The American Dream: Hummingbirds or Eagles

I see it all the time now.  The hummingbird effect.  Hummingbirds flap their wings up to 70 times per second to stay in the air.  70 times a second.  Whew!  Eagles on the other hand don’t flap much at all, yet they can fly up to 80 miles in an hour.  Their secret is they surf the wind.  They catch currents and thermals and just zoom.  We’ve become a nation of hummingbirds.  It’s what happens when stress overwhelms us.

We now know a lot about the physical, emotional, mental circus that noisily plays inside us when we are under constant, unrelenting stress.  We either start flapping our wings frantically like a humming bird trapped in a glass room smashing ourselves against windows that look like a way out but aren’t, or hide in our nest.  Unending stress makes us feel powerless.  At first this makes us angry, then sad, and ultimately hopeless.  Desolate.

This is what I see in America’s workplace.  Frantic wing-flapping or hopeless disengagement.  This recession has, to use a phrase of my mother’s, knocked the stuffing out of us.  Let’s face it.  The last ten years have been a whopper.  8 million of us lost our jobs and many of those jobs are permanently gone.  We’ve been rocked by the dot-com bust, Enron, World Com, subprime defaults, foreclosures, Wall Street casino games and oil spills.  The suffering of 9/11 has become a never-ending ache of Iraq and Afghanistan.  And all of this is being narrated by an apocalyptic media who merchandise fear, anger and despair like 31 flavors of imminent personal catastrophe.

All of this might be livable if we simply shut off the noise, but the biggest stress has seeped under our doors like toxic smoke.  It’s the sinking fear of economic starvation that drives our work life.  All of us know people who have lost their jobs and haven’t found a new one.  All of us know people who have been forced to move in with others.  Most of us still juggle debt we thought we could handle.  And many of us work for companies, even good companies, that have laid off too many people and pushed the extra work around the way a farmer spreads manure over a garden patch.

Layoffs and trying to bloom through a new layer of fertilizer has happened many times before.  But not like this.  The economists who track the numbers say the past two year’s rise in worker productivity is the greatest in history.  But worker productivity is basically a measure of revenue divided by worker pay.  Thus if managers can fire workers faster than sales decline, productivity magically goes up.  Profits too, at least temporarily.   But real life is not found in spreadsheets.  And in real life all I see is hummingbirds.  People flapping their wings to the point of exhaustion.  Literally.

Last month, a sweet woman who recently found a new job told me that in her previous job at a large company a close colleague was so stressed out over wave after wave of layoffs that she began to suffer form fainting spells and heart palpitations.  This is what happens when our hormones trigger biological responses that constrict our blood vessels.  She refused to take time off or go to the doctor because she feared she would be singled out as a weakling or worse a health care risk.  Her husband had already been laid off so her fear was not unwarranted.  One morning she started to have a panic attack.  She refused to let her friend call 911, said she would be fine and would go lay down in an empty office.  Her friend called the sick woman’s husband and then went down to the darkened office.  She was dead.  A heart attack had stolen her life.  Sadly, I am not making this up.  Are we really working ourselves to death?

This is more than sad.  It’s tragic.  And it’s driven by, as Einstein said, counting the wrong things and not counting the things that should be counted.  Firing people and forcing the survivors to do more work is not leadership.  It doesn’t create more value.  Value is created when we innovate and invent.  These are creative acts that arise in positive work environments where the rhythm of human life is respected.  The invisible air currents that help us soar at unthinkable heights are not sensed when we are madly flapping.  Those opportunities only come when people have the calm to see what was previously invisible.  Work environments that create conditions for human innovation or extraordinary value are drying up, so we must create them ourselves.

The original American Dream was driven by the ideal of self-sufficiency.  Brave nation builders came to our country willing to clear a field of rocks and stumps so they could plant.  Today our farms are our minds.  It is over-time to take the rocks out of our heads and plant for a more secure, self-determined personal economic life.  We must learn how to become extraordinary at what we are passionate for.  We must learn to be economically literate and create a sustainable lifestyle.  We must find time to rest our wings and find ways to soar.  It’s possible.

Last evening we were walking through our neighborhood and ran into Jake.  He’s a young-in-his-30’s, constantly smiling, life-loving, neighbor who we originally met when he was waiting tables at a local pizza place.  He learned to use a video camera making movies of local skateboarders.  He talked himself into a local skateboard manufacturer as their performance team manager and videographer.  The company has exploded with growth (Who would have thought?) and Jake told us he was on his way to Europe for a month, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, to compete as a member of their high-speed downhill demonstration team.  I know…Jake is an example of a guy who lives near the beach in one of the most ideal communities in the world getting paid to ride and film skateboarding around the world.  It may not be your dream.  But it is his.  Jake will not die in an empty office.  And neither should you.

What’s the best thing you can do?  Don’t leap.  Wisely plan to take control of your economic future.  Choose, adapt, live.  Really live.  This week we celebrate our independence.  Be  sure to celebrate yours!

Become Whole–Become Part of The Integrity of Everything

I have been off the grid.  I went surfing in Southern Nicaragua.  The waves were big.  Overhead everyday.  Powerful.  Awesome really.  I surfed 5 to 6 hours a day.  That’s possible for me only in warm tropical water because it soothes my old muscles lengthening my greybeard stamina.  As inspiring and joyful as the surf was, I was surprised to be more inspired by two books I found myself reading.  The first is Einstein’s God by Krista Tippett who has a regular podcast called Speaking of Faith in which she interviews certified brainiacs, mostly scientists, who have deepened their spiritual faith and continue to seek for ultimate answers even as they discover the immediate workings of our material world.

The other book I discovered on the bookshelf where I was staying was called Essential Spirituality by Roger Walsh, MD, PhD.  Walsh’s book is a guide to spiritual exercise found in all major religions that can lead us to insight and take us to the essential virtues of a well-lived life.

