In-Box Zero? This Writer Prefers In-Box Whatever :-)

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

This was too good not to re-post here. I have to agree with the author: We spend far too much time managing our inboxes and not enough time living (and working).

By Sara Stewart of the New York Post – May 20, 2016 …

It’s happened to me more than once lately: A friend sees the glaring red number on my iPhone’s email icon (2,052, if you must know) and their eyes do that cartoon thing where they bungee out of their sockets. “How do you live?” they’ll ask in a horrified whisper. “I could never stand to see that every day.”

Really? Because to me, that little number represents the freedom I feel from the compulsion to check and erase, check and erase, like a rat in a lab experiment, all day, every day.

Blame the recent trend toward minimalism. De-cluttering every aspect of our lives has morphed into an OCD obsession with tracking down and annihilating any object, real or virtual, that doesn’t, as Marie Kondo puts it, “spark joy.” Ironically, you can now spend hours and hours reading guides about simplifying your life: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” “The Joy of Less,” or, more relevantly, “21 Days to Inbox Zero.”

This irritating buzz-phrase was coined in 2007 by a “productivity guru” named Merlin Mann.

It has since spawned a widespread and disturbing philosophy, in which the more time you devote to tending to your email, the better you’ll feel — as if we didn’t already spend too many hours each day in front of our various screens. We’ve essentially been trained to see an empty inbox as proof of a streamlined, efficient mind: In truth, it’s just the opposite.

Studies show that it takes an undue amount of time to return to whatever you were doing when you take time out to read some (usually unnecessary and unsolicited) email, delete it and redirect your mind to where it was before. One study, cited in a story about how some of us may just be more attached to our techno-identities than others, quoted a researcher who studied distraction and email. “When someone drops everything just to get an unread count back to zero, productivity might be taking a hit. ‘It takes people on average about 25 minutes to reorient back to a task when they get interrupted,’ [a researcher] says.”

Plus, if we’re talking about work email, consider this: Having an empty inbox has zero effect on your salary. You’re not getting paid to erase emails all day — unless your job title is Deleter of Emails, in which case, poor you.

I’d like to suggest an alternative: Inbox Whatever. As in, who cares? Not your boss. Not the people sending you endless pointless emails (studies show only 20 to 40 percent of all emails sent actually get read, anyway, not that ad agencies aren’t always trying to up their eyeball count). Not your family or friends, who’d be delighted to see more of you now that you’re not spending hours every day pecking away at the delete button. And lest you worry that your inbox is going to get too big and the internet’s going to run out of space — well, it isn’t. But to put your mind at ease, why not schedule a purge every now and then? It’s easy enough to find guidelines, if you need them, to deleting items in bulk and deleting all unread messages.

Because here’s a dirty little secret about unread emails: If you miss reading one that’s crucial, someone’s bound to follow up. But most of the time, we know which emails we need to read and which we don’t. If emails go unread for a week or a month, they’re like that stack of magazines piling up in the corner: You’re probably never going to get around to them, and in any case, the information in them is now out of date. You can safely kiss them goodbye.

So step away from the screen. Take a walk. Eat something delicious and bad for you.

Posted in Blogging, General Musings | Tagged | Comments Off on In-Box Zero? This Writer Prefers In-Box Whatever :-)

Only a Government can Censor

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

As I understand the definition of the word, only governments can “censor” your writings or your spoken words. Webster’s defines a censor as “an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter” [emphasis mine].

I suppose we should look to the root of the word. If we do, we see that it has Latin origins related to the word census and the power of census takers to fine or otherwise sanction certain words in the Roman Empire. Thus, official would be someone with the power of government behind them.

Private enterprise retains the right (I hope) to edit, rather than censor, what it deems offensive to its operation. If we think about this for a moment, how could it be otherwise? Newspapers and publishers edit all the time. Most of the time they are editing for spelling and grammar, in order to protect their brand, which (hopefully) projects an aura of accuracy and good grammar. Businesses can edit in the day to day running of their business, or can sue for judicial redress and subsequent action for words that it, the business, considers to be offensive to its rights at equity. The misuse of a trademark, for example, can be edited. The use of language that a business deems offensive (libelous or slanderous) can be met with legal action. People, everyday people, can do the same.

But the bar has been set, I think, purposefully high so as not to infringe on our rights (American rights) to say what we want, when we want, where we want. One must prove libel or slander in a court of law in order to have what it deems offensive language removed or retracted. Proof is sometimes hard to get to; thus, lawsuits of this nature are comparatively rare. Moreover, the bar is set perhaps even higher when one considers the inability to slander or libel one’s government. We get to say about our government what we want to say.

None of this ought to mean that we say whatever comes to mind. Self-editing, the lack of which is often considered tantamount to a mental disorder by the way, is an important character trait for adults (children, not so much). As freemen, we need to exercise restraint and consideration in our words and actions. The Buddhists go ever further and suggest that “right thought” is an important cornerstone of a life well-lived. Thoughts, after all, become speech at some point.

