Tales from a Trip to Ellis Island

When I was a young boy in Cub Scouts, we went on a trip to a major league baseball game. I remember standing outside the stadium taking in the sites, when I looked around to find that the rest of my group was gone. I was taught that in that situation you should just stay just where you are. An adult will eventually backtrack their steps and find you. If you go wondering off trying to find your group, you may become very seriously lost. It worked - I stayed where I was and within a few short minutes an adult leader returned to get me. That left me with the sense of accomplishment at doing the right thing when tested that I still remember to this day.

We recently went on a trip to Ellis Island in NY city with three adults and several children. It was a crowded and noisy trip through NY city to get there, part by subway, so it occurred to me to remind the kids about what to do if they get separated from the rest of the group. I got everyone's attention for a moment, and asked the kids "does everyone know what to do if they get separated from the group?" They all looked at me with that expression that young teenagers use when adults ask them ridicules questions ( which in their mind probably covers most questions that adults ask them). One of the kids final spoke up and answered "Well yea - you call your parent on your cell phone...."

I felt a little older and crotchety at that moment.

One Month Anniversary

Yesterday was my one month anniversary of being unemployed. Contrary to my expectations, the time is going by very fast. That's due mainly to a busy schedule I'm trying to keep. I've established a regular morning routine of spending a few hours checking the online job sites ( mainly TheLadders.com and LinkedIn.com), and applying for anything that seems promising. I've also started doing some volunteer work. That may help me make some contacts and open doors that I never even new existed in some different fields. And if not, at least I'm spending some of my time doing something useful in the community.

There was a recent interview on NPR with a women who was a vice-president at a bank when she was laid off. Her to-do list for the day of the interview had 26 items on it, all related to job hunting. Looking for a new job had become a full time job in itself. She expects that it will take her at least 6 months to find one. Persistence and patience is the name of the game now for job hunters.

Unfortunately, for young couples with no real savings or severance pay, time is not something they can comfortably spend. At least those who can get unemployment compensation have something coming in for a while to help. But even that eventually runs out. Our district has a special election this coming Tuesday to fill a vacant seat in Congress. It's not surprising that the economic issues have dominated the debate, as they should.

How Should I Have Spent My Time?

I've established a good habit of getting up early each day before 6am to check the online job listings. I've also looked into getting a "project management" certification in order to make myself more useful to prospective employers. In the mean time, I've done some volunteer work, and talked to people about doing more volunteer work in the near future. I figure it's a way to make more connections and possibly open some doors that I don't even know exist yet.

That's a satisfying set of respectable and socially useful activities. I'm not writing this to blow my own horn though, but to contrast this to an alternative activity I could have spent my time on.

I'm not a stock market expert, but I did suspect that Citigroup and AIG stock, which both dipped below $1 on fears of going bankrupt, were undervalued because the government would not let them go bankrupt. If I studied this a little more and convinced myself that it was worth the risk of investing my severance pay on these stocks, I could have made over $100,000 in the last two weeks as these stocks shot up. I didn't make that investment out of fear that I could have lost a good portion of my severance pay if I was wrong, and my family needed that money to survive on until I find my next job.

Does this seem wrong to anyone else? An economic system that rewards stock speculation so much more than socially useful efforts seems broken. Maybe we accepted this in the past, but perhaps now the problems this leads to have become all too painfully apparent. Perhaps the economy won't fully recover until this situation fundamentally changes. As long as the most economically profitable thing to do involves financial speculation, we can't consider ourselves to be on the road to creating a reasonable and sustainable economy for the 21st century. Just some speculation, and I don't know if it's more wishful thinking than reality yet.

Making comparisons about how bad off we are

We've grown accustom to a lifestyle and a set of expectations that the planet and the economy cannot support. When something is unsustainable, by definition it cannot continue on forever. In some sense that is the story of our current economic crisis. One of the aspects of it that makes it painful though is that the adjustments are currently taking place in a very uneven fashion across society – many good people are finding themselves completely unemployed, while others continue to earn a substantial income. The difference between the two can often be the result of almost random circumstances.

