWYIKM are the interpersonal zones of difficulty. When dealing with difficult people, you’ll undoubtedly encounter a complex fogbank of issues. To clarify and organize these issues, WWYIKM identifies five primary zones:

1. You. These are your personal issues within you. This zone applies to how you assume roles at work and how these roles cast you into positions which cause you difficulty by hooking you.
2. Your Peers. These are issues within your peers which affect you. This zone applies to how others assume roles at work and how your co-workers cast themselves into positions and create difficulties for you. One interesting aspect of this zone is how the power dynamics between you and your peer is symmetrical.
3. Your Boss. This zone applies to the relationship between you and your boss and how its power dynamic is often of striking asymmetry. You could be fired on the spot! Your boss can hook you by assuming a role which causes you an incredible amount of difficulty. This role may tap into your personal issues and feed off the role you assume while at work.
4. Your Employees. This zone applies to the people who work for you and how you relate to them. They are not your peers, they are in positions of power under you, and for whom you play an important and dominant role in their daily lives.
5. Your Company. This zone applies to the overall culture of the business you work in.

Below is a graphic I created to conceptualize the minefield of difficulties which can arise around you. Quite a minefield, these ubiquitous perils, mmm?

The Five Zones of Interpersonal Difficulties
In the Business World

WWYIKM Offers a Coherent Coping System of Extreme Utility

WWIKYM builds upon the interpersonal zones and creates several fascinating systems:

• A set of archetypes for each zone: WWYIKM identifies and explains the details about each archetype.
• A system for how to cope with various difficult archetype at each zone: You might’ve inadvertently assumed one of the archetypes at work, and the authors present a variety of ways how you can defuse the archetypically difficult co-workers.
• A procedure with which to deal with each difficult archetype: (a) Detect, (b) Detach, (c) Depersonalize, (d) Deal.

In short, WWYIKM delivers a complete framework for dealing gracefully with difficult people.

Other Goodies

This book presents several other useful tools. My favorites are two questionnaires presented at the end of the book: the Personal Inventory and Workplace Appraisal questionnaires. These allow you to assess the culture of the company you work for, and they blew my mind. After looking at them closely, they make a lot of sense and are so obvious I’m amazed no one else thought of it before. Another huge achievement.

In Conclusion

When I see them, I look very carefully at books which deal so directly with difficulties, as WWYIKM does. The topic of difficulty is highly competitive and many authors and thinkers have entered the fray, and I have read many books on it. That said, I’d also like to tell you how special this book is.

WWYIK is a work of thought without flaw — a very rare diamond — and I was immediately fascinated with it. I tracked its sales performance on Amazon’s Sales Rank and watched it sell briskly from the very start, and at one point early on, it enjoyed a high rank in Amazon’s business bestsellers section: the mid-fifties — an astonishing performance. Today, depending upon what day of the week you look, WWYIKM sits between the comfortable mid ten-thousands all the way down to the two-hundred thousands. Why it seems to have fallen out of favor remains to me inexplicable.

But allow me to change gears. Think about our technological culture for a moment, and note the myriad of handy doohickeys we use. Sure, we enjoy a smorgasbord of telecommunication technology, but:

• Do we possess technology that keeps us calm ourselves in the face of difficult people? Nope.
• Does telecommunication technology allow new avenues for us unhook or bring us off the ledge? Well, yeah, it does — the telephone, fax, email, VoIP, text messages, and video-conferencing can potentially all be good unhooking tools. But unless you know you actually need to unhook, how could these tools help protect you and what good can they do? Not much.
• I say we suffer from a distinct lack of tools for dealing with difficult people. Does our telecommunication technology resolve this deficiency? Not specifically, no. Does technology complicate it? Yes. It certainly does make dealing with difficult people more complex. The issue at hand here is: these technologies were not explicitly designed to help you unhook, although you can use them for this. I believe technology doesn’t aid us in dealing with difficult people. Generally, it just gets in the way. You have to do it not digitally but analogly.

There is a gaping void in technology for helping us interact with troublemakers; We lack tools to handle difficult people. This is why WWYIKM becomes so important. Elster and Crowley take us a huge step forward by tackling what technology ignores. Their book is as close as I’ve ever seen to a manual on how to handle difficult people. And this book presents a coherent coping system of extreme utility.

BONUS ROUND

A few extra questions occurred to me which I pose to you for intellectual stimulation:

• Is it possible to apply the metaphors of being hooked and Elster and Crowley’s techniques toward entities larger than corporations, i.e. on a cultural level?
• Would they work on specific ethnicities?
• Would they work at the level of nations?
• How would a center for international-affairs benefit from these ideas?

Something to think about anyway.

Posted by Rob at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2007

Defusing Difficult Customers: The Bomb Squad Techniques

It gives me great pleasure to announce to you my inclusion of, to me, a very important document — Defusing Difficult Customers: The Bomb Squad Techniques, which you may enjoy at your leisure here. Please note that I encourage you to print out this document, to email it around to people who might need it, and to add any suggestions you think prudent. We all experience extreme difficulty when it comes to other people, and any tool for mitigating the anxiety and suffering they bring is beneficial, to put it lightly.

Posted by Rob at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2007

How To Hold A Grudge

What does it take to successfully hold a grudge for long periods of time?

