I have two thoughts after completing my first triathlon. First, you only get one shot at writing about your first triathlon, so it better be good and second, a marathoner does not a triathlete make!
Category: Live
Seems that I’ve tumbled across more articles lately about how bad sugar is for you. I’m not sure if it’s just what I happen to be reading or if there’s a sudden surge of publicity about the negative effects of sugar, but it’s gotten me to really think about how much sugar, particularly refined sugar, I’m ingesting every day.
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Sasha Dichter’s Generosity talk on TED
I was intrigued by Seth Godin’s blog post today, so I clicked the link to Sasha Dichter’s TED presentation entitled The Generosity Experiment. I would encourage you to watch & then peruse the comments.
The gist of the talk was his commitment to saying “yes” for a month to anyone who asks for a handout or financial help. The video discusses the impact of this experiment on himself in the context of the work that Acumen fund does.
The whole concept hits me squarely in the sweet spot of my own personal quest of investing my own life, passion & skills in something that has a sense of purpose and meaning (granted that the specifics of what that means are different for everyone).
I wasn’t all that familiar with Acumen fund, but am aware of similar investment funds and that’s something that I love to see happening. I found Sasha’s talk quite inspiring & was curious to the reactions in the comments on the presentation page (again, worth looking at). There are a number of good points that people brought up that pretty much fit into the typical responses to giving people handouts on the street, many of which I think are totally legitimate questions that people have to work through. I remember being in church leadership a few years ago and asking a lot of the same when trying to determine how we were going to handle our relatively small ministry budget.
However the point that struck me most was the idea of trajectory. It seems that the whole idea behind the generosity experiment for Sasha was to change his personal trajectory from habitual avoidance of those around him in need to habitual sensitivity to the issue. It’s not so much about “should I give some money to this particular person” as it is about cultivating an attitude of generosity.
I think it’s easy, when considering a talk like this or similar discussions in a church or other organization, to hear a “system” instead of a journey. “Well,” I may argue, “if I give money to someone, I may be inadvertently supporting the heroine trade because all they’re going to do is to buy drugs.” There are a couple of implicit assumptions in this kind of reasoning. First, there’s the assumption that if I help a particular person in a particular way, that I’m always going to do it the same way. Second that the person on the receiving end is going to always do a particular thing and react in a particular way every time (or at least more often than not). There’s the assumption that there exists a particular right or wrong way to deal with similar circumstances and that there exists some sort of systematized approach or methodology that should be used.
However, I think that line of reasoning, while making good arguments in the abstract, is faulty because they assume consistency of methodology. Instead, the whole point is that by changing a habit, Sasha felt himself becoming more attuned to the needs of those around him and his own capacity for having a generous heart (at least that’s what I took from it), not that his experiment was going to determine his methodology forever.
Just like a child learning to walk, one has to try and stumble before maturing and accomplishing. It’s the trajectory of change that’s important. Because we crave formulas, there’s little room for the idea of organic growth as we engage, attempt, help, are taken advantage of, learn, connect. The problem is that while we are often well intentioned, it is just as often that it is to a point. After which it gets messy because you have gone past checking the charity box to engaging another human being with a complex set of issues. We must each ask ourselves how far we’re willing to go, a question who’s answer is highly individualistic.
Exercising the capacity and desire to help someone is a complex thing. Our motivations have as much variation as the circumstances in which they manifest action. Will copiers of the Generosity Experiment do something wrong? Probably. Will we get taken advantage of? Sure. Will we do some genuine good and make a difference? There’s a pretty good chance of it. Will we experience and learn things that we wouldn’t have possibly known without having taken the journey? We will never know unless we try.
Since I’m spending a lot of time sitting these days, I picked up Daniel Pink’s book Drive and started to read. This is the second time, actually, that I’ve tried to read this book. Picked it up at the library the first time and got a few pages into the introduction before it got buried underneath some other books I was reading at the time.
However, I have gotten past the intro and the first chapter and am realizing what a provocative book this is. So far, I’m delighted and anxious to continue reading, having much the same emotional response to Pink’s book as I did to Sir Ken Robinson’s book, The Element.
Pink’s assertion up front is that “too many organizations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.” Those assumptions being based on what he terms Motivation 2.0, the industrial revolution era theories still very much in vogue in corporate America that external rewards and punishments are the principal drivers of human behavior.