While I don't mean to diminish the mental anguish of those suffering hard economic times right now, (having experienced a good bit of that anguish myself when I lost my job after 26 years), it is also worth noting that even people in difficult economic circumstances in this country are quite well off compared to large segments of the population in poorer sections of the world. And we are better off than the people who experienced economic hardships during the great depression. While the economic safety net here may not be as good as it is in western Europe, people still do have access to food through government programs and private charities, and emergency medical care is available to all. There is still fee public education for children. And though we tend to take this for granted, a very major benefit is that we still have a stable society with a relatively low crime rate.

The emotional tole from the insecurity is very taxing, and it is compounded by a feeling of personal failure in the back of your mind when you see other people who appear to have secure jobs. However, there should be some small comfort from the fact that our emotions tend to exaggerate how bad our circumstances are by comparing them to other people or other times. Such comparisons, when done realistically, can instead lead one to count one's blessings.

The Next Stage of Life?

Back in December when I was contemplating ways to make significant transformations in my life, I posted the following note on my office wall:

Make some change - get rid of something to signify putting things behind you and moving forward.

I struggled with this idea for a while, looking for something perhaps only symbolic, or perhaps more substantive, that I could put behind me to signify moving forward into a new stage of life. Mozart changed his middle name when he got married, which may have been his way of signifying a rebirth or new phase of his life. What change should I consider making?

Ironically, that note on my office wall foreshadowed the involuntary event of being laid off 2 months later. I guess I finally have my answer. For me, this may well become a new distinct “4th stage” of my life. The first stage was my childhood in my parents home. The second stage was my life in college. The third stage was raising a family and a 26 year career at IBM. Now I may well be entering a fourth stage with a new career and focus. As a friend recently told me, consider this opportunity to be a great gift to be exploited in the fullest.

With that in mind, I wanted to share an inspirational quote from Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes that our minister recently shared with us:

When it's over, I don't want to
wonder if I have made of my life
something particular,
and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing
and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world.

Perhaps making this an end of my "just visiting this world" phases is a good way to look at my new opportunities.

Empathy and Economic Hardship

I commented below about how having your life upended for a while can dramatically reduce your interest in social causes that your were previously passionate about, such as environmental responsibility. By contrast, I found a surprisingly strong empathy quickly developed in myself with other people going through financial distress. In reality my financial situation is relatively good in terms of short term funds and overall job prospects. However, there were some rather dark periods where I wasn't sure that this was the case. Now I feel a type of personal bond with those people for whom the outlook is much more bleak.

Andrew Sullivan does a great job in his blog of posting occasional personal stories of people dealing with economic hardships. Consider the story of a young couple who married in 2007 and bought a house at the height of the housing bubble. They're working very hard struggling to pay off a huge mortgage on a house that is now probably worth $150,000 less than they owe on that mortgage. If either of them looses their job, which is very possible, they loose everything. By conventional standards, they are a hard working couple that did nothing wrong.

I recently heard about a local case in my community of a woman who showed up at a food pantry for the first time. She described her husband as a very hard working man who always did a good job of providing for her and their three children. He's a construction worker though, and hasn't had work in months. Their savings are gone, they have nothing left, and they're about to loose their house. Unlike me, they did not get a big severance package complete with health care benefits when his work ended, they have no pension to look forward too, and as a young couple I doubt they have much if any 401K funds that they can tap into.

There are so many good people in terrible distress right now, generally through no real fault of their own. Those of us who are relatively secure have a hard time imagining what this actually feels like. My heart goes out to them in a way it never used to. Whenever anyone asks me a survey question about national priorities, job creation now jumps to the top of my list closely followed by making health care available to everyone.

Personal Uncertainty and Environmental Concern

I have always had a passionate interest in environmental issues and in climate change in particular. I personally arranged for the showing of Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” to more than a dozen local educational and civic organizations over the years. It always bothered me a little to see the lack of interest in these issues among the lower income and minority segments of our community. The standard explanation was that when you have other pressing issues on your mind, long range environmental concerns get pushed aside. I've always wondered how accurate that explanation really was though.

