Always Carry a Notebook

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

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Roger Ailes wrote a book many years ago entitled, You Are the Message. This was long before he became the head of Fox News and, in fact, long before he developed a taste for blondes. It was after the work he’d done on The Mike Douglas Show for which he’d earned an Emmy®. Anyway, I read the book in 1989, and of all its many quotables, this one stood out:

Always carry a notebook. Take notes selectively. Take notes continuously throughout the day. It helps you to listen more effectively. Keep a notebook or a diary with you at all times and jot down ideas or important bits of information from phone conversations, meetings, etc. Writing improves memory and accumulating notes gives you a quick reference source and cuts down on the number of loose scraps of paper in your office.

I once worked for a man who took his own spiral-bound, four-subject notebook everywhere. Jokingly, he picked it one time as we were headed out for a coffee break, saying,

“Joe, just in case you say something worth remembering.”

LOL, but his point was that opportunities for brainstorming will present themselves whenever and wherever the mind allows them. Carry a notebook and capture thoughts and ideas.

I came of age in the information revolution. Well, to be fair, BEFORE the information revolution (I am that old). I so wanted to embrace the idea of a personal computer for note taking and of course for word processing. As an accountant, I embraced the spreadsheet immediately. As a manager, I embraced the idea of back-office process improvement through the use of technology. But I always carried a paper notebook. Always.

[this post was originally published in 2013]

Posted in Business, General Musings, List Making | Comments Off on Always Carry a Notebook

Want to Let Go of Someone Else’s Addiction? The Answer is Detachment.

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

I wrote this post many years ago when in the midst of training to become a mental health counselor. It is worth another read. 

In my own life I have struggled with a close family member who drinks too much. And that person was once one of the two most important people in my life. It comes up in my practice a lot and it pains me to hear stories similar to my own.

Years ago, the advice I received was to detach as quickly as I could. It wasn’t easy and frankly, it continues to be hard, but it was needed if only to save my marriage and to safeguard my own well-being.

You see, the threat is that you will take on their addiction. The closer the family member, the more likely it is. You will begin to feel the upset that alcohol brings when it has become an addiction. The same is true of drugs. My own daughter struggled with drug addiction until the day she died from an overdose. I had detached but, believe me, to this day I wonder if there was anything else I should have done.

For friends and family of a person dealing with alcohol or drug addiction, detachment can be a difficult concept to grasp. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) stresses the notion of “detaching but with love.” In the end, this is the idea that the family has to let go of their loved one’s problem.

They alone must suffer the consequences. Detachment is a way to give permission to let them experience those consequences. Your duty is to circle the wagons around your own well-being and that of your marriage, job, friends, etc.

The Importance of Detachment

If you’ve dealt with someone’s progressive alcoholism (severe alcohol use disorder) or drug use, it might be hard to imagine finding happiness while the substance misuse continues. This is especially true when you have tried everything possible to keep the situation from growing worse. But this may be a critical mistake; after all, your happiness is YOUR responsibility and cannot be tied to someone else’s idea of what it means to be happy.

The stress and exhaustion associated with caring for someone with an addiction can be overwhelming. It may lead to anxiety, depression, and unhealthy behaviors or unsafe living conditions for your family.

The reality of living with alcoholism or any other addiction often means dealing with one crisis after another. Undoubtedly, you often feel like you’re constantly in rescue mode. Learning to detach relieves you of the responsibility to protect them.

Those who take part in AA long enough come to realize that detachment is important for a family’s emotional well-being. It also helps you understand that there is no way for you to control the addiction. In the end, it is only your own behavior you can control, right?

Kind Nor Unkind

Detachment does not mean you stop loving the person.

“Detachment is neither kind nor unkind. It does not imply judgment or condemnation of the person or situation from which we are detaching. It is simply a means that allows us to separate ourselves from the adverse effects that another person’s alcoholism can have on our lives.”

Avoid Infantilizing

Detachment is also about honoring the addict’s autonomy. Weird as that may seem, honoring someone else’s choices is a starting point. And it is especially true of those closest to us, for whom we feel the immediate pain of choices not of our own making. But if you step in and essentially deny the addict’s autonomy you are rendering them as an infant. This is what we call “infantilizing.” Never good.

Boundaries are important in all aspects of human interaction. It is our way, as human beings, of drawing lines in the sand. “This far and no further,” we might say. Think here of the notion of “tough love,” which parents will know all too well. When dealing with minor children, tough love is our duty in a manner of speaking, for without it, a child will run amok. Love, tough or otherwise, is our way of messaging approval or disapproval of behavior. When you criticize a child, you “lead with love,” don’t you?

With adult alcoholics (or drug abusers) the situation is different. We aren’t their parents. We aren’t their watchdogs. They have autonomy. They have what we call, “agency.” They get to do what they want to do, right?

But that doesn’t mean we must stand silently and in effect message some kind of approval. Not at all.

Detachment demonstrates that you don’t like or approve of their behavior. It is stepping back from all the problems associated with their addiction and stopping any attempts to solve them. You still care, but it is best for everyone involved if you take care of yourself first.

Many times, family members find that they have become too involved with addictive behavior. AA teaches those closest to the addict to “put the focus on ourselves” and not on the addict. Back to that notion of “circling the wagons.”

And the most effective circling is accomplished by these means:

  • Avoid the suffering caused by someone else’s actions.
  • Don’t allow yourself to be abused or misused during recovery.
  • Avoid doing things for them that they can do for themselves (aka, enabling).
  • Don’t use manipulation in an attempt to change their behavior. It won’t work.
  • Don’t cover up their mistakes. This is especially true with alcoholics who engage in abusive behavior, such as physical violence and nasty outbursts.
  • Avoid preventing crises, especially if they’re inevitable. Such crises could be the “wake-up call” they need.

For example, if your family member consistently shows up late for work and such tardiness becomes a habit, detachment teaches you that it’s not your responsibility to cover for them. It also applies to making excuses and trying to fix situations.

By way of another example, let’s say the addict engages in threatening phone calls and (of late) abusive texting and emailing. Detachment teaches us to NOT ENGAGE. You could if you wanted to, simply block them, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Someday they may actually wake up and you will want to know about it. Instead, delete the texts, the emails, the voicemails. Do not respond. Do not engage (except maybe and only maybe by texting back, “I love you and am ignoring this message.”)

By putting the focus back on yourself, by circling the wagons around your home and your marriage and your kids, you protect yourself and others from abusive behavior.

The dirty little secret here is that addicts are like pigs in mud. You know the saying, “don’t wrestle with pigs in the mud. Everyone gets dirty but the pigs love it!” By not engaging, indeed by detaching, you’re taking some of the power away from them so they’re not able to manipulate you.

Ideally, detaching from this person will hopefully help them see how their negative behavior affects everyone around them. As Alcoholics Anonymous teaches:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

Does It Really Help?

In a word? Yes, it does.

Now, you might be concerned about what happens to your loved one after you detach.  Maybe you think all of the things you did over the years to “help” will have been wasted. Or, you might have fears about what crisis — jail, hospitalization, death, etc. — may be next.

Your concerns are valid and show your love and dedication to a person dealing with addiction. However, you must put yourself and your family—especially if that family includes children—first.

“Detachment helps families look at their situations realistically and objectively, thereby making intelligent decisions possible.”

Know this: You are NOT responsible for another person’s disease or recovery from it. Remember what I said about autonomy. They are responsible.

This is very difficult, and, on the clearheaded side of addiction, you probably know what should or should not happen, but this logic may be lost on the addict. They need to want to change themselves and find the help needed to do that.

Said another way, they need to find their “rock bottom.” And plenty of them do. But they must experience that bottom all by themselves.