I have held a few long-term grudges before, and this question interested me, so I decided to give it some thought. What I came up with is an easy system for framing these quirky fixations that afflict us, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. I begin with a rundown of the cast of characters in a grudge situation; then I flesh out the general, all-purpose components of generic grudges; and finally I wind down with some ways you can put your old grudges to bed and, better yet, to good use.

The Cast Members

• The PERPETRATOR. He who causes the grudge.
• The CRIME. The act by the Perpetrator who induces the grudge. The crime may range in severity from petty crime (slights, insults, and misdemeanors) all the way up to larger crime (felonies and man-slaughter). This crime must remain be unpunished for any grudge to form, and it must cause a sense of injustice in the Victim.
• The VICTIM. He who carries the grudge.
• The GRUDGE. The Victim’s reaction to the crime. The grudge appears metaphorically similar to “emotional baggage.” These emotional bags may appear to other people as “personal issues.”

What Ingredients Are Required, Within Victims, for a Grudge to Occur?

In grudge situations, all Victims share the same general ingredients, or characteristics. A Victim must have several key attributes for a grudge to form and be retained over time. The Victim must:

• Have a very good memory of the crime.
• Have a heightened sense of indignation.
• Be energetic.
• Accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.

1. The Victim must have a very good memory of the crime.
Having a good memory of the crime is, bar none, the most important attribute. People lucky enough to possess good memories are ironically the most predisposed to forming grudges.

Along with possessing a good memory of the crime, the Victim must also regularly recall it and its Perpetrator. He must recall them by three methods: by intentionally reminding himself of the crime; by placing triggers that regularly remind him of the crime; or by being around objects or events that trigger memory of the crime.

If a person is forgetful, he is not likely become a Victim. Grudges simply don’t function without the Victim vividly recalling the crime. If the Victim’s recall of the crime becomes infrequent or vague, his grasp upon the grudge weakens, and the grudge withers away. Without visualizing the crime, the Victim forgets why he carried it in the first place. He loosens his grip upon the grudge; he forgets the crime, forgives the Perpetrator, and the grudge drops away. However, possessing a good memory of the crime and recalling frequently isn’t enough…

2. The Victim must have a heightened sense of indignation.
He must be enraged by injustice. This predisposes the Victim to hold grudges. Indignation is critical to the phenomena of grudges: the stronger the indignation, the longer the grudge lasts.

A dynamic exists between a Victim’s indignation and his identity. They are umbilically joined together. So if a crime affects a potential Victim’s identity, a grudge forms and he officially becomes a Victim. The grudge feasts upon the connection between identity and indignation, and it garners lasting strength against indignation by perpetually threatening the Victim’s identity. Whenever this connection is present, it makes it unlikely the indignant person will ever be grudge-free.

Easy-going or passive people never carry grudge or turn into Victims. People with no indignation don’t respond to the Perpetrator’s crime. A grudge is unlikely to form when a crime fails to threaten the Victim’s identity.

A Perpetrator who is well-acquainted with his Victim’s personality may be able to capitalize on this identity-indignation connection and leverage it into a long-lasting grudge. A sophisticated trouble-maker knows what crime will successfully assault his Victim’s identity, and he executes this crime upon his Victim and exacts heavy damage by creating a custom-tailored grudge with a harmful, lasting effect.

In other words, if the Perpetrator knows his Victim has a heightened sense of indignation, he may be able to “really stick it” to this Victim and create a memorable crime of long-term residual power and fuel what may potentially become in the Victim an ancient grudge.

3. The Victim must be energetic.
The sheer mental exertion needed to maintain a grudge requires sustained endurance. The bigger the crime committed by the Perpetrator, the more energy required from the Victim to carry the grudge. The Victim must be energetic enough to “carry” the emotional burden of his grudge. Some people simply don’t have the mental energy to carry grudges long distances through time. Without this energy, the Victim must “let go” of the grudge, which means he loses grip upon his grudge.

A strange dynamic occurs between the severity of the crime and the energy a Victim exerts in maintaining the grudge. Logically, you might think a little grudge would be easy to carry for long periods of time and a big grudges would be harder and more prone to be dropped early on. But this is not the case. The opposite occurs. A Victim easily drops a little grudge, but he fights tooth-and-nail to maintain a serious one. The greater the crime committed, the more the Victim spends energy in defending the grudge and in feeding it.

4. The Victim must accommodate his grudge within his identity and actively defend it from forces of grudge-erosion.
This requires all three core components: a vivid memory, a heightened sense of indignation, and a storehouse of energy. When any of these factors are absent, no lasting grudge forms because the Victim automatically disallows the grudge from entering into his identity.

Our Metaphors For Grudges

We perceive grudges as burdens. This is indicated by our terms “to carry” and “to hold” a grudge, implying this type of emotional material has mass or weight. This is also indicated by our term “to let go” of grudges. The meaning behind the “weight” of grudges is, the heavier it feels, the harder it is to hold onto.

The act of holding a grudge has a distinct quality of burdening, so that carrying a grudge, maintaining it over long periods does not occur automatically. Victims must intentionally maintained their grudges by refueling their fully-functioning and optimized identity-indignation connection. Otherwise, the grudge loses its strength and the grudge-carrier must “let go” of the grudge, which amounts essentially to giving to the Perpetrator full forgiveness for his crime and “letting him get away with it.” At this point, the Victim “gets over it,” meaning the crime and its ensuing grudge transform into an obstacle he has surmounted and he drops the emotional baggage.

Dropping A Grudge

Why Drop A Grudge?