So I found myself alternating between warm water waves washing away the accumulated stresses of 21^st century life and the waves of new implications of wisdom.  I found myself washing away my frustrations of doing much but accomplishing little. Daily, I struggle to do more…not by doing more, but by doing better.  It is a continual question of what to cut out and where to go deeper.  The quest is always for a higher level of integrity.  Not just with myself but with “all that exists.”  I find myself bouncing between the emotions of outrage at the outrages of our time and the wiser emotions of focusing on the things over which I have some control.  My time in the waves left me with a conviction that it’s desirable to embrace all my emotions as long as I don’t become them.  Authenticity requires that I feel my feelings while wisdom informs my choices of how to act or not act.

Let me get back on track with some cool things I learned or relearned that are already helping me choose where to put my energy.

Albert Einstein explicitly wrote about two realities.  One dimension is the one we live in consciously.  It began with the big bang 13.7 billion years ago where an atom of hydrogen exploded into what’s become our world.  It’s a dimension of time and space.  Einstein wrote that the other dimension has neither time nor space.  Just a constant now.  Of that we know little except that it must exist for our dimension to exist.  Science focuses on explaining our time/space reality but has nothing to offer in terms of describing the timeless (spiritual) dimension.  He wrote of a transcendence being a consciousness beyond “the vanity of human desires.”

In his autobiography, The World As I See It, Einstein wrote of his endless curiosity toward “a knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty.”  Einstein was continually amazed at the mathematical elegance of the universe feeling like mathematics revealed the thoughts of a universal creative force.  Einstein believed in the indestructible nature of energy and comforted the Queen of Belgium who was grieving the death of a loved one writing, “There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and all human delusions.”

Einstein, like all of us, asked the question as to whether the universe has a point.  Or even more personally, does our existence have a point. The nearly universal answer is that the question of all questions can only be answered by direct experiences that create a personal connection between our time dimension and the timeless.  These are not irrational experiences.  They are trans-rational.  In rational-materialism only the strong and powerful thrive.  In this “objectivist” delusion compassion, kindness, and reverence for the lives of others seems irrational.  But experiences in the timeless dimension let us know that virtue, empathy, and love matter most of all.  It’s this spiritual-timeless energy that motivates our aspiration for moral order and civilization that reveres both moral and social order.  This is our impulse to transcend self-interest and see all of existence as a connected system of energy.  Life and non-life connected.  It’s in moments of transcendence that we release ourselves from our self-obsessions and become fearless in serving others through our talents, skills, resources and the sheer force of our creative will.  This is the beginning of integrity.

How do we become members of both the time and timeless? This is what Roger Walsh writes about in Essential Spirituality.  What it takes is a commitment to spiritual fitness as strong as our physical fitness.  Our door to the timeless is to focus more frequently on the richness of what is happening now.  Brain research confirms practicing being fully present creates new neuron networks that move our mental energy from our fear-reactive limbic brain center to our wiser reflective pre-frontal cortex.  It’s literally these neuron networks that give feelings of well-being and opens our minds to see opportunities instead of problems.  These are the brain centers that dissipate stress and deepen contentment.  Here are three simple exercises:

1. Deep Mindfulness.  Taste your food.  One time each day eat something and focus your entire attention on the taste and texture of your food.  Narrate these sensations in your mind.  Listen to music.  Once a day listen to a piece of music while trying to identify each sound with its source instrument or voice.  Listen for feelings instead of content.  Once a day listen to someone with your whole attention focused on what they might be feeling instead of just the content of their words.  You will feel love.
2. Practice Learnfulness.  Once you actively, purposefully adopt the inner belief that you can benefit from anything that happens in your life you will fear less.  This is the trigger to contentment.  Once, when I had gone through a very rough patch of major disappointments a friend said, “Well, the worst happened and you’re still okay—so there’s nothing to ever be afraid of again.”  I reflect on that whenever I’m afraid.  We can become wiser from all experiences.  In the timeless dimension we have nothing to fear.  Nothing.
3. Paradoxical Gratitude.  Once we accept that our life purpose is centrally about learning all that we can learn from anything, even personal tragedy, we are free to be grateful.  This exercise is one in which we say, “I am grateful for this and it’s opposite.”  I am grateful when the sun shines; I am grateful when it rains.  I am grateful when I am with friends; I am grateful when I am alone.  I am grateful when I have extra money; I am grateful when I don’t have enough.  Huh.  I know it sounds as stupid as Paris Hilton’s dog, but don’t take my word for it.  Try it.  Right now.  See what your “mind” tells you about why you can be grateful for rain, aloneness, or being short of cash.  I think you’ll be surprised.

Let me finish with a famous quote by Albert Einstein:

“A human being is part of the whole called the universe…He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest.  This delusion of consciousness is a kind of prison restricting us to personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

This is the essence of morality.  It is the foundation of sustainability.  We become whole when we become part of “the integrity of everything.”  In Save the World and Still Be Home For Dinner I write about living in integrity.  To fulfill our Promise by making our difference.  So often we find ourselves distracted working hard to achieve other people’s goals or working to pay our debts often accumulated by selling our peace of mind for things that offer little enjoyment and less joy.  I am convinced we cannot live our dream until we awaken from the life that happens to us and live the life our higher self wishes to engage in.  Even if we are “successful” by the definition of people who do not understand us, that success is an anchor rather than a sail.  To find the wind I have found that connecting to the timeless gives energy and direction to my time.  And there are moments of beam-reach when the vessel and wind cut through the waters of life without friction.  These are great moments.  But they are appreciated because of all the other moments of tackling against the wind or hunting for it.  Good sailing to all.

Are We Losing Our Minds? We Need a Government By ALL the People for ALL the People

The great 21^st century “Brain War” is raging.  It’s a war for our mind, our thoughts and our convictions.  It’s being waged with explosive propaganda delivered through the high tech missiles of 24-hour media.  The Brain War is being waged to make us stupid, rob us of our logic, deny our own experience, and handicap our children’s future.  The war is being fought by both the political Right and Left.  They are bent on squashing independent thought and sacrificing the opportunities of citizens to live decent lives for their own political power.  Consider this.

Propaganda is the systemic use of stories,
labels and metaphors to convince us to
support policies that disadvantage us.