Your goal is to be there when they do need you and to be mentally, emotionally, and spiritually strong when they’re ready for recovery. When you learn to detach, you can find relief from much pain, stress, and anxiety, and realize that you deserve to treat yourself right.

This will not happen overnight. It requires time, a lot of patience and love, and support to help you along the way.

As they say in the program, “It’s simple, but it ain’t easy.”

Posted in Addiction, Counseling Concepts, Depression, People (in general), People in general | Comments Off on Want to Let Go of Someone Else’s Addiction? The Answer is Detachment.

Let Us Get Serious About the Common Project

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

I don’t know about you but ever since Nietzsche decreed that God was dead, I have been struck by how people have become their own little universes. Which is to say, they belong to nothing other than themselves (to wit, “me, myself, and I”) and how their lives have come to lack any sense of purpose. At least with God, I have the purpose of serving Him as best I can. Serving just me is rather banal.

Katherine Boyle writes below about we have become a “treatment-resistant-Prozac-Nation.”

I could not agree more.

She goes on to say how the practice of believing in something – anything, that is, other than oneself – can pull us out. And how asking AI (artificial intelligence, by way of something called ChatGPT) will send us the wrong direction.

It is her writing by way of Bari Weiss’s site (which I heartily recommend to my readers).

Let us get serious about purpose. Let us try and get back to a “common project.”

The most memorable business pitch I ever attended began with a young man crying. His company was raising a modest amount of capital to build drones that could protect American troops in battle. The pitch was unremarkable in the first few minutes, until the founder mentioned his family and friends who had served in Iraq. He then stopped speaking, was quiet for a few seconds, and started to sob uncontrollably.

I was in grad school at the time and had been instructed by a female professor never to offer to make men coffee, because women don’t do that anymore. But when he exited the room to compose himself, the rest of us sat in silence for what must have been 30 seconds, until I spoke—to ask if anyone needed a fresh cup. When the founder returned, he did a forceful presentation of the business, even though he left without funding that day.

None of us ever discussed what happened—even immediately after the meeting—until I bumped into the founder almost a decade later, and he alluded to “the worst pitch he ever did.”

“No, no,” I responded. “It was the best.”

That company now employs several hundred people and is valued at a couple billion dollars. I was an intern on the sidelines that day, but unlike any meeting I’ve ever witnessed, I remember the details of that one. The chair I squirmed in. The time of day: one p.m. The patterned blouse I stared at when looking down as he sobbed. Because even though that day ended with a rejection email, it was clear that this entrepreneur didn’t care what anyone thought. He knew his calling. His purpose.

Purpose is on the decline these days. A recent Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the constants that used to define our national character—have eroded in importance in the last 25 years. Only 38 percent of poll respondents said patriotism was very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998. Of religion, 39 percent said it was very important, down from 62 percent.

Beyond God and country, a desire to have children and community involvement plummeted by double digits, too. Meanwhile, the once universal value of “tolerance for others” has declined from 80 percent to 58 percent in the last four years alone. We’re replacing “Love thy neighbor” with “Get off my lawn.” The only “value” that has inflated in recent years is the one that can be easily measured: money.

Pollsters described the findings as “surprising” and “dramatic.” Twitter found them dire, an acknowledgement of America’s great sadness. Some researchers responded with disbelief, saying the poll must have been flawed to yield such swift changes.

But do these plunging red lines really come as such a surprise?

It’s not hard to see why Americans are losing a sense of membership in any kind of mutual enterprise, especially since 2020, when the steepest drops in sentiment occurred. Between global lockdowns, a fentanyl epidemic, school shootings, seemingly inevitable great-power wars, and a looming recession, Americans are losing hope. It’s the sort of poll that if America were your best friend or your child, you’d urge her to seek help.

The decline in traditional values isn’t particularly new. The things that make people feel as though their presence matters, such as civic-mindedness and religious observance, have declined in tandem. From Bowling Alone in the late ’90s to Coming Apart in 2012 to a slew of recent “End of America” essays from every major publication, researchers believe these trends are accelerating further. This decline in civic belief and religiosity predated the mobile internet. We can’t blame the phones this time.

For a while, we tried in vain to replace the default traditional values with something equally noble or even more sophisticated. Classical liberalism, which upheld individual rights and liberty until we started hating half of the individuals in this country. New Atheism had a good run until “trust the science” became a meme. There was meditation. Yoga retreats. Eating clean. Worshipping politics and politicians. Chasing influence.

But it turns out none of those things filled the national void either. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t see story after story about teenage depression and midlife crisis depression and deaths of despair. We have become a treatment-resistant Prozac Nation.

Increasingly, the void is being filled with. . . you. A relentless focus on the self that tells us you are enough. When I asked ChatGPT for the origin of the phrase “You are enough,” it told me the saying is so ubiquitous it can’t give me an answer.

I’m not an expert in purpose, but I am in the business of finding it, in determined individuals who have a deep sense of why they’re put on this earth. I meet entrepreneurs at the earliest stage, often when they have only a team and a pipe dream. Sometimes, it’s a new type of satellite or a viral app; other times, trust me, it’s the most boring idea you’ve ever heard.

But if you talk to the most storied investors about what they’re searching for in the people who will build the Disneys or the Apples or the Teslas of the future, they’re not interviewing the person. Often, they’re not even listening to the idea. They’re diving for how deeply—how obsessively—someone believes in something greater than themselves. This sense is so profound that sometimes it makes you uncomfortable. It makes you squirm in your chair. But it makes you feel something.

With this type of purpose—a calling—comes action. Practice. Silicon Valley’s infectious optimism is not because the ideas are all that mind-blowing. Many solid companies have mundane missions: software that helps salespeople sell stuff! Cybersecurity companies that stop phishing attacks! And yet, that practice of building, of doing and believing in something gives people the purpose that pulls them out of the malaise that is modern life.

And maybe that’s the secret of purpose. You don’t need to build a billion-dollar company. You don’t need to employ hundreds of people. You just need to act, and with that action comes purpose—a reason to get out of bed in the morning and build.

For too long, we’ve been told we can be anything, do anything, and that all criticisms of that anything is an attack on our identity and very being. That self-love and self-care are all we need to thrive. And yet, we’ve never seemed more miserable, never been more lost, and never less confident in what we stand for.

Maybe one day the all-knowing AI will tell us the truth:

Find a purpose outside yourself. You are not enough.

© 2023 Bari Weiss

Posted in Counseling Concepts, Depression, General Musings, State of the Nation | 1 Comment

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson is the author of a terrific New York Times bestselling book entitled The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. In his book, Mr. Manson provides the reader with raw and no-frills advice on how to live your best life and how to stop trying to be “positive” all the time so that we can become better, happier people. For what it’s worth, I have made this into a handout that I give all my clients.

So, here are 25 quotes taken from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. Enjoy!

  1. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
  2. To not give a f*ck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still act (also see Rule 9).
  3. Not giving a f*ck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. (Russo: aren’t we all … different?)
  4. If you find yourself consistently giving too many f*cks about trivial shit that bothers you, chances are you don’t have much going on in your real life to give a legitimate f*ck about. And that’s your real problem.
  5. Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another. (Russo: Indeed, life is chaos. Never forget that.)
  6. Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
  7. Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many f*cks in situations where f*cks do not deserve to be given.
  8. This is what “self-improvement” is all about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a f*ck about. Because when you give better f*cks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
  9. Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
  10. A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems.
  11. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
  12. In my life, I have given a f*ck about many people and many things. I have also not given a f*ck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the f*cks not given that made all the difference.
  13. The fact is people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
  14. You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a f*ck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a f*ck about something else. It really is that simple. It just isn’t easy.
  15. If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
  16. When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness.
  17. Being wrong exposes us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
  18. Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.
  19. We can only be truly successful at something that we’re willing to fail at.
  20. You may salivate at the thought of a problem-free life full of everlasting happiness and eternal compassion, but back here on earth the problems never cease.
  21. It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
  22. Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
  23. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.
  24. The key to living a good life is not giving a f*ck about more; it’s giving a f*ck about less, giving a f*ck about only what is true and immediate and important.
  25. What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? (See quote number 1 and read this whole list over!)
Posted in Anxiety, Counseling Concepts, General Musings, Positive Mental Attitude | Comments Off on The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

ESG – The Biggest Ruse of Our Time?