Well I can now tell you from first hand experience that there is a lot of truth to it. During the one month period between learning that my job was in jeopardy and finally being laid off, my interest in environmental issues essentially completely disappeared. Listening to my old friends in the environmental movement continue to discuss climate change issues began to seem as relevant as listening to a group of people discussing the status of public education in central Africa. Intellectually I new that it was an important topic, but emotionally it seemed like an increasingly esoteric subject of little relevance to my immediate and pressing problems.

It was very interesting to observe such an extreme swing in my attitudes when I stepped back at looked at it as a detached observer. To tell the truth, I felt a little embarrassed about it too. I let short term personal concerns override what I knew were long term vital public issues. The important observation seems to be that it's difficult for people to show an emotional concern for our long term public security and well being when they're facing a great deal of uncertainty in their own personal lives. Keeping a focus on our longer term interests will be both a public and a private challenge as we live through this period of economic uncertainty.

Doonsbury Covers my Story - Sort of

I've been following the Doonsbury comic strip since my early collage days in the 1970's. It's paralleled my life at many times in amazing ways, and it continues to do so now. One of the main characters, Rick Redfern, a reporter at the Washington Post for many years, just got laid off in the comic strip last week. His situation has many similarities to mine, and it will be interesting to see where this story line goes. My compliments to the author Gary Tredeau for tacking on this increasingly common social trend.

The relevant sequence of events starts with this strip.

A Big Change In My Life

I have always considered Obama’s election to be a transformative event for the country, if not the world. In past posts I talked about how to make significant transformations in my own life. There is a big new developments in this area that I want to announce.

I have worked for IBM for 26 years. It’s a comfortable job, but sometimes I wondered if focusing so much of my time and energy on esoteric technology issues for a major corporation is how I want to spend so much of my life. I sometimes fantasize that if I had real courage, I would quit and go work for a non-profit organization, or write a book that would change how people think, or start my own organization. I don’t have anywhere near the guts to actually do that though, especially in this economy.

Well, reality just intervened with a massive 2x4 across the forehead. Last month I learned that our department at work was downsizing and I was scheduled to be laid off at the end of February. I was focused on this for the last few weeks and thus posted very little to this blog. I can now let everyone that this phase of the waiting and uncertainty is over, and I have officially joined the ranks of the unemployed as of yesterday. I’m viewing this as a paid sabbatical for a few months (thanks to a nice severance package) while I look at various opportunities and try to decide what to do. But it’s also an unasked for opportunity to do something substantially new.

I talked to some people about what I should do on what could turn out to be effectively a 6 month paid sabbatical. The most interesting advice I received so far is to do something new, something that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Despite all the unpleasant stress over the last month, it’s entirely possible that I could turn this into an interesting adventure. Now it’s time to take a very serious look at what to do in the second half of my life.

How far can you go before giving up?

I find that when I've gone about as far as I think I can go, I'm usually about half way there.

- From a good friend of mine, Stan Goldstein

An Alternative to the Golden Rule?

The Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is sometimes considered to be the most basic foundational principle of ethics in our society. Variations on it can be found in almost every society and every major religion, and it is often considered the best candidate for the common basic principle taught by all religions.

I was recently reading about Ethical Culture, which is a notheistic religion based entirely on ethical principles. I would have guessed that some variation of the Golden Rule served as the basis of their ethical principles. However, their basic ethical core value is "Always act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself". This is an interesting alternative to the Golden Rule, one which has some merit. In some ways it goes beyond just defining right and wrong, and focuses additionally on describing the most effective action along with giving a guideline to help decide what that action might be.

I couldn't think of any cases where this Ethical Culture core value would conflict with the Golden Rule. But I also don’t think that one is just a subset or special case of the other – they are different. When considering how to respond to people affected by a natural disaster, or a neighbor who suffered a tragic loss of some sort, applying the Golden Rule seems like the best guide to establishing the right ethical action. However, in the much more common daily life occurrences of dealing with someone who is angry, argumentative, or despondent, then acting in a way to elicit the best in that person (as opposed to further feeding their anger for example), seems like the right guideline. In fact, for the very general cases of how to set examples for others or how to properly raise a child, acting in a way to draw out the best in that person seems to be exactly the right approach.