The main reason to drop a grudge is simply to unburden oneself. Grudges can be feel emotionally very dense, and relieving oneself of a grudge can be a cathartic and spiritually uplifting act. We have many words to describe this state of relief, such as buoyant, upbeat, uplifted, better, lightened.

How To Drop A Grudge

In order to successfully drop the grudge, the Victim must…

• Develop the ability to detach from his vivid memories and stop fixating on the crime
• Decouple his sense of indignation from his identity
• Starve the grudge by limiting the energy he expends on it
• Expel the grudge from his identity and allow it to wither away

These steps force the Victim to re-define himself so the grudge is not built-into his identity; this kills the grudge and unburdens the Victim.

The Use Of A Grudge, The Use Of A Pearl

A grudge is often a burden from which we should relieve ourselves, and unburdening yourself of all your grudges is a very good habit. But before you unburden yourself, understand that a grudge can be very useful. It can provide a powerful incentive to work and accomplish goals. Sometimes the process of coping gracefully with a grudge bears incredible fruit.

How Oysters Transform Their Irritants Into Pearls

When talking about profiting from a grudge, we must discuss the oyster for a moment. Oysters evolved an ability to transform their irritants into pearls, known as pearlization. An oyster reacts to an irritant, generally a parasite it cannot purge, by encasing the intruder in a protective material called mother-of-pearl, which incarcerates the parasite and renders it inert, and thereby forms a pearl. A pearl is an imprisoned parasite, and the process of pearlization is the oyster’s coping tool. This is how the oyster copes with irritants. An oyster cannot produce a pearl unless it suffers an irritant, an affliction.

What the irritant is to the oyster, grudges are to human beings. Grudges can initiate the beginning of something beautiful. I mentioned above how to expel a grudge, but the question is: How does a human being pearlize a grudge?

How to Pearlize a Grudge

Grudges are powerful instructors. They are opportunities for a Victim to learn about himself, and it’s important a Victim extracts the lesson contained in a grudge before he purges it from his identity and gets over it. A Victim ought not to waste a painfully juicy grudge by ignoring it, suppressing it, or purging it too early. He needs to relish the grudge for a while, in order to pearlize it. Through this process, a grudge can transform into a difficulty not to be denigrated but celebrated.

So how does a Victim alter his reaction toward his grudge in a healthy direction so that he, like the Oyster, imprisons his irritant and transforms it into a pearl? In order to successfully pearlize a grudge, the Victim must match the oyster. He must…

• Imprison the memory of the crime by emotionally detaching from it, retaining it, and not fixating on it.
• Reverse his sense of indignation by becoming grateful to the Perpetrator for providing the crime and by learning the lesson it brings. This is extremely hard to do because this so deeply threatens the Victim’s identity.
• Reflect on the grudge and be vigilant about applying the lessons it carries. The quicker he applies these lessons, the quicker he pearlizes his grudge into a pearl.
• Wear his pearl proudly as a badge of strength and grace.

IN CONCLUSION, think of difficulties in life as opportunities for meaning and growth. I hope this system gives you a useful set of tools to examine your grudges, enables you to think in a versatile way about the many difficulties that afflict you, and helps you in how you deal with troublesome people.

Posted by Rob at 12:50 AM | Comments (1)

January 11, 2007

Enjoying Difficult People

Do you feel it is possible to enjoy difficult people?

I wondered about it when my wife told me about a lecture/workshop named exactly this — “Enjoying Difficult People” — to be taught by Dian Killian PhD from Center for Nonviolent Communcation at the 92nd St Y. Naturally, the topic for this class seemed very interesting to me.

Well, I checked it out and found that it was interesting. The length of the class was only two hours, and consequently Dr. Killian could only touch upon the innermost core ideas of her topic, which in general were about non-violent communication, but she had several specific techniques for every-day communication that she wanted to impart upon us.

I would summarize these techniques as this: When you find yourself with a difficult person, it is possible for you to enjoy your experience, however you must be curious about several things — about yourself, this person, and how you react to the difficult situation.

She said you must do three things:

1. Identify the sensation that indicates you are, in fact, in the presence of a difficult person. What is actually happening? What, for example, would be the facts and actions that a hand-held video camcorder would record in this situation? I noted that possessing the ability to think in terms of these sensations would require a great deal presence and clarity from you; furthermore, I would uncategorically characterize such a mental attribute as being not at all common to possess.
2. Identify your feelings about this sensation. In other words: How do you respond to these sensations while interacting with a difficult person?
3. Identify your needs, or, identify what you seek within this situation. The instructor stressed that you must: (a) Connect with this difficult person, even if you don’t want to, by acknowledging their experience of their predicament and (b) Request that they articulate precisely what they wish to achieve, in the form of a “concret, positive and doable request.”

These three acts of identification will force you to reframe your experience of difficult people, to the point where it is possible for you to actually enjoy them while you learn about yourself.

Two final points then come to the fore. First is: Every difficult person is actually a disguised opportunity to learn about yourself. The second corresponding issue then springs forth from the first: You must be willing to learn about yourself and enjoy difficult people for the lessons they bring you. Are you? I think, for most people, this is the greater difficulty. It is the clincher.

I would add that Dr. Killian’s interesting system pre-requires that you not be solely goal-oriented in your interaction with difficult people. Her system implies that you also must be journey-oriented. Goal-orientation is a mindset whose central motive springs out of the preoccupation to “get things done,” which is generally a good mindset to occupy but which makes difficult people impossible to actually enjoy. When you alter your mindset into include journey-oriented tendencies, you alleviate your instinct to ruthlessly plow through people and leap over potentially meaningful obstacles, and you gain the possibility to actually enjoy difficult people and the lessons they offer you.

