Do five simple things a day to stay sane

We all know many of the basic daily routines needed to maintain physical health as we grow older: proper diet, exercise, sleep... As you might expect, there are a number of basic daily routines for maintaining mental health too during our lives. A recent article in TimesOnline outlined five recommended steps for maintaining proper mental health and balance. The article discussed them in more detail, but I'll post a quick summary of them below.

Connect
Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support

Be active
Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness

Be curious Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you

Learn
Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, cooking – the challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence

Give
Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community and is very rewarding

I found that I actually did fairly well following most of these in may daily life. How about you?

The 80-20 Rule of New Projects vs Maintenance

I was reading a recent article about people managing large computer departments. The main point of the article was:

IT business priority #1 - free up money for new projects.

Basically, too many companies spend 80% of their computer department's programming budget on maintenance of old programs, and only 20% of their budget on new projects. The article suggest that this ratio needs to be inverted to realize the full benefit of the computer department.

That got me wondering. Consider my "discretionary time", that which is left after my job, sleeping, eating, etc. Shouldn't I ideally be spending 80% of that time on new projects, learning, preparing for a 2nd career, or doing something else to improve myself? And should the remaining 20% be on maintenance activities? I'm sure that the amount of my discretionary time spent on routine chores around the house, running errands, going through my email, and taking care of assorted other ongoing obligations adds up to much more the 20%. In fact, it's often more than 80%.

So the question for the day is - how do I reverse that ratio? Obviously it means cutting down the time spent on maintenance chores. This summer for the first time in many years I paid a local high school student to mow my lawn. That's one example, one which I've decided was well worth the money. I'm searching for others now.

One of the big time consumers of my evenings is email. Sometimes it seems that getting that down to 20 minutes a day would be wonderful (for non-work email). I'm not sure how to accomplish this yet though.

A Big Part of Success is Showing Up

You can make detailed plans for your future, but often times the best opportunities show up unexpectedly and are not something you plan for. They don’t show up at random though. On the contrary, I’ve realized that they tend to show up for people who tend to show up. In other words, if you make yourself a visible, active, hardworking participant in some field, people looking to give someone an opportunity will be much more likely to come to you. The result can be a totally unexpected chance to move your plans forward in a new direction.

Let me give you a recent example from our town. One good friend - let’s call her Anne (because that’s her real name), was a housewife with two young children. I am on our town’s Conservation Advisory Council, and I invited Anne to attend one of the meetings. She got very interested in one of the local environmental issues and did an enormous amount of work on it culminating in a presentation to the town board. Soon after that she joined another town council and became active there too.

When people were looking for some new to run for our State Assembly seat, guess who they decided to ask? One year ago Anne was a housewife taking care of two young children and getting somewhat board with the lack of activities in her life. Now she’s busy running for State Assembly, something neither she or her husband had in their plans. If she wins, that's a start of a major political career for her. If she looses, the contacts she made and the reputation she built up in the process will open up many new doors for her.

And all because she showed up and started to get involved on a small scale to begin with.

When does mid-life start?

The following notes are from a CD I listened to a while ago on "Mid-life Issues". I'll try to dig up the author's name and post it here, but in the mean time I thought I'd share this with you.

• Mid-life starts when yo realize your time is limited and you stop thinking about how far from birth you are and start thinking about how far you are from death.
  
• Are you reaching your goals, and if not why? If you have, why aren't you enjoying it more? There is a growing need to find meaning in what you're doing.
  
• You've already proven you can make it. Now there's an awareness of legacy issues.
  
• These transitions are inevitable. Part of the normal development process
  
• An important realization is that you're never going to be famous. Sometimes this can cause people to loose their passion. Sometimes it can cause people to loose their stress over unrealistic expectations and envy, and thus to enjoy work more.
  
• You have to learn now to do things just for the sake of doing them, because they're fun or you find personal meaning in doing them.
  
• You need to let go of your younger juvenile goals. Meaning in jobs becomes more important that promotions. Much of the meaning comes from giving back to others, including mentorship.
  
• Transitions always mean a loss, a loss of "what was", which has to be given up in order to become "what will be".
  
• To examine mid-life transitions, look at three things:
  
  
  
  1. How you're doing now
     
  2. What you'd like to be
     
  3. what you need to do to get there.
     