Interestingly, this also has implications to international policy. Consider how different things would be in Gaza right now if both sides had acted in ways to elicit the best in others. This would mean always acting to strengthen the moderate and cooperative tendencies on the other side as your overarching guiding principle. Imagine the results from such an approach, and compare that to the current horrific results produced by the policies of always showing greater strength or determination through the use of force or violence. I’ll go one step further - I'll assert that "Always acting so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself" should be one of the basic principles of American foreign policy if our attempt to transform the world is to be at all effective.

New Year's Resolutions, or Alternatives

Most of productivity experts seem to have little enthusiasm for New Year’s Resolutions. In large part that’s because they are often just wishes (“I want to loose some weight”) and not really goals. To be an effective goal, there should be a clear description of what success is (“I will loose 20 pounds by June 1st”), and a plan for how to get there (“Starting today I will eat 3 healthy meals a day, avoid all other snacks, and I will avoid completely the following foods and drinks …..”).

Some people suggest picking your most important single goal for the year and just focusing on that to maximize the chances of success. A variation on this that works well with setting new habits is to set a single goal of establishing a new habit each month and focus on that. If you’re successful you’ll set 12 new good habits in a year, which is actually quite an accomplishment.

So after giving this a fair amount of though over the holidays, here’s what I would like to publicly declare. After completing several exercises to examine my strengths and interests, my single big goal for the year is to:

Use my insights and leadership abilities to inform people and inspire them to promote a cooperative, sustainable and peaceful society.

That high level description is too general to be an effective goal, so I’m developing a description of what being successful would look like and a plan to get there.

In terms of a monthly habit I’d like to establish, I came up with the following cluster of related habits for January:

Establish a habit of being better organized, uncluttered, and focused on my important goals. This includes:

• Write current life goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Unclutter: nothing is to be stored on horizontal surfaces - desk, table tops, floors. Regularly discard unused items.
  
• Email inbox: reduce to less than one screen every evening. When a response is called for, do so within 24 hours.
  
• Web browser: shut down every evening (i.e. no long list of unread articles in tabs)
  
• Simplify activities by applying the 80/20 rule - focus on that 20% of work that produces most of the benefits and start eliminating the rest.
  
• Awake at 5am for daily reflection and planning of the day’s activities. Focus on the most important thing I can accomplish that day to achieve my long term goals.
  
• Regular weekly / monthly / yearly review of goals, projects, progress, plans

Practices specific to work:

• Write current work goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Keep track of time spent at work to see how well I'm focusing on the important projects.
  
• No personal email or web reading until 4 hours of work is accomplished, then only 30 minutes until work day is done (at least 8 hours).

That’s quite a challenge for establishing new habits in one month, but if successful it could have a big impact on my daily life.

What would a transformed life look like?

Recently I was talking about a life transformation with a good friend who asked me a very helpful question: "What does a transformed life look like to you - what is your vision of an end goal?" I've been giving this a fair amount of thought lately. While I don't have a complete description yet, I think I can list some of the high level aspects of what such a transformation might end up producing. This is a highly personal list and I wouldn't expect it to be the same for any other person contemplating similar changes, but here's what I came up with.

Some aspects of a transformed life

• Permanently put behind me all the anger and frustrations of the past
  
• Inner changes in how I see the world, and how I see myself
  
• Started on an exponential growth in both understanding and making contributions
  
• Develop a much clearer understanding of what to do and what not to do with my life
  
• Simplify other aspects of my life in order to become radically more effective
  
• Change my habits and daily schedule to better promote these goals
  
• Have my discretionary schedule and finances reflect my values and priorities
  
• Have my decisions based on compassion, and never on anger, resentment, fear, greed, or pride.
  

More details to follow.

Virtual Retreat - an Update

On Dec 20th I wrote a post about starting a one month virtual retreat to work on transforming my life. I successfully made it through a trip to visit my extended family during the Christmas holidays and want to comment on how the retreat is going so far:

Getting up early and doing daily journaling about your thoughts and plans: I haven't always made my goal of starting at 5am, but this has been a really helpful practice so far.