Posted by Rob at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2007

My Weight Throughout 2006

First thing in the morning, a few times each week, I weigh myself on a scale. Every time I do this, I write it down on a small calendar I keep in the bathroom. It’s a good habit, I think, and have done this for several years, and this morning I weighted 175 pounds, which isn't bad for a thirty-five-year-old in this country.

The more I thought about my weight for the past twelve months, the more I was curious about how much it had actually fluctuated. So I created a graph of it, which I include below.

When you look at this graph, you can also see how much my weight fluctuated throughout the year. Note that my weight had a 7.5 pound differential, ranging from a high of 176.5 pounds to a low of 169 pounds, with an average of 172.3 pounds and an approximately 3 pound fluctuation around this average throughout the year, which seems strange to me because I actually remember feeling wild weight fluctuations.

One obvious anomaly through the course of the year was my weight loss beginning in August, which was when I made a distinct effort to lose a few pounds for a special occasion in the middle of October. It took me about one month to drop six pounds from 175 down to 169 pounds. But after that, I ran into difficulties.

I had a big reason to lose those six pounds: I was getting married. Originally I planned on losing a lot more than 6 pounds during that time, but in September, I got a highly contagious, yucky case of viral pink-eye that kept me out of sight for nearly three weeks and completely out of the gym. And if you look at my weight after October 15th, our big day, the chart reveals how, after our wedding, I began three months of relaxation in which I steadily put back on those six pounds (and then some!) right up to my top weight for the year. Notice the huge spike during December. Yikes! Cause and effect people!

I present this to you as evidence that my basic psychological system for losing weight has worked for me. An important point that I make to people is that the work of losing weight is not really about doing more. It's about doing less. Losing weight or maintaining weight loss is more about the epic battle to resist temptation than it is an expression of ruthless exercise. I consider getting exercise to be only a small portion of the effort I put into my weight loss, as I wrote, only about 20%.

I also want to illuminate that for a human being's weight to fluctuate six pounds is a lot, even if you are a big person. Have you ever had to heft around six bricks of butter? It's hefty!

One pound of butter feels heavier than it looks. Now imagine that butter layered onto you and then hidden. I put on six of these since October. Eesh.

There have been periods of my life in which I have gotten tremendous amounts of exercise, as if I was possessed. I once went from 187 pounds, down to 157 pounds, over the course of four months. Note that this was after 9/11, and I was unemployed, so I had plenty of time. I would get an hour and a half of exercise and then follow that up later on in the day with another thirty or forty minutes. During this time, I lost incredible amounts of weight. But, more importantly, it took me a Herculean effort to maintain the exceedingly strict low calorie and low carbohydrate diet required. I never felt better.

But as the chart makes clear, my days of weighing 157 pounds are gone. I have a stressful full-time job, which makes getting exercise at the gym that much more difficult. What is worse is the myriad of carbo-riffic temptations flying past me at work. That's the hard part. Resisting temptation.

This year, however, I plan on losing more weight. I have a new pair of running shoes that do not cause me knee pain and which I hope will make it easier for me to run longer distances. And perhaps, who knows? I may even run the New York City Marathon. But in order to do this, I will need to get my weight down to an average near 160 to have a good time. As of this morning, that's 15 bricks of butter away!

Posted by Rob at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2006

Warren Buffett Withdraws His Children from The Lucky Sperm Club

Warren Buffett effectively told the world this past Sunday afternoon that he wants his children and their progeny to do anything they want, but they can't do nothing.

Mr. Buffet later appeared in an interview with Charlie Rose on Tuesday night alongside Bill and Melinda Gates. Charlie Rose said to Buffett: "You famously said ... you wanted to leave your children with enough money to do whatever they wanted to do, but not nothing."

"So [my children] can do anything but not nothing," Buffet responded. "I don't believe in dynastic wealth. It's nice to leave something to kids. I can understand how somebody would want to leave their farm or their small business or something that they built, all of that, to their children. But dynastic wealth, the idea that many generations should be able to go without doing a thing, if they wish, simply because they came from the right womb -- that really strikes me as flying in the face of what this country is about. I mean we believe in a meritocracy and equality of opportunity. And dynastic wealth flies in the face of that. So I really felt that if you had a choice between having a foundation like this, doing tremendous things for people all over the world, or having a bunch of people that, as they say, came from the lucky sperm club..." [laughter]

An interesting part of Buffett's move is what he calls the "debilitating effects" of wealth, something that Buffett has seen afflict the rich.

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds." New York Times

How can such a rich, powerful, and skillful business man have this attitude upon wealth? What does this mean about his attitude toward ensuring that his children live satisfying lives? And what does it mean to leave a legacy for your children? For your society? I find it fascinating that such a person would intentionally remove from his children's grasp a vast sum of fantastic and unfathomable wealth. This, to me, is an incredible expression of what wealth can do to a person.

Buffet notes his displeasure with "dynasties". Why would he dislike them?

Does it make more sense to divert your wealth into philanthropic endeavors which bestow the world with the ability to stop easily-preventable deaths, than to allow your children and grandchildren to inherit all your wealth?