  
  

The Role of Advertising in Free Markets

Alice Flynn, who works for a yellow pages publisher, responded to my previous appends on the evils of advertising by saying the following:

Advertising helps people find what they need. I have also seen the manipulative use of advertising, as we all have, by political campaigns, cults, con artists and quacks. But please, be reasonable. It is not advertising in itself, which is basically communication, that is the problem. Any tool can be used for good or evil.

She has a reasonable point, but let me digress a little to discuss the role of advertising in a truly free market. When I took my economics classes in college, I remember a long series of "proofs" that a truly free market would allocate goods and services in a highly efficient way in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Then, the course took a long look at the unstated assumptions needed for this to be true. One of them was that people always acted as informed rational consumers. As an illustration of how far this assumptions is from being true, the professor stated that if this assumption were accurate, advertising as we know it would not have any effect and would not exist. All that we would have are basic "yellow page" type ads offering information on goods and services available with contact information for the company.

So in a sense, I agree that with Alice Flynn that there is clearly a place for such informative type of advertising. But I stand by my argument that most of the advertising we are exposed to on TV, radio, and to a lesser extent in magazines and newspapers tends to be highly manipulative. If we were acting in our own best interests in the way free market theory says we should, we would do our best to limit our exposure to such advertising.

Is Advertising by Non-Profit Organizations Evil?

After my last post titled Advertising is Evil, Robin Edgar posted an interesting comment about a highly misleading, if not outright fraudulent ad. It turns out to be one of the latest new magazine ads for the Unitarian Universalists. It starts with a very provocative statement for shock value, then goes on to discuss it in a more reasonable tone.

I'd rather not go into a discussion about the effectiveness of this approach at the moment. It does bring up an interesting thought though - if advertising is evil, does this apply to ads from religious groups or non-profit organizations in general? This is somewhat of an intellectual game, but after giving it some thought I came up with the following answer. Advertising by commercial entities can be considered evil because they are trying to change your thoughts without regard to the harm it may cause you or society, motivated solely by their own profit. Non-profit organizations, including religious ones, are by definition not operating only for their own financial gain. They are much more likely to be concerned with benefiting society in general or you in particular, at least according to their view on what is beneficial.

Now it's certainly possible of course that they can end up using unethical and deceptive methods for doing this. No organization is perfect. So I'll view advertisements from non-profit groups as being potentially good or evil, needing evaluation on a case-by-case basis. I think political advertising also falls into this category, though given recent history I'm likely to consider them guilty until proven innocent.

Since I don't know of any TV or radio show supported only with non-profit advertising (with the possible exception of some PBS and NPR shows that have non-profit underwriting), this doesn't really change anything. I'm still left with the big question - what to do about watching the upcoming Olympics? I'm guessing that it will be a commercial advertising extravaganza setting new records for at least the amount of advertising money spent, and possibly the amount of total time devoted to advertising. Ugh.

Advertising is Evil

In my last post I wrote about the 100 Possession Challenge that some people are attempting in order to radically simplify their life. I've spoken to several people about this, and while none of us are willing to try the actual 100 Possession Challenge, it has inspired myself and others to consider significantly decluttering our lives.

This motivated me to think about what other radical ideas I could come up with to significantly simplify and declutter other aspects of my life, both physically and mentally. I eventually started pondering an old idea that advertising is evil. But I don't mean evil as in "really really annoying", I mean evil in the sense that slavery or child pornography is evil.

What in the world am I talking about? Why would I consider this radical notion that advertising is actually evil? Consider the basic goal of advertising. Someone else is trying to modify your thoughts, desires, and even your values for their own financial benefit. They typically use subtle and difficult to counter appeals to very basic emotions, appeals that people are often not even aware of. And they attempt to cause these changes in your mental outlook completely without regards to any harm they may be causing you in the process. Such actions are evil, pure and simple.

But isn't advertising is part of our culture, something we all learn to tolerate? Besides, how could our economy possibly function without it? Well, the exact same thing was said about slavery by its supporters in the early 1800s. People who did not grow up in a culture of slavery could easily see that it was evil, but it took a rare and courageous person who grew up in this cultural tradition to recognize it for the evil it was. And the economy did fine after it was abolished.

But isn't advertising different because it's a voluntary activity for all parties? If you tried to make the same argument about certain forms of child pornography, people would quickly and correctly object because of the harm it causes to individuals and eventually to society in general.

