Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

• On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  
• The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  
• Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  
• I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  
• Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  
• To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.
  

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

Life Transformations - Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is general health. I’ve done well this past year on hitting some of the big themes: regular doctor checkups, not smoking, wearing my seat belt in a car, etc. My diet was covered in another post, so here’s what I have left to work on this coming year:

• Average at least 7 hours of sleep per day
  
• Take a daily vitamin supplement and fish oil capsule
  
• Exercise at least 4 times a week
  
• Jog a total of at least 500 miles during the year
  
• Minimize caffeine intake. Drink no more than one small cup of coffee per day.
  
• Maintain a positive and grateful attitude (to be covered more in another post)
  

I once took a test on improving my life expectancy, and to my surprise the single biggest factor I could improve on is driving less. In principle that should be one of my health goals too, but I just don’t know how to set a specific actionable goal on that given my current uncertainty over future unemployment plans. It's something to keep in mind though.

Life Transformations - Diet

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reflect on your life and to think about establishing new habits or goals. Many experts will tell you that the best success at establishing new habits comes from focusing on one new habit at a time. However, there is a certain thrill that produces a greater sense of motivation for starting a larger life transformation all at once, which implies changing many habits at the same time. I find myself having trouble resisting the temptation to do this, or at least to contemplate it in some detail. So I’m going to write a sequence of appends about initiating a larger set of transforming habits. The idea is to start these on Jan 1st, 2010. We’ll see how successful such an approach really is.

To start the list, I’ll pick a topic that’s rather straight forward though not necessarily easy – eating. The strategy for eating food should be based primarily on maintaining the best possible health. That’s actually a somewhat radical notion for most people. Granted that there are exceptions where sharing food becomes part of special celebrations or social activities, but this should not in any way be a driving force in your diet habits. Food choices can also be an important part of an effort to live in a responsible and sustainable way, which interestingly often results in making the same choices that would be made if health issues drove your selections.

So here are some new choices that will help transform my diet:

- Eat three healthy meals per day – no between meal snacking.
- Fast one evening per week (i.e. No eating after 3pm).

I will eliminate the following from my diet:

- Cookies, donuts, muffins
- Soda (including diet)
- Candy
- Fried Foods, including French fries
- Bread (except as part of meals)
- All junk food (you know it when you see it)
- Eat lower in the food chain, and eliminate beef
- Anything I’ve seen advertised (with exceptions for obviously healthy food, but such food is rarely advertised)

That’s a good start. If I can pull off most of this, it will be a major improvement in the quality of my diet.

"Live as if this may be your last day

Thought for the day:

"Live as if this may be your last day, and people will judge you based on it."

- Author unknown

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

A personal rule that I think we should ALL follow is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", no matter how much comfort or righteous indignation you can feel by believing in something. Those of you with a background in science should be especially aware of this. It really helps keep you from believing in some rather dumb things.

For example, I recently came across a claim about a pandemic in Ukraine being caused by a bio-weapon being produced by Baxter Intl's Ukraine's Lab. This clearly counts as an "extraordinary claim", though I was surprised at the number of people willing to accept the rumor as most likely true without any investigation. An unusual "pandemic of pneumonic plague hitting the Ukraine" should be something easy to prove, so I'm going to remain skeptical until I hear some other evidence confirming that such a thing exists.

By the way, it would be really nice if anyone reporting on wild rumors would do the rest of us a favor and at least include a comment on what www.snopes.com has to say about it so that we don't all have to look it up ourselves. Unfortunately, www.snopes.com doesn't have anything to say on this one way or another yet. However, according to Wikipedia the "WHO (World Health Organization) issued a statement that there were no significant differences between the pandemic H1N1 strain, and the Ukrainian strains tested", and stated reports that the "mass refusal by Ukrainians to be vaccinated (after several persons allegedly died after vaccinations in 2008 and 2009) was partly the cause for the epidemic." In other words, what apparently happened is that Ukraine got hit by a bad outbreak of H1N1 because people refused vaccinations. At least that's the most viable explanation pending further evidence.

Empathizing With Charlie Brown this Thanksgiving

It was an unusual Thanksgiving this year, a quiet small gathering with my family. Thanksgiving happened to be nine months to the day since I was laid off from my job of 26 years at IBM, which made it a little more solemn than past holidays. During those nine months I’ve had a total of seven face-to-face interviews, but still no job. I never expected to be out of work this long – with so much experience I was sure I’d have no trouble finding suitable work. I’ve come to realize that the work I did at IBM was somewhat specialized and there’s a limited market for it outside of the company. This means I’ve had to put some effort into reinventing myself to some extent. The number of opportunities that I’ve missed has also been on my mind. When the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special came on in the evening, I found myself really empathizing and identifying with his character and all the frustrations he experiences in his life - more than at any time in my past.

It recently occurred to me that I've spent most of my time these past months trying to get a full time job and rejoin “corporate America”. It often seems as if fate has been conspiring to keep me out of “corporate America” though, as if I was destined to enter a different line of work. What that could be is something I’m spending more time thinking about now.

Back to Charlie Brown. Besides the regular Thanksgiving show, there was also a great little TV show staring the Peanuts characters about the history of the Pilgrims and their voyage on the Mayflower to North America. Although meant for younger kids, the show describes in some detail the hardships faced by those early settlers, culminating in the first Thanksgiving celebration with the local Indians. It was a useful reminder of how lucky I’ve been in comparison. During their first winter in North America, about half the Pilgrims died. By comparison, I have plenty of food on the table, a warm house, a healthy wife and kids, good health care, a promising future, and a great support community. Compared to many of the unemployed people in the world today, I have much to be grateful for.