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

 

 

 

 

Is ESG the biggest ruse of our time?

Perhaps.

Next to the COVID lockdowns which, in my opinion, will eventually prove to have permanently damaged an entire generation of young people, I think that it is.

This article is the work of Rupa Subramanya, a reporter for Bari Weiss’ Free Press. It is NOT my work and I claim no authorship. I am posting it here for my own reference and as a continual reminder that things like ESG have gotten way out of hand and may very well undermine the long-term viability of American companies who have stopped focusing on their raison d’être.

To wit, as Milton Friedman, with whose work I was trained in my bachelor’s degree in business many years ago, famously said:

“The business of business is business.”

Indeed – it ought to be, but as you read what is set forth below, increasingly it is not. That is incredibly stupid and potentially disastrous.

She writes:

Do not get Dorian Deome started on the bureaucrats investing his life savings in this trendy, newfangled thing they call environmental, social, governance, or ESG, funds. He blows up. Which is dangerous. Deome suffered a massive heart attack in May 2020 at age 38. He told me:

“My heart literally skips a beat when I think about how my money is used to fund actual racism.”

He meant diversity, inclusion, and equity training programs; racially calibrated corporate boards; the obsession in human resources departments with elevating marginalized voices, often at the expense of white men like Deome—and all the other things that make for ESG compliance.

But he has zero pull when it comes to how his retirement funds are invested. He’s a cog in the machine: Deome lives in Olympia, Washington, and processes unemployment insurance claims for Washington State, for which he is paid about $43,000 yearly. The Department of Retirement Systems decides where to invest the $178 billion it oversees. And Washington, with its Democratic governor and state legislature, loves ESG.

In fact, in 2019, the Washington State Investment Board, which oversees state employees’ pension funds, hired a sustainability officer to “integrate ESG factors and metrics as part of the investment process,” WSIB spokesman Chris Phillips said.

And yes, the money is a big part of this too, at least for Deome. “I definitely am concerned that my retirement savings is never going to really grow,” he said.

Same for Cindy Williams, in Phoenix.

Williams was a lawyer with the Veterans Administration; now she does insurance coding for a private hospital, and she’s worried her federal pension and 401(k) are going to underperform, because both funds are big on ESG.

It’s not that she’s against the asset managers who handle her company’s pension fund investing in green energy. “I have no objection to saving the planet,” said Williams, who is 62 and lives with her mother in a retirement community. “I just don’t want to lose my money. They’re more concerned about their idea of improving the world than they are with whether it actually improves my life.”

In 2022, eight of the top ten actively managed ESG funds in the United States fared worse than the S&P 500’s 14.8% decline—compounding long-percolating fears that ESG is a ruse.

When those fears first emerged, there were just a few voices willing to stick their necks out: Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent venture capitalist, took to CNBC in February 2020 to call it a “complete fraud”; Tariq Fancy, who used to oversee ESG investing at BlackRock, the powerful asset management firm, published a blog post in August 2021 arguing ESG was just a label the firm slapped on funds to charge higher fees. But they were outliers.

Over the past several months, however, the momentum has picked up. Now a growing cadre of executives, lawyers, and Republican officials has taken to lashing out against what it views as social justice parading as a serious investment strategy. The backlash reflects a growing sense that millions of Americans—those who do not subscribe to the new orthodoxy around DEI, the climate, and “stakeholder capitalism”—feel ignored by, and even at war with, the institutions charged with protecting their interests.

A Form of Extortion

Former attorney general William Barr, who served under Donald Trump, told me ESG is “a form of extortion” that is forcing “companies to take particular actions whether or not those actions are in the financial interests of shareholders.”

What is most disturbing about ESG, Barr told me, is the way it’s being implemented.

“It’s completely non-transparent,” he explained. “And that, to me—that’s the worst. That is affecting a lot of decisions in corporate America in a non-transparent way, because of the political predilections, or the policy predilections, of a small group of people who are not using their own money but leveraging off other people’s money.”

It started in the early aughts.

“The actual birthdate of ESG investing will be hard to pin down,” Terrence Keeley, a former managing director at BlackRock, told me.

At the time, it was just some activist investors who wanted to talk about “long-term value investing,” Keeley said.

That meant thinking about rising sea levels, rising temperatures, disappearing species, and climate refugees to assess the financial risks—and opportunities—that came with all that.

The challenge was getting other people to pay attention.

Former attorney general Bill Barr says of ESG: “It’s completely non-transparent and that, to me—that’s the worst.”

Enter Paul Clements-Hunt.

Clements-Hunt had been a tabloid journalist in London before pivoting to environmental consulting in Bangkok, before making his way, in 2000, to the United Nations’ Environment Programme Finance Initiative in Geneva.

His goal was to spur big, wide-ranging action on climate change by incentivizing the people with the most money—the asset managers, the people in charge of the biggest pension funds, and the sovereign wealth funds and stock exchanges—to take seriously the dangers on our horizon.

“Our standpoint was this is not about ethics,” Clements-Hunt told me. “Our standpoint was investors should look at new risks, and while understanding those risks, they then begin to appreciate new market opportunities as well, whether that’s in clean energy or water or sanitation or biodiversity protection,” he said. “It was really a fundamental business approach, and it was removed from morals.”

In the early years—in 2001, 2002, and 2003 the focus was not just on the environment but occupational safety. Eventually, that morphed into “governance”; later they threw in “social,” as in social issues. It was kind of a catchall.

The question was how to package it—make it stick in people’s minds.

One day in the spring of 2004, Clements-Hunt recalled in a Medium post, his colleagues and he were in his office when they coined the three-letter acronym that they hoped would click with investors. That would lend the movement a hint of cool.

In June 2004, the United Nations published a report called “Who Cares Wins” that introduced “ESG” to the world.

For years, no one in finance paid attention. Most people in New York, London, Shanghai, and Hong Kong had no idea what ESG meant.

Then came the 2008 financial crisis. The credibility of banks evaporated. Suddenly, so-called sustainable investing sounded like a good idea. “I think they saw that to regain trust, they had to be more active in what became the ESG space,” Clements-Hunt told me.

By 2012, asset managers had funneled $4 trillion into the ESG space. Over the next several years, that figure would jump at a clip of roughly $1 trillion per year.

Then, in June 2017, the new president, Donald Trump, pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords, arguing it hurt American business. Believing Washington, DC, had turned its back on the environment, Democrats across the country picked up the baton. Suddenly, governors and controllers overseeing multibillion-dollar pension funds in blue states viewed themselves as the country’s last best hope to “save the planet,” and they made it clear to asset managers that they wanted their money invested only in pro-ESG companies.

“The mandate they gave them was basically, ‘We’re not going to do business with you unless you adopt a firm, wide commitment to events and goals like the Paris Climate Accord, and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and diversity, equity, and inclusion standards,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the head of Strive Asset Management in Columbus, Ohio, told me. Strive portrays itself as the anti-ESG asset manager—its website says the company seeks “to restore the voices of everyday citizens by leading companies to focus on excellence over politics.”