Gates also mentioned how he was influenced by Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" which helped him think about philanthropy and set very high goals. Gates said:

"The whole idea [that] leaving wealth to your children actually would not be the best idea for society or for them, that came out of things that Warren was talking about right around the time we met him. I was starting to thing think that, oh jeez, this is a problem I'll have to deal with. This is some very good advice about that."

Posted by Rob at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

Celebrating Emotional Difficulties

The message below is something I sent to my bosses and colleagues this morning. As you may be able to detect, I am experiencing a great deal of emotional difficulty right now. From a zoomed-out perspective, the topic of emotional difficulties, I think, represents the most wily and tricky type of difficulty. It is the most hidden, the most elusive, and the most transparent of all the difficulties we face, with the exception of religious or spiritual difficulties. And it is the difficulty that is the most difficult to celebrate, as I posture to do here on this website.

Gentlemen,

Having worked at Tekserve for over three years -- nine months at glass case, greeter, and intake; and over two years in the video department -- I believe I have proven myself to be a sturdy character and someone good to have around. I have been honest, communicative, a decent learner, blessed with a decent (although not exceptional) memory for details, generally a fun person to have nearby, and overall an asset to Tekserve. I have proven myself to be a rational, reasonable person, described several times by others with great relief as a "voice of reason". My reputation among the load-bearing people here at Tekserve is that of a person who is quick to take action, capable, straight-talking, and a people-person who is good with customers, one who does not mind talking to people, generally good at delivering bad news, and generally free of "issues" that seem to plague some people.

I also have a reputation for being someone who takes good care of himself: eating lots of salads; not drinking very much or partaking in any other "substances"; keeping a stash of nuts at my desk to stabilize my blood sugar in order to keep from getting cranky at our customers; recommending diets and exercises to people who work here; bicycling and running; stretching my legs; etc. This helped me cope with the stresses and distractions that are part-and-parcel to working here, the crucible that is Tekserve.

When I first started working at Tekserve, coming here was something I immediately liked doing, and I think everyone here generally saw this. My good feelings for Tekserve continued throughout my first nine months here, but my stressful experience in the video department is beginning to take its toll.

When I first started working in the video department, I knew that there was a great deal of information that I needed to learn. I knew that it would be difficult and that I would have to absorb a great deal. Wow, how true that was! But I did learn a lot, and am now a decent salesperson of highly technical equipment.

Initially, throughout that first year, I could properly recuperate from the stresses of this job -- I could get a night's sleep, eat a hearty breakfast, and be ready for more. But lately, the last six months or so, those recuperative and coping powers that I relied upon during my early time within the fist of Tekserve have worn out and are nearly gone. Those of you who are sensitive to these types of issues within people may have noticed this: I look tired and harried. You can see it in my face, and, believe me, I can feel it. This last weekend, a three-day weekend (President's Day), I hoped the time would be enough to gather more strength, but it was not -- I did not regain my strength, and Tuesday morning came, and this week I feel I cannot continue.

I am not the type of person who can compartmentalize his life into work and away-from-work -- to me, they are all part of the same process -- and I cannot separate the two. I feel the stress affecting me even before getting out of bed. My coping tools have nearly left me and I feel I cannot recover. I feel as if I'm only a shell of the person Tekserve originally hired. I fear that I am "burning out", "losing it", "near the brink", and that I "cannot handle it".  I do not wish to become another David Shecterson (someone who did not adequately protect himself or those around him), and I fear that I have waited too long to take a little bit of time off.

I doubt that my declining state was precipitated by the loss of Frank Lamonaca -- my energy has been draining for a while now and Frank knew it. Others who work close to me have noticed, Steve and Matt Walsh especially.

I care deeply about my reputation and ability to work at Tekserve, and I hold a deep respect for those I work around, especially for Ron T. It is for these two reasons, and to retain my sense of honor, that I will depart at 2pm this afternoon and take Friday off.  I will return Monday, hopefully somewhat restored.

I apologize to my colleagues for any extra workload this may represent.

Mining such emotional difficulties for positive experiences is such a deep art, a slippery task, that I'm not even sure what to say about all this, except that one thing I know for sure: emotional difficulties can be very easily mapped via metaphor onto natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, and especially earthquakes), and we can profit by saying "I was rocked by a wave of emotion". For the record, my emotional quake, I think, was relatively mild, registering only a 1.2 on the Richter scale of emotional techtonic activity.

Within twenty minutes of sending this emotional email, I could barely think. I could barely form sentences, and when a friend came up to talk to me about it, I could barely speak. It was awful, and I wonder what good or bad will come from it.

Posted by Rob at 02:01 PM | Comments (2)

January 12, 2006

Umbrellas In The Staircase

THE STAIRWELL

Funny thing happened to me on my way to work last week: I saw the fabric of civilization tearing apart at the seams. What calamity did I witness? What insanity took hold over the populace? It was several commuters walking down the subway stairwells with their umbrellas still open — yeah, that's right — open. In the stairwell.

Now, you might not see this as a meaningful thing — just a few people trying to stay dry, but there were a lot of other people on the staircase too. Why would people descend or ascend a narrow subway staircase with their umbrellas fully-open, not even closed just a little bit? Well, to keep any rain from falling upon their perfect heads, of course. Apparently these days, one mustn't get one drop of it on one's expensive coiffs. It just isn't done.

The problem is that there are oftentimes other people on the stairwells, sometimes throngs of other people, and when a select few decide that a drop of rain upon their hairdos is simply more than they can bear, well, ladies and gentlemen, we've got a little problem.