Disciplined eating: I managed to stick with eating three healthy meals a day and avoiding all between meal snacks. It was a big change in my habits, but I felt committed and have succeeded so far. The result - I actually lost weight during the holidays :-) I also found that it gets easier after the first few days. I'm considering making this a long term habit now.

Avoid TV - I had planned to allow myself a few exceptions (PBS shows such as Bill Moyers, etc), but I'm finding that following this rule in a more strict sense without exception is working out fine. I've extended it to commercial radio and shopping malls too.

I've also decided to work on eliminating harmful negative emotions to the extent that this is possible, starting with the emotion of anger. I certainly can't claim success at eliminating anger after a week of trying, but I did notice something interesting happening. It became very easy to have the detached part of my mind recognize when anger started. I could then start an internal dialogue about what triggered this emotion, why it is likely to be harmful, and how to look at the situation in a more realistic and helpful way. This would lead to the anger dissipating reasonably quickly, leaving a more honest and unclouded view of the situation. This is more than just anger management, it's actually controlling and eliminating anger. My initial experience strongly suggests that it's habit worth spending some effort cultivating.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

A common way to look at motivation is through the system of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. From the most basic to the most advanced, they are listed as follows:

1) Physiological - food, water, air, shelter....

2) Safety - sense of security for yourself and family and access to resources...

3) Love/Belonging - Family, friends, community...

4) Esteem - achievement, respect of others...

5) Self - Actualization - creativity, problem solving, contributing, realizing your maximum potential...

I've had fairly good success at satisfying the first four categories of needs. The interest in a life transformation, or doing a "midlife assessment and transition" comes mainly from the 5th need for greater self-actualization. It's comforting to know that this is recognized as a common need for many people. It helps explain many of the thoughts I was having difficulty articulating.

When reading about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I came across the interesting claim that by the end of his life Maslow added a 6th need, though it actually sounded more like a level of development than a need. He referred to it as "self-transcendence", which is moving beyond a focus on yourself and your ego. Instead, your focus becomes centered on appreciating, understanding, and promoting the well being of the humanity and nature as a whole. This seems like an important part of the end goal of a life transformation.

Is the World having a midlife crisis?

After posting about the midlife issues I'm going through, I couldn't help but comment on an observation that is seems like The World's Having a Male Midlife Crisis. We've built up a tremendous amount of wealth and military power, and are now asking "Was this really worth it? Are we on the right track?" Now more than ever, the world is questioning the behavior that got us to this present state and contemplating the need for a change.

The analogy isn't perfect though. You can also argue that the world more closely resembles an irresponsible self centered teenager coming face-to-face with the consequences of his actions. The teen is being forced into the transition to adulthood where they need to face the consequences of their past actions and start taking responsibility for their future. And big part of the transition to adulthood for each individual nation is to view itself as becoming a responsible and contributing member to the larger (international) community.

Or perhaps elements of both transitions are taking place simultaneously. Nobody ever claimed that simple analogies were always perfect.

A midlife crisis, or something else?

It occur ed to me that a desire for a life transformation was similar to having a midlife crisis. I did some reading on this and learned that the most common times for this to happen is around the age of 50 now. Since I'm 51 it seemed that I was on to something here and I wanted to learn more.

I turns out that the classical stereotype middle age crisis (picture a man becoming depressed and anxious about growing older, divorcing his wife, buying a red corvette, and marrying a woman half his age) is actually very rare. The best data suggests that between 5% - 12% of middle aged people suffer a "classic" midlife crisis. Most people, on the contrary, find life very satisfying and content around the age of 50.

I found that there are multiple different types of midlife crises. For example, it's possible to assess one's life and future without becoming clinically depressed. In fact it's quite common and appears to be a healthy thing to do. This is more accurately categorized as a "midlife assessment" possibly leading to to a "midlife transition". This is covered in more detail on Life Two, an excellent blog about midlife improvements. This is a more accurate description of what I'm going through than a midlife crisis.

How you deal with the desire for change makes all the difference. You can take a harmful approach in a vain attempt to show some sort of youthful vigor. This often results in pursuing change for the sake of change and make radical changes without thinking them through. Such impulsive behavior can seriously damage or destroy relationships or a career.

