Ways of Knowing Can Beat Research

I just came across an article “Top Five Regrets of The Dying” that reminded me of a TED lecture Stroke of Insight featuring Jill Bolte Taylor I had listened to a while back. Both pieces ended with the learning that many do not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.

Most of my career has been in online consumer products and later in business intelligence. I’ve spent the majority of my time analyzing information, presenting to execs and working with executives

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness — of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.) Jill gives an inspirational, compelling story, and concludes with:

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.

Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill had a near death experience. Similarly, Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care. Her patients were those who had gone home to die. She was the one with them in the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. Below are some highlights from her article.

  

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard. 

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. 

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. 

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 

Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. 

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

Full article here.

Best Practices Around Open Cities

From the Office of the Inspector General of Chicago…

Best Practices in Transparency and Accountability
As part of Open Chicago, we will highlight innovative transparency and accountability initiatives that other cities, counties, and states have undertaken.  We come across these initiatives as we review the practices of other governments, while doing research for investigations, audits, and program reviews.  By identifying what other governments are doing to enhance transparency and accountability, we can help ensure thatChicago’s efforts are being held to highest standards. View initiatives we have highlighted below.

If you have suggestions about initiatives we should highlight,  email them to openchicago@chicagoinspectorgeneral.org or submit them via our online suggestion box.

Transparency and Accountability Initiatives from around the Country

·         Kansas Department of Transportation’s T-Link Calculator

The Kansas Department of Transportation has developed an innovative budget calculator that letsKansasresidents and other interested users develop their own theoretical transportation program. The calculator provides a window for users on the competing concerns and goals that must be balanced when developing the budget of a large government agency.

·         New Mexico’s Sunshine Portal

The State ofNew Mexicohas designed a website to be the central portal for residents to view government spending and contracting information.

·         Manor, Texas’s Manor Labs

The city of Manor, Texashas created an innovation website that allows City residents to submit ideas for how to improve City government. The website allows users to vote on the best ideas and winning ideas receive “innobucks” that allow them to purchase items like being mayor for a day or a ride-along with the … [Read More...]

A more German Europe?

TCM co-editor Chris Bickerton is quoted by the Los Angeles Times on the topic of the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

…

She called for rewriting the European Union‘s treaty to vest greater powers in bodies such as the European Commission and the European Court of Justice, which could act as enforcers.

Mindful of German sensitivities, she insisted that her country must not lose sovereignty in the process. But Germany has the luxury of being able to set rules that it can comfortably live by.

“This must happen without taking power away from the German Bundestag,” Merkel said, adding, “We have no intention — under our constitution it’s not possible — to have our budget controlled by a European institution.”

…

Sarkozy differs sharply with Merkel on who would ensure compliance with those policies, preferring a strengthened but still undefined mechanism for Eurozone governments to police themselves, not EU institutions based in Brussels.

Sarkozy is so…French.  :-\

The Importance of Curiosity

Tonight, I saw the 60 Minutes piece on Steve Jobs’ biography coming out. Ironically, I came across this remake of a video of Seth Godin, a former boss of mine, and transcribed it because of how important I think the message is. There are several similarities between these two men: brilliance, an incredible ability to sell, not great people managers, found great equity in their business ventures (took some along, but not everyone), incredible passion & vision, and when they speak (with or without sentimental guitar as a backdrop)…people stop and listen.

Click the picture to see the YouTube video (I cant embed video w this version of WP.)

Seth is summarizing a bit of my path here. It took me 10-15 years to turn the barge around from playing safe to being curious. He’s right…it takes a long time, especially for those who (through whatever circumstance) are either less entrepreneurial and more motivated by a perception of security–but it is possible.

Seth is right, fundamentalism has very little to do with religion and everything to do with outlook and the ability to broaden our views.

An example from Pathwise underscores this further.

Something happens to scuba divers when they come upon an underwater precipice. Under the sea there are shelves or shallow areas that may only be a hundred feet deep or so and then there will all of the sudden be a drop off that could be 1 or 7 miles deep. He shared that even though, logically, the diver knows that he or she is at the same depth, when embarking out over a precipice, there is a sense of ones relative size and importance in the face of this great void. This causes them to be compelled to scurry back to where the bottom is again visible.

The anxiety is existential. In other words we lose the sense of who we are without the form we are used to seeing or using.

So to be able to work in ambiguity without holding on to old ways of doing things; or to be able to “not know” in a situation where one is accustomed to knowing, is very much like this going out into the abyss. Logically it may be no big deal; however we have difficulty because it is “existentially” hard to do.

Transcript from Soul Biographies: Curiosity

what is a fundamentalist?

a fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it.

as opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.

so, here is what happened…in 1950-something, TV kicked in. And what TV demonstrated was that if you spent enough money, you could make money interrupting people with ads they didn’t want to get. if you spent enough money, you could repeat a message enough times, you could make enough money to buy more ads, which would allow you to make more stuff to buy more ads…

and so we end up with all those jingles that stick in our heads and all this mediocre products that we think is great, we end up with all these habits that got built after 40-50 years of this.

and then, it stopped.

that what the smartest and richest people in the world have done is turn off their TV sets.

Is your television ‘ON’or ‘OFF’?

There are two camps…

People who still have a 12:00 flashing on their VCR. They are fearful, they are stuck, they are not interested.