It labels victims as perpetrators and calls evil good.  Propagandists often use respected historical figures as icons for their cause even though the ideals of those heroes are far different than the propagandists.  Propaganda thrives on denying facts, repeatedly making outrageous false assertions and driving fear to the point of hysteria.  Propaganda is potent.  It literally takes over our thinking because it links powerful fear-based emotions with unexamined assumptions and assertions that serve the propagandist.

I just gave a business seminar on how our brain forms opinions and guides our choices.  Stories that include metaphors and labels are the most powerful opinion-shapers because they circumvent our logical defenses.  Stories activate our “right brain” and our emotional limbic center.  We process stories holistically, without debating individual facts or unsupported statements.  Most importantly when stories are stored in our long-term memories we forget they were stories at all.  We can’t differentiate between a fable, fairy tale or actual history.  In fact we don’t even remember the source of our “knowledge.”  That’s why public commentators can make outrageous unsupported claims and over time gain believers.  Repeated emotional assertions become unexamined assumptions and emotionally hardened opinions.

Propaganda is what enabled slavery to
become an institution in the U.S.
When lies are repeated they are believed.

Recently, I was in beautiful Beaufort, South Carolina where I went on a horse-drawn tour of the palatial town homes built by wealthy plantation owners of the late 1700 and early 1800’s.  The guide cheerfully pointed out the slaves’ quarters that were shared with the livestock behind the homes.  All the while she injected her commentary with the great Southern myth that the slaves had it good.  She told us they had regular medical care and good food and in many cases taught to read and write because they were plantation “assets”.  This, she assured us, was far better than their stone-age life in Africa.

I know.  It’s 2010.  But the Southern myth is alive and thriving in many parts of the South.  The “story” of the noble slaves nurtured by their kind masters persists because the thought of the real brutality of slavery and the barbaric belief that one kind of human can own another human is too repulsive to accept.  I also read the writings of a Southern “think tank” of the 1850’s which had Southern college professors write papers concluding that Negroes were a “tropical race” incapable of self-discipline and attaining “European levels of intelligence” who were far better off as productive slaves.

Why am I telling you this story? Because today propaganda is creating a national story of the false choice of a bankrupt future caused by a bloated government versus one controlled by special interests hiding behind political claims of personal freedom, low taxes and eviscerated regulation.  We cannot choose either of these futures.  And these are clearly not our only choices.  What the Tea Party Right doesn’t seem to understand is that what the most corrupt and powerful who are bankrolling their events have always done is stir up masses to weaken government so they can control it.  They wave a flag of freedom to rob us of our liberty.  This is exactly what the bankers and the bureaucrats of the last administration did.  It’s also what they did in the 1980’s to create a Christian Right by convincing them that Christ was a Capitalist who liked guns.  The manipulators don’t care about Christians or Tea Parties.  They only care about their wealth, their power, and their own families.

So the propagandists on the radical Right have taken over the national narrative to create the illusion that unless we allow the new aristocracy of lobbyists to rig our system so they can continue to create economic monopolies and wage non-strategic wars, we will somehow lose our freedom.  They are telling us what’s good for them is good for us.  This lie is not new.

Historically the two opposing philosophies
that have driven our county’s debates have
not been Republicans and Democrats
as much as it’s been
monied-aristocracy versus citizen opportunity.

Thomas Jefferson was the father of the Democrat-Republican Party.  He idealized the citizen farmer and dignity that comes from self-reliance.  He recognized the greatest threat to upward mobility where a poor family’s children could become middle class through education and initiative was the re-establishment of the aristocratic systems of Europe that didn’t allow the free ownership of land unless you were a noble.  We actually passed a law called the Land Ordinance of 1785 that allowed a common citizen to own land.  Guess who opposed it.  Of course, the large land owners who were descendants of the English land grants that established the colonies.  They claimed that common people wouldn’t be good farmers.  Alexander Hamilton was a Federalist who wanted to re-establish the elitist system of English banking and trade so that “educated” people could rule America.  The battle between aristocracy and its concentration of wealth and power versus a democracy promotes true competition, a level playing field, universal education and a national infrastructure that lifts all citizens has been going on for over 200 years.

These forces have used political parties as vehicles for their agendas, but over the decades the parties have shifted all over the place.  Today’s Republicans would undoubtedly call Lincoln, our first Republican President, a “Nazi” and a socialist because he freed the slaves which was the largest confiscation of private wealth by the U.S. government in history.  That’s what the propagandists of the 1860’s cried.  He also established free college education through federal land grant colleges and paid for federal road building to open up the West to small farmers.  This was also seen as a colossal waste of government money by the rich.  Lincoln also promoted the Homestead Act that was a major give-away of federal lands to western pioneers and established of all things the Internal Revenue Service.  I wonder what Rush Limbaugh would say about what most historians consider our greatest president.

Republican presidents also established the Civil Service Commission, supported women’s right to vote, established national parks and fought business cartels through anti-trust laws.  Today’s Republican Party would have had a hard time supporting Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or George H.W. Bush.  Of course they are using Ronald Reagan as their icon, but this is the same president who ran huge federal deficits to restart our stalled 1970’s economy.  In fact it’s hard to imagine Reagan not supporting the Bush/Obama federal bailout and government spending programs because that’s exactly what he did by radically expanding military spending in the 1980’s.

My point is simply this:

Political parties are storytellers.
They try to label policies and people
to scare us into doing what they want.

But the real battle for our future is the same one Jefferson fought with Hamilton.  It’s equality versus aristocracy.  Our freedom of choice is limited by our range of practical options.  A person with a 21^st century education has much more freedom than a semi-literate one.  An economy that offers ample access to capital, level regulations and fair taxation will create the most opportunity.

We need to stop listening to multi-millionaire TV demagogues and decide what kind of society we want.  The dimwitted voices of rage radio and cable craziness always argue the same thing—what the mouthpieces of money and special interests have always said.  We can’t afford to end slavery, child labor, universal education, decent health care, unemployment insurance, or civil rights.  Basically we can’t afford to be moral, compassionate or even wise.  What is wise is not the re-distribution of wealth but the fair distribution of opportunity. We don’t need a bigger government to solve our problems.  We just need the tools to keep the most powerful from rigging the system so it only works for their children.