If you haven't walked along the streets of New York City while its raining, you might not realize the magnitude of peril that umbrellas actually represent; the situation can be more dangerous than you'd think. Here's what I mean: Thousands upon thousand of people are trying to get to their jobs without getting soaked, and many of them use umbrellas. But a lot of people, while they innocently ambulate about, are not conscious of how lethal those little metal spikes are, the ones mounted upon the rim of their umbrellas. Major eye-pokage. Especially if the umbrella carrier is short; then the spikes are aimed right at your eye. Boink! Ah! My eye!

So, there it is: people staying dry at the cost of other's safety.

THE HEART OF THE ISSUE: THE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT

The phenomena of Not-One-Drop-Of-Rain-On-My-Hair implies something rather sinister: a Me-First mindset, one oriented purely toward selfishness. The significance of this mindset, I believe, is it implies a deep-seated relationship with culture that is, in general, that of the victim. Many people have been forced to take the position that they are the entitled-person because they believe, secretly and innerly, that they have no control over their own lives, that they lack what is called "agency".

"Agency" in this context means having power, having control, having an effect, or, in other words, mattering. They feel they are not "agents," that they do not matter or are not players on the playing field. They believe they are merely spectators, and when people feel they lack power, they react by feeling over-entitled to behave in strange ways and start doing all sorts of annoying things, like opening their umbrellas in the stairwell.

In situations such as these, an important metaphor surrounding all of this business begins to take shape: We Are Entitled To Be Dry.

There are four elements to this metaphor:

• the rain (the difficulty)
• the umbrella (the tool)
• the umbrella-carrier (the tool-user)
• those of us walking around the umbrella-carrier who are without umbrellas (the sufferers of both the difficulty and effects of the tool), and
• the stairwell (the location)

The rain, as the difficulty, represents all the outside forces that we cannot control, prevent, or otherwise are bothered by. And, to reduce the irritation the rain causes, we use umbrellas. They keep us dry, they keep us from getting wet, they keep us from getting uncomfortable. Umbrellas, in turn, are tools that come to symbolize our clever instinct for self-protection (which by the way is only a few shades away from raw, unadulterated selfishiness).

Clearly it makes sense to use umbrellas when it's raining. But is it ethical to use them in narrow staircases? The umbrellas then metaphorically acquire symbolic meaning communicating that I-am-entitled-to-use-this-tool, and I will not get wet at any cost, no matter where I am, no matter where it might be inappropriate.

The victim mindset assumed by people without agency is revealed by their excessive sense of entitlement, which is the central symptom of this malady. But give people agency or make them feel that agency is available in their lives, and you can subside the bad behavior which is so symptomatic of entitlement. You will, metaphorically speaking, reduce the swelling.

A CALL FOR GRACE: OUR ONLY ANTIDOTE FOR THE OVER-ENTITLED

We are in an epidemic of umbrella-behavior: SUVs on the highways, delicate retirement plans that are dependent upon publicly-traded stocks, corporations controlling the governments of third-world nations for their cheap factory labor. Perhaps this type of behavior is part of a greater, cyclical pattern whose pendulum is now at the side of one of its swings. Or perhaps it is a symptom of modern society in general, a constant. We may never know its cause.

But the message of this mindset is the same, no matter the context, no matter the economic scale, no matter the cause: Screw everyone, all-of-it-for-me-and-me-alone! I'm not getting wet!

One solution to this issue is that we allow our own rage to get the better of us, and shout at these people simply to gain our own sense of relief. But what would happen then? Will we then assume the dominant role as the inflictor of embarassment and just make matters worse because they have already secretly assumed the submissive role of victim?

Another solution is that we can talk to the over-entitled people. But it's often impossible to do so — they're not within earshot; we don't have their phone numbers or email address; they're cocooned within an SUV or isolated within a corporate office-building. But even if we could engage them in conversation, would it be worth it? Would the outcome be too unpredictable? And furthermore, do we have the time and energy?

The end result of all of this is that these people, and the situation they cause, come to represent difficulties for the rest of us. They are obstacles that we must overcome. The type of difficulty the over-entitled people of the world come to represent to us is an insidious one: the thing which simply must be tolerated. What this means is that we must then tolerate these people, as I had to in the staircase. And we do this with an attribute of character called Grace.

Grace is the ability to deal with difficulties with a fluid and stabile attitude, it connotates the ability to adapt and flex within changing situations, but most importantly Grace connotates tolerance

How do we acquire grace? By embracing difficulties for what they are: they are opportunities to overcome, they opportunities to feel satisfied. When you view difficulties in this context, you become graceful; you acquire grace.

Posted by Rob at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2006

New Years Dissolutions

Every new year’s eve — besides getting a little too drunk amongst confetti-strewn strangers — what is it that we always do? We always come up with New Year’s resolutions.

For those of you who may not know what a New Year’s resolution is, it’s a small proclamation we make about our goals for the upcoming year. Some examples are:

• I gotta lose ten pounds.
• I’d like to spend more time with my family.
• I want to learn a new language.
• I’m not going to let myself be a victim this year.
• I want to save more and spend less.
• I gotta finally quit smoking.

My question for you then is this: Is there a pattern beneath the surface of these resolutions, some other meaning? Notice how many of these resolutions commonly involve our bodies, our relationships, and our finances.