It was around this time—late 2017, early 2018—that “ESG” started to become a thing, with the number of Google searches for “ESG” starting to tick up.

The rise of ESG also coincided with a reassessment, at the highest echelons of corporate America, of the meaning of capitalism. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, a group of the nation’s leading CEOs, issued a statement signaling a shift away from traditional “shareholder capitalism”—which focuses on the bottom line—to “stakeholder capitalism,” which considers the interests not only of investors but those of the wider world. The statement endorsed diversity and inclusion and called for “embracing sustainable practices.”

By 2021, asset managers around the globe had plowed $18.4 trillion into “ESG-related” investments. And by 2026, asset managers are expected to invest nearly $34 trillion in ESG funds globally.

As Paul Clements-Hunt told me, ESG is now “baked into the DNA” of the global financial services industry, and countless companies are scrambling to burnish their ESG scores.

Who has the best score? That’s complicated, given that there’s little consensus about how a company lands a good or bad ESG record, and as a result there are many conflicting ESG rankings.

Insider Monkey, a financial information website, says the best ESG company is Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Investor’s Business Daily insists Columbus, Ohio–based Worthington Industries, which builds the propane tanks in barbecues, is number one. Most ESG rankings have a thing for Apple, even though it’s been accused of relying on slave labor to build its iPhones in China.

Just as ESG was taking off, the skeptics started popping up—including Tariq Fancy.

For 15 years, Fancy ping-ponged around the world—from Merrill Lynch in New York to Credit Suisse in Silicon Valley, to a social media marketing company in Shanghai. He made boatloads. After watching a friend die of cancer, he moved home to Toronto and launched a nonprofit that helps poor kids learn. That piqued the interest of BlackRock executives, who, in 2018, offered him a job: Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing.

BlackRock, of course, is not just another Wall Street titan. Being one of the Big Three asset managers, along with Vanguard and State Street, it oversees more than $10 trillion in other people’s money. It is invested in thousands of companies around the world. (That includes major stakes in Apple, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, Disney, and almost every major energy company.) It is more valuable than the economies of Germany and Japan—combined. When BlackRock says it cares about environmental, social, and governance issues, CEO Larry Fink announced in his 2019 letter to the CEOs of every company BlackRock invests in—that is felt in boardrooms in every major city on Earth.

In the months leading up to Fink’s announcement, BlackRock built its ESG team—bringing on board, among others, Tariq Fancy.

But by the end of his first year at BlackRock, in 2019, Fancy was having doubts about ESG. That came to a head while he was on a BlackRock jet flying from Zurich to Madrid to attend a conference.

“I had a disagreement with some folks from the sales team, who, it was obvious to me, viewed the mechanics of how the funds work as irrelevant,” Fancy said. What they cared about, he said, was selling as many of these funds as possible. He called ESG “green paint on the existing system.”

He was not alone.

Carson Block, founder of San Francisco-based Muddy Waters Research, which conducts research into publicly held companies, said: “ESG investing, from the fund managers to the managements of the companies themselves, is almost entirely a giant grift.”

All ESG does, Block said, is repackage existing funds.

“ESG is just bullshit tweaks at the margins.”

Indeed, between 2019 and mid-2022, at least 65 funds were “repackaged” into ESG funds with an eye toward drawing more investors and charging higher fees.

It’s unclear what a company must do for it to be part of an ESG fund. Broadly, it should strive for decarbonization, especially if it’s in the energy and utilities sector. Its board should include at least one woman, one member of a racial minority, and one representative from the LGBTQ+ community. (ESG enthusiasts are at pains to show that diversity equals higher margins.) It should definitely not invest in Russia.

But there’s a lack of concrete proposals, benchmarks, and numbers.

“It’s important to understand the multiple ways that environmental, social, and governmental factors can create value, but when it comes to inspiring those around you, what will you really be talking about?” a 2019 McKinsey report asked unironically. “Surprisingly, that depends.”

Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, said in an email:

“ESG is a scam, an idea that was born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy, and sold with sophistry. The inhabitants of this space are either useful idiots, who think that they are making a difference to society when they are, in fact, just pushing problems behind curtains, or feckless knaves, who use it to make money. The only healthy endgame for ESG is another acronym: RIP. And it will not be a moment too soon.”

The big question looming over ESG is whether it’s legal, given that asset managers like BlackRock have a fiduciary duty to maximize investment return.

Tariq Fancy has his doubts. So does Dorian Deome, in Olympia.

“Pension funds hold $40 trillion in assets across the United States,” Jed Rubenfeld, a former Yale Law School professor who now advises Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive Asset Management, told me. “And they’re very important. They’re people’s retirement money. That’s what they’re going to live off when they get older and can’t work anymore. And pension funds are under a special legal duty to not do anything with pensioners’ and retirees’ money other than use it to try to increase financial benefits.”

Red states are pushing back.

In an August 2022 letter from 19 Republican state attorneys general to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the attorneys general hinted they might sue BlackRock: “The time has come for BlackRock to come clean on whether it actually values our states’ most valuable stakeholders, our current and future retirees, or risk losses even more significant than those caused by BlackRock’s quixotic climate agenda.”

Last week, congressional Republicans passed a resolution that would overturn a Department of Labor rule allowing pension funds to consider climate change and other factors when choosing companies to invest in. President Biden has promised to veto the resolution. Republicans lack the votes to overturn a veto, but they promise this is just the beginning.

They are fueled, in no small part, by a growing chorus of critics who insist ESG funds make for bad investing.

Nor do those funds generally achieve their goals. On the contrary, a 2021 Columbia University and London School of Economics study showed that 147 American companies that were part of ESG funds had worse compliance records when it came to labor and environmental rules than companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios.

“It’s clear to me now that my work at BlackRock only made matters worse by leading the world into a dangerous mirage, an oasis in the middle of the desert that is burning valuable time,” Fancy said in his August 2021 blog post. “We will eventually come to regret this decision.”

So far, none of the state attorneys general have sued anyone. For starters, many Republicans oppose state governments mucking around in their business. And it’s unclear whether there are any grounds for a lawsuit.

Which hints at the real problem, Fancy and Terrence Keeley say: ESG doesn’t do much.

If state attorneys general could point to investments or policies that combat climate change at the expense of investor returns, they’d have a case. But how do you show that?

Better to create the impression of sweeping change—and burnish your brand—than do anything that might change the world and get you in legal trouble.

In October, BlackRock issued a statement clarifying its position on ESG. “We do not dictate how clients should invest,” the statement informed readers. “We offer a wide array of choice.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, for his part, is riding the anti-ESG wave. In February, the self-styled anti-woke investor launched his long shot bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Dorian Deome likes Ramaswamy but sees his White House bid as a way to hawk books. He’s into Joe Rogan. He’s an observant Catholic. The politicians—he thinks they’re mostly a joke. Like ESG.

Understand he’s all for saving the Earth from the climate apocalypse and correcting historical wrongs.

But this didn’t feel like that, he said.

After his heart attack, he spent several weeks in the hospital. He watched the George Floyd protests from his hospital bed, and he scrolled through all the tweets and retweets and videos about America’s racial reckoning, and it felt angry and vindictive.

His doctor diagnosed him with permanent advanced heart failure. He had his doubts Deome would make it to 50. He definitely didn’t think he’d live to 65, when Deome would normally collect his retirement savings. Deome could cash in now—Washington State offers “medical retirement”—but he’d get a lot less. The big thing for him was ESG, and what the state was doing with his money.

So, he was going to fight it the only way he could—tweet angrily, be a voice in the wilderness.