Implications of Completely Eliminating Complaining

There is a new movement that urges people to completely eliminate complaining from their lives. The idea is that if you see something that you consider wrong, then either (1) work to fix it, or (2) accept it as the way things are. Sitting around complaining produces a disempowered attitude and is toxic to your spirit. In a group situation, it can produce toxic effects on the attitude of the entire group.

I thought this would be easy for me, until I started to consider the implications. The goal is to change your attitude, not just your outward behavior. So that means ending all internal complaining about how people, or the world in general, has treated you unjustly. That is harder. Then it occurred to me that it also means eliminating impatience, because impatience is really internal complaining that the world is just not moving fast enough to suite you. It also means eliminating anger, since anger is just complaining taken to an emotional extreme. This is really challenging, but it gets even worse.

Did you ever beat up on yourself for missing an important meeting or event? Did you ever feel that if you were just a better and more dedicated person you wouldn’t have missed that appointment? In reality, missing an event should not be viewed as a moral failure; it should be viewed as a failure in your scheduling process – something that you can work to correct. This is just an example of a wider issue. For me, one of the hardest parts about eliminating any complaining from my life is to stop complaining and beating myself up for all those times when I did not live up to my expectations. This is a challenging task for anyone, but one with large potential rewards in terms of enhancing your spirit and attitude towards life.

How a Fellow Computer Geek Ends up on TV

I was watching the Discovery Channel yesterday when I came across a commercial for their mini-series called “The Colony”. It’s an imaginary reality-type show with a group of participants trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world using their skills and wits. Normally I have no interest in such series, but I recognized one of the participants as an old friend of mine, John Cohn. I knew John from IBM, where he was well known as a technical expert and a somewhat eccentric proponent of science education for young people. He became an IBM Fellow, which was the highest technical rank within IBM, is now a cast member of a national TV mini-series, and is 2 years younger than I. Meanwhile, here I sit unemployed and uncertain about my future.

I had two choices of how to react: I could become envious of his success, which is a rather self destructive approach in the end. Or I could be happy that such a well deserved advocate for science education and all around genuinely nice person is achieving some notoriety, and see what I could learn from his success. That is the option I chose.

So what can I learn from John Cohn’s success?

1. Do what you do with passion and really put your heart into things, whether it’s your career or outside interests.
   
2. Building a reputation as an enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful person can serve you very well in the long run.
   
3. You don’t want to be defined by a single corporate job forever. To avoid this, you need to develop a reputation and a passion for other interests too. In John’s case, it was his active engagement in science education for youth. This in fact may launch him into a second career outside of his IBM technical work.
   

John suffered a tragedy in his life a while ago when his 14 year old son was killed in an accident. My own son recently graduated from college, is trying to start his own business, and is starting to plan a longer term future with his steady girl friend. All things considered, I guess I really wouldn’t want to trade my life with John’s. Sometimes you just have to practice gratitude for what you have. I do wish John Cohn the best, and hope this is the start of a more public career advocating the enjoyment of science for our world’s youth. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

A New Personal Record to Be Happy About

I'm in a good mood today. When I woke up this morning I established a new personal record for the most number of consecutive days..... being alive. 52 years worth of consecutive days in fact.

Use Jobless Time to Build Better World

A friend recently pointed me to an interesting article written by Barbara Ehrenreich titled Use Jobless Time to Build Better World
(thanks Joanne). The title says it all. It doesn't really give instructions on how to do it though, but I guess that's not a realistic expectation. To my disappointment I find myself spending a great deal of time searching for that next job as the article says, which is what all the job counselors state you should do. It's sad to contemplate all the hours spent by very highly skilled people engaged in "job search" efforts producing essentially no social benefits for all their hours of labor.

By comparison I spend only a relatively small portion of my time trying to build a better world. I have more freedom than I've had in over 25 years, and more than I probably will have until I retire. In principle I could be spending 12-14 hours a day trying to build a better world as the article suggests. I'm not sitting around doing nothing for this, mind you, but I'm also not doing significantly more than I was doing while working 40 hours a week. (Let's ignore for now the discussion about how much that 40-hour per week job was really contributing to building a better world.) I think I need to reconsider my priorities (and my schedule) during this privileged period of my "paid sabbatical".

As the article concludes:

...the first step, as in any 12-step program, is to overcome denial. Job searching is not a job; retraining is not a panacea. You may be poorer than you've ever been, but you are also freer -- to express anger and urgency, to dream and create, to get together with others and conspire to build a better world.

Observations After 2 Months of Unemployment

I recently passed the 2 month mark of being unemployed. Some observations:

The job market doesn't look bad. Every week I come across multiple new job postings that are very appealing and for which I consider myself very highly qualified. The unsettling part is that I continue to get no responses after applying for them. In some cases I know that's because I'm one of several hundred people that apply, and I'm not one of the few chosen to be interviewed. In other cases the company with the job opening will collect resumes for several weeks before contacting anyone, so I just need to be patient. I'm still in a position where the wait is not causing financial problems, but I really feel for those who are in a more desperate situation with few skills to rely on.

I continue with about the same work around the house, volunteer work, and other outside interests that I used to have. I have no idea how I actually did all of this when I was working though. I feel just as busy as ever, even without taking on any major new efforts. Being busy is good, but it doesn't leave the time for deep reflection.

My wife and I really pulled together in our relationship to get through this, and she's been very supportive. It does start taking a toll on your relationship after a while though. I'm sure the number of broken families will rise noticeably due to this financial transition we're going through. That's a cost that doesn't get figured into the normal accounting procedures.

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.