Love is specific

/

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of yourself. 

Jonathan Franzen 

We can Choose

/

All of the Auschwitz survivors I met had one thing in common with me and with one another: We had no control over the most consuming facts of our lives, but we had the power to determine how we experienced life after trauma. Survivors could continue to be victims long after the oppression had ended, or they could learn the thrive. In my dissertation research I discovered and articulated my personal conviction and my clinical touchstone: We can choose to be or own jailors, or we can choose to be free.  

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

The Optimization Mindset

/

When developing an algorithm, computer science courses often define the goal as providing an optimal solution to a computationally-specified problem. And when you look at the world through this mindset, it’s not just computational inefficiencies that annoy. Eventually, it becomes a defining orientation to life as well. As one of our colleagues at Stanford tells students, everything in life is an optimization problem.  

The desire to optimize can favor some values over others. And the choice of which values to favor, and which to sacrifice, are made by the optimizers who then impose those values on the rest of us when their creations reach great scale. 

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error

The Little Stuff or the Big stuff?

/

We all feel overwhelmed by lots of little stuff we feel we have to do, and we have these big things that we’d like to do. But to do them, it feels like you need long stretches of focus when all the other little stuff is out of the way—it feels like it would be selling the project short to try beginning to write your novel in 20 minutes on a subway commute, for example. So instead, you decide to go through your email and deal with other outstanding things—but for the reasons we’ve discussed, the time never comes when you clear all that [out of the way].  

The only way to get around to the important things is: Instead of trying to eradicate all the other stuff, [make progress] on the important stuff first. You just have to let the other chips fall where they will.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic

Prisoners of their own procedures

/

Means tend to triumph over ends. Form triumphs over spirit. People become prisoners of their own procedures. The means and methods were originally designed to achieve some specific end, but when circumstances change and new means are called for, it turns out that the old ones had become sacrosanct; the means have become ends in themselves— no longer effective perhaps, but enshrined. People forget what they set out to do. It happens all the time. So the mature organization ends up with a web of customs, procedures, written and unwritten rules that is extremely hard to cut through.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

The dirt that splatters

/

Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. 

Jonathan Franzen writing in the New York Times

Sometimes procrastination is a good thing

/

I had a student who collected a bunch of data suggesting that those who procrastinate somewhat are more original and creative than people who never do it—and more creative than those who always do it. Of course, if you wait until the deadline, then you’re just going to have to rush to finish the simplest idea. But there is a sweet spot where procrastination helps with divergent thinking, with incubation, and with nonlinear connections.

Adam Grant Six secrets to true originality

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