“There are other people in the agency who have mortgages, ambitions, careers,” he said, referring to the Employment Security Department, where he worked. He didn’t have those goals. Nor did he have a family, or a girlfriend or kids. His father died in 2021 after a brief battle with Lewy body dementia, and his mother lived nearby, but really it was Deome versus the world, and the world was pushing in on him.

“I also have a bit of ‘damn the torpedoes’ in me,” he said. “In China, they call them nail houses. You can bulldoze all the houses around it, but you can’t get the owner to sell it. I’m one of those nail houses.”

Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press

Posted in Business, State of the Nation | Comments Off on ESG – The Biggest Ruse of Our Time?

A Chinese Spy Balloon Over My House

Posted on February 5, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

 

 

 

What’s that in the sky?

(aren’t weather balloons supposed to look like, well … weather balloons?)

By Walter Kirn (on the floating intruder Montanans weren’t supposed to notice)

As I prepare to do our annual tax return, this piece reminds me how very little we get back in terms of value-for-money. I had thought I was paying for a defense department (plus some other things) that would protect us. Of course, with huge deficits and an insurmountable national debt, it is clear now that none of us are paying for anything, not even remotely approaching everything).

And then I wondered: Had the balloon strayed over Texas, how long would it have lasted?

Anyway, this is Kirn’s work, not mine, and is posted here for my enjoyment and that of the few people who read my Blog.

He writes …

Last week, when Montanans looked up at the sky — the fabled “big sky” that gives our state its nickname and remains clear and blue and well worth gazing at—they saw something odd. Some people reported the distant silver sphere to the authorities, it being a tradition in a state that was pacified by vigilantes back in the days of the frontier mining camps to keep an eye peeled for signs of brewing trouble.

It’s lucky that this tradition lingers because the glinting orb, as we all know now, was an enormous Chinese spy balloon hanging above the missile silos and bases that are spread out across the northern plains and help form our nation’s nuclear deterrent.

We weren’t supposed to notice the floating intruder. According to Bloomberg, the federal government was already aware of the balloon, and had been for several days, but they wished to keep the matter on the “downlow” so as not to disrupt a coming meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and high Chinese officials.

Too bad for the bigwigs. They miscalculated, perhaps because they dwell in cities, where people tend to stare into their phones rather than idly admiring the heavens, spotting anomalous aircraft now and then.

Once eagle-eyed Montanans had seen the balloon and Americans came to discover that the country’s military elite was allowing a giant bag of gas hooked to a payload of surveillance gear to bob along unmolested above our nukes and, as it just happened, my house, a minor national panic followed.

My phone lit up with texts from distant friends and my Twitter feed with comments and questions that ranged from the serious to the tensely humorous.

Were my fellow Montanans planning to take up arms against this violator of our airspace? Weren’t we famously cranky and given to self-defense? And what about Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, which, according to the Pentagon, maintains some 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos?

As the balloon peered down upon my state, its intentions uncertain and its presence a bit humiliating, the stereotypes about Montana flowed. Much mention was made of the hit TV show, Yellowstone, which lately has spun off a couple of other shows set deep in the state’s romantic, roaring past. In all of them, Montanans are portrayed as quick to anger, intensely self-sufficient, instinctively hostile to rich and fancy outsiders. In other words, not the sort of people to sink back into their Instagram accounts when confronted with giant airborne trespassers.

I’ll admit it, the comments—and the balloon itself, hovering so smugly out of range of the dusty hunting rifle I own—put me in a touchy mood. For though I was proud we’d spotted the damn thing and raised an alarm that sounded across the continent (neighboring Canada hadn’t made a peep during the craft’s stealthy transit through its time zones), I’d just about had it with all the public attention recently paid to Montana.

Just a few weeks back, I sat down with my morning coffee, opened up the paper and learned that I now live in a quasi-fascist state. Well, by golly, it said so in the paper.

The paper wasn’t a local publication but one from a couple thousand miles away, the New York Times, whose glossy Sunday magazine included a lengthy, illustrated feature with the five-alarm headline How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. To illustrate the state’s alleged swerve toward neo-fascist theocratic rule—a dire development I’d somehow missed—the story included a scary gothic photo, heavily filtered to bring out its dark tones, of a ghostly white cross on a bare hillside reflected in a passing rearview mirror. It also included, of course, a Yellowstone reference and Kevin Costner’s name—right up top, where the search engines would see them.

Since moving to small-town Montana from New York City over 30 years ago, I’d lived through at least a couple of cycles of ominous national coverage of my state. Without going into the details, let me assure you that this article was bunk, as exaggerated as the photo.

But fiction is fact where Montana is concerned, particularly on the country’s coasts, where tales are told about the country’s interior that the country’s interior lacks the clout to counter, much as our guns lack the range to bring down aircraft. Despite our legendary swagger, Montanans are largely helpless against the country’s more powerful forces. The missiles on our prairies aren’t missiles we asked for, just missiles that formidable others wished to plant here. They make us a target, but we don’t control them.

Do I sound defensive? Perhaps I am.

I live in a state with zero big-league sports teams, not a single Fortune 500 corporation, and no national media influence to speak of—unless you count made-up shows about fake ranchers slugging it out in scripted brawls. I’m one of about a million residents, all of whom, no matter their circumstances, are up against the myth-making machines of cities and states of imperial wealth and numbers. And imperial attitudes, dare I say, which emerge in their basic, perennial story about us: those folks from the steppes and mountains are growing restless, including the ones who’ve just moved there to go skiing, who appear to be worse than the ones already living there, who we’ve always found unsettling enough.

When the spy balloon floated across America, the rest of the country got a taste, perhaps, of Montana’s stoic colonial impotence. For days, we could point, but we weren’t allowed to shoot —great-power diplomacy prevented it. Americans may think we’re tough, as Montanans may think they’re tough, but it seems that we’re tough in the way that actors in westerns are, only with the permission of the director, only symbolically. Down went the balloon on Saturday to much applause, but the spectacle was pure cinema by then, like a fistfight on Yellowstone that draws fake blood.

But at least we proud Montanans kept our honor. We spied on the lurking villain, we called the sheriff, we warned our neighbors, we did what we could do. I suspect we’ll continue in this role, watchful vigilantes of the skies. There’s trouble afoot – you can feel it everywhere, particularly if you dwell near nuclear missiles, particularly if you live where there’s no cover—and someone has to stand lookout on the hill.

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | 2 Comments

Seriously, it is Time to Get Serious

Posted on January 17, 2023 by Dr Joseph Russo

This piece, written by Katherine Boyle for Bari Weiss’s Free Press site, caught my eye and my indignation. It reminded me of my sense of a foreboding future back in the mid-2000s as this thing called Facebook emerged on the scene (driven by metrosexual “wunderkind” Jeff Zuckerberg) and its roots in college pranking, sexual utility comparison, and ranking of girls in a dorm (“faces” were compared and then ranked, hence “Face” book, which ought to please the “body positive” idealogues; we couldn’t see the girls’ bodies, only their faces). Fast forward, then, to the pranks of Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”) and nearly everyone’s fascination with crypto-everything. It was of course, a fraud, just like (to me) Facebook is a complete fraud.

Anyway, I am posting it here for my reference and the enjoyment of my readers. It isn’t my work and to that end, I would encourage everyone to take a subscription to Bari’s Free Press site. Journalism (nee’ reporting) isn’t dead … yet.

She writes…

The biggest technology story of this past year involves a fraud perpetrated by a boy. Or so the press would have us believe.