Youre Blocked from FacebookThat said (pun intended), what is Facebook up to when they remove what they consider offensive posts? To my view, they are “up to” a protection of their brand – nothing more and nothing less. They are not doing me any favors (what I consider offensive is probably not the same as what The Zuck considers offensive, nor should it be). I mean, by editing posts, including mine, they are exercising their aforementioned rights. They get to do it. And I would go to my death defending their right to do so.  I quit Facebook not because they blocked my posts (they didn’t) but because of what I perceive to be the business posture they assume when blocking others. And guess what? I don’t have to agree with their posture, their reasons, their motivations. Nor do they have to agree with mine.

In the larger scheme of things, however, if enough people quit Facebook for the same or similar reasons, good business practice would dictate a review of that posture. After all, in due course, with enough people quitting, the business might take a hit. This is the motivation behind boycotts, of which the Left is so enamored.  But mine isn’t a boycott. I won’t go back no matter what The Zuck says. One cannot change one’s basic worldview, or so I believe, and at base, I do not care for his. Think here of the many leftists who will not even consider a Trump Presidency, thinking that they cannot ever agree with The Donald’s worldview. They get to. And so do I.

But the present uproar around Facebook’s “censorship” seems to me to be rather silly. To those conservative voices so offended by The Zuck, I say, “Quit!”

And stop misusing the word “censor.” Only governments can do that.

Thoughts?

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Tagged | Comments Off on Only a Government can Censor

Friends? or Merely Acquaintances?

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

In today’s Daily Mail is an article about the numbers of friends we, as humans, can actually handle at any given time. Turns out:

“People are only capable of maintaining FIVE close friends despite using social media.”

You can read the article here, but for simplicity’s sake, let me summarize it for you:

“In short, humans have an upper limit on the number of close friends they can have and for most of history that number has been right around 5. Yes, you read correctly, FIVE friends. Of course, through those five friends, we often have a wider social network, averaging around 130 “contacts” or what were once known as mere acquaintances.”

Six Degrees of Separation was an interesting concept and when you do the math, it turns out that that is probably a correct, if not a too-liberal, estimation. It is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer connections away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. A chain of “friend of a friend statements” can be established to connect any two people in the world through a maximum of six steps.

It was originally set out as a working hypothesis by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. Karinthy did not have the means, in 1929, to test his work, but he showed how it might be done. Computers later showed that it was a testable hypothesis and went even further, suggesting that only three people (not including ourselves) connect us to the rest of the world. This would be the more conservative estimate and, at that, probably too low, if you ask me. The right answer lay somewhere in between.

Six or three, or five, it doesn’t really matter, for this little post is about what it takes to be a “friend.” As my regular readers will know, I recently quit Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter of which has done a remarkable job of depicting degrees of separation from contact to contact, pictorially on their site). My primary reason was (and is) how Facebook’s founders were accumulating wealth based solely on my presence. That is, the mere accumulation of subscribers to Facebook’s services was enticing advertisers who, in turn, pay a fee to Facebook to get in my face with any number of advertisements about things needed or not, wanted or not. I saw it has intrusive. Secondly, I disagreed with Zuckerberg’s politics and the ways in which he was spending his wealth on causes with which I have fundamental disagreements. Similar arguments were used in quitting LinkedIn, although in that case, I could see no continuing benefit to me in continuing to waste time surfing around the site.

Moving to a small town in Wyoming made it even less useful to me. Here, I can make my own contacts all of which will have far more value to me that linking to people known and unknown all over the world. In a small town, three connections are probably the right number, the right “chain” if you will. For example, I know Reed Scull, Associate Dean for the Outreach School at the University of Wyoming. How many steps from him to the governor? Well, he knows (quite well, it turns out) the leader of the Wyoming legislature, and he in turns, knows the governor quite well. How many steps from him to the President? I don’t want to know, frankly, as I am not a fan and do not want to be a friend of Obama. But the point in made: It doesn’t take that many links in the chain. And, in the end, my purpose now is to build chains that result in meaningful relationships, those which resemble friendships and not mere acquaintances.

Plato wrote about friendships. In his writings (such as they are), he discusses love (erôs) versus friendship (philia) primarily in two dialogues, the Lysis and the Symposium, though the Phaedrus also adds significantly to his views. In each work, Socrates is in two ways center stage; first, as a lover of wisdom (sophia) and discussion (logos), and, second, as an inverter or disturber of erotic norms. Plato’s views on love are a meditation on Socrates and the power his philosophical conversations have to mesmerize, obsess, and educate.

“Anyway, friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict.”

This was drawn from Stanford’s philosophy page and is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the subject. Given their definition of friendship, it occurs to me that five is about the right amount that anyone can handle. After all, the “concern” we show requires a great degree of intimacy and knowledge of the other person, with such intimacy gained only through time and experience. And since time is a rather limited resource, it follows that (done properly) friendship will only develop around a select few individuals in our lives. Those individuals can and do change, whether it be through death or circumstance.

