The unlived dream

/

My father became a tailor because his father wouldn’t allow him to become a doctor. My father was good at his profession, he was commended and awarded for it—but he was never the one who wanted it, and he always regretted his unlived dream. It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval. 

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

9/11 at CNN

/

Twenty years ago today, I finished an overnight shift at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta and left around 4 am to sleep a few hours before heading back. I was scheduled for a second shift that started at 10 am.  

I woke up at about 9 am and flipped on the television. I stopped brushing my teeth and stood in front of the screen. It took most of a minute for my head to clear and for me to realize what was happening. I had worked on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center for Voter News Service during the last general election so the scene looked familiar.

I raced back to work. It took twice as long to get inside because of the tight security. Everyone on staff who could get down to the CNN Center had come as well, whether they had a shift to work or not. 

I first walked into the CNN Headline News newsroom. It was surprisingly quiet. My shift was canceled because the network had stopped producing news reports and instead aired a feed of the CNN main channel. All the Turner Broadcast networks, including TBS, did the same thing. All except for one—The Cartoon Network. At Headline News, I overheard several people talking in hushed tones about friends and family who worked near the World Trade Centers. 

I took the escalators up to the main CNN newsroom. There were three times as many people there as usual, and they all seemed to be shouting at once. Rumors were flying about reported attacks against the U.S. (including threats to the CNN Center). Producers debated what should go on air, what we knew and what was speculation. I was used to spending my days in a noisy, volatile newsroom—but within a few minutes, the stimulus was too much. I retreated because the noise was overwhelming.   

A few days later, I wrote: 

We're all working double shifts and are exhausted. There are some video shots the network is not airing because it's just too graphic. Adding to it is the emotional element. One of the best producers here came over to a reporter I was sitting beside and asked if we could do something about stress on those who CAN'T turn it off.  He said he broke down several times last night after going home.  

We all just wanted to cry—every day.

Stephen Goforth

The Mirror Likes Us

/

Consumer technology products are great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy social media interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us.

Jonathan Franzen, excerpt from Kenyon College 2011 Commencement speech   

Knowing the Why

/

Viktor Frankl worked as a therapist in the Nazi concentration camps, and in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Communication Upward 

/

Middle- and upper-level executive should recognize that they are dependent on information that has been filtered, analyzed, abstracted, sorted and condensed by other segments of the organization. It is hard for them to stay in touch with unprocessed reality. Every official must periodically step outside the executive cocoon and experience the basic realities that the system is presumably designed to deal with. 

Every organization has its front-line activities— selling, fighting, healing, teaching— and its bureaucratic or executive-level activities. Both are important, but the frontline activities take place far from the executive’s swivel chair. The front-line people who wrestle with action problems every day know a lot more than anyone ever asked them.

The layers of middle and upper management can be a formidable filter against creative ideas generated below; and there have been many attempts to create alternative opportunities for communication upward, such as the suggestion box and the inspector general.But there is probably no substitute for creating a culture— a set of attitudes, customs and habits throughout the organization— that favors easy two-way communication, in and out of channels, among all layers of the organization. Two key messages should be implicit in such a culture: 1. “You will know what's going on, and 2. “Your voice will be heard.”

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Bias in the Judicial System

/

When it comes to bail, for instance, you might hope the judges were able to look at the whole case together, carefully balancing all the pros and cons before coming to a decision. But unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise. Instead, psychologists have shown that judges are doing nothing more strategic than going through an ordered checklist of warning flags in their heads. If any of those flags — past convictions, community ties, prosecution's request — are raised by the defendant story, the judge will stop and deny bail. 

The problem is that so many of those flags are correlated with race, gender and educational level. Judges can’t help relying on intuition more than they should; and in doing so, they are unwittingly perpetuating biases in the system. 

Hannah Fry, Hello World

The advantage of thinking like a child

/

Great strategists respond to the moment, like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past – the present is much too interesting. 

The Greek thinker Aristotle thought that life was defined by movement. What does not move is dead. What has speed and mobility has more possibilities, more life. You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasure, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed. Whenever you find your thought revolving around a particular subject or idea – an obsession, resentment - force them past it. Distract yourself with something else. Like a child, find something new to be absorbed by, something worthy of concentrated attention. Do not waste time on things you cannot change or influence. Just keep moving. 

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

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

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