People who are curious…Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education, it has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope you are interested in.

Here’s the reason these people count…not ’cause there is a lot of them, but because they are the ones who talk to the people who in a stupor, they are the ones who talk to the masses in the middle, the ones who are stuck. the masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking that it’s safe to do nothing.

it’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. that for 7, 10, 15 years of school you are required to not be curious. over, and over and over again the curious are punished. 

I don’t think it’s a matter of Mao saying “A thousand flowers bloom” and suddenly a thousand flowers bloom. I think it’s more about a 5, 10 or 15 year process where people start finding their voice and they start realizing that the safest thing they can do feels risky and the riskiest thing they can do is play it safe.

Might you be playing it SAFE?

I’m not that curious about why I’m curious, but my guess is that I grew up in a house where it was rewarded and cherished. And despite a lot of effort by a lot of people to make me non curious, I just resisted.  and now, I get all my reward, all my positive feedback, all my income, from being curious.  so now, it’s easy. but getting to the point where it was  primed wasn’t easy at all. I just coulnd’t get it to go away.

Have you found your COURAGE to keep your outlook wide open?

a fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it.

what we are seeing is that fundamentalism has very little to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook regardless of what your religion is.

Is your outlook worthy of the label of CURIOUS? 

People will remember how you made them feel…A legacy.

Joe's Training Mask

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said,

people will forget what you did,

but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

This past week I mourned the death of a favorite coach and mentor, Joe Pechinsky.  He was 92. A retired Peabody firefighter, fencing coach and noted artist, died peacefully Thursday morning, Sept. 22, 2011 at the Radius Health Care Center in Danvers after a long illness. He was first employed in the leather industry working in the tanneries of Peabody and got his inspiration to do his paintings of the Peabody tanneries that are now in the Essex Museum in Salem and the Peabody Historical Society in Peabody.  In 1940, he enlisted in the U.S. Army serving five years and was a survivor of the Pearl Harbor Attack on Dec. 7, 1941. He later served in the Pacific theatre campaign prior to his discharge in 1945. More about his life and accomplishments are available in the links below.

I had the good fortune to meet him in 1994. I was at a fencing clinic, many of the New England coaches were there. Kids went in rotation to each one, received lessons and were generally drilled into the ground on tennis courts in the hot sun, wearing heavy, sweaty gear–it was the perfect outlet for me. After working with him a while we concluded our lesson and he said “she does not rotate, I will keep her for the week.” And it was done. I drove from Amherst to Peabody for lessons whenever my classes or fencing schedule would allow. We would work in hallways of municipal buildings when they were likely to be vacant or (my favorite) under the apple trees in his back yard, there was a dirt path (worn by me and probably others). I’d sit there soaking wet on a towel and he’d give me orange juice (with no pulp) and salted cashews. He often played George and Gracie comedy albums and we’d talk about the craziness of current politics and how something was lost when people didn’t find George and Gracie funny anymore.

The Gear. No one will wear it quite the way he did.

For me Joe represented a sort of John Wooden-type who never really was recognized (nor did he seek it). He valued and wanted to work with people with strong work ethics, could give correction without causing resentment and  above all, treated kids as people. John Wooden said once: “Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.” Joe amplified qualities in me I didn’t know I had and some I wasn’t able to tap into until much later in life.

Joe focused on character rather than reputation, because it was our character that got us through our losses, gave us energy to drill on a doorknob or a hanging ball for hours as at time…and taught us that reputation is merely what others think you are–and that doesn’t really matter much at the end of the day.

He never coached from the strip, letting his fencers perform on their own, while other coaches took every time out. He had a great gift for holding his fencers accountable to their practice. He guided aggression into assertiveness with fine tuning and turning simple drills into some kind of insight into my soul: why was I hesitating when I had it in my hands?, why was I over-committing to a touch? why wasn’t I looking at multiple solutions? why did I hang on to my losses? Joe taught me that failure wasn’t fatal. At the time I struggled with adaptation in the context of fencing (and elsewhere). There were times I could only see one way out of a given situation; my problem here was the most of the time, my directness worked. Joe provided a safe place to become vulnerable to such insights. I learned that perfection in lessons would only take me so far; that if I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t really making much movement.

He also helped me celebrate my wins and learn my strengths. That I was a fast thinker was good, he helped slow me down a bit enough to “play” more with my opponent. That I had strength and hunger worked in my favor; I never gave up. I didn’t learn to actually “have fun” until much later. He would give commemorative coins to those students he wanted to encourage, I received several of these over the time I worked with him. At his wake, I put a few coins in his pocket–to reciprocate a gesture that had meant so much to me.

In the end though, Joe’s legacy to me was that success came from knowing that I did my best to become the best that I was capable of becoming…for him, and for myself. He encouraged me in the rest of my life too, sending thoughtful cards on my birthday and Christmas for several years until he fell ill…recognizing educational and career accomplishments. For him, it wasn’t just about the sport but about the whole person.

Joe…I love you, I’m so very grateful to have crossed paths with you if only for a brief period of time…and if I have half the impact on someone else’s life, I will have lived well.

Last Bells, the 555, at Joe's Firehouse in Peabody.

Obituary Links:

• Tanner City Fencing Club
• Conway Cahill-Brodeur
• US Fencing
• Salem News