Circumstance – I have had in my life many good and true friends, but some of those friends are forever lost to circumstance. For example, a very close friend of mine in the 1970s and 1980s, was Mike Bogdanoff. He and I shared a kind of friendship that met most definitions of the term: it was born of a shared background, grew and was nurtured by our shared experiences in college, world travel as backpackers, and work at Lucky Supermarkets, and had at its base a shared respect for one another. I knew quite a lot about Mike and he about me, and the relationship was something that I came to rely upon in those years. Yet, circumstance got in the way. We moved in different directions in life, particularly as I entered the corporate world and he sought a medical education. I left Southern California and he stayed. We did have a disagreement at some point (the exact nature of which I cannot recall) and the ties that bound us together seemed to wither.

You might say, “well, then, it wasn’t a true friendship.” I cannot disagree but I surely want to, for in the moments of our time together, we certainly met all the criteria for a deep and abiding friendship.

My relationship with Dean Calvo has, in contrast, survived the vagaries of time, and I count him as my closest (bestest?) friend, if not a brother of sorts. But circumstance did not intervene. We carried our friendship through time simply because circumstance did not arise to thwart the effort. Through geographical moves, through marriages and children, we remained close. I suppose it could be said that circumstance itself was a friend of our friendship and served to bring us closer when it would otherwise have drawn us apart. That same circumstance caused my relationship with Mike to wither. Go figure.

Aristotle talks of three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Putting aside, for the moment, the distinctions between the three, it seems to me that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we make and keep friends to begin with.

“That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of him, or because of the ways in which he is useful to me, or because I find him to have a virtuous character. Perhaps it is all three at once. And, given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake and not for your own.”

How in the world can this be truly operative with any more than the five people researchers say we are capable of having as friends? I don’t know. I do know that I am truly incapable of it. As of today, I would count these people as true friends, if the definition is applied:

Cindy Brock (how can your wife ever NOT be your best friend?)

Dean Calvo

Grant Ashley

Tom Harrison

Rich McGuffin

Denise Hauenstein Piehn

Now, this is not to say that there aren’t others who run a very close second:

Jerry Kleeman

Kevin Stretton

Skip Hansen, of course.

John Daley

Amber Flippo

Debbie Baer

Steve Brown

Mike Chalmers

Rob Brandenburg

Allen Tang

Jerry Sternbach

These are people, among many others,  who I know would give me the shirt of their back, as I would give mine, but time and circumstance have not aligned (yet?) to provide for the truly deep and abiding relationship that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have wanted for me. This is NOT to say that the relationships aren’t abiding or deep – all of them are, in differing ways – it is just to say that the degrees of intimacy are different and, for now, insufficient. I want of course to work on that.

But they are all friends in ways that “friends on Facebook” can and never will be.

This post was about how I agreed with the research in today’s Daily Mail. When I do a searching inventory, those six (and the next 11) rise quickly to the top. I cannot ignore this, even as it tends to confirm what the research says, but even if it didn’t, the number is still confirmatory in so many other ways.

What do you think?

Posted in Blogging, General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Friends? or Merely Acquaintances?

What Has Happened to My Country?

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

Seriously, WHAT has happened to my country? I drove today from Laramie, through Salt Lake City, and into Wendover, Utah, where I will try and spend the night at a Best Western. All along Interstate 80, and I mean ALL ALONG the highway, I saw innumerable  fruit juice bottles full of urine, no doubt tossed out the windows of passing road trains. Upon every strand of barbed wire, you cannot help but notice the ubiquitous plastic bag fluttering in the wind, looking like a tattered flag. And gone – almost completely gone – are the neat and tidy homesteads and farmhouses. What I saw and what I will no doubt see in my nightmares are endless graveyards of mobile homes.

Does anyone not have the time to have them towed away and disposed of? Hundreds of them through various places along Wyoming’s share of Interstate 80. And then there was the Denny’s in Rock Springs. A perfect example of how one can only hope to make a pig look better through the creative use of lipstick.  The place was FILTHY. The Waitress was fat and sloppy and candidly, she smelled. I suppose I should not expect much from a Denny’s, but my hopes were raised when I noticed a landscaper putting down new ground cover. I was wrong. And I won’t go back.

Utah was a little better, but not by much. Utah suffers from another problem: Interstate 80 is simply crumbling away in many places as you emerge from the Wasatch Mountain pass. I mean, hey, do they not have the money for infrastructure? How embarrassing!

Outside of Salt Lake, to the west, as you cross that great causeway and the lake that is Salt Lake, I noticed that literally hundreds of telephone poles have been abandoned. HUNDREDS! Perhaps 25 miles of telephone poles just rotting away in the salt marsh. The wires have been cut and are wrapped around each pole, almost as if to say, “there, that’s good enough.” No one apparently cares enough to have them removed. But that is good lumber, is it not? And through many of them are the plastic bags I spoke of earlier. They are literally everywhere.