Pink posits, based on a number of research studies and experiments in behavioral science, that the nature of our economy is changing the way work is done. To probably oversimplify, outsourcing of algorithmic work tasks and similar automation of others enabled by computer technology is resulting in a rapid growth of more heuristic work (work that requires creative thinking and innovation). However, the old school system of rewards and punishments, the carrots and sticks that corporate managers love to talk about, actually lead to reduced performance and actually undermine the goals that they are supposedly in place to achieve.
Like Robinson (and Lisa Gansky in The Mesh), Pink is keyed into the revolution happening all around us as years of economic crisis are forcing real human questions about wealth, possessions, the debt it took to acquire them, meaning and purpose of work and social consciousness and how these trends are re-shaping work and business in the 2010 decade.
So far, so good. Where I’m finding this book most helpful, a few chapters into it now, is in articulating some of what I’ve experienced personally, but not quite been able to turn into words.
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How To Open A Bottle Of Wine With A Shoe
Yes, it’s shameless self promotion, I know. But I was showing someone this video I did last summer and, well, I have to admit that I made myself laugh. That’s pretty sad when you’re entertaining yourself with your own jokes! So I’m resurrecting it or re-purposing it or whatever you want to call it from my YouTube channel. Enjoy!
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Clipping Fingernails
“Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.”
-John Donne
There are some times and experiences that seem so poignant that, although you are an active participant in the moment, it feels almost as though you are intruding upon some kind of sacred ground. Today was one of those experiences for me, and this is why.
Today was Thanksgiving, for many a poignant day in and of itself. A time of family gatherings, fellowship, food and football for some; for others perhaps a day of loneliness and sadness; for many though, it’s more like a mixture of the two, like something that is both sweet and bitter at the same time, like a fall day in which the beauty of autumn leaves hanging on trees and blowing through the air with their red and orange and yellow hues is at once stunningly beautiful and peaceful and yet is a reminder that the cold deadness of winter is near and that the day is somehow suspended between a world that is both living and dying at the same time.
And on this day we gathered at my mother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner: My family with our four rambunctious children, my sister and her husband with their 2 week old child, my other sister, who brought my dad, and some friends with their children whom we had invited over. Anyone looking through the windows at our gathering around the table, bursting at the seams with children running around and filled with talking and laughing would probably think we were like some Norman Rockwell painting in some magazine somewhere. And maybe at that specific moment we were really like that. But like Thanksgiving, it can be really like that and really different from that at exactly the same time.
Now dad, you should know, has Parkinson’s disease and hasn’t been doing so well this year. In fact, a couple of days ago, he took a pretty nasty spill that landed him in the hospital. Parkinson’s is a merciless disease, one that slowly sucks the life out of it’s once strong, independent and vigorous victims, and does so in such a way that those who care and love must behold it’s awful, certain, steady progress, to the point where simple things like unbuttoning a pair of pants to go to the bathroom become insurmountable tasks.
But the thing that most struck me, this Thanksgiving Day, was fingernails. And why would I expect anyway, if dad couldn’t pull up his slacks or button his trousers, that somehow he’d be able to clip his own fingernails? His were in terrible shape, long and jagged, and I wondered how long it had been. So after the laborious trip to the bathroom but before we got back to the table, we sat quietly in the foyer by ourselves, and I clipped the aged, yellowish fingernails of someone who could no longer manage but had at one time held me in his own once strong hands. How could I help but think who might be there to clip mine if the tables were turned. It was one of those perspective changing thoughts about what kinds of things are important in life.
Later that evening, we brought home our own crew of four now extremely tired, rambunctious children and began the process of getting ready for bed. And that was when I noticed another pair of fingernails on my son. So there, in my own bathroom this time, we sat and I clipped the dirty, overgrown fingernails of a tired child who couldn’t manage that well on his own, and even if he could, probably wouldn’t think to do so.
It was then, after clipping the dirty, overgrown fingernails of both my father and my son that it really struck me that whether it’s a disease or injury or simply the natural course of life, there is no way of avoiding the reality of age and sickness and death and that at that moment, I myself was suspended in that same world, blown along like those same leaves by the wind, a world which is both living and dying at the same time.