Let me first state that the phenomena of New Year’s resolutions bolsters the vibrant culture of self-help here in the United States (an arguably molly-coddling and thereby flawed culture: check this book out for more). The murky history behind New Year’s resolutions appears to go back a long way and continues in many other cultures today.

But of greater importance is the actual meaning buried within the resolutions themselves: the proclaimer of a New Year’s resolution reveals a lot about herself because the resolution forms a negative image of the difficulty she faces. It may be a solution to the difficulty, a path to overcoming the difficulty, but it usually no more than a vague roadmap to satisfaction.

The meaning hidden within New Year’s resolutions is this: we identify the difficulties that negatively impact our lives and that to overcome them we must exert our mental energy.

The resolutions listed above, if we translate them or spin their meaning in a different way, what else can we see?

• I gotta lose ten pounds. I desire more control over my body and diet.
• I’d like to spend more time with my family. I have been selfish lately and I feel guilty about it.
• I want to learn a new language. I feel guilty about not challenging myself mentally and would like to go on a trip to a foreign country.
• I’m not going to let myself be a victim this year. I feel ashamed of my weak character and I desire greater strength.
• I want to spend less and save more. I’m nervous about the future because I have a lot of debt, and I desire more control over my buying habits.
• I gotta finally quit smoking. My addiction to smoking is costing me big money and destroying my body. I desire control over this addiction.

We see that most resolutions are motivated by negative aspects our our lives, aspects that we believe we can acquire some control over. So what does this mean? It means that we use New Year’s Eve as an inaugural event of a new period of greater effort, of greater control, that we understand our position in a world ruled by time, and that we don't have that much of it.

These resolutions reveal what appears to me as backward thinking. What we should do first is acknowledge and carefully examine our difficulty, not create a (re)solution for it. When we study our difficulties as real forces, as real agents of very real pain, ones that are sometimes hidden from our conscious mind, this examination often precipitates a solution automatically.

What I therefore recommend, instead of blindly creating New Year’s resolutions, is temporarily adopting a difficulty-oriented style of thinking, one that savors difficulties for what they are: walls, adversaries, and hurdles in our lives that give us meaning. This forces you to focus on the details of whatever difficulty you face; this then causes those difficulties to dissolve.

Posted by Rob at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2005

The Use of Forest Fires

This just in from INAdaily.com (via Political Theory ), on the political use of catastrophes. Daniel Innerarity gets right to it when he notes that, although catastrophes may exact unfathomable pain and horror upon a populations, they also present unique opportunities. He notes that some people are so positioned that they can...

...exploit the state of emergency by reacting well to it. If we look at the things that excite the hottest political debate, we find catastrophic events such as forest fires, air accidents, floods and terrorist attacks, all of which cause the opposition to raise a howl. Whoever performs the thankless task of opposition knows that he or she has no better weapon at their disposal than a badly-managed catastrophe. This is his step up, the foot in the door. Governments understand this too, and prepare detailed plans for disasters so as not to give a chance to the opposition. Emergencies are now the stuff of political debate; routine business producing little political mileage, and left to the bureaucrats.

What does this mean? It means that, for those of advantageous position, enormous and catastropic difficulties can become powerful avenues of influence, that it is not only small and personal difficulties that can contain such meaning but difficulties of all size, scope, scale, and severity actually contain hidden forms of use. This utility, while, from a conventional perspective, of highly questionable moral fiber, is undeniable. Bruce Lee wrote: "Pain can be good. It is like the forest fire that, after burning, new growth springs.

The question then remains: What type of person, or character would or could capitalize on such a situation? Strong? Or weak? But then almost as an afterthought Innerarity adds:

Governing is something within the abilities of anyone; the hard thing is to be a good opposition. It is as leader of the opposition where you become believable as a leader of government. In the end, we voters think that the easier job can be done by one who has done the harder one. In other words, we are inclined to award the government to one who has performed the task of opposition. [Emphasis mine.]

Even upon the enormous playing field of global politics of these difficult times, difficulties are not always burdens.

Posted by Rob at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2005

Tempering Character

These days it seems as though we have lost focus on an important pillar in the makeup of society: strength of character. With all the corruption going on in the world of business and in the world of politics, it seems that we have lost our grip upon strength of character as a psychologically- and ethically-orienting principle.

By the term "strength of character," I mean moral and ethical character, and it seems that today there are many incentives not to be bad (public shame, fines, prison, capital punishment etc.), but there are few incentives to be good. In other words, being of strong character is not rewarded in any tangible way, that we are not “incentivized” to be moral creatures, that the men and women in power today are rewarded more often for their ability to disregard "common morality" than their strength of character, and that our society is now cast adrift because of it.

THE WEAK IN CHARACTER

When we identify a person who is weak in character, our initial reaction is very visceral, one of disgust, and we use the following expressions to describe them: no backbone, no balls, no guts, no courage, no sense of justice. Such people lack strength of heart and are emotionally crippled. We say they are immoral and corrupt. Corrupt? The idea of corruption contains the idea of cleanliness and purity, which we'll get to in a moment.

But when we suffer the presence of many such "corrupted" and "dirty" people, we watch on a societal level the weakening and collapse of justice, due to a general atrophy of honor. Today, instead of enjoying the vision, leadership, and morality of strong and principled men and women, we are surrounded by weak characters.

The enormous and seductive influence gained through following the easy paths to power causes an important cascade-effect upon our society: it creates a culture that breeds people of weak character. The very system we live in today reinforces our becoming weak and does not, in any tangible way (i.e. financially), create people strong in character or reinforce altruistic or ethical behavior.