Or, maybe it’s just one bag following me?

Coming into Wendover my hopes were high that I would be enjoying a night’s stay at a clean Best Western Motor Lodge. Nope. The room stinks, the girl who checked me in was so large and so fashion-unaware, that her stomach was leaking out of her too-small-shirt and kept inadvertently opening the cash register drawer. Disgusting. And in the room, the soap dispenser doesn’t work. I asked for a bar of soap – nope – none of that. Fatty gave me an unopened dispenser re-fill bottle. Outside, the grounds are a complete mess. I doubt that anyone has raked leaves or mowed lawns since last year. Is there no pride?

Wendover will never be anyone’s idea of a nice little American town. On one side is Utah and no casinos. On the other side, the west side, is Nevada and the casinos. And everywhere is plastic grass and plastic bags fluttering in the wind. Kitsch – is that the word?

As I drove through the outskirts of Park City, Utah, I could see the building boom that has consumed what was once a sleepy little ski village. Thousands of homes have sprung up.  And I doubt that not-one-of-them could be even remotely afforded by a middle-class couple. And way off in the distance are the abandoned mobile homes. And the fucking plastic bag.

A nation of contrasts and a nation of slobs.

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on What Has Happened to My Country?

Have You Had Your “Moment” Yet?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

Peggy Noonan wrote this piece about two weeks ago, and while I am probably breaking all manner of copyright law in reproducing it here, I feel the need to have at least posted it here in order to save for all time.

I have had my moment. The presidential race in 2016 descended upon me in one moment, a moment when I realized how very little of my country I recognize any longer. How very little of it that endears me. I am blessed to have grown up at what I now know what my country’s zenith. It has been downhill ever since.

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will.

The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. It tends to involve a poignant sense of dislocation, a knowledge that our politics have changed and won’t be going back.

We’ve had a lot to absorb—the breaking of a party, the rise of an outlandish outsider; a lurch to the left in the other party, the popular rise of a socialist. Alongside that, the enduring power of a candidate even her most ardent supporters accept as corrupt. Add the lowering of standards, the feeling of no options, the coarsening, and all the new estrangements.

The Moment is when it got to you, or when it fully came through.

My friend Lloyd, a Manhattan lawyer and GOP campaign veteran, had two Moments. The first came when he took his 12-year-old on a father-son trip to New Hampshire to see the primary. They saw Ted Cruz speak at a restaurant, and Bernie Sanders in a boisterous rally. “It was great and wonderful,” Lloyd said.

Then it happened. “The Monday night before the voting we were at a Donald Trump rally. A woman in the audience screamed out the P-word to refer to a rival candidate. Trump repeated it from the podium, and my kid heard it and looked at me.” Lloyd was mortified. Welcome to the splendor of democracy, son. “I thought, ‘And so, we have come to this.’”

It didn’t end there. Lloyd’s second Moment came a month later, the morning after the raucous GOP debate that featured references to hand size. Lloyd was in the car with his son, listening to the original Broadway cast recording of “Hamilton.” “I blurted out, ‘How exactly has America managed to travel from that to this?’” American history is fiercely imperfect and made by humans. “Yet in the rearview mirror it appears ennobling and grand. And now it feels jagged, and the fabric is worn.”

A friend I’ll call Bill, a political veteran from the 1980s and ’90s, also had his Moment with his child, a 14-year-old daughter who is a budding history buff. He had never taken her to the Reagan Library, so last month they went. As she stood watching a video of Reagan speaking, he thought of Reagan and FDR, of JFK and Martin Luther King. His daughter, he realized, would probably never see political leaders of such stature and grace, though she deserved to. Her first, indelible political memories were of lower, grubbier folk. “Leaders with Reaganesque potential no longer go into politics—and why would they, with all the posturing and plasticity that it requires?”

He added: “I felt a wave of sadness.”

Another political veteran, my friend John, also had his Moment during the New Hampshire primary. Out door-knocking for Jeb Bush, “I was struck as I walked along a neighborhood using the app that described the voters in each house. So many multigenerational families of odd collections of ages in houses with missing roof shingles or shutters askew or paint peeling. Cars needing repair.”

What was the story inside those houses? Unemployment, he thought, elder care, divorce, custody battles. “It was easy to see a collective loss of hope in a once-thriving town.” He sensed “years of neglect and sadness. Something is brewing.”

My Moment came a month ago. I’d recently told a friend my emotions felt too close to the surface—for months, history had been going through me and I felt like a vibrating fork. I had not been laughing at the splintering of a great political party but mourning it. Something of me had gone into it. Party elites seemed to have no idea why it was shattering, which meant they wouldn’t be able to repair it, whatever happens with Mr. Trump.

