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Life is Not Related to Any Classroom

by | Dec 8, 2018 | Education, Life & Timing, Personal Improvement | 0 comments

The article below takes my shallow observations steps deeper into the future of the young adults and beyond,as they grow up.

I think this article is excellent, and on target. Have a read!

What Straight-A Students Get Wrong

If you always succeed in school, you’re not setting yourself up for success in life.

By Adam Grant, NYTimes

Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist and a contributing opinion writer.

A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking.

Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers.

I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.)

Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem — it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.

In a classic 1962 study, a team of psychologists tracked down America’s most creative architects and compared them with their technically skilled but less original peers. One of the factors that distinguished the creative architects was a record of spiky grades. “In college our creative architects earned about a B average,” Donald MacKinnon wrote. “In work and courses which caught their interest they could turn in an A performance, but in courses that failed to strike their imagination, they were quite willing to do no work at all.” They paid attention to their curiosity and prioritized activities that they found intrinsically motivating — which ultimately served them well in their careers.

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality. In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

If your goal is to graduate without a blemish on your transcript, you end up taking easier classes and staying within your comfort zone. If you’re willing to tolerate the occasional B, you can learn to program in Python while struggling to decipher “Finnegans Wake.” You gain experience coping with failures and setbacks, which builds resilience.

Straight-A students also miss out socially. More time studying in the library means less time to start lifelong friendships, join new clubs or volunteer. I know from experience. I didn’t meet my 4.0 goal; I graduated with a 3.78. (This is the first time I’ve shared my G.P.A. since applying to graduate school 16 years ago. Really, no one cares.) Looking back, I don’t wish my grades had been higher. If I could do it over again, I’d study less. The hours I wasted memorizing the inner workings of the eye would have been better spent trying out improv comedy and having more midnight conversations about the meaning of life.

So universities: Make it easier for students to take some intellectual risks. Graduate schools can be clear that they don’t care about the difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9. Colleges could just report letter grades without pluses and minuses, so that any G.P.A. above a 3.7 appears on transcripts as an A. It might also help to stop the madness of grade inflation, which creates an academic arms race that encourages too many students to strive for meaningless perfection. And why not let students wait until the end of the semester to declare a class pass-fail, instead of forcing them to decide in the first month?

Employers: Make it clear you value skills over straight A’s. Some recruiters are already on board: In a 2003 study of over 500 job postings, nearly 15 percent of recruiters actively selected against students with high G.P.A.s (perhaps questioning their priorities and life skills), while more than 40 percent put no weight on grades in initial screening.

Straight-A students: Recognize that underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life. So maybe it’s time to apply your grit to a new goal — getting at least one B before you graduate.

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton and contributing opinion writer, is the author of “Originals” and “Give and Take” and is the host of the podcast “WorkLife.”

Aging Comes Without Our Help. Contentment Does Not.

by | Oct 2, 2018 | Life & Timing, Personal Improvement, Psychology | 0 comments

As good a read as it is difficult to execute. Take the headline itself, which contains the word, if not offered remedy, contentment. Well, that’s not loaded. Is it? Thing is, its a tough proposition for most (not all) people, at any age, say…over…50? Give or take? Why? Number of reasons. may justified. Really.

Why are they justified? Because life is just hard-ER, without certain things in our lives. Those “things” are another article, another essay. Lets just say, when it comes to these things, where there is more agreement, than disagreement, among rationally, realistically thinking human beings, there’s more truth, than fabrication.

With that, comes the real challenge. Its not going to be the pursuit of a spiritual zen-like stance that magically overcomes the lack of these things, but, a deliberate, almost forced acceptance, and yes, begrudging, acceptance of the particular, but common shortcomings any one of us may feel slighted from. This includes the wealthy, who are not immune to feeling the lack of things beyond the grasp of what money can buy.

Finally, the idea of rising above health problems has always been its own thing. To fight that adversity off even as we age into more physical frustrations and battles is, ironically, easier to do than most of us, or others think. Why? Because its not really in our control. at least, not once it happens. At that point, its in medicine’s hands, doctors, hospitals, viatical oddsmakers, and fate. Where do we go from there? Contentment? Hmmm. Not sure I can work with the one word alone. Too tidy. If only…

The body text is helpful, just not, the quick fix hook in the headline. Look for kinship among positive leaning souls of a like mind. A full sentence that says more to me.