If I focus on the biggest culprits, TV and radio advertising, I can avoid all advertising (or at least the most obnoxious forms of it) by limiting myself to NPR radio, PBS-TV, Book-TV, CSPAN and assorted recorded music and podcasts. That's not that big a change from my current habits, so it's feasible. There are two problems though. What about my family members? I can't insist that they change, and I have to respect their preferences. Does that mean I get up and leave the room every time they turn on a commercial TV station? Maybe so, and just ask them to understand and respect my preferences. The other really big challenge is.... the Olympics start next month. I haven't decided how serious I want to be about this yet, but showing integrity would seem to suggest that I avoid watching the "plausibly live" commercial TV coverage. Hmmmm....

The 100 Possession Challenge

I've been interested in decluttering my life for a while, and in spurts I give it a try (though often not getting beyond one room). It turns out that some people are willing to try taking this to the extreme in the "Olympics of decluttering" and reducing their personal possessions to 100 items. Gulp! My family had an interesting conversation about it over lunch today, and decided that it would have to be 100 items per person, and jointly owned family-stuff wouldn't count. But still, getting down to even 200-300 items would be an extreme challenge. I'm not sure if I'll give it a try, but at least it give me great inspiration to work on decluttering my life more. By the way, did you know that ancient Buddhist Law of Possessions allowed a monk to have only 8 possessions? Interesting.... I believe that is roughly what Gandhi owned when he died.

If you want to read more, try the Zen Habits web site article here. ( The Zen Habits site is an incredibly wonderful site in general when it comes to decluttering you possessions, your mind, and examining your priorities.) There is also a guy blogging about his efforts. And finally, surprise, there was even a recent Time magazine article about this movement.

Spiritual Intelligence

I was trying to look up Spiritual Activism on Wikipedia recently. While they didn't have an entry on that, the did have one on Spiritual Intelligence that was rather interesting. Spiritual Intelligence is considered to be one of the several types of intelligences, such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, etc.

There were several definitions of Spiritual Intelligence given in the article, some of which struck me as too vague to be of any meaning to me. Here's a collection of some of the more interesting and meaningful ones though:

[Spiritual Intelligence is]the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning-giving context; the intelligence with which we can assess that one course of action or one life-path is more meaningful than another... [It]allows human beings to be creative, to change the rules and to alter situations. It allows us to play with the boundaries; it gives us our moral sense; it allows us to wrestle with questions of good and evil and to envision unrealized possibilities.

The article goes on to list a set of practical aspects of spiritual intelligence:

1. Acceptance of adversity rather than raging against it. Not resorting to blame, guilt, rationalising, anger, despair, denial and other typical defense mechanisms.
   
2. Using materials preciously and avoiding waste. Recycling, reusing things wherever possible, reducing waste and repairing things instead of replacing them.
   
3. Being grateful for everything including adversity.
   
4. Having the capacity to see one's ego (Witness Consciousness) and choose whether to go with the ego's habitual tendency or do something different.
   
5. Apologising for one's mistakes and making amends wherever possible.
   
6. Seeing the inherent beauty of everything and everyone.
   
7. Having a positive attitude.
   
8. Treating everyone and everything with compassion and gratitude including tools and machines.
   
9. Leaving every place you go better than you found it.
   
10. Respect for the environment and bio-diversity as having inherent as well as practical value
    

It sounds a lot like the list of characteristics of a well rounded mature personality.

Winning the Debate vs. Finding Common Ground

I attended my son's college graduation last week, after having skipped my own more years ago than I care to mention. The speaker, Dr. Stanley McKenzie, gave an interesting speech - much better than most people were expecting. Most commencement speeches have some memorable thoughts expressed, and this was no exception. While I didn't write down the exact words, here is one simple but important comment he made that stuck with me.

When two people with different views are discussing a topic, our cultural tendency is to try to refute the other person's argument every way we can and win the debate. The expected outcome is that the other person will concede and adopt your point of view. Experience will tell you that such an outcome is exceedingly rare of course. In reality the more useful approach actually is to (1) try to first understand why the other person is holding their views, and (2) see if there are any points of agreement that you can work together on. ( Note that I did not say compromise on what you think is right. )

It's interesting that in our hyper-individualistic and competitive culture, trying to "win the debate" seems like the only possible approach to disagreements. In reality there are other approaches, and if we were more logical about things we might admit that experience shows that other approaches can be much more useful. It just takes some time to overcome our cultural habits.