I was offended that those curiously quick to write essays about who broke the party were usually those who’d backed the policies that broke it. Lately conservative thinkers and journalists had taken to making clear their disdain for the white working class. I had actually not known they looked down on them. I deeply resented it and it pained me. If you’re a writer lucky enough to have thoughts and be paid to express them and there are Americans on the ground struggling, suffering—some of them making mistakes, some unlucky—you don’t owe them your airy, well-put contempt, you owe them your loyalty. They too have given a portion of their love to this great project, and they are in trouble.

A few nights earlier, I’d moderated a panel in New York, on, yes, the ironic soundtrack of election year 2016, “Hamilton.” At one point I quoted a line. It is when Eliza sings, just as war has come and things are bleak: “How lucky we are to be alive right now.” As I quoted it my voice caught. I asked a friend later if he’d noticed. Yes, he said, quizzically, comfortingly, we did.

The following day I spoke at a school in Florida, awoke the next morning spent, got coffee, fired up the iPad, put on cable news. I read an email thread from a group of conservative women—very bright, all ages, all decorous and dignified. But tempers were high, and they were courteously tearing each other apart over Mr. Trump and the GOP.

Then to my own email, full of notes from people pro- and anti- Trump, but all seemed marked by some kind of grieving. I looked up and saw Hillary Clinton yelling on TV and switched channels. Breaking news, said the crawl. A caravan of Trump supporters driving to an outdoor rally in Fountain Hills, Ariz., had been blocked by demonstrators. The helicopter shot showed a highway backed up for miles. No one seemed to be in charge, as is often the case in America. It was like an unmovable force against an unmovable object.

I watched dumbly, tiredly. Then for no reason—this is true, it just doesn’t sound it—I thought of an old Paul Simon song that had been crossing my mind, “The Boy in the Bubble.” I muted the TV, found the song on YouTube, and listened as I stared at the soundless mile of cars and the soundless demonstrators. As the lyrics came — “The way we look to a distant constellation / That’s dying in a corner of the sky / . . . Don’t cry baby / Don’t cry”—my eyes filled with tears. And a sob welled up and I literally put my hands to my face and sobbed, silently, for I suppose a minute.

Because my country is in trouble.

Because I felt anguish at all the estrangements.

Because some things that shouldn’t have changed have changed.

Because too much is being lost. Because the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal.

And yes, I know this is all personal, and not column-ish.

But that was my Moment.

You’ll feel better the next day, I promise, but you won’t be able to tell yourself that this is history as usual anymore. This is big, what we’re living through.

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Have You Had Your “Moment” Yet?

Characteristics of the One Percent Crowd

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

This is a re-run of a post earlier in 2016. Since I have some rather unorthodox readers, many of whom I wish would NOT read my blog (and who are proudly in the lower rung of one percenters), reruns of blog posts are in order.

Anyway, I am not sure where this material came from. I came across it while living in Australia. I apologize to whoever wrote it and will quickly attribute ownership once I find out. So, in the meantime, please know that I do not claim authorship.

In my life, I have come to see several different characteristics which help to define the rich, the one percenters, if you will, quite apart from their money, which of course is difference enough. But you know what? They could easily LOSE that wealth, so to the extent they hold onto it, they must be doing something right.  I have also come to the conclusion that many of the 1% class are as close as your next door neighbor. They need not live in Beverly Hills or the McMansion on the hill over there.

Here are 22 of the common characteristics that I have found. I don’t for one minute believe that all 22 operate at the same time, or even that all 22 form a complete list. But they are surely emblematic of many of the richer people I have known. Wealthy individuals tend to have many things in common.

1. They set achievable and specific goals.

More than 60% of rich people who took part in a recent research study agreed that they focus on their goals on a daily basis. What’s more, the goals they set themselves are achievable through specific physical actions, so they know exactly what separates them from achieving it.

2. They create to-do lists and review them daily.

To come closer to their goals, rich people spend time creating to-do lists and maintaining them every day. Whatever you want to accomplish, there’s a certain amount of task work you need to do in order to get there. This is what a rich person makes sure to determine. With that knowledge, they commit to work on it day after day, with no excuses.

3. They take care of their bodies.

To fully focus on their ambitions, they need functional and efficient bodies. Through a healthy diet, regular exercises and treating the body as a temple, they accelerate the progress, stay in shape, avoid laziness and separate themselves from the crowd.

4. They read daily and they love it.

Rich people don’t only feed themselves with healthy food, but they also feed their minds with wisdom and information. Almost 90% of the wealthy people we surveyed agreed they love reading. Mostly, it’s self-improvement books and nonfiction, which serve as a great source of inspiration and knowledge.

5. They listen to audiobooks while commuting.

Instead of blasting pop music while being on the road, rich people listen to audiobooks so the mind is always in the mood for achieving extraordinary results. Let’s say you spend an hour a day in traffic. If you devote it to audiobooks or podcasts, that could mean an extra 365 hours of self-improvement time in a year.

6. They are the hardest workers in the room.

When asked for the secrets of success, Dwayne Johnson (The Rock?), once and famously said, “there’s no secret sauce. It’s always being the hardest worker in the room which brings you one step closer to making your dreams a reality.”