The Secret to Aging Well? Contentment

“Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.”

By Robert W. Goldfarb, NYTimes

At 88, I remain a competitive runner, always sprinting the last hundred yards of a race to cross the finish line with nothing left to give. The finish line of my life is drawing close, and I hope to reach it having given the best of myself along the way. I’ve been training my body to meet the demands of this final stretch. But, I wonder, should I have asked more of my mind?

I have no trouble taking my body to a gym or starting line. I’ve done a good job convincing myself that if I didn’t exercise, I would unleash the many predators that seek their elderly prey on couches, but not on treadmills. The more I sweated, the more likely it was my internist would continue to exclaim, “Keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll see you next year.” It was my way of keeping at bay the dreaded: “Mr. Goldfarb, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

My mind, on the other hand, seems less willing to yield to discipline, behaving as though it has a mind of its own. I have dabbled in internet “brain games,” solving algebraic problems flashing past and rerouting virtual trains to avoid crashes. I’ve audited classes at a university, and participated in a neurofeedback assessment of my brain’s electrical impulses. But these are only occasional diversions, never approaching my determination to remain physically fit as I move deeper into old age.

Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.

Some of my healthiest friends carry themselves as victims abused by time. They see life as a parade of disappointments: aches and ailments, confusing technology, children who don’t visit, hurried doctors.

Other friends, many whose aching knees and hips are the least of their physical problems, find comfort in their ability to accept old age as just another stage of life to deal with. I would use the word “heroic” to describe the way they cope with aging as it drains strength from their minds and bodies, though they would quickly dismiss such a term as overstatement.

One such friend recently called from a hospital to tell me a sudden brain seizure had rendered him legally blind. He interrupted me as I began telling him how terribly sorry I was: “Bob, it could have been worse. I could have become deaf instead of blind.”

Despite all the time I spend lifting weights and exercising, I realized I lack the strength to have said those words. It suddenly struck me I’ve paid a price for being a “gym rat.”

If there is one characteristic common to friends who are aging with a graceful acceptance of life’s assaults, it is contentment. Some with life-altering disabilities — my blind friend, another with two prosthetic legs — are more serene and complain less than those with minor ailments. They accept the uncertainties of old age without surrendering to them. A few have told me that the wisdom they’ve acquired over the years has made aging easier to navigate than the chaos of adolescence.

It was clear I lacked, and had to find, the contentment those friends had attained. The hours I spent exercising had given me confidence, but not contentment.

The 30-pound weight I no longer attempt to lift reminds me that not far off is the day when lifting anything, or running anywhere, will be asking too much of my body. My brain would have to become the muscle I counted on to carry me through these final years with the peace and purpose others had found. Aging had to be more than what I saw in a mirror.

But rather than overhauling my life completely in the hopes of undertaking a fundamental change in the way I confronted aging, I felt the place to begin would be to start small, adopting a new approach to situations I encountered every day. A recent lunch provided a perfect example.

I’ve always found it extremely difficult to concentrate when I’m in a noisy setting. At this lunch with a friend in an outdoor restaurant, a landscaper began blowing leaves from underneath the bushes surrounding our table.

Typically, after such a noisy interruption, I would have snapped, “Let’s wait until he’s finished!” then fallen silent. When the roar eventually subsided, my irritation would have drained the conversation of any warmth. The lunch would be remembered for my angry reaction to the clamor, and not for any pleasure it gave the two of us.

It troubled me that even a passing distraction could so easily take me from enjoying lunch with a good friend to a place that gave me no pleasure at all. I wanted this meal to be different and decided to follow the example of friends my age who know they are running out of joyous moments and will let nothing interfere with them. They simply speak louder, accepting the noise for what it is, a temporary irritant.

My years in gyms had taught me to shake off twinges and other distractions, never permitting them to stop my workout or run. I decided to treat the noise as though it were a cramp experienced while doing crunches. I would shake it off instead of allowing it to end our conversation.