Showing up, and Generating Opportunities

It’s been a while since I posted – I had three major presentations to give in a four week period, plus attending college graduation ceremonies for my son. Giving these presentations was a big step forward with my career goals, and these opportunities all came about because of efforts I made at giving previous minor presentations. Woody Allen used to say that “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. In a way it was true in my case. If you show up at gatherings and make yourself known as someone who has something to say about a topic, opportunities will start emerging. As a result of these most recent presentations, I was invited to review an article, review a book, and give a presentation at a conference in Beijing. (Unfortunately I had to turn down the Beijing presentation because my company wouldn’t pay for it). The more you show up and make the effort, the more opportunities present themselves.

This gets me to my son’s graduation from college. I was trying to decide what words of wisdom I could give him at this transition point in his life. I came up with the following thoughts:

You know those quotes about “opportunity knocking”? Well, it doesn’t really work that way. Opportunity doesn’t knock on your door, but it does hang around the area for a while. You have to go out and do a little exploring to find it. And sometimes what you find are the pieces that you have to put together yourself.

No One But Us

This was recently sent to me by a good friend. I found it a very empowering poem, especially if you feel inadequate because of past failures and mistakes.

No One But Us
by Annie Dillard

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
Nor a clean hand,
Nor a pure heart
On the face of the earth,
Nor in the earth
But only us,
A generation comforting ourselves
With the notion
That we have come at an awkward time,
That our innocent fathers are all dead –
As if innocence has ever been –
And our children busy and troubled,
And we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
Having each of us chosen wrongly,
Made a false start, failed,
Yielded to impulse
And the tangled comfort of pleasures,
And grown exhausted,
Unable to seek the thread,
Weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

From the book Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

Classifying people as allies or enemies

I just read an insightful little quote:

"Humans classify people based on whether they are likely to be an ally or enemy."

It was in a Newsweek article about people's voting habits, but it seems to apply to so much more in life. More times than I can count I've experienced situations where showing a little sympathy and letting people know that you're on their side made a world of difference in their attitudes towards me.

By contrast, I recently responded to a technical proposal I read at work by emailing the person making the proposal some pointed questions about things I saw missing or poorly explained. My goal was to help them come up with a better and more reasonable proposal, but they clearly inferred from my comments that I was more likely to be an adversary than an ally for them and their ideas. That's one relationship that really got off on the wrong foot. Fortunately some other allies of mine were able to step in and smooth things over, and we're building a better working relationship now. A little older, a little wiser I guess. I'll now make it a point to present myself as a potential ally to people I meet whenever possible.

Accepting Leadership Roles

One of the characteristics of a mature adult is a willingness to accept roles of responsibilities in the community. Society requires people who are willing to accept such roles. It is said that one of the requirements of a well functioning democracy is a large pool of people willing to accept leadership roles when the situation requires it.

Accepting leadership roles in non-profit community organizations is also recognized as an important part of creating future opportunities for yourself. Not only do you gain experience and make good contacts, but managers of both profit and non-profit organizations look at experiences in community leadership when evaluating whether or not a person has a "leadership disposition".

With that in mind, it was an easy decision for me to accept the position of President of our local Unitarian Universalists congregation when I was recently asked to run for that office. There will be an election later this year, but that is mostly a formality and I will likely run unopposed. It’s a big time commitment and a little scary, but there is no doubt in my mind that the experience will be extremely valuable for anything I decide to do afterwards. I’m also excited about the new ideas and programs I can help introduce and help the organization grow and flourish. It’s a wonderful group of people and a wonderful organization to work with. I believe that a progressive religion such as this can be a real benefit to people’s lives, and an important part of the solutions to some of our world’s problems. It's also an important counterweight to religious fundamentalism. Wish me luck!

21 Suggestions for Success

Here's something I copied down a while ago and recently came across while looking through some old files. I forgot how good it was.

21 Suggestions for Success - by H. Jackson Brown

1. Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your hapiness or missery
   
2. Work at something you enjoy, and that's worthy of your time and effort.
   
3. Give people more than they expect and do it chearfully
   
4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.
   
5. Be forgiving of yourself and others
   
6. Be generous
   
7. Have a grateful heart
   
8. Persistance, persistance, persistance.
   
9. Discipline yourself to save money even on the most modest income
   
10. Treat everyone you meet like you want ot be treated
    
11. Commit yourself to constant improvement
    
12. Commit yourself to quality
    
13. Understand that happiness is not based on possesions, power, or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.
    
14. Be loyal
    
15. Be honest
    
16. Be a self starter
    
17. Be decisive even if it means you'll sometimes be wrong
    
18. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.
    
19. Be bold and corageous. Whe you look back at you life you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the ones you did.
    