Contrary to the popular stories:

• American’s, overall, pay the lowest taxes in the developed world.
• Americans have the greatest concentration of wealth in the top five percent.
• America has the most corrupt system of lobbyists of mature democracies.
  
• Only 75 percent of America’s children graduate from high school.
  
• America has a media full of propagandists trying to steal our minds with issues that don’t solve any of our real problems.

I believe the healthiest society would
be the 21^st century version of the
one envisioned by Jefferson.

A nation of self-resilient entrepreneurs innovating solutions to our future’s greatest challenges.  That requires a smart government free from the grip of embedded interests who streamline choking bureaucracy but protects us from the greed and power of those consumed with their self-interest. Ours should neither be a “Tea Party” future of selfish chaos or European Social Democracy.

Instead we need to be a “government
by ALL the people and for ALL the people.”

That’s a future I am willing to invest in.

This has been a pretty long, passionate rant. And, I don’t pretend to be right about everything. But ONE thing that is clear to me is that this is NOT THE BEST WE CAN DO! It’s time for clear, independent thinking! Hold on to your mind.

Building Trust in an Age of Distrust

We swim in a sea of cynicism.  We wonder if anything is what it appears to be.  Everyone seems to be trying to talk you and me into believing his or her promise.  It seems that everyone has an idea about how to make our lives better.  They promise if we believe what they believe, vote for who they vote for, buy what they buy, we will be happy.  Tens of billions of dollars and a gazillion work hours are spent coming up with ways for someone to get their ideas in our minds, their brand in our hearts and their hands on our wallets.  All of these relentless sophisticated attempts to persuade us to do what they want us to adds to our exhausting way of life.  It’s stressful defending ourselves against all these unwanted attacks on our attention.  That’s why connecting with people who have no agenda for us other than helping us get clear on what we want is like breathing oxygen in an otherwise toxic smog of mass manipulation.  And it’s the pure oxygen of mutual service that human beings long for in all relationships whether it’s a marriage, a parent-child or a 10-minute relationship with a customer.

Years ago when I was helping Stephen Covey build our leadership practice I did most of the selling.  He told me, “Don’t sell; just seek to understand and help them find a path to get what they really want.”  So I’ve spent the better part of my professional life studying how to coach people to make their best choices.  It’s called motivation theory, and it’s a field chuck-full of fascinating research about why we do what we do and also why we often don’t do what’s best for us.  Here’s what I’ve discovered.

1. Our power to change minds principally comes from our own sincerity. If we are focused on the interests of those we’re seeking to help rather than our self-interest, our positive intentions will be felt and trust will spout.
2. Control and manipulation are trust killers whenever we try to control others’ choices, and when we manipulate to motivate we are poisoning the relationship. Manipulation is psychological poison that like a snake biting itself will eventually drain us of our life energy.  And there will be no mirror we will wish to look at.
3. Help others harness their self-determination to choose what they most desire. We are much more likely to follow through on choices we freely make.  The reasons we don’t are most often confusion because our choices aren’t clear.  Deep trust is built with people who help us get clear on what we want and why we want it.  This elevation of self-determined choices increases the motivation to follow through.
4. Helping others gain the confidence to choose what’s best is our best gift to them. The greatest hidden reason we don’t choose what’s best for ourselves is that we often lack the confidence that we can do what needs to be done to get the result.  So we act like we don’t want to learn to play the piano, learn a language, use technology, or seek a new job when it’s our fear of failure that keeps us from choosing what we really desire.
5. The most powerful way to build confidence that we can choose what we really want, learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do is to identify with stories of people just like us who were successful. This last point is critical to help people change their behavior.  By telling stories of others who are just like them who have made successful choices, people’s fear and resistance recedes and their motivation to act rises.  Stories are narratives that reveal how people overcome obstacles and conflict to achieve their dreams.  Stories inspire our minds to find new paths around brick walls.  New brain research suggests there is nothing more potent than a story to open a closed mind.

All of us have times where we desire to have a positive impact on others.  Now psychological research confirms what wise people have known all along.  We have the most impact when we genuinely care for people enough that our agenda is simply to help those we serve achieve their agenda.

America…Innovation Nation

A friend of mine just called to tell me she is going to be a panelist on a PBS show about the decline of American innovation.  I said, “What?”  As my pulse jumped I said, “We live in a tornado of innovation.”  We do.  If we define innovation as improvement that creates value, innovation is swirling at wind speed that is knocking our socks off.

She protested, “But IPOs are down, venture capital investing is down, our worldwide lead in new patents has shrunk and we aren’t producing science and math graduates.”

I said all that is true, but all those old indicators of innovation are out dated.

When we aren’t measuring the right things,
all we see is a distorted picture.

I just got back from a blitz tour over America where in Phoenix I worked with a new vocational training business that is bent on re-inventing how blue-collar skills are transformed into green-collar value.  In Washington D.C. I learned how Campbell’s Soup is inventing tasty ways of taking salt out of soup and in Portland how Nike is using sport in developing countries to create new confidence and even literacy in young girls.  And that’s not even ten percent of what I learned.  There are many ways to create value.  Sometimes it’s a new product, but often it’s a new way of offering service or even a new way of making money that didn’t exist before.

Today, innovation is everywhere.  It’s the water fish swim in, so maybe it is hard to see.  But consider this.

• In the past two years over 200,000 apps have been created for iPhones that didn’t even exist four years ago.  Many of these apps offer ingenious ways of making our lives easier or more enjoyable.  Millionaires have been launched within months.

• Zappos, the crazy online shoe seller, boomed and sold itself to Amazon for nearly $1 billion by turning their quirky customer service reps into heroes by letting them solve real customer problems and tweet and text about it.

• Facebook didn’t exist five years ago and today it has more members than all but two countries (India and China).