On the other hand, a midlife assessment can come about when you have a feeling of disquiet brought upon by a sense that you are living your life in a way that is out of alignment with what deeply matters to you, or that you are failing to live up to your potential. When handled properly, this can result in some very positive changes in how you live the rest of your life.

One of the tricks about this process is to be realistic. To the extent that you've come to terms with your life and your limitations and accept yourself as you are, you can enjoy the accomplishments and successes that you have achieve. Many of the people who find themselves very unhappy turn out to be out of touch with reality with unrealistic goals and fantasies. They're disappointed at not becoming the president of their company or a world famous best selling author. In a study on midlife crises, Orville Brim advises people to "live a life of just manageable difficulty. Goals set too low often lead to a boring life; those set too high can produce bitter disappointment."

Some positive constructive magazines

In a spurt of optimism this morning, I subscribed to ODE and GOOD magazines. That will commit me to some positive constructive reading in the coming year. I could find most of the articles online, but I figure this helps support the magazines financially. And besides, I can give copies to others when I'm done. By the way, I'm already subscribed to YES! and Tikkun magazines, two efforts which I highly support.

A Virtual Retreat

I've been giving more thought to what would be the end goal of a life transforming change. I have some initial thoughts on this that I'll post later. One of the things I have decided upon is to spend the next month conducting a "virtual retreat" to take some time to focus on this question. I started a few days ago and will continue to Jan 20th. Besides being one month from today, that just also happens to be the end of the transition period for our nation and the beginning of a new era as we change leaders.

During this next month, I will:

• Read as much as possible about life transformation and finding a purpose in life.
  
• Spend the first and last hour of each day journaling, reading, or thinking about life transformation
  
• Put off watching almost all TV or attending non-work events of questionable value.
  
• Get up at 5am to start early when the house is quiet and my family is asleep
  
• As a discipline practice: Eat only 3 simple healthy meals a day. No snacking before or after meals.
  

I started a few days ago and I already like the routine. I haven't made 5am every day, but I've always been up before 6am. Taking an hour or more of undisturbed time in the morning to read and write down your thoughts is wonderful. I've already finished reading two books on the topic, which is amazing progress for me.

Christmas vacation with the relatives will be a challenge for both the TV and eating discipline practices, but I want to try to stick as close to the guidelines as possible. Following a guideline to avoid ALL between meal snacking over the holidays could have some very practical benefits. I'm not sure if my relatives will be impressed, or just consider my behavior to be very odd.

Why pursue a life transformation?

Elisa asked some really great questions in her comment to my last post about what is the end result of a life transformation, what is the goal, and what does it get you? Indeed, I could ask why pursue a life transformation at all? I have a quite comfortable and productive life by most standards. Why not just continue living the contented life I have now? I’ve been giving these questions some thought, and let me try to address that last question first.

I agree with the many people who claim that true fulfillment comes from finding something that you are passionate about and that you can devote your time and energy towards. We all have a built in desire to be engaged in such a task, and to be part of something bigger than yourself. Some would call this a desire for finding meaning in life, and some would call this a spiritual longing. We also all have a built in desire to grow as a person, and to me this period represents a tremendous growth opportunity if I can successfully exploit it. Living an undisturbed contented life is just not fulfilling in the same way.

So I’m not really content just sitting back and doing what I’m doing now without any more growth until I die. Even when I think I’m doing well at making a contribution to the world, I know that I am doing only a small portion of what I’m capable of. I also know that according to the latest estimates, as an average American I’m consuming about 5x my fair share of the world’s resources. That could be justified if I was using this consumption to make some sort of exceptional contribution, but I’m not.

I’m not even sure I could continue living an undisturbed contented life much longer if I wanted to. I believe that the world is on the verge of undergoing a set of tremendous transformations in the coming decades, either for good or for bad. This will affect all of us more than we care to admit. The current economic turmoil is but one early example of what will be happening. The effects of peak oil and climate change are rapidly approaching. There is much work to be done to direct these transformations to a positive direction, and I feel a great desire to be part of that effort.

Besides, there’s a sense of adventure in contemplating big changes :-)