20. Take care of those you love
    
21. Don't do anything that wouldn't make your Mom proud.
    

Wondering what they will do

"Some people wonder what they will do when they grow up. I'm wondering more about what I'll do when my children grow up." - Martha Carleton

5 Months of "Most Important Tasks" (MITs)

It's been 5 months now since my 50th birthday, and 5 months that I've been practicing writing down my Most Important Things (MITs) to do each morning. Here's what I've found out so far:

(1) It's not too hard to get into this habit provided you do it early each morning before staring to work on various tasks for the day, and rate yourself at the end of each day (example - finished 2 out of 3)

(2) It helps if you keep a running score for the week. For example, completing 15 out of 21 at the end of the week. This gives you additional incentive to write them down and complete them. If you fail to write down any for the day, then give yourself a score of 0 out of 3.

(3) Writing down the MITs for a day only provides minimal help if you don't actually schedule any time to do them. You also need to plan when you are going to do them. This usually means doing them before other routine tasks. Remember, they are the most important tasks for you to accomplish that day. Plan them with that attitude in mind.

(4) Choosing your MITs is a learned skill. You need to balance being realistic, pushing yourself, and being flexible. Ideally most MITs should have something to do with your long term plans, but not always. Sometimes the priority for a day has a more immediate focus. For example, for Dec 25th the single MIT for that day could be "connecting with and appreciating family members".

Thought for the Day - Life as a mission

Thought for the day:

"Life is a mission, not a career" - Stephen R. Covey,

from The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

Books to Read

I was listening to Marc Freedman on the radio the other day being interviewed about his book Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life It sounded pretty interesting, so I went and ordered it from Amazon.com. One of the wonderful little features of that web site is that it recommends similar books to the on you're ordering that you might also be interested based on what other people bought. Here are some of the interesting sounding recommendations.

Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion After 50 by David D. Corbett

Civic Engagement And the Baby Boomer Generation by Laura B. Wilson

After 50 It's Up To Us: Developing The Skills And Agility We'll Need by George Schofield

Don't Retire, REWIRE! by Jeri Sedlar

I have no specific recommendations on any of them, but considering that the baby boomers are now passing their 50th birthdays (like me), it's no surprise that there are a growing number of books on the market addressing this audience.

I'll report back later when I get a chance to read Encore

Making Appropriate New Year's Resolutions

Making resolutions, or setting new goals, can be done at any time. Certain "transition times", such as birthdays, the start of summer, a new school year, or retirement can be good times for resolutions and setting new goals, though they can be really done at any time. Of course the period around New Year's day is the traditional time for making new resolutions in our culture. I have a membership at a local fitness center, and those of us who are long time regulars there get a chuckle the first week in January which is always the busiest week of the year. We know that things will return to normal by the end of the month.

Finding appropriate New Year's resolutions can be a tricky thing. Ideally it should be something realistic that you can accomplish in the coming year. Consider an impressive grand goal, such as "develop a 2nd career that you can follow after you retire". That's a great goal, but one that involves many steps and spans many years. On the other extreme, consider one such as "cleaning out the basement". Another worthwhile goal, but it's something that takes much less than a year (hopefully). Neither of them are really ideal New Year's resolutions.

After giving this some thought, here are some New Year's resolutions I'm considering making. Note that I am writing these down in a public way, which helps to increase the odds that I will actually keep most of them.

Health - to enable a long active life:
- Jog at least 500 miles (something I've successfully done for the past 2 years)
- Make an appointment for a physical by January 15th
- Restrict coffee to normally at most one small cup a day

I considered "eating healthy" and "getting more sleep", but these seem too vague with no defined targets or plans to be useful resolutions in those forms.

Simplify / Unclutter My Life - allowing more focus on what's important:
- Start with the bedroom in January - remove anything not related to sleeping or dressing. Simplifying your life, not just rearranging things, can call for drastic changes ;-)
- Continue with one or more uncluttering projects per month.
- Unclutter my mind: Simplify, organize, and plan my schedule on an ongoing basis. Edit down my list of projects based on my major goals. Experiment with some new techniques to reduce and manage information overload. Learn and practice new approaches to become more patient.

Other Interests:- Become known nationally in the small but growing "Great Turning" community by participating in discussions, writing articles, giving presentations, writing in my Provocative Futures blog, and taking other initiatives.

Didn't I just say above that a goal of simplifying my life involved editing down (reducing) my list of things that I'm working on? Hmmm... not off to a great start, am I?