• Every carmaker has or is about to have hybrid vehicles for sale.

• Internet commerce, advertising, information research, and education didn’t really exist 10 years ago.

• Grameen Bank invented a way to loan money to the poorest people in the world to achieve self-sufficiency and get 98 percent of their loans paid back.

• Revolution Foods is bringing affordable healthy lunches into our schools.

• We can now rent cars by the hour in most cities.

• The cost of solar electricity has dropped from almost $100 per watt in 1975 to $2 per watt in 2010.

• ING online bank became the fastest growing consumer bank in the world by incenting Americans to save instead of borrow.

• Charter schools have become the driving force of education reform.

• Chrysalis Foundation contracts their trained workforce of homeless people to local businesses.

• Threadless.com has turned a perpetual graphic arts competition into a $25 million tee-shirt business.

• Epico is combining online education with social networks to create learning communities to learn stuff faster than classroom learning.

• Our recent wars have forced us to re-invent our strategies to include economic and social factors as well as military objectives to create the possibility of actually winning the future rather than just conquering dirt.

The truth is innovation is raging, so while people tied to the status quo are all wringing their hands, those with active and open minds are doing handsprings.  It’s never been so easy to try out new ideas.  The Internet and social networks enable us to research difficult questions at no cost.  In virtually no time, we can find experts and collaborators everywhere in the world and we can do it on our laptops or even our phones!  A husband and wife team in my neighborhood last year generated over $1 million in sales selling Nintendo Wii players and products over the web.  Their innovation was not low cost; it was teaching people how to use the Wii to have more fun.  They are not alone.  Last year the number of unemployed workers who started their own business soared nearly 70 percent (See Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Jobs).

Today innovation is as much knowing what to cut out as to add in.  Saving time, effort and waste creates huge value.  And what do we all want?  We want to be smarter, healthier, financially secure, have happy relationships and an enduring sense of confidence and satisfaction.  The ways we are creating to meet those needs are unlimited and the tools never more powerful.

The big frontiers of innovation are government and religion.  Both seem stuck in dated operating models that cost way too much to create the value we value.  But it’s time to re-invent both.  We need to re-think government to provide everyone, everywhere the chance for a decent life while we promote individual responsibility.  Religion must become communities of faith that bring us closer to the divine and inspire morality rather than clans of fanatics that justify prejudice and hide immorality.

Flying home I read a brief article outlining the origin of America’s “Puritan Ethic” which it turns out is about something far more innovative than hard work and discipline.  Puritans believed it was their divine duty to improve on their opportunities.  The key is to understand that Puritans believed that our lives were pre-mapped to give us exactly the opportunities we needed.  Hence they didn’t waste a lot of time waiting for their opportunities to improve on their own.  They didn’t have much use for undeserved luck but focused on improving their luck by looking for ways to improve their current “opportunities” no matter how humble.  That’s pretty liberating.  What can we do right here, right now?  If we embrace our current circumstances what can we improve?  How?

So what’s the best thing we can do? Constantly create new value in our lives.  We need to prune and eliminate all that creates no value or creates unnecessary stress and suffering.  Get out of financial bondage and stay out.  The difference between living on 90 percent of our income and 110 percent of it is inner peace and outer happiness.  Over-invest in honest and supportive relationships and cut out time consuming trivial communication.  We need to decide what difference we want to make and become an extreme expert in making that difference.  If we are wise we will turn that into our livelihood.  And above all we need to keep our minds open to see new opportunities and ways to improve our existing ones.  We are all CEOs of our own start-ups.  It’s time to innovate.

So how has your life changed for the better in the past five years?  What do you do to increase the value of your job or your life?

Dear George…It’s No Time to Be Stupid

It’s No Time To Be Stupid

A lot is being written about how radical Conservatives are pushing out center-minded Republicans from the party.  This couldn’t come at a worse time.  Recently I read an alarming editorial by a conservative columnist, George Will, whom I usually respect for being thoughtful rather than extreme.  His column, If VAT, Ditch the Income Tax, however, was a decidedly right-wing rant accusing liberals of everything bad and offering nothing except business-as-usual as an alternative.  As an Independent, it upset me.  We need more from Conservatives than table-banging.  It seems like they have lost their ability to reason, and that’s a huge loss.  So this is the email I sent off to George Will.

Dear George,

George, what is going on?  I’ve always considered you a common sense Conservative, yet your recent column was an angry screed accusing President Obama of “creating the financial crisis” so he can make government bigger.  Finally you propose that “all taxation diminishes freedom.”  Are you sure?  It seems to me that some taxes assure freedom.  The taxes that pay for national defense, the courts and the police assure me that I have the freedom to own and enjoy my property.  Taxes that pay for roads and airports contribute to my freedom to travel and engage in commerce.  And instead of taxes being as you claim them to be, “the confiscation of our time,” maybe they are our investment in the common good.  At least they can be.

Your edgy, divisive tone is the opposite of what is needed by Conservative voices today.  The unholy trinity of Limbaugh, Palin and Beck arouse desperate passions that are little more than the propaganda of the rich telling the financially stagnating middle class that what’s good for the rich is good for the non-rich.  But clearly it isn’t.  The financial life of the middle-class has gotten steadily worse since 1980 even as the extreme wealth of the top 5 percent has ballooned.  The rich don’t need health care reform, access to quality public education, credit card regulation or a living wage.  That’s what single mothers need.  Conservative’s manipulation of people’s emotions is rampant today because the repeated assertions broadcast by multiple voices that say every attempt to broaden the opportunity for a decent life is an assault on our individual freedom.