But who, and what, are the strong in character?

THE STRONG IN CHARACTER

When you meet or hear about a person of strong character, it stops you in your tracks, doesn't it? Wow, we think, that woman! What a fighter! We note the moral fortitude of such people. We note their strength of character, their sense of indignation, their sense of honor, their moral imperative to do the right thing, and to strive to find out what is right. We note these people in our minds and respect them, but they aren't always rich people; they aren't always powerful; and they certainly aren't always physically beautiful — no, they are regular men and women who you know and affiliate with, the ones who stand up for what they believe in and make sacrifices for their principles.

There are several metaphors we use for those with strength of character. There is the general metaphor of being hard, or solid, some explicit, some obtuse:
“He’s a solid guy.”
“He’s a rock.”
“Get tough, get lean!”
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
“Ya gotta be a Teflon® pan. The stuff’s gotta slide right off.”

But people are not born strong. They are not born possessing a non-stick surface, as Teflon® pans are equipped. No, strong characters become strong because they are seasoned.

We often use the expression "incorruptible" for people of strong character. They cannot be corrupted or made dirty or tainted: they are always clean, pure, unadulterated, like unalloyed metal. Those of weak character, on the other hand, are often corrupted and made dirty. They are no longer pure or unalloyed, and it is this dirtiness and weakness about their behavior that disgusts the rest of us.

INCREASING STRENGTH OF CHARACTER

But what can we do to increase our strength of character? Are we doomed to always be weak in character? Can the weak ever become strong? The great sword-smiths of Japan use many techniques to strengthen and temper the steel they use for their blades. What can we do to temper our own character? What hammer blows can we apply to our own minds to strengthen our own character?

TEMPERING CHARACTER, SEASONING SKILLETS — A METAPHOR

One thing is absolutely for sure: there is no pill you can take that will temper your character for you. This work must be done by you, by hand: There are no shortcuts. In fact, it is because there are no shortcuts, it is because you must always do this the hard way, that we place such a premium upon strong character the way we do (or rather, the way we ought to anyway).

I would like to introduce a metaphor for strengthening character or tempering character: People Are Skillets. The metaphor implies that people are useful creatures that can withstand heat and abuse yet amazingly retain their original form and function. It implies that, like good skillets, people can be seasoned, which means to intentionally subject the object to adverse conditions to inure it.

Allow me to quote from someone who knows about skillets — chef and cookbook writer, Christopher Kimball. He discusses the best method to season skillets. Cast what he says in the context of tempering character:

"SEASONING CAST IRON COOKWARE. To season a cast iron skillet, most cookbooks instruct you to oil it and then bake at 350°F for 1 hour. This does not develop the type of deep nonstick finish you really need. The following technique is adapted from the one used by Barbara Tropp, who is an expert on wok cooking and author of The China Moon Cookbook. Place the skillet on top of the stove and turn heat to high. Tear off three wads of paper towels (two or three sheets each) and place near the stove with a bottle of vegetable oil. After about 5 minutes, when the skillet is very hot (the inside rim of the pan should also be really hot), drizzle about 2 tablespoons of oil on one of the wads and rub the inside of the skillet, including the sides. The oil will smoke. Use the second and third wads of paper towel to immediately wipe off any excess oil, pressing down hard to burnish the surface. Be careful — the pan will be very hot. It would be best to wear an oven mitt to do this. Remove pan from heat and let cool for 30 minutes. Repeat this three times. (It does not have to be done all in one day.)

After each use, immediately wipe the skillet clean with a soap-free sponge. Place back on the burner (which has been turned off) to dry while you eat. Repeat the initial process (giving the pan only one coating) after each use until the pan is thoroughly seasoned and has a deep, lustrous finish, usually a half-dozen or so times." — [Emphasis added.] Christopher Kimball, The Cook’s Bible (Little, Brown And Company, New York; 1996.) p. 9. Buy this handy cookbook here.

THE USE OF THE SKILLET METAPHOR

What is the use of this metaphor? Its utility lies here: it means you can season yourself, that you can temper your own character and acquire that "deep, lustrous, non-stick finish" possessed by all well-used and heavy-duty skillets.

What kind of workouts can we exact upon our character? How would such a workout be done? Tune in soon...

Posted by Rob at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2005

The Importance Of The Christmas Obstacles

What good would life be without obstacles? Now, I’m not talking about monstrous and unbeatable obstacles but about manageable ones, the kind that when we overcome them, they bring us a tangible, if not a little mild, amount of satisfaction. Celebrating these difficulties is part of what this website is all about.

So when you’re at your family’s house and you are inundated with the overwhelming and often irritating minutia that compose our Christmas experiences, remember this: if it was easy — if dealing with your siblings, your parents, your nieces and nephews, and extended families, the fights, the old wounds, and the great many skeletons-in-the-closet — what would you need to leave for? If living with all of those people was simple and pleasant, you’d probably still be living with them, and what would your life be like then?

So, you owe to those irritants a special nod, a little acknowledgement, for the role they play in the arc of your life. We all do. They’re the tiny roadblocks, repellents, and pinpricks that help us live the lives we do. They’re the reason we move out, the reason we pick where we live, and we expect them when we come back home. So when your pa-tience gets thin, just think to yourself: I won’t be here forever!

Here’s hoping you overcome all the tiny difficulties that assault us this time of year. Merry Christmas!

Posted by Rob at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)