Just months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s unraveling, Fortune Magazine referred to the billionaire as a “trading wunderkind” a latter-day Warren Buffett only with a “goofy facade” and a penchant for fidget spinners. Even after his downfall and subsequent arrest in the Bahamas, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Axios all referred to Bankman-Fried, or SBF, as a disgraced “crypto wunderkind.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times illustrated his boyishness best when interviewing him at the Times’ DealBook Summit last November. “When you read the stories,” Sorkin said, “it sounds like a bunch of kids who were all on Adderall having a sleepover party.”

SBF’s fate will now be decided by the Southern District of New York, but his media charade of aw-shucks interviews and congressional testimony laced with brogrammer idioms built a public persona that we’ve largely come to accept: SBF is just a kid. Indeed, he’s so young that his law school professor parents were involved in his business and political dealings. (In this, they embody the helicopter style of child-rearing favored by nearly the entire Boomer elite.)

The reality, of course, is that SBF is a grown-ass, 30-year-old man. He is twelve years older than many of the men and women we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Twelve years older than the “adults” we encourage to swallow hundreds of thousands of dollars in college debt before even declaring a major. And, if we’re serious about the math, SBF is a mere eight years away from the half-life of the average adult American man, who boasts a provisional life expectancy of only 76 years, according to the CDC. At 38, SBF would have already lived most of his life on Earth.

Perhaps you’ve given little thought to SBF or FTX beyond: WTF!? In which case I applaud your rich social life and sense of restraint.

But the reason this iteration of the time-tested financial fraud plotline matters so much is not because SBF is an exception to the rule of how our culture infantilizes millennials. It’s that he is the rule.

The tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials, or members of the generation just younger (Gen Z), have been treated as hapless children our entire lives. We have been coded as “young” in business, in politics, and in culture. All of which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that millennials are the most childless and least home-owning generation in modern American history. One can’t play house with a spouse or have their own children when they’ve moved back into mom’s, as 17 percent of millennials have.

Aside from the technology sector—which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own—most other sectors of American life are geriatric.

The question is why.

There are many theories—and many would-be culprits. Some believe it’s the fault of the Boomers, who have relentlessly coddled their children, perhaps subconsciously, because they don’t want to pass the baton. Others put the blame on the young, who are either too lazy, too demoralized, or too neurotic to have beaten down the doors of power to demand their turn.

Then again, life expectancy is growing among the healthy and elite in industrialized nations, so perhaps this is all just progress and 70 is the new 40. But one can take little solace in the growing life expectancy of the last 200 years when comparing ourselves to more productive generations that didn’t waste decades on extended adolescence.

Every Independence Day, we’re reminded that on July 4, 1776, the most famous founders of this country were in their early 20s (Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr) and early 30s (Thomas Jefferson). Even grandfatherly George Washington was a mere 44. These days much of our political class, from Bill Clinton (elected president 30 years ago at age 46) to financial leaders like Warren Buffett (92), and Bill Gates (67) who launched Microsoft 48 years ago, are still dominant three and four decades after seizing the reins of power. CEOs of companies listed on the S&P 500 are getting older and staying in their jobs longer, with the average CEO now 58 years old and staying in his or her role 10.8 years versus 7.2 a decade ago. And our political culture looks even more gray: Twenty-five percent of Congress is now over the age of 70 giving us the oldest Congress of any in American history.

The Boomer ascendancy in America and industrialized nations has left us with a global gerontocracy and a languishing generation waiting in the wings. Not only does extended adolescence—what psychologist Erik Erikson first referred to as a “psychosocial moratorium” or the interim years between childhood and adulthood— affect the public life of younger generations, but their private lives as well.

In 1990, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for women and 26 for men, up from 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. By 2021, that number had risen to 28.6 years for women and 30.4 years for men, according to the Census Bureau, with 44 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 44 expected to be single in 2030. Delayed adulthood has had disastrous consequences for procreation in industrialized nations and is at the root of declining fertility and all-but-certain population collapse in dozens of countries, many of which expect the halving of their populations by the end of the century.

“Twenty-five is the new 18,” said The Scientific American in 2017, pointing to research that extended adolescence is a byproduct of affluence and progress in society. Which is why the finiteness of a mid-thirties half-life is such a surprise to those in their 20s and 30s. It runs counter to every meme and piece of advice young people receive about building a career, a family, a company and in turn, a country.

The prevailing wisdom in Western nations is that the ages of 18-29 are a time for extreme exploration—the collecting of memories, friends, partners and most importantly, self-identity. A full twelve years of you! Self-discovery aided by platforms built for broadcasting photos of artisanal cocktails and brunch. And with no expectation for leadership because there will be time for that, a generation can absolve oneself of responsibility for their actions. (Tragically, that was never true for half of the population, which is why we have a generation of extremely accomplished older women, who weren’t really aware how difficult it is to become pregnant at 39.)

The charitable view of extended adolescence is that it emerged as a dominant feature of 21st century life because there were no real alternatives to it. The Great Recession and a cataclysmic real-estate bubble made it impossible for young people to follow their parents’ trajectory of marriage by 30, children, and home ownership. Even worse for the highly credentialed, those well-paying careers promised to the ever-growing managerial class didn’t materialize as widely as promised, resulting in a dearth of real economic power that set back this cohort by a decade.

Rather than holding leaders accountable for poor political and economic policies, the culture compensated with some particularly potent memes: indulge in experiences, go to grad school, or perhaps see the world with increasingly cheap air travel. The price of air travel declined by more than 50 percent from 1980 to 2019, and the number of passport holders in the U.S. shot up from 16 percent of total population to 42 percent in the last two decades, democratizing jet setting and experiential spending in ways previous generations couldn’t fathom. All the while the substantial things in life that compound with time—family formation and homeownership—declined at a rapid pace in the 2010s.

In many ways, the emergence of extended adolescence was designed both to coddle the young and to conceal an obvious fact: that the usual leadership turnover across institutions is no longer happening. That the old are quite happy to continue delaying aging and the finality it brings, while the young dither away their prime years with convenient excuses and even better TikTok videos.

So, in 2023, here we are: in a tri-polar geopolitical order led by septuagenarians and octogenarians. Xi Jinping, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have little in common, but all three are entering their 70s and 80s, orchestrating the final acts of their political careers and frankly, their lives. That we are beholden to the decisions of leaders whose worldviews were shaped by the wars, famines, and innovations of a bygone world, pre-Internet and before widespread mass education, is in part why our political culture feels so stale. That the gerontocracy is a global phenomenon and not just an American quirk should concern us: younger generations who are native to technological strength, modern science and emerging cultural ailments are still sidelined and pursuing status markers they should have achieved a decade ago.

Will we see the American public demand a passing of the torch? Or will we arrive at the opposite conclusion? That we need real experts for these precarious times. That leadership must come from the seasoned and the gray. Anthony Fauci (82) isn’t retiring, he says. Age is relative, don’t you know. And the sins of SBF will lead to even more extreme skepticism of ambitious young founders and leaders, who will be lumped in with a fraudster because of their age. Rather than blame the man for his maleficence, we’ll hear experts clamor for more “adults in the room.”

If you still believe you’re a child at 30, there may be a hot crypto exchange in the Bahamas looking for a buyer.

 

Posted in General Musings, Helicopter Parenting, People in general, State of the Nation, Victimhood | Comments Off on Seriously, it is Time to Get Serious

Living a Meaningful Life

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Dr Joseph Russo

For my students:

Living a Significant Life

When many people discuss what they want to achieve, they talk about being “successful.” In their view of the world, success is the ultimate goal in life. But have you ever thought about taking it one step further and becoming significant? Just take a look around you, and you’ll see that most people use their knowledge, resources, and experience to acquire things and status in an attempt to satisfy their personal desires. This, in their minds, constitutes success. But becoming significant means using your knowledge, resources, and experience to serve and benefit others.