But George, we don’t ride the range with a six-gun on our hips the way my great-grandfather did.  We have a very large-scale society with at least 330 million diverse people who all want a chance at a decent life.  Our government has been corrupted by special interests who get tax breaks, subsidies and sweetheart contracts while the rest of us make our living the old fashioned way.  Our country was founded to break away from the control of an aristocracy that united the English nobles with corrupt capitalists.  James Madison, as well as Thomas Jefferson, wrote and spoke frequently of the evils of the concentration of wealth and land in the hands of a new aristocracy.  Surely Conservatives must have more to offer than rebooting a long political history fighting any bank regulation, antitrust laws, workplace safety regulations or more outlandish the end of slavery, child labor, or racial segregation.  On the political tension between human rights and property rights, Conservatives should move to higher ground.  Conservations need to be more than the voice of the status quo saying, “I’ve got mine and I want more.”  More critically it cannot allow itself to be the advocate of the rising tide of armed groups posing as state militias or white supremacists.  But when a prominent conservative sums up her platform as “give us our constitution, our guns and our religion” as Palin does, Conservatives seem content to build a brand without real solutions only friends and enemies.

What we need is a thoughtful, common sense voice that has real ideas on how smaller government can create a better society.  We know, for instance, that at least 1/3 of the federal budget is wasted, but how can we strategically reduce the waste?  We know that federal employees are now paid more than their private sector counterparts.  That can’t be wise.  What I believe most Americans want is not a redistribution of income but a fair re-distribution of opportunity.  That requires high quality universal education, ample access to capital, a robust infrastructure, and smart ways to insure safety of products and services that can harm us.  That requires public policy innovation, not just the tired sound of table-banging “no.”

The famous economist John Nash won a Nobel Prize using Game Theory to prove that healthy human systems thrive when people maximize their own interests by ensuring everyone else’s interests are also maximized.  This is the mathematical proof that enlightened self-interest is more than selfishness.  Conservatives need new thought leaders.  And they need established ones like you to lead them upward rather than backward.  We are still waiting for the 21^st century alternative to big government to show up.

If you have any new ideas, I’d love to hear them.  The last time conservatives ran the country the government wildly expanded, we spent nearly a trillion dollars on a war that hasn’t stopped terrorism, and we borrowed ourselves collectively into a bankrupting recession.  If the Mad Hatters who guide the very strange Tea Party represent  your best ideas, our country will be left with only the left because most all of the people who want to join the Tea Party already have.  Surely someone over there has both a brain and a heart.  It’s time to start using them.

Take Back Your Life

Our world has changed.  I mean our personal world.  And the way it’s changed has added more stress than Paula Dean adds butter to baking.  Since business employment has shrunk drastically in the past 24 months those who have jobs are having to do more than ever.  Our old job plus 2 or 3 other jobs that previous full-timers did.  And those who have decided to work for themselves as consultants or starting a new enterprise have so much pressure to outperform that the velocity of our warship has to always be moving at “warp.”  If we slow down the immense gravity of our death-star economy will crush us.  Whew.

So lately I’ve been studying what happy warriors are doing to move at the speed of business without breaking apart from the rivet-busting stress.  This is what I’ve found.  Eight things that modern day Jedis do to keep positive, creative and collaborative.

1. Gratitude. New brain research is clear that counting our blessings stimulates both positive electrical (nerve) energy and chemical highs (hormones) that stimulate optimism.  According to Dr. Jim Loehr the most powerful way to practice gratitude is to stop, think, feel and write.  He suggests keeping a gratitude journal to write down whatever we’re grateful for.  The act of writing cements the feeling so we maximize the benefit.  Feel your gratitude.
2. Reflection. Productive people produce what they value.  It isn’t the volume of work they produce; it’s the valued impact of their work that matters.  As we get hypnotized by deadlines and the choking torrent of emails, texts and conference calls we lose our will to say no or even nothing at all.  What stirs our resolve to do things that matter is to daily reflect on what our best contribution is.  Deep breathing combined with “What’s the most important thing I can do today?” question aimed at domains of our career, relationships and lifestyle keeps us at the top of our game.  What do you really, really desire?
3. Self-Select Our Goals. We are bombarded by other people’s urgencies.  Some we cannot ignore.  But many others tempt us because they present problems we know how to solve.  And successful problem solving makes us feel valued.  But much of the time we’re just being used.  Saying no to other people’s urgencies to create time to invest in our important goals will create far more value for you and others.  We’re not other people’s maids.  We need to train them to clean up their own messes.  Choose your goals.
4. Proactive Time Blocks. In the new book, Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio 2010), researcher Scott Belsky tells that super creative people construct multi-hour blocks of uninterrupted time to study, digest and create opportunities, leapfrog problems, gain insights and direction unavailable if we only have our heads down pulling stone blocks to the pyramids.  Create regularly scheduled creative time.
5. Reactive Time Blocks. We all swim in an electric storm of emails, texts and tweets.  Belsky tells us that the hyper-productive stars of creative businesses like Google and Disney manage all the traffic with daily “power hours” where 30 minutes in the mid-morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon are dedicated to responding.  Many of these people’s main work area doesn’t include their computer which receives email.  That’s on another table away from their real work.  Barricade yourself from unwanted, unnecessary interruptions.
6. Short Deadline. Another trick creatives have found accelerates good work is to break big jobs down into short deadlines and mini projects.  Short deadlines cause you to think clearly. You ignore the extraneous and get to what matters.  Change your deadlines to one hour, one day, one week.
7. Choose – Act – Adapt. We never have all the information we need.  Work is like an active battlefield with conditions changing faster than a teenager’s plans.  So make a choice.  Get started, learn what you need to learn and adapt your responses to what’s working.  Plans are just predictions.  And now we’re all like the weatherman.  We don’t know what next week will bring.  Thinking we do is fatal.  Just start.  Now.
8. Over-Invest In Your “Best 7”. We can only have 7 “real” relationships at a time.  Social research is clear that what it takes to create trust and intimacy with other humans consumes our mental and emotional bandwidth in big chunks.  The limit of human intimacy where emotional honesty is high, defensiveness is low and trust is delicious is 7 people at most.  Recently Harvard researchers learned 25% of adults have zero trusted friends.  Zero.  Okay that’s bad.  What makes life worth living is what makes life worth loving.  But trust and intimacy doesn’t come without investing our time and fully present attention in those we value and who can reciprocate.  Call your best friend now, set up a time to meet this week.  Relax.  Waste some time together.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Take back our life.  It’s way too precious to waste.