7. They make family life a priority.

A rich person knows best what money can and cannot buy. That’s why they give so much value to the family time, something which they consider priceless. They realize – whereas money can always be made – there’s a limited amount of time they can spend with their families. That’s why they make it a priority.

8. They respect their time and spend it wisely.

In a world full of distractions, it’s easy to lose track of your time. It’s something rich people never let happen. They realize that time, once wasted, is gone forever; that’s why it’s such a precious resource for them.

9. They surround themselves with positive-minded people.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” said Jim Rohn. Indeed.  Letting naysayers influence your thoughts and actions is out of the question for a wealthy person. To protect themselves from negative people, they make sure their surroundings motivate them to further growth. They do not let others set the table, nor do they allow others to bully them.

10. They pay attention to their habits.

Your habits form who you become. If you eat junk, practice negative talking, and spend your time mindlessly, there’s likely no bright future ahead of you. Wealthy individuals select their habits carefully so that they only practice ones that contribute value to their lives.

11. They learn how the world of finances functions.

Nowadays, the right financial knowledge is the key to survive without getting lost in debt and other financial commitments. Rich people devote time to become the financial experts, so in the end, their money works for them and not vice versa. They know precisely where there money is and what it is doing. I recall someone asking Bob Hope once (at a time when he was among the richest people in the world), if he knew roughly how much he was worth. His answer? “I know precisely how much I am worth.”

12. They don’t believe in financial luck.

Money is made through hard work combined with creativity, market-research, and other factors, but pure lack is definitely not among the most important ones. That’s why wealthy people avoid lotteries and gambling. Frankly, they leave such inanity to the poor. They still take financial risks, but they are calculated.

13. They don’t spend more than they earn.

If you make $1,000,000 and you spend the same amount, you are still broke. Poor people tend to spend more than they make which is caused by short-term thinking. Wealthy people can extend the gratification in order to stay financially stable and make the future safe. I have also noticed that wealthy people drive American cars, buy those same cars used, and routinely drive them for more than 200,000 miles. In other words, their cars are not status symbols. Their bank accounts are.

14. They don’t watch TV.

Television is a huge time-suck with almost no value added to your life. It leads to a sedentary lifestyle, obesity and increases your chances of Type 2 Diabetes. Since rich people are always striving to eliminate bad habits, they make sure to replace TV with more creative sources of entertainment, like books.

15. They don’t give anyone responsibility for their lives.GBS

“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future, ” said George Bernard Shaw. People who can’t achieve anything significant in their lives tend to avoid the responsibility for their future. There’s always some external factor to blame. Contrasted against that mindset is that which is held by the achievers, who always take the blame and learn from their mistakes.

16. They don’t follow the flow.

Thinking differently is mandatory. There’s no way to achieve extraordinary results through regular actions and ordinary thinking. Rich people aren’t afraid to dream big and break the rules and dogmas to accomplish something. As I look back on 2016 and my experiences dreaming big and breaking rules, this one characteristic resonated with me. Sadly, many people in the academy do not wish to break rules (many of which they themselves have set) or to counter the prevailing dogma (all of which those self-same people have authored).

17. They don’t miss opportunities.

To ensure they squeeze as much as possible from what life throws at them, rich people put themselves in the right place at the right time. They realize some chances are game-changing experiences. This is the kind of thing that happens when you aren’t watching TV or listening to rap music played at mind-blowing volumes.

18. They don’t rely on formal education.

But, to be fair, they are indeed WELL educated. Wealthy individuals are life-long learners. They treat self-growth as a never-ending process and they fully enjoy it. Cultivating the mind is achieved through a broad variety of experiences.

19. Thoughts influence their actions.

Negative thinking is especially dangerous when you decide to believe in excuses and rationalizations. Your brain wants you to stay in the comfort zone, so it will spare no effort to convince you that you can’t. The key to success is to let these thoughts fade away and replace them with powerful reasons to believe in yourself.

20. They don’t say yes all the time.

Saying no at the right moment is a powerful skill which brings health, wealth and happiness. One the other hand, if you practice saying yes way too often, you are more likely to get off the track and waste your time on unnecessary commitments. Rich people know there are plenty of things you don’t need to say yes to.

21. They don’t focus entirely on the money.

Opposed to common misconceptions, money isn’t what matters the most on the long road to getting rich. Using their capital and influence, wealthy individuals want to change the world for the better, contribute to the society and simply experience the life like most people can’t. Bill Gates is the wealthiest person on the planet. But he’s also one of the most generous people. He gives back a lot of his money and he decided to donate the majority of his wealth to philanthropic causes when he dies.

22. They don’t give up.

Never, ever give up.  Getting rich isn’t an overnight process. It takes a lot of time and effort to go through the path full of obstacles and failures to finally meet your goals. The key is to stay persistent, practice self-belief, and never ever give up. In 2016, with the help of some really neat people, I did not give up and am pursuing some mighty lofty goals including helping people in need, writing more (rather than less, or not at all in the case of some), and continuing to challenge the dogma.