I continued talking with my friend, challenging myself to hear the noise, but to hold it at a distance. The discipline so familiar to me in the gym — this time applied to my mind — proved equally effective in the restaurant. It was as though I had taken my brain to a mental fitness center.

Learning to ignore a leaf blower’s roar hardly equips me to find contentment during my passage into ever-deeper old age. But I left the lunch feeling I had at least taken a small first step in changing behavior that stood in the way of that contentment.

Could I employ that same discipline to accept with dignity the inevitable decline awaiting me: frailty, memory lapses, dimming sound and sight, the passing of friends and the looming finish line? Churning legs and a pounding heart had taken me part of the way. But now the challenge was to find that contentment within me. Hoping that contentment will guide me as I make my way along the path yet to be traveled.

Robert W. Goldfarb is a management consultant and the author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?”

Life, Pain, Art, Death

Life, Pain, Art, Death

by | May 21, 2018 | Life & Timing, Movies, Video & Documentary, Music | 0 comments


Scott Hutchinson, singer songwriter, founder of the band, Frightened Rabbit, died earlier this month.

I didn’t know him, nor the band’s music well, so I decided to listen some. I came away feeling a familiar sadness, as I often have, after an artistic soul of uncommon depth leaves this earth all too early, from tragic events, and worst of all, from apparent suicide.

The world is dense with throngs of humanity that deliberately choose paths of danger, conflict, warfare, and high risk behavior. Their deaths hurt people left behind, but those outcomes are part of a calculation they made willingly, knowingly playing the odds.

Then, there are people like Scott Hutchinson, and those like him, who have a calling to create music, art, dance, and deeper voices, to share with the rest of us, while they wrestle inside of themselves to find meaning. They die too soon, and too tragically, of struggle they can never quite calculate.

Edges

Edges

by | Nov 6, 2017 | Life & Timing | 0 comments

We all have strong protective edges. They help us forge on, against friction in life. When challenges arise, or things get difficult, the edges come out of our psychological sheaths, to cut through the resistance. On the other hand, when they become locked behind their bay doors, unable to engage, we struggle with adversity and troubled times.
Conflicted personal, or emotional  relationships can weaken our native edge resources and their strength. What was once our innate strength as human beings, to rise above, fight back, and never give up, gets lost and muddled when emotional conflict moves in to the neighborhood. Emotion, is the one area that needs its own health, independent of all others, in order to support all the rest of our survival systems. Gain the edges, and you rise to challenges. Lose the edges, and you lose your power.

The Sole Pursuit of Selfhood Leaves Out Deeper Fulfillment

The Sole Pursuit of Selfhood Leaves Out Deeper Fulfillment

by | Sep 19, 2017 | Life & Timing, Psychology | 0 comments

I‘m on board with David Brooks here.
Maslow was a great thinker, but the pursuit of self as the highest goal, which has spawned the “me” generation, has always struck me as a cold and removed way of living. Selfish, in more pedantic terms. Especially when juxtaposed within a marriage or close romantic relationship.
Life is lonely enough when you really get down to it. Only a deep union with others, the type that is completely unattached to self focused goals, and one we embrace with no weighty fears of failure, can fight off that loneliness.

By David Brooks

I’d like to offer you two models of human development.

The first is what you might call The Four Kinds of Happiness. The lowest kind of happiness is material pleasure, having nice food and clothing and a nice house. Then there is achievement, the pleasure we get from earned and recognized success. Third, there is generativity, the pleasure we get from giving back to others. Finally, the highest kind of happiness is moral joy, the glowing satisfaction we get when we have surrendered ourselves to some noble cause or unconditional love.

The second model is Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. In this conception, we start out trying to satisfy our physical needs, like hunger or thirst. Once those are satisfied we move up to safety needs, economic and physical security. Once those are satisfied we can move up to belonging and love. Then when those are satisfied we can move up to self-esteem. And when that is satisfied we can move up to the pinnacle of development, self-actualization, which is experiencing autonomy and living in a way that expresses our authentic self.

The big difference between these two schemes is that The Four Kinds of Happiness moves from the self-transcendence individual to the relational and finally to the transcendent and collective. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, on the other hand, moves from the collective to the relational and, at its peak, to the individual. In one the pinnacle of human existence is in quieting and transcending the self; in the other it is liberating and actualizing the self.