“Success is indeed a journey, but if you stop at [only] adding value to yourself, you miss the reward of significance.”

—John C. Maxwell

For those that truly understand life, success and significance are one and the same. However, for a significant portion of our society, success begins and ends with the achievement of a certain list of personal goals with little regard to the impact on others. These people confuse success with significance, and regardless of their wealth and professional accomplishments, they won’t acquire the true greatness that only comes through making significant contributions to something other than oneself. Success is in the eye of the beholder, whereas significance is a view of you that is held by others.

Moving from success to significance relies completely on motivation. Are you solely seeking to have fun, fame, fortune, and recognition, or are you seeking to serve and benefit others with what you have? Having a genuine desire to help others comes from the heart, not just the head. Significant means something is weighty and highly meaningful, but if we ignore the simple things, we might risk being inauthentic. Everyday things are embedded in significance and making the simple a priority can make a big difference. Pursuing significance takes us out of our comfort zone, but once it’s sensed, nothing else will satisfy you.

More than anything, significance means instead of finding joy in your own success, your joy is the result of the success of others. Adding value to others will become most important to you, and you will be able to say that you love what you do and feel that it’s making a difference in the lives of others.

A great way to start is by being consistently present in others’ lives. Being the person who can be counted on to pick up the phone, be at your desk, answer the text, or simply listen, is invaluable and sets you apart from those who have agendas or are projecting care that isn’t genuine. Few successful people actually make the transition to significance, but every person of significance is successful.

The journey to significance takes time. Set the bar high for yourself by reevaluating your goals and objectives to ensure that you’re on a path towards significance. Don’t allow yourself to be blinded and halted by your own success. Rather leverage that success in an attempt to make a lasting and significant legacy for which you and your family can be proud. If you have the ability to live successfully, you have the ability to live significantly.

Posted in Business, Counseling Concepts, General Musings | 5 Comments

Americans Don’t Want Their Children to Become School Teachers

Posted on August 29, 2022 by Dr Joseph Russo

The following article, which appeared at today’s Daily Wire site, should startle everyone who reads it. While I am happy that enrollment in UW’s teacher preparation program seems to be up (anecdotal, because I am not sure anyone really knows the number), I know that by semester’s end a good percentage of these starry-eyed freshmen will drop out of Education as a major. And it couldn’t come at a worse time. As examples:

I could go on.

Everyone has their opinions as to why there’s a shortage, but I think this article pretty well sums it up: Teachers Want to Be Supported. And not just with more money (although that would be a start). Absent support and the honoring of those who choose to enter the profession, we will see more departures and recurring shortages.

Americans Don’t Want Their Children to Become School Teachers

By Jeremy Adams

DailyWire.com

Americans don’t want their own children to become schoolteachers. This is a sudden and troubling development and is one of the most important issues we must address if we are going to fix our schools and educate our children.

Last week, a disturbing poll about the state of the teaching profession was released.

One of the questions asked in the PDK “Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools” was, “Would you like a child of yours to become a public-school teacher in your community?”

Only 37% answered yes.

To give this number some historical context, consider that when the same question was asked in 2018, 46% answered in the affirmative. In 1969, 75% positively responded.

So, what’s going on here? And what does it say about the current state of American education?

To discover what’s at work, it is important to note that in the exact same poll Americans’ rating of their community public schools reached an all-time high in the 48-year history of the poll. A whopping 54% would give their community schools a grade of an “A” or a “B.” This fascinating duality of a public that gives high marks to a profession they wouldn’t want their own children to enter presents a crystal-clear reality: the job has become both unpleasant and unappealing.

Only 29% of the respondents cited poor pay as a reason for wanting their progeny to avoid the profession. Instead, they cited “the difficulties, demands, and stress of the job,” “a lack of respect or being valued,” and “a variety of other shortcomings.”

In Ohio last week, teachers went on strike, not in the oddball ideological tradition of the Chicago Teachers Union, but because they simply wanted air-conditioning and better working conditions.

When I travel and speak to teachers across the country, their complaints are about aberrant student behavior, poor working conditions, and disrespect from the public more often than paltry pensions or subpar pay.

Jake Miller, an award-winning teacher who quit the teaching profession last year, powerfully explained in an op-ed:

Maybe it was the in-service where my colleagues and I wanted time to catch up on emails, grading, parent phone calls, and other things lost in the substitute shortage shuffle. Instead, we were finger painting.

Maybe it was the day prior when I found 3 inches of urine flooding out of the boys’ bathroom.

Or the day when a student hurt themselves and, after reporting the situation, they didn’t get the help they needed and returned to class the next day.

Mr. Miller isn’t being dramatic or engaging in rhetorical bravado. He is telling the truth and we would be wise to listen.

Students are overdosing in bathrooms. Violence toward teachers has increased in recent years. The pernicious obsession with cell phones has robbed students of anything resembling a healthy attention span. Fellow citizens — and yes, I am sadly thinking of a great many of us— mistakenly equate all teachers with teachers’ unions and the broken-souled educators on Libs of TikTok.

We can scream about CRT and the 1619 Project (I have), but really, at the end of the day, I just want my students to be able to make eye contact, learn how to take lecture notes, understand why they can’t listen to music through earbuds when class is going on, and maybe gain a revitalized eagerness to learn in so doing.

Far too many of our students — especially the most at-risk — don’t sleep well. They don’t eat well. They don’t exercise. They don’t socialize. They are utterly stressed out and plagued with “anxiety.” They do not have adult exemplars in their lives. They live their lives untethered to the nourishing power of high expectations and real accountability. Violence and drug use surround them. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good a pitcher is if the rest of the team is off the field.

Of course, in an ideal world, schools would be palaces (with air conditioning). The most educated and talented people in America would enter the classroom because a democracy cannot survive if its citizens are not educated and imbued with the skills of reading, writing, and critical thought. Vacant teaching positions would garner multiple applications. Parents and teachers would work together instead of seeing each other as potential adversaries.

This is why Americans don’t want their children to teach. Not because it isn’t noble. Not because it isn’t important. Not because we want our children to take a vow of poverty.

No, it’s because the long-term habit of our policymakers is to view schools as meccas of social intervention and as hubs of public policy triage for a broken society. And to a certain extent, that makes sense. All of the social pathologies and community dysfunction present themselves on a daily basis on the frontlines of the American school system.

Teachers don’t need a million-dollar salary. They need to know that when they send out a disruptive student, that student won’t be back in class 20 minutes later. They want air-conditioning. They want a computer that isn’t over 10 years old. They want to be able to abolish cell phones in their classrooms without mom and dad breathing down their necks.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s common sense.

Sadly, common sense isn’t so common these days.

[Russo: I do not allow technology in my classrooms, which for college, is somewhat unheard of. But after I explain the “why,” my students gladly put away their phones, tablets, and laptops. And for what it’s worth, most if not all of my students would gladly see the so-called “smart classroom” go the way of the buggy whip. We have invested money where investment wasn’t needed. Instead, we need to stand back and decide on what is truly important. Maybe a return to blackboards and chalk would be a start. But then I’d hear from OSHA. God help us.]

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on Americans Don’t Want Their Children to Become School Teachers

An Open Letter to Incoming Freshmen

Posted on August 28, 2022 by Dr Joseph Russo

Dear College Freshman,

The University of Wyoming is back in session. I am happy about it because I love to teach.

But this year we begin with the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s $300 billion plan to forgive student debt. Is that decision a brilliant idea that will relieve a burdened generation? Or a terrible policy that leaves the working class footing the bill of the country’s college graduates?