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Characteristics of the One Percent Crowd

Yesterday we were wearing shorts!

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

Yesterday we were wearing shortsAnd today, well, take a look!  Taken at 6pm on Saturday, May 7th. The problem could be that after the snow storm passes, we are expecting heavy and warm rain. And THAT could mean flooding. Not at all unusual for May, or so I am told. We’ll see!

Posted in General Musings | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Yesterday we were wearing shorts!

Steal This Book! On Why I left Facebook

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

Laughing all the way to the bankI recently quit Facebook. Aside from the liberation of several hours of my life (Facebook is what they call a “time suck”), it has also liberated me from all manner of inanity, by which I mean the countless posts about puppies and kitties, crude jokes, people wearing sunglasses, and the assorted political wisecracking that left me cringing. But there was one other reason: By my mere presence as a Facebook subscriber I was helping to enhance Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth. He is laughing at suckers like me all the way to the bank.

I am a capitalist, so wealth is not by itself a four-letter-word to me. I am certainly a beneficiary of the technology and information boom of the past 40 years, especially through my association with Microsoft and other information technology firms, both as an employee and as an investor. Indeed, somewhere buried in my mutual funds and those of my wife’s, will surely be some basket of shares in Facebook. Consequently, I hope like hell that he is successful. But that doesn’t mean I have to like him. Right? I hope so.

Liking someone in our day and age has descended into a kind of inanity all by itself. It is meaningless when one considers the definition of Like on Facebook. I mean, what do we really know about someone such that we would raise our hands and tell the world that we “like” them? In the end, those people I count in my own social network ought to be people I really and truly like (by the way, they are). And “like” is multi-faceted, isn’t it? My best friend, Dean, is someone whom I admire and respect, but he is not without flaws. It’s just that the flaws, insofar as I know them, are minimal when compared against the many superior aspects of his character. The ratio is huge. It helps that I have known him, through thick and thin, for 52 years. I have seen him in action.

I have seen Mark Zuckerberg in action, in a manner of speaking, and I do not like what I see. I do not like his politics. I do not like how he spends his money (come on, $5 million dollars a year for personal security?). I have seen the movie, The Social Network, and I did not like the Zuckerberg I saw portrayed there either. I do not like the culture of his company – one which is seemingly hyper-focused on leveraging my existence on Facebook to sell me things I do not want or need and to connect me to products, services, political viewpoints, and a multitude of people that I most assuredly would never like. A series of recent stories have tended to confirm my worst suspicions. Gizmodo recently had this to say:

Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership.

Zuckerberg, for his part, has been quite forthcoming about wanting to monopolize digital news distribution, and that by itself ought to worry anyone. Well, maybe not worry, per se, but certainly give rise to a kind of critical thinking that asks, “what if what he thinks is news, is not what I consider news?” That kind of control concerns me. More than that, it turns out that his company has a rather dim view of journalism altogether. Again, from Gizmodo:

But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.

The selection of what qualifies to be showcased on Facebook as “trending news” is left to a very small cadre of people:

According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”

You might say, “Joe, there is nothing new here. Editors at all newspapers decide what gets published every day.” Very true, but I get to decide what newspaper to buy and if I do not care for their survey of what is newsworthy, I will decide not to buy their newspaper again. Or, I will supplement it with other news sources. My selection criteria will include the extent to which I perceive an inability to check one’s bias in one’s reporting. I want reporting that is as free from bias as it can be (and, yes, I recognize that the elimination of bias altogether is impossible, but it can be checked). Facebook has more or less declared that it will not check its own biases. That concerns me. And it is a bias that will, no matter how hard the news curators may try, emulate what Mr. Zuckerberg wants out there.

So it comes back to how he conducts himself and how he spends his money. This is a proxy for his belief system, in my view, and I do not like what I see. So, why would I continue to support, again by my mere presence, a company with such bias? From all that I can discern, he is an extreme leftist. I am not. He is an internationalist. I am not. He might even be anti-American. I am not (although I have come to a rather dim view of the plutocracy that defines my country these days). His seeming flaws are legion when compared to his positive character attributes (he has some, yes?). He would not be a friend of mine. And since he runs Facebook with an iron fist, I cannot by definition like his company. I, therefore, quit.

Steal This Book was written and published when I was but a child growing up in the paradise that was Southern California in the 1960s, notwithstanding the domestic tumult occurring everywhere outside of my tidy little suburb of Woodland Hills. It was more or less a handbook on how to be a counter-culturist. For its time, it was about as left-wing as you could get, if not downright immoral.  Even its publisher said that he would not let his own children read it.  I wonder if Zukerberg has read it? His actions, to me, suggest that he has. And that saddens me.

I could not run away fast enough.

 

(all of this is my opinion, pure and simple. I do hope that in the American of this day, I am still entitled to that.)