Most religions and moral systems have aimed for self-quieting and self-transcendence, figuring that the great human problem is selfishness. But around the middle of the 20th century, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and others aimed to liberate and enlarge the self. They brought us the self-esteem movement, humanistic psychology, and their thinking is still very influential today.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs moves from the collective to the relational and at its peak, to the individual. Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

For example, on Tuesday one of America’s leading marriage researchers, Eli J. Finkel, publishes an important book called “The All-or-Nothing Marriage.” It’s quite a good book, full of interesting insights on contemporary marriage. But it conceives marriage completely within the Maslow frame.

In this conception, a marriage exists to support the individual self-actualization of each of the partners. In a marriage, the psychologist Otto Rank wrote, “one individual is helping the other to develop and grow, without infringing too much on the other’s personality.” You should choose the spouse who will help you elicit the best version of yourself. Spouses coach each other as each seeks to realize his or her most authentic self.

“Increasingly,” Finkel writes, “Americans view this definition as a crucial component of the marital relationship.”

Now I confess, this strikes me as a cold and detached conception of marriage. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self.

In the Four Happiness frame, by contrast, marriage can be a school in joy. You might go into marriage in a fit of passion, but, if all works out, pretty soon you’re chopping vegetables side by side in the kitchen, chasing a naked toddler as he careens giddily down the hall after bath -time, staying up nights anxiously waiting for your absent teenager, and every once in a while looking out over a picnic table at the whole crew on some summer evening, feeling a wave of gratitude sweep over you, and experiencing a joy that is greater than anything you could feel as a “self.”

And it all happens precisely because the self melded into a single unit called the marriage. Your identity changed. The distinction between giving and receiving, altruism and selfishness faded away because in giving to the unit you are giving to a piece of yourself.

It’s not just in marriage, but in everything, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has always pointed toward a chilly, unsatisfying version of self-fulfillment. Most people experience their deepest sense of meaning not when they have placidly met their other needs, but when they come together in crisis.

Rabbi Wolfe Kelman’s life was fraught with every insecurity when he marched with Dr. King in Selma, but, he reported: “We felt connected, in song, to the transcendental, the ineffable. We felt triumph and celebration. We felt that things change for the good and nothing is congealed forever. That was a warming, transcendental spiritual experience. Meaning and purpose and mission were beyond exact words.”

In one of his many interesting data points, Finkel reports that starting around 1995, both fathers and mothers began spending a lot more time looking after their children. Today, parents spend almost three times more hours in shared parenting than parents in 1975 did. Finkel says this is an extension of the Maslow/Rogers pursuit of self-actualization.

I’d say it’s evidence of a repudiation of it. I’d say many of today’s parents are moving away from the me-generation ethos and toward covenant, fusion and surrendering love.

None of us lives up to our ideals in marriage or anything else. But at least we can aim high. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs too easily devolves into self-absorption. It’s time to put it away.

Need A Happiness Boost? Spend Your Money To Buy Time, Not More Stuff

by | Apr 3, 2017 | Life & Timing, Personal Improvement | 0 comments

Mowing the lawn can be good exercise, and is fun for some people. But others who find themselves squeezed for time might find the luxury of paying someone else to do it to be of much more value than buying more stuff.

Of course, this assumes you have enough disposable income to even have choices.

The problem with American culture within those who have fair amounts of disposable income, is the preoccupation with consumption and fleeting pleasures, as opposed to more thoughtful spending, with an investment factor in mind. Tangible and intangible.

Its a shame actually that many people don’t recognize the benefits of deeper psychological and spiritual rewards from their spending decisions, beyond material gains, or hedonistic pleasures.

Need A Happiness Boost? Spend Your Money To Buy Time, Not More Stuff

Courtesy of Allison Aubrey, NPR

Money can’t buy happiness, right? Well, some researchers beg to differ. They say it depends on how you spend it.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that when people spend money on time-saving services such as a house cleaner, lawn care or grocery delivery, it can make them feel a little happier. By comparison, money spent on material purchases — aka things — does not boost positive emotions the way we might expect.

Read full article on NPR>