Seeing Music

When Julie Landsman auditioned for the role of principal French horn at the Metropolitan Opera of New York (Met for short), the screens had just gone up in the practice hail. At the time, there were no women in the brass section of the orchestra, because everyone “knew” that women could not play the horn as well as men. But Landsman came and sat down and played—and she played well.

But when they declared her the winner and she stepped out from behind the screen, there was a gasp. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, and female horn players were rare.. And it wasn’t just that bold, extended high C, which was the kind of macho sound that they expected from a man only. It was because they knew her. Landsman had played for the Met before as a substitute. Until they listened to her with just their ears, however, they had no idea she was so good.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Small Things

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. -Mother Teresa (Born Aug. 26, 1910)

The miracle question

Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

You're right

You're right not because others agree with you, but because your facts are right. -Warren Buffett

Seeing Victory

A plank 12” wide laying on the floor would be easy to walk. Place the same plank between two ten story buildings and “walk the plank” is a different matter. You “see” yourself easily and safely walking the plank on the floor. You “see” yourself falling from the plank stretched between the buildings. Since the mind completes the picture you paint in it, your fears are quite real. Many times a golfer will knock a ball in the lake or hit it out of bounds and then stop back with the comment, “I know I was going to do that.” His mind painted a picture and his body completed the action. On the positive, side, the successful gofer knows that he must ‘see’ the ball going into the cup before he strokes it. A hitter in baseball sees the ball dropping in for a base hit before he swings at the ball, and the successful salesman sees the customer buying before he makes the calls. Michelangelo clearly saw the Mighty Moses in that block of marble before he struck the first blow.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Allowing grief

When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them. -Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger

First times

When is the last time you did something for the first time?  -John Maxwell

Worshiping the pursuit of extreme success

Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.  One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Romantic interests

When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. -Randy Pausch

The uses and limits of numbers

The statistics can’t capture the true toll of the COVID virus. They can’t tell us what it’s like to work in an intensive-care unit, or how it feels to lose a loved one to the disease. They can’t even tell us the total number of lives that have been lost (as opposed to the number of deaths that fit into a neat category, such as those occurring within twenty eight days of a positive test). They can’t tell us with certainty when normality will return. But they are, nonetheless, the only means we have to understand just how deadly the virus is, figure out what works, and explore, however tentatively, the possible futures that lie ahead.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Brick walls

Brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.  -Randy Pausch

Living my thoughts

I had to surrender my clothes (when I entered the Nazi concentration camp) and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript (which I had hidden in my own coat), I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the main Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

When I have learnt

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now .... When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. –C.S. Lewis

Chances and opportunities

When pessimists think they're taking a chance, optimists feel they're grasping a great opportunity.

Talking with Strangers

 A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. 

Joe Keohane writing in The Atlantic

'Life is hard'

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard.'  I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' -Sydney J. Harris

Meaning in Suffering

Having negative events happen to you decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life, according to a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering." 

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

A difficult question

When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. -Daniel Kahneman

The Suburb within

You might live in the middle of a big city, but there could still be a white picket fence around your imagination. You can take the subway to work but still park your identity in a two-car garage. This is the inner suburbia, and you probably moved her long ago. You’ve learned to contain your longings and sympathies within a comfortable zone, measures and mediocre. To grow, you must move toward otherness. You must quit the ranch house of your soul and head for the forbidden place—your inner wilderness, inner bohemia, or even your inner inner city. The answer you need lie there, where you are least at home.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

Problems

When I can’t help myself, maybe someone else’s problems can help me. –Andrew Boyd