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Steal This Book! On Why I left Facebook

The Latticework of Mental Models

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

latticeworksFriends of mine say that I live in my head, thinking all the time. I find this an odd comment insofar as, hopefully, everyone is thinking all the time. Even when we are dreaming, the brain is thinking, that is if we consider the neural firings and riverbeds of thought thus created to be the very definition of thinking. The brain is firing on several cylinders at once, although many learned thinkers believe we use maybe, what, ten percent of our brains at any given time? But be that as it may, I will accept my friends’ commentary as a compliment. I do live in my head and this has gotten to me thinking – how precisely do I think?

I am not talking about the biologics of the gray matter. I get that the brain is this vast complicated organ of which we maybe understand 1%. Imaging and so-called neural linguistics are telling us more and more each day, but a complete understanding of the brain is perhaps decades away. No, what I am talking about (writing about) is the way in which any one of us come to the various perceptions we make of the world around us. This is a function of learning, I think. The less we know, the less the world makes any kind of sense. Even with knowing more, the world can seem quite senseless, but less so. The theorists in my field of counseling psychology, including Erickson, have set forth various models that explain how our prisms of thought change as we age. As an infant, for example, we would look upon the world largely as a place of mystery and risk and would seek only to have our basic needs met. As we age, we come to perceive the world as less of a threat (not entirely, of course) and will take certain aspects of it as “givens” – the sun will come up,  the stove is hot to the touch, snow is cold, etc.

What has happened, me thinks, is that we have developed “models” of thought – models of the world into which we fit our observations and spit out perceptions that are, by and large, correct and reliable. The problem with acquiring wisdom (well, let’s call it knowledge anyway), is that we also develop many different models of thought. Think here of what goes through our minds when we read a balance sheet. We process what we are seeing through the model, the prism, of our financial learnings and come to some conclusions about the company’s whose numbers are presented. Let’s say the numbers aren’t good. Another model might come into our heads – a model that ask for inputs around non-financial data. For instance, the product model, or the people model. I think you get the drift here.

Farnam Street calls this assembly of models in our head a Latticework of Mental Models. It is their concept, not mine, so let’s quote their words around what it means:

Acquiring knowledge may seem like a daunting task. There is so much to know and time is precious. Luckily, we don’t have to master everything.  To get the biggest bang for our buck we can study the big ideas from the big disciplines: physics, biology, psychology, philosophy, literature, sociology, history, and a few others. We call these big ideas mental models.

Farnam goes on to quote the great Charlie Munger, the partner and co-founder of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. I think it brilliant and will end the post with it:

Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.

Thoughts? I’d love to hear from you! josephvrusso@outlook.com

Posted in General Musings | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on The Latticework of Mental Models

Thoughts on Thinking

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Dr Joseph Russo

 

Farnam StreetI have subscribed this day to a really neat site called Farnam Street, the author of which was recently featured in an Evernote Blog article that you can find here. My interest was piqued when they began speaking of how reading for learning was truly a lost art. I read for research purposes, of course, and that is nearly all-consuming. By last count, I had read something like 1,500 research studies and related articles for background on my dissertation topic. But then I also read for pleasure, especially as I go to bed at night.

 

This quote caught my attention, and it is certainly something I’ve learned recently in the quest for a doctorate:

 

Learning something deeply and fundamentally affects how you understand the world, and most of your reading can’t and won’t deliver that.

 

Why then is it that most of our reading cannot and will not deliver on the promise of a refreshed understanding of the world? Shane has this to say:

 

The problem I see too frequently is, especially as people age, they begin to read exclusively for information and entertainment, and stop trying to learn. They stop dropping important new roots, and don’t even tend to the older ones anymore.

 

The answer, I guess, is that reading for entertainment is by definition not at all deep, not deep enough for the roots he speaks of anyway. And indeed, most of the novels that I read I will have forgotten in about two weeks! It is a great way to save money – re-reading the same books simply because you forgot how they ended!

 

But the real import of the article came at this point, when Shane said:

In the text I am reading, I focus on what’s important; what I think is critical to the arguments in the piece I’m reading. I underline anything that strikes me as interesting. I circle words I need to look up for a better understanding. I mark comments and questions in the margins to try and tease out assumptions. Essentially, I’m trying to engage in a conversation with the author.   After I’ve read the book and have absorbed what the author is trying to tell me, I’ll look at the notes again and see what’s changed since I started reading the book. If something still strikes my interest, I take notes in the first few pages of the book on that topic. [Emphasis is mine]

And that conversation is, in effect, the execution of critical thinking, a kind of Socratic colloquy with the author that is intended to deepen our understanding and to either improve upon existing mental models, or to add to them.

 

What is a mental model, you ask? Stay tuned. My next blog post will talk about the so-called latticework of mental models that all truly deep thinkers must have.

 

Comments? Thoughts? I would love to hear from you!

 

Posted in General Musings | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Thoughts on Thinking