Make Your Free Throws

So close.  So very close.  Every underdog in America was rooting for tiny, unheard of Butler University’s Bulldogs to somehow beat mighty Duke in the NCAA National Championship game.  David versus Goliath.  It was crazy, like Amherst playing Alabama in a title football game.  No one gave Butler a chance.  Most report’s experts predicted it would be over by half time.  Duke by twenty.  Instead Duke won by 2, barely.  Butler played with great energy, smarts and discipline.  They could have won.  In fact they should have won.  And it wasn’t fate that they lost.  It was missed opportunities.  It wasn’t that Duke was too much for Butler.  Rather it was that Butler didn’t take advantage of the easiest shots in basketball, the free throw.  Butler missed nearly 30% of their 18 chances.  That’s not unusual, but for an underdog in a title game, it was fatal.

Free throws are uncontested.  No one is in your face.  In fact, no one is moving.  It’s just you, the ball and basket.  With practice and focus otherwise average players can sink close to 9 out of 10 free throws.  I had a friend in high school who practiced continually, trying to make 100 in a row.  He never quite made it, but he was deadly in games.

The point is in a David and Goliath game a free throw is like getting a free shot at the giant’s head with your best rock.  And whenever a team loses by one or two points we can’t help but wonder what if a few of those missed free throws would have been sunk.

The problem we all seem to have is that unless the free throws are at the end of the game, they don’t seem all that important.  But as it turns out, a point scored in the first half counts just as much as if it were scored in the last five seconds.  A point is a point.  And that is the point.  All of us have free throws in our life.  Lots of them.  Free throws are all the things we do control.  All the choices we make that are uncontested by others.  We have lots more free throws than we often consider.  And how we do on our free throws has a big impact on whether we win our game of life.

So what are our free throws?  To begin with…what we eat, how much sleep we get, our frequency of exercise, all the personal choices we make to enhance our health and energy or erode it.  Second, we have free throws concerning our thoughts.  Are we grateful, empathetic, and optimistic?  And certainly our education.  What do we choose to learn, to invest ourselves in?  Do we choose enjoyable hobbies, soak in the spectacular beauty of nature and art?  And do we choose friends who enrich us, help us laugh, and comfort us?  As I think about it our free throws pretty much determine our happiness and contentment.  Of course it doesn’t seem that way.  Mostly we are sidetracked by the things we don’t control.  Illness, job loss, breakups.  These things are huge.  They are like a 7-footer’s slam-dunk in our face.  They are violent and emotional.  But…at the end of our lives these ferocious points do not determine who wins.  In the end it’s our free throws.

So what free throws are you being given today, right now?  What choices can you make that score points for your health and happiness?  We might not make every choice the best one.  But with clear self-reflection and mindful practice we might make 9 out of 10.

If you have a story of choice that changed the outcome of your game, we’d all love to read it.

How an iPerson is like an iPhone

Apple Inc.’s stock is on a rocket ship.  An all-time high.  It’s no wonder.  Fortune Magazine found that Apple is the world’s most admired company by global CEOs.  That’s something.  Apple was on the verge of biodegrading in a pile of high tech mulch in 1997 when Steve Jobs was re-enthroned as CEO of the computer company he co founded in 1976.  He was once considered a kind of genius bad boy.  A one hit wonder.  Full of himself.  Isolated.  Angry.  His NeXT computer company was a commercial flop, but he found game changing success at Pixar who brought us the Toy Story movies as well as a steady series of yearly blockbuster films.  In the movie business he did the impossible.  Every movie Pixar has released has grossed over $100 million.  Every one.  Impossible according to Hollywood.  Inevitable according to Jobs.

Then Jobs resurrected Apple as a global icon by inventing software-based hardware that blew our minds about how computers ought to look and work, then how we buy and listen to music, communicate by phone, where we buy cool stuff in Apple stores, and now how we’ll learn and operate on something called an iPad.

Steve Jobs is now being canonized by many of his critics and competitors.  Sure rock-star Steve is not perfect.  Not even in business.  But as I was considering his Walt Disney-like success it occurred to me that there are three insightful things about his business decisions that translate to our own lives.  Three principles we need to consider as we choose our daily path and forge enduring priorities.  Three drivers of the “i” empire Emperor Steve has built.

Unbreakable system: Jobs has been very stubborn about building totally integrated hardware and software devices.  There is seamlessness between Apple’s electronics and their operating software.  So their immune systems are tintanically strong.  iMacs famously are virtually virus free because there are no “nasal” passages to infect.  PCs and Windows have never overcome their cobbled together genetics and open sores that leave them ripe for infection.

So, I wonder, how about me?  Am I a PC that is nothing more than a collection of other people’s software, their opinions and demands?  Or do I have my own operating system that guides my decisions, informs my values, sings my songs and recognized voices of truth?  I know that a robust personal operating system must be able to accept updates from credible sources or I’ll just become obsolete in my own thinking.  On the other hand, if I let any virus in that the popular media sneezes out into my hard drive I will become slower to adapt, angry and fearful.

What I have learned is that to even approach having a personal unbreakable system I must daily reflect on what matters most.  I must weigh my work life in the context of my relationships, my health and my sources of joy.  Every day.  If I skip reflection, I skip choosing.  Then other urgencies invade me like tiny thought-bots that make me sick with unimportant urgencies.  I need to be unbreakable.  Seamless.  Self-determined.  Soul-determined.

Revolution by evolution. Every one of Apple’s hot products is designed around Apple’s robust and elegant operating system.  From iMacs to iPads the deep DNA is their every improving and adapting operating system.  So even though it looks like an iPod is a radical departure from a computer or an iPhone is a game-changing device, the backbone of all Apple devices is the same.

For me it reminds me that even at 60 I must fearlessly re-invent my messages, my services, and my delivery channels even as I build on a lifetime of learning, interests and experiences.  As I re-purpose my purpose the way I work is constantly evolving.  Facebook, blogging, webcasts, online learning are all new tools that require new skills.  But the core of my work remains what it has been for 35 years: to help people make the biggest positive difference they can right now as a means to create more happiness and less suffering.  Or in a bumper sticker, “My purpose is to help other’s express theirs.”  That’s my operating system.  At least on my good days.