That debate will rage in the so-called “public square.” Millions are already talking about it and soon so will you. I can imagine now how it will result in all manner of protests and moralizing on either side, all of which will be a waste of time.

Remember – you are here to learn how to learn, not to protest.

So, with this letter, I want to give you my perspective, albeit rather dated (I began college in 1974). I hope to impart some hard-won words of wisdom, specifically surrounding all the false choices you will face — and therefore, the challenge of living authentically on campuses where sameness has become the rule.

They say that our universities are charged with educating tomorrow’s citizens insofar as those universities are said to be the incubators of our ideas, our language, our social movements and our politics. I don’t necessarily agree. I think that you can become a citizen, perhaps even a better one, having never gone to college at all.

In the end, the value of a real education lay in learning how to make some Important Choices. Not the meaningless ones. As examples:

Your new “.edu” inbox is by now undoubtedly full of emails from administrators asking you about your preferred dining options—Are you vegan? Do you want your meals to go? Are you sure you’re not a vegan? And roommates—How do you feel about night owls? How clean do you expect your new BFF to be? Is it okay if this person smokes? And all the clubs you might join. Badminton, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Glee, Ski Racing, The ChicanX Caucus, Anime Society . . . you name it, they’ve got it.

Then, there’s your preferred pronoun. Not exactly an essential or Important Choice, but such is the college campus of today.

Or how about your dorm room? Like so many of us “first worlders,” you’ve probably spent hours on Amazon, shopping for the perfect dorm room essentials. Perhaps a beautiful duvet?

And then, once you’re on campus, you’ll have to choose your special spot in the library, your seat in the lecture hall, your on-campus gym, and your off-campus bar (with choices aplenty as to the state you want on your fake ID).

But before you devote untold hours to mapping out exactly how you think the next four years of your life will go, I want to offer you this thought:

None of those decisions really matter.

They’re not important because they’re not real. They might feel like actual choices – I know they did to me when I started school – but I have come to understand them as fake ones. They distract us all from the fact that college has become a place where students no longer make hard intellectual and moral choices; in other words, the choices that actually matter.

Beneath the surface of all those meaningless choices, whose purpose is to assert meaningless differences, is an overpowering sameness. You may have different diets and duvets, but let me warn you: In the end, you are all supposed to think the same. It will be forced upon you by an array of social forces, cues, nods, and emojis. Sometimes it’s overt. Sometimes it’s just a vibe.

I suspect it’s already familiar to many of you. It’s the lack of discussion in lecture halls because people think they think the same things or because they’re afraid to use the wrong pronoun and then get called out. It’s the rallies where people have no idea what they’re calling for and don’t care because they just want their presence to be noted, tagged, and liked. It’s the students and professors and Teaching Assistants nodding along, clapping uproariously, at all the correct platitudes that nobody bothers to unpack: Free Palestine! Defund the police! Make college free! Believe all women! (All of them? Really?)

But sometimes, unbelievably, it will be the quiet studious professor with decades of experience and accrued wisdom who, quietly, behind closed doors, acknowledges that your unpopular opinion—the one you were bold or dumb enough to give voice to in class—was actually valid, that he didn’t want to say as much in front of his students, because, you know, it’s easier to go along. (True story.)

There’s this dead white guy, Baruch Spinoza, who tells us that the only true freedom is freedom of thought. It comes from what you believe, not what you say you believe or what you look like. If Spinoza were to reappear on campus today, he’d see a lot of people with different colored hair and tattoos and piercings who insist they are “living their truth” but are, in fact, unwitting prisoners of someone else’s truth (whatever it may be).

Go ahead: Tattoo and pierce your beautiful legs, your muscled arms, your eyebrows, whatever. But please, I beg you, don’t do it to fit in.

Often, these choices are subtle. Take for example, my lifelong friends. I have exactly four of them. I’m not a weirdo. It’s just that in my lifetime, it’s come down to the four people who insisted on being free; people who have shown me, more than anyone else, what it means to stand up for something, to make a cogent argument, to listen, and possibly to admit to being wrong. These are the people whom I admire and respect and really, truly know. It is because of these four friendships that I am now inching toward old age with the knowledge that I didn’t need to be afraid of being myself. They didn’t surround themselves with like-minded people and encouraged me to avoid them as well. It was subtle encouragement, but it was real.

We had a history teacher way back in high school whose byline was, “ask many [questions and people], listen to all [the people and answers], then make-up-your-own-mind.”

While that was high school, the class was an elective. I didn’t need to take it, nor did my friends. But without question, it taught me and them how to think, how to distinguish between fake and real choices, how to find meaning in other people — and ultimately, how to make up my own mind.

In college, I was encouraged to take ethics courses as electives. I am so glad that I did. I ended up minoring in Business Ethics and in that process, learned so much about definitions of human nature. And I had to “put up” with so many of the now-accepted relativistic ideas surrounding morality. I had to learn to stand down from “putting up” with those ideas and, instead, seek first to understand what the hell they were talking about. I asked questions, listened intently, then made up my own mind.

Make sure you do that too. There will be plenty of oddball arguments made in class, some, or all of which will have your eyes rolling. But desist if you can. Ask penetrating questions, listen intently, and then … you got it … make up your own mind.

In other words: Try to escape sameness.

One other important choice my friends and I made was to go to class. Attendance matters.

First of all, you paid for it. Regardless of whether you borrowed the money (put it on a credit card), or if your parents are paying, or if you are paying for it yourself, not going to class is like paying for a hotel room you never use.

Also of consideration, and I am being snarky here, is the idea that unless you go to class, you won’t learn the subject matter. Maybe you know it all – fair enough – but what you don’t know is how your particular professor is teaching the material. You won’t learn the subtleties that come from his or her energetic lecture on that material.

Most importantly, you won’t be practicing self-discipline.

Go to class.

I certainly had opportunities to skip classes. In my days in college, the Vietnam War was the cause du jour, and plenty of classes were empty as “students” (using that term loosely) went out to protest. The war didn’t end any earlier, by the way. Meanwhile, I aced examinations that they didn’t “ace,” simply because I was in class, and they weren’t.

I kept going. Not just because my parents, who’d paid for it all, expected me to, but because I (me, myself, and I) had elected to take the class. I wasn’t about to skip class just because a bunch of idealogues were telling me what I was supposed to believe. I resisted conforming to the mob, the blob, to give in to the sameness. Discipline.

To quote a recent article,

So, as I sat in the lecture hall chair, biting my nails and tapping my foot anxiously against the floor, I debated my next course of action. If I stayed seated, I would surely be excluded from the study guides that my friends would pass around in group meetings.

I pondered getting up with everyone else and walking out of the lecture hall. If I did walk out, I told myself, I wouldn’t chant along with everyone else or clap or add to the madness. I’d simply leave class, keep my head down, and be rewarded with study guides and maybe even a Facebook “friend.” And I’d try to pretend I wasn’t ashamed of myself.

And then I thought: No way.

He was right to stay.

Please don’t become part of the reason why in America, in the 21st century, a teacher needs a bodyguard to teach class. Or a civil rights attorney to fight the inevitable complaints filed against him. Or, worse, the reason why a teacher avoids the tough stuff.

For it is the tough stuff you are here to learn about.

Stay in class. Listen, Take notes. Ask the proverbial stupid questions. Do the readings.

Yes, you must act according to your conscience—choosing to stand apart without falling apart—but please see that as the most important, real choice you will make.

Duvets don’t matter. Indeed, all the stuff of country club living that our universities offer, do not matter.

What matters is learning how to think.

Yours sincerely,

/s

Dr. Russo

August 2022

Posted in Classroom Management, General Musings, People (in general), People in general, State of the Nation | 2 Comments