Over-invest in a few things that matter. Apple does almost everything different from their competitors.  They essentially have four products: iMac, iPod, iPhone, and now iPads.  Competitors like Dell, HP and Sony have gazillions of products.  But what Apple understands is that to be great you must make focused investments.  Bring enormous, overwhelming force to a few great ideas.  Jobs invested $200 million in advertising the iPod in its first 12 months.  No competitor has come close to that commitment.

So, I can’t do everything.  But I can be fully present for my wife and family.  That is a huge focus for me.  Enduring, healthy, enriching relationships are the most difficult achievements in life.  It takes constant attention and persistent enthusiasm.  For me it’s not work though.  It’s not work like surfing is not work.  Surfing takes great effort and concentration, but it’s joyful.  My few personal relationships of significance require “all-in” joyful commitment.  It’s simple.  A few great relationships require our over-investing in them.

I also invest in my clients’ individual success.  Everything is personal for me.  As Helen Keller said,

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

It’s true, I cannot do everything, but what I can do is pay extreme attention to how I am making a difference to someone today.  And finally I invest in learning.  Learning all that I can to be better at priorities one and two.  For me it’s come down to love, helping and learning.  That’s my daily focus.  What I try to over-invest in.

But in spite of Steve’s best intentions, Apple’s iPods break too often.  iPhones don’t have an interchangeable battery.  And likewise in too many cases, I act like a big fat jerk.  Cranky, impatient, selfish.  Yea, it’s a life long process to become an “iPerson” but why else live?

So, tell us about your journey toward your best life.  What do you over-invest in?

We Can Create Our Future

I love to surf. I talk about it all the time. It’s not that I am a great surfer. Far from it.  I am one of those journeyman surf dudes who “mind surfs” much better than I actually surf.  But as they say, “Only a surfer knows the feeling.”  The feeling is everything.  The ocean, the porpoises, and the screaming sensation of speed when you’re in the right place on the right wave.  But I am also 60 years old.  Damn.  I’ve noticed that this winter I have been more tentative than ever to take on bigger, overhead waves.  I’ve been super careful not to paddle into anything I didn’t have a 95% chance of riding well.  That’s being too careful.

I began to notice that when I saw a set of waves coming and I was paddling outside to either catch it or get over it, my mind was telling me fear stories.

“Don’t even think about it.  It’s too steep.  It will close out for sure.  It’s going to pitch…Ah!”

When my mind is going off like that I can feel the fear rise from my toes to my newly freaked out face.  Then all I want to do is survive.  Not surf.  Survive.  So what happens is I let too many perfectly good, potentially thrilling waves go by.  Then I sit outside in the calm water silently cursing myself.

“You wimp.  You old, clumsy sorry excuse for a surfer…”  No I am not kidding.

The reason my mind hits the fear button as soon as I see anything out of my comfort zone is logical.  I’ve had a few bad wipeouts and hold-downs earlier this winter.  In I went pin-wheeling head-over-heels down the overhead wave face and was rag-dolled under the water until my lungs were burning for air. That makes an impression. But the real risk is minimal. I surf deep-water breaks, which means I won’t hit the bottom.  I’ve got a new surf leash so I won’t lose my board, and if I did the swim in is easy.  I’m not afraid of the real risk.  I just hate the few seconds a violent thunderous wipe generates and the “I blew it” self-talk that rings in my head.  So I started playing it safe.  Way too safe.  Then I had a breakthrough.  A life lesson.

I was talking to the renowned sport’s psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr. According to Dan Jansen, the former Olympic speed skater, Jim’s coaching was essential to him finally winning a gold in his final Olympic race. Jim has coached 16 #1 athletes in the world. He’s the real deal.  So Jim was telling me about the power of asking yourself the right questions to take charge of your private voice.  He’s found that for anyone in stressful situations from elite athletes, Special Forces soldiers, to CEOs facing a crisis our private voice will determine success or failure.  And one the easiest ways to take control over the script our private voice is speaking is to change the questions we ask ourselves. In my case it was as simple as changing my voice from “No way” to “How?”  He suggested the next time I find myself paddling furiously outside to meet an oncoming bomb I simply ask, “How can I catch this in the right spot?” “Yea, whatever,” I thought.

So three days later on a bright, glassy Southern California morning the waves were pumping.  A storm in the Gulf of Alaska had sent a vigorous impulse down the coast and solid ten foot faced waves were pumping through with an occasional rogue a bit bigger.  It was crowded.  Many of the young, hot, zero body fat guys were ripping the break apart. I was paddling up and down the reef as usual in frantic search for solitary waves.  Then it happened.  (Of course this story has a happy ending.)  I was already sitting outside when a dark green extra large wave popped up on the horizon.  I started paddling.  I was the only one who had a chance of getting out deep enough to spin my board around and stroke into it.  But I felt Mr. Panic crawling up my legs to my stomach.  Suddenly my mind shouted, “How?”  Just how.  I immediately adjusted my line of paddle slightly to the left, calmly turned, two stokes and I was in.  The wave face suddenly got bigger and steeper as I dropped but my fin and rail bit into the wall and I slung myself under the feathering lip and there in front of me was a watery, green highway.  For nearly 100 yards I turned up the face and back down gathering and scrubbing speed in a primal rhythm that simply stokes your mind, body and soul.  I left the water as one giant human smile.

What a lesson. Since that mind-bending wave I’ve given several high-risk speeches and sales presentations.  I now prepare with “How can I help the people I am talking to?”  That question, “How?”, tied to a motive of service is emotional liberation for me.

All of us deal with our inner voice.  And Jim’s point is to “own it.”  Become the positive narrator of your life by listening to that fearless inner essence that is the “who” that answers the question, “Who am I?”

If you have similar stories of personal liberation, we’d all like to hear them.  The mind is a beautiful tool when wielded well.

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